Even more basic introduction to Hegel

Here is an even more basic introduction to Hegel (and particularly Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, and "dialectic") than the one before. It should provide a good sort of primer for anyone reading Derrida's "The Pit and the Pyramid" in Margins of Philosophy, in that it gets you thinking in the general mode of Heidegger and Hyppolite about Hegel and language--this is the mode of thought that Derrida in that essay elaborates, investigates, and to which he reacts:

Here are some simple passages in the chapter on sense-certainty that have to do with language, and particularly the conflicts, the frustrations, the impossibilities—in short, the problems—of language:

In J.N. Findlay’s analysis of the Phenomenology: “In the use of demonstrative words, there is a conflict between what we really say and what we mean to say (our Meinung, was wir meinen [i.e. what we ‘intend.’])” (p. 508).

Also in Findlay’s analysis: “Language, being divine and rational, frustrates the attempt of sense-certainty to grasp… particulars” (p. 509-10).

And in the Phenomenology itself: “If they actually wanted to say ‘this’ bit of paper which they mean, if they wanted to say it, then this is impossible, because the sensuous This that is meant cannot be reached by language” (§110).

I’m taking these quotes (especially the last one) about language and its specific relation to sense-certainty as representing how language relates to the larger task of the Phenomenology. If I can tease out the significance of language in general, then, this should orient you so that you can understand specifically what is going on in the quotes—i.e. language’s relation to the “this” to the “now,” to “particulars,” to the “bit of paper” and the like.
What does this mean if I can do this? It means I’m elaborating a thesis of Heidegger’s (as well as Kojeve’s and Hyppolite’s) about the meaning of language in the way this task unfolds or accomplishes itself (cf. “Hegel and the Greeks” in Pathmarks).
To put it plainly, the task of the Phenomenology is to try and show thought, or have thought show itself. This thought is thought in action, thought beyond the distinction between thinking and doing—Hegel calls it Spirit. A culture is in a sense this type of thought; battles between nations or plays in the theatre are types of this thought in some way, in some aspect of their existence. This thought, then, shows itself in acting in various forms, forms like “Consciousness” “Self-consciousness” “Reason,” etc.—the general divisions of the Phenomenology—and also in more specific forms, like “sense-certainty,” “perception,” and “understanding”—the individual chapters of the work. It should be obvious that when there is no more showing of thought, when thought just simply is what it is and does not show itself as what it is, the task of the Phenomenology is completed. Hegel then goes to describe how this thought is, beyond its appearance, beyond its being a phenomenon. This is the task of the Science of Logic. But it is clear that if the task in the Phenomenology is to have thought show itself, when Hegel is writing about sense-certainty, he is trying to make thought in this particular form show itself as thought that takes this particular form. He is trying to show how sense-certainty—a way our consciousness is sure of the objects to which we relate—is thought showing itself in some way, and furthermore is thought in its action as showing and not simply just being itself.
Now we can understand that in claiming that language has some relationship to the task of the Phenomenology I’m claiming that language has a relationship to the way that this showing of thought has to unfold. In short, it means how this showing must be described by Hegel, how it must be put into language.
Now, taking a step back, we usually say that Phenomenology is an unfolding of something called “the dialectic.” Could it be that this putting into language is “dialectic?”
But don’t we normally think of dialectic as a threefold structure (thesis, antithesis, synthesis) of some sort that organizes or is the organization of what comes to light in the Phenomenology? Or, better, as the twofold interplay between something and its own contradiction?
Heidegger claims that both of these interpretations are right in a sense, but only if they get their meaning from this first meaning of dialectic—in the sense of the relationship of language to the unfolding of thought. I’ll note now that for Jean Hyppolite and Alexandre Kojeve, and thus for Derrida, this is the case too. The dialectic, for these philosophers, is a going-through-language. Heidegger specifically reads dialectic as “dialegesthai:” from dia, Greek for “going through,” and legein, “the gathering (and only gathering, not unifying) of disparity, of multiplicity, under a signifier or movement of signifiers, that is at the heart of logos, language.”
But we can think this more simply if we just think that dialectic will come on the scene when the showing of thought has a relationship to language. It is only in this sense that the dialectic is the threefold or twofold structure in the Phenomenology that we might normally think it is—before it is the “thesis, antithesis, synthesis,” or the interplay between “identity and contradiction,” it is this establishing of the relationship of thought to language.
So when thought indeed has a relationship to language, sense-certainty, as a way thinking shows itself, it will be dialectical in the way it unfolds, in the way it accomplishes this showing. But then why do all the quotes above talk about the failure of language to get at what sense-certainty wants it to get? Why, in general, is language a problem in the Phenomenology?
Because these represent moments in the Phenomenology when thought is trying to establish a relationship to language that is not dialectical, that is, when it is, in an effort not to show itself but to hide itself, trying to twist language into a mode that it does not want to inhabit. What is this mode of language? A mode where language disappears in front of what it communicates, where it undoes itself as language and does not, rather, make thought show itself in language, through the mediation of language. In short, a language that erases itself so that we get only the showing of thought, and no language with it.
This is impossible for Hegel: just this pure showing is precisely what “cannot be reached by language.” In the chapter on sense-certainty, we have portrayed a form of this showing of thinking that is nothing but this desire to have language erase itself, to have what is meant to be shown exceed the attempt to mean by putting it into language. It wants to have the showing of thought be just a “this,” a “here,” a “now.” But this is precisely what, in its frustration, Hegel says is “divine and rational.”
So we have a problem, don’t we? Thought when it does not show itself is precisely when it shows itself purely, without language, when language disappears in front of what it shows. Thought when it shows itself purely does not show itself, but hides itself.
I leave this for you to think about. Meanwhile, what has been proven, if we accept this, is that dialectic is the only way that thought can show itself—that is, as a way thought relates to language. If dialectic does not appear, there we have no showing, and in fact no thought as well. Dialectic, properly understood, is a relationship of thought to language without which thought is incomprehensible. The failure of language in these instances in the chapter in sense-certainty then only serves to prove how dialectic is necessary for the thought to appear, if we understand dialectic as the relationship between thought and language.

