Then came film and burst this prison -world with the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly and venturously go traveling.
- Walter Benjamin
What Benjamin would have said about the blogsphere, YouTube and the rest today, is as they say, pure conjecture. A tenth of a second is painfully slow and plodding by our standards, much as Benjamin would have marveled (as we still do) at the people in his childhood who thought the speed of the bicycle exhilarating and provocative . The quote captures Benjamin's complex (an overused word, misapplied much methinks) reactions to technology and experience. This progress is both deeply destructive, obliterating, but we cannot turn completely away from it, in fact its consequences are as deeply attracting as in some way they are replusive. The world destroyed was a prison, but its destruction leaves only 'far-flung ruins and debris'.
It makes me think about the ruins of bombed cities, where children played, in fact now I think about it, it reminds of what the painter Keifer said in a recent interview - for him to play in the empty shells of buildings was an literally an enchanting thing.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
I wonder why ruins were so attractive to the Romantics?
Just picked up Virillo's book, Speed and Politics. Cannot make head or tail of it but in this day and agae it would be hard to make the case for 'place' or anything that *hasn't* been fragmented.
Some might say there *is* only the surface, and like a skater or a silver surfer, we have to keep on going unless we fall, sink...like the old cartoons, where you can carry on running on thin air unless you look down and realise the ground beneath your feet has disappeared!
yes the Silver Surfer - I hadn't thought of that, a being of the film, the surface, on the edge of the envelope, but of course. I like the image - I read quite alot of Virillo at Birkbeck, some of his images, and he thinks very much in images, are stricking and stick. In a sense if you try to take them apart they fail,(again like cartoon characters) I remember something he said about Howard Hughes, as the proto-typical technological man, aspiring to tranverse the globe the 'dromosphere' and ending up as a inactive frozen body in a darken room, the ultimate in a kind of monadology.
Post a Comment