Benjamin's Passages: Dreaming, Awakening 9780823262595

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Benjamin’s Passages

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Benjamin’s Passages Dreaming, Awakening

Alexander Gelley

fordham university press new york 2015

Copyright © 2015 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means— electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other— except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Visit us online at www.fordhampress.com. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gelley, Alexander. Benjamin’s passages : dreaming, awakening / Alexander Gelley. — First edition. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8232-6256-4 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8232-6257-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Benjamin, Walter, 1892–1940 — Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. PT2603.E455Z6732 2015 838′.91209— dc23 2014029447 Printed in the United States of America 17 16 15 5 4 3 2 1 First edition

For Mieke, first of all, and Ora, Mira, Andrew, Reuben, and Levi

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contents

List of Abbreviations

ix

Preface

xi

Acknowledgments Introduction

xiii 1

1.

Contexts of the Aesthetic

42

2.

Epigones in the House of Language: Benjamin and Kraus

69

3.

Benjamin on Atget: Empty Streets and the Fading of Aura

87

4.

Entering the Passagen

5.

Citation as Incitation: The Political Agenda of the Passagenarbeit 127

6.

Messianism, “Weak” and Otherwise

147

7.

Forgetting, Dreaming, Awakening

174

Works Cited

197

Index

207

102

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abbreviat ions

GB GS SW TAP

Gesammelte Briefe, 6 vols., ed. Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1995–2000). Gesammelte Schriften, 7 vols., ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1974 –89). Selected Writings, 4 vols., ed. Michael W. Jennings, et al. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996 –2003). The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).

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preface

Benjamin’s Passages: Dreaming, Awakening is focused on Benjamin’s work of the 1930s, though it reaches back to earlier writings, too (for example, “The Task of the Translator,” the study of Goethe’s novel The Elective Affinities), in order to establish certain continuities. The introduction and the seven chapters are intended to deal with central issues of Benjamin’s later work: the interplay of aesthetics and politics in his criticism (Chapter 1); the conception of language (Chapter 2); aura and its relation to image (Chapter 3); the genre of The Arcades Project (Chapter 4); citation as the key structural principle of The Arcades Project (Chapter 5); the status of “messianism” in his thought (Chapter 6); the motifs of memory, the crowd, and awakening (Chapter 7). Many (but not all) of Benjamin’s principal writings of the later period are discussed in these chapters: the essay on Goethe’s The Elective Affinities and “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” (Chapter 1); “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” “The Task of the Translator,” and the essay on Karl Kraus (Chapter 2); “Little History of Photography” (Chapter 3); the materials published as Das Passagen-Werk (The Arcades Project) (Chapters 4, 5); “On the Concept of History” (Chapters 6, 7). But my intention is not to “cover” a period of Benjamin’s writings but rather to trace a limited number of issues. The Introduction has a number of aims: to situate Benjamin’s place in the current field of “theory,” to lay out elements of the biographical context of some of the writings, and to give a preview of some of the arguments of the subsequent chapters. A section on “The Storyteller” highlights one aspect of Benjamin’s major accomplishment as a literary theorist, a topic that this book has not tried to address. xi

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The title alludes to the Passagen (arcades) of the project, of course, but it also refers to Benjamin’s effort to negotiate the “labyrinth” of his work and thought in this period. And it is intended to foreground the figurative status of awakening within the allegorical structure of The Arcades Project. In transposing the Freudian dream work from the individual subject to the collective, Benjamin projected a “macrocosmic journey” of the individual sleeper to “the dreaming collective, which, through the arcades, communes with its own insides.” He credited the Surrealists with being the first to offer a means of deciphering the nineteenth century’s “narcotic historicism, its passion for masks.” He was well aware of Marx’s early remark that “reform of consciousness” will come when “people will see that the world has long possessed the dream of a thing—and that it only needs to possess the consciousness of this thing in order really to possess it.” But any such invocation of a past cannot draw on some form of conscious recollection or antiquarian recovery. Rather, “the dialectical—the Copernican—turn of remembrance [Eingedenken]” functions as a solicitation, a call to a collectivity to come. This is linked to the motif of awakening, put forth in some entries of The Arcades Project and in “On the Concept of History,” and it conveys, I will argue, a qualified performative intent, a reaching out to a virtual collective to be constituted by awakening. “The realization of dream elements in the course of waking up is the canon of dialectics. It is paradigmatic for the thinker and binding for the historian,” he wrote in The Arcades Project. Benjamin’s effort to transpose the dream phenomenon to the history of a collective remained fragmentary, but it underlies the principle of retrograde temporality, which, I argue, is central to his idea of history.

acknowledgments

Over almost two decades, I have received encouragement and advice from many quarters: first, from colleagues in the Critical Theory Institute (CTI) and the Comparative Literature Department at the University of California, Irvine, and especially Jane Newman. In addition, I am deeply grateful for a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1993–94, which was important in the first stage of my work. Finally, Ackbar Abbas, Michael Levine, and, most of all, Erin Obodiac have proved invaluable in advising me more recently. Earlier versions of some of the chapters appeared in the following publications: “Thematics and Historical Construction: The Example of Benjamin’s Passagen-Werk,” Strumenti Critici, n.s. IV, 2 (May 1989), 25– 43; “Contexts of the Aesthetic in Walter Benjamin,” MLN 114.5 (December 1999): 933–61; “Epigones in the House of Language: Benjamin on Kraus,” Partial Answers 5, 1 ( January 2007): 17–32; and “Benjamin and Atget: Empty Streets and the Fading of Aura,” Annals of Scholarship, forthcoming, 2014. Irvine, California, December 2013

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. . . the conviction guiding me in my literary endeavors . . . That is to say, the conviction that every truth has its home, its ancestral palace, in language; and that this palace is constructed out of the oldest logoi; and that insights of individual bodies of knowledge remain subordinate to truth grounded in this way, insofar as, somewhat like nomads, they draw here and there on the domains of language, caught up in that signifying character of language that stamps its terminology with the most irresponsible arbitrariness. —to hugo von hofmannsthal, January 13, 1924 (GB 2: 409)

You know that I have always written in accordance with my convictions, but have seldom, and never otherwise than in conversation, made the attempt to express the whole contradictory fundament from which they, in their specific manifestations, derive. — t o g e r s h o m s c h o l e m , May 6, 1934 (GB 4: 408)

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Introduction

Posthumous Fame Walter Benjamin’s reputation emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, well after his death in 1940, and to a degree that was hardly conceivable in his lifetime. As his writings became known, they assumed a place alongside those of other thinkers of the century—for example, Freud, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Foucault—who may be characterized as, in Foucault’s words, “initiators of discursive practices,” authors who “produced not only their own work, but the possibility and the rules of formation of other texts.”1 What is more, Benjamin’s reputation has been singularly colored by a legendary “afterlife.” Undoubtedly, his writings have been subject to scrupulous hermeneutic labor, but the meanings drawn from them have been conditioned to a con1. Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977), 131. 1

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siderable degree by circumstances relative to his biography and the context of reception. Benjamin himself was keenly alert to this phenomenon, as is evident in his treatment of Baudelaire.2 He enunciated the underlying issue in The Arcades Project: Historical “understanding” is to be grasped, in principle, as an afterlife [Nachleben] of that which is understood; and what has been recognized in the analysis of the “afterlife of works,” in the analysis of “fame” [Ruhm], is therefore to be considered the foundation of history in general. (GS 5: 574f [N 2, 3]; TAP 460)3

The “legend” of a writer should not supersede the interpretation of the works, of course, but neither may it be ignored in evaluating their historical impact. It represents an indispensable index of cultural-political currents at a given moment. Benjamin was certainly sensitive to the “afterlife” of his own writings, which is hardly surprising in view of his belief in the transformative potential embedded in the “oppressed past” (unterdrückte Vergangenheit). Detlev Schöttker goes so far as to speak of “strategies” and “calculation” on Benjamin’s part in preparing his posthumous reputation.4 It is not accidental that Benjamin has been so eagerly received in recent decades, that his works have enjoyed an almost instant canonization, that he is cited, often for opposed ends, by the most diverse writers. There may be a sense of delayed justice, an effort to pay restitution to an individual who was ignored or misunderstood in his lifetime. The forms of the neglect and 2. “The figure of Baudelaire plays a decisive part in his fame [Ruhm]. . . . No study of Baudelaire can fully explore the vitality of its subject without dealing with the image [das Bild] of his life.” Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, 4 vols., ed. Michael W. Jennings, et al (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996 –2003), vol. 4: 168. In German, Gesammelte Schriften, 7 vols., ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1974 –89), vol. 1: 665. Citations from these editions are identified henceforth as, respectively, SW and GS. On Baudelaire, see also “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers,” GS 4: 12–13. 3. Citations from Das Passagen-Werk (in English as The Arcades Project) will henceforth be identified with the page number in the GS, vol. 5 and the designation that Benjamin used within that work (for example, [N, 3, 1]), followed by TAP and the page of The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999). 4. Detlev Schöttker provides an illuminating discussion of this issue in his Konstruktiver Fragmentariusmus (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1999), 92–142.

Introduction

3

persecution are especially designed to appeal to our sympathies, academic and political. Early in his career Benjamin was denied the opportunity to pursue an academic path by the rejection of the Habilitation (the second dissertation); subsequently his hard-won success as a cultural journalist was brought to naught by the Nazi accession to power in 1933, and at the end he was driven to suicide in attempting to escape France after the installation of the Vichy government. Of Benjamin’s self-characterizations, one of the most provocative is this note, dated about 1934: Being first has great difficulties but also some opportunities. In another sense, the same applies to being last, such as I am. (Ein Erster zu sein, hat große Schwierigkeiten, bietet auch einige Chancen. In anderer Weise gilt das selbe von einem Letzten, wie ich es bin.) (GS 6: 532)

Eckhardt Köhn links this passage to another: “It is indispensable, in any case, that any author who wants to attain to a minimal renown take possession of a precise strategic position within his generation” (GS 6: 201).5 In what series might Benjamin view himself as “being last,” an end point? In January 1930, on returning to Paris after a longer absence, Benjamin wrote an important letter to Scholem, taking stock of his situation at the time. He can report a significant achievement: First of all I have attained—in modest proportions, to tell the truth—a position in Germany. The goal that I had set myself is not yet fully realized, but, finally, I am quite close. This is to be considered the leading [le premier] critic of German literature. The difficulty is that for more than fifty years literary criticism in Germany has no longer been considered a serious genre.6 To fashion a position for oneself in criticism, this means, fundamentally, to recreate it as a genre. And on this road some serious progress has been realized—by others, but mostly by me.7 5. Eckhardt Köhn, “ ‘Ein Letzter, wie ich es bin.’ Bermerkungen zum schriftellerischen Selbstverständnis Walter Benjamins,” in Was nie geschrieben wurde, lesen, ed. Lorenz Jäger and Thomas Regehly (Bielefeld: Aisthesis Verlag, 1992), 158–59. 6. A year earlier, on February 14, 1929, Benjamin had written Scholem of a plan to write an essay on the low level of literary criticism in Germany. This was never written, but notes on the topic have survived; see GS 6: 161–69. 7. Letter of January 20, 1930. Walter Benjamn, Gesammelte Briefe, 6 vols., ed. Christophe Gödde and Henri Lonitz (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1995–

4

Introduction

In this letter he writes too of his intense focus on the Passagen project (“in fact, this is the theater of all my struggles and all my ideas”), but also of much work still to be done to provide it a theoretical grounding. But two years later his mood is much darker. (The 1930 parliamentary election marked the start of Hitler’s ascendency, which became manifest in innumerable ways in Germany in the following year.) In August 1931, Benjamin begins a diary ominously entitled “Diary from the seventeenth of August nineteen-hundred thirty-one to the day of (my) death” (Tagebuch vom siebensten August neunzehnhunderteinunddreissig bis zum Todestag). It begins with, “This journal is not likely to become very long.” And then he immediately notes the rejection of a book he had proposed to the publisher Anton Kippenberg to commemorate the centenary of Goethe’s death (1832), and adds, “and thus my plan gains all the relevance that can come from a dead-end” (und damit gewinnt mein Plan die ganze Aktualität, die ihm die Ausweglosigkeit nur geben kann) (GS 6: 441). The suicide plan would come close to being realized almost a year later, on Benjamin’s fortieth birthday ( July 15, 1932).8 In April 1932, he set sail for Ibizia (Capri) where he would spend over three months, until July 17, when he sailed to Nice. The suicide that was to take place there, although scrupulously prepared, did not occur. A letter to Scholem on July 26, 1932, expresses the hopelessness of his situation. (In Germany, the failure of Franz von Papen’s chancellorship signaled the triumph of Hitler.) Benjamin judges that “the literary forms of expression” that he had evolved in the previous ten years are doomed. While his writings were numerous, they were “small-scale victories but correspondingly large-scale defeats.” The works he had planned (including the Passagen) he calls “the veritable sites of ruin and catastrophe, of which I see no end . . . in the coming years” (GB 4: 112–13). It is noteworthy that Benjamin, in spite of the precarious situation in those years, did not abandon his work. On the contrary, up to the final ca2000), vol. 3: 502. Henceforth cited as GB. Translations from this edition are mine. The letter is written in French, and Benjamin admits at the beginning that this serves him as a way of overcoming a resistance in writing it to Scholem, perhaps because he admits here his abandonment of efforts to learn Hebrew. 8. See Gerschom Scholem, Walter Benjamin: Die Geschichte einer Freundschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1975), 223f, 232–35, for the circumstances.

Introduction

5

pitulation, every blockage in his career seemed to serve as impetus for a fruitful reorientation of his thought. As late as May 7, 1940, three months before the departure from Paris that would end with his ill-fated attempt to leave France, he could still write a long letter to Adorno, one that touches on a variety of literary issues familiar to both and mentions English lessons and other aspects of his anticipated trip to New York. It is worth returning to the comment of 1934 and considering in what sense Benjamin saw himself as “last.” In spite of the shipwreck of his career as an essayist, in spite of his exile from Germany, Benjamin could not abandon the hope of making a definitive contribution to literary criticism. The ambition expressed in the letter of 1930, “to recreate it [criticism] as a genre,” had not faded. One of his last feuilleton articles, “Germans of 1789” (SW 3: 284 –301), written in 1939, takes up one of the aims of German Men and Women (a series of letters by German figures in the period 1783–1883, published in 1931–32, with commentary, as feuilletons)—this was, to exhibit “the age when the German bourgeoisie placed its weightiest and most sharply etched words on the scales of history” (SW 3: 167, trans. modified). In the 1939 article, Benjamin cites (for the second time, as Alexander Honold notes9) the words that Hölderlin had written in 1801 just before setting off on his trip to Bordeaux: “I shall and must remain a German, even if want and famine drive me as far as Tahiti,” to which Benjamin adds, “Like an echo in the mountains, reverberating from valley to valley, this lament of Hölderlin’s resounds through the century” (SW 3: 293). Of the many ways that Benjamin might have seen himself as concluding an era in 1934, not the least was as witness to the destruction of German bourgeois culture. The posthumous publication of Benjamin’s writings, including an enormous body of journals, letters, notes, and drafts—all in carefully edited and annotated versions10—has provided us with an exceptional opportunity to examine this seminal thinker from a variety of perspectives: first, in the evolution of his thought and writing over some three decades of intense productivity; then, as an exemplary figure whose work crystallized major 9. Alexander Honold, Der Leser Walter Benjamin: Bruchstücke einer deutschen Literaturgeschichte (Berlin: Vorwerk 8 Verlag, 2000), 10. 10. Suhrkamp Verlag is currently issuing Werke und Nachlass, a multi-volume series intended to provide definitive texts for Benjamin’s writings, including drafts and preparatory materials. The arcades material has not yet appeared.

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elements of the philosophical temper of the era just prior to the great divide of the Second World War; and finally, in the extraordinary emergence of his reputation since the sixties, a phenomenon inseparable from the new status of “theory” in the human and social sciences. Of those thinkers who most strongly inflected theories of art and of history in this period—Adorno, Foucault, Derrida, Blumenberg, Deleuze, Lyotard—Benjamin holds a special place in that his work achieved its impact well after his lifetime. Benjamin’s intellectual career parallels a transformation of philosophical temper that extends from Romanticism and Idealism to the crisis of humanist culture that may be dated from the Weimar period. Yet it would be misleading to trace the path of this thinker—with his extraordinary critical, and self-critical, acuity—primarily in light of the age or epoch. He was, as we know, highly suspicious of the methods and pretensions of history of ideas (Geistesgeschichte), and his own conception of historical temporality was in part motivated by a radical reaction to that approach. In this context, a passage in Einbahnstrasse (One-Way Street) is revealing: technical pointer There is nothing more impoverished than a truth expressed as it was thought. In such a case its writing down is not even a bad photo. And truth is loath (like a child, like a woman, who does not love us) to hold still and smile before the lens of writing, while we stoop under the camera’s black cloth. (SW 1: 480 [trans. modified]; GS 4: 138)

This little fable of “writing” (I cite only the beginning), however playful (Einbahnstrasse, let us recall, is an experiment in an avowedly Surrealist vein), is indicative of a determined resistance to conceptualization in the practice of criticism. In a letter to Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Benjamin articulated “the conviction guiding me in my literary endeavors . . . that every truth has its home, its ancestral palace, in language; and that this palace is constructed out of the oldest logoi. . . .” (GB 2: 409.) The precedence that Benjamin grants to language over any repertory of philosophical concepts should serve to curb any overly neat assimilation of his thought to a school or other ideological tendency, whether it be that of Adorno and the Frankfurt School, or of Brecht and Marxist materialism, or of Scholem and Jewish tradition. All these offer, at a given moment, relevant parallels, but none provide a consistent blueprint for Benjamin’s thought.

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Benjamin’s radically isolate position—both ideologically and conceptually—places a particular burden on his readers. To articulate the stakes of a reading presupposes an entry into the subject matter, an entry that may be articulated retroactively, from the vantage of a given position. But this is especially difficult in the case of a thinker like Benjamin, whose work cannot be easily fitted within any of the familiar categories of writerly production—whether philosophy, feuilleton, autobiography, sociology, cultural commentary, literary criticism. Benjamin is often invoked in the name of a progressive political stance, but that which is deemed political today could hardly be confirmed in Benjamin’s terms. The most relevant concepts in his terminological repertory, such as Aktualisieren and messianism, can be taken as “political” only in a very qualified sense, as will be developed further. Uwe Steiner, in the most detailed examination of Benjamin’s lost or unfinished manuscript “The True Politician,” offers this sobering analysis: Though Benjamin decisively rejects all writing which puts itself at the disposition of politics as a mediate utilization of language through the deed, he wants to accord to his own conception of an immediate, “magical” effect the predicate of “highly political” writing. It is precisely the separation of politics from the spiritual that is supposed to meet the preconditions necessary so that “the magical spark can leap between the word and the moving deed.” (GB 1: 127) The attempt to define politics as an independent, profane sphere in its relation to the metaphysical sphere of the idea also comprises the premise of the conception of politics and of political commitment. It is a conception that is abstract in the sense that it abstains entirely from a concrete, substantial definition of political targets.11

If we look to Benjamin’s writings for guidelines regarding his philosophy or his beliefs, we will not find a ready answer. In the circle of his friends and associates Benjamin was repeatedly challenged to take a stand, to declare his adherence, whether at the level of religion, of politics, or of class. What he wrote to his friend Gershom Scholem in reply to one such challenge is characteristic: “You know that I have always written in accordance with my convictions, but have seldom, and never otherwise than in conversation, made the attempt to express the whole contradictory foundation [den gan11. Uwe Steiner, “The True Politician: Walter Benjamin’s Concept of the Political,” New German Critique 83 (2001): 85.

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Introduction

zen widerspruchsvollen Fundus] from which they, in their specific manifestations, derive” (May 6, 1934, GB 4: 408). Yet, what is asked of us, as readers of Benjamin’s oeuvre, is just this: to posit as a point of departure “the whole contradictory foundation” from which his convictions derive. In this Introduction I want to pursue this matter along two paths: one more personal and biographical, as revealed through Benjamin’s relation to two of his friends, and the other more conceptual and theoretical.

“Dic cur hic?” Friendship and a Thinker’s Identity In his treatment of writers and thinkers Benjamin often uses a personal feature or anecdote as a heuristic, a mode of entry into the linguistic-conceptual complex that, in a sense, discloses an individual’s core identity. An illustrative anecdote, even a fictive one, may have a decisive function—for example, the story of Potemkin at the beginning of the Kafka essay, or the title “On the Image of Proust” (“Zum Bilde Prousts”), which refers quite precisely to the image of the writer as a paradigmatic literary-existential construct. Proust’s “is not a model life in every respect,” he writes there, “but everything about it is exemplary” (SW 2: 237). This exemplarity is then glossed as “the highest physiognomic expression which the irresistibly growing discrepancy between literature and life was able to assume.” A similar conception of exemplarity is also evident in German Men and Women (Deutsche Menschen), a collection Benjamin made of letters written between 1783 and 1883 by individuals both well-known and obscure. He introduced each letter with a brief commentary illustrative of the writer’s personal-ethical profile. This work, first published as a series in the Frankfurter Zeitung during 1931–32, was conceived as a subversive counter-canon to the typical monumental treatment of leading German figures. Where might one look for Benjamin’s own “physiognomic expression”? He had no strong autobiographical bent. It is true that he began a kind of memoir in 1932, “Berlin Chronicle,” but he left it unfinished to make way for a series of sketches, “Berlin Childhood Around Nineteen Hundred,” in which the personal element is highly stylized. He had close friendships with individuals of commanding intellectual stature, and the letters that survive

Introduction

9

offer, in many instances, exceptional self-revelations. But, conscientious correspondent that he was, Benjamin’s letters are markedly oriented to the recipient, and any self-disclosure needs to be evaluated in that light. Benjamin’s tendency to keep the diverse circles of friends and associates apart was notorious. His friend Gershom Scholem writes of a “wall of reserve [Sperrbezirk von Schweigsamkeit] which could be recognized intuitively . . . [and] a mystery-mongering [Geheimniskrämerei] to an eccentric degree that generally prevailed in everything relating to him personally.”12 Jürgen Habermas sketches this side of Benjamin in a fanciful evocation: Only as a surrealistic scene could one imagine, say, Scholem, Adorno, and Brecht sitting around a table for a peaceful symposium, with Breton and Aragon crouching nearby, while Wyneken stands by the door, all gathered for a debate on Bloch’s Spirit of Utopia or even Klages’s Geist als Widersacher der Seele. Benjamin’s intellectual existence had so much of the surreal about it that one should not confront it with facile demands for consistency.13

The conclusion that Hans Mayer draws seems conclusive: “In the end he had become impenetrable for them all: Hofmannsthal and his friends, Brecht, Scholem and the Zionists. To all sides, a decisiveness in not-choosing [Allenthalben die Dezision für die Nichtentscheidung].”14 And yet, what some saw as Benjamin’s elusiveness in no sense betokens a lack of commitment, of deep engagement in personal relationships. A journal entry of May 1931, is revealing in this regard. Benjamin had been spending some days with two male friends in the course of a trip in the south of France: We spoke about experiences of love, and in the course of this conversation I understood something for the first time in my life: every time I’ve experienced a great love, I’ve undergone a change so fundamental that I’ve amazed myself and have been forced to realize that the man who said such unexpected things and behaved in such unpredictable ways was myself. This

12. Scholem, Die Geschichte einer Freundschaft, 34. My translation. 13. Jürgen Habermas, “Consciousness-Raising or Rescuing Critique,” in On Walter Benjamin: Critical Essays and Recollections, ed. Gary Smith (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1991), 92. 14. Hans Mayer, Der Zeitgenosse: Walter Benjamin (Frankfurt am Main: Jüdischer Verlag, 1992), 42. My translation.

10

Introduction is based on the fact that a genuine love makes me resemble the woman I love. . . . This transformation into the realm of similitude—which is so indispensable that in view of the Church it has to be guaranteed by the sacrament of marriage, for nothing makes people resemble each other more than living together in marriage—was something I experienced most powerfully in my relationship with Asja [Lacis] with the result that I discovered many things in myself for the first time. On the whole, however, the three great loves of my life have influenced me not just chronologically, in terms of periods, but also in terms of experience. I have come to know three different women in the course of my life, and three different men in myself. To write the story of my life would mean describing the rise and fall of these three men and the compromise among them — one could also say, the triumvirate that represents my life. (SW 2: 473; GS 6: 427)

In this passage Benjamin, alluding to a doctrine of similitude that he had developed elsewhere, acknowledges the transformative force of a love relation but at the same time is able to conceive a measure of integration among discrete selves. What Benjamin expresses here about his love affairs can help us in gauging his friendships, particularly insofar as they throw light on his “physiognomic expression.” As one might expect, some of his friends, well aware of the contradictory implications of some of his associations, raised this issue with him, sometime discretely, sometimes bluntly. The tenor of such questions comes through in a provocative Latin tag that Max Rychner, a prominent Swiss literary critic, had attached to a copy of a review of his own that he sent Benjamin, a review of Marxist literary theory that Rychner evidently thought reflected Benjamin’s own position: “Dic cur hic?” (Tell us, is this where you stand?), Rychner wrote. His challenge may be taken as a sample of the kind of question repeatedly addressed to Benjamin from diverse, often divergent, ideological positions. I want to briefly examine two such instances. In February 1930, Scholem, following a repeatedly postponed plan for a visit by Benjamin to Jerusalem, had cautiously asked Benjamin whether it would not be better to abandon “false illusions regarding a never-to-berealized definitive stand on Judaism, which we have considered a joint undertaking for nearly fifteen years, and acknowledge the (however disappointing for me, but nonetheless unequivocal) reality of your existence outside that

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sphere [i.e., the Jewish]?” (Feb. 20, 1930, GB 3: 523). And Benjamin, in his reply, while delaying a full explanation of his stand on the matter, wrote: I have never encountered the living spirit of Judaism [lebendiges Judentum] in any other figure than yourself. The question how I stand in regard to Judaism is always the question of how I am related—I don’t what to say to you (since my friendship in this regard is no longer subject to any decision)— [but] to the forces that you have awakened in me. (April 25, 1930, GB 3: 520)

A year later, in a letter of March 30, 1931, Scholem renewed Rychner’s challenge of Dic cur hic? but in a much more forceful manner. Benjamin’s reply, in letters of April and July 1931, shows much consideration for Scholem but also tries to make clear how little he, Scholem, understood Benjamin’s situation, both in political and existential terms. In a series of deeply felt questions in the letter of April 17, 1931, Benjamin reveals how subtly he calculates his tactical options, poised as he is between “Berlin W.WW,” his base in a bourgeois, cosmopolitan intellectual milieu, and his need to intervene in the Communist debates in spite of the fact that such intervention would be judged “counterrevolutionary” by the German, as well as Moscow, party. It is worth noting that in this letter Benjamin outlines his Marxism in a differentiated, nuanced manner, though Scholem’s stand on the matter is altogether negative: “Do you really want to prevent me,” Benjamin writes, “with my small writing factory that is situated in the middle of the west, purely out of imperious necessity of distinguishing myself from a neighborhood that I must tolerate with good reason— do you want to prevent me from hanging the red flag from my window with the comment that it is nothing more than a tattered piece of cloth?” (April 17, 1931, GB 4: 25). Interestingly, Benjamin adds in the same letter that he will consult with some of those he is close to in formulating a more definitive response to Scholem’s challenge, and he mentions in this connection Ernst Bloch and Gustav Glück, both of them individuals who were situated well outside the orbit of either Scholem’s Judaism, Brecht’s highly independent Communism, or the official Communist party line. Although Benjamin alerts Scholem more than once what an impact the writings of Brecht are making on him (see July 20, 1931, GB 4: 45), Scholem’s reaction is one of resistance and even incomprehension. In the memoir of their friendship, written long after Benjamin’s death, Scholem could still write about this period, “For the sequel to our debate Brecht’s work cer-

12

Introduction

tainly had no significance, for although he [Benjamin] reverted to it often, he was unable to make comprehensible to me the two conflicting, ‘ideological’ countenances that he at the same time and also later directed to Brecht and to me.”15 In summary, we may conclude that Benjamin’s Jewish identity is neither merely tributary to Scholem’s nor that Judaism as Benjamin understood it was embodied only in Scholem. Rather, it may be taken as a feature of the kind of identity construction that Benjamin articulated in the journal entry about the “three great loves” cited previously. In that passage, Benjamin had radicalized the singularity of multiple identity models, but at the same time spoke of establishing a compromise among them, in this way indicating the need to negotiate a linkage, to realize— even if only intermittently—a degree of integration among otherwise discrete identities. Just as Benjamin could address in Scholem “the living spirit of Judaism” so he could write in 1923 to Florens Christian Rang, a Gentile friend of his during the early twenties: Certainly you embody for me today true Germanity [das wahre Deutschtum]—indeed, even at the risk of irritating you, I would almost say, you alone . . . (November 18, 1923, GB 2: 368)

In the same letter Benjamin had criticized a mutual friend for abandoning himself (at least in his philosophical writings) to a “European” viewpoint while never having experienced “what was positive in the phenomenon of Germany.” And Benjamin continued: But for me it is always restricted ethnic entities [begrenzte Volkstümer] that are preeminent: the German, the French. The fact that, and the extent to which I am bound to the former [the German] will never be far from my consciousness.

In writing this, Benjamin by no means lays claim to full participation in German cultural ethnicity. He goes on, in the lines that follow—it is 1923, 15. Scholem, Die Geschichte einer Freundschaft, 220. Scholem is commenting on Benjamin’s letter of July 20, 1931, where Benjamin had written, “we cannot expect real results from a formal debate conducted through correspondence,” on the subject of their relationship. Instead, Benjamin expressed the strong impact that Brecht’s Versuche had had on him.

Introduction

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let us recall, a year after the assassination of Rathenau and in the midst of he chaotic conditions of the Weimar Republic—to demarcate in the most anguished manner just how far a Jew might go in identifying himself with German ethnic-national identity: in the most terrible moments of a people [eines Volkes] only those should be called upon to speak who belong to it, nay, even more: who belong to it in the most eminent sense, who can say not only the mea res agitur but the propriam rem ago. The Jew should certainly not speak. . . . Can he participate at all [Soll er mitreden?] . . . Here, if anywhere, we come to the heart of the current Jewish question: that the Jew today betrays even the best German cause which he publicly supports. Since his public German expression is necessarily purchasable (in the deeper sense) it cannot show a seal of authenticity [Echtheitszeugnis].

Benjamin concludes this somber diagnosis with the remark that, at this time, only secret personal relations between Germans and Jews are possible: “the noble natures of both peoples are, today, bound to silence regarding their association.” The reflective, careful manner in which Benjamin weighs the modalities of German-Jewish contact here are characteristic of Benjamin’s way of situating himself. He by no means ignored the power of ethnic particularism and he recognized all too well the extent to which it eludes individual intention or will. He paid his due to the “Germanity” within him in many ways—not least by underscoring it in Rang, the friend he is writing to. But he recognized too that anything like “Germanity”—a form of ethnic or national consciousness— offered no intellectual or existential, much less practical, refuge. To return to Scholem: In the spring of 1934, he again challenges Benjamin to make clear his orientation. Scholem is reacting to Benjamin’s review of a collection of essays on the sociology of language, and although Benjamin’s essay reflected no strong communist sympathies, Scholem, clearly giving vent to a long-standing frustration, asked his friend: Is this [review] supposed to be a Communist credo? And if not, what is it? I must tell you that, in this year above all, I no longer have any idea where you stand. I never succeeded, in spite of all those earlier attempts that you will recall, to gain clarity even then regarding your stance. And now, with the start of this new epoch, when you will be less than ever predisposed to

14

Introduction this because of your terrible material situation, I am less likely than ever to succeed.16

Benjamin’s reply comes promptly and forcefully, and it represents perhaps the most revealing response that Benjamin made to friends who questioned his stance, intellectual or political: That we cannot engage one another at the level of controversy [in the correspondence] is obvious. And when, in the course these exchanges, issues come up that might give grounds for such a stance, there remains—as it seems to me—no other course for each partner than to look to the living image that he has of the other. I think that the one you have of me is not that of an individual who lets himself in for a “credo” on the slightest occasion. You know that I have always written in accordance with my convictions, but have seldom, and never otherwise than in conversation, made the attempt to express the whole contradictory basis from which they, in their specific manifestations, derive. [. . .] But what could even that [letter to Rychner] tell you that is new?! That my communism, of all possible forms and means of expression, is least akin to anything like a credo, that it—at the cost of its orthodoxy—is nothing, absolutely nothing but the expression of certain experiences which I have come to in my thinking and my existence. That it is a drastic, not unfruitful expression of the impossibility of the present state of scholarly production [Wissenschaftsbetrieb], capable of providing a certain opening for my existence, my thought, in the context of the present economic situation; that for one whose means of production have been totally or very nearly ravaged, it represents a strategic, rational attempt, both in one’s thinking and one’s life, to proclaim one’s right to these—that it is all this and much more, but in every sense nothing else but the lesser of evils [. . .]— do I need to tell you this? (May 6, 1934, GB 4: 408–9)

The subsequent letters to Scholem signal that an intellectual distancing is underway, or at least that Benjamin is restricting what can treated in their correspondence. Benjamin seems to avoid issues of religion and ideology in his letters to Scholem, probably wishing to avoid any friction with his old friend. 16. April 19, 1934, in Walter Benjamin / Gershom Scholem Briefwechsel 1933–1940, ed. Gershom Scholem (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1985), 136. My translation.

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15

It might seem that Adorno now assumed the role of primary confidante for Benjamin, and this is certainly what Adorno himself, as well as the editors of the Gesammelte Schriften, have suggested. While it is undeniable that Adorno, together with Scholem, deserves enormous credit for editing Benjamin’s writings during the 1950s and 60s and otherwise facilitating his reception, there remain serious questions about the extent of their compatibility regarding certain intellectual issues. From 1934 to his death in 1940 Benjamin was at first partially and then wholly dependent on the financial support of the Institute for Social Research, then located in New York. Max Horkheimer was the director of the Institute but Adorno was also involved in its administration and it was in great part with Adorno that Benjamin dealt regarding his contributions to the Institute’s Zeitschrift. The strains on Benjamin resulting from this situation became strikingly clear when in November 1938, Adorno, acting then in an editorial capacity for the Zeitschrift, in effect rejected Benjamin’s “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,” a rejection that Adorno justified in a long letter of November 10, 1938. I will deal with their exchange on this issue later, but first I want to consider their relationship in more general terms. It is undeniable that Adorno’s expert and challenging response to Benjamin’s work in the 1930s was of great value to Benjamin, particularly in view of his painful isolation in this period. Nonetheless, a careful reading of Benjamin’s letters to Adorno reveal a determined effort on Benjamin’s part to hold fast to his positions without appearing to reject Adorno’s. The relation of the two, particularly during the late 1930s, is clearly an important one, not only as a matter of biographical interest but also for the light it sheds on their work and views. In this connection, Julian Roberts speaks of Adorno’s “gratuitous assertiveness” and his “hidden competitiveness, which simultaneously tries to flatter and frighten possible rivals.” In Roberts’s view, Adorno addressed Benjamin in “the form of enormously long and highly theoretical letters which left the correspondent at an apologetic loss.”17 Benjamin’s reaction was tactical and evasive. He could not endanger his support from the Institute by a break with Adorno. At the same time he could not help but appreciate so detailed a response to his work, even if it did not always respond to his concerns. Let us take up Benjamin’s reply to a long commentary (six pages in the book edition) that Adorno had sent him in 1935 on Benjamin’s Kafka essay, 17. Julian Roberts, Walter Benjamin (London: Macmillan Press, 1982), 71.

16

Introduction

an essay, incidentally, that Adorno had to obtain from another source because Benjamin had not sent it directly to him. Benjamin’s letter begins, Not without trepidation—[your letter] is so weighty and gets right down to the crux of the matter that there is no prospect of my doing it justice in a letter. It is thus all the more important that, before doing anything else, I once again assure you of the great joy I felt at your vital interest in me. I not only read your letter, but also studied it; it demands to be pondered sentence by sentence. Since you grasped my intentions so accurately, your indications of where I went wrong are of the greatest importance. ( January 7, 1935, GB 5: 12)

And so on for another few lines. Benjamin never gets around to engaging the substance of Adorno’s remarks. One cannot help but wonder whether Benjamin is here engaging in a sly maneuver—in effect, discounting Adorno’s ideas by a show of extravagant flattery. But in the later instance mentioned earlier—their 1938 exchange regarding “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire”—the stakes for Benjamin were much more serious. He could not there evade Adorno’s critique and his detailed reply led to a rewriting of the “Flâneur” chapter. This brought with it a drastic revision of the plan for The Arcades Project, although, as we know, the political situation intervened all to soon and nullified whatever development Benjamin may have had in mind on that score. It should be added that, however ungenerous or ill-considered one might judge Adorno’s rejection of the manuscript on Paris, the effect was to force Benjamin to produce “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire”— one of his finest essays—in a feverish burst of work in the winter of 1938–39. Still, the 1938 exchange between the two reveals a far more problematic relation than Adorno or Rolf Tiedemann, the chief editor of the Gesammelte Schriften, were willing to acknowledge. In this exchange, Benjamin’s letter of December 9, 1938 may stand as an object lesson in his way of explicating his work.18 The point at issue, we recall, is “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,” which Benjamin intended to be the second part of a larger, three-part work, never completed, “Charles Baudelaire. A Lyric Poet in the Age of High Capitalism.” Benjamin is at pains to make clear why certain elements could not be included in this 18. This letter, as well as Adorno’s of November 10, 1938, are given in SW 4: 99–115.

Introduction

17

second part. He takes up a sentence in Adorno’s critique, “Panorama and ‘trace,’ flâneur and arcades, modernity and the ever-same [Immerleiche],19 without theoretical interpretation: Is this ‘material’ that can wait patiently for interpretation without being consumed by its own aura?” (SW 4: 100). Benjamin in his reply concedes that panorama is not relevant in his text, but he insists all the more on the significance of the other terms. Regarding “trace,” he writes that he looked assiduously for a passage in Poe’s writings that would illustrate “the effacing or fixing of the traces of the individual in the urban crowd,” and he found it in “The Mystery of Marie Roget,” which he cited at length in the text.20 “But the treatment of the traces must remain at this level in the second part if it is to be illumined as by a lightening flash in the decisive context later. This illumination is already planned” (SW 4: 106). Next Benjamin turns to the issue of the flâneur. His resistance to Adorno is quite decided: “your mistaken indication [Fehlanzeige] here threatens to pull the ground from under my feet” (SW 4: 106, trans. modified). Whereas Adorno had pointed to an insufficient theoretical frame in relation to the empirical data, Benjamin replies that “a theory in the strict sense of the word . . . serves as the culmination for the section on the flâneur. . . . It’s like a single ray of light breaking into an artificially darkened room . . . that comes to a focus in the third part.” In this connection, Benjamin confirms the parallels between his discussion of empathy with the commodity soul and Adorno’s on the consumption of exchange value in the latter’s “On the Fetish Character of Music and the Regression of Listening,” both, of course, drawing on Marx’s section on the commodity form in Capital I. Regarding the other points that Adorno raised, Benjamin responds that the arcades are not a theme to be treated in this book, and that modernity (which is the title of the last part of the chapter in question) is treated here solely within the parameters that Baudelaire had set out. His own treatment will come in the yet unwritten third part. But Benjamin is far from done. He now launches into a detailed and complex analysis of the role of two components in his writings— construction and philology. Construction as a conceptual activity involves an element 19. A reference to Nietzsche’s, and Blanqui’s, eternal return. 20. A further discussion of this story appears later in Chapter 3.

18

Introduction

of willed intention. Thus in Thesis XIV of “On the Concept of History”: “History is the subject of a construction whose site is not homogeneous, empty time, but time filled full by the now-time [ Jetztzeit]” (SW 4: 395). An earlier variant of this passage makes clear that such a construction will be at the cost of “visibility” (Beschaulichkeit) and the epic dimension of history.21 The word also alludes to building and architecture, which Benjamin took account of in an early entry to The Arcades Project, “Attempt to develop Giedion’s thesis. ‘In the nineteenth century,’ he writes, ‘construction play the role of the unconscious.’ Wouldn’t it be better to say, ‘the role of bodily processes’—around which ‘artistic’ architectures gather, like dreams around the framework of physiological processes?” (GS 5: 494 [K 1a, 7]; TAP 391). Philology, as Benjamin understood it, generally has the usual sense of the interpretation of texts.22 Now in this letter Benjamin brings the two terms into close proximity. He cites a phrase that Adorno had used in a somewhat critical sense—“an amazed presentation of facticity” (die staunende Darstellung der bloßen Faktizität) (SW 4: 102, trans. modified) and then adapts it positively: “you are in fact describing the proper philological attitude. It was necessary to adopt this, not just for its results, but for its role in the essay’s construction.”23 He then again takes up a formulation of Adorno’s and again adapts it to his own purposes: “The non-differentiation between magic and positivism, as you so aptly formulate it, must indeed be liquidated.” And there soon follows an expansive sense of philology: “The philological approach entails opening the eyes to the text detail by detail, leading the reader to fixate magically on the text. That which Faust takes home in black and white [Fausts schwarz auf weiß nach Haus Getragenes],24 and Grimm’s veneration of the minuscule [Kleinen], are closely related. They have in common the magical element, which it is left to philosophy—here, the concluding part—to exorcise” (SW 4: 108, trans. modified). It may be

21. cf. “Eduard Fuchs, der Sammler und der Historiker,” GS 2: 468. 22. SW 4: 107. Cf. this entry in The Arcades Project, “Bear in mind that commentary on a reality . . . calls for a method completely different from that required by commentary on a text. In the one case, the scientific mainstay is theology; in the other case, philology.” GS 5: 574 [N 2, 1]; TAP 460. 23. In the process, he rebuts the “direct connection drawn between the wine tax and Baudelaire’s ‘L’Ame du vin’ ” (SW 4: 101) that Adorno had raised. 24. Allusion to Goethe’s Faust, Pt. I, ll. 1966 –67.

Introduction

19

speculated that Benjamin, chafing a bit from his dependence on Adorno and the Institute for Social Research, allowed himself a certain flair as he gave his friend a lesson in philological reading, though it should be added that their relationship remained wholly cordial. It is noteworthy that he does not retreat from his insistence that this chapter, the “philological,” must await the third, the properly philosophical, to realize its full meaning. Of course, Benjamin had already outlined his intended plan for the three parts to Max Horkheimer (letters of April 16 and September 28, 1938), so nothing that he writes on December 9 will have been new to Adorno. My remarks here were intended primarily to illuminate the relationship between Benjamin and Adorno. They have necessarily touched on the larger issue— the plans for the Baudelaire project and its relations to the arcades work— but it is one that is outside the scope of this book.25 To conclude this discussion of Benjamin’s friendships, I cite a letter that he wrote to Gretel Karplus, who at the time, 1934, was soon to become Adorno’s wife and with whom Benjamin had a much more confiding relationship than with Adorno. He is responding to a letter of hers in which she had expressed strong misgivings about Benjamin’s increasing intimacy with Brecht. Benjamin responds by recalling that much earlier, around 1914, he had been similarly cautioned about a friendship, in that instance with C. F. Heinle, the young student who was an intimate of Benjamin’s in their first university years and who committed suicide in 1914. At the time, Benjamin writes to Karplus, it was also a woman friend who, solicitous for his welfare, had warned him passionately that he was falling under Heinle’s “spell”: A discussion on this matter remains unforgettable although it goes back some twenty years. . . . Maybe you are astonished that I elaborate the matter in such a way. But I must do so to make you understand why—without disputing your contentions—I can face up to them and hold fast. In the economy of my existence a select few relationships play a role that allow me to assert a pole opposed to my fundamental being [ meines ursprünglichen Seins]. These relationships have always elicited a more or 25. Michael Jennings has treated this issue, first in his book Dialectical Images: Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Literary Criticism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987), esp. 30 – 41 and 217–19, and more recently in “On the Banks of a New Lethe: Commodification and Experience in Benjamin’s Baudelaire Book,” boundary 2, vol. 30, no. 1 (2003): 89–104.

20

Introduction less vigorous protest from those closest to me, as in the case of Brecht at the moment—and to a lesser degree and quite differently, to put it cautiously— that of Gershom Scholem. In such cases I can do little more than to ask my friends’ trust that these connections, whose risks are obvious, will prove to be fruitful. You, first of all, will not be unaware that my life as well as my thinking has moved in extreme positions. The breadth that it thus claims, the freedom to dispose things and ideas that are considered irreconcilable in proximity to each other, can be kept in focus only by virtue of the danger—a danger which in general becomes apparent to my friends only in the form of those “dangerous” relationships. ( June 1934, GB 4: 440f )

Benjamin well understood that the “extreme positions” in which his thought moved was related to a willingness to engage in relationships that his closest friends might find “dangerous” and irreconcilable. As the journal entry about the “three great loves” cited earlier indicates, he was prepared to assume the risk of multiple identity models, and although he rarely alluded to this disposition, he was prepared to safeguard it when challenged.26

Translation and Afterlife In this and the following sections of the Introduction, I move from a biographical to a conceptual focus, although my guiding question remains that of the “physiognomic expression” of the thinker in light of his own conception of historical temporality. I want to consider first the early essay “The Task of the Translator” (1921) where Benjamin develops a conception of language and history that will underlie all his subsequent thought. To the rudimentary question, Why translate? Benjamin has an astonishing answer: not to convey information or to fashion a copy or replica (Abbild, GS 4: 12; SW 1: 256), but for the sake of a quality inherent in a work, its translatability (Übersetzbarkeit, GS 4: 10; SW 1: 254). This way of characterizing a work brings with it a number of consequences. To posit such an inherent quality, Benjamin makes clear, involves an apodictic claim. This 26. This section does not, of course, attempt to deal with all of Benjamin’s close intellectual friendships. The two selected have the advantage of extensive documentation in letters and in their relevance to the question “Dic cur hic?”

Introduction

21

Kantian formulation is echoed in what may sound like a theological variant—“God’s remembrance” (ein Gedenken Gottes, GS 4: 10; SW 1: 254)— but the argument is to be taken in terms of an a priori, an inherent necessity. In the reference to “God’s remembrance” Benjamin is not displacing the issue to a transcendent sphere but, in a Kantian sense, to a transcendental one, a “condition of possibility.” The characteristic of such a transcendental orientation is to incorporate in its procedures an ongoing reversion to its own premises. What is sought, then, is not simply the meaning of an original text but a process that encompasses a continuity extending from its origin to its effects and afterlife—hence the focus on reputation, fame, history. Let us take as a premise that Benjamin’s use of translation /translatability—Übersetzung—signifies not a replication or rendering of meaning (Wiedergabe des Sinnes, GS 4: 17; SW 1: 259) but something closer to what the German Romantics signified by criticism (Kritik, GS 4: 15; 1: 258), in fact a complementary form of an underlying life-historical process—what Benjamin terms the posterity or continued life of the work (Fortleben des Werkes, GS 4: 15). In the Translator essay Benjamin carefully balances the emergent and vitalizing tendencies in the evolution of a language with the regressive, declining ones. Thus the afterlife of a source text is characterized in terms of transformation and renewal (Wandlung und Erneuerung), while the late maturation (Nachreife) suggests a process of elimination and erasure, where certain levels of meaning fade or else appear as merely residual and archaic, but still within an overall process that valorizes neither an “original,” primordial meaning nor a new, emergent one: Even words with fixed meaning can undergo a maturing process [Nachreife]. The tendency of a writer’s literary style in his age may in time wither away, only to give rise to immanent tendencies that come to the fore out of what has been established. What sounded fresh once may sound hackneyed later; what was once current may someday sound quaint. (GS 4: 12f; SW 1: 256)

When, a few sentences later, Benjamin speaks of labor pains (Wehen) what he refers to is the specific status of the target (the translator’s) language that becomes manifest as a result of the translation process. For, Benjamin argues, while the poet’s utterance (das Dichterwort) is able to somehow survive the changes that overtake its native dialect or tongue (Muttersprache), the language of even the greatest translations is doomed to participate in and

22

Introduction

be absorbed by the growth of its language (SW 1: 256). It is in context of this complex evolution of two language systems that Benjamin characterizes the preeminent task of translation as “watching over the maturing process of the alien word and the birth pangs (Wehen) of its own” (SW, 1:256, trans. modified). Nachreife, thus, attests to an undoubted enhancement, a gain, in the source language that comes about in consequence of a deformation (thus the Wehen, the pain) of the target language. When Benjamin speaks of Nachreife, there is no reason to think that he deals with a mode of posthumous existence. Rather, drawing on his own earlier essay, “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” he argues for the inaccessibility of primal language, of God’s word, and suggests an absolute division between any such level of primal meaning and subsequent, human articulation. Any theory of translation must be founded on this absolute division. For Benjamin the essential determination of Übersetzung is to reach out to what he terms the sphere of “pure language” (reine Sprache, GS 4: 19; SW 1: 261), in repeatedly renewed trials, even in the face of the impossibility of ultimate realization, so as to wrest something akin to response or confirmation from that sphere. Undoubtedly, pure language is never claimed as a substantial entity, as an existent. Benjamin refers to it variously as the end-point, the goal, the telos of a dynamic that is characterized in terms of a life-process (cf. GS 4: 12f, 14f ), and an ongoing exfoliation and renewal. Although Benjamin uses figures of growth and germination in this connection, the essay articulates in an incipient manner a conception of history that is not indebted to progressive or organic models but that itself serves as the ground for any determination of human events and life processes. Thus he argues that the only sense of a life-process we can have is based on human institutions: Sequence, even temporality, is derived from the succession of human events: In the final analysis, the range of life must be determined by history rather than by nature, least of all by such tenuous factors as sensation and soul. The philosopher’s task consists in comprehending all of natural life through the more encompassing life of history. (SW 1: 255, trans. modified)

This turn in the argument casts a new light on the use of words like Überleben, Fortleben, Nachreife. Benjamin terms the link of a translation to its

Introduction

23

original as “a natural [connection], or, more specifically, a vital one” (SW 1: 254). But this is to be understood, he goes on, in “wholly unmetaphorical facticity.” That is, “life” is to be figured not in terms of organic bodily processes, whether at the level of “soul” or “animal” or “sensibility” (Seele, das Animalische, Empfindung, GS 4: 11). Rather, it is the continuity, the ongoing mutation of textual events that determines a life pattern and makes history possible. Works of art serve, in this sense, as historical events, and their mode of actualization comes about through reputation or fame (Ruhm, GS 4: 11) and through the mode of representation (Darstellungsmodus, GS 4: 12). Translation thus ultimately serves the purpose of expressing the innermost relationship of languages to one another. It cannot possibly reveal or establish this hidden relationship itself; but it can represent it by realizing it in embryonic or intensive form. (SW 1: 255, trans. modified)

This argument, it is clear, involves a radical inversion of the traditional model where some principle of organicity, a life-force or spirit (such as Hegel’s Geist) is postulated as a ground for human activity, and where history is invested with a “progressive” tendency. Benjamin instead argues that the only sense of a life-process we can have is based on human institutions. We find, then, in “The Task of the Translator” a conception of history that is centered on language and that takes account of a radical disjunction, an “abyss,” between the proper meaning (das Gemeinte), on the one hand, and the mode of intending or presentation, on the other ([die] Art des Meinens) (GS 4: 14). To bridge this, Benjamin conceives translation as “the perpetually renewed life of language” (SW 1: 257), an activation, a vital intensification, where the mode of intending/presentation (Art des Meinens) approaches but never wholly reaches the proper meaning (das Gemeinte): “all translation is only a somewhat provisional way of coming to terms with the foreignness [Fremdheit] of languages” (SW 1: 257). In bringing to the fore this “foreignness of languages,” translation is oriented to the dimension of “communicability itself,” or as Samuel Weber puts it, of “impartibility,”27 27. Samuel Weber, “Benjamin’s Writing Style,” in Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, ed. Michael Kelly (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), vol. 1: 262.

