Constellations of Reading: Walter Benjamin in Figures of Actuality 3039118609, 9783039118601

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Contents



List of Abbreviations

7



Foreword

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1. Figures: On Reading

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2. The Flâneur: On Modernity 2.1 The Art of Straying: Walter Benjamin and the Dialectics of Flânerie 2.2 Flânerie after the Battle: Juan Goytisolo and the Return of the Flâneur

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3. The Detective: On Traces 3.1 The City as Crime Scene: Walter Benjamin and the Traces of the Detective 3.2 Spectres of Detection: Paul Auster and the Metaphysical Detective 4. The Prostitute: On the Commodity 4.1 The Decay of Love: Walter Benjamin and the Silent Whore 4.2 Paradoxes of the Unruly Commodity: Daci Maraini and the Talking Whore 5. The Ragpicker: On History 5.1 The Trash of History: Walter Benjamin and the Dialectical Ragpicker 5.2 The Past as Future: Mudrooroo and the Indigenous Ragpicker

40 62 89 92 112 135 138 161 187 190 214

6. Constellations: On Dialectic

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Notes

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Bibliography

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Index

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List of Abbreviations

All references to Benjamin’s work are made parenthetically in the text, following the abbreviating conventions below. All references to the Arcades Project are to the convolute number, for example (M5,9). For the other works, references both to the German text and the English translation are provided, for example (GS 1.1:69/SW 1:153–4) or (GS 1.1:216/ OT 36). Where no English translation is available, I will use my own. For the other primary texts analysed, I provide both the original in French, Spanish and Italian and my own translation. GS SW OT AP GB C

CC AB

Gesammelte Schriften, eds Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974 ff.). Selected Writings, ed. Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1997–2003). The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1998). The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1999). Gesammelte Briefe, ed. Christoph GÖdde and Henri Lonitz (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995–2000). The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin 1910–1940, ed. Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno, trans. Manfred R. Jakobson and Evelyn M. Jakobson (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1994). Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence 1928–1940, ed. Henri Lonitz, trans. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1999). Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin, Briefwechsel 1928–1940, ed. Henri Lonitz (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994).

Foreword

In January 1930, Walter Benjamin wrote to Gershom Scholem that the goal he had set himself was to be considered the “foremost critic of German literature.” Since literary criticism was “no longer considered a serious genre in Germany,” he set out to “recreate criticism as a genre” (GB 3:502/ CC 359). His work abounds in essays, articles, reviews and sketches about literary works, figures and movements, from Baudelaire to Brecht, Goethe to Kafka, Hölderlin to Kraus, from Romanticism to Surrealism, from children’s books to detective fiction. The list would be very long and embrace both major “canonical” figures and works and minor “forgotten” books, as well as popular fiction and cinema. A prominent part of his work is also devoted to the theoretical definition of what criticism should be. Here, his approach to reading and the interpretive act is perhaps the central issue – and the more “actual,” in the sense defined below – in his multivocal and diversified writings. Throughout his career, he elaborated and remained true to a notion of the interpretive act the roots of which lie in his doctoral thesis, The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism, and the final outcome of which would be the historiographical “method” for the unfinished Arcades Project. In the 1930s, Benjamin became more aware of the need to define a critical methodology, but the coherence of the way he theorized interpretation – interpretation of any text, from Goethe’s Elective Affinities to the prehistory of modernity – allows for the identification and definition of a peculiarly Benjaminian method of reading: not a theory, which would set a priori the agenda and goals of interpretation, but a method, which establishes an open-ended approach to the text. This method revolves around two fundamental notions: an imagistic or figural approach, where images are to be intended as constellations; and actuality as the fundamental motor of the reading. In this study, I will apply this Benjaminian method to Benjamin himself. The goal will be to read Benjamin in a way true to his intellectual

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and political project, avoiding both his enshrinement as a canonical, “untouchable” author and his cooptation into contemporary theories and practices, which twist and distort the sense of his writings in order to “adapt” them to their own agenda. This means neither to imitate nor ape his style, nor to reproduce and adopt his ideas and concepts in an unchallenging fashion, but rather to engage with his work in the way it asks to be read, acknowledging its importance to contemporary debate, but also being respectful of its own politics and intentions. This study does not offer a comprehensive account of the totality of Benjamin’s work, but rather proposes four readings, four experiments in “Benjaminian reading of Benjamin.” Chapter One sets up the theoretical apparatus used in the four readings: by exposing and analysing Benjamin’s method of interpretation, it construes a genealogy of his figural style and defines figure as a constellation of the past with the present. Chapters Two, Three, Four and Five constitute the readings: each chapter consists of two parts, the first assembling a Benjaminian figure from quotations and fragments, the second juxtaposing to it a contemporary text in a constellation of reading. Chapter Two proposes to read the Flâneur as a representation of the contradictions of modernity and postmodernity, and thus construes a parallel between them. Chapter Three reads the Detective as a figure for intellectual pursuit and sets Benjamin’s modernist project against a certain postmodernist self-referentiality. Chapter Four analyses the Prostitute as a paradigm for Western erotic culture, focusing on commodity fetishism and reification, and simultaneously counterposing Benjamin’s own patriarchal image to feminist reading. Chapter Five reads in the Ragpicker the figure of Benjamin’s historiographical revolution and “actualizes” it through the practice of contemporary indigenous history-telling. Finally, Chapter Six concludes the study by comparing Benjamin’s method to more recent theories of interpretation, especially to contemporary ways of reading Benjamin himself, thereby attempting to position his politics and ethics of reading in the current intellectual landscape. The experimental readings proposed here are not only limited to four figures, and therefore to only a few aspects of Benjamin’s important and vast corpus; they are also constitutively temporary and provisional. The Benjaminian method, as Chapter One will explain, consists in polarizing

Foreword

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the reading through the present, and thus condemns any reading to congenital contingency and impermanence. Always new readings are required by an ever-changing present, always new approaches that spell the necessity of perpetual vigilance and infinite renewal. Thus new interpretations of Benjamin and new constellations of reading will eventually push aside these present experiments. By reading Benjamin against the grain of our time, however, my hope is to remain true to his project and to give way to further, attentive and actualizing Benjaminian readings. This book is the re-elaboration of a doctoral thesis submitted in the Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies at Monash University in 2007. The study would not have been possible without the fortunate concurrence of many factors, the most important being the help and support of a number of persons whom I want to thank. First and foremost, Andrew Milner and Andrew Benjamin, my two supervisors, wisely guided me through all the stages of this project. Axel Fliethmann oriented me toward a strong definition of Benjamin’s figures, thereby helping shape my theoretical approach. Dimitris Vardoulakis read part of the manuscript and, in many conversations and discussions, provided invaluable help and support. Kate Rigby, Alison Ross and Robert Savage offered important comments and bibliographical advice. Adriana Cavarero not only offered me friendship and support all these years, but also inspired, with her writings, my “figural” readings. Finally, David Ferries and John Frow reviewed the thesis and provided important remarks for its reelaboration. I also want to thank, in open order, Gail Ward, Susanna Scarparo, Raffaele Lampugnani, Stewart King, Ramon Lopez Castellano, Olivia Guaraldo, Sabina Sestigiani, Grazia Sumeli-Weinberg, Ali Edgar, all the co-editors of the journal Colloquy: Text Theory Critique, and, last but not least, Barbara dalle Pezze. Early versions of the following chapters have already been published: Chapter 2.2, “Flânerie after the Battle: Juan Goytisolo and the Return of the Flâneur,” in JILAS: Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies, Vol. 13.1 ( July 2007): 59–85; Chapter 3.1, “The City as Crime Scene: Walter Benjamin and the Traces of the Detective,” in New German Critique 100, Vol. 34, No. 1 (Winter 2007): 165–87.

chapter 1

Figures: On Reading

Les images, ma grande, ma primitive passion. — Baudelaire … vielleicht auch in einem Bilde zu erklären ist. — “Über die Wahrnehmung” (GS 6:36/SW 1:95)

Reading Figures To read Walter Benjamin today means to approach a work overdetermined by a large and growing body of secondary literature and appropriated by the most diverse and heterogeneous disciplines. The ramifications of Benjamin’s posthumous influence reach out to philosophy, sociology, literary theory, film theory, visual culture, linguistics, postmodernism, architecture and urban studies. His fragmentary and ultimately unclassifiable writings have great appeal to the uncertainty of our postmodern age. Benjamin is read as strikingly actual, an illuminating precursor, an anticipator, even a prophet for our time. Many contemporary readings thus appropriate his writings in search of a sort of usefulness for problems of current concern, a workability of his theories and concepts outside their actual context. Dismembered, consumed and digested, his literary corpus thus runs the risk of becoming a monument. In a celebration of Benjamin’s centenary in 1992, Irving Wohlfarth wrote that “the task facing today’s students of Benjamin is to find ways through his work; to renew his efforts to ‘blot out’ (GS 1.3:1235) the theology in which it was steeped.”1 The least “digestible” part of Benjamin’s writings for our contemporaneity

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is, in fact, his insistence on using theological and messianic language and categories, which, for Wohlfarth, are useless and unworkable today. Sigrid Weigel argued strongly against Wohlfarth – and also similar discourses on Benjamin’s actuality, which derive from another commemorative address by Habermas twenty years before2 – by drawing attention to the inappropriateness of this operation. Not only is “the attempt to fit past theories to current conditions and discourses” a questionable recuperation, she wrote, but it “misses the point of Benjamin’s concept of Aktualität.” Such appropriation is, for Weigel, a combination of “commemoration” and “historicisation” in the search for contemporary relevance and it leads to a consequent relativization and modification for the uses of the present. The question of “the actuality of Walter Benjamin” is thus malposed, and his work misread, whenever the issue at stake is confined to the historical appropriateness of his analysis or its compatibility with current trends; in a word, to his “contemporary relevance.” “The issue,” she writes, “is the more fundamental one of the manner of philosophizing, thinking, analysing, of the attitude adopted towards ideas and constellations encountered, of the modes of approaching and working with the signs and the material of history and culture – in short, of the ‘work of presence of mind incarnate’ (GS 4.1:142).”3 The present study will attempt a recognition and representation of Benjamin’s actuality that will hold to Weigel’s important remarks. It will do so by identifying four figures – the Flâneur, the Detective, the Prostitute and the Ragpicker – among the many that populate Benjamin’s writings and by juxtaposing them to five contemporary texts in new constellations of reading. The theoretical foundation for this exercise is in the assumption that the act of reading Benjamin entails a figural approach, and that this is inextricable from his concept of Aktualität. Reading, figures and actuality, it will be shown, are not merely related notions; rather, they coincide, are unthinkable without each other, are the indivisible facets of the same prism. Benjamin’s Aktualität, Weigel argues, is to be encountered in his thinking-in-images (or figures), which is inextricable from his theory of reading. The three notions are usually misrecognized and their interrelatedness passes generally unperceived. It is important

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therefore to dwell on this point. We can begin with a quotation from “Central Park,” where Benjamin writes on Baudelaire: The magnetic attraction which a few basic situations continually exerted in the poet is one of the symptoms of his melancholy. Baudelaire’s imagination is occupied by stereotyped images [stereotype Bilder]. He seems to have been subject to a very general compulsion [Zwang] to return at least once to each of his motifs. This is doubtless comparable to the compulsion which repeatedly draws the felon back to the scene of his crime. Baudelaire’s allegories are sites where he atoned for his destructive drive. This may explain the unique correspondence between so many of his prose pieces and particular poems from Les fleurs du mal. (GS 1.2:669/SW 4:172)

With very little modification, the same words could be referred to Benjamin himself: his writings are populated by recurring figures and images, to which he returns compulsively, like the “felon to the scene of his crime.” Theoretical problems are handled through the use of, and crystallize around, imagery rather then concepts or analysis, they are “staged” in a quasi-performative act. These figures and images crowd his later work, especially the Arcades Project, where entire convolutes are devoted to the flâneur, the gambler, the prostitute, the sales clerk, the collector, the doll etc., and where the concept of “dialectical image” is central. However, figures and images are fundamental to his entire work and gain centrality at least from the brooder and the allegorist of the Trauerspiel book. Benjamin’s figures are nevertheless not Baudelaire’s stereotype Bilder, not stereotypes, personifications, allegories, metaphors. What, then, are they? Benjamin’s “thinking in images” is generally acknowledged to be the most peculiar characteristic of his writings, but usually considered a supplement to his work, an additional quality. Seldom do critics dwell on this peculiarity, but rather privilege the more actual traits, thereby misreading its centrality and the fact that in it Benjamin’s Aktualität must be sought. Seldom is it recognized that his images and figures are absolutely sui generis and cannot be reduced to sociological, historical or psychoanalytical operative tools. Even as careful and acute a critic as Susan Buck-Morss misreads Benjamin’s figures as “emblems” or “allegories.”4

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Weigel’s work has the merit that it puts great emphasis on this point in its re-readings of Benjamin: figures and images (or figures as images) are the way Benjamin’s philosophizing works, a “third thing,” it will be shown, that is neither a concept nor a metaphor, neither mere signification nor pure aesthesis. What distinguishes Benjamin’s images from stereotypes, archetypes or ideal types is that they are constellations: not recurring tropes, immutable in time, but rather ever-changing “force fields,” configurations saturated with tension, which combine representation with what is not representable and put into dialectical relationship things and history, thought and desire. They are thus constructions, montages, bound to the present, to their Aktualität, and always changing. “Thinking in images” is therefore also different from “figurative” thinking or writing as understood in linguistic or literary studies. It is not a “poetic style,”5 in which figures and images are used as embellishments or substitutes for thoughts, which could otherwise be conceptually formulated. It is not, as Weigel puts it, “the ‘encoding’ of meanings in images,” but rather the articulation of ideas and praxis in images, a “politics of images, not a figurative or metaphorical politics.”6 This is no minor issue for philosophy or literary studies, but a long-standing dispute, which can be traced back at least to Plato: the contraposition of thought and image, content and form, inside and outside. Conventionally, literary writing is considered “imagistic” or metaphorical, philosophical writing conceptual or denotative. A corollary to this, since Plato, is the predominance of language over vision and, thus, of the symbolic over the imaginary, of semiotics over aesthetics. The image as “appearance” – what Benjamin called Schein – is a spectral eidolon, emotive, “nebulous and obfuscating,” as Paul de Man writes, lacking the rigour, and therefore the truth claim, of the concept. This contraposition has been challenged repeatedly until poststructuralism cut the Gordian knot, by erasing the difference between philosophical and aesthetic writing and claiming that language is figural – metaphysically, as it were. Therefore, de Man writes, “all philosophy is condemned, to the extent that it is dependent on figuration, to be literary and, as the depository of this very problem, all literature is to some extent philosophical.”7 However, de Man’s own figural readings, focused on rhetorical devices, remain locked within the inversion of the

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contraposition they try to erase.8 The exasperation of the poststructuralist stance recreates this contraposition by shifting the whole emphasis to the form, as in the postmodernist “liberation” of the signifier, the twin companions of which are Debord’s “autonomous image, where deceit deceives itself,”9 and Baudrillard’s simulacrum. The emphasis here is on vision, but only as passive contemplation that becomes spectacle. Considering the enormous power of the image in our world, “undreamt of by the ancient idolaters,”10 it is important to stress Benjamin’s own difference. Image as Schein, appearance, which locks understanding away from the world, was already for Benjamin the modern phantasmagoria that must be shattered. His “thinking in images” is radically different: the image as figure and construction goes beyond this dualistic opposition, its content and form, meaning and sensibility, grammar and rhetoric, coming together in a “third thing,” a heterogeneous constellation of similitude. This “third thing” also goes beyond the dichotomy of rigour and pleasure inherent to the contraposition of philosophy and literature. Benjamin’s work is pervaded with, but also absorbed and “captured” by, his “thinking in images,” in a “mode” of critical reflection Weigel and Akbar Abbas call “fascination.”11 As he himself wrote of Baudelaire, Benjamin seems “to have been subject to a very general compulsion [Zwang] to return at least once to each of his motifs” (GS 1.2:669/SW 4:172, emphasis added). Images and figures coalesce in his writing, only to disappear and re-emerge, distorted or modified, in different constellations. They are compulsively sought and desired, in a way that grounds thought, in Weigel’s words, “in processes of excitation whose omission from theoretical consideration deprives reflection of its own matrix.”12 The fascination of the image is itself a critical tool for historical understanding. This is not delusion, spectacle, “will-less affect,” but, as Abbas argues, “a willingness to be drawn to phenomena that attract our attention yet do not submit entirely to our understanding. Benjamin works out a method which in practice consists of patiently entrusting thought to the folds of the image. It never disdains to look again at what critique too hastily dismisses.”13 Ambiguity, but also a certain degree of hermeticism, it will be argued, are constitutive qualities of the image. It is not “garrulous,” Abbas writes,

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“it closes itself off from explanation,”14 but as such is able to disrupt the self-satisfactory and “garrulous” phantasmagoria of culture. In order to understand these figures, and what “thinking in images” entails and implies, it is necessary to examine their genealogy, which leads us back to Benjamin’s early writings on language, then through his major publications, and on to the esoteric dialectical image from the notes for the Arcades Project. This genealogical route will, on the one hand, throw light on the interrelatedness of images, reading and actuality, and, on the other, show how “thinking in images” constituted Benjamin’s peculiar “mode” throughout his work.

Reading and Representation A thematic line runs through Benjamin’s early writings and fragments, which almost unifies their heterogeneity: an interest and preoccupation that focuses on name, perception and representation. This thematic unity, which is ultimately a focus on language, establishes the foundation for Benjamin’s subsequent work, and will continue to flow, as a sort of subterranean current, in the methodological catacombs of his later literary, historical and political constructions. The name, reads Benjamin’s famous definition in “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” is “that through which, and in which, language itself communicates itself absolutely.” Only as name is the mental being communicable, “only through the linguistic being of things [das sprachliche Wesen der Dinge] can [man] get beyond himself and attain knowledge of them – in the name” (GS 2.1:144/SW 1:65). Benjamin opposes what he calls the “bourgeois view of language,” that “the word has an accidental relation to its object, that it is a sign for things (or knowledge of them) agreed by some convention.” He states that “language never gives mere signs,” but rather “the human word is the name of things” [der Name der Dinge] (GS 2.1:150/SW 1:69). The implication for perception (Wahrnehmung) is that it becomes a “type of language,” since language, “in the view of philosophy,” is “absolute

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experience” [absolute Erfharung] (GS 6:38/SW 1:96). “Perception is reading” [Wahrnehmung ist Lesen], reads a 1917 fragment: “readable [Lesbar] is only in the facet of what appears” [in der Fläche Erscheinendes], and this facet is “the configuration – absolute Zusammenhang,” which can be translated as “absolute being-in-connection” (GS 6:32), or what Benjamin would later name “constellation.” The explicit context of these statements is an engagement with Kant’s transcendental aesthetics: the task of the “coming philosophy,” for the early Benjamin, is to go beyond the Kantian dichotomy of “experience” [Erfahrung] and “knowledge of experience” [Erkenntnis der Erfahrung] (GS 6:37/SW 1:96), in order to establish a new concept of knowledge and a new conception of the world. These can be attained only by “relating knowledge to language”: “a concept of knowledge gained from reflection on the linguistic nature of knowledge will create a corresponding concept of experience which will also encompass realms that Kant failed to truly systematize” (GS 2.1:168/SW 1:108). Many fragments from these early years revolve around the problem of representation in painting, graphic arts, signs, marks, imagination, semblance. Here the “linguistic word” is that invisible quality which reveals itself “only in the composition” (GS 2.2:607/SW 1:86). The 1914–15 essay on Hölderlin puts forward a notion that will persist into the later writings: in artistic representation, das Gedichtete, or “that which has been poetically formed,” the “poetized,” “differs decisively from the form-content model by preserving within itself the fundamental aesthetic unity of form and content. Instead of separating them, it distinctively stamps in itself their immanent, necessary connection” (GS 2.1:106/SW 1:19). Das Gedichtete brings together into functional unity the “perceptual” [das Anschauliche] and the “intellectual” [das Geistige] and this unity, which is a limit-concept, is the “idea” (GS 2.1:106–7/SW 1:19). This unity is called “connection” or “connectedness” [Verbundenheit] (GS 2.1:122/ SW 1:32). These motifs are organized into a coherent vision in the epistemocritical prologue to the Trauerspiel book, which Benjamin described in a letter to Scholem as “a kind of second stage of my early work on language […] dressed up as a theory of ideas” (GB 3:14/C 261). The first sentence of the prologue establishes the nexus: “it is characteristic of philosophical

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writing that it must continually confront the question of representation” [Darstellung] (GS 1.1:207/OT 27). Philosophy is here identified as the Darstellung of truth and, as such, it cannot adopt the systematic form of the doctrine [Lehre], but rather its methodology must be the treatise [Traktat]. Treatise as method is representation and representation is “digression,” “lack of conclusiveness,” “the absence of an uninterrupted purposeful structure,” where the process of thinking tirelessly “makes new beginnings, returning in a roundabout way to its original object” and continuously pauses for breath (GS 1.1:208/OT 28). As Rainer Nägele argues, Darstellung as method means that philosophy stands [stellt] before [dar] the question, it halts at every turn in front of it, in the caesura.15 The image of the treatise is the mosaic, made up of “capricious particles,” of the “distinct and the disparate” – the “authoritative quotation” – the value of which is in inverse proportion to the relationship to the underlying idea. As Graeme Gilloch notes, “combination” and “arrangement,” rather than accumulation, are its principles.16 Representation as method is what relates phenomena to their idea. Truth is “made present [vergegenwärtigt] in the dance of represented ideas,” thus resisting the acquisition and possession of knowledge (GS 1.1:209/OT 29, translation modified). The actuality of the representation is, not the possession of the idea that characterizes knowledge, but its making present of the truth. The concept [Begriff] is what is grabbed, seized [gegriffen] by the intellect. Truth is not an object of knowledge and, as Hans-Jost Frey notes, what is presented in Darstellung cannot be seized by the intellect, it is not communicable except as itself: “presentation is not mediation.”17 As such, Darstellung does not make something accessible through language, but gives it unmediated in language: it is an opening to what lies “outside the cognitively accessible”18 through the renunciation of the uninterrupted course of intention. The concept as product of the intellect is counterposed to the idea as “simply given to be reflected upon,” pre-existing the concept and, thus, “idea as essence” [Idee als Sein] in the Platonic sense (GS 1.1:210/ OT 30). If the realm of knowledge and concept pertains to the scientist, then the philosopher shares with the artist “the task of representation” (GS 1.1:212/OT 32). Representation redeems phenomena by putting them into configuration with ideas.

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Here Benjamin introduces the fundamental notion of idea as constellation: Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars. […] Ideas are timeless constellations, and by virtue of the elements’ being seen as points in such constellations, phenomena are subdivided and at the same time redeemed […]. The idea is best explained as the representation of the context within which the unique and extreme stands alongside its counterpart. (GS 1.1:214–5/OT 34–5)

At this point a very precise statement serves to illuminate Benjamin’s subsequent theory of reading: “the being of ideas simply cannot be conceived of as the object of vision” [Anschauung]. Vision entails an “intention” and is therefore a modality of knowledge, but truth is that which is devoid of all intention: “truth is the death of intention” (GS 1.1:215–16/ OT 35–6). Rather, “the idea is something linguistic,” the symbolic in the essence of the word [im Wesen des Wortes], and the task of the philosopher is to restore, through representation, this linguistic primacy. The question is thus not the “actualization of images in visual terms; but rather, in philosophical contemplation, the idea is released from the heart of reality as the word, reclaiming its name-giving rights” (GS 1.1:216–17/ OT 36–7). Darstellung is, thus, according to Frey, the “restitution of a language that is not the instrument of cognition and communication.”19 The Adamite act of naming must be continually renewed in philosophical contemplation, hence “philosophy is […] a struggle for the representation of ideas” (GS 1.1:217/OT 37) and representation the crystallization of the idea in linguistic figurations. As such, the idea is a monad, which includes “its past and subsequent history”: the representation of phenomena resides within it, as in their objective interpretation (GS 1.1:228/OT 47). Therefore, “the purpose of the representation of the idea is nothing less than an abbreviated outline of this image of the world” (GS 1.1:228/ OT 48). The problem of origin [Ursprung] lies at the heart of representation: unlike genesis [Entstehung], origin does not describe “the process by which the existent came into being,” but rather “that which emerges from the process of becoming and disappearance.” In representation as original phenomenon, an idea constantly confronts the historical world, and thus entails a relationship to history and its development; it is a “process of

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restoration and re-establishment,” which as such is always “imperfect and incomplete” (GS 1.1:226/OT 45–6). In it a constellation of phenomena comes into being, is perceived as such, and the idea is recognized. Origin is the recognition of the truth in an “eddy in the stream of becoming,” when in representation the idea is recognized and phenomena redeemed. The constellation is thus the condition of readability of ideas and phenomena; as mosaic, it is the condition of the construction of an image, Bild as Bildung, formation, architecture.20 The act of reading a constellation is criticism. In the Trauerspiel book, Benjamin deploys a concept from his doctoral thesis, The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism. The original content – in this case of the work of art – is revealed in a process he describes as “the burning up of the husk as it enters the realm of ideas, that is to say a destruction of the work in which its external form achieves its most brilliant degree of illumination” (GS 1.1:211/OT 31). Criticism thus means the “mortification of the works,” that is, “to make historical content, such as provides the basis of every important work of art, into a philosophical truth,” the transformation of “material content” [Sachgehalt] into “truth content” [Wahrheitsgehalt] (GS 1.1:357–8/OT 182). This concept of criticism is fundamental to the whole of Benjamin’s work: in his doctoral thesis he argues that criticism is not concerned with judging or evaluating the work, but is rather the “the completion [Vollendung], consummation [Ergänzerung], and systematization of the work and, on the other hand, its resolution in the absolute” (GS 1.1:78/SW 1:159). Through the destruction, in irony, of the historical form of the work – its “material content” – its original “truth content” is revealed and the individual work dissolved into the unity of art. For the Romantics, irony “assails” and dissolves the form, sacrificing its totality for the sake of “connection” [Zusammenhang] (GS 1.1:86/SW 1:164). Criticism is thus the “Darstellung of the prosaic kernel in every work.” Darstellung must be intended, Benjamin continues, “in the chemical sense, as the generation of a substance through a determinate process to which other substances are submitted” (GS 1.1:109/SW 1:178, translation modified). He insists on this point in his correspondence over the years: to Herbert Belmore in 1916 he wrote that criticism, attacking its object and “decomposing it, […] exposes its inner nature, but

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does not destroy it,” and also reiterated the image of the chemical process (GB 1:349/C 84); to Florens Christian Rang in 1923 he wrote that, as the mortification of works of art, “criticism […] is the representation [Darstellung] of an idea,” and as such the naming [benennen] of the idea (GB 2:393/C 224). Criticism is thus the completion of the work, the completion of its Darstellung.

Reading and Image At the end of the 1920s Benjamin reshaped the problem of Darstellung into what can be called a “theory of the image.” Two essays, both published in Die literarische Welt in 1929, are pivotal to this operation: “Surrealism” and “On the Image of Proust”. Here he defined the image, das Bild, as the site where actualization becomes a critical and political act. The conclusion to the essay on Surrealism, published in February, sums up the political significance of this artistic movement: “to win the energies of intoxication for the revolution.” Does this mean, Benjamin asks, a “poetic politics,” that is, a politics based on poetic devices, rhetorical figures and imagery? The answer is no, but, in order to explain this, he has to define a poetic politics and its difference from a politics of images. The former is the program of the bourgeois parties, “a bad poem on springtime, filled to bursting with metaphors [Vergleichen],” but also the social-democratic program: “the socialist sees that ‘finer future of our children and grandchildren’ in a society in which all act ‘as if they were angels’ and everyone has as much ‘as if he were rich’ and everyone lives ‘as if he were free.’ Of angels, wealth, freedom, not a trace – these are mere images [Alles nur Bilder].” “Filled to bursting” with cheap imagery, it is the ineffective, and ultimately counterrevolutionary, organization of “optimism” (GS 2.1:308/SW 2:216). This is an important point: bourgeois and social-democratic imagery propose optimistic images of the future and are thus “utopic.” To create an image of the future means to seek, in “unprincipled, dilettantish optimism,” a “reconciliation” [Verständigung], which would reinstate and perpetuate

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the continuum, the homogeneous and empty time of the history of the victors. Metaphors explain and reconcile. A revolutionary politics of images, by contrast, must react with “mistrust” to the poetic politics of utopia, and respond to its cheap optimism with what the Surrealist writer, Pierre Naville, called the “organization of pessimism.” Benjamin refers to Aragon’s Traité du style and its distinction between metaphor [Vergleich] and image [Bild]: a politics of images, as the organization of pessimism, he writes, means “to expel moral metaphor from politics,” to expel the cheap and optimistic images of the future, and “to discover in the space of political action the one hundred percent image space [Bildraum]” (GS 2.1:309/SW 2:217). In order to “discover” this image space, a revolutionary politics will need to get rid of the stock imagery of moral metaphors and so “make room.” It needs, first, to adopt the strategy Benjamin would later identify in “The Destructive Character”: he “sees no image hovering before him. He has few needs, and the least of them is to know what will replace what has been destroyed. First of all, for a moment at least, empty space.” Clearing away the traces of the age, he “rejuvenates” [verjüngt] and passes down to posterity situations, not things, “by making them practicable [handlich] and thus liquidating them” (GS 4.1:397–8/SW 2:541–2). In order to become “practicable” and “functional,” the revolutionary intelligentsia must abandon its contemplative stance and project, in action [Handeln] (“in the joke, too, in invective, in misunderstanding”) “its own image,” so opening “the long sought image space, […] the world of universal and integral actualities [Aktualität], […] the space […] in which political materialism and physical creatureliness share the inner man.” The image provides evidence and is therefore a form of action. “More concretely,” Benjamin insists, this image space is a “body space” [Leibraum]: the image is not a moral metaphor, but physis, organized and intermingled with the body in technology, where “bodily innervations of the collective become revolutionary discharge.” As Weigel notes, the image is here materialized in corporeal innervation, almost “enfleshed”: Darstellung and idea coincide and are made present, thus actual.21 The great merit of Surrealism for Benjamin is to have understood this need and exchanged the moral imagery of the metaphor, “the play of human features,” for the

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innervated body space of “the face of an alarm clock that in each minute rings for sixty seconds” (GS 2.1: 309–10/SW 2:217–18). The essay on Proust, published in June–July, insists on differentiating the image from a simple metaphor: image is not the figurative expression of a concept, but Darstellung, representation, which as such cannot be described but must be “evoked,” or better “called up” [heraufrufen].22 The title of the essay is Zum Bilde Prousts, “towards” the image of Proust: the image cannot be considered an organic, visible whole, neither the figuration of a concept which can be grasped and mastered nor an image of life nor an image of poetry. Rather, it is something to which we can approximate, go “towards,” the dialectical physiognomy of a “discrepancy,” the relationship of literature and life (GS 2.1:311/SW 2:237). In Proust’s images, Benjamin identifies a fundamental trait for the understanding of his own theory of images, which he will deal with in two fragments of 1933, “Doctrine of the Similar” and “On the Mimetic Faculty.” This characteristic is resemblance, Ähnlichkeit, which can also be translated as Baudelairean correspondance. Resemblance in Proust is the mechanism that makes for the mémoire involontaire: the discrepant connection that puts together wakeful state and dream world, “in which everything that happens appears not in identical but in similar guise, opaquely similar to itself ” (GS 2.1:314/SW 2:239). To illustrate this, Benjamin uses an image that will reappear in Berlin Childhood: the child, thrusting his hand into a bag-like, rolled-up and turned-inside-out sock, grabs the “little present” hidden within and draws it out, unveiling its secret by undoing the “bag.” Bringing out the “present” means to undo the “pocket,” and this endlessly repeated experiment taught the young Benjamin that “form and content, veil and what is veiled, are the same. It led me to draw truth from works of literature as warily as the child’s hand retrieved the sock from ‘the pocket’” (GS 7.1:417/SW 3:374). In the Proust essay, the child’s act of “unveiling” changes the bag and what it contains, form and content, into a “third thing” [etwas Drittes]; in the same way, Proust emptied his self, the dummy [Attrappe], in order to keep capturing “that third thing, the image which satisfied his curiosity.”23 The image is thus beyond the relation of form and content, it is etwas Drittes, a “world distorted in the state of similarity, a world in which the true surrealist face of existence

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breaks through” (GS 2.1:314/SW 2:240). When the image comes forth and emerges from the text, thus becoming legible, it also unravels and dissolves the text, as in the “mortifying” work of the critic. The Proustian image is the work of mémoire involontaire, the “rejuvenating [verjüngenden] force which is a match for the inexorable process of aging.” Rejuvenation means here presentification, to make present and actual an image of the past through its mirroring in the present. The temporality of the image is thus the eternity of “intertwined time” [verschränkte Zeit], a time “folded” [verschränkt] upon itself, in which similarity and correspondances rule. It is a temporality of simultaneity, which breaks the linearity of the time-line, the homogeneous and empty time. When “what has been is reflected in the dewy fresh ‘instant’ [Nu], a painful shock of rejuvenation pulls it together once more,” and this is the “actualization” [Vergegenwärtigung] that characterizes Proust (GS 2.1:320/SW 2:244). Temporal boundaries are broken and past and present “folded” together in the Nu: each moment somehow touches, or overlaps upon, every other moment. The image is thus that “third thing” in which, through resemblance, history and reality become readable. As Beryl Schlossman puts it, the “dialectic of the evanescence of time and the resurrection of the instant is crystallized in the image.”24 These fundamental intuitions took form, in the theoretical turning point of the late 1920s, in a number of short prose pieces Benjamin himself called Denkbilder or thought-images. Under this title, and under the pseudonym of Detlef Holz, he published, in 1933 in Die literarische Welt, seven short pieces dealing with dream, writing, storytelling, games and other minutiae: imagistic miniatures that captured fleeting moments of life, the accidental and the neglected, and that would become the hallmark of Benjamin’s famous city portraits (Naples, Moscow, Marseille, Weimar, San Giminiano etc.). However, the most important example of Denkbilder is in One-Way Street, a slim volume published in 1928 containing pieces written throughout the 1920s. One-Way Street is an important work for a number of reasons. Its strongly avant-gardist and Brechtian tones prepare the terrain for the experiment of The Arcades Project. It introduces many methodological innovations and strategies that would later become central: immediacy, “profane illumination,” the dialectics of intoxication,

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imagistic construction, the monadological fragment and the montage. Here Benjamin deploys the “theory of the image” unveiled in Surrealism and Proust, and politicises the figure of criticism that guided his work on Romanticism and Trauerspiel. The Denkbilder of these years are not the subjective impressions of a refined intellectual observing his time, but rather images of actuality read as a language in which the truth of history and reality is concretely re-presented [dargestellt] and becomes readable.

Reading and Actuality The “theory of the image” provides the methodological architecture for The Arcades Project, Benjamin’s unfinished “prehistory of modernity,” which occupied his researches throughout the 1930s and until his premature death in 1940. At its centre towers the dialectical image, which remains to this day a dilemma for Benjamin scholars. The dialectical image as historiographical method will be dealt with in detail in Chapter Five, but, since it makes explicit the “theory of the image” running through his previous work and almost organizes it into a “theory of reading,” it also has to be the cornerstone for this introduction. The dialectical image represents and shows the indissoluble relationship between image, actuality and reading. Benjamin wrote to Martin Buber as early as 1927, referring to his essay on Moscow, that his presentation [Darstellung] would be “devoid of all theory”: the intention was to let the “creatural” speak for itself, as “‘all factuality is already theory’ and therefore it refrains from any deductive abstraction, any prognostication, and, within certain bounds, even any judgment” (GB 3:232/C 313). This was also the year in which the project on the Paris arcades was conceived and a first sketch, Arcades, written with Franz Hessel. The note in the letter to Buber echoes the more famous and often quoted entry in the Arcades Project: “method of this project: literary montage. I needn’t say anything. Merely show” (N1a,8). The dialectical

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image was intended as a montage, where “what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation,” and the progression of, and the dialectic between, “what has been” and the “now” freezes and crystallizes, suddenly emerging into an image (N2a,3). This constellation is characterized by resemblance and synchronicity. On the one hand, as Benjamin writes in “Central Park,” “if it is imagination that presents correspondences to the memory, it is thinking that consecrates allegories to it. Memory brings about the convergence of imagination and thought” (GS 1.2:669/SW 4:171). The image emerges from the perception of “nonsensuous similarities” that link one “now” with another. On the other, “every present day is determined by the images that are synchronic with it” and in the point of explosion when time stands still – “the death of the intentio” – “truth is charged to the bursting point with time” (N3,1). The connection with Proust’s image (and its mysticism) is clear, and it is made explicit by Benjamin when he defines the dialectical image as “the involuntary memory of redeemed humanity” (GS 1.3:1233/SW 4:403). An important feature of these images, too often downplayed (or even misunderstood) by critics, is that “the place where one encounters them is language” (N2a,3, emphasis added). The “heightened graphicness” [Anschaulichkeit] (N2,6) Benjamin endows to this method does not entail a mere, pre-linguistic or a-linguistic visuality: as Darstellung, the image is eminently linguistic, in the sense of Benjamin’s early writings on language. Anschaulichkeit conveys graphicness as “vividness,” a “bringing to life,” and thus making present and actual; a concreteness of truth counterposed to the abstractness of the concept and the mere visuality of the metaphor. As etwas Drittes, neither concept nor metaphor, this “figural manifestation” [bildliche Erscheinung] is characterized by “ambiguity” [Zweideutigkeit] (GS 5.1:55/SW 3:40, translation modified). Adorno greatly disliked this sentence in the 1935 exposé, “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” arguing that “ambiguity is not the translation of the dialectic into an image, but the ‘trace’ of that image which itself must first be rendered dialectically by theory” (AB 149/CC 113). “Ambiguity” thus disappeared from the 1939 exposé. Nevertheless, it must be read here as that etwas Drittes, the interruption and standing still of the dialectic, in which philosophy stands before the question and truth is made present

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rather than argued and understood through theory. Zweideutig is what is ambiguous and equivocal, but, in a figurative sense, also “suggestive” [schlüpfrig]: the two-fold complexity of truth that cannot be “pinned down” [deuten], fixed and made clear and distinct by meaning, but only become apparent [erscheinen] in a linguistic image. The dialectical image cannot be inserted within the coherent and totalizing frame of a theory, but remains contradictory and ambiguous in the frozen crystallization of the dialectical contradiction. Eminently linguistic and not merely visual, the dialectical image is not seen, but read. And it is read when it becomes legible [lesbar], in its actuality. An image attains legibility only at a particular time, when other images synchronic with it enter a constellation of recognizability [Erkennbarkeit], that is, when time, as in Proust, folds upon itself, nonsensuous similarities are perceived, and two synchronic moments become recognizable. “The image that is read” [das gelesene Bild], that is, the image that crystallizes in the moment of its legibility, “bears to the highest degree the imprint of the perilous critical moment on which all reading is founded” (N3,1). This notion retains Proust’s mysticism, though Anselm Haverkamp insists that the mysticism is “ironic.” It is irony, in the sense deployed by Romantic criticism, that disrupts the Platonic and mystic traditions of ecstatic access and immediate vision, and reuses them to complete the project of Darstellung initiated in the prologue to the Trauerspiel book. Haverkamp’s emphasis on reading and its convoluted [verschränkt] temporality points towards the differentiation of the dialectical image from “mere imagerie and mere imagination.” The gelesene Bild is a “text,” which may resemble a picture insofar it is framed and structured, but as text it can be “indefinitely reframed and restructured.”25 The paradigmatic instance of the linguistic essence of images is the quotation, “language reused and reread.” Dialectical image thus means for Haverkamp “reading citation.”26 The power of citation, in the sense Benjamin draws from Kraus, resides in the continually renovated actuality of what is cited: not the authorial evocation of a text passed down to posterity and made thus “untouchable,” but a “situation” passed down by making it “practicable” and thus “liquidating” it (cf. GS 4.1:397–8/SW 2:541–2). The text is

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disrupted, disappears, like the “little present” in the sock, leaving behind an image of actuality. In the 1930s Benjamin transfers the notion of Romantic criticism into the realm of history and reality: history is read in the way the Romantics criticized the work of art, by disrupting the continuum of its false organic wholeness and unveiling its “truth-content,” which for the historical event is its “after-history” [Nachgeschichte]. To read critically means – Benjamin quotes from Hofmannstahl – to “read what was never written” (GS 1.3:1238/SW 4:405): to discover, only retrospectively, the significance of an event through its integration into a new critical constellation, to make present [vergegenwärtigen], to make actual that event. Benjamin identifies the founding concept of the Arcades Project in actualization [Aktualisierung], which means the “polarisation” of the presentation, becoming a “force field” where past and present “interpenetrate” (N7a,1). It is important to emphasize – and this is the trait that most contradicts the interpretation of the dialectical image as “visual” and “static” – that this polarization into fore- and after-history happens “always anew, never in the same way” (N7a,1, emphasis added). Reading never gives a “definitive version,” but rather is an operation – a political action – that keeps renovating and re-actualizing the image that is read, because “it is the present that polarizes the event into fore- and afterhistory” (N7a,8, emphasis added). What is legible is involved in a “continuous process of change” (GS 2.2:467/SW 3:261–2) and is continually re-actualized by the act of reading. The image as constellation, with its double emphasis on reading and actuality, is what decidedly distinguishes it from a plethora of theories about the image, the figure and their reading – from Weber’s “ideal type,”27 to Auerbach’s “figura”28 or Jung’s “archetype”29 – and makes it absolutely sui generis. Benjamin explicitly engages only with Jung, and this for a specific reason: in the 1935 exposé of the Arcades Project he used a language with strong Jungian connotations, especially in the references to the “collective unconscious” (or “collective consciousness”), and Adorno urged him to differentiate his dialectical image from the dangerously regressive Jung. In the 1939 exposé Benjamin dropped the concept of “collective unconscious,” but the dangerous similarity remained, so that he planned to have an introductory chapter on Jung, which would clarify the issue.

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If Horkheimer had not insisted on having the Baudelaire part first, that is what Benjamin planned to do in the late 1930s. The famous definition of the dialectical image thus ends with a clarification: “only dialectical images are genuine images (that is, not archaic)” (N2a,3, emphasis added). The archaic image – clearly the Jungian archetype – is not dialectical and not historical. “Historicity” lies for Benjamin in the constellation of an image of the past with one of the present, thus in the actuality of the image as constellation, which “bears to the highest degree the imprint of the perilous critical moment on which all reading is founded” (N3,1). It is the historical index, that is, a convergence of past and present, which distinguished Benjamin’s images from Jung’s archetypes, but also from the “‘essences’ of phenomenology” and from what he called “the categories of the ‘human sciences,’ from so-called habitus, from style, and the like” (N3,1). Phenomenological essence and archetype are “timeless and eternal” (K6,1), immutable, “static,” and thus regressive “forms” and nostalgic idealizations, whereas the dialectical image is actual, polarized by the present and thus always changing. An entry of the Arcades Project quotes from Jung’s Seelenprobleme der Gegenwart, where the archetype is described as being unconsciously “activated,” “translated into the language of the present,” “conjured up” by the artist who “reaches back to the primordial image in the unconscious.” This image, the quotation concludes, “[the artist’s] longing seizes on, and as he … bringing it to consciousness, the image changes its form until it can be accepted by the minds of his contemporaries, according to their powers.” Archetypes are merely made “accessible to Zeitgeist” (N8,2) and thus make “semblance in history still more delusive by mandating nature as its homeland” (N11,1). If similarity must be found, then it is with Goethe’s Urphänomen: “the dialectical image,” Benjamin writes, “is that form of the historical object which satisfies Goethe’s requirements for the object of analysis: to exhibit a genuine synthesis. It is the Urphänomen of history” (N9a,4).30 Another entry explains this: Benjamin’s concept of Ursprung, as deployed in the Trauerspiel book, is the transposition of Goethe’s concept from the domain of nature into that of history. Ur-phänomen becomes Ur-sprung “only insofar as in [its] own individual development [Entwicklung] – ‘unfolding’ [Auswicklung] might be a better term – [it] give[s] rise to

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the whole series of […] concrete historical forms, just as the leaf unfolds [herausfaltet] from itself all the riches of the empirical world of plants” (N2a,4). As Comay glosses this, “the revelation of the general in the detail involves a certain ‘unfolding’ […], in this case, of the specific temporal constellation (never stable) within which every ‘small individual moment’ (N2a,6) is to be inscribed.”31 There is no arche, “timeless and eternal,” that conditions and determines the images of the present; rather, the Ur-phänomen as Ursprung entails a relationship with history in its “unfolding” and is the moment of recognition, when it emerges into readability in an ever-changing constellation with the present. “Origin is the goal,” Benjamin quoted from Kraus, and the goal is the image, the historical constellation of reading that is inseparable from its actuality.32

Figures of Reading To read Benjamin today without paying heed to his own peculiar notion of reading is to fail the spirit of his project. Whether we “enshrine” his work and make it “untouchable,” or file it away as non-actual and surpassed, we fail to answer his call. As a text, his work contains instructions on how it should be read, it asks and almost prescribes a reading that will be figurative [bildlich] and actual, that is, broken down into images and polarized by the present. It asks to be read historically, that is, to be put into a constellation with our present; it asks that our reading recognize its non-sensuous correspondences with our time, that its historicity be “unfolded” and its Ursprung unveiled. It asks to be “mortified” and “ruined” and its truth-content re-presented. As a cultural artefact, it asks to be violated and read against the grain of its and our own time, and thus re-inscribed in new practices, re-assembled and re-made always anew. To read the “actuality of Walter Benjamin” today thus means to read images of Benjamin in a constellation with the present, and images from the present in a constellation with Benjamin, or, as Weigel writes, “in the light of – or with the attitude of,”33 Benjamin. An entry in the Arcades Project

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reads: “the book on the Baroque exposed the seventeenth century to the light of the present day [durch die Gegenwart belichtet]. Here, something analogous must be done for the nineteenth century, but with greater distinctness” (N1a,2). Belichtung is the “exposure” of a photographic camera; the purpose of the present study is to belichten Benjamin’s work through the light of our present, to “construct” images/constellations of Benjamin and with Benjamin. It will do so by “constructing” four figures from Benjamin’s work and putting them into constellations of reading with four contemporary texts. Many facets of Benjamin’s work are still a dilemma, especially the dialectical image, which, although the theoretical and methodological fulcrum of the Arcades Project, never achieved “terminological consistency” and remains to this day, in Rolf Tiedemann’s words, “iridescent.”34 This study is not an attempt to solve, nor give definitive answers to, any riddle and so “pin down” [deuten] into concepts Benjamin’s constitutive ambiguity [Zwei-deutigkeit]. I am not claiming that Benjamin’s “theory of the image” is of straightforward application or deployment and will therefore not try to emulate or mimic his style or method, which would merely result in a laughable and fruitless aping. Most of all, this study will not attempt to construct new dialectical images: not only is the dialectical image still a riddle, strongly embedded within a plethora of modernist suggestions (cf. Chapter Five), but the conditions and modes of my readings also disavow and contradict a great many of Benjamin’s imperatives. On the one hand, my reading is very specific: I have chosen to analyse only four figures among a heterogeneous and colourful crowd, and this choice is very personal and subjective. I am not claiming these are the central figures in Benjamin’s work and – although it could be argued that, to a certain extent, every figure works as a monad in which the whole of Benjamin’s work is mirrored – there are important absences: the Child, the Gambler, the Collector, the Dandy, the Poet or the Little Hunchback. The present readings are thus circumscribed to a few facets and motifs, and deny any claim to exhaust them; they are Belichtungen, partial and ephemeral exposures or snapshots. On the other hand – and this is the point of greater difference – the choice of the texts juxtaposed to Benjamin’s figures in my constellations of reading is absolutely personal

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and subjective, determined and delimited by my cultural background, by biographical turns, by personal interest and taste, by suitability and pertinence; in a word, by chance. Now, subjectivity and chance were what Benjamin most tried to expel from the construction of the image, which should, rather, carry a revolutionary and disruptive necessity (cf. Chapter Five). Nevertheless, despite these limits and differences, and with my much more modest goal, this study will attempt to carry out its readings in the spirit of Benjamin’s project, intertwining figures, reading and actuality. The figures in this study are constructions ad hoc, shaped by putting together a number of quotations extracted from across the whole of Benjamin’s work, from the early writings, through to his correspondence, published essays, fragments and the notes for the Arcades Project, and reassembled into a fictitious unity. They are thus a very Benjaminian montage, which shuns organic wholeness and completeness. The quotations disrupt Benjamin’s text and pursue, not authorial justification, but effectiveness and actuality. If these figures are syntheses, it is in the sense of Darstellungen, mosaics made up of “capricious fragments” the value of which is “all the greater the less direct their relationship to the underlying idea” (GS 1.1:208/OT 29). In fact, an “underlying idea” or category is attached to every figure – Modernity, the Trace, the Commodity and History – not in order to pre-establish the meaning of the figures, but rather to suggest a possible focus for the Darstellungen as constellations. The four contemporary texts that complete each of the constellations of reading belong to diverse, distant and heterogeneous traditions and are unrelated to one another, or to Benjamin, except through the “capricious” whim of my choice. The flâneur of Juan Goytisolo, the Spanish writer fascinated by the Arab world and the dream of multiculturalism, is unrelated to the detective of Paul Auster, the American postmodernist and fashionable novelist, as much as the prostitute of Dacia Maraini, the Italian feminist writer and playwright, is to the ragpicker of Mudrooroo, the Australian Indigenous novelist and poet. And, with the exception of Goytisolo, none has any connection to Benjamin. These texts carry with them linguistic, social, cultural and theoretical traditions that are as distant from one another, and from Benjamin, as the stars in the night sky, whose orbits “do not come into contact with each other.” Their distance

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is “unbridgeable” [unaufhebbar] (GS 1.1:217/OT 37), but, as the stars are related to one another in the astrologist’s figurations, so the texts will receive new figurations of meaning when put into these constellations of reading. My figures of reading are intended as Benjaminian: this means that I will not read the texts through recurrent and standardized ideal types or figurae; rather, the Flâneur, the Detective, the Prostitute and the Ragpicker will emerge from the texts and become a kind of Urphänomene only once they enter the constellations of reading. As origin, that is Ursprung, of my readings, the four figures are not the premise but the goal of the study, and will emerge only a posteriori, as images of a read actuality. Whether this study will succeed in “evoking” or “calling up” [heraufrufen] the four figures, depends on a number of very personal and subjective issues, most obviously the competence and ability (or lack thereof ) of its author. As an experiment, however, its origin and goal (and hope), is to enact and stage a series of readings that will be truly Benjaminian. But all this, as Benjamin would say, “can perhaps be elucidated best by an image” (GS 6:36/SW 1:95).

chapter 2

The Flâneur: On Modernity

There has never been an epoch that did not feel itself to be “modern” in the sense of eccentric, and did not believe itself to be standing directly before an abyss. The desperately clear consciousness of being in the middle of a crisis is something chronic in humanity. Every age unavoidably seems to itself a new age. The “modern”, however, is as varied in its meaning as the different aspects of one and the same kaleidoscope. (S1a,4)

It seems appropriate to begin with the flâneur, not only because of his centrality to Benjamin’s work, but also because the only way to read this figure is as a constellation of different, ambiguous, at times contradictory features. He thus constitutes a monad for both Benjamin’s “prehistory of modernity” and his method of reading, a monad for all the other figures in his work and for the way in which they must be read. The architecture of this first constellation will emphasize the act of “construction” necessary to the comprehension of the Benjaminian figures. The part on Benjamin is therefore focused on the dialectics of flânerie: it will argue that the only way to make sense of the many contradictory flâneurs who populate his work is to “construe” a dialectical model which would hold together, in a constellation, his many elusive traits. This model is also the best way to represent the contradictions, paradoxes and inconsistencies which constitute the kaleidoscope of modernity. The elusiveness of the flâneur is implicit in the fact that there is no translation for it, that all cultural contexts maintain the French term. Its etymology goes back to the old Scandinavian flana, which the Robert Dictionnaire Etymologique translates as “courir çà et là,” “to wander here and there.” Its use is attested to in Norman texts since the sixteenth century, but it entered common use only in the nineteenth. The verb flâner is explained in Le Robert as “se promener sans hâte, au hasard, en s’abandonnant à l’impression et au

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spectacle du moment” (“to take a walk, at leisure, aimlessly, indulging in the impressions and spectacle of the moment”). In English it can be translated as “to wander, ramble, roam, rove, stray, to go aimlessly or casually.” The flâneur is thus the wanderer. However, the word is seldom translated, and the reason for this is that it immediately and intuitively evokes the context in which it entered common use: the nineteenth-century Paris of the industrial revolution, of the birth of the modern metropolis, of the “prehistory” of commodity society, of the artistic representation of modernity, of Hugo, Dumas, Balzac and most of all Baudelaire. The flâneur thus evokes a series of concepts and categories, which can easily be reunited under the general banner of “modernity.” Itself an elusive label, modernity is the constellation the flâneur is the most apt figure to inhabit. Better, the flâneur is the most apt figure to embody, and simultaneously produce the representation of, modernity. Therefore, Benjamin places him at the centre of his “prehistory of modernity,” as focal point and monad. His dialectics of flânerie centre on several contrapositions, the first that between vision and invisibility. The identifying trait of the flâneur is observation: he indulges in the impressions and spectacle of the moment. Observation is made while leisurely and aimlessly walking through the streets of the metropolis: he is thus the embodiment of the modern gaze, mobilized, distracted, exhilarated by the colourful spectacle of the modern city. This gaze has a completely new relationship with space, time and reality, and is thus connected to new forms of representation. It is related to pleasure and intoxication: pre-modern contemplative observation becomes “scopophilia” (from the Greek skopein, to view + philía, fondness), the derivation of pleasure from the very act of watching, an intoxication that is thus erotic and connected to voyeurism, and, in turn, to participation. The flâneur does not participate, he remains aloof and seeks invisibility: scopophilia is a substitute for actual (sexual) participation, which allows the flâneur to embrace and describe the spectacle he beholds. Invisibility also involves gender issues: “flâneur” is in French a gendered noun, and the exclusive use of the masculine pronoun is not an oversight. There is no “flâneuse,” no female flâneur, women are left out of the picture and thus confined to invisibility. Reading the constellation of the flâneur thus unveils the gender dynamics of Benjamin’s

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construction and of the project of modernity. The other contrapositions of this constellation focus on the construction of space in the capitalist metropolis, on the dialectics of time and representation, on the place of the individual amid the crowd and on the role of the intellectual. This last feature involves Benjamin himself as representative of the modern writer. Observer and judge of modernity, the flâneur is the figure for the modern intelligentsia, imprisoned within, and torn apart by, the contradictions of modernity: he “wanders” amid a labyrinth of power, geniality, heroism, trahison, prostitution, hypocrisy, exile. Benjamin identified with the flâneur and embodied many of his contradictions: this constellation thus also becomes a lens through which to illuminate his role as intellectual. In the second part, it will be argued that the same dialectical model can fruitfully be applied to the postmodern flâneur. Juan Goytisolo updates this figure and deploys it in the Paris of the 1980s, where his features have become even more confused, paradoxical, spurious, scattered through a wider spectrum, but also more diffused, internalized, “popularized.” Postmodernity enhances scopophilia and imagistic intoxication, complicates the already confused representation of space and time, multiplies the roar of the crowd and replicates the contradictions of the intellectual. The flâneur, transformed, bastardized, incoherent and inconsistent as ever, appears as apt at the centre of the representation of postmodernity as he was in modernity. A postmodernist writer, Juan Goytisolo embraces paradox and contradiction: the flâneur is thus for him not only the best figure to represent, and produce representations of, our age, but also the epitome for a strategy of critical engagement with society, politics, history and writing. Embodying in his own persona, like Benjamin, many traits of the flâneur, he reproduces and takes to a new level the contradictions of the engagé intellectual. The image this first constellation attempts to conjure up is thus a kaleidoscope through which to read, on the one hand, Benjamin’s representation of modernity and his own personification of the modern intellectual and, on the other, the compelling endurance of this model for unveiling the contradictions of our time.

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2.1 The Art of Straying: Walter Benjamin and the Dialectics of Flânerie Flânerie is a kind of reading of the street, in which human faces, shop fronts, shop windows, café terraces, street cars, automobiles and trees become a wealth of equally valid letters of the alphabet that together result in words, sentences and pages of an ever-new book. In order to engage in flânerie, one must not have anything too definite in mind. — Franz Hessel, Spazieren in Berlin

Theory of the Flâneur In a long letter to Adorno written on 9 December 1938, Benjamin pleads the case for his “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,” recently rejected by the Institute for Social Research, and identifies the focal point of his essay as “the theory of the flâneur” (GB 6:187/CC 293). Nevertheless, it remains difficult to speak of a single such theory in Benjamin’s writings, where this figure comes to signify many, at times even contradictory, realities. He uses it for his analysis of the prehistory of modernity, but the outcome is no single “theory”; rather, the flâneur is the focus, or the excuse, for many different insights into modernity, often opposed and contradictory. On the one hand, Benjamin’s flâneur is a textual fiction, literally constructed out of many texts and references, from Baudelaire to Poe, Balzac to Dickens, Marx to the Illustrated Guide to Paris. He is a fictional marriage of several elements, for Sven Birkerts a “collection of attributes,”1 for Anne Friedberg a “palimpsestic construct.”2 He is thus a truly Benjaminian montage. If the flâneur was ever a historical phenomenon,3 in Benjamin’s texts this historical reality merges with fictional representation, so that he is read as a Parisian type of the nineteenth century, or as a way of experiencing metropolitan life, or as an emblem of the intellectual, etc. On the other hand, Benjamin’s “theory” of the flâneur leads to many different definitions of what this figure “stands for.” The inconsistency of these many flâneurs is due, in part, to the incomplete,

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fragmentary and essayistic nature of Benjamin’s work, his paratactic style and his refusal to provide theoretical mediation for his quotations. It would therefore be extremely ill-advised to read the various references to the flâneur in Benjamin as amounting to a “theory.” At most, they can be read as a constellation “within which the unique and extreme stands alongside its counterpart” (GS 1.1:215/OT 35). The flâneur certainly represents the quintessential modern vision for Benjamin, and also the critical conscience of the process of modernization; but in addition he is a figure for the prostitution of modern intellectuals to the culture industry, and a prototype for the subject of the totalitarian mass-state, etc. The flâneur was an urban type in the Paris of the first half of the nineteenth century, the solitary stroller, who aimlessly and leisurely wandered the city, making his occupation the observation of modern life. This figure effectively disappeared during the Second Empire, when the city’s epochal transformation under Haussmann resulted in the disappearance of the loci of flânerie, the passages or Parisian arcades. Benjamin’s notes at times refer to the man of leisure of the first half of the nineteenth century, at others to his transformation into the consumer and the salaried writer after 1850; at times they focus on the flâneur’s gaze, at others they highlight his relationship with the crowd and the tempo of modernity, at others they refer to his resemblance to the commodity, etc. At times they also seem to refer to Benjamin’s contemporary modernity rather than to “prehistoric” Paris. All these description are to be read, in their many contradictions, as a historical movement. They constitute not a “theory,” but rather a dialectic. Benjamin’s main model for the figure of the flâneur is Baudelaire, both as the writer who created a privileged image of the flâneur and the historical figure who embodied it in his own persona. For Baudelaire – who wrote during the Second Empire, when the “historical” flâneur was already extinct – the figure is already a montage of literary myths drawn from Balzac and Hugo, from a mythologization of Poe, from his description of Constantin Guys as the modern artist par excellence, and of himself as “the modern poet.” In his Le peintre de la vie moderne (1860), Baudelaire describes the flâneur as the artist who observes modernity.4 This modernity is Paris,5 although its exact meaning, Marshal Berman

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argues, “is surprisingly elusive and hard to pin down.”6 “La modernité,” reads the famous definition by Baudelaire, “c’est le transitoire, le fugitif, le contingent, la moitié de l’art, dont l’autre moitié est l’éternel et l’immuable” (“modernity is the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art, whose other half is the eternal and the immutable”).7 The dialectic of the transitory and the eternal is the contradiction of modernity, the task of the modern artist “de tirer l’éternel du transitoire,”8 to distil the eternal from the transitory. But Baudelaire’s observer of modernity also opposes and resists many aspects of that same reality he claims to embrace: the representation of modernity is thus already a dialectic of love and rejection.9 Benjamin’s flâneur is therefore better read as a constellation, in which the dialectical relationship between the distant and contradictory poles of the description calls forth an image of modernity. Benjamin himself hints at a “dialectics of flânerie” in two different entries of the Arcades Project. The first reads: “dialectic of flânerie: on one side, the man who feels himself viewed by all and sundry as a true suspect and, on the other side, the man who is utterly undiscoverable, the hidden man. Presumably, it is this dialectic that is developed in ‘The Man of the Crowd’” (M2,8). The second reads: “dialectic of flânerie: the interior as street (luxury)/ the street as interior (misery)” (GS 5.2:1215). These definitions are neither consistent nor constitute a sufficient instrument of analysis to embrace the many contradictory facets of the flâneur. I therefore propose to broaden the concept and to configure the many flâneurs we encounter in Benjamin into a “dialectic of flânerie,” through which to describe the multiple meanings of the figure. In every one of his facets and in all his possible readings, the flâneur emblematizes a contradiction and a contraposition, the two poles of a dialectical movement that allow for an – if not satisfactory, at least comprehensive – reading of modernity as in itself contradictory. First, I will consider the dialectics of vision and invisibility: the flâneur’s scopophilia and his ambulatory practice make him the emblem of modern vision, the only one capable of capturing a fleeting modernity; but he is also the invisible observer, who hides behind anonymity and thus represents the mechanical neutrality of the gaze; and he is the producer of images of modernity and, as such, establishes the canons of modern (in)visibility. Second, I will turn to the dialectics of space:

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the arcade, the preferred locus of the flâneur’s ramblings, is at the same time interior and exterior, home and landscape, and so emblematizes the phantasmagoria of the modern city. Thirdly, I will analyse the dialectics of time: the flâneur is the observer of modernity, but at the same time he opposes its rhythms, and this opposition seems to be the prerequisite for the interpretation of the same reality it opposes. Fourthly, I will analyse the dialectics of the crowd: the crowd is the necessary environment of the flâneur, but he keeps at a disdainful distance from it. Finally, I will look into the dialectics of the market: the flâneur is a figure for the modern intellectual in his troubled relationship with mass-culture and the culture industry. The resulting picture will be, at the very least, multi-dimensional and multi-vocal, and thus itself a “textual flânerie.” The Dialectics of Seeing10 As the ambulatory observer, the flâneur has been considered the very embodiment or emblem of the perceptive attitude in modernity. He is the spectator par excellence, the substantialization of the sense of seeing, the embodiment of the eye; however, he is a moving eye, who strolls through, and is shaped by, the new reality of the metropolis. The spectacle of the modern city cannot be captured by the traditional contemplative beholder, since the experience of modernity is of “the fleeting, the fugitive, the contingent,” in which the observer is bombarded from all directions by continuous stimulation.11 Moreover, in modernity the relationship between sight and bodily movement was changed due to the invention in the nineteenth century of new machines which mobilized the gaze and volatilized perception.12 Jonathan Crary describes modern perception as “acutely temporal and kinetic […]. There is never a pure access to a single object; vision is always multiple, adjacent to and overlapping with other objects, desires, and vectors.”13 Anke Gleber argues that “the flâneur embodies an intellectual and sensory disposition that records and responds to the new phenomena of the metropolis, the new sensations of its streets.”14

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The superabundance of images and stimuli in the city makes flânerie inviting and exciting; indeed, the flâneur strolls in a state of intoxication.15 Addicted to perception, he seeks visual pleasure in the street. Nevertheless, for Gleber, this very intoxication is the prerequisite for visual access to modernity: “the potentially unlimited continuum of impressions in the city,” she writes, can “neither be fixed in static positions nor stopped and comprehended in the terms of a preceding generation.”16 Therefore, the flâneur’s ambling trance is peculiarly able to intercept these fleeting images. “In the flâneur,” Benjamin writes, “the joy of watching [Schaulust] prevails over all. […] The revealing representations of the big city […] are the work of those who have traversed the city absently, as it were, lost in thought or worry” (GS 1.2:572/SW 4:41). Modern vision happens in a state of distraction, since the multiple stimuli of the metropolis can never be properly absorbed. In the flâneur, acute attentiveness to the multifaceted stimuli of the city is thereby accompanied by a distracted distantiation.17 The flâneur “goes botanizing on the asphalt” (GS 1.2:538/SW 4:19) and, in his aimless strolling, collects images of the big city. Benjamin writes: “we have a tangible idea of what concerns the flâneur and of what he looks for. Namely, images [die Bilder], wherever they lodge. The flâneur is the priest of the genius loci” (GS 3:196/SW 2:264). He is therefore related to the figure of the collector or, better, to his debased alter-ego, the ragpicker. Attracted by the marginal, the discarded and the superfluous, he fixes his attention on the details, the fragments and the particles which whirl in the atmosphere of the street. He then pours his observations and reflections into his writings, for the flâneur’s is the speculative gaze of the physiologist, the author of the popular journalistic pieces which, in the Paris of the first half of the nineteenth century, described social types. His gaze is “illustrative,” he “composes his reverie as text to accompany the images” (M2,2). His ambling may thus be purposeless, but his gaze is purposeful. Benjamin therefore relates the flâneur to two figures of observation and investigation, the “amateur detective” (GS 1.2:572/ SW 4:41), concerned with finding the clues of street life, and the historian, who discovers hidden memories in the labyrinth of the city.18

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The flâneur thus has a purpose: to read the metropolis as a system of signs or a text. Every phenomenon, every corner of the street, every trivial detail, is for him replete with secret meanings which, if connected, will disclose a world of significance. In the city-as-text, the flâneur finds “correspondences”: his gaze, Benjamin writes, is “the gaze of the allegorist” (GS 5.1:54/SW 3:39), who can say, with Baudelaire, “tout pour moi devient allégorie.” Nevertheless, the flâneur is not simply a passive receptor of fleeting images, since the allegoric gaze re-imagines the world and, as Shields argues, “rebuilds a cognitive mapping”19 of the urban environment. The flâneur is an active “imaginer” and imagination is his heuristic device. The allegoric gaze, building a net of relations in the urban text, interweaves it with poetic imagery. Gleber emphasizes that the flâneur’s “contemplative openness” lets him “experience his every step as a poetic process, as a flânerie that constitutes an ‘essentially poetic act.’”20 “For the first time,” Benjamin writes, “with Baudelaire, Paris becomes the subject of lyric poetry” (GS 5.1:54/SW 3:39). The flâneur-as-modern-gaze is, then, the medium through which modernity becomes image: he walks the city streets, captures images and pours them into his writings, thus supplying the literary representation of the metropolis. His gaze is shaped by the modern urban environment, but at the same time he gives back in exchange the representation of it. Gleber argues that “he is as much a product of modernity as a producer of its images.”21 She compares the eye of the flâneur to a camera, which, moving through the city, “shapes reality into an ongoing film.”22 The flâneur’s moving eye captures a series of urban snapshots and puts them together in a sort of film-like montage, “acting in this way like the camera of silent cinema.”23 He is thus, on the one hand, the human equivalent of the visual multiplicity and mobility of the city, and, on the other, the medium through which this multiplicity and mobility is best represented. As the producer of the representation of modernity, the flâneur is the self-appointed critic and judge of the spectacle of the city. His activity is the observation and interpretation of modernity and, in this practice, he strives to be all-seeing. Bruce Mazlish therefore describes him as “a kind of perambulating panopticon.”24 Friedberg correctly points out how the flâneur’s perambulations invert the panoptic regime: “mobility” and “fluid

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subjectivity” are antithetic to the Foucaultian model of power and vision, and the visual practice of flânerie is “coincident with – but antithetical to – the panoptic gaze.”25 Nonetheless, the flâneur, like the panopticon, is invisible. He tries to remain anonymous amid the crowd, the unobserved observer, the pure eye, in a quasi-decorporalization and abstraction of the function of seeing. This model of vision, based on invisibility, on seeing without being seen, implies an instance of control, of mastery over the observed reality. Richard Burton thus writes that “the flâneur belongs to the same social and moral universe as the spy, the agent de sûreté and, somewhat later, the detective. Like them, he strives to be both all-seeing and invisible.”26 His presence amid the crowd must go unperceived, while his perception dominates it. In this perspective, the model of vision becomes suspicious, and the flâneur a suspicious character. So the first definition of a “dialectics of flânerie”: “on one side, the man who feels himself viewed by all and sundry as a true suspect and, on the other side, the man who is utterly undiscoverable, the hidden man” (M2,8). This model of vision is suspicious also in its claim to neutrality and universality. The flâneur is the (invisible) producer of the images of modernity and, in this act, he forces invisibility on the images he does not produce. The “invisible flâneur” is not only the (male) observer, who strives to remain invisible among the crowd, but also the female stroller, who remains invisible because not seen. Janet Wolff famously drew attention to the gendered dynamics inherent to flânerie and its description in Benjamin and other male readers: a sort of invisibility is forced on the female stroller by overlooking her presence in the streets.27 Women are always only the object of the flâneur’s gaze, they cannot join the observers, but are always only the observed, an object of curiosity and admiration, like a piece of art or a mannequin in a shop window; an object, therefore, for consumption. An indispensable object in the flâneur’s visual pleasure, women form part of the spectacle of the arcade. The experience described in Baudelaire’s sonnet À une passante, the fleeting encounter with a female passer-by amid the crowd, is for Benjamin the paradigm of modern perception and shock-experience, a shock that is, significantly, sensual and almost erotic. The dialectics of seeing thus consists of, on the one hand, the flâneur as all-seeing representative of the modern gaze

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and, on the other, his invisibility amid the crowd; but also of, on the one hand, the male observer, whose gaze seeks a voyeuristic mastery over the city, and women, and, on the other, the female observed as object of visual consumption. The Phantasmagoria of Space The street is … the only valid field of experience. — André Breton, Nadja Maxim of the flâneur: “In our standardized and uniform world, it is right here, deep below the surface, that we must go. Estrangement and surprise, the most thrilling exoticism, are all close by.” — Daniel Halévy, Pays parisiens (M14a,4)

The locus of the flâneur is the metropolis, the “sacred ground of flânerie” (M2a,1). More precisely, this locus is the street the flâneur inhabits as if it were his room: he spends uncountable hours strolling and wandering and exploring the street, sitting at the cafés, looking at faces and shops, seeking amusement and distraction. The flâneur has a sort of intimacy with the street: “at the approach of his footsteps, the place has roused; speechlessly, mindlessly, its mere intimate nearness gives him hints and instructions” (M1,1). As Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson writes, “the flâneur’s field of action is encompassed by his field of vision […]. The reciprocity between the city and the flâneur is complete.”28 The most common trope for the modern city in Benjamin is the labyrinth: he writes that “the city is the realization of that ancient dream of humanity, the labyrinth. It is this reality to which the flâneur, without knowing it, devotes himself ” (M6a,4). This devotion and intimacy produce a special knowledge, a “connoisseurship” of the urban environment: the flâneur is the one who knows how to move within the labyrinth. Or, better, he knows how to get lost in it. As the famous passage of A Berlin Chronicle reads, “not to find one’s way [sich nicht zurechtzufinden] in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance – nothing more. But to lose oneself [sich verirren] in a city – as one loses oneself in a forest – this calls for quite a

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different schooling. […] Paris taught me this art of straying [Irrkünste]” (GS 6:469/SW 2:598). Moving within the labyrinth is thus an art, the art of straying. The flâneur has learned this art and can put it to use: “the labyrinth,” Benjamin writes in “Central Park,” “is the right path for the person who always arrives early enough at his destination” (GS 1.2:668/ SW 4:170). The flâneur loses himself in the city as in a forest. Benjamin also uses the city trope of the landscape, the panorama, the wilderness: “landscape – that, in fact, is what Paris becomes for the flâneur” (M1,4). The city thus becomes a wilderness, where the flâneur looks for exotic sights. Benjamin notes how this trope of the city as wilderness was dominant in the nineteenth century. But the passage continues: “or, more precisely: the city splits for him into its dialectical poles. It opens up to him as a landscape, even as it closes around him as a room” (M1,4). If the city is an exotic landscape, the flâneur nonetheless moves within it with ease and confidence, as if in his own room. The city is sought as an exotic panorama, a source of excitement and surprise, but at the same time it is tamed, confined into a room: the exotic is sought within an interior setting. Shields therefore describes flânerie as a “psychotic appropriation of space”: on the one hand, “the city was explored and visually consumed as a series of ‘exotic’ sights”29; on the other, the exotic was explored metaphorically in order to render it into everyday life. Benjamin writes that “the familiar city beckons to the flâneur as phantasmagoria – now a landscape, now a room” (GS 5.1:54/SW 3:40). The flâneur wanders through the wilderness of the city, but feels at home in its environment, addicted to its optical illusion. The street thereby turns into a room, an interieur for the flâneur: “Parisians make the street an interior” (M3,1).30 The streets made into an interior are the arcades, “glass-roofed, marble-paneled corridors extending through whole blocks of buildings […]. Lining both sides of these corridors, which get their light from above, are the most elegant shops, so that the arcade is a city, a world in miniature, in which customers will find everything they need” (A1,1). There is little need to emphasize the importance of the Parisian arcades for Benjamin’s project: as a city in miniature, “in a bottle,”31 they were the emblem of, and the privileged

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subject of investigation for, the prehistory of modernity. The flâneur was the inhabitant of the arcades and therefore holds a central place in Benjamin’s project. Before the “haussmannization” of Paris, the street had been a dangerous place for the man on foot, so that “flânerie could hardly have assumed the importance it did without the arcades” (GS 1.2:538/SW 4:19). They were a refuge, a safe reserve for the stroller and, at the same time, gave him the comfort of a house. They were: a dwelling place for the flâneur; he is as much at home among house facades as a citizen is within his four walls. To him, a shiny enamelled shop sign is at least as good as wall ornament as an oil painting is to a bourgeois in his living room. Building’s walls are the desk against which he presses his notebooks; newsstands are his libraries; and cafés terraces are the balconies from which he looks down on his household after his work is done. (GS 1.2:539/SW 4:19)

Thanks to architectural innovations, modern illumination32 and luxury decorations, the space of the arcade became privatized. The “dialectics of flânerie: the interior as street (luxury)/the street as interior (misery)” (GS 5.2:1215) means, for Friedberg, that “the once-private interior became a public realm, the once-public exterior became privatized […]. The flâneur reprivatized public space, turned the street into an interior.”33 So the flâneur “goes for a walk in his room” (M2a,2). The 1850s and 1860s saw the ruination of the arcade and therefore the end of flânerie. The “rationalization” of the city space under Haussmann meant the demolition of substantial portions of the old Paris and the construction of ample boulevards in which the crowd could safely promenade. The locus of commodity consumption thus became the department store, so that the crowd abandoned the arcades, which became ruins and were soon demolished. Tester argues that this rationalization of the space of Paris deprived the city of its mystery and poetry and, since flânerie “is predicated on the possibility that there might be secrets to be imputed to things,” “administrative rationality destroyed that possibility” insofar as “it establishe[d] the meaning and the order of things in advance.”34 Finally, the frenetic rhythm of mass consumption in the department store declared war on the flâneur’s loitering. Displaced, alienated amid the crowd, exiled into the hurried and jolting mass of the boulevards

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and the department stores, he could not survive. He was overwhelmed by the transformation of the city and eventually disappeared into the consuming crowd.35 Benjamin writes that “the department store is the last promenade for the flâneur” (GS 1.2:557/SW 4:31). Like the arcade, the department store is at the same time landscape and interior, but it is a decayed interior, the interior turned into a street: “if in the beginning the street had become an interieur for him, now this interieur turned into a street, and he roamed through the labyrinth of commodities as he had once roamed through the labyrinth of the city” (GS 1.2:557/SW 4:31). The dialectics of space had been reversed: whereas in the city-as-labyrinth he had mastered the art of straying, in the labyrinth of commodities of the department store the flâneur is lost and overwhelmed. The department store is thus the site of the commodification of flânerie: it “makes use of flânerie itself to sell goods” (GS 5.1:54/SW 3:40). Feminist readers, however, point out that the creation of these new spaces of consumption allowed women a new freedom of movement. The street, Gleber observes, was a gendered space, the place of the male free wandering, while the female place remained the house. Women in the street were there for the pleasure – optical, sexual etc. – of the male.36 Margaret Mahony Stoljar argues that the arcade, the place of visual consumption for the male eye, was a “feminized” space, but also a space mastered and enjoyed by the man.37 The department store, to the contrary, “feminized” the practice of flânerie, so that women could “flâner,” becoming one of the first public places where they could ramble at ease and without a male escort. As Friedberg writes, “the department store may have been, as Benjamin put it, the flâneur’s last coup, but it was the flâneuse’s first.”38 Nevertheless, this “feminization” of flânerie meant its end in the specifically Benjaminian sense of purposeless strolling, distant and disinterested gaze and fleeting encounters. These characteristics do not apply to shopping: the “speculative gaze of the shopper”39 abolishes the distance between the observer and the commodity, so that, according to Parkhurst Ferguson, “the flâneur’s dispassionate gaze dissipates under pressure from the shoppers’ passionate engagement in the world of things to be purchased and possessed.”40 The dialectics of space thus counterpose the privatization of the exterior and the publicization of the

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interior, eventually dissolving in the final transformation of every corner of the city into a marketplace. The Tempo of Flânerie In 1839 it was considered elegant to take a tortoise out walking. This gives us an idea of the tempo of flânerie in the arcades. (M3,8)

The flâneur is the gentleman of leisure, calm and unhurried, who parades the streets making idleness his occupation. As dandy, he distinguishes himself from the crowd by his attire, as flâneur, “through his activity,” as Gilloch writes, “or rather, through his lack of activity, for the business of the flâneur was ‘doing nothing.’”41 Flânerie is practised independently of the clock, considering time irrelevant, to the point that the flâneur, as Benjamin remarks in several notes, mimics the pace of the tortoise. He writes that the flâneur’s leisure reflects the rhythmics of dream: “existence in these spaces flows then without accent, like the events in a dream. Flânerie is the rhythmics of this slumber” (D2a,1). The flâneur walks the arcades in a state of dreaming intoxication; the arcades, the form of his dreams, are wish-images “in which the new is permeated with the old” (GS 5.1:46/SW 3:33). As sleepwalker, Shields writes, he is an emblem of the “finely crafted decadence”42 of the nineteenth-century urban bourgeoisie, but, at the same time, he epitomizes the modern subject, awaiting awakening from the dream world of commodity capitalism. Out of step with the rhythms of modernity, purposelessly ambling through the city, the flâneur is a figure of irresolution: “the peculiar irresolution [Unschlüssigkeit] of the flâneur. Just as waiting seems to be the proper state of the impassive meditative thinker, so doubt [Zweifeln] appears to be that of the flâneur” (M4a,1, translation modified). The art of straying within the labyrinth of the city is, simultaneously, the art of finding the exit and that of building around oneself a labyrinth in order to avoid finding an exit. Benjamin writes in “Central Park”: “the labyrinth is the habitat of the dawdler. The path followed by someone reluctant to reach his goal easily becomes labyrinthine” (GS 1.2:668–69/

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SW 4:171). The flâneur thus waits, stores time43 and makes plans: “the best way, while dreaming, to catch the afternoon in the net of evening is to make plans. The flâneur in planning” (M3a,2). The irresolution of the flâneur is thus the irresolution of the modern subject confronted by the superabundance of stimuli in the modern metropolis. Unable or unwilling to cope with the frenzy of modernity, the modern subject slips into melancholy and spleen. Flânerie is caught up in a dialectic between the attempt to avoid boredom and spleen44 and inevitable defeat by the overwhelming city. Which is why Shields calls the flâneur’s appropriation of time “psychotic.”45 It might therefore seem that the flâneur is an anachronistic figure and, in a sense, he is: “unwilling to forgo the life of a gentleman of leisure,” he is “out of place” (GS 1.2:627/SW 4:326) in modernity.46 He is a resistant reader of modernity, a mere observer who refuses to merge into the stream of his epoch and will not accept the functionalization of time. Nevertheless, as Birkerts observes, idleness becomes a prerequisite for cognition: whereas the one who is submerged by the current is blind to it and lacks the time for observation, only an idle, external observer can grasp the multifaceted reality of the frenetic modern metropolis. “Idleness sponsors indirection,” Birkerts writes, “and indirection proves to be the only access to certain aspects of the truth,” so that the flâneur’s casual progress is “an evolved adaptation to the complexity of transformed urban life.”47 The epistemological problem of modernity is that its interpretation hardly ever keeps pace with its progress. The flâneur does not so much participate in modernity as “study” it: “basic to flânerie, among other things, is the idea that the fruits of idleness [Müßiggang] are more precious than the fruits of labour. The flâneur, as is well known, makes ‘studies’” (M20a,1). But Benjamin also writes that the flâneur’s predilection for the pace of the turtle is a protest against the tempo of the machine, against the time determined by the punch clock, “a demonstration against the division of labour” (M5,8). If he “had had [his] way, progress would have been obliged to accommodate itself to this pace” (GS 1.2: 556–7/SW 4:31). The tempo of modernity is speed: in the circulation of people, machines, commodity, thoughts. Speed, rationalization and the discipline of mass

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production waged a “war on flânerie” (M10,1), to which the flâneur reacted by sabotaging the traffic (A3a,7). The flâneur’s “ostentatious nonchalance [Gelassenheit]” is thus a protest “against the division of labour,” “against the production process,” “against the tempo of the crowd” (GS 1.2:679/ SW 4:181), in a word, against the tempo of modernity.48 Benjamin calls the flâneur’s indolence “heroic,” borrowing the expression from Marx: “in bourgeois society, indolence – to take up Marx’s word – has ceased to be ‘heroic.’ (Marx speaks of the ‘victory … of industry over a heroic indolence.’)” (m1a,1). Another entry from the same convolute reads: “in the person of the flâneur, whose idleness carries him through an imaginary city of arcades, the poet is confronted by the dandy (who weaves his way through the crowd without taking notice of the jolts to which he is exposed). […] Dandyism is the last glimmer of the heroic in times of décadence” (m5,4). This heroic indolence can be – and has been – read as a subversive strategy of resistance to the dehumanizing tempo of the machine. Buck-Morss, for example, writes that “as a dream-image, loitering allows a subversive reading […]. The loiterer refuses to submit to industrial social controls”49; and Gilloch that “the idler has not been coerced into compliance with the dehumanizing pace of machine-time in the industrial age. Sloth is heroic.”50 These readings are certainly pertinent, but need to be put into a dialectical frame. The tempo of the machine and of the crowd is the decisive experience of modernity, as Benjamin writes in “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire”: “of all the experiences which made his life what it was, Baudelaire singled out being jostled by the crowd as the decisive, unmistakable experience” (GS 1.2:652/SW 4:343). The flâneur can only exist and assert his opposing indolent individuality within the frame of modern frenzy; he can boast his nonchalance only in opposition to, and thus within, the frantic tempo of modernity. In flânerie, the dialectics of time move between the two poles of idleness and frenzy, where idleness needs frenzy as a defining opposition, and frenzy needs idleness as the only – and necessary – way to recognize and interpret modernity.

