The two world wars and the catastrophes of the period between (victory of Nazism, Stalinism, the Spanish Civil War) hardly leave the cumulative vision of historical meaning and progress intact. Nietzsche, Péguy and Sorel already vigorously rejected historical fetishism and the ideology of progress that puts vigilance to sleep in the face of an inevitable accumulation of facts.
Walter Benjamin had a profound understanding of the intimate links between conceptions of positivist origin and the representation of mechanical time, ‘homogeneous and empty’.
It is no longer a matter of parenthesizing the present in order to reconstruct the past, nor of considering the present as a fleeting stage on the path to the future. With him, there is neither determinism nor finalism. Neither the myth of a golden age nor the utopia of the happy city.
The central category is the present, or rather the present instant, this sharpened point, this imperceptible grain of time where everything is constantly played and replayed, where the possible is decided and where the scorned and trampled past can maybe be saved. The resources of an uncompromising rebellion do not reside in the soothing perspective of the comfort of future generations but in the duty owed to the defeated, whose fate is perpetuated by the triumph of the victors. Unlike historical accounts or simple memory, vivid recollecting gives the past a new lease of life: looking back transforms us.
History and progress have their metaphors, among them the famous locomotive hurling forward on its rails. Benjamin turned the images around. Progress is the storm blowing from the terrestrial paradise, relentlessly pursuing the fallen angel. Genuine progress no longer consists in rushing towards a happy future but simply in halting and interrupting the unfolding catastrophe. Not by the gradual, step-by-step pedagogical development of consciousness, but in the sudden lucidity of awakening that dispels the nightmare.
Present, awakening, astonishment: this reversal, which breaks linear temporality, implies another one. Politics is no longer the extension of history, the final link in a mechanical chain of cause and effect. From now on, politics takes precedence over history, insofar as each present moment is full of junctions and bifurcations. Today’s choices can change the meaning of yesterday and times gone by.
Thus the figure of a messianic reason emerges, which is not a passive waiting for the inevitable, but an active look-out for the irruption of the possible. The infernal alternative of either the declared end of history or the eternal return of the same is opposed by the star-shaped crossroads of bifurcations glimpsed by Blanqui in his cell in the Fort du Taureau.
This messianic rationale transcends the abstract rationality of progress without resorting to myth. On the contrary, it seeks to purify the soil ‘undergrowth of delusion and myth’.i If myth, according to Nietzsche, is anti-history, politics, according to Benjamin, is anti-myth.
Neither Moscow nor Jerusalem
Benjamin is always grappling with obscure and ambiguous identities. How can one be saved without joining the victors? He lives in an era when a certain Europe is falling apart and the Jewish community is torn apart, with Jewish communists calling Zionists Jewish fascists and Zionists calling communists Red assimilationists.
Sombre Aufklärer, Benjamin continues to clash with such identitarian summons.
As he moves towards communism, he finds in Moscow not a revolution, but the beginnings of restoration: the petrification of a reason and aesthetics of state. To join Moscow would be to take his place among the victors. Already Radek was picking on Benjamin for his article on Goethe in the Soviet Encyclopedia. For his part, in his Moscow Diary of the winter of 1926-1927, the outsider showed magnificent lucidity.
Just as he cannot adhere to a statified communism, Benjamin cannot, despite Scholem’s efforts and invitations, go to Jerusalem.
His predilection for Kafka is significant. Kafka, cornered between the German language of assimilation and Yiddish ‘jargon’; Kafka struggling with himself and his people; ‘my people, supposing I have one…’ In Palestine, a new statist edification and a new identitarian closure are already taking shape to which Benjamin, citizen of the European enlightenment and inheritor of the libertarian messianism of a stateless people, is doubly resistant.
This impossible choice, this unresolved tension between the universalism of the enlightenment and a threatened identity, this position of the non-Jewish Jew, of the ‘Spinozaist’ dedicated to thresholds and passageways, would be fatal. Unable to break away from a European culture which was his unpassable horizon, he would come crashing down on the closed border of the Pyrenees.
Indexed knowledge
Knowledge is not the triumphant self-development of Reason with a capital R. It is, rather more modestly, waking the world from its dream about itself, and recovering the ‘concreteness’ of an entire epoch in the montage of its fragments (The Arcades Project).
