ON WALTER BENJAMIN (An Original Essay)

in #steemrepo6 years ago (edited)

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"There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism."
--Walter Benjamin (1892-1940)
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One afternoon Benjamin sat in the Café des Deux Magots in Saint Germain des Prés while enjoying the empty sky. It was then that he was struck by an idea that suddenly appeared in his head: drawing a diagram of his life. And he then drew a labyrinth.[1]

Reading the texts of Walter Benjamin thoughts is to face, in a term often used by Benjamin himself, a constellation of “force-field” aroused by his own text or language. But my interest in this Jewish thinker is, first of all, not because I have read one or two essays that are often referred to by many arts critics. My interest in the author of the “Arcades Project” began when, inadvertently, I saw his photograph being the cover of his collection of essays entitled “Reflections”. I did not know why I was interested in that photo. The first impressions that came into me when I looked at the photograph were melancholy, sentimentality, depression, and Angst, which eventually clumped into an intriguing romantic feeling. I feel like I’ve found a "beautiful metaphor".

However, my assumption was a big fault. Benjamin was not a romantic thinker, but a revolutionary thinker who contemplated many things: from literature to translation, from music to photography, from storytellers to libraries. So for me, reading his thoughts is like going into a big, dark building in the shape of a labyrinth.

In a labyrinth, maybe we will immediately feel the fun of a complex and complicated room which can satisfy our desire to play. But, in the labyrinth we may encounter great difficulties, confusion, and ultimately frustration, if then we want to immediately know where the way out, or from where we enter. Why? Because Benjamin's reasoning—unlike Lukács's or Lucien Goldman's (the main disciple of Lukács who came from Romania) systematic thinking—is a montage. And as we know, a montage is a connection of different things that do not share the same meanings, with the purpose to surprise the reader so as to elicit a "new understanding”.

That's Benjamin. He wrote about history but not a historian. He wrote about photography but not a photography critics. He wrote about language but not a linguist. He translated literary works but not a professional translator. He did a study of psychopharmacology but not a psychopharmacologist, and so on.

Therefore, we will encounter great difficulties if we face a montage with the tendency of mind which always seek systematization strictly, or with the minds that do not dare to face metaphors. A montage, for me, can only be confronted with a slightly playful---sometimes serious sometimes submissive---mind, like when we read poetry.

John Lechte, in his book “Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers” (1990), said that any attempt to systematize the thoughts of Benjamin will find that it will back again at the beginning.[2] While Terry Eagleton said that “…it would be difficult in any case to know what an adequate ‘critical account’ of Benjamin would like, given his own hostility to the academic mode of production, and the complex strategies whereby his texts resist such reductiveness. Benjamin’s sardonic distate for conventional book production is closely linked to his politics…”[3]

So, in order to reduce the possible reduction in writing about Benjamin's thoughts, I will only discuss his essay entitled "The Author as Producer", and then also his other essay which is related to the first essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction."

Why do I choose the two essays? One of the reasons that often bothered me was that Benjamin, like Brecht and unlike Adorno, believed that salvation through arts/literature must be done in an esoteric, democratic, and politically powerful manner (politicizing effect). And, amongst his essays, the two essays clearly describe Benjamin's aesthetic position. The first essay, "The Author as Producer," was written by Benjamin three years before his death (1973), when Brecht had a powerful effect on him. This essay was written in an atmosphere of Soviet debate about the duties and the functions of arts and literature in a socialist society.

While the second essay, which also shows Benjamin's tendency for democratization and politization of arts, was written in 1933 (the year when the Nazis began to expand their wings in Germany). This essay is one of Benjamin's classic essays and is often referred to in the debates on mass culture, modern arts and literature, but is very often misunderstood.

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Very Active in Radical Literature Movement: Brief Biography of Benjamin

Benjamin was born on July 15th, 1892, in a rich Jewish family. He studied philosophy in Freiburg, Munich, Berlin and Bern. As a student, he was active in the radical literary movement and wrote his doctoral thesis on the origin of the German Baroque tragedy "The Origins of the German Trauerspiel", which later became one of his important works. He works as an arts and literary critic, essayist, and translator in Berlin and Frankfurt.

