I read this set of essays primarily for "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction". The lengthy introduction by Hannah Arendt is very good, though dense. The essays are mostly good, some are terrific, though Benjamin chases his tail a bit throughout each (particularly writing on Baudelaire). I'm not emotionally prepared to read 6 volumes of Proust to appreciate the the nuances of Benjamin's essay on remembrance, but the essay on Kafka is substantial and thought-provoking enough to warrant some supplement. The final essay, "Theses on the Philosophy of History" is a bit too Marxist and aphoristic for me, but you do you. I highly recommend reading WoAitAoMR in tandem with his "A Small History of Photography", which dives much deeper into the nitty-gritty of aura.
Overall, a damn fine set of essays.

Read as a continuation from Larry McMurtry at th Dairy Queen. Also started my 2021 summer drink — Lime Dr Pepper.

A must read for anyone interested in art and ideas and the confluence of the two.

De lo mejor que me ha pasado este curso, la prueba definitiva de que se puede ser marxista y agradable al mismo tiempo.
Por otro lado sobre la cuestión de la mística y el interés por la cábala, la verdad que sin palabras, es el verdadero "intensito". Lo adoro.

This book was heading towards five stars just as quickly as I could read it until I got to the last 2 essays, when Benjamin decides to get really political and Marxist and tries to convince the reader that the cut and paste nature of film reflects the industrialized blah blah blah blah. The first part, actually almost all this book is 5-star material, GREAT, simple, modest essays and thoughts on various aspects of art, books, etc. And I can't wait to read Reflections, but I don't know if I can stomach any more chapters about exploding states of historical crisis and all this god-awful Frankfurt school rhetoric. Walter Benjamin, along with alot of those German communists during that time, was a spoiled Jewish brat with a rich, capitalist father who sent him to school and gave him monthly stipends, freeing him from any kind of real work. What the hell would he know about the proletariat? He didn't even have the balls to actually even walk into that part of town. Politicizing art, what a dumb expression.

"Pro captu lectoris habent sua fata libelli".
- verse 1286 of De litteris, De syllabis, De Metris by Terentianus Maurus; literally, "According to the capabilities of the reader, books have their destiny"

Difficult to rate when one finds oneself halfway either agreeing with or being bewildered by Walter Benjamin.

His 'Unpacking the Library' essay is, obviously, my favourite, it's pleasant to find oneself nodding along to the sentences, we see eye to eye, Walter and I, in terms of Books: Walter argues that buying an old book is rebirth, that a collector's desire is to renew an old, possibly forgotten world. To a book collector, the true freedom of all books is somewhere on his shelves. There is no sense of (vulgar) 'ownership', the books do not come alive in the collector, it is he who lives in them.

"And the non-reading of books owned, you will object, should be characteristic of collectors? This is news to me, you may say. It is not news at all. Experts will bear me out when I say that it is the oldest thing in the world. Suffice it to quote the answer which Anatole France gave to a philistine who admired his library and then finished with the standard question, 'And you have read all these books, Monsieur France?' 'Not one-tenth of them. I don't suppose you use your Sevres china every day?' "

The Baudelaire essay taught me of Engels having an unpleasant aesthetic reaction to the crowds of London, as opposed to the French masters (Delvar), but where Engels is just a peasant boy from Barmen (yes, the very place where one of the first concentrations camps was opened in Germany), with daddy-money (that was coming from owning a large textile factory in Britain), who would always be bothered by crowds, for the Parisians moving in a crowd is a natural thing.

Some random, personal thoughts on reading 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' essay:

Yes, even the most perfect reproduction of art is lacking one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.

But what a thing to ponder in our contemporary world. How many physical copies are there of Fiammetta ? How many duplicates of these? How many digital duplicates of these? Has Fiammetta  lost its soul? Or has it merely stretched itself out, giving a small piece of itself to every owner of every copy? And do I answer my own question simply by being conflicted whether to use the pronoun 'it' or 'she' in the last sentence?

