Charged by the reception of my Heidegger thread, I've decided to go for a @threadapalooza on Walter Benjamin, another thinker whose influence is far-reaching, despite being quirky, esoteric, and, in his own life-time, deeply unlucky. https://twitter.com/ZoharAtkins/status/1341445303061385219

Arendt, who along with Adorno, introduced Benjamin to the English speaking world, wrote about Benjamin's bad luck as a hallmark of his life. WB killed himself on the Spanish-French border, fleeing the Nazis (but had he not freaked out, would have made it to safety) 2/

One reason Benjamin is a (tragic) hero of mine is that he failed his dissertation (the Origin of the German Mourning Play); the work was too weird to land him a job, but is now a primary text in its own right. His intro is a meditation on the concept of "origins." 3/

Benjamin is best appreciated not for his theses, but for his range, his variations on a theme, his eccentric mash-ups of high and low culture; he was a Marxist, but he was also a collector (born into wealth) with a proclivity for mysticism. 4/

He owned Paul Klee's painting "Angelus Novus" yet lived a life of destitution, a genuine bohemian. 5/

The weirdness of Benjamin meant that his reception was fraught from the beginning; everyone felt like he was one of theirs (Adorno claimed him as a materialist, Arendt as a liberal individualist and Scholem as hermetic scholar-mystic. (This is true of many greats). 6/

Benjamin is probably the reason why we have Cultural Studies today. He popularized the idea that an object or a bumper sticker from everyday life was as worth contemplating as a canonical text. He knew his Plato, but the font of an awning was just as important. 7/

WB was obsessed with marginalia and trivialities. If "every document of civilization is a document of barbarism," then the critic must search for new texts and new ways of reading that don't simply reinforce the status quo. 8/

But Benjamin had no plan for the Revolution, and no belief in its inevitability. He turned Marxism into an internal experience, turning Marx's terms into poetry. 9/

His life's work--the Arcades Project--was (appropriately) never finished; the idea was to create a new work by collecting snippets from other works, and through collage, make them say something new. 10/

This is one of the best and most recurrent ideas in Benjamin, namely that creation is collection, and that words and ideas speak through "constellations" so that how we order things matters as much, if not more, than what we order. 11/

This, btw, is also a Talmudic idea: the laws of Shabbat open with a discussion of the prohibition of carrying from one domain to another (work isn't just about changing something's composition, but also it's positioning). 12

WB lived a life of serendipity, believing that coincidences were quasi-providential signs. Memory or re-collection, giving something attention, is an act not just of generosity, but revival as well as prophecy. This moment is singular. 13

Lots of folks talk about the singularity of the moment, from Heraclitus to Suzuki, but WB's angle is to note how the present moment is a citation of the past and will be citable in the future. 14

Redemption for him is a future moment in which all moments of the past are equally citable (which is absurd but brilliant)--it means that all moments are equal and also that no moment is lost to history. 15

WB's work is almost a reductio ad absurdum against egalitarianism, even though he seems sincere about it. To prioritize anything over anything else reflects a hierarchy that needs to be overcome. 16/

But WB wasn't "woke" in the way that today's "decolonizers" are, b/c he thought that all exoteric ideas were equally on the side of the oppressor. To locate the subaltern requires detective work (or being a pearl diver to use his metaphor), not simply taking a partisan side. 17/

In this way, he's kind of relativistic; to riff on the Groucho Marx line--any group that has members is already not marginalized. 18

Like Heidegger, WB flirts with pre-modern nostalgia while recognizing the inevitability of modernity. His essay on the Storyteller is needed as much today as it was when he wrote it, after WWI--it's about how "information" & "news" (and we might add "social media") obstruct...19

our capacity to pass stories of our own experience, intimately from person to person. We are so mediated, we've lost touch with the art of telling and hearing personal stories. 20

You might object that this is an exaggeration; after all, what about TV, novels, movies, etc.? But WB is talking about the role of the storyteller as an archetype. Storytellers are moralists and therapists whose task is to offer wisdom; this is different than the op-ed writer 21

or the pundit or the TedTalker. The storyteller, like Kafka's Hunger Artist, belongs to a world that is no more. S/he's been "disrupted" by something more efficient and scalable. 22

But like the slow food movement, WB recognizes that what's lost to scale is idiosyncrasy & what's lost to efficiency is singularity. The words on every page of WB's books are the same. But WB collected editions b/c he cared about what wasn't the same. 23

This is like the person who prefers driving over speed bumps and gravelly roads to a highway. It makes zero practical sense, but is kind of charming. 24

Another thing I admire about WB is that he was a literary critic whose works are at the same time works of literary art. Many critics are parasitic on what they write about, but WB's criticism is its own hybrid thing, like a good (Jewish) commentary. 25

In contrast to Heidegger, WB doesn't have one single topic on which he meditates, but if I had to sum him up I'd say his project is to cut through "spiritual materialism"--that is, to find the existential meaning in material culture and...26

to find the material conditions underlying theological and spiritual concepts. WB doesn't follow the reductive line that sees theology simply as the 'superstructure' to an 'economic base' 27

Instead he compares theology to a hunchback hidden inside of an automaton--nobody sees it pulling the strings, but it's there, with agency. Weird! https://www.sfu.ca/~andrewf/CONCEPT2.html /28

For me, this means that we can't hide between formulaic ideologies, but must recognize the inherent power and choice in our beliefs; we also must recognize that there's no escaping theology, in for secularists and non-believers. It's a structure of consciousness and culture.

