Benjamin's Materialist Theory of Experience Author(s): Richard Wolin Source: Theory and Society, Vol. 11, No. 1 (Jan.

, 1982), pp. 17-42 Published by: Springer Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/657284 Accessed: 06/10/2010 21:39
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=springer. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Springer is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Theory and Society.

http://www.jstor.org

17

BENJAMIN'S MATERIALIST THEORY OF EXPERIENCE

RICHARD WOLIN

Introduction

In his early aesthetics Walter Benjamin had pursued the problem of the dissolution of man's capacity for experience, i.e., the decline of his capacity to live a meaningful and fulfilled existence, from a decidedly theological perspective.Life in the profane continuum of history was deemedincapable of fulfillment a priori insofar as it was the diametrical antithesis of the Messianicage, the sphere of redeemed life. So extreme was the opposition between these two dimensionsthat neither could have any direct and immediate bearingon the other. They existed in a state of pureantithesis.According to this schema, historical life, as the antipode to the eternal life represented by the Messianic realm, was subject to an irremediablefate of decay and decline. It was comprehendedas "naturalhistory" whose inevitablelot, like that of all organic life, was ultimately death and putrefaction,an eventual return to the condition of inorganiclife. As such, the telos of all such mere, unsanctifiedlife was death. This outlook servedas the historico-philosophical vantagepoint from which Benjaminmasterfullyanalyzedthe GermanTrauerspiele of the baroque age.1 The manifestabsenceof all immanentmeaningto life compelled the Baroquedramatiststo conjurevoluntaristically a vision of the roundabout of If redemption through technique allegory.2 one could with any justification speak of the problem of the "disintegrationof community" in the Trauerspiel book,3 it would be the dissolutionof an integrated, organic totality of meaning. Such a "community"can be said to have existed previously only in Paradise, before man was condemned to perdition by original sin. For the early Benjamin, as soon as one begins surveying the unreconcileddomain of historicallife, one finds the continuumof experience in a state of perpetualdisintegration.There are exceptions, however;in the realm of aesthetic experience, where the artist momentarilybreaks through the mythical realm of historicallife, and in the realmof eternalrepetitionor

Berkeley, California.

18 the always-the-same (das Immergleiche),to produce a fragileimage of transcendence.4 It becomes the task of the critic to redeem (retten) these images from the fate of historical oblivion that incessantlythreatensto overwhelm them, to breathe new life into them and thereby make them relevantfor the present. In the aesthetics of the later Benjaminthe transcendentpoint of reference - the category of redemption- temporarilyrecedes from view, but it never disappearsentirely from the horizon of his thought. It recedes,as it were, for strategic reasons. Once Benjamin took up the profane cause of the class struggle (to be sure, in his own highly idiosyncratic and stylized fashion), his theological impulses ran the risk of being seriouslymisconstrued.Thusin the thirties he resumedhis investigationof the problemof the disintegration materialist of the capacityfor qualitativeexperiencefroma quasi-sociological, nor made a effort not He concerted always always prudent perspective. successful - to abandonhis earlier"bourgeois"reverencefor culturalgoods aesthetic categories and to assist in the annihilationof traditional,prejudicial such as genius, creativity, and beauty,5 in favor of an approachthat takes materialconditions of production and reception of works of art as its point of departure:
The concept of culture, as the substantive concept of creationswhich areconsidered independent,if not from the productionprocessin which they originate,then from the productionprocess in which they continue to survive,carriesa fetishistic trait. Culture appearsin a reified form. Its history would be nothing but the sediment of human formed by the curiositieswhich have been stirredup in the consciousness beingswithout any genuine,i.e., politicalexperience.6

as a "historicalmaterialist"bore Nevertheless,Benjamin'sself-understanding a distinct resemblance to the metaphysically inclined "rettende Kritik" method of his early period. In both cases the theoretical adversarywas a static, empathetic, historicist relation to the work of art that tries to present art "the way it really was," as a dead, lifeless object, sedimented in the historical past, devoid of all contemporary relevance or "nowtime". The methods of "culturalhistory" turn tradition into a deadweightfrom which humanity must be emancipated: "Culturalhistory, to be sure, enlargesthe weight of the treasurethat accumulateson the back of humanity.Yet cultural history does not provide the strengthto shake off this burdenin orderto be able to take control of it."7 For Benjamin,the primary considerationin approachingpast works of art must be the demandof Aktualitdtor relevance. is The question of how a work of art was experiencedby its contemporaries at best scholastic. Benjamin's mission therefore was simultaneously the
"destructive" task of negating the false semblance of autonomy and homo-

19 geneity the realm of spirit assumesfrom the perspectiveof culturalhistory - an approachwhich reifies works of art as beautiful but irrelevant"cultural commodities" - and the complementary"constructive"goal of resuscitating those elements of traditionthat can once morebe madeserviceable for humanin its ity contemporaryhour of need:
Historicism presents the eternal image of the past; historical materialism presents a given experience with the past, an experience which stands unique. The replacement of the epic element by the constructive element proves to be the condition for this experience. The immense forces which remain captive in historicism's 'once upon a time' are freed in this experience. To bring about the consolidation of experience with history, which is original [ursprunglich] for every present, is the task of historical materialism. It is directed towards a consciousness of the present which explodes the continuum of history. The historical materialist explodes the epoch out of its reified 'historical continuity', and thereby lifts life out of this epoch, and the work out of this life work.8

The science of hermeneutics originated with Schleiermacherin the early nineteenth century. It was born out of an awarenessthat as "moderns,"our relation to tradition (in Schleiermacher's case, our relation to classicalantiquity) has ceased to be self-evident,that our way of life has become separated from that of our ancestors by a chasm of misunderstanding, that to understand the past through the eyes of the present is to commit a graveinjustice to it (i.e., to "the way it reallywas"), and that, consequently,there arisesthe need for a special type of knowledge charged with the responsibility of and thereby creatingmore solid groundfor revealingthese misunderstandings a bridge between past and present.9 Benjamin'sinvestigationof the origins and consequences of the demise of the traditional or communal basis of experience proceeds from a similar impetus (though, to be sure, minus the historicist implications of Schleiermacher's approach). He is disturbed that the abyss separatingthe modern world from past historicallife has expanded to where ah entire array of tradition-boundmeanings have become unrecognizable, if not patently unserviceable,to us in the present.Not only does he fear the loss of past experience, but also the serious impairmentof the present-day capacity to assimilate experience altogether. The implacable advanceof the forces of production in the modern age, rapidlyrendering all remnants of tradition obsolete, eventually comes to penetrateall aspects of existence, so that ultimately even the human faculty of perception itself is diminished.Consequently,not only has the qualityof experiencedeteriorated in modern life to an unprecedenteddegree, but the subjective capacity to detect this development, and thus possibly redress it, has likewise been seriouslyeroded. The problem of the rationalizationof social life and the concomitantdiminu-