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Introduction

that is, what shows language to be in the first instance not a function of its contents but a constitutive capacity of the human.

Counsel for Living: The Storyteller From late 1933 on, Benjamin was in Paris, engaged in extensive research in the Bibliothèque Nationale for a sociological study of France in the mid-nineteenth century, the “Passagen” project. In the middle of this period, 1936, he wrote “The Storyteller. Reflections on the Work of Nicolai Leskov.” The essay takes up issues regarding the novel and storytelling (Roman und Erzählung) that had occupied Benjamin since at least 1928 [cf. GS 2: 1276ff; SW 3: 429], and this would undoubtedly have entered into an essay on that topic. But in 1935, Benjamin was prompted by a commission from a Swiss periodical, Orient und Occident, to write something on Nikolai Leskov, and given the drying up of publication venues that had come about since 1933, this proved a welcome opportunity. So, drawing on his notes on the novel and storytelling as well as his long-standing familiarity with Johann Peter Hebel’s Kalendergeschichten, he produced the essay focused on Nikolai Leskov’s writings. In a sense, this essay reverts to Benjamin’s production of some ten years earlier, when he was working primarily as a literary critic and supplying material to the leading literary feuilletons in Germany, and it is worth considering what drew him to this topic in 1935–36. It may be that in the figure of the storyteller, Benjamin sought to capture, and to memorialize, a conception of tradition that was under dire threat at that moment. He did this in other writings of the period, such as Deutsche Menschen, the series of letters by German writers and thinkers from the century 1783–1883 that he selected and commented. The twenty-seven individuals represented in this collection, some well-known, others obscure, constitute a subversive counter-canon to the monumental cavalcade of German greats that were usually cited by defenders of Germanity, Deutschtum. What Benjamin foregrounded in the brief commentaries that he appended to each letter was often a little-known personal anecdote or trait that illustrated the ethical cast of the writer in question. This, then, represents one effort on Benjamin’s part to revive for the German public a part of the tradition that was fast being obliterated.

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“The Storyteller” had a similar purpose, a conception that he identified with forms of storytelling that were antecedent to the genres of novella and novel dominant in the nineteenth century, forms which featured the storyteller’s artisanal capacities and his identification with the everyday practices of a localized community. This represents the positive thesis of the essay. But there is a parallel negative argument, a critique of the novel that is related to Georg Lukács’s Theory of the Novel, a work very much present in Benjamin’s thinking since its publication in 1916. Lukács conceived the modern novel as the heir of primary (Homeric) epic. Both share a thirst for totality, but in epic this was available in the immanence of lived experience; in the modern novel it is a totality that can be shown only in “abstract” terms, that is, in forms that are overtly constructed and whose dominant moods are nostalgia and irony. Epic was expressive of the organic totality of its culture whereas the novel discloses the “transcendental homelessness” of the modern subject. Benjamin, like Lukács, posits a convergence between an anthropological and a textual dimension; that is, he projects a primordial form of human expressivity onto a certain textual (or “literary”) tradition. And, again like Lukács, he characterizes the modern novel in terms of “homelessness,” of a constitutive alienation on the part of the protagonist. But then he introduces a third category (to epic and novel), one that wholly transforms the argument: narration or storytelling (Erzählen). And instead of the Hegelian principle of totality that Lukács drew on, Benjamin introduces the idea of experience (Erfahrung), one that is better able to negotiate between the individual and the collective.28 Storytelling (Erzählen) is, of course, a very general term that could be applied to many, quite divergent phenomena— all the way from gossip to examples cited in a sermon to legal case studies. I want to circumscribe what Benjamin meant by the term. Benjamin begins the essay by mentioning a condition that came in the wake of the First World War, what he characterizes as a “fall in value” of experience. This phrase, of course, alludes to the catastrophic monetary inflation that overcame Germany in the immediate aftermath of the war. Benjamin now extends this phenomenon to something equally pervasive, if less 28. See also Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Times (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1985), 267ff.

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Introduction

tangible, what he calls “communicable experience”: “Wasn’t it noticeable at the end of the war that men who returned from the battlefield had grown silent—not richer, but poorer in communicable experience?” (SW 3: 144). In “Experience and Poverty” (1933). Benjamin had written the following: Never has experience been undermined more thoroughly [than in World War I], strategic experience [undermined] by positional warfare; economic experience, by the inflation; physical experience, by hunger; and moral experiences, by the ruling powers. A generation that had gone to school in horse-drawn streetcars now stood in the open air, amid a landscape in which nothing was the same except the clouds and, at its center, in a force field of destructive torrents and explosions, the tiny, fragile human body. (SW 2: 732)

Storytelling, as Benjamin develops in “The Storyteller,” would have the ability to compensate for the atrophy of experience in the present era, and one feature of this capacity is concentrated in the concept of “Rat.” Benjamin puts an unusual burden on this word. One sense involves the sphere of daily practices, how the world is put together and how it works—what the ancients believed could be wholly derived from the Homeric epics. “Rat” also denotes the capacity of narrative continuity: the way that one story leads to another, or the way that retelling a story changes it and gives rise to a new story. In this sense, “Rat” functions as a deferral of closure, a force of propagation, the spawning of new stories from the old. In this way, what becomes available for transmission—what achieves “transmissible form” (94, tradierbare Form), as a later formulation in the essay has it, is experience [Erfahrung], both as a fruit of lived experience and as a form of stored wisdom: The storyteller takes what he tells from experience—his own or that reported by others. And he in turn makes it the experience of those who are listening to his tale. (SW 3: 146)

As a noun, “Rat” is generally used in the negative—for example, “Ich weiss mir keinen Rat” (I’m puzzled, I don’t know what to say). In the positive, verbal form —raten, Rat geben—it signifies advice, guidance, usually of a practical sort.29 Notice how Benjamin brings about a swerve in the following passage: 29. To summarize “Rat”: The practical, realist dimension; how the world is put together and how it works; what the ancients believed was wholly found in Homer. The capacity of narrative continuity, one story leads to another, stories prompt their

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27

. . . the storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers. But if today “having counsel” [Rat wissen] is beginning to have an old-fashioned ring, this is because the communicability of experience is decreasing. In consequence, we have no counsel either for ourselves or for others. After all, counsel is less an answer to a question than a proposal concerning the continuation of a story that is in the process of unfolding. To seek this counsel, one would first have to be able to tell the story. . . . Counsel woven into the fabric of real life [gelebten Lebens] is wisdom. (SW 3: 145f; GS 2: 442)

An extraordinary expansion in meaning has taken place. Although “giving counsel” applies initially to a specific situation, the context is progressively expanded to include the larger narrative in which the situation is embedded. The storyteller’s capacity to give counsel can only be a function of this expanded horizon. The withering of the storyteller’s art is thus to be seen as coordinate with a diminution of “wisdom,” termed here “the epic side of truth.” But, Benjamin continues, this is not to be taken “as merely a ‘symptom of decay,’ let alone a ‘modern symptom.’ ” It is, rather, to be linked to the historical process of secularization, a process that has “gradually removed narrative from the realm of living speech and at the same time is making it possible to find a new beauty in what is vanishing” (SW 3: 146). The argument traces, then, not a simple process of loss and decay but a compensatory economy that points to yet unspecified mutations.30 Where is this heading? Benjamin is not yet ready to provide a definitive response. Within the argument of the essay it might seem that what supretelling and the link to other stories; thus not counsel as a determinate lesson at the end of a story but as a deferral of closure. Information, by contrast, signifies a blockage of this propagating potential. And, in an existential sense: how does one live? Experience that is accessible to counsel testifies to a principle of authority that is embedded in communal experience, widely acknowledged and readily available. Thus the figures of traveler (sailor) (GS 2: 444), of farmer, established husbandman; thus also that of death (GS 2: 450, XI). Death marks access to a stage of transmission and storage (GS 2: 449; SW 3: 151), of “transmissible form.” The novel, by contrast, is characterized by an incommensurability in the representation of human existence (GS 2: 443; SW 3: 146), a gap between any authoritative standard and experiential reality. 30. Regarding the novel, Benjamin adopts Lukács’s view of the “homelessness,” the alienation of the novel protagonist, but he comes to this idea by a very different route, namely, as the pragmatic, worldly impulse that inheres in narrative. Thus, for the novel, Benjamin poses “die tiefe Ratlosigkeit des Lebenden” (the profound perplexity of the living) (GS 2: 443; SW 3: 146).

28

Introduction

plants the narrative capacity in modernity, the capacity to tell stories and transmit them, are two phenomena: the novel and “information.” Each of these is sketched in Chapter 5 of the essay. The novel is faulted in that “it neither comes from oral tradition nor enters into it. . . . The novelist has secluded himself. The birthplace of the novel is the individual in his isolation, the individual who can no longer speak of his concerns in exemplary fashion, who himself lacks counsel and can give none” (SW 3: 146). It is only later in the essay, when he evokes Lukács’s idea of “transcendental homelessness,” that Benjamin develops this issue, and he does so by citing the conclusion of Flaubert’s Education sentimentale (SW 3: 155 and GS 2: 1282– 83). It is the episode where Frédéric and Deslauriers, two boyhood friends now middle-aged and reunited in their native town, recall a moment in their teens when they came to the local house of prostitution with an offering of flowers picked in their garden. It was “the finest thing in our lives,” they conclude, and Benjamin interprets this by way of Georg Lukács’s sense of the temporality of “transcendental homelessness.” The two men’s recollection serves to frame their past life as “the divinatory-intuitive grasping of the unattained and therefore inexpressible meaning of life” (Lukács cited, SW 3: 155). But Benjamin goes further. It is not only the “inexpressible meaning of life” that is at issue here but the possibility of drawing any meaning, any moral lesson at all. It is not only that Frédérick’s life, so circumstantially recounted in the novel, proves to be hollow. But the reading of the novel yields no insight, no illumination. The “meaning of life”—both as it applies to Frédérick and to the reader—proves to be nugatory, as if all the foregoing narrative were put under erasure. It is in this sense that Benjamin speaks of the Ratlosigkeit, the irredeemable confusion and disarray, of the modern novel. But Flaubert’s novel serves primarily to provide a negative instance of the principal aim of the essay, which is to move the notion of “Rat,” of practical counsel, to a more rarified ethical level, to Weisheit (wisdom) and to its agents, the “Lehrer und Weisen,” the teachers and sages. This movement is climaxed at the conclusion in a veritable apotheosis:31 31. Beatrice Hanssen offers a penetrating analysis of the “just man” in the context of Benjamin’s essay, in Walter Benjamin’s Other History: Of Stones, Animals, Human Beings, and Angels (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 156 –62.

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The storyteller: he is the man who could let the wick of his life be consumed completely by the gentle flame of his story. This is the basis of the incomparable aura that surrounds the storyteller, in Leskov as in Hauff, in Poe as in Stevenson. The storyteller is the figure in which the righteous man [der Gerechte] encounters himself. (SW 3: 162)

We know from other writings what an exalted place the figure of der Gerechte holds in Benjamin’s oeuvre,32 but it is one that is subject, too, to dialectical limitation. This focus on “the righteous man” at the end of “The Storyteller” must be differentiated from righteousness with reference to Karl Kraus. In “The Storyteller,” Benjamin is treating narrative units governed by a principle of closure, and the storyteller functions as a constructor who allows the governing principle to emerge from the sequence of incidents. His ethical authority is crystallized in the ability to take “what he tells from experience—his own or that reported by others. And he in turn makes it the experience of those who are listening to his tale” (SW 3: 146). But in the case of Kraus, Benjamin is dealing with a very different conception of narrative units, one that leads to the messianic temporality of the “Theses” of “On the Concept of History.” “The chronicler,” in Thesis III, “who narrates events without distinguishing between major and minor ones,” is subject to “a redeemed mankind” (SW 4: 390). By contrast, in “The Storyteller,” “Death is the sanction for everything that the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death. In other words, his stories refer back to natural history” (SW 3: 151). The dimensions of “natural history” and “redeemed mankind” are altogether distinct. In Karl Kraus, Benjamin wrote, “justice and language remain founded in each other,” making it clear that while justice in a legal sense (Recht) was often invoked in Kraus’s critique of journalism, what was fundamentally at stake for Kraus was a reverence for “the image of divine justice [Gerechtig-

32. In his diary of 1916, when he was in almost daily contact with Benjamin, Gershom Scholem underlines the difference between Recht, mischpat (justice, law), and Gerechtigkeit, zedaka: “mischpat is something human, zedaka, divine . . . The essence of Judaism is Gerechtigkeit. A divine category. . . . In Judaism one does not believe but is just [gerecht].” Gershom Scholem, Tagebücher I: 1913–1917, ed. Karlfried Gründer, et al. (Frankfurt am Main: Jüdischer Verlag, 1995), 392.

30

Introduction

keit] in language” (SW 2: 444, trans. modified).33 In his diary of conversations with Brecht in 1931, Benjamin notes the following: Kafka’s fixation with his one and only theme may arouse in the reader the impression of rigidity [Verstocktheit]. But in fact this impression is only an indication of the fact that Kafka had abandoned a purely narrative prose. Perhaps his prose proves nothing; in any case, it is managed in such a way that the determining relationships may at any time be suspended. One could think of the form of the Hagada: this is what the Jews call the stories and anecdotes of the Talmud that serve to explain and confirm the teaching—the Halacha. The teaching [Lehre]as such is of course never expressed by Kafka. One can only attempt to deduce it from the astonishing stance [Verhalten] of the people, a stance born of dread [Furcht]and arousing dread. (GS 6: 433)

Now this remark, it should be noted, appears in the context of notes regarding a conversation with Brecht and may well reflect, in the first instance, Brecht’s own ideas. But Benjamin is by no means averse to adopting the position of one or another of his friends as a point of departure in developing his own position, and indeed, often he will solicit the views of certain friends on topics he is engaged in. His approach to Kafka drew on a number of interlocutors—Willy Haas, Werner Kraft, and especially Gershom Scholem and Berthold Brecht. The various references to Halacha/Haggadah34 in Benjamin’s treatment of Kafka are highly relevant to his conception of storytelling. In the first 33. Edward Timms notes that Benjamin’s use of Gerechtigkeit here “modulates between secular and religious registers—from ‘justice’ into ‘righteousness.” He goes on to cite a text by Benjamin that Scholem had transcribed into his diary, where Benjamin glosses Gerechtigkeit as “not a virtue like any other, but an all-encompassing condition of existence: ‘In God all virtues have the form of righteousness.’ ” Edward Timms, Karl Kraus. Apocalyptic Satirist, vol. 2 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 224. 34. Hayim Bialik, far from opposing the two genres, looked for ways of demonstrating their complementarity: “In fact, [he writes] Halakah and Aggada are two elements that in reality are one; they are merely two phases of the same phenomenon. . . . what the word is to the thought and the impulse; or what the deed, the plastic representation, is to the concept.” Hayim Bialik, “Law and Legend, or Halakah and Aggada,” in The Book of Legends / Sefer ha-Aggadah: Legends from the Talmud and Midrash, ed Hayim Bialik and Yehoshua Ravnitzky (New York: Schocken Books, 1992 [originally in German, 1908]). Bialik had edited a massive compilation of legendary narratives drawn from the Talmud and Midrash, Law and Legend or Halaka and Ag-

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treatment, the Kafka essay of 1934, we read that the relation of Kafka’s parables to “doctrine” (Lehre) is “similar” to that of Haggadah to Halakah. What does this mean? Presumably, Haggadah, as parable, refers to a determinate doctrine. Kafka’s are “not parables” insofar as the doctrine that they interpret “does not exist” (GS 2: 420; SW 2: 803). But in a later instance (the letter to Scholem of June 12, 1938, SW 3: 322–27; GB 6: 105–14), he confirms the normative definition as he understands it: Kafka’s parables “do not modestly lie at the feet of the doctrine, as the Haggadah lies at the feet of the Halakah.” But he now provides a more nuanced discussion of the difference. This involves a “sickness of tradition” (Erkrankung der Tradition), but as he develops it, this “sickness” is something like a mutation conveyed through the variant of “Tradition” into “Tradierbarkeit.” The English transmissibility does not make quite so clear the cognate form of the two terms, and their source in Latin, trado/traditio, to give over, surrender, pass on. To sacrifice truth “for the sake of clinging to its transmissibility, its haggadic element,” is to postulate a different truth, one no longer embodied in the monumental form of tradition, but subject to the variability of transmission (Tradierbarkeit), which is precisely the “haggadic element.” But in this later formulation, Kafka’s achievement is so noteworthy that the very structure of Halakah/Haggadah is transformed. In the earlier formulation, Kafka’s instances were “not parables”; in the later, they are “more than parables. They do not modestly lie at the feet of the doctrine, as the Haggadah lies at the feet of the Halakah. Though apparently reduced to submission, they unexpectedly raise a mighty paw against it” (GB 6: 113). The idea that the “haggadic element” involves a sacrifice of truth for the sake of its “transmissibility” may serve as a gloss to a passage at the conclugada, trans. Julius L. Siegel (New York: Bloch, 1923). This was a pillar in the modern revival of Hebrew as a colloquial language. Whereas the orthodox religious position gave precedence to Halakah, Bialik’s essay argued for a fluid interpenetration of the two, both at the level of conceptuality and of genealogy. “What, pray, are all the Taryag Mitzwoth [the 613 commandments in the Torah, codified by Maimonides] but the final quintessence of ancient myths and customs—the living or Oral Law, the Law of the heart—which were, so to speak, afloat in the air for thousands of years until the hour struck for them and they were ready to become stabilized in the form of laws, inscribed on rocks and written down on parchments.” The significance of this work for Benjamin is discussed in David Suchoff, Kafka’s Jewish Languages: The Hidden Openness of Tradition (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011).

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sion of “The Storyteller.” Here the storyteller is explicitly characterized as an exemplary figure or persona. He is invested with “an incomparable aura,” he “joins the ranks of the teachers and sages,” and he “is the figure in which the righteous man encounters himself.” Yet this should not be taken as an apotheosis of the storyteller as an individual, but rather as way of underscoring the ethical authority of his function. And this function is crystallized in the storyteller’s ability to fashion “the raw stuff of experiences, his own and those of others, in a solid, useful and unique way.” And here Benjamin again underscores the storyteller’s task as that of an artisan or craftsman, thus situating him /her among the class of workers rather than that of artists or intellectuals. A preeminent feature of this craft of storytelling is to distill proverbs or sayings from a story. Benjamin calls these “an ideogram” of a story, and goes on: “A proverb [Sprichwort], one might say, is a ruin which stands on the site of an old story and in which a moral twines about a gesture [ein Moral sich um einen Gestus rankt] like ivy around a wall” (SW 3: 162). We should be careful not to take “moral” in a moralistic sense. This simile does not suggest that a proverb should be taken as a lesson or conclusion of a story, nor that a story can be reduced to a proverb. Rather, in evoking the image of ivy twisted around a crumbled wall, it solicits the reader’s imagination, inviting him to use the ivy (the proverb) as a means in restoring something that has been lost. The proverb thus functions not as a symbol (synthesizing the essence) nor a part (synecdoche) of the missing story. Rather, Benjamin takes it as an indexical function, one that points to the meaning of a story without naming or summarizing it. The ideogram, thus, may be situated midway between doctrinal teaching, the Halakhic element, and narrative exemplification, the Haggadic. What survives in the proverb is neither law nor narrative, but a relic or trace that points to both.

The City as Historical Node in The Arcades Project Benjamin possessed to a singular degree what we may term a topographic imagination. In “Moscow Diary”35 he speaks of his “fanatical passion for 35. Composed during a two-month visit in Moscow in 1926 –27 but only published posthumously: Walter Benjamin, Moskauer Tagebuch, ed. Gary Smith (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1980).

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travel,” and in a letter commenting on one of the city sketches that he prepared for feuilleton publication in the late twenties (this one on Marseilles), he wrote, “Weak perhaps, but particularly dear to me for a singular reason, which is that I have never struggled with a city so intensely. To wrest a sentence from her is more difficult, one might say, than to bring forth a book from Rome” (GS 4: 992). In one of the Berlin sketches, Benjamin speaks of “setting out the sphere of life—bios—graphically on a map” (GS 6: 466). What this suggests is a form of autobiographical exploration guided by a spatial schematism, a “mapping” of the self projected onto a determinate topographic and historical model. Proust’s oeuvre is an immediate model.36 The many rooms superimposed on one another in the half-dream at the beginning of Combray, the deux côtés that it takes the whole of the Recherche to bring together—such exercises in spatializing a life sequence undoubtedly affected Benjamin. No less important is the phenomenon of the city found in Baudelaire’s poetry, a body of work that, in Benjamin’s analysis, projects a readership that will be sensitized to the shock phenomenon of urban existence and thus become available for new forms of post-auratic experience. It is worth recalling that Benjamin produced a number of autobiographical writings focused on cities during the same period as his work on The Arcades Project, that is, from the late 1920s until his death in 1940. The densely layered fabric of the personal reminiscences which we find in works like the “Moskauer Tagebuch” (“Moscow Diary,” 1926 –27), the various city sketches, and those on his Berlin childhood (“Berliner Kindheit um Neunzehnhundert,” 1932–38) should be viewed in integral relation to the cultural-historical aims of the Paris project. In both types of writing, Benjamin is in search of an appropriate form for representing modernity by way of multiple incursions into the phenomenon of the city. To the extent that something like urban consciousness is coextensive with the cultural phenomenon of modernity, any category derived from it and used as an interpretive clue needs to be grasped both as theme and as a modality of experience and cognition. This involves not a homogeneous theme or metaphor but something like relational clusters conceived as a series. The city—and its synecdoche, the arcades—is granted a world-structuring or cosmological function. 36. Benjamin had translated parts of the Recherche in collaboration with Franz Hessel in the mid twenties, and though parts of the translation have been lost, two volumes were published, in 1927 and 1930 (cf. GS 2: 1044). The essay “Zum Bilde Prousts” appeared in 1929.

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Introduction

In connection with an essay on Moscow that Benjamin planned to write on his return to Berlin in 1927, he wrote to Martin Buber, “I want to achieve a presentation [eine Darstellung] of the city of Moscow at this moment in time in which ‘everything factual is already theory’ ” (February 23, 1927, GB 3: 232). By way of this citation from Goethe, Benjamin indicates his adaptation of the idea of Urphänomen (primal phenomenon) from the sphere of nature, as it was for Goethe, to that of history. This will become a methodological principle in The Arcades Project where he characterizes the Urphänomen as a concept “extracted from the pagan context of nature and brought into the Jewish contexts of history.” And he continues, “Now, in my work on the arcades I am equally concerned with fathoming an origin. To be specific, I pursue the origin of the forms and mutations of the Paris arcades from their beginning to their decline, and I locate this origin in the economic facts.” Origin in this sense functions as a moment of origination that gives rise “to the whole series of the arcade’s concrete historical forms, just as the leaf unfolds from itself all the riches of the empirical world of plants” (GS 5: 577 [N 2a, 4]; TAP 462).37 We find in Benjamin’s later writings a complex interplay between the forms of reminiscence and the work of historical construction. “Berlin Chronicle,” a series of sketches on his native city that Benjamin wrote during the 1930s, begins as follows: “Not to know one’s way in a city doesn’t signify much. But to lose oneself in a city as one loses oneself in a forest calls for schooling. . . . I learned this art late. It fulfilled the dream whose first traces were labyrinths on the blotting papers of my school notebooks” (GS 4: 237). What The Arcades Project characterizes as the transformative potential of the dialectical image—its capacity to incite an awakening—is anticipated in a discussion of individual memory in “Berlin Chronicle” and “Berliner Kindheit.” Thus, when Benjamin speaks of reminiscences [Erinnerungen], he differentiates these from the narrative form of autobiography, which “has to do with time, with sequence and what makes up the continuous flow of life.” By contrast, in “Berlin Chronicle,” “I am talking of a space, of moments and discontinuities. For even if months and years appear here, 37. Cf. Uwe Steiner, “ ‘Das Höchste Wäre: Zu begreifen, dass alles factische schon Theorie ist’: Walter Benjamin liest Goethe,” Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 121 (2002): 265–84.

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it is in the form they have at the moment of recollection” (GS 6: 488). The determining experiences of childhood survive, then, not in the manner of a continuous narrative but as images whose form bears the imprint of the moment of recovery. We may trace this conception by looking at Benjamin’s differentiated use of terms relating to the notion of experience. In “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” (1939), Benjamin postulates Erfahrung as the normative term, the formation of consciousness as a cumulative storage of experiential data. Erlebnis, on the other hand, subjects accumulated experience in consequence of the habituation of modern consciousness to the shock phenomenon. The punctuality of Erlebnis works against any integrative pattern of personality structure, but it does leave, in place of an “integral content,” a temporal marker, “a precise time indicator in consciousness” (eine exakte Zeitstelle im Bewusstsein) (GS 1: 615). This unanchored trace structure, a consequence of the shock phenomenon, may be understood as a form of cathexis in the Freudian sense, an energy investment deposited in the past awaiting its moment of release. Analogically, Benjamin conceived the topography of cities as minefields strewn with explosive potential. The German generation born at the end of the nineteenth century was the first to grow up in full consciousness of the cosmopolis of modernity. In the course of the nineteenth century, far-reaching changes in the cultural valorization of landscape and city had taken place. The experience of the city replaced the sense of nature that had been embodied in the pre-Romantic concept of landscape. As Joachim Ritter makes clear, landscape in this sense is not merely a genre of painting related to a view, to a piece of nature, but a central component of aesthetics itself as the category of the reception and experience of art works.38 Thus new city sensibility in Romanticism is far different than a mere substitution of one thematic cluster for another. What is at issue is the status of aesthetic experience and judgment itself, a development exemplified most powerfully in the emergence of the city as an alternative to landscape, more radically, as an anti-nature (adumbrated in Wordsworth and then made explicit in Hugo, in Baudelaire, and the fiction of the mid-century). 38. Cf. Joachim Ritter, Landschaft: Zur Funktion des Aesthetischen in der modernen Gesellschaft (Münster: Aschendorff, 1963).

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The effects of the urban environment on individual and collective sensibility became a leading motif in the writings of Kracauer, Bloch, Hessel, Benjamin, and others. Georg Simmel had characterized this phenomenon in a prescient manner in “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (1903) and The Philosophy of Money (1907). Simmel’s “impressionist” sociology was able to see a historical significance in the “heightening of psychic sensibility” (Steigerung des Nervenlebens)39 of the modern city dweller, a significance that Kracauer would develop in the form of “analysis of surfaces” (Oberflächenanalyse). And where Simmel viewed the hyper-rationality of urban life as a defense mechanism (Schützorgan) against a fear of isolation and alienation, Benjamin generalized the defensive posture of a consciousness habituated to the shock phenomenon as an ongoing “coping with stimuli” (Reizbewältigung)40 on the part of the city dweller. Benjamin’s city texts are to be situated within a critical discourse of the city that goes back at least to Rousseau and Wordsworth and then proliferates in the early and middle nineteenth century. Furthermore, a process began at this time whereby the city, and especially the great metropolitan centers such as Paris and London, became preeminent showplaces of culture. Cosmopolitan came to denote both a level of cultural achievement and a maximal form of urban agglomeration. A new industry of illustration and publication contributed to the production of the city as spectacle. Baudelaire, as Benjamin demonstrated, articulated a devastating critique of this tendency to treat the city as icon. As poet of anti-nature, he did not simply register the image of the desolate, degrading urban environment but served as exemplar and witness of a transformation of sensibility that became a formative element of modernity. While the urban phenomenon is a central focus of The Arcades Project, it cannot constitute its ultimate aim. A number of texts related to the project, notably, the two exposés entitled “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century” (1935 and 1939) and the book draft, “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,” had each quite distinct focuses. Benjamin was well aware of a work like Maxime du Camp’s monumental Paris: Ses origines, ses fonctions 39. Georg Simmel, “Die Großstädte und das Geistesleben,” in Brücke und Tür (Stuttgart: K.F. Koehler Verlag, 1957), 228. Schützorgan is found on the same page. 40. In Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” GS 1: 614.

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et sa vie dans la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle (1975),41 but his own undertaking was in no sense modeled on it. One of the aims of The Arcades Project as it evolved in the thirties was to use modern urban existence as the paradigm of a “constellated” historical temporality, a counter-history that ceaselessly works over the past and, by that very operation, inserts itself as an active force in the present. (See Chapters 4 and 5.)

Counter-History At the center of Benjamin’s work is a question that involves both epistemology and historiography. It may be formulated as follows: In what ways is the concept of experience (both Erlebnis and Erfahrung) congruent with the idea of history? The unproblematic assimilation of historical experience with cognition was a basic tenet of nineteenth-century Geistesgeschichte. Benjamin strenuously rejected the assumption that experiential data could be somehow stored, transmitted, and then recovered by way of empathy. Thus he wrote in the essay on Eduard Fuchs, “It [cultural history] may well increase the weight of the treasures [die Last der Schätze] which are piled on humanity’s back. But it does not give mankind the strength to shake them off, so as to get its hands on them [in die Hand zu bekommen]” (GS 2: 478). “To get one’s hands on (the treasures)”—Benjamin mocks in this fashion what he took to be the unredeemed promise of the historicist tradition. “What concerns me above all, as you know,” Benjamin writes to Theodor Adorno in 1935, “is the ‘history of the origin’ [or ‘primal history’—Urgeschichte] of the nineteenth-century” (GS 5: 1118). Benjamin’s concern here is not the origins of the period in the sense of specific historical antecedents but the problematic of a primal, originating force embedded in the historical substance—thus, Ursprung and not Entstehung.42 What distinguishes the “phenomenon of origin” (Ursprungsphänomen) is the confrontation of an idea with the historical world “to the point where it shows itself in the to41. Stathis Gourgouris comments perceptively on Benjamin’s use of this work in Does Literature Think? Literature as Theory for an Antimythical Era (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 219–21. 42. Michel Foucault has outlined the Nietzschean basis for this issue: “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, 141.

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Introduction

tality of its history” (GS, 1: 226). The totality of the history of an idea, encompassing both a “pre- and post-history” cannot help but throw into question anything like a representation in the sense of a portrait or panorama of an epoch. In spite of his immersion in the minutiae of nineteenth-century social history—“les détritus même de l’histoire” in Remy de Gourmont’s words as cited by Benjamin (GS 5: 676)—Benjamin did not lose sight of the fact that The Arcades Project was to be a contribution to the philosophy of history rather than a historical documentation. But trying to understand how this might have been achieved remains a daunting task for the readers of this fragmentary work. In order to devise an appropriate form for his project, Benjamin needed, first of all, to find a way of articulating the constellated structures of past experience (what conventionally might be called the historical materials or data) so as to avoid the totalizing narrative patterns of Geistesgeschichte and historicism. His goal in The Arcades Project, he writes, “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. The history that showed things ‘as they really were’ was the strongest narcotic of the century” (TAP 463, GS 5: 578, N 3, 4). It is this dynamic potential of the historical substance that Benjamin wanted to activate, and in explicating his form of historiography and hermeneutics— of meaning and of signs—we must keep in mind this underlying performative intention. It is not accidental that Benjamin should use the phrase that Kant had applied to his transcendental method—“Copernican turn” (kopernikanische Wendung, GS 5: 1057)—to indicate the radical nature of this form of historical construction. For in contrast to the data supplied by synthesizing forms of historical writing such as Geistesgeschichte, where the historian aims to distill an essence from the experiential data of the past, Benjamin is on the lookout for data that bear what he terms an “alarm signal”: “What we construct here is an alarm signal [einen Wecker] that stirs up the kitsch of the last century into a ‘collection’ ” (GS 5: 1058). It is here that the categories of recollection and awakening converge, for what induces the moment of release must already somehow have been marked at the level of storage: “There exists ‘not yet conscious knowledge’ of what has been [Es gibt ‘noch nicht bewußtes Wissen’ vom Gewesenen] that has a claim to the structure of awakening” (GS 5: 1058).

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Such a projection of the present into the past, however, is not to be taken as merely a retrospective form of historical construction. As such it would signify nothing but that every epoch recovers its past selectively, chooses what underwrites its own self-understanding. Benjamin’s claim is more radical in that he views the past itself as primordially marked. The work of remembrance, then, would not simply juxtapose two static dimensions, a present and a past. With the Copernican turn neither past nor present could function as a stable axis. The linear representation of traditional historicism would be replaced by a multi-directional temporality, the possibility of moving the present back into the past and bringing the past forward into the present. As Jürgen Habermas has argued,43 Benjamin was not satisfied with the available variants of historical continuity (Wirkungsgeschichte), including Nietzsche’s critical history. In all of them, the authenticity of the present involves a fusion of innovation with the continuity of tradition; the past is always a pre-history, bound to the present by links of a continuous destiny. What Benjamin does is to take the characteristically modern sense of a radical futurity and transform it into a still more radical orientation toward the past. He shifts the horizon of expectation (Erwartungshorizont) from the present to the past. The past becomes laden with a horizon of unrealized expectations, and it becomes the duty of future generations to evoke these by virtue of the “weak messianic power” (SW 4: 390) they possess. This solidarity of the present with the past may be realized through the work of remembrance (Eingedenken). The idea of history as somehow incomplete, capable at any present time of bringing forth a hitherto latent force, is the central tenet of Benjamin’s historiography. In his late reflections, “On the Concept of History,” he wrote, There is no document of culture that is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is never free of barbarism, so barbarism taints the manner in which it was transmitted from one hand to another. The historical materialist therefore dissociates himself from this process of transmission as far as possible. He regards it as his task to brush history against the grain. (SW 4: 392) 43. Jürgen Habermas, Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1985), 23.

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In March 1937, Max Horkheimer wrote to Benjamin that his idea concerning the “incompleteness of history” was mystifying. “Past injustice has occurred and is completed,” Horkheimer wrote. “The slain are really slain. . . . If one takes the lack of closure entirely seriously, one must believe in the Last Judgment.” Benjamin’s reaction was as follows: The corrective to this line of thinking may be found in the consideration that history is not simply a science but also and not least a form of remembrance [Eingedenken]. What science has “determined,” remembrance can modify. Such mindfulness can make the incomplete (happiness) into something complete, and the complete (suffering) into something incomplete. That is theology; but in remembrance we have an experience that forbids us to conceive of history as fundamentally a-theological, little as it may be granted us to try to write it with immediately theological concepts.44

Here, Benjamin differentiated two senses of memory: Erinnerung, the more general, unmarked term, and Eingedenken (literally, entering into a thought process), which refers to the recovery of data guided by an inverse temporality—remembrance as a recovery practice with a projective, transformative power. It may well be, as Rolf Tiedemann has suggested,45 that Horkheimer’s letter, which Benjamin found important enough to include in The Arcades Project, prompted Benjamin to amplify the qualified sense of theology in his reaction to Horkheimer. When in “On the Concept History” he referred to “a secret index by which [the past] is referred to redemption” (SW 4: 390), the last word is not to be understood in a religious sense but in the context of what Benjamin termed “profane illumination,” that is, a secular messianism that underwrites a transformative (revolutionary) potential. What he came to understand as the task of the materialist historian was to evoke that “secret index” so as to enable “Every age . . . [to] strive anew to wrest tradition away from the conformism that is working to overpower it” (SW 4: 391). This task is evoked more than once in the text (for example, “our coming was expected on earth,” Thesis II) and then reaffirmed in Thesis XVII: 44. Horkheimer’s letter of March 15, 1937, cited in GS 5: 588–89 (N 8, 1); TAP 471 (trans. modified). 45. “Historischer Materialismus oder politischer Messianismus?” in Materialien zu Benjamins Thesen “Über den Begriff der Geschichte, edited by Peter Bulthaup (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1975, 87–89).

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The historical materialist . . . recognizes the sign of a messianic arrest of happening, or (to put it differently) a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past. He takes cognizance of it in order to blast a specific era out of the homogeneous course of history; thus, he blasts a specific life out of the era, a specific work out of the lifework. As a result of this method, the lifework is both preserved and sublated in the work, the era in the lifework, and entire course of history in the era. (SW 4:396)

This, in effect, responds to Horkheimer’s claim, “If one takes the lack of closure entirely seriously, one must believe in the Last Judgment.” Benjamin makes clear that it is the burden of the interpreter, the historical materialist, to fix the historical record.

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How to talk about the aesthetic today? In many circles the term meets with either suspicion or lack of interest. Discussions of the aesthetic are viewed as a diversion from cultural-political considerations in favor of merely formalist or antiquarian preoccupations. Aesthetics has been displaced on all sides—by cultural and media studies, by sociology of the arts, by psychology and biography of artists, by audience response, by various “anti-aesthetics” (including the postmodern). And the sponsorship that conceptual thought had provided for aesthetics at least up to Hegel is now seen as one of its principal liabilities. One difficulty, of course, is the diversity of meanings attached to the term. The modern origin of the problematic lies in the mid and later eighteenth century, the period from Baumgarten to Hegel, a moment when the “aesthetic” was integrated within a comprehensive philosophical system, and in fact, when it assumed a key function therein. In the wake of the English empiricists and of the French philosophes, the turn to aesthetics in Ger42

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man Romantic and Idealist thought may be seen as an effort to rehabilitate a sense of wonder, of divinity in nature in a time of skepticism and disbelief. The effort of philosophy in this period was directed to awakening the “moribund language of nature” (Hamann) and giving it a place of honor in the system of philosophy.1 It is in this sense that aesthetic thought in this period—and preeminently Kant’s Critique of Judgment— came to view art and nature in strict analogy. The opening pages of Derrida’s “Parergon” very properly put us on guard regarding the presuppositions that any discourse on the aesthetic entails, presuppositions such as teleology, circularity, belatedness: “the philosophical encloses art in its circle,” Derrida writes, “but its discourse on art is at once, by the same token, caught in a circle.”2 Yet this is not to say that a circle of this kind can be altogether avoided. The circling of art and philosophy, their mutual resistance and interdependence, has always been integral to the aesthetic. If that point has been neglected in recent discussions, it may only be because it has been displaced by questions regarding the social or the political component in art. We will come back to this point later. Hegel’s dictum regarding the death of art is so familiar that we tend at once to acknowledge and ignore it. Derrida, alluding to Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art,” reminds us that “it is from the possibility of its death that art can here be interrogated. It is possible that art is in its death throes, but ‘it will take a good few centuries’ until it dies . . .”3 What Derrida terms the “interrogation” of art “from the possibility of its death” designates the radical historicality that Hegel brought to considerations of art works. The Lectures on Aesthetics subject art to an altogether new kind of temporal determination. The truth of art can never coincide with a present manifestation but becomes available only in the mode of retrospection. This concep1. Cf. “Ästhetik,” in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, vol. 1, ed. Joachim Ritter, et al (Basel: Schwabe Verlag, 1971), col. 564. My brief survey also draws on Rodolphe Gasché, “Of aesthetic and historical determination,” in Post-structuralism and the question of history, ed. Derek Attridge, et al (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 139–61. 2. Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 23. 3. Derrida, The Truth in Painting, 29. The Heidegger passage is in the Epilogue of “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), 79.

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tion of the constitutive pastness of art bears directly on the relation of philosophy and art. If, as Hegel maintains, art was once deemed the preeminent avenue to truth, it is only by way of philosophy that we can now know this. But, correspondingly, philosophy’s function in disclosing this truth factor in art becomes, in a sense, an enabling condition for philosophy itself.4

Benjamin’s Intervention The intervention of Benjamin’s writings in the transformation of theoretical discourses that began in the seventies is still very close to us. But it is often overlooked that his analyses were directed to vastly different conditions than those that we confront today. At the same time, his own sense of history postulated hidden conjunctions between the present and the past, conjunctions that themselves determine what counts, at a given moment, as historically relevant.5 There is no question but that his writings, especially those of his last period, anticipated and in part stimulated the massive reaction to aesthetics that we have witnessed in the past few decades. But this should not obscure the central role that elements of the aesthetic tradition played in his thought. It is in part to probe the extraordinary impact of Benjamin’s writings in recent years that I propose to examine this dimension of his work. Although the Greek stem aisthesis refers primarily to modes of perception, the emphasis of modern aesthetic theory has been on the imbrication of a theory of the (fine) arts with a theory of perception and experience. It is noteworthy that during 1915–17, a period when he is deeply engaged with Kant’s thought6 and formulating a far-reaching theory language that will remain integral to his future work,7 Benjamin is also reflecting on color and space as fundamental cognitive modalities.8 In 1917, he wrote to a friend, 4. Cf. Rüdiger Bubner, “Über einige Bedingungen gegenwärtiger Ästhetik,” in Ästhetische Erfahrung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1989), esp. 16 –18. 5. Cf. “On the Concept of History,” II and XIV, SW 4: 389f, 395; GS 1: 683f and 701. 6. See in the letter to Scholem of October 22, 1917, GB 1: 389–92. 7. Notably, “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” SW 1: 62–74; GS, 2: 140 –57. 8. The most relevant texts are “Painting, or Signs and Marks,” SW 1: 83–86; GS 2: 603–7, “Der Regenbogen. Gespräch über die Phantasie,” GS 7: 19–26 (not

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Ernst Schoen, “I have been thinking for a long time about where free scope and opportunity for the development and greatness of basic ‘aesthetic’ concepts might finally be found, and where they might be released from their wretched isolation (which in aesthetics is the equivalent of what in painting is mere artistry)” (GB 1: 415). At this stage Benjamin conceives the aesthetic in the first instance as a fundamental theory of perceptual experience and cognition and only secondarily in relation to works of art.9 While Benjamin’s work came to be increasingly oriented to the social function of art, his early preoccupation with aisthesis persisted in the ways he situated the work of art in relation to the historicity of human perception and experience.10 I agree with Susan Buck-Morss’s contention that “Benjamin’s critical understanding of mass society disrupts the tradition of modernism . . . by exploding the constellation of art, politics, and aesthetics into which, by the twentieth century, this tradition has congealed,”11 but I see Benjamin’s contribution as more directly engaged with that tradition than she does. In 1935, as Benjamin completed the Artwork Essay (“The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility”), he wrote a friend from his Paris exile, “Herein [in the essay] I have found extraordinary formulations, deriving from altogether new insights and conceptions. And I may now claim that the materialist theory of art, about which one has heard so translated in SW), a philosophical dialogue in the style of German Romanticism, and some twenty pages of notes and fragments gathered under the rubric “Zur Ästhetik,” GS 6: 109–29. Howard Caygill’s Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience (London: Routledge, 1998) provides a detailed account of this phase of Benjamin’s reflections on color, the image, and perception. 9. Thus more in the sense of Kant’s section on schematism in the Critique of Pure Reason than of aesthetic judgment in the Critique of Judgment; cf. Caygill, The Colour of Experience, 81. Benjamin develops a more explicit political orientation for criticism in a series of notes dated between 1929 and 1931, in GS 6: 161–80. 10. Benjamin’s linkage of the theory of art and of perception is indicated in the Artwork Essay where, in discussing the reception of film in terms of “distraction” and “shock effect,” he characterizes this new medium in terms of “that principle of perception [jene Lehre von der Wahrnehmung] which was called aesthetics by the Greeks” (GS 7: 381). This formulation comes from the second, what Benjamin considered the definitive version of “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” in GS 7: 350 –84. The English translation in SW 4: 252–83, is based on a shorter German version in GS 1: 471–508. For brevity, I refer to the essay as the Artwork Essay. 11. Susan Buck-Morss, “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered,” October 62 (Autumn, 1992): 5.

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much talk though no one had ever laid eyes on it, now exists.”12 Clearly, what the younger Benjamin understood by “basic ‘aesthetic’ concepts” is at some remove from “the materialist theory of art.” It behooves us both to measure that gap and to trace some of the continuities. Benjamin’s intervention may perhaps be understood in terms of Hans Blumenberg’s argument that a culture harbors certain “answer positions” for which appropriate questions are no longer available or not yet formulated.13 Benjamin’s manner of displacing a problematic in no sense eliminates it but rather fractures it in order to reconstitute its elements.14 Thus, with the notion of aura, Benjamin proceeds by displacing a conceptual register, so that aura functions not so much as a concept or idea but rather as a differential marker, a means of situating a phenomenon in light of its historical lapse.15 My point in raising this is not to pursue a discussion of this notoriously knotty notion but to suggest that the aesthetic is still very much at play in Benjamin’s thought, even in a terminology that appears to supplant it. For his “theses” on the philosophy of history Benjamin took as one of the mottos the following passage from Nietzsche’s “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” from Untimely Meditations: We need history [Historie], but we need it in a different way than does the spoiled idler [verwöhnte Müßiggänger] in the garden of knowledge.16

One may read here a caution that Benjamin addressed to his own generation, a caution against being caught as mere pleasure seekers in a time of crisis. In the twenties and thirties, Benjamin had good cause to react against certain overwrought forms of aestheticism,17 and he did so in part by attempting to provide literature and other art forms with a grounding that could resist 12. Cited in GS 6: 814. 13. See Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern World, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1985), 65–69. 14. Norbert Bolz, citing a phrase that Benjamin uses with respect to Surrealism —“the destruction of the aesthetic” (GS 2: 1035)— comments: “What will be destroyed is the illusion of its totality. Thus the aesthetic will not be eliminated but broken into pieces which can then be fitted together anew.” Norbert Bolz, “Walter Benjamins Ästhetik,” in Walter Benjamin, 1892–1940, zum 100. Geburtstag, ed. Uwe Steiner (Bern: Peter Lang Publishing, 1992), 21f. 15. Discussed in greater depth in Chapter 3. 16. “On the Concept of History,” Thesis XII, GS 1: 700; SW 3: 394. 17. Jugendstil is the preeminent example in The Arcades Project, GS 5: 690 –93 [S 7a, 3 and ff ]; TAP 556 –58.

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the kind of aestheticizing turn that was typical of Geistesgeschichte and other tendencies of nineteenth-century historicism. Today our situation is different. In the wake of the transformations in criticism and theory that have occurred during the past few decades, the problem is not so much that historical-political considerations are in danger of being displaced by the aesthetic. The aesthetic has been pretty much under attack from all sides. Rather, it is the very lability and indeterminacy of this notion that obscures the extent to which it has, from at least the mid-eighteenth century, been understood correlatively to pragmatic, which is to say political, concerns.

Three Strands of the Aesthetic The socio-political function of Bildung, of aesthetic education as developed in Idealism and Romanticism, has been part and parcel of the humanist program for the past two centuries. Schiller used Kant’s analogy of beauty and morality as the basis for an explicit program of pedagogy and social conditioning. Hans-Georg Gadamer summarizes this development as follows: “When [Schiller] based the idea of an aesthetic education of man on the analogy of beauty and morality, formulated by Kant, he was able to pursue a line explicitly laid down by Kant: ‘Taste enables us, as it were, to make the transition from sensible charm to a habitual moral interest without making too violent a leap.’ ”18 The premise whereby the individual’s appreciation of beauty could underwrite a universal theory of culture may be found in the way that Kant, in the Critique of Judgment, shifts the agency of aesthetic judgment from a level of communal response based on sensus communis to a transhistorical subject. Such a subject assumes, in David Lloyd’s formulation, the “concept of man in general as producer of form, as producer, in particular, of forms of himself through an aesthetic labor which transcends specific economic or political determinants.”19 It is in this sense that Lloyd can claim, “Kant’s work is saturated with politics even, if not especially, where it is ostensibly not at all 18. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, ed. and trans. Garrett Barden and John Cumming (New York: Seabury Press, 1975), 68. The citation is from § 59 of the Critique of Judgment. 19. David Lloyd, “Arnold, Ferguson, Schiller: Aesthetic Culture and the politics of Aesthetics,” Cultural Critique 2 (Winter 1985–86): 138f.

