From Benjamin to Flusser: Towards a theory of critical engagement with technologically reproduced images

Viner, Nicholas 2025. From Benjamin to Flusser: Towards a theory of critical engagement with technologically reproduced images. PhD Thesis, Cardiff University. Item availability restricted.

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Abstract

Drawing on a reading of the engagements of Walter Benjamin with technology, visual arts, and the condition of modernity, this thesis examines the ways in which the Benjaminian concepts of the aura in relation to visual art, phantasmagoria, and eternal return are linked in a manner through which can be drawn an understanding of the relationship between people and technologically produced images within modernity. The project offers a reading of Benjamin which points towards a modernity which is dominated by the phantasmagorias of technologically produced images, bound up with their status as commodities. In the phantasmagorical transformation of these images to the status of the commodity, they become a concrete manifestation of Benjamin’s understanding of the doctrine of the eternal return of the same. In the closing stages of the thesis, the arguments of Benjamin concerning the tendency of technologically produced images towards phantasmagoria will be subjected to a reading using the engagement with technical images of the Czech philosopher Vilém Flusser. While the connection between Benjamin and Flusser has been made by other writers, it is argued in this thesis that Flusser’s writings provide a clearer conceptualisation of Benjamin’s arguments than has previously been suggested. It will be argued that by offering a Flusserian reading of Benjamin’s arguments, it can be shown that the tendency towards phantasmagoria is inherent within the technology which creates such images. It will be argued that the lack of understanding both of the nature of the production of technical images through apparatuses, and of what it is such images actually represent, allows them to take on the character of phantasmagoria. This leads to the modern world being, in a Flusserian understanding, a ‘post-historical one’ which, in the language of Benjamin, is organised by the logic of the eternal return of the same.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Date Type:	Completion
Status:	Unpublished
Schools:	Schools > English, Communication and Philosophy
Subjects:	B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > B Philosophy (General)
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	16 April 2026
Last Modified:	17 Apr 2026 10:20
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/185864

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