Walter Benjamin “Some Motifs”
Commentary by
Studying Learning
Erlebnis Erfahrung
mémoire voluntaire mémoire involuntaire
Consciousness Memory
We can begin by observing a
distinction that Walter Benjamin makes in his review of Franz Hessel’s Spazieren in Berlin
[“On Foot in Berlin”], between studying [studieren] and learning [lernen]. “A whole world separates these words,” he
argues, “Anyone can study, but learning is something that you can only do if
you are there for the duration.”[1] To study a city is to take it as an object to
be analyzed and otherwise accounted for.
To learn, on the contrary, would be to become transformed by experience
(not Erlebnis—the
experience of a remarkable event—but Erfahrung—which would be more like an ethos or way of being).
Benjamin’s review of Hessel’s book emphasizes
two motifs that will throughout the remainder of his career gather in
intensity: that of cultural memory and that of the flâneur. In their underdeveloped state these motifs
remain provocative if perhaps somewhat idealistic. Hessel learns his
city, Berlin, by walking its streets and remaining open to the city’s random
stimulations, suggestible to chance encounters and the involuntary associations
that they trigger. A crucial factor in
this is Hessel’s resident’s memory, which is what
conjures the senses of change and transformation, as well as the relative
permanence and impermanence of people and places, some of which remain while
others are palpably—often surprisingly—lost to some principle of renewal or
decay. And it is this alternative
temporality of cultural memory, Benjamin suggests, that informs the dweller’s
understanding of his dwelling environment.
Later in “On Some Motifs in
Baudelaire” (1939), which is the culmination of Benjamin’s engagement with
modern urbanism in general, he harnesses a range of key texts and arguments
concerning memory, historicity, modernity and urbanism, and creates what is now
one of the single most influential studies of the modern city through a
sustained reading of Charles Baudelaire’s lyric poetry.[2] Here the distinction between Erlebnis and Erfahrung has been
considerably developed and it allows Benjamin, perhaps for the first time, to
outline what he understands as the basic conditions for an adequate,
historically informed, engagement with modernity. The fact that he chooses to do this through
his own admittedly peculiar form of literary criticism is wholly
significant. For in Baudelaire’s poetry
(Benjamin argues that with Baudelaire this was possible for the last and thus
the only time) the lived events of urban life were given the weight of an Erfahrung: an
experience. It is this experience,
otherwise obliterated from the urban dweller’s consciousness, that constitutes
for Benjamin the cultural memory of late 19th and early 20th
century urban life.
Already suggested in the Hessel review but axiomatic by the time of the Baudelaire
article, the vicarious role of the written text is no less a resource for
Benjamin than the supposedly (though never in fact) more direct encounter with
the urban environment itself. There are
good technical reasons for this, which Benjamin develops out of dichotomies
like the studying/learning one, and which involve the mutually exclusive
categories of consciousness and memory.
By critically engaging with texts of philosophy, psychoanalysis and
literature, Benjamin develops an analysis of urban experience that would have
eluded any attempt to grasp it directly via the intellect. His analysis is based on what he calls the
method of historical materialism.[3] The assumption here is not simply that the
written text records or is impressed by experiences (and thus functions as a
kind of memory) beyond or even against the conscious intention of its
authors. Rather Benjamin ac
Benjamin’s method is simultaneously
historical and aesthetic but the notions of history and aesthetics are
transformed in the process. The question
that underlies Benjamin’s text would be as follows: how and to what extent is
urban experience determined by historical conditions? The main answer that his readings provide
would be that, under the conditions of modern urbanism, the ways in which history
determines experience do not become matters of conscious awareness. The proof of this, Benjamin suggests, begins
with an ac
Towering above this literature is
Bergson’s early monumental work, Matière et mémoire. More
than the others it preserves links with empirical research. It is oriented to biology. The title suggests that it regards the
structure of memory as decisive for the philosophical pattern of
experience. Experience is indeed a
matter of tradition, in collective existence as well as private life. It is less the product of facts firmly
anchored in memory than of a convergence in memory of accumulated and
frequently unconscious data. It is,
however, not at all Bergson’s intention to attach any specific historical label
to memory. On the contrary, he rejects
any historical determination to memory.
He thus manages to stay clear of that experience from which his own
philosophy evolved or, rather, in reaction to which it arose. It was the inhospitable, blinding age of
big-scale industrialism. (157)
Bergson’s rejection of any historical
determination to memory is symptomatic of the historical conditions that
determined his philosophy. And this forgetting, this elision, is exactly what those conditions would determine. Here in this essay and elsewhere, Benjamin
argues for the great consequences that the camera and the photograph have had
on both memory and culture. In a
startling analogy, rich with the metonymic vocabulary of photography, Bergson’s
work becomes in Benjamin’s description the snapshot of his age: “In shutting out
this experience the eye perceives an experience of a complementary nature in
the form of its spontaneous after image, as it were. Bergson’s philosophy represents an attempt to
give the details of this afterimage and to fix it as a permanent record” (157). Just as the photograph provides a permanent
record of a transient moment, the philosophy of the time fixes on a contingent
image of memory and renders it essential.
