Benjamin-Historical

[Giles Peaker]

Dear Warren,
Your last response was a fascinating and sustained critique which raises
some fundamental issues. Before I offer some counter positions, I must
first agree with you in many regards. Your points about terminology are
exactly right. I was sloppy in using 'eternal' as a synonym for divine.
There is, as you say, a huge gulf between the timeless and the eternal.
'Timeless' is right, I am less sure about transhistorical, for reasons I
will come back to. You are also entirely right that I personified
'allegory'. This was partly an attempt to deal with the awkwardness of its
status in W.B. as objective truth about historicality (your points are
noted, see below) and as subjective 'perception'. It also partly involved a
whimisical play on the emblem. (To be honest, it was also the result of
producing a response in a very difficult situation without any materials to
hand, but I will try to avoid self pity). I don't think that the problems
of subject and object are just a result of my phrasing, they are also a
problem in Benjamin. If I had to claim a position for myself, it would be
that of an Hegelian Marxist in an Adornoesque mould (a contradiction in
terms, of course) and the status of the subject-object relation in Benjamin
is one of the things that worries me. Again, more below.
There is far too much in your text to respond to it point by point, and
there is also much to which I would completely assent. Instead I hope you
will accept some accounts under two headings: 1. Reading the 'Early'
Benjamin; 2. The (shifting) concept of the dialectical image and the
metaphysical. I have added some brief comments on Benjamin, reactionary
modernism (not necessarily 'romantic') and 1930s positionality, but this
would need another mail (and much more thought/research on my part!).
1. I do tend to trace elements of the early W.B. through the later work,
but not without a sense of the profound changes that occur. The reason for
this is that there is a central form of experience, first articulated in
the early period, which motivates or organises the later work even as its
terms are transformed.See 2. below. Allegory is key here, not because,
contra Witte, it serves as a model for Benjamin's practice but because it
offers a vision of the complex relations of the historical and truth (and
its representation). The significance of allegory is, as you say, that in
it the historical and the divine are separated - history is secularised.
But the vital part of this cannot be recognised or indicated within
allegory, because of allegory's own historicality. 'In God's world the
allegorist awakens' OGTD 232. This is the resurrection of the spirit, freed
>from the empty realm of natural history (the emblem of the death's head).
Allegory  is allegorised and the desolate historical world becomes a sign
for its transcendence. But this is a false escape. Any resurrection which
leaves the material world behind is false. The error in allegory is the
distinction between spirit (subjectivity) and world, but this separation is
what gives rise to allegory in the first place. The 'transcendence'
achieved in allegory is actually just as much a part of the historical
world. Adorno might choose to read this as a narrative of alienated
subjectivity, (the Kierkegaard book) but it isn't, at least not for
Benjamin. The Trauerspiel book attempts to read the relentless negativity
of allegory and the falseness of the 'resurrection' as a sign of truth
(timeless presence) but such a reading cannot itself be allegorical. It has
to be grounded (if you will excuse the term) and it can only be grounded in
the 'recognition' of the truth. This recognition, which is not of or for
the critic as subject, is what the assembly or constellation of historical
materials is intended to represent (negatively). This is the moment of
metaphysical experience, an intimation of the timeless given not just
through the particular historical materials, but through their very
historicality. (Note that there is a tension between the rational
constructive element of assembling the constellation and the nonsubjective,
extra individual intimation of truth. I'll come back to this). This is the
basis for my contention that up to 1935 or so the mode of metaphysical
experience is not historicised, even though the materials through which it
emerges (and its truth is 'represented') are absolutely historical and
particular. It is perhaps a lingering Neo-Kantianism, but the experience
has nothing to do with the critic as an individual, it takes him/her beyond
their own specific historicality. Perversely this is perhaps one reason why
Benjamin is supremely historically self conscious, objectifying his own
life as historical experience. This leads me on to ...
2. The dialectical image is a notoriously difficult concept, partly because
W.B. reformulates it. I take your point about the relation of allegory and
dialectical image, but I'm not sure it can fully stand. Both allegory and
the dialectical image [D.I.] involve the non-narrative reading of images
('Both externally and stylistically - in the extreme character of the
typographical arrangement and in the use of highly charged metaphors - the
written word tends towards the visual'. OGTD 175-6). The difference, that
the D.I. points to redemption or revolution, returns us to the model of
metaphysical experience. One Way Street and the essay on Surrealism are
first attempts at the secularisation of this experience (profane
illumination) but neither faces up to the question of the historicisation
of the metaphysical experience per se. Consider the change in 'Imperial
Panorama' between the gift to Scholem (1923) and 1928 publication. The
'downhill road of hate' transformed to 'the rising path of prayer' becomes
in the later version 'the downhill road of grief' turning into 'the rising
path of revolt'. A minimal change of words effects a secularisation of the
theological without, at this point, changing either the experience of
recognition, or the means of its representation. Similarly the description
of profane illumination in which 'nearness looks with its own eyes, the
long sought image sphere is opened, the world of universal and integral
actualities' Reflections 192, to some extent maps earlier concepts onto
surrealist experience (does this not sound like the Ursprache?). This essay
does raise the issue of the 'instant' (and modernity's temporality) which
are important, but not followed through. The difficulties of this
secularisation are particularly marked at the time of the 1935 Arcades
expose. Here, the D.I. appears as dream image (the dream of the inhabitants
of 19c Paris) and its recognition as D.I. is governed by the 'now of
recognisability' - a moment in the historical situation of the critic, but
how is this linked to awakening? The revolutionary potential of the D.I.
seems to have two components. One, obviously, is the constructive critical
