Response: Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt

First, I will start off with a few informal reactions.

I found Benjamin easier to read than Adorno and Horkeimer, as far as the language goes. However, as Kerry McAuliffe remarked to me, and I agree with her, he seems to use some words in a very specific, defined sense, and I was not entirely sure I understood all the implications of his usages of these words. These terms include “progressive” as it refers to literary technique, “phantasmagoria,” and “fetish.” I hope we might be able to go over these terms some in class so I can get a better grasp on precisely what he meant.

I was also unclear on his position towards fascism. Perhaps my understanding of fascism is somewhat faulty, but I had thought of fascism and communism as opposites, and Benjamin seems to support some of the ideas of Marx. But at other times, he refers to “the privilege of fascism,” as though he were praising it.

Now, on to the prompt.

For Arendt, there seem to be two types of intellectuals in society. The function of the first is to take objects of culture and figure out how to adapt them to prevailing societal trends such that they are more universally palatable and consumable. She refers in one instance to this first group as a “special kind of intellectual” (284). The second , which she categorizes as being in a state of malaise, is the type that wishes to preserve objects of culture. This type exists in conflict with those “professionals” who “fabricate” books rather than write them (284). This double and apparently self-contradictory usage of the word “intellectual” may reflect some degree of the prevailing confusion between culture and entertainment about which Arendt writes.

Benjamin uses the term “intellectual” in a rather more specific sense. He references Hiller’s definition of the intellectual as “representatives of a certain characterological type”, a type which transcends class, in that belonging to a specific class is not necessary for consideration as an intellectual (although, he does provide the caveat that members of the bourgeoisie have greater access to the means of production that help to facilitate becoming an intellectual” (84). The intellectual is defined by a shared set of “opinions, attitudes, or dispositions” (85). Benjamin states that, as an intellectual does not necessarily belong to one class or another, the position of the intellectual in society is determined “on the basis of is position in the process of production” (85). I understand “production” to refer to the act, craft, or process through which a work of art—in this case, literature—is created or written; in other words, it refers to the literary techniques used to convey an idea. Thus, it is not enough that a work merely promote revolutionary ideas; it must do so in a way that actively engages the process of production, using various techniques not merely from habit or tradition but because the author “has reflected deeply on the conditions of present-day production” (89). An intellectual only becomes part of the revolutionary class if he is also a producer in the sense that he engages these means of production, not merely regurgitates revolutionary rhetoric.