Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project 9781472547842, 9780826463869, 9780826463876

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Acknowledgements Irving Wohlfarth’s and Susan Buck-Morss’s essays originally appeared in New German Critique (Number 39, Fall 1986) and are here reprinted by kind permission of the authors and NGC. Commissioned for the present volume, Barbara Johnson’s essay appeared in her Mother Tongues: Sexuality, Trials, Motherhood, Translation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003) and is here reprinted by kind permission of the author. Stathis Gourgouris’s essay was commissioned by the editor of the present volume and included in his Does Literature Think? (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003). It is here reprinted by kind permission of the author and Stanford University Press. Detlef Mertins’s essay originally appeared in Assemblage (no. 29, 1996, pp. 6–23) and is here reprinted by kind permission of the author and Assemblage. Stanley Cavell’s essay is reprinted by kind permission of the author and Artforum (April 2000).

Abbreviations All references to the Convolutes of The Arcades Project are given parenthetically, according to each Convolute’s letter, without further specification. AP Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, (trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin; Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999). C The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin 1910–1940, (ed. Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno; trans. Manfred R. Jakobson and Evelyn M. Jakobson; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). CA Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence 1920–1940, (ed. Henri Lonitz; trans. Nicholas Walker; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). CB Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, (trans. Harry Zohn; London: New Left Books, 1973). CS The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, (ed. Gershom Scholem; trans. Gary Smith and André Lefevere; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). GB Gesammelte Briefe, (ed. Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz; Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995–2000). GS Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, (ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser; Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972–89). OWS Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street and Other Writings, (trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kinsley Shorter; London: New Left Books, 1979). PW Walter Benjamin, Passagen-Werk, (ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Herman Schweppenhäuser; Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982) = GS 5. SW Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, (ed. Michael W. Jennings; Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1997–2003). UB Walter Benjamin, Understanding Brecht, (trans. Anna Bostock; London: New Left Books, 1973).

1 Introduction: Physiognomy of a Flâneur: Walter Benjamin’s Peregrinations Through Paris in Search of a New Imaginary Beatrice Hanssen An anecdote in which Kant captures himself in pithy fashion: [Kant’s] Famulus, a theologian who was unable to connect philosophy to theology, once asked Kant for advice as to what he should read on the subject. Kant: Read travel literature. Famulus: In dogmatic philosophy, there are things I do not understand. Kant: Read travel literature. Walter Benjamin, ‘Unknown Anecdotes about Kant’, GS 4:809 Could one think of Benjamin as a peripatetic philosopher, a philosopher in motion, a critic on the go, whose cultural theory reflected the position of the nomadic intellectual in modernity? Surely it is well known that National Socialism forced Benjamin into exile, into an enforced nomadic existence in Paris, where he would wander from one borrowed room and apartment to the next. Less a topic of consideration, however, is the fact that during the Weimar years, Benjamin practised the fine art of travel, gravitating to Paris like his affluent intellectual friends. Unlike Kant, who never left Königsberg, Benjamin crisscrossed Europe, visiting numerous cities and places about which he dispatched literary postcards, Denkbilder, thought-images, full of moving physiognomical details about the urban topographies of cities such as Berlin, Paris, Moscow, Naples or Marseilles. Unlike the reclusive Nietzsche, Benjamin stayed at a distance from the mountains and the green pastures, evoking nature only in its auratic capacity, as he wandered through the streets of urban Europe, developing a method of cultural analysis that was honed on the activity, the profane illumination, of the flâneur. These literary postcards were to become the seeds of the cultural theory of modernity and the metropolis on which Benjamin was at work in the late 1920s and 30s, and which would be consecrated in his unfinished magnum opus, The



Walter Benjamin and The Arcades Project

Arcades Project or Passagen-Werk. Crafting his philosophical theory on the road, so to speak, Benjamin described a critic–flâneur who, from the pictorial and photographic annals of the past and from the remnants of almost forgotten topographies, the Parisian arcades, would seek to release the dialectical image. Moreover, as a peripatetic critic, Benjamin simultaneously emerged as a writer in search of a new habitat; not just because of his love of the Berlin cafés, where he wrote the better part of the Trauerspielbuch, or because of his search for the comfort of tranquility in the Rue Dombasle and the Bibliothèque Nationale. Instead, as an early draft of The Arcades Project indicates, Benjamin decried modernity’s alienation as a collective state of no longer being heimisch or at home. Seeking to remedy this condition of homelessness, he charted the changed urban habitat required of the new historical subjects – a motley group which included flâneurs, surrealist artists and energized political crowds, whose new politicized gaze and activism were to be at home in cafés, movie theatres or even arcades. These introductory comments to the present volume will pursue part of Benjamin’s path as critic–flâneur and specifically his search for a new imaginary, on the way to The Arcades Project. As such, they are meant to save his work from Adorno’s charge that Benjamin’s project was too imagistic, and that, like Kierkegaard’s existentialist philosophy, it potentially might be too aesthetic, insofar as it lacked the constellation of theory. Indeed, I will submit that Benjamin himself was acutely aware of the dangers that beset his theory of the image. Thus, as flâneur and critic, one could argue, Benjamin on the one hand was prone to the torpor of the melancholic, who in trying to recapture images of the past, risked assembling a nostalgic photo album of sorts, for example, in ‘Berliner Chronik’, which he dedicated to his son. On the other hand, Benjamin developed into the cultural collector of dialectical images, who, unlike Heidegger, did not decry modernity as the age of the Weltbild, the world image, but who sought to understand history precisely as a complex dialectic of images.

The Phantasmagoria of Paris Benjamin visited Paris for the first time in 1926, together with his friend Franz Hessel, with whom he was engaged in a translation of Proust, just a few years after he himself had published his own translation of Baudelaire’s Tableaux Parisiens. A francophile of the first order, Franz Hessel had exported the art form of flânerie from Paris to his home turf Berlin, and in 1929 would publish a collection of anecdotal essays called Spazieren in Berlin. But by the time of his first Paris visit, Benjamin had already learned to turn city-scapes and urban topographies into texts and physiognomies, open to interpretation. For together with Asja Lacis, whom he had met in Capri, he wrote one of his early city text ‘Naples’, in 1924–25, focusing on



Introduction



the same motifs that were to gain prominence in later city work: the catacombs, poverty, architecture, public theatricality, gambling, street vending, the dispersal of objects (Zerstreutheit), private life, domesticity, the habitat, the house, children’s toys and the physiognomy of corporeal gestures. Indeed, practising the genre of the kleine Form, the ‘short form’, which included the essay, the newspaper article and the aphorism, in the years 1923–26, Benjamin was at work on a collection of aphorisms about Berlin, originally to be called Street Closed to Traffic (Straße Gesperrt), but eventually to be published in 1927 as One-Way Street. Yet no city more than Paris provided an agreeable sensory overload to Benjamin’s perceptual apparatus. Overwhelmed by the intoxicating excitement of the French capital, Benjamin gave himself up to the pleasures of flânerie, the magic of the fair (Jahrmaerkte), to the point where the art of flânerie even threatened to take the place of reading and study. This is how he describes the experience in a 1926 letter to his then fiancée Jula Cohn: I often saunter along the quays [of the Seine] in a state of complete relaxation; real finds have become very rare there and the sight of countless ordinary books gives me a certain sense of satisfaction. All this strolling [Flânieren] along the streets also makes it easy to get out of the habit of reading for a while, or so it seems to me. (GB 3:139, C 297, letter of 1926 to Jula Cohn) Flânerie – of course – was an urban art form, a leisure habit, made famous by dandies, such as the poet Baudelaire, not the healthy exercise of strolling or walking, spazieren, prescribed by doctors as a means to ward off melancholy. Kant, who associated melancholy with genius, took such a remedial stroll on a daily basis always at the same time, to the point where the townspeople of Königsberg could set their clocks by it. Alternatively, Spazieren, as practised by Hessel, amounted to the fashionable, aesthetic display of the self in peregrinations through the city-scape and encounters with the ‘crowds’ (never the masses). Unlike the reveries of the solitary walker Rousseau, flânerie involved the gregarious if defiant encounter with passers-by, a social ritual of the bourgeois upper class. More than to the quays of Paris with their famous bouquinistes, however, Benjamin was drawn to the space of the arcades, to the point where on 30 January 1928, he wrote to Scholem that he was working on a text called ‘Parisian Arcade – A Dialectical Fairyland’ (‘Pariser Passage – eine dialektische Feerie’). As half-forgotten, yet still existing, phantasmagorias, these arcades impressed Benjamin, who recognized in them the haven of magical objects, remnants from the past, former abodes of fairies, and an enchanted world that, paradoxically, had grown dimmer as gaslight was replaced with electricity. Transfixed in time, the wax dolls and advertising dummies on the shops’ facades resembled the sleeping beauty out of whose slumber Benjamin



