10 2004

The Author as Traitor

Gerald Raunig

Translated by Aileen Derieg

"It is hard to be a traitor, it is a creative act. It requires relinquishing one's identity, losing face. One must vanish
from the picture, remain unrecognized."
(Gilles Deleuze/Claire Parnet)[1]

Walter Benjamin's essay "The Author as Producer" is an attack on the "leftist bourgeois intelligentsia" in
Germany of the 1920s and early 1930s. Its primary targets were the Neue Sachlichkeit[2] and a movement from
the 1910s that has been largely forgotten in German-speaking countries, but whose name sounds surprisingly
up-to-date today: the name "Activism" was applied to a discourse in the shadow of Expressionism[3] marked
by literature and literary criticism and the loose association of mostly men of letters affiliated with it. This
included, for certain periods of their work, such diverse authors as Heinrich Mann, Gustav Landauer, Max
Brod and Ernst Bloch. The circle affiliated with the publicist Kurt Hiller had been developing since 1910,
specifically under the label "Activism" after 1914. Although Hiller and his circle are hardly remembered today,
in 1934 Benjamin could be certain that the figure of Hiller and the associated positions would still be familiar
to his recipients. Especially the abusive diatribes and mockery on the part of the Berliner Dadaists against the
"Activists" were characterized by a remarkable vehemence around 1920 and probably still remembered in the
mid-1930s due to their verbal brutality.[4]

In "Author as Producer" Benjamin presents Hiller, as the "theoretician of activism", as a classic example of a
purportedly leftist intellectual tendency that was actually counter-revolutionary. According to Benjamin, it was
revolutionary only in its mentality, but not in its production.[5] This difference between tendency and
technique and the neglect of the latter was only one of the problems of "Activism", the misleading
self-definition another. What was peddled during the First World War and the years following it as
"Activism" was, according to Hiller's self-definition, "religious socialism"[6] or - in my interpretation - vitalist
spiritism[7]. In addition to eloquent appeals to and invocations of the "young breed" ("das junge Geschlecht",
Heinrich Mann), of the "New Demotic" ("Neue Volkstümlichkeit", Kurt Hiller), or the people as "sacred
mass" ("heiliger Masse", Ludwig Rubiner), the "Activists" focused primarily on the hypostasization of the
spirit and the "spiritual" (Geistige). The term "spiritual", initially a tactical substitute for "intellectual", was
gradually substantiated by Hiller and others and eventually understood as a "characterological type"[8]. From
Heinrich Mann's seminal text "Geist und Tat" ("Intellect and Action") to Hiller's manifesto-like "Philosophie
des Ziels" ("Philosophy of the Goal") to Ludwig Rubiner's "Der Dichter greift in die Politik" ("The Poet
Intervenes in Politics"), the Activism texts[9] wrestle conspicuously often with themes of religion, mysticism
and the church. It seems that the spirit that haunts the spiritual here is more of a holy one than Hegel's
Weltgeist. Hiller himself tends to posit paradise more than revolution and socialism as a utopian goal.
"Consecrate yourselves, you spiritual ones, finally - to the service of the spirit; the holy spirit, the active
spirit."[10]
The two main aspects of Benjamin's question about the "place of the intellectual" are its position with respect
to the proletariat on the one hand and the manner of organization on the other. Benjamin's criticism of
"Activism" thus consists primarily in its self-positioning "between the classes". This position beside the
proletariat, the position of benefactors, ideological patrons, is an impossible one.[11] The principle of the
formation of this kind of collective, which assembles men of letters around the concept of "the spiritual"
beyond any incipient organizing, is a wholly reactionary one, not only for Benjamin.[12] This criticism is even

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more evident, if we include not only Benjamin's technical, formal insistence on changing the apparatus of
production, but also the attitude of the "Activists" that was not at all revolutionary: sometimes their texts are
marked by nationalism, are often even anti-democratic, and in Hiller's circle anti-democratic tendencies
cannot be interpreted as radically democratic or radically leftist. "Activism does not want a -cracy of the
demos, in other words of the masses and mediocrity, but rather a -cracy of the spirit, in other words of the
best."[13] Hiller's principle of spirit-aristocracy propagates a dominion of the spirit, meaning a dominion of
that which is of the spirit, of the best, finally even of the "new German master house"[14].

