Fredric Jameson - The Benjamin Files

The Benjamin Files

Also by the Author

The Poetics of Social Forms

I. Categories of the Narrative-Historical (forthcoming)

II. Allegory and Ideology

III. The Antinomies of Realism

IV. A Singular Modernity / The Modernist Papers

V. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

VI. Archaeologies of the Future

Studies

Sartre: The Origins of a Style

Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist

Late Marxism: Adorno, Or, The Persistence of the Dialectic

Brecht and Method

The Hegel Variations: On the Phenomenology of the Spirit

Representing Capital: A Reading of Volume One

Chandler: The Detections of Totality

The Benjamin Files

Theory

Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature

The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism

The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act Valences of the Dialectic

An American Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army

Film

Signatures of the Visible

The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System

Essays

The Ideologies of Theory

The Seeds of Time

The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 19831998

The Ancients and the Postmoderns: On the Historicity of Forms

The Benjamin Files

Fredric Jameson

First published by Verso 2020

Fredric Jameson 2020

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Verso

UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG

US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201

versobooks.com

Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-398-3

ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-400-3 (US EBK)

ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-399-0 (UK EBK)

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Jameson, Fredric, author.

Title: The Benjamin files / Fredric Jameson.

Description: London; New York: Verso, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: A comprehensive new reading of Walter Benjamins major works, as well as a great number of his less well-known publications, from one of Americas foremost cultural and literary criticsProvided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020023370 (print) | LCCN 2020023371 (ebook) | ISBN 9781784783983 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781784784003 (ebk)

Subjects: LCSH: Benjamin, Walter, 18921940.

Classification: LCC B3209.B584 J36 2020 (print) | LCC B3209.B584 (ebook) | DDC 193dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020023370

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020023371

Typeset in Minion Pro by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh

Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

For Susan

to transpose the crisis into the very heart of language

Contents

Unmarked references in the text are twofold: first to the English translation, one of the genuine monuments of US academic publishing, the Selected Writings in four volumes (Harvard, 19962003, edited by Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland and Gary Smith); then to the German originals, the Gesammelte Schriften in seven volumes (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 197489, edited by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhuser). Volume V of the German edition has been published as The Arcades Project, translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Harvard, 1999); references to this edition are marked A.

The English version of Origin of the German Trauerspiel (to be found in Volume I of the German) is translated by John Osborne (The Origin of German Tragic Drama, Verso, 2009) the English is referenced as OT. The Moscow Diary (to be found in Volume VI of the German) is translated by Richard Sieburth (Harvard, 1986). References to the letters, marked B, designate first the English translation by Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson under the title Correspondence (Chicago, 2012); and then the German originals in Briefe (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1966).

For the dialectician, what matters is having the wind of world history in ones sails. For him, thinking means setting the sails. What is important is how they are set. Words are for him merely the sails. The way they are set turns them into concepts. (IV, 176; II, 670)

Benjamin is often too readable (or readerly) for us to realize that he is incomprehensible, or, in other words, writerly. This passage seems to confirm the obvious, namely that everything in Benjamins work is driven by the passion for history (or at least, for the historical). Beyond that, however, the figure grows devious, multiple implications lead us in contradictory directions, raising unanswerable questions: prevailing wind versus tidal currents, tacking against the wind, rigging, size of the craft itself. Metaphor denarrativizes, with its immediacy of identification; and the wind of history is certainly a conventional figure. But it has become the raw material on which further figures work, producing not a map but a users manual. As our initial reading begins to disintegrate, sails flapping weakly in a waning breeze, meanings fading away becalmed, we begin to sense that what we have here is no metaphor but rather an allegory: a form that lives by gaps and differences rather than identities, and that develops in time.

The twist, the operative figure is, of course, the setting of the sails, by which Benjamin wishes to convey the variety of critical codes or theoretical languages within which we work, depending on the immediate historical situation, which is to say, depending on politics. This is not a philosophical relativism, it is a pragmatism, which does not aim at consistency or the forging of a synthesis of such codes; indeed, it prescribes exactly the opposite: their adaptation to the moment, the crisis, the need. On the other hand, it appeals to cunning, to tactics and to a keen practical awareness of how to use such multiple codes and systems as are available to catch the prevailing wind.

Meanwhile, Benjamin revises his figure as he goes along, without modifying his starting point, leaving apodictic sentences behind him which are haunted by Derridean undecidabilities. The thinker in Benjamin incessantly interferes with the writer and vice versa, producing an unstable fluctuation between words and concepts which the reader must walk like a tightrope. This uncertainty is productiveit makes for a tension between temporality and space which, when maintained to the breaking point, allows us to glimpse the absent center of this work, the famous Stillstand in which history and the Now are momentarily indistinguishable. Benjamin has, as we shall see, a number of different languages to characterize this tension, but to settle for any of them even provisionally is to turn that glimpse into a generalized paralysis or, in other words, to reify either his words or his concepts, to produce works in the place of sketches. Baudelaires notion of the modern as an ephemeral notation in a classical representational language (the transient, the fleeting, the contingent the one half of art, the other being the eternal and immovable) is as useful a characterization of Benjamins written thoughts as another.