Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Walter Benjamin Entry 1.Biography 2.Early Works: Kant and Experience 3.Romanticism, Goethe and Criticism 4.Baroque Constellation 5.Arcade Street Project 6.Art and Technology 7 Baudelaire and Modernity 8.Image, History, Culture

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Walter Benjamin Entries

Walter Benjamin (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

First published Tue Jan 18, 2011; substantive revision Wed Oct 14, 2020

Originally written by Peter Osborne and Matthew Charles

Translation: @aho @juckmade

Proofreader: @Qingxin

<h1 toutiao-origin="h2" >1</h1>

As a philosopher and critical theorist, Benjamin's importance can be measured by the diverse intellectual influences of his ideas and the enduring productivity of his thoughts. Benjamin was initially regarded as a literary critic and essayist, but his writing was increasingly recognized for its philosophical foundations. They decisively influenced Theodore Adorno's conception of "philosophy's actuality" or "adequacy to the present" (Adorno 1931). In the 1930s, Benjamin devoted himself to the development of a politically oriented, materialist aesthetic theory, which also stimulated the critical theory of the Frankfurt School and the Marxist poet and playwright Brecht.

The postponement of the publication of Benjamin's collected works decided to maintain the acceptance of his works in English-speaking countries. (A two-volume German anthology was published in 1955, the full volume was not published until 1972–1989, and a 21-volume revised edition began in 2008; the English anthology was first published in 1968 and 1978, and the four-volume Anthology was published in 1996 and 2003.) ）

At first, Benjamin's ideas were accepted in the context of literary theory and aesthetics, and it was not until the last decades of the 20th century that its philosophical depth and cultural breadth began to gain full attention. Although a large number of second-hand documents were produced, his works still had a lasting productive character. Understanding the intellectual context of his work contributed to the philosophical revival of the early German Romantics. His philosophy of language was grounded in translation theory. His thesis,'The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility' remains the main theoretical text of film theory. The works produced by One-Way Street and his unfinished 19th-century paris studies (The Arcades Project) provide theoretical stimuli for cultural theories and philosophical concepts of "modernity" . Benjamin's messianic understanding of history has always been an enduring source of theoretical charm and frustration for various philosophical thinkers, including Jacques Derrida, Georges Agamben, and Jurgen Habermas in a critical context. Critique of Violence and On the Concept of History are important resources for Derrida's discussion of messianicity, and together with Paul Deman's discussion of allegory, it influenced the post-structuralist reception of Benjamin's work. Some aspects of Benjamin's thought have also been linked to a revival of political theology, although it is doubtful whether this acceptance truly reflects Benjamin's own political ideological tendencies. More recently, his early writing was translated in 2011, and a radio transcript of his children's radio station (Radio Benjamin) was translated in 2014, sparking interest in Benjamin's philosophy of education.

<h1 toutiao-origin="h2" >2. Early works: Kant and Experience</h1>

Many scholars have stressed that Benjamin's early unpublished fragments are important for understanding his broader philosophical project (Wolfharth 1992; Caygill 1998; Rrenban 2005)。 In fact, without them, it is difficult to understand the intellectual background and historical tradition of Benjamin's writings, and it is almost impossible to understand the philosophical basis of his work. Benjamin's earliest published essay, titled Experience (1913/1914), in which he sought to distinguish between an alternative, more advanced concept of experience, helped to introduce the center of his thought and the continuing concern. Benjamin's concern was to portray a direct and metaphysical experience of spirit, which helped to provide a theme for describing the conceptual opposites that had always run through his thoughts. By screening the cultural ideas of the Youth Movement in Germany, he here contrasts the empty, spiritless (Geistlosen), non-artistic "experiences" that are accumulated only by living-through (erlebt); and a specific superior experience that is imbued with spiritual content through continuous contact with the dream of youth (SW 1, 3-6). Nietzsche's influence is evident in these early texts (McFarland, 2013), especially in the young Benjamin's emphasis on aesthetic experience, which he overcame the resentful nihilism of contemporary values (although he had no way to elucidate this cultural transformation except by implicitly appealing to German poets: Schiller, Goethe, Hölderlin, and Stefan Georg).

By 1918, in what Benjamin called "the coming philosophy," an attempt was made to develop a more systematic and philosophically complex understanding of the "higher concept of experience" (SW 1,102), which was related to Kant's transcendental conceptualism. Benjamin argues that the value of Plato and Kant's philosophy lies in its attempt to defend the scope and depth of knowledge through justification, exemplified by Kant's critical inquiry into the a priori conditions of knowledge. But this Kantist attempt to grasp a certain eternal knowledge is instead based on the empirical concept of experience, which Benjamin considers limited to the "naked, primitive, self-evident" experience of the Enlightenment, which is based on Newtonian physics (SW 1, 101). Although Kant introduced the transcendental subject, his system still bound the empiricalist naïve understanding of experience, which was privileged in the positivist scientific tradition, which saw experience as an encounter between a definite subject (conceived as a cognitive consciousness, receiving sensible intuition) and an object (understood as the object itself that evokes sensation).

In contrast, the pre-Enlightenment concept of experience gives the world a deeper and deeper meaning, because "the creation" assumes the religious importance of revelatory. This was evident not only in the Christian worldview of medieval Europe, but also in the form of secularization in the Renaissance and Baroque humanism, in "counter-Enlightenment" thinkers such as J. Berger. The same is true of G. Harman, Goethe, and the Romantics. Benjamin felt that "the concept of experience, which leads so one-sidedly to the line of mathematical-mechanical lines, must be vigorously transformed and revised, as Harman tried in Kant's lifetime, and can only be achieved by linking knowledge to language" (SW 1, 107–8). In 'Über Sprache überhaupt und über die Sprache des Menschen' (c. 1916), Benjamin offers a theological concept of language that draws on Haman's argument that regards creation [creation] as the physical imprint of the divine Word of God, claiming that "in a nature, with or without life, There is no event or thing that does not in some way have a pertake language" (SW 1, 62-3). This means that all experiences—including perception—are linguistic in nature, while all human language (including writing, often associated with mere conventions) is expressive and creative in nature. In these early essays, language is superior as an empirical model precisely because it undermines and violates the neat divisions and boundaries of Kant's system, including the most basic lines that distinguish between the sensory subject and the object. If both are constitutively linguistic, then language acts as an intermediary of experience, linking the ostensible "subject" and the "object" in a deeper, perhaps mysterious, potentially intimate relationship. More generally, Harman's meta-critique made Benjamin aware of Kant's hypocrisy of separating intellect from sensibility, a separation based on the idea of pure reason, its empty, pure form, and pure reason itself can only be set according to the concrete, perceptual content of language.

At the same time, Benjamin was not interested in returning to the pre-critical plan for a rationalistic reduction of experience, nor in conceiving the world directly and religiously, but in how the scientific concept of "experience" used by Kant distorted the structure of Kant's philosophical system and how it was corrected by theological concepts. Epistemology must be devoted not only to the "question of the certainty of continuing knowledge," but also to the overlooked "integrity of ephemeral experiences." (SW 1, 100) As for how the plan was planned in the Kant system, Benjamin's proposal was sketchy, but it did indicate some concerns about his later writing. In general, it involves extending the finite spatiotemporal forms of Kant's philosophy and the categories of essential causal-mechanistic, such as integrating religion, history, art, language, and psychological experience. Benjamin's continued concern with new, outdated, and otherwise reflects his attempt to integrate more speculative phenomenological possibilities of experience into the realm of philosophical knowledge. It refuses to recognize any single discipline of knowledge, retaining multiplicity, which implies truth in the question of aesthetic representation. This would lead Benjamin to attempt to radically rethink the philosophical concept of "idea", to break away from its binary connection with the timeless, purely rational nature of all things.

Benjamin also believed that a more speculative metaphysics necessarily erased the sharp distinction between nature and freedom—or between causal mechanisms and moral will—in Kant's architecture. Because in Kant's critical system, it is the special intellect of "dialectics" that mediates these two fields, which requires speculative rethinking of Kantian dialectics. This means that the new possibilities of syllogistic logical relations may themselves be opened up and included in what he calls "the nonsynthesis of two concepts in the other." (SW 1, 106; cf. Weber 2008, 48) The non-synthetic relationship implied here can be seen as foreshadowing Benjamin's understanding of the idea in The Origin of german tragedy, which understands the idea as a constellation of extremes and also foreshadows the dialectical image in late-mature writing. In this sense, Benjamin's meta-critique of Kant represents an attempt to construct another post-Kantian tradition outside of Hegelian dialectics. Thus, it requires a new philosophy of history.