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The Man of the Crowd In Le peintre de la vie moderne Baudelaire wrote that the flâneur’s domain is the crowd comme l’air est celui de l’oiseau, comme l’eau celui du poisson. Sa passion et sa profession, c’est d’épouser la foule. Pour le parfait flâneur, pour l’observateur passionné, c’est une immense jouissance que d’élire domicile dans le nombre, dans l’ondoyant, dans le mouvement, dans le fugitif et l’infini. […] Ainsi l’amoureux de la vie universelle entre dans la foule comme dans un immense réservoir d’électricité.51 like air is that of the bird, like water is that of the fish. His passion and his profession is to marry the crowd. For the perfect flâneur, for the impassionate observer, it is an immense joy to chose his residence amid the numerous, the changeable, the movement, the fugitive and the infinite. The one who loves the universal life enters into the crowd as into an immense reservoir of electricity.

Benjamin follows Baudelaire, considering the crowd the “decisive, unmistakable experience” (GS 1.2:652/SW 4:343) of modernity. His flâneur ambles amid the crowd seeking to experience le transitoire, le fugitif, le contingent, that is the new: “the circumstance of the new,” he writes, “is perhaps nowhere better illuminated than in the figure of the flâneur. His thirst for the new is quenched by the crowd, which appears selfimpelled and endowed with a soul of its own” ( J66,1). Moreover, “being jostled by the crowd” emblematizes the main experience of modernity, which is shock.52 Benjamin reads Baudelaire’s sonnet À une Passante as the emblem of the shock experience, where the city stimuli, represented by “an unknown woman,” “mysteriously and mutely borne along by the crowd” (GS 1.2:623/SW 4:324), enter the poet’s field of vision for just an instant and then immediately disappear. As Gilloch explains, “experience is no longer a continuous development, but is reduced instead to a seemingly random series of half-impressions, of images and thoughts only partially registered, still less understood.”53 The “moment of enchantment” coincides with “an eternal farewell,” so that “the delight of the urban poet is love – not at first sight, but at last sight” (GS 1.2:623/SW 4:324).

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This encounter of the poet with the crowd thus has an erotic character. Benjamin writes that “far from experiencing the crowd as an opposing, antagonistic element, the city dweller discovers in the crowd what fascinates him” (GS 1.2:623/SW 4:324). In the piece entitled “La foule” of Le spleen de Paris, Baudelaire claims that the solitary promeneur experiences a singular ivresse, a sort of drunkenness, an intoxication in the “universal communion” with the crowd: Ce que les hommes nomment amour est bien petit, bien restreint et bien faible, comparé à cette ineffable orgie, à cette sainte prostitution de l’âme qui se donne toute entière, poésie et charité, à l’imprévu qui se montre, à l’inconnu qui passe.54 What people call love is indeed small, limited and weak, in comparison with that ineffable orgy, that holy prostitution of the soul which offers itself entirely, poetry and piety, to what unexpectedly appears, to the unknown that passes.

For Benjamin, however, this intoxication obstructs the sober perception of reality. In a letter to Max Horkheimer of 16 April 1938, he reiterates a central point of his Baudelaire essays: “the crowd places itself like a veil in front of the flâneur: it is the latest drug of the isolated individual” (GB 6:65–6/C 557). The flâneur’s intoxication in the crowd is thus a veil, which hides the social reality of the modern city, that is, the existence of the mass: “for the flâneur, the ‘crowd’ is a veil [Schleier] hiding the ‘masses’” ( J59,2). The flâneur’s empathic fusion with the crowd55 is a narcotic commodification of the individual, which hinders the development of social and political consciousness.56 The political consequences are disastrous: “the totalitarian states have taken this mass as their model. The Volksgemeinshaft [People’s Community] aims to root out from single individuals everything that stands in the way of their wholesale fusion into a mass of consumers” ( J81a,1). The flâneur, “who so prides himself on his alertness [Aufgewecktheit], on his nonconformity [Eigenbrötelei]” ( J66,1), is in his desire to epouser la foule the prototype for the blind followers of the fascist mass-parties of the 20th century. So Benjamin writes that he “was in this respect also ahead of his contemporaries: he was the first to fall victim to an illusion [Trugbild] which since that time has blinded many millions” ( J66,1, translation modified).

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Nonetheless, this erotic fusion is fake, since the fleeting encounter with a passer-by, this “love at last sight,” is the only encounter the modern stroller can experience amid the crowd and it is no encounter at all. As Baudelaire writes, the experience of the crowd is solitude: “multitude, solitude: termes égaux et convertibles” (“multitude, solitude: equal and convertible terms”).57 The crowd in which the flâneur strolls is therefore an atomized congregation in an anonymous mass of randomly rambling people. Physical proximity dialectically opposes social estrangement, distance, non-communication and alienation.58 Analysing Poe’s story “The Man of The Crowd,” Benjamin writes that the flâneur in the crowd “takes on the features of the werewolf restlessly roaming a social wilderness” (M1,6). In this story the flâneur is “someone who does not feel comfortable in his own company” (GS 1.2:550/SW 4:27) and therefore “seeks refuge in the crowd” (GS 5.1:54/SW 3:39). The psychotic experience of the crowd is this dialectic between solitude and multitude: a sum of solitudes, the crowd is a “mere appearance [nichts als Schein],” an “empty mould [Hohlform]” ( J66,1). The masses, he writes in “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” “do not stand for classes or any sort of collective; rather, they are nothing but the amorphous crowd of passers-by, the people in the street” (GS 1.2:618/SW 4:320–21). They have no social significance, no political insight, no revolutionary potentialities; they are the buyers of the free market.59 On the opposite pole of this dialectic stands the flâneur as hero. Baudelaire writes that it is not given to everyone “de prendre un bain de multitude” (“to bathe amid the crowd”); it is an art, which only the poet knows.60 Baudelaire’s poet and Benjamin’s flâneur are outsiders and, even though they seek to remain anonymous amid the crowd, they must keep their distance: unlike the mere pedestrian, “who wedged himself into the crowd,” the flâneur demands “elbow room” [Spielraum] (GS 1.2:556/ SW 4:30). This attempt to preserve his own individuality constitutes the flâneur’s heroism: “individuality, as such, takes on heroic outlines as the masses step more decisively into the picture. This is the origin of the conception of the hero in Baudelaire” ( J81a,1). In this sense, the flâneur is not the man of the crowd Poe had anticipated: “the man of the crowd is no flâneur. In him, composure has given way to manic behaviour. He

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exemplifies, rather, what had to become of the flâneur after the latter was deprived of the milieu to which he belonged” (GS 1.2:627/SW 4:326). Poe “purposely blurs the difference between the asocial person and the flâneur” (GS 1.2:550/SW 4:27), whereas the heroic pedestrian is for Benjamin the one who strives to retain his individuality while everyone else loses theirs. The man who merges into the crowd is the badaud, the gaper, who “absorbs and is absorbed by the flux of urban life.”61 The rejection of female flâneurs derives, according to Parkhurst Ferguson, from women’s presumed incapacity to maintain this heroic distance: allegedly they strive to merge into the crowd.62 For the flâneur-as-hero the crowd is a necessary background, but at the same time something to keep at a distance, in a contrast which highlights his individuality. The end of the flâneur comes when he is unable to keep this “elbow room.” The dialectics of the crowd thereby oscillate between the extremes of the flâneur as heroic and arrogant outsider and the flâneur as eager to fuse into the Volksgemeinschaft.63 Flânerie is a “crowd practice,”64 which requires the crowd for its own existence; but it is a practice that moves dialectically between the individual, who strives to maintain his individuality, and the crowd which strives to absorb him. The Strolling Commodity Benjamin writes that “in the flâneur, the intelligentsia sets foot in the marketplace – ostensibly to look around, but in truth to find a buyer” (GS 5.1:54/SW 3:40). The final truth of the flâneur is thus that he only pretends to stroll purposelessly through the labyrinth of the city, while knowing the exit perfectly well. This exit is the marketplace: “the labyrinth is the right path for the person who always arrives early enough at his destination. This destination is the marketplace” (GS 1.2:668/SW 4:170). The idle stroller was historically the reporter of city gossip, the journalist, the writer of physiologies and feuilletons, who rambles through the city trying to catch news and images to sell.65 His hours of idleness are thus working hours:

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chapter 2 On the boulevards he spent his hours of idleness – Benjamin writes – which he displayed before people as part of his working hours. He behaved as if he had learned from Marx that the value of a commodity is determined by the worktime needed from society to produce it. In view of the protracted periods of idleness which in the eyes of the public were necessary for the realization of his own labour power, its value became almost fantastic. (GS 1.2:530/SW 4:14)

Buck-Morss argues that “the flâneur is not truly a person of leisure (Musse). Rather, loitering (Müssigang) is his trade,”66 and he fully exploits the commodification of time, that is, the equation of time and money. Gilloch points out that his studied slowness is a “calculated scheme for pecuniary gain. He thereby transformed laziness into a paid occupation.”67 Baudelaire – “at once socially rebellious bohemian and producer of commodities for the literary market”68 – “knew the true situation of the man of letters” (GS 1.2:536/SW 4:17) and therefore both embodied the ambivalences of the flâneur and emblematized the objective circumstances of the intellectual producer in consumer society. Benjamin writes that “the physiologies were the first booty taken from the marketplace by the flâneur – who, so to speak, went botanizing on the asphalt” ( J82a,3). The fruits of the long hours spent thus are the saleable product of his observations and reflections. The artist-asproducer in mass-society is a supplier for the culture industry of news, feuilletons and advertisements, a new prototype of salaried employee who produces mass-marketed products: “the social base of flânerie is journalism” (M16,4).69 The man of letters has to understand his objective position in the production process, since, in order to survive in the capitalist world, he must sell his abilities and transform them into “hard cash.” Esther Leslie argues that “the flâneur is a vision of every-person who sells his or her self, for he is implicated in all facets of the universality of exchange in commodity society.”70 The conditions of production – even of the production of words – are dictated by the market and, in order to survive, the modern intellectual has to bow to its rules. Therefore, she continues, what the flâneur really observes is the market. “Permanently under threat, menaced by market rebuff,”71 the flâneur needs to become an expert on market fluctuations, because on this expertise depends his survival: “the idler,” Benjamin writes, “the flâneur, who no longer has any

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understanding of production, seeks to become an expert on the market” ( J83a,4). Historically, the intellectual-as-flâneur had begun as rebellious bohemian, Baudelaire himself providing the archetype. The bohemian’s political insights, observed Benjamin, “do not go beyond those of these professional conspirators” (GS 1.2:515/SW 4:4). Forced to enter the marketplace, he nevertheless becomes a journalist in uniform. In a late note Benjamin writes: “Climax: flâneur – sandwichman – journalist-in-uniform. The latter advertises the state, no longer the commodity” (GS 1.3:1179). His politics too are shaped by the attitude towards the market and he ends up following ideological fashion. As an entry of the Arcades Project states: “the attitude of the flâneur – epitome of the political attitude of the middle classes during the Second Empire” (M2,5). The salaried flâneur thus sells his power of observation, his detective-like sharp eye, to the cause of his employers: “the flâneur is the observer of the marketplace. His knowledge is akin to the occult science of industrial fluctuations. He is a spy for the capitalists, on assignment in the realm of consumers” (M5,6). What the flâneur sells in the market is, therefore, himself. “He is no buyer,” Benjamin writes, “he is merchandise” (A3a,7); he “takes the concept of marketability itself for a stroll” (M17a,2), he is “the strolling commodity” [die promenierende Ware] ( J79,4). In commodity society the writer is, as Baudelaire knew, the most prostituted of all because he himself becomes a commodity. The flâneur-as-writer empathizes with the commodity, for he is “bound to see every individual as a buyer in whose hand and house it wants to nestle” (GS 1.2:558/SW 4:31).72 Like the commodity, the flâneur is “someone abandoned in the crowd”; like the commodity, he surrenders to the intoxication of being “immersed in a surging stream of customers” (GS 1.2:557–8/SW 4:31); like the commodity, he needs to be seen and “bought” by the crowd of consumers/ buyers; like the commodity, Terry Eagleton writes, he “tart[s] [himself ] up in dandyish dress”73; like the commodity, Keith Tester observes, the flâneur is hollow.74 This equation with the commodity leads to the end of the flâneur, as he is swallowed up by the society of consumption. The end of the flâneur thus lies in his commodification. The actual embodiment of the strolling commodity, who takes the concept of

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marketability itself for a stroll, is the sandwichman, that pitiful figure who wandered the streets imprisoned in an advertisement placard. “The sandwich-man,” Benjamin argues, “is the last incarnation of the flâneur” (M19,2), the “true ‘salaried flâneur’” (m4,2). He is the flâneur stripped of all make-up, fancy dress, haughty posture and hypocrisy. Only the truth of the flâneur remains: the aimless strolling and shameful self-promotion. Considering the importance of the concept of “ruin” and “ruination” for Benjamin, we could say that the sandwichman represents the ruin of the flâneur. It is only in the ruin, after a process of ruination, that its truth-content finally emerges. This truth-content is revealed only in the afterlife of the object and the afterlife of the flâneur is as a pathetic walking billboard. Walter Benjamin, Flâneur When Hannah Arendt placed the flâneur at the centre of Benjamin’s thought, she traced a correspondence between the (fictional) figure and Benjamin himself: for Arendt, the flâneur is an allegorical self-portrait.75 Her thesis was substantiated by personal acquaintance with Benjamin and lacks neither plausibility nor interest: many physical features, gestures, postures, attitudes and even biographical turns connect Benjamin’s persona and existence with the figure of the flâneur. Arendt quotes Max Rychner’s description of Benjamin’s gait, “at once advancing and tarrying, a strange mixture of both,” which, she concludes, “was the walk of a flâneur.”76 Benjamin certainly felt the same combination of attraction and intoxication when he rambled through the streets and arcades of Paris in the 1920s and 1930s, and he too, like Baudelaire, considered Paris to be the privileged locus of modernity, the capital of the nineteenth century. In A Berlin Chronicle he writes that Paris taught him the “art of straying” (GS 6:469/SW 2:598), the art of losing oneself in the city, which is the primal art of the flâneur. Benjamin’s own gaze was as acute and attentive toward the phenomena of multifaceted urban modernity as it was distracted and awkward in regard to practical things. He was perhaps no dandy, but felt the same dandyish disdain and rejection towards

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the crowd, the same inept incapacity to feel at ease with people around him: “solitude,” he wrote, “appeared to me as the only fit state of man” (GS 6:473/SW 2:601). Finally, as a failed academic and free-lance writer he must also have felt on his skin the pains and contradiction of the modern intellectual forced to come to terms with the culture market. Arendt argues that Benjamin’s “flaneurish” gait also determined “the pace of his thinking”: flânerie was “the way his mind worked, when he, like the flâneur in the city, entrusted himself to chance as a guide on his intellectual journeys of exploration.”77 Flânerie is thus a possible figure for Benjamin’s own style of research and writing: he wandered and strolled through the capital of modernity and amid the texts of the Bibliotéque Nationale, gathering the debris of the prehistory of modernity in order to record the signifying moments of the capitalist present. Gleber argues that his project can therefore be understood as a kind of “meta-flânerie”78: it takes practice to lose one’s way in a city, and this practice of flânerie supplies the only accurate method to map the labyrinths of modernity. This same practice is also forced on Benjamin’s readers. For how else are texts like One-Way Street or the notes of the Arcades Project to be read? The reader must literally “stroll” through the labyrinthine, city-like text, collecting his or her booty amid Benjamin’s notes, transcriptions and aphorisms. I have read the constellation of the flâneur through a dialectical scheme, in which the movement between two (or more) opposite and contradictory poles allows us to interpret the mobile and contradictory reality of modernity: vision and invisibility, interior and exterior, speed and leisure, crowd and individual, genius and mass culture. The same dialectical scheme can be applied to Benjamin-as-flâneur: this figure is for him simultaneously self-portrait and wish image, self-justification and alter ego. Birkerts argues that Benjamin’s interest in the flâneur was also part of a process of self-reconciliation: “his sense of failure, peripherality, his inability to do the right academic thing, these were gathered into an intellectually acceptable image, attached to a type with some historical precedent.”79 Moreover, the figure of the flâneur served to legitimize Benjamin’s own socially marginal predilections, such as wandering, collecting and observing, and astutely transformed his incapacity for an

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academic career or family-life into a fashionable pose: “the flâneur wants to preserve his peripherality,” Birkerts writes, “it is the basis of his existence. By highlighting the unique virtues of the flâneur – virtues established as such by Benjamin himself – he was, in effect, making a case for his own persistent nonconformity.”80 Nevertheless, he continues, the flâneur is simultaneously a sort of wish-image, “an elaborate alter ego,” which also represents everything Benjamin was not: “the flâneur, for example, was at home on the street, at ease in the deeps of the metropolis. Benjamin was not. He was a timid, civilized, fastidious man. He yearned for ease but could not have it. The flâneur moved freely in all directions on the societal grid. Benjamin’s ventures always represented approaches to the threshold, the Other, the forbidden.”81 The flâneur, I would add, knows how to “sell himself ” on the marketplace, how to bow to the compromises of the culture industry, how to survive social and political earthquakes. Benjamin did not. He cultivated his own marginality, refused to bow to the rules of academia or mass-culture and was forced to flee the Nazi eroticization of the crowd. He remained a heroic wanderer, from Berlin to Paris, from Paris to Port Bou.

Juan Goytisolo, Flâneur

2.2 Flânerie after the Battle: Juan Goytisolo and the Return of the Flâneur Perhaps the flâneur should turn away from matronly, pearl-grey Paris, the city built by Napoleon III and his henchman Baron Haussmann, and inhabited today by foreign millionaires, five-star hotels, three-star restaurants and embassies: a phantom city. For the real vitality of Paris today lies elsewhere – in Belleville and Barbès, the teaming quartiers where Arabs and Asians and blacks live and blend their respective cultures into new hybrids. — Edmund White, The Flâneur

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Bradley Epps writes that the flâneur “populate[s] the modern mythologies of high Western culture.”1 He has become a label attached to the urban experience and his equivocal and contradictory features recur in the most heterogeneous discourses and genres. It even seems that some of his characteristics, such as the mobile gaze, invisibility, scopophilia, irresolution, the erotics of the crowd and, not least, his saleability on the marketplace, apply better to our own age: the postmodern condition enhances flânerie and the features of the urban wanderer have become constitutive of postmodern identity. However, the inconsistency of this figure, already present in Benjamin, is increased by contemporary cosmic dispersion and produces a multiplicity of discourses that fragment and refract it into ever more contrasting and contradictory representations. Moreover, the figure must be updated. Baudelaire’s Paris of the 1850s and 1860s and Benjamin’s of the 1920s and 1930s are outmoded, “prehistorical” relics: the experience of the city and its representation have undergone an epochal change in the passage from modernity to postmodernity. If modernity was “le transitoire, le fugitif, le contingent,” postmodernity is dissemination, hybridity, atomization, rhizome. Flâneur and flânerie remain powerful tools for the analysis of (post-)urban civilization, but they need new elaboration and definition. In this chapter I will analyse the return of the flâneur in the Paris of the 1980s, by reading a novel of the Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo, Paisajes después de la batalla (Landscapes after the Battle, 1982). Goytisolo has said that he constructed the main character in this novel out of Baudelaire and Benjamin’s flâneurs,2 but this is problematic. In Baudelaire and Benjamin the flâneur is not a univocal figure but rather a dialectical constellation of various contrasting traits; Goytisolo seems to read him univocally and therefore simplifies this figure by smoothing some traits and forgetting others. Moreover, he adds new puzzling traits and submits him to a parodic deformation that disarranges his features. Secondly, the Paris of the 1980s is a new, disheartening challenge for the flâneur: the desolate landscape of high capitalism surveyed and depicted by Benjamin has turned in late capitalism into the apocalyptic devastation of consumer

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culture, a landscape of ideological and ethical ruins transformed into a field of permanent battle, ongoing strife and savagery. Is the flâneur’s detached observation still the proper strategy? Finally, if Benjamin argued that the end of the arcades meant the end of flânerie (even though there was a “return of the flâneur” in the 1920s with Franz Hessel), what does it mean to speak of a return of flânerie today? How did Goytisolo update and adapt a very modernist figure to the postmodern city? Is the dialectical schema I utilized in the previous chapter still valid? This chapter will try to answers these questions. The novel’s setting is Paris and there is no traditional narrative line: the book is a collection of notes, short episodes and fantasies of and about an unnamed and ambiguous solitary wanderer. He endlessly strolls through the streets of the Sentier, a Parisian neighbourhood in which a postcolonial mix of nationalities and races threateningly coexists. He is a manic misanthrope, aloof from neighbours, old friends and even from his own wife, who lives in the next apartment and with whom he communicates by slipping notes under her door. He observes and contemplates the swarming life of the Sentier heading towards the apocalypse in a continuing strife between political refugee groups, African and Asian immigrants and overwhelmed and outraged Parisian “aborigines.” The spectacle this flâneur beholds is the degradation of the social and cultural values of the West: terrorism of the most different kinds and fashions transforms the streets into a political and cultural battlefield. Back in his room, “our hero” gives free rein to his erotic ravings, composing pornographic letters to impubic girls, in the fashion of the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), and collects and files newspaper cuttings, which he says will compose his literary opus. Many traits identify him as a writer: he has published some “scientific fantasies” in the Spanish newspaper El País, sends pornographic letters to the Parisian Libération and at one point an old job as reporter is mentioned. In the end, kidnapped by one of many terrorist groups, the Maricas Rojos (Red Fags), with a time-bomb tied to his chest, he is forced to write a self-critical confession that ends up as the book the reader now holds in his or her hands, until he explodes and is disseminated, like his book, throughout the world.

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The book comprises 78 short texts, each with a title, which fragment the narrative into a collage of broken images or, better, a chaotic labyrinth of amorphous anecdotes. Marta Gómez Mata y César Silió Cervera call the fragments “microtexts,” autonomous, self-enclosed, independent units that barely constitute a plot.3 There is, of course, a certain thematic coherence holding the “macrotext” together, but the thematic lines are not based on logical and temporal succession and never progress towards a climax. They are also stylistically heterogeneous: each one mimics and parodies a different style and genre, such as the journalistic piece, the pseudo-scientific essay, the political pamphlet, the pornographic letter, the revolutionary manifesto, etc. Paisajes can be defined as a postmodern parody, deploying a series of postmodernist techniques such as playfulness, fragmentation, intertextuality, self-reflexivity, metafiction. As in the case of Benjamin’s One-Way Street or The Arcades Project, a sort of metaflânerie is forced on the reader, who has to find his or her way through, or get lost in, the labyrinth of the text. Many traits of the main character correspond to the real identity of Juan Goytisolo: same age, same birth date, same nationality, same history of voluntary exile, same profession, same address in the Rue Poissonniére in the Sentier. Paisajes is thus also an autobiographical game, where the identities of the narrator, the author and the character mingle and dissolve in a parodic redefinition of autobiography as genre. Towards the end of the text Goytisolo defines his own novel as “el disfraz de una crónica burlona y sarcástica” (“the disguise of a mocking and sarcastic chronic”), “una autobiografía deliberadamente grotesca” (“a deliberately grotesque autobiography,” Paisajes 224).4 This autobiographical playfulness can be read at different levels.5 What interests me in this context are the correspondances between autobiography and flânerie in Benjamin and Goytisolo: for both, the flâneur becomes a sort of self-representation and at the same time a wish-image. There are also interesting biographical correspondences between them: both escaped from a fascist dictatorship because of their Marxist convictions, Benjamin from Nazi Germany and Goytisolo from Francoist Spain; both chose Paris as the site of their exile6; both see it as a sort of “capital” or emblem of Western civilization; both are enthralled by the spectacle of urban civilization; both are driven by

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an insatiable intellectual and ethical curiosity; both devoted to a project of redemption. We could say that both adopt flânerie as a methodology, an intellectual mode, as well as a literary mask: in different novels, essays and interviews Goytisolo refers to himself as a wanderer, as “landless,” as “Juan sin tierra” (Juan the Landless, the title of a more or less autobiographical novel of 1975), as exile and “inveterado rompesuelas” (literally “inveterate solebreaker,” the one who breaks the soles of his or her shoes by continuous walking).7 He sees himself as the heroic wanderer and suggests (“prescribes” could be a more apt term) flânerie as the true method and only identity for the modern intellectual. He employs several postmodern techniques and is usually referred to as a postmodernist writer, but at the same time despises “postmodern intellectuals” and embodies in his public persona the Sartrean engagé intellectual. He claims contradictoriness to be the engine of progress8 and is often reproached for his paradoxes and inconsistencies. As in the case of Benjamin’s flâneur, these paradoxes and contradictions constitute the dialectical poles of a constellation: only as constellation can the postmodern flâneur be represented and become a kaleidoscope through which to represent and make sense of our time. The Cinematic Gaze Goytisolo’s flâneur faithfully reproduces the main characteristic of flânerie, scopophilia: immersed in the multiethnic and colourful crowd of the Sentier, he “se convierte a su vez en cámara cinematográfica que registra fríamente, con curiosidad neutra, el extraordinario crisol que le ciñe” (“turns […] into a movie camera, which coolly records, with impassive curiosity, the extraordinary crucible that surrounds him,” Paisajes 108). “Our hero” is a man of leisure, who spends his days in endless strolling, whereby he records the images and voices of multiethnic Paris. The spectacle is exciting and intoxicating, and he beholds it in distraction, “con ese aire suyo de lejanía y ausencia, de estar pensando siempre en otra cosa” (“with that distant and absentminded look of his, as if he were always thinking about something else,” Paisajes 150). He is thus the classic flâneur-as-voyeur, deriving pleasure in secret observation and becoming at the same time a

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social observer, the professional onlooker, through which society is mirrored and analysed. Nevertheless, Goytisolo constructs a parody of the cinematic gaze, whereby the classic features of the flâneur’s own gaze, motility, invisibility, purposelessness, universality and panoptic mastery, are at once affirmed and deconstructed. The postmodern gaze, even more than the modern, has been deeply transformed by the mass media. In her analysis of cinema and postmodernity, Anne Friedberg describes the new cinematic gaze as “a mobilized ‘virtual’ gaze.” “The virtual gaze,” she explains, “is not a direct perception but a received perception mediated through representation […], a gaze that travels in an imaginary flânerie through an imaginary elsewhere and an imaginary elsewhen.”9 The cinematic gaze, “a spatially and temporally fluid visuality,” has become for Friedberg “the dominant mode” of postmodern subjectivity.10 The mobility that revolutionized the gaze in the nineteenth century becomes virtual in the second half of the twentieth and flânerie thus becomes imaginary. This creates a confusion for the flâneur: in one sense, virtual mobility enhances the scope of flânerie, opening up the distant and previously unreachable “elsewhere and elsewhen”; on the other, it also confines the flâneur to his room, making strolling and wandering unnecessary and entirely virtual. Goytisolo’s flâneur ha advertido que no es necesario coger el avión de Estambul o Marraquech en busca de exotismo: basta con salir a estirar las piernas para topar inevitablemente con él. (Paisajes 147) realized that it is not necessary to take a plane to Istanbul or Marrakech in search of the exotic: it suffices to go out to stretch one’s legs to bump into it.

He does not even need to leave his room, because the contemplation of the subway map is itself an unsurpassed exercise in flânerie (Paisajes 149). I will return later to the dialectic of space in Paisajes; what I want to emphasize here is the uncertainty of the direction of the gaze, pointed at once outward and inward, or towards an outside that becomes also a mirror for the inside, and vice versa. In Paisajes, we could speak of an alternation between the two spaces. Indeed, the flâneur still claims to be the one who (re)produces the images

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and representations of the city. In this novel, Alison Ribeiro de Menezes observes, the cinematic gaze becomes a metafictional narrative device.11 As Benjamin had already suggested, the broken experience of the city cannot be represented in a linear and organic narrative, but must be subjected to a fragmentation that reflects its discontinuity and multivocity. Paisajes is thus a montage of “snapshots,” broken images and anecdotes, each independent and self-enclosed. Moreover, Goytisolo attempts to go one step further, trying to produce a polyphonic picture by fragmenting the unity of the narrator with the creation of a series of gazes structured in infinite regress: the author and the character must disappear, become “transparente” (“transparent,” Paisajes 108) and let the different voices of the city emerge and speak for themselves. The camera-eye claims to be invisible, neutral and, therefore, incorporeal and universal: as in Benjamin, the flâneur strives to be all-seeing and invisible. Amid the hustle and bustle of the everyday-struggle-for-life in multiethnic Sentier, the European “intruso” (“outsider”) is ignored, is “ninguneado” (becomes a non-entity), almost “transparent”: “las miradas parecen atravesarle y apuntar algún objeto situado detrás” (“people’s gaze seems to pass through him and to aim at some object behind him,” Paisajes 108). The issue of invisibility is nevertheless subjected to a parody that deconstructs and unmasks it. The flâneur strives to become a “man of the crowd,” “Monsieur Tout Le Monde,” in order to put himself above suspicion in any situation and setting, “lo mismo en el interior neonizado de una sex-shop que junto al tobogán de un risueño parque infantil” (“in the neon-lighted interior of a sex-shop as well as near the slide of a merry children’s park,” Paisajes 57), and observe unobserved. Mobile anonymity, dissolving one’s self in the undifferentiated and indifferent crowd, is the refuge of the voyeur: “ningún lugar mejor que el espacio público para disimular y proteger tus actividades” (“no place is better than the public space to conceal and protect your activities,” Paisajes 211). During his ramblings he behaves like any other retired man (Paisajes 132), but his absurd search for anonymity betrays him: Por encima de todo: pasar inadvertido. Mudar camaleónicamente de piel, adaptarse a los colores y matices del barrio. Crear poco a poco las condiciones que aseguren tu

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invisibilidad y te permitan actuar en un clima propio. Vestirás en consecuencia de modo gris y convencional, sin elegancia pero sin desaliño: impermeable verdoso u ocre, sombrero de cuadros, gafas discretamente ahumadas. Llevarás, si es necesario, una cartera de ejecutivo […]. Tu calzado será ligero y flexible, con suelas de goma silenciosas […]. (Paisajes 210) First of all, pass unnoticed! Change skin like a chameleon, adapt yourself to the colours and nuances of the neighbourhood. Create gradually the conditions that ensure your invisibility and allow you to act in an apt climate. You will dress consequently in a grey and conventional fashion: greenish or ochre raincoat, check hut, discreet dark glasses. You will carry, if necessary, an attaché briefcase […]. Your shoes will be light and flexible, with silent gum soles […].

Invisibility is unveiled, because the outmoded disguise identifies the flâneur as the typical peeping-tom or exhibitionist, a sinister and dangerous figure, and, simultaneously, as someone “playing” the detective: he is “identificable a distancia gracias a su impermeable y sombrero de fieltro” (“identifiable from afar thanks to his raincoat and his felt hat,” Paisajes 150). The apparent purposelessness of the flâneur’s gaze is thus all but abandoned, in spite of the author’s claim for his “curiosidad neutra” (“impassive curiosity,” Paisajes 108): the gaze of the flâneur is unmasked as blatantly purposeful. He strives to be invisible in order to observe and register the spectacle of the crowd, but also in order to pursue his paranoid ravings and spy on his wife, or to follow his sexual perversions and approach unsuspicious young girls. Furthermore, in Paisajes the flâneur has become a terrorist: he not only observes the brutal everyday battle for survival, but also takes a stance in favour of the marginalized immigrants, reproducing graffiti in Arabic and Turkish and mingling with the various terrorist groups, in order to foster disorder and the destruction of the West and its values, to accelerate its apocalypse. In Paisajes’ parody, the gaze of the flâneur is a contradictory montage of contrasting impulses, where the distinction between peeping-tom, social observer and terrorist blurs into an improbable and paradoxical mix: the postmodern flâneur possesses the characteristics of the voyeur, the ethnographer, the journalist, the spy, the detective, the terrorist and also the writer. In Goytisolo,

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observation is far from impassionate, but rather tends, in its various and contrasting facets, towards transgression: of social norms, of political and racial boundaries, of sexual decency. The purposefulness of the cinematic gaze is thus ethically charged, but this itself entails a problem of representation. The camera-eye claims to be at once neutral, universal, and to carry a moral message. Goytisolo wants to renounce the authority of authorial view by proposing a polyphonic picture, but ends up reproducing the flâneur’s panoptical mastery over the images he produces. In spite of his commitment to give voice to the immigrants and marginalized, Goytisolo’s flâneur remains an outside observer, an instance of control and mastery, producer of visibility and invisibility. This is evident in many passages of Paisajes: “el hormigueo de la calle, su frondosidad creadora, le procuran diariamente un espectáculo continuo, variado y gratuito” (“the teeming of the street, its creative vegetable luxuriance, offer him every day a continuous, varied and free spectacle,” Paisajes 147, emphasis added); he “estudia una a una, como un etnólogo, las diferentes peñas de exiliados” (“studies one by one, like an ethnologist, the different groups of exiles,” Paisajes 208, emphases added); he cannot but “seguir con el rabillo del ojo el tráfago y movimiento de norteafricanos, paquistaneses o turcos” (“follow out of the corner of his eye the comings and goings of North Africans, Pakistanis or Turks”); his interest lies in “descifrar pintadas trazadas en las paredes e inmuebles del Sentier” (“deciphering graffiti traced on the walls and buildings of Le Sentier”); he feels an erotic, “pasmo grotesco ante los mozallones morenos que dan el callo en las siempre renovadas y misteriosas zanjas de obras publicas” (“grotesque amazement in the presence of the dark skinned young men who toil in the always renewed and mysterious trenches of public works,” Paisajes 217–8). This last example suggests a further replication of the shortcomings of the classic flâneur: apart from brief “cameos” by the protagonist’s wife, in Paisajes women are “invisible,” not even the object of erotic objectification, since the author/narrator/character’s homoerotic desire is directed to, and objectifies, male North African immigrants. Goytisolo’s cinematic gaze is thus caught in a series of dialectics that deform, but basically reproduce, Benjamin’s dialectics of seeing.

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Space in Motion The operation of deciphering the urban palimpsest provokes a fragmented and deformed vision: at times, it is pure surrealism. — Juan Goytisolo, “Berliner Chronik”

“El peripatetismo de nuestro héroe es exclusivamente urbano” (“our hero’s peripateticism is exclusively urban,” Paisajes 74, 91), Goytisolo writes. As for Baudelaire and Benjamin, the city is the “sacred ground of flânerie” (M2a,1), a semiotic palimpsest the decipherment of which is the exciting and intoxicating activity of the flâneur. Goytisolo adds that “sólo la cives, su perímetro urbano, contiene la idea de espacio” (“only the city, its urban perimeter, contains the idea of space,” Paisajes 75): space means the superimposition and conflict of multiple historical, cultural and racial layers, a “Space in Motion,” to borrow the title of one of Paisajes’ microtexts, subject to continuous change, the porous, “madrepórico caos callejero” (“madreporic chaos of the street,” Paisajes 75).12 The metropolis is a complex space: denso y cambiante, irreductible a la lógica y programación, [que] invita a cada paso a trayectos versátiles, que tejen y destejen lienzo de Penélope, una misteriosa lección de topografía. (Paisajes 147) dense and changing, irreducible to logic and planning, [that] invites at each step versatile trajectories, which weave and un-weave, like Penelope’s fabric, a mysterious lesson in topography.

The flâneur “[juega] con el espacio y el haz de posibilidades que implica” (“[plays] with the space and the beam of possibilities it implies,” Paisajes 85), he reads a city-as-text made of “dispersed sequences, discontinuous spaces,” and in turn creates a city-like text made of a Surrealist “collage of postcards or scraps of different forms and colours.”13 We should remember, however, that Benjamin described the end of the flâneur: the haussmannization of Paris and the emergence of the department store deprived him of his environment and decreed his disappearance into the consuming crowd. The return of the flâneur in Goytisolo’s Paris is

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evidence of a change in the postmodern metropolis and at the same time a wish-image and proposal. Haussmann (and his twentieth-century emulators, De Gaulle, Pompidou, Giscard and Chirac), with his straight, wide boulevards, grandiose perspectives and imposing monuments, attempted a “rectification” of the labyrinth, a “sanitization” of the true liveliness of the metropolis. His planning, with its linearity and sense of totality, was a “neutralization” (Paisajes 146) of space in motion and of its possibilities, in an instance of order and control. Areas swarming with life, providing the simultaneous perception of different historical planes and heterogeneous cultures, have been replaced by neat, decentred zones, spectacular facades, “rigurosamente trazado[s] para prevenir todo conato de efervescencia o desorden” (“rigorously drawn in order to prevent any attempt at effervescence or disorder,” Paisajes 104), which hide cultural, political and ethical emptiness.14 This urban control closes off the city, makes of it an immobile, imprisoned, dead space. This monumental Paris has become in the twentieth century a tourist Mecca and giant department store, a huge commodified space that sterilizes any residue of flânerie. Goytisolo’s flâneur thus shuns La Ville Lumiére, the monumental/artistic precinct of l’Etoile, “las grandiosas perspectivas de cartón piedra” (“those grandiose, papier-mâché perspectives,” Paisajes 146), the Quartier Latin, Montparnasse and Saint Germain des Prés. He feels an “alergia absoluta […] al acervo milenario de la ciudad” (“absolute allergy […] to the millenary patrimony of the city,” Paisajes 104) in which he lives and limits his ramblings to the popular and multiethnic neighbourhoods of the Sentier, Barbés and Belleville, where the city is still a living labyrinth. He scorns libraries, theatres, exhibitions and museums, especially the Louvre, the great department store of culture, which he cannot enter without feeling a desire to dynamite it. He still finds “space in motion,” space still “alive” and apt for flânerie, only in the popular banlieues, epitomized by the Sentier. This neighbourhood has not been subjected to rational planning:

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ningún monarca, presidente, arquitecto oficial ni urbanista han proyectado en él modelo alguno de convivencia o solaz. A decir la verdad, el barrio no ha sido reglamentado por nadie: sabiamente, se ha improvisado a sí mismo. (Paisajes 90) no monarch, president, official architect or urbanist has planned in it any model of cohabitation or recreation. To tell the truth, the neighbourhood has not been regulated by anyone: wisely, it has improvised itself.

The struggle for survival in the Sentier makes it a “stimulating” place, filled with “un suplemento de tension […], un excedente de energía que inviste a cualquier movimiento o gesto” (“a supplement of tension […], a surplus of energy that invests every movement or gesture,” Paisajes 108). What attracts the flâneur is “el París barbarizado de Belleville o Barbès, un París que no tiene nada de cosmopolita ni culto, sino iletrado y meteco” (“the barbarized Paris of Belleville or Barbés, a Paris that is not cosmopolitan or intellectual, but rather uncultivated and foreign,” Paisajes 147). Goytisolo’s ideal space is what he calls a “medina,” a vital web of streets, relationships and desires, exuberant and fertile, renewed every day (Paisajes 187–8). The Sentier is all this and thus “abrevia el caos universal” (“is an epitome of universal chaos,” Paisajes 207). What allows the return of the flâneur is therefore the series of immigrations from poor Europe, Africa and Asia that, in the second half of the twentieth century, counterbalanced the controlling and normalizing impulse of the city planners. Within the Cartesian and ordered perspectives traced by Hausmann and his followers, new gaps have emerged, fragments of Tremecén and Dakar, Cairo and Karachi, Bamako and Calcutta; the European metropolis is contaminated by these new affluxes, so that Berlin-Kreuzberg becomes a new Istanbul on the Spree, Moscow is “infected” by Uzbeks and Chinese, Barcelona by Tagalogs and blacks (Paisajes 187–8). These migrations restore the labyrinth, the liveliness and energy that characterized pre-Haussmann Paris, the anarchic city of Rabelais with no house numbering, census or wide boulevards, by contaminating it with the “creative spontaneity of the medina.”15 Goytisolo insists both in his fictional and essayistic work that it is in these new amalgamations, the “popular neighbourhood with no artistic aura,” that

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“new forms of life, new proposals for literary and social experience, new urban texts develop.”16 This entails a peculiar and problematic notion of modernity17: “what defines it [modernity],” he writes in the essay “Europa, en menos y más” (Europe, the Plus and the Minus), “is its multiple vision, simultaneous and open to the vital, incessant swarming that we call city, metropolis or medina. The inhabitant of the civitas, needing neither to travel nor sometimes to leave his or her neighbourhood, verifies every day that his or her culture is neither unique nor necessarily exemplary.” 18 The metropolis is the spatial and temporal superimposition and juxtaposition of historic, cultural and ethnic planes and, as such, “favours the existence and proliferation of spatial-temporal collisions, phenomena of hybridization and dynamic blending of discourses that represent […] the unequivocal hallmark of modernity.”19 Modernity is thus defined as ecumenicalism, internationalism of cultures, mixture, hybridity, osmosis. Culture, he writes in “París, ¿Capital del siglo XXI?” (Paris, Capital of the XXI Century?), “cannot be today exclusively French, English, German nor even European, but rather plural, hybrid and bastard, the result of exchange and osmosis, fecundated by contact with women and men belonging to distant and different horizons.”20 This is a golden rule for Goytisolo, who time and again defines a culture as “the total sum of the contributions and influences it has received throughout its history.”21 What expresses these characteristics, no matter where or in what epoch, he considers “modern.” He constructs his own tradition of “modernity” in what he calls “the tree of literature,” searching for predecessors in the literary canon.22 “Modernity obeys reasons that chronology ignores!,” he writes in “Planta del desierto” (Desert Plant): “tradition and modernity are neither exclusive nor antithetical terms.”23 If the locus of Benjamin’s flâneur was the arcade, that of Goytisolo’s is the bazaar. This seems to imply a “democratization” of the flâneur, who now abandons his dandyish pose for multicultural participation. Nevertheless the bazaar, like Benjamin’s arcade, is imprisoned within a phantasmagorical representation: it becomes a site of excitement and “adventure” and the city becomes a landscape, a forest, a wilderness. What Goytisolo looks for in the streets is a sort of postcolonial exoticism, which,

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in spite of his political and ethical commitment to the cause of marginals, immigrants, the “others,” is appropriated and made “familiar.” What Benjamin called the “phantasmagoria of space,” the fact that the city “beckons to the flâneur […] now [as] a landscape, now [as] a room” (GS 5.1:54/SW 3:40), the “psychotic appropriation of space” where exotic sights are metaphorically explored in order to render them into everyday life, is replicated almost exactly in Goytisolo. He celebrates the vivifying “otherness” of the new “urban texts,” but, by feeling “at home” in the multiethnic Sentier, he assimilates them into his room. The dialectic of space in Paisajes is even more complex: the celebration of the labyrinthine space of the bazaar needs no actual flânerie. “La contemplación del plano del metro le absorbe durante horas” (“The contemplation of the metro plan absorbs him for hours,” Paisajes 135): without leaving home, the flâneur surrenders to the exhilaration of the mental flânerie of reading the metro map. The metro system presents a spatial simultaneity where all routes are possible, a network of discontinuities and creative possibilities, where every single station presents its own local existence, connected to the other by contiguity rather then by subordination. To contemplate it means: ceder al recuerdo, evasión, desvarío; abrirse a la utopía, la ficción y la fábula: recorrer los monumentos, abominaciones y horrores de la ciudad, los monumentos, abominaciones y horrores propios, sin necesidad de moverse de casa. (Paisajes 149, emphasis added) to yield to memory, evasion, raving; to open up to utopia, fiction and fabula: to tour the monuments, abominations and horrors of the city, the monuments, abominations and horrors of one’s own, with no need to leave home.

The city space is thus a mirror of the mental space, and vice versa. Flânerie becomes a mental exercise, a metaphorical exploration of oneself. The motif of the blurring of boundaries between interior and exterior, private and public, inside and outside, can be read at different levels. In Paisajes and other texts Goytisolo celebrates the confusion and intermingling of private and public spaces in the bazaar. As he writes in “París, ¿Capital del siglo XXI?,” this intermingling was characteristic of “pre-

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modern” Paris, “with its evocation of the hotchpotch, the street scenes, the human teeming of the markets,”24 and was eliminated by the haussmannization of the city, which traced neat boundaries between the two spaces. Haussmann’s grandeur entails the regulation, and thus “privatization,” of public space, in the same way that the department store meant the “privatization” of the street and of flânerie. This privatization is a closure, a limitation, an imprisonment of space. What Goytisolo celebrates is, rather, the “publicization” of private space, its opening up to variations and possibilities. The “de-Europeanization” of Paris seems to restore, for Goytisolo, this pre-modern creative confusion: the descriptions of pre-Haussmann Paris “reproduce in an amazing way the actual urban experience of some neighbourhood of Marrakech or Cairo familiar to me.”25 Paisajes’ Sentier, su creciente confusión de lo público y lo privado, configur[a] lentamente un mapa de la futura ciudad bastarda que será al mismo tiempo el mapa de su propia vida. […] La megalópolis moderna vive ya a la hora de Bizancio. (Paisajes 147) with its increasing confusion of public and private, slowly gives form to a map of the future bastard city which will be at the same time a map of his own life […]. The modern megalopolis already lives by Byzantium time.

The map of this future bastard city thus corresponds to the map of the narrator’s own life. The opening up of private space to the “publicity” of the bazaar is counterbalanced by the closing down of the space of flânerie to the flâneur’s own room. Apparently, Paisajes develops in the alternation of two spaces, the swarming streets of the Sentier, scenography of the flâneur’s daily rambling, and his leonera (lair), where he devotes himself to epistolary deliriums.26 However, Lucille Braun notes that in the novel “the room is a centre that holds.”27 “Our hero”: puede emprender, sin moverse de su buhardilla gatera, la busca y rastreo de los espacios perdidos que configuran su escenografía mental. (Paisajes 75) can undertake, without leaving his cat hole, the search and dragging of the lost spaces that give form to his mental scenography.

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The real space of Paisajes is thus the flâneur’s den, where he writes, describes and invents trajectories through the city landscape and the subway labyrinth, which are all therefore mental spaces. Moreover, Epps notes, in spite of celebrating the hazards of the street, the flâneur “takes refuge in the close solitude of his home, removes himself from direct oral communication, generates a mock epic of destruction, and scoffs at obligation, responsibility, counsel, and commitment.”28 In this he is much closer to the “urban werewolf,” the “man of the crowd” into which the flâneur had dissolved. The public space of the “medina” is appropriated and “reprivatized” as the mental space of a self-searching flânerie. Paisajes, Epps concludes, dramatizes “the retreat of the wanderer to the home.”29 The virtual flâneries of the author thus become the book: the flâneur moves within “el doble espacio de la cives y el libro” (“the double space of the city and the book”), where he can callejar escribir extraviarte […] inventar trayectos laberínticos desorientar desorientarte: esparcir la materia narrada al azar de sorpresas e imponderables por toda la rosa de los vientos: textos-vilano a merced del aire vehículos de leve polinación. (Paisajes 233) loiter write stray […] invent labyrinthine trajectories disorient [the reader] disorient yourself: scatter the material of the narration to the four winds entrust it to surprises and imponderables: thistledown texts at the mercy of the breeze vehicles of a light pollination.

Flânerie becomes the very act of writing or, better, writing becomes a form of flânerie, an “art of straying” amid times and spaces. The book itself becomes city-like, “space in motion,” an open text, infinitely rich in possibilities, combinations and permutations. Goytisolo’s aim is in fact “componer un libro abierto al conjunto de sus voces y experiencias, construido como un rompecabezas” (“to compose a book open to the totality of their [all the people] voices and experiences, constructed like a jigsaw puzzle,” Paisajes 229), where, to borrow the title of Paisajes’ last microtext, “el orden de los factores no altera el producto” (“the order of the factors does not change the product”). In the palimpsest the city and the text have become, space is a sum of spaces, an intertwining of interior and exterior,

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room and street, city and book. Gómez Mata and Silió Cervera have argued that this entails the dissolution of distinctive spaces30; however, for Goytisolo the superimposition and alternation of planes and spaces does not mean their annihilation, but rather the preservation of a space in motion. Africa in the Boulevards In Paisajes, the crowd is, as it should be in any narrative of the flâneur, a character as central as the mock-autobiographical narrator: long descriptions are dedicated to it and the defence and enhancement of the multiculturalism of the Sentier is the only value that escapes the narrator’s cynicism.31 The flâneur is enthralled by the “complejo, prodigioso microcosmos cellular” (“complex, prodigious cellular microcosm”), “la osmosis plurirracial” (“the multiracial osmosis,” Paisajes 207) of his neighbourhood; he studies, “like an ethnologist,” the different groups of exiles, lee la propaganda revolucionaria o independentista de beréberes, kurdos, armenios, eritreos, afganos, paquistaneses o turcos; traduce las inscripciones trazadas en los muros con brocha o soplete y las anota cuidadosamente en sus cuadernos. (Paisajes 208–9) reads the revolutionary or independentist propaganda of Berbers, Kurds, Armenians, Eritreans, Afghans, Pakistanis or Turks; translates the graffiti traced on the walls with a brush or blowlamp and carefully copies them in its notebooks.

In a very Baudelairean fashion, he finds correspondences, “paralelos y afinidades sutiles entre comunidades remotas y a primera vista incomparables” (“parallels and subtle affinities between remote and at first glance hardly comparable communities,” Paisajes 209). The crowd of the Sentier is different, nonetheless, from that in Poe, Baudelaire and Benjamin: what attracts Goytisolo’s flâneur is not the undifferentiated and indifferent mass of Parisian “natives,” but the “dynamic, fruitful mixture of cultures and ethnos”32 of the multiracial medina. The Sentier is like a “multilayered cake”:

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una gigantesca tarta foliada, [que] presenta entonces, una vez hecho el corte sectorial, una serie de ingredientes sociales y étnicos propios de las heterogéneas comunidades esmeradamente dispuestas por la mano invisible del confitero. (Paisajes 53) an enormous foliated tart, [which] presents, in cross section, a series of social and ethnic ingredients characteristic to the heterogeneous communities carefully arranged by the invisible hand of the confectioner.

The crowd has lost the grey indifference which constituted a sort of unity, or at least uniformity. As the disheartened Parisian “natives” cry, “África empieza en los bulevares” (“Africa begins in the boulevards” (Paisajes 203). This colourful spectacle intoxicates the flaneur: “la paulatina deseuropeización de la ciudad […] le colma de regocijo” (“the gradual de-Europeanization of the city […] fills him with delight,” Paisajes 147). The Baudelairean erotic of the crowd is in fact central to Paisajes. Goytisolo calls the crowd a “magnet” in the essay “La ciudad palimpsesto” (The City as Palimpsest): “the energy surplus of the crowd: could it be the intimate magnet of my simultaneously physical and textual vagabondages that since childhood irresistibly attracts me?”33 The homoerotic attraction for the crowd, only implicit and hidden in Baudelaire,34 becomes explicit and revindicated in Goytisolo. The crowd he observes and studies is composed of male North Africans, Pakistanis and Turks (women are “invisible” in Goytisolo’s crowd), whom the flâneur spies “con el rabillo del ojo” (“out of the corner of his eye”) and in front of whom he feels “un pasmo grotesco” (a “grotesque amazement,” Paisajes 217). It could be that Goytisolo is here parodying the voyeuristic perversion of the flâneur, but parody mixes complicitously with confession: his homoerotic attraction to North African men is a persistent motif in both fictional and autobiographical writings. This eroticism combines with messianism when the multiethnic crowd becomes the only salvation from the decay of Western culture: the “multiracial osmosis of the Sentier” is the one positive value in the desolate and apocalyptic landscape of Paisajes. What remains after the cultural and ideological battles of the twentieth century is a heap of ruins “mounting towards the sky,” as Benjamin would say: all Western ideologies, from far Right to far Left, are mocked, parodied and

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deconstructed in the novel, the one weak message of redemption remaining in the new multicultural contributions of the immigrant non-Western crowds. However, as many critics have noted, Goytisolo’s position is often the simple reversal of Eurocentrism and ends up as a sort of mystique of the immigrant crowd. This mystique is nonetheless very far from that of the Volksgemeinschaft, so justly feared by Benjamin. The empathy with the crowd of Benjamin’s flâneur led him to become the prototype for the blind followers of the fascist mass-parties. But in order for this to happen, the crowd must become “people,” homogeneous, pure, united and univocal, with a compact and strong identity. Goytisolo rejects the “apego senil a unos usos y normas anticuados y rancios” (“senile attachment to obsolete, old-fashioned customs and norms”) of the Parisian “aborigines,” which confines them “al margen del vasto crisol del barrio” (“to the margins of the vast crucible of the neighbourhood”) and gradually gives them “caracteres atípicos” (“atypical traits,” Paisajes 113). Instances of identity and homogeneity in the Eurocentric “peoples” are thus ideological relics. Nor is the Sentier crowd the grey, indifferent and undifferentiated mass of consumers of commodity society, a sum of solitudes.35 It is instead a colourful, hybrid, nomadic mixture of cultures, races, languages and customs, which resembles what Hardt and Negri call the “multitude”: “multiplicity, a plane of singularities, an open set of relations, which is not homogeneous or identical with itself and bears an indistinct, inclusive relation to those outside of it.”36 Its model is for Goytisolo the bazaar, the square of Xemaá el Fna in Marrakech, the hybrid, multivocal, multiethnic marketplace. Yet the “multitude” is, for Hardt and Negri, a wish-image and they warn us against celebrating hybrid identities, flexible hierarchies and the rhizomatic multiplicity of the marketplace as such, because these same elements can be very well managed and enhanced by the new forms of power and the global market of high capitalism.37 Goytisolo is less subtle on this point and unequivocally celebrates plurivocity and miscegenation in a quasi-mystic exhilaration (which, in turn, Hardt and Negri at times also share). What is puzzling, then, is that this colourful multitude is watched from afar by the flâneur. It is hailed and celebrated, but not interrogated. Indeed, Goytisolo intends to construct a polyphonic novel: he writes in

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“La ciudad palimpsesto” that amid the crowd “life becomes a sort of collective exercise of writing, in which I discreetly take part.”38 In Paisajes, by fragmenting the narration into a multiplicity of voices, he aims at disrupting the authoritative voice of the narrator and letting the crowd speak. The babelesque Paris of the novel is thus constructed on colliding signs and scripts, conflicting and competing messages and languages: it takes its inspiration from the many public messages of the city streets, graffiti, newspaper articles, wall placards, billboards, personal ads, and so on, in a linguistic war constituting the hecatomb of language that opens and closes the novel. It is composed of quotations, imitations, copies, translations, satires. The voices are multiple: French patriots, revolutionary terrorists, pederasts, old communists, homosexuals, ecologists, scientists, liberals, zoophiles. A polymorphic language is utilized to represent the different voices: advertising, political, pornographic, journalistic, rhetorical, poetic. Society is depicted not from one, authoritative vantage point, but rather from a multiplicity of planes. As Gómez Mata and Silió Cervera argue, Paisajes aims at being a social novel39: it depicts a society full of contradictions, opposed voices, conflicts that lead to the apocalypse of Western culture. Paisajes becomes “la minuciosa exposición de las ideas cliché de la época que configuran poco a poco el mapa universal de la idiotez” (“the detailed exposition of the cliché of the age, which gradually give form to the universal map of idiocy,” Paisajes 224). However, what we hear are the voices of the West. Paisajes depicts the apocalypse of Western culture, where a weak message of redemption is found in the multicoloured crowd of immigrants; but these immigrants are merely contemplated from afar, admired, desired, celebrated, even invested with a mystical aura or power, but never given voice as subjects. Edward Said wrote that Goytisolo “crossed to the other side”40 of the West-East and North-South fence, but is such crossing really possible? Kadhim Jihad also writes that Goytisolo “becomes” the Other, the Arab, the African, the Cuban,41 but this certainly does not happen in Paisajes. The crowd or the multitude in the novel is admired, desired, but nonetheless kept at distance; the more “other” the multitude, the greater the desire and admiration, but also the distance. The dialectic between the flâneur and the crowd needs distance, which cannot be bridged by any

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crossing. The flâneur is the solitary wanderer, who needs the crowd but maintains a heroic resistance to “absorption” and thus cannot “become the Other.” As Epps notes, Goytisolo’s practice of re-calling the Other as his own risks the reproduction of the discourse of appropriation characteristic of imperialism and colonialism.42 The Art of Straying, or, The Author as Dissident Exile is also for my purposes a metaphorical condition. […] The pattern that sets the course for the intellectual as outsider is best exemplified by the condition of exile, the state of never being fully adjusted, always feeling outside the chatty, familiar world inhabited by natives, so to speak, tending to avoid and even dislike the trappings of accommodation and national well-being. Exile for the intellectual in this metaphysical sense is restlessness, movement, constantly being unsettled, and unsettling others. — Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectual Voir la bêtise et ne plus la tolérer. — Flaubert

If the flâneur’s final truth was that he went to the marketplace to find a buyer, then he is the perfect figure for the postmodern mass-media intellectual: professional of culture, philosophe de télévision, in Bourdieu’s words, acrobat and clown in the great media circus, ubiquitous on the lecture circuit or late-night talk shows, the postmodern intellectual is the reincarnation of Benjamin’s “journalist-in-uniform,” a spy for the capitalist, an agent of Empire, in brand-new media attire. The postmodern flâneur is what Said calls the “free-floating intellectual, whose technical competence is on loan and for sale to anyone,”43 who “prize[s] competence”44 over truth or freedom and has “internalized the norms of the state, which when it understandably calls them to the capital, in effect becomes their patron.”45 Goytisolo has words only of contempt for these: “the silence of the postmodern intellectuals, synchronized to the new media culture, is alarming. A society with no critical voices is no longer a living society but rather becomes an empty society, where the spectacle of politics, or

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better politics as spectacle, substitutes not merely for ethical reflexion, but for the conscience of reality.”46 The flâneur-in-uniform is incapable of critical thought, a lackey of power, he or she has forsaken any independence, any ethical or political commitment, any capacity for straying outside the accepted and regulated limits. But if one thing characterizes the flâneur, it is precisely the “art of straying”: this is not merely the art of “getting lost” in the city, but also the art of crossing boundaries, of trespassing limits, of seeking a labyrinthine and convoluted path, rather than the straight and easy. The flâneur as stray is thus the dialectical counterpart of the flâneur as free-floating commodity, in a reversal of the historical process that witnessed the flâneuras-bohemian become the flâneur-as-lackey. If Benjamin identified with the flâneur, he certainly did not identify with the journalist-in-uniform, but rather with the “artist of stray.” So too does Goytisolo, for whom the flâneur represents the opposite of the postmodern intellectual: the “author as dissident.” This connection of intellectual work with the notion of transgression, straying, border crossing is not uncommon: Said, for example, sees the intellectual as exile, marginal and amateur, essentially an outsider47; the notions of “deterritorialization” and “nomadology” are central in Deleuze and Guattari; Hardt and Negri name “being-against” as the new form of opposition to power, exemplified mainly in acts of desertion, exodus and nomadism.48 Flânerie as the “art of straying” thus acquires a strong ethical and political emphasis. Crossing boundaries and trespassing limits means, first of all, physically, culturally and mentally evading the constrictions of one’s nation, one’s culture, one’s intellectual circle. Goytisolo exiled himself to Paris from Franco’s Spain, but also crossed the limits of his own cultural and intellectual world, first into French and European culture, both censured by the Francoist regime, and then into non European languages and cultures, especially Turkish and Arabic. However, straying soon becomes dissidence tout-court and, in turn, dissidence becomes the only mark of true art. In an essay entitled “De la literatura considerada como una delincuencia” (On Literature Considered as Delinquency), he defines literature as a “crime”: “insofar as it does not accept life as it is, art is a form of dissidence subjected throughout history to a repeated collective conceptualization.”49 The mark of true art is thus

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rebellion against orthodoxy, against any norm, and against the obtuse opacity of reality. True writing as such is always a form of rebellion: “we could draw a literary history on the base of the subsequent answers of writers […] to the circumstances of asphyxia that inevitably generate the totalitarian state and orthodox thought and we would reach the equation Writing = Dissidence.”50 In Paisajes, political, sexual and textual norms and limits are trespassed and broken. Irony and parody do not spare any social rule, any limit of decency or respect. In the novel itself, Goytisolo makes a declaration of his own poetics when he proposes as his literary ideal “el derviche errante sufí” (“the wandering Sufi dervish”): Un hombre que rehúye la vanidad, desprecia las reglas y formas exteriores de la convivencia, no busca discípulos, no tolera alabanzas. Sus cualidades son recatadas y ocultas y, para velarlas y volverlas aún más secretas, se refocila en la práctica de lo despreciable e indigno: así, no sólo concita la reprobación de los suyos, sino que provoca ostracismo y condena. Tras las máscaras y celajes de la escritura, la meta es el desdén: el rechazo orgulloso de la simpatía o admiración ajenas será el requisito indispensable a la alquimia interior operada bajo el disfraz de una crónica burlona y sarcástica. (Paisajes 224) A man who shuns vanity, despises the rules and exterior forms of conformity, does not look for disciples, does not tolerate praise. His qualities are reserved and hidden and, in order to protect and make them even more secret, he amuses himself in the practice of the despicable and contemptible: this way, he not only stirs up his people’s reprobation, but also provokes ostracism and condemnation. Behind the masks and concealments of writing, the goal is disdain: the proud rejection of the other’s sympathy or admiration will be the indispensable requisite for the interior alchemy worked beneath the disguise of a mocking and sarcastic chronicle.

The flâneur-as-dissident is no longer the man-about-town, the socialite, domesticated, integrated, comfortably settled in his literary position. “To be lovable,” glosses Randolph Pope, “is also to be ineffective, for to him artistic truth must have a revulsive element and the messenger cannot escape its effect; to be a speaker for a cause is to annul the self and curb the independence of the questioning mind.”51 Rejection from part of society is the mark of the flâneur-as-dissident, who revindicates his condition

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of pariah.52 If Goytisolo’s flâneur was constructed out of Benjaminian and Baudelairean suggestions, his model for the flâneur-as-Sufi-dervish is nevertheless Jean Genet: “when I was describing in my novel Paisajes después de la batalla the literary and human ideal of the excentric scribe cloistered in the Parisian neighbourhood of Sentier, it was very clear to any reader acquainted with my work that I was referring to Genet.”53 But Flaubert is also a model for the “proud abnormality” of the literary addict, imprisoned within the loneliness of the creative spirit.54 Goytisolo brings dissidence into his very language: the flâneur-asdissident takes as his task dissent from his own language “by violating deliberately the laws and canons respected by the cultural community in whose bosom he lives and works.”55 This is less evident in Paisajes, which restores a certain “correctness” to the writing, than elsewhere, where meaning, language, syntax and punctuation are disarranged, scattered, confused: hermeticism thus becomes a weapon of dissent, a “personal option of resistance.”56 In the essays collected in El bosque de las letras (The Forest of Literature), Goytisolo defines the task of the intellectual as the defence, against the predominance of imagistic representation, of “writing’s inalienable right to be writing.”57 Against a language become “canonized, stiff, monopolized by power,” the flâneur-as-dissident must “undertake a work of subversion and demystification, aimed at undermining the semantic order imposed by the occupier ideology.”58 However, dissidence too is parodied in Paisajes, in the many caricatures of terrorism and terrorist groups. Terrorism, of course, stands for transgression, for subversion, for the irruption of the unexpected, for violent and extreme rupture. There are nevertheless many forms of terrorism in Paisajes: what we could call “bad terrorism” – for example, that practised by the Right-wing Charles Martel group, but also by the Left-wing Red Fags – which serves and pursues order, truth, identity, unity and totality; and the “good terrorism” – sporadically and imaginatively practised by the protagonist – which serves and pursues fragmentation, dispersion and particularity.59 The “terrorist” work of the flâneur-as-dissident is thus linguistic and operates mainly through irony. Satire and irony, Goytisolo writes, “play a primordial role: they are the weapon the writer utilizes in order to recover the language, to unveil the petrification of the system,

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to point out the grotesque and ridiculous side of pontifices and sacred cows.”60 Irony and parody are fundamental tools in Paisajes, where all the different social discourses are taken on and emptied out from within. As Epps notes, however, Goytisolo’s real and serious commitment to the dispossessed, the marginals, the immigrants, within and without Paisajes, is beyond the twist of irony.61 This is an important point: Paisajes is not that “fábula sin ninguna moralidad” (“fabula without morality,” Paisajes 234) the author/narrator claims it to be. We should not trust this claim since he himself warns the reader that “el narrador no es fiable” (“the narrator is not trustworthy,” Paisajes 217). A number of commentators “dismiss” the novel as without any “agenda,” flirting with “total indifference”62; or carrying a “carefree humour, with no moral lesson whatsoever”63; or showing a depravity that neutralizes “the seriousness of political ideals and of the same literature,” in the “absence of any exemplary message.”64 But, as most note, the ethical and political message of the novel is actually very clear and, furthermore, is paralleled by Goytisolo’s substantial and unequivocal essayistic production. This betrays a clear and assertive political and cultural commitment: a “militancy” in favour of the minorities, the marginalized, the excluded, the “vanquished” and “oppressed” of history; a militancy that is “múltiple, tentacular, polimorfa: abarca el espacio geofísico y cultural; el passado, presente y futuro; las tropelías e injusticias ya olvidadas de la Historia” (“multiple, tentacular, polymorphous: it embraces geophysical and cultural space; past, present and future; the forgotten outrages and injustices of History,” Paisajes 209). Here, many critics discover a paradox: on the one hand, Goytisolo utilizes a number of postmodernist techniques and themes – dissemination, hybridity, polyphony and the disappearance of the author – and in Paisajes also parodies and demolishes the figure of the old humanist intellectual by showing his emptiness and obsolescence; on the other, he reproduces this model and actually embodies in his own persona the figure of the Sartrean engagé intellectual. He claims for himself “the defence of civic causes and universal values threatened by barbarism”: “antiracism, defence of minorities and immigrants, critique of the monetary fundamentalism and of technoscience, etc.”65; “a defence of the individual values of the minorities, of whatever is mixed, hybrid or heterogeneous, against

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the insidious ‘normalization’ imposed by the mass media, the omnipresent ideology of the market and excluding nationalisms and dogmas.”66 He considers himself “heir to the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen”67 and reproduces the old Enlightenment dream of a total and redemptive knowledge. In Paisajes the flâneur experiences: una pasión voraz de aprender, de asimilar los símbolos, creencias, lenguaje de comunidades remotas y aun desaparecidas absorbe por completo tu atención y energías. Desearías compilar, si dispusieras de tiempo, la totalidad de la memoria y conocimiento humanos […]. Quisieras abarcar en un lapso brevísimo la increíble variedad de credos, cultos, ceremoniales, costumbres, valores, ideas, sentimientos, obsesiones de los hombres y mujeres que te han precedido y te seguirán: entrar en su fuero interno y morada vital, comprender sus aspiraciones y anhelos, comulgar con su fe, sentir sus tristezas y alegrías. (Paisajes 229, emphases added) a voracious passion to learn, to assimilate the symbols, beliefs, languages of remote and even vanished communities absorbs completely your attention and energies. You would like to make a compilation, if you had time, of the totality of the human memory and knowledge […]. You would like to encompass in the shortest time the incredible variety of creeds, cults, ceremonials, customs, values, ideas, feelings, obsessions of the men and women who have preceded and will come after you: enter their hearts and innermost vitals, understand their aspirations and desires, share their faith, feel their sadness and joy.

Goytisolo thus criticizes the figure of the Western intellectual through the deconstruction of various humanist ideologies, but replicates and reiterates the Enlightenment dreams of freedom, knowledge, total comprehension and integration, accumulation, assimilation, the appropriation of the other cultures and intellectual mastery.68 He rejects Western values, true, but does he really become the Other, as Said suggests? Flânerie, I would reply, can never be a “becoming.” As a figure for intellectual work, even when critical and committed, it is a kind of observation that must remain detached, from afar, from a distance, from exile. The figure of the “crossing,” which Said employs, is indeed very apt, provided the crossing is a permanent one, as Epps argues,69 which cannot embrace the Other, wouldn’t even try to conquer it, but prolongs ad infinitum the act of approaching. The art of straying as perpetual border-

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crossing would suit Benjamin perfectly. Paisajes thus replicates many of the contradictions of the flâneur, but remains faithful to the spirit of the heroic wanderer Benjamin certainly was.

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The Detective: On Traces

*  *  * What the constellation of the flâneur highlights is thus the impossibility of reading this figure as a monolithic whole. It becomes a central tool for the analysis of modernity and postmodernity only when we read him as a kaleidoscope, a prism, whose many facets reflect in different directions the contradictions of our age. It is precisely his elusiveness and contradictoriness that make him the representative and monad of modernity and postmodernity. Benjamin put him at the centre of his prehistory of modernity and Goytisolo at the centre of the battlefield of Western decadence because the flâneur works as a seismograph, registering and reproducing the social, cultural and political waves of the time. He embodies and reflects the paradoxical relationship that the new subject has with vision, space, time and society; he registers the epochal changes produced by the mechanization of locomotion and the digitalization of communication in everyday life; he epitomizes the conflicts, threats and hopes inherent to the urbanization and cohabitation of great human masses; he also gives human form to the contradictions, miseries and heroisms of the Western intelligentsia, from whose errors and failures a model for intellectual work can possibly be learned. He towers at the centre of our “prehistory” because he reunites, beyond any possible reconciliation, all the paradoxes and inconsistencies of our age. The only way to read them is in a constellation that attempts, not to conciliate, mediate or reduce them to unity, but to call forth, in the construction of a dialectical model, an image of the time.

Like Sisyphus, they are doomed to roll the stone of detection up to the top of the hill over and over. To have to repeat the discovery ultimately means that no discovery is final, no discovery is a solution but rather a tendency, an approximation, since the past is full of unsolved mysteries waiting for their detective. — Stefano Tani, The Doomed Detective

The constellation of the detective is related to that of the flâneur: it will thus prolong the comparison of the descriptions of modernity and postmodernity attempted in the first constellation, but will also add a critical turn, by introducing the theory of the trace and the critique of history. Whereas the constellation of the flâneur construed a parallel and correspondence between the representations of the two periods, that of the detective will set the politics of these representations against each other. In Benjamin’s analysis, explored in the first part, the detective is one of the many metamorphoses of the flâneur, who picks up a trace in his ramblings through the city and follows it to explore the mysteries of modernity. This figure is important in the architecture of modernity because it provides an account of the “dark side” of the metropolis, of the crime, threat and violence which lurk at the heart of the new human conglomerates, an account that the physiologies, the journalistic product of the flâneur’s observation, failed to provide. The description of the city in detective fiction responds to, and satisfies, for Benjamin, several “modern” demands: it plays with bourgeois anxiety and fear of crime and supplies a fictive reassurance that law and order will eventually be re-established; it “romanticizes” the city and transforms it into a place of excitement and adventure, offering to the bored bourgeois the illusion of a “heroic” existence; it thus (fictitiously) “salvages” the individual from the anonymity of the crowd by rescuing his or her traces. As such, it is a phantasmagoric

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narrative. The origins and development of detective fiction are connected by Benjamin to the development of new optical devices in modernity, especially photography and film: the detective’s “scientific” observation is the literary expression of the optical revolution that transformed the construction of time and space since the early nineteenth century. It is therefore also connected to the new forms of panoptical control enabled by these optical devices: they multiply the traces of the individual and allow the state to keep a record of every person. Nevertheless, the detective also provides, for Benjamin, a critique of the bourgeois obsession with possession, secrecy and accumulation: snooping in the bourgeois apartment, he disrupts the separation of interior and exterior and unveils the crime at the basis of the capitalist system and the death at the heart of commodity fetishism. Moreover, pursuing the traces hidden under the surface of the phantasmagoria of progress, he becomes a figure for the materialist historian, whose task is to discover the crimes of the past and redeem the victims of a history of violence and oppression. The detective thus acquires a final political significance in Benjamin’s project of redemption: he is a figure for the recovery of the traces of an obliterated and forgotten past. The second part of this constellation will counterpose to Benjamin’s account of detection that given by Paul Auster in the New York of the 1980s. Hailed as one of the key figures of American postmodernism, Auster directs the model of detective fiction to a very different goal: the pursuit of identity. He represents the later stage in the development of the detective story, whereby the pursuit of the criminal becomes a highly intellectualized allegory for the pursuit of meaning among the ruins of the modernist world. The victim, the criminal and the pursuer become the same person, in a search that leads inward and is always doomed to failure. In its deconstruction of the traditional paradigms of meaning-making, its questioning of the truth claims of linguistic construction and its open-endedness, the metaphysical or anti-detective story, as it is known, constitutes a critique of the discourse of modernity and has thus become an archetype of the postmodern imagination. As such, it unveils, in a sense, what Benjamin called the phantasmagoric function of the detective novel: the reassuring presupposition of an eventual transparency of urban, social and personal constructs. Conversely, in

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this new sub-genre, detection “implodes” and is confined to the vicious circle of a subjectivity endlessly (and fruitlessly) seeking its own personal truth. If all the traces lead inward, the external world is simply bracketed and forgotten, and so too is any political significance of the pursuit. This “sovereignty of inwardness” determines the construction of spatiality and temporality in Auster: space is confined within the writer’s head, a hall of mirrors where every surface reflects the flat image of the author, and time is reduced to the eternal present of his self-searching investigation. Not only are the traces of a forgotten history abandoned in forgetfulness, but also history, society and reality as such are transformed into the mere mirror of the subject’s anxieties and desires, and so annulled. Furthermore, in this pursuit there is no trace of crime: if the mysteries of reality and identity cannot be solved, then the status quo is finally accepted and any political pursuit or action loses its meaning. No longer a figure for the historian, the detective becomes instead a figure for historical failure and political quietism. The intent of this constellation is thus to evoke, from the collision of these two accounts of detection, a picture of the politics of intellectual pursuit that differentiate modernism and postmodernism. It will result in a critique of a certain mode of investigation and representation that abandons historical attentiveness and ethical commitment. Read against the grain of Benjamin’s political awareness, the self-referentiality and navel-gazing of much contemporary cultural enterprise emerges as complacent and highly phantasmagorical.

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3.1 The City as a Crime Scene: Walter Benjamin and the Traces of the Detective A remark by Ernst Bloch apropos of The Arcades Project: “History displays its Scotland Yard badge.” It was in the context of a conversation in which I was describing how this work – comparable, in method, to the process of splitting the atom – liberates the enormous energies of history that are bound up in the “once upon a time” of classical historiography. (N3,4)

Theorie des Kriminalromans In 1930 Benjamin published in the Literaturblatt der Frankfurter Zeitung a short piece titled “Kriminalromane, auf Reisen” (“Crime Novels, on Travel”). Beginning with the observation that people do not usually bring their own books to read in trains, but buy new ones at the stations, Benjamin wonders why crime novels are particularly suitable for this kind of journey. Entering a railway station, he writes, is like entering the middle of a gigantomachy between the gods of the railroads and those of the station, so the modern traveler must pay his or her offertory to the divinities of modernity, “in a dark feeling of making something which will please the gods of the railway” (GS 4.1:381). These divinities are the god of the steam, the naiads of the smoke and the demons of the stucco. A railway station, a cathedral of modernity (GS 4.1:381), is populated, Benjamin had learned from the Surrealists, by myth; and the city dweller – in this case the train traveler – must forge his or her way through it as if in the primeval forest. A train journey is a “succession of mythic trials and dangers,” beset by uncountable problems, from the anxiety of being “too late” to “the solitude of the compartment,” from “the fear of missing a connection” to “the horror of the unknown lobby” (GS 4.1:381). The easiest way to free the mind from this series of fears, Benjamin writes, is to provoke another fear, which will anaesthetize the first: “the anaesthesia of a fear through another one is his [the traveller’s] salvation. Between the fresh cut pages of the crime novel he looks for the idle, as it were,

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virginal apprehensions [Beklemmungen], which could help him to get over the archaic fear of the journey” (GS 4.1:381). The Kriminalroman thus constitutes a momentary escape from the anxieties of modern life. In the station-as-cathedral of modernity, “we want to thank,” he concludes, “the mobile and gaudily colored altars” and “the minister of the new, of the absence of spirit and of the sensational,” which allow us, for a couple of hours, to envelope ourselves in the protective scarf of fictitious excitement (GS 4.1:382–3).1 Benjamin’s taste for crime and detective novels is well known.2 At one stage he even contemplated writing a crime novel: in a 1933 letter from Ibiza to Gretel Karplus he mentioned the “project” of a Kriminalroman, of which he was sketching “scenes, motifs and tricks” for future consideration (cf. GB 4:207); in the same year, he wrote again to Karplus from Paris about his discussions with Brecht on the Theorie des Kriminalromans, which “perhaps will be followed one day by an experimental undertaking” (GB 4:310).3 Such interest in detective stories and the in figure of the detective was arguably part of the Zeitgeist of the 1920s: Siegfried Kracauer wrote a book-length study, Der Detektiv-Roman: Ein Philosophischer Traktat; in France, Regis Messac published a thick book on the influence of scientific progress on detective fiction, Le detective novel et l’Influence de la pensée scientifique in 1929, from which Benjamin transcribed many quotations.4 In Benjamin’s corpus, references to the figure of the detective are multiple, but usually go no farther than a hint or suggestion. Apart from “Kriminalromane, auf Reisen,” no other piece of writing is dedicated exclusively to the figure of the detective or the detective novel. References can be found, from One-Way Street to the late notes of the Arcades Project, mainly in relation to Poe and Baudelaire, but also to the motifs of the flâneur, the bourgeois interior and the theme of the trace. If these few inferences cannot be considered either whimsical or superficial, they are nonetheless marginal and dispersed and do not therefore add up to a Theorie des Kriminalromans. Indeed, critical attention to this figure in Benjamin rarely goes further than a brief acknowledgment of its existence, so that, to date, only a few article-length studies focus on it specifically. Nevertheless, the detective can be analyzed as a coherent and consistent

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figure in Benjamin’s work, even if its fictitious cohesion and unity result from the work a posteriori of the commentator. I propose to connect it with the motif of the “trace,” to broaden its range and give it fuller meaning within Benjamin’s theoretical project. I will first analyze Benjamin’s quasi-sociological account of the birth and development of the detective story in the nineteenth century as another phantasmagoric description of the city. I will then connect this description to the phenomenon of the city crowd and the anxieties and fears it provokes. After comparing the detective and the flâneur, I will relate the figure of the detective to Benjamin’s “theory of the trace,” thus stressing the political importance of the detective pursuit. I will conclude by giving an account of the historian as detective and of the city as crime scene. The Phantasmagoria of Parisian Life Then we sallied forth into the streets, arm in arm, continuing the topics of the day, or roaming far and wide until a late hour, seeking, amid the wild lights and shadows of the populous city, that infinity of mental excitement which quiet observation can afford. — Poe, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”

In “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire” Benjamin writes: “No matter what trace the flâneur may follow, every one of them will lead him to a crime” (GS 1.2:543/SW 4:22). The city, initially a delightful intérieur for the flâneur, a spectacle of excitement and intoxication, is depicted here as a crime scene. Benjamin argues that the literary genre of the detective story snoops into the “dark side” of the metropolis, transforming it into a place of danger, fear and angst. Even to the flâneur, the “urban native,” supposedly perfectly at ease in the metropolitan environment, “the city has become strange” “and every bed ‘hazardous’” ( J72,3). In his “Little History of Photography,” Benjamin observes that “it is no accident that [Eugène] Atget’s photographs have been likened to those of a crime scene. But isn’t every square inch of our cities a crime scene? Every passer-by a culprit? Isn’t the task of the photographer – descendant of the augurs

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and haruspices – to reveal guilt and to point out the guilty in his pictures?” (GS 2.1:385/SW 2:527). The “sacred ground of flânerie” (M2a,1), the place the flâneur considered his house, the street, is portrayed in this new account as inhospitable, fearsome, dangerous. The detective story developed in France in the mid nineteenth century as a substitute for an earlier “urban” literature, the physiologies. In these, the flâneur-as-journalist had described urban types, giving a sense of intelligibility and familiarity to the urban environment, which Benjamin judged highly phantasmagoric. “The phantasmagoria of the flâneur,” he writes in the Arcades Project, is the pretension “to read from faces the profession, the ancestry, the character” (M6,6). The goal of the physiologies had been to alleviate the panic caused by the overwhelming new reality of the city and in this they ultimately failed because the urban environment always resists interpretation and description. Unlike the physiologies, the detective story plays with this sense of unfamiliarity, incomprehensibility and anxiety and so exacerbates fear of the urban environment. As a genre it was more successful: it satisfied the bourgeois obsession with the threat to order and propriety in a time of political and social turmoil. As Tom McDonough writes, “threat haunted the bourgeois imaginary as a concatenation of all those forces – from ghetto uprising to the more diffuse spread of a counterculture with its rejection of normative models of social behaviour – that threatened the middle-class hold over the city. Yet even greater than these political fears, and to a considerable extent acting as a mask for them, was the social anxiety that dominated the urban imaginary of this class: a fear of crime.”5 This fear derives from the bourgeois obsession with law and order, ideological security and political immobility.6 Benjamin writes that “in times of terror, when everyone is something of a conspirator, everybody will be in the position of having to play detective” (GS 1.2:542–3/SW 4:21). His description is politically charged: bourgeois society always feels under attack; political crisis, social crisis, ideological terror, are its permanent state of existence; therefore we always play detective – and read detective fiction. The literary-ideological trope for the city thus becomes the jungle, for, like the jungle, the primeval forest and the wilderness, the modern city is a site of danger and adventure, its citizen either hunter or victim.

