Professional Documents
Culture Documents
History
Andrew Benjamin,
Editor
Continuum
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The Tower Building
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London SE1 7NX
Contents
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Introduction A NDREW BENJAMIN
1 The Supposition of the Aura: The Now, the Then,
and Modernity GEORGES DIDI-HUBERMAN
2 The Shortness of History, or Photography In Nuce:
Benjamins Attenuation of the Negative DAVID FERRIS
3 Now: Walter Benjamin on Historical Time
WERNER H AMACHER
4 Down the K. Hole: Walter Benjamins Destructive
Land-surveying of History STEPHANIE POLSKY
5 The Sickness of Tradition: Between Melancholia and
Fetishism R EBECCA COMAY
6 Trembling Contours: KierkegaardBenjaminBrecht
R AINER NGELE
7 The Subject of History: The Temporality of Parataxis
in Benjamins Historiography DIMITRIS VARDOULAKIS
8 Tradition as Injunction: Benjamin and the Critique of
Historicisms PHILIPPE SIMAY
9 Boredom and Distraction: The Moods of Modernity
A NDREW BENJAMIN
10 Walter Benjamins Interior History CHARLES R ICE
11 What is the Matter with Architectural History?
GEVORK H ARTOONIAN
12 Messianic Epistemology: Thesis XV ROBERT GIBBS
13 Non-messianic Political Theology in Benjamins
On the Concept of History HOWARD CAYGILL
Notes
Contributors
Index
vi
vii
1
3
19
38
69
88
102
118
137
156
171
182
197
215
227
253
256
Acknowledgements
George Didi-Hubermans chapter was first published in Negotiating Rapture:
The Power of Art to Transform Lives (The Museum of Contemporary
Art, Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1996).
Werner Hamachers chapter was first published in Heidrun Friese (ed.), The
Moment: Time and Rupture in Modern Thought, (Liverpool: Liverpool
University Press, 2001), while the German text appeared as Jetzt:
Benjamin zur historischen Zeit, in Benjamin Studies 1.1 (2002).
Portions of Rebecca Comays essay appeared in Research in Phenomenology
29 (1999) under the title Perverse History: Fetishism and Dialectic in
Walter Benjamin.
A version of Charles Rices chapter is published as: Immerger et rompre:
Lintrieur de Walter Benjamin, trans. Philippe Simay, in Philippe
Simay (ed.), Walter Benjamin: Mtropole et Modernit (Paris: Editions
de lEclat, 2005).
Abbreviations
All references to the Convolutes of The Arcades Project are given parenthetically, according to Convolute no., without further specification.
AP The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin
(Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1999).
BA Briefwechsel 19381940: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, ed.
Gershom Scholem (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1994).
BS Briefwechsel 19331940: Walter Benjamin, Gershom Scholem, ed.
Gershom Scholem (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1985).
C
INTRODUCTION
ANDREW BENJAMIN
1
THE SUPPOSITION OF THE AURA:
THE NOW, THE THEN, AND
MODERNITY
GEORGES DIDI-HUBERMAN*
Looking at someone carries the implicit expectation that our look will be
returned by the object of our gaze. When this expectation is met (which, in the
case of thought processes, can apply equally to the look of the minds eye and
to a glance pure and simple), there is an experience of the aura to the fullest
extent . . . Experience of the aura thus rests on the transposition of a response
common in human relationships to the relationships between the inanimate or
natural object and man. The person we look at, or who feels he is being looked
at, looks at us in turn. To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to
invest it with the ability to meet our gaze. The experience corresponds to the
discoveries of the mmoire involontaire. (These discoveries, incidentally, are
unique: they are lost to the memory that seeks to retain them. Thus they lend
support to a concept of the aura that comprises the unique apparition of a
distance. This designation has the advantage of clarifying the cult nature of
the phenomenon. The essentially distant is the inapproachable: inapproachability is in fact a primary quality of the cult image.) Prousts great familiarity
with the problem of the aura requires no emphasis.
Walter Benjamin, On Some Motifs in Baudelaire [1939], SW 4: 338
(trans. modified 1939)
THE SUPPOSITION OF THE OBJECT: THAT OF WHICH OUR
EYES WILL NEVER HAVE THEIR FILL
What is the sense today, 60 years after Walter Benjamin, of reintroducing
the question, the hypothesis, the supposition of the aura? Is not the art
contemporary to us inscribed within does it not inscribe within itself
what Benjamin called the age of technological reproducibility (SW 4:
25183), an age supposed to have produced the death, the withering at the
very least, of the aura? Many historians and critics of twentieth-century art
have drawn a lesson from that age of technological reproducibility, have
* Trans. Jane Marie Todd.
drawn its consequences for the very production of artistic objects.1 But such
reflections on reproducibility, on the loss of originality and of origin,
have proceeded as if foregrounding these notions must inevitably make the
archaic and outdated question of the aura, linked as it was to the world of
cult images, fall away and hence disappear.
But falling away is not the same as disappearing. Fortunately, we no
longer have to bow to our knees before statues of gods I note in passing
that Hegel already registered this fact at the beginning of the nineteenth
century, and that others had done so before him.2 But we bow our knees,
if only in fantasy, before many other things that hang over us or hold us
down, that look at us or leave us stunned. As we know, Benjamin speaks
of the decline of the aura in the modern age, but for him, decline does
not mean disappearance. Rather, it means (as in the Latin declinare) moving
downward, inclining, deviating, or inflecting in a new way. Benjamins
exegetes have sometimes wondered whether his position on the aura was not
contradictory, or whether one ought not to oppose his early thoughts on
the question to his mature views, his (quasi-Marxist) philosophy about the
destruction of the aura to his (quasi-messianic) thinking on its restoration.3
To that, we must first reply that the notion of aura is diffused throughout
Benjamins oeuvre. Its incorporation into his oeuvre was a response to a
transhistorical and profoundly dialectical experience; therefore, the question
of whether the aura has been liquidated or not proves to be a quintessentially
false question.4 We must further explain that while the aura in Benjamin
names an originary anthropological quality in the image, the origin for him
does not in any way designate something remaining upstream from things,
as the source of the river is upstream from it. For Benjamin, the origin names
that which emerges from the process of becoming and disappearance, not
the source but a whirlpool in the river of becoming [that] pulls the emerging
matter into its own rhythm (OT, p. 46, trans. modified).
Hence decline itself is part of the origin so understood, not the bygone
albeit founding past, but the precarious, churning rhythm, the dynamic
two-way flow of a historicity that asks, without respite, even to our own
present, to be recognized as a restoration, a restitution, and as something
that by that very fact is uncompleted, always open (OT, p. 46, trans.
modified). The beauty that rises from the bed of ages as Benjamin writes
with reference to Proust and the mmoire involontaire is never outdated or
liquidated; reality never ceases to sear the image; remembrance continues to
offer itself as a relic secularized. And since silence is fundamentally auratic
in its manifestation as Benjamin writes of Baudelaire modern or even
postmodern man, the man of technological reproducibility, is obliged, in
the midst of the noisy labyrinth of mediations, information and reproductions, sometimes to impose silence and submit to the uncanniness of what
comes back to him as aura, as thirst-inducing apparition (SW 2: 510; SW 4:
3347; SW 4: 177). Let us say, to outline our hypothesis, that whereas the
value of the aura was imposed in the religious cult images that is, in the
protocols of dogmatic intimidation within which the liturgy has most often
brought forth its images it is now supposed in artists studios in the secular
era of technological reproducibility.5 Let us say, to dialecticize, that the decline
of the aura supposes implies, slips underneath, enfolds in its fashion the
aura as an originary phenomenon of the image. It is, to be faithful to Benjamin
in the productive instability of his exploratory vocabulary, an uncompleted
and always open phenomenon. The aura and its decline are thus part of the
same system (and have undoubtedly always been so in every age of the auras
history: we need only read Pliny the Elder, who was already complaining
about the decline of the aura in the age of reproducibility of antique busts).6
But the aura persists, resists its decline precisely as supposition.
What is a supposition? It is the simple act not so simple in reality
of placing below (ova supponere: placing eggs to be incubated). It means
submitting a question by substituting certain parameters of what is believed
to be the response. It means producing a hypothesis also underneath
which then becomes capable of offering not only the principal subject
of a work of art, but also its deepest principle.7 Can we, then, suppose the
aura in the visual objects that twentieth-century art, from Piet Mondrian
to Barnett Newman to Ad Reinhardt, for example, offers to our view? We
can at least try. We are prepared to admit that the construction of such a
supposition remains awkward cumbersome, heavy with the past in one
sense, too facile, even dubious, in another.
In the first place, it is cumbersome for any discourse of specificity: isnt the
aura, which designated that dimension of other presence literally required
by the age-old world of cult images, condemned to obsolescence as soon as
a visual object is in itself its own subject? Hasnt modern art emancipated
itself from the subject, the subject matter whether natural, conventional or symbolic which Erwin Panofsky placed at the foundation of
any comprehension of the visual arts?8 To that we must reply that there
are other ways of understanding subject matter the subject as matter
than the way proposed by Panofskian iconology. Moreover, our supposition is cumbersome only for those historical or aesthetic discourses
closed upon their own axioms. In fact, discourses of specificity usually
present themselves as (pseudo)axiomatic, and the consequence of their
closure their tone of certainty, has often been to pronounce supposedly
definitive death-sentences. The modernist will say, for example, that the
aura is dead, the postmodernist, that modernism is dead; and so on.
But the supposition of the aura is not satisfied with any sentence of death
(historical death, death in the name of a meaning of history), inasmuch as
that supposition is linked to a question of memory and not of history in the
usual sense, in short, to a question of living on (survivance, Aby Warburgs
Nachleben). It is within the order of reminiscence, it seems to me, that
Benjamin raised the question of the aura, as Warburg had raised that of the
these two orders may lie our second hypothesis in the dynamic of labour,
in the process of making art. We must seek to understand how a Newman
painting supposes implies, slips underneath, enfolds in its fashion the
question of the aura. How it manoeuvres the image-making substance in
order to impose itself on the gaze, to foment desire. How it thus becomes
that of which our eyes will never have their fill.
production. He was seeking a model that could retain from Hegel the
prodigious power of the negative and yet reject Hegels reconciliation and
synthesis of Spirit. With the dialectical image, Benjamin proposed an open,
undogmatic even relatively drifting use of the philosophical dialectic,
which he distorted, like other writers and artists of his time: Carl Einstein,
Bataille, S.M. Eisenstein, and even, in another register, Mondrian.17
Why an image? Because, the image designates something completely
different from a picture, a figurative illustration. The image is first of all a
crystal of time, both a construct and a blazing shape, a sudden shock:
Its not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is
present its light on what is past; rather, an image is that in which the
Then and the Now come into a constellation like a flash of lightning. In
other words: image is dialectics at a standstill. For while the relation of the
present to the past is a purely temporal, continuous one, the relation of
the Then to the Now is dialectical: is not progression but image, suddenly
emergent. Only dialectical images are genuine images. (N2a, 3)
This strange definition has at least two consequences, and it is crucial to
clarify them if we are to address the problem of twentieth-century art, its
position in relation to the aura, and its role in the relation between the Now
and the Then. First, Benjamins definition valorizes a parameter of ambiguity
essential to the structure of any dialectical image: Ambiguity, writes
Benjamin, is the manifest imaging of dialectic (AP, p. 10).18 In this way, he
lays claim to certain aesthetic choices (the only authentic image is one that
is ambiguous), while at the same time dissociating the dialectical operation
from any clear and distinct synthesis, any teleological reconciliation.
Second, Benjamins definition valorizes a critical parameter, revealing
the dialectical images enormous potential for intervening in theoretical
debates (art, according to Benjamin, goes straight to the heart of problems
of cognition). To produce a dialectical image is to appeal to the Then, to
accept the shock of memory while refusing to submit or return to the past;
for example, it is to welcome the signifiers of Theosophy, the Kabbalah or
negative theology, awakening these references from their dogmatic sleep as a
way of deconstructing and criticizing them. It is to criticize modernity (the
forgetting of the aura) through an act of memory and, at the same time,
to criticize archaism (nostalgia for the aura) through an act of essentially
modern invention, substitution and designification. Benjamin dismissed
with the same gesture myth and technology, dreaming and waking, Carl
Jung and Karl Marx. He returned to the fragile moment of awakening, a
dialectical moment in his eyes because it lies at the evanescent, ambiguous
borderline between unconscious imagery and necessary critical lucidity.
That is why he conceived of art history itself as Traumdeutung, dream
interpretation, to be elaborated on the Freudian model.19
This historical and critical supposition, which I evoke all too briefly here,20
allows us to move beyond or displace a number of sterile contradictions
that have disrupted the aesthetic domain in the matters of modernity and
memory, and especially the pictorial materiality inherent in the adventure
of abstract art and its notoriously idealist references. Nearly all the great
artists, from Wassily Kandinsky to Jackson Pollock, from Malevich to
Reinhardt, from Mondrian to Newman, from Marcel Duchamp to Alberto
Giacometti, have too quickly irritated or delighted their interpreters by their
use, sometimes light-hearted, sometimes profound, of spirituality, original
art, orthodox theology, Theosophy, even alchemy . . . And most historians
spontaneously forget that a philosophical, religious, or ideological claim on
the part of an artist does not in any way constitute an interpretive key to
his oeuvre, but rather requires a separate and joint interpretation that is,
a dialectically articulated interpretation of the aesthetic interpretation as
such.21 Whether they are materialists, or idealists and in general they
never ask themselves the question in those terms whether they claim to
be avant-garde or nostalgic, artists make their artworks in an order of
plastic reality, formal labour, which must be interpreted for what it offers.
This means it must be understood in its capacity as a heuristic opening, and
not in terms of an axiomatic reduction to its own programmes. That is
another reason art history is related to Traumdeutung. Let us note that artists
writings, parallel to artworks themselves, very often manifest the same critical
ambiguity supposed in the relation Benjamin called the dialectical image.22
From this perspective, the case of Newman seems to me exemplary and of
flawless clarity. We know that in 1947 Newmans artworks and declarations led
Clement Greenberg to form a suspicious judgement, typical of what I have called
the model of specificity, a model trapped within the vicious circle of historyas-forgetting (modernism as the forgetting of tradition) and history-as-rebirth
(antimodernism as return to tradition). Greenbergs suspicion was directed
precisely at Newmans use of certain words stemming from philosophical and
religious traditions: intangible reality, uniqueness, ecstasy, transcendental
experience, symbolical or metaphysical content. And Greenberg found such
uses archaic, he said, permeated by something half-baked and revivalist in a
familiar American way, something he found excessive and pointless for artistic
activity as such, pointless, in short, for its specificity.23
Newman gave a vehement response to these arguments: according to
him, they stemmed from an unintentional distortion based on a misunderstanding.24 What misunderstanding? That of imagining, in an extremely
traditional frame of mind all in all, that the relation between certain words
(coming from an age-old tradition) and a certain pictorial tradition must
inevitably be expressed in terms of a programme, that is, in iconographical
terms. Newman refuses the idea that the use of the word mystical corresponds to a principle for him or to an a priori, that is, to his assumption
of a pre-existing belief. He refuses to be seen as a programme-maker,
10
laying claim to a transformed and transforming today we would say deconstructive use of these words from the Then. And how does he transform
and deconstruct the meaning of such words, if not by taking on the Now
of a singular, absolutely new, and originary experience, of a pictoriality that
dismisses in a single gesture the figurative past and the stylistic present of
abstract, albeit purist, art? That is why, in his response, Newman does
not hesitate to rub together, hence to irritate as a way of decomposing
their accepted usage the words ecstasy and chaos, the expressions
transcendence and nonmaterial stenography, and the (at the very least
interesting) expression materialistic abstractions. This is a way of positing
himself, if not exactly as a master in contradictions, as Thomas Hess said,25
then at least as a master of the dialectical image in Benjamins sense.
It is significant that all of Newmans writings between 1945 and 1949
that is, during the gestation period that saw the implementation of his
most novel, most decisive, and most definitive pictorial problematic26
manifest most acutely a thinking of the origin that has nothing to do with
a nostalgia for the past, but that concerns precisely the productive collision
between the Now and an unexpected, reinvented Then. His thinking has
nothing to do with an aim of restoration or rebirth, but engages the very
issue of a radical modernity.27 Hence, the new (origin as whirlpool) requires
us to think from top to bottom of art history itself, that is, the relation an
artist now maintains with the past (origin as source). That is why, in The
Plasmic Image, Newman devotes so much time to rethinking primitive
art, in a mode more anthropological than aesthetic, valorizing ecstasy,
desire and terror at the expense of beauty itself. According to him, the
poor comprehension and use of such primitive art recourse to the criterion
of the ornamental, for example have waylaid the entire modern notion of
abstraction.28
Hence, the new (origin as whirlpool) requires beginning not with something
like the idea of a golden age represented here by Greek art but on the
contrary with its destruction (a direct and explicit echo of the state of the
civilized world in 1945, when the painter felt he was truly beginning his
work).29 The origin, as Newman proposes it in a very dialectical notion, is
first of all the destruction of the origin, or at the very least its distortion, its
making strange. That is why the artist of today can feel much closer to a
fetish from the Marquesas Islands, about which he understands nothing,
than to a Greek statue which nonetheless constitutes his most intrinsic
aesthetic past. The collision between the Now and the decomposed Then
logically leads to the barbarian Newmans term decomposition of
traditional aesthetic categories; and the timeless quality of our imaginary
museums had been wrongly conceived in terms of those categories. Thus,
for heuristic purposes, Newman attempts certain conceptual discriminations
plasmic versus plastic, sublime versus beautiful30 that are designed
above all to deconstruct our own familiarity with the art of the past.
11
In the end, what is the origin (origin as whirlpool) if not the wrenching
implementation of that critical ambiguity that Benjamin implicitly characterized with the notion of dialectical image? What does it mean to originate
in the whirlpool of an artistic practice, if not to appeal to a certain memory
of the Then in order to decompose the present that is, the immediate
past, the recent past, the still dominant past in a determined rejection of
all revivalist nostalgia? Interpretations that spontaneously use the temporal
categories of influence, or the semiotic categories of iconography, go astray
when they try to make Newman a spokesperson for, or an heir to, the
Jewish tradition.31 We must rather hypothesize that a certain kind of critical
memory of the Jewish tradition among other things permitted Newman
to create the collisions and destructions he was seeking in order to originate
his pictorial practice in what he saw as the sclerotic present of abstraction.
In short, the critique of the present the appeal to categories such as
primitive art or the sublime also included a critique of all nostalgia.
Newman was laying claim to the Now to the utmost degree. I believe that,
without betraying Newman, we could paraphrase his famous title of 1948,
The Sublime is Now by saying that, for him, the supposition of artistic time
implies the dialectical and critical proposition that the origin is now. It is from
within the reminiscent Now that the origin appears, in conformity with a
fundamental anachronism that modernist criticism has as yet been unable
to take on. The image we produce is the self-evident one of revelation, real
and concrete, that can be understood by anyone who will look at it without
the nostalgic glasses of history.32
12
13
14
a double door left ajar before us: first, because the edges of the central zip
ooze or bleed as a result of the the procedure of adhering, then removing
ripping off the material strip, which is designed to reserve the white of
the drawings support while the ink is being spread; and second, because
the saturated zones of black, far from being uniformly compact, reveal a
disintegration in the brushstroke, a loss of adhesiveness that makes the
gesture itself visible, and with it, a fraying of the brush-hairs. These are the
marks, the voluntary traces of the procedure, which the pictorial version of
Onement I will push to the extreme, decisively asserting the incompleteness
of the painting.44
Phenomenologically speaking, the auratic distance invoked by Benjamin
can be interpreted as the depth that Erwin Straus, then Maurice MerleauPonty, constituted as the fundamental sensorial paradigm of distance
and place, a concept far from any spatial depth that could be objectified
by measurement or by perspective.45 If in Onement I Newman breaks
definitively with any objectifiable depth of space, he reconnects, it seems to
me, with the physical sensation of a depth of place. In that sense, Hubert
Damisch was quite right, evoking Newman but also Pollock to challenge
the so-called rejection of the so-called convention of depth.46 Like all great
American painting of the period, Newmans effort requires a specific optics
whose theory and phenomenology remain to be set forth.
In Onement I, that phenomenology certainly includes a version of
closeness, given the restricted dimensions of the drawing.47 But, as Benjamin
says, however close the apparition, a distance suddenly irrupts within it.
It irrupts here in the reserve, in the retrait 48 contrived (and not drawn,
outlined, or situated) by Newman. In that sense, it places us squarely before
a kind of dialectic of place close/distant, in front of/inside, tactile/optical,
appearing/disappearing, open/closed, hollowed out/ saturated which
confers on the image its most fundamental auratic quality. It is an inchoate
rhythm of black and white, a physical sensation of time that gives to the
image-making substance the critical ambiguity that Jean Clay, speaking of
Pollock and Mondrian, so aptly named flat depth.49
Why is that ambiguity of the place rhythmic, appearing and disappearing at the same time? Because something in it passes through infiltrates,
mixes with, permeates and disintegrates any certainty about space. This
something is again the aura, which we must not understand in terms of a
third characteristic, which returns to the most archaic and physical, the
most material sense of the word aura. This meaning is that of breath, of
the air that surrounds us as a subtle, moving, absolute place, the air that
permeates us and makes us breathe. When in Onement I Newman reveals
the reserve of the support by stripping off the zip the way one might pull a
gag off someones mouth, he creates not so much a spatial form as a rush of
air. When his brush heavy with ink presses on the paper, it does not so much
draw as exhale its pigmentary matter; when he lifts it slightly off the support,
15
16
17
the brush in the case of the drawing; the interruption of this same process
in the case of the painting, where Newman left his colour test as it was,
on the adhesive strip affixed vertically to the centre of the painting that
experimental operation or supposition transforms the usual effectivity of the
matter as it is normally deposited on the canvas by the brush. In the same
way, the suspension of that operation, its critical ambiguity, transforms
the usual position of the subject facing his work in progress. We could say,
paraphrasing Jacques Lacan, that the zip in Onement I functions as a unary
trace (trait unaire) in Newmans work: in a single stroke, it has transformed
everything, has literally invented the subject of his painting.60
We can then understand that the subjective position of the painter, far
from being reducible to some affective abandon (as we too often imagine
with respect to Abstract Expressionism), is to be deduced from an effective
choice, that is, a procedural choice. Conversely, this relationship illuminates the very notion of procedural choice (as we too often imagine it with
respect to Minimalism, for example) from the angle of a subject position.
There is no procedural negotiation without a displacement, a rapture of a
subject, just as there is no rapture of a subject without the procedural and
even logical negotiation of a heuristic working rule.61 To say this, to note
this in Onement I, is again, I believe, to speak of the aura. It is to detect in
the supposition of the aura something that Newmans art teaches us even
beyond what Benjamin may have said about the aura. The most beautiful
gift that an auratic work like Newmans can make to the notion of the aura
is to modify it, to transform it, to displace it.
We know that, for Benjamin, the aura as apparition of a distance,
however close it may be was opposed to the trace, which was defined as the
apparition of a proximity.62 According to him, that opposition conditions
our attitude as spectators of human labour: the auratic images of the past are
in fact often as the example of the veronica forcefully attests objects made
in such a way that people will believe they were not made by the hand of
man.63 In them the aura imposes itself, as I said, to the degree that the imagemaking procedure remains secret, miraculous, beyond reach. With Onement
I, in contrast as with a number of twentieth-century artworks the aura
comes into being, is supposed, through the gazes proximity to a procedural
trace as simple as it is productive, as effective as it is ambiguous. In this type
of artwork, trace and aura are no longer separated; as a result, we can even
recognize the work as an unprecedented combination, which I shall call for
the occasion an auratic trace. In this case, the procedural effectivity and
the hand does not always intervene directly in the procedure, as we see in the
retrait of the central zip in Onement I produces the apparition of distance
and, so to speak, succeeds in making us touch depth. In this contact, it is our
relation to human labour that is implicated, transformed and renewed.
That may be why the twentieth-century artist succeeds in giving us the
gift of artworks that look at us, beyond any objective relation, beyond
18
2
THE SHORTNESS OF HISTORY, OR
PHOTOGRAPHY IN NUCE:
BENJAMINS ATTENUATION OF
THE NEGATIVE
DAVID S. FERRIS
20
other art: preserve the past for the present by means of the image. But, equally
compelling as this conditional opening is the sequence of comparisons it sets
up. Including the opening phrase, three comparisons are made in this sentence.
The first, hypothetical, makes history and a text equivalent to one another.
The second compares a text to a photographic plate. The third, by accepting
the terms of the first hypothetical comparison would offer knowledge of the
initial subject of this whole sequence: history. In effect, the logic enacted by these
comparisons takes the form of a syllogism that can be expressed as follows: if
history is comparable to a text and a text is comparable to a photographic plate,
then, history is comparable to the same photographic plate. Yet, throughout
this sequence it cannot be forgotten that, first, the premise is conditional, and
second, what is at stake in these comparisons is another relation, the relation
between a looking (betrachten) and a saying (sagen), between a history looked
at as a text and a history that can be spoken about because of this looking in
other words, a history that can be read. As will be seen later in passages from the
Arcades Project, it is the attainment of such a relation that is at stake in the dialectical image. But what is at stake in this relation is that history should mean, be
of value, possess worth as the verb used by Benjamin in the phrase connecting
this looking and saying indicates: gelten. What then decides that such a history
is meaningful (that is, has significance in the present since history has no other
time in which to be meaningful) is that what can be looked upon belongs to
language. Yet, if history is to attain value in this way, why is it that a visual mode,
photo-graphy, is the chosen means of recognizing this value? Does this mean
that Benjamins understanding of history is only conceivable after the advent of
photography, a history that is then a reflection of the modernity announced by
photography? Or does photography effect a change in the structure of history in
the same way that Benjamin claims it does for the work of art in his essay The
Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility, a claim that locates the
significance of art as a function of the technological?1
Only with the advent of photography does it become possible to look at what
was actually present to the past, since the moment of the photographic image is
also the moment captured in the image. No painting can make this claim; as
Benjamin argues, its means of production, so dependent on the hand, forbids
it from doing so.2 Since photography is what allows the past to be captured for
the first time in an image that also belongs to the moment of the time captured,
what then appears with photography is an image that no longer simply belongs
to the domain of art it now makes an historical claim.
Benjamin expresses such a claim, in the course of The Work of Art
in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility when he relates the work of
the Parisian photographer, Eugne Atget, to the withdrawal of the auratic
presence of the human subject in early photography:
But where the human being withdraws from the photographic image,
there the superiority of exhibition value to cult value steps [tritt] for
21
the first time. To have given this development its local habitation is the
incomparable significance of Atget, who, around 1900, captured Paris
streets devoid of their human aspect. It has been justly said that he
recorded them like the scene of a crime. A crime scene, also, is devoid
of the human; its record occurs on account of its evidence. With Atget,
photographic records begin to be evidence in the historical process
[Proze ]. This brings out their hidden political significance [Das macht
ihre verborgene politische Bedeutung aus]. (GS 1.2: 485/SW 4: 258)3
The absence of the human subject from the street scenes recorded by Atget
becomes, for Benjamin, the sign of an incomparable but also superior significance. This significance, concentrated in the exhibition value of the image,
is named the political by the end of these sentences. Photography not only
allows the political to appear, but does so by bringing it out of concealment.
The political is therefore what resides, first of all, concealed in the photograph as image. But, by what means does this concealment occur? Is it a
natural attribute of the photographic image? Despite the attraction of such a
claim (which presumes an essential effect for photography), the example of
Atget indicates that this ability of photography to bring out the political does
not reside in the technical process of photography as if, by its nature, photography excluded the presence of a human subject. Rather, Benjamin derives
the political aspect of these photographs by means of comparison: they are
like the record of a crime scene, a record from which the human subject is
excluded in favour of the objects that remain in such a scene. The political
significance of Atgets photographs is understood strictly in accordance to
this analogy. In fact, it is the analogy which brings out this significance
rather than some aspect of photography as a medium. Atgets photographs
thus achieve the importance Benjamin attaches to them because of a choice
to capture street scenes of Paris undisguised by any human presence.4 As a
result, Atgets photographic images become the record of a street from which
the organizing actions of a human subject have been excluded rather than the
record of photographys technical ability. This demonstration of exhibition
value is not an attribute of the medium but a framing within the medium.
This is why Benjamin will state that Atget has only given this exhibitional
aspect of photography what he calls a local habitation, an abode or a place
(seine Sttte). Yet, despite this limitation, the example reveals the crucial place
the technical will hold as a means of understanding history. The question will
be to account for the technical in terms of the historical since it is through the
recognition of the former in the latter that the political significance of history
is to be recognized (or, to recall a verb Benjamin uses in the passage just cited
as well as elsewhere in the Reproducibility essay, it is a question of how the
technical steps into the place of history).5
In an entry to Convolute Y of the Arcades Project, Benjamin locates
this technical aspect in relation to history in the following manner: The
22
23
claims its significance through a historical relation to the present). The image
is the handle of history, but as Benjamins description of its appearance in
exhibition value points to, its role as handle only appears at the point of an
absolute emphasis. It is at this point that exhibition value is recognized not
for exhibiting something such as a building or street in a photograph but
rather for exhibiting exhibitionality in general. What is exhibited in this case
is the means of exhibition: photography, exhibition as technique.
Benjamin emphatically bases his understanding of the change in the
function of art on such a means. This can be read in the Reproducibility
essay when he asserts the difference that the camera makes: For the first
time, photography freed the hand from the most important artistic tasks
in the process of pictorial [bildlicher] reproduction, tasks that now devolved
solely upon the eye looking into a lens [welcher nunmehr dem ins Objektiv
blickenden Auge allein zufielen] (GS 1.2: 47475/SW 4: 253). This freeing
of the hand, enabled by photography, has all the character of an event (for
the first time and a few a pages later this becomes the first time in world
history [GS 1.2: 481/SW 4: 256]). But, what does not change is that art
is functional even when it displays itself as technical. A technical art is,
in this respect, no different from an auratic art: they are both claimed by
function.
This shared aspect can be readily seen if the sentence in which Benjamin
speaks of the new function of art is cited in full. This sentence describes this
functionality as occurring both in the absolute emphasis on exhibition value
and in the absolute emphasis on its cult value:
Just as the work of art in prehistoric times, through the absolute emphasis
that rested on its cult value, first became an instrument of magic which
was only later recognized as a work of art, so today, through the absolute
emphasis that rests on its exhibition value, the work of art becomes a form
[Gebilde] with entirely [ganz] new functions. (GS 1.2: 484/SW 4: 257)
Only in its existence as means is the work of art both an instrument of
magic through cult value and a form with entirely new functions. In each
case, the work of art is a form whose significance derives from a value that
can be placed on that form. Consequently, the work of art is only known
through the value that steps into its place. Yet, in asserting such an understanding, this sentence also poses a question about the existence of a work
of art that is not simply the embodiment of a value. The question is, if
value is the handle by which the work of art may be picked up, what is in
effect being picked up? What remains of the work of art when there is no
such handle? According to what Benjamin says in this sentence, what is
picked up is what has been subject to the forces that produce an image das
Gebilde. But, here, not only is the work of art recognized in terms of what
produces an image, the means of recognizing it also proceeds by way of the
24
image to the extent that photography becomes both the means of producing
the exhibitional image (that is, the work of art) and the image through
which the production of such a value is recognized.8 The camera doubles
as a technological instrument whose formation (also Gebilde) permits the
recognition of the technological. Since, as Benjamin claims, the appearance
of absolute exhibition value in an art whose mode of production is technological is not simply an event in a series of events but the moment in which
a confrontation between history and art takes place, then such recognition
is understood as also being brought on by history that is, history has a
role in the appearance of the technological. How history fulfils this role is
directly related to its structuring which, as Benjamin makes clear in the
course of the Reproducibility essay, is a movement between two poles: cult
and exhibition. Despite the fact that Benjamin grants absolute emphasis to
these poles at different times, the latter pole is not excluded from the former
when under the sway of auratic, cult value.9 This is why Benjamin can speak
of exhibition value as if it had always been there, hidden within the art of
aura and cult value, waiting for the mode of existence most adequate to its
meaning. In recognizing photography as that mode, Benjamin does not just
recognize an example of exhibition value, but also recognizes a history in
which technology and reproducibility are inevitable for art. Photography
thus becomes the means to develop, in the technical, photographic sense
of the word, the history in which its confrontation with the past of art is
already set by history.
In the second sentence of the fragment, The Dialectical Image (discussed
at the beginning of this chapter), Benjamin grants photography just such
a role. And again he refers to Andr Monglonds comparison between
photography and a text to do so. This time, however, Monglond is not
paraphrased as in the first sentence but cited in Benjamins own translation:
Only the future has at its disposal developers strong enough to allow the
image to come to light in all its details (GS 1.3: 1238/SW 4: 405). Much of
Benjamins understanding of history, as it is expressed in the posthumous
text, On the Concept of History, is condensed here. Above all the sense that
what is properly historical only reveals itself to a future generation capable
of recognizing it, that is, a generation possessing developers strong enough
to fix an image never seen before and never to be seen again, as Benjamin
will later insist.10 Within the Reproducibility essay, photography, as the
future of art, fulfils this role. Photography does this not merely because it
brings out exhibition value, but also because at the same time it brings out
the auratic. Only from the perspective of the exhibitional is it possible to
recognize the auratic otherwise art is essentially and unchangeably auratic
even to the point of being incapable of any other determination. In this case,
the auratic could not be a value attached to the work of art. By the same
logic, if it were not something attached, exhibitionality would have no mode
of existence. More importantly, nor would the technological be an essential
25
pole of art. What is therefore at stake for art in Benjamin is not just a history
that allows the confrontation of these two poles to be recognized as history,
but the recognition of this history through technology. Technology is both
part of this history and the means by which this history and its part in this
history is recognized.
The sentence Benjamin cites from Monglond reflects the crucial role
of the image in securing this recognition. However, this emphasis on the
image in Benjamins translation is not exactly what Monglond says. As
Benjamin knew, since he cites the passage in French in Convolute N of
the Arcades Project, Monglond writes: Seul lavenir possde des rvlateurs
assez actifs pour fouiller parfaitement de tels clichs (N15a, 1) [Only the
future possesses developers active enough to search out perfectly such
negatives]. Benjamin translates this sentence as follows: Nur die Zukunft
hat Entwickler zur Verfgung, die stark genug sind, um das Bild mit allen
Details zum Vorschein kommen zu lassen (GS 1.3: 1238) [Only the future
has developers at its disposal that are strong enough to allow the image to
come to appearance in all its details]. Where Monglond uses the French
word for a negative, clich, Benjamin substitutes image, Bild. From one
perspective, there would be no difference here. After all, a negative is an
image even if it is a reversal of how the world is seen. Yet, Benjamins substitution does pose the question of why it occurs at all and of what effect this
change has on the relation between photography and his understanding of
history, a relation so resolutely focused on the image.
Before discussing this substitution of Bild for clich, two other changes of
emphasis in Benjamins translation should be noted: where Monglond says
perfectly (parfaitement), Benjamin writes in all its details (mit allen Details);
where Monglond describes the activities of these developers as searching out
(fouiller), Benjamin says that such developers allow the unperceived image
to come to light, that is, to come to appearance or sight (das Bild mit allen
Details zum Vorschein kommen lassen). Within the example of photography,
what these changes clarify is an emphasis on the image produced, even
to the point of subsuming the negative into that image. For Benjamin,
the negative is already an image waiting for all its details to be brought to
light. As a result, the negative is understood from the perspective of what it
produces to use a Marxist-inflected phrase from the introduction to the
Reproducibility essay, it becomes its own prognostic requirement (GS 1.2:
473/SW 4: 252). The difference between negative and print then becomes
a merely technical aspect of an image that has subsumed the process
of its production into itself as technology is recognized less as a means of
producing an image (Baudelaires servant) than a determination of the
image. In this respect, photography is a mode of appearance of the image,
a mode that, quite literally, places the image in its appearance before us: der
Vorschein. As a result, in photography, the image is seen as coming into its
own as image. This result, perhaps only distantly hinted at when Monglond
26
27
of that project while attributing its cause to time.14 Benjamin writes: What
for others are deviations are, for me, the data which determine my course.
On the differentials of time (which, for others, disturb the main lines of
inquiry), I base my reckoning (N1, 2). In the language Benjamin uses here,
the difference time makes would disturb the hope of returning through the
image to the moment captured in the negative. Yet, as the sentence preceding
the one just cited indicates, the difference registered by this disturbance does
not arise independently of the attempt to achieve such a return. Benjamin
writes: Comparison of other peoples attempts to the undertaking of a sea
voyage in which the ships are drawn off course by the magnetic North Pole.
Discover this North Pole (N1, 2). To discover this North Pole Benjamins
emphasis is, according to his example, to discover the source of deviation,
the source of what makes any intention of arriving at the North Pole go
astray. But, it is only in such an intention that this deviation is exhibited for
Benjamin in the same way that what is developed from the photographic
image utilizes the same process and produces the same image as any other
time, yet what appears in this image is no longer understood as the image
present to the lens in the time of its capture. Although, in the fragment
on the dialectical image, Benjamin attributes this difference to the future
existence of a developer strong enough to bring out the image in all its details
and although it is the privilege of the future (and therefore the passage of
time) to possess such a developer, time is not such a developer. Time does not
produce the image that becomes available to the future. However, time as a
differential is what makes production of this image possible for this future,
since such a time is marked by the occurrence of two events a condition
that is equally true for photography since every negative and every print is
conceived, technically speaking, on the basis of time, the defined time of its
exposure, the opening and closing of the shutter.
In an entry to Convolute Y of the Arcades Project, Benjamin recounts a
transformation of visual forms that explicitly points to time as a technical
condition to which photography owes its significance:
The entrance of the temporal factor into the panoramas is brought
about through the succession of times of day (with the well-known
lighting tricks). In this way, the panorama transcends painting and
anticipates photography. Owing to its technical condition [technischen
Beschaffenheit], the photograph, in contrast to the painting, can and must
be coordinated [zugeordnet] with a well-defined and continuous segment
of time (exposure time). In this chronological defineability [chronologischen Przisierbarkeit], the political significance of the photograph is
already contained in nuce. (Y10, 2)
The political significance referred to here is also claimed by Benjamin on
behalf of Atgets photographs of Paris streets but for a different reason. In
28
the case of Atget, it was their status as evidence their exclusion of human
presence that allowed their hidden political significance and therefore
their relation to the historical process to be brought out. Here, it is not
a question of what is or is not in the photograph. Rather, the emphasis
falls upon the chronological definability that arises from the technological condition of any photograph: the fact that a photograph can only
exist because of a defined time. By claiming that the significance of this
defined time is political, Benjamin is also claiming that the technological
already contains the possibility of this significance in nuce. Consequently,
history in Benjamin becomes the exhibition of this hidden significance in
technology in effect, developing technology as the example of what it
already is. For history to develop the political significance of technology is
then for history to develop the means by which it also attains significance. If
history does not attain this, time, as Benjamin describes it in Thesis XVII of
On the Concept of History will remain a precious but tasteless seed in its
interior (GS 1.2: 703/SW 4: 396). Precious because, without it, no history as
such is conceivable; tasteless because time, in its chronological definability,
that is, in its technological definition, is not the same as history a history
whose seed offers only its shell, that remains, literally, in a nutshell rather
than yielding its fruit, the nut. How, then, does the technological exhibit
what Benjamin refers to as the nourishing fruit of what is historically understood (GS 1.2: 703/SW 4: 396)?
As already seen in the second entry to Convolute N of the Arcades Project,
to exhibit historical significance is, for Benjamin, to exhibit a relation to
the past that is also a deviation from that past in the sense that the past
occurs in the form of an image not yet developed in all its details. For
this significance to appear, an account of such images in terms of their
exhibitionability is necessary. While photography offers an account of such
exhibitionability for the first time, this account runs the risk of remaining,
as Benjamin notes with respect to Atgets photographs of Paris streets, a local
habitation. As such, it does not reside within the means of photography, it
is not, as already pointed out above, a property of its technology. By what
means, then, does technology produce historical understanding, by what
means does it step into the place of this understanding?
In the Reproducibility essay, technology takes such a step when it appears
with an absolute emphasis on exhibition value. This emphasis, Benjamin
claims, first emerges within photography. As Benjamin describes it, the
moment this first emergence depends upon is a moment that occurs within
the photographic process, namely, the moment when what is captured in the
image and the image are defined by the same duration of time: their chronological definability. This definition takes the form of the negative. Although
Benjamin, unlike Monglond, does not retain the negative when he makes
the analogy between photography and history in the fragment entitled
The Dialectical Image (preferring instead to treat the negative as ein Bild,
29
granting it the same status as the printed image that can be made from it),
the negative is accentuated when the defining property of exhibitionability
is given in the Reproducibility essay. Benjamin defines this ability when he
states that from the photographic plate, for example, a multiplicity of prints
is possible [ist eine Vielheit von Abzgen mglich]; the question of an authentic
print has no sense (GS 1.2: 4812/SW 4: 256). This definition privileges
what is produced from the negative, since it is the print that possesses the
ability to exhibit what is present in the negative not with respect to what
is depicted in the negative (that is again merely a local habitation, not a
property of technology), but with respect to its purpose: to produce reproductions that have no priority in relation to one another and therefore no claim
to authenticity since each is as authentic as the other. Here, the prints allow
a negative to come to light, but again it is a negative whose property may
only be recognized through its development into those prints. Monglonds
text, hidden behind Benjamins translation, reminds us that photography, in
the stage that Benjamin refers to it as a medium of reproducibility, is only
such a medium because of the clich or negative that permits it to possess
exhibition value. In other words, multiplicity is the effect of a difference
signalled by the image in its negation. The absolute emphasis on exhibition
value of photography, the means by which technology takes its first historical
step, overwrites this difference. By turning from this difference, Benjamin
brings to light in all its details the invariability of the image produced from
the negative. This emphasis on the absolute exhibition value of the photographic image is by no means an emphasis on the significance of an image,
but rather an emphasis on the technological existence of such an image. Such
an emphasis cannot yield a history other than the repetition of this process.
