1. Packing my library<\/i><\/p>\n
Twelve or fifteen standardized brown boxes of books, covered in dollar store tarps and dust from lizard corpses and asbestos toxins \u2014 I\u2019m lining them all up, three by four, three by five. Each box is stamped identically with bar codes, and green icons certify that they are all made from recycled paper, but nothing says where the recycled paper came from, so you wonder, does it come from dead books? Obsolete books? All those textbooks that your students don\u2019t really read \u2014 do their carcasses get recycled into your moving boxes?<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I\u2019m leaving all the boxes in a dirty garage with bad air in Whittier, California, where my precarious postdoc contract is coming to an end. And a week later the movers will come for them, but I won\u2019t watch as they stack them up in a trailer. The books will traverse the desert flats and the desert mountains, sit indifferently\u00a0through a long series of desolate towns, and cross the Mississippi driven by some unknown driver. Each day the books will get slightly more crushed by the furniture stacked on top of them. One moving company estimates that my family\u2019s belongings collectively weigh about 8,400 pounds. I start to fantasize that the moving trailer will fall in the sea or off a cliff, and so free us from the immense weight of our household goods. But would we do anything but buy them again? What are we if not agents of our metastasized objects and objectified needs?<\/p>\n
Even the books, for those of us working in bookish fields, become fetish objects whose inhuman spirits impel us to adopt false needs as our own \u2014 such as the need for academic work in a dehumanized world, where labor equals docility, pliability, and migration. In a rigid system whose parts don\u2019t fit together, gnashing like mismatched gears, the individual is always asked to grease the gears with their flesh or to crush the self down into some malformed space misnamed \u201copportunity.\u201d That\u2019s why my books are en route to Cleveland, where my partner is starting a postdoc, and it\u2019s also why I won\u2019t be staying in Cleveland, because I\u2019m going a few weeks later to another teaching job 8,200 miles farther away. Separation has become the condition of our continued academic labor, and we have to believe that this separation is a condition of future togetherness, a step towards solving the misnamed \u201ctwo body problem.\u201d But even my books won\u2019t be coming on the transatlantic flight. I\u2019ll miss them, too.<\/p>\n
2. Ideologizing your library<\/i><\/p>\n
In Walter Benjamin\u2019s tragicomic essay \u201cUnpacking my Library,\u201d he portrayed his book collection as a mournful space of freedom. His books, he said, got more free in his private hands than they could in a public library, since in his hands each book summoned up a specific history and memory: the memory of its acquisition, the history of its writing. The book collector, for Benjamin, was quintessentially someone who knew how to take books beyond their mere use-value. For a collector, the books were not necessarily for reading, and certainly not for reselling at a profit. Instead, they constituted a world that was curiously authentic and \u201cintimate,\u201d a world that the collector could \u201cdisappear inside.\u201d In this dreamy world, \u201che\u201d \u2014 always he \u2014 could come to \u201clive in\u201d objects.<\/p>\n
It is perhaps not coincidental that this essay dates from 1931, the year after Benjamin\u2019s brutal divorce and his parents\u2019 death. What would be more logical than retreating into a fetishized object world after the collapse of one\u2019s human relationships? For Benjamin, and probably for everybody who hauls their books around, unpacking a library is an ideological compensation. The question is: a compensation for what?<\/p>\n
3. The class character of Walter Benjamin<\/i><\/p>\n
When Benjamin announced that his library had a non-instrumental character, this was only a half truth. In fact, Benjamin was economically dependent on his library. It constituted one of his only economic assets: he had to sell part of it to pay his divorce settlement. Later, he saved much of it from the Nazis in Germany only to see it seized by the Gestapo in Paris. Hannah Arendt suggests that the seizure of Benjamin\u2019s library was among the reasons for his famous suicide on the Spanish border: \u201cHow was he to live without a library, how could he earn a living without the extensive collection of quotations and excerpts among his manuscripts?\u201d (Illuminations<\/i> 17). No doubt Benjamin felt <\/i>magical while unpacking his library, as he proclaimed. But the books were also a prime tool of his trade \u2014 writing \u2014 and he couldn\u2019t not need them. Far from escaping the forces of instrumentalism, Benjamin depended on his books\u2019 use value as much as on their exchange value.<\/p>\n
