Chris Cutrone lecture introducing Benjamin and history

Main ideas, concepts, and lessons

Course overview (purpose and scope)

• Instructor Chris Cutrone introduces the course as a deep dive into Walter Benjamin’s writings, with attention to the kinds of objects Benjamin works with (texts/subjects).
• Benjamin’s aspiration is framed as being the greatest literary critic of his generation—especially as a Marxist literary critic.
• The course primarily focuses on Benjamin’s literary criticism (literature/fiction/poetry), rather than his media/culture-industry work (covered in a different course).

Core course structure (how the semester builds)

• The semester builds toward reading Benjamin’s major late work on history:
  • “On the Concept of History” (proper title)
    • Presented as Benjamin’s methodological introduction to an unwritten project (the Arcades Project / a history of 19th-century France).
    • Emphasizes that it draws from notes/note cards and from material associated with an unfinished book.
• The course also positions Benjamin as having a reputation for a philosophy of history, preparing students via:
  • literary pieces
  • conceptual tools needed to read that later.

Materials and format

• All materials are posted on Canvas as PDFs (including most books); the Arcades Project full book is reportedly not on Canvas.
• Main recurring reading sources:
  • Benjamin: Illuminations and Reflections
  • Selections from the Arcades Project
  • Other Benjamin essays available as PDFs (from a “selected writings” set)
• Additional referenced authors/texts (inspiration/context):
  • Marcel Proust via In Search of Lost Time (specifically Swann’s Way, first and last chapter)
  • Nietzsche (essay on “use and abuse of history for life”)
  • Andre Breton (called “Mad Love” and later references to other works)
  • Bertold Brecht (including mention of a play)

Work expectations and class procedures

• Reading intensity: roughly 100 pages per week (sometimes more/less, but “qualitatively” around that amount).
• Progression: readings begin harder and are expected to become easier over time.
• Weekly discussion framework (Canvas):
  • Discussion threads where students post bullet-point notes (observations/questions/passages).
  • Posting is encouraged but not required for most students.
  • Volunteers presenting that week must post their notes.
• Presentations:
  • Students present twice over the semester overall.
  • Each week includes two volunteers.
  • Volunteers should coordinate outside class.
• Attendance policy:
  • Attendance is emphasized; missing class is discouraged because weekly coverage is substantial.
  • Audio recordings are made and posted to a Google Drive folder for students who miss.

Final assessment

• A short final essay at semester’s end.
• It is described as a thought-piece / argument/position essay, not a research paper:
  • not focused on summarizing readings
  • not primarily dependent on external research
  • emphasizes developing a thesis responding to the course readings

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Key intellectual content covered in the lecture

1) Benjamin’s thematic foundation: modernity and the 19th century

Distinctions among terms

• “Modern” = simply “current/present” relative to past.
• “Modernity” = a specific historical condition associated (as described) with Charles Baudelaire’s coinage/initiative.
• “Modernism” = related concept focused on how writers/artists should respond to modernity (how to “rise to the occasion”).

19th-century capitalism as modernity’s context

From a Marxist view, the 1800s are characterized by:

• Capitalism
• The industrial revolution

Modernity raises questions about whether humans can keep faith with ancient virtues (the “true/good/beautiful”) when the social order has changed.

2) Ancient virtues vs changing historical moral/aesthetic values

The lecture argues (via a Kant-framed discussion) that:

• The categories “true/good/beautiful” persist across cultures,
• But the content/substance of those categories changes drastically over history.

Therefore, modern people cannot assume ancient moral/aesthetic frameworks map directly onto current life. The point is not that truth disappears, but that truth remains meaningful while its historical form/content changes.

3) Theology and modernity: “Fortuna,” Christianity, and God-forsakenness

The lecture uses conceptual contrasts to interpret modern life:

• Renaissance “recalling the pagans” vs biblical/Christian authority
• Fortuna (fortune/distribution of gifts) vs “according to the book” (Bible/Christian providence)

A puzzle is posed:

• If people are punished for virtue in ancient tragedy, is something similar true in modernity?
• What does it mean to be God-forsaken?

