Kaufman - Lyric Commodity Critique, Benjamin Adorno Marx, Baudelaire

theories and methodologies

Lyric Commodity Critique, Benjamin

Adorno Marx, Baudelaire Baudelaire

Baudelaire

robert kaufman

RobeRt Kaufman� teaches in the Depart-

ment of Comparative Literature at the

university of California, berkeley. He is

the author of Negative Romanticism: Ador

nian Aesthetics in Keats, Shelley, and Mod

ern Poetry (forthcoming) and is at work

on two related books: Why Poetry Should

Matter—to the Left and Modernism after

Postmodernism? Robert Duncan and the

FuturePresent of American Poetry. His es-

says have appeared in journals including

Critical Inquiry, October, American Poetry

Review, Modernist Cultures, Cultural Cri

tique, New German Critique, and Studies in

Romanticism and in the collections Wal

ter Benjamin and Art (Continuum, 2005),

The Cambridge Companion to Adorno

(Cambridge uP, 2004), and Adorno and

Literature (Continuum, 2006).

So How imPoRtan�t IS moDeRn� LyRiC PoetRy?

Answers will depend on who’s answering—and what they un-derstand by modern, lyric, and poetry. Academic and other cultural institutions will hardly have the only say; the most significant testi-monies often come from poets themselves, who in relation to matters academic and institutional may have feet in more than one camp but who perhaps finally have, in proportion to the intensity and overall achievement of their art, no camp at all. Yet an at least century-long critical tradition, which Marjorie Perloff’s 2006 MLA Presidential Address joins, has salutarily maintained that for all academia’s evi-dent weaknesses—including an often fatal distance from the realities of artistic making and audience engagement—it can still contribute crucially to the life of poetry. In that light, it’s worth reconsidering a body of work that for decades has resonated in the larger poetry world but has also known academic prominence: Frankfurt school—and the wider spectrum of Marxian and Marxian-inflected—critical theory. What if, in ways that have mostly escaped notice, a signal exchange between Frankfurt school critics demonstrates (with les-sons aplenty for poetry, criticism, and theory today) that, far from merely illustrating theoretical and sociohistorical dynamics, the de-velopment of modern lyric animates or generates the theory in the first place, locating itself at the heart of Frankfurt school and related attempts to take history’s measure and to enable reflective judgment and critical agency?

Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno’s impassioned—al-ternately amiable, wary, embittered, again excitedly undertaken—discussions of Benjamin’s 1938–40 writings about the French poet Charles Baudelaire have long been touchstones of aesthetic and so-ciopolitical modernity, though what one was supposed to know from touching these stones has been disputed. But consensus has rightly emerged about the foundationality and profundity of the issues ini-tially broached and about the deep coloring these Baudelaire dis-cussions will impart to virtually everything Benjamin and Adorno

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proceed to write in the time left to them (about two years for Benjamin, three decades for the friend and colleague who survives him). Yet despite their having captured artistic and crit-ical imaginations for decades, the Baudelaire debates’ perhaps most remarkable aspect has remained obscure: in their engagements with Baudelaire, modern lyric, and each other, Benjamin and Adorno move—in ways far ex-ceeding their previous efforts—toward clari-fying central aspects of a still-fraught matter, the relation between commodity and aesthetic (starting with lyric) form.

In autumn 1938, Benjamin presents to Adorno—for publication in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung—“The Paris of the Sec-ond Empire in Baudelaire,” Benjamin’s “first” Baudelaire essay. The essay is in many ways an astonishingly imagined effort to continue—or relocate on the terrain of artistic construc-tion and lyric-aesthetic experience—Marx’s great Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852). Taking as his point of departure the Brumaire’s fond though unsparing critique of the bohème’s “conspiratorial” rebelliousness (over against what Marx deems the genuine revolutionism in movements arising from or integrated with an advanced industrial prole-tariat), Benjamin builds elaborate parallels or discovers the intersecting levels where Baude-laire’s poetry itself becomes the admirably antisocial conspirator whose socioconceptual- imaginative limits are those of present society. Baudelaire’s fantastic creativity, intelligence, intuition, and bitter subversiveness, gathered into and animating his unique artistic talent, yield a lyric poetry unprecedentedly modern in its aim homeopathically to inhabit—and thereby make imagistically available—the very engine and frame of the modern limit- phenomenon at issue, exchange value. More precisely, Baudelaire burrows into, indeed captures and presents, exchange value’s socio-economic manifestation-identity in and as mechanical reproduction, in and as commod-ity form.

