Phantasmagoria: Walter Benjamin and the Poetics of Urban Modernism

Abstract

In 1917 Max Weber, in an essay entitled ‘Science as a Vocation’, claimed that the essence of modernity was the disenchantment of the world, brought about by the spread of what he called ‘rationalization’ across all forms of social life.3 The predominant scene of this disenchantment, according to such diverse theorists of modernity as Weber, Lukács, Simmel and Benjamin, was the modern metropolis, within which the consequences of historical change and technological innovation are actualized. The theorizing of ‘modernism’ in relation to ‘modernity’ has often appealed to the Marxist concepts of alienation and reification.4 Yet Lukács’ famous rejection of Modernism suggests that in so far as these concepts are staked on the faith that Marxist science could expunge superstition, annul the power of mythic thinking and recover a lost harmony of the particular and the general, they are inadequate to deal with the questions of subjectivity and aesthetics thrown up by modernist practice. Enlightenment notions of modernity are based on a refutation of spectres, but are haunted, as so much modernist literature attests, by the return of premodern, animistic or magical modes of thought.5 Jacques Derrida’s most recent work offers a critique of Marxist ontology, and calls for a new ontology, a hauntology which, far from attempting to exorcize ghosts and spectres, as Marx claimed to do, would introduce haunting into the structure of Marxist concepts.6