But what is important to remember, and the Reproducibility essay does this
most clearly, is that the absolute emphasis on exhibition value is what establishes the two poles and therefore the possibility of recognizing deviation
within the auratic (the recognition that the auratic is already in a certain
respect exhibitional). However, once established, this exhibitional pole, in
order to become historical truth, rather than truth, is set against itself. To be
historical, it must be the place in which a deviation steps and steps in the
name of history as something hidden.
If the presentation of photography as the image of history is maintained
as Benjamin describes it in the fragment, The Dialectical Image, then the
image produced from the negative can bring out what could not have been
seen, but remains hidden in the historical moment in which the image was
captured in its negative form. In both the earlier essay on photography (A
Short History of Photography) and the later essay, The Work of Art in the
Age of its Technical Reproducibility, Benjamin explains the possibility of
such an other understanding in the past by reference to what he terms the
optical unconscious. In 1931, Benjamin describes the appearance of such
an effect as follows:
30
It is another nature which speaks to the camera rather than to the eye:
other above all in the sense that in the place of a space interwoven
with human consciousness steps a space interwoven with the human
unconscious [an die Stelle eines vom Menschen mit Bewutsein durchwirkten Raums ein unbewut durchwirkter tritt]. For example, it is readily
accepted that one can give an account, if only in general terms, of the
act of walking; for certain, one knows nothing more about its disposition in the fraction of a second of stepping out [von ihrer Haltung
im Sekundenbruchteil des Ausschreitens]. Photography, with its devices
of slow motion and enlargement, opens it up. One comes to know this
optical unconscious first through photography, just as one comes to know
the instinctual unconsciousness through psychoanalysis. (Photography
GS 2.1: 371/SW 4: 51012)15
To uncover what is hidden is again a matter of stepping into the place of
something else. Here, a space interwoven with the unconscious takes the
place of a space interwoven with consciousness. To know this step, and,
above all, to know this step for the first time, is the achievement of photographys technical ability. Thus photography, and its instrument, the camera,
become the means of knowing that this technical means of reproduction has
stepped into the place of non-technical or manual reproduction.
This step (by which the significance of photography is grasped and its
significance is that it has made this step) is, in effect, only knowable through
photography. Since what takes place in this step can only be revealed by
the camera, photography becomes the example of the means by which it is
known as a technology. Only by stepping into the place of the auratic, the
space of conscious, meditative understanding, does the technical become
known in its technicality. But, the step by which it achieves this knowledge
is only recognizable because it has already stepped into the place of the
auratic.16 Already being there is a fundamental principle of Benjamins
understanding of history. But, equally important is the necessity that
what is there becomes recognizable in its hiddenness like the absence
of people in Atgets photographs of Paris streets. It is the significance of
this hiddenness that remains hidden until the future. Photography in the
Reproducibility essay is an example of such a history as Benjamins references to the existence of exhibitionability prior to its appearance indicate.
The advent of photography, then, represents the moment when technology
is seen to exhibit a tendency already present but undeveloped in auratic art.
This is why, within the terms of Benjamins history of the work of art, there
could never have been a debate about whether or not photography is an art
unless art had already recognized this tendency. Without this tendency,
photography would simply have had no relation to art and art could not
have, as Benjamin claims, sensed the approaching crisis (GS 1.2: 475/SW
4: 256). The sense of history expressed here is strongly Marxist to the extent
31
32
33
aside since it would also reinforce this temporal condition if the German
sense of Nu is also heard.
The temporal factor that coordinates the photograph and the technical
condition of its creation (Y10, 2) can now be discerned in the appearance
of the image through which Benjamin founds his understanding of history.
It is this condition that gives recognizability to such an image, that allows
it to move from what is merely a looking on (the looking into the lens
of the Reproducibility essay) to a look whose duration, however short,
is given significance by this condition (through its recognizability and
readability, its coming to light zum Vorschein kommen). That this coming
to light takes the form (Gebilde) of the technical condition of exhibitionability (through which the work of art takes on entirely new functions)
in the Reproducibility essay reveals the extent to which what is at stake
in Benjamins understanding is the technical condition through which his
historical materialism is reproduced: history as the reproduction of itself
as image. While the condition of this history can be coordinated with the
reproducibility of the work of art after aura (and Benjamins allusion to the
political significance of Atgets photographs of Paris streets already points to
this relation), this coordination also takes the form of an inversion. Where
the historical image, the dialectical image occurs, it announces itself in a
flash of light just as the shutter of the camera announces the arrival of an
image to the photographic plate or negative on which it is recorded inversely:
darkness as light, light as darkness. But besides this coordination by
comparison (which can only transform photography into a phenomenology
of history), there is another inversion, one in which photography, or rather,
its formation functions as the clich of history.
This inversion, already indicated in the shift from blickende Auge to
Augenblick, is given a local habitation in the lightning flash whose significance is not its blinding effect but its minimal temporal duration. Only in
such a duration does history and the dialectical image occur for Benjamin
but, in this case, what happens in this duration of the lightning is not the
reception of light, as in photography and the camera, but its emission.
Reception only occurs when, like the photographic plate, the historical
subject receives this flash by recognizing and reading what is received as
an image. Here again, the place of the clich, the historical subject, would
give way to the Bild as the image becomes the only point of reference.
Here, it gives way in the name of a history whose recognizability arises
in its deviation from those forms of history Benjamin would resist if not
overcome, namely, historicism, universal history, progress, a tradition
subject to conformism (the geographical poles rather than the magnetic pole
of Benjamins historical project).23 But, the condition of this deviation is the
placement of the image in its inverted form in its other pole. (In the terms
of the Reproducibility essay, the relation of cult value to exhibition value
is the inversion of its relation in photography). The dialectical image is in
34
this sense strictly dialectical, it is the inverse of the history out of which it
appears but at the same time is already within that history.
In the passage previously cited from Convolute Y (10, 2) where
Benjamin traces the political significance of the photograph to its chronological definability the recognition of such an image occurs through what
he names the differential of time, the difference that time makes. But, for
an image to appear according to this differential, it must also be filled with
time, for Benjamin the time of the now. An early fragment from the Arcades
Project addresses how this is to be understood. According to this fragment,
the dialectical image contains time in its smallest, its least form:
On the dialectical image. In it lies time . . . The time differential in which
alone the dialectical image is real . . . Real time enters the dialectical
image . . . in its smallest form [Gestalt] . . . All in all, the force of time
[Zeitmoment] in the dialectical image lets itself be discovered [lt sich . . .
ermitteln] only by means of the confrontation with another concept. This
concept is the now of recognizability. (Q, 21)
Time in its least form enters the dialectical image. A form that can only
be discovered in confrontation. A time without time for itself. A time that
needs something other than itself if it is to be itself rather than a timeless
history to which it cannot belong. In its least form this time is the condition
of the dialectical image. But in this case, what is referred to as time cannot
be time at all, at least not in the sense that confuses history with time. Yet,
in order to intervene, this time is given an image. As an image it is given
definition and, as Benjamin states, confrontation is the means by which
this definition arises when the dialectical image comes up against the now
of recognizability. This now is also the moment, the Augenblick in which
the looking of the eye is figured as a look.24 The inversion that relates the
looking eye to the Augenblick is now revealed as the moment of figuration
since, in this moment, seeing becomes what can only be said (in the sense
that the instant is always over in order to be an instant and therefore cannot
be seen but only spoken of).25 Yet, when Benjamin describes this movement,
it is not a particular figuration or a particular inversion that is at work but
figuration itself. In Benjamins own words, it is the image as an image that
produces this arrest, the image in its figurality:
The image is that in which what-has-been [das Gewesene] steps together
[zusammentritt] in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other
words: the image is dialectics at a standstill . . . the relation of what-hasbeen to the now is dialectical: not temporal in nature but figural [bildlich].
Only dialectical images are genuinely historical that is, not archaic
images. (N3, 1)
35
36
37
the place in which its interruptive force may again take place. This is why, for
Benjamin, these images first come to readability only at a defined time [sie erst
in einer bestimmten Zeit zur Lesbarkeit kommen] (N3, 1). The historical index
of this coming to readability is the now of recognizability the defined time
in which they can be read. But if what is read is their truth, then, what can
only be read is that they will never be seen again. This is the truth that is the
death of intentional history: history as progress, universal history, and so on.
This, in the end, is the content of the truth exhibited in the dialectical image:
never to be seen again. In this aspect, every image so produced has the same
effect history in the age of its reproducibility. There is no authentic image
of time since no image, as photography so clearly illustrates, takes place in
time, but only because of a time that recedes as the condition of its recognition. Within this understanding of time, every image is thus the record of
this recession, that is, every image is the recession in which history takes on a
form. In this, they do not vary and this is also why the interest of Benjamins
concept of history does not, in the end, lie in his claims on behalf of historical
materialism. This concept treats the temporal condition of history, a condition
that assures the reproducibility of history in the image. It is not, in this case,
an example of history but the example of time as the unvarying clich from
which the image is developed. Its force is this exemplariness, which is to say
its citability an aspect reinforced by the presentation of the Arcades Project
as well as the theses on history, both are pre-eminently citable as well as preeminently readable as citations.
In this citability, Benjamin remains the most telling example of a history
understood as example, a history that can and would only be shown
(method of this project . . . nothing to say . . . only to show?). This understanding, unlike Kafkas Messiah, does not come later than it should.32
(But then, who is to say that the lateness of Kafkas Messiah would not
allow the Messiah to arrive on time, unnoticed? An arrival that would not
matter.) This understanding of history has appointed its time now as
if it were a time appointed for it (as if time could ever be late or even on
time). But, to defer this moment to the future is to ensure that history, in
its least form, will show itself on time if not in time. As such, it will show in
the moment of its appointment, the moment of its only possible recognition
as history. Only then does it arrive as das bildliche Bild. Only then does it
arrive in the shortness of a history that has no time to call its own other
than the chronological definability of its event. But to make the example of
times not-coming matter, to make the time that has no time short enough
to be recognized as history, is this not still the task of technology? Even in
the time of an Augenblick, when the looking of the eye is splintered into the
look of messianic time? And is such technology not the reproducible image
of history reproduced as the end of modernity? And is this not in the guise
of something different from what was previously signified, and so on, ad
infinitum, until the entire past is brought into the present? Im Nu-ce?
3
NOW: WALTER BENJAMIN ON
HISTORICAL TIME
WERNER HAMACHER*
39
40
arouse envy in us only in the air we have breathed, among people we could
have talked to, women who could have given themselves to us (GS 1.2:
693/SW 4: 389). The possible stored in un-reality is not an abstract or ideal
possible in general and for all times but a possible always for a particular
future, that is, for precisely the one singular future that recognizes itself in
it as missed. It is we who could have talked to people but didnt; it is we
who did not seize an opportunity and now have to enviously admit that
we have missed a possibility to speak that only we could have taken, for it
was our possibility, which already now is no more. It is we, again and again,
who leave language in its possibility unused, although it was a possibility
of our happiness, of ourselves, which was therefore an absolutely singular,
irreplaceable and unrepeatable possibility. And it is only us for and in whom
this missed possibility lives on as missed and demands fulfilment in every
moment.
If possibilities are only ever possibilities for someone, then they are intentions. We have been meant by our lifes possibilities, be they conscious or
unconscious, seized or missed. Possibilities are not abstractly categorical,
relating to objects, conditions and actions in general, but are always possibilities only for those who could seize them, and belong to the existential
structure of their existence. Therefore, Thesis II remarks: the image of
happiness that we cherish is thoroughly coloured by the time to which
the course of our own existence has assigned us (GS 1.2: 693/SW 4: 389).
Benjamin is only drawing the conclusion from the intentional structure of
possibilities and of the temporal space they open up, when he continues:
The past carries with it a hidden index by which it is referred to
redemption. Doesnt a breath of the air that pervaded earlier days caress
us as well? In the voices we hear, isnt there an echo of now silent ones?
Dont the women we court have sisters they no longer recognize? If so,
then there is a secret agreement between past generations and the present
one. Then our coming was expected on earth. Then, like every generation
that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak messianic power, a
power on which the past has a claim. (GS 1.2: 693/SW 4: 390)
Redemption, as Benjamin here talks about it, is meant most prosaically:
a redeeming (Einslsung) of possibilities, which are opened with every life
and are missed in every life. If the concept of redemption points towards a
theology and it does so without doubt and a fortiori in the context of the
first thesis, which mentions the little hunchback of theology then this
is not straightforwardly Judaeo-Christian theology, but rather a theology
of the missed or the distorted hunchbacked possibilities, a theology of
missed, distorted or hunchbacked time. Each possibility that was missed
in the past remains a possibility for the future, precisely because it has
not found fulfilment. For the past to have a future merely means that the
41
pasts possibilities have not yet found their fulfilment, that they continue to
have an effect as intentions and demand their realization from those who
feel addressed by them. When past things survive, then it is not lived-out
(abgelebte) facts that survive, facts that could be recorded as positive objects
of knowledge; rather what survives are the unactualized possibilities of that
which is past. There is historical time only in so far as there is an excess of
the unactualized, the unfinished, failed, thwarted, which leaps beyond its
particular Now and demands from another Now its settlement, correction
and fulfilment.
The possible is a surplus over the factual. As such, the possible is time: excess
over anything that can become a positive given; excess over that which is;
remainder that itself is not. Every possibility, and a fortiori every missed possibility, survives as the time to fulfil this possibility. Time historical time is
nothing but the capability of the possible to find its satisfaction in an actual.
As a standing-out (Ausstand ) and exposition of that actual in which a mere
possible could find its fulfilment, in which the possible as intention could
find its goal, time is the claim of the unfi nished and failed, of the broken
and thwarted for its completion and rescue in happiness. Time is always the
time of the unfinished and itself unfinished time, time that has not reached
its end. It is the time of that which is not yet and perhaps never will be. It
is therefore the dimension of the possible to claim to become actual. For
Benjamin, the addressee of this claim is not an instance that precedes this
claim it is not an already constituted subject that perceives such a claim,
united in itself and in control of itself. The claims addressee is rather fundamentally a function of this claim, thoroughly coloured by the time, and of
the possibilities that assert their demands towards this claim, not only in its
time but as its time. Therefore, our coming was expected on earth. What is
said here is that we are first of all and primarily the ones that were expected
by the missed possibilities of the past. Only qua expected have we been given
a weak messianic power (GS 1.2: 693/SW 4: 390). This messianic power
is the intentional correlate of the claim that calls upon us from the missed
possibilities of the past, not to miss them a second time but to perceive them
in every sense: cognizingly to seize and to actualize them. In this force, those
possibilities and the time in which they survive search for the telos of their
intentions. Messianic power is therefore nothing other than the implicit
hypothesis of the missed possible that there has to be an instance to correct
the miss, to do the undone, to regain the wasted and actualize the has-beenpossible. This power therefore is not one that is our own, independent of
this claim. It is not ours, something we can have at our disposal by our own
means, but it is the power which we have been endowed with by others, it
is the power of the claim itself and of the expectation that the claim is met.
This power is never messianic in the sense that we ourselves are enabled by it
to direct the hope for our own redemption towards the future or, to be more
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precise, to future generations, but only in the entirely different sense that
we have been endowed with it by former generations, even by all former
generations, as the compliance with their expectations. The messianic power
is, in short, the postulate of fulfilability and, in this sense, of redeemability
that is immanent in each missed opportunity and distinguishes it as a possibility. Regardless of whether this power of fulfilment and redemption of the
possible is ever actually proven or not; regardless also of whether there has
ever been a single case where this messianic power was indeed active in the
actualization of the possible. It is, as this power, given, and we have been
endowed with it by the simple givenness of what has been and, because it
did not reach its goal, did not stay. The possible possible happiness is
that which demands actualization actual happiness and in which the
telos of this demand remains inscribed, even if there has never been and will
never be this actualization. We independent of whether we presently
exist or not are the intentional complement destined to fulfil the postulate
of realizability of this possiblity, in so far as it is possibility. The messianic
power that we have been endowed with by all that is past is weak because
it is not an ability that springs from ourselves but it is the vanishing-point
of missed possibilities and of their demand for fulfilment. But it is a weak
power also because it has to become extinguished in each future by which
it is not perceived and actualized. Thesis V thus apodictically but consistently pronounces the finiteness of this messianic power: it is an irretrievable
image of the past which threatens to disappear in every present that does
not recognize itself as intended in that image (GS 1.2: 695/SW 4: 391). The
weak messianic power is therefore the expectation of others towards us,
the undischarged remains of possibility that are transferred from former
generations to the future ones. It is the rest of time that remains in order to
meet those demands a rest that is not as substantial existence but is given
as time and passes with it. The weak messianic power in us is time as mere
possibility of happiness.
By determining the relationship of the past to the respective present
towards us as an essentially linguistic relationship: as an agreement
between former generations and ours, as echo of now silent voices that we
lend our ear to, as the claim of the unused possibility that we could have
talked to certain people (GS 1.2: 6934/SW 4: 390), Benjamin explains
historical time, if only implicitly, as a time made out of language. History
presents itself as the afterlife of unused linguistic possibilities, which
demand their redemption by other languages and finally by language itself,
as the temporal extension of intentions on to language, as imperative claim,
which the forfeited possibilities of language raise in view of their realization,
and as an expectation that invests every single work with the weak messianic
power to transform the missed possibilities into fulfilled ones. Awaiting
(Erwartung) is to be understood as a-wording (Erwortung); languages as
the demand of a language that did not become one, for there to be one.
43
And similarly history, which for Benjamin ever since his The Task of the
Translator is bound up inextricably with language and even identical with
its history and with it language.
The theology of language and history that Benjamin outlines in Thesis II
is a theology of wilted possibilities and thus an essentially wilted, dwarfed
and hunchbacked theology. To be more precise, it is a theory that there
could only be an unfinished and therefore an anatheology of the weak possibility of theology. The formulation weak messianic power talks about the
weak, the insubstantial and thus genuinely historical possibility of historical
cognition and historical action. If theology assumes the necessity, constancy
and certainty of a God and historiography assumes that there already has
been history and there will be history in the future, then both of them
assume essentially unhistorical concepts of deity and history. Historicisms
concept of history is thus the simple counterpart to the concept of God of
substantialist theology. As the latter relies on the constancy of God, so does
the former on the positivity of historical facts. The historicity of such facts,
however, does not have its origin in their steadiness (Stndigkeit), much less
their standing on their own, their autonomy (Selbstndigkeit). Historical is
that which only can be recognized as historical from its contingent possibility to yet have been different and to yet become different, and thus from
its after-history. Historical is only ever that which it is not yet the always
other, open possibility. Only that can become historical that is not yet
historical. This however also means: as it is, namely as a possibility given
and subject to actualization, in principle, this possibility is equally exposed
to the danger of being missed. In so far as it is mere possibility, in so far as it
is not grounded in a substantial actuality, historicity is always also the possibility of becoming impossible and expiring. Facts would last if they existed
as facts outside any intentional relation; only possibilities can be missed;
historical facts, which constitute themselves as having-been only within the
space of their possibilities, ensue solely from the dimension of their capacity
to be missed. They are insubstantial, singular, finite. Even if facts have
the structure of referring and furthermore of intention and tendency (and
Benjamin suggests that they do have this very structure: The past carries
with it a hidden index by which it is referred to redemption), they are still
constitutively designed for their expiration: expiring either in the redemption,
fulfilment and resolution of their intention or expiring in the miss of this
redemption. The historical is historical only because it manifests itself in
the span between these two possibilities of intention, these two possibilities
of possibility: that the possibility expires in its fulfilment, or that it passes
away if it is not seized. Thus it follows that each possibility is a possibility of
its actualization only if it is at the same time the possibility of the missing
of this possibility. Only those possibilities are historical possibilities that can
always also not be seized. They are fleeting possibilities, not possibilities that
as a substantial stock in the archive of potentialities could be grasped at any
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time. Because there is no reservoir fixed for all time, in which the treasures
of possibility for ever accumulate, but only a reservoir whose stock dissolves
with every missed chance, history is no progression where given possibilities,
one by one, one out of the other, are actualized, so that in the end all possibilities will have been exhausted and all possible actualities established.
Where there is history, there is no continuum between the possible and the
actual. Any continuum between them would de-potentialize the possible
and turn it into an in principle calculable necessity. Only where its possibility is contingent possibility namely one that can be another possibility,
the possibility of something other or even no possibility at all only there is
the possible historical. As a fleeting, non-archivable, contingent possibility,
as one that is just now given and has already gone and thus as always
singular, as the solitarily leaping out of every pre-stabilized formation it
concerns the one who would have to lapse into lethargy in the face of the
automatism of the actualities unfolding homogeneously out of possibilities,
and demands of him his grasping intervention: a grasping without which
there would be no history, but a grasping which would not exist without
the corresponding possibility that it fails to appear or is unsuccessful. Only
because Benjamin thinks of history from the point of view of its possibilities,
from the point of view of its possibility of being other or of not being, can
he view history not as a mechanical series of events but as act. Only because
he does not view historical possibilities as constant and freely available
resources for series of realization does he have to view each historical act as
the always singular answer to an always singular possibility. Only because
his answer can be missed can it also succeed.
History, as it is thought by Benjamin, is never the history of facts, incidents
and developments without initially being the history of their possibilities;
and never the history of these possibilities, without being the history of
their continued unfulfilment. The redemption to which the past in its
hidden index is referred is redemption only because it can be missed. When
Benjamin talks about a weak messianic power and highlights the word
weak by use of italics (one of the few such words in his Theses) he does not
do so because there would be for him also a strong messianic power or even
one that would overcome with certainty any conceivable opposition, and not
because a power in general would under certain circumstances be reduced
to a weaker one. Weak denotes not so much the quantum of this power in
relation to a larger one be it a demanded one, or even an ideal one but
rather the susceptibility, on principle, to its failure.
There is a messianic power only where it can fail: anything that may be
called messianic power is therefore a weak one. To imagine that it could
be strengthened through vigour or that it could be sufficient to possess it
is equally nonsensical. It is enough to perceive and activate it nothing
else is possible to turn it into a historical force and into the only genuine
45
force of history; but nothing else is necessary either.1 If that which has
been and each present that can become past carries with it a hidden index
through which it is referred to a weak messianic power that would realize
its possibilities of happiness, then all historical existence has an irreducible
and irreducibly weak messianic structure. When Benjamin first touches
upon the referentiality to redemption in historical existence in Thesis II,
the reason he does not talk about the Messiah as a historically determined
religious figure is that each singular historical moment, of whatever epoch
or religious observance, has to be structured with reference to the messianic
imperative if it is to fall into the domain of historical existence at all. If
the index of a messianic power, which we have been endowed with like
every generation that preceded us, marks every historical possibility, then
messianic referentiality is the structure of the possible and of the historical
time in which it lives on. Benjamin attributes weaknesses to this structural
messianicity not in order to note an accidental defect, which, under ideal
circumstances, could be remedied, but in order to emphasize a structural
element of this messianicity, through which it, in turn, is referred to its
possible failure. The possibility of happiness is only indicated together with
the corresponding possibility of its failure. The messianic index is crossed
a priori by its reference to a possible failure and thus a possible impossibility. There is, in short, no referring (Verweisung) to a messianic power
that should not at the same time indicate, as Paul Celan used the word, its
orphaning (Verwaisung); no index that would not have to reach the borders
of its indexicality and become an ex-index; no messianicity that does not
emerge from its non-messianicity. The weakness of the messianic power
lies in its structural finitude. The Messiah, who is supposed to rescue the
missed possibilities of history into actual happiness, can himself be missed.
Any Messiah and each moment in which he should be able to enter, each
Now is essentially finite. That is to say, he can only be Messiah because
there is a possibility of his not being Messiah.
In early drafts of his Arcades Project, which are dated to 1927, Benjamin
took up the Kantian metaphor of the Copernican turn and considered it
in relation to the historical perception: it was thought that a fixed point
had been found in what has been, and one saw the present engaged in
tentatively approaching the forces of cognition to this solid ground (ho, 2).
This characterizes the historicist conception of history. The turn Benjamin
wants to bring about analogous to Kants intended to indicate the conditions of the synthesis under which that which until now appeared as a fixed
point can only be brought to a dialectical fixation (ho, 2). This fixing
in the synthesis between what-has-been and the present that Benjamin
called dialectic does not assume a definite past in that respect it follows
the Kantian turn; nor however, does it assume a fixed instrumentation of
the cognitive apparatus that could pre-form its results in that respect it
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form that historical cognition could entrust itself to, and no reliable course
on which history heads for its goal. History has to be won over and again,
at each singular moment, ever again in a singular way. Neither history nor
happiness, which is striven for in the former, is reliable; only the existence
of unhappiness is reliable. World-historical unhappiness manifests itself as a
continuum of catastrophes. Happiness, however, is never given as a state, it
is never embedded in a continuing course of events, but is, at best, offered
as a possibility and assigned as the goal of longing, of desire and of demand.
There is no form of happiness. The domain of forms belongs to the realm
of domination, where permanence of forms can only be secured through
the suppression of other possibilities that is, possibilities of happiness
that rebel against such domination. The danger that threatens historical
cognition as well as the politics of happiness therefore originates in the last
instance from the forms that are to guarantee the rule of a certain reality
over an infinity of possibilities of happiness. If, however, this threat does
not only originate from the interest of the current ruling class, but rather
from the most enduring instrument of its domination (i.e., from a particular
form), then in the realm of history and historical time this danger originates from the time-form of constancy and persistence. This form of time
is the continuum. In this form, one Now-point follows another, uniformly,
in linear succession. The historical form corresponding to this continuum
of points of time is progress, the equally uniform, steady and inexorable
striving towards a pre-given ideal of political life. At the base of the social
and political conformism that threatens historical cognition, and thus
history itself, lies the transcendental conformism of the form of perception
of time, through which time is represented as the homogeneous continuum
of punctual events. The first and decisive step towards historical cognition
that does not join forces with the suppression of possibilities of happiness
has to be a step out of the transcendental conformism of the continuum
of time and history. Historians and politicians take a stand for the historically possible and for happiness only if they do not see history as a linear
and homogeneous process whose form always remains the same and whose
contents, assimilated to the persistent form, are indifferent. Together with
the continuum the conformity of each Now with every other Now of the
time series has to be broken as well. The possibility of this breaking through,
however, must be grounded in the very possibility (Ermglichung) of the
continuum itself and thus in relations of discrete Nows that preceded their
homogenization.
The political critique of social conformism, the historical critique of
the automatism of progress and the philosophical critique of the time
continuum join together in the critique of the structural conformity of
all forms of experience. All three critiques have to retrace, by means of
political intervention, historical cognition and philosophical analysis, the
conformisms and their underlying forms to the constitutive movement,
48
and they have to push the constitutive elements of these forms to crisis, to
diremption and to the possibility of another configuration. Only in this way
can the political outrage over the ruling injustice, the historical melancholy
over the incessant sameness in progress and the philosophical dissatisfaction
with already constituted forms become productive. Benjamins critique of
progress an element of his philosophy of history that currently receives
little respect even amongst his admirers is only adequately understood if
it is grasped as a critique of time as a transcendental form of perception and
thus of the empty form of experience that progresses in it. And so he writes
in Thesis XIII:
Progress as pictured in the minds of Social Democrats was, first of all, the
progress of humankind itself (and not just advances in mens ability and
knowledge). Secondly, it was incompletable [unabschliessbar], in keeping
with the infinite perceptibility of humankind. Thirdly, it was considered
as inevitable something that automatically pursued a straight or spiral
course. Each of these predicates is controversial and open to criticism. But
when the chips are down, criticism must penetrate beyond these assumptions and focus on something that they have in common. The concept
of humankinds historical progress cannot be sundered from the concept
of its progression through a homogeneous, empty time. A critique of the
concept of such a progression must underline any criticism of the concept
of progress itself. (GS 1.2: 7001/SW 4: 39495)
The critique of conformism, a conformism that is at each moment on the
point of overpowering this critique, thus has to be founded in a critique of
the form of the homogeneous and empty time, which, as the mere form
of experience, lies at the foundation of each conformism. Any critique of
historical cognition and historical action has to be initially a critique of the
transcendental conformism of the continuum of time.
Benjamins conviction that a Copernican turn in historical perception
must be brought about emerges thus from the insight that history would
not be history if it merely proceeded in time as a stable form of perception,
rather than creating its form in the first place. It will therefore have to be
proven that time as a continuum of form can only be generated through a
discontinuous historical cognition that is not fixed in any form. According
to Benjamins ultra-Copernican turn there is time only by virtue of history:
the latter does not run its course in the former, but time is fixed in history
always in different ways, the forms of which are not given beforehand. If,
according to Benjamins formulation, that which has been (das Gewesene)
experiences its dialectic fixation in synthesis with cognition, then, together
with that which has been, the time-form in general experiences its dialectic
fixation. The time-form is owed to a synthesis and, thus, is not itself the origin
of this synthesis. The reflections collected in the theses On the Concept of
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50
the original creation of time and the reflective medium can be illustrated
with a quote from Schlegels Athenum-Fragmente and its commentary by
Benjamin. Schlegel writes: The essence of the poetic feeling perhaps lies in
the fact that one can affect oneself entirely out of oneself. And Benjamin:
That means: The point of indifference of reflection, where the latter springs
from the Nothing, is the poetic feeling (GS 1.1: 63 SW 1:150). If the point
of indifference of reflection, and with it its medium, is self-affection, then
the medial time, which Benjamin associates with Romantic messianism,
is in turn, nothing other than this: an affecting entirely out of oneself. The
Schlegelian poetics of self-affection, however, is derived, as Benjamin must
have realized, from Kants doctrine on time as the way the mind is affected
by its own activity . . . and hence by itself.2 By extending self-affection to
history, albeit first of all the history of artistic forms, Benjamin pronounces
self-affection to be the fundamental constitutive mode not merely of time,
but also of history. Before there can be a continuum, be it of time, be it
of history, it has to be produced in the self-touching of the soul. And thus
Kant himself speaks of a paradox3 in a self-touching only from which
a self emerges. With this self-affection self-affection of something passive,
self-determination of something undetermined historical time rises as the
medium of all elements that enter into a relation in it. With historical time,
the historical subject appears. This subject, which is nothing other than
time, is in its deepest layer, as the happening of becoming definite through
itself, mere medium.
Benjamin never dissociated himself from the Kantian theory of time
constitution. The more determined, however, was his critique of the neoKantian ideology of progress of the social democracy of the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries.4 This ideology of progress is based on the
assumption that time arises not only out of a manifoldness of always
singular auto-affections of the faculty of understanding for this could
only result in an unsteady aggregate of moments but also out of selfaffections in successione as a continuous, linear and therefore also geometrically disaffected time. Such a succession can only exist if it is conditioned
by a faculty identical in its unvarying duration. In this case, however, such
a succession could not be experienced as succession and thus not as time.
Only between the contents of the continuum could differences be perceived;
differences that, in turn, would be numerical but not temporal and least of
all historical differences. To be experienced as succession, a succession of
self-affections must be a constant, directed and inevitable affection between
different and diverse self-affections. But there is nothing in the structure of
these affections (even if they are, as for Kant, merely affections of the faculty
of understanding) that can work towards constancy, strict orientation and
inevitability, there is also nothing in that structure from which a continuous
and homogeneous series could emerge from such an affection between selfaffections. Time can only ever be a homogeneous series if the sameness of
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Thinking involves not only the movement of thoughts, but their arrest
as well. Where thinking suddenly stops in a constellation saturated with
tensions, it gives that constellation a shock, by which thinking crystallizes
into a monad . . . In this structure he [the historical materialist] recognizes
the sign of a messianic arrest of happening, or (to put it differently) a
revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past. He takes cognizance of it in order to blast a specific era out of the homogeneous course
of history. (GS 1.2: 7023/SW 4: 396)
It would lead to triviality, and further to confusion, to understand this
passage such that an arrest follows a movement, for then the arrest itself
would still lie in the succession of the movement and its originally claimed
contrast would be negated. Movement and arrest, and therefore continuum
and interruption, stand in a relation other than one of opposition. Where
arrest still belongs to movement, movement has to rest in an indissoluble
substratum of persistence. Benjamins reflection is aimed at precisely that
gesture of thought through which this substratum is lifted out of the
appearance of the mere flowing. The urgency of this reflection can be
demonstrated by a simple thought: if the arrest of movement both of
thoughts and of historical events can neither intervene in this movement
from outside (since then it would not be an historical intervention) nor be a
mere element of the movement itself (since then it would not be its arrest),
then this arrest has to be based within the structure of the movement itself; it
has to be based in the structure in such a way that the movement itself essentially stands still. And vice versa: the arrest can be nothing other than the
movement, it therefore has to be the movement of the movement. Thus, the
gesture of thought as Benjamin grasps it does not bring to light a rigid image
purged of the movement of events, but it is nothing other than the movement
of events itself. He continues the train of thought of Thesis XVII:
[The historical materialist blasts] a specific life out of the era, a specific
work out of the lifework. As a result of his method, the lifework is
preserved and sublated [aufgehoben] in the work, the era in the lifework,
and the entire course of history in the era. The nourishing fruit of what
is historically understood contains time in its interior as a precious but
tasteless seed. (GS 1.2: 703/SW 4: 396)
What the arrest of the movement of work, lifework, era and course of
history brings to light is the time, that is, as the last words of the thesis
emphasize, time in its inside. By virtue of the arrest the genuinely historical
thought preserves in its objects that which makes these objects possible and
the preservation and continuation of which makes these objects contribute
themselves and these objects are not merely works, they are the course
of history itself. The essential object and the decisive yield of thinking, as
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present time, therefore no time at all that would not be the empty ideality of
a mere succession. Time is thus always the doubled, and only in its doubling
united, moment in which one time recognizes itself in another as meant
intended, indicated, demanded, claimed. Neither of its instances, neither
the instance of cognition nor the instance demanding cognition, can be
absent if there is to be time. There is time only if the time for which it, and
only it, is there seizes it.
Benjamin portrays this minimal structure of historical time in one of the
very important notes to an epistemological critique from the Convolutes of
the Arcades Project:
What distinguishes images from the essences of phenomenology is their
historical index. (Heidegger seeks in vain to rescue history for phenomenology abstractly through historicity.) . . . For the historical index of
the images not only says that they belong to a particular time; it says
above all that they attain legibility only at a particular time. And indeed
this acceding to legibility constitutes a specific critical point of the
movement in their inside. Every present is determined by those images
that are synchronistic with it: each now is the Now of a particular recognizability. In it, truth is charged to the bursting point with time. (This
point of bursting, and nothing else, is the death of the intentio, which
thus coincides with the birth of authentic historical time, the time of
truth.) It is not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what
is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has
been comes together flash-like with the Now to form a constellation. In
other words, image is dialectics at a standstill. (N3, 1)7
This very complex note that starts with one of the rare but significant references to Heidegger to be found in the Arcades Project serves to identify the
image in contrast to the phenomenological essences, even though not
Heideggers Being and Time but Benjamins own Trauerspiel book is the
likely precedent. Benjamin reproaches Heideggers notion of historicity
as being an attempt to save history abstractly and therefore, ahistorically and uncritically for phenomenology, while only such a concept of
history could be seen as historical and critical, where what-has-been carries
with it a historical index, and thus a critical one, for the present in which
it becomes recognizable. Benjamin thus also undertakes, as he suggests, to
save history for phenomenology, but, in contrast to Heidegger, concretely
and critically through the concepts of image and historical index. This
index, which Benjamin also discusses in Thesis II, marks a double time:
the time of what-has-been and the time of the Now that is directed towards
the formers cognition. This index, thus, is a twofold one: it stands in for
two times; it is critical: it marks the point at which an internal crisis divides
time into a Before and an After, into the time of the past and the time
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points. This leap (Sprung) has to be understood in the twofold sense of both
rift and leap over the rift (bersprung): the difference between Now and
Now has to preserve each instant as discrete and has to refer them strictly
to each other as the difference between precisely these discrete points. What
is at-the-same-time is only that which is not-at-the-same-time between the
recognized and the one who recognizes and within each of them and thus
that in them which as nucleus of a differential time resists its erasure.
Time namely would be erased as soon as different Now-points contracted
into a single one or were assimilated into the continuum of an always
identical line; time would also be erased as soon as the difference between
discrete Nows extinguished any relation between them. The possibility not
only of historical cognition but of historical time as well thus has to be based
on a third that is neither identity nor inability to relate, but distinction
and relation at the same time. This possibility, is, for Benjamin, based in
a leap which is not secured, held or founded, it is based in an original leap
(Ur-sprung) that separates the discrete Nows and one can say paradoxically, or, as Benjamin puts it, dialectically joins them in their separation.
This leap, and nothing else, is the Now, the nucleus of time, the irreducible
historical happening, which the historian has to bring to experience.
In the leap of time (Zeit-Sprung), in the origin of time (Zeit-Ursprung), at
least two different Nows stand together as one. The leap is Einstand of time;
in it, the crisis that separates and the difference that relates stand together as
one it is critical movement; in it movement and standstill stand together
it is what Benjamin, using Gottfried Kellers words, calls petrified
unrest (J50, 5);8 in it, finally, the dialectical movement between has-been
and present, object and cognition, stands still the leap is dialectics at a
standstill and as such, for Benjamin, image. Because the image is the
constellation in which one Now meets precisely the other one in which it
becomes recognizable, the image alone is the place of historical time, being
historical time in contrast to time as a mere flux. The image is dialectics
at a standstill. For while the relation of the present to the past is a purely
temporal, continuous one, the relation of what-has-been to the Now is
dialectical: it is not progression but image, suddenly emergent (N2a, 3). For
Benjamin, the image is the historical relation kat exochen, for it brings about
and holds on to the discontinuity of appearances, the leap within them.
It appears at that moment when nothing but the medium the middle
and the element and thus the irreducibly dia-chronical and a-chronical
between and in the phenomena is preserved. It is historical time as the crisis
in the Now which only opens space for the times and sets free all times as
nucleus of time.
Benjamins claim that every present is determined by the images that
are synchronistic with it will have to be made more precise with regard to
the critical point in their movement: this synchrony can only be situated in
the critical separation, that is, in an asynchronic difference as the common
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tears apart each point and each series of points, it is the moment of discontinuity by virtue of which there is, always for the first time, historical time at
all. Any revolution that, unlike the bourgeois revolution, did not take place
in the arena of the ruling class, would be such a leap. Not a former Now
into which a present Now leaps, but the leap itself is the revolution. Because
the Now that has been as well as the present Now are Now only by virtue
of this leap, the one that leaps ahead of both of them is the original leap
(Ur-Sprung). Only as such an original leap (Ur-Sprung) that is, original
crisis (Ur-Krisis) can it reach what Benjamin in the fragment Aus einer
kleinen Rede ber Proust, an meinem vierzigsten Gerburstag gehalten calls
original past [Urvergangenheit] (GS 2.3: 1064), that is: a past which was not
there before the remembrance of it. In this sense, the Now is the origin of
the historical. And in this sense it is messianic: the rescue of that which was
not there before the rescue.
With the notion Now of recognizability, which is fundamental for his
philosophy of history, Benjamin insists on the transcendental status of that
to which it refers. He is not concerned with the Now of cognition, but
with the Now which, ahead of every actual cognition, fixes the structural
condition of the possibility of cognition. Just as the centre of his early study
On Language as Such and on the Language of Man is not communication
but communicability, the centre of his studies on historical time is the
Now of recognizability. Thus no decision has been made on whether there
is actual historical cognition and a corresponding politics. Neither has it
been decided whether there is indeed a Now of cognition. The object of
Benjamins analyses is not this Now as it actually now is, but rather
how it has to be constituted in order to be able to be an actual Now. As
little as this says about the existence of actual historical cognitions, as much
does it say about the conditions it needs to fulfil in order to become real as
genuine historical cognition. Each actual Now is Now and actual only if it
corresponds to the constitution which has been prescribed by this structure
of possibility of the Now by Nowability (Jetztbarkeit). Historical cognition
is cognition and historical only if it fulfils the conditions put forward by
the structure of recognizability: in all other cases it is not historical, that
is, no cognition that triggers history, and not a cognition that intervenes in
history; that means it is, in fact, no cognition at all.
