Walter Benjamin: Or, Towards a Revolutionary Criticism

Preface

One afternoon, Walter Benjamin was sitting inside the Café des Deux Magots in Saint Germain des Prés when he was struck with compelling force by the idea of drawing a diagram of his life, and knew at the same moment exactly how it was to be done. He drew the diagram, and with utterly typical ill-luck lost it again a year or two later. The diagram, not surprisingly, was a labyrinth.

This book is not that diagram restored. It is neither an introduction to Benjamin’s writing nor scholarly exegesis; nor is it quite a ‘critical account’, since even where I seem to be ‘explicating’ Benjamin’s thought I am hardly ever actually summarizing or transcribing his texts. I am trying rather to manhandle them for my own purposes, blast them out of the continuum of history, in ways I think he would have approved. The relation between Benjamin’s discourse and my own is not one of reflection or reproduction; it is more a matter of imbricating the two languages to produce a third that belongs wholly to neither of us. It would be difficult in any case to know what an adequate ‘critical account’ of Benjamin would look like, given his own hostility to the academic mode of production, and the complex strategies whereby his texts resist such reductiveness. Benjamin’s sardonic distaste for conventional book-production is closely linked to his politics, and I should say that the formative impulse of this book too is political rather than academic. I wrote it because I thought I could see ways in which Benjamin’s work might be used to illuminate some key problems now confronting a ‘revolutionary criticism’. In the manner of Benjamin himself, the book is deliberately not an ‘organic unity’: the logic of its second part in particular is as much to be constructed by the reader as given by the text.

In these ways, then, the book marks a development from my Criticism and Ideology (NLB, 1976), which was less overtly political in timbre and more conventionally academic in style and form. That development, however, is not merely my own. What seemed important when I wrote my earlier book, at a time when ‘Marxist criticism’ had little anchorage in Britain, was to examine its pre-history and to systematize the categories essential for a ‘science of the text’. I would still defend the principle of that project, but it is perhaps no longer the focal concern of Marxist cultural studies. Partly under the pressure of global capitalist crisis, partly under the influence of new themes and forces within socialism, the centre of such studies is shifting from narrowly textual or conceptual analysis to problems of cultural production and the political uses of artefacts. Interwoven with that general mutation is my own individual evolution since writing Criticism and Ideology. What intervened between that book and this was a play, Brecht and Company (1979), which both in its writing and in the final product raised questions of the relations between socialist cultural theory and cultural practice, the relevance of both to revolutionary politics, the techniques of intellectual production and the political uses of theatre and comedy. This shift of direction was in turn obscurely related to certain deep-seated changes in my own personal and political life since the writing of Criticism and Ideology.

There are other reasons why a book on Benjamin seems appropriate. Bred as a bourgeois intellectual, Benjamin buckled himself to the tasks of revolutionary transformation; so that whatever the individual class-provenance of Marxist intellectuals within the academy today, his life and work speak challengingly to us all. This is true above all at a time of historical upheaval, when every materialist intellectual labour must deliberately examine its own political credentials. Moreover, Benjamin’s work seems to me strikingly to prefigure many of the current motifs of post-structuralism, and to do so, unusually, in a committedly Marxist context. The book is therefore intended among other things as an intervention into those particular disputes. But I have written what I believe is the first book-length English-language study of Benjamin in order also to get at him before the opposition does. All the signs are that Benjamin is in imminent danger of being appropriated by a critical establishment that regards his Marxism as a contingent peccadillo or tolerable eccentricity. Were it not for his premature death, suggests Frank Kermode, Benjamin ‘might now, at eighty-six, be a distinguished American professor emeritus’.¹ One can envisage the glee with which Benjamin would have greeted this prospect. ‘Had he lived’, asserts George Steiner, ‘Walter Benjamin would doubtless have been sceptical of any New Left. Like every man committed to abstruse thought and scholarship, he knew that not only the humanities, but humane and critical intelligence itself, resides in the always-threatened keeping of the very few’.² These words, which are the exact reverse of the truth, seem to me an insult to Benjamin’s memory. My final and most simple reason for writing the book, then, is to pay homage to Walter Benjamin, who in a dark time taught us that it is the lowly and inconspicuous who will blast history apart.

I am grateful to Francis Mulhern, Bernard Sharratt and Paul Tickell, who commented valuably on the manuscript of this book. I must also thank Faculty and students at the Universities of Oregon, British Columbia, and Deakin University, Australia, with whom I have discussed these matters, and the Society for the Humanities, Cornell University, for appointing me to a visiting senior research fellowship during which the last stages of work were carried out. Toril Moi argued some of these ideas with me to the point where it is impossible to say whether they are ‘hers’ or ‘mine’; but I cannot hold her responsible for typing the manuscript, tolerating prolonged periods of unsociability with patience and good humour, or keeping me sane.

T.E.