In 1918, he met Ernst Bloch who later introduced him to Marxism. In addition, he was also involved in the investigation of psychopharmacology in Berlin. In 1933, when the Nazis came to power in Germany, he moved to Paris and lived there until 1940. Benjamin also became an exponent of the Institute of Social Research in Frankfurt, a place where thinkers such as Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Otto Kircheimer, Friedrich Pollock, Erich Fromm, and others, gathered.

One of his monumental works while he was living in Paris was a long study of 19th-century Paris known as the "Arcades Project" (unfinished work). When in 1940 France fell into the hands of the Nazis, with the help of Horkheimer and Adorno, he attempted to escape to America via Spain, but failed. He then committed suicide on 26 September 1940 by consuming excessive morphine.

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“The Author as Producer”

Literature may be an artifact, a product of social consciousness, a world of vision, a form of experience. Yet literature is also an industry, a model of social production. A collection of books is not just a collection of meaning structures. It is also a commodity produced by publishers and sold in the market for profit. A drama is not just a literary text. It is also the business of capitalists who employs certain people (scriptwriters, directors, actors, and other stage workers) to produce commodities for profit.

Authors/writers are not just composers of trans-individual mental structures, they are also workers paid by publishers to produce commodities to be sold for profit. "An author," as Marx wrote in his “Theories of Surplus Value” (1940), "is a worker not because he produces ideas, but because he enriches publishers, because he works for wages."[4]

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“We collect books in the belief that we are preserving them when in fact it is the books that preserve their collector.”
-- Walter Benjamin (1892-1940)
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In other words, literature and arts are understood as a reality and social activities that can determine the nature of arts/literature itself. Arts, for Benjamin, is primarily a social practice rather than an object that can be academically explained. We may see literature as a text, but we may also see it as a social activity, a form of social and economic production that comes together and deals with other forms of social production.

Therefore, for Benjamin, as well as for Brecht, an author must first be seen as a producer, just like every worker or producer of other social products. This idea of the author as a producer unravels the romantic idea of the author as a creator who, like God, mysteriously conjures up his work from emptiness. This inspirational, solitary, and individualist concept of the author (in other words, the concept of a romantic writer) hinders the understanding of the artist/author as a worker living and rooted in a particular historical situation.[5]

It is this view that sees literature as a social activity and social production that Benjamin used in his essay "The Author as Producer" (1937). In the arts/literary world at the time, there was a heated debate, i.e. the debate on (political) tendencies in literature/arts. This debate is related to the issue of commitment in literature/arts. On the one hand, there is an argument that states that an author, or poet, or artist, must follow a correct political line. On the other hand, the author/poet/artist must also produce quality work.

For Benjamin, the debate is of little use if the relationship between the two factors, i.e. between the correct political line and quality, is ignored, or if the relationship between the two is dogmatically defined. A work that has a true political tendency does not necessarily indicate another good quality.

What Benjamin wants to show is that the relationship between these two factors must be dialectically approached, and approached by material analysis. A literary work/artwork has a correct political tendency if it also has a good literary quality (literarily correct). In other words, the correct political tendency includes the literary tendency: "A work that exhibits the correct tendency of necessity have every other quality."[6]

Therefore, the issue of commitment in literature is not merely a matter of how to present the correct political opinions in arts/literature. More than that, this issue also concerns the quality of works produced by the artist/author. In other words, this issue concerns how far the author/artist treats the artistic forms and techniques available to him, so that the author, the reader, as well as the audience can together become his arts collaborators.

