In the history of technologies and materials the transfer from soft to hard plays a central role. From a dialectic point of view it seems to be a clear-cut matter of one overpowering the other, yet conceptually things are more convoluted. What we call the chiastic model of history is driven by the exchange of empowerings where the one inhabits the other. By taking the most antithetical examples of materiality from architectural history, the plastic and the lithic, we begin to (...) understand the psychological aspects of this exchange: a history of dreams, imagination and even hallucination. The technologies involving the plastic offer an enormous array of such imagery, which we start to analyze as part of a fundamental aspect of technology itself. Using the notion of the pharmakon, as developed by Derrida and Stiegler, we study its ambiguities: technology by its nature is both remedy and poison, cure and addiction. Accepting this ambivalence is the explicit goal of pharmacology, which makes the history of soft and hard one of prosthetic extension as much as of mimetic absorption. We will be guided by two architectural fantasists to investigate the what we call the pharmacology of architecture, J. G. Ballard’s fantasy of a house automaton in the case of the plastic, and G. B. Piranesi’s hallucinations of a reversed archeology in that of the lithic. (shrink)

Many considerations of Walter Benjamin's oeuvre refer to the central role of the image and of the visual. Much has been written on terms such as the “optical uncon...

Post-critical pedagogy, which offers a significant alternative to the dominant trends in contemporary philosophy of education, objects to seeing education as instrumental to other ends: it attempts to conceive of education as autotelic, namely as having intrinsic value. While there are good reasons for accepting the post-critical reservations with the instrumentalization of education, I argue that its autonomy is equally problematic, as it risks turning the philosophy of education—perhaps education itself—into a privileged activity, out of touch with the most important (...) issues in the contemporary world. In this paper I offer post-critical pedagogy a way out of this dilemma, by drawing on Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility”. After presenting the thesis concerning the autonomy of art held by Benjamin’s Frankfurt School friends, and pointing to the similarity between their view and that of post-critical pedagogy, I articulate six Benjaminian theses on post-critical pedagogy. Following Benjamin’s claim that the technological reproducibility of art changes the way it is perceived as well as its political function, I argue that school is an educational technology that reproduces the world to the masses without an “aura”, in a way that allows for political critique that does not reduce education to politics. Next, I highlight the importance of the school to post-critical pedagogy, and contribute to developing the critical-political aspect that remains essential to post-critical pedagogy. Finally, the Benjaminian perspective also makes it possible to reflect on the relation of digital technologies of reproduction to post-critical pedagogy. (shrink)

This paper argues that Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility” provides a rich analytic framework for understanding how the many dimensions of aesthe...

This article examines the ways in which Georges Didi-Huberman conceptualizes the notion of the “aura” after Walter Benjamin’s famous and elusive rendering of the term. The central focus is on the way in which Didi-Huberman theorizes the aura to showcase its capacity for transformation – specifically in terms of its connection to “place” and in terms of what he calls a “memory trace.” After an introduction, the article is divided into five sections, followed by a conclusion. The first two sections (...) act as a foundation from which to investigate Didi-Huberman’s engagement with the aura. Therein, I explore the aesthetic debates surrounding what kind of knowledge artworks can produce and specifically how language can, most reductively, objectify the way in which artworks are critiqued, on the one hand, or produce elusive and romantic readings of artworks, on the other. Furthermore, I explore the way in which the notion of aura is engaged in Benjamin’s work upon which Didi-Huberman largely draws for his own understanding of the term. The subsequent two sections outline what I call Didi-Huberman’s two-part proposal of the aura re-imagined; this entails what he calls the “supposition” of the aura and the “secular” aura. Didi-Huberman takes Barnett Newman’s “zip” paintings as a point of entry to think how the aura can be hypothesized after Benjamin. In the final section, I look to the artworks of James Turrell as they are investigated by Didi-Huberman and to one of his short books, Being a Skull, to describe how artworks can function as vertiginous places, which implicate our conception of space in general. Didi-Huberman’s “dialectics of place” both complexifies Benjamin’s equating of place with the aura as uniqueness and smooths over some edges of his paradoxical thinking. (shrink)

In his famous 1936 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” Walter Benjamin tells us that in his time art became valued for its exhibition value instead of what he refers to as its secularised ritual or cult value. This essay makes this bold claim plausible by arguing that it means that a historicising gaze no longer has a function in the reception of art. Although this argument is supported by Benjamin’s use of the concepts of (...) authenticity and aura, it is somehow missed by Benjamin’s many readers. His essay, as it turns out, presents an end of history thesis, which foreshadows the condition of the image in contemporary media. (shrink)

Key sections of Walter Benjamin's montage-text Berlin Childhood around 1900 figure the relationship between human experience and modern media, with the sections that frame the text, ‘Loggias’ and ‘The Moon’, structured around metaphors of photography. Drawing on the work of Siegfried Kracauer, and especially his seminal essay ‘Photography’, Benjamin develops, in the course of his book, a theory of photography's relationship to experience that runs counter to the better-known theories developed in such essays as ‘Little History of Photography’ and ‘The (...) Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility’, theories that are part of the broad currents of technological utopianism and, as such, emphasize photography's transformative potentials. In the Berlin Childhood, Benjamin instead emphasizes photography's role in the mortification and annihilation of meaningful human experience. Photography emerges here as the mausoleum of youth and hope. (shrink)

This thesis explores how we might think the relation between psychoanalysis and the cultural field through Donald Winnicott’s concept of the environment, seeking to bring the concept into dialogue with more “classical” strands of psychoanalytic theorizing. A substantial introduction sets out the rationale behind the thesis by reading Freud and Winnicott in relation to the “classic” and the “romantic”, or the “negative” and “positive”, in psychoanalytic thought. It goes on to outline the value of bringing these tendencies together in order (...) to think the relationship between psychoanalysis, culture and change. The chapters which follow move from psychoanalysis as a “cultural cure” – a method and discourse drawing on and feeding into a broad conception of cultural life – towards a notion of “culture as cure” informed by Winnicott’s theory of the environment. Chapter one examines Freud’s refusal of the “culture”/ “civilization” distinction and considers what it means for the idea of a cultural cure. Chapter two considers whether Winnicott’s thinking about “culture” ultimately prioritises the aesthetic over the political. Chapter three uses Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World to explore an analogy between totalitarianism, technology and maternal care. Chapter four turns to the series In Treatment to think about the intersections of therapy and technology in terms of reflection and recognition. Chapter five employs Ian McEwan’s Saturday as a means to reflect on the capacity of culture to cure. Ultimately, I suggest that social “cure” may require more than “good-enough” cultural forms and objects, but Winnicott’s “romantic” theorization of the aesthetic, coupled with a “classic” attention to structures of power and oppression may offer a means of thinking the relationship between psychoanalysis and culture in potentially transformative ways. (shrink)