‘What distinguishes Naples from other large cities’, wrote Walter Benjamin and his Bolshevik Latvian lover Asja Lacis in their joint essay on the city in 1925, ‘is something it has in common with the African kraal: each private attitude or act is permeated by streams of communal life. To exist, for the Northern European the most private of affairs, is here, as in the kraal, a collective matter.’1
Lexicographer Charles Pettman’s 1913 book, Africanderisms: A glossary of South African colloquial words and phrases and of place and other names, defined kraal as: ‘1) An enclosure for stock. 2) A Hottentot village. 3) Any native village or collection of huts. The word seems to have been introduced by the Dutch and applied somewhat contemptuously at first to the Hottentot and Kaffir holdings and villages.’2 But while Dutch colonists may have used kraal to suggest that Africans lived like cattle, Benjamin and Lacis used it to praise how Neapolitans lived. In particular, they were struck by how this south European city served as reproof to the lives of northern Europeans who, under capitalism, distinguished increasingly ruthlessly between private and public worlds.
Yes, the Englishman’s home had long been proverbially his castle. More symptomatic of what they took to be a growing trend was that Benjamin’s parents’ sumptuous homes in Berlin’s socially cleansed west end excluded the poor so efficiently that their son scarcely knew they existed. In The Arcades Project, Benjamin argued that such jealously guarded private zones first arose under the rule of the bourgeois French king Louis Philippe in the 1830s and 1840s. The result was, he thought, a growing division between private and public spaces, where the function of the former was to provide the bourgeois citizen with refuge from business and social concerns, and sustain him in his illusions. Benjamin wrote: ‘From this derive the phantasmagorias the interior – which, for the private individual, represents the universe. In the interior, he brings together remote locales and memories of the past. His living room is a box in the theatre of the world.’3 Benjamin was presciently writing before the age of television or the internet, before the assembling of the distant in space and time in the domestic interior became technologically sophisticated, before the phantasmagorias of the interior made us socially atomised spectators – or perma-gawpers in what French situationist thinker Guy Debord called the society of the spectacle.
The cities that excited Walter Benjamin as he roamed Europe in the 1920s were not like that. In Naples, Marseilles and Moscow in particular, he found private and public life thrillingly intermingled, the possibilities of transcending class apparently limitless. Each city in its different way offered him a cure for the disease of modern life in general, and of his upbringing in particular. His compatriot, the sociologist Max Weber, had written of the iron cage of capitalism inside which humans were submitted to efficiency, calculation and control. Cities were part of that system of control, which worked by keeping the poor and the rich in their proper places. The cities that turned Benjamin on were the opposite of that.
He wrote about them in a series of essays that are often erotically charged, as the privileged north European got up close with the sensual other – experiencing frottage on a crowded Moscow tram, savouring the stirring Neapolitan language of gestures, or exploring the captivatingly seamy side of Marseilles, a city then living up to its hotly contested title as the world’s wickedest port.
In 1925, Benjamin left Berlin and an increasingly antipathetic Germany – one in which anti-Semitism was on the rise, and the prospect of socialist revolution receding into the distance. Benjamin’s sense of Germany as an unsympathetic place was intensified by professional setback. His hopes of becoming an academic were in tatters as the University of Frankfurt had rejected his post-doctoral thesis, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, thus denying him the necessary qualification to be able to teach. As a result, he had to rely on money from Grub Street and the occasional commission from the Institute for Social Research; the death of his father Emil in 1926 made matters even more financially perilous.
Italy was for Benjamin, as it had been for Germans from Goethe onwards, antidote, distraction and place of erotic renewal. And so it proved when he arrived in Naples with the actress Lacis, leaving his wife Dora and seven-year-old son Stefan in Germany. What he and Lacis eulogised in Naples was a quality they called porosity. It’s a term that became central to Benjamin and the Frankfurt School during the 1920s. Benjamin and Lacis defined porosity as the melting away of structural and hierarchical divisions. Instead of domestic space being ringfenced from an irksome world as it seemed to them to be in northern Europe, in Naples they found that private life was ‘dispersed’ and ‘commingled’. They wrote: ‘Just as the living room reappears on the street, with chairs, hearth, and altar, so only much more loudly the street migrates into the living room.’
The only civilised, private and ordered buildings in Naples, they thought, were the posh hotels and great warehouses; otherwise, Neapolitans demonstrated a way of urban living inimical to Benjamin’s upbringing in Berlin and one piqued by poverty. ‘Poverty has brought about a stretching of frontiers that mirrors the most radiant freedom of thought.’ Children, he wrote with a northern European’s shock, are up at all hours. ‘At midday they then lie sleeping behind a shop counter or on a stairway. This sleep, which men and women also snatch in shady corners, is therefore not the protected Northern sleep. Here, too, there is interpenetration of day and night, noise and peace, outer light and inner darkness, street and home.’ Of course one could dismiss this as a privileged man’s poverty tourism, but what is worth preserving from his and Lacis’s essay about Naples is that in their vision of it, life has become communal, space-time twisted inside-out and inwardness unthinkable. Naples wasn’t just a city to Benjamin, but a Catholic carnivalesque, the realisation of utopian dreaming, and a modernist work of art.
Instead of an iron cage, Benjamin found a world of libidinal flows in Naples. For instance, he and Lacis observed the language of gestures like voyeuristic anthropologists. ‘The conversation is impenetrable to anyone from outside’, they wrote. ‘Ears, nose, eyes, breasts, and shoulders are signalling stations activated by the fingers. These configurations return in their fastidiously specialised eroticism. Helping gestures and impatient touches attract the stranger’s attention.’ It’s hard to tell in this passage whether Walter Benjamin is being given directions or being propositioned. Either way, he seems to like it.
