Detournament of Retrospective Desire

[cbertsch]

My favorite theorist of allegory is Walter Benjamin. He was interested in the perception of decline, the way artists have confronted the feeling of belatedness that seems to be an integral part of the modern experience. For centuries, people have been afflicted with the sense of having been born too late. The strange thing is, as Benjamin noted, that this feeling goes hand in hand with the relentless "progress" promoted by a capitalist economy. Not surprisingly, this perception has often been most acute during periods of political regression. Denied the opportunity to transform the social order, people turn their attention to transforming their personal lives. They give themselves the "makeover" they can't give to society. But these attempts at personal transformation are shadowed by the prospect of what could have been. No matter how many fads they run through, no matter how many items they purchase in order to refashion their identity, they can never completely escape the political tragedy of the recent past. This was true of the German Baroque that Benjamin pondered in The Origins of German Tragic Drama. It was true of Paris during the Second Empire, to which he devoted his vast, unfinished Arcades Project. And it was true of the post-WWI era in which he conducted his analyses. The 1970s have much in common with those periods.

Benjamin was no pessimist. At one point in the Arcades Project, he declares his goal to be showing that, in reality, "there are no periods of decline." He believed that, even though you can't literally go back in time, you can still make good on the promise of the past.

But in order to do so, you have to reinterpret it. Benjamin called this process Eingedenken, which translates literally as "remembering into." It provides the means to actualize the potential in what could have been. Where a more conventional approach to history sees refuse, it sees raw material. It redeems. For Benjamin, it would still be possible for us to connect with that spirit that has been missing since 1969. The trick is to distinguish between what we can't change — our forward motion in linear time — from what we can — our attitude towards a million dreams deferred.

Comments

[chrisglass.livejournal.com]

Deep thoughts you've put forth here, stuff I didn't know before. This
Benjamin character sounds worthy of investigation and your writing about Hotel California is sublime.

I was just reading up on Steven Johnson's Everything Bad is Good For You with nuggets that are getting tossed around the web like "Watching TV Makes You Smarter" and "Imagine an alternate world identical to ours save one techno-historical change: videogames were invented and popularized before books."

Tangent? Perhaps.

My interpretation of things began with a media rich childhood, with heavy doses of engineering (Legos) thrown in. When my pops hooked up the Odyssey2 videogame system to the TV, I made the connection between monitor and input device. That evolved to critical thinking with text based adventure games (Zork) when computers with real keyboards made their way onto (my) scene.

What folks dimiss as pop distractions, I found understanding.

And that forward motion in linear time, it would seem natural that I'd grow bored of the adventure games that went from text to flat to 3D. That I'd learn how to make the mouse do whatever I needed it to do onscreen.

And then, in lieu of contempt or boredom, I'd start reading. And thinking. And finding myself in some whacked out time period that could potentially alienate.

When it seems to be all too much to think about in a single evening, I'm damn happy I read your words (even though they make me think more.)

And your wife's lucky, as I'm sure you are too.

Viva Eingedenken.

[(Anonymous)]

This is very touching and admirable, and also very characteristic, your "faith," in a way, in theory, and in so personal a way. It made me think about psychoanalysis, also a reinterpretation of the past that makes the forward-moving possible, though perhaps in a less hopeful way than you might have it. Laura

[kdotdammit.livejournal.com]

Isn't it funny how the poem or whatever you call it I wrote about this picture is about not wanting to be looked at and for everyone to stop staring at me and for me to stop looking at me, but here I am for everyone to see? It's weird seeing something so deeply, deepy personal put into this context. Not that it's a bad thing. It's just a weird thing.

[elizabeg.livejournal.com]

I really loved this entry, and loved your responses to Laura and Kim above. And I knew from the very moment I read Benjamin's name that reading you would break me just a little on the inside, in a beautiful way. In the middle of the night when I was still awake and reading (which I haven't had the impulse to do so much as in undergrad and it makes me sad, like something lost) I think I wanted reading you reading Benjamin to make me want to cry. It seems absurd, I know, but I wanted to be sure I was still feeling things (that personal reaching that I read from LB calls faith) in theory. I will write you soon--