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Duy Lap Nguyen, "Walter Benjamin and the Critique of Political Economy: A New Historical Materialism" (Bloomsbury, 2024)
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- [00:00]
A
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- [01:07]
B
All right, welcome to the New Books Network. I'm Elliot, a sessional lecturer from Melbourne in Australia, recording on the lands of the Bunurong people whose sovereignty was never ceded. And I'm delighted to welcome Associate Professor Zuy Lap Nguyen to the show. Zuy is an associate professor in World Cultures and Literatures at the University of Houston and conducts research in critical theory and Vietnamese studies. Welcome, Zuy.
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C
Thanks a lot.
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B
Eliot Zweet's actually a returning guest on the New Books Network, having previously been on to discuss his 2020 book, the Unimagined Imperialism and Culture in South Vietnam. Today we're privileged to have him on the air to hear about his most recent book, Volta, Benjamin and the Critique of Political Economy, A New Historical Materialism, published with Bloomsbury Press. First thing, these are quite distinct titles. Your first book, dealing with imperialism and culture in Vietnam, seems superficially quite different to your most recent title on critical theorist and philosopher Walter Benjamin. Can you firstly tell us how this most recent book project came about?
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C
Oh, yeah, sure. This is actually a project that I've been working on for quite a number of years, concurrently, actually, with the book on the Vietnam War. And it just started, really, with an interest in Marxism and especially heterodox forms of Marxism. And that's really the connection between the two books, you know, they're really, really different books. And, you know, I think they seem like they could have been written by two completely different people. And I'm pretty proud about that, actually, although I think it may be complexing for some readers because there isn't much overlap between Vietnamese studies and critical theory. But my training was highly interdisciplinary and I wanted to make substantial contributions to both philosophy and the history of the Vietnam War, which of course, is part of my own personal history. But the two books, as I was saying, are connected insofar as they both explore different heterodox forms of Marxism. So the first book makes the claim that the early part of the Vietnam War was not, as it's usually portrayed, primarily a conflict between the Americans and the Vietnamese or between communism and democracy, but could better be characterized as this contest between two competing forms of Vietnamese communism, Stalinist versus this sort of heterodox Marxist humanism. And what I try to do in the book is challenge this prevailing view of the first South Vietnamese government, which was established in 1955, as being this sort of Catholic dictatorship or fascist puppet of US imperialism. And the provocative move in the book is to try to revise the history of the Vietnam War, looking at it from the perspective of the political philosophy of the early South Vietnamese leaders. And they embrace this political ideology called Vietnamese personalism, which is usually kind of mischaracterized as this conservative mixture of Confucianism and Catholicism. But the argument that I make is it actually has more in common with all of these different strains of Marxist humanism, like Sartre's existentialist Marxism, which was circulating in post war France. Yeah, so that's kind of the first book. And then the second book, of course, deals with another kind of heterodox Marxism, which you could actually characterize as being anti humanist, though, which is Walter Benjamin's historical materialism.
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B
Excellent. And let's dive more into that second book, your most recent book, because just like you mentioned, it addresses Walter Benjamin and threads together a narrative from his quite what other authors have described as idiosyncratic, episodic and dispersed writings. And you put forward an argument that his. Walter Benjamin's work actually represents a coherent philosophical system. Can you please tell us how your work here and how this argument differs from usual views on Benjamin's work?
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C
Yeah, so the claim that Benjamin's fragmentary body of work constitutes a coherent philosophical project is not new.
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B
Right.
