53-83 Maria Gough - Paris, Capital of The Soviet Avant-Garde

Paris, Capital of the Soviet Avant-Garde
Author(s): Maria Gough

Source: October, Vol. 101 (Summer, 2002), pp. 53-83
Published by: The MIT Press
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Paris, Capital of the Soviet Avant-Garde*
MARIA GOUGH
This essay tells the story of Walter Benjamin's "The Author as Producer"
(1934), a text considered central to the writer's much celebrated Brechtiania.1While
not seeking to contest that centrality, my aim is nevertheless to bring to the surface
another story of that text-a story that has so far been largely occluded by that which
Irving Wohlfarth well describes in another context as "the lingering controversy over
the 'editorial monopoly' exercised over Benjamin's writings by the so-called
'Frankfurters."'2This other story foregrounds Benjamin's producer essay as one of
the most valuable and indeed poignant documents in the early history of the Western
European reception of the Russian and Soviet avant-garde'spioneering attempts to
theorize the role and efficacy of the artist and, more broadly, of the intelligentsia, in
revolution. Benjamin's text holds open-as a philosophical possibility for not only his
own historical present but also myriad other presents-a process of theorization
otherwise shut down in the Soviet Union in the early 1930s by social engineering and
socialist realism. My reading of "The Author as Producer"is thus necessarily a story of
* An earlier version of the final section of this essay was first developed for a Clark Art
Institute/Getty Research Institute workshop held in Williamstown, Mass., in October 2001, and then
presented at its sequel in Los Angeles in February 2002. Sincere thanks to all the workshop's
organizers and participants, especially to Karen Lang for her subtle response paper, and to Benjamin
Buchloh, Harry Cooper, Tom Crow, Francoise Forster-Hahn, Michael Holly, David Joselit, Juliet Koss,
Rosalind Krauss, Stephen Melville, Keith Moxey, Allan Sekula, Terry Smith, Mariet Westermann, and
Alastair Wright for their generous comments and critical suggestions. I would also like to thank
Eduardo Cadava, Karin Cope, Anne Duroe, Jodi Hauptman, and Michael Taylor for crucial advice and
assistance en route.
1. Benjamin, "Der Autor als Produzent: Ansprache im Institut zum Studium des Fascismus in
Paris am 27. April 1934," Gesammelte Schriften, 7 vols., ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann
Schweppenhaiuser (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972), vol. 2 (1977), pt. 2, pp. 683-701 and pt. 3,
pp. 1460-1464; trans. Edmund Jephcott, in Benjamin, SelectedWritings, trans. Rodney Livingstone
and others, ed. Michael W.Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, Mass. and London,
England: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), vol. 2, pp. 768-82. "Der Autor als
Produzent" was published for the first time in a posthumous collection of Benjamin's writings on
Bertolt Brecht, Versucheiiber Brecht, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1966), pp.
95-116.
2. Irving Wohlfarth, "Re-fusing Theology: Some First Responses to Walter Benjamin's Arcades
Project," New GermanCritique39 (Fall 1986), p. 4.
OCTOBER101, Summer2002, pp. 53-83. ? 2002 OctoberMagazine,Ltd. and MassachusettsInstituteof Technology.

54 OCTOBER
displacements: it begins and ends in the place and moment of the text's produc-
tion-Paris in spring 1934-but about a third of the way through, in testimony
to the sheer insaturability of that context, it briefly retreats to mid-nineteenth
century German social thought, then fast forwards to the last years of the Weimar
Republic, slips across the border into the Soviet Union, returns again for a moment
to Weimar Berlin, before, in the last third of the essay, finally spiraling back-or
rather forward-to Paris in the mid-1930s.
Thresholds
In a handful of letters to the great epistolary stalwarts of his Paris exile-

Theodor Adorno and Gretel Karplus in Berlin, Bertolt Brecht in Svendborg, and
Gershom Scholem in Jerusalem-Benjamin recounts that he is preparing a cycle of
five lectures on contemporary German literature, to be delivered in French at the
home of a rather well-known gynecologist. "Les Courants politiques dans la littera-
ture allemande" will open the series on April 13, 1934, and will be followed over the
course of the spring by individual lectures or seminars devoted to four specific areas
of contemporary literary production and their authoritative representatives: the
novel (Franz Kafka), the essay (Ernst Bloch), theater (Brecht), and journalism (Karl
Kraus).With the exception of its opening act, the cycle is to be available by subscrip-
tion only so as to vouchsafe its speaker "some respite for the summer."In addition,
Benjamin hopes that presenting in the salon of a respected private residence will
introduce him to certain prominent circles within the Parisian intelligentsia.3
Coming on the heels of unsuccessful bids to publish in the Nouvelle Revue
Francaise, Le Monde, and elsewhere, the projected cycle is but the German
writer's "latest experiment" in his perpetual endeavor to establish himself
within French intellectual life, as well as to secure sufficient livelihood in order
to resume research at the Bibliotheque Nationale, after a hiatus of some four
years, on what would become his most mammoth undertaking, The Arcades
Project.Despite his having established a deep sense of affinity with the cultural
milieu of Paris through several long sojourns there in the late 1920s, myriad
difficulties and frustrations during his first year of exile after the National
Socialists' seizure of power in Germany in the spring of 1933 had taught him
the desperate caution of the emigre: "[i]t would almost take a miracle," he confides
to Scholem, "to find an appropriate use here for my abilities."4
3. See Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin, The CompleteCorrespondence of WalterBenjaminand
TheodorAdorno, 1928-1940, ed. Henri Lonitz, trans. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1999), p. 41; The Correspondenceof WalterBenjaminand GershomScholem,1932-1940, ed.
Gershom Scholem, trans. Gary Smith and Andre Lefevere (New York: Schocken Books, 1989), pp. 99,
101-02; The Correspondence of WalterBenjamin, 1910-1940, ed. and annotated by Gershom Scholem and
Theodor W. Adorno, trans. Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson (Chicago: Chicago University
Press, 1994), pp. 435-38; Walter Benjamin, GesammelteBriefe,6 vols., ed. Christoph Godde and Henri
Lonitz (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1995-2000), vol. 4, pp. 378, 381-82, and Godde and Lonitz's
editorial note, p. 360.
4. Scholem, Correspondence, p. 99.
Paris, Capitalof the SovietAvant-Garde 55
The rather well-known gynecologist-whose name, curiously, remains

undisclosed in the corrrespondence-is Jean Dalsace, a committed member of
the French left (and later member of the Communist Party) who, in addition to
his manifold pioneering contributions to medicine, plays a significant role in
Paris in the 1930s in both antifascist and cultural affairs. The two had met
through a mutual acquaintance, Camille Dausse, the physician who had treated
Benjamin for malaria.5 At the time of their meeting, Dalsace is active in the
various antifascist organizations founded after the defeat of the German
Communist Party (KPD), when Paris was transformed into the new center for
the Western European struggle against fascism. He serves on the Comit6
Thaelmann (which agitates for the release of the leader of the now-exiled KPD
and Reichstag deputy, Ernst Thalmann, who had been imprisoned by the Nazis
in March 1933), and is a member also of the Comit6 d'initiative for an international
exhibition of antifascist art and propaganda curated by the Institut pour l'6tude
du fascisme (INFA) at the Galerie de la Bo6tie in spring 1935.6 As cultural
patrons since the early 1920s, Dalsace and his wife, Annie Bernheim, had
acquired a substantial collection of modern art, which was distinguished by its
unusually high number-for this period at any rate-of papiers collesby Picasso
and Braque.
Outside of the field of medicine Dalsace and Bernheim are probably best
known, however, for commissioning Pierre Chareau to design their Paris residence
and medical practice, the much-celebrated Maison de Verre(1928-32) on the
rue Saint-Guillaume-a three-story, asymmetrical steel- and reinforced-concrete
structure built into the masonry shell of an eighteenth-century town house, its
forecourt and rear garden facades wrapped in a thick membrane of translucent
glass lenses.7 In the mid-1930s, its magnificent double-height salle de sejour-
walled-in glass from floor to ceiling across its breadth and thus flooded with
natural light-is transformed into a salon regularly frequented by Marxist
intellectuals and Surrealist poets and artists such as Louis Aragon, Paul Eluard,
Jean Cocteau, Yves Tanguy,Joan Mir6, and MaxJacob.8
Perhaps no more spectacular venue for Benjamin's Paris d6but could be
imagined-not only or even chiefly on account of the sheer specularity of
Chareau's luminous structure ("at night... [it] glows like a ... lantern, or a huge
translucent screen across which shadows move"9) but because it seems also, at
the very same time, profoundly apposite to the antiauratic, liquidationist strain
5. Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe,vol. 4, p. 360.

6. Jacques Omnes, "L'Institut pour l'etude du fascisme (INFA)," in Gilbert Badia et al., Les Bannis
de Hitler: Accueil et luttes des exiles allemands en France (1933-1939) (Paris: Etudes Documentation
Internationales and Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 1984), p. 195.
7. On Chareau's design, see especially Kenneth Frampton, "Maison de Verre," Perspecta12 (1969),
pp. 77-126.
8. Adam Gopnik, "The Ghost of the Glass House," TheNew Yorker70, no. 12 (May9, 1994), p. 63.
9. Brian Brace Taylor,PierreChareau:Designerand Architect(Cologne: Taschen, 1992), p. 106.
J
I
ii l
t-
PierreChareau.Maison de Verre (main