The historico-philsophical aperus that Benjamin noted during his work
on the Arcades Project and provisionally summarized in the theses On the
Concept of History are both diagnostic and propaedeutic and in both respects
critical. Written immediately after the HitlerStalin pact, which Benjamin,
according to his friend Soma Morgenstern, saw as the total discrediting of
the communists11 as well as of the social democratic movement, these notes
give an explanation for the powerlessness of social democratic politics with
respect to National Socialism: social democracy was powerless because it
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Messiah is only the one who can also not come and can also not be the
Messiah. The Messiah is only he who, even in his coming, might as well
not come. Only he, who in his not-coming can still come. Because only
the coming of the Messiah can give rise to time and can thus in no way
by subjected to the form of a continuous and homogeneous course of
time, he has to be the one who can come even before he has come, and
who can come after he has already come. The Messiah only comes in a
time that is distorted, however slightly, against any linear course. And
only as distorted in such a way, as an always leaped time (ersprungene Zeit),
can the messianic time come; it can only come as the distortion of time,
distortion of the conditions of experience, distortion of its very possibility.
The deepest distortion of the possibility of messianic time, however, the
distortion of the messianic ability itself, which Benjamin calls messianic
power, lies in its being exposed to the inability and thus the impossibility
of perceiving itself, acting and fulfilling itself as the possibility, ability and
power. Because messianic power is not a transhistorical substantial ability
that realizes itself in history from case to case, but an ability out of which
alone history could arise, it is a force that opens history without substantial
and without historical assurances. It is only effective under the condition
that it remains exposed to its own impotence (i.e. under the condition that
it includes even this impotence into itself. It is a weak power because it is
the power of weakness, because it is the power out of the missing of power.
This weakness is not in contrast to power, but lies in its centre. For that
power cannot be messianic that rescues only itself; messianic is only the
power that rescues even its own failing. A Messiah is only he who rescues
even the impossibility of a Messiah. He can only come in such a way that
he might also not come, and come as someone other than the Messiah. And
his coming this future expected by all pasts, that Benjamin touches upon
in his theses this coming can only be possible out of that which not only
holds back all coming but also threatens it with the possibility of being for
ever impossible. The future of the Messiah would not arise out of the wealth
of his possibilities, not even out of the single possibility that something like
history and thus world, freedom and happiness could be experienced; it
would arise from the complete loss of all possibilities of the future, out of
the impossibility of its coming, and out of that alone. This impossibility of
the coming, the impossibility of the future would be that which comes. In
this coming of something that does not come and could not come and
therefore can not come only therein would the coming be even in its most
extreme possibility: that it fails to appear; only therein future itself and thus
time would be rescued. What would be rescued is that there is no rescue.
And this would be the Now of recognizability, the critical and only thus
messianic Now of recognizability, the Now that constitutes history in the
moment of its disappearance and with its disappearance: the Now of its
Not.
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Among Kafkas notes the following sentence can be found: The Messiah
will come only when he is no longer needed, he will come one day after his
coming, he will not come on the last day, but on the very last.12 Benjamin
does not cite this passage, although it can be assumed he knew it. However
distant it may be from the manifest content of the theses on history, it
draws out the lines that become visible in Benjamins reflections. For when
Benjamin notes that the past can only find its Messiah in the moment of
danger and thus ties the messianic possibility to the possibility of its impossibility, then Kafkas remark brings this possibility into the structure of the
messianic future itself. He fi xes it in a paradoxical distortion of time. If the
Messiah only comes the day after his arrival, that is, only after his coming,
then the coming of the Messiah is his coming only in his not-coming, and
thus it is the arrival of his failing to appear. The Messiah who only comes
after his coming is not only the split and twofold Messiah that Jewish
tradition knows under the names of the suffering and dying Messiah ben
Joseph and the triumphant Messiah ben David. The one who comes after
his coming, the Messiah that comes after himself and as another than
himself, is the Messiah who is not necessary, who does not rescue and who is
no Messiah; and more precisely, he is the Messiah of the Not-Messiah. The
Messiah is Messiah of there not being a Messiah. This messianicity of the
non-messianic, this messianic without the messianic this a-messianic is
the last and final crisis of which the structure of the messianic is capable. It
is not destroyed by this crisis, but steps into it as into the centre of its force.
In it, even the Nothing of the messianic is rescued.
4
DOWN THE K. HOLE:
WALTER BENJAMINS
DESTRUCTIVE
LAND-SURVEYING OF HISTORY
STEPHANIE POLSKY
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many critics seem to approach Benjamins work with a mind toward bureaucratization, obsessively seeking out ways to reorganize and recatalogue his
Schriften. What they disregard is that maintaining a disordered strategy of
mind was quite possibly the most advantageous intellectual practice for a
man in Benjamins situation. Here is a man who finds himself dropped in the
middle of a modernist ethical scheme whose political programme institutes
a position of dire scarcity (fascism), or replete abundance (communism),
both of which are founded on a shaky platform of humanism. Benjamin,
as someone wary of those projects, is nonetheless implicated in them, as he
variously inhabits societies for which there is a termination scheme imposed
upon those who are believed to fail compliance with these human regulation
programmes.
Indeed, for our purposes in mapping Benjamins political and cultural
whereabouts, it is crucial to bear in mind that his coordinates are always
already joined in a constellation of protofascism, not beginning in 1933 but
rather in 1892, the year of his birth. He is in the unique position to claim
that he was born into a generation of men, German Jews, whose lifetimes
were determined from the start to end in cultural and historical obliteration.
From the outset Benjamin had to confront a possible failure of traces. The
Nazis determination to rub out figures like Benjamin from the historical
record failed, but others less obviously succeeded in blurring his conceptual
project so far as to obscure it in our readings of his work.
One of the greater elements of that project, which remains somewhat
obscured in current readings of Benjamin, is his interest in deploying
writing as politics. It is widely known that Benjamin was a great admirer
of Kafkas literary approach. What is less known is the degree to which he
relied upon Kafkas literary work to cast his own politics in the later years
of his work. Deleuze and Guattari (Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, A
Thousand Plateaus, On The Line) are the only critics willing to stumble upon
a political modus operandi within Kafkas writing, and therein provide great
assistance in an attempt to lay the groundwork for a topographical historiography as opposed to a biography of Benjamins life. This topographical
exercise has its beginnings in a rather conspicuous assumption, one that
Deleuze and Guattari will come to associate with Kafka, and I later with
Benjamin. Simply put, the assumption is that there is no ideology, and
indeed there never has been.3 Thus it becomes evident to all parties that
it is useless to choose political strategies, outside of your own. Even then,
for the sake of expediency, this position too must be periodically voided.
Therein there are no hard and fast demarcations of belonging, positionality,
or as K. calls it fit, but rather a geography extending outward composed of
politicized gestures. Ideology or fit would imply that these are solid configurations, when in fact they are, simply put, a matter of flows. Initially, K.
will complain to the teacher, I dont fit with the peasants, nor, I imagine,
with the Castle. The teacher will reply, There is no difference between
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the peasantry and the Castle.4 Why is this so? Because as groups they are
constantly negotiating for the same territory and in so doing rhythmically
take on the characteristics of each other. In Deleuze and Guattaris words,
they form a rhizome.5
A rhizome is not a matter of fit, but rather a concern of mutual transformation. K. soon realized after making this assertion that he would need
to rethink his approach and in so doing enter into mutual relations with
both Barnabas, a Castle functionary, and Frieda, a peasant, both of whom
have intimate contact with the Castle. There is no room for imitation in
these relationships. Nor is any identification made between his and their
position. Instead, K.s presence works to shift the ground of Barnabas and
Friedas relationship of obedience to the Castle. Ironically, in doing so K.
is becoming more and more engaged in his role as Castle functionary.
K. deterritorializes their position, at the same moment that he reterritorializes his own. Conversely, it is Barnabas and Frieda who act to block K.s
total absorption into Castle law. They function as blocks to encourage his
continued strategy of building an adjacent relationship to the Castle: a way
out that does not resemble escape so much as it reassembles the layout of the
whole territory. K. is the land-surveyor after all, and the blocks he finds on
his way to the Castle extend his capability to deterritorialize its significance
while dodging an understanding of it as a discrete signifier.
K.s task eventually reveals itself not to be to get to the Castle, but rather
to get around it. This approach is fundamentally related to Benjamins
project of a consistent realignment of our approach toward history. Real-life
figures such as Asja Lacis, Gershom Scholem, Theodor Adorno and Bertolt
Brecht play similar roles to Kafkas characters Frieda and Barnabas, in so
far as they act as pressuring forces that periodically harden or solidify a
contemporary position around Benjamin with regard to the entity of state
politics. Through a series of intense encounters with these individuals,
Benjamin is able to at once determine a political position for himself, and at
the same time extend his professional viability by occupying an ostensible
position within a particular political milieu. Indeed, he manages to operate
quite convincingly within these milieux, using the reflective extension of
what is told to him by the others. In point of fact he possesses no deeprooted understanding of leftist debates, seldom enough to back himself
up concretely within these arenas. He relies almost solely on his rhetorical
prowess to get him by. This is not to say that Benjamin operates as a political
charlatan, for at no point does he explicitly identify himself as a Bolshevik,
Zionist, Critical Theorist, or even as a Marxist. Rather it is much more the
case that through contact with the figures of Asja Lacis, Gershom Scholem,
Theodor Adorno and Bertolt Brecht respectively, he is able to extend,
for a certain period of time, his own personal capability in tackling the
subjects. That is how he manages to carve out a provisional place within all
these ideological camps. One example of this happened during his visit to
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Moscow in 1926. Here Benjamin employs Asja Lacis as his guide through
the local terrain of Marxist thinking. Within a matter of days of being there,
he has cause to remark in his diary: once again I realized just to what extent
the possibility of tackling these subjects depends on my contact with her
(MD, p. 18). This situation of seeming political dependency on Lacis does
not appear to trouble Benjamin. On the contrary, he is quite happy for these
sorts of majoritarian Politics with a capital P to flow over him, and for them
to remain a point of contingency indefinitely. This is the case so long as he
maintains loyalty to a more pressing political objective: the task of assembling an intimate minor geography of European protofascistic terrains.
This is perhaps the reason why Walter Benjamin never really made it to
Central Park.6 Indeed, when recalling his writings, we confront another
territory altogether. A territory transversed by a series of long-distance
calls, signals coming in from a Europe that has long since been levelled,
a summons that perhaps may even travel beyond the zone of Benjamins
personal finitude. There is no history of Benjamins discursive impact in
this century that does not have a past like that, an unworked-through
dialling route beginning and in some ways ending along a Berlin-based
circuit. We must take care not to undermine the significance of the disappearance of Berlin and indeed of Europe as the fundamental aporia within
the Benjaminian project. Benjamin does not wish to be emancipated from
the scene of Europes devastation, but instead wishes to come to its defence,
to argue for its continued recognition as a place beyond the realm of
fascism, to argue for its future, its worthwhile position in the world, despite
Hitlers appropriation of the place, and against the ever-encroaching forces
of Americanism on one side and Stalinism on the other. What Deleuze and
Guattari characterize as diabolical powers knocking on the door.7 If need be,
Benjamin would prefer to greet these diabolical powers on the common
ground of a European corpus, and by extension on the territory of his
singular body as he understands it to be fundamentally European.
With this attitude in mind, it should come as no surprise that the nomadic
Benjamin of the 1930s was wary of joining Adorno and Horkheimer in New
York. He took out his insurance policy with Kafka roughly 20 years before
that, and had read the fine print carefully. When Kafka, in the opening
lines of The Stoker describes the Statue of Liberty as holding aloft a sword,
rather than a torch, Benjamin meticulously takes note of it. This was not
a territorial defect on the part of Kafka: one made by a man who could
barely convince himself ever to leave Prague. Rather it reads for Benjamin
as a substantive prediction of what America was to become in the first half
of the twentieth century: a burgeoning imperial power poised to unseat the
cultural domination of Europe, whose popular stance was one of hostility
towards so-called European intellectualism (read Marxism).
Kafka is ironically positive about this throughout Amerika, convinced
that everyone has a place in the circus of American life. Perhaps this is so,
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mined and this can occur through the introduction of a new diagram or
map of the states operations which temporarily removes blockages and
allows long disused connections to function again. However, a more likely
scenario to take place from within this overcoded structure is that the trace
itself becomes intense and in so doing takes on a diagrammatic, as opposed
to grammatic, character trait. That is to say, it no longer subtends the
solidified grammar of the state but rather forms out of that grammar a map
of its utterances in such a way that it begins to assemble a radical parabasis to
the states discursive logic, loosening the foundation of its signifiers along the
way. Deleuze and Guattari illustrate how this might happen:
Accounting and bureaucracy proceed by tracings: they can begin to
burgeon nonetheless, throwing out rhizomatic stems, as in a Kafka novel.
An intensive trait starts working for itself, a hallucinatory perception,
synesthesia, perverse mutation or play of images shakes loose, challenging
the hegemony of the signifier.18
In this instance the trace might expose the rhetorical signifier of life in the
Nazi state to be something that in material terms equates itself with
death, with a death-dealing force. This is a force that goes on to exploit
the living wealth by choosing to annihilate its own servants rather than
terminate its own process. This is the moment at which the messages of
National Socialism stop resonating in a state apparatus and causes them
to interact with the war machine. The overall effect being that a line of
destruction takes just so many bodies both docile and resistant with it in a
massive march toward abolition.
In response to the appearance of this telling trait in National Socialism,
Benjamin is compelled to wage a last critical deterritorialization of literature.
He does so through his essay of 1934, which reissues a critical consideration
of Franz Kafka on the Tenth Anniversary of the Authors Death. In it he
identifies Kafka as someone uniquely able to put the writing on the wall
to document violence, and moreover protofascism, portraying them both
as a routine effect of the machinery of modernization. Kafkas job at the
Accident Insurance Company was endured for reasons having nothing to do
with a consistently stalled writing technique, but rather it was utilized as a
means to train his skills of observation and reportage. Kafkas writing raised
the tenor of bureaucracy to a political programmatics, making his own
line of flight contingent on being wedged permanently in the bureaucratic
apparatus of the office. Benjamin writes: the citizen of the modern state,
confronted by an unfathomable bureaucratic apparatus whose operations are
controlled by agencies obscure even to the executive bodies, not to mention
the people affected by them. (It is well known that one level of meaning in
the novels, especially in The Trial, is located here.) (SW 3: 325). Deleuze and
Guattari concur with Benjamin and offer further that
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not so much those who have lost the Scripture . . . but students who cannot
decipher it (CS, p. 127). Benjamin finds Scholems understanding of a
law being in force without significance objectionable based on his opinion
that, as Agamben puts it, a law that has lost its content ceases to exist and
becomes indistinguishable from life.20 Whether the pupils have lost It [their
Scripture] or whether they are unable to decipher it comes down to the
same thing, because without the key that belongs to it, the Scripture is not
Scripture but life, the life as it is lived in the village at the foot of the hill on
which the castle is built (CS, p. 135).
Giorgio Agamben credits Scholems formulation of being in force without
significance as a faultless description of the ban (the term Agamben used
to describe the relationship between bare life and the form of law), that our
age cannot master, something which is directly akin to the status of the law
in Kafkas novel.21 He gleans further from Scholems comments, that:
For life under a law that is a force without signifying resembles life in
the state of exception, in which the most innocent gesture or the smallest
forgetfulness can have the most extreme consequences. And it is exactly
this kind of life that Kafka describes, in which the law is all the more
persuasive for its total lack of content, and in which a distracted knock
on the door can mark the start of uncontrollable trials . . . in Kafkas
village the empty potentiality of law is so much in force as to become
indistinguishable from life . . . The existence and the very body of Joseph
K. ultimately coincide with the Trial, they become the Trial.22
Moreover, Agamben contends this transformation of the body into law
persists so long as:
Law is maintained as pure form in a state of virtual exception, [and] it lets
bare life (K.s life, or the life lived in the village at the foot of the castle)
subsist before it. Law that becomes indistinguishable from life in a real
state of exception is confronted by life that, in a symmetrical but inverse
gesture, is entirely transformed into law.23
I would argue that it is on this point of subsistence versus absorption before
the law that the virtual fate of the bare life meets with its real-life consequence. It is here, in a real state of exception, that Benjamins formulation
of an asignifying law outstrips the virtual limitations of Scholems configuration of that same principle and emerges as the real life threshold of this
new era of biopolitics. For in a biopolitical era, bare life is compelled to fold
back upon itself, to invert its liberties toward a proliferation of state orders,
to offer the body itself as a foundation for the assertion of sovereign power,
for the transference of an asignifying law. Ultimately, Agamben too comes
down on the side of Benjamins formulation as the definition of the law
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which best described the political parameter of the status of the law in this
present era.
Moreover Benjamin grasped, better than most critics of his time, how this
condition of life under a law that is for all intents and purposes asignifying,
influenced writers like Kafka to transform themselves and their characters in
response to tremendous pressures exerted on the organic body and assume
the form things assume in oblivion, meaning that they are distorted.
Benjamin goes on to cite a litany of examples of this distortion:
The cares of the family man, which no one can identify, are distorted;
the bug, of which we know all too well represents Gregor Samsa is
distorted; the big animal, half lamb, half kitten, for which the butchers
knife might be a release is distorted. These figures are connected by a
long series of figures with the prototype of distortion, the hunchback.
(SW 2: 811)
These creatures occupy a corporeality that is composed solely out of writing,
as such they could hold a place in a world so distorted that the virtual
exception of the law now exists as a real state of exception. Under such a
state of affairs these demonic creatures will continue to proliferate in their
aberrant forms and can only disappear with the coming of the Messiah
(SW 2: 811). This is interpreted by Agamben as an event wherein the law
being in force without significance has come to an end. For the Messiah will
only be able to enter after the door of the law has been closed.24 Persisting in
this state of distortion helps these abysmal creatures to elude what Agamben
calls the absolute intelligibility of a life wholly resolved into writing which
corresponds to the impenetrability of writing that having become indecipherable now appears as life.25 This is the condition a true-life figure like
Benjamin faces. Only at this juncture of reality do the terms distinguished
and kept united by the relation of ban (bare life and the form of the law)
abolish each other and enter into a new dimension.26 Benjamin would argue
that the cusp of this dimension has already emerged within protofascist
Berlin, through an era in which, as Agamben would have it,
That state of exception turned into rule signals laws fulfilment and its
becoming indistinguishable from the life over which it ought to order.
Confronted with this imperfect nihilism that would let nothing subsist
indefinitely in the form of a being in force without significance, Benjamin
proposes a messianic nihilism that nullifies even the Nothing and lets no
law remain in force beyond its own content.27
Prior to the arrival of this nullification, the existence and body of Walter
Benjamin are left to coincide with National Socialism, destined to contend
with its influence, as the state of exception could not be separated out from
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the bare life of any individual residing in Berlin in the era National Socialism
came to envelope. Under such an exceptional rule of law his existence, his
very body, coincided with National Socialism to such a profound extent it
began not just to resemble, or imitate the effects of National Socialism on
his person but actually to manifest them rhizomatically. His body, thus
written over with a force of law that was at once asignifying and profoundly
consequential, meant that for Walter Benjamin ones only form of agency
was to become a point on a point of view on the events which followed in
its immanent wake, to become National Socialisms reporter.
It was Leibniz:
Who subjected the points of view to exclusive rules such that each opened
itself onto the others only in so far as they converged. Nietzsche, contrary
to Leibniz, argued that the point of view is opened onto a divergence
which it affirms. In other words each point of view becomes the means of
going all the way to the end of the other, by following the entire distance.
In Nietzsches scheme divergence is no longer a principle of exclusion, and
disjunction no longer a means of separation.28
The convergence of disjunctive events is now a means of communication.
Everything thereafter happens through a resonance of disparities, point
of view on a point of view, displacement of perspective, differentiation
of difference, and not through the identity of contraries.29 The violence
that Benjamin defines in the Critique of Violence as divine moves along
on a similarly disjunctive principle. Following in line from Agambens
arguments, it is situated in a zone in which it is no longer possible to
distinguish between exception and rule.30 As such divine violence functions
as a dissolution of the link between violence and the law.31 Benjamin can
say that divine violence neither posits nor conserves violence, but deposes
it. Divine violence shows the connection between the two [positing and
preserving violence] and even more between violence and the law the
single real content of the law.32 For Benjamin divine violence with its
characteristic mode of incompossibility emerges in the modern age as the
states most powerful agent for communication and perpetuation of law with
signification, namely the law of dictatorial power.
In the last paragraph of Critique of Violence, Benjamin asserts that the
critique of violence is the philosophy of its history the philosophy of this
history, because only the idea of its development makes possible a critical,
discriminating, and decisive approach to its temporal data (SW 1: 251).
In analysing this data Benjamin cautions that we must not take the short
view:
A gaze directed only at what is close at hand can at most perceive a
dialectical rising and falling in the lawmaking and law-preserving forms
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from this pathway to become compossible with the Chinese philosopherarchitect Tsui Pen, the inventor of the garden of bifurcating paths, a
baroque labyrinth whose infinite series diverge or converge, forming a web
of time embracing all possibilities.52 Remarking on Tsui Pens work, Deleuze
observes that all outcomes are produced, each being the point of departure
for other bifurcations.53 A similar pattern of bifurcation is responsible for
establishing the individual in so far as Deleuze posits the real definition of
the individual as an ad hoc mixture of concentration, accumulation, coincidence of a certain number of converging preindividual singularities.54
Therein the category of historical event no longer slavishly responds
to the commands of the symbolic meaning, but instead proliferates those
commands into infinity, creating a series of transformations of meaning
based on an intimate connection with somebody who is able to import them
in line with their own unique zone of expression, dispersing them within his
own mimetic idiom.
Rather than contextualize the writings, minor histories are meant to
speed the narrative, but not toward any particular outcome. Instead, they
are meant to indicate something gestural, as opposed to symbolic, for the
individual. Benjamin describes Kafkas work as something that constitutes
a code of gestures which surely had no definite symbolic meaning for the
author from the outset; rather, the author tried to derive such a meaning
from them in ever-changing contexts and experimental groupings (SW 3:
801). A minor history operates in a similar way, through series, pairings,
repetitions and deviations of the appearance of ordinary locations. These
happenings then are not linked but instead form a constellation of little
dramas. Benjamin, in describing how gesture functions in Kafkas work,
explains that Each gesture is an event one might even say a drama in
itself (SW 3: 802). Therein these gestures form a map of constantly shifting
happenings, one that neither concerns itself with the vagaries of timing,
nor space, but rather with the instant. As Benjamin had observed in The
Theses on the Philosophy of History: The true image of the past flits by. The
past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the moment of its
recognizability, and is never seen again (SW 4: 390). This is very much the
work of the topographical historiographer: to seize upon moments that are
flitting from existence. However, the historic act does not have to be one of
memorial to the dead or drained instant, rather it can be used as a signpost
for instants yet to come which share the same fleeting appearance.
A minor history is able to get involved in the proliferation of these
instants, merging them into a collective rhizome, rather than isolating
them and forcing their attenuation. Building up such a mimetic dossier
on Benjamin is a perilous assignment, requiring recovering tactics of a
different order than the archiving tendency of the trace can offer. This is
why a minor approach is necessary, one that refuses to entertain any desires
to house Benjamin, to remember him, to replace him as displaced figure,
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5
THE SICKNESS OF TRADITION:
BETWEEN MELANCHOLIA AND
FETISHISM
REBECCA COMAY
89
90
supremely pertinent. Over and above the logical loop evident in the melancholic conversion of privation into acquisition is the spectre of acquiescence
which would this is Hegels beautiful soul embrace the present in the
gratification of its own despair. There is nothing neutral about the drift to
compensatory gratification. The sublime abstraction which finds power in
disempowerment threatens to evaporate the object into an aesthetic phantasmagoria which would adapt the subject to the requirements of the present.
The effacement of negativity would still the repetition which is the essential
legacy of trauma the signature of its inherent historicity but which is
equally, by that very token, its most generative power. The occlusion of the
traumatic past cuts off any relation to a radically (perhaps catastrophically)
different future.
The structure of melancholia in this way begins to bleed into that of
fetishism the compensatory construction of imaginary unities in response
to a traumatic loss (castration) which structurally can be neither fully
acknowledged nor denied.5 Perversion not only names the simultaneity
of recognition and disavowal: it hints at the deeper paradox that the very
recognition is the disavowal. There is no acknowledgement of trauma which
in its claim to adequacy (a claim implicit in the very protestation of inadequacy) does not efface the loss it would concede. Despite appearances, the
celebrated Je sais bien . . . mais quand mme structure outlined by Octave
Mannoni in no way neutralizes by partitioning the contradiction it would
announce.6 The fetishistic split which maintains the contradiction between
knowledge and belief traumatic loss, on the one hand, redemptive totality,
on the other provides no protective containment of its antitheses, but
rather implicates both within a contaminating porosity and oscillation of
one term into the other.
Could such a perverse simultaneity of acknowledgement and disavowal
be the condition of historicity? Far from indicating a simple deviation from
some norm of repression (together with its counterpart of enlightenment),
fetishism might rather indicate the subjects irreducible split between two
contradictory imperatives an antinomy which itself marks the ambivalent
legacy of every trauma. If every relation to history is always at some level a
non-relation to another history a missed encounter with the others lack
and as such a traumatic relation to the others trauma history itself would
be defined by the recursive or reflexive pressure of a loss recognizable only in
its own effacement. Could perversion be the mark of the subjects impossible
relationship to a loss which is ultimately not its own to acknowledge in the
first place but so too, equally, the index of a certain promise?
The issue is all the more pressing at a time when the very proliferation
of memorials, the manic drive to museify, threatens to spell the erasure of
memory. It is less a question here of disavowing such disavowal (in the name,
for example, of a demystified or disenchanted mourning) than to consider
what might be at stake in such a contradiction. How to respond to the claim
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of the dead when every response (starting with the piety of the response
which invokes the dead as if they were some kind of self-evident corporate
subject) threatens to escalate the amnesia against which the anamnestic
project is directed?
92
93
not the immediate, banal contrast between the determined misery of the
former and the voluptuous determination of the latter decisive? A grain of
Nietzschean suspicion might go some way here: the defiant exhibitionism
of the melancholic reveals a streak of luxurious enjoyment matched only
by the severity of the fetishists commitment to a jouissance which in its
workmanlike assiduity displays a discipline and focus verging on the
ascetic. Both loss and jouissance present themselves here as symmetrically
and reciprocally traumatic. If castration names the trauma of our symbolic
mediation, the encounter with the Real brings the equally devastating
trauma of an unmediated proximity the hard kernel which marks at
once the limit and the possibility of experience. The fantasy of loss can
itself function as a defence against the trauma of enjoyment, just as jouissance itself can be reinflected as a defence against the trauma of castration.
Just as obsessional rituals can defend against the real death threatening
to engulf the subject on the battlefield of enjoyment, so too even little
deaths can be reconstructed as so many miniaturized defences against the
symbolic mortifications on the plane of language. The operative antithesis
in this case would be thus not between symbolic castration and real
enjoyment per se, but rather between the imaginary overlay each inevitably
acquires in the face of the other: according to this Borromean logic, even
trauma can be mobilized as a fantasmatic defence against trauma. The
manifest opposition between the experiences of lack and excess is thus
ultimately less decisive than the structures of fantasy which pre-emptively
sustain them.
One might then proceed to schematize the various parallels. Both
melancholia and fetishism involve a doubling or splitting of the self in the
face of a loss, the intractability of which structurally prohibits the recognition it thereby, as prohibition, demands. In the terms of Mourning and
Melancholia the topological cleavage between the critical faculty of the ego
and the ego as altered by identification (SE 14: 249) reflects the ambiguity
of a loss which is simultaneously accepted (by way of metabolizing identification) and disavowed (by way of literalizing incorporation) a permanent
open wound which ambiguously commemorates the original instance
of traumatic wounding in so far as it at once drains away every interior
plenitude of the subject and (the catch) reifies the resultant void of subjectivity as a last, stubborn surd of positivity, thereby reconfirming or
sustaining narcissism in the very injury which would deface it. A lack
congeals, which in its hypertrophy pre-empts the very possibility of the
substitution which it at the same time renders necessary. This brings
melancholia virtually to coincide with fetishism, where the epistemic split
between the affirmation and the denial of lack inevitably reproduces the
very antithesis it seeks to neutralize: the split both retraces and effaces the
castration which it is designed to regulate, in that it functions simultaneously
both as catastrophic fissure and as stabilizing partition.11 The Ichspaltung in
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this way not only creates the very possibility of forming fetishist attachments
but in itself functions as the ultimate fetish.
Various other parallels flow directly from this. The paradoxical relation
to loss in each case leads directly to an intensified attachment to things
whose prosthetic role is neither countenanced nor entirely denied. Thus the
apparent literalism of fetishist desire, the refusal of symbolic mediation,
the irreplaceable thisness or singularity of the fetish object, and thus
similarly the peculiar tenacity of melancholia. The cathectic loyalty12
to the lost object in this latter instance not only does not preclude but
requires the secret construction of a substitute the remnant of the object
incorporated within the empty interior of the subject which functions
as a screen memory the very opacity of which remains both refractory
and infinitely tantalizing. (It is ultimately memory itself which gets determined as the ultimate fetish-object: the veil.) Thus the familiar paradoxes
of recuperation: mourning itself becomes a fetishistic proxy for an object
whose loss is overshadowed by the clamorous grief it occasions, and in
this way furtively stages substitution precisely by insisting on the latters
impossibility.
Substitution in each case structurally requires the construction of a partobject whose fragmentation both prolongs and occludes the traumatic wound
it commemorates. The fetishistic passion for the inanimate to objects, to
body-parts, and even to the whole body itself now refashioned as its own
synecdoche of itself (the erect body posing as substitute for its own absent
member)13 displays a chiasmic exchange between unity and fragmentation
whereby the subject finds vitality in the mortification which most shatters it
and thereby retrieves a weird, excessive organicity in dismemberment as such.
The supplement thus both denies and reveals the irreparability of the lack to
which it is consecrated the part-object functions as the whole object and
as such blocks the syntagmatic completion which it simultaneously incites
and enables and in this way erodes the opposition between unity and fragmentation, an opposition which is in turn elaborated as the opposition
between jouissance (oriented toward the viscosity of life-substance) and
the dead letter of the law. In enunciating the law of enjoyment as his very
own private law posited without the detour of symbolic mediation the
pervert effectively elides the structural gap which is the essential condition
of the law as such, and in this way, and through the various literalisms of
his practice, flaunts the law precisely in usurping as exclusive occupant the
site of the laws own enunciation.
Melancholia displays a similar logic. The incorporation of the object
requires the latters abbreviation as a frozen attribute and thereby inflicts
upon it a kind of second death miniaturization reproduces the death
which it simultaneously reduces a violence which will in turn reverberate
within the sadomasochistic theatre of grief wherein, famously, it is the lost
object itself which is being whipped by the subjects most intimate self-
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flagellations. The refusal to admit the objects lack involves the concession
of that very lack and exacerbation of the latters mortifying dismemberment.
Reduced to a part-object within the hollow crypt of subjectivity, the object
persists as living corpse, at once congealed remains and extruding surplus,
whose death accretes like so much cellular efflorescence.
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screaming, the serpents venom not quite completely penetrated, the agony
not quite yet at its climax: the gaze fixes on the penultimate moment so as
to block the revelation of the monstrous void. Penultimacy incompletion
as such becomes a defence against a mortifying conclusion.
Melancholia and fetishism would thus seem to collude to produce the
illusion of an intact present solitary, sufficient, immune from past or
future threat. Indeed they come to coincide: postponement of a death
forever pending consummates itself in the pre-emptive fantasy of a death
always already accomplished. Thus, in Proust, the blink of an eye from
chronic prematurity to chronic, irreversal senescence, from the phantasm of
the blank page to the phantasm of the bal de morts, from perpetual virginity
to premature, perpetual mummification and into the no less reassuring
fantasy that having already died, I have nothing left to fear from death.16
What would it mean to traverse the fantasy so as to release the present
from a reassuring stasis? To negotiate the switching station between the too
early and the too late, between fetishistic before and melancholic after,
so as to change the terms of both postponement and its obverse? Here
Benjamins reflections on history may prove compelling.
BENJAMINS LOSSES
. . . This is so true, that the eternal is more the frill on a dress than any idea.
N3, 2
Is there a way of disentangling the dialectical image from the phantasmagoria of late capitalism? Adorno famously did not think so. The arresting,
sometimes distracting details of the debate between Benjamin and Adorno
at times veil over the depth of the rift between the two thinkers but so too,
perhaps, their secret complicity. Responding to the sprawling, smorgasbordlike assemblage of the Passagen-Werk, Adorno charges Benjamin with vulgar
Marxism: thus the lack of mediation notoriously discerned in Benjamins
various attempts at linkage from base to superstructure, from sidewalk size
to flnerie, from wine tax to Lme du vin, etc. (C, p. 582) an inference
which in its metonymic crudity at best overlooks the complex negotiations of
the commodity fetishism chapter in Kapital, at worst falls under the spell of
bourgeois psychology (C, p. 497). Vulgar Marxism would in this case conspire
with vulgar psychoanalysis (Jung) in its reduction of the social imaginary
to a dreaming collectivity which in its abstract homogeneity dissolves the
explosive ambivalence the blend of desire and fear which signals at once
the traumatic burden of the dialectic, the fissure of uncontainable negativity,
but, so too, equally, its objective liberating power (C, pp. 4956).
Implicit in Adornos repeated accusation of magical thinking is the
suggestion that Benjamin has succumbed to more than one kind of fetish:
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metaphysical problematic of part and whole unfurls into the more poignant
Benjaminian problematic loss and redemption, death and resurrection
the political, historical and indeed theological stakes begin to emerge.
The issue here is not just the familiar paradox of capitalist recuperation
the endless reintegration of every dissonance within the syncopated
continuum of the history of the victors. Nor is it simply a question of
Benjamins seemingly limitless capacity to blur antitheses the exquisite
oscillation of virtually every item on the menu between subversion and
subvention. Does the scavenging operation of, for example, Baudelaires
chiffonier disrupt or merely reproduce the consumerist compulsion of
capitalist modernity?21 Does the lingering hesitancy of the flneur obstruct
the traffic flow (as the transit authorities feared) or, by fostering the illusion
of surplus leisure, secretly reinforce it?22 Does the enigmatic satisfaction
of the allegorist the lingering lasciviousness toward the thing-world
challenge the aesthetic plenitude of the symbolic or supply a brand of
private consolation? Do the obsessional arrangements of the collector defy
the functionality of capital or furnish it with the alibi of aesthetic disinterestedness?23 Is the melancholic fidelity to the dead decisively distinguished
from the luxurious despondencies empathic acedia, left-wing melancholy
of the vainglorious victors?24 Such fretful questions (the list continues)
have from the beginning plagued the reception of Benjamin. The symmetrical chorus of reproaches too happy, too sad circles around, but perhaps
itself shies away from the most intractable aporia.
Does the revolutionary standstill blasting, freezing, exploding time,
shooting the clocks, pulling the emergency brake, etc. disrupt the triumphal
procession of the victors or merely invert it (thereby buttressing it, etc.) by
reproducing the crystalline abstraction of alienated labour? The question
is not entirely well-posed, but does have the merit of focusing attention for
a moment on the profound congruity between, for example, the essays on
mass culture and the various reflections on history.25 Photography presents
each time the privileged metaphor and model of temporal contraction: to
seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger (GS 1.2: 695
SW 4:391) is to experience a synchronization of past and present which can
be understood in the strictest sense as traumatic: the posthumous shock
inflicted on the past under the pressure of a present danger which is to
say that history is experienced only as and at an irreversible delay. Where
thinking suddenly stops in a constellation saturated with tensions it gives
that constellation a shock, by which it crystallizes into a monad (GS 1.3:
703 SW 4:396). Benjamin does more here than extend Freuds or Prousts
celebrated analogy between the deferred action of the photograph and
the structural belatedness of experience. In pointing to the coincidence of
trauma with its own abreaction the lightning flash retroactively inflicts the
shock it shockingly discharges he also points to an irreducible contamination between the messianic rupture and the oppressive viscosity in which
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it intervenes. The revolutionaries who shot all the clocks had, in the first
place, to synchronize their watches, had to affirm the historicist continuum
in the moment of negating it, just as, in another register, the moment of
awakening is negotiated only from within the claustral confines of the
dream: the dream or phantasm not only gropes numbly towards the next
enthralling episode but in so doing (Adorno ignores this part) turns with
stealth and cunning towards its own overcoming (cf. AP, p. 13)
Fetishism informs not only the content of the Passagen-Werk, and not just
the form of its peculiar windowshop appearance. One might set aside the
(by now) tiresome speculations regarding the mimicry at work here: is the
Passagen-Werk itself a kind of literary arcade, a collection, a site of flnerie,
a department store, a museum, a cluttered interieur, a sad inventory; is
Benjamin a shopper, a ragpicker, a brooder, a thief? A deeper and more
intractable ambiguity informs the project: is it a ruin, a heap, a sketch, a
scaffold, a constructivist construction? Is its posthumous, unfinished quality
provisional, accidental, structural: what is the measure of its incompletion?
Is its unfinishedness that of the collection (forever structurally just one item
short completion both its presupposition and its logical undoing), and if
so what sustains this logic of perpetual penultimacy? Is the fragmentation
pre-emptive, the serial production of a lack generated so as to maintain the
fiction of totality, and as such a kind of fetishism in reverse?
Liminal experiences pervade the Arcades Project and define its most familiar
landmarks from Metro entrances to railway stations to the twilight zone of
the arcades themselves and Benjamin repeatedly invokes the magic of the
threshold as paradigmatic both of nineteenth-century urban experience and
of the work that commemorates it; the various spatial and optical ambiguities generated architecturally by glass and iron inside and outside, near
and distant, past and future correlate with the deep existential ambiguities
between human and non-human, animate and inanimate, living and dead.
The very porosity of these distinctions in the dream-world of Baudelaires
Paris speaks to the unease and fascination generated by the ambiguous timespace of capitalist modernity itself the birth-pangs of commodity culture as
it pervades the interstices of the big city and acquires layered political and
historical resonance in the aftermath of repeated revolutionary defeat. In the
architectural phantasmagorias of post-1848 Paris, ruin and sketch converge
monuments to missed opportunities, ciphers of futures foreclosed.
Writing in 1935, and remarking on the preliminary nature of Baudelaires
modernity (that is to say, his modernity tout court), Benjamin insists on
the provisional or penultimate status of the various nineteenth-century
innovations: all these products are on the point of entering the market as
commodities. But they hover on the threshold [Alle diese Produkte sind im
Begriff, sich als Ware auf den Markt begeben. Aber sie zoegern auf der Schwelle]
(AP, p. 13/GS 5.1: 59). There is a sense in which Benjamin himself, on the
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6
TREMBLING CONTOURS:
KIERKEGAARDBENJAMIN
BRECHT
RAINER NGELE
The configuration indicated in the title Benjamin between Kierkegaard
and Brecht is not one that imposes itself self-evidently. Not only does there
seem to be an unbridgeable abyss between Kierkegaard and Brecht, but also
a glaring asymmetry between Benjamins very intense relation to Brecht on
the one hand and his very rare references to Kierkegaard on the other.1 If
we linger for a moment with the image of the abyss in the configuration
and sequence of the three names: Kierkegaard Benjamin Brecht, the
name Benjamin would then take the place of the abyss that separates the
two incommensurable names Kierkegaard and Brecht and perhaps, at the
same time, it is the impossible bridge but, no doubt, a shaky and trembling
bridge.
Benjamins essay on Brechts epic theatre Was ist das epische Theater?, 2
which will be the focus of this essay, begins indeed with an abyss and with
the levelling of an abyss: What is at stake today in the theatre can be determined more precisely in regard to the stage than to the drama. At stake is
the levelling of the orchestra. The abyss that separates the actors from the
audience like the dead from the living, the abyss whose silence increases
the sublime in the drama, and whose resounding increases the intoxication
in the opera, this abyss, that bears the traces of its sacred origin most
indelibly among all the elements of the stage, has lost its function (GS
2.2: 519).3 Three times the abyss is invoked, as if in an act of conjuration
to exorcise it forever. And indeed, at the end of the sentence, the abyss
has disappeared or, more precisely, it has lost its function, ist funktionslos
geworden. With the word funktionslos we enter into a different sphere and
a different age: emerging from the world where depth and height, abyss
and the sublime (Erhabenheit), the living and dead structure a world of
metaphysics and of intoxication, we enter suddenly into a technological
world of functions and utter sobriety. It is the world of Brechts epic theatre,
so Benjamin tells us. And in telling it and in the way he tells it, it is as if in
these initial sentences he were drawing in one bold line the movement and
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transformation of his own thinking and his style: from the dense and even
esoteric metaphysical writings of the teens and early twenties to the stark
and sober style of such essays as Der Autor als Produzent, Das Kunstwerk
im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit and, Was ist das
epische Theater?
It is of course not that simple. The essays on Karl Kraus (1931) and on
Kafka (1934), written in a rather different style and register, go hand in
hand with the seemingly so different tones of Was ist das epische Theater?
(1931) and Der Autor als Produzent (1934). And the more Benjamin, in
the last five years of his life, launches into his major project on the Parisian
arcades and the nineteenth century in the recognizability of the Now of
the early twentieth century, the more Benjamin notices and recognizes, in
another Now of recognizability, the foundational return of his early essay
on language ber Sprache berhaupt und ber die Sprache des Menschen
and his book on the baroque drama of mourning.
