Thinking Space

Mike Crang, Nigel Thrift, Mike Crang, Nigel Thrift

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134721177
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

As theorists have begun using geographical concepts and metaphors to think about the complex and differentiated world, it is important to reflect on their work, and its impact on our thoughts on space. This revealing book explores the work of a wide range of prolific social theorists. Included contributions from an impressive range of renowned geographical writers, each examine the work of one writer - ranging from early this century to contemporary writers.

Among the writers discussed are Georg Simmel, Mikhail Bakhtin, Gilles Deleuze, Helene Cixous, Henri Lefebvre, Jacques Lacan, Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault and Franz Fanon. Ideal for those interested in the 'spatial turn' in social and cultural theory, this fascinating book asks what role space plays in the work of such theorists, what difference (if any) it makes to their concepts, and what difference such an appreciation makes to the way we might think about space.

Part 1
UR-TEXTS AND STARTI NG POINTS

1
WALTER BENJAMIN’S URBAN THOUGHT
A critical analysis

Mike Savage

1 Introduction

In recent years there has been a major upsurge of interest in the work of the German cultural critic Walter Benjamin (1892–1940). Attention has been directed particularly to the relevance of Benjamin’s writings for literary criticism (for example, Eagleton, 1981; Jennings, 1987), philosophy (for example, Benjamin and Osborne, 1993; Roberts, 1982), social theory (for example, Buci-Glucksmann, 1994; Buck-Morss, 1989; Frisby, 1985), and cultural studies (Lury, 1992; McRobbie, 1992). By contrast, the direct significance of Benjamin’s ideas to the study of urbanism has attracted relatively little attention (the important exception to this is Szondi, 1988, also, see Frisby, 1985), though there are recent indications that this is changing (Buci-Glucksmann, 1994; Burgin, 1993; Cohen, 1993; Gregory, 1994; Wolff, 1993). My intention in this paper is to examine critically the way Benjamin explored the ‘urban’ in his work, in order to emphasise the distinctiveness and originality of his writing in this area. I aim not to make an original contribution to the now formidable field of Benjamin scholarship,¹ but rather to position Benjamin’s ideas so that they may fruitfully be brought to bear on those working in urban studies and related fields.

The principal issue which I will interrogate with Benjamin’s work as my guide concerns the value of ‘culturalist’ approaches to urbanism, which have undergone a striking revival in recent years. In the late 1970s and early 1980s it was widely believed that concepts of ‘urban culture’ were unsustainable, as advanced capitalist countries were characterised by the break-down of a distinction between the city and country, with the result that cities lost any cultural distinctiveness they might once have possessed (see Giddens, 1981; Mellor, 1977; Saunders, 1981; Smith, 1981). Instead, different versions of political economy were championed as being able to explore the various processes which produced specific urban sites (for example, Harvey, 1982). However, ten years later, the situation has been transformed. Largely as a result of poststructuralist influences, there has been a growing interest in reading cultural artifacts as ‘texts’, and the city has been no exception to this. Keith and Cross (1993:9) argue that ‘the urban narrative has reemerged triumphantly as a genre in which the city can be read as both emblem and microcosm of society’, and there are a number of recent studies which appear to support their contention.² The study of representations of cities has become the subject of considerable attention in art history (for example, Clark, 1985; Seed and Wolff, 1988) and literature (for example, Tanner, 1990; Williams, 1973), and there is evidence that the endeavours of cultural geographers to read landscapes is applied increasingly to urban settings (for example, Duncan, 1990; Zukin, 1991). What remains uncertain, however, is the status of the ‘urban’ in this work. Is the ‘urban’ simply a discursive term standing in opposition to others (such as ‘rural’)? Is the ‘urban’ synonymous with the built environment, in the way that Olsen (1986) suggests in his account of how cities can be seen as ‘works of art’ in terms of their architectural forms? Or do distinct forms of urban social or cultural relationship exist? Is the ‘urban’ merely a convenient site in which a variety of social or cultural processes can be explored (as suggested by Savage and Warde, 1993), including, possibly, the various textual processes and narratives which encode the ‘urban’? Just as debates about urban studies have never been able to resolve the question of defining what the ‘urban’ actually is (see Saunders, 1981), so the recent cultural trend in urban studies has tended to dodge this key issue. In this paper I will argue that the work of Walter Benjamin offers a fruitful way of considering the stakes involved in these sorts of issues. Benjamin talks about the urban in very different ways, however, and it is no easy matter to elucidate his views. In what follows I argue that the ideas which he advances in one of his best-known essays, ‘On some motifs in Baudelaire’ (1968b), where he appears to articulate a fairly conventional view of the city as site of a distinctively modern experience, is not the best starting point. I argue that this essay does not reflect his more complex interest in the ‘urban’, and suggest that a more interesting angle of approach is to consider how Benjamin examined the relationship between history, experience, memory, and the built environment. This concern was closely related to his fascination with the ways in which cities could (and could not) be represented textually. I argue that attention to this aspect of Benjamin’s urban thought illuminates other aspects of his thinking.

