Benjamins Figures - Dialogues on the Vocation of the Humanities / libri nigri Band 65

reface Madeleine Kasten This volume finds its origin in a conference titled Benjamin’s Figures: Dialogues on the Vocation of the Humanities which took place at Leiden University, Netherlands, in August 2013. In the meantime, the theme that inspired the conference – the more or less permanent crisis in the humanities, reinforced by the economic crisis that hit the world in 2008 – has in no way lost its urgency. The opposite is true: far from having ended with the financial crisis, whose effects are still noticeable everywhere, the need for the humanities to defend their existence appears only to have increased. Two examples, one from the US and one from the Netherlands, will suffice to illustrate this point. In March 2017, US President Donald Trump presented his first federal budget plan, in which he proposed to end both the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. It was the first time since the creation of the endowments in 1965 that a US president demanded their termination, and although the House later voted for a continuation of federal support at a slightly decreased level the proposal itself is a sign on the wall. A year before, Dutch conservative senator Pieter Duisenberg had already gained wide support for his view that academic study programmes in the Netherlands offering no job guarantees (so-called pretstudies – literally ‘fun studies’, understood to include art, most of the humanities, and a considerable part of the social sciences) should be axed. Meanwhile Duisenberg has been appointed chair of the Co-operating Dutch Universities (VSNU), where he took up his duties on October 1, 2017. One of his stated aims is to create more incentives for universities to market their study programmes, and to link the allocation of budgets for tuition to performance agreements based on quantitative indicators between the government and ‘internal stakeholders’ (students and university staff) as well Madeleine Kasten xii as trade and industry. In addition, the allocation of research budgets is to be increasingly geared towards ‘social relevance’. So the question remains: how can the humanities justify their existence in an academic environment facing ubiquitous cutbacks – an environment where, as Stanley Fish has argued, productivity, efficiency and consumer satisfaction appear to be the only relevant criteria anyway? Even if eloquent spokespersons such as Fish and Martha Nussbaum are perhaps overstating the case it appears that the humanities, more than ever, need to reconsider their specific role for our times. For on the one hand, the institutional call for more efficiency is seen to conflict with the humanities’ insistence on academic freedom and interdisciplinary research as essential to the development of a critical perspective on the operations of culture as a whole. On the other hand, the notions of freedom and interdisciplinarity must themselves be constantly rethought to prevent the legacy of ‘the cultural turn’ from being reduced to an empty cliché. At Leiden University, we chose to address this need for reflection on the vocation of the humanities by organizing an international conference devoted to the thought of philosopher of culture Walter Benjamin (1892- 1940). In doing so, our aim was to consolidate an interdisciplinary initiative started in 2010, when we marked the recent fusion between our former faculties of arts, philosophy and religious studies with a conference on the hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer. A conspicuous feature of Benjamin’s writing is its lack of any formal pretence to system building. In fact the bulk of his oeuvre is made up of short essays and notes on a wide range of seemingly disparate cultural phenomena, where philological commentary and criticism go hand in hand. The reason for this absence of closure and the frequent shifts in focus must not be sought in any incidental default. Instead, they reflect Benjamin’s experience of his own age as requiring a direct, polemical style and approach antithetical to incorporation into a fixed order. If fragmentariness imposes itself as a necessary formal characteristic of Benjamin’s writing, his project is nevertheless held together by a single underlying ambition: to study cultural signs as the ideal expression of the religious, metaphysical, political, and economic tendencies of a specific historical period. True to the semantic potential of Greek aisthesis, he promotes aesthetics to the status of an all-encompassing, interdisciplinary theory of experience. For the timeless idea, says Benjamin, is to be captured only in the process of its historical becoming – that is, at its origin, the Preface xiii vanishing point where it enters, and dissolves into, the material as the force determining its necessary form in history. The apprehension of this origin thus depends on a dual intuition where the singular reveals itself as part of a structure, a constellation that transcends the realm of the material yet remains faithful to each of its particulars: ideas stand to objects as constellations stand to stars (GS I.1, 214). In his analyses of cultural phenomena and the constellations to which they belong Benjamin shows himself unusually aware of the role of the philosopher/critic. Characteristically, this agent takes on different shapes according to varying contexts: the angel of history, the narrator, the flâneur, the child, the dwarf, the collector – to name just some central personas. Indeed Benjamin’s use of multiple, at times carefully orchestrated voices in his texts radicalizes the notion of interdisciplinarity in ways which, we feel, provides a vital source of inspiration for the humanities in our times. For our conference, then, we solicited papers reflecting on the sociocritical potential of the humanities through one or more of these Benjaminian figures, and our call was rewarded by a rich response. For three days we experienced the peculiar energy generated by non-stop discussion, the atmosphere being enhanced by the material presence of visual art inspired by Benjamin, a musical performance, and the conference-related art festival Cultuur?Barbaar! organized by our indefatigable former students Looi van Kessel and Gerlov van Engelenhoven. The essays contained in the present volume reflect this energy. Twelve of them are written in English, four in German. As the conference itself was bilingual and this bilingualism was experienced by many attendants as a blessing, especially in view of the long-standing divide between German and Anglo-American Benjamin studies, we have decided to publish the essays in their original languages. The first section, “Dialectics at a Standstill: Benjamin’s ‘Denkbilder’”, opens with Gustan Asselbergs’s attempt to assess the philosophical nature of the aphorisms or Denkbilder, sixty in all, which Benjamin collected in his volume One-way Street. The author begins by justifying the use of the term Denkbilder itself and develops his analysis in three steps. In the first part of his argument he focuses on Benjamin’s notion of the idea set forth in the “Epistemo-Critical Prologue” to his Origin of German Tragic Drama. The idea cannot be rationally grasped; it can only reveal itself – hence the problem of representation or Darstellung. The prose form of the thought Madeleine Kasten xiv image, a “kontemplative Darstellung” which forces the reader to pause, was designed to meet this difficulty. However, One-way Street is not just about the idea of an ordinary street. In his thought-images, of which Asselbergs discusses examples in his Part II, Benjamin confronts the shock experience of modern city life, opening up an ‘image-space’ which at the same time offers a free playground for the spectator. Asselbergs examines the textual properties responsible for this effect and concludes: “By this means a space is opened that distinguishes itself from the mercantile gaze of shock-reality, in favor of the interplay...