Walter Benjamin

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Illuminations

Theses

  • for context: Anderson 1983, Bowen 2009
  • Marxist historicism is guided by disavowed mythology, Christian eschatology
  • brushing history against the grain: the truth of history is not visible
    • breaking through the succession -- things in their own time: fight against the outcomes because they hide the process
  • Messianic time
  • 254 The past carries within it a temporal index by which it is referred to redemption.
    • current state cleansed by future state
  • There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim. That claim cannot be settled cheaply. Historical materialists are aware of that.
    • the Messiah who is only the bringer of gifts, maker of good; if you're thinking in strong way they're fighters (but not only victors)
  • The class struggle, which is always present to a historian influenced by Marx, is a fight for the crude and material things without which no refined and spiritual things could exist. Nevertheless, it is not in the form of the spoils which fall to the victor that the latter make their presence felt in the class struggle. They [255] manifest themselves in this struggle as courage, humor, cunning, and fortitude. They have retroactive force and will constantly call in question every victory, past and present, of the rulers.
    • retroactive causality: the expectation of redemption affecting the present
  • 255 In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it. The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer, he comes as the subduer of Antichrist. Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins.
    • strong Messianic power?
  • 257 [The Angel of History] His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.
  • 261 [Empty, homogenous time]: History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogenous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now [Jetztzeit]. Thus, to Robespierre ancient Rome was a post charged with the time of the now which he blasted out of the continuum of history.
  • 263 The present, which, as a model of Messianic time, comprises the entire history of mankind in an enormous abridgment, coincides exactly with the stature which the history of mankind has in the universe.
  • Important: Historicism contents itself with establishing a causal connection between various moments in history. But no fact that is a cause is for that very reason historical. It became historical posthumously, as it were, through events that make be separated from it by thousands of years. A historian who takes this as his point of departure stops telling the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary. Instead, he grasps the constellation which his own era has formed with a definite earlier one. Thus he establishes a concept of the present as the "time of the now" which is shot through with chips of Messianic time.

The Storyteller

Reading Notes

  • 83 end of storytelling - "It is as if something that seemed inalienable to us, the securest among our possessions, were taken from us: the ability to exchange experiences."
  • 84 ...Experience has fallen in value...Every glance at a newspaper demonstrates that it has reached a new low, that our picture, not only of the external world but of the moral world as well, overnight has undergone changes which were never thought possible. With the [First] World War a process began to become apparent which has not halted since then.
  • 86 ...the nature of every real story. It contains, openly or covertly, something useful. The usefulness may, in one case, consist in a moral; in another, in some practical advice; in a third, in a proverb or maxim.... Counsel woven into the fabric of [87] real life is wisdom. The art of storytelling is reaching its endbecause the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.
    • interesting to relate to Price 2000: that which is anthologizable, extractable, indexible, is the story, not the narrative?
  • but he's adamant this isn't about "modernity" but rather secularization and the changing relationship to history -- see "Theses"
  • 87 The earliest symptom of a process whose end is the decline of storytelling is the rise of the novel at the beginning of modern times. What distinguishes the novel from the story (and from the epic in the narrower sense) is its essential dependence on the book.
  • [The novel] neither comes from oral tradition nor goes into it.
  • The birthplace of the novel is the solitary individual, who is no longer able to express himself by giving examples of his most important concerns, is himself uncounseled, and cannot counsel others.
  • 88 If now and then, in the course of the centuries, efforts have been made -- most effectively, perhaps, in Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre -- to implant instruction in the novel, these attempts have always amounted to a modification of the novel form. The Bildungsroman, on the other hand, does not deviate in any way from the basic structure of the novel. By integrating the social process with the development of a person, it bestows the most frangible justification on the order determining it. The legitimacy it provides stands in direct opposition to reality. Particularly in the Bildungsroman, it is this inadequacy that is actualized.
  • It took the novel, whose beginnings go back to antiquity, hundreds of years before it encountered in the evolving middle class those elements which were favorable to its flowering. With the appearance of these elements, storytelling began quite slowly to recede into the archaic; in many ways, it is true, it took hold of the new material, but it was not really determined by it. On the other hand, we recognize that with the full control of the middle class, which has the press as one of its most important instruments in fully developed capitalism [[[Habermas 1962]]], there emerges a new form of communication which, no matter how far back its origin may lie, never before influenced the epic form in a decisive way. But now it does exert such an influence. And it turns out that it confronts storytelling as no less of a stranger than did the novel, but in a more menacing way, and that it also brings about a crisis in the novel. This new form of communication is information.
  • 90 The value of information does not survive the moment in which it was new. It only lives at that moment; it has to surrender to it completely and explain itself to it without losing any time. A story is different. It does not expend itself.
    • literature is "news that stays news"
  • wonderful - grains in the pyramids that are still germinative
  • 93-4 death being pushed out of "the perceptual world"
  • 94 Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death. In other words, it is natural history to which his stories refer back.
  • 95 ...raise the question whether historiography does not constitute the common ground of all forms of the epic. The written history would be in the same relationship to the epic forms as white light is to the colors of the spectrum.
  • 97 novel and memory
  • 101 The novel is significant therefore, not because it presents someone else's fate to us, perhaps didactically, but because this stranger's fate by virtue of the flame which consumes it yields us the warmth which we never draw from our own fate. What draws the reader to the novel is the hope of warming his shivering life with a death he reads about.


