Ten years ago I bought the second volume of Walter Benjamin’s Selected Writings in an old-fashioned used bookshop in Toronto. For someone who knew Benjamin from his essays in Illuminations (1968), the book on Charles Baudelaire (1973a), the slim volume of Understanding Brecht (1973b), and his ‘Moscow Diary’ published as a special issue of October (1985), this thick book of Benjamin’s writing from 1927–1934 is a revelation. It shows the working life of an essayist, book reviewer and radio broadcaster. As Michael Jennings insists, it is a fantasy of academic commentators that Benjamin was a rejected intellectual during the Weimar Republic:
The common view of Benjamin as a distanced, ineffectual loner laboring in the ivory tower may conform to the self-understanding of some of Benjamin’s critics, but it has little to do with his life. Writing for some of the most prominent weeklies and monthlies in Germany, Walter Benjamin established himself in the late 1920s as a visible and influential commentator on cultural matters (Jennings 2004: 19).
Collected into a thick volume of 870 pages (in two volumes for the paperback edition) are some of Benjamin’s most important essays on Moscow, Goethe, Surrealism, Proust, Karl Kraus, Kafka, also Benjamin’s ‘Little History of Photography’, the autobiographical ‘A Berlin Chronicle’ and his controversial lecture from 1934 on ‘The Author as Producer’. Most of these were published at the time. Add to this the important reviews of novels by Fyodor Gladkov, Julien Green, Alfred Döblin and there is still much to be explored.1
These essays first appeared in newspapers and journals. The difficult short piece called ‘Dream Kitsch’ was published, two years after it was written, as ‘Gloss on Surrealism’ in Die neue Rundschau in January 1927: this renowned periodical from S. Fischer Verlag is described by a historian as ‘the principal journal of the German educated bourgeoisie’ (Kaes 1987: 14). The reader might have understood Benjamin to be saying that not only experience, but also dreams have declined in value. Benjamin’s essay on Moscow was published in 1927 in Martin Buber’s journal Die Kreatur, which paid for some of the cost of his travel. Is this part of the reason why the essay mostly avoids politics and instead describes the rhythms of the city? The Internationale Revue was a Constructivist periodical, published in Amsterdam. Benjamin published a very critical review of a Surrealist novel there in 1927. To jump ahead in time, Benjamin’s essay on Kafka first appeared in the Jüdische Rundschau, the largest Jewish publication still allowed in Germany in 1934. Two years later Benjamin published his famous essay on the Russian novelist Leskov as ‘The Storyteller’ in Orient und Occident, an exile magazine. Maxim Gorky had given a speech at the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934 in which he emphasized the importance of popular unwritten literary forms such as legends, tales, myths and folklore (Papazian 2009: 125).
The most important periodical for Benjamin was Die literarische Welt (The Literary World) which was at first a house magazine for his book publisher Rowohlt. The magazine quickly took on an independent life under the editorship of Willy Haas, whose friend Hugo von Hofmannsthal played an important role in Benjamin’s career. Modeled on Nouvelles littéraires in France, at its height in 1929 it sold almost 30,000 copies. Although it was considered a liberal paper, Die literarische Welt was open to all political opinions:
Haas’s editorial line had shown a strong commitment to that loosely defined left-liberal network the ‘Gruppe 1925’, which at this stage embraced well-known authors such as Brecht and Döblin, as well as the communists Johannes R. Becher and Egon Erwin Kisch who were eventually to break with the ‘bourgeois’ literary circles and form their own close-knit organization, the Bund proletarisch-revolutionärer Schriftsteller (BPRS). And it was in close association with the ‘Gruppe 1925’ that Haas had lent his support to a vigorous campaign against the Prussian Academy as unrepresentative and hostile to youthful and enterprising talent (Midgley 1989: 129–30).
Brodersen’s biography of Benjamin includes a caricature from the front cover in December 1926 of the main writers, including Benjamin. He published over a hundred contributions from October 1925 to February 1933. Benjamin was to specialize in recent French art theory, though the range of his articles and book reviews is much broader (Brodersen 1996: 159–62). Benjamin’s participation in the weekly paper gave him a regular readership and he saw this as an opportunity to influence writers as a critic. Benjamin might later explain this as a technical interest in writing: he is a kind of consulting engineer in literary production.
Benjamin had a more difficult relationship with the Frankfurter Zeitung, though it was his second most important outlet after Die literarische Welt. Things got off to a bad start when Stefan Zweig published a critical review of Benjamin’s translations of Baudelaire in the Frankfurter Zeitung in 1924. Benjamin criticized a novelist associated with the newspaper the following year in the Literarische Welt. Benjamin published in the Frankfurter Zeitung from 1925 until 1935. The elite newspaper was founded in 1856 and had a reputation for excellent business news and liberal bourgeois opinions. It was intellectually demanding; too highbrow to have mass appeal. In 1928 it had a circulation of 71,000 copies, many of which were read outside Frankfurt (Eksteins 1975) and its editors had quite an amount of autonomy. Siegfried Kracauer who had become a full editor in 1924 personally sponsored Benjamin at the paper. This was necessary because there was considerable rivalry between the paper and the Literarische Welt and Benjamin’s specialty in modern French culture competed with the interests of a Frankfurter Zeitung editor, Benno Reifenberg who had also lived in Paris. Joseph Roth (2004) wrote about the city of Paris for the Frankfurter Zeitung from 1925 to 1932.
