WALTER BENJAMIN’S FIGURATIVE SOCIOLOGY1 (original) (raw)

This paper attempts to demonstrate that Walter Benjamin, in his writings dedicated to the city, shaped a true "microsociology of everyday life" of the city, which is part of a sociological type often ignored as it cannot easily be ascribed to any of the dominant currents of thought of the twentieth century (Positivism, Neokantism, Dialectics, Phenomenology). It is essentially founded on an "aesthetic paradigm" both as regards the theory of knowledge and the centrality of play as a fundamental element of social reality. From an epistemological point of view, the paper points out the limits of a theory of knowledge of society which is exclusively rationalistic, and it proposes a form of concrete, anti-systemic knowledge, made up of images, figures, constellations and fragments, capable of restituting the individuality of the phenomenon. From this style of thought comes the "mimetic" element of Benjamin's writings on the city, which build up a dialectical exchange between the text and urban reality. Text and city become a single interchangeable reality. An exploration of three fundamental "figures" of players in the city -the flâneur, the collector and the gambler -shed further light on the fundamental aspects of Benjamin's conception of everyday life. The flâneur experiences the urban space of the city in what could be termed an "as if" mode: in his imagination it becomes similar to a dream landscape which turns into a sitting-room, an amusement park, or a labyrinth in which to lose himself. The collector tries to overcome the anonymity of the urban environment by attempting to leave traces in the private space of his home. The gambler, finally, tries to challenge the inexorability of time as destiny, through the rite of the number and the element of chance which belongs to it.