Walter Benjamin’s communism

Abstract

What does ‘communism’ mean in Walter Benjamin’s writing? It has been used in some quarters to claim that Benjamin has a quasi-Marxist theory of communist society. This paper will argue instead that Benjamin’s communism is framed by his distinctive conception of experience and that it is understandable only through that conception. Benjamin’s image of ‘communist society’ refers to a specific type of experience (‘collective experience’) rather than a type of social organization. The paper discusses the conceptual background of that image and also points out a number of the difficulties that Benjamin’s conception of collective experience faces given its genesis in a model of individual experience.

Keywords

Walter Benjamin collective experience communism experimentation revolution

Benjamin never wrote in any detail or length on ‘communism’ or ‘communist society’. Only in a few places in his writing do we even come across these terms. The substance of what we know about his understanding of these notions mostly comes from reported conversations. These are where he explicitly uses ‘communism’ or ‘communist society’ and negatively or positively characterizes them, i.e. says what he takes one or the other to be or not to be. But on their own these characterizations do not allow us to surmise what exactly he understands by them. We will see that his lack of interest in these notions (as they were understood in his time) is completely consistent with his thinking. He in fact has nothing to say about the ‘communist society’ if this is taken to mean a particular socio-economic organization. Exploring the question of what ‘communism’ means for Benjamin quickly brings us to the distinctive métier of his thinking. This is indeed its real interest. In this essay, I briefly discuss the passages where ‘communism’ comes up in his correspondence or in reported conversations. Then, I analyse some of the important concepts from his writing that make it possible for us to answer the question: what is Benjamin’s communism? Drawing on a wide range of sources from across his corpus, I argue that Benjamin’s communism is organized by his particular conception of experience and that it is legible uniquely through that conception.

In a letter to his friend Gershom Scholem in December 1924, Benjamin mentions that his idea of communism requires a form of absolute commitment and, more importantly, that it entails ‘experimenting and taking extreme measures’ (Benjamin, 1994b: 257). Another letter to Scholem, penned nearly a decade later in May 1934, contains a reference to the idea that clarifies to some extent what Benjamin has in mind. The letter is part of the exchange between the friends on the topic of Benjamin’s ‘Marxism’. In response to Scholem’s impatient criticisms Benjamin writes:

[A] credo is the last thing my communism resorts to;…even at the cost of its orthodoxy – my communism is absolutely nothing other than the expression of certain experiences I have undergone in my thinking and in my life;…it is a drastic, not infertile expression of the fact that the present intellectual industry finds it impossible to make room for my thinking, just as the present economic order finds it impossible to accommodate my life.…[M]y communism represents the obvious, reasoned attempt on the part of a man who is completely or almost completely deprived of any means of production to proclaim his right to them, both in his thinking and in his life. (Benjamin, 1994c: 439)

Benjamin’s comparison of his situation with that of the industrial worker’s (‘deprived of any means of production’) is apparently meant and offered as his reason to embrace communism, a reason that seems acceptably Marxist. He even transposes the Marxian notion of alienation to his own condition (‘the present intellectual industry finds it impossible to make room for my thinking’), using legitimate and legitimizing Marxist language. But then why does he excuse himself for not being orthodox? What exactly does he have in mind when he describes his communism as ‘nothing other than the expression of certain experiences in my thinking and in my life’? What is the term ‘expression’ supposed to mean? The point of entry (‘experience’) makes all the difference between his communism and what he casts as the orthodox one. In fact, as we will see, the ‘experiences’ undergone by him in his life and in his thinking have little in common with those of the industrial worker, and then only on the most general and hence abstract level, that is, insofar as the radical alienation of one and the other from their respective milieu leads to the most radical opposition, which he calls ‘communism’. This position encourages ‘experimenting and taking extreme measures’.

We find references to ‘classless society’ in Benjamin’s notes for his theses in ‘On the Concept of History’. The image of the classless society expressed in these notes is quite different from usual Marxist conceptions, although Marx is praised for secularizing in it the idea of messianic time (Benjamin, 2003f: 401). Thus, the classless society is described by Benjamin not as ‘the final goal of historical progress’ but as ‘its frequently miscarried, ultimately [endlich] achieved interruption’ (Benjamin, 2003f: 402). The former notion is Marxist – what precisely the classless society is not for Benjamin. He also describes the classless society inaugurated by the messianic interruption of ‘progress’ as ‘the situation of a “redeemed humanity”‘. What would this be like? Benjamin recuses himself: to ask what this ‘situation might actually be’ or how and when it may arise is to pose ‘questions to which there are no answers’ (Benjamin, 2003f: 402). It is clear, however, that for him the absence of such answers does not turn this situation into an ‘infinite task’ of merely theoretical prescriptions (Benjamin, 2003f: 401). In any case, the ‘answers’ ought to emerge from the experience of the most radical form of social experimentation, otherwise they would not be answers. Benjamin’s comments in the Paralipomena about the classless society may be connected with his remarks in the essay on Surrealism where he states that ‘we penetrate the mystery only to the degree that we recognize it in the everyday world’. This is his conception of ‘profane illumination’. The mystic’s ‘illumination’ is of course his experience of oneness with a sacralized universe. Note that the illumination, whether mystic or profane, is necessarily a personal experience. Benjamin uses the notion of ‘profane illumination’ in the essay on Surrealism to define communism as a renewed experience of the everyday, a realized ‘image-space’ (see below) (Benjamin, 1999j: 216–17).¹ What his idea of communism necessarily lacks in programmatic features it compensates for by drawing on the radical and marginal (‘extreme’) experiences of life in bourgeois society.² Benjamin’s entire theoretical effort is taken up by the justification that these experiences not only make communism imperative but also determine its conceptual content.