Table 2.1 Readership of the Frankfurter Zeitung in 1927
In an unpublished introduction for a planned series of articles on Russia for the French socialist journal L’Humanité in 1927, Benjamin addresses the issue of left-bourgeois intellectuals in Germany (Benjamin 1999a: 20–21). His generation in Germany was radicalized by the war in 1914 and even more by the failed revolution of 1918. But the existence of independent writers is put in question by the difficulties of making a living. In this situation some writers like Benjamin seriously consider whether they should join the Communist Party and affiliate with the revolution. One of Benjamin’s reasons for visiting Russia in 1926–27 was to investigate the situation of intellectuals. He found that the era of experimentalism was over: what now was required was basic educational work and service to the state.
Back in Germany Benjamin’s work in the literary field has been summarized by Berman (1988) in this way. He is different from feuilleton writers who give their subjective impressions as part of the culture industry; also different from conservatives who seek to create a national canon of literature and from critics who do their work in a directly political way. Instead Benjamin addresses a loosely organized field of other writers and intellectuals who earn their living in the literary world. He continually confronts them with the meaning and context of their work. Benjamin writes reviews of people he knows: from the conservative Hofmannsthal to the radical Brecht, and including journalist friends Hessel and Kracauer. But he is also involved in a debate about the role of intellectuals in Weimar Germany.
This is evident in much of Benjamin’s writings in the second volume of his Selected Writings. His essay on Goethe was originally written for the Great Soviet Encyclopedia and if it had been successful Benjamin might have stayed in Russia and written other contributions on German and French literature. This lengthy essay may seem unusual as an encyclopedia article, but in the early twentieth century they were not always written to a standard format: Kropotkin wrote the entry for ‘Anarchism’ for the Encyclopedia Britannica. Benjamin’s article on Goethe was rejected in the form that he wrote it, because an official who looked it over said it talked too much about class conflict. Lunarcharsky also read Benjamin’s article and found it unsuitable for the encyclopedia (see letter reprinted in Benjamin 1985: 130–31).
Benjamin begins with Goethe’s habitus. When he was born in 1749 in Frankfurt, it had only 30,000 inhabitants, whereas Paris and London each had more than half a million people:
Goethe was the cultural representative and, initially, the political spokesman of a new bourgeoisie, whose gradual rise can be clearly discerned in his family tree. His male ancestors worked their way up from artisan circles and married women from educated families or families otherwise higher in the scale than themselves (Benjamin 1999a: 161).
Apart from this emphasis, the encyclopedia article rarely mentions class conflict. Its main theme is the uneven development of history. When he gave up the idea of a legal career, Goethe entered the service of the court at Weimar where he had duties as tutor to young princes, and eventually supervised scientific institutes, museums, the university, technical schools: all aspects of culture and education. The bourgeoisie could not yet support independent intellectuals. What Benjamin repeatedly stresses is the contradictions of Goethe’s position and his writings: ‘Goethe felt himself to be less the champion of the middle classes than their deputy – their ambassador to German feudalism and the princes’ (Benjamin 1999a: 171). He did not support the French Revolution. Nor did Goethe find an affinity in Kant’s philosophy, except in his aesthetics. The purpose of the beautiful – including natural beauty – is to have no purpose.2
In his short book on Heidegger, the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu describes how the German intellectual field was dominated by neo-Kantian philosophy between 1870 and 1920. Caygill (1998) especially stresses Kantian aspects of Benjamin’s thought. Although it is well documented that Benjamin studied Kant as a student, others have suggested that what matters is an intellectual habitus dominated by neo-Kantian philosophers. These include Benjamin’s teacher Heinrich Rickert, and the Jewish socialist Hermann Cohen. It has been argued that neo-Kantian philosophy owed its success to its ability to mediate and act as an official philosophy in Germany after 1870. It received institutional support not simply for intellectual reasons but because its contradictions reflected deeply felt concerns during a period of rapid development in science and industry. For example, Cohen’s political philosophy attempted to reconcile liberal bourgeois ideas with working-class socialism.
Neo-Kantianism is not a single movement but the return to Kant includes many different approaches, most of which tried to correct or improve on his system of philosophy. Widely criticized on the left as ‘bourgeois’ philosophy, the movement, which developed slowly through the 1800s, also included social democratic and socialist thinkers. Willey (1978: 23) argues ‘the neo-Kantians expressed the tentative and unsuccessful efforts of a segment of the upper bourgeoisie to make peace with the proletariat and retain an attitude of cultural community with the West’. Köhnke (1991) ascribes its success to the expansion of the university system after 1870 and the desire for a philosophy that stresses a free, moral and autonomous individual against materialist or deterministic accounts. It could be directed against bourgeois materialism as well as that of the lower classes. Neo-Kantianism can be understood as a general response to the effects of industrialization. It was also a position against religious dogma, especially Catholic anti-modernism. Kant’s argument that there are a priori structures of our knowledge of the world is central, though in the late 1800s the emphasis shifted more to Kant’s moral and political writings.3 In 1959 Adorno lectured on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and stressed the contradictions and tensions in Kant’s attempt to create a philosophy that is neither pure reason or logic, nor based only on empirical knowledge of the world.
