Emotion, experience

As I read Sianne Ngai, she wants to say that emotion produces the very distance or distantiation that is at the heart of the experience of an aesthetic object qua object, via a modification (not at all Marxist) of Benjamin's concept of aura. Where for Benjamin, this sense of the object crystallizing out of a more richer intimate experience was itself only a nostalgic projection of the bourgeois conception of art (i.e. there was never any actual aura of the artwork, but rather the divorce of art from communal experience as the ruling class consolidates itself produced the retrofiction that there was, and it is now imbued with a power to ironically individualize the artwork), for Ngai, this is actually the function of emotion itself. The resulting ahistoricality of this formulation isn't entirely the most suprising thing about it, nor the complacency with which it distorts (under the aegis of modification) the already overpopular Benjamin. Rather, what's odd is it seeks to at once dissolve the process of reflection which produces the object into emotion, at the same time as it would seek to make any sort of pull away from that process also emotional, so that the solution to the objectification of the art object is also to sink it back into some even more primordial emotional structure.

But one might say that this in turn supposes that one can't present the experience of the artwork in any other form. And this is typical of an extremely regressive post-postmodern movement going on now (not conscious of the ramifications of what it is really saying, and at worst just anarchic like the high theory it seeks to replace) that would try to overcome the sort of difference-producing logics of that earlier moment by showing how more traditional logics can be based upon them instead of upon logics of presence--something akin to having your cake and eating it too. Thus Ngai cites the "post-structuralist turn away from experience" (or some interpretation of emotion as a very thin form of testimony) as all the more legitimating her return to emotion and experience (even though--and this seems forgotten--all that was actually articulated in any generally sane post-structuralist theory like Lacan or Derrida's was a distance in levels between experience and what it would not grasp). But returning to emotion and experience in order to aestheticize both, and then pass them off as difference-friendly, doesn't seem legitimated at all. What is needed is rather something like a sense that the critical presentation or exposition is indeed based upon a different logic than our experience of the text, such that both come to meet each other from different places. As it is, Ngai still supposes, like all the close readers in the post-formalist days of high theory, that our criticism unproblematically expresses our experience, and that the more detailed this gets, the more experience there would be. Instead, I would suggest that I can have an intensely emotional experience of an artwork, and yet that my present explication of it (however impassioned) does not at all immediately reflect that experience, but another one instead. Moreover, I would claim that it is only because of this that I indeed can investigate an emotional experience in any concrete way.

A bit on photography: digital ghosts

If the old photograph rendered its subject spectral, as Walter Benjamin never tired of emphasizing, and which the spirit photographers of the late 19th century literalized, I feel like the average little digital photos we take now on our simple digital cameras (preferably on a night out) show us (again?) that this spectralization was always filtered through the technical. Put more clearly, while the spirit photos of the late 19th century literalized the spectrality of a technology, the pleasure we take in many digital photos now is one of literalizing the technical nature of this spectrality. This is a pleasure that will probably disappear very soon with the advancing sophistication in digital cameras, but still remains most visible in pictures of the night.

Here I just want to call attention to the fact that we might be almost at the end of this interesting period in photography--as I'm sure many people more specialized in the field than me have probably noted. It is not unlike the end of the era of 8-bit images, which we now nostalgically look back at. These are, incidentally, captured well by Michael Wolf in his monumental The Transparent City: the grid-like structures provided by buildings (which were much more oppressive in his The Architecture of Density)

here are able to be filled in, just like in any little 8-bit graphic. Accordingly the detail shots of the people who inhabit these buildings are extremely pixelated:

The particular inability of the digital image to capture phenomena, however,--and especially at night--which produces a clearer image in some parts and a longer-image exposure in other areas, along with the play of light and even the iridescent vein-like outlines and scale-like squares of compression will perhaps be gone soon too, only to make a comeback. The pictures allow us the sense that the disoriented feeling, that ghostlike feeling, of life is not just due to the fact that death inhabits it--this was spirit-photography's point. What digital photos allowed was the sense that this death in life was technical, was due to the immense amount of mediation that our experience has undergone in the last few years.
At least this is the only way I can explain the amazing fact that over the years as the technology has gotten better these phenomena of the digital photo became more fun to see. As cameras adjusted the image already as you were taking it to stabilize it and prevent problems of underexposure and blurring, one began to take pictures in such a way that one was negotiating with the camera, working with and against it, in an extremely organic way. The pleasure you took in the odd blurred photo then (which was only blurred in certain areas to a certain degree), was in the fact that something could escape and emerge out of this dance. But the fact was that at the same time what emerged would have to be even more technical, or produced by the errors and creativity in the technology. That is, taking pictures became more than ever relating to the abstractness of the machine which actually performed it. The surprising over-exposure, or underexposure, or blur, would be brought to you the more arbitrarily and randomly the you manipulated the device. In short, what is special to to this particular digital image, I think, is that the texture of the photo is brought out, often, but not on the surface, like it is in wonderful gritty (and undersaturated) photos of New York, for example, in the 70's.

