This is not a call for anti-intellectualism, nor a requiem for philosophy. It is rather a potential to revisit the desires and goals of philosophy, to which Walter Benjamin offers a fruitful impulse, when he says in the introduction to his Origin of the German Tragic Drama that “Knowledge is possession [Erkenntnis ist ein Haben]” and underlines that therefore “the object of knowledge is not identical with the truth” (29f.). We can see that Benjamin does not turn away from Truth, but at the same time, he proposes a different conception from the one I’ve sketched above. In the end of the book, he will criticize “pure curiosity which is aimed at mere knowledge with the proud isolation of man,” and connects it with “magical knowledge” that “threatens the adept with isolation and spiritual death” (229). In this passage, he is talking about the allegorist, but it is clear that it is essentially the philosopher that he is criticizing — the philosopher as an allegorist, an adept, as an alchemist that sits in his study looking for the magical formula, “That I may understand whatever / Binds the world’s innermost core together” (Faust).

The philosopher must therefore take on a different socio-political role, one that Benjamin outlines in another text, The Author as Producer (1934). There, he traces the question, to what degree a writer, or, as we could say, the intellectual, needs to be politically active. The extremes lie on the one hand in the bourgeois conception of the artist’s autonomy that shields him from political involvement, and on the other hand with communist conceptions of activism, which that time intended to integrate him directly into the class struggle. While Benjamin’s sympathies lie with the latter, being a leftist himself, he acknowledges the fact that pieces of art that are directly political and fomenting, are often of bad quality and rarely attain their insurgent goals. Hence, the question poses itself as one of literary quality: how can progressive — meaning socially aware — literature be good? But what is implied here is something else, namely the question of how thought can be socially relevant and influential, how philosophy can step down from its pedestal of academia without losing depth and quality.

Know thy means of production

Instead of giving in to the above conundrum that poses like an exclusive choice — either you write good books or you are a politically active writer — , Benjamin says that it’s only as long as we understand political tendency in a wrong way that we will end up with crappy writing. Instead, he says that “literary tendency, which is implicitly or explicitly included in every correct political tendency, this and nothing else makes up the quality of a work” (87). This is a bold statement, as literal value is equaled with political value. But a piece of literature does not become political through the proclamation of slogans or by presenting moral and political lessons. It’s not a contentual variable, but rather a formal one— and Benjamin introduces here the term of literary technique. Hence, “this literary tendency may consist in a progressive development of literary technique, or in a regressive one” (88). The techniques that interest Benjamin are not (primarily) stylistic ones, but rather those that concern and reflect “the productive relations of [their] time” (87), and this concerns the question of how literature is produced and how it is received.

One such technique was the Dadaist performance that questioned the possibility of poetry after the catastrophe of WWI and reflected the noise and chaos of the industrialized city just as much as the noise and destruction of the newly invented machine gun — by shocking the audience that often responded by shouting and booing. This technique, like many others of the avant-garde — and this is the backdrop of what Benjamin is talking about here — “not only destroys the conventional separation between genres, between writer and poet, scholar and popularizer, but […] questions even the separation between author and reader” (90, my emphasis). The screaming audience was as much part of the dadaist performance as the poet.

In what way did the dadaists invent a progressive technique? The bourgeois means of production of art, its famed concept of autonomy, intended to draw the sharpest line possible between producer and consumer, potentially elevating the former to the status of genius, while the latter only manages to remain in awe of the sublime piece of art. This allows only for a contemplative reception, meaning that as a reader, I am completely passive. This passivity of the reader relates to the passivity of the obedient citizen. In this radical distinction, the author is in possession of ‘divine inspiration’, while the reader, a ‘mere mortal’, is barred from the access to such marvels. This repeats the political distinction of intellectual and manual labor (Marx), wherein the bourgeois has access to knowledge due to his education, while the ‘bovine’ proletarian must do the only thing he is capable of — work. Work for the bourgeois, of course. This ultimately creates a false intelligentsia that is only interested in remaining in charge, meaning, in conserving the current power structure:

“The characteristic feature of this literature is the way it transforms political struggle so that it ceases to be a compelling motive for decision and becomes an object of comfortable contemplation; it ceases to be a means of production and becomes an article of consumption” (96f.).

Essentially, what all that amounts to, is the categorical differentiation of knowledge and action, where the intellectual, as a possessor of knowledge and the ‘know-how’ is free from political action (=autonomy), while the proletarian is ‘legitimately’ excluded from possessing the means of production. But in this relation, neither are truly productive, because the intellectual himself remains a consumer of that knowledge that his bourgeois education is passing on to him; as when he is handed over a certain canon of literary classics that he can neither question nor expand. It is the hierarchical form of the classroom: The teachers are in possession of knowledge that they produce during class, while the pupils consume that knowledge and act by writing exams. The teacher is seemingly active, but like the pupils that repeat the contents of the course book after him, so does he repeat the contents of the curriculum. Hence, not only does the radical differentiation of knowing and acting legitimate the suppression of the proletariat, but it also leads to the passivity of the intellectual. This is why a writer, who does not reflect his own position within the means of production, will never be able to produce quality work — as he cannot attain the productivity that is needed for that (like bestseller writers that only repeat the established form of the novel, but also the established from of publication of the novel). Hence, said differentiation of knowing and acting is necessarily reactionary.

El Lissitsky — Proun 93 (1923)

Interpretation: Activity and Visibility

Questioning the separation between author and reader essentially comes along with the questioning of the differentiation between knowing and acting. As Benjamin elaborates, only those authors and artists can be considered progressive that don’t degrade their recipients to mere passive consumers. The activation of the reader can lie in participatory modes of creation, like the Dadaist performance (even against the audience’s desires), but also in the activity of interpretation as a means of producing sense. Teachers that pound into their pupils that “the author meant x when he said y” repeat the myth that the author knows everything about his work and has exclusive rights to the meaning(s) that it produces. Yet, writers are famously the worst interpreters of their own works and if Kafka magically came back to life, he might just say that he was enjoying himself coming up with things (he laughed while reading his own work aloud to his friends). Interpretation, rather, is a productive relation to a given work of art that enriches it and is just as much the reader’s as the writer’s activity. It is a collaborative exercise, and people who call interpretations random are exactly the victims of a mode of teaching that has debased them to pure consumers of education.