• © Natalija Šeruga Golob; The Walter Benjamin Collection (Child A. L.), 2021, 25 × 22 cm, acrylic on canvas
  • © Natalija Šeruga Golob; The Walter Benjamin Collection (Child A. L.), 2021, 37 × 27 cm, acrylic on canvas
  • © Natalija Šeruga Golob; The Walter Benjamin Collection (Child B. L.), 2021, 29 × 23 cm, acrylic on canvas
  • © Natalija Šeruga Golob; The Walter Benjamin Collection (Child A. V.), 2021, 32 × 25 cm, acrylic on canvas
  • © Natalija Šeruga Golob; The Walter Benjamin Collection (Child B. V.), 2021, 30 × 22 cm, acrylic on canvas
  • © Natalija Šeruga Golob; The Walter Benjamin Collection (Child X. H.), 2021, 28 × 22 cm, acrylic on canvas
  • © Natalija Šeruga Golob; The Walter Benjamin Collection (Child M. J.), 2021, 32 × 23 cm, acrylic on canvas
  • © Natalija Šeruga Golob; The Walter Benjamin Collection (Child E. D.), 2021, 33 × 23 cm, acrylic on canvas
The W. B. Collection (Child A. L.), 2021
 

 


 

The W.B. Collection (2021)...Postcards to W. B. (2021)...Addressed to W. B. (2021)

 

 

Destiny of Faithlessness; Allegorical Perception of Commemoration


 

 

FREDRIC JAMESON*

WALTER BENJAMIN,[1] or NOSTALGIA**

 

 

.... So the melancholy that speaks from the pages of Benjamin's essays — private depressions, professional discouragement, the dejection of the outsider, the distress In the face of a political and historical nightmare — searches the past for an adequate object, for some emblem or Image at which, as in religious meditation, the mind can stare itself out, into which it can discharge its morbid humors and know momentary, if only an esthetic, relief. It finds it: In the Germany of the thirty years war, in the Paris of the late nineteenth century ("Paris — the capitol of the nineteenth century"). For they are both — the baroque and the modern — in their very essence allegorical, and they match the thought process of the theorist of allegory, which, disembodied intention searching for some external object in which to take shape, is itself already allegorical avant la lettre.

....

.... Indeed, It seems to me that Walter Benjamin's thought is best grasped as an allegorical one, as a set of parallel, discontinuous levels of meditation which is not without resemblance to that ultimate model of allegorical composition described by Dante in his letter to Can Grande della Scala, where he speaks of the four dimensions of his poem: the literal (his hero's earthly destinies), the allegorical (the fate of his soul), the moral (in which the encounters of the main character resume one aspect or another of the life of Christ), and the anagogical (where the individual drama of Dante foreshadows the progress of the human race towards the Last Judgement)[2]. It will not be hard to adapt this scheme to twentieth century reality, if for literal we read simply psychological, and for allegorical ethical; if for the dominant archetypal pattern of the life of Christ we substitute some more modern one (and for myself, replacing religion with the religion of art, this will be the coming into being of the work of art itself, the incarnation of meaning in Language); if finally we replace theology with politics, and make of Dante's eschatology an earthly one, where the human race finds its salvation, not in eternity, but in History itself.

....

.... Benjamin's work seems to me to be marked by a painful straining towards a wholeness or unity of experience which the historical situation threatens to shatter at every turn. A vision of a world of ruins and fragments, an ancient chaos of whatever nature on the point of overwhelming consciousness — these arc some of the images that seem to recur, either in Benjamin himself or in your own mind as you read him. The idea of wholeness or of unity is of course not original with him: how many modern philosophers have described the "damaged existence" we lead in modern society, the psychological impairment of the division of labor and of specialization, the general alienation and dehumanization of modern life and the specific forms such alienation takes? Yet for the most part these analyses remain abstract; and through them speaks the resignation of the intellectual specialist to his own maimed present; the dream of wholeness, where it persists, attaches itself to someone else's future. Benjamin is unique among these thinkers in that he wants to save his own life as well: hence the peculiar fascination of his writings, incomparable not only for their dialectical intelligence, nor even for the poetic sensibility they express, but above all, perhaps, for the manner in which the autobiographical part of his mind finds symbolic satisfaction in the shape of ideas abstractly, in objective guises, expressed.

....

