The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire, Part 3

 

Summary of Part III: Modernity

In this section, there is a strong feeling of Benjamin’s mode of composition of the essay from his clippings gathered in the Arcades Project. You can see him gathering his clippings and quotations into groups, first under the higher headings (Bohemian, Flaneur, Modernity), then here, under "Modernity," into further subheadings (writing as work/fencing, the ragpicker, the apache, antiquity as modernity, etc.) which he strings along in turn. Since he rarely gives an overall summary of how these are related to each other, the reader is left to infer this for themself.

The first point has to do with Baudelaire’s writing and representation of the city as a kind of dangerous, even perilous labor. Baudelaire saw writing poetry as work, and Benjamin compares it to the labor of Guys in painting (as described by Baudelaire in the Painter of Modern Life). Though Baudelaire wrote favorably of the flaneur, he himself was not one. The [modern hero or representer of the city] is distinguished from several types of "observer:" first the flaneur, also the "amateur detective" and the badaud, or rubbernecker (98-9); observation is a "priggish habit," per Chesterton. In contrast, Baudelaire and Dickens are absent-minded dreamers who wander the city: "Dickens did not stamp these places on his mind; he stamped his mind on these places."" (99, quoted from GK Chesterton)

Benjamin uses the language of "shocks" and "parries," and fencing,  though not referencing urban environment but events of Baudelaire's life, and his writing in response:

The shocks that his worries caused him and the myriad ideas with which he parried them were reproduced by Baudelaire the poet in the feints of his prosody. Recognizing the labor that he devoted to his poems under the image of fencing means learning to comprehend them as a continual series of tiny improvisations. (99)

 For Baudelaire the street became a place of refuge from creditors, this he made a "virtue of necessity":

But in flanerie, there was from the outset an awareness of the fragility of this existence. It makes a virtue out of necessity, and in this it displays the structure which is in every way characteristic of Baudelaire's conception of the hero. (100)

Baudelaire was "overtaxed," and lacked control over his own means of production, or an apartment, good clothes, etc. Through an emphasis on Baudelaire’s hard work and penury, Benjamin establishes links between Baudelaire as poet and the lumpen, "dangerous classes" etc. – though he will later pull Baudelaire back from this linkage, in a sort of dialectical move. In any event Baudelaire portrayed proletarians in their everyday lives as being as brave as gladiators.

Benjamin discusses the idea of suicide as a noble gesture, practiced by the proletariat as a form of resistance to the brutality of modernity; according to Benjamin, this is different than how suicide was seen in ancient times, in which the suicides were somehow noble or exceptions of some kind. Suicide is a distinctly modern thing; [though this complicates the opposition Benjamin has already made between Baudelaire and Balzac etc. as [realist-era] moderns in an opposition against the preceding "romantics," of whom who could be more a clear example than Goethe's Young Werther?]

Benjamin gives a nuanced discussion of how somber blacks and greys came to dominate men’s clothing during the 19^th Century. This is on the one hand part of the beautiful aspects of the specifically modern which Baudelaire wants the painter of modern life to illustrate: yet there is also a mocking aspect to his description of a nation of everyone dressed as undertakers, as if “We are all attendants at some kind of funeral” (106). Benjamin describes the later critique of men's fashion by Friedrich Theodor Vischer and its similarity to Baudelaire’s in emphasizing the ridiculousness of modern somber fashion as also at the same time somehow democratic, or at least moreso than the earlier eras when the wealthy emphasized their difference through the richness of their clothing [procession to circulation here]. [Nevertheless there is a contradiction here which Benjamin does not seem to fully emphasize, not to mention that while he situates the origin in the contest between democratic and monarchist regimes in 19^th century France, there is an earlier history coming from the Protestant Reformation. I am thinking of Rembrandt's group portraits of Dutch bourgeois men, all nearly identical in their somber democratic Protestant black, which they nevertheless distinguish by the finery of their textiles, showing that they are in fact wealthy and not commoners. Or in the 19^th and 20^th Century American cities, in which most men dressed practically identically in suit, tie, and hat, but the wealthy are wearing tailored suits from prestigious makers, and the poor are wearing mass-produced suits off the rack. Or in 21^st Century Silicon Valley, etc. culture, which adopts the democratic hoodie and jeans, but then these are super-expensive designer hoodies and jeans, and so on.]

