Abstract

The purpose of the article is to analyse the different ways through which eminent scholars of the early twentieth-century Germany have considered the shift from a notion of machine linked to the necessities of factories (the «machine of production») to a machine as a vehicle for dissemination of words, images, and sounds (the «machine of communication»). Whereas Spengler and Heidegger merely emphasise the role of the machine of production and its logics of homologation, simultaneously disregarding the machine of communication, Schmitt and Jünger begin to recognise the perverse effects of the «psycho-technical machinery of mass suggestion» at a global level. Nevertheless, only Adorno and Benjamin develop a dialectic analysis of the communicative sphere as the acme of a process of aestheticization of politics. In conclusion, the relationship between machine of production and machine of communication may prove to be an effective instrument for further exploring the diverse conceptions of technique and of reality in the German philosophy and culture of the first half of the twentieth century.