Evgeny PavlovWALTER BENJAMIN IN CONTEXT: DECIPHERING THE INTERRELATIONS OF MNEMOCENTRIC NARRATIVES IN MODERNIST LITERATURE.
The present study is an exploration of the mnemonic sublime in Western Modernism. My choice of subject owes in part to memory’s centrality in the specter of modernists’ concerns. What makes these writers’ attention to memory distinct from that of their predecessors is an emphatic change of focus from what is being remembered to the actual weaving and unweaving of mnemonic presentation, the materialityof the very work of remembrance, with all its breaks and gaps—at once the work of articulation and dismemberment.1 The sublime manifests itself all the more powerfully in these writings because traditionally, mnemonic representation relied on the possibility of re-creating past experience from the position of self-identity, self-presence and living authority.2 Meanwhile, a mnemonic art form that “suspends itself in the name of its truth content” must by the same virtue exclude itself from complete and seamless integration into the order of life. Modernist work of remembrance stages the suspension of life-writing, and in it, of remembered experience, by a strategy of negative presentation that rejects the pretension of immediacy, linearity and closure. Autobiographies emerging through this work fashion themselves in terms of a radical difference from the continuous narrative of the writer’s life, and memory figures in these texts not as a tool which projects the past into the present and assures life’s uninterrupted continuity, but rather as the material scene in which what it recovers takes place. While the question of modernist mnemonics thus defined has long been a staple of theoretical discussions, no extensive attempt has ever been made to relate what Walter Benjamin terms in the Passagen-Werk “the Copernican turn of remembrance [Eingedenken]” (B V:1, 490)3 to the pivotal point in the self-proclaimed Copernican revolution of Kantian philosophy. While Kant initiated his fundamental turn in philosophy by abolishing the assumption that “the intuition must conform to the nature of the objects” (CPR 15), Benjamin’s ground-breaking proposition was to do away with the kind of remembrance that takes the past as the fixed point and sees the present “as attempting to lead knowledge gropingly to this fixed ground” (ibid.). Instead, Benjamin developed a theory of remembrance based on a “dialectical reversal” of this relation: “the past should become the sudden thought of an awakened consciousness,” a consciousness awakened to a discontinuity, a caesura of the present infused with the past. This awakening has the structure of a violent bursting (Zerspringen) described in the Passagen-Werk as “nothing other than the death of intentio, which accordingly coincides with the birth of authentic historical time, the time of truth” (B V:578). The Copernican turn of remembrance thus defined has its roots in the Kantian sublime, and, as this project suggests, is best approached from the firm ground of Kant’s Critiques. I wish to argue that not only does such an approach appear warranted as an attractive strategy of reading modernist mnemonic explorations, but it may also open up a space in which these texts could be seen as supplementing our theoretical understanding of the unpresentable. Namely, what lies at the bottom of modernist preoccupations with memory is the unpresentability of non-figurable pure time which the strategy of fragmentary recollection shows to be something other than a continuous, experience-unifying flow. Mnemonic sublime, as it enters the site of the autobiography in modernism, reveals the violence by which the imagination maintains the synthesis of successive unfolding. This violence is exposed by memory’s shocks when, confronted with the impossibility of representing the past as it was experienced, the imagination turns upon itself and its own presentation. My project thus attempts to locate the idea of the ‘sublime’ in the theory and practice of modernist remembrance. 1. Copernican TurnThe following pages will investigate the unpresentable in the writings of Walter Benjamin. I will take up Benjamin’s thought asa paradigmatic example of modernism's debt to the Kantian delineation of the limits of representation. What the Weimar writer, philosopher and critic brings to the general understanding of the crisis of modernity is an exceptionally rich articulation of the relation between writing, critical practice and historical experience. That he famously sought to render all experience—and, above all, historical—as philosophical, as the experience of truth puts him in a unique position among the literary and intellectual figures of his day. A celebrated fragment from the “N” convolute of the Passagen-Werk is one of Benjamin’s most representative formulation of historical remembrance that informs the concept and strategy of his own mnemonic texts and has everything to do with the return of the sublime.
The distinction made here between, on the one hand, past [Vergangene] and present [Gegenwartige] and, on the other, what was [Gewesene] and what is now [Jetzt] is decisive. The first binary refers to simple temporal continuity, the passage of time, a causal connection between moments in history. According to the famous dictum of Uber den Begriff der Geschichte (B I:704), it is something with which traditional historicism contents itself. The notion of the past flowing swiftly into the present is thus to be discarded as positivist and illusory in order to make way for a new, radical conception of historical unfolding. What the punctum of Jetzt describes is a momentary temporal stasis; its connection to the Gewesene is a fleeting image brought to a standstill. Benjamin’s fashioning of the anterior in terms of the image made visible at the now-time of recognition signifies a disjunction, a shock akin to a lightning flash. This shock is what allows the historical to become legible as if it were a text. The shock infuses the now with what was; it delimits, immobilizes the frame of immediate experience and thereby dissociates the present from itself. The imprinted image, then, is momentarily brought to legibility by that which can never be read: the seal of “the critical, dangerous” power. This power is precisely what distances the now from itself. The danger described here is that of the broken continuum, of formlessness and chaos. What poses a supreme danger is the momentary failure of the imagination’s synthesis on which, according to Kant’s first Critique, the connection of the manifold and thus the very possibility of experience rest.4 If the synthesis came undone completely, the subject of experience would at the very least be reduced to the Dostoevskian amnesiac Prince Myshkin drowned in the abyss of self-knowledge at the end of the Idiot. Therefore, a trace of form remains, and for that very reason, Benjamin’s image does not bear discernible inscriptions of truth. In the fragment immediately following the above-cited, the critic concludes: “Entschiedne Abkehr vom Begriffe der “zeitlosen Wahrheit” ist am Platz. Doch Wahrheit ist nicht... nur eine zeitliche Funktion des Erkennens sondern an einem Zeitkern, welcher im Erkannten und Erkennenden zugleich steckt, gebunden” (B V:578). The shattering moment of recognition does not deliver access to any kind of “timeless truth,” much less can it be defined in Marxist terms, as a “temporal function of knowledge” (ibid.). Planted in both the one who recognizes and that which is recognized, time-kernel (whose other names in Benjamin are Jetztzeit and caesura) is the omission in which time is momentarily immobilized in order to bring forth the dialectical image—a monad, a “sign of a Messianic cessation of happening” (Uber den Begriff der Geschichte; B I:705). Benjamin’s strategy of personal remembrance is fashioned according to the above model of finite Messianism. This procedure has nothing to do with deliberate memoiristic recreation of lived experience that strives to conjure up a continuous flow of past life or a perpetual succession: “He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging. This confers the tone and bearing of genuine reminiscences” (B VI:486; R 26). The matter is only a deposit in which a treasure lies hidden: “the images, severed from all earlier associations, that stand—like precious fragments or torsos in a collector's gallery—in the sober [nchterne] rooms of our later understanding [Einsicht]” (ibid.). The essentially fragmentary strategy of such recollection leads up to a philosophically motivated reconstitution of the exhumed pieces of the past, and something other than life is fashioned in the process. On these grounds Berliner Chronik, one of Benjamin's autobiographical texts that also presents a theory of autobiography, distances itself from its genre:
The word Eingedenken which is here tied to Augenblick is a neologism also used in “Zum Bilde Prousts” to render into German the notion of memoir involontaire (das ungewollte Eingedenken). It combines the verb gedenken, “to think of something in a memorial sense” with eingendenk, a predicative adjective conveying a sense of “bearing in mind.” 5This indicates that purposive mnemonic excavation of dead matter proceeds with an obscure awareness of the moments that confer on memories, particularly those of childhood, “a quality that makes them at once evanescent and as alluringly tormenting as half-forgotten dreams” (R 28). Yet the phenomenal “precious torsos” that the mnemonist unearths and puts up in the gallery of his sober contemplation only represent the absence of what could never be immediately present. At the same time, by virtue of being mnemonically severed from the organic unity of experience, these moments acquire a powerful signifying potential. Thus “language shows [bedeutet] clearly that memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theater [Schauplatz]” (B VI:486; R 25f.). On its stage, significant and signifying fragments “rhapsodically” excavated and thereby torn out from the opaque yet compelling wholeness and immediacy of previous sensory associations form allegorical constellations with the eye of the present moment. They show themselves as finite and mutilated yet readable and infinitely configurable vestiges of irretrievable and therefore incomplete experience. When a sudden flash “from an alien source” (R 56) transfixes, as in a snapshot, an image on the plate of remembrance, subjectivity surrenders its intention, and by the same token its mythical authority, to the violent power of the sublime:
What is sacrificed in the moment of mnemonic shock is the very self of the remembering subject; what is gained is “an indelible image” in memory. Benjamin’s Copernican turn leads him to the fundamental admission that it is only by sacrificing the temporal continuity of the subject that the “deeper self” can be glimpsed. 2.Program of Coming PhilosophyOddly enough, Benjamin’s debt to the third Critique has not been properly acknowledged in the rich, fast-growing industry of Benjamin criticism. The thinker’s early engagements with the Kantian concept of experience are well documented, but most scholars rarely take Kant beyond Benjamin’s “neo-Kantian period” of 1917-1920 during which he was mostly concerned with the first Critique and its overly restrictive delimitation of experience. Two years later, however, it is the Critique of Judgment that makes its decisive appearance in the crucial passages on the beautiful and the sublime in the Goethe essay. These engagements were certainly far from a fleeting interest. Kant’s critical thought is present everywhere in Benjamin, and most expressly in the works on memory and history. The explicit recognition of this debt in naming his own highest achievement “the Copernican turn in viewing history” (B V:490) is hardly a mere rhetorical gesture. It suggests approaching this work with Kant in mind, and we have all the more reason to do so if we recall what Benjamin wrote in a letter to Scholem as early as in 1917:
Benjamin found enough for his purposes—in both what Kant did and did not say. Operative in Benjamin’s work on remembrance we find the Analytic of the Sublime at its most incisive, if discreetly silent moments. These are the moments where the sublime emerges as the imagination’s recognition of its own violence imposed upon time, the harmonizing and reconciliatory effects through which the ineluctable illusion of continuous historical unfolding is sustained. Benjamin’s writings systematically confront that which is not localizable in time and hence sends spasms to our concept of history and interpretation. To cite Lyotard’s succinct description of the temporality of the sublime, “When the sublime is ‘there’ (where?), the mind is not there. As long as the mind is there, there is no sublime. This is a feeling that is incompatible with time, as is death” (Heidegger and “the jews” 32). Approaching history—personal history and the history of human civilization—with this understanding, Benjamin the demystifier of recuperative temporality articulates the Kantian silence in terms whose eloquence has not been surpassed. Perhaps, this goes without saying, but it is for this very reason that looking for the Kantian in Benjamin, as I am about to try, is much more than performing the tedious—if sometimes necessary—task of tracing intellectual genealogies. Indeed, the Kantian in Benjamin is by the same token the Benjaminian in Kant insofar as “es ist dem philosophischen Schriftum eigen, mit jeder Wendung von neum vor der Frage der Darstellung zu stehen”(Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, B I:207). And yet, for the sake of convenience, I will begin with a genealogical gesture, while following Benjamin’s Darstellung as it unfolds in his texts. My path will start with a close look at Benjamin’s early essays in which the Kantian origins of his future method are most pronounced. I will then attempt to establish a link between what Benjamin saw as a gaping omission in Kant’s critical enterprise, namely the philosopher’s failure to do justice to historical experience, and the temporality of the sublime in the third Critique as it is treated in the essay on Goethe’s Wahlverwandschaften. This will take us to the place of the sublime in “Uber einige Motive bei Baudelaire,” Benjamin’s best-known, and conceptually most elaborate study of memory and experience. This chapter will conclude with a reading of Benjamin’s short, yet unexamined novella “Auf die Minute” which brings together the entire tangle of theoretical issues I will be concerned with here, while also opening up the inextricable political dimension of these issues. In his Walter Benjamin: die Geschichte einer Freundschaft,Gerschom Scholemoffers perhaps the most eloquent definition of the direction in which his friend proposed expanding Kant’s critical project. In the spring of 1918 while Benjamin was in Bern working on his first dissertation, “Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik,”he and Scholem spent much time analyzing and discussing Hermann Cohen’s fundamental treatise Kants Theorie der Erfahrung. By Scholem’s account, Benjamin was disappointed with the sage of Marburg’s rationalistic positivism. He sought to overcome Cohen’s mechanistic bias by proposing a system in which the subject nature of the cognizing consciousness would be eliminated, and all experience would be related to the absolute of pure transcendental consciousness. The scope of the concept of experience was thus to be enormously broadened as it was to encompass realms “not penetrated by cognition.” “Als ich die Rede darauf brachte,” recalls Scholem, “da? demnach die mantischen Disziplinen in diesen Begriff von Erfahrung legitim einzubeziehen seien, antwortete er in einer extremen Formulierung: ‘Eine Philosophie, die nicht die Moglichkeit der Weissagung aus dem Kaffeesazt einbezieht und explizieren kann, kann keine wahre sein’.” (Walter Benjamin 77). The esoterical sense of Benjamin’s writings, if understood as a philosophical system has long been the focus of critical industry. As Rodolphe Gasche, among many others, has observed, these writings lack “almost everything usually associated with the philosophical enterprise: a homogenous conceptuality, canonized rules of argumentation, and reference to the traditional set of problems” (“Saturnine Vision...” 69). And yet the stakes of Benjamin’s engagement with systematic philosophy—first and foremost, Kant’s anatomy of experience—are decisive. Although the idiosyncratic plane of reference (such as soothsaying on coffee grounds) established in his essays hardly authorizes an unobstructed view of his work’s philosophical system, it is essential that we recognize the Kantian momentum of the system that readily embraces astrology and fortune telling. This momentum is at its most apparent in the critic’s early engagements with Kant, most importantly in “Uber das Programm der kommenden Philosophie”. The central preoccupation of these engagements may be summarized as an attempt to liberate “immediate and natural concept of experience” (Erfahrung) (“Uber die Wahrnehmung” SW I:95, B VI:36) îò “concept of experience in the context of knowledge” (Erkenntnis) (ibid.) to which it was confined in the Konigsberg philosopher’s critical architectonic.6 The reasons for such a conflation, argues Benjamin, are historical in nature: one must take into account the temporal limitations of the concept of experience available to Kant “as a man who somehow shared the horizon of his times:” “it was an experience of the world of the lowest order,” the kind “virtually reduced to nadir, to a mere minimum of significance” (SW I:101, B II:158). What counts for Kant is the concept of scientific experience that is rigorously and painstakingly deployed in the first Critique under the supreme objective of “putting a stop to empty flights of fancy” of the pre-critical age (SW I:94, B VI:36). As mentioned before, the preface to the second edition of Critique of Pure Reason postulates that “Erfahrung selbst [ist] eine Erkenntnisart, die Verstand erfordert” (KRV 26). Yet, according to Benjamin, it was the hollowness of experience historically possible in Kant’s day that led the philosopher to deny the possibility of any kind of metaphysics of experience and therefore limit the latter to the sphere of epistemology. Meanwhile, as put in the fragment “Uber die Wahrnehmung,” “die Erfahrung selbst kommt, so paradox dies klingt, in der Erkenntnis der Erfahrung gar nicht vor, eben weil diese Erkenntinis der Erfahrung, mithin ein Erkenntniszusammenhang ist. Die Erfahrung aber ist das Symbol dieses Erkenntniszusammenhanges und steht mithin in einer vollig andern Ordnung als dieser selbst.” (B VI:36). In the idiosyncratic terms of Benjamin’s essay on Goethe’s Elective Affinities to which we shall return, Kant’s experiential deficiency is poignantly described by “ how clearly the most sublime spirits of the Enlightenment had a premonition of the content [Gehalt] or an insight into the matter [Sache], yet how incapable even they were of raising themselves to the perception [Anschauung] of its real [material] content [Sachgehalt]” (SW I:299, B I:127). “Uber die Wahrnehmung” addresses this same confounded distinction in more conventional philosophical vocabulary as it poses its final question: “in der Tat [ist] die “Erfahrung” die wir in der Erfahrung erfahren dieselbe, identische..., die wir in der Erkenntnis der Erfahrung erkennen. “ (B VI:37). The “Program of the Coming Philosophy” answers this question by unequivocally asserting that “Erfahrung ist die einheitliche und kontinuierliche Mannigfaltigkeit der Erkenntnis” (B II:168).In its totality, Erfahrung directly [unmittelbar] relates to “Absolute, as existence” (B II:196), the latter being prior unity as the condition of possibility of mediated cognition. “Uber die Wahrnehmung” cites an example of such a relationship: we are invited to think experience as a symbol of the context of knowledge (Benjamin, however, is quick to add that his choice of the term may be unfortunate: the privileging of allegory over symbol is quite apparent even in these early writings and will be made explicit in the Goethe essay and, of course, the Trauerspiel book). A painter is said to copy a landscape in front of which he sits while the landscape itself certainly does not appear in the painting. The landscape to the painting is then what Erfahrung is to Erkenntnis—symbol of the latter’s Zusammenhang. Two major correctives to Kant are at work here. First, the Kantian notion of the manifold (given in the a priori forms of intuition—space and time) is drastically reconceptualized in such a way as to include that “which reason thinks,” but which, according to the first Critique, cannot be given in spatio-temporal experience. Thus the fundamental critical rejection of any continuity between intuition/understanding and the ideas of reason is questioned with the introduction of Erfahrung—in order to show that the totality expressed by the ideas of reason appears in intuition and concepts of understanding (the distinction between which already the Neo-Kantians sought to abolish7), and, consequently, that spatio-temporal experience contains elements of both universally valid categories of understanding and