<h1 toutiao-origin="h2" >3. Romanticism, Goethe, and Criticism</h1>

Initially, Benjamin sought to develop these ideas in the context of Kant's philosophy of history, in which he believed that it was in this context that the problems of the Kant system could be fully exposed and challenged (C, 98). The early article Das Leben der Studenten (1915) hinted at how these problems can be manifested in the philosophy of history. It rejects "a view of history, in which it believes in infinite time, and therefore focuses only on the speed or lack thereof of time itself, and then the people march along the path of progress with the times", as opposed to another perspective, in which "history appears to be concentrated in a single focal point, such as those found in the utopian imagery of the philosophers". (SW 1, 37) And the latter, the "messianic" view of history, has a clear intent and methodology: it aims to grasp what Benjamin calls the "ultimate condition" of history and the "highest metaphysical state"—which we might call the historical absolute—which is not intended as the purpose of history( telos) or end, but as an immanent state of perfection, the potential to manifest itself at any given moment (SW 1, 37). He claims that the necessary recognition of this metaphysical condition requires a critical (Kritik) action (SW 1, 38). Benjamin's doctoral dissertation was originally planned to be Kant's philosophy of history, and although he later felt the need to change the topic to the art philosophy of the early German Romantics, the key features of the original plan were preserved in the finished product. He says that it is still possible for the keen reader to discern insights into the relationship between truth and history (C, 135-6). In particular, the concept of art criticism that operates in Romantic aesthetics is based on epistemological conditions that reveal the nature of the Romantic "Messiah" (SW 1, 116–7; n.3, 185). The messianic conjunction between the highest metaphysical state of history and the ephemerality of each particular moment is seen here as theoretically determining the romantic relationship between each particular work of art and the artistic absolute (or the Idea of art as defined by Benjamin).

In his doctoral dissertation, Benjamin argued that the philosophical relationship between the idea of art assumed by Romanticism and a particular work of art must be understood in connection with Fichte's theory of reflection. This theory seeks to lay ground possibilities for a particular and direct class of cognition, without resorting to the problematic idea of intellectual intuition. For Fichte, reflection indicates the free action of consciousness, which makes itself the object of its own thinking: it has the ability to think of thinking. In this way, the first form of thinking is transformed into its content. In this reflection, thinking seems to have the ability to grasp itself directly as the subject of thinking, and thus possesses some kind of direct and foundational knowledge. Although Benjamin has some detailed criticism of Fichte's philosophical position in his treatise, he attaches great importance to Fichte's concept of reflection because it provides the epistemological basis for Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis to understand the metaphysical function of art criticism. However, some scholars have questioned the accuracy of Benjamin's interpretation of Fichte's concept of reflection and the importance of his reflection in the Romantic epistemology (Bullock 1987, 78–93; Menninghaus 2005, 29–44).。

Unlike Fichte, immediacy and infinity are not mutually exclusive sides of cognition. The Romantic concept of absolutes is unique in that the Romantic concept of infinity is not empty, but "substantial and filled" (SW 1, 129). Benjamin argues that the Romantics, in particular, equated structure of the Absolute with the Idea of art, and especially with the artistic form (SW 1, 135). Art criticism is at the center of this infinite fulfilment because, as in Fichte's epistemological relationship between reflection and thought, criticism perfects it by elevating the finite and specific work to a higher level—at this level, the form of the work is transformed into content, used as an object of criticism—and at the same time, the continuity and unity of the specific art form of the work with the absolute form in the idea of art Connect. For the Romantics, criticism is the continuation and ongoing completion of a particular work through infinite connections with other works of art and critical works. The early Romantics conceived of the idea of art as a "reflective intermediary," thereby dissolving fichte's empirical scientific Enlightenment worldview inherited from Kant, and in doing so overcoming the critical prohibition imposed on infinite experience (SW 1, 132; 131). This concept of fulfilled infinity constitutes Messianism, with Benjamin asserting that messianism was essential to the early Romantic epistemology.

In the edition formally submitted to the University, Benjamin concluded that Romantic theory defined art criticism as "the consummation of the work" (SW 1, 177). Works of art provide an intrinsic standard for critical reflection, which in turn completes by elevating the work to an autonomous, higher existence. This inner critique rejects both the dogmatic imposition of external rules (such as those of classical aesthetics) and the dissolution of aesthetic standards (appeal to artistic genius). Benjamin argues that it provides a fundamental legacy for the modern concept of art criticism. However, the version circulating among friends and colleagues did not stop at a blanket affirmation of Romanticism, but rather, included a key afterword to the paper that made clear the key rebuttal that Benjamin had carefully embedded in the text. It shows that the theory of Romantic art and the absolute structure on which it implies and is based, if judged by (1) its formalism; (2) its certainty; and (3) its unity, are one-sided, incomplete, and problematic.

(1) Since, at each, continuous level, the content of reflection is provided by the form of its object, criticism unfolds the germ of its inherent criticality contained in each particular form of work of art. This formalism precludes any serious discussion of the particular content of the work of art.

2. On the contrary, nothing inherently undeciplinable can constitute a true work of art. Thus, Romantic criticism could not distinguish between good and bad works of art, since its only criterion was whether a work counted as art. This criticism is completely positive in evaluation, and lacks a negative link that is crucial to judgment.

3. Finally, Benjamin says, "When he believed that he must turn the [artistic] [absolute] ground into an individual," Schlegel "made the old mistake of confusing 'abstract' with 'universal'". (SW 1, 166–7) Thus he misinterprets the unity of all works, imagining it as attached to some mysterious, single, a priori work.

As Benjamin presents, the next thing to do is to modify the early Romantics in a Gothic way, which will unfold in this epilogue. The following statement hints at the relationship between the criticism of Romanticism and Goethe's thought, "the final, mysterious thesis that 'art itself is a work'... It is rigorously linked to the principle of asserting that 'the indestructibility of the work itself is purified by irony'" (SW 1167). By falsely emphasizing the singularity of artistic ideas, romantic perfection can only qualify with the unconditional infinity, which means that the fullness is in an inherently non-historical category. This criticism cannot be described as judgment, for all authentic judgments are concerned with "completing" its essential negation in "self-annihilation" (SW 1, 152). As a result, because "Romantic Messianism did not exert all its might" (SW 1,168), the Romantics were forced to increasingly turn to ethical, religious, and political "accoutrements" to provide what their artistic theories demanded.

Goethe's conception of aesthetic judgment and the principle of "uncriticalness" of his great works provided Benjamin with a way of thinking that necessarily revised the ideas of early German Romantic art. He explains the metaphysical structure implicit in Goethe's conception of the corresponding Ideal of art, which reveals the distinctive features of his absolute structure: a sphere of pure content, a medium of destructive refraction, and a plurality of discontinuous archetypes) (Charles 2020, 53–67)。 Because finite, special works can never be romanticized into individual, absolute unity, they remain inherently incomplete and still impotent to a higher perfection: a "torso", dismembered relative to the whole, as if in its deadness in its death. In this context, the real task of criticism is no longer to perfect the living work, but to put to a destructive end to the dying one.

Benjamin's Essay on Goethe's Selective Affinity (1924–5) gives a model for this type of criticism, while placing it more explicitly in the historical context, which develops this concept. Here, the task of criticism is to reveal Benjamin's so-called "truth content of the work of art", which at the beginning of the history of the work is intimately bound to its "material content" (SW 1, 297). Unlike mere commentary, which considers nothing more than its material content, which is now historically obsolete, the purpose of criticism is to destroy this outer layer in order to grasp the inner truth content within the work. The fundamental philosophical error of criticism is to relate the work only to the "lived experience [Erlebnis]" of the author's biographical life (e.g., Friedrich Gundolf's 1916 biography of Goethe), rather than to the broader intermediary of historical acceptance, through which it is transmitted to contemporary critics. In the section on internal criticism in Romantic theory, Benjamin insisted that the work must contain its own internal standards, so that the critic could proceed from the work itself, not from the life of the author. (SW 1, 321) Benjamin thus examines how these features derive from techniques borrowed from the unique forms of the novella, starting with the peculiar and distinctive features of Goethe's work that fascinated later generations of critics. This novella-like structure gives Selective Affinity a strange, parasymisistic character that sets it apart from the naturalism of typical fiction. It is this mystical level, the true material content of the work, that expresses the presence of the pantheistic and "daemonic" attitude toward nature in Goethe's work.

On the contrary, the content of truth cannot be found in the salient features of the technique of the work, but only in the unity of its unique form. The task of criticism is to make the content of truth an empirical object. It is not concerned with the life or intention of the artist, but with the semblance or appearance of life that the work itself possesses by virtue of its ability to imitate or reproduce: its ability to express language is described as imminent and close to life (SW 1,350). What is essential to art, however, is that what distinguishes it from the semblance of nature is "expressionless [Ausdruckslose]": critical violence in works of art "prevents this appearance, confuses movement, and interrupts harmony" (SW 1,340). Benjamin believed that "only no expression can be completed" as a "work" of a work of art, and it can do this by breaking the appearance of the unity of the work, the pseudo-manifestation of its wholeness. Unlike the intensification of Romantic reflection, refractive dissonance opens up when the appearance itself becomes the object of a higher level of appearance. Benjamin used Hölderlin's concept of caesarura to describe the moment, which he called "counter-rhythmic rupture" (SW 1, 341). In the concentrated reproduction of caesara, true criticism in turn deepens refractive violence, performing destructive or mortuary acts of self-annihilation on works.

