Reflections

by Walter Benjamin

  In Illuminations (1968) Hannah Arendt gathered some of Benjamin’s most important literary essays, and in the present companion volume she wanted (if I judge her intentions correctly) to show the many rich strains of his writings and the variegated forms in which he articulated his experience of thoughts, places, books, and people. Here she arranged his philosophical essays, aphorisms, and autobiographical writings in a sequence in which the chronologies of his life and of his developing ideas often cooperate, but I would recommend that the reader (particularly one approaching Benjamin for the first time) study and enjoy these texts in a more meandering way. We would keep together particular clusters of texts, as Hannah Arendt would have wanted us to do, and yet move on to a different finale—not to the pure metaphysics of his luminous early thought, as suggested by Dr. Arendt’s arrangement, but to later essays in which the metaphysical and the Marxist elements confirm and contradict one another. I would suggest that the reader first approach those of Benjamin’s writings that can loosely be termed autobiographical, including the ironic self-exploration in “The Destructive Character” (pages 317–19), and then proceed to a group of early writings in which a systematic and metaphysical orientation predominates. In consonance with his intellectual development, we would, in the next step, deal with a third cluster of essays in which Benjamin moved to the speculative left or tried to formulate what he thought he had learned from Bertolt Brecht; and once we had learned something about his Marxist commitments, we might feel better prepared to deal with those particularly difficult texts in which, to the despair of partisan interpreters, spiritual and materialist ideas appear in cryptic configurations. In these (as, for example, the Paris précis) the failure of the systematic thinker constitutes the true triumph of the master of hermeneutics who, in “reading” the things of the world as if they were sacred texts, suddenly decodes the overwhelming forces of human history.

  Benjamin’s “A Berlin Chronicle,” a relatively late text sketched during his first stay (1932) in Ibiza, Spain, and never published while he lived, looks back in many important passages upon his early childhood experiences and upon the emotional vicissitudes of the thinker as a young man of the idealist jeunesse dorée. He himself suggests how we should read the text; the “Chronicle,” precisely because it explicates the nature of memory by testing its powers, is a far more restless and profound text than his “Berlin Childhood Around the Turn of the Century,” in which individual memories are neatly ordered in a static if not mannered way. In the “Berlin Chronicle,” his intimate childhood and the city of his youth emerge luminously: the shaft of light under his bedroom door revealing the consoling presence of his parents nearby, the first experience of a threatening thunderstorm over the city, the smell of perspiration in the classroom, the confusions of puberty, the pale whore in the blue sailor-suit dominating (as in an Antonioni movie) his recurrent dreams, the famous Romanische Café as well as the more modest Princess Café, where he wrote his first essays on a marble table-top. The details are vivid and precise, but Benjamin is not satisfied with the informative splinter: he wants to explore the process of remembering itself—unfolding, dredging up—and to analyze the particular movement of his thoughts that gives shape to the materials and isolates the illuminating significance of what is close to the center of his sensibilities. We are, as readers, involved in a Proustian exercise in creating a past by using the finest snares of consciousness; to remember, Benjamin writes, is to “open the fan of memory,” but he who starts to open the fan “never comes to the end of its segments; no image satisfies him, for he has seen that it can be unfolded and only in its folds does the truth reside: that image, that taste, that touch for whose sake all this has been unfurled and dissected; and now remembrance advances from small to smallest details, from the smallest to the infinitesimal, while that which it encounters in these microcosms grows ever mightier.” Memory is the “capability of endlessly interpolating.” In an extended image (implying an allusion to Schliemann and his discovery of Troy), Benjamin praises the writer as an archeologist who is never satisfied with the first stroke of the spade and returns again and again to the same place to dig deeper and deeper.

  Benjamin himself is aware that his memories are characterized by a remarkable absence of people, and he tells us of a sudden epiphany that revealed to him in what way modern cities take their revenge upon the many claims human beings make upon one another. Memory ruled by the city does not show encounters and visits, but, rather, the scenes in which we encounter ourselves or others, and such an insight betrays an entire syndrome of Benjamin’s ideas about life in the modern world: his concern with the “thingness” of the cities, the only places of historical experience in industrial civilizations; his obsession (shared by the French Surrealists) with walking the streets and boulevards; his fundamental urge to rearrange everything lived by fixing it on maps, in graphic schemes, spatial order. In his imagination, as in that of Rainer Maria Rilke, space rules over time; his “topographical consciousness” shapes experience in architectonic patterns, in neighborhoods, and in particular in urban districts the borders of which have to be crossed in trembling and sweet fear. The “Berlin Chronicle” is a misnomer, because it actually offers a map of coexistent apartments, meeting places, elegant salons, shabby hotel rooms, skating rinks, and tennis courts; social distinctions are expressed in terms of different urban landscapes in which the rich and the poor are enclosed without knowing one another; and certain streets, dividing the red-light districts around the railway station from the quarters of the haute bourgeoisie, are ontological thresholds on which the young man likes to dwell, tasting the terrible and magic moments of confronting a totally “other” life or the “edge of the void,” the whores being “the household goddesses of [a] cult of nothingness.” Benjamin always looked for threshold experiences, and not only in a private way. As a young man he may have loitered near the railway stations to face another way of living that radically negated all his personal values of absolute purity, and as a philosopher he continued moving toward thresholds of speculative potentialities, tasting, confronting, exploring, without really caring to cross over into a total commitment to the “other” once and for all. His early fascination with the other world of the red lights may be emblematic of the most secret bents of his mind.