.... Psychologically, the drive towards unity takes the form of an obsession with the past and with memory. Genuine memory determines "whether the Individual can have a picture of himself, whether he can master his own experience." "Every passion borders on chaos, but the passion of the collector borders on the chaos of memory" (and it was in the image of the collector that Benjamin found one of his most comfortable identities). "Memory forges the chain of tradition that passes events on from generation to generation." Strange reflexions, these — strange subjects of reflexion for a Marxist (one thinks of Sartre's acid comment on his orthodox Marxist contemporaries: "materialism is the subjectivity of those who are ashamed of their own subjectivity"). Yet Benjamin kept faith with Proust, whom he translated, long after his own discovery of communism; like Proust also, he saw in his favorite poet Baudelaire an analogous obsession with reminiscence and involuntary memory; and he followed his literary master in the fragmentary evocation of his own childhood called Berliner Kindheit um 1900; he also began the task of recovering his own existence with short essayistic sketches, records of dreams, of isolated impressions and experiences, which however he was unable to carry to the greater writer's ultimate narrative unity.

....

.... He was perhaps more conscious of what prevents us from assimilating our life experience than of the form such a perfected life would take: fascinated, for example, with Freud's distinction between unconscious memory and the conscious act of recollection, which was for Freud basically a way of destroying or eradicating what the former was designed to preserve: "consciousness appears in the system of perception in place of the memory traces ... consciousness and the leaving behind of a memory trace are within the same system mutually incompatible." For Freud, the function of consciousness is the defense of the organism against shocks from the external environment: in this sense traumas, hysterical repetitions, dreams, are ways in which the incompletely assimilated shock attempts to make its way through to consciousness and hence to ultimate appeasement In Benjamin's hands, this idea becomes an instrument of historical description, a way of showing how in modern society, perhaps on account of the increasing quantity of shocks of all kinds to which the organism is henceforth subjected, these defense mechanisms are no longer personal ones: a whole series of mechanical substitutes intervenes between consciousness and its objects shielding us perhaps, yet at the same time depriving us of any way of assimilating what happens to us or to any genuinely personal experience. Thus, to give only one example, the newspaper stands as a shockabsorber of novelty, numbing us to what might perhaps otherwise overwhelm us, but at the same time rendering its events neutral and impersonal, making of them what by definition has no common denominator with our private existences.

....

.... Experience is moreover socially conditioned in that it depends on a certain rhythm of recurrences and similarities, on certain categories of likeness in events which are properly cultural in origin. Thus even in Proust and Baudelaire, who lived in relatively fragmented societies, ritualistic devices, often unconscious, are primary elements in the construction of form: we recognize them in the "vie antérieure" and the correspondences of Baudelaire, in the ceremonies of salon life in Proust. And where the modern writer tries to create a perpetual present — as in Kafka — the mystery inherent in the events seems to result not so much from their novelty as from the feeling that they have merely been forgotten, that they are in some sense "familiar," in the haunting significance which Baudelaire lent that word. Yet as society increasingly decays, such rhythms of experience are less and less available.

....

.... At this point, however, psychological description seems to pass over insensibly into moral judgment, into a vision of the reconciliation of past and present which is somehow an ethical one. But for the western reader the whole ethical dimension of Benjamin's work is likely to be perplexing, incorporating as it docs a kind of ethical psychology which, codified by Goethe, has become traditional in Germany and deeply rooted in the German language, but for which we have no equivalent. This Lebensweisheit is indeed a kind of halfway house between the classical idea of a fixed human nature, with its psychology of the humors, passions, sins or character types; and the modern idea of pure historicity, of the determining influence of the situation or environment. As a compromise in the domain of the individual personality, it is not unlike the compromise of Hegel in the realm of history itself: and where for the latter a general meaning was immanent to the particular moment of history, for Goethe in some sense the overall goal of the personality and of its development is built into the particular emotion in question, or latent in the particular stage in the individual's growth. For the system is based on a vision of the full development of the personality (a writer like Gide, deeply influenced' by Goethe, gives but a pale and narcissistic reflexion of this ethic, which expressed middle class individualism at the moment of its historic triumph); it neither aims to bend the personality to some purely external standard of discipline, as is the case with Christianity, nor to abandon it to the meaningless accidents of empirical psychology, as is the case with most modern ethics, but rather sees the individual psychological experience as something which includes within itself seeds of development, something in which ethical growth is inherent as a kind of interiorized Providence. So, for example, the closing lines of Wilhelm Meister: "You make me think of Saul, the son of Kish, who went forth to seek his father's asses and found, instead, a kingdom!"

....

.... It is however characteristic of Benjamin that in his most complete expression of this Goethean ethic, the long essay on Elective Affinities, he should lay more stress on the dangers that menace the personality than on the picture of its ultimate development. For this essay, which speaks the language of Goethean life-psychology, is at the same time a critique of the reactionary forces in German society which made this psychology their own: working with the concept of myth, it is at the same time an attack on the obscurantist ideologies which made the notion of myth their rallying cry. In this, the polemic posture of Benjamin can be instructive for all those of us who, undialectically, are tempted simply to reject the concept of myth altogether, on account of the ideological uses to which it is ordinarily put; for whom this concept, like related ones of magic or charisma, seems not to aim at a rational analysis of the irrational but rather at a consecration of it through language.

