6
Walter Benjamin’s Essay on Eduard Fuchs: An Art-Historical Perspective
The essay ‘Eduard Fuchs, Collector and Historian’ of 1937 remains to this day one of the least discussed of the works of Walter Benjamin.1 And it is hard to see why: the essay is ambitious in scope, was prominently published during Benjamin’s lifetime (in the exiled Frankfurt School’s Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung) and has long been available in English translation.2 It qualifies, in fact, as a canonical text of a canonical philosopher, yet the bibliography of critical discussion on it remains thin.
Perhaps the reason lies in the fact that it is, at first, very difficult indeed to determine exactly what the essay is about. Despite the clarity of the title, the most impressive parts of the essay are not devoted to a figure the editors of the Essential Frankfurt School Reader called (certainly unfairly) ‘a relatively insignificant Social Democratic intellectual’.3 In any case, despite the attention he receives at the hands of Benjamin, Fuchs remains relatively unstudied by historians of art, the press, Marxism, or any of the various fields that might have reason to attend to this (in fact) significant publicist, politician, confidante of Franz Mehring, collector and historian of art, manners and caricature.4 The Fuchs essay might seem to be more about the type of the collector, a topic which fascinated Benjamin and to which he devoted an entire convolute of his Arcades Project.5 But in the end, he seems not to have found Fuchs representative of the type he considered so indicative of modernity, and a reader learns little in this essay about Benjamin’s complex sense of the relations between the collector and a world whose texture is determined by the presence of consumer commodities and whose politics is determined by their production under high capitalism. Most helpful, perhaps, is to look at the Fuchs essay as one of Benjamin’s few sustained meditations on the history of art and its methods.6 To do so is to ignore large portions of the text, in particular one of Benjamin’s only explicit reckonings with the history of institutional Marxism, but it is the path I shall follow here. For despite art historians’ considerable interest in Benjamin’s own interest in their field, the Fuchs essay remains the most forceful account of what he saw as the shape and possibilities of a materialist and dialectical history of art.
A reader of Benjamin’s correspondence would be inclined to relate the strangely opaque and seemingly indeterminate nature of the essay to the author’s own ambivalence with regard to it and its subject. Benjamin did not choose the topic himself: the piece was commissioned by Max Horkheimer, director of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, which, after fleeing Germany and briefly regrouping in Switzerland, had found a home in New York, affiliated with Columbia University. Horkheimer’s own acquaintance with Fuchs (1870–1940) may have been behind his decision to commission an article about the elder socialist and author of books on satire, fashion, the illustration of manners, Chinese art, the work of Daumier and, most notoriously, erotic art. The fact that Benjamin and Fuchs shared the fate of a lonely Parisian exile might have been another reason. Yet Benjamin never warmed to the topic. ‘The more intensely I engage with the work,’ he wrote to his friend Alfred Cohn, ‘and I’m not referring to his things on the “history of manners”, the more wretched it seems.’7 A year and a half later, Benjamin had still ‘neither in his writings nor in his person found any redeeming feature.’8 To Gershom Scholem, he wrote in 1935 of ‘two years of adroit and ingenious stalling’,9 but a few months later that ‘no god can save me now from the study of Fuchs’.10 But the gods granted yet another reprieve: in May of 1936 Benjamin reported to Scholem that he had ‘managed to obtain certain liberties’ in connection with the essay (which he had still not commenced).11 And in the end, he was not entirely displeased with the result. ‘The finished text does not entirely have the character of penitence,’ Benjamin wrote, again to Scholem. ‘On the contrary, its first quarter contains a number of important reflections on dialectical materialism.’12 It is this first quarter of the essay that contains Benjamin’s discussions of the nature and possibility of cultural history and art history, and to which we must attend.
Benjamin’s interest in the history of art is well known. His focus on the writings of Alois Riegl, especially his Late Roman Art Industry (1901), seems to have been one of the most constant aspects of his intellectual development since he first read the work around 1916.13 Riegl’s anti-classicism and relativism were crucial to Benjamin’s argument in Origin of German Tragic Drama, and the art historian’s attention to changes in the mode and organisation of perception over history is cited by Benjamin as a model in ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility’ (hereafter referred to as the Artwork essay).14 But the art historian’s example was most important for Benjamin for the way it focused attention on the unique object, on the work of art in its singularity. It was Riegl whom Benjamin cited when he wrote of his goal of ‘an analysis of the work of art which recognises in it an integral expression… of the religious, metaphysical, political and economic tendencies of the epoch’;15 this was an art historian who ‘penetrates so far into the historical conditions that he is able to trace the curve of their heartbeat as the line of their forms’.16
Now this close attention to the singular work – some of Riegl’s later followers called it ‘structural analysis’17 – is certainly one lesson that can be gained from a study of Riegl’s work, but it is worth pointing out how selective an approach this is to that work. Benjamin ignores some of the more problematic aspects of Riegl’s form of art history – his Hegelian historicism, one that saw a grand evolution from a ‘haptic’ to an ‘optic’ mode of seeing in the history of western art, and his synthesising approach to the characterisation of entire periods of art would certainly have been off-putting, not to say offensive.18 But out of Riegl’s remarkable formal analyses, Benjamin developed his notion of the work of art as ‘monad’, which ‘with its past and subsequent history, brings – concealed in its own form – an indistinct abbreviation of the rest of the world of ideas’.19 And for Benjamin, Riegl’s extraordinary ability to grasp the central principles of individual works of art and to relate them, in their uniqueness, to a historical period is a challenge that must be met by any history of art or culture.
