The Frankfurt School Revisited

Richard Wolin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135445393
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This volume is a collection of essays by Richard Wolin, a leading political theorist and intellectual historian.

It is the follow up to Wolin's two recent, widely acclaimed books: Heidegger's Children and The Seduction of Unreason. In those books, he explored the legacy of Martin Heidegger and his impact on some of his most influential and notable students. He dealt particularly with the effect that Heidegger's subsequent embrace of fascism and National Socialism had on these students. Delving further in his next book, Wolin explored the question of why philosophers and intellectuals have been drawn to antiliberal, antidemocratic fascism.

The essays in this book are focused on European Political Thought particularly with figures associated with the Frankfurt School. The collection represents a virtual who's who of European political thinkers with essays on Walter Benjamin, Adorno, Marcuse, Arendt, Heidegger, Weber, Jaspers, and Carl Schmitt. Moving beyond these thinkers and those books, this collection will also include essays on contemporary political issues such as post-communist revolutions, human rights, global democracy, the revival of republicanism, and religion and public life.

Part I

The Frankfurt School Revisited

1

Between Proust and the Zohar: Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project

What the child (and, through faint reminiscence, the man) discovers in the pleats of the old material to which it clings while trailing at its mother’s skirts — that’s what these pages should contain.

Walter Benjamin, describing his intentions for the Arcades Project during the 1930s

To great writers, finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they work throughout their lives.

Benjamin, One-Way Street (1928)

The Perils of Montage

For years an aura of mystery has surrounded Benjamin’s Arcades Project, the chef d’oeuvre on which he labored fitfully during the last thirteen years of his life, from 1927 to 1940. His letters of the period furtively allude to a projected magnum opus that aimed at expounding a novel “materialist philosophy of history,” a “primal history of the nineteenth century.” Yet, precisely what Benjamin intended by these pithy, elusive descriptions has been the source of enormous speculation and controversy.

That the work survived at all is something of a miracle. With the fall of France in 1940, Benjamin, fleeing the rapidly advancing Wehrmacht and fearing the worst, hastily entrusted his precious manuscripts to his friend Georges Bataille, who concealed them in the bowels of the Bibliothèque Nationale. A few months later, Benjamin met with an untimely end, taking his own life on the Franco–Spanish frontier rather than fall into the hands of the pro-Nazi Vichy authorities. After the war another French acquaintance, Pierre Missac, following Benjamin’s wishes, contacted Theodor Adorno with the information that Benjamin’s manuscripts had indeed survived. Adorno, who had been devastated by his friend’s death, could barely conceal his exhilaration: “The decisive theoretical sketches for the Arcades Project,” he wrote to Missac in 1946, “go back to a relatively early date: Benjamin read the first important excerpts aloud to me in Königstein [outside of Frankfurt] in 1928. Among these excerpts was a metaphysical theory of the gambler. These things were doubtlessly among the most ingenious Benjamin ever wrote; it would be extremely important for me to know precisely how much has been saved.” And in uncanny anticipation of the enormous philological difficulties Benjamin’s thick packet of notes would incite, he went on to remark: “Everything depends on whether the material in your possession consists in large part of theoretical formulations and sketches, or whether it mostly contains excerpted citations that may have had theoretical significance for Benjamin, yet which would, even for me, remain uninterpretable.”¹

Three years later, Adorno had come to a preliminary conclusion about the nature of the materials in his possession, and the verdict did not bode well. In a detailed letter to Gershom Scholem, he expressed the fear that his deep-seated methodological reservations concerning the Arcades Project had been borne out. Benjamin had long flirted with an experimental method of composition he referred to as the “dialectical image.”² Under the influence of montage techniques that had been used with such success during the 1920s by both surrealists and cinéastes, Benjamin had turned away from the idea of laborious theoretical exposition, preferring instead an uncommented construction of so-called material elements. These “material elements” consisted of either citations or stark empirical observations. When the method was successful — as, for example, in his brilliant, surrealist-inspired collection of aphorisms, One-Way Street — the results were magisterial. As a stylist and social critic, Benjamin, when he was on his game, was a nonpareil. However, when this antitheoretical bent was carried to an extreme, the final result could prove infuriating: contra Benjamin’s own pantheistic expectations — he was prone to reading both nature and society as inspired palimpsests or “texts” (as he remarks in the Arcades Project, “The expression ‘the book of nature’ indicates that one can read the real like a text”; PW, 574) — the types of empirical observations he had in mind were rarely self-explanatory.