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In the bourgeois imagination the city is turned into a landscape, which threat, danger and vice transform into a hunting ground. As Benjamin notes in “A Berlin Chronicle”: “only those for whom poverty or vice turns the city into a landscape in which they stray from dark till sunrise know it in a way denied to me” (GS 6:488/SW 2:612). Confronted with this social reality, the flâneur is transformed from a “philosophical stroller” into a werewolf, a hunter, a savage, and the experience of the metropolis depicted as “adventure.” Many of Benjamin’s entries in the Arcades Project refer to the novels of James Fenimore Cooper, which portray the North American savage roaming and hunting in the wilderness. These images of the forest and the savage are transposed to the urban setting and contribute to the experience of the city as “adventure” and the subsequent creation of the detective story: “owing to the influence of Cooper,” Benjamin writes, “it becomes possible for the novelist in an urban setting to give scope to the experiences of a hunter. This has a bearing on the rise of the detective story” (M11a,6). A quotation from Baudelaire’s Fusées, annotated by Benjamin in the Arcades Project, summarizes this description of the city: “Man … is always … in a state of savagery. What are the perils of jungle and prairie compared to the daily shocks and conflicts of civilization? Whether a man embraces his dupe on the boulevard, or spears his prey in unknown forests, is he not … the most highly perfected beast of prey?” (M14,3). This “romanticization” of the city is, for Benjamin, no less phantasmagorical than the operation of “domestication” attempted by the physiologies. To picture the city as wilderness is a way to escape the fundamental boredom and repetitiveness of capitalist modernity, to evade the claustrophobic limits of a highly regulated society.7 Crime-as-adventure thus provides a fictitious escape-route: Poe, Alexandre Dumas, Eugène Sue transform the city into a place of unnameable dangers, menacing shadows and evil lurking in every door, that is, an exciting place. This escape is merely imaginary, generated by, and in turn producing, self-deception, a childish intoxication that hides the social, political and economic reality of capitalist modernity.8 The individual, annulled in the crowd and living a life of repetition, boredom and spleen, recovers in the detective story what Graeme Gilloch calls “a heroic sense of the self.” Here, intrepid

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figures perform heroic deeds, either of sublime courage or magnificent infamy, in tales that exalt everyday-life as a heroic struggle for survival. Baudelaire would call it “the heroism of modern life.” Gilloch acutely notes, however, that “the precarious character of civilization was strictly for harmless consumption.” There is no social critique, no sociological analysis of crime or poverty, no political concern for the revolutionary potentiality of the mass: the villains, the criminals, are always aristocratic and often gentlemen, who seek “the challenge and excitement of crime for its own sake, not merely for pecuniary benefit.”9 The detective novel is thus, for Benjamin, part of the phantasmagoria of modern life: if the traces the flâneur follows inevitably lead to a crime, then “this is an indication of how the detective story, regardless of its sober calculations, also participates in the phantasmagoria of Parisian life. It does not yet glorify the criminal, though it does glorify his adversaries and, above all, the hunting grounds where they pursue him” (GS 1.2:543/SW 4:22). The Hiding Place of Modernity An essential element in the development of the detective story, Benjamin writes, is the quintessentially modern phenomenon of the crowd. In various passages and notes he argues that at the origin of the detective story lies the possibility for the criminal to hide amid the population of the big city. In “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,” for example, he writes: “here the masses appear as the asylum that shields an asocial person from his persecutors. Of all the menacing aspects of the masses, this one became apparent first. It lies at the origin of the detective story” (GS 1.2:542/SW 4:21).10 The crowd is a threatening phenomenon because the asocial and the criminal may hide amongst the urban multitude. Unlike the physiologies, in which the crowd was depicted as harmless and amusing spectacle, the detective story describes it as the “asylum for the reprobate and the proscript” (M16,3), into which the criminal vanishes so that at any moment one is in danger of encountering a bloodthirsty villain in the street. The flâneur, who in the physiologies disinterestedly enjoyed the colourful life of the swarming boulevard, is

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phantasmagorically turned into the detective, who searches the menacing urban masses for a trace of the criminal. The phantasmagoria of the detective story lays in the assumption of the detective’s ability to follow these traces through the crowd-as-hiding-place: the flâneur-as-detective, McDonough notes, becomes an instance of social control, which can assuage bourgeois fear of the crowd.11 Nevertheless, the crowd obliterates the traces not only of the criminal, but of the individual in general. “The masses,” Benjamin writes, “efface all traces of the individual” (M16,3). It is a hiding place because in it all traces are lost, a fact which is a double source of anxiety and alienation. Georg Simmel, whose analysis of metropolitan modernity was seminal for Benjamin’s generation, wrote that “the deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of technique of life.”12 The work of the detective can therefore also be read as a reassuring rescue of individual traces from the anonymity of the mass. John Carey, for example, argues that the detective’s function is “to disperse the fears of overwhelming anonymity that the urban mass brought.”13 Both readings, of the detective-as-rescuer of the individual and as an instance of social control, are based on the same premise, that “the original social content of the detective story focused on the obliteration of the individual’s traces in the big-city crowd” (GS 1.2:546/SW 4:23). Bourgeois fear of anonymity is balanced by the necessity for the criminal – but also the poor, the bohemian, those living at the fringe of society and legality – to hide from the panoptical power of the state. The crowd, Gilloch argues, “becomes the hiding place of modernity, the haunt of the bohemian and the fugitive.”14 The dialectic between the desire to escape the anonymity of the crowd and the necessity to hide within it corresponds to the dialectic of anxiety and desire inspired by the crowd. For Benjamin, the description of the crowd finds profound, acute and contradictory formulation in Baudelaire, whose flâneur embraces the crowd in a kind of erotic encounter with the other. But Benjamin’s primary reference is Poe: “fear, revulsion, and horror were the emotions which the big-city crowd aroused in those who

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first observed it. For Poe, it has something barbaric about it; discipline barely manages to tame it”; “the appearance of the London crowd as Poe describes it is as gloomy and fitful as the light of the gas lamps overhead” (GS 1.2:629, 625/SW 4:327, 325). One of Poe’s stories provides Benjamin with the perfect example of the collapse of the flâneur into the crowd: “the case in which the flâneur completely distances himself from the type of the philosophical promenader, and takes on the features of the werewolf restlessly roaming a social wilderness, was fixed for the first time and forever afterward by Poe in his story ‘The Man of the Crowd’” (M1,6). McDonough argues that the flâneur-detective collapses into the man of the crowd, who is dragged towards the other by a pathological, and therefore criminal, passion. The flâneur-as-criminologist, as instance of panoptical observation, thus becomes indistinguishable from the badaud, l’homme de foules, the asocial: pursuer and pursued lose their polarities and the desire for the other becomes criminal. For Benjamin, then: Poe’s famous tale ‘The Man of the Crowd’ is something like an X-ray of a detective story. It does away with all the drapery that a crime represents. Only the armature remains: the pursuer, the crowd, and an unknown man who manages to walk through London in such a way that he always remains in the middle of the crowd. This unknown man is the flâneur. […] To Poe the flâneur was, above all, someone who does not feel comfortable in his own company. This is why he seeks out the crowd; the reason he hides in it is probably close at hand. Poe purposely blurs the difference between the asocial person and the flâneur. The harder a man is to find, the more suspicious he becomes. (GS 1.2:550/SW 4:27)

Poe’s description of the crowd and the street summarizes the fundamental motifs of modernity, but his narration surpasses Baudelaire’s erotic fusion with the crowd. At the beginning of “The Man of the Crowd,” the narrator behaves like the flâneur-physiognomist, reading on the faces of passers-by “the history of long years.”15 But when he spots the old man, he encounters an “absolute idiosyncrasy,”16 a face that cannot be read, which explains the incipit of the tale: “there are some secrets which do not permit themselves to be told.”17 The old man represents the reality of the crowd, which can never truly be read. Jonathan Elmer makes the same point: “the tale narrates the collapse of these two poles, for it is the narrator’s

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inability to withstand trying to read the (man of the) crowd that causes him to plunge into its very circulation. He cannot read the crowd and he cannot stop trying to do so; he cannot be alone and he cannot cease from being so.”18 The impossibility of communion with the crowd, and the impossibility of escaping it, makes up the drama of modernity. The result is that the man of the crowd, in his own unreadability, becomes suspicious: everyone is a criminal in the crowd. The Uses of Observation Turning the flâneur into the detective entails the social legitimation of flânerie. Benjamin writes that “if the flâneur is thus turned into an unwilling detective, it does him a lot of good socially, for it legitimates his idleness. His indolence is only apparent, for behind this indolence there is the watchfulness of an observer who does not take his eyes off a miscreant. Thus, the detective sees rather wide areas opening up to his self-esteem. […] He catches things in flight; this enables him to dream that he is like an artist” (GS 1.2:543/SW 4:22).19 Rob Shields argues that the emergence of the detective novel is tied to the social justification of the labour time of journalists and writers of feuilletons, who, like the flâneur, “put their observations […] ‘for sale’ on the market.”20 Ill at ease with the idleness of the flâneur, capitalist society triumphs over his formal resistance by imposing a “productive” label on the activity of observation. In utilitarian society, the flâneur’s power of observation is “put to use” and becomes the productive work of the detective, thereby receiving social approval. The common trait of flâneur and detective is thus their power of observation. Following Benjamin, many have drawn this parallel: James Werner, for example, highlights the resemblances between the flâneur and Poe’s Dupin, pointing out how both pay “minute attention to details regarding facial features, expressions, and body language”; how both present a connection with some form of wealth and aristocracy and a snobbish rejection of “productive” and “socially valuable” labour; how both exhibit “isolation and detachment from society.”21 The eye of the stroller may be casual, and that of the detective purposeful, but both

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need to be simultaneously wide-ranging and deeply penetrating. Both flâneur and detective derive a subtle pleasure from detecting the truth of the street and both demonstrate a thorough pedestrian connoisseurship. Their method is the acute observation and perception of details, attention to whatever occurs in the street and incessant obsession with images and the pursuit of traces in the city crowd; both wish to uncover the mysteries of the city. Moreover, both are able to conjugate attentiveness to detail, a certain absentmindedness and distance from the outer world and the confidence of the idler in the power of chance.22 An entry to the Arcades Project reads: The experiences [Erfahrungen] of one who attends to a trace result only very remotely from any work activity, or are cut off from such a procedure altogether. (Not for nothing do we speak of “fortune hunting.”) They have no sequence and no system. They are a product of chance, and have about them the essential interminability that distinguishes the preferred obligations of the idler. The fundamentally unfinishable collection of things worth knowing, whose utility depends on chance, has its prototype in study. (m2,1)

Through its connection with observation, the detective story is related to the development of the optical devices of modernity, especially photography and film. “A Little History of Photography” relates the development of the camera to that of a new, “scientific” mode of observation: it brings things closer for inspection, discovers unknown images, reveals the secrets of reality – in a word, it discloses the optical unconscious of which Benjamin speaks in the Work of Art essay. “The camera is getting smaller and smaller,” Benjamin writes, “ever readier to capture fleeting and secret images whose shock effect paralyses the associative mechanisms in the beholder” (GS 2.1:385/SW 2:527). Similarly, the detective follows traces and the detective story, with its attention to details, brings to light what was hidden. Both camera and detective story thereby problematize the relation between “inner” and “outer,” on which bourgeois society is based. This is the argument of Tom Gunning’s study of Benjamin’s “optical” detective. Drawing a parallel between Poe’s Dupin and Benjamin’s detective, Gunning argues that the detective method inverts and complicates the relationships between “hidden” and “uncovered,” “deep” and

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“superficial,” “visible” and “invisible,” “simple” and “complex,” “inner” and “outer,” so that the boundaries between these apparently opposed categories become fluid under the detective’s gaze. Therefore, he concludes, “the detective story activates the complex dialectical optics of modernity, an optics based not only on the visual mastery of surveillance but also on the uncanny experience of transformed vision, glimpsing a presence where it is not, a space where it does not belong, and triggering a frisson of possible recognition.”23 Observation, detection, chance: all add up to the question of “method,” which for Benjamin is the core of the detective story.24 The method of detection is similar to that of the flâneur: through flânerie and observation the detective constructs, Shields argues, “a social physiognomy of the street.”25 “Flânerie,” Benjamin writes, “gives the individual the best prospects” for playing the detective (GS 1.2:543/SW 4:21). Nevertheless, the physiognomies of the first half of the nineteenth century provided an insufficient description of the modern city, because they were unable to grasp the complexity of the phenomenon of the crowd, especially its dark shades. If we identify the method of the flâneur with the physiognomic method, then detection can also be seen as in opposition to, and an evolution from, this method. And the detective story can be considered an evolution from the physiognomies, able to account for the anxieties of the city. As Benjamin notes, the insufficiency of flânerie led to the eventual collapse of the flâneur into the badaud. The distance the flâneuras-physiognomist claims to maintain from the crowd, and from others, disappears in the Second Empire, as the flâneur collapses into the criminal and every distinction between pursuer and pursued is annulled. This is why Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd” is an X-ray or, better, a model for the detective story.26 The detective’s observation is thus slightly different from that of the flâneur-physiognomist, a development and improvement upon it. Dana Brandt points out that “The Man of the Crowd” was written before the Dupin stories and argues that it is therefore not an X-ray, but an “embryo” of the detective story. In the representation of the city, the detective’s method superseded the flâneur’s, since it was both more adequate to the new experience of the crowd and more complex and detailed than the physiognomies. Poe’s descriptions of crime,

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incommunicability, anxiety, violence and solitude invented a new genre and new models for reading and consuming the modern city.27 Theory of the Trace The man who hasn’t signed anything, who left no picture, Who was not there, who said nothing: How can they catch him? Erase the traces. — Brecht, Lesebuch für Städtebewohner

Benjamin’s “theory of the detective” comprises a dialectic between the analysis of the detective story as another phantasmagoric representation of the city and the detective’s method as a sign of modernity and a progressive political tool. I will pursue this second path a little farther, connecting the figure of the detective to Benjamin’s “theory of the trace” (Theorie der Spur). This connection is explicit in his notes, even though it seems marginal and has therefore not been investigated with due thoroughness. This theory of the trace remains at the state of intuition, scattered in notes to the Arcades Project – mainly, but not only, in Convolute “I,” “The Interior, The Trace” – and a few other pieces. It is related to the “theory of the intérieur,” to the analysis of the panoptical state and, finally, to the revolutionary potentiality of modern architecture.28 “To dwell means to leave traces,” Benjamin writes, and the preferred site of these leavings is the bourgeois interior. In the 1935 exposé “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” he wrote that “the interior is not just the universe but also the étui of the private individual. To dwell means to leave traces. In the interior, these are accentuated. Coverlets and antimacassars, cases and containers are devised in abundance; in these, […] the traces of the inhabitant are imprinted in the interior” (GS 5.1:53/SW 3:39).29 The interior of the bourgeois apartment is thus the place where the owner stamps his or her mark, transforming it into a frozen museum for posterity; the bourgeois individual is “at home” only when surrounded by his or her own traces, only among the marks of his or her property. In fact, Benjamin notes, the privilege to leave traces is

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almost a bourgeois monopoly; and plush is “the material in which traces are left especially easily” (I5,2). Benjamin refers to Poe’s “Philosophy of Furniture” as a seminal account of this phenomenon: “enter the detective story, which pursues these traces. Poe, in his ‘Philosophy of Furniture’ as well as in his detective fiction, shows himself to be the first physiognomist of the domestic interior. The criminals in early detective novels are neither gentlemen nor apaches, but private citizens of the middle class” (GS 5.1:53/SW 3:39). The reference to Poe is not fortuitous: the detective story remains the only adequate description of the bourgeois interior and its horror. The traces the bourgeois leaves there are the traces of a crime, the apartment as claustrophobic and horrifying as a crime scene, the interior itself a “dead” space. This connection between bourgeois interior and the detective story is made explicit as early as the piece in One-Way Street called “Manorially Furnished Ten-Room Apartment”: The furniture style of the second half of the nineteenth century has received its only adequate description, and analysis, in a certain type of detective novel at the dynamic centre of which stands the horror of apartments. The arrangement of the furniture is at the same time the site plan of deadly trap, and the suite of rooms prescribes the path of the fleeing victim. […] The bourgeois interior of the 1860s to the 1890s […] fittingly houses only the corpse. ‘On this sofa the aunt cannot but be murdered.’ The soulless luxury of the furnishings becomes true comfort only in the presence of a dead body. (GS 4.1:88–9/SW 1: 446–7)

The bourgeois apartment is thus a dead space, soulless and lifeless, built as a trap and inhabited by corpses, from which any living thing is expelled, annihilated or murdered by the cult of lifeless and ageless commodities.30 The dream of permanence in commodity culture perpetuates the phantasmagoria of modernity and, as such, is as intoxicating as hashish.31 Though the bourgeois proprietor stamps every object with his or her mark, he or she conceals these traces from others. The bourgeois private sphere is therefore a fortress against the interference of public life. Heiner Weidmann notes that “the keeping of the trace is at the same time also its covering. The bourgeois, like the asocial, erases the traces, even as he or she preserves them; what the owner rescues for him- or herself, he or she conceals from the others. The cult of the trace is also simultaneous

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to the disappearing of the trace.”32 The bourgeois, like the asocial, erases the trace because in modernity an increasingly strict and firm net of control has been spread over private life. Examples include the official numbering of houses or the use of photography as a police identification procedure. As Weidmann writes, “a new way of preserving the traces immediately regains control of the disappearing of traces.”33 Benjamin himself observed that, since the French Revolution, the administrative apparatus has striven to multiply the traces of the individual in an instance of panoptical control.34 He writes that: The invention of photography was a turning point in the history of this process. It was no less significant for criminology than the invention of the printing press was for literature. Photography made it possible for the first time to preserve permanent and unmistakable traces of a human being. The detective story came into being when this most decisive of all conquests of a person’s incognito had been accomplished. Since that time, there has been no end to the efforts to capture [dingfest machen] a man in his speech and actions. (GS 1.2:550/SW 4:27)

Personal traces thus become incriminating clues, dangerous evidence in the hands of the detective-as-spy. To erase the traces, Brecht writes, becomes a necessity not only for those who are illegal, but for everyone, since everyone is a sort of criminal.35 Modern architecture further complicates the theory of the trace. If to live means to leave traces, then modern architecture seems to connote a paradox: it uses as construction materials glass and steel, on which it is impossible to leave traces. Its motto is thus “to live without leaving traces.” The idea of transparency seems dominant in the modernist architecture of Adolf Loos, Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus, which projected and built constructions whose materials and lines declared war on everything the nineteenth-century bourgeois interior had stood for: secrecy, possession, accumulation, collection. In “Experience and Poverty” Benjamin writes that “objects made of glass have no ‘aura.’ Glass is, in general, the enemy of secrets. It is also the enemy of possession” (GS 2.1:217/SW 2:734). Transparency annuls the opposition between interior and exterior, walls of glass do not protect the inner space and the functionality of modern lines declares war on nineteenth-century plush. As Weidmann notes,

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“the private sphere, the proprietor’s biotope, appears now destroyed in the new houses, which exhibit the inmates as in a theatre and prevent the collection and the accumulation of objects.”36 The anti-bourgeois potentialities of avant-garde architecture are embraced as revolutionary by Benjamin, at least in this piece: a new “poverty” is necessary in order to disrupt the bourgeois world and its obsession with traces, marks and possession; a new poverty is the tool to “erase the traces” of the capitalistconsumerist modes of production-accumulation and redesign new ways of living. In a piece called “To live without Leaving Traces” Benjamin writes: “this is what has now been achieved by the new architects, with their glass and steel: they have created rooms in which it is hard to leave traces. ‘It follows from the foregoing,’ Scheerbart declared a good twenty years ago, ‘that we can surely talk about a “culture of glass.” The new glassmilieu will transform humanity utterly. And now it remains only to be wished that the new glass-culture will not encounter too many enemies’” (GS 4.1:428/SW 2:701–2).37 Trace and Aura Objects made of glass have no “aura.” Is this because no trace can be left on them? How, then, are trace and aura related? It might be inferred that, where no trace can be left, no aura can be found. But the relation between trace and aura is more complex, articulated and, at times, apparently contradictory. On the one hand, aura and trace are bound together, since aura comes from the unique existence of an object “that bears the mark of the history to which the work has been subject” (GS 7.1:352/SW 3:103); aura is thus the result of the transmission of traces as an instance of tradition. On the other, Benjamin explicitly counterposes aura and trace. In an entry to the Arcades Project he writes: “Trace and aura. The trace is appearance of a nearness, however far removed the thing that left it behind may be. The aura is appearance of a distance, however close the thing that calls it forth. In the trace, we gain possession of the thing; in the aura, it takes possession of us” (M16a,4). The problem revolves around the concept of tradition, its conservation, cancellation or rewriting and our relation to it.

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The argument can be introduced through a discussion of the commodity. The commodity is “auratic” insofar as it bears no traces of its production. In this case, aura and traces are opposed. Eagleton argues that, like the flâneur or the baroque emblem, the commodity is a decontextualized fragment, polyvalent and empty. Its significance lies in the social relations of production, but it obliterates the traces of this production and floats, like the baroque allegory, in a polyvalence of meanings. The commodity receives and displays the traces only of other commodities, in a vicious circularity he calls “ambiguity”: “hollowed to the empty receptacle of traces of other traces, without a particle of autonomous matter in its economic make-up, the commodity is an orphaned nonentity with nothing to call its own […]. The process of commodity exchange is infinitely metonymic: each commodity is defined only by its displacement of another, constituted only by the endless circulation of the ‘trace’ that is the mechanism of its movement.”38 The detective, whose job is to follow traces, becomes in this context a possible instance of reconstructing the conditions of production from the collection of evidence or traces of social relations in commodities. Benjamin’s detective thus becomes an archaeologist and the traces he follows are the fossils of industrial glaciation: these fossilized traces can be read on the surfaces of surviving objects, the fossils of the ur-commodity revealing in their afterlife the truth-content of production.39 The reference to the figure of the detective is important, because the obliteration of the traces of the social relations of production is a crime. The capitalist mode of production as a whole is criminal and it tries to erase the traces of its crime in the commodity. A “progressive” detective fiction could be used to show this, and this is the aim, Benjamin writes, of Brecht’s Threepenny Novel: Brecht is concerned with politics; he makes visible the element of crime hidden in every business enterprise. Bourgeois legality and crime – these are, by the rules of the crime novel, opposites. Brecht’s procedure consists in retaining the highly developed technique of the crime novel but neutralizing its rules. This crime novel depicts the actual relation between bourgeois legality and crime. The latter is shown to be a special case of exploitation sanctioned by the former. (GS 3:447–8/ SW 3:8–9)

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The auratic object, Eagleton writes, “continually rewrites its own history to expel the traces of its ruptured, heterogeneous past.”40 Like the commodity, which expels the traces of the social relations of production, the auratic object constructs the authority of an origin by erasing, expelling and rewriting its traces. Aura as “authenticity” and “authority” imposes a fictitious tradition (a path of traces) which is the tradition of the victors. This is the aura the bourgeois proprietor attempts to impose on the commodified intérieur of plush: the trace is reinscribed, modified, falsified. “The trace, then,” Eagleton argues, “belongs in one sense with the aura, either as its petrified physical residue or […] the unconscious track.”41 The “authenticity” and “authority” of a thing are the essence not only of what is transmitted but also of the modes of its transmission. The revolutionary potentialities of mechanical reproduction lie in its expunging such “Ersatz aura” in a cheerful act of revolutionary violence, which according to Eagleton, “will blast out of history the apocalyptic empty space within which the new may germinate.”42 The personification of this purifying violence is the “destructive character,” a personal parallel to the revolutionary work of mechanical reproduction: just as “the technology of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the sphere of tradition” (GS 7.1:353/SW 3:104), so the destructive character, destroying, “rejuvenates, because it clears away the traces of our own age” (GS 4.1:397/SW 2:541, emphasis added). The destructive character is the revolutionary force which clears away the phantasmagoria of the bourgeois interior and the bourgeois obsession for leaving traces of proprietorship: “the destructive character is the enemy of the étui-man. The étui-man looks for comfort, and the case [Gehäuse] is its quintessence. The inside of the case is the velvet-lined trace that he has imprinted on the world. The destructive character obliterates even the traces of destruction.” The destructive character gets rid of “auratic” tradition, of those traces the bourgeois can only leave in plush, and “make[s] room,” “clears away,” “what exists he reduces to rubble – not for the sake of the rubble, but for that of the way leading through it” (GS 4.1:397–8/ SW 2:541–2, emphases added). The “shattering of tradition,” the “liquidation of the value of tradition in the cultural heritage” (GS 7.1:353–4/

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SW 3:104), must ensure the re-discovery of the traces – those erased and obliterated by the tradition of the victors – of a different history. Therefore, Eagleton insists, the erasure, preservation or revival of traces is a fundamental political practice. The object is but a palimpsest, on which every generation leaves a new set of scars and traces, which are thus what mark the object’s historicity, the elements of the production process which, in still clinging to the object, help defetishize it. “The traces inscribed on an object’s body,” Eagleton writes, “are the web that undoes its self-identity, the mesh of consumptional modes in which it has been variously caught.”43 The decision to erase or preserve the trace depends on the nature of the trace itself: the “auratic” trace “takes possession of us,” whereas if we clear superstructural tradition out of the way and rescue the traces of a different history, of the tradition of the oppressed, “we gain possession of the thing” (M16a,4). The figure of the detective thus becomes complementary to the destructive character: by rescuing and redeeming the traces of a shattered past and lost tradition, the detective becomes a metaphor for the materialist historian. The Historian as Detective Benjamin convincingly argues that the detective story developed in the second half of the nineteenth century as part of the phantasmagoria of modernity. Depicting the city as a place of danger and adventure, it played with the fears and anxieties of bourgeois society, which likes to indulge in the feeling of ideological terror. Yet it also romanticized the dull and boring existence of the city dweller and rescued – albeit only fictionally – the sense of individuality and singularity modernity has lost in the labyrinth of the crowd. Interested in the detective’s peculiar gifts for observation, Benjamin explicitly relates the figure to the new optical technologies. It is plausible to argue that the development of the detective story is related to a Zeitgeist involved in an optical revolution and in a peculiar interest in vision and visibility. Tom Gunning’s and James Werner’s studies pursue this argument, but limit their analyses to the detective’s “optical” dimension. I have been arguing that the figure

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of the detective in Benjamin acquires a fuller meaning if related to the theory of the trace. Pursuing the traces the bourgeois proprietor imprints on his or her objects as a mark of ownership, the detective unveils the crime and death residing at the centre of the bourgeois interior; snooping after the traces the panoptical state tries to multiply to control private life, the detective becomes a spy in the capitalist complot; finally, losing these traces in a twentieth century marked by an architecture of glass and steel and serialized reproduction of art and commodities, the detective reveals the revolutionary possibilities in the avant-garde. To conclude, I would like to expand on the notion of the detective as metaphor for the materialist historian. The revolutionary action of mechanical reproduction and the destructive character has to be counterbalanced and completed by the activity of research and preservation of the materialist historian-as-detective, whose task is not to “erase the traces” (the destructive character has already done this), but rather to recover and reconstitute them. As Pierre Missac points out, “to destroy or to shatter is not to annihilate – to return to dust soon dispersed by the ‘winds of history’ – but rather to unsettle, ‘to break into pieces.’”44 Amid these broken pieces, the shattered ruins of the official history, the materialist detective, like the hunter or the archaeologist, tries to “follow the trail [Spur] of the past” (H1a,1). Detection is the method of the flâneur, the ragpicker, the archaeologist and the historian, who search for clues among dead data. Reading – or rather reconstructing – the traces of a shattered tradition, the tradition of the oppressed, is the redemptive activity of this alternative figure of detective, who, in David Frisby’s words, seeks to bring “insignificant details and seemingly fortuitous events into a meaningful constellation.”45 For Benjamin, the city’s surface is double layered: in the asphalt over which the flâneur passes, “his steps awaken an echo” (GS 4.1:238/ SW 3:354), that of the past. “The space winks at the flâneur” (M1a,3): along his route the palimpsest of the street becomes alive and images from the past throw the flâneur-as-detective into a state of “anamnestic intoxication” (M1,5). The spectre of the past haunts the present, the ghosts of the past await resuscitation; the flâneur-as-detective, following the traces of forgotten histories, discovering what is hidden in the city, awakens the

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dead. The work of the historian is similar to that of the detective because these traces are hidden and obscure, incomprehensible like hieroglyphs.46 Under the detective’s acute observation, the traces reveal the past in a flash of light, which illuminates what was in the dark, but risks disappearing if we do not recognize it. As Benjamin writes in “On the Concept of History,” history withdraws, the image of the past always “threatens to disappear in any present that does not recognize itself as intended in that image” (GS 1.2:695/SW 4:391). History, Eduardo Cadava points out, “is always on the verge of disappearing, without disappearing.”47 The possibility of history is bound to the survival of its traces and our ability to read them, and the task of the historian-as-detective is thus to bring these traces to legibility in time of danger. The metaphor that connects the historian with the detective is well worn by now: their methods and tools are similar and Benjamin is not alone – either in his time or ours – in his taste for detective novels, as a growing literature suggests.48 Robin Winks, one example among many, writes that “the historian must collect, interpret, and then explain his evidence by methods which are not greatly different from those techniques employed by the detective, or at least by the detective of fiction.”49 In this sense, Benjamin himself has often been related to the figure of the detective. He was a great collector of traces, as Featherstone points out: he collected “the scraps of urban life such as handbills, tickets, photographs, advertisements, diaries, newspaper cuttings. He followed the principle of citation in which the mute bits and pieces of urban life were asked to speak for themselves.”50 His researches in the archives and in the labyrinth of the Bibliothèque Nationale emblematize the “dangerous” and obscure pursuit of the explorer of texts and the adventurer of libraries. What this literature fails to emphasize, however, is that the historian has to work as a detective because what he or she has to uncover in the past is a series of crimes. This is surely Benjamin’s point when he asks: “but isn’t every square inch of our cities a crime scene? Every passer-by a culprit? Isn’t the task of the photographer –descendant of the augurs and haruspices – to reveal guilt and to point out the guilty in his pictures?” (GS 2.1:385/SW 2:527). This passage is echoed and completed in The Work of Art essay, when Benjamin again refers to Atget’s disturbing

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photographs: “with Atget, photographic records begin to be evidence in the historical trial [Prozess]. This constitutes their hidden political significance” (GS 7.1:361/SW 3:108). For Benjamin, history is a “catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage” (GS 1.2:697/SW 4:392), a never-ending series of crimes, injustice, murders. As in a detective novel, the traces, Ernest Mandel writes, “have to be discovered because tracks have been covered.”51 These traces are the “evidence in the historical trial” and therefore the work of the historian-as-detective is eminently political. The historian thus shares with the detective, not only method and technique, a sharp eye and deductive power, the diligent search and acute intuition, but also the gloomy expectation of discovering a corpse, the sense of danger and precariousness at being in the dark, the awareness of fighting powerful and merciless enemies, and the iron determination to discover the murderer.

3.2 Spectres of Detection: Paul Auster and the Metaphysical Detective It is ridiculous to set a detective story in New York City. New York City is itself a detective story. — Agatha Christie, Life, 14 May 1956 Why … is everybody so interested in texts? — Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

Benjamin in New York Benjamin never made it to New York. One can wonder whether he would have found there the “capital of the XX century” and been as at home in the centre of modern high capitalism as in the Paris of the Surrealist revolution. Gretel Karplus-Adorno was convinced he would, when she

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wrote to him in a letter of 7 March 1938: “not only I feel much more comfortable here than I did in London, but I’m quite convinced that you would too. […] One does not have to search for surrealistic things here, for one stumbles across them all the time” (AB 314/CC 241). Indeed, Benjamin’s theories of urban modernity have been repeatedly applied to New York as the representative case of the “modern city” by urbanists, social critics and literary theorists. Benjamin’s discourse about the city, the sign and the flâneur, although elaborated in the old Europe of the 1920s and 1930s, also seem to be actual and operative in the capital of the New World. In this chapter, I will juxtapose Benjamin’s account of the detective with the work of “detection” elaborated in a fictional representation of 1980s New York, Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy. This constellation will put together two very different settings, the Paris of the 1930s and the New York of the 1980s, and two very different critical vocabularies: whereas the 1930s in Paris were the high point of modernism, the 1980s in New York were that of postmodernism. This operation goes against the common practice of Auster criticism: he is regarded as one of the key exponents of American postmodernism and usually read through postmodernist critical grids.1 Moreover, he explicitly disavows reading his Trilogy as a detective novel. He agrees that he “used certain elements of detective fiction,” but “for such different ends, for things that had so little to do with detective stories,” that he “was somewhat disappointed by the emphasis that was put on them.”2 This constellation will thus propose a misreading, a misinterpretation of the author’s intentions and a misuse of his work. To my knowledge, only one study attempts a comparison between Benjamin and Auster, an article by Peter Kirkegaard published in Orbis Literarum in 1993. Kirkegaard finds interesting similarities between Benjamin’s work on language, allegory, the sign, the flâneur, the ragpicker, and parallel suggestions in Auster’s novels. He concludes that “ideas, concepts, interests that you find in Benjamin’s work, pop up and show themselves to be fully operational today in New York, USA.”3 Benjamin is often appropriated by postmodern theory as a precursor, a “protopostmodernist”: his work on allegory, on the fragmentation of history, on the urban condition and, not least, his marginality to the modernist

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intellectual panorama, make him very “attuned” to a postmodern sensibility which cannibalizes his work with characteristic nonchalance. Benjamin’s strong presence in contemporary debate might also be due to the “malleability” of many of his categories. Nevertheless, this pastiche-like operation risks emptying Benjamin’s project of its meaning, transforming theory into slogan: Kirkegaard’s study simply “adapts” Benjamin to Auster, thereby deforming his politics to the point that they seem to coincide with American postmodernism. What this constellation will attempt is, rather, a reading that, by juxtaposing Auster and Benjamin, will call forth an image of the detective and its place in contemporary criticism. Benjamin’s critique of the detective novel is that, as a form of “consumption” of the city, it is phantasmagoric, because it romanticizes the setting and glorifies the actors, “saving” them from the unreadability and anonymity of modern life. The development of detective fiction into the “metaphysical detective novel,” or the “anti-detective novel” – of which Auster’s Trilogy is an instance – unmasks this phantasmagoria in the negation of its constitutive elements. I too will find, like Kirkegaard, correspondances between Benjamin and Auster in the first part of my analysis. Nevertheless, I have argued that in Benjamin the project of detection, supported by the theory of the trace, can be interpreted as a figure for the work of the materialist historian, who must unveil the crimes in history by following the traces the criminals have covered. Auster uses instead the form of the detective story to undertake a quest for identity, which ends up as an exercise in introspection, where all the traces lead inward – i.e. disappear – and the world is left behind. I will therefore argue that the project of detection in Auster has lost its potentialities, its political meaning, and has been transformed into a complacent glance into the mirror. From l’Homme de Foules to the Doomed Detective Auster’s New York Trilogy comprises three novellas, City of Glass, Ghosts and The Locked Room.4 In the first, a writer of detective novels, Daniel Quinn, receives mysterious phone calls from someone urgently looking

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for Paul Auster, a private detective. Quinn decides to adopt Auster’s identity and take the case, so he meets Peter Stillman, Jr., a young man who has spent nine years of his childhood locked in a dark room, because his father, Peter Stillman, Sr., had been convinced he would thereby remember God’s language. Stillman, Sr., has been released from prison and Stillman, Jr., is afraid of him; Quinn’s job is to follow the father and ensure he will do no harm to the son. In Ghosts, a private detective, Blue, is hired by a mysterious man, White, to follow another individual, Black, for as long as it takes. Blue rents an apartment in front of Black’s building and observes him; Black, for his part, sits in his room all day, reads and writes, and nothing happens for many long months. In The Locked Room, an unnamed narrator receives a phone call from the wife of his childhood friend, Fanshawe, who has disappeared and whose writings she wants the narrator to publish. The narrator falls in love with the wife, marries her, adopts Fanshawe’s son, publishes his books, and starts writing his biography. Everything goes well until the narrator receives a letter from Fanshawe: he is not dead, but merely went into hiding. The narrator therefore begins to look obsessively for Fanshawe and his biographical research becomes a pursuit of the “criminal.” The plot of the three novellas follows the traditional schema of the detective story: A is hired by B to follow C. We could say that they reproduce what Benjamin called the “X-ray” of the detective story, following the pattern of Poe’s “Man of The Crowd.” The trope of the urban wanderer, the flâneur, becomes central from the very first pages of the Trilogy, in its description of Daniel Quinn: “more than anything else, […] what he liked to do was walk. Nearly every day, rain or shine, hot or cold, he would leave his apartment to walk through the city – never really going anywhere, but simply going wherever his legs happened to take him” (City of Glass 3). Nevertheless, the flâneur has long since being swallowed up by mass society and Auster’s 1980s wanderers are very far from Baudelaire’s detached urban connoisseur: though pursuers in the game of detection, they are closer to the figure of the old man in Poe’s story, who seeks refuge in the crowd and “refuses to be alone.”5 Quinn, in particular, tries to “lose” himself and “erase his traces,” by tramping the streets of New York, thus attaining the sensation that he is “nowhere” (City of Glass,

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p. 4). Lost in the city streets, he tries to depersonalize himself and so escape the memories that haunt him (of a dead wife and son).6 In Quinn, the observing eye has collapsed into the “man of the crowd,” l’homme de foules, the badaud, who uses his wanderings through the city to escape from his own despair.7 Detective and criminal are indistinguishable. Following Poe’s blueprint, Auster’s detectives assume, at the beginning of the novellas, that the city and the Other are “readable.” In City of Glass, Quinn, following the rules of Dupin’s detection, even attempts a physiognomic reading of a picture of the man he’s pursuing, Peter Stillman, Sr. But, like the old man in Poe, Stillman’s face (also that of an old man) “lässt sich nicht lesen,” is unreadable, incomprehensible, undecipherable: it is the anonymous face of the man of the crowd. As in Poe, the crowd in Auster’s novellas is the “hiding place” into which one strives to merge in order to escape the burden of individuality. The dialectic Benjamin identified between Baudelairean erotic fusion and bourgeois fear of anonymity has disappeared: the postmodern subject is the “man of the crowd,” even in the person of the detective, the supposed “saviour” of individuality’s traces. However, a different reading is possible. Patricia Merivale and Susan Elisabeth Sweeney consider Poe’s “The Man of The Crowd” the origin of the “metaphysical detective story,” an account of detection parallel and opposed to the Dupin’s model, where the victim, the pursuer and the pursued are indeed the same person and detection result in a quest for identity.8 For Merivale and Sweeney, Poe has to be credited with the invention of two specular genres of detection: both the Dupin’s model (Conan Doyle, Sayers, Christie, Hammett and Chandler) and “The Man of the Crowd” “metaphysical” genre of introspective detectives (Borges, Nabokov, Robbe-Grillet, Calvino, Eco).9 This second model eventually becomes dominant and transforms the detective story from popular lowbrow consumer good into highly intellectualized and refined postmodern allegory. Auster’s Trilogy falls entirely within this second type: the three “detectives,” Daniel Quinn, Blue and the unnamed narrator, discover eventually that they have been pursuing themselves the whole time. The crowd is no longer the “hiding place” where traces are erased because it simply disappears from the story: the detective pursues his own self in

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an imaginary space, which is in the end a non-space.10 Benjamin’s quasisociological reading of “the pursuer, the crowd, and an unknown man” (GS 1.2:550/SW 4:27) is superseded by an account where the detective, in Stefano Tani’s definition, is “doomed” to an endless (and fruitless) introspection that severs him or her from the world.11 The threat of the Other is annulled. “It was all a question of method”: The Anti-Detective Novel The three novellas begin as an exercise in detection, with all the characteristic features of the detective novel: the “private eye” (although only in Ghosts is he a “professional”), the missing person, the “dame.” Daniel Quinn, the protagonist of City of Glass, is himself a writer of detective fiction under the pseudonym of William Wilson (which is, of course, a reference to the homonymous Poe story) and a great consumer of “mysteries.”12 What Quinn likes in detective novels is: their sense of plenitude and economy. In the good mystery there is nothing wasted, no sentence, no word that is not significant. And even if it is not significant, it has the potential to be so – which amounts to the same thing. The world of the book comes to life, seething with possibilities, with secrets and contradictions. Since everything seen or said, even the slightest, most trivial thing, can bear a connection to the outcome of the story, nothing must be overlooked. Everything becomes essence, the centre of the book shifts with each event that propels it forward. The centre, then, is everywhere, and no circumference can be drawn until the book has come to its end. The detective is the one who looks, who listens, who moves through this morass of objects and events in search of the thought, the idea that will pull these things together and make sense of them (City of Glass 8).

Quinn thus reads and writes detective novels, searching for this sense of economy and completeness, for the “thought, the idea” which can make sense of the reality. In an interview, Auster defines the detective as “the seeker after truth, the problem solver, the one who tries to figure things out.”13 The detective novel, therefore, looks for, or imposes, an order in the chaos of events. This is the phantasmagoria of panoptical

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control Benjamin identified in the origins of the detective story (cf. GS 1.2:550/SW 4:27). The presupposition, Stephen Bernstein writes, is that “patterns do cohere behind the confusing surface of reality, and that there exists a specialized group, detectives, who can read them.”14 The traditional detective novel is governed by what William Little calls “a totalizing imperative”: it presumes a structure in which nothing goes to waste, nothing is not significant, in which every single trace leads to the organizing circumference, refers to the logos of the story and “becomes essence.”15 The formula is the teleological construct of beginning, development and end, where the conclusion bears a promise of redemption. Mauro Pala argues that the detective story thus reaffirms and celebrates the discourse of modernity.16 Nevertheless, in Auster’s detective fiction this circumference cannot be drawn. The plot of the three novellas inescapably comes to a standstill when the detective realizes that the traces he is following lead nowhere. The detective tries to figure things out, but, Auster says, “what if, in the course of trying to figure it out, you just unveil more mysteries?”17 “His trilogy,” Bernstein writes, “consistently defers the expectation that the city can be read, or the individual recovered from the crowd.”18 In the end, Quinn concludes, “it was all a question of method” (City of Glass 65), echoing Benjamin’s own statement19; but the method of the detective no longer works. If, for Benjamin, observation and chance are the keys to detective work (cf. m2,1), in Auster chance overwhelms any possibility of observation. Auster writes that Quinn: had always imagined that the key to good detective work was a close observation of details. The more accurate the scrutiny, the more successful the results. The implication was that human behavior could be understood, that beneath the infinite façade of gestures, tics, and silences, there was finally a coherence, an order, a source of motivation. But after struggling to take in all these surface effects, Quinn felt no closer to Stillman than when he first started following him. He had lived Stillman’s life, walked at his pace, seen what he had seen, and the only thing he felt now was the man’s impenetrability. Instead of narrowing the distance that lay between him and Stillman, he had seen the old man slip away from him, even as he remained before his eyes (City of Glass 67).

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The assumption that “human behavior could be understood” is necessarily false; close observation of details – and all the other tricks of detective work – is insufficient to find order and coherence, not only in human beings, but in reality itself. The coherence of reality is an invention,20 an ideological phantasmagoria, and after two weeks old Stillman disappears without trace, leaving Quinn with “no clues, no leads, no moves to be made” (City of Glass 91). Therefore, the crowd, the city, the mystery, to quote Poe again, “lässt sich nicht lesen,” the order the detective tries to impose on reality is illusory and the mystery remains unsolved. This form of open-ended, or “failed,” detective fiction has been labelled “anti-detective fiction” and related specifically to the crisis of the modern order – and of the detective novel as a reaffirmation of that order. Auster, among others, subverts the existing elements and deliberately negates the fundamental purposes of the genre by refusing final redemption: the mystery remains ungraspable, like Stillman, who slips “away from him, even as [he] remained before his eyes” (City of Glass 67). As Bernstein writes, “the trilogy ultimately dramatizes detection as an unworkable confrontation with a reality whose dubious significance cannot be credibly decoded.”21 The text, like reality, resists the reader’s expectations and the necessity of closure, it resists any “hermeneutic recuperation” and deludes any “hermeneutic promise.”22 No case is closed, no one of the novellas ends properly, the teleological promise of progress and the search for meaning are subverted: the city withholds its secrets from the detective. William Spanos famously described the antidetective story as “the paradigmatic archetype of the postmodern literary imagination,” its formal purpose being “to evoke the impulse to ‘detect’ […] in order to violently frustrate it by refusing to solve the crime.”23 As Tani notes, this “decentring and chaotic admission of mystery, of nonsolution,” is particularly attuned to postmodern sensibility and becomes its ideal medium of expression.24 It seems also particularly attuned to Benjamin’s critique of the bourgeois desire for readability, control, mastery, which constituted for him part of the phantasmagoria of the detective story.

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The Language of Babel The impossibility of solving the mystery, of connecting clues to crimes, traces to criminal, is first a linguistic problem. Therefore, the question of language becomes central both in the detective story in general and in Auster’s Trilogy in particular. The detective story is usually considered a gloss to the act of reading: the readers mirror and identify with the detective in their pursuit of traces, in the attempt to piece together the fragments of the puzzle and solve the mystery. Both reader and detective attempt an epistemological work of interpretation.25 In order for the epistemological task to be fulfilled, traditional detective fiction presupposes a linguistic economy of simple correspondence, of transparency. Auster’s detectives undertake their detecting “job” with what Blue in Ghosts calls a “transparent” conception of language: Words are transparent for him, great windows that stand between him and the world, and until now they have never impeded his view, have never even seemed to be there. Oh, there are moments when the glass gets a trifle smudged and Blue has to polish it in one spot or another, but once he finds the right word, everything clears up (Ghosts 148).

This is the same unproblematic “sense of plenitude and economy” (City of Glass 8) that Quinn finds so appealing in detective novels: words are there to describe facts; facts can be read as “traces,” as a source of information; the signifier matches the signified, the traces match the crime. However, Auster’s three novellas tell of the unworkability of this linguistic economy: the functionality of signs is negated. As Blue finds out: It’s as though his words, instead of drawing out the facts and making them sit palpably in the world, have induced them to disappear. […] For the first time in his experience of writing reports, he discovers that words do not necessarily work, that it is possible for them to obscure the things they are trying to say (Ghosts 149).26

In this sense, the central motif of the whole Trilogy is the lost prelapsarian language Peter Stillman, Sr., was trying to reconstruct. The postlapsarian,

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post-Babel language is a broken language, in which signifiers no longer correspond to signifieds, and therefore evil reigns on earth. Stillman had deprived his son of any contact with the broken postlapsarian world in order for him to “remember” the prelapsarian divine language of unity. But this unity cannot be restored and, in consequence, Stillman commits suicide and Auster’s detectives disappear in a textual jam. Stillman’s references to “the language of Babel” are interestingly reminiscent of Benjamin’s terminology in the early essays “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man” (1916) and “The Task of the Translator” (1921).27 Even more important for Auster’s postmodern “linguistics” is Benjamin’s work on allegory, one of the most “postmodernized” – or “postmodernizable” – aspects of his work (and therefore the main reference for Kirkegaard’s essay). The antinomy of the allegorical, Benjamin writes in the Trauerspiel book, is that “any person, any object, any relationship can mean absolutely anything else” (GS 1.1:350/OT 175).28 The signifier is free. One episode in City of Glass is particularly suggestive: “without any particular reason,” Quinn traces in his notebook the map of Stillman’s wanderings through the streets of New York, finding that the daily routes resemble letters of the alphabet. Composing them together, the word “owerofbab” results. Realising that he failed to record the first four days’ movements, and assuming that Stillman has not finished yet, Quinn imagines these wanderings are an attempt to write the words “the tower of babel,” a reference to his crazy plan of language reconstruction. However, much in this absurd conclusion is the work of Quinn’s desire to find meaning and purpose in Stillman’s wanderings. Quinn needs to think that Stillman’s steps lead somewhere, that they have a purpose; when they go nowhere he creates the missing correspondence between signifier and signified.29 The picture thus exists only in Quinn’s notebook, language no longer describes outer reality, but reality is what is registered and mastered in the detective’s notebook. As Carl Malmgren writes, “materializing the signs, the notebook creates them. And insofar as the case begins when the notebook is purchased, and the notebook contains the only record of the case, then reality has already been turned into text.”30 This is a catchword of postmodernism: every description of reality happens through a textual

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construct, which, given the free-floating nature of the signifiers, has no claim to “truth.” Hence, reality is only text. Norma Rowen’s conclusion thus seems consequential: “Auster’s reworking of the detective story as a quest for the definitive language finally tells us that it is not the correct and final text of reality but a text about the text that is the most appropriate one for the postmodern world. Stories about stories, books not of answers but of questions: these are the forms in which the difficult reality of our time finds its best embodiment.”31 The isolated, free-floating signifier takes the place of old(-fashioned) reality, the outside world, and the real becomes text, thus suspending what Jameson calls “the troublesome notion of ‘objectivity.’”32 “Texts about texts” are welcomed and hailed as the “most appropriate” form and “best embodiment” of post-modernity, and Benjamin’s allegory is often evoked, as in Kirkegaard’s essay, in their support. However, the misunderstanding here is acute, since Benjamin never welcomed the allegorization of the real. He certainly identified a “progressive tendency of allegory” in its “destructive furor,” which dispels “the illusion that proceeds from all ‘given order’” and “the illusion of totality or of organic wholeness which transfigures that order and makes it seems endurable” ( J57,3). But, as he writes in “Central Park,” “allegorical emblems return as commodities” (GS 1.2:681/SW 4:183). The free-floating signifier that only reflects itself – Baudrillard’s simulacrum – is, like the commodity that obliterates every trace of its production, ultimately “auratic.” The signifier is thus commodified; more, it becomes the ultimate form of commodity. If for Benjamin “allegory is the armature of modernity” (GS 1.2:681/SW 4:183), today it is even more so one of post-modernity. Glass In Auster’s novellas, reality is unreadable because the signifier floats over it, unable to penetrate it, the surface is resistant to interpretation. Auster’s cityscape, Ralph Willet writes, is flat, uniform, without depth, a play of repetitions.33 Quinn, Blue and the narrator of The Locked Room look for transparency, for the clarity of the signifier, for a city of glass. What they

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find is instead a glossy surface, where the signifier rebounds, is reflected, and by which it is repelled: a mirror. In a city of mirrors and multiple reflections, signs are purely arbitrary and there is no possible system of representative reference. As Richard Swope writes, “the urban text we read is impenetrable because it is all surface, as if nothing exists beneath the glassy veneer.”34 The construction of space in The New York Trilogy follows a precise pattern: at the beginning of each novel, New York is described as an “inexhaustible space” (City of Glass 3), a place for wide-ranging walks and freedom; eventually, each character finds himself enclosed in a hall of mirrors, the topography of the novels revealed as only one of many specular illusions, in which space is emptied out and becomes, in Little’s phrase, an anti-topos, a place of absence.35 Benjamin called Paris “the city of mirrors” (R1,3), but viewed the mirror interplay in the Parisian street as contributing to the “interweaving of space,” of street and intérieur, so that mirrors “bring the open expanse, the streets, into the café” (R1,1).36 The detective (together with the optical devices of modernity) problematized the bourgeois spatial division of “inner” and “outer,” so that the interplay of mirrors has been a traditional tool in detective fiction, signifying penetration and intrusion. Auster’s city of mirrors, by contrast, repels the gaze and imprisons his characters in a world made of infinite images of themselves. Instead of bringing the outside street into the intérieur, Auster’s mirrors bring the characters’ “inner” into the “outer,” annulling the outer space and subjecting it to the “sovereignty of inwardness” (City of Glass 61).37 The “interweaving of space” means here that space is ultimately annulled, the space of the novel only ever a fictitious New York, merely the projection of the character’s mind. In this postmodern form of Berkeleian idealism, reality exists, as Markus Rheindorf argues, only through the characters’ minds, the exterior world constantly brought into existence by their thoughts, and hence detection will show them nothing but themselves.38 When Auster’s detectives look at the Other, then, they look into a mirror. All the characters in the novellas are in the end only the Doppelgänger of the pseudo-detective, reflections in some ways of his self, embodiments of aspects of his own nature. The traditional assumption

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is that the detective is a “shadow”: the three detectives begin “shadowing” the Other, following their traces, behaving like them, copying their every move. Quinn ends up behaving like Stillman, Blue identifies with Black, the narrator of The Locked Room marries Fanshawe’s wife, adopts his son, publishes his books and begins to write his biography. The “transparency” of the city of glass should ensure the visibility of the Other, the possibility of understanding their existence, their thoughts, their “essence.”39 However, glass turned into a mirror, not only precludes the observation of the Other, but also annuls their existence. In the hall of mirrors, there are only images of the self, multiplied into infinity.40 This same self is a two dimensional, flat, depthless image, which cannot be penetrated. Quinn does not recognize himself when he sees his image reflected in a shop window at the end of City of Glass; the detectives are condemned to monitor themselves without being able to penetrate the surface, to break the mirror. The space of the novel and the project of detection, that utopia of transparency in the city of glass, collapse into the closed space of the individual mind, which the illusory game of mirrors makes infinite, but which in the end is only a point, the locked room that gives the third novella its title. And this locked room, to which the detective has no key, is “located inside my skull” (The Locked Room 293), as the narrator discovers. This complex interplay of mirrors is complemented by the specularity of the novellas: all three are essentially retelling the same story, they are mirror images of one another, they look at one another and duplicate meanings, situations, even the names of characters (which recur – although the characters themselves are changed and unrecognizable). We could say about Auster what the author writes about Quinn at the beginning of City of Glass – “what interested him about the stories he wrote was not their relation to the world but their relation to other stories” (City of Glass 7) – adding perhaps that the author of these other stories is always the same, Paul Auster.41 In The New York Trilogy Auster constructs an intricately self-referential world that revolves around itself, reproducing ad infinitum the same obsessive image: the walls of the city of glass mirror the protagonists, characters mirror characters, each novella mirrors the others. Therefore, there is no room for any “theory of the

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trace”: to paraphrase Benjamin, no matter what trace Auster’s detective may follow, every one on them will lead him inward. The emphasis on glass in Benjamin’s “theory of the trace” derives from the modernist myth of transparency42: glass has no “aura,” it is “the enemy of secrets,” “the enemy of possession”, the anti-bourgeois material par excellence (GS 2.1:217/SW 2:734). In postmodern architecture – and in Auster’s novels – transparency turns into its reversal, reflectivity, glass becoming a mirror, which does not permit unmediated access and visibility, but produces spatial illusion. As Jameson writes, the fact that postmodern hyperspace is unmappable produces a new poverty of experience: experience, which means also cultural production, is relegated to mental space, without any connection to social, political and cultural reality. The cultural system, thus, cannot but reproduce itself absolutely, inevitably and infinitely.43 This is certainly not the poverty of experience Benjamin invoked as revolutionary liberation from the bourgeois obsession with accumulation, plush, traces. In a city constituted of “a series of states of mind”, Anthony Vidler observes, “we wander […] surprised but not shocked by the continuous repetition of the same,” and in the end “we cross nothing to go nowhere.”44 The postmodern poverty of experience multiplies exponentially what was once modern boredom – which the detective novel had aimed to conceal by romanticizing the city as “adventure.” Benjamin defined modernity as “the time of hell,” where “the new (the pendant) is always the eternally selfsame” (S2a,3). The play of infinite repetition of the hall of mirrors adds a certain copycat quality to the postmodern, which no longer even tries to mask its self-referentiality under the phantasmagoric label of “new”: it happily embraces the devil. The “perspective on infinity” of two mirrors reflecting each other is, according to Benjamin, “Satan’s favourite trick” (R1,6).45 The infinite reflection “fabulously amplifies the spaces,” but precisely in its infinitely many aspects, space “remains ambiguous, double-edged. It blinks: it is always this one – and never nothing – out of which another immediately arises. The space that transforms itself does so in the bosom of nothingness [im Schloße des Nichts]. In its tarnished, dirty mirrors, things exchange a Kaspar-Hauser-look with the nothing. It is like an equivocal wink coming from nirvana” (R2a,3, emphases added).

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The hall of mirrors reflects ad infinitum a satanic nothingness, the same nothingness Auster’s characters build around themselves. The description of Quinn’s walks in the incipit of City of Glass establishes the setting for the three novellas: “New York was that nowhere he had built around himself, and he realized that he had no intention of ever leaving it again” (City of Glass 4). Stefano Tani writes that the detective has to map the labyrinth of the past by crashing the mirror of the present, which, since it changes and distorts the image of the past, is the best ally of the murderer.46 To get to the crime, to catch the murderer, the detective has to crash the mirror. Auster’s detectives, rather, remain hypnotized by their own image and dissolve into the infinite multiplication of their own emptiness. Labyrinths of Solitude: Inside Paul Auster Benjamin noted how the detective story contributed to a (phantasmagoric) “salvage” of the individual amid the anonymous crowd. Constructing the fictitious strong and resourceful character of the detective, who could follow the trace of the individual and work out the mysteries of the city, the detective story romanticized the city as “dangerous” and allowed for the self-deception of what Baudelaire would name the “heroism” of modern life. Auster seems to play with this concept in order to unmask the fictitious construction of identity. His characters identify with the figure of the detective47 only to find out the instability of every identity. Quinn, in particular, identifies with Max Work, the protagonist of the detective novels he writes, in order to make sense of his own meaningless life. Impersonating the private detective, Paul Auster, he tries to step into the figure of Max Work, in order to have an extratextual adventure, in which he will become his literary “hero.” Like Don Quixote (whose initials Daniel Quinn shares), he tries to inhabit the fictional world of his favourite fictional form.48 However, Auster allows his characters to take on strong fictitious personalities only in order to mock them and demonstrate the unworkability of individual identity. Auster’s detectives not only cannot solve the case, not only lose the traces of the criminal

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and end up nowhere, but also, most importantly, find out that their own identity is unstable, dysfunctional, schizophrenic. Nevertheless, this same “deconstruction” of the heroic self is what, in Auster’s fiction, is supremely “heroic,” and it remains, therefore, highly phantasmagoric. His characters undergo a process of fragmentation and humiliation, their quest for identity leads them to break down completely, to pursue physical deprivation, hunger, exhaustion, self-sacrifice and solitude: the quest for identity is as bristling with dangers and risks as was the traditional detective story’s “city as jungle.” If the final redemption fails to materialize, at least the quest has been heroic; or, better, the quest for identity is itself its own heroic redemption. Auster romanticizes the notion of the self (or non-self ) in a different, but no less phantasmagoric, way to that in the traditional self-centred detective. The process of introspection encloses the characters in what the narrator of The Locked Room calls a “mythical solitude” (The Locked Room 292), which is the heroic solitude of the writer. Ever since Auster’s first “experiment” in prose, the semiautobiographical The Invention of Solitude (1982), solitude has been one of his catchwords: the heroic moment of introspection, of romantic selfreflectivity, is the only way out of the absurd situations in his novels. As Auster has stressed on various occasions, the core of The New York Trilogy is “the problem of identity,” “the question of who is who and whether or not we are who we think we are. The whole process that Quinn undergoes in that book – and the characters in the other two, as well – is one of stripping away to some barer condition in which we have to face up to who we are. Or who we aren’t. It finally comes to the same thing.”49 Auster’s characters never reach the end of their quest, because the process loops into a vicious circle of what Walker calls “obsessive voyeurism.” All their pursuits are pointless and in the end futile, Walker writes, “because they lead to nothing new, because they collapse into circular paths of obsessive voyeurism: me watching you watching me watching you, and on to infinity.”50 In this sense, Ghosts is an “X-ray” of the other two novels and of the Trilogy in general: it does away with all the drapery of convoluted plot, names and places, so that only the armature remains: me watching you watching me. Since the watching “I” (or “eye”) is in reality looking into a mirror, the problem of alterity is reduced

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to the problem of identity (and thus eliminated). Esse est percipi. Blue in Ghosts at moments “feels so completely in harmony with Black,” his own specular image, that “to anticipate what Black is going to do […] he needs merely look into himself ” (Ghosts 158). But the image in the mirror is pure surface, with no depth, and thus impenetrable, unknowable, so that “there are times when he feels totally removed from Black, cut off from him in a way that is so stark and absolute that he begins to lose the sense of who he is” (Ghosts 158). This final passage of The Locked Room is thus a conclusion to the Trilogy as a whole: We exist for ourselves, perhaps, and at times we even have a glimmer of who we are, but in the end we can never be sure, and as our lives go on, we become more and more opaque to ourselves, more and more aware of our own incoherence. No one can cross the boundary into another – for the simple reason that no one can gain access to himself (The Locked Room 249).

The model for The New York Trilogy is, therefore, not so much “The Man of The Crowd” as Poe’s story “William Wilson,” with its plays of doubles and mirrors. Postmodern enthusiasts conclude that the self, like reality, is a merely textual construct, “subject to the difference and deferral inherent in language,”51 and that the end of the quest for identity must lead protagonist and reader to realize this: there is no truth of identity, but rather only a text. The various identity-texts of The New York Trilogy collapse into one another, and the macro-text of the novel is a play of mirrors, which in the end reflects only multiple images of the author himself, Paul Auster. Playful “autobiographism” is a mark of Auster’s fiction. In all his books, episodes of the author’s life become attached to one or the other character: a young artist living “hand to mouth,” a disastrous first marriage, a son the product of this marriage, salvation in the form of a happy second marriage, the sojourn in France, a small inheritance that provides relief to the young artist, etc. In City of Glass, he introduces himself as a character: initially just a name, “Paul Auster of the Auster Detective Agency” (City of Glass 7), whose identity Quinn takes in order to live his detective-like “adventure”; later, the “real” Paul Auster, a writer whom Quinn visits in his apartment in Manhattan. In the meeting between

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Quinn and Auster there is a revelatory moment: at one point, they discuss Auster’s latest piece of writing, an essay on the authorship of Don Quixote, which Auster claims was written by Sancho Panza, the barber and the priest, in order to “cure Don Quixote of his madness” (City of Glass 99). “The idea,” Auster concludes, “was to hold a mirror up to Don Quixote’s madness, to record each of his absurd and ludicrous delusions, so that when he finally read the book himself, he would see the error of his ways” (City of Glass 99). Usually commentators relate Auster’s autobiographism to the problem of authorship in the age of the “death of the author.”52 Steven Alford, in particular, argues that Auster (the author) “establishes the sense of his identity by projecting himself into the narrator, {Auster}, and holding the textual mirror up to himself.”53 Whether this is Auster’s “conclusion” or not, it is certain that he holds up his fiction as a mirror to himself. One cannot but imagine Auster, the author, as he depicts Paul Auster, the character, in City of Glass at the end of the conversation with Quinn: “Auster leaned back on the sofa, smiled with a certain ironic pleasure, and lit a cigarette. The man was obviously enjoying himself, but the precise nature of that pleasure eluded Quinn. It seemed to be a kind of soundless laughter, a joke that stopped short of its punchline, a generalized mirth that had no object” (city of Glass 100). Auster evidently enjoys the cleverness of his convoluted construction – and the view of his own image in the mirror. Voyeurism becomes narcissism, as in this entry of The Arcades Project from S.F. Lahrs: “Egoistic – ‘that is what one becomes in Paris, where you can hardly take a step without catching sight of your dearly beloved self. Mirror after mirror! In cafés and restaurants, in shops and stores, in haircutting salons and literary salons, in baths and everywhere, “every inch a mirror!”!’ (R1a,4).

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Spectres of Detection The waxwork figure as mannequin of history. – In the wax museum the past enters into the same aggregate state that distance enters into in the interior. (Q3,3)

So, where is the crime? Auster’s “meta-anti-detective” novels,54 Cameron Golden writes, “slowly unravel, leaving only the barest traces of crime, criminal, and detective.”55 Not only is the detective incapable of solving the mystery, but also this kind of fiction ultimately “casts doubt on the very existence of criminal activity and the categories of right and wrong.”56 Justice and order dissolve into chimeras, in a struggle with the ungraspable reality of the self, and we are left with the author looking obsessively at himself in the mirror.57 In her Derridean reading of Auster’s novels, Russell concludes that, if there is a crime, then “logocentrism, the term applied to uses and theories of language grounded in the metaphysics of presence, is the ‘crime’ that Auster investigates in The New York Trilogy.”58 More commonly, however, commentators tend to point to an “ethical” relevance in Auster’s project. Auster himself once stated in an interview that the “quasi-religious” content of his novels is in “the search for spiritual grace.”59 Commonly considered an exponent of postmodernism, he is at the same time distinguished from more “typical” postmodern writers through a certain coherence in narrative discourse, a neo-realistic approach and, it is argued, by showing a certain responsibility for social and moral questions. Auster’s ethics would thus reside in his “deconstructive” questioning of the traditional – modernist? – myths of truth and totality.60 It might be asked, nonetheless, what exactly the politics are of this obsessive looking inward, which takes refuge in the excluding mirrored space of the mind. Auster’s “heroic” quest for identity has as its premise what Willet calls the “acquiescing in the status quo,” which he defines as “politically regressive.”61 The conclusion of the postmodern anti-detective novel is summarized thus by Tani: if the mystery of reality – and of the self – cannot be solved, then “the detective must accept the mystery and its epitome, the prince of darkness, the devil. […] Justice is not even an issue any more, since there is no solution.”62 What Tani calls “a literature of possibility,” or “allusive fiction,” therefore runs the risk of

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turning into quietism: “the only adequate solution to a life of possibility,” he writes, “is the acceptance of it, of total suspension, since to ‘solve life’ is to accept the mystery within it.”63 This may well be an acceptable conclusion for “the mysteries of the self,” or the “mystery of life,” but not for the crimes of history. In his description of the traditional detective story, Tani captures what Benjamin found most interesting and useful in the detective as figure for the historian: “the traditional detective novel,” he writes, “presents a reconstruction of the past and ends when this reconstruction has been fulfilled. […] To go back in time is equal to finding a criminal, to unravelling a mystery. […] The detective ‘wins’ the past, unravels it, but only to be doomed to go backwards in time in the next story.”64 The detective, like the historian, is “doomed” to go backwards in time incessantly. What Tani identifies as the Sisyphean doom of the detective is precisely the sense of never-ending historical work Benjamin’s historian-as-detective has to perform: “to have to repeat the discovery ultimately means that no discovery is final, no discovery is a solution but rather a tendency, an approximation, since the past is full of unsolved mysteries waiting for their detective.”65 The work of the historian is for Benjamin precisely this endless process of approximation to the crime and the criminal, and also the moral/political obligation to perform this task.66 If, as I have argued, the importance of the figure of the detective in Benjamin is to be found in the ultimate need to uncover the crimes of history, then the evolution of detective fiction – towards Auster’s metaphysical detectives – is the story of an emptying out of this project of detection. Auster’s fiction is quite fundamentally preoccupied with storytelling. His characters obsessively tell stories to each other and to themselves, anecdotes of American life or of the life of American writers. These are the parables the characters tell, as Black says to Blue in Ghosts, in order to “understand things” (Ghosts 177). As the narrator of The Locked Room insists, “these are true stories. They are also parables, perhaps, but they mean what they mean only because they are true” and their meaning for the author is that “they could somehow help him to understand himself ” (The Locked Room 255–6). Nevertheless, Auster, like Quinn, is interested only in “stories related to other stories”; their “relation to the world”

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does not interest him (cf. City of Glass 7). In the postmodern textual euphoria, in the free-floating dance of the signifier, stories only relates to other stories, that is, to themselves, and in the end they sever any possible connection with history (or histories).67 The distance from Benjamin’s storyteller should be evident. The storyteller for Benjamin fished in “the lore of the past” [die Kunde aus der Vergangenheit], in “the chain of tradition which transmits an event from generation to generation,” in order to transmit “the epic side of truth – wisdom” (GS 2.2:440, 453, 442/SW 3:144, 154, 146). Auster’s stories, like the commodity, are a decontextualized fragment, polyvalent and empty. Severing their connection with history (erasing their “traces”), they become Baudrillard’s simulacrum, the ultimate form of commodity. History, as the postmodern vulgata insists, is a textual construct, a Foucauldian “discourse” implying power and interpretation, a view Benjamin certainly shared.68 However, the postmodern text “erases its traces” and becomes self-referential: for Alford “in the end, there is text, and only text, and […] each text […] cancels out the previous one, establishing not the truth of identity, […] but simply another text, an experiential description of the differing/deferring movement of language.”69 The free-floating text presents a phantasmatic inconsistency; Auster’s solipsistic writer creates spectres, stories that are transparent, incorporeal, and float freely over reality. He is himself a ghost, as Black says to Blue (cf. Ghosts 178). This kind of “fabulation,” as Jameson calls it, “or if you prefer, mythomania and outright tall tales,” is a symptom of social and historical impotence.70 Creative freedom becomes the substitute for an impossible praxis: everything is possible in the self-mirroring space of the individual’s mind, but any concrete agency in the world is negated. Postmodern (tall) story-telling has severed any tie with history and, entrapped within a hall of mirrors, becomes a self-reproducing, self-indulgent, self-celebrating refraction of an absolutized present. The evocation of the past in Auster’s erudite anecdotes responds to what Jameson calls “nostalgia”: history is approached through commodified pop images and simulacra of that history, “conveying ‘pastness’ by the glossy qualities of the image.”71 Without a sense of history as real, the image of the past becomes, as Guy Debord argued, the last form of commodity, transformed into stereotypes and

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texts. The creative principle disavows facts, fiction becoming more important than reality.72 Crime, too, is thus only a textual construct, fiction. Just as Benjamin’s materialist historian is haunted by the ghosts of the past, so too are Auster’s characters. As Black says to Blue: “yes, there are ghosts all around us” (Ghosts 176). But Auster’s phantasms do not haunt the author, asking to be redeemed, to be vindicated from a past of crimes and a present of oblivion. These spectres are the shadowy commodified images of the author’s mind, his obsessions, the skeletons in his closet. And they remain within the locked room “inside his skull.” History is out of reach, the ineluctable and unchangeable eternal return of the same. As Blue affirms: “something happens, Blue thinks, and then it goes on happening forever. It can never be changed, can never be otherwise” (Ghosts 164). Auster’s New York Trilogy is thus a phantasmagoria, a parade of ghosts projected for the amusement of author and readers.73 The phantasmagoria of the traditional detective novel consisted, for Benjamin, in the romanticization of the city as “danger” and “adventure,” and in the glorification of individual “heroism.” Nevertheless, Benjamin “salvaged” the project of detection as a figure for redemptive historical work. This is no longer possible in Auster’s project of “meta-anti-detection,” which, to paraphrase Benjamin, “does away with all the drapery that a crime represents” (GS 1.2:550/SW 4:27) and exiles itself into the obsessive and narcissistic contemplation of a mirror. This fiction remains utterly phantasmagoric in its glorification and romanticization of the “quest for identity” and its a-historical/anti-historical self-indulgence. *  *  * The constellation of the detective calls forth an image of intellectual and cultural pursuit: it dismantles the phantasmagoria of a perfect and univocal readability of urban, social and historical texts, but also unveils the poverty of any cultural enterprise which renounces the relationship with history, politics and reality and withdraws into the autistic space of the mind. The pursuit of the trace and the unveiling of the crime are, for Benjamin, the political task of the materialist intellectual engaged in the critique of modern society and the rescue of a history that has been

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silenced, covered and forgotten. This critique is based on the assumption that crime and violence lie at the heart of the capitalist mode of production and capitalist society as a whole; that the long series of crimes which constitute the history of the victors has been hidden, masked and forgotten; and that sharp observation, deductive power and acute intuition – the tricks of the detective – are needed to bring them to light. When detection, as in Auster’s case, is diverted inward and pointed toward the deceitful mirror of self-contemplation, it loses all critical potential. Hypnotised by his own image, the detective-turned-failed-metaphysician gets lost in labyrinths of solipsism and textuality, and forgets about crimes, criminals and, more importantly, victims. Intellectual pursuit becomes escapism disguised as deconstruction. If, on the one hand, this constellation unveils Benjamin’s very modernist faith in the act of reading and “detecting” a text, in the work of vision, language and signification, on the other it also shows the cultural jam in which the waning of this faith has left us.

chapter 4

The Prostitute: On the Commodity

Female subjectivity denies the patriarchal order’s claim to embody symbolic figures that supposedly give meaning to the entire human species, including the functional subspecies “women.” […] It demands adequate representation in a symbolic order where there are two differently sexed subjects capable of autonomously adopting figures appropriate to each. […] But, as a result of this demand, the masculine and feminine figures of Western culture will be thrown into disarray within their symbolic framework, with an even greater disarray in the case of the feminine figures. — Adriana Cavarero, In Spite of Plato

The constellation of the prostitute emphasises the moment of destruction fundamental to any Benjaminian reading. Critical reading must “mortify” the text, that is, “destroy” the semblance of organicity and wholeness and reduce it to ruins, rubble, debris, in order to unveil, and then “actualize,” its truth-content. This constellation is thus centred on allegory, which works for Benjamin as a powerful destructive tool: the prostitute as allegory of the commodity (and of modernity) destroys the semblance of fullness and richness of commodity society, unveiling the deadly truth lurking at its centre. But the moment of ruination will also be applied to Benjamin’s text itself, in order to expose the historical and conceptual limits of his construction and actualize the truth of his analysis. The first part moves dialectically between the emphasis on the importance of the figure of the prostitute in Benjamin’s analysis of commodity fetishism and the critique of his patriarchal use of feminine figures, which reinstates the silencing of women. The prostitute appears very early in Benjamin’s work: in his juvenile writings she signifies the unhealthy status of Western erotic culture, where the erotic is confined within rigid social conventions and thus sterilized. She also introduces a motif which will remain a constant preoccupation in Benjamin’s work:

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the connection of eros and creativity under the sign of gender difference. The prostitute signifies the liberation of the erotic power of creation from the chains of procreation and thus the eroticization of spirit and culture. However, she becomes a central figure only in the analysis of the modern city and, more specifically, of commodity fetishism: as the site of sexuality, the prostitute is read as an image both of the vices and dangers proliferating in the new urban conglomerates and of their new sexual possibilities. From Baudelaire Benjamin derives a number of categories which connect prostitution and modernity: the destitution of the poet/intellectual in consumer culture, the empathy with the masses, the decay of the sublime body, but also the allegorization of a human figure, which deprives it of its humanity. Benjamin connects these Baudelairean suggestions to his analysis of capitalism and consumerist culture and reads the prostitute as the allegory of the commodity: selling herself, she is a figure for the worker in capitalism, forced to sell labour power and condemned to alienation and destitution. However, combining saleability with sexual appeal, she becomes, most of all, the perfect figure for commodity fetishism. She also allegorizes other important features of the commodity: she is mass-produced, abundantly available and serialized through uniform-like make-up and attire; she needs to empathize with the crowd of buyers and thus becomes the vehicle for an erotic communion with the urban masses. Most importantly, she allegorizes the empathy for the commodity: disguising the character of the commodity under natural appearance, she signifies its eroticization, the transfer of erotic pulsion to the inorganic, and thus the love of death at the heart of commodity capitalism. However, the prostitute as ruin of the sublime body allegorizes, and so uncovers and openly declares, the devaluation of the living in commodity society. She thus becomes a dialectical image which unveils the contradictions and miseries of that society and is therefore a powerful tool for the materialist critic. If this theoretical importance is acknowledged, it must also be emphasized that the prostitute remains merely a “sign” in Benjamin’s construction: she is never interrogated as a human being, but always used only as a passive rune, object and never subject of the reading. This constellation therefore also aims at unveiling the patriarchal phantasmagoria in which

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Benjamin’s own discourse is embedded. The second part juxtaposes to Benjamin’s figure the account of the prostitute given by feminist writer Dacia Maraini. This operation is problematic: feminist discourse does not focus specifically on modernity or capitalism, but rather subsumes them within the much wider scope of patriarchy. Therefore, the emphasis in the second part is shifted from urban modernity and commodity fetishism to the atavistic commodification of the female body. Benjamin’s critique is thus internal to, and almost diluted by, patriarchal discourse, which objectifies, forgets and finally silences women. The figure of the prostitute is central to feminism because it epitomizes the reification and dispossession of women and thus becomes a paradigm for the female condition. She is a fossil in our social structure which declares the gendered dynamics at the base of contemporary society and culture. The paradigm functions as the Benjaminian allegory: by showing the facies hippocratica of the female condition, it eradicates the semblance of the patriarchal continuum and reduces it to rubble. Maraini gives the prostitute the voice Benjamin had denied her, but when she speaks, her protests and requests are surprising: what she wants is the recognition of her status as worker with all the rights and guarantees connected to it; paradoxically, she wants to take charge of the exchange and become the manager of her own commodification. These “scandalous” requests eradicate the semblance of naturality and the sex appeal which constitute the phantasmagoria of the exchange: the talking prostitute thus exposes and threatens the deadly structure of market capitalism. Nevertheless, she ultimately leaves intact the terms of the exchange and the market, though unmasked and reduced to ruins, continues to work, perhaps even more smoothly. The paradox of the talking prostitute is that she is unable to escape the logic of the market and so finally reinstates and prolongs her own commodification. The prostitute as paradigm thus reveals the insufficiencies of any merely destructive politics, which renounce the constructive moment of messianic redemption. The constellation of the prostitute attempts, on the one hand, to disentangle the truthcontent and poignancy of Benjamin’s analysis of commodity fetishism from the phantasmagoria of patriarchy and, on the other, to expose the contradictions of any feminist politics which limit its critical power to

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a project of deconstruction. The image it attempts to evoke is perhaps the necessity of a “hope for the hopeless,” which should animate all materialist critique.

