Myth and Metropolis E-Book

Graeme Gilloch

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 493

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

This is a lucid study of Walter Benjamin's lifelong fascination with the city and forms of metropolitan experience, highlighting the relevance of Benjamin's work to our contemporary understanding of modernity.

Leseprobe

MYTH ANDMETROPOLIS

Walter Benjamin and the City

Graeme Gilloch

Polity Press

Copyright © Graeme Gilloch 1996

The right of Graeme Gilloch to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 1996 by Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishers Ltd.

First published in paperback 1997.

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Contents

Acknowledgements

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

1    Urban Images: From Ruins to Revolutions

2    Urban Memories: Labyrinth and Childhood

3    Dialectical Images: Paris and the Phantasmagoria of Modernity

4    Urban Allegories: Paris, Baudelaire and the Experience of Modernity

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to a number of individuals and institutions who contributed to this book since its beginnings as a doctoral thesis at the University of Cambridge. I would especially like to thank John Thompson for his guidance, support and patience throughout. I would also like to thank Barry Sandwell who first introduced me to Benjamin’s work. I am grateful to David Frisby, Andrew Bowie, Jon Fletcher, Anthony Giddens, Hans-Joachim Hahn, Thomas Regehly (and the Kolloquium fur Kritische Theorie in Frankfurt am Main) and Charles Turner for their thoughtful comments, suggestions and ideas. All errors, omissions and oversights are of course mine.

I wish to express my gratitude to those institutions whose generous financial support made this book possible: the Economic and Social Research Council, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the British Council and especially the Leverhulme Trust.

I am grateful to the Akademie der Kunst in Berlin for access to their archives and to the T. W. Adorno-Archiv (Frankfurt am Main) and Suhrkamp Verlag and Harvard University Press for kindly giving permission to include archival and previously untranslated material from Benjamin’s work. (Harvard University Press will publish the first volume of a three-volume collection of selected essays of Walter Benjamin in the Fall of 1996.) I am also grateful to Telos Press Ltd. for permission to include material first published with them. I am grateful to Verso/New Left Books for permission to include material from One-Way Street and Other Writings, 1985 and Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, 1983, both by Walter Benjamin. Thanks are also due to Gill Motley and the staff at Polity Press and Blackwells for their patience and help.

I would especially like to thank Bernadette Boyle for all her encouragement and help. Above all, I wish to thank my parents, Audrey and Peter, for all their understanding, patience and support.

Every effort has been made to trace all the copyright holders but if any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangement at the first opportunity.

List of Abbreviations

Where possible, existing English language translations have been used. Other translations are my own. References to material in the Passagen-Werk are given by Konvolut number and page (e.g., J67,1, GS V, p. 438) or page of translation (e.g., N6,5, Smith ed., 1989, p. 57). The following abbreviations are used in the text:

GSGesammelte Schriften, vol I–VII, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, with the collaboration of Theodor Adorno and Gershom Scholem. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1974; Taschenbuch Ausgabe, 1991.ABTheodor W. Adorno – Walter Benjamin Briefwechsel 1928–40, ed. Henri Lonitz. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1994.APAesthetics and Politics: Debates between Bloch, Lukács, Brecht, Benjamin, Adorno, tr. and ed. Ronald Taylor, with an afterword by Frederic Jameson. London: Verso, 1980.BKBerliner Kindheit um Neunzehnhundert, with an afterword by Theodor Adorno. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1950.BRBriefe, ed. Gershom Scholem and Theodor Adorno. 2 vols. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1978.CBCharles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, tr. Harry Zohn. London: Verso, 1983.CORThe Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, ed. and annotated by Gershom Scholem and Theodor Adorno, tr. Manfred Jacobson and Evelyn Jacobson, with a foreword by Gershom Scholem. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994.CP‘Central Park’, tr. Lloyd Spencer, New German Critique, 34 (Winter 1985), pp. 28–58.GERThe Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem 1932–1940, ed. Gershom Scholem, tr. Gary Smith and André Lefèvre, with an introduction by Anson Rabinbach. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992.ILLIlluminations, ed. with an introduction by Hannah Arendt, tr. Harry Zohn. London: Fontana, 1973.MODMoscow Diary, ed. Gary Smith, tr. Richard Sieburth, with a preface by Gershom Scholem. Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1986.OGTDThe Origin of German Tragic Drama, tr. John Osbourne, with an introduction by George Steiner. London: Verso, 1985.OWSOne-Way Street and Other Writings, tr. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter, with an introduction by Susan Sontag. London: Verso, 1985.UBUnderstanding Brecht, tr. Anna Bostock, with an introduction by Stanley Mitchell. London: Verso, 1983.

Introduction

Benjamin and the city

In Konvolut N of his ill-fated study of nineteenth-century Paris, the Passagenarbeit, Walter Benjamin writes: ‘the pathos of this project … I find every city beautiful’ (N1,6, Smith ed., 1989, p. 44). What is remarkable about this candid statement is its location in a vast study dedicated to the critical revelation of the modern metropolis as the phantasmagoric site of mythic domination, to the representation of the city as the essential locus of modern capitalism and its attendant evils of exploitation, injustice, alienation and the diminution of human experience. It is both characteristic and informative that Benjamin should choose to situate such an affirmation of the urban complex in a study specifically concerned with the grotesque character of the city and the dehumanizing tendencies of metropolitan daily life. For Benjamin, the great cities of modern European culture were both beautiful and bestial, a source of exhilaration and hope on the one hand and of revulsion and despair on the other.1

The city for Benjamin was magnetic: it attracted and repelled him in the same moment. He was an urbanite, a metropolitan whose life was split between two cities: Berlin, where he was born, and Paris, to which he fled in 1933. Gershom Scholem notes that ‘Benjamin had a deep love for Berlin’ (1976, p. 176). Benjamin himself recognized that Berlin was a vital backdrop to, and component of, his work. In a letter to Scholem of 17 April 1931, he remarks: ‘the most sophisticated civilisation and the most “modern” culture are not only part of my private comfort; some of them are the very means of my production’ (Scholem, 1982, p. 232). Berlin was, as Bertolt Brecht notes, ‘impossible to live in, impossible to leave’,2 and it was indeed only under the most desperate and compelling of circumstances that Benjamin did leave his native city eventually. By early 1933, the rise of the National Socialists in Germany had finally made continuing residence in Berlin too hazardous. Benjamin left Berlin for the last time in March and travelled to Paris, a city which he had visited on numerous occasions and for which he had frequently expressed a predilection. Scholem recalls a conversation with Benjamin in Paris in 1927 in which ‘Benjamin said that he would like best to settle in Paris because he found the city’s atmosphere so much to his liking’ (1982, p. 130). Indeed, Benjamin resisted leaving the city that had adopted him even when France was invaded in 1940. Despite numerous entreaties and warnings from friends and colleagues at the Institute for Social Research, most notably Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, who were themselves safely ensconced in exile in New York, Benjamin refused to leave his adored Paris until it was too late. His eventual attempt to escape to Spain was thwarted at the last moment, and, tragically, he committed suicide on the border in September 1940.

