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Redemption and Utopia
Introduction
The following is an essay based upon Redemption and Utopia of
Michael L|wy published originally under the title Redemption et
Utopie in 1988 by Presses Universitaires de France. I read the
book in Gustaf Gimdal's Swedish translation F|rlossning och Utopi
published by Daidalos in 1990. I intend to use some of L|wy's
themes as a springboard for a discussion of the concepts of time
and victimhood as they apply to progressive thought at the end of
the 20th century.
L|wy's book is an examination of the thought of 15 German Jewish
writers born between 1875 and 1900. Though many of them talked or
corresponded with each other, what is most striking are the
parallels in their lives and thinking, the similar ways in which
the events of their times, their family background, and their
Jewish heritage interacted to form their ideas. What emerged in
these men in varying degrees was a breathtakingly radical analysis
of history, contemporary society, and possibilities for the
future. Quite simply they attempted a synthesis of the fundamental
and apparently contradictory trends in contemporary political and
social thought. Their incredible drive toward integration was
epitomized by Walter Benjamin, whom L|wy describes in the
following terms: "[His] thought progresses like the painting of an
artist who never erases his brush strokes, but rather constantly
covers them with new layers, which at times seem to follow the
contours of the original sketch and at times seem to transcend
them in an unexpected form." (p. 122) One senses in reading the
book that many of the writers lived their lives with the same kind
of intensity that their thought reflects: a number of them
expected imminent transformation of the world and committed
suicide in despair when their hopes failed to materialize. Others
lived on to a ripe old age, moderated their views and became
accepted within liberal or more traditionally radical circles, yet
even at the end of their lives held on to the messianic dreams
which had fired their thought as youths.
L|wy's book operates on several levels. On the most basic level he
traces the development of the thought of each of the 15 men and
their relationship to their times and its contradictory
ideological currents. On another level L|wy distinguishes among
three groups of writers: those who had an essentially religious
orientation with anarchistic and libertarian tendencies, those who
were primarily anarchistic and libertarian but who drew on
spiritual traditions, and those who stood at the crossroads of the
first two groups. A third level is L|wy's application and
development of the concept of "elective affinity" that sociologist
Max Weber had first employed in his analysis of the relationship
between Protestantism and the growth of capitalism. A fourth level
is the way in which L|wy suggests that these men influenced
history and ideology in the 20th century: "Thus we are talking
about a generation of history's losers...in a paradox that is more
apparent than real, it is just because they were losers, outsiders
that swam against the currents of their time, stubborn romantics
and incurable utopians, that their work becomes more and more
relevant, more and more significant as we approach the end of the
20th century." (p. 8) In particular the anti-nuclear and
environmental movements reflect a great deal of their thinking.
What is particularly fascinating in the "delayed effect" of their
thought is its consonance with the tenor of the thought itself,
its sympathy and faith in the victims of oppression and absolute
belief in the power of human beings to transform history.
A final level on which the book operates is in its suggestion that
these men reflected a radically new consciousness of the nature of
time. One cannot help noticing that their concept of time bears a
striking resemblance to that of 20th century physics. I would
argue that the sense of pregnancy that their work exudes and the
disjointed way in which it has affected contemporary thought is a
reflection of the gradual "seeping" of non-mechanistic reality
into our consciousness in this century. These men stood on the
threshold of a new reality, a position that helps to explain their
ambivalent attitude toward science and the Enlightenment: they saw
the limits of the mechanistic worldview, yet sensed that 20th
century science could offer a "rational" basis for its
transcendence.
Section I of my essay will introduce the concept of elective
affinity and the way in which L|wy employs it. Section II will
highlight some of the social and political trends in 19th century
Germany that constituted the basis for the ideological alchemy
that L|wy describes. In this section I will also suggest that
Enlightenment and rationalistic thinking was as significant an
element in the alchemical reaction as the two traditions L|wy
focuses on. In Section III I will discuss the substance of the
thought of the writers L|wy treats. But instead of making
distinctions between the primarily religious and primarily
political writers, I will emphasize how different and apparently
contradictory aspects of their ideas built upon each other to form
a powerful whole. In particular, I will discuss Franz Kafka and
Walter Benjamin as concrete illustrations of the complexity and
richness of these men's thought. In Section IV I will take up the
implications of the failure of their ideas to triumph during their
lives and the revolutionary concept of time that their beliefs
represented. I will suggest that in incorporating the
contradictory elements of their age, they reached the limit of
what was possible at that time. And finally I will argue that
perhaps the most radical aspect of their vision is the sense that
history is not predetermined by economic, theological, or
political factors, but depends upon real and unpredictable choices
that human beings make in concrete moments of time.