To be sure, particular biographical details as well as statements from his celebrated essays might be invoked to generate a more orthodox picture of his approach to communism. Among these is Benjamin’s visit to Moscow, apparently prompted by Asja Lacis, between 6 December 1926 and 1 February 1927. It is difficult to gauge how significant this short trip to Moscow was for shaping Benjamin’s communism. Scholem characterizes Benjamin’s correspondence from this period as ‘sparse’ and ‘reserved’. In contrast, Benjamin’s Moscow Diary, which Scholem rates as ‘unique in kind’ in Benjamin’s corpus, is ‘absolutely and mercilessly frank’, and ‘free of self-censorship’.³ The material covered in the diary from the two-month stay in Moscow covers his relations with Lacis, meetings with her acquaintances and cultural officials, alongside ‘detailed descriptions of the city’s physiognomy and Soviet life’ (Scholem, 2003: 155). Above all, the diary, which rehearses Benjamin’s deliberations on whether or not to join the Communist Party, is presented by Scholem as a faithful reflection of Benjamin’s ‘mood not to join the Communist party’ (Scholem, 2003: 155).⁴ This characterization is of a piece with passing references in other biographical accounts about the talks he gave and the views he expressed.⁵ Benjamin’s stated communist sympathies do not have anything to do with recognizable Marxist doctrines, and, apart from his intellectual interest in the physiognomy of cities, for which the Moscow trip provides another occasion, his activities and statements at the time do not add up to more than a sketchy harlequin figure, which mutually antagonistic figures from his intimate circle risk over-interpreting in one direction or another.⁶

The scattered references to communism in his writing that prima facie might seem compatible with a credo, and thus contradict the picture presented thus far, do not in fact change it in any substantial way. In the final section of his famous essay on the work of art, Benjamin pits communism against fascism and declares that to the fascist ‘aestheticization of politics, communism responds by politicizing art’ (Benjamin, 2003g: 270). It has been noted that the argument of the final part of the essay is forced and artificial, and that it fails to clarify what communist art politics could mean.⁷ Perhaps this position was what Benjamin thought was expected of an essay in Marxist aesthetics, or perhaps we have to understand ‘politicization’ in an unusual way (see below). Whether or not the circumstance of the essay’s publication should be considered a relevant factor, it is clear that this circumstance makes it difficult to seek in this essay an authentic representation of Benjamin’s ideas without any further argument to support the claim.⁸ There is evidence of editorial interventions from the Institute for Social Research, which insisted on changes as the condition for the essay’s publication despite Benjamin’s reluctance and indeed defiance (see Jennings and Eiland, 2012: 520–21).⁹

Brecht’s role in the development of the essay’s architecture and position is also documented, as is Benjamin’s favourable account of his exchanges with Brecht about the essay.¹⁰ If the context of this essay’s development and publication makes interpretation of its controversial passages complicated, it is at least clear that Benjamin came to discover that the effort to win the ‘progressive’ audience of film to the side of the communist ‘politicisation of art’ was unfruitful, since he did not pursue the idea in subsequent work.¹¹ Another place where Benjamin mentions communism is his ‘Commentary on Poems by Brecht’. In his discussion of the poem ‘Der Kommunismus ist das Mittlere’, Benjamin agrees with Brecht’s statement that communism is ‘the most obvious thing, the middle way, the most sensible’. Similarly, the two agree, as Wizisla puts it, that ‘the revolution’ is the ‘obvious, necessary path’ for overcoming oppression (Benjamin, 2003a: 216; Wizisla, 2009: 174–5). But we can hardly expect to gain clarity about ‘revolution’ or ‘communism’ from such consensus, other than that in their view ‘communism’ and ‘revolution’ are ‘obviously necessary’, whatever this may mean. Once again, we have an expression of a sympathetic attitude, but no developed theoretical position for determining what Benjamin means by ‘communism’.

Putting aside for the moment these biographical or occasional observations, the approach of an influential commentator to the topic is worth our brief review. Michael Löwy has drawn attention to some of Benjamin’s lesser-known works, which he believes can be used to give content to his elusive idea of communism. He places considerable weight on the reference to communist society in Benjamin’s essay on the 19th-century Swiss antiquarian Johann Jakob Bachofen for Benjamin’s own view of communism. In the 1935 essay Benjamin treats the question of Bachofen’s influence critically and dispassionately. He notes that the widespread influence of Bachofen’s idea of a matriarchal epoch stems from a work that, just like Darwin’s Origin of Species or Marx’s Das Kapital, few have in fact read. The thesis of Bachofen’s Das Mutterrecht [Mother Right] of a prehistoric matriarchal epoch became popular in the academy and literary circles despite the work’s scholarly style, which made it inaccessible, Benjamin writes, even for ‘the lettered public’ (Benjamin, 2002a: 17). Its sizable volume further restricted its readership. As a consequence, ‘[Bachofen’s] main ideas were disseminated outside the text, and this was facilitated by the picture, at once romantic and precise, that he drew of the matriarchal age’ (Benjamin, 2002a: 17). Benjamin maintains that Bachofen’s work attracts Marxist and anarchist thinkers (like Elisée Reclus) because Bachofen’s ‘picture’ of a matriarchal epoch ‘evokes a Communistic society at the dawn of history’ (Benjamin, 2002a: 12). Obviously, this suggestion of a reason for the attraction of the thesis among Marxists and anarchists is hardly a proof of Benjamin’s endorsement of the idea. Nonetheless, Löwy goes so far as to ascribe to Benjamin a project for a ‘future classless society’ that is based on Bachofen’s picture of a matriarchal age (Löwy, 1988: 118).¹² The view that Benjamin entertained such a ‘project’ misconstrues not only the purpose of Benjamin’s essay on Bachofen but also the theoretical frame of his notion of classless society (see below). In the Bachofen essay, in other words, Benjamin does not seek to give a genealogy of his conception of communism; he is simply writing a solicited overview of the life and ideas of the Swiss scholar.¹³ If it is true that Bachofen has an idea of ‘a Communistic society at the dawn of history’, there is no reason to assume that Benjamin’s image of communism was influenced in any way by this idea, or even that he subscribed to such a characterization of the ‘prehistoric’ human community.

