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Benjamin's Figures
eBook - Dialogues on the Vocation of the Humanities, libri nigri
ISBN/EAN: 9783959489218
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Erschienen am 29.06.2018
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- aus dem Klappentext:Just as Benedetto Croce cleared the way to the individual, concrete work of art by demolishing the doctrine of artistic form, so the purpose of my analyses so far has been to clear the way to the work of art by demolishing the doctrine which would assign art to a distinct domain. The common programmatic aim of these analyses has been to further the process of integration in scholarship, which increasingly transgresses the rigid disciplinary boundaries that characterized its practice in the last century. They do so through a study of the work of art which sees in it an integral expression of the religious, metaphysical, political, and economic tendencies of its age that will not in any sense be pigeonholed.Walter Benjamin
- Leseprobe
- prefaceMadeleine KastenThis volume finds its origin in a conference titled Benjamins Figures:Dialogues on the Vocation of the Humanities which took place at LeidenUniversity, Netherlands, in August 2013. In the meantime, the theme thatinspired the conference the more or less permanent crisis in thehumanities, reinforced by the economic crisis that hit the world in 2008 has in no way lost its urgency. The opposite is true: far from having endedwith the financial crisis, whose effects are still noticeable everywhere, theneed for the humanities to defend their existence appears only to haveincreased. Two examples, one from the US and one from the Netherlands,will suffice to illustrate this point.In March 2017, US President Donald Trump presented his first federalbudget plan, in which he proposed to end both the National Endowment forthe Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. It was the firsttime since the creation of the endowments in 1965 that a US presidentdemanded their termination, and although the House later voted for acontinuation of federal support at a slightly decreased level the proposalitself is a sign on the wall. A year before, Dutch conservative senator PieterDuisenberg had already gained wide support for his view that academicstudy programmes in the Netherlands offering no job guarantees (so-calledpretstudies literally fun studies, understood to include art, most of thehumanities, and a considerable part of the social sciences) should be axed.Meanwhile Duisenberg has been appointed chair of the Co-operating DutchUniversities (VSNU), where he took up his duties on October 1, 2017. Oneof his stated aims is to create more incentives for universities to market theirstudy programmes, and to link the allocation of budgets for tuition toperformance agreements based on quantitative indicators between thegovernment and internal stakeholders (students and university staff) as wellMadeleine Kastenxiias trade and industry. In addition, the allocation of research budgets is to beincreasingly geared towards social relevance.So the question remains: how can the humanities justify their existencein an academic environment facing ubiquitous cutbacks an environmentwhere, as Stanley Fish has argued, productivity, efficiency and consumersatisfaction appear to be the only relevant criteria anyway? Even if eloquentspokespersons such as Fish and Martha Nussbaum are perhaps overstatingthe case it appears that the humanities, more than ever, need to reconsidertheir specific role for our times. For on the one hand, the institutional callfor more efficiency is seen to conflict with the humanities insistence onacademic freedom and interdisciplinary research as essential to thedevelopment of a critical perspective on the operations of culture as a whole.On the other hand, the notions of freedom and interdisciplinarity mustthemselves be constantly rethought to prevent the legacy of the culturalturn from being reduced to an empty cliché.At Leiden University, we chose to address this need for reflection onthe vocation of the humanities by organizing an international conferencedevoted to the thought of philosopher of culture Walter Benjamin (1892-1940). In doing so, our aim was to consolidate an interdisciplinary initiativestarted in 2010, when we marked the recent fusion between our formerfaculties of arts, philosophy and religious studies with a conference on thehermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer.A conspicuous feature of Benjamins writing is its lack of any formalpretence to system building. In fact the bulk of his oeuvre is made up ofshort essays and notes on a wide range of seemingly disparate culturalphenomena, where philological commentary and criticism go hand in hand.The reason for this absence of closure and the frequent shifts in focus mustnot be sought in any incidental default. Instead, they reflect Benjaminsexperience of his own age as requiring a direct, polemical style and approachantithetical to incorporation into a fixed order.If fragmentariness imposes itself as a necessary formal characteristic ofBenjamins writing, his project is nevertheless held together by a singleunderlying ambition: to study cultural signs as the ideal expression of thereligious, metaphysical, political, and economic tendencies of a specifichistorical