Benjamin turns to how Baudelaire and writers like him celebrated the “apache” (an urban ne'er-do-well)  or the chiffonier or ragpicker as hero; [the key question is, how is this personage presented differently as "hero," than in the panoramic/flaneuristic literature? The difference appears to be that there is a parallel between the ragpicker and the poet who is describing them, in terms of their activity: Baudelaire sees himself in the ragpicker, or vice versa? There is apparently at least a respect for these urban characters as “heroes,” as opposed to the flaneuristic representation of them as images for bourgeois consumption, but frankly Benjamin may assert this but does not go far to demonstrate it.]

The poet and the ragpicker are linked in an “extended metaphor.” Even their gait or way of movement through the city is equated:

This is the gait of the poet who roams the city in search of rhyme-booty; it is also the gait of the ragpicker, who is obliged to come to a halt every few moments to gather up the refuse he encounters. (108-9)

According to the translators, Benjamin here borrows a term from Brecht, "Gestus," to describe this gait or characteristic [in the original German, but translated out as “gait?” It is unclear]. (252n221).

Baudelaire felt some need for modernity to become antiquity, meaning apparently to achieve greatness in art etc., sufficient to be admired by later epochs. This is linked to his valuation of modern life as subject matter for art, and the idea that antiquity should “serve as a model only where construction is concerned; the substance and the inspiration of a work are the concern of modernity." (110) In the Guys essay, Baudelaire defines modernity as "the transitory, fleeting beauty of our present life." [Benjamin’s interest in drawing out and emphasizing Baudelaire’s juxtaposition and mixing of modernity and antiquity is perhaps an example of his practice of the dialectical image, a way of destabilizing the categories of modern and ancient, more particularly the modern?]

Baudelaire's theory of beauty, from the Painter of Modern life, regards the interaction of two elements: one is "constant, immutable," and the other is "relative, limited," derived from the current milieu (i.e., the modern) (110, quoted from Baud). Benjamin adds, hysterically: "One cannot say that this is a profound analysis" (111). Benjamin criticizes Baudelaire's theory of art as not living up to his own work, and being inadequate for the time: the poem "Le Cygne" is presented as an example, with the city as brittle and changing, with the famous line about the city changing faster than a mortal's heart. Benjamin quotes Peguy about Hugo, to show what Baudelaire wanted: Hugo could see in the beggar on the street, the ancient beggar; in the modern fireplace the ancient hearth, etc.

Benjamin discusses the Victorian fascination with visions of Paris, London, etc. as future ruins, and also the city as doomed [Baudrillard's much later concept of “exposure” a la the WTC fits here] and as involving some impeding urge to suicide, which is the "passion moderne" (114). Maxime Du Camp has a vision of Paris as future ruins, and is moved to write a description of the city as the ancient authors had failed to write of their now ruined cities, in the past. Benjamin links this to the concurrent destruction and rebuilding of Paris by Haussmann. [Thus it is the changing nature of the modern city which compels the writers to try and capture it for the future; there is a need for a sense of fragility and vanishing, in order for this momentary capture to be understood as desirable or necessary/urgent]. This is in fact what Benjamin means by an "image":

"Les poetes sont plus inspires par les images que par la presence meme des objets;" said Joubert. The same is true of artists. When one knows that something will soon be removed from one's gaze, that thing becomes an image. Presumably this is what happened to the streets of Paris at that time. (115)

However, Baudelaire himself is not impressed with the future ruins image so much but the idea of [a living?] antiquity springing directly out of modernity, and thus he prefers the detailed engravings of Charles Meryon that gave a sense both of detailed lifelikeness of the modern, and the timelessness of antiquity. Benjamin makes a reference to "allegory" as the form or means of "interpenetration of antiquity and modernity": 

For in Meryon, too, there is an interpenetration of classical antiquity and modernity, and in him, too, the form of this superimposition – allegory – appears unmistakably. (116)

Modernity's constant renewal and consuming of itself means that the modernity of Baudelaire's time is indeed already antique:

