Int J Polit Cult Soc (2009) 22:231–248

DOI 10.1007/s10767-009-9052-1

The Ur-History of Media Space: Walter Benjamin

and the Information Industry in Nineteenth-Century Paris

Jaeho Kang

Published online: 3 June 2009

# Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2009

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 Media space . Phantasmagoria . Urban space . 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 (Fig. 1).

1
Benjamin (1999), pp. 885–887.
J. Kang (*)
Department of Media Studies and Film and Department of Sociology, The New School,
New York, NY, USA
e-mail: KangJ@newschool.edu
232 Kang

Fig. 1 Grandville, Le pont

des planètes, 1844.

Grandville’s drawings appeared mainly in the periodicals Le Charivari and the popular
journal La Caricature during the Second Empire. From the late 1920s onward, Grandville’s
work became central to Benjamin’s account of the way in which advertisement had come to
form a new mode of art. For Benjamin, Grandville’s illustrations, collected in Un Autre Monde
(Another World 1844), demonstrate how advertising in newspapers synthesizes technology,
urban spaces, and consumer esthetics. In order to capture the masses’ attention in a single
glance, a work of art tends to produce sensational images, which consequently shocks the reader
and the audience. Grandville tried to achieve this effect by showing a “topsy-turvy world”,
organized according to common laws of the absurd.2 Benjamin draws out the allegorical
implications embedded in Grandville’s “surreal” illustrations. He considers Grandville’s work to
be a prototype of the art of phantasmagoria of urban space, which exposes both the myths and
fetishism of commodity culture in capitalist society. The combination of technology and visual
animation in Grandville’s drawings is not only a precursor of the use of graphics in advertising
but also represents the advent of a new art form. For this reason, Benjamin calls Grandville “a
forerunner of Surrealism”, particularly of “the surrealist film of Méliès”.3 Grandville’s vignette
creates a “graphic utopia”, that is, a fantastic vision of the commodification of urban space.
Grandville’s art gives “the enthronment of the commodity its glitter of distraction”. While
Honoré Daumier’s work appeals to the melancholic way of seeing of the bourgeois individual,
Grandville’s illustrations appeal to the masses, that is, the view of the “average Frenchman”,
whose eyes are familiar with advertising in the newspapers and on the street.
No wonder Benjamin locates Grandville as one of six topical issues for his magnum
opus, The Arcades Project. In 1935, following the suggestion of Friedrich Pollock, co-
director of the Institute for Social Research, then in exile in New York City, Benjamin wrote
a brief research statement, which encapsulated his grand research on the primal history or
ur-history (Urgeschichte) of capitalist culture.4 In this exposé, entitled “Paris, the Capital of
the Nineteenth Century,” Benjamin outlined the structure of the project in accordance with
six subjects: I. Fourier, or the Arcades; II. Daguerre, or the Panoramas; III. Grandville, or

2
For more analyses on Grandville’s work in connection with modernism, see Hannoosh (1992)
3
AP, [K4,1], p. 396.
4
Influenced by J. W. Goethe’s idea of Urphänomen and the Baroque use of allegory, Benjamin extensively
employs the notion of Urgeschichte in his study of German Tragic drama (Benjamin 1985a, b).
The Ur-History of Media Space 233

the World Exhibitions; IV. Louis Philippe, or the Interior; V. Baudelaire, or the Street of
Paris; and VI. Haussmann, or the Barricades. For Benjamin, these six cultural objects
illustrate the quintessential features of the “phantasmagoria of the modernity”, which
circumscribe the spectacular aspects of urban space predicated upon media technology and
commodity culture of high capitalism.5 Benjamin was interested not only in the allegorical
motives illustrated in Gradville’s satiric images but also in the emergence of urban spaces
precipitated by new media technology and consumer culture depicted in Grandville’s
images. For Benjamin, the growth of the mass-circulation press in nineteenth-century Paris
engendered the thoroughgoing transformation of the capitalist culture, the inextricably
intertwined culture, which entailed not only the melting-down process of bourgeois literary
culture but also the rise of the new mass culture grounded upon the entertainment industry.
Benjamin conceived newspapers to be an ur-form of media space, a prototypical space
which unpacks the distinctive intersections of communication technology, commodity
culture, and urban experiences. Benjamin’s numerous studies—from The Arcades Project
via his analysis of Charles Baudelaire and the literary industry of the Second Empire to his
seminal essay on the electronic media, “the Work of Art in the Age of its Technological
Reproducibility”—explore the origin and the dynamics of media space in capitalist society.
This essay is primarily concerned with Benjamin’s analysis of the newspaper as a media
space with particular reference to the transformation of urban spaces and experience.
Furthermore, 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 in
nineteenth-century Europe. It aims to go beyond historical reconstruction and curiosity,
though. Overshadowed by the members of the Frankfurt School, those aspects of
Benjamin’s work that analyze media space have been relatively marginalized. Jürgen
Habermas’ seminal work, The Transformation of the Public Sphere, has made a significant
contribution to the development of sociology of media. However, in many respects, his
arguments constitute an unsatisfactory basis for a critical analysis of the information
industry and the public space. As Michael Schudson among many commentators aptly
points out, Habermas’ emphasis on the “commercialization” or “de-feudalization” of mass
media in the nineteenth-century deals with one part of dual development, ignoring the
parallel development: the “professionalization” of journalism. (Schudson 2003) In my view,
Benjamin largely avoids the shortcomings of oversimplification embedded in the analysis
of the public sphere and grasps the complex dynamics of the information industry. As such,
I find Benjamin’s account of the transformation of the media space more relevant for our
understanding of digitalized media space in contemporary society. Hence, in this essay, I
intend to show that Benjamin’s rich illustration of the complex dynamics of media space in
the nineteenth century provides a systematic framework by which to examine the
intersection between the media space and the urban experience in a digital age.

Media Space of Production 1: Genealogy of the Information Industry

Privatization of Urban Space

It was Georg Simmel who characterized the shock-experience of the big-city dweller and
his/her characteristic uneasiness, brought about by an over-stimulation of the visual sense.