Walter Benjamin and The Arcades Project

hoped to awaken her (Trauerspielbuch). Seeing parallels between modernity and antiquity, Benjamin noted how the Parisian arcades escaped the rectangular and perspectival reorganization of Paris under Haussmann and how they pulled away into gates, porticos, and entries to a Hades-like realm, the realm of the dead of the catacombs and cemeteries, the space of subterranean collectivities. While being the epitome of the modern metropolis, Paris remained a mythical realm, whose labyrinthine topography acquired mythical dimensions, of the sort also analysed by Caillois. In parenthesis one might note that it is no coincidence that during his first visit to Paris, Benjamin stayed in the hotel Floridor diagonally across from the entrance to the Parisian catacombs, a reminder of the allegorical figure of the skull, in the Trauerspielbuch. And, to make matters even more interesting, the hotel was located around the corner of the Montparnasse cemetery, site of Baudelaire’s grave. Already in an early 1927 draft, Pariser Passagen 2, Benjamin evoked two attitudes that marked his early understanding of the critic–flâneur: on the one hand, the dreaming idler’s anamnestic intoxication, as the flâneur was inundated with a flood of images, and, on the other hand, a gesture of fixation through which the cultural historian froze these images into an archive of anamnestic recollection. At the centre of this double experience lay the dialectical concept of (authentic) boredom, which was the outside layer of unconscious dreaming; for in the intoxicated state of wandering aimlessly through the streets, the flâneur turned the city into a landscape, or a topography of memory, through which he acquired a ‘felt knowing’ (gefuehltes Wissen). Flânerie, as evoked in the earliest phases of Benjamin’s Arcades Project, followed the same flux and rush of intoxication that marked the hashish-eater, who absorbed space, experienced a ‘colportage-like’ spatial state – spatialized time – that is, a heightened sensitivity that allowed for the simultaneous sensation and evocation of multiple layers of space. The idler, ambling through the arcades without a fixed goal (ohne Ziel), succumbed to a condition of euphoria and inebriation, comparable to the dandy’s boredom. Authentic boredom, or Langeweile in German (which literally means long time, or the stretching of time in ambling and idling), was the grey shawl, the veil, in which this subject was wrapped, while the shawl’s hidden orange lining evoked the state of dreaming, a heightened visionary or poetic consciousness of images, whose flux into reality the surrealists had made possible (Pariser Passagen 2, PW 1053, 1054; AP 880–81). Thus, it soon appeared that Benjamin’s first forays into the art of flânerie were inspired not just by Baudelaire but by the surrealists, who he had discovered around 1925, and whose method of dreaming he adopted in ‘Dream Kitsch’ (1926). Indeed, in his oft-quoted aphorism: The father of surrealism was Dada, its mother an arcade (GS 2.3:1033; PW 1057; PW 133; AP 883), Benjamin alluded to the Passage de L’Opéra and the café Certa in which Aragon and Breton used to meet, and which was described in



Introduction



all its glory in Aragon’s 1924 Paysan de Paris, a book Benjamin had partly translated into German. Thus, the new style of walking through the past, in which the cityscape emerged as landscape (Hofmannsthal) and parlour, was in fact the product of the artistic revolution ushered in by surrealism, to which Benjamin would devote his important 1929 essay. There he would hail surrealism’s transformation of the public city-scape into a new habitat, a dwelling, a living space, in which the streets were the home of the flâneur and masses (GS 3:196), replacing the enclosure of the bourgeois intérieur. It was the new art of living outside the space of the Biedermeier intérieur, a dialectical image that Adorno, following Benjamin would analyse in his book on Kierkegaard’s existentialist philosophy. Moreover, the new appreciation of space was matched by a new transparent architecture, of the kind inaugurated by modernist architects like Le Corbusier and Mendelssohn, or theorists such as Giedion, and evoked in the transparent glass house at the center of Breton’s 1928 ‘novel’ Nadja. This architecture of demolition and destruction, which expressed Nietzsche’s embrace of uprooting violence, had erased the antiquarian traces of the past, much as Benjamin’s ‘Destructive Character’ (1931) would set himself up as the enemy of the Etui-Menschen (GS 4.2:1000) – a human boxed in, clasped in a jewel case. The demolition of homely space spelled the end of the epoch of bourgeois moralism symbolized by the enclosed intérieur and brought with it the beginning of a new ‘revolutionary virtue’ (ibid.), that is, the intoxicating frenzy of a moral exhibitionism (ibid.). But in order to make oneself at home in the city streets a new gaze was in order, a new mode of seeing, which broke with the bad habits of historicism, its museal monumentalism and souvenir hunting – a reference to Nietzsche – that is, with the ‘pious gaze glued to das Museale’ (SW 2:264, corr.; GS 3:197) or the ‘great reminiscences, the historical frissons’ of travelling tourists (SW 2:263; GS 3:195). The new way of seeing now was to be focused on the micrological, on a new ‘sense of reality’ that paid attention to ‘chronicle, document and detail’ (GS 3:194). Thanks to this new gaze, the crossing of a new threshold (Schwelle) became possible, an image that Benjamin enhanced by invoking the mythical plebs deorum (SW 2:264), the house gods or female guardians, who facilitated the crossing of what once were mere wooden or metaphorical thresholds (ibid.). Centrally, Benjamin’s surrealism essay introduced the flâneur as nothing more nor less than a profanely illuminated type, a label he shared with other characters such as the reader, the thinker, the waiting one, the opium-eater, the dreamer and the inebriated type. Seeking to develop a dialectical concept of intoxication, Benjamin hoped to chart a path away from mere anarchistic revolt and mere subversion to the coming of the real revolution; this new historico-political stage, he suggested, could be reached once surrealism ‘[appropriated] the energies of intoxication for the revolution’ (GS 2.1:307; SW 2:216). Fusing politics with anthropology, Benjamin was in search of the dialectical interpenetration of ‘political materialism’ and ‘physical creatures’.



Walter Benjamin and The Arcades Project

Profane illumination was the new stage that would set an end to the torpor and the inauthentic boredom of modernity in the thrall of too much contemplation; Benjamin’s aim was the transformation of ‘an extreme contemplative position in revolutionary opposition’ (GS 2.1:303; SW 2:213) through radical spiritual freedom, which, in decisive manner (Schmitt), did away with the post-war boredom, nihilism, and climate of eternal discussion, the post-First World War lassitude of Weimar Germany and Europe. Interested in unfolding the dialectical kernel at the heart of surrealism, Benjamin promoted the new existential experience, the Existenzform of surrealism, insofar as it did not hesitate to venture to the uttermost limits of what was possible (GS 2.1:296; SW 2:208). Surrealism enabled the release of a flood of images, rushing across the threshold between sleep and awakening and it provoked a new synaesthetic experience in which sound and image merged, spelling an end to conventional Meaning. Thus, the new type of revolution required not just a change in external historical conditions but it exacted a new Gesinnung (GS 2.1:308; SW 2:216) or attitude, in other words, the replacement of the historical with the political gaze (GS 2.1:300; SW 2:210) and what Benjamin called ‘the organization of pessimism’ (GS 2.1:308; SW 2:216) – pessimism here being a code word for nihilism. As a state of ecstasy, profane illumination did not just produce the ‘loosening’ of the I, but it allowed the subject to engage in real political Erfahrung, free from contemplative overtheorizing or too much speculative theory. Still, the surrealist state of intoxication was not to be confused with Marx’s rejection of religion as opium of the people. Rather, its roots were to be found in mystical Minne, in the ecstasy of mystical love which was matched by sobriety in a parallel world. For the subject’s profane illumination found its complement in what Benjamin called the sobering mysticism of things, a condition in which the revolutionary energies of objects, architecture, iron construction, fashion and so forth burst forth. Exploding the confines of their old habitat, the intérieur, or die gute Stube, these formerly enslaved now liberated things announced the coming of a revolutionary nihilism, which I believe to be comparable to Nietzsche’s strategic nihilism. No figures more than Breton and his lover Nadja possessed this revolutionary gaze, for in their capacity as lovers they knew how to ‘convert everything that we have experienced on mournful railway journeys’; travelling through the abject proletarian quarters of Paris, they transformed these scenes into revolutionary experience and action, bringing the ‘mood’ (Stimmung – not atmosphere) lurking in things to explosion. Their prime love object, of course, was Paris herself, whose streets were to be flooded by the liberated masses and whose surrealist face emerged in full glory in the book Nadja. As such, the dialectic of intoxication, Benjamin suggested, could be seen to be at work in Breton’s picture book, Nadja. For the technique of releasing dream images that Breton and Nadja practised in their ambles through Paris was matched by the fact that its author, at decisive moments, inserted