To be sure, Paris is still standing and the great tendencies of social development are still the same. But the more constant they have remained, the more everything that stood under the sign of the "truly new" has been rendered obsolete by the experience of them. Modernity has changed most of all, and the antiquity it was supposed to contain really presents a picture of the obsolete. (118-9)

The next pile of clippings Benjamin assembles are on the subject of lesbians as modern heroes (119). He links this to Saint-Simonianism which celebrated the image of the androgyne or hermaphrodite, and discusses Claire Démar's early Saint-Simonian feminism, and her plan to abolish motherhood through a [Spartan] style system (119-20). Benjamin situates this historically, talking about the "masculinization" of the "feminine habitus" through factory work, and in "higher forms of production." Baudelaire had a fascination with this, his stance was ultimately contradictory, as revealed through his poems. Benjamin quotes Lemaitre on Baudelaire’s contradictory attitude toward women and to modernity; yet, according to Benjamin, this contradiction was what Baudelaire was aiming for:

To present this attitude as a great achievement of the will accorded with Baudelaire's spirit. But the other side of the coin is a lack of conviction, insight, and steadiness. In all his endeavors, Baudelaire was subject to abrupt, shock-like changes; his vision of another way of living life to extremes was thus all the more alluring.

[The overall fascination Benjamin has with Baudelaire and his time seems to be with its incompleteness or unachieved possibility. Baudelaire achieves partial insights but then draws back from them or rejects them. This was prefaced earlier in the essay in the context of Baudelaire’s class position and his linkage with the bourgeois “professional conspirators,” who, not truly linked with or representing the truly revolutionary class, were doomed to fail. This link will return at the end of this section when Baudelaire is compared again to Blanqui, whom Benjamin treats as the exemplar of this conspiratorial type, both admirable and pathetic at once.]

The subject of poetic rhythm comes up in a discussion of Baudelaire’s poem, “L'Invitation au voyage:”

This famous stanza has a rocking rhythm; its movement seizes the ships which lie moored in the canals. To be rocked between extremes: this is the privilege of ships, and this is what Baudelaire longed for. (124) 

[In this reference to rhythm Benjamin contradicts Bakhtin's claim, according to which rhythm is a form of stylization which removes the poem from reality, and monologizes it under the voice of the poet. Here, in contrast, rhythm is affective, an impress of the actual view or experience of the rocking boat, into the poem, and into the experience of the reader or listener [i.e., something analogue is carried through]. This in turn perhaps demonstrates Baudelaire's susceptability, his openness to shocks, etc., and even a place for the non-human in the “polyphonic” and “heteroglossic.”]

The image of the boats is significant to Benjamin’s argument, because they embody a contradiction, in that that they are tied up, yet beckoning to sail away; this is like the modern hero:

The hero is as strong, as ingenious, as harmonious, and as well-built as those boats. But the high seas beckon to him in vain, for his life is under the sway of an ill star. Modernity turns out to be his doom. There are no provisions for him in it; it has no use for his type. It moors him fast in the secure harbor forever and abandons him to everlasting idleness. Here, in his last incarnation, the hero appears as a dandy.

[With this description of the hero as dandy, we are of course reminded that we are in the Second Empire, in which there is considered no hope, no room for innovation or advancement, etc. [one of the “No Future” generations, at least in Benjamin’s telling]. This somewhat constrains the overall applicability of the "modern hero" as described here, to other stages or periods of the modern, does it not?]

Benjamin describes the modern hero with a quote from Baudelaire: "a Hercules with no labors to accomplish" (124). Benjamin links dandyism to bourgeois merchants, who desire to avoid or not show the shocks of trade, and changing fortunes [it is a pretense or artifice that covers one up]; Baudelaire himself was not a successful dandy because he was too strange, when it requires a balancing act. [The discussion here of the dandy is very short, and little of the complex class issues are gone into]. The point seems rather to raise and then dismiss the equivalence of the writer-as-modern-hero with the dandy (whom Baudelaire had described as the last of the heroes) because the "modern hero" is in fact not a "hero":

Because he did not have any convictions, he assumed, ever new forms himself. Flaneur, apache, dandy, and ragpicker were so many roles to him. For the modern hero is no hero; he is a portrayer of heroes.  (125)

So now we see the list of (proletarian and bourgeois) heroes, oppositional to modernity (apache, ragpicker, flaneur and dandy) are pulled back away from the modern hero, who either fails to become one or never could have been one of them. The “extended metaphor” ends here.