No doubt, there were changes in Benjamins mode of thought and
presentation, radical ones that even such a close friend and sensitive reader
as Gretel Karplus, with whom Benjamin shared in the thirties perhaps the
most intimate secrets of his thoughts as far as they were communicable,
confessed that she did not recognize his hand in some of his texts any more.
Benjamins reaction to this confession indicates a deep consternation:
When you write of my second outline, that one would never recognize in
it the hand of WB, I would call this a somewhat rude remark [so nenne
ich das doch ein wenig geradezu gesagt] and you transgress with this remark
certainly the borderline where you can be certain not of my friendship
but of my agreement . . . WB has and this is not self-evident for a
writer but in this he sees his task and his best right two hands. At
the age of fourteen I decided one day [hatte es . . . mir in den Kopf gesetzt]
that I had to learn to write with my left hand. And I still see myself today
sitting for hours at the school desk in Haubinda and practice. Today my
desk stands in the Bibliothque Nationale and I have taken up again the
lesson to write temporarily in such a way on a higher level.4
In not recognizing WBs hand, Gretel Karplus has transgressed a limit, a
border line and such limits were explicitly a constitutive part in the close
friendship between Benjamin and his Felizitas, as he called and addressed
her; she has transgressed the limit of an accord and almost, if not quite, as
the denegation indicates, the limit of friendship.
In a sense, in not recognizing WBs hand, Gretel Karplus has mutilated
her friend, has cut off one of his two hands that Benjamin claims for himself.
Claiming two hands is, as Benjamin remarks, not self-evident for a writer.
For while most writers might have two hands, very few write with two
hands, at least in the pretechnological age when people still used to write by
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hand, and by a hand that left its signature and mark in the writing as the
signature and mark of the writer himself. Benjamin was among other things
also a graphologist who occasionally earned some extra money from rare
books with his graphological expertise.
As a 14-year-old, Benjamin tried literally to learn to write with his left
hand, and he now tries again to learn to write in such a way on a higher
level, as he puts it. The line drawn from the school desk of the 14-year-old
in Haubinda to the desk of the Bibliothque Nationale, where the 37-yearold Benjamin exercises his new style of writing with the left on the left is
more than a shift from the literal, physical hand to a figurative hand: it is
at the same time and this is at the centre of Benjamins whole project as
a physiognomic project the inseparable interrelation, the Verschrnkung,
of the literal and the figurative, the suspension of their clear separation in a
hovering sphere of trembling contours that promise a new physics beyond
metaphysics, something Benjamin will call a materialist doctrine of ideas or
also an anthropological materialism.
But I have jumped far ahead. We must return and patiently follow the
traits of the two-handed writing of Benjamin. Benjamins exercise in lefthanded writing, temporary auf Zeit! as it might be, no doubt has left
indelible marks in the style of his thinking and writing. But this transformation goes beyond the wilful exercise which itself seems more like a
symptom of another transformation that the writer can only ascertain after
the fact, as Benjamin writes to Werner Kraft on 25 May 1935:
The Saturnine tempo of the matter has its deepest ground in a process
of complete turning around [Umwlzung], that a mass of thoughts
and images, dating back to a long past time of my more immediate
metaphysical, even theological thinking, had to undergo in order to
nourish with its full force my present condition. This process took place
silently; I myself knew so little of it that I was immensely astonished,
when due to an external occasion the plan for the work was written
in just a few days.5
Benjamin diagnoses the transformation as an Umwlzung, which literally
means a rolling over or turning over of a heavy object or mass, such as a
big stone or rock. It is also often used in German as a literal translation of
revolution. Benjamin speaks of the rolling over of a mass of thoughts and
images originating in a metaphysical and even theological thinking. He
seems thus to confirm a radical revolution of his early metaphysical and
theological thinking. But it is first of all a revolution in the literal sense
of the word, which after all originates in astronomy: something rolls over,
turns around, yet it remains in its substance. The mass of thoughts and
images originating in metaphysical and theological thinking are, to be sure,
no longer in immediate connection with this mode of thinking after the roll
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over, but the emphasis on the unmittelbar indicates that a mediated relation
might still continue. At the same time the rolling over seems to invest the
mass with a kind of dynamic force, a Kraft that nourishes and propels the
new condition.
Only a few days later, Benjamin restates the transformation in a letter to
Adorno in a slightly shifted image. He first detects with some astonishment
the striking analogies between his new project on the Parisian arcades and
the book on the baroque drama of mourning, and he comments: You must
allow me to see in this circumstance an especially significant confirmation
of the refounding process [des Umschmelzungsprozesses], that leads the whole
mass of originally metaphysically motivated thoughts towards an aggregate
state, in which the world of dialectical images is secured against all objections that metaphysics provoke.6 The Umwlzung has now become an
Umschmelzung, a refounding, a transformation of the mass into a different
aggregate state. The images and thoughts originating in metaphysical and
theological thinking are melted in order to reemerge as dialectical images,
that now seem immune against interventions and objections, the Einrede, of
metaphysics or against metaphysics, the phrase can be read in both directions. And yet, this transformation finds its substantiation and confirmation
precisely in the clearly emerging analogies with the earlier work.
Umwlzung and Umschmelzung: the first process leaves the substance of
the mass intact, but rolls it over in order to expose its formerly hidden side.
It is an image that recurs at various moments in Benjamins work on the
Parisian arcades. If one turns over a stone, in the forest for example, that
has rested on the ground for a long time, at the moment of the rolling over,
a rush of countless little creatures will take place that leave nothing behind
but a labyrinth of patterns that might appear like a script on the underneath side of the stone. Reading such scripts and traces is one of the tasks
of the anthropological materialst and physiognomist. The second process
of melting and refounding transforms the aggregate state of the substance
in a procedure that evokes the traditions of alchemy. But alchemy itself is
transformed in this process and reemerges as construction: This much is
certain: the constructive element has the same significance for this book as
the philosophers stone for alchemy.7
It is in the middle of this process of Umwlzung and Umschmelzung in the
early 1930s that Benjamin enters into a complex configuration with Brecht.
It is one of the most enigmatic configurations in Benjamins life. While it is
tempting to see in Brecht the secular, materialist, sober counterfigure to the
metaphysical and theological sides of Benjamin, and while Brecht certainly
liked to project this image of his role, there is something deeply enigmatic,
deeply troubling like a cloudy kernel in Benjamins relationship to Brecht.
Benjamins three closest friends Adorno, Scholem and Gretel Karplus
were in agreement about one thing: their fear of Brechts influence on
Benjamin. There was apparently something in Brechts ways that evoked
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strong affects in all three of them. But while Adorno more or less rationalized his affect with his reduction of Brecht to a vulgar Marxist, and
Scholem with his refusal to read the texts of Brecht that Benjamin kept
sending him, Gretel Karplus addressed this affective level in a letter full of
concern to Benjamin. And Benjamin responded for once on the same level
in a long letter of June 1934 (GB 4: 440f.).
In contrast to his letters to Scholem, where Benjamin vigorously defends
his interest in Brechts work and its affinity with his own mode of thought
on political and ideological grounds, the letter to Gretel Karplus approaches
the cloudy kernel of the relationship. Benjamin recognizes first a pattern of
repetition: What you say about [Brechts] influence on me recalls for me a
significant and ever returning constellation in my life. He mentions two precedents: the friend of his youth, the poet C.F. Heinle, who committed suicide at
the beginning of the First World War, and a little later the somewhat dubious
Simon Guttmann, whose influence was the object of a passionate opposition
on the part of Benjamins wife. Her opposition culminated in the reproach
that Benjamin was under some kind of hypnotic influence. Benjamin makes
no attempt at refuting such a suggestion, but instead attempts to analyse
the forces involved in such relations: In the economy of my existence, a few
relations, that can be counted, play indeed a role that allow [sic] me to assert
a pole that is opposite my original being. It is no longer a simple question
of ideology, but one that concerns both existence (Dasein) and being (Sein).
Benjamins concept of thinking in other peoples heads, his mimetic ability
to occupy the most extreme opposite positions, finds here its most radical
expression. The repetitive pattern of Benjamins excentric circles of friendship
opens up to a Haltung, a posture, that involves an existential positioning of
ones innermost being in the extremes. It is the most radical ex-position of
ones existence. Benjamin is well aware of the protest of his friends: These
relations have always provoked a more or less violent protest in those closest
to me, as does now the relationship to B[recht]. Benjamin can only plead
for an understanding of the incomprehensible: In such a case, I can do little
more than ask my friends to trust me, that these ties [Bindungen], whose
dangers are obvious, will reveal their fruitfulness. And, once more, Benjamin
invokes the necessity of moving and of positioning himself in extremes but
also the liberating potential of such a movement and position:
It is not at all unclear to you that my life as well as my thinking moves [sic]
in extreme positions. The expanse that it [sic] thus asserts, the freedom to
move side by side things and thoughts that are considered irreconcilable,
assumes its face only through the danger. A danger that generally appears
also to my friends only in the form of those dangerous relations.
These are, then, literally liaisons dangereuses with all their perverse implications.8 And yet, the danger appears as a physiognomic force that gives a
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face to the otherwise faceless; and the face is the figure of a readability of
physiognomic traits. Thus danger is also the condition that the dialectical
image appears as a moment of readability.
Dialectical images, we have read, are the result of an Umschmelzung, of a
refounding of images and thoughts that originated in and were motivated
by metaphysical and theological thinking. But how do metaphysical and
theological images become dialectical images? And what happens to
metaphysics and theology in this process? For one thing is clear: it is not
a question of simply discarding them. It is here that a closer reading of
Benjamins essay on Brechts epic theatre might give us some clues.
A theatrical abyss, the orchestra, has lost its function. What was its
function? To separate the stage from the audience like the dead from the
living, Benjamin says. The comparison with that radical separation of the
world of the dead and the world of the living points at the representative
function of the separating abyss: the physical separation represents a
metaphysical separation between the physical space of the stage and what
it represents and signifies, the separation between a phenomenal world of
appearance and a noumenal world of true being.
What happens when this separation has lost its function? Audience and
stage are now in the same physical space; the stage no longer represents
another world. The stage is a stage, one might say. Yet it is still elevated,
Benjamin points out, thus still indicating a difference. But the elevation
is no longer the elevation of the sublime, no longer Erhabenheit, but the
purely physical elevation, an Erhebung of a podium or a platform. And, as
if to underline the flatness of this platform, Benjamin states dryly: Das ist
die Lage, this is the situation, here we have to install ourselves. Das ist die
Lage. The sentence itself sounds flat in its factual assertiveness. As Marx
says of the ultimate condition of the proletarian revolution: the conditions
themselves, the situation itself not any arbitrary wilfulness and decision
must call out [die Verhltnisse selbst rufen]: Hic Rhodus, hic salta! 9 And
yet, this Lage that according to Benjamin categorically demands of us to
install us here, resonates with one of Benjamins earliest and most densely
written texts, his essay on two poems of Hlderlin. There, in the middle of
a seemingly well ordered metaphysical world, where gods and mortals move
in well distinguished orders and in opposite rhythms (GS 2.1: 113) through
the poem, Benjamin invokes the Lage as the space of truth. Hlderlins
world, he writes, is die Erstreckung des Raumes, der gebreitete Plan, the
extension or expansion of space, the expanded plain. This flat plain of
Hlderlins world becomes die Wahrheit der Lage als Ordnungsbegriff der
hlderlinschen Welt, the truth of the situation as the conceptual order of
Hlderlins world (GS 2.1: 114). The Wahrheit der Lage, the truth of the
situation, the situation as a space of truth rests literally in the fact that the
Lage is gelegen, opportune, and thus a Gelegenheit, an opportunity for truth.
Es sei alles gelegen dir, says Hlderlins poem, and thus the poet walks on
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that which is true like on carpet: Geht auf Wahrem dein Fu nicht, wie auf
Teppichen?10 And this is what Benjamin calls die Wahrheit der Lage. There
seems to be an abyss between this Wahrheit der Lage in Hlderlins poem
and the Lage that is the stage of Brechts epic theatre. Yet the line that arches
over the abyss from Lage to Lage is perhaps opportune enough to form the
bow that Benjamin hoped for in order to be able to shoot the ultimate arrow
of his work, as he writes to Scholem in October 1934:
Whether I will ever be able to stretch the bow in such a way that the
arrow speeds off, is of course uncertain. But while my other projects have
soon come to the end where I took leave from them, this project will
occupy me longer. Why this is so, is indicated by the image of the bow:
here I have to deal with two ends simultaneously, namely the political
and the mystical.11
The two ends of the bow, that Benjamin characterizes here as political
and mystical, reaching from Lage to Lage, are both situated in a plain, in a
surface which, according to Benjamin, is the condition of readability: Lesbar
ist nur in der Flche [E]rscheinendes, Readable is only what appears in the
surface (GS 6.1: 32).
It might seem that the essay on Brechts epic theatre only handles the
political end of the bow. Yet we must not overhear the resonances of the
Lage, as flat and sober as it might be in the form of a podium. Benjamins
first step is to redefine the function of the podium: it is not simply an
elevated space from which political messages are sent to the audience, but
it becomes part of a functional context and what is at stake is the transformation of this functional context by changing the relations of its elements
that include, besides the stage, the audience, the text, the performance, the
director and the actors. Each of these elements assumes a new function in
the epic theatre: the stage becomes for the audience an exposition space
instead of a space of illusion, the audience is no longer a hypnotized mass
but an assembly of interested individuals, the text loses its central significance for the theatre and becomes an experimental sketch that has to prove
itself and its potentials in the performance. Thus Benjamin moves through
each of the elements and characterizes the functional changes in its relation
with the others. For, like Marx, Benjamin locates the materialist ground not
in reified things, but in relations, in Verhltnisse.
Almost as a by-product of these changes in the theatrical relations, another
relation is put into question and confronted with the challenge of a radical
change: that of theory and praxis, or, in Benjamins words of theory and
existence (Dasein), a word perhaps better translated more literally as beingthere, in order to avoid the heavy ideological burden of the word existence.
Benjamin speaks of the professional critics who were unable to recognize the
exemplary staging of Mann ist Mann in Berlin, because of a theory languishing
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in the Babylonian exile of a praxis that has nothing to do with our being there
[mit unserem Dasein]. Theory is in a Babylonian exile, because it is cut off
from our Dasein, from its specific situation, its Lage, it thus has no relationship
any more to the Wahrheit der Lage, the only firm ground as changing and
volatile as it might be for theory, and, one might add, for art. For already in
his book on the baroque mourning play, Benjamin criticizes what he considers
to be the abyss of Nietzsches aestheticism: The abyss of aestheticism opens
up, Benjamin writes, where art takes up the centre of existence [Dasein] in
such a way that it makes the human being its appearance instead of recognizing in the human being its ground not as its creator but his existence [sein
Dasein] as its eternal pre-position [als ihren ewigen Vorwurf ] (GS 1.1: 2812).
Dasein as Vorwurf, as pre-position, as pre-disposition of art and theory, cannot
be reduced to a reified, naively understood reality, although it is real enough
as that which pre-positions and pre-disposes the structures of our relations in
our sphere of living, the possible movements in our environment, the horizon
of our space of freedom to the degree that we have such a space. The task of
theory would then be to articulate these structures and their disposition. To do
that, theory sometimes must become silent, must at least be kept at a distance,
as Benjamin writes already on 23 February 1927 in a letter to Martin Buber,
proposing a report on his experience in Moscow for Bubers journal Die Kreatur
(GB 3: 2312). All theory, Benjamin insists, will be kept away from this report,
in order to let something else speak, what Benjamin calls das Kreatrliche.
Kreatur, which was also the title of Bubers journal, and das Kreatrliche are
located at a curious intersection of theology and materialism. Kreatur embraces
animals and human beings as creatures (of god, theolo-gically) and as bodies
and flesh subjugated and exposed to the sufferings of the body and the flesh,
and ultimately exposed to death. It is a word that plays a central role in what
Benjamin calls later anthropological materialism, a word that is as important to
Buber as it is to Brecht. Paul Celan, in his Meridian speech will talk of Georg
Bchner as the Dichter der Kreatur. While Kreatur is often thought of as mute
die stumme Kreatur Benjamin wants to let it speak. And in order to let it
speak, theory has to be silenced for a while. How does it speak? Its language is
determined by the dispositions of Dasein, and these, for Benjamin, are radically
new in the Moscow of his experience, and thus the language is a very new,
very strange language (diese sehr neue, befremdende Sprache), and it resonates
through a resonating mask (durch die Schallmaske) of a completely changed
environment.
When the Kreatur enters the stage of the epic theatre and Brecht indeed
often speaks of Kreatur it speaks less in resounding speeches than in
gestures, and when it resounds it might be the sound of the mute Kattrin in
Mother Courage, drumming on the roof to awaken the city. That is how the
stone speaks: Der Stein spricht, is the title of the scene. But more than the
sound of the drum, it is the slowly diminishing rhythm of the gestures of the
drumming Kattrin that makes up the language of the creature.
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which they are unobtrusive and habitual. The more unobtrusive, the more
habitual, the more mechanical they are, the less consciousness, which in
Benjamins as in Freuds experience is the primary agent of deception, can
interfere. Such gestures are like the hand in Dr Strangelove that constantly
rises up to the Hitler salute against the will of its subject. But gestures are
more than revelations of an individual subjects hidden intentions: they are
witnesses of an interest in the most literal sense of that word. They testify
to a sphere of inter-esse, of a sphere between the subjects and between their
world. Gestures are, so to speak, sedimentations of movements in a sphere
of interests. Their movements reveal the patterns of the network of pathways
possible or impossible in a given social and cultural setting.
While the relative distance of gestures to the controlling consciousness
thus allows them to be witnesses of the sphere of interests, the possibility
to frame them in terms of a clear beginning and ending turns them into
means to dissect what Benjamin calls the complexity (Vielschichtigkeit) and
opaqueness (Undurchschaubarkeit) of peoples actions. Gestures are the epic
theatres equivalent to the Aristotelian plot, the mu`q o~, with a beginning, a
middle, and an end. As such, they interrupt the constant flow and current
of life and events which, of course, have no fixable beginning or end. Every
beginning in our experience has something before, and every end something
after it. The gesture, frozen in a fi xed beginning and a fi xed end, functions
as a caesura in the flow of actions and events, just as Hlderlins caesura
interrupts the torrential stream of representations (Vorstellungen). While the
interruption of the current of Vorstellungen uncovers the Vorstellung itself,
according to Hlderlin, the interruption of the action in the epic theatre
uncovers and discovers, according to Benjamin, states of affair, conditions
or situations (Zustnde).
This functioning of the gesture as a caesura would demand a further
extensive reading and analysis. But it is time for a caesura in this text
whose title promised not only the names of Benjamin and Brecht, but also
of Kierkegaard. The latter seems to have disappeared with the abyss of the
orchestra in the epic theatre. To find him again, to find him at all will
not be easy on this stage and podium. But then, even in his own writings,
Kierkegaard is often quite evasive, hidden behind pseudonyms, if indeed
he can be found there. Pathways to Kierkegaard tend to be circuitous,
demanding most of the time elaborate detours.
If a shade or a trace of Kierkegaard can be suspected at all in Benjamins
essay and evidently I am suspecting something of that order it would
most likely be found at that end of the bow of Benjamins writing that he
called the mystical end, where the transformations of the earlier more
directly metaphysical and theological elements are taking place in a kind of
alchemistic melting process. It is of course that end of the bow that in this
particular essay is particularly unobtrusive; but then it is the unobtrusive
that is invested with a special revelatory quality. We have already noted
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Vielfrab, but, he continues, who guarantees [wer steht mir dafr] that the
Vielfrab played on the stage [der gespielte Vielfrab] has the advantage of
reality over the pictured one [vor dem gezeichneten die Wirklichkeit voraus
hat]? Benjamin undermines Brechts simple opposition of a real and a
pictured Vielfrab. Instead he confronts two representations: one played,
the other drawn. At this point, the status of the real is suspended. Nothing
hinders us, Benjamin says, to have the played figure sitting in front of the
real one, that is to let the pictured figure be more real than the played one.
Once the status of reality as a firm ground and difference to the fictional has
been suspended in the double representation, another space and structure
enter into play; another scene opens up on the stage of the epic theatre. Once
the real is movable and can move from the foreground into the background,
the play in the foreground assumes a kind of fantomatic aura: many of
the players, Benjamin writes, appear as emissaries of the greater powers
[als Mandatare der grberen Mchte] that remain in the background. As
in medieval and baroque allegories, the figures on the stage figure another
reality, with the minor spatial difference in this case that the other reality,
the other scene, der andere Schauplatz, as Freud called it, is not a higher,
metaphysical sphere, but horizontally displaced in the background from
where their effects emanate into the foreground, functioning like Platonic
ideas.13 Thus Nehers projections become something very paradoxical, what
Benjamin calls materialist ideas. But to the degree that these projections
are visible they assume themselves a strange intermediary place: although
being materialist ideas, they can become visible only by tearing themselves
off from their status as ideas, for even materialist ideas are outside the realm
of the empirically visible. But how then do we recognize their real status?
Through a minimal effect in the mode of their appearance: as close as they
have moved to the event [on the stage], the trembling of their contours [das
Zittern ihrer Umrisse] still betrays from what much more intimate proximity
they have themselves torn away in order to become visible. A trembling at
the edges indicates the effect of another scene.
And in this trembling in Benjamins text, the effect of another figure can
be read: the effect of an ever so brief intersection, an ever so brief crossing of
paths between Benjamin and Kierkegaard, after which their paths will move
in opposite directions. But what legitimates such a reading? To simply base
it on the word Zittern that evokes the title of the German translation Furcht
und Zittern, would certainly seem far-fetched although, as we will see, it
is not all that far-fetched in Benjamins unconscious. Yet the trembling in
Benjamins text is the echo of another trembling that Kierkegaard evokes in
his text as the signal and effect of another sphere, and it is as unobtrusive as
the trembling of Caspar Nehers posters. Kierkegaard describes the figure of
the knights of infinity (Unendelighedens Riddere Ritter der Unendlichkeit,
in the German translation).14 These knights are completely inconspicuous
in this world, they even have in Kierkegaards description a striking
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7
THE SUBJECT OF HISTORY: THE
TEMPORALITY OF PARATAXIS IN
BENJAMINS HISTORIOGRAPHY
DIMITRIS VARDOULAKIS
1
Focusing on the subject of Walter Benjamins notion of history inevitably
conjures up the image of the chess-playing automaton of Thesis I of On the
Concept of History. In the writing of history, the subject figures both as
the hidden chess-player inside the mechanism, and as the puppet that moves
the pieces on the chessboard outside. There is a mechanism that can potentially be propelled indefinitely, but its operation at each time is determined
by the definite stamina of the player crouched in the dark, suffocating
compartment. On the board, the continuation of the game is related to
the hidden player, while the puppets jerky movements are incidental to the
games duration. Thus the image of the Turk, as the automaton was known,
provides a complex temporality: in terms of movement, the machine can go
on for ever, while the man only as long as he can cope; whereas in terms of
the game, its perpetuation is dependent on the calculating man, while the
puppet is incidental. Thus the complexity of time is created by the juxtaposition the parataxis of man and puppet. Thereby, the subject becomes
an integral part of the act performed by the automaton, but the medium of
that act is time itself.
As the image of the automaton is refracted through Benjamins writings
the subject as historian and as the subject that appears within written history
will assume a clearer outline. The coordinates for such an outline can
only be provided by Benjamins writings themselves, and first of all by the
unfinished Arcades Project to which the Theses were conceived in part as a
methodological grid. The fact that the Arcades Project to remain unfinished
is be a problematic element in such an investigation, and one that Benjamin
is well aware of: Outline the history of The Arcades Project [die Geschichte
der Passagenarbeit] in terms of its development. Its properly problematic
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frugal with space in recording each citys contribution to the Greek army,
or the items on Achilles shield; and Herodotus in his Histories provides
detailed inventories of the armies in the Persian wars or of what he saw in
his travels; and it should not be forgotten that the earliest European script
that has been deciphered, the Minoan Linear B, has been preserved as clay
tablets recording the goods produced and stored at the Cretan palaces. The
fact that decisively different narrative forms use the same apparatus, only
proves, as Longinus recognized, that the list is a fertile topos for stylistics
to turn into a philosophy of language thereby addressing both the human
and the object.1 On the other hand, the thinkers of the modern era were
equally aware of this: Montaignes use of the list as the only way to record
his own experience is a telling example, even if somewhat timid compared
with the compulsive list-making of a Rabelais or the lists that comprise La
Popelinires perfect history.2 It is not a coincidence that Foucault starts
his history of words and things from the seventeenth to the nineteenth
century with extrapolating on the way that a list records not only the objects
perceived as well as the reflection upon these objects, but also the pistme
that is sedimented between the individual listed items and which comprises
the order, or the grammar, of the list.3 The issues of narrative, subjectivity
and the epistemological status of objects coalesce in the notion of the list so
that their relation to history can be examined.
The second reason that universal history is crucial is derived from
Benjamins writings. It is not only that the huge list known as the Arcades
Project can be viewed as a type of universal history. In addition, universal
history is a term employed by Benjamin himself. Although Benjamin refers
to it only once in the Theses, that reference in Thesis XVII is of extreme
importance for a discussion of the historiographic method. Further, if
universal history is taken to mean a completed history, then contrapuntal to this idea is that universal history is also messianic. The authentic
concept of universal history [Universalgeschichte] is a messianic concept
(N18, 3). This assertion is significant enough for Benjamin to jot down
a number of times in the preparatory notes for the Theses, for instance:
Only in the messianic realm does a universal history exist (SW 4: 404/GS
1.3: 1235). Universal history, as the term around which completeness and
incompleteness entwine and unfold, is a necessary condition of Benjaminian
history. However, it is not a sufficient condition of history. The stress in the
last citation from the preparatory notes is on the only: universal history
can be actualized only with the coming of a Messiah, on Judgement Day.
Moreover, Benjamin warns: Universal history in the present-day sense is
never more than a kind of Esperanto. (It expresses the hope of the human
race no more effectively than the name of that universal language) (SW 4:
404/GS 1.3: 1235). The utopian vision of universal history in the presentday sense a qualification which will be shown to be of significance for
Benjamin is nothing but wishful daydreaming. If humanity could ever
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2
To avoid such a power struggle, it is important that the two notions of the
historical subject are clearly delineated. Only then would it be possible at
the end to indicate what kind of struggle they avoid, what is the nature of
their alliance their complicity. For the moment, the investigation should
proceed with the oppressed by asking the question: Who are the oppressed?
Who are the hopeless? An answer will reveal that according to Benjamin
there is no one identifiable group of people that can be called the oppressed.
The question leads to the realization that a philosophy of time is needed.
Temporality will yield the historiographic method. Yet this method will
require the reshaping of the question: How are the hopeless to figure in a
historical narrative? The latter question will lead back to the historian.
It may appear self-evident who the oppressed have been. To assume
that there is an obvious way of identifying the oppressed and the hopeless,
namely as those who have suffered injustice, the slain [who] are really slain,
as Horkheimer put it in a letter of March 1937, would be to miss the crux
of Benjamins thought. When Benjamin transcribed Horkheimers letter in
Convolute N of the Arcades Project, he appended the corrective that history
is not merely science but also a remembrance (Eingedenken) that can modify
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The extrapolation of the Absolute in relation to time does not only hark
back to Benjamins early writing. It also recalls the extrapolation earlier
of the oppressed in relation to history. With the oppressed it was shown
that a chiasmus takes place between history and those for whom history is
written. The temporal caesura repeats the chiasmic structure. The fullness
of time makes incompletion possible, but it is also made by incompleteness.
This chiasmus does not indicate that the complete and the incomplete, the
particular and the absolute, the oppressed and messianic temporality are the
same thing. Rather, the point is that the terms of those conjunctions are
given within the same structure that has arisen out of Benjamins philosophy
of time. Thus, what is repeated is not solely the complete in the incomplete,
and so on, as if they were identical. What is repeated is the constructive
principle of history. The paratactically presented information in historiography and the messianic temporality can only be necessary conditions
of history. The additional constructive principle indicates that they have a
structural connection. This is what makes possible the mutual transformability of the complete and the incomplete, as Benjamin wrote in reply to
Horkheimer. It makes possible the little gate of particularity through which
the Messiah might enter any second now (SW 4: 397/GS 1.2: 704). In other
words, it is the structural arrangement that makes particularity and the
absolute consupponible and codeterminable. The Messiah is not a religious
concept; rather, the Messiah is the regulative impossibility that allows for
interruption as the temporality that pertains to history.
At this juncture, nothing more can be said about who the hopeless are,
other than that they are whoever occupies the nexus of particularity in the
formal structure of the constructive principle of history. This formulation
already discloses at least three points: first, the subjectivity of the hopeless
does not conform to historicisms forms of selfhood, such as its identification with a Geist or with an autonomous individual I. Second, if the early
Benjamins structural argument about criticism is indeed transportable to
the later philosophy of time, then the hopeless will occupy a position akin
to that of the material content; and to the extent that the material content
is always in a process of ruination, the same process of disintegration of
subjectivity will be expected to take place in history.6 Simultaneously, and
this is the third point, specifying the particularity of subjectivity as other
than a fact of historicism discloses the limit of the question who are the
hopeless?. For it can only provide an answer in the negative. A positive
articulation requires the hopeless to figure in a different question: how are
they to be presented? This in effect asks for the way that the subject figures
in, as well as configures, the chiasmic relations between the complete and
the incomplete. In other words, what sort of figure of the subject can make
possible Benjamins philosophy of time? What is the nature of this subjective
act that allows for figuration?
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3
To start answering these questions requires to focus on the historian and
the methodology of historiography. The crucial passage in this respect is
Thesis XVII. This thesis is important enough to be quoted in full here,
even though only the first half will be treated in the present section, and the
second at the end:
Historicism rightly culminates [gipfelt] in universal history. It may be that
materialist historiography stands out [abhebt sich] in method more clearly
against universal history than from any other kind. Universal history has
no theoretical armature. Its technique [Verfahren] is additive: it musters
the mass of facts in order to fill the homogeneous and empty time.
Materialist historiography, on the other hand, is based on a constructive
principle. Thinking involves not only the movement of thoughts, but
their arrest [Stillstellung] as well. Where thinking suddenly comes to
a stop in a constellation saturated with tensions, it gives that constellation a shock, through which thinking crystallizes itself into a monad.
The historical materialist approaches a historical object only where it
confronts him as a monad. In this structure he recognizes the sign of a
messianic arrest of happening [Stillstellung des Geschehens] or, to put it
differently, a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past. He
perceives the monad in order to blast a specific era out of the course of
history [Verlauf der Geschichte]; thus he blasts a specific life out of the era,
a specific work out of the lifework. The product of his technique [Der
Ertrag seines Verfahrens] is that the lifework is both preserved and sublated
[aufbewahrt ist und aufgehoben] in the work, the era in the lifework, and
the entire course of history [der gesamte Geschichtesverlauf ] in the era. The
nourishing fruit of what is historically understood contains time in its
interior as a precious but tasteless seed. (SW 4: 396/GS 1.2: 7023)
On the one hand, Thesis XVII offers a formulation about the method of
historiography. There are two techniques contrasted, universal history and
materialist historiography. On the other hand, in order to expand on the
latter, Benjamin refers to the historian. The materialist historian is based
on a constructive principle. Thus, subjectivity is implicated in method. The
latter point will be left unattended for the time being.
Approaching technique means paying attention to the complexities of this
passage. And a complexity emerges from the very beginning in the contrast
between materialist historiography and universal history. For if the entire
course of history is something that can be methodologically entertained,
as Benjamin suggests in the penultimate sentence, then what is it that
really separates it from universal history, taken to mean precisely the aim
of representing the entirety of facts? The problem will not be solved easily
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with reference to the precious seed, time. For the very next thesis states
that messianic or now-time comprises the entire history of mankind in a
tremendous abbreviation (SW 4: 396/GS 1.2: 703). Prima facie a moment
that comprises the entire history of mankind may not appear all that
different from the project of a universal history, namely to add up all the
facts. Thesis XVII may indicate why Benjamin relates elsewhere universal
history to the messianic (e.g. N18, 3), but universal history is thereby, if
anything, even more elusive. A closer look at the term universal history is
called for, yet it should be kept in mind that Thesis XVII explicitly address
the historiographic method. Universal history will become a fruitful
concept only if it is viewed in relation to writing, and thus in connection
to narrativity. This is not to say that there is a specific kind of historical
narrative this has been rejected already. There still is, nonetheless, a
method and a technique of writing history.
The issue of what can be recorded in written history the historical
object in general, which includes the oppressed revolves around the
notion of universal history. The reason is that universal history can present
most clearly the difference in technique between historical materialism and
historicism. What does Benjamin mean by the term universal history? The
assertion in Thesis XVII that historicism culminates in universal history is
not a straightforward identification of historicism and universal history. If
the metaphors in the verbs of the first two sentences are heeded, then what is
conjured is an image of vertical mobility. Universal history is at the summit
(der Gipfel) of historicism.7 And materialist historiography only rises (heben)
even higher. Thus, universal history is not only the meridian of historicism,
but also a median between historicism and materialism. Further, the twist
in Benjamins logic has it that universal history as messianic concomitantly
functions as a meridian of materialism. The middle point between historicism and historical materialism is, simultaneously, the highest point of each.
The fact that the term universal history is used only once in the Theses in
Thesis XVII makes it all the more enticing given that Benjamin refers to
it consistently in the preparatory notes. There, Benjamin strategically draws
a qualitative distinction between the present-day sense of universal history
and a more authentic sense. After repeating the call for the destructive
energies of materialism to blast apart the temporal continuum, Benjamin
observes that this would serve as the precondition to attack the three most
important positions of historicism. Benjamin continues by immediately
identifying universal history as the first such position: The first attack must
be aimed at the idea of universal history. Now that the nature of peoples
is obscured by their current structural features as much as by their current
structural relations to one another, the notion that the history of humanity
is composed of peoples is a mere refuge of intellectual laziness (SW 4: 406/
GS 1.3: 1240). Universal history is unproblematically a historicist category,
only if the completeness alluded to in it is meant to signify the sum of
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people. In other words, only the history that sees the victors as those who
were really victorious and the slain as those who were really slain.
Yet this is not the whole story; Benjamin immediately opens a qualifying
parenthesis:
(The idea of a universal history stands and falls with the idea of a
universal language. As long as the latter had a basis whether in theology,
as in the Middle Ages, or in logic, as more recently in Leibniz universal
history was not wholly inconceivable. By contrast, universal history as
practised since the nineteenth century can never have been more than a
kind of Esperanto.)
The universal history of historicism the universal history in the presentday sense is that of nineteenth-century positivism. Conversely, universal
history is still relevant to a Leibnizian monadology, a monadology reconfigured in Benjamins philosophy of time as the monad or the dialectical
image which, according to Thesis XVII, crystallizes thinking into a
constellation in order to make it possible for the historian to approach the
object. The distinction, then, between the two notions of universal history
hinges on the way that the historian presents an entire record of objects.
The question of how the subject of history is presented can be reformulated
as how the subjectivity of the historian is to be construed in relation to
the writing of the historical object. Universal history coalesces three terms
the subject, the narrative and the historical object under the rubric of
completeness. The endeavour to record the entire course of history recalls
what was called at the beginning the paratactic presentation of the specific.
A parataxis of things is by definition the most emphatic attempt to present
those things in their entirety. Such an inventory is a necessity for history.
Lists may appear to be simple grammatical structures to the extent that they
repeat the same part of speech. This simplicity is deceptive.
The historicist fault is to be deceived by this simple grammar. Historicism
contents itself with establishing a causal nexus among various moments in
history (SW 4: 397/GS 1.2: 704). The story that this causal connecting
presents is precisely an adding up of facts, an unreflective universal history.
The positivist historiographic methodology can be likened to a vast collection
of index cards, each card representing a fact. The historian merely arranges
the cards in a way that makes sense utilizing the causal methodology of
the natural sciences.8 Such a historian can never question the rhetorical
structure of the narrative, because its language is all along assumed to be
referential to be scientific. But this is nothing but the wishful thinking
of an Esperanto. Just as positivisms facts rely on a metaphysics that
pronounces an unproblematic relation between those facts and their interpolations, so also Esperanto relies on a simplified grammar which assumes
the unproblematic relation between the name and its referent. And, just as
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4
This is not to say that historiography is impossible. Rather, historiography
is to be viewed from the vantage point of a philosophy of time. If incompleteness and infinity are to be retained, then they cannot be constructed
as positivisms pure language. Only then will the qualitative difference
between the present-day universal history, and the universal history as a
possibility or at least as that notion of history that allows for a conception
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130
has the tone of a chronicle throughout, it will take no effort to gauge the
difference between one who writes history (the historian) and one who
narrates it (the chronicler). The historians task is to explain in one way or
another the events with which he deals; under no circumstances can he
content himself with simply displaying them as models of the course of the
world [Weltlaufs]. But this is precisely what the chronicler does, especially
in his classical avatars, the chroniclers of the Middle Ages, the precursors
of todays history. By basing their historical tales [Geschichtserzlungen] on
a divine and inscrutable plan of salvation, at the very outset they have
lifted the burden of demonstrable explanation from their shoulders. Its
place is taken by interpretation, which is concerned not with an accurate
concatenation of definitive events [Verkettung von bestimmten Ereignissen],
but with the way these are embedded in the great inscrutable course of the
world. (SW 3: 1523/GS 2.2: 4512)
Every epic form, that is every linear narrative, is intricately connected
to historiography. But this is not to say that every narrative is properly
historical. However, even if the chronicle is still not history, nonetheless it
still aspires to history in a manner that presents its objects as inscrutable.
What this manner precludes is a conception of historiography as a chain of
independent events there is no concatenation of definitive events, that is,
there is no causal narration in the manner practised by positivism. Such a
collection of independent facts can never be fitted into the great inscrutable
course of the world. In contrast to positivism, storytelling makes possible
a different form of infinity, and hence a different notion of totality. The
difference arises from the immediacy of the presence of the storyteller and
the rich experience of storytelling. This is an experience of particularity,
an immediate specificity. Whereas the pure language of positivism presupposed an infinite and self-referential grammar, the storyteller starts with the
immediacy of the multicoloured (bunte) world view (SW 3: 153/GS 2.2: 452).
And, whereas positivism is trapped in that infinite grammar, the storyteller,
because he starts with particularity, still has access to infinitude. This is
Benjamins point when he evokes the chronicler in the Thesis II:
The chronicler who narrates events without distinguishing between major
and minor ones acts in accord with the following truth: nothing that has
ever happened should be regarded as lost to history. Of course, only a
redeemed mankind is granted the fullness [vollauf ] of its past which is
to say, only for a redeemed mankind has its past become citable in all its
moments. (SW 4: 390/GS 1.2: 694)
The demand of the universal history is clear in the chronicle: nothing is
to be lost for history. The chronicler can entertain this refusal to let the
thing disappear, because his narrative the Geschichtserzlung is one of
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132
Since he was already over-full of grief, it took only the smallest increase
for it to burst through the dams. Thus Montaigne. But one could also
say: The king is not moved by the fate of those of royal blood, for it is his
own fate. Or: We are moved by much on the stage that does not move
us in real life; to the king, this servant is only an actor. Or: Great grief
is pent up and breaks forth only with relaxation; seeing this servant was
the relaxation. (SW 3: 148/GS 2.2: 446)
These explanations are acts of judgement. The historian differs from
the chronicler in that he makes judgements. But here judgement is not
understood as any arbitrary ascription of value on a given object. Rather,
judgement is the act that intervenes in what is possible. The judgement
halts the infinity of potentiality, it intervenes in the perpetual pendulum of
completeness and incompleteness. More emphatically, it is the interruption
of the movement between infinite and finite.
5
Interruption is the act of the technique of materialist historiography and
that which makes possible a conception of the infinite and the finite, of the
complete and the incomplete. However, if interruption is also to be linked
to judgement, the parataxis of judgements with which Benjamin responds to
Herodotus story does not seem to fix the problem of a bad infinity. For they
may appear as individual judgements, pointing towards a notion of infinity
as an aggregate of similar judgements a dialogue between independent and
individual points of view. However, infinity and the finite have to be given
by temporality itself. Therefore, time will have to operate in judgement.
The time inscribed in the parataxis of judgements in section VII of The
Storyteller can be presented only when it is distinguished from the temporality of each judgement on its own.
The first judgement, which Benjamin copies from Montaigne, emphatically asserts the immediacy of experience. It was at the point that the
king was filled up with grief that he had a visceral reaction as if his
body could not help it. This is the temporality of specificity. Conversely,
the invocation of fate in the second judgement installs a temporality that
eschews specificity, the temporality that knows only of the decisions of the
gods and effaces human freedom and ethical responsibility. The image of
the world as a theatre in the third explanation partly repeats the temporality
of fate: the actors act according to a script that cannot be altered. However,
here the exclusion of the king from the infinite play on the stage makes it
possible that the king could stop being indifferent at the drama and react.
The kings reaction is provoked by the eternity of the stage-action. The final
explanation, with its proverbial nature, has the structure of a storytelling
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134
the king recognizes in the manner that the historian judges. His tears are the
historians judgement. The complicity that is established between the king
and this hetairon is the complicity that also pertains between the historian
and King Psammenitus at that moment.
