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WALTER BENJAMIN:
THE ARCHITECTURE OF A MANUSCRIPT
By Álvaro Cuadra*
REVIEW of: Philippe SIMAY (ed.), Capitales de la modernité. Walter Benjamin et la ville. Paris. Éditions de l'Éclat. 2005: 206 pages.
Contributors: Michael Löwy, Régine Robin, Guy Petitdemange, Robert Kahn, Graeme Gilloch, Andrew Benjamín, Charles Rice, Wolfgang Bock
[*Álvaro Cuadra. Docteur de la Sorbonne. Santiago, Chile. 2007 - wynnkott@gmail.com]
Spanish Version: WALTER BENJAMIN: LAS ARQUITECTURAS DE UNA ESCRITURA
The book under review is an excellent compilation of articles edited by Philippe Simay. With Capitales de la modernité: Walter Benjamín et la ville (Capitals of modernity: Walter Benjamin and the city) [1] as its eloquent title, it establishes an instance for contemporary debate in a new perspective. The city, which had earlier received only scant attention from Benjamin criticism, is now revealed. Therefore, this book will fill a theoretical void that had existed not only in the French language.
The contributors display the architecture of a perpetually present writing, Walter Benjamín and his never fully achieved book. As in a palimpsest, the new signs are engraved in the twists and creases of that book which is evoked and quoted. There is a presence that is a premonition and, at the same time, a shrewd intuition. We cannot look into every detail that each of the chapters offers. However, we will endeavour to paint an overall picture of this interesting volume, even despite the inevitable omissions.
Walter Benjamín has contemporarily been represented under the label of an "original intellectual", which means that a certain resistance has arisen to associating him with any specific discipline. He is seen as offering much wisdom on topics such as art, language and history. However, people tend to forget that Benjamín was one of the pioneers of the theory that the city is a manifestation of the modern. As Simay correctly reminds us: "La ville constitute pourtant le centre de gravité, et non une simple variable, de la lecture benjaminienne de la modernité. A la différence des approches exclusivement politiques et morales, tout comme des théories de la modernisation, ce n'est ni dans la sphère des valeurs ni dans l'appréhension idéale de la totalité sociale que Benjamín a cherché le sens de la modernité, mais dans les phénomènes urbains les plus concrets" ('The city is, however, the centre of gravity, and not just a simple variable, in Benjamin's reading of modernity. By contrast with exclusively political and moral approaches or theories of modernisation, it was neither in the sphere of values nor in the ideal apprehension of the social totality that Benjamin sought modernity, but in the most concrete urban phenomena'.) [2]
This collection of essays has the virtue of possessing diversity, and although we do recognize a subjacent architecture, the authors' visions are linked in a panoramic fashion around Benjamin's work. This makes the act of reading Walter Benjamin "une variante héretique du matérialisme historique" [3] ('a heretical variant of historical materialism' - Michael Löwy). At the same time, we recognize that his discourse tends to allude and avoid, as a kind of "écriture flâneuse" ('flâneur's writing' - Regine Robin), through the metaphors and allegories that seek to expose the cultural expressions of capitalism up to our days.
Michael Löwy recalls the fact that Paris, the true capital of the 19th century (another way to name the modern prehistory), was at the same time the revolutionary capital of the time: "L'espace urbain comme lieu du combat entre les classes: voici un aspect souvent negligé par les travaux savants sur le thème de la ville dans le Passagenwerk. Pourtant, il occupe une place de choix dans ce projet inachevé" ('The urban space as locus of the class struggle: this is an aspect often neglected by the scholarship on the urban theme in the Arcades Project. Nonetheless, it plays a key role in the unfinished scheme').[4]
Of special interest is Regine Robin's effort to explicate the figure of the "flâneur" in postmodern times: "Le nouveau flâneur, serait celui qui "trâine", qui résiste à la fonctionnalité des lieux, à leur amnésie, à leur rhythme" ('The new flâneur would be the one who "drags his feet", who resists the functionality of the locations, their amnesia, their rhythm'). [5] The new flâneur is the one who resists the simulacrum, rejecting the false utopias of consumerism, precisely those that breach or bypass the pre-established functionalities, whose last refuge could be in the streets of the megapolis or in cyberspace.
