Table Of ContentWalter Benjamin
Overpowering Conformism
Esther Leslie
P
Pluto Press
LONDON • STERLING, VIRGINIA
First published 2000 by Pluto Press
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Copyright © Esther Leslie 2000
The right of Esther Leslie to be identified as the author of this
work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 0 7453 1573 9 hbk
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Leslie, Esther.
Walter Benjamin : overpowering conformism / Esther Leslie.
p. cm. — (Modern European thinkers)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0–7453–1573–9
1. Benjamin, Walter, 1892–1940—Political and social views.
I. Title. II. Series.
PT2603.E455 Z726 2000
838'.91209—dc21
00–020282
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Contents
Acknowledgements vi
Preface: An Accumulation of Technological Themes vii
1. Explosion of a Landscape 1
2. Benjamin’s Objectives 42
3. Berlin Chthonic, Photos and Trains and Films and Cars 63
4. Dream Whirled: Technik and Mirroring 89
5. Murmurs from Darkest Europe 123
6. The Work of Art in the Age of Unbearable Capitulation 130
7. Time for an Unnatural Death 168
Benjamin’s Finale: Excavating and Remembering 208
Notes 236
Bibliography 276
Index 292
Acknowledgements
The Collected Writings, Gesammelte Schriften, of Walter Benjamin
appearedin1991asa14-partboxset.Itcontainednotonlyjuvenilia
alongside multiple versions of the famous pieces and notes and
drafts, but also an extensive ‘editorial apparatus’, with datings,
excerpts of relevant correspondence, indication of first places of
publication, types of paper and ink used and all the other things
that an obsessive scholar needs and wants to know. (In this, it is
unliketheEnglish-languageWalterBenjamin:SelectedWritingsfrom
The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.) The robust box
sethasservedmewell,andIthanktheeditorsforalltheirscholarly
effort.TheGesammelteSchriftenwasmymainsourceofinformation,
and this meant that I often translated quotations from Benjamin
myself as I made notes for this book. I sometimes stick with those
translationshere,butIalsoprovidepagereferencestotherelevant
place in published English translations where those are available.
This book took on its shape over the 1990s. That decade opened
with the calendrical opportunities for reflection offered by the 50th
anniversary of Benjamin’s death. Then came the centenary cele-
brations, which were followed by the flurry around the opening of
Dani Karavan’s monument at Portbou. All these events produced
more and more words about Walter Benjamin. My contribution
found first form as a doctorate, whose successful completion was
much aided by my supervisor, Dr Margarete Kohlenbach, and my
examiners, Professor Edward Timms and Dr Steven Giles. Since
that completion, this contribution to the ever-growing pile of Ben-
jaminiana has been recomposed time and again. Sometimes
sentences or paragraphs found their way out of my study into
articles or reviews or conference papers, only then to be altered
and imported back again. Some might recognize certain turns of
phrase. For opportunities to unravel further my thoughts on
Benjamin I thank the editors of Things, Mute, the Journal of Design
History, Art Criticism Theory, De-, Dis-, Ex-, Revolutionary History,
New Formations and the organizers of the digital ‘Artwork project’
at London’s Camerawork and all the others who published my
words or gave me a stage for an hour.
Above all, I thank my parents, George and Sheila, and Ben
Watson.
vi
Preface: An Accumulation of
Technological Themes
On ‘overpowering conformism’
The phrase ‘overpowering conformism’ is a half-quote whose con-
notations mark out some parameters for a study of Walter
Benjamin’s work. The phrase alludes to Benjamin’s caution in one
of his final compositions, ‘Über den Begriff der Geschichte’, written
at the end of the 1930s:
Ineveryepochtheattemptmustbemadeanewtowresttradition
away from a conformism that is about to overpower it.1
Conformism here refers to the energies of conventional inter-
pretation. These ensnare tradition and the receivers of tradition in
tales devised, or at least approved, by the ruling class and its
ideology-mongers. The accumulated experience of the oppressed
is overwritten in histories that re-transmit the existing balance of
power: business as usual. Long dead, Benjamin is himself now part
of transmissible tradition. Using here the phrase ‘overpowering
conformism’ flags a desire to wrest Benjamin from a conformism
inherent in those appropriations that excise him from a culture of
engaged political critique. ‘Overpowering conformism’ suggests a
confrontation with domesticating readings of Benjamin’s work.