In that summer of 1925, Benjamin and Lacis were joined in the Bay of Naples by other German critics and philosophers, including Siegfried Kracauer and the twenty-two-year-old composer, music critic and aspiring philosopher Theodor Adorno, who was breaking off his studies in Vienna with the composer Alban Berg. All were stimulated, not just by the city, but by its surroundings – by the idyll of Capri, by visits to Vesuvius, and, further along the coast, by the cliffs of Positano. The suggestion made in Martin Mittelmeier’s book Adorno in Naples is that the Frankfurt scholars were schooled in Naples, that some of the most exciting ideas they developed found their inspiration there, that they were seduced like Goethe by ‘das Land wo die Zitronen blühen’ (the country where the lemon trees bloom). While Marxism was ossifying in Frankfurt, it was exploding into life in Naples.4
Between 1924 and 1926 Vesuvius was open to the public. Mittelmeier traces a distinction in Adorno’s 1928 essay on Schubert, between the chthonic force of Beethoven and the fissured landscapes of Schubert, to the volcano. Mittelmeier also suggests that Adorno’s repeated figure of hollow spaces or Hohlraume has a literal precursor: it is what he found on the cliffs of Positano. There, the Swiss futurist Gilbert Clavel spent much of the 1920s blowing huge holes into the rock face with dynamite. ‘Whenever I create these holes’, wrote Clavel in 1923, ‘I always have the feeling that I am capturing air-pockets of energy, compressed spaces in which something spiritual can then explode.’5 Mittleimeier suggests that when Adorno argues that Beethoven blows empty spaces (‘Hohltstellen’) in bourgeois music, that image is literally prefigured by what he saw in Positano’s cliffs.
Perhaps it was at Positano that Adorno learned how to philosophise. Nietzsche philosophised with a hammer, Adorno upgraded to dynamite. Deconstructionist before the word was coined, Adorno started his writing career in the 1920s with eviscerating musical criticism, and never really ceased blowing holes in other thinkers’ long-nurtured intellectual edifices. In the culmination of Adorno’s mature thought, Negative Dialectics, for example, he blew up Hegel’s philosophy of history. History for Hegel was, like a rock formation, a slow process of becoming. It was also a story with a happy ending; what’s more, it was a redemptive narrative in which everything, even the dead ends of evolution, even human lives crushed on history’s implacable march towards the absolute, had a meaning, a place in the story. When Hegel said ‘the real is the rational’ that is what he meant. When he wrote, paradoxically, that there is an ‘identity of identity and non-identity’, there too he was claiming that everything that comes about must contribute in some way to the workings of the absolute.
Heraclitus envisaged the world as in flux, seeing change as the truth of existence. But under Hegel’s gaze, the world’s Heraclitan flux congealed into something more readily comprehensible – as though instead of Vesuvian magma, it had become Positano cliff face. History became paradoxical: through a process of becoming, the laws explaining it became set in stone. Adorno, doing what Beethoven did to bourgeois music, shattered that Hegelian whole. He argued that there was a ‘non-identity of identity and non-identity’, by which he meant that existence is incomplete, that it has a hole in it where the whole should be, that history is not the simple unfolding of some preordained noumenal realm and that existence is therefore ‘ontologically incomplete’.6
Adorno’s takedown of western philosophy had its precursor in his writing about music in the 1920s. ‘His discourse was full of melancholic allusions pointing to the crumbling of all traditional values’, wrote the composer Ernst Krenek, who met the young Adorno in 1924 while the latter was a critic and tyro composer attending the rehearsals of the former’s comic opera Der Sprung uber den Schatten (The Leap Over the Shadow). ‘One of his favourite phrases was “crumbling substance”, and he used it so often that we ended up joking about it.’7
For some, the modern and modernist art were about progress; for Adorno they were about disintegration. In the 1920s old values and aesthetics were crumbling: Schoenberg’s development of twelve-tone music, abstraction in painting, Dadaism, all the new forms of artistic expression detonated traditional values. Indeed, that is why they were all loathed by the Nazis who sought to restore pre-modern artistic values. In this cultural struggle, the Frankfurt School was on the side of the modernists. When, in 1928, Adorno wrote an essay called ‘On Twelve-tone Technique’, an analysis of Schoenberg’s atonal system, he told the history of music as a process of disintegration. The fugue and the sonata had ceased to be sacrosanct frames of musical reference. Then tonality, along with its harmonic structures and cadences, crumbled. To use such musical forms and techniques, as Stravinsky or Honegger did in their neo-classical moods, was reactionary, Adorno argued.
What crumbled most under Adorno’s musical philosophising, though, was the notion that music was a neutral natural phenomenon unaffected by historical change; rather, he argued, it was moulded by the dialectics of the historical process. As a result, there could be no universally valid method of composition. Here his criticism detonated not just the bourgeois who disliked atonal music and demanded tunes, not just the neo-classicist composers, but also Krenek who argued that atonal music was primary.
If the destructive impulse Adorno discovered on his Neapolitan holiday in the 1920s was inspiring for his later writings, Benjamin’s foreign wanderings during the same period fired his writings with enthusiasm. Two years after visiting Naples, Benjamin visited Moscow where Lacis, the great if unhappy love of his life, was by this time in a sanatorium after suffering a nervous breakdown. He was similarly excited by a city that, like Naples, had dispensed with the distinction between private and public lives and was embarking on a communist social experiment. While Horkheimer was bemoaning German proletarian impotence in 1927, as we saw in the last chapter, in the same year Benjamin was very nearly hyperventilating with enthusiasm over the Soviet experiment. ‘Each thought, each day, each life lies here as on a laboratory table’, he wrote.8 Riding on a city tram was, for Benjamin, a miniature expression of the complete interpenetration of technological and primitive modes of life. The foreigner enjoyed the civility of the crush: ‘A tenacious shoving and barging during the boarding of a vehicle usually overloaded to the point of bursting takes place without a sound and with great cordiality. (I have never heard an angry word on these occasions).’ Another form of Muscovite public transport, the sleigh, captivated Benjamin even more, particularly because it annulled social distinctions.