In the digital photos the texture is, because it originates in the back and forth in the algorithms and not in the actual mechanisms of the camera, more tightly imbricated with the particular objects photographed. The texture, the surprise, is more in the things than in the medium. And what's more, its totally without pretension, without setup. (The use of the flash gets rid of this effect sometimes while keeping, or perhaps even emphasizing, the hand-held nature--American Apparel figured this out, taking it, of course, from amateur porn. The processing of the camera that is involved without the flash seems to take longer and be more involved, thus becoming more and more technical. Flash brings back the surface, in other words.)
Perhaps this is due to the fact that what was being integrated into these photos was not the eye, but the hand--digital photography became, as it became more handheld (like it did with the 35mm cameras of old), a more bodily experience. This would correspond with the notion that the technical mediation of experience was everywhere, or is at least more tactile, and therefore not just in the eye. Regardless, photos such as the one above--someone else's experiences in Paris that I just stumbled upon randomly--and some like the following



will remain my favorites long after the stabilization techniques overtake our ability to work against them (and with them) manually, thus making all the images of night fixed and clear.

"Force of Law" and Benjamin

I've been wrestling with Derrida's massive, somewhat disturbing essay "Force of Law" for a week or so, not only reading the essay but turning over its questions and its analysis in my head--I must have started and stopped about five or six posts on it (a rare instance where what is on my mind won't directly make it to this blog). The essay attempts two tasks, really, or situates itself between them, in the space and time in which they both overlap and exclude each other: first, an analysis of the relation of deconstruction(s) to law and justice, second, an analysis of Walter Benjamin's "Zur Kritik der Gewalt" ("Critique of Violence") that interprets his work on violence in the light of what it could or could not say about the Holocaust.

Like I said, these tasks intertwine, so that the analysis of Benjamin proceeds mainly through issues of law and justice. But I don't think that one can dissociate the analysis of Benjamin from the focus on the Holocaust, and this is not only because Derrida says his analysis of Benjamin could not have proceeded other than with the Holocaust in view. Nor is this the case (in fact, it is absolutely not the case) because the critique of Benjamin that Derrida engages in is due only to an inability of the positions of Benjamin to comport themselves towards something like the Holocaust, as an insane remark that I read somewhere said (Derrida does not critique Benjamin because "Benjamin's position could not account for the Holocaust"). No, the issue remains one of how we read today. That is, the issue remains precisely how we today take up the writings of Benjamin and "use" them: critics, theorists, philosophers, activists use them, simply put, to critique the fascism that culminated in that unbelievable atrocity. In other words, one of the main things the essay tries to do is understand how we still are acting towards the Holocaust, and with the use of Benjamin. To this end, it takes up what we already do (use Benjamin, follow Benjamin, and attempt to comport ourselves to the atrocity that haunts us) in its deepest coherence, and shows what we must do if we are really to respect our own intentions. And what we must do is be willing to critique Benjamin, especially in the interest of the law and justice (as much as we are willing to critique Marx--see my post on Marx and Derrida below). In still other words, Derrida is trying to have us respect the fact that one simply does not read Benjamin without reading what happened after his death into his writings. This is a symptom of the fact that, more fundamentally, one does not read anything before atrocity without reading atrocity into it, remembering it--that is, looking at what is being read and its possible (direct or indirect) complicity in this atrocity.

