Beyond the Footnote
Walter Benjamin
Walter Benjamin
In 1932 Benjamin wrote that 'the Goethe Centennial is starting up, and as the only person besides at most two or three others who knows something about the subject, I of course have no share in it.' In the year of his own centenary, the rules of journalism sanction a revival. It is right to hesitate at the banquet of re-interpretation of Benjamin's work that will be served up. And then to argue strongly that the visual arts are not wrong to claim the scraps that fall from the table. 'In the fields with which we are concerned, knowledge exists only in lightning flashes. The text is the thunder rolling long afterward.' The lightning flashes are images - which we do know something about, though we are not used to trusting that knowledge. Those hollowed-out, seductive illusions become, in Benjamin's thought, bonds to our commonality with the dead and with the promise that technology still holds.
Benjamin's reputation was posthumous, except amongst those who knew him; and arrived in English nearly thirty years after his death. As a miraculous survival, he feels closer to us than we have a right to believe. Yet he is not well enough known, and must be blasted from the footnotes that cite him, when the force of his language does not do this itself. The uncompleted nature of his work invites us to sign ourselves and the present in it. We find, to our surprise, that this is not a desecration but a part of the point.
'All close relationships are lit up by an almost intolerable, piercing clarity in which they are scarcely able to survive. For on the one hand, money stands ruinously at the centre of every vital interest, but on the other, this is the very barrier before which almost all relationships halt; so, more and more, in the natural as in the moral sphere, unreflecting trust, calm, and health are disappearing.'1
The work of Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) has been thought central to the study of culture ever since a collection of essays appeared in English under the title Illuminations in 1969. With a biographical essay by Hannah Arendt, the crossing of historical and cultural dilemmas in Benjamin's personality was observable before his writing was; one learned of the bungled flight from Paris, of suicide, of the wavering between Zionism and Marxism characteristic of his generation, and of Benjamin the book collector and melancholic. But the flow of translation that might have corrected this emphasis has been slow. There were very good reasons for an interest in Benjamin's life; its brokenness was and is more expressive to us as lived difficulty than fables of partisanship are. Apart from the rich collection One Way Street and Other Writings, one of the best introductions to Benjamin's thought was Gershom Scholem's memoir based on their long correspondence. Inevitably, as a Judaic scholar, Scholem's emphasis indicated that theology was the key to unlock Benjamin's work; the secretiveness of the late Theses on the Philosophy of History seemed to confirm this. There, the story is told of a chess-playing automaton in Turkish attire, seated before a table, underneath which is concealed a dwarf:
'One can imagine a philosophical counterpart to this device. The puppet called "historical materialism" is to win all the time. It can easily be the match for anyone if it enlists the services of theology which today as we know is wizened and has to keep out of sight.'2
Depending on one's politics, the Theses became the signal that Benjamin was assimilable as a radiant figure of literary studies, to be known by the injunction that 'criticism must speak the language of artists,' or that he was a dreamer fundamentally flawed by a messianic belief. Though he remained favourite bedtime reading for intellectuals, his apparently unfulfilled ambition for unity of perception and action sat strangely in the sedentary life of ideas. For those who sought radiance within the profane heart of our experience, those to whom Benjamin's sense of the interpenetration of the material world and of history seemed exemplary, it seemed unlikely that his uncompleted project could ever be grasped as a whole.
These debates reached the world of the visual arts only in footnoted form. The Work of Art in the Age of its Mechanical Reproducibility (as it is now generally translated) was the primary resource. John Berger's influential espousal of it under-emphasised Benjamin's preparedness for the question of mystery. This, as Berger's subsequent work shows, will return as a totalising explanation if insufficient room is allowed for it initially. The 'aura' of the work of art before the advent of lithography and photography was not simply that of uniqueness and of a mystified property relation, as we shall see, but a word that expresses valuation, and a valuation of the human. Whatever one takes from Benjamin, it is hard to argue this away.
After the over-politicised version of Benjamin came a depressingly aestheticised one. The studies collected in Charles Baudelaire were not readily explicable without some knowledge of the Arcades Project (Passagen-Werk), the 13-year project relating to 19th Century Paris. The notes for this work were not then published. Perhaps the eclectic range of Benjamin's learning, in footnoted form, only served to reintroduce the possibility of dandyism in art criticism: the well chosen fact serving as tie-pin. T.J.Clark's work meditated on the Baudelaire studies more profitably. Likewise the obscurities of the early theories of allegory from The Origin Of German Tragic Drama could be used to legitimate the productions of postmodernism. Only with difficulty could the quite genuinely progressive potential of the term 'allegory' in Benjamin's work be prised from its learned context, for even scholars predisposed to such ideas have questioned whether it is the most useful term for what seems meant by it. It is by no means clear that the critics servicing the traffic of ideas from literary criticism into art criticism were not simply assisting in the subjection of a practice by a theory. In the 'eighties' we mistakenly thought that everything could be 'read'.