And it is this challenge that the other great art historian of the time, Heinrich Wölfflin, failed in Benjamin’s eyes to meet. His first reaction to Wölfflin – he is referring to the book Classic Art (1899) – was positive: ‘For me, Wölfflin’s book is one of the most useful I have ever read about concrete art.’20 But Benjamin soon saw that Wölfflin’s project was radically incompatible with his own sense of the work of art. Wölfflin’s methodological work centred upon the isolation of the purely visual aspect of the artwork, and this formalism allowed him to do two things. First, he developed a set of categories, formal elements meant to represent the extremes within which all aspects of representation would fall. These were Wölfflin’s famous ‘principles of art history’: in terms of formal definition, linear vs. painterly; in terms of spatial organisation, plane vs. recession, etc.21 And he used these principles to define the common representational denominator of the works of entire periods (his test case was the distinction between classic and baroque) and thus to draw conclusions about the diachronic development of form. Benjamin’s judgement was harsh and typically extreme: in 1915, after attending one of Wölfflin’s lectures in Munich, he wrote to a friend:
I did not recognize right away what Wölfflin was up to. Now it is clear to me that what we have here is the most disastrous activity I have ever encountered in a German university. A by no means overwhelmingly gifted man, who, by nature, has no more of a feel for art than anyone else… has a theory which fails to grasp what is essential but which, in itself, is perhaps better than complete thoughtlessness. In fact, this theory might even lead somewhere were it not for… the inability of Wölfflin’s capacities to do justice to their object… [H]e has the effect of attracting an audience that clearly has no idea what is going on: they are getting an understanding of art which is on the same level and of the same purity as their ‘normal’ understanding of culture… Wölfflin himself… completely lacks that awe before the work of art that even the most primitive man can somehow summon forth.22
For Benjamin, the use of categories to define the common elements of works ignored what was unique about each one, focusing attention not on works themselves but on the abstraction of a ‘style’. And he would have recognised the principles for what they were: a neo-Kantian attempt to define a priori categories of representation for the analysis of all works of art. Benjamin wanted no truck with the prevailing neo-Kantianism of the university Geisteswissenschaften of his time, a tendency that entered the history of art through Wölfflin and, later, Erwin Panofsky.23
Benjamin’s engagement with the academic history of art was a serious and long-term one. If his interest in the Warburg school and attempts to engage in a dialogue with Panofsky were, perhaps, tactical,24 his interest in the developments of the new Vienna School around Hans Sedlmayr and Otto Pächt was sincere and productive (he reviewed the first issue of their Kunstwissenschaftliche Forschungen, a text that represents his only purely art-historical intervention).25 But none of this reveals something art historians interested in Benjamin rarely address: his fundamental ambivalence toward the discipline, a deep doubt about its possibilities that paradoxically served as the energy behind his constant re-engagement with it.
