Walter Benjamin and the Media: The Spectacle of Modernity by Jaeho Kang (review)

The history of even the most radical and forward-looking thinker reaches a point when her or his work has been almost completely exhausted by interpretative desire, and when even the most remote aspects of that work have been thoroughly explained from the widest possible range of perspectives, methodologies, and cognitive interests. It is at that point, however, that critical reflection must seek to identify in the midst of historicizing analysis those potential sparks of significance that may be (re-)activated to resonate powerfully with the present, even and especially when the original texts could not possibly have anticipated such correspondences. The legacy of Walter Benjamin’s work may have reached this transitional stage. Every one of his surviving texts seems to have been scrutinized in its historical context as well as from the perspective of virtually every theoretical paradigm, and at least the appearance of two excellent volumes, the Benjamin-Handbuch edited by Burkhardt Lindner et al. (Metzler 2006) (ed. note: see review in Monatshefte 99.3, Fall 2007, 399–400) and the recent critical biography by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014) present such a panoramic evaluation of their subject that it is hard to imagine what new angles and insights may be offered afterwards.

In this sense, the present introduction to Benjamin’s prolific and wide-ranging work on technological media takes an almost heroic step in combining the precise explication of his texts with assessing their significance for the digital present. While it is simply not true, as the cover endorsements claim, that Benjamin’s reputation as a media critic has been effaced by other aspects of his work, it is evident that his approach to the media technologies of his time is affiliated with virtually all the other areas of knowledge to which he devoted his attention. After giving a concise account of pertinent biographical events, Kang successfully maps out, in meticulous detail and great clarity, four main areas: the fate of storytelling and the crisis of the novel in the age of expanding newspaper production, the information industry, and the new role of intellectuals in the age of mass media; Benjamin’s contributions to the audience sociology and media pedagogy of the radio culture of his day; the central and widespread importance of the famous essay on technological reproducibility for the rapid changes in the function of art and human perception in high capitalist society and fascist politics; and the role of media in the Arcades Project’s analysis of urban space, commodity culture, and the phantasmagorias of modernity.

Beyond this reconsideration of Benjamin’s texts in their significance for the era of classical modernity, Kang offers nuanced and fresh suggestions on how we may inscribe the implications of this work in our own global culture of digital media. He suggests that Benjamin’s media critique offers a better account of the complex contradictions of media society than that provided by Adorno and Horkheimer’s analysis of the culture industry (203–4) or by Habermas’s theory of the emergence and transformation of the public sphere (204–6); he argues that Benjamin’s analysis of technological reproducibility takes into account political ramifications not found in McLuhan’s view of media machineries (208); and in contrast to the theories of visual spectacle, simulacra, and hyperreality by Baudrillard and Debord, Benjamin’s critique is found to take a more subtle and pluralistic assessment of contemporary digital culture (212).

Without suggesting that Benjamin now be celebrated as the master-critic superseding his influential successors, Kang does portray him as a voice powerfully speaking from classical European modernity to postmodern times and beyond. While seasoned Benjamin experts may not necessarily find too many new insights offered by Kang’s narrative, it does serve as one of the best introductions on the market, not only to Benjamin’s media critique, but to his...