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political.”20 The liability of this tendency is that it brought with it a diversion of energies away from social-political to aesthetic pursuits, where the sphere of art came to stand as a (utopian) deferral for what could not be realized in society. “It may be,” writes Lloyd, “that it was in Germany, where the conditions for a representative politics were not yet emergent, that aesthetics first came to represent a forestalled politics.”21 In summary, the aesthetic, from the beginning of its modern career, has been deeply implicated in what is now termed the political, though in Romantic and Idealist thought this was chiefly designated by way of a vocabulary of pedagogy (for example, Bildung, Erziehung). I turn now to another, but not unrelated, feature of the aesthetic and this is the presumption of an interdependence between the spheres of art and philosophy, an interdependence that signifies both the necessity of conceiving art through philosophy and, conversely, the need of philosophy to draw on art in order to validate its own access to truth. In a general sense one may trace this linkage of truth and art to the neo-Platonic impulse to seek an embodied form, a visible manifestation, for transcendental truth. But we are heirs to versions of this tradition that derive from the Romantic era, specifically from Schelling and Hegel, versions such as Adorno’s claim of an “inherently idealistic moment [that] is indispensable to art—the objective mediation of all art through spirit [Geist].”22 Adorno here, in his Aesthetic Theory, is glossing the Hegelian notion of Geist, which, in Hegel’s terminology, is the channel for truth in its historical exfoliation; and though Adorno is in many ways strongly resistant to Hegel, 20. David Lloyd, “Analogies of the aesthetic: the politics of culture and the limits of materialist aesthetics,” New Formations 10 (Spring 1990): 119. 21. Ibid., 120. The kind of argument that I draw from Lloyd has parallels in many other scholars. An important early formulation is that of Odo Marquard, who wrote as follows about § 59 of the Critique of Judgment, which he called “the centerpiece of the Kantian aesthetic”: “[I]s the realization of a humane society, a state worthy of man, provided with a foundation, prepared, anticipated here, or is it only, in a beautiful manner, embalmed? Is [the aesthetic] . . . an instrument or a substitute for political realization, for the project of historical reason?” Odo Marquand, “Kant und die Wende zur Ästhetik,” Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung 16 (1962): 370. A recent essay by Marc Redfield provides a lucid reformulation of the argument: “Aesthetic Ideology and Literary Theory,” The Centennial Review 39 (Fall 1995): 537–58. 22. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. C. Lenhardt (London: Routledge, 1984), 135.

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he cannot help but acknowledge a principal tenet of Hegel’s aesthetics, one which he formulates as follows: Not every existent is spirit. Art is. And art is a kind of existent that becomes spiritual as a result of its configurational nature [seine Konfigurationen].23

In his characteristically condensed manner Adorno gives expression here to a central claim —and enigma— of modern philosophical aesthetics: namely, that the privileged access of art to spirit or truth is dependent on an element that he terms “configurational.” But however this term might be understood— whether as a formal, figurative, or material dimension of works of art—it designates an inescapably partial, historically conditioned manifestation of spirit. The problem that philosophical aesthetics leaves us with may be formulated in a double sense: What justifies the privileged access of art to truth? What constitutes the historicity of art’s “configurational” status?24 These two aspects of the question allow us to demarcate two phases of Benjamin’s aesthetic-historical project: The earlier work—the essays on language and on the mimetic faculty, the dissertation, The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism (1920), and the study of Goethe’s novel The Elective Affinities (Die Wahlverwandtschaften)— offers abundant materials regarding the first part of the problematic, that is, a testing of art’s access to truth. The later work—from and including the “Mourning Play” (Trauerspiel) monograph—is more directly oriented to the second, what may be termed the medium of art as a historical trace.25 The third component of the aesthetic tradition as I outline it is the association of sensibility and beauty. Whether in its Platonic-Kantian form —as a correspondence between subjective feeling and the perfection of creation— or its Hegelian form —as “the sensuous appearance of the Idea” (sinnliches Scheinen der Idee)26—the project of aesthetics has been to vali23. Ibid. 24. J. M. Bernstein’s The Fate of Art. Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno (Cambridge: Polity, 1992) develops a detailed and persuasive consideration of this issue based on the thinkers named in the title as well as Heidegger. 25. I do not propose here anything like a strict demarcation in Benjamin’s career but only suggest this division heuristically for purposes of my discussion of the aesthetic. 26. “Das Schöne bestimmt sich dadurch als das sinnliche Scheinen der Idee.” G.W.F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, 3 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag,

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date a fit, an ordained conjunction between the human sensory apparatus and a transcendental order, whether of nature or of history. In designating this conjunction as beauty, aesthetics sought to validate it in terms both of a quality in the object and a capacity to be moved, to respond feelingly, on the part of the subject. The limitations of this component of the aesthetic tradition, namely, its basis in an immutable human nature, are all too evident. What historical approach to the social collective today can underwrite the consensual principle underlying Kant’s idea of taste? Or, to take up another principal tenet of his aesthetic theory, what remains of the reflective judgment—predicated on the mind’s pleasure in its own operation, in the concordance of imagination and understanding—in an era when, as Benjamin put it, technology has subjected “the human sensorium to a more complex type of training [einem Training komplexerer Art]” (GS 1: 630), a condition to which a new medium such as film, he goes on, responds by assimilating the habitual shocks of modern urban existence as a formal principle? (We shall come back to the interplay between artistic media and collective consciousness.) And in Hegel, the ambiguities implicit in “sinnliches Scheinen der Idee” point to the disaggregation of the idea of beauty in its modern career. In Hegel’s definition of beauty, one may lay a stress either on Idee as the realization of Geist in the form of a fulfilled manifestation, a translucence of the idea, or, alternatively, on sinnlich, the sensuous mode of this appearance, its embeddedness in a specific materiality and substance. In Hegel’s own terms, the first alternative was undoubtedly preeminent, whereby the work of art enables, if not a coincidence, at least a convergence of ideal meaning and material configuration. But if one focuses on sinnliches Scheinen, then the work status of art, its dependence on a specific medium and materiality, gains a new prominence.27 In this connection, we are now able to appreciate that Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics, with its wide-ranging analyses of cultural styles and functions, laid the basis for a modern “media theory,” where “media” is understood in relation both to an expressive apparatus and to the mediation supplied by an agency of reception. 1970), 1: 151. The English translation has, “Therefore the beautiful is characterized as the pure appearance of the Idea to sense.” G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, 2 vols. trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 1: 111. 27. This discussion of Hegel draws on Bubner, “Über einige Bedingugen,” 16 –19.

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What I have undertaken so far in this chapter is to characterize the classical aesthetic tradition in terms of three components—as a politicalpedagogic project (Bildung), as philosophy’s stake in art, and as a rationale for the manifestation or appearance of Beauty (semblance, Schein). I have selected these to allow us to trace Benjamin’s ongoing preoccupation with the idea of the aesthetic, though the term itself, as is characteristic for his thought, undergoes significant swerves or displacements within his conceptual vocabulary. I want now to situate Benjamin’s thought in relation to these three strands, focusing in each case on one of Benjamin’s writings. Regarding the linkage of art and philosophy, what may be termed the ontological status of art, I shall draw on the essay on The Elective Affinities (written 1919–22, published 1924 –25). Regarding the political-pedagogic function of art, I will examine “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility” (1935–36). And regarding the question of Beauty and Schein, I will focus on the issue of commodity fetishism as treated in The Arcades Project (1928– 40).

The Truth of Art In Benjamin’s essay “Goethe’s Elective Affinities,” we read, “all genuine works [of art] have their siblings in the realm of philosophy.”28 In the elaboration of this statement Benjamin speaks of the unity of philosophy as a “nonexistent question,” which, however, may be designated as the “ideal of the problem” of philosophy. And, he goes on: The concept of this nonexistent question seeking the unity of philosophy by inquiry functions in philosophy as the ideal of the problem. Even if, however, the system is in no sense attainable through inquiry, there are nevertheless constructions [Gebilde] which, without being questions, have the deepest affinity with the ideal of the problem. These are works of art. (SW 1: 334; GS 1: 172)

While at first glance such a formulation seems allied to an Idealist conception of the linkage between philosophy and art, it in fact moves in the op28. SW 1: 333; GS 1: 172. For a revealing variant of this and the following citation see “The Theory of Criticism” (editor’s title), a fragment written in 1919–20, in SW 1: 217–19; GS 1: 833–35.

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posite direction. Here, and in the essay as a whole, Benjamin is intent on demonstrating a fundamental heteronomy of the two spheres, philosophy and art. Philosophy now is enclosed within a project of criticism that rescues its “unity” but makes any formulation of such unity subject to the interpretive potential of individual works of art. What is designated as the unity or the “ideal of the problem” is a systematicity on the part of philosophy that, a few years earlier, Benjamin had still thought possible but that he now relinquishes. In a text written in 1917–18 but never published in his lifetime, “On the Program of the Coming Philosophy,” Benjamin had argued the need for a future philosophy to establish criteria based on a principle of “systematic unity or truth [die systematische Einheit oder die Wahrheit]” (SW 1: 100; GS 2: 158). The essay itself is primarily a critique of elements of neoKantian thought, prominent in the German universities of that period, and it makes no effort to indicate just where that principle is to be sought. But we may see in Benjamin’s major writings of the succeeding years—the doctoral thesis on the concept of criticism in Romanticism and the essay on The Elective Affinities—an effort to formulate a conception of criticism that could make good what he had diagnosed as the failings of philosophy at that time. The doctoral thesis, far from being only a historical exposition of Romantic theory, is an important stage in Benjamin’s evolving conception of aesthetic criticism and, in fact, a forceful presentation of the Romantic sources for the modernist conception of art.29 When Benjamin writes, “[F]or the Romantics criticism is much less the judgment of a work than the method of its fulfillment [Vollendung]” (GS 1: 69), he is anticipating the kind of claim that he will make in the Elective Affinities essay regarding the work of art’s affinity to the “ideal of the problem” of philosophy. Benjamin sees the early German Romantics’ criterion of immanent form not only as the basis of aesthetic judgment but as the point of departure for a reflexive process underlying the status of criticism itself. What is now claimed as central to criticism is not its evaluative function but its agency in realizing the historical destiny of the work of art: With the true critic the actual judgment is a final stage that he wrests from himself, never the basis of his undertaking. In the ideal case he forgets to 29. Cf. Jennings, Dialectical Image, Chapter 5.

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judge. So that criticism may be inward to the work: Art is only a stage of transition for the great works. They have been something else (in the state of their becoming) and they are to become something else (in the state of criticism).30

Yet the idea of criticism that Benjamin puts forward in no sense aims at a conceptual totalization or sublation of art. Aesthetic criticism is subject to an aporetic limit, at once a ground and blind-spot, what The Elective Affinities essay names as “the expressionless” (das Ausdruckslose): The expressionless is the critical violence which, while unable to separate semblance [Schein] from essence in art, prevents them from mingling. It possesses this violence as a moral dictum. . . . For it shatters whatever still survives as the legacy of chaos in all beautiful semblance: the false, errant totality—the absolute totality. Only the expressionless completes [vollendet] the work, by shattering it into a thing of shards, into a fragment of the true world, into the torso of a symbol.31

That violence is justified as a “moral dictum” for criticism may be understood in one sense as a resistance to any Idealist identification of beauty as the semblance (Schein), much less the manifestation of truth.32 What is at issue here will be developed a few years later by Benjamin in connection with the allegorical mode of the Baroque “mourning play” (Trauerspiel), a mode that proves decisive for his conception of criticism and history even to his latest writings. In The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1927), Benjamin wrote: Criticism means the mortification of the works. By their very essence these works confirm this more readily than any others. Mortification of the works: 30. GS 6: 172. This is taken from notes written in 1931 but reflects a position that Benjamin had been developing in the previous decade. 31. “Goethe’s Elective Affinities,” SW 1: 340; GS 1: 181. A detailed consideration of this issue, especially with reference to the sublime, is Winfried Menninghaus, “Das Ausdruckslose: Walter Benjamins Kritik des Schönen durch das Erhabene,” in Walter Benjamin, 1892–1940, 33–76. See also Joanna Hodge’s discussion of the “expressionless” in terms of Spinozan substance: Joanna Hodge, “The Timing of Elective Affinity: Walter Benjamin’s Strong Aesthetics,” in Walter Benjamin and Art, ed. Andrew Benjamin (London: Continuum, 2005), 28. 32. Cf. Marleen Stoessel, Aura. Das vergessene Menschliche. Zur Sprache und Erfahrung bei Walter Benjamin (Munich and Vienna: Hanser Verlag, 1983), 122.

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This puzzling term “mortification” is not used casually by Benjamin. What it suggests is not only death but also a parceling and fragmentation, a preservation in which destructive and utopian impulses are held in tension.34 While The Elective Affinities essay draws on philosophy as an ideal totality to underwrite a criterion of truth, it is only by way of the critique of works of art that the intimation of such truth could be revealed. And one must stress intimation, for the work of art can only testify to the need for a truth-content but is not capable of providing its formulation. The excavation (Förderung) of what lies buried (vergraben) in the multiplicity of works of art is “the business of critique [das Geschäft der Kritik]. The latter allows the manifestation, one of the manifestations, of the ideal of the problem to appear in the work of art. For what critique ultimately demonstrates in the work of art is the virtual possibility of formulating the work’s truth content as the highest philosophical problem.”35 What is designated here as the virtual possibility of truth and earlier as the “nonexistent question” of the unity of philosophy constitutes a utopian aspiration that may be put forward as a

33. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: New Left Books, 1977), 182. The German in GS 1: 357. 34. Miriam Bratu Hansen’s discussion of this term traces the continuity of Judaic messianism in the historical-materialist phase of Benjamin’s thought: “because the aura as the necessary veil of beautiful appearance (schöner Schein) pretends to a premature, merely private reconciliation with a fallen world, it requires the destructive, ‘masculine,’ demystifying gesture of allegory, the mortifying grasp of knowledge, of critical reading. For only in a fragmentary state, as ‘quotation,’ can the utopian sediment of experience be preserved, can it be wrested from the empty continuum of history which, for Benjamin, is synonymous with catastrophe.” Miriam Bratu Hansen, “Benjamin, Cinema and Experience: ‘The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology,’ ” New German Critique 40 (1987): 190. On mortification, see also Timothy Bahti, Allegories of History: Literary Historiography after Hegel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 262 ff.; and Bettine Menke, Sprachfiguren: Name—Allegorie— Bild nach Walter Benjamin (Munich: Fink Verlag, 1991), 280, 337, 427–31. 35. “Goethe’s Elective Affinities,” SW 1: 334 (translation modified); GS 1: 173. It’s worth noting that the German “Kritik” may be translated both as critique and criticism. In this citation, the translator adheres to the principle stated in a note of SW: “the term ‘critique’ (Kritik) usually designates a specific, philosophically informed aspect of criticism” (SW 1: 219).

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claim although it cannot be specified in a question. It is in this sense that I would read the formulation, “that truth in a work [of art] would know itself not as if prompted by a question but rather under the force of a demand.”36 By displacing truth to a condition of virtuality critique separates itself from the preserving and monumentalizing function of the system of philosophy.

Politics and Art “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” is probably the most widely read and cited of Benjamin’s writings, and understandably so. Benjamin himself saw it as a decisive step in his theoretical work of the thirties.37 What one most readily recalls from the conclusion of the essay is the tone of resistance, the challenge that it throws out in that dark hour—1936 —in proclaiming a Communist-inspired “politicization of art” as a counterweight to the then ascendant Fascist “aesthetization of politics.” Benjamin saw his own undertaking in this essay as a new model for a politicization of the aesthetic. The difficulty of the essay is that there seem to be not so much two arguments, as two structures or forms of presentation. We may label them, provisionally, as performative, the espousal of a praxis, and epistemological, the analysis of a historical mutation in perception. The first is foregrounded from the start: “the concepts which are introduced into the theory of art . . . are completely useless for the purposes of Fascism. On the other hand, they are useful for the formulation of revolutionary demands in the politics of art [Kunstpolitik].”38 In responding to the urgency of the moment, Benjamin saw his task as preparing for a new mode of reception on the part of the public collectivity, a task that took issue with basic tenets of 36. My translation of “daß die Wahrheit in einem Werke zwar nicht als erfragt, doch als erfordert sich erkennen würde,” GS 1: 173. 37. Regarding the Artwork Essay he writes to Gershom Scholem on Oct. 24, 1935, “it has moved forward in a decisive manner in recent days through certain fundamental conclusions regarding the theory of art. Together with the historical schematism that I developed about four months ago, these—as a systematic base— will form a kind of network in which every particular is to be entered. These reflections fix the history of art in the nineteenth century in terms of an awareness of the situation which we are now experiencing” (GB 5: 190; cf. also 282). 38. SW 4: 252; GS 7: 350 (italics in the original).

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the Marxist class theory. Thus one goal of the essay is to map a liberating praxis for a future proletarian collectivity, a praxis capable of dispelling the enchantment of the older mythology, what Benjamin termed the magical basis of the ideology of the nineteenth-century.39 Within this political project, Benjamin develops a defense of arts-of-reproduction while at the same time taking pains to distinguish the corrupting, degenerating tendencies of Fascist art from the emergent arts-of-reproduction, even though both draw on comparable technological factors. Now this argument—the overtly political and performative side of the essay—is predicated on another, one that is not so evident as an argument but rather seems to function as the historical context, the backdrop of the former. It is, however, a no less central argument in the Artwork Essay, and indeed, in all of Benjamin’s writings in this last period of his life. I would term this the epistemological-cognitive argument and characterize it briefly as the analysis of a historical mutation of experience and perception.40 Here Benjamin offers a telescoped history of consciousness (both Wahrnehmung and Erfahrung) designed to lay the groundwork for a new conception of the social collectivity, of what in Marxist thought was designated as the proletarian masses. In Benjamin’s argument, the new collectivity would be capable of participating in the emergent technological media for its own advantage rather than, in the Fascist sense, becoming subject to their control. This second argument of the Artwork Essay puts into play a series of categories that are both epistemological and historical: aura, shock, distance/proximity, contemplation /distraction, singularity/reproduction, and so on. Art, and specifically film, serves as an exemplary instance, in a sense a test case, for the mutation of consciousness that Benjamin is charting. 39. Cf. the following working note for the Artwork Essay: “This work in no sense sees its task in providing a prolegomena to a history of art. It undertakes rather, first of all, to pave the way for a critique of the conception of art that has come down to us from the nineteenth century. It will be shown that this conception bears the mark of ideology. Its ideological character is to be seen in its mode of abstraction whereby it defines art in general and without any consideration of its historical construction on the basis of magical conceptions” (GS 1: 1050). 40. See Joel Snyder, “Benjamin on Reproducibility and Aura: A Reading of ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility,” in Benjamin: Philosophy, Aesthetics, History, ed. Gary Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989): 158–74, for a detailed account of this part of Benjamin’s argument.

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These complementary arguments of the Artwork Essay, then, may be more narrowly specified as follows: On the epistemological side, Benjamin charts the emergence of a new form of collective consciousness, and, on the performative side, he urgently warns against its possible appropriation by the forces of Fascism. The imbrication of the two arguments comes through most clearly, perhaps, in this sentence from the last paragraph of the essay, “Fiat ars-pereat mundus,” says fascism, expecting from war, as Marinetti admits, the artistic gratification of a sense perception altered by technology.” (SW 4: 270; GS 7: 383–84)

What is expressed here—and with scorching irony in Benjamin’s variant of the Latin citation41—is the dire warning of what Fascism may do if it is indeed able to control “the artistic gratification of a sense perception altered by technology.” But the greatest part of the essay has been devoted to analyzing just what this convergence involves—that is, how perception and experience (Wahrnehmung, Erfahrung), transformed by technology, might be conceived as responding to what was traditionally experienced through works of art.42 The most ambitious goal of the essay is its attempt to conflate the epistemological with the political argument, drawing on the former to underwrite the revolutionary potential of the latter. By showing that a decisive mutation in human consciousness can be traced by means of the history of art and its reception, Benjamin reformulates the issue of Bildung in the following terms: How is the new collectivity, the essentially urban mass of modernity, susceptible to aesthetic formation in light of the technological transformation of the media of art? How may post-auratic forms of collective experience draw on these media without falling prey to the kinds of manipulation characteristic of Fascist propaganda? Such questions had clearly assumed a new urgency in light of the Fascist approaches to technological media. Five years earlier, in the essay on Surrealism (1929), it seemed possible to claim that the sabotaging tactics of the Surrealists offered an effective 41. Variant of a saying attributed to Emperor Ferdinand I, “Fiat iustitia et pereat mundus” (Let justice prevail though the world perish). Cf. GS 1: 1055. 42. Of course, this is not to be taken in a Schillerian sense—as a kind of aesthetic Bildung. Benjamin strenuously rejected this side of the Idealist inheritance, which, in his view, had drastically compromised the social potential of art.

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political practice by way of what was provocatively termed an “organization of pessimism.”43 In place of the traditional path of contemplative (passive) reception, aesthetic practices would engage the sphere of images so as to induce a more direct, “bodily” (leibhaft), form of reception.44 When, in the closing pages of that essay, Benjamin wrote, “Only when in technology body and image space so interpenetrate that all revolutionary tension becomes bodily collective innervation, and all the bodily innervations of the collective become revolutionary discharge, has reality transcended itself to the extent demanded by the Communist Manifesto,”45 he envisaged the realization of the revolutionary project in terms of a transformed consciousness of a future collectivity, a collectivity whose sensory capacities would have been shaped by the new technologies. The image that concludes the essay— “the face of an alarm clock that in each minute rings for sixty seconds”—is formulated in a Surrealist vein but at the same time anticipates the kind of analysis of mass consciousness in relation to technological media that Benjamin will turn to in the following decade. Indeed, in other essays of this period—“The Author as Producer,” “The Destructive Character,” “Karl

43. Cf. Ulrich Rüffer, “Organisierung des Pessimismus,” in Walter Benjamin: Profane Erleuchtung und rettende Kritik, ed. Norbert W. Bolz and Richard Faber (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann Verlag, 1985), 223–30. 44. “Auch das Kollektivum ist leibhaft,” comes at the end of the essay on Surrealism, and just prior to that Benjamin wrote that the “Bildraum” (image space) was more concretely a “Leibraum” (body space) (GS 2: 309f; SW 2: 217). This orientation is central to the Artwork Essay. Buck-Morss aptly writes that Benjamin conceives that the task of art is “to undo the alienation of the corporeal sensorium, to restore the instinctual power of the human bodily senses for the sake of humanity’s selfpreservation, and to do this, not by avoiding the new technologies, but by passing through them.” Buck-Morss, “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics,” 5. On the convergence of body- and image-space, see also Sigrid Weigel, Body- and Image-Space: Re-reading Walter Benjamin (London: Routledge, 1996), ch. 2; and Norbert Bolz and Willem Van Reijen, Walter Benjamin, trans. Laimdota Mazzarins (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanity Books, 1996), 56 –57. 45. SW 2: 217–18; GS 2: 310. Miriam Bratu Hansen has shown the significance of the concept of innervation—“a two-way process, that is, not only a conversion of mental, affective energy into somatic, motoric form, but also the possibility of reconverting, and recovering, split-off psychic energy through motoric stimulation”—in Benjamin’s theory of the collectivity in relation to technology: Miriam Bratu Hansen, “Benjamin and Cinema: Not a One-Way Street,” Critical Inquiry 25 (Winter 1999): 317.

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Kraus”—Benjamin explores various means for making criticism an effective stimulus for social action. But whereas the focus of these essays is essentially on the status of criticism and the critic, the Artwork Essay more directly addresses the work of art in relation to the context of reception. What results is a significantly new model of the social collectivity in light of the mutation of art through technology. One can see in the multiple versions of the Artwork Essay that Benjamin placed the greatest emphasis on this new conception of the collectivity—the “masses” (Masse) of Marxist theory—though his formulation of the issue had by no means reached a definitive stage. The programmatic intention is clear enough: “The masses are a matrix from which everything in the traditional stance [alles gewohnte Verhalten] toward works of art is today emerging newborn” (SW 4: 267; GS 7: 381, trans. modified). The English version has “all customary behavior,” which suggests a high degree of autonomy on the part of the agency of reception. One of the points at issue in this part of the Artwork Essay is just how the relation of works of art and their public is to be understood in light of the current state of technology. “Behavior” implies a determinate, intentional receptivity, something that cannot be assumed in view of Benjamin’s analysis of a public whose perceptive apparatus (Wahrnehmungsapparat) will be governed not by a contemplative attitude but by a habit of distraction (Zerstreuung) and of resistance to shock effects (Chockwirkung). Cinema provides the most telling evidence for what this new type of apperception will be like and, at the same time, the preeminent means of accustoming the public to it. But it is important to keep in mind that Benjamin’s larger argument is about the history of perception and experience at the level of the public collectivity.46 In speaking of the power of art “to mobilize the masses,” Benjamin, at the conclusion of the Artwork Essay, juxtaposes the positive image of a public capable of responding to the new technologies in a spirit of critical self-consciousness with the negative one of the masses subject to a per46. The fact that Benjamin, in the last section of the Artwork Essay, uses architecture to illustrate distraction as a mode of reception is indicative of the wider scope of his argument (XV, SW 4: 267f; GS 7: 381). What distraction as a mode of experience and perception signifies is only broached but not developed in this essay. But it is clearly intended to mark a sphere that both absorbs and transgresses the “contemplative,” auratic frame of (high) art.

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verse aestheticizing of politics at the hands of the Fascists. What underlies this opposition is the analysis that Benjamin was developing in The Arcades Project of the enchantment of the urban masses of the nineteenth century to the “phantasmagoria” of the commodity system. (We will take this up in the following section.) In the Artwork Essay, Benjamin is specifically concerned with demonstrating how the new forms of collective experience of art can serve as a defense against “the corrupt conception of the masses that Fascism seeks to establish in place of their class consciousness.”47 It is on the basis of a new partnership with technology—what is termed the “second technology” in the longer, definitive version of the Artwork Essay—that Benjamin sees in the “matrix” of the masses a redemptive potential for art. He postulates here a progression from a “first technology,” where mankind sought mastery over nature by means of ritual and magic, to a second technology that operates in terms of experimentation and play. “This second technology is a system in which the mastering of elementary social forces is a precondition for playing [das Spiel] with natural forces. . . . Because this technology aims at liberating human beings from drudgery, the individual suddenly sees his scope for play, his field of action [Spielraum] immeasurably expanded” (SW 3: 124; GS 7: 360). In projecting a collectivity that is responsive to the altered conditions of production and transmission of art, Benjamin at once acknowledges and challenges the moral-pedagogic premises of traditional aesthetics. In place of the humanist form of Bildung whereby a certain cultural substance is imposed upon a passive social body, Benjamin puts forward the model of a mutually sustaining and transforming relation between technology and collective experience. In this model the privileged place of art, its auratic basis, is not so much eliminated as temporalized. The lapse of aura, like the death of art, turns out to have a long life span.48

47. GS 7: 370. Here, in the second version of the Artwork Essay, Benjamin elaborates his critique of the Marxist notion of the masses. See esp. XII, GS 7: 370f. This issue is well treated in Bolz and Van Reijen, Walter Benjamin, 55–69. 48. Cf. the following passage in the second version of the Artwork Essay: “in the decay of illusion, the lapse of aura . . . there comes to works of art an immense gain in play-room. And the greatest play-room has been realized by film” (GS 7: 369).

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Commodity Fetishism I turn now to the third strand of the aesthetic tradition as I have outlined it, what I termed “the Schein of beauty,” its “appearance” in any of the multiple senses that may be read into the word (semblance, manifestation, shining). While The Elective Affinities essay features certain code words of the Romantic-Idealist repertory—Schein, Hülle (veil), and Geheimnis (secret)—we need to be attentive to a swerve that anticipates a quite different conceptual register. When, near the end of the essay, Benjamin writes, “All beauty harbors something like the revelation of a historical-philosophical order. For it makes visible not the idea but its secret” (GS 1: 196), “secret” is undoubtedly still to be understood in terms of a “theological,” which is to say, messianic context. At the same time it, when read backwards from the perspective of the later work, it raises the issue of art’s historical adumbration in a way that can help us understand the treatment of commodity fetishism in The Arcades Project. In an early sketch for The Arcades Project, Benjamin characterizes the jumble of obscure, faded objects that are laid out in the shop windows of the Paris arcades as a rebus whose sense lies “on the tip of one’s tongue.” The clue to reading these displays, their allegorical significance, is to be sought in terms of the idea of commodity: “Here resides the last dinosaur of Europe, the consumer. On the walls of these caverns, their immemorial flora, the commodity, luxuriates and enters, like cancerous tissue, into the most irregular combinations” (GS 5: 1045; TAP 874). To what extent did Benjamin pursue Marx’s provocative but fragmentary discussion in Capital, where he refers to commodity as a commonplace, ordinary thing, but, when subjected to analysis, “a strange, vexing thing, full of metaphysical subtleties and theological spider-webs”?49 While the focus of Marx’s analysis is on a structure of value-formation or value-production, the nature of value itself is broached though not developed.

49. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Penguin, 1990), vol. 1: 163 (translation modified). Cited by Benjamin, GS 5: 262. The rendering “sensuously supersensuous” is suggested by Kevin McLaughlin, Writing in Parts: Imitation and Exchange in Nineteenth-Century Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 7.

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Commodity fetishism signified for Marx an aspect of the mystification, the pervasive self-deception, of bourgeois society that would inevitably be dispelled by the transformation of the capitalist system. In an early text he articulated the program to be undertaken: “Reform of consciousness, not through dogmas, but through analysis of the mystical consciousness that is unclear about itself, whether in religion or politics.”50 But Marx himself and later materialist theory had done little to theorize this “mystical consciousness” in such a way that it could be linked to specific socio-economic practices. The tendency of subsequent analyses—in Simmel, in Lukács, and then in Benjamin—was to treat commodity fetishism as a constitutive category of modernity and a preeminent indicator of new signifying practices.51 Lukács’s elaboration of the concept of reification in History and Class Consciousness (1923) shifted the focus from economics to the sphere of experience and consciousness. For Lukács, the commodity relation is not restricted to the dimension of human needs but “stamps its imprint upon the whole consciousness of man; his qualities and abilities are no longer an organic part of his personality, they are things which he can ‘own’ or ‘dispose of ’ like the various objects of the external world. And there is no natural form in which human relations can be cast, no way in which man can bring his physical and psychic ‘qualities’ into play without their being subjected increasingly to this reifying process.”52 What Lukács identifies as the deadening imprint of the commodity system onto the collective consciousness becomes for Benjamin a point of departure for disclosing the traces of this system as they are embedded at every level of the social complex, extending to the most diverse forms of social practices and artistic formations. Adorno, in commenting on an early version of project, had written to Benjamin, “With the vitiation of their use value, the alienated things are hollowed out and, as ciphers, they draw in meanings.” Benjamin cites 50. Letter to Ruge, from Kreuznach, September 1843, in Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, ed. Loyd D. Easton and Kurt H. Guddat (New York: Hackett Publishing Company, 1967), 214. This passage is cited by Benjamin, GS 5: 583 [N 5a, 1]; TAP 467. 51. Cf. David Frisby, Fragments of Modernity: Theories of Modernity in the Work of Simmel, Kracauer, and Benjamin (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1985), 25ff. 52. Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1971), 100.

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this comment favorably in his notes, adding, “in the nineteenth-century, the number of ‘hollowed-out’ things increases at a rate and on a scale that was previously unknown, for technical progress is continually withdrawing newly introduced objects from circulation” (GS 5: 582 [N 5, 2]; TAP 466). Over and over, Benjamin reflects on the status of cultural detritus, objects that have survived fashion, use value, and exchange value, and retain, in the end, a kind of reliquary status. In a letter to Scholem in the mid-thirties, he characterized The Arcades Project in the following terms: “to retain an image of history in the most insignificant fixations of existence, in its dregs, as it were” (letter of August 8, 1935, GB 5: 138). And elsewhere he noted, “truth is not—as Marxism maintains—just a temporal function of knowledge; it is bound to a time-kernel [Zeitkern] that is planted in both the knower and the known. This is so very true, that the eternal is far more likely to be the frill on a dress than an idea” (GS 5: 578 [N 3, 2]; TAP 463). Further, Benjamin takes the social collective, the masses, into account in entirely new ways. He mocks the historicist assumption of the social body as a mere passive agency of reception: “If that commodity soul existed about which Marx occasionally spoke in jest, it would be the most prone to empathy that was ever seen among the souls of this world. For it would have to view everyone as the very buyer, in whose hand and house it would want to nestle”(GS 1: 558). “Empathy” [Einfühlung], a favored term of Diltheyian Geistesgeschichte, here denotes the aestheticizing mode of reception of the historicist tradition. Implicit in the method of Geistesgeschichte was the assumption of a storehouse of historical data that could yield a kind of experiential surrogate. Cultural history [Kulturgeschichte], Benjamin writes, “lacks the destructive element which authenticates both dialectical thought and the experience of the dialectical thinker. Cultural history, may well enlarge the weight of the treasures [die Last der Schätze] piled on humanity’s back. But it does not give mankind the strength to shake them off, so as to get its hands on them [in die Hand zu bekommen]” (GS 2: 478). Getting one’s hands on those “treasures” remained for Benjamin the unredeemed promise of the historicist tradition. The idea that remnants of tradition could in some manner be rescued and stored was, in his eyes, a decisive flaw in its epistemology.53 53. Cf. the following passage from Berliner Kindheit um Neunzehnhundert (1932–34) as an anticipation of the concept of dialectical image in The Arcades Project: “I have

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Benjamin complicates Marx’s early program of a “reform of consciousness” by taking the collective dream, not as the projection of a liberated society but rather as a state of enchantment that persists in the phantasmagoria of commodity. His goal in The Arcades Project was to demonstrate that insofar as the dream state of the social collective might harbor a utopian promise, this could only be activated by drawing out in its fullest expressive density the hidden physiognomy of the commodity system. “The nineteenthcentury—,” Benjamin noted in an early note for The Arcades Project, “to borrow the Surrealists’ terms—is the set of noises that invades our dream, and which we interpret on awaking” (GS 5: 998; TAP 881). Awakening for Benjamin is not, as I have argued, to be taken in the Marxist sense as a harbinger of revolution but rather as the projection of a new sensibility (Wahrnehmung) on the part of the social collective. His use of figures of dream and awakening points in two directions: a dispelling of enchantment from the phantasmagoria of commodity, and a means of evoking the past for the sake of the present—memory as remembrance (Eingedenken). In “On the Image of Proust” (1929), Benjamin anticipated the development he would give this issue in the next decade.54 When he wrote in The Arcades Project, “What is provided in the following is the attempt of a technique of awakening. An attempt to become aware of the dialectical— the Copernican—turn [Wendung] of remembrance [Eingedenken]” (GS 5: 490 [K 1, 1]; TAP 388), it is Proust who is invoked as the preeminent model for this capacity of active remembrance, what is termed, “this side that is directed to dreams, the child’s side.” In the same entry Benjamin notes, “Proust could emerge as an unprecedented phenomenon only in a generation that had lost all bodily and natural aids to remembrance [alle leiblichsought to gain possession of the images [der Bilder habhaft zu werden] in which the experience of the metropolis inscribed itself for a middle-class child” (GS 7: 385). 54. In this essay we find the claim, “Proust’s analysis of snobbery, which is far more important than his apotheosis of art, constitutes the apogee of his critique of society. For the attitude of the snob is nothing but the consistent, organized, steely view of life from the chemically pure standpoint of the consumer.” The upper bourgeoisie [die Großbourgeoisie] is, in Proust’s portrayal, “a class which is everywhere pledged to camouflage its material basis” and which provides the embodiment of “the pure consumer . . . [as] the pure exploiter. He is that logically and theoretically, he is that in Proust in the full concreteness of his actual historical existence” (SW 2: 243; GS 2: 319).

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natürlichen Behelfe des Eingedenkens],” a characterization that, of course, encompasses Benjamin’s own generation. It would be a mistake to understand commodity fetishism simply as a hidden code whose solution would bring immediate enlightenment and a release from the state of enchantment. In Marx’s classic formulation commodity, fetishism arises from an inversion whereby the “definite social relation between men themselves” assumes “the fantastic form of a relation between things.”55 Kevin McLaughlin has described Marx’s idea of fetishism as, “this peculiar animation that sticks to commodities . . . [it] is itself essentially concealing . . . Or, more precisely, it conceals this character while mirroring it: it reflects back to human beings something to which they are, at least initially, blind.”56 Benjamin’s point of departure is to undertake a reading of this “blindness” of the social collective, to treat it as a materialist hieroglyphic or physiognomic that is susceptible to a measure of elucidation. “The property appertaining to the commodity as its fetish character attaches as well to the commodity-producing society,” he writes, “—not as it is in itself, to be sure, but more as it represents itself and thinks to understand itself whenever it abstract from the fact that it produces precisely commodities” (GS 5: 822 [X 13a]; TAP 669). This suspension (or cancellation) of the actual productive operation in society, which the society is prone to label as its “culture,” corresponds to the concept of phantasmagoria.57 At the same time the phantasmagoria, the enchanted sleep of the collectivity, is susceptible to a dialectical reversal. For Benjamin the decisive index of a historical turning comes by way of what he terms “dialectical image.” For one thing, an image (Bild) has an ineradicable punctual character; it can always be detached from a continuum. Further, the dialectical image situates history centrally within the observer’s context: not what happened but what may happen (at any moment).58 The dialectical image, let us recall, is 55. Marx, Capital, 1: 165. 56. McLaughlin, Writing in Parts, 9. 57. In this connection, Benjamin cites Adorno’s characterization of commodity as an object in which the element of work or productive labor has been “magically” erased: GS 5: 822 [X 13a]; TAP 669. 58. Cf. the following passage from The Arcades Project: “What distinguishes images from the ‘essences’ of phenomenology is their historical index. . . . For the historical index of the images not only says that they belong to a particular time; it says, above all, that they attain to legibility only at a particular time” (GS 5: 577 [N 3, 1];

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at once pictorial and linguistic, and (one should add) phantasmatic.59 It denotes not only a potentially revelatory moment but functions as a label for the historiographic task that Benjamin set himself. “The dialectical image,” he wrote to Gretel Adorno on August 16, 1935, “does not draw a copy of the dream . . . But it does seem to me to contain the instances, the incursions of consciousness on awakening, and indeed to produce its likeness only from these passages just as an astral image emerges from luminous points” (GB 5: 145). We are now in a better position to see how the political agenda of the Artwork Essay fits into the larger aims of The Arcades Project. As I have indicated, the primary aim of that essay was to find a way to rescue post-auratic experience from the manipulation and control of the masses that Fascism had attempted; and then, while sketching the link between the social collective and the commodity system, to argue that consciousness itself, when understood at the level of the collectivity, cannot be dissociated from the historical formation of media technologies. But the essay only indirectly entered into the problematic that was central to The Arcades Project, namely, the pervasive effects of commodity fetishism in social practices. And its goal was to awaken the collective unconscious by representing a cultural legacy that had become an instrument of enchantment (phantasmagoria) in such a way that humanity might “shake off . . . the weight of the treasures piled on its back” so as “to get its hands on them” (GS 2: 478). What is at issue for Benjamin is the necessity of taking account of the inertia of tradition while leaving an opening for a transformative potential, the “weak Messianic power” that he refers to in the “theses” on the philosophy of history.60 Benjamin harbored no illusion regarding the capacity of the modern public to withstand the fascination of forces that had appropriated the newer media technologies, whether at the level of the market or of the state. In focusing on the potential of new forms of enchantment, both liberating and oppressive, Benjamin in his writings in the thirties sought to articulate forms TAP 462). See also further entries on the dialectical image in this convolute: N 9, 7 and N 9a, 4. 59. Cf. “the place where one encounters them [dialectical images] is language” (GS 5: 577 [N 2a, 3]; TAP 462). 60. See GS 2: 694; SW 4: 390.

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of resistance for a future public. But his prognosis in this period was anything but optimistic, whether we think of the fable that he placed at the beginning of the “Theses,” where the dwarf, theology, “small and ugly and . . . out of sight” controls the moves of the puppet, “historical materialism,” or of the idea that revolution may be generated by “time filled-full by the nowtime [ Jetztzeit],” but that this potent force embedded in the past “became historical posthumously, as it were, through events that may be separated from it by thousands of years” (GS 1: 693ff; SW 4: 389, 395, 397). It should come as no surprise that this examination of the aesthetic in Benjamin concludes with a focus on the perceptual and experiential potential of the social collective, a collective which he posited not as an existent audience but as the projection of developments in consumption and media technologies that were undergoing profound changes in his lifetime. As Norbert Bolz concluded, “Walter Benjamin’s aesthetics is a doctrine of perceptual experience [Lehre von der Wahrnehmung]—more properly: of perceptual experience of the collectivity—more properly: of a techno-medially organized collective experience.”61 In consequence of this orientation to the collectivity, Bolz goes on, Benjamin “laid out the matrix of a transformation of the conception of art. Nothing could be more untimely today.” If we pursue Bolz’s remark about the untimeliness of Benjamin’s undertaking, we might note initially that in fact Benjamin’s analysis of the transformation of the aesthetic has proven extraordinarily prescient. Current theoretical discussions deal exhaustively with the aesthetic dimension of media technologies or, inversely, with media analogues to older aesthetic categories. But this should not be taken to imply—as is often the case in general assessments of Benjamin’s impact—that his analysis constitutes something like a preview, much less an endorsement, of the vastly augmented partnership of art and technology in this age. Insofar as Benjamin disclosed hitherto neglected consequences regarding the technological media, he did so with a view to reversing the “miscarried reception of technology” of the nineteenth century (GS 2: 475), but, as the preceding discussion has shown, he judged the capacity for enlightenment on the part of the collectivity to be conditioned by the very nature of its enchantment, its subjection to the phantasmagoria of commodity. 61. Bolz, “Walter Benjamins Ästhetik,” 28.

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We recall that in the essay on Goethe’s The Elective Affinities, Benjamin maintained that the conjunction of beauty and Schein is constitutive of art but at the same time stands as a definitive barrier to any direct manifestation of truth in the work of art. This aporetic limit was designated as “the expressionless” and served as the basis for a form of critique whose “violence” was sanctioned by a “moral dictum.” It is on the basis of something like a need for truth linked to an acknowledgment of its inaccessibility within the system of philosophy that Benjamin developed the type of historical critique that, I would argue, represents a persistent orientation of his thought. I can almost subscribe to the following conclusion by Peter Osborne, though I would give the “need” a more positive valorization: “The political, one might say, is the black hole at the centre of Benjamin’s work. The linchpin of his project to fuse materialism with theology, the idea from which everything else derives its meaning, it is present, ultimately, only as a need.”62 Benjamin responded to the split that Hegelian aesthetics had disclosed between the work of art’s embodiment of historical truth (Idee) and the materiality of its realization (sinnliche Erscheinung) by a reorientation of the politics of the aesthetic. In his writings of the thirties, and notably in The Arcades Project, he envisaged a collectivity that, in place of the goals of Bildung, of tradition as an imposed value structure, would attain to a critical consciousness capable of reading the material world as embodiment of social processes. These writings provide the model as well as the theory for a development whereby “the historical index of the images says . . . that they attain to legibility only at a particular time” (GS 5: 577 [N 3, 1]; TAP 462), which is to say, when they take on a performative valence. Aesthetics in this sense was, for Benjamin, a deeply political project, not simply a displacement of aesthetics into politics but rather its precondition. 62. Peter Osborne, “Small-scale Victories, Large-scale Defeats: Walter Benjamin’s Politics of Time,” in Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy: Destruction and Experience, ed. Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne (London: Routledge, 1994), 96.

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Epigones in the House of Language: Benjamin and Kraus

If the subject matter of Benjamin’s criticism in his early maturity foregrounds philosophical-theological issues— one thinks of the two dissertations and the essay on Goethe’s Die Wahlverwandtschaften—the writings of the late twenties seem to search for a tactic whereby the written word could bring about a discernible, immediate effect by the most economical of means. One-Way Street, the playful, experimental text of 1928, is a kind of laboratory of “inconspicuous forms” (unscheinbare Formen), as they are called in the very first entry, “Filling Station,” forms more apt, we read, for realizing a “constructive” effect at a communal level than the “pretentious, universal gesture of the book.” Such forms are instanced as “leaflets, brochures, articles, and placards” (Flugblätter, Broschüren, Zeitschriftartikeln und Plakaten, SW 1: 446; GS 4: 85). What Benjamin intends by this list is midway between media of dissemination and genres of writing. In one sense, this type of occasional writing is formulated in reaction to the canonicity of the literary or philosophical work, the book. But what is salient in such a 69

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formulation is the idea of writing as a gestural practice, at once contingent and vital even at a micrological level. In the following decade, Benjamin will repeatedly attempt to realize this idea in a consistent writing practice. Let us recall that Benjamin’s plan to pursue an academic career, first in philosophy and then in the field of aesthetics, had been blocked when the second dissertation (Habilitationsschrift), Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, was rejected by the University of Frankfurt in 1924. The turn to literary journalism in the following years was thus not altogether voluntary. He had been developing, at least since the essay on Goethe’s The Elective Affinities of 1921–22, a conception of philosophical criticism in which aesthetic appreciation and explicit value judgment occupy a distinctly subordinate place. Criticism, as he conceived it in that essay, would make good what he took to be the bankruptcy of the philosophical tradition. It would be a criticism of art, but its goal would be to recover what he termed the “unity of philosophy” or the “ideal of the problem of philosophy.”1 The writings of the late twenties go in a quite different direction. Benjamin did not abandon his demanding conception of criticism, but his subject matter moved increasingly outside the sphere of canonic literary products. In this period, as Benjamin turns his energies primarily to feuilleton writing, he is increasingly drawn to reflect on this field, both in personal terms and in a socio-historical context. He is well aware of the risks that this change in professional status involves. He could no longer devote himself to the kind of scholarly researches that had absorbed him hitherto. Of course, the journals for which Benjamin now wrote—Literarische Welt and Frankfurter Zeitung, among others—had a high standard and drew on some of the best minds in the Germany of the Weimar period, e.g., Kracauer, Tucholsky, Bloch. Furthermore, the separation between scholarship and high criticism, on the one hand, and the press, on the other, was never so sharp in Europe as it has been in the United States. Nonetheless, the very fact that the feuilleton was dependent on the system of journalism, of the daily press, could not help but give rise to some troubling considerations. As Benjamin turned to literary journalism, he was forced to consider the contingencies of the medium, its power as well as its risks, and this issue assumes a new urgency in the period of his exile from Germany after 1933. He addressed 1. See the discussion of “Goethe’s Elective Affinities” in Chapter 1.

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it most directly in the essay “The Author as Producer” (1934), where he saw his era as being “in the midst of a mighty recasting [Umschmelzungsproceß] of literary forms” (SW 2: 771; GS 2: 687), but it had already occupied him earlier, roughly from the time of his Moscow visit of 1926 –27. The essay on Kraus is one of Benjamin’s most densely woven, recondite productions. His work on it, he wrote to Scholem on February 5, 1931, had been “exceptionally long, nearly a year, and in the last months completely putting aside all personal and material obligations” (February 5, 1931; GB IV: 11). It is filled with formulations that reach back to Benjamin’s earliest writings. Some elements are to be identified more with Benjamin’s own conceptual universe than with Kraus’s, notably, the theological conception of justice and the references to Judaic scriptural practices. This may explain to some extent Kraus’s own reaction to the essay, which was distanced and ironic: I was able to conclude from this essay, one which is surely well-intentioned and also well conceived, in essence only that it has to do with me, that the author seems to know something about me that I have hitherto been ignorant of, although I do not myself yet quite know what it is, and I can only express the wish that other readers will understand it better than I. (Cited in GS 2: 1082)

Yet we should not dismiss the possibility that it was Benjamin’s intention to bring out a tendency of Kraus’s persona that was not congruent with his public image at the time, or even with his self-understanding.2 Benjamin had situated language at the heart of his philosophical speculations from his earliest writings. It is revealing, though not surprising, that at the end of the 1920s, well into his materialist phase, he would undertake to reexamine his own conception of language in relation to Kraus’s work. In a short feuilleton of 1927, “A State Monopoly on Pornography,” Benjamin argued that in the “huge process of experimentation” of language, the sphere of popular, demotic language must be granted a place alongside the “formulary of great literature.” In the unending transformative process 2. Werner Fuld has suggested that Kraus’s reaction is to be taken as a defensive tactic by someone who could not help but grasp the implications of Benjamin’s analysis. Werner Fuld, Walter Benjamin zwischen den Stühlen: Eine Biographie (Munich: Hanser Verlag, 1979), 218.

