The difficulties of reading Walter Benjamin

The difficulties that Walter Benjamin presents for anyone who reads him now could be put as follows (in a typically Benjaminian way--which means that of course these difficulties will exceed what I am now going to specify): first, it is difficult to discern at any moment whether Benjamin is engaged in a negative critique or an encomium, whether he sees a work under analysis as leading to the decline of civilization or contributing to its rejuvination, and, second, it is difficult to discern whether the resulting analysis Benjamin gives us prescribes anything to combat the forces of Fascism or not. As far as the latter point, it is clearest in the essay on the work of art and its technological reproducibility that Benjamin does indeed seek to give us something. This is why most people might be drawn to it as the clearest statement of Benjamin on how art relates to politics, along with the Theses. But it is doubtful whether anyone can specify whether any other writing of Benjamin prescribes anything clearly for a fight against Fascism. Furthermore, it isn't even clear that Benjamin seeks to prescribe anything in the "Work of Art" essay, either! Let's look at the (almost incomprehensibly dense, if one reads it right, while being at the same time almost blindingly clear) passage I'm indicating:

However, theses about the art of the proletariat after its assumption of power or about the art of a classless society would have less bearing on these demands [for a prognostic analysis of society culturally as well as materially capitalist] than theses about the developmental tendencies of art under present conditions of production [put simply, it makes no sense for a critical Marxist to talk about art after the revolution]. Their [the deveopmental tendencies of art] dialectic is no less noticeable in the superstructure than in the economy. It woud therefore be wrong to underestimate the value of such theses as a weapon. They brush aside a number of outmoded concepts--such as creativity and genius, eternal value and mystery--concepts whose uncontrolled (and at present almost uncontrollable) application would lead to a processing of data in the Fascist sense. The concepts which are introduced into the theory of art in what follows differ from the more familiar terms in that they are completely useless for the purposes of Fascism. They are, on the other hand, useful for the formulation of revolutionary demands in the politics of art.
-"The Work of Art in the Age of [Its] Technological Reproducibility," Illuminations, 218.

Benjamin here is not saying that a proper analysis of art can combat Fascism. He doesn't even say (as many think and act like he says in the academy) that the battleground against Fascism takes place within the sphere of the analysis of art. And yet some read him this way--in a way that imputes to him (what is really these people's) absolutely astounding naivete. Benjamin knows all too well what bullets do: something that works of art do not. Does the work of art need to be able to literally kill for us to be able to praise a critic for his willingness to fight Fascism? Is this the slavishness that we have reduced ourselves to as critics, as scholars? Yet some talk of Benjamin as if he does impute to the artwork this ability. Rather, we need to see how a work of art can effect something worse than death--communal enjoyment, the unleashing of banal affectivity. These are what Benjamin opposes.
But back to the passage: it is not even a positive statement about the analysis that will follow: all they will do will render themselves "completely useless" for Fascism. At the same time, they do not lend themselves directly to any revolution, either: these concepts the essay will intriduce are "useful for the fomulation of revolutionary demands", i.e. not in the revolution itself--and not even that, for they are demands "in the politics of art".
And, yet, there is a relay between art and politics being articulated here. Let's just indicate that for Benjamin, if we read him rightly, the relay between art and politics occurs in the spaces (or, what is perhaps better, times) in which politics is irreducibly artistic. (Less interesting to him, and yet what we constantly focus on as critics, is the complementary phenomenon: when art is irreducibly political. If we are reading Benjamin correcly, we should see why this phenomenon is extremely boring to him, why he chooses the first possibility.) But we can see this relay clearer if we turn from the second difficulty to the first one.
Is Benjamin in favor of Proust or not? Or Bergson? Or Breton? Or any of the other amazing figures he writes about? The key to reading Benjamin, I find, is to see that criticism in his eyes is never truly criticism if it can supply an answer to a question like this. In other words, this first difficulty arises because we cannot conceive for some reason the task Benjamin is engaged in. Or, put differently, Benjamin gives us answer that cannot be an answer to this question. In fact, in "The Image of Proust," he stages this question himself, only to avoid answering it:

What was it that Proust sought so frenetically? What was at the bottom of these infinite efforts? Can we say that all lives, works, and deeds that matter were never anything but the undisturbed unfolding of the most banal, most fleeting, most sentimental, weakest hour in the life of the one to whom they pertain?
-"The Image of Proust," Illuminations, 203.