This perhaps makes Derrida's condemnation of Benjamin's conclusions sting all the more. For this is the main experience of reading the article: a certain bitterness, not unlike that bitterness experienced reading Specters of Marx (or, perhaps, the Politics of Friendship with respect to Carl Schmitt or even Of Spirit with respect to a Heidegger that could be construed as Marxist), at the fact that we are losing a figure that we thought could fight fascism and the horrors of modernity. We cry out when we read Derrida: "Oh no! Can't the thinkers against fascism, against destruction band together for once or compromise?" If I focus more on this right now instead of returning directly to the question of deconstruction(s), law, and justice as I intended, it is because I think this digression contains what is necessary to understand Derrida's comments on law and justice (legal scholars/theorists focus upon the first part of the article--and it should be noted, political theorists and philosophers like Agamben on the second--and I think this is missing something). The experience of reading Benjamin is one of the possibility of a critique so powerful or forceful in the compactness and brilliance of its ideas that they seem like bullets. But what Derrida shows us is that we must reread over and over when confronted with such ideas, such "audacity," as he says in the essay. This is not due to the "style" of them, though this is crucial of course, but because they make a demand upon the reader to take up a position. We will develop this more in a second. But, regardless, the willingness to submit to the personality of Benjamin, to stop reading and simply (or not so simply) become a member of the "cult of Benjamin," as it is often called, is huge (though not as huge as the willingness to submit to the call of Marx). The temptation to reject Derrida's conclusions about "Critique of Violence" as contained to this early period in Benjamin, or to the influence of chance encounters with "inadequate" thinkers like Sorel, or more simply to accuse him of misreading Benjamin (without rereading Benjamin against him), is massive.
But ultimately unproductive, I think, even if one disagrees with Derrida's conclusions. In Derrida's willingness to critique Benjamin (and extend by suggestion this critique to some central concepts within Benjamin's oeuvre), he reminds us that this is reading (or not-reading) against Benjamin's own theses on the identification with a personality-figure at the head of fascist states. But in a deeper manner, he reminds us that the real desire to identify with the cause of someone like Benjamin really lies in a desire for solidarity in a politico-juridico-ethical position against forces that destroy life without legitimacy or even with legitimacy. Foremost in this desire for solidarity that brings forth the personality of Benjamin instead of his texts is a desire, then, for a position. And specifically a position as a guarantee, a guarantee that "I am just," (237) or even (and perhaps especially) "we, and not they, are just." Here is the link back to the law and to justice I suggested that this digression would somewhat elucidate, and the reason why ultimately Benjamin needs to be not just followed but always reread. The guarantee against the risk of a destruction of life of even immense proportions: this is what is sought in a "position" that would refuse to think the somewhat aberrant nature of Benjamin's "Critique of Violence" with the rest of his texts (if not with the larger concerns like fascism that we use his critiques to critique), that would preserve the figure of Benjamin above and beyond all concern for whether what Benjamin says could be said more coherently, that would pit the guarantee in the name of Benjamin against the real possibility that in covering up the sight of the risk one could become complicit with it. This risk, Derrida reminds us, is essential in any position that could deserve the status of a "position:" to dilute its reality through a guarantee would indeed mean that a position could become perhaps more stable and opposed to the destruction of life, but it does not mean that it can interrogate it more responsibly and in fact remember, mourn, and prevent it. The position, for Derrida, must deconstruct itself: it cannot be a position at all, but must be a continual insistence on rereading, a love of rereading. This does not mean that any position is problematic, but only that a position that could do what it professes to do would be impossible. (Thus compromising within the politico-juridical-ethical domain Derrida does not oppose: when it takes the form of a compromise to "take up a position," however, he sees it as dangerous, because it comes with the clause that we do away with rereading, with the singular risk.)
Situating himself within this impossibility as much as he can, Derrida reads Benjamin against Benjamin, shows how the discourse of Benjamin itself refuses to engage this impossibility, this risk, and thus becomes complicit with the type of destruction that a position as clearly articulated as Benjamin's is supposed to prevent: the destruction of someone thinking "I am just" or "we are just." It is for this very specific reason that he reads Benjamin within the context of the Holocaust.
I apologize if I moved too quickly, especially with regard to how Derrida thinks of "complicity:" obviously Derrida is not saying that we need to submit thinkers to a test, the criterion of which would be atrocity. He is trying to show that complicity means a shutting down of reinterpretation, of deconstruction, through the setting up of a position that would supposedly be fixed and stable and just. The link then between a figure like Benjamin and an event like the Holocaust would hinge on the proscriptive "positioning" of several of Benjamin's articulations, how his discourse is actually inconceivable without a fixing of a position on a particular issue. That is, Benjamin's concepts must foreclose at a certain point a their own coherency in order to use them to give a position: Benjamin's articulation itself is inseparable from this foreclosure. This is what Derrida means when he says, in a postscript to the essay, that Benjamin mobilizes a discourse of authenticity too much for him. It is not that the authentic is itself bad, but that there is too much of it: enough that it ends up sacrificing coherence for the setting up of a politico-juridical-ethical position. Here the this preliminary sketch would expand, but perhaps another time--let's move on. All this noted, this does not mean that Derrida is saying that fluidity must be preserved for its own sake. He is arguing in favor of an accountability for a risk which is the condition of justice and also of injustice, the individual event in its undecidability. I also apologize for moving too quickly with such sensitive issues, and for not getting to the law an justice as much as I should. I'll take these up later, perhaps. I hope though that I've somewhat shown the interconnectedness of both concerns of the essay in some way. This is all not yet to agree with Derrida and what he says, but to prepare a better reading.

Space, time and gambling in Benjamin

I'm looking into gambling in Benjamin and its relation to touch and shock, and from there to the eye and the image, as a way to see how the field of action of the gambler--space--becomes linked up with the time of an image.

