14/10/22 Partly finished; needs knots.
”The poet’s right to exist has not often been stated with the same insistence; but it is today. Certainly it has rarely been posed in this form.But you are all more or less familiar with it as the question of the poet’s autonomy: his freedom to write whatever he may please. You are not inclined to accord him this autonomy. You believe that the current social situation forces the poet to choose whom his activity will serve. The bourgeois writer of popular stories does not acknowledge this alternative. So you show him that even without admitting it, he works in the interests of a particular class. An advanced type of writer acknowledges this alternative. His decision is determined on the basis of the class struggle when he places himself on the side of the proletariat. But then his autonomy is done for. He directs his energies toward what is useful for the proletariat in the class struggle. We say that he espouses a tendency.”
So Benjamin opened this piece by discussing Plato’s discussion of the ideal state. In this state, in the interests of societal cohesion, he exiles poets; all of them. This was because Plato saw the destructive, revolutionary capacity that poetry, writing, narrative, myth entailed. Benjamin explains that today, once again, the existence of the poet as a revolutionary arbiter of language is being called into question. Those who Benjamin speaks to in his preface believe that the writer “in this day and age” has a social responsibility; not even that - politically, they are forced to take a side, there is no middle ground - responsibility implies an aspect of choice, an ability to abjure ones responsibility. Yet, if a poet recognises this, although implicitly this is true for the writer who does not recognise their position, they must necessarily abjure their autonomy towards a theme, a tendency. They must restrict their craft
Yet for Benjamin, when an author espouses a tendency therein lies a problem: “on the one hand we should demand that the poet’s work conform to the correct political tendency, on the other hand we have the right to expect that his work be of high quality”. He expands on these demands:
I want to show you that the political tendency of a work can only be politically correct if it is also literarily correct. That means that the correct political tendency includes a literary tendency. For, just to clarify things right away, this literary tendency, which is implicitly or explicitly contained in every correct political tendency – that, and nothing else constitutes the quality of a work. The correct political tendency of a work includes its literary quality because it includes its literary tendency.
The true quality of a work then lies in its ‘literary tendency’. This, for Benjamin, as a political choice in its own right.
As we know, social relationships are determined by relationships of production. When it examined a work of art, materialist criticism was accustomed to ask how that work stood in relation to the social relationships of production of its time. […] Thus I would now like to suggest a question which lies closer at hand. A question which is somewhat more modest, which is less encompassing, but which seems to me to have a better chance of being answered. […] Before I ask: how does a literary work stand in relation to the relationships of production of a period, I would like to ask: how does it stand in them? This question aims directly at the function that the work has within the literary relationships of production of a period. In other words, it aims directly at a work’s literary technique.
So Benjamin starts out here by pushing back against traditional Marxist criticism which would want to ask things like “how does this work frame the relationship of production” - he is a true materialist here, instead he wants to ask how the work itself is produced. Not purely the manuscript, although that is part of this question, but also printed text. His use of the word Technik for technique in the original German is interesting too. He use it to discuss the aesthetic technique of the work for sure, but in the German, it is laden with heavy mechanical connotations; it relates to the technicalities of how the work is produced. For Benjamin, this concept of technique “gives access to a direct social analysis, and thus a materialist analysis of literary products”. Benjamin draws back to the last section, positing that “literary tendency can be found in the progress or regression of literary technique”.
Benjamin rounds out his discussion of technique by discussing the Russian author Sergei Tretiakov.
”Tretiakov distinguishes the operative writer from one who gives information. His mission is not to report, but to struggle; he does not play the role of spectator, but actively intervenes. He defines his task through the statements he makes about his activity. At the time of the total collectivization of agriculture, in 1928, when the slogan ‘writers to the kolkhozy (collective farms)’ was launched, Tretiakov left for the ‘Communist Lighthouse’ commune and during two lengthy stays there undertook the following tasks: calling mass meetings, collecting money to pay for tractors, persuading individual peasants who worked alone to enter the kolkhoz, inspecting reading rooms, creating wall-newspapers and editing the kolkhoz newspaper, being a reporter for Moscow papers, introducing radio and travelling movies. It is not surprising that the novel Master of the Fields which Tretiakov wrote after his stay, had a substantial influence on the further formation of agricultural collectives”.
Benjamin suggests afterwards that his readers may object to his example of Tretiakov, calling him a journalist, asking what this has to do with literature. For Benjamin though, this example allows us to rethink our notions of literary form in line with the techniques of cultural production available to us today; “so that we may arrive at the forms of expression to which literary energies should be applied today”. He makes the point that literary form has morphed over the centuries from rhetoric to poetry, tragedy and epic, the emergence of the novel, and the resurgence of public theatre: “All that should make you conscious of the fact that we stand in the midst of a powerful process of the transformation of literary forms, a process of transformation in which many of the oppositions with which we used to work could lose their power.” He primes us for the advent of the newspaper.
Newspapers’ content, a leftist writer cries, “refuses any form of organization other than that imposed by the reader’s impatience. This impatience is not only that of the politician who expects a piece of news, or of a speculator who awaits a tip: behind them hovers the impatience of whoever feels himself excluded, whoever thinks he has a right to express his own interests himself.” Sound familiar? Eerily anachronistic? I think it probably should. The writer goes on to explain how editors, trade on the consumers’ “avid impatience for fresh nourishment”, manifesting a change in the form of the newspaper with columns and letters and all sorts of new sections/materials opening up. Apparently this necessitates a shift from the reader towards the level of co-worker. I don’t know if I like this jump.
But fear not, for Benjamin makes an even larger one:
”This phenomenon hides a dialectical moment: the fall of literature in the bourgeois press reveals the formula for its resuscitation in the Soviet Russian press, because the realm of literature gains in width what it loses in depth. In the Soviet press, the difference between author and public, maintained artificially by the bourgeois press, is beginning to disappear. The reader is indeed always ready to become a writer, that is to say, someone who describes or even who prescribes. As an expert – even if not a professional, but only a job-occupant – he gains entrance to authorship. Labour itself speaks out for writing it out in words constitutes part of the knowledge necessary to becoming an author. Literary competence is no longer based on specialized training in academic schools, but on technical and commercial training in trade schools and thus becomes common property.”
I don’t think I’m capturing the full weight of Benjamin’s argument in this little summary here, but the real logic at play here for me is as follows: because of the deterritorialising effect on the written word (reterritorialised in the form of the daily serialised paper) that the newspaper enacts, the word is no-longer beholden to specialised contexts or higher, philosophical signifiers; instead the written word becomes about the bare rearticulation of present, material conditions. No one any longer needs specialist training to be a writer with the advent of the newspaper, one must simply be literate. Anyone in society can partake; the word has been democratised.
I’ll just blockquote the last paragraph of this section; pretty accessible and clear and a good primer for the next section
But we cannot remain at that point. For as yet the newspapers of Western Europe are not a suitable instrument of production in the hands of the writer. They still belong to capital. On the one hand the newspaper, on the technical level, represents the most important literary position. But this position is on the other hand in the control of our opponents, so it should not be surprising that the writer’s comprehension of his dependent social position, of his technical possibilities and of his political tasks must struggle against enormous difficulties. Among the most important developments in Germany in the last 10 years is the fact that many productive minds have gone through a revolutionary development parallel to and under the pressure of the economic situation, without however, having been able in a revolutionary way to think through their own work and its relationship to the means of production, its productive techniques, its technology. As you see, I am talking about the so-called left-wing intellectuals, and I will limit myself to left-wing bourgeois intellectuals. In Germany, the pace-setting politico-literary movements of the last decade have originated with these left intellectuals. By the example of two of these movements, ‘activism’ and the ‘new objectivity’, I want to show that however revolutionary this political tendency may appear, it actually functions in a counterrevolutionary manner as long as the writer experiences his solidarity with the proletariat ideologically and not as a producer.
”The slogan which summarizes the demands of activism is ‘logocracy’, that is, the power of the intellect. Power to the intellect. The expression could well be translated as the power of the intellectuals. This conception of intellectuals has, in fact, become standard among left-wing intellectuals and it dominates their political manifestoes from Heinrich Mann to Doblin.”
Benjamin’s real issue here is that this construction does not account for the role of intellectuals within the process of production. So too does it instil a rift between political activists and the leftist intelligentsia; you may well be smarter than the activists - but, and we paraphrase from Brecht: “politics it is not individual thoughts, but […] the art of thinking what is in the heads of other people.” The leftist intelligentsia, says Benjamin, should not separate themselves from the proletariat, but rather take up their position alongside them.
“But what kind of a position is that? It is that of a benefactor. Of an ideological patron. An impossible position. And so we come back to the thesis we stated at the beginning: the place of the intellectual in the class struggle can only be determined, or better, chosen, on the basis of his position in the process of production.
