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A Participant's Notes on the International Walter Benjamin
Association First Congress:
Amsterdam, July 24-26, 1997
"In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it. The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer, he comes as the subduer of Antichrist. Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious."
---Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History" (1940)
Preface
At the conclusion of his essay, "The Integrity of the Intellectual: In Memory of Walter Benjamin," Leo Lowenthal, sociologist of literature and editor of the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung , posed a challenge:
Now that the edition of Benjamin's collected works is completed, the publishing house and the group responsible for it can collectively regard themselves as the writers of Benjamin's history. It will remain a concern to all of us, especially those younger than we, to define his gift to us from the enemy...
In an attempt to wrest the tradition Benjamin fought for from the enemy, the publishers and their tenured ministeriales, the Walter Benjamin Research Syndicate sent a delegate to the International Walter Benjamin Congress 1997: "Perception and Experience in Modernity/ Wahrnehmung und Erfahrung in der Moderne," which was held in Amsterdam, July 24th through July 26th, at the Felix Meritis Foundation of the University of Amsterdam.
The Congress itself was well-attended, as was indicated by the number of people standing in the aisles during the plenary papers. Between the plenary sessions parallel workshops were held throughout the Felix Meritis Foundation on Keizersgracht and the Bungehuis on Spuistraat. Plenary Speakers included George Steiner, Samuel Weber, Gary Smith, Sigrid Weigel, Irving Wohlfahrt, Martin Jay, Mona Jean & Kim Yvon Benjamin (WB's granddaughters), Michael Benjamin (WB's nephew), Burkhardt Lindner, Werner Hamacher, and Susan Buck-Morss. Over one hundred people gave short presentations (15 minutes) in the parallel workshop sessions.
July 24th: Opening
Helga Geyer-Ryan of the University of Amsterdam's Institute of Comparative Literature, and one of the editors of the Benjamin Bulletin [1], welcomed the participants. The late Wil van Gerwen, who had first planned the Congress before his premature death, was commemorated along with Jean Selz, who died at the age of 92 on 26 June 1997. R.H.T. Bleijerveld, Chancellor of the University of Amsterdam, officially opened the Congress by praising the open-mindedness of Amsterdam and the Dutch in rather self-serving and monotonous rhetoric.
It should be stated here at the outset that this Congress was kept quite secluded from the public. One saw and heard no mention of it anywhere in the city. In a letter written a few days after the event, Dutch critic and activist Geert Lovink reported: "I asked around. Not one person noticed that a Benjamin conference had taken place. Was it closed and secret?" It was only open to those who had paid for the conference, and there were monitors posted at the doors to the Concertzaal to inspect name-tags. No matter how intellectual an event purports to be, once those name-tags come out the attendant visions of secret handshakes and hierarchies in the adytums of academe quickly follow. The first Congress of the International Walter Benjamin Association was no exception. By the end of the Congress, however, extra-academic positions had been voiced repeatedly, and the positive reception granted to such positions by students, Phd candidates, and new Phds signaled a shift in current Benjamin scholarship that will be felt in the coming years. The writer who penned "What is Epic Theatre?" would not have wanted his work and the discussion of his work hermetically sealed off from the rank and file.
George Steiner
George Steiner's lecture "To Speak of Walter Benjamin" was one of the high points of the Congress. Kiernan Ryan's introduction of Steiner, however, credited the latter with having first introduced Walter Benjamin to the English-speaking world in the 1958 essay "Marxism and the Literary Critic." One will search through the bibliographies of Benjamin secondary literature in vain for any mention of this article [2]; an indication of its real impact in the field. Moreover, the credit is misplaced. Already in the spring of 1948, Benjamin's essay "Notes on Epic Theatre" had been translated into English by Edward Landberg for the Western Review. Landberg's translation will be cited below within the context of Samuel Weber's paper on Benjamin and Epic Theatre.
Following some opening remarks about the interdisciplinary nature of Benjamin studies and the multitude of topics covered in the parallel workshops, Steiner narrated an anecdote about meeting Scholem in Geneva and dining with him in a restaurant which Benjamin had frequented. The mythical University of Muri was evoked, and on the basis of his conversation with Scholem, Steiner postulated twelve prerequisites for the study of Walter Benjamin.
1. The Emancipation of the German-Jewish bourgeoisie. The ambiguous position of Heinrich Heine. The cult of Goethe amongst assimilated Jews in Germany. The particularly idealized picture of France through their reception of Voltaire.
2. The German Youth Movement prior to WWI: Gustav Wynken, the Wandervogel, the concept of the Führer and discipleship, Benjamin and the Freie Deutsche Jugend. The importance of Stefan George.
3. German Pacifism: a virtue whose history in Germany does not fill many volumes. Benjamin's break with Wyneken and the Freie Deutsche Jugend over the issue of war. Scholem was quite proud of what Steiner emphatically called "draft dodging". Both men had gone to Switzerland. The rather amazing lacunae in their correspondence regarding any mention of the war.
4. Development of the German Language in Mystical Literature from Martin Luther through Boehme and the Pietists to Hölderlin. Hölderlin's 'dramatic hermeticism'. The influence of Norbert von Hellingrath on Benjamin's study of Hölderlin.
5. The Inaccessibility of an Academic Career: the irony of the WB Congress in this light. Despite his being excluded, WB had hungered for academic recognition. The irony of WB's first obituary in English, quoted from Brodersen's biography. In the NY Jewish weekly, Aufbau (Oct. 11, 1940), "The suicide of Prof. Walter Benjamin, a well-known psychologist" was recorded.
6. The Mentality of the Collector: WB as bibliophile, his collection of children's books and books by the deranged. Passagen-Werk as a collector's prized quotations.
7. Graphology: WB was expert graphologist. Steiner's own lack of expertise in this discipline. (The influence of L.Klages).
