Ground Zero: Walter Benjamin’s Urban Politics

Abstract

This article explores “urban atmosphere” through the lens of Walter Benjamin’s utopian politics. While a city can be defined as a built environment enjoying relative longevity, this stands in tension with the fact that cities are objects of intense technological transformation and hence transitory. Benjamin looked to the aesthetics of architectural purism (Le Corbusier) and surrealist encounter (André Breton) in order to find a redemptive obverse to the destructive technology of capitalist production. Walter Benjamin explores the theme of atmosphere in his 1929 essay on Surrealism. Here he attributes to André Breton the discovery of revolutionary energies concealed in the processes of technological obsolescence. Outmoded objects exude an atmosphere or mood that Surrealism seeks to convert into revolutionary energy. The modern city is the environment in which innumerable processes of obsolescence take place. Hence, Benjamin’s utopian politics inevitably centers on the revolutionary interpretation of urban atmospherics. His reflections on the “decay of aura” in his 1935 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” should then be placed within the framework of his urban theory. Once the connections between object obsolescence and Benjamin’s revolutionary theory are grasped, the shift from an aesthetics of concentration to one of distraction can be better understood. Zerstreuung (distraction) does not denote an individual lack of attention but instead a collective condition of somatic self-awareness. Through the media of modern art forms, the urban collective is capable of translating this self-awareness into revolutionary praxis.

Keywords:

• Walter Benjamin
• urban experience
• political utopianism
• avant-garde art and architecture
• modern technology

Notes

¹ Quotation from Walter Benjamin, “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia” (1929), in Walter Benjamin, Selected Works 2, ed. Michael W. Eiland, Howard Jennings and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2003), 210.

² Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 2003), 36, 47.

³ Cf. Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992).

⁴ Walter Benjamin, “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” in Selected Writings 3, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2002), 34.

⁵ Ernst Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia, trans. Anthony Nassar (Stanford: Stanford University Press, (1918) 2000), 192.

⁶ Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1999), 858.

⁷ Walter Benjamin, “Diary March–May 1931,” in Eiland, Jennings and Smith, Walter Benjamin, Selected Works 2, 701.

⁸ Benjamin/Eiland and McLaughlin, Arcades Project, 459.

⁹ Benjamin, “Surrealism,” 210.

¹⁰ Benjamin, “Paris,” 33.

¹¹ Benjamin, “Surrealism,” 210.

¹² Ibid.

¹³ Ibid.

¹⁴ Ibid.

¹⁵ Walter Benjamin, “Experience and Poverty” (1933), in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings 2, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1999), 735.

¹⁶ Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (1903), in On Individual and Social Forms, ed. Donald N. Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971).

¹⁷ Ibid., 329.

¹⁸ Ibid., 329, 330.

¹⁹ Benjamin, “Paris,” 38.

²⁰ Massimo Cacciari, Architecture and Nihilism: On the Philosophy of Modern Architecture, trans. Stephen Sartarelli (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993), 21.

²¹ Benjamin, “Experience and Poverty,” 733–4.

²² Walter Benjamin, “The Present Social Situation of the French Writer,” in Jennings, Eiland and Smith, Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings 2, 760.

²³ Author’s translation. Cf. Walter Benjamin, “A Different Utopian Will,” in Eiland and Jennings, Selected Writings 3, 135. For the German text, see Benjamin Gesammelte Schriften VII, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1991), 665–6.

²⁴ Benjamin, “Different Utopian Will,” 135.

²⁵ Cf. Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (Boston: Beacon, 1971).

²⁶ André Breton, “Surrealist Situation of the Object” (1935), in Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972), 261.

²⁷ Walter Benjamin, “Naples” (1925, written with Asja Lacis), in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings 1, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1996), 417.

²⁸ Ibid., 419.

²⁹ Walter Benjamin, “One-Way Street” (written 1923–6, published 1928), in Bullock and Jennings, Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings 1, 487.

³⁰ Ibid.

³¹ Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” in Bullock and Jennings, Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings 1, 245.

³² Walter Benjamin, “Moscow,” in Jennings, Eiland and Smith, Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings 2, 22.

³³ Ibid., 45.

³⁴ Ibid., 31.

³⁵ Walter Benjamin, “Theory of Distraction,” in Eiland and Jennings, Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings 3, 141.

³⁶ Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version,” in Eiland and Jennings, Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings 3, 119–20.

³⁷ Ibid.

³⁸ Benjamin, “Paris,” 36–7.

³⁹ Benjamin, “Work of Art,” 115–16, 117.

⁴⁰ Walter Benjamin, “Capitalism as Religion” (1921), in Bullock and Jennings, Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings 1, 288–9.

⁴¹ Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London: Verso, 2005), xv.

⁴² Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings 4, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2003), 397.

⁴³ Cf. Tigran Haas, ed., New Urbanism and Beyond: Designing Cities for the Future (New York: Rizzoli, 2008).

⁴⁴ Cf. Marshal McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964).

⁴⁵ Cf. David Harvey, Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution (New York: Verson, 2012).

⁴⁶ Cf. Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, trans. Michael Eldred (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1987).

⁴⁷ Benjamin, “Work of Art,” 119–20.

⁴⁸ Benjamin, “One-Way Street,” 487.

⁴⁹ Peter Sloterdijk, “Airquakes.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 41 (2009).

⁵⁰ For a collection of essays with a global perspective that reflect on this transition, cf. Richard Scholar, ed., Divided Cities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

⁵¹ Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution, trans. Robert Bononno (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2003).

⁵² Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon, 1964), xxiii.

⁵³ Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History: On the Destruction of Experience, trans. Liz Heron (London: Verso, 2007), 60.

⁵⁴ Author’s translation. Cf. Benjamin, “Different Utopian Will,” 135.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Brian Elliott

Brian Elliott studied Philosophy and English at the University of Edinburgh (1990–4) and Philosophy, Germanistik and Anglistik at the University of Freiburg (1994–8). He has published three books in English: Phenomenology and Imagination in Husserl and Heidegger (Routledge, 2005), Constructing Community (Rowman & Littlefield, 2010) and Walter Benjamin for Architects (Routledge, 2011), the latter having been translated into Japanese, Mandarin and Korean. His research is situated at the interface of political philosophy and urban theory. His current book is Natural Catastrophe: Climate Change in the Age of Neoliberal Governance (Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming 2016).