Art, at the right limit of its imitative power, draws attention to its construction, and in doing so seeks resources to encapsulate deeper truths. This rejects Benjamin's so-called mystical certainty of Christianity in the future reconciliation (Goethe inserted this passage in the conclusion of the novella as an attempt to confront the mysterious fatalism that dominates elsewhere), and instead he endorses the paradoxical flicker of hope, which he recognizes as an image of a meteor, manifested in Goethe's novella (SW 1,354-5). If the imagery of the star retains its relationship with symbols here, this is also in line with Benjamin's earlier description of non-representation: "the torso of a symbol" (SW 1,340). However, it is best to understand the meaning of Caesara in the context of the theory of allegory. This can only be properly illustrated in Benjamin's next work, the Origin of the German Mourning-Play (Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, 1928).

<h1 toutiao-origin="h2" >4. Baroque cluster</h1>

The term "Trauerspiel" is used to describe a genre of drama that appeared in art history during the Baroque period in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. The main examples discussed in Benjamin's paper are not from the great members of it, Pedro Calderón de la Barca and William Shakespeare, but from the German playwrights Martin Opitz, Andreas Gryphius, Johann Christian Hallmann, Daniel Caspar von Lohenstein, August Adolf von Haugwitz。 Their plays are characterized by simple movements, comparable to the classical dramas of the early Renaissance, but also contain unique Baroque features. This includes exaggerated and violent exaggerations in their language (including figurative tendency towards linguistic contraction), characters lacking psychological depth, reliance on a large number of theatrical props and machines, and a crude emphasis on violence, pain, and death (see Newman 2011; Ferber 2013）。

Leaving aside for a moment the introduction to methodology (known in the English translation as 'Epistemo-Critical Prologue'"), the first part of Benjamin's treatise was concerned with rejecting the dogmatic attempts of later critics who tried to impose on these plays external standards of Aristotle aesthetics that were originally rooted in classical tragedy. Benjamin's understanding of tragedy (and his general approach to the study of mourning drama) was particularly influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy. Benjamin claims that The Birth of Tragedy confirms a critical insight that the empathy of undirected modern feeling does not contribute to proper grasping of ancient tragedies (OGT, 93). Instead, Nietzsche made a metaphysical inquiry into the nature of tragedy, which is precisely the dialectic between the perceptual impulses of Apollo appearance and Dionysus truth. This dialectic is at the center of Benjamin's own philosophical study, and in particular, of his proposition that derives from his discussion of Goethe's Selective Affinity— that the expressionless moment is constitutive to art, and that the boundaries of appearance are chiseled here precisely to enlighten the truth of art.

But Benjamin also criticized Nietzsche for limiting his approach to aesthetics and therefore abandoning the historical understanding of tragedy. Without the philosophy of history, Nietzsche's research cannot identify the political and ethical significance of the metaphysical and mythological features it separates (OGT, 93). Influenced by the ideas of Franz Rosenzweig and Florens Christian Rang (Asman 1992), Benjamin presents tragedy as a rupture, a rupture between the prehistoric era of mythical gods and heroes and the emergence of a new ethical and political community. When asked about the possibility of restoring tragic forms in contemporary theaters, the historical limitations of Nietzsche's theory of tragedy become acute. While Nietzsche tended to simply condemn the weakness of modern drama relative to Greek theater (except in his earlier works, Wagner's opera), Benjamin was concerned with determining whether the historical conditions of the tragic form themselves limited its effectiveness in the present.

According to the principles of Romantic criticism discussed above, tragedy plays contain their own unique forms and should also be criticized according to the standards of their own inner discoveries. The "content [Gehalt]" and "real object" of the Baroque tragedy are not myths, but historical life, as tragedies are (OGT, 46). Just as Goethe borrowed the novella form, this content derives in part from other aesthetic structures, especially the eschatological focus of medieval Christian literature: the Passion-Plays, Mystery-Plays and chronicles, whose historiography depicts "the entire historical process, the history of the world as a history of redemption" (OGT, 65). But Lutherans' abandonment of the Catholic emphasis on good works (good works), coupled with the secular tendencies implicit in the naturalistic philosophy of law and political philosophy of the 16th and 17th centuries (discussed in conjunction with Karl Schmidt's theory of sovereignty), led to the stripping of human values and meanings in this history. This tension, this back-and-forth combination of transcendence and immanence, creates an uneasy mixture in which history—as the narrative of mankind's redemptive march toward the Day of Judgment—loses the eschatological certainty of its redemptive conclusions and becomes secularized, into a natural setting for a blasphemous struggle for political power.

Benjamin's reflections on sovereign violence in the 17th century can be compared to his earlier discussion of the type of revolution in 'Critique of Violence' ('Zur Kritik der Gewalt' (1921)), which itself was a response to Georges Sorel's Reflective Violence (1908). These texts provoke a number of responses in the context of political theology, most notably from Karl Schmitt, Derrida, and Argamben. Schmitt responded directly to Benjamin's article in Hamlet or Hecuba (1956). The chapter on Derrida's Critique of Violence, in Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority (1989), questions the arousal of revolutionary sacred violence, and this critical engagement continues in Derrida's discussion of the Messiah in Vision of Marx (1994) and 'Marx and Sons' (1999), while the connection with Schmidt remains here Politics of Friendship (1994). The complex relationship between Benjamin, Schmitt, and Derrida has been the subject of several studies, including Forrest Ben's Exceptional States (2004) (Bredekamp 1999, 247-266; Liska 2009), although more nuanced studies highlight the apparent differences between Benjamin's position and Derrida and Schmitt (Tomba 2009, 131-132; Averlar 2005, 79-106; Weber 2008，176-194)。 In this regard, it turns out that it is not Schmitt's political theology, but Ludwig Klages's reactionary vitalism, which is more influential and more enduring for Benjamin (Fuld 1981; McCole 1993, 178-180, 236-246; Wolin 1994, xxxi-xxxviii; Wohlfarth). 2002，65-109；Lebovic 2013，1-10，79-110；Charles 2018，52-62)。

In the second part of his essay, Benjamin uses the concept of allegory to expose the eschatological structures implicit in these works. However, the first part uses the distorted tension of this structure to distinguish the special, historically remarkable technique of german Baroque tragedy. The conclusion is to identify sorrow or mourning (Trauer) as the dominant emotion inherent in its metaphysical structure, in contrast to the suffering of tragedy. With "the total secularization of the historical in the state of creation ... History gradually becomes the setting", natural history (OGT, 81), and the accompanying cognition is the melancholy contemplation of things, which derives from its recognition of their transience and emptiness (OGT, 141). "For all the wisdom of the melancholy is subject to the depth," Benjamin says, "it is won by immersion in the life of creaturely things, and no voice of revelation can reach it." Everything that is said about Saturn points deep into the earth..." (OGT, 157).

To grasp how the forms of these works are determined by their truthful content, it is necessary to reconstruct the Baroque concept of parasymism, which structures its melancholic contemplativeness. Benjamin argues that the true understanding of the allegory that appeared in the highest form of the 17th century was obscured, on the one hand, by the later Romantic aestheticization of the symbol, and, on the other hand, by a tendency that would negatively [negatively] contrast the allusion with this devalued, aesthetic concept. Therefore, only by first restoring the original, theological symbolic concept can we in turn distinguish the authentic allegory concept. To do this, it is necessary to reassess the profound but paradoxical theological unity in symbolism, between the material and the transcendental basis. What we see here is that the fundamental difference between symbolic and allegorical theological concepts is not that there are different objects (ideas vs. abstract concepts), but that they represent, represent, or reproduce this object in different ways. Benjamin concluded that this difference was especially temporal.

Borrowing from the insights he discovered in the work of mythologists Georg Friedrich Creuzer and Johann Joseph von Görres, Benjamin points out that "the timescale that symbolizes [Symbolerfahrung] experience is the mysterious moment [Nu]" (OGT, 173). Instead, we must understand the temporality of the parasite as something that is dynamic, moving, and flowing. The concept of authentic allegory, which appeared in the Baroque in the 17th century, responds to the confrontation between medieval religiousity and Renaissance secularization discussed earlier. The spatialization of the eschatological temporal structure and the naturalization of the religious structure corresponding to baroque history:

"In the symbol, with the sublimation of decline, the transfigured countenance of nature is briefly revealed in the radiance of redemption; in the sojourner, the observer is confronted with a petrified primitive landscape, a facies hippocratica (lit.' Hippocratic face'= the characteristics of depression, hollowness, and crease exhibited by a dying person). History, in all the inopportune, sadness, and miscarriage that belonged to it in the first place, is inscribed on a face—no, on a dead skull [Totenkopfe]" (OGT, 174).