Although the city was beautiful, beloved, congenial, and vital for his literary production, Benjamin was perhaps never fully convinced that the urban complex could be the site of lasting contentment. Indeed, his writings on the city are concerned with critically unmasking the delusions, pretensions and barbarism of precisely that urban environment and social milieu which he found so indispensable, so much a part of his ‘private comfort’. Hoffman notes that ‘urban life was essential to Benjamin, yet also barely tolerable’ (1983, p. 150). He both loved and loathed the city. It is this paradox, this unresolved tension, that lies at the heart of Benjamin’s fascination with the modern metropolis.

The modern city, its architecture, spaces, street life, inhabitants and daily routines are a recurring set of themes in Benjamin’s oeuvre. Benjamin produced a plethora of texts focusing on the character of urban experience and, in particular, a number of sketches of the cities that he visited during the mid- to late 1920s.3Denkbilder (‘thought-images’) was the general designation for a variety of texts that included a series of short cityscapes beginning with an impressionistic essay on Naples written around September/October 1924. A second such city portrait, ‘Moscow’ (1927), appeared as a result of Benjamin’s visit to the Soviet capital during the winter of 1926–7. More of these urban pen-pictures were to follow: ‘Weimar’ (June 1928), ‘Marseilles’ (October 1928–January 1929), an essay entitled ‘Paris, the City in the Mirror’ (January 1929), ‘San Gimignano’ (published 30 August 1929), and ‘North Sea’ (a sketch of the city of Bergen in Norway, completed on 15 August 1930).

In addition to these miniatures, Benjamin was engaged in the production of more extensive texts concerned with the description and analysis of the urban setting. In 1927 he embarked on an ever-expanding analysis of the Parisian arcades of the nineteenth century (the so-called Passagenarbeit or ‘Arcades Project’), an enterprise that from modest beginnings was to come to dominate all his intellectual endeavours. The project was to yield an exposé (‘Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century’) and nearly a thousand pages of notes, drafts and quotations. The longest section of this assemblage, Konvolut J, was concerned with the writings of Charles Baudelaire, and by 1937 Benjamin was planning to compose a separate, though intimately related, study of the poet. Intended as a model of the larger ‘Arcades Project’, Benjamin drafted and then rewrote the central section of this study under the titles ‘Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire’ and ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’. In addition to these Paris writings, Benjamin composed a lengthy essay recording his childhood impressions of the city of Berlin. Written in 1932, shortly before his exile, the ‘Berlin Chronicle’ was later to be rewritten for publication under the title ‘A Berlin Childhood around 1900’. These two texts stood in the closest relation to the Paris materials he had assembled, and indeed constituted methodological and historiographic experiments for the ongoing ‘Arcades Project’.

These were not Benjamin’s only texts on the theme of the city. Between 1927 and 1933 he was involved in the production of some eighty-four radio broadcasts (for Berliner Rundfunk and Südwest-deutscher Rundfunk in Frankfurt am Main). A number of these took facets of everyday life in Berlin as their subject-matter: for example, ‘Berlin Dialect’, ‘Street-Trade and the Market in Old and New Berlin’, ‘A Berlin Street Boy’ and ‘Tenement Building’.4 Furthermore, in his capacity as a literary reviewer, Benjamin wrote on several contemporary books dealing with city life, urban architecture and metropolitan experience, the most important of which were concerned with the writings of his friend and colleague on the ‘Arcades Project’, Franz Hessel.5 The Denkbilder, then, may be seen as the point of departure for an enduring preoccupation with the city.

There has been a tremendous upsurge of interest in Benjamin’s work since the publication of the Gesammelte Schriften began in 1974 under the editorship of Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser. This has been given added impetus recently by a number of exhibitions and international conferences staged to mark the fiftieth anniversary (1990) of Benjamin’s death and the centenary (1992) of his birth. Benjamin has been catapulted from relative obscurity to being regarded, particularly in Germany and France, but increasingly in Anglo-American circles as well, as one of the foremost intellectual figures of his generation.6 Although Benjamin’s fascination with the city is frequently mentioned by commentators, this theme has not proved a principal focus of sustained attention. His essays ‘Naples’ and ‘Moscow’ (and the ‘Moscow Diary’) have attracted little scholarly interest.7 They have been deemed, and largely dismissed as, ‘travel pieces’ (Smith ed., 1988, p. 18) and Sunday newspaper material (Buck-Morss, 1989, p. 27). More surprisingly, the Berlin studies have fared only moderately better. While it is true that a number of short articles have concerned themselves with these writings,8 there has been relatively little sustained analysis of Benjamin’s reflections on his native city, with the notable exception of Anna Stüssi’s thorough (but as yet untranslated) examination of ‘Berlin Childhood’. The Paris writings have fortunately attracted more systematic consideration. The publication of the (still untranslated) Passagenarbeit as the fifth volume of the Gesammelte Schriften in 1982 produced a spate of ‘special editions’,9 features and even a conference in Paris in 1985. Apart from Frisby’s stimulating analysis of Benjamin’s Paris writings as part of his Fragments of Modernity, it was not until 1989 that the first book-length examination in English of the ‘Arcades’ material was published (Buck-Morss’s The Dialectics of Seeing). More recently, the Paris writings have been discussed with reference to Benjamin’s critique of tradition (McCole, 1993), his Surrealist interests and motifs (Cohen, 1993), and with respect to the themes of melancholy and allegory (Pensky, 1993). It is strange that despite this recent proliferation of material, the significance of the earlier city writings for the Paris studies has not been explored in depth. With the exception of Buck-Morss’s study (1989),10 there has been little attempt to explore the relationships, interconnections, thematic continuities and contradictions in the various city writings taken as a whole.