Introduction



images, photos and drawings into the text, thus turning Parisian space into the illustrations and pictures of a cheap ‘colportage’ novel (GS 2.1:298; SW 2:208). This ‘living in images’, enacted quite literally in Breton’s colportage novel, is of course something that Benjamin himself tried out frequently. Both a book collector and specialist of the history of the book, Benjamin savoured all sorts of iconographic manuals, especially children’s books, books of the insane, such as Schreber, and colportage novels, that is, five-and-dime novels, disseminated by book peddlers and hawkers all across the countryside for the pleasure of servants and maids (GS 4:620–22; SW: 225–31). Even The Arcades Project had always been conceived as a Bilderbuch, picture book, for which Benjamin assembled illustrations in the Cabinet des Estampes, in the basement of the Bibliothèque Nationale. However, children’s books above all had a special place in his collection, as did the image-world of the child, as evidenced in his Berlin Childhood around 1900, a memory book replete with nostalgic photographs. For, just as the collector or curiosity seeker was enchanted by the trove of treasures and glimmering objects on display in the arcades, so the child’s gaze was transfixed by the lure of magical things. Indeed, in Berlin Childhood, little Walter emerges as obsessed with the enveloping interiority of objects, especially socks, stockings (PW 1041, 1042, 1047) and even a doll clinic, which functioned as a shell (Gehäuse) – a substitute home of sorts. Later the Gehäuse will become the abode of the Etui-Menschen, as it did in ‘The Destructive Character’ (1931). To Benjamin the collector, these images in children’s picture books offered up a mysterious topography in which the child–spectator could become absorbed to the point of self-extinction (in the 1929 essay about children’s literature), blissfully merging with the object of representation – a flash-like moment – blitzhaft – in which the border between representation and the represented object was obliterated. It was precisely this mimetic impulse, through which the imitator merged with the object imitated, that announced itself in the child’s obsession with the sock, just as it surfaced in surrealist dream-work, in which the subject crossed the expanse of ‘aesthetic distance’ to gain close proximity or nearness to the magical thing. This mimetic displacement, which affected the language of dreams, riddles, and ‘Echolalien’ (GS 6:573), as such played a significant role in Benjamin’s language theory. However, where Benjamin’s rather benign 1926 essay ‘Dream Kitsch’ linked the child’s mimetic impulse to surrealist dream-work, in the 1929 surrealism essay, by contrast, he went much further, appropriating the dangerous Schmittean rhetoric of decisionism, Entscheidung, and Nietzsche’s philosophy of the Rausch to celebrate the spontaneity of evil. More than just engaging in a playful épater le bourgeois at the aesthetic level, Benjamin hoped to strategically undo the last vestiges of conservative, no less than left-wing, morality and humanism. Profane illumination as an ecstatic loss of self, together with the nihilisitic ‘organization of pessimism’, eventually were to lead from metaphysical to anthropological materialism, allowing for



Walter Benjamin and The Arcades Project

the subject’s entry into a genuine Bildraum and Leibraum: image-space and body-space. As such, Benjamin’s surrealism essay called for the overcoming of mere representationalism in the experience of a physical collectivity that was at home (heimisch) in an organic imaginary (heimisch machen, GS 2.1: 310; SW 2:217). It is good, then, to pause here for a moment and to acknowledge the extraordinary implications of Benjamin’s invocation of this Bildraum. For, in ending his exposé on surrealism with this concept, Benjamin said farewell to the ban on images that had marked philosophy up to the coming of Nietzsche. Indeed, one does well to remember that Nietzsche, in his early Notebooks, in a text called ‘Truth and Lies in an Extramoral Sense’, had argued that all truth amounted to a ‘moveable army of tropes and figures’1; even more so, Nietzsche had suggested that all human bonds and social contracts were the sedimented or petrified remnants of originally vibrant images generated by human creativity. Lauding aesthetics as man’s original activity, Nietzsche had given centre stage to the imagination as the creative faculty that enabled the construction of images within which humans liked to dwell. Finding his point of departure in these Nietzschean insights, Benjamin pushed the implications of this theory even further, going so far as to promote the Bildraum as the new habitat. Besides Nietzsche, Aragon’s Traité du Style, notably the section on Vergleich and Bild, comparison and image, appeared influential in Benjamin’s attempt to politicize the realm of the imaginary. For, in the final analysis the organization of pessimism (revolutionary nihilism) required that one forever leave behind the realm of moralistic analogizing or the contemplative realm of symbolic representation – as theorized in Kant’s third critique, where the beautiful was linked to the moral through the device of hypotyposis or the imagistic stand in. Surrealism demanded the Zerschlagung des Aesthetischen, the demolition of aesthetic contemplation and the abolition of the distance that separated the aesthetic beholder from the object. Jumping out of the lofty yet confining space of spirit and contemplation, the new revolutionary subject splashed into an enveloping image-space and body-space, an immediacy, wo die Nähe sich selbst aus den Augen sieht. As such, this utopian desire to attain the Bildraum still carried the poetic overtones of Rilke’s attempt to think the open as the space of the animal, or Nietzsche’s envy of the herd-like animal grazing peacefully and living blissfully in the non-representational moment of pure immediacy, an extended now that wasn’t even conscious as such a now. To live, then, in the immediacy of the image meant to be wrapped in a veil of visions, visions not unlike the drug-induced imaginary of the hashish-eater. Indeed, that the excessive activity of the imagination, the original producer of phantasmagoric images, could be enhanced through the use of hashish or opium, is something Thomas de Quincey had already argued in his Confessions. And it should come as no surprise then that like de Quincey, Baudelaire and Freud before him, Benjamin, together with