salon). 1928-32. Photo:JordiSarra.
Paris, Capitalof theSovietAvant-Garde 57
manifest within Benjamin's thinking from the late 1920s onward. Specifically, I
would suggest that the Maison de Verre'stranslucency instantiates Benjamin's
broadly constructivist-rather than expressionist-reading of Paul Scheerbart's
utopian project for a future "culture of glass," for a "new glass environment
[which] will completely transform mankind," as the latter expressed it in his
1914 treatise Glass Architecture.10 Ever since receiving Scheerbart's novel
Lesabendio:Ein Asteroiden-Romanas a wedding present from Scholem in 1917,11
Benjamin had harbored a fascination with the work of this poet and novelist of
glass. But the precise terms of his fascination flew increasingly in the face of the
sentiment-a certain once-shared delight in the magical-expressed not only
in Scholem's gift to Benjamin and Dora Kellner, but also in Scheerbart's dedication
of his treatise to the expressionist architect Bruno Taut, who, in turn, dedicated
to Scheerbart the Glass Pavilion he built for the 1914 Deutsche Werkbund
Ausstellung.
Benjamin's unorthodox interpretation of Scheerbart's culture of glass
gathers momentum in the late 1920s. In his 1929 commentary on Surrealism,
for example, we find an aside in which that movement's occasionally "overprecipitous
embrace of the uncomprehended miracle of machines" and "overheated fantasies,"
are unfavorably compared with Scheerbart's "well-ventilated utopias."'2 But it is in
one of the first essays of his exile-the piercing "Experience and Poverty"published
in Prague in December 1933-that Benjamin's reading of Scheerbart comes to
a head.13 Here there is no mention of the familiar territory of expressionism with
which the prophet of glass culture is historically associated (Taut, the Crystal
Chain, the Weimar Bauhaus), perhaps partially due to a perceived correspondence
of certain aspects of that trajectory with fascism.14 Instead, Benjamin places
Scheerbart in the company of Cubism, Le Corbusier, the Dessau Bauhaus, Paul
Klee, Adolf Loos, and Brecht-diverse traffickers in what he calls the new
poverty of experience.
What is common to each of these practitioners, as Benjamin sees it, is the
conviction that the experience of the Great War, its advanced technological
violence, and its aftermath of inflation and starvation, has so thoroughly contra-
dicted, and thereby impoverished, our "inherited" experience-that body of
memories, habits, and informal knowledges accumulated before the war-that
10. Paul Scheerbart, "Glasarchitektur" (1914), trans. James Palmes, in Glass Architectureby Paul
Scheerbartand AlpineArchitecture byBruno Taut (New York:Praeger Publishers, 1972), p. 74
11. Gershom Scholem, WalterBenjamin: The Storyof a Friendship,trans. Harry Zohn (Philadelphia:
Jewish Publication Society of America, 1981), p. 38, see also p. 208.
12. Walter Benjamin, "Surrealism:The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia" (1929), trans.
EdmundJephcott, in Benjamin, SelectedWritings,vol. 2, p. 212.
13. Walter Benjamin, "Experience and Poverty" (1933), trans. Rodney Livingstone, in Benjamin,
SelectedWritings,vol. 2, pp. 731-36. (Hereafter, cited in the text as "Experience.")
14. On Benjamin's "after-history of glass architecture," see Detlef Mertins, "The Enticing and
Threatening Face of Prehistory: Walter Benjamin and the Utopia of Glass,"Assemblage29 (1996), pp.
12-17; and also Pierre Missac, WalterBenjamin'sPassages,trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 1995), ch. 6.
58 OCTOBER
the only possible avenue for cultural production in the present climate lies in
"barbarism,"in a total lack of refinement, formal learning, and received culture.
With this slap-in-the-facebut nevertheless, he asserts, "positive"concept of barbarism,
Benjamin defamiliarizes that which is but the central dialectic of vanguard theory
and practice-the rejection of cultural heritage for the sake of cultural rebirth.
But he also, significantly, attributes to barbarism a formidable pedigree: the work
of "constructors" such as Descartes and Einstein. Instead of composing on the
basis of inherited, and thus now invalid principles, the barbarian sets out to
construct from scratch, to begin at the beginning, to clear a tabula rasa, to return
to the drawing board. Emulating the engineer, he or she derives form through
centrifugal deduction, in Benjamin's opinion (Klee's figures, for example, "obey
the laws of their interior") ("Experience," p. 733).
But it is the glass-and-steel dwellings of modern architecture-prophesied by
Scheerbart and since built by Loos and Le Corbusier-which Benjamin posits as
the exemplary figure of the new culture of barbarism: "It is no coincidence that
glass is such a hard, smooth material to which nothing can be fixed.... Objects
made of glass have no 'aura.' Glass is ... the enemy of secrets ... [and] of possession."
The traditional bourgeois interior, by contrast, is the repository of traces that reg-
ister that possession ("there is no spot on which the owner has not left his
mark-the ornaments on the mantelpiece, the antimacassars on the armchairs,
the transparencies in the windows, the screen in front of the fire"). These traces-
which Brecht exhorts, in the first poem of his Lesebuchfiir Stidtbewohner(Reader
for city-dwellers), be placed under erasure-have been obliterated, Benjamin
asserts, "by Scheerbart, with his glass, and by the Bauhaus, with its steel." Each has
"created rooms in which it is hard to leave traces" ("Experience," pp. 733-34).
To the extent that the thenjust-recently-completed Maison de Verreaccom-
plishes the figuration of erasure that Benjamin confers on glass-and-steel
dwellings in 1933, the opportunity to present in its salon could only have intensi-
fied the palpable excitement about the impending cycle that he conveys in his
correspondence. But the Dalsace salon is not, in the end, to be its venue. After
printed invitations had already been sent, the series is unexpectedly canceled
in early April due to its host's sudden contraction of a serious pulmonary
inflammation.15 All that remains of the cycle per se is a convolute labeled
"Studien zum geplanten Vortrage bei Dr. Jean Dalsace," which contains twenty-
five sheets of preparatory lists, notes, and plans for Benjamin's inaugural
lecture on the political dimensions of recent trends within German literature
and culture.16
In the nature of fragments, these sheets range hither and thither, opening
myriad avenues, producing now-unreconstructable constellations of thought.
But a couple of passages stand out, for reasons that will become clear: one consists
15. p. 101; and Adorno and Benjamin, CompleteCorrespondence,

Scholem, Correspondence, p. 41.
16. See Benjamin, Gesammelte
Schriften,vol. 6 (1985), pp. 181-84, 741-46.
Chareau.Maison de Verre (stairs ascending toward the main
salon). ca. 1933. Photo:ReneZuber.? MuseedesArts decoratifs,Paris.
60 OCTOBER
of a highly schematic notation on a major concept from the Brechtian arsenal,

that of Umfunktionierung,or "refunctioning," which Benjamin epigrammatically
summarizes from the point of view of both production (its theoreticians, basic
elements, and contemporary instantiation in drama and the novel) and also
consumption (its effect on the reader). He asserts that the practice of refunctioning
is the specific responsibility of the contemporary intellectual and specialist.
Another fragment lists those German movements and individuals who have,
however, abnegated this responsibility: Expressionism (including Richard
Hulsenbeck, Gottfried Benn, and ErnstJiinger), the Neue Sachlichkeit (among
others, Erich Kastner, Kurt Tucholsky, Walter Mehring, and Albert Renger-
Patzsch), and the so-called outsiders (such as Kurt Hiller, Erich Unger, Siegfried
Kracauer, and Alfred D6blin).l7
In Benjamin's demarcation of the late Weimar cultural field for his projected
Paris audience, refunctioning's antagonists clearly outnumber its protagonists.
Furthermore, according to his scheme the concept has not one but two theoreti-
cians: In addition to Brecht himself-the figure with whom it is conventionally
more singularly associated-Benjamin also and rather intriguingly names as its
co-theorist Sergei Tret'iakov,18the Soviet writer, playwright, poet, agitator,journalist,
editor, and photographer, who helped to spearhead the Soviet avant-garde's
factographic turn in the pages of Novyi lef (1927-28). In comparison with
Brecht, whose work he translates into Russian, Tret'iakov is almost unknown
today outside a narrow circle of specialists-the more than forty-page bibliography
of his published writings19 and his considerable international significance in
the late 1920s and early 1930s having been largely obliterated, first by his arrest
and execution on a false charge of treason in 1937,20 and then by the Cold War
context of disinformation, which unhelpfully coincided with his Soviet rehabilitation
after Stalin's death.
Since no drafts of the Dalsace lectures have been preserved, we can only
speculate as to the extent to which the concept of refunctioning, and Benjamin's
intriguing displacement of Tret'iakov to the heart of the Weimar left, might
have constituted their overarching concern. What seems certain, however, is
that Benjamin, disappointed by the failure of his latest experiment but never-
theless still determined to utilize "every opportunity to take at least this first
step before a Parisian audience,"21 rolls over his preparation for the first lecture
into "The Author as Producer," an address to the Institut pour l'6tude du fas-
cisme, with which, as noted at the outset, Dalsace is also connected.
17. Ibid., pp. 182-83.

18. Ibid., p. 182.
19. See the entry for Tret'iakov in Russkie sovetskiepisateli-prozaiki:Biobibliograficheskiiukazatel'
(Moscow: Izd-vo Kniga, 1972), vol: 7, pt. 2, pp. 346-96.
20. See Vladimir Kolyazin, "'How Will He Go to His Death?' An Answer to Brecht's Question about
the Death of His Teacher the 'Tall and Kindly' Tret'iakov," The BrechtYearbook/Das BrechtJahrbuch22
(1997), pp. 169-79.
21. Scholem, Correspondence, p. 101.
Several of the convolute's tantalizingly suggestive fragments find their

elucidation in this highly polemical essay, which Benjamin drafts in German in
late April 1934. Its conglomerative construction is almost a celebration, as it were,
of the recent arrival in Paris of his Berlin archives (especially his political writings),
secretly smuggled out of Germany in fall 1933 by persons unknown.22 In particular,
Benjamin fleshes out the juxtaposition of Tret'iakov and Brecht he had originally
proposed for the Dalsace cycle. And, in fact, he transcends the latter, now going so
far as to invoke Tret'iakov's model of the "operating" or "operative" ["operierende"]
writer as the most "tangible" demonstration of the producer essay's major thesis,
namely, the dialectical entanglement of a work of art's tendency or commitment
with the technology of its making or production.23
Before entering into a discussion of the strategic function of Benjamin's
citation of the Soviet writer in an address for a Paris audience and otherwise
devoted to German cultural production, I would like first to spend some time
grappling with the major thesis that the producer essay sets forth and defends.
Such attention is necessary, I think, given that the essay, although very often
cited, has been comparatively little read in recent years.24 This has partially to
do with its having been so often coupled with, and, as a result, overwhelmingly
overshadowed by the famous "Work of Art" essay of 1936. In fact, with the
exception of the explosive significance of its materialist concerns for the New
Left in the wake of its very first publication by Rolf Tiedemann in 1966, "The
Author as Producer" has rather suffered at the hands of caricature, or simply
fallen altogether through the cracks of the great expansion of the House of
Benjamin that has occurred over the last several decades.
Tendencyx Technique
It is a truism that political tendencies are implicit in every work of art,

