Dustin Kidd

Modernism and Mass Culture

Professor Flatley

12/14/98

Are the present hundred years a long time? But first see whether a hundred years can be present. —Carolyn Forche, "The Angel of History"

I set out initially to create a dialogue between T. S. Eliot and Walter Benjamin but found that task to be too daunting. The two intellectuals simply do not address exactly the same issues on the same grounds. There is an affinity between them to be sure, but that affinity creates an incredible risk of mistaking similar theories for concurring theories. Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965), though a banker by profession for much of his life, served the art world as a poet, dramatist, and literary critic. Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), was also a literary critic, as well as a social theorist. However, the critical work of each man was quite different from the other.

A look at each man’s writings on Baudelaire illustrates my point. Eliot was concerned primarily with placing Baudelaire in his proper position in literary tradition, thus affirming the poet by affirming the tradition. Benjamin’s approach was quite different. He used Baudelaire as a means of codifying the nineteenth century in order to understand the twentieth. My point is that, rather than confuse the terminologies of each man, we would be better served to understand one man’s work in light of the other man’s theories. Both writers were concerned with the crises of the arts and of politics in the early twentieth century. I have chosen to examine Eliot with a view to Benjamin’s theories because I believe Eliot offered a tangible solution to the those crises, a solution that can based on principles quite similar to those of Benjamin. I hope to establish that Benjamin would reject Eliot’s solution as oversimplifying both the problem and the creative possibilities for the solution.

At the most basic level, the problem was that the culture of the twentieth century, the status of the arts and of politics, was simply unacceptable to most men and women of letters, particularly to poets. Consider the words of Gertrude Stein: "You had to recognize words had lost their value in the Nineteenth century, particularly towards the end, they had lost much of their variety, and I felt that I could not go on." Stein was not alone in identifying the beginnings of the crisis with the nineteenth century. That hundred years saw the increasing democratization of the west, the growth of a mass culture by means of both mass education and mass media, and the overall flattening of cultural hierarchies. The control of cultural authority dissipated in the hands of the many individual members of ‘the people’. This created a crisis that would develop first in the arts and later in politics. The growth of technology and the sciences played no small part in this crisis. The mass culture was also an industrial culture. Solving the so-called ‘labor problem’ became the goal of those who hoped to return to the primacy of high culture.

Benjamin identified particular technological advancements that had contributed to the crisis of the arts. The first was the mass printing of books. The invention of the printing press created a new entity of the book. Previously, a book’s entity was its intellectual offering. A man who sought a particular book sought really for the ideas of language of the book. Rarely could he actually own a physical copy of the book unless he copied the book himself. Once mass printing began the possibility for ownership increased significantly and books gained a physical entity. A book could then be understood as having been produced in a particular year or particular town, in a particular edition. As the mass culture of the west developed, the book became a commodity. The increase of ‘book collectors’ illustrates the commodification of the book in that the goal of a book collector is not the gaining of intellectual knowledge, but the acquisition of the physical entity of the book. Benjamin says of the collector that his experience is tied "to a very mysterious relationship to ownership." This ownership is one of substitution. While certainly many collectors would read most of the books in their collection, simple ownership was able to stand in place of actually knowing the material of the book.

In this new relationship, the collector sees himself in service to the physical book, rather than the ideological book. In purchasing a book for his collection, the genuine collector believes that he has freed the book from despair. Ultimately, says Benjamin, the book serves the fetish of the collector. "Ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them." The relationship of the collector to his possession of the book marks the close of certain literary tradition. If the purpose of authorship had been to satisfy a need in the literary tradition, that purpose becomes irrelevant once the emphasis of collection is physical rather than intellectual.

The reproduction of literature by means of the printing press is followed in the nineteenth century with the reproduction of the work of art by means of photography; and both forms of reproduction contribute to what Benjamin terms "a crisis in perception itself." According to Benjamin, the mass reproduction of art allows the beholder to receive the work of art in his circumstances, rather than the situation of the art itself. The beholder is then isolated from the "unique experience" of the artwork. In this isolation, the ‘aura’ of the work of art is lost. Aura is a complicated term to define. Where it represents anything that has been lost due to the reproduction of art it is something that our society was not entirely aware of until it had been lost, at which point it could no longer be truly studied, only reminisced about. But aura is essentially bound up in the proximity of the artwork to the perceptive capabilities of the beholder. The existence of the aura predated any notion that an artwork could be appropriated by means of technical reproduction. The loss of aura marks a change in our perception of art. Even when we view an artwork that has never been reproduced we are aware that it could be and we cannot view the work apart from some idea of commodity.

