Walter Benjamin & Charles Baudelaire - Walking & Writing The Morality Of The Modern City

OCTOBER 23rd 2006 - Paul O ’Kane

(Written for Kate Love’s Fine Art BA Level One Lectures at Central St Martin’s College, UAL and accompanied by slides of Atget’s photographs)

The Flaneur, of course, is a modern figure, a figure of modernity. Not a rural, countryside figure, but an urban wanderer, a dandy, well-dressed –or dressed as well as possible- narcissistic, admiring not only windows but their reflections too, bored and aimless, exploring, yet idly, the labyrinth which is the city. [1]

The villages and country life that the industrial revolution left somehow behind us, these were not labyrinthine but small and familiar, populated by those who knew each other only too well, and who lived amid familiar sights, barely changing. The rural rhythms were attuned to the seasons, the sun, the moon, and the weather.

For the flaneur of the modern city, its arcades, illuminated at dusk, provided a new space which is both inside and outside, impervious to weather, changes of season or times of day, arcades in which everything is seen reflected in everything else and where everyone sees each other as a kind of reflection, as a judgement upon their own appearance and behaviour.

Charles Baudelaire, a poet and art critic of mid 19th century Paris, is regarded today and by 20th century writers like Walter Benjamin as having been one of the great, clear and emphatic voices capable of telling what he saw and felt and thought about the birth and development of modernity and the modern city.

Baudelaire fits the image of the flaneur, a man with a heroic and aristocratic air, but who is yet to find his role and status in the modern world. Perhaps that is precisely what the flaneur is looking for amid the cornucopia of the city’s offerings, and what defines him as a typically modern figure.

Baudelaire however also chose to live a life of Bohemian poverty and creativity. Walter Benjamin, searching though the Paris libraries in the 1930s, notes in Baudelaire’s letters to his mother that he had an extraordinary number of home addresses in just a few years, that he stuffed holes in his shiny black shoes with straw, and that he was regularly on the run from people to whom he owed money. [2]

If Baudelaire’s clothes were not always appropriate for the dandy or flaneur (in one letter he wrote of the fear that he must confine himself to bed because of a lack of clothes) nevertheless his senses were always attuned to wandering the city and finding flashes of meaning and value in events and things that he transformed into images.

This ability to rescue or procure meaning, value, stories and poems we might call Symbol or Allegory. Baudelaire, sometimes a ‘Symbolist’ poet, speaks of his modern experience as mysterious, as a ‘forest of symbols’ in which the senses become mixed and confused. [3]

Our journeys through the city are like paths on which we are drawn not being quite sure where or why we are going. Sometimes, we are not even sure why we are here in the city at all. We have left the countryside behind only to find ourselves in an even stranger forest, traversing even stranger plains.

The modern environment is full of signs, but for the imaginative reader and thinker, the signs are never clear and sometimes they say more than they should. Walter Benjamin turns even the simple sign ‘One way Street’ into a reflection on pains of broken romance. [4]

For all the modern world’s pride in its inventions, its architecture, its Knowledge and its libraries, it is nevertheless a labyrinth and a forest in which we may need some very ancient skills.[5]

Allegory, like symbol, shows more than the surface of things, it can take up images as moral examples, signs of how to act translated through an indirect language. The morals and allegories of modernity however, are not prescribed Christian ones. In fact, Baudelaire recognises that one of the motivations of modernity, at least since the French revolution of 1789, is to shake off Christianity’s domination of our liberties, imaginations and expressions.

Modernity is to a certain extent a search for the possibilities of a secular society in which belief in god is supplanted by humanism, Capitalism, Consumerism, and where Rights become something to believe in and to live (and even die) for. Human rights, the rights of man become a moral order, a new, worldly virtue. Meanwhile, technology and novelty themselves become a guiding, dazzling force by which humans are humbled by their own inventions.

Walter Benjamin, a Jewish German intellectual and innovative writer and thinker, working significantly in the 1920s and 30s, is not only captivated by the importance of Baudelaire as an inspiring, guiding spirit, he is also influenced by the ancient Jewish hermeneutic tradition whereby truth is rigorously debated according to continuous scrutiny of the great religious texts by one of the so-called ‘religions of the book’. Benjamin is also influenced by modern ideas like Marxism, the Russian revolution, Hegelian dialectics and the dominant, modern notion of History as a kind of spirit or force within which man performs. He is influenced by Surrealism and by Dada, all of which he uses to produce his own, 20th Century interpretation of the flaneur’s duty to wander the city’s labyrinth, in casual, distracted searches, looking, or hoping, for what Benjamin called ‘profane illuminations’.

