Introduction

Since his essay, 'The Work of Art in a Period of Technical Reproducibility',^[1] written between 1935 and 1939, was taken up by courses in cultural studies and photography, since the 1970s, Benjamin's writing has been subject to a growth of commentary and interpretation. His idea of the erasure of the aura of the artwork and culture's move to democratization in media such as film has become familiar through translations. But the focus tends to be selective. Other works, such as his radio talks, or his comments on theatre in the Soviet Union,^[2] have been largely overlooked; and his important essay on Brecht and the need for an appropriate mode of writing for political engagement is, though cited, in the shadow of the work-of-art text.. Benjamin's mythicised status is, in a way, odd given, or perhaps might follow from, the sparsity of his completed texts.

His unfinished Passagenwerk^[3] was intended as his major work (begun in 1927) but is no more than a vast card index: quotes (many of them anecdotal), his own notes, and versions of an introduction.^[4] Susan Buck-Morss, in her interpretive re-construction of the arcades project, The Dialectics of Seeing,^[5] describes Passagenwerk as 'a book that was never written ... a massive collection of notes on nineteenth-century industrial culture as it took form in Paris ...'^[6] Benjamin's suicide in September 1940 adds to the mystique - though it was, in a way, a mistake - Benjamin was with a group trying to cross from Vichy France to Spain; they had some documents but were stopped at the frontier, and Benjamin assumed they would be returned, inevitably to an internment camp, and took his life; the next day the other members were allowed through.

Suicide seems to run against the grain of redemption which illuminates much of his writing, but Benjamin offers no easy or pleasing analysis. As Esther Leslie writes, introducing Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism,^[7]

 

Conformism here refers to the energies of conventional interpretation. These ensnare tradition ... in tales devised, or at least approved by, the ruling class and its ideology-mongers. The accumulated experience of the oppressed is overwritten in histories that re-transmit the existing balance of power ... Long dead, Benjamin is himself now part of transmissible tradition. ...

Wresting Benjamin's writings from the conformism that threatens to overpower their reception is the task. Such an assignment is aided by taking cognizance of Benjamin's onslaught on a second conformism ... the conformity of reformist theory and practice ... Nowadays it is frequently reformist-minded theorists who see reflected in Benjamin their own defeatist melancholy and desperate half-hope that, ameliorated by their wishful thinking, things might just work out for the best in the end, somehow. ... This is quite contrary to Benjamin's intent. In his final notes on the concept of history, Benjamin attacks reformist political tactics and economic delusions for their by-passing of the insurgent, self-organized moment of proletarian revolution.^[8]

 

Benjamin, then, for Leslie (and for me) is a revolutionary. Like other members and associates of the Frankfurt School, he revises Marxism for the twentieth century. But he does not give it up, rather seeks to extend it as a means to critique mass culture and its new technologies. This radical aim is pervaded in his writing by a sense of redemption which is specifically Jewish and personal, which he articulated in Paris in the 1920s in conversations with, among others, Ernst Bloch and Gershom Scholem.

 

I want to re-examine three aspects of Benjamin's work, asking whether his radicalism is relevant today, amidst the globalised culture-entertainment-news industry (itself in context of the military-industrial-security state):

•       the democratization of cultural production and reception;

•       the role of technology;

•       and the anticipation of redemption.

 

The second is closely connected to the first; the third remains, to me, impenetrable. In the space available, too, I have little choice but to compound the problem of selective focus by drawing on only a few of Benjamin's texts.

 

Can cultural production can be radically democratised?