I. L|wy and elective affinity
Lowy's book deals with the interaction of two trends of thought in
the work of the writers with whom he is concerned: 19th century
libertarian Romantic anarchism and the Jewish messianic tradition.
The concept he chooses in order to illumine the nature of this
interaction is that of "elective affinity," the attraction and
merging of distinct forces or phenomena. L|wy traces this idea
back to Hippocrates, describes its relevance to medieval alchemy,
its importance in the work of writers such as Swedenborg, and
ascribes its first modern explicit formulation to Swedish chemist
Tarbem Olof Bergman (1775). In Lowy's exposition there are four
phases involved in the elective affinity relationship between two
forces or objects: 1) a passive or potential correspondence; 2)
election - the beginning of the interaction; 3) coming together,
partial or total fusion (or symbiotic relationship); 4) the
emergence of a new form that is greater than the sum of the parts.
L|wy relates that sociologist Max Weber consciously used the
concept of elective affinity, but that he neglected the fourth and
vital aspect, the emergence of a new form. It is quite interesting
that L|wy identifies both Weber's truncated formulation of the
concept and its scarce application in modern sociology as part and
parcel of the scientific, rational nature of the age. Lowy's aim
is both to apply elective affinity to the thinkers with whom he
deals and to vivify the concept within sociological analysis in
general. In doing so he thus reveals his sympathy with the
restitutional and transcendental of the very thought he is
describing.
II. The historical background
Nineteenth century German society as L|wy describes it was
characterized by the explosive growth of capitalism and a cultural
reaction against it on one hand and the partial emancipation and
assimilation of the Jews on the other hand. Industrialism spread
at a particularly rapid rate from 1870 until the First World War.
This period also represented the height of the influence of
Romanticism, the cultural reaction to industrialization.
Romanticism was characterized by a harsh critique of modern
society as dominated by rationalism, mechanization, and
secularism. By the end of the century it was the leading
intellectual current and united cultural and political thinkers
across ideological lines.
At the same time 70% of Germany's Jews had left the ghettos that
had been their home for so many centuries and had been granted
formal political equality. However, except for a privileged few,
cultural equality, acceptance into German society, remained as
elusive as ever. This contradiction was especially marked at the
universities, where Jews in 1885 constituted a whopping 10% of the
student population but were denied access to most regular teaching
positions. This partial assimilation made Jewish academics ripe
for the intellectual currents of their time. Though a majority of
them followed the liberal or respectable Marxist trends in German
thought, a number, including the men L|wy treats, became more
enamored of anti-modernist Romantic ideas.
On the one hand, their identification with Romanticism was a
result of their emancipation, their identification with German
society and even the nationalistic elements of Romanticism (for
many of them Zionism was a counterpart to German nationalism). On
the other hand, the contradictory nature of their assimilation was
the very precondition for their rejection of that assimilation,
particularly those aspects that represented acceptance of a
materialistic, secularized society. Thus, many of them identified
early in their careers with those trends within Romanticism that
looked to previous historical periods, in particular the guild
structures in medieval Europe, as a model for a more
spiritualized, participatory society. This tendency often included
an admiration of Christian values and mystical tradition. But as
they, often as a result of exposure to the works of Martin Buber
concerning the Jewish mystical tradition, got in touch with their
Jewish roots, they began to identify with their own messianic
tradition.
This tradition's outstanding feature can be encapsulated in the
rich Kabbalistic concept of Tikkoun, the obligation of Jews to
work for the restitution of society to a harmoniously functioning
and just entity. The concept in itself is a radical one, among
other reasons because it implies a "return" to a situation that is
not first and foremost "good" or "merciful" as the Christian
mission is often interpreted, but to something holistic, "beyond
good and evil," something like the state of innocence in the
Garden of Eden. It is true that the form in which Jewish
messianism had been propagated through the rabbinical and
Talumudic tradition was rather more reactionary than radical: the
wished-for restitution was expected to occur outside of history in
an indeterminate future through the miraculous intervention of a
personal and charismatic Messiah.
