Walter Benjamin’s account of social class and photography Essay Example for Free

Walter Benjamin’s account of social class and photography Essay Walter Bendix Schonflies Benjamin was born in July 15, 1892 in Berlin, German. He was many things rolled in one: sociologist, essayist, philosopher, translator, literary critic. Occasionally, he was associated with critical theory school of Frankfurt, as he wrote extensively on cultural and sociological thoughts and contributed greatly to the Western Marxism and aesthetic theory. He translated Marcel Proust and Charles Baudelaire, the coiner of ‘Modernism’. He himself came up with the term’ auratic perception’ in the aesthetic field in which civilization was to recover myth appreciation (Mali 1999, p. 170). Benjamin came from in a rich business family. His parents were Emil Benjamin, a banker and later a trader in antiques, and Pauline Schonflies, his sibling being Georg and Dora. He later married Dora S. Pollak who bore him a son called Stefan Rafael. He killed himself through an overdose of morphine in Portbou; a French-Spanish border town in 1940. He was escaping from Nazis, who had invaded France. The discussion below will concentrate on Benjamin account of social class and history of photography. Social class Being one of romantic/socialist Jewish-German writers, Walter Benjamin developed a radical anti-protestant and anti-capitalism argument, which was chiefly instigated through the works of Max Weber (Lowy, 2010). In his attempt to describe the system of capitalism, Walter Benjamin proclaims that capitalism was a form of an evil and cruel religion. To him there exists a connection between work ethic of Protestant: hard work, ploughing back of profit to business and frugal life, all of which are the characteristics of bourgeois, and capitalism. Winning more and more money, accumulating wealth and in the process of doing so, one should let go of all pleasures of life are the basic tenets of capitalism. To capitalists, a person is conditioned to continue acquiring wealth not for the sake of gratifying his needs and wants, rather as organized way of living. To Benjamin, bourgeois pay little attention or no attention at all, to the struggle of proletariats. Capitalism begs that the human happiness and life’s need are something meaningless and irrational which according to Benjamin; it is a complete reversal of the common order of life. Capitalism brought about the order of people living for their work instead of working for their life. He borrows the phrase ‘Capitalism as religion’ from Ernst Bloch and Max Weber’s work and Benjamin continue to show the religious aspects of capitalism, and it is not controlled by religion, but capitalism is in itself a religious phenomena, for it has taken the world like a bush fire, no one is save from it’s tentacles. His arguments goes on to highlight how at the Reformation time, Christianity opposed capitalism establishment, but how later Christianity let itself into capitalism (Weber 2002, p. 17). One of characteristic of capitalism as a religion is just like a cult; capitalism does not have a specific theology or dogma but utilitarianism-which wins the day. Such capitalism utilitarian practices: speculations, capital investment, manipulation of stock-exchange, financial operations, buying and selling goods and services; all these aspects take the shape of a religious cult. In capitalism, there is no requirement of a theology, a creed or a doctrine acceptance, rather action counts, which by extension, through social dynamics, take cult practices form. In capitalism, just like in religion, there exist adoration objects which come in form of money. People adore saints in ordinary religions, just as they adore money in capitalism. Benjamin does not stop at that, but goes all the way in comparing paper-notes with ‘Hell’s door architecture’ manifesting seriousness as capitalism’s Holy Spirit. According to him, the world’s religion state is despair, under capitalism. The other characteristic of capitalism, just like the permanence nature of a cult, capitalism is conducted year in year out. Capitalism permeates all the life conduct setting on vocation calling of systematic, restless and continuous work. Most if not all of Catholic holidays have been suppressed by Puritan capitalists who see them as some type of idleness. Capitalist religion permanently deploy ‘sacred pomp’ every day of Finance or Stock-Exchange, adorers following with extreme tension and anguish, the fall or rise of the value of shares. Capitalist practices know not of stoppage, it take over the control of a person, twenty fours hours a day, seven days a week and three hundred sixty five days a year.