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Many like Brecht had already escaped to the US where the
Frankfurt School had set up its institute which would return to
Germany only after the fall of Nazism. To flee Nazi tyranny
Walter Benjamin attempted to get away, like his other friends to
New York City. A briefcase containing his valued manuscript that
became finally the famous ‘Arcades Project’ in one hand, he
crossed the Pyrenees on his way to non-aligned Spain. But he
could not make it. The papers being incomplete, he was turned
back at the checkpoint. On his way back to France an overdose of
morphine ended his life.
Esther Leslie
in his concise and well-organized book shows Benjamin’s
concern with the explorations of the paradoxical, ambiguous and
uncertain open-ended nature of reality—a rejection of the
notion of the integrated personality in favor of the emphasis on
the destructured, dehumanized subject. As is obvious here,
Benjamin had held such views long before the coming of
postmodernism. The book is an in-depth study of modernism and
its broader perspectives involving the whole of culture and the
relationship that exists between it and the economic and
political order. But Leslie cannot really do away with the
post-structuralist prejudice that has characterised so much of
Benjamin’s writings, much that he strives to. In ‘On the
Concept of History’, Benjamin remains inherently postmodernist
in his privileging of ‘peripheral voices’. Deep down Leslie
recognises that Benjamin had brought together the philosophical,
the political and the aesthetic which were integral to his
exploration of the link between history and modernity, between
memory as truth and linearity as false; this had led him to view
‘human subjectivity as a construction of fragments of often
discontinous moments’ and the reconstruction of the past as
nothing but the inevitable ideologizing of the past. The ‘real’,
therefore is never more than the ‘meaning’. His disbelief in
the conventional narratives had, therefore, given rise to the
aphoristic, intertextual and fragmentary nature of most of his
writings. On the other hand, ‘the arcitecture of articulation’
in the words of Roland Barthes, is so vital to the
foundationalist who tries to draw ‘truth’ from concrete
details, forgetting that all narrative structures are in fact
born within the realm of myths, epics, or in other words,
fiction.
Benjamin and
his colleagues moved away from Marxism, in situating the sources
of control in the area of culture and ideology and not
exclusively in the economic structure of society. In its attempt
to liberate people from false impressions and restrictions of
their own making, they endeavored to expose misrepresented forms
of consciousness, or ways of thinking that inculcated
conformism.
The ideas of Adorno, Marcuse,
Walter Benjamin, Franz Neumann, and Otto Kirchheimer (members of
the Frankfurt School) are an investigation into the sources of
compliance to authority and what makes certain people
predisposed to dictatorial half truths. They maintain how the
economic misuse of people under capitalism is made possible by
Western society’s ‘instinctual and psychic subjugation of
the individual’. Benjamin increasingly turned his attention to
music, entertainment, shopping arcades, department stores and
what Adorno called the culture industry as forms of repression
intended to appease and restructure any excessive social
tendencies. The school also acted as an impetus behind
the radical movements of the sixties when the Marxist belief in
the proletarian revolution was replaced by the hope that
minority subcultures like the lesgays, blacks, women and
students would final usher in social renovation.
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A
student of philology at Frieburg University; then at
University of Berne where he keenly researched in the area of
philosophy, Benjamin submitted his doctoral thesis on German
Baroque drama entitled The Origin of German Tragic Drama
at the University of Frankfurt in 1925. Benjamin’s plans for
obtaining the Habilitation that would enable him to go
into academics failed as the thesis with its dual concerns
with philosophy and literature did not fall under the rubric
of the university. The dissertation with its main aim at
condemning 19th century philosophy for its totalising
pretensions was to become the single most important document
to the Frankfurt School. Benjamin had always stood against the
ambitions of philosophy to knit a scientific and ‘false
reconciliation between heterogeneous systems of knowledge’.
Ideologically, he opposed the First World War, and therefore
evaded military service. An anti-establishment activist,
attracted more by Communism than Zionism, he spent his
university days fighting against materialistic, prudish and
self-satisfied obsessions of the bourgeoisie, and for
educational reforms.