5
For a detailed analysis of Benjamin’s distinctive use of ‘phantasmagoria’, see Kang (2005).
234 Kang

In light of Simmel’s account of metropolitan visual culture, Benjamin assesses the

enormous impact of urbanization on the visual experience of everyday life as a key aspect
of atrophied experience based upon optic shock and haptic withdrawal of a big-city dweller.
At this juncture, Benjamin locates the crisis of the “communicability of experience (die
Mitteilbarkeit der Erfahrung)” at the problematic center of modernity. The decline of the
communicability of experience refers to twofold dimensions: The unprecedented
deterioration of the quality of experience at a social level and the increasing inability of
people to impart their experience at an individual level. The distinctive aspect of
Benjamin’s diagnosis lies in the fact that he aligns the question of experience with the
historical transformation of various forms of communication technology: “Historically, the
various modes of communication have competed with one another. The replacement of
the older relation by information, of information by sensation, reflects the increasing
atrophy of experience. In turn, there is a contrast between all these forms and the story,
which is one of the oldest forms of communication”.6 Here, Benjamin attempts to
differentiate two patterns in the transformation of the media as a certain mode of
communication: the shift from oral to visual communication and from storytelling to the
modern information and entertainment industries. In their pioneering work, The
Mathematical Theory of Communication, Shannon and Weaver conceived “information”
to be a quantity that is measured in bits and defined in terms of probabilities of occurrence
of symbols (Shannon and Weaver 1949). Since then, in the field of information studies, the
emergence of information has been linked with the rise of the post-industrial feature of
capitalism in the mid-twentieth century in opposition to knowledge. Benjamin, however,
regarded information as an integral component of modern society by contrasting it with
story. Benjamin employed the notion of information in a particular historical context in
conjunction with the decline of oral communication culture (e.g., storytelling) and the rise
of mass culture in nineteenth-century Europe.
For Benjamin, storytelling, the oldest and most artisan form of communication, is
emblematic of oral culture, in which the storyteller’s experience is communicated from
mouth to mouth and from generation to generation. The story’s longevity lies in its useful
value, which is closely connected with the everyday life of a community. The crisis of
communication coincides with the decline of oral communication and the rise of the novel.
The novel has a close affinity to storytelling in the sense of narration, but as a mode of
“mediated communication” via a book, the novel in modern times accelerates the loss of
many of storytelling’s core characteristics. For Benjamin, the decline of storytelling is
bound up with the disintegration of communal relation, the transition from a collective
community to an individual social structure, from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft in
Ferdinand Tönnies’ terminology. It is well known that personal moral psychology is at
the very heart of the novel. It was private citizens and members of the middle class who
began to play the main role in the writing and reading of the novel. The novelist writes for
“the solitary individual”, who is no longer bound with other members of society through
communal ties, but remains connected only through the media. From the titles of a cluster
of famous European novels—Don Quixote, Tom Jones, David Copperfield, Emma, Jane
Eyre, Anna Karenina, and Madame Bovary—one can see that the novel of the early modern
period privileges individuality, reflecting the isolation of private experience. Unlike other
literary critics, Benjamin was more interested in the interplay between media and urban
space, focusing on the role of the novel in the configuration of bourgeois private space

6
Hereafter SW (Benjamin 1996–2004).
The Ur-History of Media Space 235

particularly during the period of Louis Philippe’s reign. Louis Philippe (1773–1850), a
descendant of the Bourbon-Orléans royal line of France, was declared “Citizen King” in the
July Revolution of 1830 and overthrown by the February Revolution of 1848. Benjamin
underlines that the ascendancy of the bourgeoisie’s political power under Louis Philippe
brought about the privatization of space. For the first time, the place of dwelling is
separated from the place of work, constituting two distinct spaces: “the interior” and the
“office”. For Benjamin, while the private individual deals with “reality” in a public space
like an office, he requires an illusion in his domestic interior. The novel supplies a narrative
for their private illusion. Benjamin argues: “From this arise the phantasmagoria of the
interior. His living room is a box in the theater of the world”. 7

Industrialization of Public Communication

Whereas the rise of the novel represents the formation of bourgeois private space, the
emergence of the newspaper coincides with a new dynamic of public space in high
capitalism. Throughout The Arcades Project, Benjamin provides a detailed exposition of
the history of the press. In a Convolute, U [Saint-Simon, Railroads] in The Arcades Project,
Benjamin identifies the key issues he intends to examine: the history of newspapers in terms
of differentiation according to social classes and the masses; the circulation of literature; the
introduction of the feuilleton in its early days and its influence; the press under Charles X; the
advent of advertisements in newspapers; an overview of the revolutionary press in Paris in
1848; the competition between newspapers; and the heyday of boulevard journalism. His
detailed examination also embraces statistics on the annual publication of newspapers,
monthly periodicals and fortnightly reviews, the launch of a fashion journal, and the first
introduction of a foreign correspondent in the history of the press. While at the beginning of
industrial capitalism the emergence of the novel was accompanied by the rise of the new
middle class, he argues that the rapid growth of the press is indicative of the predominance of
the middle class under “fully developed capitalism”.
On the other hand, we can see that with the complete ascendancy of the middle class—
which in fully developed capitalism has the press as one of its most important instruments—a
form of communication emerges which, no matter how ancient its origins, never before
decisively influenced the epic form. But now, it does exert such an influence. And ultimately,
it confronts storytelling as no less of a stranger than did the novel, but in a more menacing
way; furthermore, it brings about a crisis in the novel. This new form of communication is
information.8
Benjamin underscores that with the help of the technologization and industrialization of
communication, information becomes the dominant mode of communication in the mid-
nineteenth century. Being contrasted with “storytelling”, information is a type of “report”,
which conveys a happening per se. It is “the pure essence of the thing”, and unlike a story,
it is not assimilated into everyday life.9 Benjamin’s definition of information amazingly
coincides with one widely used by contemporary scholars in the areas of information and
communication studies. For instance, David Sholle (2004) characterizes information as

