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Happy birthday, Walter Benjamin
Jul. 15th, 2013 10:09 amWe live in a painfully simple-minded era, in the midst of one of the most complex social and environmental transformations in human history. (I do not say "the most complex," for none of us can really know the full dimensions of past planetary upheavals...including parallel transformations that were taking place independently on opposite sides of the planet.) Not only are our passionately held simplicities destroying the lives, literally, of millions of human beings of all levels of income and education, they are rendering the economically fortunate more unhappy than they need to be—it is astonishing how, over the course of history, so very few human beings have ever achieved a combination of material comfort and emotional stability. The intellectual tools with which contemporary theorists ponder all this are frequently infected with category mistakes that the great thinkers of both the Left and the Right pointed out long ago and condemned unequivocally.
But let that pass. We are here, because I woke up this morning and decided we should be, to reflect briefly upon the abbreviated careers of two men who were anything but simple-minded, and in fact wrote things about networks, process, fluidity, and the doubtful pitfalls of the quest for social justice and personal happiness that were many decades ahead of their time. In spite of this, I have been wondering whether it is no longer productive to try to tease out and translate for our times the useful insights of thinkers who lived in such distinctively distorting historical contexts, contexts that we in turn have mythologized in ways of which they would not approve.
I had forgotten that Antonio Gramsci was in fact "sentenced to twenty years of boredom for trying to change the system from within," to quote the opening lines of Leonard Cohen's song "First We Take Manhattan." Twenty years and eight days, actually, a time in which he was given an unlimited bookshop account for special-ordering, thanks to a friend who had just accepted a teaching post in Cambridge. It is one of the many reasons Gramsci could ponder how a social institution could get people to accept conditions that were far from being in their best interests, without resorting to crude methods of violent repression. (Gramsci was an elected member of parliament who was arrested for representing a political party that had not been illegal at the time of his election, but the Italian state then felt compelled to allow him his rights otherwise to the point of giving him meticulous medical care after placing him in insalubrious conditions of confinement, and it released him unconditionally two days before he died of an unexpected cerebral hemorrage at age forty-six. Contrast his fragmentary writings on an incredible variety of political, economic and cultural topics with those of Walter Benjamin, which are fragmentary because he wrote so many of them to earn money, and couldn't ever get his act together even when he had the leisure time to embark on systematic projects. Benjamin died at roughly the same age as Gramsci, about three years after Gramsci's death, because he had been hauling a heavy suitcase over the Pyrenees one step ahead of the Gestapo, and either committed suicide or suffered a heart attack. National Socialism favored less roundabout methods of neutralizing its opponents.)
Anyway, as I was saying, I question whether it is useful to cherry-pick piquant quotations from Gramsci or Benjamin in order to buttress tendentious arguments that frequently have nothing to do with their thought and that quite often reflect simple-minded approaches that they would have disliked had they known of them. Part of my agenda in the original joculum journal was to try to compose a different way of putting the pieces together, starting from what is known today about networks, flows, power relations, and the environmental-biological forces that affect all of them; all the while keeping aware of contemporary discourse without feeling obligated to make obeisance to the decade's dominant academic methodologies.
This would still end up being a half-baked approach to the problems of the twenty-first century, but hopefully it would be an approach that acknowledged its own half-bakedness, and the half-bakedness of all approaches that aren't completely raw without having the nutritional benefits of raw foods.
I don't think I got very far with the project, but at least I outlined it.
But let that pass. We are here, because I woke up this morning and decided we should be, to reflect briefly upon the abbreviated careers of two men who were anything but simple-minded, and in fact wrote things about networks, process, fluidity, and the doubtful pitfalls of the quest for social justice and personal happiness that were many decades ahead of their time. In spite of this, I have been wondering whether it is no longer productive to try to tease out and translate for our times the useful insights of thinkers who lived in such distinctively distorting historical contexts, contexts that we in turn have mythologized in ways of which they would not approve.
I had forgotten that Antonio Gramsci was in fact "sentenced to twenty years of boredom for trying to change the system from within," to quote the opening lines of Leonard Cohen's song "First We Take Manhattan." Twenty years and eight days, actually, a time in which he was given an unlimited bookshop account for special-ordering, thanks to a friend who had just accepted a teaching post in Cambridge. It is one of the many reasons Gramsci could ponder how a social institution could get people to accept conditions that were far from being in their best interests, without resorting to crude methods of violent repression. (Gramsci was an elected member of parliament who was arrested for representing a political party that had not been illegal at the time of his election, but the Italian state then felt compelled to allow him his rights otherwise to the point of giving him meticulous medical care after placing him in insalubrious conditions of confinement, and it released him unconditionally two days before he died of an unexpected cerebral hemorrage at age forty-six. Contrast his fragmentary writings on an incredible variety of political, economic and cultural topics with those of Walter Benjamin, which are fragmentary because he wrote so many of them to earn money, and couldn't ever get his act together even when he had the leisure time to embark on systematic projects. Benjamin died at roughly the same age as Gramsci, about three years after Gramsci's death, because he had been hauling a heavy suitcase over the Pyrenees one step ahead of the Gestapo, and either committed suicide or suffered a heart attack. National Socialism favored less roundabout methods of neutralizing its opponents.)
Anyway, as I was saying, I question whether it is useful to cherry-pick piquant quotations from Gramsci or Benjamin in order to buttress tendentious arguments that frequently have nothing to do with their thought and that quite often reflect simple-minded approaches that they would have disliked had they known of them. Part of my agenda in the original joculum journal was to try to compose a different way of putting the pieces together, starting from what is known today about networks, flows, power relations, and the environmental-biological forces that affect all of them; all the while keeping aware of contemporary discourse without feeling obligated to make obeisance to the decade's dominant academic methodologies.
This would still end up being a half-baked approach to the problems of the twenty-first century, but hopefully it would be an approach that acknowledged its own half-bakedness, and the half-bakedness of all approaches that aren't completely raw without having the nutritional benefits of raw foods.
I don't think I got very far with the project, but at least I outlined it.