But Adorno thinks Baudelaire’s poetry goes farther than even this brilliantly symp-tomizing, bitter homeopathy that Benjamin identifies; Adorno believes, moreover, that Benjamin’s earlier writings had already begun to articulate this extra, supercharged distance in Baudelaire and later Baudelaireanism. Adorno therefore argues that in “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire” Benja-min now, in line with “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935) and kindred essays, limits not only Baude-laire but himself too—constrains his under-standing of Baudelaire’s, of advanced lyric’s, of modern art’s critical value—by adopting an essentially orthodox Marxist-Leninist, resolutely determinist approach to exchange value, the commodity, and human agency. Observing that at key moments Benjamin’s essay redirects its treatment of Baudelaire’s poetry back to the commodity and that Ben-jamin consistently claims—citing Marx—that the commodity is defined by labor, Adorno insists otherwise, noting too that Marx did not make, or emphatically not halt at, such a definition (e.g., Benjamin, “Paris” 22, 29, 55, 56, 58, 61; Adorno and Benjamin 304).

Adorno effectively evokes the f inal movement in Capital ’s historical critique of exchange value and commodity form. For Capital initially does make Enlightenment economist David Ricardo the virtual hero of its commodity story, emphasizing the progressive character of Ricardo’s demon-stration that what defines the commodity is not use value but production for and as ex-change value (based not on particularity’s inextricable relation to use but on a treated- as-universalizable abstraction of labor time—hence, value derived vis-à-vis an abstraction of the labor time necessary for each product produced over against all other products pro-duced in the market). Marx then steps past Ricardo (and past what has already begun to identify itself as left-Ricardian, labor-theory- of-value socialism). Marx notes that the

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commodity’s value derives not only from the conceptual abstraction of labor time but also, crucially, from an ongoing, sociohistorical, and now contestable judgment that this ab-straction of labor time must or should be the final basis for valuation (rather than a judg-ment process capable of holding that the ab-straction of labor time should be a significant, but not necessarily the ruling or determining, basis for valuation, so that value finally would not need to remain determined by, but would be free to transcend—free to not be deter-mined by—labor time [81–86]).

Marx shows that this ability to transcend the conceptual abstraction of labor time as ultimate determinant of value would break open—initially, via aesthetic judgment!—ex-actly what aesthetic judgment by definition (since Kant at least) offers the form or sem-blance but not the substance of: an already extant, determined, determining concept. In this breaking open, stretching past, or side-stepping of extant, substantive-objective conceptual determination, aesthetic quasi- conceptuality lets subjects feel or experi-ence their semblance-play with conceptual form as if this play already were substantive- determinative-objective conceptuality, though a conceptuality somehow freely chosen rather than determinatively, coercively compelled. Aesthetic judgment thus begins to enact, in form or semblance, the experience and pro-cess of forming, making, or constructing something not conceptually predetermined. Marx’s historical critique of Ricardo stresses ultimately that it has been and continues to be capital’s decision—not labor’s—to make the conceptual abstraction of labor time the final, untranscendable basis, limit, or ho-rizon of socioeconomic value. In doing so, capital ideologically proclaims the concept of exchange value (along with exchange value’s embodiment in or as commodity form and its enactment in or as mechanical reproduc-tion) to be a matter of natural or scientific, determinate judgment; Marx reiterates, in a

quite Kantian schema, the need to break open this seemingly already adequately conceptu-alized question of value when he insists that socioeconomic valuation be subject to ongo-ing judgment (that it be subject not to prede-termined but to “reflective,” i.e., “aesthetic,” judgment). From The Poverty of Philosophy (1847) through Critique of the Gotha Pro-gramme (1875) and beyond, Marx will remain adamant that labor socialism’s goal of simply expropriating, nationalizing, or “socializing” exchange value and commodity production is woefully inadequate to labor’s own most pressing sociocultural, let alone socioeco-nomic, needs, starting quite formally with labor’s need to make, and then to take action to realize, valuations arrived at through re-flective judgments.

