“That Things Are ‘Status Quo’ Is the Catastrophe”

On the Contemporary Relevance of Walter Benjamin

Herbert Böttcher

1. Why Walter Benjamin?

About 100 years ago Walter Benjamin wrote his fragment “Capitalism as Religion” (Benjamin 1921). The anniversary of this piece was an occasion to revisit Benjamin. In the process, the relationship between Benjamin’s dictum “that things are ‘status quo’ is the catastrophe” (Benjamin 2006, 184), and the crisis of capitalism coming to a head in the so-called polycrisis moved into a constellation. This constellation illuminates the explosive nature of the crisis and the danger of the catastrophes that accompany it.

In the attempt to take up Benjamin, we cannot overlook the fact that Benjamin’s critique of capitalism focuses on the cultural level without including the “hidden abode of production” (Marx 1976, 279), i.e., the level of political economy (cf. Böttcher 2021, 35ff). Moreover, Benjamin’s characterization of “capitalism as religion” remains phenomenologically truncated (cf. Kurz 2012, 389ff), thus requiring corrective further thinking with regard to a Marx-oriented critique of fetishism. In connection with political-economic and fetishism-critical insights, Benjamin’s thinking can provide insights into what he described as the catastrophe and what we describe as the final crisis of capitalism.

2.Can the Story Be Recognized?

With the looming dangers of fascism and war, Benjamin’s thinking in the 1920s and 30s focused on the question of history. His last text, written in the form of theses, “On the Concept of History” (Benjamin 2006, 389-400) was inspired by the Hitler-Stalin Pact – “in a race against Hitler’s extermination apparatus” (Werner 2011, 7). At its core is the question of the relationship between the past and the present. They are connected by a “time-kernel that is planted in both the knower and the known” (Benjamin 1989, 51). This “time-kernel” makes history recognizable.

Benjamin thus distinguishes himself from a bourgeois concept of truth that emphasizes the timelessness of truth. At the same time, he marks a contrast with Heidegger’s connection of “Being and Time” (Heidegger 2008). In Heidegger’s understanding of time, real history does not occur. History becomes historicity, an existential of time. Above all, Benjamin distinguishes himself from historicism. The latter wants to recognize history “the way it really was” (Benjamin 2006, 391). In doing so, historicism starts from the present and tries to explain how the present came to be by “empathizing” with the past. Benjamin criticizes the fact that what was victorious becomes the starting point for the question of history, and the propagated “sympathy” with the past becomes sympathy “with the victor” (ibid.). Only what has survived victoriously comes into view. The failed, the downfalls and catastrophes as well as the victims as the defeated in history disappear. Benjamin, on the other hand, insists on the “time-kernel” that, in the constellation of past and present, makes history recognizable in the “now” in the face of imminent danger.

This has epistemological implications. Benjamin’s talk of the “time-kernel” is not – as Adorno notes – about “truth in history, but rather history in truth” (Adorno 2013, 135). So it cannot be the task of philosophy to grasp its time in thought in the Hegelian sense. For, according to Adorno, philosophy finds itself “in a reality whose order and form suppresses every claim to reason” (Adorno 1977, 120). Therefore, it is denied the possibility of placing itself in a positive relation to reality. If it does so, it “only veils reality and eternalizes its present condition” (ibid.).

Benjamin refers to history from its flip side, emphasizing that the concept of progress must be “grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are ‘status quo’ is the catastrophe.”  (Benjamin 2006, 184). History is not, as in Hegel, the self-revelation of spirit in a progressive process in which relations come to “reason.” They are not directed toward a positive end. In Hegel, this becomes a justification for the fact that the course of progress advancing on the “battlefield” (Hegel 1971, 46) of history involves sacrifices. They are to be accepted as unavoidable collateral damage or to be paid as the price of progress.