Introduction



friends such as Hessel and Bloch, in 1927–28, eagerly participated in drug experiments, about which they wrote elaborate protocols. Even as late as 1932, Benjamin wrote to Scholem that he was planning a book on hashish, which he considered as important as the Parisian Arcades. Anticipating the aesthetics of evil at the centre of the surrealism essay – the Dostoevsky-like celebration of freedom as pure spontaneity and encounter with evil – these protocols focused on the acquisition of satanic knowledge and satanic laughter, celebrated in Baudelaire’s artificial paradise. Residing in the satanic phase, for Benjamin the horizontal ‘Erstreckung’, stretching or spatialization of sentences and laughter as well as the labyrinthine space of the arcades (GS 4:559), all proved to be one. The experience was one of being beckoned by an ‘utterly equivocal wink coming from nirvana.’ (AP 878). Thus, the multiplication of space in hashish experiments resembled the ambiguity of the spatial arcades, where the near-satanic reflections of mirrors in which the flâneur’s gaze got caught, produced the effect of an unhinged perspective or even multiple perspectives. More then than just producing the deconstruction of the rationalistic stronghold of the subject, these encounters with hashish for Benjamin amounted to a theological experiment. For the hyper-activity of the imagination, the confrontation with nothingness and nihilism in spatialization, or the multiplication of space in colportage-like fashion, in the end proved, said Benjamin, that ‘the realm of theology [was] submerged in that of colportage’ (PW 677; AP 545). In a central passage from one of these protocols, which later would return in The Arcades Project, Benjamin lauded the French artist Odilon Redon for having given shape to the ‘ambiguous wink from Nirvana’ (SW 2:87). To Redon, Benjamin ascribed a superior knowledge of the ‘colportage phenomenon of space’, a flash-like, blitzhaft, experience of the abyssal image-within-the-image or mise-en-abyˆme. For in Redon’s paintings the spectator seemed to hover in the ‘equivocal, with double and triple perspectives, or inklings of perspective (images within images) – forms that take shape and come into being according to the state of mind of the spectator’ (AP 429). Now, if such was the net of correspondences that Benjamin wove between these various states of profane illumination, he also increasingly became aware of the danger facing the intoxicated flâneur, that is, that this excessive dwelling in the imaginary realm might induce a torpor comparable to the aestheticization of politics. Indeed, it was Adorno who indirectly warned Benjamin about the pitfalls of this position, that of an interiority devoid of objects, objektlose Innerlichkeit, when, in his Kierkegaard study, Adorno set up the Kierkegaardian subject as the Baudelairean flâneur, whose strolls through the streets really amounted to a walk through his own room, insofar as the outer world emerged as mere reflected inwardness. As a place of aesthetic illusion, or Schein, the flâneur’s salon was filled with archaic images, and all of external reality became crystallized into one point, the self, while authentic time was transfixed in spacelessness, or the simultaneity of the

10

Walter Benjamin and The Arcades Project

existentialist moment.2 However, while Adorno often would criticize his friend’s alleged blindness to this problematic, I would argue that Benjamin remained acutely aware of the dangers lurking in a protracted life in images, above all, of the danger of melancholy, spleen and a depoliticized torpor. For, might not the nostalgic imagination transport the hashish-eater–flâneur back to the realm of correspondences, that is, to the mythical, to the antediluvian fossil state, as Benjamin wondered in his Baudelaire essay. Might this not mean that the subject remained mired in the stage of spleen and perhaps, of Dürer’s Melancholia I, which, in allegorical fashion, exposed the fallen angel’s inability to leave the visionary and the imagistic for healthy political action. Indeed, one is reminded here of the wonderful reflections on the imagistic, das Bildliche, and the aesthetic stage in Kierkegaard’s Either/Or. In its Preface, a collection of aphorisms, Kierkegaard’s melancholic poetic spirit laments the fact that all he can do is capture or carry off images: ‘was ich erbeute sind Bilder’. When in a reflective age the imagistic, das Bildliche, is found very rarely and sparsely in a reflective presentation, much like an antediluvian fossil reminding us of another kind of life that doubt has eroded, one will perhaps marvel that the metaphorical could ever have played so great a role. But as the metaphor gains more and more ground, accommodates more and more in itself, it invites the onlooker to rest in it, to anticipate a pleasure to which restless reflection perhaps would lead one by a long detour. When the imagistic, das Bildliche, finally acquires such dimensions that all existence becomes visible in it, this is the retrograde movement toward the mythical. (Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony, pp. 103–4) Was ich erbeute sind Bilder. (Either/Or I, diapsalmata) 3 Thus, the imminent danger manifested itself as a sojourn in the realm of images and consequently, as a return to the mythical no less than it exposed the illness of the imagination, Einbildungskraft, which hovered in the realm of potentiality, Möglichkeit, at the expense of transitioning to the here and now of political reality (in Stadien, quoted in Adorno GS 2:91). Let me, then, point ahead to some of the changes that will occur in Benjamin’s thought as he gradually gained an insight into these dangers. It is clear that in its earliest phase, The Arcades Project had much in common with Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, or his theory of reconstructive, involuntary memory (madeleine), which Proust likened to a Japanese game; for the object of the past ‘sprang into being’ in his cup of tea much like the unfolding pieces of paper which the Japanese, for their amusement, set afloat in a porcelain bowl of water.4 Tellingly, Benjamin increasingly became aware of the fact that the Proustian text might become a drug, a narcotic, whose overindulgence might become fatal, as he confided to Adorno. When applied to The Arcades Project, the Proustian paradigm presented the threat that the



Introduction

11

vast expanse of historical space might become reduced to the porcelain-filled salon of a bourgeois subject, in which ornamental archaic images adorned the parlour of modernity. Reflecting this awareness, Benjamin would now complement his early reflections on surrealist dreamwork, by calling for a dialectical moment of awakening, a rude shock-like awakening that snatched the sleeper out of his enveloping visions (PW 1014, PW 1058; AP 845; 884). As he gradually abandoned the aesthetics of Rausch, Benjamin would exchange the peregrinations of the intoxicated flâneur for the historical gaze of the ‘economic flâneur’, or the perspective of the young Friedrich Engels, who, having left the provincial streets of Germany, strolled through the England of the Industrial Revolution, in awe, overwhelmed and in shock. Leaving behind the impoverishment of experience, Erfahrung, on display in Marcel Proust’s bedroom, Benjamin proclaimed that his new methodology called for a radical rearrangement of the furniture in one’s own room. This embrace of historical materialism demanded a changed account of temporality, one that did away with spatialized time, the reified time of spleen or Bergson’s durée. Surely, in the quintessential theoretical convolute of The Arcades Project, Convolute N, Benjamin still thought of the dialectical image as blitzhaft, like a flash of lightning. Yet, its constellation now was radically different for it spelled the encounter between the historic ‘now’ and the historic ‘then’ of recognizability, no longer the euphoria of the self-indulgent surrealist dreamer. If the movement of dreaming might have taken one back to the vie antérieure of the correspondances of primeval time, then awakening now meant the revolutionary completion of the past, the explosion of past possibility in the actuality of the present. It is then precisely this radical destruction of the lure of the auratic dream image that shows Benjamin as being on the road to a new theory of time – the time of Eingedenken or historical commemoration – a temporal condition he was all too familiar with and one upon which he dwelt during his exile years in Paris. For, on the move from one crammed Parisian room to the next, he still found time to write his ‘Berlin Chronicle’, dedicated to his son Stephan, in which the Proustian souvenir (Andenken) was radically displaced by irreparable historical loss, the loss of Berlin. Ultimately, ‘Berlin Chronicle’ became the pendant to the Parisian Arcades Project, a testimony to the fact that Benjamin’s expanding theory of historical time came at the expense of his personal loss, the irreparable loss of his childhood in Berlin.

2 Et Cetera? The Historian as Chiffonnier1 Irving Wohlfarth (. . .) a rag-picker: with my spiked stick in my hand and my basket on my back, I traverse the field of science, and I gather what I can. François Magendie Concerning Hugo, but also the petites vieilles (both not named by Cassou): ‘For such is indeed the novelty of the Romantic century: the scandalous appearance of the satyr at the table of the gods, the public manifestation of beings without name, without the possibility of existence, the slaves, the negroes, the monsters, the spider, the nettle.’ Jean Cassou: Quarante-huit, Paris, p. 27. (One may also think here of Marx’s account of child labor in England.) PW 482

1.   ‘J’aime À rouler ma bosse’ Nous avons queuqu’ radis, Pherre, il faut fair’ la noce; Moi, vois-tu les lundis J’aime à rouler ma bosse. J’sais du vin à six ronds Qui n’est pas d’ la p’tit’ bière, Pour rigoler montons, Montons à la barrière, Pour rigoler montons, Montons à la barrière. H. Gourdon de Genouillac: Les refrains de la rue de 1830 à 1870 (Paris: 1879), p. 56. PW 442 Was glauben Sie Wohl, wie sich ein Leben gestalten würde, das in einem entscheidenden Augenblick sich gerade durch den letzten beliebtesten Gassenhauer bestimmen liesse? GS 2: 300