Such an unequivocal "mentality" inevitably leads to the question of why Benjamin was even willing and able to
sell the authors of "Activism" as left-wing bourgeoisie at all. I suspect that has to do not only with Benjamin's
text-immanent intention, which I will come back to later, but also and especially with the broader activities of
a second branch of "Activism". Although this branch rarely referred to itself as "Activism", its organ, the
weekly paper the "Aktion", substantially influenced leftist intellectual and radical leftist movements in the
German-speaking region in the 1910s.[15] Although the "Aktion" and its protagonists were not activists in
today's sense either, they were certainly more politically and pointedly active than Kurt Hiller's circle. In its
early years until the start of the war, the "Aktion", alongside the "Sturm", was the leading Expressionist
periodical with a clearly anti-militarist tendency. During the war it was the only oppositional literature and art
periodical, avoiding censorship with astonishing mastery using veiled writing and other means, and after the
end of the war it increasingly became an organ of the radical leftist opposition with a close relationship to
Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. Its publisher and editor-in-chief, Franz Pfemfert, radicalized himself
and the paper in several surges from its founding in 1911 into the revolutionary war and post-war period,
through the Spartacist uprising and the soviet republic.

Whereas the literary activism associated with Hiller was otherwise marked by a relatively diffuse will to
change, from the beginning Pfemfert linked Expressionist literature and contemporary cultural politics in the
"Aktion" with (historical) social-revolutionary texts to form a singular combination. The focal point of the
paper was its anti-militarist critique, which particularly examined the war-mongering function of the liberal
press and the Social Democrats and the affirmative stance of writer-colleagues within the framework of events
leading up to the war. It also published early social-revolutionary texts, anarchist texts from Russia, essays by
Lassalle and Reclus. Texts by the later Dadaists Hugo Ball, Hans Richter and Raoul Hausmann were also
published in the "Aktion".

As people involved in earlier associations (the newspaper "Demokrat" and the Democratic Association)
gradually left for ideological reasons, in the early years the "Aktion" drew more and more authors and
subscribers. At least until Pfemfert distanced himself from Hiller in 1913[16], the "Aktion" was something of
a gathering point for the men of letters who were later to assemble under the label Activism with Hiller.
Hiller's spiritist ideas were reason enough for Pfemfert to put an end to the cooperation in the paper's third
year. Contrary to Hiller's reactionary rejection of democracy, Pfemfert's anti-authoritarianism saw itself as
propagating soviet democracy; the absolute pacifism of Hiller's logocracy (the revolution of words) was
countered by Pfemfert with an anti-militarism that became increasingly revolutionary and concretely
soviet-communistic during the course of the war; contrary to Hiller's German nationalism, Pfemfert's position
was anti-national and anti-antisemitic.

In the first months of its publication, specifically from No. 3 to No. 16, the "Action" was published with the
programmatic subtitle "Publication Organ for the Intelligence of Germany". Even though this subtitle quickly
disappeared again, the paper increasingly assumed organizing functions for a mixed association of artists and
intellectuals throughout the decade. Whereas the literary-activist circle around Hiller comprised - as Benjamin
correctly describes it - an "arbitrary number of private existences without offering the least grounds for
organizing"[17], Franz Pfemfert was the pivotal point not only for the "Aktion", but also for a number of
other attempts at an "organization of the intelligence". Following the start of the "Aktion" as a weekly paper

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on 20 February 1911, the publishing company was founded in 1912. To begin with, Pfemfert published
Expressionist literature; this was expanded beginning in 1916 with the "Political Action Library", including
revolution texts by Lenin, Marx, Liebknecht and others. Finally, Pfemfert also recognized the necessity of a
concrete location, a public sphere outside printed material, and opened the Berliner "Action Book Shop" in
1917 together with his wife Alexandra Pfemfert and her sister [hat die Schwester auch einen Namen?], which
was open for exhibitions and events.

One of the anti-militarist agitation actions against conscription in 1913[18] even turned into an early instance
of communication guerrilla: to create a broader base for protests against an extension of the powers of the
Wehrmacht in Berlin, Pfemfert faked the declaration of a bourgeois anti-national association, "To the German
Reichstag", against the new military laws. This declaration was propagated not only through the "Aktion", but
also with flyers, which ultimately led to an actual demonstration through the aspect of media
counter-information. Since conscription was being debated in France at the same time, the action was
extended there to a parallel French declaration under the direction of the later Nobel Prize winner for
literature, Anatole France.[19] This may be regarded as an attempt to internationalize anti-militarist
resistance, which also used media guerrilla means to fight for an expansion and international organization of
anti-national structures; with little success, however, as history shows.

Whereas Hiller's "Activists" increasingly invoked the party of the spirit[20], the German spirit[21] or the
spiritual[22], Pfemfert founded the Anti-National Socialist Party Group of Germany (ASP) as early as 1915.
The tiny anti-capitalist, anti-national, socialist party was "covertly active" until the end of the war, entering
the public sphere on 16 November with a manifesto in the "Aktion". The party never grew beyond the status
of a special interest group of a few dedicated artists, yet the reversal of the conventional relationship between
party and newspaper appears to be an interesting constellation: instead of a party founding its publicizing
organ, the newspaper founded the organization of a party in an ongoing process. Although the collectivity and
the quantity of the distribution of endeavors revolving around the "Aktion" may be debated, Benjamin's
question about organizing must certainly be answered positively in Pfemfert's case as the process of organizing
leftist intellectuals in the second half of the 1910s, especially because of the aforementioned attempts to work
on organizational linking and articulation in association with the "Aktion" and going beyond the paper.

The whole spectrum of German "Activism" appears to be quite a disparate arrangement that is fed - roughly
outlined - from a right-wing activism of the spirit, which sometimes slipped into the margins of
antisemitism[23], racism and proto-fascism[24], as well as from a left-wing activism of the "Aktion", which
from its basis as a literature magazine became increasingly radicalized and turned into an agitation platform for
radical leftist politics. Especially in the first half of the 1910s the actors frequently alternated between the
unraveling camps, and naturally there were "activisms" of all kinds to the right of Hiller as well. Returning
now to Benjamin's essay, which was based on the draft for a lecture in Paris from April 1934, the answers to
the question of why this late attention is devoted to Hiller in particular may be found in the context of this
lecture.

Benjamin uses the foil of "Activism" mainly to criticize recognized leftist, but purely content-focused,
agitational strategies, in other words primarily socialist realism, in a communist context. At the Paris Institute
for the Study of Fascism, a sham organization that was controlled by the Comintern, he would have found
himself on thin ice with this, as he was well aware[25]. Even before Stalin's cultural politics, such diverse
positions as Lenin's, Bogdanov's and Lunacharsky's were all, despite their very different ideas of proletarian
culture, oriented to the production and presentation of proletarian contents. Even in Germany, in the socialist
circles of the 1920s and the 1930s, there was a line of giving precedence to revolutionary contents over form.
Benjamin's attitude, which focused primarily on the technique and organizing function of art practice, was the
exception. Particularly before an audience that was skeptical about formal considerations, Hiller's partly
reactionary position was excellently suited as a negative point of approach. Even though he represented

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something completely different from the content-fixed position of socialist realism, in Benjamin's lecture
Hiller represents the position of being fixed on content, writing sentences such as these: "But in truth, all
truly great art works [...] were great not because of the perfection of what was specifically artistic about them,
but rather [...] because of the sublimeness of their What, their Idea, their Goal, their Ethos. [...] If one takes
away from one of them its content, its idea, its morality, so that only what is 'designed' remains, what remains
is worthless!"[26] Hiller's attitude is just as clearly idealist as it is anti-formalist: "Form, though, as such, is
empty"[27], "what remains essential is what is designed"[28]. In the position of the German "Activists" there
were echoes of a debate that was also familiar from Soviet cultural politics, yet because of its idealistic
orientation, it was impossible to link this position with materialist cultural politics. In this way, the discourse
associated with Hiller also became a suitable foil in terms of content, which Benjamin could use to highlight
the practices of Bert Brecht and Sergei Tretyakov as positive counter-examples of changing the production
apparatus.