What the men whom L|wy treats accomplished was to re-instate the
radical character of the Jewish messianic tradition through its
integration with 19th century libertarian anarchist ideas: the
restitution, though seen as a total transformation of human life
and its relationship to nature, was expected to occur within
history. Furthermore, its occurrence would be expedited, if not
wholly determined, by the concrete actions of human beings within
history. One of the common denominators of Jewish messianism and
libertarian anarchism that made for such a felicitous match was
the radically anti-authoritarian character of both traditions. The
state and all the forms of domination and control that it
represents were regarded as the chief enemy. Drawing on their
messianic tradition, the anti-authoritarianism of L|wy's thinkers
often took the form of an the belief in an apparently oxymoronic
"theocratic anarchy," i.e. a society in which the very absence of
power relationships among people and of the abuse of nature would
be insured by their absolute obedience to God. This view dovetails
nicely with the most radical elements in Judaism, namely that
human beings through making proper choices can be God's co-workers
and compel her/him to establish a just order on earth.
Though L|wy focuses on the chemistry between Jewish messianism and
libertarian anarchism, he implies that the Enlightenment
influenced many of the thinkers he treats, and I would argue that
rationalism was an important term in the equation as well. L|wy
hints more than once that these men had a more ambivalent attitude
toward the Enlightenment than many of their non-Jewish Romanticist
or anarchist colleagues. One clearly historical reason for their
tendency to be more favorably disposed toward the Enlightenment
was that its ideas of human equality had led more or less directly
to the emancipation of the Jews. But in my view the more
fundamental relationship arose from the fact that the idea of a
just social order that is so central to the Jewish tradition has
strong rationalistic components. The concept of Jews as having a
special mission on earth as God's co-workers has always implied a
reasoned, educated knowledge of just what it is that God expects
people to do and what will work in realizing her/his expectations.
The Romantic rebellion against the Enlightenment, though
satisfying to these Jewish intellectuals in its attempt to
re-infuse spiritual and cooperative values into society,
represented also a threat against significant elements of their
Jewish identity.
I would argue that they identified with the spirit of the
Enlightenment, that free and open inquiry was essential to
creating a just and free social order. But they realized, as did
the Romantics, that the content of much of the thought that had
developed from the Enlightenment was no longer valid, i.e. the
model of a mechanistic, deterministic universe with all of its
implications for the organization of society. At the same time,
however, they sensed that the Enlightenment had unleashed a wave
of scientific and philosophical inquiry that would eventually
transcend the deterministic model and open the way for a new
concept of time and causality.
L|wy summarizes Martin Buber's introduction to his book Utopia and
Socialism as follows: "...[he] distinguishes between two forms of
the nostalgia for justice: messianic eschatology, whose paradigm
is a perfected time, creation's consummation; and utopia, whose
paradigm is a perfected space, a community based on justice. As
far as utopia is concerned, everything is subservient to man's
conscious will; as far as eschatology is concerned - to the extent
that it is prophetic and not apocalyptic - human beings play an
active role in the redemption." (p. 73) This view of time
runs counter to the deterministic view that had followed from
Enlightenment thought. But it also runs counter to the Romantic
view that society should return to some previous historical
condition, such as medieval social organization. In this regard it
is tempting to argue that Communism in the Soviet Union was an
attempt to implement the Enlightenment perspective, whereas Nazism
in Germany was an attempt to implement the Romantic perspective.
However, 20th century science and philosophy have come to posit a
view of the world that is radically anti- mechanistic and thus
lends support to messianic anarchist thought. As I will argue in
the conclusion to this essay, it is highly credible that as human
consciousness changes in response to this new worldview, the
chances for the realization of utopian ideals will increase; at
the same time the very nature of radical messianic thought leaves
unresolved the question of the likelihood of this realization.
III. Currents of thought in messianic anarchism (Kafka and
Benjamin)
If Martin Buber, particularly in his writings on the Jewish
mystical tradition and his newspaper Der Jude (1916-24), was the
Godfather to the group of men whom L|wy treats, Franz Kafka and
Walter Benjamin can be said to be their guiding spirits. Kafka was
marginally involved in political activity and only at a relatively
early stage of his career. But his sympathy with and knowledge of
both the Jewish tradition and radical political movements were
much greater than is ordinarily assumed. In any case, his ideas
were expressed powerfully in fictional form and had a profound
influence on the more explicitly political and religious writers.
