Formalism and its Malcontents: Benjamin and de Man on the Function of Allegory

Hansen, Jim.

New Literary History, Volume 35, Number 4, Autumn 2004, pp. 663-683 (Article) Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: 10.1353/nlh.2005.0004

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Formalism and Its Malcontents: Benjamin and de Man on the Function of Allegory*
Jim Hansen
The very opposition between knowledge which penetrates from without and that which bores from within becomes suspect to the dialectical method, which sees in it a symptom of precisely that reification which the dialectic is obliged to accuse. Theodor Adorno, Cultural Criticism and Society

ormalism is evidently making a comeback in North American literary criticism. After facing decades of apparent exile at the successive hands of the structuralists of the late 1960s, the poststructuralists of the 1970s and 1980s, and the various historicist schools of the 1990s, the formalist analysis of aesthetic tropes appears to have returned to the post-2000 academic scene. In a recent issue of PMLA, W. J. T. Mitchell interrogates the terms longstanding use as a pejorative while simultaneously affirming his own commitment to form.1 Mitchell warns us that this new formalism, a far more subtle, sober, and erudite approach than its much-derided ancestor the New Criticism, shares many of the aims of historicism and ideology-critique. Moreover, Mitchell argues, throughout the critical debates of the last few decades, formalism has continued to rear its head, even when most fervently disavowed.2 Similarly, in a special issue of Modern Language Quarterly, Ellen Rooney claims that formalism is an unavoidable moment in the projects of both literary and cultural studies.3 Like Mitchell, many of new formalisms most ardent and thoughtful defenders tend to list theorists and politically savvy thinkers like Fredric Jameson, Edward Said, and Theodor Adorno as critics whose formalist
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I would like to thank the following people who helped with the essay: Jed Esty, Erich P. Hertz, Michael Rothberg, Mark Christian Thompson, Rene R. Trilling, Fergus Clinker, and the students from my graduate seminar on Frankfurt School Aesthetics from the spring of 2004.
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readings score political points. We are reminded that if a respected and nuanced critic like Jameson imports formalism into his Marxism, then formalism must not be all that bad. To my way of thinking, this kind of defensive reading of formalist techniques fails to think through the division between formalism and historicism. That is, perhaps an immanent critique of formalism, a critique that takes up and actually deploys formalisms logic, should begin by asking what is wrong with formalism, where does its own internal logic collapse, and what separates ideologically inflected historicism from a critique circumscribed by questions of aesthetic form in the first place? Obviously, these are not so much new questions as they are rewarmed versions of the familiar aporia that has kept philosophy professors up at night at least since G. W. F. Hegels content- and history-driven Aesthetics challenged Immanuel Kants pronouncement that art was autotelic or purposiveness without purpose.4 For modernity, in other words, formalism has always been a matter of theory. This is all to say that if, as Mitchell suggests, academic criticism is entering the age of a new kind of formalism, I certainly do not think that anyone suspects it will resemble either the traditionalist science of meaning one sees in the New Criticism or even the more sophisticated literary-historical/evolutionary model proposed by Russian formalism.5 Neither is it likely that any sort of contemporary and critically astute academic formalism will try to teach us to recognize the inherent aesthetic beauty of certain forms. Quite the contrary, we are far more likely to see formalisms indebted to postmodern modalities of suspicion and to the heteromorphic conceptions of historicism and discourse analysis that this suspicion has engendered over the last thirty years. Generally speaking, formalism has been taken by a generation of politically informed and historicist critics to be the other of ideological criticism. If, however, immanent critique always conceals a politics, that politics need not necessarily be aligned with conservative forces. In fact, claiming that all formalisms are reactionary would be an insight of such purely metaphysical formalism that even the most vulgar left-Hegelian could denounce it as insufficiently historicized. Nevertheless, contemporary critics might well fear that even supple and reflective formalist practices lead, at best, to something like a diffident quietism. Rather than constructing a list of political critics who recur to formalism, I would like to look to two critics who often begin with formalism only to end up as its malcontents, articulating its various philosophical, social, and aesthetic paradoxes. In the writings of Walter Benjamin and Paul de Man, we see two thinkers who both attempted to redeem that clumsiest and most belabored of formal devices: allegory, the embodying of an idea in a character or an emblem. Formalist practices were as central to Benjamins project as they were to de Mans.

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For his part, Benjamin seemed so committed to teasing out the aesthetic and dialectical implications of allegory that it remained central to his critical vocabulary even after his epistemo-theological thinking had been called into question by his conversion to Marxism. On the other hand, the de Manian conception of allegory remains suspicious both of the totalizing claims implicit in ideology-critique and of the politicizing of art that Benjamin himself had once advocated.6 For de Man, allegory gradually became the key rhetorical figure in a particularly relentless strain of deconstruction. In his writing, allegory marks out the space of the failure of referential meaning, the space in which, as he explains, representation does not stand in the service of something that can be represented.7 In other words, early speculation about a hamhanded formal feature provided something of a foundation for the kind of provocative micrological and materialist work that we see Benjamin doing throughout his later writings, particularly in Das Passagen-Werk (The Arcades Project ) and the work on Charles Baudelaire. Likewise, in discussing that same formal feature in his notorious 1969 essay The Rhetoric of Temporality, de Man initiates the kind of ascetic, negative reading that would come to characterize both his conception of the finitude of human agency and his inveterate resistance to referential and empirical meaning. In the work of Benjamin and de Man on allegory, then, we witness two contrasting species of theoretically nuanced literary criticism that not only deploy formalist strategies, but also actually begin and end with the consideration of aesthetic form, with what we might call the dialectic of immanence and transcendence, the internal and the external.8 When read against each other, Benjamins messianic approach to allegory and de Mans conception of allegorical reading provide contrasting models of the political and/or theoretical interventions that a criticism reliant on the formal, the tropological, or the carefully measured generic category can make. I believe that in their separate techniques for engaging with or displacing the dialectic of immanence and transcendence, Benjamin and de Man suggest that any contemporary type of formalism is always already itself an allegory of larger philosophical or social problems. In fact, I will argue that any formalism seeking to enter into or resituate current academic debates must start by negotiating the dialectic of immanence and transcendence and by acknowledging how formalism itself invariably becomes a way of thinking beyond form. In the end, we should be able to formulate the theoretical boundaries for any new formalism by suggesting that a Benjaminian kind of politicizing formalism can be used to criticize a de Manian nihilistic formalism while de Manian skepticism can, likewise, be deployed to nuance the potentially reifying nostalgia that appears to haunt Benjamins approach.

