Copyright Status the Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Literary Theory and Criticism
Key Theories of Walter Benjamin
Walter Benjamin (1892–1940), best known for a text called The Piece of work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction where the world of mass produced artworks, in particular those of photography and motion picture, are explored. Benjamin is besides regarded as an iconic intellectual of the twentieth century, who blurred the boundaries of many traditionally isolated field of study areas, from the impact of modernity to the significant of Mickey Mouse. Benjamin was born on 15 July 1892 in Berlin; he was educated at Kaiser Friedrich Schule in Berlin, and at the Landerziehungsheim Haubinda in Thuringia where, significantly, he came into contact with the charismatic school reformer Gustav Wyneken, an of import figure in Benjamin's youth. The German youth movements – via Wyneken'southward mediation – inspired Benjamin, and he became a member of the radical 'group for school reform' at Albert Ludwig University in Freiburg im Breisgau, too joining the commission of the Free Students Union during his fourth dimension at the Royal Freidrich Wilhelm University in Berlin. While the youth movements led him to some passionate early publications in journals such as Der Anfang (The Beginning), Benjamin'southward academic career did not atomic number 82 to the expected result of a professorial position: he completed his doctoral dissertation in 1919 (published the post-obit year as The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism) and worked on his post-doctoral dissertation, or Habilitation, on the High german Bizarre mourning play, which he completed in 1925, eventually withdrawing information technology from the University of Frankfurt after an extremely negative reception. The Habilitation chosen the Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (The Origin of High german Tragic Drama) was eventually published in 1928, aslope a radically dissimilar text, the Einbahnstrasse (One Mode Street), which is well-nigh the opposite of a university dissertation, utilizing playful montage techniques and linguistic games.
During this menses Benjamin was mixing with heady new German language thinkers, such as his philosopher friends Ernst Bloch and Gershom Scholem (Bloch'due south The Spirit of Utopia was published in 1923, the same yr as an of import new Marxist text, Georg Lukacs's History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics). Other new intellectual developments were occurring at this time: the German Judaic thinkers Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929) and Martin Buber (1876–1965) were producing challenging works. Buber's journal, Der Jude, explored literary, disquisitional and political issues of the day, while Rosenzweig published his Star of Redemption in 1921, a book which attempted a 'new thinking' bringing together ethics, philosophy and theology; both men worked on a translation of the Hebrew Bible into German, which had a mixed reception. While Benjamin did not ally himself with Zionist idea or a specially 'Judaic' sensibility, he besides kept at a distance from other intellectual and cultural movements and charismatic leaders, such equally the Georgekreis, a literary and spiritual motion that aimed at a German language cultural renewal nether the leadership of Stefan Anton George (1868–1933). Benjamin followed an independent path: information technology took him on complex intellectual and physical journeys, to Paris, Capri, Naples, Rome, Florence, Ibiza, Moscow, Lourdes, Marseille and Port Bou, on the Spanish border, where he committed suicide on 25 September 1940, fleeing Nazi Frg.
Benjamin's early writings are deeply metaphysical and theological, and are renowned for their philosophical density. In essays such as 'On Linguistic communication equally Such and on the Language of Man' (1916), 'On the Plan of the Coming Philosophy' (1918) and the substantial 'The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism' (1920), Benjamin presents interlinked concepts of language, sacred text, a projected reworking of Kant's express concept of experience, and a new approach to criticism and Romanticism as a tracing of the absolute in early Romantic writing. Benjamin argued for an 'immanent criticism' which would engage in some ways quite mystically with a text's internal structures and divine traces. This very early work can be compared with the popular English translation of Benjamin'due south selected essays, collected under the championship Illuminations, which show Benjamin theorizing modernity by bringing together, amidst other things, Marxist dialectics, Surrealism, snippets of theology, Baudelaire's poetry (and, most chiefly, his theories of the flâneur), Kafka'due south novels, the image of Proust, a Klee painting called the Angelus Novus, book-collecting, translation, storytelling, photography and moving picture. In this heterogeneous earth, old and new collide, the material and the spiritual intersect, industrial modes of product take an affect upon, and transform irrevocably, the making and reception of art, and philosophical grand narratives are broken into small pieces: essays, radio shows, images and fragments.
