MAKERS OF MODE MARXISM 3. Walter Benjamin

Scan page 6

It is only recently that Walter Benjamin has been retrieved from the obscurity of history and restored to his true status, as perhaps the nost brilliant and original Marxist cultural critic of the twentieth century.

Born in Berlin in 1892, the son of a wealthy Jewish family, Benjamin was active in the radical literary movements of pre-war Germany, and wrote a pioneering doctoral thesis on German baroque tragedy.

So pioneering was it that his examiners, unable to understand a word of it, failed him his degree, thus depriving him all academic career.

Precarious Instead, Benjamin lived a precarious existence Berlin and Frankfurt as a critic and translator; he was introduced to Marxism by the philosopher Ernst Bloch, and became a close friend of the playwright Bertolt Brecht.

He fled to Paris in 1933 when the Nazis came to study • oi Paris which has become * Arcades When Nazis, he frontier, committe told tha handed o known the project' France tell to the fled to the Spanish where he id suicide on being t he was to be ver to the Gestapo.

Tragic

The tragic career of Benjamin is in some way a sign of his tragic times.

His life was marked by exile, material deprivation and a frustrating inability to get his work published. (Thedor Adorno, his German/Marxist colleague, refused to publish one of his most important works).

His writing is shot through with suffering and melancholy, composed of odd fragments and brief, brilliant passages. It is marked often by a profound obscurity, as Benjamin struggles tortuously with some _oi the most intractable problems of culture, history and politics.

Disdaining any facile clarity, Benjamin writes as though every sentence has been painfully wrenched from his deepest meditations.

He is acutely self-conscious of his Jewishness-of belonging to a cultural tradition which has been hounded, ridiculed, misunderstood.

His writing has much of the enigmatic, riddling quality of the Jewish tradition of sacred writings, demanding a severe labour of reading from his audience.

Greatly preoccupied with the importance of tradition (Benjamin recalls Trotsky's insistence in Literature and Revolution that 'we Marxists have always lived in tradition'), he is at the same time a notably idiosyneratic writer, whose insights are notoriously difficult to categorise.

What importance, then, has an obscure, idiosyncratic cultural critic to present-day Marxism?

Break-up

One answer is that if Benjamin was one of the most traditionalist of thinkers, he was also one of the most astoundingly 'modern'. Benjamin lived through a period which saw the explosive break-up of traditional cultural forms.

Futurism, Expressionism, Surrealism: these and allied movements scandalously overturn middle class, shibboleths of 'realism', 'beauty' and tradition' in art, unleashing new productive forces, and the drives of the unconscious itselt, to challenge the settled conventions in which the bourgeoisie finds itself securely reflected back to itself.

Materialism

But such movements are not thereby necessarily revolutionary in a socialist sense; and Benjamin's aim was to create a revolutionary aesthetics by harnessing them to historical materialism.

In his pioneering essay The Author as Producer' he notes that the question which Marxist critics have traditionally posed to a work of art is: What is its position with regard to the productive relations of its time?

Benjamin himself, however, wants to pose a new question: What is the work of art's position within the productive relations of its time? What he means by this is that all culture depends upon certain forces and relations of production; and the task of the revolutionary artist is to develop new 'forces of cultural production' and new social relations between artists and audiences.

Gramaphone records, for example, are overtaking that form of production known as the concert hall and making it obsolete; film and photography are deeply changing traditional modes of perception, traditional techniques and relations of cultural production.

Paintings in an art-gallery have what Benjamin calls an 'aura' of uniqueness, distance and permanence about them; but the mechanical reproduction of paintings tends to destroy that alienating aura and allow the viewer to encounter the work in his own particular time and piace.

Whereas the portrait keeps its privileged distance, the film camera penetrates, brings its object closer and so tends to 'de-mystify' it.

And whereas traditional painting allows you restful, reverent contemplation, film is constantly modifying your perceptions, constantly producing a 'shock' effect.

Brecht Traditional drama rigidly divides stage from audience, framing the play as a commodity to be passively consumed; but the political drama of writers like Bertolt Brecht, of whom Benjamin was the first great champion overturns these social relations, strips off the theatrical illusion and forces audiences into active; critical relationship to what they see.

There seems no doubt that Benjamin's cultural theories are marred by a certain "technologism'-a belief that technical developments will in themselves lead to changed social relations in the cultural field.

Few would now claim that a Hollywood close-up was exactly demystifying, or that Benjamin's optimism about, say, the newspaperthat it broke down traditional literary divisions and turned readers into participants-has been trimphantly borne out by the Sun.

But if Benjamin's optimism needs heavily qualifying it still contrasts healthily with the patrician pessimism with which many 'Marxist' critics have greeted modern cultural developments.

For Georg Lukacs and his Stalinist progeny, 'modernism" in art is merely bourgeois decadence: art is a matter of 'timeless' value rather than • changing material production.

They begin, as Brecht remarked, trom the good old things'-from the established culture of the pastSOCIALIST PRESS, Wednesday 13 February 1980

Scan page 7

----- pull-quotes -----

power, and lived there until 1940, working on a massive