In contrast, Benjamin’s insistence that the “status quo” is the catastrophe makes clear that in the “status quo” history rolls over ruins, unfulfilled hopes, unrealized possibilities, in short: over its victims. They are consigned to oblivion, so that “even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he is victorious” (Benjamin 2006, 391). To perceive the catastrophe that is happening now and to think about it allows what is lost and forgotten, not the victors but the defeated, to come into view and into materialist thinking. It becomes possible to “brush history against the grain” (ibid., 392).

3. Benjamin’s Struggle for Time and History as A Struggle Against the Myth of the Return of the Same in Capitalism.

Benjamin characterizes the time in which past and present enter into a constellation as “now-time” (Benjamin 2006, 395). In it, an image of the past flashes. It “holds fast to that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to the historical subject in a moment of danger” (Benjamin 2006, 391). Past and present enter into a constellation that makes them “recognizable.” The “moment of danger” for Benjamin is the spread of fascism and the threat of war. In the face of this danger, Benjamin makes clear in the theses “On the Concept of History” that the struggle against the totality of fascist relations of domination is linked to the struggle for the suppressed past, for all those who have been namelessly defeated in history. Therefore, history as the history of the victors must be interrupted, the “continuum of history,” as a homogeneous and empty flowing time of progress, must be blown up.

The fight against the dangers that flash and can be recognized in the present is a fight for time and history and therefore against myth. It is not determined by the time of history, but by the flowing time of the return of the same. Myth is about the course of nature, about the oneness with nature and its uniform flow of becoming, passing away and becoming again – not bound in temporal-historical constellations, but in the eternity of the cosmos and the constellations of the stars. In the myth time becomes an empty, uniform and homogeneous time.

In connection with political-economic and fetishism-critical insights, Benjamin’s struggle for time and history and against myth takes on clear contours as a struggle against capitalism.

For one thing: In capitalism, history is naturalized through competition. In it, the strong are selected from the weak and, as the crisis deepens, increasingly the useful from the “superfluous.” Those who prove to be strong enough in their ability to adapt have the best chances in the struggle for survival. Companies can only be fit for the future if they respond optimally to new economic situations. Individuals face the challenge of keeping themselves fit as an “entrepreneurial self” (Bröckling 2013) for the competitive struggle for work through permanent self-optimization – always ready to adapt on their own initiative. Those who prove too weak in this process are thrown out of the race. What Darwin thought he had recognized as the law of natural selection becomes law of capitalist-historical selection, the “biologization of world society” (Kurz 2009, 293ff).

Second, as Marx writes in his analysis of the fetish character of the commodity and its mystery, the social character of labor and the representationality of its products appear “as the socio-natural properties of these things” (Marx 1976, 165). The social context of commodity production appears as a natural context, the production of commodities as “natural.” It revolves – advancing in competition on an ever-increasing scale – around the always-same: the end in itself of the multiplication of capital. The always-same, however, is not history, but myth. Modernity cannot be described as rationalization or disenchantment – as Max Weber thought – but is instead characterized by (re)mythification and by magical enchantment. They find their expression in the phenomenon of the enchanting cult of commodities. This cannot be separated from the contexts of commodity production, distribution and consumption, i.e. from the myth represented by commodity production as a whole.

In the myth of commodity production, time becomes a homogeneously flowing and empty time; for the concrete time of labor is subsumed into the abstract time of value (Zamora 2022, 266ff). It is integrated into the qualitatively (i.e. in terms of content) empty flow of the self-valorization of capital as an abstract and empty end in itself. This goes hand in hand with a spiral of acceleration in which there is no rest – as Benjamin had described it on the level of the phenomenon of the permanence of the capitalist cult without interruption by feast days (cf. Benjamin 1921). The driving force behind this restlessness is the tension of raising the level of productivity under the constraints of competition. “[…] [V]alue which insists on itself as value preserves itself through increase; and it preserves itself precisely only by constantly driving beyond its quantitative barrier,” (Marx 1993, 270). In this process, the accumulation of capital moves in self-referential, empty and incomplete circuits that cannot stop at any external limit. Accumulation as an endless process is indispensable for reasons of self-preservation.