If this line of thought seems odd, it's because we are less likely to think of the image within the sphere of fate and chance than in terms of time and history. But Benjamin thinks the second terms primarily in relationship to the first ones. Gambling is one site where this happens in his work. It becomes a sort of way he can pursue all the complicated relationships of man to fate that he articulated in the early essays "Character and Fate" and the "Critique of Violence" as they interact with technology and modernity in his later work.

Other figures like the flâneur serve this purpose too in Benjamin. But the gambler retains a link to touch that is perhaps more pronounced, and thus a link to space that is very different.

The gambler uses his hands for Benjamin. In his little fragment "Notes on a Theory of Gambling" he says that a gambler has more discernment in his approach to the table "the more emancipated" his motor skills are "from optical perception," that is, the more his hands and not his eyes are at the ready. In this, Benjamin sees not a sort of simple resistance to the forms of the visuality of modern day, however, but a process that has its capabilities for a "renewal of mankind" ("Work of Art...") because it is imbricated in this modern, optical development. For the resistance to the visual does not make the gambler have a clearer relationship to the future, to time (whether his number will come up or not), but one that is more dispersed and distracted.

This is due to the repetitive nature of gambling. The gambler is always ready to begin again with his hands, to take up the space around him, his room for action, and put it in service of yet another spin of the roulette, and to await the appearance of the time of his fortune. Thus Benjamin sees the gambler in "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire" as similar to the worker on the assembly line featured in Capital, whose labor, as Marx describes it, always takes up anew the fragmented labor of another and performs his own "partial task" on it (Capital, 464).

This is because the repetition of the worker and the appearance of the future in the present (that is, the appearance of time) on the gambling table that the hands anticipate manifests itself in a shock. Touch and the actions of the hands in space becomes the infinite anticipation of a blow to one's self from another point in space. Gambling is what happens when experience has already become shock, or in other words, when the experience of time has, due to changes in how movements in space by hands anticipate themselves, become a non-experience.

Benjamin describes this shock experience in the gambler in the following formula: "gambling converts [verwandelt sich] time into a narcotic" ("Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century;" Cf. also a footnote to "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire"). It is a narcotic because it attempts to "alleviate" ("On Some Motifs") the lack of a harmony of space and time that is introduced by the anticipation of shock.

If the time of the image also manifests itself in a non-experience, as we (I am writing this for my class with Eduardo Cadava) have been saying, if the experience of history in the photo is a non-experience, we can now see that this is not because the image simply foregoes any relationship to history or time, but because its experience is the experience of the gambler. The image is penetrated with touch and space, the touch in the repetitive motion of a gambling hand that awaits time as its fate.

Benjamin on fate, character, and law

For Benjamin, "fate" signifies what befalls man beyond the commandment of religion (thus as irreligious) when he has submitted himself to the law of the state. This submission entails that man renounces his life as a man and assume the complex relationship to legal determination which only considers him in terms of his bare life, his actions as a legal subject. Thus Benjamin says,

It is not therefore really man who has a fate; rather, the subject of fate is indeterminable... it is never man but only the life in him that it [fate] strikes.
-"Fate and Character" in Selected Writings, Volume 1

The subject of fate then is actually void. This does not mean he is free in a Sartre-like way, however. The subject of fate is complex and always already guilty or unfree, because he must always assume this voided legal subjectivity and annul his rich and complex bond as a man to the religious. To put it another way, the annulment of man by the assumption of law invests the subject with bonds to comport himself towards law in a legal way--this is why he is complex and not free (in a Sartre-like way) in his being void. When the subject does comport (or submit) himself this way, most notably when the law bears upon him, fate strikes on the subject.
"Character" takes up this void subject of fate and law and "gives this mystical enslavement... the answer of genius." In other words character takes up the void subject and develops him into an irreducible comic (that is, playful, supplemental) signifier. The bond to the religious, beyond the law, is thus restored. But this does not occur by any retrieval of the man that originally held a bond to the religious and not to the law: this man is not a reserve of plenitude outside of the law which can always be reinstated, for instance, through religious worship. Rather, character reinstates a bond to the religious, beyond the law, by creating a new bond to religion as this void subject of the law, as a subject that has transgressed religion: we see how Benjamin thinks dialectically about this. However, this is not a positive dialectic of determinate negation: the point is to arrest and interrupt the development of the legal subjectivity, not conserve it, in the assumption of character (cf. "Derridian dialectic," and "Benjamin, German Idealism, and dialectic" below). All this means that the character is not a plenitude but a void which resists the void: in short, he is a performative subject, "an individual whom, if we were confronted by his actions in life instead of by his person on the stage, we would call a scoundrel," because he went beyond the "authentic" and infinitely empty legal subjectivity. Then, as Benjamin says, "complication becomes simplicity, fate freedom."
The relationship to religion also changes: as much as the man before he voided his subjectivity and became mere life under the law, religion is not a plenitude to be returned to by this development of character. Religion too must be void, that is, must be messianic and waited for indefinitely. It is only in this way that it could be present to a subject that has renounced it: one must wait for divine recompense for the transgression that was submitting to the law instead of holding fast to the commandments (this is the meaning of the messianic that we find in the "Critique of Violence" and, modified, in "Theses on the Concept of History").