Benjamin’s doubt is expressed most clearly in a letter to Florens Christian Rang, written in 1923 and thus at the time when he was grappling most closely with the art-historical work of Riegl, Warburg, Panofsky and Wilhelm Hausenstein in the context of his work on his Habilitation on the German mourning play. ‘What has been preoccupying me,’ he wrote,
is the question of the relationship of works of art to historical life. In this regard, it is a foregone conclusion for me that there is no such thing as art history… In terms of its essence, [the work of art] is ahistorical. The attempt to place the work of art in the context of historical life does not open up perspectives that lead us to its innermost core… The research of contemporary art history always amounts merely to a history of the subject matter or a history of form, for which the works of art provide only examples, and, as it were, models; there is no question of there being a history of the work of art as such… In this respect, works of art are similar to philosophical systems, in that the so-called history of philosophy is either an uninteresting history of dogmas or even philosophers, or the history of problems. As such, there is always the threat that it will lose touch with its temporal extension and turn into timeless, intense – interpretation. It is true as well that the specific historicity of works of art is the kind that can be revealed not in ‘art history’ but only in interpretation. For in interpretation, relationships among works of art appear that are timeless yet not without historical relevance.26
Benjamin is profoundly sceptical that any study of works of art that takes its problematic to be fundamentally a historical one could ever yield any valid sort of knowledge about history or about the work of art. What for Benjamin constitutes the essence of the artwork is not what connects it in any obvious way to its historical period or other works of art. These connections are accidental, the stuff of chronological lists of artworks or artists, correlations of subject matter, or bland classifications of formal similarity. In fact, he sees the creative moment of a work of art not in its seamless connection to its time but its eruptive disturbance of the continuity of history, describing, in his Origin of German Tragic Drama, the true ‘origin’ (as opposed to the ‘genesis’) of the work of art as ‘an eddy in the stream of becoming’.27 He also rejects the situating of works in historical life by such abstractions as Weltanschauungen. Indeed, he would have had in mind Karl Mannheim’s critical thoughts on the issue published in the Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte that year, which Benjamin read immediately.28
Yet for all his scepticism about the very possibility of a history of art, Benjamin did not give up. And ultimately, he came to the conclusion that a history of art was still both possible and meaningful. He pursued this goal along two separate lines that ultimately converged. One was what I have called a ‘physiognomy of art’ that had its final issue in the Artwork essay of 1935–38.29 The other is what Benjamin himself called a ‘dialectical’ or ‘historical materialist’ approach to works of culture that he outlined in the Fuchs essay. There he sketches out the possibility of a form of knowledge that attends to both the ‘monadalogical’ nature of the work of art and the relationships between works that he called, in the letter to Rang, ‘timeless yet not without historical relevance’. And Benjamin would not have been able to develop his vision of a materialist history of art without a thorough understanding of the deep epistemological problems that were being addressed at the time in academic art history, problems to which I shall now turn.
As codified around the turn of the twentieth century in German and central European universities, the academic history of art represented a tense and ultimately unstable constellation of idealism, historicism and formalism in the study of human cultures. The fundamental idealism of the history of art is the legacy of its origins in, and consistent closeness to, German philosophical aesthetics.30 The premise of the study of art has thus always been that the work represents not only a physical artefact and a representation of a world, but more fundamentally the activity of the human mind. Whether normative in essence (Kant’s aesthetic judgment, with its subjective origins but claims to universality) or relativist (Herder’s emphasis on the individuality of cultures and the incommensurability of their works), the assumption that artistic form represents matter (words, paint, marble) in dialogue with the highest faculties of the human mind remained a sine qua non of art-historical discourse through (and after) Benjamin’s day. (Even sophisticated theories, such as Gottfried Semper’s, that balanced semantics with an emphasis on technology and function were rejected at the time as materialist.) The historicism of the discipline is of a piece with the changes in the human sciences in the wake of Hegel’s pervasive influence at the beginning of the nineteenth century. For reactions against Hegelianism, in and beyond the history of art, concern that aspect of his thought that we should probably not call historicism but, following Mannheim and Heinz-Dieter Kittsteiner, ‘philosophy of history’.31 The impact of Hegel on the human sciences was not so much his grand vision of a collective spirit or mind that works, through history, to overcome its alienation from the world of matter and toward self-knowledge.32 Instead, it was the way this vision of history was part of a philosophical base for the study of culture that made a claim considerably less bold and more intuitive: that the products of mind broadly and faithfully reflect the state of spirit at the time of their creation. It is this postulate of a fundamental unity of the experiences and manifestations of life that was the unquestioned core of the human sciences at the turn of the twentieth century.
This comfortable or intuitive historicism that tied art to historical epoch and made the one interpretable in terms of the other is a combination that informs almost all histories of art since the mid nineteenth century, even in the hands of those who (like Jacob Burckhardt) proclaimed their own reactions against Hegelianism. Though many continued to pursue the goal of a history of art that represented a logical, rational process that can be understood as a whole, this was not central to the discipline. What was were the two possibilities opened up by the combination of idealism and historicism: a diachronic approach that could trace the development of forms as meaningful, as reflecting, more or less transparently, changes in culture and thought; and a synchronic approach underwritten by the postulate that all objects reveal a shared state of mind that would allow this mind to be seen equally in all products of a single cultural epoch or people.
Yet such a comfortable idealist historicism was hardly a solid base for the history of art as a discipline that could define its object and defend its borders intellectually and institutionally. The object of study, for one, remained unclear: was it the artist? The physical work of art? Or the spirit it conveyed? And the very necessity of a history of art remained equally unclear. If the same cultural content is expressed in all manifestations of a people, what then is the justification of a separate field of art history? For Hegel, art was subordinate to the larger history of spirit; it was not a phenomenon in itself, but an epiphenomenon of a larger history of mind.
