Reflections

by Walter Benjamin

  In his lecture “The Author as Producer,” given at the Paris Institute for the Study of Fascism (1934), Benjamin concentrates on important questions often discussed with Brecht; and I wonder how the functionaries responded to his nostalgic memories of the Soviet “Left Front,” or Levyi Front, group (he did delete a long Trotsky quotation from his manuscript). The lecture begins in good Brechtian fashion by separating the “bourgeois entertainer” (Brecht would have said the “culinary” writer) from the progressive artist who has thrown his lot in with the revolutionary proletariat, but Benjamin does not want to accept the traditional idea that the correct tendency alone assures the quality of the text. Trying to redefine the old problem of content/form in a dialectical way, he rightly argues that it is insufficient to analyze “a book, work, or novel” independently of social relationships, and, dexterously shifting to his central question, he suggests that the question about the work and the social structure should be revised; instead of asking how a work of art relates “to” modes of production, we should ask how it operates “within” them (he is thinking of modes of property as well as of technology). Like the Levyi Front writers and Brecht since the late twenties, Benjamin demands that left-wing writing use the technological advances in the media, and he praises Sergei Tretiakov as a true “operative” (not merely “informational”) author who energetically seized on new technologies and forms of expression, joined the peasant communes in the Russian countryside, organized st’engazety (newspapers on the walls), and brought radio and movies to the villages. Benjamin’s image of the Soviet press may be rather romantic, but what he really wants is a radical democratization of cultural life, based on the potentialities of the mass media; he hopes (as does Herbert Marcuse later) that these new forms would not be easily absorbed by the capitalist apparatus of production/distribution, but would instead revolutionize the apparatus itself (a rather optimistic idea, if we remind ourselves of the experiments of the Italian futurists, allied with the Fascists, or of Leni Riefenstahl’s experimental movies in praise of the butchers on the right). Benjamin finds little consolation in the German writing of his time; expressionists and activists, from Heinrich Mann to Alfred Döblin, have wanted “spiritual transformation” rather than “technical innovation,” and even the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) of the mid-twenties, with all its striking interest in photography and reportage techniques, has delivered its goods to the capitalist culture machinery, rather than change it. Yet we should not ignore the beginnings of a countermovement: “the revolutionary strength of Dada” tested the authenticity of art, John Heartfield used photo montage to teach the working people, and Bertolt Brecht, above all in plays like The Measures Taken (Die Massnahme), created the new paradigms of a theater obstinately refusing to be absorbed by capitalist society. Brecht (whose Threepenny Novel Benjamin vastly overrates) emerges as the master of what artists and the arts should do; his epic theater constitutes a model of production able to teach other producers what to produce and, by requiring a different kind of theatrical apparatus, transforms the old cultural institutions in a revolutionary way. There is much tragic irony in Benjamin’s last stand as a theoretician of “operative” literature. He demands a new, open, and experimental Marxist art in the manner of Tretiakov and Brecht exactly at the moment when, in the Soviet Union, Karl Radek is attacking James Joyce, and eager Party functionaries are declaring that nineteenth-century traditions are the best way to the future.

  Sectarian interpreters of Benjamin are fond of referring exclusively to one group of essays and ignoring others, but such divisive tactics are of little help to his readers, because they impose a reductive pattern of either/or on an intricate surfeit of paradoxes, abrupt changes of orientation, internal contradictions, and thoughtful self-subversions. It is not difficult to include the author of the Brechtian essay “The Author as Producer” (1934) among the revolutionary Marxists of his time or to characterize the writer of the essay on language (1916) as a belated Romantic, but it is far more challenging to read these two essays as demarcating an extensive field of intellectual possibilities within which Benjamin moves with piercing insights, a distinct aversion to inherited orthodoxies, and surprising reversals of direction. Only if we are willing to accept the entire Benjamin, and not just an essay here or a tag there quoted in support of somebody’s narrow dogma, are we really qualified, at least in a preliminary way, to deal with those of his puzzling texts in which whole syndromes of divergent ideas work with and against one another. The essay “Karl Kraus” and the précis “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century” surely are representative and challenging examples of meditations in which speculative and Marxist views of the world forcefully collide.