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of this linguistic mass, “by-products of every kind are inevitable” (SW 2: 73, trans. modified). These he instances as “nicknames and company names, swear words and oaths, pieties and obscenities.” Benjamin’s focus here is, of course, hardly unique in the context of Surrealism and other modernist practices with which he felt a strong affinity. Furthermore, this attention to the fragmentary and the debased in language represents not only a fundamental practice of his style but also a tenet of his social philosophy. The by-products of language belong in the class of rags and rubbish collected by the chiffonier or Lumpensammler, evoked in a number of Baudelaire poems that Benjamin had written about. This figure was emblematic for the underside of the nineteenth-century urban environment, peopled by outcasts and marginal beings with their threat of contamination and anarchy. “The ragpicker,” Benjamin wrote in The Arcades Project, “is the most provocative figure of human misery. Lumpenproletarian in a double sense: clothed in rags and occupied with them” (GS 5: 441 [ J 68, 4]; TAP 349, trans. modified). Although Benjamin’s interest in Kraus goes back at least to 1916, as Gershom Scholem notes in his memoir,3 his increasing attention to Kraus in the late twenties marked a decisive stage in his intellectual life. This focus is particularly revealing with respect to an issue often raised regarding the continuity of his work, namely, how to relate the early preoccupation with language in a theological context with the materialist, sociological-political focus of the later work. Benjamin’s earliest treatment of Kraus is a onepage entry in One-Way Street entitled “Monument to a Warrior” (“Kriegerdenkmal,” 1926), which presents Kraus as a combatant, but one already vanquished, surviving only as a monument: “In ancient armor, wrathfully grinning, a Chinese idol, brandishing a drawn sword in each hand, he dances a war-dance before the burial vault of the German language. . . . What more helpless than his conversion? What more powerless than his humanity? What more hopeless than his battle with the press?” (SW 1: 469).4 Yet what invests Kraus with a singular authority in spite of the futility of his stance is his link to “the chthonic depths of language.” This “calls him to vengeance, 3. Scholem, Die Geschichte einer Freundschaft, 105, 136. See also GS 2: 1078–79f. 4. “[H]is conversion” may refer to Kraus’s Jewish origin, an issue that figured markedly in the discussions between Scholem and Benjamin.

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as narrow-minded as spirits that know only the voice of the blood, who care not what havoc they wreak in the realm of the living.” While this text goes far in conveying the powerful and paradoxical impact that Kraus produced in the 1920s, one can well imagine that for Benjamin it served as a point of departure for a deeper examination of his own affinities to—and separation from —Kraus’s preoccupations. After attending a reading by Kraus of Offenbach’s operetta La vie parisienne in early 1928, Benjamin wrote a glowing review in which he articulates what will be one of the tenets of his conception of citation, its capacity to interrupt, to break the mood of a discourse and confront the audience: At this point Kraus—intentionally, rightly— explodes the framework of the entire evening. Anarchically, he turns directly to the audience during an interval in a brief speech that applies to Berlin the refrain we have just heard: “I bring out the worst in every town.” And in so doing he affects his listeners directly, in the same way he does with the texts he reads—that is to say, he assaults them unexpectedly, destructively, disrupting the prepared “mood,” attacking the audience where they least anticipate it. (SW 2: 111)

This is the period when the “Arcades Project” was taking shape in his mind.5 The essay on Surrealism comes the next year—an essay that clearly anticipates a preoccupation of his subsequent work, the relation of art and political praxis. And in 1930, Benjamin devotes almost a year of work to Kraus, whose ideological position was in many respects quite opposed to his own. The most direct argument of the essay on Kraus, namely, a defense of Kraus’s polemical critique of feuilletonism, is encapsulated in a sentence right at the start: “In the end he brought together all his energies in the struggle against the empty phrase [die Phrase], which is the linguistic expression of the despotism with which, in journalism, topicality sets up its dominion over things” (SW 2: 434; GS 2: 335). “Die Phrase,” understood as banality, platitude, the hackneyed register of routine journalese, undoubtedly constitutes the most overt target of Kraus’s as well as Benjamin’s critique. But the figure of Kraus that is constructed in the essay is in no sense simply that of a champion of linguistic purism: first of all because Kraus’s 5. After hearing Kraus’s reading from La vie parisienne, Benjamin wrote his friend, Alfred Cohn, that the evening had “set a whole mass of ideas into motion—you know in what area,” referring to the arcades project. (March 27, 1928, GB 3: 358).

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own motivations, in Benjamin’s assessment, are by no means as transparent as the initial formulation might suggest, and then—more importantly— because the very idea of purity in language—a preoccupation of Benjamin’s, as we know—may not be susceptible to the kind of defense that Kraus was capable of providing. This is not to overlook Benjamin’s undoubted admiration for Kraus, but it is an admiration tempered by an awareness of the eccentricity and perhaps futility of Kraus’s endeavor. The entry in One-Way Street devoted to Kraus provides the clearest statement of Benjamin’s sense of the theatrical and quixotic nature of the Kraus phenomenon: None more disconsolate than his disciples, none more abandoned than his opponents. No name that more deserves to be honored by silence. In an ancient coat of armor, grimacing in rage, a Chinese idol, both hands swinging the quivering swords, he dances the war-dance before the tomb of the German language. He, who “resides only as one of the epigones in the ancient house of language,” has become the one to seal its vault. He keeps guard day and night. No post has ever been more faithfully defended, and none ever more lost. (“Kriegerdenkmal,” GS 4: 121, my translation)

Kraus’s outrage at the debasement of language in journalism led him to a well-nigh obsessive preoccupation with bad writing. For over a quarter of a century his public impact in German-speaking circles was enormous, his name a by-word, both adulated and scorned. He had been publishing Die Fackel (The Torch) since 1899 and continued to the year of his death, 1936. For about half of that period he was wholly responsible for its contents. In all there were 922 issues. The contents consisted for the most part of critiques— often satiric parodies or polemics— directed at Viennese political and social institutions, and particularly at the press as the reflection, but at the same time the authorizing agency, of the public doxa.6 At one level, Die Fackel may be seen in the line of Flaubert’s “Dictionnaire des idées reçues.” We know that Flaubert had denominated as bêtise 6. An anthology in the form of a “dictionary of idioms (locutions, clichés)” drawn from Die Fackel provides a new kind of access to this massive body of writing: Wörterbuch der Redensarten: zu der von Karl Kraus 1899 bis 1936 herausgegebenen Zeitschrift “Die Fackel,” ed. Werner Welzig (Vienna: Öterreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1999).

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all that he despised in the mentality and behavior of the bourgeoisie. One of the aims of the Dictionnaire, he wrote, was to isolate the most characteristic expressions of bêtise so that those who read his collection would find themselves unable to utter a word. But Flaubert realized full well that what he conceived as bêtise was far more pervasive and powerful than anything he might invoke against it. “Bêtise,” he wrote, “is something ineradicable. . . . It is in the nature of granite” (cited in Prendergast 193). Thus, works like the Dictionnaire, as well as Bouvard et Pécuchet, may be understood as a kind of labor of Sisyphus and reflect the deep pessimism and even desperation of Flaubert’s endeavor. Kraus, however, directed his satire at a form of idées reçues that gained particular significance in a slightly later period—the discourse of the popular press. Its salient characteristic is what Benjamin refers to in calling “die Phrase” “an abortive product of technology” (SW 2: 435, trans. modified; GS 2: 336). What both Kraus and Benjamin focus on is not so much the content of journalistic writing but rather the system as a whole—production, reproduction, and dissemination—whereby the report of a local incident becomes “marketable” (is given a “Warenzeichen,” tagged as commodity). Benjamin quotes Kraus to the effect that “[t]he newspaper industry, like a factory, demands separate areas for working and selling. At certain times of day—twice, or three times in the bigger newspapers—a particular quantity of work has to have been procured and prepared for the machine” (SW 2: 435; GS 2: 336). J. P. Stern has argued that Kraus shared with other German-language writers of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, such as Rilke, Hofmannsthal, and Kafka, an “initial consciousness of linguistic inadequacy and deprivation, as well as the initial hesitancy and uncertainty vis-à-vis German German” (as opposed to these writers’ personal German), a situation that could lead, as in the case of Rilke, “to the idea of a private language.”7 For Stern, the lines from Rilke’s “First Duino Elegy,” “daß wir nicht sehr verläßlich zu Haus sind / in der gedeuteten Welt” (“that we are not very dependably at home in the interpreted world”), are indicative of a radical schism in language—a schism between the worldly, practical, communicative function and a more 7. J. P. Stern, “ ‘Words Are Also Deeds’: Some Observations on Austrian Language Consciousness,” New Literary History 12, no. 3 (1981): 519.

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fragile, remote, “poetic” dimension—“language announcing its own failure and in the announcement transcending it,” as Stern writes of the “Ninth Duino Elegy” (Stern 521). In this light, Kraus’s unremitting campaign against lapses in linguistic usage may be understood as the negative, reactive side of what Stern has characterized as Kraus’s faith in “language as an absolutely reliable moral indicator of life, acting as an infallible witness to all that happens in the world, part of a pre-established and perhaps even mystical harmony between words and action.” It is in the sense of such an exalted conception of language, what Stern calls Kraus’s “panlogism” (ibid., 523), that we may take Kraus’s claim to be “one of the epigonoi / living in the ancient house of language.” As such, he continues in the poem “Bekenntnis,” “Though I come after the masters of old, later, / yet bloodily I revenge the ancestral fate. // I speak of revenge, and to revenge / language on all those who speak it is my will” (cited by Stern, 514). To be exiled from “the old home of language” is to be left bereft of the most precious resource available to mankind. In the programmatic essay “Die Sprache” Kraus writes, “And it is as if, in providing those who think they speak German with the richest, most thought-provoking of languages [gedankenreichster Sprache], fate had imposed the punishment of compelling them to live outside this language: to reflect after speaking it, to act before being able to consult it.” Because, he continues, this people (Volk) cannot master the language granted it, what remains is “[t]o learn to see abysses where banalities are found [wo Gemeinplätze sind]—this would be the pedagogical task for a nation reared in sin; this would be the salvation of life’s treasures from the chains of journalism and the fetters of politics” (Kraus, “Die Sprache,” 345). It is in light of passages like these that we can appreciate the complex, contradictory persona that Kraus presented to his public: part mythic kobold, part Old Testament prophet. Marcel Proust, in a feuilleton of 1907, “Filial Sentiments of a Parricide,” provides a revealing comment on reading the daily newspaper: I wanted to glance at the Figaro, to proceed to that abominable and voluptuous act called “reading the newspapers,” thanks to which all the world’s misfortunes and cataclysms of the last twenty-four hours, the battles costing fifty thousand lives, the crimes, the strikes, the bankruptcies, the fires, the poisonings, the suicides, the divorces, the crude emotions of statesman or

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actor, transmuted for our personal consumption, make for us, who are not involved, a fine little morning treat, an exciting and tonic accompaniment to the sipping of café au lait.8

What is notable about Proust’s article is that, while itself treating a sensational, lurid incident, it uses the occasion to reflect on the nature of tragic pathos, and, in the process, to comment on the paradoxical status of the feuilleton genre itself. There was much in Kraus’s work that Benjamin could endorse and draw on, but much too that he needed to withstand and reject.9 Thus Benjamin’s treatment of Kraus is as much a taking of distance as an act of homage. “My Kraus essay,” he wrote in his preparatory notes for the essay, “marks the place where I stand and do not participate” (GS 2: 1093). In Benjamin’s view, Kraus had little capacity for reflecting on the public impact of his lifelong campaign against the corruption and hypocrisy of public discourse. “He is aware only of the hysterical crowd that emerges at his public readings or in letters to Die Fackel,” Benjamin wrote in his preparatory notes. “He has not the least sense, by contrast, of those for whom his work has an authentic impact” (GS 2:1092). It is, in part, this discrepancy between Kraus’s self-awareness and his public persona that Benjamin has in mind when he remarks on “the strange interplay between reactionary theory and revolutionary practice that we find everywhere in Kraus” (SW 2: 438; GS 2: 342). Kraus was famous not only for his writings but also for his public readings—readings of his own writings as well as one-man performances of dramatic and operatic works. He was endowed with an extraordinary mimetic talent. Elias Canetti, who attended Kraus’s readings for many years though he eventually reacted strongly against him, provides a revealing account: “Kraus was haunted by voices, a condition that is not so unusual as one imagines—but with this difference: the voices that pursued him actually 8. Marcel Proust, “Filial Sentiments of a Parricide,” in Honey and Wax: Pleasures and Powers of Narrative, ed. Richard Stern, trans. Barbara Anderson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 177. The original, “Sentiments filiaux d’un parricide,” reprinted in Contre Sainte-Beuve, ed. Pierre Clarac (Paris: Gallimard, 1971). 9. Joanna Hodge aptly writes, “This is Benjamin’s distinctive mode of reading: inhabitation of the text of the other, with partial citation working to shift the conceptual apparatus in line with a shifting configuration of thinking.” Hodge, “The Timing of Elective Affinity,” 27.

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existed in Vienna.”10 Kraus spent his days reading newspapers, Canetti continues, “the most diverse newspapers which, apparently, printed the same things over and over. And since his ear was constantly open, constantly alert, constantly listening, he read these newspapers as if he heard them. The black printed words were for him sounding words. When he cited them it was as if he made voices resound: acoustic citations.” Elsewhere Canetti writes: Thanks to [Kraus] I began to understand that each individual has a linguistic figure [sprachliche Gestalt] whereby he is differentiated from all others. I realized that men may talk to one another, but that they do not understand each other; that their words are blows which bounce off those spoken by others; that there is no greater illusion than the idea that language is a medium of communication among men. One talks to the other, but in such a manner that he does not understand. . . . For the very words which cannot be understood, which induce isolation and bring about a kind of acoustic figure, are in no sense rare or new . . . they are the most commonly employed words, phrases spoken innumerable times, and it is precisely these that men employ in order to manifest their stubborn will. (Canetti 42)

Benjamin saw Kraus, together with Baudelaire, as a precursor in the compromise that the writer is forced to make with journalism: “Only Baudelaire hated, as Kraus did, the satiety of healthy common sense, and the compromise that intellectuals made with it in order to find shelter in journalism. . . . Idle chatter [Geschwätz] is its true substance, and every feuilleton poses anew the insoluble question of the relationship between the forces of stupidity and malice, whose expression it is” (SW 2: 446 trans. modified; GS 2: 352). In underscoring how, for Kraus, journalism had become “the expression of the changed function of language in the world of high capitalism” (SW 2: 435), Benjamin anticipates what will be one of the tenets of the seminal essay that is still to come, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” (1935–36), where he develops the argument that the illusionary nature of film is of “a nature of the second degree” (SW 4: 263, trans. modified), that is to say, an illusion that could only be brought about by technological means. But already in the early thirties, the period of the Kraus essay, 10. Elias Canetti, “Karl Kraus: Schule des Widerstands,” in Das Gewissen der Worte (Munich: Hanser Verlag, 1975), 45. My translation.

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Benjamin is tracing a mutation of collective consciousness, a mutation that may have a basis in the commodity system as developed in Marx’s analysis of capital, but whose consequences had not yet been pursued within any materialist theory in Benjamin’s time. This will be developed in Benjamin’s later reflections on aura and technological reproducibility, but it is already broached in his discussion of an “optical unconscious” (SW 2: 512) in “Little History of Photography” (1931). While this line of thought focuses primarily on film and photography in constructing a historicity of perceptual experience, Kraus’s extraordinary sensitivity to mass discourse (cf. the “acoustic citations” that Canetti spoke of ) gave Benjamin an opportunity to explore the collective unconscious in relation to language and print technology. I have already touched on Kraus’s gift for mimicry.11 Benjamin shows how this capacity is in the service of a strategy of citation. Thus, in the following passage, he identifies a kind of gestic citation: But in his polemics, too, mimesis plays a decisive role. He imitates his subjects in order to insert the crowbar of his hate into the finest joints of their posture. . . . Indeed, the exposure of inauthenticity—more difficult than that of the merely bad—is here performed behavioristically. The citations in Die Fackel are more than documentary proof: they are props with which the quoter unmasks himself mimetically. (SW 2: 442, trans. modified; GS 2: 347)

In Kraus’s practice of citation, Benjamin found traces of a primordial creative force of language, a thetic power akin to divine naming: “A single line, and not even one of his, was enough for Kraus to descend as savior into that inferno . . .” (SW 2: 363). Benjamin’s sense of citation underscores an activating moment, the emergence of a new force in what is being cited, whether it be a word or a historical moment.12 A citation, strategically chosen and implanted, has the effect of an interpellation in the discursive fabric. The passage lifted from its context assumes a new autonomy. This transformed status Benjamin designates as name: 11. In drafts of the essay Benjamin refers to Kraus’s “Chinese courtesy” (Chinesische Höflichkiet) as a kind of mimicry, “a way of creeping into the other (in den andern hineinkriechen)” (GS 2: 1092). 12. Cf. this remark in “On the Concept of History”: “The French Revolution . . . cited ancient Rome exactly the way fashion cites a by-gone mode of dress” (SW 4: 395).

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Epigones in the House of Language From within the linguistic compass of the name, and only from within it, can we discern Kraus’s basic polemical procedure: citation [das Zitieren]. To quote a word is to call it by its name. [Ein Wort zitieren heißt es beim Namen rufen.] (SW 2: 453, trans. modified; GS 2: 362)

Benjamin here reaches back some fifteen years to “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man” (“Über Sprache überhaupt und über die Sprache des Menschen,” 1916), a text written expressly for Gershom Scholem and conceived in context of their philosophic-theological preoccupations at that time. In this essay, language is conceived as a primordial expressivity of which man’s language (post-Babelic language) is only a weak reflection. Nature no less than history is an agency of this expressivity, and human language discloses its divine origin insofar as it can partake of a power of nomination: “in the name the mental being of man communicates itself to God” (SW 1: 65).13 To this extent language conveys not a content or message but a spiritual substance, one that Benjamin terms “the medial itself ” (eine Mitteilbarkeit schlechthin, GS 2: 145– 46),14 and not, as in the “bourgeois conception” (bürgerliche Auffassung, GS 2: 144; SW 1: 65), merely an instrumental medium where a word is used to convey a message or to designate a thing. The essay goes on to claim that in invoking the power of naming in language, man partakes of divine creativity, though in a derivative, diminished mode. The creative, formative dimension of God’s speech is replicated in man’s power of cognition, Erkenntnis: God creates by means of the word; man cognizes (erkennt) by means of names. Naming constitutes the border space where the divine conveys in diminished measure its creative capacity to the human: “The theory of proper names is the theory of the frontier between finite and infinite language” (SW 1: 69). Near the end of “On Language as Such . . .” Benjamin puts forward a still more radical dimension of “name language” (Namensprache), one where the 13. “[I]m Namen teilt das geistige Wesen des Menschen sich Gott mit” (GS 2: 144). 14. SW 2: 66 has “something communicable per se,” which, I would argue, suggests a content where the German wants to convey precisely a mediality without content. Samuel Weber is right, I think, to suggest that mitteilbar, generally translated as communicable, is to be understood here in the sense of impartibility. “Language, in short,” Weber writes on this essay, “is to be understood not as ‘means’ to some other goal, but as the immediate possibility of being imparted: ‘This impartible is language itself.’ ” Weber, “Benjamin’s Writing Style,” 1: 262.

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“impartibility of things” (die Mitteilung der Dinge) comprises “the world as such in an undivided whole” (die Welt überhaupt als ein ungeschiedenes Ganzes) (SW 1: 73, trans. modified; GS 2: 156). He justifies this in light of “nameless, nonacoustic languages”: There is a language of sculpture, of painting, of poetry. Just as the language of poetry is partly, if not solely, founded on the name language of man, it is very conceivable that the language of sculpture or painting is founded on certain kinds of thing-languages, that in them we find a translation of the language of things into an infinitely higher language, which may still be of the same sphere.

In this formulation of a trans-medial conception of impartibility (of “Mitteileung”) we may see the germ of Benjamin’s ongoing multimedia explorations— explorations with respect to “Bild,” to children’s books, to radio, to photography, to cinema, and, of course, to textuality. These pursuits involve multiple disciplines and Benjamin, in his subsequent work, was well aware of the distinctive histories and protocols of genres and disciplines.15 “The Task of the Translator,” written some five years after “On Language as Such . . .” and two short pieces of 1933, “Doctrine of the Similar” and “On the Mimetic Faculty,” take up some of the elements of trans-medial impartibility of “On Language as Such . . .” But in the later writings, Benjamin tends to focus on specific constraints of a given medium rather than its potential for transposition or translation. Elsewhere in the essay, Benjamin developed the Biblical story of the Edenic tree and the Fall as parabolic of the enfeeblement of Adamic language from its primordial state as language of naming (Namensprache) to one of mediation and communication. The significance of the tree is not to reveal any truth regarding good and evil but to serve as “an emblem of the judgment” (Wahrzeichen des Gerichts, SW 1: 72; GS 2: 154) regarding the questioner. To be placed under the rule of judgment inaugurates the historicity of mankind, and it derives, in Benjamin’s version of the narrative, from eating of the tree, an act that signifies the emergence of good and evil as categories of human cognition. It is noteworthy that Benjamin here characterizes language in its post-Edenic state as prattle, empty talk. “The knowledge of things,” he writes, “resides in the name, whereas that of good and 15. See, for example, Chapter 3 of this book, on photography.

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evil is, in the profound sense in which Kierkegaard uses the word, ‘prattle’ (Geschwätz), and knows only one purification and elevation, to which the prattling man, the sinner, was therefore submitted: judgment [das Gericht]” (SW 1: 71; GS 2: 153–54). Further, just as, at the level of language, Geschwätz marks the advent of human history, so another term is introduced that extends this condition to things, to the material world insofar as it is known and manipulated by man—Narretei. This word is a rarely used form, somewhat archaic. Its sense is nonsensicality, folly. The relevant passage reads as follows: The enslavement of language in prattle is joined by the enslavement of things in folly (Narretei) almost as its inevitable consequence. In this turning away from things, which was enslavement, the plan for the Tower of Babel came into being, and linguistic confusion with it. (SW 1: 72; GS 2: 154)

My aim in referring to the extraordinary essay on language has been to show that even in this early phase of Benjamin’s thought, we may find a conjunction— even more, an imbrication— of linguistic and materialist reflection16— of words and things, both caught in a kind of originary dependency. Benjamin’s use of the creation narrative from Genesis, it should be noted, is not made to invoke a transcendent authority. Benjamin treats it as a fable on the origin of historicity. What emerges in his retelling is the need to think words and things, signs and signifieds, in a mutual dependency that is termed “enslavement” [Verknechtung]—not to divine authority or to some principle of original purity, but enslavement precisely as mutual dependency: things subject to being represented as signs, signs functioning as mediations of things, both signs and things subject to distortion and incomprehension in the sense of Geschwätz and Narretei.17 16. Winfried Menninghaus, referring to Benjamin’s letter of March 7, 1931, to Max Rychner (GB 4: 18) characterizes Benjamin’s interpretation of the story of the Fall as “a first attempt . . . to bring together within a conceptual paradigm . . . constellations of linguistic critique and historical crisis. And only for this reason, could it become ‘clearer and clearer’ that ‘from my very particular position regarding the philosophy of language there might be a bridge—however strained and problematical—to the viewpoint of dialectical materialism.’ ” Winfried Menninghaus, Walter Benjamins Theorie der Sprachmagie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1980), 48. 17. I return to this issue in a different context in Chapter 5.

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This kind of transmutation of fable into history may be understood as anticipating the distinctive form of allegorical history that will be undertaken in The Arcades Project: an effort to read the commodity structure of modernity as if it were the post-Babelic, fallen language. Benjamin was particularly drawn to cultural detritus, objects that had survived fashion, use, and exchange value, and retained in the end a status akin to fetish and relic. This, I suggest, is the sphere of Narretei transposed to the conditions of the modern commodity system. Here commodity, like post-Babelic language, discloses— even in its degraded state—traces of a primal relation to creation and to nature. We should not be surprised to find in Benjamin’s later writings elements of the theological orientation of the earlier work,18 but we cannot simply assume that the same presuppositions apply. Let me illustrate this by a final instance. The essay begins with an image of chaos and turbulence: In old engravings there is a messenger who rushes toward us crying aloud, his hair on end, brandishing a sheet of paper in his hands, a sheet full of war and pestilence, of cries of murder and pain, of danger from fire and flood, spreading everywhere the Latest News [Neueste Zeitung]. (SW 2: 433; GS 2: 334)

The image of the “Latest News” is here doubly framed—pictorially (as engraving) and theatrically in the simulated noise and hubbub and the catalogue of catastrophes. In the next sentence, Die Fackel is identified as a newspaper (Zeitung) “in the sense that the word has in Shakespeare.” This may be an allusion to “The time is out of joint,” whereby Zeitung is turned back to its semantic core, Zeit, and Die Fackel is figured in terms of a primordial breach, a disjointing of time that radically undermines the warrant of actuality and factuality implicit in the usual sense of Zeitung. Benjamin thus introduces, by way of a muted allusion, a semantic genealogy that situates “the news” (Zeitung) in a historical temporality.19 18. Cf. in The Arcades Project: “My thinking is related to theology as blotting pad is related to ink. It is saturated with it. Were one to go by the blotter, nothing of what is written would remain” (GS 5: 588 [N 7a, 7]; TAP 471). 19. Avital Ronell may be alluding to this passage when she writes, “Insofar as the rumor arrives from nowhere it would be useful to recall Benjamin’s undisclosed sense of Shakespeare’s sense of news. To this end, let us recall Shakespeare’s great

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In this sense, “making even the newspaper citable” (selbst die Zeitung zitierbar zu machen, SW 2: 453, trans. modified; GS 2: 363) effects a transformation of die Phrase to the level of name: “From within the linguistic compass of the name, and only from within it, can we discern Kraus’s basic polemical procedure: citation. To quote a word is to call it by its name.” And this signifies that “the empty phrase” is “drawn out of its dark recess” (ihrer Nacht) and granted a power that is “not punishing but rescuing, redemptive” (nicht strafend, sondern rettend) (SW 2: 453, trans. modified; GS 2: 363). Where, in the 1916 essay, name and naming designate the dimension of divine creative power in pre-Babelic language, in the Kraus essay the term is used more figuratively to characterize the potential of citation to pierce through layers of intention, deception, and ambiguity and draw out of the fabric of language a power of judgment: “In the citation that both saves and punishes, language proves the matrix of justice (die Mater der Gerechtigkeit). It summons the word by its name, wrenches it destructively from its context, but precisely thereby calls it back to its origin”20 (SW 2: 454; GS 2: 363). Benjamin’s and Kraus’s fascination with the dregs of public discourse, what Benjamin called the “by-products” and “waste products” (Nebenprodukte, Abfallprodukte) of language (SW 2: 73, trans. modified; GS 4: 457), are to be understood as the negative pole of an exalted ideal of language, though conceived differently by each one.21 Kraus’s preeminent tactic was to excerpt particularly egregious passages culled from the local Viennese press, passages that illustrated a debasement of language and thought in the medium of journalism or in the words of public figures and even of quite ordinary rumor text [Hamlet] whose nervous unfolding and semiotic restlessness can guide our reading.” Avital Ronell, “Street-Talk,” in Finitude’s Score: Essays for the End of the Millennium (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 85. 20. Cf. Manfred Voigt’s reading of the essay, which is focused on “the Jewish conception of divine justice as language”: Manfred Voigt, “ ‘Die Mater der Gerechtigkeit.’ Zur Kritik des Zitat-Begriffes bei Walter Benjamin,” in Antike und Moderne: Zu Walter Benjamins “Passagen” (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann Verlag, 1986), 97–115. 21. Cf. One-Way Street: “Children . . . are irresistibly drawn by the detritus generated by building, gardening, housework, tailoring, or carpentry. In waste products they recognize the fact that the world of things turns directly and solely to them” (SW 1: 449; GS 4: 93).

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citizens quoted in the newspapers. But this practice, though in the first instance polemical and satiric, served a higher aim. For Kraus, Benjamin wrote, “justice and language remain founded in each other,” making it clear that while justice in a legal sense (Recht) was often invoked in Kraus’s critique of journalism, what was fundamentally at stake for Kraus was a reverence for “the image of divine justice [Gerechtigkeit] in language” (SW 2: 444, trans. modified).22 To conceive of language, by way of citation, as an instrument of justice is to imagine a way of invoking, in however mediated a fashion, the power of pre-Babelic nomination. Citation, as a cut in language, an extraction and transmission, enables a new access of force. While Benjamin could identify with Kraus’s ongoing reversion to “the chthonic depths of language,” as he put it in “Monument to a Warrior,” what he undertook in the essay on Kraus was a presentation that allowed the “rescuing, redemptive” (rettend) potential of language a place alongside the violent, destructive one. In a short fragment on Kraus published in 1928, Benjamin called him “the most magnificent irruption of halachic writing into the massif of the German language,” and, further, likened Kraus to Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas: “an unprecedented, ambiguous, genuinely demonic spectacle of the accuser eternally calling for justice” (SW 2: 194; GS 2: 624). But it was not until the essay of 1931 that Benjamin could lay out the “immense dialectic” (GS 2: 625) of Kraus’s achievement. In the structure of the Kraus essay, the concluding section, “Nonhuman Being” (Unmensch),23 is to be understood as marking an inversion of the first part, “Cosmic Man” (Allmensch). In place of the “pedagogic humanism” (Bildunghumanismus) of the Cosmic Man, the Nonhuman Being— anarchic, childlike, cannibalistic— emerges as the bearer of “true humanism” (cf. GS 2: 366 –67, 1002, 1006). Between these there comes the sec22. Edward Timms notes that Benjamin’s use of Gerechtigkeit here “modulates between secular and religious registers—from ‘justice’ into ‘righteousness.’ ” He goes on to cite a text by Benjamin that Gershom Scholem had transcribed into his diary, where Benjamin glosses Gerechtigkeit as “not a virtue like any other, but an allencompassing condition of existence: ‘In God all virtues have the form of righteousness.’ ” Timms, Karl Kraus, 224. 23. I adopt here Paul Reitter’s translation of “Unmensch” rather than “Monster” as in SW 2: 447 ff. Paul Reitter, The Anti-Journalist: Karl Kraus and Jewish SelfFashioning in Fin-de-Siècle Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 164.

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tion entitled “Demon,” where Benjamin unleashes a series of biting, knotty improvisations on the proximity of judgment and self-exposure. “When the age laid hands upon itself, he was the hands,” Brecht had said of Kraus, and Benjamin lays out the extent to which Kraus’s method exposes him to the soiling of the materials he cites: “ ‘To creep’ (hineinkriechen)—this is the term used, not without cause, for the lowest kind of flattery; and Kraus creeps into those he impersonates, in order to annihilate them. Has courtesy here become the mimicry of hate, hate the mimicry of courtesy?” (SW 2: 442– 43). The impulse to respond to the dire political situation of that period in a radical, even brutal manner finds its most pregnant formulation in a short text that Benjamin published later that year, “The Destructive Character” (November 1931, SW 2: 541– 42). A model for this figure, as Benjamin wrote to Scholem, was Gustav Glück,24 a friend to whom Benjamin had dedicated the essay on Kraus. But the conception of “the destructive character” may also be seen as a variant of what Benjamin termed Nonhuman Being (Unmensch) in the Kraus essay. In its closing pages, Benjamin underscores the rapacious, devouring force of Kraus’s satire, “das Menschenfresserische” (weakly translated as “the cannibal quality,” SW 2: 450; GS 2: 358). What Benjamin envisioned in “Karl Kraus” and “The Destructive Character” is a radical cleansing of the cultural landscape, even at the cost of unyielding destruction: a new beginning that might well involve a “new kind of barbarism” (“neuer Barbarentum”).25 In the world situation of the early thirties, a therapeutic cleansing, however violent, may have seemed to him not the worst of choices. 24. See letter of October 28, 1931 (GB 2: 542). Another model was Mephisto in Goethe’s Faust. In the preparatory notes for the Kraus essay, Benjamin cited Mephisto’s line, “Ich bin der Geist, der stets verneint!” (“I am the spirit that always denies!”) and added, “Kraus and Mephisto” (GS 2: 1091). 25. “Experience and Poverty” (1933), SW 2: 732; GS 2: 215.

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Benjamin on Atget: Empty Streets and the Fading of Aura

The discussion of Eugène Atget within “Little History of Photography” (1931), though it occupies only some three pages (SW 2: 517–19; GS 2: 377–79), is significant in that it touches on some of the major issues not only of the essay itself but of Benjamin’s subsequent work in the thirties, notably, the relation of technology, work of art, and aura. In fact, it is in this essay that Benjamin offers a first detailed discussion of aura, and Atget’s Paris photographs serve as illustration of the political dimension of the fading of aura. Equally significant is the way Benjamin develops the idea of a retrograde futurity in the photograph: “the beholder feels an irresistible urge to search such a picture for the tiny spark of contingency, of the here and now, with which reality has (so to speak) seared the subject, to find the inconspicuous spot where in the immediacy of that long-forgotten moment the future nests so eloquently that we, looking back, may rediscover it” (SW 2: 510). The idea of retrograde temporality, fundamental to Benjamin’s conception of history, is already formulated here. What is at issue may be likened to 87

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Barthes’s punctum, although “the spark of contingency” is not concentrated in an inconspicuous detail as in the punctum. But in both cases, it is a matter of seeing what is not (yet) visible. The relevant section in the essay begins a page before the first mention of Atget with a reference to the famous photo of Kafka as a child, one that Benjamin calls a “pendant” to the earlier photographs, photographs in which, he goes on, “people did not yet look out at the world in so excluded and godforsaken a manner as this boy” (SW 2: 515). This photograph, taken in 1888 when Kafka was five, had a special significance for Benjamin on many counts, not least because it must have reminded him of similar childhood photographs of himself.1 But its mention at this point in the essay is somewhat anomalous. As a studio product in a late phase of portrait photography, its décor clearly represented an effort to simulate an aura in a period when, as Benjamin writes a couple of pages later, “a pose was more and more clearly in evidence, whose rigidity betrayed the impotence of that generation in the face of technical progress” (SW 2: 517). Its link, then, to photographs of the mid-century is one of contrast. Regarding those earlier ones, he goes on, “There was an aura about them, a medium that lent fullness and security to their gaze even as it penetrated that medium” (SW 2: 515f ). In this first mention of the decisive word, notice that “medium” comes in apposition to “aura” and in that sense the latter cannot yet be taken as terminus technicus. But it becomes one in the course of the rest of that page. What Benjamin does then is to take the citation from Bernard von Brentano—“that a photographer of 1850 was on a par with his instrument” (SW 2: 514)2—and condense it into the formula: “Rather, in this early period subject and technique were as exactly congruent as they then drew apart in the period of decline 1. GS 2: 176. Eduardo Cadava in Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997) has underscored the significance of this photo in light of Benjamin’s relation to Kafka and to his own childhood (106 –15). The Kafka photo can be found there on 114, and one of Benjamin together with his brother George made in 1902 when he was about 9, on 102. Benjamin’s recollection of this photo can be found in “The Lamp,” a short text of 1933 written in the context of his Berlin childhood sketches (SW 2: 691–93). Another photo of Benjamin in 1902 is in Benjamin Handbuch: Leben—Werk—Wirkung, ed. Burkhardt Lindner (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler Verlag, 2006), 689. 2. “daß ein Photograph von 1850 auf der gleichen Höhe mit seinem Instrument stand” (GS 2: 374).

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that immediately followed” (SW 2: 517, trans. modified).3 This mutual conjunction and subsequent dislocation of disparate elements has its basis both in historical conditions and in the technological apparatus involved, a complex process that is developed in the essay as a whole. And then, in glossing the “optical-unconscious,” which is paralleled to the instinctual unconscious of psychoanalysis, the text details how, through the “most precise technology photography can gives its products a magical value, such as a painted picture can never again have for us . . . [it] reveals . . . image worlds, which dwell in the smallest things—meaningful yet covert enough to find a hiding place in waking dreams, but which, enlarged and capable of formulation, make the difference between technology and magic visible as a thoroughly historical variable” (SW 2: 512). The Paris of Atget’s photographs provides an antithesis to the boulevards of Haussmann’s Paris, as featured in the Baudelaire section of the 1935 exposé of The Arcades Project. These boulevards, “long straight streets opening onto broad perspectives,” embodied “Haussmann’s ideal in city planning. . . . With the Haussmannization of Paris, the phantasmagoria was rendered in stone” (TAP 24). Haussmann’s “urbanistic ideal,” Benjamin argues, reenacts the principles of Napoleonic imperialism. Its primary motivation was strategic, a defensive measure against any future insurrection. But correlatively—and this is the central point in Benjamin’s cultural diagnosis—Haussmannization helped to institutionalize the emergent commodity system.4 Photography is only briefly discussed in these exposés, as an instance of the mass reproductive technologies that arise in this era. In The Arcades Project itself, one convolute, “Y,” is devoted to photography. The entry most relevant for our purposes is perhaps the following: “What makes the first photographs so incomparable is perhaps this: that they present the earliest image of the encounter of machine and man”(TAP 678, and cf. 675). This is an issue that Benjamin had elaborated on in the essay on Eduard Fuchs, in the section where he mentions the “bungled reception of technology” in the nineteenth century: “Technology, however, is obviously not a purely scientific development. It is at the same time a historical one. As 3. “Vielmehr entsprechen sich in jener Frühzeit Objekt und Tehnik genau so scharf, wie sie in der anschliessenden Verfallsperiode auseinandertreten” (GS 2: 376). 4. Cf. Rebecca Comay, “Materialist Mutations of the Bilderverbot,” in Walter Benjamin and Art, ed. Andrew Benjamin (London: Continuum, 2005), 43– 44.

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such, it forces an examination of the attempted positivistic and undialectical separation between the natural sciences and the humanities” (SW 3: 266). The exemplification that Benjamin provides here involves the technology that made war possible. But in the photography essay, the manifestations of technology are quite different. They involve a commerce between photographer and subject (in portrait photography) mediated by the apparatus of the camera. What is decisive is that technology is determined equally by all these elements: These pictures were made in rooms where every client was confronted, in the person of the photographer, with a technician of the latest school; whereas the photographer was confronted, in the person of the client, with a member of a rising class equipped with an aura that had seeped into the very folds of the man’s frock coat or floppy cravat [Lavallière]. For this aura was by no means the mere product of a primitive camera. Rather, in this early period subject and technique were as exactly congruent as they become incongruent in the period of decline that immediately followed. (SW 2: 517)

Technology, thus, involves the subject matter, the apparatus, and the operator, and it is located as much in the folds of a coat worn by a client (earlier in the essay it was Schelling’s coat and the creases in his face that were cited) as in the “primitive camera.” This should clarify what is meant by the “congruence” between subject and technique that Benjamin refers to. Aura, it should be clear now, is not to be situated in only one of the components involved. It represents a transient phase in which several components—that is, not only the mechanical apparatus but also the expertise of the operator and the receptivity of the subject matter, the clients being portrayed— come together. The essay now turns to Eugène Atget, and we may interject here a few remarks about the man. He was “discovered,” as it were, by Berenice Abbott, who had met him in Man Ray’s studio in 1925, though he was already known to Ray and others in the Surrealist group. He had, for over half a century, made and sold “Documents pour artistes,” photos used by painters to supply details of background, but he also had a clientele among architects, contractors, and public institutions. He left an archive of some 8,500 images, and Abbott purchased a large number of negatives and prints from him shortly before his death. She also took a portrait of him in his last year, 1927.5 5. Berenice Abbott, “Eugène Atget,” in John Szarkowski, Atget (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2000), 12.

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It is a strong face, looking directly at the camera, the mouth pursed, eyes alert, an expression between quizzical and skeptical, someone who is normally absorbed in his own tasks and thoughts who consents, momentarily, to this interruption; eyeglasses held loosely in one hand, the other on his lap, a formal coat and tie; an expression that could be on the verge of a wellmeaning question but not without a trace of anxiety, prepared to return to a habitually more formal, reserved stance. Let us recall that in his career he had quite consciously not pursued the profession of photographic portraiture, the dominant and most profitable path for photography in the mid and later nineteenth century. How may Atget’s photographs be classified? He himself did not do this, presumably because he did not see himself as an artist and so did not consider this work as an oeuvre but rather as the regular production of a craftsman. Skarkowski and Maria Hambourg, in their edition of The Work of Atget (4 volumes), selected some five hundred images and organized them under four labels. In doing so, they provided one construction of Atget’s oeuvre, a thematic construction, but it is not one that finds authority in his own writings. The few remarks that are recorded on this issue speak only of his work of “documentation.”6 And indeed it was as a craftsman that Atget made photographs to be sold to museums, municipal collections, and others. There were a number of major commissions, such as documenting the Tuileries Garden for the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris. But “documentation” is in itself a relatively empty term until the specificity of context is filled out, and in the course of his career, Atget, through strategic attention to the needs of an extensive, diversified clientele, developed a capacious sense of just what was being documented. Molly Nesbit, in her introductory essay to Atget’s Seven Albums,7 shows how difficult it is to situate Atget’s images in a systematic order of knowledge (connaissance) in their time. She writes, Knowledges emerged and converged in Atget’s photographs in a way that reveals much about the relations between knowledges and much about the nuts and bolts of modern visual culture. However, and this is extremely important, Atget’s pictures were not completely identified with these knowledges.

6. Cf. John Szarkowski and Maria Morris, The Work of Atget, 4 vols. (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1985), III: 9. 7. Molly Nesbit, Atget’s Seven Albums (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).

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Benjamin on Atget Most of the time his photographs were breathing down the outsides of one kind of connaissance or another, their forms addressing the knowledge yet to come, their relation to power unsteady, ambivalent. . . . Atget’s pictures, complete with their technical signs, moved back and forth in a crowd of professional looks. They worked behind the scenes and then, duty done, could expect to be buried in a file. (Nesbit 17)

Atget himself, as Nesbit goes on to show, was not indifferent to the market status of his work, and the place that he claimed was not in the direction of art but of author, appealing thus to a droits d’auteur, a claim not unequivocally guaranteed for photographs by copyright in his time. Atget’s recourse was, as of 1902, to call himself an auteur-éditeur, more a claim to authorial privilege than a professional designation because his photographs were not usually published but sold singly or collected in albums that he himself put together for specific clientele.8 In characterizing Atget’s sense of his professional standing, Nesbit usefully cites Benjamin’s discussion of Baudelaire’s commercial acumen: “Through his negotiations with editors, he was continuously in contact with the market. . . . Baudelaire was perhaps the first to conceive of a market-oriented originality, which for that very reason was more original in its day than any other (créer un poncif ).”9 It is this documentary dimension of Atget’s work that Benjamin refers to in the conclusion of the “Little History of Photography” when he writes, “Won’t inscription [Beschriftung] become the most important part of the photograph?” This unexpected word, Beschriftung, should be taken in an extended sense, not merely as caption or gloss for a photograph but, as Benjamin put it a few sentences earlier, “This is where inscription must come into play, which includes the photography of the literarization of all the conditions of life [die Photographie der Literarisierung aller Lebensverhältnisse], and without which all photographic construction must remain arrested in the approximate” (SW 2: 527). The phrase “Literarisierung aller Lebensverhältnisse” is probably cited from Sergej Tretjakow, Brecht’s Russian translator, who was to be cited by name a few years later in Benjamin’s “The Author as Producer” (1934), possibly his most militant Marxist text.10 There he will take up in more radical form what he writes at the conclusion 8. Cf. Szakrowski and Hambourg, Work of Atget, III: 10. 9. Central Park, SW 4: 168. Cited in Nesbit, Atget’s Seven Albums, 99. 10. See GS 2: 687.

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of “Little History”: “ ‘The illiteracy of the future,’ someone has said, ‘will be ignorance not of reading or writing, but of photography.’ . . . Won’t inscription become the most important part of the photograph?” (SW 2: 527). In “The Author as Producer” the “mighty recasting” (Umschmelzungsprozeß) of literary forms that Benjamin claims for his time is exemplified by Beschriftung, a “literarization,” capable of wrenching the photographic image “from modish commerce and [giving] it a revolutionary use value” (GS 2: 693). When Benjamin associates photography, and specifically Atget’s Paris photographs, with a Tatort, a crime scene, both here in the “Little History” and later in the “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” he has in mind a forensic reading that goes far beyond the investigation of crime in the usual sense. In the latter essay he notes the gradual disappearance of the human face, still redolent of cult value and of the coincident predominance of exhibition value in photographs: To have given this development its local habitation constitutes the unique significance of Atget, who, around 1900, took photographs of deserted Paris streets. It has just been said that he photographed them like scenes of crimes. A crime scene, too, is deserted; it is photographed for the purpose of establishing evidence. With Atget, photographic records begin to be evidence of the historical trial [Prozess]. This constitutes their hidden political significance. (SW 4: 258)11

To take the deserted Paris streets as evidence for a historical jurisdiction is linked to the kind of forensic reading that Benjamin will draw from Poe’s Dupin stories in “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire.” What the Poe stories provide is a kind of phenomenology of urban space that allowed a conversion of the urban milieu into a variety of heterotopic sites, each one cut out, as it were, from the spatial continuum in terms of a given enigma to be solved. Thus the crime signifies not in the first instance an evil, a moral transgression, but rather the means of instituting a specific quest or search. Urban space is thus made available for a new kind of revelation, whereby what was hitherto invisible is shown and invested with evidentiary value.12 11. Bernd Stiegler develops this issue in “Walter Benjamin und die Photographie,” in Schrift, Bilder, Denken: Walter Benjamin und die Künste, ed. Detlev Schöttker (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1974), 136 –37. 12. Cf. this entry: “A remark by Ernst Bloch apropos of The Arcades Project: ‘History displays its Scotland Yard badge’ ” (GS 5: 578 [N 3, 4], TAP 463).

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In Poe, Dupin’s attunement to traces is celebrated as both science and art. His particular gift is an ability to read the mass of quotidian, ordinary elements of a site as a way of life, and pick out the significant detail, “significant,” of course, with a view to a certain point of reference, in most cases to a crime to be solved. But Poe demonstrates Dupin’s art even where no crime is at issue, as in the Chantilly episode at the beginning of “Murders in the Rue Morgue.” And in “The Mystery of Marie Roget,” one of the points at issue is whether an individual can be lost in a city where she lives and is presumably known to many inhabitants. Where there is no rule of selection, of limitation, space, however small, is in a sense featureless, and will not yield the required data. Is there a rule or method for such a case? Dupin, in this story, has difficulty in formulating one, though he sets about to demonstrate its application. He mocks the police’s ineptness and then attempts to provide various explanations for his procedure, none conclusive. Finally he undertakes a speculative reconstruction of the traces of the young woman in the city. Benjamin begins his detailed summary of this story with the principle “The original social content of the detective story focused on the obliteration of the individual’s traces in the big-city crowd.”13 What follows, then, in the Flâneur chapter, is the famous commentary on Baudelaire’s “A une passante.” But it should be recognized that one of the principal conclusions of this analysis is stated at its conclusion: “Since the days of Louis Philippe, the bourgeoisie has endeavored to compensate itself for the fact that private life leaves no traces in the big city” (SW 4: 25). This statement underlies the significance that Benjamin attaches to the flâneur’s capacity to observe the apparently random miscellany of street life: “No matter what trace the flâneur may follow, every one of them will lead him to a crime. This is an indication of how the detective story, regardless of its sober calculations, also participates in the phantasmagoria of Parisian life” (SW 4: 22). Thus the flâneur serves to provide a compensatory means for dealing with the anonymity of the big city as it was developing in the early nineteenth century. Benjamin cites Baudelaire: “An observer is a prince who is everywhere in possession of his incognito” (SW 4: 21–22). Benjamin’s treatment of the flâneur figure in the 1938 book on Baudelaire comes, of course, some year after the “Little History of Photography,” but, as this discussion has tried to show, they are linked by a consistent approach. 13. “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire” (SW 4: 23).

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When Benjamin, somewhat surprisingly, calls Atget “a Busoni of photography,” he may be anticipating what he will later analyze as Dupin’s forensic reading of the “phatasmagoria” of the modern metropolis. The photography essay goes on to speak of Atget as follows: He was the first to disinfect the stifling atmosphere generated by conventional portrait photography in the age of decline. He cleanses this atmosphere—indeed, he dispels it altogether: he initiates the emancipation of object from aura, which is the most signal achievement of the latest school of photography. . . . He looked for what was unremarked, forgotten, cast adrift [das Verschollene und Verschlagene]. And thus such pictures, too, work against the exotic, romantically sonorous names of the cities; they suck the aura out of reality like water from a sinking ship. (SW 2: 518)

The reference to “what was unremarked, forgotten, cast adrift” immediately alerts a reader of The Arcades Project to those passages where Benjamin evokes the feel of certain obscure corners of a city, as, for example, in the early sections of “Pariser Passagen I,” the notes written in 1927–28 when the plan first arose in his mind: These squares [in Paris] are lucky accidents, as it were, in the urban landscape; they do not enjoy the patronage of history like the Place Vendôme or the Place de la Grève, are not the result of long planning, but instead resemble architectural improvisations—those crowds of houses where the shabby buildings collide in a jumble [wo sich niedrige Bauten etwas regellos durcheinander tummeln]. In these squares, the trees hold sway; there the smallest trees afford thick shade. At night, however, their leaves stand out against the gas-burning street lamps like transparent fruits. These tiny hidden squares are the future Gardens of the Hesperides . . . (TAP 832; GS 5: 999)

Descriptions like these give a sense of the revolutionary energies of obsolescence that Benjamin found in certain Surrealist works or in the “detritus” [Abfallprodukten] for which he found children especially responsive.14 John Szarkowski, in his commentary for the album of Atget’s photos published by MOMA, has glossed one photo of 1901, “Cour, rue Beethoven, 9” (see Figure 1), as follows: 14. Cf. One-Way Street (SW 1: 449).

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Figure 1. Cour, rue Beethoven, 9. (Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.)