8. Massive experiments with 'narcotics': Scholem told Steiner that the extant writings on hashish, etc. and the recorded protocols of his experiments were the tip of the iceberg, and that many recorded notes had been lost. Steiner emphasized this point in such a way as to admonish those who had been studiously overlooking this fact. Yet, the discomfort of his position led him to avail himself of a disclaimer. Not wanting to be seen as an advocate, he allowed himself an easy exit by emphasizing the sociological distance between WB and our own time.
9. WB's rejection of Leninism: the meeting with Asja Lacis and Brecht; WB own peculiar brand of messianic marxism --metamarxism.
10.Translation: the importance to WB of Hölderlin's translations of Sophocles Antigone and Pindar; Proust; Rudolf Borchardt. Steiner refers to his own After Babel.
11.Eros and Sexuality: WB's love and fear of women.
12. Theological background: All of WB could be expressed in the kabbalistic phrase of 'Tikkun Olam'. WB a parodist theologian. Justice in Remembrance. To bring justice to the victims of history, that history not be written by the victors and despots. The Kafka letters between WB and Scholem. WB's articulate genius for sadness. WB 's own dishevelled state makes him a symbol of the limitless immensity of waste of the Shoah, a world made ash and irreparable. A number of Steiner's remarks here were almost verbatim from his documentary on Franz Kafka; e.g. the concept of the 'Ungeziefer' (vermin) from The Metamorphosis, which was then turned against the Jews. Dr. Steiner was not necessarily pleased to have this similarity called to his attention.
July 25th: Day Two
The first full day of the Congress opened with a plenary session at 10:00 a.m. in the Concertzaal. Samuel Weber's "Walter Benjamin and the Citability of Gesture" and Gary Smith's "Benjamin, Scholem and Jonah: Towards a Jewish Theory of Justice" were the featured papers. Anselm Haverkamp chaired the session. In his introduction of the speakers, Haverkamp credited Weber with having set the entire theoretical stage for Benjamin's reception, situating WB within the discipline of "theory," in contrast to "philosophy," where WB is usually situated in Germany.
Samuel Weber
Weber's paper focused on the two versions of Benjamin's essay "What is Epic Theatre?" [3] whose pertinent passages on gesture and citability are worth quoting here:
1. Epic theatre is gestural: The extent to which it can also be literary in the traditional sense is a separate issue. The gesture is its raw material and its task is the rational utilization of this material. The gesture has two advantages over the highly deceptive statements and assertions normally made by people and their many-layered and opaque actions. First, the gesture is falsifiable only up to a point; in fact, the more inconspicuous and habitual it is, the more difficult it is to falsify. Second, unlike people's actions and endeavours, it has a definable beginning and a definable end. Indeed, this strict, frame-like, enclosed nature of each moment of an attitude which, after all, is as a whole in a state of living flux, is one of the basic dialectical characteristics of the gesture. This leads to an important conclusion: the more frequently we interrupt someone engaged in an action, the more gestures we obtain. Hence, the interrupting of action is one of the principal concerns of epic theatre. Therein lies the formal achievement of Brecht's songs with their crude, heart-rending refrains. Without anticipating the difficult study, yet to be made, of the function of the text in epic theatre, we can at least say that often its main function is not to illustrate or advance the action but, on the contrary, to interrupt it: not only the action of others, but also the action of one's own. It is the retarding quality of these interruptions and the episodic quality of this framing of action which allows gestural theatre to become epic theatre. [First version, trans. A. Bostock]
2. The Quotable Gesture: 'The effect of every sentence,' Brecht asserts in a didactic dramatic poem, 'was expected and revealed. And was awaited until the crowd had weighed every sentence.' In short, the play was interrupted by the pauses of the actors. One may reach out further here and recall that interruption is one of the methods fundamental to all shaping. It extends far beyond the precincts of art. It lies, to select only one example, at the basis of quotation. Quoting a text includes an interruption of its context. It is therefore clear that the epic theatre, which is based on interruption, is in a specific sense quotable. The quotability of its text would be in no way peculiar. But with gestures, which, in the course of the play are appropriate, it is quite different.
'To make gestures quotable' is one of the essential tasks of the epic theatre. The actor must be able to space out his gestures as a compositor spaces out words. This effect can be attained, for example, by having the actor on the scene quote his own gesture. Thus we follow how, in Happy End, the girl, Neher, playing the part of a Salvation Army sergeant who, in order to make converts, has sung a song in the seamen's pub - a song all too much in place in a pub - and then has to repeat this song and the gestures that go with it before a Salvation Army council. Thus, in Massnahme, not only the report of the communists, but also, by their acting, a series of gestures of the party-member against whom they proceeded, is brought before the party-tribunal. What, in the epic drama, is an artistic device of the subtlest kind, becomes, in the special case of the didactic play (Lehrstück), one of the most immediate ends in view. For the rest, the epic theatre, by definition, is one of gestures. The more frequently we interrupt an actor the more gestures we obtain. [Second Version, trans. E. Landberg]
Citing these two passages, Weber proceeded to explain the citability of gesture and the importance of interrupting action. The German word 'Zustand' [4] [usually translated as 'condition' or 'state'] was broken down into its components 'Stand' [position, standing, rank] and the preposition 'zu' [to, towards]. The 'conditions' which it is epic theatre's job to represent, rather than developing actions, would best be defined, according to Weber, as 'stances'. The translation of 'Zustand' here as 'stance' elucidates the importance of the mode of representation, the gesture.
Epic theatre is a non-aristotelian theatre. 'Einfühlen' (empathy, sympathetic understanding) and catharsis are dispensed with. Brecht denied the actual ability to 'identify with' the 'other' because this other did not occupy a stable position with fixed contours. While Aristotle considered poetic representation a correlative to mythical representation, Brechtian theatre seeks to interrupt the myth. The gesture interrupts the action, frames it, and serves to comment upon the preceding action. It is a negation. Interruption as the 'Mother of dialectics'. Gesture suspends the animation, and its shock-effect retards thought in the sense of the word 'Nachdenken' ('thinking back on,' 'provoking thought'). The disjunctive nature of the gesture opens up interstices for the formation of public will and decision-making. Epic theatre fills in the orchestra pit, the originally sacred abyss of tragedy separating actor and audience which has lost its original meaning. The stage has become a podium.