Humming just beneath this analysis is something about exchange value, commod-ity form, and conceptualization that might otherwise go unheard. Economic modernity until his moment, Marx argues, has largely involved the emancipation of exchange value, which has made central not just this concept and practice—exchange value—but also the socioeconomic takeoff or initial triumph of determinate conceptualization itself. For the first time in history, Marx emphasizes, nei-ther an unpredictable (because particular) individual use nor an unpredictable (because powerfully arbitrary) feudal or authoritarian diktat or set of directives but rather a single predetermined conceptual operation—the abstraction of labor time (predictable in its operational formula if not in the yield of its case-by-case data)—has a major, if not the ma-jor, say in determining socioeconomic value. This holds enormously generative possibili-ties for socioeconomic productive capacity; but aside—or flowing—from the new mode of production’s tendency, in an era of eman-cipatory and egalitarian discourse, greatly to expand the social character of production and amount of goods produced while simultane-ously intensifying the disparities of wealth

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and of resource distribution, comes too an increasing disappearance of particularity (re-lated to if not wholly caused by the disappear-ance of use as a determinant of value). This loss-of-particularity theme, already devel-oped by Marx and Engels, famously becomes in Benjamin’s and then Adorno’s writings “the crisis of experience,” wherein subjectiv-ity, reflective judgment, and critical agency confront a felt evisceration of the capacity for the provisionally spontaneous, concrete, not- already-conceptually-determined experience presupposed in the ability to project more than mechanical relationships between the in-dividual and the collective, the particular and the potentially universal (see Jay). Further-more, because of the close if not synonymous relation between conceptual abstraction and exchange-value abstraction (in which the lat-ter and its embodiment in commodity form appear as the apotheosis of conceptuality and conceptual determinacy themselves), and then given that language is deemed (certainly by Marx and Engels and then the Frankfurt-ers) the medium for significantly communi-cable conceptuality, there is already in Marx and Engels the noteworthy intensification of a high romantic theme (rooted deeper still in classical poetics and aesthetics): lyric poetry bears a special, radical relation to conceptual-ity as such and, in modernity, to determinate conceptuality’s socioeconomic identity as exchange value and as the commodity.

Benjamin from the get-go thus grasps that Baudelaire, taking up the commodity and exchange value, perforce takes as subject mat-ter modernity’s problematic apotheosis of de-terminate conceptuality and, vice-versa, that Baudelaire’s tortured explorations of infernal, experience-denying modern determinism reg-ister an abiding reality: the nonexperience of human beings for whom judgment is by defini-tion—by the very definition of exchange value and the commodity—an already conceptual-ized, predetermined affair external to them and to any version of their subjectivity that

would imply the importance of their capac-ity for reflective judgment and critical agency. Adorno urges Benjamin to extend the analysis to consider whether, starting if not conclud-ing with sheerly formal artistic-aesthetic dy-namics, Baudelaire’s wager—about making a significant modern lyric poetry just when the experiential preconditions for significant lyric appear to have gone missing—might have to inculcate critique of socioeconomic moder-nity’s concept of concepts, the superconcept exchange value. For wouldn’t such artistic- aesthetic activity likewise constitute, enable, or begin to enact a sensed recognition of re-newed possibilities for conceptually undeter-mined experience and judgment?

Art or semblance, the argument goes, is critical precisely in its formal character of aesthetic illusion, as opposed to unknowing aestheticist delusion. In marking itself as il-lusion (as the form rather than substance of conceptuality), in advertising its illusion character to its audience, art signals the in-teraction and interdependence of, but also the difference between, itself and the world (whereas aestheticist delusion tends toward the collapse of the different identities—at times under the pressure of good-faith, radi-cally intended assumptions of responsibility for sociopolitical or ethical engagement, for changing the world—and aestheticist delu-sion can thus contribute unwittingly to an inability to distinguish between artwork and world). Critical aesthetic illusion pivots on a formal dynamic or dialectic of, to paraphrase Benjamin on Baudelaire, charged distance: the artist’s, artwork’s, and audience’s intense engagement and correspondence with—amid an awareness of difference from—the empiri-cal, sociohistorical and political, real.

