Fredric Jameson. The Benjamin Files. (New York: Verso, 2020), 262 pages. $29.95
There seem to be as many versions of Walter Benjamin in circulation as there are critical schools. An early practitioner of cultural studies, the first New Historicist, a post-structuralist avant la lettre, a secular theologian and, of course, a peculiar kind of crypto-Marxist, Benjamin has seemed all these things to the many critics who have taken up his work. It will surprise no one familiar with Fredric Jameson that these seemingly contradictory Benjamins are gathered together in the dialectical sweep of his new book The Benjamin Files. “The existence, in [Benjamin’s] thinking, of a variety of distinct language fields or clusters” Jameson writes, represents not a “philosophical relativism,” but rather the fact that our “theoretical languages” are modified “depending on the immediate historical situation, which is to say, depending on politics” (3, 2). Benjamin does not aim at “consistency or the forging of a synthesis of such codes” (2). Instead, he “prescribes exactly the opposite: their adaptation to the moment, the crisis, the need” (2). Benjamin is therefore, for Jameson, a fundamentally historical thinker whose work is, paradoxically, defined by an investment in discontinuity. But this discontinuity is no mere post-structural fetish. Rather, Benjamin feels the deepest aversion for “the ideological pictures of history abundantly supplied us by the tradition and the category of continuity” (236).
This sense of a discontinuous history puts us “at the very heart of what is profound and original in Benjamin’s work: the relationship between narrativity and the raw material of social life, the figurability and representability of history itself” (161). Why, Benjamin asks, are some aspects of the past representable, while others are not? Benjamin’s interest in representation—his consistent reliance on figures to convey his most powerful concepts, as in the Angel of History that introduces the “Theses on the Philosophy of History”—is no mere formalism. Instead, the question of representation was, for Benjamin, and, likewise, has been for Jameson, fundamentally political, part of a larger project by which he sought to render inoperative “categories which, like those of ethics or aesthetics, presuppose the domain of the individual” (189). Instead, Benjamin transforms these individualist concepts so that they might be more suitable for the masses who took center stage in the early 20th century, the very people crushed by the bourgeois ideal of progress and all that it obscures.
In making this case, Jameson places Benjamin squarely within the Marxist tradition, while simultaneously retaining all that is unique and complex about his thinking. Ranging across his work, and offering readings of many of the major essays—including One-Way Street, the Reproducibility Essay, the “Theses,” as well as the material on Baudelaire, Berlin and Benjamin’s childhood—Jameson continually emphasizes the dialectical nature of Benjamin’s thinking, arguing that our confusion about his work often arises from a “desire to find judgments . . . in what he stubbornly means to be a historical account of transition and change” (194). If nothing about history tends in any particular direction, then any moment contains both progress and reaction in equal measure. Our historical judgments become a matter of politics, as we determine which elements of our conjuncture we seek to retain for the future we hope to create.
Perhaps the easiest way to explain this idea is through Jameson’s reading of what is easily one of Benjamin’s most famous concepts: “aura.” In the Reproducibility essay, Benjamin describes the loss of what he names the “aura” of the work of art—its unique existence in a particular time and place—through the technological procedures of reproduction. Benjamin’s description of the process is fundamentally dialectical for what seems, from one angle, like a loss is, from another, a positive gain as the reproducible work of art becomes precisely one of those concepts Benjamin views as suitable for the masses. Substituting “a mass experience for a unique existence,” reproducibility removes the work of art from its exclusive sphere of privilege and brings it to the people.
Jameson’s account of aura develops its fundamentally dialectical nature. “A positive form of aura,” Jameson writes, “attracts accounts of authenticity and the unique value of this or that one-time experience. Yet the negative form—in which aura is part and parcel of that immense cultural swindle that compensates the commodified poverty of industrial ‘ever-sameness’ . . . arouses a no less passionate denunciation on Benjamin’s part” (189). Aura is both “a rough equivalent of what remains of the central and constitutive concept of academic aesthetics, namely beauty”—and therefore to be eliminated like all bourgeois concepts which rest on the individual subject—as well as a historical marker for the waning or disappearance of experience, something Benjamin often decries, perhaps most clearly in “The Storyteller” (186). But Jameson is adamant that we should not read Benjamin as nostalgic. If “Benjamin is only too willing to register innumerable signs of decline,” it is nevertheless “not certain that he thinks we can return to [the past] or that he even wants to do so” (219, 220). The decline of aura is not something to be mourned, a position we can only reach if we abandon our desire “to find judgments” in Benjamin’s historical accounts.
And yet, the concept of aura is not exactly neutral either, for the whole essay is written with a precise political aim in mind: “to render older, now-obsolete critical values useless for aestheticization, which is to say, for fascism,” repurposing technological reproduction as a potentially progressive element in the dissolution of individualized aesthetics (178). If Benjamin wished, as he wrote, “to set aside . . . a number of traditional [aesthetic] concepts” he did so by “rendering such concepts inoperative . . . disarming them, as one might disable a factory and sabotage its mass-produced weapons” (177, 178). Aura is one such concept, as Benjamin reads its progressive and reactionary elements off of one another.