Where Europeans, on their rapid journeys, enjoy superiority, dominance over the masses, the Muscovite in the little sleigh is closely mingled with people and things. If he has a box, a child, or a basket to take with him – for all this the sleigh is the cheapest means of transport – he is truly wedged into the street bustle. No condescending gaze: a tender, swift brushing along stones, people, and horses. You feel like a child gliding through the house on a little chair.
How poignant, incidentally, it is that Benjamin here connects the sleigh ride with the lost innocence of his youth, finding in the Bolshevik experiment prompt for a Proustian reverie.
The essay is charged with heat, sensual excitement and political engagement. The city streets of the Soviet capital were a zone of new possibilities, junking and reappropriating old traditions, inventing new ones. This was in that brief era before the Soviet Union congealed into something monstrous – a Stalinist tyranny of gulags and show trials, where avant-garde art such as Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk was denounced in Pravda, the Communist Party’s official mouthpiece, in 1936 under the headline ‘Muddle Not Music’, as ‘tickling the perverted taste of the bourgeoisie with its fidgety, screaming neurotic music’.9 Benjamin’s hope for modernist art – notably cinema, visual arts and the kinds of literary experiments he did in the 1920s – was that it would be part of the revolution that would liberate the minds of the oppressed.
Benjamin was rarely an excitable man. In 1921 when on a trip to Munich he bought Klee’s watercolour Angelus Novus for 1,000 marks. His friend Charlotte Wolf then recalled how this ‘gauche and inhibited man’ had ‘behaved as if something marvellous had been given to him’.10 Something similar happened in Moscow in 1927. The Soviet Union was a cultural experiment as invigorating to him as Kandinsky’s and Klee’s paintings, or the other modernist art he championed in his writings of the Weimar years – Proust’s novel, Brecht’s epic theatre, avant-garde cinema, surrealism and photography. But it was not just what he wrote about but the way that he wrote about it that opened a new front in the political struggle.
In the 1920s, indeed, how Benjamin wrote was his most political act. He came to prefer ‘inconspicuous forms’ over the ‘pretentious, universal gesture of the book’, and so such essays as the one he wrote on Moscow, revolutionise writing, undermine bourgeois norms and embody modernism’s shock of the new. His writing is terse, dense, brief, improvised, narrative order junked in favour of writerly riffs recurring in variation, forming constellations and making meaning. It was like jazz, subversive: indeed in his Moscow essay, Benjamin noted that dancing to jazz had been banned (it represented, for the authorities, western decadence). As a result, he wrote: ‘It is kept behind glass, as it were, like a brightly coloured poisonous reptile.’ Benjamin’s writing from this era is similarly snake like, moving unpredictably, darting through labyrinths, restlessly subverting the established literary order.
‘From first to last’, his biographers write of this gambler, ‘Benjamin took chances in the subjects he addressed and on the form and style of his writing.’11 The best example of this is One-Way Street, his 1928 collection of aphorisms, philosophical fragments and musings on modern life; the book is a jump-cut assemblage, a montage akin to what Dziga Vertov was doing in the Soviet cinema, what Weimar Dadaist artist Hannah Hoch was doing with her scissors, or what the French surrealists Benjamin admired were doing with paper scraps, portions of painted canvas, newspapers, tickets, stubs, cigarette butts, and buttons (namely creating deranging montages of found objects). His writing seemed decadent, strange, alarming to Nazis and Soviet ideologues alike. In its very structure it proselytised for a vision of art and writing inimical to the one that György Lukács agitated for in his critical eulogies to the realist novel. But for all its modernist genius, his best writing in the 1920s wasn’t of the kind that would have got him tenure. Rather, in One-Way Street and in his deliberately fragmented impressionistic portraits of the cities that fired his imagination, he self-consciously broke out of the formats amenable to the academy and applied his techniques of criticism to phenomena that mere professors hadn’t considered worthwhile – the phantasmagoria of modern urban life, and that suspicious new thing, the movies, among them.12
For all that, what Benjamin started in 1920s Germany – a style of writing that borrowed its form from the best journalistic vignettes (notably those composed by Benjamin’s and Adorno’s friend and mentor Siegfried Kracauer) and its techniques from avant-garde cinema, photography and art – would prove to be one of the most enduring literary forms for later European intellectuals (as, for example, in Roland Barthes’ Mythologies or Gilbert Adair’s The Postmodernist Always Rings Twice).
Despite his embrace of the modern, Benjamin was hardly an uncritical celebrant of what he found in Moscow. He was charmed but worried about where this experiment might lead. ‘Bolshevism has abolished private life’, he wrote. But while in Naples he savoured that abolition, in Moscow he worried about what prompted it: ‘The bureaucracy, political activity, the press are so powerful that no time remains for interests that do not coincide with them.’ He worried about what this nascent totalitarian society would mean for intellectual life. ‘What figure does the man of letters cut in a country where his employer is the proletariat?’ he asked. This, for freelance intellectuals like Benjamin as much as for Frankfurt scholars beavering away inside the sober Institute for Social Research, was a particularly vexed question. Benjamin’s thought was that both kinds of intellectual were living on borrowed time:
For sooner or later, with the middle classes who are being ground to pieces by the struggle between capital and labour, the ‘freelance’ writer must also disappear. In Russia the process is complete: the intellectual is above all a functionary working in the departments of censorship, justice, finance, and if he survives, participating in work – which, however, in Russia means power. He is a member of the ruling class.
He worried that all the great modernist art that he loved had been found unfit for revolutionary purpose and those who had made it either sent to the gulags or made into supine functionaries: ‘[T]he constructivists, suprematists, abstractionists who under wartime Communism put their graphic propaganda at the service of the Revolution have been dismissed. Today only banal clarity is demanded.’ One can almost hear him shuddering here, as though he is imagining himself transported into the nightmarish bureaucratic fictions of his beloved Kafka: the freelance writer risks becoming Josef K, and (chilling phrase) ‘if he survives’, a functionary in a new ruling class. Banal clarity? Functionary in government? Member of the ruling class? Benjamin never returned to Moscow.