The audience that participates in sem-blance character on the one hand provision-ally treats the semblance, the artwork or our aesthetic experience of it, as if it were real or had the dignity of the real—or, what amounts


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to the same thing, the audience judges it as such and feels it can cognitively make such a judgment, that it can experience or know the feeling of this judging agency. On the other hand and virtually at the same mo-ment, the audience also knows—indeed, dy-namic, constructivist semblance demands that the audience know—that this is only an as-if, fiction-generated experience, be-cause, despite the real subjective feelings of agency engendered, nothing, or at least noth-ing much, has yet been done to the empirical world. In other words, semblance character’s formal, protocritical dynamic constructs the true fiction whereby one feels the capacity for cognizing, and then for acting on and chang-ing, the world, while, at the same time, aes-thetic semblance character negatively, in its antiaestheticist vocation, reminds the sub-ject that, however much it might seem or feel otherwise, this capacity has yet to be practi-cally applied and realized.

In the traditions of poetics and aesthetics that Marx and then the Frankfurters inherit, lyric’s special role derives not from its being better, nobler, or more right on than other kinds of literature, art, or cultural works but from the otherwise almost unremarkable fact that, as a formal matter, lyric maintains a special relation to the presumptive medium for significantly communicable conceptual-ity: language. Each art has its unique charac-ter; lyric’s is to take language, the presumably bottom-line medium of objectivity (in the Frankfurters’ and others’ philosophical- theoretical vocabulary for the attempt to cognize reality, of conceptuality) and, first, to subjectivize it, affectively to stretch concep-tuality’s bounds in order to make something that seems formally like a concept but that does something that ordinary, “objective” concepts generally do not do: sing. For lyric song to reach and give pleasure to a signifi-cant audience, it must then construct its own form of objectivity or coherence, though the logic is that of art—here especially involv-

ing poetic art’s relation to musicality—rather than strictly mathematical-conceptual logic. Each of the arts has its mode or modes of sem-blance. In lyric, semblance primarily involves making speech acts appear, feel, as if their very logic has compelled them somehow to burst—naturally, justifiably, as it were—into song, which suddenly seems necessary but certainly hadn’t yet felt predetermined, and which in its bursting (in a manner inseparable from plea-sure) the formal contours of extant conceptu-ality allows for a renewed sense of capacity or agency vis-à-vis materials that can eventually be grasped as reconceived or newly conceived sociopolitical, historical, or ethical content in the newly stretched form or formal capacity.

In Benjamin and Adorno’s basically shared account, the age of art’s technological reproducibility (“mechanical reproduction”) is characterized not by the aesthetic aura (or semblance character, illusion character, ap-pearance character [Scheincharakter]) that operates through charged distance, suspen-sion, or negation. Rather, it operates by the commodity form’s version of aura or sem-blance, wherein a privileged concept—the superconcept called exchange value—pretends (by means of what Benjamin initially thinks of as phony aura [“Little History” 517]) that it isn’t an already determined and determin-ing concept, that its particular instantiations are free, are not predetermined and subsumed under this concept-practice that presumes to have already conceptualized the way to arrive at the value of anything and everything socio-economically significant. Commodity aura is thus the photonegative of aesthetic aura’s (and, especially relevant to conceptuality because of its linguistic character, lyric aura’s) genuinely distanced-yet-charged (because generally openly acknowledged) semblance character; this specially charged distance of recognized or admitted aesthetic semblance is to be grasped as a critical (though only formal) negation, a provisional negation or suspension emerging from the process in which aesthetic thought


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experience phenomenally takes the form of conceptual thought—though it takes only the form, and is thus only the semblance, of a de-terminant, substantive-objective concept.

The commodity, on the other hand, at-tempts positively to sell or serve up auratic luminosity as genuine, free immediacy, and the commodity does not wish to admit that its seeming freedom from conceptual de-termination is illusory. That is, commodity form does not present aura, illusion, in or as Benjaminian-Baudelairean charged distance; hence commodity form does not really prof-fer its aura through the aesthetic’s thought-and-felt as if, where semblance is engaged as if it were reality, while also being marked consciously as mere aesthetic semblance, inherently distant from reality. Rather, the commodity presents aura through aestheti-cization (where the audience is meant to lose sight of the status or character of illusion, and thus to have the illusion meld in identity and immediacy with reality), and the commodity does this in lockstep with aestheticization’s march toward its own logical endpoint: the collapse into pure immediacy of the as if ’s constitutive tension of charged distance, so that semblance or illusion is no longer criti-cally, simultaneously enjoyed and recognized as illusion but instead now produces the de-lusion of literal, immediate, particularized presence that supposedly never was illusion, or that has somehow left illusion, semblance, mimesis, and judgment-play behind. This collapse, of charged aesthetic illusion into delusion, leads to or is itself the concomitant collapse of the experiential preconditions for reflective judgment and critical agency.