Another fundamental problem with Löwy’s position is that the semantics of the term ‘society’ in Benjamin’s work is left unexamined and thus his advocacy of ‘classless society’ risks being turned into a programmatic statement – when it is in fact an enduring conceptual problem. We know that Benjamin keenly notes and tries to analyse the modern disintegration of traditional contexts of experience in its various aspects, and to locate new sites and possibilities for collective experience under bourgeois social conditions. Scholem’s observation about Benjamin’s ‘desire for community’ (see note 3) is quite reasonable given the preoccupations of his writing. Thus, the question whether Benjamin has a conception of ‘communist society’ after all must be considered in relation to his approach to the topic of experience on the one hand and his understanding of (contemporary) historical impediments to the conceptualization of collective experience on the other. In this perspective, it is Benjamin’s remarks about extreme experiences and experimentation in his correspondence with Scholem that prove to be relevant for understanding Benjamin’s communism, rather than Bachofen’s thesis about the (supposed) prehistoric communist society.

I will argue here that Benjamin does not have a socio-economic theory of communist society, still less a program for a future communist society. Rather, he develops a concept of emphatic and fulfilling experience partly from literary and theoretical works and partly from his own theorizations of modern society, and he uses this concept of experience to formulate an idiosyncratic theory of history. It is within this framework that his understanding of communism, no less than revolution, must be placed. If I may be allowed an initial schematization, the conceptual hinge of this theoretical apparatus is ‘collective experience’. It is this concept, in other words, that mediates between the notion of emphatic, fulfilling experience and the theory of history in Benjamin’s thought. Biographical and bibliographical data such as those just reviewed cannot determine our approach to the topic but must be considered and assessed in the frame I just sketched.

Fulfilling experience and existential security in Benjamin

…there must be something human in things which is not put there by labor. (Walter Benjamin, ‘Letter to Theodor W. Adorno on Baudelaire, George, and Hofmannsthal’, 7 May 1940)

A consistent theme across Benjamin’s heterogeneous corpus is his theoretical effort to come to terms with what he considers the impoverished state of experience in bourgeois society. His diagnosis and critique of this state is paired with a theorization of experiences of fulfilment. The various spheres where Benjamin seeks elements of this theory of experience include the child at play,¹⁴ ‘proletarian theatre’, ‘auratic perception’, but also literary works such as Proust’s ‘involuntary memory’ or Baudelaire’s ‘shock experience’, and theological images such as the biblical story of Adam’s naming the phenomena of nature.

The category of experience also plays an important role in Marx’s critical theory of bourgeois society. The concept of ‘species essence’ [Gattungswesen] in his 1844 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts is intended to provide a critical reference for a comprehensive (or radical) assessment of human alienation in modern society. Marx’s critical approach to alienation via the notion of species essence is based in a fundamental anthropological thesis. According to this thesis alienation is the condition in which human beings are unable to develop their natural faculties to their full potential. The postulated species essence thus legitimizes the project of changing the material conditions of life that are thought to impede the full development of human faculties. The ‘anthropological’ character of this theory of social alienation is important to Marx not only because it is a critical tool of historical diagnosis but, more importantly, because it makes history the stage of a meaningful, universal story. Fulfilment of the individual human being coincides with that of history. It is this aspect of Marx’s theory that attracted Benjamin: the possibility of ‘tremendously abbreviating’ history into a moment of meaning. But in contrast to Marx’s anthropological theorization Benjamin uses the language of fate and guilt to analyse the experience of alienation, that is to say, he uses a theological frame (see below).¹⁵

To the extent that for Benjamin theology is fundamentally at odds with naturalistic anthropology, the two approaches are irreconcilable. We can also see that Marx’s anthropological concept of species essence obviates the problem that dogs Benjamin’s theorization of collective experience. Marx in effect presupposes the very category of the collective that Benjamin must build up, starting from the concept of individualistic experience (Erlebnis).¹⁶ The difference is further reflected in their respective conceptions of revolution. Benjamin’s emphasis on ‘wish fulfilment’ as the basis of meaningful political engagement marginalizes the dialectic of oppression and emancipation. Exploitation and alienation as socio-economic conditions do not on their own lead to ‘class consciousness’ and emancipatory revolutionary action, they only breed further brutality. Oppression only undermines the capacity for rejuvenating experience and thereby blocks the path to meaningful (i.e. fulfilling) historical engagement.¹⁷ Habermas has argued that Benjamin ‘is one of the first’ in the ‘Marxist tradition’ to add the further dimensions of ‘failure’ to ‘hunger and oppression’ and of ‘happiness’ to ‘prosperity and liberty’ (Habermas, 1991: 121). In my view, these categories (‘failure’ and ‘happiness’) in Benjamin’s writing are Marxist only in appearance.

Benjamin associates happiness or bliss with wish fulfilment. In other words, and in contrast to the import of the dialectic of oppression and liberty outlined by Habermas as a feature of the ‘Marxist tradition’, happiness is for Benjamin experienced in the mode of remembrance. In his 1929 essay ‘The Image of Proust’, Benjamin argues that the French novelist’s ‘obsessive quest for happiness’ is not hymnic, but elegiac (Benjamin, 1999f: 239). Proust does not seek an unprecedented, unsurpassed experience; his gaze is rather turned back to his past where he searches for experiences of happiness. Happiness is the remembrance of a childhood wish in the moment of its fulfilment, the experience of this moment in the light of that wish. But the medium of such an access to fulfilment is the mémoire involontaire. At times Benjamin seems to equate collective experience (Erfahrung) with this medium, which in a sense annuls external temporality by way of the absorption of the self in the moment that is simultaneously past and present, or, in Benjamin’s later terminology, is the ‘dialectic at standstill’: the realized dialectic of past and present. What is important for Benjamin in Proust’s notion of mémoire involontaire is the possibility of conceptualizing the community of the past and present selves at the level of experience. Benjamin will try to transpose this temporal community to history where generations will play the role of Proustian selves. In his major 1939 essay ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, Benjamin connects Proustian mémoire involontaire and experience (Erfahrung) with ‘auratic’ perception as the organ of fulfilling experience. Like Proust’s notion, auratic perception internally lines, as it were, the present moment with a past experience. The essay is significant for its analysis of Baudelaire’s identification of the modern disintegration of auratic perception into ‘immediate shock experience [Chockerlebnis]’ (Benjamin, 2003d: 343). A genuine (i.e. historically enlightened) theory of community has to be able to account for the possibility of collective experience in bourgeois society on the basis of the most extreme forms of individualistic experience (Erlebnis). Benjamin tries to articulate this approach as a methodological principle in his ‘Epistemo-Critical Preface’ to the Origin of the German Trauerspiel (see below).