every artistic epoch-since, after all, they are historical configurations
of consciousness. But just as deeper rock strata emerge only where the
rock is fissured, the deep formation of "political tendency" likewise
22. Benjamin, "Der Autor als Produzent," p. 686; trans. Jephcott, "The Author as Producer," p. 770.
Hereafter cited in the text and notes by page number only, reference to the German original preceding
that of the English translation [the latter occasionally slightly modified].) Due to certain inconsisten-
cies in Benjamin's correspondence, it is moot whether his address was eventually presented at the INFA
or not (for summaries of the problem, see Tiedemann and Schweppenhauser's editorial note,
GesammelteSchriften,vol. 2, pt. 3, pp. 1460-1463; and also Chryssoula Kambas, WalterBenjamin im Exil
[Tubingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1983], p. 25-26). Whatever the case, the fact remains that "The
Author as Producer" was most certainly drafted, and intended, as a live interlocution with that
particular audience. (And, without wanting to complicate matters unduly, one could even suggest that
the producer essay was deliveredto the INFA insofar as it was written for it.)
23. Scholem, Correspondence, pp. 52, 72, 82.
24. One exception is Mary Lucia Wickerhauser Bun's inquiry into Benjamin's debt to Soviet literary
theory, "The Author as Producer: Issues of Soviet Literary Theory in Walter Benjamin's Cultural
Criticism" (Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University, 1990).
62 OCTOBER
reveals itself only in the fissures of art history (and works of art). The
technical revolutions are the fracture points of artistic development; it
is there that the different political tendencies may be said to come to
the surface. In every new technical revolution the political tendency is
transformed, as if by its own volition, from a concealed element of art
into a manifest one.
-Walter Benjamin25
The producer essay poses the problem of the role and efficacy of the intellectual-
here, a broadly inclusive category comprising both writers and artists-in the class
struggle. Benjamin seeks to determine, in particular, the degree to which "certain
literary groups" on the left are themselves responsible for the National Socialist
"defeat" of the German intelligentsia, and thus for the condition of exile in which
the left now finds itself.26 In order to make such a determination, Benjamin
locates the root of the latter's manifest inefficacy in the way in which it typically
defines and deploys the concept of commitment or tendency (Tendenz) in the
work of art. Insofar as the concept of tendency has been locked into an utterly
banal opposition to the notion of "quality"(Qualitdt), it is but a "perfectly useless"
instrument for materialist aesthetics. In order to reconfigure tendency as an
efficacious instrument, the precise connection between the two constituent terms
of the antithesis must be retheorized (p. 684/p. 769).
In confronting the left's inefficacious theorization of Tendenz,Benjamin is
taking up a concept derived in the mid-nineteenth century from judicial and
administrative lexica, and having a long and much-contested history within
Marxist aesthetics. In a 1932 essay, the Hungarian Marxist philosopher and lit-
erary critic Georg Lukacs, for example, rejects the concept altogether on the
grounds that it cannot be extricated from its origins in a bourgeois antithesis
of "pure art" and "tendency," wherein to be "tendentious" is to be "inartistic"
and "hostile-to-art." Within bourgeois aesthetics, Lukacs explains, "a text is
seen as displaying 'tendency' if its class basis and aim are hostile ... to the pre-
vailing orientation." One's own tendency is thus "not a tendency at all," he
wryly observes, "only that of one's opponent." Furthermore, it is usually the
"more politically and socially progressive trend" that is "reproached for its 'ten-
dency,' rather than the reactionary trend." As such, tendency is but a bourgeois
"term of abuse" unfortunately now worn by young Communist writers, Lukacs
regrets, as a "badge of honour"27
25. Benjamin, "Reply to Oscar A. H. Schmitz" (1927), trans. Rodney Livingstone, in Benjamin,
SelectedWritings,vol. 2, pp. 16-17.
27. Georg Lukacs, "Tendenz oder Parteilichkeit," Die Linkskurve4, no. 6 (June 1932), pp. 13-21;
trans. David Fernbach in Georg Lukacs, Essays on Realism,ed. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press, 1981), p. 35.
Benjamin is no doubt familiar with this 1932 essay by his early mentor, whose
History and Class Consciousness(1923), along with the proletarian dramaturgy of
the Latvian Communist Asja Lacis, had played a fundamental role in awakening
his initial interest in historical materialism in the mid-1920s. But the reasons for
this familiarity are not limited to the fact of that early, formative relationship.
Rather, Lukacs's attack on the concept of tendency had appeared in Die Linkskurve
(Berlin), the organ of the KPD-affiliated League of Proletarian Revolutionary
Writers (Bund proletarisch-revolutionarer Schriftsteller [BPRS]). It is one of a
cluster of like-minded essays published in the League's journal in the second half
of 1931 and 1932 by some of its most prominent members (aside from Lukacs
himself, also the German poetJohannes Becher and the Yugoslav writer [and later
art historian] Oto Bihalji-M6rin), who together launch a critique of so-called
committed literature, or Tendenzkunst,on the grounds of its (putative) lack of
quality. In doing so, they insist upon precisely the opposition of tendency and
quality that Benjamin, in 1934, seeks to overcome.
Of further significance is the fact that Lukacs, Becher, and Bihalji-M6rin
typically conflate that which they perceive as a lack of quality with the experimental
forms and techniques of modernism in general. As such, they signify the
League's mid-1931 turning away from its earlier exploration of a variety of tech-
niques in proletarian literature, in favor of a controversial reorientation toward
the platform of the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (Rossiiskaia
assotsiatsiia proletarskikh pisatelei [RAPP]), which foregrounds concepts of
quality, illusionistic modes of realism, and the preservation of literary heritage,
particularly the classics of the nineteenth century by Balzac and Tolstoy.
Lukacs, having been sent from Moscow to Berlin in summer 1931 (probably as
an emissary of the Comintern), plays a crucial role in prompting Die
Linkskurve'srepackaging of RAPP policy for the germanophone Communist left
in Western Europe.28
It seems plausible to suggest, therefore, that Benjamin takes up the problem
of tendency and quality partially in order to reopen, and challenge, the very
terms of the League's rapprochement with the RAPP in the early 1930s. In contrast
to the League-of which he is not a member-Benjamin does not dismiss tendency
but rather seeks instead to redeem it for materialist theory and practice by dissolving
the antithesis in which it has been historically incarcerated. For many on the
left, he observes, tendency is all that matters: "a work that shows the correct
political tendency need show no other quality." (Precisely, that is to say, the
position attacked by the League.) But rather than simply champion tendency's
opposite term, quality, Benjamin asserts the inextricability of the terms of the
antithesis itself: "a work that exhibits the correct tendency must of necessity
have every other quality" (p. 684/p. 769).
28. See David Pike, German Writersin Soviet Exile, 1933-1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1982), esp. ch. 2; see also idem, Lukdcs and Brecht(Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1985).
64 OCTOBER
In support of this initial hypothesis, Benjamin marches the reader through a

succession of breathless, almost syllogistic assertions: "The tendency of a literary
work can be politically correct only if it is also literarily correct." For Benjamin this
means that "the politically correct tendency includes a literary tendency." (By the
latter term, we should perhaps understand something like creative method.) To
this Benjamin then makes an assertion that is crucial to his developing thesis:
"This literary tendency, which is implicitly or explicitly contained in every correct
political tendency of a work, alone constitutes the quality of that work."With this
weighty assertion in hand, Benjamin proceeds to his first summa: "The correct
political tendency of a work thus includes its literary quality becauseit includes its
literary tendency"(pp. 684-85/p. 769 [original emphasis]).
Then, after a short detour through some of the ground rules of historical
materialism, Benjamin pushes his initial summa a step further: "If... we stated
earlier that the correct political tendency of a work includes its literary quality,
because it includes its literary tendency, we can now formulate this more precisely
by saying that this literary tendency can consist either in progress or in regression
of literary technique [Technik]" (p. 686/p. 770). The upshot of this expansion
of his initial formulation is that for a work of art to embody the right political
tendency-for it to be "useful to the proletariat in the class struggle" (p. 684/p.
768)-the technology of its production must be progressive. To sum up: In
order to formulate an efficacious concept of tendency, Benjamin dissolves its
conventional opposition to quality by redefining quality itself as a matter of literary
tendency, and the latter, in turn, as a matter of progressive or regressive literary
technique.
Thus, in the course of defending his initial hypothesis as to the inextricability
of tendency and quality, Benjamin in fact arrives at a significantly more aggressive
thesis than that with which he began: A "functional interdependence [Abhdngigkeit]
always, and under all conditions exists," he ultimately asserts, "between the correct
political tendency and progressive literary technique" (p. 686/p. 770)29 It is in this
assertion of the mutual imbrication of a work of art's political commitment with
the technology of its making or production-of which Tret'iakov provides the most
tangible demonstration-that we find the real stakes of "The Author as Producer":
the reformulation of the old problem of tendency or commitment in terms no
longer of subject matter or semantic content, but rather of technique. The key to
the efficacy of leftist cultural production lies in the progressive or regressive
character of its technique, Benjamin argues, and not in the inversion of the terms
of an untenable, in his view, antithesis.
In foregrounding "literary technique" as the linchpin of his redefinition
of tendency, Benjamin believes that he is resolving one of the great obstacles to
the forging of a sophisticated materialist criticism. But the word Technikposes
29. "[D]ie funktionale Abhangigkeit, in der die richtige politische Tendenz und die fortschrittliche
literarische Technik immer und unter alien Umstanden stehen" (p. 686/p. 770).
problems of its own, its precise meaning slipping as it courses through his essay.
In the most rudimentary sense, Benjamin uses Technikhere to refer to the specific
methods, manners, or practices of literary production, such as, for example,
illusionism or montage. But because the traditional delimitation of the category
itself of literature is under such intense pressure in the producer essay, and is
subject to all manner of center-periphery shifts (to borrow Iurii Tynianov's
pithy formulation30) that continually redefine its borders, Benjamin also sometimes
seems to use the word Technikto refer more broadly to genre or even medium
of production.
But it is the modification of Technikby the evaluative adjective "progressive"
(fortschrittliche)that presents Benjamin's readers with an even trickier problem.
What is a progressive technique? By introducing this modifier, is Benjamin
referring-necessarily or even at all-to the newer, so-called technical media of
industrial modernity such as film and broadcast radio? Does he promote such
media as inherently more progressive (and thus inherently more "useful to the
proletariat in the class struggle") than the traditional media of theater and the
novel (which are equally, though differently, technical)? Is Benjamin in fact
proposing that progressivity or regressivity is a property immanent to, or inherent
in, a specific technique?
On the one hand, it is true that in its ambivalence toward the concept of
cultural heritage, the producer essay carries over the liquidationist thrust of its
author's 1933 "Experience and Poverty," which I discussed earlier. And it is also
true that, like many of his contemporaries in the 1930s, Benjamin therefore
tends to privilege the new media, or rather their potential, valorizing their as
yet not fully tried utopian collective dimensions. On the other hand, if we sur-
vey the specific examples he distinguishes as progressive in the 1934 essay, we
find that it is not film and radio, as it turns out, but rather particular instantia-
tions of the refunctioning of such traditional media as the concert, the
theater, or the book jacket, or, of some hybrid thereof (such as the infusion of
film into theater or photography into literature). On balance, therefore,
Benjamin is far from proposing an immanent theory of progressive literary
technique. But how, then, are we to understand this linchpin concept of his
thesis? To answer this question, we need to consider the materialist basis of
Benjamin's argument-specifically, to locate the theoretical armature of his
reformulation of tendency in his particular, if always provisional, interpretation
of historical materialism.
30. "At a period when a genre is disintegrating," Tynianov writes (in a way entirely prescient for
Benjamin's preoccupation with the recasting of the hierarchy of literary genres), "it shifts from the
centre to the periphery, and a new phenomenon floats in to take its place in the centre, coming up
from among the trivia, out of the backyards and low haunts of literature"; see Tynianov, "The Literary
Fact" (1924), trans. Ann Shukman, in ModernGenreTheory,ed. and introduced by David Duff (Harlow,
Essex: Pearson Education Limited, 2000), p. 33.
66 OCTOBER
Marx's Theoryof History
Although not invoked explicitly by name, Benjamin's reformulation of

