Illuminating

How Benjamin the mystical philosopher becomes Benjamin the historical materialist

by James Surowiecki

WALTER BENJAMIN: SELECTED WRITINGS, VOLUME 1: 1913-1926, edited by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 527 pages, $35.

WORDS OF LIGHT: THESES ON THE PHOTOGRAPHY OF HISTORY, by Eduardo Cadava. Princeton University Press, 203 pages, $29.95.

Walter Benjamin committed suicide in 1940 without ever making it to America. He never produced a systematic work of criticism on 20th-century mass culture. Until the 1970s almost none of his writings had been translated into English. And yet, when the history of American cultural studies finally gets written, Benjamin undoubtedly will be one of its crucial figures. All of which makes the publication of an ambitious new edition of Benjamin's selected writings a genuinely exciting event. In place of a limited selection of Benjamin's more immediately accessible pieces, American readers now have the chance to wander the full range of his work, and to gain a real sense of the often contradictory but always provocative combination of philosophy, criticism, and cultural history that it offers.

Benjamin's influence has grown steadily since his essays became available in English, and a recent flood of books about him and his writings -- including the charming but thin Momme Brodersen biography from Verso -- testifies to his continued importance. From the start, film theorists, cultural historians, and literary critics seized upon this thinker who combined theoretical rigor and Left politics with often dramatic insights into the workings of culture generally and popular culture specifically. Writing in a historical moment when new technologies of mass reproduction were altering the terrain of daily life, Benjamin probed the relationships between high and low culture, between Romanticism and modernity, between literature and film. In doing so, he helped frame the central questions of what we now know as cultural studies, even if he never offered anything resembling a comprehensive theory of culture.

The vogue for Benjamin in academic and artistic circles is based almost entirely on his later work, which he produced as a Marxist (albeit a rather idiosyncratic one). He did return throughout his career to certain familiar themes, and the mysticism that suffuses his early essays remained present even after he had embraced historical materialism. What this first volume of writings shows is the degree to which Benjamin's eventual interest in popular culture and Marxist politics represented a profound shift in his intellectual concerns. And part of what makes this volume so crucial is precisely how new the Benjamin we find here will be to most readers.

Technology, mass reproduction, the image: these are notable here by virtue of their absence. Instead, the collection of fragments, essays, and letters, assembled by editors Michael Jennings and Marcus Bullock and ably translated by an ensemble of scholars, gives us a Benjamin deeply concerned with questions of metaphysics and idealist philosophy, a Benjamin whose main intellectual influences are Goethe, Hšlderlin, Kant, and Schlegel. The most important previously untranslated works included here, Benjamin's dissertation on the concept of criticism in German Romanticism and his essay on Goethe's novel Elective Affinities, are searching literary critiques that would be difficult to surpass in rigor (or in density). But they are not the products of a writer concerned with contemporary problems.

Although the earliest pieces in this volume, which emerge from Benjamin's participation in the German Youth Movement, are haunted by the shadow of August 1914, it's possible to read essay after essay without imagining Benjamin as a 20th-century figure. Readers can witness his evolution from an almost purely abstract philosopher into a critic -- first of literature and then of the broader world of culture and the everyday. His insistence, in his 1922 manifesto for the never-published journal Angelus Novus, that "[r]elevance to the present is more important than even unity or clarity," can be taken as a signal of his transformation. And when, in a 1923 letter to the conservative writer Florens Christian Rang, Benjamin writes of the need to "concentrate creaturely life in ideas," we detect the seeds of his later work. As William Carlos Williams would have it, no ideas but in things.

Indeed, it's not until "One-Way Street," the Surrealist-influenced collection of fragments on urban life that closes the volume, that Benjamin the theorist of modernity becomes clearly visible. In the end, one cannot come away from this new collection without a sense that the trajectory of Benjamin's career was dramatically rerouted by Marxism. (His love affair with the Bolshevist Latvian writer/actress Asja Lacis, whom he met in 1924, only spurred his interest in Marx.) If many of the essays here seem to come from a writer more comfortable with the 18th or early 19th century than with the 20th, by the time we arrive at "One-Way Street" the urban territory is unmistakably modern, even if Benjamin does not necessarily seem any more at home in it.

When taken in conjunction with Eduardo Cadava's Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History, the absence in this first volume of any substantive reflections on what might crudely be called technology becomes all the more striking. Cadava's book is a meditation on the connections between photography and Benjamin's conception of history, as well as a fascinating attempt to link seemingly disconnected pieces of Benjamin's writing. Cadava does this, in part, by comparing Benjamin with other thinkers of modernity, including Henri Louis Bergson and Louis Auguste Blanqui, as well as the obligatory Marx, Freud, Kafka, and Proust.

For Cadava, a professor of English at Princeton, Benjamin makes clear the essential relationship between the image -- especially the photographic image -- and modernity. We cannot understand, Cadava argues, what it means to be modern without grasping the degree to which our experience of the world is defined by what might be called the photographic mentality. We see the world as if we ourselves are cameras, and, at the same time, we see ourselves as objects in a photograph -- at once ourselves and yet other.

Cadava's real interest in photography as a trope for modernity turns on the intimate relationship between photography and death, a relationship articulated by Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag. Words of Light is, in that sense, closely connected to a whole series of recent works -- most notably Jacques Derrida's Aporias, and his essay "By Force of Mourning," and Avital Ronell's The Telephone Book -- that concern themselves with mourning and technology. These texts are preoccupied with figures of spectrality. For these writers, the now is never free of what was and what will be. The image and the word take on meaning only through reproduction. And death is always immanent in life. The photograph becomes essential, then, for Cadava and Benjamin because it proclaims our mortality. "The image already announces our absence," writes Cadava. "The photograph tells us that we will die, [that] one day we will no longer be here, or rather, we will only be here the way we have always been here, as images."

But Cadava is interested in more than just a gloss on what Barthes called, in Camera Lucida, "the advent of myself as other: a cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity." As the book's subtitle -- a nod to Benjamin's final work, "Theses on the Philosophy of History" (look for it in Harvard's third volume) -- suggests, what really matters to Cadava is the relationship between photography and history. It's here, in its determined resistance to any definition of history in terms of narrative, that Words of Light is most problematic, but also most compelling. It's also here that Cadava's work engages most clearly with Benjamin's early writing, especially the fragments "The Role of Language in Trauerspiel and Tragedy" and "The Meaning of Time in the Moral Universe" and the essay "Critique of Violence." Cadava seems profoundly influenced by Benjamin's view of history as discontinuous, as a process of permanent interruption. For Benjamin, the historian should stop "telling the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary," and inhabit instead a present in which "time stands still and has come to a stop." Similarly, for Cadava, history does not flow in linear fashion but asserts itself in sets of images, each of which arrests the world in what Benjamin, in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," called "the dynamite of the tenth of a second."

The appeal of this desire to "blast open the continuum of history," as Benjamin wrote in 1940, seems clear enough in a modern world in which narratives of society's inevitable progress have long since exhausted themselves. But this embrace of a kind of messianism, however well-suited it may seem to modernity's definition of reality in terms of the contextless image, leaves us in a place where making connections between events comes to seem impossible. Benjamin's hope of remaking the world in a moment may be the dream, but remaking it across many moments is our necessity. Trapping history in a freeze frame, Cadava, and Benjamin, imagine us embedded in a now without a path to a then. You can't, they seem to say, get there from here. n

James Surowiecki has written for the Village Voice and Lingua Franca.