A brief return to infrastructures - contemplating Benjamin's Berlin Childhood

Reading Mattern last week, the spatial theory nerd in me truly delighted in her historical approach to connecting digital infrastructures to infrastructures of media and communication that have always factored into spatial/urban organization. Her mention of Benjamin inspired me to reread my favorite of his texts this weekend. In Berlin Childhood around 1900, Benjamin recounts experiences and impressions through a series of nostalgic vignettes, some centering on mundane objects like “The Telephone” and “The Sock,” others on spaces like “The School Library” and “Imperial Panorama,” others still on thematically abstract subjects like “Society” and “Misfortunes and Crimes.” 

Thinking through some passages in Benjamin helped me to better unpack Mattern’s claim that “cities carry in them the ‘residue’ of all media technologies past—and that, furthermore, these ‘past’ media are not merely artifacts or ruins” (96). In “The Telephone,” Benjamin describes the moment the titular apparatus became an object central to daily life: 

Each day and every hour, the telephone was my twin brother. I was an intimate observer of the way it rose above the humiliations of its early years. For once the chandelier, fire screen, potted palm, console table, gueridon, and alcove balustrade–all formerly on display in the front rooms–had finally faded and died a natural death, the apparatus, like a legendary hero once exposed to die in a mountain gorge, left the dark hallway in the back of the house to make its regal entry into the cleaner and brighter rooms that now were inhabited by a younger generation. For the latter, it became a consolation for their loneliness. To the despondent who wanted to leave this lonely world, it shone with the light of a last hope. With the forsaken, it shared its bed. (Benjamin 48)

By referring to the telephone as his “twin brother,” Benjamin is likely charting a parallel between his growing social awareness and the telephone’s emergence as an invaluable presence in the home after a prolonged stint in domestic obscurity (in “the dark hallway in the back of the house”). In my contemporary mind’s eye, the notion of phone-as-twin instantly conjured up the image of a selfie. The phone in our context is, of course, a literal mirror, among other things.

In fact, it seems impossible not to consider our present context when reading this passage. The telephone as “consolation for [...] loneliness”? Certainly social media and dating apps are meant to combat isolation, to build community and foster (at least the impression of) meaningful connections with others. “With the forsaken it shared its bed”? How many of us haven’t doom-scrolled ourselves into metaphysical oblivion at 2AM instead of sleeping, even though we really planned to this time? I’m certainly taking liberties here with my interpretation of Benjamin. But his passage speaks to the way we humanize the technologies that inhabit and shape our spaces, just as we inhabit and shape our technologies. Sharing a bed with one’s technology was figurative for Benjamin. Despite this, his prescient phrasing still implies intimacy and reliance, or more sinisterly, dependence. Benjamin goes beyond humanizing the telephone, allowing it residence in our, well, residences, but additionally allowing it residence in the realm of myth. In his playful hyperbole, it becomes “a legendary hero.” The telephone moving from the back of the house to the front is not simply a rearrangement of space. It is a movement couched in a classic story arc, that of epic journey. The telephone, then the newest iteration of a network facilitating human communication, cannot be extricated from older forms of communication, from traditions dating back to ancient modes of storytelling. At the risk of sounding like a dreaded “techno-determinist” (105), the movement of Benjamin’s telephone in space takes on an aura of triumphant inevitability in part because it is movement guided by pathways articulated long ago. Our current relationships with technology and their interplay with contemporary infrastructures, including micro-infrastructures undergirding domestic and private spaces, are the latest iterations of these pathways. We can look to Mattern to provide further nuance here. She advocates for balancing “a recognition that technologies have material effects—that the channels laid and spaces configured by preceding technologies do steer the development, to some degree, of successor technologies—with an acknowledgment of the roles played by serendipity and tinkering, by historical social and cultural factors, in technological development” (106).