Body, Technology, and Art: On Walter Benjamin's "Work of Art" Essay and Related Writings

Shih-Yen Huang

《Ex-position》 48期 (2022/12) Pp. 123-149

https://doi.org/10.6153/EXP.202212_(48).0007

摘要

This article aims to read Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility" by focusing on the conditions that redefine the human being in terms of the interplay between the corporeal and the technological. The discussion starts by exploring Benjamin's concept of the collective body organized in technology. The collective body, as put forward in Benjamin's early writings on anthropological issues, combines the human and the technological. The "Work of Art" essay takes it further by treating film as the kind of modern art based on the necessary technological measurements and operations that open up for the human being a space of expanded experience and altered perception conditioned by the second technology. This leads to a re-orientation of the theory of perception as film, with its tactile/tactical dimension and particular material-technological operations, allows its viewers to get closer to things by incorporating directly what it mediates. In this way, film accomplishes its historical task of turning technology into a first nature for the collective body.

關鍵字

Walter Benjamin ； film ； body ； technology ； art ； perception

參考文獻

Benjamin, Andrew, ed. Walter Benjamin and Art. London: Continuum, 2005.

Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Belknap-Harvard UP, 1999.

Benjamin, Walter. Gesammelte Schriften. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann et al. 7 vols. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974-1989.

Benjamin, Walter. Selected Writings. Ed. Michael W. Jennings et al. 4 vols. Cambridge, MA: Belknap-Harvard UP, 1996-2003.

Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility [First Edition].” Trans. Michael W. Jennings. Grey Room 39 (2010): 11-37.