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Walter Benjamin Traces of Craft
Walter Benjamin Traces of Craft
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access to Journal of Design History
This paper considers Walter Benjamin's theory of the object in the industrial age. Benjamin's work is replete with
craft practices. Pot-throwing and weaving appear as paradigms of authentic experience and the processes of
Prominent in Benjamin's account of craft practice is the hand that feels and marks its objects; authentic knowledge
is envisioned as a 'grasping hold' of the world. The shift from artisan labour to industrial labour, with its growing
of the hand in the processes of production, impacts on modes of memory and experience. Benjamin's delineation
industrialized experience is shown to be redemptive. He re-evaluates Dada and photography as manual craft p
might rediscover a modern authenticity of experience and memory.
Keywords: Walter Benjamin -hand- industrial organization -material culture studies -Modernism -techni
Journal of Design History Vol. ii No. i ?0 i998 The Design History Society 5
6 Esther Leslie
body, while others are cushioned in the well- After all, storytelling, in its sensory aspect, is by
upholstered seats of management. The techno- means a job for the voice alone. Rather, in ge
frenzy of the First World War was made possible storytelling the hand plays a part which supports
by nineteenth-century technological advance, and what is expressed in a hundred ways with its gestures
that war marks for Benjamin a re-editing of learnt of work.23
experience. From factory to battlefield the experi-
ence of shock, physical and psychic, constitutes Stories are lost; that is to say, textured experience,
the norm. Technology dictates a syncopated, dis- graspable experience, is lost because of the loss of
locating rhythm to which workers and soldiers the weaving and spinning activities that went on
must permanently react. The division of labour while they were heard. The web that cradled
compels a mechanical measure of labour time, the storytelling is unravelling at all its ends.24
voided, homogeneous time of manufacture. The Benjamin relates elsewhere the tale of the
work process, especially the factory drill, de-skills hand's redundancy for production; notably in
operators. Industrial work processes are an 'auto- his most famous essay 'The Work of Art in the
matic operation', wherein each act is an exact Age of its Technical Reproducibility' (1935-8).25
repetition of the last. Benjamin remarks: Here he tells how, until the arrival of mechanical
8 Esther Leslie
10 Esther Leslie
There it is night; tents are erected; lions are close by. I object. Cretu so e ct crat to
have not forgotten my dainty, which I want to show ori Craft stem rth erSan w
everyone. But the opportunity does not arise. Africa is power, force or strength-in German this is the
gripping everyone too much. And I wake up before I meaning of the word Kraft. Frequently this sense
can reveal the secret which I have subsequently come of craft was endowed with magical or devious
to understand: the three phases into which the toy connotations. It is still to be found in this sense in
falls. The first panel; that colourful street with the two the word crafty, and in the word witchcraft, a
children. The second: a web of fine little cogs, pistons thing that fascinated Benjamin and which he
and cylinders, rollers and transmissions, all of wood, analysed.42 Witchcraft proposes a special relation-
whirling together in one level, without person or ship with objects and words, not unlike Benja-
noise. And finally the third panel; the vision of a new min's. Witchcraft accents the unca
order in Soviet Russia.38 objects, such as charms, and the trickiness of
order i SovietRussia38
words, as in incantations.
The magical dream-object, not unlike the What emerges from all this is a sense in which
wooden Russian toys he collected, reveals itself Benjamin's understanding of objects-craft
to have reference to a fantasized ideal social order, objects, mass-reproduced objects-includes essen-
represented, at least in tendency, in the post- tially an understanding of experiences to be had
revolutionary Soviet Union, positively infantile, with objects, and memories evoked by objects or
organized around play, not work, colourful, encoded in objects-memories of objects in all
bright, fulfilled. Benjamin's objects may be real possible senses. Crafted objects, specifically the
or imagined (for as the surrealists intuited, objects pot, provide a model of authentic experience, the
are both objective and dreamt). He shows how experience of a person imprinted on to the objects
those objects are invested with social utopian that he or she brings into being, and tapestry
desire. Benjamin's materialism of objects solicits offers a model of authentic memory, the weave
a liberation of objects from the fetishizing snares of past and present experience and utopian pos-
and deadening repetitions of capitalism, but he sibility. In the case of the modern mass repro-
wishes to salvage the power of enchantment for duced object, however, despite new conditions of
the purposes of social metamorphosis. Futurism, production, such intimacy and imaginative
dada, surrealism use magical strategies, Benjamin investment in objects may still be possible. Craft
divulges. These avant-gardes set off magical as mode of activity translates into craft as a power,
experiences, Erfahrungen, venting a concealed an obscure power, nestling in the imaginatively
reality subtending everyday subject/object com- conceived object.
