Walter Benjamin: Fugitive
In this week's classes I have been talking about the work of the German theorist Walter Benjamin as a way to recast some questions we've been exploring through the city symphony. Benjamin, who died as a fugitive from Nazism, orients a relation to the experience of modernity as both confronting and ephemeral, an experience of both the shocking and the transient. I've been using quotations from various works by Benjamin to frame his insightful investigations of this experience as quintessentially urban and modern but nothing serves this work better than the incomplete and massive series of archives (called convolutes) he compiled as the Arcades Project (Passagenwerk). In particular, we can consider the ways in which our "urban" films cast their particular scenes and points-of-view as both transitory, ephemeral, and typological, potentially international and historically ambiguous.
A translation of The Arcades Project as it exists is available for you to peruse at Fisher, but I'm also giving you this link to an online work that seeks to represent the "straying" nature of the text through the use of hypertext. H. Marcelle Crickenberger's work offers a "mimetic," rather than "critical" elaboration of the massive work of the project, and is both composed of and offers connections to much exciting and relevant speculation about modernity, cinematic and otherwise.
1 comment:
I collect nice quotes about Benjamin so thought I'd post one of my favourites (in honour of academia!)
"In September 1939—on the eve of the Vichy regime—Benjamin, along with thousands of other Parisian exiles of German and Austrian descent, was forced by the French authorities to report to one of the local collecting stations. He was subsequently transported to the gruesome French internment camp at Vernuche near Nerves. Within a few days of his arrival at the camp, which made few concessions to its prisoners’ human dignity, Benjamin began to hold an outdoor seminar “for advanced students,” charging a tuition fee of three cigarettes, or alternatively, one button. Along with a small group of interested inmates, he convened regular meetings on straw-covered ground beneath a suspended blanket in order to launch an academic camp journal. Drinking contraband schnapps from a thimble, Benjamin, to the amazement of the other prisoners, conducted these editorial meetings with a ceremonious rigor that stood in marked contrast to the camp’s macabre living conditions."
(Walter Benjamin and the Corpus of Autobiography.)
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