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Walter
Benjamin
A life in scraps, quotations & fragme
nts
24
Hours
pp. 50-
I
At the age of 48, Walter Benjamin
gave himself to death on 26 September 1940 in the Spanish border town of
Port Bou. Fifty years later, the Australian documentary-maker John
Hughes filmed the inauguration of an environmental sculpture
commemorating Benjamin’s life, death and writings. Through the rocks
above Port Bou, the sculptor had cut a passage – stopped by a panel of
glass – through which the free swell of the Mediterranean could be
viewed but never attained. That passageway recalls the motif from
Benjamin’s study of nineteenth-century Paris which emphasised its
arcades.
“There
is one thing curious about the Moscow streets: the Russian village plays
hid-and-seek in them … The street takes on the dimension of the
landscape. In fact, nowhere does Moscow really look like the city it is,
rather it more resembles the outskirts of itself.” (Moscow
Diary, 1926-7)
II
In 1928, Benjamin published a
collection of fragments, One Way Street, which is also invoked by the blocked passage in the
rock. John Hughes has taken that phrase for the title of his documentary
which he hopes will entice viewers to became readers. This aim is but
one of the ways in which One Way
Street challenges the conventions of television documentary.
III
Largely unpublished and almost
unknown during his lifetime, Benjamin came to be considered as the
finest German literary critic from the first half of this century after
a two-volume selection of his writings appeared in 1955. English
translations of essays became available after 1968 and were soon popular
as part of the New Left’s retrieval of one more alternative to Soviet
Marxism.
IV
Benjamin’s reputation
flourished in Anglo-Saxon societies as part of the a 1970s interest in
those inter-war German social critics with whom he had argued and
collaborated: Ernst Bloch, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse and Bertolt
Brecht, all of whom survived Nazism by escaping to the USA. With their
aid, Benjamin had been on his way to New York when Spanish authorities
closed the border. During the night, he took an overdose of morphine, by
no means his first encounter with drugs or suicide.
“If
I write better German than most writers of my generation, it is thanks
largely to twenty years’ observance of one little rule: never use the
word “I” except in letters.” (Berlin Chronicle, 1932)
V
Benjamin’s life cannot be
contained in any one of the forms or themes with which he worked –
fragments, quotations, passages, cities, or the minutiae of everyday
life. From those, and more, Hughes must select.
VI
Television demeans. Ideas are
reduced to their biographies. The lives of artists and philosophers are
plundered for their gossip quota. The complexities of living and
thinking are flattened into a storyline. Visuals in documentaries about
intellectuals are little more than slide evenings.
VII
One
Way Street opens with its form expressing a key device in
Benjamin’s writing: what he called the “charmed circle of
fragments”. His one completed book-length study – The
Origins of German Tragic Drama (1928) – is also made up of brief
segments. Competition between scraps and tomes is crucial to
Benjamin’s view of language, knowledge and the world. He reasoned in
letters, or at no more than essay length. His life’s work on the
arcades of Paris remained incomplete, and perhaps lost, although no one
can be sure if its surviving remnants are all there ever was. His cast
of mind erupted in his prose – the fulcrum of his sentences being
dashes rather than conjunctions. In his fascination with fragments,
Benjamin’s method paralleled the montage of film. In tribute, Hughes
has jigsawed his screen with multiple comments and images. Benjamin’s
choice of fragments was political. So is Hughes’s.
“Significant
literary work can only come into being in a strict alternation between
action and writing; … it must nurture … leaflets, brochures,
articles, and placards. Only this prompt language shows itself actively
equal to the moment.” (One Way
Street, 1928)
VIII
The corollary of fragments was
quotations, which Benjamin saw as “robbers by the roadside who …
relieve the idler of his convictions.” Although philosophising in
fragments had a distinguished lineage – from Montaigne and Pascal,
through Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and onto Wittgenstein – arguing
through the assembling of the words of others was more controversial. To
subvert the definition of originality as all work and no plagiarism,
Benjamin hoped to produce a volume made up only of quotations.
