fogetting benjamin
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F OR G ET TIN G B E N J M I N
T R N S L T I O N B Y F R N C I S C O G O N Z L E Z
ea t r i z
a r l o
w
hat we call academia that dispenser of legitimacy and pres-
tige to all branches of knowledge) is well versed in the technology of
reproduction: it generalizes everything it touches. We could add that
academia is a leveling force because most of its members, in order to
be in it, do the same things and follow the same trends within a spe-
cialized symbolic market whose dimensions are, at least, those of the
Western world. It has by now become clear if belatedly so, as a result
of the disruptive processes that military dictatorships introduced in
academic life) that university curricula in Argentina have been stan-
dardized according to the universal rules of academia. This standard-
ization has had several consequences that
do not intend to discuss
in full here, except one: the wide, if diffuse, penetration of certain theo-
retical waves through respectable segments of Argentinean academia.
One example of this process is the thriving success of the cultural
studies label; another example is the staunch persistence with which
literary criticism, as well as semiotics and cultural analysis, keep
coming back to the city as a subject of study. The Benjamin trend,
so fashionable in the eighties, is part of this process.
Strollers unknown and indifferent to one another, foreigners,
marginal characters, conspirators, dandies, collectors, murderers,
cityscapes, galleries, display windows, mannequins, modernity and
the ruins of modernity, shopping centers, and freeways-a back-
ground rustle of sounds where the words fldneur and flinerie are
uttered as unexpected synonyms of practically any movement that
takes place in a public space. Fldnerie is discussed in cities where the
Cultural Critique 49 Fall 2001 Copyright 2 0 0 1 Regents of th e University of Minnesota
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8
presence of the fl neur would be impossible. The simple evening
stroller in a provincial retreat or on a two-block pedestrian street has
become a character in a philosophical urban novel, sketched in accor-
dance with Benjaminian theories about modernity in the nineteenth
century or about the ruins of capitalism in the display windows of its
merchandise.
It is not a new phenomenon; Foucault s work underwent a simi-
lar process of trivialization (suddenly, in the words of Oscar Teran,
people found themselves saying that knowledge produces power and
vice versa) and so did such exciting areas of study as the represen-
tation of history in fiction or politics in discourse, all of which was
worn thin through hundreds of papers and presentations. There was
also a Bakhtin explosion, everything acquired a carnival quality, and
the notion of parody was generally applied to any discourse that was
not completely straightforward. And since no discourse can be com-
pletely straightforward, all discourse seemed parodic. Amends should
be made on account of Foucault and Bakhtin.
These statements do not avoid a certain emphatic tone, stemming
as they do from a sense of uneasiness that turns into self-criticism,
but also into criticism of the habits of our tribe. One cannot plead
innocence when oneself is part of this process, but the conceptual
inflation of the last few years has devalued some notions to near
worthlessness, as happens to money in times of a price-hike spiral.
Perhaps they should be deposited in a safe place and we should agree
not to use them for a while, so as to give them the chance to recover.
Reading Benjamin (and with him, as if it were more or less the
same, Schorske,
Berman, Sennett, de Certeau, and Augk, among
many others) has produced a kind of theory erosion that corrodes
Benjamin s originality to the point of complete triteness. To say that
this is a case of semantic impoverishment is not enough. Benjamin is
now drowned in a purely nominal syrup, quoted as if the quote
would ensure (the way it sometimes did for him, after a long process
of historical research and composition) the production of a new
meaning on multiple stages.
We should, then, review a few known facts.
Benjamin did not study cities because it was a fashionable sub-
ject. He looked for meanings and found a suitable searching ground
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8 B E T R I Z S R L O
on cityscapes. He did not travel to Moscow in order to write the
diary of his visit to a great capital. He went to Moscow in pursuit of
a double passion: a woman and an idea of revolution. He found
neither completely.
As the years go by, Paris grows on him because of its arcades, on
the one hand, and of his vision of capitalism on the other. He does not
go to Paris in order to find a city as the object of his analysis. On the
contrary, Paris goes to Benjamin because it is an indispensable cul-
tural arena to understand something that is not Paris or, at least, not
only Paris. Not until 1935 did Benjamin drop the title Pariser Passagen
and begin to refer to his future work as Paris, Capital of th Nineteenth
Century. The first title is the one he had used since 1927.
