Walter Benjamin's Other History: Of Stones, Animals, Human Beings and Angels

by Beatrice Hanssen
ISBN-0-520-20841-2
University of California Press
218 pages,$35.00 cloth

Reviewed by Mike Mosher


In Walter Benjamin's Other History Beatrice Hanssen makes the debatable case that Benjamin assembled from his eclectic interests and literary inclinations "a new theory of natural history". If she doesn't completely prove this, in the process she turns over a variety of motifs from his texts and makes connections in the critic's fossil record. While an artist might be more immediately inspired by Susan Buck-Morss' The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (MIT Press, 1989), a book that unpacks a very different (and unfinished) part of Benjamin's work, there is much a student of Benjamin can find of value in Hanssen's serious philosophical and literary study.

The author's wide net catches a wriggling and diverse range of topics. Motifs of wild and domestic animals in Franz Kafka writings, whether dog, mouse, monsters like the cat-lamb or more often monstrous humans. Benjamin's fascination with a Paul Klee painting of an angel. Concepts of humanity, humanism and the unmensch, in opposition to Hitler's abuse of a bastardized-Nietzchean one of the ubermensch. Benjamin's thoughts on the kreatur and language itself.

Hanssen pays particular attention to Benjamin's first book The Origin of German Tragic Drama, written in hopes of securing a privatdozent university teaching position which never materialized for him. In it Benjamin saw literary symbols that expressed an "organic, mountain and plant-like quality" and that semantically overdetermined and oversignified allegory proceeded from the era's interest in natural history. That this was also the era of great wunderkammer, eclectic personal museums seems no accident. Fragments and ruins were incorporated into theatrical drama as they were into private scientific collections. Motifs of decay, decomposition and dissolution prevalent in plays of that period only mirrored nature's own.

The writings of Walter Benjamin most often studied and cited by Multimediastes is his 1936 essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", and Beatrice Hanssen's bases a chapter "The Aesthetics of Transience" upon it. My own work as an artist has been marked with volatility and disappearance-community murals quickly obliterated to multimedia works created in popular off-the-shelf packages that can't run in later versions (or on hardware) five years later-so found this chapter of particular interest.

In "The Work of Art" essay Benjamin worked to develop principles that could resist the aesthetics of fascism taking hold around him, and began with assumptions of the validity of ideas about art from Futurism and Dadaism, and their suitability for an age of urban temporality and fluidity. Hanssen points out Benjamin's new aesthetic model "privileged the fragmentary and the transient", qualities he also recognized and appreciated in German Baroque drama. He saw the relationship of a unique artwork to its "aura" as comparable to that of a literary allegory to its originating phenomenon in nature.

In this arena Hanssen examines Benjamin's mutually attentive relationship with the theories of Theodor W. Adonrno; R.B. Kitaj's 1972 painting The Autumn of Central Paris (After Walter Benjamin) somewhat suggests visually the richness of their discourse. After Benjamin's death Adorno carried his pessimism about permanence on into an aesthetics of art objects never transcendent, only transient. Hanssen writes Adorno "held that the refuse or remnants produced by historic decay now no longer spelled 'transience' as their meaning. Instead these relics were presented as ghostly objects, letters, traces--that is, as a spectral scripture of a forever mediated, inaccessible eternity." In 1998 as an apt description of much of the ar/work displayed or constructed upon the World Wide Web.