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Have You Read Any Good Books Lately?
Book Reviews
Bill Nygren, writer, activist and philosopher, is a "native"
Oregonian and lives in the southern reaches of the Pacific Northwest, the San Francisco
Bay Area. The interface of the history of politics and culture is a life long interest.
Life in the Jaws of the Crocodile:
Walter Benjamin's Last Project
By Bill Nygren
The Arcades Project
by Walter Benjamin
edited by Rolf Tiedemann
translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin
illustrated. 1073 pp. Cambridge, MA
The Belknap Press/Harvard University
Paul Klee's Senecio, 1922 in Basle, Kunstmuseum from Klee by Norbert
Lynton, Spring Books, London
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In Walter Benjamin's time, who you were was how you died.
As the Nazis threatened Paris in 1940, the philosopher Benjamin held fast to his
monumental project: an attempt to grasp the Utopian potential of modern culture.
He continued working in the city of his creative vision, a glistening, phantasmagorical
Paris, a metaphor of the past and future. Walter Benjamin waited too long to flee.
When detained at the Spanish border, fearing the Gestapo behind him and fretting
that if he did reach America he would be exhibited as another European curiosity,
he took his own life. Possibly affected by the suicide, the guards allowed his refugee
party to pass safely the next day.
In his last work, Benjamin meditated on Paul Klee's watercolor,Angelus
Novalis, which he had purchased in Munich in 1921. Benjamin mused that as the
angel soars, his face is turned against the past, looking down on wreckage piled
on wreckage. A storms blows from Paradise. The angel can't close his wings. He is
blown toward the future with his back turned. Benjamin's outlook is naturally skewed
by the desperation of his plight, writing in the dark night of 1940 when it seemed
the only illumination came from falling stars.
He once described himself as "a man at home between the
jaws of a crocodile which he holds apart with iron struts". His philosophy,
cultural criticism and innovative history are inherently of interest, but Benjamin
thrusts his way into our lives on the wings of Klee's angel. The angel wants but
is unable to halt the carnage. There exists an oblique relation between the
brutal acts, which masquerade as historical "progress" and a realm of hope
or redemption. After all, the "storm" is blowing from Paradise.
What is Paradise? Possibly, just a trace of hope, memory that one day might find
a purpose.
I
Born in the Berlin of 1892, young Benjamin was reared in a secular
Jewish, upper-middle class household. As a student, he became a leader of the idealistic
German youth movement, the nature-celebrating counterculture of imperial Germany.
A college student during World War I, he and his new friend, Gershom Scholem, used
a number of creative ruses to avoid conscription in the Kaiser's army. Scholem was
drawn to the study of Jewish mysticism and later moved to Jerusalem. Scholem kept
up a lifelong correspondence with Benjamin, which he eventually published along with
a biography of his friend.
Moving to Switzerland, Benjamin married, earned a doctorate and
met the dadaist Tristan Tzara and the philosopher Ernst Bloch. Returning to Germany,
he became a translator of Baudelaire and Proust. Benjamin developed an interest in
Sorel and wrote the difficult The Origin of German Tragic Drama.. Benjamin
met his first and only disciple, Theodore Adorno in 1923. His marriage in ruins,
he went to Capri where he met the Latvian actress, Asja Lacis, who worked with Bertolt
Brecht. She introduced them and they became close friends.
While Benjamin's Marxist interests blossomed after 1928, he was
still attentive to symbolism and Jewish mystical thought. His friends, Schlem, Brecht
and Adorno were suspicious of if not hostile to one another and he tactfully kept
them in the dark concerning his supposed intellectual indiscretions.
In 1929, he published an essay on the French surrealists, one of
his most important. Benjamin sensed surrealism was reaching an impasse yet attributed
to them the virtue of "seeing" and "freeing" revolutionary energies
in things obsolete. He was influenced to discover new meanings in particular objects,
such as the first iron constructions, early photographs and old dresses. He began
to experiment with a style of montage, excavating fragments of experience and connecting
dis-similarities in order to shock an audience into fresh recognition. Brecht had
also been honing this as a staple of his aesthetic. These factors later made Benjamin
receptive to the idea that artists should be receptive to new technologies and change
the "technique" of traditional forms.
Isolated and living in Paris, Walter Benjamin was helped by a small
grant from the Frankfort School. It was actually named the Institute for Social Research
and was an independent free school. Neo-Hegelian critical theory was its guiding
principle. Besides the director, Max Horkkkeimer, its key figures were Adorno and
Benjamin. Herbert Marcuse was a young member. By the late thirties, the school had
moved to New York, having been closed down by Hitler. Benjamin stayed on in Paris,
laboring on his "Arcades Project" at the Bibliotheque Nationale while living
mainly on the handouts of a Jewish refugee organization run by Hannah Arendt, former
student of Martin Heidegger. Later, as a world-renown liberal philosopher, Arendt
penned a gentle essay on Benjamin in her Men In Dark Times.
II
The Arcades Project began in 1927 as an analysis of the urban culture
of 19th century capitalism. Benjamin focused on the Parisian "Arcades",
forerunners of our modern indoor shopping malls. The Arcades were glass-roofed, marble-
paneled corridors. Lining both sides of these corridors, lit from above, were elegant
shops. The Arcade was a city in miniature. Regarding what as becoming his legendary
project, Benjamin wrote to Scholem in 1935 that,"I believe that its conception
, however personal in its origins, has as its object the decisive historical interests
of our generation." He added, "The project represents both the philosophical
utilization of surrealism - and thereby its transcendence - as well as the attempt
to seize the image of history in the most unlikely locations, as it were, in its
refuse."
Using his montage method, which had been skillfully used by filmmakers
and surrealists and by Brecht, Benjamin moved away from theoretical exposition and
concentrated instead on an unglosssy construction of "material elements"
- direct citations or empirical observations. By bringing to life the Paris of Marx
and Baudelaire, he hoped to compose a new kind of epic poem. He wrote to Scholem,
his project "howls in my nights in the manner of a small beast if I do not take
it to drink at the most distant sources."
Thus the material culture of 19th century Paris, railroads, panoramas,
barricades, exhibitions city streets, gas lighting, the stock exchange, took on world
historical meaning. The Parisian Arcade and the City of Paris constituted the key
to the "mythological topography of Paris". His intention was to render
transparent the origin of the "myth symbols" that lull the world to sleep.
Benjamin pointed to architecture as the most important evidence of mythology. "And
the most important architecture of the 19th century is the Arcade." It was the
gateway to the "primal landscape of consumption" and the labyrinth of secret
dreams.
Benjamin walked, he himself reported, with one hand out to ward
off despair and the other to write down what he saw "for he sees differently
from the others." It's worth pondering: what if this "most peculiar Marxist
ever," in Arendt's words, really did see differently? Is his voice prophetic
concerning humanity's absolute need to break with his "ever-same"? According
to him, "On this planet a great number of civilizations have perished in blood
and horror. Naturally one must wish for ...a civilization that has abandoned blood
and horror ... but this is doubtful ... and if we don't, the planet will finally
punish us ... with the last judgment."
Copyright © Spencer Creek Press 2000. All Rights Reserved by Spencer Creek Press
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