“The time of capital is marked by the paradox of a circularity directed towards the future. But this future is nothing other than the future of future circuits of accumulation” (Zamora 2018, 215). Therefore, the emptiness of the process of accumulation in terms of content is trapped in the homogeneous emptiness of time, which flows along as a recurrence of the same – with no goal and no perspective to escape the spell of the same over and over again. The fact that the new always replaces the old, that new products, brands, fashions and trends replace one another, only apparently contradicts this. What is decisive is “that the face of the world never changes precisely in what new, that the new is always the same in all its components” (Benjamin 2015a, 676). Even the new, in its constant change, cannot cover up the emptiness. It does not provide satisfaction and reassurance, but produces the boredom that is an expression of the emptiness that is supposed to be filled by constant newness. For bored customers, there are now offers of relief and deepening in the relevant event, esotericism and spirituality markets. They range from the intensification of experiences of happiness through experiences of spiritual depth to permanent entertainment through events (cf. Böttcher 2023, 81ff). More and more of the same is demanded and offered in the mythological cycle of the “return of the same.”

4. Limits for the “Return of The Same” And the Final Emptiness of Capitalism

Nevertheless, the “return of the same” cannot continue indefinitely. It comes up against a logical barrier, which Marx had described as the “moving contradiction” (Marx 1993, 706) of capital. Production conducted within the framework of competition forces labor to be replaced by technology as a source of value and surplus value. In the process, capital destroys its own foundations. With the microelectronic revolution, the disappearance of the substance of labor can no longer be compensated for by expanding production, reducing costs, making commodities cheaper, expanding markets, and so on. Thus the logical barrier also comes up against a historical limit which can no longer be overcome within the framework of capitalism.

Now, Benjamin did not include the “hidden abode of production” (Marx 1976, 279) in his critique of capitalism. Nevertheless, insights can be drawn from his critique, which focuses on phenomena that are important for confronting the crisis of capitalism that we are currently experiencing:

1. Benjamin had in mind the limits of capitalism at the level of guilt. He had characterized the capitalist cult as a “cult that creates guilt, not atonement” (Benjamin 1921), i.e. as a cult without the possibility of salvation. Even God is included in this cycle of guilt (ibid.). God is thus not simply dead, but his “transcendence is at an end” and God is thus “incorporated into human existence” (ibid). He does not stand opposite the conditions, transcending them. Rather, he becomes the expression of their immanent fetishization, the “real metaphysics” (Robert Kurz) of capitalist relations. In this sense, when capitalism becomes religion, it offers “not the reform of existence but its complete destruction. […] It is the expansion of despair, until despair becomes a religious state of the world” (ibid.). The essence of this religion is to persevere to the end, “to the point where God, too, finally takes on the entire burden of guilt, to the point where the universe has been taken over by that despair which is actually its secret hope” (ibid.). The end of the world then seems more conceivable than the end of capitalism (as Frederic Jameson has said).

2. According to Benjamin, the God concealed in the capitalist cult becomes recognizable at the zenith of indebtedness (see Benjamin 1921). Here, it becomes clear that today, the pseudo-accumulation of capital in the financial markets can no longer be related to real accumulation, which is why bubbles burst again and again. The flow of a homogeneous and empty time that Benjamin had associated with progress is recognizable in the deepening crisis of capitalist “real metaphysics” as the emptiness associated with the multiplication of capital as an abstract end in itself. It is empty of content in two ways. On the one hand, it is oriented not to qualities, that is, to content, but to quantity, that is, to multiplication in the abstract. The objects of the world are not recognized in their own quality, but only as material for the valorization of capital. Second: With the immanent crisis of valorization, which can no longer be overcome, the abstract and irrational end in itself, to increase capital/money for its own sake, itself runs into the void. Robert Kurz sees its potential for annihilation in the impossibility of resolving the “contradiction between the metaphysical emptiness and the ‘representational compulsion’ of value in the sensuous world” (Kurz 2021, 69). “This gives rise to a double potential of annihilation: an ‘ordinary,’ in a certain sense everyday one, as it has always resulted from the process of reproduction of capital, and a somewhat final one, when the process of divestment reaches absolute limits” (ibid. 70).

