Conspiracy : James Martel

8. Benjamin and the Conspiracy with Objects

In terms of Benjamin and his own contribution to this inquiry, there are a great many similarities to Machiavelli and Hobbes alike. Like Machiavelli, for Benjamin, there is a decidedly public orientation to his writing and thinking; his work too effectively publicizes the methods and ways of power in a way that serves a decentralizing agenda. Like Hobbes, Benjamin pays a great deal of attention to the relationship between author and reader; one of his key goals as a theorist is to overcome the division between the author as a figure of expertise and the reader as a figure of passive receptivity. In this way, he can be said to consciously seek what Hobbes may only have produced inadvertently.

But Benjamin is different from these earlier figures, not only because he is a non-canonical author but also—and relatedly—because he is more clearly conspiratorial than they are. While we can only speculate about the intentions of Machiavelli and Hobbes, in the case of Benjamin he is forthrightly anti-authoritarian. We do not need to read a “code” in Benjamin so much as look at how his theorizing effects and produces political alternatives.

Benjamin directly evokes the concept of conspiracy in his discussion of Charles Baudelaire, a subject that occupied much of the latter part of his life. In “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,” Benjamin writes:

Behind the masks which he used to their fullest extent, the poet in Baudelaire preserved his incognito. He was as circumspect in his work as he was capable of seeming provocative in his personal associations. The incognito was the law of his poetry. His prosody is like the map of a big city in which one can move about inconspicuously, shielded by blocks of houses, gateways, courtyards. On this map, words are given clearly designated positions, just as conspirators are given designated positions before the outbreak of a revolt. Baudelaire conspires with language itself. He calculates its effects step by step.⁴⁰

In writing that “Baudelaire conspires with language itself,” Benjamin is introducing a new dimension in thinking about conspiracy, a sense that conspiracies don’t just operate between human beings but involve non human aspects as well: language, signs, even material objects.

This notion reflects Benjamin’s theologically inflected philosophy wherein human beings have been condemned to engage in false and idolatrous forms of representation since the Fall of humanity. In paradise, Benjamin tells us Adam’s role was to give a spoken name to the objects of the garden. He had a direct and unmediated relationship to truth and to materiality. Afterwards, for Benjamin, human beings have no recourse but to representation, to the attempt to reproduce a direct relationship to reality through language and other means. In “On Language as Such and the Language of Man,” Benjamin writes:

The knowledge to which the snake seduces, that of good and evil, is nameless. It is vain in the deepest sense . . . Knowledge of good and evil abandons name; it is a knowledge from outside, the uncreated imitation of the creative word.⁴¹

In speaking of the “uncreated imitation of the creative word,” Benjamin is showing how representation is a failed imitation. This leads to a situation in which he tells us language “fell into the abyss of the mediateness of all communication, of the word as mean, of the empty word, into the abyss of prattle.” [ Ibid.] Inevitably, our attempts to reproduce the lost relationship to truth results in idolatry (“prattle”), in false representations that collectively constitute what Benjamin calls the “phantasmagoria.” Commodity fetishism, a hallmark of capitalism, is perhaps the most pernicious aspect of humanity’s estrangement from the material world.

Our recourse for Benjamin is not to expose the fetish and seek the truth, since that is impossible, but rather to seek out the failure of representation, to make the absence of truth legible to us and, in this way, interrupt the hold that phantasm has on each of us. By arguing the Baudelaire “conspires with language itself,” Benjamin is suggesting that Baudelaire resists the seductions of phantasm by aligning himself with his own words, with the signs and symbols that convey his poetry and their struggle against the idolatry they otherwise convey.

In his study of German baroque drama, Benjamin evokes a similar sense of conspiracy. He tells us that “the language of the baroque is constantly convulsed by rebellion on the part of the elements which make it up.”⁴² Here, he describes the German baroque dramatists as being saved from their own desire to portray strong kings and the workings of natural law by the plays themselves, by the language and sometimes even the stage props that they employed. Their plays are disrupted; their plots and dialogues collapse onto themselves, serving to undermine the authority (taken in its literary, political and religious sense all at once) the authors wish to make evident.

As Sam Weber notes, in the course of these plays about political sovereignty, there are many plots afoot, especially among the ranks of courtiers.⁴³ As if modeling the ambiguous relationship that the playwrights have to the authority structures they intend to serve (but undermine), the courtiers portrayed in these plays are involved in constant plots against the monarchs they serve. These plots, as Benjamin points out, convey the same kind of alliance with non-human forces that we saw with Baudelaire as well. For Benjamin, the very symbols of authority themselves buck the sovereignty system they ostensibly serve:

Crown, royal purple, scepter are indeed ultimately properties, in the sense of the drama of fate, and they are endowed with a fate, to which the courtier, as the augur of this fate, is the first to submit. His unfaithfulness to man is matched by a loyalty to these things to the point of being absorbed in a contemplative devotion to them . . . Clumsily, indeed unjustifiably, loyalty expresses, in its own way, a truth for the sake of which it does, of course, betray the world. Melancholy betrays the world for the sake of knowledge. But in its tenacious self-absorption it embraces dead objects in its contemplation, in order to redeem them.⁴⁴

The betrayal of the world referred to here is, once again, not a sheer destructiveness for its own sake; as Benjamin shows, it serves as much to redeem as to destroy. The plots of the courtiers, in coordination with the objects that otherwise serve as the sites of fetishism, serve to unmake false and idolatrous forms of authority, leaving a space open for new political forms to emerge.

^{40. Walter Benjamin, “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,” in The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire (Cambridge: Belknap, 2006), 126.↩}

^{41. Walter Benjamin, “On Language as Such and on Language of Man,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Vol. 1, 1913-1926 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 72.↩}

^{42. Walter Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama (New York: Verso: 1998), 207.↩}

^{43. Samuel Weber, Benjamin’s—Abilities (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008). ↩}

^{44. Walter Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, 156-7.↩}