▶︎ 0:01 In the last lecture, we discussed the character of memory in the autobiographical context of Benjamin's Berlin childhood around 1900. And our problem is how to move from that account of individual memory to something like the standpoint of the collective, one might say collective memory, but also the way in which memory feeds into history, so the form of history as memory, and also lead to what I would call the political moment of the historical investigation of the past. That is, how that investigation feeds into a transformation of the present.
▶︎ 0:53 Now, the general form of that problem will be discussed in the next lecture in relation to the Arcades Project, but I want to lead into it today by way of an essay from 1933, entitled Experience and Poverty. A short but very, very rich essay.
▶︎ 1:19 Now, let's start with the term experience that appears in the title of this essay. Of course, we speak in philosophy of experience as the ground of our knowledge of the world, of nature. Concept of experience is central to empiricism, but also to Kant's theoretical philosophy, on which Benjamin wrote at some point in the late 1910s, early 1920s. And we also use the term experience in the context of a certain practical knowledge.
▶︎ 2:03 So here I would say the term experience acquires, in addition to this dimension of knowledge, also a character of value. We speak of an experienced person. Someone who has accumulated experience, who has learned from experience, who has lived through things, whatever life presented him with. And in a sense, he has incorporated those encounters, those experiences, they bear upon his life in the present rather than someone who might have avoided that incorporation, repressed, forgotten, and so on.
▶︎ 2:52 So an experienced person benefits from the weight of the past, and that weight of the past, that accumulation of experience transforms the way that person recognizes the significance of things around them. So he can recognize significance of something which an inexperienced person might completely miss. He can, as it were, spot occasions to do something which would never come to the mind of the inexperienced. And of course, in that sense, in which it starts to be associated with wisdom, and that's why I speak also of not only knowledge, but also sense of unity of knowledge and value. It of course distinguishes the older people from the younger people, or at least that's how it usually goes. Now, so this concept of experience, of wisdom is such as to include the incorporation of time, certain relation to the past, or an accumulation of the past.
▶︎ 4:07 And that past can be, of course, your experience, but it can also be the experience of others that's being passed to you. So you can speak of the experience of generations, as it were, that's passed through and acquired and orient the person in the world in what they do and so on. In the most general sense, we can call this idea of the experience feeding into collective existence, tradition. Tradition in the broadest sense of the term that is not only limited to the religious tradition, which is of course a form of the transmission of way of life, of experience, and so on.
▶︎ 4:57 But Benjamin would say, once we want to take this idea of experience and broaden it to the collective and the acquiring of the experience of the past, we have different forms of thinking of the transmission of experience. And one of the forms that most interested Benjamin is the imparting of experience through stories. That, of course, connects with what we talked about, his way of turning to the world of childhood. But, more generally, he wants to say that something in this practice of telling and listening to stories was a mode of transmitting experience.
▶︎ 5:55 He starts the essay Experience and Poverty with a fable, a fable that appears in La Fontaine's opus, the famous fable about the old man and the vineyard. I read, it's a little short passage. "Our childhood anthologies used to contain the fable of the old man who, on his deathbed, fooled his sons into believing that there was a treasure buried in the vineyard. They would only have to dig. They dug, but found no treasure. When autumn came, however, the vineyard bore fruit like no other in the whole land. They then perceived that their father had passed on a valuable piece of experience. The blessing lies in hard work and not in gold."
▶︎ 6:41 There's much to say about this little story. It stands for the power of stories, more generally. Because it's not just a story that communicates experience, it's a story about how stories can produce experience for those who did not take the time to accumulate it. The sons are being told the story that leads them to do various things in a certain direction, but somehow, and there's this aspect of cunning that sometimes comes with the telling of stories, something else altogether is acquired, learned, as experience.
▶︎ 7:34 Now, just to point at other features of that small stories, one of the interesting things is the way in which that story also imparts something like an attitude toward death. You might say, when we think of the moment of death, the old man on his deathbed, we would expect a moment of authentic communication, maybe a moment of anxiety, something truthful to happen. But this old man, he spins a tale. It tricks his son, and in some sense, that stands for a way of even tricking death. Some fables are about that.