So what does this necessary positioning in the process of production look like? Benjamin discusses Brecht: “do not simply transmit the apparatus of production without simultaneously changing it to the maximum extent possible in the direction of socialism.” Okay, what does this mean exactly? That “certain works should no longer so much relate individual experiences, but rather should be aimed at the utilization (transformation) of certain institutes or institutions”? Clearer. The difference between transmission and transformation is as follows: transmission in the context of literature would be analogous to a mass publishing company disseminating the Communist Manifesto or the like - it allows for the reterritorialisation of the material under an axiom of Capital thus extracting its revolutionary potential and replacing it with commodity value. Transformation on the other hand, ruptures the means of production, necessarily resists this reterritorialisation. I find it hard to extract concrete examples from this text, but perhaps the Party’s collective printing houses would be a transformation that Benjamin would approve of? The next section seeks to ask: to whom is this technique of transformation useful?
Benjamin opens this section with a discussion on photography. He talks of the revolutionary DaDaists and the Photomontages that were popular in early 20th century socialist propaganda, yet for Benjamin, as the discipline has modernised it has necessarily transfigured everything it touches into aesthetic object. Just like Capitalism; it has brought a double bind of revolutionary potential and stultifying reterritorialisation.
It has even succeeded in making misery itself an object of pleasure, by treating it stylishly and with technical perfection. For the ‘new objectivity’, it is the economic function of photography to bring to the masses elements which they could not previously enjoy – spring, movie stars, foreign countries – by reworking them according to the current fashion; it is the political function of photography to renew the world as it actually is from within, in other words, according to the current fashion.
For Benjamin this is exactly what happens when one passes over an apparatus of production in an act of transmission rather than transformation; “changing it would have meant breaking down one of the barriers, overcoming one of the contradictions which fetters the production of intellectuals.” He suggests that we should have made like Barbara Kruger, added captions “which would tear it away from fashionable clichés and give it a revolutionary use-value” - I think we’ve seen what Capitalism did to Kruger (made her a shit-ton of money). Ah yes, “but we will pose this demand with the greatest insistence if we – writers – take up photography”. This sounds so trite and ridiculous but he does expand rather well. Essentially, the idea is that the leftist intellectual necessary needs to educate themselves in the techniques of production; that is all the technical skills necessary to use the apparatus of the camera, the printing press, script code, and so forth. There is also an interesting discussion about a parallel idea: let us not privilege certain forms; the example given is orchestral music: “‘We must be careful not to over-rate orchestral music and think of it as the only form of high art. Music without words took on its great importance and fullest development only with capitalism.” Instead, in democratising art we must privilege folk forms and the like, be not snobbish intelligentsia. Union songs are a great example of this.
”When I turn to the ‘new objectivity’ as a literary movement, I must go a step further and say that it has made the struggle against misery into a consumer good. In fact, in many cases its political meaning has been exhausted with the transposition of revolutionary reflexes, in so far as they appeared in the bourgeoisie, into objects of distraction and amusement which were integrated without difficulty into the cabaret business of the big cities. The metamorphosis of the political struggle from a drive to make a political commitment into an object of contemplative pleasure, from a means of production into an article of consumption, is characteristic of this literature.
Benjamin discusses how those who operate within these modes of production are not effective revolutionaries, they are merely masquerading as socialists: “their function, seen from a political point of view, is to form not a Party, but a clique, seen from a literary point of view, not a school but a fad, from an economic point of view not to become producers but agents. Agents or hacks, who make a great show of their poverty and congratulate themselves on the yawning void. It would be impossible to carve a more comfortable position out of an uncomfortable situation.” For Benjamin, the role of the author then (as opposed to the writer), is to be instructive and to work in an organising capacity in relation to the means of production, as well as the development of liberatory form. I think I see this manifesting mostly in the role of a state-sponsored propagandist? Although Benjamin says that they should not be limited to their propagandic practices. “The determinant factor is the exemplary character of a production that enables it, first, to lead other producers to this production, and secondly to present them with an improved apparatus for their use. And this apparatus is better to the degree that it leads consumers to production, in short that it is capable of making co-workers out of readers or spectators. We already possess such a model, about which I can only speak briefly here. That is Brecht’s epic theatre.”
Benjamin makes the point that the costly apparatus of modern theatre is a dying art form. Stultified, dying off. In competition with a newly-saturated media market given the rise of radio and cinema. The writers, actors, critics, constituting the theatre-apparatus are possessed by their apparatus rather than in possession of it. “This theatre – whether one thinks of the ‘high- brow’ theatre or that of mere entertainment – belongs to a satiated social stratum which transforms everything it touches into amusement. Its position is hopeless.” The idea is not to get into competition with publication and publicity, but rather to learn from them and use them; deterritorialise them. Brecht’s epic theatre is an example of this apparently.
