The pure machine's gambit: Walter Benjamin's Thesis I.

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Date: 22 September 2005
• Author: Vardoulakis, Dimitris
• Published date: 22 September 2005
• Author: Vardoulakis, Dimitris

How can one think of the future? This question will of necessity remain indeterminate if it is taken as asking what a thinking subject imagines will take place in the future. There are no restrictions in what one is allowed to imagine. Conversely, the question becomes fruitful as soon as the future is related to the subject: How does one figure in the future? How does the future figure the subject? There are two ways of approaching such a problematic. First, the future could be understood in terms of content--this is the utopian impulse. (1) There is an image of the future that the subject strives to conceive as well as to realize. This is the prevalent way of thinking the utopian. However, what this presupposes is a metaphysical distinction between presence and absence, between being and nonbeing. In which case, the subject either has an immediate access to its own thought process or the thought process itself provides an immediate access to reality. Second, the subject can be allowed to figure in a way that configures, as well as disfigures, the opposition between presence and absence--this is the anti-utopian impulse. Here, the future can no longer be conceived in terms of content. Rather, the future is a structural element of the present, that part of the present which makes possible an interruption of a linear notion of time. The subject of this anti-utopian figuration can be called a Doppelganger. This is not an arbitrary choice of term, but the way that the subject was conceived by Jean Paul, the author who coined the word 'Doppelganger'. Jean Paul used the Doppelganger to argue against the attempt to unify a particular subject and its transcendental subjectivity, so that the Doppelganger allows for a finite infinite--a temporality of the present which does not concede primacy to the future. (2)

Walter Benjamin adhered to this prohibition against making an image of the future. The anti-utopian impulse in Benjamin's thought is expressed, for instance, in Thesis B from 'On the Concept of History' (1940). The 'disenchanted future', as Benjamin calls it, is positioned against the 'soothsayers of enlightenment', that is, against the attempt to ground Utopia on a teleological conception of time. However, this is not to reject the Enlightenment project tout court. Rather, as Benjamin underscores, the future is still operative, but now as 'the small gate in time through which the Messiah might enter'. (3) The future is still operative, but not as the principle guaranteeing or legitimating the political. The political, instead, is about the present and how the present allows the subject to judge. (4) Thus, not only is the Doppelganger, in the sense described above, operative in Benjamin; its operative presence counters the utopian project of giving content to the future. In other words, Benjamin shows that time figures the subject by undoing the opposition between presence and absence.

Benjamin's argument against the metaphysics of presence vis-avis the subject is succinctly and memorably presented in Thesis I of 'On the Concept of History'. In Thesis I, Benjamin refers to the image of the Turk, the chess automaton with a man hidden inside it. The Thesis, in its entirety, reads:

It is generally known [Bekanntlich soll es] that there was once an automaton constructed in such a way that it could respond to every move by a chess player with a countermove that would ensure the winning of the game. A puppet wearing Turkish attire and with a hookah in its mouth sat before a chessboard placed on a large table. A system of mirrors created the illusion that this table was transparent on all sides. Actually, a hunchbacked dwarf--a master at chess--sat inside and guided the puppet's hand by means of strings. One can imagine a philosophic counterpart to this apparatus. The puppet, called 'historical materialism', is to win all the time [immer]. It can easily be a match for anyone if it enlists the services of theology, which today, as is generally known, is small and ugly and has to keep out of sight [sich ohnehin nicht darf blicken lassen]. (5) Two points about the Thesis are crucial from the beginning. First, Benjamin describes the unbeatable combination of dwarf/theology and puppet/materialism--the utopian vision of what Edgar Allan Poe (the source of Benjamin's anecdote, as it will be argued) describes as a 'pure machine'. Poe's argument is that the Turk would win if and only if it were a pure machine; or, the other way round, only a pure machine can win all the time. The argument here will be that such a utopian vision can only be sustained if the emphasis is placed upon the 'win'--the win being what happens in the future. Conversely, the thesis allows for a formulation that critiques utopianism if the emphasis is placed upon 'all the time'. That is, there is a construal of the subject in terms of a temporality that does not allow for a vision of a subjectivity (sich ohnehin nicht darf blicken lassen) that gives access to the future. Second, if this is an undoing of metaphysics, it still requires a response to traditional metaphysical oppositions. Such an opposition is registered here as the ensemble of the inner mind of a chess player and its outer mechanical part. The important point is not about the arrangement of what is inside and what outside, but the positing of such an arrangement of interiority and exteriority. (6) The argument here will be that Benjamin in Thesis I performs a gambit in the twofold sense of the word in chess: a sacrifice and an opening strategy. Benjamin presents a metaphysical opposition only to show that it fails--the interior-exterior arrangement is sacrificed. But this failure is also a strategy that positions the subject outside the bounds of individual agency.

Overcoming the 'pure machine' in effect means that the relation enacted by the chess-playing automaton, the Turk, should not be resolved in favour of either the dwarf or the puppet. Rather, it is a relation of complicity; there is no sublation into a synthesis of the part, nor sublimation into a hierarchical higher entity. Moreover, it is a relation that allows for the movement of the chess pieces on the board and hence for the interruptions effected in the game of chess. And since the dwarf stands for the 'small and ugly' image of theology while the puppet stands for historical materialism, this means that, as Rebecca Comay puts it, 'in insisting on the...