Wadham College Oxford

ONE

Walter Benjamin

1

Walter Benjamin found it demeaning

To leave more than fragments for gleaning;

His Ursprung explains

That God gave us brains

To deem meaning itself overweaning.

ALAN WALL

The progressive discovery of Walter Benjamin that has marked the past two decades is not really very surprising. For who could be more appealing to Western Marxists than a writer who manages marvellously to combine all the vigorous iconoclasm of a materialist ‘production aesthetics’ with the entrancing esotericism of the Kabbala? Who indeed could speak to us more persuasively, torn as we are between media technology and idealist meditation? In the doomed, poignant figure of a Benjamin we find reflected back to us something of our own contradictory desire for some undreamt-of emancipation and persistent delight in the contingent. The Origin of German Tragic Drama stands at the confluence of these impulses—for nothing could be at once more boldly dialectical and more intriguingly arcane than the seventeenth-century Trauerspiel.

For an English critic in particular, Benjamin’s return to the seventeenth century inevitably recalls the apparently similar gestures of T.S. Eliot and F.R. Leavis. Restless with an eighteenth century that it has already rewritten as ‘Augustan’, thwarted by its own ideological creations, twentieth-century English criticism peers back beyond that artificially pacified epoch to glimpse in its turbulent predecessor an image it can call its own. Far from merely paralleling that project, however, Benjamin’s recourse to the Trauerspiel neatly exposes its ideological basis. Writing of John Donne in Revaluation, F.R. Leavis suggests that his ‘utterance, movement and intonation are those of the talking voice … [exhibiting] a natural speaking stress and intonation and an economy that is the privilege of speech …’.¹ Pope’s verse is similarly expressive: ‘above every line of Pope we can imagine a tensely flexible and complex curve, representing the modulation, emphasis and changing tone and tempo of the voice in reading …’.² It is this trace within script of the living voice that the linguistic disaster of Milton has fatally erased. Milton’s language ‘has no particular expressive work to do, but functions by rote, of its own momentum, in the manner of a ritual’; his diction at its worst is a ‘laboured, pedantic artifice’, in which the obtrusive sign draws imperiously onto itself that attention to ‘perceptions, sensations or things’ that it is its business to foster.³ Milton’s arid, factitious discourse suggests a medium ‘cut off from speech—speech that belongs to the emotional and sensory texture of actual living and is in resonance with the nervous system’.⁴ What is ‘natural’ about Donne, by contrast, is precisely his subtle rootedness in ‘idiomatic speech’. Eliot, who is similarly in pursuit of a poetry that infiltrates ‘the cerebral cortex, the nervous system, and the digestive tracts’,⁵ also finds such a bodily semiotic in Donne rather than in Milton, whose ‘remoteness … from ordinary speech’⁶ is for the early Eliot grievously disabling.

For both critics, the contrast between Donne and Milton is cast in terms of the ‘visual’ versus the ‘auditory’ imagination. What both in fact find corrupting in Milton is an irreducible surplus of signification that deflects the sign from its truly representational role—and reveals, in Leavis’s phrase, ‘a feeling for words rather than a capacity for feeling through words’.⁷ That surplus of signification we can designate as écriture, and for Benjamin it lies at the heart of the Trauerspiel. Seventeenth-century allegory, obsessed as it is by emblem and hieroglyph, is a profoundly visual form; but what swims into visibility is nothing less than the materiality of the letter itself. It is not that the letter flexes and effaces itself to become the bearer of ‘perceptions, sensations or things’, as Leavis would have us believe of Donne; it is rather that ‘at one stroke the profound vision of allegory transforms things and works into stirring writing’.⁸ The allegorical signifier is ‘not merely a sign of what is to be known but it is in itself an object worthy of knowledge’:⁹ its denotative force is inseparable from its complex carnality. The writing of Trauerspiel, Benjamin remarks, ‘does not achieve transcendence by being voiced; rather does the world of written language remain self-sufficient and intent on the display of its own substance’.¹⁰

This is not to say that such writing is not ‘voiced’ at all—that sound is merely quelled by its material thickness. On the contrary, the baroque signifier displays a dialectical structure in which sound and script ‘confront each other in tense polarity’,¹¹ forcing a division within discourse that impels the gaze into its very depths. That division, for Benjamin, is ontological: spoken language signifies the ‘free, spontaneous utterance of the creature’,¹² an expressive ecstasy at odds with that fateful enslavement to meaning which the language of allegory entails. What escapes such enslavement is shape and sound, which figure for the baroque allegorist as a self-delighting, purely sensuous residue over and above the meaning with which all written language is inexorably contaminated (and here, of course, ‘written language’ can mean nothing less than ‘language as such’). Seeking in the fullness of sound to assert its creaturely rights, language is nonetheless grimly subdued to significance; the ‘semiotic’, in the Kristevan sense of that babble or prattle of loosely articulated impulses below the threshold of meaning, enters the constraints of the ‘symbolic’ but just manages to remain heterogeneous in relation to it.¹³ No finer image of such constraint can be found than in the baroque echo-game, in which the echo, itself quite literally a free play of sound, is harnessed to dramatic meaning as answer, warning, prophecy or the like, violently subordinated to a domain of significance that its empty resonance nonetheless threatens to dissolve.

