Æstetiseringens dynamik: Walter Benjamins teser om æstetisering

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  • Bent Fausing

The industrialization produces a veil in its aesthetization, and in this lies a criticism and heterotopia in its images of dreams and illuminations. This is the dynamic duality in Walter Benjamin’s incomplete project, ‘Paris. Capital of the nineteenth century Paris’. Benjamin deals especially with the so-called passages or arcades in Paris. They are new architectural phenomena that connect streets with each other through alleyways with shops. Passage has a more spacious meaning with Benjamin, pointing to the way he reads the metropolis. Passage means in Benjamin's optics threshold or transition, namely between nature and history, I and things, awakening and dream, potential and realization. ‘I and things’ are essential to keep in mind, when it comes to exhibitions of commodity in the passages, where you try to make things personal and particular. The personification or anthropomorphication of things plays an essential role in Benjamin's analysis of the metropolitan aesthetics. The article seeks to answer why and how Benjamin sought this path in his mapping of modernity's aesthetization and finally how it manifests itself in the digital passages now.
Original languageDanish
Book seriesAkademisk kvarter
Volume19
Number of pages15
ISSN1904-008
Publication statusPublished - 29 Dec 2019

ID: 222410356