Basic Introduction to Hegel

I’m just going to tease out what Hegel says in the Phenomenology of Spirit in three phrases. Each is representative of a separate concern that consistently takes place throughout the Phenomenology as a whole, and also in the unbelievably rich history of the interpretation of Hegel. But I’m not going to be so concerned with what is asserted and where and why it is said so much—i.e. the particular arguments within each of them—so much as with the general way of thinking about things or general point of view that could allow something like these phrases to be written:

1. “It is clear that the dialectic of sense-certainty is nothing else but the simple history of its movement or of its experience, and sense-certainty itself is nothing else but just this history” (§109). Here we are concerned generally with history and experience and its relation to the dialectic (of sense-certainty, but also the dialectic qua dialectic).
2. “The Here pointed out, to which I hold fast, is similarly a this Here which, in fact, is not this Here, but a Before and Behind, a Right and Left… The Here, which was supposed to have been pointed out, vanishes in other Heres, but these likewise vanish. What is pointed out, held fast, and abides, is a negative This, which is negative only when the Heres are taken as they should be” (§108). Here we are generally concerned with the negative and negativity being what something is when it is taken as it “should” be.
3. “If they actually wanted to say ‘this’ bit of paper which they mean, if they wanted to say it, then this is impossible, because the sensuous This that is meant cannot be reached by language, which belongs to consciousness” (§110). Here we are concerned about language and how it cannot reach the “This” of sense-certainty, which Hegel says early on is the immediate.