tendency as a matter of technique unquestionably draws upon one of the most
fundamental, and controversial, aspects of Marx's theory of history. In the 1859
Preface to A Contributionto the Critiqueof Political Economy,Marx famously argues
that each mode of production-ancient, feudal, capitalist, and so forth-has
two major components: its forces of production and its relations of production.
Most minimally defined, the forces consist in a given mode's means of production
(that is, its raw materials, and the instruments with which those materials are
worked, such as tools, machines, equipment, and so forth), and its labor power
(that is, the strength, faculties, skills, knowledges, techniques, capacity for
invention, and so forth, which enable its producers to work with the means of
production). The relations of production, by contrast, consist in the class or
social relations of production obtaining within a given mode of production.
Under capitalism, for example, the relations of production consist in the bour-
geoisie's legal ownership of, or effective control over, the means of production,
while the proletariat owns or controls only its labor power.
Marx argues in the 1859 Preface and elsewhere that it is the productive
interrelation of these two components-in fact, their productive contradiction-
that drives the historical shift from one mode of production to the next: "At a
certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come
into conflict with the existing relations of production or ... with the property
relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From
forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their
fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution."31 The existing relations of
production, that is to say, begin to give way at the precise moment when they
start to hinder, rather than continue to promote as they have hitherto done, the
further development of the productive forces. Since history, as Marx defines it,
consists in the succession of the modes of production, the contradiction between
productive forces and relations may thus be understood not only as the motor
of history itself in general, but also of the revolutionary transition from capitalism
to communism in particular.
Insofar as Benjamin's thesis as to the functional interdependence of tendency
and technique implicitly draws upon Marx's argument, it is important to note
certain particularities in the way that it does so. First, Benjamin transposes the
31. Karl Marx, "Preface,"A Contributionto the Critiqueof Political Economy,with an introduction by
Maurice Dobb (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971), p. 21. Benjamin may also have drawn-
particularly in setting the tone of his essay-from Marx and Friedrich Engels' earlier, collaborative,
and more highly polemical exposition of their materialist conception of history as an attack on both
philosophical idealism and German socialism in The GermanIdeology(1845-46), which was first published
in its entirety in 1932; see Marx and Engels, CollectedWorks,vol. 5 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1976),
esp. pp. 35-54.
constitutive contradiction of productive forces and relations from the economic

foundation-which is where Marx locates it-to the superstructural realm of
cultural production. The form of consciousness that is the work of art is
thereby posited as itself a matter of production rather than as a reflection or
refraction of the economic base. To some extent, therefore, Benjamin's thesis
redraws Marx's metaphor of base and superstructure. Differentiating his enterprise
from that of other materialists (who concern themselves primarily with a work's
manifest attitude-whether affirmative and thus reactionary, or contestatory
and thus revolutionary-toward the social relations of production of its time),
Benjamin seeks to address what he considers a narrower, more modest question,
namely, a work's position or function within the relations of literary production
of its time.
To inquire into a work's position or function within such relations,
Benjamin then adds, is to concern oneself "directly with [that work's] literary
technique" (p. 686/p. 770). This is a crucial, but potentially obscure moment in
the producer essay-in terms both of Benjamin's formulation of its major thesis
and also his particular reading of Marx. Why is a concern with a work's position
within the relations of literary production to be understood as a concern with
its technique? It is because Benjamin hypostatizes technique-one of the con-
stituent elements of the productive forces-as that which has the capacity to
either affirm or transform those relations of production. A progressive technique,
Benjamin seems to believe, has the capacity to transform the existing relations
of production and thereby lead, as Marx put it, to social revolution-to the
socialization of the means of production.
The basis for Benjamin's belief-and this is my second note apropos his
recourse to historical materialism-is a technologically determinist reading of the
contradiction of productive forces and relations. In other words, in his producer
essay, Benjamin implicitly vests explanatory primacy in the productive forces, tech-
nique being chief among them. In doing so, his essay engages in an affirmative
reading of one of Marxism's most enduring controversies, namely, the question of
whether or not Marx's theorization of the contradiction of the productive forces
and relations in fact assigns explanatory primacy to the former over the latter.
While elsewhere in Benjamin's writings, particularly of the later 1930s, we find evi-
dence of his interest in a nondeterminist reading of Marx's theory of history-in,
for example, his convolute X citations to Karl Korsch's antitechnocratic concept of
the productive forces, or, in his late reflections on historical materialism in the
"Theses on the Philosophy of History" (1940)32-a determinist reading of that the-
ory nevertheless provides the theoretical armature for the producer essay's
assertion of the functional interdependence of tendency and technique.
32. See Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin
McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 668; and also
idem, "Theses on the Philosophy of History" (1940), trans. Harry Zohn, in Illuminations,ed. and with
an introduction by Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), pp. 253-64.
68 OCTOBER
The technological determinism of Benjamin's thesis has drawn criticism

from all sides. While non-Marxists tend to criticize the 1934 essay on the
grounds of vulgar materialism, Marxists, particularly of the New Left, tend to
criticize it on the grounds that it is so vulgar that it is unmaterialist. Among the
former, we find the essay's very first reader, Klaus Mann (the novelist, journalist,
and editor of the Amsterdam-based 6migre journal Die Sammlung, in which
Benjamin initially hoped to publish the address), who confided in his Tagebuch
on May 1, 1934: "Tremendously annoying-despite all its cleverness. The
grimmest materialism applied to literature is always embarrassing."33 Among
those espousing greater sympathy with Benjamin's materialist project, we might
turn to Rob Burns, for whom Benjamin's "analysis of technology is tendentially
unmaterialist . . . nothing is more remote from Marxism than emphasis on
innovation and technique as the principal agency of historical change since
this forgoes a proper consideration of the objectively determinant factors of
class and of the social organization of production."34
In the present context my concern cannot be to evaluate whether or not,
in implicitly vesting primacy in the forces, Benjamin is in fact reading Marx
"correctly," still less whether or not Marx himself vests primacy in them, and
still less again whether or not the forces are indeed primary.35 My ambition has
been rather more modest: to suggest that in order to grasp what Benjamin
means by progressive technique, we must acknowledge the uncited dependency
of his reformulation of tendency as a matter of technique on a technologically
determinist reading of the contradiction of forces and relations. In order to
lend further support to this suggestion, I want to turn now to consider
Benjamin's filtering of Marx's theory of history through the lens of a concept
noted above, that of Umfunktionierung,or, refunctioning, a filtering that is the
direct result of that which Benjamin later describes in a letter to Adorno as his
"decisive encounter with Brecht."36
Brecht'sUmfunktionierung
Himself drawing upon Marx's theory of history, Brecht develops his concept
of Umfunktionierung around 1929-30, during the period in which he and
Benjamin first became acquainted in Berlin. At this time, Brecht was working in
collaboration with the composer Hanns Eisler on the learning play, Die
MaJfname,and gathering together his various writings on literature and the new
media in a series of compendia collectively entitled Versuche.As his various
33. Klaus Mann, Tagebiicher1934 bis 1935, ed. Joachim Heimannsberg, Peter Laemmle, Wilfred F.
Schoeller (Munich: Edition Spanenberg, 1989), p. 31.
34. Rob Burns, "Understanding Benjamin," RedLetters(London) 7 (1978), p. 29.
35. See G. A. Cohen, Karl Marx's Theoryof History:A Defence(Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1978), p. 134.
36. Adorno and Benjamin, CompleteCorrespondence, p. 89.
commentaries on Brecht make clear, Benjamin was especially fascinated by the