Let's stay with this negative foil for a few more sentences and examine the question that was central for
Benjamin, the position of the "author as producer" or, more broadly, the position of intellectuals and artists:
in the distinction between "universal" and "specific intellectuals"[29] developed by Foucault, Hiller's position
would be that of a representative of the universal. The spiritual thus corresponds to a universal truth, the
carriers of which, the spiritualists, represent a universality denoting the conscious and developed form of the
unconscious universality of the proletariat. Here the spiritualists would be the widely visible role models,
exemplary and illuminating, rising out of the dark form of the proletariat. Foucault describes the universal
intellectual - this also corresponds to the example of Hiller's literary "Activism" - using the example of the
writer and the threshold of writing as the sacralizing feature of the intellectual.

This figure, which implies speakers articulating the mute truth of others, must necessarily come under fire in
emancipatory, egalitarian contexts. The contents, according to Benjamin, and the political tendency have a
counter-revolutionary function, as long as the instruments, forms and apparatuses of production, in other
words the relationship of the "spiritual" as universal intellectual to the proletariat remains unchanged.
Benjamin uses not only the example of "Activism", but also that of Neue Sachlichkeit to describe how even
photographs of misery become an object of enjoyment, how the artistic processing of a political situation is
able "to achieve ever new effects for entertaining the audience"; in other words, how the bourgeois apparatus
of production and publication is able to assimilate and even propagate revolutionary themes with the help of
the figure of the artist/intellectual next to/over the proletariat.[30]

Writing work in the position of a bearer of the law and fighter for justice, for the proletariat, is a presumption;
the place of the universal intellectual is an impossible one. If the intellectual's solidarity with the proletariat
can always only be a mediated solidarity, then the intellectual, who has become a bourgeois intellectual due to
social and educational privilege, must become, according to Benjamin, a "traitor to his original class"[31]. This
necessary betrayal consists in the transformation of his position, from someone who supplies the production
apparatus with contents, as revolutionary as they may be, to an engineer who changes the production apparatus,
who, as Benjamin formulates it, "sees his task in adapting it to the purposes of the proletarian revolution".[32]
For a renewal of this demand that Benjamin poses, that of changing the production apparatus rather than
supplying it, it seems to me that both aspects are equally important: the first part of the demand, not to supply
the production apparatus, could be updated with the help of Deleuze's criticism of representation, especially
the criticism of the framework of media representation and the function that intellectuals and artists carry out
within this framework. The second part of the demand, namely that of changing the production apparatus, is
found in an expanded form in Foucault's exhortation to specific intellectuals to constitute a new politics of
truth. There are echoes of Benjamin's figures and terminology in both Deleuze and Foucault: with Deleuze it
is the topos of betrayal, with which the intelligentsia leave their class[33]; with Foucault it is the "specialist",
which Benjamin in turn took over from the terminological toolbox of the Russian productivists.

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Contrary to Foucault's assumption of the disappearance of the great writer, the universal intellectual, ever new
metamorphoses of this type have emerged in recent decades, still in the pose of the autonomous artist and
thinker, but in fact in heteronomous subordination to structures, in which their figures fulfill certain
functions.[34] Contrary to this pseudo-revival of the classical bourgeois, the universal intellectual, who is
questioned about everything and also has something to say about everything, especially on the surface of the
media and instrumental think-tanks, the point is not to continue supplying these media and politics with ever
new contents, but rather to refuse to supply, to vanish from the machinery of the spectacle, to betray the
spectacle.

To a certain degree, to the extent that intellectuals are involved in this spectacle, this also implies a betrayal of
oneself. Going beyond Benjamin's classical Marxist formulation, the movement of the "betrayal of the
bourgeois class" could generally be described in the words of Deleuze/Parnet as the position of a "traitor to
one's own empire, one's gender, one's class, one's majority"[35]. Betraying one's original bourgeois class and
adapting the production apparatus to the proletarian revolution today would primarily mean dropping out of
the framework of representation. What can be aligned to the grid of possible images and statements is only
that which is a priori acceptable , and what is acceptable is susceptible to recuperation a priori. To counter the
mechanism of the media spotlight, which is capable of assimilating contents today much more radically than
the reportage of the Neue Sachlichkeit was able to do, it is necessary to vanish from the picture, remain
unrecognized, hide the traces of prominence. The key to change is not found in the battle of intellectuals for
hegemony in the mainstream media, but rather in refusing to take part in this show battle, rejecting the role
of commentators and suppliers of keywords in the framework of the media spectacle. Disrupting this
relationship, preferably developing a form of disturbance through these kinds of disruptions, this is Deleuze's
adaption of the demand to not supply the production apparatus: "Creating has always been something
different from communicating. The key thing may be to create vacuoles of noncommunication, circuit
breakers, so we can elude control."[36]