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Vous-même, mon cher ami, n’avez-vous pas tenté de traduire en une chanson le cri strident du Vitrier, et d’exprimer dans une prose lyrique toutes les désolantes suggestions que ce cri envoie jusqu’ aux mansards, à travers les plus hautes brumes de la rue? Baudelaire, dedication of Le Spleen de Paris The figure of the ‘materialist historian’ who is so frequently invoked in Benjamin’s later writings appears in as many metaphorical guises as the poet in Baudelaire’s literary oeuvre. He is, to cite only a few examples, an expert cameraman, a transfixed angel, a retrospective prophet and a ‘herald who invites the shades of past to table’ (PW 603). No one of these divergent – but also convergent – figures is, needless to say, to be isolated at the expense of the others. What matters, as in the case of Baudelaire, is the ‘configuration’ that emerges from their juxtaposition. If, at the risk of hypostatizing or romanticizing him, I nevertheless propose to single out for special attention the relatively minor figure of the rag-picker, this is because the chiffonnier plays a significantly dual role within the economy of the Passagen-Werk. The Lumpensammler is, like the ‘collector’ proper, both one small item within the total collection and a figure for the activity of putting it together. While he has only a small walk-on part within the whole, he can thus also be considered a miniature version of the whole. ‘Dire que j’ai tout Paris, là. Dans cet osier’, writes a nineteenth-century eyewitness of the rag-man’s hovel (PW 482). There is also a sense in which the whole Passagen-Werk is reflected in the ‘dialectical image’ of the chiffonnier. Consider, for example, how Benjamin there proposes to solve the problem of combining sensory concreteness with Marxist rigour : ‘The first step of the way will be to apply the principle of montage to history. To erect large constructions from the tiniest, sharply fashioned (scharf und schneidend konfektioniert) materials. Indeed, to discover the crystal of the total event in the analysis of the small, discrete moment, thus breaking with vulgar versions of historical materialism. To grasp the construction of history as such. By way of commentary. The refuse of history’ (PW 575). The chiffonnier would represent one such monad, an incisive particular which, like a wellcut crystal (or rough diamond), mirrors the whole. Cutting the crystal does not mean cutting corners or smoothing rough edges in order to produce some well-rounded microcosm; the pieces of the mosaic fit together as parts of the whole, and as pars pro toto, only if their essential asperities are accentuated – the ‘value of fragments of thought’ being considered, as early as the Trauerspiel book, ‘all the greater the less direct their relationship to the underlying idea’ (GS 1:208). Not merely would the chiffonnier represent one of the innumerable themes of the Passagen-Werk. As a collector of the ‘refuse of history’, he would also be the incognito of an author who, in this instance, seeks to abandon the traditional prerogatives of authorship for a marginal, anonymous and subterranean position from which, ideally, to let

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the historical materials speak for themselves. The result of this experiment was to amount, quite literally, to a series of chiffons – not so much a collection of fragments, that by now well-established genre, as an unclassifiable scrap-book, the ruined ‘death-mask’ of its own ‘conception’ which, like the Tower of Babel, was perhaps destined to become its own ruin inasmuch as its ambitions rivalled Mallarmé’s dream of a Work to end all works. Not merely does this implication of the author within the folds of his own work, the containment of the collector within his ‘own’ collection, recall the parting flourish of an earlier essay, Ich packe meine Bibliothek aus, in which the author–collector, having finished unpacking, proposes – as befits – to disappear inside the library he has just erected.2 The fact that the collector can be identified with or as one of his own objects suggests a further sense in which he is implicated in his own collection. If that figure belongs to a certain mythology of the nineteenth century, Benjamin’s project of ‘brushing history against the grain’ is no less firmly embedded in the century from which it seeks to awaken: such profound implication is, on Benjamin’s argument, the dialectical precondition for any self-extrication. The Passagen-Werk strategically locates itself as the threshold over which, at the conclusion of Berliner Kindheit um Neunzehnhundert, a little hunchback 3 whispers the following urgent plea : Oh dear child, I pray of you, Pray for the little hunchback too. We know from the Passagen-Werk that this threshold is also the one that separates dreaming from awakening. It is across such a multiple threshold that the rag-man plies his trade, thereby effecting a critical, ‘dialectical’ transition from myth to history, prehistory to actuality. ‘The use of dream-elements upon awakening’, writes Benjamin in ‘Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century’, ‘is an exemplary case of dialectical thinking’ (PW 59). Or, as Benjamin puts it in a note which implicitly defines this montage of Brechtian Umfunktionierung and the surrealist vague des rêves as the act of a metaphorical Lumpensammler: ‘Method of this project: literary montage. I have nothing to say. Only to show. I will steal no valuables, nor appropriate any clever turns of phrase. But the rags, the refuse: not in order to take stock of them but to use them – which is the only way of doing them justice’ (PW 574). What Benjamin calls the ‘refuse of history’ has its psychic counterpart in what Freud termed the ‘leavings of the phenomenal world’ (Abhub der Erscheinungswelt). The materials the materialist rag-picker collects are the stuff that collective dreams are made of. It takes the trained reflexes of the peripatetic collector to snatch them up. His Proustian finds are so many snatches of lost time. The historian as chiffonnier unceremoniously transports these leftovers of the nineteenth century across the threshold of the twentieth – both to preserve and to destroy, that is, to ‘use’ them, to get off



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our (hunch)backs a past which, in Marx’s words, weighs on the living like a nightmare. ‘J’aime à rouler ma bosse.’ The ‘author’ of the Passagen-Werk is – as befits – deeply implicated in his own bibliography. If, as our opening motto claims, the redirection of attention to ‘nameless beings’, to ‘slaves, negroes, monsters’, to Baudelaire’s petites vieilles or his chiffonniers, marks a ‘novelty of the Romantic age’, then the Passagen-Werk could in turn be said to represent an attempt to realize the dream of a certain Romantic tradition in literature and historiography, and to implement decisive elements of that dream for the purpose of ‘awakening from the nineteenth century’. Not for nothing is the only historian to be directly quoted in ‘Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century’ the one who wrote, in terms that anticipate Benjamin’s account of the ‘storyteller’, of giving voice to the ‘silences of history’ (faire parler les silences de l’ histoire). ‘“Chaque époque rêve la suivante” (Michelet. Avenir! Avenir!)’ (PW 46). To which Benjamin adds, by way of consummation, the all-important afterthought: ‘Not merely does each age dream the next one, but it aims, in so doing, to awaken.’ One awakens from one’s dreams only by awakening to them, by an act of redoubled attention. It is in a children’s rhyme about a little hunchback – a rhyme which according to Benjamin, plumbs the depths of German and Jewish folk tradition alike – that his essay on Kafka locates the theological basis of such Proustian activity, which Malebranche termed ‘the natural prayer of the soul’. In this attentiveness, Benjamin, like Kafka, ‘included all living creatures, as saints include them in their prayers’ (GS 2:232). We may hear in this passage both an echo of the paragraph in the Trauerspiel book where nature silently laments her speechless condition and an anticipation of the programme of the Passagen-Werk, which aims to call history by its name, beginning with what weighs most heavily on the present. If the author of the Trauerspiel book was attentive to the sadness of creation, passed over (in a double sense) by the Word on its way to and from itself, the materialist historian will devote himself, in his capacity as rag-man, to the fate of those unattended things that are rejects of another sphere of circulation – namely, the capitalist economy. It is precisely when they no longer circulate, as well-behaved commodities should, that things begin to give signs of a more subversive potential.4 And who will save those neglected objects if not that fisher of things, the salvage-man? May not the Messiah, who has often been pictured in the guise of a beggar, also come as a chiffonnier? Just as the little hunchback is magically transformed from the plaintive creature who, in the Kafka essay, still pleads for salvation, into a master-strategist who, in the first of the Theses on the Philosophy of History, actually organizes Benjamin’s salvation army, so the Lumpensammler is at once the epitome of the unsalvageable (a)social existence (‘without the possibility of existence’), the lowest of the low, the bottom of the barrel, and, despite all this, or rather because of it, the very agent of redemption, the scraper of the barrel. Such is the logic of the last

