Walter Benjamin

Overpowering Conformism

Esther Leslie

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2000
• eBook ISBN: 9781783719617
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Democracy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Esther Leslie's path-breaking study of Walter Benjamin is unlike any other book presently available in English on Benjamin, in seeking to make a case for a more politicised reading of Benjamin's oeuvre. In looking at the entirety of Benjamin's work - rather than the four or five essays available in English which tend to form the Benjamin 'canon' - Leslie offers powerful new insights into a key twentieth-century political thinker, correcting the post-structuralist bias that has characterised so much Benjamin scholarship, and repositioning Benjamin's work in its historical and political context. In her examination of Benjamin's commentary on the politics and aesthetics of technology - from Benjamin's work on nineteenth-century industrial culture to his analyses of the Nazi deployment of the bomber - Esther Leslie re-contextualises Benjamin's writings in a lucid and cogently argued new study.

CHAPTER 1

Explosion of a Landscape

Analogy between a person and a switchboard, on which are thousands of bulbs; suddenly one set extinguishes, then the other, and then they are relit.

‘Pariser Passagen’ 1 (1927–29)¹

‘Zum Planetarium’: on a betrayed elective affinity

Highly technologized, imperialist war reverberates in Benjamin’s writings.² A number of his essays and reviews refer to the largescale destruction delivered by war. These writings clatter in the unnerving silence of a ceasefire, soon to be interrupted by even more catastrophic bloodfests. Benjamin warns that the 1914–18 war cast just the shadow of a brutality soon to be superbly outbid. The armies of the future will deploy technologies of far greater destructiveness;³ troops will be immeasurably more sadistic and bloodthirsty;⁴ war will be total, and inescapable – it will be fought by new technological means. Chemical warfare turns soldiers and civilians alike into targets.⁵ A short piece from 1925 named the gaseous killing tools manufactured in I.G. Farben’s Hoechst, Agfa and Leverkusen plants and at other ‘respectable’ laboratories and institutes. ‘Die Waffen von morgen: Schlachten mit Chlorazetophenol, Diphenylamchlorasin und Dichloräthylsulfid’ speculates on the consequences of chemical warfare.⁶ Gas warfare is described as a military attack by a barely visible but choking penetrant which permeates everything, diffusing from the warfront, slithering into cities and under the skin of civilians. Military atrocity is intensified by technological means. Shell-shock jolts a mass psychosis for civilian populations, who in previous wars remained remote from events in the combat zone.⁷ I.G. Farben were not alone in developing poison gases so deadly no gas masks could give protection.⁸ Though the Hague Convention before the Great War had outlawed gas deployment, Ypres in 1915 was the testing ground for chemical weaponry which broke the stalemate of trench warfare. The modern, states Benjamin in an early note in the Passagenwerk, is a time of hell.⁹ The most modern technological inventions, products of capitalist research and development, encompass the latest military gadgets that mete out battlefield punishments. For Benjamin, war features as the destructive life-consuming aspect of technological development. The vast accumulated resources clotted by the factory system in the second half of the nineteenth century increase productive potential, but also boost massively the potential for destruction. Benjamin’s commentary on military technology provides a starting-point for his critical analysis of technology in general. The 1914–18 war marks the historical breakdown of the promissory ideology of technological benefit. The Great War provides a clanging riposte to the credo of perpetual historical progress guaranteed through technological innovation.

Einbahnstraße (One Way Street), Benjamin’s brochure on modern existence, which draws on the language of commercial slogans and city signs, was begun early in 1923, completed in 1926 and published by Rowohlt in 1928. Benjamin describes it in letters to Scholem as a work that signals a new orientation in his thought.¹⁰ His habilitation project, an academic dissertation entitled Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (Origin of the German Mourning Play) (1923–25) had not been passed, and so an academic path was barred. He had to identify himself anew as a cultural critic, a freelance journalist, writing weekly reviews, articles and lectures for the more or less mass media of the Weimar Republic. He describes this period, which begins with the aphoristic spoutings of Einbahnstraße, as the start of a new ‘production cycle’. It is to end only with the completion of a study of the Parisian arcades.¹¹ The previous ‘production cycle’ had been a Germanist one, concluded by his unsuccessful academic submission. The new ‘production cycle’, however, never does reach a close, despite Benjamin’s claims that it will last only a few more weeks. The study of the arcades and their world, now known as the Passagenwerk (Arcades Project), is never completed – Benjamin had stated in a letter to Scholem that he had never written with such a risk of failure.¹² Until the end of his life Benjamin explores the ‘profane motifs’ first exhibited in Einbahnstraße. In his Passagenwerk, he reveals, these motifs parade past in ‘hellish intensification’. Perhaps some sort of systematic orientation in Benjamin’s thought can be uncovered around the ‘profane motifs’ of Einbahnstraße and the Passagenwerk.¹³ What Benjamin meant by ‘profane motifs’ was not revealed to Scholem, for he was himself unclear. Many themes in these two works, and others, cluster around questions concerning technology and techniques. Benjamin’s absorption in the effects of technology and technological change duplicates the fascination of nineteenth-century commentators charting industrial progress, commentaries that are reproduced and explored in the various files of themed notes in the Passagenwerk. For Benjamin, technology opens up access to new realms of experience, perception and consciousness. Always relating technological developments to human experience, Benjamin’s study of technology turns into a type of anthropology, as well as political critique. But profanity also intimates Benjamin’s turn to the world, the common, the impious. This move meshed with his encounter with Marxism.