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II. The Dialectical Problem of Formalism

Simply put, formalisms, both old and new, approach the artworks immanent or internal architecture. As this often-told story goes, transcendent criticism, always already extratextual in its aspirations, neglects particularity in an effort to focus on utopian, ethical, communal, or social generalities. Immanent criticism avoids such teleological agendasetting by simply explicating the text and surveying its often very nuanced structuring principles. Of course, from a Marxist, feminist, or postcolonial perspective, immanent criticism stands accused of neglecting the ideological and the historical entirely and of deploying its critical vocabulary with some pretense to scientific authority. At the risk of oversimplifying, then, we might say that the critical alternatives are either confronting the internal structure of an art object by analyzing its stylistic maneuvers, its coherence or incoherence, and its rhetorical figures, or else maintaining an external or identity position from which to read a cultures products and call the whole of that culture into question with regard to its ideology. With immanent criticism we get the fetishizing of the object itself and, implicitly, the notion of an abstract, ahistorical meaning that is always readily available to an interpreting subject who always appears suspiciously impervious to anything resembling prejudice or false consciousness. With transcendent criticism we often get an extorted form of reconciliation in which objects are subsumed under universal-historical principles, as transcendent critique pursues its overt goal of positive social change. In its most nuanced formulations, however, immanent critique negates the universal-historical through an analysis of the particular objects inconsistencies and ambiguities. The opposition between the immanent and the transcendent so central to what we call literary criticism is, to Theodor Adornos way of thinking, symptomatic of reified consciousness in that it fails to see how form is always already imbricated with the sociohistorical. Adorno tells us in Prisms that any truly dialectical criticism must subscribe to both methods and to neither.9 Each side of the dialectic remains enfolded inextricably into its other. If we take it for granted that Adorno is correct, as someone like Mitchell certainly does, we still have to determine precisely how particular breeds of formalism attempt to rethink or even to sublimate this dialectic and to what ends. Of course, for Adorno political or utopian aesthetic criticism is not abandoned but, rather, kept alive by being thought negatively. That is, the transcendent and the immanent at once meet and are kept at bay by a critical method that points to the internal contradictions of a work of art-qua-object as

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embodying historical, cultural, and social contradictions. The artwork falls short where the social world from which it springs falls short. For Benjamin and de Man allegory works precisely as a formal feature that embodies historical contradictions or ontological problems, respectively. In either case, and indeed in nearly any formalist critique, determining what transcendent aims the critic actually advocates can be achieved by establishing how the critic figures the finite boundary of immanent form as a reflection of the sociohistorical or philosophical finitude of human understanding and practice tout court. Explicitly, formalism always points towards boundaries, towards that which cannot be discussed, always draws a line past which critical consciousness trespasses only at the risk of projecting a potentially mythic or totalitarian order on an already existing world. Implicitly, formalism conceals certain assumptions about that preexisting order and its role in creating the possibility for human action and critical theory in the first place. Even when Kant, modernitys arch-formalist, describes the immanent concerns of a reflective judgment, he claims that in such judgments one begins by meditating on a particular object for which the universal has to be found.10 In other words, even a most circumspect and rigorously skeptical formalism relies on or moves towards certain ontological assumptions. It seems to me, then, that any truly dialectical evaluation of the different breeds of formalism must read each approachs explicit claims against its implicit assumptions. We must ask what transcendent aims are implicit in any given immanent critique. Coincidently, near the very end of his career, de Man engaged with Benjamins work on this very subject.

III. Formalism and the Question of Historicity

At first glance, de Mans methodology, predicated on poststructuralist discourse analysis, the cautious teasing out of philosophic and linguistic paradoxes, and the foregrounding of something like undecidability, appears much more amenable to our own literary and theoretical practice than the often theologically inflected approach taken by someone like Benjamin. As late as the 1979 Allegories of Reading, de Man had casually dismissed Benjamins Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiel (Origin of the German Mourning Play ) for remaining too Hegelian in its dialectics and too teleological in its attempt to define allegory and map the terrain of romanticism.11 In other words, Benjamins critique, blind to its own situatedness and historicity (Geschichtlichkeit ), remains too transcendental, too willing to remain outside of history and attack the whole of romantic consciousness because of its fragments and divisions. De Mans offhanded criticism of Benjamin might easily be overlooked,