What Benjamin takes from neo-Kantian philosophy is an emphasis on the formal conditions of possibility of an object. As in Hermann Cohen this need not imply a very strict reading of Kant. Cohen might even provide Benjamin with an example of selective quotation (from Kant) that throws a text into a very different meaning, or ‘completes’ its meaning. This could include borrowing from Plato’s concept of Ideas, or even (for Benjamin) from Goethe’s concept of ur-phenomena (for example that the structure of the leaf is the basic form of all other parts of the plant). Lambrianou (2004b) suggests that Cohen’s concepts are present throughout Benjamin’s work, for example the concept of Ursprung or origin. In his essay on Naples in 1925, Benjamin wishes to demonstrate that the concept of this city, the formal conditions of its possibility, is its porous space and its uneven development in time. Porosity is the formal condition of possibility of the city of Naples. It is typical of Benjamin’s work that this concept is deeply contradictory.
However, against Caygill (1998) this insight into Benjamin’s foundation in neo-Kantianism needs to be handled with care. There is also a moment in Benjamin that seems close to sheer description. This is true for Benjamin’s essay on Moscow, which cannot easily be read under the concept of ‘mobilization’ or total control by the Communist Party as Caygill claims. The fundamental contradiction that Adorno describes in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is also present in Benjamin: an oscillation between conceptualizing formal conditions of existence and a refusal to abandon the world in itself. There is a great deal of description of the material existence of Moscow in Benjamin’s essay: his conceptualization of living in a state of ‘mobilization’ is only a hint (and living in an empty room is not specific to Moscow). Unlike Joseph Roth’s novel The Silent Prophet, based on his experience in Moscow at much the same time, there is very little political commentary in Benjamin’s essay. He himself said that it is mostly a description of the rhythms of the city.
Benjamin quotes from Hermann Lotze in The Arcades Project. The quotes are not extensive and all have to do with Benjamin’s theory of history. Lotze was a kind of precursor to neo-Kantianism, also influenced by Leibniz. He joined in the struggle against Hegel and against materialism. His main weapon was a kind of epistemological scepticism which he took from Kant (Willey 1978: 40). Since Benjamin is sometimes faulted for his emphasis on fragments in The Arcades Project, it is interesting that the quotes from Lotze all tend to locate phenomena (upright posture, exhibitions, poverty) in a broad context. Poverty only takes the form of raggedness in a certain kind of society. The most significant quotes have to do with scepticism about the idea of progress: history actually takes the form of spirals and many advantages and charms are lost. Progress does not mean only the advance of a minority: it must include the majority. The most significant quotation is quite close to the famous paragraph on barbarism in Benjamin’s ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’: ‘All degrees and shades of moral barbarism, of mental obtuseness, and of physical wretchedness have always been found in juxtaposition with cultured refinement of life …’ (Benjamin 1999b: 480).4
The habitus of Walter Benjamin has been described many times (Arendt 1969; Brodersen 1996; McCole 1993; Scholem 1981; Selz 1988). He is a highly educated young man from a wealthy bourgeois family. He has an aristocratic attitude to university and to intellectual life, even towards his own family; his intellectual pursuits are encouraged by women. Like many Jewish intellectuals of his generation he rebels against his parents, bourgeois culture and especially against the war in 1914. In fact, his world-view has much in common with the conservative revolution in social thought, especially its rejection of materialism, science and its diagnosis of a general decline in culture and experience. Benjamin absorbs Jewish culture through friends, since his family is generally assimilated. His work up to 1924 is decidedly that of a private scholar and his main struggles with his parents are about financial support for his esoteric writing. Through literary contacts with the conservative Hugo von Hofmannsthal and others, Benjamin becomes a well-known book reviewer and essayist in the German press after 1925.
Table 2.2 Women university students in Germany
Source: Ringer (2000: 113)
Is it possible to expand Bourdieu’s notion of class habitus and to develop a picture of Benjamin’s intellectual habitus? Bourdieu considers habitus and intellectual field to be distinct: his central concern is to show how people participate differently in intellectual fields according to their class habitus. For an intellectual like Benjamin the notion of an intellectual habitus may actually be useful. It helps to move beyond the idea of intellectual influences, or even intellectual affinities, to consider more complex relations between thinkers and ideas. Consider the well-known statement in Benjamin’s ‘On the Program of the Coming Philosophy’ from 1918: ‘The central task of the coming philosophy’, announces Benjamin, ‘will be to take the deepest intimations it draws from our times and our expectation of a great future and turn them into knowledge by relating them to the Kantian system’ (Benjamin 1996: 100). Whereas Caygill attempts to show an influence from Kant on Benjamin, the issue here is more of a Kantian habitus: a general style of thinking that may include a rejection of much in Kant, as well as disagreements with neo-Kantians such as Rickert and Cohen. The intellectual habitus that Benjamin affirms is a disinterested study of the conditions of possibility of experience or knowledge. The problems with Kant centre round his attention to experience, especially science, which Benjamin describes as of a low order, perhaps the lowest. Benjamin speaks of a ‘new and higher experience yet to come’ (Benjamin 1996: 102). The program of the coming philosophy is to explore this kind of higher experience: ‘The decisive mistakes of Kant’s epistemology are, without a doubt, traceable to the hollowness of the experience available to him …’ (Benjamin 1996: 102). At university Benjamin had a similar aristocratic attitude to most of his professors.
