Benjamin's Intensive Method

[Ralph Dumain]

So is the letter to Rang the very same I quoted from Wolin's book?

As usual, I don't fully understand the responses.  Let me (re)iterate the
two apsects of the passage I cited of interest to me:

(1) From a history of art and history of philosophy perspective: taxonomy,
periodizing, writing chronologies, etc., creates more or less plausible
and/or valid structures of historical influence and causality, though what
can be overlooked are the discontinuities in the developments of different
thought-systems or oeuvres (in the case of the creative arts).  You may
remember my comments on the Frankfurt list on Kracauer's notion of
non-simultaneity, or, perhaps further bacj on the spoons Marxism lists, my
references to the historical process in philosophy as treated by Jonathan
Ree in PHILOSOPHY AND ITS PAST, T.I. Oizerman, etc.  This is looking at the
issue from the point of view of historical causality as interrupted by
originality.  It could be looked at from the point of view of comparison of
systems in their internal structures rather than their historical linkages:
now is this what Benjamin means by intensive analysis?

(2) There are some other places in Benjamin (can't remember where) where
the work of art is viewed not only as a product of history but as opening
into eternity, i.e. not merely a product of history but something else as
well, perhaps interpretable in a divine sense, as one way of labelling the
transhistorical or transcendent.  Does intensive analysis have anything to
do with this perspective?

At 08:45 AM 02/16/2000 +0000, L Spencer wrote:
>Someone on the Frankfurt School list (Ralph Dumain) posted a quote 
>about Benjamin's "intensive" analysis. This list seems a little quiet 
>so I am posting my reply here.
>
>I suspect the Benjamin-list is quiet because everyone is bowled over 
>and rather daunted by the publication in the last days of the last 
>millenium of Benjamin's unfinished major work... the Arcades Project. 
>
>It was easier to deal with as a great scholarly legend than as a huge 
>but accessible text.
>
>THE INTENSIVE METHOD?
>
>Benjamin's first "classic" statement on an intensive approach to works of
art comes in a long letter to Florens Christian Rang which he wrote in
1923. This is still much in the charged language of his "Task of the
Translator" essay, etc. and his work on German Romanticism. 
>
>"Intensive" analysis in this sense is closely akin to Benjamin's notion of
a "monad" as cryptically announced in the "Epistemo-Critical Prologue" to
his failed Habilitionsschrift translated as "Origins of German Tragedy". 
>
>Actually although Benjamin's language is sometimes arcane the idea here
seems to me not at all an obscure one. 
>
>And Benjamin returns to such  matters in his last reflections and you can
see traces of the "intensive" approach throughout the Arcades materials,
and again in the treatments of his own childhood which announce their
preoccupation with reading off an epoch from its details, its smallest
smallest details. (At one point talking of "splitting the atom"). 
>
>Lloyd SPencer 
>
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>