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I have to go back to that essay. Thank you for bringing it up to me. I think after Bernie 2020, many people legitimately become content producers -- on the Left, because there was no other media/govt/ngo structure they could go to. In Germany right now, you have a whole class of creatives and tech types captured by American politics. The cultural authors as American Producers

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I love teaching Benjamin. Not Steyerl. But I am sad how little he is taught now

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I have been teaching it to design students at Pratt. It can be a bit of a slog, but I assign each student a passage and it works pretty well. I made some teaching tools that might be useful that I would like to share here. This is an annotated version with pictures https://www.are.na/block/18105627. The timestamps refer to the audiobook version https://www.are.na/block/17910825. The PDF also includes a Chinese translation and the original German. I'm sure I will come under fire here for having crossed out the prologue and epilogue, but I made this for a specific class and our concern was authorship, aura and the cult/exhibition value of art.

Also excellent is the reappearance of Benjamin. https://new-documents.org/books/walter-benjamin-recent-writings https://vimeo.com/61669696.

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I was in a conversation with some other professors last fall, and someone suggested that Work of Art could be replaced by Hito Steyerl's How Not To Be Seen. https://vimeo.com/322112926. I love and teach both, but I don't see how Steyerl could replace Benjamin because they say very different things. Perhaps he meant that the cult of Benjamin had been supplanted by the cult of Steyerl?

Both are bangers, but I don't think you're properly educated in art without exposure to Benjamin and Duchamp. It seems impossible to understand current thinking without them.

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Have been thinking about this post for a couple of days and WB's "Author as Producer":

"Among the most important developments in Germany in the last 10 years is the fact that many productive minds have gone through a revolutionary development parallel to and under the pressure of the economic situation, without however, having been able in a revolutionary way to think through their own work and its relationship to the means of production, its productive techniques, its technology."

The subsequent sections go on to critique "activism" and "the new objectivity" and how those writers' tendencies fail to "experience solidarity" as a producer, but "ideologically." Activist writers occlude class relations, new objective documentaries are "fashionable" that pander to the proletariat but are intended for a more rarefied audience. It's been a very long time since I've read this, so my thoughts are still nascent, but to me, it's still thinkers like Benjamin who are more useful in giving us tools to think through our present materially instead of what I think he would call now mere political tendencies in literary and artmaking practices, the "hacks" Benjamin sees as strengthening "the bourgeois apparatus of production and publication [that] assimilate an astonishing number of revolutionary themes" for their own ego.

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Which of his ideas do you think is most prescient? What is your opinion on Sartre? Is existentialism in conflict with Frankfurt?

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