....

.... But for Benjamin Elective Affinities may be considered a mythical work, on condition we understand myth ns that element from which the work seeks to free itself: as some earlier chaos of instinctual forces, inchoate, natural, pre-individualistic, as that which is destructive of genuine individuality, that which consciousness must overcome if it is to attain any real autonomy of its own, if it is to accede to any properly human level of existence. Is it farfetched to see in this opposition between mythical forces and the individual spirit a disguised expression of Benjamin's thoughts about past and present, an image of the way in which a remembering consciousness masters its past and brings to light what would otherwise be lost in the prehistory of the organism? Nor should we forget that the essay on Elective Affinities is itself a way of recovering the past, this time a cultural past, one given over to the dark mythical forces of a protofascist tradition.

....

.... Benjamin's dialectical skill can be seen in the way this idea of myth is expressed through attention to the form of Goethe's novel, no doubt one of the most eccentric of Western literature, in its combination of an eighteenth century ceremoniousness with symbols of a strangely artificial, allegorical quality: objects which appear in the blankness of the nonvisual narrative style as though isolated against a void, as though fateful with a kind of geometrical meaning — cautiously selected detail of landscape, too symmetrical not to have significance, analogies, such as the chemical one that gives the novel its title, too amply developed not to be emblematic. The reader is of course familiar with symbolism everywhere in the modern novel; but in general the symbolism is built into the work, like a sheet of instructions supplied inside the box along with the puzzle pieces. Here we feel the burden of guilt laid upon us as readers, that we lack what strikes us almost as a culturally inherited mode of thinking, accessible only to those who are that culture's members: and no doubt the Goethean system does project itself in some such way, in its claim to universality.

....

.... The originality of Benjamin is to cut across the sterile opposition between the arbitrary interpretations of the symbol on the one hand, and the blank failure to see what it means on the other: Elective Affinities is to be read, not as a novel by a symbolic writer, but as a novel about symbolism. If objects of a symbolic nature loom large in this work, it is not because they were chosen to underline the theme of adultery in some decorative manner, but rather because the real underlying subject is precisely the surrender over into the power of symbols of people who have lost their autonomy as human beings. "When people sink to this level, even the life of apparently lifeless things grows strong. Gundolf quite rightly underlined the crucial role of objects in this story. Yet the intrusion of the thing like into human life is precisely a criterion of the mythical universe." We are required to read these symbolic objects to the second power: not so much directly to decipher a one-to-one meaning from them, as to sense that of which the very fact of symbolism is itself symptomatic.

....

.... And as with the objects, so also with the characters: it has for example often been remarked that the figure of Ottilie, the rather saintly young woman around whom the drama turns, is somehow different in its mode of characterization from the other, more realistically and psychologically drawn characters. For Benjamin however this is not so much a flaw, or an inconsistency, as a clue: Ottilie is not reality but appearance, and it is this which the rather external and visual mode of characterization conveys. "It is clear that these Goethean characters come before us not so much as figures shaped from external models, nor wholly Imaginary in their invention, but rather entranced somehow, as though under a spell. Hence a kind of obscurity about them which is foreign to the purely visual, to painting for instance, and which is characteristic only of that whose very essence is pure appearance. For appearance is in this work not so much presented as a theme as it is rather implicit in the very nature and mode of the presentation itself."

....

.... This moral dimension of Benjamin's, work, like Goethe's own, clearly represents an uneasy balance, a transitional moment between the psychological on the one hand, and the esthetic or the historical on the other. The mind cannot long be satisfied with this purely ethical description of the events of the book as the triumph of fateful, mythical forces; it strains for historical and social explanation, and at length Benjamin himself is forced to express the conclusion "that the writer shrouds in silence: namely, that passion loses all its rights, under the laws of genuine human morality, when it seeks to make a pact with wealthy middle-class security." But in Benjamin's work, this inevitable slippage of morality into history and politics, characteristic of all modern thought, is mediated by esthetics, is revealed by attention to the qualities of the work of art, just as the above conclusion was articulated by the analysis of those aspects of Elective Affinities that might best have been described as allegorical rather than symbolic.

....

.... For in one sense Benjamin's life work can be seen as a kind of vast museum, a passionate collection, of all shapes and varieties of allegorical objects; and his most substantial work centers on that enormous studio of allegorical decoration which is the Baroque.

....