7
SW3, p. 38.
8
SW3, p. 147.
9
SW4, p. 316.
236 Kang

“piecemeal, fragmented, and particular”, “timely and transitory”, and “a flow across
spaces”. In Benjamin’s view, information reflects only quantified experience and is
deprived of the profundity of life, while stories contain an element of useful practical
advice, a kernel of wisdom, or a conventional moral.
Benjamin seems to elicit the key features of information from the notion of gossip,
which was widely used at the time. Gossip was a type of news spread through the
boulevard press.10 In this way, the notion of information was used in a pejorative sense
within literary circles to mean a valueless story or piece of knowledge. A crucial aspect of
Benjamin’s argument lies in the fact that despite noticeable increases in the amount of
information, over time, knowledge as a whole has become poorer in quality. This is a
primary symptom of the crisis of experience and the rapid decrease in our communicability:
“Every morning brings us news of the globe, yet we are poor in noteworthy stories. This is
because nowadays no event comes to us without already being shot through with
explanation. In other words, by now almost nothing that happens benefits storytelling;
almost everything benefits information”.11 In conjunction with the rapid propagation of
information, the nature of news items also began to change. As newspapers became
increasingly available to the masses, “short abrupt news items began to compete with
detailed reports. These news items caught on because they could be employed
commercially.”12 While storytelling drew its validity from the wisdom of tradition endowed
upon it by the ancients, information lays claim to prompt verifiability.13 The momentary
nature of information reflects the key features of modern society, its fragmented
instantaneousness and ephemerality. Thus, information does not become part of
“tradition”.14 The principles of journalistic information expand and accelerate its purpose.
Benjamin draws attention to the “newness, brevity, clarity, and lack of connection between
the individual news items”.15 In a sense, the experience of the newspaper corresponds with
the de-contextualized empty experience in a modern big city. His argument is particularly
significant as it aims at the core aspect of the Enlightenment, which links the increasing
level of knowledge with progressive and emancipation.

Mediazation of Public Space

Benjamin continues to examine the commodification of information during the Second

Empire and the consequent subjugation of intellectual work to the information industry,
which led to the decline of the literary public sphere. The newspaper industry became
differentiated “according to social classes and mass circulation of literature”, principally
under Charles X.16 In conjunction with these changes of the nineteenth century, literary life

10
Richard Sennett graphically describes how, in the nineteenth century, most “information” was
communicated in the form of “gossip” Sennett (1994). Michael Schudson is one of a few media sociologists
who paid critical attention to Benjamin’s analysis of information, Schudson (1981).
11
SW3, p. 147–8.
12
SW4, p. 13.
13
SW3, p. 147.
14
As Wolin observes, in the form of information, experience no longer has anything to teach us:
“Information has simply become another fungible aspect of modern life, an item of momentary itself which
will soon cease to be topical and then be promptly discarded,” Wolin (1994).
15
SW4, p. 316.
16
AP, [U6,5], p. 581.
The Ur-History of Media Space 237

in Paris also began to alter, gravitating toward the “periodical”. These changes were
fundamentally connected with the decline of the spatial public sphere. Benjamin,
anticipating Habermas’ account of the transformation of the bourgeois public sphere,
illustrates the impact of the growth of the newspaper industry on Parisian cafe life.17 When
newspapers were still a luxury item, seldom bought, they were instead consulted by people
who frequented the coffeehouses.18 The cafe, although by no means a nineteenth-century
invention, became a fundamental institution of Parisian culture during the nineteenth
century (Burton 1994). The cafe represented the concrete expression and focus of
“sociability”—the heightened concern with public affairs and the desire for dynamic
interchange with others—unleashed by the Revolution.19 Benjamin conceives of the cafe as
a public space, that is, a kind of “boulevard press”, where the exchange of information and
public discussion took place before the wide availability of the mass press20.
From the middle of the nineteenth century, however, there were dramatic changes in the
newspaper industry, causing a fundamental transformation in the boulevard press and,
subsequently, the literary arena. This transformation resulted from three pivotal innovations
in the newspaper industry: the decrease in the cost of subscription to newspapers (for
example, 80 to 40 francs), the increase in advertising in newspapers, and the growing
importance of the serial novel in the feuilleton section.21 Following three significant
innovations in the newspaper industry and with the introduction of the electronic telegraph,
the so-called “boulevard press” lost its monopoly. From this point, “news of accidents and
crimes could be obtained from all over the world”.22 Individuals began to take advantage of
the reduced price of newspapers, which now not only covered a wider range of information
than any other source but also published stories much sooner after the event. These
innovations discouraged private citizens from visiting cafés in order to receive and
exchange information and instead accelerated the privatization and isolation of individuals.
According to Benjamin, legislation introduced in France in July 1828 was more liberal
than ever before, and so made dailies and periodicals accessible to a much wider readership.

17
Benjamin illustrates thus: “During the restoration period single copies of newspapers could not be sold;
people had to subscribe to obtain a paper. Anyone who could not pay the high price of eighty francs for a
year’s subscription had to go to a café where often several people stood around reading one copy. In 1824
there were 47,000 newspaper subscribers in Paris; in 1836 there were 70,000; and in 1846, there were
200,000.” (SW4, p. 13).
18
SW2, p. 512.
19
Ibid., p. 16.
20
“The news fillers originated in cafés, over apéritifs. “The custom of taking an aperitif... arose with the
boulevard press. When there were only the large, serious papers... cocktail hours were unknown. The cocktail
hour is the logical consequence of the ‘Paris timetable’ and of city gossip.” Through coffeehouse life, editors
became accustomed to the rhythm of the news service even before its machinery had been developed.” SW4,
p. 14 According to Benjamin’s account, in 1824 the twelve most widely circulating newspapers together had
some 56,000 subscribers. Situating class relationships at the basis of these changes, he says that: “For the
rest, both the liberals and the royalists were concerned to keep the lower classes away from the newspaper.”
AP, [U4a,7], p. 579.
21
SW4, p. 13. In Germany in the period between the 1870s and 1930s, particularly rapid growth took place
in feuilletonism and the aestheticization of literary criticism. Subsequently, debates concerning the
relationship between journalism and literature arose (Burman 1985). Benjamin was aware of these debates
about the transformation of literary language in the literary public sphere in Germany.
22
SW4, p. 14.
238 Kang

