Benjamin's materialist theology

[Tom Walker]

Thanks to Warren and Giles for an extremely stimulating discussion. I 
apologize for my brevity in responding to these complex issues. Part of my 
excuse is that I am "out of training" in my Benjamin scholarship. The other 
part is that I have always had an embarrassingly idiosyncratic reading of 
Benjamin, one that uses Benjamin's writing as a hermetic text in a kind of 
ritual of insurrectionary alchemy.

To pursue the alchemy image one step further, alchemy tells us more about 
the motives of chemical science than chemical science can ever tell us about 
the truth status of alchemy -- or for that matter, about its own truth 
status. This is, of course, to say no more than to rephrase Benjamin's 
parable about the theological dwarf pulling the levers in the historical 
materialist chess automaton.

With all the controversy about the early vs. late Benjamin, the idealist vs. 
materialist, I am surprised to see no mention of two terms that seem to me 
to be key to what I would risk calling a "symphonic" (or should that be 
a-chronistic?) reading of W.B.: childhood and messiah. For, after all, 
redemption requires an _agent_ of redemption.

Last night, speaking in his dream, my two-year son, Reuben, uttered the name 
"Stanley Park". This is certainly no anomoly because Stanley Park is an 
extremely important part of Reuben's wish vocabulary, a vocabulary he is 
quite adept at reciting like beads on a rosary. 

What use is it to discuss metaphysically the "primordial form of perception, 
in which words possess their own nobility as names" without mentioning that 
empirically observable primordial form of perception, childhood, in which 
words actually do possess precisely their own nobility as names? 

To put a Wittgensteinian twist on it (and I hope this doesn't sound too 
"surly"): words mean how we use them. Children are much closer to this 
ground of meaning than is society, with its dream of transcendent truth. 
Awakening from the dream is both profoundly simple and extraordinarily 
difficult. I'm tempted to say that attempting to systematize the awakening 
is to risk slipping back into dream.

Other than this admonition: small children can tell us more about Benjamin 
(and language and ourselves and truth) than Benjamin can ever tell us about 
small children. We just have to learn how to listen.

Tom Walker, knoW Ware Communications
http://mindlink.net/knowware/
tel (604)688-8296
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