4.1 The Decay of Love: Walter Benjamin and the Silent Whore The prostitute does not sell her labour power; her job, however, entails the fiction that she sells her powers of pleasure. Insofar as this represents the utmost extension attainable by the sphere of the commodity, the prostitute may be considered, from early on, a precursor of commodity capitalism. But precisely because the commodity character was in other respects undeveloped, this aspect did not need to stand out so glaringly as would subsequently be the case. ( J67a,1)

Erotische Unkultur In his juvenile writings from the years of the Jugendbewegung, Benjamin began a critique of what, in a short piece of 1913 entitled Erotische Erziehung, he calls the bourgeois “erotische Unkultur” (GS 2.1:71), the lack of culture in modern erotic civilization. This topic was to remain a continuing preoccupation in his critique of modernity and developed in his 1930s writings into a theory of commodity fetishism centred on feminine figures: the lesbian, the androgyne, the sterile woman and, most of all, the prostitute and the whore.1 These feminine figures are poorly developed in Benjamin’s notes and remain merely a fragment, concealed, as Christine Buci-Glucksmann writes, in “the interstice between concept and metaphor.”2 They are nevertheless central to the architecture of the Arcades Project and the Baudelaire book, to the point that woman is seen as the allegory of modernity, and they display a wealth of meaning and interpretive radicality that must be pursued. However, this conceptual wealth is not unproblematic: it is accompanied by an essentialisation and

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reduction of woman to sexuality and an excessive abstractionism, both of which define the limits of Benjamin’s critique. In his 1915 “The Life of Students,” Benjamin attacked the dominant erotic conventions, which monopolized the notion of eros within concepts of marriage and family, and so relegated the erotic to rigidly defined social structures. The “one erotic spirit” is thus reduced to a “distorted and fragmented torso,” hypocritically confined to the family and sterilized in prostitution. For the young Benjamin, the problem unaddressed by the revolutionary student movement was that of the separation of creation [Schaffen] and procreation [Zeugen]: the “eros of creativity” is annulled by the “lamentable division” between an “autonomous creative spirit” and an “unmastered force of nature.” The goal “to which students should aspire” is therefore to recompose this division and unify spiritual life in “a single community of creative persons – through love.” Women appear in this piece as a “hydra-headed mass” of prostitutes, or, at best, as bearers of a different sort of creativity, because they “are not productive in a masculine sense” (GS 2.1:83–5/SW 1:43–4). This statement can be complemented by an unpublished piece written in 1920, “On Love and Related Matters (A European Problem),” where, analysing “one of the greatest revolutions ever to take place in the relations between the sexes,” Benjamin describes woman’s life as “supernatural” [übernatürlich], identifying it with an erotic power that inspires “an incomparable act of creative love” in men (GS 6:72–4/SW 1:229–30). The equation of woman and sexuality is completed by the correspondence between sexuality and the act of (male) creation.3 Creativity under the simultaneous sign of eros and gender difference is a persistent motif in Benjamin’s writings, from these juvenile pieces to the notes on Baudelaire. In “Metaphysics of Youth” (1913–14), the figure of the prostitute appears as “the listener,” the one who shares the vigil with the (male) genius and so helps him to create: the liberation of the erotic from the chains of procreation opens up the space for the act of true creation, art. The procreative power of women is thus negated and annulled by the “true” creative power of men. Talking about her clients, the prostitute tells the genius: “no one engendered them, and they come to me in order not to engender.” “No one engendered them,” she is

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made to say, so that men are not born from women, but give themselves their “true” birth through art, inspired by the erotic power of the sterile woman, the prostitute. “All the women I go to are like you,” the genius says to the prostitute, “they gave birth to me” (GS 2.1:93–4/SW 1:8–9). Love without procreation in the imaginary self-procreation of the artist also surfaces in One-Way Street, in the piece entitled “Number 13,” where books are compared to harlots (cf. GS 4.1:109–10/SW 1:460–1). Sexuality and writing will remain strictly connected and acquire their strongest theorization in the Baudelairean motif of the writer as prostitute, and of the prostitute as allegorical image, in the Arcades Project. Women in these juvenile writings “remain silent,” companions of, and listeners to, creative men: “for every woman possesses the past, and in any case has no present. This is why she protects meaning from understanding; she wards off the misuse of words and refuses to let herself be misused.” The guardians of conversation, women “receive the silence,” because “language extinguishes their soul. Women receive no sounds from it and no salvation”; “language does not bear women’s soul aloft, because they do not confide in it; their past is never resolved.” Besides, “none of them complain,” “they bring their bodies close and caress one another” (“Metaphysics of Youth,” GS 2.1:93–6/SW 1:8–10, emphasis added). Benjamin here clearly gives expression to the patriarchal objectification of women into silent things. In spite of his own reproaches to Herbert Belmore (Herbert Blumenthal) in a letter of 1913, Benjamin’s feminine figures are at most signs and symbols, deprived of a proper voice. Benjamin wrote to Belmore: To you, a prostitute is some kind of beautiful object. You respect her as you do the Mona Lisa, in front of whom you also would not make an obscene gesture. But in so doing, you think nothing of depriving thousands of women of their souls and relegating them to an existence in an art gallery. As if we consort with them so artistically! […] You yourself do not want to relinquish humanity, yet you would have us believe that there are people who are objects. You arrogate human dignity to yourself. As for the rest, they are pretty things. And why? So that we have a noble gesture for ignoble deeds. (GB 1:127–8/C 35–6)

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The definition of prostitute he opposes to Belmore’s – “the prostitute represents the consummated will to culture” [der vollendete Kulturtrieb] – is no less objectifying. For Benjamin, the “morality of the prostitute” lies in her “sexualization of the spirit”: “she represents culture in Eros” (GB 1:127–8/C 35–6). Women are, on the one hand, equated with sexuality and, on the other, made to “represent,” used as signs and symbols and thus not allowed to speak. In the following analysis of the figure of the prostitute, I will pursue this line of reasoning to argue that, underneath the radicality and richness of the image of the whore as “allegory of the commodity,” and thus as “allegory of modernity,” flows the patriarchal silencing of women. In spite of Benjamin’s will to give voice to the dispossessed of history, here he merely speaks for them, thus persisting in their reduction to silence. Sex and the City Paris. La grande prostituée. Flaubert, Dictionnaire des idées reçues La Prostitution s’allume dans les rues. Baudelaire, Le Crépuscule du soir

The figure of the prostitute appears in Benjamin’s Berlin cycle in relation to the concept of boundary and limit: where the child is entrapped in a web of class and topographical boundaries, “the feeling of crossing for the first time the threshold of one’s class had a part in the almost unequalled fascination of publicly accosting a whore on the street” (GS 6:471/SW 2:600). As Sigrid Weigel argues,4 the whore is here akin to “the race of threshold dwellers” (GS 4.1:238/SW 3:354), a chthonian guardian of the past and a priestess in the rites of passage into adulthood. She also signifies the class boundary that relegates the poor and dispossessed “at the back of beyond” (GS 6:471/SW 2:600). The passage into adulthood means for Benjamin the (“illusory”) attempt at “repudiating my mother, those like her, and the social class to which we both belonged” (GS 4.1:288/SW 3:404) and a topographical crossing into the monstrous and voluptuous

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labyrinth of the city, “that whole networks of streets [that] were opened up under the auspices of prostitution” (GS 6:471–2/SW 2:600). As Sven Birkerts notes, these areas, the precincts of the poor and dispossessed, are always associated by Benjamin with vice and prostitution5: they are “the edge of the void” and whores are like “the household goddesses of this cult of nothingness” (GS 6:472/SW 2:600). Staying on the threshold (prostitutes “love the thresholds of these gates of dream,” O2a,1), they help usher the (male) modern subject from the state of (childish) dreaming into the constellation of adult awakening. In these images, Benjamin reproduces a consummate urban trope: the city is the place of infinite sexual experiences, where the forbidden, the desired, the feared become possible. Elisabeth Wilson, in her analysis of the feminine in relation to the modern city, shows the centrality of prostitutes and prostitution in discussions of urban life, and emphasises the strict relationship between sexuality and disorder in the city.6 Woman, as the site of sexuality, is depicted in urban literature as temptress, lesbian, whore, an ambiguous threat to Victorian morality, when not constricted within the cage of virtuous bourgeois womanhood (and in that case, in danger, tempted and menaced by the vice lurking at the heart of the city). To be a woman, Wilson argues, “an individual, not part of a family or kin group – in the city, is to become a prostitute – a public woman.”7 Judith Walkowitz argues similarly that the treatment of sexuality in the epoch of the expanding metropolis and its new urban forms made the prostitute into “a logo of the divided city itself ”8: on the one hand, she was a symbol of its vices and decadence for the bourgeois moralists à la Parent-Duchatelet; on the other, she was romanticized as the embodiment of (or the excuse for) a revolutionary and liberating sexuality for nineteenth-century anti-bourgeois littérateurs.9 The figure of the prostitute thus acquires its full meaning in Benjamin’s analysis of urban modernity in the Parisian cycle: from her role as “threshold dweller” in the Berlin cycle, she becomes a metaphor for the whole new regime of nineteenth-century urbanism, an allegory of modernity itself. In “Central Park,” Benjamin argues that “the face of prostitution was changed by the rise of the great cities. […] With the emergence of big cities, prostitution comes to possess new arcana. Among the earliest of

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these is the labyrinthine character of the city itself ” (GS 1.2:687–8/SW 4:189). The new phenomenon of urban modernity transforms the face of “the oldest profession” and makes it a symbol and logo of this labyrinthine experience: “the first arcanum known to prostitution is thus the mythical aspect of the city as labyrinth” (GS 1.2:688/SW 4:189). Benjamin notes that the background for Baudelaire’s “numerous evocations of the whore is never the bordello, but often the street” (GS 1.2:687/SW 4:188), the realm of the flâneur and the site of urban modernity. At the centre of the labyrinth, Benjamin continues in the same passage, towers the Minotaur, “the image of the deadly power” of the city; but this image of vice, corruption, danger and death is in reality the prostitute, the terrifying power of woman’s sexuality. Wilson argues that “at the heart of the urban labyrinth lurked not the Minotaur, a bull-like male monster, but the female Sphinx, the ‘strangling one,’ who was so called because she strangled all those who could not answer her riddle: female sexuality, womanhood out of control, lost nature, loss of identity.”10 As in the discussion on the flâneur, the central factor in Benjamin’s analysis of the prostitute is the new nineteenth-century phenomenon of the urban masses. In various places Benjamin emphasizes this point: “only the mass of inhabitants permits prostitution to spread over large parts of the city. And only the mass enables the sexual object to become intoxicated with the hundred stimuli which that object produces” (GS 1.2:559/SW 4:33); “the masses first made it possible for the sexual object to be reflected simultaneously in a hundred different forms of allurement – forms which the object itself produced” ( J61a,1). Prostitution thus takes on a completely new form with the rise of the metropolis: it spreads out into unknown dimensions and is invested with the myriad of intoxicating stimuli of the human maze. But most of all it is transformed by the new consumerist culture: the prostitute sells herself and thus becomes the allegory of saleability, in a culture where everything is for sale. She becomes the perfect allegory for the commodity insofar as she combines saleability with sexual appeal, which constitutes the main feature of commodity fetishism:

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chapter 4 Saleability itself can become a sexual stimulus; and this attraction increases wherever an abundant supply of women underscores their character as commodity. With the exhibition of girls in rigidly uniform dress at a later period, the music hall review explicitly introduced the mass-produced article into the libidinal life of the big-city dweller. ( J61a,1)

The prostitute therefore becomes a mass-produced article, on sale, abundantly available and serialized in the monotonous repetitiveness that characterises mass production: garish make-up and an easily recognizable, uniform-like garment erase the prostitute’s individuality and “package” her as an identifiable type, the always-the-same feature of the commodity. So Benjamin writes that “in the form taken by prostitution in the big cities, the woman appears not only as commodity but, in a precise sense, as massproduced article. This is indicated by the masking of individual expression in favour of a professional appearance, such as makeup provides. The point is made still more emphatically, later on, by the uniformed girls of the music-hall review” ( J66,8). Gilloch emphasises that the prostitute is the model for both the reification of the human body within capitalism and the cessation of individual identity.11 Moreover, Benjamin notes that prostitution becomes the vehicle of an erotic empathy with the crowd, what Baudelaire called “épouser la foule,” opening up the “possibility of a mythical communion with the mass”: “for Baudelaire, prostitution is the yeast that causes the great urban masses to rise in his imagination” (GS 1.2:669/SW 4:171–2). The figure of the prostitute is therefore strictly connected in Benjamin with the flâneur: both walk the streets of the city, both are connoisseurs of its recesses and of its dark side, both embody the melancholia of its unfulfilled promises and intimate desires. Furthermore, the flâneur, like the prostitute, sells himself in the marketplace and, as a figure, is as empty as the commodity, pure form, commodification walking the public sphere. So, could the prostitute be seen as the “flâneuse,” the female flâneur of the nineteenth century? The debate over the figure of the flâneur is very complex and its ambiguity and elusiveness allow for the most varied readings. Nevertheless, the similarities between these two figures cannot veil their obvious differences: the flâneur and the prostitute don’t inhabit the street in the same way. The flâneur strolls in the street as an active observer

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of the spectacle of the city, he is the spectator and the connoisseur and, if he sells “himself,” it is through his writings, his spirit, his soul, not his body. The prostitute, by contrast, is a “street-walker” and a “tramp,” but, as such, is always the object of the (male) gaze of the stroller, and, selling her body, incarnates the commodity as flesh and blood.12 The prostitute works, like the flâneur, as a personification of the characteristic aspects of modernity, spectacle and transitoriness; but, as Deborah Parson writes, she is “regarded as object of the gaze and [her] own perspective of looking is not considered.”13 Benjamin seems remarkably insensitive to this difference: the language of his descriptions is always unsympathetic and tends to reinforce the objectification of the female body. A couple of entries from the Arcades Project can be used as examples: “feminine fauna of the arcades: prostitutes, grisettes, old-hag shopkeepers, female street vendors, glovers, demoiselles” (O2,4, emphasis added); and “prostitution opens a market in feminine types” (O14,2).14 Like the inorganic souvenir in the shop, she is an object for consumption. It is clear, then, that the female flâneur remains “invisible” and that, in spite of an increased female presence in the city street, the prostitute remained relegated to the state of object, not subject of flânerie. As Wilson emphasises, the image of the prostitute as flâneuse is mere (male) romanticism.15 The prostitute is a construct of the male imaginary, produced, according to Shannon Bell, “as a negative identity by the bourgeois subject, an empty symbol filled from the outside with the debris of the modern body/body politic, a sign to women to sublimate their libidinal body in their reproductive body.”16 Some Motifs in Baudelaire It is, fundamentally, on the complete agreement of two forms of existence – life under the aegis of mere mind, and life under the aegis of mere sexuality – that the solidarity of the man of letters with the whore is founded, a solidarity to which Baudelaire’s existence is once again the most inviolable testimony. (GS 2.1:352/ SW 2:446)

As for the flâneur, so also for the figure of the prostitute, Benjamin’s major source and inspiration is Baudelaire. His work strongly connects female

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figures with the advent of modernity, which, according to Janet Wolff, “breeds, or makes visible, a number of categories of female city-dwellers”17: the widow, the old lady, the murder victim, the passante, the lesbian and, most of all, the whore. In Baudelaire, the figure of the prostitute refers to a constellation of meanings, often ambiguous and contradictory, and not to a univocal sign: prostitute and prostitution are used as a descriptive category which embraces fleeting modernity, the activity of the poet, the erotic empathy of the mass, the misery of the modern intellectual, etc. Benjamin inherits this contradictory richness of meanings and also its symbolic limits and cultural poverty. An early fragment of 1920–21, entitled “Baudelaire”, ventures that the connection between Baudelaire as littérateur and the prostitute resides in the “hedonistic and hieratic nature of the prostitute’s existence” (GS 6:134/SW 1:362): the poet, in a bad romantic image, conjugates, like the prostitute, sanctity in sin. However, the most famous Baudelairean image Benjamin appropriates is that the poet sells himself like a whore. The first connection between poet and prostitution is the misery of the modern intellectual. Baudelaire’s economic failure and consequent social marginalization associated him with the prostitute at the social level and forced him to “[throw] himself into the bargain,” so confirming “in his own person what he had said about the unavoidable necessity of prostitution for the poet” (J60a,2). The intellectual in modernity is reduced to a state of misery, if he18 does not embrace and absorb the logic of the market. Baudelaire thus always associates his own persona with the figures of urban decay and destitution, from the ragpicker to the beggar to the prostitute. But the poet is connected to the prostitute precisely because he has to embrace the logic of the market. Deprived of his status and aura, he has to sell his writings in order to survive. The poet’s art is his most intimate and precious part, hence the poet, selling it, prostitutes himself. A couple of examples will suffice: Benjamin notes that “Au lecteur,” the famous incipit of Le fleurs du mal, represents the poet “in the unflattering position of someone who takes cold cash for his confessions” (GS 1.2:536/SW 4:17). In “La muse vénale,” repeatedly quoted by Benjamin, the poet is depicted as a “saltimbanque à jeun” (“hungry acrobat”), who chants the Te Deum in spite of not being a believer and does his best to

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please in order to earn his daily bread.19 Therefore, Baudelaire typifies, for Benjamin, the situation of the writer in the age of commodification, when literature and “spirit” become things to sell and the poet, in order to survive, has to learn the laws of capitalist economy: “Baudelaire knew the true situation of the man of letters: he goes to the marketplace as a flâneur, supposedly to take a look at it but in reality to find a buyer” (GS 1.2:536/SW 4:17). He was actually an initiator, the first to recognize the new status of the poet, who “had the idea of a market-oriented originality, which just for that reason was more original in its day than any other. The création of his poncif led him to adopt methods that were the stock in trade of the competition” ( J58,4). The poet thus transforms himself into a commodity, dehumanises and reifies his own self into a dead object. But the artist is a prostitute in a much wider sense: “Qu’est-ce que l’art?,” asks Baudelaire in Fusées; the answer is “prostitution.”20 Charles Bernheimer argues that here Baudelaire may have in mind the etymology of the term: “etymologically, prostitution means to set or place (Latin: statuere) forth, in public (pro). […] Art is the making public of private fantasies, the public exposition of one’s imaginary creations.”21 Art as such, and not only in modernity, would therefore be a form of prostitution. Art as prostitution entails a shattering of the integrity of the individual. However, for Baudelaire every form of getting out of oneself implies prostitution. He writes in “Mon coeur mis a nu”: Qu’est-ce que l’amour? Le besoin de sortir de soi. L’homme est un animal adorateur. Adorer, c’est se sacrifier et se prostituer. Aussi tout amour est-il prostitution. 22 What’s love? The need of getting out of oneself. Man is an adoring animal. To adore means to sacrifice and to prostitute oneself. Therefore, all love is prostitution.

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And in “Fusées”: “L’amour, c’est le goût de la prostitution. Il n’est même pas de plaisir noble que ne puisse être ramené à la prostitution” (“Love is the taste for prostitution. There’s no noble pleasure that cannot be reduced to prostitution”).23 And: L’amour peu dériver d’un sentiment généreux: le goût de la prostitution; mais il est bientôt corrompu par le goût de la propriété. L’amour veut sortir de soi, se confondre avec sa victime, comme le vainqueur avec le vaincu, et cependant conserver des priviléges de conquérant. 24 Love can arise from a generous sentiment: the taste for prostitution; but it is soon corrupted by the taste for propriety. Love wants to move out of itself, to merge with its victim, like the victor with the vanquished, and at the same time to retain the privileges of the conqueror.

Prostitution is this going out of oneself and proceeds from the “horreur de la solitude,” the need of “oublier son moi dans la chair extérieur, que l’homme appelle noblement besoin d’aimer” (“forgetting one’s me within the other’s flesh, that man nobly calls need to love”). The common man thus “veux être deux” (“wants to be two”), he loves, and thus prostitutes himself, in order to multiply his person biologically in another body. By contrast, “l’homme de génie veut être un, donc solitaire. La gloire, c’est rester un, et se prostituer d’un manière particulière” (“the man of genius wants to be one, hence solitary. Glory is to remain one, and to prostitute oneself in a particular manner”).25 The poet’s particular manner is a different need for multiplication of the self, biologically sterile, but erotically stimulating. It is the empathy with the crowd, “la jouissance de la multiplication du nombre” (“the pleasure of the multiplication of the number”)26: the prostituted soul of the poet is the wandering soul, for whom any one particular body provides no more than a provisional identification. In Le peintre de la vie moderne, the crowd is described as the domain of the modern artist, “comme l’air est celui de l’oiseau, comme l’eau celui du poisson. Sa passion et sa profession, c’est d’épouser la foule” (“like air is that of the bird, like water is that of the fish. His passion and his profession is to marry the crowd”).27 Number itself is eroticized and its infinite

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possibilities provoke erotic intoxication. For the poet/flâneur, Baudelaire writes in Le spleen de Paris, to marry the crowd means to “adopte[r] comme siennes toutes les professions, toutes les joies et toutes les misères” (“adopt as one’s own all professions, all joys and all miseries”) of the mass, in an “ineffable orgie,” a “sainte prostitution de l’âme qui se donne tout entière, poésie et charité, à l’imprévu qui se montre, à l’inconnu qui passe” (“holy prostitution of the soul that gives itself entirely, poetry and piety, to the unexpected that appears, to the unknown that goes by”).28 Prostitution here signifies spiritual marriage, poetic identification, the empathic copenetration of poet and crowd, a going out of oneself, giving up one’s own identity and becoming other, any other and everyone.29 Baudelaire can therefore write in Mon coeur mis a nu that: L’être le plus prostitué, c’est l’être par excellence, c’est Dieu, puisqu’il est l’ami suprême pour chaque individu, puisqu’il est le réservoir commun, inépuisable de l’amour.30 The most prostituted being is the being par excellence, God, since he is the supreme friend for each individual, since he is the common, inexhaustible reservoir of love.

Here prostitution describes what Bernheimer calls a “movement of empathy whereby the individual, presumably male, separates from his ego to enter into the other. Prostitution in this sense […] does not involve possession but rather a kind of eroticized capacity for multiple identifications.”31 Prostitution here has nothing to do with female sexuality, with the “animality” of the body, with the “debased” realm of instincts. Actually, it has nothing to do with women. In fact, Baudelaire has no sympathy for the prostitute per se, for the human being in flesh and blood, nor for women in general. In Le peintre de la vie moderne, he describes Constantin Guys’ filles as representing “la sauvagerie dans la civilisation” (“savagery within civilization”), their beauty “vient du Mal, toujours dénuée de spiritualité” (“comes from Evil, always deprived of spirituality”).32 His misogynism reaches unsurpassed heights in Mon coeur mis a nu, when he writes:

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chapter 4 La femme est le contraire du dandy. Donc elle doit faire horreur. La femme a faim et elle veut manger; soif, et elle veut boire. Elle est en rut et elle veut être foutue. Le beau mérite! La femme est naturelle, c’est-à-dire abominable. Aussi est-elle toujours vulgaire, c’est-à-dire le contraire du dandy.33 Woman is the opposite of the dandy. Therefore she must elicit horror. Woman is hungry and she wants to eat; she’s thirsty and she wants to drink. She’s in heat and wants to be fucked. Beauty requires effort. Woman is natural, which means abominable. She’s also always vulgar, that is, the opposite of the dandy.

Woman, in her naturalness, “ne sait pas séparer l’âme du corps. Elle est simpliste, comme les animaux” (“cannot separate the soul from the body. She is over-simple, like the animals”).34 Abominable creatures of nature, prostitutes are thus negative and despicable beings. From this disgust with female corporeality derives Baudelaire’s attraction to the sterile woman, the frigid, the unfertile lesbian, who – in his view – reject the biological constrictions of the female body. As Bernheimer writes, “this sphinx’s impenetrability saves the poet from engulfment and stimulates his own prostitutional openness, especially to the improvisation of female identities.”35 Benjamin therefore writes that “the figure of the lesbian woman belongs among Baudelaire’s heroic exemplars”36: she represents the heroic rejection of despicable nature. Thus, prostitution and prostitute are for Baudelaire essentially allegorical. He uses them to allegorize modernity and its contradictions, the commodification of art and the poet, the decay and decomposition of the sublime body, the dehumanization of the human in capitalist society. Like the corpse in baroque allegory, the destruction of the prostitute body signifies the facies hippocratica of modernity. At the same time, however, as Shannon Bell and Dominique Fisher argue,37 Baudelaire also intends through the destruction of the prostitute body a re-construction and reidealization of the sublime body. Woman can thus become:

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La source des plus vives et […] des plus durables jouissances, […] une divinité, un astre, qui préside à toutes les conceptions du cerveau male; c’est un miroitement de toutes les grâces de la nature condensées dans un seul être; c’est l’objet de l’admiration et de la curiosité la plus vive […]. C’est une espèce d’idole, stupide peut-être, mais éblouissante, enchanteresse.38 the source of the most vivid and […] most durable pleasures, […] a divinity, a star that presides over all conceptions of the male mind; she’s a flashing of all of nature’s gracefulness condensed in one being; she’s the object of the most vivid admiration and curiosity […]. She’s a kind of idol, stupid maybe, but dazzling, enchanting.

She is all this, insofar as she remains a symbol, a sign, a metaphor, and is deprived of her natural debasing animality. Baudelaire therefore eulogizes “maquillage”: “le bien est toujours un produit de l’art.” He writes thus: La femme est bien dans son droit, et même elle accomplit une espèce de devoir en s’appliquant à paraître magique et surnaturelle; il faut qu’elle étonne, qu’elle charme; idole, elle doit se dorer pour être adorée. Elle doit donc emprunter à tous les arts les moyens de s’élever au-dessus de la nature.39 Woman is in her right and also she performs a sort of duty, when she strives to look magical and supernatural; she must astonish, she must enchant; as an idol, she must glitter in order to be adored. She must thus borrow from all the arts the means to raise herself above nature.

In this “need to surpass nature,” women should strive to resemble a “statue, c’est-à-dire […] un être divin et supérieur” (“a statue, that is, a divine and supreme being”).40 The naturalness of women, their body, their individual being, disgust Baudelaire; women are good only if they abdicate from natural being and strive to become statues, lifeless and polished objects, which the male artist can use as emblems.41 Prostitutes are for Baudelaire allegories, never human beings; and prostitution is construed as an allegory of modernity through the denial of the prostitute’s individuality and corporeality.42

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The Allegory of the Commodity Benjamin organized these Baudelairean suggestions, together with his own analysis of baroque allegory and Lukács’ account of commodity fetishism, into the image of the prostitute as an allegory of modernity. Baudelaire’s use of allegory and his colorful imagery of the dispossessed merge in this powerful allegory of the prostitute as commodity: “Baudelaire idealizes the experience of the commodity, in that he ascribes to it, as canon, the experience of allegory” ( J66,2). For Benjamin, modernity is an allegorical time, because “allegorical emblems return as commodities” (GS 1.2:681/ SW 4:183). In modernity, “the commodity has taken the place of the allegorical mode of apprehension” (GS 1.2:686/SW 4:188) and “the devaluation of the world of things in allegory is surpassed within the world of things itself by the commodity” (GS 1.2:660/SW 4:164). Therefore, the figure of the prostitute as allegory of the commodity has a central place in the architecture of his analysis of modernity; as Rey Chow writes, it gives to amorphous suggestions and theoretical insights “the concreteness of a human shape.”43 The prostitute allegorizes the capitalist system of production: she is the ur-form of the worker, forced to sell his or her labor power in the marketplace. In the nineteenth-century metropolis, industrial labour processes reduced work and workers to a state of debasement and dispossession, mechanization and repetitiveness, dehumanization and humiliation that resembled prostitution: work and prostitution thus became inextricably connected, interchangeable categories.44 Benjamin argues that “prostitution can lay claim to being considered ‘work’ the moment work becomes prostitution” ( J67,5). And: “the closer work comes to prostitution, the more tempting it is to conceive prostitution as work” ( J75,1).45 As BuciGlucksmann writes, “there is much more than a superficial historical analogy between the prostitute, who obtains an increasingly well-accounted for, both profitable and exploitative, payment for her time and attentions, and a commercial economy where everything has a price.”46 Capitalist society creates and enforces a massive and universal commodification, which means prostitution, of everything and everybody.

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However, the prostitute does not produce an article for sale, but rather sells herself, her body, becoming seller and sold in one. Therefore, she also represents the embodiment of the commodity. Gilloch notes that “the body of the worker becomes ‘mechanized’ in modern society, so that of the prostitute is commodified: it becomes an object to be bought, something available for consumption.”47 The prostitute, not the flâneur, “takes commodity for a walk” (M17a,2). Unlike the sandwichman, she has nothing to advertise but her own self and so must endure the ultimate denigration of the female body and dehumanization of women. She was one of the main attractions of the arcades, those temples for the cult of commodities, in an epoch when the proliferation of commodities was matched by that of prostitutes. Gilloch writes: “in the fairy palaces of consumption, under the fetishizing gaze of the customer, the prostitute was framed by the other commodities produced by the alienating labour processes of capitalist industry and the exploitative workings of colonial markets.”48 She represents the final commodification of human beings. Benjamin writes that the commodity “celebrates its triumph in the fact that nature itself takes on a commodity character. It is the commodity appearance [Warenschein] of nature that is embodied in the whore” ( J65a,6). The whore, the human become commodity, is the ultimate stage of universal commodification. At the same time, however, the commodity tries to hide its deadly character behind natural appeal: “more and more relentlessly, the objective environment of human beings is coming to wear the expression of the commodity. At the same time, advertising seeks to disguise the commodity character of things” (GS 1.2:671/SW 4:173). The prostitute is at once nature with a commodity appearance and commodity with a natural appearance: “the whore is, fundamentally, the incarnation of a nature suffused with commodity appearance” ( J75a). This natural appearance is the vehicle of empathy for the commodity. Like the commodity, the prostitute must empathize with the mass of possible buyers and acquire intuition into the multitude of possible customers. “If there were such a thing as a commodity-soul,” Benjamin writes, “[…] it would be the most empathetic ever encountered in the realm of souls, for it would be bound to see every individual as a buyer in whose hand and house it wants to nestle” (GS 1.2:558/SW 4:31). If the commodity had a

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soul, it would be the soul of the prostitute who offers herself promiscuously to the crowd and imagines the whole city as a field of voluptuous desire. Like the prostitute, the commodity “dresses up,” puts on garish make-up in order to advertise its availability, attract potential customers and activate their desires and fantasies. Therefore, Benjamin insists, “love for the prostitute is the apotheosis of empathy with the commodity” ( J85,2) (O11a,4). Desire for the prostitute is the corollary of commodity fetishism, the lust for the inorganic. Prostitution emblematizes the eroticization of the commodity, the transfer of erotic pulsion from the human to the inorganic: Under the domination of the commodity fetish, the sex appeal of the woman is more or less tinged with the appeal of the commodity. […] The modern advertisement shows, from another angle, to what extent the attractions of the woman and those of the commodity can be merged. The sexuality that in former times – on a social level – was stimulated through imagining the future of the productive forces is mobilized now through imagining the power of capital. ( J65a,6)

The natural sexual instincts are diverted into the commodity and desire forced onto lifeless artefacts, so that, as Gilloch argues, “modern capitalism involves both the sexualization of the commodity and the commodification of the sexual.”49 This leads to the sterilization of nature, to a rejection and transformation of the body and its pulsion. Benjamin notes how the inclusion of women in the process of commodity production led to their “masculinization.”50 As we have seen, for Baudelaire the lesbian was the heroic figure of the negation of nature, a tendency Benjamin locates in the whole modernity: “the paradigm of the lesbian woman represents the protest of ‘modernity’ against technological development” (GS 1.2:667/SW 4:170). The logical end result of this process would be the complete sterilization of the organic: “the extreme point in the technological organization of the world is the liquidation of fertility. The frigid woman embodies the ideal of beauty in Jugendstil” (S9a,2). The body is thus consumed, devalued and, in the end metaphorically “killed” and reduced to the inorganic.

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There is a “revolutionary” aspect to this process, “the symbolic side, which creates no less than discovers” (O2,3), by which the female body is “freed” from the compulsion of reproduction and sex is “freed” from the cage of love.51 Far from being an anachronistic “sexual liberation,” however, this revolution merely expresses the will to dominate and enslave nature: “the sexual revolt against love not only springs from the fanatical, obsessional will to pleasure; it also aims to make nature adaptable and obedient to this will. The traits in question here appear more clearly still when prostitution […] is regarded less as the opposite than as the decay of love [Verfall der Liebe]” (O2,3, emphasis added). The ultimate rape of nature, its sterilization and reduction to the inorganic, is accompanied by an erotization of the inorganic, a love of the “thingly,” the lifeless, the dead, and therefore of death. In this assimilation of the living to dead matter, the erotic impulse merges with destructive violence: “sadism and fetishism intertwine in those imaginations that seek to annex all organic life to the sphere of the inorganic” ( J71,3). The rise of prostitution therefore allegorizes, and testifies to, the decline, decay and degeneration of love into love of death. As Buck-Morss notes, this phenomenon is accompanied, on the one hand, by the distortion of the erotic in fascism and modern warfare and, on the other, by political impotence (cf. J63a,1; J64,1).52 Dialectics of the Allegorical Whore In “Central Park” Benjamin writes: More and more relentlessly, the objective environment of human beings is coming to wear the expression of the commodity. At the same time, advertising seeks to disguise the commodity character of things. What resists the mendacious transfiguration of the commodity world is its distortion into allegory. The commodity wants to look itself in the face. It celebrates its incarnation in the whore. (GS 1.2:671/SW 4:173)

The allegorization of the commodity world, that is, its “distortion” into the free-floating allegory, seems to be what saves “the objective environment

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of human beings” from a total “transfiguration” into the expression of the commodity. In the whore, “commodity wants to look itself in the face,” thereby to recognize its commodification under the mendacious disguise of make-up and advertisement. Allegory is for Benjamin “the armature of modernity” (GS 1.2:681/ SW 4:183) because the commodity, erasing the traces of the production process and “dressing up” for the buyer, repeats the allegorical detachment and independence from the “real,” its fundamental interchangeability and self-referentiality. Richard Wolin formulates this equivalence as follows: Just as the commodity turns objects (and persons) into lifeless abstractions (into exchange values), so too does allegory devalue the intrinsic meanings of things for the sake of its own arbitrary meanings. As such, allegory, which proceeds by way of reification, embodies the perfect technique for the poetic representation of a capitalist society which, according to its innermost laws, operates by virtue of the principle of reification: the transformation of social relations between men into lifeless relations between things – commodities.53

Commodities relate to their exchange value just as baroque allegories relate to their meaning, with arbitrariness, abstraction, whimsicality. The commodities’ arbitrary meaning is their price. The whore is an allegory of modernity because the commodification of the human and the fetish character of the commodity is at its most evident and apparent in prostitution. However, the connection between the whore as allegory of modernity and the baroque allegory is also – and perhaps principally – in the devaluation of the organic. “The whore […] has inherited all the powers of Baroque allegory,” writes Benjamin (GS 1.2:676/SW 4:178). As the commodification of the human, she signifies the reduction of the organic to the inorganic, to the lifeless thing, and therefore to death: “the whore is the most precious booty in the triumph of allegory – the life which signifies death” ( J60,5). The key figure in early allegory is the corpse, as Benjamin observed in the Trauerspiel book, because in it “the observer is confronted with the facies hippocratica of history as a petrified, primordial landscape. Everything about history that, from the very beginning, has

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been untimely, sorrowful, unsuccessful, is expressed in a farce – or rather in a death’s head” (GS 1.1:343/OT 166). As the baroque allegorical gaze “causes life to flow out of [the object]” so that “it remains behind dead” (GS 1.1:359/OT 183), so the ultimate commodification of the human in the prostitute chases life away from the human body.54 Nevertheless, dialectical movement is inherent to allegory, which makes of it a revolutionary tool: on the one hand, the commodity is like the allegory; but, on the other, the allegorization of the real by the poet/ flâneur reveals its deadly truth. The allegorical gaze of the poet/flâneur objectifies and so destroys its object, reducing it to ruin, but in so doing it unveils the object’s truth-content. Therefore: “the motif of androgyny, the lesbian, the unfruitful woman, should be treated in connection with the destructive power of the allegorical intention” (GS 1.2:661/SW 4:165). The prostitute as ruin of the sublime body allegorizes, and so uncovers, shows and declares the devaluation of the living within commodity society: the prostitute as allegory thus scatters and destroys the veil of appearance of the commodity as dream-object. In “Central Park” Benjamin notes the “majesty of the allegorical intention: to destroy the organic and the living – to eradicate semblance [Schein]” (GS 1.2:669–70/SW 4:172). The destructive violence of allegory, the disfiguration and devalorization of the prostituted body, reduces this body to pieces and fragments, signifying the loss of aura, beauty, immortality, but it simultaneously demystifies the process of prostitution inherent in the commodification of the real. In this sense, “allegory should be shown as the antidote to myth” (GS 1.2:677/SW 4:179). When the commodity “looks itself in the face” in the prostitute as allegory, “it celebrates its incarnation in the whore” (GS 1.2:671/SW 4:173), but at the same time demystifies its appearance by revealing itself to the world. Therefore, the arbitrary and negative movement of allegorization can be transformed into the utopian configuration of the dialectical image, the freezing of the dialectical flow in a theoretical construction that would blast open the capitalist world. Benjamin only hints at the figure of the prostitute as dialectical image in the 1935 exposé, “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” and fails to pursue the idea:

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chapter 4 Ambiguity is the appearance of dialectic in images, the law of dialectics at a standstill. This standstill is utopia and the dialectical image, therefore, dream image. Such an image is afforded by the commodity per se: as fetish. Such an image is presented by the arcades, which are house no less than street. Such an image is the prostitute – seller and sold in one. (GS 5.1:55/SW 3:40)

This passage disappears from the 1939 exposé, probably because of Adorno’s aversion to the term “ambiguity.”55 Nevertheless, the theoretical power of the observation remains: the prostitute, seller and sold in one, freezes in an image the contradictions and miseries of capitalist society and thereby becomes a powerful tool for the materialist critic.56 Benjamin and the Silent Whore This use of the whore as allegory for the commodity and as dialectical image is indeed a powerful critical tool. The prostitute is therefore a central theoretical figure in the Arcades Project and in Benjamin’s mature critique of capitalist modernity. The figure already marks Benjamin’s early writings, but, as I have argued in these pages, it acquires its full theoretical power only in the work on the Parisian arcades and on Baudelaire. Nevertheless, it also marks Benjamin’s last work, the theses “On the Concept of History,” thus reaffirming the centrality of its allegorization and also allowing for a few concluding remarks. In Thesis XVI, in his description of the historical materialist, Benjamin writes: “the historical materialist leaves it to others to be drained by the whore called ‘Once upon a time’ in historicism’s bordello. He remains in control of his powers – man enough to blast open the continuum of history” (GS 1.2:702/SW 4:396). As Eagleton notes, for Benjamin homogeneous history is whorelike, instantly available, barren and empty; it can easily be penetrated but is sterile, endlessly repetitive and always-the-same, “since for sexist mythology all whores are essentially one.” Historicism’s bordello, nevertheless, is as delusional and pathetic as the erotic encounter with the whore: “the duplicity of the mythological whore,” he writes, “is that she is always penetrated but never ravished, ceaselessly filled but continually empty; the openness of homogeneous history is both seductive

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invitation and frustrating refusal, since in entering its gaping void you are entering precisely nothing.”57 The historical materialist, by contrast, is “man enough” and “remains in control of his power.” The crass sexism of Benjamin’s language is disturbing in a revolutionary discourse with claims to recover and salvage the “tradition of the oppressed.” Nevertheless, it is unfortunately the proper conclusion of a theoretical trajectory which, in spite of all the determination to avenge the silenced, remains an accomplice to the patriarchal silencing of women. Benjamin never acknowledged women as a peculiar category of the oppressed, thus effectively reinstating their oppression. Margaret Mahony Stoljar’s analysis of the language of desire in the Arcades Project therefore becomes especially interesting. Reading Benjamin’s discourse on history, she argues that he uses a figurative language which employs the erotic and feminine as key concepts: the language is eroticized in order to “characterize the activity of calling up the past as like the quest of a lover.” Since the erotic belongs, for Benjamin, to the semantic field of femininity, Mahony Stoljar speaks of a “feminization of his language”: the past is penetrated by the historian, memory is a category of desire and, as such is feminized. As he describes “the details of life in the arcades,” she continues, “Benjamin repeatedly evokes the crossing of threshold and the penetration of doorways, the pleasure of expectation and of intimate meetings, the innocent seduction of displays in boutiques, and the charm of chance encounters. The softly-lit spaces within the arcades open so that the historian as passer-by and as lover may enjoy a glimpse of what is hidden, before it is lost forever.”58 This feminization is a reification, in which the object of desire is reduced to silence and deprived of a proper voice. Mahony Stoljar proceeds to argue that Benjamin’s image of sexuality is always degraded. It is degraded to the level of commodity, therefore located in the inorganic world, reified and debased, but also regarded as depraved by Benjamin: the linguistic register of the Arcades Project represents a sexuality full of shame, despised and vilified. The fact that the word Dirne, more formal and neutral for prostitute, is used in the early writings, but almost entirely replaced in the Parisian cycle by Hure, like the Old English “whore” more colloquial,

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but also stronger and more abusive, suggests Benjamin’s fundamental uneasiness with sexuality as such. This language is paralleled by what Gilloch calls a “frequently myopic, unsympathetic and occasionally even crass”59 attitude towards figures of destitution in the city. These, especially the prostitute and the ragpicker, have a central role, but, Gilloch writes, Benjamin’s treatment “is not always particularly sensitive or insightful. He never adequately grasped, perhaps, the hardship and miseries endured by the marginal figures of the city.”60 Despite Benjamin’s preoccupation with the tradition of the oppressed, the emphasis in the Arcades Project is on consumption, and therefore on the bourgeois consumer. The “oppressed” in urban modernity, the worker, the beggar, the prostitute, the poor, the ragpicker, are relegated to the margins of the theoretical construct, “to the role,” Gilloch argues, “of historical extras.”61 Benjamin does not voice the prostitute’s anguish, but rather speaks for her. He thus replicates that reduction to silence of the figures of marginalization which his critique takes to task. The prostitute remains a mere sign in Benjamin’s work, “bearers of meaning rather than makers of meaning,” as Walkowitz writes.62 Benjamin utilizes a consummate trope of nineteenth- and twentieth-century urban literature, which never escapes phallocentric discourse63; the prostitute remains “the other,” Buck-Morss writes, “a field of symbolic rather than experienced meaning.”64 Prostitutes (and women in general), reduced to signs and used as tropes, are in the end transient and disposable entities. Thus Epstein Nord argues that: the individual woman or prostitute has no existence and no significance beyond what she allows the male observer to express about his own experience. Benjamin and his Baudelaire provide a kind of paradigm for looking at urban spectatorship through the lens of gender, for we begin to see that in the city of the male spectator woman appears most often as prostitute, always objectified, always “other” and always instrumental in making the social or existential statement he is after.65

Benjamin noted that “Baudelaire never wrote a whore-poem from the point of view of the whore” ( J66a,7). However, his own analyses and use of the figure also never give voice to her as a person, but, at the most, only speak for her. Benjamin never wrote a word from the point of view of

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the whore: like Baudelaire, he addresses prostitutes in his writings, while women themselves remain mute and silenced. As Buck-Morss writes, “the image of the whore, the most significant female image in the PassagenWerk, is the embodiment of objectivity, not subjectivity. Not the prostitute but ‘prostitution’ is a keyword; and it is coupled with ‘gambling’ as a manifestation of the alienation of erotic desire (in the man) when it surrenders itself to fate.”66 In Benjamin’s writings on prostitution women are elided, whilst prostitution itself remains a romanticized trope. In spite of the theoretical power of his argument, Benjamin is unable to escape the patriarchal phantasmagoria of the prostitute.

4.2 Paradoxes of the Unruly Commodity: Dacia Maraini and the Talking Whore Exchanges without identifiable terms, without accounts, without end … Without additions and accumulations, one plus one, woman after woman … Without sequence or number. Without standard or yardstick. […] Use and exchange would be indistinguishable. The greatest value would be at the same time the least kept in reserve. Nature’s resources would be expended without depletion, exchanged without labour, freely given, exempt from masculine transactions: enjoyment without a fee, well-being without pain, pleasure without possession. — Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One

From Whore to Sex-Worker Rebecca Schneider takes Benjamin to task on the issue of the prostitute: she is fascinated by the dialectical image of the prostitute who “straddle[s] a treacherous conceptual line, illegally walking the street between subject and object” and thus “can be read back against the pervasive myths” of capitalism; nevertheless, the prostitute as dialectical image “also make[s] evident, as dialectical materialists such as Benjamin completely ignore, the

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gender dynamics at the structural base of the signifying system propping the circulation of commodities.”1 These gender and gendered dynamics are implicit in the “gender coding” inscribed in the very act of reading them. She writes: Benjamin’s dialectical images seem to wait passively for the intervention of a historical materialist who, discovering them, is viscerally struck by a flash of insight and proceeds to interpret the images as mysterious runes, translating their leaking secrets for the purposes of his materialist observer who, like some Great White Emancipator, can “invest it with the ability to look at us in return” (GS 1.2:646–7/ SW 4:338) – as if that object did not possess a “look” of its own, whether we are habituated to recognize it or not.2

This anti-subjectivism is a structural problem of the dialectical image, especially when the image happens to be a human figure, which is never interrogated but always merely “read.” And the reading takes place within a signifying system that goes unquestioned. For Benjamin the prostitute remains a sign, extremely useful and with a central place in his analysis, but without body and voice. However, the prostitute – or better, prostitutes, human beings in flesh and blood and with a plurality of voices – spoke. Beginning with the revolutionary movements of the 1960s, prostitutes commenced to resist “any appellation as passive runes”: they looked and talked back, accepting their function as dialectical image of the capitalist system perhaps, but also claiming the role of “image interpreters,” “loudly voicing their own interpretations,” Schneider writes, “sex commodities and materialist philosophers in one!” As dialectical images, she argues, they “bear dialectics of their own, coming out with their secret(ion)s and making a mess across a number of high holy divides – […] between theorized and practiced, historian and historicized, materialist and materialized.”3 Not waiting to be “invested” by the gaze of the (male) materialist interpreter in order to look back, the “political” prostitute becomes an “unruly commodity,” talking back to her positioning and “becoming commodity, salesgirl and buyer in one.”4 And the stories she tells are of an entirely different account of commodification, reification and fetishism, of Western erotische Unkultur and the “decay of love.”

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Benjamin’s “blindness” is by no means unusual among the male leftist intelligentsia, which rarely defined women as a category of the dispossessed. As Shannon Bell writes, “prostitution, for Marxists, is exploitative in the same way that the selling of all labour power is exploitative.”5 In Marxist analysis, the prostitute is construed as the ur-worker and the worker construed as prostitute, whereby both are reduced to the position of the human commodity determined by the market system. Prostitution is exploited as labour and every exploitation of labour is seen as prostitution. Family, gender inequality, women’s labour are certainly issues in Marxist analysis, but the founding and totalizing dialectic of its discourse is that between labour and capital: this dialectic would subsume any other account of inequality and domination. Marxism remains therefore essentially “sex-blind” and fails to acknowledge the heterogeneity of women’s oppression. Where feminism embraced Marxism, it used it as a powerful tool for the analysis of society, but pointed it in other directions: gender issues, the silencing of women and above all the oppression of women by men.6 What Schneider calls the “political whore” emphasizes the gendered dynamics of oppression, accepting, in a way, the status of commodity and seller, but also claiming the status of “labourer,” thus outing the “coagulated” human labour “concealed” in the commodity.7 When prostitutes speak, they reject first of all the male account that for millennia construed their identity. But they go further. In the aftermath of May ’68, some prostitutes associated into groups, unions, committees and began to speak publicly. As few had done before, they spoke about themselves, telling stories of violence, degradation, humiliation; but most of all they started to speak for themselves, claiming the attention of society and demanding a series of rights. This was an absolute novelty, because these movements – at different times in different places and with different modalities – for the first time wanted to produce a reality, and therefore a culture, putting aside male accounts and prescriptions. Interestingly, what they wanted principally was recognition of their condition as workers, with all the rights and guaranties connected to this status, and the protection of their dignity as human beings and citizens. The base of their “scandalous” argument is the recognition that prostitution is work like any other, which therefore could be freely chosen and practised.

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They claimed there to be no more alienation in their profession than in any other practice of “selling” labour power, that is, the alienation of the “productive” capacities of the worker’s body. Theirs was not an apology for prostitution; they merely claimed the right to dignified existence in a society where everything and everyone is commodified and for sale. With the act of speaking, anthropologist Amalia Signorelli notes, prostitutes for the first time “transformed a stigma into an identity capable of defining itself autonomously,” thereby breaking the silence and ignorance that surrounded their condition and commencing a process of analysis of all the factors in what she calls the “prostitution system.”8 As a paradigm of the commodification of the female body, and therefore of the oppression of women, prostitution has become a central issue for feminism. Nevertheless, feminist theorists are deeply divided on the social and moral status of prostitution and therefore on the politics to be adopted. Whereas some embrace the argument that sex is work and thus pursue a “realist” politics of re-definition, de-penalization and legalization, others, most famously Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, insist on the de-humanization of women prostitution entails and therefore argue it cannot be tolerated. What emerges is a fundamental paradox inherent to the talking prostitute: on the one hand, the talking prostitutes embrace in a way the phantasmagoria of the market, accepting commodity capitalism as an unsurmountable reality which has to be dealt with; on the other, they unveil the dreamscape of commodity society as phantasmagorical, hinting at utopian images of “awakening.” The issues at stake are many and the debate is complex and articulated. In this chapter, I intend to pursue this paradox through a reading of Dacia Maraini’s 1973 play Dialogo di una prostituta con un suo cliente (Dialogue Between a Prostitute and Her Client).9 Written and performed in the heyday of feminist activism, Dialogo is a one-act play consisting entirely of a dialogue between Manila, an uncommon prostitute, and an unnamed client, in which the stereotype of the prostitute is deconstructed and traditional gender roles and sexual myths are confused, refused, subverted and reversed. It is a deliberately provocative piece that, in the intentions of writer and producers, presents arguments and gives rise to debate and discussion, rather than proposing models or solutions to the “problem” of prostitution.

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Unlike Benjamin’s figure, Maraini’s prostitute has a voice, a name and a personality, she looks and talks back to the client and to her positioning, thereby “demythifying the myth,” but also opening up a number of different questions. The Commodity Speaks Benjamin wrote that “prostitution can lay claim to being considered ‘work’ the moment work becomes prostitution” ( J67,5). Maraini’s Dialogo is based precisely on this assumption: commodity society enforces the universal prostitution of everything and everybody and Manila thus embraces prostitution as a profession which gives her money, independence and freedom. By choosing prostitution as work, she declares the universal prostitution of commodity society, but simultaneously threatens the stability of the exchange. From the very beginning of the play, she demythifies the myth of the commodity by giving exchange its proper name: M: Perché fai tante domande? Tu compri, io vendo, stiamo ai patti. C: I patti sono che io prendo e tu ti fai prendere. M: No, tu compri io vendo, niente piú. C: Ma che cosa? M: La mia fica. […] siamo in commercio, no? (Dialogo 396) M: Why are you asking so many questions? You buy, I sell, that’s the deal. C: The deal is that I take and you let yourself be taken. M: No, you buy I sell, nothing more. C: But what? M: My cunt. […] we’re in business, aren’t we?

Dialogo is a very Brechtian, “didactic” or “ideological” play,10 which seeks to avenge the female point of view through the Verfremdungseffekt.11 By talking back to her own commodification, Manila destroys the Schein, the appearance of naturalness of the exchange; by reifying her own body as “cunt,” she destroys the sex-appeal of the sale; by reducing the sellerclient relationship to mere material exchange, she dispels the empathy

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that enables and sustains the exchange. The client complains: he is paying a lot and therefore does not want to hear coarse language; Manila replies by stressing the merely material nature of the exchange: M: Mica tanto caro. Il mio corpo lo vendo a prezzo ridotto, incluso l’uso della stanza, del letto, delle coperte, del portacenere, della radio, della finestra, del cesso. C: Ma sai che sei meschina? Pensi solo al denaro. Non hai qualcosa dentro che si muove, soffre, piange … non hai un’anima? M: Mai sentito parlare. (Dialogo 396) M: You’re not paying that much. I sell my body at discount price, including the use of the room, the bed, the blankets, the ashtray, the radio, the window, the toilet. C: You know you’re really petty? You just think about money. Don’t you have something inside that moves, suffers, cries … don’t you have a soul? M: Never heard of it.

The client is disconcerted by the crudeness of the revelation: he dismisses it as coarseness and asks Manila not to use “that word.”12 Without empathy, the exchange cannot take place: the client complains that “se tu non fai la tua parte, scusa, io mi smoscio, mi smollo, perdo la voglia” (“if you don’t keep up your end of the deal, you’ll turn me off, I’ll lose my desire,” Dialogo 396) and “ma cosí mi smonti, Manila, mi smonti, porca l’oca, mi butti giú” (“this way you dampen me, Manila, for god’s sake, you turn me off,” Dialogo 401). The phantasmagoria of the exchange requires that the woman-commodity comply with the rules of the market and establish an empathy with the client; it requires therefore that she not look or talk back. To her assertiveness the client replies twice “mi spoetizzi!” (“you de-poeticize me!,” Dialogo 398, 404): the phantasmagoria of the womancommodity requires that she hide the deadly character of her fetishization and be what de Beauvoir called an “eminently poetic reality.”13 Manila will not comply and thus for the client she is not a prostitute, not even a woman, as he says in these two passages: C: Ma tu … tu chi diavolo sei? M Ho la gonna non vedi?

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C: Sarai mica un travestito? Guarda che io con gli uomini non ci sto. M: No, scemo, sono una donna. C: Mica le donne fanno così. M: E come fanno? C: Un po’ di civetteria, di garbo, che ne so … scodinzolano, fanno le moine. M: Io non scodinzolo perché non sono un cane. Spogliati! (Dialogo 395) C: But you … who the hell are you? M: I wear a skirt, can’t you see? C: You’re not a transvestite, are you? I don’t go with men. M: No, idiot, I’m a woman. C: Women don’t do like that. M: How do they do then? C: A bit of coquetry, of charm, I don’t know … they wiggle their ass, they flirt. C: I don’t wiggle anything, I’m not a dog. Undress!14 C: Ma tu, ma tu, scusa, tu non sei una prostituta, io me ne intendo, tu sei una cosa diversa, sei una deficiente, un’invertita, una attrice, una buffona, non lo so, certamente non sei quella roba che ho comprato per scopare. (Dialogo 397) C: You, you, you’re not a prostitute, I’m an expert, you’re something else, an idiot, an invert, an actress, a buffoon, I don’t know, certainly you’re not that stuff that I bought to screw.

The client attempts to re-instate the empathy by re-narratizing Manila into the patriarchal account of the prostitute/commodity. He tells stories, invents “poetic fictions” in order to create the “atmosphere”15 apt for a proper exchange: M: E allora di’ tu che facciamo C: Facciamo finta che ci siamo incontrati per caso su un tram e io ti ho rimorchiato a tu sei incerta se tradire tuo marito o no. M: Non mi va. E poi il marito non ce l’ho. C: Fai finta, no?! M: Insomma, devo fare la commedia. C: Ma no, che c’entra. Devi solo darmi retta … M: Io non faccio la commedia. Io vendo la fica e basta. (Dialogo 398)

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chapter 4 M: Then say what you want to do. C: Let’s pretend we met on a tram and I picked you up and you are unsure whether to cheat your husband or not. M: I don’t like it. And I don’t have a husband anyway. C: You can pretend, can’t you?! M: So, you want some play-acting. C: No, no, just listen to me … M: I don’t do any acting. I sell my cunt and that’s it.

The re-mythification of the exchange, the re-instatement of the empathy, entails also the obliteration of the term “whore” and of the commodification itself: it needs to mask the exchange behind the veil of a supposed “poetic fiction.” The client tells Manila not to refer to herself with the derogatory term “whore”: M: Come dovrei dire? C: Non lo so, massaggiatrice, accompagnatrice, cortigiana, to’, la vita bisogna un po’ inventarla, un po’ immaginarla … io sono qui in una stanza con una che non conosco, é tutto da scoprire, da inventare, capisci … chissá cosa ne viene fuori … Ecco questa é l’avventura come la vedo io. […] C: Lo sai, basta poco … chiudo gli occhi e immagino … che tu sei una vergine … una ragazza altera, solitaria, che non ha mai conosciuto l’uomo e non vuole, non vuole a nessun costo essere toccata. (Dialogo 404) M: What should I say then? C: I don’t know, masseuse, escort, courtesan; life has to be invented, imagined … I’m here with someone I don’t know, everything must be discovered, imagined, you see … who knows what could happen … See, this is adventure as I see it. […] C: You know, it’s easy … I close my eyes and imagine … that you’re a virgin … a disdainful, lonely girl who never had a man and doesn’t want, at any cost, to be touched.

Manila resists these attempts to recreate the customary conditions for the exchange: she strives at all times to dispel the Schein and expose the commodification and crude materiality of the exchange. An important factor in the economy of the talking whore is her reason for choosing this profession: she is not driven by poverty or desperation, nor is she

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the stereotypical prostitute with a heart of gold; Manila has a degree in philosophy and chose prostitution for money and independence. She rejected both the traditional roles of wife/companion/mother and the protection of a pimp, associating with other prostitutes in order to set up an independent “business.” The underlying thesis is that there is little choice for a woman in patriarchal society: in one way or another, she is always forced to sell herself, so that selling one’s body consciously, openly and for real money, exposing, accepting and taking advantage of it, becomes a choice for freedom. Towards the end of the play the client tries to talk Manila out of the job (in order to get sex for free): C: Io, guarda, potrei perfino sposarti! M: Sí, per fare la prostituta a tempo pieno, no, grazie. […] C: Ma allora perché non lavori, potresti fare la dattilografa, come la mia ragazza, vuoi che ti aiuti a cercare un posto? M: Si, per fare la prostituta d’azienda, no, grazie. C: Potresti fare la commessa. M: Si, prostituta di negozio, no, grazie. C: Ma perché non ti accontenti mai? Sembra che la donna non puó fare altro che la prostituta. M: L’hai detto, occhio di serpente, la donna puó solo decidere se prostitutirsi in pubblico o in privato, per la strada o in casa, chiaro? (Dialogo 409–10) C: I, listen, I could even marry you! M: Yea, so I would be a full-time prostitute. No thanks. […] C: So why don’t you work then, you could be a typist, like my girlfriend, do you want me to help you find a job? M: Yea, so I would be a company-prostitute. No thanks. C: You could be a shop assistant. M: Yea, shop-prostitute. No thanks. C: But why are you never satisfied? It seems like a woman could only be a prostitute. M: You said it, snake eye; a woman can only decide whether to prostitute herself in public or in private, on the street or at home, is that clear?

What Benjamin called the “sexual revolt against love” (O2,3) was the expression of a will to domination that enslaved nature and the organic and ended in love for the inorganic, the “decay of love.” The talking

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prostitute’s sexual revolt against love is, by contrast, a revolt against the traditional roles and usual forms of “private” prostitution prescribed to women by a “love” which is always male; a revolt which is based on the liberation of sex – the object of the contract – from the cage of male domination. She appropriates the stigma of the “fallen woman” in order to unmask the reifying nature of any kind of male love. When the dialectical image of the prostitute talks back, the flash of insight that emerges goes much further than Benjamin could have imagined. It is not merely the universal commodification of capitalist society she tells of, the “love of death” inherent in the reification of commodity fetishism; what she spells out is the millennial commodification of women in patriarchal society, the reduction of women to a commodity to be possessed, used and exchanged. The new freedom gained by the revolutionary, “political” prostitutes is to take that exchange into their own hands. The Prostitute as Paradigm At the origin of Maraini’s play lies Kate Millett’s argument that prostitution is a paradigm of women’s condition, which: not only declares [woman’s] subjection right in the open, with the cash nexus between the sexes announced in currency, rather than through the subtlety of a marriage contract (which still recognizes the principles of sex in return for commodities and historically has insisted upon it), but the very act of prostitution is itself a declaration of our value, our reification.16

What the prostitute is made to sell, for Millett, is the degradation (read “commodification”) of her body and herself, and what the client buys is not much her sexuality as the power over another human being. The exchange thus openly declares not simply the commodification of the human in capitalist society, but also the power relations that constitute and sustain that society, the gendered dynamics at the base of patriarchal capitalism. Millett writes that prostitution is a “fossil” in the social structure, which points towards the prehistory of the present social relations, and refers to Lévi-Strauss’ famous definition of women as a “scarce

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commodity requiring collective intervention for its distribution.”17 The commodification of women at the base of patriarchal society consists in a sort of metonymic reduction whereby woman is confined to her sexuality and identified with her sex, cunt: “our self-contempt,” she writes, “originates in this: in knowing we are cunt. That is what we are supposed to be about – our essence, our offence.”18 In Dialogo, Manila insists on declaring and loudly exposing this situation: she repeats time and again, against the client’s remonstrations, that what she sells, what is at the base of the exchange and constitutes the only possible nexus between them, is her cunt. A woman is never whole, her body is not only reified but also divided. The prostitute as paradigm thus works as Benjaminian allegory: its destructive violence disfigures and reduces the female body to pieces, thereby demystifying her commodification and exposing the Schein of social relations. On one occasion the actress playing Manila interrupts the play and bluntly asks the audience: Anche voi (al pubblico) scommetto che avete delle preferenze del corpo femminile, come dal macellaio: mi dia un po’ di spalla, oppure la coscia … il corpo della donna é diviso, esaltato ma diviso … (ad un uomo del pubblico) Tu cosa preferisci? Il seno, la coscia? (Dialogo 403) You too (to the audience), I guess you prefer some parts of the female body, like at the butcher’s: give me a piece of shoulder, or the haunch … the woman’s body is divided, glorified yet divided … (to a man in the audience) You, what do you prefer? The breast, the thigh?

Once the paradigm/allegory eradicates the semblance, the paradoxical disruption of the continuum of male supremacy by the revolutionary prostitute consists in taking charge of the exchange. Manila embraces, and turns into the manager of, her own commodification in order to gain the paradoxical freedom of the marketplace. What is so threatening for the client is, not much the demystification of the myth and the unveiling of the truth, as the fact that the prostitute takes control of the terms and modality of the exchange. Prostitution has been tolerated by every society, every law and every church: what is not acceptable, what

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so unsettles and undermines the social structure and thus constitutes the real scandalon of the talking whore, is her removing the exchange from the power of men. Prostitutes who associate and refuse the protection of pimps and states, who claim rights, recognition, respect and the status of worker, undermine a social structure founded on the exchange of women and on male control of this exchange.19 Luce Irigaray dwells on this argument: like Millett’s, her starting point is Lévi-Strauss’ anthropological analysis of the “elementary structures” of society, which poses the exchange of women as the foundation of the economic, social and cultural order. “The passage into the social order,” she writes, “into the symbolic order, into order as such, is assured by the fact that men, or groups of men, circulate women among themselves, according to a rule known as the incest taboo.”20 The commodification and exchange of women is, for Irigaray, the “unknown infrastructure” that makes social and cultural life possible. Any system of exchange, and thus any social, economic and cultural system, is therefore “men’s business,” the exclusive valorization of men’s needs and desires, of an exchange (of women) that takes place only among men, that reduces women to the goods to be exchanged, and that she calls therefore the “reign of hom(m) o-sexuality.”21 In Dialogo, Manila is well aware of the “hom(m)o-sexual” terms of the exchange: M: Levati le mutande. C: E vaffanculo, stronza! Chi è che compra qui, io o te? M: I soldi ce li hai tu e perciò sei tu che compri, ma il piacere ce l’avrai solo tu e perciò sei tu che compri te stesso attraverso di me. (Dialogo 404) M: Take of your pants. C: Fuck off, bitch! Who’s the buyer here, you or me? M: You’re the one with the money so you are the buyer, but you’re the only one who’ll get pleasure out of this, so it’s really you buying yourself through me.

Every economic structure is thus for Irigaray homosexual, especially the economy of (sexual) desire, which constitutes the foundation and blueprint for any form of exchange: “woman,” she writes, “exists only as an

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occasion for mediation, transaction, transition, transference, between man and his fellow man, indeed between man and himself.”22 Patriarchal economic, social and cultural order requires, on the one hand, that women do not participate in the exchange except as alienated commodity to be consumed and, on the other, that men be exempt from being used and exchanged as commodities. Irigaray thus embarks on a long and detailed comparison between Marx’s definition and description of the mythical status of the commodity in the first chapter of Das Kapital and the status of woman in patriarchal societies.23 Woman, she argues, is construed by men’s desire, she is a “product” of men’s “labour,” and this labour is what constitutes her value on the market. Reduced to an abstract and universal value through their exchange among men, “transformed into value-invested idealities,”24 the women-commodities are denied any possibility of exchange – and thus communication – among themselves and this prohibition is what inaugurates and maintains the symbolic/ economic order: “women, animals endowed with speech like men, assure the possibility of the use and circulation of the symbolic without being recipients of it. Their nonaccess to the symbolic is what has established the social order.”25 The question thus becomes “what if ”: “what if these ‘commodities’ refused to go to ‘market’? What if they maintained ‘another’ kind of commerce, among themselves?”26 How would this affect the social, economic and cultural order?27 Women are not allowed to go to the market on their own, to establish and exchange their own value among themselves, to take control of the seller-buyer-consumer relationship.28 This possibility threatens the entire edifice of society and thus hovers above the gendered dynamics of the social construct both as menacing ghost and utopic image of revolution. This is the ultimate origin of the taboo on female homosexuality: lesbians are commodities which refuse to circulate, except among themselves, and thus interrupt the flux of exchange, breaking down the circulation of commodities and the symbolic order. Maraini’s Dialogo concludes with such a question mark. After the client tries to run away without paying and gets beaten up by her colleagueprostitutes, Manila sings a lullaby to her baby-girl which seems to propose lesbian separatism as paradoxical solution:

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chapter 4 Ninnà ninnà ninnà bella bambina Dormi e non pensare al tuo futuro Ti cuciró le labbra con lo spago Per non avere la tentazione di baciare Dirai che la tua mamma era una strega Dirai che la tua mamma era una fata Ti cuciró la fica con filo di seta Per non avere la tentazione di chiavare, Dirai che la tua mamma era una strega Dirai che la tua mamma era una fata Dormi bambina dormi mangia e ingrossa Ti cuciró gli occhi col verderame Per non avere la tentazione di guardare Dirai che la tua mamma era una strega Dirai che la tua mamma era una fata Quando sarai grande vivrai solo fra donne Diventerai una strega, diventerai una fata. (Dialogo 412) Ninna nanna beatiful girl Sleep and don’t worry about your future I will sew your lips together with strings So you won’t be tempted to kiss You’ll say your mother was a which You’ll say your mother was a fairy I’ll sew your cunt with silken threads So you won’t be tempted to screw You’ll say your mother was a which You’ll say your mother was a fairy Sleep my girl and eat and get fat I’ll sew your eyes together with verdigris So you won’t be tempted to watch You’ll say your mother was a which You’ll say your mother was a fairy When you grow up you’ll live only among women You’ll become a witch, you’ll become a fairy.

This utopian (or dystopian) provocation works as an allegory for the implosion of the marketplace: in the “reign of hom(m)o-sexuality,”29 (female) homosexuality is not simply a “defensive castration” which seals out the baby from the seductive but brutal world of the fathers, as

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Maraini suggests.30 It also interrupts the continuum of male supremacy (the “victors”) by disrupting the “homogeneous and empty” space of the market that enables and sustains the exchange. The hyperbole in the lullaby projects a shocking image of the collapse of the marketplace, its modes of exchange and patriarchal erotische Unkultur. The Gaze of the Commodity If the collapse of the male economy of desire is the goal of Maraini/ Manila’s strategy, Dialogo nevertheless pursues a paradoxical tactics which disrupts the continuum of male supremacy but retains the space of the market. This tactics is the comic reversal of the traditional roles, adopted by Schneider’s “political prostitute”: to claim purchasing power for herself. The prostitute as dialectical image becomes, Schneider writes, not only seller and sold, but also buyer, in one.31 If the continuum of the patriarchal phantasmagoria is founded on the denial to women of any active role in the exchange, then the violent (and illegal) assumption of the role of buyer disrupts the symbolic structure. Dialogo, in a sense, operates – or at least prefigures – an inversion of the roles of seller and buyer, commodity and purchaser, subject and object of the exchange, an inversion performed through Manila’s gaze: in the political prostitute, the commodity not only looks itself in the face, but also looks back at the buyer, not merely revealing the universal commodification of capitalist society, but also disrupting the gender dynamics of the exchange. A recurring motif in the play is the question “who’s the buyer?” Manila maintains a male-like decisiveness that tends to objectify the client rather than let him objectify her. The play begins with her confronting the client with a crude “allora, ti spogli?” (“well then, don’t you undress?”), to which the disconcerted client responds: “non sono mica una donna!” (“I’m not a woman!,” Dialogo 395). She continuously forces her gaze onto the client‘s body: M: Levati la camicia cosí ti vedo. C: Vedi che? M: Vedo se hai un bel petto.

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chapter 4 C: Ma scusa, sono io qui che compro sai, mica tu! M: Certo che sei tu che compri. Ma a me piace guardare. Sono una guardona, io. Mi fai vedere il petto? (Dialogo 395) M: Take off your shirt so I can see you. C: See what? M: See what’s your chest like. C: Listen, I am the buyer here, not you! M: Sure you are the buyer. But I like to watch. I’m a bit of a voyeur. Can you show me your chest?

Objectified as commodity, the client’s body is then metaphorically torn to pieces by Manila’s gaze, in a reversal of the practice of the male gaze: M: Hai dei bellissimi occhi verdi. Ma sono verdi o celesti? C: Belli vero? M: Di corpo sei un po’ scarsuccio. Cioé troppo magro. Fai vedere le mani? […] M: E hai una bella bocca. C: Me lo dicono tutti. M: Sorridi un po’ … bei denti … non c’é male. […] C: Bello qui bello lí … ma chi è che compra fra noi, eh? (Dialogo 398–9) M: Beautiful green ayes. Are they green or blue? C: Beautiful, aren’t they? M: Your body is a bit lacking though. Too skinny. Show me your hands. […] M: And you have a beautiful mouth. C: Everybody says so. M: Smile a bit … nice teeth … not bad. […] C: What is all this “nice here” and “nice there” … who’s the buyer here, eh?

In the play it is the male body that is exposed naked and reified,32 whilst Manila remains dressed at all times, wearing every-day clothes, not the garish and provocative “uniform” of prostitution.33 The client’s features are “feminized”: beautiful eyes, slender and graceful body, refined hands, beautiful mouth; he is also hypocritically outraged (as a woman should be) by Manila’s (man-like) coarseness. Moreover, while she has a proper name, the client, though possessing personal features and a personal story, remains anonymous, the client, the “john,” a stereotype, a sign,

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in complete reversal of traditional roles. In a long monologue, Manila draws a whole typology of man, dwelling insistently on a long typology of dicks (cf. Dialogo 400–1), as in a list of goods to sell, reminiscent of Benjamin’s “feminine fauna of the arcades” (O2,4). However, the question remains whether this reversal of roles changes anything; whether the purchasing power of the prostitute can purchase anything other than a paradoxical place in the same market that commodifies her; whether by becoming an actor in the market she is not simply re-absorbed and normalized by the logic of the exchange. The allegorical gaze of the prostitute unveils the facies hippocratica of her own fetishization, but does not disrupt the functioning of the exchange: in the end, its object, direction and power-dynamics remain the same. Schneider stresses that the “recognition of misrecognition” and the “demystification of the myth […] in no way alters the stream of desire ignited by the myth, much less the social mechanisms responsible for the erection and manipulation” of the system. The “conundrum of the public secret” is that, although unveiled, it is still prized, paradoxically, as secret, and from this paradox derives, in part, the pleasure.34 The marketplace is reduced to rubble by the gaze of the paradigmatic/allegorical prostitute, but its ruins work even more smoothly than the rigid old structure. The prostitute as buyer is therefore a false solution, an acquiesceence rather then an awakening. Nevertheless, beside the autistic interruption of the commodity circulation prefigured in the final lullaby and the inversion of roles suggested by the commodifying gaze of the emancipated prostitute, Dialogo also proposes a third alternative, in which Maraini’s political message must be sought. Manila’s gaze is the vehicle of a different approach which spells a utopian de-commodification of the body. It does not stop at the surface of the other’s body, is not reflected by the mirror of her own desire which petrifies the other into a commodity, but is rather absorbed by the opaqueness of alterity. The gaze projects Manila into the other, as she explains in four monologues addressed to the audience: Io lo guardo, me lo guardo tutto, proprio tutto, dai piedi alla testa, perché a me piace guardare, sempre cosí: io guardo, riguardo e poi trac, casco nella cosa guardata …

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chapter 4 questo é il rischio … a me il guardare mi dá uno strappo, come un rubinetto aperto giú per la schiena … se ad un certo punto guardo ancora mi butto, é cosí, mi butto dentro la cosa guardata e non ci sono piú, calo a fondo, colo a picco, nuoto, corro, mi distendo … mi dico: sono io, Manila, stai tranquilla … e invece no, non sono piú io manco per niente, sono quella cosa lí guardata … (Dialogo 397) I look at him, I look all over him, from head to toe, because I like to look, it’s always like this: I look and re-look and then, trac, I fall right into what I’m looking at … that’s the risk … looking gives me a jolt, like cold water down my back … and if at some point I look again, then I jump, I jump into what I’m looking at and I’m no longer there, I sink, I drown, I swim, I run, I spread out … I say to myself: it’s me, Manila, don’t worry … but no, I’m not myself at all, I’m that thing I’m looking at …

She tells, for example, of how she “fell into” a dog on the street, bossed and ill-treated by its owner (Dialogo 397); or how she “fell into” an old woman on a tram, how she felt the disgusted looks of the people around on her wrinkled skin and the ugliness and pettiness of an abandoned existence (Dialogo 410). She finally “falls into” the client when they have sexual intercourse: she tries to resist, she “hang[s] on to the edges,” ma non c’é niente da fare, senza che quasi me ne accorgo scivolo dentro quell’acqua melmosa e mi faccio lui, timido, gongolante, assetato di latte materno. Apro la camicetta, gli do da bere il latte mio e lui, cioé io, se ne viene come una fontana, un fiume, una cataratta, un diluvio, perché io sono un cazzo innamorato dentro la fica della mia mamma e il latte che mando giú per la gola mi eccita, mi stravolge, mi tira il seno e io divento tutto latte nella gola di mio figlio che sono io e che sputa il seme dolce nel mio ventre che é il suo e io sono in lei che é la madre mia e il figlio della madre che si fa latte per il mio amato amore materno. (Dialogo 406) but there’s nothing I can do. Almost without noticing I slip into that muddy water and become him, shy, overjoyed, thirsty of maternal milk. I open my blouse, I give him my milk to drink and he, that is, I, comes like a fountain, a river, a cataract, a deluge, because I’m a dick in love inside my mother’s cunt and the milk I’m swallowing excites me, shakes me, he pulls my breast and I become all milk in the throat of my son who is me and who spits the sweet semen into my womb that is his and I am in her who is my mother and the son of the mother who becomes milk for my beloved maternal love.

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Manila’s gaze functions as what Rodica Diaconescu-Blumenfeld calls a “trajectory of identification”: it enacts a permeation of selves that blurs the boundaries between self and other. Diaconescu-Blumenfeld defines Maraini’s poetics as “writing the world from the inside,” a writing that affirms corporeality through the articulation and reorganization of a possession that disavows the violence of power and reification.35 The relation between corporeality and subjectivity is a struggle, resolved by Maraini’s characters in a commingling of consciousnesses on a sensual basis: the other is not distanced and objectified, as in the male voyeuristic gaze, but experienced as embodied subjectivity by a gaze that is corporeal, that is, by will and desire. This immersion and identification is inevitably accompanied by a sensation of nausea, of queasiness: Manila’s monologues all end with a note of disgust. Desire goes together with repulsion, with fear, and identification and repulsion form a dialectic that expresses, for Diaconescu-Blumenfeld, the essence of an approach to the other which is not final loss of the self, but articulation, interrogation and negotiation, and which thus constitutes an ethical imperative against violence, reification and domination. Against the patriarchal-capitalist reification of the human, the body must be read as will, not meat, subjectivity as agency, not object.36 Diaconescu-Blumenfeld calls this identification “empathy,” a suspicious sounding term to a Benjaminian ear, which must therefore be redefined. Manila’s “falling into” does not attempt to re-establish the erotic intoxication of the Baudelairean artist/flâneur, who projects his desire into the crowd, thereby reifying it. Baudelaire’s “holy prostitution of the soul,” the imperative of “épouser la foule,” epitomizes male desire, which despises and rejects the corporality and materiality of the other, thereby annulling its alterity and subsuming it to the identity of the self. His “prostitution” is the empathy of the pimp, which sees every body as a commodity to sell. Manila’s empathy – if we have to use this term – is by contrast a sensuous embrace of the corporeality of the other, a “penetration” that is a continuous negotiation between self and other and thus has a cathartic effect, which leads to understanding rather than reification.37 This approach to the other is bodily and sensuous and, as such, de-reifying.

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What Manila performs in her immersion in the other is a contraction of the (gendered) space that separates buyer and commodity, which constitutes the space of the market. As Schneider argues, this space is fundamental for capitalism: “the (gendered) separation between viewer and viewed,” she writes, “functions as a conceptual space for commodity exchange in which the viewer (male) is marked as separate, possessing desire for the sensuous (residing in the commodity, female).”38 This separation establishes and sustains an unbridgeable divide whereby the viewer possesses the desire and the commodity is the desired. The circulation of commodities is assured by the fact that literal and immediate contact between viewer and viewed, buyer and commodity – what Schneider calls “sensuous complicity” – is disavowed in order to sustain the “desire for contact.” In order for commodities to circulate, this space must be preserved: the viewed, the commodity, must not return the gaze, still less engage actively and bridge the divide; “sensuous contact,” the crossing of the space of the exchange in the search for explicit tactility, would disrupt circulation.39 This is precisely what happens, for brief moments, when Manila “falls” into people and things: for an instant, viewer and viewed, buyer and commodity collapse into one another, into a physicality and corporeality that annuls reification, the “love of death,” and establishes a sensuous understanding. These moments are therefore glimpses into a utopian implosion of the marketplace, flashes of light that spell the decommodification of the body and the dissolution of the phantasmagoria of the market. The politics of female desire grounded in gendered corporeality is a central feature of Maraini’s writing and more generally of many other forms of feminism. It seems obvious that the “love of death” inherent to commodity fetishism, the sterilization of the organic implicit in commodity capitalism, should be opposed by a revaluation of the organic itself; and the privileged site for this revolt against reification is the prostituted body, the epitome of commodification at the foundation of any patriarchal economy of exchange. Feminist politics of the body thus contrast the “decay of love” with the recuperation of the organic, singular, particularized, carnal reality of the self against massification, serialization and commodification; it recuperates the body Baudelaire so loathed and

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patriarchy expelled from its discourse.40 However, sensuous complicity needs reciprocity, which is absent in Dialogo. When the client senses Manila’s “weakness,” he attempts to re-establish the power relations of the exchange. She has taken pleasure from him, hence “il nostro non è più un rapporto commerciale” (“ours is no longer a business relationship”): C: Dico che siamo pari. Non siamo due classi opposte, una che si vende e una che compra, siamo uguali, d’altronde siamo poveri tutti e due, siamo due sfruttati, no? (Dialogo 407) C: I say we’re even. We’re not two opposed classes, one which sells itself and one which buys, we’re equal. We’re both poor and exploited, aren’t we?

The client tries to transform Manila’s sensuous complicity into an acceptance of traditional gender roles, to bring the exchange back to the level of “un rapporto affettivo” (“a sentimental relationship”), where commodification and exploitation are masked by the fiction of love and, most of all, where he will get the sex-commodity for free.41 Manila strives to regain a status of equality in the exchange by rejecting the “weakness” of sensuous complicity, which, from the point of view of the market, is simply a defeat. Half-disheartened, she replies: M: Ecco, io vorrei non avere bisogno del tuo corpo, di nessun corpo d’uomo. (Dialogo 411) M: I wish I didn’t need your body, any male body!

In the seller-buyer relationship, Manila cannot afford to disregard the logic of the exchange, because this will be turned against her by the client, and so she regards as “weakness” the utopian image of a de-commodification of bodies.42 The talking prostitute, who returns the gaze and claims purchasing power for herself, unmasks, disrupts and declares in the open the brutality of her commodification, but still cannot affect the mechanisms of the exchange: so long as the market is in place, it will re-absorb into its logic any attempt at emancipation; so long as the market is in place, the gaze of the commodity cannot but reverse and return the same violence by which it is reified, taking refuge in hyperbolic dreams of isolation.

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Paradoxes of Awakening The phrase “Before you know the bodies” appears destined for a sublime irony. Those lovers never seize the body. What does it matter if they never gathered strength for battle? Only for the sake of the hopeless ones have we been given hope. (GS 1.1:201/SW 1:356)

What Dialogo stages is thus a paradox: the talking prostitute denounces the universal commodification of the human and the specific commodification of women, but she also takes control of her own commodification as a partial but revolutionary victory in a society where everything and everyone is commodified; she enters the marketplace loudly claiming the status of worker and demanding purchasing power for herself, but she also projects utopian images in which the space of circulation of the commodities implodes and the body is decommodified and liberated. The dichotomy between empowerment and victimization is essential to any contemporary discourse on the prostitute and it defines the deadlock from which Dialogo cannot escape. Postmodernist theorists like Bell and Schneider embrace the paradox as effective destruction of the patriarchal phantasmagoria. Bell’s plea for the liberation of the prostituted body is founded on the postmodernist assumption that there is no longer a privileged site of knowledge and thus, in the collision of different knowledges, an “ethical space of otherness” opens.43 Postmodernist “awakening” resides in counter-discourses of “dis-identification” in which the “other” – the prostitute – speaking on her own behalf and representing herself, provides alternative mappings of her subject position. But awakening as dis-identification does not break the spell of commodification: the discourse of “destabilization” runs the risk of being re-absorbed by the dominant phantasmagoria.44 Schneider follows a similar line: when the “other” – the prostitute – started to speak, she writes, the impasse of a redefinition of subjectivity not grounded on the contraposition between a “self ” and an “other” led to a redefinition of the notion of “awakening.” The images of “dream” and “wake” acquired new meanings, whereby waking from the phantasmagoric dream of commodification and identity came to signify, not awaking “out”

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of the dream and into “reality,” but rather awakening to the fact that we are dreaming, and thus waking “into” the dream. She continues: our social reality, or Symbolic Order, is affected, even constituted, by our social dreamscapes. Thus we acknowledge the collective dream-properties of the Symbolic Order and simultaneously recognize those dreamscapes as bearing reality effects. […] Dream effects do not automatically dissipate upon waking. Identity effects, bodily markings, historical legacies repeat as noisome ghosts of collective memory, marking and re-marking the wake-walker within the social dreamscape.45

This reversal of Benjaminian terms is based on the Lacanian assumption that the real is always relative to, dependent on, and thus hidden behind/ by the dreamscape. Whereas for Benjamin’s historical materialism the real is finally apprehensible through materialist analysis as the phantasmagorical construction of capitalist reality, for Lacanian psychoanalysis it can be only apprehended as what is “forever missed,” deferred, occluded and therefore impossible.46 The politics arising from this “awakening into the dream” acknowledge that the implications of social and cultural dreamscape are inexorably real. A materialist politics must thus, for Schneider, take into consideration not only the phantasmagorical production of the social dreamscape, but also the “sensuous reality effects”47 of the social phantasmagoria. The prostitute who does not wait to be “invested” by the gaze of the historical materialist speaks from the perspective of the marked object, which asks the question of a representation that precedes her. The political project therefore becomes one of “reciprocity,” in order to recognize the dense net of gazes and histories that constitute this representation and “terrorize” the structure that constitutes the phantasmagoria of the market.48 The postmodernist prostitute as paradigm/allegory thus disrupts the continuum of the patriarchal phantasmagoria, but remains a prisoner of the Realpolitik of destabilization, a merely destructive act.49 Maraini is well aware of this paradox, but not so willing to embrace it: she remains strongly anchored in a humanist tradition that leads her to distrust the limits of a politics of destabilization, as Manila’s monologues indicate. Dialogo thus retains a messianic thrust that points beyond a simple awakening-into-the-dream and towards the redemption of the gendered body. Its politics can best be explained through a number of

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journalistic pieces Maraini wrote in the 1970s and 1980s and which focus on prostitution: here she unveils the contradictions of the various movements of prostitutes which, on the one hand, claim that prostitution is work like any other profession and thus ask for its “normalization,” but, on the other, list the horrors of the profession and protest against the commodification of the female body, implying it is an exchange to be eliminated.50 As in the case of pornography, the self-management of an atavistic sexual servitude appeared a great revolution, but, Maraini stresses, to awake-into-the-dream is merely a “makeshift solution,” the acceptance of the ancient commodification of women. The fact is that “to sell one’s body as a commodity,” she writes, “even if voluntarily and provocatively, with intelligence and irony, does not change the brutality of the choice. The fact that women are satisfied with directing their own sale rather than suffering it, shows the level of desperation we have reached.”51 For Maraini, the so-called sexual revolution of the 1960s, in which the various movements for the rights of prostitutes originated, did not change the erotische Unkultur of our society, the gender(ed) dynamics and the power relations of the market. It was, rather, an economic revolution, which liberalized and increased the circulation of sex-ascommodity without changing the basic structures of the exchange. This is why the sexual revolution did not eliminate prostitution, as some had anticipated, but rather reinforced and spread it.52 Culture and society are now soaked in sexual images: from advertising to television and cinema, the female body is today even more fetishized, sectioned and exposed.53 This universal eroticization still responds to the dominant, reifying and totalizing male eros, and women’s new freedom is the freedom to turn themselves into commodities and sell themselves to the best bidder. The “right to sell oneself ” is for Maraini equivalent to the “right” to shut oneself in a convent, historically another feminine “choice”: there is no real freedom in these options, no real alternative; what women gain from sexual liberation are mere “convict-freedoms.”54 It has been important for feminism to theorize the lawfulness of prostitution against the old division between “good” and “bad” women and the demonization of the “wicked.” However, Maraini asks:

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Should we really be satisfied with the normalization of the evil? Shouldn’t we desire something more ambitious, something concerned with the deepest desires of the female body, and elaborate an eros with a mythopoeic capacity not imposed by others, with a carnal language elaborated by us? 55

In our society everything is eroticized, but only in male mode: the eros that impregnates the market and constitutes the essence of the exchange, epitomized in the figure of the prostitute, is a male eros, male desire, which still construes woman as the “desired.” A true sexual revolution, a true contestation of the market, will have to proceed from a different premise: not the acceptance of the lesser evil, but the creation of new myths and new solutions. Maraini does not therefore renounce messianic eschatology, the “hopeless hope” for a final awakening, not “into” but “out” of the phantasmagoria of the market and of patriarchy. Dialogo dramatizes the destructive moment necessary for this awakening, but simultaneously declares its insufficiency and calls for a further moment of construction for which our society still waits. *  *  * The constellation of the prostitute reads Benjamin’s critique of commodity fetishism against the grain of contemporary commodity culture and gender awareness. What emerges is the striking “actuality” of his critique of the commodity and of the market, but also the cultural and historical limits of his use of feminine figures, which are never given voice but merely used as “signs.” The patriarchal phantasmagoria in which his discourse is embedded is the material content a Benjaminian reading must “mortify” and dismantle in order to unveil the poignancy at the heart of his analysis. Prostitution still remains a powerful allegory for our hypercommodified society, still enamoured of the thingly and the inorganic and caught in a pathological frenzy of buying and selling. But it is an even more apt allegory for our unhealthy erotic culture, still entrapped, despite a series of sexual revolutions and gender emancipations, within a logic of power and domination and poisoned by its atavistic connection with the market. Maraini, by giving voice to the prostitute, dispels the

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semblance and raises a number of issues overlooked in Benjamin’s figure, but simultaneously unveils the paradoxical status of a talking commodity unable to abandon the logic of the market. The talking prostitute declares the necessity of a moment of destruction, which reduces to rubble the continuum of both commodity capitalism and patriarchy, but also the even more present and pressing necessity of not disavowing a redemptive politics aiming at messianic awakening.

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The Ragpicker: On History

Resolute refusal of the concept of “timeless truth” is in order. Nevertheless, truth is not – as Marxism would have it – a merely contingent function of knowing, but is bound to a nucleus of time lying hidden within the knower and the known alike. This is so true that the eternal, in any case, is far more the ruffle on a dress than some idea. (N3,2) Telescoping the past through the present. (N7a,3)

Like that of the flâneur, the constellation of the ragpicker works as a monad, not for the representation of modernity or postmodernity, but for the project of critical redemption, which informed Benjamin’s mature life and remains its most characteristic and “actual” trait. Both constellations also work as monads for the act of reading, but whereas the flâneur emphasizes the notion of “construction,” the ragpicker focuses on “actualization” and the political/revolutionary task of the reader. The method of reading exposed in Chapter One will here be reproposed as the kernel of Benjamin’s redemptive historiography and revolutionary project. This last constellation will then attempt to “actualize” the project by “telescoping” it, as it were, through present issues. Benjamin’s redemptive practice is evoked in a figure of utter dispossession, the ragpicker. As in the case of the prostitute, this constellation will firstly dispel the Schein of Benjamin’s romanticization of the dispossessed, the “aura” and quasi-mysticism with which he endows the figures of urban marginalization. The excluded are invested with a “privileged” form of knowledge, as if only from the fringe, from the margins of society, “truth” can unveil itself to the “poor in spirit”: the dispossessed as philosopher, novel Diogenes, capable of a “deeper” gaze into the human condition, possessor of secret wisdom. This fascination with the “exoticism” of the fringe is a wishful projection of anxieties and desires into an image

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that becomes mere sign, deprived of substance, reality and humanity. Industrialisation in the nineteenth century reduced to poverty large strata of the lower classes and hurled them into the city. With the rise of the metropolis, the urban dispossessed acquired more distinctive features: not only poverty and filth, but also aggression, rage and drunkenness. Moreover, in the pyramid of production and consumption of the new industrialised society, they were associated with “waste”: themselves the human refuse of society, they received only the refuse of commodity consumption, what was broken, ruined, useless, rejected and forgotten. A new social figure then arose: the ragpicker, who collected the waste of commodity society, restored a certain use-value to the ruined commodity, and reinserted it into the cycle of consumption. The nineteenth century was fascinated by the ragpicker: depicted by some as the bon sauvage of the urban wilderness, uncorrupted by the vices of commodity civilization, considered by others a wish-image of freedom and independence within an oppressive system, he or she was entrusted with the utopic role of a privileged vision of society, critical and penetrating, dereifying and revolutionary. The ragpicker’s aggression and rage against society became a symbol of revolution for modernity’s discontents; his noisy drunkenness a sign of rebellion against bourgeois moralism and overpowering conformism; but most of all, his dealing with the waste of capitalist society was subsumed as revolutionary practice. It was in the refuse of society that illuminating insights must be sought. Benjamin absorbed from Baudelaire the fascination for the ragpicker and transformed him into an allegory of the materialist historian. It is clear that, for bourgeois intellectuals like Baudelaire and Benjamin, offspring of cultured and well-to-do families, the ragpicker was only a sign, a useful allegory pregnant with illuminations, but void of humanity. The ragpicker remained always the other and, as such, was played into their narratives as sign and not given voice. The emphasis on waste as repository of historical truth, the necessity of a violent, destructive interruption of the monolithic and excluding bourgeois phantasmagoria and, most of all, a constructive methodology based on the assemblage of lost and forgotten fragments gathered from the trash of society, are the features of a philosophy of history we could rename the “theory of the ragpicker.” This

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theory is laden with a mysticism of the dispossessed, but is also endowed with a theoretical and “imagistic” force that still retains its power of fascination. The second part of the constellation will then explore the correspondances between Benjamin’s project and a specific form of new historiographical ragpicking: indigenous history-making. If today the image of the ragpicker is no longer an allegory of redemptive historiographical practice, many traits of Benjamin’s theory can still be fruitfully compared to contemporary critical philosophies of history: the ragpicker is present in any historiographical practice that attempts to rescue lost and forgotten traditions from the rubble of ruined dominant narratives. While a multiplicity of new “minority” histories has emerged in recent decades from the ruins of the dead “traditions of the victors,” nowhere has the heterogeneity of the new histories been more evident than in narratives of post-colonial identity. Indigenous histories challenge, not merely the tradition of the victors as oppressive and silencing, but the very discipline of history as such, its methodology, its essence, its finality. The major event has been that the oppressed and the marginal, instead of being “played” as sign or allegory in “critical” and “revolutionary” discourses belonging to Western white male intellectuals, have seized the historical narratives for themselves and revolutionized the practice of history-making. When the dispossessed speak, their stories and histories are different. As an “image” to juxtapose to Benjamin’s ragpicker, I have chosen an Australian Indigenous text. This is not because the figure of the Indigenous Australian can be compared to the ragpicker: while dispossession, marginalisation, poverty, but also drunkenness, asocial behaviour and rebelliousness could once have suggested facile correspondances, such cheap romanticism has been dispelled by the voices of the oppressed themselves. The reason is rather practical: in settler societies like Australia, the clash of historical narratives, so actual and central in the social debate, includes issues of race, identity and “authenticity,” which challenge a revolutionary Western discourse, like Benjamin’s, with claims to speak for the oppressed. By juxtaposing Benjamin and Mudrooroo, the Indigenous writer, the voice from the “fringe,” and his appropriation and transformation of the “theory of the ragpicker,” I will try to conjure up an image for the politics of historiography in contemporary debate.

