“Often an era most closely brands with its seal those who have been least influenced by it, who have been most remote from it, and who therefore have suffered most. So it was with Proust, with Kafka, with Karl Kraus, and with Benjamin.” — Hannah Arendt, introduction to Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, a collection of Walter Benjamin’s essays
Arendt’s words are very very important and insightful!
More from Arendt:
…Benjamin was forced into a position which actually did not exist anywhere, which, in fact, could not be identified and diagnosed as such until afterwards. It was the position on the “top of the mast” from which the tempestuous times could be surveyed better than from a safe harbor, even though the distress signals of the “shipwreck,” of this one man who had not learned to swim either with or against the tide, were hardly noticed–either by those who had never exposed themselves to these seas or by those who were capable of moving even in this element.
It’s Walter Benjamin’s birthday today.
Benjamin and Arendt were friends, as well as related to one another through Arendt’s marriage. Walter Benjamin was a busy critic during his short life (1892-1940), and had open ambitions for himself to be the greatest literary critic in Germany. (Many have pointed out that Benjamin suffered from catastrophic bad luck and perhaps even a more catastrophic ability to be in the worst possible place at the worst possible time.) Benjamin was a Marxist, and yet much of his analysis doesn’t fit in all that well with the strict ideology required at the time to be a rising star in such circles. He was a German Jew, born at the worst possible time to be born a German Jew. He wasn’t particularly religious but he was very influenced by Jewish mysticism, and what he called cultural Zionism – embracing Jewish art and philosophy when it was increasingly under threat. He was an obsessive collector (one of his essays is on his library), and his belief in the power of quotation is too fascinating to summarize. Clive James does a great job of it in his entry on Walter Benjamin in Cultural Amnesia. Benjamin saw using quotations as a way to “smuggle” the past into the unwelcoming present. This is a very Modernist outlook: consider the work of Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot – all used quotations in their work in such a strange way that you were sometimes hard-pressed to separate the quotation from the poets’ own words. That was the point. World War I was a rupture. All certainties had been destroyed. What was back there, in the rear view mirror, that could speak to the current reality? What quotes needed to be smuggled out of their context and into the present-day? These writers were all obsessed with this question. Benjamin, in fact, wanted to write a book made up ENTIRELY of quotations. His use of quotations is one of the reasons why his work is difficult to excerpt. Quotations are woven so thoroughly into the fabric to such a degree that if you remove a sentence the whole thing unravels.
I was introduced to Walter Benjamin’s work through Camille Paglia, who references him often, and also devoted a huge essay solely to him, and his impact on her generation – an interesting phenomenon. This German philosopher, basically unknown in his own time, rising from out of the past to speak in urgent ways to the 1960s Boomer generation. Much of it had to do with his essay, “The Work of Art In the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”. “Prescient” doesn’t even begin to cover it. Paglia lived in the era of Andy Warhol, a natural continuation of all of the things Benjamin was writing about in 1937, 38. Not too many people can see that far ahead.
When I read Illuminations, I wasn’t quite able to absorb it at first. Or, I would be startled by this or that sentence – so much so I’d literally have to put the book down and think it over – but I couldn’t retain the whole. It’s pretty dense. I re-read it constantly, and re-reading definitely helps. You start to be familiar with his rhythms, the beauty and apt-ness of his analogies and metaphors, the sheer scope of his exploration.
His “angel of history” theory has been incredibly important to me in understanding the world. I can’t even tell you how many times it pops into my head. It’s not a comforting view of history. In fact, it is the opposite. I have always distrusted people who invest in Utopias – either in the past OR in the future – and so his vision of an angel moving into the future, but facing the past – frozen with horror – has always seemed right on the money. Not a comforting vision and also … makes you re-think terms such as “progress”.
One can understand why Benjamin, in his particular situation, on the run from the Nazis, separated from his book collection (a catastrophe for someone like him, especially with his reliance on quotation), and fearing for his life, would take such a view of history. As an endless stream of carnage, where peace was the exception to the rule of war.
It is haunting to consider his abrupt end. When Hitler became Chancellor in January, 1933, Benjamin had already fled Germany. He moved around, to Nice, to Ibiza, to Paris. He met up with other exiles (Hannah Arendt among them). Eventually, though, as we all know, there was nowhere left to run. Things got worse. In the late 1930s, German Jews were stripped of citizenship rights, and so Benjamin was arrested in France. After a short stint in prison, he was released in early 1940. He wrote the piece about the angel of history at that point. A couple of months later, the Germans invaded France, making their way towards Paris, where Benjamin was living. He fled yet again, to the town of Lourdes. Through the intervention of friends, he was able to get a visa to travel to the United States via Portugal. With a small crowd of refugees, he made it to Portbou, Spain. However, Franco had ordered all refugees to be returned to their countries of origin, so the day they arrived the police informed them they’d be deported back to France the following day. Benjamin killed himself that night. He was 48 years old.
