Anarcho-Modernism: Toward a New Critical Theory in Honour of Jerry Zaslove

By Ian Angus

This volume is a collection of thirty-eight pieces unified by a combination of the playful, primitive aesthetic of literary modernism with the anti-authoritarian, anarchist praxis of radical democratic politics. This bipolar sensibility permeates the work of Jerry Zaslove, to whom the book is dedicated.

Yet even if this sensibility pervades the book, the ideas presented here are all animated by highly conflicting attempts to articulate rigorously the anarcho-modernist stance, its literary forms and its political implications and values. In particular, all the contributors explore the fundamental tension that defines our new century—between bureaucratization and industrialization on the one hand, and the critical and autonomous individual on the other.

The five sections of the work are The Industrialization of Culture; Literature and Aesthetics; Public Education and Literacy; Human Rights and Politics; and Anarchism and Friendship.

Whatever holds together the anarchist solidarity represented in this collection, it isn’t a “principle,” a generality that is made to apply equally to all comers. It’s a particular relation, an affinity, that perhaps can be approached through thinking about friendship as a utopia of the near, the particular, and the concrete—not as a system of generalities for all. This guiding orientation is vital for the reconstruction of a critical theory adequate for our own time.

The contributors are all friends, colleagues and collaborators of Jerry Zaslove, many of whom, such as Russell Jacoby, Robin Blaser, Wayne Burns, Harvey Graff, David Kettler, Wolf-Dieter Narr, Jeff Wall and Heribert Adam, are well established and widely recognized in their fields. There are also many newer authors included here whose work is sure to become equally well known over time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Talonbooks
• Release date: Sep 15, 2014
• ISBN: 9780889228733

Book preview

ANARCHO-MODERNISM:

TOWARD A NEW CRITICAL THEORY

In Honour of Jerry Zaslove

Edited by Ian Angus

Talonbooks

2001

Acknowledgements

This volume would not have been possible without the enthusiastic participation and collaboration of the contributors, as well as other friends and associates of Jerry Zaslove. His name immediately opened many doors, and convinced many otherwise fully occupied people to participate. In particular, I would like to mention Tom McGauley, whose timely intervention spiced up the project and took it in new directions, and Sibylle Zaslove, who kindly located personal photographs of Jerry and allowed them to be printed in the book.

It required considerable dedication to locate and invite friends, associates and comrades from Jerry’s long and influential intellectual career. This difficult task was undertaken by Trish Graham and the project would have been impossible without her collaboration. If, despite our intentions to contact as many of Jerry’s associates as possible, we have overlooked or not been able to contact others who would have liked to be included, I register my sincere apology.

I would also like to record my thanks and regrets to several persons who had intended to contribute to this volume but who finally could not do so due to personal reasons, competing commitments, or other problems: Glenn Deefholts, Roman Onufrijchuk, Robert Russell, Hari Sharma, Michael Steig, Tom Steele, Gary Teeple and Richard Wolin. Finally I would like to thank Karl and Christy Siegler of Talonbooks, without whom this tribute would not have become such a tight volume and also a lovely physical object.

Contents

Introduction

Jeff Wall, Portrait of Jerry Zaslove

PART ONE: THE INDUSTRIALIZATION OF CULTURE

Russell Jacoby, Benjamin in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Paul Kelley, Destruction and Experience: Four Notes on Walter Benjamin

Robert Hullot-Kentor, What is Mechanical Reproduction?

John Doheny, The Industrialization of Education and the Intellectual

Gerald Butler, The Real versus the University Branch of the Culture Industry:

The Academic Institutionalization of the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

PART TWO: LITERATURE AND AESTHETICS

Robin Blaser, Image-Nation 26 (being-thus

Ross Clarkson, The Literary Community:

A community of those who have no community

David Wallace, In Search of a Democratic Aesthetic, or Does the Novel Still Matter?

Martha Langford, An Excursion into the Amateur Grotesque

Paul Green, Ein Hungerkünstler: The Fine Art of Starving

Brian Graham, Notes on Kafka’s Intention from In The Penal Colony

Edward Byrne, A Translation of Stéphane Mallarmé’s La Gloire

Robert D. Callahan, The Films of Jan Svankmajer:

Sweet Horror, or the Revenge of Childhood

Tom McGauley, Yes tribulation bones

Patricia Kilsby Graham, The Leg

Wayne Burns, The Panzaic Principle Once Again

PART THREE : PUBLIC EDUCATION AND LITERACY

Harvey Graff, Literacy’s Myths and Legacies:

From Lessons from the History of Literacy, to the Question of Critical Literacy

Stephen Duguid and Jane Harris, A Dangerous Business: Teaching Humanities on the

Street and in the Gaol

Jennifer Allen Simons, Timeless Values for a New Age

Kath Curran, Forever Mud: Zaslove as Teacher

Kirsten Emiko McAllister, Creating Spaces of Possibility: Jerry Zaslove as Teacher

Richard Pinet and Derek Simons, Public Programming, Pedagogy and

the Public Sphere: The Spectacular State

G.P. Lainsbury, Visions of the North—Scenario 3: Dreams of Exile

Photos of Jerry Zaslov

PART FOUR: HUMAN RIGHTS AND POLITICS

Tom Morris, Aqui se torture / Here they torture

Donald Grayston, Antisemitism in The Pilgrim’s Tale

Jim Chalmers, Negating Caste

Ralph Maud, Tom Bottomore Speaking

Alan Whitehorn, From Alienation to Community: An Existential Journey

Aaron Vidaver, The Twentieth

David Kettler, Interest, Ideology and Culture: From the Protocols of Peace to

    Schlesinger v. Quinto

Heribert Adam, Globalization of Justice: Truth Commissions as an Alternative?