As an advanced student, Benjamin seeks to expand neo-Kantian philosophy to mystical, religious and even erotic experiences. In doing so, he draws heavily on his Jewish habitus. This includes an emphasis on language and a sharp dislike of any emphasis on individual subjectivity. The main issue in Benjamin’s disputes with the Stefan George School is its emphasis on the author as hero and on heroic figures in history. This especially includes what Michael Löwy calls an elective affinity between Jewish messianic thought and libertarian politics in the early twentieth century (see also Rabinbach 1997). In all of his public statements, Benjamin insists on his Jewish origins against the fairly widespread anti-Semitism of the time, including in university affairs. Theoretically, what this means is an emphasis on messianic time. (One of Benjamin’s major disagreements with Heidegger is over his concept of time). It is impossible to understand Benjamin’s early work on Romanticism or Goethe without this messianic understanding. Because Benjamin proposes that his readings are a redemption of the work; a fulfillment of its original meaning in a messianic now, even if this is a weak messianic power. In a similar way, it is impossible to understand Benjamin’s late work in the Arcades Project without such a messianic moment.5
The key to understanding Benjamin is that his disinterested study of the conditions of possibility of experience or knowledge produces a concept or a critique that is a contradiction in terms, what he will later call a dialectical image. These contradictions are never resolved, and much of Benjamin’s efforts are to present them as irresolvable. For example, in his study of the concept of German Romantic criticism there is a deep contradiction between Benjamin’s claim that he has fulfilled its concept and the Romantic theme of an infinite dialogue on the meaning of meaning. In Benjamin’s essay on Goethe’s novel Elective Affinities there is a tension between Benjamin’s claim that he has completed the work (fulfilled its original meaning) and both Goethe’s rejection of the need for literary criticism of his works, and the historicist commonsense that each generation reads the literary work in a different way. In his work on German Baroque mourning plays, Benjamin takes this very far. The original concept of these strange plays is one that denies conceptual knowledge: it is allegory, or images that lose their meaning in history. In reading the plays in this way Benjamin is encouraged by Alois Riegl’s art history which combines a Kantian emphasis on the conditions that make experience possible and an emphasis from Hegel on art as the expression of a period’s will to knowledge. By disinterested study Benjamin means no prior judgment that the art is inferior to classical art, or that it comes from a period of decline (see Jennings 1987: 151–63).
How can Bourdieu’s sociology of intellectual and artistic fields be brought to bear on Benjamin’s strange project? It is fairly clear from the above that Benjamin is not a social scientist and from the point of view of social science his messianic readings are fairly irrational. This judgement has been made especially by Frankfurt School thinkers including Adorno, Horkheimer, Habermas, Tiedemann and also Jameson. Benjamin’s Arcades Project is not a work of social science like David Harvey’s, Paris: Capital of Modernity. (Though Benjamin’s historical research has contributed many ideas to social science). What would it mean to study Benjamin’s intellectual habitus in relation to more or less disorganized fields such as book reviewing or philosophical essays?
The case has been well established in the literature for an affinity between Benjamin, Bloch, Lukács and other messianic Jewish thinkers of the early twentieth century.6 It will be no surprise to find such thinkers struggling with Kant’s system. Consider the well-known description of Kracauer, fourteen years older than Adorno acting as his tutor in Kant:
They worked together on Saturday afternoons for years on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, taking an unconventional approach. Under Kracauer’s guidance, Adorno experienced the book not just as epistemological theory but as a kind of coded writing from which the historical condition of the spirit could be deciphered, in which objectivism and subjectivism, ontology and idealism were joined in battle (Wiggershaus 1994: 67, see also Adorno 2001).
Adorno, Benjamin, Bloch, Lukács as a formation (Williams 1977) encounter Kant and the neo-Kantian philosophers of their time and respond in different ways. Benjamin would seem to turn most of Rickert’s method on its head. Benjamin studied with the neo-Kantian philosopher Heinrich Rickert, who makes a fundamental distinction between natural science and cultural science. He argues that the historian does not tell the past as it was, but inevitably uncovers patterns based on his own system of values. Rickert justifies this procedure if these values belong to the ‘normal consciousness’ of humanity. Benjamin also discerns patterns in art history but he claims they are not based on his own system of values. He intuits ‘original meaning’ and not the normal consciousness of humanity, and this in a moment of crisis. Benjamin has a similar relation to Hermann Cohen’s neo-Kantianism. He accepts some elements and turns others on their head. From Cohen he accepts the emphasis on messianic politics – Cohen combines a reading of Kant with a commitment to socialist politics – but whereas Cohen’s messianic socialism is forward looking, Benjamin looks backward to failed or unfulfilled utopias which he believes can be redeemed in a messianic present (Lambrianou 2004a: 88–9).
