Piecework

In his Epistemo-critical Preface to the Origin of the German Mourning Play, Walter Benjamin distinguishes his notion of “origin” from that of an absolute beginning—or end:

Origin, although an historical category through and through, has nevertheless nothing in common with emergence (Entstehung). […] In the bare manifestation of the factual, the original is never discernible, and its rhythm is accessible only to a dual insight. It is recognizable on the one hand as restoration, as reinstatement, and on the other, precisely therein as incomplete.¹

“Precisely” because an originary phenomenon seeks to reinstate and repeat an earlier one, it must remain “incomplete.” Such incompletion is the result of what Benjamin describes as the distinctively historical “dialectic” of origin, which “shows singularity and repetition to be conditioned by one another in all essentials.”² Thus the “incompletion” of the originary phenomenon becomes historical when its “singularity” emerges through “repetitions”—we could also say, “responses”—that both transform and alter it. Like all reading, such responses must to a degree seek to reproduce and reinstate the texts they purport to read. But they can do this with the awareness that it is not reconstruction per se that is the goal, but rather a reinscription that awakens dormant possibilities that were never actualized in the “original” text.

Related to this dialectic of singularity and repetition is another distinction that Benjamin makes in the same Preface, namely that between knowledge and truth:

The object of knowledge, determined as it is by the intention inherent in the concept, is not truth. Truth is an intentionless state of being, made up of ideas. (…) Truth is the death of intention.³

Taking these two statements together, one can conclude that, for Benjamin, the “truth” of a historical phenomenon begins there where its animating—Husserl might have said, meaning-giving—intention (Bedeutungsintention⁴) dies—which does not, to be sure, necessarily mean here to disappear. Can this be applied to Benjamin's own texts as well: are they “historical” in this “originary” sense? And, if so, what might that historical “truth” look like?

The first essay in this second Benjamin issue, by Robert Ryder, provides a possible response to this question. It exhumes a little-read text of Benjamin, “Auf die Minute”—imperfectly rendered in English as “On the Minute”⁵—which is usually consigned to his occasional and peripheral writings. But in accordance with Benjamin's insight that precisely the “periphery” and “extreme” could be more decisive than what appears more “central,” Ryder reads this description of Benjamin's highly problematic initial experience with the medium of radio not, as has been suggested, as a failure—a failure to master much less to transform the medium—but rather as a “staging (of) a crisis of reading and misreading time […] using radio to do it.” Ryder situates Benjamin's 1934 essay in the context of his lifelong interrogation of different experiences and concepts of time, going back to his earliest writings on time, and refers also to the Trauerspielbuch as one of its most important instances. The situation that Benjamin describes in this essay—his confusing of the time allotted him to present his forty-minute radio essay—finds a prescient prefiguration in his description of the German Baroque and its relation to time. The description is precise not only to the minute, but to the second—the second-hand of the clock, which, as he points out, is to be found in many passages from the Baroque plays:

It is no accident that the image of the clock dominates these formulae. In Geulincx's celebrated clock-metaphor, in which the parallelism of the psychological and physical worlds is presented schematically in terms of two accurate and synchronized clocks, the second hand, so to speak, determines the rhythm of events in both. For a long time to come […] the age seems to have been fascinated by this idea.⁶

And Benjamin seems to have been “fascinated by this idea” even longer—although his “fascination” produced a characteristic and distinctive shift in its significance: for the second-hand, far from confirming the psycho-physical parallelism in the German Radio Studio, serves rather to underscore their disjunction—which, after all, was Benjamin's major concern at least since the book on the German Baroque. Ryder's text follows out many of the implications of this disjunction to show how Benjamin's notion of “historical time” evolves through his encounter with contemporary media technology.

Another ostensibly marginal, because occasional essay of Benjamin's from the same year, on “The Present Social Situation of the French Writer,” is examined by Zakir Paul, who, like Ryder, sees it as part of a continuing effort, stretching back to his earliest writings—for instance, the 1916 letter to Martin Buber—to describe what a properly “political” style of writing could look like. Without suggesting that this is fully accomplished in this piece—it more than others remains “incomplete” for both internal and external reasons—Paul demonstrates that what could be called a “performative” approach to political writing also anticipates the writing of the subsequent “Arcades Project”—in which the political performance cannot be reduced to the statements or propositions—the semantic denotations—that are most ostensible and strike the eye. Reading Benjamin as the latter himself once suggested—”to read what was never written”—Paul demonstrates how the opposition between visible and invisible, explicit and implicit tends to collapse into a discourse that demands a participation of readers that the roughly contemporaneous essay on “The Author as Producer” thematizes—but that Benjamin's writing has perhaps always presupposed, from the very start. Such a dependence on co-constitutive reading alters the kind of authority that such writing can claim for itself: in a letter, apparently self-disqualifying, Benjamin refers to his essay as “reine Hochstapelei”—not “fraud” as generally translated in published English versions, but rather “pure bluff.” This suggests that Benjamin's political writing, and perhaps his writing in general, which may be political even where it is not obviously so, seeks to “bluff” the reader into an engagement that in the best of cases at least can produce transformative results. As we shall see shortly, Benjamin's use of the word “pure” is anything but innocent—or pure!

Although Hyowon Cho's revisiting of the Schmitt-Benjamin controversy over Shakespeare's Hamlet never uses the word “bluff” or “Hochstapelei,” his juxtaposition of the two terms, “humor” and/or the “dying voice,” seems not entirely distant from such a position. The pathos with which Schmitt singles out Hamlet's “dying voice” as a key to the “historical eruption” of Elizabethan religious and political conflicts in the play—and its truly historical meaning—is contrasted with Benjamin's association, again in his book on the origins of the German Trauerspiel, with the necessary and immanent emergence of comedy and, more precisely, the “pure joke,” as the “obligatory interior side” of the mourning play. If Schmitt seeks to challenge Benjamin's suggestion that “only Shakespeare was capable of striking Christian sparks from the baroque rigidity of the melancholic” in Hamlet,⁷ then only Benjamin is capable, as Cho shows, of striking sparks of comedy from the mourning play. This connection opens up new ways of reading Hamlet, as, for instance, the conversation of the Prince with the visiting Players about the destructive parody of theater by child actors (Hamlet II.2.343–349)—in which the problem of historical continuity (of theater in pre-Puritan England, for instance), and that of the transmission of political sovereignty in post-Reformation Europe, might turn out to be mutually illuminating.

Historical continuity and discontinuity is also the subject of Anna Glazova, in her discussion of Paul Celan's poem, “Port Bou –German?,” where the “pure joke” emerging from the Trauerspiel has become the “pure word,” the “purity” of which perhaps is the most powerful or most exemplary instantiation of that “dialectic of singularity and repetition” considered by Benjamin to constitute the essence of an originary historicity. The “secret Open” that she chooses as the title of her essay marks a reiterative transformation of the “Secret Germany” that was the label assumed by the Circle around Stefan George, which Benjamin repeatedly accused of mythical hero-worship. Thus one of its most brilliant members, Max Kommerell, could write a book titled “The Poet as Führer in German Classicism,” before the Führerprinzip and its “purification” passed from “Secret Germany” of George to the Germany of the Third Reich. Glazova traces the complex path that leads back from Celan's poem to Benjamin reading Kommerell's book as a brilliant but mythical celebration of poetry as a heroic medium culminating in the figure of George, the “master” of the “masterwork” against which Benjamin writes. Glazova demonstrates how Benjamin's fascination with “names”—at first theological, but then increasingly critical—can be seen to culminate in his accusation that it is not a monument that German poetry and its criticism demands, but a radical change of name: “This land,” Benjamin writes, “can become Germany once again only when it is purified, and it cannot be purified in the name of Germany—let alone the ‘secret Germany.’”⁸

“Too late,” Benjamin declares, for anything but the invention of another name for the country and tradition that he could neither escape nor simply join—and that hunted him to his death at “Port Bou – German”—in the name of a certain “purity.” The alternative would be a “pure word” in the sense of one that could not be reduced to univocal semantic meaning, in which nay-saying and yea-saying can no longer be definitively separated. It is possible to read the enigmatic close of Celan's poem—”Kein Zu-Spät,/ein geheimes Offen” as one of those originary, historical reiterations of Benjamin's radio experience, where he fails to keep time, to be on time, to be “auf die Minute”—and thus produces the impression, in one of his listeners, that his radio receiver ceased briefly to function. The interruption of the radio as a manifestation of that “secret opening”?