In an example of Benjamin’s horrifying “luck” – although that word seems inappropriate – the day after he killed himself, the Spanish changed their minds and allowed the refugees safe passage to Portugal.
Thankfully, Benjamin had given Arendt his manuscript on the “angel of history”, as well as a couple other manuscripts of unpublished works. Arendt became one of his biggest champions in the post-war world, making sure his work saw the light of day. The whole thing is tragic no matter which way you look at it.
Illuminations is made up of 10 essays, many of which are now world-famous and some of the most influential essays ever written. Essential, too. There are two essays on Franz Kafka, an essay on Baudelaire (if I recall, this was his first major work that got any traction). He wrote an essay on his close friend Bertolt Brecht, and Brecht’s ideas of “epic theatre”. He wrote a very influential essay on translation, and another now-famous essay on storytelling. Also included are the two essays for which he is most well-known: “The Work of Art In the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” and “Theses on the Philosophy of History”.
This post here just scratches the surface of what Benjamin did, what he accomplished. The real work of understanding him is in his own words, and that is a deep pool. He wrote that you don’t excavate the past, you drill into it. This is his philosophy. His theories on “aura” – that which makes a work of art unique, itself, an emanation of the essence of the artist – are invaluable. His thoughts on quotations are fascinating, and make so much sense when you consider he was a man who experienced the first World War, the rise of Nazism, the loss of his livelihood, his home, his family, his safety – the downfall of civilization in Europe – the destruction of all human values. Quotations from the past can carry messages with them, they are a way for the past to “smuggle” (a word he used specifically) their message into the destroyed present. Rip them out of their context, place them in the current context: as all is being destroyed, so is language, so is thought, but quotations can be a fragile thread with what has been lost.
One of his major themes was the “transmissibility” of experience. That word comes up again and again and again. Experience must be “transmissible” – across space, across time. But what happens when there is a rupture, a shattering of the continuum, an abyss opening up between people and epochs – so that experience can no longer be “transmitted” from one era to the next? Catastrophe looms.
This has urgent relevance to our current time, where so many people want to dismiss the past as totally worthless, with nothing to teach us. Benjamin saw the past as “flitting by” us, fragmented, in tatters, its signals weakened by too much noise. He used potent metaphors to get this image across. One of them is of a man on a sinking ship, climbing up to the top of the mast, and signalling for help, even as the mast lowered itself into the sea.
Benjamin’s work is a rich subject, deep as the ocean, and important – vitally important – to understanding not just his time, but our own. His work will never go out of date.
He is also highly prescient on the rise of technology and what it was doing to art in his time. He was more correct than he could even know, and the process has deteriorated further, beyond recognition.
As I mentioned, I find him difficult to excerpt, since his essays are so tightly wound together, so all-of-a-piece, with thoughts building on the thought before … but I have – in the spirit of his love of quotation – pulled out some quotes I love. His words have a way of worming themselves into your consciousness. I am reading Proust’s magnum opus right now, and I cannot even tell you how many times Benjamin’s Proust essay comes to my mind. He NAILS it.
From Schriften:
What seems paradoxical about everything that is justly called beautiful is the fact that it appears.
Swoon.
Letter to Gerhard Scholem, April 17, 1931:
Like one who keeps afloat on a shipwreck by climbing to the top of a mast that is already crumbling. But from there he has a chance to give a signal leading to his rescue.
From Briefe II:
The goal I set for myself…is to be regarded as the foremost critic of German literature. The trouble is that for more than fifty years literary criticism in Germany has not been considered a serious genre. To create a place for criticism for oneself means to re-create it as a genre.
Letter, 1935:
Actually, I hardly feel constrained to try to make head or tail of this condition of the world. On this planet a great number of civilizations have perished in blood and horror. Naturally, one must wish for the planet that one day it will experience a civilization that has abandoned blood and horror; in fact, I am inclined to assume that our planet is waiting for this. But it is terribly doubtful whether we can bring such a present to its hundred- or four-hundred-millionth birthday party. And if we don’t, the planet will finally punish us, its un-thoughtful well-wishers, by presenting us with the Last Judgment.
