Benjamin's Wager on Modernity: Gambling and the Arcades Project

Abstract

Walter Benjamin wrote about gambling during his youth and the topic remained important through his project on the Parisian arcades that dominated the last decade of his life. In the Arcades, Benjamin analyzes gambling in relation to capitalism, religion, and psychoanalysis, and to our experience of time. Like prostitution, with which it is paired in Convolute O, gambling is a kind of ritual or game with a long history that has taken on a new guise in the exchange economy of capitalism. Benjamin believes that a genealogy of the practice can uncover aspects of its former, transformative meaning, expressed in bodily innervation. I claim that gambling is related to Benjamin's idiosyncratic idea of prophecy, in which looking toward the past opens up new possibilities of meaningful experience. It signals a possible rupture in capitalistic society, one that has revolutionary political potential, precisely because the practice is so ubiquitous.

Notes

The original work on this essay was supported by the NEH Summer Seminar on “Walter Benjamin's Later Writings: The Arcades Project, Commodity Culture, Historiography” at the University of California, Irvine, in 2011. I would like to thank the director of the seminar, Prof. Alexander Gelley, and the other participants for their helpful discussion. The anonymous reviewers for this journal also provided very useful comments.

While on a trip to the south of France he gambled and won money in Monaco. See David S. Ferris, The Cambridge Introduction to Walter Benjamin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 13.

References to Benjamin will be made to: Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Marcus Bullock, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, 4 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996–2003), indicated by SW with volume and page number; and also to Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), with reference to the convolute and citation system. On occasion, references to the German edition, in Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedeman and Herman Schweppenhäuser, 7 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974–1991), cited as GS with volume and page number.

See Letter 7 to Wiesengrund-Adorno, dated March 31, 1932. Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence: 1928–1940, trans. Nicholas Walker, ed. Henri Lonitz (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 15. Incidentally, Königstein is not far from Bad Homburg, whose famous casino was frequented by Dostoyevsky and is the setting of the opening scene of George Eliot's Daniel Deronda.

Georg Simmel, Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings, ed. David Frisby and Mike Featherstone (London and Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1997). The editors discuss the essay in their introduction (16).

Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (London: Penguin Books, 1966), Series II, 149–55.

For a profound study of this topic, see Ian Hacking, The Emergence of Probability (London: Cambridge University Press, 1975).

The question is whether God exists or not. If God exists, then while the disbeliever may enjoy finite goods in this world, he will pay the price of his disbelief with infinite punishment in the afterlife. If God exists, the believer may have to give up finite goods in this world, but he will be infinitely repaid in the afterlife. If, however, God does not exist, the believer will lose the finite goods of this world and enjoy nothing on his death. The disbeliever will enjoy his finite goods and likewise perish without further consequences. But compare the stakes: The disbeliever is making a bet in which finite goods are compared with infinite goods. The rational man, Pascal argues, ought to always bet on the basis of the expected payout. It would be a great mistake to give up the possibility of infinite goods for the sake of finite ones. So, he ought to bet on the existence of God.

Eric Downing, “Divining Benjamin: Reading Fate, Graphology, Gambling,” MLN 126 (2011): 516–80.

Miriam Bratu Hansen, “Room-for-Play: Benjamin's Gamble with Cinema,” October, 109 (2004): 3–45.

Heinz Brüggemann, Walter Benjamin Über Spiel, Farbe Und Phantasie (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2007).

Peter Fenves, “Tragedy and Prophecy in Benjamin's Origin of the German Mourning Play,” in Benjamin's Ghosts: Interventions in Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory, ed. Gerhard Richter (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 237–59.

Benjamin makes the connection a bit more explicit in Arcades, O10a, 3, in which he comments on the privacy of lottery shops with private booths: Even a husband and wife could be next to each other and not even know.

In N10a, 2 Benjamin appears to specify that “presence of mind” serves to defend materialism against the constellation of dangers to the “burden of tradition.”

See Arcades, O13a, 5.

Miriam Hansen, “Benjamin and Cinema: Not a One-Way Street,” in Benjamin's Ghosts: Interventions in Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory, ed. Gerhard Richter (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 41–73.

See also the section on “Gambling” in “Short Shadows (II),” in which Benjamin talks about the “spark” that “leaps within the body from one point to the next, imparting movement now to this organ, now to that one, concentrating the whole of existence and delimiting it” (SW 2: 700).

See O2, 3 and O11a, 2.

See W8, 3, to which I will return later.

For a survey of the concept of redemption in Benjamin's work, see Heinrich Kaulen, “Rettung,” in Benjamins Begriffe, ed. Michael Opitz and Erdmut Wizisla, vol. 2 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000), 619–63. It has only a relatively brief discussion of the concept in the Arcades.

This ambivalence of gambling pleasure is illustrated in the following passage: “The peculiar feeling of happiness in the one who wins is marked by the fact that money and riches, otherwise the most massive and burdensome things in the world, come to him from the fates like a joyous embrace returned to the full. They can be compared to words of love from a woman altogether satisfied by her man. Gamblers are types to whom it is not given to satisfy the woman. Isn't Don Juan a gambler?” (O13, 4). Winning leads to an overwhelming moment of pleasure in which fate is found to be on our side. But the next moment the gambler may lose and he is back to a state of suffering and dissatisfaction that, unlike the sexual urge, is never diminished and only leads to more of the same. The reality principle eventually reasserts itself. The ideas of the joyous embrace and the challenge that pleasure gives to fate are also found in the key O1, 1 passage.

“Erlebnis” is used in O12a, 1—”The lack of consequences that defines the character of the isolated experience [Erlebnis] found drastic expression in gambling”—and in O14, 4, where it is coupled with “Chock” as it is J53a, 4 in the Convolute on Baudelaire. Benjamin does not seem to always be consistent on this score. In “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” he seems to talk about Erfahrung in the same way that he talks in O about Erlebnis: “But it is experience [Erfahrung] that accompanies one to the far reaches of time” (SW 4: 331).

This is true in the Bible (see Ezekial 1:14), and certainly among the mystics (who used the idea of the chariot journey as described in Ezekial as the trope of their vision—Ma’aseh Merkavah—and drew on other images in this key passage), as well as the philosophers, such as Moses Maimonides, who in the “Introduction” to the Guide for the Perplexed explicitly uses “lightning flashes” to describe the nature of prophetic knowledge.

Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1998). For discussion, see Fenves, “Tragedy and Prophecy in Benjamin's Origin of the German Mourning Play.”

For a good, succinct discussion of this concept and its relation to Benjamin, see Edward S. Cutler, Recovering the New: Transatlantic Roots of Modernism (Hanover, NH, and London: University of New Hampshire/University Press of New England, 2003), 58–59.

Martin Jay, “Politics of Translation: Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin on the Buber-Rosenzweig Bible,” in Permanent Exiles: Essays on the Intellectual Migration from Germany to America (New York: Continuum, 1985), 198–216.

For other mentions of “Geistesgegenwart” see the essay on Karl Kraus (GS II: 339), the essay on Proust (GS II: 320), and “The Work of Art in the Age of its Reproducibility” (GS VII: 379, note 16).

The concept of fate [Schicksal] is discussed by Downing, especially as it relates to the early works, and also in Lorenz Jäger, “Schicksal,” in Benjamins Begriffe, ed. Michael Opitz and Erdmut Wizisla, vol. 2 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000), 725–39. Jäger notes the connection between “Schicksal” and “Vorhersagung” in a relatively early (1920) set of theses (737). Benjamin suggests there that the two concepts are united in a moment in which the past, present, and future are rendered simultaneous (gleichzeitig) (GS VI: 91).

Hansen, “Benjamin and Cinema: Not a One-Way Street,” 70.

Benjamin's use of the German word Funke to denote the spark of innervations in gambling (see Kurz Schatten (II); SW 2: 700; GS IV: 426) resonates both with the traditional idea of the prophetic lightening strike and with the modern technology of radio [Rundfunk] as a tool of mass communication.

Susan Buck-Morss, “The Flaneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering,” New German Critique 39, Special Issue on Walter Benjamin (1986): 99–140.

In his notes on the making of the film 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (1967), Jean-Luc Godard makes a similar point about prostitution: “To return to this film about the housing complexes, the thing that most excited me was that the anecdote it tells coincides basically with one of my most deep-rooted theories. The idea that, in order to live in Parisian society today, at whatever level or on whatever plane, one is forced to prostitute oneself one way or another, or else to live according to conditions resembling those of prostitution.” Jean-Luc Godard, Godard on Godard, trans. Tom Milne, ed. Tom Milne (London: Da Capo Press, 1986), 239.