Experience has, then, perhaps become blind to the conditions out of
which it arises. Benjamin observes in
his review of Hessel that, “Baudelaire is the source
of the cruel aperçu
that the city changes faster than a human heart” (265).
Benjamin locates what he sees as an
immanent critique of Bergson’s terms in the works of Marcel Proust and Sigmund
Freud. The distinction in Proust between
the mémoire voluntaire
and the mémoire involuntaire
decisively excludes one from the other, making it in theory impossible to
access what for Bergson was mémoire pure
(conscious recollection of the durée, the stream of life) through contemplation. Proust, on the contrary, insists on the
confrontation of mémoire volontaire,
which would be a work of the intellect, by mémoire involontaire, over which the conscious
thinker has no control and which is experienced more often in the register of
forgetting. This loss of memory must be
surprised or shocked by the uncanny experience, where a minor event appears
both strange and deeply familiar. Such
an event triggers a forgotten (and thus unconscious) feeling, giving access to
a fragment of lost time, which is registered at the level of lived
experience. So in Proust the taste of
the madeleine
pastry transports his narrator to a past that had hitherto been beyond
conscious recollection. The Freudian
reference is to Beyond the Pleasure
Principle, where Freud, in attempting to unravel the dreams and
associations of trauma victims—specifically First World War victims—notes that
“consciousness comes into being at the site of a memory trace” (Benjamin
160). What Freud argues, in fact, is
that it is not unreasonable to assume that consciousness arises instead of a memory trace:
One might thus say that the
Consciousness system has the particularly distinguishing feature that
excitation processes do not leave their mark in the form of an enduring
alteration of its elements, as they do in all other psychic systems, but simply
evaporate, as it were, in the process of entering consciousness.[4]
Consciousness, in other words,
functions not for the reception or perception of stimuli—which would in “other
systems” (i.e. the unconscious) become permanent traces and as such the basis
of memory—but for protection against
overwhelming stimuli. Shock, anxiety,
trauma—these virtually interchangeable terms in Freud name situations where a
source of stimulus has failed to leave any impression that could be
recalled. For Benjamin, then, this
pattern—not simply a theory to be applied, of course, but also part of the
symptomatic textual inscription of the time—is best read directly back into the
situation that gave rise to it: the hypermodernity of which the 19th
century urban tabula rasa, the motorized ravages of the World War, and the
ubiquitous clicking and snapping of the camera, were only the most powerful of
a whole range of assaults on the human sensorium.
So long as consciousness—the human
intellect—can remain alert as a screen against stimuli, Benjamin suggests, then
the shock impulses of an increasingly hazardous urban environment will remain
in the sphere of Erlebnis, lived through safely but without
registering much as Erfahrung,
or cultural experience. Benjamin chooses
to engage with the historicity of urbanism through the lyric poetry of
Baudelaire because this poetry bears the traces—a prosthetic memory for a
culture without one—of the poet’s struggle against the shocks of city
life. “A case in point,” he remarks, “is
the telephone, where the lifting of a receiver has taken the place of the
steady movement that used to be required to crank the older models” (174). In modern 21st century life the
telephone is now ubiquitous and even the mobile-phone, which nestles
permanently in the palm of its user’s hand or rests blinking up at them from
the coffee table, is fast being replaced by micro models that nestle invisibly
behind the user’s ear, the mouthpiece discretely hanging down to access the back
of the jaw, to receive the spoken or whispered instructions that will dial the
next address. Increasingly city dwellers
communicate with each other on a day to day basis remotely. Two can go shopping though only one will
actually be there at the shops. The
telephonic Short Message Service has been responsible for a new written
language that spreads rapidly into the magazines, newspapers and written
reports.
[1]
Published as “Die Wiederkehr
des Flaneurs” and translated as “The Return of
the Flâneur” in Selected Writings Volume II (Cambridge: Harvard, 1999). 262-267.
[2]
“On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” translated by Harry Zohn
in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections,
edited by Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1968)
155-200. A slightly modified version of Zohn’s translation can be found in Selected Writings Volume IV1938-40 (Cambridge Mass.: Bel
[3] See his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations 253-264, for a late account of his understanding of historical materialism.
[4]
Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure
Principle: and Other Writings, translated by John Reddick
(