period. True to the semantic potential of Greek aisthesis, hepromotes aesthetics to the status of an all-encompassing, interdisciplinarytheory of experience. For the timeless idea, says Benjamin, is to be capturedonly in the process of its historical becoming that is, at its origin, thePrefacexiiivanishing point where it enters, and dissolves into, the material as the forcedetermining its necessary form in history. The apprehension of this originthus depends on a dual intuition where the singular reveals itself as part of astructure, a constellation that transcends the realm of the material yetremains faithful to each of its particulars: ideas stand to objects asconstellations stand to stars (GS I.1, 214).In his analyses of cultural phenomena and the constellations to whichthey belong Benjamin shows himself unusually aware of the role of thephilosopher/critic. Characteristically, this agent takes on different shapesaccording to varying contexts: the angel of history, the narrator, the flâneur,the child, the dwarf, the collector to name just some central personas.Indeed Benjamins use of multiple, at times carefully orchestrated voices inhis texts radicalizes the notion of interdisciplinarity in ways which, we feel,provides a vital source of inspiration for the humanities in our times.For our conference, then, we solicited papers reflecting on the sociocriticalpotential of the humanities through one or more of theseBenjaminian figures, and our call was rewarded by a rich response. For threedays we experienced the peculiar energy generated by non-stop discussion,the atmosphere being enhanced by the material presence of visual artinspired by Benjamin, a musical performance, and the conference-related artfestival Cultuur?Barbaar! organized by our indefatigable former studentsLooi van Kessel and Gerlov van Engelenhoven.The essays contained in the present volume reflect this energy. Twelveof them are written in English, four in German. As the conference itself wasbilingual and this bilingualism was experienced by many attendants as ablessing, especially in view of the long-standing divide between German andAnglo-American Benjamin studies, we have decided to publish the essays intheir original languages.The first section, Dialectics at a Standstill: Benjamins Denkbilder, openswith Gustan Asselbergss attempt to assess the philosophical nature of theaphorisms or Denkbilder, sixty in all, which Benjamin collected in hisvolume One-way Street. The author begins by justifying the use of the termDenkbilder itself and develops his analysis in three steps. In the first part ofhis argument he focuses on Benjamins notion of the idea set forth in theEpistemo-Critical Prologue to his Origin of German Tragic Drama. Theidea cannot be rationally grasped; it can only reveal itself hence theproblem of representation or Darstellung. The prose form of the thoughtMadeleine Kastenxivimage, a kontemplative Darstellung which forces the reader to pause, wasdesigned to meet this difficulty. However, One-way Street is not just aboutthe idea of an ordinary street. In his thought-images, of which Asselbergsdiscusses examples in his Part II, Benjamin confronts the shock experienceof modern city life, opening up an image-space which at the same timeoffers a free playground for the spectator. Asselbergs examines the textualproperties responsible for this effect and concludes: By this means a spaceis opened that distinguishes itself from the mercantile gaze of shock-reality,in favor of the interplay between distance and nearness; a dimension thatgoes beyond the experience of shock. In the third and last part he analyzesthe critical function of the thought-image through the figure of the flâneur.Wolfram Malte Fues, in his contribution, draws attention to some wellknownobservations from the Arcades Project, for instance, In demGebieten, mit denen wir es zu tun haben, gibt es Erkenntnis nur blitzhaft. DerText ist der langnachrollende Donner; Bild ist Dialektik im Stillstand; DasEwige ist eher eine Rüsche am Kleid als eine Idee. These statements areuttered by an author-subject. But what kind of a subject is speaking here,and what is the status of the comments themselves? They are apodicticjudgements claiming that something is necessarily the case withoutdetermining this something further. Determination should result from theimages themselves; here, however, metaphor assumes the nature ofcatachresis, a word meant to fill a semantic gap, and images such as Blitz,Donner, Rusche am Kleid, turn out to stand for something that is hardlyclarified through examination. The author finds an answer to the questionconcerning the nature of the author-subject in the following passage fromBenjamin: An einem Sommernachmittag ruhend einem Gebirgszug amHorizont oder einem Zweig folgen, der seinen Schatten auf den Ruhenden wirft das heit die Aura dieser Berge, dieser Zweige atmen. In Fuess analysis ofthe text a complex play of closeness and distance unfolds itself which leadshim to conclude that Das Autor-Subjekt des Passagen-Werks is dasjenige, dasan einem Sommertag die Konfiguration des Auratischen ruhend auf sich werkenlät, um die in ihm aufgehobenen Konstellationen atmend freizusetzen. In hisconclusion he locates this attitude, this fixed stare of quiet attentivenesswhich enables manifold reflection, in Benjamins Denkbild The Tree andSpeech, anchoring it retrospectively