Texts
Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
“Jeder heutige Mensch kann einen Anspruch vorbringen, gefilmt zu werden.”
Der apparatfreie Aspekt der Realität ist hier zu ihrem künstlichsten geworden und der Anblick der unmittelbaren Wirklichkeit zur blauen Blume im Land der Technik.
Course Description
Walter Benjamin’s remarks on The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction are probably one of the most cited philosophical observations of the 20th century. He wrote the original version in 1935, shortly after having arrived in exile in Paris to escape Nazi persecution. Collaborating with Max Horckheimer, the founder of the influential Marxist Institute for Social Research, he revised his first draft which was then published in 1936—in French.
Hardly a thinker has been more prescient and less sentimental when it comes to assessing the modern human condition. In his famous description of Paul Klee’s painting angelus novus, he observed the ‘angel of history’ unable to put resist the ‘storm of history’, and horrified by the detritus of construction created by humanity’s relentless ‘progress.’
In this Salon, we will engage in a close reading of Benjamin’s foundational essay in which he reacts to the political developments of his time–curiously in front of the backdrop of the meteoric rise of a new technology: film. Not only does he recognize this genuine mass medium’s potential to both empower and seduce the masses. He also anticipates its aestheticization of the political landscape, and everyday life.
What can we glean from this essay to gain a better understanding of our own times—when an even more pervasive new technology is shaping our society and influencing our own political and social environment?
Joining Details:
Three-meeting study live on Zoom
Dates: TBD
Recommended edition: Walter Benjamin, Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit, Reclam Verlag, 2011.
Language of Instruction: German
Cost: $120