This study provides a detailed reading and examination of Benjamin’s city writings with a view to uncovering such relationships. My aim is to identify and explore Benjamin’s critical insights into the character and experience of the metropolis, and thereby to indicate the methodological and thematic significance of his work for social theory. Benjamin’s texts seek to devise an innovative, appropriate mode of representation for the city. They examine and articulate the complex relationships between the organization of time, space and human activity in the urban environment. His writings attempt to give voice to the character and political significance of particular individual and collective experiences within the urban setting. His work resists both the one-dimensional negation and the blind affirmation of modern social forms, and instead presents an appreciative, critical theory of metropolitan life. Benjamin’s ambivalent vision of the city results in a sensitive and sophisticated reading of modern culture.

Benjamin’s enterprise is not free of difficulties, however. His texts present paradoxical or at best incomplete formulations. Far from in any sense solving the aporias of Critical Theory, he succeeds only in generating an equally elusive, enigmatic set of concepts. But within these paradoxes, and in his integration of a diverse assortment of elements from Marxism, Judaic mysticism, German Romanticism and avant-garde modernist approaches, Benjamin seeks to develop a set of highly original and illuminating textual practices which challenge accepted forms of social-theoretical discourse. His critical, redemptive reading of the city-as-text is complemented by his innovative, immanent writing of the text-as-city. My goal in this book is to explore these configurations of reading and writing, of ruination and redemption, of myth and the metropolis.

In the remainder of this introduction I will be concerned with an initial delineation of the principal themes and recurrent motifs of Benjamin’s city writings. Benjamin’s cityscapes appear to be underpinned by a number of intricately interconnected yet distinctive concerns which may be considered under the following rubrics: physiognomy, phenomenology, mythology, history, politics and text. These form a set of directions or co-ordinates to aid the navigation and mapping of his cityscapes.

Physiognomy

For Benjamin, the urban complex is the quintessential site of modernity. The social totality is crystallized in miniature in the metropolis. The city constitutes a monad: it is an entity that encapsulates the characteristic features of modern social and economic structures, and is thus the site for their most precise and unambiguous interpretation.11 In the spaces and structures of the modern metropolis, contemporary culture presents itself most readily and acutely for decipherment. It is thus through the critical reading of the structuring principles and practical modes of metropolitan life that Benjamin endeavours to construct a fragmentary but insightful critique of modern capitalist society and elaborate a set of imperatives for Critical Theory and revolutionary practice.

The notion of physiognomical reading is interwoven with Benjamin’s monadological approach.12 In his radio broadcast ‘Das dämonische Berlin’ Benjamin gives the following description of the writer Heinrich Heine von Hoffman as physiognomist:

he perceived the extraordinary … in specific people, things, houses, objects, streets etc. As you have perhaps heard, one calls people who are able to discern from people’s faces, from their gait, from their hands or from their head-shape, their character, occupation, or even their fate, ‘physiognomists’. Hoffman was less an observer [Seher] than a scrutinizer [Anseher]. That is the best German translation of ‘physiognomist’. A major concern of his scrutiny was Berlin, both the city and its inhabitants. (GS VII, p. 89)

In his cityscapes Walter Benjamin seeks to present urban ‘physiognomies’, readings or decipherments of the metropolitan environment in which the key to understanding social life is, on one level, located in the physical structure of the cities themselves. For Benjamin, the buildings, spaces, monuments and objects that compose the urban environment both are a response to, and reflexively structure, patterns of human social activity. Architecture and action shape each other; they interpenetrate. The metropolis constitutes a frame or theatre for activity. The buildings of the city, and its interior setting in particular, form casings for action in which, or on which, human subjects leave ‘traces’, signs of their passing, markers or clues to their mode of existence.13 Benjamin states that ‘living means leaving traces’ (CB, p. 169), and these traces left behind by the modern city dweller must be carefully preserved by the urban physiognomist, and their meaning deciphered. For Benjamin, the urban physiognomist is part archaeologist, part collector and part detective.14

The ‘character’ of a city may be read from its numerous faces. The city as a monad in turn contains within itself monadological fragments. Benjamin notes: ‘in thousands of eyes, in thousands of objects, the city is reflected’ (GS IV, p. 358). Whether it is the inconspicuous churches in Naples, the wooden hut nestling next to the tenement block in Revolutionary Moscow, the towering monuments to imperial glory in Berlin, or the various dream-houses (arcade, railway station, museum) in Paris, the city’s architecture forms a secret, unwritten ‘text’ to be ‘read’ by the urban physiognomist. Physiognomic reading is for Benjamin a critical enterprise, one which, though preoccupied with the external, superficial manifestations of the metropolis, none the less penetrates beneath the façades of things to reveal their true character.

Phenomenology

Benjamin is concerned with the physical structure of the city and the material objects found therein as a setting for, and as indices of, social activity. He seeks to identify and examine the mundane experiences of the urban population. He offers nothing less than a ‘micro-sociology of everyday life and of the city’ (Tacussel, 1986, p. 48). Benjamin is particularly interested in the minutiae and marginalia of the urban setting. His description of the French photographer Eugène Atget is almost a self-portrait in this respect:

Atget always passed by the ‘great sights’ and so-called ‘landmarks’; what he did not pass by was a long row of boot lasts; or the Paris courtyards, where from night to morning the hand-carts stand in serried ranks; or the tables after people have finished eating and left, the dishes not yet cleared away – as they exist in their hundreds of thousands at the same hour; or the brothel at Rue … No. 5, whose street number appears, gigantic, at four different places on the building’s façade. (OWS, pp. 250–1)

Benjamin himself ‘passed by’ the landmarks of the city, and instead was preoccupied with, and stressed the significance of, apparently banal and trivial features of the metropolis. His cityscapes seek to develop ‘a dialectical optic that perceives the everyday as the impenetrable and the impenetrable as the everyday’ (OWS, p. 237). They draw upon the most diverse elements: a disfigured beggar in Naples, a streetcar ride in Moscow, a small meeting-house in Berlin, the site of a double suicide, and the dilapidated Parisian shopping arcades on the brink of demolition and the often eccentric clientele that frequented them in their heyday.

