Walter Benjamin in Ibiza, 1930s - PowerPoint Presentation

1. Walter Benjamin in Ibiza, 1930s

2. The Communist ManifestoConstant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned…

3. Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret)It was as if the world had suddenly gone mad… To leave our house meant that, once we had crossed our threshold, we were in danger of being killed by the passing cars. I think back twenty years, to my youth as a student: the road belonged to us then; we sang in it, we argued in it, while the horse-bus flowed softly by.

4. Place Clichy (Paris), ca. 1890

5. Place Clichy (Paris), ca. 1925

6. Villa Savoye (Poissy, 1931): ‘The sleek geometry of the white living space, with its elongated ribbon windows, is supported by a series of narrow columns around a curved glazed entrance, and topped with a solarium’

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9. Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1843)The very turmoil of the streets has something repulsive about it, something against which human nature rebels. The hundreds of thousands of people of all classes and ranks… crowd by one another as though they had nothing in common, nothing to do with one another, and their only agreement is a tacit one: that each should keep to his own side of the pavement, so as not to delay the opposing streams of the crowd, which it occurs to no man to honour another with so much as a glance. The brutal indifference, the unfeeling isolation of each person in his private interest becomes the more repellent and offensive, the more these individuals are crowded together within a limited space

10. Christmas Shopping, Northumberland Street, Newcastle

11. ‘Don’t start from the good old days but the bad new ones’(Bertolt Brecht – here playing chess with Benjamin, 1934)

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13. this battlefield experience of shock ‘has become the norm’ in modern life. Perceptions that once occasioned conscious reflection are now the source of shock-impulses that consciousness must parry. In industrial production no less than modern warfare, in street crowds and erotic encounters, in amusement parks and gambling casinos, shock is the very essence of modern experience. The technologically altered environment exposes the human sensorium to physical shocks that have their correspondence in psychic shock, as Baudelaire’s poetry bears witness… The motor responses of switching, snapping, the jolt in movement of a machine have their psychic counterpart in the sectioning of time’ into a sequence of repetitive movements without development. The effect on the synaesthetic system is brutalizing. Mimetic capacities, rather than incorporating the outside world as a form of empowerment… are used as a deflection against it. The smile that appears automatically on passersby wards off contact, a reflex that ‘functions as a mimetic shock absorber (Susan Buck-Morss ‘Aesthetics and Anaesthetics’).

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15. Accounting office, Brooklyn, 1925

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18. Theses defining the developmental tendencies of art can… contribute to the political struggle in ways that it would be a mistake to underestimate. They neutralize a number of traditional concepts – such as creativity and genius, eternal value and mystery – which, used in an uncontrolled way (and controlling them is difficult today), allow factual material to be manipulated in the interests of fascism. In what follows, the concepts which are introduced into the theory of art differ from those now current in that they are completely useless for the purposes of fascism. On the other hand, they are useful for the formulation of revolutionary demands in the politics of art.

19. Bauhaus Dessau (Walter Gropius, 1925-28)

20. Frankfurt Main Grossmarkthalle (1920s)

21. Vladimir Tatlin: Design for the Tower of the Third International

22. The auratic artworkThe technologically reproducible artworkGrounded in a single, unique location in space. Value derived from tradition and ritual – the artwork’s continuity with the past.Consumed by the isolated individual.Authority derives from the artefact.Derived from the order of nature: ‘a mountain range on the horizon or a branch which casts its shadow over you’.Therefore preserves distance from its audience. Freed from constrictions of space and time, consumption can be transferred anywhere. Value derived from exhibition – destruction of artwork’s continuity with the past.Consumed by a mass of people simultaneously.Authority is transferred to the consumer. Outside the order of nature – entirely humanly constructed. Distance between audience and artefact collapses.

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24. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mW4qrnK_gbI

25. da Vinci ‘The Last Supper’ (1498)

26. The Giftshop!!!

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29. Rodchenko works

30. Alexander Rodchenko/Liubov Popova

31. Alexander RodchenkoWe must revolutionize our optical perception. We must remove the veil from our eyes.Only the camera seems to be capable of describing modern life.

