Issue #141 A Positive Concept of Barbarism: Benjamin and the Consequences

A Positive Concept of Barbarism: Benjamin and the Consequences

Sami Khatib

141_khatib_01

Giovan Battista Gaulli, Dispute between Achilles and Agamemnon, circa 1695. License: Public domain.

Issue #141
December 2023










Notes
1

This re-edited essay contains sections of an earlier publication entitled “Barbaric Salvage: Benjamin and the Dialectics of Destruction” (Parallax 24, no. 2, 2018). A different version was presented at MAMA Multimedijalni institut, Zagreb, on February 27, 2015. I thank Anne van Leeuwen, Nadia Bou Ali, Mark Hayek, and Petar Milat for their comments and critical remarks on earlier versions. My argument is indebted to the works of Benjamin Noys and Irving Wohlfarth, and discussions during the workshop “Nihilism, Destruction, Negativity: Walter Benjamin and the ‘Organization of Pessimism’” at Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, on December 6, 2012. All mistakes and misreadings, however, are mine.

2

Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, ed. Marcus Bollock and Michael W. Jennings, vol. 2.1 (Belknap Press, 1999), 367.

3

Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Hermann Schweppenhäuser and Rolf Tiedemann, vol. 7 (Suhrkamp, 1989), 655.

4

Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 2.1, 367; Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Hermann Schweppenhäuser and Rolf Tiedemann, vol. 2 (Suhrkamp, 1977), 662.

5

Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 2.1, 367.

6

Bertolt Brecht, Stories of Mr. Keuner, trans. Martin Chalmers (City Lights Books, 2001), 10.

7

Walter Benjamin, “On Theoretical Foundations: Theses on Brecht,” Radical Philosophy, no. 179 (2013): 28.

8

Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, ed. Marcus Bollock and Michael W. Jennings, vol. 2.2 (Belknap Press, 1999), 732.

9

Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 2.2, 732.

10

Marx’s technical term for this sort of capitalist root extraction is “abstract labor,” the transformation of living labor into the spectral, that is the “sensuous-supra-sensuous,” materiality of value. See Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (Penguin, 1990), 138f.

11

Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 2.2, 732.

12

Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 2.2, 735.

13

Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 2.1, 217f.

14

Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, ed. Marcus Bollock and Michael W. Jennings, vol. 4 (Belknap Press, 2003), 402.

15

See the film The Matrix, dir. Lilly and Lana Wachowski, 1999. The complete formula “Welcome to the Desert of the Real” became famous through Slavoj Žižek’s same-titled book, Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 (Verso, 2002).

16

According to Barbara Cassin’s reading of the Sophists, this binary had already been undermined and denaturalized in Ancient Greece. Cassin, “Sophists,” in Greek Thought: A Guide to Classical Knowledge, ed. Jacques Brunschwig and Geoffrey E. R. Lloyd with the collaboration of Pierre Pellegrin (Belknap Press, 2000), 969f.

17

John Wesley Powell, “From Barbarism to Civilization,” American Anthropologist 1, no. 2 (1888): 98.

18

Powell, “From Barbarism to Civilization,” 121.

19

Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford University Press, 2002), 50.

20

Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 169.

21

Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 11, 4, xviii.

22

Rosa Luxemburg, The Junius Pamphlet: The Crisis of German Social Democracy, 1915, marxists.org .

23

In thesis thirteen in “On the Concept of History,” Benjamin criticized the bourgeois concept of progress, maintained by vulgar Marxism and Social Democracy: “Social Democratic theory and to an even greater extent its practice were shaped by a conception of progress which bore little relation to reality but made dogmatic claims. Progress as pictured in the minds of the Social Democrats was, first, progress of humankind itself (and not just advances in human ability and knowledge). Second, it was something boundless (in keeping with an infinite perfectibility of humanity). Third, it was considered inevitable—something that automatically pursued a straight or spiral course. Each of these assumptions is controversial and open to criticism” (Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 4, 394). This criticism was later echoed in Adorno’s Minima Moralia (1951). Despite the decline of the Social Democratic belief in progress, the determinist belief in objective laws of history and economy remained intact. Even catastrophic regresses in history were taken as driving forces of progress: “Cured of the Social-Democratic belief in cultural progress and confronted with growing barbarism, Marxists are under constant temptation to advocate the latter in the interests of the ‘objective tendency,’ and, in an act of desperation, to await salvation from their mortal enemy who, as the ‘antithesis,’ is supposed in blind and mysterious fashion to help prepare the good end.” Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections On a Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (Verso, 2005).

24

Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 4, 392.

25

I owe this insight to Maria Boletsi’s excellent study Barbarism and Its Discontents (Stanford University Press, 2013), 117–21.

26

I borrow this apt translation from Boletsi, Barbarism and Its Discontents, 123.

27

Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 2.2, 732.

28

Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, ed. Marcus Bollock and Michael W. Jennings, vol. 3 (Belknap Press, 2002), 144.

29

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Manifesto of the Communist Party, ed. David Harvey (Pluto Press, 2008), 38; cf. Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (Penguin, 1988), 15–36.

30

Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 3, 268.

31

Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 4, 406.

32

Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 3, 268.

33

Since this difference gets lost in the English language (Erlebnis and Erfahrung are both translated as “experience”), I have added the German word whenever I refer to “experience.”