Corollary to this change is the transition of the use art from one of cult value to one of exhibition value. The artwork ceases to serve religious functions for the beholder; it is understood in terms of artistic tradition and value, rather than religious tradition. "When the age of mechanical reproduction separated art from its basis in cult, the semblance of its autonomy disappeared forever." Benjamin wastes little time in lamenting the loss of this autonomy, his focus is as much on the gains from photography as the losses, but he does mark our need to recognize the loss of the aura. The gains of photography are part of Benjamin’s solution.

I cannot so much summarize the problem as distinguish its parameters. The artists of the late nineteenth century felt a debilitating loss that they felt would have political ramifications. There was a general sense that modern culture was a failure to society. Never had Benjamin’s thesis been so true: "There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism." The crisis of the high arts resulted in apocalyptic visions of the near future, visions finally realized in the warfare and death camps of the Second World War that Benjamin would not survive.

Solution is an inexact term that I use in the absence of a better word. Benjamin does not offer a simply formula for overcoming the crises of the time. Indeed, Benjamin identifies the usefulness of those crises for achieving an ideal society. To understand Benjamin’s social theory, we must look with Benjamin to the work of French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941). According to Benjamin, Bergson’s Matiere et Memoire, "regards the structure of memory as decisive for the philosophical pattern of experience." Bergson developed the theory of memoire pure that Marcel Proust transformed into memoire involontaire. This idea is best described through the story of the ‘Proust moment’.

In eating a madeleine Proust was "transported" to a moment from his past. A physical object triggered an earlier experience and brought the experience into full relevance. This triggering is a very different experience with memory than the attentive memory of memoire volontaire. Memoire involontaire leads to Erfahrung, to experience, where memoire volontaire leads to Erlebnis, to the identifiable passing moment. To Benjamin, as well as to Proust, "The past is ‘somewhere beyond the reach of the intellect, and unmistakably present in some material object (or in the sensation which such an object arouses in us), though we have no idea which one it is.’" To Benjamin, a past that was usable for articulating a transformed present could only be distinguished by means of triggering memoire involontaire.

Benjamin’s unfinished opus, the Arcades Project, can be understood as an attempt to catalog the many possible triggers of memoire involontaire. Benjamin felt that history spoke to man through material objects. This idea is stated best by Susan Buck-Morss, who developed the Arcades Project in The Dialects of Seeing, "That which is eternally true can thus only be captured in the transitory, material images of history itself." Benjamin suggested a variety of forms for the Project but seemed most set on creating a photomontage because of the ability of that form to trigger unconscious memories. "Benjamin believed such philosophico-historical constellations could be represented by a dialectical image rather than by dialectical argumentation." I mentioned earlier that the gains of the technology that allowed for the reproduction of art, that is, the gains of photography were a part of Benjamin’s solution. Photography, by allowing for reproduction of the image, is a necessary technology for the creation of the photomontage. Not only that, but photography is also instrumental in the triggering of memoire involontaire because, "the camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses." Benjamin emphasized the significant potentialities of film use, over the despair of the loss of the aura.

The purpose of triggering memoire involontaire is best understood through Benjamin’s "Theses on the Philosophy of History." In this essay, Benjamin outlines his stance in favor of historical materialism in opposition to historicism. Benjamin’s first thesis tells of a computer-generated chess player whose opponent is a puppet guided by a hidden monk. With this hidden guidance, the puppet will surely win. Similarly, "the puppet called ‘historical materialism’ is to win all the time." Benjamin expounds, the hidden guide of historical materialism is a "weak messianic power," the possibility of a transformed present. Benjamin is rejecting the notion of history as progress, the idea that mankind is constantly on the path towards an improved future. Benjamin identifies this notion with historicism, which he counters with the historical materialist theory that historical truth speaks through material objects and that by raising up these objects before society the historical materialist might effect, through memoire involontaire, a vision of a transformed society and a means of attaining it. I do not use the term utopia because that offers too many suggestions of what this society might look like. Benjamin’s goal was not to formulate an argument for this transformed society, but to actually cause it to come into being by means of Erfahrung. What can be said is that in order for society to be transformed according to Benjamin’s goals, historical materialism must rupture the progression of history, destroying empty, homogenous clock time and instating messianic time.

Benjamin references a painting by Swiss painter Paul Klee (1879-1940), called "Angelus Novus", which is the model for his angel of history. The painting depicts an angel who, according to Benjamin, seems about to depart from an object or work that he has been studying. "His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread." Benjamin envisions the angel of history in the same pose as he faces the past. The debris of history grows before him as the storm of progress blows from Paradise and propels the angel into the future, even as he continues to face the past. "A construction of history that looks backward, rather than forward, at the destruction of material nature as it has actually taken place, provides dialectical contrast to the futurist myth of historical progress (which can only be sustained by forgetting what has happened). As Susan Buck-Morss highlights, the focus of the angel is the lost material of the past, material than cannot be regained through historical remembrance, but only through the intersection of memoire involontaire. The angel of history serves as a model for the historical materialist. As such, my goal in the rest of this essay is to look at the work of T. S. Eliot in a comparison with that model. My question is, "Does Eliot act as a historical materialist?" Is Eliot’s view of the past in line with that of Benjamin, and do Eliot’s theories on social transformation adequately satisfy the demands set forth by Benjamin? Ultimately, I am asking whether Eliot is a usable angel for the historical materialist.