of totality that reason is able only to think in its ideas. It is in this sense that the metaphysics of Erfahrung would avow to subsume under the latter notion all those realms not penetrated by philosophical cognition, including religion, as well as “die mantischen Disziplinen” with which Scholem was so fascinated. “This experience, then,” explains Benjamin’s “Program,” “also includes religion, as the true experience, in which neither god nor man is object or subject of experience but in which this experience depends on pure knowledge as the quintessence of which philosophy alone can and must think god” (SW I:104, B II:163). Second, as the above passage makes clear, the concept of experience put forward by Benjamin harshly criticizes Kant’s inability to overcome the subject/object division and “the relation of knowledge and experience to human empirical consciousness” (ibid.).8 In effect, “The Program of the Coming Philosophy” ascribes Kant’s failure to establish a continuity between metaphysics and epistemology to the fact that the philosopher’s epistemology “epistemology... contains within itself primitive elements of an unproductive metaphysics which excludes all others” (SW I:102, B II:160), while the most basic of these elements is of course the subject nature of the cognizing consciousness that has objects confronting it. This notion, however, is, to Benjamin, pure mythology insofar as “cognizing man, the cognizing empirical consciousness, is a type of insane consciousness” (SW I:103, B II:160)—if only because people deemed insane by the very same cognizing man are known to identify themselves with objects of their perception. Primitive peoples of the pre-animistic age, Benjamin goes on to argue, are also known to identify themselves with sacred animals and plants and to name themseleves after these. Last but not least, clairvoyants at least claim to be able to have the sensations of other people as their own. The possibilities of experience that seems to transcend the subject/object constraints imposed by Kantian epistemology are endless, which hence necessitates the postulate that “alle echte Erfahrung beruht auf dem reinen erkenntnis-theoretischen (transzendentalen) Bewu?tsein wenn dieser Terminus unter der Bedingung da? es er alles Subjekthaften entkleidet sei noch verwendbar ist” (B II:162f.). Benjamin’s drastic expansion of the paradigm of experience thus shook the very foundations of epistemology by supplanting the mathematical-mechanical model of experience by a profoundly innovative theoretical position. The two fundamentals of a new system of what has been recently described as “a transcendental but speculative philosophy”9 radically recast Kant’s experience-grounded model without, on the other hand, giving up the critical spirit of the whole enterprise. In his plea for a system that “can do justice to a higher experience” (SW I:101, B II:158) by incorporating reference to a higher ground and by replacing empirical consciousness with what he terms “pure transcendental consciousness... stripped of everything subjective,” Benjamin, as said, wants a return to a strictly criticist economy in which the realms of experience and the absolute are neither completely separated, nor seamlessly fused. Not separate, they do not mingle. The solution to the dilemma is not Hegelian either. Philosophy as a criticism of “naked, self-evident experience,” i. e. subjective Erkenntnis can never hope to incorporate truth into its system, yet Benjamin suggests the possibility of expanding the bounds of philosophy by including in it reference to that which makes possible the experience of ideas of reason and to that which ultimately enables all philosophical distinctions—in terms of his 1921 essay “Goethes Wahlverwandschaften,” the crucial one of Mythos and Wahrheit.10 If philosophy by virtue of this reference becomes theology, it is not theology in any conventional sense because it holds no absolute guarantees and provides for communing with “the source of existence” that “lies in the totality of experience” (SW I:109, B II:170) only in a finite and irreducibly idiosyncratic manner—namely, by exposing the finitude of experience in its nakedness. And if this is “philosophising beyond philosophy,”11 then the traditionally circumscribed limits of philosophy as a rigorous discipline are to be understood as violently restrictive. To speak with Adorno, “[m]an konnte beinahe sagen, da? er philosophisch um so leuchtender sich zeigte, je weniger das, woruber er redete, die sogennanten offiziellen Gegenstande der Philosophie waren” (“Uber Walter Benjamin” 11). But how exactly does one get to this higher experience, the experience of freedom the access to which Kant emphatically barred? What authorizes a philosophy claiming the opposite to call itself a Kritik? To answer these questions, we need to cast at least a cursory glance at Benjamin’s critical method. It is the method that interests us most. 3.Moment of ReadingIn the “Epistemo-Critical Prologue” to his Trauerspiel book, Benjamin takes another step away from postulates of the primacy of cognition, interiorizing consciousness, and reflection, thus putting to test the entire tradition of the philosophy of consciousness from Kant to Husserl. Instead of giving priority to epistemological questions, the original [ursprungliche] task of philosophy is in that work defined as “the representation of ideas” [Darstellung der Ideen] (Origin 34-35, B I:214) whereby ideas are described as timeless constellations. This implies that the “idea” as “objective interpretation” of empirical phenomena articulates and, more than that, “determines their [i. e. phenomena’s] relationship”—that is, the idea lets us perceive a pattern that phenomena represent and by which the phenomena are in turn eternalized (ibid., emphasis added). “The representation of ideas through the medium of empirical reality” no longer marks the Platonic divide between separate worlds of light and shadow (one material, the other ideal) but rather describes a transformation that occurs before our very eyes, whereby a multiplicity of things becomes the unity of an idea (ibid.). As said in the “Epistemo-Critical Prologue,” “ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars”—and this analogy itself indicates for Benjamin “the distinguishing power of the intellect,” a power that accomplishes “two things at a single stroke: the salvation [Rettung] of phenomena and the representation [Darstellung] of ideas” (Origin 43-35, B I:214). Thus the immediacy of philosophical experience presupposes that what is grasped in the unity of ideas is always mediated by representation, the constellation of material signifier brought into view for a moment [Augenblick] by the distinguishing intentionality of the beholder. Borrowing a well-known formulation from Benjamin’s 1933 fragment “Lehre vom Ahnlichen,” what then matters most for philosophy is not logic or proof, but an ability to piece together “characteristic” aspects of a “unity” against which, because the “original totality” is not available, truth cannot be checked. In “Lehre vom Ahnlichen,” Benjamin speaks of “profane and magical” reading, activities sharing in the “gift” or “effort” of “letting the mind take part” [den Geist teilnehmen zu lassen] (B II:209f.) in the critical moment of understanding, a “measure of time” in which the “mimetic faculty” allows the reader to perceive hidden relations, and more than that, to access “the most perfect archive” of such relation, “language and writing” (ibid.). Thus in addition to delineating the task of philosophy in terms of representation, Benjamin also emphasizes the linguistic form of truth. Benjamin’s idea of piecing together fragments of the original Edenic totality—which is no longer extant and can only become manifest through these fragments—means endowing them with signifying power, making them symbols that human perception regards as if they bore a necessary, direct connection to their origins. At some remote point in the past, we are told, the law of similarity encompassed a much larger sphere of life than it does now, and the gift we now possess for seeing similarities—Benjamin calls it “the mimetic faculty”—is a weak rudiment of the formerly powerful compulsion “to become similar and to behave in similar manners.” “Wir mussen... als Erforscher der alten Uberlieferungen damit rechnen, da? sinnfallige Gestaltung, mimetischer Objektcharakter bestanden habe, wo wir ihn heute nicht einmal zu ahnen fahig sind. Zum Beispiel, in der Konstellation der Sterne”(B II:206). No claim is made for the existence of that connection or for the actual accessibility of the original totality through the pattern, pieced together by the mimetic faculty. The primary condition of unity is the distinguishing power of the intellect that, relying on the rudimentary mimetic faculty of understanding, both salvages objects from randomness and illegibility and attributes to the identified pattern the unity of an idea. Indeed, the enterprise of astrological prophesy or soothesaying on coffee grounds is brought to bear upon philosophy precisely because it locates ideas in experience understood as the crux of perception, this zusammenfugen defining reading as a participation in meaning. Understood as participation in meaning, the kind of perception that amounts to true experience is thus both instanteneous and ocular. It is also most precarious in that neither the possession of the pattern by the observer, nor the reciprocal possession can continue beyond the moment of capture. Not surprisingly, Benjamin conveys this temporal predicament by likening the moment of perception as participation to that of birth. Coming into the world, being born to it as a subject is what in truth this is all about. One of his most richly articulated metaphysical images spells this out better than any paraphrase. If the genius of becoming similar was a life-determining power of the ancients, he writes in “Lehre vom Ahnlichen,” “dann ist es kaum anders moglich, als den Vollbesitz dieser Gabe…, die vollendete Anbildung an die kosmische Seinsgestalt, dem Neugeborenen beizulegen” (B II:206).
Perceiving a pattern of similarities, literally taking it as true (Wahrnehmung) becomes in each case “bound to an instant flash,” also called by Benjamin the critical moment (der Augenblick) in which the pattern flashes up and vanishes precisely because it takes the observer in. Unlike other perceptions—or, rather, representations thereof—it cannot be preserved in consciousness. One cannot hold on to it, it disappears in its very emerging, which is to say, it occurs even before there is representation, consciousness, and subject. How are we then to conceptualize the constellation of the eye and this critical, infinitisimal measure of time? Thinking the “Dazukommen,” the decisive “Nu” of birth that makes it all possible would require our placing it before the moment of ocular recognition, which is quite impossible, for it is one and the same moment that we are presented with in Benjamin’s Lehre. The instance of a “full possession of the cosmic form of being” is also one of separation from it, as long as it is the instance of recognition. “Der Augenblick der Geburt, der hier entscheiden soll”: the word for “deciding” is a prominent presence in Benjamin’s texts—far more prominent than any of its common synonyms. The conveniently transparent German etymology is therefore decisive. Ent-schiedenheit speaks of an abrupt separation, a cutting into and a splitting apart that ends the homogeneity of indecision.12 Birth tears away from the world even as it gives the world to the newborn. To cite Nancy’s inspired observation, “[birth] is there in the mode of being born: to the degree that it occurs, birth effaces itself, and brings itself indefinitely back. Birth is this slipping away of presence through which everything comes to presence” (“The Birth to Presence” 4). In a similar mode—and the similarity is decisive13—the critical moment arrests a constellation, yet in its very seizure, its very taking in of the astrologer, the taking of truth zooms by, leaving him with nothing more—and nothing less—than the recognized pattern of the constellation. We will come back to this fundamental image of Benjamin’s philosophical teaching, but first we need time to consider his position vis-a-vis the third Critique, its Analytic of the Sublime, for the perception of similarities in the Benjaminian scenario has much in common with the spasm that Kant describes when something other than presentation of sensible appearances occurs in presentation itself. When at the end of Critique of Practical Reason Kant famously proclaims, “zwei Dinge erfullen das Gemut mit immer neuer und zunehmenden Bewunderung und Ehrfuhrcht...: Der bestirnte Himmel uber mir und das moralische Gesetz in mir” (KpV 300), he seals the absolute discontinuity between on the one hand, the magnitude of the sensible external world that annihilates the importance of the bodily self as a mortal “animal creature” and on the other, the innermost interiority of the non-experiential moral law that reveals to that self “a life independent of animality.” Neither “thing,” says Kant, needs to be conjectured as though veiled: “Ich sehe sie vor mir und verknupfe sie unmittelbar mit dem Bewu?tsein meiner Existenz” (ibid.). We will next look into the manner in which Benjamin’s philosophy of experience sees the immediacy of the connection. 4.Imprint of the SealBenjamin’s direct references to Critique of Judgment are not numerous. Nowhere does he discuss it at length. Whenever he invokes the problematic of the beautiful and the sublime, he alludes to Kant obliquely, almost discreetly, with the implicit understanding that little more needs to be said to explicate the connection. Yet his recasting of Kant’s concept of experience owes everything to what the author of the third Critique sought by locating the transcendental principle of the faculty of judgment. At the same time, those silences of the Critiques that Benjamin detected early on become the most decisive moments of the Weimar philosopher’s method. They become caesuras. The most obvious relevance of Kant’s aesthetics for Benjamin’s proposed philosophy of speculative experience lies in the fact that the third Critique, in its quest of a passage from pure speculative to pure practical reason, examines the capacity of the imagination, as the faculty of presentation, to transpose into sensible intuition a direct manifestation of the supersensible. Critique of Judgment is no longer concerned with the question of Erfahrung as Erkenntnis in which objects present themselves to a subject. Cognition of objects by a subject is not at issue, what matters instead is the universal validity of the power of concepts. To this end, the third Critique investigates purpusiveness with respect to form only: it concentrates on transcendental imagination and its capacity to present a form that accords with its free play, to present the existence of an accord between the sensible manifold and a certain pre-conceptual unity of the supersensible (CJ 15). In this investigation, the sublime whose analytic was meant to be a mere appendix to the study of our aesthetic judgment (CJ 100) is discovered to have a decisive role in grounding the beautiful. While the beautiful “concerns the form of the object”, i. e. limitation, the sublime strives for the unlimited as it seizes us in the presence of “a formless object insofar as we present unboundedness” (CJ 98). Simpler put by Kant himself, the beautiful “carries with it directly a feeling of life’s being furthered, and hence is compatible with charms and with an imagination at play,” while the sublime “is produced by the feeling of a momentary inhibition of the vital forces followed immediately by an outpouring of them that is all the stronger” (ibid.). It is this latter correlation, the momentarily presented mutual dependence of life and death that forms the centerpiece of Benjamin’s philosophy of experience and informs the thrust of his objections to the first Critique’s basic assumptions. The presentation of this dependence is also that which grounds the possibility of remembrance. Benjamin’s most extensive and incisive reference to the third Critique is to be found, of course, in the essay on Goethe’s Wahlverwandschaften where, in a continued elaboration of the all-encompassing philosophy of Erfahrung, he articulates the relationship between life and death, beauty and the sublime. Our requires a careful consideration of this reference. Fashioned as a critical response to Friedrich Gundolf’s triumphalist biography of Goethe and biographical criticism as a whole, the essay is doubly significant for our purposes because it also illuminates Benjamin’s idea of reading the inscriptions of the author’s life in his work. The essay opens with a methodological preface that seeks to establish the correlation between the truth content [Wahrheitsgehalt] and the real/material content [Saschgehalt] of a work of art—a relationship that would focus the reader’s attention on the task of the essay as a critique of Goethe’s novel, not a commentary on it. It is the truth content that the critic is after. To this end, Benjamin carefully spreads the veil of figural language by advancing three tropes of reading— paleographic, alchemical, and the reading of a seal—whose vertiginous sequence means to throw light on how one is to proceed with sorting out the Sachgehalt of a work from its Wahrheitsgehalt. The latter’s relationship with the material content “is determined by that basic law of literature according to which the more significant the work, the more inconspicuously and intimately its truth content is bound up with its real content” (SW I:297). On the face of it, the task of a critique would grow easier in proportion to the significance of the work, because the more enduring its import proves the more its “concrete realities” “rise up before the eyes of the beholder,” becoming progressively “eye-catching and curious” [befremdend]. That, however, in no way exposes the truth content, for, even though it “comes apart” from the “concrete realities,” it “remains to the same extent hidden when the real content comes to the fore” (ibid.). Thus no critical judgment can be made solely on the basis of what lies on the surface, no matter how conspicuous that surface may be. A solution would seem to be in first performing the task of a commentary by scrutinizing that which, from the distance separating the critic from the work, appears most striking in it: “Man darf [den Kritik] mit dem Palaographen vor einem Pergamente vergleichen, dessen verblichener Text uberdeckt wird von den Zugen einer kraftigern Schrift, die auf ihn sich bezieht. Wie der Palaograph mit dem Lesen der letztern beginnen mu?te, so der Kritiker mit dem Kommentieren” (B I:125). But it does not seem likely that the original script can be retrieved by gaining insight into the nature of the later text’s living power, for the powerful strangeness emanating from that life is at once what is real and perceptible in it as well as its hidden source. All the more curious then is Benjamin’s conclusion about the ground for judgment the critic acquires by first performing the job of a commentator: “Und mit einem Schlag entspringt ihm daraus ein unschatzbares Kriterium seines Urteils: nun erst kann er die kritische Grundfrage stellen, ob der Schein des Wahrheitsgehaltes dem Sachgehalt oder das Leben des Sachgehaltes dem Wahrheitsgehalt zu verdanken sei” (ibid). The answer to this fundamental critical question, however decisively the latter is posed, obviously cannot give preference to either of the two alternatives: if there is life in the work, the material content seems (lustrously) true because it is alive, and, yes, it is alive because truth sustains it. Yet, only this question and no other is critical: only thus formulated does it correspond to the task of a genuine critique, and only after the movement of coming apart has been detected. The criterion of judgment “springs out” rather violently in this very movement, for it is not truth itself that the coming apart makes visible but the truth’s further concealment. “In diesem Sinne,” writes Benjamin, “bereitet die Geschichte der Werke ihre Kritik vor und daher vermehrt die historische Distanz deren Gewalt” (ibid.). Thus it is due to the lack of historical distance that one would see in the work “more the moving than the resting truth, more the temporal effect than the eternal being” (SW I:298). Distance re-moves the deceptive appearance of living immediacy that may tempt one to equate the truth content with its shining semblance. The immediacy of what is alive and continuously estranging, rather than being Unmittelbarkeit, the unmediated truth of lived experience [Erlebnis], is instead the Augenblicklichkeit of Erfahrung in which the enigma of the work’s continued life is apprehended. Therefore if a commentator is a chemist before the funeral pyre of the work, the critic is an alchemist: “Wo jenem Holz und Asche allein die Gegenstande seiner Analyse bleiben, bewahrt fur diesen nur die Flamme selbst ein Ratsel: das des Lebendigen. So fragt der Kritiker nach der Wahrheit, deren lebendige Flamme fortbrennt uber den schweren Scheitern des Gewesenen und der leichten Asche des Erlebten” (B I:126). Insofar as the inextinguishable flame consuming what is no longer a living presence preserves [bewahrt] the enigma, and by the same token its truth, to the alchemist, this iridescent flame is not unlike that of a star to the astrologer: cold. And of course, just as the astrologer, the alchemist is taken in by his own reading. Thus akin to the astrological procedure of grouping, by resemblance, individual stars in meaningful constellations, the alchemical reading, far from revealing the unmediated presence of truth in the flame, does just the opposite—brings forth the illusoriness of what in its shimmering immediacy appears true. One can now see somewhat more clearly in what sense the philosophical experience of critical insight is immediate as it intuits the criterion upon which the content [Gehalt] of the matter [Sache] can be grasped: not by mechanical deduction of the latter’s essence in a manner of Erkenntnis but as a unity of Sachgehalt—a constellation, or, as Benjamin further suggests in “Goethes Wahlverwandschaften,” an imprint of a seal, Siegel des Siegels:
A “blissful vision of the divine name” presumably cancels the need to distinguish between the real content of the work and its truth content, for the two are in this vision one and the same: “Die vollendete Einsicht in den Sachgehalt der bestandigen Dinge [fallt zuletzt] mit derjenigen in ihren Wahrheitsgehalt zusammen. Der Wahrheitsgehalt erweist sich als solcher des Sachgehalts” (ibid.). It is not, however, the vision of God that Benjamin summons here, but rather, God’s name, the essence of language.14One in the mediating name, the Sach- and the Wahrheitsgehalt, are intuitable in the immediacy of a critical grasp afforded by the philosophical experience. The seeming possibility of immediately apprehending in the matter’s eye-catching appearance what in fact lies most hidden in it, is consequently a trap, however alluring. Hence the distinction between Sachgehalt as an imprint graspable through philosophical experience and Wahrheitsgehalt as the seal of the divine name: “Dennoch ist ihre Unterscheidung—und mit ihr die von Kommentar und Kritik der Werke—nicht mu?ig, sofern Unmittelbarkeit zu erstreben nirgends verworrener als hier, wo das Studium der Sache und ihrer Bestimmung wie die Ahnung ihres Gehalts einer jeden Erfahrung vorherzugehen haben” (ibid.). Kommentar to Kritik and Erkenntnis to Erfahrung are what Siegel is to Siegel. As Fritz Gutbrod shrewdly points out in a recent article on Benjamin’s essay, the essential here is that German does not distinguish between the imprint and the seal, the stamp and the stamped, the signet and the form of the wax: “das Siegel ist das Entscheidende” (“Wahl:Verwandschaft” 557). Moreover, language bears the imprint of “das Selige” in an anagram of “das Siegel;” the two are inseparable in the name. Thus, if the real content is to be distinguished from the truth content, what can make the difference visible is not the separation of the two but precisely the philosophical experience of their inseparability, the experience of an imprint stamped on the phenomenal world by the divine seal.15 In the reading of Goethe’s novel, it is beauty that leads Benjamin to the philosophical Erfahrung. The essay focuses on semblance [Schein] with which “everything essentially beautiful is always and in its essence bound up, but in infinitely different degrees” (SW I:350). Benjamin posits Schein as the mythical in beauty and defines the concept as that in which “everything living... manifests itself as essentially beautiful” (ibid.). Semblance, he further argues, belongs to the essentially beautiful “as the veil and as the essential law of beauty shows itself thus, that beauty appears as such only in what is veiled” (ibid.). The luminous, free appearance of the manifold in beauty is fashioned in the third Critique in terms of “lawfulness without a law” (CJ 92): the imagination as the faculty of understanding organizes chaos into visible forms before all conceptualization and representation of objects. It is a form forming itself, a play of presentation with itself without any represented object, imagination organizing chaos in accord with its own free play, with no external laws commanding its figurative power. In his critique of Schein, Benjamin implicitly expounds on Kant’s designation, in the final section of the Analytic of the Beautiful (a transition to the sublime is already anticipated there), of the beautiful view of objects as a poetic vision of finite, but ever-changing figures. These in Kant are, for example, “shapes of the flames in a fireplace or of a rippling brook” (CJ 95)—figures that provide for the imagination the occasion “to engage in fiction [dichten], i. e.,... the actual fantasies with which the mind entertains itself as it is continually being aroused by the diversity that strikes the eye” (ibid.; KU 166)16 Benjamin’s significant note to the Goethe essay entitled “Phantasie” spells out the implicit connection with this passage from the Analytic of the Beautiful in some detail. Phantasie is here described as something that incessantly de-forms, entstaltet, what has been formed [das Gestaltene]. In fact, “forms” is not even the right word to describe Phantasie’s products: “fur die Gestalten der Phantasie besitzt die deutsche Sprache kein eignes Wort. Einzig und allein das Wort ‘Erscheinung’ darf man in einer gewissen Bedeutung vielleicht fur ein solches ansehen.” Thus the Erscheinung of objects represented in empirical cognition analyzed in the first Critique is very different from what appears in imagination’s de-formations. “Phantasie” forms by de-forming while it never destroys in the same sense as the empirical is destroyed. Its de-formation is first, “zwanglos, kommt aus dem Innern, ist frei und daher schmerzlos; second, “[sie] fuhrt niemals in den Tod, sondern verewigt den Untergang den sie herauffuhrt in einer unendlichen Folge von Ubergangen....Alle Entstaltung der Welt wird also in ihrem Sinne eine Welt ohne Schmerz phantasieren, welche dennoch vom reichsten Geschehen durchflutet ware. Diese Entstaltung zeigt ferner... die Welt in unendlicher Auflosung begriffen, das hei?t aber in ewiger Vergangnis.” (B VI:115) In “Goethes Wahlverwandschaften,” Benjamin connects this opaque, “trembling harmony” of figuration that knows no physical destruction with semblance that merely flows through chaos (“through this only and not the world” (SW 340)) and in its flooding-through, only appears to enliven it. The Schein of the beautiful is essentially the Schein of its life. However, no artwork, according to Benjamin, “may seem wholly alive..., without becoming mere semblance and ceasing to be a work of art” (ibid.) if it does not stage a momentary inihibition of this beautiful semblance of life by arresting the latter in a petrified form. It is only thus that chaos momentarily becomes world—not by creation but through conjuration, a spell that is essentially of the same order as what enchanted the Schein of life: “Kunstlerisches Schaffen “macht” nichts aus dem Chaos, durchdringt es nicht; genau so wenig wird, wie Beschworung dies in Wahrheit tut, aus Elementen jenes Chaos Schein sich mischen lassen. Dies bewirkt die Formel. Form... verzaubert [das Chaos] auf einen Augenblick zur Welt” (B I:180).17 This brings us to the crucial methodological moment in the “Wahlverwandschaften” essay: the critical power of the expressionless that seizes the “trembling harmony” of the work’s semblance in the silence of a caesura. “What restrains the semblance, spellbinds the movement, and interrupts the harmony is the expressionless [das Ausdruckslose]” (SW I:340, B I:181). This latter negative concept is further defined as “the critical violence [die kritische Gewalt] which, while unable to separate semblance from essence in art, prevents them from mingling. It possesses this violence as a moral dictum [moralisches Wort]. In the expressionless, the sublime violence of the true [die erhabne Gewalt des Wahren] appears as that which determines, according to the laws of the moral world, the language of the real world” (ibid.). The expressionless appears in the silence of a caesura, defined by Holderlin as “das reine Wort, die gegenrhythmische Unterbrechung” necessary “um... dem rei?enden Wechsel der Vorstellungen, auf seinem Summum, so zu begegnen, da? alsdann nicht mehr der Wechsel der Vorstellung, sondern die Vorstellung selber erscheint” (Holderlin 1183). And as Benjamin emphasizes toward the end of the essay, “this moment can never be expressed in words but solely in representation: it is the dramatic in the strictest sense” (SW I:355, B I:200). Given all these striking attributes, one needs to ponder the concept of the expressionless in the context of the Analytic of the Sublime, for what happens here may seem to differ somewhat from the Kantian scenario of sublime occurence. Benjamin ties the expressionless to the strictly outlined form that turns chaos into world. Meanwhile, the couterpurposiveness, the Dawider of the sublime in the third Critique from the very outset speaks of the unboundedness, the unlimitation that disfigures, to which the thought of its totality (plurality as unity) is added (CJ 98). If the sublime, expressionless “objection” [Einspruch] (SW I:340), according to Benjamin, violently binds the trembling harmony into rigid forms, does this mean that the Kantian scheme is here flatly reversed? One would be tempted to say yes if one forgot that unlimitation involved in the feeling of the sublime in Kant is always a matter of presentation.18 Or more precisely put, it is always a matter of the limit that the imagination hits in attempting to present the unbounded totality. To the poetic conjuration of the trembling form at work in the beautiful view of objects the sublime adds the task of comprehending the formlessness of vibration, the trembling itself. At stake in the sublime is the necessarily limited zusammenfassen in which imagination does violence to itself while fighting its own finitude in the service of reason. As Nancy points out in “The Sublime Offering,” “the beautiful and the >sublime, if they are not identical—and indeed, quite the contrary—take place on the same site, and in a certain sense the one upon the other, the one along the edge of the other, and perhaps... the one through the other. The beautiful and the sublime are presentation but in such a manner that the beautiful is the presented in its presentation, whereas the sublime is the presentation in its movement—which is the absolute re-moval of the unlimited along the edge of any limit” (38).19 Thus Benjamin: “[Das Ausdruckslose] zerschlagt was in allem schonen Schein als die Erbschaft des Chaos noch uberdauert: die falsche, irrende Totalitat—die absolute. Dieses erst vollendet das Werk, welches es zum Stuckwerk zerschlagt, zum Fragment der wahren Welt, zum Torso eines Symbols” (B I:181). A completion through the movement of a devastating delimitation is directed against the self-adequation of presentation as such; the expressionless is an objection to the latter’s seeming capacity to present the absolute as totality. For an instant, the chaotic manifold vibrating in the work’s beautiful forms ceases to seem lustrously alive and shows itself for what it is: fragmented world. Is it then simply the negation of symbolic immanence that we are presented with here? No doubt, the expressionless stages a negative presentation, but there is more to this simplicity. It is not in vain that Benjamin chooses his own term to describe what since Longinus has carried the somewhat complacent name of the sublime, or the elevated. “Das Ausdruckslose” of the poetic caesura, although given in Darstellung, does not present anything other than “Vorstellung selber.” In itself it is thus only a presentation, a Vorstellung, not a Darstellung, for nothing is being re-presented in a silent pause for breath.20 All expression comes to a halt in the counter-rhythmic interruption, “um einer innerhalb aller Kunstmittel ausdruckslosen Gewalt Raum zu geben” (B I:182). This formulation indicates that the expressionless appears at the limit of the graspable but never beyond it: it is given room inside presentation, for outside of it there is no Raum; only monstrous chaos, “der Ausgeburt des Wahnsinns” (B I:182). It seizes presentation itself on the edge of the presentable. Its violence then is not external to Kunstmittel—i. e. the medium of presentation through which the imagination stages its conjuration of life—”lawfully, but without a law.” What the sublime violates then, as Benjamin’s reference to Holderlin seems to suggest, is not presentation as such, but rather its rhythmic sequence. The nature of this violence will become even clearer if we put Holderlin’s definition of the caesura (Benjamin takes care to cite it in full) in a constellation with a rare passage from the Analytic of the Sublime in which violence is considered in the context of its temporality:
Holderlin’s Kalkul of “meeting the onrushing change of representation at its highest point” implies gathering their swiftly flowing plurality into a single moment of comprehension. It is thus a violent supression of the temporal condition in the imagination’s progression that strives to freeze the temporal flux. One could view this as an intervention by what is most incalculable, the prephenomenal time itself, the inner sense of the imagination, that finds its impossible, expressionless expression in the moment of the “atemporal.” Time, the non-figurable, apriori form of intuition, grounds the possibility of representable experience, including the experience of non-presentability.21 As Jacob Rogozinski persuasively argues in an illuminating analysis of the temporality of the sublime, originary time is then not reducible to transcendental imagination and the latter’s violent maintenence of it in the form of a homogeneous, monotonous progression, “for if originary temporality were identical to imagination, nothing other would be possible, nothing sublime could happen” (“The Gift of the World” 145). It is only by breaking the schema of “substance as the permanence of the real in time” (CPR 147) that the sublime succeeds in schematizing, or in Holderlin’s language, “calculating,” the non-figurable primal form of intuition. This pure form, the time of freedom, is undoubtedly linked to the moral dictum of expressionless violence: it recalls imagination to the law of which its schematism is forgetful. In a famous footnote to the Analytic, Kant “subreptively” illustrates the ungraspability of pure time by citing the sublime image of veiled Isis:22 “Vielleicht ist nie etwas Erhabeneres gesagt, oder ein Gedanke erhabener ausgedruckt worden, als in jener Aufschrift uber dem Tempel der Isis (der Mutter Natur): ‘Ich bin alles was da ist, was da war, und was da sein wird, und meinen Schleier hat kein Sterblicher aufgedeckt’” (KU 353). Another, later reference to the veiled goddess in “Von einem neuerdings erhobenen vornehmen Ton in der Philosophie,” equates this figure for the temporal mystery of the phenomenal world with the awe-inspiring mystery of the non-figurable moral law: “Die verschleierte Gottin, vor der wir... unsere Knie beugen, ist das moralische Gesetz in uns, in seiner unverletzlichen Majestat” (395). In his critique of semblance in Goethe’s novel, Benjamin clearly alludes to this popular Enlightenement allegory when he suggests that beauty appears as such only in what is veiled. However, it is not the static idol of the super-sensible in nature that bears the Schleier in his essay, but rather the mortal, trembling, creaturely form: the veil of beauty is the Schein of its life. And “nothing mortal is incapable of being unveiled” (SW I:353). Everything mortal is uncovered in death: along with life, death removes the veil of semblance. But beauty also goes under in this removal. What remains is the naked body, “a Being beyond all beauty—the sublime” (SW I:351). The striking valorization of the naked body in death as the proper “Ausdruck des Erhabenen” (see “Schonheit,” B VI:129) completes the thought that “the sublime violence of the true... determines the language of the real world according to the laws of the moral world” (SW I:340). “The moral word” of the sublime has no expression, it does not reveal a pre-established moral rule. What it does reveal, in its petrifying appearance, is the deceptively luminous veil of life represented, given expression in artistic medium. Naked body is what remains to be seen when “vital forces” are permanently “inhibited” never to pour out again “all the stronger.” When the expressionless ruptures the temporal sequence of presentation, the infinite finitude of this expression is violently uncovered in an Anschauung des Zugleichseins—Anschauung der Einheit, des Sachgehalts, des gottlichen Namens...—an intuition proper to the visual sense ot the German word and inseparably bound up with the ocularity of the Augenblick. “Also wird allem Schonen gegenuber die Idee der Enthullung zu der der Unenthullbarkeit. Es ist die Idee der Kunstkritik. Die Kunstkritik hat nicht die Hulle zu heben, vielmehr durch deren genaueste Erkenntnis als Hulle erst zur wahren Anschauung des Schonen sich zu erheben” (B I:196). Critical violence at the limit of form and formlessness is then best thought in terms of unequivocal Entschiedenheit: that which comes to pass at the momentary intersection of alchemist and flame, astrologer and stars, intention and truth. Thus in respect to Goethe’s novel, critical methodology enables Benjamin to decide on the relationship between, on the one hand, the myth of “beautiful life,” semblance triumphant and complacent in its opacity, and on the other, semblance-like beauty which in the figure of Ottilie emerges as essential in its striving, however blindly, to extinguish itself as semblance for the sake of underlying essence. Ottilie’s beautiful semblance “goes under” and simultaneously a momentary sublime movement of a “passage,” of a going-over takes place. In this way, we are told, “Kant’s doctrine, that the foundation of beauty is a relational character, accordingly carries through victoriously... For beauty makes visible not the idea but rather the latter’s secret” (SW I:351, B I:196). The Darstellung of his final critical moment—the moment that identifies the novel’s caesura—glimpses the unity of Goethe’s work by allegorically setting-there at a point remoter still something that in the novel is quite literally already distant: the symbol of a star that in the middle of the novel falls, rather inconspicuously, over the lovers Eduard and Ottilie. Benjamin relates Sulpiz Boisseree’s account of a moment during his trip with Goethe to Heidelberg in “the most beautiful starlight” when something prompted the poet to speak of the Wahlverwandtschaften. Goethe himself, says Benjamin, was at that moment “hardly aware” of the connection between the stars and the novel’s lovers to whom his thoughts suddenly turned; the mysterious element of this eye-catching connection did not, however, escape the reporter. What the latter’s perceptive eye brings into view “alludes more deeply [and, one should add, no less unwittingly] “to the secret of [Goethe’s] work than ever [the poet] might have been aware of.” “Wenn es dem Berichtenden nicht entgangen ist,” writes Benjamin, “wie mit dem Aufgang der Sterne Goethes Gedanken auf sein Werk sich hinlenkten, so hat er selbst kaum gewu?t—wovon doch seine Sprache Zeugnis ablegt—wie uber Stimmung erhaben der Augenblick war und wie deutlich die Mahnung der Sterne. In ihr bestand als Erfahrung was langst als Erlebnis verweht war. Denn unter dem Symbol des Sterns war einst Goethe die Hoffnung erschienen, die er fur den Liebenden fassen mu?te” (B I:199, emphasis added). The warning of the stars was clear, and it cannot be said any more clearly that something “jenseits des Dichters” violently raised the Augenblick above mood, above semblance—rendered it sublime. As the light of the stars that takes an eternity to travel from its origin is never apprehended in its living immediacy, so the Erlebnis as “what has long ago faded away” is said to be experienced again, in the posthumous Erfahrung of the sublime Augenblick, as a living mystery. What, according to Benjamin, in that moment was still alive—although no longer an immediate living presence—is the feeling of hope in which the meaning of the event was once fulfilled when in the symbol of the falling star Goethe took hope for the lovers who of that star were unaware: “Er allein ist’s, der im Gefuhle der Hoffnung den Sinn des Geschehens erfullen kann” (B I:199).23 Benjamin the critic, in turn, takes his own stance and fulfills the meaning of what Goethe’s companion faithfully recorded as an enigma, a “mysterious foreboding” that overcame the poet in “the most beautiful starlight.” Benjamin glimpses the flicker of the enigma and gives Goethe’s hope its only possible human fulfillment. It takes the vision of an astrologer to capture that spell, thus: “Es ist wie das Dazukommen des Dritten, des Astrologen zu der Konjuktion von zwei Gestirnen, die im Augenblick erfa?t sein will” (B II:206). When the critic steps in, the falling star, a shimmering symbol of hope, is seized and held up fast in the vault of the sky, as hope’s allegory. Eighteen years later, in the second Baudelaire essay, Benjamin says more: “Je weiter ein Wunsch in die Ferne der Zeit ausgreift, desto mehr la?t sich fur seine Erfullung hoffen. Was aber in die Ferne der Zeit zuruckgeleitet, ist die Erfahrung, die sie erfullt und gliedert” (B I:635). Experience is time fulfilled in the dissection of temporal distance. 