But this is not an attempt to reproduce a well-known chronology
just for the sake of scholarly precision (the titles and themes spread out
like a network of communicating vessels, constantly reworked in the
letters to his friends). We should try, rather, to follow the path through
which Benjamin arrives at th city: early Surrealism, from which he
will later attempt to distance himself in order to free my work from
a hitherto much too obvious proximity with surrealism, he writes to
Scholem in 1928; and on his notes to the future book he adds:
To set apart the tendency of this work from that of Aragon's: Whereas
Aragon perseveres on the world of dreams, here we need to find the
constellation of awakening. Whereas, in Aragon, there remains an
impressionist element-the mythologyu-here we are dealing with the
resolution of mythology into history. Naturally, this can happen only
if we can awaken a still-unconscious knowledge about the past.'
There is, in short, a settling of old philosophical scores as the
work uncoils through its unending spirals.
In any case, it becomes increasingly clear that he has come to
Paris because the city happens to be one of the cultural keys to an
understanding of the movements of art and merchandise; he did not
come there because of a vague inclination or in order to satisfy mere
curiosity as to how cities are alike. The themes of his work in
progress show what Benjamin was after: the images of the dream that
are materialized by the city, the illusion of novelty in merchandise
and fashion, the prehistory of the twentieth century in the forms of
the merchandise of the nineteenth century. In the city he recognized
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F O R G E T T I N G B E N J M I N 8
objects, arrangements and uses of space, types, systems of movement
and communication, technological icons, that kept crowding the the-
oretical and critical impulse of his work.2As evidenced by the index
cards filled during the preparation of the huge Passagenwerk, when
Benjamin set out to describe Paris as a construct of the historical and
critical imagination, he thought about a very complex plan that
included over thirty thematic titles. Obviously, The Flsneur is only
one of those titles. Why, then, has the flineur become a recurring
phantom on texts that either bewail his disappearance or celebrate
his survival? There is something too easy about this, something too
simple and immediate, that should raise some misgivings. And there
is also a process of forgetting; Benjamin left unfinished a work on
Paris in which he followed the notes of a theme: the problem of the
metropolis viewed in terms of experience and the complete loss of
all experience in the
metr~pol i s .~philosophical dimension, then,
was weakened.
The theory of knowledge and the theory of progress are equally
significant in the plan of the Passagenwerk, and both played an essen-
tial role in Benjamin's work (they were the true theoretical founda-
tion of his future work) as was also the case with dreams and the
oneiric city, both of which configure the way in which Benjamin
reads the city through the fragments and quotes we have come to
know. If the flineur were a key to the Passagenwerk, if the book could
be synthesized mainly into this figure, Benjamin's Paris would most
likely have lacked the polemic heterogeneity, the mixture of ruins
and future that we perceive in the vast architecture of this unfinished
work.
As Adorno pointed out to him, Benjamin worked to materialize
the images that he had found in literature and that had led him to
construct Paris as an object of study. In the haussmannization of
Paris, he writes in the Expos&, the phantasmagoria has been petri-
fied. Years later, he notes on his index cards: Haussmann's pen-
chant for perspective is an attempt to impose artistic forms upon
a technique (an urban technique in this case). Such an attempt leads
invariably to
kitsch. hese two statements show well how Ben-
jamin proceeds. In the first one he keeps, as he does throughout this
unfinished work, the notion that his work deals with capitalism and
the cultural dialectics of merchandise, the symbolic and material
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B E T R I Z S R L O
forms of merchandise circulation in social life. This is an obsession
from the very first texts he wrote on this subject, in the twenties, and
summarized in the preparatory notes to the book as a critique of
modernity in terms of its dialectics of renewal and changelessness
and of fashion as the means to transfer the character of merchandise
to the cosmos, the eternal return as a demon of historical con~cience.~
The quote about Haussmann proposes a link (unbreakable to
Benjamin) between technical development and aesthetic form. He
will obstinately pursue this theme. It is a dimension of the material
perspective of the Passagelzwerk but also of The Work of Art in the
Age of Mechanical Reproduction, a key to Benjamin's way of think-
ing about the relations between art and society.