These changes resulted in newspapers becoming burdened with certain financial

obligations, developing a new financial strategy based on advertising and mass circulation.
For Benjamin, nothing illustrates better the relationship between the cost of subscription
and advertising than a piece from a popular magazine of the time: “‘What will we do to
cover the new expenses?’ demanded the newspapers. ‘Well, you will run advertisements,’
came the response”.23 Soon after the rapid rise in the number of large printing presses,
newspapers came to need advertising revenue in order to offset the accompanying lowering
of subscription rates then demanded by increased circulation and competition. In
Benjamin’s view, the emergence of newspaper advertisements was pivotal to changes in
the relationship between “printing technology”, “economics”, and “public life” (Benjamin
1985a, b). Consequently, what had been a quarter page now became a poster to
accommodate the many necessary advertisements and had to be seen by as large a number
of subscribers as possible, if the newspaper were to remain competitive.24 A device was
therefore needed, Benjamin notes, which would appeal to a wide spectrum of readers,
regardless of their private opinions or political viewpoints. This encouraged the shift from
serious political debate to mere gossip, which appealed to readers’ curiosity. From this
point, the information came to be replaced by sensational communication engendered by
the entertainment industry.

Media Spaces of Production 2: The Meltdown of Bourgeois Subjectivity

The Decline of the Homme Des Letters

Benjamin draws attention to the fact that literary products came to be substantially
subjugated to the capitalist mode of production: “The first result of the predominance of the
newspaper is to expose the fact that literary production has been integrated into the
production of commodities.”25 Some literary critics and media historians have paid
attention to the way in which the development of the feuilleton accelerated changes in the
nature of literary practice. Russell Berman identifies three fundamental changes in the
textual features of the literary product: “the depersonalization and objectification
(Versachlichung) of social relations in literary institutions”, “the diversification of the
literary public caused by market expansion”, and “the desubjectification of writing”.26 This
formulation is helpful in order to systematically examine Benjamin’s account of the impact
of the feuilleton on literary writing and the nature of the author. In Benjamin’s view, the
newspaper completely overtook literature by publishing fiction in a serial form. It even
appropriated the novel. Benjamin gives a close examination of the impact of the newspaper,
in particular the feuilleton, on the status of the author via a focus on the case of Alexandre

23
AP, [U9,1], pp. 585–6.
24
Benjamin describes the invention of advertisement thus: “The idea that newspaper advertisements could be
made to serve the distribution not only of books but of industrial articles stems from Dr. Véron, who by this
means had such successes with his Pâte de Regnauld, a cold remedy, that an investment of 17,000 francs
yielded him a return of 100,000. ‘One can say, therefore, … that if it was a physician, Théophraste Renaudot,
who invented journalism in France …, it was Dr. Véron who, nearly half a century ago, invented the fourth-
page newspaper advertisement’” (AP, [U12,3], p. 591).
25
SW2, pp. 504–5.
26
Russell Berman, “Writing for the Book Industry: The Writer under Organized Capitalism”, p. 47.
The Ur-History of Media Space 239

Dumas, one of the most popular authors at the time.27 First, Benjamin begins his essay
“The Flâneur” by describing the relationship between the author and the market: “Once a
writer had entered the marketplace, he looked around as if in a diorama. A special literary
genre has captured the writer’s first attempts to orient himself. This is the genre of
panoramic literature.”28 For Benjamin, the panorama here represents the prototype of the
modern entertainment industry, in which the main attributes of perception lie in shock and
distraction of collective spectatorship. In the context of the literary industry, when referring
to “panorama literature”, Benjamin emphasizes significant differences in perception that
result from reading the novel in an attentive, as opposed to a distracted manner. This new
genre consists of individual sketches that reproduce the foreground of the panorama with
anecdotes, and the panorama’s extensive background with a “store of information”.29 In the
newspaper, the readers’ experience is less akin to “reading” a story than to “shopping” as a
consumer. Second, as a form of panorama literature, the serialized novel is not intended for
a man of letters in his private space; it appears to be peculiar to “the masses in a big city”, a
feature also typical of Hugo’s work. Third, in addition to the change of content, the
traditional form of the book itself began to alter.30 In big-city literature, “the inconspicuous,
paperbound, pocket-size volumes” began to appear for sale on the street. Attitudes toward
the book also changed in accordance with its social status.
While literary circles still regarded books as “sources of wisdom”, “the statutes of their
small and exclusive groups”, the newspaper-reading public came to regard literature as “an
instrument of entertainment, animation, or the deepening of sociability”.31 As fees for the
feuilleton increased, rising to two francs per line, authors would often write as much dialog
as possible so as to benefit from the blank spaces left in the lines.32 The cause of the abuse
was the high fees offered to writers. Raising the primary issue of the status of the author in
the period following the emergence of the feuilleton, Benjamin brings to the fore the decline
of the man of letters, that is, the death of the novelist. Grandville’s work fits well with
Benjamin’s insight into the commodification of literature. In this illustration (Fig. 2), the
feuilleton appears to be no more than a mass-produced commodity, reeled off and cut up
like macaroni. Grandville demystifies literature and disperses the aura surrounding the
bourgeois literary public sphere, by showing literature to be nothing more than a
commercial product. Likewise, in Benjamin’s view, the growth of feuilletonism and
journalism in the literary arena accelerated the integration of literature and the information
industry.
Grandville’s other graphic (Fig. 3) grotesquely illustrates the media machine, which
pumps a torrent of newspapers, pamphlets, and advertisements into city streets. It also

27
The beneficial effects of the roman-feuilleton [serialized novel] on newspapers’ revenue are most clearly
demonstrated in the contract drawn up between the newspapers and Dumas: “In 1845 Dumas signed a
contract with Le Constitutionnel and La Presse guaranteeing him a minimum annual payment of 63,000
francs for supplying at least eighteen instalments per year” (SW4, p. 14 and AP, [U8a,3], p. 585).Benjamin
investigates similar cases, focusing on popular writers and their fees: “For his Mystères de Paris Eugène Sue
received an advance of 100,000 francs. Lamartine’s income has been estimated at 5 million francs for the
period from 1838 to 1851. He received 600,000 francs for his Histoire des Girondins, which first appeared in
the feuilleton section” (SW4, 14).
28
SW4, p. 18.
29
SW4, p. 18.
30
SW4, p. 18.
31
SW2, p. 290.
32
AP, [U9a,1], p. 586.
240 Kang