A cluster of ellipses in a corner (like a clutch of eggs in a nest) may define an architectural space and if the skin of the niche (like the wall of the nest) has a coherent, articulated surface, that is good both for clarity and liveliness. If the picture seems too secure, one can pan the camera a little to the left, and open up an escape into the unfamiliar distance, and danger.

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Such occasional small blessings accumulate in a photographer’s mind, not in a form conscious enough to be called ideas, except in the most inchoate form, but as a growing awareness of the pictorial possibilities of the world.15

Szarkowski alerts us to features of the image in an aesthetic sense, to what makes them “clear and lively,” but what draws Benjamin to such images is another quality, the way “they suck the aura out of reality like water from a sinking ship” (SW 2: 518). This is then supplemented a few sentences later when he writes that these images “peel away” and destroy the aura: “The peeling away of the object’s shell, the ruining of the aura, is the signature of a perception whose capacity to apprehend the meaning of all that is similar in the world may be won, by way of reproduction, even from the singular, the unique object” (trans. modified).16 Without attempting a detailed analysis of this notoriously knotty term,17 I want to suggest that aura functions for Benjamin not so much as a concept or idea but rather as a differential marker, a means of situating phenomena in light of their historical lapse.18 In earlier periods, before 1880, Benjamin writes, aura derived from an implicit mutual appreciation of technician (photographer) and model, an understanding based on professional and class values. Later, in the phase of bourgeois imperialism, this implicit contract had to be constructed, leading to the mannerism of Jugendstil. As a critical concept, aura emerges only in consequence of an appropriation: an attempt to grasp the remote (Ferne) in a pictured copy (Abbild), or to appropriate the singular by way of reproduction. What is behind Benjamin’s analysis 15. Szarkowski, Atget, 50. 16. “Die Entschälung des Gegenstands aus seiner Hülle, die Zertrümmerung der Aura ist die Signatur einer Wahrnehmung, deren Sinn für alles Geichartige auf der Welt so gewachsen ist, daß sie es mittels der Reproduktion auch dem Einmaligen abgewinnt” (GS 2: 379). 17. Needless to say, aura has a rich and complex history in Benjamin’s writings up to the central part XI of “On Some Motifs of Baudelaire,” for which “A Little History” represents an early phase. 18. As Josef Fürnkäs puts it, aura for Benjamin is not to be classified as a concept. Rather it may be designated as a name or chiffre. “It functions as dialectical ‘linguistic figure’ [Sprachfigur] of a performative rhetoric . . . that calls to the messianic ‘world of all-encompassing, integral actuality . . .” Josef Fürnkäs, “Aura,” in Benjamins Begriffe, vol. 1, ed. Michael Opitz and Erdmut Wizisla (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2000), 103– 4.

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here is the notion of veil in Romantic thought, as an intermediary and mediating modality, at once revealing and shielding, disclosing and hiding. In speaking of aura one already acknowledges being situated in a postauratic phase.19 There is an analogy here to Schiller’s use of naive and sentimental. In Schiller’s “On Naive and Sentimental Poetry,” the naive (whether understood historically or generically) is posited as a category that could be accessible to a modern thinker or poet only in a mediated form, ex post facto, and it is the sentimental that makes this mediation explicit.20 In a similar way, Benjamin’s use of aura brings to the surface the inescapable factor of alienation that accompanies any effort to make one element of tradition foundational for the present. Atget’s distinct achievement for Benjamin is found in scenes that avoid “the vast vistas and the so-called emblematic images” of the city. Instead, Atget shows a long row of boot lasts; or the Paris courtyards; or the tables after people have finished eating and left, the dishes not yet cleared away—as they exist by the hundreds of thousands at the same hour; or the brothel at No. 5, Rue—, whose street number appears, gigantic, at four different places on the building’s façade. (SW 2: 519)

And then we have this summation: Remarkably, however, almost all these pictures are empty. Empty is the Porte d’Arceuil by the fortifications, empty are the triumphal steps, empty are the courtyards, empty, as it should be, is the Place du Tertre. They are not lonely, merely without mood; the city in these pictures looks cleared out, like 19. As Eduardo Cadava writes, “the experience of aura [in Benjamin] is always also an experience of its disintegration—a disintegration in which photography is implicated.” Cadava, Words of Light, 120. Cf. also Miriam Bratu Hansen’s remarks on the “complex temporality” of Benjamin’s notion of aura, “which inscribes his theory of experience with the twofold and antagonistic registers of memory and history. . . . (O)nly in the process of disintegration can the aura be recognized, can it be registered as a qualitative component of (past) experience.” Bratu Hansen, “Benjamin, Cinema and Experience,” 189. 20. According to Peter Szondi, the two terms represent not a polarity but stages in a process: the naive is posited from the point of view of the sentimental. Naive, thus, is to be understood as a “perspectival concept.” Peter Szondi, Poetik und Geschichtsphilosophie, vol. 1, ed. Senta Metz and H. H. Hildebrandt (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1974), 167.

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Figure 2. Rue de la Montagne-Sainte-Geneviève. (Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art /Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.)

a lodging that has not yet found a new tenant. It is in these achievements that Surrealist photography sets the scene for a salutary estrangement between man and his surroundings. It gives free play to the politically educated eye, under whose gaze all intimacies are sacrificed to the illumination of detail. (SW 2: 519)

Benjamin does not mention Man Ray’s use of an Atget image on the cover of La Révolution surréaliste nor other images, such as “Magasin, avenue des Gobelins” (see Figure 3), where the mirroring in a shop window of mannequins and clothing samples turns a familiar commercial display into an uncanny assemblage of humanoid multiples. Insofar as Atget is to be taken as a forerunner of Surrealism, it is worth recalling parts of Benjamin’s Surrealism essay (written 1927–28): first, that part where he speaks of the yet unwritten history of esoteric writing and then, in a bird’s eye survey of some

Figure 3. Magasin, avenue des Gobelins. (Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art /Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.)

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eight pages, moves back as far as Hebel, Büchner, Nietzsche, Lautréamont, Rimbaud, and, finally Dostoevski, to conclude with the Surrealists proper and the call “to organize pessimism . . . to discover in the space of political action the one hundred percent image space [Bildraum] . . . [that] can no longer be measured out by contemplation [ist kontemplativ überhaupt nicht mehre auszumessen]” (SW 2: 217; GS 2: 309). And then, earlier in that essay, where he refers to Breton: He can boast an extraordinary discovery: he 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. . . . Breton and Nadja are the lovers who convert everything that we have experienced on mournful railway journeys (railways are beginning to age), on godforsaken Sunday afternoons, in the proletarian neighborhoods of great cities, in the first glance through the rain-blurred window of a new apartment, into revolutionary experience, if not action. (SW 2: 210; GS 2: 299)

This is where Benjamin laid out the premises for what, in “Little History,” he calls “a salutary estrangement between man and his surroundings,” and it anticipates the yet more radical proposal for “a new, positive barbarism,” (GS 2: 215) a systematic disencumbering and cleansing operation that he saw exemplified in Karl Kraus’s Die Fackel or found encapsulated in Brecht’s “Verwische die Spuren” (erase the traces). Later, right after the war, Adorno will take up this issue in his oft-quoted (and misquoted) remark, that “it is barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz,” and his program for a reconsideration of fundamental issues of methodology and validity. But it is a position that was already laid out in One-Way Street (written 1923–26) and then reiterated in Benjamin’s writings of the late twenties and early thirties. This is the context that makes clear the political charge of a passage, already quoted: “almost all these pictures are empty. Empty is the Porte d’Arceuil by the fortifications, empty are the triumphal steps, empty are the courtyards, empty, as it should be, is the Place du Tertre.” Atget’s images of Paris in a state of withdrawal and deprivation, bereft of mood or voice (“stimmungslos,” GS 2: 379; SW 2: 519), may be understood as emblematic of the fading of aura as political action.

four

Entering the Passagen

Origins The origins of The Arcades Project go back to the summer of 1927 when Benjamin was in Paris, working closely with Franz Hessel on a translation of Proust. At the same time, the two collaborated on a feuilleton essay entitled “Passagen” (GS 5: 1041– 43; TAP 871–72). It begins by noting the opening of a fashionable new arcade on the Champs-Elysées but soon shifts to a consideration of the disappearance of some of the oldest of these structures: “today a few arcades still preserve, in harsh light and gloomy corners, a past become space. Antiquated trades survive within these inner spaces, and the merchandise on display makes no sense, or else has several senses” (GS 5: 1041; TAP 871, trans. modified). There follows a detailed catalogue of relics found in one of the older arcades, now in a state of neglect and disrepair— outmoded objects, made strange through decay and bizarre juxtaposition. In the months that follow, something in this took hold of Benjamin’s imagina102

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tion. He no longer pursues a collaboration with Hessel, and the idea of developing this subject as a feuilleton essay is abandoned. Benjamin’s excitement about the project is indicated in comments like the following, in a letter to Gershom Scholem of May 24, 1928: “The work on the Paris Arcades is taking on an ever more mysterious and insistent mien and howls into my nights like a small beast when I have failed to water it at the most distant springs during the day” (GB 3: 378). In short, something like a crystallization has taken place, a compelling attachment to a topic with a name, a locale, but as yet no determinate form either at the level of genre or of discipline. In this same period, Benjamin finishes work on the essay on “Surrealism,” published in February 1929, a piece that, with its radical simplifications and apparent endorsement of the political impact of art works, can be taken as indicative of a turn in his mode of writing. He credits the Surrealist group with being concerned “not about literature but something else— demonstrations, watchwords, documents, bluffs, forgeries if you will, but at any rate not about literature” (GS 2: 297; SW 2: 208, trans. modified). This essay, he writes to Scholem in March 1929, is “a screen placed in front of the Paris Arcades—and I have many a reason to keep secret what goes on behind it” (GB 3: 453). What appealed to Benjamin in Surrealism was that it sought ways of utilizing techniques of art for extra-aesthetic ends, more specifically, for undermining the status of art as a preserve of bourgeois culture—practices that in some respects anticipate what the Situationists will term détournement. The secrecy that he here claimed for the project may be explained by his awareness that the topic was decidedly ripe for treatment. He himself had been enormously excited by Aragon’s Paysan de Paris, about which he writes to Scholem, “Evenings, lying in bed, I could never read more than two to three pages by him because my heart started to pound so hard that I had to put the book down” (GB 5: 96 –97). And he was well aware that other German writers—Bloch, Kracauer, Dolf Sternberger—were engaged in possibly competing undertakings.1 But there were more deep-seated grounds for Benjamin’s anxiety about this new project. In the letter to Scholem just cited, he continues, “the issue 1. Siegfried Kracauer’s Jacques Offenbach und das Paris seiner Zeit (1937), Dolf Sternberger’s Panorama oder Ansichten vom 19. Jahrhundert (1938). Benjamin was well aware of their work in the preceding years.

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here is precisely what you once touched on after reading One-Way Street: to attain, as in that work, the most extreme concreteness as it occasionally manifested itself in children’s games, a building, or a real-life situation, but now for a whole era. A perilous, breathtaking enterprise [the English does not do justice to the melodramatic tone of “halsbrecherisches, atemraubendes Unternehmen”] repeatedly put off over the course of the winter, not without reason . . . thus sometimes paralyzing me, and as I have discovered, it was just as impossible to postpone as it is to complete it at this time” (GB 3: 454). Uppermost in Benjamin’s mind was the desperate political situation within Germany that had developed in the previous decade. His analysis in OneWay Street, in spite of an irony bordering on gallows humor, is withering. The genre of the sketches in this volume maintain a biting, sarcastic tone throughout, except perhaps in the final entry, “To the Planetarium,” but it is clear that Benjamin is on the lookout for a mode of writing that would be at once philosophically valid and politically effective. In the following decade, up to 1940 when Benjamin took his life in the course of an attempted flight out of France, he was also occupied with other writings than The Arcades Project. Some may be linked to it at a biographical level (the Berlin writings); others may be considered offshoots (a planned Baudelaire book;2 others still are apparently quite independent of The Arcades Project (writings on Kraus, Fuchs, and Kafka). What is presumably Benjamin’s last major text, “On the Concept of History” (1940), could be viewed as a reflection on the methodology of The Arcades Project, and thus constitutes a kind of supplement to Convolute N in that work, “On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress.” When he died in 1940 Benjamin left behind the following writings that may be considered parts of The Arcades Project: part of a book on Baudelaire—Das Paris des Second Empire bei Baudelaire (The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire); the essay “Über einige Motive bei Baudelaire” (“On Some Motifs in Baudelaire”); two exposés entitled “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century” (1935 and 1939), which Benjamin prepared for the Institute for Social Research; and—most significantly—the massive archive, the “convolutes,” thirty-six folders, each identified by a rubric, in which Benjamin stored the citations and commentaries that he had collected over 2. Cf. Jennings, “On the Banks of a New Lethe,” 89–104.

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some twelve years. These 900 (printed) pages or so of notes and materials (“Aufzeichnungen und Materialen”) are in essence what the editors of the German collected writings called Das Passagen-Werk. Although Benjamin had put the convolutes and other materials in safekeeping when he left Paris in 1940, he probably did not imagine that they would ever be published. But what has also survived in addition to these texts, what may properly be identified with the never-to-be-completed Passagen-Werk, is an idea or conception of the work—whether Benjamin’s or that ascribed to him by his interpreters, it is impossible to say. These come together in—to adapt terms that Benjamin used in “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers” (“The Task of the Translator”)—the “Ruhm” (fame, reputation) and “Fortleben” (afterlife) of the work (GS 4: 11; SW 1: 255). Das Passagen-Werk was never a book, whether unfinished or fragmentary, but “die Passagen” or “Passagen Arbeit” or “Pariser Passagen” (terms Benjamin used) name a project, complex and variable, that Benjamin pursued during his last twelve years and that has since been sustained in an “afterlife” by its readers and interpreters.3 The English translation was long-anticipated by a readership that had elevated Benjamin’s reputation to dazzling heights, but when it finally appeared in 1989, the response was somewhat anticlimactic. T. J. Clark, whom one might expect to be among the most discerning of readers, made much of the difficulty of access to the work, and summed up his judgment with, “what we have . . . is the wreckage of a book that did not get written” (3).4 He avers that he read The Arcades Project through from cover to cover but warns that this is not the right way to go about it. He advises that “it is open to us to re-create such a book, in bits and pieces” (3), perhaps a more downto-earth formulation of a work’s “afterlife.” Clark’s disappointment in The Arcades Project may be traced to expectations that arose even prior to the publication of the German edition in 1983, expectations that, it has been argued, played no small role in the way that edition was prepared and received. Two scholars, Michel Espagne and Michael Werner, who have made a detailed study of the manuscript sources, 3. The title of the English translation, The Arcades Project, has the virtue of avoiding the sense of a work or book implicit in Das Passagen-Werk. But, as I discuss in this chapter, something is also lost in translating Passagen as “arcades.” 4. T. J. Clark, “Reservations of the Marvellous,” The London Review of Books ( June 22, 2000). I can support this conclusion though not its implicit judgment.

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write, “The Passagen-Werk is less a text . . . than a myth inscribed in the German intellectual currents of the 1960s and 1970s . . . Although inaccessible at the time, the Passagen-Werk tended nonetheless to become an omnipresent phantom within the German intelligentsia, primarily in the context of literary theory, in the 1960s and 1970s, where it legitimated the revolt against the tyranny of the logos and strengthened what Adorno called negative dialectics.”5 When the work appeared in 1983, it had already become part of the charged discourse that accompanied the discovery of Benjamin by the post-war generation. His elevation to a preeminent place among modern thinkers was fed by passionate debates reflecting divergent, in some cases, radically opposed ideological positions. This is perfectly in line with Benjamin’s own conception of the meaning of a work, where the afterlife is as intrinsic to the work as its antecedents and its contemporary impact.6 What Espagne and Werner point out, however, is that a certain image of the “Passagen-Werk” was already in circulation before its publication, an image that tended to supersede a careful reading of the posthumous texts and prompted the conclusion that one was finally in possession of the book that had figured so often in speculations about Benjamin in the preceding decades. The intractable nature of the work—the sheer mass of data and the apparent miscellany of the selection—was explained in terms of either the “fragmentary” mode of Romantic writing or as “montage” and “citation” in the modernist sense. In short, they argue that a reductive monumentalization of the Passagen-Werk blocked a more considered approach to Benjamin’s writings in the 1930s.7 5. Michel Espagne and Michael Werner, “Ce que taisent les manuscrits: les fiches de Walter Benjamin et le mythe des ‘Passages,’ ” in Penser, classer, écrire: De Pascal à Pérec, ed. Béatrice Didier and Jacques Neefs (Vincennes: Presses universitaires de Vincennes, 1990), 110, 112. 6. Cf. GS 6: 172. 7. Their conclusions are particularly directed against Adorno’s influential conception of the work: “The Benjamin papers say nothing about the Passagen-Werk as it exists for the tradition of the Frankfurt School. In particular, it is impossible to explain how Benjamin created a fragmentary work when, quite to the contrary, his working notes provide evidence of a high degree of systematicity in the elaboration of the working documents. It is not in contemplating Benjamin’s workshop that one can explain—to put it briefly—how there developed in Germany an anti-historicist philosophy founded on the discontinuity of the aphorism and the citation.” Espagne and Werner, “Ce que taisent,” 112f.

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Berlin /Paris In order to better understand what I have called the “crystallization” of the Passagen project that took place in 1927–28, let us look at Benjamin’s concurrent preoccupation with other city texts. In the densely layered fabric of travel journals and reminiscences that we find in this period—the Moscow Diary, the various city sketches, and the autobiographical writings on his Berlin childhood—Benjamin is in search of an appropriate form for representing modernity by way of the phenomenon of the city. In connection with an essay on Moscow that he planned to write on his return from a visit there in the winter of 1926 –27, Benjamin wrote to Martin Buber, “I want to give a presentation [eine Darstellung] of the city of Moscow at this point in time in which ‘everything factual is already theory . . .’ ” (February 23, 1927, GB 3: 232). Urban consciousness, in this sense, is to serve as both theme and vision, topos and mode of cognition. The city (and its synecdoche, the arcades) is granted a world structuring or cosmological function. The Berlin of Benjamin’s childhood and youth and the Paris that Benjamin visited throughout his early years and then made his second home after the exile from Germany, should be understood in integral relation to the cultural-historical aims of the Paris project. The Berlin writings—“Berlin Chronicle” and “Berlin Childhood Around Nineteen-Hundred”— occupied him during the same period as his work on The Arcades Project, that is, from the late 1920s until his death in 1940. He began the Berlin texts during a stay in Ibizia (Capri) in 1932, at a time when he realized that his absence from Berlin would be long-lasting, perhaps definitive. Many passages in these texts suggest an imbrication of the two cities in Benjamin’s imagination. In the “Berlin Chronicle,” he credits Paris with providing the model for the “dream images” that he is seeking in the reminiscences of his childhood: The more frequently I return to these memories [of Berlin], the less fortuitous it seems to me how slight a role is played in them by people. . . . I tell myself it had to be in Paris, where the walls and quays, the asphalt surfaces, the collections and the rubbish, the railings and the squares, the arcades and the kiosks, teach a language so singular that our relations to people attain, in the solitude encompassing us in our immersion in that world of things, the depths of a sleep in which the dream image waits to show the people their true faces. (GS, 6: 490; SW 2: 614)

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In another passage he distinguishes two forms whereby a child’s experience of city life may be recovered: I would scarcely be able to abandon myself to the shifting currents of these memories of my earliest city life, had not Paris set before me, strictly circumscribed, the two forms in which alone this can legitimately—that is, with a guarantee of permanence—be done; and had I not forsworn the attempt to equal the first as firmly as I hope one day to realize the second. The first form was created in the work of Marcel Proust, and the renunciation of any dalliance with related possibilities could scarcely be more bindingly embodied than in the translation of it that I have produced. (GS 6: 467; SW 2: 597)

Benjamin and his friend Franz Hessel had translated parts of A la rechereche du temps perdu. What he “renounces” and cannot imagine competing with, is, presumably, the Proustian mode of representation by way of involuntary memory. But if this is the “first form,” the one he renounces, what is the second, that which he one day hopes to realize? The text does not provide any answer (recall that “Berlin Chronicle” is a draft, left incomplete), and one may speculate that he has in mind a different kind of autobiographical project, something like what he does in fact undertake when he adapts some of the material in that work to the collection of short prose texts which he composed during the following years “Berlin Childhood Around NineteenHundred.” But I would suggest another answer, not necessarily alternative but supplementary: that the Passagen is precisely the work of finding a passageway back to the pre-history (Urgeschichte) of the generation born around 1900, a generation still held in a state of mythic enchantment, as Benjamin believed, a condition from which it needed to be awakened in order to confront the historical crisis of the 1930s. Thus in Convolute K (“Dream City and Dream House”) he writes, what Proust, as an individual, directly experienced [erlebt] in the phenomenon of remembrance [Eingedenken], we have to experience indirectly [erfahren] (with regard to the nineteenth century) in studying “current,” “fashion,” “tendency”—as punishment, if you will, for the sluggishness which keeps us from taking it up ourselves. (GS 5: 497 [K 2a, 3]; TAP 393)

The opening page of “Berlin Chronicle” sketches an idiosyncratic cartography, that of a child (Benjamin himself ) who had “a very poor sense of direction” (GS 6: 466; SW 2: 596), not in command until early manhood, he

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claims, of an instinctive sense of left and right or of being able to read a city map. The “son of well-to-do middle-class parents” (wohlgebornes Bürgerkind) is taken for walks by a series of “Führer” who prove to be troubling guides. In walks with his mother, he reacts to her steady, directed pace by invariably moving a half pace behind, seeming “slower, more maladroit, more stupid than I am.” This account of the child’s resistance to parental control is part of a more extended reminiscence going back to walks with his nurse in the Tiergarten when barely three. The maze near the entrance anticipates the labyrinth motif that will recur throughout the text. As he is led through the park, he becomes aware of the word “Liebe,” not yet grasped as a concept but linked to the spot where an “Ariadne” is couched in the greenery. This premonitory hint of sexuality is interrupted by the figure of a “nursemaid . . . a cold shadow.” The superposition of the (his?) “Fräulein” with the opaque scene glimpsed in the greenery brings about a shock that is conveyed in this enigmatic sentence: “It is likely that no one ever masters anything in which he has not known impotence [Ohnmacht]; and if you agree, you will also see that this impotence comes not at the beginning of or before the struggle with the subject, but in the heart of it.” The word “Ohnmacht” is repeated almost immediately to characterize his whole childhood as a period “of impotence before the city,” and one should gloss Ohnmacht also as giving over and passivity. The passage as a whole, in its combination of infantile confusion, spatial disorientation, and sexual awakening, anticipates the “arts of straying” (Irrkünste) whereby, a few pages later, Benjamin characterizes his mode of exploration, what may be termed a willed errancy, open to the unconscious and to chance. On the next page of “Berlin Chronicle,” Benjamin plays with the idea of “setting out the sphere of life—bios—graphically on a map.” What he envisages is an autobiographical exploration guided by a spatial schematism, the self projected onto a cartographic model, like a “a general staff ’s map of a city center.” What is in question here are significant scenes of Benjamin’s own formative years, which he quickly surveys: “the houses of my friends and girlfriends, the assembly halls of various collectives, . . . the hotel and brothel rooms that I knew for one night, the decisive benches in the Tiergarten . . .” This mapping-graphing of childhood loci involves both a spatial and a scriptive schema, and these modes are then more closely interwoven in “Berlin Childhood Around Nineteen-Hundred.” In the following passage

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(found in both texts), the labyrinth is at once scriptive, topographic, and mythic: Not to find one’s way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance—nothing more. But to lose oneself in a city—as one loses oneself in a forest—this calls for quite a different schooling. . . . Paris taught me this art of straying; it fulfilled a dream that had shown its first traces in the labyrinths on the blotting pages of my school exercise books. (GS 6: 469; SW 2: 598)

What is here characterized as “arts of straying” will assume conceptual form in The Arcades Project, where “losing oneself ” becomes a discovery practice, at once spatial and textual. I will turn later to the “flâneur” as the agent of this new form of divinatory exploration—a figure situated socially between bourgeoisie and Bohemia, and, as reader, singularly attuned to the emergent commodity culture of the mid-century metropolis. But at this point it is worth noting how the accounts of his Berlin childhood anticipate the stance of The Arcades Project. In the introduction to “Berlin Childhood Around Nineteen-Hundred,” Benjamin lays claim to not only a personal but also a historical dimension for this work. Its images cannot draw on the “established forms . . . of a feeling for nature” available to a childhood spent in the country. Rather, “the images of my metropolitan childhood perhaps are capable, at their core, of preforming later historical experience” (GS 7: 385; SW 3: 344, trans. modified).

Genre When encountering a work that is hard to classify, not commensurable with our usual designations, the literary scholar has a tool ready at hand, “The Law of Genre.” I use that phrase in the ironic sense that Jacques Derrida gave to his essay, “The Law of Genre,”8 because genre, as the concept that seeks to institute a law, the principle of clean, neat classification—a place for everything and everything in its proper place—this law, writes Der-

8. Jacques Derrida, “The Law of Genre,” trans. Avital Ronell, Glyph 7 (Spring 1980): 55–81.

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rida, “is precisely a principle of contamination, a law of impurity, a parasitical economy . . . a sort of participation without belonging. . . . The trait that marks membership inevitably divides, the boundary of the set comes to form, by invagination, an internal pocket larger than the whole” (ibid., 206). If we follow these indications, we need to be alert to a “trait” (or re-mark) that, in defining the class or genre, fashions a kind of place apart, a pocket both outside (“hors d’oeuvre”)9 and interior (“invagination”), a part that may exceed the whole and, in a sense, swallow it. I take Derrida’s trait here in the sense of foundational gesture: the positing of a genre that would serve not so much to define the text in question as to institute a class of texts, a class that recursively would be capable of situating, making room, for the founding text. The trait, then, could not be the setting of a boundary; rather, it brings out the permeability of boundary, the potential of a closure “that excludes itself from what it includes” (Derrida, “Law of Genre,” 212f ). Benjamin was certainly concerned, throughout his career, with the issue of classification, and, insofar as this applies to writing, with that of genre. In the “Epistemo-Critical Prologue” of The Origin of German Tragic Drama, he takes this up explicitly with respect to treatise (Traktat), the class under which he situates that work, but he goes further and sketches a theory of literary genres that draws on Leibniz’s monadology. “The idea is monade,” Benjamin writes in the Prologue, “—that means, briefly: every idea encloses the image of the world. Its presentation has no lesser task than to sketch the image of this world in a foreshortened manner” (GS 1: 228). In understanding literary genre on the model of monade, Benjamin draws on a pre-Idealist conception that is altogether consistent with the Baroque period that he deals with. At the level of literature, this meant, as Heinz Schlaffer puts it, “The genre projects a world in which the particular work constitutes an instance.”10 Now admittedly, the transposition of this principle to The Arcades Project was no simple matter. Whereas for the Baroque, allegory represented an accredited practice, operative at multiple levels of representation, both re9. See Jacques Derrida, “Outwork, Prefacing” in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 1–59. 10. Heinz Schlaffer, “Walter Benjamins Idee der Gattung,” in Profane Erleuchtung und Rettende Kritik, 47.

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ligious and profane, an allegorical reading of the nineteenth century would demand the construction of a world-model that harbored, at the level of signifiers, a repertory susceptible to allegorical reading. This, in fact, is what Benjamin envisaged for The Arcades Project,11 and it is in light of this conception that he found in Baudelaire a veritable Virgil who could guide his exploration of the nineteenth century. More specifically, it is the nineteenth century as text that becomes the object of his exploration, as indicated in this entry in Convolute N: The expression “the book of nature” indicates that one can read the real like a text. And that is how the reality of the nineteenth century will be treated here. We open the book of what happened. (GS 5: 580 [N4, 2]; TAP 464)

In this sense, the Passagen may be understood as the assemblage of a world model, the monadic basis for a genre that this work would itself institute. Thus the entry, “Method of this project: literary montage. I needn’t say anything. Merely show” (GS 5: 574 [N 1a, 8]; TAP 460), is not to be taken as notice that Benjamin is relinquishing the work of language and conceptual presentation in favor of an imagistic montage with minimal commentary, as Adorno had suggested. Far from it. The task of reading “the book of what happened” will bring into play a new form of philosophical presentation, one that Benjamin’s thought during the 1920s had been approaching but that could be put to the test only with the kind of subject matter that presented itself to him in the idea of Passagen.

Darstellung In a section of Negative Dialectics entitled “Presentation” (Darstellung), Theodor Adorno refers to the Passagen in a curious but revealing manner: Benjamin, whose original Passagen draft12 combined incomparable speculative skill with micrological proximity to factual contents, later remarked in 11. “The book on the Baroque exposed the seventeenth century to the light of the present day. Here, something analogous must be done for the nineteenth century, but with greater distinctness” (GS 5: 573 [N1a, 2]; TAP 459). 12. Adorno is referring to texts that Benjamin had read to him and others in 1929. These are now published as “Pariser Passagen II” (GS 5: 1044 –59; TAP 873–84).

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correspondence about [this] first properly metaphysical stratum of this work that it could be achieved only as an “impermissible ‘poetic’ one.” This admission of surrender denotes as much the difficulty of a philosophy loath to decline [die nicht abgleiten will] as the point at which its concept can be carried further. It was probably due to Benjamin’s acceptance of dialectical materialism as a weltanschauung, so to speak, with closed eyes. But the fact that he could not bring himself to put the definitive version of the Passagen theory into writing reminds us that philosophy is more than busy-work [Betrieb] only where it runs the risk of total failure, as a response to the certainty that has traditionally been attained by devious means. Benjamin’s defeatism with respect to his own thought was conditioned by the undialectical positivity from which he dragged a remnant, formally unchanged, from his theological into his materialist phase.13

Adorno here misremembers the context of the phrase cited from a letter Benjamin had written him in 1935. There, Benjamin compared the exposé “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” which he had just sent to the Institute for Social Research, to excerpts read to Adorno in 1929. He wanted to make clear that, although the earlier materials could be given no proper form (Gestaltung) lest it be “an impermissible ‘poetic’ one,”14 the exposé is anything but a conclusion of his work on the Passagen. So Benjamin’s remark should not be taken as an “admission of surrender,” as Adorno put it. Further, Adorno seems to characterize Benjamin’s undertaking as a form of anti-philosophy that is close to the aims his own “negative dialectics” (“philosophy is more than busy-work only where it runs the risk of total failure”), but then quickly converts this apparent convergence of their approaches into a “defeatism” brought on by Benjamin’s adherence to materialist ideas. 13. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialektik: Jargon der Eigentlichkeit, Vol. 6 of Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1973), 29; in English, Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973), 18, trans. modified. 14. See the letter to Gretel and Theodor Adorno, August 16, 1935, in GB 5: 141ff, cited in GS 5: 1139: “Diese beiden Entwürfe haben ein polares Verhältnis. Sie stellen Thesis und Antithesis des Werkes dar. Es ist daher dieser ‘2’ für mich alles andere als ein Abschluß. Seine Notwendigkeit ruht darauf, daß die im ‘1’ vorhandenen Einsichten unmittelbar keinerlei Gestaltung zuließen— es sei denn eine unerlaubt ‘dichterische.’ Daher der, längst preisgegebene, Untertitel im ersten Entwurft ‘Eine dialektische Feerie.’ ”

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Most revealing, perhaps, is the sentence, “This admission of surrender denotes as much the difficulty of a philosophy loath to decline as the point at which its concept can be carried further.”15 What does he mean by “nicht abgleiten will”— does not want to slip . . . to lose its balance . . . to risk a lapse or decline? And what are the means whereby the concept of philosophy can be carried further? Is Adorno referring to his own undertaking in Negative Dialectics? Is he crediting Benjamin with having moved in that direction, but then failed to continue by falling prey to materialist ideas? Quite aside from Adorno’s intentions, this passage in Negative Dialectics interests us insofar as it brings into relief the philosophical import of the Passagen. From the vantage of his own later development, Adorno, in spite of his personal loyalty to Benjamin and his labors on behalf of Benjamin’s writings, resists coming to terms with Benjamin as a philosophical thinker. And this also involves his attitude to the Passagen as a philosophical work. The problem may lie in the way each of them view the issue of presentation, Darstellung. Although Adorno deals with the concept in Negative Dialectics, the term is far more characteristic for Benjamin than for Adorno. The first sentence of the “Epistemo-Critical Prologue” of The Origin of German Tragic Drama already puts forth the central issue and its terminological stakes: “It is the very characteristic of philosophical writing that at every turn it must confront anew the question of presentation” (GS 1: 207). “The question of presentation” (Frage der Darstellung) is then worked through a series of permutations that represent fundamental positions for Benjamin regarding language, conceptual articulation, and representation, positions that are modified but sustained to the end of his career.16 While Benjamin seems to assume a Platonic notion of truth, his approach is to find a way 15. “Diese Kapitulationserklärung designiert ebenso die Schwierigkeit von Philosophie, die nicht abgleiten will, wie den Punkt, an dem ihr Begriff weiterzutreiben ist.” 16. Hans-Jost Frey has pertinently characterized presentation (Darstellung) as, “not the communication of a sequence of thoughts, but the discontinuous arrangement of ‘fragments of thought’ [Denkbruchstücken] whose coherence lies outside knowledge and flashes forth in the gaps and breaks. Presentation must take place in such a way that an opening ensues onto what lies outside the cognitively accessible. The method demands the inclusion within the thought process of what cannot be mastered.” Hans-Jost Frey, “On Presentation in Benjamin,” in Walter Benjamin: Theoretical Questions, ed. David S. Ferris (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 140 – 41.

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around it, another path, a detour. What he develops is a systematic method of conversion, a method that opens up a passage between what he calls truth-content (Wahrheitsgehalt) and techniques based on material means of representation, reproduction, and dissemination. This throws light on the reiterated characterization of the quest of truth as a preoccupation with the fragmentary, the scattered elements brought about by “micrological transformation” ( mikrologische Verarbeitung). When Benjamin speaks of “the uncircumscribable essentiality of truth,”17 his goal is to develop an indirect mode of access that goes around, detours, the symbolic and theological dimension, and provides instead a form of presentation, which he terms didactic or propaedutic: “Its method is essentially presentation. Method is detour. Presentation as detour. Such is the methodological nature of the treatise” (Methode ist Umweg. Darstellung als Umweg — das ist denn der methodische Charakter des Traktats, GS 1: 208). Thus, what Benjamin draws from the Platonic tradition is not an idea of truth in its ideality, but rather the incommensurability of conceptual cognition and truth. It is in consequence of this heterogeneity of cognition and truth that Benjamin can make it his goal to seek out a historical method based on the linguistic and (re)presentational status of ideas. What is here, in the Prologue to the Trauerspiel book, characterized as a “methodical,” “discontinuous” procedure designed to make a truth “flash forth in the gaps and breaks” becomes a defining feature of the Passagen. It is in this sense that Benjamin considered that the gathering of data regarding material practices in nineteenthcentury France — a gathering that from a certain perspective may seem no more than a catalogue of trivia — constitutes a truly philosophical undertaking. In one of the entries of Convolute N, he writes, “the eternal, in any case, is far more the ruffle on a dress than some idea” (GS 5: 578 [N 3, 2]; TAP 463).

Passagen Just what is this idea? The word “Passagen” contains a semantic node that brings together space and time, the diagrammatic and the directional. Karl17. “die unumschreibliche Wesenheit des Wahren,” GS 1: 208; The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 28.

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heinz Stierle glosses the term as follows: “Around the passage there are gathered derivations of pas: passer (passing), passé (past), passant, passager (passenger, fleeting), as well as ‘maison de passe,’ to whose secrets the passage provides hidden access.”18 Passagen /passages as architectural constructs began to appear throughout Europe around 1830 –50, made possible by new ways of combining iron and glass. They became key indicators of a revolution in exhibition practices in the mid-century, harbingers of department stores and malls. Benjamin is well aware of this but his focus is not on the history of the phenomenon. Rather, he is interested in the way that the shopping arcades soon turned into hang-outs of idlers and prostitutes, sites of shabby commercial establishments and of the endless cycle of fashion. In this sense, the Parisian passages become temporal markers, fixed in a mode of arrestation. In early notes to the project he writes, Being past, being no more, is passionately at work in things. To this the historian trusts for his subject matter. He depends on this force, and knows things as they are at the moment of their ceasing to be. Arcades are such monuments of being-no-more. And the energy that works in them is dialectics. The dialectic takes its way through the arcades, ransacking them, revolutionizing them. . . . And nothing of them lasts except the name: passages. (GS 5: 1001; TAP 833)

For Benjamin, the passages become emblematic for the evanescence of the commodities that are on display there. It is of the essence of the commodity article that it bear witness to a temporal lag, an arrestation of historical time: “the aborted, broken-down matter” (die halbe, steckengebliebene Materie, GS 5: 269 [H1, 1]; TAP 203). Over and over Benjamin reflects on the status of cultural detritus, objects that survive use and exchange value and retain in the end nothing but a kind of symbolic signification. Sylviane Agancinski has proposed the phrase “Un Passeur de Temps” for the agent correlative to the passages: “To pass time” [passer le temps] signifies waste, a gratuitous way of existing without using time effectively, as a stroller does. But this meaning is not ap-

18. Karlheinz Stierle, Der Mythos von Paris: Zeichen und Bewusstsein der Stadt (Munich and Vienna: Hanser Verlag, 1995), 26.

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parently related to that of passeur, a kind of ferryman who helps passengers pass from one shore of a river to the other . . . Our passeur de temps evokes these two meanings: he is open to time without trying to master it, and he is available for passage, for opening a passage from one time to another in letting himself be attracted by traces—traces of the past in the city, written traces in books.19

What is suggested here is an aleatory movement and at the same time a discovery practice, a means of gathering and collecting that is guided not by any determinate will but by traces found in data not yet been classified and defined by a pre-existent schema. A locus of agency is required to identify this data and this is provided by the flâneur. Flâneur is to be understood not as a social type but as an agency of reception posited in order to facilitate the analysis of a coordinate system of reality.

Flâneur The term “flâneur” was in no sense a creation of Benjamin’s but had long been recognized as one of the characteristic types of urban life. Discussions of this figure could be found in the many “physiologies” that appeared in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, publications that served, among other things, to provide a characterization of the city for the mass of new residents. What is distinctive in Benjamin’s analysis is that he focused on certain types—in addition to flâneur there is collector, Grübler (brooder), destructive character, prostitute, gambler, Müssigänger (loiterer). These function for Benjamin not as empirical types in a sociological sense, but

19. Sylviane Agacinski, Time Passing: Modernity and Nostalgia, trans. Jody Gladding (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 49–50. Agacinski writes further that for Benjamin the passages bear witness to “a world in the process of passing, just as a color fades; he is witnessing the very event of the city’s aging. . . . On the one hand, these passageways [of the Second Empire] still illustrate the triumph of progress and its splendor, . . . On the other hand, their speedy obsolescence transforms this audacious architecture into the simple remains of a world that is falling apart before our eyes. Thus, these galleries testify to the essential ambivalence of modernity. . . . The image of the new already symbolizes the old. Fashion becomes old-fashioned; progress dispels progress.” (Ibid., 58)

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rather as agents through which the philosopher thinks, what Deleuze and Guattari denominate “conceptual personae.” The flâneur is a stroller, under the spell of urban vertigo (Strassenrausch), captivated by the miscellany of street life, by its rubble and trash but also by the alluring commodity objects on display all about. In relation to the sphere of commodity, flâneur is neither a creator nor a user but an incipient version of the bourgeois consumer who endows objects with an imaginary exchange value. He serves Benjamin as a determinate receptor attuned to the context of the urban existence as it developed in early and mid-nineteenth century. He is in many ways a harbinger of the bourgeois consumer, drawn in fascination to the ambient commodity sphere but not yet altogether absorbed by it. Thus in contrast to the bourgeois consumer, whose fixation on objects is relatively rigid, the flâneur is related to objects in a more floating, inconstant manner, sustained by fantasmatic desire. He gives over to the associational current of his environment and thus makes himself into a registering sensibility for the relics of the past as they are spread out in the décor of the streets: “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” (GS 5: 562 [M 17a, 2]; TAP 448). For Benjamin, the flâneur is an allegorical subject in a double sense, both figure and operator, emblem of a new type of experience and the agent who brings this about. At one level he stands “on the threshold both of the metropolis and of the bourgeoisie.” But he is more than that. He senses the transformation of quotidian experience that the urban environment is bringing about. He calculates his options, and in doing so oscillates between passive participant and active agent. “In the flâneur, the intelligentisia sets foot in the marketplace” (GS 5: 54; TAP 10), we read in the exposé “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth-Century.” Within the allegory of the Passagen, flâneur fulfills at least two functions: as a counterforce to the “Haussmannization” of Paris in the Second Empire, and as an index (though not necessarily a representative) of the emergent urban bourgeoisie in the mid-century. This suggests a parallel to the binarism nomos/polis that is developed in Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus.20 The “striated” space of the polis, as Deleuze and Guattari analyze 20. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).

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it, is segmented “by walls, enclosures, and roads between enclosures” (381) and intended by the state “not only to vanquish nomadism but to control migrations and, more generally, to establish a zone of rights over an entire ‘exterior,’ over all of the flows traversing the ecumenon” (385). This model is applicable to Haussmann’s transformation of the center of Paris at the behest of Napoleon III in the years after 1848. Haussmann’s goal was understood as a means of preventing any future recourse to barricades by a popular uprising. And also, of course, it served to clear out the workers and poorer inhabitants from the ancient quartiers and make space for the avenues, monuments, and commercial establishments that would make Paris a prime goal for tourism, fashion, and entertainment. In this model, the flâneur may be likened to Deleuze-Guattari’s nomad: “the nomad can be called the Deterritorialized par excellence . . . [nomads] are vectors of deterritorialization” (381–82). Benjamin’s flâneur provides a historical instantiation of considerable complexity for this idea of nomadic space. In the exposé Benjamin writes, the gaze of the allegorist, as it falls on the city, is the gaze of the alienated man. It is the gaze of the flâneur, whose way of life still conceals behind a mitigating nimbus the coming desolation of the big-city dweller. The flâneur still stands at the threshold— of the metropolis as of the middle class. Neither has him in its power yet. In neither is he at home. He seeks refuge in the crowd. (GS 5: 54; TAP 10)

Benjamin avoids any overly narrow identification of the flâneur with either the artist /bohemian class or with the bourgeoisie. Rather, flâneur serves as a variable historical designator of time (pace, speed) and space, as Benjamin indicates in his comment on Poe’s “Man of the Crowd”: “The man of the crowd is no flâneur. In him, composure has given way to manic behavior. He exemplifies, rather, what had to become of the flâneur after the latter was deprived of the milieu to which he belonged”(GS 1: 627; SW 4: 326). In a sense, the flâneur and the arcades function as alternative and complementary operators in relation to the street, articulating its new status in the modern city. Each serves, though in different ways, to turn the street into an interieur: the flâneur by the way he uses it and sees it, the arcades by literally covering and encasing the street. The flâneur gives over to the associational current of his environment and thus makes himself into a registering sensibility for the relics of the past as they are spread out in the décor of the

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streets and shops. Benjamin relates this stance to what he terms the “colportage phenomenon,” a fascination with the surface glitter of the world, with the indiscriminate aggregate of appearances, a “category of illustrative seeing” (GS 5: 528 [M 2, 2]; TAP 419). Thus, the flâneur embodies a mode of response very different from the kind of interiorization and accretion of memory data that characterized the subject of historicism. The flâneur as wanderer, more precisely, as errant stroller, Irrender, is continually on the move. But—and here the notion of territoriality is especially relevant—his function in the urban milieu is both variable and formative. He is attuned to the qualities of that milieu—its rhythms, its currents of desire and repulsion, its degrees of density—and in ongoing interchange with it serves both as gauge and regulator. In this sense, the flâneur instantiates what Deleuze and Guattari term conceptual persona, the dimension of the philosophical concept that serves to track mobile forces, agencies interacting with one another and thereby continually modifying the field in question. Such personae, they write, “make perceptible, in the most insignificant or most important circumstances, the formation of territories, the vectors of deterritorialization, and the process of reterritorialization.”21 In this sense, Benjamin’s flâneur should be taken not as an aimless wanderer but as agent of a self-regulating praxis, mediating temporal and historical registers. In “Berlin Chronicle,” we recall, Benjamin wrote that he viewed his childhood as a period of “impotence/passivity before the city” (Ohnmacht vor der Stadt) (GS 6: 466; SW 2: 596). If this is taken as indicative of how, in the early 1930s, he gauged his receptivity to signs of the city, his orientation in the second phase of work on the Passagen project took a new turn. A letter of August 2–5, 1935, by Gretel and Theodor Adorno, alludes to the Grandville illustration that Benjamin had described in “The Ring of Saturn” (TAP 885), a passage that Benjamin had probably read to the Adornos in 1929. Benjamin’s reply of August 16, 1935 takes this up and then, playing on their version of the Grandville image, Benjamin writes, That “the wrought-iron balcony would have to become the ring of Saturn,” I do not in the least want to deny. But I will have to make this clear: To bring 21. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 68.

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about this transformation can in no sense be the task of a single reflection— and least of all of that drawing by Grandville—rather, it devolves exclusively on the book as a whole. Forms such as were presented in “Berlin Childhood” cannot find a place or be utilized in any measure precisely in this book: It was a major function of the second draft [the exposé, “Paris Capital of the Nineteenth Century”] to ground this realization within me. The primal history of the nineteenth century, mirrored in the vision of the child playing on its threshold, had a totally different countenance than that in the signs that they engrave on the map of history. (GB 5: 144)

These dense, allusive lines are significant but need some clarification. Although what is at issue in these letters is the exposé of 1935, Benjamin does not want the Adornos to assume that the Passagen project is still at the stage of the sketches that he had read to them in 1929 and which Adorno had enthusiastically endorsed. Nor does he want this project mixed with the reminiscences of his Berlin childhood that he composed in the intervening years. It is significant that he should focus on his short account of Grandville’s “Ring of Saturn,” which also dates to 1929. The implication, I think, is that that passage, while not in itself symbolic for “the book as a whole,” was far more relevant than the Berlin sketches for what he intended as “the primal history [or Ur-history] of the nineteenth century.” It is noteworthy that Benjamin at this time, 1935, still envisaged a book as the fruit of the project. Three years later, in 1938, things were more confused, in part because the Baudelaire materials had claimed his chief attention, and also, of course, because his status in France was becoming more acute. Still, he continued to enter excerpts into the manuscript until May 1940.22

An Exile in Paris From 1933 on, Benjamin was an exile in Paris, supported by a minimal stipend from the Institute for Social Research, largely ignored by the French intelligentsia, sustained by letters from Scholem, Adorno, and a few others, and also by contact with a few fellow-emigrés and with Brecht, whom he visited occasionally in Denmark—but still, for the most part, isolated. Even in 22. See GS 7: 871.

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the letters to friends he can only show a part of himself, that part adapted to each one’s interests and capacities, something he is keenly sensitive to. And this very quality, the separation he maintains from those close to him, may also be related to his extraordinary ability to work along multiple tracks, often quite remote from one another. His only secure home, now—after the loss of his apartment in Berlin, not to mention the virtual loss of any means of feuilleton publication, and thus of his livelihood—is the seat that he can claim in the Paris libraries. But this is not a negligible matter. You have a place (even if only a seat at a table), your work is taken seriously (at least by the library personnel), you have a something to do, something in principle inexhaustible though it can be adapted to one’s particular pursuits. For Benjamin, that library “research” is a kind of safe haven. Surely he couldn’t have said, in many instances, what he was looking for, but he trusted his instincts. And then there were some surprising discoveries in his reading, such as the figure of Blanqui. At certain moments things crystallize, as when he has to write those exposés for the Institute for Social Research. And to this we should add the major essays that must be considered offshoots of the Passagen, namely, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” and “On the Concept of History.” All the time that he is gathering materials for the convolutes there is an ongoing theorization and speculation, scattered throughout the work, though much is concentrated in Convolute N. The image of Benjamin as an exile in Paris, working in the Bibliothèque Nationale, has been captured photographically in a number of shots by Gisèle Freund and it is also intimated in one of the rare entries of the Passagen that, while it does not employ the first-person singular, nonetheless clearly refers to the writer himself: These notes devoted to the Paris arcades were begun under an open sky of cloudless blue that arched above the foliage; and yet— owing to the millions of leaves that were visited by the fresh breeze of diligence, the stertorous breath of the researcher, the storm of youthful zeal, and the idle wind of curiosity—they’ve been covered with the dust of centuries. For the painted sky of summer that looks down from the arcades in the reading room of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris has spread out over them its dreamy, unlit ceiling. (GW 5: 571 [N 1, 5]; TAP 457f )

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Benjamin refers here to the famous main reading room built in the early 1860s by Pierre-François-Henri Labrouste. It is noteworthy that its gigantic glass dome is a variant of the type of construction that was used in the arcades that became widespread in European cities in the mid-century, as well as the enormous exhibition halls, such as the Crystal Palace of the London World’s Fair of 1849. This entry has, I think, a performative valence, something like an invocation—not to a goddess or muse, but, in its contradictory strains, perhaps an effort to address the archive to which Benjamin is devoting these years and which he confronts with keen awareness of its resistant immensity.23 The entry just cited, as well as others at the beginning of Convolute N,24 all testify to an effort on Benjamin’s part to bridge the gap between his place in the reading room and the veritably infinite archive of works available to him. To find the appropriate citations, to make a cut or incision in that archive, would seem to call for a well-neigh divinatory capacity. How does one find one’s way in an archive? This is the question that Benjamin must have posed in the course of his researches in the Bibliothèque Nationale, and it is one that confronts any reader of the Passagen. Benjamin’s answer, I suggest, was: By getting lost. By acceding to the rule of the labyrinth. (Cf. “to lose oneself in a city—as one loses oneself in a forest,” GS 6: 469; SW 2: 598.) It is by way of Irrgänge (straying, erring)—akin to the divinatory sauntering of flânerie—that Benjamin conceived a way of penetrating the archive, of finding a passage into the massive, apparently impenetrable storehouse of the Bibliotèque Nationale (“millions of leaves . . . covered with the dust of centuries”). 23. Heiner Weidemann makes this apt comment on the political stakes of Benjamin’s work in this period: “One might well consider absurd the spectacle of Benjamin sitting in the Bibliothèque Nationale, immersed in an endless, passionate reading of the nineteenth century, and this, not even as a dreamy Privatgelehrte who has understandably abstained from any political concerns, but actually in the very name of politics—all this while the political situation world-wide, and also for him personally, becomes ever more acute and the routes of escape diminish daily, until he finally attempts a last one.” Heiner Weidemann, Flanerie, Sammlung, Spiel: Dike Erinnerung des 19. Jahrhunderts bei Walter Benjamin (Munich: Fink Verlag, 1992), 58. 24. For example, “In the fields with which we are concerned, knowledge comes only in lightning flashes. The text is the long roll of thunder that follows” (GS 5: 570 [N 1,1]; TAP 456).