From a parasitic point of view, the instantaneous transformation within symbols becomes an extremely slowed natural history, so that each symbol appears solidified and arbitrary—as if loosening any other relation. The concrete corporeality of handwriting exemplifies the allegorical emphasis on things. The parasite is not a conventional representation [conventionalrepresentation], as later critics misunderstand, but an expression of convention (Ausdruck der Konvention) (OGT, 185). Parasitory representation, like its object, includes precisely this historical convention, this manifestation of meaninglessness and indifference [insignificance and indifference]. In other words, the agreement itself can also be instructed or represented. Benjamin's rediscovery in the feud, then, resembles the concept of expressionless, which, as a symbolic torso, was also introduced into his treatise on Goethe. Benjamin believes that the parasite that dominated the Baroque in the 17th century is most dramatically expressed in the tragic drama, so the concept of the tragic drama must be grasped through the parasitism.

The work's Erkenntniskritische Vorrede, or "Epistemo-Critical Prologue", can be understood to have two core functions: it provides a direct methodological justification of the critical theory invoked by the work by questioning existing disciplinary approaches; implicitly, it restores a parasitic concept of experience, which is described in the second part of the treatise in terms consistent with modernity. At the methodological level, Benjamin argues that there is a need for works of art to adopt an interdisciplinary approach (Osborne 2011, 24), capable of critically overcoming the epistemological and historical limitations of existing disciplines such as art philosophy and art history (especially literary history). This interdisciplinarity of Benjamin's thesis may be part of the reason it is difficult to be accepted by the University of Frankfurt, where both the Faculty of Philosophy and the Faculty of Literature rejected it. Much of the theoretical discussion in the preamble is about correcting the methodological one-sidedness of an existing approach through the positive features of another approach. In general, the philosophy of art is rightly aware of the essential problem, but it is still hindered by the lack of any sufficient historical considerations. On the other hand, art history is concerned with historical contexts without a sufficient concept of essence. What is needed, however, is not a simple merging of aesthetics and history, but a radical rethinking of them first in terms of the essential concept of essence and, to a lesser extent, the philosophical concept of history.

Roughly speaking, Benjamin's conceptualism shifted the philosophical questions of metaphysical realism into an aesthetic context. That is, it asks about the realism of aesthetic genres such as "tragedy" or artistic epochs such as "Renaissance", which classify a particular set of works according to a common set of characteristics. The preface criticizes the existing tradition of aesthetic nominalism because it does not adequately address the problem. Literary historians have demonstrated the uncritical use of induction, which rejects the hypostatize of the "Renaissance" philosophical term on the basis that it promotes false identity between similar empirical features, thus obscuring their diversity. This antipathy to any realism of constitutive Ideas is based on positivist criterion of factual verification. Thus, when they use terms like "Renaissance", they have a proviso that understands it simply as an abstract general concept. However, this soon led to skepticism, because it still does not show that according to what problematic criteria, general concepts can initially be selected and abstracted from the plurality of particularities. Or on what basis are these particulars grouped together? As a result, they cannot comprehend the necessity of the Platonic assumption of ideas for the representation of essence: concepts seek to make similarities homogeneous, and to synthesize dialectically between phenomenal extremes, ideas are necessary (OGT, 18-19). In contrast, philosophers of art are concerned with the nature of art, and ultimately abandon the idea of any generic forms, based on the idea that each work has its own singular originality, implying that the only possible essential genre must be the universality of art itself and the universal and the universality of art itself individual one of art itself)。 This error—as Benjamin previously denounced the Early German Romantics—consisted in dissolving real and important perceptual structures or forms into an undifferentiated unity, thereby denying their irreducible plurality (OGT, 21-23).

If we depart from the context of Benjamin's early works, the conceptualism presented in the preface is truncated and incomprehensible, and the philosophical tradition involved is obscured by the first English translation. However, the critical aspect of Benjamin's research opposed the aesthetic version of positivist empiricism and adhered to metaphysical realism; and opposed a specific version of philosophical idealism, advocating non-singular essentialism. That is to say, he does not limit the possibilities of metaphysical reality to the peculiarities of actual experience, he argues for the plurality of essence rather than unity (in Goethe's words, harmony of truth rather than unity). In this way, he must show that the "theological" paradox is mentioned in the discussion of symbols and parasites, that is, how transcendental/transcendental objects appear intrinsically in matter/sensations. Benjamin was well aware that the relationship between ideas and phenomena was neither an Aristotle "containment" nor a Kantian legitimacy or hypothesis. Ideas do not give intellectual intuition, but they can be represented perceptually. This sensuous representation of truth remains the task of philosophy.

Benjamin astonishingly imaged reconstructs existing elements of the philosophical tradition to advance his theoretical elaboration. In the preface, he offers some possibilities for contemplating such ideas, which come not only from the field of philosophy, but also from aesthetics, theology, and science. The first is the Platonic Idea, which is no longer associated with purely rational, objective knowledge rising from science (as in the description of dialectics in the Republic), but to the discussion of beautiful semblance in the Drink (OGT, 6). The second is Adamic Name, which he developed in his early theories of language. In this context, he commented that the early German Romantic attempts to renew the idea were frustrated because truth was characteristic of reflective consciousness to them, rather than the kind of intentionless, linguistic feature in which things were classified by Adam's primal-interrogation (urvernehmen) under essential Names (OGT, 15). The nomenclature is the primal history (Urgeschicte) of signifying, indicating a thing-like disinterest, which contrasts sharply with the directed, unifying intentionality of Husserl's phenomenology (OGT, 14). The third is the Goethean Ideal, which is reviewed in the context of the Faustian "mother" and alluded to his earlier discussion of Goethe (OGT, 11). Finally, and most famously, Benjamin likens the virtual objectivity of the idea of reconfiguration to reproduce the actual phenomenon of astrological constellation, which is revealed by the cluster of individual stars grouped together and at the same time revealed by a cluster of individual stars (OGT, 11). Truth is said to be "actualized in the round dance of presented Ideas [vergegenwärtigt im Reigen der dargestellen Ideen]" (OGT, 4). Adorno took the concept of the star cluster directly to his inaugural course,'The Actuality of Philosophy,' in which he spoke of "the manipulation of conceptual materials by philosophy... Grouping and tentative arrangement, clusters of stars and composition" (Adorno 1931, 131). From this point on, it permeated Benjamin's philosophical practice in his major works, starting with One-Way Street (1928), to the methodological requirements for constituting history in his related works of the "Arcade Project" of the 1930s, and the dialectical theory associated with it, all the way to the concept of history proposed in his famous late essay 'On the Concept of History' (1940).

Benjamin's concern with re-incorporating the temporal transformation of art requires an analogous radicalization. "Categories and concrete classifications" (to distinguish them from the generalizing thought abstracted from change and development) is what Benedetto-Croce calls history (OGT, 24), and it must now be harmonized with Benjamin's conceptualism. Because Benjamin's work is based on a Messianic philosophy of history, it makes the existing exposition of the concepts of history and the origin of history problematic. According to his discussion of "ideas," the concept of historical origins should not be reduced to the causality and reality of empirical facts, nor should it be regarded as a purely logical, timeless essence. Benjamin argues that it is not merely "the coming-to-be of what has already originated" nor can it be known in "naked, obvious factual existence" (OGT, 24).

For the sequence of "histories" that allows the "idea" to be characterized includes not only the actual phenomena of a given period, but also its subsequent developments in the understanding of it in later times. For example, the study of the nature of German tragedy cannot be confined to the events and actual dramas of the same epoch, as if they were all 'facts' fixed and determined once and for all, but must also examine the changes in the understanding of this historical epoch and the different acceptances of these plays, including the pre-conditions for their self-understanding. But it is also not a category of "pure logic", as if ideas were essential, detached from history, independent of history, and grasped by abstraction of all these particular historical developments (OGT, 25). Thus, origin (Ursprung) differs from the evolutionary development of purely generic, genetic coming-into-being [Enstehung]) and "pure history", but instead includes an essential internal history of "life in works and forms" (OGT, 24-6). The "science of origins", a philosophical history, a history of essence, draws on a dialectical perspective to grasp the form of the "phenomena of origin": as things subject to the process of generation and disappearance, and therefore only partial and unfinished. Benjamin again appealed to an image:

"Origin stands in the stream of generation as a whirlpool, forcefully drawing emerging materials into its rhythm." (OGT，24)

Criticism attempts to virtually reassemble the pre- and after-history of phenomena (Vor- und Nachgeschichte) into historical clusters in which ideas are characterized and phenomena are redeemed. This is precisely the messianic function that is related to the historical absolute.

The preface also attempts to save for the sake of modern critical theory the allegorical experience recognized in the tragedy. The purpose of parasympathic contemplation is to destroy things in order to construct [baun]) a new whole from the old elements in its moment of redemption [link]. This characteristic of composition makes it different from creative invention of fantasy in that it manipulates and rearranges materials that already exist. Leaving an imprint or impression of this construction [Konstruktion]) is one of its purposes. This double emphasis on deconstruction and constructivism has led some scholars to see a rehearsal of Derrida-style deconstruction in Benjamin's work (Fischer 1996, Section 1: Modernity/Postmodernity; Weber 2008, 122–128), although it should be noted that he has a special, historical consideration of this critical concept, and he insists that works of art have intrinsic truth content, which remains firmly modernist and cannot be easily assimilated into any "postmodernist" position (see Weigel 1996, xiv). The underlying affinity between Romanticism and Baroque lies in the fact that they share modernist concerns: a quasi-mythological perspective of revision of classicism and general classicism in art (OGT, 230; 185). The preface reflects on this "modernity" of the Baroque, it states

"The striking analogy with the current state of German literature is how constantly ... Immerse yourself in the Baroque" (OGT, 36).