PART FIVE: ANARCHISM AND FRIENDSHIP

Wolf-Dieter Narr and Martin Blobel, Anarchism Today

David Goodway, Aldous Huxley as Anarchist

Richard Day, The University as Anarcho-Community

Peyman Vahabzadeh, Technological Liberalism and the Anarchic Actor

Art Efron, Jerry Zaslove’s Utopia

Michael Mundhenk, A Translation of Sigfried Kracauer’s On Friendship (excerpt)

Ian Angus, Sharing Secrets, or On Burrowing in Public

Contributors

Introduction

After the collapse of the Eastern Bloc in 1989, it is clear enough that the Left must embrace the decentralizing and anti-authoritarian impulses that have informed its anarchist variants more profoundly than its Marxist or social democratic ones. An anarchist sensibility to particularities, a suspicion of rules and law-like procedures, ties such a political inclination (which always remains a tendency rather than a program) to the playful, primitive aesthetic sensibility of modernism. These come together in a democratic populism that paradoxically remains marginal due to the simultaneous shutting down of genuine public speech in the West. Thus, the title anarcho-modernism is intended to indicate the intellectual sensibility of the works collected here and inspired by the life in thought of Jerry Zaslove.

Perhaps what I mean by an anarcho-modernist sensibility can be elucidated with reference to the approach of radical contextualism that Jerry takes to the interpretation of literary works.

The contextualist must find ways to realise the experience and represent that experience with an empirical basis for his or her belief that the representation of experience which she or he ‘has’ can be realised in this society and culture. The critic completes the experience of the work of art by giving evidence of herself as a thinking and feeling individual who is impressed by changing historical circumstances, shifting contexts of value, the insufficiency of cultural norms, and the difficulty of accepting permanence as an aesthetic value. The act of completion is a social act which demonstrates the situational immediacy of aesthetic experience.¹

In this way, the reader begins from the work, but completes it in a social act which questions the established limits of the representation of experience. The sensibility expressed in a literary work is thus a point of entry into a critique of contemporary experience. This critique of experience has led Jerry to argue in a recent essay that The spectator of the modern world is the homeless cosmopolitan who is no longer the culture bearer of former times. The new culture bearer is the bourgeois spectator who is the carrier of history without culture and therefore a carrier of violence in-built into the culture.² The literary critic becomes a critic, not only of contemporary culture (as the cultural studies crowd has it), but of violence done by culture through the disemboweling of experience. The anarcho-modernist sensibility, which is achieved as a completion of readings of modernist works, thus stands as an engaged, personal, concrete opposition to the enforced limits of contemporary bureaucratic and consumer culture.

It is the task of the critic, the radical intellectual, to wage war on these limits. Though, in a war which seeks to recover and re-value dismissed experience, laughter is often a stronger weapon than the sword. Speaking of Heinrich Heine and the basic affinity of the pariah to the people, Hannah Arendt referred to "that simple joie de vivre which one finds everywhere in children and in the common people—that passion which makes them revel in tales and romances… "³ The intellectual pariah always has friends, though not usually in high places.

Yet even if this sensibility does pervade the book, the ideas presented here do not constitute a consistent package. They are animated by conflicting attempts to articulate rigorously the anarcho-modernist sensibility, its literary forms, and its political implications and values. In particular, the contributions explore the fundamental tension that defines our time, between bureaucratization and industrialization on the one hand, and criticism and independence on the other—animated by a whiff of utopia made perceptible by the constant search for something better.

Jerry Zaslove’s work has had a profound impact on Vancouver, Simon Fraser University and far beyond. His retirement as the founding Director of the Institute for the Humanities, an activist-oriented public education centre with ties around the world, provides the occasion for this tribute by friends, comrades, students, co-workers and teachers. The diverse array of essays, reminiscences, stories and poems collected here stands as a testimony to the life of an intellectual radical that will, one hopes, offer aid and comfort to those of coming generations. Paying tribute to one’s elders and influences doesn’t take away from the tasks set by tomorrow and the day after, but gives us courage to carry on. Jerry’s influence—over Vancouver and the world is the only way I can put it—says something about the precarious role of British Columbia in Canada, about anarchism (which is always local and, indeed, could be called the pinprick of locality in any debate or concern), and also about the importance of the anarchist sensibility in this place. The Wobblies were once strong here and their spirit remains.

The division of the book into sections is primarily for convenience and is, of necessity, somewhat arbitrary. The essays range over a gamut of topics or, better said, they integrate various concerns in a way that is characteristic of Jerry’s own work. Nonetheless, some categorization by topic seemed useful in order to isolate and define separately the themes that become mixed in argument and presentation. The five sections here represent some of the main thematics that inform Jerry Zaslove’s work—though they are by no means exhaustive. Jerry is not only, like everyone else, seen from many perspectives, but also this perspectival character is enhanced by the fact his work takes him into many different corners and specialities of academic and community work, and thus into many different discursive communities. Any totalization that might emerge from this volume is built upon a multitude of perspectives that cannot be rendered strictly compatible. Thus, the totality is riven with the tensions and contradictions inherent in a complex personality, political actor and intellectual sensibility.

Part One, entitled The Industrialization of Culture, takes up the contemporary situation of the intellectual, understood as a protagonist of culture. The problem of the culture industry that was signalled by Horkheimer and Adorno in the 1940s and first publicly debated in the 1950s, has now become not only the external environment of the university, but has now come to structure the so-called ivory tower itself. First, artists and intellectuals were pushed into the university as a refuge from the commercial forces that spelled the decline of their ability to make a living directly from culture. They had to teach it instead. Since then, the university has been, and is being, restructured by those same commercial forces. The loss of the university as a non-commercial, publicly-funded public sphere is the crucial aspect of the contemporary situation of the intellectual and culture. While this battle is not fully over yet, and may well continue for some time without resolution, it is clear by now that this situation has become even more radically problematic for the future. It thus seemed fitting that this common concern be placed first.

