Thread by @ZoharAtkins

Charged by the reception of my Heidegger thread, I've decided to go for a @threadapalooza on Walter Benjamin, another thinker whose influence is far-reaching, despite being quirky, esoteric, and, in his own life-time, deeply unlucky.

https://twitter.com/ZoharAtkins/status/1341445303061385219

Arendt, who along with Adorno, introduced Benjamin to the English speaking world, wrote about Benjamin's bad luck as a hallmark of his life. WB killed himself on the Spanish-French border, fleeing the Nazis (but had he not freaked out, would have made it to safety) 2/

One reason Benjamin is a (tragic) hero of mine is that he failed his dissertation (the Origin of the German Mourning Play); the work was too weird to land him a job, but is now a primary text in its own right. His intro is a meditation on the concept of "origins." 3/

Benjamin is best appreciated not for his theses, but for his range, his variations on a theme, his eccentric mash-ups of high and low culture; he was a Marxist, but he was also a collector (born into wealth) with a proclivity for mysticism. 4/

He owned Paul Klee's painting "Angelus Novus" yet lived a life of destitution, a genuine bohemian. 5/

The weirdness of Benjamin meant that his reception was fraught from the beginning; everyone felt like he was one of theirs (Adorno claimed him as a materialist, Arendt as a liberal individualist and Scholem as hermetic scholar-mystic. (This is true of many greats). 6/

Benjamin is probably the reason why we have Cultural Studies today. He popularized the idea that an object or a bumper sticker from everyday life was as worth contemplating as a canonical text. He knew his Plato, but the font of an awning was just as important. 7/

WB was obsessed with marginalia and trivialities. If "every document of civilization is a document of barbarism," then the critic must search for new texts and new ways of reading that don't simply reinforce the status quo. 8/

But Benjamin had no plan for the Revolution, and no belief in its inevitability. He turned Marxism into an internal experience, turning Marx's terms into poetry. 9/

His life's work--the Arcades Project--was (appropriately) never finished; the idea was to create a new work by collecting snippets from other works, and through collage, make them say something new. 10/

This is one of the best and most recurrent ideas in Benjamin, namely that creation is collection, and that words and ideas speak through "constellations" so that how we order things matters as much, if not more, than what we order. 11/

This, btw, is also a Talmudic idea: the laws of Shabbat open with a discussion of the prohibition of carrying from one domain to another (work isn't just about changing something's composition, but also it's positioning). 12

WB lived a life of serendipity, believing that coincidences were quasi-providential signs. Memory or re-collection, giving something attention, is an act not just of generosity, but revival as well as prophecy. This moment is singular. 13

Lots of folks talk about the singularity of the moment, from Heraclitus to Suzuki, but WB's angle is to note how the present moment is a citation of the past and will be citable in the future. 14

Redemption for him is a future moment in which all moments of the past are equally citable (which is absurd but brilliant)--it means that all moments are equal and also that no moment is lost to history. 15

WB's work is almost a reductio ad absurdum against egalitarianism, even though he seems sincere about it. To prioritize anything over anything else reflects a hierarchy that needs to be overcome. 16/

But WB wasn't "woke" in the way that today's "decolonizers" are, b/c he thought that all exoteric ideas were equally on the side of the oppressor. To locate the subaltern requires detective work (or being a pearl diver to use his metaphor), not simply taking a partisan side. 17/

In this way, he's kind of relativistic; to riff on the Groucho Marx line--any group that has members is already not marginalized. 18

Like Heidegger, WB flirts with pre-modern nostalgia while recognizing the inevitability of modernity. His essay on the Storyteller is needed as much today as it was when he wrote it, after WWI--it's about how "information" & "news" (and we might add "social media") obstruct...19

our capacity to pass stories of our own experience, intimately from person to person. We are so mediated, we've lost touch with the art of telling and hearing personal stories. 20

You might object that this is an exaggeration; after all, what about TV, novels, movies, etc.? But WB is talking about the role of the storyteller as an archetype. Storytellers are moralists and therapists whose task is to offer wisdom; this is different than the op-ed writer 21

or the pundit or the TedTalker. The storyteller, like Kafka's Hunger Artist, belongs to a world that is no more. S/he's been "disrupted" by something more efficient and scalable. 22

But like the slow food movement, WB recognizes that what's lost to scale is idiosyncrasy & what's lost to efficiency is singularity. The words on every page of WB's books are the same. But WB collected editions b/c he cared about what wasn't the same. 23

This is like the person who prefers driving over speed bumps and gravelly roads to a highway. It makes zero practical sense, but is kind of charming. 24

