Benjamin and the New. Response

[Giles Peaker]

Dear Warren Goldstein,
This is a response to your comments. It is rather lengthy, so I have not
generally quoted your text. The following paragraphs refer to yours, in the
order of the text.

>If Benjamin is basing his conception of the new off of Nietzsche's "die
>ewige Wiederkehr", then what is new is the return to something old.
1. Indeed, but there is a tricky dual sense, both eternal recurrence and
the sucession of instants as the structure of experience.

2. My comments on the attempt to anchor allegory concern Buck-Morss'
argument. The significance is that the dialectical image is not, supposedly
allegorical. Nor is the activity of the critic in the Trauerspiel book. For
Benjamin, the polarities of allegory are themselves meaningful. The empty
material world and empty subjectivity are historical truths. Allegory is,
if you like, ultimately right about the world, but cannot recognise this
truth because it posits subjectivity as eternal and distinct from the
material world. The emptiness of the transcendence of the spirit reveals
the falseness of this belief; indeed it reveals that the very separation of
subjectivity from the material world, which is to say the existence of
subjectivity, is part of the fallen state of the world. The negativity of
allegory, in the objective truth it reveals and in the subjective condition
of allegoresis, points outside of history, here a death mask, to full
presence. Such a presence is a return or end in which language and the
world are fused as one, in which nature ceases to mutely mourn and speaks
the same language of presence as humans. This is a divine realm, despite
the platonic terms of the prologue. The dialectical image shares much with
allegory (including, I would tentatively suggest, its imagistic basis.
Allegory is based on images, the emblem or heiroglyph, rather than
narrative) but this is because of allegory's objective truth. Allegory as a
technique, however, cannot reveal that truth, that revelation relies on the
metaphysical experience of allegory's negativity. For the dialectical image
to have any effect, it must share the insistence of the metaphysical
excperience of truth, not the downward spirals of allegory. (Hence
Baudelaire teeters on the edge of a revelation of the historical condition
of modernity, but cannot make it. Instead he allegorises
himself/subjectivity as well as the world. The result is spleen rather than
false transcendence.)

3. I agree, but my point would be that he is attempting to ground a
metaphysical experience of history in material life. The relation of the
dialectical image (after the confusions of 1935) to historical experience
and the experience of history (temporality) has to be that of the divine.
(See Peter Osborne 'The Politics of Time', Verso 1995)

>>Benjamin is more concerned with a recovery of the modes of tradition
>>than he is with a specifically modern intimation of redemption (again the
>>1934 Kafka essay).
>
>I think this depends on which writings you are referring to.  While this is
>the case in the first Baudelaire work, I do not think it holds true for his
>early works or for the theses.
4. Yes, the early works are not so preoccupied with modes of historical
experience, omposing a simple lapsarian divide. The Theses are after the
mid 30s point that I suggested a change to a concern with specifically 
modern experience  as the basis for revolutionary experience (again
temporal? as interruption, end, shift to a new temporal realm?). Such a
modern experience is mass experience, as explored in the 'Mechanical
Reproduction' essay and the 1938 Kafka letter.

5. I don't argue that One Way Street is ahistorical. The streets are those
of Berlin in the 1920s. It is the critic as critic who is ahistorical. What
I think  I mean by this is that in the early (pre 1928?) work, the
condition of the encounter with unrepresentable truth, whilst formed out of
historical materials (Trauerspiel, Berlin etc.) is not in itself
historical. The possibility and forms of metaphysical experience do not, in
these texts, depend on the historical situation in which they occur, or,
another way, the experience (social/temporal) of the critic does not affect
the kind of metaphysical experience, even as it puts forward the materials
through which that experience emerges. W.B.' s ongoing problem is, as you
say, to find a materialist and historical ground for that experience, to
portray it as arising out of historical experience itself. Some of these
attempts are dodgy to say the least - the collective consciousness indeed!-
 and some more lasting but problematic (surrealist experience).
Nevertheless it is that metaphysical experience which remains at the heart
of his critical and political project (Look at the definitions of the
dialectical image from the early/mid 1930s as well as the late 30s in
Konvolut N).

As a throw away line, I think this leads his politics towards decisionism
and anarchism, not Marx. Also , I suspect that the 'explicit mixing of
materialist and theological elements' disappears in 1931-39 because it
places him in conjunction with some very suspect figures as Adorno and
Brecht both identify. To display akinness to Klages, Junger, even Heidegger
would be politically disastrous in that period. 
I hope this clarifies what I tried to say, I'm sure it remains full of
problems - all responses welcome. Thanks again for the criticisms.
Yours
Giles