I’d like to write something that comes from things the way wine comes from grapes.
—Walter Benjamin (via missfolly)
Streets are the dwelling place of the collective. The collective is an eternally unquiet, eternally agitated being that - in the space between the building fronts - experiences, learns, understands, and invents as much as individuals do within the privacy of their own four walls. For this collective, glossy enameled shop signs are a wall decoration as good as, if not better than, an oil painting in the drawing room of a bourgeois; walls with their “Post No Bills” are its writing desk, newspaper stands its libraries, mailboxes its bronze busts, benches its bedroom furniture, and the café terrace is the balcony from which it looks down on its household. The section of railing where road workers hang their jackets is the vestibule, and the gateway which leads from the row of courtyards out into the open is the long corridor that daunts the bourgeois, being for the courtyards the entry to the chambers of the city. Among these latter, the arcade was the drawing room. More than anywhere else, the street reveals itself in the arcade as the furnished and familiar interior of the masses.
Memory is not an instrument for surveying the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities lie buried. He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging.
—Walter Benjamin, in “Berlin Childhood Around 1900” (via nohats)
None of us has the time to live the true dramas of the life that we are destined for. This is what ages us - this and nothing else. The wrinkles and creases on our faces are the registration of the great passions, vices, insights that called on us; but we, the masters, were not home.
—Walter Benjamin from Illuminations (via gravellyrun)
Every morning brings us news of the globe, and yet we are poor in noteworthy stories. This is because no event comes to us without being already shot through with explanation. In other words, by now almost nothing that happens benefits storytelling; almost everything benefits information. Actually, it is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation as one reproduces it. The most extraordinary things, marvelous things, are related with the greatest accuracy, but the psychological connection of the event is not forced on the reader. It is left up to him to interpret things the way he understands them, and thus the narrative achieves an amplitude that information lacks.
—Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (via toadustyshelf)
If the totally administered society is standardizing thought by rendering it formulaic, then redemption cannot be found in the simple narrative form. Only aphorisms or fragments allow for the evanescent moment in which utopian glimpses can be illuminated. The mediated totality surrenders in favor of the individually structured constellation as the organizing principle of critical theory.
—
from critical theory: a very short introduction by stephen eric bronner, regarding walter benjamin’s unfinished arcades project. i would like to learn more about this person and his ideas
tumblr is my arcades project
(via ourlostkingdoms)
Knowledge comes only of lightning flashes. The text is the long roll of thunder that follows.
—Walter Benjamin (via lucjanlocke)
- Benjamin, W. 1936. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. London: Penguin Group
(Source: eideticfields)