Partisans of Adorno, sympathizing with his understanding of how aspects of Lenin-ism and above all the Stalin regime (inventor of the very terms “Leninism” and “Marxism- Leninism”) had pushed the “nationalizing” of exchange value into grim, nightmarish realms, have too often seemed to ignore or

ratify Adorno’s failure to appreciate impor-tant moments in Benjamin’s first Baudelaire essay. This may be prompted by solidarity with Adorno’s overarching arguments about exchange value and mechanical or commodity form and by response to numerous passages in which Benjamin does appear—in a manner uncharacteristic of his earlier writings on po-etry—to venture causal or semicausal linkages that do seem mechanistic or determinist (not least in some of Benjamin’s attempts rather di-rectly to tie poems to specific economic events [Benjamin, “Paris” 17–22; Adorno and Benja-min 282–83]). But Adorno here bullheadedly fails to grasp (despite Benjamin’s attempts to spell it out for him in a language of image ap-prehension and philological method) the ne-cessity in poetry, literary-historical study, and critical theory of immanently dwelling in the experience of alienated social and existential life. Elsewhere in Adorno, especially after the war, such principles are fully adopted. But in the Baudelaire debates, whether in addition to or in consequence of his obtuseness, Adorno makes inaccurate, high-handed pronounce-ments about literary and cultural matters in which Benjamin is far more expert than he (e.g., philological method; the accuracy of Brecht’s translations of Shelley; the history—a foreshadowing, by Benjamin, of Habermas!—of the English coffeehouse’s significance for modernity’s development of a public sphere [Adorno and Benjamin 303–04]).

On the other side, some Benjaminians have, since the 1970s republication of the 1930s expressionism debates, read Adorno as refus-ing metaphoricity and thus intellectual and linguistic play (when attention to the full con-text of the Benjamin-Adorno correspondence and to Adorno’s writings in general establishes Adorno’s lifelong, withering critique of the idea that language should, even if it could, be purged of metaphor or that concepts should be expressed and known primarily through a flattened, thinly abstracted scientism). But Adorno in effect argues the opposite case: he


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essentially contends that Benjamin has gussied up the closed, mechanistic conceptualism of Leninist determinism with a dazzling meta-phoric language whose falseness stems not from its character as metaphor but from its ef-forts to hide actually operative commitments to determinism. (In this and related collo-quies, Benjamin at times bites the bullet and appears close to confirming Adorno’s analysis; Benjamin will candidly state that—differences of style and philological emphasis aside—he does periodically commit himself, aestheti-cally as well as politically, to a nothing-if-not- determinist Soviet and Communist Party line in hopes of more effectively opposing reac-tion, fascism, and Nazism. Adorno associates all this with stances he discerns in Brecht’s theory, criticism, and drama, though not in Brecht’s poetry, which Adorno consistently lauds (Adorno and Benjamin 108–13, 128–31, 146–47, 277–78, 291–96, 308–12).

This is also what generates Adorno’s no-torious words about Benjamin’s putting him-self at “the crossroad of magic and positivism” (Adorno and Benjamin 283): the problem isn’t the magic of artistic, aesthetic, imaginative play, speculation, metaphor, and make-believe but a calculated magicianship that re-presents sheer, before-the-fact determinism as if it were arrived at through open-ended speculative experience and play. Orthodox or received ideas and hyperconceptualism are indeed at issue (especially orthodox historical materi-alism); they are what Adorno argues against as he seeks to return Benjamin to the “good theory” that Benjamin practiced when Benja-min had, Adorno claims, been true to Marx-ian and other emancipatory projects because Benjamin’s theory had then sprung as much from poetry and imagination as from theo-retical precepts and conceptual knowledge, when Benjamin as critic, theorist, and writer had undertaken work whose outcome wasn’t predetermined—already conceptualized—and then buttressed, calculatedly poeticized after the fact, with impressive metaphorizations

(Adorno and Benjamin 284–85). (As rich and thought-provoking a treatment as that of Giorgio Agamben—a classic instance in this regard—can thus approach the Baudelaire debates in a manner that scarcely mentions Benjamin’s sense of the geopolitical, Soviet and Marxist-Leninist determinants and the consequently politico-rhetorical, rather than literary-philological-philosophical, strategies involved; Agamben hence mischaracterizes Adorno’s and Benjamin’s own grasps of the “magic” Adorno criticizes.)

