Walter Benjamin

Introduction

Walter Benjamin is the German-Jewish critic, philosopher, and essayist whose work integrated Marxist analysis, Jewish mystical theology, German Romantic aesthetics, and the analysis of mass culture into one of the most distinctive bodies of writing in twentieth-century thought. He is affiliated with the Frankfurt School — Adorno was his closest intellectual interlocutor and Benjamin received support from the Institute for Social Research through the 1930s — but his sensibility, methods, and concerns were sufficiently distinctive that he is not adequately classified as a Frankfurt School member tout court.

Benjamin published comparatively little in his lifetime: a short book on German tragic drama (the Trauerspiel book, 1928, which had been rejected as a Habilitation at Frankfurt the year before), a small book on language and translation (the Origin of German Tragic Drama and various essays), the substantial unfinished Passagen-Werk (Arcades Project) on nineteenth-century Paris, the famous essay The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility (1936), and a substantial body of essays and short prose pieces. The major scholarly recovery has been posthumous; the 1955 edition by Adorno and Gershom Scholem and the subsequent Suhrkamp Gesammelte Schriften (1972–89) made the corpus available and produced one of the most influential single bodies of work in late-twentieth-century cultural criticism.

Life

Walter Benjamin was born on July 15, 1892, in Berlin to a wealthy Jewish family. The father was an antiquarian and businessman; the family was prosperous and culturally engaged. Benjamin's intellectual formation was unusually distinguished: he studied at Freiburg, Berlin, Munich, and Bern, taking his PhD at Bern in 1919 with a dissertation on the concept of criticism in German Romanticism.

The attempted Habilitation at Frankfurt in 1925 with the Trauerspiel book was rejected; the rejection effectively closed off the academic career Benjamin had planned and forced him into the precarious life of an independent intellectual. The 1920s saw substantial work as a critic and essayist for Frankfurter Zeitung, Die literarische Welt, and other major German publications; translations of Baudelaire, Proust, and Saint-John Perse; the friendship with Gershom Scholem (the major modern scholar of Jewish mysticism) that shaped Benjamin's engagement with Kabbalah and the messianic tradition; the friendship with Bertolt Brecht that shaped his engagement with the politics of cultural production; and the friendship with Adorno, with whom Benjamin carried on the major intellectual correspondence of his life.

The Nazi seizure of power in 1933 forced Benjamin into exile. He spent most of the 1930s in Paris, working on the Passagen-Werk and producing some of his most important essays. The Institute for Social Research provided support through stipends and publication in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, though the relationship with Horkheimer and Adorno over editorial direction was sometimes strained.

In 1940, with the German invasion of France, Benjamin attempted to flee to the United States via Spain and Portugal. On September 26, 1940, having reached the French-Spanish border at Portbou, he learned that the Spanish authorities were about to refuse transit visas and return the refugees to France. That night Benjamin took an overdose of morphine and died. The companions in his group were allowed to cross the next day. The manuscript he was carrying — likely a version of the Theses on the Concept of History and possibly portions of the Arcades Project — was lost.

The problem he worked on

Benjamin's project across the major works is the development of a critical method capable of redeeming what was repressed or forgotten by the dominant intellectual frameworks of his time. The frameworks he engages — Marxist historical materialism, Jewish messianic theology, German Romantic aesthetics, French symbolism, the new media of photography and film — each capture some dimension of the historical experience Benjamin wants to articulate, but none alone is adequate. His method works by holding these frameworks in tension, producing constellations of images and concepts whose combination yields insights none could produce alone.

The distinctive Benjaminian categories — the aura (the unique presence of an artwork that mechanical reproduction destroys), the dialectical image (the moment in which past and present flash up together in an arrested constellation), the messianic (the redemptive interruption of historical continuity), the flaneur (the nineteenth-century urban observer who reads the city as a text), the angel of history (Klee's Angelus Novus read as the figure who sees history as a single catastrophe) — are designed to articulate dimensions of historical experience that conventional academic frameworks pass over.

Contributions

The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility

The 1936 essay Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility) is Benjamin's most-read single text and one of the most influential essays in twentieth-century cultural criticism. The essay analyzes how the new technologies of photography and film transform the conditions of artistic production and reception.