The act of judgement is the act whereby a spectator becomes simultaneously an actor. The historian makes, and is also made by, the object
of history. This chiasmus corresponds to the chiasmus identified earlier in
pursuing the question of who the subject of history is. It will be recalled
that then it was shown that the hopeless make and are made by history;
and also that time, as the absolute, creates and is created by the interruption
of the temporal continuum. These chiastic relations were shown to be the
structural principle of historiography. The correspondence of Psammenitus
gaze to the earlier chiasmoi discloses the essential quality of the principle
of historiography: it is the act of judgement. The most general answer as to
how the subject figures in history is: through this instantaneous act. The
act that is performed in such a way that the parataxis is recognized. If it
is recognized as parataxis, then the historians gaze cannot be fixed on the
whole parade of catastrophes but it has to concentrate on the anonymous
(cf. SW 4: 406/GS 1.3: 1241) old man. Yet the old has to be recognized as
a paratactic object, that is as belonging to the structure that unravels the
relation between completeness and incompleteness to the infinity of time.
6
If this infinity of time is consistently pursued, the conclusion can only be
that a subjective judgement is no longer possible. What this means is that a
subjects judgement can never attain a self-consistent truth. The subjective
act is never occlusive. No matter how many individual acts of judgement
are possible, they can only be secondary to the possibility of judging as
such. This signals the destruction of the subject. The subject cannot fix
itself on a stable position from which to pronounce a judgement. The act
of judgement destroys the singular individual, because the subject is now
dissolved into the I and the hetairon, the I and the object that looks back at
it forming a community that is complicit in judging. The standstill of this
judgement is not that of standing on a fixed point. It is, rather, a dispersal,
which is crucial to the constructive methodology of materialist historiography, as it is described in Thesis XVII. It will be recalled that Thesis
XVII starts with a vertical movement between historicism, universal history
and materialist historiography. The ascent (abheben) from historicism to
materialism is mediated by universal history. However, by performing a kind
of leap, universal history in the form of the chronicle has been shown to be
also at the summit of materialism. Benjamin insists in Thesis XVII that
this up-and-down movement is not enough: Thinking involves not only
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the movement of thoughts, but their arrest [Stillstellung] as well. But this
Stillstellung is not something exhausted within the figure of the historian:
He [the materialist historian] perceives the monad in order to blast a
specific era out of the course of history; thus he blasts a specific life out of
the era, a specific work out of the lifework. The product of his technique
is that the lifework is both preserved and sublated [aufgehoben ist] in the
work, the era in the lifework, and the entire course of history in the era.
(GS 1.2: 703 / SW 4: 396)
The historian perceives the monad, he recognizes the historical object. But
the product is not up to the historian on his own. Rather, the product is
given through his technique. In the aufheben of Benjaminian sublation the
abheben from historicism to universal history to historical materialism is
halted by erasing the subject from the sublating. The individual I is no more,
because historiography can methodologically entertain the entire course of
history only through the complicity of the historian with the hopeless. The
process of sublation, in Benjamins sense, is to disperse the historian in the
hetairon, the hetairon in the historians writing, and then both, as subject of
written history, to historys infinite unfolding.
This destruction of the subject does not mean that the practice of history
does not matter. It does not say that the construction of history destroys the
historian as such. Rather, it indicates that destruction is constitutive of historiography. There is no psychological communication between the historian and the
historical object no empathy that mediates their relation. The relation is given
through time. On the one hand this is a full time, one that allows for the entire
course of history to parade before the historian; on the other hand it is a nowtime, the instant of recognition that concentrates on one object in the parataxis
rupturing its relation to the whole of history. The subject is occupying the
position at this point of tension between relationality and nonrelation, between
the complete and the incomplete. The subject is given through its occupying.
This is another way of saying that the question who are the subjects of history?
is inadequate. The destruction of the subject demands that only the manner
in which the subject acts that is, only the judgement can be questioned.
And, thus, it is a productive destruction, the condition of the possibility of the
historical construction. What is destroyed is history as pure immediacy, understood either as specificity or as a transcendental other. What is constructed is
a political community, and the possibility of a materialist historiography as
political praxis. In the dialectical reversibility between completeness and incompleteness, the finite and the infinite, politics attains primacy over history (K1,
2). The destruction of the individual subject announces the political in the
complicity established between the I and its hetairon.
This complicity is captured in the image of the Turk from Thesis I.
To see it, it is crucial to follow the movement of the relation between the
136
chess-player and the puppet. The parataxis of man and puppet precludes
any sharp definition of one independently of the other. They can only be
independent in their interdependency. Thus, what matters in the operation
of the chess-playing automaton is not who controls the game of chess.11
Asking this question will inevitably conflate the movement of the pieces
and the game itself. In relation to the movement of the pieces, what matters
is the cooperation between the hidden chess-player and the puppet. And in
relation of the game itself, both the player and the puppet as independent
entities are secondary compared to the move the act on the board. This
board is the historians writing page which, however, is not blank. The black
and white pieces are already poised in a parataxis without which historiography is impossible. But historiography is equally impossible without the
empty squares that form the space between the pieces. Those squares can
be filled to infinity with different moves, but in each case are occupied by a
single piece, which is the product of a single move a single judgement of
the complicit man and puppet.
8
TRADITION AS INJUNCTION:
BENJAMIN AND THE CRITIQUE OF
HISTORICISMS
PHILIPPE SIMAY*
138
but two forms of historicism: the first, which is well known, postulates the
existence of a historical evolution; but also a conception of time apparently
close to Benjamins discontinuous, retrospective, entirely devoted to the
present which however swims with the current, because it considers the
past as a reserve of moments and things freely exploitable. If this second
side has gone relatively unnoticed, it is due mostly to the mixture of the
different characterizations of the concept of tradition which Benjamin
developed throughout his work. In this chapter I intend to go back over the
route which leads Benjamin to think the tradition in the present, to invent
other modalities of transmission, to reject the instrumental uses of the past,
in order to restore the subversive force contained in it. And in order to show
that tradition is not at all a principle of continuity, or something that can be
mastered, but rather the sudden appearance of an ethical injunction.
Tradition as Injunction
139
140
This aspect allows for the seizure of the authentic temporality of narrative
communication. If the story presents itself as an ancestral account, it
nevertheless takes form in the present: there is in it a part of invention, of
recreation. To make his account transmissible, the storyteller must actualize
what has been bequeathed to him according to the expectations of his
listeners; otherwise the listeners will pay no attention to him. He always
performs a critical evaluation of the past from the starting-point of its own
context of reception. This inventory work, properly hermeneutic, allows
him to make actual what is not actual any longer. The story is thus an
answer found in the past to a question formulated in the present. But, as it
is in the past that the present finds its answer, it inscribes itself within the
framework of a continuity a retrospective continuity, since it is the critical
recovery of the past, not the past itself, that has here a power of filiation.
For Benjamin, wisdom designates precisely this capacity of narration to
make past experiences actual and, vice versa, to make novel experiences
customary, relating them with things different from themselves in order
to create filiation and establish an intergenerational continuity. In fact,
the account, at the same time as resumption and as variable, possesses a
singular power of implication. On the one hand, the storyteller is always
concerned with describing the source from which his message comes and
his supposed competence ensues. He is authoritative just inasmuch as he is
able to mobilize in the narrative act the lineage of storytellers within which
he inscribes himself. On the other hand, he invites his listeners to inscribe
themselves too within this continuity. A man listening to a story is in the
company of the storyteller (GS 2.2: 456/SW 3: 156), says Benjamin. He
reinscribes dialectically in his own person the whole of past and present
generations. Thanks to his account, the past is constantly actualized and
the present is interpreted within the language of tradition. Precisely for this
reason, the storyteller is not simply the representative of a past tradition: he
fabricates tradition.
These analyses on the narrative pragmatics introduce a novel approach to
the traditional phenomena. Displacing the attention to an anthropological
ground, they disclose the way in which tradition is constituted in time. They
invite an investigation of its genesis in the present and no longer in the past,
as had been done until then. It is this displacement which leads Benjamin to
reject respectively the substantialist, essentialist, prospective and cumulative
conception of tradition.
Actually, it is with the substantialist conception that Benjamin first
breaks off. This conception, which identifies tradition with a thing or
group of things, is the most ancient and the most widespread. It originates
in the Roman law where it designates the transfer of material goods from a
possessor to a purchaser. By extension, it eventually came to designate only
the thing itself susceptible of being alienated and handed over in person.
Benjamin takes the opposite course of view. For him, not only is tradition
Tradition as Injunction
141
not a thing, but the elements which compose the tradition are not a priori
traditional. They become traditional only from the moment in which
they are transmitted. It is transmission that traditionizes its objects. The
important thing to reflect on is the process, not the product.
This change of perspective implies another change: if the elements which
constitute the tradition are not a priori endowed with a specific quality which
confers on them the privilege of being transmitted, that is because they do
not have an essence. Benjamin redoubles his critique of substantialism in a
critique of essentialism. He insists on showing that the content of tradition,
far from resembling an immutable truth, alters with time. Antiquity and
continuity are thus not the essential attributes of tradition. Tradition, even
though it has an identity within time, does not have an essence. What is
being discredited here are all those representations that assimilate tradition
with an intangible deposit and, therefore, also the institutions which claim
to be the traditions exclusive keeper.
Finally, Benjamin rejects the prospective and cumulative conception,
which postulates that tradition, far from being a simple repetition,
integrates also new elements. This novelty would introduce a cumulative
dimension, purely quantitative, which would explicate the continuity of
tradition within time. Whether it is assimilated to a concatenation of
prejudices by the French Enlightenment, or to a sedimented wisdom by
the English counterrevolutionaries, tradition is, in both cases, assimilated
to a continuum. It is against this conception that Benjamin will deploy
his most radical arguments. They can be found already, in a form indeed
highly speculative, in the epistemo-critical prologue of the Trauerspiel book.
His questioning the notion of origin did in fact lead him to doubt the
possibility of a veritable transmission of the past in a linear and continuous
form. Origin [Ursprung], he said, although an entirely historical category,
has, nevertheless, nothing to do with genesis [Entstehung]. The term origin is
not intended to describe the process by which the existent came into being,
but rather to describe that which emerges from the process of becoming
and disappearance (GS 1.1: 226/OT, p. 45). Since origin is that which
recurs as absolutely primary at any instant of its historical deployment, any
form of linear transmission cannot but betray it. Tradition as a continuum
ruins all that it transmits; it crystallizes the past considering every one of
its moments as bygone. In The Storyteller, Benjamin rather concentrates
on the prospective aspect of this continuum. The double movement of
reception and bequeathing indicates well that the active locus of tradition is
not to be found in the past, as the traditionalists like to repeat, but rather
in the present. The authentic movement of tradition does not go from the
past to the present but, inversely, from the present to the past. Benjamin
thus turns inside out, like a glove, the prospective conception of tradition.
The constitution of tradition happens always afterwards, in a properly
retrospective way. Therefore, it is not possible to consider tradition as a
142
Tradition as Injunction
143
already emerged and played a part in its reception. The places where
tradition breaks off hence its peaks and crags, which offer footing to
one who would cross over them it misses (N9a, 5)
Thus, Benjamin aims less at the prospective dimension of tradition than
its retrospective reconstruction, and the instrumental uses which follow.
This point shows well that Benjamins critique does not deal solely and
not even mainly, with the philosophies of progress. Thinking the tradition
in the present and as discontinuity must hinder any instrumental form
of transmission and reception of the past. What remains to be done is
to establish a different relationship with the past, to find how it can be
transmitted without lapsing into the pitfall of a normative continuity.
144
practicable and thus liquidating them. The latter are called the destructive.
The destructive character has the consciousness of historical man, whose
deepest emotion is an insuperable mistrust of the course of things and
a readiness at all times to recognize that everything can go wrong.
Therefore, the destructive character is reliability itself. (GS 4.1: 396/SW
2: 542)
Benjamin is clear: the destructive is a traditionalist. Nevertheless, such an
assertion raises a certain number of paradoxes: how can one transmit what
one destroys? Why are the traditionalists those who destroy? In what way
will the distrust towards the course of things be more faithful to the past?
These paradoxes are related mainly to how Benjamin seems to compare
the two modes of transmission as if each was autonomous. On the other
hand, the contradiction disappears if we do not consider destructivity as an
autonomous practice, but as a response to the aporias of the conservative
approach. It is therefore important not to dissociate Benjamins considerations
on destructivity from the critiques of tradition as a continuum. Once again,
what must be destroyed is a type of tradition, not tradition as such.
Destructivity is not just, as Arendt thought, a simple destruction. Its first
vocation is rather of a critical nature. Its first task is to reveal. Attacking
the conservative mode, destructivity casts light on that dark part which
tradition strives to mask behind a normative continuity. It unveils its
violence. This violence pertains to the process of transmission itself, which
manages to retain the past only at the expense of its appropriation and
reification: it mortifies and strikes to make it powerless in order to keep
only the material content. Once transmitted, the past becomes then the
object of tradition patrimony or booty at the disposal of the present. The
destructive character reveals that tradition is also a destructive force itself,
because it ruins all that it transmits. And if he uses a violence against it,
thats because of another violence, more insidious, which anticipates and
founds it. Violence for violence then, destruction of what is destructive: such
are the elements of a strategy which consists in turning tradition against
itself. This permits the wrenching of moments of the past from the process
of transmission, to restore to them the force of which they were deprived
by the normative continuity, to make them transmissible again. If there is a
paradox of destructivity, it lies in the fact that it reveals, restores and rescues
that which the linear transmission keeps betraying. The study of three
authors Kafka, Kraus and Fuchs allows Benjamin to bring to light these
three functions of destructivity.
Within the tradition of destructive characters who inspire Benjamin,
Kafka incontestably holds the first place. For Benjamin, as for many
intellectuals of his generation, Kafkas work embodies the disarray of the sons
facing the secularized Judaism of the fathers, the authoritarian guarantors
of a tradition fallen into abeyance. Kafkas texts evoke this atrophied,
Tradition as Injunction
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146
fragments until it empties the text of its own substance. The destructivity
of citation does not consist merely in extracting fragments of thought out of
texts, but also, and maybe principally, in subtracting them from the course
of their exposition in time, in breaking with the process of transmission that
inscribes them within a unique reading and a unique usage.
Here comes to light the restoring function of citation: its destructivity
emancipates, frees from the discursive order, that is, at the same time from
the texts and from the contexts of their reception. It is, says Benjamin, the
only power in which hope still resides that something might survive this
age because it was wrenched from it (GS 2.1: 365/SW 2: 455). What
conservation neutralizes, destructivity restores. Diverting these fragments of
thought from their primary significations and destinations, citation opens up
for them a different destiny. It makes its own content exploitable and hence
transmissible. It then regains its critical intensity and its subversive power.
Wrenching things from the continuity of tradition this is, for the
destructive character, the means to make them transmissible. For Benjamin,
no one demonstrates this better than the collector. He too wrenches the
work from its original context and frees it from the continuum of art
history. In his collections, things, far away from the world which saw their
creation, gain a novel signification. Like the one who cites, who recuperates
apparently insignificant fragments of texts, the authentic collector like
Pachinger or Fuchs becomes attached to any kind of object independently
of its commercial value or its cultural recognition. He destroys the codes
of the art market. For the fetish of the art market, Benjamin reminds
us, is the masters name. From a historical point of view, Fuchss greatest
achievement may be that he cleared the way for art history to be freed from
the fetish of the masters signature (GS 2.1: 503/SW 3: 283). The collector
makes visible the objects in the act of citing them, that is, in the fact of
considering them for themselves. As Benjamin says, the collectors true
passion, very misunderstood, is always anarchic, destructive. For this is his
dialectic: to tie the fidelity towards the thing, towards the singularity that
it conceals, with a subversive and obstinate protestation against the typical,
the classifiable (GS 3: 216). For the collector, the only understanding
of things lies in the acknowledgment of their uniqueness and in the
rejection of their normativity. Arendt acutely spotted, behind the collectors
apparent irreverence, the blow dealt to tradition: Therefore, while tradition
discriminates, the collector levels all differences. Against tradition the
collector pits the criterion of genuineness.2 But, according to Benjamin,
for the collector it is less a question of levelling all differences than of
questioning the classificatory logic of tradition, the legitimacy of criteria by
which it isolates and transmits cultural contents. In the essay on Fuchs, the
collector appears as opposing all the normative processes of transmission
and reception. Beside the official art history, which conserves from the past
only the masterpieces, his collection lets a subterranean history appear; it
Tradition as Injunction
147
148
the past has become citable. And if it is not in the power of the historian to
cite integrally every one of its moments, he can nevertheless wrench some
of them from the homogeneous and empty time in which various forms of
historicism put them. It is these forms of historicism that the Theses will
contest in order to restore the true face of the past.
Tradition as Injunction
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150
Tradition as Injunction
151
be broadened: with the manifest oppressors side also the conservatives, who
contemplate the past only under its patrimonial form.
Therefore, Gadamers hermeneutician is not so different from the
historian who identifies with the victor. Both take part in the same
hypocrisy which consists in remaining insensible to the nonfulfilment of
the past and to the laments contained in it by transforming them into
heritage. It is proper here to remember that, for Gadamer, understanding
the tradition means first of all finding in the past a legacy accepted with
reservations. This appropriation of the tradition is only possible if we
postulate that the past has ceased to send signals to the present and that
we do not expect anything more from it. Gadamer, moreover, willingly
confirms this. According to him:
Traditions essence implicates the unreflected restitution of the transmitted
past. In order to form an explicit conscience of the hermeneutic task of
appropriating tradition, tradition itself must have become problematical
. . . With the emergence of the historical conscience, which implicates
the presents gaining a fundamental distance from the whole of the
transmitted past, understanding has become an entirely different problem
that requires the guide of a methodology.6
The approach of understanding proceeds deliberately from a double outdistance
from tradition: on the one hand the past presents itself a priori as a text to be
deciphered, which will be proper to translate according to our own criteria;
and, on the other hand, the present claims to be the instance of judgement
which allows it to become the heir of the tradition without being under
any obligation to it. Postulating that the past is henceforth stricken with
strangeness, hermeneutics neutralizes the contestation which comes from it;
remaining deaf to the injunctions that it transmits, hermeneutics betrays the
tradition from which it claims to derive its authority; assimilating tradition to a
legacy, hermeneutics reduces it to a sum of items, it makes it an alienable good
that can be mastered: an instrument in the hands of the dominant class.
If, in Benjamin, the tradition as discontinuity makes way to the tradition
of the oppressed, it is because this is inseparable from the recollection of
a past of suffering, absent in Gadamer. Benjamins critique of the schemes
of historicity thus also includes a certain mode of thinking tradition in the
present. For Benjamin, the present cannot be that margin of exteriority
from which we redefine tradition in order to make it more easily a principle
of conformity to anything whatsoever. The notion of tradition of the
vanquished commits us to think of the ethic relationship that the present
maintains with its own anteriority: if the present turns towards the past, it is
not in order to interpret it or to find in it its benefit, but first of all in order
to be questioned by it. The past is not written in a foreign language. What it
says is clear to anyone who makes the effort to listen to it. For it:
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Tradition as Injunction
153
Every present day is determined by the images that are synchronic with
it: each now is the now of a particular recognizability. In it, truth is
charged to the bursting point with time. . . . It is not that what is past
casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is
past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash
with the now to form a constellation. In other words: image is dialectics
at a standstill. (N3,1)
The dialectical image forms a constellation where the past and the present
find, in a dialectic movement, their historical correspondence without the
necessity of going through the mediation of the temporal continuity. This
way, Benjamin manages to keep together the idea of discontinuity and the
one of a true relationship with the vanquished.
We can regret that the critics main concern has been to find out
whether materialism or theology will remove this aporia in interpretation,
without exploring other tracks. We wish, as a conclusion, to interrogate a
bit more the anthropological dimension of the tradition of the oppressed
and examine once again the Benjaminian concept of discontinuity.
Discontinuity is associated with the idea of breaches, of ruptures, or of
the explosion of the continuum of the tradition of the vanquished, but it
characterizes also the tradition of the oppressed as such. The conclusion is
generally that the tradition of the oppressed is the reverse of the one of the
oppressors, which makes it similar to the linear model, with the exception
that it will be punctuated with interruptions. Now, the tradition of the
oppressed is not structurally identical with the one of the victors: the
discontinuity of the tradition which characterizes the former is different
from the one which affects the latter. The discontinuity of the tradition
of the oppressed is not a rupture, even though it solicits a rupture in the
continuum of the victors. Nor is it linked to the retrospective character of
tradition, but to the fact that it is not something which can be possessed
and transmitted from hand to hand. Actually, in so far as this tradition is
neither a deposit nor a sum of items an inheritance susceptible to being
alienated it is impossible to establish in advance or retrospectively the
chain of its successive heirs. It is not simply something whose advance
within space and time we can follow. Discontinuity is thus to be thought
differently: it is more similar to a discrete in the mathematical sense
of the term series than to an addition of segments. The linear model,
with its axial, sinusoidal, segmentary logics, has to be substituted by a
radial model: diffusionist, disseminating, rhizomatic, even if these words,
foreign to a Benjaminian vocabulary, still spatialize too much the mode
of action of the tradition. We could here reverse Ren Chars sentence
according to which our heritance is not preceded by any testament,
for Benjamin, unlike Arendt,7 does not lament here the rupture of a
continuum, but rather affirms that the tradition of the oppressed points
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Tradition as Injunction
155
the vanquished does not release one from the (responsibility of) the decision.
Subjectivity is not the place of its inscription. It is only when the exigency
of justice will be entirely fulfilled that we could tell what this tradition was
and to whom it belonged. In the meantime the way we relate to tradition
constitutes nothing less than its condition of possibility.
The tradition of the vanquished is thus neither an authentic relationship
with time nor the assurance of a rectification of the past injustice. It offers
no guarantee. But it has the advantage of staying clear of all historicisms
and of their instrumental constructions of time. Benjamins message is
subtle but of great importance: it reminds us that considering tradition as
the transmission of a content which the past entrusts to us under the sign of
continuity or, on the contrary, as a reconstruction of the past in the present,
leads to a misunderstanding of its essential character. What is expressed in
the tradition is not an unmodifiable and intangible core which, from afar,
gives form to the present. Nor is it the game of infinite recompositions
according to the exigencies of actuality. The action proper to the tradition is
not to determine the conformity of different attitudes to a code of conduct,
but rather it is the investing of every new decision with the exigency on
whose behalf it claims to speak. In this sense, tradition and contestation
are one and the same. Forgetting this means to open the door to those
who, ready to run it, to administer it, to make it an instrument of control,
enclose tradition within conservatism. To wrench the tradition from the
conformism that wants to seize it means, on the contrary, to prevent what
freezes it in a normative system which will decide on the usages of the past.
It is in this sense that Benjamin, in Thesis VI, recognizes in the threat of
the tradition the very fact of it becoming tradition: The danger threatens
both the content of the tradition and those who inherit it. For both, it is
one and the same thing: the danger of becoming a tool of the ruling classes
(GS 1.2: 695/SW 4: 391). A double menace always weighs on tradition: the
first comes from the monolithism in which it can freeze; the second from
the opportunism in which it can dissolve and lose its instance of convening.
If, in fact, tradition is that modality of relation with the past that accepts
the contestation which derives from it, then to be within the tradition does
not mean to be guardians of a truth or a normative knowledge which in the
present finds a moment of its historical deployment; it rather means to feel
questioned by it in its own mode of being and to be called to answer for it
at any instant.
9
BOREDOM AND DISTRACTION:
THE MOODS OF MODERNITY
ANDREW BENJAMIN
OPENING
History, once freed from the hold of dates, involves bodily presence. The
presence of those bodies is positioned within a nexus of operations. If that
nexus can be named then it is the locus of moods. Moods are lived out;
equally, however, they are lived through. Implicit in the writings of Walter
Benjamin is a conception of historical subjectivity presented in terms of
moods. The project here is the formulation of that implicit presence. This
necessitates not just the recovery of this direction of thought, but the attempt
to plot possible interconnections of historical time and the complexity of
lived experience. What is essential is that their occurrence be understood
as integral to the formulation of modernity. Subjectivity cannot simply be
assumed. Its modern configuration is essential.
History, in Benjamins writings, is not a distant concern. While a late
work, On the Concept of History is a short text a set of theses through
which Benjamin began to give systematic expression to the final development
of a philosophy of history. The theses or notes contain certain allusions to
subjectivity. And yet, subjectivity is not incorporated as a condition of
history. Precluding a concern with subjectivity would seem to leave out an
important element through which experience and hence the subjects being
in the world takes place. This condition does not pertain to the psychic
dimension of subjectivity. The organization of experience experience as
organized takes place in terms of moods. Boredom and distraction, to cite
but two, are not conditions of a subject. On the contrary, they are conditions
of the world. And yet, they are neither arbitrary conditions, nor are they
historically random. Moods, it will be contended, are inextricably bound
up with the modern. This occurs both in terms of what would count as a
description of the modern and equally in terms of what will be described
as modernitys self-theorization. It should be added immediately that any
one instance of this self-theorization is not assumed to be true; indeed this
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could not be the case given fundamental distinctions as to how terms such as
boredom are conceived.1 Rather, part of what marks out the modern is the
presence of this self-theorization, a process bound up with the inevitability
of a form of conflict. Conflict can be defined, at the outset, as designating
differing and incompatible constructions of the present constructions
enjoining specific tasks that occur at the same point in chronological
time.2 This is the context within which a conception of mood needs to be
located.
Highlighting the centrality of moods has to be seen as a way of thinking
through a relationship between bodily presence and the operation of
historical time. (An operation thought beyond any conflation, let alone
identification, of historical time and chronology.) To the extent that
boredom functions as a mode determining experience, there will be an
important distinction between the factual boredom of a given individual
and the world that continues to present itself as boring. In the second
instance boredom will have a greater scope precisely because it is not
subject-dependent. (This form of boredom is not more authentic. Rather
it identifies a different locus of intervention and thus enjoins a different
politics.) However, there is the subjects boredom. There is the subjects
distraction; distracted by the world, though distracted nonetheless. If there
is a critique of experience that takes as its object an overcoming of the hold
of Kants Transcendental Aesthetic as the organization of experiences
possibility, then, it will be conjectured that it takes place not just through
the addition of moods but in relation to the complexity of subjectivity
that the interconnection of moods and historical time creates.3 The transcendental aesthetic need not refuse the hold of history per se, what it
refuses is a conception of history in which the detail of the now of its
happening demands specific attention. Moreover, it will be the identification of that now that allows for the advent of inventions and innovations
enjoining their own philosophical and political response. Interruption and
innovation demand more than simple incorporation. They allow for forms
of transformation. This is an argument advanced by Benjamin in relation
to the interruption within the presence and the practice of art brought
about by the emergence of reproducibility. (Clearly reproducibility, while
central to Benjamins position, can be read as a transformative figure. In
other words, reproducibility need not be literalized since more is at work.
Not only therefore can it be retained as a mark of interruption; in this
context it will also be the case that interruption as a potentiality need not
be identified with reproduction tout court.)
Positioning the importance of moods necessitates noting the way the
techniques of arts production are connected to the relationship between the
advent of the new and the recognition thus experience of the demands
made by it. The new therefore is not just a different image, let alone
another image. Benjamin argues this point in the following terms:
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It has always been one of the primary tasks of art to create a demand
whose full hour of satisfaction has not yet come. The history of every art
form has critical periods in which the particular form strains after effects,
which can be easily achieved only with a changed technical standard
that is to say, in a new art form. (SW 4: 266/GS 1.2: 5001)
What has to be read within this formulation is a state of affairs that is more
complex than first appears. Complexity arises precisely because the recognition of a demand is a position that can always be created retrospectively
by the advent of a new art form. (Development is neither deterministic
nor teleological.) The presence of the new the identification of the new
as the new can be grounded in the twofold movement of locating limits
and then defining their having been overcome. There is an inbuilt fragility
to this position since technological reproduction reproducibility, if only
in this context, being the mark of the new cannot preclude attempts to
explicate its presence within concepts and categories that are inappropriate.
(Fragility will re-emerge as an important motif.) However, what counts as
appropriate is not defined by the positing of an essential quality to art, but
rather is present in terms of the particularity of the art form itself. After all,
Benjamins formulation pertained to a new form einer neuen Kunstform
and not a new content. Particularity is as much concerned with the medium
as it is with the accompanying effect that forms will have on perception.
They will make up part of a general conception of the what and how of
perception. An example here is photography. The photograph breaks the
link between art and what Benjamin calls a works cult value.
Two points need to be made concerning this break. This first is that it
occurs because of the nature of the photograph as opposed to a work whose
particularity is located within ritual and thus as part of cult. On the other
hand, precisely because what is important is not the photographic content
per se, but the condition of its production and the implications of those
conditions, it will always be possible that a given content will have a greater
affinity to cult value than to its break with that value. The presence of the
face in a portrait, for example, will bring into play considerations that are
already incorporated in the oscillation between a set of eternal values,
the essentially human, the soul, etc., and the rearticulation of those values
within the ethics and politics of humanism. While the photograph of the
face will allow for such a possibility, the technique resulting in the photograph of the face holds out against it. The presence of these two possibilities,
a presence whose ambivalence will be a constitutive part of the work even
though only ever played out on the level of content marks the need for a
form of intervention. The site of intervention is this ambivalence the cause
of politics.4 In addition, though this is the argument to be developed, ambivalence will come to define not just art work but mood itself. The ontology
of art work will be defining the configuration of the moods of modernity.
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(Hence art will only ever enjoin politics to the extent that both content
understood as a predetermined image structured by a concern with meaning
and instrumentality are displaced in the name of technique.)5
Rather than assume this position, a specific location in Benjamins work
will provide a point of departure. The moods of distraction and boredom will
be central. Working through these organizing moods will demand a consideration of Convolute D of Benjamins The Arcades Project (a Convolute
whose title is Boredom, Eternal Return). A prelude is, of course, necessary.
It will be provided by Benjamins famous engagement with architecture
in The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility.
That engagement is presented in terms of distraction (Zerstreuung). The
argument to be developed is that distraction is an organizing mood of
modernity. Benjamins concern is to situate the emergence of distraction
within the context of arts reception. However, were it to be situated, in
addition, in relation to the emergence of art, remembering that Benjamin
limits his analysis to reception, then a further argument would be necessary.
What would need to be underlined is that distraction, as a mode of
reception, arises because of the unavoidable link between art and secularization. Art arises because the necessary inscription of objects within ritual
has been checked by developments within art itself. These developments
are themselves part of the process of secularization.6 With the abeyance of
ritual, differing subject positions arise. In this context therefore the link
between art and the secular entails the ineliminability of distraction as a
mode of reception. Distraction involves fragility. It is never absolute. The
subject is drawn across positions. Edges fray. Distraction is a form of ambivalence, one that presages another possibility. (Distraction and ambivalence
are signs of the secular.)
DISTRACTION
I am distracted, unable to concentrate, hence adrift. Not noticed, a haze
perhaps eine Nebelwelt (D1, 1) overtakes me. Of course, it is a haze
through which I see. As the haze settles perhaps the brouillard des
villes (D1, 4) its presence as a felt condition has vanished. In the grip of
boredom, inured to the situation in which I come to find myself, even my
boredom the imposition, its imposing presence leaves me unmoved.
What little interest there is. The subject, the fetish of a residual humanism,
matters little. What matters precisely because it matters for the subject is
the there is. Hence what little interest there is. How then does this there
is provide a way into the mood and thus into the subjects distraction, my
being distracted? The question therefore is what happens to the my within
the opening up of distraction in its encounter with the there is? Within
the movement, I return to myself. Once my being as me, my being me,
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161
since what takes place is the practice and history of discontinuities the
continuity of the discontinuous which are present both formally and
technically. This presence will have differential effects both on subjectivity
and relatedly on conditions of reception.
What arises from the centrality attributed to architecture is the possibility,
for Benjamin, of distinguishing between two modes of arts reception. The
first is the tactile and the second the optical. The first is linked to usage
(Gebrach). What is important is that within the opposition between the
tactile and the optical, the position that would be taken up by contemplation, and thus individual attention, no longer figures. The individual
as opposed to the mass does not have a position. A transformation has
occurred. Indeed, if there is to be a conception of the individual, then it will
have to be reworked after having taken up this new position. In other words,
if the individual is to emerge, it will only do so in relation to this reworked
conception of the mass. This conception is presented by Benjamin in the
opening lines of section XV of the essay the masses are a matrix adding
that it is in regard to this matrix that all habitual behaviour [alles gewohnte
Verhalten] towards works of art is today emerging newborn (SW 4: 267/GS
1.2: 503). The question of the habitual (the customary) is central. Art is
given again reborn because of a reconfiguration of the relationship
between subject and object. There is a shift in the comportment towards
the art object; because its occurrence is internal to art, such a move has to
be understood as concerning arts mode of formal presentation. The object
of art comes to be repositioned. (Thereby underlining the proposition that
objects only ever have discontinuities as histories.) Therefore, the disclosure
of art does not open beyond itself, precisely because the unity that bears the
name art is already the site of divergent activities and histories. Questions
of reception and production will always need to have been refracted through
this setting.
The mode of reception demarcated by the tactile, a mode that will also
predominate in relation to the optical and which defines reception in terms
of perception (Wahrnehmung) is structured by habit. That architecture
whose concern is with dwelling Wohnen should be defined in relation to
habit Gewohnheit is an important opening move and yet on its own is not
sufficient. What matters is the subject of habit and, as will be noted, habits
implicit temporal structure. Learning to live comes through habit. Within
the terms given by this setting the mass becomes the site of distraction.
The mass is distracted. The film positions the mass as mass. And yet, the
film brings with it a real possibility. Benjamin writes that the film makes
the cult value recede into the background not only because it encourages
an evaluating attitude in the audience, but also because, at the movies, the
evaluating attitude requires no attention (Aufmerksamkeit) (SW 4: 269/GS
1.2: 505). It is, of course, attention that, for Benjamin, is the term that
defines art as a relation between an individual and the singular work. The
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163
164
in one. What then is the mood of (for) the mass individual? Answering this
question will, in the end, necessitate returning to the relationship between
the there is and the my. In the move from my boredom to boredoms
there is quality, a different question emerges: Who is bored? This is the
question addressed to the mass individual.
BOREDOM
Convolute D of Benjamins the Arcades Project die Langeweile, ewige
Wiederkehr (Boredom and Eternal Return) does not have an intentional
structure. This must be necessarily the case. Nonetheless, the move from
the thematic of boredom to Nietzsche takes place via the intermediacy of
Blanqui. In regards to the latter, Benjamin cites specific passages from his
LEternit par les asters, a work that Benjamin will deem to be Nietzschean.
Deeming it as such was not based on a clear study of Nietzsche in any
straightforward sense, but rather from what he develops, using as its basis a
citation from Karl Lwiths 1935 study of Nietzsche. A quotation in which
the central section of Die frhliche Wissenschaft (The Gay Science) concerning
eternal recurrence is, indeed, repeated. The whole project therefore is
not just selective in terms of the tendentious nature of the quotation, but
its selectivity would be compounded if the proper names were allowed to
dominate. The Convolute is about the mood of boredom and the reality of
boredoms already present structural location within certain conceptions
of historical time. Again, mood meets time. The centrality of that connection
provides the way in and moreover allows the proper names to be positioned
beyond the hold or the accuracy of either citation or interpretation. Viewed
in this light, the interpretive question then has to concern the Convolutes
actual project.
Even though the elements of the Convolute would in the end need to
be detailed a move in which the identification of boredom is caught
between the weather, the sameness of grey, somnambulism, etc. the philosophical dimension of boredom is presented with its greatest acuity in the
following:
We are bored when we dont know what we are waiting for [worauf
wir warten]. That we do know or think we know is nearly always the
expression of our superficiality or inattention. Boredom is the threshold
[die Schwelle] of great deeds. Now it would be important to know: What
is the dialectical antithesis to boredom? (D2, 7)
The force of this final question resides in part in the answer not being
found in any attempt to identify the content of what we are waiting for.
This reinforces the centrality of Benjamins formalism in the sense that
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167
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169
the beginning (SW 2: 120/GS 3.1: 131). In both instances there is a type
of transformation. What is fundamental is its nature. The essence (Wesen)
of play resides in its being the transformation of a shattering experience in
to habit [der erschtterndsten Erfahrung in Gewohnheit]. Play allows an originating event to be accommodated. Living with it, becomes the registration
of play within habit and thus within dwelling. (This is the link between
Gewohnheit and Wohnen.) Habit, now as the living out of a certain structure
of activity, contains within it an element that cannot be mastered even by
the demand that habit has to be lived out continually. It harbours that transformative moment that is its own construction. Habit contains therefore not
the capacity to revert to play but the fundamental doubling that brings two
incompatible elements (unassimilable both as an occurrence and as image)
into a type of constellation; a constellation containing both the experience
that shatters and its transformation. This complexity has to be run back
through the construction of subjectivity; construction as a process of selfpossession. What will emerge is that in terms of their formal presence one
will mirror the other.
Gained in this act of self-possession is a doubled site. Play is the continual
encounter with a particular conception of the founding of subjectivity.
Founding involves a dislocation that locates. The re-presentation thus
reiteration of this positioning occurs as habit. The possession that we
have of ourselves prior to any encounter with the other is of a site that
is not simply doubled but constructed within and as ambivalence. What
enters into relations with the other, therefore, is this doubled entity who can
love and therefore be surprised because that transformative potential is
there from the start. However, precisely because it is given by a founding
ambiguity, even love will not transform absolutely. (Loves end is, after
all, an insistent possibility.) Nonetheless, love is only possible because of
an original ambivalence. However, this original condition is not to be
understood as epistemological. Ambivalence is not relativism. Even though
within the precise structures of Benjamins own formulation it may not have
been presented in these terms, ambivalence needs to be understood as an
ontological condition. As such, it is another description of what has already
been identified as the many in one. In other words, the mass individual is
the locus of ambivalence; the potentiality of the masses lies therein. The
realization of that potential, however, should not be interpreted as a move
from an ideological condition a state of self-deception towards truth.
Benjamin brings these elements together in the following formulation:
The sort of distraction that is provided by art represents a covert measure
of the extent to which it has become possible to perform new tasks of
apperception. Since, moreover, individuals are tempted to evade such
tasks, art will tackle the most difficult and important tasks where it is able
to mobilize the masses. (SW 4: 2689/GS 1.2: 505)
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10
WALTER BENJAMINS
INTERIOR HISTORY
CHARLES RICE
Against the armature of glass and iron, upholstery offers resistance with
its textiles (I3, 1). In this single line, embedded within the voluminous text
of Walter Benjamins Arcades Project, arcade and domestic interior come
together. This coming together is, however, arranged around a point of
resistance. Arcades offer a structural armature and a hardness of material
finish that upholstery and textiles resist in their stuffing and covering.
Arcades figure the wedded advance of technology and commerce, the
emblem of the modernizing city; upholstery and textiles figure the domestic
interior as a site of refuge from the city and its new, alienating forms
of experience. Yet this resistance heightens their mutual entanglement.
Benjamin writes of arcades themselves as kinds of interiors in the city, spaces
that reorganize relations between inside and outside: Arcades are houses or
passages having no outside like the dream (L1a, 1). And: The arcades,
which originally were designed to serve commercial ends, become dwelling
places in Fourier (AP, p. 17).
This chapter will think Benjamins historical work on the nineteenth
century through the concept of the interior, considering it as part of the
historical terrain he worked over, and as a figure for an organization of this
terrain, an organization which produced the Arcades Project, a document
which has largely been seen as incomplete, a provisional organization
for a complete conception of a materialist history of Paris, capital of the
nineteenth century.
In producing what might be called a history of discontinuity, Benjamin
recognized a productive instability in the concept of the interior, and in its
associated concepts such as dwelling and domesticity:
The difficulty in reflecting on dwelling: on the one hand, there is something
age-old perhaps eternal to be recognized here, the image of that abode
of the human being in the maternal womb; on the other hand, this motif
of primal history notwithstanding, we must understand dwelling in its
most extreme form as a condition of nineteenth-century existence. (I4, 4)
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173
places of dwelling are for the first time opposed to places of work. The
former come to constitute the interior. Its complement is the office (AP,
p. 19). The interiors emergence is identified with a new sort of division in
the urban and social fabric of nineteenth-century Paris. For the bourgeoisie,
dwelling becomes divided from work, and in this division the conditions for
the emergence of the domestic interior are made possible. This interior is a
space of immaterial, illusory experience produced from insistently material
effects. These effects are produced through the collection, consisting of
objects whose commodity character has been divested through their
presence in the interior. The particular affect of the interior emerges out of a
double play between the material nature of the collection and the expansive
illusion that the collection supports in bringing the distant in space and time
close to hand.
The interior is not just the universe of the private individual; it is also his
tui (AP, p. 20). This ability to dream away with objects is only possible
to the extent that the interior is a completely enclosed environment.