Wresting Benjamin’s writings from the conformism that
threatens to overpower their reception is the task. Such an
assignment is aided by taking cognizance of Benjamin’s onslaught
on a second conformism mentioned in ‘Über den Begriff der
Geschichte’ – the conformity of reformist theory and practice.2
Reformism is still the conformity that overpowers the supposedly
critically-minded. Nowadays it is frequently reformist-minded
theorists who see reflected in Benjamin their own defeatist
melancholy and desperate half-hope that, ameliorated by their
wishful thinking, things might just work out for the best in the end,
somehow. No major shake-ups intended. This is quite contrary to
Benjamin’s intent. In his final notes on the concept of history,
Benjamin attacks reformist political tactics and economic delusions
for their bypassing of the insurgent, self-organized moment of
proletarian revolution. For Benjamin, without revolution there can
be no redemption from ‘this life here’, since revolution and
vii
viii WALTER BENJAMIN
redemption are fused.3 In the wretched late 1930s, while some of
his contemporaries looked to Moscow and others vacillated (and
numerous others hailed Hitlerite Munich), Benjamin attacked the
‘innate’ conformism of the left parties.4 Conformism of one sort
manifests itself for him in 1939, in the chimera of an ever-onwards-
and-upwards progress of history, a salvation that can take place
without the intervention of revolutionary subjects. This desperate
and blind faith flies in the face of an actual devastation – plain for
all to see – of the working class and the labour movement.
Benjamin recalls that such devastation set in after the failure of
the Spartakus rebellion in Germany, and it was exacerbated by the
regimes of Hitler and Stalin. He sees a downhill tumble of the
prospects for workers’ self-activity. Not that he loses hope. But the
reformist-meets-Stalinist trust in the progress of history, and the
more or less wilful ignorance of Marx’s insistence on proletarian
self-emancipation, mean that proclaimedly progressive ideologues
overlook the catastrophic impact of the defeat of revolution in
Germany in the Weimar years and after, and in the Soviet Union
under Stalin. They put their faith in history, economy and theory,
and do not put their energies into the re-animation of class struggle.
Conformism incubates business as usual; that is to say, nothing
changes, because to the conformists it seems that nothing very
much needs to change. Benjamin thought that the so-called critics
were mistaken. Business as usual is a state of emergency. In a
defence of the absolutely revolutionary fracture, in thought and in
practice, he concludes: ‘That it continues “like this” is the
catastrophe.’5
From the mid-1920s, Benjamin investigates Marxism. He
explores Marxist theory, enters into dialogue with Marxists and
visits the Soviet Union. Benjamin is a nonconformist, often
sceptical about trends engendered by the Communist Party of his
day. His misgivings multiply as Stalinism solidifies its rule, and
what passes for Marxist analysis extinguishes its revolutionary
spark. He deploys the tools of historical materialism quirkily, and
yet no more idiosyncratically than does the ‘official’ Marxism of the
party. Benjamin’s nonconformism is conspicuous in his critical
interrogations of the ways in which party communists make use of
Marxist maxims.
It may be tedious to participate in prolonging the game of
selecting quotations, reinserting ellipses, arguing over the political
affiliations of a dead man. But asserting the revolutionary under-
pinning of somebody’s thought is, if nothing else, a poke in the
eye of those perpetrators of scholarship who endlessly defuse,
debarb and domesticate that which has slipped into the intellectual
bequest. However, recovering theory is not a matter of archival
accuracy alone. Benjamin’s political work is still of interest if its
PREFACE ix
strategies and insights can be of use for analysis and action today,
if it can be used as a resource and research tool for overpowering
present political and cultural conformism, if it can be found to
possess continuing relevance or, maybe, Aktualität.