IX
The Viennese satirist Karl Kraus
(1874-1936) had directed the attention of Benjamin’s generation to
quotations. Kraus filled his weekly journal The Torch (1899-1936) with quotations from the daily press. These
extracts were more than “documentary proof” of bourgeois stupidity,
as they had been in Flaubert’s Dictionary
of Received Opinions. Kraus used quotation marks to reveal, in
Benjamin’s words, the bourgeois trinity of “Why nonsense is true,
stupidity beautiful, weakness good.” Quotation had begun as a means of
preservation. Kraus, Benjamin and Brecht realised that quotations could
serve as ammunition. Quotation had the power to “purify”. Each stale
adverb in the morning paper sparked philosophical outrage among devotees
of The Torch.
“The
desire to avoid clichés should not, on pain of falling into vulgar
coquetry, be confined to single words. The great French prose of the
nineteenth century was particularly sensitive to such vulgarity. A word
is seldom banal on its own: in music too the single note is immune to
triteness. The most abominable clichés are combinations of words, such
as Karl Kraus skewered for inspection: “utterly and completely”,
“for better or for worse”, “implemented and effected”. For in
them the brackish stream of stale language swills aimlessly, instead of
being damned up, thrown into relief, by the precision of the writer’s
expressions. This applies not only to combinations of words, but to the
construction of whole forms. If a dialectician, for example, marked the
turning-point of his advancing ideas by starting with a “But” at
each caesura, the literary scheme would give the lie to the unschematic
intention of his thought.” (Adorno, Minima Moralia, Reflections
from Damaged Life, 1951)
X
Concern for literary scraps
completed a fascination with what professional historians had dismissed
as trifles. Benjamin believed that “nothing that has ever happened
should be regarded as lost for history.” Since the 1970s, the texture
of everyday life has became an academic fashion, but Benjamin was among
the first to treat such materials as microcosms from which to
investigate a society. In company with the Surrealists, he used everyday
objects – the arcades of Paris, panoramic photographs, clothing
styles, tatoos – to detect the roots of social disorder. In Russia, he
bought and studied toys. Throughout his life, he accumulated postcards.
“To
an ever greater degree, the work of art reproduced becomes the work of
art designed for reproducibility.” (“Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction”, 1936)
XI
As a form, fragments expressed a
key element in the content of Benjamin’s thoughts. Yet Hughes needed
more than one device to approach how competing notions operate in one
life, and in order to rebut all attempts to dissolve life’s diversity
in a final solution.
XII
Attempts to recruit Benjamin’s
ghost for one element in his thinking against the others neutralise his
critical powers. The current move is to incorporate him into the
academic world he never managed to join in life. Hughes’s film-making
sags only when he parades one talking brain after another.
XIII
Benjamin rejected any attempt to
depict a writer’s life apart from the after-effects of his works.
Hughes has been faithful to Benjamin’s injunction by giving time to
the battles among Marxists, between Marxists and Zionists, as well as to
a recent challenge from deconstructionists for possession of the
Benjamin legacy. Such disputes presume that Benjamin’s thinking was
headed towards a predetermined terminus – whether Moscow or Jerusalem.
Moreover, the body-snatchers must make themselves forget that the
intellectual enterprises of Marxism, Zionism and semiotics remained open
and fluid before 1940. Benjamin met Marxism and Zionism as competing
responses to Nazism, the threat from which bound them to each other.
“Every
line we succeed in publishing today – no matter how uncertain the
future to which we entrust it – is a victory wrenched from the powers
of darkness.” (Benjamin to Scholem, 11 January 1940)
XIV
Philosophising about language
provided Benjamin with a means to enrich both his Marxism and his
Jewishness, while commenting on their weaknesses. His Jewishness led him
into the Kabbalah while its mysteries stimulated his belief that words
were not arbitrary signs.