Figure 4. Reading room of the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris. (Photo by Candida Höfer. © 2002 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.)

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We may better grasp now the surprising collocation of historical method and philology that Benjamin expressed in this notation regarding the Passagen-Werk: “The historical method is a philological one that lies at the basis of the book of life. ‘To read what was never written,’ we find in Hofmannstahl. The reader of whom one thinks here is the true historian” (GS 1: 1238). “Philology” here may be taken in the sense that Daniel HellerRoazen, in an essay on the destruction of the Library of Alexandria, termed “the restorative function.” This signifies, he continues, “that one . . . may speak of its subject matter only once it has registered its very loss, and it can give itself its object only on condition of having destroyed it first.”25 This dynamic element of the project is well characterized by Susan Buck-Morss: Benjamin described the “pedagogic” side of his work: “ ‘to educate the imagecreating medium within us to see dimensionally, stereoscopically, into the depths of the historical shade’ ” (GS 5: 571). Now a stereoscope, that instrument which creates a three-dimensional image, works from not one image, but two. On their own, the historical facts of the Passagen-Werk are flat . . . It is because they are, and were meant to be, only half the text. The reader of Benjamin’s generation was to provide the other half from the fleeting images that appeared, isolated from history, in his or her lived experience.26

Benjamin’s project manifests the stereoscopic principle in a highly reflexive manner, and it invites a reading that is attuned to its status as relic and fragment—a reading that is philological and historical, but also, coordinately, divinatory because the Passagen-Werk, though not a book but an integral “Werk,” was a project awaiting its “actualization.” 25. Heller-Roazen develops this in an essay on the alleged burning of the Library of Alexandria. The destruction, he argues, whether it happened or not, may be taken as foundational for philology. Daniel Heller-Roazen, “Tradition’s Destruction: On the Library of Alexandria,” October 100 (Spring, 2002): 152. 26. Susan Buck-Morss, “The Flaneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering,” New German Critique 39 (1986): 109.

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Citation as Incitation: The Political Agenda of the Passagenarbeit

What is “Das Passagen-Werk”? What we have is a massive collection of fragments, tantalizing but unwieldy, a collection that could give rise to a number of alternative models. It cannot be called a Werk, although it was undoubtedly conceived in view of one. At the same time, it was in ongoing dialogue with the essays of the thirties, essays that may well be considered finished works. Thus, it is not inappropriate to look for what might be termed “the idea the Passagen,” though it would be mistaken to suggest that Benjamin’s own conception of it might be recovered or reconstituted. The closest we come to such a conception, as Irving Wohlfarth has argued, is in the two exposés of 1935 and 1939. He terms the first (the second is nearly identical, with the addition of two short sections) “a first fundamental outline of the envisaged book,”1 and characterizes their condensed, 1. Irving Wohlfarth, “Die Passagenarbeit,” in Benjamin-Handbuch, 260. This essay provides a discerning account of the place of the Passagenarbeit within Benjamin’s writings of the thirties. 127

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concise style as follows: “Every sentence deserves a chapter, every chapter, a book for itself. Here the Land Surveyor traverses the terrain in seven-league boots. The art consists in bringing the motifs into relation to one another and leave the commentary in the background” (259). But the exposés were prepared at the request of Horkheimer and the Institute for Social Research. They reflect a fixation of the project at a given moment, oriented to what Benjamin presumed to be the interests of the Institute. They are not at all congruent with the topic headings of the “convolutes,” the “Aufzeichnungen und Materialien” of the Gesammelte Schriften, and it is these that constitute the reservoir of materials that Benjamin gathered over some thirteen years. This enormous collection of excerpts and notes dealing largely with nineteenth-century Paris might well be taken as the basis for a work of critical sociology. But for Benjamin it served as a highly personal archive, a textual labyrinth intended to generate a new kind of historical writing. And it was an indeterminate archive, one whose boundaries and method of classification remained open. The multiple crossreferences, the repeated attempts to create supplementary classifications, the excess of citations over commentary—all this ensured that this textual landscape would allow for further exploration. In this sense, Benjamin fashioned a labyrinth where he might wander without premeditation, one where constellations could come about without intention.2 After the first intense occupation with the Passagen in the late twenties, Benjamin’s attention turned elsewhere. When he resumed serious work on it in 1934, it was to a very different project than the earlier one, as he wrote to Scholem in March 1934 (GB 4: 358). Again, in the fall he is writing to Adorno of the “conclusion of the essay period” and the resumption of work on the Passagen.3 And in a letter to Werner Kraft in May 1935, he speaks with wonderment of the “total revolution that the mass of ideas and images deriving from my very early purely metaphysical, even theological, thinking had to undergo . . . so that they could nourish my current disposition with 2. As Rolf Tiedemann notes in the introduction to the Passagen-Werk, a large body of manuscript notes were not included in the GS. Their publication will have to await the forthcoming edition of the Passagen materials by Suhrkamp. 3. Letter of Adorno to Benjamin of November 6, 1934, referring to a lost letter of Benjamin’s. Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno, Briefwechsel 1928–1940, Volume 1 of Theodor W. Adorno, Briefe und Briefwechsel, ed. Henri Lonitz (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1994), 73.

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all the force they contained” (GB 5: 88–89). “This process proceeded in silence,” he continues. “I myself was so little aware of it that I was extraordinarily astonished when—as the result of an external stimulus—the plan was recently written within a few days.” He is referring, of course, to the exposé “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” which he had prepared for the Institute for Social Research. A week later, on May 31, 1935, after sending the exposé to the Institute, he sends Adorno a detailed reflection on it. As with all of Benjamin’s letters, one must be closely attentive to his relations to the recipient. He now recalls for Adorno the meetings in Königstein (near Frankfurt) in the fall of 1929 when he read his first sketches for the project to a group that included, in addition to Adorno, Grete Kaplus, Adorno’s future wife, Horkheimer, and Asja Lacis. He refers somewhat disparagingly to the project of that period, terming it one of “rhapsodic naiveté” (GB 5: 97) that was brought to an end by those very talks, although, he goes on, “at the time, and for some years to come, I still had no idea of any other possible form.” He touches on the decisive impact of his new relationship with Brecht, which began at that time, well aware that the influence of Brecht is something Adorno would disapprove of. But he also wants to make clear that this has been assimilated and put into perspective in the intervening years. What is more, Benjamin defends himself “for everything which could possibly be mobilized against my working methods from orthodox Marxist quarters.” He may be responding here to Adorno’s hope, stated in a letter just a few days before (May 20, 1935) but before Adorno had seen the exposé, that Benjamin would “write the Arcades in a manner faithful to its own origin [Urgeschichte].” Just what Adorno meant here is not easy to deduce, but evidently Benjamin took him to refer to the 1929 discussions where, it may be presumed, he and Horkheimer had urged Benjamin to immerse himself in a study of Marx. It should be noted that Adorno had been a fervent champion within the Institute of what he understood of the Arcades Project as developed in those meetings of 1929. But now in 1935, Benjamin may have felt it necessary to make clear that his own position had not been static, and he writes, “I now believe that à la longue I have actually reached solid ground through the Marxist discussion of my work, if only because the decisive question concerning the historical image has been treated here for the first time in all its range.” When Benjamin writes “historical image” here he is reiterating what he referred to as “the world of dialectical images”

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a few lines before, and this may be taken as the decisive new dimension that he has now attained, the fruit of the “general process of fusion” (Umschmelzungsprozess) whereby he has overcome his earlier “metaphysical” orientation. The practical motive of this letter is still to come, for Benjamin next makes clear that he will require 1,000 francs a month from the Institute for Social Research to maintain his research in Paris, though it is already understood that the Arcades Project would not serve as a contribution to the Institute’s periodical. Indeed, Benjamin declares himself ready to take on other assignments for this purpose, though he makes it clear that any too burdensome tasks would compromise his work on the Arcades. In summary, while this letter documents a decisive phase of Benjamin’s conception of the project, his position is embedded in a complex negotiation that involves both his personal relation to Adorno (and to Adorno’s conception of the project) and his dependence on the Institute. Most treatments of The Arcades Project have assumed that its essence lies in a few thematic elements. These have been well analyzed by a number of critics, beginning with an essay by Burkhardt Lindner just a year after the publication of Das Passagen-Werk.4 He notes that in the 1935 exposé and the entries of the work itself, there is a transformation of the flâneur figure who, in contrast to his function in the early sketches as a roving aesthete, is now sent into the street and immersed in the life of the city and the masses. Lindner distinguishes three dimensions of this state of affairs, each increasingly focused on the relation of modernity and urban experience: The big city is turned into an interieur where the experience of space as colportage allows street to exist alongside dwelling, landscape alongside home, in each case fusing into a sense of well-being and belonging. The multitude of Physiologies, tracts of city living that appeared in the earlier nineteenth century, were designed to facilitate an acclimatization to the new urban centers. 4. Burkhardt Lindner, “Das ‘Passagen-Werk,’ die ‘Berliner Kindheit’ und die Archäologie des ‘Jüngstvergangenen,’ ” in Passagen: Walter Benjamins Urgeschichte des XIX. Jahrhunderts, ed. Norbert W. Bolz and Bernd Witte (Munich: Fink Verlag, 1984), 27– 48. In English as “The Passagen-Werk, the Berliner Kindheit, and the Archaeology of the ‘Recent Past,’ ” trans. Carol B. Ludtke, New German Critique 39 (Autumn, 1986): 25– 46.

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The comforting image of the city at this first level gives rise to a contrasting dimension of wilderness and degradation. Benjamin here evokes the new literature of this nether world, both in Europe (Sue, Dumas, Balzac) and in alien settings (Cooper’s Indian novels). The emergence of the detective story allows an elaboration of the resultant phantasmagoria as well as a means of bringing it under control. In Lindner’s analysis, the miscellany and glamour of the arcades are displaced by a more effective venue of display, the department store (“The department store is the final trajectory of the flâneur,” GS 1: 557). Here commodity comes fully into its own. Benjamin cites Marx’s discussion of commodity fetishism in Capital and Baudelaire’s characterization of the “religious intoxication of the big cities.” And, extending an image of Baudelaire’s—“Cette sainte prostitution de l’âme”—Benjamin imbues commodities with a sensuous allure and self-conscious venality that is concentrated in the prostitute. The whore’s professional capacity to achieve empathy with any number of potential clients serves as emblematic for the prostitution of use value in all forms of commodity. In a wide-ranging sketch of “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire” of early 1938, Benjamin wrote, “The allegorical viewpoint is always constructed in terms of a debased world of appearances [entwertete Erscheinungswelt]. The specific debasement of the object-world [Dingwelt] that is present in commodity is the basis of the allegorical intention in Baudelaire. The prostitute as embodiment of commodity has a central place in Baudelaire’s work. The prostitute is on the other hand allegory in human form” (GS 1: 1151).5 He is pursuing a long-standing intention to transpose allegory from the Baroque Trauerspiel to the modern commodity form, though this remained largely unrealized.6 Of the more recent studies, Isabel Kranz7 provides a searching analysis of The Arcades Project from an intrinsic point of view, that is, on the premise 5. Included in a letter to Horkheimer of April 16, 1938. 6. Benjamin often expresses this intention, as in Zentralpark: “Die Umfunktionierung der Allegorie in der Warenwirtschaft ist darzustellen. . . .” (GS 1: 671). 7. Isabel Kranz, Raumgewordene Vergangenheit: Walter Benjamins Poetologie der Geschichte (Fink: Munich, 2011).

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that a conception of the work as an integral whole can be reconstructed. She is well aware of the risks of such an undertaking and guards against any facile assumptions regarding the unity of such a conception. Nevertheless, her approach, as indicated in her title, is markedly topographical, and even, as she puts it, paleontological. In this connection she cites the following passage: As rocks of the Miocene or Eocene in places bear the imprint of monstrous creatures from those ages, so today arcades dot the metropolitan landscape like caves containing the fossil remains of a vanished monster: the consumer of the pre-imperial era of capitalism, the last dinosaur of Europe. Commodity, like immemorial flora, luxuriates on the walls of these caverns and enters, like cancerous tissue, into the most disorderly combinations. (GS 5: 670 [R 2, 3]; TAP 540, trans. modified)

In her gloss, she emphasizes a recurrent thematic of hollowness, concavity, in short, of a void-to-be-filled. This is exemplified in The Arcades Project by entries that dwell on the urban nether world of nineteenth-century Paris— the catacombs, the underground sanitation system, and then, by association, grottos, aquariums, and a sunken oceanic world (suggested by Friedrich Gestäcker’s 1853 tale, “Die versunkene Stadt”). In terms of the bourgeois individual, the Privatmann, the most relevant category is the (domestic) interior (das Interieur). This is featured in one of the sections of the exposé of 1935, “Louis Philippe, or the Interior”: Under the reign of Louis Philippe, the private individual makes his entrance on the stage of history. . . . The private individual, who in the office has to deal with realities, needs the domestic interior to sustain him in his illusions. . . . The interior is not just the universe but also the etui 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 most ordinary objects of use are imprinted. In just the same way, the traces of the inhabitants are imprinted in the interior. (Exposé of 1935, TAP 8–9)

In the most general terms, we find here a phenomenology of domestic existence or dwelling (Wohnen) that applies to innumerable practices of a given culture. Benjamin recognized the need but also the difficulty of circumscribing such a sphere of historically characteristic instances:

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Analysis of dwelling: The difficulty here is that on the one hand, in dwelling (Wohnen) the age-old—perhaps eternal—has to be recognized: image of that abode of the human being in the maternal womb. And then, on the other hand, this motif of primal history notwithstanding, we must understand dwelling in its most extreme form as a condition of nineteenth-century existence, one with which we have begun to break. . . . . The nineteenthcentury, like no other century, was addicted to dwelling. It conceived the residence as the receptacle for the person, and it encased him, with all his appurtenances, so deeply in the dwelling’s interior that one might be reminded of the inside of a compass case, where the instrument with all its accessories lies embedded in deep, usually violet folds of velvet. (GS 5: 1035; TAP 865)

Both Lindner and Kranz provide a well-documented and thoughtfully organized account of the social and material context treated in The Arcades Project. Lindner’s essay takes as a point of departure “Berlin Childhood Around 1900,” and this allows him to draw on Benjamin’s conception of childhood as a privileged means of access to the unconscious of nineteenthcentury material culture.8 Further, he shows how Benjamin’s reception of Surrealism confirmed his sense of the revolutionary energies of obsolescence. Isabel Kranz proceeds from a number of a number of key loci (citations as well as spatial forms) and shows how Benjamin displaces and recontextualizes them for purposes of a literary (poetologisches) project (15). She pays close attention to the sources of the cited materials and then traces how, for Benjamin, “words become metaphors and finally concepts.” But one cannot help asking: Whose concepts? Her book provides a complex argument based on Benjamin’s (largely) posthumous writings, but it cannot provide the link that makes the argument Benjamin’s own. Still, the book poses an interesting methodological problem. It certainly puts forward a plausible version of the “Arcades Project.” The question I would raise is, whose project? With the “Aufzeichnungen und Materialen” (Notations and Materials), the two exposés (of 1935 and 1939), and early sketches and drafts, Benjamin left behind an extraordinary trove. How may it be used?

8. This excerpt from One-Way Street is one of many passages on this issue: “For children . . . are irresistibly drawn to the detritus generated by building, gardening, housework, tailoring, or carpentry. In waste products [Abfallprodukten] they recognize the face that the world of things turns directly and solely to them” (SW 1: 449).

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To undertake a fulfillment of The Arcades Project,9 would be, in a sense, to try to complete the task that Benjamin never completed. Possibly, in the course of those years that Benjamin spent in exile in Paris, he moved further and further from the “crystallization” of 1928. Adorno reported that it was Benjamin’s intention in The Arcades Project “to avoid any direct explication and allow the meaning to emerge solely through a shock-induced montage of the material . . . To cap the anti-subjectivist tendency of this work it was to consist solely of citations.”10 Adorno is surely mistaken on this last point, but his remark is nonetheless relevant in that it underscores Benjamin’s interest in drawing on cinematic—what today we might term media—techniques in the composition of his work. Adorno’s remark also draws our attention back to the active sense of “citing” and “citation” in Benjamin’s usage. (This was developed in Chapter 2 with respect to Karl Kraus.) When Benjamin writes, “To write history, then, means to cite history” (GS 5: 595, [N 11, 3]; TAP 476), he is not talking about the dependence of the history writer on any source or archive but rather about his ability to wrest what materials he needs and model them for his purposes. Thus citing involves not only evocation, retrieval of a text or a concept, but also a dynamic intervention into the temporal process that activates a past in the present: citing as an inciting. Through this focus on citation, Benjamin is, in effect, arguing for a model that stresses, first, the isolate, fragmentary form of the historical datum, its resistance to assimilation into a narrative mold; then, its “monadic” structure, that is, its inclusiveness and complexity, its ability to reflect a conflict in a still unresolved form (cf. GS 5: 594 [N 10, 3]; TAP 475); and finally its “acceding to legibility” (zur Lesbarkeit kommen, GS 5: 577 [N 3, 1]; TAP 462), its capacity to prepare the modality of its reception and thus to bring about a determinate effect.11 9. This title more accurately conveys Passagenarbeit, the term frequently used by Benjamin, than the title that editors of the Gesammelte Schriften gave to the 1982 publication, Das Passagen-Werk, one that misleadingly suggests an integral work. 10. Cited in Tiedemann’s introduction to the Passagen-Werk, GS 5: 13. 11. See Michel de Certeau, L’écriture de l’histoire (Paris: Gallimard, 2002), 111 ff, for a discussion of the function of citation in history writing. Gerhard Kurz acutely connects the notion of citation with Benjamin’s idea of a recuperative function of criticism (“rettende Kritik”), and Kurz underlines this form of criticism as an exercise of freedom and thus a manifestation of history as practical reason in Kant’s

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Citation is by definition oriented to the second-hand, and Benjamin radicalizes this feature by singling out what is outmoded, used-up, cast-off. One of the first notations that Benjamin made on the project in 1927–28 gives a sense of what attracted him: World of particular secret affinities: palm tree and feather duster, hairdryer and Venus de Milo, champagne bottles, prostheses, and letter-writing manuals . . . (TAP 827)

What is relevant in lists of this kind is that the items, quotidian and insignificant in themselves, serve as markers of temporal strata and thus can be subjected to archeological analysis. It was in the essay “Surrealism” (1929), written at the time that he was putting down his first ideas about the Passagen, that he most directly articulated the historical significance of the “outmoded”: He [André Breton] can boast an extraordinary discovery: he 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. . . . 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. (SW 2: 210)

He frames the issue more explicitly in a letter to Scholem in 1935: “The project involves . . . the attempt to retain the image of history in the most inconspicuous corners of existence, in its dregs, as it were” (August 9, 1935, in GB 5: 138). What is more, because the meaning derives from the process of construction, the instances used may be trivial in themselves: Method of this project: literary montage. I need’t say anything. Merely show. I shall purloin no valuables, appropriate no ingenious formulations. But the rags, the refuse—these I will not inventory but allow, in the only way pos-

sense. See Gerhard Kurz, “Benjamin: Kritischer Gelesen,” Philosophische Rundschau 23 (1976): 183ff.

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sible, to come into their own: by making use of them. (GS 5: 574 [N 1a, 8]; TAP 460)

What is at issue in Benjamin’s conception of citation is not limited to the sphere of language but applies also to his historiography. In the “Theses,” alluding to Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire, he writes, “To Robespierre ancient Rome was a past charged with now-time [ Jetztzeit], a past which he blasted out of the continuum of history. The French Revolution viewed itself as Rome reincarnate” (SW 4: 395; GS 2: 701). And in the essay on Eduard Fuchs (1937), he writes that a scholar “must abandon the calm, contemplative attitude toward his object in order to become conscious of the critical constellation in which precisely this fragment of the past finds itself with precisely this present” (SW 3: 262; GS 2: 467f ). What is referred to in both instances, of course, is the conjunction of two events not two texts, but just as such a conjunction is capable of transforming “homogenous, empty time” (Thesis XIII) into mutually potentiating moments, so the act of citing at the level of language is conceived by Benjamin in dynamic terms. Antoine Compagnon has analyzed this “dynamic” operation as follows: Citation proceeds from a double arbitrary choice: first, that of solicitation, which is produced in the course of reading or hearing something and provokes me to extract from an ante factum, to excise a piece read or heard; second, that of incitation, which leads me to insert the piece that has been dislodged into my own discourse. Solicitation and incitation separate for good the citation from the referent, the “idea” which the expression enunciated in the first place, the ground of the sign, and launch the series of values which it assumes in the repetition, these values and the repetition never abolishing the [element of ] chance at the origin of the citation.12

What Compagnon has done here is to separate the moment of selection and retrieval, the evocation of a citation (what he terms “solicitation”), from its repetition and reactivation (“incitation” in his usage). The “referent” or “idea” that may have been lodged in the initial instance ceases to be operative because now the instance has “launch[ed] the series of values which it assumes in the repetition . . .” Compagnon does not pursue this point, but 12. Antoine Compagnon, La seconde main: Ou, le travail de la citation (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1979), 66f.

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it is precisely what interests me most strongly here. The process of retrieval, the interpellation or summoning denoted by zitieren, implies a necessity, a compunction within the past instance for a future fulfillment or realization, what Benjamin termed Aktualisieren. I will return to this issue, but need first to consider a distinctive representational feature that Benjamin intended to put into play in this project. Although he was intensely interested in forms of pictorial and theatrical representation as they had evolved from the seventeenth century on, he was no less conscious of the fact that his own medium remained the printed text, the book. What he seems to have aspired to in the Passagen was a book without illustrations that would nonetheless have the effect of a multimedia collage, working on its audience not through explicit conceptual argumentation and exposition but by evoking and reordering a repertoire of images already available to the mass audience. Already in One-Way Street (written 1923–26), he was theorizing the transformation of the book in the context of print culture: “Writing, which had found a shelter in the printed book where it could maintain an autonomous existence, has been mercilessly dragged out into the street by advertisement and subjected to the brutal heteronomy of the chaotic marketplace. This is the demanding lesson of its new form” (SW 1: 456; GS 4: 103). The key cognitive category that Benjamin evolved in connection with his project is “dialectical image.” In the 1935 exposé, “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” Benjamin had written of the dialectical image as a “dream image” (Traumbild), and continued, “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: 55; TAP 10). As we may see in these example— commodity, arcades, prostitute—the dialectical image predicates an idealizing context that is first accepted and then exploded.13 The arcades suggest both the sheltering ambiance of a house and the alienating exteriority of 13. Kaja Silverman offers an interesting qualification for this concept: “The dialectical image is not well served by the name Benjamin gives it. It consists not of a thesis, antithesis, and resolution, but rather of something more closely approximating a Baudelairean ‘correspondence.’ It makes manifest the resemblances linking temporally divergent moments to each other, permitting them to ‘communicate.’ These similarities render null and void concepts like progress, development, and

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the street. The prostitute, at once saleswoman and wares, embodies the bifurcation of the structure of commodity: an object of desire that reflexively betrays its presumed worth. This reflexive element is especially noteworthy, as Benjamin writes, “Commodity attempts to look itself in the face. Its entry into mankind [ihre Menschwerdung] is celebrated in the whore” (I: 671, Zentralpark). Jean-Luc Godard’s cinematic technique, especially as manifest in Histoire(s) du cinéma, offers a revealing analogy to what Benjamin undertook in the Passagen. In his films of the 1990s, Godard had been developing what may be called single-shot montage, where there are two (or sometimes more) shots in rapid alternation, sometimes flickering so rapidly that the separate shots are difficult to perceive. This near-fusion of divergent images constitutes a radicalization of a more typical technique, where a series of divergent shots—not linked by temporal or diegetic continuity—may be used to construct a visual effect that transcends any single shot. Whether Godard’s single-shot montage is perceptible in normal viewing is an open question, but it does offer an analogy to the montage technique that Benjamin was developing. The kind of layered palimpsest effect that Godard undertook is indicated by Benjamin’s entry in Convolute N: Pedagogic side of this undertaking: “To educate the image-making medium [das bildschaffende Medium] within us, raising it to a stereoscopic and dimensional seeing into the depths of historical shadows.” The words are Rudolf Borchardt’s in Epilegomena zu Dante . . . (GS 5: 571 [N 1, 8]; TAP 458)

This is noteworthy on a number of counts. What is sought is an on-going capacity, and one oriented not so much to language as to Bild, which of course is most readily translated as (pictorial) image but should be taken more widely to encompass figurative language, too. What is more, the receptive or viewing power is coincident with a formative, creative one [bildschaffende(s) Medium], these two fusing into what is called “stereoscopic and dimensional seeing,” that is, a viewing that spontaneously evokes multiple layers in a pluridimensional configuration. This Benjamin terms “pedagogic,” whereby he indicates his own highly self-conscious, disciplined training in vision. cause and effect.” Kaja Silverman, “The Dream of the Nineteenth Century,” Camera Obscura 17, no. 3 (2002): 4.

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When Bild is made the fundamental unit of citation, an altogether new temporal process is stipulated. Compagnon’s account of these two phases, namely, solicitation and incitation, is vague about their relation to each other, suggesting that they must be mutually coordinate but somehow also sequential. Benjamin resolves this issue by what he terms the “historical index of the Bilder,” an index whose temporal modus is the present as determined by “recognizability” or “legibility”: “the now of a particular recognizability” (das Jetzt einer bestimmten Erkennbarkeit) or “acceding to legibility” (zur Lesbarkeit kommen) (GS 5: 577–78 [N 3, 1]; TAP 462). These formulations are not altogether congruent with Compagnon’s phases of solicitation /incitation. When Benjamin writes (still in the same entry, N 3, 1), “what has been comes together in a flash with the Now to form a constellation” (dasjenige, worin das Gewesene mit dem Jetzt blitzhaft zu einer Konstellation zusammentritt), he does not refer to an inert repository of past events, waiting to be revived or activated. The lightening moment, the Now ( Jetzt) that marks the emergence of a new constellation, does not allow for a considered process of selection. The emergence is tied to the “perilous, critical moment,” to “truth charged to the bursting point with time” (ibid.). While the focus on temporality in this entry (N 3, 1) anticipates one of the preeminent issues of the Theses (“On the Concept of History”), the formulation “acceding to legibility” is no less significant for The Arcades Project. The idea of legibility involves a coordination of message and recipient: A citation comes due only when it reaches its appropriate addressee, one attuned to its meaning. In this sense, legibility becomes implicated in explicitly messianic concepts such as Aktualität and Ruhm (afterlife), concepts that cannot be fitted into a historicist framework. Let us now return to the question of how the collection, the fragments gathered in the convolutes, may be conceived. What kind of archive is it? It is clearly not a passive, pre-existent reservoir but one that is somehow created or activated in the process of retrieval. What constitutes this act of retrieval? Typically, an archive operates as a source, subject to contingent memorization. A citation is sought in view of a determinate purpose or motivation. But The Arcades Project is conceived in a manner that might allow the citation to emerge as if unsought. Here, the solicitation or retrieval is to be motivated by a link in the source, as if that source were a personal memory. Hence the archive will yield a meaning only for me (for any single individual).

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Benjamin accounts for this singular type of recovery through the notion of Eingedenken. His claim is that, by way of Eingedenken, the past becomes available for modification.14 Let us not forget that Das Passage-Werk names a prospective work, one that remained unwritten. These excerpts, culled from books in the Bibliothèque Nationale, do not yet constitute citations in that they have not yet been inserted into a new context. This stage is what Compagnon calls solicitation. Of course, their status within Benjamin’s collection, and indeed, their placement in specifically identified folders, already constitutes a significant displacement, and in the afterlife of this work they have been, and will continue to be, interpreted in view of the unwritten work that each interpreter projects. It would only be at a later stage, in a text that drew on the citations as a source, that the impact of a juxtaposition of citations would become evident.15 This juxtaposition is comparable to the lightning conjunction that produces a constellation: “image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash [blitzhaft] with the Now [ Jetzt] to form a constellation”(N 2a, 3).16 Thus, within the convolutes, the excerpts drawn from multiple sources may be considered no more than incipient citations because their placement within an argument (incitation for Compagnon) is still indeterminate. This function, what Benjamin in another context terms “putting them to use” (sie verwenden), remains potential. What is Benjamin looking for as he orders hundreds of books from the stacks and copies out the mass of citations? What principle guides this selection, both of the books and the passages selected from them? Or, to shift the question, what did Benjamin hope to discover once he had gathered this highly miscellaneous archive? So many of the entries, laboriously copied from mostly French sources, may seem negligible, even trivial. At the level of biography we must take account of his exilic condition, of the fact that 14. See also Benjamin’s reaction to Horkheimer’s protest to what he saw as Benjamin’s idea of the “incompleteness of history.” (See the conclusion of the Introduction in this book.) 15. This principle may be applied to other writings. Benjamin, as we might expect, was very mindful of how to situate citations. In “The Storyteller”—which is structured as a sequence of narrative citations—the argument depends in great part on the placement of the excerpts in relation to each other. 16. Cf. “The dialectical image is an image that emerges suddenly, in a flash [aufblitzendes]. What has been is to be held fast—as an image flashing up in the Now of its recognizability” (GS 5: 591–92 [N 9, 7]; TAP 473).

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his research in the Bibliothèque Nationale served as a kind of safe haven in his exile. But this approach does not take account of his passionate quest to resolve the problem that had awakened in him in 1927–28 when the idea of the Passagen first arose. This sense of mystery, of a nether dream world to be penetrated, is suggested in a number of the notes he made then, such as this one: Such an ideal panorama of a barely elapsed primeval age opens up when we look through the arcades that are found in all cities. Here resides the last dinosaur of Europe, the consumer. . . . These items on display are a rebus; and how one ought to read here the birdseed kept in the fixative-pan from a darkroom, the flower seeds beside the binoculars, the broken screws atop the musical score, and the revolver above the goldfish bowl—is right on the tip of one’s tongue. (TAP 874; GS 5: 1045)

Or, in “Berlin Chronicle” (1932), I tell myself it had to be in Paris, where the walls and quays, the places to pause, the collections and the rubbish, the railings and the squares, the arcades and the kiosks, teach a language so singular that our relations to people attain, in the solitude encompassing us in our immersion in that world of things, the depths of a sleep in which the dream image awaits them, to show them their true faces. (SW 2: 614, trans. modified; GS 6: 490)

The “rebus,” “our immersion in that world of things,” “the dream image”—in these and similar formulations scattered throughout the “First Sketches” and “The Arcades of Paris” (= Pariser Passagen I and II in the GS) Benjamin broaches what is at stake for him in this project. And it is in the citations culled from the volumes of the Bibliothèque Nationale that he looks for the answer. Another answer, of course, constitutes the texts that he actually composed on the basis of the “Aufzeichnungen und Materialen,” namely, the two exposés—“Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century”—and the book draft, “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,” although this last certainly marks a deviation from the Passagen project into a new one. But a different approach to the question may be sought in what Benjamin termed the “magical aspect of language,”17 whereby a past is identified in terms of an unknown future. Benjamin’s task was to treat the citations, 17. Cf. Menninghaus, Theorie der Sprachmagie, 231–33.

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gathered apparently at random, as found objects, but now to be taken as names, in the sense that he had articulated in his 1916 essay “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” thus as potentially revelatory (GS 1: 142–52). The idea of naming as developed in that essay alludes to the creative power with which God endowed Adam (Genesis 2:20). The human power of nomination may well function as mere denotation of things, what Benjamin termed the “bourgeois conception” (die bürgerliche Auffassung), language as only instrumental. But as it moves through phases of trans-position and translation (Übersetzung), language realizes what may be termed a “universal nomination” (universelle Benennung): “So in name culminate both the intensive totality of language, as the absolutely communicable mental entity, and the extensive totality of language” (SW 1: 65; GS 2: 145). The possibility of a “continuum of transformations of one language into another” leading to the highest spiritual revelation, to “pure language,” constitutes the major argument of this essay. But what is not generally considered is the way that human cognition (Erkenntnis), drawing on divine nomination, produces the dense interweaving of multiple layers: “The language of things can pass into the language of knowledge and name only through translation—so many translations, so many languages— once man has fallen from the paradisal state that knew only one language” (SW, 1: 70 –71; GS 2: 152). It is only in consequence of such a conception of language, of language after the fall where the name is still active but much reduced from a primordial potency, that one can understand the significance of Geschwätz (prattle, chatter, gossip, mere talk) in this part of the essay.18 It is an issue that occupied Benjamin in various contexts from the late twenties on, in the essay on Surrealism (1929) and in “On the Image of Proust” of the same year. This last focuses prominently on “Proust’s aim to construe the entire structure of high society as a physiology of chatter [Physiologie des Geschwätzes]” (SW 2: 241; GS 2: 315). Benjamin’s ap18. Peter Fenves first dealt with this issue in “Chatter”: Language and History in Kierkegaard (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993). His recent essay, “The paradisal epoche¯: on Benjamin’s first philosophy,” on which I draw, extends this analysis and situates it in the context of Benjamin’s early conception of language. Peter Fenves, in Arresting Language: From Leibniz to Benjamin (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 174 –226.

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proach to the writings of Karl Kraus provides another illustration of his conception of fallen language.19 In all these instances what becomes manifest is that this lapse or “fall” is not to be taken in a moral sense, as a judgment on certain kinds of speech. It is in the Translator essay that Benjamin most directly articulates what it is that human language has fallen from, and this is expressed figuratively, as the shards that remain of a shattered vessel (GS 4: 18). Or, in another figure from that essay, the “density” of language, sign of a proximity to a primordial fullness, is likened to the “infinitely small point of sense” where a translation meets the original—like the tangent touching a circle—from which each then “pursues its own course according to the law of fidelity in the freedom of linguistic movement” (GS 4: 19–20). What interests me particularly, however, is not that Benjamin draws on elements of revelation or mystical language—which in any case he uses figuratively, much like sources in mythology and literature—but rather how his conception of language— pursuing his distinction between “language as such” (die Sprach Überhaupt) and “the language of human-kind” (die Sprache des Menschen)—leads to a very distinctive approach to the latter, whether this terms is taken to refer to post-Babelic language, to social intercourse, or to a prose du monde. Peter Fenves has termed this negative residue “The paradisal epoche¯,” adapting the Husserlian notion of epoché (suspension) to something like a halting, an abstention with respect to an unavailable positivity. “‘The Task of the Translator,’” Fenves writes, “is an essay on the courage of the translator, and this courage, like that of the poet, does not consist in inspiration or enthusiasm. Rather, the courage consists in halting, that is, in abstaining from positing oneself in a positive world in the first case; abstaining from presenting the residue of the abstention in terms of ‘spiritual content’ or meaning in the second. The Halt of translation is an Enthalten to the second power” (Fenves, “The paradisal epoche¯,” 222–23). This leads Fenves to postulate that Benjamin was in search of techniques capable of generating “the paradisal epoche¯.” “One of these techniques—which Benjamin develops in the body of the Origin and elaborates most fully in the Arcades Project,” Fenves continues, “is a parody of the phenomenological reduction: instead of ‘bracketing’ the world, Benjamin brackets words, taking citations out of their ‘natural’ contexts and 19. See Chapter 2.

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thus making them legible for the first time” (ibid., 225). This way of linking phenomenological reduction and parody suggests that the citations in The Arcades Project, in being “bracketed,” are divested of a determinate meaning and become available for that intermediate stage of “the human word, in which name no longer lives intact and which has stepped out of name-language” (SW 1: 71; GS 2: 153)—the stage that Benjamin termed “magical” in “On Language as Such.” But the magical element is strongly restricted to mark the separation from the level of primal, creative language: “This is really the fall of the language-mind [Sprachgeist]. The word as something externally communicating, as it were a parody by the expressly mediate word of the expressly immediate, the creative word of God, and the decay of the blissful, Adamite language-mind that stand between them.” In these formulations of the 1916 essay on language Benjamin lays out a position that remains constant right through to the final writings. But what in the later work best characterizes the decisive moments is not epoché, parody, or translation, but citation in the radical, transformative sense given to it in “On the Concept of History,” notably, Theses III and XIV: “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 Judgment Day” (SW 4: 390). Citation as has been developed here is coordinate with the more global technique of montage that Benjamin intended for the Passagen.20 It is this constructive element that, in the following entry, he wants to emphasize with the phrase, “putting them to use”: Method of this project: literary montage. I needn’t say anything. Merely show. I shall purloin no valuables, appropriate no ingenious formulations. But 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 [sie verwenden]. (V: 574 [N 1a, 8]; TAP 460)

Though the Passagen contains ample materials for what might be termed a sociological study of nineteenth-century Paris, this would not have been its primary aim. Benjamin’s goal was very different from that of books like Donald Olsen’s The City as a Work of Art, Christopher Prendergast’s Paris and the Nineteenth Century, or a work that Benjamin drew on, Maxime Du 20. It is worth recalling that there is another work that Benjamin constructed largely out of cited materials, Deutsche Menschen, a collection of letters of the period 1783–1883, representing a high point of German bourgeois culture.

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Camp’s Paris. Ses organes, ses fonctions et sa vie dans la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle, 6 vol. (1869–75). Benjamin’s intention is partly captured in a sentence he wrote to Gretel Adorno in 1939, with reference to the second, 1939, exposé that he had prepared for the Institute for Social Research: “I have tried, insofar as I could in the short time, to state at its center the fundamental conception of the ‘Passagen’: the culture of the commodity-producing society as phantasmagoria” (March 20, 1939, GB 6:240) . However, this formulation is restricted to the level of aesthetics and affect. More fundamental is the need to bring about an intense and vivid sense of the historical event, what he termed “Anschaulichkeit” (graphicness or perceptibility): Must the Marxist understanding of history necessarily be acquired at the expense of the perceptibility of history? Or: in what way is it possible to conjoin a heightened graphicness [Anschaulichkeit] to the realization of the Marxist method? The first stage in this undertaking will be to carry over the principle of montage into history. That is, 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. (GS 5: 575 [N 2, 6]; TAP 461)

A further stage involves a continuity between the events of history (das Geschehen) and the historian’s account of these events. “Citing” (zitieren) applies to both, or rather, the force of intervention or interpellation arises initially in language and then becomes available for the event, becomes, in this manner, an incitation for a transformative act: The events (das Geschehen) surrounding the historian, and in which he himself takes part, will underlie his presentation in the form of a text written in invisible ink. The history which he lays before the reader comprises, as it were, the citations occurring in this text, and it is only these citations that occur in a manner legible to all. To write history thus means to cite history. It belongs to the concept of citation, however, that the historical object in each case is torn from its context. (GS 5: 595 [N 11, 3]; TAP 476)

The transformative potential of citation is characterized in terms of speed and violence. In this entry from One-Way Street it is both light-hearted and brutal: Citations in my work are like robbers on the road who leap out, armed, and relieve the idle stroller of his conviction. (SW 1: 481; GS 4: 138)

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But Benjamin’s very serious point is that the incitation of the citation, fleeting and ephemeral, cannot be held fast or sustained: In the fields with which we are concerned, knowledge comes only in lightning flashes. The text is the long roll of thunder that follows. (GS 5: 570 [N1, 1]; TAP 456) What has been is to be held fast—as an image flashing up in the now of its recognizability. 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. (GS 5: 591–92 [N 9, 7]; TAP 473)

The mimetic faculty, too, operates as a lightning flash: “It flits past” (SW 2: 722; GS 4: 213, Sie huscht vorbei). What underlies Benjamin’s motivation in the extended labor of gathering the citations in the convolutes is perhaps best explained by passages in his last text, “On the Concept of History.” “The French Revolution,” he writes there, “viewed itself as Rome incarnate. It cited ancient Rome exactly the way fashion cites a bygone mode of dress. Fashion has a nose [eine Witterung] for the topical [das Aktuelle], no matter where it stirs in the thickets of long ago; it is the tiger’s leap into the past” (Thesis XIV, SW 4: 395; GS 2: 701). But the passage then continues with a qualification, “Such a leap, however, takes place in an arena where the ruling class gives the commands.” The concluding sentence, then, reverts to the idea of revolutionary force, “The same leap in the open air of history is the dialectical leap Marx understood as revolution.” In the theses that follow, Benjamin seems to be groping for a formulation that can carry out this “leap,” or, in the formulation from the Passagen already cited, that can put “[the rags, the rubbish] to use” [sie verwenden].21 This is not to be deduced from any entry or combination of entries in the convolutes but needs to be stipulated. As the posthumous residue of Benjamin’s last years, the materials of the Passagen serve not only to elaborate issues that he raised in other writings but also to move some of them into new directions. They remain the torso of an unrealized work and any attempt to complete it must remain at the level of speculation. 21. Ian Balfour is right to observe that “Citation then is the model not just for the understanding of history but equally for its performance,” but it is necessary to add that the gap from understanding to performance remains unresolved. That this issue requires a different formulation is developed in Chapters 6 and 7. See Ian Balfour, “Reversal, Quotation (Benjamin’s History),” MLN 106 (1991): 645.

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“The Life of Students” In 1914 –15, as the war was beginning, Benjamin wrote the essay “The Life of Students.” He was studying at the Berlin University and was one of the leaders of the student body association. (It’s worth nothing that Benjamin avoided this kind of quasi-political involvement subsequently.) The piece is an impassioned yet closely argued plea to his fellow students not to squander their time in frivolous sociality but rather to focus on ideals of self-development, both spiritual and erotic. What interests me particularly in this essay is the way that Benjamin, just over twenty years old, outlines a conception of history that is to remain with him to his last writings. I quote from the opening: The following remarks . . . delineate a particular condition in which history appears to be concentrated in a single focal point, like those which have traditionally been found in the utopian images of the philosophers. The elements of the ultimate condition do not manifest themselves as formless pro147

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gressive tendencies, but are deeply rooted in every present in the form of the most endangered, excoriated, and ridiculed ideas and products of the creative mind. The historical task is to disclose this immanent state of perfection and make it absolute, to make it visible and dominant in the present. This condition cannot be captured in terms of the pragmatic description of details (the history of institutions, customs, and so on); in fact, it eludes them. Rather, the task is to grasp its metaphysical structure, as with the messianic domain or the idea of the French Revolution. It is worth taking the trouble to describe the contemporary significance of students and the university, of the form of their present existence, only if they can be understood as a metaphor, as an image of the highest metaphysical state of history.1

The hypothesis that the “metaphysical structure” of history might be exemplified by either the messianic domain or the idea of the French Revolution states in the baldest form a kind of alternative—messianism or revolution, theology or politics—that Benjamin would subsequently nuance and complicate. In later writings he tended to avoid a clear choice in favor of parabolic or paradoxical formulations. There is, for example, the fable at the beginning of “On the Philosophy of History”—those “Theses” which constitute something like a philosophical testament, written during the last year of Benjamin’s life (1939– 40). This fable deals with a chess-playing automaton, identified as “historical materialism,” but hidden inside is a hunchback dwarf who represents theology. The allegory that Benjamin draws from this is that the apparatus “can easily be a match for anyone if it enlists the services of theology, which today, as we know, is small and ugly and has to keep out of sight” (GS 1: 693; SW 4: 389). Or, to give another instance of such paradoxical formulations, there is the entry in The Arcades Project, My thinking is related to theology as blotting pad is related to ink. It is saturated with it. Were one to go by the blotter, however, nothing of what is written would remain. (GS 5: 588 [N 7a, 7]; TAP 471)

This little allegory requires that we take the idea of “saturated” in an expansive sense. If a wish were imputed to the blotter, it might be that the page be 1. SW 1: 37. Stéphane Mosès has pointed to the significance of this passage: “Geschichte und Subjektivität: Zur Konstitution der historischen Zeit bei Walter Benjamin” in Das Subjekt der DichtungFestschrift für Gerhard Kaiser, ed. Gerhard Buhr, et al. (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann Verlag, 1990), 153–78.

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restored to its blankness. But the word “saturated” suggests a very different result for the speaker’s thinking, a thinking which, in “blotting” the script, cannot help but be saturated not only by the fluid but by what was written by it. In attempting to expunge theology, the speaker has only more deeply absorbed it.

Benjamin’s Judaism Walter Benjamin’s link to Judaism is generally acknowledged as fundamental to his work, but it is by no means clear how to engage this issue. Judaism cannot be assigned a consistent or unitary sense in the context of modern European intellectual history. “The Jewish side [das Jüdische] goes without saying,” the young Benjamin wrote in 1912 to a correspondent who had challenged him to define his Jewish side. This retort on Benjamin’s part is more evasive than defining. He was later to be challenged in a comparable manner by Gershom Scholem, and though a tactic of evasion on Benjamin’s part remains, the issue of just what constitutes the Jewish side takes on greater urgency and complexity in later years.2 In the case of Benjamin, other factors complicate the picture, one of which is the role that his friend Scholem played, both as a kind of alter ego for Benjamin’s religious consciousness and as a custodian of his reputation afterward. Scholem was 17 and Benjamin 23 when they met in 1915. They maintained close personal contact until 1923 when Scholem emigrated to Palestine. Their friendship, however, continued up to Benjamin’s death, largely through the medium of a correspondence that may be ranked among one of the major intellectual dialogues of the period. Scholem came from the same milieu as his friend, that of a prosperous bourgeois, highly assimilated household.3 He demonstrated his independence 2. Scholem’s remarks about Benjamin’s religiosity in the early years of their friendship—1915 to 1927—are instructive but should still be viewed as coming from a very partial witness. See Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1981), 55–56 and passim. 3. The standard study of Scholem’s life and work is David Biale, Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982). The most important autobiographical documents by Scholem are From Berlin to Jerusalem: Memories of My Youth, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1980), and Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship. The collection Gershom Scholem:

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of mind from the start by rejecting the assimilationist culture of his family and pursuing studies in Hebrew and the Talmud without, however, turning to orthodox observance. He emigrated to Palestine in his early twenties and soon joined the faculty of the newly founded Hebrew University, and eventually pioneered a new type of research of Jewish theological, and especially mystical, traditions. This approach, virtually created by Scholem, applies the methods of modern, objective scholarship to writings that had been treated by observant Jews as holy and esoteric. Yet Scholem’s motivation was far from an Enlightenment impulse of exposure and rationalist simplification. He was strongly conscious of contributing to the recovery and preservation of an endangered cultural remnant. His writings on messianism, gathered in The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality (1971), represent one of his major scholarly achievements, but it is noteworthy that many of the writings in this field come after Benjamin’s death. A detailed account of the relationship between the two still remains to be written, particularly an account of the relationship’s early years, a decisive period in the intellectual development of each. Certain features of Benjamin’s essay of 1916, “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man”— a text which remained seminal for his thinking throughout his life—seem to derive from Jewish mystical traditions, which, one might surmise, Scholem was then studying and conveyed to Benjamin.4 But an influence in the other direction is no less plausible in view of Benjamin’s familiarity with the German mystical tradition extending from Jacob Boehme to Franz von Baader, and also Franz Josef Molitor’s Philosophie der Geschichte oder ueber das Judentum (1827–57), a mid-nineteenth-century, Christian compilation on Kabbala. In a diary that Scholem maintained in that period, he quotes Benjamin as saying in 1916, “If I shall one day have a philosophy of my own it shall somehow be a philosophy of Judaism.”5 Zwischen den Disziplinen, ed. Peter Schäfer and Gary Smith (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1995), contains a number of important essays. Julia Chi Yan Ng’s 2012 Northwestern dissertation, “Conditions of Impossibility: Failure of Fictions of Perpetual Peace,” provides important data regarding the relation of Benjamin and Scholem in the early years of their friendship, especially 1915–18. 4. This, in fact, is the conclusion of Moshe Idel in “A. Abulafia, G. Scholem, and W. Benjamin on Language,” in Jüdisches Denken in einer Welt ohne Gott: Festschrift für Stéphane Mosès, ed. Jens Mattern, et al. (Berlin: Vorwerk 8 Verlag, 2001), 130 –38. 5. “ ‘Wenn ich einmal meine Philosophie haben werde,’ sagte er zu mir, ‘so wird es irgendwie eine Philosophie des Judentums sein.’ ” Scholem Tagebücher I, 391.

