almost as good as in the original German

I found “The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction”, “Theses on the philosophy of history”, and Arendt's introduction the best parts of this book. Unless you are into literature, Marxist, popular, and fashionable criticism; you cannot appreciate much of the rest of the book. It also convinced me to read Baudelaire.

Actually this gets 5 stars for the introduction by Hannah Arendt. Benjamin is taxing to follow and understand. But the two essays on Kafka are full of interesting ideas and the brief opening essay Unpacking My Library: A Talk about Book Collecting made me feel that he really is a kindred spirit. I read The Wprk of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction for a second time and I am still all at sea throughout. I think I have well-lodged assumptions that I can’t quite bring to the surface to see around but if I could, if I do eventually, I will catch on. Benjamin is a subtle one. I have another book about Benjamin on my stack of books. Maybe that will help.

Benjamin embodied the cultural critic as hero. He was among the first to observe how the world around him was being transformed by new technologies of art and language. Although Benjamin had a nearly fetishist tropism to books, he was unromantic in his discussions of how the storyteller has been eliminated from our cultural landscape. The local currency of tales invented, borrowed, stolen, told and retold has been cashed in for an alienated and alienating media production. We read alone, we watch film or TV alone, we play games or surf the web mostly alone. But in the era of folklore and epic, stories presupposed an integral social context and an aesthetic uniqueness. A movie will always be the same, but a story will change constantly in ownership and details. The mass production of the story (in books or film) has led to a mass production of people. People are turning into a mass, into the masses, precisely as they consume the same undifferentiated artistic performances/reproductions. Films do not let the eye choose. We must see as the director wills us to see, from the exact angle and with the exact focus as with everybody else who is viewing. No longer will art be private, and no longer will we be offered the choice of from which angle to view the presentational artform. We are all critics now. As with art, criticism is now mass produced (like this thing I am writing with no authority save you who are reading it now). All these things Benjamin saw or foresaw from the vantage point of his troubled existence. He was a hero on account of his tenacious will to open up the world within, thereby to free us from the world without. He would dive into the works of Kafka, Leskov, Brecht, Baudelaire, and Proust, and would bring us pearls and coral. Benjamin teaches how to read, not how to write. The text we learn to read is experience. And so with history, we are taught by strange analogies and stranger symbolism to respect the materialist history of the Marxists while rejecting the historicist tradition of the romantics. For Benjamin, history is a struggle between histories. This piece may not any longer be true, but it certainly was accurate during the ascendency of the Third Reich and of Stalin's purges. The world was not a beautiful place to be in 1940, and this fact probably killed Benjamin. Although not optimistic, there is hope nevertheless in Benjamin's work. This is clearest in his discussion of translation. For in translation we do not create a faithful recreation of the original, nor do we exploit every possible freedom in our language to make it most like the text being translated. The truth of language is between two languages, not in the generative universal grammar sense, but in the sociolinguistic idea of a code being pliant enough for two people from different possible worlds to find common ground in the interstices of those worlds. Wherever people strive for understanding, that is where you find translation. Translation is not impossible, but it ain't easy either. Herein lies the Benjaminian hope. Ultimately, Benjamin did not wish to control what we see the way a camera does. Rather, his great hope for us was that we can see how he sees, alone among fellow mortals, isolated from the crowd, strolling from scene to scene, detached but going slow enough that all can be taken in. We learn from Benjamin to visualize the invisible and to jot down the traces of humane existence. It takes someone of a heroic disposition to face the masses, not like Hitler or Stalin did, but as any lover of freedom would. Benjamin had invested heavily in a disappearing commodity, the self who lives authentically, the self who is aesthetically aware.

I attempted to read “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” - some really great stuff but buried in some of the most dry academic writing… maybe I’ll come back to this when I have the mindset (read: patience) for it.

Worth the price of admission for the Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction alone. Much in the other essays was interesting, although they're too studded with references to 19th Cent French literature for a rube like me to understand fully.

I didn't find Hannah Arendt introduction very "illuminating" hahahaha

ILLUMINATIONS is the first part of a collection of essays and musings written by Walter Benjamin (1892-1940). Benjamin is well known for his philosophical analysis of literature and culture. He had a way of looking at things which made them no longer familiar: he thought nothing is as it appears to be, for this reason he became a scholar of appearances.

Benjamin greatly influenced Sebald's writing. Sebald quotes Benjamin's thesis about the angel of history in his book ON THE NATURAL HISTORY OF DESTRUCTION to question the relationship between progress and ruination. This is the central theme of Sebald's oeuvre so Benjamin's "Theses on the Philosophy of History " is indispensable reading for those interested in Sebald's work.

This tome includes Hannah Arendt's introduction with an essay about Benjamin's life and the dark times in which he lived. His essays on Proust and Kafka are simply brilliant. Benjamin is a must read for those interested in cultural criticism.

I could have gone nowhere without Walter Benjamin.

Goated, writes (in translation) with a really clear sense of personality and wit shining through this collection of writings, loved.

From the last chapter: Theses on the Philosophy of History

The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the "state of emergency" in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism. One reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm. The current amazement that the things we are exoeriencing are "still" possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge--unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable.

Truth be told I found Benjamin to not be particularly insightful. It's perhaps cruel to say but his work strikes me as like an enthusiastic painter attempting a watercolour with a tradesman's brush and shaky hands. Which is to say even if the initial trajectory of the argument is sensible it ends up dense, meandering and far too broad, and often overshooting any sensible end-point.

To put it mildly, I'm no fan of his arguments and his most famous essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, is actually the nadir of his writing to me. An argument beginning with flawed assumptions, advanced with shaky reasoning, where the arguments are incompatible with his prior essay The Storyteller.

However he was a romantic and a Marxist, as well as a traditionalist so much as those allowed, three things I am not, so there's a degree to which my positions differ and I'm going to be ill-inclined to his arguments at the outset; but as Orwell was also those things and was capable of regularly advancing very compelling arguments I think this is an issue of his reasoning being lacking. Notably I found his Theses on the Philosophy of History, heavy steeped in a Marxist worldview (albeit arguing against aspects of Marxist historiography), to contain his most compelling arguments.

So why three stars if I hold the arguments in such low esteem? Simply, Benjamin's writing is beautiful. As a set of arguments his reputation far outstrips his actual work, though a germ of something valuable is intermittently discernible. But as a piece of literature it is wonderful. I may not love the arguments but I love the expression of them, and just as an atheist can find beauty in the Bible I find beauty and worth in these essays.

To this end perhaps my favourite essay is Unpacking My Library, in which he opines on his hobby of book collecting and expresses wonderfully the joy in second hand items and in the act of collection. In this he is not arguing for or against an interpretation of literature or putting forward an argument but simply opining on his hobby and letting the beauty of his experience and of his writing shine through. The themes may be less weighty than his other works but it demonstrates that despite his reputation Benjamin's true talent was not as a philosopher or critic but as a writer.

I'm re-reading this book because that's what you do with a book like this. And especially with essays like "The Storyteller," "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire," "The Work of Art in the Age...," and "Theses on the Philosophy of History."