Dead in his own lifetime

“when someone is dead, you can see it from two hundred yards away,” says Goya in a play we wrote, “his silhouette goes cold.”’

What Berger makes Goya say in his play is connected also to another of Berger’s favourite notions, this time from Walter Benjamin, that storytellers are “death’s secretaries”. What he means by this, I think, is that with stories their end is in their beginning. Each event bears the silhouette the End. This is also what Goya sees around the dead. Their life is ‘closed’. It has become the story leading up to their death. To use Benjamin’s example, the man who dies at 35 becomes, through death’s fiat, the man who was always going to die at 35. Death seems to give a kind of ‘verdict’ on the life. It takes a life but releases its meaning. I remember, when Debord commited suicide, a friend rang me distraught. It was as if this one act had thrown new shadows over the man's work.

But Benjamin acknowledges that this very idea of death, and of storytelling, belongs to pre-modern times. We no longer think of death as something that exchanges a life for its meaning. We no longer accept the sense of destiny or ‘telos’ implicit in the storyteller’s art. Storytelling, where events are summoned and defined by an End they do not know, denies the openness of lived experience; it distorts the actuality of time as ‘just one thing happening after another’. The veil of finality that Death lends to life is the false consciousness of time.

So although Benjamin is attracted to the World of the storyteller, just as he is attracted to archaic and outmoded things of all kinds, his literary production takes its cue instead from the modern world of street signs, snapshots, the ‘insistent, jerky nearness’ of the advertisement.

Nonetheless, the bond between death and significance is preserved and held to be necessary. Because what fascinates Benjamin is historical transience. It is not so much that death releases a thing’s eventual meaning. The death of historical phenomenon – whether it be something like the Paris arcades or, more generally, a whole culturally specific form of life – empties them of their ‘illusio’, our ready investment in them, their unshakeable immediacy, their ‘blinding obviousness’. Drained of this immediate significance they are left behind as so many enigmas and questions, or perhaps just objects of condescension and disbelief. But this draining away of (obvious) meaning is paradoxically the condition required by critical thinking to retrieve meaning on another level. It creates the distance in which interpretation can thrive. In order to penetrate its sense the thinker must first encounter the thing as opaque, stained with nonsense.

But there is a further twist. Benjamin’s point is that in staring into the enigmatic objects and behaviours of the past, especially the earliest forms of the Modern, the present too is made strange, illuminated from a point outside it - marked with death. Through the peculiar nature of his historical studies, Benjamin is able to outflank the present and see it as already historical. As Adorno says of WB:

He is compelled.. to scrutinise living things so that they present themselves as being ancient, ‘ur-historical’ and abruptly release their significance.. He viewed the modern world as archaic.

This ‘outflanking’ puts WB in a peculiar position. To some extent, it involves an over-familiarity with Death. It is this which WB finds also in Kafka, as in:

Anyone who cannot come to terms with his life while he is alive needs one hand to ward off a little his despair over his fate—he has little success in this—but with his other hand he can note down what he sees among the ruins, for he sees different (and more) things than do the others: after all, he is dead in his own lifetime and the real survivor.’

Benjamin himself, I think, said that what enabled him to see the present as already historical was a new phase of capitalism in which things were no sooner supercharged with value than they were consigned to obsolescence and oblivion, the presently ‘archaic’ had only last week been the latest thing. The ceaseless (and monotonous) production of novelty and fashion was infact orchestrated by Death. But what I also think allows Benjamin to be a ‘survivor’ in the very time he lives in, to see that time as already past, is something else. It is a sense of approaching historical catastrophe (What he himself called "An inner intimation of coming events"). It is this sense – sometimes quite obscure, sometimes faced full on – which to me links the world of WB with those of Kafka and Bruno Schulz.