Aktualität is a word that recurs in Benjamin’s writing. For
example, it appears in 1921, when he announces the formation of
a journal, Angelus Novus. The Aktualität of Angelus Novus is said
to mean the capturing of the underlying, decisive ‘spirit of the
epoch’.6 Aktualität is mentioned again in 1925 when, having
resigned himself to a career in upmarket feuilleton journalism,
Benjamin defends the topicality of popular illustrated magazines
– that they speak to the moment.7 In a letter to Hugo von Hof-
mannsthal introducing Einbahnstraße in 1928, he insists that
Aktualität is the obverse of the eternal in history, and is endlessly
more significant for historical, political and cultural research.8The
concoction of the theoretical concept Aktualität was evidence of
Benjamin’s attempt to avoid high-minded abstraction. He wants
to engage in the world as he finds it. Refusing to focus purely on
the formal aesthetics of the painterly canvas surface or extrapolat-
ing for purposes of bloodless philosophizing and eternity beckoning
the subtleties of Hegelian thought, Benjamin, the ‘anthropological
materialist’, enters drawing rooms and attics, spaces and scenes of
historical, material human traces. Materialism – in Benjamin’s
sense – assumes an interaction between people and world. Humans
work upon physical things and materialism questions the ways in
which they do this and the relationships into which they enter in
order to do this, and how this alters their thoroughly historical
human nature. In order to study such matters, Benjamin is enticed
into lodgings crammed full with baubles and valuables and
vibrating with scratchy phonographs. He proposes taking seriously
the clutter of material existence, and wants expressly to analyse
the commodity trash of mass production, scrutinizing what his
friend Siegfried Kracauer called ‘inconspicuous surface-level
expressions’ which, ‘by virtue of their unconscious nature, provide
unmediated access to the fundamental substance of the state of
things’.9An attitude informed by Aktualitätgrabs quotidian objects
whose very insignificance and ‘unconscious nature’ warrant their
indexical relationship to social truth and social lies. Whether on
the track of theorists’ more or less secret politics, or on the trail of
the embedded social and historical meanings of things, to negotiate
Aktualität is to enmesh critique in precise social observations and
to be responsive to the urgencies and apprehensions of the
moment, to be topical. An attitude informed by Aktualität
understands Benjamin in context, underscoring his reactive
engagement with contemporary controversies and phenomena.
x WALTER BENJAMIN
But how can Benjamin’s stress on Aktualität be interpreted
today? The meaning of Aktualität is fractured, for it has to
acknowledge a constellation between the past and present.
Aktualität entails responsiveness to the specific historical and
political conditions of the scrutinized object’s emergence into the
world and into theory. The questions must be posed: what
conditions impinged on Benjamin’s thought, how was his theory
inflected by its sorties into historical and political actuality? But
also to be faced in this idea of Aktualitätis the relationship between
the object of study, Benjamin, and this present, this urgent
moment, now (for all moments are urgent). Benjamin details this
linearity-defying perspective: ‘Telescoping of the past through the
present.’10 Even the past is topical, for it has significance in the
present. The past reverberates in the present; the present filters
the image of the past. Critique, sensitive to the conditions that
shape the past, cannot evade the concerns of the present.
A perspective convinced of past Benjamin’s continuing relevance
for the present draws on the Aktualität of his offensive against a
technology fetishism that is ignorant of the stipulations accorded
by the private mode of appropriation. Such ignorance may be
newly prevalent in the hyper-cyberbabble of the new millennial-
ism. The notion of the technoid subject might give a neon-green
light to cybermaterialism and its visions of machinic subjects,
enhanced with prosthetics, wired up and plugged into inflowma-
tion (a version of Marinetti’s futurist rhapsody for a postindustrial
age). What happens in this cyber-conception of material is that the
distinction between machine–technology–worker – a technician
producing within technical relations of production – is collapsed
into a single, mythic, postnatural subject. This subject embodies,
quite literally, technology, technical relations of production and
producer, and so can only with difficulty be envisaged as involved
in a process of exploitation. But a communion with high-tech that
evades relations of exploitation is a rare privilege. Cybermaterial-
ism sets up a frozen concept of technology, a blindly determining
force, shooting us back to Second International Marxism, and it
is no wonder that Charles Darwin and friends enjoy a new
popularity: the talk, for all its rhetoric of revolution, is of evolution.
The cybers seek through technology a new determination of the
species. Benjamin might sometimes be wheeled on to articulate
the early birth of this machine-man, but he would be shocked at
the cybermonster’s class-blindness.
Under investigation here is the Aktualität of Walter Benjamin,
then in his time, and now in mine. Nowadays, constantly, the
attempt has to be made to wrest his work away from a conformism
about to overpower it – bred of an historical and political amnesia
about the past and the present, affecting those quite able to forget.
