Benjamin, Walter
Walter Benjamin (1892–1940), a German-Jewish intellectual born in Berlin on July 15, was a cultural sociologist, literary critic, and translator of Charles Baudelaire and Marcel Proust. His works are informed by a mixture of Marxism and Jewish mysticism. Benjamin most often is associated with the Frankfurt School as well as with his friends and colleagues Teodor Adorno (1903–1969), Gerschom Scholem (1897–1982), and Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956), all of whom influenced his thought. Believing that the Gestapo was about to capture him, Benjamin committed suicide on September 27 at Port Bou on the French-Spanish border while fleeing from the Nazis. He left behind a large collection of notes and published and unpublished writings, most of which have been compiled, edited, and translated since his death.
Benjamin's books and essays deal with a multitude of subjects, with their most common themes being the degradation of contemporary experience and the need for a radical break with tradition and the past. Among his best-known works are Einbahnstrasse [One-way street] (1928), the essay "Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit" [The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction] (1936), Geschichtsphilosophische Thesen [Theses on the philosophy of history] (1939 but published posthumously), and the monumental Das Passagen-Werk [The Arcades Project] (written between 1927 and 1940 and published posthumously). Among these works The Arcades Project is the most pertinent to science, technology, and ethics because it deals with the ways in which modern technology in the form of new architectural constructions altered human perception and experience.
Left unfinished at his death, The Arcades Project is an extended set of notes and quotations loosely arranged in thirty-six categories with titles such as "Dream City," "Baudelaire," "Fashion," and "Prostitution." For Benjamin the glass-enclosed streets of nineteenth-century Parisian arcades exemplified the commodification of experience and the distracted perception of reality. At home in these arcades is the flâneur, the "heroic pedestrian" or tourist who wanders aimlessly in the crowd, deriving pleasure from the exercise of what might be called a shopper's gaze. For the flâneur the city is a text to be read, but only from always changing vantage points and thus distractedly, with shifting glimpses of meaning in the kaleidoscope of signs. For Benjamin such distraction is the defining characteristic of contemporary perception, and some interpreters have argued that such perception has been extended in MTV-style editing, multitasking, channel and Web surfing, and the experience of cyberspace in general.
Benjamin also dealt with this issue in the essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," which considers how technology has altered not just aesthetic perception but the nature of art. For millennia even the most perfect artistic reproduction lacked the essential element of the original, "its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be." That uniqueness bestowed authenticity. However, contemporary technologies of reproduction, especially sound recording, photography, and film, have undermined the traditional appreciation of originality and authenticity. Indeed, reproduction may favor the copies, which can be placed into situations impossible for the original: "The cathedral leaves its locale to be received in the studio of a lover of art; the choral production, performed in an auditorium or in the open air, resounds in the drawing room."
Among all technological media, Benjamin considered film especially significant for two reasons. First, like contemporary life, film is saturated by and dependent on technology, with the performance of a film actor mediated by a series of machines (camera, editor, projector). Second, it is film that best accommodates the distracted perception of the flâneur. At the cinema people simply sit back, relax, and watch the movie; they do not have to discipline themselves to pay attention: "The public is an examiner, but an absent-minded one." ("Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction")
Benjamin's writings, including meditations on literature, history, philosophy, sociology, and art, are so broad that they have stimulated numerous fields of scholarship, and his meticulously crafted, indirect, and at times enigmatic style has influenced succeeding generations of reflections on technological culture. At the same time Benjamin has been criticized for a nostalgia that does not always appreciate the democratizing ethos at the core of the new forms of technological art he examined.
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Bibliography
Benjamin, Walter. (2002). The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Benjamin, Walter. (2003). Selected Writings, Vol. 4: 1938–1940. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Contains the third and final version of the essay here titled "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility."
Brodersen, Momme. (1996). Walter Benjamin: A Biography, trans. Malcolm R. Green and Ingrida Ligers. New York: Verso.
Rochlitz, Rainer. (1996). The Disenchantment of Art: The Philosophy of Walter Benjamin, trans. Jane Marie Todd. New York: Guilford Press. A critical study of Benjamin's thought and works.
Smith, Gary, ed. (1991). On Walter Benjamin: Critical Essays and Recollections. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Twelve critical essays by colleagues of Benjamin and contemporary scholars dealing with a wide range of Benjamin's interests.
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