Walter Benjamin
- Thread starter version
- Start date
version
Well-known member
Just rereading this piece on WWI,
lithub.com
Can we still find people able to tell a proper story? How are the words of the dying passed on from generation to generation like an ancestral ring? Who, today, has a helpful proverb ready to hand? Who attempts to deal with the young by evoking past experience?
No, this much is clear: experience’s stock has fallen and did so for a generation that underwent, from 1914 to 1918, one of the most horrific experiences in world history. Perhaps this is not as surprising as it seems. Was the observation not made at the time that people returned mute from the battlefield? They did not come back richer in experiences they could impart, but poorer. What flowed into the flood of books about the war that appeared ten years later was anything but experience, which streams from lips to ears. No, this was not surprising at all.
For experiences have never been refuted more thoroughly than strategic ones were by trench warfare, economic ones by inflation, physical ones by hunger, ethical ones by the ruling powers. A generation that had gone to school in horse-drawn streetcars found itself under the open sky in a landscape in which only the clouds were unchanged and where, in the midst of it all, in a force field crossed by devastating currents and explosions, stood the tiny, fragile human body.
Walter Benjamin: How WWI Changed the Meaning of ‘Barbaric’
Our children’s storybooks contained the fable of the old man who, on his deathbed, convinced his sons that a treasure was buried in the vineyard. They simply had to dig for it. They dug and dug but…
lithub.com
No, this much is clear: experience’s stock has fallen and did so for a generation that underwent, from 1914 to 1918, one of the most horrific experiences in world history. Perhaps this is not as surprising as it seems. Was the observation not made at the time that people returned mute from the battlefield? They did not come back richer in experiences they could impart, but poorer. What flowed into the flood of books about the war that appeared ten years later was anything but experience, which streams from lips to ears. No, this was not surprising at all.
For experiences have never been refuted more thoroughly than strategic ones were by trench warfare, economic ones by inflation, physical ones by hunger, ethical ones by the ruling powers. A generation that had gone to school in horse-drawn streetcars found itself under the open sky in a landscape in which only the clouds were unchanged and where, in the midst of it all, in a force field crossed by devastating currents and explosions, stood the tiny, fragile human body.
sus
Moderator
He's totally wrong about strategic experiences though.
Trench warfare was developed during the (American) Civil War specifically in response to the failures of Napoleonic theory to accommodate modern rifled bores. It was specifically the repeated experience of theory's failure that led to new theory. Trench warfare is a testimony to the power of experience, not the opposite as Bejamin (as I read him?) claims.
Trench warfare was developed during the (American) Civil War specifically in response to the failures of Napoleonic theory to accommodate modern rifled bores. It was specifically the repeated experience of theory's failure that led to new theory. Trench warfare is a testimony to the power of experience, not the opposite as Bejamin (as I read him?) claims.
sus
Moderator
I think his mechanical reproduction stuff is good, but his "Task of the Translator" is one of the strangest experiences I've had reading theory. He just doesn't understand language at all, I think, and it shows. Some of the "aesthetic autonomy" concepts are on display in the very first paragraph:
Puh-lease.
Puh-lease.
version
Well-known member
I really need to read Against the Day.
version
Well-known member
‘Messianic Time’ in Gravity’s Rainbow
In ‘On the Concept of History’ (1940), the philosopher Walter Benjamin offered two conceptions of time: ‘homogenous and empty time’ and ‘Messianic time’. ‘Homogenous and empty time’ is the type of …
allcenturies.home.blog
sus
Moderator
+1 on this, I've always meant to read Guyotat