I want to
begin with a remark recently made by Fredric Jameson:
we
may pause to observe the way in which so much of left politics today – unlike
Marx’s own passionate commitment to a streamlined technological future – seems
to have adopted as its slogan Benjamin’s odd idea that revolution means
pulling the emergency brake on the runaway train of History, as though an
admittedly runaway capitalism itself had the monopoly on change and futurity.
(2011: 150)
This is, of
course, a reference to a remark by Benjamin in the ‘Paralipomena to “On the
Concept of History”’ (1940):
Marx
says that revolutions are the locomotive of world history. But perhaps it is
quite otherwise. Perhaps revolutions are an attempt by the passengers on this
train – namely, the human race – to activate the emergency brake. (Benjamin 2003:
402)
For
Jameson, obviously, this conception is an ‘odd idea’ because it is a failure to
measure up to Marx’s own embrace of capitalism, and capitalist production, as
the condition of revolutionary change; as Marx puts it: ‘if we did not find
concealed in society as it is the material conditions of production and the
corresponding relations of exchange prerequisite for a classless society, then
all attempts to explode it would be quixotic.’ (Grundrisse) Jameson’s implication is that by giving capitalism a
monopoly on the future we lose, in advance, any alternative ‘utopian’ vision of
free production. The result is that we then embrace the past as shelter – if
not feudal socialism, then perhaps feudal Keynesianism.
Obviously, one immediate rejoinder
to Jameson is the explicit context of Benjamin’s ‘odd idea’. This is the
critique of German Social Democracy, especially in Thesis XI of ‘On the Concept
of History’, where it is remarked that ‘[n]othing has so corrupted the German
working class as the notion that it was moving with the current’ (2003: 393).
The conformity of Social Democracy to the ideology of progress, and not least
technological progress, meant that it was unable to grasp the dynamic of
fascism and unable to critique capitalism effectively. The detachment of Social
Democracy from recognising the destructive side of technology, was, as Benjamin
argued in the essay ‘Edward Fuchs, Collector and Historian’ (1937) (2003: 349−386), due to an alienation from the
destructive side of the dialectic (2003: 358). The ‘movement with the current’
is a movement that replicates the faith in the productive forces, while denying
that these are also destructive forces.
The reply to Jameson might be, to borrow another familiar image from the
theses, that stopping the clock is not
turning back the clock.
Here I want to place Benjamin’s
thought-image in a deeper context of the thinking of temporality and
interruption that can be traced across his work. My account is by no means
exhaustive, but rather selects and traces certain moments of interruption
across his corpus. I want to suggest that Jameson’s style of critique misfires,
as Benjamin’s thinking of interruption engages with ‘material conditions’ to
explode them, in a way which does not replicate capitalist dynamics of
production. These forms of interruption certainly modulate across Benjamin’s
thinking, but they suggest an engagement with the present, rather than the
‘nostalgic’ image that Jameson portrays – Benjamin as historian of destruction,
or the ‘Sebald option’. In this conception only one side of Benjamin’s
conception of history remains, that of it as the ‘negative totality’ of
catastrophe, as the ‘pile of wreckage’ (McGettigan 2009: 26). I want to probe
another side – a critical politics of temporality (McGettigan 2009).
Benjamin’s
modelling and critique of the temporal forms of progress was present, as
Michael Löwy notes, in Benjamin’s early essay ‘The Life of Students’ (1914).
There Benjamin wrote:
There
is a view of history that puts its faith in the infinite extent of time and
this concerns itself only with the speed, or lack of it, with which people and
epochs advance along the path [or, we could add rails] of progress. (in Löwy,
2005: 6)
From
the very beginning Benjamin ‘tracks’ [forgive the pun] a critical politics of
temporality that stands against the unfolding or advancement of progress that
is premised on infinite extension.
This ‘infinite extension’ has to be,
in the early work, interrupted or disrupted by a thinking of the ‘absolute’. In
these early texts, as Howard Caygill has indicated (Caygill 1998), Benjamin
takes-up a thinking of the ‘absolute’ within and against the neo-Kantian
moment. Tracking Kant’s strictures on the conditions of experience, Benjamin
also pushes at the limits of Kant to consider an absolutisation of experience.