The second section, Literature and Aesthetics, collects meditations derived from literary modernism that contribute to the creation of a sensibility in which individuality, community and democracy may thrive. Your path is poetry, your goal is beyond poetry says Robin Blaser in his contribution. Even if he doesn’t want to be held to it exactly— because to be exactly sure here would be to erase the uncertainty from which the project’s questioning character derives—the notion that the aim of literary modernism is not simply literary is fundamental to the work of Jerry Zaslove. Wayne Burns re-articulates in his contribution his influential notion of the Panzaic Principle. What makes characters Panzaic… is their function … to show that the senses of even a fool can give the lie to the noblest ideals of even the most profound thinker. The fool may well be the key character of a modernism whose sensibility undermines the pretentious strutting of official forms.

Section three, entitled Public Education and Literacy, enters directly the opposition between critical sensibility and the commercial and bureaucratic forms of education. Teaching, artistic and intellectual projects aim to renew public debate, humanist values in the jail and on the street. These are the forms of cultural criticism and engagement demanded by a new critical theory that may emerge from counterposing literary modernism with a critique of the commercialized situation of the contemporary intellectual. As Kath Curran explains in her account of Jerry Zaslove as a teacher, the job is not to clarify, but to muddy, the waters. False clarity is the ally of pretentious officials. Those fools who are not quite sure, who still have nagging questions, have much to offer the public sphere. Public education must help to articulate these doubts and questions. It must let itself laugh.

Section four, Human Rights and Politics, continues to develop this opposition, but moves the focus from education to politics. What forms of political intervention can encourage revealing domination and injustice and subjecting them to public debate and remedy? Tom Morris shows how the light of the public begins to turn the tables on the torturers. They need silence and work for it. The struggle for the recognition of human rights is both an old and a contemporary one. From the labour struggle early in the twentieth century detailed by David Kettler, to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of the current government South Africa examined by Heribert Adam, it is shown that social justice needs the light of the public. This emancipatory link between the suppressed modernist fool, widespread literacy and the public sphere is a key component of Jerry Zaslove’s thought.

The fifth and final section, Anarchism and Friendship, turns backward on the argument of the previous sections, asking about the values and experiences that orient the emancipatory project. For Jerry Zaslove, despite the importance of Marxism and, especially, the Frankfurt School in his thought, this orientation is found primarily in anarchism. Whatever holds together anarchist solidarity, it isn’t a principle, a generality, that applies equally to all comers. It’s a particular relation, an affinity, that perhaps can be approached through thinking about friendship. Anarchism, friendship: a utopia of the near and concrete, not of generalities for all. These may be the ethics of a new critical theory.

It is an odd experience to edit a book in honour of a friend, someone who is still working to develop his thought and, as ever, engaged in intellectual and political projects to construct and enhance the public sphere. First of all, it is tentative. My selections, organization and introduction adumbrate and define a person and an intellectual project that far outstrips the book itself. Second, and more important, it is heterogeneous. The contributors are not bound by a common doctrine, they are brought together by their common regard for a person, a figure who embodies ethics and practices that they hold in high regard, and about which they ask questions. A heterogeneous affinity, perhaps an anarchist unity-in-difference, an act of friendship intended to recall previous acts.

In his poem As If By Chance, Robin Blaser speaks of love, which is true attention to whatever and sometimes some one and then turns to friendship, which he calls guidance in every attention.⁴ Jerry’s example has been such a guidance. The attentions of the contributors to this volume overlap and diverge, though we share a common debt for guidance in these attentions. But this debt is not simply a private one. It is a debt for the reminder to take our suppressed experiences into the public sphere. This guidance is important for the reconstruction of a critical theory adequate for our own time. I have been happy to assemble these writings in the honouring and extending of this project, but in the end it is Jerry’s book, not mine. It makes a worthwhile contribution to such a needed reconstruction.

Anarcho_0013_001

Notes

1. The term radical contextualism was coined by Jerry to refer to the anti-formalist approach that he derived from Wayne Burns and Stephen Pepper. The quotation is from Jerry Zaslove, course notes for English 366, Spring 2000, Radical Contextualism: Studies in Critical Approaches to Literature.

2. Jerry Zaslove, Sigfried Kracauer’s Cosmopolitan Homelessness—The Lost Cause of an Idea in the Film Age in Cosmopolitans in the Modern World, ed. Suzanne Kirkbright, (München: iudicium Verlag Gmbh., 2000), 144.

3. Hannah Arendt, The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition in The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age ed. Ron H. Feldman, (New York: Grove Press, 1978), 71.

4. Included in the collection, Robin Blaser, The Holy Forest (Toronto: Coach House Press, 1993), 325.

Anarcho_0014_001

Portrait of Jerry Zaslove by Jeff Wall, (September 2001).

PART ONE:

THE INDUSTRIALIZATION OF CULTURE

 Benjamin in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Russell Jacoby

For Jerry Zaslove, friend of the forgotten, ally of the ignored—and intrepid basketball player.