A little materialism is in order, even in the face of someone who likened a certain historical materialism to a \u201cTurkish puppet.\u201d The fact is that Benjamin grew up a rich kid, culturally encouraged to disregard material concerns. Arendt calls him \u201ctypical of an entire generation of German-Jewish intellectuals\u201d: the progeny of \u201csuccessful businessmen who did not think too highly of their own achievements and whose dream it was that their sons were destined for higher things\u201d (26). Thus Benjamin\u2019s dad subsidized him into his thirties; he lived at home because he would not get a job; and he mooched his wife\u2019s journalistic income. Arendt, who also grew up in a wealthy German Jewish household, excuses Benjamin\u2019s behavior by alluding to his class habitus: \u201cIt is reasonable to assume that it is just as hard for rich people grown poor to believe in their poverty as it is for poor people turned rich to believe in their wealth\u201d (25-26). Everyone is a prisoner of their habitus, it\u2019s true. But the important point about Benjamin is less the rich kid origins per se than the life trajectory that it facilitated. A general trajectory of precarious downward mobility was Benjamin\u2019s lot in life, culminating ultimately\u00a0in his suicide.<\/p>\n
4. The very center of a misfortune<\/i><\/p>\n
Whether or not Benjamin was the first precarious intellectual to commit suicide, it is certain he was not the last. The newspapers are full of them, like the unknown adjunct teacher whose body was \u201cfound at the bottom of a cliff in the Blue Mountains\u201d last year in Australia, or the American adjunct at Temple University who recently declared: \u201cSuicide is my retirement plan.\u201d Benjamin precociously sabotaged his possible academic career by criticizing the wrong people, and never got paid much for his own journalism. As Arendt put it: \u201cLike Proust, he was wholly incapable of changing \u2018his life\u2019s conditions even when they were about to crush him.\u2019\u201d And she added: \u201cWith a precision suggesting a sleepwalker his clumsiness invariably guided him to the very center of a misfortune\u201d (7). Benjamin was destined for an immense solitude. \u201cNo one was more isolated than Benjamin, so utterly alone\u201d (9).<\/p>\n
Precarious intellectual work is often misunderstood as the exception to a rule, and never more than in our fantasies. Maybe I can still get a tenured job. Maybe I can cross the border.<\/i> Maybe I can escape my lot<\/i>. But to twist an Arendtian phrase, precarious life is always<\/i> the very center of a misfortune. And centers (like margins) are places of collective experience; thus Benjamin\u2019s misfortunes are less singular than they appear. He was far from the only German Jew to commit suicide: someone in my family did the same thing when the Gestapo arrived at her door. And I doubt that Benjamin\u2019s loneliness was really so much greater than that of the melancholy old adjunct who worked last year at the desk next to mine, barely speaking to anyone, even less being spoken to, and dousing himself repeatedly with cigarette smoke. I would not say my colleague was more<\/i> isolated than Benjamin \u2014 only that he was not less.<\/p>\n
Still, I understand why Arendt describes Benjamin\u2019s experience with superlatives. Strategic quintessentialism, if that\u2019s the word for it, becomes a useful strategy for representing precarious experiences that usually aren\u2019t allowed to matter. In a world indifferent to loneliness, for example, one has to say something hyperbolic, like \u201cno one is more isolated than X,\u201d to make any impression. Benjamin himself suggested enigmatically in 1931 that \u201csolitude is a privilege of the rich, or, at least, of economically secure beings.\u201d<\/p>\n
What\u2019s superlative about Benjamin is just that he illuminates the center of precarious misfortune. And if we want to leave our misfortune, before we can leave it practically, we must first leave it ideologically.<\/p>\n
5. Walter Benjamin is the problem, not the solution<\/i><\/p>\n
Somehow Walter Benjamin has acquired a special place in the intellectual landscape. The fetishists love him, consciously or unconsciously; as with Nietzsche, the marriage of cryptic writing and ambiguous politics lends itself to all sorts of reappropriations. Benjamin\u2019s prose is fungible today because it is so evocative. Its imagistic, essentializing, dialogical, magical character makes it exceptionally functional as an accent in high-end prose spaces. If you need an argument from magical authority, Benjamin\u2019s prose is pre-organized into deployable aphorisms. If you want to edge towards \u201cradical\u201d (perhaps post-Marxist) politics without being dirtied by political realities, the imaginary angel of history always loves to hover over your shoulder.<\/p>\n