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This constellation will thus be “critical” in a very Benjaminian sense, that is, polemical and destructive, attempting to rescue a new “use-value” and a new “actuality” for his work.

5.1 The Trash of History: Walter Benjamin and the Dialectical Ragpicker Paris, when seen in a ragpicker’s hamper, is nothing much … to think that I have all Paris here in this wicker basket …! Félix Pyat, Le Chiffonnier (cit. J88a,4) To assemble large-scale constructions out of the smallest and most precisely cut components. Indeed, to discover in the analysis of the small individual moment the crystal of the total event. And, therefore, to break with vulgar historical naturalism. To grasp the construction of history as such. In the structure of commentary. The trash of History. (N2,6)

Le Chiffonnier de Paris In 1983, Irving Wohlfarth presented a seminal description of “the historian as chiffonnier” to the Benjamin International Conference held in Paris.1 He proposed to use the figure of the chiffonnier, the ragpicker, not only as one of many motifs in Benjamin’s project, but as a “monad,” a “dialectical image,” a “miniature version” of the Arcades Project. For Wohlfarth, the ragpicker is a figure of collecting and putting together, which thus allegorizes the materialist historian, who scavenges the “trash of history” in order to let the historical materials speak for themselves. Conversely, the Arcades Project itself is a collection of Lumpen, chiffons, rags; thus the refusecollector also allegorizes Benjamin’s project as a whole. The ragpicker as monad, though failing to do justice to the minutiae and internal differences within the Benjaminian panorama, allows for a comprehensive glance embracing the differences in a “configuration.” This configuration

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is what Habermas defined as rettende Kritik, a redemptive critique of capitalist modernity, based on the attempt to redefine both history itself and the Marxist project of revolution. Who was the ragpicker? What Benjamin translates as Lumpensammler was a figure of the utmost destitution and poverty in nineteenth-century Paris, the chiffonnier. The development of industrial society created the inevitable double of the city of light: the city of waste. Rubbish is the end product on which commodity society is built and on which it incessantly feeds: industry, Benjamin quotes from Frégier, “like nature itself, [has] the sublime privilege of breeding [se reproduire] with its own débris” ( J89,4).2 The inhabitants of the city of waste constitute the very bottom of the social pyramid, “the lowest level on the industrial scale” (a3,2),3 and the ragpicker, who collects and sorts out the refuse of the city, is its exemplar figure.4 Barrie Ratcliffe explains that, until Prefect Poubelle’s 1883 decree imposing the use of receptacles, household refuse was deposited in piles in the streets to be collected early in the morning.5 The ragpicker walked the city equipped with a wicker basket on his or her6 back for the harvest, a hook to pick up the trash and a lantern to illuminate the streets at night. They had to make three rounds a day, one in the evening preceding and two early in the morning before the carts passed. After each round, at home in the shantytowns,7 they carried out their second task, the sorting of items to be sold to the rag-and-bone dealers. Because of their living conditions, their appearance, their trade and their clothes – “‘ragtag’ [Lumpenproletarier] in a double sense,” Benjamin writes, “clothed in rags and occupied with rags” ( J68,4)8 – their smell and their incessant wandering at night, ragpickers were declared pariah, untouchables. They were also characterized by drunkenness,9 aggression and rage against bourgeois society and therefore symbolized human failure and ultimate marginality. Benjamin writes that “the ragpicker fascinated his epoch” (GS 1.2:521/ SW 4:8). Once again, he absorbs the fascination for this figure from Baudelaire, whose chiffonnier, in a passage of Du vin et du haschisch quoted by Benjamin, is:

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chapter 5 un homme chargé de ramasser les débris d’une journée de la capital. Tout ce que la grande cité a rejeté, tout ce qu’elle a brisé, il le catalogue, il le collectionne. Il compulse les archives de la débauche, la capharnaüm des rebuts. Il fait un triage, un choix intelligent; il ramasse, comme un avare un trésor, les ordures qui, remâchées par la divinité de l’Industrie, deviendront des objets d’utilité ou de jouissance.10 a man whose job it is to collect the day’s waste of the capital. Everything the big city has thrown away, everything it has lost, everything it has disdained, everything it has smashed, he catalogues and collects. He collates the archives of debauchery, the capharnaum of waste. He sorts things out, he choices with acumen; he collects, like a miser with a treasure, the refuse which, re-processed [literally “chewed again”] by the divinity of Industry, will become useful or pleasurable objects.11

The passage continues: “Il arrive hochant la tête et buttant sur les paves, comme les jeunes poëtes qui passent toutes leurs journées à errer et à chercher des rimes” (“he arrives tossing his head and stumbling on the street, like the young poets who spend all their time rambling and looking for a rhyme”). The same image is used in Le vin des chiffonniers, where the chiffonnier arrives, “hochant la tête, / Butant, et se cognant aux murs comme un poëte” (“tossing his head, / stumbling, bumping against walls like a poet”), crushed under a pile of trash, “vomissement confus de l’énorme Paris” (“the confused vomit of the enormous Paris”).12 And in Le soleil, the poet stumbles [trébuches] “sur les mots comme sur les paves, / Heurtant parfois des vers depuis longtemps rêvés” (“on words like on the street, / bumping every now and then into some long dreamed verse”).13 Benjamin argues that “Baudelaire recognizes himself in the figure of the ragman” ( J68,4). Like the chiffonniers, “the poets find the refuse [Kehricht] of society on their streets and derive their heroic subject from this very refuse” (GS 1.2:582/ SW 4:48). They recuperate the fleeting images of modernity, recycle the linguistic scraps, the forgotten, the unnoticed, the leavings of modern society. The old concept of beauty had crumbled into a pile of debris, from which the modern artist must construct la beauté nouvelle. Like the ragpicker, the poet is an outcast, crushed by poverty and despair, scorned by society. Banished from tradition and from “official” literature, he must take what he finds, the crumbs of the cultural banquet. Both ragman and poet “go about their solitary business while other citizens are sleeping”

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(GS 1.2:583/SW 4:48), at night, roaming the streets of the metropolis; both turn to wine to attain a level of intoxicating inspiration, of “ivresse.” “They even move in the same way,” Benjamin concludes: “Nadar speaks of Baudelaire’s ‘pas saccade.’ This is the gait of the poet who roams the city in search of the rhyme-booty; it is also the gait of the ragpicker, who is obliged to come to a halt every few moments to gather up the refuse he encounters” (GS 1.2:583/SW 4:48).14 This connection is for Benjamin an indicator of the hidden revolutionary intent of Baudelaire’s work: “the ragpicker poem,” he argues, “strenuously disavows the reactionary pronouncements of its author. The criticism on Baudelaire has overlooked this poem” (J68a,1). Benjamin even claims to identify connections “between Baudelaire’s oeuvre and radical socialism” ( J88; J88a,1): “in the guise of a beggar,” he writes, “Baudelaire continually put the model of bourgeois society to the test. His wilfully induced, if not deliberately maintained, dependence on his mother not only has a psychoanalytically identifiable cause; it also has a social one” ( J61,7). The chiffonnier, “the most provocative figure of human misery” ( J68,4), is thus, for Benjamin, one of Baudelaire’s principal emblems of modernity, his model for the modern hero, by way of his “‘jerky gait,’ the necessary isolation in which he goes about his business, the interest he takes in the refuse and detritus of the great city” ( J79a,5). Deprived of the heroic models of antiquity, witness to the ruination of modern urban experience, the modern artist is heroic in his attempt to embody modernity as such, embracing its fleeting newness and collecting its waste. “The hero is the subject of la modernité,” Benjamin writes, “In other words, it takes a heroic constitution to live modernity” (GS 1.2:577/SW 4:44) and the most heroic figure is the ragpicker.15 As in the case of the prostitute, the figure of the ragpicker is “romanticized.” Baudelaire and Benjamin are interested in ragpickers as an allegory of urban modernity, but fail to acknowledge their real destitution.16 On the one hand, Benjamin is victim to the fascination with the “exotic” marginal, which characterized certain elite avant-garde intellectuals, to the myth of the “privileged position” of the dispossessed “within the domain of knowledge,” to quote Gilloch.17 On the other, Benjamin points

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to the identification of nineteenth-century conspirators with the noisy and intoxicated rebelliousness of the ragpicker: A ragpicker cannot, of course, be considered a member of the bohéme. But from the litterateur to the professional conspirator, everyone who belonged to the bohéme could recognize a bit of himself in the ragpicker. Each person was in a more or less blunted state of revolt against society and faced a more or less precarious future. At the proper time, he was able to sympathize with those who were shaking the foundations of this society. (GS 1.2:522/SW 4:8)

In a 1938 letter to Adorno, Benjamin wrote: “the figure of the ragpicker is infernal in origin. It will reappear in the third part [of the Baudelaire book], in contrast with the chthonian figure of the beggar in Hugo” (GB 6:186/CC 293, emphasis added). The ragpicker is thus “infernal,” demonic in his allegorization of revolt against bourgeois society, unlike Hugo’s inoffensive beggar. Ragpickers fascinate Benjamin as allegories, but their humanity is overlooked.18 If this limit has to be acknowledged, an attentive analysis must nevertheless recognize, with Wohlfarth, that the Lumpensammler is very possibly the most powerful figure in Benjamin, the ultimate model for redemptive practice. Wohlfarth admits that there are decisive differences between “a metaphorical and an actual chiffonnier.”19 But the Lumpensammler as allegory provides both a perfect methodology for redemptive practice and a constructive strategy for “conspiring” against the capitalist order. In this chapter, I will attempt to construe a genealogy of the ragpicker in Benjamin’s work: I will trace his interest in the fragmentary, his destructive nihilism, his method of montage, back to the early writings and try to “assemble” a coherent figure to allegorize his project of rettende Kritik. A Theory of Trash For the ragpicker to be considered the figure for the materialist historian, a concept of history as “trash” becomes necessary. From his juvenile writings,20 Benjamin had opposed the Christian-Hegelian (and Marxian) vision of history as progress and/or progression with what in the 1930s

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he would name a theory of “catastrophe.” This marks every stage of his work, and is tied to the notion that the rubble of catastrophe is the proper material for critical investigation. We can therefore find in his work a “theory of trash,” the conviction that truth should be sought in the fragment, the ruin, the citation. This “theory” – in the etymological sense of the term – informs Benjamin’s writing from the work on Romantic criticism to the theses “On the Concept of History”. The strongest reference to the theory of trash in the writings of the 1920s is the book on the baroque, which is clearly based on the concept of ruin.21 The Trauerspiel fascinated Benjamin because it introduced history into the “setting” as transience, decay, Trauer.22 The ruin is thus the allegory of transience and decay. Classicism had pursued ideals of harmony, beauty, totality, and “was not permitted to behold the lack of freedom, the imperfection, the collapse of the physical, beautiful, nature. But beneath its extravagant pomp, this is precisely what baroque allegory proclaims, with unprecedented emphasis” (GS 1.1:352/OT 176). In the notion of history as decay, the subject becomes a torso, a fragment, a rune: “trash.” The beauty of the symbol disappears and so “the false appearance of totality is extinguished” (GS 1.1:352/OT 176). The clarity and univocality of signification “evaporates” and the ruin becomes a “rebus”23: baroque literature “pile[d] up fragments ceaselessly, without any strict idea of a goal,” collected and accumulated the trash of history “in the unremitting expectation of a miracle, to take the repetition of stereotypes for a process of intensification” (GS 1.1:354/OT 178). The Trauerspiel was one such ruin itself, a half-forgotten and barely studied minor genre, trash in the rubbish bin of literature. Therefore, its rescue and interpretation became important for Benjamin: “in the ruins of great buildings,” reads the conclusion of the book, “the idea of the plan speaks more impressively than in lesser buildings, however well preserved they are” (GS 1.1:409/OT 235). Benjamin’s turn, in the mid-1920s, from what has been called the “German cycle” to the “Parisian cycle,” widens the focus from a minor literary genre to the analysis of modernity as such. The discourse on history as decay and the baroque as ruin is transposed onto the analysis of the modern metropolis, which is for Benjamin the ultimate repository of

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trash, the treasure-house of historical debris. The baroque ruin becomes the outmoded, ruined commodity, the ever-growing pile of urban trash: the capitalist system is intrinsically an endless production of refuse, the wastage of commodities that must be endlessly and frantically replaced by new ones. This urban waste provides precious material for the investigations of the historian-as-ragpicker. A major influence in Benjamin’s attentiveness to urban debris is the artistic avant-garde, in particular Surrealism. The revolutionary power of Surrealism, Benjamin writes, resides in it directing its gaze to the trash of commodity society and building an aesthetic canon on waste:

In 1929, the same year as “Surrealism,” Benjamin published his essay on Proust, the second major influence on this period. Benjamin derived from Proust the fundamental intuition that the work of remembering is a work of excavation and rescue of broken and mutilated memories, the ruins of the personal past, from the muddy terrain of oblivion. The allegorical figure here is the archaeologist, who must dig the soil in order to salvage fragments of past civilizations and unearth the junk-torsos of history. Benjamin applied Proust’s doctrine to his own memories in Berlin Childhood around 1900 and A Berlin Chronicle, where he writes that memory:

Nothing could reveal more about Surrealism than their canon. […] [the Surrealist] was the first to perceive the revolutionary energies that appear in the “outmoded” – in the first iron constructions, the first factory buildings, the earliest photos, objects that have begun to be extinct, grand pianos, the dresses of five years ago, fashionable restaurants when the vogue has begun to ebb from them. The relation of these things to revolution – no one can have a more exact concept of it than these authors. No one before these visionaries and augurs perceived how destitution – not only social but architectonic, the poverty of interiors, enslaved and enslaving objects – can be suddenly transformed into revolutionary nihilism. […] They bring the immense forces of “atmosphere” concealed in these things to the point of explosion. (GS 2.1:299–300/SW 2:210)

is the medium of past experience, just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities lie buried. He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging. […] the matter itself is merely a deposit, a stratum, which yields only to the most meticulous examination what constitutes the real treasure hidden within the earth: the images, severed from all earlier associations, that stand – like precious fragments or torsos in a collector’s gallery – in the sober room of our later insights. (GS 6:486/SW 2:611)

The Surrealist gaze focuses on the trashed commodity, highlighting the gap between the wish (progress, stability, prosperity) and its embodied failure. The “outmoded” is the ruin of an intention, through which the Surrealists expose the ruinous façade of bourgeois life. As Ackbar Abbas writes, anachronism as a Surrealist strategy shows “ruins as modern” and “the modern as ruins.”24 Destitution, obsolescence and anachronism can be transformed, for Benjamin, into “revolutionary nihilism,” so that the importance of Surrealism resides in the political force of its aesthetic.25 The obsolescent, old-fashioned artefact, deprived of both use- and exchange-value, defetishizes and demythifies the commodity, unlocking the secrets of modernity. “Intoxication” is the revolutionary tool that allows the performance of this demystification, by plunging reality into myth and dream.

The treasure of memory is junk, precious because ruined, in pieces, forgotten. The historian-as-archaeologist does not aim at the reconstruction of the lost whole, but at the discovery of the precious fragment which will give way to political insight. Recollection, Eingedenken, is the salvaging of the fragmented and residual deposits of a junk-past from the oblivion of modern amnesia. The work on the Paris arcades begins around the time of the Surrealism and Proust essays.26 During the summer or autumn of 1927 Benjamin wrote Passagen, “Arcades,” a short draft, possibly in collaboration with Franz Hessel, for a newspaper article. The two-page sketch is a sort of list – foreshadowing the paratactical methodology of the Arcades Project – of all the junk that can be found in the arcades, “a past become space.”27 As Max Pensky points out, this first sketch establishes the setting for the materialist historian’s work in the Arcades Project itself: “an entirely new mode of historiographic imagination, one in which a visual-anamnestic collection of discarded or forgotten objects constitutes the means for a definitive insight into historical truth.”28 A much quoted entry in Konvolut

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“N” in fact reads: “I shall purloin no valuables, appropriate no ingenious formulations. But the rags [die Lumpen], the refuse [den Abfall]” (N 1a,8). The historian must be a rag-picker, must research not valuables, but waste, trash; and the Parisian arcades, at the same time containers of trash and themselves ruins, are the perfect monad for the history of modernity as decadence. Built with glass and iron, they were in their heyday – the first half of the nineteenth century – the symbol of modernity and progress, filled with the commodities of the new industrial production, emblematic of abundance and plenty. However, in a few decades they were superseded by the department stores and abandoned by the crowd. Empty, ruined and filled by outmoded commodities-turned-junk, they became commodity graveyards and, in this afterlife, revealed the truth of modernity and capitalism. A dreamworld, the ultimate wish-image of nineteenthcentury positivistic belief, the collective dream of progress and plenty, in their ruination they revealed the emptiness of precisely this dream. The nineteenth century itself is a dead – ruined – age, a world surpassed and contradicted by the horrors of the Great War, its culture, creeds, buildings and artefacts mere relics. From this ruined world, from the “prehistory of modernity,” Benjamin essays out to extract and distillate the meaning of twentieth-century modernity. Ironically, what remains of his ambitious and monumental project is itself an apt conclusion to his theory of trash: the Arcades Project is a ruin, the iron skeleton of a never-built construction, a pile of fragments, a heap of junk.29 His refusal of the official documents of historiography, the monuments and memorabilia of high culture, corresponds to a refusal of the history of the victors. Wohlfahrth argues that this focus on refuse is itself a strategy of radical refusal30: rejecting the value of the cultural heritage, Benjamin rejects the tradition of the oppressors and its monolithic history, the compactness and solidity of which aim at silencing the vanquished. The monuments of history testify to a past of grandeur and a present of progress, therefore belonging to the phantasmagoria of modernity. To give voice to the oppressed means to rescue and redeem the part that has been excluded, silenced and trashed by this historical vision, the waste that is discarded, as Wohlfarth writes, by the Hegelian Aufhebung.31 This waste is witnessed by the angel of the theses “On the Concept of History,”

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the final figure of the Benjaminian “theory of trash”: turned toward the past, he merely sees a mounting pile of wreckage growing “toward the sky.” The angel’s “eyes are wide, his mouth is open,” in an expression of terror provoked by the catastrophic disasters he witnesses. The wind phantasmagorically called progress is in reality an ongoing catastrophe that reduces the world to rubble. This accumulation of debris is not going to stop, its end is not near, the enemy “has never ceased to be victorious” (GS 1.2:695/SW 4:391); but this rubble, these ruins, this trash, are the material the historian has at hand for a new redeeming practice. Pars Destruens: The Infernal Ragpicker The destructive momentum in materialist historiography is to be conceived as the reaction to a constellation of dangers, which threatens both the burden of tradition and those who receive it. It is this constellation of dangers which the materialist presentation of history comes to engage. In this constellation is comprised its actuality; against its threat, it must prove its presence of mind. Such a presentation of history has as goal to pass, as Engels puts it, “beyond the sphere of thought.” (N10a,2)

The junk-heap the historian-as-chiffonnier scavenges is imprisoned within a mythical straightjacket that hides the rubble behind the glittering ideological mask of progress: the phantasmagoria of modernity. Picking up the rags of history therefore implies the violent effort of wrestling them from the mythical context that constricts and obliterates them. The uniqueness of the historical fragment in its monadological entirety must be recognized and redeemed from the false context of historical continuum, liberated from, and purged of, its mythical character. The ragpicker is infernal, Benjamin wrote to Adorno, a rebellious drunkard undermining the foundations of society. The historian-as-chiffonnier must also possess this destructive character: “to the process of rescue belongs the firm, seemingly brutal grasp” (N9a,3).32 One can read the short 1931 piece “The Destructive Character” as an allegory for the historian clearing away the phantasmagorical obstacles of historicism: “the destructive character knows only one watchword: make

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room. And only one activity: clearing away.”33 The destruction aims to reduce the system to rubble, then to make use of this rubble: “the destructive character sees no image hovering before him. He has few needs, and the least of them is to know what will replace what has been destroyed. First of all, for a moment at least, empty space […]. Someone is sure to be found who needs this space without occupying it.” In opposition to historicism, which “pass[ess] things down to posterity, by making them untouchable and thus conserving them,” the materialist historian-asdestructive-character “pass[ess] on situations, by making them practicable and thus liquidating them.” Therefore, “the destructive character has the consciousness of historical man, whose deepest emotion is an insuperable mistrust of the course of things and a readiness at all times to recognize that everything can go wrong.” The goal of such de-contextualization, of the interruption of the continuum, is to rediscover the truthful trash of the past under the glittering coat of lies, and to clear the way for a future politics: “the destructive character sees nothing permanent. But for this very reason he sees ways everywhere. Where others encounter walls or mountains, there, too, he sees a way. But because he sees a way everywhere, he has to clear things from it everywhere. […] What exists he reduces to rubble [Trümmer] – not for the sake of the rubble, but for that of the way leading through it” (GS 4.1:396–8/SW 2:541–2). The destructive character was present in the 1920s in the figure of the Allegoriker of the Trauerspiel book. The allegorical gaze shatters the phantasmagorical illusion, extracting the fragmented object from its context, in order to reutilize it.34 In allegory, an element is isolated, ruined and deprived of its original function and meaning; the phantasmagorical illusion [Schein], the false glimmer of history, its pretension to totality and progress are thus eradicated. This is the “majesty of the allegorical intention: to destroy the organic and the living – to eradicate semblance [Schein]” (GS 1.2:669–70/SW 4:172). Therefore, for Benjamin, “allegory should be shown as the antidote to myth” (GS 1.2:677/SW 4:179): it dissolves the mythical illusion by depicting the nakedness of the object and by exposing the status of history as catastrophe and hell.35 The allegorical gaze is melancholic. Melancholy causes life to leave the object and so reduces it to the lifeless facies hippocratica, the death-mask: “melancholy

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causes life to flow out of [the object] and it remains behind dead, […] that is to say it is now quite incapable of emanating any meaning or significance of its own; such significance as it has, it acquires from the allegorist” (GS 1.1:359/OT 183–4). The melancholic gaze sees history as decay, as a frozen, petrified primal landscape; it “devaluates” the object and “petrifies” it; and it “fragments” the petrified world into a heap of rubble.36 Nevertheless, “allegory holds fast to the ruins” (GS 1.2:666/SW 4:169). Benjamin stresses that allegorization does not erase and cancel the object, but rather reduces it to pieces and conserves them. “Baudelaire’s destructive impulse,” he writes, “is nowhere concerned with the abolition of what falls prey to it. […] allegory has to do, precisely in its destructive furor, with dispelling the illusion that proceeds from all ‘given order,’ whether of art or of life: the illusion of totality or of organic wholeness which transfigures that order and makes it seems endurable” ( J57,3). The baroque allegory thus returns in the nineteenth century in Baudelaire,37 where melancholy takes the name of “spleen,” the ennui provoked by the futility and monotony of the commodified (i.e., petrified) world.38 Baudelaire’s importance for Benjamin resides in the transposition of baroque allegorical destructiveness into capitalist modernity. Benjamin explicitly connects the destructive violence of allegory to the work of criticism. He writes in the Trauerspiel book that “criticism means the mortification of the works. […]: not then – as the Romantics have it – awakening of the consciousness in living works, but the settlement of knowledge in dead ones” (GS 1.1:357/OT 182).39 The content of the work is thus “revealed in a process which might be described metaphorically as the burning up of the husk as it enters the realm of ideas, that is to say a destruction of the work in which its external form achieves its most brilliant degree of illumination” (GS 1.1:211/OT 31). In his doctoral thesis, Benjamin had defined criticism as destruction: the work of the critic means the ruination of what he calls the “material-content” of the work of art, of its appearance of beauty and illusion of completeness and totality, in order to “expose” and reveal its “truth-content,” its prosaic kernel. “Criticism,” he wrote, “is the preparation of the prosaic kernel in every work. In this, the concept ‘preparation’ [Darstellung] is understood in the chemical sense, as the generation of a substance through a determinate process to

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which other substances are submitted” (GS 1.1:109/SW 1:178).40 Truth only emerges from the rubble: it becomes apparent only in the work’s afterlife, after the process of ruination enacted by the critic. Criticism is thus neither evaluative nor interpretive, but rather genuinely destructive.41 Fundamental here is the concept of afterlife (Nachleben), the period in which the pure but illusionary appearance of the work is eroded and subjected to transformations that reveal its significance and actualize its potential. The original truth-kernel of the work, its historical meaning, reveals itself only in a new constellation that strips it of temporal surface: paradoxically, the “origin” of the work, its Ur-sprung, is revealed only in its afterlife, only once the work is ruined and mortified. This notion of criticism remains a constant in Benjamin, but in the 1930s it would be charged with Marxian overtones and become “politicized.” However, already in the 1928 One-Way Street the figure of the critic had emerged as a protagonist of the cultural “struggle.” This text may be considered the trait d’union between the literary interests of the 1910s and 1920s and the politico/historiographical interests of the 1930s. Strongly influenced by the avant-garde, in One-Way Street the critic becomes an “engineer,” a “strategist in the literary struggle,” who holds “the shining sword in the battle of minds” and, free of any reverential awe, approaches the text “as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.” “Polemics,” writes Benjamin, “mean to destroy a book using a few of its sentences. […] Only he who can destroy can criticize” (GS 4.1:108/SW 1:460). Art criticism will finally be charged with a full political function in the 1930s: the exigency of destruction, of getting rid of a phantasmagorical tradition, is the main point of the 1936 essay on the work of art. Here, technical reproducibility – and most of all film – shatters the aura of untouchable tradition in order to reutilize its fragments for the revolution. Benjamin writes: “the social significance of film, even – and especially – in its most positive form, is inconceivable without its destructive, cathartic side: the liquidation of the value of tradition in the cultural heritage” (GS 7.1:353–4/ SW 3:104, emphasis added). Tradition as “cultural heritage” is the tradition of the victors, the “enshrinement” of phenomena in a “monumental” continuum that phantasmagorically erases the tradition of the oppressed as trash unworthy of transmissibility. Mechanical reproduction and film

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enact a “catharsis,” a destructive purification that reduces tradition to rubble. Film in particular has the power to open up the tradition-as-prison and explode it “with the dynamite of the split second”: it provides a world of debris for the revolutionary ragpicker to scavenge in.42 In the 1930s, Benjamin adapted and applied this theory of literary criticism to the representation of history. The concept of destruction is fundamental to the “methodology” of the Arcades Project, as is clear from in Konvolut “N,” where Benjamin writes that “it is important for the materialist historian, in the most rigorous way possible, to differentiate the construction of a historical state of affairs from what one customarily calls its ‘reconstruction.’ The ‘reconstruction’ in empathy [Einfühlung] is one-dimensional. ‘Construction’ presupposes ‘destruction’” (N7,6). Rekonstruktion is the historicist methodology that, empathizing with the tradition of the victors, enacts the monolithic fiction of the past “wie es eigentlich gewesen ist,” “the way it really was.” Historicist Rekonstruktion flattens phenomena onto a one-dimensional continuum, which is the historiographical equivalent of the organic totality of the artwork; this is what has to be destroyed by the materialist historian-as-ragpicker. What results from that destruction is a different concept of temporality, a temporality of fragments, discontinuous and heterogeneous moments, independent temporal “torsos,” which are self-enclosed historical units un-entrappable in the fiction of a continuum. Benjamin famously names these temporal torsos “Now-times,” Jetztzeiten, and confers upon them a monadological structure. The truth of historical phenomena becomes readable only when these phenomena are “blasted out” of the fictive continuum that entraps them and flattens their multi-dimensional “roundness” into a one-dimensional totality. Destruction is thus one of the basic principles of the historian-aschiffonnier. Michael Jennings emphasises this point and proposes to characterize Benjamin’s “tendency toward an apocalyptic messianism” as “nihilism” proper.43 Benjamin adopts the very “revolutionary nihilism” (GS 2.1:299/SW 2:210) he had previously identified as one of the more interesting characteristics of the Surrealist movement, and adapts it to a historiographical methodology based on the monadological fragment. This nihilism is merely the preparatory moment, however, for the properly

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“constructive” act: “all-embracing negativity,” Wohlfahrt writes, will be substituted, “when the time is ripe,” by an “all-encompassing positivity.” The historian-as-ragpicker thus “represents the two extremes of destruction and preservation, each one turning dialectically into the other.” Only radical destruction can clear the way for revolutionary construction, negativity is thus never pure and gratuitous, but rather the counterpart of a truer affirmation, “the hidden other face of the negative which, like the theological dwarf, cannot today show itself in public.”44 Pars Construens: Quoting, Collecting, Assembling This work has to develop to the highest degree the art of citing without quotation marks. Its theory is intimately related to that of montage. (N1,10) Necessity of paying heed over many years to every casual citation, every fleeting mention of a book. (N7,4)

Ruins, fragments and trash are the material for historical reconstruction. In order for the truth of the fragment to be available for historical redemption – in order for it to become part of what Benjamin will call the “dialectical image” – a constructive moment is necessary. The ragpicker must make un choix intelligent, sort out and recompose the trash into new configurations: destruction is the condition for the appearance of the dialectical image, but it must be integrated by the constructive act of materialist historiography. Both pars destruens and pars construens of Benjamin’s project proceed from his literary practice and take literary models: the rags the historian picks and salvages take the textual form of quotations; and the “theory of citation” is one of the most characteristic and fascinating aspects of Benjamin’s thought.45 “Knowledge comes only in lightning flashes,” Benjamin writes in Konvolut “N”: “The text is the long roll of thunder that follows” (N1,1). Historical knowledge comes in the form of a sudden shock provoked by an image. The text is a construction, the series of quotations which, put together in a “long roll,” follow the flash of recognition. As we have seen, these quotations must be torn from their context. In order to be

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returned transfigured, they must be wrenched – and therefore purified and saved – from the historical and textual continuum.46 The last part of the Kraus essay can be considered a theory of citation: Kraus practised a revolutionary form of citing, transforming the quotation from a claim to authority into a polemical procedure. His quotation, which “both saves and punishes,” summons the word by its name, wrenches it destructively from its context, but precisely thereby calls it back to its origins. It appears, now with rhyme and reason, sonorously, congruously, in the structure of a new text. […] In citation the two realms – of origin and destruction – justify themselves before language. And conversely, only where they interpenetrate – in citation – is language consummated. (GS 2.1:363/SW 2:454)

Benjamin’s juvenile interest in the philosophy of language resurfaces here. The notion that the name is the pure form of language entails the force of its citability: quoting means calling the word by its name, isolating it from the continuum of the text and retracing its origin, its truth. The destruction of the text – performed by criticism – rediscovers the origin of the fragment in its truth-content: “origin is the goal.” Kraus “makes even the newspaper quotable,”47 trash in the realm of words. He rejects the authority of the text, invokes neither “literature” to legitimize his own writing nor the past to legitimize the present. Rather, he claims the citability of every word by the act of “transporting” it, transfiguring it, to his own sphere; he re-utilizes (in a sort of Brechtian Umfunktionierung) the fragment in order to subvert authority. His is a “polemical procedure,” shocking, violent, because it destroys the continuum of the text, but also because its purpose is to shock. The quotation assails the reader, and its function is to appear in a flash that disrupts the continuum of the reader’s convictions.48 The historian-as-ragpicker adopts Kraus’s revolutionary practice of citation. Historical exposition, the text that comes in a “long roll,” is a collection of rags, which the historian picks, a collection of independent quotations. Therefore, writes Benjamin, “to write history […] means to cite history” (N11,3). As for Kraus making even the newspaper quotable, for the materialist historian there is no distinction between major and minor events – he or she believes that “nothing that has ever happened

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should be regarded as lost in history.” A “full” historical exposition would therefore comprehend all events.49 The historian-as-ragpicker collects, sammelt, all these quotations: the Lumpen-sammler is first of all a Sammler, a collector, another central figure in Benjamin’s work and life.50 “Rag-picker” would thus be better translated as “rag-collector.” As with citation, collecting means to wrench an object from its context and to salvage it from its function. “What is decisive in collecting,” Benjamin writes, “is that the object is detached from all its original functions in order to enter into the closest conceivable relation to things of the same kind. This relation is the diametric opposite of any utility, and falls into the peculiar category of completeness” (H1a,2). The collector releases the object from the historical strata in which it is imprisoned, purging it of the cultural meanings in which it is encrusted and from the tyranny of traditional hierarchies. As Arendt notes, tradition “puts the past in order,” it systematically separates what is “worth” transmitting from the “unworthy,” the orthodox from the heretical, the “relevant” from the “irrelevant.” By contrast, “the collector’s passion,” she writes, “is inflamed by [the object’s] ‘genuineness,’ its uniqueness, something that defies any systematic classification. […] Against tradition the collector pits the criterion of genuineness; to the authoritative he opposes the sign of origin.”51 The collector, inserting the object into a new context – the collection – enacts its renovation. In Berlin Childhood Benjamin writes that “whatever was stored away kept its newness no longer. I, however, had something else in mind: not to retain the new but to renew the old. And to renew the old – in such a way that I myself, the newcomer, would make what was old my own – was the task of the collection that filled my drawer” (GS 4.1:286/SW 3:403). Like the Lumpen-sammler, the child collects and salvages the trash of the adult world from oblivion and amnesia.52 Collection is thus strictly connected with recollection. Benjamin writes that, by assembling the objects in new configurations, the collector pursues the category of “completeness,” the wholeness of a messianic work of redemption of things: the collection becomes “a new, expressly devised historical system,” “an encyclopaedia of all knowledge of the epoch, the landscape, the industry, and the owner from which it comes” (H1a,2). In the collection, the collector “salvages”

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particular items by recording them, by assimilating them into a new, meaningful wholeness. Therefore, Benjamin writes, “collecting is a form of practical memory” (H1a,2). The recollection and observation of urban modernity is the activity of the flâneur. The collector and the flâneur are thus related: both are obsessed with accumulation, of either images or objects; both snatch images and objects from the urban landscape and reassemble them in different configurations. Nevertheless, the collector is more directly connected with the sense of “touch,” whereas the flâneur’s sensorial sphere is the optical.53 Moreover, the flâneur presents overtones of authoritative panopticism and dandyism that alienate him from the “vulgar” masses. The mode of urban “connoisseurship” Benjamin finally sees as expressive of modern consciousness is more closely related to the marginality of the collector of rags than to the dandyism of the flâneur, to the ragpicker’s symbiotic relationship with the city and its refuse than to the detached voyeur. In this sense, Arendt’s image of the “pearl diver” seems inadequate, or at least imprecise.54 It is trash, not pearls, the materialist historian must gather for his or her redeeming task, the more broken, despised and ruined the better. Trash as such reveals the truth of the modern world, and not because it hides some precious pearl beneath the rags that cover it. The collector also presents aspects of the allegorist: both snatch the object from its context and transpose it into an entirely different context; both re-assemble the fragments, deprived of their function, and create new meanings, completely unrelated to their original context.55 But the allegorist constructs a new, totally arbitrary configuration, the result of his melancholic subjectivity.56 Pensky therefore argues that collecting is in the end the dialectical counterpole to brooding allegory: the allegorist approaches the thing with “intense, subjective rage which will insist on the destruction of things for the sake of the imposition of subjective will,” whereas the collector approaches them “innocently,” in “selfless compassion,” wanting to “enclose [them] in the embrace of ‘ownership.’” Therefore, the collector “approaches the objects with love, not spleen. He embraces them, rather than seizing them.” Through “love” for the object, the collector is able to overcome the melancholic subjectivity of the allegorist and to insert the fragment concretely into the present.

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Nevertheless, the collector’s drive for possession betrays any possible critical knowledge of the object, since it is cherished and treasured precisely for its own sake. Both allegory and collection are thus insufficient “constructions” for materialist historiography.57 The historian-as-ragpicker needs a different approach. Benjamin, in fact, borrows a methodological trick from the artistic avant-garde: the technique of montage, the textual juxtaposition of heterogeneous fragments.58 Rejecting the model of the creative and solitary genius, the Surrealists put together discarded fragments, useless objects, trash, in constructions that aimed at shocking and disorienting the beholder through the “estrangement effect.” Heterogeneous, otherwise meaningless fragments, removed from the context that made them meaningless, thus acquired new meanings through their juxtaposition in a new context. Benjamin transposes this technique beyond the aesthetic sphere, into the practice of critical historiography, where montage becomes “the art of citing without quotation marks” (N1,10). His famous definition in the Arcades Project reads: “method of this project: literary montage. I needn’t say anything. Merely show. […] The rags, the refuse – these I will not inventory but allow, in the only way possible, to come into their own: by making use of them” (N 1a,8). The problem the montage should resolve – in respect to the insufficiencies of allegory and collection – is that of the subjectivity of the construction. The Surrealist montage is different from the subjective allegory and from the total sum of a collection, since it is beyond the intentionality of the artist, it is “automatic.” “Automatism” gives the assurance that the historian assembles the fragments in the right way, so that the image becomes legible and politically useful. The montage is not merely the sum of all the heterogeneous pieces; rather, from the juxtaposition of these pieces a unity arises, a monad, “a crystal of the total event” (N2,6). The new constellation is a necessary interpretation of the relationship between the fragments, which Benjamin names the “dialectical image.”

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The Dialectical Scavenger The historian-as-ragpicker collects the trash of history, tearing it from the historical continuum, and then makes un choix intelligent, sorting out this trash and re-utilizing it in a montage-like constellation. This new constellation cannot bear the melancholic marks of subjective allegory, nor the fetishistic passion of collection, but must be dialectical, in order to resolve the aporias of historiographical “construction.” Nevertheless, in Benjamin’s notes, the meaning of this new dialectical construction remains “iridescent,” in Rolf Tiedemann words: it never achieves any “terminological consistency,”59 but is ambiguous and unclarified, and therefore one of the most controversial points in Benjamin scholarship. However, the dialectical image is also the culminating point of a historiographical methodology based on rag-picking, and thus the final point of this analysis. One of the most quoted entries of the Arcades Project reads: It’s not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words, image is dialectics at a standstill. For while the relation of the present to the past is a purely temporal, continuous one, the relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical: is not progression but image, suddenly emergent. – Only dialectical images are genuine images (that is, not archaic); and the place where one encounters them is language. (Awakening). (N2a,3)

The first point to dwell on is the notion of “image”: history is “imagistic,” or “figurative” [bildlich], it “decays into images [Bilder], not into stories [Geschichten]” (N11,4). The trash picked up and sorted out by the historian-as-chiffonnier is thus “not temporal in nature but figural [bildlich]” (N3,1). What Benjamin calls “historical time” is not the simple relationship of past [Vergangenheit] and present [Gegenwart], which is purely “temporal” [zeitliche], part of the mere flux, the continuum. Rather, the “what-has-been” [Gewesen] and the “now” [Jetzt] jump out of the temporal flux as self-enclosed monads, and therefore become “historical.” When the monads, “what-has-been” and “now,” are juxtaposed “judiciously” into a new constellation, they constitute an “image,” a new monad charged with

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dialectical, and therefore “historical,” meaning. This monad emerges in a flash, with the stillness, immediacy, completeness and visual power of a photographic shot, but it is to be encountered in language nonetheless (N2a,3).60 Its “monadological structure” demands that “the object of history […] be blasted out of the continuum of historical succession”: in the “historical confrontation” that makes up the “interior” of the historical object, “all the forces and interests of history enter on a reduced scale.” Therefore, “the historical object finds represented in its interior its own fore-history and after-history” (N10,3).61 Benjamin names this image “dialectical,” but at the same time defines it through the oxymoron of “dialectics at a standstill.” How can the dialectical movement stop and coagulate into an image, and yet remain dialectical? The dialectic of the rag-picking historian is for Benjamin the act of putting into a relationship two heterogeneous historical moments. Dialectic is opposed to the homogeneous and continuous flux of time as the “tension” [Spannung] that saturates the constellation of these two moments, Gewesen and Jetzt. Where “the tension between dialectical opposites is greatest,” then the dialectic comes to a necessary arrest. This “caesura in the movement of thought” is thus “not an arbitrary one” and is “identical with the historical object” (N10a,3). “The historical” does not arise from the mere passage of chronological time, but from the historian’s capacity to read images as frozen interruptions of the flow. The interruption, the standing still of the image, is what allows history to become legible, to become a text. Benjamin’s temporality is a discrete series of “nows” to be composed/juxtaposed into a montage-like text in order to let their tension explode.62 Discontinuity is thus the form of time itself, but also the methodology that can unmask the concept of continuum as mythic, and therefore oppressive.63 The continuum of history is an incessant catastrophe, the never-ending accumulation of ruins and sufferings, the continuity of the victors, the continuity of oppression. The revolutionary and redeeming event can only be an instant, a revolt against the continuity of oppression and its necessary interruption: the historical process must therefore come to a standstill. The necessity of the arrested dialectic, the non-arbitrariness of the historical construction, is a fundamental, but also highly problematic

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point. The ragpicker must sort out and compose the fragment in the necessary way. Benjamin argues that what makes the imagistic constellation necessary, and therefore beyond the subjectivity of the historian, is its “historical index.” That images have an “index” means that they belong to a particular time, but also – and principally – that “they attain to legibility only at a particular time,” that they accede to “legibility” only when the time is ripe: “every present day is determined by the images that are synchronic with it: each ‘now’ is the now of a particular recognizability” (N3,1). This index is for Benjamin a characteristic of the image itself that allows for its readability, for the “intelligent choice” of the historian-asragpicker. The setting free of the image, of the figurative “now,” is tied to the time of its recognizability: there is only one single point in time when two heterogeneous “nows” come into a constellation of truth, of reciprocal legibility. There is historical time only when the present recognizes itself as “meant,” or, in Hamacher words, as “intended, indicated, demanded, claimed. […] There is time only if the time for which it, and only it, is there seizes it.”64 The time of recognizability is the present of the historian-as-ragpicker. This is what Benjamin calls the “Copernican revolution” of historiographical method. As opposed to historicism, which suspends the present in order to discover an autonomous past wie es eigentlich gewesen ist, the materialist historian bases his historiographical critique on the experience of the present, on the necessity of the present to understand itself, and therefore on a politically “useful” vision of the past: “Politics attains primacy over history” (K1,2).65 As Hamacher has brilliantly argued, what is recognized in the present is the trash of history, that is, all the missed possibilities that have been wasted in its course. These missed possibilities are what Benjamin calls wish-images, the utopian dreams of the collectivity, which in capitalist society are sedimented in its material culture: commodities, architecture, fashion, popular literature. Wish-images as the dream of plenty are phantasmagorical demands, but their ruins offer to the materialist historian the material for his critique of society’s myths and for a true reconstruction.66 As Benjamin writes in the Fuchs essay, “historical materialism sees the work of the past as still uncompleted” (GS 2.2:477/SW 3:267). The missed possibility is always in danger of

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being missed again and forever. Therefore, the dialectical image only becomes legible in a moment of danger. This danger is that of falling into oblivion, the unrecognition, the forgetting of the missed chances, the destructive amnesia which characterizes the continuum of the tradition of the victors. The dialectical image emerges as legible only at this time of danger, when it demands to be recognized.67 We should note that the critical agency of the materialist historian is here limited to the capacity to recognize the dialectical image, in the readiness to read it when it springs forth. The ragpicker finds and picks up the trash of history only when this is ready to be found, and his virtue resides in attentiveness and in the capacity to compose the rags into a dialectical montage. The expedients of the “historical index” and the “now of recognizability” detach the reading from subjective “interpretation” and consign it to historical necessity.68 Benjamin can therefore affirm that “I needn’t say anything. Merely show” (N 1a,8). From Adorno, subsequent commentators have been puzzled by these methodological acrobatics. Adorno was himself preoccupied with the need for a “theory” that could hold together what he called Benjamin’s “wide-eyed presentation of mere facts” (AB 368/CC 283). However, theory is exactly what Benjamin tried to avoid: he believed that it was too dependent on the subjectivity of the theorist. The ragpicker does not walk the city streets following a “theory,” but with all his or her senses awakened and ready to capture what is ripe to be found. Truth, Pensky notes, would be lost by the imposition of a theoretical superstructure, whereas the task of the materialist historian is “to cultivate a particular capacity for recognizing” moments of truth.69 Thus, he argues, Benjamin substitutes “method” for “theory.”70 This materialist method utilizes a messianic structure, itself another point of discord and uncertainty among his interpreters. What is the sense of the recourse to messianism and theology in Benjamin’s dialectical construction? This extensive debate cannot be summarized here. I will therefore conclude by relying on one interpretation, that is best represented by Werner Hamacher and Peter Osborne. In their account, messianism must be understood as the structure of temporality that historical materialism appropriates in order to become dialectical. As Hamacher acutely notes, if the concept of redemption points towards a

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theology, then “this is not straightforwardly Judeo-Christian theology.” History is structured messianically because it is the “medium” of the possibilities of happiness, therefore redemption must be understood “most prosaically” as the redeeming of possibilities, and theology as a “theology of the missed, or the distorted – hunchbacked – possibilities, a theology of missed, distorted or hunchbacked time.”71 The weak messianic force we have been endowed with is thus, for Hamacher, “the postulate of fulfilability and, in this sense, of redeemability that is immanent in each missed possibility and distinguishes it as a possibility.”72 Nevertheless, Osborne argues, the postulate of fulfilability must depend upon the impossibility of a willed redemption. The dialectical image as monad mirrors the structure of history as a whole, and, as messianic time, it views history from the vantage point of its end. The messianic time as cessation of happening, as the end of history, can be read as that perspective outside history of a perfect whole, from which to judge, and politically intervene in, the present. The whole reflected in the dialectical image is yet to be completed, and therefore carries only a perspective of redemption. “Only if the Messianic remains exterior to history,” Osborne writes, “can it provide the perspective of a completed whole (without the predetermination of a teleological end), from which the present may appear in its essential transience, as radically incomplete.”73 Wholfahrt, by contrast, falls into mere romanticism when he almost reads the figure of the ragpicker as the embodiment of the messiah. The ragpicker is certainly Benjamin’s ultimate model for redemptive practice, but the meaning of this “redemption” remains materialist and dialectical, so that Wohlfahrt unnecessarily applies a purely Judeo-Christian language to Benjamin’s figure.74 The ragpicker as a figure of destitution is certainly charged with the “aura” of the oppressed and marginals, who have to be vindicated. However, his relevance for Benjamin’s project as a whole resides in the allegorization of a historiographical practice based on a thoroughly materialist principle: the rescue of lost possibilities from the trash of history.

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5.2 The Past as Future: Mudrooroo and the Indigenous Ragpicker It is our past and only we can write it, for in a sense we need history and it is not “ours” until we do the writing ourselves, giving importance to those stories which now matter to us. — Mudrooroo, Us Mob

The Postmodern Ragpicker Many of Benjamin’s intuitions have gained currency in contemporary debate about historiography. If the dialectical image remains an esoteric dilemma, many terms and concepts of his “method” resonate in contemporary discourses on history and historiography: notions like “the continuum of history,” “progress as catastrophe,” “the tradition of the oppressed,” “the trash of history” are implicit or explicit referents in much contemporary debate. History and historical narrative have undergone a dramatic revolution over the last fifty years: the catastrophe of World War II reduced “monumental history” to rubble; after Auschwitz it was no longer possible to encompass history in what Lyotard would call the “master (or grand) narratives” of Enlightenment, Progress and Emancipation. In addition, the “subjects” and “producers” of histories, and the forms in which these histories are produced, have undergone enormous change. It could well be argued that Benjamin’s “theory of the ragpicker” has been “confirmed” and his methodology partly adopted by various historiographical schools. History has been fragmented, decentralised, dispersed, particularised: what Benjamin called the “trash of history” has finally emerged from the ruins of the dead old narratives into new narratives which privilege the forgotten, the vanquished, the silenced and the oppressed. In England, for example, Eric Hobsbawm’s and E.P. Thompson’s “history from below,” or “social history,” sought to rescue what had been previously hidden and excluded; in France, the Annales School of Jacques Le Goff, Marcel Detienne, Jean-Paul Aron and Marc

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Bloch challenged the narratives of “kings, wars and intrigues,” refocusing the discipline on social, cultural and economic issues; in India, the Subaltern Studies group headed by Ranajit Guha counterposed to British imperial history the history of the subaltern; feminism reoriented historical method toward the history of the excluded (women, gays, ethnic and racial minorities etc.); a final example can be seen in Foucault’s project to investigate the history of madness, the prison and sexuality. A central event and catalyst of these changes has been decolonization: the new independence of the former colonies carried with it a search for new, alternative and revisionist histories, the replacement of the narratives of imperial power by new narratives that privileged what imperialist histories had discarded and “trashed.” The rescue and redemption of suppressed histories became a central issue in indigenous identity and politics. These other traditions, the “traditions of the oppressed,” are also, however, the traditions of “others.” This made for an epochal revolution in historiographical method: when the oppressed, the colonized, the subaltern speak, they do so in forms and fora that are heterogeneous to the “scientific” methods of Western narrative. When the colonized wrestle control of their history from the colonial “keepers,” they subvert the canons of what history is and how it should be written: stories previously regarded as not-history, such as myths, legends, songs and ceremonies, have now entered the realm of history itself. In addition, the figure of the historian has been enlarged to include story-tellers, informants, politicians etc. This phenomenon is not restricted to de-colonized societies, but has spread to the previously colonial powers, now multicultural societies, and is a central issue in settler societies, such as in the Americas, South Africa and Australasia. What have been called “minority histories” challenge the traditional discipline of history with demands for democratisation in a struggle for inclusion and representation. This phenomenon has been called the “democratisation of history” by historian Bain Attwood: history as a form of knowledge has been transformed, the absolutism of “scientific history” overthrown and new narratives reshaped by questions like “Whose history is this? Who is telling this story? Whose interests are served by it? What kind of truth does this history tell?”1 Democratisation has been accompanied

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by “popularisation”: history and memory have become key concerns, which attract the attention of media and popular culture and are central issues of political identity and strategy. As Andreas Huyssen points out, if modernism projected itself into the future, then postmodernity has turned its face towards the past. And this shift has been accompanied by multiple statements about endings: the end of history, the death of the subject, the end of the work of art, the end of metanarratives, etc. “Such claims,” Huyssen writes, “were frequently understood all too literally, but in their polemical thrust and replication of the ethos of avantgardism, they pointed directly to the ongoing recodification of the past after modernism.”2 Nevertheless, he continues, the political uses of the past are varied and contradictory: they range from conservative and chauvinist constructions of mythic national identities to the attempts, in post-dictatorship countries like Chile, Argentina or South Africa, to rescue a silenced past from the previously dictatorial politics of forgetting. “In sum,” he concludes, “memory has become a cultural obsession of monumental proportions across the globe.”3 The paradox is that this postmodern “history boom” is accompanied, as Huyssen and others note, by a loss of historical consciousness: in Attwood’s formulation, a “sense of the past” has been superseded by “images of the past” that are “increasingly pervasive in innumerable tangible forms, especially but not only in popular culture. The more the past itself recedes, the more it returns as representation.”4 History has become a mass activity, “the past as pastime,” another spectacle in the society of spectacle, in the end, just another commodity. Jameson famously named this paradox “postmodernist nostalgia”: deprived of genuine historicity, postmodernity “approaches the ‘past’ through stylistic connotation, conveying ‘pastness’ by the glossy qualities of the image.”5 “Pastness” as pseudohistorical depth, pop images and simulacra, Jameson argues, displaces and replaces “history.” This phenomenon is not identical with what Benjamin called “modern amnesia”: where for Benjamin the continuum of the history of the victors silenced and displaced the tradition of the oppressed, postmodern amnesia, by contrast, recovers a range of colourful and silenced pasts, but commodifies them in a way that annuls any possibility of critical historical consciousness. If a methodology of

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“ragpicking,” of rescuing forgotten and silenced traditions, has become central in contemporary historiography, the work of the historian is nevertheless still a struggle against amnesia, power and forgetting. Moreover, the picture becomes more complicated when the oppressed decide to speak in forms heterogenous to canonical history. Benjamin’s “method” is challenged by a number of new issues. In this chapter, I will attempt to confront Benjamin’s historian-asragpicker with this new cultural and historical context and its new methodological problems, using a composite text, The Mudrooroo/Müller Project: A Theatrical Casebook, which includes various texts revolving around a play by the Australian Indigenous writer, Mudrooroo (Colin Johnson),6 that in its turn “frame” a play by German playwright Heiner Müller. This text is not a “history” and certainly not a dialectical image, but it nevertheless offers interesting pretexts to analyse Benjamin’s ragpicker in the contemporary arena. Its play of temporalities, the destruction of the continuum of history, the notions of ruin, quotation and montage, allow for fruitful confrontations. Indigenous histories provide the biggest challenge not only for traditional historiography, but for any historiographical method aiming to give voice to the oppressed. One could even identify correspondances between the ragpicker and the Australian Aborigine: a figure of dispossession and marginalisation, historically banished from Australian history and relegated to silence and invisibility, often a ragtag, exiled within the “trash” of culture and plagued by drunkenness, violence and antisocial rebelliousness, the Aborigine has been the pariah of Australian society. However, these correspondances would repeat and reinstate Benjamin’s “romanticisation” of the oppressed and certainly fail to acknowledge the diversity and complexity of Aboriginal identities, most of all their (relative) emancipation in Australian society over the past fifty years. My goal in this chapter is, rather, to challenge Benjamin’s method through Indigenous histories. The biggest challenge will obviously be in the discussion of the dialectical image: I will aim not to find definitive answers to questions that, in Pensky words, are “more or less structurally unanswerable,”7 but to highlight and unravel probematics that are intrinsic and extrinsic to Benjamin’s argument.

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Quotation, Fragment, Montage The Mudrooroo/Müller Project is the brainchild of Sydney-based German scholar Gerhard Fischer. As he explains in the introductory section, in 1987, on the eve of the bicentennial celebration of Australian White settlement, he brooded over the uncanny proximity of this commemoration (and the lack of recognition of the dispossession and cultural genocide which accompanied it) to another celebration, the bicentennial of the French Revolution and the proclamation of the Rights of Man in 1989. He embarked on a project to link together (or juxtapose?) the two events, their incongruities and contemporary re-enactments, in dramatic representation. After discarding a project on Georg Forster, the “enlightened” German who travelled with Cook on his second voyage, wrote the first article in German on the penal colony of Port Jackson and ended up a revolutionary Jacobin, he turned to Heiner Müller’s play Der Auftrag, here translated as The Commission,8 which dramatises the failed attempt to export the French Revolution to Jamaica after the slave uprising of Toussaint L’Ouverture in Haiti. Fischer jotted down an exposé, where the failed mission of the revolutionaries in Jamaica is juxtaposed to the failure of the ideals of the French Revolution in the colonisation of Australia, through the fiction of an Aboriginal theatre company rehearsing Müller’s play. This project had to be shelved for lack of interest and funding, until Fischer approached Aboriginal actor and director Brian Syron in 1990, and, through him, received the placet of the Centre for Performance Studies of the University of Sydney, funding from Sydney’s Goethe Institute and the involvement of Mudrooroo, who would write the Aboriginal “frame” around Müller’s play. This frame fictionalises a rehearsal of Der Auftrag in front of Parliament House in Canberra on 25 January 2001, on the eve of the would-be proclamation of an Australian Republic, as a protest against the exclusion of Aboriginal issues from the new constitution. The play, with the impossible title of “The Aboriginal Protesters Confront the Declaration of the Australian Republic on 26 January 2001 with the Production of The Commission by Heiner Müller,” was workshopped in the autumn of 1991 and a public reading given at the

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end of the workshop. The Mudrooroo/Müller Project was then published in casebook form in 1993. The Theatrical Casebook is a montage of different and heterogeneous texts. Its very cover is conceived as the juxtaposition of two paintings: the German Anselm Kiefer’s Twilight of the West, representing railway tracks cutting a desolate countryside and perhaps leading into a concentration camp, and the Australian Trevor Nickolls’ Wrestling with the White Spirit, representing the struggle of Indigenous Australians with the coloniser White Spirit. The macro-text is a montage of texts and images: the first few pages reproduce the playbills for the public reading, where Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus is juxtaposed to Indigenous Jimmy Pike’s Mangkaja, which represents a totemic white bird from the Dreamtime (the two pictures are reproduced at full-page size at the beginning, respectively, of the Müller and Mudrooroo sections). Pictures of Mudrooroo, Fischer and Müller appear in the first page; pictures of the workshop are scattered through the texts, including one of director Brian Syron. The first section is dedicated to the conception of the project, with an introductory essay by Fischer on its genesis and an essay by Mudrooroo on the “Aboriginalising” of Heiner Müller. The second section is dedicated to Müller and begins with the juxtaposition of Klee’s painting, Benjamin’s ninth thesis on the Angel of History and three fragments from Müller’s rewriting of Benjamin’s angel.9 There follows an extract from Anna Seghers’ Das Licht auf dem Galgen (The Light on the Gallows), which inspired Müller to write Der Auftrag, and a short extract on Seghers’ piece from Müller’s autobiography Krieg ohne Schlacht. After the translation of Der Auftrag by Fischer, there is a commentary by Andrzej Wirth on its first representation in Berlin. The third section is dedicated to Mudrooroo: it begins with the juxtaposition of Jimmy Pike’s Mangkaja with five poems by Mudrooroo on birds from his collection of poems Dalwurra: The Black Bittern, and continues with an extract from his 1991 novel Master of the Ghost Dreaming. Then follows the play “The Aboriginal Protesters …” The fourth section is dedicated to the workshop, with Fischer’s workshop notes, an interview with director Brian Syron and another essay/commentary by Mudrooroo. The fifth section is dedicated to the politics of the project, with an essay by Paul Behrendt, Director of the Aboriginal Research and

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Resource Centre at the University of New South Wales, on Aboriginal sovereignty and the Australian republic; the transcription of a speech by Michael Mansell, Secretary of the Aboriginal Provisional Government, on Aboriginal government; an essay by Brian Syron on Aboriginal theatre; and “A Bicentennial Gift Poem” by Mudrooroo. Attached as an appendix is the original concept by Fischer. Müller’s “decidedly contemporary, post-Marxist and post-modern” play (Project 4)10 is itself a montage: it assembles Seghers’ story with a number of suggestions arising from European theatre. The play opens in 1801 with a sailor delivering to Antoine, a former leader of the French Revolution, a letter from Galloudec, one of the three “commissioners” sent to Jamaica to propagate the revolution. This letter tells of the treason of Debuisson, the second commissioner, a son of Jamaican slaveholders, after Napoleon’s coup of 18 Brumaire (2 December) 1799, and the death of Sasportas, the third commissioner, a black ex-slave. The sailor himself also tells of the death of Galloudec in prison. The action then jumps back to 1798 and the arrival of the three commissioners in Jamaica, the re-encounter between Debuisson and his family and the passivity of the slaves. Another temporal jump takes the action forward to 1979, when the play was written, and tells of the nightmarish trip of a man in an elevator going to a meeting with his boss and never reaching the desired floor. When the door finally opens, he finds himself in a village in Peru, ignored by, and almost invisible to, the natives. This episode combines/ quotes two of Müller’s personal experiences, a visit to Honecker and a trip to Mexico. The action then jumps again to 1799, after 18 Brumaire, and stages the treason of Debuisson, who returns to his old family customs, while Galloudec and Sasportas vow to continue their mission. The plot echoes/quotes Brecht’s enactment of a party mission in Die Maßnahme (The Measure Taken), but also, as many commentators have noted, Büchner’s Dantons Tod (Danton’s Death), Genet’s notion of skin colour as mask in Les nègres (The Blacks), Kafka’s nightmarish search for a (com)mission in the man in the elevator, Beckett’s life without a (com) mission, and Marcuse and Reich’s connection of eros and politics. The end result even gestures towards Artaud’s theatre of cruelty. “Müller’s style is method rather than mere post-modernist whim,” writes Fischer

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in his introduction to the translation (Project 42), a method based on the montage of fragments and quotations, the juxtaposition of disparate scenes and unconnected plots, into an unfinished structure that asks to be completed by the beholders/readers. This method, Jonathan Kalb argues, aims “not at unity but at clashes of images and subjects,”11 clashes of time and memory in an explicit attempt to redeem the dead (the subtitle of The Commission is Memory of a Revolution).12 Mudrooroo’s “frame” is also a montage and also utilises the technique of quotation. As a frame around Müller’s text, his play assembles chunks of Der Auftrag (which is quoted in full in the fictive rehearsal) with dialogue between the Aboriginal actors discussing the play and its meaning for their struggle. A group of Aboriginal amateur actors13 rehearses Der Auftrag, which should be part of the protest, the following day, against the failure of the new constitution to address the demand for Aboriginal sovereignty. The black academic Clint believes that the contraposition of motifs in the play, such as the black revolution in Haiti and the betrayal of the ideals of the French Revolution by white intellectuals, with the “betrayal” of Australian Aboriginals by white invaders in the same years, establishes parallels that unmask the colonisers’ lies and thus help the struggle for sovereignty. During the rehearsal, however, the Aboriginal actors become weary of Müller’s mysoginism, defeatism, sado-masochism and Eurocentric navel-gazing, and come to question its effectiveness for the Aboriginal struggle. At the end of the rehearsal, they vote against performing the play. Mudrooroo not only quotes Müller’s play in full, but also, as Fischer argues,14 in the long title and in the form of the play-around-a-play, gestures towards Peter Weiss’ Marat/Sade,15 Günter Grass’ The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising, Genet’s Les nègres and even Pirandello’s teatro nel teatro, in its psychological role-plays of identity. Moreover, Fischer continues, Mudrooroo “quotes” from his own novels Doing Wildcat (1988), a novel-around-a-film being shot of his first novel Wild Cat Falling (1965), and Long Live Sandawara, which is a montage of two different stories and different time-frames. Several levels of temporality are utilized in the various texts: Fischer’s concept juxtaposes the arrival of the First Fleet at Botany Bay in 1788, the French Revolution in 1789, and their commemorations in 1988 and 1989;

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Müller’s play puts together the year 1801, when the facts of Der Auftrag are narrated, the beginning of the mission in 1798, its tragic end in the aftermath of the 18 Brumaire 1799, and the present of 1979 for the scene of the man in the elevator; Mudrooroo adds a new level of temporality, projecting his play into the fictional future of the proclamation of an Australian Republic at the centenary of Federation in 2001; a further level of temporality is introduced with the djangara (spirits), dancers invisible to the characters of Mudrooroo’s play who move around them and silently comment on the action, representing the temporality of the Dreamtime. Most of these dates cannot be considered the “trash of history”: they mark crucial moments which belong to the continuum of universal history. However, they are wrenched from this continuum and juxtaposed in an uncanny constellation in order to create new meaning. In Fischer’s plan, the juxtaposition of Australian colonisation in 1788 and the French Revolution in 1789 should highlight the betrayal of the ideals of the Enlightenment by the dispossession and cultural genocide of the Indigenous population. Moreover, the juxtaposition of these two dates with their bicentennial commemorations in 1988 and 1989 should unmask the amnesia that hides this treason under the glittering phantasmagoria of celebration. Müller’s juxtaposition of the temporalities of the revolutionary mission with the present of the man in the elevator can be read as a lament for the failure of revolutions (especially the socialist revolution in his German Democratic Republic), the betrayal of the revolutionary promises made to the Third World by the First, and the lack of missions in the contemporary world. Mudrooroo’s contraposition of the failed Black Revolution in enslaved Jamaica with a present in 1991 when, as Fischer writes in the first section, “the movement towards establishing a republic in Australia seems to be gaining momentum” (Project 7), and the fictional future of the proclamation of an Australian Republic, aims at denouncing any eventual republic which declines to acknowledge the dispossession of Indigenous Australians and their prior sovereignty. I am not suggesting here that The Mudrooroo/Müller Project can be read as a dialectical image. In fact, the intentions of the Australian “ragpickers,” who collaborated in the project and in the assemblage of the final macro-text, remain within what Benjamin called “a purely temporal [and]

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continuous” relationship of past and present (N2a,3). Where Benjamin insisted that “it’s not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past” (N2a,3), Fischer writes that “not only do past and present illuminate and ‘distance’ each other, the present tense of the project also projects into the future while the future, in return, provides a sharp and witty contrast to the present.”16 By including in the montage Klee’s Angelus Novus and Benjamin’s ninth thesis, and by juxtaposing them to Müller’s fragments on angels and Aboriginal figures of flying beings, Fischer gestures towards a Benjaminian concept of history. But the Australian ragpickers’ montage is not “dialectical,” or at least not in the sense of a “dialectics at standstill.” However, my point is not to find a contemporary dialectical image, but to address the problematics arising from Benjamin’s figure of the historian-as-ragpicker, when transposed into the post-modern and post-colonial era. The Mudrooroo/Müller Project, with its use of fragments, quotations, montage and juxtaposed temporalities, offers fertile ground for this analysis. Continuum The contemporary ragpicker is confronted by the monolithic continuum of colonial and post-colonial histories. In the Australian historical disputes of the past fifty years, various levels of “continuity” have been questioned and challenged, but an ever-new alternative continuum keeps reimposing silence on the oppressed. The terminology used in current historiographical debate is poststructuralist: “narrative” is a loose poststructuralist “translation” of the Benjaminian “continuum,” which emphasises much more strongly the “textuality” of history as a linguistic construction, its character as “fiction” and the “subjectivity” of its project. The Mudrooroo/Müller Project was conceived and produced at a crucial moment of Australian history, when several “narratives” clashed in the struggle for recognition and “truthfulness”: the early 1990s witnessed the first official recognition of the existence of Indigenous native titles on their lands in the “Mabo case” of 1992, a Labor government responsive to Aboriginal claims and a push for the declaration of an Australian Republic, with the prospect of

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definitive separation from the colonial motherland and its history. It was a moment of great opportunity and, at the same time, great danger. The Mudrooroo/Müller Project puts on stage a representation of this historical crucible, where Mudrooroo-as-Indigenous-ragpicker faces the task of “destroying” multiple layers of old and new threatening continuums. Australian history had been, until at least the 1960s, a “white” history. The first colonists did not find “castles and ruins” and concluded that Australian Indigenous people were “without” or “outside” history; accordingly, they were left out of subsequent narrations of the country. This continuum of Australian history has been named by historian Geoffrey Blainey the “Three Cheers View” of history: a history of heroic endurance, courageous conquest and patriotic progress, which even the conservative Blainey viewed as “too favourable and too self-congratulatory.”17 It claimed that the country was “settled” and not “conquered,” that is, colonized peacefully on the basis of civilised values and the rule of law, heroically fighting against, and conquering, a harsh environment. The slogan proposed in the late 1970s, by the conservative Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser, for the 1988 bicentennial commemoration was “The Australian Achievement.” The phantasmagoria of the “Australian Achievement” obliterated the presence of indigenous populations, but also of non-Anglo-Celtic minorities such as the Chinese and Kanakas (Melanesians). In 1959, historian John La Nauze observed, without regret, that Aborigines were only a “melancholy anthropological footnote” in Australian history.18 The 1960s and 1970s saw radical changes in Australian society: in 1967, following a national referendum, Indigenous Australians were given citizenship and, in 1971, they were included in the census. In 1968, anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner denounced for the first time the phantasmagoria of the “Australian Achievement” as the “Great Australian Silence.”19 But the phantasmagoria persisted. However, immigration flows from Europe and, after the abolition of the “White Australia Policy” in 1972, from Asia, changed the texture of society, so that the fiction of an Australia with a British identity and a British past ceased to be tenable. Multicultural Australia needed a new unifying identity and so turned to Indigenous history. By celebrating Indigenous culture and history, non-Indigenous Australians, on the one

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hand, found an identifying character of “uniqueness” for Australia, and, on the other, added to the 200-odd years of white colonisation tens of thousands of years of human time in the continent. As Attwood writes, the “appropriation of Aboriginality” by non-Indigenous Australians meant its commodification into “images” that conveyed “pastness.”20 Aboriginality was thus, John Morton argues, to be the symbolic substitute for the British monarchy.21 If in the 1980s Aboriginality gained prestige in society,22 in the 1990s it became the pet subject of Labor Prime Minister Paul Keating, who melded the recognition of Indigenous native title with a push for the Australian Republic. He saw the two causes as means to create a new foundational history for Australia: “Indigenising” or “Aboriginalising” the republic would build a new identity and sense of belonging.23 It is clear, though, that Keating’s politics simply substituted a new phantasmagorical continuum for the old. In the new phantasmagoria, the tradition of the oppressed was appropriated and commodified for political goals: it became, to use Benjamin’s words, “a tool of the ruling classes” (GS 1.2:695/SW 4:391).24 For embracing a rhetoric of guilt towards past injustices, Keating was accused by the conservative opposition of imposing a gloomy vision of history. But, as historian Stuart Macintyre argues, his “Big Picture” employed “bright colours of suffering and endurance, emancipation and triumph. It painted a story of redemption, not guilt.”25 It was a new, more “politically correct” – and thus more useful – phantasmagoria. A number of historians and intellectuals did embrace the vision of “Australian history as catastrophe,” which Blainey called the “Black Armband View of History.”26 But this again was merely what Benjamin had called Linke Melancholie (Left-Wing Melancholy), leftist moral indignation covering for political resignation and quietism (GS 3:279–83/SW 2:423–7), that “acedia” and “indolence of the heart,” which, in “On the Concept of History,” he linked to empathy with the victors (GS 1.2:696/ SW 4:391). Black Armband melancholia was never meant to shatter the continuum of Australian history and, in fact, Mudrooroo’s protesters attack this new phantasmagoria as an extension of the old, “the same horse with a different jockey,” as Paul Behrendt writes (Project 154). At the time of publication of The Mudrooroo/Müller Project, the debate about the republic and the Aboriginalisation of Australian history

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was at its height. But the Republic was never declared, Australians voted against it in the 1999 referendum, and Keating’s Labor government was replaced in 1996 by a conservative coalition under Prime Minister John Howard. The new conservative government, supported by the socalled “Howard intellectuals,”27 disavowed the “Black Armband View of History” and pushed for the reinstatement of the continuum of “Australian Achievement.” Critical histories, and the methodology of ragpicking that had become central to historiography since the 1960s, came under attack during the 1990s, not only in Australia but also as a general trend elsewhere. The method was accused of hypocritical political correctness and of re-writing history according to a political agenda. The Historikerstreit of the mid-1980s in Germany and the Enola Gay imbroglio of the mid-1990s in the United States set the tones and terminology for what came to be known in Australia as the “history wars.” The discipline entered public and political debate with fierce tones, as if to confirm Benjamin’s “Copernican revolution” in historical perception: “politics attains primacy over history” (K1,2). However, the political push of the so-called “neo-conservatives” aimed at counteracting the historical revisionists whose methodology had presented affinities with Benjamin’s ragpicking: “neo-con” historical politics is a reaction against the “leftist” revolution in historiography of the 1960s and 1970s.28 The contemporary historian-as-ragpicker is thus confronted by a renewed phantasmagorical push with strongly political overtones. Nevertheless, Mudrooroo adds a further level of phantasmagoria, a further continuum the Indigenous ragpicker must un-mask and shatter: Eurocentric postmodernism and postcolonialism. At the end of his play, the Indigenous actors vote against performing the Müller play: “we got better things to do,” says the director Bob (Project 120); it is a “fucking male white text!,” yells MaryAnne (Project 97, 101), another phantasmagoria unable to address Indigenous issues, as impenetrable as Peru is to the man in the elevator. White European postmodernism and postcolonialism keep “writing the histories of others,” Mudrooroo observes in his essay in the workshop section, citing Müller’s treatment of Jamaican black slaves and of women: “the Other is still the plaything of Europe” (Project 136). Müller has not given voice to the slaves and his pursuit of redemption in

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the Third World is but the search for “European solace in the arid desert” (Project 137). Postmodernism and postcolonialism are “white concepts,” new silencing “narratives” or “continuums,” new white “beasts of prey,” which, “like all predators[,] will eat your writings up, digest them, and shit them out as turds of colonial bullshit.”29 Furthermore, Müller’s play is “non-political”: “politics had failed Europe,” Mudrooroo writes (Project 139). In his introductory essay “The Aboriginalising of Heiner Müller,” he calls Der Auftrag a “circular essay on defeat” (Project 21), evidence of the “dreariness” and “weariness” of contemporary European man (not woman – Müller’s mysoginism is another of Mudrooroo’s criticisms), his displacement and lack of mission/commission in life, which render him “impotent” (Project 21). King George, the goomee and central character of his play, calls Der Auftrag “‘Nother brainwashing bit” and argues that white European men are “so fucked up that they can’t even tell who they themselves are in this century.” Their “sickness, their sadness, their blandness” (Project 100) hinder any possibility of revolutionary action. The same criticism has been put forward, for example, by Arlene Teraoka, for whom Der Auftrag demonstrates “the repeated failure of European intellectuals to offer a revolutionary alternative: […] all end in resignation and compliance.”30 King George’s attack echoes the accusations Benjamin levelled in 1931 at German radical intellectuals like Erich Kästner, Franz Mehring and Kurt Tucholsky: their linke Melancholie was but “bourgeois dissolution,” a “decayed bourgeoisie’s mimicry of the proletariat,” merely transposing revolutionary reflexes into “objects of distraction, of amusement, which can be supplied for consumption,” and thus also deprived of any “corresponding political action.” Ultimately, a “curious variety of despair: tortured stupidity” (GS 3:279–83/SW 2:423–7). Thus, “when Aboriginality meets post-modernism” (Project 136), it rehearses it only to reject it. What the actors want from Germany is not Müller’s play but the return of ancestral bones from its museums: “them bones,” cries King George, “them bones all dried and put on shelves … A theatre of blackness, that’s what I see, that’s what we have to do. Our suffering, their cruelty; theatre of our blackness” (Project 99). What the Indigenous struggle needs is not

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Der Auftrag but a “theatre of blackness”: “we want a theatre of blackfella business. Proper theatre” (Project 100). Thus, Mudrooroo concludes in his introductory essay: As it is a European play the Jamaicans are not given a voice, are only backdrop to these three characters. Picturesque slaves who only exist […]. Familiar, isn’t it? But then Müller is really not interested in the blacks of Jamaica. He is, as an East German, interested in the stagnation of defeat; whereas I, as an Aborigine, a Nyoongah, am interested in combating the stagnation of defeat, and so in the process of Aboriginalisation, I establish a dialectic which sets up against the Müller text to create a tension of blackness, as well as to give a voice to those black people who are denied one. (Project 20)

Montage, Truth and Subjective Intention If the part destruens of Benjamin’s project of ragpicking can easily be shared by a contemporary ragpicker, and has even been incorporated into the methodology of much contemporary historiography, the same cannot be said for its pars construens, the dialectical image. This is not merely because, as Pensky argues, it “has, to this day, remained far more a dark star, indeed a kind of theoretical and methodological black hole, a ‘singularity’ following its own extraordinary laws and capable, apparently, of absorbing any number of attempts at critical illumination”31; but also because the conditions of possibility of the dialectical image have radically changed over the past fifty years. Benjamin’s “construction” is irredeemably rooted in modernist aesthetics and politics, and has therefore lost effectiveness and significance in contemporary historiographical debate. In spite of Fischer’s gesture towards Benjamin’s concept of history, The Mudrooroo/Müller Project not only remains in a “purely temporal [and] continuous” relationship of past and present (N2a,3), but also contradicts and denounces several “rules” of Benjamin’s method. Instead of trying to find answers to questions that, in Pensky’s words, “would prove difficult if not impossible to redeem,”32 I will, rather, attempt an analysis of the conditions of possibility of the dialectical image as a method for the contemporary ragpicker.

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The first point to dwell on is the notion of shock. Borrowing the technique of montage from the Surrealists, Benjamin aimed at shocking and disorienting through a sort of Brechtian Verfremdungseffect. The juxtaposition of forgotten and present images should “burst open” the historicist continuum through shock. Nevertheless, in our age the innovative techniques of the artistic avant-garde have been adopted, absorbed and digested by both advertising and television: the contemporary reader/ viewer lives in a media-reality saturated by digital appearances, spinning information and images put together in impossible montages; he or she is literally bombarded at every moment by shocking “constructions.” The postmodern subject has by now “metabolized” shock, nothing can disorient or surprise the TV-generation, nothing can really achieve Verfremdung today. The power of juxtaposition to shock the beholder into new revolutionary awareness has faded, if not disappeared. In any case, shock does not describe the necessary act of synthesis required from the beholder. As Pensky notes, “the shocking aspect of Surrealist montages presupposes the capacity of the audience to reflect upon the very activity of aesthetic reception and appreciation.”33 It presupposes the capacity to connect the juxtaposed fragments or quotations into new meaningful wholes and, hence, the interpretive act of relating the images to subjective feelings, experiences and values. As Paul Messaris emphasises, “what the viewer makes of an image, or what the reader makes of a text, is out of the hands of the image’s or text’s creator.”34 The necessity, on which Benjamin insisted, of assembling the fragments in the right way, and therefore of obliging the necessary and correct interpretation of the material culture from which they were wrestled, seems a remnant of theological suggestion, which goes against any theory of communication. The other subjectivity Benjamin dreaded was that of the historian: he chose the Surrealist montage over allegory and collection in order to eliminate the subjective intentions of the historian and thus assure that the dialectical image was assembled in the right way. Nevertheless, Surrealist notions of “objective chance,” intoxication, automatic writing and other attempts to eliminate the subjectivity of the author all betray the presence of a strong authorial intention. As Pensky points out, what to count as a fragment, in what way to assemble it, what other fragments

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to juxtapose to it and so forth, conform “to a recognizable narrative of aesthetic innovation, negation, and judgement; in short, of art history from the rise of representational painting through its negation in aesthetic modernism (and subsequent rebirth in postmodern realism).”35 Messaris insists on the role of the montage’s creator in shaping interpretation: “the ability to intuit the viewer’s perspective and to use that intuition as a means of affecting the viewer’s response” invites or conditions the viewer to draw determined conclusions.36 Benjamin attempted to bypass this obstacle by the invention of the “historical index,” a sort of intrinsic characteristic of the historical image, and of the “now of recognizability,” with clear messianic overtones. But in so doing, he fell back on the “theory” he had wanted to avoid. The ragpicker’s capacity to recognize the useful trash “when it springs forth” and to make un choix intelligent, that is, Benjamin’s substitution of method for theory, conceals in the end a theory, and thus subjective intention. This theory, Pensky argues,37 is theology, which is kept “out of sight,” not because it is “small and ugly” like the chess-master and hunchbacked dwarf (GS 1.2:693/SW 4:389), but because it would betray the subjectivity of the assembler and thereby disavow the objectivity of the construction. Contemporary scholarship, especially Indigenous history, pushes this argument much further. Poststructuralist and postmodernist theory postulates that, in Linda Hutcheon’s formulation, “facts do not speak for themselves […]: the tellers speak for them, making these fragments of the past into a discursive whole.”38 The teller “constructs” a narrative by giving particular meaning to the material fragments, a rule which applies also to the montage and its claim for the “presentation of mere facts”: the “construction” of history, even in montage, does not merely show, but say. Montage is a narrative, and every narrative is a montage. This point is emphasized and made into a claim for authenticity and “truthfulness” in Indigenous histories, where the subjectivity of the teller itself becomes the central issue. Indigenous history-making challenges and opposes history as a “scientific” and “objective” discipline, based on verifiable data, distance, and necessary and correct interpretations. Indigenous history, Attwood notes, is “both personal and parochial,”39 focused on families and kin, constructed in the form of oral histories, myths and legends, and directed

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to their own people. Questions of authorship and authority thus become central: the control of the past is essentially bound to questions about who could and should tell stories about it, and to a strong connection between history-teller, the history that is told and the addressee for those histories. The notion of historical truth, of the truth-value of historical facts and narration, is therefore revolutionized. The subjectivity of the “historian” becomes fundamental and his or her identity is stretched in order to include the features of the storyteller, whose “traces,” as Benjamin noted, “cling to a story the way handprints of the potter cling to a clay vessel” (GS 2.2:447/SW 3:149). This claim is made in King George’s plea for “a theatre of blackfella business”: only a “real blackfella play” can put forwards a claim for authenticity and truthfulness; this “proper theatre […] gotta come from us” and be taken “to the missions and settlements,” not “overseas” but “overground.” The only possible claim to truthfulness for Indigenous histories lies in narratives which “keep seeing through black mind, through black heart, through black eyes” (Project 100). Even if one wanted to overlook the obscurity of Benjamin’s construction, the “embeddedness” of the dialectical image in the aesthetics and politics of European modernism makes it unsuitable for contemporary historiography and politics. From Adorno on, one of the major challenges of Benjamin scholarship was to save subjectivity in such a way “that those on whose behalf critique was meant to intervene not be sacrificed.”40 But, when the oppressed “snatch” the construction of history from the victors, this very subjectivity becomes the unavoidable mark of revolutionary history-making. This needs not lead us to a complete disavowal of the montage in juxtaposition of forgotten “trash” with issues relevant to present politics, which is still the method of contemporary historiographic “ragpicking” and of The Mudrooroo/Müller Project. But it does underline the need to think beyond Benjamin even within his own method.