  “One-Way Street” was originally planned to be a highly personal record of observations, aphorisms, dreams, and prose epigrams assembled from 1924 to 1928 for a few intimate friends; the title suggests, in its urban metaphor, the fortunate turn of a street that opens onto a striking view of an entire new panorama, and indicates to readers that they should confront each of the little pieces as an abruptly illuminating moment of modern experience—intimate, literary, and political. The “Imperial Panorama,” Benjamin’s diagnosis of German inflation, was possibly the first piece, to which others were added. It is a first-rate document, in which his private shock (often articulated in terms of his incipient Marxism) and the social dissolution of the age closely correspond. He wrote these observations from the double perspective of the reluctant bourgeois son who had been living on the financial resources of his father (the capitalist), and the revolutionary Marxist who was beginning to grasp, from his conversations with Asja Lacis and his readings of Georg Lukács, in what way middle-class stability, now seemingly destroyed forever, had caused the unstable fate of the less privileged. He rightly observes how inflationary pressures make money the destructive center of all interests, and yet he sounds very much like the disappointed middle-class idealist in the German Romantic tradition when he deplores the loss of communal warmth in human relationships, the disappearing feeling for a free and well-rounded personality, and the new dearth of productive conversation, due to the sudden predominance of the question of the cash nexus. But it is difficult to separate Benjamin the social commentator from the moralist in the French tradition; his brief and lucid observations on the fragility of feelings between men and women forcefully remind me of Stendhal’s De l
’amour, and he is particularly impressive when he fiercely comments on the analogies between books and prostitutes (variations of a leitmotif), discusses the insecurities of the modern writer, or playfully works out rules for writing bad books. Looking far into the future, he demands new forms of publications that would be more easily accessible, in an industrial mass society, to people averse to the “universal gesture of the book,” and he speculates, as a pioneer in the semiotic tradition, about the literary and technological changes effected by new modes of print, advertising, and the developing cinema. As if in passing, and yet with astonishing foresight, he approaches problems that today dominate our changing awareness of literature and the media in the age of concrete poetry, Marshall McLuhan, and Jacques Derrida.

  Peter Szondi suggested that in his “images of the cities” Benjamin offers an “exegesis of creation,” but I would distinguish between his exercises and his pieces of perfection. Whether or not the portrait of “Naples” (1924) was sketched by Benjamin alone, as Adorno believed, or with his friend Asja, it strikes me as a preliminary essay in future possibilities, rich in precise observations (as if preserved by Lina Wertmüller’s camera), and yet unusually relaxed in idiom, a funny and lovable travel reportage. The pages on “Marseilles” (1929) are of an entirely different order and of highly personal importance. They were especially dear to him, Benjamin confessed in 1928 to the Austrian writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal, because he had to “fight” Marseilles more than any other city. Marseilles was the toughest of adversaries, and to “squeeze a single sentence out of Marseilles was more difficult than to write an entire book about Rome.” Hiding his own obsessions behind a quotation from André Breton (who speaks about the city streets as the only place of authentic experience), Benjamin consistently relies on his topographical approach again, breaks up the city into its constituent components, and, mobilizing striking and precise metaphors, shows himself an absolute master of reading the hidden meaning of the sparse detail. Certain of his total isolation in the toughest of all cities, Benjamin decided, as soon as he arrived in his small hotel room and read a little in Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf, to continue the hashish experiments he had been undertaking for a number of years under the medical supervision of Dr. Ernst Joël, one of his oldest friends from the time of the Youth Movement. Benjamin wanted to sharpen his sensibilities to pierce the essence of the city, but “Hashish in Marseilles” (introduced by a long quotation from Dr. Joël’s medical report) revises and transforms an actual record of his experiment (dated September 29, 1928) into a distinct work of art in which fluid and inchoate experience has changed into an ordered narrative of precision and radiance. Inarticulate consumers of hashish who merely want their narcissistic kicks surely cannot claim to follow Benjamin’s example.

  In the essays written during and immediately after the years of World War I, Benjamin wants to confront central questions about the order of the universe. He speaks of these writings as contributions to a new “metaphysical” philosophy and does not conceal his systematic interest in providing inclusive answers; the form of the essay may indicate some of his hesitations, yet it is always our knowledge of the entire kosmos—of God, man, and things—that is at stake. In a fragment about the essential tasks of (his) philosophy, Benjamin shows himself deeply impressed by Kant’s epistemological fervor, but sharply contrasts a genuine philosophy, “conscious of time and eternity,” with the Enlightenment, which unfortunately admitted to scrutiny only knowledge of the lowest kind (elsewhere he speaks of the “hollow” and the “flat” concerns of the Enlightenment). What he seeks is a theory dealing with higher knowledge that is not limited by mathematical and mechanical norms of certainty, but sustained by a new turn to language, which alone communicates what we philosophically know.