Fig. 2 Grandville, 1844.

illustrates the commodity character of journalism, which provides not just information, but
also a series of sensational stories to thrill the reader. This illustration is also intended to
make readers suspicious of the truthfulness and the objectivity of journalism. Ironically,
Grandville’s images question the very same journals in which they appear and disenchant
through enchantment.
For Benjamin, Baudelaire is one who possessed real insight into the true situation of a
man of letters. Baudelaire’s understanding derived from the fact that he himself had little
sense of his own social position or self-importance. Drawing not only upon Baudelaire’s
texts but also on Baudelaire himself, Benjamin sees the key attribute of the flâneur as that
of a writer, standing and looking about himself in the marketplace. Here, what Benjamin
demonstrates is that a writer becomes merely a literary worker and a wordsmith; the notion
of the creative genius is wholly undermined, and the true nature of the writer is made
brutally apparent. From his early writing onward, Baudelaire had no illusions about the
literary market. With an understanding of the real prospects of a man of letters, no wonder
Baudelaire frequently described such authors, including himself, as “whores”. Benjamin
was very impressed by Baudelaire’s speculation on the commodified author and used this as
the basis upon which he built the edifice of his critical account of the decline of the
bourgeois literary sphere.33

33
Presenting his account of the genesis and structure of the ‘literary field’, Pierre Bourdieu gives a detailed
examination of Baudelaire in connection with journalism and the literary market. In much the same way as
Benjamin, he suggests that: “There is no doubt whatsoever that moral indignation against all forms of
submission to the forces of power or to the market—whether it is a matter of careerist assiduity which makes
certain littérateurs (one thinks of a Maxime du Camp) pursue privileges and honours, or the subservience to
the demands of the press and journalism which pushes writers of serialized fiction and vaudeville into an
undemanding literature devoid of style—has played a determining role with writers such as Baudelaire or
Flaubert in the daily resistance which led to a progressive affirmation of the autonomy of writers; and it is
certain that, in the heroic phase of the conquest of autonomy, the ethical rupture is always, as one sees clearly
with Baudelaire, a fundamental dimension of all aesthetic ruptures.” Bourdieu (1996).
The Ur-History of Media Space 241

Fig. 3 Another graphic of

Grandville, 1844.

The Journalist in the Mediated Public Sphere

Benjamin’s famous account of the flâneur focuses primarily on the rise of a new social
subject, endowed with new modes of perception, set against the backdrop of a period of
rapid growth in commodity culture and the information industry. The concept of the flâneur
was established by writers such as Baudelaire and Zola during the nineteenth century, and
Benjamin was a key proponent of the notion of the flâneur in his criticism. The flâneur is
first and foremost the nineteenth-century stroller on the city street. Although it has various
nuanced meanings and applications, a core feature of flânerie is a behavior involving
observation of spectacle and dawdling in shops. It involves the active communication of
serial observations. As John Rignall points out, Benjamin’s observations on the flâneur’s
way of seeing suggest “a way of defining more precisely the changes that take place with
respect to vision in the development from realism to modernism” (Rignall 1992). This
highlights the issue of reflection on the object. The flâneur’s joy of watching, which used to
be grounded in contemplative observation, is now easily upset and disturbed. Benjamin
draws attention to flânerie as the emblem of a new form of behavior and perception that is
inextricably linked with the rise and establishment of urban space in the early nineteenth
century.34 He places particular emphasis on the way in which the entertainment industry—
arcades, interiors, exhibition halls, and the diorama—emerged and rapidly expanded in the
middle of the nineteenth century, and these spatial changes are associated with flâneur’s
“fancy footwork” (Shields 1994). The flâneur came into being within these social spaces. It

34
Benjamin’s interest in flânerie was deeply influenced by his close friend and collaborator, Franz Hessel.
He describes the most significant features of flânerie as follows: “Flânerie is a kind of reading of the street,
in which faces, shop fronts, shop windows, café terraces, street cars, automobiles and trees become a wealth
of equally valid letters of the alphabet that together result in words, sentences and pages of an ever-new
book. In order to engage in flânerie, one must not have anything too definite in mind.” (Franz Hessel,
Spazieren in Berlin (1929), cited in David Frisby (1994), p. 81.) In his essay, “The Return of the Flâneur”,
Benjamin gives a detailed review of Hessel’s book.
242 Kang

was the “phantasmagoria of space to which the flâneur devotes himself”.35 The arcade is “a
city, a world, in miniature”,36 providing the flâneur with a panorama of commodity.
Hence, Benjamin characterizes Baudelaire’s Paris as a “gastronomy of the eye”, and the
flâneur as a “kaleidoscope endowed with consciousness”,37 Baudelaire’s poetry, represent-
ing no less than the gaze of the alienated man, is born from these social changes, the most
significant feature of which lies in the rapid growth of commodified public space. The rise
of consumer culture enabled the flâneur as a new social figure to appear in a public space
by providing him with visual amusement. While the existence of the flâneur on the street
could be linked to the growth of the commodity space such as arcades, his decline was
accelerated by rapid urban planning, that is, the Hausmannization of the Paris street as well
as the rise of the mass consumer culture generated by department stores. In this vein, I
focus particular attention to the intersection between the most vital characteristics of the
flâneur and the journalist. Indeed, Benjamin explicitly argues that “the social base of
flânerie is journalism”.38 In the field of urban and communication studies, some scholars,
like David Henkin, draw attention to the city as a text in connection with the rise of the
daily newspaper and the changes of public space (Henkin 1999). Benjamin investigates the
intersection between commercialization and professionalization in the newspaper industry
in a distinctive way. Such a topic requires some elaboration.
The characteristics of the journalist–flâneur are associated with those of the
physiognomist of the 1830s and 1840s in the context of a reader of urban life. In this
way, the journalist–flâneur is an urban spectator who regards the metropolitan space as an
entertaining spectacle as well as a text. The journalist lingers on the city streets not just for
the sake of his own visual pleasure, but in order to locate events that he will be able to
transform into information. This figure of the flâneur coincides with the character of the
detective in Benjamin’s account of Edgar Allan Poe’s stories. The journalist, the flâneur,
and the detective share in common the attribute of being hunters in a jungle-like
metropolitan city. The flâneur’s distracted observation, however, differs significantly from
the detective’s attentiveness. The journalist’s way of seeing is less akin to an unwilling gaze
than to contemplative observation. Benjamin gives particular emphasis to the way in which
the journalist, like the flâneur, strolls among the crowd: “It lacks the skill and nonchalance
which the flâneur displays as he moves among the crowds in the streets and which the
journalist eagerly learns from him.”39 However, the journalist–flâneur acts not merely as an
observer or a decipherer, but instead has a more sophisticated role as a producer of literary
and journalistic texts. The journalist’s observation is basically associated with a production
of a text while the flâneur’s visual pleasure is with the consumption of those texts.
Paradoxically, the journalist undermines the flâneur by providing “mediated flânerie” in a
virtual space like the newspaper. Benjamin describes the characteristics of mediated
flânerie; thus, “The original social content of the detective story focused on the obliteration