Ernst Bloch’s treatment of Kant in The Spirit of Utopia (1919) is very similar. As in Benjamin, Bloch’s judgement is that the way Kant lives and speaks is not immediately rich. Yet there is no reason why his method cannot be expanded beyond Newton’s science to a broader range of experience:
For one can clearly just as well ask about the conditions of possibility for Javanese dance, Hindu mysteries, Chinese ancestor worship, or if one wants to be Western European, and insofar as one can substitute scholasticism for Newton, scientific as well, how Christ’s sacrificial death, the Apocalypse and certain other similar synthetic judgements are possible, in particular if one does not want to survey just a single nook – eighteenth-century Europe – but rather the entire spirit apportioned to us human beings (Bloch 2000: 173–4).
If Kant limits his range of experiences and examples, there is another Kant, who in spite of himself, asks inexhaustible questions about moral and aesthetic experience. Bloch says that we have intuitions of the world that go beyond rational categories: dampness, the sound of scissors cutting cloth, the gait of a shepherd dog. There is even a utopian spirit in Kant. And if Kant remains inward, there is a much greater expanse and scope in Hegel. In spite of his reservations about Hegel (Bloch describes him as a headmaster, or indiscriminate lawyer for the Being that hired him), he imagines combining Hegel with neo-Kantian philosophy. Kant cannot be done if Hegel is left out (Bloch 2000: 173–87). This Hegelian moment may explain some of the doubts that Benjamin felt about The Spirit of Utopia, which is otherwise close to his intellectual habitus.
Hugo Ball’s Critique of the German Intelligentsia (originally published in 1919) includes a much wilder, almost Dada, treatment inspired by the support of neo-Kantian philosophers for the war in 1914: ‘In his personality Kant displays the traits of despotism. When coming from such a crotchety old bachelor, the excogitation of universally binding propositions could hardly lead to anything else’ (Ball 1993: 53). Ball invokes the conservative religious philosopher Baader against Kant. The complete works of Baader were in Benjamin’s library.
Benjamin would later have read long sections in Lukács, History and Class Consciousness on Kant (Lukács 1971: 123–7, 132–40). Lukács’s main argument is that the antinomies in Kant’s philosophy can be overcome by moving from Kant’s stance of abstract contemplation to praxis. Lukács also defends Kant’s method, which he believes can be expanded to deal with post-Newtonian science, against Engels’s materialism. It is through activity in the world that one overcomes the unknowable Kantian ‘thing-in-itself’. Benjamin read this in 1924 at a time when he was shifting from the habitus of a private scholar to become a more public and politically engaged writer.
When Benjamin read Hugo Ball’s Critique of the German Intelligentsia (first published in 1919) he shook his head at what he considered Ball’s immoderate attack on Kant (Scholem 1981: 79). But by the mid-1920s the neo-Kantian paradigm was displaced by a revolution in ideas, and this did not happen only for intellectual reasons. A wide variety of irrational world-views came into prominence – in this context Benjamin’s own messianic theology might not seem out of tune – including various kinds of existentialism and life philosophy. The most dramatic moment in this paradigm shift is the debate between Ernst Cassirer (representing the neo-Kantians) and Martin Heidegger in the late 1920s.7 There are many layers to this debate. As Bourdieu shows, Heidegger by the late 1920s is the consecrated representative in the university of a wide-ranging ‘conservative revolution’ in thinking. And because so many neo-Kantian philosophers were Jewish an attack on neo-Kantianism as a movement inevitably has anti-Semitic undertones (Gusejnova 2006: 8).
Benjamin took his distance in part in the mid-1920s, and as usual with Benjamin not in a direct manner. It has been pointed out that the concept of space in his essay on Naples (written in 1925 with Asja Lacis and published in the Frankfurter Zeitung) is hallucinatory by comparison with Kant’s notions of space and time. In their reading of the city, Benjamin and Lacis develop the concept of a ‘porous’ architecture for the city, in which the distinction between interior and exterior space is deconstructed (Benjamin 1996: 416, and the commentary in Caygill 1998: 121–6). In One Way Street (written 1923–1926 and published in 1928) there is a commentary on Kant’s ethics that introduces a temporal and political dimension into Kant’s universal maxim that one should behave as if one’s actions could be generally followed. The segment is titled ‘Ministry of the Interior’ (Benjamin 1996: 450). The revolutionary anarchist orients themselves in their ethics to the maxims of a future society, whereas the conservative politician does not follow the principles that he publically states, because what matters is their public authority and not that he actually follows them (Benjamin 1996: 450). Benjamin only loosely continues the spirit of neo-Kantianism after the mid-1920s. The presence of Alois Riegl’s art history continues in the Arcades Project of the late 1920s and 1930s. The philosophy of Hermann Lotze, a precursor to neo-Kantianism, is also important in the Arcades Project, especially for his political statements on social inequality.8
In departing the neo-Kantian establishment, Benjamin would visit or pass by some strange stations and literary kiosks. He always resisted the gravitational pull of Heidegger: in the 1930s he and Brecht planned to ‘annihilate’ Heidegger (Wizisla 2009: 41). But many commentators have noted, sometimes with surprise, the conservative figures that attracted Benjamin’s attention in the 1920s and 1930s. In an approach to Benjamin that stresses his intellectual habitus in relation to several only loosely organized intellectual fields, the presence of these conservative figures cannot be ignored. It is not a matter of whether Benjamin actually met them, or corresponded with them or can be shown to have been influenced by them.9 The matter is that they are objectively part of the field and attracted Benjamin’s attention. For example, there is little doubt that the early Benjamin shared the widely felt mood of Spengler’s Decline of the West (eight years after its publication in 1918 it had sold 100,000 copies, see Hughes 1951: 89) even if he called him a ‘trivial bastard’ (Gusejnova 2006: 6). The early work of Benjamin is full of widely felt assumptions about a decline in culture, which Fritz Ringer (1969) attributes to an actual decline in the status of mandarin culture in an age of expanding education and rapid industrialization.10