I begin in section 2 by offering a brief introductory survey of Benjamin’s urban writing in order to emphasise its complexity as well as the central part which it came to play in his later writing. I then offer a thematic discussion of some of the central issues which Benjamin’s urban writing provokes. In section 3 I discuss how Benjamin viewed, sociologically, the distinctive nature of urban ‘experience’ in his later work, emphasising his concern not to describe modern experience but to suggest how it could be redeemed. In section 4 I consider how Benjamin used urban writing critically, as a device for disrupting narrative meaning. Finally, in section 5 I seek to place Benjamin’s urban writing in the context of his philosophy of history and relate it to his idea of ‘aura’ in order to explain why the city was so compelling to him. In the concluding section of the paper I pull out some of the implications of this survey for contemporary approaches to urban culture.

2 Benjamin’s urban writings

Benjamin’s interest in cities developed only in the course of the 1920s, especially as his work on The Origins of German Tragic Drama (1977b) reached its conclusion and he turned to critical issues of more direct political concern. By the late 1920s, it can be argued that Benjamin constantly used cities to frame his inquiries. However, being well aware of the complexities of representational processes, he wrote about cities in a variety of ways, with little consistency of approach, and no single view on urbanism can be discerned in his work. As a starting point it is useful to summarise the different characters of his urban texts. At least five different types of urban writings can be elucidated.

1. Benjamin’s city portraits of Naples (1924), Moscow (1927), and Marseilles (1928) (all included in Benjamin, 1979a) are all accessible short essays, written in journalistic, largely descriptive, style, reflecting on urban life and culture in the respective cities. Their interest derives partly from their being the first works where Benjamin’s direct interest in cities was manifest.
2. One Way Street (1925–26) (in Benjamin, 1979a) is one of Benjamin’s best-known works, also written in the mid-1920s, at the time of his developing interest in Marxism and surrealism. Its status as an urban work needs justification. It was written as a series of aphorisms, many of which were titled around typically urban sights such as ‘filling station’, ‘underground works’, ‘caution: steps’, and so forth. He uses urban wandering as a device on which to hang a series of reflections which seem to be triggered by phenomena of the urban built environment.
3. Benjamin’s autobiographical sketch, A Berlin chronicle’ (1932), which incorporates his own childhood memories into an account of Berlin and Paris (in Benjamin, 1979a) and uses a complex narrative form involving ‘photographic’ recollections of his youth, is distinctive in being one of the relatively few works in which Benjamin discussed directly his own experiences (see Witte, 1991). In the same category might be placed his ‘Moscow diary’, a recently translated diary of his two-month stay in Moscow in 1927–28 (Benjamin, 1990).
4. The Passagenwerk (or Arcades project) absorbing Benjamin for much of the last decade of his life was a study of Paris, ‘Capital of the nineteenth century’. Never completed, it left in published form a number of essays (for example, Benjamin, 1968b; 1968d; 1968e), a series of writings translated as Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism (1973a), and a series of detailed notes, mostly still untranslated into English (though, see Benjamin, 1985). Benjamin’s aim was to use montage techniques to explore the relationship between Baudelaire, urbanism, and the development of capitalism. Much recent Benjamin scholarship has been preoccupied with reconstructing the purpose, methods, and ideas of this work (Buck-Morss, 1989; Tiedmann, 1988), though there has been relatively little attention to its urban dimensions (though see Cohen, 1993).
5. In many of Benjamin’s theoretical and philosophical reflections, some of them arising out of the Passagenwerk, there are a number of observations and references to architecture, the built environment, and other urban phenomena. Many of the otherwise disparate essays collected in Illuminations (1968a), and One Way Street (1979a) contain important asides on cities.