Kafka's fiction painted a devastating, if often fantastic and
ironic, picture of life in modern industrialized society. But, as
L|wy suggests, Kafka's work was not primarily social criticism as
such, but rather a kind of metaphysical portrayal of a "negative
utopia," of a daily existence lacking all redeeming features and
marked by a total absence of either spiritual awareness or of
earthly justice and truth. It is, in other words, an
uncompromisingly stark indictment of the present. L|wy summarizes
the message of Kafka's two major novels The Trial and The Castle
in the following way: "[they] describe a world in despair,
abandoned to absurdity, to authoritarian injustice and to
mendacity, a world without freedom where the messianic promise
reveals itself only in a negative sense by means of its radical
absence. Not only does is a positive message lacking, but the
messianic promise exists only implicitly, in the religious sense
of perceiving (and rejecting) the contemporary world as hellish."
(p. 103)
Particularly relevant to this essay is the way in which Kafka's
fiction reflects an existence in which time has lost its
dimensionality and potential, has become a kind of torture for
human beings in their everyday lives, another tool for their
oppression. In an interview Kafka once described modernity as a
condition in which "the most sublime and least corruptible aspect
of all creativity, time, is compressed and entangled in a net of
obscene commercial interests. In this way not only creativity but
above all man as its essential force is degraded and humiliated."
(p. 95) Nevertheless, Kafka's work is written as if from the
flipside of the darkness, as if the very absence of redemption
suggests its possibility. Kafka's fiction implies that
transcendence of the nightmare of history is possible just within
and in recognition of that nightmare. The desperate and often
comic struggles of human beings within an oppressive order reflect
the suppressed desire to live in a wholly different way. And a
concept of time as offering transcendence, as being by nature
other than deterministic, empty, and endlessly cyclical, is
essential to this "negative" vision. L|wy quotes Maurice Blanchot
on Kafka: "All of [his] work is a search for an affirmation that
can be achieved by means of negation...[and] transcendence is just
that affirmation that cannot be achieved other than by negation."
(p. 95)
Kafka's view of the present was shared by all of the writers to
whom L|wy devotes his book. Modernity was seen as bankrupt
spiritually and unable to provide human beings with meaningful
lives or to protect nature from human ravages. Though many of them
looked favorably upon Soviet Communism (until it became clearly
authoritarian and oppressive in the 1930's), their analysis was
not primarily economic: they saw neither the causes nor the cure
of the malaise in economic terms. Their hope for the Soviet
experiment lay in its appearance of having radically broken the
monotony of history and in its promise of creating a stateless
cooperative society. For similar reasons many of these men
supported, and were later disillusioned with, the Zionist
experiment in Palestine. But though their analysis was not chiefly
economic, it shared Marxism's perspective of history through the
eyes of the exploited and oppressed. And they saw that oppression
primarily in political and spiritual terms, in the nature of power
and the way that it is intrinsically employed.
This critique of power was bound up with their identities as Jews.
They saw the Jews as the quintessential victims of political
oppression throughout history (in this regard it is relevant to
note that Jews had typically enjoyed greater economic than
political rights). At the same time Jewish life in Europe, with
its tightly-knit communities, statelessness and focus on obedience
to God could be regarded as a kind of anarchistic model. The
Jewish concept of the Sabbath, which was central to the culture
and religion, could also be interpreted as a kind of revolutionary
anarchistic idea. The Sabbath's proscription of work was seen to
derive from the belief that labor in its current form is a
reflection of man's fallen state, of his antagonistic relation to
nature. The Sabbath, as well as the Jewish concept of a Jubilee
every 50 years when all debts and obligations would be forgiven,
represented an aspiration to break the monotonous and empty cycle
of time. Thus, the Jewish messianic tradition in its radical, as
opposed to rabbinic, interpretation, namely that human beings in
their daily lives choose or prepare the way for a radical
transformation of human life, was seen as exemplified in the
particular way in which Jewish history and culture had developed.
But it was also just their Jewish identities that made it
impossible for L|wy's thinkers to fully embrace Romanticism,
which, in its tendency to look to the past for social models,
reminded them of the nightmare that history had been for Jews, and
by extension all oppressed (the majority of) people. A concrete
corollary of this proclivity was that, as opposed to the
Romanticists in general, they saw technology as important to the
realization of their vision, though they condemned its misuse in
both capitalist states and the Soviet Union. L|wy says of Walter
Benjamin: "The cardinal point in his criticism is not a denial of
technology, but rather its radical re-definition, its mastery not
over nature, but rather over the relationship between man and
nature." (p. 131) If one remembers that the fundamental critique
these men levelled was against power and authority in itself, it
should come as no surprise that they could view technology as a
positive element within a non-authoritarian social and political
structure.