There has been an amount of commentary on Benjamin’s relation to conservative thinkers on myth and the unconscious: Carl Jung, J.J. Bachofen, and especially Ludwig Klages (Lobovic 2006; Male 1999; McCole 1993: 178–80; Wohlfarth 2002 and Wolin n.d.). Benjamin famously talked about reading right-wing figures against the grain: to extract a kernel of truth from even conservative writings. The argument of this chapter is that it is not so easy for Benjamin to leave behind his class habitus and that he is himself aware of this. For all his misgivings about the over-stuffed bourgeois apartment circa 1900, it is somewhat difficult to imagine Benjamin living in Hannes Meyer’s almost empty housing co-op room of 1926. (This room which is the exact opposite of a bourgeois interior is only a photograph. It never actually existed. See Hays 1992: 64.) In Benjamin’s essay on Moscow he admires people who camp in empty rooms, ready to be mobilized where they are needed. But he is secretly attracted to a petty-bourgeois apartment. He says that he could probably get a lot of writing done there.11
Certainly we have to look to Benjamin’s class habitus to understand his fascination with the Paris Arcades of the nineteenth century, which mostly housed boutiques that sold luxury goods. Surely the spectacular food markets of Les Halles, at the centre of Zola’s novel The Belly of Paris (2007, originally published in 1873) are objectively far more important. It is true that Benjamin approached the Arcades in part through Paris Peasant by the surrealist Louis Aragon (1994). But also in part through his friend Franz Hessel, and even Benjamin’s father spent some time in Paris as a young man. The description of vegetable and meat markets in Zola’s naturalist fiction has no interest for Benjamin (see also Harvey 2006: 195–207).
We know what Bourdieu would say at this point: ‘Movements of rebellion on the part of the privileged are extraordinarily ambiguous: these people are terribly contradictory and, in their very subversion of the institution, seek to preserve the advantages associated with a previous state of the institution’ (Bourdieu 1990: 45). This famous judgement by Bourdieu is also pretty much the message of Benjamin’s study of Baudelaire:
In the flâneur, the intelligentsia sets foot in the marketplace – ostensibly to look around, but in truth to find a buyer. In this intermediate stage, in which it still has patrons but is already beginning to familiarize itself with the market, it appears as the bohème. To the uncertainty of its economic position corresponds the uncertainty of its political function. The latter is manifest most clearly in the professional conspirators, who all belong to the bohème. Their initial field of activity is the army; later it becomes the petty bourgeoisie, occasionally the proletariat. Nevertheless, this group views the true leaders of the proletariat as its adversary. The Communist Manifesto brings their political existence to an end (Benjamin 2002: 40).
It is strange that Benjamin could imagine a book (even one by Marx and Engels) having this kind of messianic effect, though the book title might be a metonymy for a social movement. Benjamin’s concepts are generally constructed with this kind of studied ambiguity. However, his reflections on his position in the intellectual field in the 1920s and 1930s are completely lucid.
Benjamin addressed his essays and reviews from 1925 to other writers and intellectuals. Even when writing in Die literarische Welt or the book review section of the Frankfurter Zeitung, he saw himself participating in what Bourdieu calls a restricted literary field: Benjamin is mainly writing for his peers. In 1930 Benjamin’s friend Siegfried Kracauer published a book called The Salaried Masses. It seems to be reportage about white-collar workers: the miseries of their work and their tastes for entertainment on the weekend. It might be a prescient sociological study about the middle-class fraction that tended to support the rise of fascism in Germany. Benjamin wrote a long essay about Kracauer’s book for Die Gesellschaft, a prominent socialist monthly in which he also published the essay ‘Theories of German Fascism’ on the right-wing Ernst Jünger, who has important political affinities with Martin Heidegger. Benjamin’s approach to Kracauer’s book is deeply puzzling. He does not start with Kracauer’s subject matter but instead turns his attention to Kracauer himself who he describes as a kind of malcontent. This book has little to do with reportage and the New Objectivity in Weimar culture. It is about Kracauer himself as a white-collar employee, a destructive character at that.12
Benjamin’s odd strategy makes sense when one realizes that his essay on Kracauer is a contribution to an on-going debate about Karl Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia, originally published in Germany in 1929. Mannheim is famous for his hypothesis about ‘free floating intellectuals’ who owe allegiance neither to capitalist ideology nor to working-class utopia, but to the autonomous field of intellectuals. Benjamin will have nothing to do with this. In a kind of critique of Kracauer, Benjamin ‘completes’ the work, or shows its origin, not in Mannheim’s ‘free floating intellectual’, but in the figure of intellectual as malcontent.13
In this essay on Kracauer, and elsewhere, Benjamin shows a high degree of reflexivity about his own position in the intellectual field. Benjamin was especially critical of the illusions of left-bourgeois writers:
This left-radical wing may posture as much as it likes – it will never succeed in eliminating the fact that the proletarianization of the intellectual hardly ever turns him into a proletarian. Why? Because from childhood on, the middle-class gave him a means of production in the form of an education – a privilege that establishes his solidarity with it, and perhaps even more, its solidarity with him. This solidarity may become blurred superficially, or even undermined, but it almost always remains powerful enough to exclude the intellectual from the constant state of alert, the sense of living your life at the front, which is characteristic of the true proletarian (Benjamin 1999a: 309).
