Things, Benjamin tells us, have a dumb and inchoate form of speech, yet they communicate with each other by means of a material commonality. This commonality is immediate and magical. Only through the mediation of things can the world be grasped as a whole.

The Language of Things is subtitled with quotations from Benjamin’s “On Language as Such and on Human Language.” They appear over the image sequences of a precisely calibrated machinery of acceleration – carousels, wave pools, and the like – from Tokyo’s artificial worlds and high-tech amusement parks.

By way of a language of technology, the people in the amusement park rides can be outside themselves, ecstatic. For milliseconds, gravity is suspended and speed induces sheer joy. The video screen breaks apart. The technologies of this enjoyment are non-linguistic effects of a designating and calculated language: the language of humans, with its vocabulary of physical designations, leads to the technical knowledge and calculability of affect. But to do so, human language also draws upon the language of things: in this sense, the language of things expresses, through technology, that very commonality by which the world seizes upon itself as an undivided whole.

• Sektion Section: Film
• Programm Programme: Early Videos