Walter Benjamin's theories of experience: a critical study in the history of art and the politics of aesthetics

The question of Walter Benjamin's thinking on aesthetics is by now as much part of culture as Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup Cans, proving once again that culture has a tendency to appropriate and defang its most articulate critics. In a sense the aim of this study is to forge the way to a clearing by observing Benjamin's ideas on the paradoxes of culture, in the context of a body of thinking. The study is composed in such a way as to uncover the 'inner logic' of an ambiguous, contradictory, and subversive oeuvre: for all the paradoxes the essence remains written by the same hand. Although Benjamin wrote sharply against any notions of a 'system', the 'systematising' nature of his thinking needs to be delineated. Part one serves to root Benjamin in a gnostic-theological belief that language is revelatory, that the text is a source of truth. Part two, perhaps as an antithesis, focuses on Benjamin's move to images; a distinctly political move directed against the aestheticisation of reality common to modernity. If for Benjamin the fecund thinker would be a strategist and mobilizer of pessimism, his own acute sense of melancholy finds its apotheosis in a belief in messianic history. Part three, referring back to part one, is devoted to the discussion or "synthesis" of this messianic tendency, the substance of much contemporary debate. The study concludes by locating Benjamin's 'Utopian' thinking in the present historical, political aesthetical context; that is to say, marking the immediate influence Benjamin has on much postmodern thinking, a fact too often ignored whilst being appropriated as its own. Not forgetting the fact that Benjamin himself exhibited modernist aesthetic preoccupations with amongst other things shock and montage, if Benjamin is highly critical of ahistorical aestheticist thinking, then a rehabilitating criticism must be directed at the kind of postmodern thinking, which despite its fervent claims to the contrary, succumbs to such ahistoricism: aestheticising politics instead of politicizing aesthetics. If Benjamin is appropriated without reference and understanding of the historical context a crucial uncovering of the present tendency fails to take root. In this sense reading the contemporary through the "failure" of Benjamin is a critical move.