20 tion of the capacity for qualitativeexperience thus becomes the problemfor the later Benjamin. Yet, as we shall see he always harbored ambivalent feelings about the decay of traditionallife forms, feelingsthat at times appear to be mutuallycontradictory.For Benjamin recognizedthe demise of tradition as an irreparableloss: the meaning potentials objectified in the cultural they are products of traditionalsocieties contain a promiseof transcendence; the objects in which past ages have deposited their collective dreams and longings, their aspirationsfor a better life, which adversehistoricalconditions have heretofore frustrated;and it falls due to future generationsto preserve such hopes for a better life, if not to redeem them outright. As Benjamin observes: "The past carrieswith it a temporalindex by which it is referredto redemption. There is a secret agreementbetween past generationsand the present one. Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generationthat power, a power to precededus, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic which the past has a claim. This claim cannot be settled cheaply. Historical materialists are aware of that."10 This illustrates the degree to which the theological motifs of Benjamin'searlier "redemptive criticism" have been preservedin his later writing. The foremost dangerof "modernity"is that its radical disrespect for tradition runs the graverisk of totally eradicatingour links with tradition, thus squanderingthat invaluable "temporal index of redemption" the past represents. An authentic sublation of past would necessarilypreserve the promise of redemptionthat has been sedimentedin artefactsand ruinsof traditionallife. Yet in his more self-consciouslyMarxistwritings Benjamindisplays a naive and - in view of his other works - highly uncharacteristic trust in the course of historical progress.Thisis evident above all in his celebrated1936 essay on "The Workof Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction."Here, Benjamin's the on tradition to seems reverse itself: promessedu bonheurembodied position in the aura of traditionalworks of art is viewed as hopelesslyutopian (if not to rationalizedmedia such flatly reactionary).It has instead been transferred as photography and film. The forces of rationalizationare conceived of as redeemingin and of themselvesthe traditionalaspirationfor a better world. Yet, this is a position which despite They aredeemedinherentlyrevolutionary. of boldness felt himself compelled to relinquish, and because its Benjamin althoughit has come to representfor his Marxistinterpretorsthe "quintessential Benjamin".The merits and drawbacksof both positions go far toward determiningthe parametersof a materialisttheory of culture, for in many ways the thoughts raisedby Benjaminover four decadesago remainvaluable formulations of the problems involved in trying to assess the meaning of traditionin the face of an increasingly rationalizedsocial environment.

21 The Disintegration of Experience In his 1936 essay "The Storyteller: Reflections on the Work of Nikolai Leskov," Benjaminattempted to show, by contrastingthe "epic" element of the story to the fortuitous characterof events in the novel, just how far experience itself, and our capacity to convey experiences,has diminishedin modern life. The inability of men and women to exchangeexperiencesin the contemporaryworld is merely the obverse side of the fact that the structure of experience has undergone significant and far-reachingtransformations. Today, Benjaminobserves,it has become obvious that "experiencehas fallen in value. And it looks as if it is continuing to fall into bottomlessness.Every glance at a newspaperdemonstratesthat it has reacheda new low, that our picture, not only of the external world but of the moralworld as well, overnight has undergone changes which were never thought possible.""1 In cultural phenomenaas keeping with the Marxist principle of understanding they originatewithin determinatematerialconditions of life, Benjaminoffers the following persuasivedepiction of the multifariousand sudden transformations in the traditionalstructureof experience around the time of World War I, transformationsso swift and extensive that it would seem almost humanlyimpossiblefor one to adapt to them:
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.l2

The art of storytelling is a genre falling midway between the antique epic and the modern novel. Yet its clear affinities with the "epic side of truth" closerto the formergenre than to the latter. betraythat it standsincomparably It is an art form in which meaningis unquestionablyimmanentto and transparent in life. It flourishedin the context of what the young Lukacsreferred to as "integrated civilizations".13Its traditional representativeswere the
"resident tiller of the soil" and the "trading seaman". In the latter case, that

the tale had come from afar stamped it with an aura of authority; in the former, it acquired this aura because its teller was a man of experience and wisdom, whose ancestorshad dwelled in the same regionfor countless generations, a man steeped in the lore of all-importanttradition. A significant expansion of the art of storytelling was brought about by the traveling journeymen of the Middle Ages, who representeda sort of fusion of the two basic historical types of the storyteller. As Benjaminnotes, "If peasantsand seamen were past mastersof storytelling, the artisanclass was its university.

22 In it was combined the lore of farawayplaces, such as a much-traveled man bringshome, with lore of the past, as it best revealsitself to the nativesof a place."14 That meaningis immanentto life in the world of the story is apparentbecause the story always contains something useful, be it in the form of practical advice, a kernal of wisdom, or a conventional"moral".That such knowledge acquires an immediate self-evidencebespeaks of a situation in which there exists a continuity and flow to the continuumof experience,where time has the character of a meaningfully ordered, organic sequence of events, and within this sequence. where even the phenomenonof deathfits "meaningfully" Under such conditions advice and counsel are readily communicable and seemingly step forth from life of their own accord. Benjamincontrasts this situation to the wholly different structure of experience in modern life, where events take on a desultoryand isolated,overwhelmingly privatecharacter; where "experiences"are at best meaningfulfor the individualbut have forfeited the attribute of universalityfrom which the element of wisdom, the "moral"of the story, traditionallyderived. "In every case the storytelleris a man who has counsel for his readers.But if today 'havingcounsel' is beginning to have an old-fashioned ring, this is because the communicability of experience is decreasing. In consequence we have no counsel either for ourselves or for others."15 Benjamininsists this developmentis not merely another symptom of "decayingvalues" or the "crisisof modernity".Rather, it has a determinatesocial origin as a "concomitant symptom of the secular
productive forces of history."16 This tendency becomes especially apparent

upon examination of the social history of literary genres. Such an analysis shows there is far more at stake than the historical obsolescence of this or that art form; the demise of storytelling signals a correspondingloss of meaningin life itself. The fabric of experiencehas ceased to be structuredin an intelligible and coherent fashion, such that one could readily extract "wisdom" or "meaning"from its individualepisodes;it has instead become fragmentedand discontinuous,thus renderingthe very concept of "wisdom" problematic:"Counselwoven into the fabricof reallife is wisdom. The art of storytelling is reachingits end because the 'epic side of truth', wisdom; is dying out."17 The obverseside of the declineof storytellingis the riseof the novel. According to Benjamin, "What differentiates the novel from all other forms of prose literature - the fairy tale, the legend, even the novella - is that it neither comes from oral tradition nor goes into it."18 Insofar as stories are handed down orally from generation to generation, they become, as it were, the property of the community. They representthe primarymeans of recording

23 experience in those societies where handicraft is the dominant mode of production. Indeed, the distinct imprint of craftsmanshipinheres in the process of storytelling: "traces of the storyteller cling to the story the way handprintsof the potter cling to the clay vessel."19In the case of the novel, however, the "communal"aspect of the artistic process - both in terms of the conditions of its production as well as its reception - has disappeared: "The novelist has isolated himself. The birthplaceof the novel is the solitary individual,who is no longer able to expresshimself by givingexamplesof his most important concerns, is himself uncounseled, and cannot counsel others .... In the midst of life's fullness, and throughthe representation of this fullness, the novel gives evidence of the profound perplexity of the andreadby "solitary living."20The novel is producedby "solitaryindividuals" individuals".The individual's"profound perplexity" results from his having been sundered from traditionalconditions of life in a capitalist society that has become a bellum omnium contra omnes, where the credo of self-serving individualismhas become the dominantprincipleof conduct. Try as he might to integrate his private experiences within a more universal, meaningful framework,the "hero"of the novel, fromDon Quixote to "K," is predestined to confusion and ruin. As Benjaminnotes, "Even the first great book of the genre, Don Quixote, teaches how spiritualgreatness,the boldness, the helpfulness of one of the noblest men, Don Quixote, are completely devoid of counsel and do not contain the slightestscintillaof wisdom."21 In the background of Benjamin's discussion of the novel stands Lukacs' work The Theoryof the Novel (1914). Benjaminheld The Theory pre-Marxist of the Novel in esteem, and its themes echo throughoutthe Leskovessay. In his attempt to produce a typology of the novel form, Lukacscounterposes the "integratedcivilizations"of the Homeric epic (paralleling use Benjamin's of storytelling) to the bourgeoisworld of "transcendental homelessness"as it is portrayedin the modernnovel. For Lukacs,"The novel is the epic in an age in which the extensive totality of life is no longer directly given, in which the immanence of meaning to life has become a problem, yet which still thinks in terms of totality." In modernlife the wisdom of the story has been supplantedby the proliferationof information.Concomitantwith the advent of the division of labor and the universalpredominanceof the bureaucratic form of administration,the vast social stockpiling of informationindicates the degree to which the parametersof society have been quantitatively extended at the expense of its former integralunity. Thus,we know "more" about everything,yet this knowledge is poorer in quality, it has ceased to be concerned directly with those ultimate questionsconcernedwith the meaning of life. The increase in quantity remainsforeverincapableof compensating for the decreasein quality. The emergenceof "information"as the dominant