Another thing I admire about WB is that he was a literary critic whose works are at the same time works of literary art. Many critics are parasitic on what they write about, but WB's criticism is its own hybrid thing, like a good (Jewish) commentary. 25

In contrast to Heidegger, WB doesn't have one single topic on which he meditates, but if I had to sum him up I'd say his project is to cut through "spiritual materialism"--that is, to find the existential meaning in material culture and...26

to find the material conditions underlying theological and spiritual concepts. WB doesn't follow the reductive line that sees theology simply as the 'superstructure' to an 'economic base' 27

Instead he compares theology to a hunchback hidden inside of an automaton--nobody sees it pulling the strings, but it's there, with agency. Weird! sfu.ca/~andrewf/CONCE… /28

For me, this means that we can't hide between formulaic ideologies, but must recognize the inherent power and choice in our beliefs; we also must recognize that there's no escaping theology, in for secularists and non-believers. It's a structure of consciousness and culture.

The idea that theology is here to stay, even if we don't believe in God, is an important feature of post-secular thought from anthropologist Talal Asad to Zizek, Agamben, Charles Taylor, Aladair McIntyre. 31

WB predates French Deconstruction but is a herald of the idea that texts can move in multiple directions (an official and subversive one) 32

WB doesn’t just discover and attend to neglected texts, he also attempts to show that old texts can be read in unorthodox ways 33

Like Scholem who turned to Jewish mysticism for an alternative history to western rationalism, WB turned to early modern dramas—but this is one reason why WB failed his dissertation: 34

Besides not fitting an academic box, WB was anti-historicist (he didn’t believe the best way to understand the present was through a mechanistic model of causality of past events) 35

Instead, despite being a scholar, he had a belief that the past is perspectival and can only be known through the prism of how it speaks now. 36

Yerushalmi calls this idea “memory” (Zachor); skeptics who bemoan its post truthiness call it “revisionism”; 37

The last thing Benjamin wrote —to my knowledge—was a paragraph about how now is the time during which the Messiah might come at any moment. Weird—what does he mean??38

Clearly he doesn’t mean it literally, but his point is anti mechanistic (post Kantian)—the present moment is or can be free of what came before. The messianic moment is the moment liberated from linear causality. “Make it new” 39

Arendt likewise shares this idea when she grounds human freedom in “natality”—history isn’t about fate but being surprised, having the theory blown open by the event. 40

Adorno says great texts are messages in a bottle —addressed to a future time when they can only be fully understood. WB shares that Utopianism, but is more presentist. There’s no time other than now! Now is the time! He even coined a term for this —Jetztzeit 41

Agamben thinks this word is a reference to Paul. In any event, WB was a master of taking theological concepts and applying them to contemporary life and analysis, which is pretty weird and awesome 42

He compares the French Revolutionaries shooting at the clock tower to Joshua stopping the sun—whoever controls time and how we relate to it wins. (Also a Heideggerian idea) 43

WB’s work doesn’t scale because he wasn’t a master theorist with a key for every lock. But his example of being an intellectual flaneur is culturally significant and appealing, making him a folk hero of sorts to hipsters. 44

WB seems to be a fan of “emergency politics” but also suspicious of the way they can be used to bolster fascism. He and Carl Schmitt share much in common, though Benjamin’s Critique of Violence attempts to differentiate itself from Schmitt...45

But for me WB is not at his strongest as a thinker of politics—where is work seems incoherent and knotted in contradiction; but as a mythologist—he grasped that politics could not divorce itself from myth. 46

Here he joins the company of Nietzsche and Burke who understood that modernity couldn’t simply shake off ritual, symbolism, magical thinking—but would have to remake it or even continue it. 47

Let’s take the Marxist idea of “exchange value”—following WB’s way of reading, this isn’t an economic idea only that things are valuable in relation to other things but is a spiritual and aesthetic idea—contrast and context ARE substance. 48

In Jewish mysticism, there’s an idea that everything is composed of combinations of Hebrew letters (kind of like DNA) 49

But where a monist or atomist would focus on the sameness of the underlying building blocks, the semiotician is more interested in the unique combinations—the idea that out of sameness comes novelty. 50

Clifford Geertz is the anthropologist who popularized “thick description”—the notion that by describing one thing in detail you could learn a ton about the world in which it exists. 51

WB practiced this—but towards his own culture. He is a forerunner of what’s called “native anthropology”—the idea of the insider-outsider focusing the gaze on everyday life (see also Lefebvre) 52

Try it yourself—find an object in your house and ask yourself what it says about the world you inhabit. This is a contemplative practice but not in the way of the antiworldly monk. It’s hyper-worldly. 53