If we can say something about each of these and how they enunciate the larger themes of the work and of Hegel’s thought in general, we might be able to connect them together.
Let’s first orient ourselves. You’ve probably heard “the dialectic” described as thesis, antithesis, synthesis. This interpretation has some foundation in Hegel, but it’s much more helpful, and much more complex (richer and more deeply problematic when indeed it proves problematic), actually, if we look at the dialectic as a movement between two terms Hegel uses a lot, terms you can easily trace in the movements of the Phenomenology: the immediate and the mediated (Unmittlebare, Mittelbar)—defined loosely, what has not gone through a process of some sort, and what has gone through that process. Sometimes it is good to think of the immediate as the undetermined or indeterminate, and the mediated as the determined. If we restrict our view to the movement of these two terms (and not yet considering exactly what “process” the mediated goes through and the immediate refrains from undergoing), the dialectic can be roughly characterized as the movement whereby what is immediate shows itself to be only properly immediate, only properly itself, when it is mediated, when it undergoes mediation (or becomes determined). To put it a better way, dialectic can be said to appear when anything taken immediately shows that if it is to be taken as what it is, it has to be taken as mediated (as determined).
Here in the chapter on sense-certainty, Hegel is dealing with something that is immediate—namely, sense-certainty itself (sense certainty is “immediate knowledge itself,” §90). We can presume, then, that if the Phenomenology structures itself around something called “dialectic,” as we usually think is the case with Hegel’s works, sense-certainty will show itself to be properly immediate only when it is mediated. Let’s take a step back and orient ourselves further to understand what all this means.
What is Hegel doing in the Phenomenology as a whole? Hegel has a lot to say on this, but his exact meaning is very confusing, and any way you reduce the confusion gives you a radically different interpretation of Hegel. I’ll just note this so you can get a different story than the one here if you want—go to some of the people on the handout. Put simply, however, Hegel is trying to think about what he calls Spirit (Geist). Spirit in its structure is something like the freedom (the determined indeterminacy) of thought or knowing in action—considered on a world-historical scale but never reducible to what we would call history or even freedom in its historical manifestation (Introduction to the Philosophy of History, III, “freedom is the only truth of Spirit”). It is a governing, proscriptive, disciplinary force in thought that also, like ideology or like a government, arises and is constituted by the actions of people. In short, Spirit is something like “the spirit of the times.” Hegel is trying to think about this Spirit, but, in the Phenomenology, not this Spirit itself, in its internal, determinate structure, in its being determined as freedom—this is only an indirect effect of Hegel’s primary concern.
This primary concern is in the Phenomenology is, rather, Spirit in its difference from itself, in its not being determined yet as itself, in its becoming-itself—in short, Spirit when it is not itself. When Spirit is itself and it returns to itself from out of the state of not-being determined as itself, the Phenomenology is over. Hegel can only then describe the logic of that Spirit, its internal structure in its completeness—this is why his next book after the Phenomenology is the Science of Logic. So, the Phenomenology describes or outlines or thinks about what Spirit is in its process of becoming-determined-as-Spirit, in a state in which it cannot be accurately described as a determinate structure, but in how it seems when it is not yet itself, when it is indeterminate. In short, the phenomenology describes the appearance and not the structure of Spirit: we can see now why and, more important, in what sense it is called a phenomenology—the phenomenon is what Spirit does and is when it remains in its difference from itself… it appears, and is appearance, the appearance of the structure (logic) of Spirit (which is freedom). (It should be clear that it is nothing Husserl would describe with his “phenomenology.”)
The form of the resistance of Spirit to becoming-itself, the phenomenon, Hegel understands as consciousness. This makes sense: if the freedom of thought or knowing in action is what we defined Spirit as, then there would have to be a mode of thinking in action that is not yet as free. Consciousness is that type of knowing: it is not as free for Hegel primarily because it takes everything from the subject-object point of view. Thinking things beyond the subject-object point of view is another way of saying that Spirit has returned to itself, that a mode of knowing or thinking exists that is free in its action. As we have been saying, this is the thought of the logic of Spirit, that takes place in the Science of Logic, but we should also note that from the perspective of the Phenomenology it is what Hegel calls “Absolute Knowledge,” a knowing that is fully Spiritual or free knowing/thought, a thought beyond consciousness or consciousness in its “absolute” form.
Now we know generally what sense-certainty is: it is a type of consciousness, a type of knowing that is the appearance of that free knowing or thought that is Spirit in its not-being itself, in its becoming-itself, in its resistance to Absolute Knowledge. If Hegel wants to describe what this consciousness is, because he wants to get at Spirit in the state of not-being itself, he will then only be able to describe it insofar as it remains this resistance to becoming Spirit.