reflection upon the 'present' proffered by the materials of the past. But
the 'awakening' seems to be impelled by the 'now' of recognisability. This
seems to be an interruption, an intimation of a position which is not that
of a specific historical existence (& temporality). The revolutionary urge
is thus against the nature of (modern) historicality, not simply particular
aspects of it. Indeed it has to be, or the dialectical image simply becomes
the same as the ultra- subjective and contingent assembling of allegory.
None of this is resolved, and the difficulty is compounded by the attempt
to cast the D.I. as historical dream. Adorno's objections are well founded
(letter 2 Aug 1935). Vitally, Benjamin takes the 'immanence of
consciousness' as given, he takes 19c consciousness on its own valuation.
This means that although the content of the dream is thoroughly historical,
the status of dreaming is not (hence Adorno's insistence on the specific
commodity character of the 19c). Adorno's recommendation of 'more theology'
is an attempt to return Benjamin to the Trauerspiel, where allegory is
taken not at 'face value' but shown to be generated out of specific
historical conditions. At this stage and in OWS, modernity appears as
'fallen' but this simply proffers the fantasy of the golden age, the
'primal state appear as truth'. (Romantic reactionaries appear again). The
complicated introduction of a difference between tradition and modernity
also emerges at this time. I referred to this and the reactionary nature of
the 1934 Kafka essay in an earlier letter.
The later D.I. approaches the problem of finding the genesis of awakening
in the experience of the image. (Note that the problem is the legacy of the
formulation of the intimation of truth in the Trauerspiel). 'Progress does
not reside in the continuity of temporal sucession, but rather in its
moments of interference: where the truly new first makes itself felt, as
sober as the dawn.' N 9a, 7. Here the new is a qualitative distinction, not
the eternal return of historical 'progress'. It is to the new in and of the
experience of urban modernity that W.B. turns. Part of this is the nature
of the Instant. Modernity is, temporally, a sucession of empty instants,
but crucially, it is experienced as such. The instant, W.B. suggests, can
also be the site of a qualitative experience - hence the imagery of
lightning, photographs, flashes. The previous metaphysical experience is
here tied to the nature of modern experience (although how it is generated
out of that experience remains thoroughly unclear. Benjamin's texts usually
resort to rhetoric to cover the gap, e.g. the end of the Surrealism essay,
or the curious end of the 1935 expose CB 176.) Such interruption of the
'continuum' offers an intimation of a different experience of history, a
glimpse of plenitude (of experience). Here lies its revolutionary force
(and its relation to the old metaphysical schema of truth). It must remain
a mere metonym, or intimation, otherwise it reopens the dangers of
surrealist rapture and of a 'return to a golden age' (Klages). Presence
cannot be present in modernity in any way, and the impoverished nature of
modernity is confirmed by the 'passing away' of the instant of recognition,
suceeded by another instant in the empty continuum. ('That things just keep
going on is the catastrophe'N9a, 1). Here the separation between the
'constructive' and 'interruptive' aspects of the D.I. becomes marked. The
notes in konvolut N from the period vary between imagery of instanteneity
(as above) and of critical activity (construction, montage, dream analysis,
constellating). The critical activity is to render the critique of the
present through its encounter with a specific past (no longer just its
dream images). But the two aspects cannot be conjoined. One is critical,
rational and of modern historicality, the other experiential,
non-subjective and ruptures historicality. One cannot reflect on the event
of the 'Now' as it happens. The constructive element is that aspect which
Adorno adopts in his model of the D.I. ('to contemplate all things as they
would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption'. Minima Moralia
247. Note this is an 'as if'. As Adorno goes on to point out, such an
escape from the historicality of thought is impossible). Benjamin is not
prepared to concede this, and in the Theses, the constructive aspect
disappears, it is solely the detonation of the experience of the instant
that remains - eschatological destruction. Hence also, in part, the
explicit return of a theological language which, I would suggest, had
painfully been there all along but submerged.
To close what has become an epic missive, I would just like to offer a few
unsupported comments which relate your last paragraph. I am intrigued by
Benjamin's use of positionality. I suspect that his intense historical self
consciousness means that his adoption of positions (often contradictory) is
in part an exploration of the forms and parameters of modernity, in
particular the emergence of mass experience. But it can also be defensive,
to shield himself from association with those he politically opposes. In
particular I'm thinking of his intermittent adoption of a class analysis,
for example Theories of German Fascism or the review of Pierre Mac Orlan's
'Sous la Lumiere Froide' [mislaid the ref.]. In the latter, a class
analysis of the social position of the writer/intellectual since 1830
points to the literary obsession with the boheme as fantasised
classlessness. Hardly novel, but his language changes when he moves on to
Mac Orlan's stories, which deal with prostitutes, gambling etc. and enact a
(by then traditional) literary flanerie. Very much Benjamin's own concerns,
treated rather differently. Benjamin shies away from dealing with the
seduction of the material or the issue of his own relation to the mythemes
of 1930s representations of Paris. (See A.Rifkin, Street Noises. Manchester
Uni.Press, for interesting comments on this and on Adorno related issues of
entertainment technologies and social space). As you know, a class analysis
has little place in W.B.'s own concerns so why deploy it ? (It is not, I
think, in this instance a question of the journal in which the review
appeared). Another example might be his repudiation of Klages and Jung
after Adorno's comments. I sense that, as an historically overdetermined
practice, Benjamin's work does share elements with some of his
contemporaries whom we would rather not consider, but I need to do much
more work on this before I can make a tenable case. The plurality of
Benjamins that you mention also seems to me to set forth a challenge, but
it is less to discover their commonalities than to attempt to understand
them as traces of irresolvable (or at least unresolved) contradictions, and
here, in turn, I reach for my Marx! There I rest. This was written in
haste, so my apologies for any ridiculous mistakes.

Yours
Giles