▶︎ 8:26 So as it were, many things are imparted through that little fable. But the important point, for Benjamin in bringing up this fable at the very beginning of the essay is to say that
▶︎ 8:42 Storytelling is on the decline. We do not find that young people, children, benefit in the same way as in the past from those stories. This is a big theme in a famous essay of Benjamin's called The Storyteller. And it is one of the symptoms, I would say, of a more general understanding, which we might call the decline of tradition, and which Benjamin understands as one of the most fundamental traits of modernity.
▶︎ 9:25 So modernity is, in a certain sense, a problem about our relation to the past, about our being able to rely on the past, about our being able to count on tradition and the experience of the past. A powerful passage in the beginning of the essay, I think, suggests ways in which we can no more draw from this experience of the past.
▶︎ 9:59 Benjamin writes, "For never has experience been contradicted more thoroughly. Strategic experience has been contravened by positional warfare. Economic experience by the inflation. Physical experience by hunger. Moral experiences by the ruling powers. A generation that has gone to school in horse-drawn streetcars now stood in the open air amid the landscape in which nothing was the same except the clouds. And at its center, in the force field of destructive torrents and explosions, the tiny, fragile human body."
▶︎ 10:37 Obviously, this is a way of marking the breaking point, which is the First World War, and economic experience and hunger and so on was the consequence of that war. But it does give a sense that somehow after you've gone through that, then turning to even to how people were facing wars and hunger in the past is no more relevant. It cannot assist you. It cannot be something like a trove of experience that you learn from.
▶︎ 11:24 In a sense, the story about the treasure in the vineyard, which opens the essay, and which is supposed to exemplify the passing on of tradition through stories, turns into the theme of the sickening of tradition, as Benjamin calls it sometimes. And that's the second word in the title. Instead of a treasure, we find ourself with the poverty that descends upon humanity. And poverty, in that sense, is precisely the impossibility of drawing on this treasure of the past for one's own existence. The treasure is the experience of the past.
▶︎ 12:11 It might be something stored in museums, in books, and so on, but it is no use to us anymore as experience. And Benjamin says, well, there are all forms of replacement and something about the wealth of spirituality that develops at that time still develops new age, the wisdom of yoga, he says, all kinds of spiritualisms. Those are not really something that can counter the effect of the loss of experience. He says they're like galvanic shocks to a body that's already lifeless. Basically, the term that Benjamin uses for this condition of poverty is barbarism.
▶︎ 13:08 The barbarian is someone who has no culture available to them. We are the new barbarians. And he says that positively, and that's very important. So it's not a reactionary critique of the effects of modernity and technology in the big city and so on. Those are barbarians, those masses and so on. No. The idea is that the task is now the affirmation of barbarism. That is the proper stance toward this catastrophic state of tradition is to affirm it, to do the utmost out of your new poverty, or to turn that poverty into a new form of value.
▶︎ 14:06 It's as though Nietzsche has this expression that what he's trying to do is the reevaluation of all values. And in a sense, Benjamin wants to say something like that. When you start from nothing, from this poverty, from this barbarism, it's not like you have to recapture the values that you forgot, return in some way to the past despite the problems and so on. No, you have to shift the whole understanding of what value is and what values there are in order to now affirm this poverty. It's the whole culture that has to shift.
▶︎ 14:49 Of course, at the background, we have echoes of, it's Benjamin's Marxism, certain way in which he speaks of the affirmation of poverty as some kind of revolutionary moment, at least in the sphere of culture, and we'll talk a little bit about that later.
▶︎ 15:12 But what I want to do now is touch upon various moments in the continuation of this essay, that develop, I think, something like this manifestation, first of all, of the new barbarism and different forms of affirming it or avoiding it and as it were suffering from the burden of the past. One thing that we should say, again, very generally, and I will develop it in the next lecture, is that those moments of crisis manifest themselves in a transformation of very fundamental categories through which we understand our world, our human existence, our relation to one another, to nature, and so on.
▶︎ 16:16 And one of those categories which I want to take really as an example, in this essay, Experience and Poverty, and go with Benjamin's development of this transformation, is the category of inner and outer. Inner and outer, of course, that comes with a lot in our understanding of value. What's external, what's internal, what's inward, what's merely external to us, and so on. And I remind you that we touched upon that distinction, let's say, it's part of its spiritual significance in the essay, Fate and Character. Both in relation to fate and in relation to character, there was this way in which sharp distinction between inner and outer does not hold so much.
