Reflections

by Walter Benjamin

  Tragedies and operas are constantly being written that apparently have a well-tried theatrical apparatus at their disposal, but in reality they do nothing but supply a derelict one. “The lack of clarity about their situation that prevails among musicians, writers, and critics,” says Brecht, “has immense consequences that are far too little considered. For, thinking that they are in possession of an apparatus that in reality possesses them, they defend an apparatus over which they no longer have any control and that is no longer, as they still believe, a means for the producers, but has become a means against the producers.” This theater, with its complicated machinery, its gigantic supporting staff, its sophisticated effects, has become a “means against the producers” not least in seeking to enlist them in the hopeless competitive struggle in which film and radio have enmeshed it. This theater—whether in its educating or its entertaining role; the two are complementary—is that of a sated class for which everything it touches becomes a stimulant. Its position is lost. Not so that of a theater that, instead of competing with newer instruments of publication, seeks to use and learn from them, in short, to enter into debate with them. This debate the epic theater has made its own affair. It is, measured by the present state of development of film and radio, the contemporary form.

  In the interest of this debate Brecht fell back on the most primitive elements of the theater. He contented himself, by and large, with a podium. He dispensed with wide-ranging plots. He thus succeeded in changing the functional connection between stage and public, text and performance, director and actor. Epic theater, he declared, had to portray situations, rather than develop plots. It obtains such situations, as we shall see presently, by interrupting the plot. I remind you here of the songs, which have their chief function in interrupting the action. Here—in the principle of interruption—epic theater, as you see, takes up a procedure that has become familiar to you in recent years from film and radio, press and photography. I am speaking of the procedure of montage: the superimposed element disrupts the context in which it is inserted. But that this procedure has here a special right, perhaps even a perfect right, allow me briefly to indicate. The interruption of action, on account of which Brecht described his theater as epic, constantly counteracts an illusion in the audience. For such illusion is a hindrance to a theater that proposes to make use of elements of reality in experimental rearrangements. But it is at the end, not the beginning, of the experiment that the situation appears—a situation that, in this or that form, is always ours. It is not brought home to the spectator but distanced from him. He recognizes it as the real situation, not with satisfaction, as in the theater of naturalism, but with astonishment. Epic theater, therefore, does not reproduce situations; rather, it discovers them. This discovery is accomplished by means of the interruption of sequences. Only interruption here has not the character of a stimulant but an organizing function. It arrests the action in its course, and thereby compels the listener to adopt an attitude vis-à-vis the process, the actor vis-à-vis his role. I should like to show you through an example how Brecht’s discovery and use of the gestus is nothing but the restoration of the method of montage decisive in radio and film, from an often merely modish procedure to a human event. Imagine a family scene: the wife is just about to grab a bronze sculpture to throw it at her daughter; the father is opening the window to call for help. At this moment a stranger enters. The process is interrupted; what appears in its place is the situation on which the stranger’s eyes now fall: agitated faces, open window, disordered furniture. There are eyes, however, before which the more usual scenes of present-day existence do not look very different: the eyes of the epic dramatist.

  To the total dramatic artwork he opposes the dramatic laboratory. He makes use in a new way of the great, ancient opportunity of the theater—to expose what is present. At the center of his experiment is man. Present-day man; a reduced man, therefore, chilled in a chilly environment. Since, however, this is the only one we have, it is in our interest to know him. He is subjected to tests, examinations. What emerges is this: events are alterable not at their climaxes, not by virtue and resolution, but only in their strictly habitual course, by reason and practice. To construct from the smallest elements of behavior what in Aristotelian dramaturgy is called “action” is the purpose of epic theater. Its means are therefore more modest than those of traditional theater; likewise its aims. It is less concerned with filling the public with feelings, even seditious ones, than with alienating it in an enduring manner, through thinking, from the conditions in which it lives. It may be noted, by the way, that there is no better start for thinking than laughter. And, in particular, convulsion of the diaphragm usually provides better opportunities for thought than convulsion of the soul. Epic theater is lavish only in occasions for laughter.

  It has perhaps struck you that the train of thought that is about to be concluded presents to the writer only one demand, the demand to think, to reflect on his position in the process of production. We may depend on it: this reflection leads, sooner or later, for the writers who matter—that is, for the best technicians in their subject—to observations that provide the most factual foundation for solidarity with the proletariat. I should like to conclude by adducing a topical illustration in the form of a small extract from a journal published here, Commune. Commune circulated a questionnaire: “For whom do you write?” I quote from the reply of Réne Maublanc and from the comment added by Aragon. “Unquestionably,” says Maublanc, “I write almost exclusively for a bourgeois public. Firstly, because I am obliged to”—here Maublanc is alluding to his professional duties as a grammar-school teacher—“secondly, because I have bourgeois origins and a bourgeois education and come from a bourgeois milieu, and so am naturally inclined to address myself to the class to which I belong, which I know and understand best. This does not mean, however, that I write in order to please or support it. I am convinced, on the one hand, that the proletarian revolution is necessary and desirable and, on the other, that it will be the more rapid, easy, successful, and the less bloody, the weaker the opposition of the bourgeoisie. . . . The proletariat today needs allies from the camp of the bourgeoisie, exactly as in the eighteenth century the bourgeoisie needed allies from the feudal camp. I wish to be among those allies.”