From Schriften I:
[The collector] dreams his way not only into a remote or bygone world, but at the same time into a better one in which, to be sure, people are not provided with what they need any more than they are in the everyday world, but in which things are liberated from the drudgery of usefulness.
From “Unpacking My Library: A Talk About Book Collecting”:
But one thing should be noted: the phenomenon of collecting loses its meaning as it loses its personal owner. Even though public collections may be less objectionable socially and more useful academically than private collections, the objects get their due only in the latter. I do know that time is running out for the type that I am discussing here and have been representing before you a bit ex officio. But, as Hegel put it, only when it is dark does the owl of Minerva begin its flight. Only in extinction is the collector comprehended.
From “The Task of the Translator: An Introduction to the Translation of Baudelaire’s ‘Tableaux Parisiens'”:
The history of the great works of art tells us about their antecedents, their realization in the age of the artist, their potentially eternal afterlife in succeeding generations. Where this last manifests itself, it is called fame. Translations that are more than transmissions of subject matter come into being when in the course of its survival a work has reached the age of its fame. Contrary, therefore, to the claims of bad translators, such translations do not so much serve the work as owe their existence to it. The life of the original attains in them to its ever-renewed latest and most abundant flowering.
From “The Task of the Translator: An Introduction to the Translation of Baudelaire’s ‘Tableaux Parisiens'”:
Unlike a work of literature, translation does not find itself in the center of the language forest but on the outside facing the wooded ridge; it calls into it without entering, aiming at that single spot where the echo is able to give, in its own language, the reverberation of the work in the alien one.
The above quote goes towards Arendt’s observation that, to Benjamin, translation was an aural phenomenon.
From “The Task of the Translator: An Introduction to the Translation of Baudelaire’s ‘Tableaux Parisiens'”:
The imperfection of languages consists in their plurality, the supreme one is lacking: thinking is writing without accessories or even whispering, the immortal word still remains silent; the diversity of idioms on earth prevents everybody from uttering the words which otherwise, at one single stroke, would materialize as truth.
“The immortal word remains silent.”
From “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov”:
… The art of storytelling is coming to an end. Less and less frequently do we encounter people with the ability to tell a tale properly. More and more often there is embarrassment all around when the wish to hear a story is expressed. It is as if something that seemed inalienable to us, the securest among our possessions, were taken from us: the ability to exchange experiences.
From “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov”:
For never has experience been contradicted more thoroughly than strategic experience by tactical warfare, economic experience by inflation, bodily experience by mechanical warfare, moral experience by those in power. A generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body.
From “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov”:
The communicability of experience is decreasing. In consequence we have no counsel either for ourselves or for others. After all, counsel is less an answer to a question than a proposal concerning the continuation of a story which is just unfolding. To seek this counsel one would first have to be able to tell the story. (Quite apart from the fact that a man is receptive to counsel only to the extent that he allows his situation to speak.) Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom. The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.
From “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov”:
All great storytellers have in common the freedom with which they move up and down the rungs of their experience as on a ladder. A ladder extending downward to the interior of the earth and disappearing into the clouds is the image for a collective experience to which even the deepest shock of eery individual experience, death, constitutes no impediment or barrier.
From “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov”:
A proverb, one might say, is a ruin which stands on the site of an old story and in which a moral twines about a happening like ivy around a wall.
He is just so damn good.
From “Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death”:
If [György] Lukács thinks in terms of ages, Kafka thinks in terms of cosmic epochs. The man who whitewashes has epochs to move, even in his most insignificant movement. On many occasions and often for strange reasons, Kafka’s figures clap their hands. Once the casual remark is made that these hands are “really steam hammers.”
From “Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death”:
Kafka’s Sirens are silent.
Jesus. YES.
From “Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death”:
[Kafka] divests the human gesture of its traditional supports and then has a subject for reflection without end.
From “Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death”:
The invention of the film and the phonograph came in an age of maximum alienation of men from one another, of unpredictably intervening relationships which have become their only ones. Experiments have proved that a man does not recognize his own walk on the screen or his own voice on the phonograph. The situation of the subject in such experiments is Kafka’s situation; this is what directs him to learning, where he may encounter fragments of his own existence, fragments that are still within the context of the role.
From “Some Reflections on Kafka”:
Kafka’s work is an ellipse with foci that are far apart and are determined, on the one hand, by mystical experience (in particular, the experience of tradition) and, on the other, by the experience of the modern big-city dweller.
