Capitalism and its Discontents

Power and Accumulation in Latin-American Culture

John Kraniauskas

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781783169566
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Capitalism and its Discontents presents a series of interpretative essays on a number of key modern and contemporary Latin American novels and films. The overarching theme in the essays is the relation between such textual materials and their regional contexts.

PART I

WALTER BENJAMIN AND/IN LATIN AMERICA

1

Beware Mexican Ruins! ‘One-Way Street’ and the Colonial Unconscious

We must rather picture this unconscious material topographically…

Sigmund Freud¹

I have long, indeed for years, played with the idea of setting out the sphere of life – bios – graphically on a map.

Walter Benjamin²

America

Towards the end of his analysis of Walter Benjamin’s city portraits, Peter Szondi tells the following anecdote: ‘At that time a story was circulating in the emigrant community about a Jew who planned to emigrate to Uruguay; when his friends in Paris seemed astonished that he wanted to go so far away, he retorted, “Far from where?”’³ The time was 1933, and the Nazis had just seized power in Germany. Towards the end of August seven years later, in 1940, escaping from Nazi troops advancing on France, Benjamin began to make his own way to the American continent. His journey would have taken him across the Pyrenees and into Falangist Spain, and from here on to join his exiled colleagues at the Institute of Social Research in the United States.⁴ Thanks to the help of Max Horkheimer he had been issued with a visa in the US consulate in Marseilles. Some days later, however, he was detained by Spanish border authorities at Port Bou. Threatened with deportation back to France, Benjamin committed suicide on 25 September 1940.

America had beckoned before. Almost exactly five years earlier, in a letter to Benjamin dated 23 September 1935, the literary historian Erich Auerbach mentions a previous attempt to provide him with an opportunity to leave Europe for the ‘far away’ American continent, this time to a teaching post in Sao Paulo, Brazil:

I thought of you once, at least a year ago, when they were looking for a professor to teach German Literature in São Paulo. I found out your (then) Danish address through the Frankfurter Zeitung and communicated it to the relevant authorities

But, continues Auerbach, ‘nothing came of it’ (see the Appendix to this chapter below). The correspondence between Benjamin and Auerbach has not been published as yet, so we do not know how he may have responded to such an idea, if at all. We do know, however, that his economic situation in 1935 was extremely precarious, and that he was finding it very difficult to survive on the stipend he received from the Institute of Social Research and to make a living as a writer. He may, therefore, have welcomed the opportunity to emigrate.⁵ On the other hand, Benjamin’s reluctance to leave Europe – and, for example, join Gershom Scholem in Palestine – is well known, as is his strong intellectual commitment to the Arcades Project, which by 1935 was quite well advanced. This reluctance, Benjamin insisted, had political content.⁶

First, there was the arena and traditions to which, as a Jewish intellectual, he believed his work was relevant. Bernd Witte is surely right, in this regard, to point out that Benjamin’s reluctance to join Scholem in Palestine accords with his long-held ‘plea for an establishment for the spiritual values of Judaism in the context of European culture’.⁷ Secondly, there was his commitment to deciphering the crisis-ridden present of that very tradition in the Paris of Baudelaire and the Arcades. By September 1940, with the advance of Fascist forces on Paris, Benjamin finally decided to leave Europe. He would, however, never reach America – be it the USA, Brazil or even Uruguay. Nevertheless, the Americas certainly reached him – culturally – and not only in its most obvious US guise: cultural Fordism (Hollywood).

Bernd Witte’s intellectual biography of Walter Benjamin suggests that the latter’s interest in language was ‘awakened by studies with the Berlin teacher Ernst Lewy on Wilhelm von Humboldt and [most importantly for us here] furthered by his work with [Walter] Lehmann in Munich’. In October 1915, he goes on, Benjamin had moved to Munich where, until his departure in December 1916, he attended a number of seminars. According to his correspondence at the time, he was unhappy with his instruction there; except, that is, for a colloquium given by the Americanist Walter Lehmann ‘on the language and culture of ancient Mexico’.⁸ Witte’s suggestion about Benjamin’s interests in ancient Mexico confirms remarks already made by Scholem in his own earlier book Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship:

There [in Munich], under the Americanist Walter Lehmann, he [Benjamin] had already started his studies of Mexican culture and religion of the Mayas and Aztecs in the summer semester – studies closely connected with his mythological interests. In these lectures, which were attended by few people and by hardly any regular university students, Benjamin became acquainted with the memorable figure of Bernardo [sic] Sahagún, to whom we owe so much of the preservation of the Maya and Aztec traditions … Some time later, in Berlin, I saw Molino’s [sic] big Aztec-Spanish dictionary on Benjamin’s desk; he had bought it in order to learn the Aztec language, but he never carried out his project.⁹