And yet the adoption of Benjamin by the visual arts and its magazines was much more than an inevitable process. A recognition had taken place. His thinking was visual, as it was grounded in an enlarged understanding of everyday experience. It is symptomatic that Benjamin's idea of the aura is most attractive to us, though we encountered it in an essay in which it seemed to be decaying. It was a quality he found in the unique work of art, in the familiarity with death shown by the story in the mouth of the storyteller, in utensils and objects worn by use; in Proust's memoire involontaire. It is given its clearest formulation in the essay On Some Motifs in Baudelaire: 'To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return.'3 Such a formulation opens a way to parallels with the discourse of love and Freudian theory from which many subsequent thinkers have attempted to extrapolate a politics. But Benjamin's critique of an economy in which objects 'lost their ability to look,' will reverberate in the minds of artists for whom objects remain obstinately more than a sign, retaining weight, substance and quality, even as they serve our linguistic needs by representing something else. Are such objects the ground of our social being? In the notes that are all that survive of the Passagen-Werk, Benjamin cites Marx: 'In a practical sense, I can behave in a human way toward an object only when the object behaves in a human way toward human beings.'4
The Passagen-Werk (Arcades project) was Benjamin's main preoccupation from 1927 until his death. There exists for it no opening sentence. Whilst his closest associates knew it contained Benjamin's highest ambitions, the surviving files of notes and drafts were not published in the German collected works until as late as 1982. The transcriptions are from a huge variety of sources few philosophers or historians were then considering worthy of attention. Benjamin's comments indicated a complex of thought around progress, technology, historical method, nature, fashion, and the commodity. The implied intention was to move through the thicket of facts to a possibly quite simple fairy story of sleep and awakening, an awakening from the 19th Century.
The notes demanded not just meticulous scholarship but an effort of tactful re-imagination. Susan Buck-Morss' book The Dialectics of Seeing, published in 1989, is equal to the task in every way and is, appropriately, a philosophy book with pictures. As a professor of political philosophy and social theory, Buck-Morss shows some impatience with the flow of literary and philosophical interpretations that Benjamin has attracted and wishes to redirect us to the political point of the work. This her book does without minimising the difficulties, and in the process mobilises an active reader. It gives us theoretical co-ordinates for understanding Benjamin's historical work as a whole without writing it off as an academic construct. The vulnerability that Benjamin's work has shown to critics of all persuasions might seem to be even more the case here in his incomplete masterwork. The reconstruction of what Benjamin might have meant has instead sharpened the debate, to which the theory of the image is crucial.
One cannot presume that knowledge is transmitted from generation to generation, especially in the visual arts where we inevitably experience 'the fashions of the most recent past as the most thorough anti-aphrodisiacs that can be imagined.'4 Benjamin ought, however, to be recognised as being as germane to the 'trends', towards subjectivism and privacy, as to the critique of the larger adventures of fashion itself. His work intersects with the concerns of artists, architects, designers, teachers and those for whom utopianism cannot be confined to the pursuit of perfect recorded sound, or to those who have wondered if there are not now more varieties of bread in supermarkets than there are names for God. He asks for trust and willingness, qualities which, together with scepticism and irreverence, artists have traditionally displayed. Criticism must indeed speak the language of artists; but it cannot do so by constantly identifying itself with their concerns. As in any conversation, effort needs to be made by either side.
In the hundredth year of Benjamin's birth, reverence threatens to dampen the 'political dynamite' that John Miller thought might detonate with the new understandings made available by Buck-Morss' book.5 That book continues its argument by means of a picture section. The following notes are not conceived as a rejoinder to academic understandings, but - like the picture section - as a complement to them.
