a journal of the international council of philosophical inquiry with children
A
Constellation of Childhood
Tyson Lewis
Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) is a rather
enigmatic figure in the history of Western Marxism, literary criticism, and
aesthetic theory more broadly. Caught rather precariously between a historical
materialist interpretation of history and Jewish mysticism, Benjamin’s work
refuses to sit clearly in any one particular philosophical camp. It is precisely the tension which results
from this combination that—at its best—fuels the dialectical force of
Benjamin’s thought and has made it relevant for many contemporary
philosophers. While the debates
concerning Benjamin’s unusual method—both in terms of form and content—have
provided much room for critique and analysis (including the now infamous
exchange of letters between Benjamin and Theodor Adorno), Benjamin’s comments
on childhood have received little attention from scholars working in critical
and literary theory. This is
particularly surprising considering that between 1929 and 1933 Benjamin wrote a
series of radio scripts for children, revealing a very intimate interest in the
meaning and significance of childhood. Thus, I have collected a rather small
yet highly provocative set of childhood images to start this much belated
discussion.
It is in the simple activities of childhood
that Benjamin finds paradimactic instances of dialectical thinking and
aesthetic theory. Thus reflections on
childhood reveal naïve and intuitive moments of complex conceptual operations
that are later lost to adults stuck in a one-dimensional world of production
and consumption. An autobiography of
childhood is not reducible to a series of Oedipal dramas that haunt the
conscious self. The archeology of memory
is first and foremost a methodology for philosophical thinking through which philosophy
and experience reunite in the figure of the child at play in his or her
surroundings. While not supplying us
with a full philosophy of childhood, Benjamin nevertheless presents the reader
with a complex constellation of images which suggest, when read together, that
childhood—mediated through the intellectual activity and experience of the
adult—is a potent resource for philosophical practice. In the phenomenology of childhood—in the
seemingly inconsequential and smallest details of childlike play—the very idea
of the world is to once again be rekindled for the adult. Thus these images excavated from Benjamin’s
memory, ripped from their original context by the passing of historical time,
become integrated into a new constellation of meanings through the process of
autobiographical reflection.
For instance, in the
second excerpt entitled “The Stocking,” Benjamin provides a powerful allegory
for thinking dialectically. Here the fist
that probes the stocking becomes the embodiment of thinking in which subject
and object, content and form interpenetrate one another. Through the analysis of content, form emerges
and vanishes. The two cannot be clearly
separated from one another but are rather locked in a perpetual back and forth movement. It is the “surprise” of the moment of reversal
or turning that represents the shock of dialectical thinking as it pole-vaults
from one point to the next. The moment of wrestling with the sock and its
hidden treasure also suggests that thinking dialectically is never a complete
apprehension but is rather a process of continual inversions where truth
becomes untruth or as the case might be, “the veil and what it hides are one
and the same.”
In the next aphorism,
Benjamin explores the implications of childish play with trash as an allegory
for aesthetic theory. Children, playing
with the discarded remnants of adult work unleash a utopian dimension buried
within the forgotten. They bring
together disparate and unrelated or partial objects into a quasi-sensual constellation
(a bricolage) which allegorically represents a world lost to the time of
labor-production inherent in adult life.
The notion of the renewal of the old world is further explored in the
next selection which describes a collector’s relationship to his or her
books. Again the hopes and aspirations
of the collector are found in their nascent state in childish play (which as we
have seen is uniquely linked to trash and ephemera). It is in the model of childhood that Benjamin
finds the closest approximation to the oddly utopian desires of the book
collector to save the world through the care and the tenderness given to old
and dusty volumes. As such, the figure
of the child combines the hope of the new with its dialectical foil: care for
the old and the discarded. Perhaps both
that which is forgotten and that which has newly arrived share one trait in
common in that they are poised on the edge of social use-value and
exchange-value. They are in other words
inside yet outside the sphere of social relations defining the commodified
adult world.
Overall the allegory of
childhood for Benjamin is an attempt to renew a world that is fragmented and
meaningless. It is a resource that
Benjamin’s melancholic dialectic employs to think against the present and thus
to revitalize the promise of a future deferred.