But in doing this, in suspending the becoming-itself of Spirit, describing sense-certainty will have to end up effectuating by itself the intrusion of Spirit into this consciousness, the lifting up of sense-certainty into the process of the becoming-itself of Spirit, simply because sense-certainty will not be anything that seems to be something, but will be something, will be seen as described. It cannot remain a phenomenon, it cannot seem. In other words, if this form of Spirit is to be taken as what it is, as not-Spirit, it has to become Spiritual. Put differently, it has to become a part of the movement not of the difference of Spirit from itself but of the structure of Spirit as it is described.
Now we have fully oriented ourselves: we see the connection between this wider view we took that explains what Spirit must be, and the more narrow characterization of the dialectic that we set out with. In other words, we see how Spirit is immediate and how it is mediated: it is immediate in its not-being Spirit, in its becoming-Spirit, in forms of consciousness like sense-certainty, and it is mediated when it is as itself, as the freedom of thought in action. But according to the schema of the dialectic that we laid out earlier, immediacy is itself when it is mediated. This means that Spirit is immediate, is fully the becoming-Spirit of Spirit, when it has indeed become Spirit, when it has become itself. On a more local level, sense-certainty will be itself when it is described, when it is seen to be not itself, to already be beyond itself, to already be another form of consciousness (namely, what Hegel calls perception).
Let’s be a little clearer, and think about why this is so. Given what we said about Spirit as a phenomenon when it is not itself, we can see what Spirit itself, beyond the Phenomenology proper (or at the end of it, in the chapter on “Absolute Knowledge”), would have to be described as, from the point of view of a study that only traces what Spirit is not (the Phenomenology). Spirit would have to appear as, and be described as, the fully mediated itself, as what has gone through a process. This also means that becoming Spirit is that “process” which the mediated qua mediated goes through and the immediate holds off. But if beyond the Phenomenology (or in the consideration of “Absolute Knowledge”) this is the case, this means that the immediate is what makes up that Phenomenology. But at each stage of this Phenomenology, if what is to be described is the immediacy as it is itself, it must be mediated, it must show itself as immediate in its being mediated or undergoing mediation.
Thus we have oriented ourselves fully, because we see how Spirit is the result of the dialectic. With this, we can look at the first quote, and see how it is possible for Hegel to say this simply because he is saying just something like this: “the dialectic of sense-certainty is nothing else but the simple history of its movement or of its experience”—this means simply the movements of sense-certainty in how we try to describe how it knows exactly correspond to the dialectical way of considering it, because, essentially (remember we’re not considering the real content of these phrases, just how they are able to assert something like what they are saying), describing will have to show the Spirit in it, and this means describing its immediacy as itself in mediatedness.
But this gets proven when we consider what sense-certainty is again. It is, as we said, the immediate. But we also said it was consciousness. It is, then, the most immediate sphere of the development of immediacy into mediation, but also what it contains is immediate: it is just that type of immediacy that has a relation to itself (to itself as subject-object) as immediate. In other words immediacy is in sense-certainty, and (on a more general level) as sense-certainty. Thus throughout the section Hegel shows what is immediate about sense-certainty in particular and in doing so shows what is immediate about consciousness in general by mediating them. We’re taking the quote above as referring to consciousness in general, but this is also true of sense-certainty in particular, like the third quote, to which this leads us.
This third quote is essentially about the impossibility of grasping immediacy at all outside of a dialectical structure: the sensuous “This” is the immediate in sense-certainty, not sense-certainty as immediate, but of course this applies too: “the sensuous “This” that is meant cannot be reached by language.” In general, the immediate as immediate cannot be reached in description if we want it to be different than what is being described—in the case of consciousness, as what is part of a mediating movement of Spirit. In short, the immediate can’t be seen to be something totally apart from the mediated: it is what is is only as mediated, as determined—there is no total indeterminacy.
The second quote is the most crucial, but also the most vague considering what we have done. “What is pointed out, held fast, and abides, is a negative This, which is negative only when the Heres are taken as they should be…” We know that if something is taken as it should be, it should be mediated. What this indicates is that there is an affinity between negation and mediation, that allows one to be what one is, that allows Spirit to return to itself. We can indicate one way in which we have already seen this. Immediacy, we said, was immediate only when it was mediated. Another way we can describe this is that immediacy can only be itself when it is its negative, when it is its negation, when it holds fast within its negation as itself. In this sense, mediation comes about through the death of the immediate: it is the holding fast within death of the immediate itself. Now we see that the mediated and the immediate are not different, but both are just two sides of the phenomenon of negation: when negation surfaces, we don’t see them as different—they are mediation.
This connects the three quotes together roughly, and hopefully it has helped to make Hegel’s general approach in this confusing book clear.

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.)