约翰·格雷评《本雅明传》

2013，Literary Review

JOHN GRAY

Last of the Haute Bourgeoisie

Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life

By Howard Eiland & Michael W Jennings

(Harvard University Press/The Belknap Pres 704pp £25)

A letter describing Walter Benjamin as he appeared in the early months of 1938, when he was living in Paris, captures something essential about the German- Jewish critic and philosopher:

He had nothing of the bohemian about him. In those days, he had a pot belly that protruded slightly. He usually wore an old, halfway sporty tweed jacket with a bourgeois cut, a dark or colored shirt, and grey flannel trousers. I don't believe I ever saw him without a tie.

Benjamin led a precarious and nomadic life, moving from place to place, at times close to penury. His chronic shortage of money was aggravated by a gambling addiction - his family believed he lost large sums at the roulette tables - and spells of paralyzing depression during which he was unable to work.

The larger explanation for Benjamin's displacement was that his class had been ruined in the chaos that had swept through Europe after the First World War. Coming from a thoroughly assimilated family of the Berlin haute bourgeoisie, he suffered the fate of an entire generation of central European intellectuals: the world into which he had been born had largely disappeared, while the rise of Nazism posed a mortal threat to what remained of it. A paucity of publishing venues and repeated failure in securing an academic post left him without a foothold in society. Yet he never ceased to be loyal to the values of the high bourgeois civilization that was passing away, and devoted a large part of his energy to examining how it was that they were in a state of seemingly terminal decline. As Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings put it, in a forceful summary of the impulses animating Benjamin's work, he 'analyzed the conditions threatening the existence of the very cultural type he embodied'.

Benjamin is often bracketed with the Frankfurt School of Marxism, but while he knew most of its leading members well and was helped in his struggles by some of them, his own thought was more fluid and less oriented towards any political objective. The authors comment that the intense political activity of his early university years, when he joined and promoted various youth movements, 'constitutes an absolute exception in Benjamin' pattern of social behavior'. In fact Benjamin never had anything that could be described as a definite political position. Certainly he was on the Left, but his enthusiasm for the Soviet experiment evaporated with Trotsky's emigration.

Eiland and Jennings suggest that Benjamin's stance towards the world had as much in common 'with the salutary moral skepticism of a long line of bourgeois literati from Goethe to Gottfried Keller' as it did with the proletarian causes affected by his friend Brecht. I would go further and suggest that the fate of this bourgeois tradition was Benjamin's chief concern. Like many in his time he turned to communism in the belief that it could renew the civilization that the European bourgeoisie had embodied at its best. It was a costly illusion, as he seems to have realized. No one can know for sure, but the growing interest he displayed in Jewish mysticism may have been an implicit recognition that any political hopes he might have harbored were vain. In many ways he had closer affinities with Kafka than with Brecht or any of the Frankfurt School.

The part of Benjamin's work that has had most resonance is his analysis of the impact of modern technology on the nature of culture. In his essay 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility', a version of which was published in 1936 but which he continued to work on into the spring of1939, he argued that the mechanical reproduction of works undermines their authenticity, which derives from their situation in a particular place and time. His analysis has been vastly influential, particularly in writing on film. Most have read it as an attempt at a materialist theory of culture in the Marxian sense, which is how he himself seems to have begun it. But here again other influences are at least as important. There can be no doubt that much of Benjamin's inspiration carne from neo-Romantic German thinkers - such as Ludwig Klages (1872-1956), from whom he derived the idea that works of art have an 'aura' - a quality of uniqueness that Benjamin believed is lost when art becomes an object of mass production.

How well Benjamin's theories have fared an open question. The cultural transformation that is taking place as a result of the internet goes beyond anything he could have imagined, and it is not obvious that ideas rooted in 19th-century German Romanticism have much leverage today. A more valuable legacy may be his use of the Denkbild, or 'figure of thought', which Eiland and Jennings characterize as a type of prose without discursive argumentation in which 'observations and reflections are presented in paragraph-length clusters of thought revolving around a central idea'. In writing in this way Benjamin was influenced by the German aphorist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-99) and by Nietzsche, both great prose stylists. Benjamin's choice of this way of writing reflected his rejection of the idea that truth can be captured in any system of ideas - one of the most attractive features of his work. His prose style also expressed his resistance to the standardization of intellectual life, which he feared as part of the industrialization of culture. Ironically, in a development that would not have surprised Benjamin, his critical writings have been absorbed into the academic culture industry, becoming objects of mass production and consumption of the kind he warned against.

Presented here in what looks like a definitive version, Benjamin's life emerges as a tragedy of incompleteness. If he had survived he would surely have applied his prodigiously fertile mind to the world that developed after the defeat of Nazism. As it was, his thinking was cut short. Released from a French internment camp, Benjamin travelled in September 1940 to a village on the Spanish border. Having managed to acquire an entry visa to the United States but denied an exit visa by the French authorities, he hoped to cross into Spain via a mountain path and then make his way to America. With a small group of fellow refugees and a guide, he reached the Spanish fishing village that was his immediate destination only to find that the Spanish authorities had closed the border to illegal refugees such as himself When one of his fellow refugees said they had no alternative but to go back and face reinternment, Benjamin replied that there was an alternative for him. Using a supply of morphine he carried with him, he ended his life. The day after his suicide the border was opened. An inventory of his belongings, found many years later listed in the municipal records as the property of 'Dr Benjamin Walter', listed a black leather case, a watch, a pipe, some photographs, a pair of glasses, some letters and a small amount of money. There was no record of a manuscript he said he was carrying in the case which he had described as ‘more important as I am'.