Essay on the Misuse of Benjamin in Latin American Studies

Forgetting BenjaminAuthor(s): Francisco González and Beatriz SarloReviewed work(s):Source: Cultural Critique, No. 49, Critical Theory in Latin America (Autumn, 2001), pp. 84-92Published by: University of Minnesota PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1354703 .

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FORGETTING BENJAMIN TRANSLATION BY FRANCISCO GONZALEZ

Beatriz Sarlo

W hat we call academia (that dispenser of legitimacy and pres- tige to all branches of knowledge) is well versed in the technology of

reproduction: it generalizes everything it touches. We could add that academia is a leveling force because most of its members, in order to be in it, do the same things and follow the same trends within a spe- cialized symbolic market whose dimensions are, at least, those of the Western world. It has by now become clear (if belatedly so, as a result of the disruptive processes that military dictatorships introduced in academic life) that university curricula in Argentina have been stan- dardized according to the universal rules of academia. This standard- ization has had several consequences that I do not intend to discuss in full here, except one: the wide, if diffuse, penetration of certain theoretical waves through respectable segments of Argentinean academia. One example of this process is the thriving success of the cultural studies label; another example is the staunch persistence with which

literary criticism, as well as semiotics and cultural analysis, keep coming back to the city as a subject of study. The Benjamin trend, so fashionable in the eighties, is part of this process.

Strollers unknown and indifferent to one another, foreigners, marginal characters, conspirators, dandies, collectors, murderers, cityscapes, galleries, display windows, mannequins, modernity and the ruins of modernity, shopping centers, and freeways-a back-

ground rustle of sounds where the words fidneur and flanerie are uttered as unexpected synonyms of practically any movement that takes place in a public space. Flanerie is discussed in cities where the

Cultural Critique 49-Fall 2001-Copyright 2001 Regents of the University of Minnesota



FORGETTING BENJAMIN 1 85

presence of the flaneur would be impossible. The simple evening stroller in a provincial retreat or on a two-block pedestrian street has become a character in a philosophical urban novel, sketched in accor- dance with Benjaminian theories about modernity in the nineteenth

century or about the ruins of capitalism in the display windows of its merchandise.

It is not a new phenomenon; Foucault's work underwent a simi- lar process of trivialization (suddenly, in the words of Oscar Teran,

people found themselves saying that knowledge produces power and vice versa) and so did such exciting areas of study as the represen- tation of history in fiction or politics in discourse, all of which was worn thin through hundreds of papers and presentations. There was also a Bakhtin explosion, everything acquired a carnival quality, and the notion of parody was generally applied to any discourse that was not completely straightforward. And since no discourse can be com-

pletely straightforward, all discourse seemed parodic. Amends should be made on account of Foucault and Bakhtin.

These statements do not avoid a certain emphatic tone, stemming as they do from a sense of uneasiness that turns into self-criticism, but also into criticism of the habits of our tribe. One cannot plead innocence when oneself is part of this process, but the conceptual inflation of the last few years has devalued some notions to near

worthlessness, as happens to money in times of a price-hike spiral. Perhaps they should be deposited in a safe place and we should agree not to use them for a while, so as to give them the chance to recover.

Reading Benjamin (and with him, as if it were more or less the

same, Schorske, Berman, Sennett, de Certeau, and Auge, among many others) has produced a kind of theory erosion that corrodes

Benjamin's originality to the point of complete triteness. To say that this is a case of semantic impoverishment is not enough. Benjamin is now drowned in a purely nominal syrup, quoted as if the quote would ensure (the way it sometimes did for him, after a long process of historical research and composition) the production of a new

meaning on multiple stages. We should, then, review a few known facts.

Benjamin did not study cities because it was a fashionable sub-

ject. He looked for meanings and found a suitable searching ground



86 | BEATRIZ SARLO

on cityscapes. He did not travel to Moscow in order to write the

diary of his visit to a great capital. He went to Moscow in pursuit of a double passion: a woman and an idea of revolution. He found neither completely.

