Latest news with #WalterBenjamin
The Hindu
10 hours ago
- Politics
- The Hindu
Kashmir book ban: Why is authority scared of the printed word?
Last week, when the Home Department of the Jammu & Kashmir government declared a list of 25 books 'forfeited', an X user posted a simple and seemingly rhetorical question: 'Why did they go against books?' Everybody, including that user, would know or can guess the usual answer. Historically, censorship has worn many masks, be it nationalism, morality or law and order. But what does it mean to declare books 'forfeited' or banned when soft copies of them are freely available online, slipping past restrictions and borders? On November 1, 2003, Umberto Eco, Italian novelist, philosopher and cultural critic, stood before an audience in the Bibliotheca Alexandrina Library in Egypt and spoke about the destiny of books. In his lecture titledVegetal and Mineral Memory: The Future of Books, he described printed books as a form of 'vegetal memory,' made from the bodies of plants (meaning paper), shaped into repositories of human thought, distinguishing it from mineral memory (clay tablets or electronic memory) and organic memory (our own minds). He made a simple yet subversive point: unlike electronic memory, which can vanish at the flick of a switch, or the fragile storage of our own minds, the book is a durable embodiment of memory which remains resistant to time, censorship and power. So, why is authority always after books? Perhaps it is not the ideas themselves. Ideas, after all, are already loose in the world. But it may be thephysicalityof the book. While ideas are elusive, books as instruments are tangible and susceptible to the blows of power. In this digital age, you cannot really ban a book; it would be nearly impossible. One would need an Orwellian structure (hoping that it doesn't already exist) and tools to erase a piece of literature in its totality. But one can assault its embodiment. And, by doing so, it scares future writers. What's at stake? The state or any authority that be has always known that it cannot silence everyone. It doesn't need to. If it frightens a bit of the population, a chunk which could have told their own stories, a percentage which could have become writers, it wins. Fear is a slow, contagious thing. But fear is not the only goal. There is something more fragile and more material at stake for them. The bookas objectis under attack. Not its words which have long floated online as zeroes and ones. But its form, its spine, its paper and its physicality. A physical book is a 'thingness' something rooted inbeing; it stands in the world, and the world stands around it. It resists deletion and takes up space and stares back. It can be hidden in pits and behind walls, or found years later in a forgotten trunk while a PDF, an e-book disappears in a keystroke. Philosopher Walter Benjamin, or maybe Gen Z, might say the book carries an 'aura' of itself. Physical books invite serendipity. How many times have you gone to a bookstore just to skim through shelves and shelves and stumbled upon a book which explores something you have been thinking about earlier? The bookstores which Eco may call 'temples of vegetal memory', were raided across Kashmir by the police to enforce the order, and their videos were posted online. People on social media became thesamizdatand started to share soft copies of the said books, perhaps rendering the whole action counter-productive for the government. But soft copies, in their solitary convenience, cannot replicate the culture of exchange and community which physical books foster. You can't discover a soft copy in your friend's bookshelf and borrow it, much to their apprehension that you will never return it. Pieces of the world Kashmiris have seen everything at the hands of the authority. Curfews, communication blackoutsand internet gags so total that the virtual world ceases to exist for them. In those long, suspended hours and days and months when the phones don't ring and the screens go dark, the books stay. I keep a stack of books on my desk. Another stack rests on a table in front of it. Among them is a copy of Ray Bradbury'sFahrenheit 451.(In Bradbury's world, the destruction of books is the destruction of complexity, and without the challenging contradictions books contain, society collapses into shallow entertainment and unthinking conformity.) Their presence gives me a sense of security and belonging. So, if tomorrow the authorities decide, once again, to switch off the world for Kashmir, like they did in 2019, people know, like me, they will still have something left of the world. Some part of feudal Russia inAnna Karenina, some ancient street in Damascus from Mahfouz'sThe Harafish, some dim-lit Dublin morning fromUlysses, some windswept Yorkshire moor fromWuthering Heights, some Harlem night from Baldwin'sAnother Country orsome bleak English factory town fromHard maybe that's what is scary to the power, that in the end, after everything, the books remain for us as memory. In its flesh and blood. The writer is a journalist with experience in publishing.