How should we deal with other observations in the Passagenwerk
about the theories of knowledge and progress? Benjamin writes that
Marx sets forth the causal connection between economy and culture.
An expressive connection is being described here. It is not an attempt to
explain the economic origin of culture, but rather the expression of the
economy in the culture. It is, in other words, an attempt to grasp an eco-
nomic process as an ostensible protophenomenon from which derive all
the vital manifestations of the passagen (and, to that extent, of the nine-
teenth ~e nt ur y) .~
How should we deal with this reference to totality, which is by no
means an isolated instance in Benjamin's works?
We can choose to view it simply as an affliction of the times, a
vestige of theology or Hegelianizing Marxism, the same that also
makes him register his wish to understand simultaneously the work of
Breton and Le Corbusier as part of a whole that can no longer be rep-
resented but lingers as a philosophical pulsion. There are many ways
in which we could deal with this last quote and the previously men-
tioned dialectic obstinacy other than turning an awkward blind eye
on them, as one might do upon detecting a hick strain in a friend's
otherwise agreeable manners.
In Benjamin's fragmentariness, in his aesthetic and epistemolog-
ical restoration of the collage and the quote, there is not only a
relieved or celebratory break with totality, but rather a crisis of total-
ity in which, at the same time, totality is maintained as the horizon of
critical and historical operations. This is one of the main problems
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with Benjamin, and it cannot be dismissed as if it appeared only
exceptionally or by chance in his works. On the contrary, would say
that it crops up continuously, both in the philosophical language and
in the imagery. would say that in Benjamin there is a yearning for
totality that coexists with the gradual erosion of totality in the aes-
thetic dimension and in the empirical world. Benjamin can be con-
sidered a writer of the crisis, but not its apologist.
Whence, then, comes this view of Benjamin as a forerunner of
postmodernity and
flbneur
himself among the ruins of totality? The
laboratories of international academia, developers of the latest indus-
trial products in cultural studies, combine, with enviable simplicity,
Foucault and Benjamin, Derrida and Deleuze, Raymond Williams
and Bakhtin. Everything adds up. But adding is precisely the prob-
lem. The uses of Benjamin as theoretician of cultural studies and the-
oretician of a catechism for devotees of the modern city have been
stretched to their limit.
On the one hand, Benjamin never had full philosophical confi-
dence in the notions he advanced throughout his great project, the
Passagenwerk neither the flbneur nor the collector, mirrors, fashion,
nor cityscapes are full categories. They should be taken rather as
findings in the shape of images, in the narrative or poetic construc-
tion of the historical. Working with these notions requires a process
of infixation that is lacking in the Benjamin texts on Paris. On the one
hand, these are firmly historical notions (though rooted in philoso-
phy and theory). They cannot be carried as mannequins from a shop
window in Paris to another in San Juan or Catamarca.
Benjamin s complexity (the Avant-Garde trait that makes him so
elusive and difficult to categorize, the flow of sense and contradic-
tion that makes up his texts) renders the simplifying canonization to
which he is being subjected in academia an even more admirable
operation, especially in the readings made by what we today call cul-
tural studies, which are becoming a chapter of literary criticism
where Benjamin s texts are presented as a closure (a faulty closure)
to the theoretical discussions about literature and the symbolic or
material dimension of societies. Everyone speaks Benjamin. Every-
one has learned the Esperanto of cultural studies. Texts that belong
to the tradition of literary criticism are being placed in the protective
bosom of the new academic religion. Texts that are well founded in
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the theoretical discussions about literature migrate, via Bakhtin or
Benjamin, to the overpopulated republic of cultural analysis.
And in this republic, the city is, precisely, capital. The technical
reproduction of a Benjamin vulgate in an academic environment a
trend that began in the United States) places the city as a sort of ana-
lytical imperative, an indispensable unit. Do we know more about
the city as a result of such endeavors attributable to the constrictions
and distractions of the symbolic market? I would not dare say that we
do. At any rate, the city is not studied in the. way Benjamin studied
the Paris of the nineteenth century. It could be rightly objected that it
need not be studied in that manner. But then, why Benjamin? Why
the perennial return of a changeless Benjamin? Whence comes the
automatic link between cultural studies and Benjamin? Upon what
oblivion do we remember Benjamin? And if our amnesia is so vast
I have indicated just part of it), why not simply forget Benjamin also
without further ado?