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but it marks a key difference between a poststructuralist approach to the question of form and one inflected by Frankfurt School aesthetics. Following various Heideggerian schools of thought, de Man foregrounds the philosophical concept of historicity. If historicity, conceived of as the unavoidable situatedness of the interpreting subject in a context or discourse, circumscribes what Heideggerian thinkers call the horizons of understanding, if Geschichtlichkeit is, as Heidegger claims in Being and Time, prior to what is called history, then it forecloses on the possibility of transhistorical or universal-historical modes of sensemaking.12 Ostensibly, then, there can be no such thing as a transcendent or teleological conception of History, no ontological principle like freedom, revolution, theodicy, or identity to guide the dynamic of History. Following this logic, as de Man explains in Form and Intent in American New Criticism, to understand something is to realize that one had always known it, but at the same time, to face the mystery of this hidden knowledge. Understanding can be called complete only when it becomes aware of its own temporal predicament.13 In poststructuralist thinking, the interpreter, subject to and constructed by the vicissitudes of structural and linguistic phenomena like diffrance, finds him/herself bounded by the hermeneutic circle circumscribed by historicity. From this perspective, Benjamins approach to the problem of form, which foregrounds ideas like originality, revelation, and truth-content, seems to retain precisely those extrinsic, Hegelian-Marxist dialectical maneuvers that de Man sees as potentially totalizing. Oddly enough, however, in his 1982 introduction to Hans Robert Jausss Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, de Man seems to have changed his tune as he associates the Trauerspiel books notion of allegory with the disruptive force of figural language. Now, Benjamin gets grouped together with deconstructions favorite arch-debunker of metaphysical and referential truth, Nietzsche.14 Likewise, in the last of the Messenger Lectures that de Man delivered at Cornell in 1983, he goes so far as to say of Benjamins 1923 essay The Task of the Translator that in the profession you are nobody unless you have said something about this text (73).15 As with his various interpretations of Nietzsche, de Man began to read Benjamin as a protodeconstructor, a flouter of transcendent and utopian criticism. De Man is characteristically attentive to the delicate aporias of Benjamins essay, and language certainly appears to have as resolutely an antisubjectivist feel in Benjamins Translator essay as it has in much of de Mans post-1968 work. After all, Benjamin begins his piece by telling us, no poem is intended for the reader, and that language does not communicate or impart any information.16 Here, Benjamins thinking seems to partake of the kind of immanent criticismconscious of its own situatednessthat de Man fosters, a criticism

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that does not work to resolve inconsistency through the fiat of some utopian, teleological, or extrinsic harmony. Rather, in de Mans reading, Benjamins thought outlines how the inconsistencies of figures of speech and referentiality reflect the internal structures of language. Does this mean that, contra de Mans own claim in Allegories of Reading, Benjamins Trauerspiel book is not blind to its own Geschichtlichkeit? Appended to de Mans lecture is a particularly illuminating questionand-answer session. Apparently disconcerted by de Mans arguments, Dominick La Capra explains to de Man that on the left today, I think Benjamin is being introduced as someone who gives us all of the . . . all of the subtlety of contemporary French criticism, with a political dimension thats very much identified with messianic hope.17 De Man quickly retorts that Benjamins critical powers are resistant to messianism, that Benjamin would be closer to Nietzsche than he is to a messianic tradition which he spent his whole life holding at bay (103). Beware all messianic interpretations of Benjamin, he warns, for that way madness lies (103). Of course, here all political readings seem to dovetail nicely with the messianic ones. If de Man always preferred the immanent, negating approach to criticism over what he saw as the salvational and transcendent pretensions of an overtly political criticism, then somewhere between 1979 and 1982 he seemed to discover a Benjamin who agreed.18 But what if de Mans 1979 characterization of Benjamins thought is, quite accidentally, as accurate as his 1982 depiction? Perhaps Benjamins rethinking of the dialectic of immanence and transcendence provides, to appropriate one of de Mans pet phrases, an irrefutable critique by anticipation of the de Manian approach to the problem of form.19 In de Man and in Benjamin, formalism becomes the way for modern thought to negotiate the problem of historicity, but Benjamins peculiar, dialectical disposition towards aesthetic form maintains both the transcendent and immanent positions at once, or, that is to say, it enfolds the transcendent into the immanent while de Mans approach deconstructs the transcendent via the immanent.

IV. An Allegorical Formalism

For both thinkers negation is the task of modern critical consciousness. Hence, both Benjamins Trauerspiel book and de Mans Rhetoric of Temporality speculate about literary meaning by staking a claim for the negating immanence of allegory over and against the mythic and universalizing implications of its more popular sibling, the symbol. If formalism is to survive, it must itself become allegorical. That is, formalist reading must become an allegory for larger, sociohistorical

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contradictions and/or ontological problems. As the key figure for tragic pathos, the symbol transmutes that which has been lost within the context of an individual work of art into an eternal, indivisible, and essential unity. Lost for an instant, it is recovered and recoverable forever. Symbols long for transcendence in the most overt and nave sense. They project a mythic, ideal order. In The Rhetoric of Temporality, de Man argues that with the advent of romanticism the symbol, conceived as an expression of unity between the representative and semantic functions of language, becomes a commonplace that underlies literary taste, literary criticism, and literary history.20 Derived from the mythic movement of tragedy, the symbol provides an idealizable teleology. As an artistic trope that also philosophizes, it works to overcome the immanence-transcendence dialectic by reconciling material form to transcendental ideal. For Benjamin, the critical emphasis on symbolism and, subsequently, the teleological unity of form and content, erases the distinction between the transcendental and the material, appearance and essence, subject and object. In rather undialectical ways, symbols actively conceal sociological, contextual, or referential conflict by constructing universal imperatives and continuums. In Benjamins thought, and here he is followed closely by de Man, the romantic conception of the symbol posits the beautiful as the true and, likewise, as the truly moral. Any formalism founded on and tied to this romantic theory of the symboland we might place New Criticism in this categorymasks similar transcendent aims. That which is symbolic, autotelic and unifiedin-itself, also pretends to be absolute in a metaphysical sense. The similarity here between the powers of the symbol and those claimed for the post-Kantian Enlightened subject are not simply coincidental. They are both forms that get posited as preexisting the historical. In preexisting history, they also appear to define and guide it. Finally, then, the symbol acts as a kind of a priori undialectical totality. In their critical works, both de Man and Benjamin oppose the kind of overtly transhistorical claims made by such a notion of the symbol. The symbol subsists as a form that denies its historicity, where form can actually only exist in and reflect its own historicity. Formal attention to allegory becomes a self-consciously micrological way of articulating the underlying macroproblems of modernity. Lets not forget that allegory, regularly dismissed by romantic critics as fragmentary, anachronistic, and unpoetic, is something of a linguistic trick, an emblem or representation that refers to an unrepresentable idea. Artworks in which characters appear to simply and unproblematically embody virtue or lust always seem, at the very least, a bit forced. The clumsy sphere of allegory is never as subtle, as timeless, or as beautiful as the well-wrought world of the symbol. In his Trauerspiel book, Benjamin