It is perhaps not difficult to work out what Benjamin meant by this phrase ‘Profane Illumination’. When someone as interested in religion or its modern equivalents as Benjamin uses the word ‘illumination’ it is likely that he is invoking the Judaeo-Christian theme of light-as-holy, sacred or divine, and of the sacred, divine and holy as light. A moment of illumination is then divine, a holy moment of special experience, a chance, an enhanced sense, a sudden new understanding or ‘reading’ of a small detail of the city. [6]

However, as modernity and moderns like Baudelaire and Benjamin are secular thinkers, perhaps believing wholeheartedly only in modernity itself, these ‘illuminations’ cannot be sacred in the usual religious sense, and they are not located only in the church or the mass, in fact they may arise from the very opposite circumstances, from the most everyday and even the most poor and ugly and irreligious thing –the profane. But arising thus, unexpectedly from unlikely paces and things, at unexpected moments while wandering the city, these ‘profane illuminations’ are even more valued and are a proof not of a god who lives above and beyond but evidence of our very own mysterious powers of imagination and our idiosyncratic interpretation of the endless book that is the city. The city itself, or at least our relationship to it, is something to believe-in, to live.

If modern man has abandoned or been abandoned by his God, nevertheless man’s need or thirst for the sacred, for meaning, value, order, narrative and judgement (all things found in the bible) is in no way diminished by the experience of modernity. It is merely re-directed so that man finds a human or profane value within this world that he has created for himself –the city is the world (at times the whole world) that man has created for himself.

This value does not have a permanent residence or address like the icon in the church, but might flash up at any moment as something of historical importance or even as a kind of divine vision, only to disappear again into the rush of the labyrinth.

Without a unifying creed or organised religion, a man in the city easily finds himself alone, and many seek out this solitude,[7] the modern, human ‘I’ and modern, urban subjectivity overwhelm the central male characters of arch-modern novels like Dostoevsky’s ‘Crime and Punishment’, Herman Hesse’s ‘Steppenwolf’ or J.D Salinger’s ‘The Catcher in the Rye’. The way of seeing and thinking that this man brings to the city becomes extremely personal, idiosyncratic, even psychotic.

The city is in fact a private space, a private world, made even more private by Baudelaire’s opium or absinthe, or Benjamin’s experiments smoking hashish. [8] If we venture into the city without a goal or a God to guide us or unite us with other men, with a greater reason and meaning beyond our selves, we are forced to read the city even harder, more desperately and more necessarily because we are lost.[9]

We thus read it like a book, another activity that we tend in the modern world to do alone. The book, like the city, is also the outcome of modern technologies and mass production. Made for the mass, it paradoxically produces another kind of solitude. We read the book of the city with our own needs, our own journeys in mind, finding there, not the folk tales of the country kind everyone once knows and which were learned at their mother’s knee, but idiosyncratic narratives, surprising events, subjective meanings, new values, new allegories. In fact it is we who write and rewrite the book of the city even as we walk it. This life is not pre-scribed, we script it as it unfolds and closes behind us. [10]

Nevertheless, the city gives itself to us as if objectively, as apparently clearly labelled and signposted, even its Underground map is popularly known to be a ‘classic of graphic design’, it has to be of course, for the most mysterious depths of the city’s labyrinth need the most reassuring mask of visible clarity. The city is increasingly littered with large and clear signs, and yet, acknowledging the influence of Benjamin and Baudelaire, it seems that we are forced to believe increasingly in our selves, in our own interpretations, and even in our very own choice of signs. We make of the city what we want and what we need, applying imaginative interpretation to what is commonly regarded as objective information, claiming a certain place or zone as ‘ours’, or regarding certain events as our very own signs of History, laced with threats, promises, echoes and regrets.[11]

In some ways, we have become less or more than that ‘human’ ideal strived–for by the original modern men, we explore the city like animals or perhaps with the intuitive confidence of those mystics who once wore animal masks to show their special powers. [12]

We follow our noses as much as signs or common sense thereby discovering what is uncommon and unsignposted. But in this regard we are also like those knee-high Children who bump into us in the park because they are drawn to something that we have not noticed and move with a blind purpose, oblivious to our own path. Graeme Gilloch, in his ‘Myth and Metropolis’ draws our attention to some of the moments in Walter Benjamin’s description of his visit to Moscow where he describes his experience as child-like.

“ The instant one arrives, the childhood stage begins. On the thick sheet ice of the streets walking ha to be relearned. ”

And describing travelling at speed, through crowds, close to the ground in a sleigh Benjamin says:
“ You feel like a child gliding through the house on its little chair.”[13]

Benjamin, who collected playful objects and Children’s books, also displays a child-like state of mind in all of his wanderings, whether it is through the city or the library –both of which are comparable labyrinths and both of which we are advised to enter with the modesty and open minds of children.