Benjamin writes of the interior encasing the inhabitant along with the
inhabitants objects. The surfaces of this encasing register the impression
of both inhabitant and objects alike. These traces of occupation, of a life,
are registered as a compensation for the alienation which is at the core
of a contemporary urban experience. Yet private life is also produced as
a life that can be detected and followed up through the traces that form
it. Here Benjamin locates the birth of the detective novel, a genre of the
private par excellence. The other side of this liberation into the private
is the mortification produced by the interior as encasing. Following the
traces registered in the interior leads to something akin to the uncovering
of a dead body.1
The liquidation of the interior took place during the last years of the
nineteenth century, in the work of Jugendstil, but it had been coming
for a long time (AP, p. 20). The interior confuses distinctions between
the animate and the inanimate, the living and the dead. The Jugendstil
artist/architect begins to assume the role of total designer, taking up the
tectonic elements of new constructional forms, and naturalizing them with
a distinctly animated and vegetal stylistic line. The individuality expressed
within the interior shifts from being that of the inhabitant, mediated
through collected objects, and becomes that of the architect-turned-artist,
whose artistic vision constricts the inhabitant. This liquidation of the
interior presents itself as the last moment of a bourgeois private life made
possible there.
In just two pages of text, we have a crystallization of the short historical
life of the bourgeois domestic interior. But, as Benjamin himself recognized,
it is a short historical life that has engendered a sense of timelessness. In his
seminal Illustrated History of Interior Decoration, Mario Praz has associated
this timelessness with the idea of a progressively developing history of the
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interior. Introducing this idea, he cites Benjamins expos in detail, emphasizing how it illuminates the relationship between the interior, its
decoration and the character of an inhabitant. Yet this relationship loses its
historical specificity and becomes generalized. In witnessing the destruction
of houses just after the Second World War, their interiors laid open with
some still furnished corner, dangling above the rubble, surrounded by ruin,
Praz muses:
The houses will rise again, and men will furnish houses as long as there
is breath in them. Just as our primitive ancestor built a shapeless chair
with hastily chopped branches, so the last man will save from the rubble a
stool or a tree stump on which to rest from his labours; and if his spirit is
freed a while from his woes, he will linger another moment and decorate
his room.2
Praz does not grasp how Benjamins account of the liquidation of the
interior, which Praz translates as its consummation,3 carries a force relative
to the political context of interwar Europe. For Benjamin, the liquidation
of the interior presages a cultural necessity to overcome the sort of thinking
that would essentialize the experience of dwelling in the interior, that would
make it something timeless and essential to identity. In the essay Experience
and Poverty Benjamin remarks:
If you enter a bourgeois room of the 1880s, for all the cosiness it radiates,
the strongest impression you receive may well be, Youve got no business
here. And in fact you have no business in that room, for there is no
spot on which the owner has not left his mark the ornaments on the
mantelpiece, the antimacassars on the armchairs, the transparencies in the
windows, the screen in front of the fire. A neat phrase by Brecht helps us
out here: Erase the traces! is the refrain in the first poem of his Lesebuch
fr Stdtebewohner [Reader for City-Dwellers] . . . This has now been
achieved by Scheerbart, with his glass, and the Bauhaus, with its steel.
They have created rooms in which it is hard to leave traces. It follows from
the foregoing, Scheerbart declared a good twenty years ago, that we can
surely talk about a culture of glass. The new glass-milieu will transform
humanity utterly. And now it remains only to be wished that the new
glass-culture will not encounter too many enemies. (SW 2: 734)
Benjamin writes of the need to overcome experience (Erfahrung), and the
connections to tradition that it implies, by overcoming the way in which
the interior resists the revolutionary aspects of an architecture of glass. This
overcoming was a political necessity, a necessity in not re-establishing a
connection to tradition and timeless values from the rubble of its destruction
but instead in accepting destruction, and the poverty of experience which
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to construct the walls; Benjamins own thoughts would have provided the
mortar to hold the building together.6
The metaphor is architectural, one of structural coherence from which an
image of completion can be projected. Yet in incomplete form, Tiedemann
remarks upon the oppressive weight of the excerpts. As editor of the
original German edition of the Arcades Project, he mentions the temptation
to publish only Benjamins comments. But the necessity of including the
excerpts, which are largely quotations from nineteenth-century sources and
which make up the bulk of the convolute material, comes with the possibility of seeing the Arcades Project as a complete edifice, one which the reader
should construct through his or her own reading of it.
Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, the editors and translators of the
English version, invoke a more structurally complex metaphor in describing
its ordering. The Arcades Project is the blueprint of an unimaginably massive
and labyrinthine architecture a dream city, in effect.7 They comment that
this might describe the project as research rather than the finished writingup or application of research. But they also note that the convolute material
was itself subject to revisions, itself being treated as a manuscript. Eiland and
McLaughlin ask: Why revise for a notebook? They describe the combining
of quoted fragments and Benjamins own commentaries as a deliberate
montaging:
[Such a] transcendence of the traditional book form would go together,
in this case, with the blasting apart of pragmatic historicism grounded,
as this always is, on the premise of a continuous and homogeneous temporality. Citation and commentary might then be perceived as intersecting
at a thousand different angles, setting up vibrations across the epochs of
recent history, so as to effect the cracking open of natural teleology.8
Susan Buck-Morss also confronts the reality of the compositional form of the
Arcades Project, writing of this nonexistent text.9 Yet for Buck-Morss, such
a nonexistent text can still be described as having an overall philosophical
conception, bringing together an earlier, theological stage in Benjamins
intellectual development, and a second Marxist phase. This conception she
describes as a dialectics of seeing.10 To aid in making manifest an overall
sense of order in the project, Buck-Morss develops several organizational
diagrams or displays that aim to give several forms of overview for the
project. She explains that there is no narrative continuity in the project,
but there is a conceptual coherence. Her own analysis of the project aims to
show its coherent and persistent philosophical design.11
Metaphors and diagrams of structure and organization drive these
analyses. Yet we might return again to Benjamins aphorism which opened
this chapter: Against the armature of glass and iron, upholstery offers
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gathering but also being formed and deformed through the impressions
made by the collected quotations: the plane of immanence is ceaselessly
being woven, like a gigantic shuttle.15
But the question still remained for Benjamin: how is the force of these
impressions to be divined? This question might be approached by thinking
through the relation between the Convolutes and the exposs. The exposs
can be seen as a way of exteriorizing his thinking, of letting it be imaged
within a world of intellectual formalities; yet the counterpart to this exteriorization is the deepening interiorization at work: an interiorization which,
as Missac suggests, conceals intentions.16 This double-play between the
Convolutes and exposs mimics the interiors historical emergence as both a
spatial and representational condition. In this doubled condition, an image
is not simply transparent to a space. So too with the exposs and Convolutes;
yet we might think of the trajectory of Benjamins thinking being traced out
between them. In this traced line, a dialectical image is formed, allowing
the fragments wrested from their temporal and associational embeddedness
to deliver the force of an argument to a present context of reception. Here is
Benjamin on the dialectical image:
What distinguishes images from the essences of phenomenology is their
historical index . . . These images are to be thought of entirely apart from
the categories of the human sciences, from so-called habitus, from style,
and the like. For the historical index of the images not only says that they
belong to a particular time; it says, above all, that they attain legibility
only at a particular time. And indeed, this acceding to legibility constitutes a specific critical point in the movement at their interior. (N3, 1)
The dialectical image, formed through the trace between Convolutes and
exposs, is the trace between the nineteenth century as archaic past and
Benjamins temporal present. It carries a force that produces an awakening
to the problems of the present. Specifically for the interior as a cultural
form, this awakening had to do with its abandonment as a space of retreat
and immersion. It is in the crystallization of a concept of modern dwelling
as rootless, open and on the move that the bourgeois domestic interior is
delivered of its regressive resistance, being delivered instead into a different
kind of resistance, one of revolutionary thinking, where the radical potential
for dwelling of a glass architecture is illuminated.
The force of Benjamins interiorized thinking breaks the interior apart.
This breaking apart, only possible through an immersion within the
interior, renders the eternal sense of dwelling radically historical. But this
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11
WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH
ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY?
GEVORK HARTOONIAN
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this situation, any relation to the past is subject to temporality, as the storm
of progress moves from one catastrophic situation to another. According to
Franoise Choay, the historic monument has a different relationship to living
memory and to the passage of time. On the one hand, she continues:
It is simply constituted as an object of knowledge and integrated into
a linear conception of time: in this case its cognitive value relegates it
irrevocably to the past, or . . . to the history of art in particular; on the
other hand, as a work of art it can address itself to our artistic sensibility,
to our artistic will.5
If Choay is correct in claiming that the dawn of this new century witnesses
the decay of our competence to build, then, how should architecture
articulate the architectonic of that witnessing? Choays idea of the decay
of competence to build alludes to the disappearance of that totality which
prevailed in premodern era. The artistic representation of that totality was
indeed the content of what architects and builders would create under the
name of place. But does that decay also banish the vision of competence to
build?6
The place is experienced through technique. But techniques are not just
an assembly of tools: besides doing what they are invented for, techniques
set up a particular movement and rhythm the temporality of which coordinates the bodys action and its relation to a place.7 Those who lived through
the modern times had access to technologies that launched the first attack
on the spirit of the place, the experience of which was based on natural
time. The present experience of time, framed by the advent of electronic
networking, enjoys a different temporality. Modern industrial techniques
and machines were operating at such a capacity that Karl Marx characterized them as tools extending the performance of the organic potentialities
of the body. Electronic technologies, if one relies on Jean-Franois Lyotards
account in The Postmodern Condition, are changing the balance between the
natural, the body and the built-form. Computer technologies have changed
our communication system. They have also shaken the situation where one
could have space for self-contemplation. Privacy, the microspace, is invaded,
if not taken over by the global flow of information and goods. We eat,
wear, watch and even dream about things that have the least relation to our
immediate place. Involuntary memory of a bygone place is the only thing
left to the present generation, and the next generation of architects might
have even less chance to imagine and contemplate a memory that would
evoke any aspects of the competence to build.
This discussion entails two assumptions; firstly, that progress is registered
in an understanding of time that orchestrates ones experience of the natural
time. Progress progresses, but its flow does not suggest that history unfolds
according to a pre-planned linear path. Secondly, the juxtaposition between
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the natural and the ruins of modernity the piled wreckage of the past is
essential for understanding that in the landscape of modernity everything is
already history. According to Harry Harootunian, all production immediately falls into ruin, thereafter to be set in stone without revealing what it
had once signified, since the inscriptions are illegible or written in the dead
language. And he concludes: beneath the historical present, however, lie
the spectres, the phantoms, waiting to reappear and upset it.8 What does
this statement, which addresses something central to Benjamins vision of
history, entail for architecture?
The question necessitates two considerations: First, to differentiate history
from historiography, and second, to underline the specificity of architectures relation to history. The difference between history and historiography
is obvious, but needs to be reiterated mainly because of Benjamins unique
intellectual cause. The title of Werckmeisters essay, mentioned in note 3,
anticipates the authors detailed account of Benjamins various rewritings
of what finally would be formulated as the angel of history. The transfiguration of the revolutionary into the historian, the subtitle of Werckmeisters
essay, summarizes the tale of Benjamins intellectual life, which was closely
connected to the broader praxis of the Left in 1930s. In the available
four versions of Benjamins text the reader notes a modification at work
which not only demonstrates Benjamins disappointment with the fate of
revolution in those days, but also unfolds the process of distillation of the
concept of angel from all religious connotations except one: that the angel,
like a superman, represents the image of a gifted revolutionary figure who
could read more into the rubble of history than anybody else. In giving up
the idea of progress as the ultimate engine of political revolution, Benjamin
turned the revolutionary and constructive aspects of Marxs understanding
of history into the act of historiography. While historicism is content with
establishing a causal connection between various moments in history, and
perpetuates the eternal image of the past, materialistic historiography,
according to Benjamin, is based on a constructive principle. Thinking
involves not only the movement of thoughts, but their arrest as well (SW 4:
396). What is involved in arresting the thought?
If historicism endorses the flow of time, then, one way to halt this
continuum would be to arrest the time.9 When the time is out of joint, as
Shakespeare puts it in Hamlet, then the present is saturated by the propelling
wreckage of the past. In this standstill situation the present merges with the
past, but the distinction between the old and the new does not disappear.
The redemptive power of the past rather shines out of the surface of the new.
The historian should capture the gaze of that power.
Such was the situation in the Russia of 1920s, a historical period the
transformation of which was of great interest to Benjamin. In his journey to
Moscow, he witnessed how his concept of history was under construction.
The Russian constructivists considered themselves constructors and not
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To say that the historians vision is overcast by the apparition of an architects work necessitates a discussion that, in the first place, involves the task
of the historian, and in the second, demands specifying the subject matter
of architectural history. The point is not to picture the architect as a gifted
seer, but to underline the importance of the work itself. How the project
addresses the interiority of architecture, and in doing so interjects a critical
horizon into the historians discourse?
The autonomy of architectures interiority has always been understood in
reference to architectures dialogue with institutions, among which the most
influential are land, capital and technology. These three factors are essential
for differentiating architecture from other artistic activities. Paradoxically,
it can be claimed that the very realization of architectures project is bound
to the investment of capital, land and technology. Architecture cannot be
constructive and transform the built environment effectively without these
factors. This is not to deny the fact that utopian projects could also inform
the historical development of architecture.
To avoid general theorization of the task of the historian, the subject
should be discussed in conjunction to the ways architecture differs from
visual arts, painting and sculpture in particular. Hence the importance
of asking an old question: what is architectural in architecture? And, how
is architectures particularity approached in the historians text? That the
discipline of architectural history is a young one and was born out of the
bone of art history says nothing new. What is important in reiterating this
old story, however, involves an argument to address architectural history in
reference to the formative themes of architectures disciplinary history; a
subject dismissed by art history in most cases.
Before the mechanical reproduction of art, the symbolic content of the
artwork was detrimental in differentiating artistic creativities from each
other. In the Renaissance, for example, the homology between arts was
discussed in reference to simulacra the symbolic association made between
everyday life and the divine world of Christianity. Although the symbolic
content, the aura of the artwork discussed by Benjamin, disappeared when
modern technologies were infused into the process of production, nevertheless the artisanal dimension of architecture was little changed. This is one
reason why, towards the end of the work of art essay, Benjamin discusses
architecture in terms of habit and the tactile, rather than the optical. Even
transformation taking place in the optical realm is considered effective
when it is changed into habit. That which bonds architecture in premodern
societies with painting and sculpture is indeed the works symbolic content
and not the technique specific to each artistic activity. Still, after the birth
of art history in the nineteenth century, the perceived homologies between
different artistic productions was formulated in terms of style, understood
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ways the work presents itself to the historian. This prompts a discussion
that concerns the essentiality of the tectonic for architecture but also the
poetics (image-laden quality) of construction: a subject that triggered debate
between Alois Riegl and Semperians.27
Riegl, an Austrian art historian, challenged the idea of autonomy implied
in Wlfflins remarks on the formal properties of art, and underlined the
beholders role in the internal unity of painting and its necessity for the
evolution of art from the haptic (volumetric) to the optic (spatial).28 Riegl
was also interested in the autonomous nature of the work of art. He was less
concerned for the subjective process of creation, or a materialistic interest
in matter-of-factness. Kunstwollen, artistic volition, was for Riegl a gestalt
of continuous flow of thought that would make a reciprocal dialogue with
sociotechnological transformations.29 Riegls importance, however, lay in
his argument that stylistic changes are driven by the perceptual world.
When Benjamin made his famous statement that, just as the entire mode
of existence of human collective changes over long historical periods, so too
does their mode of perception (SW 4: 255), the major historical example he
provided was from the late Roman art industry whose birth, according to
Riegl, coincided with a sense of perception different from the classical one.
Obviously Benjamin had read Riegls Late Roman Art Industry; nevertheless,
he criticized Riegl for not discussing the social sources of the alleged new
perception (SW 2: 255). What was intriguing to Benjamin was the contemporaneity that would catch up with Riegls writing a decade later through
expressionism. This opens an opportunity to make a similar claim: Riegl was
not just reformulating Wlfflins ideas; it was rather the contemporaneity of
Sempers position on history and style that haunted Riegls discourse.
Semper and Riegl agreed on one point: that techniques, skills and forms
developed in the applied and decorative arts are important for major artistic
production beyond territorial constraint. Their difference, however, points
to the art historians concern for surface and image, and the tectonic for
Semper. This is how Alina Payne articulates the ways these two important
figures of the late nineteenth century read fabrication and surface:
For Riegl the carpet was not an example of fabrication, of manipulation
by the hand, tied into an anthropological explication of the development
of shelter-making as it had been for Semper. Instead, he looked at the
carpet as a decorative, painting-like surface, displaying a will-to-form that
reached all artistic production and manifested itself in the predilection for
a particular range of decorative motifs.30
The difference is obvious: abstraction in Riegls position unfolds a new
horizon in discussing the work of painting. Abstraction figures itself, in
the first place, in the virtual space sought by the painter (Rembrandt in his
Dutch Portrait paintings). The painted image embodies both the space
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of the beholder and that of the canvas. Thus according to Benjamin Riegl
exemplifies the masterly command of the transition from the individual
object to the cultural and intellectual [geistig] function (SW 2: 668). In
the second place, abstraction is recognized as a cognitive tool to periodize
history. In contemplating the developmental process of art from the haptic
to the optical, Riegl failed to recognize the import of modern institutions for
any production activity. His main focus was directed towards a discussion
of architecture that is not a self-reflecting object, but includes the spectator.
Semper, instead, chides the thing character of the artefact whose aesthetic
is not seen as an autonomous entity perceived by the beholder; rather it is
revealed through the embellishment of material and purpose (ur-form). The
surface of the carpet has no life of its own; it is woven into the technique of
fabrication, even if the latter is not visible as is the case with the carpet, or
implied as understood in Sempers formulation of the relationship between
the art-form and the core-form. Furthermore, contrary to Riegl, Sempers
theorization of architecture does not end in a closed system; once the
particularity of architecture is recognized in the tectonic, the autonomy
of architecture is located in the matrix of the disciplinary history of architecture and techniques developing outside of that history, but in close ties
with historical transformation.
The discussion presented here does not attempt to pit Semper against
Riegl. The aim is to show how the architects understanding of the disciplinary history of architecture differs from those which have prevailed in
art history. Also mention should be made to the specificity of the suggested
openness in Sempers theory: he not only theorized architecture beyond
the historicity of the nineteenth-century debates on style but, more importantly, his discourse on the tectonic places architecture squarely in
relation to modernization. That architecture should rethink its own history
based on the prevailed techniques of making does, paradoxically, subject
architecture to the nihilism of modernity. This is one reason why the tectonic
has become of interest to most contemporary historians who attempt to
formulate the thematic of critical practice. Paradoxically, those who want
to theorize at present architecture along with the spectacle generated by
computer technologies appropriate Sempers ideas too.31
The suggested openness and closure is not exclusive to Semper: many
modernists who wanted to avoid making a one-to-one correspondence
between the spirit of time and architecture also sought to rethink architectures interiority according to the demands of time.32 This much is clear
from Charles Garnier, the architect of the Opera House in Paris, who
discusses architecture not only within history but also in its engagement in
the construction of history. In his words, architects who build monuments
must consider themselves to be the writers of future history; they must
indicate in their works the characteristics of the time in which they create;
finally they must, through duty and through the love of the truth, inscribe
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of the great geniuses who created them, but also, in one degree or another,
to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries. And he continues: There
is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of
barbarism (SW 3: 267). One implication of Benjamins statement can be
formulated in the following words: by dismantling the work, the historian
ends in the construction of a montage of stories, each unfolding the contradictions involved in the process of the design and construction of the work.
How architecture relates to institutions, for instance? As a document, the
work should be read, as Benjamins remarks on history suggests, against the
network of intentions that create the condition for the works production.
Only in this way, Carlo Ginzburg reminds us, will it be possible to take
into account, against the tendency of the relativists to ignore the one or the
other, power relationships as well as what is irreducible to them.38 Secondly,
attention should be given to how the work translates material and technique
into tectonic figuration. The tectonic as theorized by Semper allows deconstruction of all kinds of unities and continuities essential for the humanist
discourse on architecture. By distancing his theory of architecture from
the theological aspects of Riegls ideas implied in Kunstwollen, the tectonic
formulates what is intrinsic to the art of building (architectures interiority)
with factors extraneous to architecture. What the tectonic means to architecture could be associated with the impact of the mechanical reproduction
of the artwork and the loss of aura. This suggests a passage from poesis to
techne,39 an opening that necessitates a critical dialogue between architecture
and modernity. Another implication of Benjamins observation concerns
the durability of the work: that architecture survives its time through the
culture of building rather the intentions of the architect, or because of the
physical strength of building.
In leaving the architects intentions behind, it remains to establish
another aspect of the task-awaiting historian: what is the particularity
of the work, a building that invites criticism? And, given the disjunction
between autonomy and historicity, is it not, then, the particularity of a work
that opens itself up as historical? To make an opening to these questions,
a distinction should be made between the work of a connoisseur and that
of the historian. The formers task is limited to recognizing the presence
of the hand of the genius in the work and issues relevant to style. Before
the rise of art history, most discussions concerning architectural history
aimed at characterizing the particularity of the work in association with
a style-determined period, and/or the artists skills in demonstrating the
essentiality of mimesis for the work.40 The historian instead cuts through
the work and produces knowledge. And yet, the knowledge one receives
from architecture would not become constructive if it does not stand as
historical. If historical does not concern style, then what does it stand for?
In the first place, historical concerns the question of modernity in its many
manifestations, including criticism as a negative court of judgement,41 but
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understanding of architecture, but it also underlines any critical reinterpretation of contemporary architecture. Secondly, the idea of project should
be understood as a failure in the architects attempt to present a totalized
picture of diverse stories involved in the works realization. This demands
inflicting the historicality of the work with the problematic of the present
architectural praxis, that is, the technification of architecture,45 and the level
of abstraction involved in the process of design as architects utilize telecommunication technologies. Finally, the future that a project assigns to itself
should be regarded as the architectonic realization of a past whose traces can
be recovered by the fleeting moments of the present. In this reconstruction
architecture loses its autonomy and becomes a fragment in the constellation
of a broader knowledge, the constructive principle of which is montage.46
Architecture is indeed recognized as architecture by opening itself into the
world. In doing so architecture saves its own claim on history taking a critical
role in the construction of the conditions of life.
12
MESSIANIC EPISTEMOLOGY:
THESIS XV
ROBERT GIBBS
The representation of time too easily divides into the opposition of lines
and circles. One seems to be either looking down the line from the height
of progress (modernity) or up the line, back from the decline of civilization
(ancient) or else one is stuck on the wheel of time, fated to repeat what has
gone before. Historians oblige us by compiling chronicles and chronologies
of events or occasionally painting a grand canvas of rises and falls. Time
moves on inexorably, either off to the horizon or in an endless spinning of
the eternal return of the same.
We do not live time in some special nonrepresentational way, where the
flowing-off of the moment is given in pure immediacy. Rather, we live
time through our representations of it, in the newspaper, on the television,
according to the clock, following the prompting of the palm-pilot. Time is
not simply a flow or a river for us, but is rather broken into chunks, hours,
minutes, days, weeks of holidays, quarters of a game, seconds downloading
images, years watching our children grow. It is not one event after another,
but it is measurable and publicly standardized and, while punctuated, there
is a memory of a past and an expectation of the future that hangs on our
clock and calendar. The messianic, however, is a name for a not-yet, a future
that exceeds the present, that interrupts it and our own expectations for a
future. If we were able to draw time as a line or as a circle, the messianic
would break it apart. It is not the end of the line, a distant, far-off moment,
thousands of years hence, but rather, an interruption now, or almost now.
In the next moment. Today. . .
There is likely no theme more over-exposed and over-theorized in
Benjamins work than the messianic. In this volume alone, there will be
several serious discussions of it, and the bibliography on that topic would
run to dozens if not scores of important essays by scholars, by critics, by
philosophers.1 This discussion will not serve as a literature review, but will
offer a specific angle of enquiry. For a few years I have explored a group of
twentieth-century Jewish thinkers who developed a parallel interpretation
of the messianic: Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber,
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ROSENZWEIG ON CALENDARS
There are three kinds of calendars, according to Rosenzweig, and each offers
a way of living time in a cycle. The three are, as is typical for Rosenzweig:
Jewish, Christian and Pagan. The one that requires the most explanation
is the Jewish calendar, but not because it is lunar and so has a complicated
intercalation formula. No, its demand is that we think about time not
merely linearly, but more importantly, not merely circularly.
Rosenzweig develops an account of eternity that requires eternity not to
be a flight from time, but an insertion of eternality into temporality. Our
lived time must itself become changed, and become in that sense messianic.
We live time socially and experience time with the breaks and units that
society imposes. In the evening we seek shelter and eat; at sunrise we rise.
Of course, the seasons also provide a certain kind of regularity, but the
most basic units in our lives arise from the regular repetitions of socially
constructed bits of time: the hour, the week and the year as marked on our
calendars. Constructions that are not merely time-lines, that measure the
passing away of time, but allow for the circling back of time. The revolution
in time by which the messianic enters, for Rosenzweig, is the bending of
time into a circle that allows the past moment to come again. The contrast
begins, for Rosenzweig, with the hour, and proceeds from the hour to the
week, and thence to the year.
The new we seek must be a nunc stans, not a vanishing moment thus, but
a standing one. Such a standing now is called, in contrast to the moment,
an hour [Stunde]. Because it is standing, the hour can already contain
within itself the multiplicity of old and new, the fullness of moments.
Its end can discharge back into its beginning, because it has a middle
indeed many middle moments between its beginning and its end. With
beginning, middle, and end it can become that which the mere sequence
of individual and ever new moments never can, a recoiling circle. In
itself it can now be full of moments and yet ever equal to itself again.
When an hour is up, there begins not only a new hour, much as a new
moment relieves the old one. Rather, there begins again an hour. This
re-commencement, however, would not be possible for the hour if it were
merely a sequence of moments such as it indeed is in its middle. It is
possible only because the hour has beginning and end. Only the striking
of the bells establishes the hour, not the ticking of the pendulum. For the
hour is a wholly human institution. (3223/290)3
For Rosenzweig, the hour allows for a specific form of repetition: where
it is not simply the same thing over and over again, but when the unit is
born from a holding together of beginning, middle and end. They are held
together through the time of the hour. The diachrony of the moments allows
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for a new one to replace the old one, in the precise sense of repeating. Not
the incessant flow of one thing after another (tick-tock), but the chiming
signals the flow that is contained within a narrative of the hour. What comes
after an hour? Another one with another narrative. But what comes after the
instant? Some other instant with no repetition, no recurrence. Rosenzweig
does not replace the random flow of events with a synoptic vision of the
whole. Rather, in moving into the next hour, we are cast back on the
beginning to live through it again. When we hear the chime, we think, it
is starting again. Time has passed, but it is a new hour.
In an even bolder manner, the week structures our experience of time
because on the seventh day we stop our work. Here the end bears a specific
mark of reflection, of completion. Rosenzweig accepts Hermann Cohens
reading that emphasizes the social justice dimension of the Sabbath
(depending on reading the Deuteronomy version of the commandment).
Thus the week with its day of rest is the proper sign of human freedom.
Scripture thus explains the sign by its purpose and not its basis. The week
is the true hour of all the times of the common human life, posited for
people alone, set free from the orbit of the earth and thus altogether law
for the earth and the changing times of its service . . . But how then does
the power to force eternity to accept the invitation reside in prayer? . . .
Because time which is prepared for the visit of eternity is not the individuals time, not mine, yours or his secret time: it is everyones time. Day,
week, year belong to everyone in common, are grounded in the worlds
orbit of the earth which patiently bears them all and in the law of labor
on earth which is common to all. The clocks chiming of the hour is for
every ear. (3245/291)
Here two further claims are bound up with the recycling circle: the social
dimension of lived time and the invocation of eternity. They are not haphazardly linked, however. For Rosenzweig the key to interpreting eternity is
to see it as a social reality, a world to come, a way for individuals and the
community to be bound together in institutions and practices. The universality of the lived time of a calendar, particularly when the Sabbath requires
all to rest; not just the masters, but also the servants; not just the men, but
also the women; not just the citizens, but also the resident aliens. This public
rhythm of the week embraces all and so marks the sense of eternity in time.
Only at the end of days is everything common, Rosenzweig comments on
this page, and so the common time now is an image, a pre-experience, of
the messianic time.
So far, we would have, then, a circle that repeats, and a moment of interruption that allows us to see the repetition, to experience it only through
the distended experience of living in time. Not so much a circle, then, as a
kind of gear, or counter. But in the Jewish tradition there is also a calendar
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for the year, and that calendar is built out of the weeks. The building up
of the year depends on reading a different portion of the Torah scroll (the
first five books of the Bible) each week. Those portions are read in sequence.
Rosenzweig explains how the sequence of sabbatical readings makes a year:
In which the spiritual year is grounded, the recurrence in its recurrence,
of the Sabbath. In the cycle of weekly portions, which in the course of
one year, run through the whole of the Torah, the spiritual year is paced
out, and the paces of this course are the Sabbaths. By and large, every
Sabbath is like every other, but the change in the portions of Scripture
distinguishes each from each, and this lets us know that there is not a
last portion, but that they are only individual parts of a higher order, of
the year. For in the year the individual parts first again fuse into a whole.
The Sabbath bestows existence [Dasein] on the year. This existence must
be recreated week by week. The spiritual year must always completely
begin in the weekly portions of the running week. It knows, so to speak,
only what is found in this weeks portion, but it will become a year first
through that, so that each week is only a fleeting moment. It is first in the
course of Sabbaths that the year rounds to a garland. The very regularity
in the course of the Sabbaths, the very fact that, aside from the weekly
portions, one Sabbath is just like the other makes them the cornerstones
of the year. (344/310)
Here is the production of a year. The next week is the same as last week
when viewed as a week. One finishes and it begins again. But a year is
a longer story than a week, and the Jewish year is told with a sequence of
holidays, and even more basically with a course of Sabbaths, each one a
piece of the Torah scroll. Of course, one year is the same as the last, too,
because we read the relevant portions one after the other. The eternity is the
repetition of the Torah, but now the Torah as read in synagogue. It takes
Jews today one year to read the Torah. The narrative is built on the portions
of Torah read, week by week, that make a year of the scroll. And at the end
of the year, the scroll must be re-rolled. The rolling and re-rolling of the
Torah is the image of this circle of Jewish reading. Thus rolling the scroll
is the time that is the performance of eternity. It always begins again, even
when it has just finished. The year is the diagetic time, just long enough to
tell the story of the Torah. The time it takes to read through the scroll is the
measure of the year.
But what of the text read? The portions do not lead up to the present
time. This is not a New York Times bestseller that explains how the USA got
into Iraq. The story told is the history of the world up to the Patriarchs
and Matriarchs, and then up through the birth of the nation (drawn forth
through the waters), the giving of the law, the wandering in the desert and
preparation for entering into the promised land. Although the story is the
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story of the Jews, the current readers are not the characters in it. It is set,
even in its textual development, as a history of what happened long ago. The
story told does not connect with the time of its telling. Indeed, the story told
does not lead continuously into the time of the editing of the Torah, or to
the time of its first public reading under Ezra.
Surely this account of the history of the world up through the birth
of the Israelite nation works as a kind of history because it is unwilling
to collapse the distance between its listeners/readers and the events being
told. But it is not merely that we now perceive a gap between us moderns
and this ancient text: the text itself is built on a gap of time. A gap that is
not bridged by the story. Rosenzweig managed to read Jewish holidays as
following that sequence creationrevelationredemption, showing that the
cycling in our calendar has within it a cycle of a history of past events, events
held in their pastness. This cycle is experienced as weeks of portions of an
earlier story itself rolled up in a scroll. The way to experience eternity is
not by a collapse of this historical gap. Rather, each year the exodus from
Egypt repeats, and each year it seems to be not about us, the readers; (it has
its internal connection to the plagues and the revelation at Sinai), and yet
we readers participate in eternity by listening to it each year. That it takes a
year to read the scroll, gives it a certain kind of narrativity, that each station
on the cycle of our year has its own story, law, genealogy, etc., has its own
bit of Torah, that seems more perplexing.
The waters part year after year on the same week (of the lunar calendar).
Does it mean the same thing to its readers, year after year? No, of course not.
But Jews do not substitute some other event (for instance, the death of Julius
Caesar). Always the same text at the same season, whatever is happening
to the readers. Whatever has happened since last year. (Because what has
happened is the congregation has read to the end of Deuteronomy, rerolled the scroll.) The weekly portion is the template of Jewish time, even
though there is no connection from past to present.
But perhaps we have not quite grasped the Torahs own temporality. For
the events that happen there are not governed by necessity but by freedom,
and told by a specific kind of discontinuity. Hardly a chronicle, the Torahs
sequence follows enigmatic construction principles. The beginning, middle
and end are themselves neither a haphazard sequence nor a straight narrative
line. What we do see, however, is that people speak and they act, and they
are surprised by events. Perhaps they are even more surprised than we,
because we have read the story just last year. But if our sequence of reading
is fixed, our own lives are not governed by a necessity.
The Hegelian historiography that Rosenzweig rebelled against was one
of world-historical necessity. When Rosenzweig says the Jews are eternal,
or rather have eternal life implanted within them, he is saying, at least, that
they do not participate in the dialectics and the necessities of world-history.
For many people, this has meant that Rosenzweig thinks that Jews and
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Judaism have no history of any sort. But I think I can begin to show how
we might release Rosenzweig from this prison.
Jews experience their eternality, the eternal life, by reading each year the
same portion, a portion which always has its own discontinuities within
it and its sense of contingency. That reading alerts us to see our present
moment as also one that is not fated or governed by the sway of worldhistory. Whether we are in Babylon or Spain, under emperors, kings, or even
President Bush, we persist in seeing our own time as bound to a template
that resists a reduction to necessity. Messianic hope arises from a Torah
portion promising change and justice and it does not stop short of criticizing the practices and ideas of its narrated time. Indeed, one can consult
biblical historians who recognize the concerns of the redactors, and see the
Torah text itself criticizing the prevalent ideas and practices at the time of
its editing or its first public reading. The Torah portion messianically breaks
the spell of our present moment, and so makes us free due to the discontinuity between our own moment and the moment of which we read.
This is a calendar of a specific sort because of its mapping onto the Torah
reading. The Torahs own modes of discontinuity and demands for justice,
and dreams of peace, interrupt its story, but our reading of it places a series
of discontinuities into our experience of the year. The year is a set of circles.
At the innermost one is the Torahs text. It follows the patterns of its written
scroll, but what it tells of is fraught with interruptions and even messianic
shards. At the outside is the time of our year, marked out by the portions
of the scroll. The outer circle is the time of reading, not continuous, but set
apart to mark the change of the weeks that as units are alike. The relation
of the inner and outer circles is one of mutual disruption, but performed by
the community.
However, there are two other forms of calendar, and it is in confronting
these that we may find insight into the specificity of this Jewish calendar.
Every society has its holidays. Rosenzweig acknowledges these as follows:
Here is the place for all of the historical commemorative days [Gedenktage],
in which humanity is conscious of its course through time. Such anniversaries change with the changing centuries, are different from place to
place and from government to government; but as long as each one is
celebrated, it is filled with human joy in the living worldly present and
the hope for a still better, still richer, in short a growing life in the future.
For us, the few remembrance days of our peoples history we have, because
they are past, have become permanently fixed. (410/368)
These are holidays that are in principle changeable, and indeed, changing.
The Jewish calendar, though built on the rolling of the scroll, also has its
set of holidays, holidays which do not change. Victorias birthday, however,
was not destined to be celebrated after the end of her reign. Pearl Harbor
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Day is quickly fading from importance as Martin Luther King Jr Day rises
on the scene. But the need to commemorate is linked here to the future, to
allow past events to enhance our present hope. What is past connects us to
our nation, to our peoples, fashioning a certain resistance to the flowing off of
time. But the sequence does not follow a single text, is not marked off by the
sequence within the Torah scroll. And when the Jews add events, they become
utterly fixed, and so do not breathe with the sense of adding and dropping
of holidays that show the way that secular communities live in the flowing of
time, even that their communities are destined to flow along and disappear.
The retention of the memory is clearly linked to an identifying process. It is
not the simple task of the positivist historian, but it is a more unambiguous
sense of joining ones fate in order to become stronger in the future.
The third calendar, however, makes everything messier. For Rosenzweig
has a strong interpretation of the need for both Judaism and Christianity.
Judaism stays within its own circle, a fire burning at the centre of the star,
and Christianity goes forth as rays of light. This mission of Christianity is
to convert the world to the truth of Gods will, to bring the other nations
into a community of redemption. This mission requires Rosenzweig to
articulate both the truth and the limitations of the pagan world. For
Rosenzweig, Christianity is always on the way, always converting pagan
aspects of the nations, but never consummated. Thus the world is not really
split between pagans, Christians and Jews, but only between Jews and the
others. The others are at once pagan and Christian, for becoming Christian
is the history of the world. But the conversion transpires in three dimensions
(borrowing heavily from Schelling). A Petrine church converts the body
and the polity; a Pauline church converts the soul and the mind; and the
Johannine church converts the culture. The third church is the most recent,
dating to the late eighteenth century, and includes Goethe, Schelling and
Hegel as church fathers. So to be Christian in the age of this last church is to
live in a culture that in its very secularity has become Christian (cf. Libert,
Egalit, Fraternit which Rosenzweig derives from the Johanine church).
The rediscovery of the Eastern church and the emancipation of the Jews are
hallmarks of this church. Love of the neighbour and the hurrying of the
kingdom of God are the tasks which have now moved outside the church,
into the streets and the squares, where culture is formed. In a challenging
way, this church does not build or dwell in church buildings, but disseminates throughout the community, recruiting institutions and practices to
the task of redemption. The church in its expansion takes its laws from the
peoples it approaches, and so in this vast secularization, it Christianizes by
recasting institutions that were content to fight the flowing on of time (as
pagan temporality does) into institutions that bend time into the cycle of
eternity.
In order to do that Christian calendars must be more than the circles of
the Jewish reading of scripture. They cannot close within themselves, but
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this generally with the festivals, which in the course of the life of Mary
mirror the existence of the church itself. And it does this specifically even
more in the saints days, which in its limitless capacity to change, adapt
and grow, makes possible a completely intimate bond between it and the
local, the class, and the personal interests of the world, and so it inserts
this temporal and worldly always again into the eternal circle, which even
in these festivals that change with time and place, the eternal way of
redemption through place and time has already for a long time no longer
remained a circle, rather it has opened itself into a spiral. (Ibid.)
And Rosenzweig notes that the paradigm is the Roman Catholic Church
(the Petrine church), which so emphatically interweaves local events, whose
calendar is almost overloaded with saints days. Here we see the temporal
expression of the mission of Christianity: its way takes the pagan seriously,
takes it up into itself and does not merely assimilate it, but more importantly
changes itself. While the Jewish calendar can only integrate a new event by
fixing it, and so preserves the notion of a cycling but immutable eternity,
the Christian calendar is expanded and transformed as the outward motion
of the eternal way one encounters new events. Thus the Christian calendar
becomes a spiral, expanding outward each year. It takes in more of time and
allows its messianic futurity to shine on it. Such a spiralling out is neither a
line, nor a circle. It is also neither the dialectic moved by necessity, nor the
bittersweet remembrance of all that must eventually fade away. Rather, the
Christian calendar allows for remembrance and change. It is not constructed,
like the Jewish calendar, around the tension of the inner and the outer. And,
perhaps more interestingly, lacking a fixed inner circle, the spiral does not
disrupt itself as radically as the two circles of Jewish reading.
Or does it? We have so little further discussion by Rosenzweig of the spiral
itself that we are left with the general sensation of outward motion. The new
constitution or victory in battle reciprocally coordinates with the traditional
Christian holidays. They are dated by the Christian calendar (itself a transformation of the Roman): 4 July, or 14 July, or 1 May or, as we all know, 9/11.
These days are dated by the Christian calendar (even in Israel and Brooklyn
where the Jewish calendar is also in place). We remember them in the renewing
context of Christian time. Renewal requires a tension between the old and the
new, and so the next old one, the next pagan institution or pagan nation, to be
confronted by the Christian Western culture, is marked as not-yet Christian.
But the identity of the past is key to negotiating not only that future, but the
instability of the present: for it too is both not-yet Christian and Christian.
When the events enter the calendar, they are marked as one step further out
on the spiral (as being added from the last time around), as being intrinsically
becoming and not achieved. And so the unwinding of the spiral reveals the same
lack of necessity that we found in the circles within circles. A similar sense of the
demand of the messianic to pull it further out, but to whatever comes next.
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BENJAMINS THESIS XV
If we now return to our text, Thesis XV, we are faced with a series of key
questions for interpreting Benjamins work.