At the time of his suicide in 1940, Walter Benjamin was little known even among the German-speaking cognoscenti; in North American culture he had no presence at all. Yet the unlucky Benjamin was blessed with brilliant and loyal friends like T. W. Adorno, the neo-Marxist culture critic, and Gershom Scholem, the scholar of Jewish mysticism. They rescued his manuscripts; published his books and essays; and wrote appreciations and memoirs. Over the decades, the trickle of Benjamin materials has turned into a raging river. In English alone scores of books and thousands of articles have been written on him. At a conference in Amsterdam several years ago a hundred scholars gave presentations on Benjamin to an overflowing audience. Benjamin surfaces everywhere. In 1999 the Texas writer Larry McMurtry used a Benjamin essay as a springboard for autobiographical reflections improbably titled Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen. At the local fast food place McMurtry "opened a book called Illuminations and read an essay of Benjamin’s first published in 1936. Benjamin’s reflections about the dwindling role of the storyteller provoked McMurtry to delve into his own career writing about vanishing breeds" of cattlemen and cowboys.

Hannah Arendt wrote the introduction to Illuminations, the 1968 collection of Benjamin essays that McMurtry stumbled upon. Thirty years ago she had already mulled on Benjamin’s reputation, comparing it to Kafka’s. Both men received the acclaim in death they lacked in life. The comparisons go further. As Arendt commented, both defy easy categorization. It would be as misleading to recommend Kafka as a short story writer as Benjamin as an essayist. Neither console or entertain. Neither is to be read in the morning sun with coffee and croissants. They are writers of the dusk and the rubble.

Yet Benjamin’s fame is even more mysterious than Kafka’s, as well as more circumscribed. While the educated citizen might know, or pretend to know, Kafka, Walter Benjamin’s name would probably elicit no response. The inexhaustible attention bestowed on Benjamin remains confined to professors and graduate students—an ironic fate since his own teachers rejected his postdoctoral thesis as incomprehensible. With an academic career closed off, Benjamin eked out a life as a free-lance critic and translator; he once satirized the academic fashion of writing fat books. Principle I: The whole composition must be permeated with a protracted and wordy exposition of the initial plan; Or Principle IV, examples should be given for all general concepts. If, for example, machines are mentioned, all different kinds of machines should be enumerated. Today fat books on Benjamin pile up in university libraries.

Apart from Arendt, it is Adorno and Scholem who fashioned Benjamin’s posthumous reputation. Both had been friends of the young Benjamin. Each represented a polar side of Benjamin—and each jealously monitored the other’s influence. Scholem feared that Benjamin might become too Marxist, and Adorno feared he might be become too theological. In fact, Benjamin was drawn to both Marxism and Judaism, materialism and spirituality, conventional politics and messianic utopianism. He called for a revolutionary aesthetics and studied Hebrew with the intention of moving to Palestine. Benjamin’s thought refuses to relinquish either the street or the temple. In a statement typically limpid and ambiguous he wrote, My thinking is related to theology as a blotting pad is related to ink. It is saturated with it. Were one to go by the blotter, however, nothing of what is written would remain.

Benjamin collected books and postcards, and wrote lovingly about collecting. For him the collected item radiated history. One has only to watch a collector handle the objects in his glass case. As he holds them in his hands, he seems to be seeing through them into their distant past as though inspired. He called collectors the physiognomists of the world of objects. If the physiognomist reads character from human faces, the collector interprets fate from the period, the region, the craftsmanship, and former ownership of an object. In fact Benjamin did more than prize the collector. He approached the world as a collector, seeking to fathom the meaning of history by assembling its objects.

He was a collector with a twist, since he revered defamed or ignored objects. Benjamin inventoried the world as if everything mattered equally. He once wrote that the chronicler, who recounts events without distinguishing between major and minor ones, obeys the truth nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history. This was Benjamin’s principle: nothing should be lost. Even the most trivial object can illuminate history. Benjamin searched for truths in the everyday stuff of street and home. He sought to divine the essence of the nineteenth century industrial world from its debris. This effort to unlock the mystery of the industrial culture became his central mission, which he pursued by combing the streets of the Paris he loved—or, more exactly, by combing old books about these streets.

The materials he culled from these books and his commentary on them constitute The Arcades Project, Benjamin’s masterpiece, which he worked on for thirteen years. For Benjamin, the Parisian Arcade or covered street served as a prism of industrial capitalism. He cited from an early nineteenth-century Parisian guide that identified the Arcades as a "recent invention of industrial luxury … glass-roofed, marble-paneled corridors … Lining both sides of the arcades, which gets its light from above, are the most elegant shops, so that the passage is a city, a world in miniature." Benjamin deliberated on every facet of the Arcades: the lighting, construction, foot traffic, advertising, stores, as well as its prostitutes, gamblers, bohemians and rag pickers. He ranged far and wide; he devoted several hundred pages to Baudelaire, whom he considered the poet of Parisian streets. He wrote about mirrors, dandies and photography. For students of urban life and industrial culture, The Arcades Project is a gold mine of insights and aperçus.

A gold mine, but not gold. Much is dross. It thuds onto the desk at over a thousand pages. Benjamin never finished it. It remains a series of sketches and plans, not a coherent work. As Susan Buck-Morss put it in her volume on The Arcades Project: This nonexistent text is the object of the present study. Benjamin fills yards of paper quoting but not analyzing descriptions of old Paris. He vacuums up both the essential and the inessential, the illuminating and the unilluminating. The worker next door would be obliged if, in closing the door, you refrained from slamming it. Benjamin quotes this handwritten sign without comment, as well as another from the same building. ANGELA, 2nd floor, to the right. Benjamin often disappears behind banks of citations.

To be sure, the unfinished state of The Arcades Project does not fully explain this mosaic of quotations; it belonged to Benjamin’s method and to his genius. He wanted objects to speak for themselves. By exhibiting scraps and refuse, he would tease out the meaning of nineteenth century civilization. He once called it literary montage. I needn’t say anything, he claimed, merely show. Exactly on these grounds, Adorno, Benjamin’s greatest supporter, was also his greatest critic. Their published correspondence abundantly demonstrates both: the extent to which Adorno viewed The Arcades Project as pathbreaking, and the extent to which he raised fundamental questions about it. I regard the project, he wrote to Benjamin, as the decisive philosophical work which must find utterance today; as a chef d’oeuvre like no other.