  On this Aragon comments: “Our comrade here touches on a state of affairs that affects a large number of present-day writers. Not all have the courage to look it in the face. . . . Those who see their own situation as clearly as René Maublanc are few. But precisely from them more must be required. . . . It is not enough to weaken the bourgeoisie from within, it is necessary to fight them with the proletariat. . . . René Maublanc and many of our friends among the writers who are still hesitating, are faced with the example of the Soviet Russian writers who came from the Russian bourgeoisie and nevertheless became pioneers of the building of socialism.”

  Thus Aragon. But how did they become pioneers? Certainly not without very bitter struggles, extremely difficult debates. The considerations I have put before you are an attempt to draw some conclusions from these struggles. They are based on the concept to which the debate on the attitude of the Russian intellectuals owes its decisive clarification: the concept of the specialist. The solidarity of the specialist with the proletariat—herein lies the beginning of this clarification—can only be a mediated one. The Activists and the representatives of New Matter-of-factness could gesticulate as they pleased: they could not do away with the fact that even the proletarianization of an intellectual hardly ever makes a proletarian. Why? Because the bourgeois class gave him, in the form of education, a means of production that, owing to educational privilege, makes him feel solidarity with it, and still more it with him. Aragon was thereby entirely correct when, in another connection, he declared, “The revolutionary intellectual appears first and foremost as the betrayer of his class of origin.” This betrayal consists, in the case of the writer, in conduct that transforms him from a supplier of the producti
ve apparatus into an engineer who sees it as his task to adapt this apparatus to the purposes of the proletarian revolution. This is a mediating activity, yet it frees the intellectual from that purely destructive task to which Maublanc and many of his comrades believe it necessary to confine him. Does he succeed in promoting the socialization of the intellectual means of production? Does he see how he himself can organize the intellectual workers in the production process? Does he have proposals for the Umfunktionierung of the novel, the drama, the poem? The more completely he can orient his activity toward this task, the more correct will be the political tendency, and necessarily also the higher the technical quality, of his work. And at the same time, the more exactly he is thus informed on his position in the process of production, the less it will occur to him to lay claim to “spiritual” qualities. The spirit that holds forth in the name of fascism must disappear. The spirit that, in opposing it, trusts in its own miraculous powers will disappear. For the revolutionary struggle is not between capitalism and spirit, but between capitalism and the proletariat.

  Karl Kraus

  Dedicated to Gustav Glück

  1. Cosmic Man

  How noisy everything grows.

  —Words in Verse II

  In old engravings there is a messenger who rushes toward us crying aloud, his hair on end, brandishing a sheet of paper in his hands, a sheet full of war and pestilence, of cries of murder and pain, of danger from fire and flood, spreading everywhere the “latest news.” News in this sense, in the sense that the word has in Shakespeare, is disseminated by Die Fackel [The Torch].* Full of betrayal, earthquakes, poison, and fire from the mundus intelligibilis. The hatred with which it pursues the tribe of journalists that swarms into infinity is not only a moral but a vital one, such as is hurled by an ancestor upon a race of degenerate and dwarfish rascals that has sprung from his seed. The very term “public opinion” outrages him. Opinions are a private matter. The public has an interest only in judgments. Either it is a judging public, or it is none. But it is precisely the purpose of the public opinion generated by the press to make the public incapable of judging, to insinuate into it the attitude of someone irresponsible, uninformed. Indeed, what is even the most precise information in the daily newspapers in comparison to the hair-raising meticulousness observed by Die Fackel in the presentation of legal, linguistic, and political facts? Die Fackel need not trouble itself about public opinion, for the blood-steeped novelties of this “newspaper” demand a passing of judgment. And on nothing more impetuously, urgently, than on the press itself.

  A hatred such as that which Kraus has heaped on journalists can never be founded simply on what they do—however obnoxious this may be; this hatred must have its reason in their very nature, whether it be antithetical or akin to his own. In fact, it is both. His most recent portrait characterizes the journalist in the first sentence as “a person who has little interest either in himself and his own existence, or in the mere existence of things, but who feels things only in their relationships, above all where these meet in events—and only in this moment become united, substantial, and alive.” What we have in this sentence is nothing other than the negative of an image of Kraus. Indeed, who could have shown a more burning interest in himself and his own existence than the writer who is never finished with this subject; who a more attentive concern for the mere existence of things, their origin; whom does that coincidence of the event with the date, the witness, or the camera cast into deeper despair than him? In the end he brought together all his energies in the struggle against the empty phrase, which is the linguistic expression of the despotism with which, in journalism, topicality sets up its dominion over things.