IN THE SAME year Benjamin wrote his essay about Moscow, he began the book that he described as ‘the theatre of all my struggles and all my ideas’ and which remained unfinished at his death thirteen years later. The Arcades Project was originally conceived as a newspaper article on the arcades that had begun to be constructed in Paris at the start of the nineteenth century. The project then mutated into an essay called ‘Paris Arcades: a Dialectical Fairyland’. Ultimately it spiralled into a book. But why Paris? Weren’t there shopping arcades in his native Berlin? In part, as its English translators write in The Arcades Project’s foreword, his interest in the French cultural milieu sprang from his sense of alienation from contemporary German writers.13
Benjamin was a longtime Francophile. His father Emil had spent several years living in Paris before moving to Berlin in the 1880s and the Benjamin household’s domestic staff included a French governess. So when Walter visited Paris for the first time in 1913, he was already fluent in French, and his nascent Francophilia was piqued by the fact that the Frenchified Berlin of his childhood wanderings was trumped by his experience of the real thing. Then he felt ‘almost more at home in the Louvre and on the Grand Boulevard than I am in the Kaiser Friedrich Museum or on the streets of Berlin’.14
No wonder: Paris was the pre-existing model of his childhood world. Later in the 1930s, in exile from Nazi Germany, Paris became his home; in a sense it had long been his spiritual home. As a result, when he wrote about the city in the book that occupied him his last years, The Arcades Project, Benjamin the archeologically minded critic was digging through strata of the past, and one of the layers he penetrated was his Berlin Childhood Around 1900.
But The Arcades Project was scarcely a love letter to Paris. Rather, it is the story of the birth of capitalist modernity through the figure of the iron and glass structures of the Parisian arcades. As Douglas Murphy puts it in Last Futures: Nature, Technology and the End of Architecture, these arcades ‘created interior spaces in the city through which the new social world of modern capitalism took shape’.15 Benjamin was sensitive, as perhaps no other writer was before, to how new spatial forms were significant for the culture of capitalism. Like the private citizen’s domestic interiors, the Parisian arcades functioned for Benjamin by excluding the real world outside. ‘Arcades’, he wrote, ‘are houses or passages having no outside – like the dream.’16
What’s singular about Benjamin’s project, though, is that he takes the arcades both as metaphors for the contradictions of capitalism but also as containing glimpses of a better world. A hopeful glimpse comes out in one of the last things he wrote, the introduction (or as he called it, exposé) to the book, in 1939: ‘The century was incapable of responding to the new technological possibilities with a new social order.’17 This was Benjamin’s dialectical Marxist move – these very temples of capitalism contained intimations of capitalism’s eclipse in favour of a socialism that harnessed technology for the good of the masses. Later German philosophers have been unimpressed by this gambit. Most strikingly, Peter Sloterdijk, in his 2005 book Im Weltinnenraum (In the World Interior of Capital), agreed with Benjamin that capitalism functions, in part, by creating exclusive spaces to keep out the undesirable and unmoneyed – be they gated estates, malls with security guards, or fortress Europe – but denied that such grand interiors of capital contained any hope for a better world. Indeed, Sloterdijk argued that another, grander capitalist temple of glass and steel, namely Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace built to house the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London, was a better, but less hopeful, metaphor for capitalism. ‘The arcades formed a canopied intermezzo between streets or squares’, wrote Sloterdijk, ‘the crystal palace, on the other hand invoked the idea of an enclosure so spacious that one might never have to leave it.’18 Inside the Palace, the world’s most diverting flora, fauna and industrial products were displayed under climate controlled, obligingly sanitary conditions under one roof, thus precluding the necessity for travel, while whatever remained outside (war, genocide, slavery, unpleasant tropical diseases) dwindled into irrelevance. In that respect, Crystal Palace rather than the Parisian arcade was the blueprint for how capitalism has functioned since. ‘Who can deny’, Sloterdijk wrote, ‘that in its primary aspects, the western world – especially the European Union – embodies such a great interior today?’19 In The Arcades Project, Benjamin took the bourgeois drawing room to be emblematic of private space under early capitalism, one in which the private citizen could hole up from the irksome world; under late capitalism, for Sloterdijk, the exclusion zone had expanded from drawing room to the size of a continent.
When he first considered writing about the Parisian arcades, Benjamin told his friend Gershom Scholem that he wanted to bring the collage techniques he admired in surrealism to bear on his books. He did so in his newspaper articles, the montage book One-Way Street and in his city vignettes, but most ambitiously in The Arcades Project. Instead of writing history through the study of great men, he aimed to disclose history through its refuse and detritus, studying the overlooked, the worthless, the trashy – the very things that didn’t make sense to the official version but which, he maintained, encoded the dream wishes of the collective consciousness.
Benjamin’s intention was to administer a kind of shock effect to awaken us from our illusions. The effect would be akin to what cinemagoers felt, or at least what Benjamin supposed they felt, when they saw a montage of images intertwining different times. Indeed, he wrote of carrying over the ‘principle of montage into history’. The book grew unstoppably. After 1933, when he settled in Paris after Hitler’s accession to power, he became a fixture at his desk in the Bibliothèque Nationale, filling cards with detailed notes on the the birth of capitalism. He became a ragpicker or collector stuffing his manuscript with quotations and catalogues of ephemera such as advertising posters, shop-window displays, clothing fashions. The project seemed haunted with the idea that everything carried a hidden message and it was his role to decode it. The Arcades Project was uncompleted at his death, but, if this was its guiding philosophy, perhaps it was uncompletable.