As the years go by, Paris grows on him because of its arcades, on the one hand, and of his vision of capitalism on the other. He does not

go to Paris in order to find a city as the object of his analysis. On the

contrary, Paris goes to Benjamin because it is an indispensable cultural arena to understand something that is not Paris or, at least, not

only Paris. Not until 1935 did Benjamin drop the title Pariser Passagen and begin to refer to his future work as Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth

Century. The first title is the one he had used since 1927. But this is not an attempt to reproduce a well-known chronology

just for the sake of scholarly precision (the titles and themes spread out like a network of communicating vessels, constantly reworked in the letters to his friends). We should try, rather, to follow the path through which Benjamin arrives at the city: early Surrealism, from which he will later attempt to distance himself "in order to free my work from a hitherto much too obvious proximity with surrealism," he writes to Scholem in 1928; and on his notes to the future book he adds:

To set apart the tendency of this work from that of Aragon's: Whereas

Aragon perseveres on the world of dreams, here we need to find the constellation of awakening. Whereas, in Aragon, there remains an

impressionist element-the "mythology"-here we are dealing with the resolution of "mythology" into history. Naturally, this can happen only if we can awaken a still-unconscious knowledge about the past.1

There is, in short, a settling of old philosophical scores as the work uncoils through its unending spirals.

In any case, it becomes increasingly clear that he has come to Paris because the city happens to be one of the cultural keys to an

understanding of the movements of art and merchandise; he did not come there because of a vague inclination or in order to satisfy mere

curiosity as to how cities are alike. The themes of his work in

progress show what Benjamin was after: the images of the dream that are materialized by the city, the illusion of novelty in merchandise and fashion, the prehistory of the twentieth century in the forms of the merchandise of the nineteenth century. In the city he recognized



FORGETTING BENJAMIN | 87

objects, arrangements and uses of space, types, systems of movement

and communication, technological icons, that kept crowding the the-

oretical and critical impulse of his work.2 As evidenced by the index cards filled during the preparation of the huge Passagenwerk, when

Benjamin set out to describe Paris as a construct of the historical and critical imagination, he thought about a very complex plan that

included over thirty thematic titles. Obviously, "The Flaneur" is only one of those titles. Why, then, has the flaneur become a recurring

phantom on texts that either bewail his disappearance or celebrate

his survival? There is something too easy about this, something too

simple and immediate, that should raise some misgivings. And there is also a process of forgetting; Benjamin left unfinished a work on

Paris in which he followed the notes of a theme: "the problem of the

metropolis viewed in terms of experience" and the complete loss of all experience in the metropolis.3 A philosophical dimension, then, was weakened.

The theory of knowledge and the theory of progress are equally significant in the plan of the Passagenwerk, and both played an essen- tial role in Benjamin's work (they were the true theoretical founda- tion of his future work) as was also the case with dreams and the oneiric city, both of which configure the way in which Benjamin reads the city through the fragments and quotes we have come to know. If the flaneur were a key to the Passagenwerk, if the book could be synthesized mainly into this figure, Benjamin's Paris would most

likely have lacked the polemic heterogeneity, the mixture of ruins and future that we perceive in the vast architecture of this unfinished work.

As Adorno pointed out to him, Benjamin worked to materialize the images that he had found in literature and that had led him to construct Paris as an object of study. "In the haussmannization of

Paris," he writes in the Expose, "the phantasmagoria has been petri- fied." Years later, he notes on his index cards: "Haussmann's pen- chant for perspective is an attempt to impose artistic forms upon a technique (an urban technique in this case). Such an attempt leads

invariably to kitsch."4 These two statements show well how Ben-

jamin proceeds. In the first one he keeps, as he does throughout this unfinished work, the notion that his work deals with capitalism and the cultural dialectics of merchandise, the symbolic and material



88 | BEATRIZ SARLO

forms of merchandise circulation in social life. This is an obsession

from the very first texts he wrote on this subject, in the twenties, and summarized in the preparatory notes to the book as a critique of

modernity in terms of its dialectics of renewal and changelessness and of "fashion as the means to transfer the character of merchandise to the cosmos," the eternal return as a demon of historical conscience.5