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explains that allegory embodies the paradoxical structure of a profane and bourgeois world because under allegorys auspices any person or object can become an emblem of absolutely anything else. In the language of allegory, then, as Benjamin further claims, we view a world in which detail is of no great importance.21 Later, in The Arcades Project, he will go on to claim that allegories stand for that which the commodity makes of the experiences people have in this century.22 Where the symbol erases the distinction between matter (or form) and transcendence, allegory foregrounds precisely this distinction because as a form it is so forced and excessive, so unashamedly about human consciousness struggling to dominate or to evade matter and nature. In other words, allegorys failure actively underscores the gulf between matter and transcendence by foregrounding the conflict between artistic form and transcendent or theological intention. Allegory pronounces a judgment upon the profane world by translating that worlds erasure of the specific detail into a formal feature of art. For Benjamin modern allegory does not idealize but, rather, mourns.23 Allegory subsists as the mournful trope that embodies as it acknowledges the loss of specificity, originality, and revelation. With this insight into the structure of allegory in modernity, the Trauerspiel book anticipates the kind of aesthetic-historical thinking that Benjamin will later advocate through his conception of experience. In his much-discussed essay On Some Motifs in Baudelaire, Benjamin warns that Erfahrung (collective, reflective, communal experience) has been replaced in modernity by the more solitary Erlebnis (lived experience).24 In the closing passage of the essay he suggests that in the collision of structurally profane imagery and mundane materiality that we find in Baudelaires poetry, we see the nature of something lived through (Erlebnis) to which Baudelaire has given the weight of experience (Erfahrung) (194). To Benjamins way of thinking, Baudelaires poetry cannot recover Erfahrung for us but, rather, can offer us a critical simulacrum of its loss. This same negativecritical maneuver is central to Benjamins thinking about allegory. Baudelaire as allegorist broods upon and mourns a form of experience that is lost by depicting the failure, isolation, and horror of his contemporary world. Allegory becomes the formal feature par excellence of the transient and the irretrievable. It points not to redemption, but only to the Fall itself, only to the dated and the worldly. Hence its function as an object is critical and mortifying rather than harmonizing and reconciling. Benjamin encapsulates this distinction in the Trauerspiel book by claiming that whereas in the Symbol destruction is idealized and the transfigured face of nature is fleetingly revealed in the light of redemption, in allegory the observer is confronted with the facies hippocratica of history as a petrified, primordial landscape.25 Where the

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symbol presents a fixed point outside of the contingencies of history and nature as eternal and unified, allegory presents the emblem as a death mask, as the face of that which has passed away. As Benjamin goes on to tell us in The Arcades Project, certain epochs in human history that have experienced a crisis of the aura, or, that is, eras that have stigmatized the ideas of both distance and the cult value of the work of art tend toward allegorical expression (J 77a, 8/365). Allegorical form itself, then, is produced by certain kinds of historical crises. Allegory is a similarly negating formal feature in de Mans work. As he tells us in his own Allegory book, allegorical narratives tell the story of the failure to read.26 And certain kinds of very self-conscious authors, the Nietzsches, Rousseaus, and Prousts of the world, deploy the linguistic trickery that is allegorical forma kind of substitutio ad absurdumin order to undermine any simple, utilitarian, or transhistorical purpose for their various writings. For de Man, these writers acknowledge their own historicity by allegorizing unreadability itself. They represent the collapse of transcendental signifieds. Putting it another way, de Man argues, in The Rhetoric of Temporality, that the meaning constituted by the allegorical sign can then consist only in the repetition . . . of a previous sign with which it can never coincide, since it is the essence of the previous sign to be pure anteriority (207). The linguistic context or constructedness of an allegory, its situatedness, always collapses that allegorys pretension to be transcendentally or transhistorically true. As a critic, the trick is to be aware of this aporia, to see allegory, as de Man instructs us in Aesthetic Ideology, as the ironic pseudoknowledge of its own impossibility.27 Where in Benjamin allegory reflected some historical failure of or crisis in human perception en masse, in de Man it reflects a deconstructive move on the part of either a piece of writing or an individual writer. Allegory, then, is always presented as an ethical problem in de Mans work because it brings explicitly value-laden claims about things like virtue or falsehood into conflict with their own historicity. Writers sufficiently attuned to the nuances of languages historicity appear capable of realizing allegory not as truth but, rather, as an indication of the truths ineluctable failure to be anything other than rhetorical and situated. Simply put, then, in opposition to the symbol, allegory consciously points to its own temporality and, in so doing, embarrasses its own claims to truth. De Mans rethinking of the immanence-transcendence dialectic begins with the individuated problems inherent in form and then leaps directly to larger structural and ontological metaproblems. In the process the space that mediates between these extremes, the space of collectivity, gets occluded by de Manian criticism, which seems to suspect that collectivity is always subject to a kind of intransigent and totalizing conformity.

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In Benjamin and de Man on allegory, then, we have two basic formulations of the dialectic of immanence and transcendence. For Benjamin, the artworks immanence seems to embody external sociohistorical problems, and for de Man, the internal incoherences that manifest themselves in form are indicative of the larger problems associated with historical situatedness. In both cases, formalist analysis uncovers failure. If, as I claimed earlier, even the most circumspect and skeptical formalism relies on certain ontological assumptions, what different kinds of ontological assumptions underwrite the formalisms we see in Benjamin and de Man? Where are the respective boundaries of finitude drawn and to what purpose? In Benjamins Trauerspiel book, finitude is marked by the dialectic of Natur-Geschichte (natural history). In de Man, the finite is delineated by an ontological principle that we might call discursive historicity.

