Abstract
This paper traces a genealogy of mediated memory from Hannah Arendt’s analysis of bureaucratic rationality in The Origins of Totalitarianism to Walter Benjamin’s “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia.” For Arendt, bureaucracy represents the political form of amnesia, that is, an administrative automatism that replaces judgment with procedure and thought with function. For Benjamin, surrealism offered a counter-movement: the recovery of experience through dream, shock, and profane illumination, the possibility of awakening within modernity’s trance. Reading these two thinkers together, the paper develops a dialectic between mechanization and imagination, forgetting and remembrance, that resonates with the algorithmic condition of the present. Memory has once again become mechanical in the age of artificial intelligence, an archive governed by statistical recurrence rather than lived recollection. The machine both extends and erases our mnemonic capacity, performing what Arendt would call thoughtlessness under the guise of cognition. By juxtaposing Arendt’s political critique with Benjamin’s aesthetic revolution, I propose “mechanical memory” as a conceptual figure for contemporary digital culture: a system that remembers without recollection and forgets through endless reproduction. The paper asks whether surrealist strategies of estrangement and juxtaposition can still reawaken historical and political consciousness—or whether, under AI’s bureaucratic logic, even the dream has been automated.
Presenters
Chunyu WangStudent, Experimental Humanities and Social Engagement; Digital Humanities, New York University, New York, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
2026 Special Focus—Human-Centered AI Transformations
KEYWORDS
Bureaucracy; Artificial Intelligence; Memory; Algorithmic Culture; Political Imagination; Surrealism