3. The naturalization of history, which Benjamin saw in the selection of the strong from the weak, takes on a destructive character as the crisis progresses. It barbarizes itself into a social Darwinist struggle for existence, which can be tamed less and less by political regulations. This finds its expression in the so-called polycrisis of state collapse, wars and civil wars, the destruction of livelihoods, migration and flight, escalating violence in state repression, and barbaric struggles for survival. The fight is to the death. But there is virtually nothing left at stake, because the capitalist struggle for social Darwinist self-assertion is coming to nothing. Catastrophe is inherent in the process of valorization of capital. In the logic of the valorization of capital as an end in itself, there can be no emancipation, but only ruin and destruction.

5. The Present Moment of Danger: World Destruction and Self-Destruction

The current “moment of danger” (Benjamin 2006, 391) is probably the war in Ukraine. In it flashes the world order wars that are waged primarily in regions where states are collapsing. They are an illusory response to the “territorial system of sovereignty that is beginning to disintegrate before the eyes of the democratic-capitalist apparatuses, which unintentionally support this process” (Kurz 2021, 414). In the war in Ukraine, it becomes clear that the so-called great powers, who have nuclear weapons of mass destruction, are also involved in the processes of capitalist disintegration. They are fighting for self-assertion in the processes of disintegration. This struggle also comes to nothing, because there is no prospect of a new regime of accumulation that could serve as the basis for a new hegemonic “world order” (cf. Konicz 2022).

At the same time, isolated and disoriented individuals are driven into a competitive struggle for self-assertion. Under the pressure of a permanent and unattainable process of self-optimization, it is a matter of self-submission to be achieved on one’s own initiative. In this process, the “self-referentiality of the empty metaphysical form” (Kurz 2021, 69) does not remain external to the subjects. Rather, they are forced to deal with the crisis processes to which they are exposed within this form. These struggles, too, come to nothing the more labor as the basis of individual agency and autonomous self-consciousness dissolves.

The universe, “taken over by that despair which is actually its secret hope” (Benjamin 1921), interacts with the “condition” in which individuals have to process the crisis dynamics. In this process, the defense against the experiences of powerlessness and humiliation through hallucinations of greatness and power can also occur in self-destruction (cf. Böttcher, Elisabeth 2022). Attempts to ward off the empty self and to defend it in an identitarian way could be means by which the defense of Western freedom and the willingness to accept the price of world annihilation for it in the face of hopelessness gain plausibility. The “greatness” of the Western world is then shown in the willingness give one’s life for it.

The final promise of self-efficacious greatness is the willingness to destroy oneself and the world. It offers itself as the possibility to show greatness and to demonstrate power through acts of destruction. On the social level, too, rampages come within reach. Robert Kurz had hinted at it when he wrote: “The concept of the democratic rampage is […] to be taken quite literally on the level of military action. […] The more untenable and dangerous the world situation becomes, the more the military aspect comes to the fore and the less hesitation there is to use high-tech violence on a large scale without asking questions” (Kurz 2021, 429). The “unmanageable world” and “the incomprehensibility of the problems” can mobilize a “diffuse rage for destruction” (ibid.).

The nation-states that confront each other in blocs in warlike or dangerous constellations are part of the insane capitalist fetish system that has reached the limits of its reproductive capacity and within which there can be no peaceful coexistence. “In the world of consummate capitalism, only open madness is realistic. Under these conditions, so-called pragmatism itself inevitably takes on eschatological features” (Kurz, 2001, 343).