V. Natural History or Discursive Historicity

As a number of critics have indicated over the years, by championing the allegorical fragment over the mythic aspirations of the symbol, Benjamin takes aim at those pretensions of modern subjectivity that grow out of idealisms claims to totality.28 To Benjamins way of thinking, the subject can neither precede nor provide a teleology for history. His thinking prepares the way for what Adorno will come to call Vorrang des Objekts, the preponderance of the object.29 A criticism focusing on the objects Geschichte (history), rather than the subjects Verstehen (understanding), works to disrupt the normal and accepted order of idealist philosophy and culture. In a sense, Benjamin knocks the modern subject off of its philosophical and cultural pedestal. In The German Ideology, Marx argues that idealist philosophies generally seek to explain away pesky things like materiality and empirical history.30 In fact, for Marx the tradition of philosophical idealism actually reads material history as merely a result of ideal history. History gets replaced by the history of philosophy or the history of understanding, individuals are transformed into consciousness, and things like nature or the material world are either renounced as unreachable or understood simply and undialectically as the objects of consciousness. For Marx, this theoretical maneuver makes idealism a very heady, but finally politically vacuous, philosophy. Of course, to Marxian ways of thinking, if a philosophy replaces politics with abstraction it does so at the price of shoring up the status quo and supporting reified social relations. Intuitively, even in its pre-Marxian phase, Benjamins thinking corresponds to Marxs insights here. Throughout the Trauerspiel book,

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Benjamin develops a theory of the Natur-Geschichte (natural history) dialectic that shares Marxs suspicions about abstract philosophy. 31 This dialectic measures out the limit of human finitude for Benjamin. The continual nuancing of the concept of historicity might, in some sense, be read as twentieth-century philosophys rejoinder to Marxs criticism. In contrast, a Benjaminian theory of form works neither to point out nor to expand horizons of understanding but, rather, to indicate that human understanding is itself subject to a dialectic that can be neither instrumentalized nor fully understood. That is, human understanding and historicism must be read together as only one side of the mutually determining natural-history dialectic. It is by virtue of a strange combination of nature and history, Benjamin explains, that the allegorical mode of expression is born.32 The imprint of Natur-Geschichte separates allegory from the Telos and universalism of the symbol. The protestant baroque playwrights that Benjamin studies in his Trauerspiel book view history as human and profane. In their plays, nature, in all of its decay and transience, becomes an allegory for a human history that is resolutely tied to the ruin, the irreparably lost, the morbid.33 This is how allegory points to Natur-Geschichte. It is an immanent problem of allegorical form, with all its fixed, outdated, mundane meanings, that points towards an external or transcendent problem. As Benjamin goes on to explain:
[T]he word history stands written on the countenance of nature in the characters of transience. The allegorical physiognomy of the Natur-Geschichte-, which is put on stage in the Trauerspiel, is present in reality in the form of a ruin. In the ruin history has physically merged into the setting. And in this guise history does not assume the form of the process of eternal life so much as that of irresistible decay. Allegory thereby declares itself to be beyond beauty. Allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things.34

If nature was the primary source for the Trauerspiel allegorists, and they viewed nature as eternally decaying, then history, written upon nature, was always already decaying with it. Furthermore, if human history, like nature, is transient and impermanent, then it is neither self-realizing nor self-recovering but, rather, always fragmentary and disunited. History resembles something like a series of ruins, rather than a progressive Geist or consciousness, and is much more accurately mourned as a collection of lost and defeated cultures than celebrated as a triumphal procession from the past into the future. As such, in allegory, material form itself, which is always moribund, can never reconcile with transcendental ideal, can never be permanent. Rather, it is a marker of impermanence and loss.

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Where the symbol had pointed beyond history and towards ontological truths, allegorical form, so dated and lifeless, points towards the ruins place in what Benjamin calls the Jetzt, the now of contemporary actuality.35 The ruin exists as ruin in the present, and, as Benjamin further explains, ruins are the formal elements of works of art (182). The baroque allegorists pile these ruins and fragments, these allegorical stereotypes and remnants, on top of each other without any strict teleology or goal (178). Literature, in turn, does not embody the autotelic art of creation but rather, as Benjamin explains, an ars inveniendi, the art of finding fragments, and the accruing of more and more fragments only serves to intensify the artworks sense of mourning and loss, its persistent yet miserable denunciation of totality (179).36 In 1940 Benjamin will reenvision this idea writ large in his final piece, the Theses on the Philosophy of History, where he depicts Paul Klees Angelus Novus observing with great horror a catastrophic history that piles wreckage upon wreckage.37 There, Benjamin goes on to warn that the tradition of the lost and the oppressed should teach us to recognize the dangers inherent in our contemporary now-moment or Jetztzeit (257). The ruins of the past teach us to recognize and critique the present. Similarly, allegories from past works of art teach us that our own ideas and circumstances are, like nature, invariably transitory and subject to decay. Benjamin extrapolates from allegorical form a theory of human finitude. Allegorys apparently arbitrary linking of an unrepresentable idea to a material emblem indicates that the idea itself was dialectically enfolded into a material history strewn with similarly transient ideas. History, we are to remember, is written on transient nature, and, subsequently, allegory represents the irrecoverable loss of the objects originary sense. Allegory historicizes itself, and immanent critique, then, becomes an allegorical method for discussing and meditating on lost forms. Formalism itself becomes allegorical. From an attempt to differentiate Trauerspiel allegory from tragic symbolism, Benjamin goes on to develop a theory of allegorical perception that calls modernitys various notions of progress and historicism into question. Part of allegorys critical function is to awaken us to the current historical moment. The arc of Benjamins theory of forms is finally sociocritical as opposed to epistemological. Discussion of the artobjects immanent architectural inconsistencies and failures leads outward to observations about cultural and historical failures. As Benjamin himself claims in his December 9, 1923, letter to Florens Christian Rang, the same forces that become explosively and extensively temporal in the world of revelation (and this is what history is) appear concentrated in the silent world (and this is the world of nature and of works of art).38 Political criticism is preserved here by being thought negatively. It does