These are the problems faced with the rise of a ‘cultural history’ that the decisive works of Riegl and Wölfflin sought to address. In his Renaissance and Baroque of 1888, Wölfflin neatly characterises the tautological form of knowledge generated by this common, debased form of cultural history. The approaches to art as ‘an expression of the age’, he writes, produce
a good deal that is ridiculous, summarising long periods of time under concepts of a very general kind which in turn are made to account for the conditions of public and private, intellectual and spiritual life. They present us with a pale image of the whole, and leave us at a loss to find the threads that are supposed to join these general facts to the style in question.33
Such a method, he writes in Classic Art, ‘takes us only so far – as far, one might say, as the point at which art begins’.34
Wölfflin and Riegl solved the problem by an isolation of the art historian’s gaze to the irreducibly visual aspect of the work of art – by formalism, in other words. And their formalism must at some level be seen as a philosophical gambit. For to defend the autonomy of the discipline, both were forced to make the implicit claim that visual form had its own, autonomous history, one separate from other manifestations of the spirit and one that is in itself fully adequate for the analysis of the work of art. Thus Riegl’s polemical rejection of iconography as a ‘secondary field’; thus his constant repetition of the true object of the art historian’s study as ‘outline and colour on the plane or in space’.35 But this gambit became the most unstable aspect of the discipline to which they bequeathed it. Consider Riegl’s postulate of the form of late Roman art ‘offering us a faithful image of the disturbed spiritual conditions of the time’, for it leads to some very strange conceptual acrobatics.36 In a tour de force of historical analysis, Riegl defines the late Roman style and goes on to offer erudite parallels from other areas of culture, only to back off and state that ‘to conflate phenomena from two different fields would not be scholarly and is thus not permissible’.37 Why ‘unscholarly’? Riegl has backed himself into a corner: he says that only poetic spirit or Wollen can be understood by looking at poetry, and that art has its own, separate cause, at the same time as he has to assume that parallel phenomena are caused by a common spirit. And in trying to define the area of competence of the new discipline, he creates a fundamental problem: he cannot explain whether changes in form are the result of extra-artistic factors or whether they have their own laws; whether the history of art has an internal, immanent history, or is part of a larger evolution.
Wölfflin fared no better in his recourse to formalism as a basis for an autonomous history of vision and representation. He had a stronger starting point: his engagement with the work of Konrad Fiedler and Adolf von Hildebrand led him to a neo-Kantian sense of the visual as a separate way of knowing the world, with its own categories, a form of knowledge and not merely an epiphenomenon of it; but he too failed to answer what he realised was the fundamental question of a history of art: whether changes in style were the result of artistic developments alone, or the result of extra-artistic causes.38
These were the internal contradictions that vexed ambitious thinkers about art and history of Benjamin’s generation. Panofsky sought to address them from a neo-Kantian position, seeing visual form as Cassirean ‘symbolic form’: he thus broke down the distinction between form and subject matter, tinkering, in other words, with art history’s formalism.39 Hans Sedlmayr and Otto Pächt deployed gestalt psychology and theories of physiognomic expression to explain the way forms produced meaning: by recourse to the natural sciences, they tinkered, very tentatively, with art history’s idealism.40 Benjamin’s Fuchs essay shows him to be vexed by the very same set of problems created by the previous generation of art historians and their uneasily constituted discipline. His solution, however, was far bolder. He attacked the history of art where it seemed to be on the firmest ground: its common-sense historicism that seeks to understand an object in the context of its creation, to interpret a work in terms of the conditions obtaining at the time of its creation. This historicism was always, and still remains, a cornerstone of art history, even in its post-1968 form as a social history of art. And thus, Benjamin’s attack is a challenge that still reverberates today.
But we are jumping the gun here. It has been necessary to trace out the intellectual framework of the art-historical project in such detail in order to understand the strategy of Benjamin’s attack on the field in the Fuchs essay. For Benjamin takes on all three of the philosopical pillars of the academic history of art and subjects them to critique, but in a most surprising way.