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C
It's been advanced by a lot of other scholars. But at the same time, there's this Sort of long tradition that probably begins with Hannah Arendt of interpreting the fragmentary character of Benjamin's writings as evidence that he didn't have a kind of systematic philosophy. And indeed, there's many commentators who continue to argue that his work resists any sort of totaliz system. And Benjamin himself at times described his thinking as sort of moving dialectically between opposing extremes, and noted that he himself never managed to sort of reconcile all of these different tensions in his own thinking. But that said, I don't think that this observation should absolve readers from the task of reconstructing the systematic intent that animates his work. Right. I think the intention is clearly there, even if it was never fully realized or even if that philosophical intention sort of changed it over time. And I'd also add that the effort to uncover a sort of systematic philosophical intention of Benjamin's fragmentary writings actually sort of aligns with his own approach to interpreting literature, right? So if you look, for example, at his dissertation, he's looking at these poetic fragments from German Romantic writers as expressing this sort of coherent theory of knowledge or epistemology as well as this whole philosophy of history. So he makes this observation about Friedrich Schlegel in the dissertation, I think, could actually be applied to his own work, right? So he says that Schlegel wrote in fragments, right? But it's clear that there was a systematic intention behind these fragments. Just as, you know, no one doubts that Nietzsche's short aphorisms provide these glimpses into this sort of complicated, unified philosophical system that he had. Right? And then this. This approach, I think, is also reflected in Benjamin's concept of the constellation which he develops in his thesis on the German Morning Play or the Trauerspiel. And there he opposes both these approaches to the history of art that's based upon the reduction of these unique artworks into general categories, which erases their. Their irreducible difference. And at the same time, he's equally critical of these nominalistic approaches that rejects all general categories. So he offers the constellation as this way of kind of reconciling both positions, where the constellation is defined by the individual elements, sort of respects their individual differences while at the same time holds them together. Right? And so I guess this insistence, right, on both kind of paying attention to the fragmentary character of Benjamin's writings. He kind of deliberately wanted to present his ideas in that way, while at the same time trying to sort of piece together this philosophical framework that's operating behind these fragments, I think is sort of consistent with Benjamin's own methodology.
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B
Yeah. Excellent. And what I found about your book too, which is really fascinating, was that not only was it threading these dispersed narratives together, but you also provided a real sense of the context which Benjamin lived in and also the writers and theorists who influenced him as well. So your book really has such a widespread view on Benjamin's footprint in history, if you might say.
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C
Yeah, that seemed important to me too. Like sort of situating those fragments within these larger sort of intellectual communities that Benjamin was a part of, I think is really the only way to understand them properly. But, yeah, yeah.
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B
And you wrote early in your book that Benjamin's historical materialism, and I'm quoting here, departs from many, if not virtually all, the main currents of Marxist philosophy in the 20th century. Could you please give us a brief sense of why this is the case? You know, what makes Benjamin's historical materialism, realism, so unique?
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C
So I meant several things by that. First, I just meant the Benjamin in this sort of later stage of the development of his last work, the Arcades Project, which was never completed, seems to be dealing with a really specific interpretation of Marx, and it's one that emphasizes the critique of political economy. So you see, for example, in this Convolute X that Benjamin put together in this later stage of his development of the Arcades that was devoted to Marx, all of these references and quotes to the first volume of Capital and specifically to this section on the fetishism of commodities. But then you also find that there's a lot more citations and quotes taken from a book by a Marxist philosopher named Karl Korsch that Benjamin was acquainted with a book called Karl Marx. And in fact, Korsch is cited more often than Marx is in the Arcades Project. And Korsh presents this sort of heterodox interpretation of Marx that emphasizes the importance of the critique of political economy, which he felt that kind of orthodox party Marxists had sort of largely ignored. And this orthodoxy kind of treated Capital as being this sort of scientific treatise predicting the inevitable downfall of capitalism. And Korsh was equally critical of this attempt by people that regarded themselves as sort of strict adherents of Marx who were trying to kind of take capital and turn it into this whole sort of universal materialist worldview and universal theory of history. And then at the same time. So Benjamin seems to be using this text as sort of a guide through these sections of Capital. And at the same time, right, he seems to kind of reject this emphasis by critics of this communist orthodoxy of his period in France. France. These avant garde Figures who are turning to the young Marx that was supposedly more Hegelian, more