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In the course of the 1920s, Scholem repeatedly invited Benjamin to visit him in Palestine, and later, to settle there. Benjamin was receptive to the idea but then invariably pulled back. It is in light of this background that we can appreciate Benjamin’s response to Scholem in 1930, when Scholem, not for the first time, raised the question of Benjamin’s adherence to Judaism. In an earlier letter, Scholem had cautiously asked Benjamin whether it would not be better to abandon “false illusions regarding a never-to-be-realized definitive stand on Judaism, which we have considered a joint undertaking for nearly fifteen years, and acknowledge the (however disappointing for me, but nonetheless unequivocal) reality of your existence outside that sphere [i.e., the Jewish]?”6 And Benjamin, in his reply, while still delaying a full explanation of his stand on the matter, writes, I have never encountered the living spirit of Judaism (lebendiges Judentum) in any other figure than yourself. The question how I stand in regard to Judaism is always the question of how I am related—I don’t what to say to you (since my friendship in this regard is no longer subject to any decision)— [but] to the forces that you have awakened in me. (April 25, 1930, GB 3: 520)

While such a passage suggests that Benjamin’s Jewish consciousness was strongly marked by his friendship with Scholem, we cannot assume that he followed Scholem on central Jewish tenets such as messianism. Where does one look for elucidation regarding the messianic? Does the term have any meaning independent of specific religious and/or mystical traditions? Even within Judaism, can someone not trained in Talmudic exegesis begin to probe the issue? Emmanuel Levinas, at the beginning of his commentaries on messianic texts, writes, “The exposition of a Talmudic text by someone who has not spent his life studying rabbinic literature in the traditional way is a very daring enterprise . . . The traditional knowledge of Talmudic texts, in all their scope, would not by itself satisfy a Western [i.e., secular] thinker, but this knowledge is nonetheless the necessary condition of Jewish thought.”7 Our task becomes even more problematic when we consider the markedly extra-religious, though not anti-religious, orientation in which Benjamin and others of his generation cast their views. In his essay on Surrealism, Benjamin focuses on the term “profane illumination” to denote 6. February 20, 1930, cited in GB 3: 523. 7. Emmanuel Levinas, Difficile Liberté: Essais sur le Judaïsme (Paris: Albin Michel, 1963), 84.

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“a materialistic, anthropological inspiration, to which hashish, opium, or whatever else can give a preparatory training. (But a dangerous one; and that of religion is stricter.)” (SW 2: 209, trans. modified; GS 2: 297). We should remember that Benjamin took very seriously both the experience of hallucinatory drugs and of religion. We do possess a number of texts in addition to “The Life of Students” from the early phase of Benjamin’s career that are relevant to our topic, notably, a letter to Martin Buber of June 1916, responding to Buber’s invitation to participate in the periodical that he edited, Der Jude; “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man” (1916); “On the Program of the Coming Philosophy” (1918); and, finally, a fragment written sometime around 1920 –21, “Theological-Political Fragment” (Adorno’s title). In each of these, Benjamin develops a highly personal fusion of philosophical and theological speculations, speculations that develop themes that will continue to preoccupy him to the last. And while these texts do not contradict the statement that Scholem attributed to him in 1916 —“If I one day have a philosophy of my own it will somehow be a philosophy of Judaism”—the positions they indicate cannot be easily assimilated to Jewish tradition.

Modern Jewish Messianism I want first to briefly situate Benjamin with modern Jewish messianism in the early twentieth century, a complex phenomenon that harbored divergent, even radically opposed stances with regard to religion and politics. Anson Rabinbach has characterized it as an ethos “in the Greek sense of a characteristic spirit or attitude,” thus avoiding designations like “ideology” or “belief.” He outlines its components as follows:8 A restorative orientation, directed to a quest for esoteric knowledge as a means of redemption. Karl Kraus’s “Ursprung ist das Ziel” (origin is the goal) could be its motto. A redemptive-utopian orientation, where redemption marks the end of history but not an event produced by history. 8. Anson Rabinbach, “Between Enlightenment and Apocalypse: Benjamin, Bloch, and Modern Jewish Messianism,” New German Critique 34 (Winter 1985): 83.

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An apocalyptic strain, allied to the second, but emphasizing the catastrophe and caesura that marks “a quantum leap from the present to the future.” And finally, an “ethical ambivalence” in the messianic idea—the coexistence of exaltation in the hope for redemption (Bloch’s “Prinzip Hofnung”), on the one hand, and pessimism and passivity in view of the apparently insurmountable obstacles to realization, on the other. These divisions, while useful as a point of departure, are quite schematic and do not go far in charting the complex mixture of positions prevalent in a given period. Just prior to the First World War, Benjamin and Ernst Bloch were developing, each independent of the other, versions of this messianic ethos that were very much at variance to the dominant Jewish tendencies of that period, tendencies that may be characterized as Zionism, nationalist and secular, at one extreme, restorative and spiritual, at the other. The last was in quest for new forms of inner experience (Erlebnis) that could draw on a variety of sources, philosophical as well as folk, many of the latter opened up by the Hasidic movement. Martin Buber and, in a different sense, Franz Rosenzweig, were the principal proponents of this latter tendency. Benjamin and Bloch rejected both tendencies—the first, the Zionist, because it led inexorably to assimilation, to an embrace of the secular, nationalist culture of the West. And the second because of its emphasis on traditional practices and individual experience that neglected what Bloch saw as the central component of Jewish experience, the “chosenness” of the Jewish people as a key to their messianic destiny. Although Benjamin and Bloch did not meet until 1919, they were among the few young Jewish intellectuals of the period who strongly opposed Germany’s stance in the World War. This led them, though in quite different ways, to formulate a conception of history that was not so much apolitical as programmatically anti-political,9 in that it set apart linear history—the dimension of “progress,” of political events in the usual sense—from a potentiality that is immanent to history, omnipresent but incalculable, what in effect constituted the messianic dimension. This is not to say that they were in agreement on just what this 9. Cf. Rabinbach, “Between Enlightenment and Apocalypse,” 107.

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dimension was, far from it. Benjamin actually wrote a review of Bloch’s 1918 Geist der Utopie, a text unfortunately lost. But from a letter to Scholem one may gather that, in spite of much personal sympathy for Bloch and agreement with certain elements in the book, Benjamin expressed a fundamental rejection of Bloch’s premises, his “conception of philosophy.”10 The book, however, served to turn Benjamin’s own reflections in this period, the early twenties, to a new direction, namely, to the nexus of theology, history, and politics. Though Benjamin never wrote the major essay that he had envisaged, “Der wahre Politiker” (The True Politician), we find a preoccupation with these issues in a number of short but complex texts of this period, notably, “Critique of Violence” (c. January 1921), “Theological-Political Fragment” (probably 1920 –21), and some writings that were eventually published in One-Way Street (1923–26). We may gauge the significance of Bloch’s The Spirit of Utopia for Benjamin from a sentence in his “Theological-Political Fragment”: “To have repudiated with utmost vehemence the political significance of theocracy is the cardinal merit of Bloch’s The Spirit of Utopia” (SW 3: 305). Benjamin’s point here is to underscore his solidarity with Bloch in vehemently rejecting theocracy—that is, the direct intercession of a divine power in human history.11

“Theological-Political Fragment” I want to touch on one of the early texts, an extraordinarily dense but suggestive document, a single page in length, “Theological-Political Fragment.” It begins as follows: “Only the Messiah himself completes all histori10. February 2, 1920, to Ernest Schoen. GB 2:72. 11. In letters at the time, Benjamin states that he had written a detailed review of Geist der Utopie. This has been lost. But in a letter to Scholem of February 13, 1920, he outlines his differentiated verdict of the book and its author. Fundamentally, Benjamin expresses “a rejection of the book with respect to its outdated cognitive premises [Erkenntnisprämissen], a rejection en bloc. . . . my philosophical thinking has nothing in common with it.” But in spite of the slap-dash [Schnellfertiges], unripe quality of the book, Benjamin wrote that his review took a milder tone because, “I found in the conversations we had in Interlaken so much warmth, so many possibilities to express myself, to make myself understood, to be understood, that I sacrificed such a critique [of the book] for the sake of my hopes” (GB 2: 54).

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cal happening [vollendet alles historische Geschehen],” which is consistent with a traditional theological conception (Kant, Cohen) where the Kingdom of God is the fulfillment of history. But then the sentence continues, “in the sense that he alone redeems, completes, creates its relation to the messianic” (SW 3: 305; GS 2: 203). And this constitutes a radical break with a theological and progressivist conception. As Werner Hamacher comments, “If the assertion that only the Messiah himself will complete all historical happening holds, then the consequence must be that there can be no teleological orientation of history to the Messiah or to any messianic end.”12 Benjamin leaves no doubt here that he intends an absolute disjunction between worldly telos and divine eschaton, between the course of history and the Kingdom of God. The fragment continues, “Therefore, the Kingdom of God is not the telos of the historical dynamic; it cannot be established as a goal. From the standpoint of history, it is not the goal but the terminus [Ende].” What is more, in what follows, Benjamin links happiness (Glück), transience, and the secular order in a manner that remains constant throughout his life. The idea of Glück is to be understood not as a supplement, a bonus added to existence, but rather as a wholehearted acceptance of one’s earthly lot. “For in happiness,” he writes further, “all that is earthly seeks its downfall, and only in happiness is its downfall destined to find it.” This is Glück in the sense of destiny, of good fortune, rather than as an affective state. This may be glossed by a passage from One-Way Street, “To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself [embrace oneself ] without fright” (Glücklich sein heißt ohne Schreken seiner selbst inne werden können) (SW 1: 463; GS 4: 113).13 In Benjamin’s last major piece of writing, “On the Concept of History” (Theses), he again links happiness, transience, and historical temporality. Here the idea of transience is figured as memory (in the sense of Eingedenken) and, in an unexpected development, this sense of personal memory is projected onto historical temporality. What this might mean is developed in Thesis II, one of Benjamin’s most seductive passages: 12. Werner Hamacher, “Das Theologisch-Politische Fragment,” in Benjamin Handbuch, 178. 13. Cf. too “Dialectics of happiness: a twofold will—the unprecedented, that which has never existed before, the pinnacle of bliss. Also: eternal repetition of the same situation, eternal restoration of the original, first happiness” (SW 2: 287, from fragments written 1928, 1929, and 1930).

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“It is one of the most noteworthy peculiarities of the human heart,” writes Lotze, “that so much selfishness in individuals coexists with the general lack of envy which every present day feels toward its future.” This observation indicates that the image of happiness we cherish is thoroughly colored by the time to which the course of our own existence has assigned us. There is happiness—such as could arouse envy in us— only in the air we have breathed, among people we could have talked to, women who could have given themselves to us. In other words, the idea of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the idea of redemption. The same applies to the idea of the past, which history has made its own. The past carries with it a secret index by which it is referred to redemption. Doesn’t a breath of the air that pervaded earlier days caress us as well? In the voices we hear, isn’t there an echo of now silent ones? Don’t the women we court have sisters they no longer recognize? If so, then there is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Then our coming was expected on earth. Then, like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak messianic power, a power on which the past has a claim. Such a claim cannot be settled cheaply. The historical materialist is aware of this. (SW 4: 389–90, translation modified; GS 1: 693f.)14

“If so” (verhält es sich ebenso) is slyly outrageous, as if a series of images had a conclusive logical force. And the concluding sentences confirm the tongue-in-cheek tone: the “historical materialist” is well aware of the extravagance of the claim and he does not make it easy (billig) to unravel. At the same time, there is no mystification and no recourse to abstruse reasoning. The analogy that runs through the passage between the recollections of a personal subject (“women who could have given themselves to us”) and the self-awareness of the historical process (“the idea of the past which history has made its own”) is situated in an atmospheric medium (akin to aura) that allows both levels—the personal and the historical—to be oriented to a form of Erlösung (redemption). But such Erlösung, whether it be resolution, fulfillment, or redemption, is not to be taken in the sense of a future 14. Giorgio Agamben has suggested that the italicizing of “weak” here is to be understood as a discreet citation of 2 Corinthians 12: 9–10, “power fulfills itself in weakness” (Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, tr. Patricia Dailey, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005: 139– 40). This is plausible, though it hardly serves to underwrite the kind of Pauline interpretation of Benjamin’s “Theses” that Agamben offers.

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promise. History’s “secret index” is explicated in terms of a subject’s sense of a personal past. The “weak messianic power” inheres in the subject’s relation to this singular past, though the historical past (die Vergangenheit) may make a claim on it. What that claim is is left unstated. The entry as a whole does no more than confirm the premise stated at the beginning, how one’s “image of happiness” (Bild von Glück) is “tinged” by the sense of temporality of one’s earthly lot (unseres eigenen Daseins). Thus the argument is focused on the human condition and not on any trans-historical promise.15 Yet the claim (the Anspruch—literally, an address to) is insistent. It may not be discounted. Its cost (implicit in “nicht billig”) is what the historical materialist must continue to take into account. The sense that “our coming was expected on earth” reiterates the idea expressed in the “TheologicalPolitical Fragment,” and again, it has to be understood in the sense of being able to embrace what one is (seiner selbst inne werden [zu] können).16

Extreme Thinking Messianism for Benjamin was in no sense the expectation of an ultimate redemption but rather a willingness to confront the extreme alternatives posed by the present situation. This messianism is not equivalent to a utopian position.17 The utopian projects an ideal model, whether as determinate expecta15. Werner Hamacher has aptly commented on the sense of “Glück” in this passage as fundamentally a possibility, an irrealis: “If happiness were a possession, an established holding, its recognizability would be as little necessary as even possible. It is recognizable only in its pure—and that means, its defective, exposed and unrealized—possibility. And only thus can it offer itself for a future recognition.” Werner Hamacher, “ ‘Jetzt.’ Benjamin zur historischen Zeit,” Benjamin Studies / Studies 1: Perception and Experience in Modernity, ed. Helga Geyer-Ryan (Amsterdam and New York: Editions Rodopi B.V., 2002), 148. 16. The Fragment has been dated by Adorno and the editors of Selected Writings quite late in Benjamin’s life, to 1937. But the more likely dating of 1920 –21, supported by Scholem and the editors of the Gesammelte Schriften, makes the relation of the two texts, this early Fragment and the “Theses” of 1940, all the more interesting. 17. Cf. Jacques Derrida, “Marx & Sons,” in Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx, ed. Michael Sprinker (London and New York: Verso, 1999), 248– 49.

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tion or as aspiration. Where a utopia is future directed, Benjamin’s messianism is radically presentist, in the sense of Vergegenwärtigung, which stresses the dimension of realization or fulfillment in a present moment. In a variant to the Theses, Benjamin glossed the idea of the historian as a “backward turned prophet” (rückwärts gekehrter Prophet) as follows: “Whoever rummages in the past as if it were a trash bin of examples and analogies has not the slightest conception how much, in a given instant, depends on its present realization [Vergegenwärtigung]” (GS 1: 1238f ). He had characterized his own thinking repeatedly in terms of the phenomenon of extremity, as in a 1934 letter to Adorno’s wife, Gretel Karplus: “You first of all will not be unaware that my life as well as my thinking has moved in extreme positions. The breadth which it thus claims, the freedom to move things and ideas which are considered irreconcilable in proximity to each other gains its countenance only from the danger.”18 His view that the European situation had reached a stage of catastrophe, “that things cannot go on like this (daß es nicht mehr so weiter gehen kann)” was already evident in the sketches and aphorisms that he had been writing since 1923, the most dire period of the German inflation, and which were published as One-Way Street in 1928. There he wrote, People in the national communities of Central Europe live like the inhabitants of an encircled town whose provisions and gunpowder are running out and for whom deliverance is, by human reasoning, scarcely to be expected. . . . But the silent, invisible power which Central Europe feels opposing it does not negotiate. Nothing, therefore, remains but to direct the gaze, in perpetual expectation of the final onslaught, on nothing except the extraordinary event in which alone salvation now lies. (SW 1: 451; GS 4: 95)

This was written in the mid-twenties, in the wake of the chaos of hyperinflation and social unrest of that period. In the following decade, in pursuing his preoccupation with The Arcades Project Benjamin did not lose his sense of the danger of the moment. Yet it is not the case that Benjamin’s idea of a (“weak”) messianic power was significantly motivated by specific historico-political events, as Jacques Derrida has suggested. Referring to the Hitler-Stalin pact, which came shortly before the Theses were presumably written, Derrida speculates whether “there would be, for Benjamin, critical 18. Letter to Gretel Karplus (Adorno), June 1934, GB 4: 440f.

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moments (pre-revolutionary or post-revolutionary), moments of hope or disappointment, in short, dead ends during which a simulacrum of messianism serves as an alibi.”19 What speaks against this is, first of all, Benjamin’s own words in a letter to Gretel Adorno, to whom he sent “On the Concept of History” in the spring of 1940. Here he refers to a meeting with her in 1937, when, as he states, those notes had occupied him, and he adds, “The war and the constellations that came with it led me to put down certain thoughts, about which I can say that I have stored (verwahrt habe) them for some twenty years, indeed, stored them away from myself ” (GB 6:435). But more generally, as has been demonstrated, a messianic orientation characterized Benjamin’s thought from his earliest writings. While in certain respects it mirrors widespread attitudes of Jewish intellectuals at the time, Benjamin gave it a cast that can only be grasped in context of his singular aspiration. In spite of its preoccupation with the minutiae of nineteenth-century social history, The Arcades Project was to be a contribution to the philosophy of history rather than a work of documentation. And, what is more, its aim, in the spirit of Marx, was not simply to describe the world but to change it. Benjamin’s writings in these years was directed to a collective subject, heirs of the Marxist proletariat, a collective not yet actual, still under the spell of the “phantasmagoria” of the nineteenth century. Its goal was to awaken such a subject, to further its emergence, its coming to consciousness as a collective. In selecting and organizing the materials for this work Benjamin was on the lookout for data that would serve as an alarm signal: “What we construct here is a wake-up call [einen Wecker] which stirs up the kitsch of the last century into a ‘collection’ ” (GS 5: 1058). But to make a category of reception constitutive for history writing involved no small dilemma. For how can such writing come about unless its addressee, the intended subject of the awakening, is somehow available, or at least conceivable as a projection? Benjamin here confronts a classic dilemma of Marxist theory, namely, identifying in advance the collective subject of revolutionary action. He harbored no illusions regarding the capacity of the modern public to withstand the fascination and domination of forces that had appropriated the newer media technologies, whether at the level of the market or of the state. 19. Derrida, Ghostly Demarcations, 253.

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At one point in his reflections on history, Benjamin draws on the theological concept of apocatastasis, the idea of a resurrection of all creatures who had ever lived. Whereas the theological form of apocatastasis does indeed assume, as Horkheimer had argued, a Last Judgment, Benjamin’s intent is “methodological,” that is, is conceived as a way of converting a theological doctrine into a practice of disinterment and extraction, a splitting operation that works over every residue or negative. Like the theological apocatastasis there is a recovery of a past, but for Benjamin this is not to be taken in an apocalyptic or restorative sense. Rather, it is a model of selection guided by a present need, a model that situates a force of attraction in the past correlative with the “weak messianic force” in the present. A projection of the present into the past is, however, not to be taken as merely a retrospective device in historical construction. As such, it would signify nothing but that every epoch recovers its past selectively, privileging what underwrites its own self-understanding. Benjamin’s claim is more radical. It is that the past itself is primordially marked, for what induces a release in the present, whether revolutionary or eschatological, must already have been structured in terms of a determinate futurity: “There exists [he writes] ‘not yet conscious knowledge’ of the past [Es gibt ‘noch nicht bewußtes Wissen’ vom Gewesenen] that has a claim to the structure of awakening” (GS 5:1058).20 What Benjamin termed “weak messianism” in the Theses is consistent with a such a performative goal, a form of writing designed to awaken a readership by means of image, example, anecdote, citation. The intent of The Arcades Project, insofar as it can be deduced, was to realize a textual medium that would have the kind of capacity that Benjamin ascribed to fashion and to revolution—“a tiger’s leap into the past” (SW 4: 395). His form 20. As Jürgen Habermas has noted, Benjamin’s idea of historical temporality involves a radical inversion of the historicist construction whereby cultural data evolves as a cumulative accretion. “[Benjamin] ascribes to all past epochs,” writes Habermas, “a horizon of unrealized expectations, and to the future-oriented present the task of experiencing, by way of Eingedenken, a corresponding past moment in such a way that we become capable of fulfilling its expectations through our weak messianic power. This inversion allows two strands of thought to come together: the conviction that the continuity of transmission is fashioned as much by way of barbarism as of culture; and the idea that each present generation carries responsibility not only for the fate of future generations, but also for the fate that past generations have suffered through no fault of their own.” Habermas, Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne, 24.

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of Kritik was certainly “political” in the expansive sense Benjamin gave it, but given the contingency of the situation in which he was writing it could hardly claim more than a “weak” force. It will be clear that I have tried to situate Benjamin’s work within a relatively narrow sense of messianism, one that is alert to the constraints that certain phases of his life and writing imposed on him. Irving Wohlfarth’s “On the Messianic Structure of Walter Benjamin’s Last Reflections” views a “messianic structure” as foundational and pervasive in Benjamin’s whole oeuvre. Thus Wohlfarth, citing a passage from the Theses, writes, “For the Jews ‘every second was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter,’ writes Benjamin in the closing lines of his last-minute message. The angel of history who is being blown away from paradise would ‘willingly return.’ Such messianism —indeed, all messianism —is clearly triadic by definition; it is predicated on a second coming, a return from exile.”21 Wohlfarth’s detailed essay begins with Georg Lukács’s Theory of the Novel and then incorporates the whole Hegelian and Marxist tradition as a context for Benjamin’s messianism. But in my view this covers too much ground. Benjamin, I argue, carved out a distinctive path in the intellectual milieu of his place and time, one that allowed him to maintain a distance from such friends and allies as Scholem, Bloch, Adorno, Krakauer, and Brecht, while still keeping the contacts alive and vital. I want to explore this issue now by tracing, in a series of evolving stages, a more discrete messianic current in Benjamin’s work, one that will illustrate, I hope, what he termed (in the passage cited from “The Life of Students”) “the utopian images of the philosophers . . . deeply rooted in every present in the form of the most endangered, excoriated, and ridiculed ideas and products of the creative mind.” First, let us look briefly at Benjamin’s interest in certain types of narrative—fantastic and then parabolic.

The Fantastic Utopists Benjamin was strongly attracted to certain utopian fantasists— Charles Fourier (the phalansteries may be viewed as a systematic application of the idea 21. Irving Wohlfarth, “On the Messianic Structure of Walter Benjamin’s Last Reflections,” Glyph 3 (1978): 171.

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of “passages”), Paul Scheerbart, Louis August Blanqui, and the caricaturist J. J. Grandville. These are figures who had no philosophical significance for someone like Adorno. But for Benjamin they did. He may have been drawn to such utopists not because they envisaged what would or should happen in an ideal society, but rather how one might imagine another social order, whether realizable or not. The sections on Fourier (1772–1837) and Grandville (1803– 47) in “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century”—a condensed exposé of The Arcades Project—are written in a manner that leaves in doubt whether Benjamin considered these figures unwitting heralds of the commodity system or veritable utopian fantasists. Thus he writes about Grandville, “The enthronement of the commodity, with its glitter of distractions, is the secret theme of Grandville’s art. Whence the split between its utopian and cynical elements in his work. The subtle artifices with which it represents inanimate objects correspond to what Marx calls the ‘theological niceties’ of the commodity.”22 Benjamin here refers, of course, to the well-known passage in Capital where Marx speaks about a table as “a material immaterial thing. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in the face of all other commodities, it stands on its head, and out of its wooden brain it evolves notions more whimsically than if it had suddenly begun to dance” (cited in The Arcades Project, GS 5: 262 [G 13a, 2]; TAP 196 –97). He termed Grandville’s illustrations “the sibylline books of advertising” (GS 5: 233 [G 1, 3]; TAP 172), and added, “Grandville’s masking of nature with the fashions of mid-century—nature understood as the cosmos, as well as the world of animals and plants—lets history, in the guise of fashion, emerge from out of the eternal cycle of nature” (GS 5: 267 [G 16, 3]; TAP 200, trans. modified).23 Paul Scheerbart (1863–1915) is another of the eccentric fantasists who attracted Benjamin. He was especially drawn to the novel of the fantastic, Lesabéndio (1913), which today might be classified as children’s science fiction. Benjamin wrote a short, penetrating review of it in 1919. The work deals with an asteroid and its native inhabitants, tiny creatures, not at all 22. TAP 18. See also Marleen Stoessel’s commentary, one of the rare treatments of Grandville that elaborates on Benjamin’s attraction to him. Marleen Stoessel, “Dans le demi-jour: le même et le semblable: Deux contes en images de Grandville,” in Walter Benjamin et Paris, 439. 23. Cf. also G 1, 3; G 5a,2; G 7, 2; G 13a,2; G 16,3, and the mottos to “G.”

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resembling humans, but endowed with a pure, selfless sociability and an advanced, evolving technical capacity that reaches its maximal development in the figure after whom the work is named. This Lesabéndio supervises the construction of tower on the little planet, a vast project but one that, in contrast to the Biblical Babel, has a wholly spiritual and altruistic goal. As it reaches its culmination this tower will dissolve its architect’s body and fuse his being, together with that of his compatriots and the very star they inhabit, into a far vaster ring of asteroids circling the sun. What Benjamin admired in this work is a conception, laid out with humor and modesty, of a civilization whose inhabitants are totally absorbed in the maintenance and improvement of their material environment, but in a context in which technical labor is innately also spiritual. “The great discovery of Scheerbart,” Benjamin wrote, “was to direct a plea in the cause of creation from the stars to mankind. . . . The gentle, amazed serenity with which the author describes the strange natural laws of other worlds, the vast cosmic projects which are undertaken there, and the nobly naive discussions of the inhabitants show him to be one of those humorists who, like Lichtenberg or Jean Paul, seem never to forget that the earth is a star.”24 During his two-month visit to Moscow in 1926 –27, Benjamin, in an interview on the German cultural situation, cited Scheerbart’s novel as the outstanding literary achievement of that time in Germany. And in “Moscow Diary” he noted, “No other author [than Scheerbart] has been able to demonstrate the revolutionary character of technical work.”25 What is distinctive about Scheerbart’s creatures (Geschöpfe not Menschen) is their absence of inwardness and, coordinately, the proximity of their nature with the material conditions of the asteroid they inhabit. This allows a form of technology to come into play altogether different from what is normally understood by that term. Scheerbart imagined a complex material and social system that has some analogies to the earth and human existence but that functions in terms of quite different laws. What is normally understood by concepts such ecology, technology, and society would need to be radically revised. In Benjamin’s words, “This idea— or rather, this image—was of a humanity which 24. GS 2: 632. See also Scholem, The Story of a Friendship, 208, on their conversation in 1938 regarding Brecht and Scheerbart, cited in GS 2: 1424. 25. The interview is reproduced, in translation, in GS 7: 879–81. For the “Moscow Diary” passage, see GS 6: 368.

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had deployed the full range of its technology and put it to humane use. To achieve this state of affairs, Scheerbart believed that two conditions were essential: first, people should discard the base and primitive belief that their task was to “exploit” the forces of nature; second, they should be true to the conviction that technology, by liberating human beings, would fraternally liberate the whole of creation (SW 4: 386). Scheerbart’s novel was to be featured in an essay on which Benjamin was at work in 1921, “Der wahre Politiker” (The True Politician), but for which the materials and notes have been lost. Still, we have many traces in his letters and other writings of a preoccupation in this period with issues of politics and class-struggle.26 And the “Theological-Political Fragment,” generally dated around 1920 –21 (though the editors of Selected Writings put it in 1928) supports this. But perhaps the most telling evidence for Benjamin’s conception of a technologically based utopist politics is found in the last entry of One-Way Street, “To the Planetarium” (written 1923–26, published 1928). There we read: This immense wooing of the cosmos was enacted for the first time on a planetary scale, that is, in the spirit of technology. [Benjamin here refers to the technological forces activated in World War I.] But because the lust for profit of the ruling class sought satisfaction through it, technology betrayed man and turned the bridal bed into a bloodbath. . . . In the nights of annihilation of the last war, the frame of mankind was shaken by a feeling which resembled the bliss of the epileptic. And the revolts which followed it were the first attempt of mankind to bring the new body under its control.27

The combination of annihilation and bliss, of revolt and control of “the new body” as induced by the cataclysm of the World War will be reformulated only a few years later in the essay “Surrealism” (1929) in what is figured as “image space” (Bildraum), “the world of universal and integral actualities, where the ‘cozy room’ is missing—the space, in a word in which political materialism and physical creatureliness share the inner man, the psyche,

26. Cf. Chryssoula Kambas, “Walter Benjamin liest Geroges Sorel: ‘Réflexions sur la violence,’ ” in Aber ein Sturm weht vom Paradiese her, ed. Michael Opitz and Erdmut Wizisla (Leipzig: Reclam Verlag, 1992), 250 –69. 27. SW 1: 487; GS 4: 147– 48. Cf. Uwe Steiner, “Der wahre Politiker: Walter Benjamins Begriff des Politischen,” in Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur 25, no. 2 (2000), 48–92.

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the individual, or whatever else we wish to throw to them, with dialectical justice, so that no limb remains untorn” (GS 2:309; SW 2: 217, translation modified). What Benjamin imagines at this stage is an extraordinary realization of the Communist Manifesto: “Only when in technology body and image space so interpenetrate that all revolutionary tension becomes bodily collective innervation, and all bodily innervations of the collective become revolutionary discharge, has reality transcended itself to the extent demanded by the Communist Manifesto” (217–18). “To the Planetarium” characterizes an antecedent stage, one where the discharge of “body and image space” induced by technology has become destructive and self-consuming. As Irving Wohlfarth writes, Benjamin’s scattered comments on modern technological warfare can be pieced together . . . roughly as follows. According to the Marxian dialectic, new forces of production blast open (sprengen) old relations of production. Where this dynamic is diverted from its “natural,” revolutionary goal, the dammed-up forces of production find an unnatural, counter-revolutionary outlet in imperialist and inter-capitalist war.28

These two texts—“To the Planetarium” and “Surrealism”—span what Wohlfarth calls a “Marxian gamble,” which Benjamin entertained for roughly a decade (1925–36), namely, that “[o]nly a new collective master— the united masses— can regain control over the productive forces.” These texts show that Benjamin’s sense of the social and technological forces of his time cannot be easily accommodated in either a Marxist sense of proletarian revolution or a utopian messianism, though they draw on both.

Kafka and Parable I want now to shift from instances of the fantastic utopists to one of the parabolic dimensions of Jewish tradition, the work of Kafka. What Benjamin draws from it is a mode of revelation that sacrifices content for the sake of continuity. Gershom Scholem wrote that “in Judaism the Messianic idea has compelled a life lived in deferment, in which nothing can be done defini28. “Walter Benjamin and the Idea of a Technological Eros: A tentative reading of Zum Planetarium, in Benjamin Studien /Studies, ed. Helga Geyer-Ryan, et al, Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi, 2002, 73.

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tively, nothing can be irrevocably accomplished. One may say, perhaps, the Messianic idea is the real anti-existentialist idea. Precisely understood, there is nothing concrete which can be accomplished by the unredeemed [thus, in historical time].”29 Scholem’s point is well illustrated in the Hasidic parable that Benjamin inserted in the Kafka essay: In a Hasidic village, so the story goes, Jews were sitting together in a shabby inn one Sabbath evening. They were all local people, with the exception of one person no one knew, a very poor, ragged man who was squatting in a dark corner at the back of the room. All sorts of things were discussed and then it was suggested that everyone should tell what wish he would make if one were granted him. One man wanted money; another wished for a son-in-law; a third dreamed of a new carpenter’s bench; and so each spoke in turn. After they had finished, only the beggar in his dark corner was left. Reluctantly and hesitantly he answered the question. “I wish I were a powerful king reigning over a big country. Then, some night while I was asleep in my palace, an enemy would invade my country, and by dawn his horsemen would penetrate to my castle and meet with no resistance. Roused from my sleep, I wouldn’t have time even to dress and I would have to flee in my shirt. Rushing over hill and dale and through forests day and night, I would finally arrive safely right here at the bench in this corner. This is my wish.” The others exchanged uncomprehending glances. “What good would this wish have done you?” someone asked. “I’d have a shirt,” was the answer.30

The beggar’s response is no mere joke but an acknowledgement of the limits of messianic intervention. This story, Benjamin comments, “takes us deep into the household of Kafka’s world.” And then he goes on, “No one says that the distortions (Entstellungen) which it will be the Messiah’s mission to set right someday affect only our space; surely they are distortions of our time as well.” Entstellungen, which the translator renders as “distortions,” 29. Gershom Scholem, “Toward an Understanding of the Messianic Idea in Judaism,” in The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), 35. 30. “Franz Kafka. On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death,” SW 2: 812. This tale can also be found in Ernst Bloch’s Spuren, 1930, a book in which, as Bloch himself wrote to Adorno, Benjamin had a hand: “For he was personally involved with regard to Spuren, he ‘encouraged’ me ‘again and again’ to put down such stories with their distinctive stamp, the best time in our friendship was accompanied by such mandolin, shawn, and bagpipe tunes.” March 18, 1935, Ernst Bloch, Briefe 1903–1975, ed. Karola Bloch, et al. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1985), 2: 435f.

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may more properly be understood as dislocations or disjoining,31 a state where a slight deviation may have momentous consequences. In one of his drafts Benjamin wrote, That the concept of Entstellung in Kafka’s representation has a double function, and which illustrates that Jewish tradition whereby the world would be not altogether changed after the coming of the Messiah but, on the whole, become “a little bit” different from what it was. (GS 2:1200)

In fact, Benjamin applies the term Entstellung to a whole series of Kafka’s uncanny figures beginning with Odradek, and he calls the “little hunchback” (“der Buckliche Maennlein” of folk-song, a recurrent figure in Benjamin’s personal mythology) “the veriest inmate of displaced life” (SW 2: 811, translation modified; GS 2: 432). He writes further about this Little Hunchback: “he will disappear with the coming of the Messiah, who (a great rabbi once said) will not wish to change the world by force but will merely make a slight adjustment in it.” The Little Hunchback, along with a series of Kafka’s strange, quasi-human figures, may serve as a negative index of the coming of the Messiah. Their disappearance will make good the slight dislocation or unhinging of the world that the Messiah will remedy. The “great rabbi” to whom Benjamin credits this teaching may be the same rabbi whom Bloch cites in Spuren (both are drawing on the Hasidic tales which Buber was publishing in this period), where he writes, “Another rabbi, a true Kabbalist, once said, ‘To bring about the kingdom of freedom, it is not necessary that everything be destroyed, and a new world begin; rather, this cup, or that bush, or that stone, and all things must only be shifted a little. Because this ‘a little’ is hard to do, and its measure so hard to find, humanity cannot do it in this world; instead this is why the Messiah comes.’ ”32

Rhetoric of the “Theses” Benjamin prepared “On the Concept of History,” a series of eighteen short texts (few are more than a half page in length), as a theoretical program for the Baudelaire book that he hoped to draw out of the larger Arcades Project. 31. Cf. Hamlet I:5, line 190, “The time is out of joint.” 32. Ernst Bloch, Spuren (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1969), 201–2.

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But he saw it, too, as a kind of testament of his work up that that point, as he wrote to Gretel Adorno in April 1940: “The war, and the constellation which it has brought with it, have led me to put down a certain number of thoughts, which, I may say, I have sheltered these twenty years, yes, sheltered even from myself ” (April, 1940, GS 1: 1226). In this text the messianic conception of history is characterized in a variety of formulations. Here are some of the most notable: “The past carries with it a secret index by which it is referred to redemption.” (Thesis II) “weak messianic power, a power on which the past has a claim.” (Thesis II) “a secret heliotropism —toward that sun which is rising in the sky of history.” (Thesis IV) “The past can be seized only as an image that flashes up at the moment of its recognizability, and is never seen again.” (Thesis V) “appropriating a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger.” (Thesis VI) “The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer; he comes as the victor over the Antichrist.” (Thesis VI) “appropriating the genuine historical image as it briefly flashes up.” (Thesis VII) “History is the subject of a construction whose site is not homogeneous, empty time, but time filled full by now-time [ Jetztzeit]. . . . it is the tiger’s leap into the past.” (Thesis XIV) “The historical materialist . . . remains in control of his powers—man enough to blast open the continuum of history.” (Thesis XVI) “The historical materialist . . . recognizes the sign of a messianic arrest of happening, or (to put it differently) a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past.” (Thesis XVII) “Now-time [ Jeztzeit], which, as a model of messianic time, comprises the entire history of mankind in a tremendous abbreviation . . .” (Thesis XVIII)

The various types of figuration in these passages would each merit detailed explication, but let me try to summarize their import. First, there is the

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sense of a momentary, radical contraction of time, made manifest in a flash of light or an explosive force; this violent intervention comes at a moment of danger; and it is a force which must be recognized and acknowledged immediately or else lost forever. This description, however, is focused on the content of the images and does not account for the rhetorical or discursive status of these texts, that is, the intended effect that is embedded in them as enunciations. The fact that he referred to the several entries at the time as “theses” suggests a kind of performative valence. While the form of address is not explicitly illocutionary, that is, the addressee is not called upon to take any action, the arguments expounded are presented in a manner that alternates between apodictic pronouncement and highly personal evocation. This is achieved in part through the personification of “the historical materialist” or “historical materialism” (ii, iv, v, vi, vii, xvi, xvii), an agent midway between the addresser and addressee. One may identify this figure, in the first instance, with the speaker, as in the conclusion of Thesis ii, where the addresser assumes a self-confident stance: “Such a claim [to be endowed with a weak messianic power] cannot be settled cheaply. The historical materialist is well aware of this” (SW 4: 390 trans. modified; GS 1: 694). But elsewhere, the figure can also be understood as a model to be assumed by the reader or addressee. This last point is supported by the way the addresser is frequently incorporated in the first-person plural—we, our, us—as in this passage of Thesis II: Don’t the women we court have sisters they no longer recognize? If so, then there is a secret agreement between the past generations and our own. Then our coming was expected on the earth. (SW 1: 390, trans. modified)

Here, too, the way that the text brings together a universal temporality with a highly subjective evocation is meant to appeal to the reader’s most personal feelings. In general, the rhetoric of this text is designed to win the acquiescence of the reader without drawing on an overtly prophetic tone, though this is invoked at times, as in the conclusion of Thesis III: Of course 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

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all its moments. Each moment it has lived becomes a citation à l’ordre du jour—that day being doomsday.33

But such an assertive tone is exceptional, and in any case the reference to “doomsday,” as the translation puts it, is not so much theological as stylistic, that is, as a play on the French tag, the “order of the day” (in a military sense) being the last [jüngste] or Judgment day.

Historical Temporality in The Arcades Project The rhetorical orientation is not so pronounced but still present in Convolute N of The Arcades Project, the section where Benjamin gathered the “epistemo-theoretical” (Erkenntnistheoretische) premises for his project. Here the emphasis is on a retrograde temporality, a theory of counterhistory, as the basis for those critical outbreaks that, in the Theses, will be termed messianic. Entry N 3, 1, is the most trenchant and elaborated statement of the argument. In it, the preeminent terminological markers are linked in a continuous series: time as a function of realized legibility (zur Lesbarkeit kommen); the “now” as a particular recognizability; truth charged to the bursting point with time, and thus altogether devoid of intentio, that is, of the causal chain of human projection; the image (Bild) as constellated fusion of present and past, crystallized as “dialectics at a standstill”; and finally the dialectical image (dialektisches Bild) as “imprint of the perilous, critical moment on which all reading is founded” (den Stempel des kritischen, gefährlichen Moments, welcher allem Lesen zugrunde liegt) (GS 5: 578 [N 3, 1]; TAP 463). This formulation evokes the special sense of the title of the 1921 essay “The Task of the Translator” (Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers).34 As that title suggests, a task is imposed on the translator (Auf-gabe emphasizes the sense of imposition)—and the translator stands for

33. SW 1: 690, trans. modified; GS 1: 694. The German, “welcher Tag eben der jüngste ist,” cannot be rendered precisely in English. 34. As Benjamin argued in the 1916 essay “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” translation is to be understood not only as interlingual but as fundamental in the constitution of language. There, too, he speaks of Aufgabe, a task, an imposition.

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the historian, for the reader tout court—that is far more exacting than passive receptivity. The opening paragraph dismisses such a conception of the reader: “In the appreciation of a work of art or an art form, consideration of the receiver never proves fruitful. . . . No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the audience” (SW 1: 253; GS 4: 9). What is then developed is a conception of language that stresses the provisional status of historical languages and, correspondingly, the provisional condition of historical time. Provisional to what? one may ask. That is the task, the burden of the translator, of the reader, of all men insofar as they are alert to the “present-now,” Jetztzeit. The option “Acceding to legibility,” in N 3, 1, reiterates only what was already formulated in the 1921 essay on translation. Its qualified messianicity may be glossed by what Jacques Derrida has characterized as an openness “to the most irreducibly heterogeneous otherness . . . this exposure to the event, which can either come to pass or not (condition of absolute otherness), is inseparable from a promise and an injunction that call for commitment without delay, and, in truth, rule out abstention.”35 The goal of The Arcades Project was to awaken a collective subject, to further its emergence, its coming to consciousness. What Benjamin hoped to achieve, he writes — comparable to the method of atomic fission—is to liberate the stupendous forces of history [Geschichte] that are enclosed within the “Once upon a time” of classical history writing [Historie]. The kind of history that showed the object “as it actually was” represented the most potent narcotic of the century. (GS 5: 578 [N 3, 4]; TAP 463)

It is this dynamic potential of the historical substance that Benjamin sought to activate, and, in considering his historiography and his hermeneutics— his conception of meaning and of signs—we must keep in sight this underlying performative intention. At the same time, his messianic orientation, while continuous throughout his career, should not be viewed as an overt, active agency. In that sense, he remained faithful to the restricted sense he gave it in his early text, “Theological-Political Fragment,” when he wrote, 35. Derrida, “Marx & Sons,” 249. The connection between Derrida’s “messianicity without messianism” and Benjamin’s “weak messiasnism” is complicated. See Chapter 7 for further discussion of this issue.

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“To have repudiated with utmost vehemence the political significance of theocracy is the cardinal merit of Bloch’s The Spirit of Utopia.”36

Messianism and Zionism The radical separation of the historical and the messianic that Benjamin found in Bloch was operative, as has been argued, throughout Benjamin’s career. It was already present as early as 1916, as we learn from conversations between him and Scholem that the latter recorded in his diary. Scholem at the time was primarily concerned to affirm his own position in relation to the multiple Zionist options in Germany at the time. He wrote of an ongoing personal struggle but was determined not to accede to the available “ideological” or Buberian versions.37 Benjamin encouraged him to follow his innermost promptings and “reject the Zionism of the others” (392). The same issue recurs later in their relationship, though it is Scholem who is most articulate on the matter since he is then in Palestine and actively involved in Brit Shalom.38 On August 1, 1931, reacting to the 17th Zionist Congress in Basel that year, he writes Benjamin that his hopes for a renewal of Judaism in a “religious-mystical” sense could no longer be maintained in light of an “empirical Zionism, which is based on an impossible and provocative distortion of an alleged political ‘solution of the Jewish question.’ ”39 Benjamin’s reply is altogether approving: “I, for my part, consider these lines [of Scholem] as a kind of historical document.”40 And he goes on to write that in this concurrence he sees a fulfillment of their exchanges earlier that year regarding the question of his (Benjamin’s) Jewish identity.41 36. A short text by Bloch written in 1919, a year after The Spirit of Utopia, “Über das noch nicht bewußte Wissen,” shows marked parallels with Benjamin’s later ideas about temporality and dream. See Ernst Bloch, Viele Kammern im Welthaus. Eine Auswahl aus dem Werk, ed. Friedrich Dieckmann and Jürgen Teller (Leipzig: Edition Suhrkamp, 1994), 64 –72. 37. Gershom Scholem, Tagebücher I: 1913–1917, ed. Karlfried Gründer (Frankfurt am Main: Jüdischer Verlag, 1995), 342. 38. Covenant of Peace, a group largely centered at the Hebrew University that sought a peaceable accommodation with the Arabs. 39. Scholem, Walter Benjamin: Die Geschichte einer Freundschaft, 214. 40. October 3, 1931, GB 4: 56. 41. See above, p. 11.

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In a recent essay, Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin traces the imbrication of Zionism and messianism in the history of Zionism, focusing particularly on Scholem’s evolving position.42 He cites from a Hebrew article that Scholem published in 1931: Excepting a historical catastrophe, the salvation of this movement [Zionism] from the forces to which it has sold itself is hardly possible. The alternatives are terrible: if Zionism remains with the ruling powers, it will undoubtedly break; yet if it attempts to desert them now, it may not succeed in doing so. Furthermore, this desertion may be accomplished only by risking the total destruction of our entire endeavor . . . (376)

Of course, Scholem’s views changed significantly in later years, but RazKrakotzkin is right to find a parallel between Scholem’s position at that time and Benjamin’s resolute critique of a progressive-redemptive narrative of Jewish history. It was the writings of the thirties, notably in the arcades materials and in “On the Concept of History” (Theses), that Benjamin most fully addressed the historiographic dimensions of his conception of messianism. 42. Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, “ ‘On the Right Side of the Barricades’: Walter Benjamin, Gershom Scholem, and Zionism,” Comparative Literature 65, 3 (2013): 363–81.

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In May 1940, on the eve of his departure from Paris, a departure that would be definitive, Benjamin wrote a long letter to Theodor Adorno. In response to comments that Adorno had written him in a few months earlier regarding the relation of forgetting and experience (Vergessen, Erfahrung),1 Benjamin wrote, “There can be no doubt that the concept of forgetting which you inject into your discussion of the aura is of great significance. . . . I cannot pursue this now . . . It seems unavoidable to me that I will again confront in my work the question you raised . . . The first thing, then, will be to return to the locus classicus of the theory of forgetting, which, as you well know, is represented for me by [Tieck’s] ‘Der blonde Eckbert’ ” (GB 6: 446). Benjamin’s interest in this tale goes back many years. In 1925, he had written to Scholem that he wanted to write something about it (along with Goethe’s “Die neue Melusine”) as part of a more extensive study on the Märchen 1. February 29, 1940, in Benjamin and Adorno, Briefwechsel 1928–1940, 417f. 174

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(May 20 –25, 1925, in GB 3: 38, 41), but nothing came of the plan. He mentions Tieck’s tale again in the essay on Kafka in connection with the discussion of animals in Kafka’s stories: like the totem poles of primitive peoples, the world of ancestors took [Kafka] down to the animals. Furthermore, it is not only for Kafka that animals are the receptacles of the forgotten. In Tieck’s profound story “Der blonde Eckbert” the forgotten name of a little dog—Strohmi [sic]—stands as the sign of a mysterious guilt.2

Tieck’s tale, “Der blonde Eckbert” (1797), is a Kunstmärchen by one of the masters of genre—that is, a fairy tale modeled on the type of oral stories that were being avidly collected in the period, but composed by some of the leading Romantic writers and intended for a sophisticated readership. In this story, Eckbert, a knight who lives in quiet retirement with his wife, Bertha, invites his friend Walther to spend the night at his castle. In the course of their conversation, Eckbert asks Bertha to recount the strange story of her youth. Bertha’s narrative then constitutes the greater part of the tale. She had been harshly treated by her father and, at the age of eight, ran away from home. Her wandering took her into remote, fantastic, and frightening regions where she almost despaired of life, but eventually she came to a verdant, isolated area where she encountered an old woman who gave her shelter and then offered to let her stay in her house in a beautiful retreat deep in the forest. There were two animals in the house, a colorful bird who regularly sang “Waldeinsamkeit” and a little dog. The old woman soon initiated Bertha into the duties of the establishment and often left her alone, sometimes for short periods but eventually much longer. After some years, the old woman told Bertha that the bird laid an egg every day containing a pearl or other jewel. When Bertha was 14, the old woman announced she would be away for quite a long time and, as usual, left Bertha alone. The girl, oppressed by her years of isolation and inflamed by visions of romance and glamour drawn from her reading, decided to escape. She took the bird 2. “Franz Kafka,” in SW 2: 810, trans. modified; GS 2: 430. See also, “Odradek is the form which things assume in oblivion [in der Vergessenheit]. They are distorted [entstellt]” SW 2: 811. Beatrice Hanssen has treated Benjamin’s link between forgetting and animals in Kafka in Walter Benjamin’s Other History: Of Stones, Animals, Human Beings, and Angels, Berkeley, 145– 49 and 163–65.

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with her and left the dog, barking pitifully, behind in the house. Eventually she made her way back to her native region. By selling some of her jewels she was able to buy a house. The bird, who had virtually stopped his haunting singing, gave one last version of “Waldeinsamkeit,” but altered now to reflect the sense of abandonment and exile from its forest home, and died. Bertha soon after met Eckbert, whom she married. This tale Bertha related to the friend, Walther, and at the conclusion he remarked, “Noble lady, I thank you, I can clearly picture you with that marvelous bird, feeding the little Strohmian.” Soon after, Bertha became ill and, as her condition worsened, she told her husband that she had never been able to recall the name of the little dog that she had cared for all those years of her childhood, and she was naturally astonished to hear Walther name it. How was it possible, she wondered, that this man could fill in this gap in her memory? Eckbert, on hearing this, moved and troubled, went outside with his crossbow, thinking to relieve his mind by hunting. But he soon saw Walther at a distance and, without premeditation, aimed and killed his friend. On his return, Bertha was dead. To summarize the conclusion of the tale: Eckbert’s guilt and melancholy eventually lead him to search out the old woman in her forest retreat, and she tells him that she herself was the friend Walther. What is more, Bertha is revealed to have been Eckbert’s half-sister. Those she had considered her parents were only her guardians. In taking Bertha in, the old woman had put her to a test that might have freed her of her tainted origin, but in running away from the house Bertha initiated the series of transgressions that eventually doomed her as well as Eckbert. There are striking parallels between this tale and Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”3 In both, there are acts of violence, apparently unmotivated, leading to despair and self-destruction. There is a sense of a primordial guilt that overshadows transgression at the level of the individual subject. In Tieck’s tale, neither Bertha nor Eckbert are characterized as greedy or violent, though their behavior would seem to derive from such traits. Yet they are portrayed as unwitting victims of a preordained fate. Both 3. Cf. Geoffrey Hartman on “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” in “On Traumatic Knowledge and Literary Studies,” New Literary History 26, no. 3 (1995): 537–63.