Excerpt from
Language shows clearly that memory is not an instrument for exploring
the past but its theater. It is the
medium of past experience as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie
interred. He who seeks to approach his
own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging. This confers the tone and bearing of genuine
reminiscences. He must not be afraid to
return again and again to the same matter; to scatter it as one scatters earth,
to turn it over as one turns over soil. For
the matter itself is only a deposit, a stratum, which yields only to the most
meticulous examination what constitutes the real treasure hidden within the
earth: the images, severed from all earlier associations, that stand—like
precious fragments or torsos in a collector’s gallery—in the prosaic rooms of
our later understanding. True, for
successful excavation a plan is needed.
Yet no less indispensable is the cautious probing of the spade in the
dark loam, and it is to cheat oneself of the richest prize to preserve as a
record merely the inventory of one’s discoveries, and not this dark joy of the
place of the finding itself. Fruitless
searching is as much a part of this as succeeding; and consequently remembrance
must not proceed in the manner of a narrative or still less that of a report,
but must, in the strictest epic and rhapsodic manner, assay its spade in
ever-new places, and in the old ones delve to ever-deeper layers….
….I was often seized—I
seem to remember—by revulsion at being hemmed in by this multitude, and again,
as on those walks in the city with my mother, solitude appeared to me as the
only fit state of man. Very
understandably, for such a mob of school children is among the most formless
and ignoble of all masses, and betrays its bourgeois origin in representing,
like every assembly of that class, the most rudimentary organizational form
that its individual members can give their reciprocal relationships. The corridors, and the classrooms that finally
came into view, are among the horrors that have embedded themselves most ineradicably
in me, that is to say, in my dreams; and these have taken revenge on the
monotony, the cold torpor that overcame me at each crossing of the classroom thresholds,
by turning themselves into the arena of the most extravagant events. The backdrop was often the fear of having to
take the Aabitur again (under more unfavorable conditions), a position in which
I had been placed by my own recklessness and folly. Undoubtedly, these rooms lend themselves to
dreamlike representation; there is something nightmarish even in the sober
recollection of the damp odor of sweat secreted by the stone steps that I had
to hasten up five times or more each day.
The school, outwardly in good repair, was in its architecture and situation
among the most desolate. It matched its emblem, a plaster statue of the Emperor
Fredrick, which had been deposited in a remote corner of the playground
(admittedly one favored by hordes engaged in martial games), puny and pitiful
against a fire wall. According to a
school legend it was, if I am not mistaken, a donation. This monument, unlike the classrooms, was
never washed, and had acquired in the course of years an admirable coat of dirt
and soot. It still stands today in its
appointed place. But soot descends upon
it daily from the passing municipal railway.
It is far from impossible that my uncommon aversion to this railway
dates from this time, since all the people sitting at their windows seemed
enviable to me. They could afford to
ignore the school clock that held sway above our heads, and quite unawares they
cut through the invisible bars of our timetable cage. They could only be seen, incidentally, during
the breaks, for the lower panes of the classroom windows were of frosted
glass. “Vagabond clouds, sailors of the
skies” had for us the absolute precision that the verse holds for
prisoners. Moreover, little about the
actual classrooms has remained in my memory except these exact emblems of
imprisonment: the frosted windows and the infamous carved wooden battlements
over the doors. It would not surprise me to hear that the cupboards, too, were
crowned with such adornments, not to mention the pictures of the Kaiser on the
walls. Heraldic and chivalrous
obtuseness shone forth wherever possible.
In the great hall, however, it was most ceremoniously united with art nouveau….All the same, one of these
occasions is perhaps noteworthy fro the effect it had on me for years
afterward. It was the leave-taking
ceremony for those who had graduated. Here,
as in several other places, I find in my memory rigidly fixed words,
expressions, verses that, like the malleable mass that has later cooled and
hardened, preserved in me the imprint of the collisions between a larger
collective and myself. Just as a certain
kind of significant dream survives awakening in the form of words when all the
reset of the dream content has vanished, here isolated words have remained in
place as marks of catastrophic encounters.
Among them is one in which for me the whole atmosphere of the school is
condensed; I heard it when, having hitherto received only private tutoring, I
was sent for my first morning, on a trial basis, to what was later to become
the Kaiser Freidrich School, but at the time was still situated on
Passauerstrasse. This word that still
adheres in my mind to a phlegmatic, fat, unbecoming figure of a boy is the
following: ringleader. Nothing else is
left of this earliest school experience.
