Date: Mon, 4 Oct 1999 23:54:43 -0400 From: nrl-AT-acsu.buffalo.edu (Nick Lawrence) Subject: Re: starting the discussion Thanks to Lloyd Spencer for taking up the thread; it's a pleasure to have him on board this list, since it was his translation of "Central Park" that started me thinking about the transatlantic roots of modernism in the mid-19th century, via Baudelaire and Whitman, lo these many years ago. Regarding Benjamin in cyberspace: Despite his overwhelmingly literary bent, I've come to see WB as a theorist of media in the broad post-McLuhan sense. Anyone familiar with his writings on cities, and specifically with his comments on the labyrinth as exemplary metaphor for urban space, will recognize in them suggestive analogies to the internet. Questions raised by the "Work of Art" essay concerning the role of information and distraction in film seem equally suited to this still-new medium, where (nearly) everything in the off-line world finds its double. At the same time, the increasing interrelation of words and images signalled by the web offers an opportunity to revisit Benjamin's analyses of signs, emblems, advertising, thought-pictures, etc. My own interests keep returning me to the Passagen-Werk and the implications of that project for current critical practice. I read the Adorno-Benjamin correspondence on the P-W as a primary document for historical-materialist methodology, whose legacy has been too often neglected by latter-day cultural studies. (Has anyone compiled a bibliography pertaining to the A-B debate, btw?) I'm also interested in the question, in the end political, of Benjamin's critical address, its relationship to an audience actual, imaginary, or otherwise. Much of the urgency of B's version of historical materialism seems to derive from this dimension of his writing. Along these lines, how might we reconcile or adjudicate the following two quotations: "No poem is intended for the receiver" ("The Task of the Translator," 1923) and "Baudelaire envisaged readers to whom the reading of lyric poetry would present difficulties. . . . He was eventually to find the reader at whom his work was aimed" ("Some Motifs in Baudelaire," 1938)? On the Critical Inquiry issue: the Shoshana Feldman essay makes for gripping reading, though the mandarin injunction at its close to "return to Benjamin his silence" annoys me somewhat. I'd be curious to hear what others have to say about the issue. E.g., Frederic Jameson's essay on B's "sociological predecessor" Georg Simmel advances a determined critique of both Simmel and Benjamin for their resistance to theory, marked by a "category mistake" regarding the continuity between the individual and the collective. Comments? Nick Lawrence -------- from list seminar-11-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu -------
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