本雅明：作为生产者的作者

03/18/2007 03:57 PMNew Left Review - Walter Benjamin: The Author as Producer Page 1 of 9http://newleftreview.org/?page=article&view=135 New Left Review I/62, July-August 1970 WALTER BENJAMIN THE AUTHOR AS PRODUCER Il s’agit de gagner les intellectuels `la classe ouvrière, en leur faisant prendre conscience de l’identité de leurs dé-marches spirituelles et de leurs conditions de producteur. Ramon Fernandez You recall how Plato treats the poets in his projected State. In the interest of the community, he does not allow them to live there. He had a high idea of the power of poetry. But he considered it destructive, superfluous—in a perfect community, needless to say. Since then, the question of the poet’s right to exist has not often been stated with the same insistence; but it is today. Certainly it has rarely been posed in this form. But you are all more or less familiar with it as the question of the poet’s autonomy: his freedom to write whatever he may please. You are not inclined to accord him this autonomy. You believe that the current social situation forces the poet to choose whom his activity will serve. The bourgeois writer of popular stories does not acknowledge this alternative. So you show him that even without admitting it, he works in the interests of a particular class. An advanced type of writer acknowledges this alternative. His decision is determined on the basis of the class struggle when he places himself on the side of the proletariat. But then his autonomy is done for. He directs his energies toward what is useful for the proletariat in the class struggle. We say that he espouses a tendency. [1] There you have the key word about which there has long been a debate, as you well know. It is well-known to you, so you also know how fruitless it has been. It has never broken away from the boring ‘on the one hand—on the other hand’: on the one hand we should demand that the poet’s work conform to the correct political tendency, on the other hand we have the right to expect that his work be of high quality. Naturally this formula is unsatisfactory as long as we do not understand the connection which really exists between the two factors: tendency and quality. Of course we can simply decree what this relation is. We can say: a work which exhibits the correct political tendency need demonstrate no further qualities. We can also decree: a work which exhibits the correct tendency must necessarily exhibit all other qualities. The second formulation is not uninteresting. What is more, it is correct. It is the one I adopt. But at the same time I refuse to decree it. This assertion must be proven. I ask your attention for an attempt at this proof. ‘That is’, you will perhaps object, ‘a very peculiar, not to say farfetched, subject. Yet you want to advance the study of fascism with such a proof?’ That is indeed what I have in mind. For I hope to be able to show you that the concept of tendency, in the summary form that it usually occurs in the above-mentioned debate, is a completely inappropriate instrument of political literary criticism. I want to show you that the political tendency of a work can only be politically correct if it is also literarily correct. That means that the correct political tendency includes a literary tendency. For, just to clarify things right away, this literary tendency, which is implicitly or explicitly contained in every correct political tendency —that, and nothing else constitutes the quality of a work. The correct political tendency of a work includes its literary quality because it includes its literary tendency. I hope I can promise you that this affirmation will shortly become clearer. For the moment I would point out that I 03/18/2007 03:57 PMNew Left Review - Walter Benjamin: The Author as Producer Page 2 of 9http://newleftreview.org/?page=article&view=135 could have chosen another starting point for my observations. I started from the fruitless debate over the relation between a work’s political tendency and its quality. I could have started from an older but no less sterile debate: what is the relation between form and content, in political literature in particular? This way of formulating the question is decried: rightly so. It is considered an academic method of trying to fit literary relations undialectically into compartments. Very well. But what does the dialectical treatment of the same question look like? The Concept of Technique The dialectical consideration of this question, the one by which I come to the subject itself, can never lead anywhere by starting with isolated and lifeless objects: work, novel, book. It must be situated in the living social context. You reply, correctly, that this has been undertaken an innumerable number of times in our friends’ circles. Certainly. But in so doing, they have often proceeded to generalities right away and thus necessarily became lost in vagaries. As we know, social relationships are determined by relationships of production. When it examined a work of art, materialist criticism was accustomed to ask how that work stood in relation to the social relationships of production of its time. That is an important question. But also a very difficult one. The answer to it is not always unambiguous. Thus I would now like to suggest a question which lies closer at hand. A question which is somewhat more modest, which is less encompassing, but which seems to me to have a better chance of being answered. Namely, instead of asking: what is the relationship of a work of art to the relationships of production of the time? Is it in accord with them, is it reactionary or does it strive to overthrow them, is it revolutionary?