This is another paradoxical point in WB—the contemplative ascetic can be fully immersed in materialism and material culture—no renunciation required. Drinking a cappuccino and people watching is also “meditation.” 54

Sartre discovered something similar—when he observed that be could practice phenomenology while sipping a cocktail. 55

Except where phenomenologists might focus on the nature of their experience as such (suspending “the natural attitude”, the Benjaminians would focus on something more like prophecy—the moral epiphany of the moment. 56

WB wrote about his time smoking hashish, which follows a 19th c. trend from Coleridge & de Quincey--and continues to Burroughs and the Beats...but he didn't indulge out of ahedonist imperative. No, he describes the moment of his "coming up" as a foreboding of the apocalypse. 57

Suffice it to say, WB was a painfully anxious, depressed person with many personality tics. A very heady guy. Not so much fun. I find him even more broody than Heidegger, who wrote about joy and festival. 58

WB helped popularize the Kafka quote "there is infinite hope, plenty of hope, but not for us." At a time when Kafka was still "contemporary," WB understood he would become a "classic." 59

One of WB's most enduring--& compelling & strange--ideas is his theory of translation: B/c translation is impossible, it is necessary. Because each language is limited, a work only attains completeness when it is mass translated into every language 60

The reason great works need to be translated into each language, though, isn't because there's a content that can only be expressed through each language. No. It's because of what he calls "translatability" (a term meant to convey the quality of being translatable) 61

See, Benjamin is kinda avant-garde, so in his conceptualist mode, he doesn't actually care about content. 62

Basically, WB thinks human language is limited, but imagines or mythologizes there's an ur-language that's "pure"--we don't get to this pure ur-language through any existent language, but through "translatability" through experiencing works in their linguistic morphings. 62

Translation, which is thus a banal, and on some level, derivative or "lesser" enterprise, is at the same time, vertiginously and miraculously, a holy and redemptive project. 63

Because WB stands with the minor figure and the overlooked idea, OF course, he's into translation; what could be more contrarian that preferring Proust in Romanian, Turkish, and Swahili than the French original? 64

I think WB was a heartfelt person who sacrificed for his art, but he definitely invites lesser, ironic imitators who revel in the relativism of making the lesser thing better than the obviously original main thing. 65

Like John Cage, WB teaches us to find art and beauty and insight in all kinds of things not typically framed as beautiful or meaningful. This isn't just self-help; it's rooted in a mystical and egalitarian sensibility. I can only describe it as a kind of pantheism. 66

Or panetheism—ie if the whole world is filled with divine glory/presence, everything is beautiful, true, artful...67

I'm not sure we'll ever know what WB actually believed, b/c it seems that he tried on theologies and ideas, almost like masks or dresses, as if discourse were a runway. There's something inspiringly flamboyant about inhabiting ideas like a method actor. 68

Ben Lazier wrote a great book about how many German -Jewish thinkers were captivated by gnosticism during the time between WW1 and WW2 (gnosticism being the idea that the world is ruled by a demonic force and the good God being very far away and inaccessible). 69

An aside, but gnosticism (from gnosis, knowledge) has had many lives and strange bedfellows. It's a kind of metaphysical conspiracy theory and form of ontological paranoia, often promoted by occultists; but it's also been mainstreamed by Paul (who saw through a glass, darkly) 70

and by many mystics of all stripes for whom the world is illusory and the truth available only to initiates--from adepts of to Ramakrishna to followers of Leo Strauss; from QAnoners to radical skeptics--the notion that appearances is deceive is a gnostic common thread. 71

One reason cults and cult leaders succeed is because they leverage the skeptical part of gnosticism to parlay a positive solution at the other end of the tunnel. Don't believe in anything--except THIS. "I am the way, the truth, the light." Damnation is everywhere, but here. 72

But lest you think gnosticism leads inevitably to bad politics or to authoritarianism, think again. It's also at the heart of anti-authoritarian protest politics. It's like Plato's pharmakon, a drug that is both a remedy and a poison. 73

Karl Barth is a Protestant theologian whose work bears gnostic elements, and he opposed Hitler. Why? Well, on a basis level, because he opposed the idea that a person could claim to be God or godlike. Man is fundamentally sinful. There's a giant chasm between us and God. 74

But wait--how can gnostics find beauty everywhere and think the world is overrrun by the demonic? Yes, it's indeed one of the great paradoxes. You see the other side of gnosticism isn't God's remoteness, but God's diluted presence, albeit hidden, in the world. 75

