Should Benjamin Have Read Marx?

First, apologies for my title. I realize it puts the question I have in mind somewhat glibly, not to say flippantly, as if scared to death of seeming too reverential in the face of the Benjamin phenomenon. I apologize, then, for the form of the question but not for the question itself—and not for posing it baldly. Doing so is meant as antidote to what seems to me to have been happening in the generality of Benjamin studies over the last decade or so—where I take the question very often to be put implicitly, and, as it were, with regret, and the answer given by the implicitness.

"Was it a good thing for Benjamin as a writer"—here is the question spelled out—"that he came to identify himself with the project called Marxism, and seems to have entertained the idea of turning his book on nineteenth-century Paris into a study, specifically, of culture shaped by commodity production, the latter elaborated in terms picked up from Capital and The Critique of Political Economy?" Posing the question implicitly, as, by and large, recent writing on Benjamin has done, seems to me a way of avoiding having to say something as vulgar and ahistorical as that it was a bad thing. Only very distinguished South African novelists are allowed to produce that opinion out loud, with a positive cold war twang. But I take the drift of serious current scholarship to be reaching much the same conclusion sotto voce. Benjamin's Marxism was a period phenomenon, it tells us: a serious phenomenon, to an extent, and certainly not simply to be condescended to, but never a set of commitments and dreamed-of procedures that Benjamin properly reconciled with his deeper, and more original, religious and critical positions, and on the whole getting in the way of Benjamin's true upward trajectory as a thinker. In particular—and here is my topic—Marxism got in the way of the wonderful poetic-ethnological simplicity of The Arcades Project as first conceived in the later 1920s. It muddied, multiplied, and mechanized the project's original outlines; so that finally, essentially, Marxism can only be seen as a cancer on Benjamin's work—on what should have become the last and greatest of surrealist grapplings with the nineteenth century, a settling of accounts with all the mad dreams of Grandpa and Grandville and Victor Hugo. But is it necessary for us to say this? Doing so will only give pain. Does not true originality regularly come with its measure of dross? Is not talking at length about Benjamin's Marxism the equivalent of harping on Newton's obsession with alchemy or James Merrill's nights at the Ouija board?

Obviously I do not think so. But I almost think so; I understand the recent scholars' squeamishness, and I think much of the case they make (or intimate) is reasonable and well meaning. I want to suggest in what follows why I think in the end it will not do. This will necessitate my discussing The Arcades Project very broadly and synoptically—stating the obvious at some moments, and at others hacking my way crudely through what I know to be difficult thickets of interpretation. I have to do this, because my subject is the overall plan and direction of Benjamin's later work, and what the engagement with Marxism meant for it. I need to totalize, and to think about the nature of Benjamin's changing totalizations. And therefore I need—very much in the spirit of Benjamin's own view of history and philology—to present a Benjamin who is deeply, constitutively, out of date. A dusty, unfashionable, left-wing Benjamin, discovered in the backroom of a 1960s antique store. In the Passage Debord or Galerie Wiesengrund. Much like the Benjamin I remember coming across—with what mixture of excitement and disbelief one can imagine—in the British Museum reading room in 1965, in the...