Witte concludes his own remarks on this subject as follows:

The impetus to develop his thinking in written form was given by the intensive discussions with Scholem, who at the time was still studying mathematics but was already occupied with Jewish mysticism. Benjamin’s pioneering essay, ‘Concerning Language in General and the Language of Man’, completed toward the end of 1916 in Munich, originated in his desire to continue his discussions with Scholem on the essence of language in a written forum.¹⁰

The narrative reconstructed here – from an ‘awakening’ to the ‘development’ of Benjamin’s thinking on language – leaves little doubt as to the importance of his introduction to ancient Mexican culture for his subsequent intellectual development, and of the seriousness with which he originally pursued – albeit momentarily – his desire to speak ‘Aztec’.¹¹ A critical appreciation of this interest may provide a new perspective on important aspects of Benjamin’s work. America would not just be present in his work as the sign of the industrialization of culture (USA) but also, more problematically perhaps, as a site of its mythological critique (Mexico). The purpose of the following notes is to map out some of this (‘underground’) terrain with reference to Benjamin’s 1928 avant-garde publication ‘One-Way Street’, and to ask after the significance of his subsequent reluctance to register Mexico or to address the questions of colonialism and imperialism in his work on the cultural experience of capitalism (modernity).

Geographies: the Points of a Compass

Travel was, of course, fundamental to Benjamin’s writing. Indeed, the point of Szondi’s anecdote about the Jewish emigrant’s intended voyage to Uruguay was to explain why Benjamin had stopped writing about his travels. The emigrant’s retort, he believed, contained the germ of a possible explanation: ‘with the loss of one’s homeland’ – in this case to Nazism –

the notion of distance also disappears. If everything is foreign, then the tension between distance and nearness from which the city portraits draw their life cannot exist. The emigrant’s travels are not the kind one looks back on, his map has no focal point around which foreign lands assume a fixed configuration.¹²

From 1933 onwards Benjamin’s now exiled gaze remained fairly fixed on the arcades of his second home, Paris, as he gathered the materials necessary to produce their cultural history. So much so that, as we have seen, he left it until 1940 to attempt to leave Europe and join his colleagues in America.

The importance of the city portraits for Benjamin’s Arcades Project has been underlined by Susan Buck-Morss in The Dialectics of Seeing in which she takes Benjamin at his word and sets out ‘the sphere of [his] life … graphically on a map’. The cultural and political significance of the cities visited by Benjamin during the late 1920s and 1930s is such that together they provide his life and work with a structure ‘that locates the Passagen-Werk geographically, and lends it a spatial order’. Underlying Benjamin’s work can be deciphered the traces of a political geography. Buck-Morss continues:

To the West is Paris, the origins of bourgeois society in the political-revolutionary sense; to the East, Moscow in the same sense marks its end. To the South, Naples locates the Mediterranean origins, the myth-enshrouded childhood of Western civilization; to the North, Berlin locates the myth-enshrouded childhood of the author himself.¹³

It is the sociocultural space constituted by the Arcades – as at one and the same time ‘commodity graveyards’ and ‘the unconscious of the dream collective’ – that lies at the centre of the east–west/north–south axes, and gathers together – under one roof, so to speak – the revolutionary origins (past) and ends (future) of bourgeois culture. This particular map also contains, however, as Benjamin knew well, a triumphant fascism in the myth-enshrouded locations mapped out by Buck-Morss which, furthermore, eventually threaten to overtake Europe’s past and future too. Benjamin’s Arcades thus become a complex spatio-temporal construct of modernity porous to unconscious desire and myth, dreams of the past and the future.¹⁴

There is, however, something lacking in a political geography of Benjamin’s life and work – of Arcades, cities and Europe – so dependent on Benjamin’s own contextualization of his work, and it is the internationality of these spaces as structured by such concepts as colonialism and imperialism. ‘I believe’, says Theodor Adorno of Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘Paris – the Capital of the Nineteenth Century’, ‘that the commodity category could be greatly concretized by the specifically modern categories of world trade and imperialism. Related to this is the arcade as a bazaar, also antique shops as world-markets for the temporal.’¹⁵ Adorno never took full note of this idea in his own work. Yet it is arguable that Benjamin did not follow up this criticism either, refusing to involve himself – and Baudelaire – in the international dimension of capitalism (imperialism/colonialism) signalled by the above criticism. From Adorno’s point of view the Paris of Benjamin’s essay was not just a historical capital – the capital of a specific time (the nineteenth century) – but also a geographical capital – the capital of a specific internationalized space (imperialism).

