ABSTRACT
Like much of his other work, Walter Benjamin’s consideration of technology is scattered, fragmented and perhaps even contradictory. Yet this tension in his writing is often ignored, especially by commentators attempting to co-opt his thought for the potentials they envisage within postmodernity. Benjamin is often seen, rather simplistically, as an advocate of the radical possibilities inherent in technology. Bound up with his treatment of technology is Benjamin’s account of the historical loss of experience. It is possible to trace a dual response to this perceived loss: on the one hand, there is an attempt to win back these complex modes of experience; on the other hand, Benjamin at times seems completely to abandon older, more ‘auratic’ forms of experience and to replace them by a ‘new pattern of perception that is low in experiential content, but for that reason precise with regard to the matter and unimpassioned’ (Honneth 1993: 91). Yet if more sophisticated readings of Benjamin are able to reveal this nuanced response to new technologies, I want to argue that it is necessary to go beyond simply registering increasingly subtle forms of ambivalence in his work.
