Benjamin did not see culture as threatened by ‘barbarism’, so much as
itself being implicated in it:
Barbarism lurks in
the very concept of culture—as the concept of a fund of values which is
considered independent not, indeed, of the production process in which these
values originated, but of the one in which they survive. In this way they serve
the apotheosis of the latter, barbaric as it may be.
The concept of culture
as the values of a heritage was for Benjamin ‘fetishistic’: “Culture appears reified Only an understanding of “the crucial importance of reception… enables us to
correct the process of reification which takes place in a work of art” (SW 3,
267; 269). For Benjamin, however, reception—or what he called the ‘afterlife’ is tarred by the invisible idea of culture as value. What is required is an ontological
rethinking of reception
Benjamin was
interested in ‘culture’ not as an autonomous realm of values (“the independent
values of aesthetic, scientific, ethical… and even religious achievements”),
but on the contrary, like the sociologist Georg Simmel, whose Philosophy of Money he cities in this regard, as
“elements in the development of human nature”
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