这个世界失去了它的魔力吗?如果是，那是件坏事吗?如果是这样，我们能做些什么呢?在本周的节目中，我们将讨论沃尔特·本雅明(Walter Benjamin)，这位20世纪初的德国犹太思想家，对这一切有很多精彩的见解。

Benjamin took seriously Max Weber’s claim that “the fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the ‘disenchantment of the world.’” Modernity is, above all, a time of disenchantment. These days a rainbow isn’t a god, as it was for the ancient Greeks, or a sign of God’s promise, as it was for the ancient Hebrews; now it’s just a bit of prismatic refraction, easily explained by science. There’s no mystery or wonder in the world around us any more.

The sacred has increasingly retreated not just from the natural world but also from the public sphere (law, politics, education, marriage). Even in the world of art, things have changed: now that any of us can hang a copy of the Mona Lisa on our wall, there’s no magical “aura” attaching to the original.

In addition, we’re living spiritually impoverished lives, crushed beneath capitalism, bureaucracy, and efficiency. We’re alienated, in Marx’s sense. Modern work conditions have a way of turning us into things, functions, cogs in a machine—if not ourselves machines, automata, merely going through the motions of our lives. We’ve lost the capacity to have full-blown experience (“Erfahrung”), and are reduced to simply sleepwalking through our existence.

Benjamin would probably have agreed with Theodor Adorno that “to be still able to perceive anything at all, regardless of its quality, replaces happiness, since omnipotent quantification has taken away the possibility of perception itself.” As for history, well, it’s just “one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage”—and there’s no sign of things changing any time soon. (Tragically, Benjamin took his own life in 1940 when it seemed escape from Nazi-occupied France was going to be impossible.)

这是现代生活的惨淡景象，但本杰明并没有止步于此。首先，祛魅并不总是一件坏事。有必要详细说明将宗教置于法律和政治之外的好处，但让我们只提本杰明关于艺术的杰出和有影响力的思想:它的“光环”的衰落有使它更民主的优势。任何人都可以拥有那幅蒙娜丽莎的海报;任何人都可以看卓别林的电影;任何人都可以成为一件艺术作品的共同创作者，只要做得好。本杰明说，一件好的艺术品“引领消费者走向生产”。更重要的是——本杰明在这里借鉴了贝托尔特·布莱希特——去auralised艺术可以在政治上有效，把我们从梦游的状态中唤醒。

第二，现代性并不是完全没有幻想。一个小村庄仍然坚持抵抗入侵者:世俗的村庄重新被蛊惑。在这里，超现实主义者通过对弗洛伊德的解读指明了方向。在经验的普遍匮乏中，奇迹之地仍然存在——事实上，正是造成了所有损害的现代性产生了新的奇迹之地。

Take the gas pumps we use unthinkingly every time we fill our tank: these become sources of “profane illumination” once we realize, as Louis Aragon did, that they look like strange living creatures, one-eyed, one-armed gods with numbers for features. Whoever designed them chose that shape because it felt right, and it felt right because their unconscious told them so. The built environment is haunted by the ghost of collective hopes and fears, hopes and fears that we unconsciously pour into everything we make. This is the source of the “everyday miracles” that are still on offer to us. Everything has hidden depths, speaks a secret language, is more than it appears. We may have banished Iris, but we did so only to forge new gods.

In an optimistic mood, then, Benjamin might perhaps have said that Surrealism can keep us going until, thanks in part to the work done by avant-garde art, we find the collective political will to change the world. And if all else failed, then for Benjamin, who had a mystical side to him, there was always a different kind of hope: “every second [is] the small gateway in time through which the Messiah might enter.”

Was Benjamin right? Can avant-garde art console and save us? If not, can something else—something unimaginable—ride to our rescue? Tune into this week's show with guest Margaret Cohen, author ofProfane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution.

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