Walter Benjamin and "Drilling" for Pearls

09-15-2014

“Walter Benjamin knew that the break in tradition and loss of authority which occurred in his lifetime were irreparable, and he concluded that he had to discover new ways of dealing with the past. In this he became a master when he discovered that the transmissibility of the past had been replaced by the citability and that in place of its authority there had arisen a strange power to settle down, piecemeal, in the present and to deprive it of ‘peace of mind,’ the mindless peace of complacency.”

–Hannah Arendt, “Introduction” to Walter Benjamin’s Illuminations

Hannah Arendt was a capacious thinker. She tackled topics such as totalitarianism in Fascist and Stalinist forms, the tradition of Western political philosophy, the human condition, international law and human rights, and the destruction of the world in an atomic age. Moreover, as her former students and current readers can attest, her range of knowledge is daunting as she moves with ease among languages, time periods, historical detail, and philosophical abstraction. Yet Arendt was also invested in fragments, moments, poetry, and individuals as a way to remember the past and speak to present political needs. One place where this is well-represented is in her introduction to Walter Benjamin’s Illuminations.

[caption id="attachment_14351" align="alignleft" width="300"] Walter Benjamin's Illuminations[/caption]

In 1968 Arendt edited and introduced a selection of Benjamin’s writings in Illuminations, the first English translation of his work published by Schocken Books. At the time, little was known about Benjamin’s work aside from a few details about his idiosyncratic literary criticism and his intellectual debts to Marxism and Jewish theology. Some may have known of his suicide at the French-Spanish border in 1940 en route to the US while fleeing Nazi rule after his exile in France.

I recently re-read Arendt’s introduction to Illuminations. What struck me was how generous and frank she is in her presentation of Benjamin’s work and life. She presents the bad luck, the emergence of his posthumous fame, the circumstances of war, his status as the son of a middle-class German-Jewish father, the sheer strangeness and beauty of Benjamin’s collections of quotations -- those “pearls” dug from the past -- and the figure of the flâneur who wanders cityscapes, particularly that place Benjamin considered “home,” Paris. This attention to time and place and person is something that recurs in her other writings. It’s her performance of the value of taking account of an individual life, whether pariah or war criminal. This accounting is perhaps most controversially seen in her presentation of the Nazi Adolph Eichmann at his trial. But unlike Eichmann in Jerusalem, with Benjamin, she is in the company of a colleague, critic, and a friend.

Arendt observes that quotations are the center of every work that Benjamin produced. She writes: “The main work consisted of tearing fragments out of their context and arranging them afresh in such a way that they illustrated one another and were able to prove their raison d’etre in a free-floating state, as it were. It definitely was a sort of surrealistic montage.” While it might seem “whimsical in the extreme and self-destructive to boot”, it wasn’t any more so than other like-minded surrealistic experiments. This “drilling” method differs from “excavating” since the interpretation doesn’t lay waste to the context, nor does it “ruin everything with explanations that seek to provide a causal or systematic connection.” Benjamin would have rejected our world of big data, for as Arendt presents him, he had the rare gift of “thinking poetically.” This method of drilling for “pearls” and “coral” – metaphors for crystallizations of thinking – is a destructive practice, but this tearing out creates something new.

The assemblages Benjamin created are significantly different than the typical posts found on Facebook or Twitter. These modern-day assemblages tend to confirm the way things are, try to sell or sensationalize something, or present us in our best (sometimes worst) light. They do not deconstruct or create anything new. Therefore, Benjamin’s practice of citability seems even more radical today. Benjamin saw the fragmentation of the world and its destruction by human hands as a modern phenomenon. He reassembles cultural objects to illustrate how modernity changes the ethical and political tasks of the present; how individuals can now be brought into more equitable, healthy collective political bodies outside of the forces that put people into competing capitalist social classes and nationalist state bodies. How do we see both the promise and the threats of modernity? How do we see the “shades of the departed” today? How can we in our highly mediated age create collections of sound bites and images through which we might “regard the pain of others,” as Susan Sontag put it (Regarding the Pain of Others, 2004)? Most interestingly, how did Benjamin do it with the “archives” he constructed?

Arendt recounts how in the thirties Benjamin carried “little notebooks with black covers” for collecting these snapshots of text and time. She recalls that he would on occasion read what his expeditions had “netted” him in the way of “pearls” and “coral”.

And in this collection, which by then was anything but whimsical, it was easy to find next to an obscure love poem from the eighteenth century the latest newspaper item, next to Goecking’s “Der erste Schnee” [the first snow] a report from Vienna dated summer 1939, saying that the local gas company had “stopped supplying gas to Jews. The gas consumption of the Jewish population involved a loss for the gas company, since the biggest consumers were the ones who did not pay their bills. The Jews used the gas especially for committing suicide” (Briefe II, 820). Here indeed the shades of the departed were invoked only from the sacrificial pit of the present. (45-46)

[caption id="attachment_14355" align="alignleft" width="300"] Walter Benjamin[/caption]

I wonder, can the method of quotation, of drilling and not excavating thought in words and visual media, still have the unsettling quality that Arendt saw in Benjamin’s collections of quotations all those years ago? I think so. I hope so. “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight” (Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”).

(NOTE: With the publication of Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life (Harvard 2014) by well-known scholars Howard Ellard and Michael W. Jennings, we have a chance to explore with renewed vigor the circumstances of Benjamin's life and his contribution to thinking about modernity. The authors note that Benjamin was concerned in his work with experience, historical remembrance, and art as medium for both. Benjamin, coming from a well-to-do Jewish family in Berlin left with many others in 1933 and found himself in exile in Paris. His life was entwined with that of Hannah Arendt in terms of friendship and ideas.)

-- Laurie Naranch