Georg Lukács’ Geschichte und Klassenbewußtsein (History and Class Consciousness) (1923), read in Capri, was an important influence. Benjamin brands communism as that which is rooted in practical experience. This rooting, as Benjamin had alleged in a letter to Gerhard-Gershom Scholem, written on 29 May 1926, makes it the corrective for its political assertions and avowed goals.¹⁴ The stance was adopted from Lukács. Another letter to Scholem in 1924 relates how the key insight in Lukács’ book is its philosophical underpinning for the assertion that theory is understood through practice.¹⁵ The activism of the Latvian Bolshevik Asja Lacis (Benjamin met her in Capri in 1924) provided a model of political practice. Lacis was part of a politically active avant-garde dedicated to developing the cultural practice of the Soviet Communist Party. Lacis worked in Germany too, with Brecht’s theatre in the 1920s and on Erwin Piscator’s agitprop spectaculars. She wanted to generate a revolutionary pedagogy, specifically through theatre work with proletarian children. Benjamin considered her an active builder of the post-revolutionary society: using the fashionable political language of the time, he called her an ‘engineer’ in the dedication in Einbahnstraße. He fell in love with her. He made himself resemble her by adopting Marxism as a framework. And yet, he had to make it his own too. He had to be critical. His commentary on his new political environment was voiced in Einbahnstraße.

‘Tankstelle’ (Petrol Station) is the opening blast in this slim volume which edits philosophy into scenes, freezeframing it into stills hung under captions or titles. ‘Tankstelle’ tenders a constructivist-inspired analogy between literary technique and machine maintenance.¹⁶ Here Benjamin specifies a type of literary production closer to journalism or political polemic effected by commentators who specialize in knowing the social world and its relations. The order is to avoid vague and grand gestures.

Opinions are to the huge apparatus of social existence what oil is to machines; one does not go up to a turbine and pour machine oil all over it. One applies a little to concealed spindles and joints that one has to know.¹⁷

In order to propagate opinions and critique, ‘Tankstelle’ recommends the fabrication of leaflets, posters, pamphlets and newspaper articles, all apt and valid forms of artistic production. ‘Tankstelle’ suggests that technology has enabled new literary forms, mass-reproducible and able to respond rapidly to events and situations. Benjamin advocates ‘prompt language’ and the spurning of the ‘pretentious universal gesture of the book’.¹⁸ Such a stance is reiterated in the book’s format. Ernst Rowohlt published Einbahnstraße as a booklet, and its typography was designed to emulate the shock-effects and chaotic experimentalism of 1920s’ advertising and newsprint. Technology facilitates new modes of presentation, and it suggests new matter for representation. The dust jacket, by the montagist Sascha Stone, was a scrambled photomontage of road signs and shop signs; street furniture and urban bric-à-brac demanding, confrontationally, the right to be exposed to philosophical inquiry. Benjamin was devising modes of address appropriate for modern propagandizing.