Yet Adorno did not mince words of criticism. Against the backdrop of rising Nazism Adorno and Benjamin corresponded about each other’s writings, their fellow refugees and sometimes the political situation; again and again they returned to The Arcades Project. For the present age—accustomed to memos and e-mails—their missives recall another universe, where intellectuals traded thoughts unafraid to be lengthy, complex and tough. The enormous seriousness of the issue, wrote Adorno, is why I must speak so brutally. Adorno questioned Benjamin’s tilt into pure facticity or, as he put it, his superstitious tendency to attribute to mere material a power of illumination that belongs to thinking. Adorno missed in the Benjamin draft an interpretation of the information he presented. The theological motif of calling things by their names tends to switch into a wide-eyed presentation of mere facts. If one wanted to put it rather drastically, one could say that your study is located at the crossroads of magic and positivism. This spot is bewitched.

Adorno wrote Benjamin from New York, where he had emigrated, but Benjamin himself tarried in Paris; he saw himself as defending the last abandoned European post. Yet even Benjamin began to doubt what soon would be left to save. He felt increasingly despondent—the situation of the Jews; the terminal illness of his sister; his inability to get French citizenship papers. Alluding to the Munich Pact, which delivered democratic Czechoslovakia to Hitler, Benjamin pondered, I do not know how long it will still physically be possible to breathe this European air. Friends in New York obtained an American affidavit for him, but in his last letter to Adorno the doomed writer sensed the doors were closing. My great fear is that we have much less time at our disposal than we imagined.

Years earlier Benjamin had written to Scholem that he stood convicted by a society that had no place for my thinking. He was right. The universe of arts and letters had little use for Benjamin’s gnomic brilliance. He bequeathed to an indifferent world, however, a series of shimmering essays and incandescent aphorisms. His writings on art in an age of mechanical reproduction, Kafka, or growing up in Berlin display an incomparable gift of fusing stunning ideas with sensual detail. The nuggets in The Arcades Project can enrich even the weekend prospector. Benjamin’s theseson the philosophy of history, completed shortly before his death, with their charge to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it, inspire countless writers and historians. He had begun his essay on surrealism this way: Intellectual currents can generate a sufficient head of water for the critic to install his power station on them. Today many of us read in light from Benjamin’s station.

The endless attention now given him indicates that the world has finally found room for Benjamin. Or has it? His posthumous reputation is well-deserved, but threatens to solemnize an unsettling thinker and a fragmentary oeuvre. McMurtry highly esteems Benjamin, but as he reads more of his work, the reading leaves him a little disappointed. He is all sparks, but the sparks rarely produce a steady flame. He wonders whether the expectation to produce a brilliant masterwork crippled Benjamin, who exhausted himself accumulating a slag heap of notes. One must also wonder what the unflinching Benjamin would make of the cult that has grown around him. What would he think of successful professors celebrating a defeated writer? Of conferees droning on about an aphoristic thinker? Or of a recent book titled Benjamin for Beginners? Is it possible that Benjamin has succumbed to a mystique that his own work protests?

Destruction and Experience:

Four Notes on Walter Benjamin

Paul Kelley

As most readers of the works of Walter Benjamin would readily admit, experience is his great theme. Experience has been claimed, writes Gary Smith, to constitute the true focal point of [Benjamin’s] analysis of modernity, philosophy of history and theory of the artwork.¹ A survey of his writings, from the earliest to the last, easily bears out the truth of this observation. However, the already problematic concept of experience which Benjamin was repeatedly drawn to examine in such works as The Origins of German Trauerspiel, the essay on Surrealism, the essays on Baudelaire, The Storyteller, the Work of Art essay and the Theses on the Concept of History, is, in most cases, indissociable from the development in modernity of experience’s on-going destruction. Benjamin’s characteristic mode of perception, which was regularly oriented to arresting phenomena at the moment of their imminent disappearance, beholds experience, the sine qua non of subjectivity, of selfhood, of development, of education (Bildung), hence of all social-historical institutions, to be in a state of dissolution. For Benjamin, experience cannot be understood apart from the conditions that foreclose it and mutilate it, despite the fact that it is all the while clung to and appealed to unquestionably. Hence, his marked fascination with destruction and with the destructive character—without vision and wholly indifferent to any imagined future—is to be detected in the subjects Benjamin presents, as well as, tellingly, in the rhetoric of violence he often displays in presenting them.

I.

Writing to his friend Gershom Scholem from his parents’ house in Berlin West in 1931, Benjamin informs him that he has written a little text, Der destruktive Charakter. It is a sketch, based on the person he has been closest to for approximately one year, one Gustav Glück, the director of the foreign division of the National Credit Society.²

This little text, because unsummarizable, is simply better presented.

The Destructive Character

It could happen to someone looking back over his life that he realized that almost all the deeper obligations he had endured in its course originated in people who everyone agreed had the traits of a ‘destructive character.’ He would stumble on this fact one day, perhaps by chance, and the heavier the shock dealt to him, the better his chances of representing the destructive character.

The destructive character knows only one watchword: make room. And only one activity: clearing away. His need for fresh air and open space is stronger than any hatred.

The destructive character is young and cheerful. For destroying is rejuvenating, because it clears away the traces of our own age; it cheers, because everything cleared away means to the destroyer a complete reduction, indeed a rooting out, of his own condition. Really, only the insight into how radically the world is simplified when tested for its worthiness for destruction leads to such an Apollonian image of the destroyer. This is the great bond embracing and unifying all that exists. It is a sight that affords the destructive character a spectacle of deepest harmony.