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34. ‘Our bars and city streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories seemed to close relentlessly around us. Then came film and exploded this prison-world with the dynamite of the split-second, so that now we can set off calmly on journeys of adventure among its far-flung debris. With the close-up, space expands; with slow motion, movement is extended’ (117).

35. ‘A person who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it; he enters into the work, just as, according to legend, a Chinese painter entered his completed painting while beholding it. By contrast, the distracted masses absorb the work of art into themselves. Their waves lap around it; they encompass it with their tide. This is most obvious with regard to buildings. Architecture has always offered the prototype of an artwork that is received in a state of distraction and through the collective. The laws of architecture’s reception are highly instructive’ (119-20).

36. Jonah who will be 25 in the year 2000 (dir. Alain Tanner; script John Berger) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8fhqHyRj6M

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38. The Little HunchbackDas bucklicht Männlein

39. ‘My mother gave me the hint. “Greetings from Mr. Clumsy,” she would say, when I had broken something or fallen down. And now I understand what she was talking about. She was speaking of the little hunchback, who had been looking at me. Whoever is looked at by this little man pays no attention. Either to himself or to the little man. He stands dazed before a heap of fragments. “When I go up to my kitchen stove/To make a little soup,/ I find a little hunchback there/Has cracked my little stoup.” Where the hunchback appeared, I could only look on uselessly. It was a look from which things receded – until, in a year’s time, the garden had become a little garden, my room a little room, and the bench a little bench. They shrank, and it was as if they grew a hump, which made them the little man’s own. The little man preceded me everywhere. Coming before, he barred the way. But otherwise, he did nothing more to me, this gray assessor, than exact the half part of oblivion from each thing to which I turned. “When I go into my little room/To have my little sweet,/I find a little hunchback there/Has eaten half the treat.” The little man was often found thus. Only, I never saw him. It was he who always saw me. He saw me in my hiding places and before the cage of the otter, on a winter morning and by the telephone in the pantry, on the Brauhausberg with its butterflies and on my skating rink with the music of the brass band. He has long since abdicated. Yet his voice, which is like the hum of the gas burner, whispers to me over the threshold of the century: “Dear little child, I beg of you,/Pray for the little hunchback too.”’ (Walter Benjamin, A Berlin Childhood around 1900, pp. 120-21).

40. Thesis VI, ‘On the concept of history’ Every age must strive anew to wrest tradition away from the conformism that is working to overpower it. The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer; he comes as the victor over the Antichrist. The only historian capable of fanning the spark of hope in the past is the one who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he is victorious. And this enemy has never ceased to be victorious.

41. J.L.G FerrisThe First Thanksgiving 1621 (1932)

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44. Benin Bronzes/Elgin MarblesBritish Museum

45. [I]t is clear that a society that loses its memory is inevitably engaged in violence. Reciprocally, a society that is shot through with violence either loses its memory, or is caught up in a problematisation of memory which tends to suggest that the order and continuity that memory at the sovereign level offers apparently to preserve, are themselves in fact violences and forgettingsFrancis Barker. The Culture of Violence: Tragedy and History (1993)

46. anamnestic redemptionThe injustices historically perpetrated on the poor by the rich, on the powerless by those in power ‘cannot of course be undone but can at least be virtually reconciled through remembering. One has to take seriously the injustice that has already happened and that is seemingly irreversible; that there exists a solidarity of those born later with those who have preceded them, with all those whose bodily or personal integrity has been violated at the hands of other human beings; and that this solidarity can only be engendered and made effective by remembering (Habermas).

47. Thesis II, ‘On the concept of history’ ‘The past carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred to redemption. 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’.