Every (or nearly every) reference of Walter Benjamin to Heidegger in his letters

Here they all are (from The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910-1940, ed. Theodor Adorno and Gershom Scholem, tr. Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson, Chicago: U of Chicago Press--note, I still have to check the German for any more) , for anyone who is ever interested. It is striking how much they throw light on many of Benjamin's views, as well as how the views of Heidegger were perceived:

The first, in a letter to Gershom Scholem, November 11, 1916 (p. 82), after just completing "On Language as Such and on the Language of Man," updating Scholem on his latest reading:

An essay (originally held as a lecture when he received the venia legendi in Freiburg) on "Das Problem der historichen Zeit" has appeared in the last or next to last issue of the Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik, and documents precisely how this subject should not be treated. An awful piece of work, which you might, however, want to glance at, if only to confirm my suspicion, i.e. that not only what the author says about historical time (and which I am able to judge) is nonsense, but that his statements on mechanical time are, as I suspect, also askew.

In another letter to Scholem, December 1, 1920 (p. 168), referring to Heidegger's habilitation dissertation, "The Doctrine of Categories and Meaning in Duns Sotus," (1915) a topic Benjamin himself was (prior to finding Heidegger's text) thinking of writing about:

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.

In another letter to Scholem, January 1921 (p. 172), despairing the progress of his work on language and meaning alluded to above:

...I essentially must patiently lie in wait for my new project. To be sure, I have firmed up certain basic ideas, but since every one of them must be explored in depth, it is impossible for me to have any kind of overview at the beginning. Furthermore, the research I have done to date has caused me to proceed with caution and to question whether it is correct tofollow scholastic analogies as a guide, or if it would not perhaps be better to take a detour, since Heidegger's work presents, albeit in a completely unilluminated way, the elements of scholastic thought that are most important for my problem, and the genuine problem can somehow be intimated in connection with this. Thus it may be better first to have a look at some linguistic philosophers.

Nine years later, in yet another letter to Scholem, January 20, 1930 (p. 359-60), reflecting on his goal over the past two years "that I be considered the foremost critic of German literature," and on possible changes to the Arcades Project ("the theatre of all my conflicts and all my ideas"):

I intend to pursue the project on a different level than I had previously planned. Up till now, I have been held back, on the one hand, by the problem of documentation and, on the other hand, by that of metaphysics. I now see that I will at least need to study some aspects of Hegel and some parts of Marx's Capital to get anywhere and to provide a solid scaffolding for my work. It now seems a certainty that, for this book as well as for the Trauerspiel book, an introduction that discusses epistemology is necessary--especially for this book, a discussion of the theory of historical knowledge. 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.

Here is the most striking reference--one can hardly believe it. Back in Berlin (from Paris) later that year, on April 25, 1930 (p. 365), at the inception of his wonderful and extremely productive friendship with Bertolt Brecht, Benjamin writes to Scholem summarizing his recent work:

My most recent short piece bears the title of "From the Brecht Commentary" and I hope it will appear in the Frankfurter Zeitung. It is the first product of my recent very interesting association with Brecht. I will send it to you as soon as it has appeared. We were planning to annhiliate Heidegger here in the summer in the context of a very close-knit critical circle of readers led by Brecht and me. Unfortunately, however, Brecht is not at all well. He will be leaving very soon and I will not do it on my own.

A letter from March 7, 1931 (p. 371-2) to the publisher of Neue Schweizer Rundschauu, Max Rychner, after receiving Rychner's article on Bernard von Bretano's essay "Kapitalismus und schöne Literatur." Benjamin is articulating his standpoint with respect to dialectical materialism to Rychner, who refers to Benjamin in his essay as just another Communist-sympathizing Marxist dogmatically employing the materialist view:

...The strongest imaginable propoganda for a materialist approach came to me, not in the form of Communist brochures, but in the form of "representative" works that emanated from the bourgeois side over the last twenty years in my field of expertise, literary history and criticism... Marxist ways of thinking, with which I became acquainted only much later, were unnecessary for me to demarcate myself early and clearly from the horrid wasteland of this official and unofficial enterprise... Cur hic?--Not because I would be an adherent of the materialist "worldview;" instead, because I am trying to lead my thinking to those subjects into which truth appears to have been most densely packed at this time. Today those subjects are neither the "eternal ideas" nor "timeless values." At one point in your article you very kindly refer to my Keller essay in a way that does me honor. But you will no doubt agree with me in this essay too it was precisely my concern to legitimize an understanding of Keller on the basis of understanding the true condition of our contemporary existence. It may be a truly unmaterialistic formulation to say that there is an index for the condition of historical greatness, on the basis of which every genuine perception of historical greatness becomes historicist--not psychological--self-perception on the part of the individual who perceives. But this is an experience that links me more to the clumsy and caddish analyses of a Franz Mehring than to the most profound paraphrases of the realm of ideas emanating today from Heidegger's school. [The implication is that Heidegger is a theorizer of "eternal ideas." Benjamin concludes by asking Rychner] ...to see in me not a representative of dialectial materialism as dogma, but a scholar to whom the stance of the materialist seems scientifically and humanely more productive in everything that moves us than does that of the idealist.

About seven years later, on July 20, 1938 (p. 571-2), Benjamin writes to Gretel Adorno from Skovsbostrand in Denmark (traveling with Brecht) about the intellectual atmosphere there and in the world more generally:

Here I get to see writing that hews to the [Communist] party line a bit more than what I see in Paris. For example, I recently came upon an issue of Internationale Literatur in which I figure as a follower of Heidegger on the basis of a section of my essay on Goethe's Elective Affinities. This publication is wretched. I think you will have a chance to hear what Bloch makes of it. As for Brecht, he is trying his best to make sense of what is behind Russian cultural politics by speculating on what the politics of nationality in Russia requires. But this obviously does not prevent him from recognizing that the theoretical line being taken [a line close to party lines, that incidentally would render Benjamin a follower of Heidegger] is catastrophic for everything we have championed for twenty years.

Of course, there could be more references, so actually I wouldn't take this as exhaustive (references, of course, proceed by other means than by dropping names). But at least these "by-name" references are all here.

Scattered notes for a paper on Benjamin and Heidegger

This might not be a paper I will end up writing, so I put my notes here:

In "Theory of Gambling"
The Hand and the body more than the eye as the experience of the gambler "feeling" the table.

In "The Work of Art In The Time of Its Technological Reproducibility"
The Freeing of the hand by technologies of reproducibility
and the "Shock:" the eye touched while watching a film

In Being and Time
This schema the opposite of the augenblick whih eschews techne's setting and space--it is the pure relation of Dasein to ecstatic (dispersed) temporality which only then gives space.

Comparison (which relies on a difference in the concept of dispersion [Zerstreuung] between Heidegger and Benjamin: dispersion for Heidegger is geshick, being determined from outside, as well as Benjamin, but for Heidegger this ecstatic relation is only temporal where for Benjamin it is spatio-temporal, in fact irreducibly spatial--cf. Sam Weber, Mass Mediauras)
Augenblick as the view of the history (destining) of light and clearing/concealing compared to the history of shocks [touch] in the theses on the concept of history. cf. Benjamin on Augenblick in his text on Baudelaire: "The camera imparts to the Augenblick an as it were posthumous shock"--after it is already dead, dying beyond dying.

Gambling and risk (cf. Lyotard's Just Gaming, Pascal, and Deleuze's Nietzsche)
These show us two ideas of risk, in gambling existence. for benjamin gambling as an activity shows us the activity of subjectivity itself--in Heidegger nothing is truly gambled because it always can (or does, has to) return from representation to being's possibility, to the nonrisk of presence.

also cf. Benjamin's theories of german fascism and the theologico-political fragment possibly vs. Heidegger's early writing on the three-day meditation on world war I.

Zapruder and Benjamin

A great new article by Max Holland on the film documenting the Kennedy assassination made by Abraham Zapruder suggests that the first bullet fired at Kennedy (of three bullets) was shot within a gap in Zapruder's filming. Zapruder began filming before Kennedy's Lincoln had made it onto the main road. He turned it off and then, according to Holland, the first shot (that missed) was taken. Turning it back on, we then see the two other shots fired at Kennedy. Most viewings of the film just pick up the tape at the point where Zapruder turned the camera back on. Holland concludes:

If this belated revelation changes nothing from one perspective — Oswald still did it — it simultaneously changes everything, if only because it disrupts the state of mind of everyone who has ever been transfixed by the Zapruder film. The film, we realize, does not depict an assassination about to commence. It shows one that had already started.

The "transfixing" that goes on when we look at the Zapruder film, is then directly linked to the assassination being a structural part of the film--and, one could say, the structure of any film in general. What is so interesting about documentary films like that of Zapruder's is the fact that they always are viewed like evidence. The film here itself betrays this general quality of film because it was itself used for evidence.