This brief description indicates that after the mid-1920s Benjamin constantly used urban phenomena as devices for exploring the intellectual problems with which he had grappled throughout his life and to which older means of inquiry seemed inappropriate. This does seem to mark an important shift in his thinking. Much critical discussion of Benjamin has examined whether he replaced his early messianic and romantic thought with a more critical (though never orthodox) Marxism in the mid-1920s (see Roberts, 1982) or whether he remained enmeshed in the same sort of intellectual dilemmas throughout his life (see McCole, 1993). In the context of this debate it is interesting to note that at least in methodological terms Benjamin did appear to recast the literary criticism and abstract philosophical-ethical discussion which characterised his early writing (most notably, The Origins of German Tragic Drama) into a sort of urban criticism (further, see Cohen, 1993). However, it is evident from the variety of his urban writings that Benjamin wavered and experimented in his textual approach between journalistic narrative, memoir, aphorisms, essays, and montage. Similarly, the urban as ‘object’ shifted incessantly—from being the general properties of the built environment, to specific buildings, the nature of urban ‘experience’, accounts of particular cities and their histories, and the ability of certain forms of representation (such as photography) to ‘picture’ cities. It is the complex and manifold meanings of the urban in Benjamin’s work which makes that work of such contemporary interest.

3 Modern urban experience in Benjamin’s thought

In many accounts of Benjamin’s writing the way he saw the city as being characteristically modern (in Frisby’s words, as ‘the crucial showpiece of modernity’ (1985:224)) is stressed (for instance, see Turner, 1994: facing 25). Here, Benjamin seems to follow a long, orthodox tradition within social theory. The notion of a distinctly modern urban experience, or ‘way of life’, has, from the time of Simmel and Wirth, been the central focus of sociological discussion of urban culture (see Savage and Warde, 1993). The transition to modernity is seen as leading to profound changes in the nature and quality of social relationships, and both Tonnies (1988) and Simmel (1950) argued that these changes could be seen most clearly in cities, where modernity was most developed. The city, in opposition to the small-scale community, was the main locale in which new impersonal social relationships, the money economy, and social disorganisation could be observed. This was also the conception which modernist novelists evoked in their writings, conceiving the city as symptomatic of the new and modern (Anderson, 1988; Berman, 1983; Bradbury and MacFarlane, 1976; Williams, 1989).

In the late 1920s and early 1930s Benjamin articulated a theory of history which had many parallels with this account (Honneth, 1993; Roberts, 1982). This theory of history elaborated the replacement of ‘experience’ (Erfahrung) by instrumental reaction (Erlebnis). In the former state, found in preindustrial societies, experience is based in habit and repetition of actions, without conscious intention. These experiences are bound to traditions, the socially constructed and legitimated ways of acting, which gain their authority by their uniqueness and specificity. In the latter state, found in modern industrial societies, the mass reproduction of commodities and symbols disperses tradition, so that individuals simply react to the stimuli of the environment and develop instrumental ways of thinking in order to cope in such a changed environment (for a discussion, see Roberts, 1982:157–95).

However, there is considerable disagreement concerning the status of this theory of history in Benjamin’s overall thought. Some commentators (Bauman, 1993) argue that it goes against the persistently nondeterminist, redemptive character of Benjamin’s general thought, manifested notably in his ‘Theses on the philosophy of history’ (see Benjamin, 1968e). Here Benjamin criticised historicist ideas of progress and trend in history so that the possibility of redemptive action could always be held open, a view which appears to contradict his own formulations concerning the replacement of Erfahrung by Erlebnis. And in line with this view, Benjamin’s account of urban experience turns out to be more complex than that of Simmel and Wirth. Consider Benjamin’s celebrated account of ‘urban experience’ in his essay ‘On some motifs in Baudelaire’ (1968b). Here he seems concerned to establish a relationship between the modern city and the development of the ‘shock experience’. Benjamin argued that the daily routine bombardment of people’s senses by various shocks forces them to use consciousness as a filter to protect themselves, and he discussed this in relationship to the urban masses as well as to modern factory workers. Benjamin saw Baudelaire as the poet of the ‘metropolitan masses’, as the first writer who refused to stand apart from the urban mass in order to write detachedly about them but who immersed himself in the experience of the masses.

In this essay he refers mainly to Proust and Freud in developing its arguments, but its formulations appear initially very close to those developed by Simmel in his famous essay ‘The metropolis and mental life’ (in Wolff, 1950) written thirty years before. And it is a difficult essay to interpret. The published version of ‘On some...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part 1 Ur-Texts and Starti NG Points
• Part 2 Reformulated Spaces Decolonisation, the wake of ‘68
• Part 3 Refiguring Spaces in The Present
• Index