Precisely what Place & Fitterman note is the following:
7c. Walter Benjamin wrote that baroque allegorical writing (save Dante) is fundamentally writing as souvenir, commodity as collector's item. Because allegorical writing is a frozen dialectic, its figural properties are necessarily deformed/destroyed - as figured by the "ruin."
This, of course, refers to Benjamin's innovative study The Origin of German Tragic Drama, to which they allude elsewhere, when mentioning the skull as the supreme allegorical image.
All this, I believe, is quite apt for their exploration of conceptual writing and new media/digital poetry. However, I believe they focus on the negative aspect of Benjamin's re-articulation of allegory to the exclusion of its positive aspect. This is a typical interpretation of Benjamin's work: critics like Georg Lukács and J. Hillis Miller, whose presences loom over theory like angels of the Apocalypse, largely support such an interpretation. They propose that Benjamin's work is negative, deconstructive, and take "ruin" at (nearly) its face value. Benjamin's actual conception, however, is far more complex.
What they're alluding to is Benjamin's statements that "allegories are, in the realm of thought, what ruins are in the realm of things," that as such it reveals nature's "irresistible decay," and it thereby "declares itself to be beyond beauty" (OGT 178).
And these critics are partially correct: at this point, Benjamin is largely pointing toward allegory's negative qualities. At the beginning of this section, he writes that with allegory, “a destructive, but just verdict is passed on the profane world: it is characterized as a world in which the detail is of no great importance.” Allegory arbitrarily assigns its object a meaning that is alien to it. This denies the material object inherent significance. Given the unimportance of detail, the “fragment” or ruin can then arbitrarily stand for something else, and hence “the false appearance of totality has gone out [geht aus]” (176). Yet geht aus can mean either "extinguished" or "left the room" - i.e. totality may come back with a vengeance.
Thus, Benjamin does not draw a steadfast line separating totality and allegory and then throw his money on the side of allegory. Instead, his mode is one of oscillation between positive and negative views of the two and of obscuring their distinction. For example, he states several times that the goal of allegory in the baroque writers is to use it in a way “which makes them appear no longer commensurable with profane things, which raises them onto a higher plane” (175), that they regarded the work of art as a “pil[ing] up of fragments ceaselessly” or as a “repetition of stereotypes” in hopes of a miraculous transformation (178). Although later interpreters may sneer at this hope, Benjamin will note its affinities with parts of Romanticism, citing one of Novalis's fragments (187). Perhaps, then, Benjamin does not equate the miracle with a false hope, but wishes to hint at the process by which the “miracle” occurs.
One place where he begins to hint is in a passage about nature's irresistible decay, a passage favored by his negative critics: “However, nature was not seen by them in bud and bloom, but in the over-ripeness and decay of her creations. In nature they saw eternal transience...” (179). More than the other section on irresistible decay, this one states definitively the absolute degeneration of nature into rot, yet it is precisely that that he states: absolute degeneration, or in the words of the text, eternal transience. As Lukács notes at the conclusion of his essay, Benjamin is “much too precise a stylist to ignore” the full implications of his words (88). The word “eternal” is totalizing: nature always falls into decay, a decay as irresistible as the Calvinist God's grace – i.e. one cannot under any circumstances avoid it. Whether pointed upward or downward, eternity is still eternity, and as the Jena Romantics demonstrate, the arrow can be turned around.