Thus, although these men were heavily influenced both by German
culture and by cultural Zionist ideas, they came to oppose either
full Jewish assimilation into German society or the goals of
political Zionism. Assimilation into German culture represented
accepting a bankrupt social order, abandoning the special insight
into the nature of political power that the Jews had garnered, and
aligning with the reactionary tendencies within the Jewish
tradition itself. Political Zionism represented the acceptance of
the concept of the state, the abandonment of revolutionary
struggle in Europe, becoming tools of Western imperialist
aspirations, and taking on the role of oppressors over another
people (the victimization of the Arabs was apparent to these men
as early as the 1920's). Overarching all these considerations was
a radical political interpretation of the essence of Jewish
prayer, belief, and the concept of the "chosen people": that Jews
could not be free from oppression without a transformation of
society that would be carried out by and lead to the freedom of
all oppressed people and in the liberation of nature from human
exploitation.
L|wy's entitles his chapter on Walter Benjamin, "Outside all
currents, where the ways cross" to describe the rich complexity of
Benjamin's thought and relationship to other writers. Throughout
his long and prolific life Benjamin attempted a vast synthesis of
the currents of thought of his time and held to a devastating
criticize of modernity and of the withering role of the power
principle in history. His work is also rich in its focus on the
restitutional and transcendental elements that are central to the
thinking of the men L|wy treats. It is noteworthy that of all the
writers he deals with Benjamin is the one whom L|wy explicitly
identifies as an admirer also of rationalist (particularly
Kantian) thought despite his base in the Romantic tradition. The
following is an attempt to summarize L|wy's treatment of the
various elements of Benjamin's thinking. In this way I intend to
more concretely convey the sense of the dynamism of the work of
these messianic anarchists.
Benjamin's early writings during the First World War were smack in
the middle of the Romantic tradition. Though he was to grown
beyond Romanticism, it always maintained a strong hold on him.
However, rationalism was also an early influence on his thought.
Kafka had once referred in an interview to a passage from Plato
concerning poets: "[They]... are enemies to the state, because
they advocate change." Benjamin believed that all free inquiry was
inimical to the state and the power principle. As early on as his
doctoral thesis, Benjamin emphasized that life is a striving for
perfection and transformation, not endless evolutionary progress.
He was also influenced early on by the Jewish Kabbalah, with whose
restitutional elements he strongly identified: he related utopia
to the perfection of speech which had been corrupted by the fall
from grace in the Garden of Eden and the Tower of Babel. Around
the same time he wrote of anarchistic elements in the Catholic
medieval cloisters.
At an early stage as well Benjamin levelled a blistering attack
not only against the concept of state power but also against its
oppressive and reactionary function in modern society: he saw
institutions such as the police as the most degenerate and
despicable representatives of power and, unlike many anarchists,
was favorably inclined to revolutionary violence as a means of
breaking the stranglehold of state institutions, the endless cycle
of oppression. On a more existential level, he regarded the futile
pursuit of pleasure in a degenerate social order as a kind of pale
reflection of the utopian ideal within each person. Thus he often
called himself a nihilist as opposed to an anarchist in order to
emphasize the need for a total break with reigning values in order
to forge a complete restitution.
Despite his scepticism of political movements in general, Benjamin
was drawn to Communism in the Soviet Union, where he perceived the
potential of blending Marxist theory and practice. L|wy coyly
paraphrases a 1926 letter from Benjamin to Gerlom Scholem: "The
anarchist methods [are] 'clearly inappropriate' and the Communist
goals 'pure nonsense'; but this doesn't detract a jot from the
Communist approach, because it is a corrective to its goals and
because there is no such thing as a sensible political goal...The
goals of anarchism are significant in that they are not political
goals, but the best method for achieving them is offered by the
Communist approach." (p. 129) Though Benjamin was later to
renounce the Soviet experiment, its very existence strongly
affected the direction of his thinking: his messianism took on a
more secular tone. In one telling example cited by L|wy, a phrase
in a text in which Benjamin had cited the role of prayer in
overthrowing oppression was changed two years later to focus on
the role of proletarian revolt. From the beginning Benjamin's
formulation of Marxist class-struggle theory was particularly
nuanced and conscious of contemporary realities: he saw the
seizure of power by the proletariat not as somehow historically
inevitable, but rather as urgent, not only in their own interests,
but in order to check the rampage of technology as it had
developed under bourgeois control before it could lead to
irreversible catastrophe.