.... The Origins — not so much of German tragedy ("Tragödie) — as of German Trauerspiel: the distinction, for which English has no equivalent, is crucial to Benjamin's interpretation. For "tragedy," which he limits to ancient Greece as a phenomenon, is a sacrificial drama in which the hero is offered up to the Gods for atonement. Trauerspiel, on the other hand, which encompasses the baroque generally, Elizabethans and Calderon as well as the 17th century German playwrights, is something that might best be initially characterized as a pageant: a funereal pageant — so might the word be most adequately rendered.

....

.... As a form it reflects the baroque vision of history as chronicle, as the relentless turning of the wheel of fortune, a ceaseless succession across the stage of the world's mighty, princes, popes, empresses in their splendid costumes, courtiers, maskeraders and poisoners, — a dance of death produced with all the finery of a Renaissance triumph. For chronicle is not yet historicity in the modern sense: "No matter how deeply the baroque intention penetrates the detail of history, its microscopic analysis never ceases to search painstakingly for political calculation in a substance seen as pure intrigue. Baroque drama knows historical events only as the depraved activity of conspirators. Not a breath of genuine revolutionary conviction in any of the countless rebels who appear before the baroque sovereign, himself immobilized in the posture of a Christian martyr. Discontent — such is the classic motive for action." And such historical time, mere succession without development, is in reality secretly spatial, and takes the court (and the stage) as its privileged spatial embodiment.

....

.... At first glance, it would appear that this vision of life as chronicle is in The Origins of German Tragedy, a pre-Marxist work, accounted for in an idealistic manner: as Lutherans, Benjamin says, the German baroque playwrights knew a world in which belief was utterly separate from works, in which not even the Calvinistic preordained harmony intervenes to restore a little meaning to the succession of empty acts that make up human life, the world thus remaining as a body without a soul, as the shell of an object divested of any visible function. Yet it is at least ambiguous whether this intellectual and metaphysical position causes the psychological experience that is at the heart of baroque tragedy, or whether it is not itself merely one of the various expressions, relatively abstract, through which an acute and concrete emotion tries to manifest itself. For the key to the latter is the central enigmatic figure of the prince himself, halfway between a tyrant justly assassinated and a martyr suffering his passion: interpreted allegorically, he stands as the embodiment of Melancholy in a stricken world, and Hamlet is his most complete expression. This interpretation of the funereal pageant as a basic expression of pathological melancholy has the advantage of accounting both for form and content at the same time.

....

.... Content in the sense of the characters' motivations: "The indecision of the prince is nothing but saturnine acedia. The influence of Saturn makes people 'apathetic, indecisive, slow.* The tyrant falls on account of the sluggishness of his emotions. In the same fashion, the character of the courtier is marked by faithlessness — another trait of the predominance of Saturn. The courtier's mind, as portrayed in these tragedies, is fluctuation itself: betrayal is his very clement. It is to be attributed neither to hastiness of composition nor to insufficient characterization that the parasites in these plays scarcely need any time for reflection at all before betraying their lords and going over to the enemy. Rather, the lack of character evident in their actions, partly conscious Machiavellianism to be sure, reflects an inconsolable, despondent surrender to an impenetrable conjunction of baleful constellations, a conjunction that seems to have taken on a massive, almost thing-like character. Crown, royal purple, scepter, all are in the last analysis the properties of the tragedy of fate, and they carry about them an aura of destiny to which the courtier is the first to submit as to some portent of disaster. His faithlessness to his fellow men corresponds to the deeper, more contemplative faith he keeps with these material emblems."

....

.... Once again Benjamin's sensitivity is for those moments in which human beings find themselves given over into the power of things; and the familiar content of baroque tragedy — that melancholy which we recognize from Hamlet — those vices of melancholy — lust, treason, sadism — so predominant in the lesser Elizabethans, in Webster for Instance — veers about slowly into a question of form, into the problem of objects, which is to say of allegory itself. For allegory is precisely the dominant mode of expression of a world in which things have been for whatever reason utterly sundered from meanings, from spirit, from genuine human existence.

....