24 form in which experience is stored is thus a primarysymptom of the crisisof experience, of our inability to communicate experiences in other than the most shallow and truncated fashion. As Benjaminnotes, "Every morning bringsus the news of the globe and yet we are poor in noteworthy stories."22 For Benjamin,journalism representsthe deliberate sabotage of experience, its reduction to a minimum number of superficialfacts and statistics a process of distortion that aims at destroying the public's capacity for independent judgment. The pressattempts to manufacturean artificialconsensus, explanationsto each "public opinion," by appendinginsipid "psychological" story in order to suggesthow the averageman on the street should interpret events. He notes that "by now almost nothing that happensbenefits storytellcharacThus, the fragmentary ing; almost everythingbenefits information."23 ter of contemporarysocial life meets the desultoryjournalisticprocessingof experience halfway. The story, in contrast, was devoid of all such insidious psychologicalintentions, permittingthe materialrichnessof life to step forth unprocessed,in all its fullness, and thus allowing the listeners to judge for themselves. In this way each story retained a meaning (or moral) for the according community of listenersthat was inexhaustibleand lasting.Whereas, to Benjamin, "The value of information does not survive the moment in which it was new. It lives only in that moment; it has to surrenderto it completely and explain itself to it without losing any time."24 In the form of information,experience no longer has anythinglasting to teach us; it has simply become another hollow facet of modern life, an item of momentary interestwhich will soon cease to be topical and then be promptly discarded. The lack of manifest psychologicalmotifs in the story further differentiates it from the novel. The strikingabsenceof a self-evidentmeaningto life in the novel results in the concerted attempt on the part of the novelist to procure meaning synthetically or subjectively. "The 'meaning of life' is really the center about which the novel moves,"25observesBenjamin.Because of the lack of a readilyapparentmeaningto life the novel often assumesthe form of a search for meaning; whereas in the world of story, where something as fundamentalas the "meaningof life" is neveropenly throwninto doubt, the problem of meaningnever needs to become explicitly thematized. Benjamin cites the following significant passage from Lukacs' Theory of the Novel: "Only in the novel are meaning and life, and thus the essential and the temporal, separated .... Only in the novel ... does there occur a creative memory which transfixes the object and transforms it."26 Here Lukdcs suggests it becomes the task of the novelist to make over experience subjectively; if he were merely to transmitit to the readeras he found it, in its mere facticity, he would be simply presenting a congeries of meaningless, discrete facts. The conscious recastingof experience, an integralpart of the

25 creative process for the novelist, is something vastly different from the acitivity of the storyteller,whom Benjamindescribesas a sort of "secularized medieval chronicler,"who merely takes it upon himself to describeevents as they happen (or as they have been said to happen), convinced that their significance will shine through on its own, independent of any subjective interference. The profound longing of the novel to rejuvenatethe mundane characterof experience reaches an important summit with Proust'smasterpiece, A La Recherche du TempsPerdu - the thresholdof the modernnovel of consciousness- where the novel reachesthe point of no return,in which it is no longer the objective nature of the events themselvesthat is of foremost importance, but the haphazardmanner in which they materializenow and again in the memoire involuntaireof the novelist. In Proust, the power of remembranceinvests the events of life with the aura of significance they lacked as they occurredin mere life, life in its facticity: "For an experienced event is finite - at any rate, confined to one sphereof experience;a remembered event is infinite, because it is only a key to everythingthat happened before and after it."27 The loneliness of the readerof the novel corresponds to the loneliness of a world of experience that remainsopaque and unintelligible to the subject, that will not lend itself to being readily shared. In the languageof the young Lukacs,the novel providesus with a substitute totality, in compensationfor the absence of totality in life itself. The capacity of the novel to restore a semblance of coherence and unity to an existence otherwise notably lacking in these qualities accounts, on the psychologicallevel, for the tremendous popularity of this genre in the last two centuries. It stands out as a wealth of vicarious satisfaction. As Benjamin remarks: "The novel is significant, therefore, not because it presents someone else's fate to us, perhapsdidactically,but because this stranger'sfate by virtue of the flame which consumes it yields us the warmth we never draw from our own fate. What draws the reader to the novel is the hope of warminghis shiveringlife with a death he readsabout."28 Benjamin'sdepiction of the vast structuraltransformationof the traditional, integrated fabric of experience, using the story and the novel as prismsto view this process, remains extremely valuable from the standpoint of the requirementsof a materialisttheory of culture.Yet, of especialsignificanceis that rather than attempting to reduce important changes on the plane of aesthetic formto a preconceivedset of economic or sociologicaldeterminants, his account views such changeswithin the overall context of the total social process. Whereasthe genesis of an artistic genre such as the novel remains incomprehensible unless the attendant social conditions are taken into account, at the same time.such forms eventually assume a life that is quasiautonomous vis a vis their original material circumstances;e.g., Proust's

26 theory of the memoire involuntairealready prescribes a way out of the dilemmas - both aesthetic and lived - of the unfulfilled and fragmented world of experiencewith which the novelist finds himself confronted, albeit a highly individualistic,subjectiveway out. For his writingimplicitly acknowledges that a reconciliation with this world in its facticity (the motif underlying the Bildungsroman)has become an objective impossibility,and thus a recourse(retreat) to the sphereof pureinwardness (the monologue interieur) is the only possible solution, if a Pyrrhicone. The advantageof Benjamin's method for the study approach is that he employs a historico-philosophical than a of cultural phenomena rather conventional sociological one. His analysisis therefore not only synchronicbut diachronic.Significantchanges on the plane of aesthetic form are thus consideredin light of the total constellation of interrelatedsocial and culturalforces and not simply, as in light of the "economicfactor".Thehistorico-philosophical simultaneously approach allows him to avoid the illusions of the customarybourgeois reverencefor artistic forms as eternal and naturalcreations(parallelingthe illusions about the natureof capitalismMarxobservedamongthe ranksof bourgeoispolitical economists). "There were not always novels in the past, and there will not always have to be; not always tragedies,not alwaysgreatepics,"29Benjamin notes. Thus, in "The Storyteller"and other works, Benjaminis able to show considerationsenter into the heart of the process how historico-philosophical of artistic production - an approachfirst adopted by Lukacs in Theory of the Novel and employed successfully by Benjaminin his 1925 Trauerspiel study - renderingthe seemingly sancrosanctrealm of aesthetic experience prey to the flux and vicissitudesof historicallife. Yet, the method of the Leskov essay is by no means problem-free.Though Benjaminstops short of explicitly callingfor a mobilizationof the "healthy" forces of tradition against the decrepit conditions of modernity (with its obvious reactionary overtones), a solution of this nature seemingly lies in wait beneath the surface of the essay. There is no smallmeasureof nostalgia in his tone when he speaks wistfully of the decline of the integratedfabric of communalsocial life; and redeemingaspects of of experiencecharacteristic found. Moreover,the sets of antithesesforming nowhere to be are modernity the methodologicalbasis of the essay - the story and the novel, community and society, traditionand modernity- only reinforcethe impressionthat the authorseeks to establishan abstractoppositionbetween "past"and "present," compelling the readerto choose as it were between one or the other, when in reality a choice so simple in nature does not exist. Fundamentally,then, the antinomy establishedby Benjaminbetween traditionaland modern societies is overly rigid and potentially misleading.In truth communallife was never so idyllic as we modernslike to imagineit. For these were societies beset with

