"The helpless fixation on notions of security and property deriving from past decades keeps the average citizen from perceiving the quite remarkable stabilities of an entirely new kind that underlie the present situation." -- Walter Benjamin
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| Vor Dem Maskenball (with updates) -- Max Beckmann, 1922 |
The contemporary relevance of the section titled "Imperial Panorama: A Tour of German Inflation" from Walter Benjamin's One-Way Street never ceases to astonish me. Yesterday I finally understood what Benjamin meant by "German inflation." I had mistaken it for the name of an event, like "Great Depression" or "World War I" that referred to a monetary phenomenon in the Friedmanite sense of "inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon." I had attributed to it an ironic, metaphorical sense in which the "stupidity and cowardice" with which the German bourgeoisie insensibly confronted the "silent, invisible power" was "like" the rapidly evaporating value of the banknotes.
But no. The German inflation was not a metaphor for cultural impotence. It was not an event or a monetary phenomenon. The German inflation was literally that cultural impasse, that ineffectual nostalgia for foregone "stabilities" that had benefited those pining for them. Benjamin's "Imperial Panorama" was a diagnosis that "inflation is always and everywhere a cultural phenomenon."
Who knew that the economists have been lying to us about inflation? If prices go up by ten percent and wages go up by ten percent, that is inflation. If prices go up by five percent and wages don't go up at all -- voila! no inflation! "Austerity" policies, in which the price of previously public goods goes up by infinity, is not inflation -- because it is "anti-inflation."
In this cultural diagnosis of inflation, the hyper-inflation of 1923 was not something that came out of the blue in the 1920s. Nor were the printing of banknotes, the financing of the war or the demand of the Allies for reparations the cause. They were symptoms that aggravated the malaise. The inflationary die was cast long before the war.
"things can't go on like this"
I have read this post carefully 3 times so far, the third time after setting it aside for a time, but though I really want to understand the meaning I am unable to so far. Please help me understand what you are arguing.
ReplyDeleteThis time I did it on purpose! The meaning is not self contained in the post. You really need to read the passages by Walter Benjamin, which I deliberately did not quote in full or link to.
ReplyDeleteI did however give a clue. I have been reading those passages for 40 years and it only occurred to me yesterday that "German inflation" did NOT refer to a "monetary phenomenon" and wasn't a metaphor. Understanding doesn't come easy.
https://books.google.com/books?id=BgQEDAAAQBAJ&pg=PT39&lpg=PT39&dq=%22The+helpless+fixation+on+notions+of+security+and+property+deriving+from+past+decades+keeps+the+average+citizen%22&source=bl&ots=EbNav_0T-f&sig=ACfU3U1NV5NpLRCc_931uU-Cj0C5FMfD8Q&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiW-4uvp-boAhXtmHIEHUSyCmUQ6AEwAHoECAsQKQ#v=onepage&q=%22The%20helpless%20fixation%20on%20notions%20of%20security%20and%20property%20deriving%20from%20past%20decades%20keeps%20the%20average%20citizen%22&f=false
ReplyDeleteOne-Way Street
Walter Benjamin
The helpless fixation on notions of security and property deriving from past decades keeps the average citizen from perceiving the quite remarkable stabilities of an entirely new kind that underlie the present situation.
https://saladofpearls.wordpress.com/2016/06/06/a-tour-of-german-inflation/
ReplyDelete1928
IMPERIAL PANORAMA
A Tour of German Inflation
By Walter Benjamin
In the stock of phraseology that lays bare the amalgam of stupidity and cowardice constituting the mode of life of the German bourgeois, the locution referring to impending catastrophe-that “things can’t go on like this” -is particularly noteworthy. The helpless fixation on notions of security and property deriving from past decades keeps the average citizen from perceiving the quite remarkable stabilities of an entirely new kind that underlie the present situation. Because the relative stabilization of the prewar years benefited him, he feels compelled to regard any state that dispossesses him as unstable. But stable conditions need by no means be pleasant conditions, and even before the war there were strata for whom stabilized conditions amounted to stabilized wretchedness. To decline is no less stable, no more surprising, than to rise. Only a view that acknowledges downfall as the sole reason for the present situation can advance beyond enervating amazement at what is daily repeated, and perceive the phenomena of decline as stability itself and rescue alone as extraordinary, verging on the marvellous and incomprehensible. People in the national communities of Central Europe live like the inhabitants of an encircled town whose provisions and gunpowder are running out and for whom deliverance is, by human reasoning, scarcely to be expected-a case in which surrender, perhaps unconditional, should be most seriously considered. But the silent, invisible power that Central Europe feels opposing it does not negotiate. Nothing, therefore, remains but to direct the gaze, in the perpetual expectation of the final onslaught, on nothing except the extraordinary event in which alone salvation now lies. But this necessary state of intense and uncomplaining attention could, because we are in mysterious contact with the powers besieging us, really call forth a miracle. Conversely, the assumption that things cannot go on like this will one day find itself apprised of the fact that for the suffering of individuals as of communities there is only one limit beyond which things cannot go : annihilation.
Yes, supposing I now understand, this is a really excellent insight.
ReplyDeletePlease add to this terrific post when you think appropriate. I am quite startled at the way in which Benjamin thinks here.
ReplyDeleteI've got a 2,000 word blockbuster coming up soon.
ReplyDelete"I've got a 2,000 word blockbuster coming up soon."
ReplyDeleteWonderful.