Benjamin’s Baudelaire: Commodity, Experience, Shock

The poet Charles Baudelaire and cultural critic Walter Benjamin form a pair that together sketch a stark portrait of alienation in modern society. Often described as the quintessential poetry collection of modernity, Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil) remains a shocking record of the new subjective experience of urban life, a world of fractured beliefs and unstable grand narratives. Baudelaire’s poetic persona descends into the streets, confronting head-on the fleeting passersby that punctuate the lives of city dwellers. He is a poet of the senses, of murmuration and temporal echoes, of the fast beat and splenetic slowness alike. The collection was first published in 1857 to scandal and controversy that ended in a court order demanding the expurgation of several poems deemed obscene.

By way of Baudelaire’s poetry, Walter Benjamin conceptualized his most ambitious and unfinished work, The Arcades Project, which aimed at studying the commodity culture of late nineteenth-century Paris through the lens of the steel-and-glass arcades. The figure of the flâneur takes center stage in Benjamin’s understanding of the affective sociality of the late nineteenth century. Baudelaire’s poetry was for him emblematic of the position of art in the marketplace.

Together we will read The Flowers of Evil in Richard Howard’s translation, as well as selections from Keith Waldrop’s translation of The Spleen of Paris, Baudelaire’s posthumously published prose poems. Alongside these, we will read selected essays from Benjamin on Baudelaire, including those written as a response to Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s requests for a précis of The Arcades Project for the newly founded Institute for Social Research in New York City.

As we move through Baudelaire’s poetry and Benjamin’s critical responses to it, we will consider poetry’s position in the world of commodities. How does the lyric respond to the acceleration of experience brought about by late industrial capitalism? How does Benjamin’s reading of Baudelaire center his theory of history and art’s relation to new technologies of reproduction? We will focus on the novel ways Baudelaire reshaped the cultural understanding of what a poem does, and how lyric poetry responds to urbanization, modernity, and the feelings modern life intensifies: boredom, alienation, loneliness. We will examine the political and historical vision in this poetic work, its treatment of desire and memory, and the existential and religious critiques one may extrapolate from these poems. Through Benjamin’s Baudelaire we will study the new conditions of life ushered in by industrialization, and the possibility of art within the logic of capitalism.