[i] The consciousness of exploding the continuum of history is characteristic of the revolutionary classes in the moment of their action. The great
revolution introduced a new calendar. [ii] The day, with which a calendar
begins, functions as a historical time-lapse camera. And it is basically
the same day that always returns in the form of festival days, the days of
remembrance [Eingedenkens]. [iii] The calendar, therefore, does not count
time like clocks. They are the monuments of a historical consciousness,
and for a hundred years in Europe not even the slightest trace of them
appears. (GS 1.2: 7012/SW 4: 395)
We begin, easily enough, with the revolutionary sentiment. We can see
that a revolution would require a new calendar, not merely the insertion of
a new holiday in the old calendar. For the change of calendar is a change
in historical consciousness, and altering an old calendar will preserve the
sense of history from the old regime. Not a matter of simply putting in
a new holiday of emancipation, a revolutionary change of calendar is a
refashioning not only of the present institutions but rather a refashioning of
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our present. Benjamin cites the uprising of the anecdote, because it does not
depend on empathy with the tale told, but allows us to see the reality of the
event in our time. He continues:
The true method for making things present is to place them in our space
(and not us in theirs). That is why only anecdotes have the power to move
us. The things, so placed before us, endure no mediating construction
from major connections This is also the sight of major past things
Chartres Cathedral, the temple of Paestum in truth they are received
in our space (no empathy for their builder or priests). We are not transposed in them; they step into our life. The same technique of nearness
is to be observed, calendrically, against epochs. (I, 2)
Anecdotes make the characters come into our world. And so the great
monuments must be entered in our world, and not seen as a time-machine
that takes us back to theirs. They retain their life when we go and see them.
But the calendar also functions this way in relation to epochs. That is, the
past is not some hoary ancient event, but becomes part of our celebrations
and accounting of time. The distant epochs are lived again. Christmas is
not an event two thousand years ago, but rather happens each year with the
birth of new babies in the dark of midwinter. What he calls Eingedenken in
Thesis XV here is vergegenwrtigen a making-present. The calendar draws
the past near: [iii] The calendar, therefore, does not count time like clocks.
They are the monuments of an historical consciousness, and for a hundred
years in Europe not even the slightest trace of them appears. The calendar is
not like a clock, for Benjamin, but we can readily see that it is very much like
a clock for Rosenzweig. The next hour is a repetition of this hour, and the
hour, as we saw, is not the tick-tock of the clock. The clock, it seems to me,
for Benjamin is the inability of time to cycle, but only to move in an empty
way forwards. Precisely because the calendar brings the past forward, brings
it near, it produces our past, that is the past that is alive for us. Calendars
are monumental: public, fixed and commemorative.
This notion of historical consciousness is at some distance from the historians and, of course, that has been our concern. In an essay on Baudelaire
from 1939, Benjamin wrote: Correspondences are the data of remembrance
[Eingedenkens]. These are not historical but rather the data of prehistory.
What makes festival days grand and meaningful is the encounter with an
earlier life (GS 1.2: 638/SW 4: 3334). We will return to correspondences (a
term of Baudelaires), but here we see a notion of festival days that connects
not to historical events, but to prehistorical ones, events that have a hold on
us not because of their historical connection to us, but because they form
our categories of temporal existence. Like the visit to ancient sites, they are
a way for a past that exceeds the continuum of historical memory to intrude
into our time.
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And calendars are also punctuated, in the way that Rosenzweig noted.
Benjamin later comments:
Chronology, which subordinates duration to uniformity, still cannot
forgo letting heterogeneous exceptional fragments occur within it. To
have united the recognition of a quality with the measure of a quantity
is the work of the calendar, which leaves the space for remembrance as it
were with the holidays. (GS 1.2: 642/SW 4: 336)
Even the practice of marking off time as uniform, in the clock and calendar,
leaves extraneous bits. The heart of the calendar are the empty spaces, the
holidays. There quantity and quality merge, by breaking up, in a regular
way, the monotony of the standard units. The calendar is public, orderly, but
somehow heterogeneous. Rosenzweigs clocks chiming, weekly Sabbaths and
seasonal festivals all serve Benjamin by opening a space where the historical
continuum is broken open in a break in the temporal continuum.
But, says, Benjamin, they are no longer to be found in Europe (Thesis XV).
Here is the key conflict with the Rosenzweigian account: for Rosenzweig
held that the calendars are still doing their thing. That people live their own
time through the calendar. Surely we still have calendars! But Benjamins
point is more severe: the past does not live in the calendar anymore. The
modern culture has dispensed with the religious dimension of the calendar
particularly. That recent past, for Benjamin, is the time of the industrial and
consumerist transformation of Europe. Rosenzweig may have an accurate
picture of how the Jewish liturgical calendar is supposed to function, and
by extension other calendars, too, but the culture of Europe has abandoned
that manner of experiencing time and remembering history. Benjamin here
appears as the critic not of Rosenzweigs theory of calendars and memory,
but of the world which has moved away, beyond, below such means of
remembering.
Perhaps we can, with the help of Rosenzweigs three calendars, see just
what is now lost. That is, the Jewish eternal calendar might still suit the
small set of traditional Jews, who are eager to live outside of world-political
time. But it is hard to live through the 1930s and not conclude that that
calendar has become defunct, even for the religious Jews, and of course,
Benjamins world is filled with liberal and post-liberal Jews, for whom the
religious calendar holds no promise. Judgement Day is no longer New Years
Day for his world.
The key question is whether the enlarging spiral of Christianity as it
opens out to the secular world functions with its calendar. Does the spread
of Western culture bring about the progress on the way to the messianic, or,
on the contrary, has the spiral lost its bearings and become the spread of one
more pagan tale of war and conquest? While Rosenzweig offers true insight
into the development of modern culture, as a Jew looking at the secular-
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and also about the failure of the calendar. The quotation above claimed:
Correspondences are the data of remembrance [Eingedenkens]. These are
not historical but rather the data of prehistory. What makes festival days
grand and meaningful is the encounter with an earlier life (GS 1.2: 638/SW
4: 3334). Baudelaires correspondences are between archaic monuments,
temples, hieroglyphs, etc., not simultaneous links. They are not quite
history, but rather the recollection of juxtapositions from the archaic past
to the present. In Baudelaire, moreover, they remain suspended. Benjamin
notices that the correspondences also fail, that the modern world corrodes
the possibility for a linking to the prehistory. But Baudelaires writing
evokes the no longer accessible correspondence. If Rosenzweigs calendar can
envision the disruption of two historical sequences, the interruption of the
messianic then and now, then Baudelaire offers Benjamin a way of marking
the jumps from then to now that do not quite connect, that have been
corroded by the emergence of modern society. But Baudelaire still strives to
capture the correspondence in art, even the failed correspondence.
Benjamins historical work produces a new possibility for a remembering,
drawing on Baudelaire as well as Rosenzweig. The acts of remembrance
can be carried further in the work of the historian a work that is not the
task of an isolated consciousness, but of a socially located interpreter. While
Rosenzweig had hoped to resuscitate the Jewish community in Germany at
the end of the First World War, Benjamin despairs of that community and
indeed of the modern society while living in Paris on the eve of the Second
World War. What is more important for us, however, is how the structuring
of interruption that Rosenzweig discovered can become a way, even a task,
for the historian.
Benjamin collected a set of theoretical reflections in a folder entitled
Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress. These reflections are roughly
contemporaneous with the Theses, and while they are also among the most
commented-upon texts in his writings, we can attend to the specific relation
to the calendar, and specifically to the circles within circles of the Jewish
calendar. If we imagine those circles scattered, so that each circle has disintegrated, neither one held together by the practice of the other, we can begin
to see how the dialectical images might be conceived.
The historical index of the images says not only that they belong to a
determinate time, it says, above all, that they first become legible in a
determinate time. And indeed this to be legible is reached in a determinate critical point in the motion into its interior. Every present is
determined through these images, those that are synchronic with it: every
now is the now of a determinate knowability. In it the truth is loaded with
time to the point of exploding. (This explosion, is nothing other than
the death of the intention, which coincides therefore with the birth of
genuine historical time, the time of truth.) (N3, 1)
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the image, through a dialectical relation with the present; while the present
looks back in a simply temporal way. History has become these dialectical
images, in contrast to the archaic images. The latter would be the images
that do not measure the distance that time marks, but merely repeat a
non-temporal myth obliterating time, change and the discontinuity that
governs the signifying of the past.
But the historian engages, then, in a specific kind of remnant of the
calendar. And while Rosenzweig could find eternity entering time and, indeed,
the messianic interrupting in a social practice, for Benjamin modernity has
debased the calendar, leaving the historian the task of framing the dialectical
images, of engaging in the danger of a reading doubling of then and now.
Here arises that weak messianic force of Thesis II. In contrast to a strong
force, which could force the future with a social movement or revolution, the
historian struggles to redeem the past, and in redeeming the past to unstick
the present from its seemingly necessary future.
Our final question, however, then turns to the relation of the messianic
as a theological category and its reactivation as a historiographic practice.
The fascination for the scholars of Benjamin has lain in the question of how
theological his work is. The texts are familiar the ink blotter, the midget,
the promise in Thesis B of the straight gate and, if not overworked, at
least well-explored. Benjamin is emphatic about being theological. But he
surely is not pious, nor engaged in Rosenzweigs renaissance. If we put him
in the context of Buber, Scholem and Rosenzweig, he shares a passion about
theology and the exigencies of the messianic. But of all four of those, his
work holds a special fascination for us: in our moment of reading. I suggest
that the ghost, the spectre of theology has a great appeal for us. For many
of us, religious renaissance is beyond our range. Such a holiday calendar has
become impossible. It is like an artefact of a vanished civilization. Except
that the calendars still lurk behind our deformed working calendar. The act
of remembrance that binds our events with those of the past, dialectically
and with the needed standstill, is lacking in our calendar. But we yearn for
it, with Yom Ha Shoah (Holocaust Day), and with 9/11 we want to be
able to remember in that messianic way, where the press forward of time
is arrested by a breakup of history in the past. The triumph of chronology
of the line leads us to desire a simple circle. And in such a moment the
practice of the circle within the circle (and the spiral), serves as a critique
of lines and simple circles. Benjamin remembers those holiday circles in the
midst of framing his own dialectics of points. They offer a dialectic of past
and present that opens the future more radically than the simple circles of
fate and the liberal myth of progress. They charge the present with some gap
from the past, exploding the continuum of history and, if they are no longer
potent, re-examining them alerts Benjamin and his readers to a messianic
dialectical relation with the past. The messianic charge from the spinning
of the circles is now dispersed into the dialectical images.
13
NON-MESSIANIC POLITICAL
THEOLOGY IN BENJAMINS ON
THE CONCEPT OF HISTORY
HOWARD CAYGILL
The theses that comprise On the Concept of History describe a constellation made up of the crossing of persistent themes in Benjamins thought
with contemporary political events. His reflections on the collapse of the
European Left in the face of fascism as well as the HitlerStalin pact are
modulated through a persistent fascination with, and enquiry into, political
theology. His thoughts on social democracy and communism are thus shaped
by a deeper meditation upon the possible relationship between historical
materialism and theology. However, the character of this relationship in the
On Concept of History is usually framed in terms of the question of the
present and immediate future of revolutionary action, framed as the choice
between catastrophe and the messianic end of history. However, another
understanding of the future is also possible, one that complicates this choice
by means of locating political theology in a cosmo-politics dedicated to the
liberation not only of humanity, but also of the whole of creation.
The first thesis establishes a complicated scenario regarding the relationship
between historical materialism and theology. Thesis I is about the famous
chess-playing automaton who could respond to every move of a chess-player
with a counter-move and always win. The puppet with the hookah made
the moves on a table under which, concealed by mirrors, sat a hunchbacked
dwarf who controlled the puppet. There are many enigmatic features to this
scenario Benjamin had already played with the theme of the hidden dwarf
who controlled illusion in Rastellis Story (SW 3: 96) but the terms of the
analogy that he goes on to draw are fairly clear. He imagines a philosophical
counterpart to this apparatus in which the puppet is historical materialism
and the dwarf theology which today, as we know, is small and ugly and has
to be kept out of sight. Together, historical materialism and theology can
win all the time, political theology thus providing a winning combination.
The nature of the political theology or combination of historical
materialism and theology intimated in philosophical counterpart to the
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in The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1928) and the theory of the technological body in One Way Street (1928) as well as the analyses of the fetish
commodity in the Arcades Project (192840) were all responses to questions
provoked by this fragment, and thus indirectly by the political theology
of Weber. It marks an important turn in the development of Benjamins
political theology whose consequences still inform the On Concept of
History.
Capitalism as Religion closed a phase of social, political and religious
reflection that was rooted in Benjamins principled opposition to the First
World War and his exile in Switzerland. Benjamins focus on issues of political
theology, notably the critique of theocracy, was indebted to a diverse range of
influences ranging from the new thinking represented by a group of writers
working in the philosophy and sociology of religion comprising Florens
Christian Rang, Eugen Rosenstock and Franz Rosenzweig to the Catholic
Dadaism of Hugo Ball, the neo-Marxism of Ernst Bloch and above all the
utopian science fiction of Paul Scheerbart. While only fragments from this
period have survived the major work, Die wahre Politiker, inspired by the
ideas of Scheerbart being lost it is nevertheless possible to trace an outline
of the main concerns of Benjamins political theology from what remains.
This will provide the context for understanding his interpretation of Webers
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and also the reason for its
shattering impact on his thought.
The overall direction of Benjamins early political theology is evident in
a series of five numbered reflections from 191920, the first, World and
Time, giving the editors title to the entire collection. The first reflection on
revelation and its relationship to the end of history introduces the overall
problem of the place of the divine in the secular or temporal sphere. The
exploration of this problem begins with a critique of the political theology
of Catholicism. Benjamin criticizes Catholicism for its ecclesiastical organization or the (false, secular) theocracy (SW 1: 226). The establishment of
the church is described as the process of the development of anarchy since
authentic divine power can manifest itself other than destructively only in the
world to come (the world of fulfilment) (SW 1: 226). Here Benjamin adopts
the position of the adversaries of the church criticized by Augustine in the
City of God, the foundational text of ecclesiology.
Benjamin radicalizes his opposition by applying his critique of theocracy
to any form of legally regulated social organization. The implications of this
step become evident in the Critique of Violence (published, like the original
1905 essay by Weber in the Archiv fr Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik
in 1921) where divine violence is held to be destructive of all law. In this
text Benjamin focuses on the destructive, revolutionary aspect of divine
violence, whereas in World and Time he pays more attention to the slow
self-destruction of theocracy. Benjamin claims that where divine power
enters the world it breathes destruction whether in its revolutionary or its
218
219
220
led Weber to analyse the relationship between the spirit of capitalism and
Calvinist Protestantism in terms of Goethes concept of elective affinity
(Wahlverwandschaft).
Weber analysed the elective affinity between Protestantism and capitalism
in terms of the partial translation/mutation of a rigorous religious doctrine
into everyday economic behaviour. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of
Capitalism (especially in the remarkable footnotes) Weber described how
the rigorously transcendent doctrine of predestination was translated into
the secular concept of the vocation. The anxieties provoked in the early
generation of Protestants by the inscrutability of the divine will in its choice
of the elect and its relation to earthly business and social concerns led the
Calvinist spiritual advisers to elaborate as series of casuistic responses that,
Weber showed, crystallized into an economic ethic. In Benjamins terms, what
was at stake was the adaptation of the divine to the earthly social and realm,
or the systematic breakdown of the limits between the zones of the divine and
the political. From Benjamins viewpoint, what was even more striking about
Webers thesis was that the adaptation of divine to the secular was not accomplished by means of a theocratic organization such as state or church, but by
means of a decentralized economic ethic tangible only in its effects.
The opening sentence of Benjamins response to Weber recapitulates
one of Webers theses: that the economic ethic of capitalism serves essentially to allay the same anxieties, torments and disturbances to which the
so-called religions offered answers (SW 1: 288). However, prompted by
the Protestant ethic Benjamin drew an even more radical conclusion from
this than Webers own cautious claims for an elective affinity between
Protestantism and capitalism. For Benjamin, capitalism is not merely,
as Weber believes, a formation conditioned by religion, but an . . . essentially religious phenomenon (SW 1: 289). In effect, Benjamin proposes
to transform Webers elective affinity into an identity Protestantism and
capitalism are not mutually related, but are identical. Such an interpretation
of Goethes concept as a veiled identity was developed by Benjamin in his
essay Goethes Elective Affinities (see SW 1: 346 and 35051), written at the
same time as Capitalism as Religion. While Weber, in the concluding lines
of his essay, regarded capitalism as having cast off its religious origins and to
have relegated its elective affinity with religion to its past, Benjamin believed
it to have itself become a religion.
More is at stake in Benjamins difference with Weber than the interpretation of one of Goethes aesthetic concepts. By unifying capitalism and
religion Benjamin is acknowledging the dissolution of the separation of
the divine and the secular. This dissolution, moreover, is more serious even
than the theocratic organization of the divine represented by Catholicism,
since with capitalism as religion the divine invades not only the zone of
the political but also the realm of the body. The implication is that one
of the organizing distinctions of Benjamins political thought has broken
221
down before the realization that capitalism a form of social and political
organization is religion and that, consequently, it fulfils the definition
of theocracy. The secularization thesis is here inverted: it is is not that the
secular takes over the space vacated by the religious, but that the religious
becomes identified with the secular.
Benjamin surveys the implications of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit
of Capitalism for his social and political theory through two routes: a
critique of Webers account of the genesis of capitalism and a description
of the structural characteristics of capitalism as religion. The basic claim
is that the Christianity of the Reformation period did not favour the
growth of capitalism; instead it transformed itself into capitalism (SW 1:
290). This is of course opposed to Weber, who saw the elective affinity
between capitalism and Protestantism as one of a number of factors for
the development of modern capitalism. Additional important factors for
Weber included the bureaucratization of political administration, the rise of
standing armies and military discipline and changes in broader economic
organization. Benjamin, however, insists that Capitalism has developed as
a parasite of Christianity . . . until it reached the point where Christianitys
history is essentially that of its parasite that is to say, of capitalism (SW
1: 289). The questions raised in these genetic claims and their reduction
of elective affinity to identity are clarified by Benjamins structural view of
capitalist religion.
Benjamin claims that there are three aspects of the religious structure of
capitalism (although he adds a fourth, a secret codicil): it is (1) a cult that
(2) makes total claims on its members through (3) creating guilt and not
atonement (SW 1: 288). In the first place, Benjamin claims that capitalism
is a religious practice, or cult rather than a church: capitalism has no
specific body of dogma, no theology (SW 1: 288). It is not a theocracy in
the sense of the Catholic Church that distributes salvation according to a
theologically legitimated system of sacraments. Nevertheless, capitalism is
perhaps the most extreme [cultic religion] that ever existed (SW 1: 288) in
that its claims are total: things have meaning only in their relationship to
the cult (SW 1: 288), or, in the language of historical materialism, exchange
value dominates use value. Another aspect of the total character of the
cult is that it has no weekdays, for there is no day that is not a feast day
. . . each day commands the utter fealty of each worshipper (SW 1: 288).
Benjamin sustains this ruthless inversion of Webers secularization thesis by
his third structural claim, that capitalism is a religion that creates guilt/debt
(Schuld).
Benjamin devotes most attention to the third claim, pushing Webers
view of the iron cage of modern bureaucratic capitalism to its limit
through reflections on Nietzsche, Marx and Freud. Central to his argument
is the expansive character of capitalism, here interpreted not only on a
global but even on a cosmic scale. Benjamin understands capitalism as not
222
only creating guilt/debt through its reduction of all value to money or the
measure of exchange value, but also as universalizing guilt/debt to implicate
even God in universal despair: Capitalism is entirely without precedent, in
that it is a religion which offers not the reform of existence but its complete
destruction. It is the expansion of despair, until despair itself becomes
a religious state of the world in the hope that this will lead to salvation
(SW 1: 289). At this point, God is not dead but has been incorporated
into human existence or has become totally immanent: for Benjamin this
moment marks the end of the epoch of the human and the beginning of
the superhuman.
Benjamins observation that Nietzsches superman is the fi rst to recognize
the religion of capitalism and to bring it to fulfilment (SW 1: 289) offers
an important clue to his understanding of the cultic nature of capitalism
as religion. For Nietzsche, the superman is the one capable of willing the
eternal return rather than suffer it as the greatest weight. Consequently,
it can be assumed that the cultic ritual of capitalism for Benjamin is
repetition. The suffering of this repetition (as in Webers prediction of
the millennial future of the iron cage) as a burden is contrasted with its
affirmation that effects a transformation, creating something new in an
affirmed repetition. Thus Benjamin can claim that Nietzsches superman
is both the affirmation and destruction of capitalism as religion. On the
one hand, the paradigm of capitalist religious thought is magnificently
formulated in Nietzsches philosophy, while on the other the idea of the
superman transposes the apocalyptic leap not into conversion, atonement,
purification and penance, but into an apparently steady, though in the final
analysis explosive and discontinuous intensification (SW 1: 289). Benjamin
sees a similar outcome in Marx, namely that a capitalism that is affirmed
as capitalism already becomes something else: Marx is a similar case: the
capitalism that refuses to change course becomes socialism by means of the
simple and compound interest that are functions of Schuld (SW 1: 289).
So with Freud, the intensification of repetition qualitatively transforms
inherited guilt/debt.
Benjamins readings of Nietzsche, Marx and Freud in terms of their
alleged views on the self-overcoming of capitalism rest on a logic dependent
on the fourth appropriately concealed feature of capitalism as religion. This
concerns the demonic character of capitalism the fact that the secret of its
destruction is hidden. Benjamin claims that capitalisms God is hidden from
it and may be addressed only when his guilt is at its zenith the secret of the
divinity of capitalism lies in its immaturity (SW 1: 129). Capitalism extends
its measure of value to the point where the universe has been taken over by
that despair that is actually its secret hope (SW 1: 289). When there is only
repetition then the affirmation of it creates a novelty and thus breaks the
immanence of repetition. It is at this zenith of immanence that divinity can
be affirmed and become again transcendent. For Benjamin this may consist
223
224
225
226
Notes
CHAPTER 1
1 See, for example, Arthur Danto, The Transfiguration of Commonplace (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1981) and Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the
Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985).
2 [Greek] statues are now only stones from which the living soul has flown, just as
the hymns are words from which belief has gone. The tables of the gods provide no
spiritual food and drink, and in his games and festivals man no longer recovers the
joyful consciousness of his unity with the divine. G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of the
Spirit (1807), trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 455. No
matter how excellent we find the statues of the Greek gods . . . it is no help; we bow
the knee no longer. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T.M. Knox (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1975), 1:103.
3 See R. Tiedemann, Studien zur Philosophie Walter Benjamins (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,
1973); P. Brger, Walter Benjamin: Contribution une thorie de la culturecontemporaine, Revue dEsthtique, new series 1 (1981): 27; R. Rochlitz, Walter
Benjamin: Une Dialectique de limage, Critique 39 (1983): 287319.
4 See C. Perret, Walter Benjamin sans destin (Paris: La Diffrence, 1992), pp. 979.
5 For the moment, I refer to the studio because institutional exhibitions (galleries,
museums) often have a tendency to reproduce while at the same time transforming
of course the intimidating and dogmatic liturgy of the old rituals of display, the
old monstrances (ostensions) of images. This fundamental aspect would need a specific
analysis devoted to it.
6 Pliny the Elder, Natural History 35:114. See also G. Didi-Huberman, Imaginum
picture . . . in totum exoleuit: Der Anfang der Kunstgeschichte und das Ende des
Zeitalters des Bildes, Kunst ohne Geschichte? Ansichten zu Kunst und Kunstgeschichte
heute, ed. A.-M. Bonner and G. Kopp-Schmidt (Munich: Beck, 1995), pp. 12736.
7 Subject of a work of art and fundamental principle are two meanings of the Greek
word hypothesis.
8 E. Panofsky, Iconography and Iconology: An Introduction to the Study of Renaissance
Art, in Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1939), pp. 331.
9 See G. Didi-Huberman, Dun Ressentiment en mal desthtique (1993), in LArt
contemporain en question (Paris: Galerie nationale de Jeu de Paume, 1994), pp. 6588;
and its sequel, Post-scriptum: Du ressentiment la Kunstpolitik, Lignes 22 (1994):
2162.
10 Dante, Divine Comedy, Paradise 331.1035. Qual colui che forse di Croazia/viene a
veder la Veronica nostra, / che per lantica fame non sen sazia.
11 See J. Lacan, Subversion du sujet et dialectique du desir dans linconscient freudian
(1960), in Ecrits (Paris: Le Seuil, 1966), pp. 793827.
12 G. Bataille, Mthode de mditation (1947), Oeuvres completes (Paris: Gallimard,
1973), 5:201 [my translation].
13 On the notion of memory event, see M. Moscovici, Il est arriv quelque chose: Approches
de l vnement psychique (Paris: Ramsay, 1989).
14 See G. Deleuze, Nietzsche et la philosophie (Paris: PUF, 1962), p. 55: It is not the same
228
that comes back, it is the coming back that is the same as what is becoming [my
translation].
15 [My translation]. See G. Didi-Huberman, Devant l image: Question pose aux fins dune
histoire de lart (Paris: Minuit, 1990), pp. 65103.
16 We should note the convergence of this model with the meta-psychological model of a
Freudian theory of memory as detailed by Pierre Fdida, especially in Pass anachronique et prsent rminiscent, LEcrit du temps 10 (1986): 2345.
17 See Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics: T.W. Adorno, W. Benjamin,
and the Frankfurt Institute (Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1977). On the use of the
dialectic in Bataille and Eisenstein, see G. Didi-Huberman, La Ressemblance informe,
ou le gai savoir visuel selon Georges Bataille (Paris: Macula, 1995), 201383. On the use
of the dialectic in Mondrian, see Y.-A. Bois, LIconoclaste, in Piet Mondrian (Milan:
Leonardo Arte, 1994), pp. 33843.
18 This formula is commented on in Perret, Walter Benjamin sans detin, pp. 11217.
19 It seems to me that konvolute N on the theory of knowledge and progress is the best
methodological introduction possible to the very problem of art history.
20 I have attempted to develop certain aesthetic implications of this supposition in G.
Didi-Huberman, Ce que nous voyans, ce qui nous regarde (Paris: Minuit, 1992), in
particular. pp. 12552.
21 This is an essential point of method, which Panofsky formulated clearly in 1932
even though he sometimes forgot to apply it to his own interpretations. See E.
Panofsky, Zum Problem der Beschreibung und Inhaltsdeutung von Werken der
bildenden Kunst, Logos 21 (1932): 10319. And even if Drer had expressly declared,
as other artists later attempted to do, what the ultimate plan of his work of art was,
we would rapidly discover that that declaration bypassed the true essential meaning
[wahren Wesenssinn] of the engraving and that the declaration, rather than offering us
a definitive interpretation, would itself be greatly in need of such an interpretation. [my
translation].
22 Regarding Mondrian, for example, Jean-Claude Lebensztejn has recently proved to
be unfair and almost naive in criticizing Bois interpretation because it drops the
theosophical paradigm. Lebensztejn makes the criticism with as much vehemence as
if Bois were speaking of Masaccios Trinity while spurning the Christian dogma that
provided its iconographical programme. J.-C. Lebensztejn, review of the exhibition
Piet Mondrian: 18721944 [La Haye, Washington, New York], Cahiers du Muse
national dart moderne 52 (1995): 13940. Far from ignoring the role of Theosophy in
Mondrians art, Bois says it plays the role of a detonator, and it is very probable that
Mondrian would have remained a talented provincial landscape artist if he had not
come into contact with it. Bois, LIconoclaste, p. 329 [my translation]. Lebensztejn
pretends to ignore the obvious fact that the philosophical or religious commitment of
a twentieth-century artist cannot be compared with an iconographical programme of
the quattrocento. It is the very notion of programme that is in the question here a
notion whose deconstruction abstract art has obviously completed, along with the
deconstruction of the entire traditional iconographical approach.
Nonetheless, without articulating it clearly, Lebensztejn is getting to the heart
of the problem, which concerns the logical and temporal structure to be drawn from
the relations in play ambiguous, critical relations between idealism and material
engagement (plastic engagement as such), between the discourse of meanings laid
claim to and the formal labour actually performed. It is probable that Bois has not
yet completely articulated that structure in writing that it is the materiality of the
painting itself that [in Mondrian] guarantees the efficacy of his struggle against
matter (LIconoclaste, p. 330 [my translation]). Significantly, it is at that moment
in his analysis that Bois comes closest to the question of the dialectic. A remarkable
analysis of this type of dialectical reversal has also been done for the case of Paul
Notes
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
229
230
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
Notes
231
51
See B. Newman, Frontiers of Space: Interview with Dorothy Gees Seckler (1962), in
Selected Writing, p. 251: Instead of using outlines, instead of making shapes or setting
off spaces, my drawing declares the space. Instead of working with the remnants of
space, I work with the whole space.
52 Bois, Perceiving Newman, p. 195 and pp. 31011.
53 See Hess, Barnett Newman, pp. 556; Rosenberg, Barnett Newman, p. 61. Another
interpretation even accomplishes the tour de force of reconciling the Jewish messianic
yihud and the Christian kenosis in an allegorism of nonfigurativity. See D. Payot,
Tout uniment, in LArt moderne et la question de sacr, ed. J.-J. Nills (Paris: Le Cerf,
1993), pp. 16389.
54 See Bois, Perceiving Newman, pp. 1936 and 203.
55 Newman, Frontiers of Space, p. 250.
56 Newman, The Plasmic Image, p. 145; and idem, The Sublime is Now, pp. 1715.
57 Newman, Interview with Lane Slate (1963), in Selected Writings, pp. 251 and xiii (in
another version corrected by Newman himself).
58 In Lebensztejns very apt expression in Homme nouveau, art radical, p. 327 [my
translation].
59 On the notion of the subjectile, see J. Clay, Onguents, fards, pollens, in Bonjour
Monsieur Manet (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1983), pp. 624; G. DidiHuberman, La Peinture incarne (Paris: Minuit, 1985), pp. 2562; and J. Derrida,
Forcener le subjectile, Natonin Artaud: Dessins et portraits (Paris: Gallimard, 1986),
pp. 55108.
60 Fundamental in this respect is the reflection found in Newman, The Fourteen
Stations of the Cross, 19581966 (1966), in Selected Writings, p. 189: It is as I work
that the work itself begins to have an effect on me. Just as I affect the canvas, so does
the canvas affect me.
61 In particular, this is the lesson of Gilles Deleuzes remarkable analysis of the work of
Samuel Beckett. See G. Deleuze, LEpuis, afterword to S. Beckett, Quad et autres
pices pour la tlvision, trans. E. Fournier (Paris: Minuit, 1992), pp. 55106.
62 The trace is the apparition of a proximity, however far away that which it left may
be. The aura is the apparition of a distance, however close that which evokes it may
be. With the trace, we grasp the thing; with the aura, the thing becomes our master
(M16a, 4, my translation).
63 See Didi-Huberman, Devant l image, pp. 22447, and especially the vast survey by H.
Belting, Bild und Kult: Eine Geschichte des Bildes vor dem Zeitalter der Kunst (Munich:
Beck, 1990) [Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, trans. E.
Jephcott (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994)].
CHAPTER 2
1
In pursuing these questions, this essay will take up the crucial importance of photography to Benjamins thought, an importance convincingly and extensively explored
by Eduardo Cadava in Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). Indeed, it is only as a consequence of Cadavas
study that this essay can be written, and, it is as a contribution to Cadavas study that
this reflection on photographys relation to place within Benjamins writing is intended
while opening the question of the consequences for history of the technical and the, at
times, conflicted role photography performs within that writing.
2 Only the eye, Benjamin argues, can keep up with speech, something the hand cannot
do: since the eye perceives more quickly than the hand can draw, the process of
pictorial reproduction was enormously accelerated (GS 1.2: 475/SW 4: 253).
232
3 Unless otherwise noted all references are to the third version of The Work of Art in the
Age of its Technical Reproducibility (GS 1.2: 471508/SW 4: 25183). In many cases,
the translation of this and other works from this edition has been modified in order
to provide a more accurate reflection of Benjamins language. Where these modifications occur, the German words or phrases have been inserted parenthetically into the
translation.
4 In the collection of Atgets photographs Benjamin was familiar with, Lichtbilder (Paris
and Leipzig: Henri Joquires, 1930), none of the explicit street scenes (where the focus
of the image is on the street rather than a building or something along or in the street)
exhibit human figures (see plates 5, 6, 9, 68 in this edition). However, this is not exclusively true for all of Atgets photographs of such scenes. In some, the ghostly
presence of figures who left the frame before the end of the exposure can be seen, in
others, there are figures who remain throughout the exposure. These exceptions do
not necessarily contradict the observations Benjamin makes after seeing only the 1930
volume. Little is known of Atgets intentions in these photographs whether or not the
presence of such figures is incidental to these intentions.
5 The verb treten recurs eight times and frequently, as here, to express when something
appears for the first time or else appears within something else (see GS 1.2: 481n8, 482,
491n20, 500, 502, 503, 507).
6 Charles Baudelaire, Salon de 1859, in Oeuvres compltes (Paris: Pliade, 1976), 2:
618.
7 On the definition of art as a movement from one pole to another see, Reproducibility,
GS 1.2: 48283/SW 4: 257.
8 It is in this sense that Susan Blood, in an incisive reading of Baudelaire and Benjamin
on photography, remarks: not only is the photograph an object upon which Benjamin
may construct a history; photography also becomes the figure for that history
(Baudelaire Against Photography, in Baudelaire and the Aesthetics of Bad Faith
[Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997], p. 168).
9 Benjamin gives a sense of this when he speaks of the history of exhibition value: in
principle the work of art has always been reproducible (GS 1.2: 474/SW 4: 252); and in
a note on Raphaels Sistine Madonna Benjamin speaks of the primary exhibition value
of Raphaels painting (GS 1.2: 483n11/SW 4: 274n15). The divide between cult and
aura on the one hand, and the exhibitional on the other is not so absolute as to preclude
the presence of exhibitionality already within the history of the auratic. This sense is
reinforced when Benjamin speaks of the anticipation of one form within another: Just
as the illustrated newspaper virtually lay hidden within lithography, so the sound film
was latent in photography (GS 1.2: 475/SW 4: 253).
10 See On the Concept of History, Thesis V: The true image of the past flits by. The
past can be held fast only as an image that flashes up at the moment of its recognizability, and is never seen again (GS 1.2: 695/SW 4: 390). The verb festhalten, used
here to describe the holding of the true image of the past, is also used in Benjamins
translation of Monglond. There it describes what the photographic plate does to the
past.
11 Benjamin uses the technical word for developer here: Entwickler.
12 See Thesis VI: Articulating the past does not mean recognizing it the way it was (GS
1.2: 695/SW 4: 391).
13 Even historicism is subject to this condition. In Thesis XVI, Benjamin writes,
Historicism offers the eternal image [Bild ] of the past (GS 1.2: 702/SW 4: 396).
14 On the interruptive force of this time, see Andrew Benjamin, Benjamins Modernity, in
The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin, ed. David S. Ferris (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2004), pp. 97-114; repr. in Andrew Benjamin, Style and Time: Essays on
the Politics of Appearance (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2005), Ch. 1.
Notes
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
233
This passage reoccurs, virtually unchanged except for the removal of quotation marks
around Ausschreiten, the replacement of photography by camera, and the addition of
two examples (picking up a cigarette lighter or a spoon; however, stepping remains the
primary example) in the third version of The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical
Reproducibility (GS 1.2: 500/SW 4: 266). This property of photography is also stated
earlier in the third version (photography can bring out aspects of the original that
are accessible only to the lens (which is adjustable and can easily change viewpoint)
but not to the human eye; or it can use certain processes, such as enlargement or slow
motion, to record images which escape natural optics altogether (GS 1.2: 476/SW 4:
254). On the relation of photography to psychoanalysis in Benjamin, which could only
be treated here at the risk of repeating the problematic it brings to light as an example,
see Cadava, Words of Light, pp. 98100.
In the first version of the Reproducibility essay (a version in which treten occurs less
frequently than the third), there is one instance when Benjamin, describing the means
by which an art becomes founded on a new practice, writes stepped: An die Stelle
ihrer Fundierung aufs Ritual ist ihre Fundierung auf eine andere Praxis getreten:
nmlich ihre Fundierung auf Politik (GS 1.2: 442).
On this requirement, see GS 1.2: 473/SW 4: 2512.
See N3, 1.
That Benjamin makes a claim to the contrary is not just an effect of his translation
of Monglond, but may also be discerned in one of the most frequently cited sentences
of the Reproducibility essay: To an ever increasing degree, the work reproduced
becomes the reproduction of a work designed for reproducibility. What is reproduced,
the work, is already the reproduction of itself as a work designed to be reproduced.
Herein lies its principle of reproducibility. The work is the image of a reproducibility
that it reproduces itself in and through this image. Here, what would be the negative
in the photographic sense the principle of reproducibility enables but also becomes
what is reproduced as it is subsumed into the reproduced image or work. Such is the
work of art heralded by the advent of photography for Benjamin.
The closest Benjamin comes to invoking explicitly an inversion in On the Concept of
History is when he speaks in Thesis VII of brushing history against the grain (GS 1.2:
697/SW 4: 392).
Within the history inaugurated by this change in the artistic task, the hand will
eventually be reduced to mere gesture but does not disappeare completely, it becomes
a sign. On this development, Benjamin cites Valry: Just as water, gas, and electricity
are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs with minimal effort, so
we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear
at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign (GS 1.2: 475/SW 4: 253).
The flash is referred to three times in On the Concept of History (Theses V, VI, and
VII); in Convolute N of the Arcades Project it recurs five times (N1, 1; N2a, 3; N3, 1;
N9, 7 [two instances]).
Only once in both On the Concept of History and Convolute N of the Arcades Project
does Benjamin speak of an overcoming or berwindung: The overcoming of the
concept of progress and the overcoming of the concept of period of decline are one
and the same thing (N2, 5). Yet, such overcoming, as Benjamin attests to, is not the
end of these concepts an insight that ensures the reproducibility of what Benjamin
calls the dialectical image since such concepts carry with them a secret index (GS 1.2:
693/SW 4: 380; Thesis II) to such an image.
In this respect, the movement from das blickende Auge to Augenblick repeats the
relation of the eye to the image in photography. The image that the eye looking into
the lens sees can be read as the look of that eye the image as the Augenblick of das
blickende Auge is already an effect of photography, of technology. Here, what is retained
234
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
CHAPTER 3
1
2
3
4
Notes
235
Party from Schmidt and Stadler to Natorp and Vorlnder. Once the classless
society had been defined as an infinite task the empty homogeneous time was
transformed as it were into an anteroom where one could wait more or less calmly
for the onset of the revolutionary situation. There is, in reality, one moment that
did not carry with it its revolutionary chance it just needs to be defined as a
specific one, namely as the chance of an entirely new solution in the face of an
entirely new task (GS 1.3: 1231).
It will not be necessary to point out that the social democratic ideals, which Benjamin
blames for the passivity of the working class in the face of National Socialism, were
promulgated as regulative ideas in social philosophy in particular in Germany even
after the Second World War. They still dominate the discussion today.
5 In particular when reading Thesis XVII and its emphatic talk about arrest and
monad, one should keep in mind that probably as early as 1913, but no later than
1917, Benjamin had read Husserls essay Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft from
the journal Logos (which was published during 191011), and got to know the first
major attempt of a philosophical critique of historicism and at the same time of
psychologism and scientific objectivism (see the letter to Franz Sachs, 11 July 1913 and
the one to Gershom Scholem, 23 December 1917, which was important for Benjamins
dissertation plans on the philosophy of history [GB 1: 1414 and 40611]). On the
decisive p. 50 of his Logos essay Husserl summarizes in a few sentences some of his most
important thoughts from his 1905 lectures on the phenomenology of internal time
consciousness, Zur Phnomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins, which edited by
Edith Stein were published for the first time in 1928 by Martin Heidegger. There are
indications that Benjamin knew Husserls lectures when he started making plans for
the historico-critical introduction to his Arcades Project, from which the Theses later
emerged. In the Logos essay the psychic is said to be an experience [Erlebnis] viewed
in reflection, appearing as self through itself, in an absolute flow, as Now [and thus
enters] into a monadic unity of consciousness. Husserl complemented the motives
of absolute reflection, of the Now and of the monadic unity which will play a most
important role in Benjamins work by characterizing this monadic unity and the
limitless flow of phenomena as a continuous intentional line, which is, as it were, the
index of the all-penetrating unity. This intentional line the index is for Husserl
the line of the beginning and endless immanent time, of a time as Husserl stresses
that is not measured by any chronometer. (This immanent time Husserl talks
about is, as in the lectures, the time of the internal time consciousness, in contrast
to the objective or transcendental time which can be measured by chronometers).
The fact that at this point many more convergences between Husserl and Benjamins
motives accumulate can hardly be a coincidence. Nor can it be a coincidence that
Benjamins attacks in the Theses on the Philosophy of History are directed at the
concept of empathy, which is central in the Logos essay and is also central to the
earlier works of Moritz Geiger, a pupil of Husserls, with whom Benjamin studied in
Munich. At this point, I can go only briefly into the relevant convergence between
Husserls lectures on internal time-consciousness and Benjamins notes from the late
1930s: they are mainly found in the conceptions of the image and of the protention
of re-remembering. Husserl writes in section 24: Each remembrance contains intentions of expectation, whose fulfilment leads to the present. And: The re-remembering
is not expectation, but it does have a horizon directed towards the future, the future
of the re-remembered [Martin Heidegger ed.], The Phenomenology of Internal TimeConsciousness, [The Hague: Nijhoff, 1964].
6 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B 225.
