Walter Benjamin and the Re-Enchanted World

Josh Landy
Coming up on Philosophy Talk…

Ray Briggs
The modern world puts us to sleep. How can we wake ourselves up?

Josh Landy
Walter Benjamin: Re-enchanting the world.

Tears For Fears
All around me are familiar faces, worn out places, worn out faces

Ray Briggs
Benjamin’s right: modernity is terrible, the world is disenchanted, art has lost its magic, and we’re all sleepwalking through life.

Josh Landy
But there are new forms of enchantment, art is for everyone, and we can shock ourselves awake. Benjamin said that too!

Ray Briggs
So will the real Benjamin please stand up?

Walter Benjamin
I wonder if enjoyment of the world of images is not fed by a somber defiance of knowledge.

Tears For Fears
Mad world, mad world

Josh Landy
Our guest is Margaret Cohen, author of “Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution.

Ray Briggs
Walter Benjamin and the Re-enchanted World

Josh Landy
…coming up on Philosophy Talk.

Josh Landy
In the age of capitalism and technology, has the world lost its magic?

Ray Briggs
Are we all just sleepwalking through life?

Josh Landy
Can art wake us up and reinvent the world?

Ray Briggs
Welcome to Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Josh Landy
…except your intelligence. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. We’re coming to you from our respective shelters in place via the studios of KALW San Francisco.

Josh Landy
…continuing conversations that begin at Philosophers Corner on the Stanford campus, where Ray teaches philosophy, and I direct the philosophy and literature initiative.

Ray Briggs
Today, we’re thinking about Walter Benjamin, and the re-enchanment of the world.

Josh Landy
That guy was so interesting: German Jewish thinker from the early 20th century, died tragically. Fascinating ideas about Marxism, modernity, mysticism,

Ray Briggs
And I really like his ideas about disenchantment. He showed us how bleak life has become in the modern world: corporate greed, consumerism, capitalism.

Josh Landy
Oh, you’re, such a pessimist, Ray. I mean, modernity has also given us democracy, literacy across the globe, longer, healthier lives.

Ray Briggs
Okay fine, Josh. So we live a little bit longer, we will read a little bit more, and we get to vote. Big deal. Democracy is just an illusion that makes us think we have some say and how things go. Our long lives are full of alienation and futility. We’re all just cogs in the capitalist machine.

Josh Landy
I don’t know. I’m not sure we’re totally hopeless. Think about civil rights, Black Lives Matter, the #MeToo movement, gay marriage—sometimes things actually change. And you know what, Ray, I think modern technology is actually helped that to have it.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, I suppose it’s better than nothing. But all of that just seems like rearranging the deck chairs on the capitalist Titanic.

Josh Landy
Capitalist Titanic? What are you talking about?

Ray Briggs
Okay sure, social progress is good. But the planet is dying, thanks to that technology that you’re so excited about. And the profits aren’t even going to the people. They’re going to the richest 1%. That’s what modernity is really about.

Josh Landy
Come on, Ray. I mean, there’s always been inequality and exploitation. Would you rather live in the feudal age or maybe the state of nature? I don’t think things are worse today than they were back then.

Ray Briggs
You’re saying they’re better?

Josh Landy
Well, at least we have modern art.

Ray Briggs
Oh, modern art. How is that supposed to solve the problem of modern life?

Josh Landy
Well, that’s actually one of Benjamin’s coolest ideas. He thought some forms of modern art, like surrealism, can actually re-enchant the world. They can help us see everyday life is full of mystery and wonder—even the most mundane things like a boiler, a pipe, or a clock.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, I like the kind of art that feeds the resistance. Art that’s unsettling and jarring and shocks us out of our complacency!

Josh Landy
But Benjamin says art does that too, at least the modern kind. I mean, you can’t be a sleepwalker if you’re listening to Philip Glass all day!

Ray Briggs
Okay, fine. At least This titanic has avant-garde deck chairs. Too bad you can’t actually sit on them!

Josh Landy
Well, it sounds like we need to learn more about Benjamin. So we sent our Roving Philosophical Reporter, Holly J. McDede, to do just that. She files this report.

Holly McDede
In an effort to understand the life of Walter Benjamin, I searched for movies about him that any plebe could understand. But instead of a Hollywood biopic, I found not one but two operas about this doomed philosophers life. One is called “Benjamin.”

Another is “Shadowtime.”

Shadowtime
Is it possible to forget without remembering that one has forgotten.

Holly McDede
I listened through it but still could only describe the plot because there are summaries online—not because I understand it. It seems all over the place. Like in one scene, Benjamin is interrogated by masked figures. Karl Marx and Groucho Marx taught him about the nature of memory. Joan of Arc worries about the fate of history. And Albert Einstein asks, What time is it now? It’s trippy, surreal, and dizzying not unlike Benjamin himself.