This is similar to what Benjamin has to say about the structure of anything filmed or photographed: photos are photos of a crime. That crime, for Benjamin, is always murder--or assassination. Why? Because photos always document the death of experience, and thus are always already photos of dead people. To be a little more precise: photos and film always capture an experience that is staged for the camera. This doesn't mean that people in films and photos are always posing for the camera--Kennedy in this instance obviously is not--but that reality is becoming filmable and not what the camera is supposedly supposed to capture: "authentic" experience. This experience, then, always lies outside the filmable--in the Zapruder film, experience (and specifically the real experience of the assassination) lies within the gap in the filming. In the end, this is what is appealing to Benjamin about the photos of Atget--as he says in "The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility" they display unabashedly the structure of the photo as the death and murder of experience:

The cult of remembrance of loved ones, absent or dead, offers a last refuge for the cult value of the picture. For the last time the aura emanates from the early photographs in the fleeting expression of a human face. This is what constitutes their melancholy, incomparable beauty. But as man withdraws from the photographic image, the exhibition value for the first time shows its superiority to the ritual value. To have pinpointed this new stage constitutes the incomparable significance of Atget, who, around 1900, took photographs of deserted Paris streets. It has quite justly been said of him that he photographed them like scenes of crime. The scene of a crime, too, is deserted; it is photographed for the purpose of establishing evidence. With Atget, photographs become standard evidence for historical occurrences, and acquire a hidden political significance. They demand a specific kind of approach; free-floating contemplation is not appropriate to them. They stir the viewer; he feels challenged by them in a new way.

One could easily see that Benjamin would have similar things to say about the Zapruder film and how it challenges us, transfixes us. If this all sounds a bit too "theoretical," ponder this: isn't that which is fascinating about the Zapruder film the fact that the camera is only one of the devices that is pointed at Kennedy at this moment, tracking his movements? That is, that what gets viewed (from a different perspective, of course) in the scope of a rifle pointed at Kennedy would look the same way as the film?

Benjamin, German Idealism, and dialectic

Benjamin often speaks of dialectic, the logical movement powerfully confronted by German Idealism, in favorable terms: calling someone a dialectician for Benjamin is a compliment. He says of the work of Karl Kraus that it deserves respect because of its dialectical character:

"...the fact that this man is one of the very few who have a vision of freedom and can further it only by assuming the role of chief prosecutor is a paradox that most purely reveals the dialectic at work."
-"Karl Kraus (Fragment)," Selected Writings, volume 2, part 1.

But if dialectic is to be sought after as an amazingly forceful way of thinking, why would Benjamin say of German Idealists that they have a view of the world like those of Jünger who longed for a return to the militarization of World War I?

...as far as anyone could see over the edge of the trench, the surroundings had become the terrain of German Idealism: every shell crater had become a problem, every wire entanglement an antinomy, every barb a definition, every explosion a thesis; by day the sky was the cosmic interior of the steel helmet, and at night the moral law above.
-"Theories of German Fascism," Selected Writings, volume 2, part 1.

Because dialectic is able to be lifted (cf. my post on Derrida, below, as well as the writings of Althusser on Marx's "overturning" of Hegel in For Marx) from the world of German Idealists.
Dialectic is an amazing force precisely because it holds things in indeterminate (immediate) contradiction through its effort to determine (mediate) them. This holding together, this arresting and immobilizing that takes place through the negative work of dialectic (the work of the dialectic to not arrest--that is, the work of the dialectic to mediate, to mobilize, or to bring forth total-mobilization) is the most forceful element of dialectic. Why? It (that is, this holding in indeterminate, immediate contradiction) does not lend itself without distortion (that is, without determination or mediation) to the objectification of capitalism, fascism, any of the organizing political-economic structures that reduce the world to what Heidegger rightly calls (also against Jünger) a "world picture:" a world of images fully determined by technology. Given this, one needs to think of how Heidegger in his critique of the objectified world-picture really thinks dialectic too much as a process that brings this picture about, and does not think enough that dialectic's suspension and overturning of objectification in its very process of objectifying is precisely the power of it--this would be Benjamin's contention if he were to confront many of Heidegger's texts dealing with Hegel (which includes Being and Time--in fact one could argue Being and Time is Heidegger's most expansive meditation on Hegel). In other words, dialectic, while it renders everything into a world of images fully determined by technology, can also bring forth a world of images that are indeterminate with respect to technology, that use technology to bring forth these indeterminate images or immobilizations--it is not necessary to retreat from the objectification and images wholly, as Heidegger seems to think.
The world of Geman Idealism is precisley not the world of dialectic, then, for Benjamin: however (dialectically, of course) it is that world in that it utilizes its power of determination and resolving (mediation) most. German Idealism's relationship to the dialectic therefore cannot be simply overcome and the dialectic extracted from it, just like its landscape (the First World War) cannot be merely passed by or simply improved by the view that blasted it apart. In being lifted (relever) from them, dialectic is always stolen--it belongs still in a sense to those who originally owned it.