He starts with a passage from a letter sent by Friedrich Engels to Franz Mehring in 1893. Mehring was the Marxist most closely concerned with the history of literature and culture in the period of the Second International; and this letter from the elder master to the Social Democratic Party’s spokesman on cultural matters is therefore important. Benjamin quotes Engels:
It is above all this semblance of an independent history of state constitutions, of legal systems, and of ideological conceptions in each specialized field of study which deceives most people. If Luther and Calvin ‘overcome’ the official Catholic religion, if Hegel ‘overcomes’ Fichte and Kant, and if Rousseau indirectly ‘overcomes’ the constitutional work of Montesquieu with the Contrat social, this is a process which remains within theology, philosophy and political science. This process represents a stage in the history of these disciplines, and in no way goes outside the disciplines themselves.41
Benjamin sees here a critique of many aspects of the histories of culture as they existed in the Geisteswissenschaften at the end of the nineteenth century: the broad sweep of history that sees (in art) one style as succeeding another, a logical and necessary move from Gothic to Renaissance, then to Baroque and Neo-Classicism, and that at best homogenises the works of history into mere examples of the abstraction of style, and at worst implies a philosophy of history taken as a process of continual progress. And Benjamin criticises Fuchs himself for falling into this trap: in Fuchs’s work, ‘the course of the history of art history appears “necessary,” the characteristics of style appear “organic,” and even the most peculiar art forms appear “logical”.’42 The stakes here for Benjamin are high, as he relates this to the evolutionary thinking that took the form, in Second International Marxist thought, of a blind belief in progress, the conviction that the working classes’ accession to power was inevitable and would occur ‘automatically’.43 For Benjamin and others, this view was politically laming, leading naturally to revisionism and the abandonment of active politics; moreover, it represented a mirror image of the bourgeois ideology that equated the natural sciences and technology with progress per se (and the critique of Marxist notions of progress would find its most powerful expression, of course, in the ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’).
The second point Benjamin draws from Engels’s comments concerns the idealism of cultural history in all its forms, its tendency to represent its objects ‘as completely detached from their effect on human beings and their spiritual as well as economic processes of production’.44 ‘Cultural history,’ he writes later in the essay,
presents its contents by throwing them into relief, setting them off. Yet for the historical materialist, this relief is illusory and is conjured up by false consciousness… The products of art and science owe their existence not merely to the effort of the great geniuses who created them, but also, in one degree or another, to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries.45
The final point Benjamin finds in Engels’s letter concerns the inevitable formalism of specific disciplines in the wake of Hegel. Engels
places the closed unity of the disciplines and their products in question. So far as art is concerned, this thought challenges the unity of art itself, as well as that of those works which purportedly come under the rubric of art.46
Fuchs himself had already attacked Wölfflin on this count. Benjamin writes:
Fuchs had to come to grips with formalism. Wölfflin’s doctrine was gaining acceptance at the same time that Fuchs was laying the foundations of his own work. In Das individuelle Problem, Fuchs elaborates on a thesis from Wölfflin’s Die klassische Kunst. The thesis runs as follows: ‘Quattrocento and Cinquecento as stylistic concepts cannot be characterized simply in terms of subject matter. The phenomenon… indicates a development of artistic vision which is essentially independent of any particular attitude of mind or any particular idea of beauty.’47
Fuchs had replied as follows: ‘It is precisely these formal elements that cannot be explained in any other way than by a change in the mood of the times.’48 Yet Benjamin finds the materialism that is one (unrealised) potential of Wölfflin’s approach to form to be far more interesting than Fuchs’s attempt to look beyond the realm of art; the art historian’s formulation, he writes, ‘also contains useful elements. For it is precisely historical materialism that is interested in tracing the changes in artistic vision … to more elementary processes – processes set in motion by economic and technological transformations in production.’49 Again, Benjamin criticises Fuchs: for looking for larger causes instead of more specific material ones. In abstracting a complex social context into a ‘mode of production’ that looked suspiciously like a Zeitgeist and functioned with every bit as little epistemological efficacy, Fuchs had replaced one form of idealism with another one, albeit one that called itself ‘historical materialism’.50
Thus far, Benjamin’s points seem relatively straightforward as a materialist critique of bourgeois art and cultural history (and of a methodologically unsound version of cultural history from a revolutionary standpoint). Moreover, in his use of Engels’s letter, he asserts quite clearly that historical materialism as it existed had the intellectual tools to criticise those aspects of an idealist history of art that seem most objectionable: their idealism and formalism (and any philosophy of history that might also be present). His own contribution, clearly, would lie elsewhere. As I’ve already indicated, it is in his critique of art history’s intuitive contextualising historicism that Benjamin is at his most radical, and here he found all existing approaches from a Marxist position to be utterly undialectical, as useless for knowledge as they were for politics. ‘For the dialectical historian concerned with works of art,’ writes Benjamin,
these works integrate their fore-history as well as their after-history; and it is by virtue of their after-history that their fore-history is recognizable as involved in a continuous process of change. Works of art teach him how their function outlives their creator and how the artist’s intentions are left behind. They demonstrate how the reception of a work by its contemporaries is part of the effect that the work of art has on us today. They further show that this effect depends on an encounter not just with the work of art alone but with the history which has allowed the work to come down to our own age.51
In the wake of reception theory and a sort of hermeneutics that has become commonplace in art historiography – one thinks of Gadamer’s work on ‘horizons of experience’ and the constitutive workings of a tradition – Benjamin’s point might seem fairly pedestrian. But hermeneutics’ notion of changing distance as constitutive of interpretation still tends to posit a historical truth in the past toward which the historian might reach. Precisely this notion of interpretation in Fuchs’s work, however, is criticised as inadequate:
In his thinking, an old dogmatic and naïve idea of reception exists alongside the new and critical one. The first could be summarized as follows: what determines our reception of a work must have been its reception by its contemporaries… Next to this, however, we immediately find the dialectical insight which opens the widest horizons in the meaning of a history of reception.52
The ‘widest of horizons’: for Benjamin, this could stretch across the whole of human history. And this can be achieved by a dialectical move. It is a truism that all interpretation of the past occurs from the context of the present, its concerns and its possibilities of knowledge; Riegl himself admitted as much when he acknowledged that the meaning and coherence of late Roman art could only appear to a generation of art historians attuned to Impressionism, that a Kunstwollen (will-to-art) of the past could only reveal itself to a Kunstbegehren (desire-for-art) of the present.53 But in a shift whose Nietzschean logic of perspectivalism is evident, Benjamin proposes turning this limitation, this embarrassment, this source of error, this ghost in the machine of historicism into the necessary condition of adequate knowledge – both of history and of the work of art.