27 problems of privationand scarcity, at the mercy of nature,where social rank was decidedby birth, and in which channelsto addressinjusticeand grievances were virtually non-existent. The gains made by advancedindustrialsocieties in all these areas are by no means inconsequentialand their loss would be tantamount to wholesale regression.In a similar vein, modern societies, by exploding the closed, tightly-knit structureof traditionalcommunities,have opened up a wealth of possibilities for the enhancement of the quality of life - not only materiallybut also intellectuallyand spiritually- possibilities that admittedly remain largely distorted or unfulfilled under current social conditions, but that neverthelesswould have remainedinconceivablein past ages (and that they exist as "unfulfilled"serves as a spurtoward their future realization). The dichotomous nature of Benjamin'spresentationneglected these important facts, the inclusion of which would have made the choice at issue decidedlymore complex, and rightfullyso. or ExperienceRecaptured Correspondances, In his 1939 essay, "Some Motifs in Baudelaire,"Benjaminpursuesa similar theme, viz, the fragmentation of the continuum of experience in modern times as it manifestsitself in aesthetic experience.Yet, in this work the major methodologicalshortcomingof the Leskov essay standscorrected.No longer does Benjaminabstractlyseek to counterpose an idyllic past to the decadent present. Instead, he attempts to work throughthe dilemmasof the presentin a more immanent fashion as far as his subject matter, the lyric poetry of Baudelaire,will admit of such an attempt. The figureof Baudelaire occupied such a significant place in the thought of the later Benjamin(he became of course the focal point of the monumentalArcadesProjecton which Benjamin labored from 1927 until his death in 1940) because he stood, in Benjamin's eyes, at the crossroadsof traditional and modern societies and, as it were, the imagesof this transitionin his verse.That Baudelaire preserved consciously incorporated the often grotesqueimages of mid-nineteenthcentury city life into his poetry qualifieshim as the first "modernist,"the first true poet of urbanism.Becausehe stood on the cuspbetween two historicaleras,witnessing the extirpation of the last vestiges of traditionallife on the part of modern industrialism, Baudelaire was ideally situated to chronicle this important process of transition.Once againBenjaminseeks to show how the philosophy of history penetrates the very heart of the purportedlyautonomous activity of the artist. A primaryindication of the decline of the traditionalfabric of experienceis the experience of shocks as an inalienable feature of modern urban life. Whereasexperiencewas traditionallygovernedby the principlesof continuity

28 and repetition, making it at least in theory something always familiar and predictable,the shocks of city life disruptthese familiar patternsof experience. The predominanceof the experience of shocks is intimately bound up with the emergenceof the crowd as a constant factor to be reckonedwith. Being incessantly jostled by the mass of passersbyin the city streets was a new phenomenon in nineteenth-centurylife. "Fear, revulsion, and horror were the emotions which the big city crowd arousedin those who first observed it," remarksBenjamin.30 "Movingthrough this traffic involvesthe individual in a series of shocks and collisions. At dangerouscrossingsnervousimpulses flow through him in rapid succession, like the energy in a battery."31The teeming city masses become a perpetual obstacle in trying to get from one point to another. The din of the crowd proves inimical to the idea of having thoughts of one's own. While the huge city crowd vastly increasesthe opportunity for chance encounters,it is also the breedingground for a notorious callousness and indifference among men and women.32 For sheer numbers and the struggle for survival that characterizesurban life make it nearly impossible - not to mention against one's "interests"- to deal with each person one happens upon in a humane and personal manner. Even if the poetry figure of the crowd never becomes the explicit subjectof Baudelaire's (as it does for example in the novels of Victor Hugo) it serves as its everpresent background. As Benjamin comments, "The mass was the agitated saw Paris."33 veil; throughit Baudelaire Benjamin'sclaim, then, is that with the advent of shock experience as an elemental force in everyday life in the mid-nineteenthcentury the entire structureof humanexperienceis transformed. In supporthe cites the Freudian thesis from Beyond the Pleasure Principle that "becoming conscious and leaving behind a memory trace are processesincompatiblewith one another in one and the same system." Instead,memory tracesare "often most powerful and most endurablewhen the incident which left them behind was one that never entered consciousness."Here, Freudacknowledgesthat consciousness's role in the protection againststimuli (Reizschutz)has become infinitely more important than its reception of stimuli. In modern life consciousness must make itself so highly protective vis a vis the proliferation of aversive stimuli or shocks that the majority of "memorytraces"previouslyregistered as experience in a direct and naturalway now fail to do so. This resultsin the in the traditional irreversible diminutionof our capacity to have"experiences" sense. Today experience has been so thoroughly reduced by and filtered through consciousness that what remains is an experience reduced to its barest essentials, an experience necessary for the task of mere survival.In consequence, not only has the human apparatusof perception itself been significantlyaltered,but the very cornerstoneof the traditionalconception of

29 has also been destroyed. experience, the idea of Geddchtnisor remembrance, The experiencesdepositedin remembrance could be passedon from generation to generation;and the wisdom of life was thereby preserved.But in modern life, Geddchtnis has been supplanted by Erinnerung: the matter of fact preservationof memory traces has given way to their disintegrationin consciousness, in order for them to be assimilatedby consciousness and thus of experience would overwhelm stored. For otherwise the shock-character consciousness; experience would thus simply prove unassimilable.Only by virtue of this mutilatingprocessof censorshipandpreformation can experience in and in the to have been "lived". consciousness thus strict sense said register As Benjaminexplains:
The greater the character of the shock factor in particular impressions, the more consciously consciousness has to be alert as a screen against stimuli; the more efficiently it is so, the less do these impressions enter experience (Erfahrung), tending to remain in the sphere of a certain hour of one's life (Erlebnis). Perhaps the special achievement of shock defense may be seen in its function of assigning to an incident a precise point in time in consciousness at the cost of the integrity of its contents.34

Benjamin detects a remarkableconfirmation of Freud's theory concerning the shock-preventative function of consciousnessin Baudelaire's self-characterizationof the poetic vocation in "Le soleil"as a type of escrimefantastique (fencing); that is, a process of parryingthe shocks of modernlife on the part of the poetic imagination.Elsewhere,Baudelairehas referredto the creative process as "a duel in which the artist, just before being beaten, screamsin fright."35In this way, Benjaminseeks to show it is not merely in the content of Baudelaire'swork, its imageryand motifs, that the experience of shocks proves central, but that it has also invaded the very heart of the creative process itself. So much for the illusions of bourgeoisaestheticismconcerning the inviolable autonomy of art. The high level of consciousnessmanifest in Baudelaire'spoetry - necessary for the sake of parryingshocks - testifies that Baudelaire's "work cannot merely be categorized as historical, like anyone else's, but intended to be so and understood itself as such."36 The inclusion of innumerableimages of decay and putrefaction - set in a lyric context which causes them all the more to stand out as "shocking"- was by no means adventitious;rather it was Baudelaire'ssystematic intent. As he himself explains in the well-known dedication to his collection of prose poems, Spleen de Paris:
Which one of us, in moments of ambition has not dreamed of the miracle of a poetic prose, musical, without rhythm and without rhyme, supple enough and rugged enough to adapt itself to the lyrical impulses of the soul, the undulations of reverie, the jibes of consciousness? It was above all, out of my exploration of huge cities, out of the medley of their innumerable interrelations, that this haunting ideal was born.37