The example used by Benjamin to show that an author is not only required to have a true political commitment in his work, but also is required to make use of the forms and techniques—i.e. the forces of art production--in his day as far as possible were Bertolt Brecht with his experimental theater, the “Epic Theater”. Brecht, according to Benjamin, "successfully managed to change the functional relationship between the stage with the audience, the text with the producer, and the producer with the actor." By dismantling the traditionalistic theater with its illusions of reality, Brecht produced a new type of theater, based on criticism of ideological bourgeois theater assumptions. The core of Brecht's criticism is his famous concept of alienation effect.

The bourgeois theater, according to Benjamin, is based on illusionism, which takes for granted the assumption that theatrical performances must directly produce the realities of the world. This theater aims to make the audience, with the power of the illusion of the reality it presents, drifts and empathizes with the show, assuming the theatrical performances as real and drowning in them.

In bourgeois theater, the audience is a passive consumer of a finished and irreversible art object, which is served to the audience as something real. Theatrical performances, in bourgeois theater, do not stimulate the audience to think critically about how the characters are played, and what if the characters are presented differently. In other words, the dramatic illusion produced in bourgeois theater precludes the audience from being critically aware that everything presented to them is something that is constructed.

To counter the aesthetics of the bourgeois theater, Brecht poses the view that reality is a constantly changing and discontinuous process. The task of the theater is not to reflect the finished reality, but rather to show how the characters and events are displayed and produced historically, and also to show how if the characters and events are presented differently. Theatrical performances are not organic entities that hypnotizes the audience from beginning to end, but rather products that are uneven, choked, and discontinuous.

By using the alienation effect, Brecht wanted to make the audience aware of how the characters and events in the theater performances were presented to them. The alienation effect in Brecht's "epic" theater aims to "alienate" the audience from theatrical performances, thereby preventing the emergence of emotional identification from the audience, which kills its critical power.

The alienation effect presents an intimate experience in unfamiliar packaging that forces audience to reflect on actions and events that have been considered natural. This is the opposite of a bourgeois theater trying to manipulate strange actions and events, packing it in the illusion of reality, and imposing it on a passive audience. Thus Brecht's 'epic' theater is not a fantasy field that breeds the audience fantasies, but rather an arena resulting from a mix between a laboratory, a circus arena, a music hall, a sports arena, and a discussion room.[7]

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Techniques and Political Commitment

In relation to the debate about the right political tendencies and good literary qualities, Benjamin sees that the question traditionally raised in Marxist literary criticism concerning literary works is: how is the attitude of literary works in front of the relations of production of its time. Does it accept those relations of production, and thus become reactionary? Or reject it, and thus become revolutionary?

The question, for Benjamin, is one of the important questions for seeking a dialectical relationship between the correct political tendency and literary quality (literary tendency). However, the question is very difficult to answer. Therefore, Benjamin wanted to ask a simpler alternative question: What is the position of literary works in the relations of production of its time? This question directly highlights the function of literary works in the relations of literary production of its time. In other words, this question directly highlights techniques related to the production of literary works.

What Benjamin means by that question is that literature/arts, as well as every other form of production, depends on certain production techniques (forms of painting, publications, theatrical performances, etc.). They are part of the productive forces of arts, part of the stage of development of artistic production.

The techniques also include a series of social relationships between arts producers and their audiences. This is related to the view of Marxism which sees that the stage of development of a production model includes certain social production relations. This stage of development led to a revolution when productive forces and productive relationships contradict one another.

The social relationship of the feudalism stage, for example, becomes a hindrance to the development of the capitalist forces of production, and is therefore destroyed by it. Capitalist social relations, in turn, impedes the development of productive forces and the equitable distribution of wealth in industrial society, and will therefore be destroyed by socialism.[8]

For Benjamin, a progressive artist/writer should not simply accept the existing artistic forces, but rather develop and further revolutionize the artistic forces. By developing and revolutionizing the artistic forces available to him, the author has created a new social relationship between the author and his readers. He can overcome the contradictions that limit the artistic forces that are potentially available to everyone but only belong to a small group of people (film, radio, printing machines, photography, and music recording).