The knowledge of the historicist, Benjamin writes, the ideal of which is Leopold von Ranke’s ‘how it really was’,54 is an inadequate form of knowledge. His argument here draws on Georg Lukács’s argument in his 1922 essay ‘Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat’. In several passages of the Fuchs essay, Benjamin refers to the garden-variety notion of culture as fetishised, ‘reified’ or thing-like (dinghaft), echoing Lukács’s argument that under capitalism, the logic of commodity fetishism – Marx described this as seeing commodities as having intrinsic qualities and values as opposed to being the result of social relations and having a value that in fact represents social labour – not only leads to a faulty understanding of objects on the market but instead becomes the model for all forms of knowledge and action under capitalism, bringing about the ‘subjugation of men’s consciousness to the forms in which this reification finds expression’.55 Benjamin’s argument relies most heavily not on the first section of the well-known essay, which deals mostly with the natural sciences and the creation of a ‘second nature’ in society, but on the second section, about the ‘antinomies of bourgeois thought’, where Lukács traces how the phenomenon of reification invades western philosophy and recasts it according to the logic of the commodity.
Lukács points to bourgeois thought’s acceptance of facticity as a priori, an acceptance of the empirical as non-deducible, the treatment of the subject–object duality not as a challenge but as an aporia.56 The result is a philosophy that is passive and trapped in theory, rendering thought merely ‘contemplative’.57 Precisely this is Benjamin’s criticism of historicism: ‘every dialectical presentation of history is paid for by a renunciation of the contemplativeness which characterizes historicism’.58 The words ‘passive’ and ‘contemplative’ are used throughout the essay to describe the historical attitude against which he sees a Marxist history of culture and art as having to fight. (Not coincidentally, it is the ‘contemplative’ approach that Benjamin describes as characteristic of the auratic work of art in the Artwork essay.) For Benjamin, to perceive the meaning of a work of art as residing in the past, to approach it with a form of scholarship that accumulates or uncovers unchanging facts about it, is to fall into the trap of a contemplative attitude to history.
Indeed, he argues, the historical event or work of art is not somewhere else, in a remote time that is over, dead and buried; and scholarship should never be post-mortem. For the past is not finished, and thus the meaning of things made at a remote point in history is not fixed. Both are available for the present. Benjamin accepted no philosophy of history as presented to him by bourgeois or traditional Marxist scholars, but he was able to discern behind historicism’s linear and unidirectional sense of historical time, one that relegated the past steadily and increasingly remote from the present, a philosophy of history in its own right, moreover a reified one based on the natural sciences and one that rendered the historian passive.59 Indeed, it rendered history dead: in his letter to Rang of 1923, Benjamin drew attention to the spurious logic that treated the artwork in the past according to the same criteria of human life:
The concatenation of temporal occurrences… does not imply only things that are causally significant for human life. Rather, without a concatenation such as development, maturity, death, and other similar categories, human life would fundamentally not exist at all. But the situation is completely different as regards the work of art.60
To consider a work of art to have exhausted its meaning in the past, and to be fully explicable only in its moment of origin, is a category error.
