by John Berger
The contradictions of Walter Benjamin – and I have listed only some of them above – continually interrupted his work and career. He never wrote the full-length book he intended on Paris at the time of the Second Empire, seen architecturally, sociologically, culturally, psychologically, as the quintessential locus of mid-nineteenth-century capitalism. Most of what he wrote was fragmentary and aphoristic. During his lifetime his work reached a very small public and every ‘school’ of thought — such as might have encouraged and promoted him — treated him as an unreliable eclectic. He was a man whose originality precluded his reaching whatever was defined by his contemporaries as achievement. He was treated, except by a few personal friends, as a failure. Photographs show the face of a man rendered slow and heavy by the burden of his own existence, a burden made almost overwhelming by the rapid instantaneous brilliance of his scarcely controllable insights.
In 1940 he killed himself for fear of being captured by the Nazis while trying to cross the French frontier into Spain. It is unlikely that he would have been captured. But from a reading of his works it appears likely that suicide may have seemed a natural end for him. He was very conscious of the degree to which a life is given form by its death; and he may have decided to choose that form for himself, bequeathing to life his contradictions still intact.
Fifteen years after Benjamin’s death a two-volume edition of his writings was published in Germany and he acquired a posthumous public reputation. In the last five years this reputation has begun to become international and now there are frequent references to him in articles, conversation, criticism and political discussions.
Why is Benjamin more than a literary critic? And why has his work had to wait nearly half a century to begin to find its proper audience? In trying to answer these two questions, we will perhaps recognize more clearly the need in us which Benjamin now answers and which, never at home in his own time, he foresaw.
The antiquarian and the revolutionary can have two things in common: their rejection of the present as given and their awareness that history has allotted them a task. For them both history is vocational. Benjamin’s attitude as a critic to the books or poems or films he criticized was that of a thinker who needed a fixed object before him in historic time, in order thereby to measure time (which he was convinced was not homogeneous) and to grasp the import of the specific passage of time which separated him and the work, to redeem, as he would say, that time from meaninglessness.
Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy (the ruling class) if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.
Benjamin’s hypersensitivity to the dimension of time was not, however, limited to the scale of historical generalization or prophecy. He was equally sensitive to the timescale of a life —
A la Recherche du temps perdu is the constant attempt to charge an entire lifetime with the utmost awareness. Proust’s method is actualization, not reflexion. He is filled with the insight that none of us has time to live the true dramas of the life that we are destined for. This is what ages us — this and nothing else. The wrinkles and creases on our faces are the registration of the great passions, vices, insights that called on us; but we, the masters, were not home.
— or to the effect of a second. He is writing about the transformation of consciousness brought about by the film:
Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories appeared to have us locked up hopelessly. Then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go travelling. With the close-up, space expands; with slow motion, movement is extended …
I do not wish to give the impression that Benjamin used works of art or literature as convenient illustrations to already formulated arguments. The principle that works of art are not for use but only for judgement, that the critic is an impartial go-between between the utilitarian and the ineffable, this principle, with all its subtler and still current variations, represents no more than a claim by the privileged that their love of passive pleasure must be considered disinterested! Works of art await use. But their real usefulness lies in what they actually are — which may be quite distinct from what they once were — rather than in what it may be convenient to believe they are. In this sense Benjamin used works of art very realistically. The passage of time which so intrigued him did not end at the exterior surface of the work, it entered into it and there led him into its ‘after-life’. In this after-life, which begins when the work has reached ‘the age of its fame’, the separatedness and isolated identity of the individual work is transcended just as was meant to happen to the soul in the traditional Christian heaven. The work enters the totality of what the present consciously inherits from the past, and in entering that totality it changes it. The after-life of Baudelaire’s poetry is not only coexistent with Jeanne Duval, Edgar Allen Poe and Constantin Guys but also, for example, with Haussmann’s boulevards, the first department stores, Engels’s descriptions of the urban proletariat and the birth of the modern drawing-room in the 1830s which Benjamin described as follows:
For the private citizen, for the first time the living-space became distinguished from the place of work. The former constituted itself as the interior. The counting-house was its complement. The private citizen who in the counting-house took reality into account required of the interior that it should maintain him in his illusions. This necessity was all the more pressing since he had no intention of adding social preoccupations to his business ones. In the creation of his private environment he suppressed them both. From this sprang the phantasmagorias of the interior. This represented the universe for the private citizen. In it, he assembled the distant in space and in time. His drawing-room was a box in the world theatre.