Turning to the subject of poetic language, Benjamin asserts that Baudelaire, like some other writers in his time, fought against the "segregation" of words into those worthy of lyric or tragic poetry ("elevated speech") and those words which were not, being too urban, modern, intimate, or crude. Baudelaire also pursues this line in his use of words and images for allegories and metaphors, which is part of what makes his writing surprising and effective. Benjamin ends this section by comparing the effect of Baudelaire’s writing to a protest march by Blanqui and his forces in 1870 during the funeral procession of Victor Noir (about a year and a half before the Commune): "Baudelaire's poetry has preserved in words the strength that made such a thing possible." (129)

With this comparison of these two figures that Benjamin had begun the essay by contrasting, the image of the modern hero becomes that of someone produced by, trapped in, and fighting against their own time:

But the differences between [Baudelaire and Blanqui] are superficial compared to their profound similarities: their obstinacy and their impatience, the power of their indignation and their hatred, as well as the impotence which was their common lot. (129)

[It seems there may also be something in this regarding Baudelaire and Blanqui being limited to their own class perspective and position, despite their empathy for the proletariat.]

 

 

 

 

The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire, Part 2

 

Part II: The Flaneur

 

The discussion of the flaneur begins with the subject of panoramic literature: "These works consist of individual sketches which, as it were, reproduce the dynamic foreground of those panoramas with their anecdotal form and the sweeping background of the panoramas with their store of information" (67). "They were the salon attire of a literature which was basically designed to be sold on the street."  He discusses physiologies, the sort of who-are-the-people-in-your-neighborhood literature of the time. There is an interesting contrast to Benjamin with Bakhtin, who would perhaps have emphasized the folk origins of these, and seen them as parodic or oppositional to more elite forms. Benjamin, in contrast, sees them as a sort of colonizing of urban space by a bourgeois anti-urban consciousness: "It was a petty-bourgeois genre from the ground up." He cites Monnier as an exemplar: this is a guy who was middle class and wrote satires of the middle class. Where Bakhtin would no doubt see (and value) the satire, what does Benjamin see?

According to Benjamin, (and his source, Edward Fuchs), "Innocuousness was of the essence" for physiologies, because they were a response to the September Laws, which tightened censorship and drove true parodists out of business. "These laws summarily forced out of politics an array of capable artists with a background in satire." Daumier is specifically referenced in this regard for having moved away from pointed political parody into the safer physiological realm of “scenes from everyday life” (238n96). The images of everyday people in the panoramic literature is simplistic and “socially dubious,” designed to put the bourgeoisie mind at rest.

The built environment is crucial to the existence of the flaneurs. They are pre-Haussmann, so the arcades were necessary as a place they could do their strolling and observing. [This is complicated by Brand's demonstration that there were earlier forms of flaneuristic literature, though his are set in London.] The flaneur is the chronicler of the arcade, and the arcade gives him relief from the boredom of the "sated reactionary regime" of the Second Empire. The arcades are between a street and an interior, and the flaneur thus makes the street his home [in a  sense which is the opposite of that of the "homeless" – the street is domesticated and made safe for the middle or upper middle class consumer]. However, the flaneur is contrasted to the "bourgeois" because the latter prefers an oil painting in his living room, while the flaneur prefers "a shiny enameled shop sign." 

That life in all its variety and inexhaustible wealth of permutations can thrive only among the gray cobblestones and against the gray background of despotism was the political secret of the literature to which the physiologies belonged. (69)

 [This “variety and inexhaustible wealth of permutations” is another reason why Bakhtin would have seen this as parodic or carnivalesque, or potentially so; perhaps the flaneur's confident authority monologizes the text; but for Bakhtin there would still be that push-pull of heteroglossia vs. orchestration; and the social context that inspired or demanded the reaction of the writer, not just the writer as some independent expression of the bourgeois [though as noted in the introduction, Benjamin is also open to the importance of urban influence in scarring or affecting the writer]. I am reminded of Brand’s confession at the end of his book that, despite all his criticism of flaneuristic literature, he still loves it and wishes there had been more (in the US); it feels likely this is also true for Benjamin.