Indian Express
a day ago
- Politics
- Indian Express
When destruction comes before a make-up tutorial: Gaza's horrors are happening – and being forgotten
A genocide is unfolding in Gaza. Day after day, images of bombed schools, lifeless children, desperate families clutching the few belongings they can carry pour into the timelines of millions around the world. Each post is a demand to bear witness, an attempt at not letting people look away. And yet, within hours — sometimes minutes — these images vanish beneath an avalanche of unrelated content: A trending joke, a makeup tutorial, a football highlight, an ad for instant noodles. This is the cruel paradox of our media landscape today. What Walter Benjamin might have called the 'ephemeral now' governs the platformed world: A temporality in which everything — war, grief, joy, banality — is flattened into a single stream. Here, the act of speaking, posting, or sharing does not preserve memory. Instead, it functions as a ritual of forgetting. The post is the memorial, and once posted, it can dissolve into the churn without guilt. The forgetting is not simply the byproduct of too much information. It is actively organised. Platforms thrive on the constant replacement of the now — a cycle of attention engineered to make each moment provisional, vulnerable to displacement by the next. The promise that 'nothing is lost' because 'everything is archived' is a false one. Retrievability is not remembrance. An archive that is never revisited is indistinguishable from an erasure. In the case of Gaza, this ephemeralisation of memory is compounded by repression and censorship. Instagram users have reported drops in reach, shadowbanning, and content takedowns when posting about the bombing of Rafah or the siege of Al-Shifa Hospital. Meta's automated moderation has flagged Palestinian journalists' accounts as 'terror-affiliated'. TikTok livestreams from Gaza are cut mid-broadcast. Even search terms like 'Free Palestine' have allegedly been periodically suppressed in trending lists. This is not simply 'platform bias' — it is an infrastructure of suppression embedded into the architecture of the sharing economy. The platforms present themselves as neutral marketplaces of speech, where anyone can be a broadcaster, yet they operate as tightly regulated spaces where visibility is conditional. At the same time, governments are escalating legal action against creators: In India, journalists and influencers have faced police cases for posts critical of foreign policy; in the UK, pro-Palestinian protesters have been arrested under vague 'public order' provisions; in the US, student activists are being surveilled and disciplined for their online speech. The sharing economy sits at the heart of this double bind. On the one hand, it demands ceaseless production and visibility — the pressure to 'stay relevant' by speaking, posting, marking every event. On the other, it polices that visibility through algorithmic censorship, legal threats, and commercial prioritisation of advertiser-safe content. The result is a system that compels you to speak but ensures that your speech circulates only within boundaries that leave the larger political and economic order untouched. This repression is not an interruption of the system's logic. It is the system's logic. The feed thrives on the flattening of difference — a genocide in Gaza and a celebrity wedding occupy the same frame, each equally scrollable, equally forgettable. Outrage is absorbed, not amplified. Political speech becomes content like any other: Weighed in engagement metrics, priced in ad dollars, queued for replacement by the next viral surge. The structure guarantees that nothing remains long enough to disrupt the flow. And yet, the stakes could not be higher. The speech acts surrounding Gaza are not symbolic gestures. They are part of a global struggle over the ability to narrate, document, and hold accountable those responsible for mass violence. When a video from Khan Younis is taken down, when an eyewitness thread disappears from timelines, when a protest livestream is cut off, it is not merely a personal inconvenience — it is the destruction of evidence, the erasure of testimony, the weakening of a collective memory that might otherwise resist official denial. If speech is to resist becoming another ritual of forgetting, it must find forms and spaces beyond the endless scroll. This means building independent archives of testimonies, images, and records outside the reach of algorithmic suppression. It means forming solidarities between creators, journalists, archivists, and lawyers to defend against censorship and legal harassment. It means developing habits of sustained attention that refuse the platform's demand for constant novelty — returning to the same testimonies, the same images, the same stories, until they imprint themselves into political action. Gaza's destruction is happening in real time, but it is also being buried in real time. The question is whether we will allow the architectures of our platforms — and the repression built into them — to dictate how and whether it will be remembered. Because the scroll will not remember for us. The writer is assistant professor of Political Theory, Jindal Global Law School
The Guardian
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Guardian view on the sensuous splendour of art nouveau: ripe for revival in the age of AI
Walter Benjamin, the great German theorist of early 20th-century modernity, was famously unimpressed by art nouveau. Dismissive of the style's dreamy aesthetic and flowery taste for designs inspired by the natural world, he described it as 'the last sortie of an art besieged in its tower by technology'. An artistic movement embodying a reaction against the mass production of the industrial age deserved a more sympathetic reception. Nevertheless, the 20th century appeared to agree with Benjamin's analysis. By the end of the first world war, art nouveau's decorative curlicues and flowing forms had fallen out of fashion as a more machine-inspired modernist aesthetic came into vogue. But that was then. More than a century on, as artificial intelligence offers a fresh tech challenge to humanity, a timely spot of revisionism appears to be taking place. Last month, in Paris, it emerged that a museum is finally to be dedicated to one of art nouveau's most deserving and neglected exponents. During the early 1900s, the architect Hector Guimard designed 167 entrances to the city's new Métro, one of which was later to be donated to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The stylised lettering and sinuous green ironwork, resembling insects' wings or orchid stalks, quickly became synonymous both with art nouveau and with Paris itself. But despite their much-loved and emblematic status, almost half were bulldozed in an ill-advised wave of modernisation. Much of the rest of Guimard's work in the city has been