While Weber's paper deftly elucidated the foregoing points, this participant was struck by its failure to develop Benjamin's ideas. Weber's admirable explanation of the importance of gesture, interruption, citability and so on was really a rehash of an article which has been available in English for fifty years. The relationship of Brecht's epic theatre to current trends in theatre was never discussed. The importance of WB to developments in the media (e.g. internet) was only briefly mentioned. Missing also was any mention of a relationship between gesture, the concept of the 'dialectical image' and the messianic cessation of history.
Just as the gesture interrupts theatrical action, framing and commenting upon it, the dialectical image interrupts perception. In his essay "On Fascination: Walter Benjamin's Images" Ackbar Abbas describes the interrupting function of the dialectical image:
We can relate Benjamin's Medusan view of history to his interest in photography and in the poetics of quotation. The fascination that photographic images exert can be profoundly unnerving: it was so for Baudelaire. This is largely because photographic images 'paralyze the associative mechanism in the beholder' (One-Way Street, 256). The spark of contingency provides the point of fissure of the image: it prevents it from closing up, from hiding behind the appearance of historical continuity or organic interrelatedness. The fissure of the image ruptures myth: it provides evidence against it. When Atget photographed the scenes of Paris, he photographed them, Benjamin points out, like 'scenes of crime' (Illuminations, 228). [5]
In the 'Medusan view of history' modern experience is viewed as a series of shocks. Our experience of 'current events' is an endless series of catastrophes sold as 'news'. But just as the gesture and the dialectical image create ruptures and fissures, 'the messianic cessation of history' interrupts the false historical continuum wielded by the authorities. In Lowenthal's essay "The Integrity of the Intellectual," Burkhardt Lindner is quoted with regard to Benjamin's idea of justice as an interruption of the so-called postive law which merely rationalizes dominance and violence:
Justice is the messianic emergence or the purifying, profane power of revolutions. Correspondingly, Benjamin also rejects the notion of world history as world court. Only the revolutionary interruption of history or the messianic cessation of history can disrupt the repressive continuum and pass judgment over what has been. [6]
Gary Smith
The idea of a Jewish concept of justice was the focus of Gary Smith's paper, "Benjamin, Scholem and Jonah: Towards a Jewish Theory of Justice."
In his biography of Benjamin, Gershom Scholem discusses the relationship between WB's concept of justice and the world of myth:
Benjamin's decided turn to the philosophic penetration of myth, which occupied him for so many years, beginning with his study of Hölderlin and probably for the rest of his life, was manifested here for the first time and left its mark on many of our conversations. In this connection, at this early date Benjamin spoke of the difference between law and justice, calling law an order that could be established only in the world of myth. Four years later he elaborated on this idea in his essay "Zur Kritik der Gewalt" ['Critique of Violence,' in Reflections, pp. 277-300]. Benjamin must have been familiar around this time with the writings of Johann Jakob Bachofen and also must have read the works of the ethnologist Karl Theodor Preuss on animism and preanimism; he repeatedly referred to the latter's statements on preanimism.
Gary Smith's presentation focused on the Benjamin/Scholem dialogue concerning law and justice, its relationship to their discussions of the Book of Jonah, and the peculiar Jewish concept of justice found in that prophetic book. This discussion was to have played a rôle in forming the background to the discussions of 'mythic violence' in Benjamin's essay 'Critique of Violence,' a work which shows the influence of both Hermann Cohen and George Sorel. The recalcitrant Jonah's reluctance to prophesy by fleeing the presence of the Lord to Tarshish was rather painfully narrated along with the story of the great fish, the redemption of Nineveh and God's repentence. Though Smith had chosen an engaging topic to discuss, his delivery was simply not up to the task. Obviously unrehearsed, he betrayed a distracting nervousness and lack of confidence, which contrasted markedly with the all-pervasive position he has occupied in the world of Benjamin scholarship. Moreover, his attempts to spontaneously edit his unwieldy work faltered on numerous occasions, resulting in a most choppy and confusing performance. It was clear from scanning the Concertzaal that many faces registered disappointment and boredom. Nor would one be contradicted in saying that Smith's was certainly the weakest effort at the Congress. It is to be hoped that the published paper will find more a favorable reception. Applause was polite, but Anselm Haverkamp's attempt to console Smith with a remark to the effect of "Well, you got through it" registered a blush of humiliation on Smith's face, which this participant could not help but notice.
Workshops
Nine workshops were held simultaneously between 11.45 and 13.15. Attending Session III-1 in the Shaffyzaal afforded an opportunity to hear G.T.M. Visser (Univ. of Leiden), Geret Luhr (Univ. of Bamberg) and Willem van Reijen (Univ. of Utrecht) briefly read their respective papers: "Erlebnis und Machenschaft" ['Lived Experience and Machination'], "Die Erfahrung von Magie in der Literatur der moderne. Walter Benjamins Auseinandersetzungen mit dem Werk Stefan Georges" ['The Experience of Magic in the Literature of the Modern. Walter Benjamin's Dealings with the Work of Stefan George'] and "Der Schwarzwald und Paris. Metaphorik und mehr in den Philosophien Heideggers und Benjamin." ['The Black Forest and Paris. Metaphor and more in the Philosophies of Heidegger and Benjamin']. Last minute cancellations and alterations of the program aside, it should be emphasized that once one made a choice to attend a particular workshop, one inevitably missed the other 30 papers being presented simultaneously in the other workshops.
