This paper was delivered on 11 May 2018 at the Critical Theory and Marxism Symposium at the University of St Andrews. Click here for the PowerPoint presentation.
When Walter Benjamin set out to analyse the mechanical reproduction of works of art in 1936, that mode of reproduction was still in its infancy.
In this paper, I would like to spur a mode for thinking about the idea of mechanically reproduced works of art in the context of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Specifically, I want to draw a focus on the developing roles of both film and television in an age of on-demand streaming and digital distribution. For this purpose, I will be analysing a series that has so far spanned an approximate twenty-five-year period, from its television pilot in 1990, to its revival as an “eighteen-hour film” in 2017.
Bad Academia 