Arendt presents Benjamin as a relic of the 19th century hommes de lettres, a man whose passionate dislike for the bourgeois work ethos is equaled by his love of the vast network of fictions and histories that sustain the middle class city. As a man who did not manage to hold down a single job in his entire life, Arendt’s Benjamin is certainly not a conformist, but, depending on a monthly stipend from his father, the successful art dealer and business man, for his sustenance, nor does he live up to the ideal of the uncompromising rebel. Arendt finds it “striking that despite permanent financial trouble he managed throughout these years constantly to enlarge his library”. In Arendt’s sympathetic portrait, Benjamin is typical of a generation of middle class Jewish intellectuals at the beginning of the last century who refused to become part of the bourgeois Capitalist order and yet would not commit to a life of impoverishment outside of it. From a stricter Marxist point of view, it is of course easy to criticize this position as deliberately naïve and irresponsible, and this is to an extent the tone that Hannah Arendt adopts in her biographical introduction to Illuminations, the collection of Benjamin’s writings in which “Unpacking my Library” was included. However, with the increasing dematerialization of consumer products in the current creative economy, does collecting retain the complex relation to consumerism outlined by Benjamin? How does one unpack a virtual library?īenjamin presents collecting, this particular mode of consumption and ownership of material goods, as a quasi-mythical process of attachment to the world of objects, similar to the way children become invested in their environment or the way they “accomplish the renewal of existence the whole range of childlike modes of acquisition, from touching things to giving them names”. There is therefore something almost transgressive about Benjamin’s positive account of the possession of objects. If from a Marxist perspective, the joys of shopping belong to the realm of false consciousness, a form of mass deception, contemporary corporate discourse is equally moralizing in its justification of consumerism via green ethics, fair trade and other mitigating circumstances against an almost universally abhorred materialism.
He is unique in celebrating the constructive, creative and even critical value of mass consumer culture, as distinct from Capitalism per se. In presenting a thesis on the fetishistic engagement of the collector with artifacts of material culture, which is an almost exclusively bourgeois domain, Benjamin seems to reject a certain puritan ethos prevalent in Marxist thought, while at the same time introducing a sphere of material historicity removed from the fluid swiftness of capitalist practice. Walter Benjamin’s essay on collecting, published in 1931 under the title “Unpacking my Library”, treads a treacherous path for a Marxist.
Archiving the Future Archiving the Future: Unpacking Benjamin's Collection
0 kommentar(er)
