This outlook is familiar
to us from the discussion of the nineteenth-century avant-gardes
as they challenge the assumptions linking technology with social
progress. Nietzsche's outlook is most pessimistic in Beyond Good
and Evil, the title of a book he wrote, where these supposedly
progressive values are shown to have crushed any human potential
for full immersion in the world's delights. He regrets that only
a destructive and negative revolutionary change and negative intoxication,
as it were, can result from such unnatural repression.
This is not
the kind of intoxication that he celebrates in other texts as the
key to meaningful involvement in the world. Writing at the end
of his productive life in Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche
is much more positive. Aesthetic intoxication dissolves the artificial
separation of human and world into a continuum of Becoming where
our involvement transforms things until they are "swollen,
crammed, strong, supercharged with energy."
It is a return to the same
misleading values, however, if we think of this as productive or
purposeful. Laughter and intoxication are above all a way to get
free of all illusory goals. In the end intoxication may be no more
than what in Human All Too Human he calls a "useless
squandering," where, as we have already heard, there is no real
goal to life. He continues: "But to feel thus squandered, not
merely as an individual but as humanity as a whole, in the way we
behold the individual fruits of nature squandered, is a feeling beyond
all other feelings."
So he's claiming that in fact this wastefulness,
this squandering, may be all there is, and it's something from
which we can derive huge enjoyment.
This is a fulfillment in extreme self-expenditure,
a kind of ultimate intoxication. We come across it again in Walter
Benjamin's intoxicated reverie at the close of his essay, "Hashish
in Marseilles," where
with a kind of optimistic nihilism, he resigns with pleasure to the
inevitability of a life frequently squandered, as in erotic meetings
or while under a drug trance, seduced by all encountered phenomena.
Where Nietzsche's philosophical engagement
has him wrestling with fundamental ideas on a grand, operatic scale
(consider here his interest
in Wagner, who he supported at the start of Wagner's career as
the great hope of German culture, and then Nietzsche turned against
Wagner
at the end of his life), whereas Nietzsche focuses on these grand
ideas, Benjamin focuses on the microcosm. As a critical Marxist
aesthetician, Benjamin is interested to know why the relation between
politics
and culture is so much more unstable than had been assumed. Although
at times, under the influence of Brecht, he veers towards accepting
an instrumental relation between the two, he usually gravitates
towards less predictable interpretations where the relationship
between politics
and art breaks down, allowing him to explore the cracks in the
fractured mirror that reflects each into the other.
He has the
idea, for example,
that the demands of function and commerce have suppressed the utopian
aims embodied in the architectural and engineering products of
the nineteenth century—and this is a strange idea; Benjamin feels
that within these art forms, or engineering forms, lies a concealed
utopian goal, potential, which was covered over by their commercial
use—products, for example, or manifestations like urban development,
dioramas, factories, the arcades, the great exhibitions, department
stores, railways, photography, lithography (products which are the
outcome of the scientific optimism deplored by Nietzsche and the
avant-gardes).
If these utopian aims can be reawakened in
the present, they will explode into revolutionary action, freeing
us from the
repressive legacies of the nineteenth century. It is as if a
new kind of intoxication is needed to awaken us from those intoxications
like commerce and anarchism, which anaesthetise the nineteenth
century.
There is an infectious mixture of Surrealist, psychoanalytic,
Marxist, utopian, messianic, and even science-fiction components
to this vision.
But Benjamin is also focused on the nature of
our experience of the present, and here we see a range of finely
calibrated enthusiasms
for all aspects of his surroundings. He shapes his writing on the
cities he knows well—Naples, Moscow, Berlin, Paris, Marseilles—as
if in the process of tuning in to the idiosyncratic vitality of each
place. He soaks up the evidence of how a city's inhabitants endure
desperate conditions as a chronicle of resourcefulness to set against
the usual glamorization of poverty.
In Naples the interpenetration
of street and house, the food stands set up in windows and doorways,
the children out at all hours, are a way of coping, in fact,
with crowded one-room apartments, nothing picturesque at all. In
Moscow
in 1927 he is struck by a similar variety of street trading,
but in the extreme cold it is conducted in silence. He chronicles
the
poorer traders, the beggars, the street children, noting their
techniques for survival. There is always this effort by him to
develop a deep
cross-section of these cities from state institutions right down
to those barely surviving on the streets. He is always allowing
his senses to collect information, sights, smells, tastes, to set
against
an analytical understanding, and you feel that Benjamin is validating
his political analysis by the intimacy of these encounters.
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