The experience that natural or inanimate ‘objects’ invested with aura ‘look back’ and return the human gaze is analogous with the child’s experience of the objects they play at being, which they invest with their expressive power. An example is when the child plays at ‘being’ a windmill or a train (Benjamin, 1999h: 720). The experience we have of being addressed by inanimate things is not merely imaginative, it is also part of the structure of perception. The experience that things return our gaze is what saves the earth from reversion ‘to a mere state of nature’. ‘Experience of the aura’, Benjamin writes, ‘arises from the fact that a response characteristic of human relationships is transposed to the relationship between humans and inanimate or natural objects. The person we look at, or who feels he is being looked at, looks at us in turn. To experience the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look back at us’ (Benjamin, 2003d: 338). This aura is experienced in ‘the tree and the shrub’, and so, as he writes to Adorno, ‘there must be something human in things which is not put there by labor’ (Benjamin, 2003c: 413). Auratic perception opens the world to expression or invests it with (human) communicative power. A similar point is made in Benjamin’s treatment of the linguistic essence of things in his theological essay on language (Benjamin, 1996d: 67). Thus, Benjamin ties the disintegration of the aura in the case of emerging technologies of artistic reproduction to the ‘crisis in perception itself’ (Benjamin, 2003d: 338). And, he emphasizes the relevance of auratic perception for changes in the mode of experience, and not merely for the changes in artistic media tied to reproductive technologies. Community with things becomes for Benjamin the hallmark of a genuine collective experience, whose theological basis he had set out in his early essay on language:

If we think of the associations which, at home in the mémoire involontaire, seek to cluster around an object of perception, and if we call those associations the aura of that object, then the aura attaching to the object of a perception corresponds precisely to the experience [Erfahrung] which, in the case of an object of use, inscribes itself as long practice. (Benjamin, 2003d: 337)

Benjamin maintains that Proust understood the problem of the aura but that he formulated it ‘evasively’. Proust acknowledges the ‘delicate veil’ ‘woven about monuments and pictures as a reflection of the apparent ability of these objects to return the gaze’, but immediately reduces it to the individual’s world of emotions as ‘the only reality that is valid for the individual’. As a result, Proust misrecognizes the ‘ritual character’ of the ‘auratic perception’ (Benjamin, 2003d: 338, 339). The experience of insurmountable distance invests the object of auratic perception with its communicative power. ‘Long practice’ establishes micro-traditions in which ‘objects of use’ are associated with significant memories in the same way as mémoire involontaire becomes associated with certain objects of perception. Temporality does not preclude intimacy. In fact, intimacy is implied in the idea of accumulation of memories around an object. These memories belong to a singular life; the object shares in that life through the involuntarily invested memories which endow it with a human face and hence expressive power. This power, however, remains inarticulate, i.e. non-verbal, and essentially related to the lived moments (of an individual), even if these have become a ‘delicate veil’ that envelops the object.

The photographic camera and ‘subsequent analogous types of apparatus’ introduce techniques that extend the field of voluntary recollection (Benjamin, 2003d: 337). These techniques of reproduction degrade auratic perception and encourage ‘voluntary, discursive memory’. Benjamin cites Paul Valéry, who claims that what a work of art intends to fulfil are, by contrast, ‘desires that have “something beautiful” as their intended fulfilment’ (Benjamin, 2003d: 337). Such fulfilment relates specifically to ‘the imagination’s scope for play [Spielraum]’, which gives ‘expression to desires of [this] special kind’ (Benjamin, 2003d: 337). Valéry mentions the experience of inhaling a ‘sweet-smelling flower’. He writes: ‘we cannot rid ourselves of the fragrance that has aroused our senses, and no recollection, no thought, no mode of behaviour can obliterate its effect or release us from the hold it has on us. Anyone who undertakes to create a work of art aims at the same effect.’ Benjamin comments: ‘According to this view, the painting we look at reflects back at us that of which our eyes will never have their fill’ (Benjamin, 2003d: 337). The desire is fulfilled in its renewal; it is fulfilled and sustained in the same moment. Similarly, the mode of its recollection is not voluntary; the imprint it makes on experience endures because of its origins in auratic perception, which is not, in the essay on Baudelaire, related to the ‘child’ and the theme of wish fulfilment. Rather, it is supposed to evoke a ‘primeval world’. It is the collective past that is recalled in the beautiful work of art, but personally, as ‘one’s own’. ‘Insofar as art aims at the beautiful and, on however modest a scale, “reproduces” it, it retrieves it…out of the depths of time’ (Benjamin, 2003d: 338). This relation to the past evoked in our ‘delight in the beautiful’ involves the expectation, ‘inherent in the gaze’, that ‘it will be returned by that on which it is bestowed’ (Benjamin, 2003d: 338). Here we have Benjamin’s formulation of the temporal dimension of ‘auratic perception’.

In the ‘child’ and ‘auratic perception’, the temporal character of collective experience comes to the fore, not as an external dimension but as contained in that experience. In the fulfilment of the child’s wish, a past moment becomes the object of genuine experience. Similarly, in his Baudelaire essay Benjamin states that what makes the experience of festival days great is the ‘encounter with an earlier life’ (Benjamin, 2003d: 334). Crucially, ‘it is not a past coming from his [i.e. the flâneur’s] own youth, from a recent youth, but a childhood lived before then that speaks to him, and it is all the same to him whether it is the childhood of an ancestor or his own’ (Benjamin, 1999a: 880). The past nonetheless ‘speaks to him’, just as the collective past recalled in the beautiful is recalled as ‘one’s own’. Whether it is the childhood wish or the auratic perception of the past, ‘experience’ is intimately tied with the presence of the past in the individual’s material environment. We discover a chain that links certain spheres of experience to the collective memory via a dialectic of material environment and history. For Benjamin, collective experience is necessarily a modulation of the collective memory that is lived by the individual. It is within this distinctive conceptual constellation that we must approach his notion of communism.

