SOC 2112 Lecture Notes - Lecture 17: Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project, Frankfurt School
2 Sep 2015
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Document Summary
He was a german literary critic, philosopher, and a member of frankfurt school (horkeheimer and. He fled germany when the nazis came to power and committed suicide in 1940. Most of his books were left unpublished: the arcades project (1927 1940) this was only published in 1982, the writer of modern life: essay on charles baudelaire, on hashish (1972) There were new forms of public media that emerged (newsprint, radio, cinema) and spread. Benjamin saw the nazis effectively utilize these media (especially film) to mobilize and shape the german masses as members of the third reich. He is interested in the emergence of mass culture, the relationship between art and technology, and the relationship between aesthetics and politics. The characteristic of manual production of the traditional artwork is a historical process unique to the original object, manifest in the object as its aura .