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narratives hinge upon an act of memory—in the case of the Mariner, it is in his obsessive need to tell his tale to whomever he encounters. In “Der blonde Eckbert,” it hinges on the retrieval of the little dog’s name, a reversal of Bertha’s forgetting that opens up the fatal revelation of her past. We will not enter into the complexities and ambiguities of this tale, one that has given rise to a large body of criticism. Our concern is with the insistence with which Benjamin returns to it over a period of many years. The tale dramatizes an interplay of memory and forgetting that leads to a fateful eruption of an earlier life. What is at issue touches on a central notion in Benjamin’s conceptual register—Eingedenken—though he does not use it in this instance. But the concept probably inflects Benjamin’s characterization of the tale as “the locus classicus of the theory of forgetting.” The more general word for recollection or memory is Erinnerung. But Eingedenken (literally, entering into a thought process, becoming aware; and by implication, the old enters into the new, as suggested by the genitive formulation, einer Sache eingedenkt sein) refers to the recovery of data guided by a temporal impulse. Benjamin glosses this term more than once, and notably at the beginning of the Proust essay where he refers to “the Penelope work of remembrance” (GS 2: 311). Noteworthy too in this passage is the conjunction of forgetting with remembrance: “Or should one not more properly speak of a Penelope work of forgetting? Is not involuntary remembrance [ungewollte Eingedenken], Proust’s mémoire involuntaire, much closer to forgetting than what is usually called remembering [Erinnerung]?” It is impossible determine just how Benjamin would have developed his ideas about “Der blonde Eckbert” but from his scattered remarks about Vergessen, but it is clear that the issue occupied him intensely.4 The notion of forgetting arises frequently in his writings about Kafka, and these show a close nexus between dread (Angst), displacement or deformation (Entstellung), atonement, and forgetting. In commenting on Willy Haas’s discussion of the significance of memory in the Jewish religion—memory understood as piousness and further as the memory of man’s sins that can only be erased by ritual—Benjamin writes, 4. See also a letter to Gretel Adorno in 1940: “Furthermore, these reflections [regarding “On the Concept of History”] lead me to think that the problem of recollection [Erinnerung] (and that of forgetting), which arises in them on another level, will continue to occupy me for a long time” (cited in GS 1: 1226).

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What has been forgotten—and with this insight we stand before another threshold of Kafka’s work—is never something purely individual. Everything forgotten mingles with what has been forgotten of the prehistoric world, forms countless uncertain and changing compounds, yielding a constant flow of new, strange products. Oblivion [Vergessenheit] is the container from which the inexhaustible intermediate world in Kafka’s stories presses toward the light. (SW 2:809–10; GS 2: 430)

Thus, forgetting, at times shading into oblivion, is to be understood not as an occasional inadvertence but as a fundamental threshold: for humankind a barrier both magical and ethical, but for animals and monstra, like Odradek, a more familiar medium: “Kafka is not the only writer for whom animals are the receptacles of the forgotten. In Tieck’s profound story Der blonde Eckbert, the forgotten name of a little dog, Strohmi, stands for a mysterious guilt. One can understand, then, why Kafka never tired of hearing about the forgotten from animals. They are not the goal, to be sure, but one cannot do without them.” For Benjamin, forgetting points to a variable boundary between present and past, a source of dread but also of recovery and atonement. Instead of conceiving the past as irretrievably lost, Benjamin sought to bring it into the fold of the present. A discussion he had with Brecht about Kafka’s parable “The Next Village” is illuminating in this respect. In this story the grandfather is astonished that a young man can think of riding to the next village because, in his view, “even a normal, happy lifetime is far too short for such a ride.” Brecht views this as a version of Zeno’s paradox on the divisibility of a distance, but Benjamin takes it in quite a different sense, as a parable of memory: “the true measure of life is memory. Looking back, it runs through life like lightening. The speed with which you can turn back a few pages is the same as the speed with which memory flies from the next village back to the place from which the rider decided to leave. Whoever, like the Ancients, has seen his life transformed into writing, let him read this writing backward. Only in this way will he encounter himself, and only in this way — in full flight from the present —will he be able to understand it.”5 5. “Notes from Svendborg,” SW 2: 788; GS 6: 529–30. Cf. Sigrid Weigel’s treatment of the issue discussed here in “Zu Franz Kafka,” in Benjamin-Handbuch, 550.

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Interestingly, what is missing is “trauma,” a word that rarely appears in Benjamin’s writings, though he was aware of Freud’s conception.6 But the term is not invoked in the more extended sense that one finds in the writings of Jacques Derrida or Cathy Caruth, though Benjamin developed issues that they identify with trauma. Caruth, drawing on Freud, develops the link between individual and historical trauma. She writes that shock-induced fright (Angst) is indicative of “the lack of preparedness to take in a stimulus that comes too quickly. It is not simply, that is, the literal threatening of bodily life, but the fact that the threat is recognized as such by the mind one moment too late. The shock of the mind’s relation to the threat of death is thus not the direct experience of the threat, but precisely the missing of this experience, the fact that, not being experienced in time, it has not been fully known.”7 As a result, trauma is to be understood in terms of a “two-scene model”: “the trauma as being locatable not in one moment alone but in the relation between two moments” (ibid., 133). Drawing on the notion of latency as Freud develops it in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Caruth articulates a conception of history that is governed by an uncertain future always looming to intrude and transform the present: If monotheism for Freud is an “awakening,” it is not simply a return of the past, but of the fact of having survived it, a survival that, in the figure of the new Jewish god, appears not as an act chosen by the Jews, but as the incomprehensible fact of being chosen for a future that remains, in its promise, yet to be understood. Chosenness is thus not simply a fact of the past but the experience of being shot into a future that is not entirely one’s own. The belated experience of trauma in Jewish monotheism suggests that history is not the passing on of a crisis but also the passing on of a survival that can only 6. Notably in Parts III and IV of “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” where trauma is mentioned in connection to shock defense (SW 4: 316 –21). And see also a series of entries in The Arcades Project (GS 5: 508–9 [K 8, 2 to 9, 1]; TAP 403– 4) where Benjamin cites a passage by Theodor Reik: “We experience the death of a near relative . . . and believe that we feel our grief in all its depth . . . but our grief reveals its depths only long after we think that we have got the better of it,” and adds the comment, “The ‘forgotten’ grief persists and gains ground; compare the death of the grandmother in Proust”(K 8, 2). 7. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 62.

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be possessed within a history larger than any single individual or any single generation. (Ibid., 71)

As Benjamin writes in one of the supplementary theses in “On the Concept of History,” Eingedenken denotes for the Jews a form of time that is neither homogeneous nor empty, that is, as Thesis XVII puts it, not subject to the continuous, additive temporality of historicism. Because the Jews were forbidden to seek out the future, they could only look to Thora and prayer for models of this disjunctive form of memorization.8 Here Benjamin invokes “the small gate through the Messiah could pass”—hardly a resolution of the mystery but a speculation that verges on the “inexpressible.” Jacques Derrida in his later writings repeatedly circled around the conjunction of memory, trauma, and historical futurity, often with reference to Benjamin. In Mal d’archiv, he wrote, “Memory is not just the opposite of forgetting . . . to think memory or to think anamnesis, here, is to think things as paradoxical as the memory of a past that has not been present, the memory of the future—the movement of memory as tied to the future and not only to the past, memory turned toward the promise, toward what is coming, what is arriving, what is happening tomorrow.”9 He sought thereby both to situate Benjamin within Jewish messianism and to claim for himself a position beyond the Jewish, or, indeed, any religious determination. Claiming that Benjamin’s messianicity requires “the memory of a determinate historical revelation, whether Jewish or Judeo-Christian . . .” Derrida argued that his own can be formulated by purely linguistic and ontological means. What is at issue here—and Derrida pushes it to an extreme point—is whether Benjamin’s version of the messianic requires a context of a religious origin in order to justify its effective force, its “actuality.” But, it seems to me, that misunderstands Benjamin’s position.10 8. I adapt Aris Fioretos’s formulation in “Contraction (Benjamin, Reading, History),” MLN 110, no. 3 (1995): 562. 9. Jacques Derrida, Mal d’archive: Une impression freudienne (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1995), 383. Herman Rapaport glosses Derrida’s formulation of the issue as “an anterior recollection of a messianic, apocalyptic, or traumatic memory that defies the arrow of Aristotelian time.” Herman Rapaport, “Archive Trauma,” Diacritics 28, no. 4 (1998): 7. 10. Derrida, “Marx & Sons,” 250. Derrida reiterates and radicalizes the differentiation of his formulation, “the messianic without messianism,” from Benjamin’s.

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Actualization and Awakening Benjamin’s career may be best understood in terms of a repeatedly renewed effort to intervene in a historical juncture by means of a writing practice. His works generally eschewed direct commentary on political matters, and he never aspired to what is now termed “contemporary relevance.” Nonetheless, implicit in his conception of criticism was the goal of responding to the confluence of forces of a historical moment, and to potentiate that moment by way of writing.11 Convinced as he was of the incapacity of the history of ideas, Benjamin posited hidden patterns, “constellations,” that resist causal and structural analysis but manifest moments of maximal intensity and potency—what he termed Nowtime ( Jetztzeit) (cf. GS 1: 702f ). The goal of the critical thinker here is both diagnostic and enabling. At one point in his reflections on history, Benjamin draws on the theological concept of apocatastasis, the resurrection of all creatures who had ever lived. Whereas apocatastasis in the theological sense does indeed assume the Last Judgment, as Horkheimer had pointed out,12 Benjamin is not put off since his intent is methodological or, as he puts it, “monadological,” “to blast the historical object [Gegenstand] out of the continuum of histori“Between ‘weak’ and ‘without,’ ” Derrida writes, “there is a leap—perhaps an infinite leap. A messianicity without messianism is not a watered-down messianism, a diminishment of the force of the messianic expectation. It is a different structure . . .” He elaborates this, then, in terms of both speech act theory (the performative of the promise) and “the onto-phenomenology of temporal or historical existence” (“the horizon of awaiting [attente] that informs our relationship to time”). And then adds that it “does not . . . much resemble Benjamin’s. It no longer has any essential connection with what messianism may be taken to mean, that is, at least two things: on the one hand, the memory of a determinate historical revelation, whether Jewish or Judeo-Christian, and, on the other, a relatively determinate messiah-figure.” But Derrida’s comments here do not really address Benjamin’s situation. His “weak messianism” is in no sense a “watered-down messianism,” nor can it be identified with “what messianism may be taken to mean,” a formulation too vague to be usable here. Whether it resembles Benjamin’s is not particularly pertinent. In each case, “messianic” has a status relative to the singular conceptual configuration of a given thinker and any comparison would have to take the whole configuration into account. (On the messianic in Benjamin, see Chapter 6.) 11. See the discussion of Beschriftung as “the literarization of all the conditions of life” in Chapter 3. 12. Cited in GS 5: 588–89 [N 8, 1]; TAP 471. See the Introduction to this book.

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cal succession” (N 10, 3). The theological doctrine becomes a practice of disinterment and extraction, a splitting or separating operation that works endlessly over every residue or negative. As in the theological apocatastasis, there is a recovery of a past, but this is not oriented to an apocalyptic restoration. Rather, selection is guided by a need where the past is marked by a force of attraction arising in the present. Events, such as texts, take on historical meaning by virtue of their “afterlife.” This Benjamin calls “actualization” (Aktualisierung, GS 5: 574 [N 2, 2]; TAP 460), a term that conveys a sense of immediate realization, and installs it as a “founding concept” of historical materialism. Aktualität and its variants recur throughout The Arcades Project, but to term it a “founding concept” does not thereby make it a consistent conceptual node. Sigrid Weigel properly characterizes it as “the name of a political praxis”13 and in that sense it serves, like Jetztzeit, as a limit term for the performative goal of the project. Throughout his work Benjamin sought to theorize and to exemplify a form of writing in which the illustrative presentation would serve too as a medium of transformation. Even in the literary studies, with their more formalist orientation, Benjamin is mindful of the impact of a text. In his analysis of the craft of storytelling in “The Storyteller,” Benjamin’s focus was on the socially integrative function of narrative. He underscored the uses (and usefulness) of narrative (ihren Nutzen), its tendency to convey what we would term home truths, words of wisdom (Rat, Weisheit). Yet “The Storyteller” did not focus on the fissures in the reception structure of narrative. In The Arcades Project, this level itself is put to the test—the level of commonplaces, of counsel, but also that of a closed narrative structure. Benjamin here seems to acknowledge that the formal means of a literary work

13. Sigrid Weigel, Entstellte Ähnlichkeit: Walter Benjamins theoretische Schreibweise (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag, 1997), 225. She refers to N 2, 2, where Benjamin states that the “founding concept” of historical materialism “is not progress but actualization.” Cf. this gloss on Jetztzeit: “one could speak of the increasing concentration (integration) of reality, such that everything past (in its time) can acquire a higher grade of actuality [einen höheren Aktualitätsgrad] than it had in the moment of its existing” (GS 5: 494 –95 [K 2, 3]; TAP 391–92); or Benjamin’s remark in a letter to Hugo von Hofmannsthal (February 8, 1928) on the aim of Einbahnstrasse (OneWay Street), “To take hold in history of actuality [die Aktualität] as the reverse of the eternal” (GS 5: 1083).

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cannot be readily adapted to the construction and presentation of historical data. Correspondingly, the idea of a text’s performative potential needs to be conceived anew. While the collection of materials gathered in convolutes of The Arcades Project are not themselves to be taken as a model of presentation (see Chapter 4), Benjamin conceived the project in terms of new modalities of address and reception, in this way making image, anecdote, and citation instruments of what might be termed a new kind of mediatic transmission. Of course, in “The Work of Art” essay it is film that is granted a preeminent role in training “human beings in the apperceptions and reactions needed to deal with a vast apparatus whose role in their lives is expanding almost daily” (SW 3: 108). But this kind of transformative potential is one that Benjamin hoped to realize through his own writerly practice, and indeed, in spite of the dispersed publications of his writings, he seemed to have a deep-seated faith in their ultimate efficacy. At the core of The Arcades Project there is not a single constitutive concept or theme but rather a form of presentation (in the sense of Darstellung) that is oriented toward its own actualization. But, as noted earlier (Chapter 6), this involves no small dilemma, since to realize such presentation would require that the addressee, the intended subject of awakening, be somehow available, or at least conceivable as a projection. It is an issue that Benjamin broached but did not resolve. He stipulated no revolution in the classic Marxist sense, nor did he formulate a class theory by which to define the collective subject.14 Rather, one might say that he explored one dimension of the collective by envisaging a subject of reception through citation (see Chapter 5).15 14. See H. D. Kittsteiner’s incisive treatment of this issue: “Walter Benjamin’s Historicism,” New German Critique 39 (1986): 179–215 (translated from “Walter Benjamins Historismus,” in Walter Benjamins Urgeschichte, 193–97). From another perspective Miriam Bratu Hansen critiques Benjamin’s conception of the masses as “a philosophical, if not aesthetic, abstraction.” Her study juxtaposes it to what she sees as Sigfried Kracauer’s more differentiated construct of the masses, in Miriam Bratu Hansen, “America, Paris, the Alps: Kracauer (and Benjamin) on Cinema and Modernity,” in Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, ed. Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995, 374 –84). 15. This issue—the collective as “community,” “masses,” “people”—is, of course, present throughout the oeuvre, from the early work on youth and students to the

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The complex status of the dream figure in Benjamin has not been ignored by commentators. “Erwachen /Traum” is one of the entries in the collection Benjamins Begriffe, and the author of this entry, Heiner Weidmann, lays out the problematic with admirable concision: “What is involved is the possibility of modernity as a historical discontinuity: How, historically, is a truly epochal new beginning, a revolutionary reversal at all conceivable that would not merely—undialectically— consist in a bad negation of the antecedent condition and thus remain merely illustrative?”16 For Benjamin it is clear that the invocation of a past cannot be in the form of conscious recollection or antiquarian revival. Rather, as he writes in the first entry of Convolute K, what is at issue is “an attempt to become aware of the dialectical—the Copernican—turn of remembrance [Eingedenken]” (K1, 1). This entry seeks to address the relation of individual and collective subject, and, notably, orients this issue under the aegis of “awakening” (Erwachen): Awakening as a graduated process that goes on in the life of the individual as in the life of generations. Sleep its initial stage. A generation’s experience of youth has much in common with the experience of dreams. Its historical configuration is a dream configuration. Every epoch has such a side turned toward dreams, the child’s side. For the previous century, this appears very clearly in the arcades. . . . What follows here is an experiment [Versuch] in the technique of awakening.” (GS 5: 490 [K1, 1]; TAP 388)

But just what could constitute such an undertaking or experiment (Versuch could mean either one) is not easy to determine. In another entry in this convolute, he contrasts the individual and the collective consciousness in the nineteenth century:

feuilletons and radio talks of the middle period to the later reflections on the failure of the Social Democrats. As I argue in Chapter 1, it is in the Artwork Essay that this issue is most directly addressed. 16. Heiner Weidemann, “Erwachen /Traum,” in Benjamins Begriffe, 2: 342. See also Burkhardt Lindner, “Benjamin als Träumer und Theoretiker des Traums,” in Walter Benjamin, Träume, ed. Burkhardt Lindner (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2008), 135–68. This essay surveys the multiple dimensions of dreaming and awakening in Benjamin, from the level of immanence to that of collective transformation.

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The nineteenth century a spacetime Zeitraum (a dream-time, Zeit-traum) in which the individual consciousness more and more secures itself in reflecting, while the collective consciousness sinks into ever deeper sleep. (GS 5: 491 [K 1,4]; TAP 389)

A clue to the interpenetration of individual and collective consciousness in the nineteenth century was provided by Sigfried Giedion, who saw this figured in the “despised everyday structures . . . gray buildings, market halls, department stores, exhibitions” (cited in GS 5: 493 [K 1a, 5]; TAP 390). Benjamin explicitly adopts this, while giving Giedeon’s term “subconscious” a more materialist slant: Attempt to develop Giedion’s thesis. “In the nineteenth century,” he writes, “construction plays the role of the subconscious.” Wouldn’t it be better to say, “the role of bodily processes”—around which “artistic” architectures gather, like dreams around the framework of physiological processes? (GS 5: 494 [K 1a, 7]; TAP 391)

Benjamin did not simply accept this premise but sought to use it as the basis of an active intervention. While awakening has a decisive place in the allegory of The Arcades Project, it cannot be taken as a telos, a determinate future moment, whether of enlightenment or redemption. Its place in Benjamin’s argument is bound up with the writing praxis he is engaged in, the mode of address to a collective to come. To view this collective, then, as an addressee rather than a determinate entity may appear as an evasion, but it serves to mark a task for which Benjamin could well conceive himself as singularly fitted. Benjamin always resisted any overly explicit formulation of a link between language and praxis. The rationale given to Martin Buber in 1916 for not participating in the latter’s periodical Der Jude is revealing. He writes there of conceiving writing “only in the sense of the poetic, the prophetic, the factual—with regard to its effectivity [was die Wirkung angeht], in any case, only magical, that is to say, un-mediated [un-mittel-bar].” But he then qualifies this by stressing, “My conception of the factual and at the same time eminently political [hochpolitischen] style and writing . . .” What follows, however, markedly avoids any specific linguistic means or techniques. In fact, he argues that these must be strenuously avoided: “I do not believe

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that the Word can ever stand further from the divine [dem Göttlichen] than as ‘actual’ practice [‘wirkliche’ Handeln] . . . To treat it as means debases it to outlay [wuchert es].”17 I tried to show in Chapter 5 that his recourse in The Arcades Project to citation and montage represented one solution to the problem.18 The premise of dream as historical unconscious and of the task of the historian to be the interpreter of dreams is concisely put forth in a series of entries in Convolute N (“On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress”). The last of these entries makes the claim with a boldness that belies the difficulties involved: The realization of dream elements in the course of waking up is the canon of dialectics. It is paradigmatic for the thinker and binding for the historian. (GS 5: 580 [N 4, 4]; TAP 464)

That Benjamin was well aware of the difficulties is evident, for one thing, in his attempts to convince Adorno and then Max Horkheimer, director of the Institute for Social Research and editor of its Zeitschrift, that he should be allowed to prepare a study of the collective unconscious in Jung and Klages.19 This was rejected. In the opening entries of Convolute K (“Dream City and Dream House, Dreams of the Future, Anthropological Nihilism, Jung”) Benjamin situates dream and waking in relation to history and politics as follows: The Copernican revolution in historical perception is as follows. Formerly it was thought that a fixed point had been found in “what has been” [das Gewesene], and one saw the present engaged in tentatively concentrating the forces of knowledge on this ground. Now this relation is to be overturned, and what has been is to become the dialectical reversal—the irruption of awakened consciousness [zum Einfall des erwachten Bewußtseins]. Politics attains primacy over history. (GS 5: 490 –91 [K 1, 2]; TAP 389–390, translation modified)

17. To Martin Buber, July 17, 1916, GB 1: 326 –327. 18. Cf. “Method of this work: literary montage. I have nothing to say. Only to show” (GS 5: 574 [N 1a, 8]; TAP 460). 19. See letters to Adorno of January 7, 1935, and to Horkheimer of March 28, 1937, GB 5: 489–90. In the latter he writes that his remarks in the 1935 exposé on Klages and Jung were “for me the least satisfactory” (489).

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What the moment of awakening brings is a sudden awareness of “the irruption of awakened consciousness,” the sign of the “what has been.” (Einfall signifies to bring to mind, to recall, but it also connotes a sudden intrusion or irruption.) For in the dream state the dreaming self is occluded.20 Only in the moment of awakening can that self take charge of what the dream has figured forth, recollect it, and make it present. But this moment is fleeting and cannot be claimed as a possession. In another entry, this phenomenon is concentrated in the dialectical image as a lightening flash (aufblitzendes) and becomes available only in the “Now of recognizability” ( Jetzt der Erkennbarkeit, GS 5: 591–92 [N 9, 7] TAP 473).21 This puzzling formula, so often cited but so impenetrable on its surface, identifies the decisive performative goal of the Passagen. It presupposes the retrograde temporality of Benjamin’s concept of history.22 In a letter to Horkheimer regarding the “Work of Art” essay and the Passagen project, Benjamin speaks of a “vanishing point” that marks “the precise place in the present to which my historical construction relates,” and then expands this formulation as follows: If the fate of art in the nineteenth century is the theme of the book, then this fate has something to tell us only because it is contained in the ticking of a timepiece whose tolling has at last reached our ears. It is for us, I mean to say, that the fateful hour of art has rung . . . (October 16, 1935, GB 5: 179)23 20. Cf. Norbert Bolz, “Bedingungen der Möglichkeit historischer Erfahrung,” in Walter Benjamins Urgeschichte, 151. 21. Werner Hamacher has written pertinently about this entry: “The index about which Benjamin speaks here—and also in Thesis II of ‘The Concept of History’— marks a double time: that of the past and that of the now that takes cognizance of it. Its index is thus a double one: it stands in for two times; it is a critical index: it marks the point of an internal crisis of time in a before and an after, in which the time of the past and that of the present separate; and it synchronizes: it connects the two times in their very disjunction. By virtue of its historical index every now is distinguished as the now of another now, and only by virtue of this internal split of the now is every one the now of a specific recognizability.” Werner Hamacher, “ ‘Jetzt.’ Benjamin zur historischen Zeit,” 168, my translation. 22. See “Counter-History” in the Introduction. 23. Peter Zusi writes pertinently, “This image of the vanishing point is curious, for it presumes a counterintuitive relation between foreground and background. One does not look through the foreground of the present out into the background of the past (as a more traditional image of the historical gaze would posit), nor does

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It follows that retrograde temporality involves not some inversion of historical sequence but rather a need to revise our relation to history, to assume “the past” as relevant only to the present. The summons to awakening, while it represents one aspect of what I have called the performative intent of Benjamin’s project, involves danger and risk. When Benjamin writes, “The imminent awakening is poised, like the wooden horse of the Greeks, in the Troy of dreams” (GS 5: 495 [K 2, 4]; TAP 392), this awakening does not so much evoke the triumph of the Greeks over the Trojans, but rather signals the effort to maintain “the Troy of dreams.”24 The implication is that awakening, while apparently dispelling the dream, may well be an effort to hold on to it. Much depends on recognizing the ambiguity of this figure. As is evident in a number of entries in The Arcades Project, Benjamin sought a formulation that could maintain the conflicting claims of dream and waking without allowing either to be dissipated. It is a state not so much of suspension as of a dynamic imbrication. Thus, regarding “this generation” (his own), he writes, “we seek a teleological moment in the context of dreams. Which is the moment of waiting. The dream waits secretly for the awakening; the sleeper surrenders himself to death only provisionally, waits for the second when he will cunningly wrest himself from its clutches. So, too, the dreaming collective . . .” (GS 5: 492 [K 1a, 2]; TAP 390). In notes for the 1935 exposé, “Paris, Capital of the XIXth Century,” Benjamin had explicitly referred to the Hegelian ruse of reason as a corone look through the foreground of the present out into the future emerging on the distant horizon (as the image of prognosis would require). Rather, historical ‘background’ forms Benjamin’s foreground; and the present, that which is temporally closest, is located in the background, at the vanishing point.” Peter Zusi, “Vanishing Points: Walter Benjamin and Karel Teige on the Liquidations of Aura,” The Modern Language Review 108, no. 2 (April, 2013): 371. 24. Wolfgang Fietkau draws attention to a passage in Marx’s Die Klassenkämpfe in Frankreich 1848 bis 1850 that may have been in Benjamin’s mind here. Marx wrote, “Insofar as, hidden in the innards of the Trojan horse, we have smuggled into the holy Illion [Troy], we have, unlike our ancestors, the Greeks, not conquered the enemy’s city, but made ourselves into captives.” Wolfgang Fietkau, Schwanengesang auf 1848: Ein Rendezvous am Louvre (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt Verlag, 1978), 115. This book offers a discerning treatment of Benjamin’s treatment of Marx and Baudelaire in the context of the 1848 Revolution. Because it appeared before the publication of The Arcades Project, Fietkau could not draw on Convolute K.

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rective to the “wish and dream image of the collective.” This leads to the formula: “With cunning [List], and not its absence, can we win release from the sphere of dreams” (GS 5: 1213, Mit List, nicht ohne sie, lösen wir uns vom Traumbereich los).25 In the same group of notes, he raises an issue that clearly preoccupied him in this period but that he was not able to develop at length, namely, the status of the collective to come. (This is addressed most directly in his last years in “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 1938–39.) This entry reads: “We grasp the dream 1) as historical, 2) as collective phenomenon. To attempt [?] in the dreams of the individual to bring light through the theory of the historical dreams of the collectives” (GS 5: 1214).26 In another formulation, Benjamin drew on the Freudian dream-work of individual consciousness to project a collective phenomenon: “But just as the sleeper—in this respect like a madman [Irre]—sets out on the macrocosmic journey through his own body . . . so likewise for the dreaming collective, which, through the arcades, communes with its own insides. We must follow in its wake so as to expound the nineteenth century—in fashion and advertising, in buildings and politics—as the outcome of its dream visions” (GS 5: 491–92 [K 1, 4]; TAP 389). He credited the Surrealists with being the first to offer a means of deciphering the nineteenth century’s “nar25. Jacques Derrida has noted, “To bear the self-evidence of Hegel today would mean this: one must, in every sense, go through the ‘slumber of reason,’ the slumber that engenders monsters and then puts them to sleep; this slumber must be effectively traversed so that awakening will not be a ruse of dream. That is to say, again, a ruse of reason. . . . Reason keeps watch over a deep slumber in which it has an interest.” Jacques Derrida, “From Restricted to General Economy,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 252. Elissa Marder developed Derrida’s analysis in terms of a temporality of catastrophe. “. . . within the structure of the dream, at the dream’s core, one finds buried the stone of ‘concrete history’ which becomes manifest only at the moment of awakening. Awakening is, then, opposed to the dream without for all that being external to it. On the contrary, waking is formed, lies dormant, within the inner folds of the dream, but reveals its concrete material and political force at the moment of awakening.” Elissa Marder, “Walter Benjamin’s Dream of ‘Happiness,’ ” in Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project, ed. Beatrice Hanssen (New York: Continuum, 2006), 186f. 26. “Wir fassen den Traum 1) als historisches, 2) als kollektives Phänomen.Versuchen [?] in die Träume des Einzelnen Licht durch die Lehre von den historischen Träumen der Kollektive bringen” (GS 5: 1214). The German is ambiguous, as the editor’s question mark suggests.

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cotic historicism, its passion for masks” (GS 5: 491 [K 1a, 6]; TAP 391). And he was well aware of Marx’s early remark, Reform of consciousness not through dogmas, but through the analysis of mystical consciousness that is unclear to itself, whether it appears in a religious or a political form. Then people will see that the world has long possessed the dream of a thing—and that it only needs to possess the consciousness of this thing in order really to possess it.27

As Jacques Rancière has written, “the ‘only’ entails an absolutely immodest proposition, a tremendous presupposition: the world is dreaming. And the first presupposition entails a second one, that the world exists as a subject: the dream witnesses to the existence of the collective subject in charge of the fulfillment of modernity.” And then he continues, Modernity is deprived of the categories of its own understanding. It is not contemporaneous with itself. To the degree that modernity is liberated from prehistory, it falls back into prehistory. Prehistory thus means two things: it is the sleep, the “not yet,” the unfulfillment of modernity, but, at the same time, it is the backward movement that stems from the inner discrepancy, the “too early” of modernity. . . . So the logic of the archaeomodern might be a logic of the one-turn-more, a logic of the regressio ad infinitum, located at the core of the modern project.28

How can we understand such a logic of “emancipation in terms of unfulfillment,” a “logic of the one-turn-more, a logic of the regressio ad infinitum”? First of all, Rancière notes, the arcades present a phantasmagoria into which the worker enters as into a collective dream in which he awakens from the false awakening that the community of writing has made him believe in.29 Rancière is struck by what appears to be a parallel to his own undertak27. GS 5: 583 [N 5a, 1]; TAP 467. The citation is from a letter of Marx to Ruge of September 1843. 28. Jacques Rancière, “The Archaeomodern Turn,” in Walter Benjamin and the Demands of History, ed. Michael P. Steinberg (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996), 27–28. 29. Rancière here alludes to his own books, notably, The Nights of Labor: The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth-Century France and The Philosopher and His Poor, where he focused on “the age of a new dispersive life of meaning; for it begins with what I have called the ‘revolution of the children of the book,’ when the availability of writing— of the ‘mute’ letter— endows any life, or the life of anybody, with the capacity of taking on meaning, of entering into the universe of meaning. . . .” (29).

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ing in Benjamin’s work, what may be summarized by a phrase of Benjamin’s: “l’historien comme chiffonier,” the historian as ragpicker.30 Benjamin’s idea of awakening, as Rancière notes, revises what is generally taken as the Marxist teleology, “the common pattern of emancipation conceived as the fulfillment of the ‘unfulfilled.’ ” And Rancière continues, “He only draws out that last consequence of the theory of the dreaming cogito” (35) by making clear that “the arcade cannot be the reservoir of meaning, stored as the treasure available for the moment of an awakening” (37). What Benjamin in fact provides is an alternative temporality, one that, in displacing the substructure of the proletarian phantasmagoria from a causal sequence, in Marx’s sense, to an “economic process as perceptible Ur-phenomenon” (GS 5: 573–74 [N 1a, 6]; TAP 460), cannot realize a lifting of enchantment and the entry into a palpable, disenchanted heritage. In fact, as dialectical image, the dreaming collective remains suspended at the moment of awakening. This feature of suspension is noteworthy. It signals a persistent resistance to awakening from the dream state of the nineteenth century. It would be the task of the arcades project both to uncover this resistance and find means of overcoming it: It is not only that the forms of appearance taken by the dream collective in the nineteenth century cannot be thought away; and not only that these forms characterize this collective much more decisively than any other— they are also, rightly interpreted, of the highest practical import, for they allow us to recognize the sea on which we navigate and the shore from which we push off. It is here, therefore, the “critique” of the nineteenth century— to say it in one word— ought to begin. The critique not of its mechanism and cult of machinery but of its narcotic historicism, its passion for masks, in which nevertheless lurks a signal of true historical existence, one which the Surrealists were the first to pick up. To decipher this signal is the concern of the present undertaking. (GS 5:493–94 [K 1a, 6], TAP 391)

As Benjamin put it in a letter of 1935 to Gretel Adorno, a moment when he was preparing the draft of his Baudelaire book for the Institute for Social Research: This reading of Rancière’s essay is indebted to an unpublished essay by Brook Haley, “Jacques Rancière’s ‘The Archaeomodern Turn.’ ” 30. Cf. GS 5: 441 [ J 68, 4]; TAP 349–50.

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The dialectical image does not draw a copy of the dream —it was never my intention to assert this. But it does seem to me to contain the instances, the irruptions of awakening, and indeed to produce its figure only from these passages just as an astral image emerges from luminous points. Thus here too yet another bow must be arced, and a dialectic mastered: that between image and awakening.31

The “astral images” here are, in the first instance, the constellations in the sky, but in Benjamin’s terms they denote the fragments and citations that he ceaseless fashioned as constellations of his thinking. In a series of entries in Convolute N (GS 5: 574 –75 [N 1a, 6 to N2, 6]; TAP 460 –61), Benjamin opposes Marx’s causal teleology with his exposition of what he terms the “thread of expression” (Ausdruckszusammenhang). His insistence in these entries on the words Ausdruck, Anschaulichkeit (heightened graphicness or perceptibility), Konstruktion, Aktualisierung, and Montage is to be understood not only as a modification of the mode of historical representation but as a radical revision of what constitutes the historical itself. “Must the Marxist understanding of history necessarily be acquired at the expense of the perceptibility of history?” he asks, and then continues, “The first stage in this undertaking will be to carry over the principle of montage into history. That is to assemble large-scale constructions out of the smallest and most precisely cut components” (GS 5: 575 [N 2, 6]; TAP 460 –61). Here he articulates the procedure that had emerged for him in 1927–28 when he first began to gather the notes and citations for his project. And, in spite of deep doubts, he pursued his early sense that a transformation of the historical past would clear away the spell or enchantment that lay on the nineteenth century—this last figured as a tangled growth of madness and myth that must be cleared by “the whetted axe of reason, looking neither right nor left so as not to succumb to the horror that beckons from deep in the primeval forest” (GS 5: 570 –71 [N 1, 4]; TAP 456 –57). But the work of montage, of drawing from the juxtaposed citations and fragments sparks of illumination, is not designed to harmonize or narrativize those fragments. When he writes, “But 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 [sie verwenden]” (GS 5: 574 [N 1a, 8]; TAP 460), we come upon one of those nodes that mark both a goal and a limit for Benjamin. 31. August 16, 1935, GB 5: 145.

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From his vantage in the late 1930s, one could hardly expect more. It would not be unfair to say that he made space for this issue as early as 1926 in “To the Planetarium,”32 and then in texts of the early 1930s, “The Destructive Character” and “Experience and Poverty.” These brief but extraordinary pieces mark out not only a negative space but project a systematic disencumbering and cleansing operation as exemplified in Karl Kraus’s Die Fackel.33 The idea of a “new, positive barbarism” [positives Barbarentum; GS 2: 215] that he enunciates may be understood both as a response to the Fascist cultural program and, more fundamentally, as a strategy “to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is working to overpower it,” as he would put it in the “Theses” (SW 4: 391). It is not self-evident how impoverishment of experience (Erfahrungsarmut) and positive barbarism combine to induce a state of crisis both for the intelligentsia and the masses. After all, their reaction to the situation that Benjamin diagnosed would be opposed: The masses were excluded from the process of cultural formation (Bildung) and had never internalized the autonomy of art. They had no comprehension for the polemics of the avantgarde or of radical modernism. On the other hand, they were capable of responding in a progressive manner to a Chaplin film. Film as a medium, as well as architecture, allow the mass audience to enter into a positive relationship to the sphere of art, one not governed by contemplation but rather subject to distraction. “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” (Third Version) outlines the means for a regenerative path through new media, especially film. The last parts of this essay articulate this potential: “The masses are a matrix from which all customary behavior towards works of art is today emerging newborn” (SW 2: 267). But the sense of a tension between a liquidation and a revitalization of the cultural inheritance is persistent throughout his last years. It is clear enough in the “Work of Art” essay, where the positive assessment of the masses’ “distraction” is balanced by the Epilogue that underlines the link between Fascist aesthetics and war. The advocacy of “positive barbarism” put forward in “Experience and Poverty” in1933 has not been revoked. It can be traced to multiple strands in Benjamin’s writings: Brecht’s “Verwische die Spuren” (erase the traces) and his sense of a “universal right to poverty” (SW 2: 370); 32. “To the Planetarium” is discussed in Chapter 6. 33. See Chapter 2 for an extended discussion of Karl Kraus.

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Scheerbart’s glass architecture and the utopian self-immolation of Lesabéndio; Kraus’s cannibalistic (Menschenfresserische) satire; Kafka’s consciousness of failure; the liquidation of the aesthetic by the Surrealists; Baudelaire’s self-laceration and ingrained gloom.34 The writings of the thirties, including The Arcades Project and the final “On the Concept of History,” do not offer a resolution of this problematic. They could hardly do that. In his last reflections Benjamin pointed to the impasse of that moment: The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are “still” possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge—unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable. (Thesis VIII, SW 4: 392)

And elsewhere in that text, he writes that “the secret index by which [the past] is referred to redemption” raises a claim that “cannot be settled cheaply” (Thesis II, SW 4: 390). These formulations—tentative, searching—are written in full awareness of the catastrophe of that period, “that things cannot go on like this [daß es nicht mehr so weiter gehen kann].”35 The last three theses of “On the Concept of History” offer a complex and demanding sense of “materialist historiography.” It is one that would allow a recognition of “the sign of a messianic arrest of happening, or (to put it differently) a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed.” Although Benjamin avoided the first person singular in his writings, one cannot help but see his own person in the figure of “the historical materialist.” Thesis XVI could well be read in this sense: The historical materialist cannot do without the notion of a present which is not a transition, but in which time takes a stand [einsteht] and has come to a standstill. For this notion defines the very present in which he himself is writing history. Historicism offers the “eternal” image of the past; histori-

34. I draw here on Burkhardt Lindner’s “Technische Reproduzierbarkeit und Kulturindustrie. Benjamin’s ‘Positives Barbarentum’ im Kontext” in “Links hatte noch alles sich zu enträtseln . . .” Walter Benjamin im Kontext, ed. Burkhardt Lindner (Frankfurt am Main: Syndikat Verlag, 1978), 185–89. 35. One-Way Street, SW 1: 451. This is a text from the mid-twenties, of course, a time that had its own causes for crisis. But it seems not inappropriate to apply to the late thirties as well. See Chapter 5.

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cal materialism supplies a unique experience with the past. 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. (SW 4: 396)

It behooves us to recognize the situation from which these words arise— not to read into them any claim to redemption nor yet to ignore a strain of hope.

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index

Abbott, Berenice, 90 Adorno, Gretel (Karplus), 19, 66, 120 –21, 129, 145, 158–59, 169, 177n4, 191–92 Adorno, Theodor, 5, 6, 15–19, 37, 48, 62, 101, 106, 112–14, 120 –21, 129–30, 134, 161, 162, 174, 186 aesthetics, 42–68 afterlife, 2, 105–6, 139 Agancinski, Sylviane, 116 –17 Aktualisieren, 137, 139, 181, 192 Apocatastasis, 160 Aragon, Louis, 103 archive, 139– 41 Atget, Eugène, 87–101 aura, 88–90, 97–98, 101 awakening, 38, 64 –65, 160, 179, 184 –92, 189nn25,26 Baader, Franz von, 150 Balzac, Honoré de, 131 Barthes, Roland, 88 Baudelaire, Charles, 2, 33, 78, 94, 131, 194 Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb, 42 Benjamin, Walter: The Arcades Project, 16, 18, 38, 51, 60, 61–68, 72, 73, 83, 89, 95, 102– 46, 148– 49, 159–61, 170 –72, 182–83, 186 –92; “The Author as Producer,” 58, 71, 93; “Berlin Childhood Around Nineteen Hundred,” 8, 33, 107–10, 133; “Berlin Chronicle,”

8, 33, 107–9, 120, 141; “Central Park,” 138; “Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Age of High Capitalism,” 16; The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism, 49, 52; “Critique of Violence,” 154; “The Destructive Character,” 58, 86, 193; “Doctrine of the Similar,” 81; “Eduard Fuchs, Collector and Historian,” 37, 89–90, 104, 136; “Experience and Poverty,” 193; “Franz Kafka,” 8, 15–16, 104, 165–67, 175; German Men and Women, 5, 8, 24; “Goethe’s Elective Affinities,” 49, 51–54, 61, 68, 70; “Karl Kraus,” 29–30, 58–59, 71–86, 104; “The Life of Students,” 147– 48, 152, 161; “Little History of Photography,” 79, 87–101; “Moscow Diary,” 32–33, 34, 107, 163; “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” 22, 80 –82, 142– 44, 150, 152; “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 16, 104, 122, 189; “On the Concept of History” (Theses), 18, 29, 37– 41, 67, 104, 122, 136, 139, 144, 146, 148, 158, 161, 167–70, 173, 180, 193–95; “On the Image of Proust,” 8, 64, 142; “On the Mimetic Faculty,” 81, 146; “On the Program of the Coming Philosophy,” 52, 152; One-Way Street, 6, 69, 72, 74, 101, 104, 137, 145– 46, 154, 155, 158, 194n35; The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 49, 53–54, 70,

207

208

Index

Benjamin, Walter (continued) 111, 114 –15; “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” 104, 113, 118, 132–33, 137, 141, 188–89; “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,” 16 –19, 93–94, 104, 131, 141; “The Ring of Saturn,” 120 –21; “A State Monopoly on Pornography,” 71; “The Storyteller,” 24 –32, 182; “Surrealism,” 57–58, 99–101, 133, 135, 142, 151–52, 164 –65; “The Task of the Translator,” 20 –24, 81, 105, 143, 170 –71; “Theological-Political Fragment,” 152, 154 –55, 164, 171–72; “To the Planetarium,” 104, 164 –65, 193; “The True Politician,” 7, 164; “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” 45, 51, 55–60, 93, 122, 183, 187, 193 Bialik, Hayim, 30 –31 Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, 122–25 Blanqui, Louis Auguste, 122, 162 Bloch, Ernst, 11, 70, 103, 153–54, 161, 167, 172 Blumenberg, Hans, 6, 46 Boehme, Jacob, 150 Bolz, Norbert, 46n14, 67 Brecht, Berthold, 6, 11, 19, 20, 30, 92, 101, 121, 129, 161, 178, 193 Brentano, Bernard von, 88 Breton, André, 101 Brit Shalom, 172 Buber, Martin, 34, 107, 152, 185–86 Büchner, Georg, 101 Buck-Morss, Susan, 45, 126 Busoni, Ferruccio, 95 du Camp, Maxime, 36, 144 – 45 Canetti, Elias, 77–78 Caruth, Cathy, 179–80 Chaplin, Charlie, 193 citation, 79–80, 134 – 46 Clark, T. J., 105 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 176 –77 commodity, 137–38, 145

Compagnon, Antoine, 136 –37, 139 counter-history, 37– 41, 170 –72. See also retrograde temporality criticism, 3, 5, 21, 52–55 Deleuze, Gilles, 6, 118–20 Derrida, Jacques, 6, 43, 110 –11, 158–59, 171, 180 –81, 189n25 dialectical image, 34, 65–66, 129–30, 137n13, 140n16, 170, 187, 191–92 Dostoevski, Fyodor, 101 dreaming, 184 –92 Dumas, Alexandre, 131 Espagne, Michel, 105–6 experience, 9–10, 25–35, 36 –38, 45 Die Fackel, 74 –75, 83–84 Fenves, Peter, 143– 44 flâneur, 16 –17, 94, 110, 117–21, 123, 130 Flaubert, Gustav, 28, 74 –5 forgetting, 174 –78 Foucault, Michel, 1 Fourier, Charles, 161–62 Frankfurter Zeitung, 70 Freud, Sigmund, 1, 179, 189 Freund, Gisèle, 122 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 47 genre, 110 –12 Gerstäcker, Friedrich, 132 Giedion, Sigfried, 185 Glück, Gustav, 11 Godard, Jean-Luc, 138 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 4, 18, 34, 174 –75 Gourmont, Remy de, 38 Grandville, J. J., 120 –21, 162 Guattari, Félix, 118–120 Haas, Willy, 30, 177 Habermas, Jürgen, 9, 39 Haggadah, Halakah, 30 –32 Hamacher, Werner, 155, 157n15, 187n21

Index Hamann, Johann Georg, 43 happiness (Glück), 155–57 Haussmann, Georges-Eugène, 89, 118–19 Hebel, Johann Peter, 24, 101 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 42– 43, 48–50 Heidegger, Martin, 1, 43 Heinle, Christoph Friedrich, 19 Heller-Roazen, Daniel, 126 Hessel, Franz, 102 Hitler-Stalin Pact, 158 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 6, 75, 126 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 5 Honold, Alexander, 5 Horkheimer, Max, 19, 128–29, 160, 181, 186 –87 Husserl, Edmund, 143 Ibizia (Capri), 4 Judaism, 149–52 Jung, Karl, 186 justice (Zedaka), 29–32 Kafka, Franz, 8, 15–16, 30 –31, 75, 88, 165–67, 175, 177–78, 194 Kant, Immanuel, 21, 43, 44, 47, 49, 50 Karplus, Gretel. See Adorno, Gretel Klages, Ludwig, 186 Köhn, Eckhardt, 3 Kracauer, Siegfried, 70, 103, 161 Kraft, Werner, 30, 128 Kranz, Isabel, 131–33, Kraus, Karl, 29–30, 71–86, 101, 134, 143, 194 Labrouste, Pierre-François-Henri, 123 Lacis, Asja, 10, 129 Lautréamont (Isidore-Lucien Ducasse), 101 legibility, 139, 170 –71 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 111 Leskov, Nikolai, 24 Levinas, Emmanuel, 151

209

Lindner, Burkhardt, 130 –31, 133 Literarische Welt, 70 Lloyd, David, 47– 48 Lukács, Georg, 25, 27, 28, 62, 161 Lyotard, Jean-François, 6 Marquard, Odo, 48n21 Marx, Karl, 17, 61–64, 129, 131, 136, 145, 159, 162, 165, 190 –92 Mayer, Hans, 9 McLaughlin, Kevin, 65 memory. See remembrance messianism, 151–95 Molitor, Franz Josef, 150 montage, 112, 138, 144, 192 Nesbitt, Molly, 91–92 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 46, 101 Offenbach, Jacques, 73 Olsen, Donald, 144 Osborne, Peter, 68 Passagen project, 4, 34, 36 –37, 102–26 Plato, 49 Poe, Edgar Allan, 17, 93–95, 119 Potemkin, Grigori, 8 prattle, 81–82, 84 –85 Prendergast, Christopher, 144 presentation (Darstellung), 112–15 Proust, Marcel, 8, 33, 64, 76 –77, 177 Rabinbach, Anson, 152–53 Rancière, Jacques, 190 –91 Rang, Florens Christian, 12, 13 Rathenau, Walther, 13 Ray, Man, 90, 99 Raz-Krakotzkin, Amnon, 173 redemption, 156 –58, 167–70 remembrance (Eingedenken), 39– 40, 140, 155, 177, 180 reputation (Ruhm), 1–2. See also afterlife retrograde temporality, 37– 41; and aura, 87–88; and “acceding to legibility,” 170 –71; and awakening, 187–88

210

Index

Rilke, Rainer Maria, 75–76 Rimbaud, Arthur, 101 Ritter, Joachim, 35 Roberts, Julian, 15 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 36 Rychner, Max, 10, 11 Scheerbart, Paul, 162–64, 194 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von, 48 Schiller, Friedrich, 47, 98 Schlaffer, Heinz, 111 Schoen, Ernst, 45 Scholem, Gershom, 3–14 passim, 20, 30 –31, 72, 103, 121, 128, 135, 149–52, 154, 161, 165–66, 172–73 Schöttker, Detlev, 2 semblance (Schein), 51 Simmel, Georg, 36, 62 Steiner, Uwe, 7

Stern, J. P., 75–76 Sternberger, Dolf, 103 Stierle, Karl-Heinz, 115–16 Sue, Eugène, 131 Szarkowski, John, 91, 95–96 Tieck, Ludwig, 174 –78 Tiedemann, Rolf, 16 trauma, 179 Tretjakow, Sergej, 92 Tucholsky, Kurt, 70 Weber, Samuel, 23 Weidmann, Heiner, 184 Werner, Michael, 105–6 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1 Wohlfarth, Irving, 127–28, 161, 165 Wordsworth, William, 36 Zedaka. See justice