To wrench the historically remote work of art into the present, to demand of the present that it illuminate the work of the past, represents not only Benjamin’s approach to historicism but also his solution to the problem of interpretation of works of art that are, in their essence, ahistorical. As opposed to a dead past, Benjamin proposes his notion of the ‘constellation’ as the necessary condition for an internal element of the monadological work of art to release itself and become visible to a corresponding time in the present: the researcher
must abandon the calm, contemplative attitude toward his object in order to become conscious of the critical constellation in which precisely this fragment of the past finds itself with precisely this present…. For it is an irretrievable image of the past which threatens to disappear in any present that does not recognize itself as intimated in that image.61
It is the dialectic that sees the historian as acting upon history, releasing meanings in the work of art that represent an engagement with the past that is untouched by reification: ‘All more intimate engagement with a work of art must remain a vain endeavour, so long as the work’s sober historical content is untouched by dialectical knowledge.’62
Let us stop here and interrupt our account of Benjamin’s thought, one that must, necessarily, stress the internal logic of this view of art in history but at the same time inevitably renders any reading of it passive. Indeed it is easy enough to read such an account as, in various inadmissible ways, figurative, in ways that render dialectics simple or self-evident and that naturalise Benjamin’s ideas, leading us to contemplate them as in some way congruent with those we have already absorbed untouched. The fact is that Benjamin’s ideas cannot be naturalised; they intentionally resist logic and demand departures from business as usual from the very beginning.
For the sparks that seem to animate Benjamin’s dialectical notion of the artwork in history are based on the tension set up by two tenets that are utterly counterintuitive, tenets that the contemporary humanities tend not to accept and with which any reader must actively engage before nodding assent. Benjamin’s vision of a dialectical history of art that escapes passive contemplation of history is based on notions that have already been alluded to but need to be reconsidered in the light of a critique of historicism that is powerful but undeniably and uncomfortably speculative.
The first tenet concerns the nature of historical time. Benjamin rejects the natural sciences’ conception of time as homogeneous and quantifiable, a notion of time that sees any duration to be equivalent to an identical duration at any other point in history. The adequacy of this ‘chronological’ or ‘atomistic’ time to historical knowledge was, in the German hermeneutical tradition, often the object of critique; and with the various forms of vitalism and Lebensphilosophie around the turn of the century, coupled with the so-called ‘crisis of historicism’ in the 1920s, the topic had a particular urgency. It was also part and parcel of a reaction against the prevailing neo-Kantianism in German universities at the time.63
It is easy enough to criticise a notion of atomistic time, but that raises the question of what model of temporality to substitute for it. Answers were legion: for Heidegger, time was not, properly speaking, historical, but rather a ‘historicity’ constitutive of Dasein. Or one could try to grasp an ‘inner time’ of experience, a lived time with rhythms and durations that are different from those of the clock. The historical time of Second International Marxism as well as bourgeois liberalism was one that moved towards a historical telos in a manner characterised as ‘progress’. Other models were available too: that of paradise and fall, or a secular version of golden age and decline; that of the sudden emergence of a Messiah; a cyclical sense of history, or a nihilistic one of self-contained and intransitive eras. Benjamin’s answer was a politicised Messianism: he saw historical time as essentially empty time; it simply registers varying kinds of domination and leads, if anywhere, toward an accumulation of disasters and manifestations of barbarism.64 It is, however, shot through with sparks or flashes of redemption, though this redemption would not be a gift or emerge from a deity beyond the control of humankind; instead, these flashes need to be grasped, and grasping them would mean turning them into revolution that could stop the progression of empty time and fulfil its potential for a state that could be called social justice or human happiness. These flashes of redemption are what a work of art can reveal from a contemporary standpoint, or what a contemporary standpoint can liberate from a work of art from a remote era. In this vision, past and present can not only be juxtaposed but brought together, allowing the past to be continued at a particular moment and the intervening time suspended: it is a vision of historical time as radically discontinuous, punctual, and coalescing around ‘moments of danger’ in which the past can become ‘citable in all its moments’, moments of human historical and political agency. And to reconcile this vision of history with that of contemporary hermeneutics, however sophisticated, is the challenge that lurks unanswered below the surface of much cultural history inspired by Benjamin, though it is yet to be undertaken.