The question looks like the last one: is Proust of the weak and the sentimental? Or of the strong. But in fact, "weak" and its unsaid opposite already are called into question. Benjamin nowhere says that the strong is good and the weak is bad. So in fact all we get is what looks like description of Proust, an evasion of the question with a characterization. But in a sense this is Benjamin's point. Benjamin doesn't even really ask it in the same form as us--already he is within his own critical project and in a sense can't reach us in the midst of our banal conception of art. That is, Benjamin stages a question similar to ours by asking whether something can be said of Proust or not, not by asking whether Proust does something good or bad for civilization. In other words, Proust is not a result or a cause: he and his work already can only stand up to the test of whether something can be described with reference to him (and his work) justly or not. If we respect this way of testing the work, we transform how we look at Benjamin's aesthetic judgements. The work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility is not bad for Benjamin any more than it is good: it just isn't that simple. But this breakdown of our way of staging the question by testing it with reference to Benjamin's way shows us precisely what criticism is supposed to do for Benjamin--i.e. we see enacted before us precisely that which is criticism for Benjamin. In other words, criticism does not judge whether something is good or bad, but fixes an image of the work that, precisely in its fixity, explodes everything within it and without it, causes everything about it and its world to become, to transform. More: it is in its fixity precisely this exploding--the two processes cannot be separated. To be a bit clearer: in looking at Proust Benjamin is not trying to show him as a symptom of culture in some way, nor even paint a portrait that would in its justice to the original, to its "real, authentic" meaning, demonstrate that meaning for us, make it clear. Rather, Benjamin tries to capture an aspect of a work, reduce it to an image, and in this reduction precisely cause an expansion of its meaning and significance, an explosion into fluidity of that which he captures. To be clearer still: Benjamin wants to fix what about the work is unfixable. He wants to show its internal difference from itself, that difference that provokes everything around it to change, to be unstable. In this, he is absolutely on the same page as Derrida, and it is not wrong to read Benjamin as if he is deconstructing a work, precisely because this process of deconstruction is not an isolation of a contradiction, but a isolation of the textuality of the work that forces it and other things around it, to expand beyond the limits of a work or any work, to be different from itself (to resist absolutely any isolation, any specification of its "essence"), to historize itself. Also, if one reads their Heidegger right (that is, if one sees ontology as the specification not of an "essence" of an existence, but of what in existence stands-outside-of-itself, i.e. ek-sists, has potentiality in its facticity, has no center), it would be similar to phenomenological ontology (regarding the being of an artwork, not a thing or a Dasein). This is what Benjamin is getting at when he specifies the reason for his essay on Proust: evoking an image gives us what about Proust makes us characteristic in our existence, conceived of as existence that stands outside itself, is constantly in becoming; what makes us stand outside of ourselves characeristically; what makes it possible for us to stand outside of ourselves--what is the inner possibility of our ek-sistence?:

The outstanding literary achievement of our time is assigned a place in the heart of the impossible, at the center--and also at the point of indifference--of all dangers, and it marks this great realization of a "lifework" at the last for a long time. The image of Proust is the highest physiognomic expression which the irresistibly growing discrepancy between literature and life was able to assume. This is the lesson which justifies the attempt to evoke this image.
-"The Image of Proust," 201-2.

