Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition 9781501728679

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WALTER BENJAMIN AND THE ANTINOMIES OF TRADITION JOHN

McCoLE

Cornell University Press ITHACA

AND

LONDON

Copyright © 1993 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 1993 by Cornell University Press. International Standard Book Number o-8014-2465-8 (cloth) International Standard Book Number o-8014-9711-6 (paper) Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 92-21431 Printed in the United States of America Librarians: Library of Congress cataloging information appears on the last page of the book. @>The paper in this book meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z 39.48-1984.

FOR SOPHIE

Contents

Preface

ix

A Note on Translations and Citations

xiii

Introduction: Benjamin's Construction of the Antinomies of Tradition Benjamin on Tradition 1 The Reception of Benjamin's Work 10 3· Benjamin's Project and the Intellectual Field 4· The Argument 30

1

1.

2.

1

21

Benjamin and the Idea of Youth

35

The Topography of the German Youth Movement Gustav Wyneken's Ideological Ambiguities 40 3· Wyneken's "Strict and Fanatical Pupil" 45 4· Growing Estrangement 54 5· The Break with the Youth Movement 63 1.

36

2.

2

The Immanent Critique of Romanticism 1.

2.

3· 4· 5· 6.

A "Harder, Purer, Less Visible Radicalism" 71 The Dynamics of Early Romanticism 81 Immanent Critique 89 Destruction and Completion of the Work: 99 The Antinomies of Critique Romantic Messianism: The Antinomies of Tradition The Politics and Strategy of Interpretation 110

71

106

3 Allegorical Destruction 1.

"Goethe's Elective Affinities"

117

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[viii]

Contents 2. The Locus of the Trauerspiel Study 124 3· Symbol and Allegory 130 4· An Aesthetic of Destruction? The World of Baroque Allegorical Forms 139 5· Allegory and Critique 147

4

Owning up to the Poverty of Experience: Benjamin and Weimar Modernism Developing Strategies: Modernism, Politics, and Nihilism 159 2. The Question of Neighborhoods: Mapping the Politics of Weimar Culture 167 3· Technik 180 4· Brecht 195 1.

5

Benjamin and Surrealism: Awakening

206

1. An Immanent Critique of Surrealism 206 213 2. "Dreamkitsch" 3· Surrealism as "The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia" 220 4· Modern Mythology and Dream Consciousness 229 5· "Paris Arcades: A Dialectical Enchantment"? The Original 240 Conception of the "Arcades" Project

6

Benjamin and Proust: Remembering

253

Benjamin's "Image of Proust" 253 259 2. Involuntary Memory 266 3· The Bridge between Memory and Dream 4· The Doctrine of Memory in Benjamin's Later Work 1.

7 The Antinomies of Tradition: Historical Rhythms in Benjamin's Late Works 1.

"Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century"

2. Dialectical Images 287 3· The Antinomies of Tradition

280

280

295

Conclusion: Benjamin's Recasting of the German Intellectual Tradition

304

Bibliography

309

Index

323

Preface

In this book I explore the origins and tensions of Walter Benjamin's dealings with tradition. Few thinkers in this century have been as perceptive about the workings of tradition, as acutely aware of their own relation to it, and as convinced of the necessity of recovering the past in order to redeem the present; of those, no other was at the same time so ready to face up to the complicity of culture in injustice and conclude that humanity would have to "prepare itself to survive culture, if need be." Benjamin at once mourned and celebrated what he took to be an inevitable liquidation of traditional culture, persistently trying to find the right way of salvaging what was useful. His refusal to surrender either of these attitudes and his determination to think both through to their conclusions lend his dealings with tradition their peculiar honesty. At the same time, this is also a book about how to make sense of this tension in Benjamin's work. It cannot, I argue, be reduced to psychological ambiguity or ambivalence about his social role, nor did it derive from a conception of tradition that can be traced to some intellectual influence. Rather, it was the consequence of a sustained argument with the entrenched orthodoxies of German intellectual culture, an argument through which Benjamin sought to keep faith with the experience of all that was "untimely, sorrowful, and unsuccessful" or, as he came to put it, to vindicate the oppressed of history. The Benjamin who appears here is not (or not just) a virtuoso reader, a micrological investigator of culture, or a master of mimetic interaction with his objects, though at times he could be all of those. The hallmark of his work lies in its paradoxical, antinomial coherence. This coherence, I argue, can best be explained by taking him at his word-"the critic is a strategist in the literary struggle" -and reconstructing his pursuit of long-term [ix]

