모던 보이 벤야민, 파리를 거닐다

Walter Benjamin as a Modern Boy Strolling About Paris: The Arcades Project and The Politics of Reading

My essay is to discuss Walter Benjamin's strategies of reading. Benjamin is a philosopher who intervenes the relationship between modernity and cultural production and his way of reading cultural phenomena seems to serve as the useful methodology of cultural studies. In this way his project analyzing 19th century arcades in Paris can be seen a precursory research on the phantasmagoria of modernity. M y discussion focuses on the way in which Benjamin develops the interpretation of modern cultural phenomena and attempts to reveal the secret of high capitalism. What Benjamin tries to set out is to find out the new path in order to understand a capitalist system which would be shown in the cultural sphere rather than in the socio-economic one. For Benjamin the act of reading is not only related to the symbolic but also combined with the impulsive and the unconscious. Reading is to interpret a dream of capitalism and produce a shock by which people would be awakened. The awakened is the very product of reading in such a way that psychoanalysis teaches as the truth of the real. Benjamin's reading is a strategy to avoid the problem of totalization coupled with the limit of representation. To solve this, what Benjamin comes up with is to conceptualization of "constellation". The concept of constellation is a way in which a reader as an interpreter can reveal the social and cultural materiality to skirt the problem of representation. Thus, Benjamin's reading is a political action proposing to set out the revolutionary and radical criticism by introducing a shock into the habitual perception. This might be called the estrangement effect of Benjaminian reading in the field of cultural production. From this perspective, it would be right to say that Benjamin's reading is an effective way for cultural critics who want to search for a method to analyze the cultural logic of late capitalism.