material presented in these anthologies, often citing in particular Brecht's earliest
exposition of his concept of refunctioning in "The Modern Theatre Is the Epic
Theatre (Notes to the opera Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny)," which
appeared in the second volume of the Versuchein 1930.37
Benjamin's invocation of Umfunktionierungin the producer essay may be
summarized under more or less two main points. First, in order to play an
efficacious role in the class struggle, the intelligentsia must acknowledge its
particular position within the relations of literary production. (Just as one
must inquire apropos the work of art's position within those relations.) Within
capitalist relations of literary production, the intellectual-whether artist or
writer-is, Benjamin argues, deprived of effective control over his or her means
of production. In support of this argument, Benjamin cites Brecht's notes to
Mahagonny:"The lack of clarity about their situation that prevails among musicians,
writers, and critics has immense consequences that are far too little considered.
For, thinking that they are in possession of an apparatus that in reality possesses
them, they defend an apparatus over which they no longer have any control
and that is no longer, as they still believe, a means for the producers, but has
become a means against the producers" (p. 697/p. 777).38
The first step toward any efficacious contribution to the class struggle on
the part of intellectuals, therefore, is their acknowledgment that, within the
current relations of literary production, they are effectively deprived of either
ownership of, or effective control over, the means of production. One must
acknowledge, in other words, one's position as a producer, one's proletarianiza-
tion under capital. (It is worth noting-since this has caused some confusion in
the literature-that Benjamin uses the word "producer" [Produzent] here chiefly
to identify a particular class position, or positioning, within capitalist relations of
production, rather than to refer to any particular category of labor as such.)
But it is precisely their position within the process of production, Benjamin
argues, that the German bourgeois left-in particular activists such as Hiller and
Heinrich Mann, and the Neue Sachlichkeit writers and photographers Kistner,
Mehring, and Renger-Patzsch-fail to acknowledge. This failure, which Benjamin
attributes to their insupportable belief that the realm of ideas or consciousness
37. See Brechton Theatre:TheDevelopmentof an Aesthetic,ed. and trans. John Willett (New York:Hill &
Wang, 1964), pp. 33-43.
38. See ibid., p. 34. Brecht describes this condition of deprivation even more starkly a year later, in
his long and brilliant reflection, "The Threepenny Lawsuit: A Sociological Experiment," which appeared
in the Versuchein 1931: "The migration of the means of production away from the producers signals
the proletarianization of the producers. Like the manual labourer, the intellectual worker has only his
naked labour power to offer and nothing more than that. And, just like the manual labourer, he needs
these means of production more and more to exploit his labour power (because production is becoming
ever more 'technical')"; see BertoltBrechton Film and Radio, ed. and trans. Marc Silberman (London:
Methuen, 2000), p. 162. For a critique of Benjamin's (adoption of Brecht's) adequation of manual and
intellectual workers, see Burns, "Understanding Benjamin," p. 27. But, as Benjamin himself notes, "the
proletarianization of an intellectual hardly ever makes a proletarian" (p. 700/p. 780).
70 OCTOBER
determines social existence, rather than the other way around as Marx and
Engels had argued,39 has serious consequences for the efficacy, or lack thereof,
of their revolutionary sentiments. The immediate assimilation, and even propaga-
tion of their "revolutionary themes" by the "bourgeois apparatus of production
and publication" (p. 692/p. 774) demonstrates very precisely that "a political
tendency, however revolutionary it may seem, has a counterrevolutionary function
so long as the writer feels his solidarity with the proletariat only in his attitudes,
not as a producer" (p. 689/ p. 772).
In the pages of the Nouvelle RevueFrancaise, the prestigious journal that he
associates most of all with his hero Andr6 Gide and in which he himself is
endeavoring to publish, Benjamin encounters a similar argument concerning
the position of the intellectuals in the production process. In a "Lettre ouverte
a Andre Gide" which appeared in the NRF's issue for April 1, 1934, the literary
critic Ramon Fernandez announces his newfound conviction, in the wake of
the fascist riots of February 1934 (to be discussed below), that instead of trying
to win the working class over to a now-defunct liberalism, "[t]he task is to win
over the intellectuals to the working class by making them aware of the identity
of their spiritual enterprises and of their conditions as producers."40 It is not
difficult to imagine the passion with which Benjamin-whose correspondence
at this time endlessly laments his felt deprivation of any means of intellectual produc-
tion,41 makes this quotation the producer essay's epigraph (p. 683/p. 768).
Having acknowledged one's proletarianized position in the production
process, the intellectual's second step toward making an efficacious contribution
to the class struggle is to invent strategies-progresssive techniques, in short-by
which to regain effective control over the means of production and thereby
transform the relations of production. The left intellectual's work "will never be
merely work on products but always, at the same time, work on the means of
production ... his products must have, over and above their character of works, an
organizing function" (p. 696/p. 777). The kinds of transformation Benjamin is
seeking are those that overturn those pivotal dichotomies of bourgeois aesthetic
experience, which are founded on the division of labor, namely, producer and
consumer, performer and spectator, writer and reader, individual and collective
("the more consumers [the refunctioned apparatus] is able to turn into producers"
and the more "readers or spectators into collaborators," the better [that apparatus]
39. See Marx, "Preface,"p. 21; and also Marx and Engels, CollectedWorks,vol. 5, p. 36.
40. Ramon Fernandez, "Lettre ouverte a Andre Gide," NouvelleRevueFrancaise247 (April 1, 1934),
p. 705.
41. "Mycommunism is absolutely nothing other than the expression of certain experiences I have
undergone in my thinking and in my life," Benjamin writes to Scholem just days after drafting the
producer essay; "it is a drastic, not infertile expression of the fact that the present intellectual industry
finds it impossible to make room for my thinking, just as the present economic order finds it impossible
to accommodate my life; ... it represents the obvious, reasoned attempt on the part of a man who is
completely or almost completely deprived of any means of production to claim his right to them, both
in his thinking and in his life" (Scholem, Correspondence, p. 110).
will be" [p. 696/p. 777]). Hence, we find Benjamin's enthusiasm for the newspaper
which "revises ... the distinction between author and reader" (p. 689/p. 772), for
the work ofJohn Heartfield, "whose technique made the book cover into a political
instrument" (p. 693/p. 775), for Eisler's "transformation ... of [the] concert into a
political meeting" through his introduction of the word (p. 694/p. 776), and for
Brecht's alteration of "the functional connection between stage and public, text
and performance, director and actor" through his deployment of a montage-
derived device of interruption (p. 697/p. 778).
Tret'iakov's Operativnik
Having unpacked the materialist basis of Benjamin's thesis as to the functional

interdependence of the work of art's tendency and its technique, we return now to
the question of his provocative citation of Tret'iakov's model of the operative
writer as its most tangible demonstration. Like many of his Western European
counterparts obsessed by the crisis of the intellectual under capital, Benjamin
often looks toward (or projects) the Soviet Union as a place where the ancient rift
between poet and polis had been healed, a place where the reconciliation of artist
and society had been achieved. His long-standing interest in Soviet cultural
production is manifest in numerous essays and reviews published in the wake of
his 1926-27 sojourn in Moscow, itself richly documented in the MoscowDiary.42
Although certain critical problems come to the fore in these earlier writings-
such as Benjamin's diffidence toward the transfer of the dictatorship of the
proletariat to the realm of art (perhaps one of the main stumbling blocks to his
joining the KPD in 1927), or the seemingly endless debates over form and content
that pitted Soviet cultural organizations against one another-their character
overall tends toward the summary exposition or informative report, the polemical
tone of which is rather mute. Furthermore, in all of these texts, Tret'iakov
barely rates a mention, which only makes all the more striking Benjamin's
extremely enthusiastic and highly polemical endorsement of him in the 1934
essay. What do we make of, and how might we account for, therefore,
Benjamin's first-time displacement of the Soviet writer to the heart of German
cultural production? And what is the significance of Paris as both the occasion
for, and locus of, this displacement?
Along with Vladimir Mayakovsky, Nikolai Aseev, Osip Brik, Aleksandr
Rodchenko, and others, Tret'iakov is a member of the Lef group of Futurist,
Constructivist, and Productivist artists and writers, whose journals of the 1920s-Lef
(1923-25), and its reincarnation Novyi lef (1927-28)-structure the Productivist
opposition to the myriad embryonic strands of socialist realism then emerging in
42. See Benjamin, SelectedWritings,vol. 2, pp. 6-11, 12-15, 16-19, 22-46, 47-49, 273-75; idem,
GesammelteSchriften,vol. 4, pt. 1, pp. 481-83, 486-87, vol. 6, pt. 1, pp. 591-95; idem, MoscowDiary, ed.
Gary Smith, trans. Richard Sieburth (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986).
72 OCTOBER
both the literary and visual arts.43 In the late 1920s, the form this Productivist
opposition takes is the "literature of fact" (literaturafakta, often contracted to
litfakta). Its chief hallmark is documentary prose, which not only comes to replace
the erstwhile Futurists' own earlier emphasis on agitation through verse, but was
promoted specifically in opposition to the RAPP's insistence on "invented belles
lettres,"44and to its increasing emphasis on the realist novel as a vehicle for the
portrayal and awakening of revolutionary commitment.
The factographers argue, on the contrary, that it is in newspapers, diaries,
sketches, feuilletons, biographies, memoirs, and travelogues, rather than in the
traditional literary media of poetry and novel, that the committed writer could
best contribute to the construction of Soviet life,45 through a "utilitarian, jour-
nalistic work on current social and economic problems" such as "raising literacy,
doubling the harvest, collectivization of agriculture, raising the productivity of
labor, and other everyday matters."46 Tret'iakov attacks the belief that a "red
Tolstoy" is in the making-such a belief is, he polemicizes with the RAPP, as
43. On Novyi lef, see Leah Dickerman, "Aleksandr Rodchenko's Camera-Eye: Lef Vision and the
Production of Revolutionary Consciousness" (Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1997), esp. ch.
4, "The Fact and the Photograph."
44. Sergei Tret'iakov, "Happy New Year! Happy New Left' Novyi Lef 1 (1928); ed. and trans. Anna
Lawton and Herbert Eagle, in Russian Futurism ThroughIts Manifestoes,1912-1928, ed. Anna Lawton
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), p. 267.
45. Nikolai Chuzhak, "Literaturazhiznestroeniia," Literaturafakta: Pervyisbornikmaterialovrabotnikov
LEFa(Moscow: Izd-vo Federatsiia, 1929), p. 60; see Vahan D. Barooshian, "RussianFuturism in the Late
1920s: Literature of Fact," Slavic and East EuropeanJournal15, no. 1 (1971), p. 41.
46. Tret'iakov, "What'sNew,"NovyiLef 9 (1928); trans. in RussianFuturism,p. 271.
Anonymous. Sergei Tret'iakov. ca. 1930. From Tret'iakov,

Mesiats v derevne (iiun'-iiul' 1930 g.): Operativnye
ocherki (Moscow: Izd-vo Federatsiia, 1931).
absurd as the notion of a "proletarian church or proletarian czar." The new

