Date: Sun, 20 Feb 2000 23:43:00 +0000
Subject: Re: Benjamin's Intensive Method
From: Giles Peaker <G.Peaker-AT-derby.ac.uk>


Ralph Dumain wrote:

> So is the letter to Rang the very same I quoted from Wolin's book?
> 
> As usual, I don't fully understand the responses.  Let me (re)iterate the
> two apsects of the passage I cited of interest to me:
> 
> (1) From a history of art and history of philosophy perspective: taxonomy,
> periodizing, writing chronologies, etc., creates more or less plausible
> and/or valid structures of historical influence and causality, though what
> can be overlooked are the discontinuities in the developments of different
> thought-systems or oeuvres (in the case of the creative arts).  You may
> remember my comments on the Frankfurt list on Kracauer's notion of
> non-simultaneity, or, perhaps further bacj on the spoons Marxism lists, my
> references to the historical process in philosophy as treated by Jonathan
> Ree in PHILOSOPHY AND ITS PAST, T.I. Oizerman, etc.  This is looking at
> the
> issue from the point of view of historical causality as interrupted by
> originality.  It could be looked at from the point of view of comparison
> of
> systems in their internal structures rather than their historical
> linkages:
> now is this what Benjamin means by intensive analysis?

Up to a point, yes. There are several issues here. Certainly WB's approach
is directed against any assumption of a smooth line of historical descent
(or ascent), even in the early writings. Yet this is not just a question of
emphasising discontinuity, nor of highlighting 'breaks'. There is instead an
odd combination of ahistoricity and historical specificity, e.g. the link
drawn between Expressionism and Baroque Trauerspiel in the prologue to the
Ursprung des Deutsche Trauerspiels. The two have a connection, although not
one of descent, rather it is one of expression, in artistic form, of a
social situation or experience. WB draws similar links to Baudelaire through
allegory. Hence the use of 'Origin' not as foundation or originary, but
rather as something persistent or reoccuring - although not in exactly the
same way. So your suggestion of comparison through 'internal structures'
strikes me as more or less right. What is also clear is WB's preference for
times that were not capable of 'the well made work', times that were in the
casual art historical parlance of his time seen as periods of 'decadence'.
Witness his prefence for the 'marginal' or the 'offensive'. In part this is
because such works exceed any current lineage - or offend against it - so
that one will not be dazzled by the glimmer (schein) of beauty.

An intensive, immanent, analysis of a work will open up, for the later WB,
far greater truths about the time of its making, and possibly the present,
than any 'lineage', which can only foreground the shared delusions of 'the
victors'.

> (2) There are some other places in Benjamin (can't remember where) where
> the work of art is viewed not only as a product of history but as opening
> into eternity, i.e. not merely a product of history but something else as
> well, perhaps interpretable in a divine sense, as one way of labelling the
> transhistorical or transcendent.  Does intensive analysis have anything to
> do with this perspective?

Yes, although for the later Benjamin, pretty much only in a negative sense.
As I suggested above, there is something ahistorical about his analyses, for
all their concrete detail - a spatialising of history. The apparent
Neo-Platonism of the Trauerspiel book by and large gives way to a more
negative position (although I see the end of the Trauerspiel book as
enacting just such a negative conclusion). The 'Divine' comes to occupy a
difficult place - as possibility, but the negation of any concrete or
immediate possibility. One might perhaps say possibility without content
(e.g. the Sorel influenced essay on the General Strike). Having claimed
that, of course some texts say something very different. Still, I think
that, on the whole, WB's approach to the work of art is bound to its
inability or refusal to fit 'History' as she is wrote. Even when he
approaches canonical works, he does so via their uncanonicity and, in one
sense, their destitution. I could well be wrong here, but what matters is
what WB calls the 'truth content' of the work of art - as distinct from its
'material content'.

I'm sorry if this doesn't clarify things and it certainly begs some
questions, but hell - one post cannot explain a complex, if sometimes
annoying, thinker.

Yours

Giles