Walter Benjamin is High on Marxism

The New Yorker's appraisal of Walter Benjamin's work is strangely lifeless -- I've recently been won over by their war coverage, their coverage of Bush, their giving Seymour Hersh free rein, and their writing -- I've found almost everything in the magazine (except the fiction) eminently readable. I've been re-seduced if there is such a thing -- by The New Yorker . And then, suddenly there is an article like Adam Kirsch's that reminds me of the dangers of The New Yorker's smooth moves. Sometimes its middlebrow appreciations have the effect of a mental laxative. Kirsch's summary of Walter Benjamin's work is correct, it's accurate. It's inoffensive, -- BUT he ascribes all of Benjamin's problems to his misfired Marxism or materialism.

Without that dimension to his work, my dear Adam Kirsch, whoever you are, Benjamin would be nothing more than another discontented intellectual and aesthete, like Paul Valéry, or a compromised liberal thinker of modernity like John Dewey. Benjamin's radical anti-idealism tried to force the bourgeoisie to be born in to the twentieth century -- in order to face a violent and uncertain present.

You'll see that we are still dreamining in Benjamin's phantasmagoria of a nineteenth century weightlessness -- in the million dollar Tuscan village homes that dot the Newport Coast and the stainless steel kitchens of people who don't cook -- we see that nineteenth century bourgeois suppression and aestheticization of labor (yes, millionaires bringing home the olive harvest is a sight to relish, as are harried New Yorkers sweating it out over their Viking stoves). Oh we dream the commodity dream even harder when the yawning divide between those who work and those whose lives are fully financialized grows ever greater.