Beckett, Benjamin and Modern Crisis in Communication

8/3/2019 Beckett, Benjamin and Modern Crisis in Communication

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Beckett, Benjamin and the Modern Crisis in Communication

Author(s): Jan BruckReviewed work(s):Source: New German Critique, No. 26, Critical Theory and Modernity (Spring - Summer,1982), pp. 159-171Published by: New German CritiqueStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/488029 .

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Beckett, Benjaminand the ModernCrisisin Communicationby Jan Bruck

Beckett has so far largely defied sociological analysis, and most schol-ars are still preoccupied with the psychological and philosophical aspects ofhis work.' In an attempt to move towards a sociological perspective whichcould help to define more precisely the place and function of Beckett'swritings in contemporary Western society, I am going to make use ofWalter Bejnamin's theory of literary production, which provides an ex-planation of the crisis in communication and aesthetic perception that hasbeen constitutive for many modern writers since the turn of the century. Indrawing this connection, which surprisingly has so far escaped attention, Iam not considering Beckett's oeuvre in toto, but only those texts which hewrote a few years after World War II - Waiting or Godot and the noveltrilogy Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable. I shall assume that hislater plays and novels can be seen as a consistent development of theearlier themes and problems, some of which he had already formulated inhis major aesthetic manifesto, the essay on "Proust" of 1931. This treatiseraised issues strikingly similar to those which Benjamin discussed a fewyears later in his Illuminations essays, particularly "The Storyteller" and"On Some Motifs in Baudelaire." They deal with the concepts of "story-telling," "memory" and "experience" which provide focal points for thecomparative analysis of Benjamin's aesthetic theory and Beckett's literarypractice.2When Beckett arrived on the European scene, he was received by a

1. This is still evident, for example,in a recent selectionof criticalessayseditedby H.Engelhardt and D. Mettler, Materalien zu Samuel Becketts Romanen (Frankfurt/M., 1976).The only important xception knowof is the interpretationf Endgame yTh.W. Adorno,"Versuch, das Endspielzu verstehen,"Notenzur Literatur I (Frankfurt/M.,1963), pp.188-236. Adorno relates Beckett's nihilisticview of historyand hisparodyof existentialistphilosophy o thecatastrophic istorical ventsof fascismandtheWar.I am notdealingwiththe essayindetail,sinceit does notprovidea basis ora systematic ociological nalysis.Thebetter known treatiseon "Commitment"NewLeftReview,87/88[1974],75-89) mightbemore fruitful n this direction.2. Benjamincriticism n Englandand the USA has been growing n recentyears.Mosthelpfulfor thisanalysiswere:R. Burns,"Understandingenjamin,"RedLetter,7 (1978);R.G. Davis, "Benjamin, Storytellingand Brecht in the USA," New GermanCritique,17,Special WalterBenjamin ssue (Spring1979), 143-157; andS. M. Weber,"WalterBenja-

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stunned, speechless audience, whose traumatic experience of fascism andthe War had destroyed its power of memory - the ability to "thinkhistory" (Adorno) and the capacity to relate its "story." Yet the speech-lessness whch beset both Beckett's heroes and their audience alike was notonly due to the horrors of war; beyond the immediate historical catas-trophe, it signalized the destruction of the traditions and values of Westernculture and society, which Beckett saw in terms of a fundamental crisis incommunication and aesthetic representation. Waitingfor Godot presentsthis dilemma. Vladimir and Estragon, the existential tramps, have lost theessential capacity to tell their story - memory. Not only do they fail toremember how they came to be where they are, they also do not knowwhat to do: "nothing to be done" is the leitmotif of their habitual andfrustrating dialogue. As "time has stopped," preventing any developmentor change, there can be no progress in their understanding of the world,no formation of an experience on which they themselves or the audiencecould build:3

V.: And wherewere we yesterdayeveningaccordingo you?E.: How do I know?In anothercompartment.There'sno lackof void.V.: (sureof himself).Good. We weren'thereyesterday vening.Now whatdid we do yesterdayevening?E.: Do?V.: Try and remember.E.: Do... I supposewe blathered.V.: (controllinghimself).About what?E.: Oh... thisandthat,I suppose,nothing nparticular.withassurance).Yes, now I remember,yesterdaywe talkedaboutnothing n particular.That'sbeen goingon now for half a century.V.: You don't rememberanyfact, anycircumstance?E.: (weary).Don't tormentme, Didi.V.: The sun. The moon. Do you not remember?E.: They must havebeen there, as usual.V.: You didn'tnoticeanythingout of the ordinary?E.: Alas!