[x]

Preface

intellectual strategies. These strategies originated in choices he made at the time of his break with the youth movement and were clearly articulated in his immanent critique of German early romanticism. While his strategies continued to develop in response to new circumstances, the formative influence of this early constellation can still be traced in his dealings with baroque Trauerspiel, technology, and aestheticism in his later work. To reconstruct Benjamin's strategies, I call on Pierre Bourdieu's concept of the intellectual field to propose an approach to doing intellectual history that goes beyond documentary and reductive approaches. An intellectual field is a historically specific structure of orthodoxies and heterodoxies, and Benjamin's project can best be understood as an immanent critique of a specifically German intellectual culture dominated by the peculiar constellation of idealism and historicism that constituted what Fritz Ringer calls the mandarin orthodoxy. My study is not another intellectual biography of Benjamin, though I do hope to establish criteria for one that would be truly rigorous. Rather, it focuses attention on a particular issue, a crucial and previously under-illuminated aspect of his work-what I call his construction of the antinomies of tradition. My work has been generously supported, in various ways, by a research grant from the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst; the Graduate School of Boston University; the John Lax Fellowship of Brown University, and Peter and Anneli Lax; Harvard University; the Jaroslaw and Helena Stroczan Foundation of Mainz-Mombach; and, of course, my parents. I thank all of them. Parts of Chapter 7 appeared as "Benjamin's Passagen-Werk: A Guide to the Labyrinth," Theory and Society 14 (1985), 497-509; reprinted by permission. My debts to individuals are far-reaching, as they must be with a project of this nature. Two are particularly important. Fritz Ringer has been an incomparable mentor. He did not just introduce me to the study of German intellectual culture; he also imparted a vision of intellectual history, why it is important, and how to do it. He was the first to make me realize that I had to argue for my views, and he even succeeded in getting me to do it at times. As a reader, he has never settled for anything less than lucidity; throughout this long project, he managed the wondrous feat of being both a tenacious and a tactful critic. Nancy Lyman Roelker has helped to sustain my work on many levels for many years now; she has been unstinting and resourceful in providing sound advice, thoughtful criticism, and needed encourage-

Preface

[xi]

ment. I value both of them as teachers and as friends. My work would not have been possible without them. Carl Chiarenza was the first to encourage me to write on Benjamin; it was in his seminar on the history of photography that this project began. In Frankfurt, Lloyd Spencer generously led me into the maze of Benjamin's texts and the arcane worlds of Benjamin scholarship and left his indelible imprint on my image of Benjamin. Conversations and seminars with Burkhardt Lindner helped encourage my early work in Frankfurt as well. Irving Wohlfarth provided an incisive critique of the manuscript at an important point in its development. If our ways of reading differ, I nevertheless hope that my debt to and respect for his unsurpassed work on Benjamin will be evident throughout this book. At various stages of the work I have also had particularly helpful readings from Michael Bernstein, Donald Fleming, Mary Gluck, Mark Kishlansky, Charles Maier, Michael McKeon, Simon Schama, Kasia Stroczan, and Sophie Volpp; David J. Schoetz provided indispensable technical assistance with the footnotes. Tom Gleason, of Brown University, has genially presided over some of my pivotal passages. My editor at Cornell, John Ackerman, has shown extraordinary patience, and John Thomas's meticulous copy editing has saved me much embarrassment. My thanks to all of them. Finally, I thank my colleagues at Social Studies and at the History Department at Harvard University, and particularly my students, whose gift for dialogue and dispute amazes and sustains me. My father did not live to see the completion of this book. I can only hope it would have given him pleasure. JoHN McCoLE Cambridge, Massachusetts

A Note on Translations and Citations

All translations of Benjamin's texts in this book are my own. References to Benjamin's works are included parenthetically within the text. Figures in parentheses beginning with a roman numeral refer to Benjamin's Gesammelte Schriften: the roman numeral (1- VII) designates the volume, followed by an arabic numeral designating the page number (see the Bibliography for a list of the individual volumes). Figures in parentheses beginning with a "B" refer to the German edition of Benjamin's letters, Briefe.