We have two scholars of the Viennese school, Piergl and Wickehoff to thank for being the first to point out that human sense changes with humanity's entire mode of existence and that social transformations were moulded by these changes of perception (photography).

In this world of contemporary perception, a world in which the tradition of Art/Book ownership is rendered invalid by the Internet, how can one still debate the soul of Fiammetta , without sounding like one is off one's meds?

Mankind, which in Homer's time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself.

I never realized the heights to which literary criticism could soar before I read Benjamin, and his work is worthy of Bolaño's assertion that literary criticism is another valid branch on the literary tree along with the novel, poetry, etc., etc. Comparing Benjamin with the mostly North American criticism I've read, the latter seems to shrink to the status of mere informative journalism, a literary mode Benjamin critiqued for its limits in time and space (the news almost always only addresses the near and now) as compared to the story, which embodies the experience of the teller and is embodied in the experience of the attentive listener. Benjamin is best read carefully to the point where one loses oneself, just like the listeners of the storytellers in his essay on Leskov listen intently in the rhythm of their work; as a result the story is absorbed in their experience, allowing them to remember it and pass it on. An altogether different experience than reading the news, and a traditional practice that has all but perished in our West. As someone somewhere already said, Benjamin’s sentences seem to slow to a near stillness in order to contemplate their object, and require the contemplation akin to that of the flâneur, another personage who captivated Benjamin’s interest.

Benjamin’s essays on Proust, Kafka, Baudelaire, translation, and other topics develop specific theses about their objects but also correspond through shared contemplations about experience, tradition and memory, which give us a window into Benjamin’s concerns & thought. Benjamin’s way of finding correspondences, between diverse material and historical aspects of an epoch and the production of its artists, between the substructure and superstructure, is done often metaphorically, and Hannah Arendt describes his way of thinking as poetic. Benjamin brings a poetic aspect to analysis rooted in marxist concerns, which is really fantastic to experience.

It’s not that I’ve read much, but I’ve never read anything so unique, and I’m looking forward to reading more Benjamin. If you’re interested in this kind of thing, do yourself a favor and pick up some Walter Benjamin. It is to be read extremely attentively, and even then much may pass you by. With regard to technique: pretend you don’t live in the dawn of the 21st century and try to slow down the passing of your time so much you can actually see. (Of course, Benjamin also has some interesting things to say about the masses, art, and distracted perception, but that’s if you make it to the end of the last essay).

Benjamin bu dünyadan gelmiş geçmiş en tatlı, en naif ruhlardan birisi. Rüya gibi onun yazılarını okumak. Gerçeküstü ve salt gerçeğin birbirinin içinde eridiği bir rüya.

Çeviri yaklaşımını inanılmaz feci buldum. Benjamin'in içinden bir Nietczhe çıkarmış adeta çervirmen. ''ırzına geçmek'' gibi tabirlerin kullanılmasının metnin dokusunu ve Benjamin'in üslubunu zedelediğini düşünüyorum.