4.Shock of Memory: BaudelaireOur lengthy but necessary excursus into the Goethe essay attempted to lay bare the Kantian stakes of Benjamin’s life-long elaboration of Philosophie der Erfahrung. We tried to focus our reading of the text on the central motives of the third Critique shown at play in the momentary petrification of beautiful semblance in the artwork whereby time is impossibly forced to halt. Benjamin’s essay fashions this moment as constitutive of the work’s life. As Eduardo Cadava notes in a brief reference to the methodological opening of “Goethes Wahlverwandschaften,” “the history of works... tells us that all works are funereal: they bear an essential rapport to their finitude, and indeed survive only to the extent to which they exhibit their death” (Words of Light 23). We should not be surprised then to find the same mechanism of sublime ex/in-hibition operative in Benjamin’s works on memory and in his own mnemonic texts, for the task of reading one’s own life, historically, could not be in essence different from that of reading stars or novels. The time-fulfilling, time-dismembering Erfahrung of reading is at issue. And similar to the way in which Benjamin, in the early “Program of the Coming Philosophy,” defines the relationship of thefleeting totality of experience, Erfahrung to Erkenntnis, experience cognized, Erfahrung must also be defined vis-a-vis Erlebnis, experience merely lived. The opposition of the two terms is frequent and consistent throughout Benjamin’s writings and dates at least as far back as the 1913 essay “Erfahrung” discussed near the beginning of this chapter. The most elaborate articulation of this opposition is undertaken, however, in “Uber einige Motive bei Baudelaire,” the second of the two Baudelaire essays completed in 1939, only about a year before Benjamin’s suicide in Port Bou. As the essay contains some of the critic’s most extensive theoretical ruminations on memory and experience, it is a staple for any reader of Benjamin’s strategy of remembrance. Looking into the astonishing public success of the Fleures du mal whose poet openly declared his kinship with the hypocrite lecteur, Benjamin’s essay asks anew the question of what constitutes “true” experience “ in relation to “the kind that manifests itself in the standardized, denatured life of civilized masses.” (I 156). How can one account for a change in the structure of traditional experience in the age of high capitalism? That Baudelaire gestured to obliterate the distinction between himself and his philistine readership of a short attention span and a preference for “sensual pleasures” makes it so much harder to identify the ground of his poetry’s rapport with the experience of its readers. “[Man]... wird bei der Philosophie nachfragen” (B I:608), suggests Benjamin, and turns to the tradition of Lebensphilosophie which “since the end of the last century” has attempted to answer the question of true experience. Yet what one finds valorized there, is, to be sure, “poetry, preferably nature, and most recently, the age of myths” (ibid.). The historical concerns are as foreign to these philosophers as they were to Romantic poets. The very title of Wilhem Dilthey’s grand treatise, Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung fuses the two in a myth of “Erfahrung” as subjective, immediate Erlebnis raised to the power of Dichtung. Henri Bergson’s Matter and Memory with its strong link to empirical reasearch also “defines the nature of experience in the duree in such a way that the reader is bound to conclude that only a poet can be the adequate subject of such an experience” (I 159). Benjamin’s essay nonetheless exempts Bergson’s book from the general charge against Lebensphilosophie precisely because of the work’s sober, scientific bend, but more importantly, because “it regards the structure of memory as decisive for the philosophical pattern of experience” (ibid.)24 That any true experience is, according to Bergson, grounded in memory and is thus to be experimentally determined as “less the product of facts firmly anchored in memory than of a convergence in memory of accumulated and frequently unconscious data” (ibid.) goes against the grain of any unproblematic and truly ahistorical adequation of lived experience with pure perception. “There is no perception that is not full of memories...,” writes Bergson (Matter 33), “‘Pure,’ that is to say, instanteneous perception is, in fact, only an ideal, an extreme. Every perception fills a certain depth of duration, prolongs the past into the present, and thereby partakes of memory” (244). The memory that is involved here is in fact constitutive of the present, for however instanteneous, perception “consists in an incalculable multitude of remembered elements” (150). This memory, that is, properly speaking, bodily motor habit, acts our past experience but does not call up its image. It is largely unconscious; in fact, our unawareness of it is responsible for “the fundamental illusion”of “transferring to duration itself, in its continuous flow, the form of the instanteneous sections which we make of it” (149). The kind of memory Bergson calls memoire pure is “coextensive with consciousness” (151): it is the kind that “imagines and repeats” (ibid.). The first works by resemblance, the second by difference. The general idea, says Bergson, appears “at the meeting of the two currents” (155), for they are thoroughly intertwined, and living only by the first kind of memory would mean acting without representing, in the manner of an amoeba, while living the second without the first would amount to dreaming one’s life instead of living it. Yet Bergson’s privileging, in the proposed actualization of the duree, of the vita contemplativa, volitional, discursive memory that represents “something which outruns perception itself” (208) is what, as Benjamin implicitly claims, aligns the philosopher’s theory with the mythology of Lebensphilosophie. As the kind of actualization envisioned by Bergson is to be governed by reproductive imagination, it should now be clear why the reader of Matter and Memory must conclude that “einzig der Dichter wird das adaquate Subjekt einer solchen Erfahrung sein” (B I:609). Kant, in the sublime sobriety of his sunset years (Benjamin already resorted to its authority in the Goethe essay, with a reference to Die Metaphysik der Sitten), insists on a strict separation of memory which he includes in the faculty of conscious, volitional cognition [Erkenntnisvermogen] from imagination’s reproduction of our representations’ mere play: “Das Gedachtnis ist von der blo? reproduktiven Einbildungskraft darin unterschieden, da? es die vormalige Vorstellung willkurlich zu reproduzieren vermogend, das Gemut also nicht ein blo?es Spiel von jener ist. Phantasie, d. i. schopferische Einbildungskraft, mu? sich darein nicht mischen, denn dadurch wurde das Gedachtnis untreu” (Anthropologie 182).25 Thus Kant. And it is Proust, the Dichter to whom Benjamin turns, who in his own “contemplative actualization of the stream of life” found memoire volontaire incapable of transporting him back to the past. To Proust, the Bergsonian memoire pure becomes instead a memoire involontaire, the chance effect of low-level bodily memory, which weaves the image that, as Benjamin suggests in the 1929 “Zum Bilde Prousts,” is perhaps “dem Vergessen viel naher als dem, was meist Erinnerung gennant wird” (B II:311). 26 Baudelaire’s poetic experience is of a different order. Benjamin views it through the prism of Freud’s thesis in Jenseits des Lustprinzips that postulates the incompatibility of consciousness and the memory trace in one and the same system. The recourse to experimental psychoanalysis at a pivotal point in a work seeking a historical explanation for a change in the structure of experience should seem at least as odd as a reference to Lebensphilosophie. Yet Freud is called to the stand here as, first and foremost, a thinker of time, a thinker of Nachtraglichkeit whichBergson’s work acknowledges but then all too easily dissolves in the duree. Benjamin’s elaboration of the theory of the modern experience in the Baudelaire project, as elsewhere, explicitly proceeds from the fundamental, characteristically modernist assumption that modernity has at some prior moment fallen away from the putative unity of “traditional experience.” No longer available and perhaps always a myth, it was the experience in which Freud’s scheme presumably did not yet obtain, i. e. where memory and consciousness were fully compatible. Modernity is therefore constructed as the site of loss, while traces of this loss are made manifest every time consciousness reveals its incompatibility with memory. “In der Tat,” writes Benjamin, “ist die Erfahrung eine Sache der Tradition” (B I:608). Rainer Nagele points out that “as a matter of tradition [experience] is both a cause (Sache) of tradition and caused by it. In the causality of tradition, experience enters into conflict with scientific causality to the degree that the principles of science emerge from a radical questioning of the authority of tradition” (“The Poetic Ground...” 128f.). 27 The final section of Benjamin’s Einbahnstra?e indeed states as much when it asserts that “nichts unterscheidet den antiken so vom neueren Menschen, als seine Hingegebenheit an eine kosmische Erfahrung, die der spatere kaum kennt. Ihr Versinken kundigt schon in der Blute der Astronomie zu Beginn der Neuzeit sich an. Kepler, Kopernikus, Tycho de Brahe waren gewi? nicht von wissenschaftlichen Impulsen allein getrieben” (B IV:146). It is crucial that Benjamin here ties the waning of “cosmic experience” to the emergent prevalence of the optical in man’s questioning his connection to the universe, which is what happens when astronomy steps in to take the place of astrology: “Antiker Umgang mit dem Kosmos vollzog sich anders: im Rausche. Ist doch Rausch die Erfahrung, in welcher wir allein des Allernachsten und des Allerfernsten, und nie des einen ohne des andern, uns versichern” (ibid.). The state of Rausch this passage describes is that of an uninterrupted cosmic union of which in the latter day one could only speak as a formula for mysticism. To paraphrase Baudelaire, it names the long-lost possibility of a natural paradise which now could be replicated only as an artificially induced obliteration of what differentiates proximity and distance, subject and object, consciousness and memory. But posited as the absent other of the ratio-driven modern experience, it nonetheless shows itself as the constitutive fort of the da that is modernity. 28 In our “modern times” then, that which causes spontaneous mnemonic eruptions is not properly speaking erlebt. Thus Proust’s memoire involontaire is not “what has befallen the subject as Erlebnis” (B I:613); it is rather images we have never seen before we remember them.29 Their cognition is made possible strictly by recognition, in an event of a mnemonic shock—unexpected, accidental, and belated. Just as the past is given to Proust only by chance, so the image does not emerge by being called upon in attentive recollection. Consciousness serves another important end—the opposite of the memory trace. It anxiously protects against stimuli, cushions shocks: “je gelaufiger ihre Registrierung dem Bewu?tsein wird, desto weniger mu? mit einer traumatischen Wirkung dieser Chocks gerechnet werden” (B I:613). This is how Erlebnis comes into being. That it has been registered, “calculated” [gerechnet], that it no longer has the power to chance upon our wakeful consciousness and catch us unawares should, by logic, sterilize it for any poetic experience. “Ein erlebtes Ereignis ist endlich,” writes Benjamin in “Zum Bilde Prousts” (B II:312); as such it fails to open up the infinite universe of the past’s sensual pleasures the way an unregistered occurence does in Proust’s experience of involuntary recollection. A Zentralpark fragment puts it more forcefully: Erlebnis is only a euphemism for an “abgestorbene Erfahrung,” an experience that died when we consciously lived it and was thus never born to our consciousness (B I:681). Yet the impact of Baudelaire’s lyric seems to have everything to do with this finitude. The claim of the essay is essentially this: an Erfahrung that is not always already abgestorben is perhaps no Erfahrung at all; every lived experience is a dead experience at the very moment we live it. Benjamin brings in Valery’s reflections to support this hypothesis. I would, however, suggest that Virginia Woolf’s Freud-laced memoir “A Sketch of the Past” which she started in the spring of 1939, just as the second Baudelaire essay was being completed, describes the effect of lived shocks on poetic production even better. Having received more than her share of unconscious blows, she speaks of learning to master them:
This lengthy passage, one of the most revealing among Woolf’s autobiographical confessions, speaks of her writing’s mission precisely in terms of “die Emanzipation von Erlebnissen” (B I:615): wresting the dangerous moment from the unreality of daily life, from one’s body, from “what one says and does” by a conscious, graphematic effort of putting it into words, marking it as lived. Benjamin identifies Baudelaire’s poetic task as exactly the same, “Es haben ihm Leerstellen vorgeschwebt in die er seine Gedichte eingesetzt hat” (ibid.). And if Woolf speaks of making whole what was split asunder by an unexpected blow from behind the cotton wool, one could hardly define this wholeness in terms of pleasure and beauty alone—even though the language of wholeness is generally associated with beautiful forms. Woolf’s writerly shock defence is actually never shock-proof; in welcoming blows, it seems to claim a passage beyond the pleasure principle, over to what Freud’s text names “the reality principle” (Beyond 7), a self-preserving deferral of pleasure in the face of a danger posed by the primal desire for pleasure’s constancy.30 Furthermore, she fashions this defense as a revelation of “some real thing behind appearances”—something that, in Bergson’s idiom, “outruns perception itself” in the initial surprise and whose reality can be determined only after it has entered the structure of significance. Woolf does invoke the “satisfaction” of taking away the pain, the “delight” of discursively putting “the severed parts together” into a “work of art” that is the world—but she refuses to stop there. In a spasmodic quickening of short clauses, mere “delight” gives way to “rapture,” and what is being carefully put together again, given form is suddenly thrown back to the moment of a devastating deformation into which the attentive shock recipient first entered. “We are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself”—”we” are in this “thing” together: no subjects, no objects, everything is One. “And I see this when I have a shock.” If read out loud, Woolf’s passage would, no doubt, need a caesura inserted just before this last sentence. Woolf makes such a perfect complement to Benjamin’s constellation of poets, philosophers, and scientists because the Erlebnis from which she consciously works to liberate herself—each time anew—leads to something she names, not without reservations, “a philosophy,” an “idea” of discontinuous experience. It arises from the shocking moment through which the intended delight of beauty as continuity is born. But the idea comes to written expression only in the expressionless space of another shock.31 Benjamin, in reading Baudelaire, builds his philosophy of experience on the same ground. At several points the essay recalls the poet’s own metaphor for writing—fencing to parry shocks as he works his way through the blow-inducing veil of the crowd (“Je vais m’exercer seul a ma fantasque escrime”). This fencing, Benjamin says near the end, is akin to “the impotent rage of someone fighting the rain or the wind” (I 194). And this is what reveals the beauty of the “Le Soleil” stanza from which the metaphor is taken: “es ist die Geistermenge der Worte, der Fragmente, der Versanfange, mit denen der Dichter in den verlassenen Stra?enzugen den Kampf um die poetische Beute ausficht” (B I:618). There is, however, another kind of poetry in Les fleurs du mal: the poetry of the correspondences. It is the poetry of pure memory in which no trace can ever surface. Unlike the lyric of “le beau moderne,” the booty of bits and fragments procured by the fencing consciousness in everyday encounters, the poetry of the correspondences is marked by no Erlebnis. It is written on days when time is not chopped up by blows and there is nothing to experience. The only trace of the poet’s life it bears is the mark of the day itself—the date stamp—the sort of mark one assigns to an incident in order to register its ocurrence “at the cost of the integrity of its contents” (I 163). “Diese bedeutende Tage sind die Tage des vollendenen Zeit... Es sind Tage des Eingedenkens” (B I:637), days of vigilant, willful recollection that, by the logic of Benjamin’s prior discussion, is entirely problematic. What exactly would be recalled on these days? And more importantly, in what sense is time meant to be completing here? Dismissing the scholarly volumes on the transcendent significance of the correspondences as “the common property of the mystics” (I 181), Benjamin makes a striking assertion: “Die correspondences sind die Data des Eingedenkens. Sie sind keine historischen, sondern Data der Vorgeschichte” (B I:639). What it means, he continues, is that these data emerge from the realm of cult, the only possible place where modern experience can establish itself in shock-proof form. “Dringt [die Erfahrung] uber diesen Bereich hinaus, so stellt sie sich als “das Schone” dar. Im Schonen erscheint der Kultwert als Wert der Kunst” (B I:638). As any reader of the “Kunstwerk” essay would remember, “the cult value of the work of art in categories of space and time perception” (I 243) has everything to do with the aura, defined there as “die einmalige Erscheinung einer Ferne, so nah sie sein mag” (B I:480)—a unique appearance of a distance in the here and now of sensible forms. This value’s major quality is the unapproachability of the cult object. In works of art as described in the “Kunstwerk” essay, the appearance of an auratic distance is inseparably connected to the singular phenomenal presence of the work itself, its being there for the observer. Later in the Baudelaire essay, Benjamin associates the aura with the unique perceptual data of the memoire involontaire: lost to the memory that seeks to retain them, they produce images invested with the power to return our gaze, which is the primary quality of the Kultbild. In Baudelaire’s correspondences, however, no such data can ever appear, images attached to all previously experienced sensory perceptions are lost to oblivion. What these poems instead recall is merely the most basic sense impressions connected to no particular occurence. Gathered in the temple of nature, “les parfumes, les couleurs, et les sons” commingle in “une tenebreuse et profonde unite.” The unity is as profound as it is obscure, its attraction irresistible, the distance of its object absolute. In the correspondances then, the aura of the prehistory of any Erfahrung makes its pure appearance. But what is this prehistory? How is it remembered? An important footnote supplied at this point takes us back to the Goethe essay and its Kant-informed critique of Schein as the veil of beauty. Citing his own definition of the beautiful as that which “remains true to its essential nature only when veiled” (I 199), Benjamin points out that the correspondances in fact tell us what the veiling is all about: the reproducing aspect, “das ‘Abbildende’” of the work of art—its “Aporie.” The correspondances determine the beautiful as “den Gegenstand der Erfahrung im Stande des Ahnlichseins” (B I:639). A thoroughly aporetic formulation, Benjamin admits, yet perhaps the best one possible. Resembling itself becomes visible in such an experience. Its object obscure and infinitely unapproachable, the veil of Ahnlichsein comes into view—with the temporal distance, or as that distance, for there is no telling them apart. They are one in the veil of tears: “hysterical tears” (Baudelaire’s own terms), “the truth of the eyes”:32 “die Bilde der Grotten und der Gewachse, der Wolken und der Wogen... heben sich aus dem warmen Dunst der Tranen, welche Tranen des Heimwehs sind” (B I:639). It is thus that the here and now of prehistory is experienced on the days of pure Eingedenken. Tears notwithstanding, it is now possible to see a little more clearly what stands behind the trope of Vorgeschichte. Unlike Proust whose “restorative will remains within the limits of earthly existence,” Baudelaire “faced incomparably more elemental [ursprungliche] and powerful counterforces” (I 182). These, to be sure, are not unrelated to the ones appearing in the third Critique. Recalled to mind in the tear-veiled distance is