▶︎ 0:00 This series of lectures is an introduction to the philosophy of Walter Benjamin. Even this title might rub people the wrong way. Benjamin? Philosophy? He's taught mainly in German Studies departments, Media Studies, maybe History, Visual Culture. You rarely find classes or course offerings on Benjamin in philosophy departments, at least in the English-speaking world.
▶︎ 0:43 And this resistance to treating Benjamin's corpus of writing as philosophy is, I think, both surprising and also understandable. It is a bit surprising if we reflect for a moment on the terms that come into play in his writings. And here I need to read because I made a list of all those terms.
▶︎ 1:10 Truth, world, nature, language, judgment, name, categories, orders, identity, existence, degrees of being, intention, extensive and intensive universality, creation, revelation, redemption, religion and metaphysics, reflection, critique, idea and ideal, form and content, pure content, archetypes, symbolic knowledge, material content and truth content, beauty, character, consciousness, spirit, body, corporeality, pleasure and pain, eros and sexuality, action, habit, means and ends, history, dialectic, materialism, fate, law, force and violence, justice, image, time, memory, color, imagination, fantasy, education, tragedy and comedy, experience, commodity, and capitalism is a partial list.
▶︎ 2:15 But as I say, it's also understandable that people resist calling Benjamin's writing philosophy or treating Benjamin as a philosopher, perhaps because he wrote essays on Kafka, on Brecht, on Karl Kraus, on Marcel Proust, on Baudelaire. But I think more likely because he wrote on toys, on food, on children's books, on Mickey Mouse, on Charlie Chaplin, because he wrote radio plays for children and an endless number of reviews of books that were published actually in newspapers and journals during the '20s and the '30s of the 20th century. And of course, the endlessly read essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, which is probably assigned to every undergraduate class in Film Studies or Cultural Criticism, Art Theory, and so on.
▶︎ 3:26 Now, wouldn't this be by itself a proof that there are too many things here? It's just merely skimming the surface of things. Some would go as far as saying that Benjamin's writing is full of insights. Sometimes I think Arendt coined this term, is like a pearl fisher. He goes to the depth and draws back something very precious and beautiful, like a pearl. But he lacks the consistency or the weighty rigor of philosophical treatises. Some even say that he makes inconsistency and fragmentariness into a value.
▶︎ 4:20 And I think for me, part of the attraction that Benjamin's writings have is precisely this tension that is produced by holding together, I would say, the most fundamental and the most contingently concrete. So how can philosophy be produced when you deal with material that is banal and concrete, and yet through it, you address something very fundamental, something essential, something foundational? I will try to explain this tension by way
▶︎ 5:14 Of what I call the riddle of the Arcades Project. And among the writings of Benjamin, I mentioned a few, there is this incomplete work, which he called his Arcades Project, or in German, Passagen-Werk or Passagen-Arbeit. It's, in a sense, his life project. He worked on it intermittently from around 1928 to his death in 1940, mainly working at the Paris National Library.
▶︎ 6:01 And with the invasion of France by the Nazis, he left the manuscript of this envisioned book with Georges Bataille, which was the director of the National Library, and the stories of his escape or attempted escape and ultimately suicide in Portbou on the French-Spanish border is something probably well-known. So let's ask, what is this life project? What is the Arcades Project, this projected book which was never completed?
▶︎ 6:49 Well, what are the arcades? Benjamin was sitting in the National Library in Paris. Back then, it was in the area close to the Louvre and close to the central boulevards of Paris. And in all that area, you find passages, streets, that are usually very narrow, lined with shops, and have a roof of glass and iron, a kind of construction that makes the street into something that's protected from the elements, and so on. It's a kind of architectural phenomenon that developed mainly in the first half of the 19th century, and you can find allusions to it in various writings of the period.
▶︎ 7:55 I read from an illustrated guidebook to Paris from 1852. In speaking of the inner boulevards, we have made mention again and again of arcades which open onto them. These arcades, a recent invention of industrial luxury, are, as I said, glass-roofed, marble-paneled corridors extending through whole blocks of buildings, whose owners have joined together for such an enterprise. Lining both sides of the corridors or of the streets, which get their light from above, are the most elegant shops, so that the arcades is a city, a world in miniature.
▶︎ 8:42 Well, it's something terribly banal. It's like the first department stores in a way, or the ancestors of what we call department stores.
▶︎ 8:57 And this is Benjamin's life project. Surely this cannot be philosophy. What we have from this Arcade Project is materials that Benjamin gathered in convolutes, with various topics. A partial list of those topics makes clear that this is really dealing with the most material and concrete aspects of this phenomenon.
▶︎ 9:31 Iron construction, the streets of Paris, the interior and the trace, modes of lighting, fashion, panoramas, all kinds of things that you find around those arcades of Paris. There's mention of some types, like the flaneur, which is, I think, the most associated with Benjamin, the collector, the gambler, and so on. And there's also one convolute, the largest convolute, largest convolute by far, which is devoted to Baudelaire.
