Walter Benjamin and the Media

The Spectacle of Modernity

Jaeho Kang

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780745645216
  9780745645209
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780745670843
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), one of the most original and perceptive thinkers of the twentieth century, offered a unique insight into the profound impact of the media on modern society. Jaeho Kang's book offers a lucid introduction to Benjamin's theory of the media and its continuing relevance today.

The book provides a systematic and close reading of Benjamin's critical and provocative writings on the intersection between media - from print to electronic - and modern experience, with reference to the information industry, the urban spectacle, and the aesthetic politics. Bringing Benjamin's thought into a critical constellation with contemporary media theorists such as Marshall McLuhan and Jean Baudrillard, the book helps students understand the implications of Benjamin's work for media studies today and how they can apply his distinctive ideas to contemporary media culture.

Kang's book leads to a fresh appreciation of Benjamin's work and new insight into critical theoretical approaches to media. The book will be of particular interest to students and researchers not only in media and communication studies but also in cultural studies, film studies and social theory, who are seeking a readable overview of Benjamin's rich yet complex writings.

1

INTRODUCING DR BENJAMIN

THERE AND THEN, HERE AND NOW

Key Works

‘Curriculum Vitae (I)’ (1925)

‘Curriculum Vitae (VI): Dr Walter Benjamin’ (1940)

In September 1940, on the Franco-Spanish border, Walter Benjamin, aged just 48, committed suicide. At that time, the media world that we know today was only in embryonic form: few people had telephones; television was in its infancy as a technology; in terms of film, the age of the silent screen was fresh in the memory and the use of colour still something of a novelty; the printed word, of newspapers, magazines and journals still predominated, while radio had emerged as its main electronic rival. For his generation, the ‘wireless’ had an altogether different meaning. Some seventy years later, we live in a globalized world dominated by electronic communications of all kinds: mobile technologies, information and communication technologies (ICTs), satellite channels, instant global telecommunications, blogs, social networking sites, tweets, palm-held instant Internet access pads and pods. What, then, can Benjamin’s writings tell us about our own twenty-first-century world of ubiquitous digital media? What kind of challenges and questions might they pose for readers today, for whom instant communication across the globe, instant access to information, instant downloads, gaming graphics, 3D, HD, massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), live broadcast TV events from most distant parts of the world, and omnipresent advertising are such an integral part of everyday life that we scarcely notice them, let alone think about them?

In this book I want to argue that despite his living in a different media age, Benjamin’s writings are still fundamental to the task of critically analysing the global mediascape of the present. There are two main reasons for this: first and foremost, because what Benjamin was concerned with was the close relationship between the media and capitalist modernity; and secondly, because he foregrounded the intimate intersections of technological innovations and the transformation of human senses and experiences, links that have certainly intensified in the seventy years since his untimely death.

I first became interested in Benjamin’s writings about media as a post-graduate student. Several years later, rereading his central texts on this theme in the process of writing this book, I was struck by the enduring relevance of Benjamin’s analysis for our contemporary mediascape. For example, Benjamin was one of the few early thinkers who critically challenged conventional perceptions of media as mere technical devices to disseminate messages to a receiver. Moreover, I recognized the powerful sense of political engagement found in Benjamin’s media writings as he sought to explore their socio-economic and political circumstances and consequences. Although there are many debates around these issues, for me Benjamin’s insights show him to be indebted to his working within the historical materialist tradition of Karl Marx, and that he is a profound, often melancholic, critic of capitalist modernity and its catastrophic inhumanities, injustices and inequalities. Benjamin’s work was always geared to the possibilities of communication for human emancipation, not in some naive way that sees modern media as enabling tools – a kind of technological development – but rather as part of his abiding concern with regulating and harmonizing the complex and convoluted interplay between human beings, technology and nature.

It would be true but a little harsh to describe Benjamin himself as a ‘failed’ academic. He was never an academic if by this we mean a paid employee of an educational institution of higher learning. He never held a university post. When he was obliged to withdraw his Habilitationsschrift (post-doctoral thesis) from consideration by the examining committee in 1923, his hopes of obtaining a professorship were ended. As we will see later, his thesis was deemed unreadable, unintelligible and unacceptable by the great and good of the German academic establishment, whose names are now long forgotten or best forgotten. Whether intentional or not, Benjamin’s abrupt and unceremonious exit from the university system enabled him, or forced him, into a different way of life and certainly a different kind of writing – not the ‘fat books’ or ‘weighty tomes’ that he so scorned, but rather all manner of essays, reviews and other miniatures destined for the feuilleton section of newspapers, magazines, journals and periodicals that were to serve as the pre-eminent site of his literary activity. The newspaper, rather than the lecture theatre, was to be his main setting for communicating his ideas and thoughts. True, when in Paris in the 1930s, he spent many hours on his labour of love, The Arcades Project, burrowing away in the archives in the Bibliothèque Nationale, in exemplary scholarly fashion; but it is also true that he continually referred to the cafés he frequented in Berlin, Paris and elsewhere as key loci for his own intellectual production. We might like to think of Benjamin as a kind of forerunner of those who sit with their laptops and lattes in our metropolitan coffee shops hooked up by wi-fi connections today.