34

Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 4, 318; cf. Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Hermann Schweppenhäuser and Rolf Tiedemann, vol. 1 (Suhrkamp, 1974), 614.

35

Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 7, 360. The German word “Technik” denotes both technique and technology. The English edition only refers to “technology,” cf. Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 3, 107.

36

Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 3, 107–8.

37

Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, ed. Marcus Bollock and Michael W. Jennings, vol. 1 (Belknap Press, 1996), 486.

38

In his essay on French surrealism, Benjamin introduces the paradoxical concept of “profane illumination,” which provides the theoretical ground to combine the otherwise antithetical concepts of sober technology and ecstatic communal experiences. Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 2.2, 207–8. Cf. M. Cohen, Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution (University of California Press, 1993); and Rainer Nägele, “Body Politics: Benjamin’s Dialectical Materialism between Brecht and the Frankfurt School,” in The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin, ed. David S. Ferris (Cambridge University Press, 2004).

39

Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 4, 314.

40

Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Belknap Press, 1999), 801, trans. modified. I owe this quote and its relevance for Benjamin’s theory of Erfahrung to Jacob Bard-Rosenberg.

41

Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 2.2, 732; cf. Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2, 215.

42

Robert E. Howard, “The Phoenix on the Sword,” in Weird Tales, December 1932 . Epigraph to the fifth chapter.

43

Robert E. Howard, “Letter to H. P. Lovecraft, December 5, 1935,” in The Barbaric Triumph: A Critical Anthology on the Writings of Robert E. Howard, ed. Don Herron (Wildside Press, 2004), 175.

44

“L’hypocrisie est un hommage que le vice rend à la vertu.” (Hypocrisy is a tribute that vice pays to virtue).

45

Perry Anderson, “The Standard of Civilization,” New Left Review, no. 143 (September–October 2023.

46

Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 2.2, 733.

47

Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 3, 341.

48

Cf. Esther Leslie’s reading: “Impoverished experience can be overpowered only if the fact of poverty is made into the underpinning of a political strategy of a ‘new barbarism’ that corresponds faithfully to the new realities of the constellation of Masse and Technik.” Leslie, Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism (Pluto Press, 2000).

49

Walter Benjamin, “On Theoretical Foundations: Theses on Brecht,” Radical Philosophy, no. 179 (2013): 28.

50

Marx, Capital, 125.

51

Benjamin, “On Theoretical Foundations,” 28, trans. modified.

52

Benjamin, “On Theoretical Foundations,” 28, trans. modified.

53

Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 2.2, 370.

54

Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 2.2, 776.

55

Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 2.2, 776.

56

Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 2.2, 735.

57

Translation mine. Compare the German: “Funktion der politischen Utopie: den Sektor des Zerstörungswürdigen abzuleuchten.” Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1, 1244.

58

Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 2.2, 456.

59

In the same passage, Benjamin also enlists Adolf Loos and “his struggle with the dragon ‘ornament,’” the “stellar Esperanto of Paul Scheerbart’s creations,” and “Klee’s New Angel.” Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 2.2, 456.

60

Benjamin mentions three forms of technological alienation, Entfremdung: (1) In the case of surrealist photography he speaks of a “salutary estrangement (heilsame Entfremdung) between man and his surroundings” (Selected Writings, vol. 2.2, 519; Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2, 379). (2) In terms of the advanced Technik of cinema and film production, he states that the “representation of human beings by means of an apparatus has made possible a highly productive use of the human being’s self-alienation (Selbstentfremdung)” (Selected Writings, vol. 3, 113; Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 7, 369). (3) Speaking of imperialist wars and the fascist “aestheticizing of politics,” Benjamin remarks that humanity’s “self-alienation (Selbstentfremdung) has reached the point where it can experience (erleben) its own annihilation as a supreme aesthetic pleasure” (Selected Writings, vol. 3, 122; Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 7, 384). To keep the terminology consistent, I suggest using the Brechtian term Verfremdung, “estrangement,” for the (potentially) emancipatory impact of modern Technik; estrangement is a denaturalizing technique of undoing technology’s capitalist usage and discovering the potentials of second Technik. I refer to the early Marxian and Hegelian term Entfremdung, “alienation,” only when I highlight technology’s (potentially) negative or depriving results. This distinction can be broadly mapped on Benjamin’s differentiation in first and second Technik. As in the case of first and second Technik, the distinction of estrangement and alienation is not absolute; they are always mixed and present extreme poles of a dialectical relation.

61

Such an anachronic question exceeds the horizon of attempts to historicize Benjamin and read him only in the context of the avant-garde tendencies of the 1920s and the “Culture of Distance in Weimar Germany.” See Helmut Lethen, Cool Conduct: The Culture of Distance in Weimar Germany, trans. Don Reneau (University of California Press, 2002).

62

I am referring here to Mark Fisher’s title Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, according to which postmodern capitalism “seamlessly occupies the horizons of the thinkable.” Fisher, Capitalist Realism (Zero Books, 2009), 8.

63

Benjamin, “On Theoretical Foundations,” 28.

64

Walter Benjamin, “Brecht’s Threepenny Novel,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 3, 1935–1938, ed. Marcus Paul Bullock and ‎Michael William Jennings (Belknap Press), 7.