Walter Benjamin

Critical Constellations

Graeme Gilloch

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745666662
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria

The works of Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) are widely acclaimed as being among the most original and provocative writings of twentieth-century critical thought, and have become required reading for scholars and students in a range of academic disciplines.

This book provides a lucid introduction to Benjamin's oeuvre through a close and sensitive reading not only of his major studies, but also of some of his less familiar essays and fragments. Gilloch offers an original interpretation of, and fresh insights into, the continuities between Benjamin's always demanding and seemingly disparate texts.

Gilloch's book will be of particular interest to students and scholars in social theory, literary theory, cultural and media studies and urban studies who are seeking a sophisticated yet readable overview of Benjamin's work. It will also prove rewarding reading for those already well-versed in Benjaminian thought.

1

Immanent Criticism and Exemplary Critique

Introduction

Benjamin’s concern with rethinking and reconfiguring the activity of literary and cultural criticism underpins his doctoral dissertation, ‘Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik’ (‘The Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism’), written between June 1917 and June 1919.¹ Acutely aware of the intellectual compromises required in this work and their injurious consequences,² Benjamin nevertheless did not regard his dissertation as some arcane academic undertaking. Rather, he understood it as a timely, pointed attack upon prevailing interpretations of German Romanticism and the movement’s intellectual legacy, a legacy with significant ramifications in the present. In a letter to Ernst Schoen dated 8 November 1918, Benjamin states clearly:

The work treats the romantic concept of criticism (art criticism). The modern concept of criticism has been developed from the romantic concept; but ‘criticism’ was an esoteric concept³ for the romantics … which was based on mystical assumptions about cognition. In terms of art, it encapsulates the best insights of contemporary and later poets, a new concept of art that, in many respects is our concept of art. (COR, pp. 135–6)⁴

Benjamin’s study was to insist on the modernity and actuality of Romanticism, and stress the profoundly mystical character of its critical practice.

For Benjamin, it was in the early writings of Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829), which appeared in the Romantics’ own Athenaeum publication (between 1798 and 1800),⁵ and of Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg, 1772–1801), whose earliest philosophical fragments date from 1795, that the modern notion of literary criticism begins to take shape. These texts thus form the logical and necessary starting point for any serious attempt to ‘recreate criticism as a genre’. Breaking with the prevailing artistic orthodoxies of neoclassicism, the early Romantics explored and developed new modes of aesthetic appreciation and a conceptual vocabulary appropriate to the modern spirit of intellectual critique and revolutionary transformation. Their ideas appeared against the backdrop of, and were attuned to, the unprecedented socio-historical, political, cultural and intellectual changes of the age: the French Revolution, incipient industrialization, nationalist fervour, European war. Such radical ambitions amid turbulent times clearly had a particular resonance for Benjamin, given his own youthful rejection of what he saw as the rigid hierarchies and obsolete values of bourgeois culture and the imminent collapse of Imperial Germany.

This forward-looking, pioneering sensibility of the Romantics was not that of Enlightenment thought, with its emphasis on the disenchantment of nature, scientific rationality and calculation. Rather – and for Benjamin this was of the utmost significance – early Romanticism retained a deeply mystical understanding of art and criticism as emanations and/or reminders of a pure, poetic original language (Ursprache). In the work of Novalis, for example, nature constitutes a universe of signs and hieroglyphs,⁶ a hidden language which finds expression in the medium of art, such that ‘the most perfect poetry will be that which, like a “musical fantasy” or like the “harmonies from an aeolian harp” makes us so forget the artistic medium that “nature itself” appears to speak’ (Frank, 1989, p. 281). Similarly, Schlegel suggests, in fragments from 1804–5, that in the medium of art humanity could come to perceive the traces or intimations of divine Revelation.⁷ Such mystical ideas may seem obscure to the contemporary reader, and the very opposite of ra-tional modern thinking, but for Benjamin the ‘esoteric’ aspects of Romanticism had a particular fascination and relevance. Influenced by Judaic mysticism and the Kabbalah,⁸ and by such marginal thinkers as the eighteenth-century anti-rationalist Johann Georg Hamann,⁹ some of Benjamin’s own earliest texts – most notably his impenetrable 1916 fragment, ‘On Language as Such and on Human Language’ – speculate on the intricate connections between the act of divine creation and various orders of language: the creative word of God, which brings into being and suffuses the world; the original language of Adam, which names things according to divine intention; and the proliferation and confusion of human languages after the Fall.¹⁰ For Benjamin, as for the Romantics, the view that external nature is inert material existing solely for human manipulation and exploitation is symptomatic of an impoverished human condition and inner nature, and of the failure to understand the genuine imperative for modern technology, which is, as Benjamin later insists in Einbahnstrasse, not the human control of nature, but control of humanity’s relationship with nature.

