Critical perspectives on individual and communal identity confronting and conditioned by modern Western civilization
How one pictures the angel of history
A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. (Thesis on History IX)
Vocational Identity and the capitalist economy
According to Max Weber, a vocation is a relatively secularized version of a calling. Within the context of Lutheranism, a calling is a person’s task set by God (79 Weber). The religious sense of calling extends into that of the secular term; laboring in one’s vocation is construed as the highest moral activity one can perform. The notion of vocation is fundamental to the capitalist ethic as it counters the low productivity of the natural “traditionalist” drive to work only as much as is required to satisfy one’s needs. Through an adaptation of the religions notion of a calling, whereby the legal earning of money becomes an expression of proficiency and virtue, the acquisition of property and ascetic accumulation of wealth become ends in themselves. And in this manner, the quasi-religious vocation provides the conceptual framework for an overcoming of “traditionalism” which is necessary to capitalism (63 Weber). Walter Benjamin notes, in relation to the secularized conception of calling, that labor is defined “as the source of all wealth and all culture… [while] the savior of modern times is called work” (259 Illuminations). Besides supplying the conceptual and motivational foundation for a capitalist economy, vocation comes to constitute the integral persona of the urban individual. With the subjective self suppressed and ultimately subsumed by the overwhelming apparatus of capitalism, authentic identity is displaced by vocational identity, reducing individuals to the iconic equivalent of specialized cogs within the great engine-works of modern Western civilization. (Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism)
Fate and character
In Walter Benjamin’s essay, “Fate and Character”, the order of fate is comprised solely of misfortune and guilt (307 Reflections). There is, after all, no notion of fateful happiness as the result of an innocent life. For Benjamin, fate is not causally related to character but effectively requires its absence. Character is determined by actions, eliminating or superseding fate by supplying the problem of its “human guilt context [with] the answer of genius” (310 Reflections). To this effect, in the concluding passages of Alfred Doblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, Biberkopf remarks: “It’s no use revering it [i.e., the conditions and events of one’s life] merely as Fate, we must look at it, grasp it, down it, and not hesitate” (634). In Benjamin’s “One-Way Street”, cowardice and submissive apathy are said to govern the condition of fate, while lucidity and freedom govern its antithesis–which consists in the active laying of hands on a threatening future in order to turn it into a fulfilled now (89 Reflections). Benjamin calls the moment, which is full of constructive potentials, “the Caudine Yoke beneath which fate must bow to the body” (89 Reflections). Thus, fate as a regressive concept is inextricably bound up within a passive, apathetic aceptance of the conditions of existence. Benjamin supplies a positive antithetical reflection of this concept in the following quotidian figure: “Each morning the day lies like a fresh shirt on our bed; this incomparably fine, incomparably tightly woven tissue of pure prediction fits us perfectly. The happiness of the next twenty-four hours depends on our ability on waking, to pick it up” (90 Reflections).