Bourgeois life as an experiential world: ‘Goethe’s Elective Affinities’

…complete security of existence.”(Walter Benjamin, ‘Goethe’s Elective Affinities’)

Benjamin contrasts the collective valence of fulfilling experience as a mnemonic relation to the past with the individualizing ‘bourgeois’ life. He uses the examples of the childhood wish and auratic perception to present a relation with the past moment and, more generally, a mode of experience that is not subject to bourgeois atomization. It is clear that his critical use of these examples does not primarily aim at the structure of bourgeois society as such, but at the impact of this structure on the possibilities of experience. His 1924/5 essay ‘Goethe’s Elective Affinities’ is very important in this connection. The basic theoretical scheme of this essay parallels that of his 1916 essay on language; and, more importantly for our topic, it constitutes the theoretical armature of his treatment of the themes of urban life in the Arcades Project. He collected the material for this work from 1927 until his death in 1940. In the essay on Goethe’s novel, Benjamin opposes the petrification of the ‘merely natural life’, that is, human life cut off from God, with the theology of moral transcendence and faith in God (Benjamin, 1996b: 307–8). He ranges on the former’s side the fateful ritualization of life and the anxiety that accompanies it, and on the latter’s moral clarity and freedom. In his view, bourgeois existence is life under the power of fate. Let us look at this important essay in more detail.¹⁸

The opposition between freedom and fate frames Benjamin’s strategic reading of Goethe’s novel (‘Elective Affinities’) against the ‘truth’ of the novella (‘The Curious Tale of the Childhood Sweethearts’) it contains. The novella reveals the truth of the novel, according to Benjamin. The scenes of bourgeois choice in the novel are ‘refracted’ through the ‘light’ of the actions of the protagonists of the novella who act in defiance of fate. The empty bourgeois rituals that take root with the waning tide of tradition are shown to engender frailty of purpose and inaction. These rituals are anchored in arbitrary practices of aestheticism. Bourgeois society undermines the collective basis of tradition by the empty reign of individual ‘choice’. Bourgeois ‘experience’ is not ownable; it does not make life richer but more deprived and alienated. Benjamin associates passivity in the face of prevailing circumstances, and fateful captivation by mere appearances (‘semblance’), with the bourgeois ‘free choice’. In Goethe’s novel, the ‘free choice’ exercised in the replacement of the gravestones of the ancestors in the church grounds for a pleasing clover path is Benjamin’s key example (Benjamin, 1996b: 302). The destruction of the ancestors’ resting place fosters debilitating states of anxiety and fear. An aestheticized life does not amount to liberation from tradition; instead, it is a life of disorientation in which sensuous forms (‘natural symbols’) are forced to provide a meaningful context for human life. Since these putatively authoritative references are mute, humans vainly try to interpret the meaning these forms are supposed to convey and, as a consequence, they feel themselves to be in constant danger of transgression of rules whose basis they cannot fathom. ‘Moral decision’, in contrast, is based in the transcendent revelation vouched to human beings in language. Benjamin develops this thesis in some detail in his 1916 essay on language (Benjamin, 1996d: 67).¹⁹ I cannot discuss the details of this difficult essay here. The point to retain from it is the following idea: the clarity of articulate meaning that language makes possible for human beings has ontological, or rather theological roots. Thus the two ways of existence that the essay on Goethe’s novel opposes to one another also have a linguistic dimension: on the one hand, the ambiguity of natural symbols, and on the other the clarity of words that stand on ‘the ground of logos’. Morality would be nothing if it were not possible for human beings to ‘give an account of themselves’ (Benjamin, 1996b: 326–7). Benjamin contrasts the (discursive) lucidity of the ethical life with the opacity of the reticent person’s motives (Benjamin, 1996b: 304; 2009: 104–6). The arbitrary basis for the choice of names in Goethe’s novel, picked for their pleasing sound, reinforces the contrast between moral clarity, which has a transcendent basis, and the capricious, merely aesthetic choice.²⁰

The bourgeois life of the protagonists of Goethe’s novel is captured by (mythic) fate which induces feelings of guilt and anxiety. In contrast, the life-risking decision of the novella lovers, who dive into a dangerous current, raises them above the ‘merely natural life’ and thus saves them from mythic fate (Benjamin, 1996b: 343). ‘Only the decision, not the choice, is inscribed in the book of life. For choice is natural and can even belong to the elements; decision is transcendent’ (Benjamin, 1996b: 346). Through their resolute action these lovers attain, Benjamin says, ‘complete security of existence’ (Benjamin, 1996b: 332).²¹ This sense of security is defined specifically as ‘the feeling…that they no longer have a fate and that they stand at the place where the others are meant to arrive some day’ (Benjamin, 1996b: 332). He describes their love as a ‘true reconciliation’ because the decision they take is based in faith in God, i.e. in something beyond mere life. When the lovers decide to jump, Benjamin writes, they make this decision each ‘alone with God’ [‘ein jeder ganz für sich allein vor Gott’] (Benjamin, 1996b: 343).