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The Past as Future, or, The Aboriginalisation of History A dry husk fluffing off his past He ascends only to descend Into that past, Suddenly congealed around his wings. — Mudrooroo, Attempted Flight

Stephen Muecke puts forward the interesting idea that: No one has teased out the aesthetic consequences for the idea of indigenous antiquity in Australian modernity. This antiquity does not provide any “loosened building blocks” – ruins like old castles – out of which a “new order” can be constructed to look like European modernism. Were Australian modernism, or postmodernism, to build on indigenous antiquity, it would look completely different.41

“Ruins” are a fundamental referent of modernism: they provide the material, the “semantic building blocks” – the rubble – with which to give form to, and represent, rapid change in society and aesthetics. Modernism was “imported” into Australia without any actual base there. Muecke argues that there is a different form of Australian modernism, “indigenous modernism,” which “could be defined as the inventive adaptations – aesthetic, social, or technological – to the rapid changes brought by colonization.”42 Imported and indigenous modernisms have different “allegorical correlatives” from the ruins of the European: desert and wilderness. Both, Muecke writes, draw on the power of the dead and seek redemptive aesthetic outcomes. In Australia a decolonizing shift could be made to reconnect a new Australian modernism with Indigenous antiquity. This involves recognizing and making up for the political devastation […]. Here an indigenous sacred represents the cultural capital only slowly made visible to the nation, haunting it with a strange power, the power of indigenous legends and heroes.43

For Muecke, the “semantic building blocks” of Australian desert and wilderness are to be found in the “indigenous sacred,” the rubble left by the “political devastation,” the catastrophe of colonisation. This “trash” of Australian history is the “cultural capital” for a new constructive practice:

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a redemptive aesthetics and historiography must draw on the ruins of the Dreamtime. It is to this Dreamtime that the Australian Indigenous ragpicker looks for his or her constructive work. What the protesters in Mudrooroo’s play want from Germany is not Müller (nor Benjamin?), but the bones of their ancestors, the “ruins” of their history, forgotten and scattered around the world. To give voice to the tradition of the oppressed in Australia means to reconnect the present to those ancestral bones. For publication, Mudrooroo added to the version of the play used in the workshop a second “frame,” a group of Indigenous performers, dancers and mimes, who represent djangara or ancestral spirits. On stage all the time, “invisible” to the actors, they observe and silently “comment” on the action. The djangara represent a different level of Indigenous reality, and construct a link between the present/future of the action and the Dreamtime, the foundational myth of Australian Indigenous culture and spirituality. The tradition of the oppressed in Australia speaks through the Dreamtime, through a mythology that saturates the present and the future. Benjamin’s “Copernican revolution” consisted in a shift of historical perception from the “what-has-been” to the present of an awakened memory; the Australian Indigenous ragpicker shifts the focus from “the scientific way of thinking which seeks to explain the past from the present”44 to a past to be sought not wie es eigentlich gewesen ist, but as a mythic nurturing continuum. The mythical past of the Dreamtime is the basis for all explanation of the present and the future, a destructive weapon to shatter the phantasmagorical continuum of colonialist history and a constructive tool to “politicise” the present. But the construct “mythic continuum” sounds extremely suspicious to a Benjaminian ear. By mythic continuum, Benjamin meant the phantasmagoria of modernity, the oppressive “tool of the ruling classes”: continuum as opposed to the “true” temporality of discontinuities; mythic because undialectical, fictitious and drenched in bad consciousness. These two terms have completely different connotations for the Indigenous ragpicker and must therefore be redefined. Indigenous history, “which is different from that of Europe,”45 is to be sought in different forms of codification: oral narratives, genealogies, songs, ceremonies and myths, passed down over the generations.

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These “histories” were ejected from the discipline of Western history as not “true” by the institutionalisation of historical practices – possibly, Penny van Toorn argues, because “rapid and aggressive imperial expansion necessitated a devaluation of indigenous cultural practices.”46 They were relegated to the ambit of anthropology and archaeology and excluded from historiography. However, as Attwood writes, even in the West oral histories were central to that “democratisation” of the discipline which led to the projects of “history from below,” social history and subaltern history. Oral history was a form of giving voice to the silenced, the dispossessed, women, gays and lesbians, migrants and ethnic minorities. This shift represented a major challenge for the discipline because it questioned notions of authority, distance and “truth.”47 Indigenous oral histories do not conform to the narrative of the time-line, of an ordered linear sequence, but create a sense of the past by reactivating the tradition and establishing “historical continuity.”48 These forms, Mudrooroo argues, operate as a reinvention/re-empowerment of the past as much as do Western “objective” and “scientific” histories. If a parallel to European modernism is to be sought, then, Mudrooroo writes, it is in Surrealism,49 in its dwelling on dreams, the unconscious and intoxication, which Benjamin considered “inadequate” and “undialectical” (GS 2.1:307/SW 2:216). Nevertheless, this parallel is fruitful for Mudrooroo, insofar as it takes up the Surrealist political interpretation and use of dreaming: dreaming is politically relevant, Andrew Lattas argues, as “the best way of mediating the gap between traditional authentic Aboriginal culture and the political needs of present Aborigines.”50 The awakening from the nightmare of the colonialist continuum is only possible through the rescue and reactivation of lost and silenced dreaming. Therefore, by “Aboriginalising” Heiner Müller, Mudrooroo hints at an “Aboriginalising of History,” a rescue of the dismissed possibilities and practices of Indigenous tradition. The Indigenous ragpicker, Mudrooro writes, is “a Janus-type figure with one face turned to the past and the other to the future while existing in a postmodern, multicultural Australia in which he or she must fight for cultural space.”51 The past is there to explain the present and the future, because it is only in the past that “true Aboriginality resides.”52 The past, the remote dreaming past, the age of heroic ancestral beings,

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is the template for intervention into the present to shape the future. Indeed, temporal categories like “past” and “present” belong to a spatialization of time that is extraneous to Indigenous temporality, to what van Toorn calls “ethnocentric concepts of temporality.”53 “Aboriginal reality,” Mudrooroo writes, “exists uneasily with European reality: the Dreamtime with clocktime.”54 Australian Indigenous culture lies “outside European conventions,”55 outside that phantasmagorical continuum of European history Mudrooroo calls the “time-line,”56 but also outside the Benjaminian temporality of “discontinuities.” History as time line or discontinuities is a white construct; Indigenous history is rooted in the continuum of mythic Dreamtime, a time outside or beyond time, that is, atemporal. As such, it can be compared to Benjamin’s messianic time: where messianic time, as cessation of happening, as the end of history, provides a perspective outside history from which to judge and intervene in the present, Dreamtime also mirrors the structure of history as a whole, but from the opposite perspective, from the vantage point of its foundation. The “postulate of fulfilability” of missed possibilities is, for the Indigenous ragpicker, the possibility of a “true Aboriginality” that is impossible as such, but presents – in a monadic structure, as it were – a perspective of redemption. Both concepts, incommensurable as they are, provide a revolutionary alternative to the spatialised “homogeneous and empty time” of a persistent and phantasmagoric historicism. The concept of “Aboriginality” as perspective of redemption is nevertheless dubious: “Aborigine” and “Aboriginal” were initially constructions and impositions of the colonisers, which levelled the multiple differences and distinctions of the various Indigenous populations to a onedimensional, homogenized identity-label. However, “Aboriginality” (or “Pan-Aboriginality”) has arisen from within the Indigenous movements because it provides an ideology by which to rescue a forgotten tradition and a silenced identity. “It is not a static ideology,” Mudrooroo writes, “based on fixed traditional ways of expression and culture, but is […] a way of building a contemporary Aboriginal culture, a radical re-education of Aborigines by Aborigines and at the direction of Aborigines.”57 The point is thus, not the return to a static and monolithic past, but the politics of a present which stands in dialectical relationship with a

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silenced tradition. The process of “rescuing” this Aboriginality is necessarily continuing: aboriginality is “created” in a continuous dialectical movement. In an interview with Adam Shoemaker, Mudrooroo stated that “if you try to go back into your Aboriginality you’ll create some sort of Aboriginality because there isn’t this sort of state there which you can go back to anyway.”58 Aboriginality is thus not so much a static tradition of cultural expression, as a renovation and recreation of the past with political meanings connecting and binding the past and present. Aboriginality as a concept and as an ideology has been contested and condemned as a form of essentialism. What David Hollinsworth calls “Aboriginality-as-persistence” is a form of romantic nostalgia for a lost cultural heritage that is “universalist, essentialist, culturalist, backward looking and depoliticised.”59 In the end, it uses the same notions as, and reproduces, the discourses of rightists and racists, and is therefore useless and detrimental for the “true” politics of “Aboriginality-as-resistance.” In response to Hollinsworth, Mudrooroo defends the essentialist position, “the template of the Dreaming ancestors being the guide to the present and future.”60 The function of the primordial past of the Dreamtime, Lattas writes, is to serve as a fiction of an “uncolonized space […] from which to reflect upon the terms of present existence.”61 Essentialism creates here a dialectic, that is, a continuity between the primordial past and the modern tactics of resistance: Aboriginality is thus the right of Indigenous subjects to “create themselves through images of primordiality rather that through embracing the image of the white revolutionary as the only template of politics and resistance.”62 Aboriginality rooted in the Dreamtime is therefore the contemporary utopian perspective of redemption for the Indigenous ragpicker. “Indigenising” the ragpicker means to go beyond Benjamin, retaining the spirit of his project of redemption of the tradition of the oppressed, but acknowledging the limits of his still Eurocentric perspective and of a method laden with modernist implications. Benjamin’s “theory of the ragpicker” has been partly vindicated by contemporary theory, historiography and philosophy of history: it can still “speak” eloquently to a contemporary reader. But this is so only insofar as the present can “actualize” it – in the Benjaminian sense of the term – and thus transform and

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re-politicize it. As much as Mudrooroo’s “Aboriginalising” of Müller is an “attempt to highjack” his text in order to establish a “dialectic” and a “tension of blackness” (Project 20–1), the present political readings of Benjamin must “highjack” the ragpicker in order to keep alive the tensions of his revolutionary project. *  *  * The constellation of the ragpicker leaves Benjamin’s model in ruins: it fragments the material content of his highly modernist construction in order to unveil the truth-content of his revolutionary project and thus “actualize” his work, telescoping it through the present. This truth-content is the poignancy of a historiographic practice based on the rescue and revitalization of discarded, silenced and forgotten traditions. It tells of the necessity and urgency of this act, of the dangers inherent to its failure, of the perpetual state of exception in which memory, history and politics are threatened by amnesia, forgetfulness and acquiescence. By counterposing the voice of the dispossessed to Benjamin’s model, this constellation dispels the illusion perpetrated by the romanticization of the marginal. But it also raises fundamental questions about the forms, modality and significance of revolutionary historiography. It shows the limits of a historiographic model embedded in the modernist, Western, male, white paradigm of “scientific” history-making, which perpetrates the objectification of the Other and thus its silencing. It reduces to rubble the fiction of an “objectivity” and “necessity” of historical truth, based on the depersonalization of the act of reading and the universalization of the figure of the historian and his concerns. The indigenous ragpicker claims the right of the dispossessed to reappropriate their history and the modalities of its preservation, transmission and revitalization, thereby echoing Benjamin’s claim of the superiority of politics over history. Reading Benjamin against the grain of our time, this constellation acknowledges the importance of his work by mortifying, re-assembling, and thus actualizing his thought.

chapter 6

Constellations: On Dialectic

Critical theory has to be communicated in its own language – the language of contradiction, dialectical in form as well as in content: the language of the critique of the totality, of the critique of history. Not some “writing degree zero” – just the opposite. Not a negation of style but the style of negation. — Guy Debord, The Society of Spectacle

That Cursed Dialectic In 1967, Guy Debord lamented the “demise” of dialectics in contemporary theory. To the “canons of the prevailing language,” he wrote, and to the “sensibilities moulded by those canons,” dialectic, even the “style of exposition of dialectical theory,” is a “scandal” and an “abomination […] because it includes in its positive use of existing concepts a simultaneous recognition of their rediscovered fluidity, of their inevitable destruction.”1 More recently, in a very influential work which certainly cannot be accused of celebrating the values of the “society of spectacle,” Hardt and Negri wrote the epitaph on the tombstone of the dialectic, enlisting Benjamin himself as melancholic witness to its decease. Benjamin’s secular eschatology, they wrote, “was the mechanism by which the experience of the crisis could be set free.” Nevertheless, his attempt to discover “a hope and a light of redemption” did not escape “the powerful undertow of the dialectic, […] that cursed dialectic that had held together and anointed European values, had been emptied out from within and was now defined in completely negative terms. The apocalyptic scene on which this mysticism searched for liberation and redemption, however, was still too

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implicated in the crisis. Benjamin recognized this bitterly.”2 For Hardt and Negri, the crisis of modernity entails the crisis of a critique founded on dialectical method. The new socio-economic and political situation requires a different theoretical approach, which they find in “the series of French philosophers who reread Nietzsche several decades later, in the 1960s.” This rereading: involved a reorientation of the standpoint of the critique, which came about when they began to recognize the end of the functioning of the dialectic and when this recognition was confirmed in the new practical, political experiences that centered on the production of subjectivity. This was a production of subjectivity as power, as the constitution of an autonomy that could not be reduced to any abstract or transcendent synthesis. Not the dialectic but refusal, resistance, violence, and the positive affirmation of being now marked the relationship between the location of the crisis in reality and the adequate response. What in the midst of the 1920s appeared as transcendence against history, redemption against corruption, and messianism against nihilism now was constructed as an ontologically definite position outside and against, and thus beyond every possible residue of the dialectic. This was a new materialism which negated every transcendent element and constituted a radical reorientation of spirit.3

The present study has proposed a reading of Benjamin and a practice of critical reading anchored in the dialectical method. As explained in Chapter One, the four figures here analysed have been construed through the dialectical juxtaposition of quotations wrenched from Benjamin’s work to form a constellation, which can remain in place only through the tension established between the extremes. The method of reading here experimented with proposes, then, to juxtapose Benjaminian figures to contemporary accounts of the same figure, in order to establish a dialectic between past and present which would “actualize” their meaning. The constellation of the flâneur emphasises the notion of “construction” necessary to dialectical reading: only the dialectical juxtaposition within a constellation allows us to make sense of the contradictory flâneurs in Benjamin’s writings and of the paradoxical flâneur of Juan Goytisolo. In turn, this constellation is proposed as an appropriate way to represent the contradictions of modernity and postmodernity. The constellation of the detective unveils the dangers of any intellectual pursuit, like that of Paul

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Auster, which renounces the dialectical confrontation with history and reality and exiles itself in an undialectical self-complacency. The constellation of the prostitute emphasises the moment of “destruction” propaedeutic to the moment of dialectical construction: critical reading must first undo the continuum of an organic tradition in order to dispel the phantasmagoric Schein; nevertheless, this constellation also points to the insufficiencies of any reading that limits itself to this destructive moment and forgoes the dialectical process of construction. Finally, the constellation of the ragpicker, by reproposing Benjamin’s interpretive method in its historiographical form, focuses on the notion of “actualization,” which is bound to a dialectical confrontation with the present and is the core and ultimate goal of a Benjaminian reading. The present study thus seems out of tune, not only with the contemporary theoretical approaches that celebrate the postmodern dissolution of the modern, but also with a number of post-Marxist critiques of capitalist society, which infuse Marx with “French” Nietzschean suggestions and “liberate” Marxism from the “curse” of the dialectic. It is therefore necessary to conclude with a few remarks on the peculiar meaning of the Benjaminian dialectic. I do not intend to repeat the analysis of his method conducted in Chapters One and Five. What this last chapter will attempt is a positioning of Benjamin’s interpretive methodology in relation to some contemporary – dialectical and undialectical – interpretations of the act of reading (and of reading Benjamin). There is little need to emphasize that postmodernity is undialectical: Linda Hutcheon, one of the most coherent advocates of postmodernism, repeats time and again that “there is no dialectic in the postmodern.”4 Dialectics is identified with binary oppositions which, for Hutcheon, “conceal hierarchies”5 and thus exclusions. Dialectics set up systems that aim at unifying and ordering contradictions into what Lyotard called meta- or master narratives and thus hide an aspiration to return to an ideal totality. Multiplicity, heterogeneity, plurality, differentiation are the marks of a postmodernism that celebrates contradiction and paradox but refuses dialectical confrontation. Tensions must remain unresolved and this lack of resolution is a “stimulating teasing”: “the self-reflexive remains distinct from its traditionally accepted contrary – the historico-

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political context in which it is embedded.”6 Irreconcilable incompatibilities and unresolved paradoxes are to be preserved in order to recognize the value of differences and question the production of meaning. Hutcheon writes: “the postmodern is not transformative in aspiration or totally oppositional in strategy. It remains content to critique through ironic contextualization and through demystification of its own (and others’) signifying practices.”7 What is thereby undermined is not only the construction of coherent subjectivities, but also the accessibility of the “historical referent”: history, like fiction, is a discourse, a linguistic construct, a “system of signification,” which produces historical meaning rather than simply reveals it.8 To the accusation that postmodernism is therefore anti- or a-historical, Hutcheon responds that it “problematizes the very possibility of historical knowledge”9 and thus “sits on the fence; it literally becomes a point of interrogation. Its ironies implicate and yet critique. It falls into (or chooses) neither compromise nor dialectic.”10 What she calls “historiographic metafiction” rejects history’s truth-claims by questioning their ground as metaphysical, but in so doing, she argues, it “acknowledges and accepts the challenge of tradition: the history of representation cannot be escaped but it can be both exploited and commented on critically through irony and parody.”11 The catchword of our time is in fact “difference,” but a difference which Deleuze, one of the “French philosophers who reread Nietzsche in the 1960s,” defines as without negation, free from the negative: our time is anti-Hegelian and anti-dialectical, “difference and repetition have taken the place of the identical and the negative, of identity and contradiction.”12 In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze attacks the “long history of the distortion of the dialectic,”13 which, from Plato to Hegel and Marx, identified difference with negation. The “perversion” of the “power of the negative” substitutes “for the ideal objecticity of the problematic a simple confrontation between opposing, contrary or contradictory, propositions,”14 thus losing its power in the contentment of confrontation. The substitution of the “labour of the negative” for the “play of difference and the differential” is, for Deleuze, essentially a “conservative” enterprise, a simple “reaction,” which falsely defines affirmation in the form of negation of the negation, reducing it again to identity. “History,” he

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writes, “progresses not by negation and the negation of negation, but by deciding problems and affirming differences. It is no less bloody and cruel as a result. Only the shadows of history live by negation: the good enter into it with all the power of a posited differential or of a difference affirmed.” Quoting Nietzsche, Deleuze insists that difference cannot be reduced or traced back to contradiction, but rather that “affirmation is primary; it affirms difference, while the negative is only a consequence or a reflection in which affirmation is doubled.”15 Therefore, difference is affirmation: “it is not the negative which is the motor. Rather, there are positive differential elements which determine the genesis of both the affirmation and the difference affirmed.”16 He recognizes the danger of invoking pure difference, independent of the negative and liberated from the identical: the danger of the “beautiful soul,” for whom “there are only reconcilable and federative differences, far removed from bloody struggles. The beautiful soul says: we are different, but not opposed.”17 Nevertheless, he believes that, when difference becomes the “object of a corresponding affirmation, [it] release[s] a power of aggression and selection which destroys the beautiful soul by depriving it of its very identity and breaking its good will.”18 The list of similar theoretical propositions could continue almost indefinitely and would cover almost every discipline and cultural and geographical area. What is important to emphasize here is that the “mode” of our contemporaneity is un- or anti-dialectical and that its banner can be considered Derrida’s famous neologism, différance. This is not to say that there are no critical positions, especially in the Marxist camp, which hold to an enduring notion of dialectic, only that the dominant mode is certainly opposed to it. It is evident, however, that Benjamin hardly fits the category of “dialectical thinker” rejected by postmodernism, poststructuralism, postfeminism and post-Marxism. Absolutely sui generis, his dialectical method does not necessarily conflict with the “canons of the prevailing language” and the “sensibilities moulded by those canons,” which probably accounts in part for the extraordinary popularity of his work. It is important, therefore, to pursue this issue a little further.

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Allegory and Schizophrenia Like Hardt and Negri, many commentators emphasize aspects of Benjamin’s work that are at odds with more orthodoxly modernist or Marxist thought and thereby enlist him as a forefather of contemporary dissemination or even as a proto-postmodernist. This operation is usually performed through the concept of allegory, which is certainly central to his writings, but, as I have argued in Chapter Five, is only a part of his critical method. To read allegory as the founding tool of Benjamin’s critique of modernity is a partisan misinterpretation tainted with bad faith. Azade Seyhan, among others, situates Benjamin at the “crossroad of modernity and postmodernity.” His conception of allegory, she writes, “unsettle[s] representation and acknowledge[s] simulation where there is no coextensivity between the map and the territory it represents or between the signifier and the signified. We no longer see the territory but read the map which endlessly refers to other maps.”19 Read through a Nietzschean lens, allegory unsettles the relation between language and truth, dismantling the illusory metanarrative of a historically comprehensive unity, and thus “prefigures postmodernism’s challenge to representation.”20 Seyhan links it to Baudrillard’s simulacra, signs which “generate meaning and value only in terms of relation and difference to other signs, not as representations of things in the world,”21 and this “interlinkage” allows for Benjamin’s inclusion among the forerunners of postmodernism. In a similar operation, Torsten Meiffert relates Benjaminian allegory to Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of schizophrenia: as the schizo subversively frees him- or herself from the despotism of the signifier, so allegory shatters the continuum of historical signification, reactivating “the positive discontinuing play of similarities and differences.”22 The correspondances between Benjaminian allegory and Deleuze and Guattari’s schizophrenia lack neither depth nor interest, but must nonetheless be analysed in the perspective of Benjamin’s entire method. The cost of isolating the notion of allegory from his fundamentally dialectical method results in the loss of its meaning within his critical project. A thorough analysis of these correspondances is beyond the scope of this chapter, but a few issues must

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be identified. The revolutionary potentialities of schizophrenic reading, for Deleuze and Guattari, are in the fact that: The code of delirium or of desire proves to have an extraordinary fluidity. It might be said that the schizophrenic passes from one code to the other, that he deliberately scrambles all the codes, by quickly shifting from one to another, according to the questions asked him, never giving the same explanation from one day to the next, never invoking the same genealogy, never recording the same event in the same way.23

Schizo-reading thus takes to the extreme the fundamental “deterritorializing” impulses of capitalism, thereby destroying from within the “paranoiac despotic machine” and subverting the “molar” representations of power through schizoid, “molecular” flows of desiring-production. Benjamin’s notion of the fundamentally “allegorical” traits of capitalist production (the commodity as allegory) can, indeed, be related to Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of a schizophrenic impulse in capitalism, which inherently tends “toward a threshold of decoding that will destroy the socius in order to make it a body without organs and unleash the flows of desire on this body as a deterritorialized field.”24 In Benjaminian language, this means that capitalist modernity is allegorical because it creates a market of free-floating signifiers unrelated to any historical signified, which can potentially undo the system from within. For Benjamin, the liberation of the signifier from any signified or referent also “destroy[s] the organic and the living – [it] eradicate[s] semblance [Schein]” and this constitutes the “majesty of the allegorical intention” (GS 1.2:669–70/ SW 4:172): to resist any claim of static and totalizing representation (cf. Chapter Four). Similarly, Deleuze and Guattari’s schizophrenic impulse of decoding in capitalism is “destructive and morbid” and counteracts the paranoiac impulses for recodification and reterritorialization: “while decoding doubtless means understanding and translating a code, it also means destroying the code as such, assigning it an archaic, folkloric, or residual function.”25 The “schizorevolutionary type,” they write, “follows the lines of escape of desire,” he or she “breaches the wall and causes flows to move; assembles its machines and its group-in-fusion in the enclaves or at the periphery […]. What matters is to break through the

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wall.”26 Thus the mantra of schizo-reading is “destroy, destroy. The task of schizoanalysis goes by way of destruction – a whole scouring of the unconscious, a complete curettage. Destroy Oedipus, the illusion of the ego, the puppet of the superego, guilt, the law, castration.”27 In much the same fashion, Benjamin’s destructive character “knows only one watchword: make room. And only one activity: clearing away” (GS 4.1:396/ SW 2:541). The “violent, brutal” negative task of schizoanalysis can certainly be compared to the destructive work of Benjamin’s Allegoriker, the brooder, the critic and the translator. Like them, the schizo-analyst aims at “defamiliarizing, de-oedipalizing, decastrating; undoing theatre, dream, and fantasy; decoding, deterritorializing – a terrible curettage, a malevolent activity.”28 However, the liberation of the process of desiring-production, the “discovering for every case the nature of the libidinal investments of the social field, their possible internal conflicts, their relationships with the preconscious investments of the same field, their possible conflicts with these – in short, the entire interplay of the desiring-machines and the repression of desire,”29 is, for Benjamin, only one part of the act of critical reading. Where for Deleuze and Guattari completing this process means “not arresting it, not making it turn about the void, not assigning it a goal,”30 for Benjamin the process of destruction must be completed by a dialectical moment of construction of historical images, and thus by arresting the dialectical movement, by a standstill. Deleuze and Guattari’s anathema against “representation,” as a form of reterritorialization and recodification of desire by the paranoiac despotic machine,31 stands in absolute contrast to Benjamin’s notion of Darstellung as the proper and dialectical practice of reading. Schizophrenia, free semiosis, permanent revolution remain a purely destructive, that is negative, moment.32 The end of universal history in Deleuze and Guattari’s permanent revolution of desire can be compared to Benjamin’s destruction of the continuum of the history of the victors, but his method calls for a further moment of construction in which history is dialectically re-read. Deleuze and Guattari’s end of universal history results in an end of history tout-court and of any possibility of a practice of reading. What is the Anti­-Oedipus’ “antiinter-

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pretive method” (to use Jameson’s words33)? I will myself quote the passage quoted by Jameson, since it is fundamental to this argument: The unconscious poses no problem of meaning, solely problems of use. The question posed by desire is not “What does it mean?” but rather “How does it work?” How do these machines, these desiring-machines, work – yours and mine? With what sort of breakdowns as a part of their functioning? How do they pass from one body to another? How are they attached to the body without organs? What occurs when their mode of operation confronts the social machines? A tractable gear is greased, or on the contrary an infernal machine is made ready. What are the connections, what are the disjunctions, the conjunctions, what use is made of the syntheses? It represents nothing, but it produces. It means nothing, but it works. Desire makes its entry with the general collapse of the question “What does it mean?” No one has been able to pose the problem of language except to the extent that linguists and logicians have first eliminated meaning; and the greatest force of language was only discovered once a work was viewed as a machine, producing certain effects, amenable to a certain use. Malcolm Lowry says of his work: it’s anything you want it to be, so long as it works – ‘It works too, believe me, as I have found out’ – a machinery. But on condition that meaning be nothing other than use, that it become a form principle only if we have at our disposal immanent criteria capable of determining the legitimate uses, as opposed to the illegitimate ones that relate instead to a hypothetical meaning and re-establish a kind of transcendence.34

Critical interpretation amounts here to a breaking down of the machine to see how it works, to a purely negative, destructive moment which, Jameson writes, “demand[s] for the construction of some new and more adequate, immanent or antitranscendent hermeneutic model.”35 Benjamin’s method proposes a constructive moment based on “constellations,” the dialectical juxtaposition of diverse temporal images or Jetztzeiten. For Benjamin, allegory cannot constitute this constructive moment because it is fundamentally melancholic and subjective. Indeed, Benjamin’s rejection of subjectivity as a mark of possessive individualism is what most differentiates and separates him from postmodernist or poststructuralist approaches to critique and situates him within the modernist intellectual landscape. Once the allegorical gaze has reduced the illusion of totality to rubble, the ruin becomes a free-floating signifier: “any person, any object, any relationship can mean absolutely anything else” (GS 1.1:350/

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OT 175). This signifier is deprived of meaning and subjected to the whim of the allegorist: If the object becomes allegorical under the gaze of melancholy, if melancholy causes life to flow out [abfließen] of it and it remains behind dead, but eternally secure, then it is exposed to the allegorist, it is unconditionally in his power. That is to say it is now quite incapable of emanating any meaning or significance of its own; such significance as it has, it acquires from the allegorist. (GS 1.1:359/OT 183–4)

This absolute subjectivism cannot be, for Benjamin, the mark of true historical knowledge, since the arbitrary new configuration assembled by the allegorist shuns any historical responsibility, any connection to remembrance and Aktualität, any politics of reading tied to history and thus to revolutionary practice (cf. Chapter Five). This also seems to be the case for rhizome-thinking, which is merely interested in the “functionality” of the machine, how intensities, flows and part-objects work rather than signify and is thus, as Christa Bürger argues, implicitly committed to “forgetting.”36 The question of time is fundamental here. Rosi Braidotti reads Deleuze and Guattari’s schizo-temporality as a borrowing from the Greek notion of aion, “the molecular sense of cyclical, discontinuous time,” as opposed to chronos, “the molar sense of linear, recorded time.” The latter, she writes, “is related to being/the molar/the masculine; the former to becoming/the molecular/the feminine.” Nevertheless, schizo-temporality, as the “co-occurrence of past and future in a continuous present” of becoming,37 in reality erases the discontinuity of the aion as well as the continuity of the chronos (Benjaminian continuous empty time). The eternal present of becoming also erases the discontinuities that make up Benjamin’s Jetztzeiten, which are intended to be read as frozen, “petrified” historical constellations of “what has been” and “now.” It therefore gets rid of any sense of historicity and thus also of any real power of critique.38 This is the sense in which Jameson uses the term “schizophrenia” in his analysis of postmodernism: adopting Lacan’s definition, he identifies the “textuality” of postmodernism as an anti-historical disorder that relegates our schizophrenic contemporaneity to the irreality of an eternal present made out of glossy nostalgic images.39 A more articulated analysis of the

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uses and misuses of Benjamin’s allegory could be developed, but for my argument this brief sketch must suffice. It is not my intention here to downplay the importance of allegory in Benjamin’s redemptive project, but I believe it important to situate it in the context of a practice of reading founded on a peculiar notion of dialectic and therefore ill at ease with contemporary anti-dialectic postmodernist, poststructuralist and deconstructionist practice.

Standstill Contemporary debate is, of course, complex and articulated and more than a few voices have proposed forms of “historicizing” critique in opposition to the cynical euphoria of posthistoire. Benjamin, nevertheless, seems at odds with a good number of these too. The oxymoron of a “dialectic at standstill” makes his method as distant from posthistoire as from the orthodoxly dialectical. For example, Jameson’s imperative to “always historicize!” is the slogan of a dialectical methodology sharing little with Benjamin. Jameson remains attached to a notion of continuity and the totality of the interpretive act, which presupposes that: We never really confront a text immediately, in all its freshness as a thing-in-itself. Rather, texts come before to us as the always-already-read; we apprehend them through sedimented layers of previous interpretations, or – if the text is brandnew – through the sedimented reading habits and categories developed by those inherited interpretive traditions.40

The continuity of the historical movement, which Benjamin wanted to shatter, is thus the founding principle of Jameson’s reading. Moreover, the “actualization” of the text means for Jameson the superimposition of new interpretive layers over a huge mass of sedimented readings, where for Benjamin the act of reading “happens” when two or more temporal (and textual) fragments are juxtaposed in new constellation. The greatest difference, however, is that Jameson construes reading and interpretation

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“as an essentially allegorical act, which consists in rewriting a given text in terms of a particular interpretive master code.”41 Allegory thereby becomes for Jameson an operation in which: A text is systematically rewritten in terms of some fundamental master code or “ultimately determining instance.” On this view, then, all “interpretation” in the narrower sense demands the forcible or imperceptible transformation of a given text into an allegory of its particular master code or “transcendental signified.”42

The “actualization” of the text, its “allegorization,” here means its rewriting according to a transcendental master code (Marxism). This could not be more distant from Benjamin’s sense of “actualization” [Vergegenwärtigung]. Whereas Jameson proposes a “proper,” a priori and transcendental perspective (the master code), through which the “political unconscious” of the text can be revealed/rewritten, Benjamin seeks, by juxtaposing temporal and textual fragments and in the tension between them, to “recognize” a posteriori the historical energies of the event by letting the “mere data” speak for themselves. The act of recognition is thus for Benjamin (and not for Jameson) absolutely contingent, depending on an unpredictable and unforeseeable “coming-to-visibility” of the historical meaning, and is therefore based on attentiveness rather than presuppositions, on listening rather than speaking, on reading rather than writing.43 As is well known, this anti-subjectivism of the interpretive act greatly displeased one of Benjamin’s first readers, his contemporary Adorno. Much ink has been spilt about their theoretical commonalities and differences, sufficient to constitute a proper topos of analysis known as the “Adorno-Benjamin Debate.” Preserved in their celebrated correspondence, this debate can be summarized – very simplistically – as revolving around the question of dialectic. Where Adorno’s notion of “negative dialectic” preserves the necessity of a dialectical unfolding of the interpretive act, Benjamin’s “dialectic at standstill” perceives the act of reading precisely as an arresting of the dialectical movement. This issue has been thoroughly “dissected” and studied by critics and commentators, but a few further words are in order here. Adorno’s reading of Benjamin suggests that the “dialectic at standstill” has a mythical character. He wrote in Prisms that Benjamin had

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regarded “historical moments, manifestations of the objective spirit, ‘culture,’ as though they were natural.”44 This led the latter to “scrutinize living things so that they present themselves as being ancient, ‘ur-historical’ and abruptly release their significance.” In this way, “philosophy appropriates the fetishization of commodities for itself: everything must metamorphose into a thing in order to break the catastrophic spell of things.”45 Adorno thus compares Benjamin’s act of reading to the petrifying gaze of the Medusa: arresting the dialectic and freezing the object of investigation into an image entails, for Adorno, a reification and fetishization that is as such mythical.46 Reification [Verdinglichung], freezing, hardening and congealing represent for Adorno the mythical process characteristic of ideology, which reduces the object to a “dead thing.”47 His own critical process, by contrast, is characterized by a “reliquefying” [Verflüssigung] of the reified object in order to dispel the Schein of identity. The task of immanent critique, as Adorno explains in Negative Dialectics, is that “congealed” [versteinerte] ideological thought “must be reliquefied [verflüssigt], its validity traced, so to speak, in repetition.”48 In repetition, the recovery of what is valid in the ideological petrified object undoes what is false through critical negation. In his introduction to the 1955 edition of Benjamin’s work (included in Notes to Literature), Adorno describes the imagistic character of Benjaminian writing as a “mythicizing tendency” and explains that “under the gaze of his melancholy the historical becomes nature by virtue of its own fragility, and everything natural becomes part of the history of creation.”49 This concept of nature, informing the Trauerspiel book, is based on notions of transience and death, as “what is temporally determined and irreversible.”50 The problem for Adorno is that “the subject evaporates”: Before his Medusan glance, man turns into the stage on which an objective process unfolds. For this reason Benjamin’s philosophy is no less a source of terror than a promise of happiness. Just as the domain of myth is ruled by multiplicity and ambiguity and not subjectivity, the unequivocal character of reconciliation – conceived after the model of the ‘name’ – is the contrary of human autonomy. He reduces this autonomy to a moment of transition in a dialectical process, as with the tragic hero, and the reconciliation of men with the creation has as its condition the dissolution of all self-posited human existence.51

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The standstill of the dialectic means for Adorno a deadly, inhuman touch that “stops its animated subject matter in its tracks,” the “monumentality of the momentary,”52 a dialectic of images rather than of progress and continuity. This derives directly from Benjamin’s “micrological method,” the “concentration on the very smallest, in which the historical movement halts and becomes sedimented in an image.” Thus, “one understands Benjamin correctly only if one senses behind each of his sentences the conversion of extreme animation into something static, in fact the static conception of movement itself.”53 For Adorno, this paradoxical “static dialectic” lacks the fundamental notion of “mediation” [Vermittlung]: time and again he reproaches Benjamin for the lack of the “interpretation and total articulation in the medium of the concept” (AB 111/CC 83). Benjamin’s “concern […] to avoid all interpretation [so that] […] the assembled material speaks for itself,” leads only to “replica realism” (AB 112/CC 84).54 Benjamin’s Darstellung, which excludes “development and elaboration, the whole mechanism of premise, assertion, and proof, on thesis and result,” is “athematic” like atonal music.55 Allotting no time to “internal development,” but receiving its form “from the constellation formed by the individual statements,” his style is akin to the aphorism: “what Benjamin envisioned was the communication of the incommunicable through lapidary expression.”56 For Adorno, Benjamin’s “ascetic discipline” (AB 365/CC 281), the quasi-Surrealist elimination of all overt commentary, so as to “have the meanings emerge solely through a shocking montage of the material,”57 is in part an “admission of surrender”: surrender of the concept to an “impermissible poetic” notion of Darstellung, conditioned by an “undialectical positivity,” which spells “Benjamin’s defeatism about his own thought.”58 In Adorno’s notion of Darstellung, the juxtaposition of extremes means to find the “inner logic” of opposition, that is, the connecting link that unveils the fact that what appears as identical to itself contains in fact its opposite. The dialectical method thus proceeds, not through juxtaposition, but rather through reversal and inversion. As Buck-Morss writes, Adorno’s sentences “develop like musical themes: they break apart and turn in on themselves in a continuing spiral of variations. The phenomena are […] ‘overdetermined,’ so that their contradictory

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complexity needs to be disentangled through interpretation. But there is no affirmation, no ‘closing cadence.’ The contradictions are unravelled; they are not resolved.”59 The argument develops dynamically from one pole to another, always moving in the opposite direction; the movement is never interrupted, but must be kept alive. This notion of Darstellung leads Adorno to a very different definition of “constellation,” in which concepts “gather” [versammeln] “around the object of cognition” and thus “potentially determine the object interior [Innere].”60 This “interior” is the fact that the object has “come to be under certain conditions”: its “becoming [Werden] fades and dwells within the things; it can no more be stabilized in their concepts than it can be split off from its own results and forgotten.”61 This is what constitutes the temporality of the object, which disappears in the “fetish of the irrevocability of things in being” [die Irrevokabilität des Seinden]. This is the major point of difference from Benjamin: the arrest of the dialectic is precisely what constitutes, for Adorno, the fetishization of the existent and the elimination of its temporality. Adorno’s constellation as Darstellung aims at reading “things in being” or “the existent” [das Seiende] as a “text of their becoming.”62 This entails a “relinquishing” [Entäußerung] of the “frozen self-identity” of the existent, not a “hardening” [Verhärtung] in the Benjaminian sense.63 The interpretive act as a reading of constellations thus aims at an “internal immersion,” a dialectical unveiling of the “sedimented history” of the existent, which encompasses the inside as well as the outside of the object, the constellation in which the existent has its place: “becoming aware of the constellation in which a thing stands is tantamount to deciphering the constellation which, having come to be, it bears within it.” The “actualization” [Aktualisierung] of the existent is thus a reading of its “historic positional value […] in its relation to other objects,” which entails a “transformation” [Verwandlung] of what is already known: Cognition of the object in its constellation is cognition of the process stored in that object. As a constellation, theoretical thought circles [umkreist] the concept it would like to unseal, hoping that it may fly open like the lock of a well-guarded safe-deposit box: in response, not a single key or a single number, but a combination of numbers.64

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It is evident, as Buck-Morss argued in The Origin of Negative Dialectics, that Adorno’s vocabulary (excepting the Platonic terminology of the “Idea”) is derived from the Trauerspiel book, but it is clear also that his “model” is a sort of dialectical contradiction of Benjamin’s “method.” Adorno sees the two methods as ultimately incompatible. However, as Benjamin strived to demonstrate in their correspondence, the fundamental notion of construction in his method goes beyond the simple opposition dialectical/undialectical. In his defence of the Baudelaire essay, he remarks that, in his comprehensive plan for the Baudelaire book, the second part (which “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire” was intended to be) would constitute the “philological” section, “the only one which could be completed independently” (AB 379/CC 291). This philological presentation responds to a precise methodological demand: “it is the needs of construction which dictated that the second part of my book should consist primarily of philological material.” Konstruktion, as the fundamental structure of the act of reading, is based on a “philological,” that is “critical,” attention to the text, which unveils its historical content.65 “Philology” must be read here as “criticism” in the sense given it by German Romanticism. “When you speak of a ‘wide-eyed presentation of mere facts,’” Benjamin explains, “you are characterizing the proper philological attitude. […] Philology consists in an examination [Beaugenscheinigung] of texts which proceeds by details and thus magically fixates the reader on it” (AB 379–80/CC 291–2, emphasis added). The “astonishment” [Verwundern] in readers of the present provokes the insight: The appearance of closed facticity which attaches to philological investigation and places the investigator under its spell, dissolves precisely to the degree in which the object is construed from a historical perspective. The base lines of this construction converge in our own historical experience. In this way the object constitutes itself as a monad. And in the monad everything that formerly lay mythically petrified within the given text comes alive.” (AB 380/CC 292, emphases added)

The construction of a constellation with the present in the act of reading thus dispels the mythical petrification/fetishization of the existent; in its “actualization,” in its being “polarized” by the present in a historical

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constellation of reading, the petrified existent finally “comes alive.” Benjamin further clarifies this point, returning to the language of the essay on The Elective Affinities: the philological act of critical reading “demands the exposure of that material content [Sachgehalt] in which the truth-content [Wahrheitsgehalt] can be historically deciphered”; philological reading thus construes a sort of “artificially darkened chamber” into which theory “breaks like a single ray of light.” This is why Benjamin was “especially concerned to remain within philological bounds”: almost proudly he remarks that “on est philologue ou on ne l’est pas” (AB 378–80, 402/CC 290–2, 308). There is in Benjamin more methodological awareness in the 1930s, but one can find the seeds of his method in the early writings. Construction as the pillar of this method makes it irreducible to the dialectical/undialectical dilemma, to a simple either/or to which many have tried to reduce it. The “dialectic at a standstill” is perhaps irreconcilable with any form of more “orthodoxly” dialectical method, for which standstill remains a monstrum and an unworkable absurdity. However, it has not been my aim here to compare or subsume Benjamin’s method into different, contemporary or “more actual” theories of the interpretive act. Rather, the goal has been to attempt a reading of Benjamin with Benjamin, to unfold and apply a model of reading, which is certainly sui generis, but nonetheless presents a coherent politics and ethics of interpretation.

For an Ethics of Reading It seems appropriate to conclude with a final figure of reading, which, on the one hand, reaffirms Benjamin’s politics of reading and, on the other, allows for a last confrontation with a contemporary ethics of reading – and of reading Benjamin. This last reading is intended as a constellation of texts and different readings, a dialectical juxtaposition of figures and practices of interpretation, in the hope of conjuring up a final “image” of Benjamin’s method for the politics of the present study. This final figure

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is “translation,” the text Benjamin’s 1921 “The Task of the Translator,” to be read in a constellation with the very influential reading Paul de Man gave it in 1983. My starting point is the startling incipit of Benjamin’s text: “in the appreciation of a work of art or an art form, consideration of the receiver never proves fruitful. […] No poem is intended [gilt] for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the audience”; similarly, translation is not meant to “communicate” or “convey” [vermitteln] information to the reader, it is not an “inaccurate transmission of an inessential content” [eine ungenaue Übermittlung eines unwesentlichen Inhalts]. Against any Rezeptionsästhetik, and in accord with Benjamin’s anti-subjectivism and anti-humanism, the act of reading is not determined by any interpretive intentionality, but rather characterized by an “abandonment,” an “attentiveness” to das Dichterische, the “poetic,” defined as the “unfathomable” and the “mysterious” in the text (GS 4.1:9/SW 1:253). Recall here how Benjamin defines das Gedichtete, the “poetized,” in the essay on Hölderlin: “the fundamental aesthetic unity of form and content,” which brings together the “perceptual” [das Anschauliche] and the “intellectual” [das Geistige] into the “idea” (GS 2.1:106–7/SW 1:19; cf. Chapter One). Translation, Benjamin writes, is thus a “form” and, as such, is governed by the issue of the “translatability” [Übersetzbarkeit] of the original. It is curious – but revealing – that de Man reads this text, founded on the notion of “translatability,” as affirming rather that “it is impossible to translate,”66 finding confirmation of this in the translations he examines. This is suggestive of the fundamental intent of his reading: to co-opt Benjamin into the camp of deconstruction, to claim him as a proto-deconstructionist. The translator, de Man writes, “per definition, fails,” he or she is “lost from the very beginning,” as the title of the essay implies. De Man reads Aufgabe, “task,” as implicitly hinting at a second meaning, “abandonment,” “resignation,” “giving up,” hence the “defeat” of translation as such.67 Translation is “for Benjamin exemplary” of this failure, his essay a figure for the intrinsic failure of language and thus of any practice of reading.68 De Man’s choice responds to a precise politics of reading and of reading Benjamin. However, Aufgabe can also be read as meaning “responsibility” or “duty,” in the sense of an “obligation”

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[Pflicht] entrusted to us. This is the sense in which I choose to read the “task” of the translator, as a monad for a Benjaminian ethics of reading, which spells the “necessity” of translating/reading, rather than the de Manian “impossibility.” Benjamin defines translatability as an “essential quality of certain works,” in which, “a specific significance inherent in the original manifests itself.” Translatability is a close “relationship” [Zusammenhang] – a constellation – formed by the original and the translation, by which the translation “issues” [geht herfor] from the “afterlife” [Überleben] of the original. Translation thus marks the “continued life” [Fortleben] of the original (GS 4.1:9–11/SW 1:254–5).69 Translation as a figure of/for reading is inextricably related to the notion of “history” and, for Benjamin, the task of the philosopher (the translator, the reader) consists in “historicizing” the operation of interpretation, in the “eternal afterlife” [ewigen Fortlebens] of the work “coming into being” [entstehen], when it reaches the stage of recognizability, here called the “age of its fame.” In translation, the “life of the originals attain its latest, continually renewed, and most complete unfolding” [Entfaltung] (GS 4.1: 11/SW 1:255). As Kenneth Lea notes, translation thus has the same structure as historical transmission, which is essentially one of “iterability and presentation”: the temporality of the presentation constitutes the “historical index of translation,” the coming into visibility of the event of the original (its “now”) in its iteration in different languages (different “presents”) within a messianic structure of perfectibility.70 This unfolding signifies the “purposiveness” [Zweckmäßigkeit] of translation: “translation […] ultimately serves the purpose of expressing the innermost relationship of languages to one another,” their “kinship” [Verhältnis] which is “marked by a peculiar convergence.” This kinship, far from any “theory of imitation” [Abbildtheorie], is best expressed in the Fortleben of the work, which is a “transformation” [Wandlung] and “renewal” [Erneuerung], a Nachreife, which literally refers to the process of further maturation some fruits (grapes, for example) undergo after picking in order to “enhance” their “essence.”71 The “powerful and fruitful historical processes” of death and renewal constitute the “special mission” of translation: to watch over the “maturing process of the original

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language and the birth pangs [Wehen, “contraction” but also “drift”] of its own.”72 “Kinship” [Verwandschaft] is thus related not to “resemblance” [Änlichkeit], but rather to “origin” or “descent” [Abstammung]: all languages descend from the reine Sprache, the “pure language” or the “totality of their intentions supplementing one another.” In the concept of “intention” Benjamin draws a distinction between “what is meant” [das Gemeinte] and the “way of meaning” [die Art des Meinens]. Das Gemeinte in every language is in a state of constant “flux” [Wandel], “hidden” or “concealed” [verborgen] therein, but is “supplemented” [sich ergänzt, is “completed,” “amplified,” “augmented”] in its relation to “the way of meaning.” In the perspective of an historical “completion” of languages, the messianic end of their history, translation “is ignited” [sich entzündet] by the “eternal life [ewigen Fortleben] of the works and the perpetually renewed life [unendlichen Aufleben] of language.” Translation continuously tests the relationship between “what is concealed” [das Verborgene, or, in a different Benjaminian expression, das Wahrheitsgehalt, the “truthcontent”] and “what is revealed” [die Offenbarung, or das Sachgehalt, the “material content”] (GS 4.1: 11–14/SW 1:255–7).73 Like any act of reading, a translation is therefore only a “temporary [zeitliche] and provisional [vorläufige] solution” to the “foreignness” of a language or a text. However, since its goal is a “final, conclusive, decisive stage of all linguistic creation,” in translation the original “rises into a higher and purer linguistic air,” wächst hinauf, literally it is taken to a higher degree of “awakening.” Translation thus “points the way” [hindeutet] to the “inaccessible realm of reconciliation and fulfilment [Versöhnungs- und Erfüllungsbereich] of languages,” a stage the original cannot reach. “Ironically,” Benjamin writes, “translation transplants the original into a more definitive linguistic realm, since it can no longer be displaced by a secondary rendering. The original can only be raised there anew and at other points of time,” in other translations and other readings. At this point, Benjamin makes an important connection with German Romanticism. Translation is “ironic” in the same sense as Romantic criticism, that is, the “truth content” of the original is unveiled and raised to a higher level of consciousness through it. De Man notices this connection, but only in order to misread the fundamental notion of criticism in

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Benjamin: the “ironic gesture” of Romantic criticism (and of translation) has, for de Man, the task of “undoing” the stability of the original, not to unveil its “truth content,” but rather to show its “original” and intrinsic “mobility” and “instability,” to “question” its claims of meaning-producing.74 That criticism and translation (and philosophy, literary theory and history) are “derived and secondary” means for de Man that they are “inconclusive,” “failed” and “aborted in a sense from the start.” The games he plays with the terms “metaphor,” über-setzen and meta-phorein aim at this conclusion: if übersetzen is not meta-phorein, then “metaphor is not metaphor,” language as such – and interpretation and reading – intrinsically fails.75 The disarticulation of the original in criticism and translation reveals it to be “always already disarticulated,” the failure of criticism and translation “reveals an essential failure, an essential disarticulation which was already there in the original. They kill the original, by discovering that the original was already dead.”76 However, if one reads “The Task of the Translator” in the light of Benjamin’s thesis on Romantic Criticism, and his later work more generally, this passage comes to signify that, like criticism, the intention of translation is “derivative, ultimate, ideational” [abgeleitete, letzte, ideenhafte] only in the sense that it is the “completion” [Vollendung] and “consummation” [Ergänzerung] of the work and, as such, points towards the “language of truth – the true language.” Like Bild and Darstellung, translation is a constellation, “midway between poetry [Dichtung] and theory [Lehre]” (GS 4.1: 14–17/SW 1:257–9).77 The figure of the constellation is represented by the image of the vessel: Like the fragments of a vessel that are to be joined together [zusammenfügen] must follow [folgen] one another in the smallest details, although they need not be like one another [gleichen], so the translation, instead of imitating [sich ähnlich machen] the sense of the original, must lovingly and in detail incorporate [anbilden] the original’s way of meaning, thus making both the original and the translation recognizable as fragments of a greater language, just as fragments are part of a vessel. (GS 4.1: 18/SW 1:260, translation modified)78

To use the language of the Trauerspiel book, in translation as constellation the “idea” emerges into visibility and is made present in the image

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of the reassembled vessel (reminiscent of the mosaic of the Trauerspiel book). Thus translation “allows the pure language, as though reinforced by its own medium, to shine upon the original all the more fully.”79 De Man prefers to read the various images that populate the text as tropes, “picture[s] of total meaning, of complete adequacy between figure and meaning, […] figure[s] of perfect synecdoche in which the partial trope expresses the totality of a meaning,”80 thereby misreading yet again the meaning of Benjamin’s figural writing. These tropes convey, for de Man, the “illusion of totality” by using images of organic fullness (seed, ripening, etc.), but Benjamin’s true intention, he argues, is to manipulate “the allusive context within his work in such a way that the traditional symbol is displaced in a manner that acts out the discrepancy between symbol and meaning, rather than the acquiescence between both.”81 In Chapter One, I explored the fundamental difference between symbol, metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche or trope, and Benjamin’s figure as Darstellung. De Man nonetheless reads the image of the vessel, not as a figure for the constellation of reading, but rather as one of these paradoxical tropes signifying the break down of meaning: “the translation is the fragment of a fragment, is breaking the fragment – so the vessel keeps breaking, constantly – and never reconstitutes it; there was no vessel in the first place, or we have no knowledge of this vessel, or no awareness, no access to it, so for all intents and purposes there has never been one.”82 The “nonadequation” of das Gemeinte and die Art des Meinens, of “symbolized” and “symbolizing,” indicates for de Man the “unreliability of rhetoric as a system of tropes which would be productive of a meaning. Meaning is always displaced with regard to the meaning it ideally intended – that meaning is never reached.”83 The paradoxical use of “tropes” by Benjamin shows for de Man that language is essentially: a wandering, an errance, a kind of permanent exile if you wish, but it is not really an exile, for there is no homeland, nothing from which one has been exiled. Least of all is there something like a reine Sprache, a pure language, which does not exist except as a permanent disjunction which inhabits all languages as such, including and especially the language one calls one’s own. What is to be one’s own language is most displaced, the most alienated of all.84

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This makes the act of reading a necessary failure and thus essentially impossible. Hillis Miller reads in this impossibility of reading, and in the “universal necessity” of reading, the unverifiability of the referential dimension of an irresistible law. The true “ethics of reading,” “ethicity” in the de Manian sense, Hillis Miller (rightly) argues, means the recognition of the impossibility of the task of reading, while acknowledging the necessity of pursuing this failure.85 Following de Man, Hillis Miller enlists Benjamin’s figure of translation as epitomizing simultaneously the necessity and impossibility of pursuing the paradox of a “wordless word”: the image of the vessel thus becomes “an impossible metaphor. It fails to carry the meaning that is entrusted to it, since the fragments must fit and not fit, and they must both be parts of a greater vessel and not part of that vessel. That vessel has no shape and no meaning, since it is the place where all information, all sense, all shape, and all intention are extinguished in the expressionless word.”86 If read as constellation, however, the translation “actualizes” the original, it releases what Benjamin now calls the “symbolized” in new linguistic constructions [Gebilde] through its “symbolizing capacity.” With the notion of “actualization” we have the fundamental temporality of the translation as a figure of reading, expressed in a new image: Just as a tangent touches a circle lightly and at but one point – establishing, with this touch rather than with the point, the law according to which it is to continue on its straight path to infinity – a translation touches the original lightly and only at the infinitely small point of the sense, thereupon pursuing its own course according to the laws of fidelity in the freedom of the linguistic flux. (GS 4.1: 19–20/SW 1:261)

The point of contact, the temporal crucible in which the original and the translation meet in a fleeting “flash of light,” is the present of the translation, of the interpretation, of the reading, the now of recognizability that unveils, for an instant, the “infinitely small point of the sense.” Weber writes that “the angle of that trajectory is determined by the tangential encounter of two different languages at a specific historical time and place. The vector that results from this tangential encounter involves the interplay of the different possible meanings of the original text and of the

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translation. That interplay results not in a single meaning but rather in a difference of meanings that, like a difference of opinion, signifies precisely through its disunity.”87 The temporal crucible of the tangential point of contact constitutes the arresting of the movement of languages, a temporal contraction that rescues the past and opens itself to the future, for an instant, always to be restarted anew. If, like de Man, one reads this image as a paradoxical trope for the “errancy of language which never reaches the mark,” then the notion of afterlife, and with it history itself and the historicity of the interpretive act, become “this illusion of a life that is only an afterlife, that Benjamin calls history.”88 History reduced to “purely a linguistic complication,” poetical and not political, “has no room for certain historical notions such as the notion of modernity, which is always a dialectical, that is to say an essentially theological notion.”89 As Epifanio San Juan notes, de Man “ascribes to Benjamin a non-dialectical conception of history and politics rooted in the stasis of rhetoric and the disjunctive figural power of language […]. By this completely unwarranted genealogy, De Man affiliates Benjamin’s materialist ‘nihilism’ with Nietzsche’s perspectivism.”90 Benjamin’s work points in a different direction, however, which translation as a “monad” for the interpretive act finally epitomizes. As Andrew Benjamin has emphasized, the temporality of translation is the temporality of “actuality,” of its dialectical relationship with the original and the primordial, of temporal unities neither exclusive nor reducible to each other, but coming into visibility in the act of translation, of interpretation, of reading.91 This temporality puts forward an ethical demand, which is what constitutes the “ethicity” (in a non-de Manian sense) of Benjamin’s interpretive act: in it is inscribed the necessity of always renewing, of always “actualizing” the text and the original, of a perpetual vigilance and attentiveness to the text which always calls for new constellations of reading.

Notes

Chapter 1 1.

2. 3. 4 5. 6. 7. 8.

Irving Wohlfarth, “The Measure of the Possible, the Weight of the Real and the Heat of the Moment: Benjamin’s Actuality Today,” New Formations. A Journal of Culture/Theory/Politics. “Issue dedicated to The Actuality of Walter Benjamin” 20 (Summer 1993), p. 7. Cf. Jürgen Habermas, “Walter Benjamin: Consciousness-Raising or Rescuing Critique,” On Walter Benjamin. Critical Essays and Recollections, ed. Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 1988). Sigrid Weigel, Body- and Image-Space: Re-Reading Walter Benjamin, trans. Georgina Paul (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 3–5. Cf. Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 1989), p. 228. Benjamin was at pain to convince Adorno that his Arcades Project was not founded on a “‘poetical’ fashion,” which he considered “impermissible.” Cf. for example AB 155/CC 117–8. Weigel, Body- and Image-Space: Re-Reading Walter Benjamin, pp. 9–10. Paul de Man, Aesthetic Ideology (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 50. I will consider more in depth the differences between Benjamin’s and de Man’s “theory of reading” – and the problems with de Man’s reading of Benjamin – in Chapter Six. Here it is important to emphasise that de Man’s “figures” remain essentially the rhetorical devices defined by traditional literary studies: the images analysed in his readings are the “tropes and figures” of traditional rhetoric, metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche etc. Far from being based on construction and proposing a temporality of reading, de Man’s figural readings put forward a politics of de-construction which aims at unveiling the essential untruth of language: if literature is identified as the “rhetorical, figural potentiality of language,” this is in order to show that “rhetoric radically suspends logic and opens up vertiginous possibilities or referential aberration” (Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke and Proust [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979], p. 10). His figural readings unsettle the dichotomy inside/outside or content/form in order, not to reach a “third thing” which dialectically supersedes

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9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

Notes that dichotomy, but to reach a truth “by the negative road of exposing an error, a false pretense” (p. 16). “Resemblance,” the kernel, as it will be shown, of Benjamin’s construction of images and the core of their critical temporality, is for de Man the way in which metaphor “disguise[s] differences” and that figural readings must unveil (p. 16). Literary criticism based on figural reading is for de Man the “deconstruction of literature, the reduction to the rigors of grammar of rhetorical mystification,” in order to expose the truth of the “recognition of the systematic character of a certain kind of error.” The “negative certainty,” the truth unveiled by figural reading, is the delusion of any affirmative practice of meaning: “a literary text,” de Man concludes, “simultaneously asserts and denies the authority of its own rhetorical mode, and by reading the text as we did we were only trying to come closer to being as rigorous a reader as the author had to be in order to write the sentence in the first place. Poetic writing is the most advanced and refined mode of deconstruction; it may differ from critical or discursive writing in the economy of its articulation, but not in kind” (p. 17). Therefore, not only are de Man’s figures different from Benjamin’s, but the politics of his figural reading is the opposite of that of Benjamin’s critical reading: whereas Benjamin’s goal is to unveil an historical truth through the construction of an image based on a temporality of correspondances, de Man aims at unveiling the essential unreliability of language and of the construction of meaning. Guy Debord, The Society of Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1994), p. 12. W.J.T. Mitchell, “What Is an Image?,” New Literary History 15.3 (Spring 1984), p. 503. Cf. Weigel, Body- and Image-Space: Re-Reading Walter Benjamin, pp. x–xi, and Ackbar Abbas, “On Fascination: Walter Benjamin’s Images,” New German Critique 48 (Fall 1989) : 43–62. Weigel, Body- and Image-Space: Re-Reading Walter Benjamin, pp. x–xi. Abbas, “On Fascination,” p. 51. Abbas, “On Fascination,” pp. 52–3. Rainer Nägele, Theater, Theory, Speculation: Walter Benjamin and the Scenes of Modernity (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), p. xvii. Graeme Gilloch, Walter Benjamin: Critical Constellations (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), p. 68. Hans-Jost Frey, “On Presentation in Benjamin,” Walter Benjamin: Theoretical Questions, ed. David S. Ferris (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), pp. 139–40. Frey, “On Presentation in Benjamin,” p. 141. Frey, “On Presentation in Benjamin,” pp. 139–40.

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20. Cf. Rainer Nägele, “Thinking Images,” Benjamin’s Ghosts, ed. Gerhard Richter (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), pp. 35–6. 21. Weigel, Body- and Image-Space: Re-Reading Walter Benjamin, pp. 19–21. 22. De Man, by contrast, reads Proust’s image as metaphor, “an inside/outside correspondence as represented by the act of reading” (de Man, Allegories of Reading, p. 13). He argues that, in his images, Proust proposes the “aesthetic superiority of metaphor over metonymy,” but that this claim is made by means of ontological categories that undermine itself and the mastery of metaphor over metonymy “owes its persuasive powers to the use of metonymic structures” (pp. 14, 15). De Man writes: “in a passage that abounds in successful and seductive metaphors and which, moreover, explicitly asserts the superior efficacy of metaphor over that of metonymy, persuasion is achieved by a figural play in which contingent figures of chance masquerade deceptively as figures of necessity. A literal and thematic reading that takes the value assertions of the text at their word would have to favour metaphor over metonymy as a means to satisfy a desire all the more tempting since it is paradoxical: the desire for a secluded reading that satisfies the ethical demands of action more affectively than actual deeds. Such a reading is put in question if one takes the rhetorical structure of the text into account” (p. 67). Deconstructing Proust’s image, de Man aims at showing the instability of any rhetorical device, of any figure of reading, hence of any act of reading: the failure of Proust’s metaphor is thus a figure for the failure of language itself. He recognizes the peculiar temporality of the Proustian image, which is inextricably connected with the act of reading (pp. 57–8), but fails to pursue this point and confines his analysis to the rhetorical tropes of the text. 23. Carol Jacobs explains this image this way: “the Attrappe (which may be translated as ‘dummy,’ ‘imitation,’ ‘trap’) for which Proust reaches seems to signify the hidden presence of the self. But the grasp that should render this contents present only leads to a voiding of the self. The dummy that seemed to promise the plenitude to self was always mere image, just as the full pocket of the children was always mere stocking. The gesture of Proust, like that of the children, is only a game. His insatiable desire is not the longing for the presence of the self, but rather simply the desire to repeat the movement, to transform the dummy over and over into the empty image,” Carol Jacobs, The Disimulating Harmony: The Image of Interpretation in Nietzsche, Rilke, Artaud, and Benjamin (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), p. 95. 24. Beryl Schlossman, “Proust and Benjamin: The Invisible Image,” Studies in Twentieth Century Literature 11.1 (Autumn 1986), p. 93. 25. Anselm Haverkamp, “Notes on the ‘Dialectical Image’ (How Deconstructive Is It?’),” Diacritics 22.2/3 (Autumn-Winter 1992), p. 74. Rebecca Comay argues that the “textuality” is endowed to the image by its temporal structure: “the temporal structure of the image converts seeing into reading, image into text. If

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what is essential about the image is that it is ‘not seen before being remembered’ (GS 1.3:1064), every prophecy would inevitably become but the guilty prophecy of a present that cannot fail to come too late (cf. N13,1). ‘Hell is nothing that awaits us but this life here’ (Strindberg) (N9a,1). This will in fact define the essential shape of Benjamin’s iconoclasm. ‘To worship the image of divine justice in language … that is genuinely Jewish somersault’ by which the mythic spell is to be broken (GS 2.1:367/SW 2:244),” Rebecca Comay, “Materialist Mutations of the Bilderverbot,” Walter Benjamin and Art, ed. Andrew Benjamin (London and New York: Continuum, 2005), p. 56. 26. Haverkamp, “Notes in the ‘Dialectical Image’,” p. 71. 27. Weber’s own discussion of the “ideal type” is ambiguous and lacking in clarity and the debate around it is too complex and articulated to be summarized here. Weber formulated his concept of ideal type in order to define the epistemological status of sociologic investigation. As no scientific system is capable of reproducing all concrete reality, the social scientist “constructs” an ideal type in order to measure similarities and deviations in concrete cases. It is constructed as follows: “an ideal type is formed by the one-sided accentuation of one or more points of view and by the synthesis of a great many diffuse, discrete, more or less present and occasionally absent concrete individual phenomena, which are arranged according to those one-sidedly emphasized viewpoints into a unified analytical construct (Gedankenbild)” (Max Weber, The Methodology of the Social Sciences, trans. Edward A. Shils and Henry A. Finch [New York: The Free Press, 1949], p. 90). The ideal type is thus a mental construction extrapolated out of certain elements of reality and forming a coherent whole, but which can never be found as such in reality. “It is no ‘hypothesis,’” Weber writes, “but it offers guidance to the construction of hypotheses. It is not a description of reality but it aims to give unambiguous means of expression to such a description” (p. 90). Such ideal types are for example the “Protestant ethic,” the “charismatic leader” or the “exemplary prophet”: they are ideal pictures, syntheses of significant features constructed on the basis of logical and meaningful compatibility, against which the concrete reality of the events is to be measured; characteristic features which make the concrete phenomenon clear and understandable (cf. pp. 100–1). They are thus heuristic devices, plausible, objectively possible and thus adequate tools for the analysis. The ideal type is a means: as a conceptual construct, it is neither historical reality nor “true” reality, but rather a limit-concept with which reality is to be compared. As such it is a utopia (cf. p. 90, all emphases in the original). Benjamin’s image, by contrast, is, firstly, not a concept, and is furthermore grounded on the historical reality of the event or the text, on a materiality and corporeality that is ungraspable by theory and on which its truth-claim is founded. It is not the theorist, as in Weber, who mentally construct a theoretical hypothesis, but the image itself that emerges in the constellation as Darstellung of the idea. Images for Benjamin are certainly

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not ideal but rather absolutely and essentially real and actual, flashes of light that disrupt conceptual constructions and unveil the truth of the event/text. For an analysis of Weber’s ideal type, cf. Rolf E. Rogers, Max Weber’s Ideal Type Theory (New York: Philosophical Library, 1969); Susan J. Hekman, Weber, the Ideal Type, and Contemporary Social Theory (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983). 28. Auerbach wrote the essay “Figura” in his Turkish exile and published it in 1944 in Neue Dantestudien. The essay traces the semantic development of the term in order to explain the figurative interpretation in medieval art, applied especially to Dante. For the purpose of this introduction, I will highlight only few characteristics of the figura. “Figural interpretation,” Auerbach writes, “establishes a connection between two events or persons, the first of which signifies not only itself but also the second, while the second encompasses or fulfils the first. The two poles of the figure are separate in time, but both, being real events or figures, are within time, within the stream of historical life” (Erich Auerbach, Scenes from the Drama of European Literature: Six Essays [New York: Meridian Books, 1959], p. 53). He thus distinguishes figural reading from other types of imagistic reading, such as allegory, symbol and myth, stressing that figural interpretation is always an interpretation of history, where both events in the construction of the figura are strongly anchored in historical events. Nevertheless, as such, both are provisional and incomplete and point towards a future fulfilment, “which will be the actual, real, and definitive event” (p. 58). They point towards an “ideal model which is the prototype situated in the future and thus only promised” (p. 59). However, this ideal model, being already fulfilled in God, existed from all eternity and is thus timeless: therefore, historical events “point not only to the concrete future, but also to something that always has been and always will be; they point to something which is in need of interpretation, which will indeed be fulfilled in the concrete future, but which is at all times present, fulfilled in God’s providence, which knows no difference of time” (p. 59). Although the temporality of the figura is thus projected into the future and not towards the origin of an arche, it is nonetheless essentially static, the fulfilment that is promised in the act of critical interpretation is merely the unveiling of an eternal and immutable truth. Like Benjamin’s image, the figura is thus a construction the components of which are historical, and the temporality of which is imbued with messianic fulfilment; however, unlike Benjamin’s construction, in its pointing towards a transcendent and timeless truth, it remains utterly static and undialectic. 29. Jung’s psychoanalytic model is based on the assumption that the psyche has both personal and impersonal, collective components, and that personal consciousness is structured according to what he calls the “collective unconscious.” The structure of the collective unconscious is based on archetypes, innate, universal prototypes for ideas, which take personal form in the singular psyche. “An archetype,” Jung

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writes, “in its quiescent, unprojected state has no exactly determinable form but is in itself an indefinite structure which can assume definite forms only in projection” (C.G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, trans. R.F.C. Hull, The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, vol. 9 [London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1959], p. 70). The archetype is thus a “primordial image,” which is empty until the actual experience gives it form. Primordial images are “inherited instincts and preformed patters, […] the a priori and formal conditions of apperception that are based on instincts. […] It is not, therefore, a question of inherited ideas but of inherited possibilities of ideas. Nor are they individual acquisitions but, in the main, common to all, as can be seen from the universal occurrence of the archetypes” (pp. 66–7, emphases in the original). Every personal experience is structured according to its primordial form, which is like a “psychological organ,” analogous to the physical ones. Thus, Jung continues, “there are as many archetypes as there are typical situations in life. Endless repetition has engraved these experiences into our psychic constitution, not in the form of images filled with content, but at first only as forms without content, representing merely the possibility of a certain type of perception and action. When a situation occurs which corresponds to a given archetype, that archetype becomes activated and a compulsiveness appears, which, like an instictual drive, gains its way against all reason and will, or else produces a conflict of pathological dimensions, that is to say, a neurosis” (p. 48, emphasis in the original). The archetype is thus a priori, empty form, and as such timeless and eternal, therefore non-historical and non-dialectical. On Jung and the archetypes cf. Robin Robertson, C.G. Jung and the Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious (New York: Peter Lang, 1987); Steven F. Walker, Jung and the Jungians on Myth: An Introduction (New York and London: Garland, 1995). 30. Goethe’s Urphänomen is the cornerstone of his Morphologische Schriften. He used the term for the first time in his 1798 essay “Erfahrung und Wissenschaft” and it will remain the central notion of works such as Die Metamorphose der Pflanzen, Zoologie or Zur Geologie, in the variations Urform, Urpflanze and Urtier. Das Urphänomen, unlike das wissenschaftliche Phänomen (“the scientific phenomenon”), uncovered by the inevitable distortions of experimentation, and das empirische Phänomen (“the empirical phenomenon”), construed by common sense, is the final precipitate of all experiences and experiments, from which it cannot be isolated, and reveals itself in a constant succession of manifestations [in einer statigen Folge der Erscheinungen] (cf. Goethes Werke in 14 Bänden, Hamburg Ausgabe, vol. 13 [Hamburg: Christian Wegner Verlag, 1981], p. 25). As such, it represents the formal relations perceived within experience, the Gestalt of the phenomenon enhanced by repeated reflexion to a point of completeness. It is thus not mere hypothesis, but a model confirmed by experimental evidence, which embraces simultaneity and succession: that is, the Urform as a model encompasses both the basic form of the phenomenon and its metamorphoses and gains thus the solidity of a higher synthesis, which consists

Notes

31. 32.

33. 34.

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in its historical unfolding and cannot be separated from it. On Goethe and the Urphänomen cf. Adolph Hansen, Goethes Morphologie (Metamorphose Der Pflanzen Und Osteologie) (Giessen: Alfred Töpelmann, 1919); R.H. Stephenson, Goethe’s Conception of Knowledge and Science (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995). Comay, “Materialist Mutations of the Bilderverbot,” p. 53. Goethe will remain a fundamental reference throughout Benjamin’s life. In this context it is important to note, though, that in the last section of The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism, Benjamin counterposes the Romantics’ notion of criticism to the theory of art Goethe founded on the concept of Urbild. The two theories are not just different, but rather opposed to each other, and the point of division is the notion of “criticizability”: whereas for the Romantics criticism, not only is possible and necessary, but also, as it entails the “completion” of the work, is “valued more highly than works of art,” for Goethe “criticism of an artwork is neither possible nor necessary.” “At most,” Benjamin writes, “a reference to the good might be necessary, a warning against the bad; and an apodictic judgement of works is possible for an artist who has an intuition of the Urbild. But Goethe refuses to recognize criticizability as an essential moment in the work of art; although methodologically – that is, objectively – necessary, criticism is, from his standpoint, impossible” (GS 1.1:119/SW 1:184–5). The problem with Goethe is that he transposed the notion of Urphänomen from the field of nature to that of art, thereby positing it as the solution of the problem of form. Against his naturwissenschaftliche model, he endowed Greek (plastic) art with canonical validity – for poetry, he “aimed to establish the Vorbild himself ” –, taking it as a Vor-bild, a proto-type, an autonomous work complete in itself, definitively fashioned [geprägt] and exempt from eternal progression (cf. GS 1.1:115–6/SW 1:182). The Romantics could not acknowledge prototypes, nor can Benjamin in his theory of reading. It is important therefore to emphasise that Goethe’s concept lacks in theoretical consistency and can be taken as a model for the dialectical image only if read as the Benjaminian Ursprung, that is, Ur-bild and not Vor-bild. Cf. GS 1.1:110–9/SW 1:178–85. Weigel, Body- and Image-Space: Re-Reading Walter Benjamin, pp. 4–5. Rolf Tiedemann, “Dialectics at a Standstill: Approaches to the Passagen-Werk,” AP 942.

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Chapter 2 2.1 The Art of Straying 1. 2. 3.

4.

5.

6. 7. 8. 9.

Sven Birkerts, “Walter Benjamin, Flâneur: A Flânerie,” Iowa Review 13.3–4 (1982), p. 166. Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 34–5. Rob Shields argues against this thesis, affirming that the flâneur was always a mythological ideal-type: “the notion of flânerie is essentially a literary gloss: it is uneasily tied to any sociological reality. It is a marriage of several elements including the practices associated with specific sites – the arcades and gallerias, ‘les passages’ of Paris – and the literary imagination of Paris as metropolis. […] Flânerie was therefore always as much mythic as it was actual. It has something of the quality of oral tradition and bizarre urban myth,” Rob Shields, “Fancy Footwork: Walter Benjamin’s Notes on Flânerie,” The Flâneur, ed. Keith Tester (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 62. Baudelaire writes that the modern artist “cherche ce quelque chose qu’on nous permettra d’appeler la modernité” (“he seeks that peculiar thing which we may call modernity”), Charles Baudelaire, “Le peintre de la vie moderne,” Oevres Completes, ed. Y.-G. Le Dantec (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), p. 892. Keith Tester argues that “the flâneur certainly occupies the specific times and places of nineteenth century Paris, but that Paris is itself made important because it is an expression of modernity. Baudelaire’s uncertainty as to whether he was talking about Paris or modernity is, then, better understood in terms of an attempt to talk about both at one and the same time. For Baudelaire, modernity is the form; Paris is the content. The flâneur is the figure and the point of observation that straddles the two and pulls them together into a unity,” Keith Tester, “Introduction,” The Flâneur, ed. Keith Tester (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 17. Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), p. 133. Baudelaire, “Le peintre de la vie moderne,” p. 892. Baudelaire, “Le peintre de la vie moderne,” p. 892. David Frisby argues that Baudelaire “intended the aesthetic representation of the ‘modern’ world, often as its opposite, one that would reveal the ‘harsh refuse of modernity,’ ‘the savagery that lurks in the midst of civilization’ and its ‘living monstrosities,’” David Frisby, Fragments of Modernity: Theories of Modernity in the Work of Simmel, Kracauer and Benjamin (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1985), p. 20.

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10. Susan Buck-Morss defines Benjamin’s hermeneutic strategy as a “dialectics of seeing,” “one,” she writes, “that relies […] on the interpretative power of images that make conceptual points concretely, with reference to the world outside the text,” Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 1989), p. 6. I “steal” this expression to illustrate instead the dialectics of vision and invisibility in the figure of the flâneur. 11. Benjamin was influenced, among others, by Simmel, who wrote: “the psychological basis of the metropolitan type of individuality consists in the intensification of nervous stimulation which results from the swift and uninterrupted change of outer and inner stimuli,” Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” trans. Kurt H. Wolff, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, ed. Kurt H. Wolff (London and New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1950), pp. 409–10. 12. Friedberg names these new inventions “machines of mobility,” which changed the measure of space and time: “trains, steamships, bicycles, elevators, escalators, moving walkways, and, later, automobiles and airplanes.” Besides, “a variety of architectural forms also emerged in the nineteenth century which facilitated and encouraged a pedestrian mobilized gaze – exhibition halls, wintergardens, arcades, department stores, museums,” Friedberg, Window Shopping , p. 3. 13. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1995), pp. 19–20. Crary continues: “Vision in the nineteenth century was inseparable from transience – that is, from new temporalities, speeds, experiences of flux and obsolescence, a new density and sedimentation of the structure of visual memory. Perception within the context of modernity, for Benjamin, never disclosed the world as presence,” p. 21. 14. Anke Gleber, The Art of Taking a Walk. Flanerie, Literature and Film in Weimar Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 43. 15. An entry of the Arcades Project reads: “An intoxication [Rausch] comes over the man who walks long and aimlessly [ohne Ziel] through the streets. With each step, the walk takes on greater momentum [Gewalt]; ever weaker grows the temptation of shops, of bistros, of smiling women, ever more irresistible the magnetism of the next streetcorner, of a distant mass of foliage, of a street name” (M1,3). 16. Gleber, The Art of Taking a Walk , p. 50. The connection with Surrealism is clear: the flâneur seeks “the intoxication with images as icons of modern mythology,” Gleber, The Art of Taking a Walk , p. viii. 17. A parallel can be draught with the film-goer: In The Work of Art in the Age of Its Reproducibility Benjamin writes that “reception in distraction […] finds in film its true training ground” (GS 1.2:466/SW 3:120). 18. An entry of the Arcades Project goes: “The anamnestic intoxication [anamnesticshe Rausch] in which the flâneur goes about the city not only feeds on the sensory data

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19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27.

28. 29.

Notes taking shape before his eyes but often possesses itself of abstract knowledge – indeed, of dead facts – as something experienced and lived through. This felt knowledge travels from one person to another, especially by word of mouth” (M1,5). The city for the flâneurs is a setting imbued of memories. Cf. also Graeme Gilloch, Walter Benjamin: Critical Constellations (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), pp. 219–20. Shields, “Fancy Footwork,” p. 75. Gleber, The Art of Taking a Walk , p. 52. Gleber, The Art of Taking a Walk , p. 41. Gleber, The Art of Taking a Walk , p. x. Gleber, The Art of Taking a Walk , p. ix. Bruce Mazlish, “The Flâneur: From Spectator to Representation,” The Flâneur, ed. Keith Tester (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 50. Friedberg, Window Shopping , p. 16. This point falls within the wider argument about the reshaping of vision during the nineteenth century: the introduction of new technologies of perception and reproduction of images led to the collapse of the traditional models of vision and representation. On the one hand, vision became mobilized and volatilized; on the other, though, it was subjected to a mechanic “normalization.” This, Crary argues, implicated a repositioning of the observer: vision became “something measurable and thus exchangeable,” and visual imagery underwent a process of standardization, which went together with a regulation of the observer. For Crary, the observer – no matter if perambulating or not – was normalized by the capitalist system in order to fit the task of “spectacular consumption” of the commodified images of modernity. Cf. Crary, Techniques of the Observer, pp. 17–24. Richard D.E Burton, The Flaneur and His City. Patterns of Daily Life in Paris 1815–1851 (University of Durham, 1994), pp. 4–5. Cf. Janet Wolff, “The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity,” The Problems of Modernity: Adorno and Benjamin, ed. Andrew Benjamin (London and New York: Routledge, 1989). The female presence in the street, Gleber argues, was increasing, and the social status of women was changing, in the same years of the flâneur’s popularity. She therefore writes on Benjamin: “as perceptive and innovative as his reflections are in their approach to the shifting modernities of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, he consistently ignores one of the major formative factors in the public sphere of those times […]. And this even though the era of Weimar modernity and its theoretical debates offered the spectacle of an increased female presence in the streets as well as rapid changes in gendered patterns of employment,” Gleber, The Art of Taking a Walk, p. 179. Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, “The Flâneur on and Off the Streets of Paris,” The Flâneur, ed. Keith Tester (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 27. Shields, “Fancy Footwork,” p. 73.

Notes

273

30. “For if flânerie can transform Paris into one great interior – a house whose rooms are the quartiers, no less clearly demarcated by thresholds than are real rooms – then, on the other hand, the city can appear to someone walking through it to be without thresholds: a landscape in the round” (M3,2). 31. Gilloch, Critical Constellations, p. 133. 32. “The appearance of the street as an interieur in which the phantasmagoria of the flâneur is concentrated is hard to separate from the gas lighting” (GS 1.2:552/SW 4:28). Gleber writes: “The material changes in the intensity of light display the concomitant developments of the civilization, with its increase in capitalist commodities, its emerging and narcissistic self-awareness of a wealthy bourgeoisie, and an entire culture of leisure that stimulates the visual sensitivity of the flâneur. The exterior of the street becomes a veritable showcase, a shopwindow turned inside out, an interior realm for the display of exterior commodities, slices of social life, and ever more differentiated phenomena of scopophilia, which together encourage the turn toward an aesthetic stance of leisurely contemplation,” Gleber, The Art of Taking a Walk, p. 33. 33. Friedberg, Window Shopping, p. 64. Buck-Morss interprets this dialectics as follow: “The arcades, interior streets lined with luxury shops and open through iron and glass roofs to the stars, were a wish-image, expressing the bourgeois individual’s desire to escape through the symbolic medium of objects from the isolation of his/her subjectivity. On the boulevards, the flâneur, now jostled by crowds and in full view of the urban poverty which inhabited public streets, could maintain a rhapsodic view of modern existence only with the aid of illusion, which is just what the literature on flânerie – physiognomies, novels of the crowd – was produced to provide. If at the beginning, the flâneur as private subject dreamed himself out into the world, at the end, flânerie was an ideological attempt to reprevatize social space, and to give assurance that the individual’s passive observation was adequate for knowledge of social reality,” Susan Buck-Morss, “The Flâneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering,” New German Critique 39 (Fall 1986), p. 103. 34. Tester, “Introduction,” p. 14. 35. Parkhurst Ferguson reads in the end of the flâneur the metaphor of the alienation of the intellectual in mass society: “no longer the celebrant of urban enchantments, the flâneur at mid-century confronted not only the alienation and anomie attendant upon life in the modern city but more especially, given the writer’s investment in flânerie, the failure that haunts the creative enterprise in contemporary bourgeois society,” Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, Paris as Revolution: Writing the Nineteenth-Century City (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1994), p. 81. And: “passive, solipsistic, the ordinary flâneur turned into the ultimate consumer. Not surprisingly, this paradigmatic urban personage moved

274

36.

37.

38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

47. 48.

49. 50. 51.

Notes inside, away from the now disquieting city toward the comforting interior, the enclosed structure of social control,” p. 113. Gleber writes: “in their intense pursuit of subjectivity and perception, these flâneurs and their gazes are neither restricted by insecurity, convention, modesty, anxiety, or assault, nor by restrictions erected through the controlling or commodifying presence of an other. The possibility of a female flânerie, then, would seem to be absent from the cities of modernity,” Gleber, The Art of Taking a Walk, p. 171. Margaret Mahony Stoljar, “Sirens of Gaslight and Odalisques of the Oil Lamp: The Language of Desire in the Arcades Project,” With the Sharpened Axe of Reason: Approaches to Walter Benjamin, ed. Gerhard Fischer (Oxford and Washington, D.C.: Berg, 1996), p. 104. Friedberg, Window Shopping, p. 37. Friedberg, Window Shopping, p. 58. Parkhurst Ferguson, “The Flâneur on and Off the Streets of Paris,” p. 35. Graeme Gilloch, Myth and Metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the City (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), p. 154. Shields, “Fancy Footwork,” pp. 65–6. “To store time as a battery stores energy: the flâneur” (D3,4). Another entry in “Central Park” reads: “game of chances, flânerie, collecting – activities pitted against spleen” (GS 1.2:668/SW 4:171). As he calls “psychotic” his appropriation of space. Cf. Shields, “Fancy Footwork,” p. 73. This passage continues: “let the many attend to their daily affairs; the man of leisure can indulge in the perambulations of the flâneur only if as such he is already out of place. He is as much out of place in an atmosphere of complete leisure as in the feverish turmoil of the city” (GS 1.2:627/SW 4:326). Birkerts, “Walter Benjamin, Flâneur,” pp. 169–70. The tempo of the crowd is the tempo of the machine, and therefore of the production process and the division of labour: “we may assume,” Benjamin writes, “that the crowd as it appears in Poe, with its abrupt and intermittent movements, is described quite realistically. In itself, the description has a higher truth. These are less the movements of people going about their business that the movements of the machines they operate. With uncanny foresight, Poe seems to have modelled the gestures and reactions of the crowd on the rhythm of these machines. The flâneur, at any rate, has no part in such behaviour. Instead, he forms an obstacle in its path. His nonchalance [Gelassenheit] would therefore be nothing other than an unconscious protest against the tempo of the production process” ( J60a,6). Buck-Morss, “The Flâneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore,” p. 136. Gilloch, Myth and Metropolis, p. 154. Baudelaire, “Le peintre de la vie moderne,” p. 889.