As Jameson observes, this particular form of dialectical reading occurs throughout Benjamin’s work, most notably in his many discussions of the relationship between the archaic and the modern:
on the one hand, [the modern] is valorized as the New and as production; on the other hand, it is the loss and deterioration of experience. This is very much a transvaluation of judgment in the Nietzschean sense: it resituates the ethical binary and, depending on the historical context, “politically” reevaluates the process as good (positive) or regression (bad). Here . . . mobile and situational judgments replace the old static philosophical ethics (and aesthetics as well). (78)
“Immanent analysis cannot resolve this ambiguity,” Jameson writes, “only the pragmatics of the situation can do that” (78). Jameson’s repeated recourse to the idea of the masses represents one version of the “pragmatics of the situation.” Only by understanding the emergence of the masses in Benjamin’s historical moment—leading, all at once, to communism, fascism and mass media culture—will we see the force of his assault on those philosophical categories tied to the individual.
This attack is most clear in the three city essays, on Naples, Berlin and Moscow, which Jameson reads as a sequence describing the “rise and fall of urban individualism,” culminating in a vision of Moscow as the city of the future (114-5). Here we will also see how Jameson transvalues the theological motifs of Benjamin’s work, which have often been so troubling for his Marxist readers. Naples represents “pre-bourgeois life . . . a collective life before individuality,” while Moscow offers the example of “a post-individualistic life” (117). In between we find “the deserted and monumental Berlin,” where Benjamin spent a “childhood condemned to capitalism” (133). In Berlin, a city “consisting of so many stacked interiors,” collectivity has virtually disappeared (120). And yet, Berlin is also the place of a profound individual estrangement, suggesting that “bourgeois individualism seems to reach its apogee with the disappearance of the individuals themselves” (118).
But if bourgeois subjectivity appears to lead, through its own internal development, to its negation, Benjamin’s continual emphasis on the active work of the critic—and his lifelong aversion to any notion of historical progress—suggests how far away he was from any conception of teleology, whether of the Whiggish or Marxist variety. “Benjamin’s ‘redemption’ of the past,” Jameson writes, “calls not for resignation but for action and activism” (235). In a further paradox, this activism is tied to Benjamin’s consistent recourse to theological motifs, which have, for Jameson, “nothing to do with God” (9). Rather theology “develops collective categories” which “give us access to historical and essentially narratives modes of thinking about mass realities” through a focus on the “realm of the future” (229, 229, 231). Furthermore, theological concepts “mark and denounce their own insufficiency at the same time that they keep their content alive” (231). In this way, theology avoids the constitutive dilemma of utopian thinking, the fact that “we cannot but construct a mental picture of a radically different future by using elements of our present” (246).
Jameson, of course, has been one of the great theorists of Utopia, most clearly in his repeated analyses of science fiction. Here he connects Benjamin’s interest in the future to Kafka’s great remark that there is an infinite amount of hope, but not for us. Hope, Jameson suggests, “has a reason for existing only where it is absent and desperately needed. The place where it is needed, the place of the hopeless, is the place of the poor and the destitute: hope is the sign of a future for those who are hopeless” (242). Redemption, weak messianism, hope: these are theological concepts that Benjamin mobilized in the name of a future that might transcend our fallen modernity—a future he thought he glimpsed in Moscow—and it represents what we might call, after Adorno, his negative dialectics, his view of a modern world dominated by an “impoverishment of contemporary experience” and a set of technological innovations that might, nevertheless, help overcome that impoverishment (245).
All of this, of course, places Benjamin squarely within the tradition of Western Marxism as defined by Perry Anderson, with its distance from actual politics, a fact Jameson acknowledges. Whether we find this form of cultural analysis to be satisfactory “depends very much on the historical value one attaches to culture and on the way in which superstructures are seen as an active part of the mode of production” (30-1). Jameson’s method suggests another response: even the most seemingly abstract theorizing can find its politics when properly historicized.
One of Benjamin’s most important concepts is the dialectical image—the process by which a moment from the past is blasted out of the ideological continuity of history due to its relation to our own time—which helps us see how Benjamin’s moment, with its struggle over the fate of the masses, resonates with our own of competing right and left populisms. If we agree with Jameson that “socialism . . . is a theory and a politics of the productive uses of the ever-heightening power of the forces of production,” then we can see Benjamin’s work—and ultimately Jameson’s own—as an analogous effort to seize the forces of cultural production for a future that is in no way guaranteed (206).
Paul Stasi
University at Albany, SUNY
Albany, New York
pstasi@albany.edu