In the interest of this grappling, Brecht went back to the original elements of the theatre. He more or less made do with a platform. He renounced too far-reaching plots. Thus he succeeded in transforming the functional relation between the stage and the public, text and production, director and actor. Epic theatre, he explained, should not so much develop an action as present a situation. It attains that condition, as we shall soon see, by allowing the action to be broken up. Here I would remind you of the songs whose main function is to break the action. It is here – namely with the principle of breaking into the action – that the epic theatre takes up a process which, as you can clearly see, has become common in film and radio, press and photography, over the last few years. I am speaking of the process of montage: the element which is superimposed breaks into the situation on which it is imposed.
The idea of Brecht’s epic theatre is to distance the audience from the scene in front of them. Not mentioned in the text, I believe this was called Verfremdungseffekt (essentially: alienation). The audience “perceives them as real situations, not, as with the naturalist theatre, with self-satisfaction, but with astonishment. Thus the epic theatre does not reproduce situations, rather it uncovers them.” This Verfremdungseffekt works by way of interrupting the action on stage;”in the midst of the action, it brings it to a stop, and thus obliges the spectator to take a position toward the action, obliges the actor to adopt an attitude toward his role.”
From a single example I want to show you how Brecht’s discovery and development of the notion of the ‘gesture’ signifies nothing other than a return to the decisive methods of montage in radio and film, but at the same time transforms montage from a process too often dictated by fashion into a human act. Imagine a family scene: the woman is just about to grab a bronze statue and throw it at her daughter; the father about to open the window and call for help. At this very moment a stranger enters. The action is interrupted; what comes to the foreground in its place is the situation which meets the glance of the stranger: contorted faces, open window, smashed furniture.
I think for Benjamin this interruption, this moment of reflection, sews the seeds of change in the minds of the audience and the actors. “It aims less at filling the public with emotion, even if it is that of revolt, than at making it consider thoughtfully, from a distance and over a period of time, the situations in which it lives.” The idea is to induce a state of reflection over the circumstances that society necessarily constructs. To look at the ridiculous in our everyday life; satire is subversive: “We can remark in passing that there is no better starting point for thought than laughter. In particular, thought usually has a better chance when one is shaken by laughter than when one’s mind is shaken and upset. The only extravagance of the epic theatre is its amount of laughter.”
It’s useful just to quote much of this last section. It’s Benjamin’s closing reflections where he puts Rene Maublanc and Aragon into conversation
You may have noticed that the chain of thought whose conclusion we are approaching only presents the writer with a single demand, the demand of reflecting, of thinking about his position in the process of production. We can be sure of this: this reflection sooner or later leads the writers who are essential, that is, the best technicians of their trade, to conclusions and positions which are the basis of their trustworthy solidarity with the proletariat. Finally, I would like to mention a real proof in the form of a short passage from the current issue of Commune. Commune organized a questionaire: ‘For whom do you write?’. I quote from Rene Maublanc’s answer, as well as from Aragon’s additional comments. There can be no doubt’, Maublanc writes, ‘that I write almost exclusively for a bourgeois public. First because I am forced to’ – here Maublanc indicates his duties as a teacher in a high school – ‘secondly because I am of bourgeois origin and of a bourgeois education and come from a bourgeois milieu, and therefore am naturally inclined to address myself to the class to which I belong, which I know best and can best understand. But that does not mean that I write to please it or to support it. On the one hand I am convinced that the proletarian revolution is necessary and desirable, on the other hand that the weaker the opposition of the bourgeoisie, the quicker, easier, more successful and less bloody the revolution will be. . . . Today the proletariat needs allies who come from the bourgeois camp, just as in the eighteenth century the bourgeoisie needed allies from the feudal camp. I want to be among these allies.’
To this Aragon comments: ‘Here our comrade treats a question which concerns a very great number of today’s writers. Not all of them have the courage to face up to it . . . Those who are as clear about their own position as Rene Maublanc are infrequent. But precisely from them we must ask more . . . It is not enough to weaken the bourgeoisie from the inside, one must fight along with the proletariat . . . For Rene Maublanc and many of our friends among writers who still hesitate, there exists the example of the Soviet Russian writers, who came out of the Russian bourgeoisie and still have become pioneers of socialist development.’
Benjamin ends his article with a sort of call to arms for the Leftist Bourgeois Intelligentsia; essentially he says that while the bourgeois intellectual may never be truly separated from their class of origin, through making themselves a producer following all that entails from this article they may still advance the cause of the revolution and the party by reterritorialising the means of cultural and intellectual production; through these methods “The intellectual who opposes fascism by trusting to his own miraculous power will disappear. For the revolutionary struggle does not take place between capitalism and the intellect, but between capitalism and the proletariat.”