In an attempt to cross borders
An important reason for this trip halfway around the world was for me to stop in the tiny village of Camallera, in northern Catalunya, for a three day meeting connected to a European collaborative project which the NGO I co-founded is involved in.
Here, the bakery only opens at 9am, everyone greets each other on the street, “bom dia”, not ”buenas dias”, while “thanks” is “merci”. The local supermarket no longer operates, and everyone hangs out at the local cafe. The hotel I’m staying at, the only accommodation in town, is also the village’s restaurant and bar.
As part of this meet-up, as a kind of outing, we spent time close to the French border at Portbou, where Walter Benjamin was blocked from entering Spain in 1940, and where he subsequently committed suicide, attempting to flee Nazi persecution, escaping occupied France.
Walter Benjamin was a Jewish philosopher, cultural critic, and essayist, originally based in Germany, whose work sits at the crossroads of philosophy, literature, Marxism, and aesthetics. Benjamin explored how modern life, especially under capitalism and new technologies, reshapes perception, memory, and experience. He argued that technologies like photography and film dissolve the traditional “aura” of unique artworks, in part because these technologies allow for art being endlessly copied, fundamentally altering how culture circulates and how power operates through images. Indeed, this very much sounds like a precursor to Guy Debord’s take on the Spectacle.
In Benjamin’s unfinished lifelong project, The Arcades Project, he attempted to read 19th-century Paris as a dreamworld of modern capitalism through fragments, quotations, and reflections.
Benjamin was 48 when he died, and not in good health. Yet, it would have been fascinating to have had his take on the commercialisation of public space after the Second World War.
Between Benjamin and Debord, we can see a shared critique of capitalism as a system that colonises perception, time, and everyday life. Benjamin analysed early modern capitalism through commodities, images, and urban experience, especially the then newly installed Paris arcades, as sites where desire, history, and ideology congeal. His ideas around the shock of modernity and the flâneur prefigure Debord’s later argument that social relations themselves are mediated by images. Where Benjamin examined how mechanical reproduction transforms culture, Debord radicalised this insight into the claim that lived experience has been replaced by representation, the Spectacle.
How would both have commented on the ability to digitally copy virtually all modern cultural experiences at will?
Benjamin’s method, fragmentary, archival, montage-based, also strongly anticipates Debord’s practice of détournement, the reuse and subversion of existing cultural material. Benjamin’s more anti-colonial insistence on reading history “against the grain” and rescuing suppressed or unrealised possibilities from the past does resonate with Debord’s revolutionary project; exposing how capitalism freezes history into an eternal present while presenting itself as inevitable, still current through the modern realisation that, for many, it’s easier to imagine the end of the world, than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.
Both saw the modern city as a key battlefield, though Benjamin approached it as a melancholic archaeologist of lost futures, while Debord approached it as a strategist of revolt. But these could have primarily been artefacts of each of their times.
Perhaps also a consequence of the times they lived in, an important difference between Benjamin and Debord was their political temperature. Benjamin remained a tragic, dialectical, perhaps even fatalist, thinker, deeply aware of catastrophe, hesitant about progress, and suspicious of easy revolutionary narratives. Debord, at the top of his game during the French uprising of 1968, was programmatic and uncompromising, translating Benjamin’s cultural critique into an explicit call for the abolition of the commodity form and the transformation of everyday life.
Indeed, Debord can thus be read as a natural progression of Benjamin’s thought, under postwar consumer capitalism: taking Benjamin’s insights about images, history, and urban experience and weaponising them for direct political confrontation.
After spending a few days with a good friend in Barcelona, I left Spain for Italy. Checking in online with Wizzair, at the end of the process, I was asked if I’d be interested to be on a volunteer waiting list of passengers who would be fine with being bumped onto a next flight, in case of overbooking. If selected, besides the changed flight, this would then be compensated with 100 euros. I suppose for Wizzair to avoid having to pay much higher compensations otherwise.