This is not a ‘pure’ absolute, so
preformed ‘interruption’, but a critical method that entails a task and
intervention. To return to ‘The Life of Students’, Benjamin writes:
The
elements of the final state are not evidently present as formless progressive
tendencies, but are deeply embedded in every present moment as the most
vulnerable, deformed, ridiculed creations and thoughts. To shape the immanent
state of perfection clearly as absolute, to make it visible and dominant in the
present, is the historical task. (Benjamin in Caygill 1998: 8)
We could
consider this, anachronistically and problematically, as a rewriting of Marx’s
contention that we have to find concealed in society the material conditions to
explode it. In this case, the ‘explosion’ is one that operates by reading the ‘absolute’
in terms of ‘the warps, distortions and exclusions of bereft experience’
(Caygill 1998: 25). We find our ‘conditions’ not in the acceleration of
productive forces, fettered by the relations of production, but in the ‘most
vulnerable, deformed, ridiculed creations and thoughts’. This is a
‘metaphysical structure’, at once messianic and revolutionary.
Andrew McGettigan points out, in
regards to this programme of instantiating the absolute, that: ‘Its abandoning
coincides with Benjamin’s first reading of Marx around 1924. If we turn to the work
of the 1930s, we can see that several consistent themes – interruption,
suspension, caesura – continue into the later work’ (2009: 27). This is true of
the key example of Benjamin’s ‘Brechtiania’ (Gough 2002: 58): ‘The Author as
Producer’ [Der Autour als Produzent]
(1934) (Benjamin 1999: 768−782). It is this essay that Gershom Scholem refers
to, probably snidely, as ‘an apex of [Benjamin’s] materialistic efforts’ (2003:
253). For Benjamin the ‘refunctioning’ of literature is a result of new
technologies producing a ‘molten mass from which the new forms are cast.’
(1999: 776) Again, the process of destruction of old forms is the condition for
the new, which has to traverse this ‘melting-down process’ (1999: 776).
Benjamin stresses the necessity of ‘an organizing function’ of this
destruction.
He takes Brecht’s Epic Theatre as a
model for this organization, but one which operates through interruption: ‘[y]et interruption here
has the character not of a stimulant, but of an organizing function.’ (1999:
778) Samuel Weber has drawn attention to how this function of interruption,
which Benjamin works-through with Brecht, releases the possibility of
citability (2002: 31). It makes available new material to be organized in a new
fashion. Interruption is ‘the mother of dialectics’, in Benjamin’s formulation
(Weber 2002: 31). Andrew McGettigan remarks that: ‘Benjamin’s approach to
historiography should not be understood separated from the outline of the operative
writer’s activity in ‘The Author as Producer’. (2009: 32) What I would like
to suggest is that this ‘activity’ is one of organized interruption, which
reflects a disruption of capitalist temporality. What Benjamin will call, in
the ‘Surrealism’ essay, after Pierre Naville, ‘the organization of pessimism’
(1979: 237).
‘Angelic Locomotives’
In his essay
on Benjamin’s radio broadcasts for children Jeffrey Mehlman draws attention to
Benjamin’s 1932 talk: ‘The Railway Disaster at the Firth of Tay’ (‘Die
Eisenbahnkatastrophe vom Firth of Tay’) (Melhman 1993: 11−14; Benjamin 1999:
563−568). As the title suggests the central subject of the essay is the railway
disaster of 28 December 1879, when a passenger train of six carriages and two
hundred people was lost after plunging into the Tay, when the iron bridge it
was passing over collapsed during a fierce storm. Benjamin does not begin with
the disaster, but rather with the early technologies of iron working and train
construction and with what he calls, in the essay on Eduard Fuchs, the ‘defective
reception of technology’ (Benjamin 1979: 358). This ‘defective reception’
turns, in part, on acceleration, with the medical faculty at Erlangen
suggesting that the speed of rail travel would lead to cerebral lesions, while
an English expert suggested that moving by train is not travel but simply being
dispatched to a destination like a package (Benjamin 1999: 565). Perhaps
neither could foresee the current British train system…
In terms of describing the disaster
itself Benjamin quotes from a poem by Theodor Fontane, not the renowned poem by
William Topaz McGonagall – renowned for being terrible.[1]
Benjamin reports how when the accident occurred the storm was raging so
severely that it was not evident what had happened. The only sign were flames
seen by fishermen, who did not realise this was the result of the locomotive
plunging into the water (Benjamin 1999: 567). They did alert the stationmaster
at Tay, who sent another locomotive along the line. The train was inched onto
the bridge and had to be stopped a kilometre out, before reaching the first
central pier, with a violent application of the brakes that nearly led to the
train jumping from the tracks: ‘The moonlight had enabled him to see a gaping
hole in the line. The central section of the bridge was gone.’ (Benjamin 1993:
567)
Jeffrey Mehlman parses this talk on
catastrophe as part of Benjamin’s reflection on a gap or rift in communication
(1993: 14). What interests me is the use of the brake as interruption. While
one catastrophe has already occurred, in which 200 people have lost their
lives, the act of braking prevents, although only barely, a second catastrophe.
