The largely posthumous publication of his later writings has made Walter Benjamin perhaps the most influential Marxist critic in the German-speaking world, after the Second World War. The major works of his mature period have recently become available in English for the first time, with the translation of a collection of his essays in Illuminations (Cape-Fontana), the record of his relationship to the greatest German writer of his day in Understanding Brecht (NLB), and now the completed portions of what would clearly have been his masterpiece, Charles Baudelaire – A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism (NLB). The widespread acclaim that Benjamin has received both in his own country and abroad, has, however, with some exceptions not been accompanied by critical appraisal of any great acuity. The Left has been in general concerned to defend his legacy from mystical appropriation of it, the Right to establish its distance from any orthodox canon of historical materialism. It may thus be a surprise that probably the best critique of Benjamin’s development in his last phase remains that of his younger friend and colleague Adorno, addressed to him in a number of private letters at the time. The correspondence between the two represents, in fact, one of the most important aesthetic exchanges of the thirties anywhere in Europe. Four of the most significant of these letters are printed below – three from Adorno, with one reply from Benjamin. They concern, respectively: 1. Benjamin’s draft outline for his Arcades project, written in 1935 (entitled ‘Paris – The Capital of the Nineteenth Century’, now in Charles Baudelaire, pp. 155–70); 2. his famous essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, published in 1936 (included in Illuminations, pp. 219–53); 3. and 4. his original study of Baudelaire, composed in 1938 (designated ‘The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire’, in Charles Baudelaire, pp. 9–106).
Adorno first met Benjamin in Frankfurt in 1923, and their acquain tance deepened during the subsequent years. In 1928, Benjamin seems to have started work on his Arcades project, which he first discussed at length with Adorno the following year at Konigstein. It was also in 1929 that Benjamin formed his close friendship with Brecht. After the Nazi seizure of power in Germany in 1933, Benjamin went into exile in Paris, while Adorno was attached to Oxford, returning periodically to Germany, where his institutional record was relatively unmarked. It was from the Black Forest that Adorno wrote his first substantial criticism of Benjamin’s new work in August 1935. By that time, Benjamin was already receiving a regular stipend from the Institute of Social Research, then headed by Horkheimer in New York, which became his main source of support for the rest of the decade. The following year, Adorno received and commented on the manuscript of Benjamin’s essay on the technical reproducibility of art, which was subsequently published in the journal of the Institute, the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, in early 1936. At the turn of the year in 1937–8, the two men saw each other again at San Remo, where they had a series of prolonged discussions before Adorno’s final departure to the United States, where he rejoined the Institute for Social Research in February 1938. Later that year, Benjamin sent the three finished chapters of his planned work on Baudelaire to New York, for publication in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung. Adorno’s dissentient response to the text, answering for the Institute as a whole, prevented its inclusion in the Zeitschrift. To meet Adorno’s criticisms, Benjamin rewrote a part of it, which was published in the Institute’s journal as ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, in 1939 (now included in Charles Baudelaire, pp. 107–54). The only important text subsequently written by Benjamin was his ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, completed a few months before his death in September 1940 – whose influence on the later intellectual development of the Frankfurt School in general, and Adorno in particular, was to be pronounced.
After the Second World War, Adorno was responsible for editing the first two-volume edition of Benjamin’s Schriften, and for co-editing the two published volumes of his Briefe, in the fifties. A decade later, the relationship between Adorno and Benjamin became the object of considerable polemic on the West German Left, after the growth of the student movement and the revival of German Marxism. In assessing the correspondence printed below, however, it is necessary to avoid the illusions of political retrospection, and to situate the actual exchange between the two men historically. Benjamin had been trained in Wilhel mine Berlin before the First World War, where he was influenced by the neo-Kantian philosopher Rickert; early drawn towards Judaic mysticism, he gravitated for a time towards Zionism; in the twenties he discovered Marxism, travelled to Russia (1926–27), and came close to the KPD; his primary focus of interest was always literature. Adorno was eleven years younger, a product of Weimar Germany, and had no religious background; his formation was primarily in music, which he studied under Schönberg in Vienna; his philosophical training was untouched by Wilhelmine Lebensphilosophie; on the other hand, his political associations were very tenuous, even his collaboration with the Institute for Social Research only becoming permanent on the eve of the Second World War. At the time of his first letter to Benjamin printed below, he was 32. Culturally, the two men shared certain dominant axes of reference, both temporal and spatial – Proust, Valéry and Kafka, among others. Benjamin, however, always maintained a close interest in surrealism, whose European centre was Paris, that was foreign to Adorno; while Adorno, who had spent many years in Vienna, possessed a much deeper appreciation of psychoanalysis and of the significance of Freud than Benjamin. If contact with Brecht tended to inflect Benjamin towards a more direct Marxism than he normally displayed, communication with Benjamin tended in turn to inflect Adorno towards a more revolutionary materialism than he otherwise revealed – in part, no doubt, precisely to counteract the influence of Brecht. The complexity of this triangular relationship confers on the correspondence of 1935–9 much of its fascination.
