Pablo Oyarzun - Doing Justice

Como tantos otros textos de Benjamin, y podría decirse aun como un rasgo indeleble de su escritura, este ensayo hace ademán de celar un secreto cuya revelación destruiría por completo su fuerza de verdad. Una débil fuerza, entonces, como aquella de la que habla “Sobre el concepto de la historia”. Esta débil fuerza—que es aquella y sólo aquella requerida por la justicia— es, acaso, la que trama a la vez la narración del narrador y el texto de Benjamin. Es como si en la contextura general del ensayo, en sus vectores argumentales, en su repertorio de imágenes y ejemplos y giros, en suma, en su estilo, se estuviese dando cuenta de lo que el mismo ensayo atribuye a la narración .

As do so many other texts by Benjamin—so that we might even say that this is an indelible trait of his writing—[“The Storyteller”] gives the impression of guarding a secret whose revelation would completely destroy the force of its truth. It is a weak power, then, like the one “The Concept of History” speaks about. This weak power—which is the one and only one required for justice—might well be the power that weaves together both the story of the storyteller and Benjamin’s text. It is as if what the essay itself—in its general fabric, in its argumentative vectors and its repertoire of images and its examples, its twists and turns, in short, in its style—says about storytelling gave an account of itself. ( Chapter 3, p. 107)

Here again the translation is tricky, and I’ll return to it—in this case, to the expression Es como si … en su estilo, se estuviese dando cuenta , which is not exactly, and not only, “It is as if… in its style, what the essay itself says about storytelling gave an account of itself.” The verbal form dar cuenta crops up in both cases, in the first sentence I quoted and in this last one: it can be translated “to give account” or “to render an account.” It is as if the philosopher gives an account, dar cuenta , or a reckoning of what the storyteller recounts: the Spanish verb is contar cuenta. And it is as though, at the close of Oyarzun’s Doing Justice , this account of a telling, this reckoning of telling, has a twist: Es como si… en su estilo, se estuviese dando cuenta. It is as though, in its style, it—but what? Or who?—were realizing , becoming aware , of what the essay itself attributes to the story. The work became its daemon. Darse cuenta : to realize, to come into reckoning with, though reflexively: dar-se , to give oneself the reckoning .

I’ll come back to these two sentences, but take away from them this: first, the uncomfortable joining of attention to singularity with the exemplary severity with which the “righteous” pay that attention, the exemplary severity of the bearer of the sword of justice. And, second, the essay’s drift from taking account to giving oneself, or itself, the reckoning. This movement, this drift, is a figure of coming to awareness or noticing. Its span is not forty years long; this drift, this movement, is to be accomplished in and by means of Doing Justice : it is, indeed, the condition on which justice is done . But the caesura between these two moments also blocks—opens an unbridgeable gulf between—the force of a law based on taking account, on empiricism, on nature and noting and a form of justice based on giving an account of oneself. 12

Oyarzun begins with the observation that Benjamin’s concern “is the destruction of experience as a result of the unfolding, in modernity, of technology that culminates in war.” He says:

The development of the argument of “The Storyteller” offers convincing proof … that Benjamin considers the process of destruction compendiously. It is not a type of experience, but rather experience itself that is devastated by this process. But with this devastation something that belongs to the core of experience itself seems to get irremissibly lost, something that artisanal storytelling continues to protect like a dear treasure, something that is not substantive in itself but has the subtlety of a disposition, of fortitude and care, of attentiveness ( Aufmerksamkeit ). This something is the vocation of justice that inspires storytelling. [ Ese algo es la vocación de justicia que anima a la narración. ] ( Chapter 3, p. 76; my emphasis)

I hardly need to underscore the urgency that beats here, which Oyarzun reads clearly in Benjamin’s words. “Never,” writes Benjamin at the beginning of “The Storyteller,”

has experience been contradicted more thoroughly than strategic experience by tactical warfare, economic experience by inflation, bodily experience by mechanical warfare, moral experience by those in power. A generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body. (Harry Zohn’s translation)

The “field of force of destructive torrents and explosions” acutely assaulted and definitively changed the soldiers who were traveling home from World War I’s battlefields. The “destruction of experience” of which war is a type—the bloodiest, the most acute—is, for Benjamin, modernity’s condition and result. It is the condition on which capital trades accelerated consumption for use and habitation; and it is the effect of that trade. Planetary war—by which we now mean suicidal war with the planet, with the environment—is the evident successor to world wars, bloodier still, more acute even than the most acute of world wars. And, in a way that speaks both to the problem of scale—that is, to the terrible problem of the relation between justice and scale—and to the problem of kind—that is, to the terrible logic of the symbolic and material inequality of the “tiny, fragile” bodies, things, and creatures “under the open sky”—this planetary war is more unjust still than even the exterminating wars that make up human history.

Hence the urgency of the questions how justice is to be done and how justice is to be demanded.

We want first a practical answer; we want something that is “substantive in itself,” as Oyarzun writes (p. 76), and, if not that, we want at least a pronoun, an indication. Who will do justice—the prophet, the philosopher, the lawmaker, the activist, the storyteller? Who demands it, in whose name, and what will we be redressing, remediating, distributing?

But Benjamin and Oyarzun slow us down, in ways that my response here and now is unable, for practical reasons, to do more than note.

Just what is “the vocation of justice,” la vocación de justicia , that inspires or animates storytelling? A vocation is, of course, a calling. It is generally felt as an inner call, though this calling somehow chimes with a different sort of voice; and this chiming, this rhyming of the inner voice that calls me to something with a profession or a task, this chiming of my inner voice with something of a different order is what makes my vocation different from an appetite, for example, or from my desire, or from a whim. It is what distinguishes vocation from what in Castilian Spanish we’d call un capricho . I mentioned that I may feel called to a profession or to a task. I will say that teaching is my vocation, or that translating is the task to which I am called. When I attend to the call of my vocation I take account both of what is interior to me, which is of the order of what I want or fancy; and also of what, other than what is subjective in me and for me, rhymes with it but is of a different order. If I attend doubly in this way, I will have rhymed myself with, or also attended to, what is other than myself. I won’t call this vocation of the other than myself “objective” or “transcendental,” although we might say that the term “vocation” takes account of both. I’ll say that I will have rhymed myself with what is other than myself by taking account of what is other than my voice to myself, other than my conscience; that I will have brought myself to rhyme. And sometimes I will follow one rather than the other of these sketchily defined voices, and eventually find myself in the wrong profession, or performing a task that is not my calling.