Abstract
Theodor W Adorno described the methodology of Walter Benjamin’s critical theory as micrological and fragmentary. It concentrated on the smallest objects of reality in order to reconstruct the ideological and material functioning of bourgeois society from them. Without resorting to the notion of social totality, the micrological approach allowed Benjamin to relate the objects (for example, poems and stamps, literary quotes and advertisements) to the material circumstances and the social struggles into which they were inserted. Benjamin collected these objects as the tiny pieces of a mosaic that can never be fully completed. When he quoted a phrase from an Illustrated Guide to Paris that said ‘the passage is a city, a world in miniature’ in his exposé ‘Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century’, Benjamin was not only referring to the fact that an arcade contains manifold commodities that can be scrutinised by the dialectical philosopher, or to the fact that the world under capitalism is just one large market, but also to his own research methodology, to his idea of an Arcades project. For Benjamin the material of his object of study had to be presented in a form that resembled the commodities displayed in a Parisian arcade: a nearly infinite compilation of aphorisms, newspaper and literary quotes, obituaries, etc. – ‘Empathy with the commodity’ to break its spell.
Andreas Huyssen’s Miniature Metropolis partially follows Adorno’s remarks about Benjamin’s methodology and interprets not only some parts of Benjamin’s oeuvre in a similar manner (not the Arcades project, but One-Way Street and Berlin Childhood Around 1900), but also some of Adorno himself (Minima Moralia), as well as some very important other pieces by Baudelaire, Aragon, Rilke, Kafka, Benn, Kracauer, Musil, Irmgard Keun, and the photomontages of Hannah Höch. What is at stake in all of them – and here resides Huyssen’s main (and as we shall see, not fully accomplished) thesis – is nothing else than a critical theory of society.
At first sight, Miniature Metropolis seems to be a text about what certain philosophers, cultural critics and authors wrote about cities (mainly Paris and Berlin, but also Brussels and Los Angeles). Its aim, however, is rather to be a reflection upon the very specific form of modernist writing (both in literature and philosophy) that these authors produced in order to describe, come to terms with, and respond to the great transformations in perception and experience that took place at the end of the 19th and early 20th century society: ‘this book argues that the literary miniature, in its emphasis on visual perception and urban life, always implied a critical theory of bourgeois society’ (p. 3). What was at the basis of those great transformations? Huyssen maintains that it was the new forms of entertainment in cities, the acceleration of time, the new image media technologies (photography), and the new kinds of popular culture (cinema). This was a new urban imaginary that emerged as an ‘embodied material fact, a cognitive and somatic image of city life, rather than a figment of the imagination’ (p. 5). In his view, what was being deeply transformed was the entire manner individuals perceived and subjectivised themselves. Literature responded in different ways to these transformations, and one of these was by the creation of the miniature: not a genre in itself, but rather an acknowledgment that the temporal and spatial dimensions of individuals were being profoundly altered, allowing for a new form of viewing and reading the metropolis.
The miniature is a singular historical literary form related to urban developments that only emerges in retrospective, with the passing of time. Huyssen acknowledges that the ‘analogies to our time are striking’ (p. 22) and that we live in an age where literature will have to come to terms with the transformations in perception related to our contemporary digital interconnectedness and the delirious sprawl of the city. This is clearly one of the book’s most interesting (although underdeveloped) claims, one that will certainly guarantee its seminal character in the study of this particular form of writing. Huyssen makes very clear, however, that no present or postmodern appropriation of the miniature is possible; it came to an end with Adorno, when the metropolis stopped being an island of modernisation within a provincial and agricultural environment (p. 296).