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not point to the way but, rather, to a problem. In a dialectical maneuver that almost seems more like a Mbius strip, an immanent critique actually transforms into a sophisticated, negative form of transcendent criticism. De Mans method of allegorical reading, on the other hand, seeks to cure North American formalism of its navet about the problem of historicity. As de Man sees it in Form and Intent in American New Criticism, the patient and nuanced attention that New Critics paid to the reading of form succumbed to a kind of fetishism by mistaking the Heideggerian hermeneutic circle for the organic circularity of natural processes (29). Their practice was, at least in an intuitive sense, auspicious for its negativity, its dual focus on ambivalence and paradox, but the New Critics themselves remained uninformed about what de Man calls the epistemological nature of all interpretation (29). They failed to see that aesthetic formalism leads inevitably to certain ontological questions about the possibility of transcendent knowledge. They mistook forms, which negate truth, for the truth as such. De Mans criticism places Heideggerian notions of Geschichtlichkeit, along with much of the subsequent French poststructuralist theories of discursive Geschichtlichkeit, adjacent to New Critical formalism. He formulates a selfaware new New Criticism, an immanent critique conscious of its ontological implications and restrictions.39 As he claims in Allegories of Reading, his criticism acknowledges that language is rhetorical rather than representational (106). That is, de Manian allegorical reading becomes so vigilant that it mistrusts itself. Through a notion of allegory as failed reading, de Man finds a way to see the rhetorical, situated, or performative functions of language as evidence of historicity, and the philosophers and artists he esteems invariably allegorize this same ontological problem. Form points to the finitude of human sensemaking and the falsity of teleological conceptions of history. The Truth gets replaced by contextual and discursive truths of various hermeneutic circles. Of course, claiming that all truth is contextual is also making a truth-claim, but for de Man this is a truth-claim that acknowledges its own finitude. It is, in other words, a negative truthclaim. Such claims, he believes, always already preempt the messianic and political ones that totalize on the one hand while ignoring historicity on the other. An intractable formalism, then, leads de Man to think the problem of historical consciousness ontologically. Discursive historicity acts as the negative ontological principle of de Manian critique. Of course, in thinking the problem of material-history dialectically, Benjamins approach acts at once to acknowledge and to critique the hermeneutic circle created by the problem of historicity. In other words, historicity-an-sich can never be an ontological principle for Benjamin

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because his thinking on allegory, which draws heavily from his 1916 essay On Language as Such and on the Language of Man, argues that nature is overnamed by human language, that in human language, nature is continually made to fit different human needs, continually instrumentalized.40 In poststructuralist thinkers as different as de Man, Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, and others, nothing precedes discourse, or, at the very least, anything that precedes discourse becomes subject to the play of language as soon as we attempt to render it intelligible. Hence, nature is not something one can discuss in any real sense. But for Benjamin understanding and the like, those things through which consciousness situates itself and becomes situated in time, are only one half of a dialectical equation. Philosophical notions of historicity often acknowledge this limit by concentrating on how consciousness, subject to signifying systems, techniques, and practices, constructs and gets constructed by a context, worldview, or form of life. In On Language as Such, Benjamin argues that it is no longer conceivable, as the bourgeois view of language maintains, that the word has an accidental relation to the object, and he goes on to claim that language never gives mere sign (69). In Benjamins theory of language, nature serves as the necessary dialectical counterpoint to history and understanding. From this perspective, the poststructuralist notion of discursive historicity reads like a move that embraces some of the instrumental qualities of language or as a philosophical maneuver that occludes the natural through overnaming. From such a perspective, nature, like allegory, merely represents an object-world in which detail, origin, authenticity, and revelation are of no great importance. Allegory points to a profane world, but allegorical reading embraces that world by limiting criticism to the discursive analysis of epistemological issues. While on the poststructuralist hand we have the fear of the authorizing original and of the transhistorical claim to truth upon which it draws, on the other, tacitly modernist, hand, represented here by Benjamin, we have the fear of the copy and of the counterfeit world it endlessly reproduces. For Benjamin the controlling anxiety seems to be the nightmare vision of a society of such thoroughgoing false consciousness that the representative, the mythic, the iconic, or the fetishistic has come to reign over the actual. That is, as Marx would no doubt see it, a philosophical theory of language takes unrestrained priority over, and in many instances actively occludes, material reality. Nature itself becomes always already second to signifying systems. Nature takes whatever name that humans deem fit to give it and remains mute. But for Benjamin natures silence mournfully annunciates a critique of human understanding and of instrumental modes of reason. Careful allegorists reveal a Nature that forces us to acknowledge that human history is transient,

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profane, and decadent. If we recognize the Natur-Geschichte dialectic, however, we recognize the loss of meaning rather than its ontological absence, and we recognize it in and for the Jetztzeit. This is an essentially historical, as opposed to an epistemological, insight. To put it simply, Benjamins formalism has more in common with the projects of historicism and ideology-critique than with that of New Criticism. Dialectically speaking, then, for Benjamin the transcendent or enduring truth-content of an allegorical work of art is reached only through a recognition of that works own transient position as cultural ruin. Form decays historically. Its truth is its loss, its historical decay. If the ruin continues to exist after its meanings have been shed or lost, those meanings display themselves as historical, as subject to both transitory nature and to politics and power. Rather than attempting to recover what was eternal and beautiful about the work, the critic explores the work as ruin, as failed, transient form. Criticism must show precisely that, and how, allegorical meanings have passed away. In the Trauerspiel book Benjamin calls this critical activity the mortification of the works.41 The transcendent element of Benjamins dialectic points towards the finitude of a human history that is at once determined and demythologized by its other, the natural. As an immanent form that always collapses in the face of transcendent time, allegorical form calls consciousness, perception, and understanding into question. It arrests thought. But it is also important to recognize that nature is never a first principle in itself for Benjamin because it is always involved in a dialectic with history and, thus, is only open to us through history and language. History and the historicity of understanding are subject to nature, and nature is acknowledged as a category subject to historical thought. Benjamins insight into the Natur-Geschichte dialectic initiates the Frankfurt School critique of dominance that is perhaps best represented by Adorno and Max Horkheimers post-World War II philosophical manifesto, Dialectic of Enlightenment.42