philosophical, more humanist right than the Marx espoused by the party. So the interpretation I think that he gets from CORE sort of rejects both of these positions and looks at capital not as sort of this kind of radical political economy, but then views it as a critique of political economy that sees it as a discipline that kind of inadvertently eternalizes conditions that are specific to capitalism. So it disguises the fact that capitalism is a historically specific form of social organization. So it's that particular form of Marxism that I think was neglected by both sort of communist orthodoxy and its critics among the avant garde that Benjamin seems to sort of engage seriously with in this later part of his career. And then the other peculiarity of Benjamin's Marxism is the influence of the utopian socialist Charles Fourier. And that's a pretty interesting influence because it goes, I think, all the way back to Benjamin's time with the German student movement where he was influenced by Fourier's writings on pedagogy, all the way back there. And it continues to inform his political thinking all the way up to the end though, where in his, during the period of his exile, the members of Georges Bataille's Asifal group talk about how his political thinking seemed to be most deeply influenced by Poirier. And the really strange thing about this relationship is that Benjamin has criticisms of all of these contemporaries, these philosophical figures and these intellectuals. And he doesn't seem to criticize Foia at all and seems to embrace large parts of his utopian vision of socialism. And so one kind of strange characteristic of Benjamin's Marxism is this four years inflection and this emphasis on the need for a transformation not only in the way labor is organized, but also the way that desire and affect is organized. So, yeah, so those are two things that I think are distinguishing features of Benjamin's historical materialism. And finally, I'll just say that I think in the late stage of the development of the Arcades project, Benjamin also manages to sort of reconcile this critique of political economy, which emphasizes historical specificity of capitalism, with his earlier philosophical framework that he develops before this kind of turn to Marxism in, in the 1920s.
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B
And on that philosophical point as well, you note, especially in the early chapters, that Benjamin's project, initially when he's developing what he and yourself called in the book the coming philosophy, which Benjamin seems to set against Kant and who he identifies as the neo Kantianism of the Marburg school. Could you explain as well what are the fundamental differences between Kantian philosophy and that kind of philosophy that Benjamin sought to develop. And even how did it relate to the views that you just expressed on how Benjamin saw Marxists of his time, for example?
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C
Yeah. So the first part of the book is largely devoted to distinguishing Benjamin's positions in relationship to Kant. And the reason I did this is because Benjamin remarks that because early on, I think largely because of the influence of his professors, who, many of whom were these prominent neo Kantian philosophers, he thought for some reason that to make his positions, his philosophical positions intelligible, that he should articulate them in Kantian terminology, which I think actually makes them the his ideas sort of more difficult to understand because they're so uncontine or they depart so much though from Kant's own philosophy. But then I try to reconstruct these positions through this Kantian framework because Benjamin seems to be doing that early on, like in his career. So the first chapter looks at sort of Benjamin's kind of critique of Kant's theory of knowledge or his epistemology. The second one goes into this criticism of the second chapter goes into his critique of Kant's political philosophy, philosophy, his concepts of property. But I think because for Benjamin, the most important test of a philosophy is its concept of history. The clearest contrast to Kant might be if we go to looking at the differences or Benjamin's critique of Kant's concept of history. So Benjamin, of course, initially wanted to write his dissertation on Kant's concept of history. But as he read into what Kant wrote about the philosophy history, he became disappointed very quickly when he realized that, per Kant, history is mainly about sort of ethics, right? The progressive realization of all these moral ideals which Benjamin didn't like at all. And so a big argument in the book is that Benjamin develops this messianic conception of history against this moralistic vision of history, right, which in Kant and in the neo Kantianism becomes about the progressive realization of these moral ideas in this sort of infinite task where you can never actually realize those ideals. It just becomes this kind of ongoing thing that you have to continue. So Benjamin repudiates this concept of history and ends up articulating this messianic conception of history where the continually failed pursuit of these ideals leads to a situation where we no longer need to pursue them. And so that is something I argue is one of the kind of fundamental features of the concept of history that Benjamin develops and distinguishes in various parts of his writings from Kant's conception of history. So revolution ends up meeting not as the neo Kantians thought, though, like the realization of the categorical imperative, a perfectly sort of moral state of affairs, but this sort of like something closer to Fourier's hedonistic vision of utopia. Right. As being this situation where because of technological abundance and so forth, we no longer need to live moral lives because of the conditions that technology is made possible. Yes. I hope that answers the question. I think that's it.
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B
Yeah, yeah, it's perfect. And I've got a couple of questions on history too, because I found Benjamin's ideas about this really fascinating. And firstly, maybe building off just what you're mentioning, zui, is that Benjamin critiqued this infinite task of Kantian ethics. Did he also see this in the Marxists or the social democrats of his time as well?
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C
Yeah, there's a social democratic version of the concept of progress that I was just describing that were. So the neo Kantians wanted this return to Kant, both the Kant's theory of knowledge, which they wanted to kind of develop into this epistemology of scientific cognition, but they also wanted a return to Kant's moral philosophy. And they thought that they could sort of put socialism and the socialist movement on a more rigorous footing by kind of grounding it in Kantian ethics. And so they began to conceive of socialism as the realization of the categorical imperative. And for Benjamin, that that concept of socialism was a moralistic concept of socialism that rather than getting rid of capitalism, I think somehow like reinforced it. And that's a. And, and so against that version, that concept of history, Benjamin embraced the sort of hedonistic conception of socialism that Boyer tried to develop in his writings.
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B
And you also quote him as saying with regards to his views on history, that it's more difficult to honor the memory of the Anonymous than it is to honor the memory of the famous, the celebrated. I found this quote particularly interesting. And you know, how did he conceive this honoring of the Anonymous? And what did his broader view on history also mean for his ideas of historical materialism?
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C
So I think that this statement by Benjamin is normally taken to imply this concept of history is this notion that the history of the oppressed has been buried and that all we need to do is sort of go back and recover that neglected or concealed history and then reincorporate that into sort of the official record of history, and that's how we can save the voices of the oppressed. Like that's what Benny means by the weak messianism that he talks about on the concept of history. But I think that's a misreading because that interpretation actually lines him up more closely with someone like Heidegger and the notion of historicity, this idea of being able to return to the past to retrieve this possibility that was always there, but latent and so forth. And I think what Benjamin is suggesting there is that that's how you commemorate famous people, by incorporating elements of their story that haven't been celebrated yet and turning that into this heritage that you pass down. People know about these aspects of this famous person's life, and that's how the ruling class establishes its power. Whereas I think that what Benjamin is talking about when he's talking about honoring the memory of the Anonymous, is that they can only be honored by suspending the process through which heritage is preserved. Right. So it's not like we should sort of simply kind of honor the memory of the oppressed the same way that we would honor the memory of the ruling class. Right. In this way that kind of preserves their power. Rather, we honor the Anonymous by suspending the very process that excludes their memory, instead of recuperating it. Right. And sort of like making a monument to it, if that makes sense. Right. And so the Anonymous, then, is paradoxically celebrated, inanimate, or can only be celebrated in anonymity. Right. It's only by leaving them anonymous, by suspending this process of creating this heritage to be passed on and celebrated, that you end up being able to honor them.
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B
And that's really fascinating because it brings up, for me, and I'm not sure if I've got this correct, something I recall, I think Zizek has maybe said, where the revolution will kind of lay the spirits to rest. The Anonymous spirits who have all fought for, you know, this new revolutionary future, but it is never realized in their time. And that kind of change in social structure will then maybe put those spirits to rest, in a sense.
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C
Yeah. And there's actually very real examples of this, though. So if I can sort of go into Vietnam studies for a bit, right? You see this in the case of the Vietnam War, though, when sort of the north prevailed, of course, there was this whole politics surrounding cemeteries, right? Some people could be honored because they had merit with the revolution and so forth. This happens with all these revolutionary movements, right? Where, of course, the people that contributed sacrifice for the revolution get a bigger share in stuff or bigger stake, though, in the society that's established afterwards and that reproduces all these inequalities. So I think Benjamin is making a similar point about historical narration. If you want to honor the memory of the Anonymous the way you honor the ruling class, you end up reproducing these exclusions, creating more anonymous people and so forth, so that the only way to really honor them is to sort of suspend that whole process of transmitting heritage instead of kind of perpetuating it and simultaneously perpetuating, you know, further exclusions that require, you know, more. More sort of like attempts to incorporate different voices into the official. The official record of history. Right, excellent.
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B
And you mentioned before as well, Zwee, that one of the theorists that Benjamin set himself against was Heidegger. And in the later chapters of your book, you address Benjamin's, as you say, twofold critique of the concepts of progress and eternal return, which is relevant to what we've been discussing. And as part of his broader theory of time, and especially as it was presented in his unfinished work, the Arcades Project. Can you please tell us more about Benjamin's approach to time here and how it also differed from someone like Heidegger, who Benjamin seemed to often set himself against? Or at least in your work, you made that comparison.
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C
Yeah. So this kind of goes back to the earlier discussion we were having about the fragmentary character of Benjamin's work. Right. So I think because of that fragmentary character, you have certain fragments that have had sort of. That have gotten a lot of attention. And one of those fragments is on the concept of history. And there the focus of Benjamin's critique is on the concept of progress through empty, homogeneous time. And that's kind of led to us thinking about Benjamin as this critic of Enlightenment thinking, this critic of rationalist form, forms of philosophy. But one part of the Arcades Project that really interested me, though, was this convolute D that I think was put together during this later stage of the development of the Arcades project in the mid-1930s, too. And that one is titled Boredom and Eternal Return. And the focus there is on the concept of eternal return, developed not only by Nietzsche, but also in the writings of Louis Auguste Blanchib, the French revolutionary. And there, instead of attacking or trying to criticize a rational conception of history, the concept of history is progress toward these moral and political principles. Right. Benjamin is attacking sort of this irrationalist conception of history, the notion of history as eternal return, which, as he says in the Convolute, was used to kind of capsize the bourgeois conception of progress. So instead of having progress toward realizing these moral ideals, we have this universe where every instant must be repeated an infinite number of times, making progress completely impossible. Right. And what Benjamin then says about these two concepts of progress and eternal return is that they seem to be opposing, but they're in fact, dialectical opposites or, sorry, dialectical complements is his expression. And I think what he means by this is that they seem to oppose each other. But in both cases, they serve to kind of eternalize bourgeois society, to make bourgeois society seem eternal. So this is especially clear in the case of Blanqui's version of eternal return, where he's the most famous revolutionary of the 19th century. He's engaged in numerous conspiracy and uprisings to overthrow bourgeois society and spill time and time again. So now he's imprisoned in. During the Paris Commune, like writing these reflections, cosmological reflections, about this idea of eternal return. Whereas he had earlier kind of embraced these notions of progress, now he sees it now as sort of this infinite repetition. That undermines any possibility of progress. And so what Benjamin argues here is that. That both of these concepts that Blanqui believed in the different parts of his life end up sort of like reaffirming the apparently sort of eternal character of capitalism. So the interesting thing then, that I think this convolute shows is that Benjamin is not simply the critic of rationalist conceptions of history, or he's got this dialectical conception of history that's critical of both rational and irrational conceptions of history that served to kind of define the 19th century. And so there's this whole kind of dialectical thinking that you see from Benjamin's early writing sort of stretching into this Marxist phase, where he seems to be kind of merging it with this Marxist critique of capitalism as a specific, historically specific form of social organization that presents itself as being natural or eternal.
- [29:29]
B
And it also made me think of. I think it's a quote by Beckett which is like, try again, fail again, fail better. It's that kind of constant repetition, which I think you emphasized really nicely in the work, too. And I guess the next big question, which is, as I take it, your book relates to what do you think are the most significant contributions that Vaulter Benjamin means been made to political economy? Obviously a big question.
