This essay examines Walter Benjamin’s engagement with the early European avant-garde movements, notably Surrealism and the Russian film movement, from the perspective of media aesthetics. The essay shows how Benjamin tries to distance himself epistemologically and politically from the tradition of aesthetic modernism and to find critical motifs for the formation of the new collective public in the biomechanical approach to the cinematic experience. I argue that key analytical concepts in his discussion of film, such as the optical unconscious, tactility, and distraction, can only be grasped if we relocate the notion of technological innervation at the center of Benjamin’s account of the intersection of media, space, and human sensorium. In so doing, I aim to draw out some theoretical implications of Benjamin’s alternative model to the bourgeois public sphere and the phantasmagoric nature of urban culture for the further development of critical media studies in an age of new media.