G.T.M. Visser's paper focused on the concept of Erlebnis ('lived experience' or 'episode') found in the works of Heidegger, Dilthey, Martin Buber and Benjamin. The concept of 'shock' found in WB's 'Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' was briefly discussed, as was Baudelaire's influence. Heidegger's reading of Buber on 'Erlebnis' was also mentioned. Geret Luhr's presentation on WB's difficult rapport with Stefan George and the George circle continued the discussion of 'Erlebnis' and shock. The centrality of 'experience' in WB's early essay 'On the Program of the Coming Philosophy' was traced back to the influence of Felix Noeggerath, who appears as 'the genius' in WB's correspondence. Noeggerath had also been marginally connected to the George circle. According to Luhr, the traces of George's influence throughout Benjamin's writings (whether directly from George or indirectly through Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Rudolf Borchardt, Friedrich Gundolf, Norbert von Hellingrath, Ludwig Klages or Karl Wolfskehl) have not been adequately pursued by Benjamin scholars. Luhr's short paper was an attempt to redress this oversight. In addition to the central concept of 'experience,' the importance of 'aura' was also traced back to the George circle.
Willem van Reijen's presentation on the metaphors of country and city found in Benjamin and Heidegger was rather pedestrian and uninspired. Nietzsche was cited as a predecessor of 'Stadthaß' (hatred of cities), and Heidegger's conception of philosophy and its relation to landscape was illustrated with anecdotes about the extremely laconic nature of the 'typical' Black Forest peasant. Such laconic nature was contrasted with the 'empty' loquaciousness of urban dwellers.
The attempt made by a number of participants to liken Heidegger and Benjamin resulted in a lively question and answer period, however, which was the highlight of this workshop. It now strikes this participant as odd that Cornelia Vismann, who chaired the session, did not contribute to the lively interchange on WB and Heidegger, for the ideas she expressed in her article "Landscape in the First World War: On Benjamin's Critique of Ernst Jünger" [New Comparison, No. 18, Autumn 1994] would have been most pertinent. Evidently, one of the twenty-odd participants there had been the journalist Christian Schulte, for he has also mentioned the heated exchange concerning this issue in his short article on the Congress which appeared in the Frankfurter Rundschau (July 31,1997).[7] A clear division existed between the philosophy professors, who had located numerous parallel passages and ideas in Benjamin and Heidegger, and those for whom the political differences between the two men obviated any serious consideration of substantial similarity between their respective philosophies. The discussion which grew more and more heated did not abate at 13.15 and continued into the lunch hour.
Julian Roberts has called attention to the influence of Ludwig Klages on both Benjamin's and Heidegger's ideas of history, as Richard Sieburth has reiterated in his introduction to the English translation of Folio "'N' [Re The Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress]" from the Passagen-Werk (Arcades Project).[8] In addition to Klages, both Benjamin and Heidegger were decisively influenced by Hölderlin's reverence for the 'holiness of the minute particular'. Furthermore, their understanding of Hölderlin had been deeply influenced by George and Norbert von Hellingrath. Nonetheless, there are some serious obstacles which will have to be persuasively explained away before many participants of the Congress are convinced that this dialogue between WB and Heidegger is based on any kind of substantial common ground. Moreover, a number of professors who made such assertions were somewhat remiss in their ability to recall pertinent evidence for their positions. In a conversation with the convivial Prof. G.T.M. Visser, this participant questioned this 'common ground' on the basis of numerous barbs aimed at Heidegger in Benjamin's correspondence. When WB's criticisms of Heidegger's dissertation on Duns Scotus were cited as a case in point, Dr. Visser denied that WB had made such an assertion. In fact, Dr. Visser denied that Benjamin had ever read this work. Instead, Visser corrected, it was Heidegger's 'Das Problem der historischen Zeit' which was at issue, and indeed that work had been mentioned by WB as an example of how not to treat the subject. Now, in all fairness to Dr. Visser it should be noted that Benjamin's letter to Scholem on November 11, 1916 did concern 'Das Problem der historischen Zeit'. But in all fairness to the questioning participant, Benjamin did in fact read Heidegger's book on Duns Scotus. In his letter to Scholem on December 1, 1920, Benjamin wrote the following:
I have read Heidegger's book on Duns Scotus. It is incredible that anyone could qualify for a university position on the basis of such a study. Its execution requires nothing more than great diligence and a command of scholastic Latin, and, in spite of all of its philosophical packaging, it is basically only a piece of good translating work. The author's contemptible groveling at Rickert's and Husserl's feet does not make reading it more pleasant. The book does not deal with Duns Scotus's linguistic philosophy in philosophical terms, and thus what it leaves undone is no small task. [9]
Then there is Benjamin's assertion in a letter to Scholem that he and Brecht "were planning to annihilate Heidegger." [10] Writing to Gretel Adorno on July 20, 1938, Benjamin expressed amusement and dismay that he had figured as a follower of Heidegger in an issue of the German-language journal Internationale Literatur, which was published in Moscow and "hews to the party line." Benjamin considered the journal "quite wretched." [11] As for the supposed similarity in their philosophies of history, Benjamin's own self-understanding of their respective positions indicates the contrary. Writing to Scholem on January 20, 1930 about the epistemological-historical introduction to his Paris Arcades project (Folio 'N'), Benjamin added,
"This is where I will find Heidegger, and I expect sparks will fly from the shock of the confrontation between our two very different ways of looking at history." [12]
Within Folio 'N' can also be found the statement that "Heidegger seeks in vain to rescue history for phenomenology abstractly, through 'historicity'". [13] As these few quotes should indicate, any attempt made to coopt Benjamin by assimilating him into the Heideggerian camp will have to effectively counter and nullify Benjamin's own self-understanding of his project vis-a-vis National Socialism and its "runic humbug," which Heidegger once called "the inner truth and greatness of this movement." [14]
The afternoon sessions began at 14.45 in the Concertzaal. Sigrid Weigel began the plenary session with her paper "Lost in Translation. Vom Verlust des Bilddenkens in UEbersetzungen Benjaminscher Schriften" (Concerning the Loss of Pictorial Thinking in Translations of Benjamin's Writings). She was followed by Irving Wohlfarth, whose paper "Walter Benjamin and the Idea of a Technological Eros" presented a detailed discussion of Benjamin's prose poem "To the Planetarium" from One-Way Street. Since Ms. Weigel's soft voice made note-taking for this participant rather difficult, the following remarks will be focused predominantly on Irving Wohlfarth's paper.