So let me introduce Dr Benjamin in a number of different guises, not so much as academician, a lone scholar hiding in dusty library reading rooms, poring over arcane obtuse materials destined for the most exclusive elite intellectual readers, but rather as a politically engaged critic whom we are going to encounter in a number of different circumstances, historical moments, life situations and unlikely production sites.

Benjamin was officially stateless from 1939 but, much earlier than that, he was already embraced as a ‘left-wing outsider’. From the spring of 1934 onwards, he relied on a monthly stipend of 500 francs from the Institute of Social Research in New York and constantly argued with publishers over fees. Even in this desperate situation as intellectual refugee, he remained unaffiliated to any academic institutions or political parties. He was a member neither of the Institute of Social Research nor of the Communist Party. Yet, this marginal position did not dissuade him from playing the role of public intellectual. For example, in 1935, Benjamin attended the first International Writers’ Congress, a gathering that sought to unite communist and socialist writers against the fascist regimes. At a café in Paris on 22 June 1935, Benjamin gave a talk on his essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility’, an event organized by the Paris Defence League of German Authors. In the midst of political turbulence, Benjamin was invited by the Institute for the Study of Fascism to give a lecture on the relationship between literary form and politics, a lecture that later came out as a seminal essay, ‘The Author as Producer’. His article ‘The Letter from Paris’ was published in Das Wort, a Moscow-based journal, in 1936. This publication was recognized by the Gestapo and resulted in the revocation of Benjamin’s German citizenship. Benjamin never had an office, a private space, in any sense. He was always present in a public space: he read in libraries; wrote in cafés; and gave talks in book shops. He was a public man and the public space of the city was his work-space.

Without wishing to sentimentalize or romanticize Benjamin’s life, it is nevertheless part of the attraction of his writings that they emanate from outside the university system, beyond academy, and from the margins not the mainstreams. He was never an insider. In what follows, I want above all to try to convey a sense of Benjamin as a writer of energy and excitement, of political engagement and transgression, as a thinker preoccupied with cutting-edge technologies, new generations, and new political formations and possibilities. His ideas were new in his time and remain inspirational for us here and now. Benjamin, then, was a writer of the topical, of modernité. It is what makes him of both his time and ours. So, let us become acquainted with Benjamin in the form of four figures: the student activist; the journalist; the media practitioner; and the media critic.

FIGURING BENJAMIN

Key Works

‘Experience’ (1913)

‘The Metaphysics of Youth’ (1913–14)

‘The Life of Students’ (1914–15)

‘On the Program of the Coming Philosophy’ (1918)

‘The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism’ (1919)

‘Outline for a Habilitation Thesis’ (1920–21)

‘Letter to Florens Christian Rang’ (1923)

‘Main Features of My Second Impression of Hashish’ (1928)

‘Diary from August 7, 1931, to the Day of My Death’ (1931)

‘The Destructive Character’ (1931)

‘Experience and Poverty’ (1933)

‘Berlin Childhood around 1900’ (1938)

The Student Activist

Benjamin was born in 1892 into an upper-middle-class secular Jewish family in Berlin, yet interestingly his schooling was far from typical for a child of this background. Instead of attending the Gymnasium, he was sent in 1905 to a progressive boarding school in Haubinda in rural Thuringia, where he joined the left-liberal wing of the Youth Movement led by Gustav Wyneken (1875–1964), a prominent German educational reformer. The school reform programme advocated by Wyneken instilled a life-long preoccupation with radical pedagogy and the possibilities of alternative education systems for young people. At that time, the period just prior to the First World War, Benjamin’s adolescence was, like so many others of his generation, marked by the generational clash between the sterile conservative bourgeois world of the Prussian Empire and the progressive radical youth movement desperately seeking new possibilities and opportunities at the dawn of the twentieth century. It was a time still dominated by old hierarchies, by traditional social mores, and long-established patterns of privilege and deference. This was a world of suffocating bourgeois manners and prejudices, of triumphant German militarism and Imperial ambition. It was a social and political order that for many of the brightest young people was increasingly anachronistic and reactionary. It was to be swept away in the horrors of the Great War from 1914 to 1918.

