Similarly

Mark’s most recent post had me thinking on multiple levels – about the way education works, also prompted by a link to another essay which bothered me to no end from Matt Boutte, who trenchantly commented on Mark’s ramblings – about economics as a discipline, and how it intersects (or really acts as a skew line) versus the actual conduct of economic activity – about the actual articles he cited, one of which I read and had a similarly visceral reaction to, the other of which I stand tempted to read but, really, why?

And then I got distracted.

One of my favorite writers is Walter Benjamin.  He’s a favorite of the New Left for his passionate, yet cowardly, yet ineffectual, yet ultimately timeless resistance to fascism.  He’s a darling of structuralists and post-structuralists for appropriately contradictory reasons – structuralists love his rooting out of principles which underlay the basis of disparate elements of Western thought, post-structuralists for his willingness to challenge his own thinking on the basis of the fundamentally linguistic way in which he approaches ideas.  He died crossing the Pyrannes in an attempt to escape the Nazis, but as a more or less secular Jewish man with a deeper affinity for Germanic culture than the Parisian landscape he set before himself for analysis, his personal sense of torture in some ways sums up the entire failed modernist 20th century project.

I was distracted by a review of a new collection of essays of his; the collection is about the nature of storytelling.  Benjamin wasn’t easily pigeonholed as a scholar or thinker; he received his Ph.D for a work which was essentially an intellectual history of art criticism.   That’s probably part of why I like him: he wasn’t an historian, really, but he wasn’t an art critic either, nor was he a literary critic.  He recognized that the essence of social theory was a mixture of historical digging, rational theorizing, and a kind of intuitive creation.

The essay I read, however – written by Peter Brooks in the most recent New York Review of Books – reduced him to a sort of bland literary theorist.  Brooks strips Benjamin bare of his pursuit of multidimensionality, and reduces his expansive project into a simplistic pursuit of “story” and “narrative” in a narrow literary sense.  Unlike Mark’s antagonist academics, Brooks is writing a kind of paean to what he sees as an essential brilliance in Benjamin as a literary critic, but in doing so he misses the tragic point of what Benjamin was, I think, shooting for – why he hauled a 50 pound valise of unorganized manuscript on an ultimately futile attempt to escape the Nazis.  That valise is missing, although he told his companions that it contained the raw material for his masterwork, for what he really wanted to say as an intellectual and as a human being.

This is a kind of personal issue for me.  I started this blog as my own Arcades Project, the forerunner of Benjamin’s lifework that was lost in the escape across the mountains.  I started with an essay about Valence, about the evolution and devolution of a relationship with my own kind of Alma Mahler figure, about the rest areas of the American west, about money and pseudo-money and the pursuit of meaning, both written and oral and physical, about the nature of connection, about nature, about tone.  I’ve been joined by Mark and Viktoria on the project and it’s gotten richer, denser, more challenging, so challenging that at times I feel daunted by it and can’t find the stamina to write in the face of their insights.  But there are no edges to that project.  Mark and Viktoria – and the comments posted by all of you who do post, and the emails and conversations that join with us – are not engaged in a project about anything less expansive than the nature of existence as engaged, sentient, mortal beings in a world which is expansive beyond our capacity to understand, let alone synthesize and express in words, which is not linear in any event and which requires a kind of faith to allow for tangents, experiments, allegory, swimming.

Benjamin did the exact same thing and moreover, I think he realized that it was an open ended project and he panicked.  The “project” of nearly every writer is closed and defined.  This is of course true of academics especially, with their professional requirement to publish or perish, but it’s even been a consistent criticism of some readers of this site.  I have one friend in particular who almost always asks after a posting “why should I be interested in this?  There’s no point to it”.  I take that critique seriously because it comes from someone who’s writing I truly enjoy, although he hasn’t published anything of late.  But my response is, why do we need a point?  Why does a work have to drive towards a fixed meaning?  Why can’t it create a sensation, why can’t it describe an unfixed and uncomfortable state of being?  This is, really, what Benjamin did in his non-fiction forms; he didn’t write to make a point (sometimes he did, but not in his larger works); he created a sense.

But this was experimental and dangerous as a written project, and he didn’t have a community; as a German Jew in Paris in the late 1930s, any “community” he could have found would have been riven with suspicion and double-cross.  I trust my community in a way that Walter Benjamin could not have done, and that meant his thoughts could not have been posted to the time-equivalent of the Internet, broadcast via blast email and Google search to one and all, needed to be hoarded and only dribbled out in almost allegorical essays, children’s tales, brief commentaries in tightly circulated printed journals.

We don’t know what was in Benjamin’s suitcase that was lost in the mountains, that disappeared along with his life when he committed suicide thinking the Germans were closing in.  But it wasn’t clean, it wasn’t captured neatly, it wasn’t something that can be reduced to Brooks’ literary critique and neat analogies to Conrad and the art of story telling.  And even if it can be thought of usefully in that way, it deserves more thought: it deserves a consideration of the orality of the story, of the nature of the “story” as told around the fire versus the nature of the “novel” or “narrative” inscribed in print.  How Brooks could ignore the MacLuhan construct of hot versus cold transmission mechanisms, how he could put aside the differentiation that Benjamin himself appreciated between the physical imposition of meaning in structures and buildings versus the soft sharing of word and tone and music versus the composite nature of the rational yet expressive ambiguity of text – how could an emeritus professor in comparative literature at Yale be as tone deaf as Mark’s academic economic bimbos?

The process of unraveling ourselves – of seeing the fundamental sameness of the rules and matter that make up everything around and including us, while recognizing the astonishing irreducible and ennobling uniqueness of everything in the exact same moment – is never ending.  It isn’t something to be explained, although it can induce vertigo if you treat it well.  Academics thrive on reduction and publication; politicians thrive on reduction and incitement.  This site does not thrive: it simply seeks to circulate.  It is, after all, the essence of water.

I share Mark’s distraction.  I’ve been working on a piece about the strange epiphany of “modern monetary theory” in the news lately.  I’ve been pondering something about the meaning of being part of a chain of existence.  I’ve also been thinking about being fired from a job for being too competent, planning another year of travel and exploration, driving over the worst road in Maine to visit Quebec City and thinking about speaking French there, and the art of cooking beef Wellington.  I have a half dozen half started essays, all of which speak to the same fundamental theme that started this blog.

I don’t have to spell it out for you, though.  Thanks for reading.  Happy New Year to all!