ROOM-FOR-PLAY: BENJAMIN'S GAMBLE WITH CINEMA: The Martin Walsh Memorial Lecture 2003

[...]the danger is not so much one of losing than one of "not winning," of "missing [one's] chance" or "arriving 'too late'" (SW 2:297, 298).18 With a view to Benjamin's concept of cinema, it is significant that he seems less interested in pursuing analogies with assembly line work or the stock market than in linking the game of chance to the gambler's ability to seize the current of fate, related to ancient practices of divination which involve the human being in his or her material entirety. [...]the essay spells out the political and cultural constellation that motivated his interest in the category of play in the first place- a constellation defined, on the one hand, by the rise of fascism and the renewed threat of a technologically enhanced military catastrophe and, on the other, the false resurrections of the decaying aura in the sphere of art (aestheticism), the liberal-capitalist media (star cult), and the spectacularization of political life. [...]the particular significance of film: "The function of film is to train human beings in the apperceptions and reactions needed to deal with a vast apparatus whose role in their lives is expanding almost daily" (SW 3:108, italics in original). [...]it is unlikely that Benjamin would have gone Luddite in view of digital technology, inasmuch as it opens up for human beings another, dramatically enlarged Spielraum, a virtual space that significantly modifies the interrelations of body- and image-space and offers hitherto unimaginable modes of playful innervation.