The main themes of this phenomenology of the city are the fragmentation, commodification, interiorization and marginalization of experience. Benjamin is engaged in the representation of the city as ‘a landscape of noisy life’ (f°3, GS V, p. 1056). His cityscapes are concerned with changing patterns of street life and, in particular, the impact of the crowd upon the individual psyche. The hallmark of modern experience is ‘shock’. This in turn engenders forgetfulness and a distinctive form of memory, the mémoire involontaire. In addition, the accelerated tempo and new, machine-based rhythms of metropolitan life lead to a distinctively modern temporal sensibility rooted in the commodification of time (equation of time and money) and repetition (fetishism and fashion).

The character of economic practices and patterns of exchange assume an important place in Benjamin’s analysis. From the chaos of the Neapolitan street markets to the careful displays of artefacts in the arcades and department stores of Berlin and Paris, Benjamin is preoccupied with the city as the site of the commodity. He moves away from the traditional Marxist emphasis on forms of production, however, to explore modes of commodity display, advertising and consumption. It is not so much the experience of the alienated worker but that of the fetishizing customer which takes centre stage in these analyses. Benjamin draws upon and modifies Georg Lukács’s account of commodity culture as the reification of human consciousness and develops Georg Simmel’s account of the origins and consequences of fashion.

Benjamin focuses on the shifting relationship between interior and exterior spaces, public and private life. In ‘Naples’ he emphasizes the communal character of everyday life. A principal concern of the essay on Moscow is the abolition of the private domain through collectivization. By contrast, in his analyses of Berlin and Paris, he stresses the interiorization of social life and the erotic by the bourgeois private citizen. The bourgeois domicile is revealed as a gloomy, ramshackle site of imprisonment. The arcade itself is nothing other than a street transformed into an interior setting. Interiorization is bound up with the compart-mentalization of space and the removal of disruptive and disturbing figures from everyday life. The poor and the dispossessed vanish as modern ‘hygiene’ demands the institutionalization and confinement of the dead, the sick, the insane and the disabled.

Ernst Bloch gives the following description of Benjamin’s approach:

A sense for the peripheral: Benjamin had what Lukács so drastically lacked: a unique gaze for the significant detail, for what lies alongside, for those fresh elements which, in thinking and in the world, arise from here, for the individual things which intrude in an unaccustomed and non-schematic way, things which do not fit in with the usual lot and therefore deserve particular, incisive attention. Benjamin had an incomparable micro-philological sense for this sort of detail, for this sort of significant periphera, for this sort of meaningful incidental sign. (Smith ed., 1988, p. 340)

One of Benjamin’s principal goals is to give voice to the ‘periphera’, the experiences of those whom modern forms of order strive to render silent and invisible. Objects that are obsolete, outdated and ridiculous are salvaged and made to tell their tale. The sauntering flâneur, the self-conscious dandy, the loudmouthed beggar, the suffering prostitute, the wretched ragpicker: marginal, disregarded figures inhabit Benjamin’s pages on the city. The ‘invisible’ are made visible; the mute are given a voice. Benjamin’s ‘phenomenology’ of the city is an attempt to comprehend the experience of modernity via the examination of some of its most eccentric and despised representatives.15

Mythology

A key feature of Benjamin’s writings on the metropolitan environment is his identification and critical analysis of the mythic. His decipherment of the city from the objects and architecture of the urban complex and his consideration of the forms of experience encountered therein fundamentally combine to unmask the modern metropolis as the site of the phantasmagoric and the mythic. It is important to recognize that although Benjamin uses the term ‘myth’ in a number of contrasting ways, these different meanings are seldom explicitly formulated or clarified.16 ‘Myth’ appears to have at least a fourfold significance for him: as fallacious thought, as compulsion, as tyranny, and as a metaphorical device.

First, Benjamin uses the term to refer to erroneous thought and misrecognition. According to this view, which is clearly derived from the Enlightenment tradition, ‘myth’ refers to archaic forms of perception and experience. Myths are stories which served to explain and account for natural occurrences, catastrophes and other phenomena with reference to superhuman beings, spirits, demons and magic. Myth is rooted in superstition, ignorance and fear. The destructive forces of irrationality, obsession and intoxication hold sway in mythic consciousness. Myths are fallacious ideas, illusions and fantasies. Benjamin describes the domain of myth as ‘a primeval forest where words swing like chattering apes from bombast to bombast, avoiding at all costs the ground which would disclose their inability to stand – for this is the Logos where they should stand and give an account of themselves’. (GS I, p. 163, cited by Menninghaus in Smith ed., 1988, p. 298). Myth stands in opposition to true knowledge, both the revelations of religious thought and the rational understanding of the world provided by modern science.

The second sense in which Benjamin uses the term is with reference to creaturely compulsion. Myth is the antithesis of truth and human freedom. Nature is not only incomprehensible but also omnipotent. Myth involves human powerlessness in the face of unalterable natural laws and the subordination of reason before the blind, uncontrollable forces of the natural environment. Human actions are dominated by the necessities of instinctual drives and desires. In myth, human life is not self-determined or self-governed, but rather is subject to fate and the whim of the gods. This human impotence has an important temporal dimension. The rhythms of nature hold sway over mythic consciousness, which, as a result, has a cyclical character. Renewal is followed by decay and then by renewal once more. Benjamin notes: ‘the essence of mythic events is recurrence’ (D10a,4, GS V, p. 178). Human beings, like nature, are doomed to the continual repetition of what has gone before. Myth is the unchanging, a state of apparent ‘timelessness’.

Third, Benjamin uses the term ‘myth’ to denote the reversal or inversion of this human submission to nature in the modern period. Modernity presents itself as the end of myth. On the one hand, it is the epoch of rational thought and understanding, and on the other, the scientific and technological accomplishments born from this knowledge bring ever greater liberation from the compulsions of necessity. For Benjamin, the modern epoch has brought neither the furtherance of enlightened thought nor the realization of reason; instead, modernity is characterized by a reversion to, or the continuing domination of, mythic forms. The destructive energies of myth proliferate in the modern world in new guises. For Benjamin, prefiguring the critique of the Enlightenment and its consequences that Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer were to develop in their 1947 study Dialectic of Enlightenment, enslavement by natural forces has been transformed into the enslavement of nature. Technology and instrumentalism are not indicative of liberation, but are manifestations of a new epoch of illusion, ignorance and barbarism. Myth becomes human tyranny.17 The natural world has become ‘disenchanted’ only for the purposes of avaricious exploitation. According to Horkheimer and Adorno, ‘what men want to learn from nature is how to use it in order to wholly dominate it and other men’ (1986, p. 4). Human beings come to worship their own products in commodity fetishism. The modern individual is governed by the unchanging rhythms of the machinery he or she must serve. The industrial production line is the modern manifestation of repetition. The endless stream of identical artefacts and the cyclical character of fashion are the contemporary, phantasmagoric manifestations of recurrence. Modern capitalism is to be understood as a reconfiguration of the archaic and an intensification of myth. Modernity has not progressed beyond ‘prehistory’, but instead constitutes ‘a perpetual relapse into the always-the-same of myth’ (Wolin, 1986, p. 211). Benjamin notes: ‘as long as there is still a beggar, there is still myth’ (K6,4, GS V, p. 505).