From “Some Reflections on Kafka”:
…Kafka’s world, frequently of such playfulness and interlaced with angels, is the exact complement of his era, which is preparing to do away with the inhabitants of this planet on a considerable scale. The experience which corresponds to that of Kafka, the private individual, will probably not become accessible to the masses until such time as they are being done away with.
From “Some Reflections on Kafka”:
Kafka’s work presents a sickness of tradition.
From “Some Reflections on Kafka”:
…In regard to Kafka, we can no longer speak of wisdom. Only the products of its decay remains.
!!!!!
From “Some Reflections on Kafka”:
Thus, as Kafka puts it, there is an infinite amount of hope, but not for us.
From “What Is Epic Theater?”:
In the secular drama of the West, too, the search for the untragic hero has never ceased. In always new ways, and frequently in conflict with its theoreticians, this drama has differed from the authentic–that is, the Greek– form of tragedy. This important but poorly marked road, which may here serve as the image of a tradition, went via Roswitha and the mystery plays in the Middle Ages, via Gryphius and Calderon in the Baroque age; later we may trace it in Lenz and Grabbe, and finally in Strindberg. Scenes in Shakespeare are its roadside monuments, and Goethe crosses it in the second part of Faust. It is a European road, but a German one as well–provided that we may speak of a road and not of a secret smugglers’ path by which the legacy of the medieval and the Baroque drama has reached us. It is this mule track, neglected and overgrown, which comes to light today in the drama of Brecht.
THAT, my friends, is a piece of criticism, although … it goes way further. And it assumes that the person reading it is well-read and well-versed already. But even if you aren’t, then this at least gives you a starting point to begin to THINK about what it is Brecht did, and how to place it into context. Now, this is a subject with which I am VERY familiar, as all theatre people are.
From “What Is Epic Theater?”:
Brecht’s drama eliminated the Aristotelian catharsis…Hardly any appeal is made to the empathy of the spectators. Instead, the art of the epic theater consists in producing astonishment rather than empathy. To put it succinctly, instead of identifying with the characters, the audience should be educated to be astonished at the circumstances under which they function.
From “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire”:
Historically, the various modes of communication have competed with one another. The replacement of the older narration by information, of information by sensation, reflects the increasing atrophy of experience.
From “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire”:
The crowd–no subject was more entitled to the attention of nineteenth-century writers. It was getting ready to take shape as a public in broad strata who had acquired facility in reading.
Incredible.
From “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire”:
Fear, revulsion, and horror were the emotions which the big-city crowd aroused in those who first observed it. For Poe it has something barbaric; discipline just manages to tame it. Later, James Ensor tirelessly confronted its discipline with its wildness he liked to put military groups in his carnival mobs, and both got along splendidly–as the prototype of totalitarian states, in which the police make common cause with the looters.
Benjamin is eerie, man. He sees all.
From “The Image of Proust”:
It has rightly been said that all great works of literature found a genre or dissolve one–that they are, in other words, special cases. Among these cases [Proust’s In Search of Lost Time] is one of the most unfathomable … Everything transcends the norm. The first revealing observation that strikes one is that this great special case of literature at the same time constitutes its greatest achivement of recent decades.
From “The Image of Proust”:
We do not always proclaim loudly the most important things we have to say. Nor do we always privately share it with those closest to us, our intimate friends, those who have been most devotedly ready to receive our confession. If it is true that not only people but also ages have such a chaste–that is, such a devious and frivolous–way of communicating what is most their own to a passing acquaintance, then the nineteenth century did not reveal itself to Zola or Anatole France, but to the young Proust, the insignificant snob, the playboy and socialite who snatched in passing the most astounding confidences from a declining age as from another, bone-weary Swann.
This is so important. I can’t stop thinking about this ever since I read it. I have actually written about this a lot in various ways, and it’s something I have sensed, but of course Benjamin said it better. Every era has its serious writers, the big “thinkers”, whatever, those who have their finger at the pulse of every major issue of the day. But often those works date QUICKLY, they’re almost unreadable separated from their context. It’s often the weirdo outsiders – like Proust – people who like gossip and parties and socializing, who love a good time – who end up being the mouthpieces of their eras. It’s weird how often that happens.
From “The Image of Proust”:
It is obvious that the problems of Proust’s characters are those of a satiated society.
BRILLIANT. (I’m on volume 3 right now.)
From “The Image of Proust”:
Proust’s most accurate, most convincing insights fasten on their objects as insects fasten on leaves, blossoms, branches, betraying nothing of their existence until a leap, a beating of wings, a vault, show the startled observer that some incalculable individual life has imperceptibly crept into an alien world. The true reader of Proust is constantly jarred by small shocks.