  Karl Kraus (1874–1936) has for a long time been a towering cult figure for a particular generation of Austrian and German writers, but outside of his time and place, it is almost impossible to communicate something of his ambivalent charisma. He was to many the Isaiah of decaying old Europe or at least the Jewish Swift of Vienna, and in order to suggest his many and uncanny gifts I would have to say that he combined the interests and energies of H. L. Mencken, Sören Kierkegaard, and a demonic Woody Allen, all in one. As editor of the influential periodical Die Fackel (The Torch, 1899–1936), which for decades he himself wrote from cover to cover, as author of the superdrama The Last Days of Mankind (1922), crying from the depth of despair against the powerful of the world, and as fierce critic and polemicist in the age of Fritz Mauthner and Ludwig Wittgenstein, he was obsessed with judging the virtues and perversions of his contemporaries, famous and infamous, by looking closely at how they spoke and wrote. He would discover a cheap adjective and, with thunder and undisputed authority in his voice, reveal the unspeakable degradation of ethical norms hidden behind a microscopic detail of style.

  Benjamin’s perplexing and rich essay on Karl Kraus (of which I can hope to explicate only a major strain) argues from a late gnostic as well as from a Marxist perspective, in which the postlapsarian and the capitalist worlds seem to be synonymous. Kraus (who confessed that he himself did not really understand what Benjamin said about him) emerges as a majestic judge who, touched by the last rays of the day of creation, stubbornly upholds theological norms in a fallen (i.e., bourgeois) world of inauthenticity, base journalism, and meretricious newspapers—above all, the Viennese Neue Freie Presse. On trial are language and the press, or, rather, the outrageous cheapening of authentic language into mere prattle (Geschwätz), in which base relevance wants to triumph over the purity of all created things. Kraus actually stands for Adam, who “names” in the original sense of the word, and takes his revenge on writers like Heine or Nietzsche who, in the absence of binding norms, confuse the naming power of language with mere “essayism” and the feuilleton. But by quoting again and again (a device that Benjamin himself liked), Kraus restores the original purity of the word by lifting it out of its undignified context and by pushing it back toward its origins. Quotations, emancipating words from the demeaning bondage of context, actually purify what is being said and paradoxically reflect something of the original language of the angels, “in which all words, startled from the idyllic context of meaning, have become mottoes on the book of Creation.”

  Benjamin is not blind to the intricate mode of Kraus’s polemical discourse, in which a radical technique of unmasking the enemy combines with an intense art of self-expression continually sustained by demonic vanity. The critic Kraus behaves like an actor who anxiously waits for applause, and his famous public readings from Shakespeare and the popular Viennese playwright Johann Nestroy have been but crucial tests of his power of mimicking other voices and personae. Kraus employs these powers when attacking his enemies, literally creeping “into those he impersonates, in order to annihilate them.” Benjamin does not hesitate to say that “Kraus will pay any price to get himself talked about,” but he also knows that his elemental vanity generates a self-torture that forces him to sacrifice to his initiated reader, in each modest comma and
obscure fact, “a piece of his mutilated flesh.” In Kraus’s writings, idiosyncrasy has been elevated to the most supreme instrument of criticism, and his obsessive self-concern is put to the most noble use.

  But the Marxist Benjamin does not hesitate to judge the judge of language, who unfortunately binds his revolutionary practice, the liberation of words from the vicious contexts, to a reactionary theory suggesting (as did young Benjamin) the possibility of restoring the original glory of language without totally revolutionizing nature; “that to him the fit state of man appears not as the destiny and fulfillment of nature liberated through revolutionary change, but as an element of nature per se, of an archaic nature without history, in its pristine, primeval state, throws uncertain, disquieting reflections even on his idea of freedom and of humanity.” Karl Kraus, as the Austrian conservative Adalbert Stifter did before him, sides with “the party of nature” and inevitably turns a blind eye to the social realm. His indubitable virtues are, originally, those of the last bourgeois, who wants to be judged on being an unpolitical citizen, and only in close combat with the enemies of the naming word have his “operating powers” (Benjamin uses the military term “Einsatzkräfte”) acquired a belligerent appearance. Unfortunately, people do not see the historical necessity of these developments any more, and it is highly important to show why “this guardian of Goethe’s linguistic values” became “a comedian and why this honorable man went berserk.” I think it is not impossible to read Benjamin’s Kraus essay as an ambivalent critique of his own metaphysical concept of language. Exorcizing Karl Kraus in himself, Benjamin comes to see his own romantic ideas of language as regressive, and yet he says, as if with unrepentant pride, that his ideas are strangely and successfully operative in his protracted fight against the perversions of the Adamic word in bourgeois society. It is his gnosticism, Benjamin almost implies, that makes him a better Marxist.

