The Dwarf in the Chess Machine

Foreword to the English Edition

The publication of the translation of my ‘Benjamin book’ comes extremely late: 23 years after being finished; 20 years after the publication of the book in Dutch (I defended my PhD in October 1996, it was published as a book in Dutch in 1999). In order for my mentor and coadvisor, the famous Benjamin scholar Irving Wohlfarth, to be able to read this PhD, I asked the young enthusiast Bram Mertens to translate my manuscript for this one but invaluable reader.

Giorgio Agamben was another very important mentor but I did not dare to ask him to read my stuff. Bram did a good job: his translation was impeccable, so to speak instantly ready for publication. I barely had to change a word when, two decades later, I finally did a true final editing.

After the PhD was defended, I did some attempts to have the English manuscript published in some prestigious American university press. But all attempts failed. The editor-in-chief of one of America’s most prestigious universities was won over for the idea of publishing this rare study covering the entire oeuvre, but a referee deemed that the manuscript was too systematic and not Benjaminian enough. I tried to convince him that this was to be considered a compliment, but to no avail. Similar things with other publishers and in the end, I gave up. I almost forgot, being busy with my other books, my own oeuvre. But it remained a painful spot, each time I thought about it: this book deserved an international audience. It was written from the onset towards the international community of Benjamin scholars and Benjamin enthusiasts.

That is why I finally decided to try and publish it with nai010, the publisher with whom I made three of my major books (The Capsular Civilisation, Entropic Empire and the edited volume with Karel Vanhaesebrouk & Ruben Deroo, Art and Activism in the Age of Globalisation). I am eternally grateful to Eelco van Welie for doing me this favour, for this book is outside the scope of their tradition: art, urbanism & architecture. Although Benjamin’s work touches upon all these fields, this is an academic, philosophical book. I really consider it as a sort of restitution, a restitutio in integrum, even a sort of apocatastasis, the recovery, if not redemption of a lost book.

Of course, the book has aged. No secondary literature after 1995 has been consulted. So be it. It is simply impossible to get back into all the Benjamin literature since then. I think the

reader will see that this inconvenience is not changing the ultimate aim of the book: uncovering Benjamin’s hidden doctrine.

When this book was published in Dutch one acquaintance said he had to admit, it was a good book, ‘amazingly good’ (he meant: amazing that a superficial, incoherent character like me could be so thorough). ‘But’, he added, ‘there is absolutely nothing of yourself in it’. I had to agree. Another friend gave me an equally ambiguous compliment: he said the book ‘reads like a self-portrait’ (meaning it was, typical for all my essayistic writings, in a sense, a mere image of my own fascinations). I had to agree again. I was, of course, not very pleased with either of the compliments. But when, later, I thought of them together, I discovered they form a most beautiful compliment: a book that has nothing of the author in it and yet is a self-portrait. I would definitely have to agree to that.

This is another reason why I cannot change nor update this manuscript. With no further ado, I let the work speak for itself. But before I do, I wish to dedicate this belated English publication in deepest gratitude to my beloved mentors and far friends Irving Wohlfarth and Giorgio Agamben.

Lieven De Cauter, Brussels, summer 2018

INTRODUCTION

THE LABYRINTH OF THE TEXT

Das Labyrinth ist der richtige Weg für den der noch immer früh genug am Ziel ankommt. 1

Walter Benjamin’s oeuvre constitutes an utterly idiosyncratic universe. His work unfolds and embodies one of his favored metaphors: it is a labyrinth. Full of internal connections, recurring formulas that function like clues in an investigation, littered with traces and interspersed with secret intentions, it forms a maze, a labyrinth in which the author dwells and hides.2 It breaks down into a disparate collection of texts. It includes every thinkable genre: essays, consciously archaic-esoteric tracts, literary criticism, reviews, manifesto’s, translations, experimental proseimpressions, radio shows for kids, diaries, hundreds of letters and even a handful of poems, next to some immense collections of quotations and, finally, a huge amount of fragments and notes. The critical edition of his collected works comprises some 8.000 pages. The fields and disciplines his work touches upon are diverse and never really quite clear-cut. It deals with language, literature, art, history, anthropology, mysticism, photography, architecture, popular culture (panoramas, world exhibitions, department stores, prostitution, gambling, children’s toys), social movements and often about all of this at the same time.