The metropolis is the principal site of the phantasmagoria of modernity, the new manifestation of myth. Frisby writes: ‘the world of myth permeates the modern world of newness in such a way that, along with the Surrealists, one can speak of the creation of modern myths of urban life’ (1988, p. 208). The city proclaims itself as the triumph of culture and civilization over the natural, as a fortress built against mythic forces. Benjamin writes with irony:

Great cities – whose incomparable sustaining and reassuring power encloses those at work within them in the peace of a fortress and lifts from them, with the view of the horizon, awareness of the ever-vigilant elemental forces – are seen to be breached at all points by the invading countryside. Not only by the landscape, but by what in untrammelled nature is most bitter: ploughed land, highways, night sky that the veil of vibrant redness no longer conceals. The insecurity of even the busiest areas puts the city dweller in the opaque and truly dreadful situation in which he must assimilate, along with isolated monstrosities from the open country, the abortions of urban techtronics. (OWS, p. 59; see also Ila,8, GS V, p. 284)18

The metropolis is a monument to the conquest and subjugation of nature by humankind, and constitutes the principal site of human progress, of the wonders and marvels of technological innovation. Through its tireless parades of novelties and its bombastic monuments, exhibitions and museums, the modern metropolis presents a deceptive vision of past and present. The promises of continual progress and endless improvement are among the mystifications of capitalism. The city is home not to critical thought, but to the false consciousness engendered by bourgeois ideology, to the myths of the modern.

The fourth sense in which Benjamin uses the term ‘myth’ is as a trope or metaphor. Just as the city is imbued with the mythic, so too are Benjamin’s cityscapes. His writings make extensive and repeated reference to mythological figures to both comic and critical effect.19 The metropolitan labyrinth is home to Theseus and Ariadne. One encounters Orpheus and Euridice saying their farewells in the railway station and, on another occasion, at the threshold of the modern underworld, the Paris Metro. This amusing and playful use of mythic figures serves to parody modern bourgeois neoclassicism and the pretensions accompanying the so-called heroism of modern life, a notion explored in Benjamin’s writings on Baudelaire. These mythological figures have a more serious purpose as well, however; for they offer clues to those who seek to defeat monstrous powers and facilitate the overcoming of myth. The Critical Theorist must also employ cunning if what is precious is to be saved from the deceitful forces of myth.

For Benjamin, myth is not simply to be equated with delusion and misrecognition. Myth contains within it positive elements and potentialities which must be preserved and utilized. In his writings on Paris, for example, Benjamin characterizes the commodity culture of the nineteenth century as a dream-world, the materialization, albeit in distorted form, of genuine desire and aspirations. Furthermore, certain forms of mythic experience may be valuable. Benjamin emphasizes the positive and utopian moments that may be contained within mimesis, play, intoxication and intuition.20 Benjamin’s dialectical vision of myth is perceptively identified by Lindner, who views it with some disquiet:

Either it should – against civilising rationality – gain access to a reconstituted mythology and make a claim for myth in the sense of a liberated sensuality, polyvalence, fantasy and play, or it should denounce modern rationality itself as the exacerbation of myth in the sense of fate, spell, compulsive repetition, and fetishism … [Benjamin] evades exactly such alternatives. (1986, p. 39)

Benjamin’s evasion is more illuminating than infuriating, however. He does not advocate the one-dimensional negation of mythic forms, but demands critical redemption. Menninghaus astutely observes that Benjamin’s work is concerned with the ‘dialectic of breaking apart and rescuing myth’ (Smith ed., 1988, p. 323). Benjamin’s dialectical understanding of myth, his shifting and ambivalent understanding of its positive and negative moments, is intimately related to his fluctuating response to the metropolis, the home of myth.

History

A vital theme in Benjamin’s cityscapes is his critique of the city as the locus of an illusory and deceptive vision of the past. False history, myth, is to be liquidated through the revelation and representation of a different, hidden past. This in turn is to be achieved by adherence to a particular set of critical and redemptive historiographic principles. Benjamin articulates a number of models for the development of a demythologizing critical theory of society:

1    Archaeological: an approach concerned with the salvation and preservation of the objects and traces of the past that modern society threatens to destroy.

2    Memorial: Benjamin exhorts the Critical Theorist to oppose the modern propensity for amnesia, to remember those whose struggles and sufferings in the past would otherwise be forgotten.

3    Dialectical: Benjamin develops his conception of the dialectical image, the momentary mutual recognition and illumination of past and present.

In his methodological and historiographic writings for his study of Paris in particular,21 Benjamin claims that the modern is not to be understood as the end-point of a continuous, linear, developmental process or as the culmination of human endeavour and achievement. Modernity does not constitute the height of civilization but rather only a refinement or fine tuning of barbarism. He denounces the smug complacency inherent in the concept of ‘progress’. For Benjamin, ‘that epoch which understood itself as the embodiment of modernity, of technical and scientific progress, and of universal history in a historicist sense, is to be represented in the final analysis as the catastrophic scene of failed emancipation’ (Lindner, 1986, p. 37). Benjamin regards history as permanent catastrophe and ceaseless ruination. For him, ‘progress’ is merely the nothing-new that struts boastfully around the city streets in the borrowed garb of the latest fashions. It is the always-the-same dressed up as the ever-new. On the one hand, Benjamin attempts to reveal novelty, fashion and innovation as the unchanging, and on the other, to unmask the superficially enduring (class society and the hegemony of the bourgeoisie) as the temporary and transitory. His task then is to reveal the complex interrelations between the old and the new, the most ancient and the most recent, to articulate the prehistory of modernity.