This path to free and secure existence (‘true reconciliation’), which includes the dead, is contrasted with the unstable communion of the characters of the novel, whose basis is the passion and affection stimulated by semblance-like beauty, i.e. the ‘aesthetic life’. What Benjamin calls ‘true reconciliation’ in this essay is only possible through faith in God and consists in living in community with others (including the dead) and things. Thus, with the disintegration of tradition, Benjamin tries to formulate in this essay another basis for the possibility of community, a basis which is in a sense even more radically ‘individualistic’ than bourgeois individualism. The importance of this basis (absolute faith, absolute commitment) of genuine community for understanding Benjamin’s communism cannot be overestimated. It is just one of the ways that theology underlies his theory of history and, more specifically, his conception of communist commitment. He explicitly contrasts ‘the individual [who] wants others to make their peace with one another and only in this way become reconciled with God’ with the path of ‘true reconciliation’ in which ‘the individual reconciles himself with God and only in this way conciliates other human beings’ (Benjamin, 1996b: 342). In short, the possibility of genuine community in the essay is based on faith in God, and such faith is explicitly contrasted with those ‘insubstantial’ struggles of the novel’s characters that do not ‘thereby destroy everything…in order only then, before God’s reconciled countenance, to find it resurrected’ (Benjamin, 1996b: 342).

In the 1929 essay on Surrealism the use of glass, a transparent material, in modern architecture is favourably noted. In particular, he affirms the startling idea in surrealist writings that the basic virtue of glass architecture is its demolition of bourgeois privacy. This theme is further developed in his Arcades Project. Here Benjamin understands the rise of the bourgeois interior in the 19th century as a compensation for the increasing alienation of social relations and roles: ‘The private individual, who in the office has to deal with reality, needs the domestic interior to sustain him in his illusions.…From this arise the phantasmagorias of the interior – which, for the private man, represents the universe’ (Benjamin, 1999a: 8–9). In the 1939 exposé, ‘Paris: The Capital of the Nineteenth Century’, Benjamin foregrounds the innovation and historical significance of the Paris arcades’ steel and glass construction. Transparency in urban design promises emancipation from the isolating conventions and values of bourgeois life. The critical function Benjamin sees in glass architecture is its potential to dismantle the bourgeois interior, to relieve the resident from its burden of habits and possessions.²² Glass architecture realizes in concreto (i.e. in an urban environment) the promise of an ‘emancipated life’. Here, again, we have the dialectic of space and time. The point is explicitly made in the 1933 essay ‘Experience and Poverty’: ‘Erase the traces!’ is the revolutionary cry against the interior that ‘forces the inhabitant to adopt the greatest possible number of habits – habits that do more justice to the interior he is living in than to himself’ (Benjamin, 1999d: 734). The transparency of glass and the manner of its use in the architecture of the Paris arcades is seemingly just one of the case studies of urban practices that Benjamin uses to approach the desired intervention in bourgeois convention and isolation.

In a co-authored essay on Naples, Benjamin and Asja Lacis praise the port city and liken the interpenetration between the domestic interior and the street to the African kraal (Benjamin and Lacis, 1996: 417). The feeling of collective belonging Naples street life engenders is also akin, they write, to the festival, which is now mingled with ‘ordinary’ days (Benjamin and Lacis, 1996: 417). Existential security is understood as a type of belonging, which in urban practice and design involves a participatory context and ethos. The theme is treated in the context of auratic experience as the dialectical presence of the collective past in the living moment. The moment contains what is past in the form of meaningful experience; or better: the actual community with the past is the context of fulfilling experience. The feeling of profane illumination that characterizes such a feeling of belonging is captured by the invocation of the ‘festival’. Benjamin describes festivals as states of ‘universal and integrated actuality’ (Benjamin, 1999j: 217). And the same description is also used to characterize ‘classless society’ in his last works (Benjamin, 2003f: 405), as well as for the child’s ‘perception of similitudes’ in play.²³ Auratic perception and perception of similitudes are experiences that ‘fill and articulate time’ and bring with them fulfilment (Benjamin, 2003d: 331). Benjamin defines the perception of similitudes as nonsensuous.²⁴ He uses the word ‘nonsensuous’ in order to emphasize that the ‘similarity’ at issue is not a resemblance apprehended by the senses; rather, the ‘perception of similitudes’ consists in the aptitude (a ‘gift’, Benjamin says) for ‘recognizing’ and ‘producing’ similarities across ordinarily disparate spheres of experience. These nonsensuous correspondences can be seen in the child’s imitative play, which is not limited to what ‘one person can imitate in another…[for] the child plays at being not only a shopkeeper or teacher but also a windmill and a train’ (Benjamin, 1999c: 694). The key point for our purposes is that these are participatory and enhancive forms of experience, that is, they do not isolate but unfold in the context of the community with others and things. Similarly, the Paris arcades of the 19th century are the material environment where, according to Benjamin, the historical wish of humanity for emancipation and the concomitant experience of community across generations fleetingly become perceptible.

The object of Benjamin’s attention and analysis is experience and its various modulations in different contexts. We must not lose sight of the fact that for Benjamin only an individual can ‘experience’ anything. This may be taken as a truism or as a fact of modern life in particular. In either case, it is for Benjamin the inevitable starting point of any theorization of a mode of social life that aims to go beyond the isolating tendencies of bourgeois society. The diametrical opposition that he sets up between ritualized guilt-ridden life in the grip of fate and the secure existence in community with others and things is of course at the level of experience. Benjamin searches for those spheres of experience which give hope that the move to the latter pole is possible. The paradigmatic (= ‘extreme’) experiences of modern urban life to which he turns in his final Arcades Project are examined in the light of that search. He brings to it the entire fund of concepts he has developed in his earlier writing, such as auratic perception, the opposition between theology and myth (and all the notions in which this opposition is articulated),²⁵ the figure of the child and the perception of similitudes, and so on.²⁶ How to articulate a concept of ‘collective experience’ on the basis of the mentioned premise? This is Benjamin’s question. And his image of communism is formed from this experience.

