Walter Benjamin on Capitalism

I went to the Jewish Museum yesterday to see the exhibit The Arcades: Contemporary Art and Walter Benjamin.The so-called Arcades Project was a mammoth undertaking of Benjamin's, begun in the 1920s, when Benjamin began compiling materials that would have 19th-century Paris as the centerpiece of a study about modernism and the rise of consumerism. It was not completed at his death, but remained a cache of 1,000 pages or so, categorized into subjects, such as "ancient Paris," "prostitution," the streets of Paris, and so on. Arcades refer to the covered shopping streets that can still be found in some European cities, e.g., Basel and Lugano. Apparently they were torn down long ago in Paris, but they once were sites of fashionable stores. I think that the Galleria in Houston might be considered an example of an arcade, a mega one, to be sure. Indeed, on entering the galleries at the Jewish Museum, one encounters a wall label comparing the arcades to shopping malls. Clearly, in the eyes of the participating artists and the curators, American shopping malls fall short of the glamour of the 19th-century urban arcades.

I found the conjunction of contemporary artists and Benjamin a strange fit. I wonder what Benjamin would have thought about the giant portrait in which the ubiquitous Cindy Sherman appears as a rapacious collector of art. On the other hand, I liked the variation on the iconic image of Charles Baudelaire by Mary Reid Kelley.

One of the wall labels, next to two large photos by Rodney Graham portraying himself as a gambler (one entitled "Good Hand," the other "Bad Hand"), has the following to say: "Walter Benjamin charted the ways in which capitalism strips us of the ability to determine our own fate, leaving us subject to impersonal forces whose scope and operations remain beyond our ken." The power of such "unanticipated, generally unintelligible" causes, which are "seemingly dependent on chance" predisposes people to gambling.

Such sentiments are self-evident to the people who voice them, but a little reflection would indicate the opposite: capitalism has allowed more and more individuals to forge their own destinies in a way that was not possible when people's lives were set down in narrow channels by social and religious authorities. Not even the king or the pope was master of his own fate in the pre-modern world. That is not to say that the results are always admirable or that it is easy to chart one's own life in the absence of transcendent grounding or social limitations, but the fault is not capitalism. "Destiny," with its suggestion of hidden power, is probably the wrong word to use in any case. No one can see what is hidden. Capitalism, however, certainly allows us to create ways of life that were unimaginable in earlier eras, even if the outcome is often beyond our control.

Another label mentioned that we moderns experience a great deal of information, but it appears to us in fragmented form. Again, all that fragments are what individuals pull together to make a life of their own choosing. It is definitely not the same as when we follow a life path laid out for us by tradition, social or religious. There seems to me to be something very romantic, even reactionary, about these complaints about the loss of a unified view of life. The same writers want to have it both ways: attack religion and tradition, and then complain about modern fragmentation.

Achilles and Ajax roll dice

I am also surprised that the writer of the wall label asserts that gambling (and also the stock market) is a response to capitalism: didn't humans gamble in earlier ages? Trying to beat chance is an ancient hobby. We humans seem by our nature to be risk-takers.

Images (from top): James Welling, Morgan Great Hall; Cindy Sherman, Untitled #474 (2008), collection of Cynthia and Abe Steinberger; Mary Reid Kelley, Charles Baudelaire (2015)