Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer were alltheorists of the Frankfurt School and they were the first to introduce the idea of the “culture industry, the mass marketing of culture in the modern era. However, Walter Benjamin gives a different perspective on the role of culture in modern society, he believed that the possibility of mechanical reproduction (photography) was demolishing the integrity of art in modern society . He gives the example of the Mona Lisa painting by leonardo

Walter Benjamin was a German Jewish philosopher that people for generations looked up to for his eclectic thoughts. One of his many ideals was that the use of violence by the State is not always justified and does not always lead to justice. Benjamin states that a better approach to eliminating violence in our society is for the State to resolve social and political conflicts through non-violence means. I argue that Walter Benjamin was correct with the ideal that the State’s use of violence is not

Walter Benjamin looks into the shift in perception and its affects at the beginning of film and photography in the twentieth century. He writes about how a sense changes within humanity’s way of looking at visual works of art. Having its differences now and its consequences remain to be determined. Benjamin attempts to underline something exact about the modern age and of the effects of modernity on the work of art in particular. (Benjamin, 222) Film and photography directly lead into this movement

Flaneur was a concept first mentioned by Charles Baudelaire in his writings. A flaneur is the casual wanderer observer and reporter of street life in the modern city. In the twentieth-century Walter Benjamin returned to the concept of the flaneur with his work The Arcades Project. In The Arcades Project, Benjamin puts forward two complementary concepts to explain human response to modern city life. Erlebnis and Erfahrung.The city walker can be understood as an analogy with the flaneur. There are two

In the essay Lifeboat Ethics by Garrett Hardin and the essay A Challenge to the Eco-Doomsters by Walter Benjamin, there are many things I agree and disagree with. Both essays make very good points with facts to back them up. But I can’t help but side with Hardin on his essay Lifeboat Ethics. In this essay I am going to compare and contrast some of the similarities and differences between Hardin and Benjamin’s essays about the aid the United States provides to poor nations all over the world by reducing

(256) The Flaneur as critical observer The paradox of digital media - Explain relevance of topic to design practice - Explain how the topic may be applied to the contemporary practice of design - How it may provoke new ways of thinking/designing/practicing/and/or contextualising in the future. The flaneur is a historic figure from the late nineteenth century. His activity was that of flanerie to stroll the streets and observe the bustling life of the modern city. Due to the revolution of digital

In this essay the aura of uniqueness that Walter Benjamin discusses will be discussed using a piece from the Sistine Chapel museum in Italy as an example to explain the concept. Benjamin discusses the aura of uniqueness as a “unique thing from distance, a unique appearance in space and time” (Benjamin. 1955; 796). He argues that an object only has aura as an original. He goes on to say that an objects aura is acquired through “the unique existence of the work of art determined the history to which

Walter Benjamin’s essay, The Task of the Translator, is illuminating in the way in which it shatters any preconceived ideas that may view the act of translation as diminishing the value of the original. Benjamin has high regard for translation, placing it in the realm of art as a distinct form. He argues that art is not about the audience or the receiver that is, it is not primarily about communication. The purpose of art is not to instil a specific belief, impart information or to entertain certain

In exploring the growing loss of shared exchanges, Walter Benjamin’s “The Storyteller” specifically touches upon the silence of soldiers returning home after war. These men, “...not richer, but poorer in communicable experience” (Benjamin 84), are unable to fully express themselves, the horrors seen on the battlefield too much to accurately convey through words alone. Veterans are therefore alienated as a consequence, with civilians lacking the proper understanding needed to connect with their country’s

In a series of reflections scattered throughout The Arcades Project and elsewhere, Walter Benjamin offers a view of childhood cognition as defined by an immediacy between perception and action; the inherently tactile relation between thought and world elicited by the child invokes a direct relationship of thought and action and so a capacity to transform the world.1 Rather than accept the given meaning of things, children are said to acquire knowledge by grabbing objects, analysing them in new ways