Walter Benjamin's Reading of Charles Baudelaire and Critique of the Experience of Modernity

Abstract

Walter Benjamin's Reading of Charles Baudelaire and Critique of the Experience of Modernity In Benjamin's portrait, Baudelaire is seen for the first time as a big-city poet attempting to explore the nature of modern metropolitan experience. Benjamin's description of Baudelaire discloses that Baudelaire, standing on the cusp between traditional and modern societies, witnesses the extermination by modern industrial capitalism of the last traces of traditional life. For Benjamin experience in a capitalist society is no longer a matter of corresponding interaction of the individual with his own environment, but is reduced instead to a fragmentary series of impressions and sensations only partially registered. The writing of modernity, Benjamin suggests, can not hinge on linear description or narration since it resists our attempt to present an integrated, coherent view of the phenomena of modernity as a whole. City experiences tend to remain isolated as accidental occurrences instead of being assimilated into an integrated stock of experience. For Benjamin the atrophy of experience is contemporaneous with the disappearance of the storyteller and the problem of experience is central to his study on modernity.