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‘things’. ‘The chiffonnier’, Benjamin observes, ‘is the most provocative figure of human poverty. Lumpenproletarian in a double sense, both dressed in rags (Lumpen) and occupied with them’ (PW 441). The lumpenproletariat is the déclassé segment of the lower classes that has been regularly excluded from the Marxist revolution, just as Lumpen, Abfall and Abhub constitute the waste-products rather than the designated objects of the Hegelian Aufhebung. Such is, however, the logic of redemption that – pace Nietzsche – only the deformed can remedy the world’s deformity. ‘Only for the sake for the hopeless is hope given to us’ (GS 1:201). Indeed, they are perhaps themselves the only hope. This logic of extremes, whereby hopeless poverty, whether of people or of things, is transformable into ‘revolutionary nihilism’, is merely an extension of Marx’s theory of pauperization as the precondition of proletarian revolution. ‘As long as there is still one beggar left, there will still be myth’ (PW 505).5 As the transfiguration of the little hunchback from a mythical to a messianic figure already indicates, the relation between the two orders is not only one of the mutual exclusion: St George versus the dragon. It belongs to such a logic of the non-excluded third that the figures who are most threatened by exclusion should themselves be best placed to end it. The chiffonnier is both dressed in rags and occupied with them. His relation to the things he rescues is as appropriate as that of a knight in shining armour to a damsel in distress. No one has a closer, more mimetic, more materialist relation to the material world than he: it takes an unsalvageable existence to salvage the unsalvageable. The chiffonnier is, in short, a privileged figure inasmuch as he reverses all privilege. He is the uninvited guest who finally invites everyone to table. To single him out for special attention is to repeat the gesture that is the source of his attraction. ‘A savoir mon’, wrote Clément Marot, ‘si les bossuz seront tout droiets en l’autre monde?’

2.    ‘Tu m’as donné ta boue at j’en ai fait de l’or ’ (Baudelaire) On voit un chiffonnier qui vient, hochant la tête, Butant, et se cognant aux murs comme un poète, Et, sans prendre souci des mouchards, ses sujets, Epanche tout son coeur en glorieux projects. The analogy between poet and rag-man in Baudelaire’s ‘Le Vin des Chiffonniers’ did not fail to attract Benjamin’s attention; it is completed by Baudelaire’s portrait of the poet in ‘Le Soleil’, to which Benjamin devoted a magnificent commentary.6 Je vais m’exercer seul à ma fantasque escrime, Flairant dans tous les coins les hazards de la rime,



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Trébuchant sur les mots comme sur les paves, Heurtant parfois des vers depuis longtemps rêvés. The evident affinities between the activities of the chiffonnier and those of the Baudelairean poet (for whom we may, mutatis mutandis, substitute Benjamin’s image of the historical materialist) are further extended in the following commentary on certain other details of ‘Le Vin des Chiffonniers’: ‘The rag-picker cannot, of course, be considered part of the bohème. But from the littérateur to the professional conspirator, everyone who belonged to the bohème could recognize a part of himself in the rag-picker. They were all, in more or less muffled ways, at odds with society, and faced a more or less precarious future. Each of them could, at certain moments, feel with those who were attacking the foundations of this society. The rag-picker is not alone in his dream. He is accompanied by comrades; they too trail the smell of barrels; they too have turned grey in battles. His moustache droops like an old flag. On his rounds he meets the mouchards, the police informers over whom he lords it in his dreams’ (GS 1:522).7 Two notes in the PassagenWerk further seek to underscore the connections between the chiffonnier’s drunken imaginings and revolutionary praxis. Benjamin takes the reference to informers (sans prendre souci des mouchards) to indicate that the rag-man dreams specifically of returning in triumph from the barricades (PW 469). ‘Le Vin des Chiffonniers’ would, in fact, be the only poem in which Baudelaire intimated whose hands actually built the barricades (instead of apostrophizing their appearance ex nihilo, as he does in his projected ‘Epilogue’ to the Fleurs du Mal: ‘Tes magiques pavés, dressés en forteresses’) (PW 454). Whatever the philological merits of these claims,8 they serve to illuminate Benjamin’s own ambitions as a bricoleur. Use of omnibuses in building barricades. After the horses had been unharnessed and everyone had alighted they were overturned and a flag was fastened to the shaft (PW 184).   At the entrance to a narrow street lies an omnibus, its four wheels in the air. – To the right and left stands a heap of baskets that had perhaps been used for packing oranges, and at the rear, between the rims of the wheels and the apertures, small fires gleam, constantly giving off puffs of blue smoke (PW 201). Not merely does such ‘improvisation with the left hand’ (GS 4:87) point up the affinities between the revolutionary and the Lumpensammler. The building of barricades with whatever comes to hand also suggests evocative parallels with Benjamin’s own project of ‘quoting out of context’, ‘using’ – as opposed to ‘taking stock of’ (inventarisieren) – the available resources as ‘the only way of doing them justice.’9 Already the Trauerspiel book had been an attempt to fake academic regalia and turn the concomitant Wissenschaft

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against itself. The Passagen-Werk might, in turn, be seen as an attempt to overturn its omnibus volumes, to ransack the library and pick up whatever bits and pieces can serve the revolutionary cause of impeding ‘progress’. There are, of course, considerable differences between the various Lumpensammler we are here lumping together. Baudelaire’s chiffonnier dreams of a (more or less) socialist reversal in order to compensate himself for the sordid realities of his daily existence. The whole point of his escapist fantasies (‘glorieux projects’) is that they should be severed from any practical relation to his actual work. The ‘illumination’ of his Benjaminian counterpart is by contrast, a ‘profane’ one. It is in and through his sober activity as a rag-picker that he conspires against the existing order. His ‘glorious project’ is nothing other than to pick up the refuse and thereby to ‘raise up the victims’. Benjamin returns to the figure of the chiffonnier in another of his Baudelaire essays, this time by way of commentary on the following morceau de bravoure, tucked away in Du Vin et du Haschisch, written one year before ‘Le Vin des Chiffonniers’: ‘Let us descend a little lower and consider one of those mysterious creatures who live, as it were, off the leavings (déjections) of the big city . . . Here we have a man whose task is to gather the day’s rubbish in the capital. Everything that the big city has cast off, everything it lost, everything it disdained, everything it broke, he catalogues and collects. He combs through the archives of debauchery, the stockpile of waste. He sorts things out and makes intelligent choices; like a miser assembling his treasure, he gathers the trash that, after being regurgitated by the goddess of Industry, will assume the shape of useful or gratifying objects.’ In transcribing this description (PW 441), Benjamin underlines the phrase ‘tout ce qu’elle a brisé, il le catalogue, il le collectionne’. The passage could hardly have failed to seize his attention. Not merely does it, as he observes, constitute an extended metaphor for Baudelaire’s philosophy of poetic composition.10 It almost reads as if, mutatis mutandis (the motto, this, of the literary rag-man), it had been written with Benjamin’s own archival prowlings in mind. As in the case of ‘Le Vin des Chiffonniers’, there are, however, decisive differences between a metaphorical and an actual chiffonnier. The latter is so abjectly dependent on the laws of exchange-value that he can reproduce his own existence only by directly serving the reproductive needs of the capitalist economy: ‘The wages of a rag-picker, like those of a worker, are inseparable from industrial prosperity. Industry, like nature, enjoys the sublime privilege of reproducing itself with its own débris’ (PW 483). Whereas the real-life chiffonnier seeks to salvage his own existence by collecting debris that is to be fed back into the jaws of (an allegorically ‘capitalized’) Industry, thereby paying the mythical ‘divinity’ the strange tribute of serving her own ‘waste’ into her jaws; his literary counterpart seeks, by contrast, to save his ‘treasure’ from the capitalist order of things in order to construct objects that will help upset its digestive system. Hence Benjamin’s various definitions of the collector as the man