From Benjamin

Benjamin on Karl Kraus:

...His entire fire-eating, sword-swallowing philological scrutiny of the newspapers is actually concerned not with language but with justice... His linguistic and ethical quibbling is not a form of self-righteousness; it belongs to the truly desperate justice of a proceeding in which words and things concoct the most implausible alibi simply to save their own skin, and must be incessantly refuted by the evidence of one's eyes or straightforward calculation.
-Selected Writings, Volume 2, Part 1, 195-6.

Benjamin vs. Heidegger: gambling and being-towards-death

I just ran across a fragment of Benjamin's in volume two (part one) of the English Selected Writings (in the German, it is located in Gesammelte Schriften VI, pages 188-190), entitled "Notes on a Theory of Gambling:" it represents Benjamin grounded extremely deep within his particular perspective on existence. I'd like to (quickly) suggest that perhaps the most important differences between Heidegger and Benjamin can be traced back to this fragment, for while it is characteristic Benjamin, one sees immediately that Heidegger could never, ever have written it.
Benjamin says the following, which at first just seems--like much in Benjamin--to be a mere description of what gambling is like:

What is decisive [in gambling] is the level of motor innervation, and the more emancipated it is from optical perception, the more decisive it is. From this stems a principal commandment for gamblers: they must use their hands sparingly, in order to respond to the slightest innervations.
-Selected Writings 2, part 1, 297.

But perhaps this fragment is nothing less than the exact refutation of what Heidegger means by Augenblick (the "moment of vision" in Being and Time. In other words, gambling here functions exactly like being-towards-death in Heidegger, except that it moves along completely different contours and has a completely different result. It is similar, however, in that it is the archetypal experience or experiential structure for both of these thinkers.
The Augenblick is, for Heidegger, a moment of presence without present--it is the present as determined by the futural essence of time. That is, because time flows from the future in its being-present, it is never present. It is present only as not-present: as a futural present--a present that springs from and withdraws back into the future. The present is only an experience of the "future-to-come." And yet, Heidegger maintains that this is precisely what gives one vision, i.e. what gives Dasein the ability to be (ek-sist) within its essence.
For Benjamin, we can see that the time of gambling, if one can put it this way, is a time that moves ever closer, not to vision, but precisely towards emancipation from optical perception--that is, towards their hands. In order to understand Benjamin's point of view here, one cannot understand the present as issuing from a from a future like with Heidegger: that is, one cannot understand the non-presence of the present as due to the withdrawal of a present back into the future. Rather, this non-present present in the time of gambling, the time without vision, stems from the fact that the experience of the present is always an experience of rupture without origin--that is, even a futural origin. The present stems only from the shock within any present, but this shock is not the future-within-the-present of Heidegger. Thinking the difference between the future and the shock, the Augenblick and the gambler's emancipation from optics.
I'll have to think about this much much more--but its here in case anyone can make anything out of it.

Benjamin on Nietzsche

Walter Benjamin has an interesting reading of Nietzsche that is much less favorable than Heidegger towards the conception of the eternal return. Its power probably merits a rereading of Nietzsche against Heidegger's reading of him--a task Derrida prescribes as necessary in Of Grammatology (that is, rereading Nietzsche against Heidegger, not using Benjamin to do so), probably because of a vague sense of what Benjamin concretely works out in his reading (that is, not necessarily because Derrida has his later Spurs in mind).
Benjamin essentially says that in order to comprehend the eternal return, or even to be able to think it, one must have had an intimate experience of modernity, where the experience of singular events changes into an experience of massenwiese, the mass-like, multiple singularity. In other words, in order to think the eternal return, Nietzsche had to have had an experience of various events as the same. This does not mean that they had to be the same event, but instead that Nietzsche had to experience the quality of the event as sameness, as the "ever-same" (see below)--an experience that is distinctly modern.
Here is one sample of what Benjamin says (it appears all over his work), initially with reference to Baudelaire:

Baudelaire's project takes on historical significance, however, when the experience of the ever-same, which provides the standard for assessing that project, is given its historical signature. this happens in Nietzsche and in Blanqui. Here the idea of the eternal return is the "new," which breaks the cycle of the eternal return by confirming it.
-"The Study Begins With Some Reflections on the Influence of Les Fleurs du mal," Selected Writings, Vol. 4 (1938-1940).

Eduardo Cadava looks at this in his amazing book, Words of Light: These on the Photography of History, and covers it quite thoroughly. But still I wonder what Heidegger would say about this reading, and what differences between Benjamin and Heidegger become apparent on the basis of it.
This should take the form of a contestation of Heidegger's idea of time, which Benjamin found "awful," (The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910-1940, 81) for an unarticulated, though obviously very definite, reason.

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.)