The Most Important Origin for the Emergence of the Urban Phantasmagoria - Article Example

t[Name of writer appears here] [Course name appears here] [Professor’s name appears here] [Date appears here] Walter Benjamin: History and Time Walter Benjamin was a German Marxist literary critic, essayist, translator, and philosopher. He was at times associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory and was also greatly inspired by the Marxism of Bertolt Brecht and Jewish mysticism as presented by Gershom Scholem. As a sociological and cultural critic, Benjamin combined ideas of historical materialism, German idealism, and Jewish mysticism in a body of work which was an entirely novel contribution to western philosophy, Marxism, and aesthetic theory. As a literary scholar, he translated Charles Baudelaire's Tableaux Parisiens and Marcel Proust's famous novel, In Search of Lost Time. His work is widely cited in academic and literary studies, in particular his essays The Task of the Translator and The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Benjamin's most lengthy completed work is his Habilitation dissertation, The Origin of German Tragic Drama. In this study, at once forbiddingly theoretical and painstakingly empirical, Benjamin analyses Reformation-era German politics and culture through the Trauerspiel genre of the 16th-17th century. For Benjamin, the idea of “nature” meant the idea of an original state of things, of whatever appeared to be pregiven as fate. In this sense, it was opposed to the idea of “history”, which was the constantly changing sphere of action, the stream of becoming. Benjamin points out that the “historical” often petrifies into nature—into a frozen image of timelessness. Whatever appears to be “natural”, however, always contains traces which reveal it to be transient and historical. The project begins with a lengthy "Epistemo-Critical Prologue" in which Benjamin sets out the philosophical stakes of his work: the combination and elaboration of parts of the Platonic theory of ideas, the Hegelian historical sublation, and the Leibnizian monad. Encapsulating the one within the other, Benjamin gives the Platonic form a historical instantiation, but only in the sense that it is monadic. Within aesthetic objects of study, there is contained the monad of its historical development, and when this monad is placed within a constellation of other objects, it reveals to the scholar the historical development of the idea. Thus, in the Trauerspiel itself, what appears to be a historical accumulation of fragments is instead already in some sense historical. Within the main text itself, there are two main divisions: first, a distinction between tragedy and Trauerspiel, where Benjamin clears away the interpretations that precede his work, and second, a lengthy discussion of the relation of allegory to symbolism and the way in which allegory might open onto his modified platonic notion of the idea. In the first section, Benjamin notes that tragedy and Trauerspiel differ in their conception of time: the tragedy is eschatological insofar as its plot leads to a defined end-point, where characters and stories reach a fatalistic resolution; whereas the Trauerspiel takes place only in space, time stretches out forever towards the promised but undisclosed Last Judgment, so characters are therefore paralysed from all action and can only wait—thus there is no resolution and no sense of time passing. In short, in Trauerspiel, time is spatialized. Part of what makes Trauerspiele so inscrutable is that their relationship to history is only ever allegorical, in the sense that the play presents fragments and broken shards of history without narrativizing them, as we are accustomed to seeing in most plays. These fragments, when placed on the stage, rather than maintaining a denotative relationship to history, where history is told, the spatial constellation of these fragments reveals a true idea of history. One of the most pervasive historiographic myths about the nineteenth century is the one encapsulated in Walter Benjamin’s essay of 1936 “The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction.” It runs parallel, in the visual sphere, to that other grand narrative of the progress of realism produced in the dark ages towards the end of the half century, Eric Auerbach’s Mimesis, whose historiographical form has recently engaged Hayden White. Both are concerned with the figure of history as fulfillment, with the achieved realism of the nineteenth century as a prelude to the final coincidence between the possibilities of the medium and the opportunities of the historical present in the age of modernism. (Zohn, 95) Walter Benjamin famously portrayed the shock sensation as the cause of a “heightening of consciousness” in modernity, a process which in turn causes the disintegration of the “aura” and the suffocation of “experience” under the “protective shield” of consciousness. First we need to have a look at Benjamin’s view of modernity. Since no summary can do full justice to its richness, I will limit myself to an idea that is central to it and which, although it recurs in different forms in several of his contemporaries, was most explicitly developed by him, namely the relation between modernity and shock. This idea is expressed in his famous formulation that the price of modernity is the “disintegration of the aura in the sensation of shock” (Benjamin, 1997: 154). In modernity, people tend to protect themselves against the raw force of shock by developing a “heightened degree of consciousness”, which serves as what he following Freud calls a “protective shield” against excessive external stimuli. This in turn leads to a shift in the form of perception from assimilated experience (Erfahrung) to superficial sensations (Erlebnisse) of reified and isolated moments. Benjamin treats this shift as