Walter Benjamin

Abstract This essay is primarily concerned with Walter Benjamin’s analysis of the newspaper as a media space with reference to privatization of urban space, industrialization of public communication, and mediazation of public space in nineteenth-century Paris. I seek to show how the information industry brought about the fundamental changes in literary practice, intellectual activity, and the formation of a new social subject. I also demonstrate how Benjamin’s rich illustration of the complex dynamics of media space in the nineteenth century largely avoids the shortcomings of oversimplification embedded in the analysis of the bourgeois public sphere. In doing so, I argue Benjamin’s critical analysis that the newspaper provides a systematic framework by which to examine the intersection between the media space and the urban experience in a digital age.

Keywords 

Mediaspace.Phantasmagoria.Urbanspace.Spectacle.Storytelling. Information . Newspaper . Communication . Mediated public sphere

The Phantasmagoria of Urban Space

Between late 1928 and early 1929, Walter Benjamin wrote a short piece for radio, “The Ring of Saturn or Some Remarks on Iron Construction”.1 In this essay, Benjamin gives a description of the work of the French caricaturist and illustrator Grandville (the pseudonym of Jean-Ignace-Isidore Gérad). Here, Benjamin provides a detailed description of one of the vignettes, Le pont des planètes, in which Grandville illustrates the adventures of a fantastic little hobgoblin who is trying to find his way around outer space.