Musical Audition Reality Shows from the Viewpoint of the Media Aesthetics of Walter Benjamin With a Focus on JTBCs

2019 ◽  
Vol 41 (6) ◽  
pp. 145-184
Author(s):  
Ji-man Kim ◽  
Sun-young Lee ◽  
Dae-hyun Lee
Keyword(s):  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
The Media

Between Erlebnis and Erfahrung: Cinema Experience with Benjamin

Paragraph ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 292-312 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Elsaesser
Keyword(s):  
Media Studies ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Moving Images ◽  
Film And Media Studies ◽  
The Media ◽  
Bodily Sensations ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Media Event ◽  
Sudden Motion ◽  
Emotion And Affect

The ‘turn’ to emotion and affect in film and media studies may take its distance from earlier ways of understanding spectatorial involvement (modelled on psychoanalytic notions of identification). But such approaches, whether cognitivist in intent, or inspired by phenomenology, also return to an earlier interest in bodily sensations and somatic responses when exposed to sudden motion and moving images (associated with ideas such as innervation, shock and over-stimulation). The essay proposes to bring Walter Benjamin into the debate, with a term central to his idea of modernity, namely ‘experience’, and to revive his distinction between Erfahrung and Erlebnis. Noting certain features of excess and liminiality in contemporary cinema, and mapping them across the three distinct domains of body, time and agency, Benjamin's own attempt to locate the emotional core of the technical media is reappraised. Grounded in the peculiar variability but also interdependence of place, narration and perception, the cinema would then appear to provide Erlebnis without Erfahrung, a state formerly associated with trauma, but now the very definition of the media event.

scholarly journals Zygmunt Bauman and the Task of theTranslator

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (13-14) ◽  
Author(s):  
Szymon Wróbel
Keyword(s):  
Collective Action ◽  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Social World ◽  
Individual Experience ◽  
Zygmunt Bauman ◽  
Language Of Science ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Media

The author presents the figure of Zygmunt Bauman as a public intellectualand a translator. Following Walter Benjamin and his essay“The Task of the Translator” and Jacques Derrida and his text“What Is a ‘Relevant’ Translation,” the author concludes that a publicintellectual as a translator is persistently confrontedwith the taskof translatingstatements and postulates from the “language of politics”into “language of practice” and “individual experience”, fromthe “language of science” into the “language of collective action”, andfrom the “language of sociology” into the “language of the media.”The author claims that the key category in Bauman’s thinking wasneither “liquidity” nor “modernity”, but “socialism as active utopia”.For Bauman, socialism is impossible without a socialist culture, butculture is a practice, i.e. it is anattempt to attune our collective goalsaimed at improving the social world. This alignment comes withoutresorting to the idea of a collective conductor (a program), but bymeans of resorting to the idea of a translator.

The Question of Reflexivity

2019 ◽  
Vol 56 (2) ◽  
pp. 167-180
Author(s):  
Marketa Jakešova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Third Way ◽  
The Third ◽  
The World ◽  
Media Philosophy ◽  
The Media ◽  
Philosophical Texts ◽  
Ontological Turn ◽  
Varied Work

This article aims to critically examine three approaches to reflexivity in philosophical texts, specifically the case when the textuality becomes its own topic. The first approach is when there is no reflexivity at all. It is just describing how – according to the author – things are. As an example of this approach I take German media philosophy. This tradition is specific because reflexivity is supposed to be its very topic. However, the media philosophers succeeded in touching the indefinability of mediality itself. Another method is to question one’s own and possibly also the reader’s position. I have chosen Annemarie Mol’s empirical philosophy as the example here. The problem is that despite following the “ontological turn”, the author remains (probably inevitably) also to a large extent trapped in the fact that he/she describes the world, that is, in subject/object dichotomy and therefore, in epistemology. The third way to write aims to make readers feel what the author tells. My example here is the varied work of Walter Benjamin whom I for the purpose of this article consider more as a prophet rather than the precise thinker who he (also) by all means was. While using the second approach myself, I discuss advantages and challenges of the three and find their points of touch.

scholarly journals Blasting the past: A rereading of Walter Benjamin’s theses on the philosophy of history

2019 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 384-398
Author(s):  
Zarko Cvejic
Keyword(s):  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Significant Degree ◽  
Philosophy Of History ◽  
Representative Democracy ◽  
Global Politics ◽  
Political Situation ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Populist Movements

The text offers a reappraisal of Walter Benjamin?s Theses on the Philosophy of History (?ber den Begriff der Geschichte; ?On the Concept of History?) from the perspective of global politics today and its similarities with the socio-economic and political situation in Europe and the Americas during the 1920s and 30s; more specifically, the impact of crises on the erosion of trust in liberal representative democracy and the concomitant rise of mostly rightwing populist movements and their strongmen leaders, aided to a significant degree by the media, ?old? and ?new? alike. The purpose of the text is to draw lessons from Benjamin?s vision of materialist historiography for our current political predicament.

Book Review: Walter Benjamin and the Media: The Spectacle of Modernity

2015 ◽  
Vol 155 (1) ◽  
pp. 165-165
Author(s):  
Diti Bhattacharya
Keyword(s):  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
The Media

Synaesthesia or Anaesthesia?

2021 ◽  
pp. 127-161
Author(s):  
Tereza Havelková
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
The Political ◽  
Sensory Effects ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Senses

Chapter 4 starts from the observation that hypermediacy elicits an embodied, multisensory mode of perception. At stake here is a mode of experience whereby the perceiver “loses oneself” in the perceived, and the question of how such experience may be critically productive. The chapter is intent on making a distinction between an effect of immediacy based on (over)saturation of the senses, and a physiological, intersubjective relationship with the perceived that harbors a political potential. Drawing on critical readings of Walter Benjamin, the chapter works with the twin concepts of synaesthetics and anaesthetics. The latter allows for developing a connection between the sensory effects of hypermediacy and the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk, fostering a critique of the notions of immersion and embodiment associated with new media experiences. The former helps understand the political potential of the media of reproduction in terms of the possibility of sensory reconfiguration and a renewed sensibility to the perceived.

scholarly journals Phantasmagoria of Urban Spectacle: Walter Benjamin and Media Theory Today

2014 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jaeho Kang
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Good Deal ◽  
Seminar Series ◽  
The Media ◽  
Contemporary Media ◽  
Urban Spectacle ◽  
Modern Experience ◽  
The University ◽  
Insight Into

This contribution is the audio recording of a talk that Jaeho Kang gave at the University of Westminster in the Communication and Media Research Institute's (CAMRI) Research Seminar Series on October 29, 2014.Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) is one of the most original and perceptive German literary and cultural critics, but his unique insight into the profound impact of the media on modernity has received a good deal less attention. Based on my book, 'Walter Benjamin and the Media: The Spectacle of Modernity' (2014, see http://www.polity.co.uk/book.asp?ref=9780745645209), I will talk about Benjamin’s critical and provocative writings on the intersection between media and modern experience with particular reference to phantasmagoria, aesthetic public space, and urban spectacle. In so doing, I will clarify Benjamin’s distinctive and enduring contribution to contemporary media studies.

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