Benjamin's Illuminations

My first readings were selections from Benjamin's Illuminations. While the book included a few more essays, I chose Unpacking My Library, The Task of the Translator, What is Epic Theater?, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, and Theses on the Philosophy of History.

In Unpacking My Library, Benjamin uses a deceptively light hearted, whimsical tone, "Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like" (61), to talk about what it is to be a collector of books before at last showing the work to be an open critique of the inheritor who leaves his inheritance on the shelf. He writes, "For a collector's attitude toward his possessions stems from an owner's feeling of responsibility...it is, in the highest sense, the attitude of an heir" (66). Each of us is an inheritor of the world we are born into. To approach it with the attitude of the collector allows it to collect dust on the shelves. As Benjamin writes this essay, his "books are not yet on the shelves, not yet touched by the mild boredom of order" (59). It is his work to read the books. Of the collector of unread books, he says: "O bliss of the collector, bliss of the man of leisure! Of no one has less been expected, and no one has had a greater sense of well-being than the man who has been able to carry on his disreputable existence in the mask of Spitweg's 'Bookworm'" (67).

Benjamin again argues for personal responsibility in critiquing and renewing tradition in The Task of the Translator. He raises, early on, important questions: "For what does a literary work 'say'? What does it communicate? It 'tells' very little to those who understand it" (69). The question of what a literary work says or communicates is at the heart of what I will refer to (for lack of information) as The Problem of the Exclusionary and Subsequently Disenfranchising Nature of Literate. "High literature" is founded in the principle of "show, don't tell", meaning that it works in allegory and metaphor in order to disguise what the author might be attempting to communicate and to offer the possibility of the proliferation of meaning. Unfortunately, this lends itself to the possibility of a royalty-style inbreeding where the only people who have access to much of the meaning to be found in a literary work are those who are already steeped in the significance of the allegory and typically feel the same way. It is a preaching to the choir, saving the already saved and leaving untouched the ones the writer might intend to affect. The ones who do understand it tend to already agree with it and are thus unaffected.
Benjamin goes on to explore the nature of language, saying, "Languages are not strangers to one another, but are, a priori and apart from all historical relationships, interrelated in what they want to express" (72). This leads into what reveals itself as the argument of the essay, which is that, "translation is so far removed from being the sterile equation of two dead languages that of all literary forms it is the one charged with the special mission of watching over the maturing process of the original language and the birth pangs of its own" (73). This is to say that two languages, in translation, speak to and with one another in the way that two people speaking in the same language using different words for the same thing, or the same word for different things, might come to some new understanding of the language, and in this "house of being", the world itself. "The basic error of the translator," he says, "is that he preserves the state in which his own language happens to be instead of allowing his language to be powerfully affected by the foreign language" (81). A proper translation for Benjamin is a palimpsest, "allow[ing] the pure language, as though reinforced by its own medium, to shine upon the original all the more fully" (79), elucidating the text itself in a new, bright light. In this way the translator "expand[s] and deepen[s] his language by means of the foreign language" (81). Benjamin calls on the translator to, through the use of the foreign language, take up his own language in a new way, blossoming the language to bring its speaker perhaps closer to some truth. In Heidegger's interpretation of the Greek alethia, this is a way of being-in-truth. Without this, the language is less capable of adaptation and evolution, leaving its muscles to grow weak, to flounder about aimlessly, and eventually fade away, lost to the recesses of a history written, undoubtedly, in some more powerful, more prevalent, language.

Benjamin begins What is Epic Theater? with the quote, "There is nothing more pleasant than to lie on a sofa and read a novel" (147). This provides the vantage point of those whom Brecht aims to reach in his epic theater, who are "an interest group who 'do not think without reason'" (148). Benjamin's adoration for Brecht, which is prevalent in his essay, is based in Brecht's attempt to force those who "do not think without reason" into considering not the strife of the characters, but their own world and their own condition. 'Instead of identifying with the characters," Benjamin writes, "the audience should be educated to be astonished at the circumstances under which they function...Rather, the truly important thing is to discover the conditions of life" (150). This falls in line with Benjamin's own project. Brecht does not bury his apparent intentions too deep below the surface of stories, but rather involves his characters in direct and open discourse with the subjects he is attempting to confront and attempting to force his audience into confronting. It is this confrontation with the world that Benjamin seems to be after in each of these essays.

In The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Benjamin seems again to focus on the importance of direct confrontation with one's world, ending the essay with, "Mankind['s]...self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order" (242). The political ramifications of this mentality are predictable. "The masses have a right to change property relations: Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property...All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war" (241). Benjamin credits the production of this absent-minded examiner approach to the mass production of art, such as in film, where the mere concept of an "original," as with photographic prints, doesn't make sense, as these are mediums of art geared towards mass production. "For the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility" (224). This gearing of art towards the political realm robs a work of art of "its presence in time and space, it's unique existence at the place where it happens to be," which is "the prerequisite of the concept of authenticity" (220). Reproduction "detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition," and subsequently "substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence" (221). A tradition is a living thing, capable of changing through time and space. That is to say that one generation in a particular culture approaches a work of art in a certain way, which another generation in another culture approaches that work in another way. Benjamin asserts, though, that because of art's traditional tie with ritual each of these groups is still confronted with the work's uniqueness, or its "aura". It is because we are able to and desire to reproduce a work and bring it into our personal situations, such as the Rosie the Riveter poster hanging in my bedroom, that we take a different approach to the work. No longer do we have to go to the work, but, rather, we bring the work to us. "A man who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it," says Benjamin, but "in contrast, the distracted mass absorbs the work of art" (239). Thus we view art with the blinders of distraction, refusing its advances on our minds and instead digesting it as the consumers we are trained to be.

Lastly, I should add that reading Theses on the Philosophy of History before the other essays undoubtedly greatly influenced my reading of Benjamin. Most influential is Thesis VIII, where he writes, "It is our task to bring about a real state of emergency...The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are 'still' possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical" (257). Due largely to mechanization and mechanical reproduction, Western culture's approach to the world is mechanical. That is, we see the world in terms of its telos, or its end. This gives rise to the notion of a progressive society which is moving toward some new day, and which has already moved beyond some previous point in its linear conception of time. This is the inherent assumption in the shock that "the things we are experiencing are 'still' possible". It neglects to take up the images of the past. Benjamin writes, "Every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably" (255). This approach collects history, hiding it away beneath the dust covering the uncut books steeped in the "mild boredom of order". It allows contemporary man to "not think without reason," and never consider his condition, producing a man capable of "experienc[ing] [his] own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order." This man "preserves the state in which his own [life] happens to be instead of allowing his [life] to be powerfully affected" by the past. A man who takes up the world in this way can never recognize, much less seriously confront, the real state of emergency in which he lives each day.