Given Benjamin’s interest in the phantasmagoria of World Exhibitions – the precursors of the culture industry¹⁶ – and considering his interest in the materials and economy of the unconscious, this refusal appears unusual. For as Adorno suggests, in some places – bazaars and antique shops – the desires of purchasers and window-shoppers strangely acquired an international dimension, and the clue to such a geography of desire was precisely the historical specificity of the commodity form that so interested Benjamin – which, indeed, was at the theoretical centre of his enquiry. In this respect, both Adorno and Benjamin may have remembered the ‘colonial goods’ on sale in the shops of the recently unified – and imperial – nation into which they were born.¹⁷ The internationalized desire of colonialism was, however, subsequently denied and forgotten by both writers, as it has been by the criticism that has occupied itself with Benjamin’s work.

The general context into which Walter Benjamin and his colleagues of the Frankfurt School were born was that of an imperial – and recently unified – Germany in which nationhood and colonialism mutually re-enforced each other in the dominant ruling imaginary (and was to be suffered for years after the loss of colonies in 1918). If this denied international dimension is added to an appreciation of Benjamin’s work – and both Witte and Scholem’s references to his interest in ancient Mexican culture in the context of colonialism suggest that it should be – then its geographical contextualization must be modified so as to take it beyond Europe. Indeed, the name of the Americanist Walter Lehmann (1878–1939), whose seminar in Munich introduced Benjamin to the work of Bernardino de Sahagún (1499?–1590) and through him to the ‘language and culture of ancient Mexico’, can stand here as a sign for the comparatively early and rapid development of the discipline of ethnology in Germany (as compared to France) during the second half of the nineteenth century. In this respect, note should also be made of the relationship between German colonialism, the discipline of ethnology and art: ‘The acceleration of German colonial expansion after 1896’, writes Jill Lloyd, ‘coincided with developments in Western aesthetics and ethnology which encouraged Jugendstil artists to look towards non-European art for inspiration.’¹⁸ Artists, like Kirchner, did not have to go far to find such inspiration. Colonial collections already existed, for example at the ethnographic museums of Dresden and Berlin, and were regularly visited. Benjamin himself may even have seen the accompanying side-shows – put on by impresarios and encouraged by governments as part of their colonial propaganda – which exhibited African villages, their inhabitants and dancers in the zoological gardens in which he remembered spending so much time as a child. From this interaction between art, colonialism and the institutionalization of ethnology there emerged a particularly strong primitivist mode of expressionism – a cultural form, like the Jugendstil, of particular interest to Benjamin.¹⁹

In ‘One-Way Street’ Benjamin includes a fragment called ‘Mexican Embassy’ whose epigraph reads as follows: ‘I never pass by a wooden fetish, a gilded Buddha, a Mexican idol without reflecting: perhaps it is the true God.’ The text, interestingly, is by Charles Baudelaire, the literary object of the essay by Benjamin criticized by Adorno. The connection between Mexico and Baudelaire is not arbitrary, although it is not clear that for Benjamin it was ever more than literary. Indeed, Baudelaire’s last years, 1862–7, were the years of Napoleon Bonaparte’s imperial designs on Mexico and the short-lived rule imposed there of Emperor Maximilian I – whose execution in 1867 was painted by his friend Manet, three times.²⁰ This is precisely the imperialism referred to by Adorno and which, according to Benjamin himself, Brecht even suggested was the background to Rimbaud’s Le Bateau Ivre: ‘what it describes is not an eccentric poet going for a walk but the flight, the escape of a man who cannot bear to live any longer inside the barriers of a class which – with the Crimean War, with the Mexican adventure – was then beginning to open up even the more exotic continents to its mercantile interests’.²¹ As can be seen, Benjamin registers the imperial relation but seems unwilling to reflect upon it even after Adorno’s suggestions. Could this be because, however critical, he remains internal to an idea of European culture that in 1933 was threatened, and by 1940 destroyed?

‘Anaquivitzli’: Underground Works

I saw in a dream barren terrain. It was the market-place at Weimar. Excavations were in progress. I too scraped about in the sand. Then the tip of a church steeple came to light. Delighted, I thought to myself: a Mexican shrine from the time of pre-animism, from the Anaquivitzli. I awoke laughing. (Ana=ava; vi=vie; witz [joke]=Mexican church [!].)²²

‘One-Way Street’ is not a city portrait, although it self-consciously uses the city street as its organizing aesthetic principle. Given its status as an avant-garde literary work – it contains most of this movement’s contradictory anti-institutional gestures – of all Benjamin’s texts this one has received surprisingly little attention. This is because, paradoxic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue
• Introduction
• Part I: Walter Benjamin and/in Latin America
• Part II: The ‘Maldoblestar’ of Literature
• Part III: Film and Accumulation
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography