‘The whole world shrinks to a single Sunday afternoon’: Spatio-temporality and the travel writing of Walter Benjamin

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‘The whole world shrinks to a single Sunday afternoon’:

Spatio-temporality and the travel writing of Walter Benjamin

MA Thesis in European Studies Graduate School for Humanities Universiteit van Amsterdam

Jack David Sargeant 11315547

Main supervisor: Dr. A.J. Drace-Francis Second supervisor: Dr. Y. Rodríguez Pérez

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‘If you have a good theory, forget about the reality.’ — Slavoj Žižek

‘Notre monde, comme un ossuaire, est couvert des détritus d'époques mortes.’ — Le Corbusier

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Abstract

This thesis consists of a close reading of a selection of travel texts written by Walter Benjamin and published in a variety of periodicals between 1925 and 1932. Through an analysis of these texts in conjunction with a selection of spatio-temporal and travel writing theories, it seeks to draw out the literary construction and philosophical implications of a deceptively simplistic collection of writings – works that have, thus far, received relatively little scholarly attention. It contends that we can see in these travel texts many of the ideas that appear in Benjamin’s canonical works, including notions of observation-as-method; the epistemological importance of the image; the ontological dimensions of memory; the relationship between time and history; and, above all else, that of modernity as catastrophe.

Key words: Walter Benjamin; spatio-temporality; travel writing; modernity; memory; historicity; Marxism

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Preface

My initial thanks must go to Dr. Alex Drace-Francis for his enthusiasm and encouragement in the supervision of this thesis. I owe apologies and gratitude to those subjected to unsolicited theoretical perambulations in the course of its writing (and who occasionally picked up the tab): MDC and JV were especially charitable with time, patience, and biertjes. The thesis itself was, alas, written entirely sober, though I had no problems following Benjamin’s first rule of writing: ‘Anyone intending to embark on a major work should be lenient with themselves and, having completed a stint, deny themselves nothing that will not prejudice the next.’ Heartening advice indeed. Finally, the city of Amsterdam has provided an ever-interesting backdrop for the year of my Master’s studies, and after reading Benjamin’s travel texts I can’t help but wonder what he’d have made of the city: labyrinthine and porous, yet long since established as a centre of capitalism and modernity. An interesting contradiction with which he’d have had to grapple.

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List of abbreviations

AP W. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. by H. Eiland and K. McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002) BC W. Benjamin, Berlin Childhood around 1900, trans. by H. Eiland

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).

Hashish W. Benjamin, ‘Hashish in Marseilles’, trans. by E. Jephcott in M.W. Jennings, H. Eiland and G. Smith (eds.), Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Volume 2, Part 2, 1931-1934 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), pp. 673-9.

Ibiza W. Benjamin, ‘Ibizan Sequence’, trans. by R. Livingstone in M.W. Jennings, H. Eiland and G. Smith (eds.), Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Volume 2, Part 2, 1931-1934 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), pp. 587-94.

Marseille W. Benjamin, ‘Marseilles’, trans. by E. Jephcott in M.W. Jennings, H. Eiland and G. Smith (eds.), Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Volume 2, Part 1, 1927-1930 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), pp. 232-6.

Moscow W. Benjamin, ‘Moscow’, trans. by E. Jephcott in M.W. Jennings, H. Eiland and G. Smith (eds.), Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Volume 2, Part 1, 1927-1930 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), pp. 22-46.

Naples W. Benjamin and A. Lācis, ‘Naples’, trans. by E. Jephcott in M. Bullock and M.W. Jennings (eds.), Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Volume 1, 1913-1926 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), pp. 415-21.

SG W. Benjamin, ‘San Gimignano’, trans. by E. Leslie in U. Marx, G. Schwarz, M. Schwarz and E. Wizisla (eds.), Walter Benjamin’s Archive (London: Verso, 2015), pp. 175-6.

TPH W. Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in W.

Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. by H. Zohn, ed. by H. Arendt (New York, NY: Schocken Books, 1968), pp. 253-64.

Weimar W. Benjamin, ‘Weimar’, trans. by R. Livingstone in M.W. Jennings, H. Eiland and G. Smith (eds.), Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Volume 2, Part 1, 1927-1930 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), pp. 148-50.

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Introduction

Benjamin’s travel writing and spatio-temporality

In 1924, Walter Benjamin wrote the first of his Städtebilder, or city-images. It was the first of many, all written in the following eight years, and each based on a European city to which he had ventured. These short travel texts, commissioned by and published in a variety of periodicals, were formed of Benjamin’s fragmentary observations on what Graeme Gilloch has termed ‘the fluid and fleeting character of metropolitan existence.’1 As this suggests, Benjamin took up in his travel writings a task beyond observation for observation’s sake. Precisely through his observational flânerie, Benjamin recognised himself as grasping at a historical truth endangered by the mounting catastrophe of modernity.

The travel texts are invariably marked by a celebration of the distinctive forms of collective life Benjamin recognises, quite literally, as being as old as the spaces of the city themselves. Ultimately, however, his cityscapes are pregnant with melancholy. The memories which preserve the distinctive subjectivities of Naples, Moscow, Marseille and elsewhere, are, for Benjamin set to be dragged beneath the homogenising steamroller of modernity, the result of which can only be the uniform flattening of the cultural contours of place. Thus Benjamin, it seems, recognised his role in writing the travel texts as both that of the proverbial ragpicker, rescuing memories destined to be forgotten; and of the artist-as-activist, making a desperate plea for an alteration, if not outright aversion, of modernity’s course.

The thesis that follows has two aims: one literary, the other philosophical. In achieving the former, I will establish, through the application of travel writing theory – and with a particular emphasis on the presentation of space, time and their relationship – precisely how Benjamin constructs the image of cities through the deployment of such techniques as narrative structure, metaphor, and metonymy. For the latter, I will isolate the central ideas that emerge from a close reading of the texts, and situate them in relation to Benjamin’s other works. I contend that many of the most important philosophical ideas attributed to Benjamin are already in evidence in his cityscapes, including, but not limited to, the epistemological importance of the image; the ontological dimensions of memory; the relationship between time and history; and, above all else, that of modernity as catastrophe.

In short, I hope to illustrate how such a close reading of Benjamin’s travel texts reveal them to be a highly important part of his philosophical corpus, fully deserving of greater scholarly attention.

1

G. Gilloch, Walter Benjamin: Critical Constellations (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), 93.

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Context and literature

As this suggests, Benjamin’s cityscapes have received comparatively little academic attention. It may well be that this is partly because of the fact that they were written out of financial necessity. Unlike Benjamin’s most famous works – the Arcades Project and his Theses on the Philosophy of History, which remained, at the time of his death, unfinished and unpublished respectively – the Städtebilder were specifically commissioned for contemporary publication while Benjamin was struggling to make a living. Benjamin sought journalistic work in periodicals such as the Frankfurter Zeitung at an uncertain time: at the start of 1925, he had not yet completed the Habilitation required for an academic career, nor indeed was he certain that he wanted to follow such a path. In the words of Esther Leslie, Benjamin ‘feared success because that meant […] aspects of an academic career that “murderously attack time”, the time needed to fulfil a long-cherished plan to write on Goethe’s ‘New Melusine’ and to compose his collected essays on politics.’2 Benjamin evidently understood himself to have more important intellectual missions.