in the essay On Language as Such andon the Language of Man.The first paper in the second section, Liminal Figures: Child andFlâneur, is by Corina Stan and contains an analysis of the Denkbilder inPrefacexvBenjamins Berlin Childhood Around 1900. Stan begins by characterizing thiswork as the subjective counterpart to Benjamins Arcades project. Bothtexts represent an in-between space or liminal zone, while the title of thefirst suggests the image of the child playing at the threshold betweencenturies. Berlin Childhood can be dramatically characterized as a farewellbid to a Berlin where all places were like so many dwellings, at a momentwhen the exiled writer had no proper abode. Stan explains the nature of theDenkbilder in the book by means of a fragment from the Passagen-Werkwhere Benjamin draws a distinction between his dialectic images andphenomenological essences. According to Stan, Benjamins aim in thesetexts was to create a careful balance between two different notions, that ofthe allegorical, which imposes meaning on what is lost, and that of the aura,where meaning or significance comes from the person or object itself. Sohow [one may ask] is it possible for the Berlin texts to occupy a thresholdposition between two opposite perceptions, one that emphasizes utopianwholeness, the other that has precariousness at its core? Stan relates thisliminal zone temporally to Benjamins notions of waking up and the Jetztder Erkennbarheit, and spatially to the phenomenon of proxemics, a termcoined by cultural anthropologist Edward Hall, here used to denote theaffective realm of desire in which the child interacts with the objectssurrounding it. Stan concludes with a reflection on the possible significanceof Benjamins liminal balancing act for the humanities, drawing on oneparticular example of Benjamins proxemics: little Walters habit of alwayslagging half a step behind his mother, as this would give him the idea ofbeing smarter than he really was ...Nassima Sahraoui, in her contribution, undertakes to show how a greatnumber of Benjamins motifs are comprised in his comprehensive analysis ofone prominent figure in his oeuvre: the flâneur. Her starting point is theMaxim of the flâneur, which Benjamin explains through the followingobservation by Daniel Halévy: In our standardized and uniform world, it isright here, deep below the surface [en profondeur], that we must walk.Estrangement [dépaysement] and surprise, the most thrilling exotism, are allclose by. What follows is an analysis of the cityscape that Paris is to theflâneur, which Sahraoui develops first through Benjamins writings on themedium of the panorama, then through his reading of the experience ofmodern space as a colportage phenomenon where everything is perceivedsimultaneously. The flâneur finds himself on the threshold between twospatial contexts: on the one hand he posits himself in a necessary and almostMadeleine Kastenxviexistential relation to the marketplace, while on the other handinstantaneously abstaining from social reality. Finally, Sahraoui relates thisdoubleness to Benjamins critique of what he called the dialectic ofintoxication.Sami R. Khatibs paper makes up the third section, Unsightly Figures.In his introduction, Khatib claims that the figures in Benjamins work arenot the mere derivative illustrations of concepts, but rather the figurativemedium of the elliptical constellations of his thought. The author focuseson three of these figures, whose instability, as figures of figuration and defiguration,he reads in accordance with Benjamins understanding of thedialectic image: as disruptive figures whose force at first seems to be purelydestructive, but whose true function is to clear a space for what is yet tocome. In reality, the barbarian, the destructive character, and the monster(Karl Krauss Un-Mensch) are the figurative harbingers of a new posthumanistreal humanism.Section Four, Angels and Historians, opens with Rico Snellers essay,whose aim is to elucidate Benjamins angel figure through the tradition ofJewish mysticism. The figure of the angel plays an important part both inBenjamins work and his life. Most famous among its manifestations isprobably the angel of history in On the Concept of History; this angel, whichconstitutes a direct reference to the biblical angel protecting paradise againstmans return to it, may be read as an expression of metaphysical despair vis àvis the catastrophes of historical progress. But there are many more angelsto be found in Benjamins work, for instance in his autobiographical textAgesilaus Santander, and also in his essays on Karl Kraus and Baudelaire.Well known are his admiration of Paul Klees angel paintings, his purchase ofone of them, and his failed initiative to start a journal titled Angelus Novus.Benjamins friend Gershom Scholem recalls the frequent conversations hehad with Benjamin on the subject of angels, both in literature and in theJewish tradition. Sneller approaches Benjamins angel figure from theperspective of kabbalistic angelology. Rather than proving that Benjamin wasactually influenced by this tradition his purpose is to look for convergencesthat may shed a new light on the role of the angel figure in Benjaminsoeuvre.Anna F. Köberichs paper centres on two questions: How is one tounderstand the Jetztzeit? And what does this notion mean for us today? Inher explanation of Benjamins