In Kabbalistic theology, which influenced WB, but which WB also came to indirectly through German romanticism (which was influenced by Christian Kabbalah) the world is made of fragments of divine light, shattered remnants of a former unity. 76

I'm speculating, but this theology may help explain why WB wrote fragments, and why much of his work is incomplete, or sketchy, just a couple lines, quotes, paragraphs, cut-ups here and there, amounting to a bazaar palace of hoarded wisdom nuggets. 77

WB followed Schlegel and Hoelderlin who believed the best way to reveal truth was through the fragment form. 78

Europeans had long collected "ruins," Hellenistic antiquities, as well as imitated them. But with the romantics, the fragment became a genre unto itself. 79

Rilke wrote poems, meditating on fragments, such as his famous "Archaic Torso of Apollo"; he suggests that we are better able to see the light of Apollo through what is missing than what's there. The modern fragment is more complete than the Greek original. 80

The difference between the modern and ancient fragment is that the ancient fragments were once whole whereas modern fragments are intentionally left incomplete. But this avant garde technique is rooted in a belief in the power of the elliptical. 81

Ellipsis is the point, not simply a lack we must fill in or conjecture about. In the context of modern poetry and poetics, @accommodatingly coined the term "elliptical poetry" to refer to writers who intentionally leave their works open to multiple interpretations...82

without lamenting any original or pure form that was lost. But for WB the mood is always lament--it's just that we're not melancholic for an original artwork, we're melancholic for the paradise that is always already lost. 83

Side point, but I really like the poetry of Rae Armantrout, whose work is hilarious and coy and elliptical--but I don't find it to be melancholic, and that is perhaps a difference between European romanticism and the American appropriation of the ideas that came out of it. 84

For another thread, but everyone from de Tocqueville to Deleuze thinks of America as a place of possibility (think of the motif of the open road) and Europe as a heavy place weighed down by history. I wonder what @MacaesBruno would say about this now. 85

If you want a weird image on which to meditate or think about the different reactions to Twitter banning Trump (Merkel is anti-) consider the meeting of Bob Dylan and Foucault at Dylan's concert. There was little to talk about. Dylan just wanted to toke. 86

I mention b/c WB reads very much like an old school European thinker, yet his posthumous popularity owes a lot to the dissemination of his ideas in American academia. He's the eminence grice of continental thought and required reading for comp lit majors. 87

We haven't discussed WB's essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"; it's not my fave, but it's also a class amongst artists and art history types. Anyone selling art has to at least pretend to have read it. 88

Ben Lerner's riveting opening scene in Leaving the Atocha Station is also clearly indebted to the essay, the central point of which is that living in an age of memes and gift shops and art posters has changed the way we relate to artworks. 89

The reason to see a Mona Lisa in an age where you can google image search Mona Lisa is fundamentally different than going in an age where there was no other way to see the famed Mona. 90

WB thought the reason people seek out originals has to do with the aura of the original, but not with the quality itself (which is kind of a Girardian point); people chase social proof, but have no capacity to judge for themselves. 91

His discussion of art might well be applied to tourism, more generally. We travel to corroborate what we see on Instagram or in guidebooks and then to perpetuate the images so others will want what we've projected. 92

It also relates to how we consume news; IRL reality often seems to be fodder for a story and virtual reaction so that the line between reality and theater is blurred. It's very sad and probably toxic. 93

But there is a redemptive side to it, too: because it invites us to walk through the museum not to look at the art, but to look at the museum AS art. 94

I'm of two minds about this: I think it's kind of disaffected, disembodied, and hip in a way that avoids intimacy and vulnerability and feels superior. But I also think it's profound, a way to make every situation worthy of reflection and insight. 95

I think Jodorowsky captured the magic of making life itself a work of art in his film "Endless Poetry." Even though WB often reads as a depressive for depressives, I find his micro-attention to detail to be moving and liberating. 96

Heidegger wrote about mountaintops; I think of WB as a mole burrowing underneath those mountains, at home hibernating in the archive, but waiting for the mountaintop to blow off and the lava of redemption to flow. 97

Maybe there's something in there about "the underground," and going into hiding that captures the spirit of WB, whose thought is not as easily transmitted as that of systematic thinkers or "hedgehogs" who know one big thing. 98

Don't read WB to become Benjaminian. Read WB to become yourself. Don't read to agree with him; read because he's an extremely rare kind of person whose singularity can serve to ignite your own singularity. 99

WB failed as an academic and succeeded as a thinker for the same reason: he was a wanderer for whom every aspect of life was worthy of thought; the candy wrapper no less than the rare book. His archive was life itself. May we be so lucky to curate our own life-anthologies.

FIN

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