In 1912, Benjamin travelled to the German–Swiss border to enrol at the University of Freiburg in Breisgau, where he began studying philosophy. A year later, he was back in Berlin, attending lectures by the famous sociologist Georg Simmel (1858–1918). Simmel’s sociological analysis of commodity culture and contemporary urban life, epitomized in his The Metropolitan and Mental Life (1903) and The Philosophy of Money (1907), provided Benjamin with an enduring theoretical ground upon which a critical examination of commodity culture and modern human experience could be elaborated and elucidated. Nevertheless, for a student like Benjamin who was seeking an alternative model of intellectual and political practice, ‘the university simply is not the place to study’ (C, 72) and, indeed, might be actively injurious in that it might be ‘capable even of poisoning our turn to the spirit’ (C, 74). As president of the Berlin Free Students’ Association (FSA), Benjamin was more actively involved in the student movement than in his university classes. One of his first publications, an essay entitled ‘Educational Reform: A Cultural Movement’, appeared in 1912 in Student and School Reform, a magazine published by the FSA in Freiburg. His paper demanding the new conception of the university was presented at a student conference in Weimar in 1914. It is of vital importance to recognize that the metaphysical themes (such as the nature of language, communication and experience) explored in his early essays (such as ‘Metaphysics of Youth’, ‘The Religious Position of the Youth’ and ‘Experience and Poverty’) are part of Benjamin’s philosophical reflection on concrete socio-political issues stemming from his active engagement with the student movement. In these essays Benjamin attributed the limitations and failings of the German education system to the hierarchical relationship between professor and student, conceived as it was as one between master and apprentice, between the powerful and the powerless, a relationship based then on old ideas of one-way communication between s/he who speaks and s/he who listens. Radical pedagogical practice that shaped Benjamin’s own schooling convinced him that communication is by no means and should never be reduced to a ‘one-way street’ but must always involve mutual and communal activity. The aim of education is less akin to the conveyance of information or knowledge from an authoritative teacher to a passive student than it is to an active engagement with collective communication as reciprocal interaction. In opposition to those conventional Enlightenment pedagogic principles that dominated the German public education system at the turn of the century (and that are probably still powerful in most countries today), Benjamin saw education and entertainment as complementary rather than incompatible processes. Benjamin’s leitmotif with respect to communication, education and entertainment is the imperative to challenge all forms of established power, orthodoxy and authority, be it of conventional knowledge, of the text, of the teacher as master, of institutions, including the university, and of prevailing political power.

The Journalist

Upon the completion of his studies, Benjamin started to think about his future profession and, despite his disdain for university as institution, he decided to pursue an academic career with the hope of becoming ‘a philosophical literary critic’: ‘The goal I had set for myself has not yet been totally realized, but I am finally getting close. The goal is that I be considered the foremost critic of German literature’ (Letter to his close friend, Gershom Scholem (1897–1982), 20 January 1930; C, 359). Having narrowly avoided conscription into the German army, Benjamin relocated to the University of Bern, Switzerland, where he worked on his doctoral dissertation examining the philosophical foundation of the early Romantic theory of criticism (‘The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism’, published in 1920). In a letter of 1918 to his friend, Ernst Schoen (1894–1960), Benjamin expressed his uncertainty regarding an academic career: ‘I do want to get my doctorate, and if this should not happen, or not happen yet, it can only be the expression of my deepest inhibitions’ (C, 125). It is not entirely clear to what extent or how seriously Benjamin envisioned himself as a professor.

After a brief period with his father’s antique business in Berlin, during which time Benjamin imagined the possibility of a career as a seller of antique and rare books, Benjamin returned to academia and worked on his Habilitationsschrift on German Baroque Trauerspiel (mourning drama) in the period between May 1924 and early April 1925. It was submitted for consideration in May 1925 to the professor of literary history at Frankfurt University, then to the professor of aesthetics, and finally was passed along to members of the philosophy faculty, including Max Horkheimer (1895–1973), then a young member of the faculty and later to the director of the Institute of Social Research. This work explored a particular form (or idea) of post-medieval German theatre, which Benjamin argued gave expression to the melancholy, creaturely condition of a god-forsaken human world. Incomprehensibility was the common assessment by the examiners of the thesis, which incorporated no less than 600 quotations from the most obscure sources. Rather than facing the embarrassment of outright failure, Benjamin heeded the informal recommendation of the university authority and withdrew his submission from consideration, thus ending any chance of an academic post in the German university system of the Weimar Republic. Yet, it was perhaps a lucky escape for him (and for all those who admire his work so much). He himself expressed a sense of relief at the outcome and there is no reason to think that this was not genuine: ‘All in all, I am glad. The Old Franconian stage route following the stations of the local university is not my way’ (C, 276). A few years later in 1928, his withdrawn thesis was published under the title, The Origin of German Mourning Drama [Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels]. Contrary to the negative response from the German academic system, his book instantly received wide critical attention and a number of positive reviews in literary circles in both Germany and France.

Instead of becoming an academic, Benjamin became increasingly engaged with forms of journalistic writing, involving reviews, essays and other short pieces aimed at a mass readership, types of writings and readerships treated with some scorn by academic elites and mandarins. His collection of aphorism...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introducing Dr Benjamin
• 2 The Crisis of Communication and the Information Industry
• 3 Radio and Mediated Storytelling
• 4 Art and Politics in the Age of their Technological Reproducibility
• 5 The Media City: Reading The Arcades Project
• Conclusion: The Actuality of Benjamin’s Media Critique
• Notes
• Further Reading
• Index