I can't stop about this short essay "Dream-Kitsch" by Walter Benjamin.
The whole piece is a critical response to Surrealism, in particular the manifesto put out by André Breton in 1924 and the essay Une vague de rêves by Louis Aragon. But the ramifications of his critique go far beyond Surrealism itself.
The thesis, which is that "dreams no longer provide a view on blue horizons...dreams now lead straight into banality", has the same effect that Kafka's aphorisms give me. It suggests that we have taken the phenomenon of the dream for granted as a 'pure' ahistorical font of authenticity, and have not even begun to consider the possibility that it is contingent on other historical factors, or that its 'purpose' might be outside or even against our intentions. (Benjamin and Kafka both seem to be masters of these kinds of statements: not the shock of "God is dead", but "you never understood who God was in the first place, and now that you understand that fact it's too late to change your fate".) To me it seems that so much of this brief gloss presages future critical movements, especially situationism, in regards to how it discusses the role of commodities in the social and psychological lives of modern, industrial humans. This is the thought he leaves us with at the end of the piece: "through engagement with a social environment dating back to the second half of the nineteenth century, in dreams as well as in the words and images of certain artists, a creature is formed that deserves to be called “the furnished man'."
There are so many directions you could run with this essay. You could take this and use it to discuss the frenzy of post-war consumer culture; you could look into the late capitalist fascination with ethereal dream-worlds that merge with reality, born out of the increasing mediation of our lives through communication technologies and commodities; you could look at the myth of the "authentic self" and how it is rooted in the material culture of industrial capitalism (one of the first great industrial aesthetic movements, Art Nouveau, was remarkable in that it focused on how one furnished one's life rather than being confined to making particular forms of art). Check it our if you're interested. I think that the translation I linked above^ was the first English version of the piece, and if that's the case it just became available in English last year. If any of y'all are German speakers I'd love to hear how you think the translation holds up. The annotations were very helpful as well. If this stays stuck in my head I might make another post about this and go into some of what the essay discusses.