▶︎ 10:05 Now, on top of those very pedestrian matters, what we have is mainly quote material that Benjamin gathered out of various publications of the time, writings about Paris, as well as various later reflections on that phenomenon and other things in the city. Of course, with those quotations are interspersed remarks that Benjamin makes. And we get some sense of the way he wants to organize the material, in part through the division into convolutes, but also he had this system of color signs that connected various quotes and at least served him to reflect on how they would be put together.
▶︎ 11:03 So I return to this question: How is this philosophy? How can we understand that as a philosophical investigation? Can it at all be thought of as philosophy? Now, of course, the historical aspect of the project is not by itself ruling out that this is philosophy. You have philosophical investigations that have historical dimensions. Hegel is the best example.
▶︎ 11:38 But this is not Hegel, in many ways, in part because of the very limited scope of the material, limited in space, in time, very contingent character of the historical material. Modes of lighting, mirrors, glass. You don't have here the history of spirit. You don't have what interests Hegel as the great moments of humanity, the great achievements of humanities.
▶︎ 12:16 Benjamin describes what this research is about. It deals fundamentally with the expressive character of the earliest industrial products, the earliest industrial architecture, the earliest machines, but also the earliest department stores, advertisements, and so on. So very material, very concrete, and you might think, well, okay, it's not Hegel, but it's... You think a little bit further, it's probably some kind of Marxist or materialistic philosophical history.
▶︎ 12:55 But that too is difficult to defend when you start looking at what the materials are. There's no analysis of economic conditions, of the forces of productions, of the means of productions, of the working class, and so on. Rather, everything is focused on what Marx would call the superstructure, that is on culture, broadly speaking. Basically, it deals with shops that are luxurious, basically the dreams and illusions of bourgeois existence. Something like the false consciousness we would say of that time.
▶︎ 13:50 But yeah, the ideological aspect of culture. And on top of that, for some reason, it seems like there's no clear critical standpoint in relation to that material. So it seems like Benjamin works too much with just gathering material and not enough with establishing a critical distance towards that material. And that critical distance is often the result of having a theory, a framework on the basis of which you now analyze the material, and the framework, the theory, is the expression of your standpoint towards that material.
▶︎ 14:50 But when you look at The Arcades, there's a lack of explicit theorizing. Benjamin has some, what he calls a thin philosophical scaffolding. But really most of what we have is quotations and various remarks of Benjamin about those quotations. And it doesn't feel like this is just because he is at the preparatory stages of the project. I mean, he worked on it a long time, and he could have transformed all this quotation material into a more coherent text with some theoretical vantage point on it.
▶︎ 15:42 There is a sense that somehow the work with quotations is in principle necessary for the method of the project. That somehow Benjamin wants to show something, to present something rather than to express his position, his thesis, his critical relation explicitly in relation to that material.
▶︎ 16:10 And Adorno, with whom Benjamin corresponded a lot on this project, at some point reacted to this incomplete state and this wealth of material and the myriad of quotations by saying, "This work stands at the crossroad of positivism and magic." Why positivism? Well, you just collect all those facts. It's the most banal way of just working empirically with all that material. But then it feels like you're also fascinated by that material. That's the magical side that Adorno recognizes in this project.
▶︎ 17:10 It's as though he says to Benjamin, "You are spellbound. You're too attracted to that. You have to be a good Marxist. Keep a distance from this dream, those illusions of bourgeois existence." So all those things I think clarify the challenge that we might have, that I might have when I want to argue that The Arcades Project should be understood and read as a work of philosophy.
▶︎ 17:53 The least that needs to be done in order to justify such a claim is to say, of course, there is all that material, but when Benjamin will order it, gather it, collect it together, something will be expressed, something fundamental, something essential will be expressed through that material. So the point is not that he's attracted to those materials, but that he wants to show something about that space, about something that expresses itself through all that material. I read that, I read it before. This research deals fundamentally with the expressive character of the earliest industrial products, and so on and so forth.
▶︎ 18:51 So this focus on expression, and on the possibility of revealing what expresses itself in all that material must be our focus, in order to start understanding the philosophical character of the project. In order to do that, we must go back from this late projects to the very beginnings, and maybe start by considering what is expression for Benjamin?
▶︎ 19:28 How does it relate to his understanding of language? How does expression characterize meaning, let's say, in a work of art, in a work of literature, in how we understand, interpret, criticize such a work? How does a space of life is such that, on the face of it, everything is okay, but something else expresses itself through that space of life if you know how to read it.
▶︎ 20:12 All those things would be developed gradually in the following lectures, starting from consideration of a very, very early and extremely difficult essay of Benjamin entitled On Language as Such and on the Language of Man.