UNFINISHED UNDERSTANDINGS
OF WALTER BENJAMIN, IN THE HUNDREDTH YEAR OF HIS BIRTH
1] NATURE/HISTORY
'When as children we were given those great collected editions The Cosmos and Humanity, New Universe, or The Earth, would our gaze not fall first of all on the coloured [illustrations] of petrified landscapes or the 'lakes and glaciers of the first ice age'? Such an idealised panorama of a scarcely past epoch opens up when we gaze into the Passages that have spread into every city. Here is housed the last dinosaur of Europe, the consumer.'6
Benjamin chose the shopping arcades of the 19th Century as an image of the collective dream life of the masses, a dream from which he wanted them to awake. It is an eccentric armature for utopian thought. The theoretical underpinning for this project was the interpenetration of history and nature, and a quasi-evolutionary sense of the morphology of historical forms. To distance this from purely mythic integrations of nature and history aligned with a naive belief in progress (Social Darwinism being the most apparent) he adopted the axiom 'No historical category without natural substance; no natural substance without its historical filter.'7 This understanding contrasts with the more recent embarrassment surrounding the term 'nature', as though it is some enfeebled counter to cultural forces that comprehend it. Regardless of our difficulties with it, the term has now returned to prominence. The presentation of a free market or the progress of an epidemic as 'natural' is an offence that continues. But Benjamin remained optimistic about the potential of 'technological nature' in a way that is foreign to us. In One-Way Street he used the term 'Mother Earth' without irony. Adorno wrote that his entire thought could be described as 'natural-historical': 'The petrified, frozen or obsolete inventory of cultural fragments spoke to him... as fossils or plants in the herbarium to the collector.'8 As, indeed, did every manifestation of the new. Benjamin's idea of the 19th Century as prehistoric is given memorable expression in the surviving notes in ways that his enthusiasm for 'technological nature' are not. Here one needs to consider his optimism that the 'shock' of film be grasped and humanised. What 'technological nature' might mean returns us to the aura as Benjamin defined it: that quality of an object, image or word that causes it to behave in a human way towards us, and to his essential optimism that understanding its decay or miraculous survival might be a precondition for making it.
2] WHAT ABOUT THE AEROPLANES?
'Bomber planes make us remember what Leonardo da Vinci expected of the flight of man; he was to have raised himself into the air "in order to look for snow on the mountain summits, and then return to scatter it over city streets shimmering with the heat of summer."'9
Could an aeroplane have aura? The bomber seems only to prove that the tendency of 'technical nature', striving for the utopian promises of flight, achieves that goal only to betray it. 'Technical nature' is not innocent, and only political education can guide it. There is nothing theological about the aeroplane, miraculous as it might appear, but in this characteristic bringing together of an unfulfilled promise of the past and its contemporary redemption, albeit a failed redemption, Benjamin insists that we hold two images in mind at the same moment. The past and the present intersect, but remain explosively separate. Such a dialectical image is human for us to the extent that we see its potential even as we are aware of its historical misuse. Does this mean it has aura? Not in the sense already used: 'Unlike natural aura, the illumination that dialectical images provide is a mediated experience ignited within the force-field of dialectical time registers, empirical history and Messianic history.'10 Buck-Morss brings a huge weight of skilfully narrated learning to bear on the dialectical image, not a fraction of which can be reproduced here to explain this 'secondary aura' to be found within the productions of technical nature. To get back to the aeroplane, however, some images of subsequent failed promise are instructive. In the supersonic Concorde a child growing up in the 60s saw 'British inventiveness' and the return of the pterodactyl: not yet a 'dinosaur' of aviation and economic history but a literal one from Look and Learn, the dinosaur being a constant in children's education. The significant calendar of that childhood was formed alongside the Apollo space programme. Later on, the period was held to have been an 'unsustainable consumer boom', a phrase which leaves the promise of its aeroplanes and spaceships curiously unsnared.
3] PRAYER WHEEL
Benjamin's conviction that 'only images in the mind fortify the will'11 and his description of his pedagogic intention 'to educate the image-creating medium within us to see dimensionally, stereoscopically, into the depths of the historical shade,'12 imply a belief in a will and a collective purpose (education), unaffected by the time-cycles of fashion. The first statement is from One Way Street, a book which uses headings like those of newspaper editors for contemporary reflections contrasted with images drawn from quite other time-scales. The newspaper helps us to turn today into yesterday. Unlike the mere word, the vitalisation provided by 'images in the mind' is a practice like that 'of meditating Yoga, which breathes in accord with the holy syllables.'13
Theology saturates the Passagen-Werk like ink on a blotter. But Benjamin insisted that the ink was to disappear. The bringing together of Then and Now in the dialectical image could be seen - and understood - in a 'lightning flash'. So the fullness of history circumvents the accounts in which it has been confined and becomes useful to us.