Whatever we think of Benjamin’s messianic description of the proletariat living its life in a state of constant alert (it sounds unbearable), his recognition of his own class habitus and the function of cultural capital in a developed capitalist economy is exemplary. Bourdieu would say that if Benjamin intends to act as an intellectual in a restricted field, this kind of reflexivity about his own position is essential.14
Figure 2.1 Benjamin’s map of the late Weimar cultural field
Benjamin’s career as a book-reviewer, radio broadcaster and essayist slowed after 1933. As a leftist and a Jewish writer he was forbidden by National Socialist laws from publishing in Germany. Die literarische Welt came under the control of the authorities in September 1933, though Willy Haas attempted to continue it in exile as Die Welt im Wort, published from Prague.15 When Benjamin first appeared in the Frankfurter Zeitung, the German economy had mostly recovered from the war and inflation. The paper entered an economic crisis in 1927 that eventually led to the sale of 48 per cent of its stock to the chemical giant I.G. Farben. The newspaper gradually shifted to the right, eventually abandoning its traditional liberal bourgeois position. When Hitler won 107 seats in the Reichstag in 1930 there were many long articles trying to analyse the Nazi movement. Nonetheless the paper offered little resistance. This was in part because of its continued economic crisis and in part because of a gradual erosion of the liberal tradition in German politics. In the mid-1930s the paper was somewhat protected from Nazi interference by its international reputation and foreign readership. However by late 1938 the paper was secretly bought by a subsidy of the Nazi party (Eksteins 1975; Levin 1995).
This is the context for Benjamin’s famous ‘Work of Art’ essay and ‘The Author as Producer’. As a theory of media in Germany in 1936, Benjamin’s famous essay makes little sense. Kracauer recognized that by the late 1920s few films in Germany were critical but rather served to deny the growing sociopolitical crisis.16 Did Benjamin not go to the cinema? But if his essay makes little sense as a general theory of media, it tells us a great deal about Benjamin’s intellectual habitus. For example he borrows heavily from Riegl’s distinction between visual and tactile artistic volitions in the ‘Work of Art’ essay. It tells us even more about Benjamin’s despair at the ineffectual response of left-bourgeois writers to fascism. While they argued at meaningless conferences of writers, fascism in Italy and Germany made effective use of posters, radio and film (Ivornel 1986; Kambas 1986).
This is in effect what Benjamin wanted to say in an address at the Institute for the Study of Fascism in Paris, in 1934. His talk ‘The Author as Producer’ looks back to his journalism from Moscow in 1927. It builds on his essay on the habitus of Goethe in relation to the emergent capitalist class. The bourgeoisie has only been able to make limited use of Goethe: ‘His whole work abounds in reservations about them’ (Benjamin 1999a: 187). Benjamin’s talk is completely in accord with his essay on Surrealism in France: the problem is that Surrealism wishes to create new myths, whereas Benjamin always wishes to bring myth into history, to transform myth into use value for the revolution. Benjamin’s talk at the Institute was intended to address other writers, not to make a case for his own version of modernism (against Activism, Expressionism, Surrealism or the New Objectivity) but to call for a kind of radical reflexivity about forms of writing. There have not always been tragedy and the novel. Other forms of writing have existed and will come into existence. Benjamin gives as an example the activities of the Russian writer Sergei Tretiakov:
When in 1928 at the time of the total collectivization of agriculture, the slogan ‘Writers to the kolkhoz!’ was proclaimed, Tretiakov went to the ‘Communist Lighthouse’ commune and there, during two lengthy stays set about the following tasks: calling mass meetings; collecting funds to pay for tractors; persuading independent peasants to enter the kolkhoz [collective farm]; inspecting the reading rooms; creating wall newspapers and editing the kolkhoz newspaper; reporting for Moscow newspapers; introducing radio and mobile movie houses; and so on (Benjamin 1999a: 770).