[xiii]

Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition

These days the revolutionary will contains the conservative within itself, dialectically: at present this is the only way to those things of which the bourgeoisie has so longunjustly-seen itself as the guardian. (III 68)

Introduction

Benjamin's Construction of the Antinomies of Tradition

1.

Benjamin on Tradition

Readers of Walter Benjamin's essays in cultural criticism from the 1930s will have noticed his remarkable ambivalence toward the decay of tradition and experience which he took to be the hallmark of his times. Benjamin did not doubt that he was living through a crisis whose manifestations had first broken into the open during the lifetime of his own generation, which "between 1914 and 1918 had one of the most monstrous experiences in world history.... A generation that had gone to school with the horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in a landscape where nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a force field of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body" (II 214). It was certainly the political experience of his generation that created this sense of crisis-the "gruesome and chaotic renaissance in which so many place their hopes," as he described it in 1933 during the first months of his exile following the Nazi seizure of power in Germany (II 215). Yet beneath the political crisis he sensed an epochal upheaval in the organization of the human sensorium, the very structure of perception and experience. The vertigo induced by the political experiences of the generation of 1914, he was convinced, was also grounded in the vertiginous, disorienting acceleration of the pace of social and technological change in the opening decades of the twentieth century. The "structure of experience has changed," Benjamin contended, and he cited Paul Valery's observation that, "for the past twenty years, neither matter, nor space, nor time have been what they had been since time immemorial" (I 6o8, 472). For him, these changes in the structure of experience were both part of the explanation for the [1]

[2]

Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition

political and human catastrophes of the interwar period and a key to the possibility of bringing them under control. Benjamin examined many aspects of this crisis in the structure of perception and experience, but in his overarching formulations he often referred to it as a crisis of tradition: "a shattering blow to all that has been handed down-a shattering of tradition, which is the obverse of the present crisis and renewal of humanity" (I 477-478). What he meant by "tradition" was less a particular canon of texts or values than the very coherence, communicability, and thus the transmissibility of experience. "For experience is a matter of tradition, in collective as in private life. It is built up less out of individual facts firmly fixed in memory than of accumulated, often unconscious data that flow together in memory" (I 6o8). Benjamin's accounts of the decay of experience and tradition often sound the lamenting, elegiac tones usually associated with cultural conservatives. This note becomes perceptible in the way he contrasts the two German terms for experience, Erfahrung and Erlebnis. The individual's ability to assimilate sensations, information, and events to an integrated stock of experience (Erfahrung) was being stunted, he felt, with the result that experience was reduced to a series of atomized, unarticulated moments merely lived through (Erlebnis). When perception was sealed off from experience in this way, the result was both a decay of tradition and the helpless perplexity of the isolated individual. It became "a matter of chance whether the individual gets an image of himself, whether he can take hold of his experience" (I 610-611). But Benjamin was too astute to acquit traditional culture of complicity in the political barbarism of the 1930s. To him, many central concepts of traditional culture "such as creativity and genius, eternal value and mystery," seemed bound to promote "the processing of factual materials in the fascist sense" (I 473). Since the modes of perception underlying this culture were shot through with atavistic elements, they could provide no viable alternative-let alone effective resistance-to the new political barbarism. In this light, the imperative was not to lament the decay of tradition but to affirm, defiantly, the new "poverty of experience." We have seen too much of what this culture can bring, he insisted, "not to consider it honorable to own up to our poverty.... Poverty of experience: this need not be understood to mean that people yearn for new experience. No, they yearn to get free of experiences, they yearn for an environment in which they can bring their poverty-outer, and ultimately inner poverty as well-to bear so purely and clearly that something upright comes of it" (II 215, 218). The task at hand was not to grasp at the last straws of a dying culture but to get ready "to survive culture, if need be" (II 219). Benjamin's mature work thus seems to oscillate between celebrating