  Translating Proust and studying the French Surrealists in the middle and later twenties, the flâneur Benjamin began to collect materials for a substantial book about Paris that was to be central to his efforts and achievements. It was to investigate historical forms of culture in the wildest sense, proceeding from historical and literary texts (Baudelaire) and, as he had done before in his images of cities, from “going through” a metropolitan topography as if it were a revealing record of historical forces. “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century” constitutes part of a précis submitted to the Institut fur Sozialforschung; and while it would be useful to read it in close conjunction with some of his remarks on Baudelaire, it shows even in splendid isolation an important late moment of his thought, in which his Marxist analysis of institutional structures relies productively on his earlier habits of “reading” things as if they were texts. The individual sections of the text, concluded by a programmatic coda, follow a recurrent pattern of seizing upon an architectural development (shopping arcades or boulevards), an industrial event (exhibitions), or a fashion in the arts (the panorama) of mid-nineteenth-century Paris. After isolating the individual “fact,” Benjamin searches for its sociological and technological causes and/or correspondences, suggests links to economic trends and political tendencies of the time, and literally forces the “fact” to yield, to reveal, to deliver to his and to our minds what it hides and preserves of the wishful thinking of the ruling classes—“the development of the forces of production reduced the wish symbols of the previous century to rubble even before the monuments representing them had crumbled.” Yet for all his concern with historical time, the text (as has often been observed) has a strikingly static quality, which reflects Benjamin’s compulsion to deal with spaces, vistas, buildings, and monuments, rather than with sequences of events. His regular use of mottoes and quotations (creating graphic “blocks”) and of a striking syntax, in which paratactic statements far outnumber hypotactic constructions, generates a discourse in which history has come to a halt in “things” of monumental stillness and deceptive immobility.

  Benjamin’s problem, which he shares with other Marxists, is to link the individual fact or institution with the overall development of economic history (the prime mover). Behind, or, rather, “in,” the elegant shopping arcades, Benjamin sees as first cause the boom of the French textile industry and the economic necessity of storing a variety of expensive goods. But there is also a secondary cause—the technological advances of cast-iron construction accelerated by the growth of the railways and, in turn, the use of cast iron in building railway stations and exhibition halls, wherever transients gather. Benjamin speaks about correspondences where many other Marxists would refer to economic basis and cultural superstructure; and he often suggests these correspondences by parallel sentence structures, neatly arranging the semantic elements in the required relationships (“as . . . as”; “as little . . . as”).

  But Benjamin’s quick and productive perceptions did not go unchallenged, even among his close friends. In a letter (November 10, 1938) much discussed by Marxist metacritics, Theodor W. Adorno energetically accused his friend of linking pragmatic content “directly” with a few elements of social history, and, using Hegelian terms, he disparaged Benjamin’s inclination to give “a materialist turn” to a few selected features from the realm of the intellectual superstructure. Benjamin’s dialectic, he added, lacked proper mediation, and his thought inevitably oscillated between “magic and positivism.” I am not in sympathy with Adorno’s prescription of what proper Marxism should be, but I think he was right in pointing out to Benjamin the “theological motif” of calling things “by their names” and the “deeply romantic element” hidden in his vision; in looking at Paris, Benjamin certainly had not yet ceased to pursue the old Adamic ways of naming the individual things of the universe and releasing, in a blessed word, the energy of meaning that God, or, rather, human history, had gathered in the particularity of these things. It is still an attitude of paradisiac hermeneutics, even if Benjamin, as a kind of Marxist Hölderlin (in prose), in the age of postlapsarian capitalism cannot but rely on a more secular code.