The destructive character is always blithely at work. It is Nature that dictates his tempo, indirectly at least, for he must forestall her. Otherwise she will take over the destruction herself.

The destructive character sees no image hovering before him. He has few needs, and the least of them is to know what will replace what has been destroyed. First of all, for a moment at least, empty space—the place where the thing stood or the victim lived. Someone is sure to be found who needs this space without occupying it.

The destructive character does his work; the only work he avoids is creative. Just as the creator seeks solitude, the destroyer must be constantly surrounded by people, witnesses to his efficacy.

The destructive character is a signal. Just as a trigonometric sign is exposed on all sides to the wind, so he is exposed to idle talk. To protect him from it is pointless.

The destructive character has no interest in being understood. Attempts in this direction he regards as superficial. Being misunderstood cannot harm him. On the contrary, he provokes it, just as oracles, those destructive institutions of the state, provoked it. The most petty bourgeois of all phenomena, gossip, comes about only because people do not wish to be misunderstood. The destructive character tolerates misunderstanding; he does not promote gossip.

The destructive character is the enemy of the étui-man. The étui-man looks for comfort, and the case is its quintessence. The inside of the case is the velvet-lined trace that he has imprinted on the world. The destructive character obliterates even the traces of destruction.

The destructive character stands in the front line of traditionalists. Some people pass things down to posterity by making them untouchable and thus conserving them: others pass on situations, by making them practicable and thus liquidating them. The latter are called the destructive.

The destructive character has the consciousness of historical man, whose deepest emotion is an insuperable mistrust of the course of things and a readiness at all times to recognize that everything can go wrong. Therefore, the destructive character is reliability itself.

The destructive character sees nothing permanent. But for this very reason he sees ways everywhere. Where others encounter walls or mountains, there, too, he sees a way. But because he sees a way everywhere, he has to clear things from it everywhere. Not always by brute force; sometimes by the most refined. Because he sees ways everywhere, he always stands at a crossroads. No moment can know what the next will bring. What exists he reduces to rubble—not for the sake of the rubble, but for that of the way leading through it.

The destructive character lives from the feeling not that life is not worth living, but that suicide is not worth the trouble.³

This little sketch, with its seemingly endless percussive repetition of the nominative the destructive character… does to its reader that which the destructive character does as a matter of course: it assaults him/her, leaving him/her at a loss, exposing forms of thinking and understanding which once seemed dependable as woefully inadequate. This quality alone makes of it a "Denkbild, a thought figure—neither a visual image nor a literary image, but a third" which partakes of both while remaining neither.⁴ Nonetheless, that it constitutes such a thought-figure is strongly suggested in the conditional mood of its opening words ("It could happen… ), an attitude that is struck out by the presentation, in indicatives, that follows. In short, the two sentences preface a story that can no longer be told, for the one who could tell it is at a loss to tell it—loss of time, loss of insight. In the shock of the retrospective realization of a heretofore unknown truth, only assertions can be offered, and they have the power to reveal the preface as an afterword."

The destructive character is almost impossible to approach—to characterize—from any of the usual vantages, with any of the usual tools: purpose is inadequate, for neither historical nor moral nor pedagogical purposiveness enters into the character of this character. Nor can the character of the destructive character be understood according to psychological theories. For, rather than exhibit a multiplicity of character traits generally considered synonymous with the richness of a creative personality,⁵ the destructive character has but one. But this single trait does not suggest here the unfreedom of the compulsive monomaniac but rather something of a (horrifying) extreme of freedom, a surplus freedom. And to the degree that this is so, it can be said, along with Irving Wohlfarth, that [c]haracter is… one of [the destructive character’s] targets.⁶ The destructive character is the portrait of a freedom that occurs when the shackles of character are removed—no values, no guilt, no indebtedness, no liability, no will, no purpose, no expectation or desire, no fear, no hope, no memory, no past and no future. Likewise, we cannot help but note the absence of the emotion of happiness and/or sadness in a character described as possessing the expressionlessness of a signal. Here there is no renovation, no imagined plenitude, not even a forgotten plenitude. Rather, here only destruction—and destructibility—remains, and remains perfectly: For the destructive character obliterates even the traces of destruction.

A detailed discussion of this little text which would highlight its use and abuse of Nietzsche, its anarchism, its nihilism cannot, unfortunately, be pursued here. (That has been done, and done admirably, by Wohlfarth.) Nonetheless, a few observations are called for. The destructive character is a figure in which the destroyed melancholiac Brooder, the allegorist of the Trauerspiel ⁷ has been transformed from the paralysis of the vita contemplativa to the unbounded energy of the vita activa. The broken, fragmented nature of the world of the Mourning-Play is presented here, but seen in a radically different manner. Where the Brooder seeks to put the world together, to make it meaningful, according to a pattern the key to which has been forgotten, that meaning is to be found, for the destructive character, in the world’s worthiness for destruction. Accordingly, neither faithfulness nor the rationality of the real carry, obviously, no conviction whatever. The world itself is called upon to show cause why it should not be destroyed. The destructive character calls the world to account as in a Last Judgement (Wohlfarth, 161) at the final moment of which it is constantly arriving. This moment, separated from all that precedes it and succeeds it, means that the destructive character, far from occupying the position of timelessness, is one who simply has no time. Thus, in keeping with the absence of time, choice, the sine qua non of liberal politics, is never present.

