THE ANGEL OF HISTORY AND THE RUINS OF PARIS: WALTER BENJAMIN IN FRANCE OR THE PROGRESS AS CATASTROPHE

If Walter Benjamin's writings have been mostly interpreted in the fields of art and literature critique, we would like here to take his philosophy of history more seriously, despite its acknowledged lack of unity (Habermas 1988: 32) and systematicity (Arendt 1960: 248). Drawing from the well-known allegory of the “Angel” developed in his theses on the concept of history written at the beginning of the Second World War and just before his death in Port-Bou, we will further analyze his genealogical critique of Parisian modernity contained in the Arcades Project, a work undertook more than a decade before, during his exile in France. In echo with the imagination of prospective ruins which florished during the modernization of the French capital after the 1850's, Benjamin's conception of progress, understood as a catastrophe submitting industrial capitalist societies to a permanent “state of emergency”, is thus combined with the theorization of a “Copernician revolution in the field of historical method” (Benjamin 1999: 348). Beyond Benjamin's phenomenological enterprise of a physiognomy of material modernity, and the romantic and surrealistic sensibility of his “anthropological materialism”, his philosophy of progress inscribes itself in a radical paradigm rendering its centrality to the idea of catastrophe (Anders 1972; Dupuy 2004; Stengers 2009), against the accidental role it holds in the principles of precaution and “responsibility” (Jonas 1979) and in the nowadays dominant paradigm of “risk” (Beck 1986); furthermore, “our” catastrophes would have in a Benjaminian perspective to be diagnosed in the past and the present rather than anticipated for the future. <p> </p><p><strong> Article visualizations:</strong></p><p><img src="/-counters-/edu_01/0793/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /></p>

Last Days

“The subject of this book,” Benjamin writes in the last exposé of his Arcades Project, “is an illusion expressed by Schopenhauer in the following formula: for the one who wants to seize the essence of history, it suffices to compare Herodotus and the morning newspaper.” In this chapter, I examine the place of journalism in Benjamin’s philosophical reflections on time and history through a close reading of his great essay on Karl Kraus, the Viennese writer who, for him, embodied journalism’s “most paradoxical form.” In his physiognomies of Kraus, Benjamin develops a critique of modern journalism as the expression of a wholly reified experience of history while also trying to retrieve the elements for a different kind of journalism: a writing that rids itself from a belief in progress and instead strives after an “actuality” (Aktualität) that is both close to and infinitely distant from the novelty of the newspapers.

Penelope’s Crossword

Why does W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz escape from the laws of fictionality and factuality? How do so many of the people and place names inside of it start so improbably with the letter A? Why do so many iterations of A—as initials, as markings, or as individual letters—appear somewhat frequently and prominently? Why does the return of the repressed coincide with the completion of a crossword puzzle taking place in a used bookstore? Why is the puzzle located in the Telegraph? Why, of all people, is the owner of the bookstore named Penelope? What role do the bookstores, museums, and libraries play? Finally, what is the question that Sebald’s Austerlitz is supposed to answer? To answer these questions, a historically problematized rereading of the text is necessary. In terms of the History of Ideas, these questions recall Walter Benjamin’s interpretation of Proust and his Arcades Project; in terms of cultural history, the rise of the crossword puzzle; and in terms of the sources behind Austerlitz, a book and a radio program that have been either ignored or underappreciated in the criticism.

Placing Elsewhere: Approaches for Physical and Digital Flânerie

This paper will discuss approaches and tools for physical and digital flânerie that emerged within an RMIT second- and third-year Interior Design Studio, during the COVID-19 pandemic. In the third week of classes in March 2020, social distancing measures in Australia led us to transpose urban site-based student projects online. Though unforeseen, this was taken as an opportunity for the interior design studio to explicate modes of physical and digital flânerie, via meandering and looking. We discuss teaching and learning experiences within the digital classroom, which we discovered was a dynamic chat-scape of hyperlinks, fragments, displacements and delays. We discuss how we translated aspects of the philosopher Walter Benjamin’s flaneur with reference to The Arcades Project. The paper is structured as a stroll through key discoveries and works and aims to explicate emerging frameworks for digital flânerie within the teaching and learning of interior design.

Charles Bernstein’s Walter Benjamin, Among Other Things

This hybrid creative-critical chapter considers the work of American poet and scholar Charles Bernstein. The chapter is modelled formally on Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project and its use of found text to construct a critical montage. Benjamin’s influence on Bernstein can be dated to the late 1970s; the chapter begins with Bernstein’s early interest in Benjamin, and then tracks that interest throughout his poetry and poetics. The chapter also includes a discussion of Bernstein’s 2004 opera libretto Shadowtime, written for the music of English composer Brian Ferneyhough. This opera is based on Benjamin’s life and work.

Mickey Mouse: Utopian and Barbarian

This chapter explores Walter Benjamin’s writings on Mickey Mouse, focussing especially on the unpublished note ‘Mickey Mouse’ (1931), ‘Experience and Poverty’ (1933), and ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility’ (1935–1939). These texts are read in conjunction with other essays from the period, such as ‘The Destructive Character’ (1931) and ‘Karl Kraus’ (1931), since Benjamin detected in the anarchic, destructive, and technologically driven figure of the early Mickey Mouse a similar project to overcome bourgeois civilization and, especially, the individual subjectivity upon which humanism was based. The chapter also draws on some references to Disney films as dream images in the Arcades Project (1928–1940).