Beckett's creatures have been stripped of all the elements which identifiedthe bourgeois individual as the subject and center of the world: possessionsand property, social relations and human ties, knowledge and rationality.Beckett treats these values of bourgeois life with cynical contempt, par-odying the most important discourses that provided the ideological backingof Western society - the Bible, Science and Philosophy - whose failurein explaining the world and in providing a useful knowledge of the self and

min, CommodityFetishism,the Modernand the Experienceof History,"The UnknownDimensionin EuropeanMarxismSince Lenin,ed. Dick Howardand CarlE. Klare(NewYork:BasicBooks,1972), 49-275.3. Waitingor Godot(London, 1959),p. 66.


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of societybecamedrastically pparent n the historicalmomentof fascismand the War.The inabilityto communicate xperiencethrougha "story" s also thesubjectmatter of the novel-trilogyprecedingWaitingor Godot.The heroof the first part, Molloy, attempts to reconstructhow he reachedhismother'sroom in whichhe is living,incapacitated, ftercrawlingout of aditchthroughunknown errain.As in Godot,theessentialelementsneces-saryfor the formationof an experiencearelacking,andalthough he herois still able to recallpeopleand occurrences f the past,to reminisceaboutcertainaspectsof his life, his writingdoes not comprisea unified"story,"as the traditionalcoordinatesof spaceand time are out of order.Having

discarded materialpossessionsand humanties, Molloyengagesin trivialactivitiesand thoughts,merelyto passtimeand to wait for his end whichoccurs in partII of the trilogy,MaloneDies.Lying in his mother's room, Malone, alone, is awaitinghis death.There is no need anymoreto reconstruct he past, only to play the finalgame. Tied to hisbed andequippedwitha shortpencil,Malonerelateshisfinal "stories," "lifeless like the teller,"4 stories about the inabilitytonarrate,to describe,to communicate.Malone'sdesire is to writehisnovelinto death, to die writingand to write dying, thereby "beinggiven...birth to intodeath."5His desirefor deathcanbe linkedwith a "detestationfor the mother who ejected the hero from the womb." AccordingtoFletcher,most of Beckett'searlyheroesregard hewombas a "protectivecalm" and life as "a punishment,a pensum," which makes death "asecond, and perhaps happierbirth,"because "it will finallyreversetheprocess that has been so painfulto recalland for which life itself has notbeen sufficientto atone."6 Psychoanalyticnterpretationsindtheirparal-lel in those that relate the trilogy to biblicalmyth: "Buildingthroughbiblical allusions a parodic dialectic between Genesis and Revelation,Beckett mocks the beginningand the end of "creation."He uses theCreative Word as a comicepistemologicalmirror eflectinga distortedandnow grotesque image of his narrator"I," "creatorof all fictions..."Birth and death correlate to creation and destruction,the individualhuman life being as pointlessand incomprehensible s is the historyofhumankind n general.On the aesthetic/epistemologicallane,thispsycho-logicalor mythicaldeathsignifies he declineof thestoryandof itsauthor,in short the crisis in communication.In TheUnnamable,hepointof no returns reached.An unidentifiable

4. Molloy, MalloneDies, The UnnamableLondon,1959),p. 180.5. Ibid., p. 285.6. J. Fletcher, "Malone 'Given Birth to into Death,'" ed. J. O'Hara, TwentiethCenturyInterpretationsf Molloy,MaloneDies, TheUnnamableNewYork, 1955),p. 60.7. Jan Hokenson, "A Stuttering Logos: Biblical Paradigms in Beckett's Trilogy," JamesJoyce Quarterly, 8, No. 4 (1971), 293.