not the beautiful image of the past but the prehistory of beauty, the very origins of imaging. Indeed, the volitional memory at work in the production of the correspondences could hardly be called memory at all. It has more affinity with the dichterische Phantasie, the reproductive imagination at its most naked—the “prehistoric” force behind any beautiful appearance conjured, akin to Faust’s Helen, “out of the womb of time” (I 187). Consider Baudelaire’s own famous pronouncement from “The Salon of 1859:” “Imagination is the queen of truth, and the possible is one of the provinces of truth. Imagination is positively related to the infinite... No faculties can do without imagination, but the imagination can take the place of some” (SW I:300). As Benjamin’s reading of the correspondences subtly demonstrates, imagination can surely take the place of memory. In fact, it always does so whenever it fastens to the perceptual, bodily shock of the memoire involontaire and lingers over an auratic image “of which the eyes can never have their fill” (I 187). As for imagination’s relation to the infinite, there is no end to our desire for the beautiful in the image of the past—unless, of course, the image is a mere semblance of what can never be willfully visualized, and is recognized to be such.33 “Wenn es die Phantasie ist, die der Erinnerung die Korrespondenzen darbringt,” writes Benjamin in Zentralpark, “so ist es das Denken, das ihr die Allegorien widmet. Die Erinnerung fuhrt beide zu einander” (B I:669). When the veil of semblance is consciously beheld in the absence of the desired object, the imagination makes the poet aware of the aura’s dissolution and thus reveals its own finitude.34 Tears of loss are at the limit of a conscious remembrance in which the aura can still be said to endure—as tears. But when the tears dry up, there is nothing but rage, so Benjamin tells us. Its outbreaks “are timed to the ticking of the seconds to which the melancholy man is slave” (I 184). What brings about the destruction of the aura is the imagination’s failure to present the image from which the spellbound finitude of the temporal distance would shine. The sublimely desolate infinity of the past opens up, and with it, time itself becomes a deadly presence, in its non-figurable pure form which the transcendental imagination schematizes in the only way it knows how: as a progression from second to second, the ticking of the clock. If the bodily trace of a latent memory (such as a smell, taste, sound, touch), awakened in the involuntary recollection, “deeply drugs the sense of time” (I 184) and can in this manner engender an auratic visualization (the sustained, here-and-now appearance of a beautiful image), vigilant consciousness robs itself of these comforts. It faces the spleen of the passing second with the impotent rage of an Erlebnis divested of the Erfahrung’s “borrowed garb” (I 185). The sobriety of this experience is sublime. Kant’s late anthropology of memory names the same detrimental effect of intoxication with beautiful forms on memory’s “cognitive capacity.” The following curious passage could not have escaped Benjamin’s attention, for among numerous other things, he collected hilarious quotes and anecdotes reflecting the unsurpassed Lebensmacht of Kant’s teaching. This pronouncement in Anthropology is, however, more than a matter for comic relief:
Kant’s censure of the Romanleserin for killing time in a distracted absence from self offers an incisive commentary on Benjamin’s theory of remembrance. By habitually following her imagination’s “blo?e Erdichtungen,” says the philosopher, the reader of novels exercises her forgetfulness and, as a result, is less capable of paying attention to the present of the empirical world for which she should be making herself useful. Beautiful form commences the free play of associations as it offers itself to the moment (i. e., fulfills the intention“sich fur den Augenblick zu unterhalten”); it makes a present of itself, a semblance of the always-present. Succumbing to the illusion of the atemporal, the reader kills time and loses memory in the process. The Baudelaire essay radicalizes the kind of attitude Kant negatively prescribes. Benjamin’s text takes as his task to demonstrate what exactly becomes of memory when the hypervigilant presence of mind never lets go of its subject. When you fail to kill time by “blo?e Erdichtungen,” Benjamin seems to suggest, time kills you, the subject of intentional experiential authority, by a blo?es Leben in which there is no place for what the distracted reader of novels would presumably call experience. Time kills you by making itself felt as something other than a transparent continuum; it momentarily transports you from that continuum to another—the kind in which it makes itself felt: “Im spleen ist die Zeit verdringlicht; die Minuten decken den Menschen wie Flocken zu. Diese Zeit ist geschichtlos, wie die der memoire involontaire. Aber im spleen ist die Zeitwahrnehmung ubernaturlich gescharft; jede Sekunde findet das Bewu?tsein auf dem Plan, um ihren Chock abzufangen” (B I:642). You do not die as a living body, but you do go under as the subject of Erfahrung. Your survival, as subject, is predicated on your attachment to life, your corporeal presence of mind: such is the plan of consciousness.35 But perhaps even the reader of novels is not entirely free from this plan. As we read in Einbahnstra?e, “Als Lebensuhr, auf der die Sekunden nur so dahineilen, hangt uber den Romanfiguren die Seitenzahl. Welcher Leser hatte nicht schon einmal fluchtig, geangstigt zu ihr aufgeblickt?” (B IV:118). The negotiation between Romanfiguren and Seitenzahl is at the bottom of any experience. That the two appear on the same page makes the negotiation all the more anxiety-ridden. In another footnote to the Baudelaire essay, Benjamin points out that the paralyzing consciousness of time’s empty passage is not sustainable as something from which one could derive harmony, let alone self-fulfilling pleasure of the order of the duree. Poe, in his mystical “Colloquy of Monos and Una” attempts to do just that when through a character relating his postmortem experiences from the grave, he envisions “the moral embodiment of man’s abstract idea of Time” as “a mental pendulous pulsation,” the sixth sense one acquires in death. This harmony, writes Benjamin, “wird freilich vom Takt des Sekundenzeigers sehr leicht gestort” (I 200; B I:642). The disruption of harmony by the second-hand is precisely what happens in his own remarkable, yet unexamined “filler joke” “Auf die Minute” (1934), which silently adds perhaps the most significant character to the constellation featured in the Baudelair essay. 36 Killed Time: Heidegger[...] Ganz zu schweigen von jener furchterlichsten Droge — uns selber —, die wir in der Einsamkeit zu uns nehmen. Written in the orbit of the “Kunstwerk” essay and published in the Frankfurter Zeitung under the pseudonym Detlef Holz, this short piece tells of a strange experience that befalls the narrator during his first-time radio broadcasting session. Invited to present a brief talk on bibliology, his Spezialgebiet, he is sternly instructed always to remember two fundamental rules of live broadcasting. First, he is to speak in a natural conversational manner [zwanglos], as if addressing each individual member of the audience, not a faceless mass in a lecture hall: “Der Radiohorer ist fast immer ein einzelner, und angenommen selbst, Sie erreichen einige Tausende, so erreichen Sie immer nur tausende Einzelner” (B IV:761). Second, he is to observe the time limit “to the minute,” for if his talk runs late, it would disrupt subsequent programming. “Also vergessen Sie nicht,” sums up the studio manager, “zwanglose Vortragsart! Und auf die Minute schlie?en!” A watch in hand, the narrator practices at home and comes to the studio well-prepared to entertain each invisible listener for exactly twenty minutes. As he enters the room and notices its stillness and comfortable layout—clearly meant to put the speaker at ease,—he is shown a big Standuhr with no hour hand. When the minute hand reaches 40, his time is up. The announcer is a most obliging fellow; he greets the narrator warmly and leaves the control room fully confident that the latter will do just fine without supervision. Everything goes well until the narrator is halfway through the script. He then glances at the clock only to see that—horror of horrors!—two thirds of his slot have expired. How could it be? Has he erred in his practice calculations? Has he been reading too slowly? Panicked, he goes on in the prescribed engaging tone of voice [mit verbindlichem Tonfall], feverishly looking for a solution. There is no choice, the text must be cut short, parts of it will be sacrificed. “Aus meinem Text mich herauszurei?en war nicht gefahrlos,” says the narrator, “[a]ber mir blieb kein Wahl” (B IV:762). He omits a substantial section and, like an airplane on descent, enters the final circle. Having finished, he sighs with relief and awaits the announcer who is to replace him in the studio. But oddly, no one comes. The narrator puts on his coat and makes for the door when once again he glances at the clock. The minute hand is at 36! Four full minutes to go. When he checked the time before, he must have registered the position of the second-hand!
He decides to salvage what he still can, pulls an excised page out of his pocket—”das erste beste”—and begins to read on “in a voice that seemed to emphasize [ubertonen]” his heartbeat: “Einfalle durfte ich nicht mehr von mir verlangen” (ibid.). As the rescued passage is short, he changes the speaking style. It becomes almost oratorial: ‘ich... lie? die Vokale ausschwingen, rollte das r und schob gedankenvolle Satzpausen ein” (ibid.). Thus he reaches the end—”diesmal das richtige.” The announcer who promptly reappears is as obliging [verbindlich] as he was at the beginning of the broadcast. Let us pause for a minute and reflect on this sequence before we get to the punch line of Benjamin’s joke. The narrative seems to construct a fitting allegory for the key theoretical issues we were faced with in this chapter, for in a condensed form, “Auf die Minute” presents the archetypal scenario of a sublime event in which the texture of time is momentarily torn and the subject’s temporal stability disrupted. Certain markers Benjamin inserts at critical points are unmistakable coordinates for the reader’s orientation. “Verbindlich” is the word that recurs several times throughout the short story in different contexts and with slightly different meanings. At every point, however, it implies a reassuring connection to the texture of time, the condition of being woven into its tacit, pleasant web. This comfortable knowledge is effected by a willful lack of compulsion required in addressing the audience as a multitude of unique, if invisible, individuals. In this situation, the consciousness of the speaker, confident of its own wakefullnes, alertness to time, is lulled to sleep by the very artifice of Zwanglosigkeit it succeeds in emulating. Or so it appears in the initial jolt when the clock flashes a catastrophe. Yet this first awakening to time leads consciousness into a further dream-like distortion of the temporal sequence. As Benjamin writes in a conceptually related fragment from the Passagen-Werk, “Die ersten Weckreize vertiefen die Schlaf” (B V:494). The subject does violence to his text, and also to himself: he literally feels compelled to tear himself away from the former, at the risk of a certain peril he does not fail to register. It is not, however, until minutes after the decision that he grasps the true sense of the warning. The forceful tearing-away dictated by the intention to synchronize the reading with the clock’s movement is fraught with the same danger as is the casual weaving of one’s voice into the enchanted net. Both aim to level time. In both cases, time strikes back with a vengeance that can only be its own, the rule of the vengeance being such that the violence received is commensurate in proportion with the violence applied.37 The force by which one wrests oneself away from the continuum is countered by the power of rupture in the temporal series. Benjamin’s narrator is only marginally exaggerating when he describes the suddenly horrifying silence in the studio as “das des Todes.” What is deadly about it is the onset of total proximity that is pure blankness tightly encapsulating the subject and, in a very real sense, cutting him off from the temporal text through which his self-presence has been perceived.38 The silence of death in his own ears and in the ears of remote thousands breaks the circuit of the subject’s continuity, exposes him to nothing but his silent body shuddering with primordial anxiety. As for the unit of time in which the absence of the announcer is comprehended, its temporality in the story’s sequence is hard to identify. Past, present, future, and also none of these, it is the story’s caesura: a moment in which, according to Holderlin’s definition, “besteht... nichts mehr, als die Bedingungen der Zeit oder des Raums” (Holderlin 1188). All that takes place in the cited paragraph happens at once: it is “im gleichen Augenblick” that he understands, shudders, is ovecome by an indescribable fear and a wild resolve—”gleich darauf.” No form of extension is displayed in this description, no intention expressed. Freedom flickers up in this death-filled moment which to the narrator is anything but free, and thus inaugurates a new sequence in which the omitted text is brought back to life. That its reading is a vocal performance makes the text’s salvation doubly vital. But the manner in which the reading resumes is radically different from the fake Zwanglosigkeit. This time the artifice of emulated conversational ease is given up, the presentation rings with ecstatically pitched, operatic Vokale and rollende “r.” Why this change? The manner of the narrator’s performance becomes clearly theatrical. Yet a radio studio is no theater, and here lies an important difference: due to its actual remoteness, the audience vanishes for the narrator altogether—hence the abandonded conversational tone. What matters is the corporeal embodiment of the rescued text, the synchronization of its dramatic presentation with the heartbeat. This is the tragic unity of man and character whose fate is being fulfilled. Acting to him is indistiguishable from being, and being from acting. In his determination to reach the right end, he pays attention only to the beating heart. In terms of a much earlier fragment from Einbahnstra?e, this act could be described as corporeal presence of mind, leibhafte Geistesgegenwart, the performative “now”, valorized there as a decisive [entsheidend] “extract of the future,” far more precious than the foreknowledge of the most distant events: “die Zukunftsdrohung ins erfullte Jetzt zu wandeln, dies... ist Werk leibhafter Geistesgegenwart” (B IV:142). That the performance at hand is theatrical suggests, however, our turning to the Kunstwerk essay (1936) for which the story already sets the stage. While Benjamin’s narrator does not perform the part of a character, he—even if unconsciously—acts out himself as a tragic hero. And as we read in the Kunstwerk essay, “die Aura, die auf die Buhne um Macbeth ist, kann von der nich abgelost werde, die fur dash lebendige Publikum um den Schauspieler ist, welcher ihn spielt.” (B I:489). This is no doubt fully applicable to our story where the narrator faces similar Apparatur instead of a live audience.The story’s end—it can now be told—illustrates the shattering of the aura most vividly. Despite the announcer’s Verbindlichkeit at the end of the broadcast, the narrator is still ill at ease, he is anxious to hear what those individuals who listened to the program have to say about his radio debut. The following day he asks a friend what he thought. “Es war sehr nett”, sagte er. “Nur hapert es eben immer mit den Empfangern. Meiner hat wieder eine Minute volkommen ausgesetzt” (B IV:763). A well-hidden subtext may help us to tie Benjamin’s joke into the overall texture of our discussion. The narrator’s “wilde Entschlossenheit” is noteworthy. The word is not idly chosen and unmistakably gestures toward the Entschlossenheit of Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit where it is a key term in the discussion of Dasein’s “attestation for an authentic potentiality-for-Being.” The story’s sober conclusion reveals a deeply embedded hostility of Benjamin’s veiled allusion. 39 Being and Time posits “resoluteness” as “the truth of Dasein which is most primordial” (Being and Time 343 §60), “authentic Being-one’s Self..., authentically nothing else than Being-in-the-world” (ibid. 344). Heidegger defines the concept as “reticent self-projection upon one’s ownmost Being-guilty” (ibid). Entschlossenheit “signifies letting oneself be summoned out of one’s lostness in the ‘they’ [das Man],” which, in turn, stands for an inauthentic aggregate who know “only the ‘general situation’,” the alltagliche,are still irresolute and have not decided on their own “ownmost potentiality-for-Being-their-Selves” (ibid. 344). Furthermore, Heidegger explicitly links “lostness in the ‘they’” with “listening-away” to das Man and, consequently, the inability to hear oneself as Dasein: “This listening-away [to the ‘they’] must get broken off; in other words, the possibility of another kind of hearing which will interrupt it, must be given by Dasein itself” (ibid. 316; §55). It is then resoluteness that, on hearing the call of Dasein, throws one back to one’s authentic Being: Dasein takes over “that entity which it already is” (§68a), remembers itself in the anxiety of Being-unto-death and the “ecstasis (rapture)” of forgetting one’s “inauthentic ways of having been.” Dasein comes into its own in the moment of vision, the Augenblick which Heidegger distinguishes from the now:
The moment of Entschlossenheit thus marks the site where present, past, and future can be gathered together. The “present” of this moment is different from the “Jetzt” because it is the phenomenologically conceptualized condition of possibility of the latter: that which is given in determination, that which gives to the present its determination. The Heideggerian Augenblick authenticates one’s Being; “once one has grasped the finitude of one’s existence, it snatches one back from the endless multiplicity of possibilities which offer themselves as closest to one—those of comfortableness, shirking, and taking things lightly—and brings Dasein into the simplicity of its fate” (Being and Time 435 §74). All of this seems to be happening in Benjamin’s story whose subject is snatched from “public time,” “the inauthentic temporality of everyday Dasein” (Being and Time 477), given awareness of his finitude, aroused to “another kind of hearing,” shudders in primordial anxiety, and is overcome by a wild “resoluteness” in which he chooses the possibility “handed down” to him: to salvage the sacrificed text, re-play the Endspiel so as to reach “the right end.” As Heidegger explains in the section on temporality and historicality, “The resoluteness in which Dasein comes back to itself, discloses current factical possibilites of authentic existing, and discloses them in terms of the heritage which that resoluteness, as thrown, takes over.” (Sein und Zeit 507 §74). Yet Benjamin’s irony is not to be missed. The epithet he employs to describe his narrator’s “moment of vision” mocks Heidegger’s ponderous vocabulary. Although Sein und Zeit states that in anxiety, “Dasein is taken all the way back [zuruckgenommen] to its naked uncanniness [nackte Unheimlichkeit], and becomes fascinated by it [benommen]” (Being and Time 394 §68b), the authenticity attained in the Augenblick does not quite have the intensity of “a wild resoluteness.” Springing from “the future of resoluteness” (ibid. 395), not “from the lost Present” (as would be the case with fear [Furcht]), anxiety [Angst] in Heidegger makes for a resoluteness of a calmer, cathartic sort. Near the end of the work, the philosopher states that the Dasein’s awakening to its authentic historicality is a birth to a steadiness “which has been stretched along” in a “primordial” way “and… has no need of connectedness [Zusammenhang]” (ibid. 442 §75). According to him, it is an ontological error to suppose that resoluteness “would be actual as “Experience” [Erlebnis] only as long as the “act” of resolving lasts” (ibid. 443). The steadiness of existence “is not interrupted but confirmed [bewahrt] in the moment of vision” (ibid.). The underlying assumption here is that historical time could be authentic and that, as Heidegger’s analysis of the first Critique seems to suggest, the transcendental imagination, crudely speaking, is originary time (Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics 131).40 This assumption, to Benjamin, is thoroughly mythical and hence supremely dangerous. What to the Angst-ridden narrator was in the studio a high tragedy later appears to have had more in common with a sober Trauerspiel. The latter’s heroes die, but their death means nothing; they carry on the show as ghosts. In the 1916 essay “Trauerspiel und Tragodie,” written, as Howard Caygill recently argued, partially in response to Heidegger’s 1915 lecture “Die Zeitbegriff und die Geschichtswissenschaft” (“Benjamin, Heidegger” 4), Benjamin sets up the following opposition:
The relays between this passage and the story are unmistakable. While the narrator believes to have reached the “right end” with his resolute second reading, it concludes nothing. The listener perceives it instead as a mere continuation of the zwanglose show on which the individual time of the hero confers no determinacy. To be sure, the friend’s version comes to the narrator as a mirror image and a spectral replay of his own “Being-unto-death” when the radio set suddenly steps onto the stage as the true master of universal time and snatches away “a whole minute.” The distance of the radio range separating the actor and his audience in the story exponentially enhances this ghostly interplay by placing the latter in the form of the electronic medium. The “Trauerspiel” essay recognizes the intreplay of sound and meaning in the mourning play as “die Hemmung der Natur..., gleichsam eine ungeheure Stauung des Gefuhls, dem im Worte plotzlich eine neue Welt aufgeht, die Welt der Bedeutung, der gefuhllosen historischen Zeit... Und die Natur des Trauerspiels bleibt Torso in diesem erhabenen Symbol” (B II:139). This blocking of nature, the monstrous damming up of feelings is due to the foundering of “nature” unable to enter true historical time to which feelings, including the sublime feeling, are irrelevant. What causes the blocking in “Auf die Minute,” is the intensity of individual time turning against itself. Confronting, in the moment of danger, the impassive pure time, the subject “salvages himself for feeling... by becoming king: a symbol as the bearer of this crown” (SW 60). He feels compelled to fulfill his destiny, but “fate is the guilt complex of the living. It corresponds to the natural condition of the living” (“Fate and Character,” R 308). “The guilt complex is temporal in a totally inauthentic way, very different in its kind and measure from the time of redemption, or... of truth” (ibid.). Nothing is redeemed or resolved in the narrator’s sublime experience, for the symbol of authentic Being gets shattered at the receiving end of the transmission. At the same time, this experience leaves behind a significant empty space, a haunting gap in the continuum, registered by the listener’s distracted ear. If, as Benjamin tells us, the time of the Trauerspiel is never fulfilled, and hence finite, it is because nothing is, or can ever be reconciled in this finitude. While Benjamin himself never explicitly elaborated on what he, in a 1930 French letter to Scholem, termed “quelque scintillement de l’entre-chock” between his own and Heidegger’s “tres differentes” ways of viewing history (Briefe 506), Theodor Adorno attempted to break this silence by critiquing Heidegger’s ontologization and detemporalization of time precisely from the standpoint of Benjamin’s philosophy of history as he understood it. Thus in Negative Dialektik, he launches a particularly agressive attack on the philosopher’s “transposition of history into the existentiale of historicity” (Negative Dialektik 134). The following passage is remarkable for its Benjaminian imagery, as is Adorno’s recourse to the problematics of the aura:
With this harsh assessment, one should not be surprised at Adorno’s charge that in Sein und Zeit “Zeit selber, und damit Vergangnis, wird von den existentialontologishen Entwurfen als ewig ebenso verabsolutiert wie verklart... Das sind die jungsten Trostungen der Philosophie, vom Schlag des mythischen Euphemismus; falsch auferstandener Glaube, der Bann des Naturlichen ware dadurch gebrochen, da? man ihn beschwichtigend nachmacht (ibid. 136). This is not to say, of course, that Adorno here equates time with mere transience. There are plenty of passages in Negative Dialektik that also reject the kinds of inauthentic modalities of time to which Heidegger offers his alternative.41 And even if Adorno’s own method in Negative Dialektik of conceptualizing such modalities does not quite escape the metaphysics of presence and presencing, the Benjaminian rigor with which he contests Heidegger’s onthology of history throws sufficient light on Benjamin’s cryptic but vital references to his philosophical adversary.42 Adorno’s discussing Heidegger’s auratic fallacy in terms of transmission is an invitation for us further to think “Auf die Minute” in that context. That none of the narrator’s theatrical resoluteness came through in the transmission shows the extent to which the aura of the unique moment has been shattered for the recepient. The only trace of the studio event he is able to register is a ghostly hole in the otherwise pleasurable (nett) net (Netz) of the transmission itself. Furthermore, the recipient ascribes the interruption to the radio receiver, i. e. the technological device by whose means the broadcaster is supposed to “rule” in closing the distance between himself and the individual listener. Benjamin confirms this in the Kunstwerk essay when he says that “die Entschalung des Gegenstandes aus seiner Hullem die Zertrummerung der Aura, ist die Signatur einer Wahrnehmung, deren ’Sinn fur das Gleichartige in der Welt’ so gewachsen ist, da? sie es mittels der Reproduktion auch dem Einmaligen abgewinnt” (B I:480). But is the shattering of the aura that Benjamin describes in this scenario really the aura’s death? To answer this question we need to take a little detour in order to consider, of necessity briefly, the question of technology in its relevant historical entframing. The facts are obvious—much too obvious. 1934 is the year of the Nuremberg rallies “gestaltet” by Riefenstahl in Triumph des Willens. Benjamin is already in exile, forced to rely on the generosity of friends for subsistence. He spends the summer of that year staying with Brecht and Helene Weigel in an isolated farm house near the Danish town of Svendborg. Many evenings he sits glued to Brecht’s radio that brings him the sounds of historial events as they are unfolding back home. A letter to Scholem of July 20 reports the following: “Along Svendborg’s superior amenities is a radio, which one now needs more than ever. Thus I was able to listen to Hitler’s Reichstag speech, and because it was the very first time I had ever heard him, you can imagine the effect.” (Correspondence 450). That same year the proto-fascist popular author Enrst Junger publishes his essay “Uber den Schmerz,” in which he, also in the wake of the Nazis’ first massive propaganda use of media technology, addresses the possibility of an event’s being repeatedely experienced in all its immediacy through instanteneous electronic transmission. Junger sees in this development the potential for turning political events into mere objects of transmission:
While calling attention to this growing objectification of events, Junger embraces the aesthetic purposelessness animating the technological era. To him, the mobilising potential of media technology paves the way for the spectacle of an objectified, pain-defying, and uniformly constructed humanity, for “hinter dem Vergnugungscharakter der totalen Mittel, wie des Rundfunks und des Films, verbergen sich besondere Formen der Disziplin” (Junger 185). While calling attention to this growing objectification of events, Junger embraces the aesthetic purposelessness animating the technological era. To him, the mobilising potential of media technology paves the way for the spectacle of an objectified, pain-defying, and uniformly constructed humanity, for “hinter dem Vergnugungscharakter der totalen Mittel, wie des Rundfunks und des Films, verbergen sich besondere Formen der Disziplin” (Junger 185). Junger’s impact on Heidegger’s early work is another fact that warrants mentioning.43 Influenced by Junger as he was in his early years, at the time the philosopher worked to overcome Junger’s view of history as an aesthetic phenomenon, simulateneously rethinking some of his own previous positions. 1934 is the year of Heidegger’s “Kehre”: he resigns his rectorship at Freiburg after a few indelible events known as the “Heidegger affair,” taking up the task of thinking what, in Lyotard’s terms, “not only in Nazism, but also in his engagement in the service of knowledge for the “resoluteness” of the people, belonged obviously to the occultation… of the unforgettable and always forgotten thing” (Heidegger and “the jews” 75). Thus, in a 1938 lecture “Die Begrundung des neuzeitlichen Weltbildes durch die Metaphysik,” subsequently reworked as “Die Zeit des Weltbildes” for the much later volume Holzwege, Heidegger implicitly responds to Junger’s above observations by noting that “with the destruction of distance by the airpane” and the ability of radio to render the remote instantaneously present [herzustellendes Vor-stellen] at the flick of a switch we can determine “der Grundvorgang der Neuzeit” as “die Eroberung der Welt als Bild” (Holzwege 87). Heidegger interprets the conquering of the world as picture as a subject-securing function. This function, in addition to being totalizing, increases schematism and systematicity with ever greater velocity: “Wo die Welt zum Bild wird, kommt das System, und zwar nicht nur im Denken, zur Herrschaft” (ibid. 93). However, argues Heidegger, the dynamics of vor-stellen whereby the subject secures its foundation as the center of things also leaves an “unsichtbare Schatten, der um alle Dinge uberall geworfen wird, wenn der Mensch zum Subjectum geworden ist und die Welt zum Bild” (ibid. 88). This shadow is that part of the world-as-picture which eludes total representation, being its condition of possibility—not “absence” or “denial of light” (ibid. 104) but evidence of a hidden glow access to which “is denied to us today” (ibid. 88) and which nonetheless reveals itself in its very concealment. Benjamin’s famous pronouncement in the Kunstwerk essay on Fascism’s aesthetization of politics is supplied with a footnote that can also be read as a response to Junger: “In den gro?en Festaufzugen, den Monsterversammlungen, in den Massenveranstaltungen sportlicher Art und im Krieg, die heute samtlich in der Aufnahmenapparatur zugefuhrt werden, sieht die Masse sich selbst ins Gesicht. Dieser Vorgang […] hangst aufs engste mit der Entwicklung der Reproduktions- bzw. Aufnahmetechnik zusammen” (B I:507). To be sure, technology does not run the aura into the ground. Even as Benjamin attributes the decline of the aura to technical reproducibility, he clearly indicates that the aura-shattering capacity of technology is not to be celebrated unequivocally. As Samuel Weber points out, “aura thrives in its decline, and… the reproductive media are particularly conducive to this thriving” (“Mass Mediauras” 45). The media give the mass a face “that seems to look back and a voice that seems to address one directly” (ibid.). One harldy needs to elaborate on the monstrosity of that face or on the ease with which any aesthetization of politics reinstates the aura of the world picture by means of the very same media that undermine it. The reading of technology that Heidegger initiates in “Die Zeit des Weltbildes” and develops in the seminal post-war essay “Die Frage nach der Technik” raises similar concerns, albeit in a somewhat different manner. He stipulates that the subject remains un-free with regard to the technological “Ge-stell” that places the human being into a world whose operating principles can be learned, but whose essence and consequences remain beyond comprehension.44 What is needed, according to Heidegger, is an effort to think technology as a complex and elusive presence that resists critical analysis. However, the problem Adorno addresses in the phenomenology of Being resurfaces here as well: what remains problematic is the very thinkability of the “forgotten thing” “outside of ,” or “prior to” the Ge-stell. It is here that Benjamin’s 1934 story again confronts Heidegger—this time posthumously. What the Ge-stell of Benjamin’s story reveals is precisely the impossibility of thinking the revelation in phenomenological terms, and the structure of this revelation is that of a shock. The ghostly space of the Leerstelle in “Auf die Minute” serves as the mark of the failure to synchronize individual time with its Other. The time of the omission is the spectral, in-between, illegible break of a momentary petrificaiton, the condition of readability of any experience——”the point at which the transmission breaks down” in order to provide “those jags and crags that offer a handhold to someone who wishes to move beyond them” (Passagen-Werk, “N” 9a, 5; B V:592). The fundamental discontinuity that provides access to legibility, the flickers of remembering “the forgotten thing” cannot be sustained. It is from this moment that the critical force of Benjamin’s thinking is derived—the moment that allows a critique not to be complicit with what it critiques, not to become the after-life of the semblance, or aura against which it directs its charge. For ultimately, it is continuous history that Benjamin associates with the aura, and the “stamp of the critical, dangerous moment” underlying the source of all reading, in turn, derives its danger precisely from continuity, the temporal flux of the historicist, insofar as the moment cannot be held fast and insofar as it allows itself to be represented in an image of some duration.45 Benjamin leads us again and again back to the Kantian temporal impossibility on which the very thought of otherness hinges. And every time this impossibility needs to be enacted as that which “flames,” “flits by,” “flashes,” or otherwise disappears in its emergence. The aesthetics of shock: Lyotard calls it an anesthetics. “It is important, very important,” he writes, “to remember that no one can—by writing, by painting, by anything—pretend to be witness and truthful reporter of, be “equal” to the sublime affection, without being rendered guilty of falsification and imposture through this very pretension. The sublime cannot be produced, nor does it ‘project’ itself, it simply happens” (Heidegger and “the jews” 45). For Benjamin, putting “what was” in a constellation with “what is now” is the activity in which it happens most often. The present is momentarily seized by a past; the continuity breaks down, while the shards of the past and present become historical in this very conjunction. Thus, our own critical moment that seals the never actualized encounter between Benjamin and Heidgger. Detlef Holz is the pseudomym under which “Auf die Minute” was published. As a signature common to a series of Benjamin’s writings since 1933, most notably Berliner Kindheit um Neunzehnhundert and a collection of letters and anecdotes Deutsche Menschen, the Aryan surname under which he was forced to publish after the Nazi takeover is no doubt supremely significant in the context of his Goethe essay where, we recall, the burning of wood is what interests the critic. As we read in a letter to Scholem of July 31, 1933 written just before the publication of the Holz-signed piece “Loggien” (a chapter of Berliner Kindheit), “With it, of course, the Detlevian Holz—which I have thrown upon the flame of my life—will fare up for more or less the last time. The new press laws are already taking shape, and after they go into force, my appearances in the German press will require a far more impenetrable disgioese than before” (Correspondence 424). This, to be sure, enters into a most shocking constellation with the centrality of the Holz metaphor in Heidegger’s 1950 volume Holzwege. The famous epigraph to the volume reads:
Sie hei?en Holzwege. Jeder verlauft gesondert, aber im selben Wald. Oft scheint es, als gleiche einer dem anderen. Doch es scheint nur so. Holzmacher und Waldhuter kennen die Wege. Sie wissen, was es hei?t, auf einem Holzweg zu sein. (Holzwege 3) 6. Benjamin’s Excavation: Berliner ChronikAmong the quotes, observations, and programmatic statements of the Dream City section of the Arcades Project («Konvolut K»), the following gloss on a passage from Proust’s Recherche is noteworthy:
While Proust’s passage recommends deep sleep in order to return to the Eden of childhood, the trope of turning in Benjamin’s last sentence immediately recalls awakening. The very first fragment of the K section defines the Copernican turn of remembrance as a flash of awakened consciousness: “Was hier im folgenden gegeben wird, ist ein Versuch zur Technik des Erwachens. Ein Versuch, der dialektischen, der kopernikanischen Wendung des Eingedenkens inne zu werden” (B V:490). Let us also recall another celebrated use of the Wendung metaphor: “Es ist dem philosophischen Schriftum eigen, mit jeder Wendung von neuem vor der Frage der Darstellung zu stehen” (Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, B I:207). The philosophical writing to which such standing is proper is the same philosophy of singular and evanescent temporal experience with which we are concerned here—and with which Benjamin was concerned above all else. Standing before the question of Darstellung, facing it with every new turn is the primary, defining moment of his writing in all its modes and forms. The turning itself is the product of “Verzicht auf den unabgesetzten Lauf der Intention” (B I:208); it is a caesura, an interrupting pause for breath [Atemholen] which the Trauerspiel book names the most proper form of existence of contemplation (ibid.). This resonates powerfully with Holderlin’s calculable law of poetic presentation laid out in his notes to Oedipus: in such moments, says the poet, time takes a categorical turn, “weil sie in solchem Momente sich kategorisch wendet” (Holderlin 396). The repeated renunciation of the intention to keep present what passes, to connect to the present what does not cease to distance itself from the present bares the question of presentation. The violence of auratic presence—be it that of an epistemological certainty, a “timeless truth,” or of a timeless image of the past—dissimulates itself in that it presents. This turning comes with awakening which, Benjamin insists, is intimately related to remembering, and the relation is such that the moment of turning marks the birth of a dialectical after-image in which the veil of Isis is revealed. Proust’s passage speaks of sleep but the Halten [îñòàíîâêà] inscribed in the behalten [ñîõðàí?ò] of Benjamin’s comment points to sleep’s oscillating Other. The injunction to “dig down inwardly” is by the same token a turning against memoir volontaire because, unlike the latter, it carries within itself the possibility of an interruption in the incessant flow of presentations—the possibility of awakening. And if extreme fatigue is what it takes to “break through the surface stone of the body” and “throw out the twisted roots,” it is because on such nights death as a dialectical force enters the dream more prominently than ever. “Il faut descendre” is the imperative to relinquish the self’s mnemonic intention, to dig down to the layers where the self is no longer quite itself, where the dreamer gives himself up to the “new life” contained in the images of the dead city of childhood. But as Benjamin writes in “Zum Bilde Prousts,”
The experience of being at that bottom-most level is no longer compatible with the knowledge of images. Where the dreamer’s muscles dive down, it is the writer’s sentences that become “the entire muscular activity of the intelligible body”; it is they that “contain the whole enormous effort to raise the catch” (ibid.). If the catch can ever be raised at all, it never comes to light eeither in images or in language. What does come to light at the moment of awakening is the blind spot at the heart of the effort, and it comes to light in its dialectical after-image.46 The latter, then, is not a painterly copy of a particular dream image but instead an assembly of the dream’s significant fragments. As Benjamin explains in a 1935 letter to Gretel Adorno, “The dialectical image does not draw a copy of the dream—it was never my intention to assert this. But it does seem to me to contain the instances, the moment consciousness dawns as one awakens, and indeed to produce its likeness onl from these passages just as an astral image emerges from luminous points” (Correspondence 508).47 Another name for this constellation is a mosaic: the first pages of the Trauerspiel book tell us as much. The condition of readability of such a figure is the fragmentation of its constituent pieces, with no grounding conceptualization to underlie their assembly. What allows the dialectical image to testify to “the transcendental weight” of truth is the impact that shatters the matter into “capricious particles” (B I:208). And so, while “Proust’s syntax… reproduces his fear of suffocating,” with the deep breath of “ironic, philosophical, didactic reflections” shaking off the weight of memories (B II:323), Benjamin’s own autobiographical writing adopts a different pneumatics. It incessantly takes conscious pauses for breath, coming to the same object in roundabout ways, pursuing its different levels of meaning. His best-known autobiographical text Berliner Chronik (1932) clearly articulates its debt to Proust already in the opening sequence. Yet its difference from the Recherche is articulated just as clearly in the very same breath.
