htm">Andy Blunden 1998; proofed and corrected Feb. 2005. “Our fine arts were developed, their types and uses were established, in times very different from the present, by men
whose power of action upon things was insignificant in comparison with ours. But the amazing growth of our techniques, the adaptability and precision they have attained, the ideas and habits they are creating, make it a certainty
Walter Benjamin
whose power of action upon things was insignificant in comparison with ours. But the amazing growth of our techniques, the adaptability and precision they have attained, the ideas and habits they are creating, make it a certainty
Walter Benjamin
6 years
tional class rule by other means. Overcoming it thus requires not just anti-fascist attitudes but also a destruction of its roots in class oppression. Or, as Horkheimer put it in 1939: "If you don't want to talk about capitalism then you had better keep quiet about fascism."
The Frankfurt school, part 5: Walter Benjamin, fascism and the future | Peter Thompson | Opinion | The Guardian
6 years
sed, predominantly in film. The "aura" of traditional art may have been destroyed by modernity but the future "aura" of liberated humanity as a living work of art had to take its place.If fascism represented the aestheticisation of politics then the fight against fascism had to involve the politicisation of aesthetics and the active creation of the aura of potential. This is why Benjamin states that "the tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the 'state of emergency' in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of
The Frankfurt school, part 5: Walter Benjamin, fascism and the future | Peter Thompson | Opinion | The Guardian
The Frankfurt school, part 5: Walter Benjamin, fascism and the future | Peter Thompson | Opinion | The Guardian
6 years
le. His work on the Baroque, for example, posits it as the turning point between medieval religiosity and renaissance secularisation and the Trauerspiel (Mourning-Play) of that period, with its obsession with violence and death, reflects the growing yet still largely unconscious realisation that there is no happy end in heaven and that – as Bloch puts it – death becomes the harshest of all anti-utopias. Art and culture in his era though, in the era of what he hoped was the transition from capitalism to socialism, had to grasp the dual possibilities of technology so that it could be harnessed
The Frankfurt school, part 5: Walter Benjamin, fascism and the future | Peter Thompson | Opinion | The Guardian
The Frankfurt school, part 5: Walter Benjamin, fascism and the future | Peter Thompson | Opinion | The Guardian
6 years
realisable its traces have to be read into the symbolic forms of human expression in various different historical epochs. To return to Adorno's take on history in Negative Dialectics, Benjamin's position is that we find the solution to the apparent non-identity of the material and the transcendental within the symbolic. We can see here quite clearly another point of contact between Marx and Freud where transcendental thoughts exist not as something separate from material reality but as something both produce
The Frankfurt school, part 5: Walter Benjamin, fascism and the future | Peter Thompson | Opinion | The Guardian
The Frankfurt school, part 5: Walter Benjamin, fascism and the future | Peter Thompson | Opinion | The Guardian
6 years
wever, had to be kept well-hidden from public view even though it was often pulling the strings. To those who criticise communism and Marxism as "merely" a new form of religious belief,Benjamin's position – as with Ernst Bloch, whom I shall look at next week – was that religion was actually a vessel that contained within its authoritarian history and structures the spark of liberation which could only be fully realised through historical materialist transformation. In that sense religion is "merely" an old form of a future and as yet unrealisable dream.
Until this unrealisable future becomes realisable its traces have to be read into the symbolic
The Frankfurt school, part 5: Walter Benjamin, fascism and the future | Peter Thompson | Opinion | The Guardian
Until this unrealisable future becomes realisable its traces have to be read into the symbolic
The Frankfurt school, part 5: Walter Benjamin, fascism and the future | Peter Thompson | Opinion | The Guardian
6 years
"The class struggle, which always remains in view for a historian schooled in Marx, is a struggle for the rough and material things, without which there is nothing fine and spiritual. Nevertheless these latter are present in the class struggle as something other than mere booty, which falls to the victor. They are present as confidence, as courage, as humour, as cunning, as steadfastness in this struggle, and they reach far back into the mists of time. They will, ever and anon, call every victory which has ever been won by the rulers into question. Just as flowers turn their heads towards the sun, so too does that which has been turned, by v
The Frankfurt school, part 5: Walter Benjamin, fascism and the future | Peter Thompson | Opinion | The Guardian
The Frankfurt school, part 5: Walter Benjamin, fascism and the future | Peter Thompson | Opinion | The Guardian
6 years
olies have taken a hands-off, ideologically vacant attitude toward the upwelling of ugliness on the Internet. A defining moment was the turn-of-the-century wave of music piracy, which did lasting damage to the idea of intellectual property. Fake news is an extension of the same phenomenon, and, as in the Napster era, no one is taking responsibility. Traffic trumps ethics.
Traditional media outlets exhibited the same value
The Frankfurt School Knew Trump Was Coming
Traditional media outlets exhibited the same value
The Frankfurt School Knew Trump Was Coming
6 years
. The failure of Facebook to halt the proliferation of fake news during the campaign season should have surprised no one; the local hirelings of logic are too enamored of their algorithms—and of the revenue they generate—to intervene. From the start, Silicon Valley monopolies have taken a hands-off, ideologically vacant attitude to
The Frankfurt School Knew Trump Was Coming
The Frankfurt School Knew Trump Was Coming
6 years
