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Journal of Design History 1998 11(1):5-13; doi:10.1093/jdh/11.1.5
© 1998 by Design History Society
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Walter Benjamin: Traces of Craft

ESTHER LESLIE

University of East London


  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

Key Words: Walter Benjamin • hand • industrial organization • material culture studies • Modernism • technique


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