Upon receiving the manuscript for which his hopes had been so keen, Adorno believed that his worst fears had been confirmed. In essence, the “manuscript” for the Arcades Project consisted of Benjamin’s working notebooks. It contained thousands of fascinating and suggestive citations culled from predominantly French sources Benjamin had consulted during years of painstaking research at the Bibliothèque Nationale. Yet, the theoretical “glue” that would allow the membra disjecta of the Arcades to cohere into a meaningful whole seemed all but absent. Adorno articulated these concerns as follows:

At the beginning of the previous year [1948] I finally received the arcades material that had been hidden in the Bibliothèque Nationale. Last summer I worked through the material exhaustively, and problems arose that I must discuss with you. The most difficult aspect is the extraordinary inattention to theoretically formulated ideas as opposed to the enormous store of excerpts. That may in part be explained from the idea that was explicitly expressed on one occasion (and which to me is problematical) that the work should be merely “assembled” [montieren]; that is, compiled from citations, such that the theory leaps forth without one having to append it as interpretation. Were that to have been possible, only Benjamin himself would have been able to accomplish it; whereas I have always been faithful to the standpoint of the Hegelian Phenomenology of Spirit, according to which the movement of the concept, of the matter itself, is coincident with the explicit thought process of the reflecting subject. Only the authority of sacred texts would stand as a refutation of this conception, and the Arcades Project has avoided precisely this idea. If one takes, as I would like, the montage idea not entirely à la lettre, it might have easily turned out that Benjamin’s ideas could have been formed from countless citations (PW, 1072)

One can well imagine Adorno’s heart sinking when he came across the following bold declaration of intent in Arcades Convolute (file) N, “On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress”: “Method of this project: literary montage. I needn’t say anything. Merely show. I will purloin no valuables, appropriate no ingenious formulations. But the rags, the refuse — these I will not inventory but allow, in the only way possible, to come into their own: by making use of them” (574).

Yet, in one sense Adorno was wrong: it does not seem that Benjamin, whatever his methodological eccentricities, seriously contemplated fashioning the Arcades Project from a montage of citations. At the same time, the interpretive misgivings Adorno expresses in the remarks just cited remain legitimate and troubling. In the Arcades Project one encounters the occasional, characteristically brilliant aperçu; yet the contours and proportions of the finished whole remain to this day an object of conjecture. In their foreword to the English edition, translators Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin — whose prodigious labors merit unstinting gratitude and admiration — implicitly take a stand against Adorno’s theoretical skepticism. Instead, they perceive a positive “compositional principle at work,” the aforementioned precept of montage. Correspondingly, they proceed to compare the Arcades Project with kindred works from the same period such as One-Way Street and A Berlin Childhood Around Nineteen-Hundred. “What is distinctive about The Arcades Project,” they suggest, “is the working of quotations within the framework of montage, so much so that they eventually far outnumber the commentaries.”). Though the translators’ bona fides are certainly above suspicion, here they have attempted, rather transparently, to make a virtue out of a necessity — thereby following the precedent of Benjamin’s German publisher, Suhrkamp Verlag, which wishfully sought to compare the Arcades Project with Friedrich Schlegel’s Philosophical Fragments and Nietzsche’s Will to Power.

The problem is that, in contrast to the two aforementioned Benjamin volumes, in which the montage principle is consummately employed, with the Arcades Project the citations remain entirely unintegrated: try as one might, one searches in vain for an organizing principle or guiding precept. As Susan Buck-Morss has observed in her exhaustive survey of the Arcades Project, The Dialectics of Seeing, the 900 pages of fragments, organized into 36 “Convolutes,” provide “insufficient evidence as to the overall conception that guided Benjamin’s research.” In sum, “the Passagen-Werk itself does not exist.”³

Of course, the preceding remarks stand in need of qualification. Existence or nonexistence can often be a matter of degree. To declare that the Arcades Project is neither a book nor a meaningful arrangement of fragments begs the question of precisely what it is, or what Benjamin intended it to be. But an additional obstacle to reaching an understanding concerning the nature of the Arcades Project lies in the fact that Benjamin’s own conception underwent a number of crucial transformations. Buffeted about the continent during the “low, dishonest decade” prior to the European catastrophe, his methodological conception for the Arcades Project seemed to alter in accordance with his own changing existential and political fortunes.

“The Primacy of Politics”

Benjamin described the Arcades Project as “the theater of all my struggles and all my ideas.” As he once wrote to Scholem: work on the Arcades begins to “howl … in my nights in the manner of a small beast if I do not take it to drink at the most distant sources.”⁴ The question arises: why was it that Benjamin elected to endow the “material culture” of nineteenth-century Paris — railroads, panoramas, barricades, exhibitions, city streets, gas lighting, the stock exchange, and so forth — with such world-historical import and meaning? Moreover, what relevance would his peculiar obsession with a quaint, yet antiquated nineteenth-century building form — the arcades — have for the momentous political struggles of the Popular Front era, with which Benjamin was so concerned during this period of his life? After all, Benjamin viewed the Arcades primarily as a political intervention. Speaking of his intentions for the Arcades, he observes: “The Copernican revolution in historical perception is as follows … Politics attains primacy over history” (PW, 490–91). Benjamin was not attempting to recoup the past for its own sake, but as a part of an ongoing discourse of progressive social and cultural contestation. A few years earlier in One-Way Street, he felicitously characterized his new identity as a writer and critic as a “strategist in the literary struggle.”⁵

A quick glance at the headings for the various files simultaneously piques one’s curiosity and adds to the confusion. On the one hand, there are the “methodological” Convolutes in which Benjamin reflects on his various theoretical objectives. These files are concerned with the writings of Fourier, Baudelaire, Proust, Marx, C. J. Jung, and the surrealists, all of whom provided major sources of conceptual inspiration. However, the most important methodological file is clearly Convolute “N,” “Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress.” There, Benjamin discusses the cryptic relationship between “dreaming” and “awakening,” underlines the importance of the visual or “imagistic” component of the project, and, with disarming frankness, concedes the epistemological centrality of “theology” to its overall success. An examination of Convolute “N” makes it clear that Benjamin was pursuing above all a utopian-eschatological revitalization of Marxism. In Benjamin’s view, insofar as orthodox Marxism had itself succumbed to a host of economic and scientific prejudices (rendering Marxism itself “bourgeois,” as it were), only a massive infusion of utopian and aesthetic concepts could redeem it from its current state of advanced senescence.

