“Growing small wings” : Walter Benjamin, Lola Ridge, and the political affect of modernism

I want to argue that the dopey lyricism of the hashish writings is linked explicitly to poetics as a political form of affect and apprehension. It was Hannah Arendt who first pointed out that Benjamin, “without being a poet, thought poetically [dichterisch dachte] and that for him metaphor had to be the greatest and most enigmatic gift of language, because its ‘carrying over’ made it possible to make the invisible sensuous.” Leaving aside the many debates about Benjamin’s propensity for allegory and metaphor vis a vis his interest in the image, my concern here is briefly to assess how this preoccupation with altered consciousness might relate to poetic modernism, and how the swerve to affect, sometimes hyperbolic or indeed whimsical affect, connects to revolutionary zeal. In his famous essay on Surrealism (1929) Benjamin enlists the language of pharmacological intoxication to call for a new political dialectics: concentration and expansion, individualism and community, revolt and passivity all in concord with eschatological transformation. He makes two interesting claims. The first is that what he calls “the loosening of the self by intoxication” is undertaken in order to “step out of” another form of intoxication, which is the subordinating delusion of bourgeois values. So Benjamin confuses things somewhat by using metaphors of intoxication to indicate both ideological liberation and submission. The second claim is to do with the recommendation of a new form of vision: “true creative overcoming,” he writes, “does not lie in narcotics. It resides in a profane illumination, a materialist, anthropological inspiration, to which hashish, opium, or whatever else, can give an introductory lesson.”