Rejecting the mortal danger of Proust’s “first form,” Benjamin hopes to develop his own, based on Vorbehalt, which becomes for him the fundamental condition for the writing of memory and autobiography. And as ever so often in Benjamin, the term is not idly chosen; it is replete with echoes and overlaid with multiple meanings. In fact, Vorbehalt cannot be translated here at all: it means “reservation”—both as “retention” and “stipulation”—while also containing the semantic trace of “stopping” retained in the halt. Not only is this a posture of (pre)caution against the onslaught of memories, but also the rhythmical pattern of restoring the past, which problematizes the very effort from the beginning. Benjamin’s Vorbehalt retains both memory and its historical erasure. As for Proust’s trope of excavation which Benjamin made the central metaphor of his 1932 autobiography, it too undergoes a drastic change. Unlike Proust’s, it is not a passive, somnambulistic descent into the dead city of childhood. Instead: “Wer sich der eigenen verschutteten Vergangenheit zu nahern trachtet, mu? sich verhalten wie ein Mann, der grabt. Das bestimmt den Ton, die Haltung echter Erinnrungen” (B VI:486). Thus Benjamin’s mnemonic posture is anything but unintentional: it is that of a digger who conducts the sober work of wakeful excavation with the halting turns of his spade. He too seeks to uncover the “ville morte”—but only as a collection of precious ruins. It is to them that we now turn. As one learns from Benjamin’s biographers and editors, the work on the Chronik followed from an agreement with the journal Die literarische Welt signed in late 1931 that required Benjamin over the following months to deliver four chronicles of 200-300 lines each, or in his own words “eine Folge von Glossen uber alles was mir an Berlin von Tag zu Tag bemwerkenswert erscheine in loser, subjektiver Form zu geben” (B VI:476). Despite his work in Ibiza in early 1932 on the text that became Berliner Chronik, Benjamin failed to fulfil his obligation. The editor of Benjamin’s collected works Rolf Tiedemann speculates in his postscript that the reasons for this lay in the project’s having expanded beyond the dimensions specified in the commission, as well as in the exceptionally personal nature of this work when measured against the standard of his other writings (Tiedemann 100). The published text functions to link fleeting moments into a tenuous autobiographical narrative, but this continuous narrative remains (even after Scholem’s editorial work) inconsistent and erratic, its organization being at times chronological and more often associative. But then, as Tiedemann writes in the notes to the Suhrkamp Collected Works, “Die Berliner Chronik ist eine erste Niederschrift, die keinen durchgehenden Text bildet, vielmehr aus einzelnen, gegeneinander mehr oder weniger unabhangigen Stucken besteht. Benjamin hat, wie er es oft in Heften oder auf Blocken tat, die Blatter nicht kontinuierlich vom ersten bis zum letzten beschrieben, sondern in Sprungen: zunachst oft eine oder mehrere Seiten leer lassend, die er dann spater fullte, wie der jeweilige Platzbedarf es gerade ergab” (B VI:805). Thus, while Berliner Kindheit um neunzehnhundert into which some episodes of Berliner Chronik later evolved was re-worked many times to become a series of highly polished achronic vignettes, the latter remained a seemingly unfinished manuscript comprised of fragments in Benjamin’s microscopic handwriting. And yet, this manuscript stands on its own as a document of a very particular kind. A few years prior to its composition Benjamin had already experimented with the mode of textual montage in which his Einbahnstra?e is written. Thinking this mode productive for the discourse of autobiography, Benjamin writes from Ibiza to Gretel Adorno, “I have surprised myself by taking up again my modes of presentation from One-Way Street for a number of things that are connected to the most important topics of that book” (Briefe 552). This theoretically charged, paratactic text which illuminates, among other things, Benjamin’s precious childhood memories, complicated relationships to his family, his school upbringing, friends of his youth, and particular Berlin cafes he used to frequent, has the rules laid out for its reader in no uncertain terms.
The strategic difference between Benjamin’s two autobiographical projects is clear. The radical reorganization of the material for the Kindheit on the eve of the Nazi takeover is best approached as an attempt to arrest, and even to reverse the looming historical catastrophe. As Adorno argues in his preface to the first German edition of Berlin Childhood, the “estranging proximity” of its beautifully opaque pieces follows from the fact that “the shadow of Hitler’s Reich lies upon them” (“Nachwort” 74). In Berliner Chronik, however, Benjamin pursues another goal: here the chronos of life itself comes to the fore—certainly not as the time of canonical autobiography but as that texture out of which the representation of self is woven. One can sympathize with Scholem’s confusion in editing the disjointed notes, yet one is given to understand that the time of Benjamin’s chronicle simply cannot appear in the form of a continuous register of events, much less in the form of a continuous flow, but rather in the form that “months and years have at the moment of remembrance.” If the rhythm of interruption is to replace that of unbroken continuity, it is because Darstellung,the method Benjamin articulated in the Trauerspiel book, cannot yield any unproblematic personal history of the kind one finds in what usually goes under the name of autobiography. Carol Jacobs was among the first to link the theoretical foundation of Berliner Chronik with the “Epistemo-Critical Prologue”: “What poses as an autobiographical work,” she writes, “is one of the many detours the contemplation begun in The Origin of the German Mourning Play has taken… Benjamin’s method [in Berliner Chronik – EP] is also Darstellung as Umweg, representation or performance as digression, detour, ruse” (“Topographically Speaking” 96). As Jacobs points out, we find this digression already in the opening paragraph where the narrator first enters the labyrinth of memory as he recalls the pompous statues of the royal couple in the labyrinth of the Tiergarten park.
To be sure, it is not the life-like representations of Friedrich Wilhelm and Queen Luise that the child contemplates: his gaze focuses on the margins of the image. But even the marginal picture designed as a piece in the celebratory depiction of the Hohenzollerns’ history remains to the child’s gaze a fragment out of context, much as the two imperial idols appear petrified by the intricate if accidental figures of the stream.48 That this labyrinth is only the first in a countless number of others goes without saying. But what of its center? No doubt, it is precisely the topographic vantage point from which Benjamin is writing, trying to follow the elusive Ariadne who everywhere leads him to the scene where he finds what is most memorable yet always forgotten, like that mysterious object which gives the child his first idea of love. And yet the inability to take his bearing in this maze is also what defines the journey. Moreover, it appears from subsequent passages that the impotence of orientation, inconvenient though it is, is not necessarily to be deplored. On the contrary, the art of deliberately losing oneself in the city is far more important, it seems, than that of finding one’s way:
The sudden transformation of the city into a dark forest signals the privileging of a mode of reading that is drastically dissociated from the familiar one. To learn the art of going astray in the city is to become able to unlearn, disarticulate the very topography taught by conventional schooling: to be able to shake off the weight of authority and intention. No wonder then that Benjamin invokes here the blotter page mazes as the first traces of this dream; the labyrinths left by the excess moisture of what he wrote in class represent the seamy side of experience. Inseparably linked to the mappable, clearly delineated string of life’s events, this side is at the same time utterly unreadable in its magical yet incidental involutions. A striking example of the same—one among many to follow—is a primal experience of loneliness described a little earlier as one of the most remarkable street scenes of his childhood. The elemental powers of nature encountered on that occasion blot out the context of the event, leaving only an “alarm signal” that awakens the writing subject to an aporia.
Let us also consider the sentence that precedes this episode: “Das merkwurdigste aber aller Stra?enbilder aus meiner fruhen Kindheit – merkwurdiger als der Einzug der Baren, den ich mit neun Jahren an der Seite eines Kinderfrauleins – es kann auch meine franzosische Gouvernante gewesen sein – ansah, merkwurdiger als die Pferdebahn, die die Schillstra?e passierte oder dort ihre Endstation hatte, ist – das mu? um 1900 gewewsen sein – eine volkommen menschenleere wie ausgestorbene Stra?e, auf die die scweren poltenden Wassermassen ununterbrochen herabstromten.” The syntactical flow of this sentence is parenthetically disturbed by other incidental associations all of which bear little apparent relation to the scene in which the sequence climaxes. And yet, like the layer of soil a digger goes through in order to get to the interred treasure, they make their presence felt only to highlight the absence of anyone or anything except torrential streams on an empty street at the heart of the experience and the gap of oblivion that follows it. And even if Benjamin puts an approximate date on it, this is hardly a chronicler’s gesture. 1900 is a historical divide between the two eras, a divide between the cozy, infantile existence of the dying bourgeois century and the devastation of the century to come. Zooming in on intensely private moments of representation, valorizing incidental fragments of consciousness, Benjamin never lets broad historical trajectories out of his sight, and it is via these personal moments that the historical enters the text «êàê oåçóðà â aâèæåíèè ìûñëè» (B V:595). The dialectical image we are given in this passage speaks precisely of a belated recognition triggered by an alarm signal from long ago. It is only by writing from the perspective of the now that one can hope to disrupt history by blasting both past and present from their immediate contexts. We the readers of Benjamin’s text become aware of this disruption only gradually—only through a laborious learning process that finally affords an experience of singularity the text itself teaches us. No doubt, the chronicler has a plan that leads his pen-spade’s “careful, probing penetration of the dark earthen realm” (B VI:487). It is the same plan that in a labyrinthine fashion leads the reader toward the required mode of reading. The persistently recurring trope for this plan is topography: both the horizontal topography of a surface map and the vertical one of a mineshaft and tunnel chart. Even as he valorizes the art of losing oneself, Benjamin constantly speaks of strategic mapping:
One wonders, though, to what extent these graphic symbols are useful in orienting the reader towards the figure of the topographer to whom all these places are brimming with significance. To be sure, in one way or another, we learn about autobiographical episodes associated with them; some places get only a passing mention, others (for example, cafes) become focal points of extensive, if somewhat tangential, accounts. And yet the writing self remains ghostly and elusive. But then, as long as “hier… ist von einem Raum… die Rede,” the graphe of the project only points to a certain topos that tells us everything and nothing about the autos. As we learn from a confessional passage that throws some light on the history of the Chronicle, part of the reason why the editors of the Literarische Welt never received the “subjective glosses” on Berlin’s day-to-day life they had commissioned lies in the fact that “dies Subjekt, das jahrelang im Hintergrund zu bleiben war gewohnt gewesen, sich nicht so einfach an due Rampe bitten lie?”—a consequence of Benjamin’s old rule “das Wort “ich” nie zu gebrauchen, au?er in den Briefen” (B VI:475f). In doing so, he adopts the same strategy as Proust and Kafka of whose proximity two years later he will say the following: “Wenn Proust in seiner recherce du temps perdu, Kafka in seinen Tagebuchern Ich sagt, so ist das bei beiden ein gleich transparentes, ein glasernes” (B II:1221). And if in Berliner Chronik the city itself took over what was meant to be a series of subjective observations on it, it is because this strategy makes it impossible to tell apart the space of the self’s life and that of his city: nothing that we learn about the writer of the Chronicle from its pages can be thought separately from the topography of Berlin. But this topography is no less strange than the very form of Benjamin’s text.
Even as this stark confession proceeds to explain the strangeness of the form via the role of those who in Berlin “were… closest” to the writing subject, they too are granted “only a brief shadowy existence.” The sentence that describes this being relegates them in a rapid succession of similes to the marginalized urban under classes, ghosts that haunt particular locations, spirit of the place, finally, mere names on city gravestones. The city’s topography then is also that of a strangely spectral realm where nothing is certain, where spaces and moments are one and the same, where life and death are inseparably intertwined, where people, names, and places constantly metamorphose into each other, flicker up only to vanish again: “…und der dunkle Sinn fur diese Augenblicke, dies Orte gibt vielleicht, mehr als alles anderes, den Erinnerungen der Kindheit das, was sie so scwer zu fassen und zugleich so lockend qalend macht wie halb verge?ne Traume. Denn die Kindheit, die keine vorgefa?te Meinung kennt, kennt auch furs Leben keine. Es kommt dem totenreich, wo es in das der Lebenden hineinragt ebenso prezios verbunden (freilich auch nicht weniger reserviert) entgegen wie dem Leben selbst” (B VI:489). If the interpenetrations of memory and forgetting have the same structure as those of life and death, then the “in-between” spaces (or should one call them moments?), the uncertain loci of interweavings are the points where one enters the topographic labyrinth. A later passage in which Benjamin remembers a lightning-like revelation in Paris that opened for him the most hidden intertwinings of his friendships and relationships, asserts this even more forcefully: “Was in der Kammer… [der] ratselhaften Mitte [des Labyrinthes] haust, Ich oder Schicksal, soll mich hier nicht kummern, umso mehr aber die vielen Eingange, die ins Innere fuhren” (B VI:491). But these entry points are also limits that Benjamin tells us his text is all about.