The work’s range exhibits an almost unbearable interplay of extremes: from the most concrete – as in Adorno’s classic phrase: ‘the bewildered rendering of mere factuality’3 – up to the most cryptic and abstract theological theorems, from an apparently reckless confirmation of the new and revolutionary to the most profound melancholy. Some texts speak of the utopian possibilities of cinema, of the avant-garde as a salutary spring-clean by the new barbarians, of the Soviet Union as the country where the bourgeois interior is finally being abolished, or even of the objectification in commodity consumption as a possibility for liberation. Other texts on the contrary breathe an atmosphere of insurmountable sadness over transience, over the

paradise lost of a childhood during the fin de siècle, but especially over the irrevocable loss of tradition in modernity, over the purposelessness, the profound desolation of humanity in a world dominated by technology. Style and tenor reflect this way of thinking in extremes. At times his prose is slow, sunken, saturated, affected even, almost strained – wrapped in a Proustian blanket of memories and reminiscences – only to tip over into a lapidary staccato that excudes the kind of robust cheerfulness one would rather have expected from Brecht.

Hardly a coincidence that one of the main topoi in Benjamin studies is his ambiguity, his ambivalence.4 On top of all that, Benjamin’s texts seem to swing back and forth between theoretically irreconcilable poles that may mirror the opposition between melancholy and revolution, but absolutely do not coincide with it. It was Benjamin himself who christened these two poles ‘theology’ and ‘materialism’.5 For Benjamin, the term theology represents the messianic tradition in particular, to which he was connected in an idiosyncratic and almost mysterious way. As for the exact sources of his messianism, the secondary literature is hitherto essentially still groping in the dark. Hence one would have to conceive of it as a tradition in ruins that still continues to work, out of which Benjamin picks up fragments for his own use, without completely identifiable sources. Jewish messianism is not an integral doctrine or a school, but rather a tendency that is deeply rooted within Judaism and Christianity itself, it is in a sense the essence of it.6 This basic tendency has found a powerful expression in the Kabbalah, the mystical tradition, and after a long period of incubation it has exercised an enormous influence on the Jewish community, shortly after the expulsion from Spain in 1492. It has been recorded in countless writings, but most importantly in the anonymous ‘book of revelations’ (Sefer ha-Meschib) from around 1500 and in the doctrine of Isaac Luria, who gave his name to the ‘Lurianic Kabbalah’.7 In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this messianism leads to a number of nihilistic eruptions.8 Rationalist currents within Judaism – from Maimonides onwards, basically – attempted to minimize or suppress messianic vehemence as much as possible (this trend was continued in the nineteenth century, notably by such figures as Hermann Cohen),9 until it is used again as a philosophical inspiration by authors like Rosenzweig, Lukàcs, Bloch and Benjamin. The triadic structure already embedded in a biblical world view 10 is emphasized within messianic thought as it persistently places the three states of the world (paradise, Fall, redemption) in the center of their interpretations and doctrines, with all their theological and political consequences. Benjamin’s thought explicitly seeks to ally itself with this tradition.

As Scholem pointed out, the phenomenon of Messianism has emerged from the heart of that very Jewish tradition to which it constitutes a fundamental threat at the same time. Whereas the talmudic tradition stresses continuity, Messianism emphasizes a radical break,11 especially at those times when Messianic expectation becomes acute. Within the broad stream of Jewish tradition, Messianism in fact constitutes an anti-tradition. Benjamin’s insistence on tradition and collective experience on the one hand, and his preaching of the break, of the ‘immobilization of history’ on the other hand – this ‘ambivalence’ derives from the basic structure of traditional Messianism itself. The additional fact that his own Messianism overtly harks back to the (mystical) tradition, while dissolving it in a philosophy of secularization, is in its turn analogous to this structure. Like Bloch, Benjamin was looking for a philosophical Messianism as an alternative to the modern philosophy of history, which is preoccupied with continuity and observes everything from the point of view of power. They were concerned with finding a kind of philosophical synthesis of various Messianisms: Jewish, Christian and later, Marxist Messianism. They must have conceived of the system of Messianism, which they sought to establish together in a brief moment of mutual enthusiasm, in terms of such a synthesis.12 The young Benjamin started off as a kind of fin de siècle symbolist (under the influence of the mysticism of the Jugendbewegung and the George-circle). Between 1915 and 1925 he mainly wrote literary criticism and esoteric essays. After Origin of German Tragedy (Ursprung des Deutschen Trauerspiels), which is to say after having openly embraced Marxism,13 Benjamin took to heart the paradoxical task of joining the old to the new, esoteric writing to commitment, theology to Marxism, religious tradition to the political and artistic avant-garde as a spearhead of the secularization process. His introduction to Bolshevism (by his beloved Asja Lacis) causes – as he himself writes in a letter – ‘a turning point, that has aroused the desire in me to no longer mask the contemporary and political moments in my thoughts in an old-fashioned manner, but to develop them, and this, tentatively, in an extreme way’.14 Like theology had to be concealed first in a consciously archaic esotericism – like his Vorrede that ‘curls’ the messianic mystique of language ‘into a doctrine of ideas’15 – thus the esoteric thoughts (and hence the theology) was later to be dissolved, aufgehoben, in a materialist (exoteric) presentation. One-Way Street, originating while working on his Habilitationsschrift (Origin of German Tragedy), witnesses this breakthrough. The Arcades Project, the colossal project that fans out in numerous essays, is the epitome of the new direction. The transition from a consciously archaic theology to the montage technique of the avant-garde is hardly a development, it is more something of a complication. His entire life, Benjamin writes esoteric

