[FRA:] Thinking Incognito: On Walter Benjamin
rdumain at autodidactproject.org
rdumain at autodidactproject.org
Sat Dec 31 19:08:13 GMT 2011
"Thinking Incognito: On Walter Benjamin"
Henning Ritter and Cheryl Spiese
New Literary History, Vol. 27, No. 4, Literature, Media, and the Law (Autumn, 1996),pp. 595-603.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/20057378
This is a rather different take on Benjamin: Benjamin as dissimulator, Benjamin as institutionalizing his own failure. I'm no Benjamin scholar, but I find something odd in the authors' perspective. But he begins interestingly enough: as illustrated by Benjamin's responses to Adorno's objections, Benjamin feigns capitulation while stubbornly maintaining his own position. This illustrates a general problem:
Confusion on the part of the reader is even more inevitable when he
finds himself confronted with a style of writing that does not convey
intent. It is a type of commentary that creates no distinction between
interpretation and the object thereof. Benjamin's writings actually
cannot be interpreted, for they understand themselves to be the last
stage of commentary, providing a final answer to the person seeking an
interpretation. The Benjamin reception has overlooked this tendency
and treated his writings as philosophical sketches. Benjamin's interpre
tative writing style may have derived from his unwillingness to play the
role generally expected of a critic. In his book on the origin of German
tragic drama, he immediately insulated himself from academic opinion
by audaciously trying to create a prose argument, actually in prose verse,
out of poetic metaphors. Similar to his own work, Benjamin's approach
to describing finished texts came close to being a complete enigma.
Another characterization:
Benjamin's intention to infuse his works with elements that were genuinely alien to
him derives from his mistrust of the work's afterlife, as if its survival were
itself something alien.
Further examples of Benjamin's obscurity are adduced, and Benjamin reveals himself to be essentially Kafkaesque.
And here is how Adorno saw it:
Operating from more accurate knowledge of the meaning that failure
had in Benjamin's life, Adorno declares, at a weak point in his own
philosophy (the introduction to Negative Dialectics) the failure of the
arcades project to be the very evidence of its success. Benjamin had
rejected the "essential metaphysical level" of his work as "illicitly
poetical." Adorno calls this a "statement of capitulation." In his view, it
illustrates the difficulty inherent in a philosophy that does not wish to go
astray and the vantage point from which its conception is to be pursued.
The failure of the arcades project becomes proof of its philosophical
worthiness and was, admittedly in Adorno 's opinion, "characterized by
the apparent unquestioning adoption of dialectical materialism as an
ideology." According to him, Benjamin did indeed capitulate, but the
fact that he blindly adopted dialectical materialism is proof that this
gesture concealed a unique concept of philosophy. "The fact that
Benjamin decided not to complete a final version of the arcades theory
reminds us that philosophy is more than an occupation only when it
exposes itself to total undoing, in response to a certainty that is
traditionally absolute and fraudulent as well. Benjamin's defeatist attitude vis
his own ideas was grounded in the remains of an
undialectical positivism which he carried over unmodified from his
theological phase to the materialistic." As Adorno himself agreed, all of
Benjamin's utterances seem to be equidistant from some central point,
a center, however, which can be seen as shattered and dispersed.
The authors also claim that Adorno exploited Benjamin's messianic orientation in the cause of self-promotion.
Benjamin found a remarkable image for
this identity between subjective experience and theology: "Theology
permeates my thinking as ink does a blotter. However, as far as the
blotter is concerned, nothing remains of what was written." But theology
is that which was written, and not merely the ink.
The authors also claim that Benjamin was divorced from reality: "Benjamin had no interest in the politics of his day and was oblivious to
it . . . "
On the occasion of his trip to Capri and the subsequent change in his thinking
(the so-called Capreser Wende), he remarked that he had, up to that
point, taken care to "disguise" the "contemporary aspects" of his
thinking in "antiquated" terms.
Then:
The Marxist accents in Benjamin's work after 1929 maintain this
thought incognito and can only be assessed by considering his strained
relations with Adorno and Brecht. Both men urged Benjamin to adopt
Marxism: the one, so that Benjamin could reduce the vulnerability of his
position to attacks from Marxist quarters; the other, in order to provoke
these very attacks. Benjamin accommodated both of these contradictory
demands by means of a resolute indecisiveness. He was attracted to
Brecht because he wanted to conceal, in the latter's uncompromising
language, something that it was incapable of understanding. While
Brecht wanted to see Benjamin's position openly discredited, Benjamin
sought refuge in Brecht's materialism by totally giving up his own
position.
The mismatch between Benjamin and Horkheimer was even more severe, argue the authors.
On materialism:
The reduction of intellectual phenomena
to material prerequisites and compelling grounds is only appropriate when there is an
element of surprise, when it is carried out with some sophistication.
Materialism, however, refutes any claims to sophistication. Only in a
nonmaterialist environment, such as the salons of the eighteenth
century, can it function with impunity as an intellectual construct. Of
course, in such a context, it remains bourgeois, the expression of an
intellectual suppleness, which, as remarked by Gide, posits for every
thought its opposite. Benjamin, however, sought this opposite by substituting it for his
earlier form of thought-disguise, the antiquated language.
This disguise is probably what made his Marxism so attractive for the
political movements of the sixties, but in Benjamin's day the price for
such a charade was incomparably higher.
I know nothing of Benjamin's popularity in the '60s. The authors have a few things to say about Benjamin's peculiar orientation with respect to past, present, and future, e.g.:
While Marx's fundamental idea was to liberate the consciousness of the
living from the nightmare of a dead Past, Benjamin's secondary Present
was to burden the awareness of progress with obsolete Pasts.
The authors go on and on about Benjamin's popularity for the '60s generation and today's, which apparently did and do not understand Benjamin's world. Not acknowledging Benjamin's counterfeiting undergirds the lack of genuine Benjamin criticism. Conclusion: "Virtual reality was what Benjamin was all about."
I don't know what to make of this, especially the conclusion.
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