Howard Eiland
He’s really… really a strange kettle of fish.

Holly McDede
Howard Eiland teaches literature at MIT and has been working on Benjamin since the 1980s. He says Benjamin is an eclectic and, yes, difficult writer.

Howard Eiland
So difficult to translate. Certain sentences just had me mind-boggled for days on end.

Holly McDede
And his life was also difficult, though it wasn’t always that way. so difficult was born in 1892 into a prosperous German Jewish family in Berlin. His dad was a well-to-do antique dealer who passed a zeal for bookstores and collecting onto his son. Then after World War One, Germany went into a depression.

Howard Eiland
His father put his foot down and said, “Walter, you got to get a job.” And he suggested getting a job in a bank, which showed how little he knew his son.

Holly McDede
Benjamin instead went on a quest to get a job in academia, but Eiland says his dissertation at the University of Frankfurt was rejected because it was considered too complicated.

Howard Eiland
And when that failed in 1925, he then turned to the world of journalism. And I think that was a decisive moment in his life because it enabled him to write about a whole range of things.

Holly McDede
In 1927, Benjamin went to Moscow for two months to visit a girlfriend. This was after Lenin had died.

Howard Eiland
And there was an extraordinary sense of experiments going on in Moscow, and it was quite an experience for him.

Holly McDede
He eventually returned to Germany, but was forced to leave when the Nazis came to power. In 1933, he went to the island of Ibiza, another decisive moment in his life.

Howard Eiland
There he experienced a kind of rebirth of physical life. And he wrote a whole series of articles about what he called the mimetic capacity, the capacity that he thinks most of us have lost: the capacity to imitate things, to imitate the motions of animals, imitate the motions of the star,

Holly McDede
Benjamin is constantly drawn to what has disappeared or is at the brink of disappearing, says writer and editor Adam Kirsch. For Benjamin and many Jewish intellectuals at the time, the world was filled with despair.

Adam Kirsch
He had seen fascism takeover Germany, which had once been thought of as the most enlightened country in Europe, and specifically the best country for Jews in Europe. And he, like many other people, saw democracy and capitalism as on the road to failure.

Holly McDede
In 1935, Benjamin wrote “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” a critique of capitalism, and one of his most well known pieces.

Adam Kirsch
Where he talks about how the sort of transformation of the way people consume art, from individual objects that have this sort of magical status, like a painting, to mass media, like newspapers and magazines and movies and radio.

Holly McDede
Benjamin spent the last years of his life in France when Germany invaded in 1940. He was one of millions of people trying to escape. He reached the border between Spain and France, but the border was closed, and in his despair, he overdosed on morphine.

Adam Kirsch
And then as it turned out, the next day the border was reopened and the other people in his group managed to cross over. He didn’t—he had despaired at the wrong moment.

Holly McDede
A few months before he died, Benjmain wrote “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” his final work, In this essay he writes…

Walter Benjamin
There is no document of civilization which is not, at the same time, the document of barbarism.

Holly McDede
And in some ways his life is that document. But as Benjamin also says…

Walter Benjamin
The past can be seen only as an image, which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized, and is never seen again.

Holly McDede
For Philosophy Talk, I’m Holly J. Dede.

Josh Landy
Thanks for that great report, Holly, that’s really fascinating. I’m Josh Landy with me is my Stanford colleague Ray Briggs, and today we’re thinking about Walter Benjamin and the re-enchantment of the world.

Ray Briggs
And we’re joined now by Margaret Cohen, Professor of French language, literature and civilization at Stanford University, and author of “Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin, and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution.” Margaret, welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Margaret Cohen
Hi, it’s great to be here with you.

Josh Landy
So Margaret—by the way, I should say Margaret is my fellow Andrew B. Hammond Chair of French literature, Language and civilization at Stanford, so it’s particular pleasure to have you here. And Margaret, you’ve written brilliantly on lots of topics from novels to oceans. So what was it about Benjamin in particular that piqued your interest.

Margaret Cohen
So Benjamin’s a super-eclectic thinker, and he is interested in the outmoded and garbage, the odds and ends of things. And at the same time, he’s got a very strong avant garde commitment. And I think this spoke to me personally, because I grew up in a household where my parents were kind of like Adorno. They hated mass culture, and I wasn’t allowed to watch TV and I was taken to Pierre Boulez concerts, and an avant garde cinema from the Soviet period was inflicted on me. And I respected that aesthetic, but I also wanted some way to return to mass culture, and Benjamin seems to offer that.

Ray Briggs
So Josh and I were arguing earlier about whether the modern world is disenchanted. And I said, Look, things are pretty bleak. And Josh said, No, it’s not all doom and gloom. So what do you think Benjamin would say?