Far from diminishing the critical potency of Romantic thought, such mystical tendencies formed its critical core. This is because – and it is absolutely crucial for Benjamin – early Romantic thought did not, unlike its later decadent manifestations, espouse and privilege forms of reactionary and irrationalist thinking: the cult of artistic genius, the mythical idolatry of nature, quasi- and pseudo-religious dogmas. Instead, early Romanticism combined an emphasis upon forms of mystical illumination and intuitive insight which were anathema to Enlightenment thought with an insistence upon critical rigour and sobriety that distinguished it from the irrationalism of more recent movements – in particular, the circle around the poet Stefan George (1868–1933), the so-called Georgekreis, a group with its own plan to recreate German criticism and culture. For Benjamin, the cool precision and lucidity which lent early Romantic writing such critical power stand in stark contrast to later, and even our own popular contemporary, understanding of ‘Romanticism’ as effusive emotionalism, sentimental pastoralism or self-indulgent nostalgia. Here the main purpose of Benjamin’s doctoral dissertation becomes apparent: in recognizing early Romanticism as the ancestor of modern criticism, his study unmasked its many bastard offspring, and established a true heir in its rightful place: a new German criticism which captures the original iconoclastic impulses, critical energy and mystical insights of early Romanticism; a revitalized criticism which possesses ‘infinite profundity and beauty in comparison to all late romanticism’ (COR, p. 88); an immanent criticism which, concerned with unfolding the innermost tendencies of the work of art, is appropriate both to the artwork itself and to the changing circumstances in which it now exists.

This chapter provides an exposition of the main themes of Benjamin’s doctoral dissertation. It takes as its point of departure Fichte’s notion of reflection as an endless coming to consciousness of the self, and proceeds to indicate how the Romantics transposed this idea on to the domain of art. Criticism is to be conceived not as the recovery of some original authorial intention, but as an interpretative intervention in the afterlife of the artwork. Meaning is transformed and reconfigured as the artwork is read and understood in new contexts and historical constellations. As will become evident in this book, this notion of ‘immanent criticism’ lies at the very heart of Benjamin’s work: not just his literary criticism, but also his studies of modern commodities, urban architectural forms and mass media. Benjamin’s understanding of a number of key concepts in early Romanticism is then sketched – ‘criticizability’, ironic destruction, the Gesamtkunstwerk, allegory and monadology, and, above all, the sober, prosaic character of criticism – and their significance outlined.

After a brief consideration of Benjamin’s proposed, but never published, journal Angelus Novus, the remainder of the chapter focuses on Benjamin’s most notable attempt to utilize the critical tools developed in the dissertation and illustrate how they might facilitate a new, critical appreciation of literary texts. Provocatively, Benjamin selects a text by the greatest figure of German literary Kultur and of the traditional Bildungsbürgertum: Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s Wahlvervandschaften (Elective Affinities). In this exemplary critique, Benjamin castigates the misappropriation of Goethe’s work by the Georgekreis, and demonstrates how an immanent reading of the dialectical tensions in the narrative lead to a completely different – indeed antithetical – interpretation of the text. Far from celebrating the power of fate and mythical forces, Goethe’s story extols resolute human action to overcome them. Benjamin goes on to argue that, in the death of one of the novel’s central characters, Ottilie, Goethe’s tale itself provides an allegorical figure of the process of immanent criticism – the demise of superficial appearances for the sake of an emerging truth. Elective Affinities thus antici-pates its own immanent critique. In short, Benjamin not only wrests Goethe from the clutches of the Georgekreis and its irrationalist world-view, he also appropriates him for his own vision of criticism. Hence, it is not only in the writings of the early Romantics that Benjamin perceives the intimations of his own critical practice, but also in those of Goethe. One could claim no more illustrious forebear than this.