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"I" sits, in purgatory, watching the shadows of Malone, Molloy and allother heroes of the previous novels move past, no longer in life, merespeech, language, consciousness. There is no longer any "story," howeverrudimentary, to be told, all traditional categories of time, place, subjectand object have been jettisoned, all sense of continuity, tradition andidentity has been lost, and distrust in the power of memory is complete.What is left is a conglomerate of contradictory, self-relativizing and non-referential statements that flow on from page to page without a break,"inarticulate murmurs" that cannot be ended. The "story" ends withoutan end, so to speak: "... the voice begins again, it begins trying again,quick now before there is none left, no voice left, nothing left but the coreof murmurs, distant cries, quick now and try again, with the words thatremain, try what, I don't know, to have them carry me into my story, thewords that remain, my old story, which I've forgotten, far from here,through the noise, through the door, into the silence, that must be it, it'stoo late, perhaps it's too late, perhaps they have, how would I know, in thesilence you don't know .. " ". .. I can't go on, you mustgo on, I'll go on,you must say words, as long as there are any, until they find me, until theysay me, strange pain, strange sin, you must go on, perhaps it's donealready, perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried meto the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story, thatwould surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be silence, where am I, Idon't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must goon, I can't go on, I'll go on."8It seems here that Beckett reached as close as one possibly could to ex-pressing the fundamental dilemma of communication which he formulatedseveral times in his theoretical essays (Three Dialogues, I) and whichreappears, in distorted form, in The Unnamable: "The fact would seem tobe, if in my situation one may speak of facts, not only that I shall have tospeak of things of which I cannot speak, but also, which is even moreinteresting, but also that I, which is if possible even more interesting, that Ishall have to, I forget, no matter. And at the same time I am obliged tospeak. I shall never be silent. Never."9What a short-sighted critic discounts as "lack of talent" in writingstories (Alvarez) is precisely the point of Beckett's work: by producingtexts which lack the essential ingredients of story-telling - plots with aclear beginning, middle and end, and characters sure of their identity -he demonstrates that the meaningful writing of stories and novels is nolonger possible. Beckett's prose is a parody of story-writing, it is "meta-fiction" in the sense recently defined by Margret Rose, in that it "super-sedes a tradition of prose, while making this reflective supersession a

8. Op.cit., p. 417f.9. Ibid., p. 294.


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subject of another fiction."'0 Through their parodistic self-destruction,Beckett's "stories" represent the dilemma of story-telling, and the crisis ofliterary communication in the contemporary Western world.In order to uncover the causes of this crisis and the dilemma ofaesthetic representation, I will now turn to Benjamin. Benjamin's maintheoretical goal was to uncover the links that exist between the changingmodes of aesthetic perception and artistic creation on the one hand, andthe general "production process," the technique or technology of theproduction and reproduction of artworks, on the other. As the latterprogresses, revolutionizing the means of communication (from print andlithograph to film and radio), artistic forms undergo crises which necessi-tate the introduction of new forms. In preindustrial culture, where theproduction of artworks relied on the technology of the artisan, story-tellingwas the dominant medium of communication. With growing industrializa-tion and the invention of print, literary production superseded the oraltradition and the novel became the dominant form. Finally, with theappearance of advanced technology such as newpaper and film, the domi-nance of the traditional forms of "narrating" was challenged by a new,post-literary form of communication which Benjamin calls "information."In the process of this development, a fundamental change took place: inpreindustrial society, where artistic production was part of a ritual or cult,the work of art was endowed with a near sacred "distance," "inapproach-ability" and "uniqueness" in place and time, in short with an "aura";andit contained a truth that was passed on from generation to generation. Withthe advent of mechanical reproduction, the work of art moved out of itscollective cultic context into the competitive sphere of the commoditymarket, where the "exhibition value" became prevalent, destroying thetraditional aura, i.e. its authenticity and authority, and leading to a crisis inaesthetic perception. Out of this crisis, however, originated a new form ofcommunication which emancipated the audience from authority and tradi-tion and released its critical potential, thereby changing it from a passiverecipient of pre-established truths to an active collaborator, less interestedin cathartic experiences than in political argument. Benjamin applied thisgeneral model to the analysis of the modern crisis in communication andthe decline in traditional aesthetic forms in his essays on "The Storyteller"and on "Baudelaire," which provide a basis for the critical analysis ofBeckett's dilemma of story-telling.The essay on "The Storyteller" is concerned with the reasons for thedisappearance of story-telling in the modern world. The traditional story,which Benjamin defines of course in an ideal form, derives from oraltraditions in artisan culture, describing either local events and traditions("lore of the past") or journeys and travels ("lore of faraway places"). It

