The Third Reich

The Third Reich is a train that does not leave until everyone is onboard - Benjamin, 1932

When the End Came

When the end came, everyone reacted differently

The Arcades of Leeds

Turner V Constable

J. M. W. Turner’s calculated ploy to humiliate his arch rival John Constable was revisited yesterday as paintings by the adversaries were hung together for the first time in nearly 180 years.

His move, which even Constable acknowledged was a devastating act, was to add a small daub of red paint to the centre of his painting, Helvoetsluys, shortly before their works were to go on show, side by side, at the Royal Academy in 1832.

The addition of a single red buoy to Turner’s otherwise muted marine painting made Constable’s richly coloured depiction of The Opening of Waterloo Bridge (Whitehall Stairs, June 18th, 1817) seem gaudy by comparison.

David Solkin, Professor of the Social History of Art at the Courtauld Institute and a curator of the exhibition at Tate Britain, said that Constable was outmanoeuvred at the last possible moment. “It was the custom for artists to be given the opportunity to touch up their works immediately before an exhibition — these were called varnishing days,” he said.
“John Constable was still working slavishly away on a painting he had been struggling with for ten years. This is his big moment, but he has a misfortune: Turner’s Helvoetsluys hanging right next to his.”

Turner was in the mood for revenge, Professor Solkin said, because he believed that Constable had arranged for his paintings to be moved to a less favourable spot at a previous exhibition. “So, Constable is adding more silvers and reds to his painting and then goes out to another gallery. While he is away, Turner comes in and adds a little red circle [to his own painting] and goes away. Constable comes back and says, ‘Turner has been here and fired a gun’.

“I think Turner is saying, ‘Less is more. You don’t have to overcook a picture. Real artistry is in strength of understanding, not excessive effort’.”

The Sex Act

On the phrase "racked by their labors": with the Saint-Simonians, industrial labor is seen in the light of sexual intercourse; the idea of the joy of working is patterned after an image of the pleasure of procreation. Two decades later, the relation has been reversed: the sex act itself is marked by the joylessness which oppresses the industrial worker. [Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 367]

Passage des Panoramas

Of the hundreds of arcades (passages in French) in Paris, the index to The Arcades Project has entries for 35. By far the largest number of references (28) are for the Passage des Panoramas. Of course The Arcades Project was a work in process, interrupted by the Nazi entry into Paris and ended by Benjamin's suicide. All that can be said is that Benjamin had recognized that the Passage des Panoramas was the most important of the arcades, not that he had collected all Passage des Panoramas material that he would need.

The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Clever cover to a new edition of 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction'

Walter

Benjamin on Baudelaire

Benjamin on Baudelaire

The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire

From the “INTRODUCTION” By Michael W. Jennings — THE WRITER OF MODERN LIFE: ESSAYS ON CHARLES BAUDELAIRE by Walter Benjamin:

Yes the ragpicker is also a figure for Baudelaire, for the poet who draws on the detritus of the society through which he moves, seizing that which seems useful in part because society has found it useless. And finally, the ragpicker is a figure for Baudelaire himself, for the critic who assembles his critical montage from inconspicuous images wrested forcefully from the seeming coherence of Baudelaire’s poems. Here and throughout Benjamin’s writings on Baudelaire, we find a powerful identification with the poet: with his social isolation, with the relative failure of his work, and in particular with the fathomless melancholy that suffuses every page.

Benjamin concludes this first constellation by contrasting Baudelaire with Pierre Dupont, an avowed social poet, whose work strives for a direct, indeed simple tendentious engagement with the political events of the day. In contrasting Baudelaire with Dupont, Benjamin reveals a “profound duplicity” at the heart of Baudelaire’s poetry–which, he contends, is less a statement of support for the cause of the oppressed, than a violent unveiling of their illusions. As Benjamin wrote in his notes to the essay, “It would be an almost complete waste of time to attempt to draw the position of a Baudelaire into the network of the most advanced positions in the struggle for human liberation. From the outset, it seems more promising to investigate his machinations where he was undoubtedly at home: in the enemy camp … Baudelaire was a secret agent–an agent of the secret discontent of his class with its own rule.” … By the late 1930s Benjamin was convinced that traditional historiography, with its reliance upon the kind of storytelling that suggests the inevitable process and outcome of historical change, “is meant to cover up the revolutionary moments in the occurrence of history … The places where tradition breaks off–hence its peaks and crags, which offer footing to one who would cross over them–it misses.” … Benjamin thus seeks to create a textual space in which a speculative, intuitive, and analytical intelligence can move, reading images and the relays between them in such a way that the present meaning of “what has been comes together in a flash.” This is what Benjamin calls the dialectical image.

In the central section of “Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,” titled “The Flaneur,” Benjamin turns to an extended consideration of the reciprocally generative relations between certain artistic genres and societal forms. In the crowded streets of the urban metropolis, the individual is not merely absorbed into the masses: all traces of individual existence are in fact effaced. And popular literary and artistic forms such as physiologies (literary and artistic exemplifications of physiognomic types) and panoramas (representations of “typical” tableaux in Paris) arose, Benjamin argues, precisely in order to quell the deep-seated unease that characterized this situation: through their “harmlessness” they suggested a “perfect bonhomie” devoid of all resistance to the social order of the day, and in so doing contributed to the “phantasmagoria of Parisian life.”