Perhaps it is now a little clearer why Benjamin was more than a literary critic. But one more point needs to be made. His attitude to works of art was never a mechanically social-historical one. He never tried to seek simple causal relations between the social forces of a period and a given work. He did not want to explain the appearance of the work; he wanted to discover the place that its existence needed to occupy in our knowledge. He did not wish to encourage a love of literature; he wanted the art of the past to realize itself in the choices men make today in deciding their own historical role.
Why is it only now that Benjamin begins to be appreciated as a thinker, and why is his influence likely to increase still further in the 1970s? The awakened interest in Benjamin coincides with Marxism’s current re-examination of itself; this re-examination is occurring all over the world, even where it is treated as a crime against the state.
Many developments have led to the need for re-examinations: the extent and degree of the pauperization and violence which imperialism and neo-colonialism inflict upon an ever-increasing majority in the world; the virtual depoliticization of the people of the Soviet Union: the re-emergence of the question of revolutionary democracy as primary; the achievements of China’s peasant revolution; the fact that the proletarians of consumer societies are now less likely to arrive at revolutionary consciousness through the pursuit of their directly economic self-interests than through a wider and more generalized sense of pointless deprivation and frustration; the realization that socialism, let alone communism, cannot be fully achieved in one country so long as capitalism exists as a global system, and so on.
What the re-examinations will entail, both in terms of theory and political practice, cannot be foreseen in advance or from outside the specific territories involved. But we can begin to define the interregnum — the period of re-examination — in relation to what actually preceded it, whilst leaving sensibly aside the claims and counter-claims concerning what Marx himself really meant.
The interregnum is anti-det
erministic, both as regards the present being determined by the past and the future by the present. It is sceptical of so-called historical laws, as it is also sceptical of any supra-historical value, implied by the notion of overall Progress or Civilization. It is aware that excessive personal political power always depends for its survival upon appeals to an impersonal destiny: that every true revolutionary act must derive from a personal hope of being able to contest in that act the world as it is. The interregnum exists in an invisible world, where time is short, and where the immorality of the conviction that ends justify means lies in the arrogance of the assumption that time is always on one’s own side and that, therefore, the present moment — the time of the Now, as Benjamin called it — can be compromised or forgotten or denied.
Benjamin was not a systematic thinker. He achieved no new synthesis. But at a time when most of his contemporaries still accepted logics that hid the facts, he foresaw our interregnum. And it is in this context that thoughts like the following from his Theses on the Philosophy of History apply to our present preoccupations:
The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again. ‘The truth will not run away from us’: in the historical outlook of historicism these words of Gottfried Keller mark the exact point where historical materialism cuts through historicism. For every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.
A historical materialist cannot do without the notion of a present which is not a transition, but in which time stands still and has come to a stop. For this notion defines the present in which he himself is writing history.
Whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate. According to traditional practice, the spoils are carried along in the procession. They are called cultural treasures, and a historical materialist views them with cautious detachment. For without exception the cultural treasures he surveys have an origin which he cannot contemplate without horror. They owe their existence not only to the efforts of the great minds and talents who have created them, but also to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries. There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.
1970
Drawings by Watteau
Delicacy in art is not necessarily the opposite of strength. A water-colour on silk can have a more powerful effect on the spectator than a ten-foot figure in bronze. Most of Watteau’s drawings are so delicate, so tentative, that they almost appear to have been done in secret; as though he were drawing a butterfly that had alighted on a leaf in front of him and was frightened that the movement or noise of his chalk on the paper would scare it away. Yet at the same time they are drawings which reveal an enormous power of observation and feeling.
This contrast gives us a clue to Watteau’s temperament and the underlying theme of his art. Although he mostly painted clowns, harlequins, fětes and what we would now call fancy-dress balls, his theme was tragic: the theme of mortality. He suffered from tuberculosis and probably sensed his own early death at the age of thirty-seven. Possibly he also sensed that the world of aristocratic elegance he was employed to paint was also doomed. The courtiers assemble for The Embarkation for Cythera (one of his most famous paintings), but the poignancy of the occasion is due to the implication that when they get there it will not be the legendary place they expect — the guillotines will be falling. (Some critics suggest that the courtiers are returning from Cythera; but either way there is a poignant contrast between the legendary and the real.) I do not mean that Watteau actually foresaw the French Revolution or painted prophecies. If he had, his works might be less important today than they are, because the prophecies would now be outdated. The theme of his art was simply change, transcience, the brevity of each moment — poised like the butterfly.