However, by May 1925, Benjamin’s options had narrowed significantly; the likely rejection of his dissertation only amplified the oppression exerted by his wretched financial circumstances, and journalistic and radio work became less a sideline than a necessity.3 Travelling, and the documentation thereof, effectively became Benjamin’s major occupation for the remainder of his life. Of the texts under study in this thesis, four were published in the Frankfurter Zeitung newspaper (Naples, 1925; San Gimignano, 1929; Ibizan Sequence and Hashish in Marseille, 1932), two in the Neue Schweizer Rundschau (Weimar, 1928; Marseille, 1929); and one in the quarterly Die Kreatur (Moscow, 1927).4 The circumstances of production may well have conditioned their subsequent scholarly neglect. The upshot is that they have perhaps – consciously or otherwise – been dismissed as hackwork, less the impulsive product of Benjamin’s own philosophical genius than of the demands of commissioning editors.

Part of the reason for this may be Benjamin’s own attitude towards works ‘undertaken explicitly for remuneration’5; scholar Lecia Rosenthal quotes Benjamin’s close friend Gerhard Scholem when observing: ‘We can cite Benjamin’s own “negative attitude towards much of the work he did for money” as one of the factors that has,

2

E. Leslie, Walter Benjamin (London: Reaktion Books, 2007), 65.

3

Ibid., 66.

4

Publication information in the ‘Nota al testo’, in W. Benjamin, Immagini di Città, ed. by E. Ganni (Torino: Einaudi, 2007), xiii. Those under study in this thesis are not the only cityscapes written by Benjamin, but those from Paris and Norway have not been included in this analysis due to spatial limitations.

5

This quote is drawn from Lecia Rosenthal’s introduction to W. Benjamin, Radio Benjamin, trans. by J. Lutes, L.H. Schumann and D.K. Reese, ed. by L. Rosenthal (London: Verso, 2014), xvii.

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perhaps, contributed to their continued perception as relatively “unimportant.”’6 However, it seems clear that financial necessity need not compromise originality, and it is the contention of this thesis that these texts should not be treated as separate or secondary, but instead as immanent to Benjamin’s broader philosophical corpus. As shall become clear, many of the ideas that form the basis of Benjamin’s more canonical works can be seen in a nascent form in his travel texts.

To be sure, these texts have not been entirely ignored by scholars. Perhaps the most influential analysis was conducted by Peter Szondi, commissioned by Suhrkamp Verlag – the Frankfurt-based publisher responsible for Benjamin’s Gesammelte Schriften – to write an afterword to a collection of the travel pieces in 1962, an article translated into English in a selection of secondary works edited by Gary Smith, and published in 1988.7 Further attention has been paid to the travel writings in the aftermath of the publication of Harvard University Press’ Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings volumes from 2004, which collectively include all but one of the travel texts under study in this thesis, all translated into English. As such, I owe much of the inspiration for the lines of analysis in this thesis to secondary works containing suggestive remarks on Benjamin’s travel texts, and have been sure to stress where this is indeed the case.

That said, certain texts have been particularly helpful: Marc Katz’s expert analysis of the relationship between modernity, melancholy and architecture in a wide range of Benjamin’s work has proven particularly expedient in my narrower study.8 Andrew Benjamin’s scholarship on the notion of porosity – first formulated by Walter Benjamin in his Neapolitan cityscape – proved valuable in provoking a consideration of the homology between the form and content of Benjamin’s travel writings.9 Graeme Gilloch’s writing on Benjamin’s experience of the city in a more general sense brings together important considerations on myth and memory, which proved the starting point for my investigation of the mutually formative relationship between space and subjectivity in Benjamin’s travel texts.10 Finally, the works of the proverbial Benjamin behemoths, Susan Buck-Morss and Max Pensky, were crucial in helping to establish the underlying methodological links between the travel writings and Benjamin’s other texts.11 But as this overview suggests, Szondi’s short afterword remains one of few works

6

Ibid.

7

P. Szondi, ‘Walter Benjamin’s City Portraits’, trans. by H. Mendelsohn in G. Smith (ed.) On Walter Benjamin (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 18-32.

8

M. Katz, ‘Rendezvouz in Berlin: Benjamin and Kierkegaard on the Architecture of Repetition’, The German Quarterly, Vol. 71, No. 1 (1998), 1-13.

9

A. Benjamin, ‘Porosity At The Edge: Working through Walter Benjamin’s “Naples”’, Architectural Theory Review, Vol. 10, No. 1 (2005), 33-43.

10

G. Gilloch, Myth and Metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the City (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997).

11

S. Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: MIT University Press, 1989) and ‘Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin's Artwork Essay Reconsidered’, October, Vol. 62 (1992), 3-41; M.

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that treat these writings as a discrete body of work within Benjamin’s broader corpus. There has, as far as I am aware, been no extended, systematic analysis of the travel texts themselves. I thus hope to take the helpful observations made by other scholars as starting points, and test them against a range of Benjamin’s travel writings in a way that has not been done before.

Of course, defining the cityscapes as Benjamin’s ‘travel texts’ is to impose a rather arbitrary and artificial distinction; indeed, it is perhaps to fall foul of the error of textual hierarchy that this very thesis seeks to correct. However, the distinction between travel writing and non-travel writing in this thesis is purely an ad-hoc methodological one, drawn in order to better illustrate how Benjamin manipulates the form and content of a genre with its own discursive conventions. I hope in simultaneously illustrating the philosophical commonalities between the travel texts and his other philosophical work, I highlight the necessity of seeing Benjamin’s corpus as a dialogue, analogous to how Michael Holquist recognises the relationship between Mikhail Bakhtin’s works:

to pursue the melody of any particular idea in Bakhtin’s works it is necessary to relate it to the nuances, variations, and interweavings it experienced in relation to its own recurrences and to other subjects in the larger composition of Bakhtin’s total oeuvre.12

In establishing travel writing as a distinct category of Benjamin’s corpus, I do not intend to separate these works from his more ‘important’ texts, but precisely the opposite: highlight how recurring themes within this remunerated work formed part of the process by which his most influential ideas emerged and were refined. Graeme Gilloch has similarly identified the dialogic nature of Benjamin’s writing, noting ‘that Benjamin’s oeuvre is not to be understood in terms of a division into “early” and “late” works. Rather, the continuities between his “production cycles” must be stressed.’13 As will be established below, Benjamin consistently recognised observation itself as philosophical method; for precisely that reason, his travel writings merit particularly close attention. With that in mind, I shall now move onto explaining the methodology of my study.

Pensky, ‘Method and Time: Walter Benjamin’s Dialectical Images’, in D. Ferris (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 177-98.

12

M. Holquist, ‘The Fugue of Chronotope’, in N. Bemong et al (eds.), Bakhtin’s Theory of the Literary Chronotope: Reflections, Applications, Perspectives (Gent: Academia Press, 2010), 20.

13

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Methodology and theory

I have conducted this work with the combined analytical tools of the literary analyst and intellectual historian. Above all else, this thesis has been based on a heuristic reading of the travel texts, armed with relevant spatio-temporal and literary concepts. However, I have also read the texts through a selection of Benjamin’s other work, attempting to demonstrate the flow of ideas not merely between the travel texts, but Benjamin’s writings as a whole.

One of the questions that remains to be answered in this introduction is why I have particularly focused on the concept of spatio-temporality. This is certainly not a novel field in literary analysis: scholars have long since taken up Mikhail Bakhtin’s famous ‘chronotope’ model – meaning literally, timespace – which claims that understanding only emerges at the interface of the spatial and the temporal. Bakhtin himself declared that ‘every entry into the sphere of meaning is accomplished only through the gates of the chronotope.’14 Travel writing specialists have illustrated the importance of the chronotope in their analyses, as in Barbara Korte’s assertion of the irreducibility of the genre to a merely spatial understanding. Instead, per Korte, the very comprehensibility of travel writing depends on its orientation on axes of time as well as space.15 It can, therefore, be claimed that a spatio-temporal focus is a prerequisite to any rigorous analysis of the genre.

But as shall become clear, I argue that the presentation of spatio-temporality is a particularly important topic of study in Benjamin’s work precisely because of the novel way in which Benjamin understands the relation between space, time, and meaning. Benjamin recognises the present as the container of the past, the memories of bygone events as occupying the spaces of cities themselves. The themes mentioned in the preceding section are all presented through Benjamin’s distortion of conventional spatio-temporal understanding. Peter Szondi has correctly noted that for Benjamin, ‘a journey into the past is a journey into the distance as well.’16 But this can too be inverted: to journey into the distance – i.e. to travel to a foreign city (at least, one not yet subsumed by modernity) – is, for Benjamin, to recognise the past asserting and reasserting itself, whether in its crumbling architecture, or the stubborn persistence of cultural convention. This relationship will be one of the main focuses of the following analysis.

14

M. Bakhtin, ‘Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel’ in M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. by Caryl Emerson and M. Holquist, ed. by M. Holquist (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1981), 258.

15

B. Korte, ‘Chrono-Types: Notes on Forms of Time in the Travelogue’, in J. Zilcosky (ed.) Writing Travel: The Poetics and Politics of the Modern Journey (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 25.

16

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In the first chapter, I will illustrate the epistemological significance Benjamin recognised as existing within the simple process of observation. I will argue that Benjamin saw a form of truth as accessible through the very act of documentation inherent in travel writing, in a blurring of the lines of subjectivity and objectivity with roots in Goethe’s romanticism. In the second chapter, I will draw upon Michel de Certeau’s distinction between lieu and espace to highlight the spatial agency of memory – and the resultant melancholy that marks Benjamin’s travel writings – before moving onto a broader analysis of the porous and labyrinthine presentation of the subject cities.17 The third chapter will take a more obviously time-based focus, arguing that the illusion of simultaneity created by Benjamin is a method through which he explores the plasticity of a pre-modern temporal subjectivity. I will then explain the difference between temporality and historicity in Benjamin’s travel texts, setting up a final chapter in which I analyse the presentation of modernity’s menacing encroachment, and the spatial homology between the architecture of modernity and the very form of Benjamin’s fragmentary archive.

17

M. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. by S. Rendall (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988), 117.

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Chapter 1 Benjamin’s spatial epistemology

This opening chapter will establish the importance of space in Benjamin’s method. I contend that a spatial analysis of Benjamin’s writings is necessary to understand his thought, precisely because Benjamin saw his own comprehension of the world as emerging through the interplay of different kinds of spaces. For Benjamin, everyday reality is too dazzling to be meaningful; instead, meaning is gleaned through the very process of documentation, as that of writing itself. Such a process is that of creating an image comprehensible by virtue of its isolation. This attitude is perhaps best summarised in Benjamin’s travel writing from the town of San Gimignano, in Tuscany, and in particular by the following passage:

To find words for what one has before one’s eyes – how difficult that can be. But once they come they batter with tiny hammers against reality, until they have pressed a picture from it as from a copper plate. “In the evening the women congregate at the fountain by the town gate in order to fetch water in large jugs” – only once I had found these words did the image emerge with hard dents and deep shadows out of what had been experienced all too bedazzlingly.18

It seems that for Benjamin, the initial observation of the women at the fountain was effectively lost to the great perplexity of reality, and remained inarticulable until it was, through the very process of documentation, snatched from the confusion and continuum of experience. Indeed, the dazzle of experience is a theme manifest throughout Benjamin’s travel writings: also in San Gimignano, Benjamin asks: ‘What did I know previously [i.e. before writing] of the flat white pastures, which wake before the town walls each afternoon with their flamelets?’19 When stood before the Kremlin Gate, Benjamin writes: ‘All the colors of Moscow converge prismatically here, at the centre of Russian power. Beams of excessive brilliance from the car headlights race through the darkness.’20 In Marseille, he describes the commingling of shellfish and oyster stalls as a ‘world of images’, writhing under ‘the pressure of a thousand atmospheres.’21 The epistemological implication is clear: only when pictures are ‘pressed’ from blinding reality can they be understood.

18 SG, 175. 19 Ibid. 20 Moscow, 24. 21 Marseille, 234.

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The corollary of this notion is that the production of an image enables us to know something that is otherwise unknowable. I claim that the image for Benjamin operates in the same way as death for Pier Paolo Pasolini, writing four decades later. In his essay Observations on the Long Take, Pasolini declares it ‘absolutely necessary to die, because while living we lack meaning, and the language of our lives […] is untranslatable: a chaos of possibilities, a search for relations among discontinuous meanings.’22 If we read Pasolini analogously, we can see ‘death’ in Benjamin’s travel writings as the very creation of an atemporal, ahistorical image from a moment inscribed along the continuum of time.23 The image, precisely because it is an abstraction – and is entirely discrete – is full of its own meaning, quite unlike the messy entanglement of accident, intention and event that constitutes reality itself. But what exactly is the image, and what does it look like?

For Benjamin, the image seemingly comes in a variety of forms; it need not necessarily only refer to the written word. As shall be analysed in the context of romanticism below, Benjamin frequently makes references to paintings in his travel writings, while his interest in the picture postcard – specimens of which he collected through many of his travels, and retained as part of his vast and fragmentary archive – offers a clue that he understood the photograph too as imbued with this epistemological value.24 Indeed, the postcard’s importance on Benjamin’s understanding of place is revealed in a passage from his Berlin Chronicle, in which he declares:

it is certain that none of my boys' adventure books kindled my love of travel as did the postcards with which [Benjamin’s grandmother] supplied me in abundance from her far-flung travels. And because the longing we feel for a place determines it as much as does its outward image, I shall say something about these postcards.25

22

P. Pasolini, ‘Observations on the Long Take’, trans. by N. MacAfee and C. Owens, October, Vol. 13 (1980), 6.

23

Indeed, the link between documentation and death has been explored by writers other than Pasolini and Benjamin. See, for example, the analogy between writing and suicide made by Maurice Blanchot, quoted in J. Gregg, Maurice Blanchot and the Literature of Transgression (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 36.

24

For more on Benjamin’s postcard collection, see The Art Newspaper, ‘Walter Benjamin: his life in postcards’, 25 September 2015,

http://theartnewspaper.com/news/walter-benjamin-his-life-in-postcards, (accessed 18 April 2017).

25

W. Benjamin, ‘Berlin Chronicle’, trans. by E. Jephcott in M.W. Jennings, H. Eiland and G. Smith (eds.), Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Volume 2, Part 2, 1931-1934 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 621.

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This passage reveals much about how Benjamin blurred the distinction between space and place, between objective geographical reality and its subjective, culturalised perception. This theme will be addressed in the following chapter. I will again return to the postcard in chapter four, when addressing the relationship between modernity and the fragment-as-form. For now, however, I will substantiate the suggestion that all forms of Benjamin’s image share the same spatio-temporal implications.

Firstly, the temporal. Though these forms are necessarily created and experienced in real time, once produced, they are effectively atemporal, ripped from the context in which they were fashioned. The very idea of the image itself implies temporal disjuncture, as suggested by Benjamin’s intellectual collaborator Theodor Adorno in the following: ‘It is no accident that Benjamin's dialectic is one of images rather than continuity [emphasis added].’26 Once the moment is seized, it can no longer slip through the fingers; it remains before its examiner. Nowhere in Benjamin’s travel writings is this more evident than in Moscow, where he writes: ‘Kiosks, arc lamps, buildings crystallize into figures that will never return. Yet this impression is dispelled as soon as I seek words.’27 However, he had articulated a similar idea in Naples two years earlier, noting: ‘Even the most wretched pauper is sovereign in the dim, dual awareness of participating […] in one of the pictures of Neapolitan street life that will never return [emphasis added].’28 Benjamin’s notion is that through verbalising the ephemeral, it becomes eternal; the fleeting moment is mortified in a static image.

The spatial dimension of the abstracted image is more complex than the temporal, dealing as it does with the mysterious spaces of the imagination rather than those in which we operate in everyday reality. For not only do these images occupy real space, for example on paper or canvas, but they also operate in the imagination, conjuring imaginary spaces of their own. One hardly needs to draw attention to the etymology of the word ‘imagine’, with its roots in the in the classical Latin imāgināre: ‘to form a mental image of, to represent to oneself in imagination’.29 Writing in The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard highlights the difficulty of understanding the eerie conversion of a literary image into its own mental space – or, in Bachelard’s words, the mechanics of the ‘poetic imagination.’30 Yet if Benjamin’s epistemology, as I claim, is

26

Katz, ‘Rendezvouz in Berlin: Benjamin and Kierkegaard on the Architecture of Repetition’ (1998), 2.

27

Moscow, 23. It should be noted that mine is but one reading of a vague passage: it is not clear whether the dispelled impression is just of the ‘crystallizing’ of figures, or of the idea that these figures will never return. The original German is equally

ambiguous: ‘Die Kioske, Bogenlampen, Häuserblöcke kristallisieren zu nie wiederkehrende Figuren. Doch das zerstiebt, sowie ich nach Namen suche.’

28

Naples, 417.

29

‘imagine, v.’, OED Online, Oxford University Press, March 2017,

http://www.oed.com.proxy.uba.uva.nl:2048/view/Entry/91651?rskey=T5ugmU&result=2 &isAdvanced=false, (accessed 30 April 2017).

30

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reliant on these fragmentary images, then the mental process to which they are subjected is of paramount importance.

For Bachelard, these images combine to constitute memory itself, with memory spatial insofar as it is characterised by the retention and recollection of spaces of prior existence.31 If we then consider that memory – the ability to retain and recall meaning – is a prerequisite to knowledge, then it must necessarily follow that knowledge is in itself spatial. It is, after all, impossible to conceive of an unspatial image.

1.1 Truth and Benjamin’s dialectic

It is perhaps here necessary to distinguish between meaning, which implies some kind of subjective qualification, on the one hand; and truth on the other: many, for example, would hold that absolute truths exist independently of any cognitive operation. There is, however, reason to doubt whether Benjamin would agree. Underpinning his philosophy is a dialectic in which the truth is itself contained within the image alone. In exploring Benjamin’s concept of the dialectical image further, I will turn to a fragment of his Arcades Project:

Is awakening perhaps the synthesis of dream consciousness (as thesis) and waking consciousness (as antithesis)? Then the moment of awakening would be identical with the “now of recognizability,” in which things put on their true – surrealist – face. Thus, in Proust, the importance of staking an entire life on life’s supremely dialectical point of rupture: awakening.32

Though Benjamin here references Proust, this seems to be a neat summation of his own dialecticism more generally. The moment of ‘awakening’ is crucially where truth emerges, a process which occurs in flashes – rather than continuously – and thus produces mere fragments. The images constitutive of these fragments stand alone as evidence of objective truth. According to Max Pensky: ‘Benjamin was convinced that the historical truth of the nineteenth century was objectively present in his assembled fragments, and that this truth would be lost, not recovered, by the imposition of a theoretical superstructure upon them.’33 Indeed, Benjamin’s fixation with fragments reaches its apogee in the Arcades Project – a patchwork of short observations, often on the Parisian arcades – which was still incomplete at his death in 1940, despite having been started over a decade earlier. However, it is already evident in his travel writings. These 31 Ibid., 6. 32 AP, N3a,3, 463-4. 33

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texts – as shall be demonstrated in chapter three of this thesis – are invariably written without a conventional narrative, and usually Benjamin does not situate himself in the text with first person pronouns. Instead, the text jumps from place to place, from tableau to tableau. These fragmentary vignettes can be seen to share a similar structure to the Arcades Project, described by Henry Sussman as ‘the literary equivalent of the technique of violent, expressive, shocking film editing […] “cutting” between different scenes or loci of sociocultural activity.’34

Benjamin’s reluctance to impose a ‘theoretical superstructure’ is certainly reflected in the nature of his work, described by Michael Löwy as ‘unclassifiable’.35 For Löwy, Benjamin ‘is a revolutionary critic of the philosophy of progress, a Marxist opponent of “progressivism”, a nostalgic who dreams of the future, a romantic advocate of materialism’, in short, a figure whose work lacks a clear procedural basis.36 However, we would be mistaken to see Benjamin as entirely anti-theoretical: can we not understand the dialectical notion of ‘awakening’ as a theory of sorts? Benjamin holds, that in the recording of fragments of time and space, historical truth can emerge; what he does not – and possibly cannot – fully explain, is the precise method by which this happens. One of the fragments of the Arcades Project is illustrative of this, and his reluctance to retrospectively apply conceptual models to his observations – instead, they must stand alone: ‘Method of this project: literary montage. I needn’t say anything. Merely show. I shall purloin no valuables, appropriate no ingenious formulations.’37

Benjamin’s writings from Moscow further complicate the connection between the image, truth and theory. For Benjamin seems to suggest that not all images are testament to objective truth. Indeed, in a February 1927 letter to Martin Buber, co-editor of the quarterly in which his writings from Moscow would later be published, Benjamin noted the way in which Soviet culture effectively resisted abstraction due to the ever-presence of ‘theory’ itself, i.e. the fact that technocratic, quasi-Marxist ideas permeated through society: ‘I intend to present a picture of the city of Moscow as it is at this very moment. In this picture, “all factuality is already theory” and therefore it refrains from any deductive abstraction, any prognostication, and, within certain bounds, even any judgment.’38 Similarly, in the first fragment of his article published in Die Kreatur in 1927, he meditates on the possibility – or lack thereof – of an objective value-judgement of the post-revolutionary polity:

34

H. Sussman, ‘Between the Registers: The Allegory of Space in Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project’, boundary 2, Vol. 30, No. 1 (2003), 172.

35

M. Löwy, Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin's ‘On the Concept of History’ (London: Verso, 2005), 2. 36 Ibid. 37 AP, N1a,8, 460. 38

W. Benjamin, The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910-1940, trans. by M. R. Jacobson and E. M. Jacobson, ed. by G. Scholem and T. W. Adorno (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 313.

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the only real guarantee of a correct understanding is to have chosen your position before you came. In Russia above all, you can see only if you have already decided. At the turning point in historical events that is indicated, if not constituted, by the fact of “Soviet Russia,” the question at issue is not which reality is better or which has greater potential. It is only: Which reality is inwardly convergent with truth? Which truth is inwardly preparing itself to converge with the real? Only he who clearly answers these questions is “objective.” […] Only he who, by decision, has made his dialectical peace with the world can grasp the concrete. But someone who wishes to decide “on the basis of facts” will find no basis in the facts.39

Graeme Gilloch understands Benjamin’s letter to Buber to mean that ‘abstraction is to be avoided at all costs.’40 However, I read it differently. Abstraction, for Benjamin, is not to be avoided, but instead pursued; what matters is the reality upon which the abstraction (the dialectical image) is itself constructed. To be sure, Gilloch is right in suggesting that Benjamin believes the city must be represented by the ‘smallest manifestations and traces of the everyday’, but here Gilloch seems to ignore the fact that the very act of representation is by necessity an abstraction.41 It is no exaggeration to suggest that Benjamin’s entire dialectic is indeed a dialectic of abstraction; the very nature of dialectics is that it is impossible to avoid abstraction, that the unabstracted whole lies beyond comprehensibility. Benjamin’s objection is instead that the prevailing abstraction omits the minutiae of everyday life in favour of overarching narratives of historical progression and regression – to which I shall return to analyse closely in the final chapter of this thesis. For Benjamin, this kind of historicism blinds us to the mounting catastrophe of history.

Furthermore, Benjamin’s description of the relationship between reality and truth above appears to suggest that neither operates on a more fundamental ontological level than the other: they are instead in negotiation. But if Benjamin’s process of ‘awakening’, that through which truth is revealed, happens in the now, then how can one have realised historical truth by choosing a position in advance of arriving in Soviet Russia itself – i.e. before the ‘now’ of actual experience? Similarly, if Benjamin believed in a singular historical truth, then how can two opposing viewpoints – i.e. in this instance, both supporters and detractors of Soviet historicism – both be true? The

39

Moscow, 22.

40

Gilloch, Walter Benjamin: Critical Constellations (2002), 93.

41

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answer may well be that these are mere illusions of truth, homologous to the bourgeois progressivism Benjamin attacks both in his travel texts and elsewhere.

We should note that the relationship between subjectivity (as the personal experience of a ‘subject’) and objectivity (as a fixed truth) in Benjamin’s philosophy is a thoroughly complex one. Firstly, note the implication of the quote from Moscow that subjectivity is itself a dialectical process. This is perhaps not too difficult a concept with which to grapple: after all, objective truth is suggestive of something that is fixed and eternal, and that cannot undergo dialectical refinement; subjectivity, by contrast, is a process of constant revision: here we may think of the way in which a child learns their way in the world through trial and error. But it becomes rather more complex when we consider that for Benjamin, objective truth appears to emerge through a rupture in this subjective procedure; thus truth, paradoxically, is dependent on subjectivity (rather than being its opposite), but it is not constituted of the same process; instead, it is a break, in which this dialectic is arrested in a singular image. Truth thus emerges out of subjectivity, as demonstrated in the allegory of the shattered mountain climber with which Benjamin concludes his Ibizan Sequence. For the climber’s ‘body has become a kaleidoscope that at each step presents him with ever-changing figures of the truth.’42 The truth is thus not something that exists in the world, but emerges through our interaction with it.

In a fragment of the Arcades Project previously quoted, Benjamin refers to the moment of ‘awakening’ as a ‘supremely dialectical point of rupture’, which we may read as the break in subjectivity in which the objective truth emerges to be grasped.43 It is echoed in a separate fragment, in which he declares the image to be ‘dialectics at a standstill’.44 For Benjamin, the image is truth, or, in the words of Bainard Cowan:

Truth does not consist of a content to be possessed after digesting away the linguistic form of a philosophical inquiry; rather, as Benjamin insists, the truth is the form. Representation is thus not to be viewed for its end product but for its process. The activity of representation is the dwelling- place of truth, the only “place” where truth is truly present.45

If we attempt to move towards making meaning from this notoriously difficult concept, we may see Benjamin as seeing truth not as in the narratives through which we understand our lives and world – narratives which are constantly being renegotiated – 42 Ibiza, 593. 43 AP, N3a,3, 463-4. 44 Ibid., N2a,3, 462. 45

B. Cowan, ‘Walter Benjamin's Theory of Allegory’, New German Critique, Vol. 22 (1981), 114.

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but in blasting these narratives apart in singular moments and in isolated images; attempts in which we weave them together are merely subjective delusions to which those who have made their ‘dialectical peace with the world’ have fallen prey. This has clear implications for travel writing as a narrative form, and helps to explain why Benjamin’s cityscapes are structured as a series of isolated images, fragments of disjointed street scenes, rather than a conventional linear journey. This shall be explored in greater detail in chapter three of this thesis.

1.2 Benjamin’s romanticism

Benjamin’s connection with perhaps the most famous German romantic, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, was established early in his career: in 1920 he started work on an essay on Goethe’s Elective Affinities, described by N. K. Leacock as ‘“standard-setting” in the reception history of one of the most important European novels of the nineteenth century.’46 The effect of romanticism on Benjamin was a lasting one, with his writing bearing several of the hallmarks of the era, including the very idea of a non-oppositional relationship between subjectivity and objective truth.