Benjamin was also intrigued by the surrealistic movement in the
arts. He saw surrealism as a successful application of the Marxist
doctrine that all ideas and structures should motivate their own
transcendence. But the conscious application of Marxist theory in
the Soviet Union proved to be a source of great disillusionment
for him: not only the mass executions of the 1930's but also
Stalin's emphasis on industrialization to the exclusion of class
struggle and popular political awareness horrified him.
Benjamin would have perhaps abandoned the Soviet Union even
earlier had he not been so acutely conscious of the growth of
Fascism, which he saw as representative of modernity, and against
which he regarded Soviet Communism as a bulwark. His focus on
Fascism reflected not only his sensitivity to the political
realities of his time, but also his radical critique of modernity
in general; whereas liberals and even Marxists generally saw
Fascism as an isolated phenomenon in European history, Benjamin
regarded it as typical of modernity, a natural historical
development, and representative of the growing barbarity of the
industrialized world. Benjamin's critique of a liberal
"progressive" view of history included a reinterpretation of the
Marxist doctrine of "historical materialism": he saw the
attainment of a classless society not in deterministic or gradual
terms ("the withering away of the state"), but rather in the
"actualization" of a latent but by no means inevitable possibility
of social transformation.
One of the key distinctions Benjamin made was between conscious
experience (Erfahrung) and episodic experience (Erlebnis).
Conscious experience was conceived of as a kind of free-floating
culturally-integrating phenomenon shared by a group of people and
possessing the capacity to bind the present to the past. Episodic
experience involved the physical and psychological impressions of
isolated human beings. Benjamin argued that conscious experience
had been lost in modern society. Max Weber had remarked on a
similar phenomenon but had viewed it in a less negative light:
modernity had freed mankind from the "enchantment" of more
primitive cultures. Benjamin, on other hand, viewed just that
"enchantment" as a "liberating magic" capable of uniting human
beings with each other and with nature; its loss had led not to
clarity but to the greatest "myth" of all, that of the separation
of man from his origins. The parallel between Weber's and
Benjamin's radically different interpretations of modernity and
Weber's and L|wy's radically different use of the concept of
"elective affinity" is striking. Also striking is the prophetic
nature of Benjamin's explicit characterization of experience in
modern society as episodic and traumatic; such an analysis has
been incorporated into popular social thought and has been adopted
as the basis of "self-realization" movements (such as Werner
Erhardt's EST) in the late 20th century.
For Benjamin the restitution of a just, harmonious, and
non-exploitative society as encapsulated in the Kabbalistic
concept of Tikkoun involved an interplay between conscious
experience and social relationships. In a reflection of the Jewish
sabbatical tradition as noted above, he explored the concept of
play as opposed to exploited and exploitative labor as key to the
restitution. Similarly, he was fascinated by the research of
Bachofen and others concerning the more egalitarian and nurturing
nature of matriarchal societies. However, Benjamin's essential
differences with traditional Romanticism are evident. The concept
of restitution did not imply for him the return to an earlier
social structure but rather an integration of the past and present
to create an "actualized" as opposed to a deterministic future. He
was not interested in the "reproduction" of an historical model,
but rather in the "recovery" of the spirit of egalitarianism.
Technology was not in itself inimical to this project; on the
contrary it was an essential tool for the integration of ancient
spirit and contemporary reality.
Benjamin, like Kafka, points to the central paradox and the
central hope of modernity. To Benjamin, it is just those elements
of modernity that are the most ominous - Fascism and unbridled
industrialism - that are also the most characteristic. He is
Kafka's philosophical counterpart in his portrayal of the ravages
of authoritarianism and mechanization. But just as Kafka's fiction
was not primarily social criticism but rather a portrayal of man
caught in the nightmare of history, Benjamin focused on the
catastrophes of modernity for their capacity to illumine the
barbaric tendency of historical development. And in the same way
as the streets, corridors, and outposts of the nightmare
constitute the stage on which Kafka's dramas unfold, Benjamin is
not much drawn, as were the Romantics, to an idyllic, agrarian, or
medieval ideal. The very hopelessness and bleakness, as well as
the humor and irony, of Kafka's work suggest that only by a
transformation of consciousness within the nightmare can an escape
hatch be found. Utopia is not an ideal of perfection at the end of
the rainbow of historical progression, but the other side of the
coin of modernity: it is not the ideal or best way out of the
nightmare, it is the only way out. And as Kafka's fiction shows
modern man in a futile search for pleasure and meaning, so
Benjamin sees in the barbarity and mechanized soullessness of
modernity a kind of mirror image of the playfulness, trust and
simplicity that restitutional anarchism strives to achieve.