Margaret Cohen
Well, I guess do you have a definition of disenchantment that you’re working with?

Ray Briggs
No, I was hoping you could tell us what it meant.

Margaret Cohen
I think Benjamin’s definition of disenchantment comes out of Max Weber, who was a very important founder of sociology, you know, and specifically from a lecture called “Science as Vocation” in 1918, which was published in 1922, where he coined a phrase which has become widespread, “the disenchantment of the world.” And I actually use this in the class I just taught on gothic literature, so I have the quote in front of me. He says, “There are no mysterious, incalculable forces that come into play, but rather one can in principle, master all things by calculation.” This means that the world is disenchanted, one need no longer have recourse to magical means in order to master employ the spirits, technical means and calculation perform the service. And I think this is what Benjamin would have understood by disenchantment.

Ray Briggs
So it sounds like disenchantment is about not using magical thinking, to understand the world. But instead of thinking that everything is technologically in your grasp, is that a good paraphrase?

Margaret Cohen
Yes, technology calculation, he also associates that with intellectualization with reason. He says that with bureaucracy, which is hardly hardly rational, but a bunch of things get drawn together there in terms of mechanisms of modern society. And I think Benjamin would say, society is disenchanted, but it also performs in ways that are quite in contradiction with that. And he’s interested, for example, in Marx and Marx’s thinking that shows the ways in which society is completely mystified even as it is disenchanted.

Josh Landy
That’s really interesting, right? Because you’ve got these sort of two strands of disenchantment, one of which is the kind of thing you were just talking about, right? You know, we used to think rainbows were, were a god, and then at least a sign from God. And now they’re just prismatic refraction. So it’s sciences taken over in the world of belief, at least heavily. And then there’s the area of practices, right where faith kind of beats or retreat from the public sphere, and it’s not what dominates our legal system, our marriage system that much our education system, but what you’re saying Margaret is Benjamin gets all that sees all that worries about it, but he also thinks the modern world has its own kinds of secret enchantments.

Margaret Cohen
Yeah, absolutely. And so he goes back to Marx, he’s very interested, for example, and the concept that Marx has of the phantasmagoria, which is a way that Marx writes about the mystification of capitalist society and the way in which social relations between people become what one of Benjamin’s contemporaries Georg Lukcás, will call reified, but you have relations between people take the form of relations between things, and then those things appear as spectacles that they desire, whether they’re commodities, whether they are celebrities. So, Ben, you mean he plucks out of Marx, those kinds of concepts that talk about a certain kind of magic that continues in modernity,

Ray Briggs
Right, so how would you say that Marx’s concept of enchantment relates to Benjamin’s?

Margaret Cohen
Well, Marx is very uncomfortable with it, and he does not really pursue it. It exists more in the realm of metaphor than is something that Marx works through. And one of the very influential works for me was a work by Louis etches reading capital, where he said, argues that metaphors in thinkers are often the marks of concepts that have not yet been articulated. So what Marx does with with the world of dream with the world of enchantment with mesmerism is fascinating to Benjamin and Benjamin wants to conceptualize that how modernity has its own magic as well, and how that magic which is a source of mystification could potentially then be thought of as a source of redemptive energy.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today we’re thinking about Walter Benjamin, with Margaret Cohen from Stanford University.

Ray Briggs
Is the modern world disenchanted? Are we all just rats running on a capitalist wheel? Or is there hope for a better kind of life?

Josh Landy
Benjamin, disenchantment, and re-enchantment—when Philosophy Talk continues

Janelle Monáe
Open your heart, open your eyes—your chariot has arrived.

Josh Landy
Are we all just bionic strumpets, only worth a dime? Or is there hope for a better life? I’m Josh Landy. And this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs, and we’re thinking about Walter Benjamin and the re-enchantment of the world, with Margaret Cohen from Stanford University, author of “Profane Illumination.”

Josh Landy
With shelter-in-place still in effect, we’re pre recording this episode, and unfortunately can’t take your calls. But you can always email us at comments at Philosophy Talk dot ORG, or become a subscriber and join the conversation on our blog at Philosophy Talk.

Ray Briggs
So Margaret, earlier we were saying that Benjamin sees the modern world is disenchanted. Do you think that’s a good thing or a bad thing? Or is it more complicated than that?

Margaret Cohen
But then up is a dialectical thinker. So he is interested in how the good thing is also the bad thing. But then there’s a way to get beyond that. And he’s very interested in aesthetics as a place or as as a domain, I should say, where expressive witty and concepts and subject and object meet. And he is, throughout his work interested in the redemptive possibilities that esthetics can offer four forms of experience that would complicate calculation and rationalization and enrich us and potentially encourage us to some sort of a revolt against the capitalist conditions that oppress us.

Ray Briggs
Okay, so it sounds like disenchantment is good if it sort of encourages us to revolt against capitalism. What’s bad about it?

