This biography of Benjamin is widely and well-researched but after having read this, I had to ask myself how well I really knew this individual, whose originality was tragically at a time and place of extreme chaos, unique in human civilization's history. I read this book with the goal of gaining an understanding of his ideas while swiping aside his hectic lifestyle. Perhaps more attention should have been paid to his personal life in which he divorced his wife, left his son(though he would see both intermediantly), lost the lady he loved, struggled with suicide and completed his most brilliant work while in exile and financial downturn. Certainly more focus of mine could have been paid to the Frankfurt School(Adorno, Horkheimer, Lowenthal, Marcuse, Fromm)or Benjamin's close friendship to Brecht. For necessary enrichment, I will soon have to take on Eiland and Jenning's English translation of Benjamin's "Arcades Project."
Today Benjamin is relevant because he reshaped our understanding of important writers like Proust, Kafka and Baudelaire. His recognition and original insight of technology coordinated with capitalism formed our modern culture. He was definitely an enigma, arguably unprecedented both before and after. He was a writer full of montage with a fractured style that was original to the core of post-modern thinking.
While Eiland and Jennings master the details, their overall argument for his relevance today is unclear. The Frankfurt School or Institute for Social Research has had a bit of a resurgence lately, along with critical theory in general. What has to be recognized is that Benjamin was open to the possibilities of the modern world. He wanted to think that modern culture would lead to a radical change of the system, with Marxism being at the center of his ideal changes. Often we find Benjamin so internally charged and vibrant that he is highly naive and neglectful to the external world. Yet unlike his contemporaries, he saw past the debate of whether mechanically produced art was indeed art and instead looked at how it changed art.
On the subject of education, the youthful Benjamin responds to "What has school given us?", by saying plenty of knowledge but without the ideals to provide direction. Education is full of "arbitrariness and purposelessness." If this were to change, Benjamin aptly argues that we needed meaningful institutional change following cultural transformation, which meant an expansion of personal and social horizons. Benjamin was influenced by Gustav Wyneken and follows Wyneken's lead in saying that in education, the goal is not "improvement but fulfillment." Benjamin does not want education perverting the "creative spirit into the vocational." There should be a unity of academic disciplines and a nonhierarchal relation between students and teachers, as well as men and women. Education is a creative renewal of traditional concepts. It's purpose is to draw new life from past teachings and evolve. It aims to achieve a Dasein, a "concrete totality of existence."
One of Benjamin's notable achievements was when he immersed himself into the literature of Marcel Proust. He translated the three volume section of "In Search of Lost Time." Similar to his feelings about Thomas Mann, he thought Proust was a "kindred soul." He added that, "the most problematical side of his genius is his total elimination of the ethical viewpoint....something that goes together with the supreme subtlety in his observation of everything physical and spiritual. This is perhaps-in part to be understood as the 'experimental procedure' in this immense laboratory, where time is made the subject of experiments with thousands of reflectors." This appeared in his essay, "On The Image of Proust."
Benjamin was pulled by Proust's "philosophical way of seeing." In referring to the lesbian scene in "Swann's Way", within every fracture evil explicitly shows its true substance-humanity. In all of Proust's works, "how the consequent transformation of existence into a preserve of memory centered in the vortex of solitude." Proust discusses what Benjamin calls "intertwined time," which gives us an "entirely new image of life." Proust centres on the "counterpoint of aging and remembering is fundamental to the novel in its obsessive quest for happiness." Benjamin adds that "reality takes shape" only through memory. In short, the world Proust depicts excludes everything that is involved in production. In other words, Proust refused to take the bourgeoisie world at face value.
Another writer Benjamin explored deeply was Kafka. "Kafka had a rare capacity for creating parables for himself, yet his parables are never exhausted by what is explainable, on the contrary, he took all conceivable precautions against the interpretation of his writings." Kafka was, according to Benjamin, into the organization of life and labour in society. To Benjamin, "The Metamorphosis" is a title representing the threat over Kafka's characters, the threat of falling back into an alien-life form. They feel this threat in the form of shame and are hopeless in the face of judgement.
"The Arcades Project" is what most followers of Benjamin call his Magnum Opus, written between May 1935 and February 1936 in Paris. The topics vary from iron construction and photography to the theory of commodity obsession. The gaming table is the centrepiece symbol, representing an "ontological significance as an image of world play." Benjamin is able to bring all of his past theoretical positions together in this work. It is an examination of the role of industry in the form of an19th-early 20th century capitalistic metropolis called Paris. The main individual in all of this, examined like no other writer was by Benjamin is Baudelaire, antiquating him with the domineering feeling of male alienation. The relation between the alienated male and the massive city crowd. The crowd is "the newest intoxicant of the lonely individual." The crowd "erases all traces of the individual: it is the newest asylum of the outcast." According to Benjamin, "Baudelaire's task is to disclose these aspects," the crowd being the "most unfathomable labyrinth." This is Baudelaire's "manifest task."
In modern Paris, in the modern world, the individual is absorbed into the masses and loses all traces of individuality. The modern urban life is affixed with an illusionary quality. This affect's the human's ability to have rational thinking. To Benjamin, Baudelaire's greatness comes from his ability to make himself susceptible to the worst of modern life. Baudelaire, to Benjamin, gains these mythical qualities of the ex-bourgeois who has to take refuge on the streets. Everything can turn to allegory. Eiland and Jennings capture the essence of "The Arcades Project" when they say that "Benjamin was intent on working out a method of historical encapsulation through typifying images in shifting constellations." Technology raises the human sensory capacity to functioning in a world of traffic.
In short, while the focus of my reading was not on Benjamin's biographical details(which are tragically and fascinatingly unstable), but rather his production. However, this biography gives one an understanding of Benjamin for one who is already immersed in his writings. It helps to have read "The Arcades Project" and other writings of his, to grasp how Walter Benjamin, on a literary, cultural and perhaps philosophical scale, was one of the great dynamic voices of the 20th century.
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