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who systematically misquotes his finds by anarchically tearing them out of context, in which they are marooned, in order to piece them together into another, truer order of things. His ‘choice’ of debris is no less ‘intelligent’ than that of his opposite number, but the ‘use’ to which he puts it, while no less destructive, is utterly different. The actual chiffonnier is subject to the production and circulation of commodities, to use-value and exchangevalue (‘les ordures qui, remâchées par la divinité de l’Industrie, deviendront des objets d’utilité ou de jouissance’). The collector, as Benjamin conceives him, ‘frees objects from the drudgery of having to be useful’ (PW 53), unlike his upper-class counterpart who is in it for the money. And while the collector pits uselessness against bourgeois utilitarianism, the metaphorical rag-picker opposes a militant, Brechtian utilitarianism to the ‘interest-free pleasure’ (interesseloses Wohlgefallen) of classical bourgeois aesthetics. This primacy of politics over history also distinguishes materialist historiography from its historicist counterpart. In its absence, aestheticism is never far away. Thus, Wilhelm Dilthey pictures the historian as standing amidst a field of ruins (dieses Trümmerfelds von Resten vergangener Dinge). The decline and fall of past grandeur into more or less Romantic ruin makes for an aesthetic Erlebnis whose comfortably melancholy sublimity is only a step away from son et lumière. Despite the verbal echoes, we are far here from Benjamin’s ‘angel of history’, staring in stark horror at a mounting pile of debris (Trümmerhaufen, GS 1:698), as we are from the rag-picker or the ‘destructive character’, who reduces the present to ‘rubble’ (Trümmer) and discovers in the world he is about to clear away a mock aesthetic ‘spectacle of the deepest harmony’ (GS 4:396–8). While the materialist historian constructs a particular past according to the dictates of the hour, the historicist painstakingly reconstructs some by-gone era out of a tell-tale need to forget the present. Part tourist, part archaeologist, he seeks to ‘relive’ the past through an idle act of ‘empathy’ (GS 1:696) calculated to blunt the point of the here and now. But his ‘sad science’ (Nietzsche) merely succeeds in substituting the all-too-modern sensation (Erlebnis) of spleen for an authentic experience (Erfahrung) of historical mourning. There is, in other words, an unconscious historicist as well as a conscious materialist version of the historian as rag-picker. Where the latter ‘blasts’ (heraussprengen, GS 1:703) his finds out of the ‘homogeneous course of history’, rescues them from their context, the former arbitrarily ‘picks out’ (herausgreifen, PW 594) some inert object only to place it back into that continuum. Baudelaire’s malicious indictment of the ‘neo-pagan school’ contains a relevant diagnosis of such antiquarian pursuits. For the neopagan poet is to the Baudelairean poet-as-rag-picker what historicism is to Benjamin’s version of the historical materialist. Neither poetic paganism nor historical purism can, in substituting the ‘good old’ days for the ‘bad new’ ones, efface the traces of their original sin. ‘You must surely have lost your soul somewhere, in some bad place’, the author of ‘Perte d’Auréole’ suspects,

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‘to be running all over the past like empty bodies in order to pick up some spare one amidst ancient detritus?’11 That bad place is equivalent to the ‘brothel’ (GS 1:702) of historicism. It is patronized by those who, in their importance, cannot live (with) the present – the only engagement worthy of the name. Unable to seize the day, they indiscriminately embrace any old past, passing off their promiscuity as so much empathy. The historicist is a culture vulture. He scavenges off the garbage of other times and places, the ruins of western civilization, in search of sadly inadequate surrogates for the ‘soul’ he is in the very process of losing. Some rag-pickers clearly have neither dignity nor shame. So much, then, for the historicist’s threadbare pretensions to a god-like perspective on history. In seeming to turn away from the present in order to devote himself to the undistracted study of the past, he is in fact actuated by present needs as urgent as they are unacknowledged. His claims to historical objectivity mask a flagrant subjectivism, a set of choices which are no less arbitrary for being highly motivated. His alleged catholicity amounts merely to a Don Juanism incapable of making the right choice amidst a thousand and three options. He thereby usurps the genuine inclusiveness of the ‘chronicler’ who will, in good time, ‘recite events without distinguishing between major and minor ones’ (GS 1:694). Like William Gladstone, the philanderer who picked up fallen women on the philanthropic pretext of ‘saving’ them from their fate, the historicist prostitutes the very ideal of salvation.12 Powerless to save even his own soul, he misappropriates the ‘messianic’ idea of a ‘universal history’ (GS 1:1338) in which all souls would ultimately be saved. There are no short cuts to that distant goal. The path will, on the contrary, constantly double back on itself. It will lead through an elaborate series of intelligent choices, each one striking out in a different direction from the last. And the first, most pressing one will also prove to be the least catholic, the most uncompromising, of them all.

3.    ‘Un triage, un choix intelligent’. Part one: refusal ‘Construction’ presupposes ‘ destruction’.

PW 587

By a direct train of thought, The Cynic suggested to me The Rag-Picker; the philosopher’s lantern, the pariah’s candle; the barrel, the basket; the disinterested of Athens, the devotion of Paris, Jean was the Diogenes of Paris, as Diogenes was the Jean of Athens. Félix Pyat, Preface to Le Chiffonnier de Paris, PW 481 The only passage in Benjamin’s writings where the intellectual is explicitly portrayed as a rag-picker occurs in his piece on Siegfried Kracauer,



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Ein Aussenseiter macht sich bemerkbar: ‘A malcontent, not a leader. Not a founder, but a spoilsport. And what we seen when we visualize him going about his solitary business is a rag-picker at day-break, impaling verbal rags, scraps of language, with his stick, and then, as he grumbles somewhat drunkenly and cantankerously to himself, tossing them into his cart, contemptuously letting one or the other of these worn-out tags – “humanistic values”, (Menschentum), “inner depth”, (Innerlichkeit, Vertiefung) – flutter in the morning breeze. A rag-picker in the early hours – the grey dawn of the revolution’ (GS 3:225). Benjamin links the figure of the Lumpensammler to a literary type who is significantly enough, ‘perhaps as old as writing itself’, namely the ‘malcontent’ (der Typus des Missvergnügten, GS 3:219), as exemplified by Thersites, Shakespeare’s ‘snapper-up of unconsidered trifles’. In this capacity, he embodies the intrinsic connection between refuse and refusal: ‘This much, at all events, is clear: such a man does not play the game. He refuses to wear a mask to Vanity Fair, having left at home even the sociologist’s cap and gown, and he unceremoniously shoves his way through the crowd, occasionally lifting the mask of some particular brash type’ (GS 3:219–20). Seen through the eyes of an incorruptible outsider, bourgeois society is an allegorical phantasmagoria, a Baudelairean danse macabre, a world that has already begun to fall apart: ‘As cracks appear in the commodity economy, we begin to recognize the monuments of the bourgeois as ruins even before they have crumpled’ (PW 59). The garbage collector is not deceived by surface appearances. Like the angelus novus, he sees history as a mounting junk-heap. ‘History’, said Henry Ford, who had a corporate interest in new models, ‘is bunk’. Not merely is that succinct philosophy of progress itself part of the garbage to be cleared away. It is also responsible for the existence of the junk-yard. For the ‘storm that blows from paradise’ – the storm we call progress’ (GS 1:698) – originated in ‘forgetting’ (GS 2:436), the original sin a Ford blithely perpetuates. History isn’t bunk but junk, and never more so than when the new sets out to junk the old. Bourgeois society resembles the junk of which it keeps washing its hands. It thus unwittingly demonstrates the reverse connection between refuse and refusal. The rag-man, the lowest of the low, is too extreme a figure not to prompt avenging visions of reversal. The last shall be first. Baudelaire’s chiffonnier dreams of lording it as an enlightened despot, and Benjamin’s Lumpensammler is transformed from the scum into the salt of the earth. They will no longer show him where the garbage is: he will show them. Instead of doing their dirty work, he will show it up. But bourgeois society threatens in turn to dispose of him as neatly as it has him clean the streets. Frédéric Le Play’s itemized estimate of a rag-picker’s budget is, Benjamin observes, ‘a social document not only because it investigates a particular family but also because it attempts to make abject misery appear less objectionable by neatly (säuberlich) arranging it under rubrics. In their ambition to leave no aspect of their inhumanity uncodified . . . the totalitarian states