Reflection in Fichte and early Romanticism

Concerned with establishing the ‘epistemological presuppositions’ (SW1, p. 116) of the Romantic concept of criticism, Benjamin’s dissertation identifies the fundamental German idealist category of ‘reflection’ as ‘Schlegel’s basic epistemological conception’ (SW1, p. 120).¹¹ This is ‘the most frequent “type” in the thought of the early Romantics’ (SW1, p. 121) and ‘the style of thinking in which … the romantics expressed their deepest insights’ (SW1, p. 121). More precisely, Schlegel’s concept of criticism involved a particular interpretation and reformulation of Fichte’s insights, expounded in his 1794 Über den Begriff der Wissenschaftslehre oder der sogenannten Philosophie, as the subject’s coming to self-consciousness through reflection.¹² For Fichte, it is through the process or medium of reflection that the ‘subject’, the ‘I’ or ‘ego’, is constituted and reconstituted through time. The individual subject thinks about and reflects upon itself, comes to know itself, and through this new awareness of self is changed. The subject is in a perpetual process of coming to know itself and of modification. For Fichte, the subject is not a fixed or static entity, but is formed and transformed through the act of the ‘I’ reflecting upon the ‘I’, and in so doing, moving to an ever higher state of self-consciousness.

This vision of the constitution of the self through reflection has a number of consequences. First, the ‘self’ is not something which exists independently of the reflecting ‘I’; it is not a pre-formed ‘thing’ patiently awaiting exploration, but, as the product of the activity of reflection, is itself an activity. The self is a product of reflection, rather than reflection being a consequence of self; in short, ‘reflection is logically the first and primary’ (SW1, p. 134). Secondly, in reflection the distinction between the subject and object of knowledge is dissolved. The ‘I’ is both subject and object of knowledge. It is the subject/object of knowledge. Finally, this reflection is ‘an infinite process’ (SW1, p. 125), an endless becoming of the self, an endless becoming of knowledge of the self, the pro-cessual and incremental elevation of the self-consciousness of the subject. Benjamin cites Fichte thus: ‘ “Thus we shall continue, ad infinitum, to require a new consciousness for every consciousness, a new consciousness whose object is the earlier consciousness, and thus we shall never reach the point of being able to assume an actual consciousness” ’ (SW1, p. 125). He then comments: ‘Fichte makes this argument no less than three times here in order to come to the conclusion on each occasion that, on the basis of this limitlessness of reflection, “consciousness remains inconceivable to us” ’ (SW1, p. 125). Self-consciousness is both immediate knowledge, mediated by reflection, and ever elusive. For Benjamin, this paradox of reflection forms the epistemological basis of Romantic thought.¹³

Fichte sought to circumvent the problem of ‘an endless and empty process’ (SW1, p. 126) of reflection by positing the immediacy of knowledge through the terminus of an ‘absolute I’. By contrast, the Romantics had no wish to eliminate the infinity of reflection, but made it the basis of their understanding.¹⁴ Reflection for them was not to be understood as the activity of an individual subject, or located within an individual consciousness, a cognitive ‘I’ engaged in an endless and futile pursuit of a definitive self-consciousness. Rather, reflection is the critical medium in which art recognizes and (re)constitutes itself. The individual work of art unfolds itself and comes to reveal its innermost tendencies in, rather than through, reflection; for the medium of reflection is art itself.¹⁵ Just as the ‘I’ was both subject and object of reflection for Fichte, so art is both subject and object of reflection for the Romantics. In reflection, the meaning of the work of art yields its meaning and significance with ever-greater clarity. Whereas for Fichte, reflection brings with it ever increasing self-consciousness in the subject, for the...