File spoon-archives/seminar-11.archive/benjamin_1999/seminar-11.9910, message 3


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



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