Benjamin’s Shock and Image: Critical Responses to Hyperaesthetic Culture

Abstract

This paper argues that Walter Benjamin’s writings are especially relevant to thinking about hyperaesthetic culture. This is because they explain why overstimulating sensory regimes can be problematic, and explore the possibilities for critical thought enabled by technologically mediated sensation. Continuing a form of cultural criticism found in Nietzsche, one which censures sensory regimes that manipulate, shock and intoxicate, Benjamin describes processes of sensation, memory and thought. But although overstimulating sensory regimes disrupt processes of experience and contemplation, Benjamin does not advocate a retreat from the modern, technologically saturated environment, seeing the possibilities for critical thought as embedded in that environment. His work on visual culture shows how a mode of sense experience holds the possibility of revolution and critique. In particular, I examine how the idea of the dialectical image is an example of how visual experience enables a certain mode of cognition. The particular way the dialectical image configures the spatio-temporal engenders a certain kind of critical reflection. Other sensory modes can be read analogously to the dialectical image, and potentially the spatio-temporal configurations of senses other than vision can give rise to specific modes of critical thought.