Benjamin Walter - Walter Benjamin and the Media : the spectacle of modernity

Theory and the Media

John Armitage, Virilio and the Media

David Gunkel and Paul A. Taylor, Heidegger and the Media

Philip Howard, Castells and the Media

Jaeho Kang, Walter Benjamin and the Media

Paul A. Taylor, iek and the Media

Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, Kittler and the Media

To Junghee Ryu and Kisoo Kang

This is a small book, but there is a large number of people I would like to thank.

A great debt is owed to the students at the New School and at SOAS who have participated over the years in my classes on the critical theory of media. Their exhaustive curiosity and radical imagination have provoked this book to engage more with politics of contemporary media culture. I am also very grateful to my mentors and Doktorvter for their guidance, support and encouragement throughout: John Thompson, Nick Couldry, Axel Honneth, Gyuhwan Seo, the late David Frisby, the late Miriam Hansen, Elihu Katz, Daniel Dayan, Jeffrey Goldfarb, Andrew Arato and Patrick Baert. I hope that my debt to and respect for their insights are evident throughout this book. Thanks are also due to my friends and colleagues who made intellectual contributions to this work: Paolo Carpignano, Vinayak Chaturvedi, Lawrence Hamilton, Noah Isenberg, Troels Degn Johansson, Andreas Kalyvas, Sungdo Kim, Robert Kirkbride, Claus Krogholm, Shannon Mattern, Marcos Nobre, Dominic Pettman, Martin Roberts, Jos Rodrigo Rodriguez, Sanjay Ruparelia, Barry Salmon, Martin Saar, Nidhi Srinivas, Erik Steinskog, Sam Tobin, and McKenzie Wark. Bernadette Boyle deserves special mention for her help with meticulous proofreading in preparing the manuscript in every state. Parts of the chapters appeared in the following journals: Constellations, Theoria, and International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society. I thank them for the permission to use.

I would especially like to express my gratitude to Graeme Gilloch. Since we first met in a caf near the University of Frankfurt in 2001, he has rigorously encouraged me to pursue the topical issues we discussed and helped elaborate my rough ideas at every stage of their development. Without his friendship, this book would not have been possible. I am deeply grateful to Jeesoon Hong for many years of understanding, patience and encouragement. I also wish to thank my sisters, Moonhee and Jinhee for their understanding and support especially over the past few years.

This book is dedicated to my parents, Junghee Ryu and Kisoo Kang, for their endless generosity, patience and understanding.

Key Works

Curriculum Vitae (I) (1925)

Curriculum Vitae (VI): Dr Walter Benjamin (1940)

In September 1940, on the Franco-Spanish border, Walter Benjamin, aged just 48, committed suicide. At that time, the media world that we know today was only in embryonic form: few people had telephones; television was in its infancy as a technology; in terms of film, the age of the silent screen was fresh in the memory and the use of colour still something of a novelty; the printed word, of newspapers, magazines and journals still predominated, while radio had emerged as its main electronic rival. For his generation, the wireless had an altogether different meaning. Some seventy years later, we live in a globalized world dominated by electronic communications of all kinds: mobile technologies, information and communication technologies (ICTs), satellite channels, instant global telecommunications, blogs, social networking sites, tweets, palm-held instant Internet access pads and pods. What, then, can Benjamins writings tell us about our own twenty-first-century world of ubiquitous digital media? What kind of challenges and questions might they pose for readers today, for whom instant communication across the globe, instant access to information, instant downloads, gaming graphics, 3D, HD, massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), live broadcast TV events from most distant parts of the world, and omnipresent advertising are such an integral part of everyday life that we scarcely notice them, let alone think about them?