Although Benjamin enumerates the similarities between expressionism in contemporary literature and Baroque Mannerist exaggeration, his own reconstruction of the allegorical experience, and the value of this reconstruction to aesthetic theory, can only be experienced in accordance with the historical conjunction between the Baroque past and the modernity of Benjamin's present: modernity reveals both the Baroque and the Baroque.

The book on tragedy ends Benjamin's moral idea of "cycle of production" (C, 322). In the early 1920s, Benjamin began to immerse himself in a large-scale research program of political thought, in which only a few fragments and "Critique of Violence" (Steiner 2001, 61) remained. As Uwe Steiner points out, while Benjamin's political ideas may be positioned in the context of the expressionist acceptance of Nietzsche, in his definition of politics, "contentment with unenvirted humanity" means the attainment of happiness, occupying the center, in direct opposition to Zarathustra's tragic heroism (Steiner 2001, 49–50, 61–62). This marked a continuation and breakthrough in what Irving Wohlfarth called "politics of Youth" (Wohlfarth, 1992, 164), which drew heavily on the historical and cultural philosophy influenced by Nietzsche's Anachronistic Meditations. Benjamin says, however, that his break with the youth movement was not a abandonment of earlier ideas, but rather submerged in "harder, purer, and more invisible radicalism" (C, 74). This speaks to some extent about T. What J. Clark describes—in the words of Adorno (SW 4, 101-2)—is the "hidden" character of anthropological materialism in the Arcade Street Project, Clark comments, here "as if this politics were actively promoted and developed elsewhere" (Clark 2003, 45-46).

One-Way Street (Einbahnstraße, 1923–6, published in 1928) began a new cycle in which it put into practice, both in form and content, the speculative concepts of experience previously elaborated by theory, immersed in the depths of things in a paradoxical way. The city provided the material for the senses and imagery of The One Way Street, while the genres of flyers, placards, and advertisements provided the constitutiveness, and through these principles, the One Way Street was reorganized into clusters of stars. The methodology of this form resembles the technical mediums of photography and film, as well as the avant-garde practices of Russian Constructivism and French Surrealism. This requires what Adorno describes as "philosophy directed against philosophy" (Adorno 1955, 235) or Howard Caygill's "philosophizing beyond philosophy" (Caygill 1989, 119).

Contemporary capitalism, presented as the modernity of the metropolis in The One Way, also marked a turning point in Benjamin's writing, moving from what he recalled as "childishly caught up in the philosophical and ancient forms of nature" (BA, 88) to the development of "political views of the past" (SW 2,210). The empirical theories outlined in his early writing were proposed for revolutionary purposes. In the essay Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of European Intellectuals (1929), the experience of the Surrealists provides an example of a "blasphemous revelation", unlike the kind of revelation found in religion, which is guided by political and "materialistic, anthropological inspiration" (SW 2, 209). The latent energies lurking in the poorest and most obsolete constitute a new political cluster that is transformed into intoxicating and revolutionary experiences (SW 2, 210). This blasphemous enlightenment possibility in Nineteenth-century Paris, presented as the origin of modernity, occupied the remaining decade of Benjamin's life, and his immortal and unfinished study of the "Arcade Street Project" provided the constitutive material for all his remaining work.

<h1 toutiao-origin="h2" >5. Arcade Street Plan</h1>

The city is the birthplace of Benjamin's "Gothic" Marxism (Cohen, 1993). Paris is its testing ground. Between the fall of 1927 and his death in 1940, all of Benjamin's writings were related in one way or another to his great unfinished study, Paris – the capital of the 19th century, also known as the Das Passagen – Werk, which used the 1926 novel le Paysan De Paris by the French surrealist Louis Aragon. The founding image in the image gives it its name. Benjamin said of the book: "I never read more than two or three pages in bed at night because I had to put the book aside before my heart started beating violently. (BA, 88) Arcade Street will become, but is but one of five or six archetypal images of the psychosocial space of 19th-century Paris organized around the plan, each matched to a specific, thematically representative individual. But it provides a model for the rest of the imagery, its surrealist origins and threshold utopian impulses, neither entirely internal nor entirely external to the thresholds of sleep and wake, but above the threshold of sleep and wake, which established wish-image and dream-image on the core of the work originally conceived as some kind of "dialectical fairy tale". (The character that matches "Arcade Street" is charles Fourier, a utopian socialist.) )。 The impetus and direction of all of Benjamin's important essays in the 1930s derived from his work on Arcade Street, which expounded its elements while delaying its completion.

This postponement is, in part, the result of the maturation process inherent in the work itself—a certain ripening. The Arcade Street project was large and ambitious, not only because of the number and breadth of its archival sources (which Benjamin searched for in the Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris), but in fact mainly due to its philosophical and historical intentions, as well as the methodological and reproducive challenges it set. Its ever-spreading, but also sophisticated, historical goal is to serve as an entry point into the philosophically grasped experience of metropolis capitalism—by constructing a particular sequence of relations between the "past" and the "present" in its elements—neither some past experience nor the experience of the past stages of capitalist development, but the experience of the capitalocracy of Benjamin's time. The research practice, conceptual organization, and presentation it deals with is consciously conceived as a new, philosophically oriented materialist historiography with political intent. Its final, fragmented, and "ruined" state is no longer simply the sign of a failure of completion, but a certain constitutive incompletion paradigm that characterizes all systematic knowledge under the conditions of modernity. In this regard, it is precisely this failure to be actualized that confirms the fundamental historical and philosophical truths of Benjamin's early analysis of Romantic fragments and expands the genre in hitherto unimaginable ways.

In its ebb and flow, ever-changing rhythm of addition, revision, refactoring, and retrieval, Benjamin's Arcade Street Project provides an extraordinary case study of the labor that makes up concepts by configuring and reconfiguring archival materials. A large number of "Arcade Street" notes and materials that have survived to this day were not published until 1982 and did not appear in English until 1999 (GS V; AP). It is only after their publication that it is possible to clearly understand the entire trajectory of Benjamin's thought during this period—which makes many of the controversies of the previous cycle of acceptance redundant, or at least superseded. Notes and materials are organized alphabetically into 26 "volumes" (literally "bundles") or folders, defined according to the subject: various objects (arcades, catacombs, barricades, iron buildings, mirrors, illumination methods...) Topics (fashion, boredom, epistemology, progress, painting, conspiracy...) Characters (scavengers, wanderers, automatons...) Authors (Baudelaire, Fourier, Jung, Marx, Saint-Simon...) and their combinations. The program as a whole received two "exposés" or abstracts (the second in French) in 1935 and 1939. However, its vision and theoretical ambitions—no less than the philosophical construction of the "primitive history of the 19th century" (BA, 90)—coupled with the circumstances of Benjamin's exile (he was constantly writing to make money and not sure who would publish the plan) hindered its realization. The only slightly longer passage in the full text is derived from the study of Baudelaire (one of the five sections of the 1939 "Report", reduced from the six parts of the original 1935 edition): the second of the three estimated sections, Baudelaire's Paris of the Second Empire, although this part was never published during Benjamin's lifetime. However, the central chapter of this section, The Wanderer, was revised and expanded (partly in reply to correspondence with Adorno) and became the article "Baudelaire's Motifs", which was published in January 1940 in zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, a journal of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research. The corresponding draft of the commodity as a poetic object, the last part of the three projected sections, is strongly compressed and exists in the form of Central Park (SW 4, 161–199). As the program developed, in order to cope with obstacles to its realization, Baudelaire became increasingly central to Benjamin's thought (the "J volume" on Baudelaire is the longest volume to date). With Horkheimer's encouragement, Benjamin planned to publish material on Baudelaire as a separate book entitled Charles Baudelaire: Lyric Poets in the Age of Advanced Capitalism. In this process, the original book on the original history of the nineteenth century gradually evolved into a book on Baudelaire and "advanced capitalism", and the development of this process can be represented by the following chart.

Paris ———— capital of the 19th century (1939 theses).

A. Fourier and Arcade Street

(+) [Daguerre and Panoramas – existed only in the 1935 edition, later deleted).