In any event, as Henrik Wilberg emphasized in our first issue, and as Matthew Handelman recalls in the final essay of this issue, “silence” was for Benjamin and his close friend, Gershom Scholem, part of the essence of language, the condition of what it could say, somewhat akin to how “noise” is considered the condition of communication in modern communication theory. Handelman takes as his point of departure the suggestion of Scholem, in a letter to Werner Kraft, that the two of them together with Benjamin join in a modern version of eighteenth-century contests about the nature of language, a proposal stimulated by Benjamin's 1916 remarks on language contained first in a letter to Scholem. Although Kraft never joined the fray, Scholem sought to elaborate and continue Benjamin's letter in various forms, focusing on the relation of language to mathematics, but also to the process of the “complaint”—the Klage. The Klage as Scholem develops it is interpreted by Handelman as a means of instantiating “lack as a formal principle” of language—something not unrelated to Benjamin's fragmentary efforts to articulate the “symbol” (discussed in the previous issue by Wilberg). But when Handelman notes that Benjamin refuses to take up this line of argument, pretexting “terminological difficulties” in his (non-)response to Scholem, one cannot help be reminded of the properly critical dimension of Benjamin's thought, which Glazova points to in his critique of Kommerell: namely that the latter's representation of Hölderlin and poetry in general lacks a properly critical, that is, “martial” dimension. In a long footnote to his discussion of Friedrich Schlegel in his dissertation, Benjamin had earlier made a similar point: the Schlegelian emphasis on the “criticizability” of works lacked a properly critical, that is, evaluative dimension.⁹ Critique must affirm itself, he argues against Kommerell, which means to affirm “limits.” In his use of the notion of Klage, first in the language essay, then reprised in the book on the German Mourning Play, Klage for Benjamin always signifies also Anklage, that is, accusation, and never simply plaint or complaint—much less representation of a simple lack. To accuse, and to determine limits, is essential in the effort to transcend them. And it is this that marks Benjamin's relation to Klage as Anklage, as well as his critique of the George School and its leading exponent, Kommerell. This is perhaps the root of those “terminological difficulties” that prevented Benjamin from responding more affirmatively to his friend's proposals. Or was this already a response, prefiguring that of Celan: “Benjamin/neint euch, für immer,/er jasagt”?

Is this an indication of how Benjamin can, or perhaps even should, be read?

In his essay on Goethe's Elective Affinities, Benjamin tries to define the relation of works of art to philosophy. Whereas the latter seeks its unity by reference to what Benjamin calls “the ideal of the problem,” for works of art, however, there is no such unity:

The ideal […] lies buried in a manifold of works, and its excavation is the business of critique. […] Critique ultimately shows in the work of art the virtual possibility of formulating the work's truth-content […] That before which it stops short, however,—as if in awe of the work, but equally from respect for truth—is precisely this formulation itself. […] It says simply that the truth in a work would be known not as something obtained in answer to a question, to be sure, but as something demanded (erfordert).¹⁰

Critique, then, must approach the “virtual possibility of formulating the work's truth-content,” but it must leave that possibility virtual, stopping short of its actual formulation. Critique leaves one not with the answer to a question but with the demand that the question presupposes. Or as Benjamin puts it, more violently, in a passage quoted by Glazova: “Only the Expressionless completes the work, by shattering it,” by making it “Stückwerk”—piece-work, “fragments of the true world.”¹¹ The splintering of the work into pieces produces a demand for responses, but not necessarily for answers. Like the storyteller, perhaps, readers are left to piece together the fragments, and to ask “what happens next?”

Like the Cat Murr, Benjamin fährt fort and asks—indeed, demands—his readers to join him in an adventure that involves responses without answers and gives no guarantees. Or, as Laurence Sterne puts it in Tristram Shandy, Benjamin demands of his readers not obedience but a willingness to entertain “curious conclusions”¹²—conclusions whose singularity excites curiosity rather than putting an end to it.

Notes

Walter Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama (London: Verso, 1998), 45; translation modified.

Ibid.

Ibid., 36.

On the Husserlian notion of an animating, meaning-giving Bedeutungsintention and its relation to singularity and repetition, see Jacques Derrida, “Meaning as Soliloquy,” in Speech and Phenomenon, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 32–47.

«Auf die Minute» in German suggests precisely the situation that confronts Benjamin and to which he finds himself incapable of conforming: being exactly “on time,” measured in minutes.

Ibid., 96.

Ibid., 158.

Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings (Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press, 2001) 2, 383–384.

Walter Benjamin, “The Concept of Art Criticism,” in Selected Writings 1, 159–161.

Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings 1, 354; my emphasis.

Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings 2, 340–341.

Tristram Shandy I.20.