The 'lightning flashes' which sound so modern are transmitted by human agency through collective memory, understood as a practice, not - as in Jung - a mythic home. Like prayer, memory is a bodily practice. Benjamin expresses a sympathy for the posture of prayer, as the form in which man has sought an identification with a collective will. This sympathy for religion understood as a bodily practice is a context in which Benjamin's conviction of the importance of 'images in the mind' might be seen. Memory is not a constant ability but enshrines changing values; in making verbal culture the prime carrier of cultural memory, other memories were obscured. This was one reason why the Passagen-Werk used so many more varieties of source material than most contemporary historians would contemplate: to honour the dead, in an almost positivist way to re-insert that which was omitted. Recreating 'the most extreme concreteness for an epoch, as appears now and again in children's games, in a building, in a life-situation'14 was never more than part of its conception, however. Its utopian function, its pledge to the future, rested on its ability to create images in the mind of its readers. We are so accustomed to thinking of images as something reduced or deceptive that their prominent position, even in the apparently complex ' dialectical image', in a theory of cultural transmission, is a surprise. Academic response to Buck-Morss' book has foundered on its presentation as 'a philosophy book with pictures';15 as though the 'dialectical image' were a simply visual idiom rather than, as with the bomber, two dialectical time-registers brought into conjunction.
The dialectical image is both a carrier of collective memory, and, quite possibly, a sign that memory as a practice is changing. Education is no longer transmitted by grandparents to grandchildren, in the wisdom of stories, but by film studios and advertisers. Benjamin was no pastoralist. He registered the losses and gains, and knew it was a matter of urgency that we grasp the techniques offered by contemporary culture in order to turn it to our purpose. Montage reproduces some of the effect of the dialectical image on the page, and educates collective memory and the 'image-creating medium' for new historical tasks. It forces the reader to do the work.
4] EXIT POLL: SUBJECTIVITY
For all kinds of reasons, Theology offered a better descriptive armature for understanding the Book of Nature than the philosophy of language. The doubts that discipline has raised about intention, will and the subject, are not congruent with Benjamin's thought. Or rather, we cannot be so sure that we understand what he means when he writes of the 'explosion' of 'the death of intention'.16 We certainly cannot be sure that it relates to the theorised 'death' or 'decentering' of the subject, the origin of which few in the visual arts can remember. As phrases these gesture towards a common intuition, a state of mind: as 'projects' they reveal the most unlovely clerisy.
In the 'natural as in the moral sphere' where 'unreflecting calm, trust, and health are disappearing'17 we do feel a threat to our subjectivity and our privacy, threats that are rightly registered by artists. In One Way Street Benjamin analysed our need for newspapers, the decay of conversation into inquiries of the price of one's partner's shoes or umbrella, and the merit of the automobile as the quickest way of 'doing oneself in'. The interpenetration of the public and the private has advanced since then, but it is not complete. One of the reasons that Buck-Morss' unproscriptive understandings of the politics of collective memory are relevant here is that they question the cognitive status we grant written sources. This has implications not just for the writing of history, but also for the way we construct our sense of the present.
Thus the debate about 'subjectivity' was never properly carried out in art schools or magazines. Few gallery directors could express an opinion on it, footnotes for their prefaces being a sign of caste-status (untouchable) rather than an indication of action, past or future. Yet we are in no doubt that the discussion of subjectivity is fundamental to contemporary art. Could it have arrived there by other means through rumour or through the transmissions inherent in art as a practice?
If so, we must understand how that practice, while not guaranteeing artists a status as the unacknowledged legislators of the race (a direct phone-link to the collective unconscious), grants them a role in measuring the health of the objects produced by 'technical nature'. In as far as we perceive the cycles of art as distinct from those of fashion and colour prediction companies, subjectivity will remain in view, as it has all along. Will the current self-consciously 'stupid' assertions of subjectivity look historically distinct from gesture politics? Stupidity is certainly a precondition for some forms of knowledge inaccessible by other means. Refusal has to be an option, and can still have the historic role of waking people up - even by the proclamation of private meanings. But in the depths of one's human nature - 'every writer does of course believe in human nature, given a few sets of quotation marks'18 - one has to be sure that these utterances are not complicit with Fashion, that is 'the eternal recurrence of the new' in the mass-produced form of the 'always the same.'19 As Coleridge warned: 'The temple of despotism, like that of the Mexican God, would be rebuilt with human skulls, though more firmly, and in a different style of architecture.'20