B. Grandville and the World Exhibition

C. Louis Philippe with the living room

D. Baudelaire and the streets of Paris

↳ Expanded into Charles Baudelaire, lyric poet of the age of advanced capitalism – consisting of the following three parts:

I. (Baudelaire as a satirical figure)

II. (Baudelaire's Paris of the Second Empire) – consisting of the following three parts:

1. Bohème

2. Wanderers*

3. Modernism

III. (Commodity as The Object of Poetry \ Commodity as Poetic Object)**

E. Haussmann, or barricades

* (Wanderer) expanded and published as Baudelaire's Motifs (1940)

**(Draft of goods as objects of poetry [goods as poetic objects]) appears as Central Park (1938)

However, reducing this plan to its own, finite, de facto trajectory (though it is still rich) seriously undermines the historical and philosophical framework within which Baudelaire's material derives broader meaning. The historical framework of overarching is the "crisis of experience" of capitalist modernity. (In the European context of the 19th and early 20th centuries, the terms capitalism and modernity were intertwined with Benjamin.) The problem domain built by Benjamin's thought—extending Kant's concept of experience to infinity—has here a concrete historical context in which the idea of infinity/absolute is linked to the concept of history itself. The problem is to find the appropriate way to experience its own crisis in experiential terms, thus dialectically redeeming the concept of experience (Erfahrung). In typical "modern" terms, the present is defined as a moment of crisis and transition, while philosophical experience (truth) is associated with a glimpse of the present, through the past, of a utopian political future that will bring history to an end. More directly, the crisis is given political significance by two possible resolutions: one destructive; the other constructive/liberating – fascism and communism, respectively. In this regard, although Benjamin was a theoretical heretic of the "Marxists" and philosophically affinity with Adorno, he was always looking for new forms of collectivity for the communist future and was united with it. This laid the foundation for his friendship with Brecht. But unlike Brecht, who conceived of them in speculative cultural history. (Caygill 2004)。

Within this framework, three distinct threads in the work can be identified (discussed in the next three stanzas) :(1) the investigation of the "crisis of experience" through the "crisis of art", using the interrelated terms of technology/technique[technik], spiritual rhyme, reproduction [reproducibility]; (2) the philosophical distillation of the "new" empirical structure from social forms structure of the experience of the new) its historical and political contradictions and examines its connection to the form of fetishism and commodity; (3) constructs a new historiography with a new philosophical conception of "history". Through a series of interrelated articles, we can trace the first thread, the most important of which is Surrealism – The Last Scene of European Intellectuals (1929), A Brief History of Photography (1931), Works of Art in the Age of Technological Reproduction [Works of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction] (1935-1939), and The Storyteller (1936). The second thread focuses on Baudelaire's interpretation of texts related to Nietzsche and Blanqui. (To focus on these three thinkers is to focus on the relationship between capitalism and modernity in its purest, nihilistic form.) The third thread arises from the reflective combination of Marx, Nietzsche and Surrealism. It takes the methodological form of the "N-volume (Epistemology, Progress)" of the Arcade Street Project and is unexpectedly finalized in Benjamin's most frequently cited but still controversially interpreted texts (Caygill 2004; Löwy 2005; Tiedemman 1989; Wohlfarth 1978): these fragments are called On the Concept of History (Caygill 2004; Löwy 2005; Tiedemman). 1989；Wohlfarth 1978)。

<h1 toutiao-origin="h2" >6</h1>

Benjamin's approach to the symptomatic significance of the "crisis of art" to the "crisis of experience" through the concept of technology (Technik) confirms the basic Marxist characteristics of Benjamin's concept of historical development. The development of productive forces is the motor of history. However, as in his concept of "progress", Benjamin was not an orthodox Marxist in terms of "technology", but different from the Version of Marxism on which the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) was based. (See sect. 8 below). Not only did he recognize that technology dominated by "greed for profit" (SW 1,487) could cause "massacres"—which was amply demonstrated in the horrors of the First World War—but he set out to distinguish between "first" and "second" technologies that were potentially liberating, the latter making possible "highly productive use of human self-alienation" (SW 3,107; 113). In some places, it appears to be a kind of "technological cosmopolitics" or "new collective technoid body" (Caygill 2005, 225; Leslie 2000, 153, in Osborne 2005, II: 391).

"The mastery of nature is the purpose of all technology (Technik) – that's what the imperialists teach. But...... Technology is not the mastery of nature, but the mastery of the relationship between nature and human beings... Technically, people organize physis, through which human interaction with the universe takes on a new form different from that it has in the state (Völkern) and the family. (SW 1, 487, translation changed)

"The collective is also the body. The physis, which is technically organized for it, can only be produced in the context of the image through all political and factual realities, blasphemous enlightenments that touch us. Only when the body and imagery in technology penetrate so interpenetratingly that the tension of all revolutions becomes the bodily collective innervation of the body, and the collective neural networks of all bodies become the release of the revolution, can reality reach the level required by the Communist Manifesto, and thus transcend itself. (SW 2，217–8)

The two passages, from the ends of One Way Street and Surrealism– The Last Scene of European Intellectuals, convey a certain fanatical feature of Benjamin's political thought in the early 1930s, in which technology stands on a narrow, blade-sharp political divide, between the possibilities of "a fetish of doom" and "the key to happiness." (SW 2,321)。 Art—a mass art—appears in this scene as an educational mechanism through which the collective can begin to divert its technological potential.

The first technology does try to dominate nature, while the second technology dominates the interaction between nature and human beings. Today, the main social function of art is precisely to rehearse this interaction. This applies especially to movies. The function of cinema is to train the sense of unity and reaction that humans need to cope with the almost ever-increasingly large apparatus of their roles in their lives. Deal with this device. It also taught them that technology will liberate them from the enslavement of machine forces only when the whole structure of humanity has adapted to the new productive forces after the liberation of the second technology. (SW 3,107-8)

Benjamin mentions in the footnote to the second edition of Works of Art in the Age of Technological Reproduction [Works of Art of the Age of Mechanical Reproduction] (Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalt seiner Technischen Reproduzierbarkeit, 1936) of "phalansteries", the "self-sufficient agrarian collective" in Fourier's socialist utopia. In a volume of the Arcade Street Project on Fourier, they are compared to two major articles of Benjamin's political science: "The idea of revolution is the innervation of the nerves of the collective technological organs ... It is also the idea of 'knocking away natural teleology' (AP, [W7, 4], 631). For Benjamin, the art of cinema —the unfolding of all forms of perception, beats, and rhythms&lt; the result &gt;, rehearsed in today's machines"—thus became a possibility of rehearsal of revolution. "All the problems of contemporary art", Benjamin insisted, "their specific formulation can only be found in the context of cinema" (AP, [K3, 3], 394). In this regard, it was the constructive facilities of the Brecht Epic Theatre combined with communist pedagogy that made it a theater of the cinematic age (UB, 1-25; Wizisla, 2009).

Benjamin's writing on cinema is known for two arguments: first, a shift in the concept of art under the "reproduction of technology [mechanical reproducibility]", and secondly, which in turn contains new possibilities of collective experience, which is presented as a definite end to this process after the historic decline of the "aura" of the work of art. Many texts argue about the decline of spirituality in Benjamin's work. On the one hand, given some of his writings, it has been accused that Benjamin's concept of spirituality breeds nostalgic, purely negative modernity, which is a loss—simultaneous loss of unity with nature and with community (A. Benjamin, 1989). On the other hand, in his work on film, Benjamin seems to adopt affirmative technological modernism to celebrate the consequences of this decline. Some people felt betrayed by the latter position, and Adorno was one of them. On March 18, 1936, he wrote to Benjamin:

In your early writing... You distinguish between two ideas, one that treats works of art as structures that come from theological symbols, and one that comes from magical taboos. Now I feel a little uneasy—here I can see remnants of the sublimation of certain Brecht themes—that you have now transferred the concept of magic rather haphazardly to "autonomous work of work", and then categorically giving the latter counter-revolutionary functions. (BA, 128)

At the same time, even Brecht himself was struck by the negativity that remained in the spirit rhyme, and he wrote down his response in his Workbook: "It's all mysticism, anti-mystical gesture of mysticism... It's even more frightening" (quoted from Buck – Morss 1977, 149). And Adorno did not defend the "art of spirituality" in this way. (His defense of the art of self-discipline is based on experience derived from the development of the "self-discipline" technique of formal law.)

