Who Killed Cultural Studies?

  I had a number of complicated reactions to the recent article in the London Review of Books by Jeremy Harding describing the final day of Walter Benjamin’s life.  Benjamin’s death, perhaps more than any other of those theorists whose lives ended in suicide or insanity (Nietzsche, Deleuze), holds me in a sort of mournful thrall.  I find myself obsessing over the moment when Benjamin finally decided that there was no way out, that he would be deported, loaded into a train, sent to a concentration camp, and gassed—his body disappearing underneath hundreds of now nameless Jews in a mass grave. 

Harding’s article (a review of a recent memoir by Carina Birman, one of the individuals who attempted to take Benjamin across the Franco-Spanish border) meditates on what he calls the “Walter Benjamin cult.” Benjamin’s death, according to Harding, is

symbolic to the point of unreality, an enactment more than an event, like the death of the Christain messiah and the disappearance of the ‘risen’ body, for so long a matter of ardent conjecture.  In a ritual sense, Benjamin’s death is closer to Judaic purification than a redemptive sacrifice.  Yet in the likeness of the scapegoat, he confounds even that tradition, evicted not by his own tribe but by their enemies, wandering a mountainous wilderness not with the misdemeanours of his people on his head-‘all their iniquities in all their sins’—but their innocence. 

Benjamin is the Christ-figure of cultural studies, his unique writing style and eccentric concerns only heighten the sense of his otherworldliness: a materialist who nevertheless uses kabbalism and Jewish messianic thought to break open the homogeneous temporality embedded in much of historical-materialism.  But it is in his death that Harding sees the birth of an academic messianic figure. Benjamin sacrifices himself attempting to deliver his final work (presumably a final version of The Arcades Project, but even this is heavily disputed by Benjamin critics) to the public.  He, then, dies and his death magnifies the resonance of his work a thousand-fold.  In Benjamin 's work popular culture meets the literary, the religious and the political, and it is in the wake of his death that all of these elements merge together in the ubitquitous and nebulous form of contemporary American cultural studies.  American cultural studies is founded, in a large sense, in the haunting shadow of Benjamin's death. I can't help but wonder if my own work is not a mourning ritual for figures like Benjamin.   

This melancholy haunts the film documentation of what one could call "theory culture."  Being part of the English Department at the University of Florida, and feeling the dramatic shift away from any single discourse that one could easily describe with the increasingly nebulous title 'theory,' I experience the new genre of theory documentaries as a consumer mourning the vanishing commodity of the 'theory sage.'  Theory has become, at least for me, the practice of a generation who is quickly dying out--the recent deaths of Jean Baudrillard, Edward Said, and of course, Jacques Derrida only underscore that 'theory' as it has been conceived and practiced over the past thirty years might be slowly approaching the dusk of its proverbial day.  All that remains, for so-called "theory culture" is to consume the dead, perhaps modify their voices in the Audenian guts of living and new work.  But, then again, we see--only now--a desire to document on film the lives of these theorists: a veritable Derridean Archive Fever dedicated to the preservation of a moment in history where the importance of the practice of theory was self-evident.   In a quickly expanding genre of films dealing with critical and literary theory celebrities  (including Kirby Dick's Derrida, Astra Taylor's Zizek!, Sophie Finnes' The Pervert's Guide to Cinema, and Paule Zadjermann's Judith Butler: Philosophical Encounters of the Third Kind) David Mauas recently completed the conspiracy theory-laden Who Killed Walter Benjamin?  The film heavily critiques the largely accepted idea that Benjamin committed suicide and, instead, theorizes that he was assasinated by agents working for Stalinist Russia.  Harding mentions the film in his article, but I think looking at the trailer gives us a sense of the odd tone of the film:

How or why or even whether Walter Benjamin died is not really my concern, though it is pleasing in a slightly cheesy way to imagine hordes of conspiracy theorists convinced that Benjamin is on a deserted island somewhere having tea with Elvis and John Lennon.   It seems, though, that Mauas's film, along with Harding's article and Birman's memoir, all contribute to this odd mourning ritual for theory that show me just how unwilling many people are to give up the theoretical ghost.   The conspiracy theory surrounding Walter Benjamin seems to act as an embalming fluid for theory's corpus: to keep the body intact, theoretical reflection focuses on biography and questions and requestions the events surrounding Benjamin's death.  While a suicide seems Romantic enough for the godfather of 'theory,' a grand adventure yarn involving unseen Stalinist agents angry at Benjamin's critique of Soviet-style communism is even more titilating, and allows me to forget my sense of loss and my uncertainty about the future of my discipline in the compulsive repetition of the what ifs of Benjamin's final hours.