Language and philology enter the discussion:

• Language is portrayed as anciently connected to God and punishment (paradise loss/knowledge denial).
• Modern capitalism uses inherited language tools that may no longer fit the present reality, raising alienation.

4) Marxist historical framework: meaning through history and class conflict

Historical-theory “frame” materials include:

• An intellectual historian (referenced as Lewis Menand, still writing at the time described) introducing republished history-socialism work from 1940.
• That work is framed as an account of Marxist meaning in history (train “Finland Station” framed as a historical anchor: Lenin arrived there).

Core Marxist lesson (as stated)

• In premodern societies, the “ends of life” are given at birth (meaning is imminent).
• In modern societies, ends are contingent and become “created/discovered,” so meaning is less guaranteed.

Consequences:

• Modernity intensifies the taboo of death and anxiety about history’s verdict.

Marxism is presented as offering:

• Historical change driven by class conflict
• A sense that individuals participate in a larger drama with an eventual goal (classless society)

5) Nietzsche’s critique of how history is used (histonicism vs living history)

The lecture summarizes Nietzsche via an interpreter (presented as Peter Putz / “Puce,” as named in the subtitles):

• Humans are self-conscious and live through tasks/values.
• The 19th century discovers “history” as:
  • the historicity of the human being
  • history’s function as “meaning for us,” not just raw past facts

The danger: history becomes deadly when it turns into histonicism.

• Historicism = objectivist, disinterested gathering of facts without integrating them into present life.
• Described as academic perversion (facts-only; hesitancy about interpretation/value judgment).

Nietzsche’s alternative relations to the past:

• Monumental history: a living/valued relation to exemplary past events aligned with present values
• Antiquarian history: collecting the past without a clear value orientation (“lost in data”)
• Critical history:
  • breaks/dissolves the past to live
  • requires dangerous judgment—knowing the borderline between denial and healthy critical engagement

6) Benjamin’s aphorisms: capitalism, apocalypse, and “progress” as catastrophe

Introduced via aphorisms from One-Way Street (in Reflections), with pieces named including:

• “Fire alarm”
• “To the planetarium”

Main claims summarized:

• “Class war” can be misleading if romanticized as mere victor/defeat spectacle.
• Even if the bourgeoisie “wins” or “loses,” capitalism contains internal contradictions leading to doom.
• Timing is emphasized:
  • political interventions are technical
  • history may be “all is lost” unless decisive action happens at an “almost calculable moment”
• Apocalyptic imagery frames the urgency of confronting capitalism’s trajectory.

7) Benjamin’s cosmology and technology: communion, planetary scale, and proletarian power

The lecture links Benjamin’s rhetoric about cosmos/cosmology to modern wars:

• Ancient cosmic experience is described as communal/ecstatic rather than merely optical/scientific.
• Modernity changes cosmic contact through technology.

Technology is interpreted socially:

• Technology reflects human organization and power relations.
• The ruling class’s lust for profit can turn technological “bridal beds” into “bloodbaths” (war).

Technology’s function and agency

• Technology is treated as a “prosthesis” (described as “prosthesisology” in the lecture):
  • people feel technology acts on them when they lose control over what they themselves created.
• Capitalism is described as:
  • controlled by capital, treating artificial forces as natural
  • potentially like a religion (substituting capital/technology for God)

8) Course pedagogy: how to read Benjamin (and avoid projecting onto him)

The instructor’s teaching method:

• He acts as an “advocate for the reading,” communicating the coherence and intention of Benjamin’s ideas.
• Students should not “ventriloquize” themselves into the text (i.e., force personal meanings onto it).

Reading should involve:

• encountering the other writer’s thinking
• asking:
  • what did they mean?
  • what does it mean “to me now” across historical distance?