The quote about Haussmann proposes a link (unbreakable to

Benjamin) between technical development and aesthetic form. He will obstinately pursue this theme. It is a dimension of the material

perspective of the Passagenwerk, but also of "The Work of Art in the

Age of Mechanical Reproduction," a key to Benjamin's way of think-

ing about the relations between art and society. How should we deal with other observations in the Passagenwerk

about the theories of knowledge and progress? Benjamin writes that

Marx sets forth the causal connection between economy and culture. An expressive connection is being described here. It is not an attempt to

explain the economic origin of culture, but rather the expression of the

economy in the culture. It is, in other words, an attempt to grasp an economic process as an ostensible protophenomenon from which derive all the vital manifestations of the passagen (and, to that extent, of the nineteenth century).6

How should we deal with this reference to totality, which is by no means an isolated instance in Benjamin's works?

We can choose to view it simply as an affliction of the times, a

vestige of theology or Hegelianizing Marxism, the same that also makes him register his wish to understand simultaneously the work of Breton and Le Corbusier as part of a whole that can no longer be rep- resented but lingers as a philosophical pulsion. There are many ways in which we could deal with this last quote and the previously men- tioned dialectic obstinacy other than turning an awkward blind eye on them, as one might do upon detecting a hick strain in a friend's otherwise agreeable manners.

In Benjamin's fragmentariness, in his aesthetic and epistemolog- ical restoration of the collage and the quote, there is not only a relieved or celebratory break with totality, but rather a crisis of total-

ity in which, at the same time, totality is maintained as the horizon of critical and historical operations. This is one of the main problems




with Benjamin, and it cannot be dismissed as if it appeared only exceptionally or by chance in his works. On the contrary, I would say that it crops up continuously, both in the philosophical language and in the imagery. I would say that in Benjamin there is a yearning for totality that coexists with the gradual erosion of totality in the aesthetic dimension and in the empirical world. Benjamin can be con- sidered a writer of the crisis, but not its apologist.

Whence, then, comes this view of Benjamin as a forerunner of

postmodernity and flaneur himself among the ruins of totality? The laboratories of international academia, developers of the latest indus- trial products in cultural studies, combine, with enviable simplicity, Foucault and Benjamin, Derrida and Deleuze, Raymond Williams and Bakhtin. Everything adds up. But adding is precisely the problem. The uses of Benjamin as theoretician of cultural studies and theoretician of a catechism for devotees of the modern city have been stretched to their limit.

On the one hand, Benjamin never had full philosophical confi- dence in the notions he advanced throughout his great project, the

Passagenwerk: neither the flineur nor the collector, mirrors, fashion, nor cityscapes are full categories. They should be taken rather as

findings in the shape of images, in the narrative or poetic construction of the historical. Working with these notions requires a process of infixation that is lacking in the Benjamin texts on Paris. On the one hand, these are firmly historical notions (though rooted in philoso- phy and theory). They cannot be carried as mannequins from a shop window in Paris to another in San Juan or Catamarca.

Benjamin's complexity (the Avant-Garde trait that makes him so elusive and difficult to categorize, the flow of sense and contradic- tion that makes up his texts) renders the simplifying canonization to which he is being subjected in academia an even more admirable

operation, especially in the readings made by what we today call cultural studies, which are becoming a chapter of literary criticism where Benjamin's texts are presented as a closure (a faulty closure) to the theoretical discussions about literature and the symbolic or material dimension of societies. Everyone speaks Benjamin. Every- one has learned the Esperanto of cultural studies. Texts that belong to the tradition of literary criticism are being placed in the protective bosom of the new academic religion. Texts that are well founded in



90 | BEATRIZ SARLO

the theoretical discussions about literature migrate, via Bakhtin or

Benjamin, to the overpopulated republic of cultural analysis. And in this republic, the city is, precisely, capital. The technical

reproduction of a Benjamin vulgate in an academic environment (a trend that began in the United States) places the city as a sort of ana-

lytical imperative, an indispensable unit. Do we know more about the city as a result of such endeavors attributable to the constrictions and distractions of the symbolic market? I would not dare say that we do. At any rate, the city is not studied in the. way Benjamin studied the Paris of the nineteenth century. It could be rightly objected that it need not be studied in that manner. But then, why Benjamin? Why the perennial return of a changeless Benjamin? Whence comes the automatic link between cultural studies and Benjamin? Upon what oblivion do we remember Benjamin? And if our amnesia is so vast

(I have indicated just part of it), why not simply forget Benjamin also without further ado?

