Benjamin, Walter (1892–1940)

Walter Benjamin was a German-Jewish philosopher, historian, literary critic, language theorist, and translator. After the National Socialist takeover in Germany in 1933, he emigrated to Paris. In 1940, attempting to flee the German invasion of France, Benjamin committed suicide near the French-Spanish border.

[Page 94]Benjamin's “configurative” writings draw concepts, citations, and other materials from a wide range of sources. These include European philosophy, Judaic theology, romantic aesthetics, Marxist theories, critical theory, and the literature of the baroque, Charles Baudelaire, Marcel Proust, surrealism, Franz Kafka, and Bertold Brecht. Benjamin's work comprises analyses of modernity's commodity world, examinations of transformations in the structure of individual and collective experience in the realms of capitalist production and consumption, and explorations of the subversive dimensions of mass culture (notably of photography and film).

Benjamin's most extensive inquiries into consumer culture form part of his uncompleted Arcades Project (late 1920s–1930s). The Arcades Project examines themes such as fashion, advertising, exhibitions, architecture, prostitution, gambling, idleness, and boredom in the framework of a historiography of the Paris shopping arcades. Benjamin's objective is to offer new perspectives of the socioeconomic conditions of the nineteenth century and to foreground their significance for contemporary capitalism: to “telescop[e] … the past through the present” (1999a, 471).

Benjamin's endeavor hinges on critical analyses of historical “treasures” that allow him to unearth the “anonymous toil” and subjugation generated by the society in which they were produced. Adamantly rejecting assertions of historical progress, Benjamin insists on showing that this “tradition of the oppressed” is continuing (2003, 391–392). Simultaneously, he seeks to distill from historical materials sediments of past generations' unsatisfied utopian desires. Historians must spotlight these “wish-images,” which remain unfulfilled in the present social conditions, and amplify their “claim” to realization through “our … weak messianic power” (390, emphasis in original). The aim of establishing connections between “what-has-been” and “now” (1999a, 462) is to heighten the political awareness of the historian's contemporaries: to stimulate their social resistance, so that they take “the first revolutionary measure” (474), and to kindle their yearning for fulfillment, so that they “complete … the task of liberation in the name of generations of the downtrodden” (2003, 394).

Benjamin's acclaimed essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” (1930s) supports this radical project. Traditionally, Benjamin argues, an artwork was bound to the sphere of ritual. As “cult-value,” the aesthetic object inhabited a specific spatial-temporal position and was scarcely accessible to the public. The work retained its “aura”: its “unique appearance … of distance, no matter how close it may be” (1999b, 518). Such “cult-values” attracted the subject's focused, submerged contemplation and even adoration.

“Technological reproducibility emancipates the work of art from … ritual” (2003, 256). Reproducible artifacts such as film can be replicated and disseminated at different times in different conditions. The work is lifted from its specific here and now, loses its aura, and gains “exhibition value.” As the artwork enters several contexts, the number of spectators increases while its distance from them is reduced. The masses' reception is “distracted.” They “absorb the work of art” (268), substituting veneration with enjoyment and critical assessment.

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