The following musings from Convolute “N” are representative of Benjamin’s theoretical concerns, as well as of his patented technique of philosophical “micrology” — the art of discerning the major tendencies of an epoch from its apparently most trivial phenomenal manifestations. As Benjamin puts it: “In what way is it possible to conjoin a heightened ‘graphicness’ [Anschaulichkeit] to the realization of the Marxist method? The first stage in this undertaking will be to carry over the principle of montage into history. That is, to assemble large-scale constructions out of the smallest and most precisely cut components. Indeed, to discover in the analysis of the small individual moment the crystal of the total event” (PW, 575).

Yet the bulk of the Arcades Convolutes contain the so-called material elements for Benjamin’s study — citations and empirical observations pertaining to the material culture of nineteenth-century Paris. These meticulously culled passages embody the aforementioned “smallest and most precisely cut components,” which, through the technique of montage, would ultimately coalesce to form the Arcades Project itself. A partial list of the file names provides a good idea of Benjamin’s thematic preoccupations: “Arcades”; “Fashion”; “Exhibitions”; “The Interior”; “Haussmannization”; “Dream City and Dream House, Dreams of the Future”; “The Flaneur”; “Prostitution, Gambling”; “Panorama”; “Photography.”

In these files Benjamin was at pains to establish a meaningful correlation between the phenomenal manifestations of nineteenth-century Parisian life and the economic sphere — or, bluntly put, “capital.” Thereby, he wished to amplify a fundamental Marxian insight: industrial capitalism heralded an age of leisure and abundance; yet, this utopian potential remained distorted and repressed owing to retrograde “relations of production” — the injustices of “class society.” This is one of the reasons that Benjamin took the writings of the utopian socialists — Charles Fourier, Robert Owen, Saint-Simon — so seriously. He believed that their doctrines contained, quite literally, “wish images” (Wunschbilder) and “dream fantasies” (Traumphantasien) of a future classless society. To its detriment, orthodox Marxism — which, under Stalin, had congealed into a “science of domination” — trivialized these thinkers as “merely” utopian.

Aware of the pitfalls of “vulgar Marxism,” Benjamin was also at pains to avoid a deterministic reading of nineteenth-century material culture — that is, an interpretation that linked culture too directly with economic developments. One of his keys to avoiding this standard Marxist trap was the category of “expression” (Ausdruck). As he remarks in the Arcades Project: “On the doctrine of the ideological superstructure: … if the infrastructure in a certain way determines the superstructure, but if such determination is not reducible to simple reflection, how is it then … to be characterized? As its expression. The superstructure is the expression of the infrastructure.” But, as we shall see, in practice Benjamin’s efforts were often indistinguishable from the vulgar Marxism he otherwise scorned.

A few illustrations culled from the “material” (as opposed to “methodological”) Convolutes will help to exemplify what Benjamin had in mind. In the Convolute on the “Arcades,” for example, Benjamin observes: “People associated the ‘genius of the Jacobins with the genius of the industrials,’ but they also attributed to Louis-Philippe the saying: ‘God be praised, and my shops too.’ The arcades as temples of commodity capital.” In this way, Benjamin sought to highlight the fact that the “use-value” of the arcades, as a potential locus of material plenty, has been vitiated by considerations of “exchange value” or profit maximization. A few pages later, he appended a related insight that was also meant to illustrate the destructive predominance of the commodity form: “[Siegfried] Giedion shows (Building in France, p. 35) how the axiom, ‘Welcome the crowd and keep it seduced,’ leads to ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• The Frankfurt School Revisited
• Between Proust and the Zohar Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project
• The Adorno Centennial The Apotheosis of Negative Dialectics
• What Is Heideggerian Marxism?
• Critical Reflections on Marcuse's Theory of Revolution
• The Lion in Winter Leo Lowenthal and the Integrity of the Intellectual
• Levinas and Heidegger The Anxiety of Influence
• Karl Jaspers The Paradoxes of Mandarin Humanism
• Exiting Revolution
• What We Can Learn from the Revolutions of 1989
• From the “Death of Man” to Human Rights The Paradigm Change in French Intellectual Life, 1968–86
• The Republican Revival Reflections on French Singularity
• Postscript Hexagon Fever
• What Is Global Democracy?
• Religion and Public Reason A Contemporary Debate
• The Disoriented Left A Critique of Left Schmittianism
• Kant at Ground Zero Philosophers Respond to September 11
• Notes
• Index