Notes

275

52. In “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” Benjamin writes: “moving through this traffic involves the individual in a series of shocks and collisions. At dangerous intersections, nervous impulses flow through him in rapid succession, like the energy from a battery. Baudelaire speaks of a man who plunges into the crowd as into a reservoir of electric energy” (GS 1.2:630/SW 4:328). 53. Gilloch, Myth and Metropolis, p. 143. 54. Charles Baudelaire, “Le spleen de Paris,” Oevres Completes, p. 296. 55. “Empathy [Einfühlung] is the nature of the intoxication to which the flâneur abandons himself in the crowd” (GS 1.2:558/SW 4:31). 56. In “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire” Benjamin writes: “the flâneur is someone abandoned in the crowd. He is thus in the same situation as the commodity. He is unaware of this special situation, but this does not diminish its effect on him; it permeates him blissfully, like a narcotic that can compensate him for many humiliations. The intoxication to which the flâneur surrenders is the intoxication of the commodity immersed is a surging stream of customers. If there were such a thing as a commodity-soul (a notion that Marx occasionally mentions in jest), it would be the most empathetic ever encountered in the realm of souls, for it would be bound to see every individual as a buyer in whose hand and house it wants to nestle” (GS 1.2:557–58/SW 4:31). 57. Baudelaire, “Le spleen de Paris,” p. 295 58. “The flâneur,” writes Shields, “is the embodiment of alienation. Triply so: within himself, between himself and his world, and between himself and other people,” Shields, “Fancy Footwork,” p. 77. 59. An entry of the Arcades Project reads: “considered apart from the various classes which join in its formation, the mass as such has no primary social significance. In its secondary significance depends on the ensemble of relations through which it is constituted at any one time and place. A theatre audience, an army, the population of a city comprise masses which in themselves belong to no particular class. The free market multiplies these masses, rapidly and on a colossal scale, insofar as each piece of merchandise now gathers around it the mass of its potential buyers” ( J81a,1). 60. Cf. Baudelaire, “Le spleen de Paris,” pp. 295–6. 61. Burton, The Flaneur and His City, p. 1. 62. She writes: “the rejection of female flâneurs stems in large part from this presumed incapacity of self-sufficiency, from the willingness to join the crowd, to enter into negotiation, and to create relationships in circumstances that the true flâneur contemplates from a safe distance,” Parkhurst Ferguson, “The Flâneur On and Off the Streets of Paris,” p. 31. 63. Simmel writes: “the deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face

276

64.

65.

66. 67. 68. 69.

70. 71. 72. 73. 74.

75.

Notes of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of technique of life,” Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” p. 409. Shields writes: “flânerie is public and other-directed. It is more than ‘taking the air’ or going for a walk. The flâneur is out to see and be seen, and thus requires a crowd to be able to watch others and take in the bustle of the city in the security of his anonymous status as part of the metropolitan throng. The crowd is also an audience. Flânerie is thus a crowd practice, a connoisseur’s ‘art of doing’ crowd behaviour. As an ethic it retrieves the individual from the mass by elevating idiosyncrasies and mannerisms as well as individuality and singular perspective of an individual’s observations and point of view,” Shields, “Fancy Footwork,” pp. 65–6. In “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire” Benjamin writes: “the assimilation of a man of letters to the society in which he lived took place on the boulevard, in the following way. On the boulevard, he kept himself in readiness for the next incident, witticism, or rumour” (GS 1.2:530/SW 4:14). Buck-Morss, “The Flâneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore,” p. 111. Gilloch, Myth and Metropolis, p. 156. Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, p. 304. Two entries in convolute “m” read: “there are two social institution of which idleness [Mußiggang] forms an integral part: the news service and nightlife. They require a specific form of work-preparedness [Arbeitsbereitschaft]. This specific form is idleness” (m2a,2). “News service and idleness. Feuilletonist, reporter, photographer constitute a gradation in which waiting around, the ‘Get ready’ succeeded by the ‘Shoot,’ becomes ever more important vis-à-vis other activities” (m2a,3). Esther Leslie, Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism (London and Sterling, VI: Pluto Press, 2000), p. 104. Leslie, Overpowering Conformism, p. 190. “Empathy with the commodity is fundamentally empathy with exchange value itself. The flâneur is the virtuoso of this empathy. He takes the concept of marketability itself for a stroll” (M17a,2). Terry Eagleton, Walter Benjamin or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism (London: NLB, 1981), p. 26. Tester writes: “Benjamin proposes that the hollowness of the commodity form and, indeed, the hollowness of the egoistic individuals of capitalism is reflected in the flâneur. Flânerie is a desperate attempt to fill the emptiness even though it is actually a final resignation to it,” Tester, “Introduction,” p. 13. And also: “The flânerie which features in the work of Benjamin is soul-less and truly empty, just like the commodity forms it represents. It is perhaps not surprising that actually Benjamin’s comments on flânerie are not without a sneer,” Tester, “Introduction,” p. 14. Cf. Hannah Arendt, “Walter Benjamin: 1892–1940,” Walter Benjamin. Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1969).

Notes 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81.

277

Arendt, “Walter Benjamin: 1892–1940,” p. 22. Arendt, “Walter Benjamin: 1892–1940,” pp. 22, 43. Gleber, The Art of Taking a Walk, p. 48. Birkerts, “Walter Benjamin, Flâneur,” p. 168. Birkerts, “Walter Benjamin, Flâneur,” p. 168. Birkerts, “Walter Benjamin, Flâneur,” p. 169.

2.2 Flânerie after the Battle 1. 2.

3. 4.

5.

6.

Bradley S. Epps, Significant Violence: Oppression and Resistance in the Narratives of Juan Goytisolo 1970–1990 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p. 282. He writes in the essay “París, ¿Capital del siglo XXI?”: “when few years ago I tried to condense and give form to the pile of experiences coming from my long stance in the Sentier neighbourhood, I had assimilated in a more or less conscious way Baudelaire’s lesson and had deciphered a urban text, rich of allogenic components, with the invaluable help of Benjamin,” Juan Goytisolo, “París, ¿Capital del siglo XXI?,” El bosque de las letras (Madrid: Alfaguara, 1995), p. 187. Marta Gómez Mata and César Silió Cervera, Oralidad y polifonía en la obra de Juan Goytisolo (Madrid: Jucar, 1994), p. 96. I will use my own translation from the most recent edition of the novel, Paisajes después de la batalla (Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1990), and will refer to it parenthetically in the text as Paisajes. The Anglophone reader can refer to Helen Lane’s translation: Juan Goytisolo, Landscapes after the Battle, trans. Helen Lane (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1987). Linda Gould Levine, for example, interprets it as a satirical reading of the relationship between the physical body and the textual body; Randolph Pope as an exercise in self-irony; Claudia Schaefer-Rodriguez as an attempt of the author to free himself from the fixed forms of autobiographical discourse in order to obtain a liberation from the society that produce such discourse. Cf. Linda Gould Levine, “Comment lire Juan Goytisolo?,” trans. Abdelatif Ben Salem, Juan Goytisolo ou les paysages d’un Flâneur, ed. Abdelatif Ben Salem (Librairie Arthème Fayard et Institut du Monde Arabe, 1996); Randolph D. Pope, Understanding Juan Goytisolo (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1995); Claudia Schaefer-Rodriguez, “Goytisolo through the Looking Glass: ‘Paisajes después de la batalla ,’ Autobiography and Parody,” The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 19.2 (Autumn 1986). It must be pointed out though that Goytisolo’s exile is voluntary and he was never prevented from going back to Spain, whereas Benjamin had to flee Germany both for being Marxist and Jew.

278 7.

8.

9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

Notes He is also referred to as flâneur by some recent critique. Cf. for example Edmund White, “The Wanderer: Juan Goytisolo’s Border Crossing,” The Burning Library: Essays (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994) and Abdelatif Ben Salem, ed., Juan Goytisolo ou les paysages d’un Flâneur (Librairie Arthème Fayard et Institut du Monde Arabe, 1996). He said in an interview: “often I have been reproached: you contradict yourself. I always reply: of course I do. The world advances by contradictions. If we were one-piece beings to whom everything appears perfectly clear there would be no progress,” Manuel Ruiz Lagos, Retrato de Juan Goytisolo (Barcelona: Círculo de Lectores - Galaxia Gutenberg, 1993), p. 68. Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1993), p. 2. Friedberg, Window Shopping, p. 182. Alison Ribeiro de Menezes, Juan Goytisolo: The Author as Dissident (Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2005), p. 119. Goytisolo’s notion of “porosity” reminds of Benjamin’s description of Naples: “as porous as this stone is the architecture. Building and action interpenetrate in the courtyards, arcades, and stairways. In everything, they preserve the scope to become a theatre of new, unforseen constellations. The stamp of the definitive is avoided” (GS 4.1:309/SW 1:416). Juan Goytisolo, “La ciudad palimpsesto,” Aproximaciones a Gaudí en Capadocia (Madrid: Mondadori, 1990), pp. 88–9. Cf. Goytisolo, “París, ¿Capital del siglo XXI?,” pp. 185–6. Goytisolo, “París, ¿Capital del siglo XXI?,” p. 182. Goytisolo, “París, ¿Capital del siglo XXI?,” p. 179. Goytisolo never uses the term “Postmodernity” or “Postmodernism” if not in a derogatory way. Juan Goytisolo, “Europa, en menos y más,” El bosque de las letras (Madrid: Alfaguara, 1995), p. 170. Goytisolo, “La ciudad palimpsesto,” pp. 87–8. Goytisolo, “París, ¿Capital del siglo XXI?,” pp. 186–7. Juan Goytisolo, “Planta del desierto,” El bosque de las letras (Madrid: Alfaguara, 1995), p. 199. This could be called a “postcolonial” notion of culture. Edward Said, in fact, similarly writes that “the history of all cultures is the history of cultural borrowings. Cultures are not impermeable; just as Western science borrowed from Arabs, they had borrowed from India and Greece. Culture is never just a matter of ownership, of borrowing and lending with absolute debtors and creditors, but rather of appropriations, common experiences, and interdependencies of all kinds among different cultures. This is a universal norm,” Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), p. 217.

Notes

279

22. Juan Goytisolo, “Introducción,” El bosque de las letras (Madrid: Alfaguara, 1995), pp. 12–13. 23. Goytisolo, “Planta del desierto,” pp. 195, 203–4. 24. Goytisolo, “París, ¿Capital del siglo XXI?,” p. 181. 25. Goytisolo, “París, ¿Capital del siglo XXI?,” p. 181. 26. Andrés Sánchez Robayna interprets this alternation as a sign of the internal fragmentation of the character, because “neither the private space is properly a domestic sphere (its ‘domesticity’ is null, as his surly relationships with his wife or his neighbours and his propensity to invisibility demonstrate), nor is the public space a place of coexistence or encounter with the others, but rather a sphere of suspicion and aggression,” Andrés Sánchez Robayna, “Introducción,” Juan Goytisolo, Paisajes después de la batalla (Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1990), pp. 21–2. 27. Lucille V. Braun, “Inside and Outside: Topology and Intertextuality in Juan Goytisolo’s Paisajes después de la batalla ,” Revista canadiense de estudios hispanico 14.1 (Autumn 1989), p. 18. 28. Epps, Significant Violence, p. 330. 29. Epps, Significant Violence, p. 321. 30. Gómez Mata and Silió Cervera, Oralidad y polifonía, pp. 130–1. 31. The flâneur finds inspiration in the multicultural maze of the Sentier: Claxonazos, barullo, inmediatez promiscua no incomodan en absoluto al peripatético sujeto de esta narrativa: el guirigay de voces, encabalgamiento y superposición de planos, mescolanza de sensaciones y olores captados simultáneamente, en toda su riqueza y fecundidad, estimulan, al contrario, sus dotes creadoras. (Paisajes 204).

32. 33. 34. 35.

Tooting, hubbub, promiscuous immediacy do not disturb at all the peripatetic subject of this narrative: the hullabaloo of voices, the overlapping and superposition of planes, mixture of sensations and smells simultaneously grasped, in all their richness and fecundity, all this stimulate, on the contrary, his creative gifts. Juan Goytisolo, “Por que he escogido vivir en París,” Contracorreientes (Madrid: Montesinos, 1985), p. 145. Goytisolo, “La ciudad palimpsesto,” pp. 90–1. Cf. John R. Barberet, “Baudelaire: Homoérotismes,” Articulations of Difference: Gender Studies and Writing in French, ed. Dominique Fisher and Lawrence R. Schehr (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997). Hardt and Negri thus describe the mass: “the masses are also contrasted with the people because they too cannot be reduced to a unity or an identity. The masses certainly are composed of all types and sorts, but really one should not say that different social subjects make up the masses. The essence of the masses is indifference: all differences are submerged and drowned in the masses. All the colours of the population fade to gray. These masses are able to move in unison only because they form an indistinct, uniform conglomerate,” Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri,

280

36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.



Notes Multitude: War and Democracy an the Age of Empire (New York: The Penguin Press, 2004), p. xiv. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 103. Cf. Hardt and Negri, Empire, especially pp. xii–xiii, 125, 150–6. Goytisolo, “La ciudad palimpsesto,” pp. 90–1. Gómez Mata and Silió Cervera, Oralidad y polifonía, p. 152. Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. xx. Kadhim Jihad, “Juan Goytisolo devant l’épreuve de la traduction,” Juan Goytisolo ou les paysages d’un Flâneur, ed. Abdelatif Ben Salem (Librairie Arthème Fayard et Institut du Monde Arabe, 1996), pp. 157–8. Cf. Epps, Significant Violence, pp. 301–3. Edward W. Said, Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures (London: Vintage, 1994), p. 47. Said, Representations of the Intellectual, pp. 13–14. Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 303. This gives them “an astonishing sense of weightlessness with regard to the gravity of history and individual responsibility fritters away attention to public matters, and to public discourse,” p. 303. Ruiz Lagos, Retrato de Juan Goytisolo, p. 76–7, emphases in the original. Cf. Said, Representations of the Intellectual, p. 39. Cf. Hardt and Negri, Empire, p. 212. Juan Goytisolo, “De la literatura considerada como una delincuencia,” Contracorreientes (Madrid: Montesinos, 1985), p. 184–5. Juan Goytisolo, “Ni dios, ni amo: entrevista realizada por Ernesto Parra,” Contracorreientes (Madrid: Montesinos, 1985), p. 219. Pope, Understanding Juan Goytisolo, p. 35. In Paisajes we find a semi-serious parodic portrait of the social pariah in an open letter a zoophile addresses to a newspaper: Sus rostros, muecas, miradas traducen una actitud de repulsa y condena, cuando no de desprecio y de asco, indicando a las claras que, incluso en una comunidad nominalmente permisiva como la nuestra, el derecho a la autenticidad y divergencia no existe y quienes, como yo, lo esgrimimos, somos parias sociales, habitantes del gueto, ciudadanos de tercera clase. (Paisajes 73)

Their faces, their expressions, their looks show an attitude of rejection and condemnation, if not of contempt and repulsion; this means that, also in a nominally permissive community like ours, the right to authenticity and dissent does not exist and the ones who, like me, brandish it, are social pariah, inhabitants of the ghetto, third-class citizens. 53. Juan Goytisolo, “El poeta enterrado en Larache,” El bosque de las letras (Madrid: Alfaguara, 1995), p. 96.

Notes

281

54. Cf. Juan Goytisolo, “Flaubert o la adiccion literaria: a propósito de la correspondencia Flaubert-George Sand,” Contracorreientes (Madrid: Montesinos, 1985). 55. Goytisolo, “De la literatura considerada como una delincuencia,” pp. 183–4. 56. Goytisolo, “Introducción,” pp. 11–12. 57. Goytisolo, “Introducción,” pp. 11–12. 58. Goytisolo, “ Ni dios, ni amo,” p. 219. 59. Cf. Epps, Brad, “Sexual Terror: Identity and Fragmentation in Juan Goytisolo’s Paisajes después de la batalla ,” in Sylvia Molloy and Robert McKee Irwin (eds), Hispanism and Homosexualities (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1998), pp. 197–228. 60. Goytisolo, “ Ni dios, ni amo,” p. 219. 61. Epps, Significant Violence, p. 304. 62. Randolph D. Pope, “Writing after the Battle: Juan Goytisolo’s Renewal,” Literature, the Arts, and Democracy: Spain in the Eighties, ed. Samuel Amell (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1990), pp. 63–4. 63. Luce López-Baralt, “Juan Goytisolo aprende a reír: los contextos caribeños de Makbara y Paisajes después de la batalla ,” Insula: Revista de letras y ciencias humanas 40.468 (November 1985), p. 3. 64. López-Baralt, “Juan Goytisolo aprende a reír,” p. 4. 65. Goytisolo, “Introducción,” p. 9, emphasis added. 66. Goytisolo, “Introducción,” p. 13. 67. Juan Goytisolo, “Doce milliones de musulmanes europeos,” Pájaro que ensucia su propio nido (Barcelona: Random House Mondadori, 2003), pp. 166–7. 68. Cf. Epps, Significant Violence, pp. 273, 308. 69. Cf. Epps, Significant Violence, pp. 304–5.

Chapter 3 3.1 The City as Crime Scene 1.

Pierre Missac argues that the anxieties of the traveler are probably Benjamin’s own anxieties for the worsening of the political and social situation of Weimar Germany: “Just as he needed to escape from his anxiety, counterpart to fascination, about the train journey […] so the detective novel is in some sense an antidote to obsession with the increasing dangers now that Hitler has arrived on the scene and new conflicts are in the offing,” Pierre Missac, Walter Benjamin’s Passages, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 1995), pp. 58–9.

282 2.

3.

Notes From few sources we can get an idea of what Benjamin read and admired: Scholem writes that “Benjamin was very fond of reading mystery novels, particularly the German translations brought out by a Stuttgart publisher, of American and French detective classics like those of Maurice (sic!) A.K. Green, Emile Gaboriau (Monsieur Lecoq), and – when he was in Munich – Maurice Leblanc’s stories about Arsène Lupin, the gentleman burglar. Later he read a great deal by the Swedish author Frank Heller, and in the thirties he added the books of George Simenon,” Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin. The History of a Friendship (London: Faber & Faber, 1982), p. 32. In “Kriminalromane, auf Reisen,” Benjamin gives a list of authors and works: the Danish Sven Elvestad (1884–1934) and his character Asbjörn Krag, the Swedish Frank Heller (aka Martin Gunnar Serner, 1886–1947) and the British Wilkie Collins (1824–1889), the Czech-Austrian Leo Perutz (1882–1957), the French Gaston Leroux (1868–1927), specifically Le fantôme de l’opéra and Le parfum de la dame en noir, Arthur Conan Doyle’s (1859 –1930) Sherlock Holmes, and the American Anna Katherine Green (1846–1935), specifically Behind Closed Doors and The Affair Next Door (GS 4.1:381–2). As early as 1920 Benjamin gives a list of guten Kriminalromanen in a letter to Scholem: Green’s The Affair Next Door, Behind Closed Doors and The Filigree Ball; Elvestad’s Der Mann der die Stadt plünderte and Die zwei und die Dame; Emile Gaboriau’s (1832–1873) Monsieur Lecoq, Leroux’s Le fantôme de l’opéra and Le mystère de la chamber jaune, Lawrence L. Lynch’s (pseud. of American writer Emma Murdoch Van Deventer) Schlingen und Netze (possibly Out Of A Labyrinth), August Gottlieb Meißner’s (1753–1807) Platanenallee No 14, E. Balmer’s and W.M. Hary’s Feine Fäden, Arnold Bennett’s (1867- 1931) The Grand Babylon Hotel and Alfred Kubin’s (1877 –1959) Die andere Seite (cf. GB 2:104–5). From a couple of letters to Kracauer of 1926 and 1928, we know that he read Gilbert Keith Chesterton’s (1874–1936) The Man Who Knew too Much and The Club of Queer Trades (which Kracauer reviewed for the Literaturblatt der Frankfurter Zeitung) (cf. GB 3:147, 342). In the 1930s, George Simenon (1903–1989), an “author of worthy detective novels” (GB 4:208–9), is the main reference in the correspondence, where Benjamin mentions specifically the novels Les suicidés (GB 4:539, 541, 5:28), Le locataire (GB 5:28, 271, 276), Les Pitard (GB 5:231, 271, 276), L’Évadé (GB 5:271, 276) and La marie du port (GB 6:329); but Agatha Christie’s (1890–1976) The Mystery of the Blue Train and the French mystery author Pierre Véry (1900–1960) are also mentioned (GB 5:28, 37). In a 1937 letter to Willi Bredel, Benjamin includes a study on Simenon in a proposal for a series of “Pariser Briefe,” which were in fact never written (cf. GB 5:516). For the planned detective novel (or series of novels), cf. Materialen zu einem Kriminalroman, GS 7.2:846–51. In Brecht’s Nachlaß, the notes for Kriminalromanen go under the title of “Tatsachenreihe,” of which one episode follows a schema present in Benjamin’s Materialen; cf. Bertold Brecht, Werke, Bd. 17: Prosa 2.

Notes

283

Romanfragmente und Romanentwürfe (Berlin/Frankfurt a.M.: Aufbau/Suhrkamp, 1989), pp. 443–55. 4. Whereas Messac’s book is a constant reference in the Arcades Project, there is no trace of Kracauer’s study. In fact, Kracauer wrote Der Detektive-Roman between 1922 and 1925, but never published it; only the chapter “Hotelhalle” was later included in Das Ornament der Masse (1963). The full study was published only posthumously in 1971 in the first volume of the Schriften (cf. Schriften, I: Soziologie als Wissenschaft. Der Detektiv-Roman. Die Angestellten, ed. by Karsten Witte, Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1971, pp. 103–204). In a letter to Kracauer of March 1924 (thus before the completion of the work), Benjamin writes that he is “curious” [gespannt] about Kracauer’s “Detective Analysis”; he was thus acquainted with at least a part of it and the two possibly discussed it (cf. GB 2:430). But no other reference to this work appears in the correspondence between the two and therefore an influence of Kracauer on Benjamin’s Theorie des Kriminalromans is rather unlikely. On the other hand, Kracauer’s study is a phenomenological analysis of the metamorphoses of the ratio, the systematic scientific-industrial thought, with the dissolution of piety in bourgeois society and the relationship between Kitsch and will of power, and thus diverges from Benjamin’s interest in the genre. 5. Tom McDonough, “The Crimes of the Flâneur,” October 102 (Fall 2002), p. 116. 6. Cf. Ernest Mandel, “A Marxist Interpretation of the Crime Story,” Detective Fiction. A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Robin W. Winks (Woodstock, VT: The Countryman Press, 1988), p. 210. 7. Cf. Gavin Lambert, “The Dangerous Edge,” Detective Fiction. A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Robin W. Winks (Woodstock, VT: The Countryman Press, 1988), p. 49. 8. Benjamin quotes from Roger Caillois in the Arcades Project: “Elements of intoxication at work in the detective novel […]. The characters of the childish imagination and a prevailing artificiality hold sway over this strangely vivid world. Nothing happens here that is not long premeditated; nothing corresponds to appearances. Rather, each thing has been prepared for use at the right moment by the omnipotent hero who wields power over it. We recognize in all this the Paris of the serial instalments of Fantômas” (G15,5). 9. Graeme Gilloch, Myth and Metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the City (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), p. 141. 10. This observation is repeated in several passages. In the Arcades Project: “The masses in Baudelaire. […] they efface all traces of the individual: they are the newest asylum for the reprobate and the proscript” (M16,3). In Benjamin’s correspondence, in a letter to Max Horkheimer on 16 April 1938: “The crowd […] is the outcast’s latest place of asylum” (GB 6:65–6/C 557). 11. Cf. McDonough, “The Crimes of the Flâneur,” p. 105.

284

Notes

12. Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” trans. Kurt H. Wolff, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, ed. Kurt H. Wolff (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1950), p. 409. 13. John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1932 (London: Faber and Faber, 1992), p. 8. 14. Gilloch, Myth and Metropolis, p. 142. 15. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Man of the Crowd,” The Complete Tales and Poems (London: Penguin Books, 1982), p. 478. 16. Poe, “The Man of the Crowd,” p. 478. 17. The whole passage reads: “It was well said of a certain German book that ‘er lasst sich nicht lesen’ – it does not permit itself to be read. There are some secrets which do not permit themselves to be told. […] Now and then, alas, the conscience of man takes up a burden so heavy in horror that it can be thrown down only into the grave. And thus the essence of all crime is undivulged,” Poe, “The Man of the Crowd,” p. 475. 18. Jonathan Elmer, Reading at the Social Limit: Affect, Mass Culture, and Edgar Allan Poe (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 172. 19. The same formulation is repeated in the Arcades Project: “Preformed in the figure of the flâneur is that of the detective. The flâneur required a social legitimation of his habitus. It suited him very well to see his indolence presented as a plausible front, behind which, in reality, hides the riveted attention of an observer who will not let the unsuspecting malefactor out of his sight” (M13a,2). 20. Rob Shields, “Fancy Footwork: Walter Benjamin’s Notes on Flânerie,” The Flâneur, ed. Keith Tester (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 63. 21. James V. Werner, “The Detective Gaze: Edgar A. Poe, the Flâneur, and the Physiognomy of Crime,” American Transcendental Quarterly 15.1 (March 2001), p. 10. 22. In “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire” Benjamin writes: “An important trait of the real-life Baudelaire – that is, of the man committed to his work – has been omitted from this portrayal: his absentmindedness. – In the flâneur, the joy of watching prevails over all. It can concentrate on observation; the result is the amateur detective. Or it can stagnate in the rubbernecker; then the flâneur has turned into a badaud. The revealing representations of the big city have come from neither. They are the work of those who have traversed the city absently, as it were, lost in thought or worry” (GS 1.2:572/SW 4:41). 23. Tom Gunning, “The Exterior as Intérieur: Benjamin’s Optical Detective,” Boundary 2 30.1 (2003), p. 127. James Werner’s argument is very similar: cf. Werner, “The Detective Gaze,” pp. 13–19. 24. Cf. for example “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire” (GS 1.2:546/ SW 4:23) and in the Arcades Project the entry M12a,1. 25. Shields, “Fancy Footwork,” p. 63.

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285

26. Or, even better, as Patricia Merivale argues, for what has been called the “metaphysical” detective story, “in which the triadic multiplicity of detective, criminal, and victim is reduced to a solipsistic unity.” Cf. Patricia Merivale, “Gumshoe Gothics: Poe’s ‘the Man of the Crowd’ and His Followers,” Detecting Texts: The Metaphysical Detective Story from Poe to Postmodernism, ed. Patricia Merivale and Susan Elisabeth Sweeney (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), p. 107. 27. Cf. Dana Brand, The Spectator and the City in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 79. Benjamin himself draws a distinction between the flâneur-as-physiognomist and the detective: “One can speak, in certain respects, of a contribution made by the physiologies to detective fiction. Only, it must be borne in mind that the combinative procedure of the detective stands opposed here to an empirical approach that is modelled on the methods of Vidocq, and that betrays its relation to the physiologies precisely through the Jackal in Les Mohicans de Paris” (d14a,4). 28. I could find no evidence of an explicit derivation of Benjamin’s theory of the trace from Freud. Considered the influence of the latter on Benjamin, it seems possible nevertheless to establish an implicit connection. On the other hand, Carlo Ginzburg argues that, towards the end of the nineteenth century, a new epistemological paradigm emerged, which based interpretation on discarded information, marginal data, “clues.” Ginzburg explicitly draws the connection between the method of Freud and that of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes: “in each case,” he writes, “infinitesimal traces permit the comprehension of a deeper, otherwise unattainable reality: traces – more precisely, symptoms (in the case of Freud), clues (in the case of Sherlock Holmes)” (p. 101). It seems therefore possible to see Benjamin’s theory of the trace as part of a wider paradigmatic change that took place in European culture at that time. Cf. Carlo Ginzburg, Myths, Emblems, Clues, trans. John and Anne C. Tedeschi (London: Hutchinson Radius, 1990), especially pp. 96–125. 29. In a short piece titled “To live without Leaving Traces” (GS 4.1:427/SW 2:701–2), and, with almost the same words, in “Experience and Poverty,” Benjamin reiterates this concept: “If you enter a bourgeois room of the 1880s, for all the coziness it radiates, the strongest impression you receive may well be, ‘You’ve no business here.’ And in fact you have no business in that room, for there is no spot on which the owner has not left his mark – the ornaments on the mantelpiece, the antimacassars on the armchairs, the transparencies in the windows, the screen in front of the fire. A neat phrase by Brecht helps us out here: ‘Erase the traces!’ is the refrain in the first poem of his Lesebuch für Städtebewohner [Reader for City-Dwellers]. Here in the bourgeois room, the opposite behaviour became the norm. And conversely, the intérieur forces the inhabitant to adopt the greatest possible number of habits – habits that do more justice to the interior he is living in than to himself. This is understood by everyone who is familiar with the absurd attitude of the inhabitants of such plush apartments when something broke. Even their way of

286

30.

31.

32. 33. 34.

35.

Notes showing annoyance – and this affect, which is gradually starting to die out, was one that they could produce with great virtuosity – was above all the reaction of a person who felt that someone had obliterated ‘the traces of his days on earth’” (GS 2.1:217/SW 2:734). Gilloch argues that the bourgeois interior is the space of dying, but without the body, not so much a space of death as a “dead space”: “the interior becomes ‘ageless’, the sense of ‘bourgeois security that emanated’ from the middle-class home stemming from ‘timelessness’, from the denial of transience. The space of death, the murder, simultaneously becomes that of immortality, of permanence,” Gilloch, Myth and Metropolis, pp. 81–2. An entry in the Arcades Project refers this intoxication as “satanic,” connecting the intoxication of interior with modernity as “the time of hell” (S1,5): “Nineteenthcentury domestic interior. The space disguises itself – puts on, like an alluring creature, the costumes of moods. […] In the end, things are merely mannequins, and even the great moments of world history are only costumes beneath which they exchange glances of complicity with nothingness, with the petty and the banal. Such nihilism is the innermost core of bourgeois coziness – a mood that in hashish intoxication concentrates to satanic contentment, satanic knowing, satanic calm, indicating precisely to what extent the nineteenth-century interior is itself a stimulus to intoxication and dream. […] To live in these interiors was to have woven a dense fabric about oneself, to have secluded oneself within a spider’s web, in whose toils world events hang loosely suspended like so many insect bodies sucked dry” (I2,6). Heiner Weidmann, Flanerie, Sammlung, Spiel. Die Erinnerung Des 19. Jahrhunderts Bei Walter Benjamin (München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1992), p. 108. Weidmann, Flanerie, Sammlung, Spiel, p. 108. An entry of the Arcades Project reads: “Multiplication of traces through the modern administrative apparatus. Balzac draws attention to this: ‘Do your utmost, hapless Frenchwomen, to remain unknown, to weave the very least little romance in the midst of a civilization which takes note, on public squares, of the hour when every hackney cab comes and goes; which counts every letter and stamps them twice, at the exact time they are posted and at the time they are delivered; which numbers the houses …; which ere long will have every acre of land, down to the smallest holdings …, laid down on the broad sheets of a survey – a giant’s task, by command of a giant.’ Balzac, Modeste Mignon” (I6,a4). In “Commentary on Poems by Brecht,” Benjamin notes: “‘Erase the traces’: A rule for those who are illegal” (GS 2.2:556/SW 4:233). On the one hand, the poor and the bohéme are not allowed to leave traces; on the other though, they are pursued by a panoptical state that, at the same time, tries to control them and obliterate their existence. Therefore, “the rule in the First Poem, ‘Erase the traces!’ can be

Notes

36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

45. 46. 47. 48.

49. 50. 51.

287

completed by the reader of the Ninth: ‘It’s better than having them erased for you’” (GS 2.2:560/SW 4:327). Weidmann, Flanerie, Sammlung, Spiel, pp. 105–6. Almost the same words are repeated in “Experience and Poverty.” Cf. GS 2.1:217–8/ SW 2:734. Terry Eagleton, Walter Benjamin or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism (London: NLB, 1981), p. 29. Cf. Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 1989), pp. 56, 211. Eagleton, Walter Benjamin or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism, p. 33. Eagleton, Walter Benjamin or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism, p. 32. Eagleton, Walter Benjamin or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism, p. 31. Eagleton, Walter Benjamin or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism, p. 31. Pierre Missac, “Walter Benjamin: From Rupture to Shipwreck,” trans. Victoria Bridges & Larry Cohen & Kevin McLaughlin & Gary Smith, On Walter Benjamin. Critical Essays and Recollections, ed. Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 1988), p. 214. David Frisby, “The Flâneur in Social Theory,” The Flâneur, ed. Keith Tester (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 99. Cf. Angelika Rauch, “Culture’s Hieroglyph in Benjamin and Novalis: A Matter of Feeling,” The Germanic Review 71.4 (Fall 1996), p. 254. Eduardo Cadava, Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 11. Cf. as a few examples Michael J. Arrato Gavrish, “The Historian as Detective: An Introduction to Historical Methodology,” Social Education 59.3 (March 1995); Cushing Strout, “The Historian and the Detective,” Partisan Review 61.4 (Fall 1994); The Historian as Detective: Essays on Evidence, Winks, Robin W. ed. (New York, Evanston, and London: Harper and Row, 1968); Robin W. Winks, Modus Operandi: An Excursion into Detective Fiction (Boston: David R. Godine, 1982); Robin W. Winks, “The Historian as Detective,” Detective Fiction. A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Robin W. Winks (Woodstock, VT: The Countryman Press, 1988). Winks, “The Historian as Detective,” p. 242. Mike Featherstone, “The Flâneur, the City and Virtual Public Life,” Urban Studies 35.5–6 (1998), p. 909. Mandel, “A Marxist Interpretation of the Crime Story,” p. 211.

288

Notes

3.2 Spectres of Detection 1.

2.

3. 4. 5. 6.

For a Lacanian reading of Auster, cf. Bernd Herzogenrath, An Art of Desire: Reading Paul Auster (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1999). For a Derridean reading, cf. Norma Rowen, “The Detective in Search of the Lost Tongue of Adam: Paul Auster’s City of Glass,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 32.4 (Summer 1991) and Alison Russell, “Deconstructing the New York Trilogy: Paul Auster’s Anti-Detective Fiction,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 31.2 (Winter 1990). “Interview with Joseph Mallia,” The Art of Hunger: Essays, Prefaces, Interviews, and the Red Notebook (London and New York: Penguin Books, 1997), pp. 278–9. In another interview, he insists: “not that I have anything against detective fiction – it’s just that my work has very little to do with it. I refer to it in the three novels of the Trilogy, of course, but only as a means to an end, as a way to get somewhere else entirely. If a true follower of detective fiction ever tried to read one of those books, I’m sure he would be bitterly disappointed. Mystery novels always give answers; my work is about asking questions,” “Interview with Larry Mccaffery and Sinda Gregory,” The Art of Hunger, p. 310. Auster has actually written and published a “proper” detective novel, Squeeze Play, under the pseudonym of Paul Benjamin, but he did not reveal it until 1997 and does not consider it a part of his corpus. Cf. Paul Auster, “Squeeze Play,” Hand to Mouth: A Chronicle of Early Failure (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1997), pp. 237–449. Peter Kirkegaard, “Cities, Signs and Meaning in Walter Benjamin and Paul Auster, Or: Never Sure of Any of It,” Orbis Litterarum: International Review of Literary Studies 48.2 (1993), p. 173. Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy (London: Faber and Faber, 1987). I will hereafter refer to the three novellas parenthetically in the text, quoting their title. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Man of the Crowd,” The Complete Tales and Poems (London: Penguin Books, 1982), p. 481. The description of Auster’s “urban werewolf ” reads: “New York was an inexhaustible space, a labyrinth of endless steps, and no matter how far he walked, no matter how well he came to know its neighborhoods and streets, it always left him with the feeling of being lost. Lost, not only in the city, but within himself as well. Each time he took a walk, he felt as though he were leaving himself behind, and by giving himself up to the movement of the streets, by reducing himself to a seeing eye, he was able to escape the obligation to think, and this, more than anything else, brought him a measure of peace, a salutary emptiness within. The world was outside of him, around him, before him, and the speed with which it kept changing made it impossible for him to dwell on any one thing for very long. Motion was of the essence, the act of putting one foot in front of the other and allowing himself to follow the drift of his own body. By wandering aimlessly, all places became equal

Notes

289

and it no longer mattered where he was. On his best walks, he was able to feel that he was nowhere. And this, finally, was all he ever asked of things: to be nowhere. New York was that nowhere he had built around himself, and he realized that he had no intention of ever leaving it again” (City of Glass 3–4). 7. “Quinn was used to wandering. His excursions through the city had thought him to understand the connectedness of inner and outer. Using aimless motion as a technique of reversal, on his best days he could bring the outside in and thus usurp the sovereignty of inwardness. By flooding himself with externals, by drowning himself out of himself, he had managed to exert some small degree of control over his fits of despair. Wandering, therefore, was a kind of mindlessness” (City of Glass 61). 8. Cf. Patricia Merivale and Susan Elisabeth Sweeny, eds, Detecting Texts: The Metaphysical Detective Story from Poe to Postmodernism (Philadelphia: University of Pensylvania Press, 1999). 9. As Sweeney writes, “the protagonist of a metaphysical detective story […] may find that he cannot distinguish between supposing and knowing. […] He may even learn that he himself is the victim he avenges, the criminal he seeks, or both at once. In such tales, the answer to the detective story’s perennial question – ‘Whodunnit?’ – is ‘I.’ And ‘Who is “I”?’ is another question entirely,” Susan Elisabeth Sweeney, “‘Subject-Cases’ and ‘Book-Cases’: Impostures and Forgeries from Poe to Auster,” Detecting Texts: The Metaphysical Detective Story from Poe to Postmodernism, ed. Patricia Merivale and Susan Elisabeth Sweeney (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), p. 248. 10. Merivale recruits Auster for the metaphysical side: “a finely crafted fugue on Missing Persons, written in a lucidly self-deconstructing style with Beckettian subtones […], the episode constitutes a deliberate critique-cum-interpretation of ‘The Man of the Crowd.’ And the moral of this adapted parable is a recasting, as I see it, of the ‘es lässt sich nicht lesen’ of Poe’s story,” Patricia Merivale, “Gumshoe Gothics: Poe’s ‘the Man of the Crowd’ and His Followers,” Detecting Texts: The Metaphysical Detective Story from Poe to Postmodernism, ed. Patricia Merivale and Susan Elisabeth Sweeney (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), p. 112. 11. Cf. Stefano Tani, The Doomed Detective: The Contribution of the Detective Novel to Postmodern American and Italian Fiction (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984). 12. “Even before he became William Wilson, Quinn had been a devoted reader of mystery novels. He knew that most of them were poorly written, that most could not stand up to even the vaguest sort of examination, but still, it was the form that appealed to him, and it was the rare, unspeakably bad mystery that he would refuse to read. Whereas his taste in other books was rigorous, demanding to the point of narrow-mindedness, with these works he showed almost no discrimination whatsoever. When he was in the right mood, he had little trouble reading ten or

290

13. 14.

15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22.

23. 24.

Notes twelve of them in a row. It was a kind of hunger that took hold of him, a craving for a special food, and he would not stop until he had eaten his fill” (City of Glass 7–8). “Interview with Joseph Mallia,” p. 280. Stephen Bernstein, “‘the Question Is the Story Itself ’: Postmodernism and Intertextuality in Auster’s New York Trilogy,” Detecting Texts: The Metaphysical Detective Story from Poe to Postmodernism, ed. Patricia Merivale and Susan Elisabeth Sweeney (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), p. 138. Cf. William G. Little, “Nothing to Go On: Paul Auster’s City of Glass,” Contemporary Literature 38.1 (Spring 1997), p. 134. He writes: “if the discourse of modernity fulfils itself with the realization of the rationalist utopia, the crime represents the twisting of a certain order, emanation of a social project seen as the only possible: the detective, sort of re-edition of the man of the Enlightenment in bourgeois clothes, re-establishes the upset balance,” Mauro Pala, “L’apoteosi del Caso: Nella costellazione metropolitana di Paul Auster,” Acoma 9 (Winter 1997), pp. 77–8. “Interview with Joseph Mallia,” p. 280. Bernstein, “Postmodernism and Intertextuality in Auster’s New York Trilogy,” p. 138. Cf. “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire” (GS 1.2:545/SW 4:23) and The Arcades Project (M12a,1). “He was ransacking the chaos of Stillman’s movements for some glimmer of cogency. This implied only one thing: that he continued to disbelieve the arbitrariness of Stillman’s actions. He wanted there to be a sense to them, no matter how obscure. This, in itself, was unacceptable. For it meant that Quinn was allowing himself to deny the facts, and this, as he well knew, was the worst thing a detective could do” (City of Glass 68–9). Bernstein, “Postmodernism and Intertextuality in Auster’s New York Trilogy,” p. 135. Bernstein, “Postmodernism and Intertextuality in Auster’s New York Trilogy,” pp. 136, 149. Madeleine Sorapure writes: ”Neither character comes to a happy end, and in this sense Auster’s work examines the consequences of radical indeterminacy, as characters realize that they can no longer impose order and meaning on the contingencies of the world,” Madeleine Sorapure, “Paul Auster,” Postmodernism: The Key Figures, ed. Hans Bertens and Joseph Natoli (Malden, MA and Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2002), p. 23. William V. Spanos, “The Detective and the Boundary: Some Notes on the Postmodern Literary Imagination,” Early Postmodernism: Foundational Essays, ed. Paul A. Bové (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995), p. 25. Tani, The Doomed Detective, p. 40.

Notes

291

25. “Whether consciously or unconsciously,” Jeffrey Nealon writes, “the genre comments upon the process of sifting through signs, and ultimately upon the possibility of deriving order from the seeming chaos of conflicting signals and motives,” Jeffrey T. Nealon, “Work of the Detective, Work of the Writer: Auster’s City of Glass,” Detecting Texts: The Metaphysical Detective Story from Poe to Postmodernism, ed. Patricia Merivale and Susan Elisabeth Sweeney (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), p. 117. 26. The same happens to the unnamed narrator of The Locked Room when, at the end of the Trilogy, he reads the notebook Fanshawe has written for him, but words do not make sense to him anymore: “All the words were familiar to me, and yet they seemed to have been put together strangely, as though their final purpose was to cancel each other out. I can think of no other way to express it. Each sentence erased the sentence before it, each paragraph made the next paragraph impossible. […] He had answered the question by asking another question, and therefore everything remained open, unfinished, to be started again. I lost my way after the first word, and from then on I could only grope ahead, faltering in the darkness, blinded by the book that had been written for me” (The Locked Room 313). 27. Nevertheless, Benjamin rejects the Saussurean view – “the bourgeois view of language” – that “the word has an accidental relation to the object, that it is a sign for things (or knowledge of them). Language never gives mere signs” (GS 2.1:150/ SW 1:69). 28. Another example is this entry of the Arcades Project: “Allegory, as the sign that is pointedly set off against its meaning, has its place in art as the antithesis to the beautiful appearance [Schein] in which signifier and signified flow into each other” ( J83a,3). 29. Quinn acknowledges that “Stillman had not left his message anywhere. True, he had created the letters by the movements of his steps, but they had not been written down. It was like drawing a picture in the air with your finger. The image vanishes as you are making it. There is no result, no trace to mark what you have done” (City of Glass 70–1). 30. Carl D. Malmgren, “Detecting/Writing the Real: Paul Auster’s City of Glass,” Narrative Turns and Minor Genres in Postmodernism, ed. Theo D’haen and Hans Bertens (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1995), p. 197. 31. Rowen, “The Detective in Search of the Lost Tongue of Adam,” p. 233. 32. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London and New York: Verso, 1991), p. 186. 33. Cf. Ralph Willett, The Naked City: Urban Crime Fiction in the USA (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1996), pp. 56–8. 34. Richard Swope, Supposing a Space: The Detecting Subject in Paul Auster’s City of Glass, www.reconstruction.ws/023/swope.htm, 02.05 2005. As Jameson writes about the Westin Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles, “the glass skin repels the

292

35. 36.

37.

38. 39.

40.

41. 42. 43.

Notes city outside,” and this glass skin “is not even an exterior, inasmuch as when you to look at the hotel’s outer walls you cannot see the hotel itself but only the distorted images of everything that surrounds it,” Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, p. 42. Cf. Little, “Nothing to Go On,” p. 150. He also wrote: “where doors and walls are made of mirrors, there is no telling outside from in, with all the equivocal illumination. Paris is the city of mirrors. The asphalt of its roadways smooth as glass, and at the entrance to all bistros glass partitions. A profusion of windowpanes and mirrors in cafés, so as to make the inside brighter and to give all the tiny nooks and crannies, into which Parisian taverns separate, a pleasing amplitude” (R1,3). This is the explicit goal of Quinn’s wandering through the streets of New York: “Quinn was used to wandering. His excursions through the city had thought him to understand the connectedness of inner and outer. Using aimless motion as a technique of reversal, on his best days he could bring the outside in and thus usurp the sovereignty of inwardness. By flooding himself with externals, by drowning himself out of himself, he had managed to exert some small degree of control over his fits of despair. Wandering, therefore, was a kind of mindlessness” (City of Glass 61). Cf. Markus Rheindorf, Processes of Embodiment and Spatialization in the Writings of Paul Auster, www.reconstruction.ws/023/rheindorf.htm, 02/05 2005. Benjamin writes in “Surrealism”: “To live in a glass house is a revolutionary virtue par excellence. It is also an intoxication, a moral exhibitionism, that we badly need. Discretion concerning one’s own existence, once an aristocratic virtue, has become more and more an affair of petty-bourgeois parvenus” (GS 2.1:298/SW 2:209). The key to the Trilogy are in this sense Blue’s reflections in Ghosts: “Now, suddenly, with the world as it were removed from him, with nothing much to see but a vague shadow by the name of Black, he finds himself thinking about things that have never occurred to him before, and this, too, has begun to trouble him. If thinking is perhaps too strong a word at this point, a slightly more modest term – speculation, for example – would not be far from the mark. To speculate, from the Latin speculatus [sic], meaning mirror or looking glass. For in spying out at Black across the street, it is as though Blue were looking into a mirror, and instead of merely watching another, he finds that he is also watching himself ” (Ghosts 146). In an interview, Auster states that all of his books are really “the same book,” “the story of my obsessions, I suppose. The saga of the things that haunt me,” “Interview with Larry Mccaffery and Sinda Gregory,” p. 295. For a discussion of transparency in Modernism cf. Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 1992). Cf. Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, p. 65.

Notes

293

44. Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny, pp. 184–5. 45. The motif of the mirror was so important for Benjamin as to deserve a whole (although short) convolute in The Arcades Project, convolute “R.” 46. Cf. Tani, The Doomed Detective, pp. 48–9. 47. Who, writes Joseph Walker, “like the cow-boy and the superhero, […] is part of the collective American fantasy of the self-determined man,” Joseph S. Walker, “Criminality and (Self ) Discipline: The Case of Paul Auster,” Modern Fiction Studies 48.2 (Summer 2002), p. 396. 48. Cf. Malmgren, “Detecting/Writing the Real,” p. 179. 49. “Interview with Joseph Mallia,” p. 279. 50. Walker, “Criminality and (Self ) Discipline,” p. 405. 51. Steven E. Alford, “Mirrors of Madness: Paul Auster’s the New York Trilogy,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 37.1 (Fall 1995), p. 17. 52. Peter Kierkegaard, for example, considers it a necessary standpoint for attaining some sort of “truth” (Cf. Kirkegaard, “Cities, Signs and Meaning in Walter Benjamin and Paul Auster,” ); Walker sees it as a violation of the normative conventions of fiction (Cf. Walker, “Criminality and (Self ) Discipline,” ); John Zilcosky argues that it is a revolutionary interrogation of the concept of authorship (Cf. John Zilcosky, “The Revenge of the Author: Paul Auster’s Challenge to Theory,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 39.3 (Spring 1998). 53. “The identity of the narrator,” Alford continues, “lies in that ontologically indistinct realm of textuality, a linguistic black hole in which our common sense understanding of the proper separation of ontologically discrete categories – fiction, history, speculation, the empirical world of common, personal identity, as well as the conventional distinctions between author, narrator, and character – collapses,” Alford, “Mirrors of Madness,” p. 27. 54. As Madeleine Sorapure describes them. Cf. Madeleine Sorapure, “The Detective and the Author: City of Glass,” Beyond the Red Notebook: Essays on Paul Auster, ed. Dennis Barone (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), p. 72. 55. Cameron Golden, “From Punishment to Possibility: Re-Imagining Hitchcockian Paradigms in the New York Trilogy,” Mosaic: a Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 37.3 (September 2004), p. 94. 56. Golden, “From Punishment to Possibility,” p. 94. 57. Walker actually interprets the crime in Auster’s fiction in a very different way. For Walker, Auster’s characters commit crimes in order to define their individuality against and oppressive society. Cf. Walker, “Criminality and (Self ) Discipline.” 58. Russell, “Deconstructing the New York Trilogy,” p. 72. 59. “‘Religious’ might not be the word I would use, but I agree that these books are mostly concerned with spiritual questions, the search for spiritual grace. At some point or another, all three characters undergo a form of humiliation, of degradation, and perhaps that is a necessary stage in discovering who they are. […] The

294

60.

61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66.

67.

68.

69. 70.

Notes determination to reject everyday American life, to go against the grain, to discover the more solid foundation for oneself,” “Interview with Joseph Mallia,” p. 280–1. Cf., for example, Little, “Nothing to Go On,” ; Sorapure, “Paul Auster”; Walker, “Criminality and (Self ) Discipline”; William Lavender, “The Novel of Critical Engagement: Paul Auster’s ‘City of Glass’,” Contemporary Literature 34.2 (Summer 1993). Cf. Willett, The Naked City, pp. 56–8. Tani, The Doomed Detective, p. 78. Tani, The Doomed Detective, p. 148. Tani, The Doomed Detective, p. 45. Tani, The Doomed Detective, p. 46. This last metaphor by Tani catches exactly Benjamin’s point: “The detective is a scientist, but a particular kind of scientist, a humanist, an archaeologist. In fact both the detective and the archaeologist ‘dig out,’ and their reconstruction is only partial, limited to what is left after,” Tani, The Doomed Detective, p. 47. In an essay on Hamsung’s Hunger, Auster theorizes a view that can easily be transposed to his own writings: “historical time is obliterated in favor of inner duration. With only an arbitrary beginning and an arbitrary ending, the novel faithfully records the vagaries of the narrator’s mind, following each thought from its mysterious inception through all its meanderings, until it dissipates and the next thought begins. What happens is allowed to happen,” Paul Auster, “The Art of Hunger,” The Art of Hunger: Essays, Prefaces, Interviews, and the Red Notebook (London and New York: Penguin Books, 1997), p. 10. He hints at the notion of history-as-text in a late note to “On the Concept of History”: “if one considers history as a text,” he writes, “then to it applies what a new author says of literary texts: the past has deposited in them images, which one could compare to those captured by a photosensitive Plate. […] The historical method is a philological one, at the basis of which lies the book of life. ‘To read what was never written,’ said Hofmannsthal. The reader to whom we here refer, is the true historian” (GS 1.3:1238; cf. also N15a,1). History is to be considered a text in the sense that it becomes the object of the historian’s “reading,” which has to unveil the traces of the history of the oppressed, the traces that have been erased by the victors. Therefore, not only a text, but rather the object of a philological investigation that reads it like a text. Jameson famously makes the same point: “History is not a text,” he writes, “not a narrative, master or otherwise, but that, as an absent cause, it is inaccessible to us except in textual form, and that our approach to it and to the Real itself necessarily passes through its prior textualization, its narrativization in the political unconscious,” Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (London: Methuen, 1981), p. 35. Alford, “Mirrors of Madness,” p. 29. Cf. Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, p. 369.

Notes

295

71. Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, p. 19. 72. Francesca Benedict, for example, writes: “As the ties between reality and fiction are redefined, so too is the relation between story and history. As creativity becomes more relevant than facts, so an imaginative response to history becomes more relevant than history itself,” Francesca Benedict, “From Story to History and Back: History in North American Literature in the 1980s,” Narrative Turns and Minor Genres in Postmodernism, ed. Theo D’haen and Hans Bertens (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1995), p. 129. 73. As Margaret Cohen eruditely explains, the phantasmagoria was a popular optical spectacle invented in the late 1790s by Etienne-Gaspard Robertson: a movable magic lantern called phantoscope projected for the spectators a parade of ghosts, usually historical figures. The term famously entered first Marx’s and then Benjamin’s vocabulary. Cf. Margaret Cohen, Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1993), p. 232.

Chapter 4 4.1 The Decay of Love 1.

2.

3. 4.

Sigrid Weigel argues that “Eros,” though downplayed and hardly investigated by Benjamin scholars, is a Leitmotif in Benjamin’s writings, from his early texts to the Arcades Project. It is present in reflections on love, sexuality and the relation between sexes, it the difference between creation and procreation, between Sex and Spirit, eros and language, in the semiotics of closeness and distance, and most obviously in the motif of the prostitute and her relations to the flâneur, fashion, modernity and the revolution in the behaviour of sexes. Cf. Sigrid Weigel, “Eros,” Benjamins Begriffe, ed. Michael Opitz and Erdmut Wizisla, vol. 1 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000). Christine Buci-Glucksmann, “Catastrophic Utopia: The Feminine as Allegory of the Modern,” trans. Katharine Streip, The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Catherine Gallagher and Thomas Laqueur (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1987), p. 220. The motif of Eros and creation is also present in the 1916 “Socrates” (GS 2.1:129–32/ SW 1:52–4). For an analysis of this piece, cf. Weigel, “Eros,” pp. 306–8. Cf. Sigrid Weigel, “‘the Female-Has-Been’ and the ‘First-Born Male of His Work’: From Gender Images to Dialectical Images in Benjamin’s Writings,” New

296

5. 6.

7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12.

13. 14.

Notes Formations. A Journal of Culture/Theory/Politics. Issue dedicated to The Actuality of Walter Benjamin.20 (Summer 1993), p. 30. Sven Birkerts, “Walter Benjamin, Flâneur: A Flânerie,” Iowa Review 13.3–4 (1982), p. 169. Cf. Elisabeth Wilson, The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder, and Women (Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford: University of California Press, 1991). Cf. also Elisabeth Wilson, Contradictions of Culture: Cities, Culture, Women (London: Sage, 2001). Wilson, The Sphinx in the City, p. 8. Judith R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (London: Virago Press, 1992), p. 21. The picture is complex, as Deborah Epstein Nord explains: “the prostitute occupies a crucial place in virtually all urban description of the nineteenth century. Her meaning, however, is by no means monolithic. The sexually tainted woman can stand variously as an emblem of social suffering or debasement, as a projection of or analogue to the male stroller’s alienated self, as an instrument of pleasure and partner in urban sprees, as a rhetorical and symbolic means of isolating and quarantining urban ills in the midst of an otherwise buoyant metropolis, or as an agent of connection and contamination. From the early to the middle decades of the nineteenth century the image of the prostitute shifts from isolated reminder of human alienation to reflector of the social or collective state. Somewhat crudely put, to the Romantic sensibility she signifies the human being alone and separate; to the Victorian sensibility she suggests a flaw in the social system that threatens to implicate all. What remains constant, however, is the prostitute’s otherness, her use as trope, her ultimate transience and disposability,” Deborah Epstein Nord, “The Urban Peripatetic: Spectator, Streetwalker, Woman Writer,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 46 (1991), pp. 353–4. Wilson, The Sphinx in the City, p. 7. Graeme Gilloch, Myth and Metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the City (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), p. 163. Epstein Nord adds that, under the objectifying male gaze, every woman strolling in the street became a prostitute: “in the male discourse of urban description, then, public woman is fallen woman: she may function as a projection of the male stroller’s alienation or as an emblem of social contamination that must be purged, but in either case she is an object,” Epstein Nord, “The Urban Peripatetic,” p. 374. Deborah L. Parson, Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the City, and Modernity (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 37. Margaret Mahony Stoljar argues that “an important linguistic motif of the Arcades Project [is] female beauty as an object of pleasure for the male spectator,” Margaret Mahony Stoljar, “Sirens of Gaslight and Odalisques of the Oil Lamp: The Language of Desire in the Arcades Project,” With the Sharpened Axe of Reason: Approaches

Notes

15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31.

32.

297

to Walter Benjamin, ed. Gerhard Fischer (Oxford and Washington, D.C.: Berg, 1996), p. 99. Wilson warns also against the opposite romanticisation of the prostitute as victim: “yet to be a prostitute was not inevitably to be a victim – this notion was, and is, a feminist as well as a male romance of prostitution,” Elisabeth Wilson, “The Invisible Flâneur,” New Left Review.191 (1992), p. 16. Shannon Bell, Reading, Writing, and Rewriting the Prostitute Body (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 72. Janet Wolff, “The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity,” The Problems of Modernity: Adorno and Benjamin, ed. Andrew Benjamin (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), p. 148. The use of the masculine pronoun is not an oversight here, speaking of Baudelaire and Benjamin. Charles Baudelaire, “Les fleurs du mal,” Oevres Completes, pp. 90–1. Charles Baudelaire, “Fusées,” Oevres Completes, p. 1189. Charles Bernheimer, Figures of Ill Repute: Representing Prostitution in NineteenthCentury France (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1997), p. 1. Charles Baudelaire, “Mon coeur mis a nu,” Oevres Completes, p. 1220. Baudelaire, “Fusées,” p. 1189. Baudelaire, “Fusées,” p. 1189. Baudelaire, “Mon coeur mis a nu,” p. 1226. Another entry reads: “Foutre, c’est aspirer à entrer dans un autre, e l’artiste ne sort jamais de lui-même” (“to fuck means to enter into another, and the artist never exists from himself ”), Baudelaire, “Mon coeur mis a nu,” p. 1228. Baudelaire, “Fusées,” p. 1189. Charles Baudelaire, “Le peintre de la vie moderne,” Oevres Completes, p. 889. Charles Baudelaire, “Le spleen de Paris,” Oevres Completes, p. 296. Benjamin, commenting on this passage, argues that this holy prostitution of the soul “can be nothing other than the prostitution of the commodity’s soul […] It is this very poésie and this very charité which prostitutes claim for themselves. They tried the secrets of the free market; in this respect, commodities had no advantage over them. Some of the commodity’s charms were based on the market, and each of these turned into a means of power” (GS 1.2:559/SW 4:32). Baudelaire, “Mon coeur mis a nu,” p. 1220. Bernheimer, Figures of Ill Repute, pp. 71–3. John Barberet argues that the prostitute in Baudelaire is merely a mediation to empathise with the crowd (of males), a “communicating vessel linking the poet to other men.” Cf. John R. Barberet, “Baudelaire: Homoérotismes,” Articulations of Difference: Gender Studies and Writing in French, ed. Dominique Fisher and Lawrence R. Schehr (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), p. 54. Baudelaire, “Le peintre de la vie moderne,” p. 916.

298 33. 34. 35. 36.

37.

38. 39. 40. 41.

42.

Notes Baudelaire, “Mon coeur mis a nu,” p. 1207. Baudelaire, “Mon coeur mis a nu,” p. 1221. Bernheimer, Figures of Ill Repute, p. 74. The nineteenth century sees the inclusion of women in the production processes, and thus a “masculinization” of women; “Baudelaire affirms these traits,” Benjamin writes. “At the same time, however, he seeks to free them from the domination of the economy. Hence the purely sexual accent which he comes to give this developmental tendency in woman. The paradigm of the lesbian woman bespeaks the ambivalent position of ‘modernity’ vis-à-vis technological development” ( J49a,1). Cf. Bell, Reading, Writing, and Rewriting the Prostitute Body, p. 44; and Dominique D. Fisher, “The Silent Erotic: Rhetoric of Baudelaire’s Mirrors,” Articulations of Difference: Gender Studies and Writing in French, ed. Dominique Fisher and Lawrence R. Schehr (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), p. 36. Baudelaire, “Le peintre de la vie moderne,” pp. 909–10, emphasis added. Baudelaire, “Le peintre de la vie moderne,” pp. 912–13. Baudelaire, “Le peintre de la vie moderne,” pp. 912–13. In Kraus Benjamin identifies the opposite movement, one that goes from Spirit to Sexuality: “the life of letters is existence under the aegis of mere mind, as prostitution is existence under the aegis of mere sexuality. The demon, however, who leads the whore to the street exiles the man of letters to the courtroom. […] Robert Scheu rightly perceived that for Kraus prostitution was a natural form, not a social deformation, of female sexuality. Yet it is only the interlacing of sexual with commercial intercourse that constitutes the character of prostitution. It is a natural phenomenon as much in terms of its natural economic aspect (since it is a manifestation of commodity exchange) as in terms of its natural sexuality. ‘Contempt for prostitution? / Harlots worse than thieves? / Learn this: not only is love paid, / but payment, too, wins love!’ This ambiguity – this double nature as twofold naturalness – makes prostitution demonic. But Kraus ‘enlists with the power of nature.’ That the sociological realm never becomes transparent to him – no more in his attack on the press than in his defence of prostitution – is connected with his attachment to nature. That for him the fit state of man appears not as the destiny and fulfilment of nature liberated through revolutionary change, but as an element of nature per se, of an archaic nature without history, in its pristine, primeval state, throws uncertain, disquieting reflections even on his ideas of freedom and humanity. They are not removed from the realm of guilt that Kraus has traversed from pole to pole: from mind to sexuality” (GS 2.1:353–4/SW 2:446–7). Parson notes that in the poems of Les fleurs du mal written to Jean Duval, “she is constantly described as an inanimate, purchasable commodity. Consequently her act of sight is denied. For example, in ‘Avec ses vetements,’ the poet writes that her ‘polished eyes are made of charming stones’ that are precious like diamonds, gold, or steel, referring to them as commodities with surfaces that reflect rather than

Notes

43.

44.

45.

46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

51.

299

actively see or observe. A similar image occurs in ‘Je te donne ces vers,’ in which the woman has ‘eyes of jet,’” Parson, Streetwalking the Metropolis, p. 25. Chow continues though: “this does not mean that the prostitute ‘humanizes’ those feelings and makes them psychologically accessible; rather, her human form becomes a convenient way of staging and figuring those feelings surreally,” Rey Chow, “Walter Benjamin’s Love Affair with Death,” New German Critique 48 (Autumn 1989), p. 86, emphasis in the original. Work is prostitution and earnings from prostitution were not infrequently added to the family wage. Benjamin quotes Marx’s Der historische Materialismus: “The factory workers in France call the prostitution of their wives and daughters the Xth working hour, which is literally correct” (O10,1). Nevertheless, Benjamin points out that the prostitute does not sell her labor power, but sells the fiction of her power for pleasure: “the prostitute does not sell her labour power; her job, however, entails the fiction that she sells her powers of pleasure. Insofar as this represents the utmost extension attainable by the sphere of the commodity, the prostitute may be considered, from early on, a precursor of commodity capitalism” ( J67a,1). Buci-Glucksmann, “The Feminine as Allegory of the Modern,” p. 224. Gilloch, Myth and Metropolis, pp. 162–3. Graeme Gilloch, Walter Benjamin: Critical Constellations (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), p. 209. Gilloch, Myth and Metropolis, p. 120. “The nineteenth century began openly and without reserve to include the woman in the process of commodity production. The theoreticians were united in their opinion that her specific femininity was thereby endangered; masculine traits must necessarily manifest themselves in women after a while. Baudelaire affirms these traits. At the same time, however, he seeks to free them from the domination of the economy. Hence the purely sexual accent which he comes to give this developmental tendency in woman. The paradigm of the lesbian woman bespeaks the ambivalent position of ‘modernity’ vis-à-vis technological development. (What he could not forgive in George Sand, presumably, was her having profaned, through her humanitarian convictions, this image whose traits she bore. Baudelaire says that she was worse than Sade).” ( J49a,1) As Buck-Morss notes, “Benjamin was no apologist for the bourgeois family, believing that lasting relationships within existing society could be maintained only negatively, through the destructive energies which emanate from an unfree desire,” Susan Buck-Morss, “The Flâneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering,” New German Critique 39 (Fall 1986), p. 127. An entry of the Arcades Project reads: “in the erotology of the damned – as that of Baudelaire might be called – infertility and impotence are decisive factors. They alone are what give to the cruel and ill-famed moments of desire in sexual life a purely negative character

300

52. 53. 54.

55. 56.

57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

Notes – something that is lost, it goes without saying, in the act of procreation, as in relations designed to last an entire lifetime (that is, in marriage). These realities instituted for the long term – children, marriage – would lack all assurance of longevity, had not the most destructive energies of the human being entered into their creation, contributing to their stability not less but more than many another energy. But these relations are legitimated, through this contribution, only to the extent that this is really possible for decisive libidinal movements in present-day society” ( J66a,9). Cf. Buck-Morss, “The Flâneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore,” p. 127. Richard Wolin, Walter Benjamin. An Aesthetic of Redemption (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 231. Max Pensky notes how the baroque theme of the dead or dying body re-emerges in Baudelaire’s modern allegories: “the old favourite of allegorical concentration, that is, the dialectical ambiguity concentrated in the dead or dying body, receives in Baudelaire’s poetry a new and modern dimension: a form of sexual perversion horribly drained of all sensuous eroticism, reduced to a mechanized and deadly ritual that echoes the absorption of the worker’s body into the industrial machine,” Max Pensky, Melancholy Dialectics: Walter Benjamin and the Play of Mourning (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), p. 159. Cf. Adorno’s famous “Hornberg letter,” AB 149/CC 113. Weigel argues for a stronger reading: the prostitute is image become flesh, image and body at once, therefore “this image space is a body space in that it comes to representation in the form of bodily innervations, that is, through the bodies of the collective. Such a coincidence of representation and perception, of image and body space predestinates the whore as the central figure of the Passagen-Project. Through reflection on her, it is not only the images that become dialectical images, the allegories that become distorted representations in which the imaginary structure of representation is dispersed from within. But the whores are also the figures on which the materialistic reversal in Benjamin’s thinking in images was completed, a reversal in which the primary material, the corporeality and the organic in man and things entered the foreground, thus forming the concept of ‘body and image space,’” Weigel, “From Gender Images to Dialectical Images in Benjamin’s Writings,” p. 32. Terry Eagleton, Walter Benjamin or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism (London: NLB, 1981), pp. 45–6. Mahony Stoljar, “The Language of Desire in the Arcades Project,” p. 104. Gilloch, Myth and Metropolis, p. 15. Gilloch, Myth and Metropolis, p. 33. Gilloch, Myth and Metropolis, p. 164. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, p. 21.

Notes

301

63. Janet Wolff writes that Benjamin’s images “collude with a patriarchal construction of modernity,” Janet Wolff, “Memoirs and Micrologies: Walter Benjamin, Feminism and Cultural Analysis,” New Formations. A Journal of Culture/Theory/Politics. Issue dedicted to The Actuality of Walter Benjamin.20 (Summer 1993), p. 122. 64. Buck-Morss, “The Flâneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore,” p. 122. 65. Epstein Nord, “The Urban Peripatetic,” p. 353. 66. Buck-Morss, “The Flâneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore,” p. 120.

4.2 Paradoxes of the Unruly Commodity 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

7.

8. 9.

Rebecca Schneider, The Explicit Body in Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 107–8. Schneider, The Explicit Body in Performance, p. 108, second emphasis added. Schneider, The Explicit Body in Performance, p. 108. Schneider, The Explicit Body in Performance, p. 108, emphasis in the original. Shannon Bell, Reading, Writing, and Rewriting the Prostitute Body (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 78. The relationship between feminism and Marxism is complex and cannot be explored here. For introductory reading refer, for example, to Michèle Barrett, Women’s Oppression Today: The Marxist/Feminist Encounter (London and New York: Verso, 1988); Gen Doy, Seeing and Consciousness: Women, Class and Representation (Oxford and Washington D.C.: Berg, 1995); Ann Foreman, Femininity as Alienation: Women and the Family in Marxism and Psychoanalysis (London: Pluto Press, 1977); Ellen Mutari, Heather Boushey and William Fraher IV, ed., Gender and Political Economy: Incorporating Diversity into Theory and Policy (New York and London: M.E. Sharpe, 1997); Lydia Sargent, ed., Women and Revolution: A Discussion of the Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1981). “In the commodity of the prostitute,” Schneider writes, “labour is undisguised, appearing rather as the labour of disguise. As labourer and commodity and seller, the secret bleeds, the mystical properties of the commodity dreamscape are exposed – labour-value is made overtly apparent in the commodity object/subject of the whore,” Schneider, The Explicit Body in Performance, p. 24. Amalia Signorelli, “Alcune riflessioni antropologiche sulla storia della prostituzione in Italia,” Spunti e Ricerche 15 - The Prostitute in Italian Art and Literature (2000), p. 31, emphasis in the original. Written in 1973, Dialogo was staged for the first time in June 1976 in the small theatre Alberichino in Rome by the company La Maddalena, with Michela Caruso in the role of the prostitute and Luciano Roffi in the one of the client, and under

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Notes

the direction of Lu’ Leone and Dacia Maraini. It was published for the first time in 1978 by editor Mastrogiacomo with “A Debate on the Decision of Writing the Text and the Preparation of the Show” as introduction. I will use here my own translation from the more recent version of the text published in Maraini’s collected plays, Fare Teatro 1966–2000 (Milan: Rizzoli, 2000), pp. 393–412, and will refer to it parenthetically in the text as Dialogo. The Anglophone reader can find a translation of the play in Dacia Maraini, Only Prostitutes Marry in May: Four Plays, trans. Rhoda Helfman Kaufman (Toronto, Buffalo, Lancaster: Guernica, 1998), p. 125–176. 10. Cf. M. Grazia Sumeli Weinberg, Invito alla lettura di Dacia Maraini (Pretoria: University of South Africa, 1993), p. 32. 11. The influence of Brecht is clear and repeatedly acknowledged by Maraini, who considers him one of her “fathers.” The provocations aim at shocking the audience, at causing Verfremdung, estrangement, astonishment, alienation, in order to demolish their gender and social convictions and stimulate political consciousness. The continuous twists in the action, Manila’s interior monologues, the three interruptions for debate with the audience, break the linearity of the fabula. The technique of the Haltung, the Gestus, the freezing of the action works through Manila’s coarseness, her sudden commands and the client’s violent reactions. The openness of the structure and the direct involvement of the audience (what Benjamin called “the filling of the orchestra pit,” GS 2.2:539/SW 4:307) and even the perverse humour are all truly Brechtian. Cf. Dacia Maraini, “Un sogno teatrale,” Fare Teatro 1966–2000 (Milan: Rizzoli, 2000), p. ix; Severino Cesari, “La cipolla era un sogno celeste: Intervista con Dacia Maraini,” Dedica a Dacia Maraini, ed. Claudio Cattaruzza (Pordenone: Associazione Provinciale per la Prosa, 2000), pp. 22–3. Elin Diamond has argued that Brecht’s theoretical project is particularly useful to feminist drama, and Dialogo could be used to support this thesis: it stages “a female body in representation that resists fetishization and a viable position for the female spectator.” Although exhibiting a “typical Marxian blindness toward gender relations,” Brecht supplies invaluable theoretical and technical tools for a feminist theatre: Verfremdungseffekt, historicization, Gestus. Cf. Elin Diamond, “Brechtian Theory / Feminist Theory: Toward a Gestic Feminist Criticism,” A Sourcebook of Feminist Theatre and Performance: On and Beyond the Stage, ed. Carol Martin (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 121–2. 12. The dialogue continues: C: E tu non pronunciare quella parola, per favore! M: Perché, ti fa schifo? C: Davanti a me per favore, guarda, davanti a me non dirla, mi fa senso. Manchi di rispetto verso il tuo corpo. […] C: Ti ho pregato di non parlare grassoccio. M: La fica, è grassoccio?

Notes

303

C: Non dire quella parola per favore, mi fa senso. M: Però comprarla un tanto l’etto non ti fa senso. (Dialogo 198) C: Don’t say that word, please! M: Why, does it disgust you? C: In front of me, look, in front of me don’t say it, it repels me. It’s a lack of respect for your own body. […] C: I asked you not to be gross. M: Is “cunt” gross? C: Don’t say that word please, it repels me. M: But buying it by the pound doesn’t repel you, does it? 13. Simone de Beauvoire, The Second Sex, trans. H.M. Parshley (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), p. 192. 14. The pun is untranslatable in English: scodinzolare literally means “to wag one’s tail” and is referred usually to dogs; only figuratively it may mean “to waggle one’s hips,” but the reference to dogs is always explicit. About this passage, Tommasina Gabriele notes that in the first edition of the play the client cried “tu che diavolo sei?” (what the hell are you?), whereas in the recent edition the text reads “tu chi diavolo sei?” (who the hell are you?); the first version thus emphasized even more the character of object of the woman/prostitute. Cf. Tommasina Gabriele, “From Prostitution to Transexuality: Gender Identity and Subversive Sexuality in Dacia Maraini,” MLN 117.1 ( January 2002), p. 243. 15. Whenever he tries to reinstate the empathy, Manila disrupt it with new shockrevelations, as in this passage: C: No, così no. Io ho bisogno di una certa atmosfera, di un certo languore … accendi la radio per favore. Manila accende la radio. Musica. C: Ecco, musica, buio e un corpo caldo di donna, non chiedo altro. M: Vuoi sapere quanti ne faccio al giorno? C: Non mi smontare, stai zitta! M: Dalle tre alle cinque: due. Dalle sei alle otto: cinque. C’é chi preferisce un quarto d’ora per pagare di meno. Sabato ne ho fatti quindici in un pomeriggio. C: Dio che mal di testa! E spegni quell’arnese per favore! (Dialogo 404) C: No, not like that. I need a certain atmosphere, a certain languishing … turn on the radio please. Manila turns on the radio. Music. C: There. Music, darkness and the warm body of a woman, that’s all I ask for. M: Do you want to know how many I go through in a day? C: Don’t put me off, shut up! M: From three to five: two. From six to eight: five. Some prefer just fifteen minutes to pay less. On Saturday I did fifteen in an afternoon. C: God, my head! Shut down that thing please!

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16. Kate Millett, The Prostitution Papers: A Candid Dialogue (Frogmore: Paladin, 1975), pp. 55–6. De Beauvoire already wrote that “so long as the prostitute is denied the rights of a person, she sums up all the forms of feminine slavery at once,” de Beauvoire, The Second Sex, p. 585. 17. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, trans. James Harle Bell and John Richard von Sturmer (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), p. 37. 18. Millett, The Prostitution Papers, pp. 55–6. She continues: “In a sexual culture as unhealthy as our own, it is reiterated again through the manner of our sexual acts that the female is carnality, a thing – cunt. It is as though cunt were posed as the opposite of ego or selfhood, its very antithesis, the negative pole of selfhood or spirit. The sale of women in prostitution reinforces this attitude more powerfully than any other event,” pp. 57–8. 19. In various writings, Maraini dwells on the theory of the paradigm: the prostitute not only epitomizes the sexual servitude of women, but also any act of resistance against it. If a woman resists male narrative, if she claims the right and freedom to decide about her own body and sexuality, then she is called a “whore”: the woman who misbehaves, who has a lover, is unfaithful, but also who is arrogant, insolent, annoying, who is “free” or even simply likes sex, is called a whore. A synonymous for “bad woman,” “prostitute” is a word that every woman confronts countless times: “if she does not follow the rules of the male world that wants her faithful, submissive, discreet, modest, timid, receptive, serviceable, available, ready to sacrifice herself, she will be called a ‘whore,’ a ‘strumpet,’ a ‘slut,’ a ‘bitch.’” The prostitute has become a symbol, a negative myth, specular to the other male myth of the Madonna, the saint, the virgin, and equally petrifying. Women are not granted “the freedom of being human, contradictory, weak and strong, clever and stupid, greedy and generous, like everyone else, but [are] imprisoned into a mould with only two faces: either beast or angel, either despised or exalted, but without mercy.” Patriarchal discourse draws a neat and clear separation between “honest” woman and “lost” woman, a separation and a distance that cannot be filled. Cf. Dacia Maraini, La bionda, la bruna e l’asino: Con gli occhi di oggi sugli anni settanta e ottanta (Milan: Rizzoli, 1987), pp. 163, 167. 20. Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 170. 21. Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, p. 171. 22. Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, p. 193. 23. Woman fits perfectly, for Irigaray, Marx’s description of the commodity: “the submission of ‘nature’ to a ‘labour’ on the part of men who thus constitute ‘nature’ as use value and exchange value; the division of labour among private producerowners who exchange their women-commodities among themselves, but also among producers and exploiters or exploitees of the social order; the standardization of women according to proper names that determine their equivalences; a tendency

Notes

24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

305

to accumulate wealth, that is, a tendency for the representatives of the most ‘proper’ names – the leaders – to capitalize more women that the others; a progression of the social work of the symbolic toward greater and greater abstraction; and so forth,” Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, pp. 172–3. Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, p. 181. Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, pp. 189–90. Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, pp. 196–7, emphasis in the original. She writes: “for, without the exploitation of women, what would become of the social order? What modifications would it undergo if women left behind their condition as commodities – subject to being produced, consumed, valorized, circulated, and so on, by men alone – and took part in elaborating and carrying out exchanges? Not by reproducing, by copying, the ‘phallocratic’ models that have the force of law today, but by socializing in a different way the relation to nature, matter, the body, language, and desire,” p. 191. The argument concludes: “exchanges without identifiable terms, without accounts, without end … Without additions and accumulations, one plus one, woman after woman … Without sequence or number. Without standard or yardstick. Red blood and sham would no longer be differentiated by deceptive envelopes concealing their worth. Use and exchange would be indistinguishable. The greatest value would be at the same time the least kept in reserve. Nature’s resources would be expended without depletion, exchanged without labour, freely given, exempt from masculine transactions: enjoyment without a fee, well-being without pain, pleasure without possession. As for all the strategies and savings, the appropriations tantamount to theft and rape, the laborious accumulation of capital, how ironic all that would be. Utopia? Perhaps. Unless this mode of exchange has undermined the order of commerce from the beginning – while the necessity of keeping incest in the realm of pure pretense has stood in the way of a certain economy of abundance,” pp. 196–7. “Commodities can only enter into relationships under the watchful eyes of their ‘guardians’ […] and the interests of businessmen require that commodities relate to each other as rivals,” Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, p. 196. Adrienne Rich named it a regime of “compulsory heterosexuality,” but the point made is the same. Cf. Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 5.4 (Summer 1980). Cf. “La decisione di fare il testo,” Dialogo di una prostituta con un suo cliente (Padua: Mastrogiacomo Editore, 1978), p. 22. Cf. Schneider, The Explicit Body in Performance, p. 108. More than 30 actors had to be auditioned before finding one willing to strip. In the introduction to the 1978 edition, “La decisione di fare il testo,” the director Lu’ Leone, the actress Michela Caruso and Dacia Maraini discuss the reasons for dropping the traditional “uniform” of the prostitute in Manila:

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Lu’: I wonder why we dressed Manila as a good girl. We should have retained the cliché of the prostitute, at least in the attire. The surprise of finding a woman different from any cliché would have been greater. Dacia: I disagree. Manila dresses like that because she is a peculiar prostitute, who does not conform to the traditional schema. Lu’: Dressed in the traditional way, she would have signified in a much clearer way that the responsibility of what happens is collective, social. Dacia: So you’re saying that, dressed as a normal girl, Manila suggests someone who chose freely rather than someone forced by the circumstances. Michela: The cirtics as well spoke of a “plain” woman. Lu’: The fact is prostitutes sell themselves and therefore wear gaudy garments, they must show themselves, they must distinguish themselves from the others. Michela: The dress helps in the acting. I would have preferred the help of a recognizable attire. Dacia: it depends on where they sell themselves. Where I live, for example, on the Tiber riverside, the most showy are the transvestites. Women dress in a casual way. Besides, Manila is not a proletarian with a taste for pomp. She has an education and choses to sell herself. She dresses more like a student than a vamp. Cf. “La decisione di fare il testo,” pp. 11–12. 34. Schneider, The Explicit Body in Performance, p. 93. 35. Cf. Rodica Diaconescu-Blumenfeld, “Body as Will: Incarnate Voice in Dacia Maraini,” The Pleasure of Writing: Critical Essays on Dacia Maraini, ed. Rodica Diaconescu-Blumenfeld and Ada Testaferri (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2000), pp. 197–9. 36. Diaconescu-Blumenfeld, “Body as Will,” p. 210. Maraini’s poetics flow into an ethics she calls accudimento, where the verb accudire can be translated as “to attend to,” “to be responsible for,” “to take care of.” Accudimento is thus a form of pietas, of compassion, as she explains in an interview: “it means to acknowledge the body of the other and to approach him/her as such,” and is related to the idea of “mothering” (cf. Cesari, “La cipolla era un sogno celeste,” pp. 30–2). The ethics of accudimento certainly echo the debate around the “ethics of care,” expression coined by Carol Gilligan in the 1980s: Gilligan argued that moral reasoning in women is different, more contextual, more rooted in relationality, more concerned with responsibility and inter-personal ties. Her approach has become very influential and has provoked enthusiast adherence as well as fierce rejection among feminists. Cf. Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Cambridge MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1982). Cf. also Fiona Mackay, Love and Politics: Women Politicians and the Ethics of Care (London and New York: Continuum, 2001); Sarah Ruddick, Maternal Thinking: Towards a Politics of Peace (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989); Selma Sevenhuijsen, Citizenship and the Ethics of

Notes



37. 38. 39.

40.

