Reading backwards

"Writing is murder" Walker Percy.

House-sitting or staying with family and friends has often seduced me with new books to read. I love looking at other peoples book shelves filled with chatckas, dvd collections or books. How many friendships, or travels or coincidences in conversations have manifested a wonderful book into my lap? Endless. Reuniting with a pagey friend though is a love affair like no other. I recently unpacked and repacked boxes of my library. It isn't a very big library. There was a time when I had something like 60 milkcrates of books. When I moved my friends hated me. At the moment the books I own and savour are mostly favourite novels, and many reference non-fiction books. I sent a suitcase home with Stagg last month. I kept a half dozen or so with me during my visit in Canada.

One of these delightful old friends is a book I must have scavanged somewhere, it is beat up but unread by me. It is Illuminations by Walter Benjamin published post-humously in 1955. Benjamin is most known for his translations, which is primarily how I know him, although he is also a challenging literary critic.


"The growing proletarianization of modern man and the increasing formation of masses are two aspects of the same process. Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life. The violation of the masses, whom Fascism, with its Führer cult, forces to their knees, has its counterpart in the violation of an apparatus which is pressed into the production of ritual values.

All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war. War and war only can set a goal for mass movements on the largest scale while respecting the traditional property system. This is the political formula for the situation. The technological formula may be stated as follows: Only war makes it possible to mobilize all of today’s technical resources while maintaining the property system. It goes without saying that the Fascist apotheosis of war does not employ such arguments. Still, Marinetti says in his manifesto on the Ethiopian colonial war:

“For twenty-seven years we Futurists have rebelled against the branding of war as anti-aesthetic ... Accordingly we state:... War is beautiful because it establishes man’s dominion over the subjugated machinery by means of gas masks, terrifying megaphones, flame throwers, and small tanks. War is beautiful because it initiates the dreamt-of metalization of the human body. War is beautiful because it enriches a flowering meadow with the fiery orchids of machine guns. War is beautiful because it combines the gunfire, the cannonades, the cease-fire, the scents, and the stench of putrefaction into a symphony. War is beautiful because it creates new architecture, like that of the big tanks, the geometrical formation flights, the smoke spirals from burning villages, and many others ... Poets and artists of Futurism! ... remember these principles of an aesthetics of war so that your struggle for a new literature and a new graphic art ... may be illumined by them!”

This manifesto has the virtue of clarity. Its formulations deserve to be accepted by dialecticians. To the latter, the aesthetics of today’s war appears as follows: If the natural utilization of productive forces is impeded by the property system, the increase in technical devices, in speed, and in the sources of energy will press for an unnatural utilization, and this is found in war. The destructiveness of war furnishes proof that society has not been mature enough to incorporate technology as its organ, that technology has not been sufficiently developed to cope with the elemental forces of society. The horrible features of imperialistic warfare are attributable to the discrepancy between the tremendous means of production and their inadequate utilization in the process of production – in other words, to unemployment and the lack of markets. Imperialistic war is a rebellion of technology which collects, in the form of “human material,” the claims to which society has denied its natural materrial. Instead of draining rivers, society directs a human stream into a bed of trenches; instead of dropping seeds from airplanes, it drops incendiary bombs over cities; and through gas warfare the aura is abolished in a new way.

“Fiat ars – pereat mundus”, says Fascism, and, as Marinetti admits, expects war to supply the artistic gratification of a sense perception that has been changed by technology. This is evidently the consummation of “l’art pour l’art.” Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art."

from; The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.

I kept this book by Walter Benjamin with me because he has some criticism and notes about Brecht and Proust, both of which I was hoping to read this summer. Despite having dyslexia, I am an avid reader. Usually books on non-fiction about nature and science and mythology. But for the last few months I have been reading online and magazines. I don't seem to have the attention span for a book of any kind, least of all fiction. So, Harpers, Vanity Fair, WIRED and blogs it is for me. A book of essays by Walter Benjamin seemed like a good return to book reading.