  This side of his struggle against the press is illuminated most vividly by the life’s work of his comrade-in-arms, Adolf Loos. Loos found his providential adversaries in the arts-and-crafts mongers and architects who, in the ambit of the “Vienna Workshops,” were striving to give birth to a new art industry. He sent out his rallying cry in numerous essays, particularly, in its enduring formulation, in the article “Ornamentation and Crime,” which appeared in 1908 in the Frankfurter Zeitung. The lightning flash ignited by this essay described a curiously zigzag course. “On reading the words with which Goethe censures the way the Philistine, and thus many an art connoisseur, run their fingers over engravings and reliefs, the revelation came to him that what may be touched cannot be a work of art, and that a work of art must be out of reach.” It was therefore Loos’s first concern to separate the work of art from the article of use, as it was that of Kraus to keep apart information and the work of art. The hack journalist is in his heart at one with the ornamentalist. Kraus did not tire of denouncing Heine as an ornamentalist, as one who blurred the boundary between journalism and literature, as the creator of the feuilleton in poetry and prose; indeed, he later placed even Nietzsche beside Heine as the betrayer of the aphorism to the impression. “It is my opinion,” he says of the latter, “that to the mixture of elements . . . in the decomposing European style of the last half century, he added psychology, and that the new level of language that he created is the level of essayism, as Heine’s was that of feuilletonism.” Both forms appear as symptoms of the chronic sickness of which all attitudes and standpoints merely mark the temperature curve: inauthenticity. It is from the unmasking of the inauthentic that this battle against the press arose. “Who was it that brought into the world this great excuse: I can do what I am not?”

  The empty phrase. It, however, is an abortion of technology. “The newspaper industry, like a factory, demands separate areas for working and selling. At certain times of day—twice, three times in the bigger newspapers—a particular quantity of work has to have been procured and prepared for the machine. And not from just any material: everything that has happened in the meantime, anywhere, in any region of life, politics, economics, art, etc., must by now have been reached and journalistically processed.” Or, as Kraus so splendidly sums it up: “He ought to throw light on the way in which technology, while unable to coin new platitudes, leaves the spirit of mankind in the state of being unable to do without the old ones. In this duality of a changed life dragging on in unchanged forms, the world’s ills grow and prosper.” In these words Kraus deftly tied the knot binding technology to the empty phrase. True, its untying would have to follow a different pattern, journalism being clearly seen as the expression of the changed function of language in the world of high capitalism. The empty phrase of the kind so relentlessly pursued by Kraus is the label that makes a thought marketable, the way flowery language, as ornament, gives it value for the connoisseur. But for this very reason the liberation of language has become identical with that of the empty phrase—its transformation from reproduction to productive instrument. Die Fackel itself contains models of this, even if not the theory: its formulas are of the kind that tie up, never that untie. The combination of biblical magniloquence with stiff-necked fixation on the indecencies of Viennese life—that is its way of approaching phenomena. It is not content to call on the world as witness to the misdemeanors of a cashier; it must summon the dead from their graves. Rightly so. For the shabby, obtrusive abundance of these Viennese coffeehouses, press, and society scandals is only a minor manifestation of a foreknowledge that then, more swiftly than any could perceive, suddenly arrived at its true and original subject; two months after the outbreak of war, he called this subject by its name in the speech “In This Great Age,” with which all the demons that had populated this possessed man passed into the herd of the swine who were his contemporaries.

  “In these great times, which I knew when they were small, which will again be small if they still have time, and which, because in the field of organic growth such transformations are not possible, we prefer to address as fat times and truly also as hard times; in these times, when precisely what is happening could not be imagined, and when what must happen can no longer be imagined, and if it could it would not happen; in these grave times that have
laughed themselves to death at the possibility of growing serious and, overtaken by their own tragedy, long for distraction and then, catching themselves in the act, seek words; in these loud times, booming with the fearful symphony of deeds that engender reports, and of reports that bear the blame for deeds; in these unspeakable times, you can expect no word of my own from me. None except this, which just preserves silence from misinterpretation. Too deeply am I awed by the unalterable, is language subordinate to misfortune. In the empires bereft of imagination, where man is dying of spiritual starvation while not feeling spiritual hunger, where pens are dipped in blood and swords in ink, that which is not thought must be done, but that which is only thought is inexpressible. Expect from me no word of my own. Nor should I be capable of saying anything new; for in the room where someone writes the noise is so great, and whether it comes from animals, from children, or merely from mortars shall not be decided now. He who addresses deeds violates both word and deed and is twice despicable. This profession is not extinct. Those who now have nothing to say because it is the turn of deeds to speak, talk on. Let him who has something to say step forward and be silent!”