To this end, the critique of knowledge must join with that of history. Its central notion is no longer that of progress but that of actualization, in which one recovers the primacy of the present. Just as in history, one event communicates with another, one epoch with another, without a direct link of continuity and causality, so that knowledge operates through connections and frictions, through shifts and condensations.
The correlation between the social and economic foundations and the phantasmagorias of the city, of trends and culture, is not casual but expressive. This is why knowledge proceeds through images born from the clash between past and present. This is also why it is a matter of ‘discovering in the small, singular event the crystal of the total event’.
This knowledge does not stem from the possessive domination of nature and the creation of systems, but from the patient quest for indications and traces. The theorist becomes a detective and hunter on the lookout. The act of knowledge is the astonishment of someone who suddenly rubs their eyes, surprised to escape the phantasmagoria of the enchanted world of the commodity.
If relationships of knowledge, like historical relationships, are not those of sequence and continuity, but of attraction and gravitation, they determine a style and form of knowledge: quotation, mosaic, montage (which also breaks the abstract continuity of time).
Perhaps to be supplemented with something on the philosophy of language (but this is difficult and abstract) or with the meaning of the Benjamin/Adorno polemic on the work of art in the age of its mechanical reproduction.
Hunting grounds
Cities are the preferred terrain for this search. They are also ‘fields of battle’. In cities, which have become jungles, all ties are broken. Corpses disappear, culprits vanish. All that remains are the shards and fragments which are the material of the investigation.
For the city is structured like a language. Its body is tattooed with the hieroglyphics of merchandise. And the passages are the streets ‘of lascivious commerce only, wholly adapted to arousing desires’.ii
Everything here revolves around the enigma of merchandise, which holds the secret to a primordial crime. Prostitution, first of all, a metaphor for the body as merchandise. Fashion, a morbid simulacrum of the new, trapped in the eternal return of merchandise. Finally, waste: derisory wrecks, which rise from the rank of perishable merchandise to that of singular works, to be resurrected, ‘detached from all its original functions’,iii freed from the servitude of use and exchange and liberated from the pettiness of everyday life.
In this jungle, the saviour is a rag-and-bone man who tirelessly fills his bag with what has been forgotten, so nothing is despised or abandoned; and the hero is the singular and melancholic flâneur, a potential detective, standing out from the anonymous crowd of mere onlookers.
Europe without enlightenment
‘The same conditions that threaten my European situation will in all likelihood make emigration to the US impossible’ (letter of April 1939).iv Benjamin sensed that leaving for America would be impossible. Just as leaving for Palestine had been impossible: ‘Is there more room for me there – for what I know and what I can do – than in Europe? If there is not more, then there is less. This sentence needs no explanation. And neither does this final one: ‘If I could improve upon my knowledge and my abilities there without abandoning what I have already accomplished, then I would not be the least bit indecisive in taking that step’ (letter of June 1933v).
Intellectual, rather than material, impossibility
Benjamin is incurably European in a Europe that is falling apart, a European of the Enlightenment in an era when the lights are going out. With ‘precision suggesting a sleepwalker’, writes Hannah Arendt, ‘his clumsiness invariably guided him to the very center of a misfortune, or wherever something of the sort might lurk’.vi And Scholem predicted, ‘for the way your life is constituted it is certain that you, more than anyone else, will always wind up some other place than where you wanted to get.’vii
He carries within him the fate of a castaway that he himself had defined: ‘a castaway who drifts on a wreck by climbing to the top of an already crumbling mast. But from there he has a chance to give a signal leading to his rescue.’viii
For he is, like Péguy, a non-contemporary. Like his angel, he braces himself against the storm of progress, which drives him from paradise.
Notes:
i Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, Cambridge Mass, 2002, p 457.
ii Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 828.
iii Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 204.
iv Gershom Scholem (ed.), The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, 1932-1940, New York, 1989, p. 251.
v Scholem (ed.), Correspondence, p. 60.
vi Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, New York, 2007, p 7.
vii Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship, Philadelphia ,1981, p. 161.
viii Scholem, Walter Benjamin, p. 233.