Introduction

[3]

and mourning the destruction of tradition and traditional culture. It would be easy to dismiss this radical ambivalence as evidence of changing moods, of opportunism, or even more simply as an unnoticed inconsistency in his thought. Among the things that force us to take it seriously, however, is his attempt to bundle these diverse elements into a single concept-that of the aura of an object of perception. Benjamin's theory of the aura was first and foremost an aesthetic theory, but he was convinced that aesthetic phenomena provide especially sensitive anticipations of broader perceptual and social trends. 1 For him the decay of the aura, a "crisis of artistic reproduction," exemplified a much more general "crisis of perception" (I 645). The human sensorium, he assumed, was not naturally and immutably given but underwent fundamental historical transformations. And the changing structure of perception-the "formal signature" of an age, which the best art historians had sometimes succeeded in portrayingcould in turn be related to underlying social transformations. The destruction of the aura was "a symptomatic process whose significance points beyond the realm of art" to the social transformations of advanced capitalist society (I 477-478). He saw the aura as the juncture at which connections between a broad network of social and historical processes could be identified. In his own work, it served an analogous function: like a catalyst added to a chemical solution approaching saturation, it crystallized his implicit theory of experience and tradition. For us, it can provide a microcosm in which the puzzles and antinomies of Benjamin's mature work appear in condensed form. Benjamin never gave a definitive, discursive analysis of his concept of the aura. Instead, he evoked an image of what it is like to experience an object auratically. His fundamental account of auratic perception, to which he referred back in all his explicit discussions of the aura, appeared in his "Small History of Photography" (1931). The aura sometimes appears as the "atmosphere" that seems to envelop an object, a scene, or a moment. Benjamin glosses this experience with an apparently unremarkable account of experiencing nature as an aesthetic phenomenon:2 1 For instance, see the suggestions (I 500-501, n.26) that condense the lines of thought he was developing at the time in his notes for the "Arcades" project. The prototype of such anticipatory phenomena in his work was the temporal inversion of the deja vu phenomenon described in "A Death Notice," in Berlin Childhood around 1900 (IV 251-252). 2 Wolfgang Kemp traces this passage to closely related formulations in the work of the art historian Alois Riegl. Benjamin explicitly referred to Riegl's studies of the changing "formal signature" of perception in "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility." See Kemp, "Fernbilder: Benjamin und die Kunstwissenschaft," 224-240. Benjamin's conception of the aura was fed by many sources, a point usually missed by attempts to isolate a single, definitive origin. For a sustained examination, see Marlene Stoessel, Aura: Das vergessene Menschliche. I return to this phenomenology in discussing Ludwig Klages's phenomenology of dream consciousness as the trace of an archaic mode of perception in Chapter 5, Section 4·

[4]

Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition What is aura, actually? An extraordinary weave of space and time: the unique appearance of a distance, however close it may be. While resting on a summer afternoon, to trace the crest of a mountain range against the horizon or a branch that casts its shadow on the beholder, until the moment or the hour becomes part of its appearance-that is what it means to breathe the aura of these mountains, this branch. (II 378)

On closer inspection, this seemingly casual gloss turns out to be a concise, surprisingly dense description of contemplation and the conditions that make it possible. To begin with, the subject must assume a position of repose in order to establish the necessary distance from the object. Contemplation, "intent attentiveness" (gespanntes Aufmerken) then depends on a paradoxical tension between distance and closeness. Contemplation is ordinarily thought of and experienced as absorption in the object: "One who concentrates before a work of art immerses himself in it. He enters into this work of art like the legendary Chinese painter as he viewed his finished painting" (I 504). Yet, as Benjamin's description makes clear, contemplative immersion simultaneously requires distance: one breathes the atmosphere of the mountain range, but the mountain range itself is unapproachable; the shadow of the branch is cast on the observer but will vanish if he moves to grasp the branch. This paradox is captured in the terse formulation that the aura is the "appearance of a distance, however close it may be." Furthermore, the aura has a temporal aspect: time ("a summer afternoon") merges with the spatial dimensions of distance and closeness "until the moment or the hour becomes part of the appearance." The entwinement of space and time thus makes the aura the unique appearance of a distance. The result is that peculiar phenomenon whereby certain appearances seem permeated by an atmosphere one can "breathe," despite-or indeed because of-its insubstantiality. For Benjamin, the aura that arises from such attentiveness is a hallmark not only of visual or aesthetic perception but of cognitive processes as such: the aura "applies, in thinking, to the intentional gaze of attentiveness as it does to a gaze in the literal sense" (I 646). In nonvisual contemplation, temporal distance or disinterested detachment may replace spatial distance as the constituent dimension of the aura. Abandonment to the structure of the object and its unique otherness calls forth a play of association in the beholder, saturating the atmosphere that seems to envelop it with a "mood." Benjamin unfolds the implications of this fundamental account of auratic perception in several directions. For instance, the "unique appearance of a distance, however close it may be," as described on the

