ABSTRACT
As is readily apparent, a common strain of utopianism runs through seminal
modernist approaches to architecture and urbanism. It could hardly be claimed,
however, that modernity or modernism inaugurated this connection between
architecture and utopia. As David Harvey notes:
Given this rich and diverse history of utopianism in connection with the city it is
important to characterize Benjamin’s variety as precisely as possible, prior to
connecting it with his approach to architecture. To this end we can begin with a
fragment written around the time of the artwork essay, that is, the winter of
1935-6. Here the question of utopia is explicitly connected to the social impact
of modern technology and the nature of revolutionary praxis. The fragment
turns on a distinction between two dimensions or phases of human nature: a
first, biological and somatic, and a second, technological in character. The key
statement comes at the end of the fragment:
The politics of utopia
It is necessary to turn back to the artwork essay to make further sense of this
statement. In the essay, as noted in the previous chapter, Benjamin connects the
first and second human nature with two phases of technology: a first striving to
master nature and a second aiming ‘rather at an interplay [Zusammenspiel]
between nature and humanity’. Benjamin’s affirmation of the revolutionary
potential of a modern medium such as film rests on the following proposition:
‘that technology will release [human beings] from their enslavement to the
powers of the apparatus only when humanity’s whole constitution has adapted
itself to the new productive forces which the second technology has set free’
(Benjamin 2002: 108).
