La maleta de Port Bou, no. 36, 2019, pp. 59-65.
If Walter Benjamin has proved highly relevant to the cultural practices that, inspired by the project of Soviet productivism, have in recent decades rearticulated the links between political communication and artistic activism, a critique of the techno-energetic productivism that runs through the Benjaminian worldview is missing in them. The Jewish philosopher presupposed that the “natural utilization of the productive forces” coincided with the realization of communism. The immaturity of the society of the time lay, according to Benjamin, in an unnatural use of the “sources of energy”, which prevented the realization of the old Marxian dream of turning technology into an inorganic extension of the human sensory organs. This article provides a critical view of the Benjaminian articulation between aesthetics and energetics in one of his best known essays, “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility”.
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