Journal ArticleDOI
Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin's Artwork Essay Reconsidered
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Benjamin's essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" is generally taken to be an affirmation of mass culture and of the new technologies through which it is disseminated as discussed by the authors.Abstract:
Walter Benjamin's essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"' is generally taken to be an affirmation of mass culture and of the new technologies through which it is disseminated. And rightly so. Benjamin praises the cognitive, hence political, potential of technologically mediated cultural experience (film is particularly privileged).2 Yet the closing section of this 1936 essay reverses the optimistic tone. It sounds a warning. Fascism is a "violation of the technical apparatus" that parallels fascism's violent "attempt to organize the newly proletarianized masses"-not by giving them their due, but by "allowing them to express themselves."3 "The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life."4 Benjamin seldom makes sweeping condemnations, but here he states categorically: "All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war."5 He is writing during the early period of fascist military adventurism-Italy's colonial war in Ethiopia, Germany's intervention in the Spanish Civil War. Yet Benjamin recognizes that the aesthetic justification of this policy was already in place at the century's start. It was the Futurists who, just before World War I,read more
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The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure
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Images of Recovery: A Photo-Elicitation Study on the Hospital Ward
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Book ChapterDOI
The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism *
TL;DR: In this paper, the juncture of cinema and modernism has been explored in a number of ways, ranging from early cinema's interrelations with the industrial-technological modernity of the late nineteenth century, through an emphasis on the international art cinemas of both interwar and new wave periods, to speculations on the cinema's implication in the distinction between the modern and the postmodern.
Book
Archaeology and the Senses: Human Experience, Memory, and Affect
TL;DR: In this article, a new ontology of senses, materiality, time, and memory is proposed for a museum of sensory ab/sense, from corporeality to sensoriality, from things to flows.