Additional cautions:

• Translations are “decent but not always great.”
• Benjamin uses different rhetorical strategies/styles; some may not always “work,” and students should track that.

9) Context for critical theory (via a “Pippin” reading)

Using Robert Pippin to set up “critical theory” historically, the lecture outlines:

• After Kant, philosophy becomes tied to historicity and critiques of first philosophy/metaphysics.
• Hegel’s idea: philosophy is its own time grasped in thought.
• Modern life becomes unacceptable/pathological/ugly under capitalism’s social formations.

A “problem of non-being” is named:

• how to theorize what is absent/missing in a historical moment without reducing it to “nothing”

The lecture claims critical theory still needs a worked-out account of:

• what isn’t present in the “is” (what is missing or rejected)
• everyday falseness and forgetfulness

Pippin’s broader suggestion includes:

• postmodernism’s opposition to “grand narratives”
• Marxism as potentially the “grandest narrative of history”
• concern that unresolved problems lead to repetition (especially repeated alienations and forms of self-hatred in art)

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Methods / lists of instructions

Course participation & discussion (Canvas)

• Post bullet points in the Canvas discussion thread for the week’s reading:
  • observations, questions, passages to discuss
• Behavior rules:
  • posting is encouraged but not required for most students
  • required for volunteers presenting that week

Weekly presentation system

• Each week, the instructor takes two volunteers.
• Presenters should:
  • coordinate outside class with each other
  • set up the discussion thread and bring prioritizations/reactions

Reading workload management

• Pace yourself using the weekly schedule:
  • set aside dedicated mental/emotional/physical time for reading
• Early weeks:
  • some readings will be “steep incline”/challenging—don’t give up
• Expect “steep to easier” across the semester.

Attendance & make-up option

• Attendance is important:
  • Monday + Friday schedule makes missing Monday especially discouraged
• If absent:
  • use the audio recording posted to Google Drive via Canvas announcements
  • in-person attendance is still recommended when possible

Final paper expectations

• Write a short essay based on course readings.
• Essay requirements:
  • present your thesis responding to the readings
  • not a summary
  • not a typical research paper
  • not strongly dependent on outside sources

How to read Benjamin (pedagogical instruction)

• Do not project personal interpretations into the text.
• Instead:
  • understand the writer’s intention (“what were they on about?”)
  • then evaluate:
    • does it make sense to you now?
    • is it still true / not true / partially true?

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Speakers / sources featured (identified)

Speakers

• Chris Cutrone (course instructor)

Other referenced authors / sources

• Walter Benjamin (primary subject)
• Marcel Proust (via Swann’s Way / In Search of Lost Time)
• Friedrich Nietzsche (on “use and abuse of history for life”)
• Henri Balzac (referred to as “Balol”; linked to a memory text inspired by In Search of Lost Time—subtitles may be unclear)
• André Breton (referenced via Mad Love)
• Bertold Brecht (referenced via “Bertold Bre’s ball” / a publicly performed play—subtitle phrasing unclear)
• Sigmund Freud (two pieces referenced: “Mourning and Melancholia” plus “Transients”)
• Charles Baudelaire (modernity concept attribution)
• Immanuel Kant
• Lewis Menand (introduced as an intellectual historian)
• Edmund Wilson (mentioned regarding a 1972 edition introduction)
• Robert Pippin (critical theory context)
• Michel Foucault (mentioned via “Fuko” in critical theory discussion)
• Jürgen Habermas (likely; subtitles contain “Habramas”)
• Martin Heidegger (mentioned as “Haidiger”)
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau (mentioned as “Rouso”)
• G. W. F. Hegel
• Kierkegaard (referenced as “Kirkagard”)

Instructor’s film mentions/sources (subtitles unreliable)

• Chris Marker (as filmmaker/editor of Night and Fog Rene—subtitle likely meant Night and Fog and/or related spelling)
• Film 12 Monkeys (Bruce Willis—mentioned as a modern Hollywood echo/adaptation)
• World War I and World War II (historical events referenced throughout)