Class Notes

  • troubling because Marlow (in Lord Jim (Conrad, 1900)) fits so many of the things WB talks about storytellers doing
  • story - historiographic, novel - information ("neither comes from the oral tradition nor goes into it")
  • Is reproduction the same as passing on a story? He'd say no - Work of Art - but what about handing on Dracula (Bram Stoker, 1897)?
  • immediate lived experience is important to him, of a different quality
  • the novel only lives in the media ecology of the book
  • we can't share our experiences anymore so we go inside and write novels
  • does the novel, then, actually succeed in capturing the alienated, isolated nature of modern life?
  • storyteller is constantly engaged with death, it is the "sanction" of what they can tell
    • power of the novel in letting us know others' deaths in a way we can't know our own
  • WB is deeply concerned about the annihilation of humanity by modernity
    • commodification of experience in modern world - rupture but also equivalence with longer life of human experience
    • vulnerability of human, spoken experience to abstraction, dehumanization
      • WWI - scalar rupture - how much does individual experience matter in trying to convey the experience of WWI?
  • epic functions hope
  • messianic time/eschatological time -> fulfillment
  • using Lukacs 1937 - "once upon a time" is a story opening that is outside of time, a novel has to be plugged into history
    • "story gives access to common experience that's ahistorical, novels give us access to others' experience" (?)
    • the novel purports to take place in history (abstract historical markers) and be about individuals (bourgeois individuality and the construction of nationalism)
      • The standardization of time in C19 - Anderson 1983, "abstract time"
  • The Mill on the Floss (1860) is not a story, but it contains them (Maggie feeding the rabbits)
    • storytelling more at the beginning of Mill - weird narratologically but natural storytelling-wise
  • storytelling as hands-on work: I could give you info about how to do it but that's not going to really do it - potters never exhaust the potential skill of throwing pots, analogous to storytelling
  • unexplainability - jokes/stories die when you explain them (didactism and "information"?)
  • flip side with what Eliot can do that story can't, or we do need ways to talk about WWI and Rupert Brooke does that
  • "does the rise of the novel cause the holocaust?" No, but it's closer than we'd like to think - cultural forms have a lot of power to spread ideological formations and reflect them
    • fascism is the aestheticization of politics, communism/Marxism responds by politicizing art
      • Adorno, the culture industry -- l/u - that Frankfort School book


Unpacking My Library

  • 61 I am not exaggerating when I say that to a true collector the acquisition of an old book is its rebirth.
  • To renew the old world: that is the collector’s deepest desire when he is driven to acquire new things, and that is why a collector of older books is closer to the wellsprings of collecting than the acquirer of luxury editions.

Arcades Project

  • As he further theorizes in The Arcades Project, the collector is driven by the desire to “enclose the particular item within a magical circle” in which it is fetishistically displayed (205).
  • 206 Fundamentally a very odd fact – that collector’s items as such were produced industrially. Since when?
  • 211 The collector develops a…relationship with his objects, which are enriched through his knowledge of their origin and their duration in history.
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