10. M. Rose, Parody/Meta-fictionLondon,1979),p. 65.


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164 JanBruckwas characterized by an "orientation towards practical interests," i.e., itcontained "something useful" in the form of counsel or advice. In moderntimes - probably beginning with the end of the Middle Ages - givingcounsel through a story becomes less and less possible, since the communi-cability of experience receded and "wisdom," which Benjamin defines as"counsel woven into the, fabric of real life," is dying out." The resultingdecline of the story coincides with the rise of the novel as the dominantepic form. As an expression of the aspirations of the bourgeois industrialage, this new form of aesthetic communication is due to the loss of many ofthe characteristics that defined story-telling, in particularthe change froma collective to an individualist social structure. Whereas the storytellerpassed his experiences on to the other members of his social group ascounsel and in a communal situation, the novelist speaks for "the solitaryindividual,"12 the privatized subject, who is no longer linked to the othermembers of the society through communal ties, but through increasinglycomplex and rationalized apparatuses of socialization and communication.Benjamin does not enter into an analysis of the social and economicfactors responsible for the radical transformation from artisanto industrialculture. He is concerned only with the impact of the technological changes,accompanying the social transformation, on aesthetic perception and themodes of artistic production. They are to him the indicators that reveal thechanging social function of literature and art. The process of transforma-tion, which took place gradually over hundreds of years from mythical ageto modern industrial society, led to the replacement of traditional forms byinformation as the new medium of communication. Benjamin explains thefundamental difference between story-telling and information in this way:"the value of information does not survive the moment in which it wasnew. It lives only at that moment; it has to surrender to it completely andexplain itself to it without losing any time."'3 For this reason, informationconstantly needs to be replaced and renewed. Mass media communicationdoes not aim at the formation of a complete, unified experience whichcould be perpetuated in future generations; its purpose is "to isolate whathappens from the realm in which it could affect the experience of thereader. The principles of journalistic information (freshness of the news,brevity, comprehensibility and, above all, lack of connection betweennews items) contribute as much to this as does the make-up of pages andthe paper's style."'4 The amount of sense stimuli and items of informationhas multiplied many times over through the increased number of signs andsignals, the speeding up of traffic and communication, the pace of work inthe factory and general global mobility, as is the case in mass society. In

11. W. Benjamin, Illuminations (London, 1970), p. 85f.12. Ibid., p. 87.13. Ibid., p. 90.14. Ibid., p. 160f.


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such a world it is of course much more difficult,if not impossible,tostructure the millions of bits of information into a unified whole and tomake sense of them in their totality. With the rapidly changing andexpanding horizon of communication in which every individual is living,the connection between the present and the past, the self and the others,the individual and the community is breaking up, worsened by the increas-ing subjection of the individual to anonymous forces of bureaucracy andeconomic interests. As a result of this simultaneous expansion and disinte-gration of social communication, we no longer possess a discourse whichfunctions as a source of truth and wisdom as the old stories and the Bibledid in earlier times. Instead, we have to contend with competing dis-courses, as disparate and contradictory as the reality we live in, and itseems hard to imagine that the world will ever agree on any discoursewhich it can share collectively as a common medium of communication.The decline of storytelling manifests itself also in fundamental changesin the notionsof truthandrepresentation.The "story"n itssimpleforms(e.g. the saga, legend or fairy tale) had a linear morphology with a clearevolution of plot and character - the dominant parts of narration. In this,it did not differ much from the telling (and later writing) of history and,before it assumed a purely fictional character, could claim a "truth" similarto thatof history,on the grounds hat it relatedevents of thepast,even ifthey were mythical or legendary. The "truth" of the story/history lay in thecoherence and plausibility of the events, it revealed itself through thatstructured order, and the listener comprehended it because the story,rendered usually in a collective situation, revealed a truth explicable interms of the audience's shared experience. With the rise of the novel andfollowing the failed attempts by idealistic and romantic writers in the earlynineteenth century to regain the lost world of legend and myth, thecompleteness of a story and its ability to relate a "true" experience wasno longer guaranteed through its history-relating structure. The realistnovelists and their successors were increasingly compelled to search forthe - now privatised and internalized - truth in an abstract relation ofreflection between the work of art and reality, between the internal struc-ture of the text and that of its object, trying to bridge the gap that had beenopened up by the Kantian separation of the recognizing subject and theobjective world. The difficulties of objectively representing the worldthrough signs (language) became an urgent matter for philosophy andaesthetics and can be traced from the nineteenth-century novelists to thenouveau roman, from the realists to the surrealists, expressing in theaesthetic/epistemological sphere the atrophy of experience and the privat-ization of the individual that occurred in the social sphere. It is thisdilemma of communication and aesthetic representation to which Beck-ett's work gives meta-fictional expression.'s