What Benjamin discovers in the Trauerspiel, then, is a profound gulf between materiality and meaning—a gulf across which the contention between the two nevertheless persists. It is precisely this which Eliot detects in Milton: ‘to extract everything possible from Paradise Lost’, he comments, ‘it would seem necessary to read it in two different ways, first solely for the sound, and second for the sense’.¹⁴ The semiotic contradiction that Benjamin singles out is resolved into separate readings. For Leavis, the ‘Miltonic music’ is little more than an external embellishment, clumsily at odds with the springs of sense. That this should be scandalous for both critics is hardly surprising, given their commitment to the very aesthetic ideology that Benjamin so ruthlessly demystifies: that of the symbol. Ineluctably idealizing, the symbol subdues the material object to a surge of spirit that illuminates and redeems it from within. In a transfigurative flash, meaning and materiality are reconciled into one; for a fragile, irrationalist instant, being and signification become harmoniously totalized. It is impossible that allegory should not appear prolix, mechanical and uncouth in the light of such glamorous notions, and indeed Benjamin is only too aware of the fact; what else is his entire book but an effort to salvage allegory from the ‘enormous condescension’ of history, as allegory’s whole striving is itself for the painful salvaging of truth? Symbolism has denigrated allegory as thoroughly as the ideology of the speaking voice has humiliated script; and though Benjamin himself does not fully develop the connection, it is surely a relevant one. For the allegorical object has undergone a kind of haemorrhage of spirit: drained of all immanent meaning, it lies as a pure facticity under the manipulative hand of the allegorist, awaiting such meaning as he or she may imbue it with. Nothing could more aptly exemplify such a condition than the practice of writing itself, which draws its atomized material fragments into endless, unmotivated constellations of meaning. In the baroque allegory, a jagged line of demarcation is scored between theatrical object and meaning, signifier and signified—a line that for Benjamin traces between the two the dark shadow of that ultimate disjoining of consciousness and physical nature which is death. But if death is in this sense the final devastation of the sign, the utter disruption of its imaginary coherence, so too is writing itself, which happens at the sliding hinge between signifier and signified, and with which, as we shall see later, death itself is intimately associated.

Since Benjamin, like Bertolt Brecht, believes in starting not from the good old things but from the bad new ones,¹⁵ he does not mourn the bereft condition of the baroque world, sundered as it is from all transcendence. It is true, as we shall see, that he considers such barrenness to contain the seeds of its own redemption; but even so he welcomes the Trauerspiel as figuring the real, demystified form of ‘man’s subjection to nature’.¹⁶ For Eliot and Leavis, on the other hand, this drastic dissociation of sensibility—for that, after all, is another jargon for what we are discussing—is an ideological menace. The world of the Trauerspiel is not one in which characters feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose; and even if the typewriter had been invented they would hardly have combined hearing the noise of it with the experience of reading Spinoza. The Trauerspiel, with its habitual disarticulation of elements, knows nothing of that fetishism of the ‘organic’ which haunts an Eliot or Leavis, and which informs the German Romantic criticism Benjamin so courageously challenged. In the baroque, ‘the false appearance of totality is extinguished’,¹⁷ even if it then yields grounds to a fetishism of the fragment. Eliot and Leavis, gripped by the good old things, return wistfully to the time when the intellect was at the tip of the senses and the social relations of exploited farm-labourers constituted a ‘right and inevitable’ human environment.¹⁸ Indeed what is the Metaphysical conceit but the organic society in miniature, a Gemeinschaft of senses and intellect, a transfiguring flash in which the material object is rescued from its facticity and offered up to the ephemeral embrace of spirit? It is no wonder that the criticism of Eliot and Leavis betrays such a deep ‘phonocentric’ prejudice—in favour of what Jacques Derrida has described as an ‘absolute proximity of voice and being, of voice and the meaning of being, of voice and the ideality of meaning’.¹⁹ For if poetry is to slide into the cerebral cortex, nervous system and digestive tracts to perform its ideological labour there, it must free itself from the thwarting materiality of the signifier to become the subtilized medium of the living body itself, of which nothing is more symbolically expressive than the ‘spontaneous’ speaking voice. Unless the ‘thing’ is ripely, unmediatedly present within the word, it will fail to be borne subliminally to that realm which for both Eliot and Leavis is the very heartland of ‘human experience’, and which historical materialism knows to be the very terrain of the ideological.