From Benjamin's idea of the artist as producer,^[9] the question is how the division of writer and reader, artist and public, or producer and receiver, inherited from European culture since the Renaissance and reproduced in the bourgeois form of the novel, can be collapsed. That is, instead of a reader receiving the writer's narrative, within the shared context of a historically specific culture, can the writer become the reader and the reader the writer? To ask this is more radical than, from post-war French literary theory, asking if the reader completes a text by interpreting it in a particular way. In that scenario, the roles remain distinct. In a later version of this approach, the author dies and the reader assumes a quasi-authorship, but this is still perhaps to attain the status of writer, rather than to intervene in the relations of production in such a way that the categories of writer and reader both collapse. Then, what we call art would no longer be differentiated from the practice of everyday life, and, now, what is called the contemporary in art would merge with what might be called, much more inclusively, the art of today.

 

Benjamin's paper 'The Author as Producer' was delivered to a group of Communist writers in Paris in 1934. Benjamin transposes a Leninist strategy - the workers should take over the means of production - from industry to writing, so the writer takes over (or re-casts) the means of producing literature, insisting on the production-capacity of the reader to collapse the conventional divide between production and reception.

The event at which Benjamin read this paper was organized by the French Communist Party under the name of The Institute for the Study of Fascism. In France in the 1930s, organised opposition to fascism centred in communist and other Leftist groups. In February 1934, the French right staged street confrontations in Paris in which more than a thousand people were hurt and fifteen died.^[10] In response, the Communist Party turned from a Stalinist position - that economic disaster was an objective precondition for revolution and dismissal of social democrats as quasi-fascists - to co-operation with other Left groups; the Communist-affiliation trades unions (CGTU) combined forces, too, with the Socialists and mainstream union federation (CGT) in this popular front. As Leslie notes, Benjamin saw practical communism as a modernised and pragmatic, opposition to the growth of Rightist supremacy, thus distanced from the nineteenth-century theoretical orthodoxies of Marxism. Benjamin's communism is: '... a praxis-oriented set of intellectual outlines for socio-economic critique ...'; Leslie adds, 'Benjamin's communist affiliation was rooted in his historical experience. His communist sympathies were distant from orthodox party conceptions. He describes communism as a 'lesser evil' in comparison to everything else...'^[11].

 

Benjamin's paper bears the imprint of this context., but remains radical and revolutionary, not reformist. He argues that just as, in revolution, workers take over the means of production - a radical democratisation of industry for the common wealth - writers take over the means of literary production for a similarly common good. In process their role in society ceases to be privileged as holders of special insight. In one way, I think Benjamin sees the means of writing as equivalent to the means of industry, enabling authentic production by the workers as readers. And in another way, compatible with the first, I think he sees writers becoming readers.

 

Benjamin sees the technical means of production not neutral in the English sense of the term, but as tools of the power of either capital or revolt. Leslie writes that for Benjamin, 'The technological rationality that nurtures various systems of capitalist domination celebrates its first triumphs in the nineteenth century ... executed by Haussmann in his expansive boulevards ...'^[12] This was part of the material of Passagenwerk, on which he was working while drafting 'The Author as Produicer'.

Benjamin reminds his audience that Plato banned writers from the Republic, raising the problem of autonomy in modern literature as a freedom to write anything - which he regards as compromised in the political reality of Paris in 1934. While journalism, or 'the bourgeois author of entertainment literature,'^[13] serves class interests without acknowledgement, conforming to them, progressive writing aligns to the proletariat. But Benjamin regards such alignment alone as inadequate if the way of writing - the means of production - is conformist: Benjamin writes:

 

For the dialectical treatment of this problem ... the rigid, isolated object (work, novel, book) is of no use whatsoever. It must be inserted into the context of living social relations. ... when materialist criticism approached a work, it used to ask what was the position of that work vis-ˆ-vis the social production relations of its time. This is an important question. But also a very difficult one. ... And I should now like to propose a more immediate question ... I should like to ask: what is its position within them? This question concerns the function of a work within the literary production relations of its time. In other words, it is directly concerned with literary technique.^[14]

 