6. The Question of Salvation

6.1 Interruption and Dialectics at a Standstill

In the “moment of danger” that Benjamin recognizes in the threat of fascism and war, the question becomes urgent as to what might save us from the catastrophic flow of empty, homogeneous time in the continuum of capitalist progress. For Benjamin, the possibility of salvation depends on interrupting the empty and homogeneous flow of time and blowing up the “continuum of history” (Benjamin 2006, 396). It goes hand in hand with the refusal to forget and disregard what empty time has rolled over, not least the “name[s] of generations of the downtrodden” (ibid., 394). The constellation that becomes recognizable “at the moment of danger” does not prepare the way for a smooth transition, a gentle transformation into something new, but discharges itself in a “shock” (ibid., 396) that becomes an interruption of the “always the same” in the course of catastrophe.

In a “dialectical image,” the past flashes up “in the now of its recognizability” (Benjamin 2006, 183). In this, the past “bears to the highest degree the stamp of a critical, dangerous element” (Benjamin 2015, 578). That which “has been can become the dialectical envelope, the incursion of awakened consciousness” (ibid., 491). The awakening is an awakening from sleep and mythical reverie, from capitalism, which had come over Europe as a “phenomenon of nature” and brought “a reactivation of mythic forces” (ibid. 494).

The “dialectical image” allows us to awaken from the dream and brings to light “not yet conscious knowledge of what has been.” Awakening is linked to remembering what has perished in history, especially the victims over whose corpses progress has rolled. It aims at “history that, from the very beginning, has been untimely, sorrowful, unsuccessful” (Benjamin 1998, 155).

6.2 The Question of Salvation in the Crisis of Capitalism as the Present “Moment of Danger”

In the present “moment of danger” the tendency toward world and self-annihilation becomes recognizable. The potential for the “reform of (capitalist, H.B.) existence” (Benjamin 1921) is exhausted. This hopelessness amounts to “destruction” (ibid.), to the destruction of the coexistence of man and nature as the basis of all life.

In the present constellation, the flashing “dialectical image” would be decipherable as an interruption of the “status quo” within the framework of capitalist fetish relations and their “real metaphysics.” The god or fetish hidden in the course of capitalism becomes recognizable at the zenith of the crisis. We must break with it, i.e. with the categories that constitute capitalism: with value and dissociation at the most abstract level, as well as with their mediation in money as the most abstract expression of the emptiness of the capitalist process of the valorization of capital, with their embedding in the polarities of market and state, economy and politics, with subject and enlightenment… The challenge lies in a consistent critique of capitalist fetish relations, which at the same time implies a demythologization of the capitalist myth. It must resist the temptation to fall back on (vulgar-)materialist immediacies – be it in the form of a recourse to class, interest, identifiable agents, or a praxis that aims at transformation and alternatives in false immediacy (cf. Kurz 2021, 365ff). On closer examination, the latter often turn out to be pseudo-alternatives that do not involve a break with capitalist categories, but remain trapped in the fetishized forms of its constitution (see Meyer 2022).

The “dialectical image” that flashes by in the midst of the deepening crisis of capitalism (Benjamin 1921) flashes what capitalism is rolling over and has rolled over, what has perished in its history and is doomed in the present. It implies an objection to the Social Darwinist character of the history of capitalism, which selects the victors from the vanquished in the struggle for existence, and where, in the escalating crisis, there is “nothing left to lose,” and it amounts to annihilation. It aims at an “arrest” of the “movement of thought” (Benjamin 2006, 396), at “dialectics at a standstill.”It enables “dialecticians of history” to “contemplate” the constellation of dangers, to “follow their development in thought,”and to “avert” them “at any time at the spur of the moment” (Benjamin 2006, 595). This remains impossible without thinking about the downfall of capitalism and without breaking with capitalist fetish relations, including the temptation to seek immanent ways out within the framework of capitalist categories in a seamless continuation of the “status quo.”

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