The modern reveals itself as ruin. This notion of ruination is rooted in a recognition of the importance of an object’s ‘afterlife’. For Benjamin, the truth of an object or event is only discernible when it is on the point of oblivion. This is more than a simple appreciation of the wisdom of hindsight, however. The origins of such a conception of ruin and afterlife are to be found in Benjamin’s understanding of the task of criticism derived from early Romanticism and his preoccupation with the allegorical gaze underpinning the German Baroque. For Benjamin, the truth content of a thing is released only when the context in which it originally existed has disappeared, when the surfaces of the object have crumbled away and it lingers precariously on the brink of extinction. This destruction of deceptive appearance facilitates a process of reconstruction. Benjamin is fundamentally concerned with the rescue and preservation of the artefacts, images and ideas liberated through this process, and with their subsequent reuse or refunctioning in the pressing political struggles of the moment. History itself is a construction of the present age and must always be read backwards from the ruins which persist in the here and now. It is to be conceived as both a destructive and fundamentally redemptive enterprise.

Politics

Benjamin’s writings constitute an account of history-as-catastrophe, a vision which is concerned with the representation of the city as a locus of perpetual suffering and enduring conflict. In his consideration of Bertolt Brecht’s series of poems Handbook for City-Dwellers, Benjamin writes: ‘in this handbook the city is seen as the arena of the struggle for existence and of the class struggle. … Cities are battlefields’ (UB, pp. 60–1). Such battles not only determine the shape of contemporary society but also, because history is generated by the fusion of past and present, fundamentally give form to the whole course of human history. Benjamin’s advocacy of alternative and subversive historical practices, of what might be termed a ‘counter-history’, not only aims to unmask the modern city as the pre-eminent site of bourgeois hegemony and myth, but also seeks to empower the marginal and the oppressed.

To this end, the cityscapes offer a phenomenology of the marginal figures of the metropolitan environment. They relate the experiences of the child, the prostitute, the beggar, the rag-picker and others. Indeed, for Benjamin, it would seem that the dispossessed and despised occupy a privileged position within the domain of knowledge. They have access to a vision of society that is dereifying and critically negating. In ‘Berlin Chronicle’ Benjamin writes: ‘only those for whom poverty or vice turn the city into a landscape in which they stray from dark till sunrise know it in a way denied to me’ (OWS, p. 316). Those who inhabit the fringes of the urban complex become a source of revolutionary insight and illumination. A word of caution is needed here. While Wohlfarth notes that for Benjamin ‘only the deformed can rectify the world’s deformity’ (Wohlfarth, 1986a, p. 147), it is important to recognize that Benjamin is not engaged in some crude elevation of the Lumpenproletariat to the central position in modern class struggle. Indeed, there is reason for treating Wohlfarth’s characterization with caution. It is important to realize that the ragpicker, the prostitute and the beggar are principally metaphorical figures for Benjamin, constituting emblems or models of and for redemptive practice. They are not alone in this respect. Benjamin also draws upon a host of bourgeois social types in his city writings: the middle-class child, the poet, the flâneur, the dandy and the gambler. These figures too are important sources of illumination within the metropolitan environment. His concern is thus not so much with the ‘deformed’ as with outsiders irrespective of class position. Furthermore, such bourgeois types are, on occasion, compared in a somewhat naïve manner with the poor and destitute. The relationships and correspondences posited by Benjamin between the flâneur and the sandwichman, the gambler and the assembly-line worker, the poet and the prostitute, sometimes reveal a perplexing and unfortunate lack of discrimination. Indeed, his attitude towards such figures is frequently myopic, unsympathetic and occasionally even crass.

Benjamin’s fascination with such figures is bound up with his wish to explore and identify the relationship between the intellectual and the metropolitan population. The role of the intellectual as historian and writer in the revolutionary struggle is a theme of great importance in Benjamin’s city and other writings. Does the intellectual place him or herself at the service of the urban masses as their instrument or their leader? Alternatively, should he or she seek to preserve his or her independence from the urban population because of the depersonalizing, dehumanizing tendencies of modern mass society? Such questions animate his essay on Moscow and related texts, and also resurface in the Passagenarbeit, where his political disillusionment gradually unfolds. The affirmation of the radical potential of the so-called dreaming collectivity that informed this work, perhaps as late as 1935, gave way to an increasingly pessimistic rejection of the dehumanized metropolitan masses. Crudely put, while in the initial phases of the ‘Arcades Project’ the urban populace benignly prefigures the socialist revolution, in the later stages it ominously foreshadows the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft. At different moments, then, the metropolitan population, like the city itself, embodies the promise of Heaven or the terror of Hell.

My overall concern is twofold. First, I wish to suggest that in his loving and loathing of the modern city, Benjamin’s delineation of features vital to a critical theory of modern social forms is both highly idiosyncratic and peculiarly ambivalent. His work defies simple categorization, and subverts orthodox versions of historical materialist doctrine. As a result, attempts to locate Benjamin firmly within the historical materialist tradition have not always illuminated his elusive concepts with the precision and subtlety they deserve; nor have they helped to interpret and clarify Benjamin’s sometimes vague, continually shifting convictions. Benjamin’s city writings contain some important insights into his political views, for they crucially incorporate his uncertain and hesitant responses to the socio-political upheavals, tendencies and imperatives of his time. On one level, the cityscapes are perhaps best seen as evidence of his ambivalence towards mass political movements and his consequent reluctance to make firm political commitments. His visit to Moscow in 1926–7 provided him with an opportunity to examine at close quarters the impact of the Soviet system on social and cultural life. ‘Moscow’ and ‘Moscow Diary’ may be seen as constituting indices of Benjamin’s political naïvety, unease and, eventually, his growing disenchantment with the Communist regime he encountered in post-Revolutionary Russia. While Benjamin’s Berlin writings are fundamentally underpinned by his horror at the rise of Nazism and the experience of forced emigration, they do not appeal directly to proletarian resistance and struggle; in their depiction of a bourgeois childhood, they instead recall a period of impotence before the city. While there is, as will be seen, a distinctive political dimension to the Berlin texts, it is hard to reconcile any straightforward vision of Benjamin-as-Marxist with his concern with the magic and misery of childhood, with the character of personal memory and the fate of long-dead school friends and relatives. The Paris writings emphasize Benjamin’s paradoxical attempt to contribute to the historical materialist tradition, not so much via a consideration of Marx, proletarian movements or the Paris Commune as through the analysis of Baudelaire, bourgeois consumer fantasies and the World Exhibition. Scholem, a not disinterested observer in these matters, writes: ‘to be sure, he regarded the bourgeois world with considerable cynicism, but even this did not come easily to him’ (1982, p. 54).