From “The Image of Proust”:
The eternity which Proust opens to view is convoluted time, not boundless time.
From “The Work of Art In the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”:
The technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique experience. And in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced. These two processes lead to a tremendous shattering of tradition which is the obverse of the contemporary crisis and renewal of mankind. Both processes are intimately connected with the contemporary mass movements.
This is so insightful. Benjamin was writing this in the late 1930s. “Mass movements.” Fascism. Nazism. How he connects this with the rise of “mechanical reproduction” – is just … who thinks like this and makes these connections?
From “The Work of Art In the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”:
The uniqueness of a work of art is inseparable from its being imbedded in the fabric of tradition. The tradition itself is thoroughly alive and extremely changeable. An ancient statue of Venus, for example, stood in a different traditional context with the Greeks, who made it an object of veneration, than with the clerics of the Middle Ages, who viewed it as an ominous idol. Both of them, however, were equally confronted with its uniqueness, that is, its aura. Originally the contextual integration of art in tradition found its expression in the cult. We know that the earliest artworks originated in the service of a ritual–first the magical, then the religious kind. It is significant that the existence of the work of art with reference to its aura is never entirely separated from its ritual function.
Benjamin used the term “aura” for what he meant the uniqueness of the work of art – its self, its essence. It comes up a lot.
From “The Work of Art In the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”:
The film responds to the shriveling of the aura with an artificial build-up of the “personality” outside the studio. The cult of the movie star, fostered by the money of the film industry, preserves not the unique aura of the person but the “spell of the personality,” the phony spell of a commodity.
From “The Work of Art In the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”:
Mechanical reproduction of art changes the reaction of the masses toward art. The reactionary attitude toward a Picasso painting changes into the progressive reaction toward a Chaplin movie. The progressive reaction is characterized by the direct, intimate fusion of visual and emotional enjoyment with the orientation of the expert. Such fusion is of great social significance. The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.
Still true.
From “The Work of Art In the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”:
The growing proletarianization of modern man and the increasing formation of masses are two aspects of the same process. Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life. The violation of the masses, whom Fascism, with its Fuhrer cult, forces to their knees, has its counterpart in the violation of an apparatus which is pressed into the production of ritual values.
From “The Work of Art In the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”:
Mankind, which in Homer’s time, was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art.
From “Theses on the Philosophy of History”:
Social Democratic theory, and even more its practice, have been formed by a conception of progress which did not adhere to reality but made dogmatic claims. Progress as pictured in the minds of Social Democrats was, first of all, the progress of mankind itself (and not just advances in men’s ability and knowledge). Secondly, it was something boundless, in keeping with the infinite perfectibility of mankind. Thirdly, progress was regarded as irresistible, something that automatically pursued a straight or spiral course. Each of these predicates is controversial and open to criticism. However, when the chips are down, criticism must penetrate beyond these predicates and focus on something that they have in common. The concept of the historical progress of mankind cannot be sundered from the concept of its progression through homogeneous, empty time. A critique of the concepts of such a progression must be the basis of any criticism of the concept of progress itself.
Amen.
From “Theses on the Philosophy of History”:
The awareness that they are about to make the continuum of history explode is characteristic of the revolutionary classes at the moment of their action. The great revolution introduced a new calendar. The initial day of a calendar serves as a historical time-lapse camera. And, basically, it is the same day that keeps recurring in the guise of holidays, which are days of remembrance. Thus the calendars do not measure time as clocks do; they are monuments of a historical consciousness of which not the slightest trace has been apparent in Europe in the past hundred years.
From “Theses on the Philosophy of History”:
The soothsayers who found out from time what it had in store certainly did not experience time as either homogeneous or empty. Anyone who keeps this in mind will perhaps get an idea of how past times were experienced in remembrance–namely, in just the same way. We know that the Jews were prohibited from investigating the future. The Torah and the prayers instruct them in remembrance, however. This stripped the future of its magic, to which all those succumb who turn to the soothsayers for enlightenment. This does not imply, however, that for the Jews the future turned into homogeneous, empty time. For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.
From “Theses on the Philosophy of History”:
A Klee painting named “Angelus Novus” shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are not spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
Paul Klee, “Angelus Novus”, 1920
This is his most important insight. It is not comforting, of course, and those who believe in progress will balk at it. But to those of us who recognize it as true, to those of us who see peace as the aberration and war as the norm … it’s unbelievably perceptive.
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.