30 Thus, Benjaminviews the work of Baudelaireas being of great significance because it representsthe first concerted attempt to destroy the affirmative illusions of bourgeoisaestheticism,the firstself-consciouseffort to incorporate the contingenciesof everydayhistoricallife into the heretofore sacredpreserve of aesthetic experience - an approach which would subsequently become for the whole of modernism.As such, Les Fleurs du Mal presents paradigmatic itself as the first incarnation of de-aestheticizedart:38 a post-auratic art seeking to divest itself of its elitist, class-boundtrappingsand re-integrating itself with the concerns of materiallife. It became more and more apparent that all art which behaved with indifferencetowards its social origins itself became a matter of indifference. For Benjamin,then, Baudelaire'spoetry signals an incipient dissatisfactionwith values of l'art pour l'art, a process of disenchantment(in Weber'ssense of the term as well) that would play itself out in the various "isms" of the twentieth century avant-garde,and then reach a qualitatively new level with the advent of the thoroughly disenchanted forms of photography and film - in which the last vestiges of aestheticismhad been relinquishedforever;or so it seemed. In Benjamin'saccount of the disintegrationof the structureof experiencein industrial society the life situations of two social types stand out as prototypical, those of the factory worker (not surprisingly)and the gambler. Once again, the idea of "shock-experience"is employed as the universal metaphor through which the transition from traditionalto modern societies is grasped. As Benjaminnotes: "The shock-experiencewhich the passerby has in the crowd corresponds to what the worker 'experiences' at his machine."39 In support of this contention he relies extensively on Marx's seminal account of the transitionfrom techniques of handicraftproduction to the methods of manufactureand machine industry in ChaptersXIV and XV of Capital L.40 Benjamin'sargument proceeds from the fact that the continuity of experience, so essential for handing down experiences in traditionalsocieties, has been replacedin contemporarylife by the wholesale fragmentationof experience.Yet, in the Baudelaire essay Benjaminsurmounts the tendency in "The Storyteller" to idealize bygone communal forms of life. Here, there is no question of nostalgiafor what has been lost; instead, the past is used in an ideological-criticalsense, in order to provide by way of contrast an index of the vast and total transformationof the quality of life the modern era has wrought.Whereas under conditions of handicraftproduction there existed a determinatesequenceand logic that connected one act on the part of the craftsmanto the next, underthe conditions of modernfactory labor this connection has been dissolved to the point where the worker's activity has been degradedto the status of a mere appendageof the machine. For this reasonthe possibility of the workerderivingany intrinsicsatisfaction

31 from his activity (e.g., the satisfaction that would accrue from his having produced the finished product in its entirety), is denied. Instead, on the assembly-linehe repeatedly performsthe samemonotonous, partialfunction. He must force his actions to conform to the autonomous rhythm of the machine. His activity thus degeneratesto that of a mindlessautomaton.It is reified, becomes thing-like.Therefore,the idea of experience,the notion that one can become throughpracticewell-versedin the talents and skills necessary for the accomplishmentof a given task, proves anachronistic- so totally specialized and one-sided has labor become. Moreover,with the advent of machine industry labor comes to be prized preciselyinsofaras it has become unskilled; the more unskilled the worker, the lower the wage. As Benjamin affirms, "The unskilled worker is the one most deeply degradedby the drill of machines. His work has been sealed off from experience;practice counts for nothing there."41 In this way the process of rationalizationeffects a universalleveling of the conditions of experience. The onslaught of reification,42initially confined to the workplace,becomes absolute and all-inclusivein modern life; society in its entirety is dominated by the technicalconsiderationsof formalreason. The man on the street betrays the symptoms of this fate no less than the worker on the assembly line: the behaviorof both has become strictly regimented, stripped of its individuality,and renderedhomogenous.As Benjamin notes, Marx's description of the degradationof the factory worker to the status of an automaton, a mere appendageof the machine,sheds "a peculiar light on the absurd kind of uniformity with which Poe wants to saddle the crowd - uniformitiesof attire and behaviour,but also a uniformityof facial expression. Those smiles provide food for thought. They are probably the familiarkind, as expressedin the phrase 'keep smiling';in that context they function as a mimetic shock absorber."43The pedestriansin Poe's text44 "act as if they had adapted themselves to the machines and could express themselves only automatically. Their behaviouris a reaction to shocks. If jostled, they bowed profusely to the jostlers."45 In the arts, this processhas reached its apogee in film, where the experience of shock (rapid cutting, multiple camera angles, instantaneous shifts in time and space) has been elevatedto a formalprinciple."Thatwhich determinesthe rhythm of production on a conveyorbelt is the basis of the rhythm of receptionin a film."46 For Benjamin the gambler becomes a parable for the disintegration of coherent experience in modern life. At first employing the gambler as an example appearssomewhatcontradictory:are not the activitiesof the laborer and the gambleras antithetical as work and play? Yet, gamblingcan be said to resemble factory labor insofar as here, too, experiencecounts for nothing.

32 Eachaction on the part of the gambleris independentof the one precedingit. The result of the previousgame has no bearingon the game that follows it. Each spin of the roulette wheel is an action unto itself. One is constantly startingover again from scratch. Therefore,there can be no accumulationof knowledge or experience. As Benjaminremarks,"The manipulation of the worker at a machine has no connection with the precedingoperationfor the very reason that it is its exact repetition. Since each operationat the machine is just as screened off from the precedingoperation as a coup in a game of chance is from one that preceded it, the drudgeryof the laboureris, in its own way, a counterpartto the drudgeryof the gambler.The work of both is equally devoid of substance."47To be sure, the drudgeryof wage labor has none of the adventureof gambling.But the quality of the experiencein both cases is quite similar.Both gamblingand the labor of the workerbecome allconsuming activities. Each ultimately comes to pervade the very psyche of the subject. The experience in both cases proves ennervatingrather than satisfying.The "futility, the emptiness,the inabilityto completesomething"48 are characteristic failings of the activity of both the gamblerand the factory worker. This is the prototypical experience of modern man, who has been "cheated out of his experience";it is the model of experience in hell where has immorone is never allowed to complete what one has begun. Baudelaire talized the figure of the gamblerin his poem "Le Jeu" in Les Fleursdu Mal, the second and fourth stanzasof which readas follows:
Roundthe greentablesa friezeof liplessfaces, Of blue-coldlips, if lips, of toothlessgums, And fingers,feveredwith Hell'slast disgraces, in pockets - or deliriums. Fumbling Hereyou see the hellishpicturethat one nightin a dream, I sawunfoldingbeforemy clairvoyant eyes; And overin a corer of this silent cave, MyselfI saw,hunchedup, cold, mute and envying, Envyingthese people theirtenaciouspassion.

As Habermashas astutely noted, Benjamin'scustomarymethod of criticism was one that related conservativelyratherthan criticallyto its objects: it was less concerned with bursting ideological illusions projected by culture than with redeemingthose Messianicor utopian moments of our spiritualheritage that are incessantly endangeredin the present by the oblivion of forgetting. For this reason he refers to Benjamin'smethod as that of rettende Kritik (redemptivecriticism).49Benjaminceaselesslysought to make such moments of tradition relevant for the present, to turn them into now-times. Adorno touches on the manifest utopian dimension of Benjamin'sthought when he that Benjaminsaid or wrote soundedas if thought, mentions that "Everything

33 instead of rejectingthe promisesof fairy tales and children'sbooks with its disgraceful'maturity', took them so literally that real fulfillment itself was now within sight of knowledge."50For Benjamin,all knowledge that failed to concernitself with the question of redemptionwas partialand inferior. theory of "corBenjamindetected evidence of this concern in Baudelaire's of respondances".By virtue this theory Baudelaire,accordingto Benjamin, was able to invoke images of collective experience, the last rudiments of which werebeingrapidlyextinguishedbeforehis very eyes. Modernexperience lacked a sense of continuity that would prevent the stream of events from into a fragmentedseriesof desultoryand meaningless incidents. disintegrating It was the seeming absence of any meaningful connection between events that had renderedthe traditionalconcept of "wisdom"invalid. For Benjamin - and the importanceof this fact for his thoughtcannot be overemphasized "Wherethere is experience in the strict sense of the word, certain contents of the individualpast combine with materialsof the collective past."51Only if this crucial relation is maintainedcan "the secret agreementbetween past andthe presentone" be guaranteed.52 Forit becomesthe "mission" generations of the present generation to redeem the thwarted hopes, aspirations,and strugglesof its ancestors,the disconsolatetracesof which are inscribedin our cultural heritage. The ruthless expansion of rationalizationrendersthis vital heritagemore opaque and unfamiliarto us with each passingday. It was the - the specialdays of customaryfunction of the great"days of remembrance" festival, ceremony, and ritual that were set off from the rest of the days of the calendar- to insurethe periodicintermingling of individualand collective with pasts. These celebrationsserved to remind us of our "secretagreement" the past. The correspondances of Baudelaire a similar function: "The perform are the data of remembrance- not historicaldata, but data correspondances of pre-history."53 And like the festivals of old, what makesthem "greatand significant is the encounter with an earlierlife."54 The correspondances are the key to Baudelaire's use of allegory: from the "ruins"of modernityhe is able miraculously to conjure forth the image of a collective past long since faded from memory. Such images are intended as an antidote or counterstate of modernity. "The murmurof the past may image to the crisis-ridden be heard in the correspondences,and the canonical experience of them has its place in a previous life."55 "WhatBaudelairemeant by correspondances may be described as an experience which seeks to establish itself in crisisproof form. This is possible only within the realm of ritual."56 Indeed, Baudelaire has written a poem, "Correspondances," that begins:
Nature is a temple whose living pillars Sometimes give forth a label of words; Man wends his way through forests of symbols Which look at him with their familiar glances.