Sigrid Weigel
Because the integrity and uniqueness of the image in Benjamin's German was the central idea of Sigrid Weigel's paper, it was presented in German. The translator's translator, whose essay "Die Aufgabe des UEbersetzers" (The Task of the Translator) belongs among the most celebrated essays on translation ever written in German, [15] was discussed within the context of a persisting Unübersetzbarkeit [untranslatability] of the images of his language. Examples of the untranslatable nature of certain passages from Japanese were given. The 'Leib- und Bildraum' [Body & Field of Vision] of Benjamin's language, translation vs. transliteration, the dialectical image as a caesura, the threshold between languages, and translation as a kind of probe were discussed. The presentation developed certain themes which can be found in Weigel's recently published work, Entstellte AEhnlichkeit: Walter Benjamin's theoretische Schreibweise [Distorted Similarities: Walter Benjamin's Theoretical Mode of Writing] (Fischer, 1997).
Irving Wohlfarth
Those for whom the discussion of Heidegger and Benjamin was a subject of heated interchange were all the more stimulated by Irving Wohlfarth's penetrating discussion of WB's "To the Planetarium." Though Wohlfarth's presentation was in English, he followed Weigel's lead in quoting the passage in the original after Edmund Jephcott's English translation had been given to the participants.
Concluding Einbahnstraße [One-Way Street], "To the Planetarium" could be seen as a precis of Benjamin's philosophy, which George Steiner claimed could be summarized in the concept of Tikkun Olam. from Lurianic kabbalah. Wohlfarth, however, chose the Greek concept of apocatastasis, the final restitution of all things at the coming of the Messiah.
It is precisely this sense of cosmic experience, cosmic rausch , which separates the ancient world from the modern, postulates Benjamin. The loss and repression of a communal cosmogonic Eros, however, must inevitably lead to Thanatos, the destructive revenge of the repressed.
For it is in this experience [Rausch] alone that we gain certain knowledge of what is nearest to us and what is remotest from us, and never of one without the other. This means, however, that man can be in ecstatic contact with the cosmos only communally. It is the dangerous error of modern man to regard this experience as unimportant and avoidable, and to consign it to the individual as the poetic rapture of starry nights. It is not; its hour strikes again and again, and then neither nations nor generations can escape it....
World War I was just such an eruption on a cosmic scale never before experienced. The technological powers unleashed took human beings to the depths of the sea and the altitudes of the clouds. The lack of communal sense demonstrated by capitalist greed, however, turned the cosmic "bridal bed into a bloodbath." Mastery of nature is not and should not become the purpose of the "commingling" of human and cosmic forces, for as Benjamin asks, "who would trust a cane wielder who proclaimed the mastery of children by adults to be the purpose of education?" As he would reiterate in his later essay on "Surrealism," the ever greater frenzies of destruction looming up ahead will be inevitable until the proletariat is seized by this cosmogonic Eros and can conquer destruction in the 'ecstasy of procreation.'
As Wohlfarth correctly noted, Benjamin's "To the Planetarium" betrays the influence of Ludwig Klages's Vom Kosmogonischen Eros. The anti-militarist Klages, whose writings on "Dream-Consciousness" and graphology deeply influenced WB, had also left Germany for Switzerland during WWI. Regarding 'mind' and 'spirit' [Geist] as the rationalist enemies behind militarism, Klages advocated a return to 'soul' through the rebirth of matriarchal mystery religions like the Eleusinian mysteries. His anti-semitism, which became progressively more pronounced, ultimately found in WB a hostile critic, and in his correspondence with Adorno and Horkheimer Benjamin mentions his plan of an attack on both Klages and C.G. Jung.
For Wohlfarth, however, "To the Planetarium" reads like 'left-wing Klages'. The forces of the irrational contained in Klages's 'hair-brained metaphysical dualism' (WB) cannot simply be ignored, and are to be appropriated by the left. But rather than reinstitute the mysteries and some neofascist "ancestor worship" (Ahnenerbe), the pagan powers of rausch are to be won for German Jewishness and Jewish messianism. Here Wohlfarth has noticed the possible influence of Sabbatianism, the heretical kabbalist messianism which Gershom Scholem was investigating. Wohlfarth also noted the importance of this prose poem for WB's essay "Theories of German Fascism" (1930), which reviewed a collection of war recollections edited by Ernst Jünger.
Workshops
Eight parallel workshops were held between 16.30 and 18.00. Session III-6 in the Bungehuis featured Gale R. Mauk (Emory University, Atlanta), Scott Thompson (Independent, San Francisco), Sytze Steenstra (Univ. of Maastricht) and Warren S. Goldstein (New School of Social Research) reading their respective papers: "Reciprocal Gaze and the Mute Language of Things: Walter Benjamin's Aesthetics of Communion"; "From Rausch to Rebellion: Walter Benjamin's Writings on Hashish"; "God and the Subject Playing Peek-a-Boo in Benjamin's Philosophy"; and "Walter Benjamin's Montage of Messianism and Marxism." Mauk's paper focused on the concept of aura and the ability of things to return the subject's gaze, and the loss of eye-contact in modern society. Benjamin's writings on Baudelaire and the experience of crowds were contrasted with Jean-Paul Sartre's critique of Baudelaire. Thompson's paper can be read elsewhere in this website [click here] and so will not be discussed here. Suffice it to say that it was well-received by an audience of approximately thirty people. Steenstra's paper focused on the alternating dimensions of the political and the messianic in WB's writings, particularly his writings on German Romanticism. The idea that WB rejected his earlier and more mystical writings when he became immersed in Marxism was rejected. Warren Goldstein continued the theme by discussing the relationship of Marxism to messianism. Marxism as a secularization of the messianic was explored along with comparisons between Benjamin and Ernst Bloch. WB's "Theological-Political Fragment" and his essay "Karl Kraus" were briefly discussed.