One could easily ask who would want on their side this character who makes even the expressionless antics of an Arnold Schwarzenegger pale in comparison. Is it not the case that this character who sees ways everywhere destroys all sides? If the performance of this perpetuum mobile (infernal machine?) is in accord with Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feurbach, not to interpret the world but to change it, then its mode of making change is certainly not one any Marxism could readily or easily endorse. Nor is the destruction this character carries out one that can be rendered positive by any extant humanism, liberalist or otherwise, which would seek to marshall it in small does against political, social, or economic evils. Equally, an avowed anti-humanism that would simply re-christen this destruction as a sublimely natural principle, in the manner of Sade, for example, and aim it at culture and religion, as false illusions, would also come away disappointedly empty-handed. No, the destructive character is no team-player. Because the destructive character does what it does in the name of nothing and no one, ideologies and the aporias of ideology-critique are obliterated by an indifference as blithe as it is absolute. Not only does this destruction know no fidelity to any party; it cannot be wilfully made positive because it is emphatically not concerned with construction or creativity at all.

The destructive character—characterless and, hence, anonymous—is that from which a distance is, indeed salutary, as Benjamin wrote of Surrealist reality, which is to say, reality at its most real. It could be said that this figure cannot be seen at all but from a distance—a critical distance, to be sure. When viewed from such a distance, features other than a self-possessed individualism become visible, for the destructive character is without the self self-interest presupposes. Discernible besides a freedom which adheres to a logic of destruction is, of course, the radical strangeness that is, as it were, a corollary to that freedom. This freedom is one in which all traces of anything like personality or even subjectivity have been effaced. The uncanniness of this figure who appears nevertheless to be (somehow) at home everywhere is further intensified when its absences include one more quality considered necessary to the formation of subjectivity, freedom, character, etc., all of which develop in the course of time, thereby developing the subject. That this characterless character is more than frightening is unavoidable, and that he is closer to us than we may care to admit is a thought with its fair share of chilliness. Wohlfarth has noted the disturbing resemblance: The destructive character is no crypto-fascist of Left or Right, though he could be easily mistaken for such. But his motto resembles nothing so much as the socio-economic imperative of bourgeois society itself (Wohlfarth, 170). The destructive character, untroubled and unencumbered by any thought, or any ambivalence or hesitation to which thought might cling, is pure—that is to say, without history, without biography, without experience.

II.

That Benjamin is making, in The Destructive Character, a diagnosis of his own times is unmistakable. A further diagnosis, still without remedial prescription, is to be found in the 1933 essay Experience and Poverty, composed two years after The Destructive Character and just a short time before Benjamin left Germany forever. Experience and Poverty elaborates and extends the theme of destruction and anticipates its even further development in his writings on Baudelaire and in the 1936 essay The Storyteller by extending it to experience (Erfahrung) itself: the radical claim of Experience and Poverty⁸ is that experience (Erfahrung) itself has been destroyed. The world, an interchange with which produces experience, is one through which the destructive character has passed. Experience (Erfahrung), far from being the best teacher, is no teacher at all: one can learn nothing from it. In fact, nothing seems to be its only lesson. The event which goes by the name of experience is simply incommunicable to others regardless of their membership in a community: deprived of its afterlife, its preservation in transmissibility, experience (Erfahrung) has become that through which one merely lives: Erlebnis. Something here of an impotence, perhaps even an enforced passivity, begins to emerge—if only darkly. The question of how they live who are deprived of experience cannot but arise. But the question itself must acknowledge the separation of the two terms experience and life, even if its asker seeks to unify them. This is to ask how that which is merely lived through serves to shape those who live through it (a question which Adorno circled repeatedly). Benjamin addresses this question by means of an irreversible, irreparable rupture in history.

The catastrophe that has put the time out of joint and made noticeable the destruction of experience (Erfahrung) has been the First World War:

… this much is clear: experience has lost its currency… in a generation which has made between 1914–1918 one of the most monstrous experiences (Erlebnisse) in world history. Perhaps that is not as remarkable as it seems. Could one not, at that time, have made the statement that people came from the battlefields having fallen silent? Not richer but poorer in communicable experience …eneration which had still gone to school by horse-tram stood under an open sky in a landscape, and there in the middle of a forcefield of destructive streams and explosions, the tiny, fragile human body … A radically new poverty has come with this monstrous unfolding of technology over human beings. (EP, 731, translation modified)⁹

The destruction of experience (Erfahrung), Benjamin writes, has been accomplished through the elimination of its communicability. The elimination of communicability is not to be understood as applying only the inability of those who had served as soldiers at the front to relate the carnage through which they had lived and which had shattered their psyches—the condition of shell-shock of which Freud wrote. In other words, it is not just a matter that such experience cannot be passed on, or transmitted by those who endured it. For the other side of communication, the audience, also comes into play here: those to whom it could be passed on do not want it, do not want to hear about it, know about it. Consequently, in this essay Benjamin goes on to criticize the retreat into a (false) interiority that was one of the cultural by-products of the war. The other was the mythologization of the soldier as Warrior and the formation of a new human being adequate to the times based on the technologization and armorization of the self as a defense against the cruelties of wide-spread generalized technology. This technologization of human beings was advocated by Ernst Jünger as a form of transcendence in such of his novels as The Storm of Steel, The Soldier, The Worker, and in his photo-books such as The Dangerous Moment and The Transformed World (Die veränderte Welt, 1933),¹⁰ all of which aestheticize numbness as the proper, indeed, heroic, attitude toward modern life.

Benjamin detects in this aestheticization of the correct attitude (Rechtshaltung) an illusion which, to use Anna Freud’s term, amounts to an identification with the oppressor. But rather than argue against its barbarism of total mobilization (die totale Mobilmachung) (Jünger’s phrase—the militarization is obvious) in the name of eternal values and verities, he goes off in quite another direction: toward what he calls a new kind of barbarism, one without any illusions or myths at all.