Margaret Cohen
What’s bad about it is that it suppresses humanity. Benjamin in his famous “Work of Art in the Age of technological reproducibility” essay discusses the way the worker on the assembly line becomes mechanized almost as a as a cog in a machine and loses the capacity to recognize him or herself or their self as a subject. And so benemid wants workers to be and all of us to be able to reclaim our humanity which disenchantment threatens.

Ray Briggs
I kind of have a little bit of puzzlement about that essay, actually, because I think, and I’m not so persuaded that enchantment is as great as Binyamin makes it out to be. So like, enchanted art seems really bougie for instance, it’s all about like having, having a painting that like everybody wants the object of the painting, you can’t just have posters of it in your room, because like, it doesn’t have the aura. Um, is that really how we want to relate to our humanity? Like, isn’t that just another power structure?

Margaret Cohen
Yes, completely. And for venue, meaning that concept of art goes back to antiquity and to the notion of art as a sacred experience, where the perceiver and the art object are joined together with a sense of presence. And in fact, Benjamin is thinking in a very much in the spirit of anti bougie spirit that you’re suggesting about how new media could break up that magic and that mystery. So he uses the concept of aura, which has been lost in modernity. And he thinks about how film, which was a new media of his time, or in the 1920s 1930s could promote a different type of viewership, which has the potential to disrupt the opiate of aura, which would be what he calls reception in the state of distraction.

Josh Landy
Yeah, that is such a powerful essay, right? That does seem like a place. It’s I think it’s very much in in line with what Ray was saying. It’s a place where Benjamin, for the most part, it seems to be suggesting that we need a new kind of art, just as you’re saying, Margaret, we need the kind that doesn’t depend on aura and enchantment, but you know, kind of disenchant the aesthetic it makes it more democratic. So anyone can anyone can go see a movie. Anyone can be a critic of a movie, anyone can make a data style artwork you could even write you could even make your own art and and and just as you’re saying market you can you can make these new forms of art that wake people up. So is is there any downside to this? Because occasionally you get the feeling that nonetheless, Benjamin is saying, Yeah, I really want this more political art, this more democratic art, but maybe we’ve also lost something along the way.

Margaret Cohen
Yeah, he uses the concept of Janus faced at one point in one of his as is an embedded me there’s always looking back to look forward to looking forward to look back. I’m going to take a swerve, if you don’t mind through Benue means intellectual influences, which may be helpful to understanding his ambivalence. So Benjamin is super influenced by brushed and, in fact, writes about him and he loves the Brechtian idea of critique of getting the viewer involved of breaking the fourth wall. And at the same time, Binyamin is super influenced by a major thinker in Jewish Jewish spiritual ism Gershom Sholem. And notably, his book on Kabbalah and major trends in Jewish mysticism. And Benjamin is interested in the Jewish mystical idea through Kabbalah that God’s attributes have been shattered and are spread around the world. And that the task of the the person the ethical person is tikun olam is to go put together these pieces these shards of the shattered vessels. You cannot think of anything more anti Brechtian than this Sholem mysticism. And then of course, as I’ve written about venue meat is also influenced by surrealism, which seeks to bring desire into debt and capitalist modernity.

Josh Landy
I’m I’m dying to hear you talk about surrealism. But I want to bring in here before we get to that an email that we received from Alfredo, who lives in Aix-en-Provence, and says I’m lucky enough to live 10 minutes away from the Carrière de Lumière here in les beaux de Provence, a giant limestone quarry against whose walls are projected works of great painters. And while Benjamin’s aesthetic thinking will always have me wishing I could admire Delhi’s melting clocks on their original canvas. I believe this exhibition has done an admirable job of preserving there are truly enchanting. So that’s interesting. So that’s someone who thinks, and you know, Benjamin says once you can reproduce an artwork, a million times posters, lithographs, or whatever, its aura has gone. But Alfredo says, No, I, you know, actually experienced the aura, even in this mechanically reproduced form. What do you think about that, Margaret?

Margaret Cohen
I think we should come up with a different term. And I don’t know what that term is. But I think there is a magic to technology that we experience. And that has to do with something of its counter intuitive and anti common sense quality, as well as its ability to inch in trance us. And so, I don’t know, maybe you guys have an idea. I’ve taught many, many times, and we look for this, what else could we say for, you know, the Work of Art in the Age of technological reproduction that is doing justice to its magic, but that is not the religious or up.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re thinking about Walter Benjamin and the re-enchantment of the world with Margaret Cohen from Stanford University.