as well as exoteric texts. Most of the esoterical texts were not meant for publication, they were literally for a circle of initiates, his friends and acquaintances.

We should not lose sight of the fact that a good number of what are now held to be his key texts were only published posthumously: On Language as such and on the human language (1916), On the Program of the Future Philosophy (1918), Doctrine of similarities (1933), On the Concept of History (1940).16 But behind these texts, too, there is a third domain: the fragments and diagrams, that actually contain the least censored version of his theology. We shall therefore give ample attention to these texts.17 All other texts are placed under the heading ‘thoroughly different presentations’,18 each of them relating exoterical and esoterical phrasing in their own specific way, depending on the context. This entails a certain masking, but no actual shift in his position. Anyhow, Benjamin seeks to deploy the theological inspiration within a ‘disenchanted’ framework of messianic and mystical thoughts; within a fundamentally antimythological frame of reference, particularly with regard to the modern mythology of progress.19 In the Arcades Project, he wanted to clear his way through the virgin forest of nineteenth-century prehistory (Urgeschichte) with the axe of reason.20 On the other hand there is Adorno’s matchless characterization – in the context of One-Way Street – that his mythical interest was almost passionate. But it was a passion that knew of the fatal strategies of its object: ‘Whereas Benjamin’s thought, without mental reservations, pursues the mythical to the brink of infatuation, each of his sentences is shivering with the suspicion (…) that the guilty totality of modernity would break down, whether this should be of its own accord or from forces that would make it collapse from the outside’.21 This tension between infatuation and the prophetic awareness of imminent catastrophe determines the tension within his archaeology of modernity.22 During the thirties, Scholem, Adorno and Brecht repeatedly indicate to Benjamin the lack of mediation between the theological and the materialist pole of his thought. Scholem blames Benjamin for deceiving himself with his Marxism.23 Not only does he talk about the ambiguity of Benjamin’s speculations, he also insists on their ‘double tracking’ (Zweigleisigkeit).24 Brecht brands his materialist theory of art from The Work of Art in the Era of its technological Reproduction as an unacceptable adaptation: ‘all mysticism, and this in combination with a stance against mysticism. in that way materialist historiography is adapted! it is quite awful.’25 Adorno, finally, thinks his Marxism too unmediated. He writes about the first essay on Baudelaire: ‘Elective Affinities [Wahlverwandtschaften] and Baroque-book are better Marxism than the wine taxes and the deduction of phantasmagoria from the behaviour of feuilletonwriters’.26 His verdict is devastating: ‘Should one want to formulate it very drastically, one could

say that the work has settled at the cross-roads of magic and positivism. That place is bewitched.’27 These have all become classic critiques: the diagnosis of an unbearable oscillation is repeated in secondary literature in every possible way.28 In a nutshell, the commonplace runs as follows: ‘instead of avoiding the extremes of positive theology or vulgar materialism, Benjamin (…) had a tendency to be guilty of both’.29 Benjamin’s ambivalence, his constant combination of extremes, will be one of the motifs of this book, but rather in a negative way, since the question we ask is: how can we get beyond this cliché?