Benjamin, by contrast, does not fall prey to the illusion that the voice is any more spontaneous or immaterial than script. ‘That inward connection of word and script’, he quotes Johann Wilhelm Ritter as reflecting, ‘so powerful that we write when we speak … has long interested me…. Their original, and absolute, simultaneity was rooted in the fact that the organ of speech itself writes in order to speak. The letter alone speaks, or rather: word and script are, at source, one, and neither is possible without the other…. Every sound pattern is an electric pattern, and every electric pattern is a sound pattern’.²⁰ In the Trauerspiel, Benjamin continues, ‘there is nothing subordinate about written script; it is not cast away in reading, like dross. It is absorbed along with what is read, as its pattern’.²¹

That Leavis should manifest such hostility to Milton is itself a profound historical irony. For his animus against Milton is among other things the irritation of a petty-bourgeois radical with a thoroughly ‘Establishment’ figure—a poet solemnly venerated for his rhetorical grandeur by generations of patrician academics. But with the exception of William Blake, English literature has produced no finer petty-bourgeois radical than John Milton.²² Leavis’s own signal virtues—his unswerving seriousness and nonconformist courage, his coupling of trenchant individualism and social conscience—would not have been historically possible, in the precise configurations they display, without the revolutionary lineage of which Milton was such an heroic architect. Leavis cannot perceive this grotesque irony, partly because the Milton he assails remains the construct of the ideological enemy, partly because his formalism necessarily blinds him to the ‘content’ of Milton’s work. In this, Leavis and Eliot are at one: the former is largely indifferent to the theological and political substance of Milton’s texts, while the latter, in so far as such substance concerns him at all, finds it ‘repellent’. Such resistance to ‘ideas’ stems logically from the empiricism and irrationalism that both critics variously championed throughout their careers; few critics have betrayed such programmatic anti-intellectualism as the formidably erudite Eliot. But it also has a more particular root in their ideological construction of seventeenth-century England. For their shared linguistic idealism impels them to locate the mourned Gemeinschaft primarily in language itself. Not entirely, to be sure: ‘health’ of language must signify cultural sanity, and Leavis, rather more than Eliot, is concerned to give such sanity a social habitation. But both are forced to ‘bracket’ the ideological content of the texts they admire to an astonishing degree: the desirable wedlock of being and meaning manifest in the verbal form of a Donne poem or Webster tragedy must be celebrated in systematic inattention to the flagrant dislocations of their content. If the Donne of Songs and Sonnets centres himself as a dramatic voice, a colloquially expressive subject, it is not least because he is concerned to construct a defiant ‘imaginary’ coherence across a decentred, Copernican world of ‘symbolic’ differences. His mechanism of sensibility may indeed be capable of devouring any experience, but usually only to spew it back again as an inferior metaphor of the imaginary subject-position he can achieve with his mistress. Both Eliot and Leavis, it is true, discern in such seventeenth-century Weltanschauungen relevant paradigms for contemporary experience; but this is not the most typical focus of their interest. Eliot may draw upon such paradigms in The Waste Land, but his criticism is remarkable for its almost comic lack of interest in what a poet actually has to ‘say’. Such formalism is the concomitant of a necessary depoliticizing, as Raymond Williams has shrewdly noted: ‘let me take a case which was very important in clarifying my attitude to Leavis. I said to people here at Cambridge: in the thirties you were passing severely limiting judgments on Milton and relatively favourable judgments on the metaphysical poets, which in effect redrew the map of seventeenth-century literature in England. Now you were, of course, making literary judgments—your supporting quotations and analysis prove it, but you were also asking about ways of living through a political and cultural crisis of national dimensions. On the one side, you have a man who totally committed himself to a particular side and cause, who temporarily suspended what you call literature, but in fact not writing, in that conflict. On the other, you have a kind of writing which is highly intelligent and elaborate, that is a way of holding divergent attitudes towards struggle or towards experience together in the mind at the same time. These are two possibilities for any highly conscious person in a period of crisis—a kind of commitment which involves certain difficulties, certain naïvetés, certain styles; and another kind of consciousness, whose complexities are a way of living with the crisis without being openly part of it. I said that when you were making your judgments about these poets, you were not only arguing about their literary practice, you were arguing about your own at that time.’²³

The triumph of Benjamin’s text, by contrast, lies in its subtle imbrication of form and motif. In the jaded, secularized world of the Trauerspiel, rife as it is with sluggish melancholy and pure intrigue, the leakage of meaning from objects, the unhinging of signifiers from signifieds, is at once a matter of énoncé and énonciation, as the features of an already petrified, primordial landscape undergo a kind of secondary reification at the hands of the ‘fixing’ hieroglyph. Those features, indeed, include ‘psychology’ itself, which, elaborately encoded as it is, attains to a kind of dense objectivity in which ‘the passions themselves take on the nature of