This use of the word “eternal” is the point where Benjamin does turn it around. The baroque artwork, he says, “wants only to endure, and it clings with all its senses to the eternal,” and therefore, in allegory, it sets up “consciously constructed ruins,” the form of which is meant to withstand time's erosion (181-82). Benjamin's treatment of this topic is worth quoting at length:
The object of philosophical criticism is to show that the function of artistic form is as follows: to make historical content, such as provides the basis of every important work of art, into a philosophical truth. This transformation of material content into truth content makes the decrease in effectiveness, whereby the attraction of earlier charms diminishes decade by decade, into the basis for a rebirth, in which all ephemeral beauty is completely stripped off, and the work stands as a ruin. In the allegorical construction of the baroque Trauerspiel such ruins have always stood out clearly as formal elements of the preserved work of art. (182)
In this passage, Benjamin swings fully into the positive mode in describing allegory. The baroque artists, it turns out, knew what they were doing. As opposed to those artists who sought immortality through sheer greatness, those of the baroque followed a kind of Taoist wu-wei path by which they consciously employed weakness to their advantage. In a world of irresistible decay in which details are of no importance, baroque artists employed unimportant details that would purpose(ful)ly decay, leaving behind only a fragmentary form that would lead to a rebirth in eternal life. How this occurs, again, is explained by the Jena Romantics, but an investigation into their theories is beyond the scope of this post.
As I mentioned above, Benjamin will not be content with staking his claim on one side or the other. Soon after the passage quoted above, he returns to the negative mode. Contra a “symbolic totality” in which one or several objects are “comprised of one single feature... it is as something incomplete and imperfect that objects stare out from the allegorical structure” (186). Nature becomes personalized “not so as to be made more inward, but, on the contrary – so as to be deprived of a soul,” he writes, quoting Herbert Cysarz approvingly (187). Allegory is still ruinous, but now those ruins are despiritualized. The rebirth the baroque artists longed for, Benjamin claims, did take place, but it was mere illusion. Fragments cannot become something new; they only give the appearance of doing so. And yet the haunting language of totality remains. If objects within the allegorical structure are imperfect and incomplete, it seems they must forever remain so, which leads us back to totality.
Benjamin recognizes this, and so at the conclusion of The Origin of German Tragic Drama, he rapidly oscillates between the positive and negative poles, first seeing the negative as positive: “Whatever [the baroque age] picks up, its Midas-touch turns into something endowed with significance. Its element was transformation of every sort; and allegory was its scheme.” The material object is infused with the spirit by means of the allegorist's touch. Yet this turns around, the positive becomes negative, for absolute spiritualization “destroys itself in its emancipation from what is sacred. Materiality – but here soulless materiality – becomes its home” (229-30). Allegory, in this presentation, divides the spiritual from the material: the material object may act as a sign pointing to the spiritual, but the two never overlap. In its haste to separate itself from the spiritual realm, the allegorical sign cuts itself off too and so denies it any reality in the realm of things. On the side of the material realm, it is presented as merely a sign, and thus it is also denied existence.
Hence, this double denial incites Benjamin's rage against what he perceives to be allegory's denial of the existence of evil (233-35). Despite this rant, simultaneously powerful and elusive, Benjamin concludes his book thus:
In the ruins of great buildings the idea of the plan speaks more impressively than in lesser buildings, however well preserved they are; and for this reason the German Trauerspiel merits interpretation. In the spirit of allegory it is conceived from the outset as a ruin, a fragment. Others may shine resplendently as on the first day; this form preserves the image of beauty to the last. (235)
Somehow, after writing about allegory's irresistibly destructive nature and its denial of both the material and spiritual realms, Benjamin manages to conclude in the positive mode, back on the note that ruins, though dead, remain intact, while others only glimmer and, unaware of their own inevitable destruction, just as quickly vanish. The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our allegorist stands forever.
To understand exactly what Benjamin (and, by extension, Place & Fitterman) are dealing with here, we would have to examine Friedrich Schlegel's fragments, and, behind him, Kant's three Critiques to get a firm philosophical grounding. Clearly, such an exercise is beyond the scope of a blog post.
But what all this means for conceptual writing is that, far from avoiding totality, authoritarianism, or whatever, it constantly fluctuates between the positive and negative as a kind of bottomless well. Dworkin rightly points this out at the conclusion of his essay, finding the cataloguing nature of conceptual writing complicit in the technology of the U.S. government's desire for "total information awareness" while still attempting to challenge the authority of such technology.
Totality is total. In attempting to escape it, one flees only into more totality.
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