I’d encountered Benjamin more through the way The Arcades Project always tends to crop up as one of the foundational texts of psychogeography, but you don’t go in on a thousand-page unfinished (and probably always unfinishable) volume as your first encounter with a writer, do you*? So when I saw this in the library, I thought I’d give it a go. First surprise: about a third of the book is taken up with the introduction, which would normally be taking the piss, but this one is by Hannah Arendt, which puts a different complexion of matters. While full of praise for Benjamin, she also details the many ways in which his life was ridiculous. That refusal at the Spanish border which precipitated his suicide, for instance - had he arrived the day before, or the day after, he would apparently have got through just fine. How's that for timing? Which set part of me wondering, had it not been for his consistently awful timing, would we have heard of the poor bastard at all? Just like most of the war poets would be happily forgotten today had they been lucky enough to stay at home writing 'O why/Am I/So sensitive?' as nature intended, instead of gaining the illusion of substance with 'O why/Am I/In a trench?’ Because make no mistake, the first few essays here are very silly. ‘Unpacking my Library’ is exactly the sort of title which would usually get me on side, but when Benjamin’s detailing his collection of whole categories of books he doesn’t even much like, he comes across like a bad parody of the Continental intellectual. Which also means, of course, that he’s given to grand sweeping statements of system and theory, the sort which sound good at first but which don’t bear the slightest examination. At times it goes past even that into simple errors of fact: Mnemosyne was not the epic muse at all, for instance, but her mother. And the whole essay on storytellers - which at least makes some direct reference to its ostensible subject, Leskov (unlike the one on translators which fails to mention Baudelaire beyond the title, instead sticking to lofty generalities) contrasts the storyteller with the novelist, while seemingly never realising that the latter field includes several of the former under varying degrees of cover. If the novel is something one encounters alone, what of the Victorian paterfamilias reading Dickens to the assembled clan? And so forth.

Still, once Benjamin does properly get on to Baudelaire, he's mostly brilliant - a reading through Freud seems of questionable use, but the correspondences to Proust are enlightening, and he's dead on with the idea of Baudelaire as at once the last great lyric poet and the one who sees the end of the traditional audience for lyric poetry. This is also one of the first encounters with a theme which will recur at the book’s glorious finale: humanity's war with time. Alas, there’s more slog to come before we get there – but always with just enough glimmers of brilliance to keep you going. He’s prescient regarding newspapers as atomising the people, and the increasingly haptic everyday world. Every so often there’s a perfect image, like the idea of the proverb as a ruin where once a story stood. Or this, from the piece on Proust: “This is what ages us – this and nothing else. The wrinkles and creases on our faces are the registration of the great passions, vices, insights that called on us but we, the masters, were not home.”

And then the collection shows us it’s closer kin to the gig than the compilation album, because rather than opening with the hits, it ends with them. ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’** is ultimately much better on politics (“Fascism sees its salvation in giving the masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves.”) than it is on art, where its problem is that it was simply written too soon, with too little material or perspective. When Benjamin talks about how the audience identify with the lens, not the actor, or how the painter lays on hands but the film dissects – well, some films do one, some the other (and conversely, of course, some paintings dissect – Benjamin would never have seen Bacon). When he says that unlike the stage actor and his character, the film versions have no aura…really? Because I can’t think of a better word for what the greats of Hollywood’s golden age especially possessed. And I doubt even a Garrick, Irving or Bernhardt had more of it. Beyond that, many of what purport to be analyses are really just the old moan that it’s not like it was in my day, or rather my preferred edit of the day slightly before my day. The idea that cinema is inherently less real, less magical than theatre is exactly the same snobbery currently being replayed in Cannes, except now it’s all about how Netflix and Amazon could never be as real or magical as the cinema. Benjamin pays less attention to music, but glancingly makes much the same suggestion regarding recorded versus live music. Well, that one I’ve seen get several remakes in my time alone: it used to be vinyl DJs looking down on CD DJs, then CD DJs looking down on MP3 DJs, and now even the MP3 DJs look down on the people using playlists. Or how about the idea of the actor as reduced to just another prop? Here it’s a moan re: film in general – nowadays you see it reproduced exactly, except that fans of classic cinema instead use it as a stick with which to beat special effects blockbusters. Funnier still is the realisation that Benjamin never admits he's part of his subject – he handwaves away the reasons this thesis doesn’t apply to printing versus manuscripts (the real reason, obviously, is that he’s used to printed books), but the editor’s notes admit that his own handwriting was largely illegible, that there are errors in published magazine versions of his essays, and that on the one occasion when they could compare the two manifold differences were apparent.