Thus, contrary to what might have been expected, Adorno’s opening letter to Benjamin, discussing his draft essay ‘Paris – Capital of the Nineteenth Century’, focuses its criticism essentially on the psychologistic subjectivism and ahistorical romanticism which he believed he could see beneath the dense and lapidary brilliance of Benjamin’s text. With remarkable insight, Adorno pointed out that Benjamin’s use of Marx’s category of commodity fetishism unwarrantably subjectivized it, by converting it from an objective structure of exchange-value into a delusion of individual consciousness. Its erroneous description as a subjective ‘dream’ was accompanied, moreover, by the misguided corrective of a ‘collective’ unconscious as the repository of archaic ‘myths’. As Adorno commented, this addition compounded rather than tempered Benjamin’s initial mistake, since the idea of a collective unconscious inhabited by myths was precisely the ideological notion with which Jung – whose reactionary proclivities were easily visible – had tried to desexualize and erase the scientific concepts of Freud. Failure to understand the true import of psychoanalysis, he incidentally noted, might be related to the dangerous overtones of Benjamin’s depreciation of Art Nouveau, which Adorno defended for its fundamental impulse towards erotic emancipation. At the same time, implicit valorization of myth could lead both to romantic nostalgia for a primal unity with nature as the realm of lost social innocence, or to its obverse, utopian visions of classlessness that were more ‘classless’ (in the bad sense) than utopian. The result of the undue confidence accorded to myth was thus necessarily an uncritical nonchalance with history. Adorno, shrewdly underlining the frequency with which the archetypal phrases ‘the first time’ and ‘the last time’ occured in the exposé, proceeded to raise a whole series of concrete historical objections to the actual imprecision of Benjamin’s apparent concreteness of reference. In particular, he stressed the obvious fact that commodity production as such preceded the age of Baudelaire by many centuries, and that it was necessary to distinguish carefully within the development of capitalism between the phase of manufactures and the phase of factory industry proper. In the Second Empire, he suggested, the role of the Parisian arcades as bazaars of exotica could be linked to the overseas adventures of the Bonapartist regime; while the working-class could not be said to have ceased forever to be politically passive after the 1830’s. Adorno’s numerous smaller criticisms of detail were in the same sense: for example, bricks had preceded iron as an artificial building material, and snobbery should not be confused as a social phenomenon with dandyism. His general recommendation to Benjamin, in conclusion, was to radicalize his method towards greater historical accuracy and material evidence, and more rigorous economic analysis of the objective bases underlying the cultural configurations with which he was concerned.
Benjamin subsequently decided to make a separate book on Baudelaire, out of the original wider Arcades project. This was to be divided into three parts: a study of Baudelaire as an allegorist, a study of the social world of Paris in which he wrote, and a study of the commodity as a poetic object which would synthesize the meaning of poet and capital alike.1 It was the second section of this triptych that he completed in 1938 and sent to New York. In many ways, it seemed to comply with the urgings of Adorno towards greater historical precision and materialist objectivity; all traces of Jungian influence had disappeared, as had any oneiric version of commodity fetishism, while a great wealth of meticulous documentation from the epoch of the Second Empire was now superbly assembled and presented by Benjamin. Adorno’s response to this manuscript, however, was more astringently critical than to the original exposé. The grounds for his reserve were necessarily now somewhat different. In effect, he taxed Benjamin with so restricting the scope of his investigation that the accumulation of period detail risked becoming an occult positivism. Deprived of any explicit Marxist theorization, the relationship between the Paris of the Second Empire and the work of Baudelaire remained arbitrary and opaque. At best, or worst, specific contents of Baudelaire’s poetry were directly reduced to economic peripeteia of the time, where a global account of the social structure as a whole could alone mediate a genuinely Marxist decipherment of his literary achievement. Benjamin’s ‘ascetic’ renunciation of theory for an artless catalogue of facts did a disservice both to his own gifts and to historical materialism. Benjamin, in his reply, legitimately protested that the section of his Baudelaire submitted to the Institute should not be judged in isolation. Theoretical interpretation of the poet and the city were expressly reserved for the third section that was to conclude the work: hence their intentional absence from the historical treatment of the Parisian themes themselves. Yet it is clear that Adorno was not mistaken in detecting a deeper aversion in Benjamin to systematic theoretical exposition as such, an innate reluctance to decant the mysterious elixir of the world into any translucent vessel of ordered discourse. Beneath, or across, Benjamin’s inclination to economic empiricism lay, he commented, traces of religious superstition: a theological reverence for names strangely united with a positivist acquisition of facts, by the common impulse of obsessive ‘enumeration’ rather than analytic explanation.2 Adorno’s diagnosis of the intellectual blockage that was likely to result from the coadjutant strains of esoteric mysticism and exoteric materialism was a feat of great critical penetration.