48. In defence of property and the established social order the Elizabethan and Jacobean crown killed huge numbers of the people of England. Their names not wholly unknown, the circumstances of their demise often recorded, the sheer number of them estimable, men, women and children in ‘Shakespeare’s England’ were strung up on permanent or makeshift gallows by a hempen noose. Sometimes the spinal chord snapped at once; or they hung by their necks until they suffocated or drowned; until their brains died of hypoxeia, or until the shock killed them. Pissing and shitting themselves. Bleeding from their eyes. Thinking. Barker, The Culture of Violence

49. I am suggesting that even when violence is shown it is occluded, and that occlusion is more than a mere lack of ostentation. This raises questions about the politics of representation in… Titus Andronicus, in Shakespeare’s oeuvre more widely, and in the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre as a whole, questions in particular of the extent to which the theatre either underwrites the signifying practices of the dominant culture (and by way of that the political and social power of the dominant, as well as its cultural authority), or alternatively unsettles such structures and institutions by transgressing, erasing, confusing, contesting or making ‘disfunctional’ the categories and representations they support and which in turn support them. And… then important questions are also raised about the political orientation and purposes of [any]… interpretative approach which…depend[s] upon the view that the encratic effectivity of the Shakespearean text lies in its explicit display of power… [For] power is not made visible by Titus Andronicus; it is hidden… by other visualities. At best it leaves complex, oblique, easily unnoticeable traces as the signs of its occlusion. To be sure, there is theatrical display, and it is largely violence that is theatrically displayed; and indeed, many have commented, from the earliest moment of Shakespearean criticism, on the way in which the play seems to be composed of almost nothing but such extravagant theatricality. But it is not…the common violence of the times which is made thus so spectacular. (Barker, The Culture of Violence) 

50. There is nothing that I or anyone else can do for the dead of early modern England, other than to remember in the practical, active, historically redemptive sense that Benjamin recommended. That part of the past which has passed is truly gone. But that part of the present which we call the past, that part which flashes up at a moment of danger, is another matter… To a terrifying extent, what now counts as culture is the occlusion of… historical violence, then and now. Thus Benjamin’s dictum that ‘there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism’ is resonant Barker, The Culture of Violence

51. Thesis IX, ‘On the concept of history’There is a picture by Klee called Angelus Novus. It shows an angel who seems about to move away from something he stares at. His eyes are wide, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how the angel of history must look. His face is turned toward the past. Where a chain of events appears before us, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise and has got caught in his wings; it is so strong that the angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows toward the sky. What we call progress is this storm.

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53. ‘To a certain extent I must accuse your essay of this second romanticism… The laughter of the audience at a cinema— I discussed this with Max [Horkheimer], and he has probably told you about it already— is anything but good and revolutionary; instead, it is full of the worst bourgeois sadism. I very much doubt the expertise of the newspaper boys who discuss sports; and despite its shock-like seduction I do not find your theory of distraction convincing— if only for the simple reason that in a communist society work will be organized in such a way that people will no longer be so tired and so stultified that they need distraction” (123)Adorno, Theodor. ‘Letters to Benjamin’. Aesthetics and Politics. Trans. and ed. Ronald Taylor. London: NLB, 1977. 110-134.

54. “Benjamin’s conservative-revolutionary hermeneutics, which deciphers the history of culture with a view to rescuing and redeeming it for the overthrow” (59)“there is no place in this frame of reference, the critique of ideology, for the type of critique developed by Benjamin; a critique which prepares itself for a leap into past Jetztzeiten so that it might rescue and redeem semantic potentials” (54)Habermas, Jürgen. ‘Consciousness-Raising or Redemptive Criticism: The Contemporaneity of Walter Benjamin’. New German Critique. 17 (1979): 30-59.

55. The Pearl Diver A collected object possesses only an amateur value and has no use value whatsoever. (Benjamin was not yet aware of the fact that collecting can also be an eminently sound and often highly profitable form of investment.) And inasmuch as collecting can fasten on any category of objects (not just art objects, which are in any case removed from the everyday world of use objects because they are ‘good’ for nothing) and thus, as it were, redeem the object as a thing since it now is no longer a means to an end but has its intrinsic worth, Benjamin could understand the collector’s passion as an attitude akin to that of the revolutionary. Like the revolutionary, the collector “dreams his way not only into a remote or bygone world, but at the same time into a better one in which, to be sure, people are not provided with what they need any more than they are in the everyday world, but in which things are liberated from the drudgery of usefulness.”