The idea that theology is here to stay, even if we don't believe in God, is an important feature of post-secular thought from anthropologist Talal Asad to Zizek, Agamben, Charles Taylor, Aladair McIntyre. 31

WB predates French Deconstruction but is a herald of the idea that texts can move in multiple directions (an official and subversive one) 32

WB doesn’t just discover and attend to neglected texts, he also attempts to show that old texts can be read in unorthodox ways 33

Like Scholem who turned to Jewish mysticism for an alternative history to western rationalism, WB turned to early modern dramas—but this is one reason why WB failed his dissertation: 34

Besides not fitting an academic box, WB was anti-historicist (he didn’t believe the best way to understand the present was through a mechanistic model of causality of past events) 35

Instead, despite being a scholar, he had a belief that the past is perspectival and can only be known through the prism of how it speaks now. 36

Yerushalmi calls this idea “memory” (Zachor); skeptics who bemoan its post truthiness call it “revisionism”; 37

The last thing Benjamin wrote —to my knowledge—was a paragraph about how now is the time during which the Messiah might come at any moment. Weird—what does he mean??38

Clearly he doesn’t mean it literally, but his point is anti mechanistic (post Kantian)—the present moment is or can be free of what came before. The messianic moment is the moment liberated from linear causality. “Make it new” 39

Arendt likewise shares this idea when she grounds human freedom in “natality”—history isn’t about fate but being surprised, having the theory blown open by the event. 40

Adorno says great texts are messages in a bottle —addressed to a future time when they can only be fully understood. WB shares that Utopianism, but is more presentist. There’s no time other than now! Now is the time! He even coined a term for this —Jetztzeit 41

Agamben thinks this word is a reference to Paul. In any event, WB was a master of taking theological concepts and applying them to contemporary life and analysis, which is pretty weird and awesome 42

He compares the French Revolutionaries shooting at the clock tower to Joshua stopping the sun—whoever controls time and how we relate to it wins. (Also a Heideggerian idea) 43

WB’s work doesn’t scale because he wasn’t a master theorist with a key for every lock. But his example of being an intellectual flaneur is culturally significant and appealing, making him a folk hero of sorts to hipsters. 44

WB seems to be a fan of “emergency politics” but also suspicious of the way they can be used to bolster fascism. He and Carl Schmitt share much in common, though Benjamin’s Critique of Violence attempts to differentiate itself from Schmitt...45

But for me WB is not at his strongest as a thinker of politics—where is work seems incoherent and knotted in contradiction; but as a mythologist—he grasped that politics could not divorce itself from myth. 46

Here he joins the company of Nietzsche and Burke who understood that modernity couldn’t simply shake off ritual, symbolism, magical thinking—but would have to remake it or even continue it. 47

Let’s take the Marxist idea of “exchange value”—following WB’s way of reading, this isn’t an economic idea only that things are valuable in relation to other things but is a spiritual and aesthetic idea—contrast and context ARE substance. 48

In Jewish mysticism, there’s an idea that everything is composed of combinations of Hebrew letters (kind of like DNA) 49

But where a monist or atomist would focus on the sameness of the underlying building blocks, the semiotician is more interested in the unique combinations—the idea that out of sameness comes novelty. 50

Clifford Geertz is the anthropologist who popularized “thick description”—the notion that by describing one thing in detail you could learn a ton about the world in which it exists. 51

WB practiced this—but towards his own culture. He is a forerunner of what’s called “native anthropology”—the idea of the insider-outsider focusing the gaze on everyday life (see also Lefebvre) 52

Try it yourself—find an object in your house and ask yourself what it says about the world you inhabit. This is a contemplative practice but not in the way of the antiworldly monk. It’s hyper-worldly. 53

This is another paradoxical point in WB—the contemplative ascetic can be fully immersed in materialism and material culture—no renunciation required. Drinking a cappuccino and people watching is also “meditation.” 54

Sartre discovered something similar—when he observed that be could practice phenomenology while sipping a cocktail. 55

Except where phenomenologists might focus on the nature of their experience as such (suspending “the natural attitude”, the Benjaminians would focus on something more like prophecy—the moral epiphany of the moment. 56

WB wrote about his time smoking hashish, which follows a 19th c. trend from Coleridge & de Quincey--and continues to Burroughs and the Beats...but he didn't indulge out of ahedonist imperative. No, he describes the moment of his "coming up" as a foreboding of the apocalypse. 57

Suffice it to say, WB was a painfully anxious, depressed person with many personality tics. A very heady guy. Not so much fun. I find him even more broody than Heidegger, who wrote about joy and festival. 58

WB helped popularize the Kafka quote "there is infinite hope, plenty of hope, but not for us." At a time when Kafka was still "contemporary," WB understood he would become a "classic." 59

One of WB's most enduring--& compelling & strange--ideas is his theory of translation: B/c translation is impossible, it is necessary. Because each language is limited, a work only attains completeness when it is mass translated into every language 60

The reason great works need to be translated into each language, though, isn't because there's a content that can only be expressed through each language. No. It's because of what he calls "translatability" (a term meant to convey the quality of being translatable) 61

See, Benjamin is kinda avant-garde, so in his conceptualist mode, he doesn't actually care about content. 62

Not sure how the thread broke into two...but to continue reading to the end follow along here: https://twitter.com/ZoharAtkins/status/1348693855844126723