35
AP, p. 12.
36
AP, p. 3.
37
SW4, p. 328.
38
AP, [M16,4], p. 446. David Frisby points out that “what all the variously proposed features of the flâneur
might have in common are their connections at some time with journalism, as the flânerie is primarily
associated with a form of looking, observing and reading the city”. David Frisby, “The Flâneur and Social
Theory”, p. 95.
39
SW4, p. 322.
The Ur-History of Media Space 243

of the individual’s traces in the big-city crowd…. At the same time, this story is the
prototype for the way journalistic information is used in solving crimes. Poe’s detective, the
Chevalier Dupin, here works not with personal observation but with reports from the daily
press.”40 A city dweller came to experience the urban spectacle captured through the
journalist’s eye. This mediated flânerie invoke not the “watchfulness of the observer”, but
distracted reading for information.
It is noteworthy that in Benjamin’s discussion of the literary industry, the journalist also
appears as the end-product of the transformation of the flâneur-as-literary-writer to “the
author-as-producer of mass culture” (Buck-Morss 1986). Benjamin’s account of the
journalist–flâneur focuses primarily on his commodity-status in the marketplace: a writer-
cum-commodity, conceptually analogous to the whore. In the age of capitalism, the
journalist cannot be free from the market. The journalist, who observes the city and reads it
as a text, must produce and sell his story as a commodity. Then, finally, he becomes a
commodity himself. The journalist is the prototype of “the true salaried flâneur”, standing
between the feuilleton–writer and the advertiser. The difference between the literary man
and the journalist lies in the fact that the journalist already recognizes his commodified
status as a writer, while the literary man is still reluctant to sell himself (even though he is
doomed to sell him, eventually): “As a flâneur, the literary man ventures into the market
place to sell himself…. The journalist, as a flâneur, behaves as if he too were aware of
this.”41 The journalist as an allegory of the commodified writer–flâneur is congruent with
the figure of “the sandwich-man”, who walks the streets with advertisements hanging on his
body.42 The sandwich-man constitutes “the last incarnation of the flâneur”.43 In a period
during which the relationship between politics and the media is especially close, power is
made visible in advertisements and information. Journalism represents in a similar way
commodities and political power. When the flâneur himself becomes commodified, the end
point of flânerie is reached; the journalist is completely transformed into a commodity, and
is flâneur no longer. As a commodity, he becomes part of the spectacle of the city.

Media Spaces of Reception: The Technological Reproduction of the Masses

In parallel with the decline of the bourgeois individuality, Benjamin also considers the
enormous impact of the development of the feuilleton on the formation of modern social
subjects, that is, the shaping of amorphous crowds into publics. The crowds, in Benjamin’s
view, are no more than the multitude which “do not stand for classes or any sort of
collective; rather they are nothing but the amorphous crowd of passers-by, the people in the
street”.44 In connection with the growth of the entertainment industry and the consumer
culture, the amorphous crowds, which used to be a refuge for the flâneur, began to form

40
SW4, p. 23.
41
AP, [M16,4], p. 446—translation-modified.
42
AP, [m4,2], p. 804.
43
AP, [M19,2], p. 451. In The Dialectic of Seeing, Susan Buck-Morss points to the contemporary political
relevance of many of Benjamin’s remarks about the flâneur and the warning to intellectual flâneurs in the
inter-war period, exemplified by protofascist journalists. She identifies “the flâneur-sandwichman-journalist-
in-uniform. The latter advertises the state, no longer the commodity”. (Buck-Morss, The Dialectic of Seeing,
p. 307).
44
SW4, pp. 320–1.
244 Kang