.... And in the light of this new examination of the baroque from the point of view of form rather than of content, little by little the brooding melancholy figure at the center of the play himself alters in focus, the hero of the funereal pageant little by little becomes transformed into the baroque playwright himself, the allegorist par excellence, in Benjamin's terminology the Grübler: that superstitious, over particular reader of omens who returns In a more nervous, modern guise In the hysterical heroes of Poe and Baudelaire. "Allegories are in the realm of thoughts what ruins are in the realm of things"; and it is clear that Benjamin is himself first and foremost among these depressed and hyperconscious visionaries who people his pages. "Once the object has beneath the brooding look of Melancholy become allegorical, once life has flowed out of it, the object itself remains behind, dead, yet preserved for all eternity; it lies before the allegorist, given over to him utterly, for good or ill. In other words, the object itself is henceforth incapable of projecting any meaning on its own; it can only take on that meaning which the allegorist wishes to lend it. He instills it with his own meaning, himself descends to inhabit it: and this must be understood not psychologically but in an ontological sense. In his hands the thing in question becomes something else, speaks of something else, becomes for him the key to some realm of hidden knowledge, as whose emblem he honors it. This is what constitutes the nature of allegory as script."

....

.... Script rather than language, the letter rather than the spirit; into this the baroque world shatters, strangely legible signs and emblems nagging at the too curious mind, a procession moving slowly across a stage, laden with occult significance. In this sense, for the first time it seems to me that allegory is restored to us — not as a gothic monstrosity of purely historical interest, nor as in C. S. Lewis a sign of the medieval health of the (religious) spirit, but rather as a pathology with which in the modern world we are only too familiar. The tendency of our own criticism has been to exalt symbol at the expense of allegory (even though the privileged objects proposed by that criticism — English mannerism and Dante — are more properly allegorical in nature; in this, as in other aspects of his sensibility, Benjamin has much in common with a writer like T. S. Eliot). It is, perhaps, the expression of a value rather than a description of existing poetic phenomena: for the distinction between symbol and allegory is that between a complete reconciliation between object and spirit and a mere will to such reconciliation. The usefulness of Benjamin's analysis lies however in his insistence on a temporal distinction as well: the symbol is the instantaneous, the lyrical, the single moment in time; and this temporal limitation expresses perhaps the historical impossibility in the modern world for genuine reconciliation to last in time, to be anything more than a lyrical, accidental present. Allegory is on the contrary the privileged mode of our own life in time, a clumsy deciphering of meaning from moment to moment, the painful attempt to restore a continuity to heterogeneous, disconnected instants. "Where the symbol as it fades shows the face of Nature in the light of salvation, in allegory it is the facies hippocratica of history that lies like a frozen landscape before the eye of the beholder. History in everything that it has of unseasonable, painful, abortive, expresses itself in that face — nay rather in that death's head. And as true as it may be that such an allegorical mode is utterly lacking in any 'symbolic' freedom of expression, in any classical harmony of feature, in anything human — what is expressed here portentously in the form of a riddle is not only the nature of human life in general, but also the biographical historicity of the individual in its most natural and organically corrupted form. This — the baroque, earthbound exposition of history as the story of the world's suffering — is the very essence of allegorical perception; history takes on meaning only in the stations of its agony and decay. The amount of meaning is in exact proportion to the presence of death and the power of decay, since death is that which traces the surest line between Physis and meaning."

....

.... And what marks baroque allegory holds for the allegory of modern times, for Baudelaire as well: only in the latter it is interiorized: "Baroque allegory saw the corpse from the outside only. Baudelaire sees it from within." Or again: "Commemoration [Andenken] is the secularized version of the adoration of holy relics ... Commemoration is the complement to experience. In commemoration there finds expression the increasing alienation of human beings, who take inventories of their past as of lifeless merchandise. In the nineteenth century allegory abandons the outside world, only to colonize the inner. Relics come from the corpse, commemoration from the dead occurrences of the past which are euphemistically known as experience."

....

.... Yet in these late essays on modern literature a new preoccupation appears, which signals the passage in Benjamin from the predominantly esthetic to the historical and political dimension itself. This is the attention to machines, to mechanical inventions, which characteristically first appears in the realm of esthetics itself in the study of the movies ("The Reproduceable Work of Art") and only later is extended to the study of history in general (as in the essay "Paris — Capitol of the 19th Century," in which the feeling of life in this period is conveyed by a description of the new objects and inventions characteristic of it — the passageways, the use of cast iron, the Daguerrotype and the panorama, the expositions, advertising). It is important to point out that however materialistic such an approach to history may seem, nothing is farther from Marxism than the stress on invention and technique as the primary cause of historical change. Indeed it seems to me that such theories (of the kind for which the steam engine is the cause of the industrial revolution, and which have recently been rehearsed yet again, in streamlined modernistic form in the works of Marshall McLuhan) function as a substitute for Marxist historiography in the way in which they offer a feeling of concreteness comparable to economic subject matter, at the same time that they dispense with any consideration of the human factors of classes and of the social organization of production.

....