Communist society, urban experience and human history

In an essay from 1936, the political thinker and theologian Fritz Lieb reports on a conversation he had with Benjamin. Lieb recalls describing communist society as a threshold point of human history, and notes that Benjamin defined this threshold as the point where ‘the experience of humanity can first be created’ (Lieb, 1936: 12).²⁷ Another remark in a letter from Benjamin to Werner Kraft from the same period gives an indication of Benjamin’s understanding of communism:

You admit that for the time being you do not want to accept communism ‘as the solution for humanity’. But of course the issue is precisely to abolish the unproductive pretensions of solutions for humanity by means of the feasible findings of this very system; indeed, to give up entirely the immodest prospect of ‘total’ systems and at least to make the attempt to construct the days of humanity in just as loose a fashion as a rational person who has had a good night’s sleep begins his day.²⁸

The phrasing echoes statements on the topic of revolution in the early essay ‘The Life of Students’ as well as his 1929 essay on ‘Surrealism’. The 1915 piece on students describes revolution as a kind of experience, which is akin to ‘the eros of creativity’: in the ‘unceasing spiritual revolution…new questions would be incubated, in a more ambitious, less clear, less precise way, but perhaps with greater profundity than the traditional scientific questions’ (Benjamin, 1996c: 43). The same impatience with the stultifying precision of a total system and interest instead in experimentation is described over a decade later in his description of the Surrealists who loosen ‘the self by intoxication’. This loosening, he claims, is

the fruitful, living experience that allowed these people to step outside the charmed space of intoxication.…[Surrealist] writings are concerned literally with experiences, not with theories, and still less with phantasms. And these experiences are by no means limited to dreams, hours of hashish eating, or opium smoking. (Benjamin, 1999j: 208)

The remarks about the loosening effects of revolutionary experiences in ‘The Life of Students’ and the Surrealism essay tally with those on communism in Benjamin’s letter to Kraft. From this text it is clear that Benjamin rejects any theory of communism that involves a preconceived social design, whether Marxist or otherwise. Note also his formulation of what he means by communism: ‘to make the attempt to construct the days of humanity’, and we could add: in a thoroughly experimental way – by drawing on his writing about Surrealist experiences. Benjamin’s description of the communist society as reported by Lieb is even more unorthodox: a historical threshold where for the first time ‘the experience of humanity can be created’. Here he explicitly defines communism as a certain experience. We are already familiar with the conceptual topography where this (collective) experience must be situated.

The erosion of tradition in modernity is also the erosion of the living space of collective experience. Benjamin applied a novel vocabulary to the problem of conceptualizing sites and possibilities of collective experience in this historical situation. The Arcades Project puts forward the thesis that the 19th century was a dream collective.²⁹ This dream expressed the universal human wish for happiness in the detritus of the epoch but also in notable industrial and technological innovations and certain urban architecture. But these signs are to be ‘read’ and ‘interpreted’, as every dream in psychoanalysis, in order to yield their meanings. This is the task of the materialist historian in the Arcades Project. For Benjamin, a text underlies these visible forms and figures which contains their ‘truth’. He thus extends the basic interpretative schema of his approach in, for example, the essays on language and Goethe’s novel to his socio-historical theorization. Forms (arcades, steel and glass buildings, etc.) and various ‘allegorical’ figures (such as the gambler, the dandy, etc.) that to other eyes show nothing but irredeemable human alienation reveal to the materialist historian (let it be said: secretly armed with theological optics) their true meaning for the first time. This truth is the universal human wish for emancipation. The concrete expression of this truth makes the 19th century unique in human history: its forms and figures ‘express’ the promise of emancipation in distorted form, i.e. in dream language. But for every dreaming person, the revelations and energies contained in the dream language become ‘usable’ only upon awakening. The dreaming humanity of the 19th century must be woken up. This awakening, too, is the task of the materialist historian.

The citations collected in the Arcades Project present the cumulative ‘statement’ of collective belief in the century’s unique promise. The realization of the promise is not deferred to a future ‘to come’, as some accounts of Benjamin suppose.³⁰ The awakening from the dream understood by Benjamin as revolutionary action is obviously an experience which carries within itself the ‘experience of humanity’, that is, the realization here and now of the wish for community expressed in the dream-images of the 19th century. In the Paris arcades (both inside and outside) the wish for community is experienced in the tangible form of being (at) home in public. What is important for Benjamin is that the experience is lived here and now, albeit fleetingly and subject to dream distortion. The 19th century dream language becomes legible and understandable only in the first half of the 20th century, and with this legibility comes the possibility of awakening in the form of revolution. In Benjamin’s formulation, the 19th century carries an ‘historical index’ that points to Benjamin’s own time as the time of the redemption of its wish.³¹ We should not underestimate Benjamin’s appreciation of the potential of the new technology for a life free of toil and exploitation; the liberation of human life from misery becomes a universally realizable possibility with modern technology. His response to the notion of an historical threshold reported by Lieb must in part be a reference to this potential. It is well-known that Benjamin thinks the potential of industrial and technological innovations to realize the emancipated state was misunderstood in the 19th century, distorted, for example, in the construction of the bourgeois interior. Nonetheless, however distorted, the truth (wish for emancipation) is ‘expressed’ in concrete forms of experience in the century. This too must be what Benjamin has in mind when he characterizes the period as a threshold for the first creation of the experience of humanity.³²

Revolution (the awakening) is not only a collective experience, perhaps the paradigm of such experience, but it is also an extreme action. The concept of the ‘extreme’ is a significant methodological principle of Benjamin’s hermeneutics. This is true of his entire career. Recall his remarks in the correspondence with Scholem about his idea of communism involving ‘experimenting and taking extreme measures’. What attracted him to Surrealism was its spirit of experimentation. He tries to formulate the principle that truth is revealed in the extreme in the ‘Epistemo-Critical Preface’ to his study of the German Trauerspiel (see Benjamin, 2009: 34). In the essay on Goethe’s novel, he reads the extreme action of the novella’s lovers in risking their lives as the basis of their redemption from the demonic forces of myth and aestheticism.³³ For each to risk everything, including one’s life, is to gain everything together in freedom from the tyranny of the ‘merely natural life’. The mechanism of the shift from the individual to the collective interest is explicit. Only when the instinct of self-preservation is defied can the true community be established. In this essay, true reconciliation, or the shared life, comes through faith in God. Love ‘guides the reconciled’ to risk all, but ‘passion loses all its rights and happiness when it seeks a pact with the bourgeois, affluent, secure life’ (Benjamin, 1996b: 343). The sharing perspective that annuls individual self-interest has its basis in the faith in something beyond merely natural life. This is the moral that Benjamin extracts from the novella. He understands revolutionary action along the same lines. His essay ‘Critique of Violence’ leaves hardly any doubt in this regard.³⁴ The willingness of each to experiment in freedom from all the conventions of the bourgeois society (i.e. from the mythic power of law) is to find, to found, the true community in the revolutionary (collective) experience. In my view, this is what Benjamin has in mind when he characterizes ‘communism’ as the ‘attempt to construct the days of humanity’. In any case, if one remains faithful to the general themes and patterns of Benjamin’s thinking, his communism should be understood within such a horizon.