Some have regarded the work, published posthumously in German in 1982 and in English nearly twenty years later, as a wreck of a book. But others, notably the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, believe it might have become one of the great texts of twentieth-century cultural criticism had not the Nazis, in forcing Benjamin’s fateful escape, thwarted its completion.20 What is certainly true is that the book with which he sought to awaken us from the dream of capitalism never achieved what he hoped for it.
In writing The Arcades Project, though, Benjamin had a grand political ambition: he was striving to recast Marxism for a new consumerist era in which we were in thrall to commodities in a way even Marx had not imagined. The latter described the fetishism of the commodity as a reintroduction of pre-modern religious consciousness into the modern, into the very nature of capitalism. In order to understand the fetish power of commodities, then, Marx suggested: ‘we must take flight into the misty realm of religion. There the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations both with each other and with the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands.’21 Through the alienation of free labour came the unconscious reactivation of a kind of collective religious consciousness or, to put it another way, mass delusion. This, Marx thought, was necessary to make alienation seem natural and inevitable.
Commodities, for Marx, were both economic and symbolic forms which he conceived of primarily as manufacturing goods and raw materials. Benjamin’s twist on Marx’s fetishism of commodities was to focus on objects of consumption rather than production. ‘One could say that Marx grasped the theological complexity of the commodity’, argued the Benjamin scholar Max Pensky, ‘but not the commodity’s status as a phantasmagoria; that is, as a delusional expression of collective utopian fantasies and longings, whose very mode of expression itself, as delusional, ensures that those same longings remain mere utopian fantasies.’22
Benjamin, like Marx, took flight into the misty realm of religion, imagining that the modern world was a kind of hell. ‘The “modern”, the time of Hell’, he wrote in The Arcades Project. By investigating obsolete pieces of historical detritus such as the Kaiserpanorama or the Parisian arcades, Benjamin found not just hopes and dreams, but the dashing of those hopes and dreams. He invited us to realise that the consumer goods, gizmos and technological innovations that bewitch us today will become passé, leaving us trapped in the Sisyphean quest of acquiring something else new to satisfy our degraded longings. Such was the hellish fate of capitalism’s victims. He urged us also to realise that past collective hopes were dashed, and through their contemplation, invited us to realise that the ones we hold now will similarly be unfulfilled in the future. Max Pensky wrote of what Benjamin sought to achieve: ‘The fantasy world of material well-being promised by every commodity now is revealed as a Hell of unfulfilment; the promise of eternal newness and unlimited progress encoded in the imperatives of technological change and the cycles of consumption now appear as their opposite, as primal history, the mythic compulsion toward endless repetition.’23
The device by which Benjamin sought to awaken us from our dreams in The Arcades Project was what he called the dialectical image. This was a key notion in his developing philosophy during the 1930s. In the following passage, he tried (and for many readers, failed) to explain successfully what a dialectical image is:
It’s not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on the past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words, image is dialectics at a standstill. For while the relation of the present to the past is a purely temporal, continuous one, the relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical: is not progression but image, suddenly emergent. Only dialectical images are genuine images (that is, not archaic); and the place where one encounters them is language.24
This esoteric notion has baffled Benjamin scholars. Pensky, for instance, wryly wrote that the ‘ “lightning flash” of the dialectical image has, to this day, remained far more a dark star, indeed a kind of theoretical and methodological black hole, a “singularity” following its own extraordinary laws and capable, apparently, of absorbing any number of attempts at critical illumination’.25 Even the term ‘dialectical image’ sounds like an oxymoron: ‘dialectical’ usually describes the relationship of concepts or arguments to each other; images, by contrast are normally singular and immediate. It is tempting to despair of understanding Benjamin here. But despair is not an option, as Pensky rightly realised, if we want to do justice to the central thought at the heart of the mature Marxist philosophy of arguably the most original thinker associated with the Frankfurt School.
For Benjamin, it was the aborted attempts and abject failures erased from the narratives of progress that drew his critic’s attention and by means of which he represented hell. Blasting such historical objects out of their usual context (i.e. becoming part of the triumphalist narrative of progress or being disappeared from it) was to be a kind of Marxist shock therapy aimed at reforming consciousness. In 1843, Marx described the reform of consciousness as consisting in ‘making the world aware of its own consciousness, in awakening it out of its dream about itself, in explaining to it the meaning of its own actions’.26 Benjamin’s notion of the dialectical object was Marxist in that sense: it involved ripping objects from their context, reconfiguring them with others from different times and setting them in a different context or what he called a constellation. The idea then was that each would illuminate the other and expose the lie-dream of capitalism in a sudden, shocking image.
This elusive thing, the dialectical image, then, is not so much an image that can be seen, but something that can only be represented in language and yet connects past and present in dialectical relationship. Benjamin wrote: ‘The new, dialectical method of doing history presents itself as the art of experiencing the present as waking world, a world to which that dream which we name the past refers in truth.’27 For this method, the present is haunted by the ruins of the past, by the very detritus capitalism sought to airbrush from its history. It was this method, however esoteric, that was to possess the philosophy of Theodor Adorno in the 1930s, and become an important sideline of critical theory, if not a cul-de-sac. Benjamin scarcely wrote in Freudian terms of the return of the repressed, but that is what his project sets in motion.
In this sense, Benjamin sought to be a redeemer, freeing capitalism’s victims from hell. And the dialectical image was supposed to help in that liberation. But the reception has been mixed; Pensky worried that perhaps nobody other than Benjamin can find or make dialectical images. Other critics wondered if there is such a thing at all.28 Most likely, the term dialectical image obscures the simpler truth Benjamin was trying to convey. Under capitalism, he thought, we fetishise consumer goods – imagining that they can fulfil our hopes for happiness and realise our dreams. By considering old fetishes for now obsolete products or innovations, we might liberate ourselves from our current fetishes and so from our delusive belief that capitalism can provide us with fulfilment or happiness. By meditating on past disappointments, we might free ourselves from future disappointment. That liberation would have involved the reform of consciousness that Marx sought. But Benjamin, in part because his writings in the 1930s got sucked into a terminological black hole, never succeeded in it. This exemplifies a more general truth: Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt School never freed capitalism’s victims from hell, but rather became increasingly caustic and elegant critics of it.