He also addresses questions of class struggle. A few pages into the book, ‘Feuermelder’ (Fire Alarm) couples technology and the technological potential for destruction with the balance of class forces.¹⁹ In ‘Feuermelder’, Benjamin forecasts comprehensive economic and technical catastrophe. ‘Feuermelder’ does not present a romantic vignette of class warfare as an even fight to the death carried out in a style reminiscent of old-style army officers. Benjamin rebuffs such geometry of transformation with its interminable line of endless movement, and its presentation of history as an open book. Such history alleges that one fine day the struggle of the two opposing classes will result in victory for one side, and defeat for the other. Benjamin counters this by insisting that the bourgeoisie is necessarily condemned to expiration through its internal contradictions, irrespective of whether it succeeds in suppressing the proletariat at any specific moment in time. Capitalist decline is inevitable. The communistic reorganization of social relations is, however, not inevitable. And, because the stakes of the struggle are lopsided, if the proletariat does not win, not just the bourgeois class but the whole of humanity is condemned to extinction. In a scenario of ‘socialism or barbarism’,²⁰ Benjamin poses a momentous question: will the bourgeoisie be destroyed by itself or by the proletariat?²¹ Capitalist decline without communist revolution, he insists, means absolute annihilation in war and economic collapse. Benjamin does not suppose the triumph of the proletariat to be a question of historical inevitability, but rather a matter of social necessity whose realization is uncertain. He defies the oblivious optimism of the vulgar-Marxist interpretation of social change. Such Marxian optimism typically reveals itself to be inevitabilistic, evolutionist and technologically determinist, that is, innocently reliant on the blossoming of technologies of production. Benjamin claims that technology is not the guarantor of beneficial social evolution – or revolution – as is falsely asserted by the social democrats. As long as technology exists within capitalist production relations, it is bound to turn out to be a vehicle of disaster. Technological development is not in itself a prelude to a reorganization of production relations that automatically redistributes power to the proletariat. Making political activity a matter of deadlines, tactics and class-conscious organization, Benjamin asserts that ‘the burning ignition fuse must be severed before the spark reaches the dynamite’.²² The abolition of the bourgeoisie must be accomplished before an ‘almost calculable’ moment of economic and technical development, signalled by inflation and gas warfare. Proletarian power is not a mechanical, natural or inevitable result of technological change, but a possible, though not guaranteed, interruption of calamitous technological developments. The fizzling ignition-fuse, emblem of the devastating, explosive power of the bourgeoisie, must be severed before the spark makes contact with the dynamite. Dynamite suggests the contradictions of bourgeois order; its affinity to destruction is matched by its accumulation of a marvellously powerful technical and economic potential. ‘Feuermelder’ pictures the damage caused by technological expansion, and concludes that only the proletariat can engage in humanitarian damage-limitation.

Though Benjamin refuses the determinism of evolutionary historical advancement through technological change, his re-framing of the concept of Technik and its role in class struggle and historical change draws on another determinism, apparent in the assertion of an ‘elective affinity’.²³ The final entry in Einbahnstraße, ‘Zum Planetarium’ (To the Planetarium), proposes a marriage between humankind and modern technology. In the ruinous nights of total war, states Benjamin, an ecstatic feeling shook the ‘limb structure’ of a humanity manoeuvred into connection with powerful technologies.²⁴ Benjamin conceives the world war as an attempted communion, through technology, between national collectives, but the encounter was warped. The world war was internationalism twisted into gross distortion. Through the media of new technologies, mass populations related to external nature and to each other as if intoxicated, evoking an ancient pre-scientific encounter between humanity and cosmos, which had been displaced since the post-Renaissance promotion of a predominantly optical comprehension of the world. The ecstatic encounter of the masses and technology is described as copulation, an index of both sexual delight and the birth of the new.²⁵ Technological forces penetrated the earth in their wooing of the cosmos. Human masses, gases and high-frequency electrical currents cut through landscapes, claims Benjamin, exhibiting a distinct fascination in war’s potency. New constellations emerged in the sky, while air space and sea-depths hummed with propellers, and shafts were dug deep into the earth.²⁶ The transmutation of the landscape by industrial warfare means that nature is reinvented through technology. Technological organization infuses human relations, realigning the relationship between self and environment. Bodies are infused and enthused by technology. New technologies are born. From the collusive collision between proletariat and technology, an organic-technological techno-body is generated. Technology and humanity scheme together to form a collective, social body. The mass revolts that follow the world war are...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface: An Accumulation of Technological Themes
• 1. Explosion of a Landscape
• 2. Benjamin’s Objectives
• 3. Berlin Chthonic, Photos and Trains and Films and Cars
• 4. Dream Whirled: Technik
• 5. Murmurs from Darkest Europe
• 6. The Work of Art in the Age of Unbearable Capitulation
• 7. Time for an Unnatural Death
• Benjamin’s Finale: Excavating and Remembering
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index