Recall that for Benjamin fulfilling experience takes place without reservation because it is imbued with a thorough awareness of itself as the fulfilment of a wish. Similarly, happiness in his view is only possible in the context of a mnemonic relation to the past that is in fact an ‘experience’ of this past as the context of meaning of the present. Benjamin thought that the humanization of the alien material world in technological innovation, and the reconciliation of humanity in classless society, fulfilled the true wish of human history for humanized, reconciled existence. Nature no less than society is restored to the humanity that risks everything in revolution. Such ‘true reconciliation’ is the community not only with other human beings but also with nature. This thought is fundamental to Benjamin and is underpinned with his theology. In the essay on language, the muteness of nature is the result of the fallenness of human beings (Benjamin, 1996d: 71–3). The linguistic ‘communion with things’ (p. 69) outlined in that essay is brought under the image of classless society or the like in Benjamin’s late work. Admittedly none of these late notions are as clear as one would wish, but given the tenor of his thinking, the general truth of this claim cannot be questioned. The possibility of adopting a communal perspective vis-à-vis nature in the revolutionary experience parallels that of sharing in God’s word in Adamite language and that of the ‘death of intention’ in the Idea in the ‘Epistemo-Critical Preface’ (Benjamin, 2009: 36). This is why we must recognize that Benjamin intended the notion of human emancipation to be understood on the same ontological level as these latter, namely as objective (and universal) truth. Thanks to its theological foundations, Benjamin’s communism is not only a societal conception.

Benjamin tries to theorize the possibility of the formation of a truly concrete social body. The epochal status he ascribes to technology as an historical threshold is to be understood in this context, too. Due to it making possible the ‘interpenetration’ of ‘body and image space’ (‘anthropological materialism’ and ‘political materialism’), the new technology of communication transforms urban spaces into sites of possible formation of the collective body. To the extent that this becomes a real possibility, he says in the Surrealism essay, reality has ‘transcended itself’ in the direction of communism (Benjamin, 1999j: 217). The collective body is not simply an aggregation or transposition of individuals into a group, as Adorno following Horkheimer suggests.³⁵ This would be a degraded community for Benjamin. The interpenetration of body and image spaces is effected through ‘profane illumination’, which is to say, the intoxication and integration of creaturely bodies into a concrete body politic. This seems to be what Benjamin means by the ‘world of universal and integral actualities’ (Benjamin, 1999j: 217). Here is another indication that for him collective experience and revolutionary experience are one and the same thing. The ‘collective’ becomes a reality, that is a real body, in the intoxicating experience of revolutionary action (‘revolutionary tension becomes bodily collective innervation’); and, conversely, ‘revolution’ is nothing other than the collective’s self-formation (‘all the bodily innervations of the collective become revolutionary discharge’).³⁶ But just because the ‘image space’, which is also a ‘body space’, is a concrete place (e.g. a street, a stadium, or a theatre), in ordinary circumstances the formation of the collective body in such urban contexts cannot be more than a transitory phenomenon. Does this caveat also apply to the collective experience of revolution? It seems the answer must be in the affirmative. And the point must be valid for Benjamin’s communism, too.

Herein lies the difficulty of the definition of collective experience in Benjamin. It is first and foremost an ‘experience’ in the full sense of this term, i.e. absorbing and emphatic. Ownable experience in the mode of meaning (Erfahrung) thus preserves (even if presumably aufgehoben) the modern features of experience (Erlebnis). How might such a collective body be imagined so that it would not be entirely artificial? Benjamin outlines an answer of sorts when he describes as an experiential ‘sensorium’ the audience viewing a progressive film or the image-space of surrealist experiences. In the ‘image space’ the individual is not aware of itself in opposition to the (collective) ‘body image’. It is not clear whether Benjamin meant to use this way of understanding the formation of the collective for conceptualizing the revolutionary collective without any further qualification. It is not the transitory nature of such a ‘body image’ that would be problematic in this respect – given Benjamin’s understanding of communism – but the fact that it can equally well apply to the disintegration of the individual in fascist mass spectacles.

Themes such as linguistic ‘communion with things’, ‘auratic’ perception, the child at play, ‘perception of similitudes’, are the conceptual resources of Benjamin’s notions of revolution and ‘redeemed humanity’. In my view, the node of Benjamin’s conception of revolution is the recognition (= experience) of the wish for universal emancipation. The revolutionary experience is at the same time the recognition of that wish and the experience of community that is thereby realized. All the mentioned themes contribute to its conceptualization, as I tried to show in this article. I also presented a number of the methodological principles that Benjamin uses in this conceptualization, such as dream interpretation or the epistemological significance of the extreme. But we must always keep in mind that Benjamin’s ‘communism’ no less than his ‘revolutionary action’ is squarely a category of experience, and not a particular socio-economic arrangement or program. This is why he was so impressed by the Surrealist idea of profane illumination and used it to give content to the notion of collective experience. A collective is formed through ‘profane illumination’, which brings into existence the ‘world of universal and integral actualities’. The ‘days of humanity’, ‘classless society’ and ‘communist society’ – are these not so many ways of expressing the same idea (Benjamin, 1999j: 217)? What matters to Benjamin is the experience of profane illumination, regardless of the transitory nature of that experience. Revolution is an experimentation, and so too is Benjamin’s ‘communism’.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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