The central concept is the aura. The aura is the unique presence of an artwork in a specific place and time — the sense that this particular object is here, now, and nowhere else. Traditional artworks (paintings, sculptures, manuscripts) possess aura because they are unique and tied to specific cultic or ritual contexts. Mechanical reproduction (photography, film) destroys the aura: a film exists in identical copies in many places simultaneously; a photograph is a copy without an original. The destruction is not merely a technical fact but transforms the social function of art: the auratic artwork's distance from the viewer becomes the reproducible artwork's accessibility; the cultic function becomes the exhibition function; the contemplative reception becomes the distracted reception of mass audiences.

The essay holds the analysis in tension. The destruction of aura is partly a loss (the artwork's depth, its connection to tradition, its capacity for contemplative reception are diminished) and partly a gain (the new accessibility of art to mass audiences, the new political possibilities of cinema, the demystification of the auratic tradition's authoritarian elements). Benjamin's analysis does not resolve the tension but sustains it as the actual ambiguity of the historical situation.

The essay has shaped twentieth-century cultural criticism across film theory (the substantial Benjamin reception in Anglo-American film studies), media theory (Marshall McLuhan's framework engages parallel themes), and the broader analysis of mass culture.

Theses on the Concept of History

The Über den Begriff der Geschichte (On the Concept of History, often called the Theses on the Philosophy of History) is Benjamin's most influential single text on the philosophy of history. The eighteen numbered theses, composed in 1940 in the months before his death and circulated posthumously, articulate a messianic-materialist philosophy of history that opposes both the bourgeois historicism that treats the past as a sequence of completed events and the orthodox Marxist progressivism that treats history as the determinate unfolding of class struggle toward a predicted socialist future.

The famous Thesis IX presents the Angel of History: Paul Klee's painting Angelus Novus (which Benjamin owned) shows an angel whose face is turned toward the past; what we perceive as a sequence of events, the angel sees as a single catastrophe piling wreckage at his feet; a storm from Paradise drives him irresistibly into the future to which his back is turned; this storm is what we call progress. The image articulates Benjamin's anti-progressive philosophy of history: the conventional sense of historical progress is a perspective produced by the position of the victors; the past appears differently to those who have been historical losers.

The Theses articulate the concept of the Jetztzeit (now-time) — the moment in which the present recognizes itself in a particular constellation of past elements and produces the dialectical image in which past and present flash up together. The framework substantially shaped postwar continental philosophy of history (especially through Habermas's engagement) and contemporary historiography (especially in the work of Carlo Ginzburg and the microhistory tradition).

The Arcades Project

The Passagen-Werk (Arcades Project) is Benjamin's major unfinished work, on which he worked from 1927 until his death in 1940. The project was intended as a substantial historical-philosophical study of nineteenth-century Paris, organized around the covered shopping arcades of the 1820s–40s that Benjamin took as the prehistory of the consumer capitalism of his own era. The work was to consist substantially of citations and short commentary, the citations chosen and arranged to produce dialectical images that illuminate the conditions of modern urban experience.

The surviving materials — thousands of pages of notes, citations, and fragmentary essays organized into convolutes by topic (fashion, advertising, the flaneur, the prostitute, the panorama, dust, conspiracy, prostitution, gambling) — were edited by Rolf Tiedemann from Benjamin's manuscripts and published in 1982 as Volume V of the Gesammelte Schriften. The English translation by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin appeared in 1999.

The project is one of the most distinctive single works of twentieth-century philosophy: a work that consists substantially of cited material from other authors arranged in a constellation, with the philosophical content emerging from the arrangement rather than from sustained discursive argument. The form is integral to the philosophy: Benjamin's claim that the dialectical image is the genuine site of historical understanding is enacted by the form of the work itself.

The essays

Benjamin's essay corpus is substantial. The major essays include The Task of the Translator (1923, the introduction to his Baudelaire translations), Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia (1929), Little History of Photography (1931), Experience and Poverty (1933), The Author as Producer (1934), The Storyteller (1936, on Nikolai Leskov), Theological-Political Fragment (probably 1921, published posthumously), and the major essays on Baudelaire (The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire, On Some Motifs in Baudelaire).

