Benjaminian Ruskin: Redemptive Myth and Modernity
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The Queen of the Air, John Ruskin’s highly elliptical publication of 1869, elaborates a complex mythology as a way of responding to the prevalence of scientific thinking, widespread environmental degradation, the pernicious effects of political economy, and mechanistic labor. Benjamin’s desire to rescue human experience from prevailing scientific conceptions is reminiscent of Ruskin’s fear that the peculiar power that shapes the unities of the natural world is simultaneously being “beaten down by the philosophers into a metal or evolved by them into a gas” and obscured by the dreams and theories of philosophers and theologians. As a critic remarks, in Benjamin’s—and, we would add, Ruskin’s—view, “what the modern era lacked was a basis for continuity which would prevent experience from disintegrating into a desultory and meaningless series of events.” Despite its frenetic hyper-associativity, then, The Queen of the Air contains a key element that Benjamin believes is necessary for “redemption”: the desire for a new form of consciousness that recognizes links to the past and thus to the longings and dreams of our forebears. Thus, although Ruskin most immediately influences Proust, who in turn influences Benjamin, Benjamin’s thought is far more Ruskinian than critics have heretofore observed. Just as Benjamin helps us make sense of the ways in which The Queen of the Air is caught in the grip of the shocking associativity of modern life, so Ruskin assists us in discerning similar impulses in Benjamin’s attraction to a form of archaic consciousness that can, by altering the modern form of perception, reenchant the present.
Abstract
The Queen of the Air, John Ruskin’s highly elliptical publication of 1869, elaborates a complex mythology as a way of responding to the prevalence of scientific thinking, widespread environmental degradation, the pernicious effects of political economy, and mechanistic labor. Benjamin’s desire to rescue human experience from prevailing scientific conceptions is reminiscent of Ruskin’s fear that the peculiar power that shapes the unities of the natural world is simultaneously being “beaten down by the philosophers into a metal or evolved by them into a gas” and obscured by the dreams and theories of philosophers and theologians. As a critic remarks, in Benjamin’s—and, we would add, Ruskin’s—view, “what the modern era lacked was a basis for continuity which would prevent experience from disintegrating into a desultory and meaningless series of events.” Despite its frenetic hyper-associativity, then, The Queen of the Air contains a key element that Benjamin believes is necessary for “redemption”: the desire for a new form of consciousness that recognizes links to the past and thus to the longings and dreams of our forebears. Thus, although Ruskin most immediately influences Proust, who in turn influences Benjamin, Benjamin’s thought is far more Ruskinian than critics have heretofore observed. Just as Benjamin helps us make sense of the ways in which The Queen of the Air is caught in the grip of the shocking associativity of modern life, so Ruskin assists us in discerning similar impulses in Benjamin’s attraction to a form of archaic consciousness that can, by altering the modern form of perception, reenchant the present.
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