—in place of this question, or in any case before asking this question, I would like to propose another. Before I ask: how does a literary work stand in relation to the relationships of production of a period, I would like to ask: how does it stand in them? This question aims directly at the function that the work has within the literary relationships of production of a period. In other words, it aims directly at a work’s literary technique. [2] With the concept of technique, I have named the concept which gives access to a direct social analysis, and thus a materialist analysis of literary products. At the same time the concept of technique gives us the dialectical starting- point from which the sterile opposition between form and content can be overcome. The concept of technique also indicates the way to determine correctly the relationships between tendency and quality about which we asked at the beginning. So if we could make the above formulation, that the correct political tendency of a work includes its literary quality because it includes its literary tendency, now we can state more exactly that this literary tendency can be found in the progress or regression of literary technique. It will certainly be in line with your thinking if I now, only apparently without transition, go on to quite concrete literary problems. Russian ones. I should like to call your attention to Sergei Tretiakov and to the model of the ‘operative’ writer which he has defined and embodied. [3] This operative writer presents the clearest example of the functional relation which always exists, in any circumstances, between correct political tendency and a progressive literary technique. Of course it is only one example: I am keeping others in reserve. Tretiakov distinguishes the operative writer from one who gives information. His mission is not to report, but to struggle; he does not play the role of spectator, but actively intervenes. He defines his task through the statements he makes about his activity. At the time of the total collectivization of agriculture, in 1928, when the slogan ‘writers to the kolkhozy (collective farms)’ was launched, Tretiakov left for the ‘Communist Lighthouse’ commune and during two lengthy stays there undertook the following tasks: calling mass meetings, collecting money to pay for tractors, persuading individual peasants who worked alone to enter the kolkhoz, inspecting reading rooms, creating wall-newspapers and editing the kolkhoz newspaper, being a reporter for Moscow papers, introducing radio and travelling movies. It is not surprising that the novel Master of the fields which Tretiakov wrote after his stay, had a substantial influence on the further formation of agricultural collectives. You may appreciate Tretiakov and perhaps still think that his example does not mean very much in this situation. The duties he undertook, you may perhaps object, are all those of a journalist or a propagandist: all that doesn’t have very much to do with literature. Yet I chose the example of Tretiakov intentionally, to indicate the breadth of the horizon from which we should rethink our notion of literary forms or genres in line with the given techniques of our current situation, so that we may arrive at the forms of expression to which literary energies should be applied today. There have not always been novels in the past, they do not always have to exist in the future; there have not always been tragedies, not always great epics. Commentaries, translations, even so-called forgeries have not always been divertissements on the borders of literature: they have had their place not only in philosophical literature, but in the poetic literatures of Arabia or China. Rhetoric has not always been an insignificant form. On the contrary, in Antiquity large areas of literature bore its stamp. All that should make you conscious of the fact that we stand in the 03/18/2007 03:57 PMNew Left Review - Walter Benjamin: The Author as Producer Page 3 of 9http://newleftreview.org/?page=article&view=135 midst of a powerful process of the transformation of literary forms, a process of transformation in which many of the oppositions with which we used to work could lose their power. Allow me to give you an example of the sterility of such oppositions and of the process by which they are dialectically overcome. That is where we again find Tretiakov. The example is, in fact, that of the newspaper. The Advent of the Newspaper ‘In our literature,’ a leftist author writes, ‘oppositions which mutually enriched each other in earlier, happier times, have become insoluble antinomies. Thus science and belles lettres, criticism and production, culture and politics have fallen away from each other, without maintaining any relationship or order. The showplace of this literary confusion is the newspaper. Its content is “material” which refuses any form of organization other than that imposed by the reader’s impatience. This impatience is not only that of the politician who expects a piece of news, or of a speculator who awaits a tip: behind them hovers the impatience of whoever feels himself excluded, whoever thinks he has a right to express his own interests himself. For a long time, the fact that nothing binds the reader to his paper as much as this avid impatience for fresh nourishment every day, has been used by editors, who are always starting new columns open to his questions, opinions, protestations. So the indiscriminate assimilation of facts goes hand in hand with the similar indiscriminate assimilation of readers, who see themselves instantly raised to the level of co-workers. But this phenomenon hides a dialectical moment: the fall of literature in the bourgeois press reveals the formula for its resuscitation in the Soviet Russian press, because the realm of literature gains in width what it loses in depth. In the Soviet press, the difference between author and public, maintained artificially by the bourgeois press, is beginning to disappear. The reader is indeed always ready to become a writer, that is to say, someone who describes or even who prescribes. As an expert—even if not a professional, but only a job-occupant—he gains entrance to authorship. Labour itself speaks out for writing it out in words constitutes part of the knowledge necessary to becoming an author. Literary competence is no longer based on specialized training in academic schools, but on technical and commercial training in trade schools and thus becomes common property. In a word, it is the literarization of the relationships of life which overcomes otherwise insoluble antinomies and it is the showplace of the unrestrained degradation of the word—that is, the newspaper—which prepares its salvation.’ [4] Thus I hope I have shown that the portrayal of the author as a producer must be derived from the press. For the press, at least the Russian press, makes us acknowledge that the powerful process of transformation of which I spoke before goes beyond not only the conventional separations between genres, between writer and poet, between the scholar and the popularizer, but it also forces us to re-examine the separation between author and reader. The press is the most authoritative instance of this process and therefore any study of the author as a producer must deal with it. But we cannot remain at that point. For as yet the newspapers of Western Europe are not a suitable instrument of production in the hands of the writer. They still belong to capital. On the one hand the newspaper, on the technical level, represents the most important literary position. But this position is on the other hand in the control of our opponents, so it should not be surprising that the writer’s comprehension of his dependent social position, of his technical possibilities and of his political tasks must struggle against enormous difficulties. Among the most important developments in Germany in the last 10 years is the fact that many productive minds have gone through a revolutionary development parallel to and under the pressure of the economic situation, without however, having been able in a revolutionary way to think through their own work and its relationship to the means of production, its productive techniques, its technology. As you see, I am talking about the so-called left-wing intellectuals, and I will limit myself to left-wing bourgeois intellectuals. In Germany, the pace-setting politico-literary movements of the last decade have originated with these left intellectuals. By the example of two of these movements, ‘activism’ [5] and the ‘new objectivity’, [6] I want to show that however revolutionary this political tendency may appear, it actually functions in a counterrevolutionary manner as long as the writer experiences his solidarity with the proletariat ideologically and not as a producer. The Credo of Activism The slogan which summarizes the demands of activism is ‘logocracy’, that is, the power of the intellect. Power to the intellect. The expression could well be translated as the power of the intellectuals. This conception of intellectuals has, in fact, become standard among left-wing intellectuals and it dominates their political manifestoes from Heinrich Mann to Döblin. [7] It is not difficult to see that this conception completely ignores the position of intellectuals in the process of production. Hiller himself, the theoretician of activism, does not want to consider intellectuals as 03/18/2007 03:57 PMNew Left Review - Walter Benjamin: The Author as Producer Page 4 of 9http://newleftreview.org/?page=article&view=135 ‘belonging to certain professions’, but as ‘representatives of a certain character type’. [8] Naturally this character type as such occupies a position between classes. It includes a certain number of private existences, without offering the slightest opportunity of organizing them. When Hiller formulates his refusal (to join the Party—trs) for Party leaders, he at least concedes them something: they may ‘be more knowledgeable about essential matters . . . speak the language of the people better . . . struggle more firmly’ than he, but one thing is clear to him: that they ‘have more intellectual deficiencies’. Very probably. But where does this get him, since in politics it is not individual thoughts, but, as Brecht once expressed it, the art of thinking what is in the heads of other people, that is decisive? [9] Activism tried to replace materialist dialectics by a generality which is not definable in class terms: common sense. At best, its intellectuals represent a social stratum. In other words, in itself, the principle of this formation of a collective is a reactionary principle: no wonder the effect of such a collective can never be revolutionary. The unhealthy principles of such a collective formation can still be felt. We could calculate them when Döblin’s Wissen und Verändern (‘Know and transform’) was published three years ago. This tract was written as an answer to a young man—Döblin calls him Mr Hocke—who had come to the famous author with the question ‘what is to be done?’ Döblin invites him to attach himself to the cause of socialism, but with conditions that give one pause. Socialism, according to Döblin, is ‘freedom, the spontaneous association of man, the refusal of any constraints, indignation against injustice and force, humanity, tolerance and peace’. Whatever the truth of that may be, in any case he starts from this socialism to make common cause against the theory and practice of the radical working-class movement. ‘Nothing’, Döblin claims, ‘can grow out of something which cannot already be found in it—from a murderously aggravated class struggle can come justice, but not socialism.’ ‘You, my dear sir’—Döblin formulates the recommendations he gives Mr Hocke on this and other grounds—‘cannot bring to fruition the principled “yes” you accord the struggle (of the proletariat) by integrating yourself into the proletarian forces. You must accord your disturbed and bitter agreement to this struggle, but you also know: if you do more, an enormously important position will no longer be occupied . . . that of original communistic individual freedom, spontaneous solidarity and the unity of man. It is this position which you must adopt as your own.’ Here we can clearly see where the concept of the ‘intellectual’ as a type defined according to his opinions, ideas or dispositions, but not according to his position in the process of production leads. He should, as we read in Döblin, take up his position next to the proletariat. But what kind of a position is that? It is that of a benefactor. Of an ideological patron. An impossible position. And so we come back to the thesis we stated at the beginning: the place of the intellectual in the class struggle can only be determined, or better, chosen, on the basis of his position in the process of production. Brecht elaborated the concept of ‘functional transformation’ (Umfunktionierung) for the transformation of the forms and instruments of production by a progressive intelligentsia—interested in the liberation of the means of production and thus useful in the class struggle. He was the first to formulate for intellectuals this far-reaching demand: do not simply transmit the apparatus of production without simultaneously changing it to the maximum extent possible in the direction of socialism. ‘The publication of the Versuche’, as the author of that series writes in the introduction, ‘takes place at a point in time at which certain works should no longer so much relate individual experiences (have the character of a work), but rather should be aimed at the utilization (transformation) of certain institutes or institutions.’ [10] What is proposed is not a spiritual renewal such as the fascists proclaim, but technical innovations. I will return to these innovations. Here I will limit myself to indicating the decisive difference between merely transmitting the apparatus of production and transforming it. At the beginning of my comments on the ‘new objectivity’, I would like to set forth the notion that transmitting an apparatus of production without—as much as possible