‘Unpacking My Library’: What defines literary activity

The Jewish-German Marxist, Walter Benjamin, opened his ‘One Way Street’ (1928) by rejecting the ‘universal’ form of books. “True literary activity,” he famously argued, was the domain of ‘minor’ forms: “leaflets, brochures, articles, and placards”.

His own academic career had recently ended. The examiners had found his dissertation on German tragic drama to be so esoteric that he was forced to withdraw his teaching application for good. Meanwhile, inflation had toppled his father’s lucrative art dealership. Forced to fend for himself, Benjamin turned to journalism. Here, challenged by new constraints of Weimar press (print and radio), he improvised an acutely compressed literary style.

A cryptic aphorism in the book’s opening section explains his tactics. One cannot repair ‘turbines’ by pouring machine oil all over them. Instead, “one applies a little to hidden spindles and joints one has to know”. ‘Little’ and ‘hidden’ — there are no better keywords for describing his enigmatic miniatures: riddles, parables, fairytales, vignettes, dreams, jokes.

A collection of Benjamin’s writings, ‘Unpacking My Library’, has been included in Penguin Archive, a series of 90 slim ‘classics’ issued to celebrate Penguin’s 90th anniversary. The small size and spare design instantly evoke Benjamin’s miniatures. Yet the book collects only his standard essays: on book collecting, translation, photography, and a short diary on hashish. The problem with these ‘cultured’ choices isn’t just their formulaic nature. Along with the miniatures, they also ignore the source of Benjamin’s innovations: his ideas on time and revolution.

Unlike Social Democrats and Stalinists, Benjamin was never inspired by staple slogans of ‘better future’ or ‘gradual progress’. Instead, he decried ‘progress’ as an essentially capitalist notion, whose contradictions had found a logical expression in Nazi fascism. His solutions were also equally audacious. If orthodox Marxists planned to accelerate the proverbial ‘train of progress’, Benjamin worked to pull its ‘emergency brake’.

This is why Benjamin gravitated towards such eccentric subjects. Book collectors, translators, photographers — yes, but also ragpickers, flaneurs, sex workers. He was inspired by their penchant for rescuing outmoded commodities from the rubble of progress. Parallelly, he argued that, once ‘rescued’ from oblivion, certain historical moments could trigger an explosive ‘short circuit’ between past and present. This was a new kind of historical materialism, influenced less by Lenin and more by Jewish mystics.

For Benjamin, every moment — no matter how banal or bleak — became a gateway through which the ‘Messiah’ could enter. His own compressed style was an attempt to spark this ‘short circuit’. He wanted to saturate his thinking with so much tension that his prose might simulate conditions of a ‘revolutionary standstill’. Even so, these adventures in philosophy never resolved into political blueprints. Messiahs remained a poor substitute for concrete strategy. Similarly, histories of capitalism were too circuitous to be reduced to slick notions like ‘homogenous empty time’. There were reasons though for Benjamin’s detachment from activism and political economy.

Stranded between Nazism and Stalinism, his convictions could only find outlets in philosophy. In fact, this was true for an entire generation of western Marxists. Benjamin’s situation though was uniquely precarious. Chased by fascists into exile across Ibiza, Nice, Svendborg and Paris, he finally committed suicide while crossing the Spanish border in 1940.

‘Unpacking My Library’ risks portraying Benjamin as an innocuous ‘man of letters’. But this reveals only more about our own world, where publishing conglomerates alone determine the rules for ‘true literary activity’. This compressed ‘classic’ lacks the insurgent spirit of Benjamin: he wrote in order to transform the apparatus of publishing, not to supply content for it.

— The reviewer teaches at Department of English at UCLA, California