Introduction: Benjamin's Passage-work

Abstract

The works of Walter Benjamin have been a regular source for the many critical turns in the humanities that have been identified over the last two decades. What those various turns (linguistic, visual, topographical, ethical, and so on) amount to, is a meta-turn towards interand transdisciplinarity as organizing principles for current endeavours in the humanities; and Benjamin has a particular status as a model interand transdisciplinarian. This is the fundamental ‘Copernican’ turn, the dialectical awakening (GS V.1, 490; AP, 388), in the understanding of culture to which Benjamin’s writings make such a fundamental contribution. This collection of essays takes stock of Benjamin’s interdisciplinary thinking and some of the key opportunities for turns in critical thinking and analysis that it presents across a range of disciplinary domains and between them. The essays incorporate discussion of aesthetic production with relation to various media and genres (painting, cinema, photography, drama, essay, fiction, biography) and the intermedial or intergeneric relations between them. And they range over a number of key critical discourses — philosophical, historical, aesthetic, political, and theological — while also prospecting the territory between these. An abiding feature of the essays gathered here is thus the work of moving between different forms of object and different discursive domains, testing the dialectical energy that emerges through such work in both areas, but also — and critically — between them. For the overarching transitional space here is that between critical discourse and object of analysis, both of which are rendered transitional in themselves as they are made to occupy that space together and to work upon each other. The critical modulation between conceptual thinking (crossing disciplinary boundaries) and attention to material (crossing objective and categorical boundaries) is perhaps the most significant characteristic of what is called here Benjamin’s ‘passage-work’. The term passage-work hails, of course, second-hand from one of Benjamin’s most influential texts, the Passagen-Werk or Arcades Project, the work in which he establishes himself as perhaps the preeminent critic of urban culture in both its ‘high’ and ‘low’ forms, and in the medial territory between these. An appropriate entry to the present