307

Care: Feminist Consideration on Justice, Morality and Politics (London: Routledge, 1998). Cf. Sumeli Weinberg, Invito alla lettura di Dacia Maraini, p. 154. Schneider, The Explicit Body in Performance, p. 89. Schneider, The Explicit Body in Performance, p. 89. “The phantasmagoria of commodities on display,” she continues, “must, to propel exchange, be both separate from reality and suggestive of a reality, indeed productive of the real toward which it infinitely propels itself. The phantasmagoria of the market constructs a real that cannot yet be, or a nostalgic real that once was and might be again (if a product is purchased). That is, it constructs a real that is impossible, that needs always to be brought (bought) into existence by consumers in a scenario of desire which can never be fully satisfied, even as the ‘hit’ of the commodity promise smacks with sensuosity, squarely between the eyes. The real, in this scenario, is always nostalgically or futuristically outside over there, on the other side of fantasy, recessing away from the viewer like the vanishing point of perspective,” p. 95. This is a fundamental issue for feminism, which cannot though be explored in depth here. Patriarchy reified women, it reduced them to objects, meat, cunt. Women’s relationship to their body is therefore at the same time privileged and contradictory: as Maraini writes, the body is a burden on the female condition because women recognize in it “the mythologic site of every possible contradiction: glory and mutilation, power and loss, flattery and laceration” (Dacia Maraini, Un clandestino a bordo (Milan: Rizzoli, 1996), p. 39). “Closer” to their body for physiological reasons – menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding –, women have been historically reduced to it, a body metonymically identified with their sex: cunt. The body constitutes therefore women’s fate, the site of their historical deprivation, on which patriarchy organized its repressive apparatus: it made it passive, silent, desirable, an object to contemplate and possess. Nevertheless, as such, the body also becomes the privileged site for a new confrontation with the patriarchal symbolic order: “the starting point for a consideration of the feminine,” Maraini writes, “must have to do with the body. This has been our reality for so many centuries. So your starting point is reality. Like a slave who starts from the fact of being a slave, of being unnamed, if s/he wants to tell the story of his/her experience. In the same way, women start off from the experience of being bodies. And they drag out their thoughts, including the refusal to be bodies, but starting from this thing which has entered our flesh. Which is, by now, part of our psychology” (Serena Anderlini, “Prolegomena for a Feminist Dramaturgy of the Feminine: Interview with Dacia Maraini,” Diacritics (Summer-Fall 1991), p. 152–3). The gendered body is thus transformed from a prison into a weapon and an instrument of knowledge. This reclamation of the body as site of cultural and political protest and as material foundation of knowledge remains though problematic: it is troubled by the threat of essentialism, the reaffirmation and reinstatement of those very categories

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from which women want to break free. Janet Wolff remarks that the pre-existing codes can always reappropriate the body, in spite of the intention of women, and that patriarchal accounts can lead to justify oppression on the ground of biological and physiological separation and inferiority (cf. Janet Wolff, Feminine Sentences: Essays on Women and Culture [Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990], p. 132). For Rodica Diaconescu-Blumenfeld, Maraini avoids the danger of essentialism by grounding her writing in women’s history, acknowledging her belonging to a feminine collective unconscious but founding her narrative on a specific, contingent, material configuration of perception. The body has a history, it is historically constructed in discourse, and it can thus be re-signified by new revolutionary practices (cf. Rodica Diaconescu-Blumenfeld, “Introduction,” The Pleasure of Writing: Critical Essays on Dacia Maraini, ed. Rodica Diaconescu-Blumenfeld and Ada Testaferri [West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2000], p. 11). The debate on the body is extremely articulated and complex. For further reading cf. Adriana Cavarero, Corpo in figure: Filosofia e politica della corporeitá (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1995); Katie Conboy Nadia Medina and Sarah Stanbury, ed., Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); Rose Weitz, ed., The Politics of Women’s Bodies: Sexuality, Appearance and Behaviour (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 41. Manila replies: M: In parole povere vorresti dire che non hai voglia di pagare. C: Che bisogno c’è di pagare una cosa che viene da te spontaneamente? Questo é amore, Manila, niente altro che amore. (Dialogo 407–8) M: In other words, you’re saying that you don’t intend to pay. C: Why paying for something that comes spontaneously from you? This is love, Manila, nothing but love. 42. The power relations of the exchange based on physical difference are reinstated at the end of the play: the client is portrayed as a left-wing comrade, he quotes Lenin, is involved in the election campaign, has been in the communist party and claims to stand “per la ragione e il cuore” (“for reason and heart”) and “contro la violenza, […] per la concordia, l’armonia, la vita collectiva, i nuovi valori” (“against violence, […] for harmony, collective life, the new values,” Dialogo, 408, 409); he keeps moralizing about prostitution but finally recurs to the use of force and even tries to use a moral argument as a final excuse not to pay: M: Mi hai stufato. Paga! C: E come me lo imponi, eh, amore mio? Come fai se io rifiuto, che fai? Chiami la polizia? O tiri fuori la pistola? Ma guardati un po’, non hai statura, non hai muscoli, non hai fiato, non hai manco il cazzo, che vuoi fare? Io, guarda, prendo la porta e me ne vado, ciao! Questo per dimostrarti che hai bisogno di un protettore. Se ci fossi io là fuori nessuno oserebbe tattarti in questo modo, capisci?

Notes

43. 44. 45. 46.

47. 48. 49.

50. 51.

309

M: Non fare l’idiota. E pagami quello che devi. Non parlavi di ordine prima, di moralitá? E allora comincia col rispettare i patti. C: La moralitá consisterebbe nell’eliminare la prostituzione. Strutture nuove per una nuova convivenza civile! Tie’, ti do la metà. Il resto la prossima volta. Ciao, amore! (Dialogo 412) M: I’ve had enough! Pay! C: How are you going to force me, my love? What’ll you do if I refuse? Call the police? Pull a gun? But look at you, you have no presence, no muscles, no resistance, you even haven’t got a dick, what do you intend to do? Look, I just leave, ciao! Just to show you that you need a pimp. If I were looking after you no-one would dare to treat you like this, you understand? M: Don’t be an idiot. And pay me what you owe me. Weren’t you talking about order and morality a moment ago? Then start by respecting the deal. C: Morality would consist in eliminating prostitution. New structures for a new social harmony! Take, I give you half. The rest next time. Ciao my love! Bell, Reading, Writing, and Rewriting the Prostitute Body, p. 186. Bell, Reading, Writing, and Rewriting the Prostitute Body, p. 102, 185–9. Schneider, The Explicit Body in Performance, p. 44. Schneider refers specifically to this passage from Lacan: “How can we fail to see that awakening works in two directions – and that the awakening that re-situates us in a constituted and represented reality carries out two tasks? The real has to be sought beyond the dream – in what the dream has enveloped, hidden from us, behind the lack of representation of which there is only one representative. This is the real that governs our activities more than any other and it is psychoanalysis that designates it for us,” Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of PsychoAnalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Penguin, 1994), p. 60. Schneider, The Explicit Body in Performance, p. 104. Schneider, The Explicit Body in Performance, p. 104. Bell’s and Schneider’s position is not shared by everyone and the issue remains very problematic and divisive. Cf. for example Sheila Jeffreys, The Idea of Prostitution (Melbourne: Spinifex, 1997); Laurie Shrage, Moral Dilemmas of Feminism: Prostitution, Adultery, and Abortion (New York and London: Routledge, 1994); Paola Tabet, La grande beffa: Sessualitá delle donne e scambio sessuo-economico (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2004). Cf. Maraini, La bionda, la bruna e l’asino, p. 170. Maraini, La bionda, la bruna e l’asino, p. 78. “Desperation” and “hopelessness” are to be read in a wide sense: for Maraini the “heroic” years of feminism, of the great demonstrations, the meetings, the self-consciousness groups, the cultural initiatives, of which Dialogo is a product, are over. As a historical phenomenon, she argues, it has come to an end. Today’s reality is different, something she proposes to call “post-feminism,” or better, “dalla parte delle donne” (“on women’s side”).

310

52.

53.

54. 55.

Notes The theatre La Maddalena, where Dialogo was produced and staged, is a melancholic symbol of the new times: now the floors are water-soaked and cracked, the archives are empty, humidity devours the walls, the posters of the shows are lost, the pictures of the sets disappeared, the tapes are gone. The work of those heroic years seems to have crashed into a void. Feminism has a strong presence in the universities, but in the social arena it is out of fashion, a historic ruin. Women have obtained (at least in Italy and the West) the rights they claimed in the 1970s, but today “femininity” is the new catchword, marriage has been “re-discovered” and the traditional roles persisted despite the blows of the movement. Therefore, she wonders, “what certainties can have a feminist without feminism?” Cf. M. Grazia Sumeli Weinberg, “Il femminismo con un altro nome: Intervista a Dacia Maraini,” Studi D’Italianistica nell’Africa Australe / Italian Studies in Southern Africa 16.2 (2003), pp. 49–50; Dacia Maraini, “Reflections on the Logical and Illogical Bodies of My Sexual Compatriots,” trans. Rodica Diaconescu-Blumenfeld, The Pleasure of Writing: Critical Essays on Dacia Maraini, ed. Rodica Diaconescu-Blumenfeld and Ada Testaferri (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2000), p. 37; Maraini, La bionda, la bruna e l’asino, p. xxvi. Despite the greater sexual freedom enjoyed by women and their willingness to engage in intimate relationships, the number of prostitutes in Italy dramatically rose in the late twentieth century, with the influx of recent immigrants from Africa and Eastern Europe. The issue, again, is thus not sexual urge, but sexual intercourse as a manifestation of power over a weaker body. Cf. Signorelli, “Alcune riflessioni antropologiche sulla storia della prostituzione in Italia,” pp. 32–5. Maraini writes: “on the street you can find big coloured billboards that parade lying women offering their bottom to the passer-by; in movies other women let themselves be stripped, manipulated, mounted like goats, always smiling and winking; not to mention magazines, where women’s body is exposed in gynaecological postures,” Maraini, La bionda, la bruna e l’asino, pp. 101–2. Maraini, La bionda, la bruna e l’asino, pp. 101–2. Maraini, Un clandestino a bordo, p. 80.

Notes

311

Chapter 5 5.1 The Trash of History 1.

2. 3.

4. 5.

6. 7.

8.

The proceedings of the conference are published in Heinz Wismann (ed.), Walter Benjamin et Paris. Colloque International 27–29 juin 1983 (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1986). A “considerably abridged” version of Wohlfarth’s paper can be found in English translation as Irving Wohlfarth, “Et Cetera? The Historian as Chiffonnier,” New German Critique 39 (Fall 1986) : 142–68. H.-A. Frégier’s Des classes dangereuses de la population dans les grandes villes – et des moyens de les rendre meilleures (Paris, 1840). Benjamin quotes from Hermann Lotze: “being reduced to rags is a specific form of poverty – by no means the superlative form. ‘Poverty takes on the peculiar character of raggedness when it occurs amidst a society whose existence is founded on an intricate and richly articulated system for the satisfaction of needs. Insofar as poverty borrows bits and pieces from this system, fragments isolated from all context, it becomes subject to needs from which it can find no … lasting and decent deliverance” ( J83a,1). “When the new industrial processes gave refuse a certain value, ragpickers appeared in the cities in larger number. They worked for middlemen and constituted a sort of cottage industry located in the streets” (GS 1.2:521/SW 4:8). Ratcliffe continues: “even with the introduction of poubelles, however, the rag picker still managed to insert himself in the system and the trade survived until the police prohibited it just after the Second World War,” Barrie M. Ratcliffe, “Perceptions and Realities of the Urban Margins: The Rag Pickers of Paris in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century,” Canadian Journal of History 27.2 (August 1992), p. 199. Ratcliffe argues that over a third of ragpickers were women. Cf. Ratcliffe, “Perceptions and Realities of the Urban Margins,” p. 218. “The Cité Dorée was the ragpicker’s metropolis” ( J88a,5). The Cité Dorée was a site in Paris first occupied by workers from the national workshops in 1848 and that was gradually occupied by homeless and ragpickers. It was named after M. Dorée, the one-time owner of the land, but in French Cité Dorée means “gilded city”: the sarcasm in this denomination is clear. Wohlfarth so comments this entry: “The lumpenproletariat is that déclassé segment of the lower classes that has been regularly excluded from the Marxist revolution, just as Lumpen, Abfall and Abhub constitute the waste-products rather that the designated objects of Hegelian Aufhebung. Such is, however, the logic of redemp-

312

9.

10. 11.

12. 13.

14.

15.

16.

Notes tion that – pace Nietzsche – only the deformed can remedy the world’s deformity,” Wohlfarth, “Et Cetera? The Historian as Chiffonnier,” p. 147. Benjamin quotes again from Frégier: “like salaried workers, they have a habit of frequenting taverns … Like them, and more than them, ragpickers and particularly among the older women, spirits hold an attraction like nothing else … the ragpickers are not always content with ordinary wine in these taverns; they like to order mulled wine, and they take great offence if this drink does not contain, along with a strong dose of sugar, the aroma produced by the use of lemons” (a3,2). Charles Baudelaire, “Du vin et du haschisch,” Oevres Completes, p. 415. Wholfarth comments: “Benjamin underlines [when he quotes this passage in The Arcades Project; cf. J68,4] the phrase ‘tout ce qu’elle a brisé, il le catalogue, il le collectionne.’ The passage could hardly have failed to seize his attention. Not merely does it, as he observes, constitute an extended metaphor for Baudelaire’s philosophy of poetic composition. It almost reads as if, mutatis mutandis (the motto, this, of the literary rag-man), it had been written with Benjamin’s own archival prowlings in mind,” Wohlfarth, “Et Cetera? The Historian as Chiffonnier,” pp. 151–2. Charles Baudelaire, “Les fleurs du mal,” Oevres Completes, p. 177. Baudelaire, “Les fleurs du mal,” p. 155. One can also read the description of Constantin Guys in Le peintre de la vie moderne as a picture of the modern artist as a collector of chance sights, of loose rhymes, of le transitoire, le fugitive, le contingent, that is, of what the metropolis refuses and rejects. “The ‘jerky gait’ of the ragpicker [cf. J79a,5] is not necessarily due to the effect of alcohol. Every few moments, he must stop to gather refuse, which he throws into his wicker basket” ( J77,4). “Baudelaire unites the poverty of the ragpicker with the scorn of the cadger and the despair of the parasite” ( J84a,4). Wholfarth also quotes the Baudelaire’s passages above, but, on the other hand, highlights the differences between Baudelaire’s and Benjamin’s ragpicker: “Baudelaire’s chiffonnier dreams of a (more or less) socialist reversal in order to compensate himself for the sordid realities of his daily existence. The whole point of his escapist fantasies (‘glorieux projects’) is that they should be severed from any practical relation to his actual work. The ‘illumination’ of his Benjaminian counterpart is, by contrast, a ‘profane’ one. It is in and through his sober activity as a rag-picker that he conspires against the existing order. His ‘glorious project’ is nothing other than to pick up the refuse and thereby to ‘raise up the victims’,” Wohlfarth, “Et Cetera? The Historian as Chiffonnier,” p. 151. In this passage on One-Way Street, for example, beggars are compared to texts: “we deplore the beggars in the South, forgetting that their persistence in front of our noses is as justified as a scholar’s before a difficult text. No shadow of hesitation, no slightest wish or deliberation in our faces escapes their notice” (GS 4.1:146/ SW 1:486).

Notes

313

17. Graeme Gilloch, Myth and Metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the City (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), p. 15. The passage continues: “they have access to a vision of society that is dereifying and critically negating. […] Those who inhabit the fringes of the urban complex become a source of revolutionary insight and illumination.” This passage of Berlin Chronicle is an example: “only those for whom poverty or vice turns the city into a landscape in which they stray from dark till sunrise know it in a way denied to me” (GS 6:488/SW 2:612). On the “representation” of the ragpicker, Ratcliffe writes: “many witnesses, indeed, depicted rag pickers as noble savages, as the hunters and gatherers of the urban jungle. They did so by stressing their independence (they were self employed), by pointing to instances of their honesty, by dwelling on the conventional figure of the chiffonnier philosopher, capable of reflecting on the human condition, thereby rising above his misery,” Ratcliffe, “Perceptions and Realities of the Urban Margins,” p. 208. 18. As Buck-Morss writes, “to inhabit the street as one’s living room [like the flâneur], is quite a different thing from needing them as a bedroom, bathroom or kitchen, where the most intimate aspects of one’s life are not protected from the view of strangers and ultimately, the police,” Susan Buck-Morss, “The Flâneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering,” New German Critique 39 (Fall 1986), p. 118. 19. The flesh-and-blood ragpicker “is so abjectly dependent on the laws of exchangevalue that he can reproduce his own existence only by directly serving the reproductive needs of the capitalist economy […]. Whereas the real-life chiffonnier seeks to salvage his own existence by collecting debris that is to be fed back into the jaws of (an allegorically ‘capitalized’) Industry, thereby paying the mythical ‘divinity’ the strange tribute of serving her own ‘waste’ into her jaws, his literary counterpart seeks, by contrast, to save his ‘treasure’ from the capitalist order or things in order to construct objects that will help upset its digestive system. […] The actual chiffonnier is subject to the production and circulation of commodities, to use- and exchange-value […], the metaphorical rag-picker opposes a militant, Brechtian utilitarianism to the ‘interest-free pleasure’ (interesseloses Wohlgefallen) of classical bourgeois aesthetics,” Wohlfarth, “Et Cetera? The Historian as Chiffonnier,” p. 152. 20. Cf. for example the incipit of “The Life of Students” (GS 2.1:75–6/SW 1:37–8). 21. “That which lies here in ruins [Trümmern], the highly significant fragment, the remnant [Bruchstück], is, in fact, the finest material in baroque creation” (GS 1.1:354/OT 178). 22. “When, as is the case in the Trauerspiel, history becomes part of the setting, it does so as script. The word ‘history’ stands written on the countenance of nature in the characters of transience. The allegorical physiognomy of the nature-history, which is put on stage in the Trauerspiel, is present in reality in the form of the ruin [Ruine]. In the ruin history has physically merged into the setting. And in this

314

23. 24.

25. 26.

27.

28. 29.

30.

Notes guise history does not assume the form of the process of an eternal life so much as that of irresistible decay. Allegory thereby declares itself to be beyond beauty. Allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things” (GS 1.1:353–4/OT 177–8). “The dry rebuses which remain contain an insight, which is still available to the confused investigator” (GS 1.1:352/OT 176). Ackbar Abbas, “On Fascination: Walter Benjamin’s Images,” New German Critique 48 (Fall 1989), pp. 47–8. Susan Sontag also stresses that “the genius of Surrealism was to generalize with ebullient candour the baroque cult of ruins; to perceive that the nihilistic energies of the modern era make everything a ruin or fragment […]. A world whose past has become (by definition) obsolete, and whose present churns out instant antiques,” Susan Sontag, Under the Sign of Saturn (New York: Farrar - Straus - Giroux, 1980), p. 120. “The trick by which this world of things is mastered – it is more proper to speak of a trick than a method – consists in the substitution of a political for a historical view of the past. (GS 2.1:300/SW 2:210) As Benjamin will write to Scholem in the summer of 1935, “the work [Arcades] represents both the philosophical application of surrealism – and thereby its sublation [Aufhebung] – as well as the attempt to retain the image of history in the most inconspicuous corners of existence – the detritus of history, as it were” (GB 5:138/C 505). Old meaningless inscriptions and signs that by now signify nothing, “umbrellas and canes […] displayed in serried ranks,” mannequins wearing “orthopaedic belts and bandages wind round the white bellies” or sporting “richly undulating masses, petrified coiffures,” “souvenirs and bibelots” of a “hideous aspect,” “manuals of lovemaking beside devotional prints in colour,” “types of collar studs for which we no longer know the corresponding collars and shirts,” “naked puppet bodies with bald heads wait[ing] for hairpieces and attire,” “combs [that] swim about, frog-green and coral-red, as in an aquarium,” “trumpets turn[ed] to conches, ocarinas to umbrella handles,” “and lying in the fixative pans from a photographer’s darkroom is birdseed” (GS 5.2:1041–3/AP, 871–2). Max Pensky, “Tactics of Remembrance: Proust, Surrealism, and the Origin of the Passagenwerk,” Walter Benjamin and the Demands of History, ed. Michael p. Steinberg (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1996), p. 164. To the Arcades Project one could refer the words Benjamin uses for the baroque Trauerspiel: “in the ruins of great buildings the idea of the plan speaks more impressively than in lesser buildings, however well preserved they are […]. In the spirit of allegory it is conceived from the outset as a ruin, a fragment. Others may shine resplendently as on the first day; this form preserves the image of beauty to the very last” (GS 1.1:409/OT 235). Cf. Wohlfarth, “Et Cetera? The Historian as Chiffonnier,” p. 80.

Notes

315

31. Cf. Wohlfarth, “Et Cetera? The Historian as Chiffonnier,” p. 147. All phenomena have to be rescued thus from a destiny of “monumentality.” Benjamin writes: “what are phenomena rescued from? Not only, and not in the main, from the discredit and neglect into which they have fallen, but from the catastrophe represented very often by a certain strain in their dissemination, their ‘enshrinement as heritage.’ – They are saved through the exhibition of the fissure within them. – There is a tradition that is catastrophe” (N9,4). 32. Wholfarth notes that a certain form of historical scavenging belongs to historicism as well: “there is […] an unconscious historicist as well as a conscious materialist version of the historian as rag-picker. Where the latter ‘blasts’ (heraussprengen, GS 1.2:703) his finds out of the ‘homogeneous course of history,’ rescues them from their context, the former arbitrarily ‘picks out’ (herausgreifen, N10,a1) some inert object, only to place it back into that continuum. […] It is patronized by those who, in their impotence, cannot live (with) the present – the only engagement worthy of the name. unable to seize the day, they indiscriminately embrace any old past, passing off their promiscuity as so much empathy. The historicist is a culture-vulture. He scavenges off the garbage of other times and places, the ruins of Western Civ, in search of sadly inadequate surrogates for the ‘soul’ he is in the very process of losing. Some rag-pickers, clearly, have neither dignity nor shame,” Wohlfarth, “Et Cetera? The Historian as Chiffonnier,” p. 153. 33. The overcoming of the phantasmagorical historicism takes on Nietzschean (and Brechtian) overtones: “the destructive character is young and cheerful. For destroying rejuvenates, because it clears away the traces of our own age; it cheers, because everything cleared away means to the destroyer a complete reduction, indeed a rooting out, of his own condition. Really, only the insight into how radically the world is simplified when tested for its worthiness for destruction leads to such an Apollonian image of the destroyer” (GS 4.1:397/SW 2:541). 34. “Allegory views existence, as it does art, under the sign of fragmentation [Zerbrochenheit] and ruin [Trümmer]. L’art pour l’art erects the kingdom of art outside profane existence. Common to both is the renunciation of the idea of harmonious totality in which – according to the doctrine of German Idealism no less than that of French eclecticism – art and profane existence are merged” ( J56a,6). 35. Cf. Max Pensky, Melancholy Dialectics: Walter Benjamin and the Play of Mourning (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), p. 168. 36. “In allegory the observer is confronted with the facies hippocratica of history as a petrified, primordial landscape. Everything about history that, from the very beginning, has been untimely, sorrowful, unsuccessful, is expressed in a farce – or rather in a death’s head. […] This is the heart of the allegorical way of seeing, of the baroque, secular explanation of history as the Passion of the world; its importance resides solely in the stations of its decline” (GS 1.1:343/OT 166).

316

Notes

37. “Of all the Baudelairean poems, ‘La destruction’ comprises the most relentless elaboration of the allegorical intention. The ‘bloody retinue,’ which the poet is forced by the demon to contemplate, is the court of allegory – the scattered apparatus by dint of which allegory has so disfigured and so unsettled the world of things that only the fragments of that world are left to it now, as object of its brooding. The poem breaks off abruptly; it itself gives the impression – doubly surprising in a sonnet – of something fragmentary” ( J68,2). 38. “Spleen is the feeling that corresponds to catastrophe in permanence” ( J66a,4). 39. Cf. the letter to Florens Christian Rang of December 9, 1923: “criticism (where it is identical with interpretation and the opposite of all current methods of art appreciation) is the representation of an idea. Ideas’ intensive infinitude characterizes them as monads. Allow me to define it: criticism is the mortification of works of art” (GB 2:393/C 224). 40. The image of the chemical agents, which dissolve the components of the chemical reaction into a new substance, is an old one, as demonstrate a letter to Erbert Belmore of 1916: “true criticism does not attack its object: it is like a chemical substance that attacks another only in the sense that, decomposing it, it exposes its inner nature, but does not destroy it. The chemical substance that attacks spiritual things in this way (diathetically) is the light. This does not appear in language. […] Only in humour can language be critical. The particular critical magic then appears, so that the counterfeit substance comes into contact with the light; it disintegrates. The genuine remains: it is ash” (GB 1:349/C 84). 41. The destructive tool of the German Romantics is irony: “the ironization of form consists in its freely willed destruction” (GS 1.1:84/SW 1:163). “Thus, the ironization of form […] assails the form without destroying it, and the disturbance of the illusion in comedy should have this provocation in view. This relation bears a striking affinity to criticism, which irrevocably and earnestly dissolves the form in order to transform the single work into the absolute work of art, to romanticize it” (GS 1.1:84/SW 1:163). “Criticism sacrifices the work totally for the sake of the single sphere of connection. On the other hand, the procedure which preserves the work itself, while still making palpable its total referential connection to the idea of art, is (formal) irony. Not only does it not destroy the work on which it fastens, but it draws the work nearer to indestructibility. Through the destruction, in irony, of the particular form of presentation of the work, the relative unity of the individual work is thrust back deeper into the unity of art as universal work; it is fully refereed to the latter unity, without being lost in it” (GS 1.1:86/SW 1:164). 42. “Our bars and city streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories seemed to close relentlessly around us. Then came film and exploded this prison-world with the dynamite of the split second, so that now we can set off calmly on journeys of adventure among its farflung debris” (GS 7.1:376/SW 3:117).

Notes

317

43. Jennings notes that “Scholem was the first to point to the destructive tendency in Benjamin’s work, which he very appropriately links to Benjamin’s tendency toward an apocalyptic messianism.” He then proposes to “go further and characterize the impulse as nihilistic. The mood of destruction obtains its force not only from theological sources but also from a more general and vehement animus against bourgeois society, which predates, interestingly enough, the shift to materialism by more than a decade,” Michael W. Jennings, Dialectical Images. Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Literary Criticism (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1987), p. 180. 44. Wohlfarth, “Et Cetera? The Historian as Chiffonnier,” p. 157. 45. Arendt writes: “from the Goethe essay on, quotations are at the centre of every work of Benjamin’s. This very fact distinguishes his writings from scholarly works of all kinds in which it is the function of quotations to verify and document opinions, wherefore they can safely be relegated to the Notes. This is out of the question in Benjamin. When he was working on his study of German tragedy, he boasted of a collection of ‘over 600 quotations very systematically and clearly arranged’ (Briefe I, 339); like the later notebooks, this collection was not an accumulation of excerpts intended to facilitate the writing of the study but constituted the main work, with the writing as something secondary. The main work consisted in tearing fragments out of their context and arranging them afresh in such a way that they illustrated one another and were able to prove their raison d’être in a free-floating state, as it were. It definitely was a sort of surrealistic montage. Benjamin’s ideal of producing a work consisting entirely of quotations, one that was mounted so masterfully that it could dispense with any accompanying text, may strike one as whimsical in the extreme and self-destructive to boot, but it was not, any more than were the contemporaneous surrealistic experiments which arose from similar impulses,” Hannah Arendt, “Walter Benjamin: 1892–1940,” Walter Benjamin. Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), p. 47. 46. “It belongs to the concept of citation […] that the historical object in each case is torn from its context” (N11,3). 47. “To quote a word is to call it by its name. So Kraus’s achievement exhausts itself at its highest level by making even the newspaper quotable. He transports it to his own sphere, and the empty phrase is suddenly forced to recognize that even in the deepest dregs of the journals it is not safe from the voice that swoops on the wings of the word to drag it from darkness” (GS 2.1:362–3/SW 2:453). 48. A famous entry of One-Way Street reads: “quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out, armed, and relieve the idle stroller of his conviction” (GS 4.1:138/SW 1:481). 49. However, this “full citability” belongs merely to a “redeemed mankind,” to the day in which all ruins, all events can be rescued from the catastrophic past of sufferings and from oblivion; to the messianic concept of apokatastasis, the ingress of all

318

50. 51.

52. 53. 54.

55.

Notes souls into heaven. Benjamin writes thus in “On the Concept of History”: “only a redeemed mankind is granted the fullness of its past – which is to say, only for a redeemed mankind has its past become citable in all its moments. Each moment it has lived becomes a citation à l’ordre du jour. And that day is Judgement Day” (GS 1.2:694/SW 4:390). Benjamin himself was a great collector, especially of children books, and to this figure is dedicated the entire Konvolut “H” of the Arcades Project. Arendt, “Walter Benjamin: 1892–1940,” p. 44. The value of the object is no more the use value of functionality, nor the exchange value of the commodity, but the value of “genuineness,” therefore it is rescued from the fate of the commodity. Yet, although in one sense the use value of the object stripped of its commodity form is what remains, the bourgeois collector does not use it, and therefore the object becomes again a fetish, and thus re-plunges into the phantasmagoria of commodity fetishism. However, in the case of the collector-of-rags, the broken piece, rejected by the commercial system, is re-composed and re-inserted in a new configuration, and therefore re-utilized, umfunktioniert. Like in the imaginary world of children, only the broken and discarded is precious. The child is a great collector: many passages of One-Way Street, Berlin Childhood around 1900 and Unpacking my Library underline the similarities between the two. “The flâneur optical, the collector tactile” (H2,5). Arendt writes: “like a pearl diver who descends to the bottom of the sea, not to excavate the bottom and bring it to light but to pry loose the rich and the strange, the pearls and the coral in the depths, and to carry them to the surface, this thinking delves into the depths on the past – but not in order to resuscitate it the way it was and to contribute to the renewal of extinct ages. What guides this thinking is the conviction that although the living is subject to the ruin of the time, the process of decay is at the same time a process of crystallization, that in the depth of the sea, into which sinks and is dissolved what once was alive, some things ‘suffer a sea-change’ and survive in new crystallized forms and shapes that remain immune to the elements, as though they waited only for the pearl diver who one day will come down to them and bring them up into the world of the living – as ‘thought fragments,’ as something ‘rich and strange,’ and perhaps even as everlasting Urphänomene,” Arendt, “Walter Benjamin: 1892–1940,” p. 51. “In every collector hides an allegorist, and in every allegorist a collector. As far as the collector is concerned, his collection is never complete; for let him discover just a single piece missing, and everything he’s collected remains a patchwork, which is what things are for allegory from the beginning. On the other hand, the allegorist – for whom objects represent only keywords in a secret dictionary, which will make known their meanings to the initiated – precisely the allegorist can never have enough of things. With him, one thing is so little capable of taking

Notes

56.

57. 58. 59. 60.

61.

62.

63. 64.

319

the place of another that no possible reflection suffices to foresee what meaning his profundity might lay claim to for each one of them” (H4a,1). “Such significance as [the new construction] has, it acquires from the allegorist. He places it within it, and stands behind it; not in a psychological but in an ontological sense. In his hands the object becomes something different and for him it becomes a key to the realm of hidden knowledge; and he revers it as the emblem of this” (GS 1.1:359/OT 184). For a detailed analysis and confrontation of the figures of the Brooder, the Allegorist and the Collector in Benjamin, cf. Pensky, Melancholy Dialectics, especially pp. 240–6. Peter Bürger analyses the strict relationships between Benjamin and the avant-garde. Cf. Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). Rolf Tiedemann, “Dialectics at a Standstill: Approaches to the Passagen-Werk,” trans. Gary Smith, AP 942. Benjamin’s own fascination with photography and the technical innovations of the avant-garde surely had an influence on the elaboration of the notion of dialectical image. Many commentators, from Susan Sontag to Eduardo Cadava, make this relation explicit. Cf. for example Susan Sontag, On Photography (Penguin Books, 1977) and Eduardo Cadava, Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). However, as I have argued in Chapter One, the visual character of the dialectical image has been overemphasized; the image as Darstellung presents rather a strong linguistic character and should be related to Benjamin’s notion of language and name. Cf. Chapter One. Benjamin writes in the Fuchs essay: “the historical materialist must abandon the epic element in history. For him, history becomes the object of a construct whose locus is not empty time but rather the specific epoch, the specific life, the specific work. The historical materialist blasts the epoch out of its reified ‘historical continuity,’ and thereby the life out of the epoch, and the work out of the lifework. Yet this construct results in the simultaneous preservation and sublation [Aufhebung] of the lifework in the work, of the epoch in the lifework, and of the course of history in the epoch” (GS 2.2:468/SW 3:262). To my knowledge, the best exposition and analysis of Benjamin’s concept of temporality is Werner Hamacher, “‘Now’: Walter Benjamin on Historical Time,” trans. N. Rosenthal, The Moment: Time and Rupture in Modern Thought, ed. Heidrum Friese (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2001). “In order for a part of the past to be touched by the present instant [Aktualität], there must be no continuity between them” (N7,7). “Telescoping of the past through the present” (N7a,3). Hamacher, “‘Now’,” p. 180. This is the meaning of Benjamin’s statement in thesis II: “our coming was expected on earth. Then, like every generation that preceded

320

65.

66.

67.

68.

69. 70.

71. 72.

Notes us, we have been endowed with a weak messianic power, a power on which the past has a claim” (GW 1.2:694/SW 4:390). The whole passage reads: “the Copernican revolution in historical perception is as follows. Formerly it was thought that a fixed point had been found in ‘what has been,’ and one saw the present engaged in tentatively concentrating the forces of knowledge in this ground. Now this relation is to be overturned, and what has been is to become the dialectical reversal – the flash of awakened consciousness. Politics attains primacy over history. The facts become something that just now first happened to us, first struck us; to establish them is the affair of memory. Indeed, awakening is the great exemplar of memory: the occasion on which it is given us to remember what is closest, tritest, most obvious. […] There is a not-yet-conscious knowledge of what has been: its advancement has the structure of awakening” (K1,2). Cf. Hamacher, “’Now’,” especially pp. 163–4. Giorgio Agamben insists on the same point: cf. Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), in particular p. 158. Benjamin writes: “the rescue that is carried out by these means – and only by these – can operate solely for the sake of what in the next moment is already irretrievably lost” (N9,7). “For it is an irretrievable image of the past which threatens to disappear in any present that does not recognize itself as intended in that image” (GS 1.2:695/SW 4:390–1). On the “historicist’s threadbare pretensions to a godlike perspective on history,” Wholfarth writes: “in seeming to turn away from the present in order to devote himself to the undistracted study of the past, he is in fact actuated by present needs as urgent as they are unacknowledged. His claims to historical objectivity mask a flagrant subjectivism, a set of choices which are no less arbitrary for being highly motivated. His alleged catholicity amounts merely to a Don Juanism incapable of making the right choice amidst a thousand and three options. He thereby usurps the genuine inclusiveness of the ‘chronicler’ who will, in good time, ‘recite events without distinguishing between major and minor ones’ (GS 1.2:694),” Wohlfarth, “Et Cetera? The Historian as Chiffonnier,” pp. 153–4. Max Pensky, “Method and Time: Benjamin’s Dialectical Images,” The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin, ed. David S. Ferris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 180–1. For a detailed analysis of this point cf. Pensky, Melancholy Dialectics, especially pp. 160–5, and Pensky, “Method and Time.” Pensky argues that Benjamin found in Proust’s memoire involontaire and in Surrealism suggestions that helped him establish his evacuation of the subject. Hamacher, “‘Now’,” p. 164. Hamacher, “‘Now’,” p. 165.

Notes

321

73. Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde (London and New York: Verso, 1995), p. 147. 74. Consider for example these passages: “may not the Messiah, who has often been pictured in the guise of a beggar, also come as a chiffonier? […] the Lumpensammler is at once the epitome of an unsalvageable (a)social existence (‘without the possibility of existence’), the lowest of the low, the bottom of the barrel, and, despite all this, or rather because of it, the very agent of redemption, the scraper of the barrel. Such is the logic of ‘last things.’ […] Such is however, the logic of redemption that – pace Nietzsche – only the deformed can remedy the world’s deformity. […] it takes an unsalvageable existence to salvage the unsalvageable. The chiffonnier is, in short, a privileged figure inasmuch as he reverses all privilege. He is the uninvited guest who finally invites everyone to table.” “The rag-man, the lowest of the low, is too extreme a figure not to prompt avenging visions of reversal. The last shall be first. […] Benjamin’s Lumpensammler is transformed from the scum into the salt of the earth.” “The gruff rag-picker, whose job it is to pick up the leftovers belongs to the same family as the saints who include ‘all creatures’ in their prayers,” Wohlfarth, “Et Cetera? The Historian as Chiffonnier,” pp. 147–8, 155, 166.

5.2 The Past as Future 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

7.

Cf. Bain Attwood, Telling the Truth About Aboriginal History (Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2005). Andreas Huyssen, “Present Past: Media, Politics, Amnesia,” Globalization, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2001), pp. 57–8. Huyssen, “Present Past,” p. 63. Attwood, Telling the Truth About Aboriginal History, p. 11. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London and New York: Verso, 1991), p. 19. The “Aboriginality” of Mudrooroo was questioned in 1996, when one of his sisters revealed to a journalist that she believed their great-grandfather was an immigrant Afro-American, and not an Australian Aborigine. My argument does not involve questions of “identity” or “authenticity” and I will therefore not touch this issue. For an extensive analysis of this point cf. Annalisa Oboe, ed., Mongrel Signatures: Reflections on the Work of Mudrooroo (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2003), especially the essays by Maggie Nolan, Cassandra Pybus and Adam Shoemaker. Max Pensky, “Method and Time: Benjamin’s Dialectical Images,” The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin, ed. David S. Ferris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 195.

322 8. 9. 10.

11. 12.

13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

Notes Müller’s play is given in a new translation by Gerhard Fischer. Other translations opted for The Task, or The Mission, but The Commission was here chosen as a link to the many commissions Australian Aborigines have been plagued with. Respectively “The Hapless Angel,” from Müller’s Theater-Arbeit, and “The Angel of Despair” and “Dreaming of the Angel of the Lord in New York City” from The Commission. I will hereafter refer to Gerhard Fischer, ed., The Mudrooroo/Müller Project: A Theatrical Casebook (Kensington, NSW: New South Wales University Press, 1993) parenthetically in the text as Project. I will specify each time to which sub-text in particular I am referring. Jonathan Kalb, “Through the Lens of Heiner Müller: Brecht and Beckett - Three Points of Plausible Convergence for the Future,” Brecht Yearbook 27 (2002), p. 98. The affinities with Benjamin’s method are clear and are supported by Müller’s constant references to him: the emphasis on time and space discontinuities, fragment, quotation outside a homogeneous space and time, and a notion of monadic historical time are Benjaminian echoes in Müller. For correspondances between the two, cf. Francine Maier-Schaeffer, “Utopie et fragment: Heiner Müller et Walter Benjamin,” Etudes Germaniques 48.1 ( January–March 1993). They are all professionals: MaryAnne, an Aboriginal Medical Service woman, Eve, an Aboriginal Legal Service woman, Bob, a black activist, Clint, a black academic, Peter, a black bureaucrat, and King George, a black actor and goomee. Cf. Gerhard Fischer, “‘Twoccing’ Der Auftrag to Black Australia: Heiner Müller ‘Aboriginalised’ by Mudrooroo,” Heiner Müller: ConTEXT and HISTORY. A Collection of Essays from the Sydney German Studies Symposium 1994 Heiner Müller / Theatre-History-Performance, ed. Gerhard Fischer (Tübingen: Stauffenburg Verlag, 1995), p. 143. The full title of Weiss’ play is The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the Direction of Monsieur de Sade. Fischer, “‘Twoccing’ Der Auftrag to Black Australia,” p. 153. Geoffrey Blainey, “Drawing up a Balance Sheet of Our History,” Quadrant 37.7–8 ( July–August 1993), p. 11. John La Nauze, “The Study of Australian History, 1929–59,” Historical Studies 9.33 (1959), p. 11. Cf. W.E.H. Stanner, After the Dreaming: Black and White Australians - an Anthropologist’s View, The Boyer Lectures (Sydney: Australian Broadcasting Commission, 1969). Bain Attwood, “The Past as Future: Aborigines, Australia and the (Dis)Course of History,” In the Age of Mabo: History, Aborigines and Australia, ed. Bain Attwood (St. Leonard, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1996), p. xxvi.

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21. John Morton, “Aboriginality, Mabo and the Republic: Indigenising Australia,” In the Age of Mabo: History, Aborigines and Australia, ed. Bain Attwood (St. Leonard, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1996), pp. 120–1. 22. Mudrooroo writes: “1988 in many ways was the year of bribing the Aborigine. Aboriginal culture was invited into the centre. Art galleries had exhibitions of Aboriginal art; theatres put on Aboriginal plays, and a number of books were published, most of them on cooperation with white editors. Even in bicentennial celebrations Aboriginal participation was evident. Some Aboriginal groups pressed for a boycotting of any and all celebrations, but the call went unheeded,” Mudrooroo, Writing from the Fringe: A Study of Modern Aboriginal Literature (Melbourne, VIC: Hyland House, 1990), p. 179. 23. Cf. Graeme Davison, Australia: The First Postmodern Republic?, Working Papers in Australian Studies (London: Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London, 1994), p. 9. 24. As historian Graeme Davison wrote, “it is the art, myth and landscape of the Dreamtime rather than the recent history of Aboriginal struggle that other Australians are most eager to appropriate and nationalise,” Davison, Australia: The First Postmodern Republic?, p. 16. Mudrooroo adds: “In its search for a national identity Australia too has come to appreciate our culture and its products. […] Many tourists arrive in Australia wanting to visit Aboriginal communities. Tourism is a big money-spinner these days, and regions such as Queensland and the Northern Territory have begun featuring us and our culture. It is difficult to know if this is a good or bad thing for us,” Mudrooroo, Us Mob: History, Culture, Struggle. An Introduction to Indigenous Australia (Sydney: Angus&Robertson, 1995), p. 154. 25. Stuart Macintyre, The History Wars (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2004), p. 125. 26. Blainey, “Drawing up a Balance Sheet of Our History,” p. 11. 27. Cf. Attwood, Telling the Truth About Aboriginal History, p. 60. 28. Attwood summarizes the neo-con’s view as follow: “an unrepresentative cosmopolitan and university-educated elite have had a vested interest in advancing particular values, interests and policies in the public realm. They have favoured ‘special interests,’ such as environmentalism, feminism, indigeneity, multiculturalism and other ‘minority’ causes. These are actually fashions. Their promoters regard themselves as morally superior, yet their causes have no authentic ethical dimension and no real public value. Most derive from overseas trends and international organizations related to ‘human rights.’ This elite originated in the 1960s among the left in universities, where they have since entrenched themselves. There they have corrupted knowledge and learning by championing theory (postmodernism) and politics (Marxism), betrayed Western civilization and its canon, and created a regime of ‘political correctness’ that has censored freedom of thought and expression. Beyond the university, this elite has betrayed the interests of ‘ordinary people,’

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29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

Notes subverted the principle of equal rights for citizens, threatened the sovereignty and unity of the nation, and restricted freedom of speech by promoting the interests of ‘special groups’ rather than ‘the mainstream.’ The influence of this elite largely explains the major cultural changes that have occurred in Western societies since the 1960s. its damaging, even destructive, impact must be curtailed for the sake of ordinary people and the nation (whose interests this new conservative elite claims to represent),” Attwood, Telling the Truth About Aboriginal History, pp. 62–3. Kathryn Trees and Mudrooroo, “Postcolonialism: Yet Another Colonial Strategy?,” SPAN: Journal of the South Pacific Association for Commonwealth Literature and language Studies 36 (October 1993), p. 265. Arlene A. Teraoka, East, West, and Others: The Third World in Postwar German Literature (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), pp. 113–14. Pensky, “Method and Time,” p. 178. Pensky, “Method and Time,” pp. 195, 177. Pensky phrases these questions as follow: “What possible philosophy of history could explicate the difference between the past and ‘what-has-been,’ between the present and the ‘now’? what could it mean to claim that an alternative version of historical happening depends on a ‘flash’ of synthesis between what has been and a now: what role does such a claim leave open for the historical researcher? Why should we prefer a ‘constellation’ to a solid work of critical historiography? Why should we understand a categorical distinction between ‘ordinary’ temporal relations familiar to academic historiography, relations that appear indispensable for the invaluable work of historical interpretation, versus ‘dialectical’ relations?,” p. 177. Pensky, “Method and Time,” p. 186. Paul Messaris, Visual Persuasion: The Role of Images in Advertising (Thousand Oaks, London, New Delhi: Sage, 1997), p. 170. Pensky, “Method and Time,” pp. 185–6. Messaris, Visual Persuasion, pp. 170–1. Pensky, “Method and Time,” p. 181. Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), p. 58, emphasis added. Attwood, Telling the Truth About Aboriginal History, p. 45. Max Pensky, “Tactics of Remembrance: Proust, Surrealism, and the Origin of the Passagenwerk,” Walter Benjamin and the Demands of History, ed. Michael p. Steinberg (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1996), p. 189. Stephen Muecke, “Devastation,” Culture and Waste: The Creation and Destruction of Value, ed. Gay Hawkins & Stephen Muecke (Lanham, Boulder, New York, London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), p. 120. Muecke, “Devastation,” p. 127n. Muecke, “Devastation,” pp. 120–1.

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44. Mudrooroo, Writing from the Fringe, p. 5. 45. Mudrooroo, Us Mob, p. 191. 46. Penny van Toorn, “Mudrooroo and the Power of the Post: Alternative Inscriptions of Aboriginalist Discourse in a Post-Aboriginalist Age,” Southern Review: Literary and Interdisciplinary Essays 28.2 ( July 1995), p. 122. 47. Attwood, Telling the Truth About Aboriginal History, p. 172. 48. Mudrooroo, Us Mob, p. 178, emphasis added. 49. Mudrooroo, Writing from the Fringe, p. 37. 50. Andrew Lattas, “Essentialism, Memory and Resistance: Aboriginality and the Politics of Authenticity,” Oceania 63.3 (March 1993), p. 255. 51. Mudrooroo, Writing from the Fringe, pp. 24–5. 52. Mudrooroo, Writing from the Fringe, p. 25. 53. van Toorn, “Mudrooroo and the Power of the Post,” p. 124. 54. The passage continues: “Tenses are ideological in that they mark out the time model used by a particular language group, and when two language groups collide there are grammatical problems reflecting the collision of different ideologies,” Mudrooroo, Writing from the Fringe, p. 172. 55. Mudrooroo, Writing from the Fringe, p. 170. 56. Mudrooroo, Us Mob, pp. 177–8. Another passage from the same book reads: “History, after all, is a construct based in time, on a linear sequencing which deems those without a long classificatory system of managing time to be without such a history. It is only those societies which have sought out an objective time-system that have created history. Without such a timescale, without such a manner of sequencing events, what history can there be? History, in this sense, is a seemingly objective treatment of human (and perhaps planetary) events along a fixed timeline,” p. 175. 57. Mudrooroo, Writing from the Fringe, p. 48. 58. Adam Shoemaker, “It’s the Quest Which Matters: An Interview with Mudrooroo,” Mudrooroo: A Critical Study (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1993), p. 161. 59. David Hollinsworth, “Discourses on Aboriginality and the Politics of Identity in Urban Australia,” Oceania 63.2 (December 1992), p. 141. 60. Mudrooroo, “Self-Determining Our Aboriginality: A Response to ‘Discourses on Aboriginality and the Politics of Identity in Urban Australia’,” Oceania 62.3 (December 1992), p. 156. 61. Lattas, “Essentialism, Memory and Resistance,” p. 254, emphasis added. 62. Lattas, “Essentialism, Memory and Resistance,” p. 258.

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Notes

Notes

Chapter 6 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18.

Guy Debord, The Society of Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1994), p. 144. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 377, emphasis added. Hardt and Negri, Empire, p. 378, emphasis added. Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New York and London: Routledge, 1988), p. x. Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, p. 61. Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, p. x. Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, pp. 213–14. Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, p. 89. Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, p. 106. Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, p. 191. Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), p. 58. She continues: “historiographic metafiction accepts this philosophically realist view of the past and then proceeds to confront it with an anti-realist one that suggests that, however true that independence may be, nevertheless the past exists for us – now – only as traces on and in the present. The absent past can only be inferred from circumstantial evidence,” p. 73. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London and New York: Continuum, 2004), p. xvii. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 337. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 203. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 337, emphasis added. The passage continues: “contradiction is not the weapon of the proletariat but, rather, the manner in which the bourgeoisie defends and preserves itself, the shadow behind which it maintains its claim to decide what the problems are. Contradictions are not ‘resolved,’ they are dissipated by capturing the problem of which they reflect only the shadow. The negative is always a conscious reaction, a distortion of the true agent or actor,” emphasis added. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 67. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. xviii. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. xviii. In his book on Brecht, Jameson shifts the terms of the confrontation between the dialectical method and the Deleuzian anti-dialectic concept of differentiation. He writes: “the philosophical version of this quarrel then necessarily takes as its centrepiece contradiction and negation; and finds its most authoritative texts in Gilles Deleuze’s valorization of differentiation

19.

20. 21.

22. 23. 24.

327

over negation; however, dialecticians and Hegelians will already have lost this battle if they initially agree to its terms. I will therefore leave it to the Brecht friends among the Deleuzians (there must be some!) to show that what the playwright (and perhaps even Hegel himself ) called contradiction was in many instances only a larger tent or umbrella for rich and subtle differentiations of all kinds. It is more important at this stage to show that, for both, contradiction is a moment in a process rather then a static structure. I want to argue that for Brecht, the dialectic – the ‘Grosse Methode’ – is defined and constituted by the search for and discovery of contradictions. Perhaps one might even say: by the construction of contradictions – since it is as a reordering process that it is necessary to grasp the dialectical method in Brecht: as the restructuring of juxtapositions, dissonances, Trennungen, distances of all kinds, in terms of contradiction as such,” Fredric Jameson, Brecht and Method (London and New York: Verso, 1998), pp. 79–80, emphases added. Azade Seyhan, “Allegories of History: The Politics of Representation in Walter Benjamin,” Image and Ideology in Modern/Postmodern Discourse, ed. David B. Downing and Susan Bazargan (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), p. 245. Seyhan, “Allegories of History,” p. 237. Seyhan, “Allegories of History,” p. 239. “Similarly,” Seyhan continues, “Benjamin’s allegory posits no image/reality duality. The objects on the baroque stage exist only as images or as the simulacrum of the simulacra.” Cf. also Willem van Reijen, “Labyrinth and Ruin: The Return of the Baroque in Postmodernity,” Theory, Culture & Society 9.4 (November 1992). Torsten Meiffert, Die Enteignete Erfahrung: Zu Walter Benjamins Konzept Einer ‘Dialektik Im Stillstand’ (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 1986), p. 168. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Mark Seem, Helen R. Lane and Robert Hurley (New York: The Viking Press, 1977), p. 15, emphasis in the original. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 33. The schizophrenia of capitalism is so described: “Capitalism is indeed the limit of all societies, insofar as it brings about the decoding of the flows that the other social formations coded and overcoded. But it is the relative limit of every society; it effects relative breaks, because it substitutes for the codes an extremely rigorous axiomatic that maintains the energy of the flow in a bound state on the body of capital as a socius that is deterritorialized, but also a socius that is even more pitiless than any other. Schizophrenia, on the contrary, is indeed the absolute limit that causes the flows to travel in a free state on a desocialized body without organs. Hence one can say that schizophrenia is the exterior limit of capitalism itself or the conclusion of its deepest tendency, but that capitalism only functions on condition that it inhibit this tendency, or that it push back or displace this limit, by substituting for its own immanent relative

328

25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30.

31.

32.

Notes limits, which it continually reproduces on a widened scale. It axiomatizes with one hand what it decodes with the other,” p. 246. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 245. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 277. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 311, emphasis added. They continue: “destroying beliefs and representations, theatrical scenes. And when engaged in this task no activity will be too malevolent. Causing Oedipus and castration to explode, brutally intervening each time the subject strikes up the song of myth or intones tragic lines, carrying him back to the factory,” p. 314. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 382. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 382. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 382, emphasis added. The passage concludes: “we’ll never go too far with the deterritorialization, the decoding of flows. For the new earth (‘In truth, the earth will one day become a place of healing’) is not to be found in the neurotic or perverse reterritorializations that arrest the process or assign it goals; it is no more behind than ahead, it coincides with the completion of the process of desiring-production, this process that is always and already complete as it proceeds.” Claire Colebrook explains: “against the idea of representation – that there are persons or things that we come to know through qualities – we can say that there is a world of perceptions, intensities or varying qualities from which we produce extended things or an underlying human nature. This means that cultural or artistic works do not represent an already given human nature so much as produce general interests from intensities. Western ‘man,’ for example, is a ‘molar’ formation that begins from the specific investment in (molecular, or pre-individual) intensities. ‘Man’ is a collection of intensities that has now been taken as exemplary of the ‘human.’ For Deleuze, though, real thinking demands that we take any general category or molar formation (such as man) and look at the molecular intensities from which it is composed. Molar formations are formed from varying investments in intensities, which have less to do with belief or meaning so much as the elevation of specific qualities. We could therefore look at the distinct ways in which political machines produce the general concept of ‘man.’ This micropolitics or schizoanalysis would be different from analysing sexist beliefs or ideology; it would look at the images that allow those beliefs to be formed,” Claire Colebrook, Understanding Deleuze (Crow Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2002), p. 88. Christa Bürger emphasises the limits of rhizome-thinking as a merely negative approach: “it seems that rhizome-thinking also has more to do with the identification and occlusion of the ‘enemy’ than with specific ideas of a new way of thinking. The enemy is: dualism, or dualisms, unity, subject and object, culture, meaning, root, and tree. The bad faith of rhizome-thinking is manifested less in the fact that it can only name its positive contribution metaphorically: map and machine, than

Notes

33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38. 39.

40. 41. 42. 43.

44. 45.

329

in the fact that the new philosophical discourse itself proceeds dichotomously,” Christa Bürger, “The Reality of ‘Machines’: Notes on the Rhizome-Thinking of Deleuze and Guattari,” Telos 64 (Summer 1985), p. 35, emphasis added. Cf. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (London: Methuen, 1981), p. 23n. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 109. Jameson, The Political Unconscious, p. 23. Cf. Bürger, “The Reality of ‘Machines’,” pp. 37–9. Rosi Braidotti, “Schizophrenia,” The Deleuze Dictionary, ed. Adrian Parr (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), p. 239. She continues: “Deleuze posits ‘becoming’ as an antidote [to the paranoiac process of commodity over-accumulation]: flows of empowering desire that introduce mobility and thus destabilise the sedentary gravitational pull of molar formations. This involves experimenting with non-unitary or schizoid modes of becoming.” Christa Bürger goes as far as arguing that, as a consequence, schizoanalysis becomes indistinguishable from its very enemy, fascism. Cf. Bürger, “The Reality of ‘Machines’,” pp. 39–44. Jameson writes: “it is because language has a past and a future, because the sentence moves in time, that we can have what seems to us concrete or lived experience of time. But since the schizophrenic does not know language articulation in that way, he or she does not have our experience of temporal continuity either, but is condemned to live a perpetual present with which the various moments of his or her past have little connection and for which there is no conceivable future on the horizon. In other words, schizophrenic experience is an experience of isolated, disconnected, discontinuous material signifiers which fail to link up into a coherent sequence,” Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (London: Pluto Press, 1985), p. 119. Jameson, The Political Unconscious, p. 9, emphasis added. Jameson, The Political Unconscious, p. 10, emphases added. Jameson, The Political Unconscious, p. 58, emphasis in the original. On the other hand, Benjamin strives to prove that the act of interpretation is necessary. Nevertheless, its necessity is not the transcendental one of a master code, but the immanent necessity determined by the “historical index,” according to which historical meaning attains legibility only when the time is ripe. It is a necessity insofar it is not conditioned by the contingent subjectivity of the reader or of any “theory” of interpretation, but as such it is contingent, that is, not dependent on, a subjective intention. Cf. Chapter Five. Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (London: Neville Spearman, 1967), p. 233. Adorno, Prisms, p. 233.

330

Notes

46. “If the concept of myth,” he writes, “as the antipode to reconciliation, occupies a central position in it, especially during its openly theological phase, then everything, and especially the ephemeral, becomes in his own thought mythical,” Adorno, Prisms, p. 233. 47. He writes: “the reduction of the object to pure material, which precedes all subjective synthesis as its necessary condition, sucks the object’s own dynamics out of it: it is disqualified, immobilized, and robbed of whatever would allow motion to be predicated at all,” Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), p. 91, emphases added. 48. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 97. 49. Theodor W. Adorno, Notes to Literature, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, 2 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), p. 226. 50. Adorno, Notes to Literature, p. 226. 51. Adorno, Prisms, pp. 235–6. In the “Introduction” Adorno writes: “In the dissociation into what is without form and subject on the one hand and justice, which is separate from all natural order, on the other, everything that as dynamics, development, and freedom usually makes up the intermediate world of the human disintegrates in Benjamin. By virtue of this dissociation Benjamin’s philosophy is in fact inhuman: the human being is its locus and arena rather than something existing in and for itself. The horror one feels at this aspect of Benjamin’s texts probably defines their innermost difficulty,” Adorno, Notes to Literature p. 228. Douglas McBride argues that Adorno, the later critic of Enlightenment, defends the Enlightenment project of critical subjectivity and the necessity of preserving individual consciousness as a condition for social critique. Cf. Douglas Brent McBride, “Benjamin and Adorno on the Subject of Critique,” Monatshefte 90.4 (1998), p. 472. 52. Adorno, Notes to Literature, p. 224. 53. Adorno, Notes to Literature, p. 228. 54. In his letters to Benjamin of 10 November 1938 about “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,” Adorno formulates his famous accusations: the essay’s “concreteness and its behaviouristic overtones” turn into positivism: “the theological motif of calling things by their names tends to switch into the wide-eyed presentation of mere facts [die staunende Darstellung der bloßen Faktizität].” And paradoxically, this ascetic positivism, “worthy of Savonarola,” flows into its opposite: “abstention” and “the ascetic refusal of interpretation only serves to transport into a realm quite opposed to ascetism: a realm where history and magic oscillate.” “If one wanted to put it rather drastically,” he continues, “one could say that your study is located at the crossroads of magic and positivism. This spot is bewitched.” His request is for Benjamin to go back to theory, “your own resolute and salutarily speculative theory”, which only “could break this spell”: “it is simply the claim of this theory that I bring against you here” (CA 366–8/CC 282–4, emphases added).

Notes

331

55. Adorno, Notes to Literature, p. 229. 56. Adorno, Notes to Literature, p. 230. 57. Adorno writes that Benjamin’s “aim was not merely for philosophy to catch up to surrealism, but for it to become surrealistic,” Adorno, Prisms, p. 239. In the essay “Looking Back on Surrealism,” Adorno implicitly reiterates his criticism to Benjamin’s Surrealist montage-method: in its analogies to dream, Surrealism reduces the content of the existent, “especially [its] human contents, closer to the form of object.” In the dream-like reification of Surrealist imagistic aesthetics, the subject “directs its energy toward its own self-annihilation,” to its reduction to mere thing; Surrealism is thus the “expression of a subjectivity that has become estranged from itself as well as from the world.” In this tension between “schizophrenia” and “total reification,” the subject “turns to stone [erstarrt],” “reveals itself to be inanimate [Unbeseeltes], something virtually dead.” The Surrealist montage reveals the “supremacy of objects” in the reversion of freedom to “mere nature,” but a nature petrified into nature morte. The petrified existent is, as in Negative Dialectics, a fetish, and, in the case of Surrealism, “commodity fetish”: the reduction of something subjective to “thinglike [dinghaft] and dead [tot]” images that as such are akin to pornography. This way, for Adorno, the subject “abandons its hopes for survival,” Adorno, Notes to Literature, pp. 86–90, emphases added. 58. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, pp. 18–19. 59. Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt Institute (New York: The Free Press, 1977), p. 101. 60. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 162. 61. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 52. 62. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 52. 63. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 163. 64. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 163, emphases added. 65. “History is the subject of a construction,” he writes in thesis XIV of “On the Concept of History,” and repeats in thesis XVII: “materialist historiography […] is based on a constructive principle” (GS 1.2:701, 702/SW 4:395, 396, emphases added). For a commentary of thesis XIV, cf. Andrew Benjamin, “Being Roman Now: The Time of Fashion. A Commentary on Walter Benjamin’s ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ XIV,” Thesis Eleven 75 (November 2003), pp. 39–53. For a commentary on thesis XVII, cf. Dimitris Vardoulakis, “The Subject of History: The Temporality of Parataxis in Benjamin’s Historiography,” Walter Benjamin and History, ed. Andrew Benjamin (London and New York: Continuum, 2005), pp. 118–36. On “construction” cf. also Chapter Five of this study. 66. Paul de Man, “‘Conclusions’: Walter Benjamin’s ‘the Task of the Translator’,” The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 74. 67. de Man, “Conclusions,” p. 80. He continues: “the text about translation is itself a translation, and the untranslatability which it mentions about itself inhabits its

332

68.

69.

70.

71.

72.

Notes own texture and will inhabit anybody who in his turn will try to translate it, as I am now trying, and failing, to do. The text is untranslatable, it was untranslatable for the translators who tried to do it, it is untranslatable for the commentators who talk about it, it is an example of what it states, it is a mise en abyme in the technical sense, a story within the story of what is its own statement,” p. 86. In a further passage of his essay de Man refers again to Aufgabe to emphasize the “complete slippage of the meaning” in language which makes reading impossible: “a word like Aufgabe, which means task, also means something completely different, so that the word escapes us”; the meaning “disappears, evanesces,” and so “all control over that meaning is lost,” de Man, “Conclusions,” pp. 88–9. Samuel Weber writes thus that “translatability” as “relation” is the “potentiality” for interpretation of the original, what Benjamin in the book on Romantic criticism called “criticizability.” Cf. Samuel Weber, “A Touch of Translation: On Walter Benjamin’s ‘Task of the Translator’,” Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation, ed. Sandra Bermann and Michael Wood (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005), p. 74. Cf. Kenneth Lea, “Traducing History: Benjamin, Language, Politics,” Postmodernism and the Re-Reading of Modernity, ed. Peter Hulme and Margareth Iversen Francis Barker (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1992). Andrew Benjamin also writes: “the essential is re-expressed in terms of translatability and now translatability has itself been re-expressed in terms of fortleben; i.e. in terms of after-life/survival; the capacity of the work to live on,” Andrew Benjamin, Translation and the Nature of Philosophy: A New Theory of Words (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), p. 90. De Man reads instead “Nachreife” as something which presents the “melancholy, the feeling of slight exhaustion, of life to which you are not entitled, happiness to which you are not entitled, time has passed and so on. It is associated to another word that Benjamin constantly uses, the word überleben, to live beyond your own death in a sense.” Nachreife is not thus a “maturing process” (as Zohn translates), but a “looking back on a process of maturity that is finished, and that is no longer taking place,” de Man, “Conclusions,” p. 85. de Man attributes thus to Benjamin the “melancholy” and “slight exhaustion” which are in reality the traits of his own practice of interpretation and do not belong, as I have been arguing throughout this study, to Benjamin’s politics of reading. de Man reads “Wehen des eigenen” as “the suffering of what one thinks of as one’s own,” that is, he argues, “the suffering of the original language. We think we are at ease in our own language, we feel a coziness, a familiarity, a shelter in the language we call our own, in which we think we are not alienated. What the translation reveals is that this alienation is at its strongest in our relation to our own original language, that the original language within which we are engaged is disarticulated in a way which imposes upon us a particular alienation, a particular suffering,”

Notes

73.

74.

75.

76.

77.

333

de Man, “Conclusions,” p. 84. For de Man it is a “mystery” the reason why both Harry Zohn and Maurice de Gandillac, whose translations of Benjamin’s piece he analyses, translate Wehen as “birth pangs” and “douleurs obstétricales,” whereas it is clear, from our perspective, that Wehen hints at the process of critical reading, which is the “mortification” of the works/language (the pangs, the pain) in order to unveil its “truth-content” (the birth). Zohn’s and Gandillac’s translation, which adds to Wehen that “connotation of birth and rebirth, of resurrection” that is for de Man unnecessary and inaccurate, seems thus rather appropriate. Samuel Weber reminds us again to look at the definition of “origin” put forward in the Trauerspiel book: “the term origin is not intended to describe the process by which the existent came into being, but rather to describe that which emerges from the process of becoming [Werden] and disappearance [Vergehen]. Origin is an eddy in the stream of becoming, and in its current it swallows the material involved in the process of genesis. […] On the one hand it needs to be recognized as a process of restoration [Restauration] and re-establishment [Wiederherstellung], but, on the other hand, and precisely because of this, as something imperfect [Unvollendetes] and incomplete [Unabgeschlossenes]” (GS 1.1:226/OT 45). Cf. Weber, “A Touch of Translation,” p. 72. de Man, “Conclusions,” p. 82. He writes: “are grammar (word and syntax) on the one hand, and meaning (as it culminates in the Satz) on the other hand – are they compatible with each other? Does the one lead to the other, does the one support the other? Benjamin tells us that translation put that conviction in question because, he says, from the moment that a translation is really literal, wörtlich, word by word, the meaning completely disappears,” p. 88. The whole passage reads: “the translation is not the metaphor of the original; nevertheless, the German word for translation, übersetzen, means metaphor. Übersetzen translates exactly the Greek meta-phorein, to move over, übersetzen, to put across. Übersetzen, I should say, translates metaphor – which, asserts Benjamin, is not at all the same. They are not metaphors, yet the word means metaphor. The metaphor is not a metaphor, Benjamin is saying. No wonder that translators have difficulty. It is a curious assumption to say übersetzen is not based on resemblance, there is no resemblance between the translation and the original. Amazingly paradoxical statement, metaphor is not metaphor,” de Man, “Conclusions,” p. 83. de Man, “Conclusions,” p. 84. De Man reads the term “afterlife” as a ghostly confirmation of the essential death of the original and of language as such; his interpretation denies thus the fundamental “historicity” with which Benjamin endows the act of critical reading: translation has merely the “appearance of life, but of life as an afterlife, because translation also reveals the death of the original,” p. 85. Bettine Menke reads the image of the echo, which in Benjamin’s essay follows the comparison between translation and criticism, as a figure of the “actualization,” the “making present” inherent to translation and that thus connects it to

334

78.

79.

80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85.

Notes the temporality of the dialectical image and to the act of critical reading. Cf. Bettine Menke, “‘However One Calls into the Forest …’: Echoes of Translation,” trans. Robert J. Kiss, Walter Benjamin and Romanticism, ed. Beatrice Hanssen and Andrew Benjamin (New York and London: Continuum, 2002). de Man proposes Carol Jacob’s translation of this passage as more accurate than Zohn’s: she translates “zusammenfügen” as “articulate” rather than “glue together” and “folgen” as “follow” rather than “match.” From the new translation de Man proposes a reading of this passage that insists on the difference between metaphor, metonymy and synecdoche, which are not what Benjamin means by “figures.” Cf. de Man, “Conclusions,” pp. 90–1. Andrew Benjamin emphasises this point addressing the heterogeneity of translation with respect to a simple dichotomy form/content or literal/figural, which is what characterizes Darstellung: “translation pertains not to the meaning but to language itself. Once again this must be understood as an implicit critique of the distinction between form and content; a distinction that is itself a restatement of the earlier and perhaps enduring distinction between the literal and the figural,” Benjamin, Translation and the Nature of Philosophy pp. 89–90, emphases added. de Man, “Conclusions,” p. 89. de Man, “Conclusions,” p. 89. de Man, “Conclusions,” p. 91. de Man, “Conclusions,” p. 91. de Man, “Conclusions,” p. 92, emphases added. Cf. J. Hillis Miller, The Ethics of Reading: Kant, De Man, Eliot, Trollope, James, and Benjamin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), pp. 41–60. Thus, Miller writes, “ethics is a form of allegory […], one form of those apparently referential stories we tell to ourselves and to those around us,” p. 50, emphasis added. This is the reason for the preference accorded to allegory by de Man’s deconstructive reading: allegory is “‘unreadable’ in that it leads to a set of assertions that radically exclude each other” and thus proclaims the “impossibility of reading,” Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 245. Allegory is a figure that pretends to reveal stable meanings but then, as Doris Sommer writes, “conveniently fails”; in this “hope to fail” and thus achieve the “enlightenment of self-conscious ignorance,” “the self-consciousness of failure that de Man calls allegory,” Sommer reads a peculiar kind of “Christian ‘bad faith’,” cf. Doris Sommer, “Allegory and Dialectics: A Match Made in Romance,” Boundary 2 18.1 (Spring 1991), pp. 67–8. The comparison between Benjamin’s and de Man’s versions of allegory is a popular topic; cf. for example Jan Rosiek, “Apocalyptic and Secular Allegory, or, How to Avoid Getting Excited: Walter Benjamin and Paul De Man,” Orbis Litterarum: International Review of Literary Studies 48 (1993); Susanne Knaller, “A Theory

Notes

86. 87. 88. 89. 90.

91.

335

of Allegory Beyond Walter Benjamin and Paul De Man,” The Germanic Review 77.2 (Spring 2002); Kyoo Lee, “A Calligraphy of Time: Allegory (Dis)Orders in the Materialist Aesthetics of Walter Benjamin and Paul De Man,” Parallax 10.3 (2004); Jim Hansen, “Formalism and Its Malcontents: Benjamin and De Man on the Function of Allegory,” New Literary History 35 (2005). Miller, The Ethics of Reading, pp. 125–6, emphasis added. Weber, “A Touch of Translation,” p. 76, emphases in the original. de Man, “Conclusions,” p. 92, emphasis added. de Man, “Conclusions,” pp. 92–3, emphases added. Epifanio San Juan, “Criticism, Language, Hermeneutics,” Revue de littérature comparée 65.4 (October/December 1991), p. 399. A reworked version of the same article continues: “de Man’s pretext of a commentary turns out to be an argument for the primacy of a quasi-Nietzschean theory of language-use as a form of will to mastery, more exactly a theory of reading that would privilege the rhetorical or tropological dynamics that the critic perceives operating in the text. The reader is the ideal site for the unfolding of aporias, that is, between the performative and constative functions of discourse, between metalinguistics statements and tropological praxis, between synchronic and diachronic permutations. What de Man’s analytic style constructs is the rhetorical reader, the ideal subject (according to Ellen Rooney) of the pluralist problematic of ‘general persuasion.’ Given the impossibility of unequivocal meaning and the futility of aiming for a verifiably accurate translation free from ‘rigorously unreliable’ tropes, one might ask then what is the effect of this specific form of reading that relentlessly, even granted its surplus yield of pleasure, pursues its own dissolution, or at least the phantasy of its own death?,” Epifanio San Juan, Hegemony and Strategies of Transgression: Essays in Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), p. 20. Benjamin, Translation and the Nature of Philosophy, pp. 106–7.

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Index

Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund: 28, 30, 40, 158, 194, 199, 212, 231, 250–5, 263, 300, 329, 330, 331 actuality: 9, 10, 11, 13–35, 135, 187, 190, 199, 236, 237, 240, 241, 248, 249, 250, 253, 254, 261, 262 actualization: see actuality afterlife: 60, 107, 198, 202, 257, 262 allegorist: see allegory allegory: 15, 28, 45, 90, 107, 113, 116, 121, 122, 135, 136, 137, 140, 141, 142, 143, 150, 151, 152–8, 171, 174, 177, 183, 185, 188, 189, 190, 193, 194, 195, 199, 200–1, 207–8, 209, 229, 232, 244–9, 250, 291, 315, 318, 319, 334 ambiguity: 17, 28–9, 33, 107, 144, 158 Aragon, Louis: 24 Arendt, Hannah: 60, 61, 206, 207, 276–7, 317, 318 Aron, Jean-Paul: 214 Artaud, Antonin: 220 Atget, Eugène: 94, 111–2 Auerbach, Eric: 30, 267 aura: 105, 106–9, 122, 125, 146, 157, 187, 202, 213 Auster, Paul: 34, 90–1, 112–34, 240 awakening: 51, 142, 164, 177, 182–5, 186, 201, 209, 234, 258, 309, 320 Balzac, Honoré de: 38, 40, 41 Baudelaire, Charles: 9, 13, 15, 17, 25, 31, 38, 40, 41–2, 45, 46, 53, 54–7, 58, 59, 60, 63, 71, 78, 79, 85, 93, 94, 96, 97, 98, 99, 115, 116, 126, 136, 138, 139,

140, 141, 143, 144, 145–51, 152, 154, 158, 160, 161, 179, 180, 188, 191–3, 194, 201, 254, 270, 275, 277, 283, 284, 297, 299, 300, 312, 316 Baudrillard, Jean: 17, 122, 132, 244 Beauvoir, Simone de: 166, 303, 304 Beckett, Samuel: 220 Berkeley, George: 123 Bloch, Ernst: 92 Bloch, Marc: 214–15 Borges, Jorge Luis: 116 Bourdieu, Pierre: 82 Brecht, Bertold: 9, 26, 93, 103, 105, 107, 165, 205, 220, 229, 282, 285, 286, 302, 315, 326–7 Breton, André: 47 Buber, Martin: 27 Büchner, Georg: 220 Calvino, Italo: 116 Carroll, Lewis: 64 catastrophe: 112, 195, 199, 200, 210, 214, 225, 232, 315 Cavarero, Adriana: 135 Chandler, Raymond: 116 Chesterton, Gilbert Keith: 282 chiffonnier: see ragpicker child: 9, 25, 33, 141, 206 Christie, Agatha: 112, 116, 282 cinema: 9, 45, 66–70, 184, 202–3, 271, 316 citation: see quotation collector: 15, 33, 44, 190, 206–8, 209, 229, 318

384

Index

Collins, Wilkie: 282 commodity: 10, 34, 38, 41, 49, 50, 52, 57–60, 83, 90, 104, 107, 108, 122, 132, 135–86, 188, 196, 198, 211, 216, 245, 251, 318 Conan Doyle, Arthur: 116, 282, 285 constellation: 9, 10, 11, 13–35, 37, 38, 39, 41, 42, 66, 88, 89, 91, 113, 114, 135, 136, 137, 187, 202, 209–13, 222, 237, 239–62 construction: 16, 17, 18, 22, 27, 33, 34, 37, 39, 40, , 49, 63, 67, 88, 137, 185, 187, 188, 190, 203, 204–8, 109, 210, 212, 228, 230, 231, 233, 237, 240, 241, 242, 246, 247, 254. 255–6, 261, 264, 266, 267, 319, 325, 327, 331 continuum: 24, 30, 44, 137, 158, 171, 175, 183, 186, 199, 200, 202, 203, 205, 209, 210, 212, 214, 216, 217, 222, 223–8, 229, 233, 234, 235, 241, 244, 246 Cook, James: 218 Corbusier, le (Charles-Édouard JeanneretGris): 105 correspondance: 15, 25, 26, 32, 45, 65, 78, 114, 189, 217, 244, 264 criticism: 9, 22, 29, 30, 191, 194, 195, 201–3, 205, 258–9, 316

Derrida, Jacques: 130, 243, 288 destruction: 22, 24, 69, 77, 108, 109, 110, 122, 134, 137, 150, 157, 171, 182, 183, 185, 186, 188, 190, 194, 199–204, 205, 207, 217, 233, 241, 246, 247, 300, 315, 316, 317 detective: 9, 10, 14, 35, 44, 46, 59, 69, 89–134, 240 Detienne, Marcel: 214 dialectical image: 15, 18, 27–32, 33, 136, 157–58, 161, 162, 170, 175, 190, 204, 208, 209–13, 214, 217, 222, 223, 228–31, 319 dialectic: 28, 37, 39, 40–62, 81, 98, 103, 116, 135, 155–8, 179, 209–13, 223, 235. 236, 239–62 Dickens, Charles: 40 Dodgson, Charles Lutwidge: see Lewis Carroll Dumas, Alexandre: 38, 96 Dworkin, Andrea: 164

dandy: 33, 51, 53, 60, 74, 207 Darstellung: 18–35, 201, 246, 252–3, 259, 260, 266 Dashiell Hammett, Samuel: 116 Debord, Guy: 17, 132, 239, 264, 326 deconstruction: 127, 130, 134, 138, 249, 256, 263, 264 Deleuze, Gilles: 242–3, 326, 327 Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari: 83, 244–9, 327, 328 de Man, Paul: 16, 256–62, 263–4, 265, 331, 332, 333, 334

feminism: 10, 34, 50, 137, 161–86, 215, 301, 302 Fenimore Cooper, James: 96 figure: 9, 10, 13–35, 37, 135, 199, 215, 255–62 film: see cinema flâneur: 10, 14, 15, 35, 37–88, 89, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100–1, 102, 107, 110, 113, 115, 143, 144–5, 147, 149, 153, 187, 207, 240 flâneuse: 38, 46, 50, 144 Flaubert, Gustave: 82, 85, 141

Eagleton, Terry: 59, 107, 108, 109, 158, 276, 287 Eco, Umberto: 116 empathy: 55, 59, 80, 136, 144, 146, 148, 149, 153, 154, 165, 166, 167, 168, 179, 203, 225, 275, 276, 297, 303, 315

385

Index Forster, Georg: 218 Foucault, Michel: 46, 132, 215 Fraser, Malcolm: 224 Freud, Sigmund: 285 Fuchs, Eduard: 211, 319 Gaboriau, Émile: 282 Genet, Jean: 85, 220, 221 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von: 9, 31, 268–9 Goytisolo, Juan: 34, 39, 62–88, 240 Grass, Günter: 221 Green, Anna Katherine: 282 Guattari, Félix: see Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari Guha, Ranajit: 215 Guys, Constantin: 41, 312 Habermas, Jürgen: 14, 191, 263 Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri: 80, 83, 239–40, 244, 279–80, 326 Haussmann, Georges Eugène: 41, 49, 62, 71, 72, 73, 76 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich: 198, 242, 311, 327 Heller, Frank: 282 Hessel, Franz: 27, 40, 64, 197 historian: see history historicism: 158, 199, 200, 211, 235, 315 historiography: see history history: 34, 89, 91, 109–12, 113, 114, 131–4, 158–9, 187–237, 241, 242, 243, 246, 248, 257, 262, 294, 331 Hobsbawm, Eric: 214 Hofmannstahl, Hugo von: 30, 294 Hölderlin, Friedrich: 9, 19, 256 Honecker, Erich: 220 Horkheimer, Max: 31, 55, 283 Howard, John: 226 Hugo, Victor: 38, 41, 194 Hutcheon, Linda: 230, 241–2, 326

image: 9, 13–35, 42, 44, 45, 54, 57, 65, 101, 189, 207, 209–13, 216, 225, 255–62 image, dialectical: see dialectical image indigenous: 10, 34, 189, 214–37 interpretive act: 9, 10, 11, 13–35, 37, 120, 162, 187, 237, 239–62 Irigaray, Luce: 161, 172–3, 304, 305 Jameson, Fredric: 122, 125, 132, 216, 247, 248, 249–50, 291–2, 294, 321, 326–7, 329 Jung, Carl Gustav: 30–1, 267–8 Johnson, Colin: see Mudrooroo Kafka, Franz: 9, 220 Kant, Immanuel: 19 Karplus, Gretel: 93, 112 Kästner, Erich: 227 Keating, Paul: 225, 226 Kiefer, Anselm: 219 Klee, Paul: 219, 223 Kracauer, Siegfried: 93, 282, 283 Kraus, Karl: 9, 29, 32, 205, 298 Kritik: see criticism Lacan, Jacques: 183, 248, 288, 309 Leblanc, Maurice: 282 Le Goff, Jacques: 214 Leroux, Gaston: 282 Lévi-Strauss, Claude: 170, 172, 304 Loos, Adolf: 105 L’Ouverture, Toussaint: 218 Lowry, Malcolm: 247 Lumpensammler: see ragpicker Lyotard, Jean-François: 214, 241 MacKinnon, Catharine: 164 Maraini, Dacia: 34, 137, 161–86 Marcuse, Herbert: 220

386 Marx, Karl: 40, 53, 58, 173, 241, 242, 275, 299, 304 Marxism: 65, 163, 187, 191, 220, 241, 243, 244, 250, 301, 323 material content: 22, 185, 201, 237, 255, 258 melancholy: 52, 144, 200–1, 207, 209, 224, 225, 227, 239, 247, 248, 251, 332 messianism: 14, 79, 137, 183, 184, 186, 203, 206, 212–3, 230, 235, 240, 257, 258, 267, 317, 320 Mehring, Franz: 227 method: 9, 10, 17, 20, 33, 37, 102, 103, 118, 187, 194, 203, 209, 210, 212, 214, 217, 220–1, 228, 230, 241, 244, 254, 255 Millett, Kate: 170, 172, 304 modernism: 10, 33, 90, 91, 113, 125, 134, 216, 228, 229, 231, 232, 236, 237, 247 modernity: 9, 34, 37–88, 89, 90, 92–112, 119, 122, 135, 136, 137, 138, 142, 143, 146, 150, 151, 152, 154, 156, 160, 187, 188, 191, 192, 193, 195, 198, 201, 207, 232, 233, 240, 244 monad: 21, 27, 33, 37, 38, 88, 187, 190, 198, 199, 203, 208, 209, 210, 213, 235, 254, 257, 262, 316, 322 montage: 16, 34, 40, 41, 45, 68, 194, 204, 208, 210, 212, 217, 218–23, 228–31, 252 Mudrooroo: 34, 189, 214–37 Müller, Heiner: 217–28, 233, 234, 237, 322 myth: 92, 143, 144, 157, 165, 168, 171, 173, 177, 185, 193, 196, 199, 200, 210, 211, 215, 230, 233–5, 250, 251, 254, 266, 304, 330 Nabokov, Vladimir: 116 Nadar (Gaspard-Félix Tournachon): 193

Index Naville, Pierre: 24 Negri, Antonio: see Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri Nietzsche, Friedrich: 240, 241, 242, 243, 244, 262, 312, 315 nihilisms: 194, 196, 203, 240, 262, 286

Proust, Marcel: 23, 25–6, 27, 28, 29, 197, 265 Pynchon, Thomas: 112

origin: see Ursprung

Rabelais, François: 73 ragpicker: 10, 14, 35, 44, 110, 113, 146, 160, 187–237, 241 Rang, Florens Christian: 316 reading: see interpretive act Reich, Wilhelm: 220 Robbe-Grillet, Alain: 116 Romanticism: 9, 22, 23, 27, 29, 30, 201, 254, 258–9, 316 ruin: 32, 49, 60, 64, 79, 90, 110, 134, 136, 137, 157, 177, 188, 189, 193, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 204, 107, 210, 211, 214, 217, 224, 232, 233, 237, 247, 310, 313, 314, 315, 317, 318, 327 ruination: see ruin

panopticon: 45–6, 70, 90, 99, 105, 110, 117, 207 Parent-Duchatelet, Alexandre: 142 patriarchy: 10, 135, 136, 137, 140, 161, 167, 169, 170, 171, 173, 175, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 185, 186 phantasmagoria: 17, 18, 47, 48, 75, 89, 90, 91, 94–7, 98, 103, 104, 108, 109, 114, 117, 119, 126, 127, 133, 136, 137, 161, 164, 166, 175, 180, 182, 183, 185, 198, 199, 200, 202, 211, 222, 224, 225, 226, 233, 235, 241, 295 Pirandello, Luigi: 221 Plato: 16, 20, 29, 242, 254 Poe, Edgar Allan: 40, 41, 56, 57, 78, 93, 94, 96, 98–100, 101, 102, 104, 115, 116, 117, 119, 128, 274, 284 postcolonialism: 64, 74, 189, 223, 226–7, 278 postmodernism: 10, 13, 17, 34, 39, 62–88, 90, 91, 112–34, 182, 183, 216, 220, 226–7, 230, 232, 241–2, 243, 244, 247, 248, 249, 323 postmodernity: 10, 39, 62–88, 89, 187, 214– 17, 223, 228, 240, 241, 244 poststructuralism: 16, 17, 223, 230, 243, 247, 249 Poubelle, Eugène-René: 191 progress: 90, 91, 119, 194, 196, 198, 199, 200, 214, 224, 252 prostitute: 10, 14, 15, 34, 35, 39, 41, 55, 135– 86, 187, 193, 241

387

Index

quotation: 29, 34, 81, 111, 195, 204–6, 208, 217, 218–23, 240, 317–18

Said, Edward: 81, 82, 83, 87, 278, 280 Sammler: see collector Sartre, Jean-Paul: 66, 86 Sayers, Dorothy: 116 Scheerbart, Paul: 106 Schein: 16, 17, 56, 157, 165, 168, 171, 187, 200, 241, 245, 251, 291 Scholem, Gershom: 9, 19, 282, 314, 317

Seghers, Anna: 219, 220 shock: 26, 46, 54, 96, 101, 204, 205, 208, 229, 252, 275, 302, 303 Simenon, Georges: 282 Simmel, Georg: 98, 271, 284 standstill: 118, 158, 209, 210, 223, 246, 249–55 storyteller: 132, 215, 231 Sue, Eugène: 96 Surrealism: 9, 23–5, 27, 71, 92, 112, 113, 196, 197, 203, 208, 229, 234, 252, 271, 331 theology: 13, 14, 204, 212, 213, 229, 230, 262, 317, 330 theory: 9, 10, 14, 28–9, 33, 40, 92–4, 103–6, 188, 189, 212, 230, 330 Thompson, E.P. (Edward Palmer): 214 trace: 28, 34, 89–134, 231 translation: 256–62 truth-content: 30, 32, 60, 135, 137, 157, 201, 205, 237, 255 Tucholsky, Kurt: 227 Urphänomen: 31–2, 35, 268–9 Ursprung: 21, 22, 31, 32, 35, 202, 205, 206, 258, 269, 333 Weber, Max: 30, 266–7 Weiss, Peter: 221, 322 whore: see prostitute