Benjamin- ahistorical?

[WARREN GOLDSTEIN]

Dear Giles,

	After sifting through your last comments, it appears to me that
your reading of Benjamin is strongly influenced by the early works, in
particular the essay on "Experience", the essay on Goethe's Elective
Affinities, and the "Erkenntniskritisiche Vorrede" to the Trauerspiel book. 
This causes some methodological problems.  As you know, a shift took
place in Benjamin's work, around the time of the Trauerspiel book, from
more of a romantic and theological orientation to an attempted surrealist
materialist perspective in One-Way Street, which was published at the
same time.  Your interpretation is clearly colored by the early essays. 
However, within them you tend to emphasize the idealistic aspects over
the materialist when I would argue that they too contain both.   
	For example in your letter you write "Allegory is, if you like,
ultimately right about the world, but cannot recognize this truth because it
posits subjectivity as eternal and distinct from the material world."  Let us
here, in the advice of Marx, remember to keep our subjects and objects
strait.  In this sentence, you make allegory itself into a subject which it is
not.  For Benjamin, it is the allegorist who interprets the allegories which
are present in a broken and fragmented world.  It is the allegorist who is
the subject.  Only the allegorist, therefore can have subjectivity in his
attempt to interpret truth.  To separate subjectivity from the material world
is to deny it an object.  I do not understand how you can argue that "It is
the critic as critic who is ahistorical."  The critic is temporal; otherwise
their would be nothing to interpret.  In the Elective Affinities essay,
Benjamin writes: "the chemist stands before the commentator like the
alchemist against the critic." (Gesammelte Schriften I, p. 126)  The critic is
a historical figure who stands opposed to the alchemist.  They are earlier
historical counterparts of the modern chemist and commentator.  The
critic does not exist outside of history; it is only the truth which the critic
seeks that is eternal.  However, just because something is eternal does
not mean that it stands outside history.  Another example or your
tendency to separate the subject from the person and place it outside
history is evident in this sentence: "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."  I think you
tend to take the Trauerspiel book an interpret it from an idealistic
perspective.  However, I would argue that the Trauerspiel book contains
within it Benjamin's emerging materialism.  Remember the Trauerspiel
book is concerned the use of allegory in the German "Baroque" Tragic
Drama.  While the Erkenntniskritische Vorrede is philosophical (and
perhaps idealistic), the later part of the book is historically grounded. 
Benjamin contrasts the mystery play of the Renaissance with the
Baroque Trauerspiel.  The Baroque Trauerspiel has given up hope in any
"divine plan of salvation"; any hope for redemption is this worldly (Origin
of the German Tragic Drams, p. 81)  Benjamin repeatedly attempts to
connect metaphysical concepts to history.  He writes: "For the decisive
factor in the escapism of the baroque is not the antithesis of history and
nature but the comprehensive secularization of the historical in the state
of creation.  It is not eternity that is opposed to the disconsolate chronicle
of world-history, but the restoration of timelessness of paradise.  History
merges into setting."(OGTD, p. 92)  History is not opposed to nature; it is
secularized in it.  Eternity is not opposed to history but to timelessness. 
Therefore, I disagree with your argument that in the early 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."  I think what you are arguing is
that for Benjamin truth exists independently of history.  I think the source
of confusion is that Benjamin in the early works retains an idealistic
notions: a state of paradise, an Ursprache, and a conception of truth. 
(Interestingly enough, modern linguists also speculate about an original
language to which all modern languages are traced.)  It is these early
writings which are the basis for your argument that there is a truth
which exists outside of history.  However, I would argue that this truth
does not exists outside of history.  It may exist independent of any
particular historical moment.  In other words, truth is eternal but not
ahistorical.  Truth, in Benjamin perspective (in the elective affinities
essay) is not ahistorical but transhistorical.  The allegorist attempts to
interpret this truth.  As long as the world remains in this fallen state truth
can only be interpreted.  There is no agreement on what it is.  It is not
revealed in its entirety.  (I am not so idealistic as Benjamin in these early
writings.  I would argue paradoxically "the truth is that there is no truth"-
but this is another issue).  
	The difference between the allegorical image and the dialectical
images is cloudy.  The allegorical images is an image but not a visual one.
The early works Benjamin held on to the Judaic forbidding of graven
images.  The allegorical image is more conceptual.  The dialectical
images, on the other hand, becomes visual.  This had to do with his
increasing interest in new form of communication like photography and
film.  Even the Flaneur and the Prostitute, who are both dialectical
images, although they are based on the writings of Baudelaire, are visual
images.  The Flaneur and the Prostitute loiter in the Arcades to see and
be seen.  For Benjamin, Baudelaire is an allegorist.  I think the major
distinction between an allegorical image and a dialectical image is the
following: the allegorist is at home in a fallen world whereas the
dialectical image reveals a hope in this worldly redemption (i.e.
revolution).  	
	It is true that Benjamin certainly has anarchic tendencies.  In some
of the essay (like the Author as Producer and the Work of Art in the Age
of Mechanical Reproduction), when he does employ Marxist terminology
it seems forced.  However, to label him as either a "Marxist" or an
"Anarchist" (or for that matter an idealist or materialist) I think is wrong. 
He contains elements of both.  There are certain concepts which are
anarchic like the Jetztzeit (although its basis is can be found in the
neo-Kantian Messianism of Herman Cohen, Die Religion der Vernunft aus
dem Quellen des Judentums, p. 280: "Und ist etwas in der Jetztzeit diese
Antinomie ueberwunden, oder mehr als uebertuencht?").  However, in
the later writings, in particular the first essay on Baudelaire and the
Theses, Benjamin's historical materialism becomes more natural.  The
passages on the Flanuer, the Arcades and the Prostitute are critiques of
commodity fetishism.  Attempts by varying interprets to claim that
Benjamin is either Marxist or anarchist, theological or materialist, is
distorted by their own positions.  He is in fact, all of the these, to differing
extents at different times and in different places.  It is only on this level
that he can be understood.  This is why I would argue to interpret
Benjamin purely from the light of his early essays which have stronger
idealistic leanings would lead to a misinterpretation of his later works. 
The challenge for us is to see the commonalities in these differing
perspectives.  What is writings reveal is the commonalities of these
sometimes contradictory perspectives.  What prevented Benjamin from
his explicit mixture of Messianism and Marxism, is as you suggest is the
pressure placed on him by Adorno, Brecht (and Scholem). (His distance
>from the "reactionary romantics" was already clear- see Theories of
German Fascism).  This is perhaps why after the Kraus essay (and the
response to it by Scholem), he refrained from taking such a position until
after his release from the internment camp when he wrote from the
Theses.  Only at a time of war, when he was really in danger, did it
really not matter what the others thought.


Sincerely,

Warren Goldstein