TWO YEARS AFTER starting The Arcades Project, Benjamin was in Marseilles, and there wrote about a city that – like Naples and Moscow – was an antidote to his Berlin home.29 ‘Marseille – the yellow studded maw of a seal with salt water coming out between the teeth’, he wrote savouringly. ‘When this gullet opens to catch the black and brown proletarian bodies thrown to it by ship’s companies according to their timetables, it exhales a stink of oil, urine and printer’s ink …’ Benjamin wrote these words for a newspaper article in the same same year as From Deauville to Monte Carlo: A Guide to the Gay World of France excoriated Marseilles. Its author Basil Woon warned respectable readers that, whatever they do, they should on no account visit France’s second city. ‘Thieves, cut-throats and other undesirables throng the narrow alleys and sisters of scarlet sit in the doorways of their places of business, catching you by the sleeve as you pass by. The dregs of the world are here unsifted … Marseille is the world’s wickedest port.’30
Unlike Woon, Benjamin revelled in the city – precisely because it was wicked, clamorous, poor, sexy and dirty. Another French city, Toulouse, called itself la ville rose, the pink city, but for Benjamin, pink was more truly the colour of Marseilles. ‘The palate itself is pink, which is the colour of shame here, of poverty. Hunchbacks wear it, and beggarwomen. And the discoloured women of Rue Bouterie are given their only tint by the sole pieces of clothing they wear: pink shifts.’
Much has changed since 1929. Today gay doesn’t mean what it used to mean. Marseilles isn’t the world’s wickedest port, but subject to one of Europe’s biggest architectural makeover projects. It has become respectable enough to serve as European Capital of Culture in 2013. Its port has been sandblasted and civilised. Throughout the city there are new trams, designer hotels, luxury flats and high-rise developments. The blurb for the new Eurostar service from London seems to suggest that Marseilles has been, if not ethnically, then symbolically cleansed in preparation for visitors. ‘Famous for its soap factories’, went the blurb, ‘the second largest city in France enjoys an average of 300 days of sunshine a year, making Marseilles a pleasant (as well as sweet-smelling) place to be all year round.’31 It risks becoming as amiably polite, as fragrant, as everywhere else. Benjamin, the safe money says, would have hated it.
Benjamin’s enthusiasm for dirty, sexy, wicked cities like Marseilles is, nearly 100 years on, contagious. Particularly as so many of the world’s leading metropolises have turned sclerotic – socially stratified cages to keep the riff-raff out and the rest of us polishing our must-have Nespresso machines. In Paris, the poor are banished beyond the périphérique so that when they revolt, they destroy their own banlieues rather than the French capital’s fussily maintained environment. London’s key workers strap-hang on laughable trains from distant commuter towns to serve the wealthy before being returned to their flats in time for the de facto curfew each day. Manhattan island is today a pristine vitrine on which the lower orders don’t even get to leave their mucky paw prints, but inside which the rich get to fulfil with unparalleled freedom their uninteresting desires. I’m exaggerating in each case, but not much. Many of the world’s leading cities are becoming like the Berlin that Benjamin called a prison, and from which he escaped whenever possible. What he wrote about cities in newspaper essays in the 1920s and early 1930s, as well as in The Arcades Project, remains fascinating and instructive, and not just because he was one of the first thinkers to suggest that cities became zones of segregation, exclusion and control. His writing is even more compelling because he also found the opposite – flashes of the utopian in the abject – and suggested that cities as a result could provide solutions to, as well as be the causes of, alienation.
Especially if, as Benjamin sometimes did, you experienced a city such as Marseilles after taking hashish. ‘Events took place in such a way that the appearance of things touched me with a magic wand, and I sank into a dream of them’, he wrote in ‘Hashish in Marseilles’. ‘People and things behave at such hours like those little stage sets and people made of elder pith in the glass tin-foil box, which, when the glass is rubbed, are electrified and fall at every moment into the most unusual relationships.’ Benjamin found here what his beloved Baudelaire found when taking hashish in Paris nearly seventy years earlier – an artificial paradise. He felt, he recalled in ‘Hashish in Marseilles’, as joyful as Ariadne unwinding her thread:
And this joy is related to the joy of trance, as to the joy of creation. We go forward; but in so doing we not only discover the twists and turns of the cave, but also enjoy the pleasure of discovery against the background of the other, rhythmical bliss of unwinding the thread. The certainty of unrolling an artfully wound skein – is that not the joy of all productivity, at least in prose? And under hashish we are enraptured prose-beings in the highest power.32
Even in drug-induced reverie, Benjamin was dreaming like a Marxist, putting the joy of productivity and the dignity of labour at the heart of his vision. The trance-like work of unwinding the thread resembles D. H. Lawrence’s very nearly contemporary poems of the late 1920s.
There is no point in work
unless it absorbs you
like an absorbing game.
If it doesn’t absorb you
if it’s never any fun,
don’t do it.
When a man goes out to work
he is alive like a tree in spring,
he is living, not merely working.33
The kind of work Benjamin and Lawrence blissfully celebrate here is precisely the kind of work denied in machine-age capitalism, wherein the worker is alienated from her labour, what she produces, and therefore from herself. This kind of work, too, is an antidote to passive consumerism, to what Adorno and Horkheimer would later call the culture industry.
In the late 1920s, there was a thread binding Benjamin and Lawrence. The latter wrote:
Whatever man makes and makes it live
lives because of the life put into it.
A yard of India muslin is alive with Hindu life.