themselves into consumers, spectators, and a public. Benjamin sees the transformation of
“the public” as occurring alongside the isolation of the private citizen, both brought about
by the increasing domination of the mass press. Moreover, this process leads not only to the
commercialization of the press but also to its politicization. I would like to focus on three
key aspects of the intersection between the newspaper and the modern masses.
First, as novels acquired greater popularity through their serialization in newspapers,
authors began to pay more attention to their growing mass readership. With the help of the
feuilleton, the early novel, understood as appealing to the isolated individual, started to
undergo dramatic change. For the first time, the masses became the novel’s central subject.
They wanted to find their “image”, their faces, and voices, in this medium. They wanted an
opportunity to express themselves. It is noteworthy that Benjamin’s notion of technological
reproducibility implies “mass” reproduction. In Benjamin’s writing, “reproduction”
connotes less a “plurality”, a mere collection of individual occurrences than a “mass”
(Weber 1996). Mass reproduction relates to the emergence and transformation of the masses
themselves: “Mass reproduction is especially favored by the reproduction of the masses”.45
A key feature of filmic technology is its crucial affinity with the logic of mass formation.
Benjamin highlights the way in which the communication media not only affect the
visibility of power by virtue of the presentation of the ruler but also play a decisive role in
the formation of the masses. This is achieved by presenting them with their own image, by
realizing “the desire of contemporary masses to get closer things spatially and humanly”.
In his essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility”,
Benjamin refers to the media space engendered by the electronic media, in particular, the
cinematic space, but he sees the primal history of electronic media space in the age of the
information industry grounded upon technological reproducibility of printing in the early
nineteenth century. “Mass” visual representation technology, capable of crowd-scenes and
individual close-ups, realizes “mass reception”, but it is this “double media quality” that
makes it possible for film to enable the masses to experience themselves and to enjoy their
own mass movements esthetically. Benjamin sees similar dynamics in the representation of
the pubic in the serialized novel in newspapers. Benjamin’s analysis of the emergence of the
masses and the development of the feuilleton reveals how the information industry
gradually replaced literature’s conventional role as a bourgeois literary forum.
Second, the formation of the public was further accompanied by another social
transition: the emergence of consumers. The street brought people together in a group not
defined along class lines. People came together in real gatherings, but socially they
remained abstract, that is, they remained absorbed in their isolated private interests. The
feuilleton authors, such as Hugo, provided the model of identity through which people
could gather around their “common cause”. Their identity was that of the “customers”.46 In
the literary pubic space, Victor Hugo first spoke to the crowd in the titles of his novels such
as Les Misérables. For Hugo, the crowd comprised not only the masses of his readers but
also his voters. Whereas Baudelaire separated himself from the masses as a hero, Hugo
understood the masses to be a “public”, a group of people drawn from the essentially
disorganized and random world of market exchange. In this sense, Hugo was no flâneur. To
Hugo, “the crowd meant—almost in the ancient sense—the crowd of clients, the public”.47

45
SW4, p. 282.
46
SW4, p. 36.
47
SW4, p. 321.
The Ur-History of Media Space 245

Third, the transformation of the masses in conjunction with the literary industry also had
a political dimension. Via a close examination of financial and political scandal, Benjamin
reveals the inextricable links between the author, the reader, and publishers. During the
Second Republic, parliament tried to combat the proliferation of the feuilleton by placing
one centime tax on each installment of a serialized novel. After a short time, this regulation
was withdrawn by reactionary press laws, which curtailed freedom of opinion and thus
enhanced the value of the feuilleton.48 In conjunction with the rapid growth of the
feuilleton, their high fees and wide market appeal helped writers achieve a good reputation.
Subsequently, a political career opened up for a writer almost automatically. Benjamin
highlights the Alexandre Dumas scandal as a prototype of political scandal, which
demonstrates the close connection between the literary media and politics, that is, between
the writer-cum-politician and the reader-cum-customer/voter. Benjamin highlights new
forms of corruption, related to both financial scandal and abuse of public funds, by focusing
on the political scandal that engulfed Alexandre Dumas: “In 1846, Salvandy, the minister of
colonies, invited Alexandre Dumas to take up a trip to Tunis at government expense–
estimated at 10,000 francs–to publicize the colonies. The expedition was unsuccessful, cost
a lot of money, and ended with an inquest in the Chamber of Deputies”.49 The scandal had
even deeper reverberations and brought yet more success and popularity for Dumas. For
Eugène Sue, his considerable readership was also voters, who played a crucial role when he
was elected a deputy in the Paris Assembly in 1850. Benjamin argued that Sue’s success of
Mystères de Paris considerably increased the number of subscribers to the newspaper,
Constitutionnel from 3,600 to 20,000 and, more importantly, helped him gain the votes of
130,000 Parisian workers.50 In this way, the information industry not only brought about
rapid change in the literary arena but also altered the relationship between author and
readers in the political sphere.

“Collective Intelligence” in a Media Space?

Benjamin’s analysis of the information industry reveals how the development of newspaper
and publishing industries accelerated changes in the early literary field, annihilating the
autonomous status of the author, subjugating literary work to the commodity market and
outdating traditional categories such as genius, creativity, and authenticity. His discussion
of the rise of the information industry illustrates the extent to which newspapers have
become an arena of “literary confusion” rather than a rational communication. In the short
essay “The Newspaper”, Benjamin succinctly illustrates those characteristics that the
corruption of writing has intensified and maintained by “the reader’s impatience”, which
demands new excitement every day. In his view, editorial offices long since learned to
exploit the fact that nothing binds the reader to their newspaper so much as this impatience,
so they introduced new columns for readers’ questions, opinions and even protests, spaces
in which readers are able to voice their own opinions and desires. At this point, Benjamin’s
diagnosis profoundly diverges from Habermas’ normative claim on the reconstruction of
the public sphere predicated upon discursive ethics. This “unselective assimilation of

48
SW4, pp. 14–15.
49
SW4, p. 15.
50
SW4, p. 15.
246 Kang

readers” by the press produces unintended consequences: It lowers the barrier between
readers and writers.51 Newspapers’ unexpected function, Benjamin argues, has been to
destroy conventional demarcations not only between author and reader but also between
genres, between writer and poet, and between scholar and popularizer. This constitutes the
“most decisive point of reference” in the era of “mediazation of culture” (Thompson 1990).
The everyday lives of ordinary people are described, reported, and presented to the public
by means of newspapers. Benjamin calls this transformation the “literarization of living
conditions”.52 Benjamin sees the existence of a “dialectical factor” hidden in this process:
“For as writing gains in breadth what art loses in depth, the separation between the author
and the public—a separation that journalism maintains in a corrupt way—starts to be
overcome in an admirable way.”53 The emergence of the public as writers signifies that
literary competence is now based not on “specialized training” but on “polytechnical
education” and becomes “public property”.54 Writing is no longer an esoteric inspirational
activity; it becomes “a popular activity” and “public property”.55 Benjamin demonstrates
that the development of the media, which results in an increase of publicly available
information, stands in opposition to these expectations of the Enlightenment. Benjamin
does not regret this divergence; instead, he reveals the newly configured conditions of
communication and shows how they broaden the horizons of possible experience. The
meltdown of the bourgeois literary public sphere also led to the rise of the new media space
in which the masses prove to be a multiple social agency as consumer, spectator, the public,
and even the journalists themselves. Benjamin’s argument of the rise of the new mass-
author is reminiscent of the recent argument on the rise of collective intelligence in
cyberspace advocated by Pierre Levy. In the computer-mediated cyberspace, Levy argues
the distinctions between “authors and readers, producers and spectators, creators and
interpreters” are blurred and collective intelligence is configured as a “form of
universally distributed intelligence, constantly enhance, coordinated in real time, and
resulting in the effective mobilization of skills”.56 Benjamin’s cartography of
communication, which emphasizes the rise of the information industry in the nineteenth
century, corresponds with Pierre Levy’s historical mapping of the four anthropological
spaces (earth, territorial, commercial, and knowledge spaces). More specifically, the
media space of the information industry in Benjamin’s account stands between the
commodity space and the knowledge space. Of course, some elements of Benjamin’s
account of the newspaper cannot be applied without careful consideration of their
historical context to an examination of contemporary media space generated by the
Internet. Benjamin saw the rise of the new public as a collective author in the Soviet press
in the early revolutionary period. It seems quite naive and overly optimistic. Benjamin
overestimates the autonomous aspects of socialist public spheres as much as he
underestimates the bureaucratic and propaganda functions of the Soviet media. Despite
some limitations, Benjamin’s account of the primal history of the media space in the

