Benjamin and the new

[Giles Peaker]

>
>>With regard to Benjamin and the 'New'. This is a Benjaminian category,
>>inflected by Nietzsche. See for instance the Passagenwerk notes, the
>>related essays in 'Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High
>>Capitalism' Verso, or the essay on Surrealism. For precise quotes and sense
>>of the term (which changes), I'll have to get back to you.
>
>I'm interested in the changes that you mention?
>
>I found Susan Buck-Morss' book _The Dialectics of Seeing_ to be really
>helpful and good as a reading of Benjamin on this topic.  She brings out
>the real complexity of Benjamin's conception of the new, which is
>simultaneously redemptive and the image of an "eternally recurrent" Hell.

Dear Verne,
Buck-Morss' book is certainly a very rich text, now a classic in the area.
I do find a certainly difficulty in her attempt to anchor allegory (to
retrieve it from the subjective and arbitrary) in order to sustain the
dialectical image as a materialist conception. This anchoring attempt
hinges on the account of the Kabbalah, which is appropriately in the centre
of the book. This reinstates the metaphysical and nonsubjective 
'experience', which is called theological in the earlier Benjamin. 

The new is, as you say, a very complex conception in W.B.. I've been
thinking and worrying about this lately. What follows are a few
suggestions. The concept of the new in the accounts of modernity serves to
delineate the temporality of repetition, but also what is truly  new about
modernity, which is that very temporality. The differences between
tradition and modernity are primarily the differences between two modes of
experience, which have a temporality at their root. Each temporality is
also a mode of relation to the divine, which has no place in the historical
world(the absolute otherness of presence, which also motivates the neo
platonisms of the Trauerspiel foreword). Thus it is the 'instant' in
modernity  which gives access to an intimation of the standpoint of
redemption (see the Theses on the Philosophy of History), even whilst the
repetition of empty instants is modernity's hellish characteristic. Compare
this with the relation to the divine put forward in The Storyteller, or the
1934 essay on Kafka, which suggest that life in 'tradition' is lived in a
constant relation to the divine (The difference between the Chronicler and
the Historian is a key example. The  changes are also many and complex, but
one I would suggest is that up until the early to mid 1930s, Benjamin is
more concerned with a recovery of the modes of tradition than he is with a
specifically modern intimation of redemption (again the 1934 Kafka essay).
Even 'One Way Street' (1923-8) shifts the privileged and unproblematised
position of the critic as 'receiver' of truth directly from the Trauerspiel
to the streets of 1920s Berlin. Here the relationship of the critic to
truth is as ahistorical as the materials through which he attempts to
delineate those truths are historical. 

I hope this is of some use.

Giles Peaker