▶︎ 17:26 So if you think of fate, tragedy, I don't know, it seems like the external world forces you into some kind of horrible position, despite your best intentions and so on. But you have to ultimately recognize this external force as something that is your own. Oedipus recognizes himself in that way in which he's led to this terrible recognition. And the same with character. We saw that the person of strong character can be said to be completely externalized. He has no inner world. He lives completely outside. He's something like a type.
▶︎ 18:17 And we said that with persons like that, it feels sometime like the whole environment is lit up with their character trait, all their interactions and so on. And so in both cases, you see that inside and outside are starting to shift. But let's see how it works with various symptoms, manifestations of this transformation, this transformation of the fundamental opposition of inner and outer in modernity.
▶︎ 18:54 This theme is initially touched upon by Benjamin in considering a short discussion of Paul Klee's drawings. Primarily his line figures, that Benjamin acquired or received as a present at some point, one of those works of Klee called the Angelus Novus. There was a time when you could buy Paul Klee for nothing. And he says, when you look at those figures, you feel that the whole idea of inwardness as a value is challenged, rejected.
▶︎ 19:48 Think of the inner now as one way in which we formulate it to ourselves, a place that is wholly ours. When we are thinking, where are we ourselves? You say not in the interactions with the outside and so on. Here inside, what I feel inside, what I am inside, that's where I find value, significance, and so on. And he says those figures give us a completely different sense of the inner.
▶︎ 20:23 I read, "For just like any good car whose every part, even the body work, obeys the needs above all of the engine, Klee's figures too seem to have been designed on the drawing board, and even in their general expression that they obey the laws of their interior." Their interior rather than their inwardness, and this is what makes them barbaric. The inner is no more the inwardness of the person. It's like the engine that drives the car and around that engine and in relation to its function, you build the body of the car.
▶︎ 21:12 And this idea of the, I think it's important that the example is that of an engine of a car. Raises various questions about this shift, let's say, from certain understanding what drawing is to this engineering quality of, let's say, the drawing of lines. But more generally, I want to say what's important here is that we recognize that the transformation of the sense of the inner, let's say the devaluation of inwardness, has a lot to do with the intrusion of technology in the human form of life, into modern life. But somehow that precisely challenges our capacity to retain the inner as a space of value.
▶︎ 22:08 Of course, this incorporation of technology into human life and the question how do we get a new figure of the human, when technology interacts so much with the human body, is a question that Benjamin develops in a famous essay which I mentioned, but we will not discuss, The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility. And there, of course, the idea is, let's think of the way technology interacts with the human body by way of the medium of photography, film, and so on, and what kind of transformation does that bring about to what we think as aesthetic value.
▶︎ 23:02 There were various debates in the nineteenth century whether photography is an art or just a reproduction of reality and so on, and that looks already outdated. But what Benjamin says is, it's not at that level. What you have to understand is that the entrance of technology into art transforms our very idea of art. It's not a local thing. It's not, well, painter uses a brush and then we have the camera. No, everything shifts.
▶︎ 23:45 And that's the spirit in which he speaks here of affirming barbarism, affirming this intrusion of technology, which some would say is destructive and so on. So let's follow up the associations of inner and outer in this essay.
▶︎ 24:07 Again, every time I touch on something very briefly just to give an idea of the ramifications of this theme. After the short mention of Klee, Benjamin turns to another challenge to this distinction of interior and exterior, namely the new architecture. He mentions Gropius and the Bauhaus, Adolf Loos, and Le Corbusier, but specifically focuses on glass architecture. And the point is obvious. With glass architecture, the dwelling is opened to the outside, or the outside enters the inside, the enclosed dwelling.
▶︎ 25:01 And Benjamin admired a figure that's not very well-known, a writer by the name of Paul Scheerbart, whose most famous novel is called Lesabéndio. It's an asteroid novel. But Scheerbart also wrote a lot about glass architecture, including in his novels, but he also has a manifesto on glass architecture. And I think for Benjamin, Scheerbart sees glass architecture not just as this new mode of construction, but really as expressing, so to speak, a utopia, a transformation of humanity, or at least some kind of fantasy and dream of the transformation of humanity through that very concrete way of addressing the shifting meaning of the distinction of inside and outside.
