Imaging Benjamin
A Theory, Culture & Society International Colloquium
In association with The Nottingham Trent University
November 18 -19th 2000, Nottingham, United Kingdom
"Language shows clearly that memory is not an instrument for
exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past
experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie
interred. He who seeks to approach his own buried past must
conduct himself like a man digging. [. . . .] He must not be afraid to
return again and again to the same matter; to scatter it as one
scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil. For the matter
itself is only a deposit, a stratum, which yields only to the most
meticulous examination what constitutes the real treasure hidden
within the earth: the images, severed from all earlier associations,
that stand - like precious fragments or torsos in a collector's gallery -
in the prosaic rooms of our later understanding." A Berlin Chronicle
Such interventions continue to challenge sixty years after
Benjamin's untimely death. In remembering him, the colloquium
seeks to critically excavate the multiple after-images of Benjamin in
the service of our later understanding. To a degree perhaps
unmatched by any other twentieth century thinker, Benjamin's
legacy has facilitated fertile encounters between philosophers,
artists and cultural intermediaries. An enigmatic yearning for a
revolutionary transformation of subjectivity and the fixed experience
of the embodied individual fed into Benjamin's ambivalent
enthusiasm for the decentring forces and psychological shocks of
technological innovation. His critique of modernity unsettles
entrenched theories of temporality and progress through a unique
approach to historical investigation. The colloquium proceedings,
which are planned as a special issue of Theory, Culture & Society,
will seek to uncover some of these varied and diverse strata of his
work and influence. The volume and range of recent work on
Benjamin, taken alongside new English versions of key texts such
as the Arcades Project, make it an exciting time for such
investigations. Sessions are planned on:
The Metropolis and Modernity
Benjamin's rich texts explore the places most associated with his
travels: the great cities of Berlin, Paris and Moscow, whose past is
interred in his provocative dialectical images of urban space. This
work is vital in conceptualizing the metropolis as the key to modern
experience. From thoughts on the glass architecture of the Paris
Arcades and the new consumer dreamworlds, to his delicate
phenomenologies of the shocks of urban life and the porous spaces
of the city landscape, Benjamin's writings on the city are among his
most influential and challenging works. Following Poe and
Baudelaire, Benjamin the flâneur does not shrink from the dark,
detritus-strewn aspect of the city. The ragpicker and the prostitute
are as important to the metropolis as the monument and the metro,
embodying antagonistic social forces. This dialectic of city life, a
dialectic of embrace and recoil, of nearness and distance, is at the
heart of Benjamin's perspective on modernity.
Dialectics of Technology
'[M]ass movements, including war, constitute a form of human
behavior which particularly favors mechanical equipment' (The
Artwork in the Epoch of its Technical Reproducibility). Accurately
identifying the harnessing of technological progress in the service of
regressive social movements such as fascism, Benjamin
nevertheless hoped for an emancipation of technology and the
masses that might upset fascistic power relations. Benjamin
discusses the aesthetic transformations and transgressions
wrought by the mechanically reproduced images of photography and
film, and by the industrialization and urbanization of life. Creative
appropriations of Benjamin's theory of the related loss of the
experience encapsulated in the aura of traditional art forms can
provide vital theoretical pointers towards a theory of electronic art
and other innovative media.
Space, Time and Historical Memory
Benjamin's passages through European space refigure the trope of
the wandering Jew, forced to cross and re-cross borders, seeking a
homecoming for which there is as yet no place. This still-relevant
image perhaps also has a more universal application, from the
Middle East to the Balkans and from Ireland to Kurdistan.
Benjamin's texts on history remember questions European
enlightenment necessarily forgets, whilst simultaneously
maintaining the image of a future redemption of humanity prompted
through the consideration of past experience.
Philosophizing beyond Philosophy
Benjamin's writing encompasses wide-ranging engagements with
neo-Platonism, Romanticism, neo-Kantianism, Messianism,
Marxism and phenomenology. His hybridizations presage many
contemporary philosophical concerns, escaping the boundaries of
traditional philosophy, without slipping into dilettantism, by
producing theoretical constellations which straddle the artificial
academic division between theories of modernity and post-
modernity. His important thoughts on language provide a
sophisticated mediation between the concerns of philosophy and
literary criticism. His philosophically subtle studies of Goethe,
Kafka and Proust take philosophy beyond itself, confirming his wish
to be remembered as one of the foremost literary critics of his
generation.
Colloquium Format and Call for Contributions
Topics will be explored in a range of plenary paper sessions and
keynote presentations. The proceedings are planned as a special
issue of Theory, Culture & Society and a volume in the TCS book
series. There will also be opportunities for workshops, performances
and exhibitions designed to facilitate debate and to allow a range of
participants to share their work with other delegates. Those
interested in giving a paper, organizing a workshop, a performance,
or in exhibiting their work should contact the conference organizers
as soon as possible. Please give your full name, address and email
with a short abstract of less than 100 words describing the nature of
your proposed contribution.
Organizing Committee
Howard Caygill; Matt F. Connell; Mike Featherstone; Lluis Flaquer;
Douglas Kellner; Willem van Reijen; Peter Osborne; Gary Smith.
Contact
Matt F. Connell and Mike Featherstone, The TCS Center, Room
175, Faculty of Humanities, Nottingham Trent University, Clifton
Lane, Nottingham NG11 8NS, UK
E-mail: [log in to unmask] Web: http://tcs.ntu.ac.uk
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