At the same time, however, the practical handling by Adorno of the theoretical divergences between the two men plainly lacked wisdom. In both letters to Benjamin about his Arcades manuscripts, there is a disturbing note of willed insistence on certain of Adorno’s own ideas (the notion of ‘dialectical image’, the theme of ‘hell’, or the quotations from Jean Paul) at the expense of complete respect for the autonomy of Benjamin’s concerns, incompatible with the proper discretion of a critic. Much more seriously, the refusal of the Institute of Social Research to publish the Baudelaire texts, for which Adorno was inevitably in large measure responsible, was a heavy and heedless blow to inflict on Benjamin. The correct course for the Zeitschrift was, surely, to publish the manuscript and then proceed to a critical discussion of it in the journal. It can only be regretted that a public debate, rather than informal exchanges by correspondence, was not allowed to appear in its pages. Benjamin’s own response to Adorno’s criticism, which had obviously shaken him, was precisely to plead for the necessity of free discussion in print of his work – a plea which his personal conditions of acute isolation and distress in Paris rendered all the more poignant. In the event, Benjamin was denied this chance, and re-wrote a section of the Baudelaire study closer to the wishes of the Institute, which published his new draft ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’ a few months later.3 It is striking that in this text there was a notable loss of the strength of the original ‘Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire’ – its intense absorption and mastery of cross-connected historical materials – without compensating gains in theoretical perception. In the new version, Dilthey was dismissed; Jung and Klages – the two figures singled out for attack by Adorno in his first letter – were now, with a somewhat ostentatious zeal, consigned to the camp of fascism; while Freud was centrally introduced through extensive adoption of his notion of ‘shock’ from Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Unfortunately, this was to select one of the least successful of Freud’s later metapsychological works, and Benjamin’s use of it resulted only in a thinner and weaker variant of the original manuscript. Thus, while Adorno’s own criticisms of Benjamin’s work were profound and powerful as independent contributions to a debate between the two, Benjamin’s obligation to rework his own writing to approximate it to Adorno’s preoccupations produced the opposite of an improvement. Moreover, the circumstances of this imposition were aggravated by the fact that the Institute in New York was by 1938–9 under severe pressure from the rabidly counter-revolutionary climate of American academic culture at the time, and had started to make a series of tactical adaptations to it. The original Baudelaire manuscript opens with a political discussion of Marx’s assessment of professional revolutionary conspirators in the 1840s, contains constant allusions throughout to the proletarian struggles on the barricades of 19th-century France, and closes with a moving evocation of Blanqui. It is unlikely to be an accident that all such passages disappeared from the essay eventually published in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung. If Benjamin in Paris was a too credulous believer in the thaumaturgical virtue of ‘calling things by their names’, his colleagues in New York certainly did not suffer from any trusting literalism: they were becoming too adept practitioners of the diplomatic art of euphemism and periphrasis, that knowingly does not call things by their name.
This indirection had already been evident in the Institute’s treatment of Benjamin’s earlier essay, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, if on a lesser scale. The version printed in the Zeitschrift in 1936 was typically altered by such substitutions as ‘totalitarian doctrine’ for ‘Fascism’, ‘constructive forces of mankind’ for ‘communism’, and ‘modern warfare’ for ‘imperialist warfare’; while its preface, which directly invoked Marx, was omitted altogether. These deletions, however, were the work of Horkheimer in New York. Adorno at this stage was still uninvolved in the administration of the Institute, and received a typescript of the essay privately in London, some two years before his departure for the United States.
Adorno’s own reflections on it to Benjamin were free from any editorial steering, and thus represent perhaps the best example of his critical intelligence at grips with the ideas of his senior. Riposting against Benjamin’s attack on aesthetic ‘aura’ as a vestige of bourgeois culture and his celebration of the progressive function of technical reproducibility in art as the pathway to a new appropriation of it by the masses – realized above all in the cinema, Adorno replied with a defence of avant-garde art and a counter-attack against over-confidence in commerial-popular art. On the other hand, he argued, the ‘technicization’ of art was no less evident in Viennese atonal music than in Hollywood comedies: the inner formal development of avant-garde art itself had led to the anti-magical exhibition of its mechanisms of ‘production’, regarded by Benjamin as the great merit of industrial cinema. On the other hand, the allegedly popular art exalted by Benjamin, far from being necessarily non-aural, was in fact typically mimetic and infantilist: the American film industry, in particular, was a vehicle of bourgeois ideology even in its apparently most ‘progressive’ expressions. Chaplin, cult director of the Left, merely nurtured an inverted brutalism; jazz, ostensibly advanced and collective as a musical form, in fact rested on mesmeric repetition. The idea developed by Benjamin that the ‘distraction’ of a movie-goer or the ‘expertise’ of a sports fan could in any way be taken as prototypes of aesthetic liberation was flagrant romanticism. Economically, this conception implied that communist society would not have abolished the work-fatigue that generates the need for distraction, rather than emancipating imaginative energy and sensibility for a new intensity of concentration, as Marx had always envisaged it would. Politically, it forgot Lenin’s critique of spontaneism, which Adorno interpreted as precluding any merely optimistic attribution to the working class of an immediate capacity to master the progressive potential or latent meaning of new forms of art, without the assimilation of theoretical knowledge. The real crux of modern aesthetic debate, he concluded, necessarily lay in the problem of the relationship between workers and intellectuals within the revolutionary movement.