“The
development of the communicate aspect of language to the exclusion of
all else in fact inevitably leads to the destruction of language. On the
other hand, the way leads to mystical silence if its expressive
character is raised to the absolute. Of the two, it seems to me the more
current tendency at the moment is towards communication. But in one form
or another, compromise is always necessary.” (Moscow Diary, 1926-27)
XV
No clearer instance of how
Benjamin’s Jewishness and Marxism fed each other can be found than in
the concluding paragraph of his “Theses on the Philosophy of
History”, composed during 1940. He portrayed a proletarian revolution
capable of transforming the future through the Jewish belief that
“every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah
might enter.”
XVI
Lurking behind the disputes
around Benjamin’s politics is the question: “Had Benjamin lived,
which side would he have been on in the Cold War?” Would he have
returned to East or West Germany, or taken refuge in Switzerland, like
Thomas Mann? Benjamin’s trajectory cannot be divined from his not
joining the German Communist Party, as did his brother, a doctor, who
died in a Nazi camp. Walter Benjamin’s visit to Moscow in the winter
of 1926-27 confirmed his radical communism, in opposition to the
experience of the Austrian novelist Joseph Roth who, Benjamin observed,
had arrived as a revolutionary but was going home as a Royalist.
Benjamin found in Moscow a touchstone which obliged him to refine his
outlook on European developments. A remark of Benjamin’s concerning
Karl Kraus’s conservatism could have been a self-confession of his own
relations with the German Communist Party: “As a ‘grumbler’, he
participates in their lot in order to denounce them, and denounces them
in order to participate. To meet them through sacrifice, he one day
threw himself into the arms of the Catholic Church.” Except that
Benjamin never took unholy orders.
“Norman
Kemp Smith has come to believe in Providence and God and even talked
seriously about the angels; he says that he has been forced to believe
that there is a Providence taking care of things because it is
intolerable, impossible to accept such an idea as that the fate of
Europe after the war depended on Lloyd George.” (Edmund Wilson, 1921)
XVII
The dispute over Benjamin’s legacy is part of a contest for the spirit
of the twentieth century. Was Benjamin a pessimist, and if so, in what
sense? Many of the authors he admired are not those we associate with
optimism: Baudelaire, Mallarme, Proust, Kraus and Kafka. Yet, in the
late 1930s, Benjamin could find “radiant serenity” in Kafka’s
remark that “there is infinite amount of hope, but not for us.”
Twelve years earlier, Benjamin had been cheeky enough to assert that
since improvisation was replacing competence, “All the decisive blows
are struck left-handed.” That aphorism can be read as an injunction to
seek the sources of hope in the least likely places. In that
expectation, he had the support – personal and intellectual – of
Ernst Bloch (1855-1977), whose philosophy of hope assumed that everyone
and everything had a potential for hope other than their present
condition. If Benjamin was no Dr Pangloss, he did not accept that all
was for the worst in this most curst of all possible worlds. His
resistance to fascism kept him apart from its culture of death. Nor did
his pessimism slide into defeatism, as might be alleged against Kraus,
though never by Benjamin.
“There
is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a document
of barbarism” (“Theses on the Philosophy of History”, 1940)
XVIII
Benjamin’s Marxism was at once
an intellectual question mark and a political statement. Orthodoxy was
alien to his being and he could never have toed the party line. Yet his
greater fear became that, in an era of open class conflict, he might not
be able to resist going over to the bourgeoisie if he remained an
outsider. Possession of a party card, as he said in 1934, provided no
protection in itself. Only active involvement as a producer in the
workers’ movement could make him secure, morally and politically, and
so keep his writing fertile.
XIX
That attitude explains why he sided with Brecht against the academic
Marxists of the Frankfurt Schools, headed by his erstwhile disciple,
Theodor Adorno. In the late 1930s, the émigré Frankfurt scholars in
New York chastised Benjamin for the crudeness of his explication of
Parisian fashion in terms of technological and economic changes. For
Adorno, dialectics required greater subtlety. As arcane as writer as any
when he chose to be, Benjamin disagreed. First, he suspected that any
political act would offend the sensibilities of a philosophy professor.