One of the tropes of romantic travel writing is the notion that one’s subjective powers can be refined, as if to access and articulate a higher truth or reality. Goethe, early in his Italian Journey – written on his travels in the late eighteenth century – wrote of his intention to enhance his powers of observation:

I have now to deal only with the sensible impressions, which no book or picture can give. In fact, I am again taking interest in the world, I am testing my faculty of observation, and am trying how far I can go with my science and my acquirements, how far my eye is clear and sharp, how much I can take in at a hasty glance, and whether those wrinkles, that are imprinted upon my heart, are ever again to be obliterated.47

Goethe’s implication here is that there is a knowledge or meaning that can only be gleaned through experience itself, that there is a truth that is rooted in subjectivity as such. Furthermore, Goethe and Benjamin both share an interest in the process through which this truth is revealed: the formation of the image. While on his Italian Journey, Goethe persuaded accompanying artist Christoph Heinrich Kniep to attempt a drawing of the mountainous Campanian landscape. Kniep obliged, and, in Goethe’s words, ‘so

46

N. K. Leacock, ‘Character, Silence, and the Novel: Walter Benjamin on Goethe’s Elective Affinities’, Narrative, Vol. 10, No. 3 (2002), 277.

47

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bequeathed to me a proof, that to truly artistic powers of delineation, the impossible becomes the possible.’48 Here, Goethe actually sees the artist’s production of the image as having epistemological agency, irrupting through that which we believe to be possible – or real and truthful – and redefining reality itself. There are thus clear parallels with the way in which Benjamin sees a truth as being able to emerge from subjectivity. Mircea Anghelescu has previously noted how Goethe ‘draws the attention of the reader to the fact that his travel accounts are not the verbal equivalent of an album depicting places and things he can portray in terms of a simple description’; just as Benjamin’s images, they are somehow reflective of a truth beyond the immediately apparent. 49

Much like Goethe, Benjamin’s interest in the image extends to making frequent reference in his travel writings to works of art, and they way in which they are able to reflect and even redefine reality. In a manner analogous to that in which Goethe admires Kniep’s ability to apprehend that which is before him – perhaps even changing, and enhancing the landscape – so Benjamin’s travels force him to reflect upon the way that artists have been able to capture and convey reality in the places he visits. In Marseille, for example, he recognises ‘the light from greengrocers’ shops that is visible in the paintings of Monticelli’50; in Moscow, he writes: ‘The streets seem in reality as desolately clean and swept as in the drawings of George Grosz. And how true-to-life his types are has become more obvious.’51 Benjamin does not merely appear to authenticate the paintings through his own reality, but also vice versa: his reality through the paintings. Once again there is a dialogue between the two, rather than a set epistemological hierarchy.

However, there are also ways in which we must differentiate between Goethe and Benjamin. Just as Benjamin defies methodological categorisation, so he should not be lumped in as a latter-day romantic. Considering the importance he attached to subjectivity, Benjamin spends remarkably little time exploring himself as subject. According to Casey Blanton, the development of romantic travel writing in the late eighteenth century was characterised by a shift in emphasis ‘from descriptions of people and places to accounts of the effects of people and places on the narrator’, thus ‘by the early nineteenth century, travel writing had clearly become a matter of self-discovery as well as a record of the discovery of others.’52 Mircea Anghelescu writes that Goethe was interested in ‘his own subjective response to what he experienced […] – which was

48

Ibid., 304.

49

M. Anghelescu, ‘Romantic Travel Narratives’, in S. P. Sondrup and V. Nemoianu (eds.), Nonfictional Romantic Prose (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2004), 166-7. 50 Marseille, 234. 51 Moscow, 22. 52

C. Blanton, Travel Writing: The Self and the World (New York, NY: Routledge, 2002), 15.

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fundamentally different from that of others’.53 Yet with the exception of Hashish in Marseille – a document ostensibly written with the precise intention of documenting the effects of hashish on subjective experience – and his writing from San Gimignano, Benjamin does not place himself in the text: he is an anonymous observer, unrepresented by the ‘I’.

An explanation may well be that Benjamin does not agree with Goethe, or at least Anghelescu’s interpretation thereof, in believing that his subjective response to events was ‘fundamentally different’ from that of others. According to Benjamin’s writings on the dialectical image, the image itself reveals an objective truth – that of the truth of history. This is revealed through the very creation of said image; though this need not necessarily be a written text, the importance ascribed by Benjamin to language is made evident in the Arcades Project, when he declares that the place where ‘one encounters [dialectical images] is language.’54 His interest in language, and more broadly, semiotics – perhaps a more useful term in this context as it opens up the possibility of exploring other manifestations of the image in Benjaminian theory, i.e. a painting, or the photograph, which also contain ‘signs’ in a semiotic sense – is further evident in his desire to develop a theory of allegory. In the words of Bainard Cowan, in Benjamin’s theory: ‘Transforming things into signs is both what allegory does – its technique – and what it is about – its content.’55 This process is inherently experiential, and is not merely academic; Cowan writes that for Benjamin, ‘the signs perceived strike notes at the depths of one’s being.’56

We may here recognise parallels with the structuralist understanding of myth as popularised decades later by Claude Lévi-Strauss. Lévi-Strauss sees myth as a way through which humans come to an understanding of their own world, mediating between binaries – such as between male and female, life and death – that are otherwise inexplicable. In his Structural Anthropology, Lévi-Strauss simply declares that the purpose of a myth is to provide ‘a logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction’.57 And just as Benjamin’s theory of allegory is fundamentally linguistically (or semiotically) constructed, so the structuralist theory of myth is based around universal governing principles, with Lévi-Strauss’ ‘mythemes’ analogous to Ferdinand de Saussure’s linguistic ‘phonemes’.58 In short, for both Benjamin and Lévi-Strauss, life is simplified into such signs so that we may comprehend it; what Cowan writes of Benjamin’s allegory

53

Anghelescu, ‘Romantic Travel Narratives’ (2004), 167.

54

AP, N2a,3, 462.

55

Cowan, ‘Walter Benjamin's Theory of Allegory’ (1981), 110.

56

Ibid. 57

C. Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, trans. by C. Jacobson and B.G. Schoepf (New York: Basic Books, 1963), 229.

58

G. Deleuze, ‘How Do We Recognise Structuralism?’, in G. Deleuze, Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953-1974, trans. by M. Taormina, ed. by D. Lapoujade (South Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e), 2004), 277.

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– that this semiotic conversion is both ‘its technique [and] its content’ – is as applicable to Lévi-Strauss’ myth.

This is not to say that their theories are identical – after all, Lévi-Strauss makes no claim to a kind of historical truth unveiling itself, beyond his belief in the structuralist mode of human thought per se – but there is a shared belief that the human mind is interesting not, as Goethe suggests, because of differences in subjectivities, but instead because it is through the subjectivities that common truths emerge. This can be seen as both the ‘form’ that the subjectivities take – i.e. the image itself, created through a set of universal human thought processes comparable with Lévi-Strauss’ structuralist claim – but also, for Benjamin, as the objective truth of history, most notably articulated in his Theses on the Philosophy of History. In this piece, Benjamin warns us against the historicism of Gottfried Keller, and the latter’s suggestion that ‘the truth will not run away from us.’59 Instead, Benjamin writes: ‘The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.’60 This concept, and its historicist implications, will be analysed further through the prism of Benjamin’s travel writings in the third and fourth chapters of this thesis. But for now, I hope to have illustrated his belief that while this truth can only be accessed through subjectivity, by virtue of being a truth it is objective and constant, and has the potential to be seized by all who recognise this ‘historical materialist’ schema.