Technique, in Benjamin's use from German, is a loaded term: 'By mentioning technique I have named the concept which makes literary products accessible to immediate social, and therefore materialist, analysis.'^[15] And, 'Authority to write is no longer founded in a specialist training but in a polytechnical one, and so becomes common property.'^[16] This follows a reference to the Soviet press of the 1930s, in which readers supplied accounts of local events, letters, and so forth. This changes what constitutes literature. Benjamin writes:

 

... as literature gains in breadth what it loses in depth, so the distinction between author and public, which the bourgeois press maintains by artificial means, is beginning to disappear ... The reader is always prepared to become a writer, in the sense of one who describes or prescribes.^[17]

 

Benjamin extends the example of the Soviet press, mentioning Sergey Tretyakov, who became actively engaged in the collectivisation of agriculture:

 

When, in 1928, ... the slogan 'Writers to the Collective Farm!' was issued, Tretyakov went to the Communist Lighthouse commune and ... understood the following activities: calling mass meetings; collecting funds for down-payments on tractors; persuading private farmers to join the collective farm; inspecting reading rooms; launching wall newspapers and directing the collective farm newspaper; reporting to Moscow newspapers; introducing radio, travelling film shows, etc.^[18]

 

Benjamin accepts that this can be read as the role of a propagandist, but argues that it widens the field of literature; '... we are in the midst of a vast process in which literary forms are being melted down ...'^[19] The participatory techniques of the Soviet press offer, then, a model for the production relations of writing. Leslie summarises that, for Benjamin, 'Art can be prefigurative of social and technical relations to come. Prefiguration is important, for it indicates the extent to which Benjamin is convinced of a dynamic inlaid in technology and the forces of production.'^[20] As she explains, under capitalism, the move to a radically democratic society is pre-empted in culture as the arena in which this is possible when other avenues are blocked: 'In as much as the author uses art as a realm in which templates of new patterns of technical arrangements are generated experimentally, the author becomes a producer.'^[21]

 

Leslie emphasises the move of production from writer to reader:

 

For Benjamin, properly political art is predominantly concerned with reception effects, generated by modes of production that provide conditions for consumers to become producers or authors of an artwork's meaning. Artistic production must have the character of a model able to introduce other producers to production, by placing an 'improved apparatus at the disposal of authors and audience, bringing audiences into contact with the production process, turning readers or spectators into collaborators. Authors and audiences alike become producers.^[22]

 

Reconsidering Benjamin's text today, the role of new technologies and the extent to which they democratise culture at street level suggests the transfer of roles from writer to reader that he proposed is viable. Issues of censorship remain, as of who has access to such technologies. And there is the recurrent problem of whether new technologies reproduce old oppressions in new forms. A difficulty, perhaps, is that Benjamin seems to assume that writers are individuals acting autonomously in deciding to be readers, while the intention of the writer is one, possibly not so important factor, in a matrix of enabling and disabling factors which produce events and inflections of historical and social conditions (by which they are, of course, also produced). Or perhaps autonomy, too, is dissolved in the writer's becoming a reader, and readers' production of writing.

 

The Anticipation of Redemption

I want now to move to a very different text, Benjamin's 'Theses on the Philosophy of History,'^[23] completed in the Spring of 1940, around six months before his suicide. In Theses XI, he writes,

 

The conformism which has been part and parcel of Social Democracy from the beginning attaches not only to its political tactics but to its economic views as well ... Nothing has corrupted the German working class so much as the notion that it was moving with the current.^[24]

 

This informs Leslie's view (above), and points to the difficulty of the model on which both progress in Western, industrial society tends to be based, and specifically, I think, the model on which modern art's progressive quality rests. That is, the Enlightenment concept of progress, used in the nineteenth century in the social sciences (especially in anthropology and ethnography), posits a model of a trajectory: human development is upward, as in German Idealism, and manifest, materially, in technological invention. In Marxism, too, the rise of the proletariat to the totality of the social (at that point no longer a pyramid dominated by the ruling class and the bourgeoisie) is a trajectory. A golden future lies ahead. The role of avant-gardes in art is to make its anticipations visible, or graspable, hence closer to realization - with the inherent difficulty that this puts the avant-garde, or the intelligentsia, in the position of leading the mass public towards the golden future, thus reproducing the old relation of power (and knowledge as power). Benjamin sets out to challenge this model by, in my reading, introducing a different concept of time, no longer imminence but immanence.