7 Heidegger is mentioned several times in the Convolutes of the Arcades Project, but not
even once without Benjamins massive criticism of his philosophy of historical time
236
which can be assumed to be the criticism of the philosophy of Being and Time and
not just that of Heideggers early Marbach lecture leaving no doubt that Heideggers
philosophy of historical time is seen as the only serious philosophical competition
to Benjamins planned work. In a letter to Gershom Scholem Benjamin announces
that in his introduction to the Arcades Project, which would be a critique of historical
knowledge, je trouverai sur mon chemin Heidegger et jattends quelque scintillement
de lentre-choc de nos deux manires, tres diffrentes, denvisager lhistoire (letter dated
20 January 1930, GB 3: 503). It would be misleading to assume Heideggers influence
on Benjamins later conception of time and history. This is not just because of the
vulgar idea of an influxus physicus could not do justice to the complexity of both trains
of thought but also because that would leave aside the influence that St Paul, Sren
Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche and Edmund Husserl have exerted on both authors.
The influence is particularly apparent in the conceptions of fulfilment, the fulfilled
time and the moment. The distinction between that which is past and that which
has been (Vergangenem und Gewesenem), which Benjamin tries to respect in some of
his notes, may have been taken from Being and Time and not from Dolf Sternbergers
dissertation Der verstandene Tod. It speaks in favour of the deep impression Heideggers
book exerted on Benjamin, perhaps even the threat that he may have felt it posed, that
he, together with Brecht, thought of organizing a critical community of reading for
the shattering of Being and Time as mentioned in a letter to Gershom Scholem on
25 July 1930 (GB 3). A detailed account of Benjamins relation to Heidegger, which
oscillated between fascination and abhorrence, would have to begin with Benjamins
engagement with Heideggers habilitation thesis on Duns Scotus theory of categories
and meaning (Kategorien- und Bedeutungslehre). Such an account could dig deeper into
the problems of the work of both authors than the admirers of the one and the despisers
of the other would like.
8 Kellers verses cited by Benjamin evoke the reflecting shield that paralyses the Gorgon.
In Verlornes Recht, verlornes Glck, which peculiarly crosses the positions of Medusa
and shield, it is said of a sailor: War wie ein Medusenschild / Der erstarrten Unruh
Bild.
9 In the essay on Eduard Fuchs, der Sammler und der Historiker (GS 2.2: 468/SW 3:
288), Benjamin also quotes this passage from the preface to The Origin of German
Tragic Drama in the context of formulations that later on contributed to the theses On
the Concept of History.
10 The concept is derived from the context of neo-Kantianism and the calculus of
the infinitesimal and, as an emphatic concept of happening, is here brought up by
Benjamin against Hegels discovery of the dialectical thought-time (Denkzeit) and
thus against Hegels dialectic as well as at another place against Heideggers phenomenology, which, as Benjamin insists, is unable to set free a strict conception of history,
at best a concept of time. Benjamin uses the formula of differentials of time in another
place (N1, 2) in the sense of a deviation or digression (albeit a minimal one) away from
the grand lines, and thus, once again, from the linear continuum of tradition. In the
note relating to Hegel, the concept of the Now of recognizability is also brought into
play. It does so as complement of the time differential and thus is not a thought time
(Denkzeit) but an event time (Geschehniszeit) a time of the happening of time. Their
relation can be formally characterized such that it is only the time differential that
opens up the latitude where a Now of recognizability and thus history can happen.
Because time differential and Now of recognizability are two aspects of the same
happening, it can be said: the Now is differential.
The concept of the Now of recognizability, which gives its title to an extended
and important reflection in the context of the theses On the Concept of History (GS
1.3: 12378/SW 4: 405), finds its most significant exposition in a text dated by Rolf
Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhuser to 1920 or 1921. This text asks for the
Notes
11
12
237
medium of being true (Wahrsein) and truth (Wahrheit) and counters the epistemological dualism (Kants in particular, it seems) with the constitution of things in the
Now of recognizability. The Now of recognizability is the logical time, which has to
be reasoned for in the place of timeless validity. Logical time, however, is the time of
truth which in the Now contains in an unbroken way only itself . That means however:
the Now of recognizability, which contains itself, is its own medium it is Now as that
which is recognizable and Now, in which cognition is possible, only because it is the
point of indifference of both. As such, however, it is the medium in which both move.
With this concept of logical time, that is, a time of language that can be characterized
as a time of pure mediality in the sense of the essay on language from 1916, Benjamin
on the one hand opposes over a period of 20 years the denial or levelling of time
in theories of validity and within the Kantian and neo-Kantian epistemology. On the
other hand, he also opposes the uncritical assimilation of the concept of history to the
concept of time in Hegelian dialectics and Heideggerian phenomenology. With the
Now of recognizability Benjamin not only achieved a theory of genuine historical
cognition independent of the historical doctrines. With the Now of recognizability
he also managed to lead the motives of transcendental and dialectical phenomenology
while remaining loyal to them to the point where they leap over into the motive of
the possibility of the Now of historical cognition. This is a possibility which does not
just contain the resources of any reality, but also determines those resources according
to the measure of this possibility, in so far as it is mere possibility. As mere possibility
it determines this cognition, however, as a cognition that can be missed.
In a text from Zentralpark, cognition is therefore characterized as missable, and
even unrescuable if it is reachable only under the conditions of mere recognizability.
This text can be read as a predecessor of Thesis V: The dialectic image is an image that
flashes up. The image of what has been . . . must be caught in this way, flashing up in
the now of recognizability. The redemption enacted in this way, and solely in this way,
is won only against the perception of what is been unrescuably lost (GS 1.2: 682/SW 4:
1834). As incomplete as this sentence is, it is clear at the same time: only that which
is unrescuable is rescued and even in its rescue it remains unrescuable. This can only
mean: the Now of recognizability is the crisis, in which alone the crisis can be rescued
and not its positive basic data. The crisis the medium is messianic.
In the letters dated 21 December 1972 and 12 January 1973 to Gershom Scholem, in
Gershom Scholem, Briefe III, 19711982, ed. Itta Shedletzky (Munich: Beck, 1999),
pp. 299 and 3001.
Quoted from Franz Kafka, Hochzeitvorbereitungen auf dem Lande (Frankfurt a.M.:
Fischer, 1980), p. 67.
CHAPTER 4
1
2
3
4
5
6
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana
Polan (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 6.
Franoise Meltzer, Acedia and Melancholia, in Walter Benjamin and the Demands of
History, ed. Michael P. Steinberg (New York: Cornell University Press, 1996), p. 145.
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Athlone
Press, 1988), p. 10.
Franz Kafka, The Castle, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (London: Penguin, 1992),
p. 17.
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 10.
This comment is a reference to Benjamins failed effort to come and join the Frankfurt
school in New York and to the title of his article Central Park.
238
Notes
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
239
Ibid., p. 42.
Ibid., pp. 1617.
Ibid., pp. 212.
Deleuze, The Fold, trans. Tom Conley (London: Athlone Press, 1993), p. 62.
Ibid., p. 62.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 63.
Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p. 154.
Ibid., p. 174.
Ibid., p. 31.
CHAPTER 5
1 Sigmund Freud, Mourning and Melancholia, Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1960), 18: 253.
Henceforth references to this edition are abbreviated as SE.
2 See for some of these vacillations, the various histories provided by Giorgio Agamben,
Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture (Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press, 1993); Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1989); and, Giulia Schiesari, The Gendering of
Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), together with the inaugural work by
Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy (New
York: Basic Books, 1964).
3 See Agamben, Stanzas.
4 Cf. Jean Starobinski, La Mlancolie au miroir (Paris: Julliard, 1989).
5 See Freud, Fetishism, SE 21: 155 f. and Splitting of the Ego in the Process of
Defence, SE 23: 2718.
6 Cf. Octave Mannoni, Je sais bien . . . mais quand mme: la croyance, in Clefs pour
l imaginaire ou lautre scne (Paris: Seuil, 1969).
7 Cf. Andreas Huyssen, Monuments and Holocaust Memory in a Media Age, in
Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (New York and London:
Routledge, 1995), pp. 24960.
8 Slavoj Zizek, The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 1989).
9 Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tbingen: Niemeyer, 1927), section 27.
10 Pierre Nora (ed.), Les Lieux de memoire, 3 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1997).
11 The oscillation is reflected in the contrast between the description in the Abrib, where
the ego structurally assumes the unstable condition of fragmentation and supplementary
accretion it perceives in the object, and the New Introductory Lectures, in which splitting,
now generalized to the point of a universal topographical structure, is dissected in terms
of a crystalline division temporary and recuperable along stable, pre-established lines.
Thus, on the one hand, Outline of Psychoanalysis, SE 23: 204:
Disavowals of this kind occur very often and not only with fetishists; and whenever
we are in a position to study them they turn out to be half-measures, incomplete
attempts at detachment from reality. The disavowal is always supplemented by an
acknowledgement; two contrary and independent attitudes always arise and result
in the situation of there being a splitting of the ego. Once more the issue depends
on which of the two can seize hold of the greater intensity.
Compare, on the other hand, New Introductory Lectures, Lecture XXIII, SE 22:
58 f.:
240
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
Notes
241
CHAPTER 6
1
2
3
Thus the editors of a German collection of essays on Kierkegaard lament the fact
that Benjamin, with the exception of his review of Adornos book on Kierkegaard
had nothing to say about Kierkegaard: Leider hat er sich ber Kierkegaard andernorts [except in the review of Adornos book on Kierkegaard] nicht geubert. Dab
er ihn gleichwohl verarbeitet, lbt zumal seine Geschichtsphilosophie vermuten. In
ihr scheint er geradezu darauf aus zu sein, Kierkegaards theologische Intention aus
ihren idealistischen Fesseln zu lsen. Michael Theunissen and Wilfried Greve (eds),
Materialien zur Philosophie Sren Kierkegaards (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1979),
p. 80.
I am referring mainly to the first version of 1931: Was ist das epische Theater? (GS
2.2: 51931). Translations, if not otherwise indicated, are my own.
Worum es heute im Theater geht, lbt sich genauer mit Beziehung auf die Bhne
als auf das Drama bestimmen. Es geht um die Verschttung der Orchestra. Der
Abgrund, der die Spieler vom Publikum wie die Toten von den Lebendigen scheidet,
der Abgrund, dessen Schweigen im Schauspiel die Erhabenheit, dessen Klingen in
der Oper den Rausch steigert, dieser Abgrund, der unter allen Elementen der Bhne
die Spuren ihres sakralen Ursprungs am unverwischbarsten trgt, ist funktionslos
geworden.
Wenn Du nmlich von meinem zweiten Entwurf schreibst darin wrde man nie
die Hand WBs erkennen, so nenne ich das doch ein wenig geradezu gesagt und Du
gehst dabei bestimmt ber die Grenze hinaus, an der Du gewib meiner Freundschaft
nicht aber meiner Zustimmung sicher bist. [. . .] Der WB hat und das ist bei einem
Schriftsteller nicht selbstverstndlich darin aber sieht er seine Aufgabe und sein
bestes Recht zwei Hnde. Ich hatte es mir mit vierzehn Jahren eines Tages in den
Kopf gesetzt, ich msse links schreiben lernen. Und ich sehe mich heut noch Stunden
und Stunden an meinem Schulpult in Haubinda sitzen und ben. Heute steht mein
Pult in der Bibliothque Nationale den Lehrgang so zu schreiben habe ich da auf
einer hhern Stufe auf Zeit! wieder aufgenommen. (Letter to Gretel Karplus, 1
September 1935, GB 5: 151).
Das saturnische Tempo der Sache hatte seinen tiefsten Grund in dem Proze einer
vollkommenen Umwlzung, den eine aus der weit zurckliegenden Zeit meines
unmittelbar metaphysischen, ja theologischen Denkens stammende Gedanken- und
Bildermasse durchmachen mubte, um mit ihrer ganzen Kraft meine gegenwrtige
Verfassung zu nhren. Dieser Prozeb ging im stillen vor sich; ich selber habe so wenig
242
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
Notes
243
CHAPTER 7
1 See Longinus, Peri Hupsous, 43.
2 Of Experience, in The Complete Works of Montaigne: Essays, Travel Journals, Letters,
trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1948) is the
conclusion of Montaignes Essays and it consists of an inventory of the authors
bodily and habitual attitudes. On this famous essay, see Jean Starobinski, The
Bodys Moment, trans. John A. Gallucci, Yale French Studies 64 (1983): 273305; on
Rabelais lists, see Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, trans. Hlne Iswolky
(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984), passim and Forms of Time and
of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes towards a Historical Poetics, in The Dialogic
Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, TX: University of
Texas Press, 1988), pp. 167206; on the use of lists in La Popelinires perfect history
see Zachary Sayre Schiffman, On the Threshold of Modernity: Relativism in the French
Renaissance (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), chs 1 and 2.
3 Michel Foucault, Preface to The Order of Things: An Achaeology of the Human Sciences
(London: Routledge, 2002), pp. xvixxvi. (The French title is Les Mots et les choses
[1966]).
4 For Benjamins attitude to Warburg vis--vis the independence of disciplines, or, as
Benjamin also called it, cultural history, see Howard Caygill, Walter Benjamins
Concept of Cultural History, in David S. Ferris (ed.), The Cambridge Companion
to Walter Benjamin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 839.
Another article on the relation between Benjamin and the Warburg school that
deserves mention is Beatrice Hanssens Portrait of Melancholy (Benjamin, Warburg,
Panofsky), in Gerhard Richter (ed.), Benjamins Ghosts: Interventions in Contemporary
Literary and Cultural Studies (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002),
pp. 16988. Although Hanssen does not address explicitly the issue of the independence
of disciplines, her reading is still valuable for the investigation of the subject of history
in showing that what distinguishes Benjamins method from Warburgs method is that
for the former there is a disappearance of the human (p. 186).
5 Andrew Benjamin, Benjamins Modernity, in Ferris (ed.), Cambridge Companion to
Walter Benjamin, p. 113.
6 The historical method is a philological method, writes Benjamin in a note from the
Paralipomena titled Dialectical Image (SW 4: 405/GS 1.3: 1238). And the philologist
is, according to the essay on the Elective Affinities, the chemist who investigates the
ashes of the pyre i.e. the material content of the work of art, or the historical pile
of catastrophes. The constructive principle of historical materialism presupposes
destruction (cf. N7, 6).
7 The culmination of historicism equates universal history with the third sense of historicism indicated earlier, the positivism claiming to present the facts as they really were.
8 The metaphor of the positivist historian as a collector of index cards comes from Carl
Becker, Detachment and the Writing of History: Essays and Letters, ed. Phil Snyder
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1958), pp. 245.
9 The Storyteller is of course much more complex. The argument unfolds partly
as a contrast between storytelling and the novel. See Timothy Bahtis Death and
Authority: Benjamins The Storyteller, in Allegories of History: Literary Historiography
after Hegel (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), pp. 22654 for an
incisive reading of the difference between the two genres in terms of the temporality
of the end and of ending.
10 Herodotus with an English Translation, trans. A.D. Godley (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard
University Press, 1957), 2: 21.
11 The inadequacy of the question is indicated by the indecision as to who really is in
control. Thus Jrgen Habermas discerns Benjamins failed notion of history in that
244
CHAPTER 8
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
I wish to thank heartily Antoine Parzy for his helpful contribution to this work.
Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 2.
Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt, 1968), p. 199.
D. N. Fustel de Coulanges, Histoire des institutions politiques de lancienne France, t. III,
La monarchie Franque (Brussels: Ed. Culture et civilisation, 1964), p. ii.
See on this point Jean Grondin, Introduction H-G Gadamer (Paris: Le Cerf, 1999).
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode: Grundzge einer philosophischen
Hermeneutik, in Gesammelte Werke (Tbingen, J.C.B Mohr, 1990), 1: 295 / Truth
and Method, rev. trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York:
Continuum, 1989), p. 290.
Gadamer, Vorwort zur 2. Auflage, in Gesammelte Werke 1: 443.
Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future (London: Faber & Faber, 1954), p. 3.
CHAPTER 9
1 Clearly the other important thinker about boredom is Martin Heidegger. While both
Heidegger and Benjamin locate boredom as a condition of the modern and thus as one
of the moods of modernity, there is a fundamental difference as to how the conception
of the present is understood and thus in the way that it determines the philosophical
project. For Heideggers most sustained engagement with boredom see his The
Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker
(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995).
2 I have tried to give a detailed account of this conception of the present in my Present
Hope: Philosophy, Architecture, Judaism (London: Routledge, 1997).
3 Benjamins relation to Kant is a topic of research in its own right. In general terms
however, Kant positions Space and Time as providing the conditions of possibility for
experience. They are the pure forms of sensible intuition (Critique of Pure Reason,
trans. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997], A
Notes
6
7
8
9
10
11
245
39). While experience is essential in terms of its possibility, what is left untreated by
definition is the nature of the experience and any strong conception of the experiencing subject.
Ambivalence is an ontological state, rather than one linked to the relativism of
epistemology. What this means is that ambivalence is an aspect that is constitutive
of subjectivity itself. Within the prevailing presence of ambivalence, knowledge is
essential.
The heritage in which the technology of art is discussed usually oscillates between
two predetermined positions. In the first instance the term technology assumes a
monolithic quality and is thus not able to be used effectively to account for different
and conflicting practices that stem from the same technological source. While in
the second techniques, as a domain of practice, are linked to a humanist conception
of techne and as such presented in terms of human skill. The hand works with the
machine. As opposed to both of these directions of research what needs to be pursued
is what could be described as the development of an ontology of techniques. This is
of course a project to come. However it is one that can be located within a mode of
thinking that begins with Benjamin.
I have tried to provide a more sustained version of this argument in Disclosing Spaces:
On Painting (Manchester: Clinamen, 2004), see in particular Chs. 1 and 3.
For other uses of the term distraction, see for example Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass
Ornament, trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1995). One of Kracauers formulations opens up the question of who sees and thus the
nature of the subject of distraction. Writing of the interior design of the cinema he
notes that the stimulation of the senses succeed one another with such rapidity that
there is no room left between them even for the slightest contemplation (p. 326). The
temporality of this movement one marked by the elimination of any possible intervention is implicitly challenged by Benjamins notion of distraction. The audiences
state of absorption retains a partiality precisely because of the ineliminability of the
potential for criticality.
For a detailed investigation of the complex politics of Fury see Anton Kaes, A Stranger
in the House: Fritz Langs Fury and the Cinema of Exile, New German Critique
(2003), 89: 3358.
An obvious site in which it would be possible to begin to identify this development is
in Freuds Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, in The Standard Edition of
the Complete Psychoanalytical Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (London:
Hogarth Press, 1973), 17: 65143. The value of Freuds work is the way it complicates
any straightforward distinction between the individual and the group. What is interesting with Benjamin however is the possibility of introducing not the constraint of
the ego-ideal, but a relationship between distraction and criticality that links their
presence to a founding ambivalence. The ambivalence means that the critical will have
a relation to formal presence, rather than the projection of one content as opposed to
another. While it cannot be undertaken here, the question of ambivalence as a motif
in psychoanalysis would need to be pursued through section II of Totem and Taboo.
While its detail cannot be pursued, here the distinction between authentic and
inauthentic self is formulated in Being and Time in the following terms: The self of
everyday Dasein is the they-self which we distinguish from the authentic self that
is from the self which has been taken hold of in its own way. As the they-self, the
particular Dasein has been dispersed into the they, and must first find itself . Martin
Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford:
Basil Blackwell, 1978), p. 167.
The iconoclasm involves the need to retain technique and thus abstraction as site of
the political and not to identify the political nature of art with content. As such the
246
12
13
CHAPTER 10
1 An earlier conception of the bourgeois domestic interior emphasizes this aspect of
mortification: The bourgeois interior of the 1860s to the 1890s with its gigantic
sideboards distended with carvings, the sunless corners where potted palms sit, the
balcony embattled behind its balustrade, and the long corridors with their singing
gas flames fittingly houses only the corpse. On this sofa the aunt cannot but be
murdered. The soulless luxury of the furnishings becomes true comfort only in the
presence of a dead body. (SW 1: 447)
2 Mario Praz, An Illustrated History of Interior Decoration from Pompeii to Art Nouveau,
trans. William Weaver (London: Thames & Hudson, 1964), pp. 178.
3 Ibid., p. 25.
4 For a more detailed account of how Benjamins thinking critiques conventional
ways of writing the history of the interior, privacy and domesticity, see Charles Rice,
Rethinking Histories of the Interior, The Journal of Architecture 9.3 (2004): 27587.
5 While Benjamins notational thinking on the interior is not confined to Convolute I,
it does offer the most intense coalescence of thinking and sources on the interior.
6 Rolf Tiedemann, Dialectics at a Standstill: Approaches to the Passagen-Werk, in AP,
p. 931.
7 Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, Translators Foreword, in AP, p. xi.
8 Ibid., p. xi.
9 Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), p. 6.
10 Ibid., p. 6.
11 Ibid., p. 59.
12 Pierre Missac, Walter Benjamins Passages, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholson (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1995), p. 136.
13 Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).
14 See Peter Thornton, Authentic Dcor: The Domestic Interior 16201920 (New York:
Viking, 1984), pp. 1011.
15 Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, The Plane of Immanence, in What is Philosophy?
trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press,
1994), p. 38.
16 For a discussion of the status of the two exposs in Benjamins conception of The
Arcades Project, see Missac, Walter Benjamins Passages, pp. 13945.
Notes
247
CHAPTER 11
1
8
9
10
248
11
Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in the East
and West (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), p. 119.
12 Giedion, Building in France, p. 87. Giedions statement in part stimulated Walter
Benjamin to invest in technology as the source of new collective needs. After receiving
a copy of Giedions book Benjamin admired him in a letter using the following words:
I am studying in your book . . . the differences between radical conviction and radical
knowledge that refresh the heart. You possess the latter, and therefore you are able
to illustrate, or rather to uncover, the tradition by observing the present (quoted in
Building in France, p. 53). In Convolute N of the Arcades Project Benjamin returns to
Giedion criticizing his inclination for historicism: just as Giedion teaches us to read
off the basic features of todays architecture in the buildings erected around 1850, we,
in turn, would recognize todays life, todays form, in the life and in the apparently
secondary, lost forms of that epoch (N1, 11). Here is Detlef Mertins interpretation
of the Benjamins cited statement: In reworking Giedions dualism into a dialectic
between physiological processes and phantasmagoric dreams, Benjamin pointed to the
immanence of truth within the expression of bodily labours and the physiognomy of
historical event (Walter Benjamins Glimpses of the Unconscious: New Architecture
and New Optics, History of Photography, 22 (1998): 118.
13 On this subject see Buck-Morss, Dreamworld, especially Ch. 2, On Time,
pp. 4296.
14 James S. Ackerman, Origins, Imitation, Conventions (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2002), p. 249.
15 One is reminded of David Wattkins position in Morality and Architecture (London:
Clarendon Press, 1977).
16 I am paraphrasing John McCole in Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 172. The author makes these claims
based on Benjamins remarks in Experience and Poverty (SW 2: 7316).
17 For the complex influence of Freuds work on Benjamin, see Laurence A. Rickels,
Suicitation: Benjamin and Freud, in Benjamins Ghosts, pp. 14253.
18 For a brief and concise documentation of Benajmins attraction to the work of modern
architects, specially Le Corbusier and Scheerbart, see Detlef Mertins, The Enticing
and Threatening Face of Prehistory: Walter Benjamin and the Utopia of Glass,
Assemblage, 29 (1996).
19 Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1988), pp. 7989.
20 Hanssen, Walter Benjamins Other History, p. 54.
21 I am benefiting from Andrew Benjamins reflections on Time and Task: Benjamin
and Heidegger Showing the Present, in Present Hope: Philosophy, Architecture, Judaism
(London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 2655.
22 For Walter Benjamin, revolution, a moment of danger, offers the historian the opportunity to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up (SW 4: 391).
23 The work of two historians amongst others comes to mind: Manfredo Tafuri and
Kenneth Frampton. For Tafuri, architectures ideology unfolds itself in a stressful
search for a space beyond the domain that is already occupied, or will be occupied,
by capitalist forces of production and consumption. Every aspect of the everyday life
which in one way or another relates to the art of building has either already been internalized into the representational realm of capitalism or would be part of it through
architecture. See Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development
(Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1976). Important to Framptons discussion of modern architecture are dichotomies such as tradition and innovation, mtier and technology, but
also site and material. Frampton reads these dichotomies through Walter Benjamins
ideas on the loss of aura and Martin Heideggers discourse on dwelling. What these
Notes
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
249
readings entail is the loss of the unity between architecture and place, and the historical
impossibility of retaining such a unity even through mechanical reproduction of the
object. Thus Framptons quest for modern architecture where the inflection of a
chosen tectonic penetrates into the inner most recesses of the structure, not as a
totalizing force but as declension of an articulate sensibility. See Frampton, Place,
Production and Architecture, in Modern Architecture: A Critical History (London:
Thames & Hudson, 1980), p. 297.
Briefly, what makes these two figures important, however, is the difference involved in
their emphasis on architectural praxis. While Tafuri expands ones understanding of the
problematic of the project of modernity, exploring the work of architects who attempt
to retain architectures autonomy in spite of the expected failure, Frampton, instead,
highlights marginal victories when aspects of place-making are retained, as the instrumental reason tightens its circle on architecture. Their difference has also to do with the
fact that Tafuri recognizes the historicity of separating the task of the historian from that
of the architect. The latter, he believed, should design and build, regardless of the historians attempt to disclose the immanent gap between form and meaning in modernity.
Framptons methodology, on the other hand, enjoys a strategic doubling: in analysing
a building, Frampton tries to understand, as much as possible, how the architect had
sought an architectonic solution for the given situation.
This is not the rule: the classificatory means employed by historians who are influenced
by post-structuralist theories is different: instead of discussing the work in reference
to the project of modernity, an attempt is made to write the history of modern architecture based on themes central to the development of modernism. See, for example,
Alan Colquhoun, Modern Architecture (London: Oxford University Press, 2003). His
vision of history differs from that of Kenneth Frampton and Manfredo Tafuri. While
Frampton sees modernity as an incomplete project, for Tafuri it represents a historical
project with its own modalities of closure.
On Wlfflin see Principles of Art History, trans. M.D. Hottinger (New York: Dover,
1950). Also see Michael Podro, The Critical Art Historians of Art (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1982), pp. 98-110.
On this subject see Harry Francis Mallgrave, Epilogue, The Semper Legacy: Semper
and Riegl, in Gottfried Semper (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), pp.
35581. Also Debra Schafter, The Order of Ornament, The Structure of Style: The
Theoretical Foundations of Modern Art and Architecture (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2003), especially pp. 3259.
Alois Riegl, The Dutch Group Portrait, October, 74 (1995): 335. Analysing
Rembrandts (The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Tulp), Riegl argued that:
The picture accordingly contains a double unity through subordination: first,
between Tulp and the seven surgeons, all of whom subordinate themseleves to him
as the lecturer, and, second, between the crowning surgeon and the beholder, the
latter subordinated to the former and indirectly through him to Tulp in turn.
Such a perception of the beholder and painting remains, according to Rigel, closely
dependent upon the works of his direct predecessors . . . and one becomes convinced
that Rembrandt, too, was primarily merely an executor of the artistic volition of his
people and his time (p. 4).
According to Margaret Iversen, for Riegl, different stylistic types, understood as expression
of a varying Kunstwollen, are read as different ideals of perception or as different ways of
regarding the minds relationship to its objects and of organizing the material of perception.
Iversen, Alois Riegl: Art History and Theory (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993), p. 8.
Alina Payne, Architecture, Ornament and Pictorialism: Notes on the Relationship
Between the Arts from Wlfflin to Le Corbusier, in Karen Koehler (ed.), The Built
Surface (Burlington: Ashgate, 2002), pp. 5472.
250
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
Notes
251
CHAPTER 12
Translations from the German texts by Benjamin and Rosenzweig are mine, although
I have provided reference to the available English translations.
1 Most helpful have been: Rebecca Comay, Benjamins Endgame, in Walter Benjamins
Philosophy: Destruction and Experience, ed. Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne
(Manchester: Clinamen, 1994), pp. 25191. Irving Wohlfarth On the Messianic
Structure of Walter Benjamins Last Reflections, in Glyph 5 (1978): 148212, and the
more recent Eric Jacobson, Metaphysics of the Profane (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2003).
2 Stphane Moses, Walter Benjamin and Franz Rosenzweig, in Gary Smith (ed.),
Benjamin: Philosophy, Aesthetics, History (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press,
1989), pp. 22846.
3 References are to Franz Rosenzweig, first the German, then the equivalent English.
Der Stern der Erlsung, in Franz Rosenzweig: Der Mensch und sein Werk: Gesammelte
Schriften, Vol. 2 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976); The Star of Redemption, trans.
William W. Hallo (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1971).
CHAPTER 13
1
2
3
Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons
(London: Unwin, 1968).
Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans.
George Schwab (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985).
Max Weber, Hauptprobleme der Soziologie: Erinnerungsgabe fr Max Weber, ed.
Melchior Palyi (Munich: Duncker and Humblot, 1923).
CONTRIBUTORS
Andrew Benjamin has taught philosophy and architectural theory in
both Europe and the USA. He is Professor of Critical Theory in Design
and Architecture, Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building, in the
University of Technology, Sydney, and Adjunct Professor of Critical Theory
at Monash University. His previous books include: The Plural Event (1993),
Present Hope: Philosophy, Architecture, Judaism (1997); Philosophys Literature
(2001) and Disclosing Spaces: On Painting (2004).
Howard Caygill is Professor of Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths College,
University of London, where he teaches philosophy, aesthetics and cultural
history. His publications include: Art of Judgment (1989); A Kant Dictionary
(1995) and Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience (2002).
Rebecca Comay is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto. She
has published extensively in areas of European philosophy, and particularly
on the work of Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger, Hegel and contemporary French thought.
Georges Didi-Huberman teaches at the Ecole des hautes tudes en sciences
sociales, Paris. He is the author of numerous books in French. His books
in English translation include: Fra Angelico: Dissemblance and Figuration
(1995); Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of
the Salptrire (2003); Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of a Certain
History of Art (2004) and Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion (2004).
David Ferris is Professor of Comparative Literature and Humanities at
the University of Colorado at Boulder. He is the author of Theory and the
Evasion of History (1993) and Silent Urns: Romanticism, Hellenism, Modernity
(2000); and the editor of Walter Benjamin: Theoretical Questions (1996) and
The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin (2004). He is currently
completing a book on Walter Benjamin entitled Torsos of Modernity: Walter
Benjamin and the Moment of Criticism.
Robert Gibbs is Professor in the Department of Philosophy, University
of Toronto, in the field of modern Jewish philosophy. He taught at St
Louis University and Princeton University, and has published widely on
ethics, continental philosophy, and Jewish thought. His first major project
addressed ethics and Jewish thought, including two books: Correlations
in Rosenzweig and Levinas (1992) and Why Ethics? Signs of Responsibilities
254
(2000). His ongoing project focuses on ethics and laws, and he is completing
a book, Commands and Laws: Ethics and Laws in Contemporary Jewish
Philosophy, that explores the different interpretations of law in twentiethcentury Jewish philosophers.
Werner Hamacher is Professor of German and Comparative Literature,
Goethe University, Frankfurt a.M., and has taught at the Free University
Berlin, Johns Hopkins University, Yale University, the University of
Amsterdam and the Ecole normale suprieure. His publications include:
Pleroma: Reading in Hegel (1998); Premises: Studies in Philosophy and
Literature from Kant to Celan (1996, 1999) and Maser (1998).
Gevork Hartoonian is Associate Professor of Architecture at the University
of Canberra. He has taught at many US universities, including Columbia
University and the Pratt Institute. He is the author of Modernity and its Other
(1997), and Ontology of Construction (1994). His most recent publications
include, Modernism, the entry essay for the Encyclopaedia of 20th Century
Architecture (2004); Gottfried Semper: The Structure of Theatricality,
Art Criticism (2003); Beyond Historicism: Manfredo Tafuris Flight, Art
Criticism (2002) and Frank Gehry: Roofing, Wrapping, and Wrapping the
Roof, Journal of Architecture, (2002).
Rainer Ngele is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. His books and essays deal mainly
with literature in the intersection of philosophy and psychoanalysis, concentrating on Benjamin, Freud, Kafka, Hlderlin, Brecht, Artaud and others.
His publications include: Reading after Freud (1987); Theatre, Theory,
Speculation: Walter Benjamin and the Scenes of Modernity (1991); Echoes of
Translation: Reading between Texts (1997) and Literalische Vexierbilder: Drei
Versuche zu einer Figur (2001).
Stephanie Polsky has recently received her doctorate in the history of
ideas from Goldsmiths College, University of London, for her thesis
Walter Benjamins Transit: A Destructive Tour of Modernity. She has
lectured widely on Benjamin at various institutions including Goldsmiths,
Camberwell College of Arts, Central St Martins and the London College of
Printing. She currently lectures in the department of Creative Critical and
Communication Studies at Greenwich University. Her most recent work has
focused on Benjamin and the history of technology.
Charles Rice is Lecturer in Architecture at the University of New South
Wales, Sydney, and has taught in architectural history and theory at the
Architectural Association, London. He researches the historical emergence
of the bourgeois domestic interior, the theoretical issues surrounding its
Contributors
255
Index
Ackerman, James 187, 250n.
Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund 71,
72, 912, 968, 100, 105, 179,
240n.
Agacinski, Sylviane 234n.
Agamben, Giorgio 74, 779, 89
Alberti, Leon Battista 247n.
Arendt, Hannah 1434, 146, 153
Aristotle 111
Atget, Eugne 202, 278, 30, 33,
232n.
Augustine 217
Bahti, Timothy 243n., 244n.
Bakhtin, Mikhail 243n.
Balfour, Ian 244n.
Ball, Hugo 217
Baudelaire, Charles 4, 6, 25, 89,
100, 20912, 232n.
Bataille, Georges 7, 8, 227n., 228n.
Becker, Carl 243n.
Beckett, Samuel 231n.
Behne, Adolf 179
Belting, H. 231n.
Benjamin, Andrew 123, 193,
232n., 234n., 247n., 248n.,
250n.
Benjamin, Dora 106
Benjamin, Walter
A Short Presentation on
Proust, Held on my Fortieth
Birthday 62
The Arcades Project 8, 17, 19,
202, 258, 317, 456, 48,
49, 5763, 968, 100, 103,
105, 11822, 126, 1413,
147, 149, 1523, 159, 1648,
Index
On the Concept of History 1,
7, 24, 26, 28, 32, 357,
3848, 527, 607, 804, 86,
989, 116, 11820, 1227,
1301, 1346, 137, 14855,
156, 183, 185, 186, 193, 197
8, 20714, 215, 233n., 234n.,
235n., 236n., 237n., 241n.,
247n., 248n., 250n.
On the Mimetic Faculty 234n.
One-Way Street 147, 177, 217,
2234, 246n.
The Origin of German Tragic
Drama 4, 56, 57, 60, 83, 98,
103, 105, 109, 141, 143, 217,
2234, 236n.
Paralipomena to On the
Concept of History 19, 24
5, 279, 36, 523, 120, 1223,
126, 12930, 134, 148, 151,
152, 2345n., 236n., 243n.
Praise of the Puppet: Critical
Comments on Max von
Boehns Puppen und
Puppenspiele 146
Rastellis Story 215
The Rigorous Study of
Art: On the First volume
of Kunstwissenschaftliche
Forschung 1902
The Storyteller 98, 12934,
13842
Surrealism 101
The Task of the
Translator 423
Toys and Play: Marginal
Notes on a Monumental
Work 1689
Two Poems by Friedrich
Hlderlin 1078
What is Epic Theatre 1023,
10717
The Work of Art in the
Age of its Technological
257
Reproducibility 3, 12,
17, 205, 2833, 36, 103,
15764, 169, 1867, 189, 191,
232n., 233n.
World and Time 21719, 223
Bensmaia, Reda 238n.
Bergdol, Barry 247n.
Blanqui, Luis-Auguste 164
Bloch, Ernst 198, 217
Blood, Susan 232n.
Brodersen, Momme 238n.
Bois, Yve-Alain 15, 2289n.,
230n., 231n.
Bonnefoi, C. 230n.
Borges, Jorge Luis 85
Brandt, Sebastian 223
Brecht, Bertolt 71, 83, 102, 105
17, 117, 236n.
Brethaupt, Fritz 247n.
Buber, Martin 109, 197, 214
Bchner, Georg 109
Buck-Morss, Susan 176, 186,
228n., 241n., 248n, 250n.
Brger, Peter 227n.
Bush, George W. 203
Cache, Bernard 250n.
Cadava, Eduardo 231n., 233n.,
241n.
Caygill, Howard 243n.
Celan, Paul 45, 109
Czanne, Paul 230n.
Char, Ren 153
Chirico, Giorgio de 165
Choay, Franoise 184, 247n.
Clay, Jean 14, 229n., 231n.
Cohen, Hermann 197, 200
Colquhoun, Alan 249n.
Comay, Rebecca 240n., 251n.
Criquei, J.P. 229n.
Damisch, Hubert 14, 230n.
Dante 6, 227n.
Danto, Arthur 227n.
258
Grandville (Jean-Ignace-Isidore
Gerard) 225
Greenberg, Clement 9, 12, 229n.
Grondin, Jean 244n.
Guattari, Flix 706, 80, 815,
246n.
Guttmann, Simon 106
Hamacher, Werner 246n.
Habermas, Jrgen 243n.
Hanssen, Beatrice 188, 195, 243n.,
247n., 250n.
Harootunian, Harry 185, 186, 251n.
Hebel, Johann Peter 129
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm
Friedrich 78, 90, 92, 122, 202,
204, 227n., 236n., 237n.
Heidegger, Martin 57, 91, 149,
163, 2356n., 237n., 244n.,
245n., 248n., 250n.
Heinle, Christoph Friedrich 106
Herodotus 119, 1313
Hess, Thomas 10, 229n., 230n.,
231n.
Hitler, Adolf 62, 72, 111, 120, 215
Hobsbawn, Eric 142
Hofmannsthal, Hugo von 36
Hlderlin, Friedrich 1078, 11112
Homer 119
Hope, Thomas 178
Horkheimer, Max 72, 912, 1213
Husserl, Edmund 150, 235n., 236n.
Huyssen, Andreas 239n.
Ibsen, Henrik 177
Iversen, Margaret 249n.
Jacobsen, Eric 251n.
Janovoch, Gustav 238n.
Jung, Carl Gustav 8, 96
Kaes, Anton 245n.
Kafka, Franz 37, 678, 1445,
234n., 237n.
Index
Kandinsky, Wassily 9
Kant, Immanuel 1, 456, 4950,
52, 556, 61, 6978, 823, 85
6, 101, 122, 157, 234n., 235n.,
236n., 237n., 2445n.
Karplus (Adorno), Gretel 103, 1056
Keller, Gottfried 56, 59, 236n.
Kierkegaard, Sren 95, 102, 111,
11317, 179, 236n., 240n., 241n.
King, Martin Luther, Jr 204
Klee, Paul 183
Klibansky, Raymond 239n.
Kracauer, Siegfried 245n.
Kraft, Werner 104
Kraus, Karl 61, 144, 145
Kraus, Rosalind 227n.
Kristeva, Julia 239n.
La Popelinire, Lancelot Voisin
de 120, 243n.
Lacan, Jacques 92
Lacis, Asjia 72
Leach, Neil 250n.
Le Corbusier (Charles Edouard
Jeanneret-Gris) 186, 248n., 250n.
Lebensztejn, Jean-Claude 228n.,
229n., 231n.
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 79, 85
Leskov, Nikolai 129, 139
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 95
Levinas, Emmanuel 198
Longinus 120
Lwith, Karl 164
Lukcs, Georg 223, 240n.
Luther, Martin 110, 223
Lyotard, Jean-Franois 184
Malevich, Kazimir 6, 9
Mallarm, Stphane 56
Mallgrave, Harry Francis 249n.
Mannoni, Octave 90
Marx, Karl 8, 301, 58, 61, 96,
97, 107, 108, 113, 184, 185, 186,
208, 2212, 226, 234n., 242n.
259
Masaccio 228n.
Mauss, Marcel 139
McCole, John 248n.
McLaughlin, Kevin 176, 247n.
Meltzer, Franoise 237n.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 14
Mertins, Detlef 248n.
Michelet, Jules 97
Missac, Pierre 177, 180
Mondrian, Piet 5, 6, 8, 9, 12, 14,
228n., 230n.
Monglond, Andr 19, 245, 289,
232n., 233n.
Montaigne, Michel de 120, 132
Morgenstern, Soma 62
Moscovici, M. 227n.
Neher, Gaspar 1134
Newman, Barnett 5, 6, 67, 918,
22931n.
Nietzsche, Friedrich 79, 81, 87, 89,
93, 109, 264, 2212, 223, 236n.,
240n., 246n.
Nora, Pierre 92
Osborne, Peter 193, 250n.
Panofky, Erwin 5, 6, 16, 227n.,
228n., 239n., 243n.
Payne, Alina 191
Payot, D. 231n.
Pen, Tsui 856
Pensky, Max 241n.
Percier, Charles 178
Perret, C. 227n., 228n.
Plato 113, 114
Pliny the Elder 5
Podro, Michael 249n.
Pollock, Jackson 9, 14
Praz, Mario 1735
Proust, Marcel 3, 4, 62, 69, 99
Rabelais, Francois 120
Rang, Florence Christian 217
260