The second tenet is the monadological conception of the work of art that Benjamin shared with Adorno, but which is also very distant from current approaches to images. Benjamin’s view of the work as monad is one that draws a distinction between artworks and images or representations in a way that contemporary practitioners of both art history and visual culture resist. It is one that sees the image not as actively involved in social life, or at least not as interesting in this capacity. Its instrumental or stylistic connections to its historical moment are irrelevant or accidental; instead Benjamin postulates that the forces of an historical moment are concentrated within the work by purely artistic means. The work of art is thus hermetically sealed from history in a way that allows it to occupy the temporal vacuum of Benjamin’s philosophy of history, at the same time as this seal allows the social forces that obtain at the time of the work’s creation to be potentiated within it. The artwork as monad, in other words, is not a heuristic device or a methodological figure, but an ontology of the work of art that does not provide an easy answer to art history’s occasional and problematic formalism, but raises it instead to a new exponential level.65
So the work of art is closed. It cannot be understood in its windowless totality merely by an accumulation of knowledge about its circumstances of creation or by comparison with other objects of its time with which it will, inevitably, have superficial similarities. Those are matters of the surface, historical accident; real access cannot be achieved by stylistic analysis but only by more cunning means. And these means are predicated on not accepting works of art as finished or exhausted in their effect and available only as reified objects of knowledge or possession, but as having a vast reservoir of potency across historical time: ‘Historical materialism sees the work of the past as still uncompleted.’66 It studies an ‘object not out of a tangle of mere facticities but out of the numbered group of threads representing the weft of the past fed into the warp of the present’.67
How then does the historian achieve this sort of dialectical knowledge, sidestepping historicism’s ‘eternal image of the past’ for a proper and unique experience of it?68 It is, one could say, a matter of attitude or stance (Haltung).69 One could call the historicist attitude before the work of art or history ‘aestheticist’; Benjamin calls it one of ‘appreciation’.70 To release the historical object from its ‘pure facticity’,71 Benjamin proposes various kinds of swift, active, even violent work,72 summoning the ‘destructive side of dialectics’. ‘The historical materialist blasts [sprengt] the epoch out of its reified “historical continuity”’; hers is a consciousness of the present ‘which explodes [aufsprengt] the continuum of history’.73 For the potency held within the work of the past, once released from its thing-like status by the construction of an effective constellation, are enormous: ‘The replacement of the epic element by the constructive element proves to be the condition for this experience. The violent forces [die gewaltigen Kräfte] bound up in historicism’s “Once upon a time” are liberated in this experience.’74 This rhetoric of catastrophe and danger is one that connects the Fuchs essay to the later ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, which also concerns the active, indeed desperate role of the historical materialist in history, and also the ballistic imagery of the Artwork essay. In the Fuchs essay too, Benjamin writes of ‘the speed of traffic and the ability of machines to duplicate words and writing outstrip[ping] human needs. The energies that technology develops beyond this threshold are destructive.’75 Benjamin is writing here about the Social Democrats’ ‘bungled reception of technology’,76 but he is also clearly referring to the conditions in which knowledge of history and works of art must renounce its ‘contemplative’ approach and take the violent energies pent up in the works of the past into its own hands.
In a well-known passage of the Fuchs essay, we read that ‘there is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. No cultural history has yet done justice to this fundamental state of affairs.’77 As an aperçu, this statement can stand effectively on its own. Its context, however, was quite specific: the endless discussions in Marxist cultural theory about the status of the legacy of classical and bourgeois culture, the discussions about what was called the cultural Erbe. Benjamin refers directly to ‘the concept of heritage [Erbe], which has again become important today’;78 and indeed, the 1930s and the realignments of the Popular Front saw a new urgency in these discussions, one that is behind Ernst Bloch’s Heritage of Our Time (1935) and the so-called ‘Expressionism Debate’.79
The Fuchs essay takes a position in this discussion, but a contradictory one. On the one hand, Benjamin clearly accepts the legacy of the culture of the past; and he does so in a way that accepts it unabashedly as comprised of works of art. He does so ambitiously: instead of simply accepting this legacy untouched for its prestige and legitimating function, he sees it as the fuel of active politics. This is a view that makes a dialectical understanding of art and its history not only potentially useful to revolution but its very spark, its catalyst.
This might seem to be a very flattering, at least affirming, proposition to scholars aware of the politics embedded in the relics of the past and keen to make them function in the present. But there is another side to Benjamin’s stance in the Fuchs essay, a position that is not the kind taken in print but instead occupied by the author in practice. And it is one that warns us against a passive imitation of Benjamin’s view, the nearly irresistible temptation to follow his tracks through the arcades or in the Bibliotheque Nationale. For Benjamin shows that the history of art or culture as a practice would not take place within the institutions that had once legitimated it – and that do so once more. The work of a dialectical history of art that Benjamin imagined in his Parisian exile did not take the form of university teaching and writing for refereed journals. He had been cast far from such a life, and was trying to determine how the line, then so thin, between writing and revolution could be crossed. Since the moment of danger in which that sort of practice could be conceived has clearly past, the revolutionary potential of its philosophy of history and view of the artwork can no longer simply be assumed. Benjamin’s idea of a proper history of art represents a specific historical conjuncture. It has now retreated, monad-like, and taken that moment, with its tremendous destructive energies, with it.
‘There is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.’ Benjamin continues: ‘No cultural history has yet done justice to this fundamental state of affairs.’80 At one level, of course, much of the art-historical scholarship of the last decades has done exactly that. Social histories have rewritten art’s history ‘from below’, and various forms of art history and visual culture have considered the imbrication of the image with political power and resistance in some detail. But that does not really seem to be what Benjamin meant. Doing justice to injustice hardly means to contemplate it, catalogue it or describe it. A Benjaminian history of art, a dialectical approach to the past, would not be limited to scholarship and its institutions. Yet these institutions determine the limits of the history of art today, in a way that they did not in the brief moment of danger in which Benjamin reconsidered the discipline.