34
As long-resounding echoes from afar Are mingling in a deep, dark unity, Vast as the night or as the orb of the day, Perfumes, colours, and sounds commingle.57

The correspondances do not merely evoke randomimagesof past life. Rather, are concerned with recreating an animisticrelationto nature. they specifically Nature thereby ceases to be viewed as mere fodder for technicalexploitation and is instead regardedas in itself ensouled. The correspondances hark back to nothing less than an urhistoricalstate of reconciliation,a state before that itself vis-a-vis point where the specieshad succeededin individuating primordial in of immediate, unwhich man and nature in a existed condition nature, differentiatedunity. The first stanzaof"Correspondances" personifiesnature, it invests nature with both the capacity to speak and with the capacity to return man's glance. Nature appearsas a partnerinstead of a hostile foe. In this way, the correspondances attempt to speak out againstthe unremitting technical mastery of the environingworld and thus recapturea relation to nature whose last traces are being extirpated with the ruthless advance of rationalization.As Benjaminnotes: "the correspondancesrecord a concept of experience which includes ritual elements. Only by appropriatingthese elements was Baudelaireable to fathom the full meaning of a breakdown which he, a modern man, was witnessing."58However, it is not as if the theory of correspondancesrecommendsthe wholesale regressionof specieslife to a prehistoricrelation to nature where humanity would once more be at her mercy. Rather, in the process whereby mankind has succeeded in emancipatingitself from its originalcondition of utter thralldomto nature, it has in its overzealousnesssimultaneouslysucceeded in destroying those crucial elements of reciprocitythrough which alone a condition of harmony between man and nature could be restored. Thus in accomplishingthe subjugation of nature man has only succeededin imitatingher prehistoricharshness and rigidity, while repressingthose elements of correspondencethat would constitute a prerequisitefor the authentic pacification of the struggle for existence. The moment the history of dominationhas always tragically forgottenis that man, too, is partof nature.The cardinalmerit of Baudelaire's verse was to have recognized this tragic failing and to have attempted to with past collective life. remedyit by producingcorrespondances That Baudelairehas bestowed upon nature the capacityto returnman'sgaze ("Man wends his way through a forest of symbols/Whichlook at him with their familiarglances")is indicative of the auraticcharacterof nature.For in "Some Motifs in Baudelaire"Benjaminhas altered the definition of the aura as it originallyappearedin the 1936 "Workof Art" essay; and more importantly, he has altered decisively his attitude toward its decline. Whereasin

35 the 1936 work he embracedwholeheartedlythe process whereby a unique, nonmechanically reproduced auratic art was sacrificed to the advance of rationalization, in the 1939 essay he has come arround to realizing the irrevocabledestruction of meaning potentials that results from this process in fact. Thus in the later essay, he provides the following significantredefinition of the concept of the aura:
Experience of the aura thus rests on the transposition of a response common to human relationships to the relationship between the inanimate or natural object and man. The person we look at, or who feels he is being looked at, looks at us in turn. To perceive the aura of an object means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return.

In "Some Motifs in Baudelaire"Benjamin shows himself hardly willing to relinquishthe qualities of the aurawithout a struggle.To perceivethe auraof an object means to endow it with humanized,animatetraitsusually reserved for relations among men. It means to conceive of inanimate objectsfraternally rather than manipulatively,to grant them the capacity of projecting signalsand attributes that transcendtheir simple quality of being there. Nor is this merely Benjamin'sindulgencein mysticism. Rather, it bespeaks of an earlierrelation of man to nature that modernman has all but repressedfrom memory. Benjamin further defines the aura as "the associations which, at home in the memoire involuntaire,tend to cluster around the object of a perception."59Thus, it refers to an indefinite series of correspondencesand interrelationsengenderedby an object ratherthan a fixed imageof it as such. For this reason photographyclearlyprovesdestructiveof the auraof objects, whereas painting, on the other hand, would preserveits traces most faithfully. For photographytends to fix the image of a thing at a given moment in time, it consciously freezes its associations. As Benjamin observes, "The perpetual readiness of volitional, discursive memory, encouraged by the technique of mechanical reproduction, reduces the scope for the play of The photographis therefore eminently non-auratic;it lacks imagination."60 the all-importantcapacity to return the gaze. Just the reverse is true of painting, though. Nonmechanicallyreproducedart - especially painting qualifies as "auratic"because it is already humanized; that is, its contours have already been thoroughly shaped and fashioned by the human subject. And so when viewed by the subject,it always standsreadyto returnwhat the subject has put into it. Thus, in contrastto the photograph,"the paintingwe look at reflects back at us that of which our eyes will neverhave their fill ... to the eyes that will never have their fill of a painting,photographyis rather like food for the hungry or drink for the thirsty."61 Whereasthe auratic object incessantly calls to mind an endless streamof associations,as if it were actually endowed with the autonomous capacity to speak to us by meansof

36 its own aesthetic language,this is manifestly not the case with mechanically reproduced,non-auraticarts such as photographyand film. Because it is an object that has already been "humanized,"the work of art stands as the prototype of the auratic object; and it is the humanizedtraits with which it has been invested that account for its capacity "to returnour gaze". Indeed, the work of art has become part human. As such, it falls due to mankindto rediscoverthe analogous "auratic"qualities that lie dormant in unformed, inanimate nature, which, "once upon a time," also "spoke to man and returned his gaze"; but whose secret language of correspondencesmodern man has lost the capacity to comprehend. Only in this way will man be the key to universalhappiness,whose traceshe first capable of rediscovering encounteredin childhood, in those glorious fairy tales where the personified fauna of nature appearedas his staunch ally - a testimonial to the long-lost state of reconciliationbetween man and nature and an anticipation of its eventualrenewal:
The liberatingmagicwhich the fairytale has at its disposaldoes not bringnatureinto play in a mythical way, but points to its complicitywith liberatedman. A mature man feels this complicity only occasionally,that is, when he is happy;but the child first meetsit in fairytales,and it makeshim happy.62

ConcludingRemarks The problem remains of assessing Benjamin'stheoretical significance for Marxism,but more importantlyin the spirit of those philosophicaloutlooks which, while sympatheticto the criticalenergiesand goals of Marxistthought, felt themselvesunable to give themselvesover without reserveto a twentiethcentury Marxism whose dogmatism and senility proved itself afresh with each new social crisis.The like-mindedconceptualoutlooks that immediately come to mind are those of the early (pre-Stalinist)Lukacs, ErnstBloch, and the FrankfurtSchool with whom Benjaminwas affiliated duringthe last six years of his life. As tempting as comparisonsof this sort are, they can, however, also be quite misleading. For if Benjamin'sthinking proceeded in the it cannot be situated squarelywithin this tradition. spiritof WesternMarxism, The problem one faces with any attempt to situate his thought is that the traditionshe takes up are so transformedin the process of being assimilated that they become virtually unrecognizable.This insight holds not only for his more explicitly Marxianformulations,but for his theological tendencies as well. The customary opposition (or as one is tempted to say, mutual exclusiveness) between the latter two traditions, both of which play a prominent role in his work, exemplifies the difficulties of attempting to evaluate his thinking in terms of the conventional academic separationof disciplines;Benjaminperpetually refused to capitulate before such artificial