The task of a progressive author is to utilize and develop these new media, and to change the outdated media. This task is not only about the question of incorporating the correct political message through the existing media, but also concerning the issue of how to develop and further revolutionize the media itself.

As an example of the growing media and artistic forces that should be exploited and developed by a revolutionary artist/author is newspaper. Newspaper viewed by Benjamin as a thaw of conventional barriers between literary genres, between author and poet, scholar and commoner, even between author and reader (since newspaper readers are always ready to become a writer himself).

Likewise music recording can match the form of production like a music concert hall. In addition, film, photography, and printing have changed the perception of society, thereby make obsolete traditional techniques and models of artistic production relationships. An artist who is really progressive, according to Benjamin, never only pay attention to the object of arts, but rather to the means of production.

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Reproduction Drowns Uniqueness

Benjamin again raised the question of this relationship between literature/arts and political commitments in his essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction."[9] With its artistic production technique which is so revolutionary, the shape and nature of the work of art itself have undergone a change. Traditional artworks, he argues, has an aura of uniqueness, privilege, distance, and immortality. However, mechanical reproduction of, for example, paintings, shifts and destroys the uniqueness and the aura of traditional artworks, and replaces them with an artificial plurality of mechanical reproductions, enabling the readers/artworks consumers to appreciate the work of art at the place and time of his own accord.

With the advent of mass reproduction techniques, the work of art is no longer parasitic. Artwork is no longer tied to the sacred rituals that once wrapped it up, but now makes politics as its basis. The shift from arts that is parasitic (i.e. attached to rituals) to the politically based arts is what resulted in the fading of the art aura. Art is no longer elitist and isolated, but becomes increasingly democratic.

An example of the very revolutionary artistic production techniques is film. While portrait still reveals the distance to the object, film can permeate in and make its object closer spatially, and thus de-mystify the object. While painting still allows a connoisseur to contemplate calmly, film continually alters the viewer's perception and constantly produces a “shock effect”.

"Shocks" is one of the keys in Benjamin's aesthetics. Modern urban life is characterized by collisions of fragmentary and fickle sensations. If a conservative Marxist critics like Lukács sees this fact as a sign of the split of the "wholeness" of man under capitalism, Benjamin can typically find, in its positive possibilities, a basis for a more progressive artistic form.

Watching movies, entering the city crowd, working with machines, are shocking experiences that strip the object and experience from their aura. The artistic equivalent of all this is the montage technique.[10] Montage—a combination/connection of things that are not similar with the purpose of shocking the audience to create a new understanding--for Benjamin is a major principle of artistic production in technological times.***

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“Those who do not learn how to decipher photographs will be the illiterate of the future.”
-- Walter Benjamin (1892-1940)
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NOTES:

  1. Terry Eagleton, Walter Benjamin or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism, (London: Verso, 1994) pp. xi.
  2. See Terry Eagleton, Marxism and Literary Criticism, (California: University of California Press, 1976) pp. 75
  3. Terry Eagleton, Walter Benjamin or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism, (London: Verso, 1994) pp. xi.
  4. Quoted from Terry Eagleton, Marxism and Literary Criticism, (California: University of California Press, 1976) pp. 60.
  5. See, Terry Eagleton, Marxism and Literary Criticism, California: California University Press, 1976, pp. 68-69).
    6.See Walter Benjamin, Reflection, (New York: Schocken Books, 1996), pp. 221.
  6. See Terry Eagleton, Marxism and Literary Criticism, (California: University of California Press, 1976) pp. 65-66.
  7. See Terry Eagleton, Marxism and Literary Criticism, (California: University of California Press, 1976) pp. 61.
  8. See Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, (London, 1970).
  9. See Terry Eagleton, Marxism and Literary Criticism, (California: University of California Press, 1976) pp. 63.

(Original essay -- © @zaimrofiqi)

For Indonesian version of this essay, see:
https://steemit.com/ocd/@zaimrofiqi/my-favorite-your-favorite-our-favorite-2-thinkers-walter-benjamin-a-bilingual-essay-part-1

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