Let us then examine what is produced by the fashion of the urban theme. It produces mainly a lexicon, with which we may appear equipped to think theory. I believe, on the contrary, that we move away from theory precisely to the extent by which some-

thing appears crystallized as an index card of a lexical stock. Those index cards are played upon any city where (as with the merchandise whose phantasmagoria Benjamin attempted to examine) the

unchanging keeps returning. There are always crowds moving from one place to another, always a history that is being lost and a mem-

ory that attempts (or does not attempt) to build itself; there are

always fragmented subjects who cannot recognize themselves or one another anywhere, and these subjects always manage to build mean-

ing into their use of space, always the use of space as a builder of

meaning, whether it be by rearranging the semantics of their practices or inventing new practices; there is always something adrift and

something with a definite direction, always something that becomes

private and something that moves into the public sphere with a new use. And in all these comings and goings of language over the city, Benjamin loses his sharp edges on combinations that sometimes seem absurd. Because, let us agree, with regard to the capacity of

subjects to rearrange the semantics of the scenes or of discourses, Benjamin is not the source.




There is no Benjamin orthodoxy that needs safeguarding. Obvi-

ously, Benjamin can be put to good use in other philosophical and

historical contexts, but not to any use. Theoretical patchwork is the

exact countermand to the old philological requirement of complete adherence to the text, and both approaches are unjust with the texts

they examine. The indifferent trivialization of Benjamin teaches us

little; it is hardly more than a glossary. While the philological ap-

proach clung to the texts as though they were prayers, the barbarian use of Benjamin does not acknowledge any authority to his texts other than the authority of names. These names are the recognizable brands, part of the select group of fashionable labels.

Theory, in its aloofness, is distracted from its own conflicts and, as in an inverted reflection, reminds us of the intolerant rejection with which it was once met by philological purism. If, in the past, academicism could be identified with philological adherence to an author or a text, a new academicism reveals its own banality by pledging allegiance to the academically correct subjects of the day: cultural studies, with their inevitable chapters on the construction of identities, discourse, politics, the city. Benjamin could be read to deal with some of these questions, but we should acknowledge that these questions, as defined by cultural studies (and, basically, the studies pursued within the halls of the international academia that

grows in Argentina), are not the ones that configure the core issues of his work.

To emphasize that theoretical conflicts are perhaps the most inter-

esting part of critical endeavors is to arrange things in a potentially fruitful manner, that is to say, far from the peaceful sum of authors whose names landmark the territories of an expanding discipline. The sum by itself (given as if we were dealing with the inertness of a

bibliographical list, Benjamin, de Certeau, Williams, Derrida, and

Foucault) produces a sort of monstrous animal, but not a new theoretical articulation.

Notes

This piece first appeared as "Olvidar a Benjamin" in Punto de Vista 53 (1995).

1. The first quote is from a letter to Scholem, dated August 1935. The sec-

ond quote is from W. Benjamin, "Appunti e materiali," in Parigi, capitale del XIX



92 BEATRIZ SARLO

secolo, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Turin: Einaudi, 1986), 593. "Reflections on surrealism are a half-open door to the Passagenwerk," writes Ricardo Ibarlucia, who has studied the intricate relation that Benjamin had with Surrealism ("Dialectica del des-

pertar: Walter Benjamin y la experiencia surrealista," thesis, Facultad de Filosofia

y Letras, UBA, 1995), mimeo, 134. 2. See the chapter "Spatial Origins," by Susan Buck-Morss, in The Dialec-

tics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (London and Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989).

3. Anahi Ballent, Adrian Gorelik, and Graciela Silvestri, "Las metr6polis de Benjamin," Punto de Vista 45 (April 1993).

4. W. Benjamin, "Appunti e materiali," 182. 5. Ibid., 70, 71. 6. Ibid., 595.



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Essay on the Misuse of Benjamin in Latin American Studies