And a Navajo woman, weaving her rug in the pattern of her dream
must run the pattern out in a little break at the end
so that her soul can come out, back to her.
Benjamin wrote in One-Way Street that ‘Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built and a textile one when it is woven.’34 For both writers the joyful absorption in work is dialectical, a self-actualising process through which one weaves into being, not just text or textile, but oneself.
The thought that Benjamin unravels here – that one realises oneself through creative productive labour – was especially pertinent as Taylorite production processes and capitalist dreams of endless technological progress seemed to thwart such self-realisation. At the time the question of what work was became immensely controversial.
But at the same time as work under capitalism offered less opportunity for self-fulfilment, a gimcrack alternative – call it consumption of consumer goods, call it shopping – was being born. If we couldn’t realise ourselves through the self-actualising process of work, perhaps we could do it through shopping? That was the possibility, as we will see in the next chapter, that Benjamin’s friend Bertolt Brecht explored in his and Kurt Weill’s opera Mahoganny. Capitalist society, then, seemed to be at a pivotal moment during the late 1920s and 1930s in terms of how human beings might fulfil themselves and realise their potentialities. Writers as varied as D. H. Lawrence and Simone Weill meditated on what work could and should mean in an era when it seemed to be, increasingly, a brain-numbing, spirit-crushing, soul-destroying nightmare, and the only alternative to the Marxist cogito (I work therefore I am) was the consumerist one (I shop therefore I am).
Marx’s concept of work was to prove particularly controversial for the Frankfurt School. His suggestion was that man and woman need to work to flourish and achieve dignity. Even in a communist paradise, we must work. On the face of it, what Benjamin wrote in ‘Hashish in Marseille’ and One-Way Street about work was in line with this Marxist orthodoxy that humans defined themselves through work; the problem was that the increasingly mechanised, routine and exploitative nature of work under capitalism thwarted any possibility of fulfilment.
But scepticism about humans defining and liberating themselves through work was to become a hallmark of critical theory as it evolved from the 1930s onwards. The Frankfurt School has been called neo-Marxist, but in this area at least it might more accurately be called anti-Marxist. Indeed, the man who would take the Frankfurt School on a new intellectual trajectory in the 1930s baulked at this Marxist perspective. Max Horkheimer wrote in Dämmerung, a book of aphorisms published not long after Benjamin’s description of his drug-fuelled ramble around Marseilles: ‘To make labour into a transcendent category of human activity is an ascetic ideology … Because socialists hold to this general concept, they make themselves into carriers of capitalist propaganda.’35 For Horkheimer, who when Dämmerung was published was the director of the Frankfurt School and its primary intellectual influence, Marx fetishised labour as a category.
If that was true, then Marx was following in a venerable tradition in German thought. As Erich Fromm wrote in his 1961 book Marx’s Concept of Man, Spinoza, Hegel and Goethe all held that, as he put it,
man is alive only inasmuch as he is productive, inasmuch as he grasps the world outside of himself in the act of expressing his own specific human powers, and of grasping the world with these powers. Inasmuch as man is not productive, inasmuch as he is receptive and passive, he is nothing, he is dead. In this productive process, man realises his own essence, he returns to his own essence, which in theological language is nothing other than his return to God.36
Hegel wrote in The Phenomenology of Spirit that the productive man makes the world his own by grasping it productively, by ‘translating itself from the night of possibility into the day of actuality’.37 The work of unravelling the thread, similarly, helps lead one from the cave to the daylight – to actualise oneself, rather than being like the deluded prisoners in Plato’s cave or the Niebelungen of Wagner’s Ring Cycle mining for gold in an endless subterranean night. Under Horkheimer, the Frankfurt School rebelled against this orthodox German view of the value of work and in particular against the Marxist credo that we fulfil ourselves through labour. For the likes of Horkheimer and Adorno, if not for Fromm who remained more faithful to Marx than his colleagues, labour is not the basic category of human realisation.
Indeed, when Horkheimer read Marx’s recently published Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts in the early 1930s, in which this orthodoxy about work is expressed, he detected in it something that made him queasy. Even Benjamin, who eulogised creative productive labour, found a presentiment of the Nazi jackboot in it. The vulgar Marxist conception of labour, he wrote, ‘already displays the technocratic features later encountered in Fascism … The new conception of labour amounts to the exploitation of nature which with naive complacency is contrasted with the exploitation of the proletariat.’38 That wasn’t the kind of creative productive labour that he eulogised in One-Way Street or ‘Hashish in Marseille’; it was just the socialist flip side of the capitalist coin. This queasiness before the ruination of nature in what Benjamin called vulgar Marxist thought was to become an increasing concern of the Frankfurt School. Indeed, as late as 1969, Adorno told an interviewer that Marx wanted to convert the world into a gigantic workhouse.39
Perhaps, though, that’s unfair. Read sympathetically, Marx’s notion of productive humans didn’t entail the ruination of nature, but rather the mastery, through creative work, of oneself. And yet the Frankfurt School repeatedly disavowed this aspect of their Marxist heritage. Two decades after Horkheimer accused Marx of fetishising labour, Herbert Marcuse elaborated the accusation in his 1955 book Eros and Civilisation: A Philosophical Inquiry Into Freud. Marcuse used the stand-in of Marx’s favourite cultural hero Prometheus for a coded attack: ‘Prometheus is the culture-hero of toil, productivity and progress through repression’, he wrote, ‘the trickster and (suffering) rebel against the gods, who creates culture at the price of perpetual pain. He symbolises productiveness, the unceasing effort to master life … Prometheus is the archetypal hero of the performance principle.’40
The performance principle was a special version of Freud’s reality principle, whereby one repressed one’s pleasures in order to function better in civilisation. But there were other principles, and other heroes, Marcuse suggested. Against Prometheus, he pitted different Greek heroes – Orpheus, Narcissus and Dionysius: ‘they stand for a very different reality … Theirs is the image of joy and fulfilment, the voice that does not command but sings, the deed that is peace and that ends the labour of conquest: the liberty from time that unites man with god, man with nature … the redemption of pleasure, the halt of time, the absorption of death: silence, sleep, night, paradise – the Nirvana-principle not as death but life.’41 Marcuse’s utopian suggestion contradicted not just the German philosophical tradition that embraced Hegel, Marx and Schopenhauer, but also Freud. It was Freud who posited the Nirvana principle as an innate psychic drive or death instinct that aims to end life’s inevitable tension. We all yearn to leave the treadmill of labour, perhaps, but our fate as humans is to remain on it until we die: Thanatos and Eros are, for Freud, contrary to one another. Marcuse refused to accept that.
