Run Away, With Me [Repost]
This is a repost of a text that appeared on an earlier version of the blog in March 2021. It is the first part of a text in which I read Walter Benjamins famous "Destructive Character" against the backdrop of pubescent identification with and through aesthetic production.
No matter how much I like them, I rarely read books twice. But there are of course some songs I come back to every now and then and poems of course, and short texts. Checking in with a thing, recapping how it made me feel the last time I’ve been with it and how it makes me feel now, now, that we’re here again. What has happened in the meantime?
One of the texts I very often return to is Walter Benjamin’s ‘Destructive Character’. It must have been four years ago that I’ve read it for the first time and I am surprised how my viewpoint on the text changes every time I re-read it. I even forgot about the text's existence between my last and my most recent encounter with it. It’s not constant thought, but volatile moments that bring us together.
As soon as somebody lays out a character, a mascot, a carrier, in words or images, the questions that arise are the same. How do I relate to this figuration? Do I hate it or love it? How much does it represent me, a friend, a problem? Can it hold me? Be me? Be that Avatar that jumps from the screen into my room and guards me or at least follows along for some time with all the other desires and identifications that stick with me until they don’t suit any longer?
But of course, all the company comes with the price of giving oneself away a bit, falling for it, losing parts of an older self, that may or may not be replaced. ‘Run away, with me,’ I say to the protagonist of the book and the singer of the song. Like running away together, but also like ‘run away with the piece that you took from me.’ It’s both, the reassurance of resting in the moment of identification and the loss of control, of autonomy, when you overwhelm me. And that both of that takes place simultaneously is the thrill, I guess.
***
It could happen to someone looking back over his life that he realized that almost all the deeper obligations he had endured in its course originated in people on whose "destructive character" everyone was agreed. He would stumble on this fact one day, perhaps by chance, and the heavier the blow it deals him, the better are his chances of picturing the destructive character.[1]
The opening of Benjamin's short text presents us with the observation that the destructive character is somebody to relate to and it's somebody we all know. The question is how do we work on this relation.
The destructive character knows only one watchword: make room; only one activity: clearing away. His need for fresh air and open space is stronger than any hatred.
The destructive character is young and cheerful. For destroying rejuvenates in clearing away the traces of our own age; it cheers because everything cleared away means to the destroyer a complete reduction, indeed eradication, of his own condition. But what contributes most of all to this Apollonian image of the destroyer is the realization of how immensely the world is simplified when tested for its worthiness of destruction. This is the great bond embracing and unifying all that exists. It is a sight that affords the destructive character a spectacle of deepest harmony.[2]
The destructive character is young and cheerful. I could easily see them being a sixteen year old smoking weed behind the schoolyard with their friends, spilling nail polish remover in the bathroom, being annoyed by their co-workers, making first sexual encounters, tearing down posters from a wall, stealing, waking up with a new body part.
But as much as you read into the figure that Benjamin sketches out, it still remains an abstract concept. Like the text's protagonist withdraws from fixation, the text withdraws from an easy identification with it and it results in you, me not being able to fully identify with its main, destructive character. I am not the destructive character and neither are you, no matter how much we do or don't want to be.
Wanting what you cannot have is something that you have to do in order to keep being the person you recognize as yourself, Stephanie Burt writes in her essay ‘My Life as a Girl’, quoting Rae Armantrout’s poem ‘Birthmark: The pretext.’[3] But that doesn’t imply a binary, that if you want to portray a specific character it makes you it’s opposite. Even though the etui-man might be the opposer of the destructive character, neither wanting nor not wanting, neither affirming nor not affirming the destructive character necessarily render you an etui-man.
The destructive character is the enemy of the etui-man. The etui-man looks for comfort, and the case is its quintessence.[4]
It rather implies a dialogue of identity constructions and that brings us back to the first sentence of Benjamin's text. The destructive character exists only in relation, it is somebody you know. And at the same time you are a destructive character for somebody that knows you. But you cannot be a destructive character for yourself, even though that is something Benjamin's protagonist might try to achieve.
- ^ Benjamin, Walter: Reflections – Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings. New York/London, 1978, p. 301
- ^ Ibid.
- ^ Cf. Burt, Stephanie: My Life as a Girl, VQR Magazine #88, 2012. https://www.vqronline.org/essay/my-life-girl, Last seen March 13, 2021
- ^ Benjamin, Walter: Reflections – Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings. New York/London, 1978, p. 302