37 boundaries.Indeed, in his philosophicallast will and testament, the "Theses on the Philosophy of History," Benjaminopenly advocates that historical materialism enlist the servicesof theology if it wishes to be victorious:
The story is told of an automaton constructed in such a way that it could play a winning game of chess, answering each move of an opponent with a countermove. A puppet in Turkish attire and with a hookah in its mouth sat before a chessboard placed on a large table. A system of mirrors created the illusion that this table was transparent from all sides. Actually, a little hunchback who was an expert chess player sat inside and guided the puppet's hand by means of strings. One can imagine a philosophical counterpart to this device. The puppet called 'historical materialism' is to win all the time. It can easily be a match for anyone if it enlists the services of theology, which today, as we know, is wizened and has to keep out of sight.63

Yet, although Benjamin'sparable of the puppet in Turkish attire seems to imply that the powers of theology must be subordinatedto the imperatives of historical materialism,in truth the obverse proposition holds: for it is the puppet that stands for historical materialism,while the controlling factor, which governs the puppet's movements and guide it to victory, is the little hunchback "theology," "which today, as we know, is wizened and has to keep out of sight." This brilliant allegory captures the quintessenceof the relation between Marxism and theology in Benjamin'sown thinking. But despite this insight the basic hermeneuticaldifficulties in dealing with his thought do not simply dissolve. The parableservesmerely as a tool by means of which the self-consciouslyhermetic aspects of Benjamin's discoursemight be probed and uncovered. Perhapsthose who would respond by inquiring, "Yes, but is it worth all the trouble?," are within their rights. Yet, if it teaches us anything Benjamin'sapproachdemonstratesthat for us men and women of the scientific era, who like our truths servedup clearly,empirically, and without frills, nevertheless,by virtue of our universalpreferencefor the scientific model of truth, a good part of truth - that part of the truth which transcendsthe limits of rational quantification- has thereby been disqualified from the domain of "seriousdiscourse".Benjamin'spurportedfascination with the arcaneis in no way gratuitousor merely idiosyncratic. Rather, above all it recognizes that "actual" truth is not synonomous with a truth immediately generalizableor apparent;and in historical ages that are particularly dark (such as the one Benjaminlived through and which eventually killed him), the light of truth must of necessity seek refuge in regions far removedfrom the Weltlaufin general. One can say with a fair degree of certainty that Benjamin'srelevanceis not to be found in those of his writingsmost avowedly Marxist;i.e., essays such as "The Work of Art in the Age of MechanicalReproduction" and "The Authoras Producer,"which werewrittenunder the influence of the Brechtian

38 side of Benjamin's self-professed "Janus-face" (the other side being his theological dimension). That his "Work of Art" essay has over the years acquiredthe status of a watershedin the history of Marxistaestheticsis not have in the least undeserved.Its recognitionthat the forces of rationalization so thoroughlypenetratedthe conditions of the productionand reception of works of art in this century, to the point where the survivalof a vast arrayof traditional artistic forms - the story, classical tragedy, lyric poetry, etc. has been jeopardized,rightfully remainsan important point of departurefor the study of art and culturein all its contemporarymanifestations.However, the specific conclusions drawn by Benjamin,that mechanicallyreproduced, mass art is intrinsicallyrevolutionaryand that, conversely,autonomousart is inherently bourgeois and reactionary,can only seem in retrospectextremely naive and misguided.As Adornopointed out in response,technically advanced art lends itself just as easily to manipulativeand demagogicemployment (as the culture industry in the West and Nazi Germanyhave demonstrated); moreover, authentic autonomous art of the twentieth century submits to a process of rationalizationand thus proceeds to divest itself of the aura of bourgeois autonomous art and its undesirableaffirmativeattributes (as is well illustratedby the examples of Kafka and Sch6nberg).64 Thus, Benjamin in contained overestimates the revolutionarypotential mechanically reproduced art as much as he underestimatesthat of de-auraticizedtwentiethcentury autonomous art. Ultimately, the shortcomings of the "Marxist" speculativemode of theorizBenjaminare that he sacrificedhis characteristic, ing for the sake of an extremelyundialecticaland simplisticversionof historical materialism.Following the lead of Brecht (whose Marxism,one might note, was not itself distinguishedfor its theoreticalsophistication),Benjamin and tended to hypostatize hackneyedMarxistconcepts such as "technique"65 could that of such notions evaluation the reflective "the masses,"suppressing alone prevent them from degeneratinginto the sacrosanct platitudes they have become. relevancefor Thus, one is faced with an apparentparadoxbecauseBenjamin's the project of historical materialismis not to be sought in that aspect of his thought he himself viewed as most compatible with the Marxisttradition.66 Or as Adorno once remarked incisivelyin a letter to Benjaminconcerningthe article:"Yourstudy of Goethe'sElectiveAffinities first draftof the Baudelaire (1921-22) and your Baroque book are better Marxismthan the wine duty of the feuilltonists."67 fromthe behaviour andthe deductionof phantasmagoria The Benjamin one is left with is the one who tried in his later years to assimilatehis earlieresoteric mode of thought to a theoreticalframeworkthat was both materialistand exoteric in nature - the Benjaminof "Some Motifs in Baudelaire" and related studies such as the "Theses on the Philosophy of

39 History". This is the Benjaminwho refrainedfrom comportinghimself onesidedly as either a Marxist or metaphysical thinker per se, whose thought instead can be located at the forbidden crossroadsof these two theoretical poles. This is the Benjaminwho conceivedof himselfas a redeemerof historical Jetztzeiten or now-times, those uncommon images of redeemed life whose traces occasionally grace the continuum of history. For it falls due to the critic or historical materialistto preservesuch images in the face of the fate of historical oblivion incessantly threatening to overwhelm them; images whose traces Benjamin found embedded in Baudelaire'scorrespondances, Leskov's stories, seventeenth-century Trauerspiele, and the "aura" of traditional works of art. In this sense Benjaminsays it is the task of the historical materialist"to brush history againstthe grain."68 The path leading toward reconciled life is not to be found flowing with the historical current - which leads only to renewed catastrophe- but ratheragainstit. Its traces and manifestationsare always the exception. As Benjaminremarked in 1940, the has German notion class so much the as it "Nothing corrupted working was movingwith the current."69 Thus Benjaminviewed himself as a redeemer of those momentsof traditionin which the key to emancipationwas encoded, moments in which humanity's collective longing for a better life had been deposited;it becomes our task to preservethese moments in the face of the one-sided and distorted treatment they receive at the hands of the official guardiansof the annals of tradition, appointed by the ruling class to ensure that the forces of traditionare handed down in a mannerthat accordswith its interests.As Benjaminobserves:
In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest traditionaway from a conformismthat is about to overpowerit. The Messiah comesnot only as the redeemer, he comes as the subduer of Antichrist. Only that historianwill have the gift of fanningthe sparkof hope in the past who is firmlyconvincedeven the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceasedto be victorious.70

The eschatalogicaltone of Benjamin'slast reflections is in no small measure linked to the unspeakableevents of the NationalSocialistera.At this juncture in history the possibility that the utopian promise embodied in the relics of tradition would be forever effaced from the memory of humanity appeared indeed all too real. It is above all in the tensions between Benjamin's activity as a "redemptivecritic" and the Marxisttraditionthat the significanceof his work resides. Benjamin'sreverencefor the semanticpotentialsinvestedin the products of tradition stands in sharp contrast with the main trends of the materialist legacy. The disparagementof the content of tradition in conventional Marxist discourse echoes clearly in the use of the epithet "prehistory" to characterizeall history before the advent of socialism. Whilethe idea of socialism as representinga decisive break with the historical past is

