Walter Benjamin "Notes from a Beach North of K______"
A New Translation of the First 2 Parts of a Lost Text in 3 Parts
UNTITLED Part 1
For some months now I have had opportunity to be taken as a guest in a home that permits me quite ready access to the shore line North of the Pr______ resort town of Kr_____. With that, in my walks along the sandy shore, I have gained the opportunity to follow out my ready meditations on contemporary topics such as I see fit to share now.
We can very likely expect that the current age of mechanical reproduction of art will accelerate (note Benjamin’s use of steigern here reflects both increase in speed and elaboration or “improvement” but only of a certain kind). If we can anticipate a coming age of ubiquitous mass imaging, we can expect that the very visuality of the world will soon have been reduced to its mature state (reifer zustand): a fragmentary token or commodified footnote to an otherwise evacuated entity what we might call an ideo-entity (selbstgebaustand), a word all to often shortened to mere identity (selbstandlichkeit).
If this seems cryptic, a simple thought experiment should suffice to clarify the significance. The background of a close up photograph, as many have remarked (a reference here to the film director and theorist Jean Mitry) produces another space separate from that which it was at the time of the photograph. This process is something entirely other than representative landscape art—either photographic or in the work of painting. Ultimately, social theory must encompass the possibility that technology shall progress further along the direction that chases art’s cult value into its last refuge: the human countenance (Benjamin here repeats a central but usually ignored thesis from his seminal statement on technological art, Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit). Art’s next age will come when people will no longer pay to consume the close-up images of the faces only of specific glorified others (or not only that). Surely, we must anticipate an age when machines more advanced than those that we know now might become so refined—perhaps with the use of this or that magnetic arrangement for storing the motion of light yet to be perfected but very likely already in development by state intelligence authorities—as to allow an individual of ordinary aesthetic competence the ability to, as it were, “shoot themselves” (sich erschießen).
In this coming further iteration of the age mechanical reproduction, the Age of Photographic Ideo-identity (photographische selbstgebaustand), there are a number of new concerns that face aesthetics and politics.
Art has always had an intimate connection with “talking shit” (prahlerei). We may ask, however, pose the following question: Will these new practices of ideo-entity (selbstgebaustand) wholly transform the cult value of art into an endless ritual of Ideo-ceremony (Die Zeremonie Von Die Selbst-anbetung). Meanwhile that self-that-has-been-built (gebautselbst) shall be taken up in continuous evaluation on some sort of exchanges, and, if not sold, for surely money is itself never sold, then surely at least subjected to evaluation on a platform (Das Podium) made for exchange, rendered into a kind of social media (Die Sozialwährung).
Now, while this may be more of a concern to the psychologist than to the aesthetician himself, because for the artist who has labored to transmogrify reality into image through painting or photography, another concern arises for the value of visual reality in itself. That is, the disastrous effects on human persnoality aside, what will happen to the value of reality?
Will not the background of a close-up photograph become merely the adornment on a paper monetary note? Differentiated reality in all of its locationality (Standortbestimmung), we can expect, will become a mere enhancement to the he individual’s countenance, that of the one who has photographically ideo-identified (der, der hat selbstgebaut).
Which brings me to why I began this as a “Note from the Beach North of Kr_____” and not as my complete essay on the social media of ideo-entity as the future of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. (Die Sozialwährung Von Sebstgebaustand als Zukunft für Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarke. Note that while it is often conjectured that Benjamin intended to write such an essay in its entirety, no such essay has been discovered in his papers although it is conjectured that perhaps in “correcting” Benjamin’s drafts, the New School for Social Research led my social marxist Theodor Adorno may have “over-corrected” Benjamin’s hypotheses in this regard, so to speak.)
How I occupy myself on the shores North of K____ and how these self-constructors of the future may operate in such a “picturesque” place as I have gained to my experience here is what I must explain most of all.
Please understand, I have come into the possession of a great many charming stones here. It has become what I never had before, a hobby. And on this I shall say a bit more. But first let me say that it was just the other day, in the afternoon as the wind swept northwards along the spit as I walked along the beach head downwards scanning the sand for the finest and most unique and singular forms, alighting to the ground here and there to preserve for myself for later what I had found, my pockets all full of stones that I had a vision: a ghost from the future. I saw a woman walking alone near and behind me, or, I imagined I saw her. In a long coat. Blonde hair. Quite beautiful. She was engaged in exactly what I have just described to you. In her hand, she held the ideo-entity machine. She repeatedly pointed it at herself, turning this way and that. I knew that in each shot she tore away a bit of the world, that beautiful scenery around us into these ideo-graphs made to trade in that future world of self-ceremony in which she was so preoccupied.
