GESAMTKUNSTWERK AND THE LIMITS OF AESTHETIC UTOPIA IN WALTER BENJAMIN’S “ARCADES PROJECT”
GESAMTKUNSTWERK AND THE LIMITS OF AESTHETIC UTOPIA IN WALTER BENJAMIN’S “ARCADES PROJECT”

Summary/Abstract: This article focuses on Walter Benjamin’s considerations on the issue of Gesamtkunstwerk (total-work-of-art), interpreted with reference to his unfinished work on the history and philosophy of history, architecture, and the modern city, Passagen-Werk. It aims to highlight the importance of this term to the development of aesthetics, especially in the context of the critical reception of Wagner’s works by the left-wing German intelligentsia. In assessing the political and aesthetic “totalitarianism” that lay hidden behind Gesamtkunstwerk, Adorno criticizes the modern “premature” attempts at fusing art with technology at the end of the 19th century. Benjamikln instead addressed several crucial issues of modern aesthetics: the possibility of fusing technology and art in a new type of artwork, the political and social relevance of aesthetic utopias, the possibility or impossibility of “aesthetic” reconciliation between man and nature, the aesthetic “legitimacy” or the “illegitimacy” of the Gesamtkunstwerk to modern critical aesthetic discourse. The epilogue of this article also addresses the contemporary versions of Gesamtkunstwerk theory involved in the theorizing of “virtual reality.”

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