Marx, Proust, Benjamin?

I really appreciated the post that Jonathan made the other day commenting on Taussig’s Walter Benjamin’s Grave. In fact, I myself was just writing on the triad of Marx, Benjamin and Proust -- and more specifically (1) Marx’ conception of work as de-humanizing and alienating, (2) the role this depersonalization of work plays in Benjamin’s ‘atrophy of experience’, and (3) Proust’s re-assessment of the meaning of work (work not as dehumanizing, but, quite the opposite, as potentially meaningful, painfully personal, and involving an intimate subjective/phenomenological connection with one’s ‘world’). This quote from Marx in particular seemed to be of relevance to me when trying to conceptualize precisely what it was Proust was critiquing about ‘work’ (which to him didn’t really get to the nitty gritty of real work):

Work is external to the worker, that it is not part of his nature; and that, consequently, he does not fulfil himself in his work but denies himself, has a feeling of misery rather than well-being, does not develop freely his mental and physical energies but is physically exhausted and mentally debased. The worker, therefore, feels himself at home only during his leisure time, whereas at work he feels homeless. His work is not voluntary but imposed, forced labour. It is not the satisfaction of a need, but only a means for satisfying other needs. Its alien character is clearly shown by the fact that as soon as there is no physical or other compulsion it is avoided like the plaque. External labour, labour in which man alienates himself, is a labour of self-sacrifice, of mortification” (Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, 1964: 124-5)

If Benjamin is a ‘Proustian Marxism”, then what is it about Benjamin’s Marxism that is Proustian? Is there something 'transcritical' going on here, like Karatani Kojin's transcritique of Marx and Kant? This is something I haven’t quite grasped yet. As “an eccentric overwhelmed by the avant-garde and the fast-moving political scene of the time” (quoting from Taussig), there is both an element of the unconventional, as well as the alienated, even the outcast -- the eccentric is ex-centric, ie. outside of the center. The fascination that Benjamin had with Proust was in part a result of their shared sense of their own alterity. Amit Chaudhuri’s introduction to Benjamin’s One Way Street draws attention to Benjamin’s identity as a secular Jew, ie. his “angularity in relationship to the mainstream”. Like the bourgeoise Bengali subjugated to a colonial modernism, Chaudhuri says, he belongs to a “nomadic family”; he is one “who has become deracinated from his or her tradition” and one who is “unsure of his own identity: confronting world history has displaced him from his lineage, and his politics extends to a critique of his forbears” (x-xi). What if we think, then, of Proust problematic of ‘work’ as being the problem of constructing -- or reconstructing -- not just lost time, but a lost tradition, namely a tradition from which Proust as a modern eccentric -- an eccentric alienated from the modern, from the “fast-moving political scene of the time” (Taussig) -- has become alienated. I am not really articulating this as well as I could, but I feel that this is all connected: the Marxist conception of the alienation of the worker, the Benjaminian idea of the atrophy of experience/tradition, and the Proustian idea of regaining a lost past and restructuring the web of time ... I will end with that for now.

-D.G.