She took no notice of me and my rocks and as I trudged further north along the shore, she faded away back into the future from which she had come. But this brief vision led to some further reflections for me on just what it was that I am doing here with my rocks. If only I had the technology available to adequately document my findings. Such diversity of singularities are encompassed in these rocks here!
Large speckled marblized, red and purple granites. Often they are cut by a streak of quartz. This “zip” so to speak across the canvas of the rock is something that always attracts my eye. Those hybrid pieces cut from the border between two different mineral shelfs make the most unique to observe. Plus, anything with transparency and a certain brilliance. Later, in the sorting process once the rocks are no longer wet with sea water, the luster fades but in proper light it reamains clear which individuals must been seen in their true beauty and which are undeserving of being saved by the collector.
After my vision of the woman from the future with her selfish camera, I felt like comparing the individuality of stones and the individualities of men and women. Surely every face is unique. But could it be that the stones here on the beach north of K___ are more unique than human faces? Of course, only certain of the stones are truly unique. Only one out of a thousand, no more, really count as unique. And so, it may be for human individuals as well—either in appearance or in personality (Das Benehmen).
Will it not be just like the thinker collecting stones on this beach, I thought, when the messiah arrives in the technological future of ideo-ceremony. Like stones on the beach when the sea recedes at low tide, humanity shall be raised up to his eyes and he shall only descend to his knee to collect those which must be seen again, those which are split by that quartz zip or bear the kind of double character or formal distinctiveness that makes a single stone more captivating than several abstract works of art.
Perhaps it will be for the messiah with souls as often happens to the thinker collecting rocks, that he descends to one knee and observes that the reverse side of the stone which he has taken up makes that stone not worthy. And it is then cast out into the sea. Or that, when picking up one, another soul just as beautiful or more beautiful is saved from nearby.
Then I had some more mysterious imaginings of the future when the Ideo-entity machine is pointed at children and they come to their parents to look through the machine for the view of themselves only to find that they are no longer in the view which they sought. It recalls the famous paintings of Velasquez or Holbein (Benjamin is here referring to “Las Meninas” (1656) and Jean de Dinteville and Georges de Selve ie “The Ambassadors” (1533). The self disappears just as it accedes to the privilege is seeks: Admiring itself. In seeking to encompass death, the eye sets like the sun over the horizon. The point of view is never contained in itself. And I fear “self-enframing” (selbstgestell) is what those who will people the future’s ideo-ceremonies shall all seek in vain. And yet, the messiah will have to see the truth in the new great technological cult. And the beauty he will see, if it is beauty he is seeking, he will become the beholder of the beauty. Although so many of those engaging in the Ideo-ceremonies have come to behold themselves like never before, in a literalization of the very idea that to know beauty is to hold it, the one who encompasses ultimately the true value shall surely bring to bear a different unit of measure than those which have held thus far in the social media.
There are some of the stones here hat exhibit swirls like those that astronomers postulate exist out there in the cosmos. In one, I see something that I imagine may be a so-called “Black Hole.” In the black hole, everything is taken up and repeated and preserved a thousand times. The asteroid collision that rended the moon from the earth and thereby created the cycles of tides necessary for life may not happen in every version of the universe. Perhaps it is this that God is trying to decide. And in this, we can only imagine that as the universe recurs and recurs again to infinity that when the savior chooses those souls among the rest, he may not be—as the writer walking along the deserted windy beach—selecting individuals for their unique beauty, but simply forgiving certain of them for the sin that is universal among all for some reason that he sees they may suit his purposes in what is to come, purposes and reasons that shall forever remain opaque to us, whether grateful or forgotten.
UNTITLED Part 2
Which brings me to a problem which could be foreseeable in societies like America. What we know is that in order to achieve a kind of “Binding Energy” (bindungskraft), in societies composed through the integration of peoples of diverse origins—and all modern nations are such societies, with America being just the most wide in the diversity of places of origin from which it draws its citizens—there is a quite mandatory although often quite implicit decrease in apparent intelligence desired among its members. We have moved from societies where intelligence and objective excellence of persons was desirable to societies where it is less desirable or even viewed with intense suspicion or hatred.