My second concern is to show that, although Benjamin does not always observe his own literary prescriptions and can be said to occupy at best a somewhat marginal position within the discourse of historical materialism, this does not mean that he has little to offer modern Critical Theory. Paradoxically, and hence for Benjamin most appropriately, it is precisely in the points where he diverges from the imperatives of more orthodox Marxist thinking that his enduring significance is located: in his critique of the notion of progress and the increasing technological control of nature by humankind as mythic domination; in his concern with the redemption of the forgotten sufferings and the retrieval of the lost utopian aspirations of past generations; in his insistence upon the critical vision and political role of the marginal figures in modern society; and in his articulation of ‘autobiography’ as subversive historical practice. It is not so much, then, in his tortuous Marxism that Benjamin’s most precious insights are situated, but in his equally problematic admixture of Messianism and Modernism. Benjamin offers an intermittent, non-systematic, but stimulating engagement with, and critique of, the Marxist tradition.

Text

How is the writer to capture the momentary and fleeting? How is he or she to express the ineffable, to represent the contingent? To give form to the modern – this task, Herculean in character, was for Baudelaire that of the poet of modernity. Benjamin is also concerned in his city writings with the problem of representation.

In his essay ‘San Gimignano’ he writes: ‘to find words for that which one has before one’s eyes – how difficult that can be’ (GS IV, p. 364). His readings of the metropolitan landscape involve an attempt to overcome this problem through the development of an innovative and experimental literary style.22 A number of vital, interconnected textual imperatives run through Benjamin’s representation and critique of the modern metropolis: an imagistic approach; a concern with perspective, a demand for immediacy and for immanence.

In his writings Benjamin is preoccupied with the visual and imagistic. The early cityscapes are Denkbilder, ‘thought-images’, which seek to portray the city, be it Naples, Moscow or Marseilles, through a kind of journalistic reportage. The Berlin texts are primarily composed of constellations of remembered images (autobiography and personal narrative are attempts to recapture the ‘at first sight’ of the city), and in the Passagenarbeit Benjamin stresses the visual character of history and the methodological imperative of the dialectical image. The cityscapes are attempts, therefore, to translate the seen into the written, the picture into the word, to articulate what Buck-Morss refers to in the title of her 1989 study as ‘the dialectics of seeing’.

Photography and motion pictures provide models for the depiction of the urban complex. Benjamin exhorts writers to ‘start taking photographs’ (UB, p. 95) and to deploy themselves ‘at important points in the sphere of imagery’ (OWS, p. 238).23 It is film, however, which is most important for Benjamin in this visualization of the urban environment. He notes that ‘only film commands optical approaches to the essence of the city’ (OWS, p. 298); this is because it is able to capture the flux and movement of the urban environment, to record the spontaneous and the ephemeral.24 The shifting vantage-point of the film camera is also important. Benjamin’s concern with the depiction of the urban is interwoven with a conscious refusal of or resistance to the presentation of an overarching, integrated, coherent view of the city as a whole. The imagistic approach highlights the fleeting, fluid character of modern metropolitan existence. It denies a systematic, stable perspective. The representation of the city demands a discontinuous, fragmented literary form and style.25 Benjamin is engaged in an archaeological excavation of the city to salvage its fragments so that they can be refunctioned. Each element recovered is monadological, containing within it the totality whence it came, and is also illuminating as part of the new montage in which it is assembled.

The imperatives of an imagistic and fragmentary literary form result in Benjamin’s rejection of conventional narrative structures and his insistence upon more direct, immediate textual practices. He states bluntly:

Significant literary work can only come into being in a strict alteration between action and writing; it must nurture the inconspicuous forms that better fit its influence in active communities than does the pretentious universal gesture of the book – in leaflets, brochures, articles and placards. Only this prompt language shows itself equal to the moment. (OWS, p. 45)

Benjamin’s search for a ‘prompt language’ involves engagement with the quotation and with the principle of montage. Diverse, incongruent elements are rudely dragged from their intellectual moorings to be reassembled in radical and illuminating configurations. The ‘shock-like’ character of modern social life finds its expression in this montage of heterogeneous fragments.26

Benjamin is engaged in the bold, if flawed, venture of making historical materialist discourse ‘Surrealistic’.27 He asserts the affinity of a radical and thoroughgoing political critique and formal literary innovation. In ‘The Author as Producer’, he interweaves formal textual concerns and political orientation: progressive (modernist) literary techniques go hand in hand with progressive political (historical materialist) commitments. Benjamin argues:

I should like to demonstrate to you that the tendency of a work of literature can be politically correct only if it is also correct in the literary sense. … [T]he correct political tendency of a work extends also to its literary quality: because a political tendency which is correct comprises a literary tendency which is correct. (UB, p. 86)

Benjamin seeks to produce texts which not only give an account of the city, but have metropolitan experiences fundamentally embedded within them: form and content coalesce. The dominance of the visual, the predilection for the fragmented and the concern with the immediate and with ‘shock’ are both definitive characteristics of modern urban life and central formal properties of Benjamin’s texts. As a modernist, Benjamin regards the city as a space of intoxication, of excitement and distraction. As a historical materialist, he rejects it as the site of bourgeois domination. Fluctuating between these positions, his texts both embody and resist those tendencies he considered central to, and characteristic of, modern capitalist society. In his loving and loathing of the urban complex, Benjamin may be seen as deeply enmeshed in those paradoxes that constitute the ‘heroism of modern life’.28

In this study I trace and analyse the complex unfolding of these themes from their initial announcement (Benjamin’s ‘noteworthy and important observations’) and incipient formulation in the essays on Naples and Moscow (the earliest, most detailed and arguably most important of the city Denkbilder) to their fuller articulation and more detailed exposition in the Berlin and Paris writings. In stressing this thematic continuity, however, it is important to remember that even in their most expansive formulation in the Passagenarbeit, Benjamin’s city writings remain fragmentary, broken and disconnected. His cityscapes do not form a neat, linear, sequential series. They do not culminate in the postulation of a definitive account of the experience of modernity. His archaeology of the metropolis leads ever deeper into the underworld of modern experience, delving ever further into the rich complexities of urban social life. But his writings are ‘rhapsodic’ and repetitive, rather than systematic and cumulative. There is elaboration rather than development. The cityscapes involve a circling, a continual return to the same loci, the same figures, the same objects, but each time from a different direction, from a shifted vantage-point. In Benjamin’s text-as-city, just as in the labyrinth of the modern metropolis, there is continual movement but no progress.29

1

Urban Images: From Ruins to Revolutions

Naples

Introduction

My concern in this chapter is to examine Benjamin’s initial attempts to represent the urban environment and its population, to give voice to his fascination with the city. Although not the only such cityscapes written by Benjamin in the early to mid-1920s, his essays on Naples and Moscow constitute the most thematically developed and methodologically explicit of these texts. A detailed critical reading of them illuminates the significance and the limitations of the Denkbild as a form of critical social analysis. It is my contention that these two formative texts introduce motifs and techniques whose elaboration and refinement became key aspects of Benjamin’s subsequent writing.