IV. Conclusion: on losing and time
The following examination of the interweaving of the concepts of
the role of the victim in history and the nature of the phenomenon
of time is intended to illustrate the richness, complexity and
compassion of the thought of the men L|wy treats in his book.
Hopefully, this discussion will contribute also to understanding
the fertility of the elective affinity between Romantic anarchism
and the Jewish messianic tradition. One might say that this
interplay of time and victimhood reflected a species of optimism
that is central to the Jewish historical experience, not the
optimism of eternal progress or of this as the "best of all
possible worlds" (the Enlightenment), or the optimism of "man's
essentially good nature" (Romanticism), but a more existential
view of man's ability to choose justice and fulfilment. According
to this view the "darkness" of modernity reflects man's lack of
awareness of that choice but at the same time is a kind of
negative evidence that the choice nevertheless exists.
The view of history as a never-ending progression toward greater
justice, freedom, prosperity, etc. was largely a product of the
ideals of the Enlightenment combined with a belief in the power of
science and reason to promote the unfoldment of the good in
history. L|wy's thinkers rejected this view on a number of counts.
First, it flew in the face of the evidence as they saw it. History
had consisted not only of continual war, brutality, and poverty,
but also of a successive consolidation of power by a smaller and
smaller minority over a greater and greater majority. This view
differed sharply from Marxist analysis in that its perspective was
chiefly non-economic and because it was anti-deterministic: it did
not see a kind of inevitable triumph over oppression. The
catastrophes of the 20th century - unbridled industrialism,
genocide, Nazism, environmental destruction - were for them not
historical exceptions, and not primarily the culmination or latest
stage in the development of barbarity, but a kind of microcosm of
history itself. In particular, for Kafka and Benjamin was 20th
century authoritarianism a logical expression of the dominance and
arbitrariness of the power principle in history.
The second reason that these men rejected the view of never-ending
progress was its relationship to the nature of everyday experience
within modern society. To them what modern man experiences is an
eternally repetitive, empty and impenetrable cycle of time.
Benjamin employs the myth of Sisyphus to describe contemporary
life, the man who rolls the boulder to the top of the hill only to
have to start all over again. Images from the modern assembly
line, wheels in our machines, factory gates (the entrance to Hell
according to Marx and Engel's imagery) conveyed contemporary
versions of the Sisyphus myth. But for the messianic anarchist
thinkers the power of the myth was not in its description of
economic conditions but rather in its portrayal of daily
experience, of time. Modern man experiences life as an endless
series of minutes, hours, days, weeks in which he has no power to
transform the nature of his life or to make any fundamental
choices. In Kafka's fiction the distortion and compression of time
represents the very way in which the possibility of choice is
seemingly intentionally - through the arbitrary exercise of power
- excluded from human awareness. It is ultimately the perceived
inability to transform experience, to choose to experience
something other than endless repetition, that lies at the heart of
the existential pain behind much of what Lowy's thinkers express.
L|wy quotes one of them, Gy|rgy Lukacs in his analysis of a
passage from Das Kapital on the effects of the machine on man: "As
a result time loses its qualitative, transformational, fluent
character. It solidifies into a continuum that is wholly limited,
quantitatively measurable and stuffed with quantifiable 'things'
(i.e. the worker's labor that is reified, mechanically objectified
and essentially cut off from the human personality as a whole).
Time solidifies into space." (p. 252)
But the messianic principle, at least in its alchemy with
anarchism and rationalism, finds hope in despair, presence in
absence, light in darkness. And this hope has little to do with
faith or belief but rather with its analysis of the nature of the
darkness. The absence, darkness, distortion represents a kind of
pregnancy or potential. The power principle has distorted or
veiled the potentialities of human beings and the richness of time
but has not aborted them. In other words, man's perceived ability
to choose has been suppressed but not his essential will. The
will, however, is expressed in distorted ways in modern life, i.e.
through the search for entertainment, fame, wealth, sexual
conquest etc., all of which proceed from time as empty and needing
to be filled rather than as a potentiality offering choice and
fulfilment.