That is to say, societies governed by homogeneous tradition in all the forms that we know it—primitive tribes, an ( client empires, more recent feudal formations, etc. all preserved a certain kind of rigor. Exceptional ability in traditional societies was the goal: To be exceptionally great at embodying the tradition. In modern nations, most extremely America, where traditions need to be minimized, hidden, or even erased in order to facilitate the fusion of diverse cultures into the so-called “Melting Pot” of a newly imagined community (illusorische Gemeinschaft ), it is inevitable that a certain kind of “Playing Dumb” becomes the norm. Standards are inevitably lowered as the yardstick for personal excellence becomes lost. Conservative forces may utter their cant daily that standards are being diluted among the younger generation, but far from a new matter of concern: This is the epistemological core of modern existence since the decline of feudal regimes and monastic power in Europe. And all this is not to say that this old yardstick of feudal or ancient times was valid in itself. Simply, it is to say that there was—both among common people and those above them—an idea of the great person as a higher order personification of all that was excellent in the people of the society.
Of course, Marx’s notion that feudalism was succeeded by modernity qua capitalism was a child’s fairy tale. We know much better now that feudalism was the dark shadow of the Islamic civilization and that modernity is Islam’s echo. It serves to mention therefore that it seems the Arabic world had vast networks of patronage—that, in a sense, this was the heart of the greatness of the Islamic “golden age” perhaps having been written in to the great revolutionary empire by its founder himself as Zakat mandatory tithe—that engendered independent scholarship as a living force independent of the vast array of cultural traditions that were syncretically pulled under the banner of Islam’s monotheism.
As Europe’s Barbarism overran the crusades and crushed its way through the Americas and the Orient churning its mercantilist apocalypse, only with the nightmare of the American Civil War and the other wars of unification in France, Italy, Germany, and Russia was the pulverized biological and cultural human reality of early modernity frozen up again like cold meat gelatins into what now parade themselves like they were the very forms found in nature themselves. But one would no more put meat gelatins in the zoo, than one would find nations in nature.
Only after unification is the nation paraded about like the embodiment of greatness instead of its demise. European feudalism did the same thing with the imagined origins in the greatness of Rome. Again, this was what was so great about Islamic civilization: It had no hypocritical pretenses of carrying on an earlier banner that it had actually destroyed.
But the parapets and cathedrals of feudalism were great in comparison to level modernity. Even skyscrapers in the grand twentieth century cities—while they are much taller and more numerous than European cathedrals—are hardly any less level than the wide planes of Poland: a plane of towers is still a plane. In reaching for the sky, none of those towers that will scrape it can become, itself, exceptional.
And thus modernity strains the natural tendency of inequality of abilities in human beings: competition is not competition for exceptional accomplishments but a flight from offensiveness to the norm of stupidity. Still, certainly no population, almost certainly not an increasingly diverse population can be free of great inequality among its members. But what is the exceptionally intelligent person supposed to do in the modern nation epitomized in America where stupidity has become adopted as a kind of compulsory norm, a litmus test of belonging, that has grown up to replace the obliterated work of tradition—lost most visibly and finally in the cultural genocide exacted by the Northern aggression upon the American South that future historians will surely remember as the final and greatest exemplar of European feudalism?
Personal drive and capacity to enhance one’s own facilities—intellectual, athletic, and so on—cannot be suppressed in all individuals. Even to the point where it may lead to self-harm, a pathological urge towards personal development has been seen to arise. But in America (even more than in other illusorily unified modern nations), the appearance of intelligence is viewed as an aberration, a foreign element (and the most intelligent people are often recently immigrated), a disease, and fundamentally abnormal. But to the recalcitrant intelligence, this barrier is just a challenge to be overcome. It is quite easily overcome. Overcoming the ostracism of intelligence merely requires the creation of a new category. When intelligence and excellence can no longer present themselves as such to the great majority—as kings, emperors, and priests did so vigorously in ancient times or as did chieftains in prior epochs of humanity—a new idea must be invented that will appeal to the masses who are so resistant and often aggressively antagonistic to the exceptionally intelligent.
In America, principally, intelligence found a way to present itself to the mandatory stupidity of society at large by inventing the idea of the “Special.” It seems that in America, Stupidity—which I define simply as the refusal to think or to speak idea that have been thought out—operates more powerfully than a profession of faith. It is an urge to belong that has no content, that only evacuates words and ideas of any content in order to produce symbols of unification and belonging. Now, what the special person does is to mobilize their own intelligence to enhance these very symbols of unification. There are, of course, many ways to do this. Political celebrity: Abraham Lincoln himself was specialness incarnate. And yet, later entertainers in the American factory of dreams, Hollywood, have actively rebuilt an aura of specialness comparable to the psychotic butcher of America, Lincoln.
