Reading Benjamin

Reading Benjamin is to understand how the new idea of something comes out of the old one. Benjamin calls this as the construction of tradition.

Tradition is not only the conventional system repressing the "newness", but also the host of the novelty. Actually, Benjamin's theoretical methodology is well observed in the modern fashion system. Is this irony or not?

Yes. This is nothing less than the ironic mechanism whereby the reactionary politics gives rise to the revolutionary acitivity, let alone the new comes out of the old. Benjamin witnesses the paradoxical tendency as the aspect of modernity.

As is well known, Benjamin's style is the embodiment of this contradictory modernity. Reading Benjamin means the ironic work to understand the complex reality of modernity in a way that the partial reality is reflected in the fragmental figuration, the place of poetic imagination. This is the very form which Benjamin's idea of the aesthetic takes.