51
SW2, p. 741.
52
SW2, p. 505.
53
SW2, p. 505.
54
SW2, p. 742.
55
SW2, p. 505/p. 742.
56
Levy 1997. For Levy’s analysis of cyber-democracy and information capitalism, see Levy (2005).
The Ur-History of Media Space 247

nineteenth century makes a number of significant contributions to our understanding of

the media space. In its illumination of the aspects of the information industry which tend
to alienate the human sensorium, Benjamin’s insight helps us to understand the nature of
mediated experience in digitally reproduced media space. For instance, the Internet-
mediated communication has produced new types of mediated interaction and accelerated
the democratization of information. The Internet has also led, however, to the
privatization of experience, reproducing the phantasmagoria of the interior, which are
often ignored in the communication studies. The electric screen plugged into the network
becomes the “primary window” through which the world is experienced, in much the
same way as, in Benjamin’s account, the drawing room is the center of phantasmagoria
for the petit-bourgeoisie during the Second Empire. Here, Benjamin’s analysis of the
nineteenth-century media space has particular relevance to the formation of mediated
experience in the age of the Internet, creating the bodily collective, which is the
counterpart to the phantasmagoria of commercial space. As such, Benjamin’s account of
newspapers offers a systematic way of understanding the media space, which enables an
interpretative analysis of audience reception processes as well as contributing to a
technical and structural analysis of the media space. What Benjamin really wanted to
reveal via his analysis of the ur-history of the media space was the fact that we, the
masses, are no longer the passive consumers of the information market or inert spectators
of the entertainment industry; rather, we are the active producers of the information, the
esthetic creators of the new media art, the author of our own life in a digital media space
with the help of incessantly developing communication technology.

Acknowledgment This work was supported by the Korea Research Foundation Grant funded by the
Korean Government (MOEHRD; KRF-2007-361-AM0027).

References

Benjamin, W. (1985a). The origin of German Tragic Drama (Die Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels),
trans. John Osbourne, ‘Introduction’ by George Steiner. London: Verso.
Benjamin, W. (1985b). One-way street and other writings, trans. E. Jephcott and K. Shorter (p. 62). London:
Verso.
Benjamin, W. (1996–2004). Selected Writings, vols. I–IV. In M. Bullock, M. Jennings et al. (Eds.) (p. 316).
Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Benjamin, W. (1999). The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughline. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press.
Bourdieu, P. (1996). The rules of art (pp. 60–61). Cambridge: Polity.
Buck-Morss, S. (1986). “The Flâneur, the Sandwichman, and the whore: The politics of loitering”, New
German Critique 39, p. 111.
Burman, R. A. (1985). Literaturkritik zwischen Reichsgründung und 1933. In P. Uwe Hohendahl (Ed.),
Geschichte der deutschen Literaturkritik: 1730–1980 (pp. 205–274). Stuttgart: Metzler.
Burton, R. (1994). The flâneur and his city: Patterns of daily life in Paris 1815–1851 (p. 15). Durham:
University of Durham.
Frisby, D. (1994). The flâneur and social theory. In K. Tester (Ed.), The flâneur (p. 81). London: Routledge.
Hannoosh, M. (1992). Baudelaire and Caricature: From the comic to an art of modernity. University Park,
PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press.
Henkin, D. (1999). City reading: Written words and public spaces in Antebellum New York. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Kang, J. (2005). The phantasmagoria of the spectacle—Walter Benjamin and a critique of media culture. In
E. Steinskog & D. Peterson (Eds.), Walter Benjamin and actualities of aura (pp. 252–278). Copenhagen:
NSU.
Levy, P. (1997). Collective intelligence: Mandkind’s emerging world in cyberspace (p. 13). Cambridge:
Perseus Books.
248 Kang

Levy, P. (2005). Collective intelligence, a civilisation: towards a method of positive interpretation.

International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, 18, 189–198.
Rignall, J. (1992). Realist fiction and the strolling spectator (p. 156). London: Routledge.
Schudson, M. (1981). Discovering the news: A social history of American newspapers. New York: Basic.
Schudson, M. (2003). The sociology of news (pp. 69–71). New York: Norton.
Sennett, R. (1994). The fall of the public man (p. 139). London: Penguin.
Shannon, C., & Weaver, W. (1949). The mathematical theory of communication. Chicago: University of
Illinois Press.
Shields, R. (1994). Fancy footwork: Walter Benjamin’s notes on flânerie. In K. Tester (Ed.), The flâneur (pp.
61–80). London: Routledge.
Sholle, D. (2004). What is information? The Flow of Bits and the Control of Chaos. In H. Jenkins and D.
Thorburn (Eds.), Democracy and New Media (pp. 345–347). Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Thompson, J. B. (1990). Ideology and modern culture: Critical social theory in the era of mass
communication. Cambridge: Polity.
Weber, S. (1996). Mass mediauras: Form, technics, media (p. 84). Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Wolin, R. (1994). Walter Benjamin: An aesthetic redemption (p. 222). Berkeley: University of California
Press.