The pronouns in the last sentence blur its grammatical structure to such an extent that it is hard, if not impossible, to distinguish between the limit of Benjamin’s childhood memories, the historically circumscribed second half of the nineteenth century to which their images belong, and the things out of which, according to Epicurus, these images separate, “thingifying” our perception of them. But perhaps this is what Benjamin has been telling us all along. In this “strange form,” where everything echoes everything else, images constantly get disconnected from their things, emerging from their contexts in order to create the illusion of “things” and by the same token to signify the limit of what can be re-membered, articulated by memory. This may well be the reason why Berliner Chronik is so full of references to thresholds along which the text moves and which it can never cross into a realm that would no longer be mappable as a topographic surface. Thus,
At this point Freud seems to be silently introduced into Benjamin’s critical constellation, perhaps as yet another guide. In any event, Freud’s guidance may be just as illuminating here as that of the others mentioned by name. Freud’s testimony is central not only to the Baudelaire essay but in many ways to the entire corpus of the Passagen-Werk which Benjamin was planning to begin with an articulation of the dialectical image as a production of a social unconscious.49 Freud’s recurrent use of the term “topography” with regard to psychoanalytic models is certainly no coincidence. As Nagele points out, where Freud speaks about the topology of the unconscious/preconscious-conscious or that of the Ego, Id, and Superego, “the logic of topography defines and delineates the forces of interaction through the determining quality of the inter, that is through relations and differences rather than through self-identical substances” (Theater, Theory 71). It is this logic of positionality and difference that drives the movement of Benjamin’s text across the singular landscapes of memory determined by the unconscious. A crossing-over beyond memory’s literalized space is not within the grasp of a conscious effort. This “beyond” remains the Other of an ostentatious exterior, and the intentionality of any effort towards that otherness marks the limit, the difference permeating and shaping every phenomenon on the scene. And again, this is where Benjamin’s and Freud’s thoughts converge in their reliance on Kantian delimitations. A telling aside Freud makes in Jenseits des Lustprinzips invokes the very same correlation of time and consciousness that lies at the bottom of Benjamin’s project: “As a result of certain psycho-analytic discoveries, we are today in a position to embark on a discussion of the Kantian theorem that time and space are ‘necessary forms of thought’. We have learnt that unconscious mental processes are in themselves ‘timeless’. This means in the first place that they are not ordered temporally, that time does not change them in any way and that the idea of time cannot be applied to them. These are negative characteristics which can only be clearly understood if a comparison is made with conscious mental processes” (Beyond 31f.). Benjamin’s “chronicle” is constituted just by the sort of “timelessness” in terms of which Freud describes the unconscious. To Benjamin, however, the image-forming unconscious determines the effects not only of sexual desire but equally of belonging to a particular class. In the above passage, both intersect in the figure of the prostitute, one of the significant marginal characters under scrutiny in Passagen-Werk where it is explicitly linked with the threshold experience in the age of high capitalism. Commenting on the poverty of the modern-day experience from which the transitions earlier associated with rites of passage are increasingly absent, Benjamin points to falling asleep, waking up, and the sexual permutations of love as the only such experiences available to us. In all of these, it is the thresholds themselves from which we draw our energies, while “die Huren… lieben die Schwellen dieser Traumtore” (B V:617). They love these thresholds so much that in Berliner Chronik we see them becoming figures of mythical stature, household goddesses of the cult of Nothing guarding entryways to the Great Beyond which rises up in the child’s imagination like the fata morgana of Baltic sand dunes conjured up by the sand-colored walls of a train station in whose vicinity these goddesses reside. If childhood itself is situated in the threshold region, closely and uneasily connected to the “beyond” of the pleasure principle, it should come as no surprise that some of the boy’s most memorable sexual fantasies are recorded in the vision of a prostitute in a tight sailor suit (presumably of the sort that the boy would himself wear at the time). That prostitutes were in the course of the nineteenth century often likened to aged children becomes for Benjamin more than a commonplace; without valorizing the prostitute’s inner innocence in the Dostoyevskian manner, he places the child and the prostitute in the same threshold zone at the gates of the mappable timespace. And as said, accosting a prostitute in the street pushes the narrator into the border zone not only because it arouses him sexually. Inextricably connected with the sexual adrenalin surge is the anticipation of a stepping over the threshold of one’s class, an anticipated, even if never actualized, social transgression that excites the adolescent just as much. But the body itself is no more readable and topographically mappable in its totality than the unconscious.50 Corporeal sensitivity, heightened attention to the workings of inner sensations and responses are directly responsible for the production of dream images: the individual and the collective unconscious displace these signals and responses into hallucinatory dreams and phantasmagorias. “Das XIX Jahrhundert ist ein Zeitraum (ein Zeit-traum), in dem das Individualbewu?tsein sich reflecktierend immer mehr erhalt, wogegen das Kollektivbewu?tsein in immer tieferem Schlafe versinkt. Wie nun der Schlafer aber – darin dem Irren gleich – durch seinen Leib die makrokosmische Reise antritt und die Gerausche und Gefuhl des eignen Innern... in seinen unerhort geschrften innern Sinnen Wahn oder Traumbild, die sie ubersetzen und erklaren, zugen, so geht es auch dem traumenden Kollektivum, das in Passagen in sein Inneres sich vertieft” (Passagen-Werk; B V:491f.). No doubt, the sleeping collective does the same when it retreats into the safe, cozy interieur of the bourgeois home. Benjamin describes his grandmother’s colossal apartment on Blumeshof as a realm of Sleeping Beauty, hermetically sealed not just from the real world, but also from the Real. The collective unconscious reigning here endows the inventory filling the countless rooms with the false sense of timelessness and permanence that displaces itself into the nightmarish visions of the individual inhabitant: “Das Elend konnte in diesen Raumen keine Stelle haben, in welchen ja nicht einaml der Tod sie hatte. Sie hatten keinen Raum zum Sterben – darum starben ihre Besitzer im Sanatorium, die Mobel aber kamen gleich im ersten Erbgang an den Trodler. In ihnen war der Tod nicht vorgesehen – darum waren sie am Tage so gemutlich und des nachts der Schauplatz unserer beundrucknedsten Traume” (B VI:501). Mapping the effects of these personal and collective displacements names the penetrating interdependencies of the historical subject and the subjects of history. A rupture of the continuity of time and memory makes such mapping possible because it blasts open the inner space of bourgeois subjectivity that contains and mediates the chaos of experience: “Hier finde ich, wie in einigen andern Stellen, in meinem Gedachtnis streng fixierte Worte, Ausdrucke, Verse, die wie eine bildsame spater aber erkaltete Masse den Abdruck des Zusammensto?es zwischen einem gro?ern Kollektiv und mir in sich bewahrt haben. Wie eine gewisse Art bedeutsamer Traume in Worten das Wewachen uberdauert, wenn sonst schon alle ubrigen Trauminhalte sich verfluchtigt haben, so sind hier isolierte Worte als Male katastrophaler Begegnungen stehen geblieben” (B VI:475). The imprinting power of the signifier thus receives its significance from beyond the confines of familiar linguistic registers of rationality. Like the seal in the Goethe essay, the words, sentences and phrases stamp his memory with an imprint of an order beyond the person who stamps and seals. Thus the mapping of memory’s space in Berliner Chronik is a mapping of isolated signifiers that point beyond themselves while never yielding a map of the whole. Benjamin’s topography of these allegorical imprints on the ossified surface of memory is directed against the bourgeois imaginary because it cuts the signifier from the signified. And insofar as “Allegorien sind im Reiche der Gedanken was Ruinen im Reiche der Dinge” (Urspring des deutschen Trauerspiels; B I:354), the contents of memory must be first ploughed through in order to unearth those ruins. But in the moment of churning, the particular sedimentation of memory, the very topography that needs to be articulated is also destroyed. For what the churning leaves behind forms new and unexpected sedimentations that in a new churning will yield rather different images of the past. Yet memories “durfen sich nicht scheuen, immer wieder auf einen und denselben Sachverhalt zuruckzukommen; ihn auszustreuen wie man Erde ausstreut, ihn umzuwuhlen wie man Erdreich umwuhlt. Denn Sachverhalte sind nur Lagerungen, Schichten, die erst der sorgsamsten Durchforschung das ausliefern, was die wahren Werte, die im Erdinnern stecken, ausmacht: die Bilder, die aus allen fruheren Zusammenhangen losgebrochen als Kostbarkeiten in den nuchternen Gemachern unserer spaten Einsicht – wie Trummer oder Torsi in der Galeirie des Sammlers – stehen” (B VI:486). The text offers more illustrations of this rule than one can count, but images from the Kaiser Friedrich School seem to exemplify it directly. We learn that because the school building was often in the narrator’s vision field in later life, it became associated with so many things as to become an empty shell: “so steht [ihr Hof] jetzt, untauglich nutzlos vor mir, einem jener mexikanischen Tempel ahnlich, die wie zu fruh, usachverstandig ausgegraben wurden und deren Fresken unter den Regengussen langst bis zur Unkennltichkeit verwaschen waren als endlich erstlich die Ausgrabung der Kultgerate und Papyri beginnen konnte, die etwas Licht auf diese Bilder hatten werfen konnen. So mu? ich mich mit dem begnugen, was erst heute wieder auftaucht, vereinzelten herausgebrochenen Stucken des Interiuers, die doch das Ganze in sich enthalten, wahrend das Ganze, das dort drau?en vor mir steht, sein Einzelnes so spurlos verloren hat.” (B VI:509). A particularly telling fragment Benjamin contemplates down the page is the narrow ceiling molding crowned with crenellations. Perhaps one of the most marginal details of the school interior (literally located in the margins of its ceilings, walls, and furniture), in itself it is a mere Gothic ornament unassociated with any thought or notion: “Denn alles, was mir sonst ins Blickfeld kam, hat fruher oder spater irgendwie fur mich von Nutzen sein konnen, mit einem Gedanken, einem Handgriff sich verbunden, die ihn mit sich in das Meer des Vergessens fuhrten.” (B VI:509f.). And yet, it is a ubiquitous presence and as such an imprint of countless experiences all of which betray the inhumanity of the school and the political structure it supports. In an ironic gesture that again recalls the images of the Trauerspiel book with its baroque allegories of disiecta membra, Benjamin likens it to a scull stranded like a shell on the shore of his daydreaming: “Ich nehme sie in die Hand und befrage sie wie Hamlet den Totenschadel” (B VI:510). An aphorism from Einbahnstra?e names the essence of what is most incomparable in the “language of the scull”: “das Schwarz seiner Augenhohlen – verient er mit wildestem Ausdruck – den grindsenden Zahnreihen.” (B IV:112). The school molding recalls this image for the very same reason. The expressionless, dark mass behind classroom doors that the beveled and notched wood between its battlements immediately brings to mind is fused with the wildest expression of its “teeth”—mindless military authority and prison discipline. No matter where Benjamin’s spade digs up the molding in the soil of memory, it brings up different yet invariably dreary images of this educational fortress. But the language of the molding is not solely, and perhaps not even primarily, the language of an image; what the text enacts only implicitly is the linguistic dimension of the mnemonic mechanism that allows articulating the central significance of this marginal fragment. The German word for molding, Leiste, is homonymous with the imperative “leiste!”, and no doubt recalls the derived Leistung(en)—phonetically if not etymologically. That this similarity takes place only in language immediately recalls, in turn, Benjamin’s “Lehre vom ahnlichen” where Leonhard’s extraordinary assertion for the onomatopoeic character of language is upheld and radicalized: language, “onomatopoeic” with respect to itself, not to the natural sound of represented object is an archive of nonsensuous similarity, similarity that “makes no sense” (see B II:207). The molding is imprinted in the child’s mind precisely because its name, Leiste, points not towards its semantic concept but towards something else, something independent of any primary intention—something that can only be approximated in the process of a secondary translation and/or interpretation of memory traces in the language of autobiography. The teeth of the molding [Zinnen] very soon get displaced in the image of a dentist [Zahnartz] set to torture his victim, and one hears the gloomy clanking of the scull’s teeth in the anamorphic sequence of Klasse-Klingel -Klang -Klinke. The word, as much as the molding itself, imprints the speaker, showing its teeth, leaving a mark of a catastrophic collision with the collective. He needs to literally take the Leiste in the hand—as a broken shard of what was once whole—in order to grasp that in the absence of any fixed notion [Handgriff] with which the image may be associated, it is perhaps the word’s sound and articulation that stages the scene for the child’s submission to the authority of the mass as well as imprints the insignificant ornament in his memory. The Leiste paradoxically becomes a refuge of his “Schreckenminuten und Angsttraume” because it secretly commands him to endure until such day when his efforts will be crowned with the graduation diploma (B VI:510).51 However, the full measure of the physiognomic effect of that word upon the child remains as inexpressible as the eyes of the scull; to describe it one would need to lift the veil, Schleier,from the seven school years, Schuljahre, in which words, things, and images are so thickly interwoven. There are many other instances in the Chronik where we see words becoming allegories of that which takes place on a level of linguistic receptivity inaccessible to intended meanings, words becoming expressionless sculls or torsos in which the concept is renounced but a possibility of stepping over the threshold of conceptual understanding is indicated even if it is to remain a mere possibility. Such is, for example, Stieglitz, such is Markt Halle.52 Such is Brauhausberg, “das Wort…, in das sich wie hunderte von Rosenblatten in einen Tropfen von rose malmaison hunderte von Sommertagen ihre Gestalt, ihre Farbe und ihre Vielzahl opfernd mit ihrem Dufte erhalten haben,” while the word itself “alle Schwere verloren, enthalt von einem Brauhaus uberhaupt nichts mehr und ist allenfalls ein vom Blauen umwitterter Berg, der im Sommer sich aufbaut, um mich und meine Eltern zu behausen” (B VI:491). And much as one tries, “dem was es in sich fa?t sich nahern ist beinah unmoglich. Diese Worte, die auf der Grenze zweieir Sprachbereiche, dem der Kinder und der alteren stehen, sind denen der Gedichte Mallarmes vergleichbar, die der innere Widerstreit zwischen dem dichterischen Wort und dem profanen gleichsam ausgezehrt und zum verschwebenden Hauche hat werden lassen” (ibid.). In “Lehre vom ahnlichen” written in 1933, something similar is said:
Berliner Chronik adds a few extra similes to the similarity that is much too obvious already: “Die Sprache hat es unmi?verstandlich bedeutet, da? Gedachtnisnicht ein Instrument zur Erkundung der Vergangenheit ist sondern deren Schauplatz. Es ist das Medium des Erlebten wie das Erdreich das Medium ist, in dem die toten Stadte verschuttet liegen.” (B VI:486). One begins to suspect that this medium Benjamin insists on with regard to language and memory is one and the same. Even if not, both, as Jacobs observes, “often tend to share the same turf” (“Topographically Speaking” 106). If it is in language that things encounter one another and stage their intercourse, if remembrance of things past is an archeological exploration of this linguistic/mnemonic medium, then what one can hope to unearth in that unsteady and polymorphous medium of likeness is nothing but likeness itself—a non-sensuous relationship momentarily glimpsed through a Versprechen, which is both an unintended disfiguration and a promise.
As a slight disfiguration of Pfauenfedern instantaneously makes them into the magical Pfauenerde, the force of magical speech and the mimetic capacity assimilates the child into this realm of likeness between the two elements where their common semantic denominator—the Pfauen visible to any onlooker—is completely unimportant, for it is not the peacocks but the imageless, disconnected name that flashes up in the moment of likeness. The earth strikes an alliance with the feathers, making a promise that it cannot keep, and then likeness founders, dissolving, in its very manifestation, in the womb of mutterliche Erde. But this mother-earth that makes and breaks its promise to the child, is it not the same earth in which years later he will search for dead relics of the past? When Freud turns Versprechen inside out, when from a mere misspeaking, a slip of the tongue, it becomes an involuntary speaking of actual truth, the conventional sense of this German word, that of promise, an appeal to truth in the future, supports the inversion.53 The promise gets fulfilled when one is transported into the force field of likeness by the memories of childhood. It gets fulfilled as an understanding, in the sober light of later reading, of dis-illusionment—understanding that what is promised by the medium of likeness is unreachable through any intention. Thus language has signified in a way that cannot be misunderstood that remembrance is not an instrument for gathering information about the past, but rather its medium and theater in which the past is imprinted and performed. Any gathering that gets accomplished in the mnemonic dig of Benjamin’s is in no way different from dissemination. Or rather, the memories to be found by means of such archeological work scatter their very contents, and only by first disseminating their contents can they eventually be scrutinized. If Benjamin equates the medium of memory with Schauplatz, the endless theaters we find in the Chronik tell us little about the actual shows and everything about the scene of finding their stages in the soil of memory. Like the good chronicler he is, the narrator conscientiously lists the inventory of theatrical productions he saw as a child, all the Karmens, Wilhelm Tells, and Richard IIs attended in various circumstances, but the thick fog of forgetting he describes as remembering when he thinks back to the actual performances clouds the contents of the shows: «âñþaó, ãaå ? ïðåñëåaóþ âîñïîìèíàíè? î òåàòðå, ìåí? ïîaæèaàåò íå?ñíîñò, è â êîíoå êîíoîâ, ? óæå íå ìîãó îòëè÷èò ñîí îò ðåàëíîñòè» (B VI:506f.). One thing is certain, however: Berlin is in the background, the ever-present setting for what takes place on the stage of memory. But need one mention that what obstructs the view is the very same ghost city, the city whose thresholds are forever uncrossable and whose gates forever shut? Consider the striking similarity between the city viewed on the way to a performance and a certain image of it presented and performed, dargestellt, on one of Benjamin’s most treasured postcards:
As the picture is missing a layer, it seems that the digger may have removed one stratum of earth too many. This disinterred treasure is no doubt as damaged as all those other shards and torsos, and no interpretation, no remembrance could fill in the gaps of forgetting in the recovered image. The city is not itself, but rather its own double, its own ghostly repetition stuck at the threshold of reality and dream. A related passage in Berliner Kindheit throws light on the linguistic underlay of this spectral substitution.
The convergence of threshold and interior space in the name of a monumental Berlin gate through which the road from the city of Halle once entered names yet another cloudy space of ungraspable likeness, an illuminated grotto where everything is alike, nothing is itself, and nothing is as it was. What illuminates it? It takes an outside ray—the ray of presentation—to restore the composure of the picture, but such illumination takes away the ghostly gleam that imprinted the scene of wintry Berlin in the child’s memory. The source of the gleam is something that precedes presentation insofar as it cannot be brought forth by it, but the source cannot appear other than in presentation, other than something that, while remaining withdrawn, perforates the veil, exposing it for what it is. At the moment of presentation the communicative function of language becomes suspended, opening onto what is noncommunicative in it. The noncommunicative breaks and shines forth in the interruption of meaning achieved by the isolation of the word. And this is where we again return to the strange form of Benjamin’s chronicle. The oblique links between words that break out of what could have been a linear chronological account are due to the room-giving discontinuity that Benjamin stresses is the necessary sign of presentation. Discontinuity as an intentional refusal to succumb to the uninterrupted flow of intention is a consistently applied method. But it is also a matter of luck. What is methodical in it is the return to the same subject matter because the discovery does not happen by itself but only in a most meticulous, most systematic questioning of this subject matter. What is left to luck is those moments in which similarity flashes at the threshold of presentation. Thus discontinuity discloses something; it is crucial for recognizing similarity because the latter is concealed by the irreducible veil of the existing order whose texture is woven of the thread of temporality. What was abruptly separated is reconnected by similarity, but differently, in a way that runs against the grain of an order valid on the surface. Benjamin explains the temporal dimension of this process most clearly in a passage fîund towards the end of the Chronik.
The spacialized, photographic temporality of this process is so radical because in it a point is announced when “the past and the present moment flash into a constellation” (B V:578). Because in a flash consciousness awakens to the darkness of habit, something really happens there. But as Cadava puts it, “for Benjamin… for something to happen does not mean that something occurs within the continuum of time, nor does it imply that something becomes present. Rather, the photographic event interrupts the present; it occurs between the present and itself, between the movement of time and itself” (Words of Light 61). The consequences of such mnemonic events for the subjectivity are immeasurable: “solche Augenblicke plotzlicher Belichtung gleichzeitig Augenblicke des des Au?er-Uns-Seins sind und warend unser waches, gewohntes, taggerchtes Ich sich handlend oder leidend ins Geschehen mischt, ruht unser tieferes an anderer Stelle und wird vom Chock bteroffen wie das Haufchen Magnesiumpulver von der Streichholzflamme. Dies Opfer unseres tiefsten Ichs im Chock ist es, dem unsere Erinnerung ihre unzerstorbarsten Bilder zu danken hat.” (B VI:516). The present, through the violence of the imagination (and nowhere is this violence as pronounced as in what Benjamin in his Theses calls “the whore of ‘once-upon-a-time’ in historicism’s bordello” (B I:702)), culminates in the intention to abolish time, to sublate it in the eternity of the always-present. The idea of the permanence of the Ego is based on the permanent presence of the subject “at different times” occulting the intermittency of the self. The momentary retreat of presentation in the event of the unpresentable mnemonic shock opens the space for the strange figure of time as what emerges in the scene of writing an autobiography: subject dispersed in the gathering of its memories. WORKS CITEDAdorno, Theodore. “Nachwort zur Berliner Kindheit um neunzehnhundert.“ In Uber Walter
Benjamin, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970, 74-77. 1 Walter Benjamin's comments on Proust exemplify the shift of attention from things remembered to the work of memory itself: “...the important thing for the remembering author is not what he experienced, but the weaving of his memory, the Penelope work of recollection [Eingedenken]. Or should one call it, rather, a Penelope work of forgetting? Is not the involuntary recollection [das ungewollte Eingedenken], Proust's mémoir involontair, much closer to forgetting than what is usually called memory?” (I 202). |
