Ghost in the Wire

Why are we here? Why is the ever growing list of Long Sunday contributors spending this week discussing Walter Benjamin and his Critique of Violence? The answer is at once both banal and incisive: we wanted a reading group that began with a relatively brief and accessible text, and this particular work of Benjamin was the primary suggestion. But why? Why is it that 85 years after its initial publication this particular essay still holds such fascination? What is it about the appeal of messianic violence, the institutional critique of the police and of the death penalty, or the timeliness/timelessness of this critique? What is it about Benjamin that draws us to him on this, of all issues?

Debates over author-function aside, let's face it, for all the fame that Benjamin earned, much of it posthumously, his real reputation was made on essays penned in the 30s, not at the start of the 20s or before. This "Critique" is not an essay he returns to with any seriousness in his later work, so when we think the name Benjamin, whatever the appeal of this particular essay, this isn't really the work that defines the proper name of the author. This is a Benjamin in his infancy, a Benjamin who still ardently believed in a Jewish work for Europe, who believed that Judaism held within it a spiritual essence necessary for cultural redemption. Three years before the Critique would be published, Benjamin had sketched a "Program of the Coming Philosophy," a program that (following Kant) hoped to search for objective/empirical means for a "higher concept of experience... the sole embodiment of which, for philosophy, can and must be God." The Critique also coincides with his failed struggle to start a new journal, Angelus Novus, inspired by the same angel picture that would be referenced 20 years later in his "Theses" on history. The journal catered to a fairly esoteric crowd of religious thinkers, who gathered from a shared desire to reclaim a spiritual imaginary from the violence with which the 20th century had begun. Between a limited audience (the journal's mission statement went so far as to dismiss the general public as readers) and the financial burdens of 1921, the journal never saw the light of day. This is also a Benjamin concerned first and foremost with formulating a concept of the work of art (his works on this subject, both explicit and implicit, dominate the late 10s and early 20s), and does so with a metaphor that hints a bit at the flaming Geist of Heidegger, comparing the critic to an alchemist who, confronted with the "work as a flaming pile," believes "the flame itself remains a mystery, that of the living being. Thus the critical thinker asks about the truth, whose living flame burns above the massive logs of what once existed and the light ashes of what has been experienced."

So we have here a very religious thinker, thinking about the dialectical arrangement of violence as an object in a culture that suddenly seems violently secular, doing so in the aftermath of the Great War (violence is thus still fresh, real, palpable, or following the above metaphor, still smoldering). We can't say the essay bears directly on the horrors to follow, since it would be another eight years before the rise of National Socialism (the party existed at the time the critique was published, of course, but was suffering from a failed attempt to mobilize urban centers, something they would replace with an agrarian, farm strategy after 1928). So we can't identify the essay's fame by attributing to it a particular timelessness, as any rudimentary look at the context that governed its production tells us that the piece is indebted to a set of circumstances that no longer properly obtain.

Not properly obtain, I say? Indeed. Much has changed since Benjamin's critique; hell, much changed within Benjamin's own work, and much of that change centered on a revision of the concept of the artwork. In his most famous essay, written and revised during the mid 30s, Benjamin realized that the medium mattered, and that newer media brought with them entirely different relationships to the work of art, perhaps even a certain destruktion of the work of art altogether. This is essential for us to recall, not because it overdetermines our reading of the Critique of Violence but because it helps us to grasp its applicability, and further to understand what our attempts at grasping tell us about our own overdeterminations.

Now, I know that this is a reading group about the "Critique of Violence," and so I don't want to step out of line in my very first Long Sunday post. But we've already had a number of close reads, and we'll be having several more, so I don't feel too guilty about stepping back and doing something different, or perhaps stepping more gingerly around the Critique as I walk the line elsewhere. To wit, here's an extremely useful quote from "The Work of Art in the Age of Technical Reproducibility:"

The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced. Since the historical testimony rests on the authenticity, the former, too, is jeopardized by reproduction when substantive duration ceases to matter. And what is really jeopardized when the historical testimony is affected is the authority of the object.