Barbarism? Indeed. We use it in order to introduce a new, positive, idea of barbarism. Because where does poverty of experience take the barbarian? It makes him begin again, to start anew, to get by with little, to construct with less … Among the great creators there were always the … ones who first made a tabula rasa … [T]hey wanted to have a drawing table; they were constructors. [Konstrukteure] (EP, 734, my translation)

The addition of the epithet positive to barbarism should not mislead us into thinking that it is has something to contribute. The logic is still that of the destructive character’s Appolonianism, one in which ‘Fair is foul, foul fair’ (Wohlfarth, 161). Accordingly, it is reminiscent of the destructive character’s drive to make a clean slate. Positivity, such as it is, therefore consists solely in clearing away all illusions and all institutions from which they spring and through which they are passed along as a new precious inheritance. This clearing away—an absolute disillusionment—then, amounts to, in Weberian terms, a complete disenchantment. To arrest this process of disenchantment at some arbitrary point (and almost any point is more arbitrary than not) results in myth. The new barbarism which Benjamin advocates here is not out to construct a new mythos, a new culture; nor is it out to resist one. It is not out to oppose one myth with another myth à la ideology-critique. Rather, through desistance (Aufhörenkeit), it is dedicated to "surviving [überleben] culture if it has to" (EP, 734, translation modified).

Complete absence of illusions and in spite of that an unsupported acknowledgement of the times is [the new barbarism’s] character. (EP, 734)

By a somewhat roundabout route we are led to confront the decay of experience (Erfahrung) again:

Poverty of experience: one cannot understand it in such a way [that it means] human beings are longing for a new [concept of ] experience. No, they long to be free from experience; they long for an environment in which they can show clearly and distinctly the value [Wert] of their exterior and interior poverty [so] that something decent comes of it. (EP, 734, translation modified, my emphasis)

The new barbarism’s character, like that of the destructive character’s character, has nothing upon which character is founded and nothing to which it attaches—except, that is, its own poverty, especially its poverty of illusions. It lives in a structure in every way consonant with the open secret of its condition of fragility: the glass house (EP, 734). (It is in this connection that Benjamin discusses the architecture of Loos and Le Corbusier, as well as Scheerbart’s novel Lesabendio in this essay.)

Glass is not for nothing such a hard and smooth material to which nothing attaches itself. [It is] also cold and stern … Glass is … the enemy of the secret. It is also the enemy of ownership. (EP, 734, translation modified)

The life of glass, if such a word can be used here, is one of constant danger which the occasion of its shattering makes only too evident. The impoverished of experience live in their milieu as those walking on glass, in a state, as it were, of permanent emergency, in the midst of a catastrophe always about to happen. At the same time however, their vantage point is radically panoptical: they see ways everywhere. Interiority, divested of its opacity, is, as it were, seen through. Things made of glass, Benjamin continues, have no ‘aura.’ (EP, 734).

III.

While aura is, through the dissemination of his essay The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility, probably the most widely-known of his terms and the one automatically and indissolubly associated with Benjamin, there remains, as Susan Buck-Morss,¹¹ among others, has pointed out, a certain ambiguity, or elusiveness as regards its meaning. Although there is a consistency of assertion in Benjamin’s writings that the aura has been lost, an unequivocal response to that loss is not to be found. Rather, that decay, loss, disappearance, is examined from different points of view and in different contexts—according to Benjamin’s method, which, in this respect, did not change from his earliest writings to his last.

There are no fewer than three discussions of the loss of aura in Benjamin’s writings of the 1930s (A Small History of Photography, 1931; The Work of Art in the Age of its Mechanical Reproducibility, 1936; and the essays on Baudelaire, 1936/39). The best-known of these, contained in the Work of Art essay, concerns the decay of the aura of a work of art, a decay that is the result of forces at work from within and from without. On the one hand, aura is dealt a shock from within the development of the institution of art itself by the emergence there of such avant-gardes as Dada and Surrealism. At the same time, the aura of an artwork is dealt a blow from the media of technical reproducibility, photography and film, which are more in accord with a new mode of perception— distraction (Zerstreuung)—one in which aura figures not at all. Regardless of the inner contradictions of the argument (presented here in far too summary a fashion), the result, in any case, is the erosion of the aesthetic appreciation of art. To illustrate his point, Benjamin makes recourse to an analogy of the artwork to nature, strongly suggesting that the withering of the aura applies with equal force to the perception of both (i.e., of art and nature).

The concept of aura… may be usefully illustrated with reference to the aura of natural objects. We define the aura of the latter as the unique phenomenon of distance, however close it may be. If while resting on a summer’s afternoon, you follow with your eyes a mountain range on the horizon or a branch [of a tree], you experience the aura of the mountain or the branch. This image makes it easy to comprehend the social basis of the contemporary decay of the aura.¹²

This particular experience (Erfahrung) of nature, Benjamin claims, is no longer the case. Likewise, such experience of a work of art, to the degree that it is based in authenticity uniqueness, and the authority of tradition which constitute the aura, is also no longer the case. The reproduced and reproducible image has displaced appearance where by the latter is suggested the presence of something that itself, as quality, does not appear—in Kantian terminology, this is, of course, the noumenon. Where appearance relates to the experience (Erfahrung) of a unique object or a person, image does not. In other words, an image not only cannot be experienced, it presents nothing that can be experienced.¹³ The mode of perception characteristic of the image is distraction. It seeks nothing—hence, while it is never disappointed, its lack of disappointment is purchased at the cost of its being without expectation. In the words of Experience and Poverty, distracted perception is impoverished—which is to say, free from experience (Erfahrung).¹⁴

A few sentences later, Benjamin again approaches aura. Here, however, perception is actively (rather than