It is not a great stretch to consider this as prefigurative of Benjamin’s ‘emergency
brake’ (2003: 402).
Also, we can place this
consideration of the locomotive, speed, and the malignancy of technology, alongside
Benjamin’s remark in the essay on ‘Eduard Fuchs’ that:
The
disciples of Saint-Simon started the ball rolling with their industrial poetry;
then came the realism of a Du Camp, who saw the locomotive as the saint of the
future; and a Ludwig Pfau brought up the rear: ‘It is quite unnecessary to
become an angel’, he wrote, ‘since the locomotive is worth more than the finest
pair of wings.’ (1979: 358)
We have here
a counterpart (and opposite) to the Angelus
Novus of ‘On the Concept of History’ (1940), which is turned to the past,
with the ‘angelic locomotive’ that races forward into the future.
The ‘Angelic Locomotive’ is the sign
of acceleration to the point that indicates that the ‘energies that technology
develops beyond their threshold are destructive.’ (Benjamin 1979: 358)
Destruction here is the technology of capitalism that is pushed beyond the
threshold. I am suggesting that Benjamin’s dialectical thought-image of the
locomotive interweaves destruction and production, and the necessity of interruption.
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In his essay ‘Surrealism: The Last
Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia’ (1929) Benjamin criticises the
surrealists ‘overheated embrace of the uncomprehended miracle of machines’,
which can be found wanting in comparison to ‘the well-ventilated utopias of a
Scheerbart.’ (1979: 232) I would suggest that we see this, again, as a reminder
that we not simply embrace the accelerative and ‘overheated’ function of
technology. In fact, earlier in that ‘Surrealism’ essay Benjamin remarks of the
surrealists that: ‘No one before these visionaries and augurs perceived how
destitution – not only social but architectonic, the poverty of interiors,
enslaved and enslaving objects – can be suddenly transformed into revolutionary
nihilism.’ (1979: 229) This suggests another instantiation of the earlier
project in which the absolute is found in ‘the most vulnerable, deformed,
ridiculed creations and thoughts’. The surrealists proffer a ‘method of
nihilism’ that can traverse the destitution of the present to a dis-placement (ent-setzt) that is not subordinate to
the ends of accumulation (Gess 2010; 688), a ‘constructive destruction’ (Gess
2010: 706) that, in Gess’s words, ‘presum[es] great intimacy with the things it
takes apart.’ (2010: 706)
Revolutions per minute
To conclude
I now want to return to the remark by Benjamin that ‘Perhaps revolutions are an
attempt by the passengers on this train – namely, the human race – to activate
the emergency brake.’ (Benjamin 2003: 402) I have suggested that this remark be
not only read as a critique of German Social Democracy, or as a critique of
Benjamin’s own ‘productivist’ moment,[2]
but also as a politics of temporality. Rather than read teleologically towards
the emergency brake as the ‘final moment’ or ‘fulfilment’ of Benjamin’s work,
his (literal) ‘last word’, I want to suggest that reading across these moments
complicates our understanding. In rejection of Jameson’s claim that Benjamin’s
remark is an ‘odd idea’, even an example of the ‘left-wing melancholia’
Benjamin himself derided in a 1931 essay (Benjamin 1999: 423−427), I think we can find a politics
of temporality that is, precisely, engaged in reworking or retooling. Benjamin
has not given up all hope in any political change, pace Scholem, but continues
to think the conditions and possibilities of that change.
If we read this remark in the
context I have elaborated we could also argue that the revolutionary locomotive
of Marx is paired by Benjamin with the ‘angelic locomotive’ of capitalist
productivity that has gone off the rails. In this case we have the pairing of a
critique of capitalist and Stalinist politics of production and
accelerationism. The implication is that without attention to destruction we
can only have a malignant politics of acceleration, rather than grasping the
necessity of the brake as the means to refunction production. In Michael Löwy’s
words:
The
image suggests implicitly that if humanity were to allow the train to follow
its course – already mapped out by the steel structure of the rails – and if
nothing halted its headlong dash, we would be heading straight for disaster,
for a crash or a plunge into the abyss. (2005: 67)
Or, we could
add, into the Tay.
Benjamin’s registering of
destruction, and its equivocation, suggests exactly that heterogeneity of time
that will find its formulation in ‘On the Concept of History’ (1940).