The miniature usually appeared in metropolitan feuilletons, and shared the tropes of fragmentation, condensation, montage and estrangement with modernist writing. Its singular trait, however, was the fact that it understood the urban condition as the core of modern life. It did not have any plot, psychology or storytelling. If perception was being drastically transformed, then realistic descriptions and linear narratives were no longer possible. What took their place were dreams, hallucinations, memories, affects (terror, vertigo, for instance), unstable subject positions, and all kinds of psychic experiences that could not have happened anywhere else but in a metropolis. Very importantly, the miniature was never published with photographs or visual illustrations. In it literary experimentation taken to its limits came to terms with the new ways of seeing and experiencing the city. This is what Huyssen terms its very particular Eigensinn or obstinacy (a concept he borrows from Negt and Kluge, although taking it in his own particular direction): the fact that literature insisted on its specificity without trying to imitate or simply surrender to the new techniques. To this explanation he adds McLuhan’s concept of ‘remediation’ – when old media becomes the content of newer media technology – but introduces the idea that in the miniature this happens ‘in reverse’, that is, here an old media (literature) remediates photography and film, stubbornly reasserting its specificity. The miniature was dialectical in the sense that it did not reject these new forms of media, but instead took them as a challenge for literature. The result was powerful experimentations on the thresholds of language and imagery, high levels of abstraction, and very singular textures of ekphrasis and metaphor. Literature thus performed a stimulating sabotage on the new media. Following Adorno’s point about art, Huyssen contends that it was ‘both autonomous and fait social’ (p. 21).
Huyssen emphasises consistently the visual dimension of the miniature, the fact that it was a kind of writing contaminated with Bilder (Denkbild in Benjamin, Raumbild in Kracauer, Körperbild in Jünger, or Bewusstseinsbild in Benn). This is where his analysis departs from Adorno’s insight about Benjamin’s methodology (which could also arguably be applied to Adorno’s philosophy), and where his intuition about the miniature amounting to critical theory is revealed to be insufficient if we understand critical theory not just as media or literary critique, but as the early Frankfurt School intended. Huyssen implied this but does not fully assume in spite of his comment that the term could apply not only to the interwar Marxist theorists, but also to his whole list of authors (p. 3). Huyssen remarks that besides being visual, the miniature also accounted for the different organisation of sensual and embodied perception that the city represented. But even when he underscores that urban space is permeated by social relations, and that it leaves its marks on bodies and subjectivities, the argument goes back to claim that what is at stake in all this is the triumphalism of media and the visual in capitalist culture, the exploitation of the image. Little is said of these specific social relations (material circumstances and social struggles) that Adorno and Benjamin analysed and concentrated on when they were using their micrological lenses. Huyssen’s recourse to Giedion’s concept of Durchdringung makes the narrowness of his analysis fairly clear. For Huyssen, Durchdringung means the interpenetration of the visual and the verbal in the miniature, once again taking the argument in the direction of how perception and human knowledge were profoundly altered by the new media, and literature faced this as a call for innovation. In Benjamin and Adorno, by contrast, the critical theory of society and the micrological approach only in their implication concerned media forms, being first and foremost a way to come to terms with the fetishistic character of all social relations under capitalism. Here they followed Marx when he wrote in the first chapter of Volume 1 of Capital that in a society entirely ruled by the commodity-form, two things happen: the exchange value of commodities completely hides their use value, and social relations acquire a fantastic form as they only appear as a relation between things. Thus, micrology could not be solely a matter of perception or cognition, nor could it be a confrontation to the challenges posed to human knowledge by the new media. It was, instead, the realisation that social and bodily relations had themselves become phantasmagorical, that they had an imaginary character through and through, that reality as such had a dream-like character. It was also an analysis of small fragments of reality, as if they were being observed under a magnifying glass in order to denaturalise them, as well as a philosophical method that imitated such fragmentary nature in order to crack open the phantasmagorical shells of universal commodification.
Miniature Metropolis does not really explore these specific traits of the micrological and fragmentary approach in critical theory, instead it employs the idea that social relations and subjectivities were profoundly altered at the turn of the 20th century by changes in the metropolis and the visual media as an angle of investigation. Even in spite of this, it is certainly a very important book in as it is the first to offer a sustained treatment of a major literary innovation within modernism.