Panel Discussions
Between 20.30 and 21.30 Martin Jay and Gary Smith unwittingly supplied comic relief in their panel conversations with Mona Jean and Kim Yvon Benjamin (WB's granddaughters) and Michael Benjamin (WB's nephew). For those who anxiously awaited the divulging of Benjamin family secrets, this was surely a disappointment. The life of Benjamin's son, Stefan, was briefly described. His anxiety in being asked to return Klee's painting Angelus Novus to Scholem was recounted, and it came as no real surprise that, according to the granddaughters, Dora Benjamin had despised both Scholem and Adorno. Dora's own difficult life in England raising Stefan was mentioned, as was her remark to Stefan that she had always wanted a girl instead. Most notable in this session were the revelations about the total absence of Judaism in the upbringing of Stefan and his daughters. Stefan married a Chinese Buddhist, and neither granddaughter has ever set foot in a synagogue. Michael Benjamin described life in East Germany after the war, the similar absence of a judaic upbringing, and the reception of WB there before his reception in West Germany. All in all, it was a chatty, pleasant, and pedestrian session. The granddaughters were amused by the questions and the interest in the 'grampa' they had never met, both of them having been born in the 1970s, and on more than one occasion they burst out laughing: a welcome relief from all the day's pomp and circumstance.
July 26th: Day Three
"In general much was discussed in Amsterdam, even when the strict schedule eventually exacted its prerogatives and cut short a number of discussions in progress. If the talks in the workshops revolved around specialist problems of a primarily philological nature, the debates in the plenary meetings became increasingly political. It was Werner Hamacher, who provocatively expressed what was written on the agenda: the canonization of Benjamin as a sublime object of research has robbed him of his critical potential." [16]
Unfortunately, insomnia, jet-lag, adrenalin and fatigue all conspired to prevent the San Francisco participant from hearing Burkhardt Lindner's opening presentation, "Zeit und Glück. Phantasmagorien des Spielraums" [Time and Happiness. Phantasmagorias of Free Play]. Those wishing information about this paper or any of the other papers should contact Helga Geyer-Ryan [International Walter Benjamin Association], Institute of Comparative Literature, University of Amsterdam, Spuistraat 210, NL-1012 VT Amsterdam/ e-mail: <Benjamin@let.uva.nl>. Though all participants who read at the Congress brought a photocopy and a disk of their papers, there was some indication that money was seriously lacking to publish them.
Werner Hamacher
Werner Hamacher's paper "Jetzt" ['NOW'] dealt polemically with Benjamin's concept of history as applied to the current academic reception of Benjamin as 'sublime object of research.' 'Jetztzeit' ['Now-time'] is that interrupting lightning flash of an instant when the past is suddenly recognized as a fleeting image in the present. Benjamin's classic statements on this concept appear in his Theses on the Philosophy of History:
"The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again...."
For every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably...
To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it 'the way it was' (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. Historical materialism wishes to retain that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to man singled out by history at a moment of danger. The danger affects both the content of the tradition and its receivers. The same threat hangs over both: that of becoming a tool of the ruling classes....
History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogeneous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now [Jetztzeit]. Thus to Robespierre ancient Rome was a past charged with the time of the now which he blasted out of the continuum of history..." [17]
The 'Now of Recognizability' is an interrupting, dialectical lightning flash in which the past is cited (like the quotable gesture of Epic Theatre and the dialectical image of a surrealist collage) in the present to halt the repressive continuum of the victors' progress.
Hamacher's polemical paper was reminiscent of the conclusion to his earlier essay "The Word Wolke --If It Is One," where the disruptive process of critical reading was considered an interruption of the continuum 'for a critical, dangerous moment.'
In these places, reading no longer blinks at an image but rather is itself a disruptive moment of an image in which it is exposed to its non-being. It is the moment, not lasting, of awakening. Now. [18]
Despite the polemical tone taken by Hamacher, and later Susan Buck-Morss, there was a pronounced lack of sincerity on the part of the plenary speakers to subject the academic reception and cooptation of WB to any serious scrutiny. Hamacher spoke for many of the people at the Congress who questioned the academic appropriation of WB, but one heard no statements dangerous enough to threaten Herr Prof. Dr. Hamacher's privileged position at Johns Hopkins University. Hamacher's attempt to play the rôle of enfant terrible in an iconoclastic polemic ultimately faltered, and really amounted to nothing more than the public self-flagellation of a ministeriales. Did Johns Hopkins pay for the event, the plane fare, the hotel room at the Hilton? Or did Prof. Hamacher, like the non-academics, pay for everything out of his own pocket himself? How many of Hamacher's articles on Benjamin have been directed to audiences outside the academy? On the one hand, numerous Benjamin-scholars expressed discomfort and guilt over their own comfortable middle-class positions, but tended to react like proprietors whenever students and non-academics called such positions into question. This was especially apparent at the raucous meeting in the lounge at the conclusion of the Congress at 18.30.
Workshops
Five parallel workshops were held between 12.00 and 13.30. Session I-3 in the Tekenzaal featured Fotini Vaki (University of Essex), Peter J.E. Langford (Wroclaw University), and Beata Frydryczak (University of Zielona Góra, Poland) reading their respective papers: "Experiencing Modernity and the Disenchantment of the World," "A Critique of Vattimo's Interpretation of Benjamin in the Transparent Society," and "Gathering a New Kind of Experience". The session was chaired by Scott Thompson of San Francisco, who on more than one occasion had to explain that he had been incorrectly listed in the program as representing the University of San Francisco, a Jesuit school. Thompson seemed most amused by the fact that members of the IWBA and participants at its First Congress were automatically assumed to be university professors or Phd candidates.
It should be added that, were only 150 nonacademically-affiliated, free-lance writers, translators, and committed activists to join this organization, it could be steered in a decidedly different direction; and it could eventually be wrested from the hands of the coopting academy which would see in it a museum for the privileges of curatorship. (Before many of the participants had even arrived on Thursday, an extremely bureaucratic meeting of the members of IWBA was held to place control of the organization in the hands of the plenary elite. Why this meeting was not held at the end of the Congress after everyone had arrived and had been able to hear their 'leaders' was never explained.)