It is clear that the concept of spirituality plays many different roles in Benjamin's writing, and in his various attempts he tries to grasp his historical present with the possibility of "experience" offered by new cultural forms; he increasingly identifies it as revolutionary political potential (some say abruptly). Adorno was wrong, seeing this as a simple change of position rather than a series of complex twists and turns that a universally agreed historical narrative has. As early as 1931, in his "Brief History of Photography", Benjamin definitely wrote "liberating the object from the spiritual rhyme", and in the "Photographic History", he described Ajet's photograph as "draining the spiritual rhyme in reality, like draining the accumulated water from a half-sunken ship" (SW2, 518). It is here that we find the basic definition of spirituality: "It is the interweaving of space and time: no matter how close it is, it is a unique manifestation and appearance of distance." (he unique appearance or semblance of distance)”

Importantly, the example given by this definition comes from nature: "On a summer afternoon, (while you look at the rolling hills on the horizon, or gaze at the branches that cast shade on you) until this moment or moment also becomes part of this manifestation (this means that the spirit of the mountains and the branches begins to breathe). "Spiritual "destruction" caused by temporary and reproducible [reproducibility] is judged to be "beneficial alienation" (SW 2, 518-9). Similarly, although Benjamin, in Storyteller, speaks of "the incomparable charm surrounding storytellers" and "the art of storytelling is decaying and disappearing," he insists that "it would be foolish to think of it only as a 'symptom of cultural decay,' let alone as a 'modern symptom.'" Rather, it is only an accompaniment of the secular productive forces of history...". (SW 3, 146; 162)。

The artwork article refers to cinema and expands and enriches previous descriptions of the technological transformation of perception by photography (the "optical subconscious"). The difference is that later articles (after Hitler came to power in 1933) insisted on the political dimension and also resolved to introduce "the concept of complete uselessness for the purposes of fascism" (SW 3, 102). The main problem with the auratic is that (it is seen as a remnant of history, undemanded, and perhaps even indestructible [Didi – Huberman 2004]) Benjamin believed it was precisely "useful to fascism". This context overshadows the entire text, the almost Manichaean opposition between ritual and politics, between worship values and display values. The technological and social developments involved in this article make it difficult for the text to simply be "used" in contemporary times. For some, however, it is precisely the connection it depicts between a particular kind of popular culture and fascism that brings about its enduring relevance to the present (Buck - Morss 1992).

<h1 toutiao-origin="h2" >7. Baudelaire and Modern</h1>

Benjamin's most important theoretical contribution to the study of the history of cultural forms was his reflection on the "die Moderne." In early English translations, the word was often mistranslated as "modernism," and is still always translated as "modernity" (although in reference to Baudelaire, Benjamin tends to retain the word la modernité), which specifies both formal temporal structures and different ranges of historical instances—past and present. Baudelaire was identified by Benjamin as the leading writer of the "modern"; perhaps to Baudelaire's surprise: posterity would use The Painter of Modern Life (written in 1859/60) as a typical reference to Moderné, but the first appearance of what Benjamin called the "theory" of the modern was the Salon of 1845: "The advent of the the advent of the." truenew [die Heraufkunft des wahrhaftNeunen])"(SW4,45-6, revised; GS 1.2, 580)

In Baudelaire's Painter of Modern Life, "modernité" refers to "ephemeral, difficult to capture, accidental." In the capitalist metropolis, it is associated with transientity, transitoriness, a generalized social illustration of modern temporal and spatial sexuality. However, Benjamin was first and foremost interested (politically and philosophically) in comparison to this temporality, the "new," its "advent", or its historical generation, its quality as newness or novelty (the newness of the new), a conceptually distinct from the "modern" and "classical" retained by Baudelaire. The usual opposition between them is famous. Thus, Benjamin was also interested in the so-called "routinization" (though Benjamin did not use the term): normalization is accompanied by generalization of the new as a mode of experience—especially fashion and boredom—and "new".) The formal structure of sameness involved in its repetition. It is here that transience enters the picture—it is the result of the generalization of the newness. Baudelaire consciously embraced modernity with "heroic effort", trying to be like a painter of modern life, "distilling its epic aspects" and "distilling the eternal from the temporality"; While Benjamin tried to understand it in order to find a way out of what he called "hell". He singled out the relationship between transient and eternal from Baudelaire's account of modernity, but, first, he deronidified the idea of "eternity" and then philosophically reshaped it; second, he made the relation itself strictly dialectical: in modern times, the temporary itself is eternal.

Thus, rather than accepting and renovating Baudelaire's account of modernity, Benjamin is saying that he is "symptomatic" (in the sense of Louis Althusser) or, more precisely, paradoxically interpreting it, thus revealing the experience of the transformation of historical time under it through commodity forms. According to Benjamin, contradictory historical temporality structured Baudelaire's work, by which Baudelaire could grasp the experience: although it was decidedly modern, its poetic form (lyric) was long outdated (anachronistic). Similarly, Benjamin valued the disjunctive historical temporality in Kafka's fables: their status was parables after "end of storytelling."

Although Kafka was a "failed figure" (BS, 226) for Benjamin—attempts to translate the experience of modernity (Erlebnis) into traditional languages (Judaism) inevitably failed—Baudelaire's poems were sufficient to convey the intensity of the experience of modernity through the tension between experience and the lyrical approach he had chosen; not negatively (like Kafka's), but in a way that transformed modernity into a lyrical way. In particular, lyric poetry allowed Baudelaire to record the full effect of modern temporality in dissolving subjectivity, with the result that it achieved a heroic construction that allowed it to live in the modern (SW 4, 44, revised; GS 1.2, 577). Benjamin's Baudelaire interpretation is known for distilling the metropolitan "motif"—bohemians, wanderers, prostitutes, gamblers, scavengers—through which the structure of experience is revealed. In Baudelaire they were primary, but for Benjamin they were methodologically secondary, explaining to Adorno: "I just need to insert [them] in place (BA, 90)". Baudelaire found a method called "correspondences," which reflectively incorporated outdated lyrical forms into his work. Benjamin took up this method, along with the "ritual elements" (SW 4,333) that were separated from it, to decipher Baudelaire himself. In Baudelaire's Motifs, the response and harmony of the structure of time is empirically called "shock," linking machines, movies, and game of chance:

What determines the production rhythm of the assembly line, what is hidden under the rhythm of the film's acceptance... The chockerlebnis that passers-by have in the crowd correspond to the isolated 'experiences' that the worker has on his machines ... The shaking in the motion of the machine is like the so-called "coup" in the probability game. (SW 4, 328–30)

In the rich arrangement of phenomenological forms presented in Baudelaire's poems, the temporal structure of single, repetitive, and separate forms can be detected: "The price of modern man's senses may be: the disintegration of spiritual rhyme in the experience of shock" (SW 4,343, translation modification; GS 1.2, 653)

Moreover, the key to this interpretation, the experience of shock, is itself understood through a series of theoretical correspondences of Benjamin's own present, first and foremost the correspondence between Proust's "involuntary memory" and Freud's theory of consciousness. This theory corresponds to the "shell shock" first diagnosed during World War I, which Benjamin has previously written about in his reflection on Ernst Junger, as seen in his 1930 commentary, "German Fascist Theory: Comments on Junger's Collected Essays&lt; War and the Samurai &gt;" (SW 2,312-321). The connection between modernity and fascism is manifested not only in the theme of the pseudo-restoration of the spirit, but also in the process by which shock disintegrates the spirit (structurally, crowd shock is "like" cannon shock). Thus, not only is Baudelaire a superior writer in terms of the advent of modern theory, but also in his nineteenth-century works it is most clearly manifested in his work as the present fore-life. However, if Benjamin mastered the temporal structure of the "modern" through Baudelaire, it was through Nietzsche and Blanqui whose philosophy reflected on the transformation of commodities into "ever selfsame." "Just as the parasite became the model of dialectical imagery in the 17th century, in the 19th century the novelty was the model" (AP, 11): "Commodities have replaced the mode of apprehension. ” (SW 4, 188)

This fragment of Central Park reveals most clearly the consequences of Benjamin's Baudelaire's interpretation of his conception of history: the possibility of modernity completely transforming historical experience. On the one hand, it de-historicalizes experience, detaching it from traditional continuity. On the other hand, the messianic structure—history opens up to something outside of time———— re-establishes itself in the still life[nature mort], of modernity's endless sameness. This is Benjamin's famous "dialects at a standstill" (Tiedemann, 1982). It transforms the Baroque historical naturalism (section 4 above), which is analyzed in The Origins of German Tragedy, and points to the future. In particular, the interruptive stasis of imagery takes precedence over the continuity of chronological order. In fact, Benjamin insisted that "the concept of historical time forms the opposite of the idea of temporal continuum" (SW 4, 407).

<h1 toutiao-origin="h2" >8. Image, history, culture</h1>

For years, the debate over Benjamin's historical conception revolved around asking whether it was essentially "theological" or "materialistic" (or how it could be both), as Benjamin identified himself as a historical materialist and insisted on using explicit messianic motifs (Wolhfarth 1978; Tiedemann 1983–4). It was a legacy dispute brought about by three friendships whose effects competed with each other—Gershom Scholem, Theodor W. Adorno, and Bertolt Brecht—and the controversy over who applied it to interpret fragments of Benjamin's final text, On the Concept of History ("Über den Begriff der Geschichte", Or the well-known Outline of the Philosophy of History). Shoreham advocated theological explanation, Brecht inspired materialist interpretation, and Adorno sought to forge some form of compatibility between the two. However, if the inquiry is framed in the existing concepts of "theology" and "materialism" (the paradox becomes self-sufficient), the inquiry is wrong, because Benjamin's aim is to rethink the meaning of these ideas thoroughly on the basis of the philosophy of the new historical time. This new philosophy of historical time was the ultimate goal of Benjamin's late writing. It is almost fully apparent in the composition of The Theory of Knowledge and Progress in Volume N of the Arcade Street Project; it is applied to the history of art in the 1937 essay Edward Fuch, Collector and Historian;and in On the Concept of History it is presented in a condensed, rhetorically politically questionable form. It stems from a double critique of both the "vulgar naturalism" of historicism and the postponement of action by the Social Democrats concerned under the concept of progress (Kittsteiner, 1986). Based on the use of "literary montage" as a method of constituting "dialectical imagery," it offers an idea of historical intelligibility (AP, 460-1). It culminates in the quasi-messianic conception of revolution, which is the "interruption" of history or the "arrest of happening": "A classless society is not the ultimate goal of historical progress, but a cut off of historical progress that is often aborted but ultimately achieved" (SW 4,402).