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C
Well, I don't actually think that he made much of a contribution to political economy. The argument in the book is just that he was much more engaged in this late stage of his career than I think has been earlier recognized with Marx's critique of political economy and specifically with the idea that. That the fundamental problem with capitalism, fundamental problem here, is not so much the problem of ideology, but this problem of a historically specific form of social organization sort of presenting itself as eternal. And I Think in the late stage of Benjamin's work on the Arcades Project, he sort of takes that critique of political economy and uses it to sort of develop these notions of phantasmagoria. Right. Phantasmagoria is like this kind of vision of eternal return in Blanqui and Nietzsche, which presents a particular kind of society, bourgeois society, as this sort of cosmic fate that's inescapable. Right. So this kind of resembles the famous statement by Frederick Jameson that it's easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of the capitalist mode of production. Right, right.
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B
Yeah. It's that also critique, where you look at Hollywood and media, that there's a lot more movies about the end of the world and total planetary collapse rather than any depictions of what post capitalism might look like.
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C
Yeah. I think that's what Benjamin is getting at too, with the notion of primal history. So he talks about the Arcades Project as being this attempt to look at the primal history of the 19th century. Right. And what I think he means by that is that he's not looking at sort of ancient history as such. Right. But rather the image of the primal past that gets projected from the standpoint of 19th century bourgeois capitalism. This is how the past looks when you're in a society that seems to encompass or that sort of can't recognize its own sort of historical contours and seems to sort of project those contours throughout the infinite expanse of the universe. Right.
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B
Thank you, Swee. And our last question for you here is why or even how is Voltaire Benjamin, important to this current moment today, if at all, can we make use of his ideas or philosophy to help us understand our current historical juncture?
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C
So this is a question that I've been thinking about a lot the last few years and especially since the election in November. It. I'm sure a lot of people have been thinking about this question because of course, Benjamin's account of the way in which fascism mobilizes mass reproduction to impose itself looks a lot like the situation that we're going through right now in the United States. And because looking like, you know, like we're in the situation of government by these idiotic far right fascist social media influencers. Right. But I've also started feeling lately like it's been harder and harder for me to see how the theory fits with the practice at this point. Because, you know, for example, it's been hard for me to even and kind of see what the theoretical, the dialectical upside would be of the contemporary technologies that are pushing us in this bad direction. Right. I just keep sort of waking up each day wishing that they would just turn off the algorithms that's spreading all this stupidity and this misinformation. And so maybe I just sort of lack creativity, political creativity at this particular juncture in time, but especially with what's happening, like in Minneapolis. Right. I just. I've been feeling like at this point, maybe what we need to do is sort of set the theory aside and then just arm ourselves. Organize ourselves, though, and get ready to fight. Because. Yeah. Because at this point, I'm not sure exactly how the theory can serve as an adequate guide.
- [34:26]
B
Right. Yeah. And even. I mean, I definitely echo your thoughts on technology there, too, where it seems like the other technological innovations of our days are just making these fascist. Fascistic tendencies even worse.
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C
Yeah. And. And. And, you know, where's the emancipatory sort of possibility there? I did Benny Means saw in Film. I'm not sure. I mean, they're using it and stuff like that, though, in these kind of neighborhood organizations to be able to follow ice. I mean, that's. But, you know, it just seems like, you know, the. The negative side of it is so negative that. Yeah. Maybe dialectics doesn't get that. Get us out of this one, you know, but. Yeah. Yeah. So it's. Actually, you know, I've been thinking about this question. I just. I can't come up with any good answers at this point, other than. And at this point, too, I feel like, you know, things are moving so quickly, there's just no time for reflection. Right. And even worse. Right. There's fewer and fewer people that seem to be capable of reflection too, you know, and it's been especially true of the case of my students, though, you know, or kind of AI and the attention economy has made that all but impossible for so many of them. But. Yeah, so maybe it's kind of time now to sort of just to remember what our political principles are and then to organize.
- [35:53]
B
Absolutely. In this world on fire, it sounds like praxis and organization is where we need to head to next. So. Thank you so much, Professor Tsuy Nguyen.
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C
Yeah, no, thank you, Elliot.
- [36:08]
B
I really appreciate chatting with you on your book and your book, Volta, Benjamin and the Critique of Political Economy, A New Historical Materialism. Please pick it up wherever you can publish with Bloomsbury Press. And thank you again.
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C
Thanks.