  As I continue reading Benjamin thirty and more years after his death, I cannot close my eyes to the obsolescence of many of his beliefs (including his demand that the artist join the revolutionary proletariat), and yet I find myself constantly impressed by the erudite range of his conflicting interests and by his stubborn loyalties, which do not easily fit into the schematic image of a Central European left-wing intellectual entre deux guerres. He is well known to us as a sophisticated and cosmopolitan translator and critic of Baudelaire and Proust, but he also loved “naive” art (as we would say today) and the didactic narratives of Johann Peter Hebel, an Alemannic writer concerned with the moral education of simple village people. Benjamin was the first philosophical defender of Brecht’s revolutionary plays, but he also felt attracted by Franz Kafka for a long time and critically studied the Austrian Catholic Adalbert Stifter. His continued readings of the Bolshevik classics did not diminish his interest in Max Kommerell, whose literary essays showed high regard for Stefan George and Hölderlin, essential to the more refined members of the German Youth Movement. Benjamin wrote pioneering studies of Goethe and the baroque drama and was (together with Siegfried Kracauer) among the first intellectuals of the Weimar Republic to think seriously about the new technological possibilities of photography and film. He studied the traditions of Jewish mysticism and the German Romantics, and yet never gave up reading contemporary thrillers and detective stories, including those by Emile Gaboriau and, later, Simenon. One would wish that his interpreters, busy with developing complex terminologies thrice removed from our cultural experience, would be half as open as he was to the literature and the arts of our time.

  But there are other contradictions, astonishing and difficult to discuss. Benjamin’s friends all agree that he was a man of quiet, fastidious, and extremely polite manners, and yet there was in his character and in his thought a half-hidden thirst for violence (more poetic than political), ill according with hi
s life in the library and his later will to believe in revolutionary discipline. His studies of Sorel and his defense of anarchist spontaneity (as suggested in his essay on violence) against any Marxist “programming” of action reveal something in him that precedes all political theory and perhaps has its origins in a mystic vision of a Messiah who comes with the sword to change the world into white-and-golden perfection. His recurrent images of barricades, exploding dynamite, and the furies of civil war (as, for instance, in the essay on Surrealism) have an almost sexual if not ontological quality, and should not be obfuscated by pious admirers who would like to disregard the deep fissures in his thought and personality. A future discussion of his philosophies and politics may well come to the conclusion that his constitutional inability to come to terms with the problem of anarchy (spontaneity, intoxication, salvation) and order (programming, reason, and discipline) is more characteristic of his central conflicts than is his movement back and forth between romantic metaphysics and Marxism, closely bound to each other by Hegel’s philosophy.

  The Austrian Marxist Ernst Fischer once suggested that Benjamin contributed much to an interpretation of capitalism but little to changing the world, and added that his philosophy, sustained by utter loneliness, rather than by the concerns of the masses, particularly attracts those intellectuals who restlessly search for a better world and yet shy away from the grubbier commitments of a practical kind. Benjamin was tempted at times to say that in the age of Hitler, his brand of Communism was the “lesser evil” (May 6, 1934) and to picture himself as a shipwrecked mariner who had little choice. Whatever his motivation, he substantially participated in developing a sophisticated Marxist theory of history, society, and culture, and by at least sketching a systematic apologia for Mallarmé, Dada, and the Surrealists on Marxist grounds, he substantially aided the artists and critics of the independent left who were (and are) engaged in ever-renewed conflicts with orthodox party functionaries hiding their power games behind clichés about progressive realism (if the Eurocommunists develop a theory of culture, Benjamin will be one of their saints). Yet these are issues surviving from the early thirties, and it would be wrong, I think, to define Benjamin’s importance to us solely in terms of a political anachronism, however resilient. He has more to offer to his readers now, and we should not disregard those of his essential concerns that go far beyond the agenda of his own day. In articulating his vision of language, Benjamin soon developed a strong interest in a theory of the sign and renewed semiotic tradition (which in Germany went back to the mid-eighteenth century). His romantic opposition to the idea that the meaning of the sign was mere convention pushed him on to courageous speculations about the sign and the mimetic urge of mankind, and his later interest in the technology of the new media forcefully widened his thinking about signs to include problems of book production, graphic experiments, and advertising. He has few equals in restoring semiotics to our attention.