40

one Benjamin would certainlyendorse,in the usualMarxistaccounts tradition seems less dialectically preservedin the process of Aufhebung than merely cancelled and suppressed.The total devaluation of the bourgeois and prebourgeois past in history writingin existing "socialist"societies would appear in general.This disdain to bearout this claim, as would Marxist historiography for tradition is also evident in the unreflective employment of the Marxist method of ideology critique,in which the contents of culturalexpressionsare deemed illusory and valuelessin and of themselves,mere ideologicaleffluxes of the economic base. Benjamin'sappreciationof the value of traditionthus stands as an important corrective to such tendencies. His critical studies demonstrate that products of culture are in no way reducible to the status of "epiphenomena,"but contain at the same time a promesse du bonheur which future generationsmust preserveand redeem. NOTES
1. Walter Benjamin, Origin of German TragicDrama (London, 1977). 2. For a discussion of the contrasting historico-philosophical relations to the question of meaning in allegory and symbol, cf. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 63-73. 3. Cf. Sandor Radnoti's essay "The Early Aesthetics of Walter Benjamin," International Journal of Sociology (Spring, 1977), 76-123. See especially his concluding remarks. 4. Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," Illuminations (New York, 1973), 253. 5. It should be noted that even in Benjamin's early period, in his two most important works, the Trauerspiel study and the Elective Affinities essay, the former took polemical aim at the traditional category of "beauty" while the latter attempted to discredit the category of "genius". His own relation to the categories of criticism and art history had always been anything but conventional. 6. Benjamin, "Eduard Fuchs: Collector and Historian," The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. A. Arato and E. Gebhardt (New York, 1978), 233. Benjamin's occasional Brechtian equation of "genuine" experience with "political" experience had an extremely deleterious effect on several of his later writings, in particular, "The Author as Producer" (Ibid., 254-269) and his brilliant but flawed "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." 7. Ibid., 234. 8. Ibid., 277. 9. Cf. Gadamer, 162ff. 10. Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," 254. 11. Benjamin, "The Storyteller," Illuminations, 83. 12. Ibid., 83-84. 13. Cf. Georg Lukaics, Theory of the Novel (Cambridge, 1971). 14. Benjamin, 84. 15. Ibid., 85. 16. Ibid., 86. 17. Ibid., 87. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid., 92. 21. Ibid., 87. writer Karl Kraus, an inveterate foe of the journalistic mentality. For Benjamin's further thoughts on the subject see his 1931 essay "Karl Kraus," Reflections (New York, 1978), 239 ff. Benjamin, "The Storyteller," 89. Ibid., 90. 25. Ibid., 99. 26. Ibid. Cf. Benjamin's essay "The Image of Proust," Illuminations, 202. Benjamin, "The Storyteller," 101. Benjamin, "The Author as Producer," Arato and Gebhardt, 258. Benjamin, "Some Motifs in Baudelaire," Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism (London, 1973), 131. Ibid., 132. Cf. Benjamin's long citation from Engels' The Condition of the Working Class in England, which reads in part, ". . . they crowd one another as though they had

22. Benjamin's distastefor journalism derivedin partfromhis contact with the Austrian
23. 24. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

41
nothing in common, nothing to do with one another, and their only agreement is the tacit one, that each is to keep to his own side of the pavement, so as not to delay the opposing stream of the crowd, while it occurs to no man to honour another with so much as a glance. The brutal indifference, the unfeeling isolation of each in his private interest, becomes the more repellent and offensive the more these individuals are crowded together within a limited space." Ibid., 121. Ibid., 123. Ibid., 117 (emphasis added). The triumph of Errinerung over Gedachtnis accounts for the importance of Proust in Benjamin's thinking. Specifically, he values Proust's critique of Bergson's concept of the memoire pure. Proust's claim is that authentic experience is not a product of the voluntary memory but rather registers only through the memoire involuntaire; thus the distorting traits of conscious memory can only be circumvented by relying on the (repressed) faculty of the subconscious, involuntary memory, the organizing principle of Proust's great work A La Recherche du Temps Perdu. The importance of the idea of Geddchtnis or remembrance in Benjamin's thought has been explored at length by Irving Wohlfarth in '"The Messianic Structure of Walter Benjamin's Last Reflections," Glyph 3 (1978), 148-212. Benjamin, "Some Motifs in Baudelaire," 117. Ibid., 116-117. Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen (New York, 1971), ix-x. I have pursued this theme in connection with Adorno's work in "The De-Aestheticization of Art: On Adomo'sAesthetische Theorie," Telos 41 (Fall, 1979), 105-128. Benjamin, 134. Karl Marx, Capital I (Moscow, n.d.), 318-402. 41. Benjamin, 133. At this point a brief note on the subtle terminological differences that exist between "rationalization" and "reification" would be in order. By "rationalization" I mean the process first observed by Max Weber whereby all personal and affective considerations are eliminated from the operation of social organizations (e.g., business concerns, politics, the legal sphere, etc.), and instead social action is governed by predictable, clearly defined sets of rational and calculable formal rules. By "reification" I intend the etymological (verdinglichen: literally, to turn into a thing) and Marxian ("social relations among men turning into relations between things") definitions; in contrast, for example, to the pioneering, yet too general, use to which the term is put in Lukacs' History and Class Consciousness, where "reification" (synonomous with the Marxian notion of "commodity fetishism") is deemed the "central structural principle of capitalist society". Therefore, "reification" can be deduced from "rationalization," whereas the contrary proposition does not necessarily hold. Thus, the phenomenon of bureaucracy, for example, is an outgrowth of "rationalization" which gives rise to "reified" relations between persons; here reification is merely a result rather than a prime mover. Cf. Andrew Arato, "Lukacs' Theory of Reification," Telos 11 (Spring, 1972), 25-66. Benjamin, 133. 44. Ibid., 126-128. 45. Ibid., 133-134. Ibid., 132. 47. Ibid., 134-135.48. Ibid., 134. Cf. Jurgen Habermas, "Bewusstmachende oder rettende Kritik - die Aktualitat Walter Benjamins," ZurAktualitat WalterBenjamins, ed. Siegfried Unseld (Frankfurt, 1972), 175-223. Theodor Adomo, Prisms (London, 1976), 230. Benjamin, 113. 52. Ibid. 53. Ibid., 141. Ibid. 55. Ibid. 56. Ibid., 140. Ibid. 58. Ibid., 139. 59. Ibid., 145. Ibid., 146. In this statement the reversal of Benjamin's earlier, unilaterally positive valuation of the "technique of mechanical reproduction" becomes especially clear. Here photography is associated with the process of "volitional, discursive memory" which Benjamin, following Proust's emphasis on the memoire involuntaire, disdained. Ibid., 146-147. Benjamin, "The Storyteller," 102. Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," 253. Cf. Adomo's reply to Benjamin inAesthetics andPolitics (London, 1977), 120-126. At the same time, the drawbacks of Adorno's position should also be pointed out; especially that he generally refrained from conceding any emancipatory potential to the new media of mass communication such as film, thereby acquiescing by default to the manipulative stranglehold over these media exercised by the culture industry, which he had otherwise criticized so outspokenly. The idealization of the notion of artistic technique by Benjamin represents an unreflective transposition of the Marxian faith in the autonomous virtues of the "forces of production" from the economic to the aesthetic sphere.

33. 34.

35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 42.

43. 46. 49. 50. 51. 54. 57. 60.

61. 62. 63. 64.

65.

42
66. That this is the case should prove little cause for astonishment, however. After all, has not the most vital and consequential writing on Marx in this century - such as the basic texts of Western Marxism - come from individuals who found it necessary to distance themselves thoroughly from the ossified doctrines of Marxist orthodoxy? 67. Cf. Adorno, 131. Here, Adoro is referring specifically to Benjamin's habitual practice in the first draft of his Baudelaire study of drawing immediate, mechanical parallels between cultural phenomena and recent economic developments (such as the "wine duty"). 68. Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," 25 7. 69. Ibid., 258. 70. Ibid., 255.

Theory and Society 11 (1982) 17-42 ? 1982 Elsevier Scientific Publishing Company 0304-2421/82/0000-0000/$2.75