And yet. After that farrago, the volume closes with 'Theses on the Philosophy of History’. Which is simply staggering. Best known for its image of the angel of history, or the idea that there is no record of civilisation that is not also a record of barbarism, it’s full of similarly compelling material. If anything it’s the most aphoristic piece here, but unlike its predecessors it aims that bit higher, offers that bit more to unpack, manages to trip itself up so much less. It’s definitely something which deserves not just reading but rereading, the sort of text philosophical schools are founded around. Except much better than most of them.

In summary: skip to the end.

*OK, yes, I did with Dostoevsky, and quite liked it. But as a rule…
**I already did the Grease 2 joke on Facebook.

The destruction of Jewish Vienna came along with many attendant tragedies, but perhaps none was as poignant as the suicide of Walter Benjamin after he’d been driven into exile by the Nazi war machine. One thing I learned from this collection of essays introduced by Hannah Arendt is that his fame was largely posthumous. In his time, Benjamin was far less known than he is today. In my mind that makes him even more remarkable. Even in translation his writing is captivating. Through the circuitous route of literary criticism, he confronted the most pressing issue of his generation: the emergence of industrial civilization and mass society.

Of the essays in this collection the most memorable ones to me were his famous essay on the consequences of the mechanical reproduction of art, storytelling in the modern age, his reflections on Baudelaire and Kafka and finally a short essay on the joys of book collecting which would undoubtedly touch the heart of any reader. Benjamin had a strange style of writing in which there are long passages in which he is very hard to follow (although his meanderings are somehow still rendered beautiful by his gifted writing) before dropping some explosively powerful observation seemingly out of nowhere. This is a book of scattered gems that you have to go looking for.

In the last two centuries such rapid and overwhelming changes have taken place in human life such as have never been experienced by all the generations who lived before us. The sensory environment we live in has been filled with unprecedented symbols, sounds, explosions and signals. Politics meanwhile has been transformed by the tools of the mass control of human beings; something which many foresaw would deliver the terrifying phenomena of fascism and authoritarian communism. Benjamin did his best to parse through these changes, always with the awareness of how monumental and disorientating they were.

Literary criticism seems to have been the way people used to make certain arguments about the present, a kind of theological parsing of secular texts for eternal meaning. For people like us I suspect it would’ve been better to just make the points directly; I’d be lying to say that I understood every word Benjamin wrote because the textual and cultural references he used were simply too foreign. But one cannot fault a person for writing for the age in which they lived. I’m glad that Benjamin earned the recognition in posterity that he was denied in life. He was a beautiful writer who dealt with an evolving dilemma that all of us are still grappling with today, even as we have mostly surrendered to it.

With poetic metaphors, brilliant phrasing, and a diverse interest in all things cultural, this collection of Benjamin’s essays is not only a pleasure to read, but accessible for both scholarly and casual readers alike. He is able to take a step back, gracefully analyzing the past as it converges with the present. His multidisciplinary analysis of art, culture, and society was ahead of his times and still very relevant today.

Lucid and enlightening. I certainly feel much more illuminated (ha!).

Only skimmed the essays on Kafka and Brecht’s epic theater because those were pretty much indecipherable without any background knowledge on these artists. Benjamin’s theory of pure language in the Baudelaire chapter sparked more questions for me than answered questions, which I think is almost always a good thing when reading. I even attempted to take notes in some sort of Venn diagram while thinking about his ideas on translation and the overlaps of pure language between different editions. However, this ended not in a self-congratulatory pat on the back but more confusion, which I think is also a good thing at times while reading.

“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” the Big Boi of this collection, actually didn’t strike me as too revelatory, but that might be because I’ve already heard about the ideas presented in countless iterations of the original essay (John Berger, I’m looking at you).

The epilogue on Fascism and aesthetics was surprisingly great and is probably my favorite part of this book. Just listen to this quote: “Fiat ars – pereat mundus”, says Fascism, and, as Marinetti admits, expects war to supply the artistic gratification of a sense perception that has been changed by technology. This is evidently the consummation of “l’art pour l’art.” Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art.”

Poignant and astute like a bullet flying at you at full speed.