Secondly, for Brecht and Benjamin, dialectics demanded crudities, but
the kind of crudities that Benjamin found in Proust. “Proustian
crudities” sounds oxymoronic. Benjamin perceived crudeness in the
mundanities out of which Proust crafted his fiction. Moreover, Benjamin
grasped a “savage nihilism” when Proust “endures into the tiny
private chamber” of the petit-bourgeois in a parallel insight,
Benjamin praised detective writers for appreciating that the ponderous
furniture of a nineteenth-century apartment was designed for corpses.
“These
petit-bourgeois interiors are the battlefields over which the
devastating assault of commodity capital has victoriously swept, and
nothing human can thrive here any more.” (Moscow Diary, 1926-27)
“No
one knows how much obvious bad taste this retrospective envy accounts
for …”. (Balzac, Cousin
Bette, 1846)
XX
In dismissing Max Brod’s life
of Kafka, Benjamin deplored its “pietistic stance of an ostentatious
intimacy [as] the most irreverent attitude imaginable.” John Hughes
avoids giving offence by including comic clips of a funeral from a 1920s
feature film and by presenting Benjamin through a Groucho Marx-like
actor, Nick Lathouris. An alternative way of introducing Benjamin the
person would be for Woody Allen to adapt Benjamin’s Moscow
Diary, which is also a good place to begin reading him. In that
volume, Benjamin explores himself and his politics while we observe
discovering a new city until the man, his ideas and wanderings
illuminate each other’s shadows.
XXI
Benjamin himself long “played with the idea of settling out the sphere
of life – bios – graphically on a map” with coloured signs for
formative events. One commentator suggested that readers approach
Benjamin as he did foreign cities, walking their streets and byways,
attending to the insignificant details for what they reveal about the
dynamics of their survival.
XXII
Walter Benjamin had become a
refugee long before he had to flee Nazi Germany. An associate, the
social philosopher Hannah Arendt, located his career in the three
conflicts faced by the sons of assimilated German Jews who had to settle
accounts with their Germanness, their Jewishness and their bourgeois
families. Benjamin escaped into French culture, into the Kabbalah and
into Marxism. Each of these retreats involved a rebellion.
XXIII
Mallarme was Benjamin’s initial
contact with French sensibilities. He next earned some income by
translating Proust, in whom he found a fellow critic of the
haut-bourgeoisie as a “Camorra of consumers”.
“The
class struggle … is a fight for the crude and material things without
which no refined and spiritual things could exist … the latter …
manifest themselves in this struggle as courage, humour, cunning, and
fortitude.” (“Theses on the Philosophy of History”, 1940)
Benjamin’s reputation
as a cultural critic is now linked to a third French writer, Charles
Baudelaire, whose Tableaux
Parisiens, he had translated in 1923. Their fractured form
encouraged Benjamin’s fragmentary style as he chased the speed of a
movie film, which he claimed had become essential for representing the
city once the automobile replaced the train as the urban dynamo.
Benjamin discovered in Paris the “Capital of the Nineteenth
Century”. Much earlier, Paris had been the catalyst for his own
self-revelation, as if in a dream. Like Baudelaire, Benjamin joined the
ranks of the flaneurs who
prowled city streets, to be joined during the 1920s by the Surrealists
whose “unlimited trust only I G Farben and the peaceful perfection of
the air force” he appreciated as the right kind of pessimism. “But
what now, what next?”, he had to add.
