corrente

September 10, one day before September 11, and I'm engaged in a massive collective polemic about typography. How jejeune. Or maybe not. As Walter Benjamin writes in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction:

The presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity. Chemical analyses of the patina of a bronze can help to establish this, as does the proof that a given manuscript of the Middle Ages stems from an archive of the fifteenth century. The whole sphere of authenticity is outside technical-- and, of course, not only technical-- reproducibility.<2> Confronted with its manual reproduction, which was usually branded as a forgery, the original preserved all its authority...

The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced. Since the historical testimony rests on the authenticity, the former, too, is jeopardized by reproduction when substantive duration ceases to matter. And what is really jeopardized when the historical testimony is affected is the authority of the object.

Our post-modern wingers...

Really, the whole controversy is non-trivial. The wingers say that the documents are not authentic. We say that Bush is not authentic, and that one one reason to believe this (there are many others) is the documents. A question of character...