Homogenous empty time is the time of the train on the tracks, which can speed
up and slow down. The emergency brake of Benjamin’s metaphor for revolution is
not simply the stopping of a train on the smooth tracks of progress. Rather, as
with the metaphor of the angel of history, it suggests that the train tracks
into the future are being laid immediately in front of the train. In fact, the
anecdote of the Tay Bridge disaster suggests that the emergency brake is applied
precisely due to the derailing of the
train, and threatens another catastrophic derailing. The ‘rails’ of history
accelerate us to disaster if we are not aware of the destructive side of the
dialectic of production.
The irony, as Benjamin’s notes make
clear, is that the desire for acceleration on the tracks of history breeds
passivity before the productive forces:
Once
the classless society had been defined as an infinite task, the empty and
homogeneous time was transformed into an anteroom, so to speak, in which one
could wait for the emergence of the revolutionary situation with more or less
equanimity. (Benjamin 2003: 402)
Linking this
with the neo-Kantian deviation from Marxism, the idea of the tracks stretching
into the future leaves revolution as a receding moment – the station we never
quite arrive in. The result, contra to the revolutionary intervention, it is
the constant stoking of the train, i.e. the capitalist productive forces. In
this way ‘accelerationism’, as I’ve called it (Noys 2010: 4−9), either tries to
actively increase the speed of capital, or simply becomes the passenger on the
train, allowing the constant destruction of living labour at the hands of dead
labour to do the work.
The conclusion is that the emergency
brake is not merely calling to a halt for the sake of it, some static stopping
at a particular point in capitalist history (say Swedish Social Democracy –
which the American Republican Right now takes as the true horror of
‘socialism’). Neither is it a return back to some utopian pre-capitalist
moment, which would fall foul of Marx and Engels’s anathemas against ‘feudal
socialism’. Rather, Benjamin argues that: ‘Classless society is not the final
goal of historical progress but its frequently miscarried, ultimately [endlich] achieved interruption.’
(Benjamin 2003: 402) We interrupt to prevent catastrophe, we destroy the tracks
to prevent the greater destruction of acceleration.
In this sense the emergency brake is
the operator of Benjamin’s non-teleological politics of temporality predicated
on the wresting away of the classless society from the continuing dialectic of
production/destruction that is the constant ‘state of emergency’ (Benjamin
2003: 392).
Rather than acceleration into
destruction, we find the detachment of destruction into an integral ‘intimacy’
with things that it destroys. This is supposed by the surrealism essay’s
argument that the ‘organization of pessimism’ requires the removal of moral
metaphor and the grasping of the image within, 100% within, the image sphere
(Benjamin 1979: 238). In this case action ‘puts forth its own image’ (Benjamin
1979: 239), without external reference. If then we read Benjamin’s ‘method
called nihilism’ in terms of what I am calling the ‘organization of
destruction’ we can argue that interruption and detachment from the temporality
of acceleration is required to find a real ‘variable and non-positing’
construction. This would be an ‘intimate’ production, a production that ‘puts
forth its own image’, and insubordinate production not coordinate to ends.
Although ‘On the Concept of
History’, as Andrew McGettigan points out (2009: 26-7), involves a correction
of Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire, we
could say it could be brought into agreement with a later central contrast of
the essay. Marx remarks that:
Bourgeois
revolutions, like those of the eighteenth century, storm more swiftly from
success to success, their dramatic effects outdo each other, men and things
seem set in sparkling diamonds, ecstasy is the order of the day – but they are
short-lived, soon they have reached their zenith, and a long Katzenjammer takes hold of society
before it learns to assimilate the results of its storm-and-stress period
soberly. On the other hand, proletarian revolutions, like those of the
nineteenth century, constantly criticize themselves, constantly interrupt themselves in their own course, return to the
apparently accomplished, in order to begin anew; they deride with cruel
thoroughness the half-measures, weaknesses, and paltriness of their first attempts,
seem to throw down their opponents only so the latter may draw new strength
from the earth and rise before them again more gigantic than ever, recoil
constantly from the indefinite colossalness of their own goals – until a
situation is created which makes all turning back impossible, and the
conditions themselves call out:
Hic
Rhodus, hic salta!
[Here
is the rose, here dance!]
(my
italics)
While not
hoping to add to the potential for ‘misinterpretation’ Benjamin noted, hence
leaving the essay unpublished, I do want to suggest that something of the
‘interruption’ speaks to Marx’s notion, even in it would problematise the claim
to ‘growth’ in certain forms.
Of course, whether this enough to
cope with the capacity of capital to ‘posit its presuppositions’, even, or
sometimes especially, on destruction, remains in question. The resistance of
‘variability’ has no a priori
guarantee to produce the truly new. Therefore, we can consider the emergence of
production as a series of experiments that have ‘frequently miscarried’, and
which require an ‘ultimately [endlich]
achieved interruption’ as their real condition.
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