Benjamin’s point is not that all writers should follow the political example of Tretiakov, but that the range of what writers produce must be radically expanded if fascism is to be defeated. For example, writers could compose captions that give magazine photographs revolutionary use value, but they could also themselves become photographers. Why not then add music? At this point Benjamin turns to a discussion of Brecht’s theatre. This is not left-bourgeois theatre, Benjamin argues, but an expansion of the form of drama to include film, radio, photography and especially techniques of montage from these forms. It has always been assumed that in the ‘Work of Art’ essay Benjamin juxtaposes against the tradition of oil painting, revolutionary films such as those by Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov. This may be in part his intention. But what if in his address to writers at the Institute for the Study of Fascism, he wants to send out a call for a kind of film that did not yet exist but would require the imaginative collaboration of writers and producers, in the struggle against fascism?17
Benjamin ends once again with reflections about his own class habitus and his position in the intellectual field. Unlike leftists including Brecht who argue that their economic insecurity as writers turn them into proletarians, and those such as Adorno who are completely unapologetic about their own bourgeois habitus, Benjamin always recognizes that his education and cultural capital gave him privileges that most working-class people do not enjoy. He quotes from Aragon that: ‘The revolutionary intellectual appears first and foremost as the betrayer of his class of origin’. This for Benjamin does not mean writing novels with ‘spiritual’ qualities about workers, or making beautiful books of photographs about poverty. It means becoming an engineer: ‘who sees it as his purpose to adapt this apparatus to the purposes of the proletarian revolution’ (Benjamin 1999a: 780).
The argument of this chapter is that ambiguities in Benjamin’s writings reflect the real contradictions between his class habitus and his political commitments. What I have called Benjamin’s intellectual habitus actually seems a kind of imaginary resolution of real contradictions in his life. Scholem believes that the talk at the Institute for the Study of Fascism in 1934 was actually never presented (Benjamin 1999a: 781, note 1), just as Hannes Meyer’s co-op room of 1926 never actually existed. And if it had been presented what would have been the response in this Communist front organization? I have argued that there is some affinity between Benjamin and the work of Pierre Bourdieu. Benjamin seems extraordinarily lucid about his class habitus and his work as a reviewer and essayist in several loosely organized fields. The limits and contradictions in Benjamin are not from a lack of insight on his part, but from social forces that are more powerful than any single person. Brecht put it this way in a poem about his friend:
Tactics of attrition are what you enjoyed
Sitting at the chess table in the pear tree’s shade.
An enemy who could drive you from your books
Will not be worn down by the likes of us.
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1 Zimmermann 1979 offers an interesting discussion of Benjamin’s response to Döblin’s novel Berlin Alexanderplatz, but says little about the novelist’s career and politics.
2 In a letter to Scholem in February 1927, Benjamin explains the difficulties his article on Goethe encountered: the editors of the Soviet Encyclopedia were torn between wanting a reference work written according to Marxist principles, and wanting to impress Europe with its scholarship.
3 This is the emphasis in The Philosophy of Kant, edited by Carl J. Friedrich for the Modern Library in 1949. Friedrich was a student of Natorp and Rickert in Germany.
4 All quotes are from Lotze, Microcosmus, originally published in 1864 and translated into English in 1888.
5 Among many commentators on this see Buck-Morss 1989: 216–52 and Wohlfarth 1986.
6 Among many commentators see Löwy 1991 and Rabinbach 1997.
7 See documents in Heidegger 1997: 180–217, and commentary by Cristaudo 1991 and Gordon 2004.
8 For an introduction to Lotze see Willey 1978: 40–57. Georg Simmel is sometimes considered a neo-Kantian, though Frisby 1986 argues that his emphasis on fragmentary, fleeting experience excludes him. Nonetheless there is a significant influence of Kant in the classical sociology of Durkheim in France and Max Weber in Germany, through the influence of Rickert. Simmel’s philosophical analysis of experience and his development or critique of concepts such as conflict, or the stranger seem compatible with – for example – Hermann Cohen’s neo-Kantianism which abandons the argument that space and time are universal components of experience. Benjamin attended lectures by Simmel and an influence has been noted by several commentators.
9 On Benjamin’s correspondence with the right-wing legal theorist Carl Schmitt see Bredekamp 1999.
10 On Spengler see Adorno 1967b; Bloch 1998; Gusejnova 2006 and Hughes 1951.
11 Brodersen describes Benjamin reading Ludwig Klages, The Spirit as the Adversary of the Soul in the summer of 1930 and regardless of Klages’s suspect politics, Benjamin found that the book was ‘without a doubt a great philosophical work’ (Brodersen 1996: 180). See also Wolin (n.d.) for a discussion of Klages and the Arcades Project.
12 Levin (1995: 27) argues that Benjamin’s approach is actually correct because Kracauer attributes a spiritual homelessness both to white-collar workers and intellectuals such as himself. His descriptions of shop girls’ reactions to films are in fact rehearsals of his own reactions.
13 On Mannheim see Adorno 1967a; Jay 1985; Loader 1997 and Witte 1991: 104–5.
14 The quoted passage from Benjamin is repeated on p. 418 with the ending changed to ‘which is characteristic of anyone who has been politicized by the proletarian class’. See also variations on pp. 753 and 780.
15 For quite negative comments on Haas see Benjamin and Scholem 1992: 23, 38, 83, 86, 100.
16 Kracauer 1995: 281–328, especially his essay ‘Film 1928’ and Levin 1995: 23–4.
17 On Sergei Tretiakov see Papazian 2009: 24–68, and the special issue of October edited by Fore 2006. Benjamin’s city portraits, including his essay on Moscow, could be considered examples of the new types of observational writing called for by Tretiakov in the early 1920s. However, Tretiakov considers the worst point of observation to be a tourist or a respected guest. Perhaps Benjamin’s ‘Paris Diary’ published in Die literarische Welt, April–June 1930 is a better example (Benjamin 1999: 337–54).