Ray Briggs
Margaret, I wanted to pick up on something that Josh said earlier, which I wasn’t sure about, which was this thing about the democratization of art. So I was curious both about how much Benjamin sort of was was interested in then also like a little bit skeptical that anyone can make a film, you need quite a lot of equipment. So I guess, like, I want to know, both, like, how supportive of it was Benjamin and how it really possible is it

Margaret Cohen
he was not too interested in empowering people as art makers, then you mean really was a critic, and for him the highest work was the word of criticism. So he was interested in empowering people as critics. And I think if you look at, for example, what he admired about surrealism, it wasn’t that we could all go out and make collages to disagree with you, Josh. It was that it would enable us to turn our experience of the tawdry, banal, he uses the example of railway journeys in proletarian corners on the edges of suburbs, within cities that are aging into potentially moments of potential and possibility.

Josh Landy
Yeah, I mean, I was just picking up on a little throwaway remark in that essay about data but I but I absolutely take your point it mostly what he’s interested in is our experience as consumers of surrealism and the way in which as you say, surrealism transforms our experience. Right one of the problems with modernity is that it impoverishes our experience. Benjamin thinks, right, it takes away that that lovely German word fall, right? We don’t have full lived experience where we’re just sleepwalking through our lives. But if you can, if you can have a surrealist vision of the world suddenly everything comes to life and suddenly, buildings are eloquent. They’re full of these secret towards the hidden depths and in posters, petrol pumps or gas pumps, I guess we would say here. That’s one of my favorite examples. How is that supposed to work? Margaret? Like, what, what how? What is a surrealist vision? Show us that’s hidden in the world we don’t normally say

Margaret Cohen
Surrealism is looking for a, I guess what Benjamin would call chips of now time and this is to go back to the Kabbalah moments that are fraught with potential to break the banality of bourgeois life to put us in touch with our own desires, but also the desires of others add in that way to inspire social change. And it sounds very utopian. But and I think utopian thinking is is endemic and part of Europe in the interwar years when you have to imagine that politically, the situation is is getting bleaker and bleaker by the year. And yet, I think it also is empowering in terms of enabling us as sensuous presences to to re inject ourselves into the world around us. So for the surrealist that pathway can be a sense of coincidence, it can be they love chance meetings that break open habits, so the destruction of habit is very important to them. It can be something as surprising as a quote that sort of strikes you at the right moment. I guess it I guess time is really important to you know, that that the surrealist are looking to activate time is opening toward the future and with a sense of potency.

Ray Briggs
Right. So I wonder if there are other opportunities to find sort of this enchantment and the everyday I remember Binyamin having this thing about gas pumps looking like gods like is, are there like other artistic traditions that are inspiring besides surrealism

Margaret Cohen
For Benjamin… now scrolling through my rolodex, I mean, his great influences, of course, Charles Baudelaire, but you know, that goes to surrealism and Baudelaire, he sees is the poet of the city who finds in the most seemingly revolting aspects of modern life, such as a cadaver, rotting on a street, a chance to transform that into something aesthetic, and through the mediation of aesthetics, to create a sense of plenitude out of that

Josh Landy
I think of, I think of a lovely line, he has about balblair, where Benjamin talks about, he says the butler talks about the price for which the sensation of the modern age maybe had the disintegration of the aura and the experience of shock. So what about that, he seems to be saying that, on the one hand, you have the Surrealists, who are discovering this hidden mystery in the built environment and gas pumps, in buildings, posters, and so on. And on the other hand, you have shock experience, so you have an aesthetic of shock, where the poetry is jarring, it’s hot, as you were saying, Margaret, you might have a poem about a dead body or something like that. And that breaks the aura breaks a certain old way of doing business in art, but it brings about something really important it which allows us to wake up and have have full experience again, you know, in a world that’s disenchanted.

Margaret Cohen
And I think another influence Yes, Josh, I agree. 100%, and another influence to bring in, and I think, which takes us maybe, from Botha lair, who remains in the domain of seeking the beautiful would be the Freudian influence, because Benjamin is interested, as are the surrealist in accessing the repressed of individuals, but also the repressed of the collective. So Benjamin thinks about collective experience as potentially modeled on Freud’s notion of the psyche, and trying to uncover say, for example, the work that went into the petrol pump or trying to put us in touch with the humanity that’s hidden beneath the surface, I think is a kind of bendy minion way to take to take surrealism and Marxism and tried to fuse them. And then I guess one more influence to throw in is Proust. And the importance of sensuous experience itself as bearing the trace of time and collapsing the distinction between past future and present. So Benue me again, wants to take that to collective experience to joining people together in some acts of reisstance to rising fascism, for example.

Josh Landy
Anyone who loves Proust can’t be all bad. Right? Can you say a little bit about the arcades? Obviously Benjamin was famous for the arcades project that he was writing. How does this apply there? Are these these passages in Paris, these commercial sites? What did he see in those that had to do with sort of the ghosts of our unconscious fears and desires?