And so we get a sense of the right way to approach second difficulty through the right way to approach the first. As to the first (let us simply restate it): criticism is a locating and dislocating of the difference within a work from itself, what gives us not the present, but what is to come and what shall be on the basis of that which comes. To be a bit clearer: criticism is a locating and setting free (through evoking, since it is what is already free) of the difference within a work that mobilizes it and mobilizes civilization. Thus it is not concerned with anything actually within the work anything present. It is concerned with what is, in the work presenting itself, textual in the work, to use a Derridian/Barthian distinction between text and work, or rather what is imagistic about a work, what is fixed precisely in its absolute fludity, what about the work in its being present goes beyond the work. In this sense, it is about what is not present in the work but what makes the work possible, conceived of as what is coming-to-be within the work as it is present.
As to the second: the relay between art and politics takes place within the ability to evoke that difference. If that image is or is not able to be specified, there politics takes place. In this sense only is politics able to be accessed by criticism: politics is the question as to whether criticism, as the locating and dislocating of a work's difference from itself, is able to carry out its task. Criticism, then, and the fixing/unfixing of images, becomes one of the conditions able to be prescribed, able to be taken up by a revolution--to mirror the phrasing of the "work of art" essay. It constitutes itself as a criterion for independence, or alternately as a symptom of oppression, based on whether it is or will be able to exist in the form already specified (the form of the only true criticism, for Benjamin). It is not as simple as whether it does exist or not: i.e one is not able to say a regime is bad based on the fact that all its critics are in jail. Rather it is whether the potential for the type of criticism that brings out the future, the non-present, into the present can exist and be robust. In this way, it is a question as to whether the future will be able to exist or not: insofar as criticism looks to that future, to the non-present in the present, it is the guardian of that possibility, bound up with it. Where the question of art becomes political for Benjamin, is when in politics this issue of a possible future is being contested. Here criticism cannot directly assert itself, but can constitute itself with enough rigor that its influence as the preserver of the future, of the non-present, might be able to effect the contours of that contestation. How? Not by going out of itself into politics, but by bringing politics to it, or at least an appreciation of its object. For the object of criticism, art, wells up in the breakdown of the political--when the political must concern itself with its own future. The question of the future is the question art asks most intensely, for Benjamin, and insofar as the political at a certain juncture asks the question of its own future, it is asking the question as to the possibility of the object of art, which is what is set free and fixed in criticism. Now, as soon as art surrenders this aesthetic object (the future) to politics, it politics becomes art: this is Fascism. Thus when criticism does its job, it introduces concepts "completely useless for the purposes of Fascism": that is, concepts that (inherently, because they are concerned with art, and in art, the ek-static, the textual, the non-present) resist the politicization of art and (more significantly, again) the process whereby art becomes politics.
[In fact--this is a note that I am making after revisiting this post--the process whereby art becomes politics is able to be opposed by the politicization of art. This is what he says at the end of his essay on the work of art. My resistance to this notion about the politicization of art just as much as my resistance like Benjamin to the rendering of politics artistic, was due to a lack of a distinction common criticism now refuses to make, between art that politicizes itself, and criticism that politicizes itself. While an artistic politics is fascist, I was wary that a criticism that politicizes itself would be just as fascist. Thus I opposed both, and saw Benjamin doing the same. This is right, but it overlooks how Benjamin thought that art politicizing itself is a response to fascism, a way it could oppose it and render the fascist processing of data ineffectual or useless. This is absolutely right. But it entails a redefinition of criticism: proper criticism for Benjamin is art. It would politicize itself in the carrying out of its task. Thus criticism can also politicize itself--this was my fear. But it can't just talk about the political in order to do this--this is what Benjamin opposes, and what is all too common in academia. It has to turn itself into art first, into a politicization of itself that takes the form of art--and one should note that Benjamin's essays indeed effectuate this transformation. Only then can criticism proper oppose fascism.]
(Quick note: this last section regarding politics is extremely unclear to me--that should be evident. I work it out here to the best of my ability. Also, underneath the metaphor of fixing/exploding-unfixing or (dis)locating is, of course, the phenomenon of the photograph. In short, Benjamin sees criticism as the production of an image from a camera. However, not all photos are images. If one minds this distinction, one sees the positive potential for photography for Benjamin within his "work of art" essay and especially in his "Little History of Photography," and one gets a clue as to how to interpret Benjamin as more than just the intellect diagnosing what is wrong with modernity. But this also shows the core phenomenon that causes the difficulties in reading him: one has a tough time reading, and learning to read, an image.)