Introduction

[5]

basis of natural objects, can be read as an account of contemplative immersion in a work of art. In "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility," Benjamin uses this translation of the concept of the aura into aesthetic terms to make the cultic character of the work of art apparent. To breathe the aura of an object means to experience its unique presence and its essential unapproachability, both of which are hallmarks of the "cultic image" (I 480, n. 7; I 647). The fleeting, elusive weave of space and time which constitutes the aura lends the object an air of secrecy and mystery, of inviolability. Yet the auratically perceived object seems to cast a spell that binds and absorbs the observer; in the thrall of this spell, one may even begin to sense that the object looks back. This spell lends the cultic object its authority. In other words, auratic perception has something literally atavistic about it. "As we know," Benjamin observes, "the earliest works of art originated in the service of a ritual"; and "it is of decisive importance that the work of art's auratic mode of existence never entirely separates from its ritual function." The modern, post-Renaissance mode of aesthetic perception as an appreciation of beauty "is still recognizable as secularized ritual even in the most profane forms of the cult of beauty" (I 480). And since aesthetic phenomena have symptomatic value, this suggests that atavistic, mythic compulsions continue, unrecognized, to dominate the forms of perception and experience throughout modern society. The auratic mode of perception lends objects a "cult value," a fetishistic character, and thereby a mystifying authority. To disperse the aura would therefore be a liberating achievement. The work of art, for instance, can be "emancipated from its parasitic dependence on ritual, for the first time in world history." The "shattering of the aura" can "pry the object from its shell," "actualize it"; the object ceases to cast a spell on the beholder, who can then get at it directly and assert control over it. The "formal signature" of a mode of perception in which this takes place would be one in which distance and uniqueness are overcome by the desire to "bring things closer" and a "feeling for the uniformity of things" (I 477-480). Crucial to Benjamin's argument is the idea that a nonauratic mode of perception is not an abstract program to be imposed on reality but a tangible potential inherent in the new, rapidly proliferating media of photomechanical reproduction, photography, and film. What these media share is the ability to "reproduce" objects technically and "bring them closer," thereby placing them into new contexts and submitting them to "perceptual tests" that liquidate the cultic authority built on distance and uniqueness. Reproductions, for instance, remove an object from its exclusive presence in its original setting and enable "the

[6]

Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition

original to meet the beholder halfway"; although the original itself remains untouched, "nevertheless the quality of its presence, its 'here and now', is always depreciated" -that is, the mode of its reception is altered irrevocably (I 476-477). Photography "can bring out those aspects of reality which are unattainable to the naked eye yet accessible to the lens," penetrating the formerly inviolable surface of the visible world. Film brings an even more extensive technical penetration of reality: the film's surface of appearances is a deliberate technical construction by means of montage. With film, the media of technical reproduction go beyond altering the mode of reception of traditional works of art to establish a new mode of aesthetic production and reception. The new media do not signal the vulgarization and degeneration of ideal, eternal values, as their cultured detractors were claiming; rather, they may foster a more critical, testing attitude toward mystifying authority. In this mode, Benjamin's rhetoric is exuberant, defiant, and militant. The "liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural inheritance" has a "cathartic side" (I 478). It creates a "clean slate," a "drawing board" for those "constructors" ready to own up to the "poverty of experience" (II 215). Benjamin's account of the aura as an atavism, a mystifying haze, and his advocacy of the technical instruments of its destruction constitute a moment in his work which can aptly be termed liquidationist. When Benjamin turns to consider the aura of historical objects, however, the implications are quite different. Once again, he begins from the unique presence of the auratically perceived object: the "here and now" of the work of art-its unique presence at the place where it is located. The "here and now" of the original constitutes the essence of its authenticity . . . a core more sensitive . . . than that of any natural object. (I 475-477) Once again, the aura consists in the uniqueness of the object and the presence it seems to radiate; together, these constitute its authenticity. But this historical presence is not simply some enthralling, charismatic immediacy. Instead, it is the appearance of historical depth inherent in the object: "On this unique presence, however, and on nothing else was enacted the history to which it was submitted in the course of its existence .... This is its authenticity. The authenticity of a thing is the quintessence of all that is transmissible about it from its very beginning onward, ranging from its material duration to its historical testimony." The authenticity of the object, its uniqueness, rests in its full historical testimony, that is, in the entire range of contexts it has passed through, not just in its singular, documentary testimony to its origins. For in-