If Robin updates the figure of the flâneur, as a sort of postmodern allegory, Wolfgang Bock reminds us that "D'après la description benjaminienne, ce n'est pas de Rome que le flâneur s'enivre. L'ivresse est ici liée à un lieu précis, et est déclenchée, malgré les instants de la subjectivité et de la biographie, par des objets précis, dont le flâneur a la garde" ('According to Benjamin's description, it is not Rome that the flâneur gets drunk on. Drunkenness is here linked to a specific place, and is unleashed, despite moments of subjectivity and biography, by specific objects, of which the flâneur is the guardian'.) [6] Therefore, the flâneur as a source of Charles Baudelaire's inspiration would only be conceivable in the contemporary city as a rhetorical figure.
This book positions itself in between a number of readings of Walter Benjamín, and, in that logic, claims a contemporary significance for his theory. The main idea, initiated by Georg Simmel and which Benjamín shares with his contemporary Siegfried Krakauer, has by now become a Benjaminian commonplace regarding the way the urban environment modifies the perception and experience that the citizen has. In a word, the city has transformed the sensorium.
One of the contributors, Graeme Gilloch, poses a few radical questions in his chapter "Optique urbaine" ('Urban optics'), associating the cinema with the city. Invoking Benjamín, he says: "Seul le film permet un accès visuel à l'essence de la ville, à la manière des automobilistes qui pénètrent dans le nouveau centre-ville" ('Only the film enables a visual access to the essence of the city, like the motorists entering the new city centre')[7] , asking what the real meaning is of the city's "essence" (Wesen) and how the cinema could have access to it.
Although Gilloch ponders on this "essence" as a "modern" concept in itself, or the Baudelairean idea of "le plaisir de la mélancolie" ('the pleasure of melancholy'), we would stress an aspect that appears as only a faint possibility in his chapter: the idea of "flux". It actually looks as though modern experience in the city is directly related to rapidity, fragmentation and the simultaneous. This links the "Fluss des Lebens" and the optical flux of cinema, as the true "essence" of the modern experience. This new experience could be only captured at the time only through the cinema, and represents, without a doubt, a "sensitive" revolution of experience.
Andrew Benjamín ventures, in his chapter "Ennui et Distraction", to discuss one of the central issues in Benjaminian theory: the relationship between the individual and the masses. Leaving behind the notion of the subject as "fétiche d'un humanisme résiduel" ('fetish of a residual humanism'), he alerts us to an individual conceived in a new system of relationships in which "la masse est une matrice" ('the mass is a matrix'). This reading of Benjamín opens up an interesting perspective in respect of the objectivity of art and of l'ennui et la distraction as "fundamental tones" of modernity.
Charles Rice offers a dialectical immersion into the domestic interiors of the bourgeoisie of the Second Empire. This domestic space is also the space of intimacy, of a private world, but is nonetheless not deprived of history. The habitat settled with armchairs and thick curtains testifies to a new social texture: "L'émergence des espaces domestiques équivaut á une nouvelle forme de division du tissu social et urbain parisien du dix-neuvième siècle. Pour la bourgeoisie, le logement se sépare du travail, rendant possible par cette division les conditions d'émergence de l'espace domestique. C'est un espace d'expérience immatérielle et illusoire produit par des effets matériels" ('The emergence of domestic spaces amounts to a new form of division of the social and urban fabric of nineteenth-century Paris. For the bourgeoisie, home becomes separated from work, and this division makes possible the conditions for the emergence of the domestic space. It is a space of immaterial and illusory experience produced by material effects.')'[8] It is fascinating to see how domestic spaces construct an everyday experience through objects that, in principle, have been divested of their commodity status. Thus, a whole collection of objects, from their materiality, generate an illusional experience. The domestic space is, in the end, a closed space that works as a "box" of experience.
Reading this volume as a whole, we become aware of a sinuous surface, full of creases that delineate the outlines. It is a highly informed and valuable collection that explores the meanders of European culture. This may be the only way to get close to Benjamín, who from a "dialectical vision" exposes delicate fragments, faintly perceptible, which as a whole show us "the other city", the city that is glimpsed behind the "brouillard des villes" ('the cities' fog').
The modern city appears as a privileged space for the phantasmagorias of iron and crystal, a space of emancipating struggles, in both the social and the aesthetic sense, but also as the locus of perceptual experience and of the imagination: a crucial stage where diverse silhouettes of different times merge. It may be that the greatest value of this book lies in showing how Walter Benjamín has taught us to think of this "other city", in its secret intimacy that goes beyond the fog, in its light and darkness.
SANTIAGO, CHILE, 2007
NOTES
[1] Philippe SIMAY. Capitales de la modernité. Walter Benjamín et la ville. Paris. Éditions de l'Éclat. 2005: 206 pages.