"novel" of Soviet life is "no War and Peace," but rather contemporary reality
itself, the medium of which, he proposes, is the mass-circulation newspaper in
which readers and writers are themselves the dramatic characters.47
In the producer essay, Benjamin promulgates not only Tret'iakov's claims
for the newspaper, however, but also the latter's definition and embodiment of
the ocherkist-operativnik,
or "operative sketch writer,"48a model for cultural practice
fashioned out of his experience as a writer-in-residence on a kolkhoz(collective
farm), itself a new (and, in retrospect, catastrophic) model for agricultural produc-
tion established under the first Five-Year Plan (1928-32). Between 1928 and
1930, Tret'iakov spent extended periods at the Kommunisticheskii Maiak
(Communist Lighthouse), a commune established in the immediate aftermath
of the Civil War.During the early years of the plan, the Maiak is rapidly transformed
into a kolkhozand is then merged with several other farms to form a gigantic
agricultural combine (kombinat), the Vyzov.
Tret'iakov promotes operativism as a major new advance upon reportage per
se. The latter had quickly degenerated, as Tret'iakovhimself had predicted it would,49
into a merely aesthetic genre, particularly in the hands of the Neue Sachlichkeit
writers and photographers whom Benjamin so despises in his essay, and whom he
suggests bear at least some of the responsibility for the defeat of the German
intelligentsia. Tret'iakov'soperativism transcends the factographer's valorization of
the "little reporter" over the belles-lettrist,50 moving on instead to differentiate
between different kinds of reporters-between the merely informative journalist on
the one hand, and the operative writer on the other, who participates directly in the
"life of the material" in an organizational capacity. A case in point is Tret'iakov
himself, who is involved at more or less every level of the collective's operations,
including, as Benjamin enumerates, "calling mass meetings; collecting funds to pay
for tractors; persuading independent peasants to enter the kolkhoz;inspecting the
reading rooms; creating wall newspapers and editing the kolkhoznewspaper;
reporting for the Moscow newspapers; [and] introducing radio and mobile movie
houses" (p. 687/p. 770). The myriad dimensions of his work on the cultural front at
the Vyzov is schematized in a diagram that Tret'iakov publishes in his 1930 book of
the same name.51 "To invent an important theme is novelistic belles-lettres,"
Tret'iakov sums up in 1931, "to discover an important theme is reportage," but "to
contribute constructively to an important theme is operativism."52This differentia-
47. Tret'iakov, "Novyi Lev Tolstoi," Novyi lef 1 (1927), pp. 34-35, 36, 38.
48. Tret'iakov, Mesiats v derevne(iiun'-iiul' 1930 g.): Operativnyeocherki(Moscow: Izd-vo Federatsiia,
1931), p. 13.
49. Tret'iakov, "What's New,"p. 271.
50. Ibid.
51. Tret'iakov, Vyzov:Kolkhoznyeocherki(Moscow: Izd-vo Federatsiia, 1930), p. 325.
52. Tret'iakov, "Der Schriftsteller und das Sozialistische Dorf," Das Neue Russland, nos. 8-9 (March
1931), p. 42; quoted in trans. in Hubertus Gassner, "Heartfield's Moscow Apprenticeship, 1931-1932,"
in John Heartfield(New York:Abrams, 1992), p. 260.
CXEMA
KYAbTnPOCBETPABOTbI
KOM6MHATA.BbI3OB"
Anonymous.Diagram of cultural and educational work at the

Vyzov combine. ca. 1930. Reproducedfrom Tret'iakov,Vyzov:
Kolkhoznye ocherki (Moscow:Izd-voFederatsiia,1930).
tion of reportage and operativism is crucial to Tret'iakov's refunctioning of the

literary sketch, a prose genre with not only a long history but also tremendous
popularity during the first Five-Year Plan.53
In placing Tret'iakov at the epicenter of his theoretical reformulation of
the concept of tendency in 1934, Benjamin is in effect, I want to suggest, salvaging
the memory of a controversial literary "event" that had occurred during the last
years of the Weimar Republic. This was the series of lectures on the function of
the writer that Tret'iakov delivered in Berlin, Vienna, Stuttgart, Frankfurt,
53. On the contemporary popularity of the sketch genre, see Harriet Borland, SovietLiteraryTheory
and Practice During the First Five-YearPlan, 1928-32 (New York: King's Crown Press of Columbia
University Press, 1950), pp. 38-74.
Hamburg, Dresden, Aachen, and other cities in 1931,54 in which he explicated

his new theory of operativism. On January 21, 1931, Tret'iakov presented an
overview of his work on the kolkhozto the Gesellschaft der Freunde des Neuen
RuBland in Berlin. Benjamin may well have attended the lecture since he had
covered for Die literarischeWelta talk given at the Gesellschaft the previous year
by Tret'iakov's Lef colleague Brik.55On April 19, 1931, on the eve of his departure
for Moscow after four months in Germany and Austria, Tret'iakov presented a
second lecture, "The New Type of Writer," in which he further expounded his
operativist model.56 Then, in the fall, the Malik Verlag issued Feld-Herren:Der
Kampf um eine Kollektiv-Wirtschaft(Commanders of the field: The struggle for a
collective economy) with a cover designed by the publisher Wieland Herzfelde
and his brother Heartfield.57 This German edition-from the introduction to
which Benjamin draws in particular58-comprises an abridged compilation and
translation of two recent anthologies of Tret'iakov's essays and reports, Vyzov
(1930) and Mesiatsv derevne(1931), in which the Soviet writer recounts extensively
his collective farm experience and the development of operativism.
Benjamin's 1934 invocation of Tret'iakov is significantly rooted in and
prompted by the controversy surrounding the Soviet writer's 1931 visit to Berlin,
and the debate that quickly ensued between various factions of the German
intelligentsia, preoccupied as it also was with the crisis of its own social role and
efficacy.59 In a radio broadcast, for example, Gottfried Benn reports that the
entire literary world of Berlin had turned out for Tret'iakov's lecture, and that
it was vigorously endorsed by what he calls, pejoratively, "the Tret'iakov group
in Berlin,"60within whose number Benjamin is most certainly to be counted,
along with Brecht.61 Benn himself, however, an Expressionist poet on the brink
54. Fritz Mierau, Erfindung und Korrektur:TretjakowsAsthetik der Operativitdt (Berlin: Akademie-
Verlag, 1976), p. 21.
55. Benjamin, "Russische Debatte auf Deutsch," Die literarischeWelt(April 7, 1930); reprinted in his
GesammelteSchriften,vol. 4, pp. 591-95. Tret'iakov's first Berlin lecture was published in March 1931 in
the Gesellschaft's journal, Das Neue Russland (see Tret'iakov, "Der Schriftsteller und das Sozialistische
Dorf," pp. 39-52).
56. Fritz Mierau, "Tretyakow in Berlin," Berliner Begegnungen: Ausldndische Kiinstler in Berlin
1918-1933 (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1987), p. 207; see also Gassner, "Heartfield's Moscow Apprenticeship,"
p. 259.
57. Tret'iakov, Feld-Herren:Der Kampfum eine Kollektiv-Wirtschaft, trans. Rudolf Selke (Berlin: Malik
Verlag, 1931).
58. I should note that in referring to Tret'iakov's model of the "operierende Schriftsteller,"
Benjamin thus slightly modifies and generalizes Selke's more literal translation of Tret'iakov's
neologism ocherkist-operativnikas "operierende Skizzenschreiber" (ibid., p. 23).
59. For summaries of Tret'iakov's reception in Germany, see Hugh Ridley, "Tretjakovin Berlin," in
Cultureand Societyin the WeimarRepublic,ed. Keith Bullivant (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
1977), pp. 150-65; and also A. Kr. [sic], "Nemetskaia do-gitlerovskaia pechat' o tvorchestve S. M.
Tret'iakova,"Literaturnyikritik(Moscow) 6 (November 1933), p. 165.
60. A transcript of the radio broadcast was translated as Benn's untitled contribution to
"Metanthropological Crisis: A Manifesto," Transition(Paris) 21 (March 1932), pp. 107-12.
61. See Klaus V6olker,Brecht:A Biography,trans. John Nowell (New York: Seabury Press, 1978), p.
161.
76 OCTOBER
of a major shift to the right, utterly repudiates Tret'iakov's reconfiguration of

the relationship between art and life as but an empty negation of fundamental,
read humanist, cultural values.
But Tret'iakov's operativism drew criticism not only from the center and
the right; it also, and more acutely for our purposes, came from certain quarters
within the left, in particular, from germanophone Communist writers affiliated
with the League of Proletarian Revolutionary Writers, such as the aforementioned
Becher and Lukacs. In an October 1931 contribution to Die Linkskurve,Becher
condemns what he calls the "nonsense apropos the 'end of literature,'" which
he attributes to certain writers on the left, including Tret'iakov, whom he
accuses of recently spreading "similar nonsense ... in Berlin, above all among
the left bourgeois writers,"giving them the false impression that he is "representing
an official, Soviet Russian understanding of literature," when nothing could be
further from the truth. Behind "this terrible 'left' theory"-with its refusal of
"great paintings," its "theory of raw materials,"and its accompanying "renunciation
of high quality"-hides only a "petit-bourgeois fear" of the complex reality of
our transition to socialism.62 Lukacs reiterated Becher's criticism of Tret'iakov,
albeit in more nuanced fashion, in his substantial critique of the German
writer Ernst Ottwalt's reportage method, which he published in the pages of
the same journal the following year.63
Benjamin s Belatedness
By 1934, when Benjamin came to formulate his address to the Institut pour
l'6tude du fascisme, Tret'iakov's operativist aesthetics-insofar as it foregrounds
proletarian self-organization rather than a central party platform-and all
other Russian and Soviet models for vanguard practice elaborated in the 1920s,
had been liquidated or otherwise rendered obsolete not only by the party'sabolition
of all individual cultural organizations in 1932, but also its official endorsement
thereafter of an exclusive aesthetic policy of socialist realism. (While RAPP is
abolished as an individual organization, its basic platform nevertheless has
something of an afterlife in official Soviet policy.) Historically speaking, therefore,
there is a sense in which Benjamin's call for an operativist model of left cultural
production in Paris in 1934 comes, as Hal Foster suggestively notes, too late.64
But what if we were to propose that Benjamin's invocation of Tret'iakov is not
just late, but deliberately and polemically so? What if the belatedness of his
invocation had, in short, a strategic political function?
62. Johannes Becher, "Unsere Wendung: Von Kampf um die Existenz der proletarisch-revolutionaren
Literatur zum Kampf um ihre Erweiterung," Die Linkskurve 3, no. 10 (October 1931), p. 5; trans.
Michael Taylor.
63. Lukacs, "Reportage oder Gestaltung?" Die Linkskurve4, no. 7 (July 1932), and no. 8 (August
1932); trans. in Lukacs, Essayson Realism,pp. 45, 61, 72.
64. Hal Foster, "The Artist as Ethnographer," in his TheReturnof the Real: TheAvant-Gardeat the End
of the Century(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), p. 275, n. 4.
I am prompted in this direction in part by Benjamin's well-known investment