Introduction

[7]

stance, successive phases in the reception of a work are shaped by the contexts in which they take place; and each of these phases in turn becomes part of the context for the subsequent reception. In effect, the transmission of a work inscribes this history on it, so that "the uniqueness of the work of art is identical with its embeddedness in the context of tradition." This accrual of historical testimony-authenticity-lends the object a certain authority, but an authority that is by no means fixed and dictatorial: "Tradition itself is something thoroughly alive and extraordinarily changeable" (I 480). Authoritative meanings may even be radically reversed; but they can be challenged and overthrown only if they are passed along at all. The aura of the object thus harbors and guarantees the transmissibility of its history. It provides the "web" of tradition, the medium of transmission. If the destruction of the aura threatened the transmissibility of culture, Benjamin came to see the very ability to have coherent experience being eroded as well. Both tradition and experience were rooted in memory, and for him memory too was an auratic phenomenon. In other essays of the 1930s, he explored the implications of the fact that the kind of memory that can lend coherence to ongoing, accumulating experience depends on associative richness rather than mechanical precision in recalling discrete facts. Traces of older experience must be hauled up from the depths of memory to be rearranged and reassociated with new, incoming stimuli if experience is to develop at all. The source material of memory consists in "the associations that ... tend to cluster around the object of perception," the aura of the object. These unconscious associations are the traces left by experience, much as the practiced hand of the experienced artisan leaves its traces on the object of use (I 644). Memory itself, then, involves both "the ability to interpolate endlessly into what has been" (VI 476) and a "process of assimilation, which takes place in the depths'' (II 447). In "The Storyteller" (1936), Benjamin described this process of assimilating events to a stock of experience in order to pass them along as the essence of the culture of storytelling. Storytelling "sinks the matter into the life of the teller, in order to bring it out of him again"; for "telling stories is always the art of telling them further" (II 446-447). What stories pass along is "counsel" or "wisdom," though "counsel is less the answer to a question than a suggestion about the continuation of an ongoing story." But "to seek this counsel one would first have to be able to tell the story." Cut off from the perceptual and mnemonic coherence bestowed by auratic perception, the individual is "solitary, unable to express himself about his most important concerns in an exemplary fashion, is himself uncounseled and can give no counsel to others" (II 442-443). For lack of counsel (Rat), he lapses into perplexity (Ratlosigkeit). Benjamin does not

[8]

Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition

even hesitate to identify the forms in which an intact memory provides the basis for coherent perception as cultic. But as part of the web of transmissibility and memory, the aura does not appear as the trace of a dangerous atavism. On the contrary: the destruction of the aura would be a dangerous leap in the dark; to advocate its liquidation would be to surrender the possibility of making sense of the world. On these matters, Benjamin intones accents characteristic of the cultural conservative. Thus, while Benjamin's phenomenological descriptions of auratic perception cluster around a common center, he draws diverse and often apparently contradictory implications from the aura and its destruction. Just as he asserts that the decay of the aura signals broader tendencies, so his analysis of the phenomenon captures the radical ambivalence that provides the generative tension of so much of his mature work. Benjamin's work celebrates and mourns, by turns, the liquidation of tradition. In some passages, the conflicting moments of this ambivalence lie so close together that Benjamin seems to call himself to order and reverse direction. "The Storyteller," for instance, strikes an unmistakably elegiac note from the outset. The figure of the storyteller "is something already remote from us and is getting ever more remote .... It is as if an ability that seemed inalienable to us, the most secure of our securities, were taken from us" (I 438-439). But when the elegiac tones threaten to slip over into nostalgia, he checks the progress of the argument with a fierce disclaimer: The storyteller is a man who has counsel for his hearers. But if "having counsel" is beginning to have an old-fashioned ring these days, this is due to the fact that the communicability of experience is decreasing. As a result, we have no counsel, either for ourselves or for others .... Counsel woven into the fabric of lived experience is wisdom. The art of storytelling is drawing to an end because the epic side of truth-wisdom-is dying out. But this is a process that goes a long way back. And nothing would be more foolish than to want to see in it merely a "symptom of decay," let alone a "modern" phenomenon. Rather, it is only a concomitant symptom of secular, historical forces of production, which have quite gradually removed storytelling from the realm of living speech and at the same time make it possible to sense a new beauty in what is vanishing. (II 442)

