File spoon-archives/seminar-11.archive/benjamin_1999/seminar-11.9910, message 11


Date: Tue, 12 Oct 1999 12:15:15 -0400
From: Ralph Dumain <rdumain-AT-igc.org>
Subject: Re: Division of labour


I'm a bit confused.  Benjamin's speech was delivered in 1934.  Was Sergei
Tretiakov part of the Russian avant-garde?  Were avant-garde artists still
tolerated in 1934?  As you know, Soviet culture as well as politics changed
drastically between 1926 and 1934, and even well-established avant-gardists
were intimidated into submission into the Stalinist aesthetic.  Benjamin
paints this Tretiakov as one of these boy-meets-tractor literary types.
Later on, Benjamin cites the surrealist Aragon, another capitulator to
Stalinism (though I can't remember the exact date of his conversion).  An
editor's note says that Benjamin dropped a reference to Trotsky: gee, I
wonder why.  There's something about the tone of this essay I find most
distasteful.

It also seems to me that this speech is too sketchy to be a thorough
working out of a Marxist aesthetic.  Yes, Benjamin does have some
intriguing ideas, apparently borrowed from Brecht, but how does one extract
a fully elaborated philosophy from this little speech?  Obviously I'm too
stupid to get it, just as I didn't get the earth-shaking import of
"Mechanical Reproduction" or the "Theses on History".

As I said, Benjamin does have some interesting things to say.  He makes a
clever attempt to circumvent the problem of the reduction of art to
propaganda by making the arresting point that even protest literature
becomes an acceptable commodity like any other.  So he wishes to deal with
the conditions of production of literary texts: very clever, but not
completely convincing.

This question of overcoming the division of labor is of great interest to
me, but I'm also wary of shortcuts and cheap gimmicks that cannot deliver
on their promises.  There's something about Benjamin that disturbs me: his
pejorative remarks about masterpieces in this essay reminds me of his
remarks about "aura" (which I still don't really understand) from the
mechanical reproduction essay--there seems to be a desire to humliate the
autonomous artist, to bring him down from the clouds to earth by squashing
his face in the mud.  I'm not sure this is the way to overcome the division
of labor.  I find this very suspect.

I'm aware that Brecht caught a lot of grief from the East German regime,
and that his aesthetic was too sophisticated for Stalinist bureaucrats to
accept.  But here I also beg to differ from received wisdom.  I could be
cracy.  Maybe I'm the only one who thnks this way.  But the truth is that
of all the Brecht plays I've seen--only a small percentage of them, to be
sure--I've profoundly disliked each and every one.  I still remember very
well seeing THE MEASURES TAKEN, which Eric Bentley staged in Buffalo two
decades ago.  I found this play thoroughly loathsome, Stalinist to the
core.  I also detested the THREEPENNY OPERA, GALILEO .... what else?  I
liked the middle part of THE CAUCASIAN CHALK CIRCLE, though it was framed
by detestable pro-Soviet propaganda.  Perhaps the profoundly cynical meat
of the story shows Brecht's true feelings, which he buried under his own
propaganda.  But I've consistently found myself put off by Brecht.  Masybe
this is because I don't believe in the martyrdom of the individual in favor
of the collective.

At 10:11 AM 10/12/99 +0000, L Spencer wrote:
>Ralph Dumain's remarks on "The Author as Producer" go very wide of 
>the mark. The Russian model for Benjamin's reflections is, of course, 
>that provided by the avant-garde. Benjamin visited Moscow in Winter 
>1926 and saw things from close at hand (despite lacking any Russian). 
> 
>Of all WB's "The Author as Producer" is probably the most thorough 
>working out of a Marxist aesthetic. Benjamin wrote the piece to 
>present at a lecture hosted by an anti-fascist grouping (in other 
>words a CP front grouping). Its outlook is clearly very close to 
>positions of Bert Brecht, one of Benjamin's closest associates in his 
>exile. It would be equally careless and misleading to call Brecht a 
>"stalinist".



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