For all the mis- and half understand-ings generated, the most phenomenal thing about the original debate may be its imme-diate result. For Benjamin—without ever ceding his initial convictions—goes on to write a second essay, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” which Adorno immediately felt had taken poetics, aesthetics, and critical theory to an exponentially raised level that, Adorno believed, Benjamin alone among contemporary critics could reach. The recep-tion history has confirmed that assessment; “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” is widely re-garded as one of the great twentieth-century essays on modern poetry, social analysis, and critical theory, a locus classicus for the un-derstanding of lyric aura. While not giving up on philological method and immanent engagement with materials, Benjamin alters his view of Baudelaire’s enterprise. Benjamin does not so much move Baudelaire themati-cally from brasserie backroom to barricade front line as grasp the poetry as struggling formally with and stretching past, rather than simply reproducing, exchange value and mechanical reproduction (and as doing so largely through a second- or third-power via negativa in the realms of experience and critically auratic semblance). Confronting mechanical reproduction’s and exchange value’s tendency to cause the withering of charged auratic distance and reflective expe-rience and the withering of uncompromis-ing, searching lyric musicality, Baudelaire’s


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poetry discovers critical (not consolatory or redemptive but probing) formal means to wrest a sense of aura precisely from aura’s absence; it discovers how to particularize particularity’s disappearance, how to invest the seeming unavailability of reflective expe-rience with the charge and force of reflective experience (so that one might be enabled to reflect, for starters, on what it means to ap-pear to have lost reflective capability itself). In sum, Baudelaire’s poetry discovers how—in, as, modern lyric (and therefore suffused with lyric’s history of constructing-presenting the semblance of a singular, particularized voice that, emerging from play with language’s os-tensibly determined-objective-universal char-acter, offers the possibility of others’ hearing that voice as theirs and their voices as the po-em’s)—to sing song’s impossibility.

And though virtually no commentator seems to have noticed it, Benjamin accom-plishes all this without once mentioning the term commodity (usually called Ware in the first Baudelaire essay); the omission hardly ap-pears accidental, especially given that the first Baudelaire essay largely assimilated the poet’s work, however homeopathically, to commod-ity form. It’s as if in this remarkable, fuller discovery of Baudelaire, the limitations of conceptual determinism—of exchange value and the commodity themselves—become so evident to Benjamin that, doing justice to Baudelaire’s artistic achievement and vir-tuosically translating it into his own writing, Benjamin further develops a criticism whose radical sense of mimesis likewise names its object without thereby being deterministically bound by it, to the point where the strong ver-sion of a name or word—of the hold on us of an extant, determined, and determining concept—seems so to have fallen away that the word itself appears mutely to have slipped from the text in the dead of night.

Benjamin’s own view of what he’d accom-plished? Most telling may be his indications that the revised take on Baudelaire’s lyric

modernity ventured in “On Some Motifs” led Benjamin toward the drafting of “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” also known as “On the Concept of History” (“Über den Be-griff der Geschichte” [Adorno and Benjamin 327]). The angel of history, the hidden hunch-backed dwarf, the notion of weak messianic power—and so much more in the poetics of the left’s perhaps most celebrated self-critique of mechanistic determinism—would appear to have arisen in significant part from intense engagement with modern lyric’s difficult, self-defining explorations of aura, semblance character, and experience.

Limits of space prevent this essay from presenting treatments of the three Baude-laires—Baudelaire himself, César Vallejo, Robert Duncan—whose poetry it had meant to consider in relation to three historical pe-riods. Let Vallejo then gesture toward those sung inquiries that reach into the layers and across the moments of apparent or imagined silences to sound as historical sense:

Aniversario de Baudelaire. . . París, mayo de 1928

En el cemeterio de Montparnasse se ha conme-morado el aniversario de la muerte de Charles Baudelaire. Ha sido una escena de pura riño-nada estética y de una sencillez casi vegetal. . . .

Damas partículares unas y artistas de la Co-media Francesa y del Odeón otras, recitaron versos del poeta, entonando así la escena de un inefable tinte humano y viviente y comunicán-dole una simplicidad de trance natural y libre, despojado de todo aire de gremio o de capilla.

La voz de contralto de una artista dijo El extranjero. Otra recitó, con una unción real-mente conmovedora, La invitación al viaje. M. Alexandre hizo una declamación suprema de La danza macabre y M. Lambert, otra no me-nos cautivadora, de La muerte de los amantes.