The essays show Benjamin's distinctive method at full development: the careful selection of an apparently marginal object (a translator's task, a particular photograph, the figure of the storyteller, a specific poem); the patient analysis of the object in its historical specificity; the gradual movement to philosophical claims that the object alone could not have warranted. The essays have been continuously generative for twentieth-century criticism and have substantially shaped how literary criticism, art history, and media theory practice close reading.

Key works

• The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1928)
• One-Way Street (1928)
• A Berlin Childhood Around 1900 (composed 1932–38, published posthumously)
• The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility (1936)
• The Storyteller (1936)
• On Some Motifs in Baudelaire (1939)
• Theses on the Concept of History (composed 1940, published posthumously 1942)
• The Arcades Project (composed 1927–40, published posthumously 1982)

The standard scholarly edition is the Gesammelte Schriften edited by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Suhrkamp, 7 volumes plus supplements, 1972–89; the supplement Gesammelte Briefe in 6 volumes appeared 1995–2000). The Harvard University Press Selected Writings (four volumes, edited by Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings, 1996–2003) is the standard English-language edition.

Influences and influenced

Influenced by: Kant (the early engagement with critical philosophy); the German Romantic tradition (the subject of his dissertation); the seventeenth-century German Trauerspiel (the subject of his Habilitation); Gershom Scholem (the major intellectual partner on Jewish mysticism); Bertolt Brecht (the major intellectual partner on political aesthetics); Karl Marx (the underlying social-theoretical framework); Charles Baudelaire (the central figure of the Arcades Project); Nietzsche (the substantial early influence on Benjamin's anti-historicism); the surrealists (André Breton and Louis Aragon, the substantial influence on the method of the Arcades Project).

Influenced: Adorno (Benjamin's closest intellectual interlocutor and the major editor of his posthumous publications); the Frankfurt School second and third generations through engagement with the Theses on History (Habermas wrote extensively on Benjamin); the substantial cultural studies tradition through Stuart Hall and the Birmingham School; the substantial film theory tradition through Miriam Hansen, Tom Gunning, and others; the contemporary engagement through Susan Buck-Morss (The Dialectics of Seeing, 1989, the major study of the Arcades Project), Eli Friedlander, Howard Eiland; the wide influence on contemporary cultural criticism, photography theory, and historical method.

Reception

Benjamin's contemporary reception was modest. The published books did not sell widely; the substantial essays appeared in scattered publications; the major projects were left incomplete. The breakthrough into broad readership came posthumously with the Adorno-Scholem two-volume Schriften (1955) and accelerated through the 1968 student movement, which discovered in Benjamin a critical theorist whose work seemed less encumbered than Adorno's by the institutional caution that the New Left rejected.

The Suhrkamp Gesammelte Schriften (1972–89) made the corpus available in a scholarly form and produced one of the most substantial single bodies of late-twentieth-century cultural criticism. The Harvard Selected Writings (1996–2003) brought the major texts into English. The contemporary engagement is sustained across philosophy, literary criticism, film theory, media theory, art history, and cultural studies.

Continuing engagement

Major recent scholarly work includes Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings's Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life (2014, the standard biography), Susan Buck-Morss's The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (1989), Esther Leslie's Walter Benjamin (2007), Eli Friedlander's Walter Benjamin: A Philosophical Portrait (2012), Vanessa Schwartz's Spectacular Realities (1998), and the substantial work of Miriam Hansen, Tom Gunning, Michael Taussig, and Lambert Zuidervaart. The Benjamin Studies journal and the substantial Walter Benjamin International Society anchor continuing engagement. Active debates concern the relation between Benjamin's theological and Marxist commitments, the contemporary applicability of the Work of Art essay under digital media conditions, the editorial status of the Arcades Project, and Benjamin's place in the broader Critical Theory tradition.

Further reading

• Critical Theory — the tradition Benjamin is affiliated with
• Adorno — his closest intellectual interlocutor
• Marx — the analytical framework his historical materialism develops
• Marxism — the broader tradition his work belongs to
• Nietzsche — the predecessor of Benjamin's anti-historicism

The German-Jewish critic and philosopher whose essays on art, history, and Paris produced one of the most distinctive bodies of twentieth-century writing.