But were Horkheimer, Adorno and Marcuse right to suggest that Marx fetishised labour? It could be argued that he fetishised not labour but human development, and it is precisely that fetish that Fromm, in Marx’s Concept of Man, shares and that Marcuse seeks to overcome through, somehow, realising the Nirvana principle in life. Indeed, the very idea of a communist society is one that, for Marx, involves the ‘withering away’ of the state since it is no longer necessary; in fact its continued existence would hamper the free development of the productive forces of society. But that society, as Hannah Arendt argued, was one of individuals freely fulfilling themselves: this doesn’t sound like a communist society premised on solidarity and shared activities, but a prelapsarian paradise wherein material needs are satisfied.
What then is the paradise to which Marx thought proletarian revolution paves the way? The American Marxist critic Marshall Berman argued: ‘Marx wants to embrace Prometheus and Orpheus: he considers communism worth fighting for because for the first time in history it could enable men to have both. He might also argue that it is only against a background of Promethean striving that Orphic rapture gains moral or psychic value: “luxe, calme et volupté” by themselves are merely boring, as Baudelaire knew well.’42 And who would want a revolution if it resulted only in an eternity of boredom? But that seems precisely the boring paradise Marcuse invoked in Eros and Civilisation when he suggested that the Nirvana principle can be realised in human lives. More charitably, perhaps, we can interpret Marcuse as arguing for a work–life balance by means of shortening the working day to give opportunity for, if not Orphic rapture, then the redemption of pleasure and the halt of time.
Marx’s suggestion, nonetheless, was that to be free involves being free to do work that is not alienating, by means of which one becomes what he thought was increasingly unlikely under capitalism, a self-actualising subject. The French philosopher Simone Weil (no relation to the founders of the Frankfurt School) argued that there must be more to human liberation than this in her essay Oppression and Liberty,43 published in the same year, 1934, as Horkheimer published Dämmerung, in which he attacked Marx’s conception of labour.
For Simone Weil, human relations must not be conflated with labour and work: the latter are merely instrumental since they involve relations of a subject to an object. For her, human interactions need to be revolutionised as much as productive forces and production relations if humans are truly to be free. Weil’s thoughts were to prove important to one later Frankfurt School thinker, Jürgen Habermas, who wrote: ‘Liberation from hunger and misery does not necessarily converge with liberation from servitude and degradation; there is no automatic developmental relation between labour and interaction.’44 That distinction between work and interaction runs through Habermas’s monumental 1981 book The Theory of Communicative Action, in which he systematically argues for liberation from servitude and degradation not through revolutionising productive labour, but through interaction.
Axel Honneth, who was to succeed Habermas as director of the Institute, argued that the degradation of work in Taylorite production processes prompted the Frankfurt School thinkers to abandon the Marxist notion of work as self-fulfilment. But they replaced it with something else: arguably, rather than making a fetish of industrial labour, one might expect the Frankfurt School to fetishise communication, which could be construed not as an alternative to productive labour but as the form of productive labour to which they were temperamentally suited. As William Outhwaite notes in his book about Habermas, ‘this might seem a welcome exercise in demythologisation on the part of people whose preferred form of work involves reading and, from time to time, speaking and writing’45 – people, no doubt, such as armchair Marxist philosophers and social theorists. For them, and indeed for many of us now in the overwhelmingly post-industrial west, work is interaction, and one of the pleasures of being human as well as one of the conditions of human dignity is that we can freely converse. (The other alternative is that communicative action is a professor’s dream of what revolutionising degraded humanity involves, and one that not many outside the academy share.) The Taylorised form of labour the Frankfurt School excoriated has been massively outsourced to other parts of the world where workers can be more readily exploited – a fact that, as Henryk Grossman would have pointed out were he still alive, helps capitalism to defer its demise.
Habermas’s utopia, wherein human relations are revolutionised through uncoerced reasoned discussion, is akin to the delight Adam takes in ‘Reason in the Garden of Eden’ imagined by Milton:
Yet not so strictly hath our Lord impos’d
Labour, as to debarr us when we need
Refreshment, whether food, or talk between,
Food of the mind, or this sweet intercourse
Of looks and smiles, for smiles from Reason flow,
To brute deni’d, and are of Love the food,
Love not the lowest end of human life.
For not to irksom toile, but to delight
He made us, and delight to Reason joyn’d.46
Paradise on Earth. But, instead of paradise, at the end of the 1920s western industrial societies were in hell. Walter Benjamin thought as much when he sat at his desk in the Bibliothèque Nationale working on The Arcades Project; so too did his friend Bertolt Brecht as he wrote a Marxist opera with Kurt Weill. As we will see in the next chapter, what Brecht and Weill dramatised on stage was not the traditional Marxist hell of exploitative production relations, but one of unfettered consumerism. Instead of a gigantic workhouse, capitalism seemed to be reconfiguring the world as a gigantic shopping mall, where every taste, no matter how base or grubby, could be fulfilled – if you could afford the price.
At the start of the 1930s, Brecht’s vision of that hell was to prove influential to the Frankfurt School as they diagnosed what had gone wrong with modern society, and why the revolution had not happened.