El grupo de la posteridad se deshizo por el lado de la estatua “Souvenir.” Entre las desho-jadas avenidas, el viento se quedaba cantando en dos silencios, su silencio.


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At Baudelaire’s Tomb (Trans. Eliot Weinberger) Paris, May 1928

In the cemetery of Montparnasse the an-niversary of the death of Charles Baudelaire was commemorated. The scene was an aes-thetic kidney stew with a simplicity that was almost vegetable. . . .

Some women from the general public and actresses from the Comédie Francaise and the Odeon recited the poet’s verse, intoning a scene of ineffable, human and living color, commu-nicating a simplicity of free and natural trance, stripped of the airs of societies and chapels.

The contralto voice of an actress spoke “L’É-tranger.” Another recited, with an [sic] fluid-ity that was truly moving, “L’Invitation au Voyage.” M. Alexandre gave a supreme dec-lamation of “Danse Macabre,” and M. Lam-bert another, no less captivating, of “La Mort des Amants.”

The group to the rear broke up by the side of the statue “Souvenir.” On the leafless av-enues, the wind remained behind, singing, in two silences, its silence.

Note

Whatever errors this essay makes are the author’s alone; whatever it gets right owes much to the generous re-sponses offered to earlier versions of the argument by Russell Berman, Judith Butler, Norma Cole, Bo Earle, Howard Eiland, Miriam Hansen, Robert Hullot-Kentor, Virginia Jackson, Martin Jay, Michael Palmer, Yopie Prins, Arthur Strum, and Alex Woloch.

Works Cited

Agamben, Giorgio. “The Prince and the Frog: The Ques-tion of Method in Adorno and Benjamin.” Infancy and History: On the Destruction of Experience. Trans. Liz Heron. 1978. London: Verso, 1993. 117–38.

Adorno, Theodor W., and Walter Benjamin. The Com-plete Correspondence, 1928–1940. Ed. Henri Lonitz. Trans. Nicholas Walker. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1999. Trans. of Briefwechsel 1928–1940. Ed. Henri Lonitz. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994.

Baudelaire, Charles. The Flowers of Evil. Trans. and in-trod. Keith Waldrop. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 2006. Trans. of Les fleurs du mal. Ed. Claude Pichois. Paris: Gallimard, 1975. Vol. 1 of Œuvres complètes. 2 vols.

Benjamin, Walter. Gesammelte Schriften. Ed. Rolf Tiede-mann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser. 7 vols. and 3 supp. vols. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972–99.

———. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Ed. and in-trod. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1969.

———. “Little History of Photography.” Selected Writings. Trans. Rodney Livingstone et al. Ed. Michael W. Jen-nings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith. Vol. 2. Cam-bridge: Belknap–Harvard UP, 1999. 507–30. Trans. of “Kleine Geschichte der Photographie.” Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften 2: 368–85.

———. “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire.” Benjamin, Il-luminations 155–200. Trans. of “Über einige Motive bei Baudelaire.” Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften 1: 605–53.

———. “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire.” Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism. Trans. Harry Zohn. London: New Left, 1973. 9–106. Trans. of “Das Paris des Second Empire bei Baudelaire.” Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften 1: 511–604.

———. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Benjamin, Illuminations 253–64. Trans. of “Über den Begriff der Geschichte.” Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften 1: 691–704.

———. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Repro-duction.” Benjamin, Illuminations 217–51. Trans. of “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Re-produzierbarkeit.” Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften 1: 471–508.

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———. Critique of the Gotha Programme. 1890–91. Marx/ Engels Selected Works. Vol. 3. Moscow: Progress, 1970. 13–30.

———. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. 1852. Whitefish: Kessinger, 2004.

———. The Poverty of Philosophy. 1847. New York: Prog-ress, 1955.

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Vallejo, César. “Aniversario de Baudelaire.” 1928. Cróni-cas. Ed. and introd. Enrique Ballón Aguirre. Vol. 2. México: U Nacional Autónoma de México, 1985. 270–71. 2 vols.

———. “At Baudelaire’s Tomb.” Trans. Eliot Weinberger. Sulfur 33 (1993): 128–29.


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Kaufman - Lyric Commodity Critique, Benjamin Adorno Marx, Baudelaire