Walter Benjamin's Antifascist Education by Tyson E. Lewis;

Author:Tyson E. Lewis;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2020-04-14T16:00:00+00:00

Intimate Portraits of Two Collectors

Eduard Fuchs presents us with our first example of the educational logic of collecting. Fuchs was not so much a researcher or scholar as he was, first and foremost, a collector, and this emphasis on collecting is, according to Benjamin, absolutely essential for understanding Fuchs’s educational innovations. Indeed, Fuchs began collecting in response to a certain educational crisis within the Social Democratic Party in Germany in the late nineteenth century. Historical materialism, at that time, had largely neglected the arts and the humanities, reducing them to mere diversions or stimulations lacking revolutionary relevance to the struggles of the working class. Natural science dominated the theoretical and educational landscape of the left. The only alternative was cultural history—a discipline which abstracted culture from its social and economic context, reifying it. Culture became thinglike and cultural history took on a “fetishistic quality.”37 This fetishism is reflected in the great museums and art houses. These institutions focus on “showpieces” or masterworks, and in the process, focus more on the “master’s signature”38 than the objects themselves.

Opposed to both the dismissal of culture and its reification, Fuchs offered an alternative approach. Instead of culture as a thing, delivered over as if readymade for commodification, Fuchs conceptualized past culture as “uncompleted”39 traces of a vast network of social and economic relations. This insight liberated Fuchs from certain strands of aesthetic idealism focused on questions of beauty, harmony, and so forth. It also disrupted the unity and continuity of the canon of great art. He “strayed into marginal areas—such as caricature and pornographic imagery—which sooner or later meant the ruin of a whole series of clichés in traditional art history.”40 Mass art(s) disrupted the simple, linear story of high culture and the collecting of master works as representations of mythic history. He also shifted emphasis away from authenticity and aura to focus on each historical era’s approach to technological reproduction. Opposed to bourgeois moral taboos, Fuchs was fascinated by the grotesque and exaggerated dimensions of mass art. In fact, Fuchs’s famous phrase “Truth lies in the extreme”41 is later inherited as a methodological principle by Benjamin: truth as the maximal swelling point of knowability must be sought in the grotesque.

Fuchs himself was passionate about collecting. As Benjamin observes in relation to Fuchs, “The collector’s passion is a divining rod that turns him into a discoverer of new sources.”42 This passion is not reducible to a personal interest or possessive subjectivity (as discussed previously). Instead, it is a giving over of the self (or an act of self-forgetting). “As a rule,” Benjamin writes, “collectors have been guided by the objects themselves.”43 Instead of fame, fortune, or prestige, Fuchs abandoned himself to the act of collecting, responding to the objects he encountered no matter how grotesque. Not unlike Benjamin’s example of the collector absorbed into his collection, so too does Fuchs take on traits of his most passionate obsession: Daumier’s prints. Benjamin summarizes as follows:

And as a collector, he [Fuchs] has cleared the way to

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