Benjamin appeared to have been the only one capable of living with this bipolarity (or rather these multiple bipolarities). In a letter to Max Rychner from 1931 he defines his position towards Marxism in a rare moment of clarity. After Origin of German Tragedy, that was ‘certainly not materialist but still already dialectic’, it had become, or so he writes, ever more clear ‘that there is a mediation – albeit a tense and problematic one – between my* very special point of view on the philosophy of language and historical materialism. Yet with regard to the complacency of bourgeois science there is none whatsoever’.30 Benjamin feels more akin to the engaged praxis of Marxism than to the value-free nature of bourgeois science. And from a messianic point of view this is not as incomprehensible as it seems. Marxism as the ideology of an emancipatory praxis is or was much more congenial to the idea of redemption than to a so-called non-normativity or neutrality of science – especially at that time, towards the end of the Weimar Republic and the beginning of the Third Reich. He explains this kinship with Marxism by describing himself ‘not as a representative of historical materialism as a dogma, but as a researcher (…) to whom the attitude of the materialist, both on a scientific and on a human level, appears more fruitful than that of the idealist.’31 The fact that he puts ‘attitude’ (Haltung) in italics suggests an ethos, an ethical-political choice and not a total (let alone totalitarian) or servile credo. Along the same line, he always described his Marxism to Scholem as ‘heuristic’ and ‘experimental’.32 He considered Marxist theory primarily as an inspiring alternative paradigm for bourgeois scientific activity; an alternative from which he borrowed certain elements without for instance sharing the communist belief in progress and science. He did not blindly expect Marxism to bring about universal salvation, but he did consider its concept of emancipation quite fertile. In a 1934 letter to Werner Kraft, he even goes so far as to dismiss communism as ‘a solution for Mankind’: ‘But the very point is to do away with this infertile pretension to “solutions for humanity” by building up a practicable knowledge of it, and yes, even to give up this arrogant perspective on ‘total’ systems as such, and at least undertake the effort to construct human life as composed as a man of reason starts his day after a good night’s sleep.’33 One would do well to keep in mind this passage of

political realism when addressing Benjamin’s Marxism, especially when, in the course of our argument, we will discuss the notion of redemption. The metaphor of awakening, that will occupy so central a place in the Arcades Project, is very sober here. It is not only an awakening from phantasmagoria and myth (the enchantment of capitalism), but also from the dream of utopia (the betrayed and treacherous promises of communism). From this perspective it is hardly surprising if Benjamin describes his own position at the most crucial moments as nihilistic.34 He knew that this ethical-political choice for a radical politics, entailing the exclusion of total choices, had its problematical repercussions for the coherence of his thinking. So much is clear from the ‘problematical, tense mediation’ between theology and materialism in the letter to Rychner and from his careful, often evasive answers to the criticisms of Scholem and Adorno.35 Time and again he admits to being Janus-faced.36 It is this Janus-face of theology and materialism that determines the specificity of Benjamin’s work.

One might even say that his solution was the refusal to make a choice: suspending the verdict, placing it between parentheses, deferring dogma by thinking in extremes. This became his way of reasoning: postponing the synthesis as an epistemology, the detour as a method.

Indubitably this is one of the meanings of the famous dictum in the Erkenntniskritische Vorrede: ‘Methode ist Umweg’ (method is detour).37 To Benjamin, the labyrinth was the right way. But can a labyrinth be the right way? Isn’t it intended to deceive, puzzle, mystify by its very nature? Does it not inevitably lead to impasses, dead-ends, vicious circles, disorienting perspectives, mirror effects and the like, making those who venture too far in it – its own creator in the first place – lose their way? Because of the labyrinthine, ambiguous structure of his work, Benjamin has been labelled as ‘one of those obscure authors, whose work is doomed to a disparate reception’.38 He has been situated between the chairs.39 It has been remarked that his texts are positively teeming with idiosyncratic opinions and ‘mystical poetry’, as such ‘relevant only to its author’.40 Particularly with regard to the Arcades Project, covering the entire period of his ‘mature’ work (1927 to 1940), the question has been put forward whether his oeuvre was not ultimately overcast with the shadow of failure.41 And yet he did choose the right way (for someone who arrives in time at his destination anyway): a nomadic existence. His entire life Benjamin balanced between academia and literature, between contemplation and commitment, between melancholic travel fever and political exile, between being in love and suicidal tendencies. (…) Benjamin’s ground (…) is nothing but the silent surface of the texts to be read42