Let us then examine what is produced by the fashion of the
urban theme. It produces mainly a lexicon, with which we may
appear equipped to think theory.
believe, on the contrary, that
we move away from theory precisely to the extent by which some-
thing appears crystallized as an index card of a lexical stock. Those
index cards are played upon any city where as with the merchan-
dise whose phantasmagoria Benjamin attempted to examine) the
unchanging keeps returning. There are always crowds moving from
one place to another, always a history that is being lost and a mem-
ory that attempts or does not attempt) to build itself; there are
always fragmented subjects who cannot recognize themselves or one
another anywhere, and these subjects always manage to build mean-
ing into their use of space, always the use of space as a builder of
meaning, whether it be by rearranging the semantics of their prac-
tices or inventing new practices; there is always something adrift and
something with a definite direction, always something that becomes
private and something that moves into the public sphere with a new
use. And in all these comings and goings of language over the city,
Benjamin loses his sharp edges on combinations that sometimes
seem absurd. Because, let us agree, with regard to the capacity of
subjects to rearrange the semantics of the scenes or of discourses,
Benjamin is not the source.
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There is no Benjamin orthodoxy that needs safeguarding. Obvi-
ously, Benjamin can be put to good use in other philosophical and
historical contexts, but not to any use. Theoretical patchwork is the
exact countermand to the old philological requirement of complete
adherence to the text, and both approaches are unjust with the texts
they examine. The indifferent trivialization of Benjamin teaches us
little; it is hardly more than a glossary. While the philological ap-
proach clung to the texts as though they were prayers, the barbarian
use of Benjamin does not acknowledge any authority to his texts
other than the authority of names. These names are the recognizable
brands, part of the select group of fashionable labels.
Theory, in its aloofness, is distracted from its own conflicts and,
as in an inverted reflection, reminds us of the intolerant rejection
with which it was once met by philological purism. If, in the past,
academicism could be identified with philological adherence to an
author or a text, a new academicism reveals its own banality by
pledging allegiance to the academically correct subjects of the day:
cultural studies, with their inevitable chapters on the construction
of identities, discourse, politics, the city. Benjamin could be read to
deal with some of these questions, but we should acknowledge that
these questions, as defined by cultural studies (and, basically, the
studies pursued within the halls of the international academia that
grows in Argentina), are not the ones that configure the core issues of
his work.
To emphasize that theoretical conflicts are perhaps the most inter-
esting part of critical endeavors is to arrange things in a potentially
fruitful manner, that is to say, far from the peaceful sum of authors
whose names landmark the territories of an expanding discipline.
The sum by itself (given as if we were dealing with the inertness of a
bibliographical list, Benjamin, de Certeau, Williams, Derrida, and
Foucault) produces a sort of monstrous animal, but not a new theo-
retical articulation.
otes
This piece first appeared as Olvidar a Benjamin in Punto de Vista 53 (1995)
1. The first quote is from a letter to Scholem, dated August 1935. The sec-
ond quote is from
W
Benjamin, Appunti
e
materiali, in Parigi capitale del
X I X
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secolo, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Turin: Einaudi, 19861,593. Reflections on surrealism
are a half-open door to the
Passagenwerk,
writes Ricardo Ibarlucia, who has stud-
ied the intricate relation that Benjamin had with Surrealism ( Dialbctica del des-
pertar: Walter Benjamin y la experiencia surrealista, thesis, Facultad de Filosofia
y Letras, UBA, 1995), mimeo, 134.
2 See the chapter Spatial Origins, by Susan Buck-Morss, in Th e Dialec-
tics of Seeing: Wa lte r Benjamin and the Arcades Project (London and Cambridge: MIT
Press, 1989).
3. Anahi Ballent, Adrian Gorelik, and Graciela Silvestri, Las metropolis
de Benjamin, Punto de Vista 45 (April 1993).
4. W. Benjamin, Appunti e materiali, 182.
5. Ibid., 70,71.
6. Ibid., 595.