.... Benjamin's fascination with the role of inventions in history seems to me most comprehensible in psychological or esthetic terms. If we follow, for instance, his meditation on the role of the passerby and the crowd in Baudelaire, we find that after the evocation of Baudelaire's physical and stylistic characteristics, after the discussion of shock and organic defenses outlined earlier in this essay, the inner logic of Benjamin's material leads him to material invention: "Comfort isolates. And at the same time it shifts its possessor closer to the power of physical mechanisms. With the invention of matches around the middle of the century, there begins a. whole series of novelties which have this in common that they replace a complicated set of operations with a single stroke of the hand. This development goes on in many different spheres at the same time: it is evident among others in the telephone, where in place of the continuous movement with which the crank of the older model had to be turned a single lifting of the receiver now suffices. Among the various elaborate gestures required to prepare the photographic apparatus, that of 'snapping’ the photograph was particularly consequential. Pressing the finger once is enough to freeze an event for unlimited time. The apparatus lends the instant a posthumous shock, so to speak. And beside tactile experiences of this kind we find optical ones as well, such as the classified ads in a newspaper, or the traffic in a big city. To move through the latter involves a whole series of shocks and collisions. At dangerous intersections, impulses crisscross the pedestrian like charges in a battery. Baudelaire describes the man who plunges into the crowd as a reservoir of electrical energy. Thereupon he calls him, thus singling out the experience of shock, 'a kaleidoscope endowed with consciousness'/1 And Benjamin goes on to complete this catalogue with a description of the worker and his psychological subjection to the operation of the machine in the factory. Yet it seems to me that alongside the value of this passage as an analysis of the psychological effect of machinery, it has for Benjamin a secondary intention, it satisfies a deeper psychological requirement perhaps in some ways even more important than the official intellectual one; and that is to serve as a concrete embodiment for the state of mind of Baudelaire. The essay indeed begins with a relatively disembodied psychological state: the poet faced with the new condition of language in modern times, faced with the debasement of journalism, the inhabitant of the great city faced with the increasing shocks and perceptual numbness of daily life. These phenomena arc intensely familiar to Benjamin, but somehow he seems to feel them as insufficiently "rendered”: he cannot possess them spiritually, he cannot express them adequately, until he finds some sharper and more concrete physical image in which to embody them. The machine, the list of inventions, is precisely such an image; and it will be clear to the reader that we consider such a passage, in appearance a historical analysis, as in reality art exercise in allegorical meditation, in the locating of some fitting emblem in which to anchor the peculiar and nervous modern state of mind which was his subject-matter.

....

.... For this reason the preoccupation with machines and inventions in Benjamin does not lead to a theory of historical causality; rather it finds its completion elsewhere, in a theory of the modern object, in the notion of "aura." Aura for Benjamin is the equivalent in the modern world, where it still persists, for what anthropologists call the "sacred" in primitive societies; it is in the world of things what "mystery" is in the world of human events, what "charisma" is in the world of human beings. In a secularized universe it is perhaps easier to locate at the moment of its disappearance, the cause of which is in general technical invention, the replacement of human perception with those substitutes for and mechanical extensions of perception which are machines. Thus it is easy to see how in the movies, in the "reproduceable work of art," that aura which originally resulted from the physical presence of actors in the here-and-now of the theater is short-circuited by the new technical advance (and then replaced, in genuine Freudian symptom-formation, by the attempt to endow the stars with a new kind of personal aura of their own off the screen).

....

.... Yet in the world of objects, this intensity of physical presence which constitutes the aura of something can perhaps best be expressed by the image of the look, the intelligence returned: "The experience of aura is based on the transposition of a social reaction onto the relationship of the lifeless or of nature to man. The person we look at, the person who believes himself looked at, looks back at us in return. To experience the aura of a phenomenon means to endow it with the power to look back in return."

....

.... And elsewhere he defines aura thus: "The single, unrepeatable experience of distance, no matter how close it may be. While resting on a summer afternoon, to follow the outline of a mountain against the horizon, or of a branch that casts its shadow on the viewer, means to breath the aura of the mountain, of the branch." Aura is thus in a sense the opposite of allegorical perception, in that in it a mysterious wholeness of objects becomes visible. And where the broken fragments of allegory represented a thing-world of destructive forces in which human autonomy was drowned, the objects of aura represent perhaps the setting of a kind of utopia, a Utopian present, not shorn of the past but having absorbed it, a kind of plenitude of existence in the world of things, if only for the briefest instant. Yet this Utopian comportent of Benjamin's thought, put to flight as it is by the mechanized present of history, is available to the thinker only in a simpler cultural past.

....