Such a theme could have led him to sentimentality and wispy nostalgia. But it was at this point that his ruthless observation of reality turned him into a great artist. I say ruthless because an artist’s observation is not just a question of his using his eyes; it is the result of his honesty, of his fighting with himself to understand what he sees. Look at his self-portrait. It is a slightly feminine face: the gentle eyes, like the eyes of a woman painted by Rubens, the mouth full for pleasure, the fine ear tuned to hear romantic songs or the romantic echo of the sea in the shell that is the subject of another one of his drawings. But look again further, for behind the delicate skin and the impression of dalliance is the skull. Its implications are only whispered, by the dark accent under the right cheek bone, the shadows round the eyes, the drawing of the ear that emphasizes the temple in front of it. Yet this whisper, like a stage whisper, is all the more striking because it is not a shout. ‘But,’ you may object, ‘every drawing of a head discloses a skull because the form of any head depends upon the skull.’ Of course. There is, however, all the difference in the world between a skull as structure and a skull as a presence. Just as eyes can gaze through a mask, thus belying the disguise, so in this drawing bone seems to gaze through the very flesh, as thin in places as silk.
In a drawing of a woman with a mantle over her head Watteau makes the same comment by opposite means. Here instead of contrasting the flesh with the bone beneath it, he contrasts it with the cloth that is over it. How easy it is to imagine this mantle preserved in a museum — and the wearer dead. The contrast between the face and the drapery is like the contrast between the clouds in the sky above and the cliff and buildings beneath, in a landscape drawing. The line of the woman’s mouth is as transient as the silhouette of a bird in flight.
On a sketch-book page with two drawings of a child’s head on it, there is also a marvellous study of a pair of hands tying a ribbon. And here analysis breaks down. It is impossible to explain why that loosely tied knot in the ribbon can so easily be transformed into a symbol of the loosely tied knot of human life; but such a transformation is not far-fetched and certainly coincides with the mood of the whole page.
I do not want to suggest that Watteau was always consciously concerned with mortality, that he was morbidly concerned with death. Not at all. To his contemporary patrons this aspect of his work was probably invisible. He never enjoyed great success, but he was appreciated for his skill — very serious in, for example, his portrait of a Persian diplomat — his elegance, and for what would then have seemed his romantic languor. And today one can also consider other aspects of his work: for instance, his masterly technique of drawing.
He usually drew with a chalk — either red or black. The softness of this medium enabled him to achieve the gentle, undulating sense of movement that is typical of his drawing. He described as no other artist has done the way silk falls and the way the light falls on the falling silk. His boats ride on the swell of the sea and the light glances along their hulls with the same undulating rhythm. His studies of animals are full of the fluency of animal movement. Everything has its tidal movement, slow or edging — look at the cats’ fur, the children’s hair, the convolutions of the shell, the cascade of the mantle, the whirlpool of the three grotesque faces, the gentle river-bend of the nude flowing to the floor, the delta-like folds across the Persian’s gown. Everything is in flux. But within this flux, Watteau placed his accents, his marks of certainly that are impervious to every current. These marks make a cheek turn, a thumb articulate with a wrist, a breast press against an arm, an eye fit into its socket, a doorway have depth, or a mantle circle a head. They cut into every drawing, like slits in silk, to reveal the anatomy beneath the sheen.
The mantle will outlast the woman whose head it covers. The line of her mouth is as elusive as a bird. But the blacks either side of her neck make her head solid, precise, turnable, energetic, and thus — alive. It is the dark, accented lines which give the figure or the form life by momentarily chec
king the flow of the drawing as a whole.
On another level, human consciousness is such a momentary check against the natural rhythm of birth and death. And, in the same way, Watteau’s consciousness of mortality, far from being morbid, increases one’s awareness of life.
1964
Fernand Léger
Since the middle of the last century all artists of any worth have been forced to consider the future because their works have been misunderstood in the present. The very concept of the avant-garde suggests this. The qualitative meaning that the word modern has acquired suggests it too. Modern Art, for those who have produced it, has meant not the art of today, as opposed to yesterday: but the art of tomorrow as opposed to the conservative tastes of today. Every important painter since 1848 has had to rely upon his faith in the future. The fact that he has believed that the future will be different and better has been the result of his awareness (sometimes fully conscious and sometimes only dimly sensed) of living in a time of profound social change. From the middle of the last century socialism has promised the alternative which has kept the future open, which has made the power (and the philistinism) of the ruling classes seem finite. It would be absurd to suggest that all the great painters of the last century were socialists; but what is certainly true is that all of them made innovations in the hope of serving a richer future.
Fernand Léger (1881–1955) was unique in that he made his vision of this future the theme of his art.