Leslie, Esther (1998) Walter Benjamin: traces of craft. Journal of Design History 11 (1), pp. 5-13. ISSN 1741-7279.
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Abstract
This paper considers Walter Benjamin's theory of the object in the industrial age. Benjamin's work is replete with images of craft practices. Pot-throwing and weaving appear as paradigms of authentic experience and the processes of memory. Prominent in Benjamin's account of craft practice is the hand that feels and marks its objects; authentic knowledge of the world is envisioned as a 'grasping hold' of the world. The shift from artisan labour to industrial labour, with its growing redundancy of the hand in the processes of production, impacts on modes of memory and experience. Benjamin's delineation of modern, industrialized experience is shown to be redemptive. He re-evaluates Dada and photography as manual craft processes that might rediscover a modern authenticity of experience and memory.
Metadata
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Keyword(s) / Subject(s): | Walter Benjamin, hand—industrial organization, material culture studies, Modernism, technique |
| School: | Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Creative Arts, Culture and Communication |
| Research Centres and Institutes: | Contemporary Literature, Centre for, Humanities, Birkbeck Institute for the (BIH) |
| Depositing User: | Esther Leslie |
| Date Deposited: | 25 Jan 2013 10:35 |
| Last Modified: | 09 Aug 2023 12:32 |
| URI: | https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/5696 |
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