.... Thus it is his one evocation of a non-allegorical art, his essay on Nikolai Leskow, "The Teller of Tales," which is perhaps his masterpiece. As with actors faced with the technical advance of the reproduceable art-work, so also with the tale in the face of modern communications systems, and in particular of the newspaper. The function of the newspapers is to absorb the shocks of novelty, and by numbing the organism to them to sap their intensity. Yet the tale, always constructed around some novelty, was designed on the contrary to preserve its force; where the mechanical form "exhausts" ever increasing quantities of new material, the older word-of-mouth communication is that which recommends itself to memory. Its reproduceability is not mechanical, but natural to consciousness; indeed, that which allows the story to be remembered, to seem "memorable" is at the same time the means of its assimilation to the personal experience of the listeners as well.

....

.... It is instructive to compare this analysis by Benjamin of the tale (and its implied distinction from the novel) with that of Sartre, so similar in some ways, and yet so different in its ultimate emphasis. For both, the two forms arc opposed not only in their social origins — the tale springing from collective life, the novel from solitude — and not only in their raw material — the talc using what everyone can recognize as common experience, the novel that which is uncommon and highly individualistic — but also and primarily in the relationship to death and to eternity. Benjamin quotes Valéry: "It is almost as though the disappearance of the idea of eternity were related to the increasing distaste for any kind of work of long duration in time." Concurrent with the disappearance of the genuine story is the increasing concealment of death and dying in our society: for the authority of the story ultimately derives from the authority of death, which lends every event a once-and-for-all uniqueness. "A man who died at the age of thirty-five is at every point in his life a man who is going to die at the age of thirty-five": so Benjamin describes our apprehension of characters in the tale, as the anti-psychological, the simplified representatives of their own destinies. But what appeals to his sensitivity to the archaic is precisely what Sartre condemns as inauthentic: namely the violence to genuine lived human experience, which never in the freedom of its own present feels itself as fate, for which fate and destiny are always characteristic of other people's experience, seen from the outside as something closed and thing-like. For this reason Sartre opposes the tale (it is true that he is thinking of the late-nineteenth century well-made story, which catered to a middle-class audience, rather than to the relatively anonymous folk product of which Benjamin speaks) to the novel, whose task is precisely to render this open experience of consciousness in the present, of freedom, rather than the optical illusion of fate.

....

.... There can be no doubt that this opposition corresponds to a historical experience: the older tale, indeed the classical nineteenth century novel as well, expressed a social life in which the individual faced single-shot, irreparable chances and opportunities, in which he had to play everything on a single roll of the dice, in which his life did therefore properly tend to take on the appearance of fate or destiny, of a story that can be told. Whereas in the modern world (which is to say, in Western Europe and the United States), economic prosperity is such that nothing is ever really irrevocable in this sense: hence the philosophy of freedom, hence the modernistic literature of consciousness of which Sartre is here a theorist: hence also, the decay of plot, for where nothing is irrevocable (in the absence of death in Benjamin's sense) there is no story to tell either, there is only a series of experiences of equal weight whose order is indiscriminately reversible.

....

.... Benjamin is as aware as Sartre of the way in which the tale, with its appearance of destiny, does violence to our lived experience in the present: but for him it does justice to our experience of the past. Its "inauthenticity" is to be seen as a mode of commemoration, so that it does not really matter any longer whether the young man dead in his prime was aware of his own lived experience as fate: for us, henceforth remembering him, we always think of him, at the various stages of his life, as one about to become this destiny, and the tale thus gives us " the hope of warming our own chilly existence upon a death about which we read."

....

.... The tale is not only a psychological mode of relating to the past, of commemorating it: it is for Benjamin also a mode of contact with a vanished form of social and historical existence as well; and it is in this correlation between the activity of story-telling and the concrete form of a certain historically determinate mode of production that Benjamin can serve as a model of Marxist literary criticism at its most revealing. The twin sources of story-telling find their archaic embodiment in "the settled cultivator on the one hand and the seafaring merchant on the other. Both forms of life have in fact produced their own characteristic type of story-teller ... A genuine extension of the possibilities of story-telling to its greatest historical range is however not possible without the most thorough-going fusion of the two archaic types. Such a fusion was realized during the middle ages in the artisanal associations and guilds. The sedentary master and the wandering apprentices worked together in the same room; indeed, every master had himself been a wandering apprentice before settling down at home or in some foreign city. If peasants and sailors were the inventors of story-telling, the guild system proved to be the place of its highest development." The tale is thus the product of an artisan culture, a hand-made product, like a cobbler's shoe or a pot; and like such a hand-made object, "the touch of the story-teller clings to it like the trace of the potter's hand on the glazed surface."

....