in the potentially liberatory potential of anachronism, a word the etymology of
which may be traced to a verb meaning "to be late in time."65As the dictionaries
define it, to be anachronistic is to be out of harmony with the present, to be in
violation of the passage of time, of chronology, or to instantiate an incorrect
temporal organization of ideas, things, or people.66 The concept of being late
in time had a major motivating force in Benjamin's research project on nineteenth-
century Paris: In a letter to Adorno written in March of 1934, for example, he
expresses the hope that the realization of The ArcadesProjectwill "represent an
anachronism in the better sense of the word. In the better sense, because it will
hopefully do less to galvanize the past than to anticipate a worthier human
future."67 Further, as commentators have observed, Benjamin's concept of
anachronism lies at the heart of the 1940 Theses, wherein he argues that it is no
longer the past that constitutes the fixed point around which the historian or
critic's present revolves; instead, that present is-even if only for a blink of an
eye-immobilized, thus obliging the past to revolve around the present.68
One function of Benjamin's belated invocation of the Soviet avant-garde
is that it tempers not only the determinism of the producer essay's major thesis
but also its liquidationist thrust, thus demonstrating the persistence of the
antinomic structure of Benjamin's thinking69 even in this most programmatic
text. But in order to sort out the polemical work or strategic function his
belated invocation seeks to accomplish, one must turn to the historical context
of the essay's production in Paris in April 1934 (bearing in mind, of course,
that that context is boundless-that the text's meaning is not exhausted in the
present of its inscription).
What strategic function, then, does Benjamin's belatedness serve within
his own historical present? Since at the time of drafting the essay Benjamin is
endeavoring to establish himself within Parisian intellectual circles, he could
not have failed to notice the latter's ever-accelerating anxiety about the possible,
even probable, spread of fascism to France in the wake of the defeat of the
German left. Anxiety about the intellectual's precise role in combatting this
threat only exacerbated the French left's already-existing concerns about the
intellectual's position in the class struggle. (Benjamin had just recently
65. Thomas M. Greene, "History and Anachronism," in Literatureand History:TheoreticalProblemsand

Russian CaseStudies,ed. Gary Saul Morson (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1986), p. 205.
66. See Hans Magnus Enzensberger, "The Pastry Dough of Time: A Meditation on Anachronism,"
trans. Linda Haverty Rugg in Zig Zag: ThePolitics of Cultureand ViceVersa(New York: New Press, 1997),
p. 36.
67. Adorno and Benjamin, CompleteCorrespondence, p. 89.
68. Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History" (1940), pp. 253-64; see Philippe Ivernel,
"Paris, Capital of the Popular Front or the Posthumous Life of the 19th Century," New GermanCritique
39 (Fall 1986), p. 67, and passim; and Irving Wohlfarth, "The Meaure of the Possible, the Weight of the
Real and the Heat of the Moment: Benjamin's Actuality Today,"NewFormations20 (Summer 1993).
69. On the antinomic structure of Benjamin's thought, see John McCole, WalterBenjamin and the
Antinomiesof Tradition(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993).
78 OCTOBER
addressed some of these concerns in a substantial survey for the Zeitschriftfur

Sozialforschung,in which he maps from left to right the French intelligentsia's
attempts to define its function in society.70)
An important site for the registration of such anxieties is the deluge of
questionnaires circulated to writers through the periodical press, indicative of
a certain passion for taking stock, of an attempt to get a grip on a profoundly
disorienting and confusing historical present. For example, Henri Lefebvre's
little Paris journal Avant-Poste,founded inJune 1933, sends out an "Enquete sur
le fascisme en France" in which writers are asked whether they believe a fascist
government in France is imminent, to state their personal opinion apropos
democratic liberties and their suppression, and to suggest the most efficacious
ways to combat fascism and, in particular, to explain the role of writers in that
endeavor.71 Lefebvre's Avant-Posteis short-lived, but another journal established
the same summer takes up the problem. Directed by Andre Gide, Roman
Rolland, Henri Barbusse, and P. Vaillant-Couturier and edited by Louis Aragon
and Paul Nizan, Commune,the organ-or, rather, "revue de combat"-of the
French Communist Party-affiliated Association des 6crivains et des artistes r6volu-
tionnaires (AEAR), runs a related survey.
Communeposes the following question to its readers: "For whom do you
write?" (Pour qui 6crivez-vous?)."72 Between December 1933 and May 1934,
fifty-eight responses are published, each accompanied by commentary from
Aragon. On the one hand, Commune'squestion speaks very immediately to the
exigencies of its historical present. On the other, it is layered with the past in
its self-conscious invocation of an earlier question posed by the monthly
Litterature (edited by Aragon, Andr6 Breton, and Philippe Soupault) in
November 1919, namely, "Why do you write?" (Pourquoi 6crivez-vous?) While
the over one hundred responses received by Litteratureconstitute an important
document of the position of intellectuals in the wake of the signing of the
Treaty of Versailles, Commune now reports that Gide, who was among
Litterature'soriginal respondents, had at the time stated privately that the real
question to be asking was not "pourquoi ecrivez-vous?" but rather "pour qui
6crivez-vous?"73 In publicly reposing Gide's question in late 1933, Commune
acknowledges the historical gulf now separating the present position of the
French intellectual from that of his or her immediately postwar predecessor.
And there is a sense in which Benjamin frames the producer essay as itself
something of a response, albeit in a different forum and genre, to Commune's
70. Benjamin, "The Present Social Situation of the French Writer" (1934), trans. Rodney
Livingstone, in Benjamin, SelectedWritings,vol. 2, pp. 744-67.
71. For the responses, see Avant-Poste:Revue de littrature et de critique2 (August 1933), pp. 81-87;
and 3 (October-November 1933), pp. 145-53.
72. "Commune vous pose une question," Commune:Revue de l'association des crivains et des artistes
revolutionnaires2 (October 1933), pp. 1-2.
73. Ibid., p. 2.
question, "for whom do you write?" His essay opens, for example, with the
claim that "the more advanced type of writer" acknowledges "in whose service
he writes," and closes it with substantial citation to CommunesJanuary-February
1934 issue, in which appear some sixteen responses from writers and scholars
(Benjamin discusses that of the Marxist historian Rene Maublanc, and Aragon's
commentary upon it).
The anxiety manifest in such questionnaires greatly intensifies in the
months immediately preceding Benjamin's drafting of the producer essay,
when the city of Paris is totally unnerved by fascist riots involving some 40,000
demonstrators. On February 6, 1934, members of primarily right-wing leagues
massed on the Place de la Concorde with the intention of crossing the Seine
and storming the Chamber of Deputies (in which endeavor, however, they did
not succeed, although their violence did prompt the resignation the next day
of the just recently formed cabinet of the liberal bourgeois Edouard Daladier).
According to an eyewitness's later recollection, "[i]t was the bloodiest
encounter in the streets of Paris since the Commune of 1871."74
The analogy was not lost on Benjamin. In a letter to Karplus of February
10 or 11, 1934, he recounts the French left's mobilization and rudimentary
attempts at the unification of its various parties and factions in the wake of the
riots, in a series of massive counter-demonstrations and strikes that course for
several days on streets not far from his hotel, which is situated on the corner of
the Boulevard Saint-Germain and the rue du Four.75While he expresses some
doubt about whether these manifestations will have concrete results, he never-
theless follows them with keen interest, fascinated perhaps less by the spectacle
itself and more by the way in which it seems to correspond so precisely to earlier
such demonstrations as narrated in a book-probably Lucien Dubech and
Pierre d'Espezel's 1926 Histoire de Paris76-which he is currently reading for The
Arcades Project. In this sense, the February events signify for Benjamin not so
much an inspiration to immediate political action as an occasion for the evocation
of the past's historical present.
In the aftermath of the riots, a slew of new antifascist initiatives are under-
taken (such as the foundation of the Comit6 de vigilance des intellectuels
anti-fascistes [CVIA]), while those established in 1933 step up their activities.
According to the historian Jean-Michel Palmier, the Institut pour l'etude du
fascisme-Benjamin's intended addressee-is the most celebrated and symbolic
of all such initiatives.77 This now rather obscure institute is founded in late 1933
74. William L. Shirer, TheCollapseof the ThirdRepublic(NewYork: Simon & Schuster, 1969), p. 220.
76. Lucien Dubech and Pierre d'Espezel, Histoire de Paris (Paris: Payot, 1926); see Godde and
Lonitz's editorial note in Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe,vol. 4, p. 355.
77. Jean-Michel Palmier, Weimaren Exil: Le Destin de l'migration intellectuelleallemandeantinazie en
Europeet aux Etats-Unis (Paris: Payot, 1988), vol. 1, p. 480. Despite its status, the circumstances of the
INFA's foundation in late 1933, its operations, and its ultimate closure in mid-1935 have been little
?: : ::: CE : 7 z i : \: :S::
i-,f~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
as an archive and research center for the identification, documentation, and

analysis of established and incipient forms of fascism. In spring 1934 it is
located in a large apartment on the rue des Fosses-Saint-Bernard in the fifth
arrondissement, later moving to somewhat smaller quarters on the rue Buffon,
near theJardin des Plantes.
The institute quickly becomes the central European depository for fascist
publications in all languages and media (newspapers, books, journals, and
radio broadcasts), and its staff also runs a press-clipping service. Scholars, govern-
ment officials, and members of the public are invited to use these resources.
On the research front, the INFA has its own imprint, under which scholarly
titles appear; and it signs its name to articles in French newspapers. It also publishes
a substantial bulletin, which includes analyses of, and bibliographies on,
National Socialist and other fascist theories of race, economy, polity, law, education,
and so forth. The Galerie de la Boetie exhibition of antifascist art and propaganda
researched. Aside from the memoirs of two key staffers, the writers Arthur Koestler and Manes
Sperber, there is no history of the INFA, with the exception of a couple of modest discussions published
in the 1980s (which are largely dependent on the aforementioned memoirs); see Jacques Omnes,
"L'Institut pour l'etude du fascisme (INFA)," pp. 185-98; and also Palmier, Weimaren Exil, vol. 1, pp.
480-83.
Anonymous.Confrontation in the Place de la Concorde, Paris, February 6, 1934.