He quotes Simmel on the visuality of the big city; also on the new transportation systems which were putting people together without talking to each other [an novel discomfort depicted by Daumier; Schivelbusch will explore this further.] Benjamin uses "orchestration" in a meaning parallel to Bakhtin's, to describe how Bulwer-Lytton pulls together his description of diverse urban characters with the literary device, that “everyone has a secret.”

The physiologies were just the thing to brush such disquieting notions aside as insignificant.  (69)

["Such disquieting notions" above refers to the theme of Bulwer-Lytton's book, which the footnote (by the editors) describes as "moralizing"; but what could be more bourgeois than such "moralizing" tales by Bulwer-Lytton, of all people? It seems simplistic to see the physiologies as shielding the bourgeoisie from [heteroglossic] complexities that they at other times marshal and "orchestrate" into morality tales (and won't these also be the theme of the detective novel which follows after the flaneur? Benjamin’s answer to this will be that the truly flaneuristic literature, which peaked in the early 1840s, would die out and be replaced by the more dark and fascinated detective novel.

 The "phantasmagoria" of the flaneuristic novel does not work well, it is fragile. This leads to the development of more scientific, or at least scientistic (though involving some actual empiricism) discourses, such as phrenology and police identification methods [and the early urban sociologists such as Mayhew]. Benjamin does not state this, but it seems that this shifts the authority from the unique socially-situated insight of the individual flaneur, to a method; and wouldn’t Sherlock Holmes be a boundary figure, whose grasp of the method is magnified by his unique individual brilliance and insight? Anyway, we are heading to a literature like Poe’s “Man of the Crowd” in which the observer makes immediately astute observations just from a glance [though Brand, and apparently Benjamin, seem to absolve Poe of this charge because that story is ... parodic!]. This literature, according to Benjamin,

"... assured people that everyone could--unencumbered by any factual knowledge--make out the profession, character, background, and lifestyle of passers-by."

 [This has interesting echoes today with the AI face-reading/emotional state reading tech promoted by the military. Instead of being concerned about where people fit in to the social order, it is about their  interior state and future actions; [a jump from procession to routing]. Benjamin would see this as a continuation of the attempt to “capture (dingfest machen) a man in his speech and actions” (79).

This all makes the city seem safer and not as dangerous (contrasted with quotes from Baudelaire equating the city to a dangerous jungle). Increased knowledge is needed to deal with the city: but people are proclaiming their interests moreso than their character. Thus the "knowledge" or insight of the flaneur is really the projection or performance of people advertising their interests/products on the marketplace that the city has become. Benjamin raises this to assert that Baudelaire is different than the flaneurs he celebrates, because he believes in original sin, and so gives no credence to this marketplace "idol" of the flaneur. "His belief in original sin made him immune to belief in a knowledge of human nature." As the “soothing little remedies” of the physiologists become implausible and outdated, the new literature which replaces them becomes more about the masses than about types, about the "function" of the city [as a depersonalizing and anonymizing setting. An interesting shift from character to setting parallels the later shift, according to Deleuze, from discipline to control...

Benjamin describes the shift from flaneur to detective; Baudelaire was also incapable of writing detective novels (this is a good thing from Benjamin’s perspective). Poe’s stories “Marie Roget” and “The Man of the Crowd” are discussed; others by ETA Hoffman and Stefan George, and particularly the writings of Hugo on the crowd are contrasted with Baudelaire. In parallel with this literature is the growing police sciences (anthropometry, etc.) and control over the city, for instance though the numbering of houses. This is resisted in working class districts where people refer to homes by their names instead of their numbers, [which is possible because those neighborhoods are still communities with traditions such as named houses. This change also reflects the state becoming less and less in touch with such communities, governing more abstractly and bureaucratically rather than through patronage relationships.]

He links this growth in attempted urban control to the introduction of gas lighting; and its changing meaning over time (first thought of as garish, later romanticized after electric lighting, which in turn was seen as garish). The flaneurian practice of walking turtles in arcades is contrasted with Taylorism which soon "carried the day" (though this seems like a bit of an abrupt jump, from the 1840s flaneurs to the early 20^th Century). He finds significance in Poe's man of the crowd going into a bazaar: this prefigures the end of the flaneur, as a consumer in a department store.