The force of many of these arguments remains pertinent today. It is clear that Benjamin, following Brecht, tended to hypostasize techniques in abstraction from relations of production, and to idealize diversions in ignorance of the social determinants of their reproduction. His theory of the positive significance of distraction was based on a specious generalization from architecture,4 whose forms are always directly used as practical objects and hence necessarily command a distinct type of attention from those of drama, cinema, poetry or painting. Against this rhetoric, Adorno’s insistence on traditional norms of aesthetic concentration retains all its validity (just as his brusque dismissal of Chaplin’s confused miserabilism can only be ratified today). On the other hand, Adorno’s own analysis of jazz – which he himself counterposed to Benjamin’s discussion of film – was notoriously myopic and rearguard: focused exclusively on the swing phase of the thirties, it failed completely to perceive the dynamics of jazz as an aesthetic form, with a past and future stretching far beyond the anodyne riffs to which he confined it. Where Benjamin manifestly overestimated the progressive destiny of the commercial-popular art of his time, Adorno no less clearly over-estimated that of the avant-garde art of the period. In fact, signs of imminent conservatism can be seen on both sides of the exchange. Benjamin was already lamenting the advent of sound in the cinema, while Adorno was later unable to muster any enthusiasm for the emergence of electronic music. Both, too, reveal a considerable distance from the actual range of work in the media they discuss, which results in a pervasive vagueness about the precise nature of the ‘technique’ to whose sovereign power they both hasten to pay tribute. Adorno tended to equate this simply with the formal laws of any art, while Benjamin identified it essentially with mechanical reproduction. But since technical reproducibility as such had existed at least since the invention of printing during the Renaissance,5 Benjamin was for the most part obliged in practice to confine the term arbitrarily to the cinema, on the grounds that it alone exemplified reproduction not only in distribution but in production itself, in order to maintain his claim that the principle was a revolutionary innovation of contemporary art.6 In general, the absolute necessity for a differential historical analysis of separate aesthetic forms, and their respective technical elements, was overlooked by both men, who shared a certain proneness to casual conflations. The subsequent development of the main media with which they were concerned has not only been uneven and asymmetrical; it has also demonstrated an extremely complex and variegated set of dialectical relationships between ‘high’ and ‘low’, ‘avant-garde’ and ‘popular’ strands, that was never envisaged by either. The cinematic expertise in Hollywoodiana which Benjamin prophesied was to be realized by a sophisticated elite of the intelligentsia, which was to use it to transform avant-garde films: for all their erratic merits, it may be doubted whether Benjamin would have savoured the Cahiers du Cinema with much zest. Conversely, the immanent development of the jazz abhorred by Adorno eventually led it towards the atonality he had once championed in ‘serious’ music. Painting, in another operation altogether, was to incorporate comic-strip and advertising motifs, between parody and solemnity. Perhaps the only form to approximate to a fertile aesthetic distraction has been rock, because of its use-relationship to dance. Literature, on the other hand, perhaps the most class-divided of all art forms because of its racination in language, has proved more resistant than any other to the intertwining of popular and vanguard genres.
Neither the complaisance of a perpetually obsolete modernism nor the shrillness of a beleaguered traditionalism can account for these discordant histories. No aesthetic field has been exempt from the rending pressures of the two recurrent poles of all culture still subject to capital, autistically advanced or collusively popular. Adorno’s basic dictum in this respect still holds true: ‘Both are torn halves of an integral freedom, to which however they do not add up.’ The shifting cultural landscape of the seventies inevitably lay far beyond the horizons of the theorists of the thirties. But despite some sectoral breakthroughs in specific disciplines, the themes of the Adorno-Benjamin exchanges have yet to be truly surpassed by any general progress of Marxist aesthetic theory since that time. The correspondence printed below, a dialogue between two idiosyncratic masters of German prose, remains a document of the utmost intellectual and literary interest today.