I was unprepared for the stunning introduction by Hannah Arendt and lost the morning to her reflections. Arendt met Benjamin in Paris in the 30's where she describes him as cultivating his life as a flaneur.I am not a big fan of biographies although I could likely tell you who Brad Pitt was dating in 1985...but something about the deadly combo of Arendt and Benjamin drew me in. I knew nothing about this unusual man who translated and was a peer to Kafka and Brecht and was immersed in the study of Goethe, Here was someone who obsessed about the ordinary and surrealism. I had no idea that Benjamin was so taken with surrealism, he was friends with Georges Bataille and died tragically by his own hand trying to escape nazi Germany for America. He also collected quotations.

Not uncommon for a writer and artist, I too, collect quotations. I am more likely to post a quotation here at my blog than my very own thoughts. I find a world of passion in other peoples thoughts. My student sketchbooks offer little to me with their feeble inexperienced drawings and notes, but the excitement of reading the quotes I transcribed as a young person deliver me to the world of searching for answers and the classic debates over beer with fellow students and punks and freaks and artists. A life pahse that usually only lasts for most people during their life, that period when we actually have the time and commitment to question authority and live the life of a flaneur with our friends rather than slaves to the Man. I was charmed by reading that a large aspect of Benjamin's literary criticism was his adoption of using endless quotations within his work and collecting not only books but notes and notes of quotations. Arendt describes him as a man walking backwards into the future. And that his use of quotations in his writing was like a surrealistic montage.

From Arendt's introduction...
Insofar as the past has been transmitted as tradition, it posesses authority; insofar as authority presents itself historically, it becomes tradition. Walter Benjamin knew that the break in tradition and the loss of authority which occured in his lifetime were irreparable, and he concluded that he had to discover new ways of dealing with the past. In this he became a master when he discovered the transmissibility of the past had been replaced by its citability and that in place of its authority there had a risen a strange power to settle down, piecemeal, in the present and to deprive it of "peace of mind", the mindless peace of complacency. "Quotations in my works are like robbers by the roadside who make an armed attack and relieve an idler of his convictions" This discovery of the modern function of quotations, according to Benjamin, who exemplified it by Karl Kraus, was born out of despair-not the despair of a past that refuses "to throw light on the future" and lets the human mind "wander in darkness" as in Tocqueville, but out of the despair of the present and the desire to destroy it, hence their power is "not the strength to preserve but to cleanse, to tear out of context, to destroy". Still, the discoverers and lovers of this destructive power originally were inspired by an entirely different intention, the intention to preserve; and only because they did not let themselves be fooled by the professional "preservers" all around them did they finally discover that the destructive power of quotations was "the only one which still contains the hope that something from this period will survive-for no other reason than that it was torn out of it." In this form of "thought fragments," quotations have the double task of interupting the flow of the presentation with "transcendent force" and at the same time of concentrating within themselves that which is presented. As to their weight in Benjamin's writings, quotations are comparable only to the very dissimilar Biblical citations which so often replace the immanent consistency of argumentation in medieval treatises.

I understand this to mean, that by using quotations Benjamin knew he could turn political censor and attention away from himself and demonstrate that others had already taken a stand exploring oppression and freedom within literature. I also take this to mean that we quickly forget our past stories and their wisdom or folly. A good example of this is the last election in Canada. How could Canadians elect a leader who was against gay and womens rights? Because he stopped quoting his own biogtry and so did the media.

"The establishment came down with a constitutional package which they put to a national referendum. The package included distinct society status for Quebec and some other changes, including some that would just horrify you, putting universal Medicare in our constitution, and feminist rights, and a whole bunch of other things."
- Conservative leader Stephen Harper, then vice-president of the National Citizens Coalition, in a June 1997 Montreal meeting of the Council for National Policy, a right-wing American think tank.

How quickly we forget. How clever are the stylists to the stars and politicians revamping Harper all the way to Prime Minister. Nice work Canadian voters. How could you? In part because we don't read or remember the past. Maybe we deserve these self-serving leaders since we are too lazy to think and read for ourselves?

"The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair. " Walker Percy.

"You live in a deranged age, more deranged that usual, because in spite of great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing." Walker Percy.

At the moment "the past" in the middle east is being recalled in a series of "they started it" quotations of They said/They said.

"They started it" has never worked for parents or for child care workers. Why do we accept it from grown-ups?

Just exactly who indeed are we?