 

In 'Thesis IX' Benjamin writes of a painting by Paul Klee, Angelus Novus, which he had bought in 1920. Christine Buci-Glucksmann records that Benjamin kept the picture with him, usually placed above his writing desk, including after his flight from Berlin to Paris; then, in the war years, Georges Bataille hid it in the Biblioth�que Nationale.^[25] A journal Benjamin planned in the 1920s was named after the picture. Buci-Glucksmann writes,

 

The Angel is like all Klee's intermediate, disintegrated beings: maskers, demons, puppets. dazed madmen, beast-men, plant-faces; they no longer participate in a humanist logic of inner subject and representation. By an ironic excess, they mark the passage from the visible towards the invisible, where our floating frontiers of the human and the inhuman, culture and barbarism, ... plays itself out.^[26]

 

And in 'Thesis IX', Benjamin writes that the angel is about to move away from an object of contemplation, the eyes staring, the mouth open and the wings spread:

 

This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.^[27]

 

Progress, then, is aligned with wreckage (like the wreck of the ship Hesperus). And instead, is a sudden and frightening instant, or glimpse of another dimension. There are several resonances here, confirmed by other elements in Benjamin's work. I want to draw attention to two. First, there is the Jewish concept of redemption; second, there is the related idea of a particular kind of present, or now-time.

 

Redemption is a warmth or light which glows from the end of history to redeem the present and past; but which is not transcendence, or flight to another realm, but in this earthly realm. Redemption is not like the Christian concept of salvation - gained by belief (Lutheranism) or good works (Catholicism), and either way a transaction - but a pervasive otherness, always there, everywhere, and glimpsed in sudden flashes or moments of wonder. Richard Wolin cites Benjamin's friend and mentor Scholem:

 

Two categories above all, and especially in their Jewish versions, assume a central place ... on the one hand Revelation, the idea of the Torah and of sacred texts in general, and on the other hand the Messianic idea of Redemption. their significance as regulative ideas governing his thought cannot be overstated.^[28]

 

Wolin reads Benjamin's cultural criticism as drawing on the idea of redemption by drawing out the overlooked and incidental as offering glimpses of a utopian realm, or world transformed before the transformation of social revolutions (as if glimpsing a way the revolution is intuited prior to its historical occurrence). As Wolin emphasizes, Benjamin makes a 'decisive break' with the Social Democrat notion of progress, as a quantitative transition which maintains linear time. Wolin also stresses the continuity of Benjamin's position by citing part of an address to the Berlin Free Student League in 1914:

 

The elements of the end condition are not present as formless tendencies of progress, but instead are embedded in every present as endangered, condemned, and ridiculed creations and ideas. The historical task is to give absolute form in a genuine way to the immanent condition of fulfillment, to make it visible and predominant in the present ...^[29]

 

Or, as Graeme Gilloch writes in an introduction to Benjamin, the 'Theses' combine Marxism and Messianism, as he says, ' in a desperate appeal to remember and redeem the 'hidden', broken tradition of the oppressed ...' whose discontinuous histories 'cannot find representation in the conventional linear narratives of the historicist' but are open to being glimpsed in 'the ephemeral moment of recognition when a fleeting constellation between past and present is formed.'^[30] This theme recurs in Thesis VIII, which begins, 'The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the 'state of emergency' in which we live is not the exception but the rule.'^[31]

 

The time of redemption is now-time: the ephemeral but transformative moment, the space between past and future, the chasm between representation and experience. In its fracturing of the means of representation - language - now-time enables tacit insights into redemption. Buci-Glucksmann writes,

