Benjamin read Baudelaire’s grimace as the physiognomy of modern shock-absorbing perception

Evidence

What Benjamin had drawn from his observations of cinema-goers two years previously appeared in The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire' only as a retrospective caricature. The dandies, he had written, combined an extremely quick reaction with a relaxed, even slack demeanour and facial expression’. Benjamin saw this behaviour reflected physiognomically in Baudelaire in the form of the grimace. As a poet, however, Baudelaire was a hero of modernitybut in isolation from the crowd, which he let himself be intoxicated by, while a thousand blows from the crowd demanded the greatest alertness from his consciousness. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 859

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Benjamin’s shock-defense theory of experience from his work on art and on the decay of aura. — connects to: Benjamin’s machine catalogue psychologically embodies Baudelaire’s modern subject rather than analyzing machinery. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 162; Modernity turned shock into the norm of lived experience — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 861

Broader Connections

• Modernity turned shock into the norm of lived experience #qualifies (0.85) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 861