The year 1924 was a watershed in Walter Benjamin’s intellectual and personal life. He travelled to the island of Capri around the end of April to join a party of friends, among them Ernst Bloch and Erich and Lucie Gutkind. His stay, broken by a few excursions to the Italian mainland, lasted some six months. A number of factors prompted the trip. His principal goal was to find a place in which he could work undisturbed on his Habilitationsschrift (his now famous study of Baroque drama entitled Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels1) for the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main. But Scholem points out that Benjamin had other important reasons for wanting to escape his native city at this particular time. On the one hand, Capri offered itself as a place of much-needed refreshment, a sanctuary from pressing family anxieties and marital discord;2 on the other, it was at that time an inexpensive place to live, an important consideration for Benjamin, whose financial situation was always precarious and frequently disastrous.

While on Capri, Bloch introduced Benjamin to Georg Lukács’s recently published History and Class Consciousness. Benjamin’s avid reading of this seminal text was his first serious engagement with historical materialist thought, with which he was to have an uneasy relationship for the rest of his life. Benjamin’s new-found enthusiasm for Marxist ideas, kindled by the writings of Lukács, was fuelled by someone else he encountered on Capri: the Bolshevik actress and theatre director from Riga, Asja Lacis. She was to prove a decisive influence upon the rest of Benjamin’s life and work.3

In his letter to Scholem of 16 September 1924, Benjamin mentions a visit to Naples and notes: ‘I have collected a lot of material on Naples, noteworthy and important observations that I may be able to develop into something’ (COR, p. 250). This ‘something’ was to be a short essay, written in conjunction with Lacis during the ensuing weeks in Italy, simply entitled ‘Naples’. It was eventually published in the Frankfurter Zeitung of 19 August 1925.4 It is perhaps not surprising, given the constellation of pressing personal and intellectual concerns outlined above, that critics and commentators have focused on the progress of the Habilitationsschrift and/or Benjamin’s romantic entanglements during this period. But as a consequence, his essay on Naples has received scant attention (with a few notable exceptions). It is precisely the plethora of Benjamin’s other pressing preoccupations, however, that makes this essay so intriguing. Given his emotional and intellectual concerns and crises in the summer of 1924, why did Benjamin choose to write about Naples?

The first part of this chapter consists of a detailed exploration of Benjamin’s essay in an attempt to answer this question. ‘Naples’ contains within it the genesis and tentative initial articulation of a number of vital methodological and thematic considerations. Susan Buck-Morss astutely notes that in the Naples essay, ‘hardly noticeable to the reader, an experiment is underway, how images, gathered by a person walking the streets of a city, can be interpreted against the grain of idealist literary style’ (1989, p. 27). This experiment in the representation of the city was to culminate in the Passagenarbeit, Benjamin’s unfinished analysis of nineteenth-century Paris, regarding which Buck-Morss writes: ‘the moment [of origin] is arguably the summer of 1924, and the place is not Paris, but Italy’ (1989, p. 8). If Buck-Morss is correct – and certainly I agree with her analysis on this point – what Benjamin found ‘noteworthy and important’ during that summer day in Naples in 1924 was a series of insights and issues that were to come to dominate all his intellectual activities.

Buck-Morss perceptively identifies the essay as the starting-point for Benjamin’s enduring concern with the urban setting, and correctly notes that the essay on Naples has ‘central methodological import for the Passagen-Werk’ (1989, p. 27). She then writes somewhat dismissively, however, that ‘it is to be compared with those articles that still comprise the “travel” section of Sunday newspapers. There is no lack of humour or entertainment. There is no explicit political message’ (ibid.).5 Yet for Benjamin, the development of a ‘journalistic’ style, of an original, immediate literary form, is importantly interlaced with his political concerns. He states that ‘the newspaper is, technically speaking, the writer’s most important strategic position’ (UB, p. 91).6 Indeed, if one were to disregard ‘journalistic’ writings as politically inconsequential, then Benjamin’s oeuvre would shrink considerably. A recurrent theme of Benjamin’s texts on the city is the attempt to devise a mode or style of writing that in some way incorporates or embodies within it urban experience. As Buck-Morss herself recognizes, ‘the effect of technology on both work and leisure in the modern metropolis had been to shatter experience into fragments, and journalistic style reflected that fragmentation’ (1989, p. 23). ‘Naples’ is more than just a Sunday newspaper article or colour supplement feature. It is an attempt to capture the fleeting, momentary character of social life in a set of images. The Denkbilder are a form of literary ‘snapshot’, in which the ephemeral is frozen and preserved. The fragmentary style pursued by Benjamin in his writings on the city is in keeping with his understanding of the modern urban complex as the locus of the disintegration of experience and with his recognition of the need to salvage the disregarded debris of contemporary society. The city is a vast ruin demanding careful excavation and rescue. ‘Naples’ is an early example of Benjamin’s attempt to develop a redemptive critical practice. As will become evident, the Denkbild fundamentally prefigures the dialectical image, a notion which constitutes the crucial historiographic category in Benjamin’s analysis of Paris.

It is not so much this methodological import but a thematic schema which Buck-Morss emphasizes. She stresses the connection between ‘Naples’ and Benjamin’s subsequent writings on the city thus:

To the West is Paris, the origin of bourgeois society in the political-revolutionary sense; to the East, Moscow in the same sense marks its end. To the South, Naples locates the Mediterranean origins, the myth-enshrouded childhood of Western civilisation; to the North, Berlin locates the myth-enshrouded childhood of the author himself. (1989, p. 25)