VI. Nostalgia and Lost Forms

Earlier, I claimed that formalism is generally thought to be the other of political or historical criticism. If, however, as I have argued, formalism simply conceals its politics, it does not necessarily follow that those politics will be reactionary or conservative. In the present state of the academy, it seems much more likely that different kinds of formalism will become the bases of different theoretical and historical approaches to aesthetic and cultural politics. The key is to be able to discern which ontological or historical principles are supported by our contemporary

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brands of formalism. If such an undertaking requires that close reading always be paired with some kind of hermeneutics of suspicion, then one version of this suspicion is what de Man advocates in books like Aesthetic Ideology and The Resistance to Theory. In the latter, he warns that political criticism often confuses the materiality of the signifier with the materiality of what it signifies.43 The linguistic tricks and false realities imagined in and by literary language, then, should teach us to see ideology itself as the ultimate fiction, as the confusion of linguistic with natural reality (11). Ideology-critique is, in de Mans criticism, discredited by a formalist technique that unmasks all language as subject to the same problems as literary language. Literature becomes a metonym for discursive historicity, and overtly historicist approaches to interpreting literature are characterized as idealist and nave. One could easilyand to some degree justifiablyargue that the kind of paradox-driven allegorical reading that de Man encourages makes nothing happen. In his Principles of Literary Criticism, that inveterate moralist I. A. Richards claimed long ago that attention to form averts misapprehensions and certain kinds of interpretive biases.44 De Manian critique sees politics as ideological mystification or, in other words, as the grandest of our various misapprehensions and interpretive biases.45 But perhaps poststructuralist formalisms trenchant fear of the truth-claim has been at once its most astute and most misdirected contribution to critical theory. In some sense, the threat facing contemporary formalism is not that it will conceal reactionary politics in the guise of the truthclaim, but, rather, that it will become so immanent and so skeptical as to doubt the use or veracity of any kind of collectivity or political criticism, that it will see all political critique as structurally totalitarian. To return to Marxs insights from The German Ideology, such a criticism falls prey to the same kind of thinking that allowed philosophical idealism to replace politics with abstraction and, so, to shore up the status quo in the first place. Finally, Benjamins criticism gives us a model of formalism that fights instrumental reason without giving up on ideology-critique. In fact, a formalism based on such a theory of allegory would see the struggle against instrumental reason as the most significant work of any circumspect and dialectical criticism. This is why Benjamin warns us in the Trauerspiel book that in the last analysis, structure and detail are always historically charged. The object of philosophical criticism is to show that the function of artistic form is as follows: to make historical content, such as provides the basis of every important work of art, into a philosophical truth.46 In this dialectic, form and history are mutually determining and mutually demythologizing. Each always points beyond itself and towards the other. Moreover, each points towards loss and the transience embodied by nature.

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Though, like de Mans, Benjamins notion of immanent critique has the shape of negative truth, Benjamins thought also invariably calls for a criticism that begins with the mortification of the work of art and ends by mortifying the structure of the social world from which that work springs. A subtle and reflective new formalism would be wise to do the same. But Benjamins allegorical formalism also seems to engender a kind of intransigent nostalgia for the lost. From a certain light Benjamins thinking seems less like historical materialism and more like the melancholy political messianism that Rolf Tiedemann accuses it of being.47 If a Benjaminian mortification of the work actually manifested itself as a nostalgia that devolved into a comfortable, conformist pleasure in the lost, a tragic jouissance that took no critical account of the current state of affairs, that saw no analogue of the present moment of danger in the dead forms of the past, then that nostalgia should by all means be subjected to the kind of skepticism that underwrites de Mans project. Benjamins own melancholic nostalgia always remained linked to a critical method that found in the modern artworks form a constellation of historical dilemmas, profane illuminations, and silenced voices. A new formalism must not convert that which it studies into objects of or for consumption, just as it must not enjoy what Benjamin once referred to as the negativistic quiet of a left-wing melancholy that converts the revolutionary political struggle itself into a reified object of pleasure.48 Hence, Im not calling for a historicism that practices strategic essentialism, but rather for a politically and historically inflected formalism that practices strategic deconstruction, a formalism cognizant of its own status as an allegory of reified consciousness or, in other words, a formalism capable of doubting its own truth-claims without giving up on the objects Warheit-Gehalt (truth-content) wholesale. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
NOTES 1 W. J. T. Mitchell, The Commitment to Form; or, Still Crazy after All These Years, PMLA 118 (March 2003): 323. 2 Mitchell argues quite correctly that formalism was never really gone and that this socalled new formalism is something we will have already been committed to without knowing it (Commitment, 324). On a vaguely similar but certainly more problematic note, Elaine Scarrys On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999) works to rehabilitate aestheticism with all of its attendant ethical imperatives and Keatsian supplements. 3 Ellen Rooney, Form and Contentment, Modern Language Quarterly 61 (March 2000): 17.