For Eliot, culture and religion and intricately united. In ‘primitive’ societies, the many offices of society, including the most important offices of culture and religion, are carried out by the same people and through the same activities. As societies become more complex and grow in population, those offices become specialized. Society takes on cultural hierarchies in which religious and political leaders are placed at the top while laborers are at the bottom. Classes form and each class has its own variation of the unifying culture. Eliot offers a definition of culture as "all the characteristic activities and interests of a people." He then produces a sample list of these activities and interests in which he emphasizes that not every group in a society will adhere to every aspect of that culture, but all will draw from a family of cultural characteristics and all recognize and act upon certain cultural authorities. Eliot later offers a more precise definition of culture as, "The way of life of a particular people living together in one place. That culture is made visible in their arts, in their social system, in their habits and customs, in their religion." He adds also that culture is bound up in language.

Eliot’s purpose in defining culture is to articulate the problems of the status of culture in his time. His particular concern is the loss of cultural authorities. If, as he claims, the goal of society must be to "see that the ablest artists and architects rise to the top, influence taste, and execute the important public commissions," then society is doomed to failure in an era that finds control of culture in the hands of the mass populace. What Eliot finds is that the specialization of culture in burgeoning societies, too often leads to "cultural disintegration." Eliot claims that much disintegration has already occurred in western culture. He identifies two important cultural structures that have been lost, the first and most important being religion. We have foolishly isolated religion from culture and operate under the fallacy that the path and fate of each are separable from the other. The second lost cultural structure is the family. Eliot argues that "the primary channel of transmission of culture is family." While he recognizes that we provisionally maintain some devotion to our immediate families, we have lost our commitment to our family lineage, to a "piety for the dead," and a "solicitude for the unborn." In the absence of these necessary structures, culture is rendered impotent. The west is left in a post-culture and cannot recognize or identify what little genius may be left in its stock. Eliot’s goal is to offer two sets of solutions by which we might salvage the culture of the west, literary solutions and social solutions. These solutions can then be held up to the light that emanates from the angel of history.

The first of Eliot’s literary solutions to the crisis of authority is embodied in the work of the critic. "The important moment for the appearance of criticism seems to be the time when poetry ceases to be the expression of the mind of a whole people." The role of the critic is to step into the absence of cultural authority and to reconstruct the framework of authority through criticism. Eliot defines the purpose of criticism as "the elucidation of works of art and the correction of taste." In this sense, criticism serves not merely an artistic function but also a cultural function. The aim of criticism is to hold up the culture by setting certain standards for art. Eliot rejects the notion of ars gratia artis because it ignores the social function of art. Eliot calls upon the critic and the artist to swear allegiance to external principles, be they Catholicism or Classicism. Here, Eliot stands in sharp contrast to Benjamin. Benjamin’s emphasis on memoire involontaire relies upon the individual’s intuitive perception. For the photomontage of the Arcades Project to be successful, the images must trigger unconscious memories in the individual. Eliot disdains any suggestion that grants authority to an internal voice. Eliot gives this inner voice the name ‘Whiggery’. "There is a tendency, and I think it is a whiggery tendency, to decry this critical toil of the artist; to propound a thesis that the great artist is an unconscious artist, unconsciously inscribing on his banner the words Muddle Through." For Eliot, criticism is not a means of bringing unconscious activity to the surface of understanding, but of making the beholder of the art aware of the conscious activity of the artist. In so doing, the critic places the work of art, not only in time and context, but also in the framework of literary tradition. He indicates that the critic is "compelled to admit that there remain certain books, certain essays, certain sentences, certain men, who have been ‘useful’ to us. And our next step is to begin to classify these, and to find out whether we establish any principles for deciding what kinds of books should be preserved, and what aims and methods of criticism should be followed." This statement certainly sounds like Benjamin’s description of the angel of history. Eliot is calling for the critic to face the past and to catalog certain material debris. But for Eliot, the purpose of this catalog is preservation, whereas Benjamin seeks transformation. Benjamin looks on a past filled with material useful for the overhaul of present society, but he sees nothing in the past that he wishes to return to as such. Eliot’s stance is extremely conservative, calling for the critic to maintain to aged structures of culture.