15. The implicationsof this epistemologicaldilemma or Beckett'sworkhavebeen dis-


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In order to understand the implications of this dilemma for Beckettmore fully, we need to take a closer look at the concepts of "memory" and"experience," the structure and function of which Benjamin and Beckettexplain in their essays on "Baudelaire" and "Proust" respectively. Ac-cording to Benjamin, "memory" is the cardinal faculty in producing andlistening to a story, it is "the epic faculty par excellence" as it "creates thechain of tradition which passes a happening on from generation to genera-tion,""'6and thereby provides those cultural and spiritual links necessaryfor the experience of completeness and totality: "Where there is experi-ence (Erfahrung) in the strict sense of the word, certain contents of theindividual past combine with material of the collective past. The ritualswith their ceremonies, their festivals..,. kept producing the amalgama-tion of these two elements over and over again. They triggered recollectionat certain times and remained handles of memory for a lifetime.""'7Withthe rise of the novel, the role of memory changes. For the privatisedindividual whose communal ties have been cut off and whose immediaterelationship with death and eternity has been destroyed (making way for a"transcendental homelessness" which Lukics regards as characteristic forthe modern novel), the past can be at best recollected synthetically,through the powers of association and reminiscence, as in the exemplarycase of Proust. Consequently, the "quest for life" (Lukics) becomes thegoal of the modern novel, which centres on the development of an indi-vidual hero and his consciousness which, in Hegelian terms, tries toreconcile itself with reality and understand itself as part of a necessaryhistorical process within an ideal totality.The new faculty constitutive for the novel is "involuntarymemory," asdistinct from "voluntary memory"; Beckett and Benjamin borrow theterms from Proust, who first introduced them in his novel, modifyingBergson's concept of memoire pure. In the essay on "Proust," Beckettdefines "involuntary memory" as a faculty the novelist needs to evoke animage of the past and of the unity underlying the complexity of humanaction. Proust was the last and foremost novelist to utilize its power; in hisRemembrance of Things Past, the "miracle of evocation," initiated usuallythrough intense sense perceptions which Beckett calls "fetishes," occursabout thirteen times, beginning with the famous madelaine steeped in tea.They bring back the narrator's past, revealing its unity with the presentand thereby its essence. In contrast to this, "voluntary memory" is "theuniform memory of intelligence," which can reproduce only "those

cussed by Olga Bernal, in "LeDilemma de la representation," Language et fiction dans leroman de Beckett (Paris, 1969) (German translation in Engelhardt/Mettler, Materialen . . .)The study is partly based on Foucault's discourse analysis provided in his Les Mots et leschoses, but it lacks a sociological dimension.16. Op. cit., p. 97f.17. Ibid.. p. 96.