understanding of history as developed in Onthe Concept of History, the author zooms in on two figures: the historicalPrefacexviimaterialist, and the angel from the ninth thesis. Essential to the formersrelationship to the past is the moment of standstill or Stillstellung. It isprecisely this moment that is inhabited by the angel as it takes anempathetic stance towards the oppressed of the past. Köberich continueswith an analysis of David Mitchells novel Cloud Atlas, drawing attention tothe ingenious way in which time is fragmented here through Benjaminsconceptions of time, history, and Stillstellung. Her conclusion: The pasttriggers an impulse for agency (to act in the now) and the future is notperceived as a goal or endpoint, but as an ongoing possibility in the present.Scholars are no more able to bring the dead back to life than the angel; yetthe work of the humanities can, in a caring attitude, look backwards andensure that the stories of the past are being read and told every time anewagainst the grain of conformity and progress at all costs.In Stefano Marchesonis essay, the figure of the historian or thehistorical materialist as discussed in Benjamins On the Conception of Historyonce more takes centre stage. Characteristically, Benjamin cares less aboutthe identity of this historian than about his approach, which distinguishesitself first and foremost by its being grounded in a peculiar and multi-facetedexperience. This experience, in turn, can be related to the idea ofremembrance (Eingedenken) which Benjamin briefly outlines in the last partof his text. For Marchesoni, far from being an unambiguous concept,remembrance is a complex figure of thought in which multiple insights anddrafts converge, and which he undertakes to elaborate in the first part of hisessay. In the second part, this analysis then enables him to address theurgent question regarding the value of Benjamins thought-figure for thehumanities today. The author argues that Michel Foucaults archaeology ofthe humanities in The Order of Things has an important, hitherto underratedcontribution to offer towards the epistemological clarification of Benjaminsmethod that is of special relevance for the Arcades Project.Section Five, Allegory and the Politics of Representation, opens witha paper by Bennett Carpenter in which he raises the question how one canoffer political resistance to capitalism today. For his answer, the authorfocuses on Benjamins concept of homogeneous, empty time (On theConcept of History). Drawing on recent studies by others, he traces thehistorical relationship between this concept of time and the rise ofmanufactural and industrial labour. To his four aspects of the workersestrangement (i.e., from his product, from himself, from the essence of hisbeing-human, and finally from his fellow humans), young Marx could haveMadeleine Kastenxviiiadded a fifth: estrangement from time. What time of politics do we need tofight this particular form of estrangement? According to Carpenter, theformat of the political party remains necessary. Here, Novaliss andBenjamins understanding of allegory as the representation of theunrepresentable through the very failure of representation presents itselfas a useful analogy for the party to avoid the pitfalls of the past. For such areconceptualization shifts the party from symbol to allegory, from the vesselof truth to its conduit, opening up the problem of political organization asan autopoietic act of continual self-invention.Madeleine Kastens contribution is likewise devoted to thecontemporary significance of Benjamins critique of allegory for thehumanities, as an antidote against the progressive commodification ofknowledge but also against certain debilitating effects of postmodernismwithin the humanities themselves. In her introduction, the author contraststhe negative moral of Monty Pythons comedy film The Meaning of Life, i.e.,that the meaning of life resists objectification, to the current pressure onuniversities to convert knowledge, their stock-in-trade, into quantifiablebusiness targets. This is followed by a discussion first of Benjaminsdistinction between knowledge and truth as elaborated in the Epistemo-Critical Prologue to his Origin of German Tragic Drama, then of hishistorical-philosophical positioning of the German baroque Trauerspiel, andfinally of his reflexion on allegory and the figure of the allegorist. Onelesson scholars may learn from the latter is that notwithstanding thedemands of the market it is crucial always to maintain a critical reservetowards ones object of study. At the same time the allegorists belief thatthere is meaning, however elusive, also serves as a call never to betray oneshopes for a better world by promoting difference to the status of either agiven, or an end in itself.The last paper in this section is by Daniel Mourenza, whose aim is toshow that Benjamin perceived in contemporary cultural figures such asKafka, Brecht and Chaplin an allegorical intention to express thefragmentation of modern human beings through different media such asliterature, theatre and film. The author demonstrates the influence ofCharlie Chaplin on Brecht and his epic theatre as well as on Benjaminsreading of Kafka. He shows how, for Benjamin, the medium of cinema isconnected to his understanding of the allegorical. For it can be argued thatfilm, by exploding reality with the