Margaret Cohen
It’s such a rich and wonderful question. I mean, he entitled A 3000 Page collection of notes that were never, you know, he never was able to draw together in his lifetime. The arcades was it was about the Paris arcades. Yeah, so the arcades, similarly are both the expression of a dreaming collective and yet have the possibility of reawakening they were the first shopping malls I suppose we could say, which were built in the 1840s. Or going back to 1830s in Paris to protect strollers with leisure from the bad weather is any of you who spent time in Paris knows it’s pretty bad weather as a lot of the time and the streets, then we’re not paid. So it was really bad for your for your shoes. And they put out commodity society for you as a dream, and no as something extremely alluring. And for Benjamin the arcades were the site for the display of the commodity fetish, as an alluring dream? And he’s writing in a moment when some of the first arcades are being destroyed. So he’s interested in both their beauty and their in a sort of a nostalgic appreciation of them. And then he’s interested in understanding what are the mechanisms of commodity fetishism? Why do we think that if we buy this umbrella, or that handbag, we will, in some way be better? And I think that understanding the mechanism, commodity fetishism is a challenge which has only gotten more urgent in our society, which is so utterly saturated by the commodity in all areas, that that we need to disenchanted.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today we’re thinking about the life and thought of Walter Benjamin, with Margaret Cohen from Stanford University.

Ray Briggs
What can bend up and tell us about life in the 21st century? What would he think about Facebook smartphones and zoom? Is enchantment still possible in today’s distracted times?

Josh Landy
From distraction to wonder—when Philosophy Talk continues.

The Jam
This is the modern world. This is the modern world.

Josh Landy
This is the modern world—so where’s the magic? The wonder? The enchantment? I’m Josh Landy. And this is Philosophy Talk program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs. Our guest is Margaret Cohen from Stanford University. And we’re thinking about Walter Benjamin and re-enchanting the world.

Josh Landy
So Margaret, just before the break, you were talking really eloquently about the residue of then you mean in today’s 21st century world how certain things he was talking about just become more stark. And that brings me to an email received from Nadeem in Portland, Oregon. And he says, if the industrial and digital era brought disenchantment in people’s life, then why are most urban dwellers on social platforms and finding connections? So I guess the question is, Is there is there potentially a source of readjustment in modern technology?

Margaret Cohen
Well, I would have answered this very differently in January 2020 from June 2020. Um, I think in January 2020, I would have said that there’s a lot of potential in these platforms to make connections and break some of the bonds of habit and structures and pointed to uses of social media for potentially, or social organization. I think in June 2020, having come out of a quarter of zoom teaching, and seeing how much university life depends on presence, as well as every other aspect of social life. I would say, we got to be really careful. And digital life is a supplement, but it is not a replacement.

Ray Briggs
Right, so actually, this makes me wonder about sort of what it makes something enchanted. I know you gave us that definition at the beginning of the show. Show. But one kind of view I could have about digital technologies is that there, they can be either enchanted or disenchanted. And it seems sort of to fit with any means line of thinking that like you can find enchantment in the modern world. But it depends on sort of social settings. So if you’re living a rich life where you’re surrounded by others, and using digital technologies to supplement maybe they can be enchanted. And if you’re living a life where the your only connection to others, maybe they’re not so enchanted is that, like, Is that an option in the space of ideas? Do you think it’s the right option?

Margaret Cohen
I would agree with you. And I think it’s maybe a good moment to introduce another notion that Benjamin coins in his essay on surrealism, which is quite fascinating, the notion of profane illumination. By Illumination—he uses a word which in German means spiritual awakening, rather than enlightenment in the sense of the 18th century enlightenment, and for benemid, profane illumination has the ability to bring together what he calls the image, sphere and the body sphere. And I feel that this sense of profane illumination as conjoining image and body is something which we have really lost in the COVID moment, and which may perhaps be mediated through these digital technologies. But I think that that that profane illusion of elimination and enchantment may now have shifted, I guess I’m saying and that presence may be more important to it than one might have thought beforehand.

Josh Landy
What about some other features of Benjamin that might still be relevant or even more relevant? You talked about commodity fetishism a moment ago? What about his worry, in the essay on technological reproducibility of art about the danger of mass media, he’s celebrating the possibilities of mass media to do good political work. But he’s also worried he has that that line, the star and the dictator emerge victorious, which I just feel like it’s pretty prophetic of our moment. What do you think about that kind of thing is relevant, you know, having relevance today?