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impressionsof the pastthat wereconsciouslyandintelligentlyormed."Itsimages are "arbitrary" nd "remote fromreality,"and its actionscan becomparedto the turningof pages in a photographalbum:"the materialthat it furnishescontainsnothingof thepast,merelya blurredanduniformprojectiononce removedof ouranxietyandopportunism thatis to say,nothing."'8The novelistwho is unableto drawon the powerof involun-tary memory- and most modernwritersafter Proust seem to be in thispredicament cannotovercomethe gap betweenpresentandpast, con-sciousnessand the worldin a totalizingpicture.In searchof a moreprecisedefinitionof voluntarymemory,Benjamindraws on Freud and his Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1921), where hecontrastsmemorywith consciousness:"Becomingconsciousand leavingbehind a memory trace are processes incompatiblewith one another."Reformulated n Proustian erms this meansthat"onlywhathas not beenexperienced explicitly and consciously,what has not happenedto thesubject as an experience(Erlebnis),can become a componentof involun-tarymemory."'9Freudhad statedthatconsciousness or voluntarymem-ory) does not retain any permanentmemorytraces at all; its functionconsists, rather,in the "protectionagainststimuli,"andagainst he exces-sive energies at work in the externalworld whichenter consciousness nthe form of "shocks." "The more readilyconsciousnessregisterstheseshocks, the less likelyare they to have a traumatic ffect."20 WhatFreuddescribeshereseems similar o the mechanism f repressionhroughwhichwe shift unpleasantexperiencesand problemsinto the subconscious oavoid beingtroubledby them.But whereas he mechanism f repressionsone of storingaway without a release, the functionof consciousnessorvoluntarymemoryas describedhere is to preventthe externalstimuliandshocks from becoming a traumaticErfahrung,from leaving behind amemory trace, by turningthem into a short-lived,conscious Erlebnis.(Benjaminmakesuse here of the two differentmeanings, n German,ofthe word"experience," orwhichtheEnglish anguagehas noequivalents.Erfahrungrepresentsa wholenessandcontinuity,a unifiedexperienceofreality, which carrieswith it an increasein knowledgeand wisdom inthis sense, older people are supposedto have "experience." n contrast,Erlebnisis an atomisedand isolatedexperience,reality ivedin disparateand fragmentedmomentswhich do not formanycoherenceand continu-ity.) It needspointingout, of course,thatalthoughourmemory odaymaynot achieve the completenessof earliergenerations,it is impossibleforanyone to live withoutany memorytracesat all, withoutsome notion ofcontinuityand tradition,as a pointof referenceand a parameteror ourindividualand national identity.The dichotomybetween consciousness

18. Ibid., p. 32f.19. Ibid., p. 162f.20. Ibid., p. 163.


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and memory is, in everyday psychological reality, not as strict as Benja-min's theoretical opposition in the aesthetic sphere makes it appear to be.Without a knowledge of Freud, and a few years before Benjamin,Beckett arrived at surprisingly similar insights into the function of con-sciousness and "voluntary memory," which he equates with "habit":"Habit is a comprise affected between the individual and his environ-ment."21 It is also an "agent of security," and "when it ceases to performthat second function, when it is opposed by a phenomenon that it cannotreduce to the condition of a comfortable and familiar concept, when, in aword, it betrays its trust as a screen to spare its victim the spectacle ofreality, it disappears, and the victim, now an ex-victim, for a moment free,

is exposed to that reality,"22- or, we may add, its shocks and threats.Related to habit is curiosity, "a non-conditioned reflex. . . . a reactionbefore a danger stimulus," it is the "safeguard, not the death, of thecat,"23 a mental readiness and attention which includes the occurrence ofthe unexpected into its horizon. The curiosity of the cat is the attitudecalled for by the modern artist; voluntary memory with heightened aware-ness is the recipe for the modern artist who wants to survive - as it is forpeople in everyday life, separated from the communal ties that providedorder and tradition.This is the point at which Beckett parts with Benjamin, as well as mostmodernist writers. Although he recognizes the protective function of con-sciousness and voluntary memory, he regards the loss of involuntarymemory and the concurrant atrophy of experience, which has rendered thestory (and the novel) a useless instrument of communication, as the sign ofa fundamental inability of the modern artist to communicate, as the virtualend of communication. Instead of utilizing the creative potential of schockexperience in the fashion of other modernist writers, Beckett pursues thedepressing task of expressing the meaninglessness of discourse, and the

catastrophic impact of mass-society and war on consciousness and mem-ory. Not seeking refuge in either avant-garde experiments or in politicalutopias, he dedicates himself to the expression of the failure of the modernartist to perform his traditional function: that of giving meaning and unityto the world through his discourse. In view of the catastrophes that heexperienced, and the greater potential ones facing humankind today, hedenies any positive value to human history and moves towards a positionof complete silence. But to reach that position, he is compelled to write, toexpress his traumatic experience of shock, to use the words which containthe very angst of which he is a victim. In this sense his work is trulyabsurd.In sharp contrast to Beckett, Benjamin discovered in the loss of auraand the disappearance of traditional artistic forms (such as the story) the