PREFACE xi
‘Overpowering’ possesses another sense. It means exertion of
an unavoidable effect, suggesting another layer of significance
embedded in the phrase ‘overpowering conformism’. In Benjamin’s
analyses, adaptation to new technological forms by all elements of
the social ensemble results from an irresistible conformism. This
second sense of overpowering conformism points out a certain
formal and technical determinism in Benjamin’s work, at moments
redolent of the determinism of thinkers on the left, whose
automatic, evolutionary presumptions Benjamin is often keen to
counter. Such determinism is especially manifest in his thoughts
on aesthetics. Numerous essays set out from the presupposition
that technology generates new forms, and that adoption of the
formal characteristics of new technological forms – in art and in all
social practices – becomes unavoidable over time. Technological
form precipitates social form. In practice, however, Benjamin
asserts, this falling into conformity with new technological forms
and consummation of the reorganization of production and
reception that they suggest is retarded by capitalist relations of
production. The central contradiction of capital’s new order
consists in the fact that the socializing of production and its col-
lectivizing of culture are countervailed by a retrograde movement,
instituted to safeguard the social templates of class society.
Benjamin concentrates his inquiries in the space opened up by this
misalignment between the technological dynamic and the mode
of social ordering. He identifies this misalignment as the two-way
pull of forces and relations of production. For Benjamin, Technik
(technique, technics, technology) is implicated in the mismatch of
forces and relations of production. His assumption that the orga-
nization of the technological forces of production discharges a
determining effect on all sections of the social totality is coupled
with the insistence on analysis of the relations of production. Such
analysis forms part of Benjamin’s political strategy to nurture
proletarian activism. Forces of production and what are seen by
Benjamin to be their ‘appropriate’, ‘conforming’ relations of
production can be played out pre-emptively in the realm of art.
Cultural production and cultural reception are forms of training.
The rehearsal in culture of new modes of social relations becomes
the precondition for the general overpowering of conformism in
its cultural and political guises.
Focusing on technology does not render an analysis a contri-
bution to Marxist theory. Marxist theory demonstrates sensitivity
to the relationship posited between technology and non-technology
– that is, the relationships between technology, nature and world.
For a theory to be called Marxist it needs to flaunt an interest not
just in the hardware of production but also in relations of
production.11 It is in order to insinuate this dual concern that the
xii WALTER BENJAMIN
term Technik is more often than not left untranslated in this study.
The German word Technik transmits a more open sense than the
English word technology concedes. In order to demonstrate that
the word Technik has caused other translators conceptual grief, a
citation from one of Habermas’s translators should suffice:
Although German has adopted to some extent the corrupt usage
of technology (Technologie) to mean technics rather than its
study, the adjective technisch means technical and technologi-
cal. That is, it emphasizes the form of making and controlling
as well as the machines used in these processes. It has been
translated in both ways. Similarly, Technik means technique,
technics and technology.12
Technik intimates a sense of both technology and technique.
Benjamin seems to squeeze full meaning from this compact word.
In signifying simultaneously technology and technique, Technik
alludes to the material hardware, the means of production and the
technical relations of production. To accent technical relations of
production is to acknowledge that there exist social and political
relationships between producers and means of production.
Technique also refers to the accumulated skill and knowledge, the
scientific data necessary for the manipulation of machinery. The
point to be made here is simply that Benjamin uses the term
Technikrather than the word Technologie, and this might be because
Technikcovers social and political relations, as well as the empirical
fact of machinery. Technik includes reference to social relations
and, as such, is a category of experience. Whenever Benjamin uses
the term Technik, he is mindful of a complex of human relations
of ownership and control.13Benjamin’s dynamic of social actuality,
informed at its core by human labour and the interactions between
technology and technique, insists on an awareness of both the
factuality of the objective world and its contents and the actuality
of subjective human interaction with that objective world. A dual
concern with technology and technique is manifest not only in
Benjamin’s strictly social and political assessments, but also exerts
direct bearing on his aesthetic formulations. These formulate a
specific interest in technological art-forms and ask questions about
the relations of production and reception that those forms intimate.
Of course, the word Technik has aesthetic resonances too. To
highlight this point, here is a citation from a book by two people
both connected to Benjamin, who represent two poles of influence
on him. His friend and critical theorist, Theodor Wiesengrund
Adorno, and Bertolt Brecht’s musical collaborator, Hanns Eisler,
published, in English first, a study of film scores titled Composing
for the Films (1947), while living near Hollywood. The limits and
confusions of the terminology of technism, and the contradictions