The flaneur is himself a commodity, enjoying the narcotic of the crowd: the commodity is the speaker (argues Benjamin) when Baudelaire claims that the poet can "enter another person whenever he wishes"  (86). There is a recurring theme of narcotics and intoxication; commodities are being intoxicated by the surging of the crowd – or there is some kind of give and take, a reciprocal intoxication or flow of affect and "phantasmagoria.” Just like the human artist, writer, flaneur, etc. has become a commodity (and thus takes on some characteristics of a produced material object), so the object is intoxicated as well. A reference to "holy prostitution" seems linked to the openness of the Baudelarian poet to the city around him, and likewise of the commodity to the consumer, and vice versa]

A lengthy quote from Engels illustrates his negative vision of urban crowds in London: he remarks on the "brutal indifference", the "unfeeling isolation" in which everyone in the urban crowd is wrapped up in their own private interests and pass each other unseeingly. The flaneur also experiences this disconnected particle-crowd, but enjoys the experience because of his illusory mastery through shallow caricatures (aka physiology). According to Benjamin, Baudelaire's "pleasure" from being in crowds is an identification with commodities, and thus part of a [false consciousness] that goes away if one gains class consciousness as a proletarian: with commodities.

Unlike such “proletarianized” consciousnesses, Baudelaire is part of the "petty bourgeoisie" who, at that time, are not yet forced by history to have this awareness of how their mode of existence is imposed on them by the mode of production; later, after they have declined further, they will. At this time they are allowed to find or expect enjoyment but not power (89). They are "passing time;” this involves empathy with commodities, even damaged and decaying ones (perhaps especially).

Baudelaire was "intoxicated" with the city and "let the spectacle of the crowd act on him"; he thus saw both the good and the bad (aka spleen and ideal). This is contrasted with negative images such as Shelley’s "Hell is a city much like London.” Benjamin strangely expresses this more positive or ambiguous view, not only as the product of intoxication, but as a “veil”:

For the flaneur, there is a veil over this picture. This veil is formed by the masses; it billows. "in the twisting folds of the old metropolises." Because of it, horrors have an enchanting effect upon him. Only when this veil tears and reveals to the flaneur "one of the populous squares . which are empty during street fighting" does he, too, get an undistorted view of the big city.  (80)

[In other words, the "masses" are a fascinating veil over the city; when there are no people and the bare built environment is revealed, there is an "undistorted view.” This sounds like a strange and unusual use of the contrast between the peopled and the unpeopled images of the city (more commonly, in writers like Lofland, or Raban, the unpeopled representation of a city expresses anti-urban sentiment and an erasing of the feared crowd; the common car commercials in which an expensive car zooms around in an eerily emptied urban space come to mind as examples). However, Benjamin’s way of putting this might have something specifically to do with the consciousness of the flaneur, as a commodified person who identifies/empathizes with the commodity, and takes enjoyment from the phantasmagoria/spectacle, and so basically sees (and enjoys) himself-as-commodity in other people. A working class person with a "proletarian" consciousness would no doubt see the masses, and the empty city, differently. I bet Benjamin might also say this has something to do with the Romantic/Victorian fascination with ruins as well, as revealing a "truth" about cities.]

A street, a conflagration, or a traffic accident assembles people who are not defined along class lines. They present themselves as concrete gatherings, but socially they remain abstract--namely, in their private concerns. (80)

[Again the crowd is seen as an assemblage of people who remain separated from each other. According to Benjamin, it is "monstrous" that these private persons are assembled by the "accident" of their private interests as consumers. [Presumably they should instead have some non-private, non-consumerist shared interest]. Totalitarian states seize on this and "rationalize the accident of the market economy which brings them together" to pose this crowd as a "race" united by fate (93). Benjamin talks about the link Hugo made between the crowd and the spirit world; in Benjamin’s words, "For the crowd is the spirit world's mode of existence." [This is reminiscent of Brand's discussion of Whitman talking to the ghosts of the future].