Margaret Cohen
Yeah, I think the dangers of mechanical or technological reproducibility and to not sort of divert the show into a discussion of he who shall not be named, but the way in which the idea of fake news and it’s all ideology, separate us from truth is really extremely troubling. And I think that COVID-19 has been a wake up to say, Well, no. And maybe this is the disenchantment of the world reappearing in a strange form as a potential for enchantment, you know, disease in the body are real, and fake news cannot suppress it. And we now have to deal with reimagining and reinventing the world in light of that, so I guess the image I have is of that virus, like the image of that virus, you know,

Ray Briggs
right. So what would Benjamin say about reshaping our material circumstances? Like I think I, I am getting when he’s saying about shaping our sort of ideological circumstances do we need to do more work according to Benjamin, on the side of like the body?

Margaret Cohen
We certainly do. And we also to to return to his last work, which is extraordinarily powerful. The theses on the philosophy of history. We need to snatch memories as they’re being destroyed from the jaws of the victors. I’m mixing up metaphors here now. But his idea is that historical urgency is, and reclaiming the past from the dominant narrative is an essential work. And I think that at the moment in the US, we’re seeing how a lot of factors are coming together to draw people’s attention to black lives matter to the killing, you know, to the way in which black Americans have been discriminated against over 200 or 400 years actually, and that the return of the body, it seems to me there’s something going on with reclaiming historical memory from from be erased that is very much tied to the body as be exposed and that we can’t hide behind social media. Does that makes sense?

Josh Landy
That makes perfect sense and but it raises a broader question for me about Benjamin, which is, how much hope does he have in our capacity to make those kinds of change? Because on the one hand, I love what he has to say in the kind of Brechtian spirit about, you know, artworks that wake us up I think today in today’s context of Spike Lee, these Brechtian films, they’re there for mass audiences, and they get us to wake up. And that seems sort of hopeful that maybe we can change things. On the other hand, I think of the other side of bed you mean, where, you know, he talks about history as a single catastrophe, which keeps piling records upon wreckage, right? And it seems at times isn’t the only hope is, messianic hope, are the only hope it’s not coming from us it salvation can only come from outside because really, there’s not much we can do. Where do you stand on this? Margaret, do you think Benjamin is offering us resources to make change as human beings?

Margaret Cohen
Um, gosh, it just depends what mood you’re in. Yeah. But um, yeah, I think like the statue smashing that’s going on now of Confederate icons or people who were involved with slavery would be an example for Benjamin of empowerment. And I think at the same time, we are in an extraordinarily Dark World, and the ability not to be able to assemble as a collectivity would lead to a strand of Messianic thinking that the things have to get me there’s a strand of Messianic Judaism, we should add to know me and strain which says the Messiah will only come when things get so bad that the world is totally sunken and fallen and therefore, this SEC went about doing evil things in order to bring about redemption. I mean, there’s also that side to our world. So I don’t know it really depends what what day it is.

Ray Briggs
So one thing that I’ve noticed standing in for messianic thinking on like, a lot of the left is this idea of the revolution, like when the revolution comes, then our problems will kind of magically be solved. Is that like, is that a kind of re-enchantment, is that like a kind that we should be enthusiastic about?

Margaret Cohen
So I think the revolution kind of disappeared with the 21st century, maybe we’re reading different leftist thinkers, you know, I think a problem that Benjamin does not speak about at all, which for me, does tie together, the sphere of the body, and the image sphere is the environment for bend. You mean technology is a tool, and a tool potentially of liberation. Or as you were saying, Ray, it can it can do good things, it can do bad things, but he does not think of technology itself as destroying the planet. But if you follow on Instagram, different environmental photographers who are trying to raise awareness about climate change, there’s nothing more charismatic than a sea otter or nothing more disturbing than a graph of ice melt, you know, in the Arctic. And yet, is that just one more kind of consumable moment? Does that actually make a change in your daily life? How do we get involved in a way where we can contend with structures at a planetary level? I think that maybe you got to have brushed and surrealism together, you know, you certainly need to awaken.

Josh Landy
Well, on that note, Margaret, I want to thank you so much for joining us. It’s been an enchanting and an awakening conversation.

Margaret Cohen
Thank you so much. It’s great pleasure.

Josh Landy
Our guests is be Margaret Cohen, Professor of French language, literature and civilization at Stanford University, my fellow Andrew Hammond, Professor, author of “Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution.” So Ray, what are you thinking now?

Ray Briggs
I am honestly not sure how much hope I have for the modern world right now. I like to be optimistic that I like to think that, you know, environmental photography and statue smashing are going to save us from our problems, and I can’t quite bring myself to believe it, but I still think that like Benjamin is worth reading while the world burns at least.

Josh Landy
Oh, absolutely. I mean, one of the things I love about him is he combines that hard bitten realism, with a sense that maybe we’re not completely doing maybe certain forms of thinking certain forms of action, certain forms of art can help us and if not, maybe the missiles, hopefully revolution, hopefully the revolution. And this conversation continues at philosophers corner and our online community of thinkers where I’m also with apologies to Descartes is Cogito ergo Blago, I think therefore I blog and you and become a partner in the community by visiting our website philosophy talk.org.