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4 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York: Hafner Press, 1951), 27. 5 Mitchell, Commitment, 324. 6 Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Shocken Books, 1968), 242. 7 Paul de Man, Pascals Allegory of Persuasion, in Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrez Warminski (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 51. 8 My use of the terms transcendental and immanent derives from Theodor W. Adornos Cultural Criticism and Society, in Prisms, trans. Samuel Webber and Shierry Webber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1967). 9 Adorno, Cultural Criticism, 33. 10 Kant, Critique of Judgment, 15. 11 De Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970), 81. 12 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 17. 13 De Man, Form and Intent in American New Criticism, in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 32. 14 De Man, introduction to Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, by Hans Robert Jauss (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), xix. 15 De Man, Conclusions: Walter Benjamins The Task of the Translator, in The Resistance to Theory, ed. Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 73105. De Mans reading of Benjamin follows a path established by Hannah Arendt. Thanks in no small part to Arendts introduction to the 1968 translation of Illuminations, the English-speaking world has read Benjamins invectives against the false totalities of Fascist Europe as coextensive with Heideggerian and poststructuralist criticism. Arendt claims that Benjamin had more in common with Heideggers remarkable sense for living eyes and living bones . . . than he did with the dialectical subtleties of his Marxist friends (46). As a result, her readings of Benjamin, like de Mans, fail to see the negative theory of redemption immanent to, and the often problematic dialectical subtleties that serve as the structure of, Benjamins work. Hopefully, the translation of Benjamins Selected Writings, edited by Michael W. Jennings, will help clarify Benjamins interlocking formal, theoretical, and political concerns for the English-speaking academy. 16 Benjamin, The Task of the Translator, in Selected Writings, vol. 1, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1996), 253. 17 De Man, Conclusions, 102. 18 In The Dead-End of Formalist Criticism, de Man refers to Roland Barthess ideologically inflected structuralism as salvational (Blindness and Insight, 241). 19 De Man, Dead-End, 240. De Man reads New Criticism as an irrefutable critique by anticipation of Barthess salvational and political criticism. 20 De Man, The Rhetoric of Temporality, in Blindness and Insight, 189. 21 Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama (New York: Verso, 1998), 175. 22 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), J 55, 13/328. 23 Max Penskys Melancholy Dialectics: Walter Benjamin and the Play of Mourning (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993) provides a full account of Benjamins refiguring of allegory as a form of mourning. 24 Throughout Benjamins writings the term experience takes on an elusive and complex character that mirrors its long and troubled philosophical history. In the second

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of his much-discussed Baudelaire essays, Benjamin redefines the two philosophical formulations of experience: Erlebnis, or lived experience, consists of immediate and unintegrated inner experience, and Erfahrung, a more cumulative form of experience, seems both collective and, at least in some sense, narratable. As much as he was attracted to the cabalistic and storytelling implications of Erfahrung, Benjamin clearly displays throughout On Some Motifs in Baudelaire (Illuminations, 155200) that he very much doubts the possibility of establishing collective existence and reflective experience (Erfahrung) in modern capitalist culture. It seems, he claims, that in the modern world we are constantly fending off shock. Thus, impressions enter less often into experience (Erfahrung), tending to remain in the sphere of a certain hour of ones life (Erlebnis); perhaps, he goes on to suggest, the special achievement of the shock defense may be seen in its function of assigning to an incident a precise point in time in consciousness at the cost of the integrity of its contents (163). For Benjamin, of course, Erlebnis smacks of the familiar economy of homogenous empty-time. In materialist terms, it seems to present a form of alienation from history itself and a reification of the ontology of linear, progressive time. 25 Benjamin, Origin, 166. 26 De Man, Allegories, 206. 27 De Man, Pascals Allegory, 69. 28 In particular see Andrew Benjamin, Present Hope: Philosophy, Architecture, Judaism (New York: Routledge, 1997), 81. 29 Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973), 183. 30 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (New York: Prometheus, 1998), 149. 31 See Susan Buck-Morsss The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute (New York: The Free Press, 1977) and Beatrice Hanssens Walter Benjamins Other History: Of Stones, Animals, Human Beings, and Angels (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998). Benjamins idea of natural history is culled in large part from Georg Lukcss assertions about second nature in The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971). 32 Benjamin, Origin, 167. 33 Benjamin, Origin, 179. 34 Benjamin, Origin, 17778. Translation altered. 35 Benjamin, Origin, 183. 36 In The Eyes of the Skull: Walter Benjamins Aesthetics, Ranier Nagele explains this element of Benjamins thinking succinctly by comparing it to the poetic concept of Vorwurf. Vorwurf is a technical term for the theme of an artwork. With the prefix Vor it indicates a fore-structure like the English prefixes pro or pre. As Nagele explains, Vorwurf is pre-jection, something thrown before (217). In Benjamin, the artist or, more importantly, the allegorist/brooder does not create but rather finds the hieroglyphic entity that is the discrete object. Of course, this entity does not disclose some ontological revelation or ur-historical truth, rather it indicates the loss of its own history. Allegories represent the irrecoverable loss of the objects originary sense (Eyes, in The Aesthetics of the Critical Theorists: Studies on Benjamin Adorno, Marcuse, and Habermas, ed. Ronald Roblin [Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1990], 20643). 37 Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, in Illuminations, 257. 38 Benjamin, The Correspondences of Walter Benjamin, ed. Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno, trans. Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 224.

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39 See Jonathan Arac, Afterword: Lyric Poetry and the Bounds of New Criticism, in Lyric Poetry Beyond New Criticism, ed. Chaviva Hosek and Patricia Parker (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 351. 40 Benjamin, On Language as Such and the Language of Man, in Selected Writings, 1:73. In Conclusions, his Cornell lecture on Benjamin, de Man seems particularly interested in Benjamins use of the term reine Sprache, which gets translated by de Man as Pure Language (91). De Man is quite explicit in claiming that for Benjamin reine Sprache points not to the sacred or divine but rather to a language devoid of any kind of meaning, language which would be pure signifier (97). 41 Benjamin, Origin, 182. 42 As Buck-Morss points out in The Origin of Negative Dialectics, Benjamins Natur-Geschichte dialectic points towards Adornos own figuring of nature and history as mutually determining, mutually demythologizing concepts (54). 43 De Man, Conclusions, 11. 44 I. A. Richards, The Principles of Literary Criticism (New York: Harcourt, 1950), 167. 45 De Man, Conclusions, 11. 46 Benjamin, Origin, 182. 47 See Rolf Tiedemann, Historical Materialism or Political Messianism? An Interpretation of the Theses On the Concept of History, in Benjamin: Philosophy, Aesthetics, History, ed. Gary Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 175209. 48 Benjamin, Left-Wing Melancholy, in Selected Writings, vol. 2, ed. Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 425.