dynamite of its fractions of a second andturning it into ruins, can to some extent decipher its meaning, bestowPrefacexixmeaning on a reality which was hitherto incomprehensible. What unitesChaplin, Kafka and Brecht is their common interest in Gestus, defined byBrechts assistant director Carl Weber as the total process, the ensembleof all physical behavior the actor displays when showing as a character onstage by way of his/her social interactions. Benjamin analyzes the conceptof Gestus further, characterizing it as dialectics at a standstill. With regard toChaplin he notes that each single movement he makes is composed of asuccession of staccato bits of movement. And: Zerstücklung bei Chaplin.Er legt sich selbst allegorisch aus. Invoking Chaplins film Modern Times,which Benjamin probably never saw, Mourenza concludes that these jerkymovements [made by Chaplin] can be defined as the Gestus of a workermaking readable his bodily and mental alienation in a factory.In the sixth section, The Narrator and the Politics of Senses, TonGroeneweg draws attention to an extraordinary example of the inspirationalforce of Benjamins work: cultural anthropologist Charles Hirschkindsappeal, in his study The Ethical Soundscape, to Benjamins essay TheNarrator. In the course of his research into the ways in which the MuslimBrotherhood in Egypt spread its religious message, especially throughsermons recorded on tapes which could be listened to at work or on theroad, Hirschkind was struck by the sensory and physical nature of this modeof reception. Groeneweg begins by relating this case to Benjamins insightsin The Narrator, after which he retraces his steps and elaborates hisargument with the help of Benjamins essays on language. In particular, hefocuses on On the Mimetic Faculty and Benjamins claim that it is notthrough the cognitive act of interpretation that man relates to the nonsensuoussimilarities, it is by becoming similar. In his conclusion,Groeneweg highlights the affinity between Benjamins conception oflanguage and the religious practice studied by Hirschkind: in both cases,justice is done to the embodied dimension of language or, in Hirschkindswords, a politics of the senses.The first contribution in Section Seven, Translation betweenForeignness and Kinship, is by Orr Scharf, who condemns the approachunderlying Googles translation tool as testifying to a perfunctoryconception of language. Scharf confronts this approach with the redemptivenotion of translation in Benjamins The Task of the Translator. In doingso, he purposely concentrates on the often neglected figure of the translator that is, on Benjamins own translations. Although Benjamin himselfpersistently downplayed his individual role as a translator, Scharf does notMadeleine Kastenxxconsider this modesty justified or desirable. After all, Benjamins selection ofthe works he chose to translate was none but his own. The author elaboratesthe significance of this selection through a comparison between Benjamin astranslator of Baudelaire and Proust, and Franz Rosenzweig as translator ofJudah Halevi and (in cooperation with Martin Buber) the biblical Book ofGenesis. In his discussion of Benjamins translation essay Scharf aptlysummarizes its paradoxical essence as follows: Throughout the essay,Benjamin stresses that translation demonstrates the kinship of languages andtheir shared origin from the reine Sprache, while nevertheless warningtranslators that they should not strive to produce texts that are faithful tothe original.Where the focus in Scharfs paper lies on Benjamins own translations,Gisela Brinker-Gablers essay charts the relevance of Benjamins Task ofthe Translator for postcolonial studies. More specifically, the author arguesthat Benjamins translator/critic offers a complex and flexible site forscholars in language and literature to reflect on postcolonialism, culturaldifference, heterogenization, and social change. Thus she notes how HomiBhabha enlists Benjamins translation theory as a means of thinkingcreatively through the concept of nation and cultural difference. Otherexamples of scholars who have taken inspiration from Benjamins translationessay include Tejasvini Niranjana and Joshua Price. The latter, writing abouthybrid languages, elaborates on Benjamins conception of all languages asfragments of the reine Sprache to develop a new understanding ofmultilinguality. Here, the notion of the individual language as a necessarilyincomplete fragment works to undermine the colonizing tendency to createdichotomies between self and other, and to affirm difference instead.In Section Eight, The Task of the Critic, Anna Wokowicz analyzesthe redeeming paradoxes which together determine the mission ofBenjamins critic. For Benjamin, works of art including poems, composedas they are in imperfect human language belong inevitably to the realm offallen creation. The critics task is to recognize and represent the worksideal content; a task that not only requires its mortification, but that alsocompels him to sacrifice the false now of its historical emergence byassigning it to the ideal origin that shaped it. In arguing this point,Wokowicz traces the metaphor of sacrifice through Benjamins oeuvre,interweaving his critical review of Max Kommerells contemplativecriticism (Schau) with, among other texts, the Epistemo-Critical Prologueto The Origin of German Tragic Drama.