August 24-25, 2007, The American Living Room Festival, Here Arts Center, New York
exploring the life and thought of Walter Benjamin with Matthew Torney and Man in Boat theatre company
Intellectual foundation text
by Ian Russell (February 2007)
...the 'state of emergency' in which we live is not the exception but the rule.
(Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, VIII)
Walter Benjamin was born in Berlin, Germany in 1892 and committed suicide in Portbou on the Spanish-French border in 1940 after failing to escape the expansion of German National Socialism throughout Europe. Though cut short, Benjamin’s life of letters, leisure and thought embodied the existential and expressionistic crises of the 20th century – a century rife with emergency and tragedy.
As a philosopher he is known for making, to this day, a unique contribution to the school of continental philosophy by combining his thoughts on Jewish mysticism with interpretations of Marxist historical materialism developed through his relationship with Bertold Brecht. As a translator, he is also known for his passionate and sympathetic treatments of the works of Marcel Proust and Charles Baudelaire. Compatriot and colleague of other notable figures of 20th century European philosophy such as Hannah Arendt and Theodor Adorno, Benjamin was pained to produce texts which could help illuminate the experiential, existential and expressionistic crises of 20th century modernism. Coining the philosophical concept ‘the state of emergency as norm’, Benjamin’s thought both inspires hope through its poetic pictorial accounts of early 20th century European life in such romantic cities as Berlin and Paris and inspires anxiety and fear, signalling the impending ‘end of history’ and ‘end of poetry’ through the growth of waste and destruction of 20th century urbanism, industrialism, nationalism and warfare – later to be fully articulated by Adorno.
The degree of influence of Benjamin’s thought on contemporary social and cultural discourse is only rivalled by the degree of frequency of mispronunciations of his name within Anglophonic intellectual discourse. Walter Benjamin (pronounced Valter Ben-jah-meen) produced an enormous body of writing on politics, theatre, visual art, historical theory, literary criticism, translation and, of course, philosophy. Over the last few years, it has been the practitioners within these disciplines and pursuits which have turned back towards Benjamin to illuminate the radical nature of the early 20th century. For example, his Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (1928) or The Origins of German Tragic Drama, which was inspired by his relationship with Brecht, is critical for the understanding of the development of modern continental European theatre. The transdisciplinary resonance of Benjamin’s thought is exemplified by the vast number of conference session being organised around his philosophies in disciplines as diverse as archaeology, engineering, literary theory, multimedia studies, theatre and the visual arts.
One of the most resonant impressions from Benjamin’s work was his ability to express through the written word what was a highly visual and pictorial philosophy. His expression of history as a series of flitting images of the past in his ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ (1939) has inspired countless contemporary arts and academic practitioners in the growing ‘pictorial turn’ in social, cultural and intellectual discourse. This work is also notable for its adoption of a non-linear, textual montage, a style which would not be culturally recognised until the popular acceptance of William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch (1959).
It is not simply Benjamin’s work which inspires us today. His life is also a poetic negotiation of images, emotions, triumphs and tragedies. One of his later works Berlin Childhood around 1900 (1950) is an arresting visual exploration through textual vignettes of a child, himself, negotiating his way in the early 20th century – encountering telephones for the first time in dark back halls or simply addressing himself to his pile of socks. Throughout Benjamin’s writings is a sense of content loneliness. He was a man happy to simply observe life. This was most evident in his preoccupation during his exile in Paris from 1933 which was a fascination with Parisian arcades and flânerie, the lifestyle of the flâneur – the observer of the metropolis. This fascination of observing life through the bustling of others is what brought him to his final unfinished work Passagenwerk or The Arcades Project. Although we might meditate on his loneliness, Benjamin was not without friends which is made evident by the story that it was Hannah Arendt who smuggled the manuscript of his ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ across the Spanish-French border at Portbou a few months after his death, passing it onto Theodor Adorno who saw to its publication.
Designed by iArchitectures (2007).
All content on this webiste, unless stated otherwise, is the copyright of Ian Russell. If you would like to use any of the material on this website, please contact Ian.