  Benjamin’s essay “On the Mimetic Faculty,” with its sudden shifts of attention and compressed arguments of astonishing range and illuminating suggestions, energetically seeks to close the gap between the universe of things and the world of signs, a gap widened by modern linguistics. It is man’s mimetic faculty in the widest sense that brings together what seems split and divided; the wholeness of the universe is sustained, Benjamin suggests, by “natural correspondences” that in turn stimulate and challenge man to respond by creating analogies, similarities, something that is akin. Man’s mimetic responses have their own history; and although Benjamin is inclined to believe in a distinct weakening of some forms of the mimetic force, he introduces the concept of a “nonsensuous similarity” that operates beyond the evidence of the senses. Astrology, dancing, and the onomatopoeic element in speech reveal the oldest forms of man’s capabilities, but “nonsensuous similarity” (or in more recent parlance, a paradoxical nonsensuous iconicity of the sign, I would suspect) continues to reside in speech as well as in writing and guarantees wholeness and unity; “it is nonsensuous similarity that establishes the ties not only between the spoken and the signified but also between the written and the signified, and equally between the spoken and the written.” Implicit in these arguments are two of Benjamin’s most essential ideas—his belief that language is far from being a conventional system of signs (an idea further developed in his essay on language) and his hermeneutic urge to read and understand “texts” that are not texts at all. The ancients may have been “reading” the torn guts of animals, starry skies, dances, runes, and hieroglyphs, and Benjamin, in an age without magic, continues to “read” things, cities, and social institutions as if they were sacred texts.

  His essay “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man” (written in 1916) clearly offers a central attempt to re-establish a metaphysical view of the word, in which the overwhelming power of language spoken and heard puts forth a truth that was hidden before; and whatever Marxists may say about his allegiances, here the enemy of the Enlightenment has his place between gnostic traditions and Martin Heidegger. Quoting, against Kant, the German Romantics Hamann and Friedrich M. Müller, Benjamin separates his own ideas from a “bourgeois” (i.e., commonplace) and a “mystical” philosophy of language; the bourgeois theory unfortunately holds that language consists of mere conventional signs that are not necessarily related to Being, and the mystical view falsely identifies words with the essence of things. In his own view, the being of a richly layered world, as divine creation, remains separate from language, yet cannot but commune “in” rather than “through” it. Language, far from being a mere instrument, lives as a glorious medium of being; all creation participates in an infinite process of communication (communion), and even the inarticulate plant speaks in the idiom of its fragrance. “There is no event or thing in either animate or inanimate nature that does not in some way partake of language, for it is in the nature of all to communicate their mental meanings. . . . We cannot imagine a total absence of language in anything.”

  Following the gnostic tradition, Benjamin looks for his cue in biblical texts, and after a halfhearted attempt at reconciling the two creation narratives of the Old Testament, he develops his ideas from a close reading of Genesis 1, for he feels that the recurrent rhythm of “Let there be,” “He made,” and “He named” clearly indicates a striking relationship of creation to language. The hierarchies of the world and the order of language, or, rather, “words,” intimately correspond: although the word of God is of absolute and active power, in man’s realm the word is more limited, and it is “soundless” in the “silent magic of things.” Man’s dignity consists in mirroring God’s absolute and creative word in “names” on the threshold between finite and infinite language; the names he gives to and receives from others may be but a reflection (Abbild) of the divine Word, but name giving sustains man’s closeness to God’s creative energies and defines his particular mode of being; “of all beings man is the only one who himself names his own kind, as he is the only one whom God did not name.” To name is man’s particular fate; he alone among the created beings (as Rilke and Hölderlin would confirm) responds to the silent language of things by “tra
nslating” their speechless communication. Thus “translation,” in a complex meaning, acquires a central ontological importance because the communication of the lower strata of creation has to be translated (that is, elevated and made pellucid) to the higher orders. The speechless word of the things or the silent speech on the lowest level is translated by man into the “naming word” (nen-nendes Wort), the language of the anthropological stratum, and finally offered to God, who, in His word of creation (schaffendes Wort) guarantees the legitimacy of the translation, because it is He who has created the silent word of things as well as that of translating man. “Translating” means solving a task that God has given to man alone; and such a task would be impossible to fulfill “were not the name-language of man and the nameless one of things related in God, released from the same creative word, which in things became the communication of matter in magic community, and in man the language of knowledge and name in blissful mind.” We are in a universe structured by the presence or absence of “linguistic” articulation, and all the levels of creation (articulate and inarticulate) are alien and yet intimately related to one another by the potentialities of the “name” (not less powerful than in Gertrude Stein’s godless theory of poetry).