▶︎ 26:03 He quotes from Glass Architecture of Scheerbart, "It follows from the foregoing that we can surely talk about a culture of glass. The new glass milieu will transform humanity utterly. Now it remains only to be wished that the new glass culture will not encounter too many enemies."
▶︎ 26:27 One way to understand this mention of glass, and glass architecture, is to recall that it is a central theme of Benjamin's Arcades project. What are the arcades? They are streets that were covered with a roof of iron and glass. And so in a sense, an arcade is neither an outside, nor is it quite an inside. So it's another sign that this architectural phenomenon, this very banal phenomenon, really addresses those fundamental dimensions of human existence, here the problem of inner and outer.
▶︎ 27:12 So we are approaching slowly, the arcades with this theme. Now the utopia of glass, this transformation of humanity also, I think, receives a new meaning insofar as it is contrasted with descriptions that Benjamin gives of the interior of the bourgeois dwelling. So as it were, what retains the form of the old, in some, you'll see here, almost ossified character of the dwelling. Benjamin says, think of glass. It's a material that is very hard and that it's hard to leave traces on it. You leave traces and you clean the glass and they're gone.
▶︎ 28:15 And this idea that trace becomes something you have to think about is evident when trace is fundamentally characteristic of the bourgeois interior of the 19th century. So Benjamin draws our attention again to something which you could think of as a fashion and so on, but he sees it in relation to those shifts in the significance of the interior. There's a tendency in those bourgeois interiors to leave traces. What does it mean to leave traces? Well, he said, the individual starts feeling that he has no effect outside. Outside is the huge city, it's the masses, it's this impersonal space.
▶︎ 29:18 There's no way to leave a trace of your existence outside. And so you retreat to the inside, to the security of the home, and as it were, make it a shrine of your existence. Everything in it, all your possessions are, so to speak, testimonies to your existence. Instead of the transparency of glass, the opening to the outside, you have this accumulation of little things that you put in the living room and so on, and remind you that I was there and I was there and this is my grandmother and so on and so forth. And you create these spaces in which you affirm, as it were, that you were there.
▶︎ 30:16 It's as though you want to also leave your touch on everything. It's not only that you have various furniture and so on. Benjamin says, there's this way in which you add things to your home. If you enter a bourgeois room of the 1880s, for all the coziness it radiates, the strongest impression you receive may well be you've got no business here. And in fact, you have no business in that room, for there is no spot on which the owner has not left his mark or his trace.
▶︎ 30:55 The ornaments on the mantelpiece, the antimacassars on the armchairs. I have no idea what antimacassars are. The transparencies in the windows, the screen in front of the fire. So all those things that I add, as it were, testify to my existence. And he also says it humoristically that you have to think of the reaction of people, this kind of excessive reaction you find when something, when you break something in that kind of house.
▶︎ 31:37 He says, it's as though they react as if you erase a trace of their existence, not just you broke this little thing that they got in Venice or whatever. So there's a sense in which the, again, the way you feel this interior bourgeois home expresses something very fundamental about the shifting of this opposition of inside and outside and its significance. Maybe just go a little bit more with this theme. Benjamin says the house is no more a simple surrounding of living. We spoke a lot about surroundings and surroundings of memory and so on.
▶︎ 32:38 He says it becomes something like a hardened mold whose shape fits precisely the inhabitants. So everything, all my possessions, as it were, fit me or testify to my existence. And of course, at the same time that you make those things fitting to you, you have to maintain them. So he says, you start to be burdened by endless habits in that environment just to maintain the house, the inner. You become a slave of your house.
▶︎ 33:21 You, as it were, are made to fit all the surrounding that you created. And so the interior becomes something like a cast or receptacle of the inhabitant. It's just, like he says, a mollusk that takes the shape of its shell. That's how you feel in those houses. And again, he turns to a fashion of that time, which might seem completely insignificant, and it was the fashion of making cases for objects, like cases for glasses, cases for scissors, cases for opera glasses and so on.
▶︎ 34:06 And those cases, they're usually with plush inside or velvet, and then they have something in the shape of the object that fits in the case. And so he says, this fashion, which seems completely insignificant, is a symptom of this idea in which the house becomes sort of a protective shell. It's a symptom of this defense against the outside, this way of living in the inside. He has a special name for the person who lives in that way, that's derived from those cases. In French, such a case, it's called an etui. And he says, well, this is the etui man, the inhabitant of the interior who fits his house completely is the etui man.