If we can give our own names and meanings to the things and places that we encounter in the city, that too is a childlike activity that exists before the rules of language and society are established or imposed within us. Also perhaps evocative of a childlike psychology is an image found in the ‘Chinese Curios’ section of One Way Street. Here, Benjamin seems to be reminding every scholar of the value of the dying art of copying out a text, [14] but the line which is most childlike is: “that road cut through the interior jungle ever closing behind it” because here we glimpse the psychology of the Flaneur, the hashish smoker, the opium addict, the Absinthe drinker, but also the child, for whom the present is a bubble in which reason is not tempered by past experience and nor is any decision justified by future purposes or ends (Teleology). In a private world, the child lives empirically, testing and learning by experience, and lives intensely, in a heightened, compressed privilege of ‘the now’ in which everything can be astonishing because nothing is prepared-for or presumed.

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But to begin to move towards a conclusion, we shouldn’t assume that this child-like, intoxicated; possibly selfish or decadent city wandering is necessarily irresponsible. After all, it is clear that both Benjamin and Baudelaire are men weighed down by a grave responsibility to carry and capture, to rescue and procure, some truth of their own times and places, as something that only they can see and articulate. Their burden of responsibility is to History, to future times, but they are prophetic in that they take pains to ensure that their own experience will be properly labelled and described, not simply by the bland labels of a scientific curator, but in their own words and images.

We have already seen that these modern writers are secular thinkers, not convinced by religion, and testing what lies beyond the confines of religion, even if what lurks there appears diabolical. There are significant alternative forces, institutions, organisations, isms, to which, in turning away from religion, they can turn. Some of these we have already mentioned: Consumerism, Capitalism, Marxism, Socialism, Utopianism, and to these we might add: Romanticism, Realism, Modernism, Dadaism, Surrealism, plus Militarism, Nation-alism, Futurism, Fascism, and of course the guiding institutions of History and of Revolution.

So, how do these writers of Modernity take up their idiosyncratic sensibility, apply it to the experience of walking the labyrinthine city streets with a child-like sense of focus, empiricism and invention, ever in search of poetic images, of promising symbols and redemptive allegories –‘profane illuminations’- while nevertheless remaining gravely responsible and historically vigilant?

Both seem capable of maintaining a certain, crucial distance from all the Isms that we have listed and which surely surround them. Benjamin is a communist of sorts and certainly anti-fascist (his exiles and eventual suicide are evidence of his terror of the Gestapo), and yet Benjamin maintains a personal response to communism, in fact, typically, rather than sign up to its image, its sign or its propaganda, he travels to Moscow as a true empiricist to see for himself what it is really like. Once there of course, as we have seen, he finds far more and far less than communism and returns full of imaginative images and responses to the details of life that he never expected to encounter there.

Similarly, during his exile in Paris, where he studies Baudelaire and the 19th century arcades, he also socialises and flirts with Surrealists and Surrealism. He obviously has affinities with this ism’s interest in experiments with writing, changes in consciousness, the city, chance and a special sense of the sacred hidden within the everyday. [15] He writes an essay comparing Surrealist revolution with Marxist revolution in which Surrealism seems favoured as more profound and imaginative, and yet, despite all this, we would not call Benjamin a surrealist. In his most famous essay ‘The Work of art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ [16] Benjamin strongly advocates Dadaism as a politicised art that turns the products of Fascism and Capitalism against themselves and which uses photography to reveal the fact that art’s purpose and value is totally transformed and revolutionised by modern technology. Still we could not call Benjamin Dadaist.

In his writing, Benjamin is often concerned to question the Hegelian and Marxist model of ‘dialectics’ i.e. progress by way of opposed and conflicting ideas, the apotheosis of which we now see in the 20th Century battles between opposing totalitarian ideologies of Fascism and Communism. But again, Benjamin uses a personal response and an imaginative, poetic image to think and ‘see’ beyond this dominant model or image of thought. He talks of ‘dialectics at a standstill’ [17] as an alternative suggested to him by the Parisian arcades in which one passes through rows of opposing or facing windows, where everything is illuminated and reflective, where, as when we face two mirrors into each other, the resulting image is no longer of narrative progress or teleological direction but of dizzying infinity -something with cosmic or religious implications, something in need of cosmic or religious articulation, and yet something found amid the apparently profane world of dawdling, bourgeois consumerism. ‘Dialectics at a standstill’ might relieve the world of its bad habits of conflict and progress and grace it instead with something more fascinating or beguiling, something perhaps that it has lost in the past and cannot find either in modernity nor in any of the futures that modernity promises.