You can see some similar conceptual work being done here as was done in the earlier description of critical alchemy, but here the living flame is put into question because of its technological reproduction. Its ability to testify, as ashes once were able to do, is now in doubt or non-existent, for the ashes may be artificial, secondary, or simulacral, and the original flame can no longer be distinguished so easily from its searing dopplegangers. Let us apply this then to violence, both mythic and messianic (but especially messianic), for if we can highlight any monumental disconnect between Benjamin of 1921 and Long Sunday of 2005 it is that the wars that contextualize either moment are decidedly distinct. The aftermath of the Great War was an historical rupture of epic proportions, throwing into doubt entire ideologies of nation-hood and Enlightenment; the war in Iraq seems to confirm the banality of conspicuous consumption and to celebrate the televisual surreality/unreality of the whole affair. It's worth at least alluding to Baudrillard's infamous pronouncement about the first gulf war, that it never "took place," not only because of the debt Baudrillard owes to Benjamin, but also because Baudrillard helps us to understand that what is precisely at stake in contemporary violence is not the reality of its force and the authenticity of its power (be that power be divine or institutional), but rather the simulation of violence that removes us from the realm of violence, or more accurately, confounds any "experience" of violence by flooding us with symbolic antecedents that structure the hermeneutics of that experience.

[Please, please, please, don't misunderstand me. This is not a "people don't experience violence because violence isn't real" argument, but rather a "people primarily experience simulations of violence, or experience violence by way of extant and preceding simulations" argument. In other words, it's not about whether or not violence exists, but rather, with Benjamin's critical thinker, how it is we can understand the experience of violence since that experience is predicated on an apperception structured by mediation. I hope that's clear enough.]

And yet, the critique of violence resonates, despite what may be a slight anachronism within it. It clearly matters, yes? I don't doubt it. Personally, I love the essay. I love the readings of it. I'm glad it was suggested as a text for our reading group. But the simple fact of its suggestion doesn't explain what it is that makes this particular essay so ready-at-hand when it comes to the short list of good texts. Let's try not to be all about the intention or invention of those at Long Sunday, but rather ask more generally: what is it that makes this text so resonant, despite changes within the last 85 years that call into question some of its critical possibibilities?

I want to suggest - and here I finally return to the title of this post - that the reason is that this essay rescues violence from simulations by providing unto it a theoretical aura. In other words, by bifurcating violence and then imagining a messianic version free from the contamination of the institution or the mythic, free even from the letter of the law, violence becomes authentic again, and thus worthy of analysis. It becomes about pure means, it becomes about the coming community, it becomes bigger than life, larger than mere living, it becomes... well, whatever we wish it to become. This is an essay that, precisely because it goes under the name Benjamin, excuses us from thinking about the simulations and media environments that have also been thought under that name, and that might otherwise confound our thinking of violence. It makes of the Critique of Violence something like a positive economic value in what might otherwise be a rather hostile, bearish economic climate.

Maybe this is a good thing, maybe not. The contributions thus far have been quite fascinating, and quite insightful, and so no one can doubt the productive and heuristic force of this essay. But we shouldn't count its own violence either, its own messianic production, a production that in turn lends itself to our current violent appropriations. The picture of the Angel of History that inspired the failed Angelus Novus of 1921 is read very differently in Benjamin's "Theses on the Philosophy of History." In 1921, in the imaginary that also gives us his critique of violence, the angel is read as a religious symbol par excellence, and violence is read accordingly. In 1940, the angel is read as a picture, as an image, and history is thought accordingly. Those two moments are parsed by a critical awareness of mediation and reproduction that confounds the authentic, and that should equally confound the messianic. That we refuse that difficulty tells us much about our own critical alchemy and its shortcomings, even as it also reassures us that aura never really disappears.

Perhaps alchemy has given way to channeling, and we are all now constituted, critically, by that double sense of the medium, as technologies and as psychics. Perhaps...