Walter Benjamin nowhere to be found

the disappearance of The Work of Art Essay in the undergraduate curriculum

For 40 years, Walter Benjamin’s Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction essay was a critical part of Humanities curriculum. It blew my mind when I read it because I thought that Benjamin was trying to historicize contemporary art under the conditions of the marketplace and under the aegis of technological innovation. I guess all the anti-canon and anti-Eurocentrism young people in academia got tired of him. It was tiring to hear all the encomia to Benjamin and Benjamin trivia.

But here was a man who was thinking about Fascism, mass politics, aesthetic experience, the city, photography, film, politics, shopping, commodity fetishism, the speed of progress, etc. He never really made a living and came from a wealthy German Jewish extended family, most of whom were killed in the Holocaust. Benjamin committed suicide in Port Bou, Southern France, the night before a group he was with escaped Nazi occupied Europe. Maybe he was too much of a culture hero for my era, and people misread his cultural Leftism as pure culturalism, but Benjamin taught me how to think about history. His writing was almost devoid of any mention of class and labor, but what a theorist of the commodity and its universal grip on our imaginations. What a theorist of the radioactive half life of the aura.

I did hate the cult around him, but immersing myself in his thinking only did me good. He made me love history, when professional historians made me hate it.