…Physiologies are in this sense deeply complicit with phantasmagoria, in that they fraudulently suggest we are in possession of a knowledge that we do not in fact have. As Benjamin says, physiologies “assured people that everyone could — unencumbered by any factual knowledge — make out the profession, character, background, and lifestyle of passers-by.” …

If Baudelaire’s poetry is neither symptomatic of social conditions (as were the physiologies) nor capable of providing procedures for dealing with them (as did the detective story), what exactly is the relationship of that poetry to modernity? Benjamin champions Baudelaire precisely because his work claims a particular historical responsibility: in allowing itself to be marked by the ruptures and aporias of modern life, it reveals the brokenness and falseness of modern experience. At the heart of Benjamin’s reading is thus a theory of shock, developed on the basis of a now-famous reading of the poem “A une passante” (To a Passer-By). The speaker of the poem, moving through the “deafening” street amid the crowd, suddenly spies a woman walking along and “with imposing hand / Gathering up a scalloped hem.” The speaker is transfixed, his body twitches, wholly overcome by the power of the image. Yet, Benjamin argues, the spasms that run through the body are not caused by “the excitement of a man in whom an image has taken possession of every fiber of his being”; their cause is instead the powerful, isolated shock “with which an imperious desire suddenly overcomes a lonely man.”

This notion of a shock-driven poetic capability as a significant departure from the understanding of artistic creation prevalent in Benjamin’s day and in fact still powerfully present today. The poet is, in this view, not a genius who “rises above” his age and distills its essence for posterity. For Benjamin, the greatness of Baudelaire consists instead in his absolute susceptibility to the worst excrescences of modern life: Baudelaire was in possession not of genius, but of an extraordinarily “sensitive disposition” that enable him to perceive, through a painful empathy, the character of an age. And for Benjamin, the “character of the age” consisted in its thoroughgoing commodification. Baudelaire was not simply aware of the processes of commodification from which the phantasmagoria constructs itself; he in fact embodied those processes in an emphatic manner. When he takes his work to market, the poet surrenders himself as a commodity to the “intoxification of the commodity immersed in a surging stream of customers.” The poet’s role as a producer and purveyor of commodities opens him to a special “empathy with inorganic things.” And this, in turn, “was one of his sources of inspiration.” Baudelaire’s poetry is thus riven by its images o a history that is nothing less than a “permanent catastrophe.” This is the sense in which Baudelaire was the “secret agent” of the destruction of his own class.

…Baudelaire’s spleen–that is, his profound disgust at things as they were–is only the most evident emotional sign of this state of affairs.

–From the “INTRODUCTION” By Michael W. Jennings — THE WRITER OF MODERN LIFE: ESSAYS ON CHARLES BAUDELAIRE by Walter Benjamin

~~

Laurie Anderson Video

Laurie Anderson

The Lyrics of the song 'The Dream Before For Walter Benjamin', by singer Laurie Anderson

Hansel and Gretel are alive and well And they're living in Berlin She is a cocktail waitress He had a part in a Fassbinder film And they sit around at night now drinking schnapps and gin And she says: Hansel, you're really bringing me down And he says: Gretel, yu can really be a xxxxx He says: I've wated my life on our stupid legend When my one and only love was the wicked witch. She said: What is history? And he said: History is an angel being blown backwards into the future He said: History is a pile of debris And the angel wants to go back and fix things To repair the things that have been broken But there is a storm blowing from Paradise And the storm keeps blowing the angel backwards into the future And this storm, this storm is called Progress

Benjamin

Berlin

Walter Benjamin was born in Berlin, Germany on 15 July 1892. His childhood was spent in the elegant residential West End of a city that was fast industrialising. Berlin impressed itself upon him, and in the 1930s, once he had left the city for good, he returned to the scenes of his childhood in numerous snapshotish memoirs collected as Berlin Childhood Around 1900 and Berlin Chronicle. These compositions attempt to see the city through the eyes of a child, drunk on technological optimism, the energies of language and myth, and the joys of experience. But the narrator adopts the guise of a prophet who already sees marked on the cityscape of the pre-war years the devastating changes that are to come in the war of 1914-1918, when the technologies of modernity are deployed against humanity, language is marshalled for propagandistic ends and experience is “impoverished” as Benjamin puts it in a 1933 essay “Experience and Poverty”. Despite his own experience as a privileged child of the middle-classes, the memoirs record a knowledge that will become undeniable and crucial to his adult world-view: the city houses economic inequities and the pressure to socially conform.

The Marxist Rabbi

Walter Benjamin is hard to pin down. His writings do not fit easily into one discipline or area, and his output ranges across art history and aesthetics, literary theory, anthropology, history, philosophy, linguistics and politics. His close friends and correspondents included the Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht, the critical theorist Theodor Adorno and the Judaic scholar Gershom Scholem. The topics that attracted Benjamin are diverse: literature of the baroque, Romantic and modern periods, especially Goethe, Baudelaire, Kafka, Proust and Brecht, the philosophy of history, the social dynamics of technology, nineteenth century Paris, fascism and militarism, the city, capitalist time, childhood, memory, art and photography. Benjamin's theses on photographic reproduction have been taken up into the theory and practice of many artists, while his investigations of urban space, especially from the perspective of the urban stroller, the flaneur, now find a place on the syllabi of sundry academic departments from geography to cultural and media studies to architecture. Benjamin's influence is widespread but difficult to characterise. For some he appears as a Jewish cabalistic mystic, for others a theoretician of Brechtian “crude thought” on the way to a communist aesthetic. Terry Eagleton splits the difference in his The Ideology of the Aesthetic [Blackwell, 1990] by titling his chapter on Benjamin “The Marxist Rabbi”.

End of Desperate Romantics

So Desperate Romantics ended, and with it, the only time I can recall seeing Ruskin dramatised on TV. Nice then, to see him defending himself from implications of pedophilia. Ruskin comes off like a hero in his speech, even though he never outright denies his leanings. The defence contains the phrases "moist grunting encounters" and "I like the company of children and young people". Great.