merce.39
Benjamin's dream, in its being dreamt and in its Broken Pots
retelling, causes the tools of Enlightenment
rationalism, as manifested in Freud's talking- And to end then, back to the beginning and
cure, to collide with the snags of enchantment thoughts on pots and telling stories. In an early
and a fascination with marvellous, if profane essay, titled 'The Task of the Translator', Benjamin
illumination. Here we return to Leskov, and the alludes to pottery. This is in the course of con-
world of the fairy-tale; for essentially, Benjamin tending the impossibility of literal translation, of
says, Leskov's craft was that of telling fairy-tales; transmitting a story unaltered from one language
stories in which the little people learn how to to another. He speaks here of translation as the
liberate themselves through crafty cunning and gluing together of fragments of a vessel. These
in complicity with nature.40 Benjamin's dreams fragments must match one another in the smallest
too are fairy stories about a possible future state details, but they need not be like one another.43
i See Walter Benjamin, 'The storyteller', in Illumina- 14 Barthes uses a similar metaphorical language in
tions, Fontana, 1992 or 'Der Erzdhler', in Gesammelte discussing Proust. In 'From work to text' (1971) he
Schriften (hereafter G.S.), 11:2, Suhrkamp, 1991. 'The writes of the 'textual' novelist: 'If he is a novelist, he
storyteller' was written at the same time as Benja- is inscribed in the novel like one of his characters,
min's most famous essay, known in English as 'The figured in the carpet, no longer privileged, paternal,
work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction'. aletheological, his inscription is ludic. He becomes,
This essay is also included in Illuminations, which, as it were, a paper-author: his life is no longer the
together with One-Way Street and Charles Baudelaire origin of his fictions but a fiction contributing to his
(both Verso, formerly New Left Books), provides a work; there is a reversion of the work on to the life
good cross-section of Benjamin's wide-ranging writ- (and no longer the contrary); it is the work of Proust,
ings. Benjamin's essay on art and mass-reproduction of Genet which allows their lives to be read as a
has received enormous amounts of critical attention text.' See Barthes' text reprinted in Art In Theory
in art, film and photography theory, in the years 1goo-1ggo: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, edited by
since John Berger's Ways of Seeing (1972) introduced Paul Wood and Charles Harrison, Blackwell, 1992,
its theses to a book-reading public and television PP. 944-5.
audience. Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) has also 15 'The image of Proust', p. 198 or 'Zum Bilde Prousts',
contributed to design theory. This German-Jewish p. 311.
writer's influence is manifest not only in thinking i6 'The image of Proust', p. 208 or 'Zum Bilde Prousts',
about mass-reproduction and its consequences for p. 322.
design, but also in techniques of writing histories of17 'Eduard Fuchs, collector and historian', in One-Way
objects in urban, industrial societies, as deployed in Street, New Left Books, 1979, p. 362 or 'Eduard
Benjamin's uncompleted Arcades Project (1927-40) Fuchs, der Sammler und der Historiker', in G.S.,
and his 'Theses on the philosophy of history' 11:2, p. 479.
(1939-40). John A. Walker's Design History and the i8 See Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High
History of Design (Pluto Press, London, 1989) records Capitalism, New Left Books, 1973, p. 132 or 'Lber
Benjamin's influence on design history and histor- einige Motive bei Baudelaire' (1939), in G.S., 1:2,
iography in a number of areas: writing design p. 630. See also Benjamin's 1939 review of the
histories as a type of 'excavation'; the theoretical Encyclopedie Franqaise, in G.S., III, p. 583n.
interest in the fragment; the fascination with pas- 19 Charles Baudelaire, p. 147 or 'Uber einige Motive bei
tiche; and the attention directed towards spaces of Baudelaire', p. 645.
consumption, the erotics of shopping and questions 20 Charles Baudelaire, pp. 132-3 or 'UIber einige Motive
of aesthetic pleasure. bei Baudelaire', p. 631.
12 Esther Leslie