Pre-Release from Gerald Raunig, Art and Revolution, published in 2005

[1] Deleuze/Parnet, Dialoge, 53

[2] In a segment of an older text from 1931, which Benjamin himself cryptically cites as a quotation from an
"understanding critic" in the "Author as Producer", the target for his attacks on "the proletarian mimicry of
the decaying bourgeoisie" is the poetry of Kästner, Tucholsky and Mehring. Cf. Benjamin, Gesammelte
Werke, III, 280f.

[3] Ursula Baumeister (Die Aktion 1911-1932, 43) defines Activism as an aesthetic program and radical
cultural wing of Expressionism.

[4] Raoul Hausmann reviled the "Activists" roughly as "henchmen of the moral idiocy of the constitutional
state" and suggested drowning "these snotty-nosed drips" in the "filth of their so horribly serious six-volume
works" (quoted from Scholz, Pinsel und Dolch, 345).

[5] Walter Benjamin, Der Autor als Produzent, 689

[6] Rothe, Aktivismus, 18

[7]Translator's note: The word Geist in German, which is the focal point of Hiller's ideas here, can mean
spirit, mind, intellect, ghost. In this translation preference is given to the word spirit, although intellect is
more frequently used in older, related translations. In this case, spiritism has nothing to do with the esoteric
movement of the late 19th century.

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[8] Walter Benjamin, Der Autor als Produzent, 690

[9] Cf., for instance, the informative text collection "Der Aktivismus 1915-1920", whose publisher Wolfgang
Rothe called "Activism" an "expression of the German spirit that calls for respect" (21) in his introduction in
1969 in comparison with the 1968 movement.

[10] Hiller, Philosophie des Ziels, 42

[11] Walter Benjamin, Der Autor als Produzent, 691

[12] Walter Benjamin, Der Autor als Produzent, 690

[13] Hiller, Verwirklichung des Geistes im Staat, quoted from Rolf von Bockel, Kurt Hiller und die Gruppe
Revolutionärer Pazifisten (1926-1933), 25

[14] Hiller, Philosophie des Ziels, 53

[15] Benjamin was certainly familiar with the "Aktion", since he also published articles there. In addition, the
publisher of the "Aktion", Pfemfert, had already bin the publisher of the "Anfang", the newspaper of the
youth movement that Benjamin had been involved with in the early part of the decade.

[16] Cf. the two Pfemfert articles in the third year fo the "Aktion": "Die Wir des Doktor Hiller", Die Aktion
1913, 637f. and "Der Karriere-Revolteur", Die Aktion 1913, 1129-1136

[17] Benjamin, Der Autor als Produzent, 690

[18] Baumeister, 102f., describes Pfemfert's strategy as the "creation of a counter-public sphere on
conscription".

[19] Baumeister, Die Aktion 1911-1932, 103

[20] Heinrich Mann, Das junge Geschlecht, 97

[21] Hiller, Philosophie des Ziels, 39

[22] Hiller, Philosophie des Ziels, 43

[23] Cf. for instance, Hiller, Philosophie des Ziels, 52

[24] Hiller, Philosophie des Ziels, 53

[25] As explained in the commentary for the Benjamin edition, for unknown reasons the lecture probably did
not take place. See also Fuld, Benjamin, 235

[26] Hiller, Philosophie des Ziels, 33

[27] Hiller, Philosophie des Ziels, 33

[28] Hiller, Philosophie des Ziels, 45

[29] Foucault, Die politische Funktion des Intellektuellen, cf. also Deleuze/Foucault, Die Intellektuellen und
die Macht

[30] Benjamin, Der Autor als Produzent, 692f.

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[31] Benjamin, Der Autor als Produzent, 700f.

[32] Benjamin, Der Autor als Produzent, 701

[33] Benjamin quoted from Fuld, Benjamin, 226

[34] See, for instance, Bourdieu's concept of the media intellectual and my conclusions in Raunig, Wien Feber
Null, 63-77

[35] Deleuze/Parnet, Dialoge, 52

[36] Deleuze, Unterhandlungen, 252