The exact nature of Benjamin’s methods, and precise definition of his ‘dialectical images’, remains hard to pin down. Max Pensky has described the ‘“lightning flash” of the dialectical image [as] a dark star, indeed a kind of theoretical and methodological black hole.’61 Rolf Tiedemann has claimed that Benjamin himself ‘never achieved any terminological consistency.’62 However, the image’s position at the heart of his most important philosophical works ensure that attempts must be made to comprehend this complex concept if we are to stand any hope of understanding his work more broadly. Though my contribution makes no claim to absolute definition, the importance of the image for Benjamin, and its spatio-temporal implications, are evident. In sum, the notion of a historical truth is at the core of Benjaminian philosophy, and is apprehended through the images of subjective experience itself. Just as we experience reality spatio-temporally, so the images abstracted too are inevitably framed within these fields of intuition. It is in the interaction between the matter that constitutes the world, and the

59 TPH, 255. 60 Ibid. 61

Pensky, ‘Method and Time: Walter Benjamin’s Dialectical Images’ (2004), 178.

62

R. Tiedemann, ‘Dialectics at a Standstill: Approaches to the Passagen-Werk’, in G. Smith (ed.) On Walter Benjamin (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 284.

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concepts through which we apprehend it, that truth emerges. Benjamin’s method is thus truly dialectical, and analogous to Adorno’s reading of Hegel; both see truth as:

at once the process and the result of the process, that truth, whatever it is, emerges only at the end of this conceptual process, but that this emergence is not simply external to this process, that this process is ‘sublated’ in this result, that the whole process itself belongs essentially to this truth, and is no mere propadeutic that could then be simply detached from the result which you have now finally discovered and acquired.63

I shall conclude this opening chapter by returning to the relationship between Benjamin’s notion of the image, and travel, in advance of a greater focus on his travel writings in the subsequent sections: in short, I will seek to address why the very act of travelling was so important for Benjamin. The answer, I contend, is – for once – a simple one. If Benjamin sees our understanding of the world as emerging through a dialectic of images, of refining the concepts through which we apprehend reality in accordance with experience, exploration – and the travel implied by the term – must thus be a fundamentally important part of this epistemological process. The dialectic would, after all, be impossible if it were not constantly occupied with new realities, antitheses to the existing syn/theses. As Benjamin exclaimed in 1931: ‘How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books!’64

The Benjaminian flâneur must thus constantly go out into the world and document that which they see, much like an anthropologist in the field. They must pursue the novel, and confront that which they believe to be true. They must deliberately challenge their existing frames of reference, a notion no better conveyed than in the sentence by which Benjamin begins his reminiscences on his Berlin childhood: ‘Not to find one’s way around a city does not mean much. But to lose one’s way in a city, as one loses one’s way in a forest, requires some schooling.’65 It is on this theme, the role of memory in Benjamin’s travel writings, that I shall now turn.

63

T.W. Adorno, An Introduction to Dialectics, trans. by N. Walker, ed. by C. Ziermann (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017), 22-3.

64

W. Benjamin, ‘Unpacking My Library: A Talk about Book Collecting’, in W. Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. by H. Zohn, ed. by H. Arendt (New York, NY: Schocken Books, 1968), 63.

65

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Chapter 2 Place, space, memory, and imagination

As established above, Benjamin’s epistemology is based on a constant dialectical revision of the concepts through which we apprehend reality. The sensible is therefore at the heart of Benjamin’s method, described by Susan Buck-Morss as the ‘dialectics of seeing’.66 Yet this also necessarily involves memory, without which these concepts could not be retained and developed. As Theodor Adorno observed on the dialectical method, ‘it would […] be naive to believe that we could actually arrive at the whole […] simply on the basis of the individual phenomenon if we did not also possess some concept of the whole already.’67 This existing concept must thus be stored, in memory, if our understanding is to progress in such a fashion.

It is from this notion that we end up with the Berlin Childhood’s paradox that one must learn how to get lost; to acquire Benjamin’s method is, in some sense, to be taught how to forget, and see the everyday for what it is rather than what we already assume it to be: in other words, it is to become a child once more. 68 We must surely see this as geared towards the process of capturing the image; specifically, to isolate the events that one takes for granted in everyday life, to seize and analyse the quotidian and mundane. Yet the impossibility of learning to forget may, in part, explain the value Benjamin places on the very act of exploration. After all, does travelling to a new place not enable us to recover the curiosity of the child, and both confront and question reality afresh? Are our senses not heightened when wandering a foreign city, and only dulled by constant repetition?

The dialectical implications of childhood memory in Benjamin’s thought have been elucidated by Graeme Gilloch:

The child […] has a distinctive, special knowledge of, and experience in, the metropolis, which the adult must endeavour to redeem. Benjamin’s childhood recollections do not offer a contrast between the omniscient adult and the ignorant and/ or innocent child, but between alternative, distinctive modes of seeing and knowing […] for Benjamin, the apparently error-filled knowledge of the child may serve, unintentionally, to reveal hidden facets of the cityscape, and may even come to unmask the false appearance of things […]69

66

Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (1989).

67

Adorno, An Introduction to Dialectics (2017), 24.

68

BC, 53.

69

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The child’s perspective is different to that of the adult’s – different, as opposed to inferior or incorrect. It is not necessarily any less representative of the truth, and indeed may prove conducive to our uncovering it.

As Gilloch has further noted, Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood, a portrait of his youth in a German Jewish family around the turn of the century (that remained unfinished at his death), was a profoundly urban text: ‘The city is not simply a space remembered by Benjamin. It is, rather, the intricate interweaving of the memory of a particular site and the site of that memory which occupies Benjamin. Remembrance and metropolis become porous; they interpenetrate.’70

In-keeping with this urban emphasis, throughout the travel texts under study in this thesis Benjamin devotes almost all of his attention to urban street scenes and the ordinary people present in them. Here it is surely worth noting that Benjamin starts his first text from Marseille with a quote from André Breton, which reads: ‘The street … the only valid field of experience.’71 For Benjamin, the popular practices of public spaces are as revealing – if not more so – as those of the private sphere, which Benjamin associates with the bourgeoisie. In this regard, he seems to echo G.K. Chesterton’s claim that ‘ordinary things are more valuable than extraordinary things’ – at least in their dialectical potential.72 Indeed, only in Soviet Russia, which Benjamin finds remarkable precisely because of the irruption of formal politics into the everyday life of the travelees, does he focus specifically on the technicalities of governance and the machinations of the political elite – themes otherwise common in the history of investigatory travel writing.73

Of course, we cannot separate Benjamin’s deference to the quotidian from his political Marxism, which he had first come to in 1924.74 His article written from Naples in conjunction with Asja Lācis – who proved highly influential in encouraging Benjamin’s Marxist shift – just a year later betrays evidence of his frustration with the static class system he had left behind. Benjamin’s description of the houses in which families live is both an appreciation of the Neapolitan communalism, and an attack on its stagnant antithesis: ‘They are sober, open rooms resembling the political People’s Café – the opposite of everything Viennese, of the confined, bourgeois, literary world.’75 Stuart Jeffries has noted that in Naples, Marseille and Moscow alike, Benjamin ‘found

70 Ibid., 66. 71 Marseille, 232. 72

G.K. Chesterton, G.K. Chesterton: The Dover Reader (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2014), 286.