"Presents a kind of historical materialism that annihilates the idea of "progress" in itself, as its "founding concept, not progress, but actualization" (AP, [N2,2], 460), which Benjamin regards as one of the main "methodological objectives" of the Gallery Project. Benjamin did so for both philosophical and political reasons. Philosophically, Benjamin saw the traditional conception of progress as a projection of the future by a "homogeneous" and "empty" conception of time, and exemplary examples such as Ranke's historicism attempted to reproduce the past "as it was" (SW4, 395; 391). This conception of time is based on the fact that the past, present, and future are the continuum of time, in which events occur "in" and are causally interconnected. It does not recognize a fundamental temporal-ontological distinction between past, present, and future time, and therefore is naturalistic; it does not feel that time is the continuous production of temporal differentiation. Time is divided only by the differences between the events that take place in it. In particular, it fails to grasp that historical time (the time of human life) is constituted through this internal differentiation, through the survival of memory, expectation, and action. In this regard, there is an affinity between Benjamin's philosophy of time and Heidegger (Caygill, 1994).

Behind the idea of "progress" is temporal naturalism, and its political consequence is conformism. Paradoxically for Benjamin, this applies in particular to the German Social-Democratic understanding of communism as an ideal, a goal of "endless tasks" in the neo-Kantian sense of ethics:

Once classless society is defined as an infinite task, empty, homogeneous time becomes an anecdote, that is, here one can wait more or less calmly for the emergence of the revolutionary situation. (SW 4，402)

In other words, the idea of progress is being demobilized, and Marxism is infected by progressive ideologies. However, rather than setting an existential option in the heideggerian "resolute decision," Benjamin chose a new conception of historical time and historical comprehensibility, based not on the relationship between the past and the present, but between the "then" and the "now," which brings together images of the past. Each particular "now" in history is understood to correspond to (in the sense of Baudelaire) a particular "then", or to make "then" easy to pronounce.

This is not to say that the past illuminates the present, or that the present illuminates the past; it is an image of the past that meets the present in the blink of an eye, thus forming a cluster of stars. In other words: imagery is dialectics at a standstill. For the relationship of the present to the past is purely temporal, and the relationship between what-has-been and the present is dialectical: not in essence temporal, but figural [bildlich]). Only dialectical imagery is truly historical... (AP，[N3，1]，463)

The experimental method of montage borrowed from Surrealism became a way of producing historical comprehensibility. Moreover, in this way, the "static" temporality of imagery is understood, and it relates the experience of historical significance directly to the radical or "revolutionary" concept of action, as well as to the idea of the present as a crisis. The above paragraph goes on to say:

The image of being read—that is, the image of the present moment (Das Bild im Jetzt der Erkenbarkeik)—bears the imprint of the critical moment of danger to the greatest extent possible, and all reading is built on this moment. (AP，[N3，1]，463)

This "perilous critical moments" are intrinsic to the temporality of modernity, both at the structural level (the temporality of crises) and in each particular, accidental, and conjuncturally special case. In critical moments, the past is understood as "bringing the present to a critical state." However, this critical state is not a crisis of the status quo, but a destruction of the status quo: the critical moment is the moment when "the status quo may be threatens to be preserved" (AP, [N10,2], 474). Dialectical imagery uses the force of severance against the threat of preservation (tradition), and dialectical imagery is transmitted to experience as a result of the instantaneous temporality of the present, which Benjamin famously called now-time [Jetzzeit]: "Dialectical imagery is a sudden emergence of imagery, in a flash" (AP, [N9,7], 473). (AP，[N9，7]，473)。 Benjamin is perhaps best known for this image of a 'flash' (ein aufblitzendes] and the corresponding image of historical experience, which is the release of the blasting force, the blasting force of present time, which explodes the "continuum of history." In two main contexts, he draws together the philosophy of historical time encapsulated by these images: the development of a new conception of cultural history, but the political diagnosis of the historic crisis in Europe at the beginning of World War II.

Benjamin does not see culture threatened by "barbarism," but rather that culture itself implies it:

Barbarism lurks precisely in the concept of culture, which, as the foundation of values, is indeed not independent of the processes of production from which these values originate, but independent of those in which they survive. In this way they deify the latter, even if the latter is barbaric. (AP，[N5a，7]467——8)

The concept of culture as a heritage is "fetishistic" for Benjamin: "culture appears to be objectified", only when it is understood that "'reception' has a decisive importance ... Only then can we correct the materialization process in works of art" (SW 3, 267; 269)。 For Benjamin, however, the acceptance, or what he calls the "nachleben" of the work, is not merely externally, what happens to the work; it is constitutive to the "Vorleben" of the work itself, or to the conditions of its production. The idea of culture as a value makes these conditions of production themselves invisible, and as the work itself changes, they themselves "participate in a process of constant change."

A materialist cultural history would restore these two sets of changing conditions (before and after) and the conflict between them, touching on "the origin of every moment of the present" because "it is the present, polarizing events to fore-and after-history." (SW 3, 261-2; AP, [N7a,8], 471) It is here, in his rethinking of the ontology of "acceptance", that the philosophical significance of Benjamin's interest in reproduction techniques [reproduction techniques] lies in this: with the concept of past and future lives, Benjamin established a new problematic for cultural studies.

The "culture" that Benjamin is interested in is not a self-disciplined area of value ("Values are independent of aesthetics, science, ethics ... even religious achievements). Rather, as the sociologist George Simmel (who Benjamin often quotes from the Philosophy of Money) put it, cultural history is "an element in the development of human nature" (Simmel, quoted in AP, [N14, 3], 480). In this regard, cultural studies are positioned in the realm of the materialist philosophy of history. The philosophy of history, on the other hand, insists on conceiving history as a whole. It is here that we inevitably encounter the Messianic structure of Benjamin's conception of history; however, it is not necessarily "theological", for what is now being said is the transformation of one conceptual structure from a philosophical text to another (Benjamin's favorite surrealist approach, "de-contextualization" and "defamiliarization"), which does not have the same meaning as it is in the original theological text.

In the quest for a non-Hegelian, non-developmental view of history as a whole, Benjamin, in On the Concept of History [Outlines of the Philosophy of History], depicts "present time" in a different and quasi-Messianic way: it is a "model" of Messianic time and "penetrated by fragments of Messianic time." He diagnosed the European crisis of 1939-40 as a crisis of world history, so that in this context, the "critical state now" takes on a theological-political tone in the text. "Revolutionary opportunities to fight for the oppressed past" have been likened to "messianic signs of what is to come" (SW 4, 396–7). Benjamin knew that such rhetoric would lead to misunderstanding. But the combination of his perceived sense of political urgency and isolation forced him to expand his conception of history beyond the state of philosophical research he had done, became a clear statement. As Benjamin had hoped, the power of language alone would overcome the dilemma of action (aporia) in his philosophy, which was still hermeneutic in nature (Osborne 1995). Formally, however, On the Concept of History [Outlines of the Philosophy of History] should be read as a series of fragments (in the sense of the early Romantics). Therefore, as far as the call of history as a whole is concerned, it is still categorically negative—and importantly, it is therefore incomplete. The whole of history cannot be presented. In this sense, Benjamin's final text recalls his earliest major work, the 1919 treatise The Critical Concept of German Romanticism: a gesture toward the philosophy of history to end the revised, "modern" version of the early Romantic plan.

Function function

Automaton automata

Autonomous Self-Discipline

Transitoriness is temporary

General General

New New

Newness Novelty

Novelty is new

Fable fables

Parable metaphor

Allegory

Constitution construction

Construction composition/construction

structure structure

Theme/thematic theme

subject theme

topic topic

Motif motif

disassociated separation

Disintegration disintegrates

continuity continuity

Continuum continuum

Figural figurative

Conception Ideas/Views

Concept concept

Perfection is complete

Consummates perfect

Fulfilment is complete

Completion is over

Notion views

Semblance appearance

Appereance/appear appears

Representation/reproduction

Manifest displayed/visible

Reveal revealed

Inner interior

Immanent is intrinsic

Construction composition/construction

Signify indicates

Significance meaning

Convention conventions

aesthetic/sensuality

sensory sensation/sensibility

Limitations

limit boundary

One-sideded one-sided

Ground/Ground/Foundation

Fundamental basic

found established

Foundational foundation

founding infrastructure

fund

basis foundation

particular/special

singular single

Multiplicity complex multiplicity

Primal primitive

Merely pure

Pure pure

partial part

Special special

Particular special/special phase

Distinctly obvious

Cognition cognition

Recognition cognition

Epistemology Epistemology