 

Here the political and epistemological overturning of the victors' historicism culminates in a new concept of the present - the Jetztzeit or now-time of genuine actuality. To the empty linear time of the cumulative succession of events, Benjamin opposes the necessity of a temporal break, an interruption in time disclosed by the imaginaries of history. Jetztzeit is an intensive, qualitative time which becomes visible in 'states of emergency', the moments when 'culture engenders barbarism' and the infinitely repressed memory of 'those without a name' (Namenlosen) finally re-appropriates a history dominated by the historicism of the rulers.^[32]

 

This poses an interesting problem for a history of modernism: the sequence of avant-gardist departures from the mainstream which constitutes modernism in the twentieth century is a construction of art's history according to a trajectory - of which the most recent movement is the current culmination, soon, in turn to be reintegrated in the mainstream as another departure replaces it. The arch form of this is art critic Clement Greenberg's reductivist art history in support of Formalism, or colour-field painting in the 1960s. But the model underpins most histories of modern art. The problem, then, is not the failed tactics of an avant-garde, but, alongside the difficulty of its status as enjoying a privileged insight into social formation (or voice in it), that vangardism relies on the trajectory of historicism and is then, in Benjamin's critique, part of the problem.

 

For Now?

The above question of a philosophy of redemption, based on momentary glimpses of a redeemed world, or utopia, that exists everywhere, is one aspect of Benjamin's writing that bears updating. In a more obvious way, his call for writers to become readers and for readers to take over the means of production of literature, can be updated in terms of blogs, readers' contributions to the press (not only in letters), and perhaps reality television (where viewers become celebrities for the day, until voted out of the magic house). The latter illustrates a difficulty that a seeming democratization of a broadcast medium becomes a spectacle, as devoid of criticality and as much part of the means of domination as any movie, soap or advert. The same argument applies to the media as to consumerism: is the viewer (consumer) a dupe of the market or a knowing player of games with it? Similarly, can the medium be appropriated - or used in irony - for purposes other than those intended by its producers? But the concept of the now-time of ephemerality is perhaps more interesting: is this the time of shock in art which fractures codes of perception (as in surrealism)? Or in 1960s happenings? In a period when political change appears off the agenda, is the use of art, or writing, or the story of history, that it releases or reveals glimpses of a tacitly, intuitively known freedom?

 

To cite Buci-Glucksmann again, the angel indicates a complementary world to that of political economy, as in the works of Klee or Franz Kafka, a distancing and inversion of the world which shows its hidden aspects, both beautiful and terrible: 'It is non-dialectical; it points to the interruption of history, to catastrophe and the ... loss of subject. It induces us to think the archaic, barbaric side of our civilized societies ... '^[33]

It would be too easy to slide from this into a quasi-mysticism, or the kind of inept and uncritical call for a re-enchantment of the world expressed by art critic Suzi Gablik in 1991.^[34] The point is that the world was disenchanted when knowledge took the place of mysterious Fate as determinant of history, and with it the concepts of subject and agency ushered in the ideology of liberal humanism. Rationality became scientific, dominant instrumental rationality, a means to power-over; but this is no cause to junk the entire project - better, as Adorno and Horkheimer argue,^[35] to revise the project from within. Is tis like the Social Democrat position Benjamin rejected? I don't think so: Benjamin was, in any case, informed by the specific sell-out of the Social Democrats in Germany to the right after the brief German Revolution of 1918-19. Yet, if the point remains - as Marx wrote - to change the world, then Benjamin's concept of now-time offers an alternative to the reproduced instrumentalism of avant-gardes. It might also - here I only speculate, leaving the thought in the air as my conclusion - have a distinct resonance with Henri Lefebvre's idea of moments of liberation which occur, as sudden glimpses of clarity, within the dulling routines of work in a capitalist society, which are ephemeral but also transformative.