73

The term ‘travelee’, denoting ‘persons traveled to (or on) by a traveler, receptors of travel’ was coined by Mary Louise Pratt. See M.L. Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1993), 7.

74

Löwy, Fire Alarm (2005), 8

75

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private and public life thrillingly intermingled, the possibilities of transcending class apparently limitless.’76

It is clear that these everyday scenes also held special epistemological value for Benjamin, and dissecting them in an image constituted as close to a method as we can see in his works. This serves to illuminate Benjamin’s thinking on the relationship between place, space, memory, and imagination, which shall be explored in this chapter.

2.1 Place and Space

The importance of the street scene in Benjamin’s work has been noted by Marc Katz, who describes how Benjamin’s method follows that of Søren Kierkegaard: ‘They each take practices of everyday life – theater-going, interior decorating, strolling – and render them disjunctive by using their locales as forms of theoretically “inhabited” space.’77 The precise formation of an image – described by Katz as a ‘spatializing method’ – is necessarily disjunctive and jarring, and forces us anew to make sense of a quotidian event we may have otherwise registered only subconsciously. We may once again return to the writings from San Gimignano, where Benjamin only truly came to understand the fountain scene once it was presented in this disjunctive fashion.

The aforementioned quote from Katz is also worthy of further analysis as it defines the image-making method of Benjamin in more precise terms than other scholars. Katz emphasises that Benjamin is not merely describing the scenes before him, but is seeking to draw out the underlying concepts that dictate how these scenes play out. In other words, Benjamin is seeking to explain why what happens, happens, and more specifically, link this causality to its locale. Indeed, it is such concepts that render it possible to speak of conventional or quotidian events, of some semblance of repetition or order in the chaos of reality. Note Benjamin’s use of the ethnographic present – defined by Johannes Fabian as ‘giving accounts of other cultures and societies in the present tense’78 – throughout every one of his travel texts. For example, in Marseille, Benjamin describes ‘the down-and-out fellow who, after nightfall, sells his books on the corner of the rue de la République’79; in Moscow, ‘one beggar who always begins, at the approach of a promising-looking passer-by, to emit a soft, drawn-out howling’80. The individuals depicted, acting in an irretrievable moment in time, an event, are presented as timeless, as if governed by the essential laws of the place itself. These events, by implication, are bound to endless continuation or repetition. It is not merely that

76

S. Jeffries, Grand Hotel Abyss (London: Verso, 2016), 98.

77

Katz, ‘Rendezvouz in Berlin’ (1998), 2.

78

J. Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1983), 80.

79

Marseille, 235.

80

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Benjamin has rendered them immortal through capturing them in an image, but that the image is making an ontological claim precisely in the way in which it is written: these moments not only were, but still are.

This form of ethnographic presentation has spatial repercussions. Benjamin, read through Katz, sees public spaces as actually ‘inhabited’ by a certain theory. In analysing what this may actually mean, it is helpful to turn to Michel de Certeau’s distinction between espace and lieu, or space and place. Whereas de Certeau understands place as effectively a simple configuration of position governed by immutable scientific laws – a fixed materiality – space is entirely contingent:

in relation to place, space is like the word when it is spoken, that is, when it is caught in the ambiguity of an actualization, transformed into a term dependent upon many different conventions, situated as the act of a present (or of a time), and modified by the transformations caused by successive contexts. In contradistinction to the place, it has thus none of the univocity or stability of a “proper.” In short, space is a practiced place. Thus the street geometrically defined by urban planning is transformed into a space by walkers.81

For theorists like de Certeau and Henri Lefebvre, space is effectively culturalised place. In his ‘spatial triad’, Lefebvre speaks of ‘spaces of representation’ – the space in which we move around in everyday life, that is ‘directly lived through its associated images and symbols’.82 It is the presence of this cultural dimension that governs how the inhabitants of a place act; for de Certeau, the reading of these images and symbols completes the transformation of a place into a space. That Benjamin holds a similar notion of the distinction between place and space is made most obviously manifest in his first writing from Marseille, in which he describes Les Bricks, the red-light district, ‘a vast agglomeration of steps, arches, bridges, turrets and cellars’.83 Its architectural formation gives Benjamin the impression that it is ‘still awaiting its designated use, but it already has it [emphasis added]. For this […] is the prostitutes’ quarter.’84 Here, Benjamin notes that the district has been culturalised: it contains a set of visual signs that determine how the Marseillais behave upon entering, and that are, initially, at least, incomprehensible to an outsider – hence Benjamin’s own initial misrecognition. To

81

de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (1988), 117.

82

H. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. by D. Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 39.

83

Marseille, 232.

84

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return to the terms of de Certeau, this is the contingent cultural element that completes the lieu-espace transformation.

The question that remains, is from where does Benjamin see this culture, these defining characteristics, or perhaps what D.H. Lawrence analogously referred to as the ‘spirit of place’85, as emerging? For Benjamin, this culture is, at least in part, resultant of the memory – a prerequisite to the concepts through which we all apprehend reality – of the travelees.

2.2 Memory and place

Perhaps the most prominent work dealing with memory in Benjamin’s corpus is his Berlin Childhood. In an afterword to the text, Theodor Adorno makes a qualitative distinction between Berlin Childhood and the Arcades Project, describing the former as:

the subjective counterpart to the masses of materials Benjamin brought together for his project on the Paris arcades. The historical archetypes he wished to lay out […] in the study of Paris were to be illuminated by lightning flashes of immediate remembrances in the Berlin book, which throughout laments the irretrievability of what, once lost, congeals into an allegory of its own demise.86

What, then, determines this relationship between the supposed subjectivity of the Berlin Childhood, and the implicit objectivity of the Arcades Project?

In the previous chapter the complex relationship between subjectivity and objectivity in Benjamin’s works was discussed, yet there are further spatial implications to be drawn out. While much of Benjamin’s work – including many of his travel texts, which lament the unstoppable onslaught of modernity – suggests an awareness of an irreversible and catastrophic historical transformation, of a kind of paradise lost, Benjamin recognises the cities he visits as pregnant with the memories of what was, of subjectivity irrupting into the objective world. These memories, as suggested by his use of the ethnographic present, have agency: they occupy space, indeed, influence how spaces are perceived by their inhabitants. Benjamin’s general anti-modern attitude, to which I shall return in the final two chapters, no doubt plays a part in his understanding of memory as made manifest in a kind of Kierkegaardian melancholy; Adorno himself

85

D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (Exeter: Shearsman Books, 2011), 41.

86

‘The whole world shrinks to a single Sunday afternoon’: Spatio-temporality and the travel writing of Walter Benjamin