▶︎ 35:05 Now, let me move to the outside again. I think you can see this dialectic of inner and outer also with various phenomena that come characteristic of your relation to the outside, to the expanses of the city, to the masses, and so on. I'll mention a couple of types that emerge at that time that express this kind of new way of addressing that environment. The first is the well-known figure of the flâneur. That's many times identified with Benjamin without any, I think, justification. It's one of the types that Benjamin discusses.
▶︎ 36:04 But the flâneur is a guy who, let's say, it's not that he has no job. He's well off, and he doesn't need to work, and what he does is walk in the city. He's a little bit like the figure of a promeneur in nature who picks out various flowers and looks at various small natural phenomena with admiration and so on. But this is the romantic form of someone who's strolling around. This is maybe the 18th century form of that phenomenon. Rousseau was one of such figures, likes to stroll in nature and so on.
▶︎ 37:02 But the 19th century brings that kind of type that's open to nature in the exterior to the city. And Benjamin says the flâneur is a little bit like someone who makes the city his nature. And what are the specimens of nature that he recognizes in the city? He says it's the variety of types of people you find in the city. Suddenly you have this environment, and the flâneur becomes an expert of recognizing types of people and admiring the multiplicity and richness of the different types of people you encounter in the city.
▶︎ 37:48 This is reflected in the development of excessive development of caricature. One way of bringing out a type visually is caricature. You emphasize certain things, and then you see not the singular person, you see a type. And so this flânerie has a parallel in the publication of books and magazines and so on, in which this new form of art, which is caricature, of course dependent on the development of a mode of reproduction at the time lithography develops. And you have caricaturists like Daumier, Gavarni, Baudelaire speaks of Constantin Guys as a painter of types, painter of modern life. But you have endless books with just, see all the kind of people you have in the city.
▶︎ 39:06 So you have a caricature, and you have a caption that tells you, this is a pharmacist. This is a. It's as though you start reacting to those masses of people, I think a little bit defensively. You start to say, well, it's a beautiful environment. It's just like nature, but human, specimens and so on. Benjamin will also have other types that develop something about the violence and even guilt that comes with this emergence of the masses on the stage of history.
▶︎ 39:53 And again, we can point to a new development that connects to the problem of the trace. It's this space in which things are connected, and you start seeing all those expression of this problematic of inner and outer. And the type that is an expert in traces, not inside, inside is the dweller of the interior. Outside, we said, people don't leave traces. But there's some type that can actually trace anyone, even in the broad expanses and among the many people of the city, and that's the detective.
▶︎ 40:43 So what you see in the 19th century is the development of the detective literature. That's a completely new phenomenon. You have Poe with his famous detective Dupin, and Baudelaire translated some of Poe's stories, Sherlock Holmes later and so on. But you have a very specific type that as it were emerges in response to this problem of inner and outer, to this idea of living traces, and to the possibility as it were to be, despite this possibility of disappearing in the crowd, to be able to track someone that's guilty through the traces they leave.
▶︎ 41:36 It's someone who has this, I would say excessive logic where everything, every little thing fits together in order to ultimately lead you to the culprit and so on. So we're talking about various symptoms.
▶︎ 41:56 I went over a few. We can go on and on, and Benjamin does, that as it were express something like the burden, but also the hope, the various imaginations of utopia that are connected with this crisis of modernity and the shifting form of the fundamental distinction of inner and outer. But I speak of symptoms, and it's important that those are not psychological symptoms. So Benjamin is not concerned with what happens inside, how people react as it were, again, inside. Those are material symptoms. So as it were, the concreteness of these manifestations is evident. It's in buildings, it's in forms of literature, it's in types of people and so on and so forth. It's fashions.
▶︎ 43:01 So you have as it were different ways in which, let's call it now the uncertainty regarding this opposition of inner and outer manifests itself outside and of course needs to be interpreted so that we recognize this as such. Think of the detective and so on. It's not clear that it fits with, let's say, the description of the bourgeois home. And so something like an image of this environment of connected phenomena acquires a certain significance precisely in relation to these transformations of what's most fundamental. And this is a point which I'll not follow here, although it has other ramifications in the essay Experience and Poverty, but I'll leave to the discussion of the next lecture and the Arcades Project.