Martin Jay
The final plenary session of the Congress between 15.00 and 16.30 featured Martin Jay and Susan Buck-Morss. Jay's paper "Walter Benjamin, Remembrance and the First World War" focused on one of the central events in Benjamin's life: the suicide of the poet Friz Heinle. At the outset of WWI, Heinle and his girlfriend were found dead in the Meeting House which Benjamin and Ernst Joël had rented for the members of the Free Students. The event deeply affected WB and Jay attempted to show just how it influenced some of Benjamin's work, such as The Origins of the German Trauerspiel, which Jay considered a kind of response to Heinle. Benjamin's resistance to attempts at 'healing' after the war were discussed within the context of remembrance and redemption of the dis-membered. Given the importance of the theme of remembrance as a redemption of those forgotten, this participant found it most annoying that Ernst Joël was not mentioned even in passing.
Benjamin and Joël had been adversaries during their student days when they jointly rented the 'Meeting House', and WB's "Life of Students" contains barbs pointed at Joël's social-welfare projects. In the late 1920s, WB participated in Joël's 'experimental psychopathology,' in which hashish was used as a so-called psychotomimetic to simulate a model psychosis. Such experimentation inspired Benjamin's "Hashish in Marseilles" and his other writings on the subject. Aside from the participant from San Francisco, not one other person mentioned Ernst Joël. The academy has shut its gate to this discussion. Given this participant's own closeness to this subject, it was rather difficult to listen to Jay without being acutely aware that Joël had simply been air-brushed out of the picture. Those who doubt the importance of Joël's influence during Benjamin's student days might look at Momme Brodersen's recently translated biography of Benjamin, which builds on the work of Erdmut Wizisla's dissertation "Walter Benjamin - Friedrich Heinle - Ernst Joël. Weltanschauung, Literatur und Politik in der Berliner Freien Studentenschaft 1912-1917" (Berlin, 1987). Benjamin himself has discussed the importance of both Joël and Heinle in "Berlin Chronicle" [in Reflections, trans. E.Jephcott, New York: Harcourt, Brace & Jovanovich, 1978, pp. 16-17].
Susan Buck-Morss
In her paper "Revolutionary Time: The Vanguard and the Avantgarde," Susan Buck-Morss continued the academic self-flagellation begun by Werner Hamacher. Beginning her talk with a quip aimed at the Dutch: "Liberals are so open-minded their brains fall out," Buck-Morss proceeded to informally curate an unconvincing Bolshevik Booster Rally aimed entirely at her colleagues inside the ivy-beleaguered fortresses of Cornell and other such breeding grounds of working-class, blue-collar insurgence. For the umpteenth time we were again exhorted to feel guilty regarding the irony of an academic WB Congress. O felix culpa. Nostalgically bemoaning the demise of the USSR, Buck-Morss tried to remind her colleagues of the present state of Late Capitalism: "Socialism must be reinvented because capital demands it." Much of her paper focused on some of the progressive intellectual and artistic avant-garde movements which the Vanguard party had fostered, such as Constructivism. The importance of WB's essay on Nicolai Leskov, "The Storyteller" [in Illuminations] and Benjamin's defense of this modernist writer during the Stalinist seizure of power [with its concomitant Zhdanovist aesthetics] was discussed in this context. At the time WB wrote this essay, Shostakovich had just put Leskov's Lady Macbeth of Minsk to music, and had incurred Stalin's wrath in the process. And though Benjamin never did go to Jerusalem or New York, he did go to Moscow, she emphasized. The Vanguard party's idea of time, however, had never found a receptive ear in WB.
Prof. Buck-Morss's attempt to rescue the progressive moments of the socialist experiment, such as Russian Constructivism, was less than convincing. In general, her talk was aimed solely at other Benjamin scholars inside the academy, and the radicalism she feigned seemed entirely curricular. When she admonished her colleagues to consider the present conformist atmosphere in the university, the rewards attending less threatening Phd theses, she met with resistance from Sigrid Weigel, who in turn questioned Buck-Morss's presumptuousness regarding the supposed privileged position of said colleagues, particularly in Germany. The inauthentic nature of Buck-Morss's supposed radicalism was underscored by her overt assumption that everyone in her audience was an academic. By the time the faint-hearted pseudo-socialist sermonette ended (16.30), the increasingly opinionated tone of this San Francisco participant's notes had begun to reflect a growing impatience with the utterly toothless portrait of Benjamin that was being forged at this Congress.
Other participants at the Congress were also disenchanted. One group decided to hold its own ad hoc meeting in a pub, rather than attend one of last five parallel workshops; and for most of us this was one of the high points of the entire Congress.
Concluding Question & Answer Session
At 18.30 the entire Congress assembled in the bar of the Felix Meritis Foundation for one last question and answer period before adjourning. The newly elected bureaucrats of the IWBA sat on a panel, hierarchically facing the rest of the Congress. A memorable interchange took place between Susan Buck-Morss and the participant from San Francisco. Prefacing his question with a laudatory remark on Buck-Morss's scholarly integrity regarding Benjamin's experiments with hashish, he asked her to elaborate on the revolutionary potential of cannabis. This was evidently too much for the 'poor woman' (an epithet she herself had publicly used for Sigrid Weigel just minutes prior to this exchange), for she rhetorically asked in disbelief, "The revolutionary potential of drugs? Drugs create a phantasmagoria. I believe in clear thinking. I'm certainly not an authority for you!"