Eliot’s second literary solution is directed not at the critic, but at the artist. In his early essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent", Eliot examines the relationship of literary tradition to the new work of art in order to make the artist aware of his place in literary history. Eliot commands the artist to take on the ‘historical sense’, an awareness of literary history as active entity. "The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence." Eliot is suggesting that the literary past has presence in that it is active in the great poets of today. The literary past uses the "mature poet" as a "finely perfected medium in which special, or very varied, feelings are at liberty to enter into new combinations." The literary past is not only a complete order, but also a moving and evolving order. As it evolves, new needs arise that it fulfills by working through the contemporary poet. When a new work of art is created, if the work is to become a part of literary tradition, the entity of literary past experiences a shift that happens simultaneous to the production of the new work. Any given work must be judged in comparison to the tradition to determine whether in fact the new work has produced a shift, and thus deserves to become part of the tradition. Eliot offers this historical sense to prevent the collapse and gradual destruction of literary tradition. As with his writings of criticism, Eliot’s standpoint, though facing the past and not the future, is too focused on rebuilding past cultural hierarchies, rather than creatively defining new hierarchies.

The social solutions offered by Eliot are rooted in his sense that religion must be interwoven with culture. "Both ‘religion’ and ‘culture’, besides meaning different things from each other, should mean for the individual and for the group something towards which they strive, not merely something which they possess." Eliot’s solution is to build a Christian society. He is responding first to a fear that a society in which religion is marginalized risks becoming totalitarian. Eliot believes that a society founded upon religion will demand religious morality of its leadership. This leads to Eliot’s second concern, which is that belief and behavior cannot peacefully coexist so long as religion is divorced from cultural authority. "The problem of leading a Christian life in a non-Christian society is now very present to us…. It is the problem constituted by our implication in a network of institutions from which we cannot dissociate ourselves: institutions the operation of which appears no longer neutral, but non-Christian." In some ways, this comment is a response to concerns similar to those expressed in Benjamin’s statement about the unity of barbarism and civilization. Eliot is concerned about the coexistence of moral beliefs and immoral behavior, just as Benjamin was concerned with the coexistence of high art with acts of maliciousness towards humanity.

Eliot recognizes a relationship between the arts and morality that he wishes to highlight. "The only hopeful course for a society which would thrive and continue its creative activity in the arts of civilization, is to become Christian." It is important to note that Eliot nowhere offers any principles for this new society that can be identified as specifically Christian over any other set of religious beliefs. While he calls for a "Christian" society, he articulates only a more deliberately religious society. The role of the religious beliefs in this society would be to supplant the role of economics as it is held in current society. Eliot is fearful of the effects of capitalism on artistic standards.

Eliot does not so much deny the idea that history as progress, as to suggest that this idea has suffered under tremendous strains in recent periods. Benjamin seeks to rupture clock time altogether, but Eliot seeks to repair it. The pressures placed on progress are both technological and cultural in origin. As society has become increasingly complex and culture has become specialized, we have failed to create large structures of authority to hold the growing paradigms together. "We have been accustomed to regard ‘progress’ as always integral; and have yet to learn that it is only by an effort and a discipline, greater than society has yet seen the need of imposing upon itself, that material knowledge and power is gained without loss of spiritual knowledge and power." Both scholars accuse society of taking progress for granted. Benjamin advocates scrapping traditional notions of progress entirely. Eliot suggests restoring the notion of progress that he deems has been lost. Ultimately, Eliot’s ideas fail to meet Benjamin’s demands for the angel of history. His solutions fail to meet Benjamin’s standards simply because they attempt to address less significant problems than those that Benjamin identified. Perhaps Eliot’s poetry can offer a clue to this failure. The first poem of Four Quartets, "Burnt Norton", contains the lines: "If all time is eternally present/ All time is unredeemable." The notion of a messianic transformation of time cannot exist within Eliot’s Catholic perception of reality. To Eliot, time was to be endured and then condemned after the Judgement Day of the apocalypse. Benjamin was not looking to an external God to proffer such judgement; he encouraged the judgement to come from society.

Elie Wiesel, who after surviving death camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald, published several award-winning novels, and won the Nobel Peace Prize, offers a view of time that seems more amenable to Benjamin’s ideology than does Eliot’s. In his brief novel Dawn, Wiesel tells us the story of Elisha and Yerachmiel, two friends in the days leading up to the beginning of the holocaust, who commit themselves, in a Cabalistic endeavor, to fasting by day and praying by night in order "to wrest the Messiah from the chains of the future." The friends operated under an old legend that the Messiah was bound in the unreachable future, and could not redeem the present until mankind reached into the future to redeem the Messiah. Elisha and Yerachmiel are ushered off to separate concentration camps before they are able to find fruition to their labor. In their faithfulness to ancient prayers and rituals, Elisha and Yerachmiel were, like the angel of history, facing the debris of the past, indeed, finding their motivation in that debris, even as the storm of progress propelled them into the future. Their attempt to usher in the Messiah is in keeping with Benjamin’s final Thesis on the Philosophy of History, as he declares: