Vilém Flusser, Walter Benjamin – The technical ambiguities

In different moments of his work, Walter Benjamin reflects upon the question of technology and related issues such as work as the mediation between man and nature, conducting his critical analysis of progress. He says: “What’s the idea? to speak of progress to a world sinking into the rigidity of death. (...) The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are 'status quo' is the catastrophe. It is not an ever-present possibility but what in each case is given.” Marxism will also be reviewed by him according to his critical conception of progress: “Marx said that revolutions are the locomotive of world history. But perhaps things are very different. It may be that revolutions are the act by which the human race travelling in the train applies the emergency brake”.