Photo:Agencephotographique Paris. CourtesyGettyImages,New York.
Roger-Viollet,
is curated by members of its staff. Last but not least, it invites lectures on subjects
relating to its primary mission, the struggle against fascism.78
Who directs, staffs, supports, and pays for the activities of the Institut
pour l'6tude du fascisme? While it is uncertain whether the INFA is in fact yet
another initiative of Willi Miinzenberg79-the legendary Comintern emissary
who organizes an extensive antifascist media empire in Western Europe and
invents a new form of Communist organization, the camouflaged "front"-it
certainly bears the primary trademark of the latter, namely, a rapprochement-
like alliance between, on the one hand, French intellectuals representing the
gamut of left-wing positions and parties and, on the other, germanophone
members of the KPD in exile. Among its patrons and advisers are prominent
members of the French professorial elite (Paul Langevin, Lucien Levy-Bruhl,
Marcel Willard, Marcel Prenant, Henri Wallon, and Francis Jourdain).80 Andre
Malraux, Aragon, and Soupault (the latter is also described as one of its
patrons81) assist the INFA in cultivating the financial and moral support of the
European scientific and cultural establishment.82 In an article that appears in
Die Sammlungin early 1934, for example, Soupault calls on readers to lend their
unconditional support to the INFA. (Benjamin specifically refers to Soupault's
statement in a letter to Die Sammlung'seditor, the aforementioned Klaus Mann,
in his bid to have his INFA address published in thatjournal.)83
But there are few French nationals on the ground at the INFA. Its day-to-day
operation is accomplished by a revolving staff made up of about ten at any one
time who work for little or no remuneration. Of diverse nationalities (chiefly emi-
gr6s from Germany, Austria, Poland, Italy, and the Balkans, plus the occasional
French activist), most are Communist Party members, the rest fellow-travelers. Its
founding director is none other than the aforementioned Bihalji-Merin, a long-
time member of the KPD who had emigrated to Paris in 1933. As noted earlier,
Bihalji-M6rin had played a prominent role in the League of Proletarian
Revolutionary Writers as an editor of its journal Die Linkskurve,in the pages of
which Tret'iakov and other vanguard figures had found themselves under attack.
Whether or not Miinzenberg is behind the Institut pour l'6tude du fascisme,
the balance of the (admittedly meager) evidence available suggests that it is,
indeed, a camouflaged front for the Comintern84-what one of its staff, the
78. See Manes Sperber, Until My Eyes Are Closed with Shards, trans. Harry Zohn (New York and
London: Holmes & Meier Publishers, Inc., 1994), pp. 46-47.
79. The evidence is conflicting; see Benjamin, GesammelteBriefe,vol. 4, p. 337, and Godde and
Lonitz's editorial note, p. 338; Arthur Koestler, The Invisible Writing(New York: Stein & Day, 1984), p.
296; and Kambas, WalterBenjaminimExil, pp. 29-31.
80. Omnes, "L'Institut pour l'ttude du fascisme (INFA),"pp. 187-88.
81. Palmier, Weimaren Exil, vol. 1, p. 481, n. 1.
82. Omnis, "L'Institut pour l'etude du fascisme (INFA),"p. 190.
83. Philippe Soupault, "AufAntwort wird gewartet," Die Sammlung(Amsterdam) 1, no. 7 (1934), pp.
379-83, esp. pp. 382-83. For Benjamin's letter to Mann, see Gesammelte Briefe,vol. 4, pp. 400-02.
84. Sperber, letter to Omnis, November 28, 1979; cited in Omnes, "L'Institut pour l'6tude du
fascisme (INFA),"p. 186.
82 OCTOBER
writer Man&s Sperber later called a "petite boutique" of the Comintern-and

that it is, accordingly, directed by Bihalji-M6rin in conformity with the Moscow-
centric policies of the latter. While Benjamin's "association" with the Institute
predates the arrival there of both Sperber and Arthur Koestler, it is plausible to
assume that he would have fully expected Bihalji-M6rin to be part of his lecture's
"extremely small but highly qualified audience" that he mentions in a letter to
Adorno.85 Benjamin would also likely have been familiar with both the director's
political and cultural affiliations at the time, as well as the spirit in which the
latter is running the institute: By spring 1934, Bihalji-M6rin has moved even
further toward official Soviet policy than in his Die Linkskurvedays, embracing
the Comintern's endorsement of the increasingly socialist realist platform of
the centralized Union of Soviet Writers created in 1932.
While the producer essay's explicit polemic is mounted against the idealism
of the bourgeois left-whom Benjamin holds partly responsible for the intelli-
gentsia's defeat in Germany at the hands of fascism on account of its failure to
acknowledge its position within the process of production-his belated invocation
of Tret'iakov is fundamental to what I think is his essay's ultimately more
significant polemic-its attack on the party-affiliated Communist left. By invoking
Tret'iakov, Benjamin flags his retheorization of the concept of tendency as, in fact,
a critique of the regressive technique, and, accordingly, "incorrect" political
tendency of the socialist realist platform espoused by both the INFA under Bihalji-
Merin's direction, and by the increasingly significant numbers of the French left
at least partially guided by the latter, including now also, and perhaps most
painfully, Aragon (whose Surrealist text Le Paysan de Paris [1924-26] had earlier,
despite Benjamin's reservations, jump-started TheArcadesProject).
That the producer essay constitutes an attack on socialist realism, and thus
on the Institut pour l'6tude du fascisme's main agenda, may now seem perhaps
rather obvious. But Brecht-that champion of "crude thinking" (plumpesDenken)
who kept on a window ledge a little wooden donkey with a bobbing head, around
whose neck he had tied a sign that read "I, too, must understand it"86-found his
friend Benjamin's criticism of the "proletarian writers of the Becher type"
much "too abstract."87 Not surprisingly, therefore, Benjamin's invocation of
Tret'iakov has sometimes been read as a valorization of Stalinist aesthetics-as
a bid to flatter his party-affiliated INFA audience-a confusion probably
derived from Cold War misinformation about the precise place of factography
and operativism within the constellation of then-contemporary Soviet cultural
theories and practices.
There is great urgency, I have suggested, to Benjamin's consideration of
the role and efficacy of the intellectual in the class struggle in Paris in the
85. Adorno and Benjamin, CompleteCorrespondence,

p. 49.
86. Benjamin, "Notes from Svendborg, Summer 1934," trans. Rodney Livingstone, in Benjamin,
SelectedWritings,vol. 2, p. 785.
87. Ibid., p. 783.
spring of 1934. "The Author as Producer" is concerned not only with account-
ing for what has happened in the past-the defeat of the German left-but also
with preventing a comparable disaster in France. By invoking a model for cultural
production now deemed defunct, Benjamin is attempting to provide-almost
to salvage-in this vastly altered geopolitical and temporal context an alternative
to Moscow's increasing dominance over leftist aesthetics in Western Europe in
the mid-1930s (through the Soviet Union's control of the Comintern, and the
latter's various camouflaged fronts). Benjamin invokes Tret'iakov in a bid to
stave off the total polarization of this traumatic environment in the wake of the
February riots, wherein socialist realism is increasingly promulgated as the only
possible counter to an aesthetics of fascism.
In doing so, Benjamin holds open the philosophical possibility and efficacy
of an alternative, operativist model of left cultural production and materialist
criticism-the path not taken by the Soviet Union but one that could nevertheless,
he might have hoped, anticipate a worthier human future. Tret'iakov's operativist
model might thus be described as one of those perpetually renewed, and perpetually
missed, opportunities that Benjamin so often sought out-the latter his own
version, according to Wohlfarth, of Trotsky's call for permanent revolution.88
Tret'iakov, I am suggesting, has a critical, polemical, and, frankly, utopian function
in the historically specific moment of his later recollection by Benjamin in Paris in
1934. In this sense, there is a very precise timeliness to Benjamin's invocation of
an obsolete mode of artistic production in the context of a major struggle then
taking place within the Parisian left. Benjamin's belated call for an aesthetics of
operativism was not so much "late in time" as, rather, "late, in time."
88. Wohlfarth, "Benjamin's Actuality Today,"p. 2.

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Paris, Capital of the Soviet Avant-Garde

Author(s): Maria Gough

OCTOBER101, Summer2002, pp. 53-83. ? 2002 OctoberMagazine,Ltd. and MassachusettsInstituteof Technology.

In a handful of letters to the great epistolary stalwarts of his Paris exile-

The rather well-known gynecologist-whose name, curiously, remains

5. Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe,vol. 4, p. 360.

PierreChareau.Maison de Verre (main

15. p. 101; and Adorno and Benjamin, CompleteCorrespondence,

of a highly schematic notation on a major concept from the Brechtian arsenal,

17. Ibid., pp. 182-83.

Several of the convolute's tantalizingly suggestive fragments find their

It is a truism that political tendencies are implicit in every work of art,

In support of this initial hypothesis, Benjamin marches the reader through a

Marx's Theoryof History

Although not invoked explicitly by name, Benjamin's reformulation of

constitutive contradiction of productive forces and relations from the economic

The technological determinism of Benjamin's thesis has drawn criticism

commentaries on Brecht make clear, Benjamin was especially fascinated by the

Having unpacked the materialist basis of Benjamin's thesis as to the functional

Anonymous. Sergei Tret'iakov. ca. 1930. From Tret'iakov,

absurd as the notion of a "proletarian church or proletarian czar." The new

Anonymous.Diagram of cultural and educational work at the

tion of reportage and operativism is crucial to Tret'iakov's refunctioning of the

Hamburg, Dresden, Aachen, and other cities in 1931,54 in which he explicated

of a major shift to the right, utterly repudiates Tret'iakov's reconfiguration of

I am prompted in this direction in part by Benjamin's well-known investment

65. Thomas M. Greene, "History and Anachronism," in Literatureand History:TheoreticalProblemsand

addressed some of these concerns in a substantial survey for the Zeitschriftfur

as an archive and research center for the identification, documentation, and

Anonymous.Confrontation in the Place de la Concorde, Paris, February 6, 1934.

writer Man&s Sperber later called a "petite boutique" of the Comintern-and

85. Adorno and Benjamin, CompleteCorrespondence,

88. Wohlfarth, "Benjamin's Actuality Today,"p. 2.

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