.... In his ultimate statement of the relationship of literature to politics, Benjamin seems to have tried to bring to bear on the problems of the present this method, which had known success in dealing with the objects of the past. Yet the transposition is not without its difficulties, and Benjamin's conclusions remain problematical, particularly in his unresolved, ambiguous attitude towards modern industrial civilization, which fascinated him as much as it seems to have depressed him. The problem of propaganda in art can be solved, he maintains, by attention, not so much to the content of the work of art, as to its form: a progressive work of art is one which utilizes the most advanced artistic techniques, one in which therefore the artist lives his activity as a technician, and through this technical work finds a unity of purpose with the industrial worker. "The solidarity of the specialist with the proletariat . . . con never be anything but a mediated one." This communist "politicalisation of art," which he opposed to the fascist "estheticalisation of the machine," was designed to harness to the cause of revolution that modernism to which other Marxist critics (Lukacs, for instance) were hostile. And there can be no doubt that Benjamin first came to a radical politics through his experience as a specialist: through his growing awareness, within the domain of his own specialized artistic activity, of the crucial influence on the work of art of changes in the public, in technique, in short of History itself. But although in the realm of the history of art the historian can no doubt show a parallelism between specific technical advances in a given art and the general development of the economy as a whole, it is difficult to see how a technically advanced and difficult work of art can have anything but a "mediated" effect politically. Benjamin was of course lucky in the artistic example which lay before him: for he illustrates his thesis with the epic theater of Brecht, perhaps indeed the only modern artistic innovation that has had direct and revolutionary political impact. But even here the situation is ambiguous: an astute critic (Rolf Tiedemann) has pointed out the secret relationship between Benjamin's fondness for Brecht on the one hand and "his lifelong fascination with children's books" on the other (children's books: hieroglyphs: simplified allegorical emblems and riddles). Thus, where we thought to emerge into the historical present, in reality we plunge again into the distant past of psychological obsession.

....

.... But if nostalgia as a political motivation is most frequently associated with fascism, there is no reason why a nostalgia conscious of itself, a lucid and remorseless dissatisfaction with the present on the grounds of some remembered plenitude, cannot furnish as adequate a revolutionary stimulus as any other: the example of Benjamin is there to prove it. He himself, however, preferred to contemplate his destiny in religious imagery, as in the following paragraph, according to Gershom Scholem the last he ever wrote: "Surely Time was felt neither as empty nor as homogeneous by the soothsayers who inquired for what it hid in its womb. Whoever keeps this in mind is in a position to grasp just how past time is experienced in commemoration: in just exactly the same way. As is well known, the Jews were forbidden to search into the future. On the contrary, the Thora and the act of prayer instruct them in commemoration of the past. So for them, the future, to which the clientele of soothsayers remains in thrall, is divested of its sacred power. Yet it does not for all that become simply empty and homogeneous time in their eyes. For every second of the future bears within it that little door through which Messiah may enter."

....

.... Angelus novus: Benjamin's favorite image of the angel that exists only to sing its hymn of praise before the face of God, to give voice, and then at once to vanish back into uncreated nothingness. So at its most poignant Benjamin's experience of time: a pure present, on the threshold of the future honoring it by averted eyes in meditation on the past.

 

*Fredric Jameson (1934)

 

** Fredric Jameson; Walter Benjamin, or Nostalgia,
Salmagundi, No. 10/11 (FALL 1969 - WINTER 1970), pp. 52-68.]

 


 

Notes:

[1] Walter Benjamin was born in 1892 of a wealthy Jewish family in Berlin. Unfit for service in World War I, he studied for a time in Bern, and returning to Berlin in 1920 tried unsuccessfully to found a literary review there, before turning to academic life as a career. His Origins of German Tragedy was however refused as a Ph.D. thesis at the University of Frankfurt in 1925. Meanwhile, he had begun to translate Proust, and, under the influence of Lukacs’ History and Class Consciousness, became a Marxist, visiting Moscow in 1926-27. After 1933, he emigrated to Paris and pursued work on his unfinished project Paris: Capitol of the Nineteenth Century. He committed suicide at the Spanish border after an unsuccessful attempt to flee occupied France in 1940. He numbered among close friends and intellectual acquaintances, at various moments of his life, Ernst Bloch, Gershom Scholem, T. W. Adorno, and Bert Brecht.
........................................................................Every feeling is attached to an a priori object, and the
........................................................presentation of the latter is the phenomenology of the former.
..................................................................................................Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels

[2] It is, at least, a more familiar and less intimidating model than that proposed by Benjamin himself, in a letter to Max Rychner: "I have never been able to inquire and think otherwise than, if I may so put it, in a theological sense — namely in conformity with the Talmudic prescription regarding the forty-nine levels of meaning in every passage of the Torah."

 


Destiny of Faithlessness; Allegorical Perception of Commemoration