In this paper I seek to examine a set of tactile, habitually grounded, bodily modes of perception which lie at the centre of Walter Benjamin's analysis of urban experience under modernity. On first reading of Benjamin's later writings, particularly his various interpretations of Baudelaire, these tactile, distracted modes of perception appear to represent a profound experiential entropy; a dilution of real affective experience which Benjamin sees as defining modernity, However, it is possible to trace the outline of a richer and more far-reaching phenomenology of perception within Benjamin's thought. This is what I seek to do. In seeking to trace out this phenomenology I argue that although such tactile, distracted, habitually grounded modes of perception are intertwined in an economy of self-defence, they also contain within them a whole range of capacities for knowing and getting hold of the urban, Following the lead of earlier interpreters of Benjamin such as Marleen Stoessel, Miriam Hansen, and Jürgen Habermas I also argue that these modes of perception stand in a particular relationship to the ‘auratic’. In exploring this relationship Benjamin outlines a novel theory of intersubjectivity between humans and the nonhuman. This clement of the intersubjective is not only important in understanding Benjamin's work, it also suggests a range of productive avenues for enframing an ethics of encounter within the contemporary city.
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