It was re-enacted in similar form, however some six years later, when I
spent my first day in alien and threatening circumstances in Haubinda and was
asked by a tall, hostile-seeming lout who played a prominent part in the class
whether my “old man” had already left. This
common piece of schoolboy parlance was entirely unfamiliar to me. An abyss opened before me, which I sought to
bridge with a laconic protest. Here in
the great hall it was the verses with which the school coir began the farewell
song to the leaver—“Brother now may we/ your companions be/ in the world so
wide”—followed by something containing the words “loyally by your side”; at any
rate these were the verses that enabled my year by year to take the measure of
my own weakness. For no matter how
palpably the abominable goings-on at school were daily before my eyes, the
melody of this song seemed to surround the departure from this hell with
infinite melancholy. But by the time it
was addressed to me and my class it must have made little impression, for I
remember nothing of it. More remarkable
are some other verses that I heard once in the gymnasium dressing room after
the lesson, and never forgot. Why? Perhaps because “Schulze”—as the imprudent
boy who knew the lines was called—was rather pretty, perhaps because I thought
them true, but most probably because the situation in which they were spoken,
one of frenetic, military hyperactivity, was so utterly appropriate. “Loitering at the rear/ you never need fear/
neurasthenia.”
“The Stocking” from
The first cabinet that opened when I wanted to was the bureau. I had only to pull on the knob and the door
clicked open for me. Among the
underclothing stored there was the thing that mad the bureau an adventure. I had to make a path to the farthest corner;
there I found my stockings piled, rolled up in the old-fashioned way. Each pair looked like a small pouch. Nothing gave me more pleasure than plunging
my hand as deep as possible into the inside of the pouch. I did not do so for the sake of warmth. It was “the Dowry,” which I held in my hand
in the rolled up interior, that drew me into its depths. When I had got my hand around it and
confirmed my possession of the soft wollen mass to the best of my ability, the
second part of the game, which brought the revelation, began. For now I began working “the Dowry” out of
its wollen pouch. I drew it closer and
closer to me until the amazing event occurred: I had extracted “the Dowry,” but
“the Pouch” in which it had lain no longer existed. I could not test this process often
enough. It taught me that form and
content, the veil and what it hides, are one and the same. It led me to extricate the truth from
literature as cautiously as the child’s hand brought the stocking out of “the
Pouch.” (416-17)
“Construction Site” from One Way Street
Pedantic brooding over the production of objects—visual aids, toys, or
books—that are supposed to be suitable for children is folly. Since the Enlightenment this has been one of
the mustiest speculations of the pedagogues.
Their infatuation with psychology keeps them from perceiving that the
world is full of the most unrivaled objects for childish attention and
use. And the most specific. For children are particularly fond of
haunting any site where things are being visibly worked upon. They are irresistibly drawn by the detritus
generated by building, gardening, housework, tailoring, or carpentry. In waste products they recognize the face of
that the world of things turns directly and solely to them. In using these things they do not so much
imitate the works of adults as bring together, in the artifact produced in
play, materials of widely differing kinds in a new, intuitive
relationship. Children thus produce their
own small world of things within the greater one. The norms of this small world must be kept in
mind if one wished to create things specially for children, rather than let
one’s adult activity, through its requisites and instruments, find its own way
to them.
“Unpacking My Library”
I am not exaggerating when I say that to a true collector the
acquisition of an old book is its rebirth.
This is the childlike element which a collector mingles with the element
of old age. For children can accomplish
the renewal of existence in a hundred unfailing ways. Among children, collecting is only one
process of renewal; other process are the painting of objects, the cutting out
of figures, the application of decals—the whole range of childlike modes of
acquisition, from touching things to giving them names. To renew the old world—that is the
collector’s deepest desire when he is driven to acquire new things, and that is
why a collector of older books is closer to the wellsprings of collecting that
the acquirer of luxury editions. How do
books cross the threshold of a collection and become the property of a
collector? The history of their
acquisition is the subject of the following remarks.
Bibliographical References
Benjamin, Walter. Reflections.
Schocken Books:
Benjamin, Walter.