Having traveled all the way from San Francisco on his own dime to read a paper on Benjamin's uncompleted book on hashish, and determined to make sure that these experiments of Benjamin's and the writings they fostered would not be studiously avoided, this S.F. participant could finally hold his tongue no longer, and criticized Susan Buck-Morss for using the buzzword "drug" when refering to cannabis, expressing his own incredulousness that a person who had written the things she had, could possibly espouse such a spurious line. Indeed, Atty. Gen. of the U.S., Janet Reno, and Drug Czar, Gen. Barry McCaffrey would have cheered her official disclaimer. For the record, this is what she wrote in her Origin of Negative Dialectics:
Drugs did not themselves provide the 'profane illumination' that Benjamin was seeking...Nonetheless, 'hashish, opium and whatever else' could 'provide the introductory course' for profane illumination, and the recording of these sessions make it clear that the insights induced by drugs were not insignificant to Benjamin's theoretical endeavors... [19]
When Warren Goldstein of the New School of Social Research spoke up on this subject as well, adding that the translation of Benjamin's writings on this subject have been ignored too long, he was quickly silenced with the curt remark that such information was totally irrelevant to the discussion. [In a letter written after the Congress, he remarked: "I was really upset by how the point which you tried to raise at the informal discussion (and to which I added) was silenced. How does one understand Benjamin's later theory of experience without the rausch of hashish (even if it is only an 'introductory lesson')?"] [20] At this point, there was a murmur of discontent which rumbled through the back of the bar. Quite a few of the younger participants were shocked at the swiftness with which certain topics were silenced by the proprietors of the International Walter Benjamin Association.
A final image concludes these notes: Martin Jay sitting magisterially self-satisfied in his grey suit and telling us all that really, after all, Walter Benjamin was just a total failure. A failure as a critic, a failure as an academic, a failure as an editor, a failure as a revolutionary, a failure as a bookstore proprietor. All in all, the worst model of an intellectual to follow. Unless, of course, you don't mind waiting for posthumous fame.
I did not attend the buffet dinner "with music by 'Fritz the Cat & the Hot Shots' and a lottery." Inadvertently, the printer of the program had revealed the truth of the whole event by mistakenly substituting a 'c' for a 'z' in the following sentence: "Price [sic]: A paperback Walter Benjamin Gesamtausgabe."
Selling out Walter Benjamin seemed a heavy price to pay.
These congress notes are dedicated to the memory of Ernst Joël (1893-1929).
--Scott J. Thompson
Footnotes:
[1] Geyer-Ryan's article "Justice, Literature, Deconstruction" appears in the journal of the British Comparative Literature Association, New Comparison, Number 18: Walter Benjamin in the Postmodern (Autumn 1994).
[2] Gary Smith's admirable bibliography in On Walter Benjamin: Critical Essays and Recollections [ ed. Gary Smith, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1991, pp. 371-392] cites six essays on WB by Steiner on p. 390. There is no mention of an essay "Marxism and the Literary Critic" from 1958. Nor is there any mention of such an article in any of the secondary works in English cited in Momme Brodersen's new biography of WB.
[3] The first version of "What is Epic Theatre" was not published in WB's lifetime. An English translation by Anna Bostock appears in Understanding Brecht (London, 1977, pp. 1-13). The second version which appeared in Maß und Wert in 1939 was first translated into English by E.Landberg for the Western Review (Spring 1948) under the title "Notes on Epic Theatre". Anna Bostock's translation of this second version also appears in Understanding Brecht, pp. 15-22. Citations from the second version draw from Landberg's translation since it has been so often overlooked.
[4] In Benjamin's sentence: "The job of epic theatre, it has been explained, is not so much to develop actions as to represent conditions" [Zustände].
[5] Ackbar Abbas, "On Fascination: Walter Benjamin's Images" in New German Critique, Nr.48, Fall 1989, p.58.
[6] Burkhardt Lindner, from his letter to Leo Lowenthal quoted by the latter in "The Integrity of the Intellectual" in Benjamin: Philosophy, Aesthetics, History, ed. Gary Smith, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989, p. 255.
[7] Christian Schulte, "Das jederzeit mögliche Erkennen: 'Wahrnehmung und Erfahrung in der Moderne': Ein Kongress über den Philosophen und Essayisten Walter Benjamin" in Frankfurter Rundschau, July 31, 1997. Special thanks to Jürgen Ehbrecht from Göttingen for sending us this article, which we received while this present report was in progress.
[8] Julian Roberts, Walter Benjamin, London: Macmillan Press, Ltd., 1982, pp. 107, 109, 178, 182; Gary Smith, 'Translator's Introduction to 'N'' in Benjamin: Philosophy, Aesthetics, History, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989, p. 41, n.3.
[9] WB, Correspondence 1910-1940, trans. M.R. & E.M. Jacobson, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994, p.168.
[10] WB to Scholem, April 25, 1930, op. cit., p.365.
[13] WB, "'N': Re Theory of Knowledge, Theory of History" in Benjamin: Philosophy, Aesthetic, History, p.50.
[14] Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim, New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1959, p. 199. The entire passage runs as follows: "The works that are being peddled about nowadays as the philosophy of National Socialism but have nothing whatever to do with the inner truth and greatness of this movement (namely the encounter between global technology and modern man) - have all been written by men fishing in the troubled waters of "values" and "totalities."
[15] Cf. Das Problem des Übersetzens, hrsg. Hans Joachim Stoerig, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1969. George Steiner's After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (Oxford University Press, 1975) discusses Benjamin's theory and practice of translation in the chapter "The Claims of Theory".
[16] Christian Schulte, "Das jederzeit mögliche Erkennen: 'Wahrnehmung und Erfahrung in der Moderne': Ein Kongress über den Philosophen und Essayisten Walter Benjamin" Frankfurter Rundschau, (July 31, 1997).
[17] WB, "Theses on the Philosophy of History" in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, NY: Schocken Books, 1969, pp. 255, 261.
[18] Werner Hamacher, "The Word Wolke ---If It Is One" in Benjamin's Ground: New Readings of Walter Benjamin, ed. Rainer Naegele, Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1988, pp.147-176.
[19] Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics, NY: The Free Press, 1977, 126-127.
[20] Warren Goldstein to S. Thompson, Aug. 26, 1997.
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