21. Proust (London, 1965), p. 18.22. Ibid., p. 21.23. Ibid., p. 30.


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potential for new, revolutionary means of communication which can helpto liberate the audience from authority and tradition and instill a politicalawareness, thereby laying the ground for a democratic and collectiveartistic production and consumption of the type envisaged by the Russianfilm-makers of the 1920s and by Brecht, whose theory and practice of epictheatre and whose notion of dialectic intervention (Eingreifen) through artbecame a model for Benjamin's aesthetic ideas. For Benjamin the task ofthe modern artist is to develop a trained consciousness, always ready toparry the continuous barrage of threatening sense stimuli, or "shocks,"and to utilize their critical potential. The first writer for whom "theexperience of shock has become the norm" was Baudelaire, whose poetrydisplays "a large measure of consciousness" and reveals "a plan at work inthe composition"24 not unlike, one may add, Poe's stories of "ratiocina-tion." Benjamin regards Baudelaire as the first modern artist and showshow the shock-experience of the crowd and the amorphous masses in theindustrial cities has become constitutive for his work. In the twentiethcentury, movements such as futurism, dadaism and surrealism based theiraesthetic manifestos and artistic practices on the experience of shock,intensified by the reality of war, industrialism and imperialism. Formally,this new orientation manifested itself in the destruction of traditionalsyntax and a disregard for the rules of logic and empirical observation -which is not quite what Benjamin had in mind when he talked about themost revolutionary kind of modern art, the film, whose arrivalhe explainsin the following way: "Technology subjected the human senses to a train-ing of a new kind. There came the day when a new and urgent need forstimuli was met by the film. In film, perception in the form of shocks wasestablished as a formal principle. That which detemines the rhythm of aconveyor belt is the basis of rhythm in film."25 Jump-cut, close-up, slowmotion and other technical innovations were attempts to exploit the expe-rience of shock, by separating certain aspects and details out of the streamof events and alienating their impression, thereby making them availableto conscious, critical analysis, similar to Brecht's technique of "epic the-atre."

Whereas Beckett saw modern technology solely as a destructive force,Benjamin believed in its aesthetically productive and politically liberatingpotential. However, Benjamin's technological and aesthetic optimism,which he inherited from the 1930s, is no longer justified today. Thehistorical development has shown that it is not technological progress andconcomitant aesthetic/cultural revolutions per se that lead to politicalliberation. The subjection of the modern mass media to the forces of thecapitalistic market, which requires the continual production of commodi-ties and assimilates even the most radical theoretical and artistic practices,

24. Op.cit.,p. 164.25. Ibid.,p. 177.


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170 Jan Bruck

clearly limits the politicalinfluenceof the modernwriteror artist.Benja-min's theoreticalposition is in fact an ambiguousone: it forces him toascribe aesthetic- andpolitical liberation o a technologicalprogressresultingfromthe same economicandsocial forceswhichat the sametimeprevent that very liberation.This dilemmaled Adorno, who insistentlycriticisedBenjamin'sandBrecht'snaiveoptimism, o defend Beckettandthe modernistwritersagainstthe attacksfrom the Left and to espouseanaesthetic practicewhich,ratherthanattempting o intervene n the polit-icalprocess,assumesa positionof totalnegationandwithdrawal, lwaysofcourse in dangerof being destroyedthrough t. Beckett himself definedthis attitudein his essayon "Proust":"The artist s active,butnegatively,shrinking romthe nullityof extracircumferentialhenomena,drawn ntothe core of the eddy." For Beckett, any attemptto break out of thecommunicationaldilemmais futile andart remains hereforenothingbut"the apotheosisof solitude."26Adorno's point needs to be takenseriously,althoughhe does fall intothe opposite extremeby placingBeckett and KafkaaboveBrechtand the"committed"writers in the measure of their political import, and bydenyingthe relevanceof directpolitical ntervention o the artist.In viewof this it is necessaryto overcomethe simplistic and elitist- opposi-tion between "modernism"and "realism,"avant-garde ndpoliticalart,and to see the relationshipbetweenthemasa dialecticalone. Despitetheirobvious differences,mostmodernistand realist iteratureand art shareanantagonistic,negativerelationshipo theexistingsocialandpoliticalorder,and both drawtheirstrengthand criticalpotentialfrom theirrelationshipto each other.27Explicitlypoliticalauthorsare notnecessarilymore"com-mitted" than absurdistwriters such as Kafka or Beckett, whose greaterpoliticalscepticismhas somejustificationn a world acedwiththe threatofdestructionthroughyet another- atomic war.And despitethe need fordirect politicalaction and intervention, t would be naive not to see theconstant danger of failure of the kind which Beckett'swork expresses.What is to be avoided s a self-indulgent essimismwhich, nthefaceof thepossiblecatastrophe,resigns tself to political nactivity. do notthink hatBeckett'sworkis of thiskind;I regard t ratheras a politicalact,a warningof a dangerof which we have to be aware.The dilemmain which both Beckett andBenjamin ind themselves nrelationto politicalrealityandthesimilarities s wellas differencesntheir