Baudelaire, in his own time, produced his best-known image as ‘The Flowers of Evil’. Here, like Benjamin, he contradicts expectations and questions existing values. ‘Evil’ and ‘Flowers’ are things we usually hold far apart, but Baudelaire has crashed them together to make us think again. As a secular thinker he needs to think beyond the Christian’s clear sense of good and evil, he doesn’t want to deny the presence and the value of evil in himself and in the world around him, even children can be wicked, and having the courage to tell a lie can often get us what we need to survive in the desperately competitive city whose justice has also become modern and labyrinthine.[18]

Furthermore, the dark, the sexual, the immoral aspects of life cannot be simply hidden or written off, Baudelaire knows that these too are human, these too are a kind of human right, the source of our greatest pleasure as well as being a crucial stimulus for creativity.

Is it not also a ridiculous anthropomorphism or imposition of human values to consider flowers to be somehow ‘innocent’? Baudelaire perhaps considers anything to be a ‘flower’ that is a value discovered amid the labyrinth of the city, anything that is come upon as the Romantic rural poet would have been delighted to come upon actual flowers in the countryside. As Baudelaire famously insisted in his Salon of 1846’ the city and modernity need their own beauties, modern beauties, their own equivalent ‘flowers’, and if Baudelaire discovers these ‘flowers’ only through immoral pursuits of sex, alcohol, opium, the night, and amid the people who inhabit the sub cultural underworld of Paris, or the poor accommodation that he is forced to occupy, so be it, they will be ‘Flowers of Evil’ a new thought, and a new beauty, for a modern world.

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To sum up, what is crucial to both Benjamin and Baudelaire is -along with every man- to sustain a reason, a motivation, a justification, a narrative for life and for living in their own times. And yet, to achieve this they remain necessarily ‘Untimely’, just outside their world, never quite belonging to any gang or team or movement. Ultimately they are autonomous, finding all that they need within themselves and their own practices of thinking and writing. They dispense with the duty to confirm reality and instead displace reality and live Empirically, testing the actual value of everything as if encountered for the very first time, like a child, while feeling the momentum of modernity as runaway, rogue novelty unsure of its own youthful identity, direction and purpose, and unclear of its own relation to history. Benjamin and Baudelaire are both seers who, though profoundly optical, see also historically, unconsciously, prophetically, and extraordinarily.

By interpreting what is under their eyes and beneath their feet according to a special concoction of imagination, innovation, and responsibility, they also speak of other times, of our own times as well as making modernity appear sometimes ancient and decrepit even as it is being born. This is what makes them seers -paradoxically ancient figures dressed in modern clothes.

END

© 2006 Paul O'Kane

Related Prose: 'In and Out of the City' ended this lecture. To read it, click 'Related Prose' at the bottom of the page.

[1] Raymond Williams has written The city and the Country which might introduce or develop this enormous theme. So might Turgenev’s (far more entertaining) Sketches from a Hunter ’s Album.

[2] See Walter Benjamin’s ‘Charles Baudelaire – A Lyric Poet in the era of High Capitalism and also The Arcades Project -section on ‘Baudelaire.

[3] See the poem Correspondences.

[4] See dedication to the Chapter One Way Street in the book of the same name, or in the collection Reflections.

[5] Again see Charles Baudelaire - A Lyric Poet In the Era of High Capitalism where Benjamin traces connections made between Baudelaire’s 19th C. Paris, Edgar Allen Poe, the birth of the detective novel genre and Native American Indian tales of the kind produced by J. Fennimore Cooper.

[6] See Words of Light by Cadaver who develops this theme along with that of Photography in Benjamin’s oeuvre.

[7] See the paintings of Edward hopper to illustrate this Modern Urban loneliness.

[8] A questioner took issue with this demanding that the post modern world know no such loneliness because of mobile phones and other telecommunications devices. However, my lecture (illustrated by photos of Atget) is purposefully designed to evoke and contain issues of early modernity and does not (as is often the case with images of ‘web surfing flaneurs’ etc.) feel the need to make comparisons with our own milieu.

[9] The artist Robert Rauschenberg has said ‘You always look the hardest when you’re lost’

[10] Two references here to the Chinese Curios section of One Way Street i.e. ‘learning from a mother’s knee’, is yet another way of ‘copying out a text’ While Benjamin also talks there of paths ever ‘closing behind us’.

[11] This could serve as a definition of or introduction to the Situationists' concept of ‘Psychogeography’.

[12] A second evocation of the Native American Indian perhaps, or useful as a reference to the ‘Primitivist stimulus for early Modern art.

[13] See Moscow in One Way Street or in Reflections.

[14] Note that where Benjamin criticises mere reading as akin to flying over the text in an airplane, he prophetically or inadvertently evokes the movement of the ubiquitous Photocopier today, whose very own glide across or looking down from a distance, kills the art of hand copying in academia.

[15] Breton’s novellas Nadja and and Mad Love are useful complements to these themes.

[16] See Illuminations and other collected writings.

[17] See The Arcades Project.

[18] Kafka articulates this notion in The Trial, The Castle, in the short story ‘Before The Law’ and in numerous less direct references.

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