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These little narratives, these worlds that open within
worlds, are not accidental. Benjamin particularly valued the
qualities of "tact" and "politeness", as
the qualities appropriate to a critic who would do justice
to the significance, the intimations of totality, present in
ordinary things. Tact, he defined in an essay on the great
Austrian critic Karl Kraus, as a kind of "moral
alertness", "the capacity to treat social
relationships…as natural, even paradise relationships,
and so not only to approach the king as if he had been born
with the crown on his brow, but the lackey like an Adam in
livery." The same respect was to be given to plants, to
animals, to children. Politeness is another form of tact,
important both because it is itself the appearance of grace
and dignity in the ordinary actions of an individual, and
because it is an attitude of "alert openness" to
the humble, the comic, the extreme, the unexpected.
(Alertness is very close to that attitude of
"astonishment" which Benjamin would later claim as
the appropriate response to the work of Kafka or Brecht.)
There is an interesting gloss on "politeness" in
the essay "Hashish in Marseilles", which describes
how Benjamin, after smoking hashish, succumbed to hunger,
which required a visit to Basso's restaurant. Here he
ordered oysters from the menu, and a local dish as a main
course. The waiter returned to say that his choice of main
course was unavailable, and offered him the menu a second
time. Benjamin's finger hovers over the previously chosen
dish, then settles on the dish directly above it, which he
orders. Then he orders the dish above that one, and the next
dish, and the next, all the way to the top of the menu.
"This was not just from greed, however," Benjamin
comments, "but from an extreme politeness toward the
dishes, which I did not wish to offend by a refusal."
The tiny person who stands inside the first piece of fruit
and bows is an expression of this politeness; the two
puppets revolving in a dance in the second fruit, an
expression of that dance of significance, that unity which
is felt, appropriately but with astonishment, in the most
unexpected places. The third fruit did not open, testifying
to the unreliability of the world, the spots in it which
refuse to respond, or have no life.
Bibliographical references, author's biographical note and relevant links can be found at the
conclusion ofpart twoof this essay.
The Critic and the Public Culture:
Ivor Indyk
for example, Walter Benjamin
this paper has been divided
into parts one & two
Nevertheless, if "public culture" doesn't seem
like a redundant description, at least not at the present
time, that is because it has now become common to annex the
word "culture" to the word "corporate",
and to talk of two cultures: corporate culture, and that
territory which it has all but usurped, and which we now
call, for want of a better phrase, and with a quiet note of
pathos or desperation, the "public
culture".
For the literary critic, this situation is likely to be felt with
particular keenness, because he or she stands, hemmed in,
between two corporate worlds, the publishing and media
industries on the one hand, the university on the other. For
the university, which in the past offered a space which one
thought of as belonging to the public culture, has now
fallen hostage to the imperatives of the corporate culture.
The most obvious sign of this is the university's active
discouragement of public critical activity. No recognition
for reviews, for essays in anything other than refereed
journals, for newspaper or magazine articles, for
contributions to public debate on radio, television or other
public fora, for editing or publishing other writers'
work.
It has often been said that Australia lacks the media to
satisfy the critic's need to communicate with a larger
public. Having sought to provide such a medium, in HEAT, I
think it would be truer to say that, by and large, critics
no longer feel the need to communicate with a larger public.
The needs imposed on them by the corporate world in which
they must now make their way are far more compelling than
those which might call in the name of community, or public
responsibility.
I take a literary critic to be someone vitally concerned with the
reading of literature. Most critics are to be found in
universities, because they have to make a living, or hope to
make a living, by teaching. Teaching is a public activity, a
contribution to the public culture however much it might be
hedged by corporate economies, and the corporate criteria of
assessable aims and outcomes. But it is, necessarily,
confined in its reach; and it is offered as an increasingly
expensive privilege.
I am concerned here with the kind of criticism which is
available in a public way – which is accessible,
reproducible, interesting and with what we might call
"reach" – it has the potential to exercise
an appeal beyond its immediately specified audience. The
technology exists, or will soon exist, to give this kind of
criticism great power. But the corporate mentality requires
immediate returns, returns which are statistically
verifiable, not virtual – student numbers, grant
dollars, staff-student ratios – it needs to be able
to count. So this power goes unrecognised.
It's unnecessary to go through the familiar litany of
complaints about the ways in which the university restricts
the public role of the critic. But I would like to single
out three forms of restriction, in particular, the influence
of which is now very apparent.
The first is the way the university now structures research
activity in terms of the pursuit of large grants. Literary
projects framed for large grants are expensive by
definition: they favour the bureaucratic over the
speculative intellect simply by virtue of the degree of
management involved. Such projects are also large by
definition: they do not encourage the kind of topical
activity, the essayistic intervention, the readiness to
comment, which is typical of public criticism. In them, the
researcher is primarily responsible to the corporation
rather than to the public, and it is easy to see why this
should be so: since "large grants" are chief
amongst the university's indicators of productivity and
performance, and other forms of funding are tied to them,
the university stands to gain more from them than does the
individual researcher. They are, first and foremost, a means
of generating corporate income.
The second problem is the requirement placed on the use of
institutionally appropriate discourse, of the kind which
will carry authority within or across disciplinary
boundaries in the university system. Though it has authority
within the university, the language of academic discourse
has very little without it, and is not intended to. Viewed
from the public realm, the terms of such a language seem set
in concrete, limiting its accessibility and reach –
from this perspective, it seems unnecessarily concerned with
authority, since it has none. It appears alternately
obscure, and comical.
The third problem is the way a whole generation of young
literary critics is being trained for positions in the
academy which don't exist, because the indices which govern
the institution's income demand a high intake of
postgraduates. To be funded to read, and to write about
reading, is a wonderful training opportunity for a future in
criticism – but if the future will not, for most, be in
the university itself, why do we continue to train our
critics in a language, a method, a focus, which will not
equip them to operate where they are needed most, in the
largely undermanned "public" realm?
The sequestration of criticism in our own period is the more
marked if one thinks of the public role played in Australia
by an earlier generation of critics, like Judith Wright,
James McAuley, A.D. Hope, Vincent Buckley, or before them,
Vance and Nettie Palmer and A.A. Phillips. Since the
university was then only beginning to exercise an interest
in Australian literature, it acted as a base from which the
critic might write for the educated public at large, rather
than as the exclusive and self-absorbed domain it has since
become. The fact that so many of these critics were also
poets or novelists in their own right enhanced their
authority, though it would be unlikely to do so today.
Given the seriousness of the situation, I would like to
focus on a figure outside our own immediate tradition, one
who, by virtue of the supreme value he placed on the role of
the critic, and his dedication to this role in a time of
crisis, tells us much about the qualities necessary for a
renewed public criticism in Australia. I mean the German
literary critic Walter Benjamin, whose enormously
influential writing came out of the brief period between the
two World Wars, ending with his death in 1940, as he was
fleeing from the Nazis.
The immediate appeal of Benjamin's work lies partly in the
extraordinary sharpness of his critical perceptions, always
an essential public attribute; partly in the trajectory his
criticism took, from the reading of Goethe to the reading of
the streets of Paris; and partly also because his rejection
by the academy – he was denied his doctorate for The
Origin of German Tragic Drama, one of the great critical
documents of the twentieth century – was instrumental
in the development of his role as both a public critic, and
a critic reading the public realm. The image which has now
become so well known, of Benjamin on the day before his
suicide, perched on a mountainside above the border between
France and Spain, clinging to a heavy black briefcase
containing a recently completed manuscript, captures in an
extreme form the precariousness, and risk, which is a
feature of criticism practised outside the secure confines
of the academy. Yet there is in Benjamin's critical writing,
for all the darkness that he saw about him, and the sombre
qualities of his own outlook, a lightness of touch, and a
joyful lyrical quality. This lyricism has been all but
banished from our own critical discourse, which is earnest,
and keen to assert its theoretical credentials.
More fundamentally, what is remarkable about Benjamin's
criticism, in a period of cultural disintegration, is the
assurance it gives that every text worthy of interpretation,
every detail and every object, has in it some intimation of
a larger unity to which it belongs, and of which it is an
expression. In the first place, Benjamin seems to have drawn
on two complementary sources for this assurance, German
romanticism, and Jewish mysticism. Certainly his early
formulations were idealistic, and mystical in character. In
his early essay "On Language as Such and on the
Language of Man", this totality is the name, the divine
creative power of the word, inherent in all languages, and
in the mute communication of all things. Language is the
medium of creation, set free in man, who by naming, in turn
translates the nameless language of things. Regardless of
what we now think of its metaphysical underpinning, the
perspective allows Benjamin to assert "the material
community of things in their communication", to see
communication, and therefore community as fundamental
qualities of the world.
A few years later, in his 1925 essay on Naples, it is a
primitive folk energy, a "rich barbarism", which
communicates itself in his description of the city,
animating its spaces, overflowing its boundaries, empowering
its inhabitants, charging its ordinary objects with mystery,
so that not just the crowds in the streets, the food in the
markets, but iced drinks and toothpaste, rubber balls and
chocolate, fans and fireworks become possessed of magical
properties. Benjamin calls this animation of the detail,
this sense of the whole working in the part,
porosity.In his subsequent essays on Moscow (1927)
and Marseilles(1929) there is a similar kind of
communication or flaring out of energy, constricted and
frozen in the case of Moscow by State control, but
reasserting itself wherever the folk traditions continue to
find expression, as in the old pictorial shop signs in
Moscow for example, which Benjamin reads like images in a
poem, "shoes falling out of a basket, a Pomeranian
running away with a sandal in his mouth. Pendants before the
entrance to a Turkish kitchen; gentlemen, each with a fez
adorning his head and each at his own little table...Often
Moscow's evening sky glows in a frightening blue: one has
unwittingly looked at it through one of the gigantic pairs
of blue spectacles that project from optician's shops like
signposts." In Marseilles the enchantment is felt in
the bustle by the port, particularly in the shellfish and
oyster stalls, as the shells are "sieved, grouped,
counted, cracked open, thrown away", to be resurrected,
on the opposite quay, as souvenirs, "the mineral
hereafter of seashells", alongside inkpots and anchors,
steamers and thermometers. "The pressure of a thousand
atmospheres under which this world of images writhes, rears,
piles up," Benjamin writes, "is the same force
that is tested in the hard hands of seamen, after long
voyages, on the thighs and breasts of women; and the lust
that, on the shell-covered caskets, presses from the mineral
world a red or blue velvet heart to be pierced with needles
and brooches is the same lust that sends tremors through
these streets on paydays."
The clear sense you get is that Benjamin is deliberately
driving his interpretative skills as a critic into the
public arena, and into that arena in which the public
manifested itself in its most concentrated form, the streets
and markets of the modern city. The essay on Marseilles
begins with a quote from Breton, "the street…the
only valid field of experience". The essay on Naples is
dedicated to the Latvian Communist Asja Lacis, who had a
strong influence on the social turn that Benjamin's thought
took in the late 1920s. Perhaps inevitably, given the
idealist perspective from which he comes, as a critic, the
city first presents itself as a site of primitive energies.
Yet that cannot be the only explanation, since Benjamin's
readings constantly vacillate between these two extreme
promises of unity, the metaphysical on the one hand, the
primitive on the other, in his interpretations of Goethe or
Proust or Kafka, no less than in his readings of the city
street.
The text which most fully demonstrates the new social
orientation in Benjamin's writing is the long essay
"One Way Street", which he published in 1928. It
seems remarkably ahead of its time. In it Benjamin reads his
way along an imaginary street, stringing his meditations
from the hooks provided by its apartments, shop fronts,
displayed commodities, signs, graffiti and advertisements.
The first stop, "Filling Station" contains this
announcement:
The construction of life is at present in the power far more
of facts than of convictions, and of such facts as have
scarcely ever become the basis of convictions. Under these
circumstances, true literary activity cannot aspire to take
place within a literary framework; this is, rather, the
habitual expression of its sterility. Significant literary
effectiveness can come into being only in a strict
alternation between action and writing; it must nurture the
inconspicuous forms that fit its influence in active
communities better than does the pretentious, universal
gesture of the book – in leaflets, brochures, articles
and placards. Only this prompt language shows itself
actively equal to the moment. Opinions are to the vast
apparatus of social existence what oil is to machines: one
does not go up to a turbine and pour machine oil over it;
one applies a little to hidden spindles and joints that one
has to know.
It is typical of Benjamin that he should go for the spindles
and joints, the small details on which the operation of the
whole depends. He notes approvingly elsewhere how, in
Proust, "remembrance progresses from small to smallest
details, from the smallest to the infinitesimal, while that
which it encounters in these microcosms grows ever
mightier". The movement is similar to that which
Benjamin inherits from Romanticism and Jewish mysticism,
both of which dwell in the ruin, the fragment, stressing the
limitations of the object, its incompleteness, in order to
return it to the totality from which it draws its
significance.
In "One Way Street" some of the objects, those
from which the life has fled, or the manufactured objects
accumulated by the bourgeoisie, which never had life, do not
answer to the interpreter's gaze – "the luxury
goods swaggering before us now parade such brazen solidity
that all the mind's shafts break harmlessly on their
surface." Others, like the objects which the child
transforms in play, or those which have the magic of
tradition or fairy-tale about them, open onto larger worlds.
There is a remarkable description of a shooting range, where
the striking of the bull's-eye triggers the unfolding of a
mechanical tableau. Hence the large door with its target:
"if you have hit the mark it opens, and before red
plush curtains stands a Moor who seems to bow slightly. He
holds a golden bowl before him. On it lie three pieces of
fruit. The first opens; a tiny person stands inside it and
bows. In the second, two equally diminutive puppets revolve
in a dance. (The third did not open.)"
Continue with part two of this essay.
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