The abrupt reversal in this passage begins when Benjamin pins the accusation of foolishness on a somewhat shadowy opponent. As his theories of the aura and of experience show, Benjamin himself was by no means averse to constructing theories of decay. In fact, the reversal in this passage seems to be triggered by uneasiness at the drift of his

Introduction

[9]

own language toward the conservative, antimodernist version of the lament over the decay of experience. The defiant, progressive-sounding assurances about secular, historical forces of production with which he seeks to justify this reversal sound like whistling in the dark here. Real support for such assurances comes only from the theory that the optical testing fostered by the reception of film is the signature of a new, critical mode of perception, as sketched in "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility." It is instructive to note that "The Storyteller" was Benjamin's next major project after months of intensive work on the first version of the "Work of Art" theses. This pair of essays seems to be governed by an inner law of complementarity, however tense and paradoxical. In his essays of the 1930s, Benjamin composed an intricate counterpoint of works in which he successively developed the liquidationist and culturally conservative implications of his basic insights. 3 A dialectic of these perspectives unfolds in Benjamin's mature work: the more insistent his demands for liquidation and his identification with the forces of destruction, the deeper his permeation of vanishing forms of experience. This counterpoint, which took many forms, was nowhere more arresting than when fixed in the image of a single figure. As he observed admiringly of his friend Franz Hessel, One must not think that a pious gaze, which remains fixed on the museum-like, is enough to discover the whole antiquity of the "Old West" into which Hessel leads his readers. Only a man in whom the new announces itself so clearly, however quietly, can throw such an original and early gaze on what has just become old. (III 197)

The "Old West," the Berlin neighborhood of their bourgeois childhood which Benjamin credited Hessel with having helped him to (re)discover, was also an allegory for the precincts of an aging Western tradition which, Benjamin felt sure, was likewise approaching obsolescence. In describing Hessel's virtues as a guide, Benjamin cryptically referred to the mainsprings of his own work. He certainly sought to "let the new announce itself" in his work more emphatically than Hessel had, but the dialectical optic ascribed to Hessel was obviously his own. By extension, the figure named Benjamin united an experience of tradition more profound than that of its conservative guardians 3 Along with the "Work of Art" theses and "The Storyteller" (1935/36), the most dramatic examples are "Unpacking My Library" and "The Destructive Character" (1931; IV 388-398) as well as "Doctrine of the Similar" /"On the Mimetic Ability" and "Experience and Poverty" (1933; II 204-219). Of course, Benjamin did not mechanically alternate between these moments, and it can be dubious to single out a text as evidence of optimism or pessimism at any given time.

[10]

Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition

with a commitment to transcending it more emphatic than that of most radicals. Benjamin refused to surrender either of these attitudes toward the past. He found them equally compelling, though their consequences appeared to conflict; together, they form the figure of an antinomy in his thinking. His seeming ambivalence was not mere oscillation but, rather, an ongoing experiment: in allowing perspectives usually juxtaposed as "radical" and "conservative," "Enlightened" and "traditionalist," to converge in his work, he challenged the accepted paradigms of cultural criticism. His work constructs and explores the antinomies of a tradition understood as being in decay, antinomies whose force had emerged in the concrete historical situation of interwar Europe. This counterpoint constituted one of the most productive tensions in Benjamin's thought; it also underlies his relevance for us. It must be heeded and read properly if we are to go to the heart of his work.

2.

The Reception of Benjamin's Work

The practice of identifying conflicting tendencies in Benjamin's mature works is in itself nothing new. In one way or another it has always been central to the controversies generated by their reception. The difficulties begin when we ask how to spell out the issues involved and, equally important, how to come to grips with a body of work in which paradoxes and reversals provide so much of the animating force. Benjamin found himself faced with these questions during his own lifetime and took an explicit stand on them in his letters. As has often been noted, each of his major intellectual partners-Gershom Scholem, Theodor W. Adorno, and Bertolt Brecht-claimed to be in tune with the true sources of his inspiration and warned him against the baneful influence of the others. 4 Brecht, greeting a convert to the idea of the author as producer, viewed Benjamin as an ally for his own increasingly isolated position in the debates over Marxist aesthetics in the 1930s. Insofar as the "Work of Art" theses addressed the problem 4 These controversies, particularly what is sometimes called the Benjamin-Adorno debate, have been written up many times now. For more detailed summaries, see Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the InstitZ