Walter Benjamin - ProfilesArchive

About Me

I am Walter Benjamin, flaneur extraordinaire and ever-fervent progenitor of "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936)", an essay of the most heroic and epic wanderings of the socially conscious aesthete. Here I find myself, but one intellectual refugee, thrust forward past the cusp of the second millenium...On! On! On! Brawl and bellow, screaming soliloquies of the industrial machine. I boldly posit a mandate (note: aforementioned essay) for the happy and mutually beneficial marriage of The Aura and The Newly Engendered Cult Value in works of art today, as visual apostles of social change and a type of cultural capital in communications.And what have we now? The... I N T E R N E T? ... Technological Reproduction?! At first occasion of meeting, I commenced the act of sinking into a morass of despair. Long, ponderous evenings have passed and imbued me not with melancholia, but with DETERMINATION to seek revenge for the wrongdoings done upon the whole of society today by the aimless sprawl of technology.So now presents itself a metaphorical "World Wide Web": To exploit, to wrench, to allow to unfurl before me?I await a teleological unfurling. The current social superconstruct should rightfully tremble in anticipation of my judgment.One dogma retains its original verisimilitude:,The tenets and arguments housed in the intellectual loins of "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936)" do, will, and MUST ring true in the shocking - nay, appalling - climate of this "virtual world" of the present time.

My Interests

The Arcade Project (Passagenwerk) The Origin of German Tragic Drama (Ursprung des Deutschen Trauerspiels) Productive banter, comradeship, assorted reveries in the company of Theodor Adorno. The dark loggias of my middle-class youth.

I'd like to meet:

Aura and Cult Value, fused as one might encounter two lovers in an ever-changing arcade of glass surfaces.Modernists. Philosophical Stakes. The Angel of History. Still-tender memories and the social retrievability of the so-called decadent epochs. Wanton discourse. The Grand Narrative.

Movies:

The Cinema engorges its bloodlines with Capitalism and Schizophrenia.

Television:

How will megalopolises like the so-called "Best Buy" serve to foment the mass passage of news and information?

Books:

Translations to endear the mind to the open road.

Heroes:

Charles Baudelaire. Marcel Proust.

My Blog

On Emotional States of Flux: Love Not Denied

Have I ever withheld love, in any of its ever-mutable forms, to you, my readers, scholars, and colleagues?Hark!Never!What better day to love with the grit from the annals of one's celestial vehicle!...
Posted by Walter Benjamin on Thu, 14 Feb 2008 06:42:00 PST

Wherefore art thou namest "Dairy Queen"?

Friends! Observe!A fellow scholar has published a book bearing my name and purportedly marked by my influence! (judging by the spare synopsis)I must procure this object of potential preciousness in a...
Posted by Walter Benjamin on Thu, 07 Feb 2008 07:18:00 PST

GRAND EFFIGIES, SOMBER ELEGIES

In my wanderings through the vast lands of Blogspot, I firmly grasp the impetus for the completion and/or termination of Passagenwerk.This would be a grand effigy to dated technology, for which I find...
Posted by Walter Benjamin on Wed, 06 Feb 2008 12:47:00 PST

THE INFINITE JOYS WROUGHT FROM GMAIL

I MAY ALSO BE REACHED AT ALL HOURS [email protected]
Posted by Walter Benjamin on Thu, 24 Jan 2008 02:37:00 PST

My Ecstatic Entrance through The Threshold into The Realm of The Image!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I have made a new friend, Mr. Theirry Tillier from France.He has instructed me in the ways of EMBEDDING. THE IMAGE. INTO THE VIRTUAL PICTURE PLANE. USING "HTML" CODE, a new linguistic presence for ...
Posted by Walter Benjamin on Thu, 24 Jan 2008 02:33:00 PST

On Blogspot: Google Phenomenology and Youthful Prowess

Of the virtual vehicles for this internet category (BLOG, that is), the benevolent host "Blogspot", of The Oft-Visited http://www.google.com, houses the masses of "Bloggers".Blogger seems to be an inc...
Posted by Walter Benjamin on Thu, 03 Jan 2008 12:53:00 PST

The New Scramble (Countering Insanity)

So passes another holiday season.I spent mine in my ancestral land in the ghostly company of my father (the rascal!), reclining in supple and high-backed leather chairs. Pipefuls shared in the aura o...
Posted by Walter Benjamin on Thu, 03 Jan 2008 12:44:00 PST

Protocols to the Experiments with Hashish

is ripe for its completion.More details to follow.The Internet has been kind to me; my explorations remains nascent.W.B.
Posted by Walter Benjamin on Tue, 11 Dec 2007 10:01:00 PST

The Crock, Replete

I have reached into The Digital Void!Rewarded with a metaphysical Crock, now teeming with kindred souls!Twenty-three friends in this self-possessed Space?!My heart shall likely burst forth from the bi...
Posted by Walter Benjamin on Fri, 30 Nov 2007 03:25:00 PST

On Camaraderie

Hark!I have nineteen friends.Twenty, if I likewise endear my fresh supply of opiates.
Posted by Walter Benjamin on Fri, 30 Nov 2007 02:58:00 PST