Introduction

What follows is composed of papers first presented 6–7 April 2001 at a symposium held by the Forbes Center for Research in Culture and Media Studies at Brown University. ¹ This symposium, "Benjamin Now: Critical Encounters with The Arcades Project," was provoked by the 1999 English-language translation of Walter Benjamin's monumental Das Passagen-Werk, the most legendary work of the most legendary of twentieth-century cultural interpreters and theorists. There was also a new and (as of this writing) ongoing multivolume set of translations appearing as Benjamin's Selected Writings from Harvard University Press. While focused on The Arcades, then, the symposium implicitly considered the extent to which the English-language academy has a "new" Benjamin on its hands. We thought, as my co-organizer Kevin McLaughlin puts it in his afterword, that "now might be an opportune moment for a reconsideration of the critical work of Walter Benjamin."

Our "now"—not Benjamin's. McLaughlin is implicitly referring to Benjamin's concept of Jetztzeit, the "now-time," the point at which objects, activities, and actions from the past may be cognized in a unique and heretofore unrecognizable constellation, as an image, a figure. For Benjamin, this dialectical image manifests a knowledge uniquely available to a specific present moment that will then pass. It is precious because it is generated by and includes the desires, needs, and contexts of the present and so can be lost if not formulated now. It is also precious because although an image, it conveys a knowledge that is in some fundamental sense rigorous. This is not an obvious or simple concept. But I admit that I reflexively imagine that the essential question of this collection of essays might be formulated in something of a Benjaminian manner: What previously unrecognized cognitions will flash up from our new encounter with The Arcades Project, as cognitions about Benjamin's work that make available something new of the dangers and the dreams, the forgotten and the remembered, of his time, but also and simultaneously of our own?

Benjamin addresses this kind of question to the remarkable abundance of textual fragments he quotes as traces of the Paris of a previous generation, the Paris he named capital of the nineteenth century. This conjunction of historical time and geopolitical space is indicative. The years during which Benjamin conceived and worked through The Arcades Project were years of some of the most extraordinary political, social, and intellectual crises of the twentieth century. In formulating his own answers to his question, he was working not only on the objects of study, nineteenth-century Paris and, more broadly, the inception of modern culture and society. He was also working through the conceptual, linguistic, and interpretive means by which he and his generation might understand culture and society—that is, the subject in an epistemological sense. Clearly both of these sides, object and subject, have their histories and their politics.

What is our situation now, as subjects confronting The Arcades Project as an object? It may appear that we are in a qualitatively different position and context from Benjamin's. Many political and theoretical questions that engaged him—about culture, textuality and language, modernity and society, knowledge and history—however compelling, can seem significantly distinct from ours simply because there has been an ongoing history of politics, theory, and criticism since his death. (And certainly, most of us in the First World academy, where the interest in Benjamin is so intense, work in very different circumstances than did he.) Yet Benjamin teaches us to watch not only for irreducible particularity and radical novelty but also for symptoms and compulsions of repetition and return in that very particularity and novelty. For example, Benjamin and certain colleagues attributed crises they lived to sociopolitical and sociocultural systems whose economics, aesthetics, and social fantasies were structured by war. As I am writing this, it is almost impossible to avoid asking whether we are living at a moment that is in the process of unveiling its own forms of perpetual...