Ray Briggs
And if you have a question that wasn’t addressed in today’s show, we’d love to hear from you. Send it to us at comments at Philosophy Talk dot o RG and we might feature it on the blog. Now, a man whose speed is always enchanting, it’s Ian Shoales, the Sixty-Second Philosopher.

Ian Shoales
Ian Shoales. I came across notices for a 2014 San Francisco City Lights sponsored tribute to Walter Benjamin. There were lectures and seminars around the City over a week, including one called the Politics of Memory, which struck me as a very Benjamin kind of topic. I clicked on a link, and was taken to a website for an Indonesian poker casino. Well the link had expired, of course, the event being six years gone. Which also seemed very Benjamin. He lived in the shadow of what was gone. Born into the 20th century, his was a world rent by World War, social upheaval, Darwin, Freud, and Marx, their wicked offspring fascism and communism, also trains, planes, cars, movies, radio, the gleaming hulk of the modern. Benjamin spent his life curating memories and history, to keep a foundation in the chaos. A word often used to describe Benjamin: haunted. Wrestling with the ghosts of the past, he wound up taking his own life when he concluded he would not be able to escape the clutches of the Nazis. We know now he might have been wrong, but that’s easy to say in the future. And if there IS a connection between Walter Benjamin and Indonesian poker, well, only the future can find it, armed with irony, a sense of the absurd, and the judicious use of Wikipedia, which- you know- is something Benjamin could have invented. I first came to Benjamin through a book about his radio work. None of his recordings survive, just texts. This also seems very Benjamin. This was in the early days of radio, and the late days of the Weimar Republic. He came to radio through his work as a freelance writer, which was his career after this thesis was rejected by the University of Frankfurt. A comfortable life as a teacher and thinker denied him – though of course, the Nazis might have taken it from him anyway-he had to live by his wits. He found himself writing feature articles, usually about the world around us- city life, factories, department stores, flea markets-in that process helping to create the role of the culture critic, a kind of public intellectual. He had a cult following- Bertolt Brecht was a fan- but nothing he ever wrote ever became what we might call “viral” today. Radio was a part of all that. As a broadcaster he did think pieces, memory pieces, even pieces specifically for children. He wrote about the big noses of Berliners, he did jokes and riddles, explaining how they worked, pieces on slang, on gypsies and con men, he told funny stories about dogs. When the radio work dried up, and he was forced to move to France, he continued his eclectic pursuits. He embarked on a book, never finished, about the arcades in Paris. Glass covered promenades from the time of Baudelaire, for shopping and strolling, long gone by the time Benjamin arrived. But he hoped to preserve their flavor and the spirit of the flaneur, the boulevardier, the dandy in spats, hat and cane, strolling down the promenade, observing, amused, in the world but not of it. He wrote about Moscow, hashish, language. He championed Kafka and Brecht. And he was also assembling his personal archive. He himself was always on the move, so he always had pieces of it scattered among his friends. Old scraps of paper on which he had scribbled notes—each labeled—fancy notebooks, Russian toys, manuscripts, stamps, coins. It all seems part of an effort to give himself weight and credence, and to gather evidence. He straddled surrealism and dialectical materialism. Who else did that? Caught between dada and a hard place, he became a search engine with a point of view, a chronicler, a ragpicker, the keeper of a roadside attraction, a database, a one man museum, with commentary. If he had come across the link that led from him to Indonesian poker, he might have taken up poker and moved to Vegas. Until his luck ran out. Or he may have written a book on Indonesian puppetry. And then moved on to look at the haunted tropes of our time- ringtones, emojis, the effect of corruption on plague control. Who knows? As he once wrote, about history: “A chronicler who recites events without distinguishing between major and minor ones acts in accordance with the following truth: nothing that has happened should be regarded as lost for history.” And it’s all history, baby. What will happen might happen. What happened did happen. Something to ponder as the once mighty giants of capitalism – trains, planes, automobiles- teeter and dwindle, and the stepchildren of surrealism topple statues in the parks. I gotta go.

Josh Landy
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KALW local public radio San Francisco and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University, copyright 2020.

Ray Briggs
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Josh Landy
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Ray Briggs
Thanks also to Merle Kessler, Angela Johnston, and Lauren Schecter.

Josh Landy
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Ray Briggs
The views expressed or mis-expressed on this program did not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University or other funders.

Josh Landy
Not even when they’re true and reasonable! The conversation continues on our website Philosophy Talk dot ORG, where you too can become a Partner in our Community of Thinkers. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
An I’m Ray Briggs. Thank you for listening.

Josh Landy
And thank you for thinking,

Unknown Speaker
Well this statue… it becomes very painful when I think of the suffering that my ancestors went through, and it should not be celebrated by these statutes.