26. Op. cit., p. 164.27. It is time that aesthetictheorymoved out of the enclosuresof the modernism-realismdebate, which has reifiedworksof art intofixedobjectsandaestheticpositions ntopoliticaldogmas, disregardinghe factthat artisticproduction, s well as theoretical ctivity,do notexist in their own right,but as partof a dynamicprocessof communicationakingplacebetweentextsand their audiencesanddependenton specifichistorical ituations. t is, afterall, not only the workof artas such,but also our interpretationnd the usewe make of itwhich is politicallyreactionary r progressive.


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Beckett, Benjamin and the Modern Crisis in Communication 171

theoreticalposition are revealedin their notion of history.For Beckett,history is primarilya process of destruction:"There is no escape fromyesterdaybecauseyesterdayhas deformedus, or has been deformedbyus.Deformation has takenplace. Yesterday s not a milestonethat has beenpassed, but a daystoneon the beatentrackof the years,andirredeemablypartof us, withinus, heavyanddangerous.We are not merelymorewearybecause of yesterday,we are other, no longerwhat we were before thecalamity of yesterday."28The destructiveexperienceof war lurks alsobehind Benjamin'swork:historyoverwhelmsus in the formof catastro-phes and confrontsus in ever newmomentsof "emergency";he pasthasto be struggled againstand coped with all the time, and cannot be off-loaded with a comfortableknowledgeof the future.29Both BeckettandBenjaminrelinquish he traditional onceptsof history: he idealisticbeliefin a gradualdevelopmenttowardsevergreaterperfection,the positivisticview of an evolution accordingto natural laws, and the dogma of anecessarymovementtowardsan idealgoal.Beinginthe positionof Tanta-lus (Beckett), we live, accordingto Benjamin, in a constant "state ofemergency,"no longercertainof our future.It is not onlythe destructiveexperienceof war, but also the awarenessof the widersocialandpoliticalcrisis of mass-societywhich is responsiblefor the pessimisticaspectsofBeckett's and Benjamin'swork. Both believe that bourgeoissociety isfaced with a fundamentalcrisis and is nearingits end. But whereasinBeckett's work the breakdownof societyand the crisis n communicationand aestheticrepresentationake the formof a totalnegation, describingits catastrophiceffects without any indication of positive alternatives,Benjamin, from the vantagepoint of his materialistphilosophy,regardsthe crisisas a necessarystagein the historicaldevelopment romcapitalistto proletariansociety, fromliterateto mass-media ulture.He recognizesthe progressive potential of the mass-mediafor the liberation of theindividualfromauthorityand traditionandfor the developmentof demo-cratic formsof communication,no longerbaseduponauraticexperiencesbut on criticalargumentandpoliticalconsciousness.Thisoptimistic iewis,as we know bettertoday,overshadowedby a fundamental ilemmawithinthe political process:moderntechnologyandthe mass-media annotfunc-tion in a democraticway withoutpoliticalliberation,andpolitical ibera-tion is impossiblewithout the help of the new media.Both requireeachother, and untilthe mediahave beenchanged rom aninstrument f socialcontrol into a forum of collective decision-making,Beckett's vision ofcrisisand destructionpresentsa seriouswarning: hatthe individual ouldbe engulfed and communitiesdestroyedby the oppressiveand contradic-tory forces of mass-society.

28. Ibid., p. 13.29. See in particularhe "Theseson the Philosophyof History."

Beckett, Benjamin and Modern Crisis in Communication

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