It is repugnant to feel abnormal. And the normal is so often repugnant to the people who cling to their own normality. Even the extremely intelligent people cannot make their intelligence appear abnormal. But to avoid their own abnormality, intelligence finds ways to avoid disapproval. The primary means is to seize on transitory clues or features which are declared special (trends). By moving rapidly enough from one special trend, or sale, or fad to another rapidly enough to avoid evaluation, intelligence creates the illusion of their own worth and belonging to hide its abnormality from stupidity.
The American Civil War was the product of the great terrible fad of Anti-Slavery and Abolition. Lincoln’s clever flight from his own deserved ostracism became the nations (For Anti-Slavery was never anti-racism, it was to the contrary fully rooted in northern exclusion of southern blacks.) became the North’s faith in his special mission to rewrite the laws of government with a vague caricature of morality. It is not that the founding fathers were any less psychopathic than Lincoln. But the founders were from an age at the twilight of feudal intelligence. Lincoln was the horrible incarnation of a moment when feudal intelligence marshals all of its capacities to cater to the great studipity of the unified nation.
Evidently, specialness is rife with contradiction. Most notably is its apparent normality. When exceptional intelligence disguises itself to the stupid as being “Just like you,” this can not be done without vigorous and vicious emotional and psychological violence. Intelligence is swallowed up and rotted out by this process of deception. All intellectual efforts become directed at this illusion whereby intelligence fuses itself with the stupid. The right to think is preserved but only by devoting all efforts to deception and pandering.
The ultimate horizon of the deception is the illusion that specialness offers to the stupid normality that pervades society: Just this, You too can be special. And with that, the urge not merely to admire, or enjoy, or pursue the special, but the desire to be special becomes normal. Even to have the illusion that one is “Special” becomes “normal.” And yet, in this, at the horizon of irony, to be exceptional in any way is reviled merely for being a killjoy to the special. When someone shows that they are exceptional rather than special, the paparazzi comes along to discover the flaws that shall prove that their abnormality is not great but really, deeply pathological—more sick and pathological even than all the little stupid people so bent on believing that they are special.
The special, of course, does not exist. No one can be special. Specialness is merely the disavowal by stupidity of all the discomfort that comes from being confronted with the abnormal (which of course is everywhere, because norms are themselves rather weak concepts for organizing reality).
Whereas in the early stages, all of the work of intelligence was consumed by convincing the stupid that intelligence was not abnormal (and was therefore not intelligence, a lie) but was merely special, then intelligence becomes utterly absorbed and submerged in the task of convincing the stupid that they, the stupid, are all special, as if this was possible at all, clinging to ways of believing that these categories could ever persist for any length of time, in any way. This is the great transformation of the twentieth century.
The nineteenth century invented the category of the special. The twentieth century is the great clamorous riot that attempts to loot the special from wherever it appears. But, of course as noted above, the special itself was typically crafted only out of trumped-up artefacts and fossils of feudal sovereignty which was itself merely the trumped-up vestiges of Rome and Christ.
Of course, everyone is unique. And perhaps, everyone is deserving of love. But it would be wrong to equate the urge to be special with the desire to be loved. And perhaps this is the great horrible false meaning of being special. It takes a reality which is unique relationship between two people: a lover and the loved, and it makes it seem transcendental. Specialness was the category by which intelligence made itself lovable to the stupid, as it to say, “No, you can’t understand me but, yes, you can love me. To love me is to enjoy not understanding me.” This was the great terrible betrayal of Kant’s conception of enlightenment which declared that it was every citizen’s responsibility to “Know it for oneself.”
Instead, to participate in the rituals of admiration that surround The Special is to fortify the false belief in the universality of taste that falsely unifies the imagined community of the nation. To desire to be special is actually the refusal of the responsibilities of really being in love—which is that one should not asked to be loved without unconditionally offering to care for the lover.
Great love is always original. And there is nothing original in what is special for the special is only the clever reflection of the stupid back to itself.
And in so many cases, the image of love that the supposedly special person offers to the stupid shows itself later to have been simply quietly cruel. The polite refusal of love would have been a great honest kindness because only God can love universally. But God also judges and in true impartiality will separate the true from the merely special when the messiah arrives in the twilight hours of time when nothing any more appears special and all is shown in a light that itself is undeniably the real beauty without which any mere stone—no matter how some idle thinker walking on the Beach North of K____ may have favorited it—of itself is nothing.