equivalent to the disintegration of the “aura”—defined as that which makes an object or a human relationship appear unique and embedded in a history or tradition of its own. Drained of aura, the world turns into the world of baudelairean “spleen”, which Benjamin describes as a state where external stimuli have lost their uniqueness—every sensation seems to be merely a repetition of previous ones (Benjamin, 1997 111ff). At this point Benjamin’s observations intersect with Georg Simmel’s thesis that the “intensification of nerve-life” in the modern metropolis brings about a dominance of the intellect over the emotions in spiritual life, something which in turn produces a blasé attitude, a state of bored indifference in which consciousness is fully developed and nothing is left which might be perceived as shocking since everything is considered to be equal and exchangeable (Simmel, 256). According to Benjamin, then, spleen arises not through a lack of stimuli but through an excess of stimuli. Paradoxically, it is shock—and not its absence—that fuels boredom. Modernity appears as a seamless collusion of incessant shock-sensations and attempts by the intellect to master the shocking environment. It is a “hell” or “continuous catastrophe”, characterized by a “dialectic of the new and the ever-same”, an endless production of novelty after novelty, yet at the same time mired down in monotonous repetition, each new shock collapsing back into the ever-same (Benjamin1999: 842f) Benjamin’s theory of the decay of the aura can, to a certain point, be read as a theory of how reification manifests itself on the level of perception, i.e., as the perception of people and social products as “things” in isolation from their mediation. Mediation can only be grasped through assimilated experience (Erfahrung), whereas superficial sensations (Erlebnisse) fragmentizes perception and makes things appear as if they were independent of each other. To be sure, Benjamin affirmed the emancipatory potential of shock and the disintegration of the aura, which he treated as liberation from ritual. Nevertheless he also endowed the aura with a utopian significance. His ambivalent stance reflects what he portrays as a fundamental dilemma of modernity. The attempt to escape the modern “hell” of shock and spleen by artificially restoring the aura through heightened consciousness—as in the fascist attempt to recreate the aura of the community —must ultimately fail since the aura is dependent on the essentially involuntary workings of memory (Benjamin, 1977, p.154) Faced with this dilemma, Benjamin himself maintained an attitude of hesitant openness towards modernity. As opposed to conscious recreation of aura, which was bound to be regressive, his strategy was rather to get used to the dream-world of capitalism as a first step in order to dispel it. “The tasks which confront the human apparatus of perception at the turning points of history are not to be solved by optical means, that is, by contemplation, alone. They are only mastered gradually, by habit, under the guidance of tactile reception” (Benjamin, 1977, p.167). This was a strategy, not of subjecting the dream to an external critique, which was bound to get caught up in “the law that effort brings about its opposite”, but of groping one’s way inside the dream in search of the dialectics of “awakening” at work within it. Just as for the Jews “every second was a small gate through which Messiah might enter” (Benjamin, 1977, p.261), so for Benjamin every piece of rags or refuse was a potential “dialectical image” which might trigger the sudden flash of recognition, the involuntary memory, which would help dispel the nightmare. Another influential contribution of Walter Benjamin was of the urban phantasmagoria. The concept of the urban phantasmagoria comes from the writings of Walter Benjamin in the 1920s and 1930s in his unfinished project on the Paris arcades. In his 1939 Exposé entitled “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” Benjamin describes the origins of the early twentieth-century phantasmagoric “universe.” According to the author, the spectrality of modern urban space stems from the new forms of behavior and the new economically and technologically based creations that we owe to the nineteenth century. Studying the poetry of Charles Baudelaire, for example, Benjamin notes the new behavior of the flaneur, or street stroller, whose experience amidst the urban masses shapes the metropolis into another world. Benjamin states “The crowd is the veil through which the familiar city is transformed for the flaneur into a phantasmagoria.” (Benjamin, 1999, p.100) The simple act of an individual rambling aimlessly amidst the city crowd changes the metropolis into a spectral milieu. For Benjamin, however, the creation of the Paris arcades provides the most important origin for the emergence of the urban phantasmagoria. Products of the new use of iron technology in building construction in the early nineteenth century, the arcades are glass-covered walkways that cut through large city blocks. Lined with shops selling luxury items, the arcades exist as precursors to the modern department store and provide pedestrians with further opportunities for spectral transformations. In a manner similar to the “world exhibitions,” which showcased commodities of industry and national progress in large glass buildings in the nineteenth century, the arcades “provide access to a phantasmagoria which a person enters to be distracted.” Just as the strolling individual loses the self in phantasmagoria of the urban crowd, Benjamin believes that in the arcades, “the flaneur . . . abandons himself to the phantasmagorias of the marketplace.” In the urban phantasmagoria of the arcades, the marketplace, packed with commodities for purchase, exists at once as intensely material and as hauntingly spectral. Read More