treated with equal disdain. With good reason, the art enthusiasts who have lobbied for the new museum for years see it as the historic 'righting of a wrong'. Meanwhile, 200 miles away in the birthplace of art nouveau, more rehabilitation work has been taking place. As part of a spectacular new exhibition, Brussels' Art and History Museum this summer unveiled a restored version of Victor Horta's famous Winter Garden, an immersive stained-glass marvel that helped make the artist's name when it was designed in 1900. This too became a victim of postwar architectural aesthetics, unceremoniously dismantled as part of a wider urban development programme. A six-year process of reconstruction has salvaged much of the original and replicated the rest. And completing what might be viewed as an upliftingly revivalist year, the work of Alphonse Mucha – best known for his poster portraits of the Parisian actor Sarah Bernhardt – is now being showcased at a new Mucha museum in Prague. In the US, a recent exhibition has also highlighted his influence on the psychedelic art of the 1960s counterculture. Benjamin might have raised a sceptical eyebrow. But art nouveau's emphasis on the importance of craftsmanship, and the conviction that artistic originality can introduce beauty as well as utility into the objects of daily life, are principles with a strong echo of William Morris's work. They are energising doctrines to recall in a new age of existential anxiety. Year by year, concerns grow over the extent to which artificial intelligence will colonise creative processes that once defined the meaning of being human. Guimard's stunningly innovative Métro entrances remain a tourist attraction in their own right, and a tribute to the power of the free imagination. The Guimard and Mucha museums, and Horta's rebuilt Winter Garden, can serve as reminders of what must be protected, as we enter our own equivalent of a new industrial age. Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
The Guardian
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Guardian view on the sensuous splendour of art nouveau: ripe for revival in the age of AI
Walter Benjamin, the great German theorist of early 20th-century modernity, was famously unimpressed by art nouveau. Dismissive of the style's dreamy aesthetic and flowery taste for designs inspired by the natural world, he described it as 'the last sortie of an art besieged in its tower by technology'. An artistic movement embodying a reaction against the mass production of the industrial age deserved a more sympathetic reception. Nevertheless, the 20th century appeared to agree with Benjamin's analysis. By the end of the first world war, art nouveau's decorative curlicues and flowing forms had fallen out of fashion as a more machine-inspired modernist aesthetic came into vogue. But that was then. More than a century on, as artificial intelligence offers a fresh tech challenge to humanity, a timely spot of revisionism appears to be taking place. Last month, in Paris, it emerged that a museum is finally to be dedicated to one of art nouveau's most deserving and neglected exponents. During the early 1900s, the architect Hector Guimard designed 167 entrances to the city's new Métro, one of which was later to be donated to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The stylised lettering and sinuous green ironwork, resembling insects' wings or orchid stalks, quickly became synonymous both with art nouveau and with Paris itself. But despite their much-loved and emblematic status, almost half were bulldozed in an ill-advised wave of modernisation. Much of the rest of Guimard's work in the city has been treated with equal disdain. With good reason, the art enthusiasts who have lobbied for the new museum for years see it as the historic 'righting of a wrong'. Meanwhile, 200 miles away in the birthplace of art nouveau, more rehabilitation work has been taking place. As part of a spectacular new exhibition, Brussels' Art and History Museum this summer unveiled a restored version of Victor Horta's famous Winter Garden, an immersive stained-glass marvel that helped make the artist's name when it was designed in 1900. This too became a victim of postwar architectural aesthetics, unceremoniously dismantled as part of a wider urban development programme. A six-year process of reconstruction has salvaged much of the original and replicated the rest. And completing what might be viewed as an upliftingly revivalist year, the work of Alphonse Mucha – best known for his poster portraits of the Parisian actor Sarah Bernhardt – is now being showcased at a new Mucha museum in Prague. In the US, a recent exhibition has also highlighted his influence on the psychedelic art of the 1960s counterculture. Benjamin might have raised a sceptical eyebrow. But art nouveau's emphasis on the importance of craftsmanship, and the conviction that artistic originality can introduce beauty as well as utility into the objects of daily life, are principles with a strong echo of William Morris's work. They are energising doctrines to recall in a new age of existential anxiety. Year by year, concerns grow over the extent to which artificial intelligence will colonise creative processes that once defined the meaning of being human. Guimard's stunningly innovative Métro entrances remain a tourist attraction in their own right, and a tribute to the power of the free imagination. The Guimard and Mucha museums, and Horta's rebuilt Winter Garden, can serve as reminders of what must be protected, as we enter our own equivalent of a new industrial age.
New York Times
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
A Rarely Seen Angel With a Lesson From History
The angel is kept in a state of darkness, because it is delicate and vulnerable to light. The subject of a century of philosophical debate, and the inspiration for works of poetry, theater, music and film, the angel, called 'Angelus Novus,' is a powerfully enigmatic figure. When this artwork by Paul Klee is presented it in public, it is considered an event. Klee's 1920 watercolor print will have a rare appearance starting on May 8, as part of the exhibition, 'The Angel of History: Walter Benjamin, Paul Klee and the Berlin Angels 80 Years After World War II,' at the Bode-Museum in Berlin. On loan from the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, Klee's work — which is about the size of a standard notebook page — will be on show through July 13, a shorter-than-typical exhibition run, to protect it from too much exposure. The German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin, who owned 'Angelus Novus' for nearly two decades, wrote one of his final texts about the angel, just before he died by suicide in 1940. He saw the angel as a witness to an imminent cataclysm. 'This is how one pictures the angel of history,' Benjamin wrote in notes that would later be published as 'Theses on the Philosophy of History.'