Hugo saw the masses as an audience (of readers or of voters (because he was also a politician); he was no flaneur (95). Benjamin ends this section by comparing and contrasting Baudelaire and Hugo: 

[Baudelaire] like Hugo, failed to see through the social semblance (Schein) which is precipitated in the crowd. He therefore placed it in opposition to a model which was as uncritical as Hugo's conception of the crowd. This model was the hero. While Victor Hugo was celebrating the crowd as the hero of a modern epic, Baudelaire was seeking a refuge for the hero among the masses of the big city. Hugo placed himself in the crowd as a citoyen; Baudelaire divorced himself from the crowd as a hero. (96) 

[The Baudelarian hero (who came across as a modern alternative to, and improvement on, the flaneur, in the introduction) here becomes more problematic: as someone opposed to or defined against the crowd?]

 

 

 

The Writer of Modern Life, Introduction

 

Benjamin, Walter. The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. Edited by Michael W. Jennings; Translated by Howard Eiland, Edmund Jephcott, Rodney Livingston, and Harry Zohn.

[I was looking to reread Benjamin's works on Baudelaire and the 19th century in a collection; however, the previous notes I took were on a collection called Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism which I seem to no longer have for some reason (it must also have been a pdf, perhaps I just had parts and not the whole). I also have notes on some essay versions published in the Arcades project. Anyway not finding the original, and having already pieced through the Arcades essays not long ago, I figured I would read this version because it has complete versions of some essays: I will draw on my previous notes in reading it.]

 

Summary of Introduction by Michael W. Jennings

 

Jennings's introduction goes over the selection of texts and introduces Benjamin's key concepts with short discussions. First off is the dialectical image, a form of theory by montage; I'm still having trouble understanding just what the dialectical image is and how it is supposed to work, what makes it "dialectical." It seems that the dialectics is in some tension between how the image has a meaning in the present, and what its past meaning was; beyond this there seems to be, or to be the potential for, a deeper undermining of any sense or pretension of a fixed meaning (or of an appeal to the authority of fixed meaning). This, perhaps, is part of the value of studying history: it can be used to unsettle or unfinalize [to borrow a term from Bakhtin] the present; but only if the historical itself is also approached in a non-finalizing manner. 

Next key concept is phantasmagoria, akin to Debord's spectacle; Jennings traces this to Marx [and thus to Stirner]. This is also inspired by Lukacs's concept of a "second nature" (as is the spectacle, most likely). One of the importances of, and criticisms of, physiologies and panoramas is how they were complicit with this phantasmagoria. Another key concept is the theory of shock, or rather of the receptability of the poet (like Baudelaire) to receive such shocks from modern life. The ideal modern poet or "hero" as Benjamin apparently uses the term, is thus not a separate unmoved observer but one who is wounded or marked, scarred by the world and expresses this. Anyway as "modern hero" Baudelaire is the replacement for the flaneur, and also to the flaneur's successor the detective, who carries on the objectifying, phantasmagorical fixing-in-place of the urban and of meaning. Baudelaire's work in contrast has a revolutionary potential, and this is tied to his use of allegory, although once again I am still unclear of how Benjamin's concept of this works. The concept seems close to the earlier one of the dialectical image that destabilizes knowledge and, more deeply, the possibility of knowledge. Long experience (Erfahrung) and isolated experience (Erlebnis) are discussed; contra other sources I have read (Brand, I think), Jennings draws out Benjamin's ambivalent positions on both. In any event these are then tied back to the concept of shock (and of spleen and ideal in Baudelaire): somehow allegory often serves to parry the shock of experience in isolated experience. The modern hero, however, does not parry these shocks, but gives expression to them. The concept of the ideal in Baudelaire is also raised; this is held in an ambivalent tension with the spleen, thus giving Baudelaire perhaps some of that in-and-out character of the [rhythmanalyst]. Mechanization is also discussed, and Benjamin's ambivalent position explored.

The discussion ends on the revolutionary potential in Baudelaire, and the ability of his poetry to counter or overturn "auratic" art, which supports the bourgeoisie, tying again to the phantasmagoria/spectacle. Benjamin's work itself fights the phantasmagoric account of history, by tying the past to the present in that unsettling manner.