In the convulsions of the commodity economy, we begin to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled.
Walter BenjaminBoredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away.
Walter BenjaminThe camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.
Walter BenjaminLike ultraviolet rays memory shows to each man in the book of life a script that invisibly and prophetically glosses the text.
Walter BenjaminLanguage has unmistakably made plain that memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities lie buried.
Walter BenjaminPainting, by its nature, cannot provide an object of simultaneous collective reception... as film is able to do today... And while efforts have been made to present paintings to the masses in galleries and salons, this mode of reception gives the masses no means of organizing and regulating their response. Thus, the same public which reacts progressively to a slapstick comedy inevitably displays a backward attitude toward Surrealism.
Walter Benjamin