The third reason these men rejected the concept of history as
never-ending progress was that it is a self-contradictory idea in
itself. To understand this, one must look at the concept of being
a sort of hybrid of two aspects of the Enlightenment, on one hand
the superiority of scientific and rational thinking, and on the
other hand the virtues of justice and equality. The contradiction
lies in the fact that the adulation of science carried with it the
view of the universe as deterministic. What a universe that
operates according to fixed laws (where the most that man could
hope for is to come closer and closer to an understanding of their
operation) has to do with justice and equality, or why in any case
one would feel empowered to strive for justice and equality within
this framework, is, to say the least, problematic. On the one
hand, there did not seem to be much evidence that 19th century
scientific progress had brought greater justice and equality -
quite the contrary. On the other hand, industrialization seemed to
provide the hope of a society in which human beings could escape
the harshness of bare existence. Similarly, the revolutions,
constitutions, nationalist movements and formal emancipations of
the 18th and 19th centuries seemed to testify to the fact that
rational ideas could inspire people to action. On a more
metaphysical level, human beings, despite the reigning model of a
deterministic universe, continued to experience at least
occasional impulses that they could or should be able to affect
the course of their lives and of history.
Despite the failure of the scientific revolution to reverse the
barbaric trend of history, for L|wy's thinkers the return to some
previous historical phase, as the Romantics were drawn to,
represented the nightmare from which the oppressed majority of
mankind, and Jews in particular, were striving to emerge. And it
was just the ideal of reason, justice, even mission (not in terms
of conversion but of bringing light to superstition and
injustice), not the power principle as in the case with popes and
emperors, that had sustained the Jewish community through
centuries of persecution. It was the reign of power that had
subverted reason and turned time and choice into meaningless
categories.
Thus it was the victims of history, not only the economic victims
but all those who had felt the brutality of power and who through
their desperate search for fulfilment as well as bare subsistence,
represented the longing for real experience and bore the hope for
transformation; one might call them the "consciousness
proletariat." What was needed was a transcendence of the reigning
sterile categories of existence, a restitution of time as a
vibrating possibility. And it was just in the moment, in the
apparent banality of everyday life, that this transcendence is
possible. This is messianism in its most radical and stark form,
the promise of the moment, the opportunity for human awareness and
choice. It is also the central meaning of the Jewish tenet that
the human project is to pave the way for the messiah, who can
arrive "at any moment," a paradoxical but fertile concept.
Benjamin said, "As is well-known it was forbidden for Jews to try
to read the future...But the future was not regarded in their eyes
as therefore homogeneous and empty. Every second of the future
represented a narrow gate through which the Messiah could enter."
(p. 252) But as usual it was Kafka who put it most felicitously
and engagingly: "The Messiah arrives at that moment when he is no
longer needed, he doesn't come until the day after his arrival, he
comes not on the last day but on the very last day." (p. 99)
Almost breathtaking is the fact that 20th century physics seems to
have borne out this view of time, choice and human action. Physics
no longer talks of pre-determined events according to fixed laws,
but rather of a range of probable events. Which of a number of
possible events actually "occurs" depends on one's perspective,
the instruments one uses to measure them, and what might be called
a central built-in unpredictability factor that one can, at least
on a metaphorical level, identify as the human will, man's
consciousness of his ability and willingness to make choices. In
modern physics time is not an empty vessel or a straight line
waiting to be filled by events; rather events are woven into the
texture of time itself - time and events create and shape each
other.
One often hears that the principles of modern physics are too
difficult, abstract, or removed from everyday experience to be
understood by the "layman." But it is everyday experience as
shaped by a mechanistic worldview that is resistant to quantum
reality, not human consciousness itself. And it is reasonable to
postulate that it is just those people who have been history's
victims but who are at the same time closest to everyday
experience - in my words the "consciousness proletariat" - who
will be the most able to grasp the "new reality" that modern
science offers. And it is likely that they will understand the
"unpredictability factor" that science now sees as built into the
universe as just that human will that we, however confusedly,
experience as existing.
All this points to the possibility of transcendence, of acting
within discrete moments of time to transform the sense of
hopelessness and futility that characterizes modern consciousness.
The "nightmare of history," according to messianic anarchism, can
and must be ended within history itself. The transformation does
not occur at the end of history, nor does it occur in a kind of
personal, inward awareness of the "illusion" of time, but rather
in aware action that creates an opening for the messiah, that
activates time's potential. But what enriches, integrates and
distinguishes this thinking is that the transformation itself is
by no means destined to occur. Through cowardice, duress, malice
or whim people may fail to prepare the way for the messiah. The
catastrophe may quite simply continue. The outcome cannot be
predicted because its very nature is unpredictability - as is the
nature of the human will, whose triumph as well as it downfall
resides in its ultimate independence.