Miniaturization: Reading Benjamin in the Digital Age

On a winter afternoon in 1930, a little after three o'clock, Walter Benjamin visited the publisher and writer Adrienne Monnier in her Paris bookstore. During their conversation, Benjamin mentioned that he found it much easier to enjoy paintings, sculptures, and even architecture in photographs than in reality. When he added that he considered this kind of preoccupation with reproduced art impoverishing and unnerving, Monnier objected. "The great creations," she replied, "cannot be considered as the works of individuals. They are collective formations, so powerful that enjoying them is tied to the condition of making them smaller [sie zu verkleinern]. Methods of mechanical reproduction," she continued, "are basically a technique of miniaturization [Verkleinerungstechnik]. They enable people to obtain the degree of domination over the works without which they would not be able to enjoy them."¹ Benjamin left the store, thanking her in his diary for the "theory of reproductions" that, several decades later, became one of the most widely discussed critical analyses of modern culture and media. With the keyword "miniaturization," however, Monnier touched on something that exceeded Benjamin's most farsighted observations.

Digital technologies, like other methods of technical reproduction, are also a technique of miniaturization as described by Benjamin and Monnier.² Roberto Busa, a pioneer of computational linguistics, describes how the Index Thomisticus, his life-long project of making a vast corpus of medieval philosophy available, shrunk from an estimated five hundred tons of punch cards in 1949 to a searchable text archive that fits on a single flash drive.³ Today's cellphones allow us to carry a miniature of the social and economic world in our pockets, facilitating freedom of expression and participation as well as surveillance, censorship, and the mystification of nature and immediacy. That, for now, seven billion transistors fit on a microprocessor the size of a fingernail recalls the Scholastic question of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, indicating that miniaturization is not only a constant imperative for science and technology, but also poses aesthetic and metaphysical questions regarding quasi-religious adoration, political representation, and promises of being released from the toils of physical existence.

Surprisingly, Benjamin, who was among the first to cast a critical eye on technologies such as photography and film, and who was deeply concerned with phenomena of miniaturization in the realms of language, literature, and visual arts, has been read only sporadically with respect to the technological transformations of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.⁴ Even more surprisingly, the way in which Benjamin's media aesthetics arose from his unique understanding of language has not received sufficient critical attention.⁵ Tropes of miniaturization, reduction, and abbreviation appear frequently in Benjamin's philosophical and literary production, linking the social, political, and aesthetic dimensions of media technologies to questions of language and literature.

Benjamin's philosophical and philological engagements with practices of miniaturization are challenging in their own right.⁶ In the following, I would like to examine (I) how his interest in miniaturization allowed him to discover the emancipatory potential of technological reproducibility, and (II) how this discovery illuminates digitization as another technique of miniaturization. By following Benjamin's readings of and conversations with Proust, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and Theodor W. Adorno, I explore miniaturization as an essentially ambiguous and polarized phenomenon. As an involuntary reflex of the organism, it mitigates overwhelming sensations by representing them smaller; as a deliberate practice of paying close attention to details, it allows readers, listeners, and viewers to defetishize rather than succumb to the paralyzing effects of powerful texts, sounds, and images.

I. From Miniaturization to Reproducibility: Proust and Leibniz

Benjamin developed his understanding of miniaturization in conversation with Proust and Leibniz, two specialists of the small and minute.⁷ From his readings of their works, miniaturization emerges as an unconscious coping mechanism that renders something emotionally overwhelming manageable and enjoyable, and it is this mechanism that Benjamin later, with the help of Monnier, discerns as the driving force behind technical reproduction.⁸ To counterbalance this involuntary, anthropological notion, Benjamin develops another understanding...