Archaeologies of Modernity

Toward Bildung without a Self

Walter Benjamin's and Carl Einstein's essays on surrealism and their surrealist-inspired writings disclose how the German and European avant-garde are entwined in ways that resemble family relations of an unspoken consensus in general, but also sharp disagreement in particulars. Critics like Benjamin and Carl Einstein experienced this tension in their own life and work, as in the aftermath of the First World War they both turned against the chauvinism and militarism of the Italian futurists. But they turned principally against the culture of soulful inwardness, a traditionally German Innerlichkeit (inwardness) that was once again cultivated by mainstream German expressionism during and after the First World War. Mainstream "Oh Mensch" expressionism was targeted for its fluffy idealist, holier-than-thou subjectivity and disembodying metaphors, for its perceived reinforcement of a characteristically German tradition of "Bildung" as intellectual and aesthetic "self-cultivation" in the wake of a continued monumentalizing cult of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. In turn, with the mid-1920s they favored French surrealism with which they connected a sweeping shift from idealism, as Benjamin puts it so provocatively in his surrealism essay of 1929, toward an "anthropological materialism" in which "political materialism and physical nature share the inner man." Surrealism is therefore said to expose the image of a new man in terms of the material, physiological, and formal relations of a "hundred percent body- and image-space," meaning a tactile space beyond subjective spectatorship, beyond the distance of concept, symbol, metaphor, and temporality, in short an experiential zone "where nearness looks with its own eyes." It is this kind of an eminently tactile process of visuality emerging as materiality that is characteristic of a certain type of European avant-garde production. They begin with the early visceral expressionist Kokoschka in Vienna and contemporaneous cubist productions in Paris where in the erasure of the modern monocular perspective, thus of three-dimensional space and the appearance of volume, mass, and materiality reveal themselves in heterogeneous formal relations, which I here address as archaeologies of modernity.

In other words, we are dealing with what appear to be spontaneous constructs of "auto-formation" or "auto-generation," an alternative meaning of the German term Bildung as it appears in the subtitle of this study, in erasure of a distance between physis and its image constructed by the perspective of an individual, autonomous spectator. Benjamin's image of the play of human facial expressions (Mienenspiel) that metamorphose "to a man" into the face of an alarm clock ringing "sixty seconds in the minute," in which his 1929 essay on surrealism culminates, thus is to explode and jettison the Cartesian subject's worldview. It is to disclose (quite specifically against the idealist phenomenology of Ludwig Klages, a major influence on literary expressionism, valorizing contemplation of the auratic form of the far and removed) "the world of allround (allseitiger) and integral actualities ... so that no limb remains unrent." Surrealism, here in its rending of the subject ("a bad tooth"), is for Benjamin obviously a subsequent dialectical step beyond the Nietzschean event of the tearing apart of the individual in Dionysian frenzy always already being fused in a formal process with Apollonian appearance. Yet for Nietzsche that event is typically independent from any and all social external conditions (Birth of Tragedy in the Spirit of Music). Surrealism, giving birth to and creating its alternative hallucinatory-constructive image space, the tactile visual experience of the closest, the "actual as the singular," has, one reads in his "Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia" from 1929, finally annihilated the "gute Stube" of reified bourgeois inwardness, as in middle-class German households this site was traditionally the quasi-sacred, "best room" reserved mostly for Sunday's occasions. After the revolutionary apocalypse, the variegated universe of urban sign-fields is to have replaced the life-world of the individual and with it the remote, contemplatively harmonizing and isolating private space of the book as the medium in which Bildung is packaged and sold as education. As Benjamin writes in One-Way Street: "Script — having found, in the book, a refuge in which it could lead an autonomous existence — is pitilessly dragged out into the street by advertisements and subjected to the brutal heteronomies of economic chaos. This is the hard schooling of its new form" (Benjamin, SW 1: 456). Increasingly sensing such a demise of literary culture, Benjamin would write almost a decade later his essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," meant to be his contribution to the expressionism debate in the Moscow exile journal Das Wort (1937–38). In his view the medium of film had been paralleled and prepared in some of its techniques by the avant-garde's visual turn. Both are said to share in tearing apart metaphor and symbol as the devices of the construct of the space for individual contemplation. Indeed, his 1929 essay's culminating image of human facial play morphing quasi-cinematically into the face of an alarm clock is one of posthumanist montage. Where Hegel in his Aesthetics had valorized Greek sculpture's "elimination of the facial play" as contingent subjectivity in favor of the representation of an ideal, universal individuality, Benjamin here points at the image of intersubjecticity in the age of technology. The metamorphic motion and movement implied in the verbal...