“The
tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’
in which we live is not the exception but the rule.” (“Theses on the
Philosophy of History”, 1940)
XXIV
Paris was but one of several cities Benjamin essayed, beginning with
Naples in 1925. Cities were living entities for him and he approved the
Italian equation of cities with sins – greed for Milan, envy for Rome
and indolence for Naples. His 1929 portrayal of Marseilles animated its
physicality. Walls in its rich quarters “wear livery and are in the
pay of the ruling class”, promoting hundreds of commodities. “In the
poorer quarters they are politically mobilised and post their spacious
red letters as the forerunners of red guards in front of dockyards and
arsenals.”
XXV
Benjamin was a Modernist in his
intellectual and personal commitment to cities which were his natural
habitat. He imagined tall buildings as “mountain peaks”, and
described the flatness of Moscow as a “a prairie of architecture”,
encountering animals only in its zoos. Great cities sustained and
reassured him by enclosing him “in the peace of a fortress”. Their
centres protected him from any “awareness of the ever-vigilant
elemental forces.” He feared that those ramparts were being breached,
not by nature but by ploughed land and highways. The urban dweller
therefore had to cope with both “isolated monstrosities from the open
country [and] abortions of urban architectonics”.
XXVI
Benjamin might have survived had
the fascists halted his flight at Marseilles rather than after days in
the open.
XXVII
Despite his distance from what
most people call nature, Benjamin did not look upon the earth’s
resources as a given to be exploited, either alongside human labour as
did capitalists, or instead of human labour, as many socialists were
proposing. He no more trusted those who wanted to master nature through
technology than he did “a cane-wielder who proclaimed the mastery of
children by adults to be the purpose of education.”
A new society would need fresh understandings of both work and our
planet. Benjamin welcomed the Utopian fantasies that had illustrated
“a kind of labour which, far from exploiting nature, is capable of
delivering her of the creations which lie dormant in her womb as
potentials.” To accept nature as a free gift was equivalent to the
careless exploitation of human capacities. This radical trilogy of
humans, technology and nature grew out of Benjamin’s reactions against
trench warfare on the Western front, which he now only at second hand.
“Human
multitudes, gases, electrical forces were hurled into the open country,
high-frequency currents coursed through the landscape, new
constellations rose in the sky, aerial space and ocean depths thundered
with propellers, and everywhere sacrificial shafts were dug in Mother
Earth. This immense wooing of the cosmos … turned the bridal bed into
a bloodbath.” ???????
XXVIII
Hughes’s camera has not tracked
Benjamin around the traps of his cities. Rather, his camera interrogates
Benjamin’s enthusiasm for film which, as a development of photography,
he claimed – hoped? – had transformed the nature of art.
XXIX
Benjamin appealed to 1970s
radicals because he, more than his fellow German culture critics, had
interested himself in the visual as well as with texts. His father had
been an art dealer whose dutiful son kept Paul Klee’s “Angelus Novus”
with him until death. Shortly before that end, Benjamin’s
contemplation of Klee’s image allowed him to express his political
expectations at a moment when not even the dead could sleep safe from
the ravages of the enemy. The Angel of History, Benjamin wrote, has his
face turned towards the past while the storm we call progress blows with
such force from Paradise that he is propelled into the future.
XXX
One essay secured Benjamin a
place on reading lists for students of the visual: “The Work of Art in
the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936). Its ideas underpinned one
of the four episodes in John Berger’s Ways of Seeing television series and companion book in rebuttal of
Lord Civilisation.
XXXI
Mechanical reproduction, Benjamin
asserted, brushes aside the aura of piety and of cult values from art
works. Hughes might not agree. His documentary exists to feed off the
aura of television where the cult values have become those of mass
consumption. One Way Street is
implicated in those consequences in order to present a fifth argument
for the abolition of television – at least for long enough to read
Benjamin’s writings.
“The
newspaper is read more in the vertical than in the horizontal plane,
while film and advertisement force the printed word entirely into the
dictatorial perpendicular. And before a child of our time finds his way
clear to opening a book, his eyes have been exposed to such a blizzard
of changing, colourful, conflicting letters that he chances of his
penetrating the archaic stillness of the book are slight.” (One
Way Street, 1928)
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