Illuminations shows how though starting with deep metaphysical and theological perspectives, Benjamin'south thinking was radically modified by his ain encounters with Marxism and Surrealism, leading to a hybrid arroyo to the analysis of gimmicky culture. The flâneur – the conservative subject area strolling idly through the new city-spaces of modernity – is more than a mobile spectator: his very identity is constituted by the physiological charges and shocks of the city, and his enjoyment of the commodification of all subjects. The fast-paced, always-irresolute experiences of the metropolis are reflected in new artistic product processes and forms, those of photography and film. Where one time the unique high fine art forms dominated, now, for Benjamin, the mass-produced realm of the re-create had come into its own, neutralizing the traditional concepts of private inventiveness, genius, eternal value and mystery. Where one time the work of art had a unique aura, in part generated past the venerating approach of the subject to the work, fixed in its unique location, at present the mass-produced work comes to the subject, meeting her halfway. For instance, radio, boob tube and now the internet come up direct into the home, and mass-produced works are available and consumed much of the fourth dimension through ubiquitous advertizement. Both 'high' and 'low' art forms are treated by Benjamin as viable objects of collecting and critical report, but new mass-produced works are not secondary to previous forms: the new techniques can reach things that the onetime could not, e.g. ho-hum-motion photography or digital images. The 're-create' thus outperforms the 'original' and does away with this outmoded binary opposition. New technologies of image (re)production de-couple or detach mass-produced art from the sphere of tradition, and from the ritualistic practices in which 'high' fine art is embedded. Instead of achieving significance through sacred ritual, art becomes a political practise. Benjamin adds to this argument his study of history, Marxism and Surrealism, to develop the concept of the 'dialectical paradigm' that, as with Surrealist images, substitutes a political for a historical view of the past. Surrealist 'profane illumination' is a process whereby all human experiences are revealed to have revolutionary potential: this is revealed via a dialectics of shock, intoxication, the blurring of real and dream worlds, and linguistic experimentation, combined with a radical concept of freedom. Inspired by the 'profane illumination', which Benjamin idea exceeded the Surrealist'south grasp, Benjamin went on to develop his 'dialectical image' or 'dialectics at a standstill' in a massive piece of work of collecting called The Arcades Projection. This history of the nineteenth-century Paris arcades, creatively triggered past Louis Aragon's (1897–1982) Le Paysan de Paris or Paris Peasant (1926), collects thousands of quotations strategically arranged with snippets of critical commentary in chapters or bundles called 'convolutes'. The materials in each convolute grade a disquisitional constellation – or esoteric blueprint – whereby the collective dreamworlds of nineteenth-century article capitalism are given form and are explosively shattered: the collective can thereby awaken from its non-dialectical slumbers (at to the lowest degree, that is the theory).
Benjamin's terminal piece of work – his essay 'On the Concept of History' (known previously in English equally the 'Theses on the Philosophy of History') brings together many strands in his oeuvre: a critique of the Enlightenment (and subsequently capitalist) concept of 'history as progress', a melancholic analysis of the crisis-bound twentieth century, and the persistence of the theological and the messianic in the midst of the Marxist attempts to develop historical materialism (a rejection of universal truths, and the notion that such truths are teleological, that is to say, moving towards a pre-determined endpoint or goal). For oppressed peoples, Benjamin argues, the 'state of emergency' (say, the oppression of a particular ethnic group) is not a lived exception only the rule: adapting this lesson to historical materialism ways constantly reassessing the nowadays via past events and emergencies. The by is non something that is hermetically sealed and contained, it must constantly be re-addressed and re-conceptualized every bit it is dangerously appropriated past the ruling classes at any moment; thus Benjamin argues that: 'Each age must strive to wrest tradition away from the conformism that is working to overpower it.' The nigh infamous image from this last work is the angel in Klee'south Angelus Novus (a painting that Benjamin owned); Benjamin calls this image 'the angel of history' and imagines history hither as a series of catastrophic events piling wreckage at this angel's feet every bit he is blown into the future by the tempest that human beings telephone call 'progress'.
Benjamin is 1 of the fundamental thinkers of modernity, and an important figure on the margins of the Frankfurt School and other schools of Marxist criticism. While his experimental techniques, and essays on pic and popular culture take been the most influential in the Westward, contempo new English language translations of a wider range of his work, in item The Arcades Project, have led to considerable new interest in Benjamin in the English language-speaking earth. Much of Benjamin'due south piece of work is firmly rooted in metaphysics, however, and this aspect of his work continues to exist troubling in the post-metaphysical humanities and, in some cases, is simply ignored.
Source: FIFTY KEY LITERARY THEORISTS by Richard J. Lane, Routledge Publication.
Categories: Literary Theory, Marxism
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