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have brought to fruition a seed which, one may surmise, was already present at an earlier stage of capitalism’ (GS 1:521). The parallel that Baudelaire establishes between the poet and rag-picker is, in this chilling perspective, a prophetic one that extends into the twentieth century: ‘Sixty years later a brother of the poet who has meanwhile been reduced to a rag-picker appears in Apollinaire. It is Croniamantal, the poète assassiné – the first victim of a pogrom that is intended to end the species of the lyric poet throughout the world’ (GS 1:583). Another parallel is unavoidable at this point – with the émigré Jew, who, even as he establishes the further analogy between the rag-picker and the materialistic historian, surely knows that he too will soon be the object of similar mopping-up operations. In the name of philanthrophy (GS 5:74), Le Play’s monumental study Les Ouvriers Européens clothes abjection in sterile administrative language and thereby washes its hands of it. By contrast with such bureaucratic euphemisms, Kracauer, the rag-picker who unmasks society’s masquerade, wears no mask, not even the paraphernalia of an academic sociologist. Whereas academics vainly arrange the chaos of their ‘lumber-room’ into neat piles of facts that nonetheless accumulate like so much debris, thereby reflecting the chaos of history without reflecting upon it, the rag-picker throws all the litter out almost without comment. He has ‘nothing to say’, ‘only to show’. Not merely ‘culture’ and ‘cultural history’, perhaps even cultural criticism, meta-prattle, has to go. Here, too, the disgruntled rag-picker who goes about his lonely work in the wee hours of the revolution is – outer appearance to the contrary – the comrade-in-arms of the destructive character who, while ‘no Thersites’, likewise reduces the world to ruins, ‘not for the sake of the ruins, but of the path that leads through them’ (GS 4:398)13. Neither of these terribles simplificateurs has the slightest interest in ‘positive’ perspectives or ‘constructive’ solutions, still less in being ‘creative’. Zerstörungwürdigkeit – this, and nothing else, constitutes the great chain of being: das grosse Band, das alles Bestehende einträchtig umschlingt (GS 4:397). This latter phrase ironically passes off allegorical godforsakenness as symbolic harmony. ‘The facies hippocratica of history’, writes Benjamin in The Origin of German Tragic Drama, ‘confronts the allegorist as a petrified landscape’ (GS 1:343), as the ‘hopeless confusion of Golgotha’ (Schädelstätte, GS 1:405), a place of skulls and bones. The rag-and-bone man, a cousin of the Shakespearean grave-digger, is like the destructive character, an allegorist in action – the grave-digger of the bourgeois world. If he emerges here as a figure of all-embracing negativity, he will eventually, when the time is ripe, also stand for an equally all-encompassing positivity. He represents the two extremes of destruction and preservation, each one turning dialectically into the other. For in the end everything (and nothing) is to be saved. Then there will be no more refuse or refusal. But



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the more pressing task – one which, however, already prepares the messianic end – is to go through the garbage and make the intelligent choices: ‘Some hand things down by conserving them, thus making them inviolable; others hand on situations by liquidating them, thus making them handy. The latter are called destructive ones’ (GS 4:396). Only on the basis of such radical destruction can any viable construction ever get under way. For, even at its most devastating, refusal of this kind is never synonymous with negativism. The critical act of clearing away phony positivity is the counterpart of a truer affirmation – the hidden other face of the negative which, like the theological dwarf, cannot today show itself in public. ‘The destructive character has no vision (kein Bild ). He has few needs, least of all to know what will replace the things he has destroyed. First of all, for a moment at least, the empty space, the place where the thing stood or the victim lived. Someone is sure to be found who needs the space without taking it up . . . Where others encounter walls or mountains, there too, he sees a way. But because he sees ways everywhere, he also has to clear everywhere (GS 4:397–8). The refusal of the positive here recalls the biblical taboo on graven images. But it now seems to extend to theology itself. The activity of finding a way through mountains leaves no time for the faith that moves them. A certain ‘cynical’ refusal is the first stage of a messianic salvage-operation with which it cannot, at this stage, have any truck. Diogenes14 rudely bade those who sought to engage him in conversation to get out of his light. Likewise, pious notions of messianic salvation would merely land in the salvage-man’s basket. And yet, in clearing space, does he not, with all due cynicism (‘someone is sure to be found . . .’), leave room, for, say, the coming of the Messiah (‘. . . who needs the space without taking it up’)? Like the destructive character, the rag-picker refuses to think that far ahead, gets on with the business at hand – and thereby faithfully prepares the way. Brecht’s dismissal of Benjamin’s own ‘Judaisms’ is an intriguing case in point: a serious misunderstanding that is little short of providential.

4.    ‘Un triage, un choix intelligent ’: parts two, three, four, etc. Verneinende Geschichtserserkenntnis ist ein Widersinn.

GS 3:265

‘Small methodological suggestion concerning the dialectics of cultural history. It is very easy to devise ways of dividing up the various ‘areas’ of any given period between, on the one hand, the “fruitful”, “forward-looking”, “living”, “positive” part and, on the other hand, the futile, backward, dead part. The contours of this positive part can, indeed, be brought into clear relief only when set against its negative counterpart. Conversely, every negation has

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value only as the backdrop for the living, positive aspects. It is, therefore, crucially important that the excluded negative part be divided up in turn so that with every shift in perspective (but not standards!) another positive aspect emerges that differs from what was established thus far. And so on in infinitum till the whole past has been gathered into the present in a historical apokatastasis’ (PW 573). This modest proposal represents a far-reaching critique of simplistic forms of Ideologiekritik which divide the world, along strictly party lines, into two unalterably opposed camps. Such black-and-white separations between the ‘positive’ and ‘negative’, ‘true’ and ‘false’ consciousness, the sheep and the goats, have all the naiveté of medieval paintings of the Last Judgement, which show the saved ‘on the one hand’ (of God) and the damned ‘on the other’. It is merely that the binary terms have changed in the meantime. ‘Progressive’ forces are now pitted against ‘regressive’ ones. The all-too-familiar jargon suggest both that the possibilities of replacing one opposition by another are considerable, and that the dogmatic a priori antithesis between what is ideologically acceptable and what is not is itself ultimately an ideological one. Vulgar Marxism might thus be considered, like traditional theology, a case of arrested judgement. It characteristically regards itself, however, as having ‘transcended’ all ideology – notably theology, which it would, of course, range among the ‘regressive’ forces. Benjamin by no means proposes to disqualify even the most vulgar Ideologiekritik. He does, however, propose to qualify it, and to do so ad infinitum. Even the most superficial communist platitudes are, he announces in 1931, more faithful to the talmudic doctrine of the forty-nine levels of meaning contained in each passage of the Torah than the monotonous pseudo-profundities of bourgeois apologetics. A certain crudity (Brecht’s plumpes Denken) is, in short, an essential moment – no more and no less – of any self-respecting position. Even though they must finally be superseded, simple (un)critical distinctions are the sine qua non for all further reflection. To discard them from the outset – in messianic parlance, to ‘hasten the end’ – is to leave oneself in the most uncritical position of all. Bereft of the critical distinction between positive and negative, thought becomes all-too-positive. Norman Vincent Peale’s ‘power of positive thinking’ comes readily to mind, as do Zarathustra’s least qualified affirmations. So, above all, does the ‘historicism’ that Benjamin, like Nietzsche, denounced for its indiscriminate assimilation of every available fact. Only in the end, after elaborate preparations, will everything be, in Ranke’s phrase, gleich nah zu Gott. The phrase is both an ideological and a utopian one, ideological inasmuch as it usurps a perspective on history that will become possible only in the fullness of time. ‘Which is to say that only for a redeemed humankind has its past become citable in all its moments. Each moment it has lived becomes a citatition á l’ordre du jour – that day being none other than the Day of Judgement’ (GS 1:694). Or, as Benjamin puts it in the Passagen-Werk: ‘The authentic concept



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of universal history is a messianic one. Universal history as understood today is the domain of obscurantists’ (PW 608). The category of ‘universal history’, so dear to historicism, coincides with that of ‘universal apokatastasis’ – the heretical speculation, too catholic for the Catholic Church, that all souls go to paradise (GS 2:458). Pure all-embracing positivity cannot, then, constitute a valid point of departure for the simple reason that – as Brecht said of ‘depth’ – it ‘goes’ nowhere at all. It is, rather a messianic end-point – but one which, far from being infinitely postponable, is already given, at least in part, at every moment. Instead of arresting critical negativity in the name of the positive, Benjamin proposes to radicalize it to the point where it coincides with the name of the positive – with naming itself. In the arithmetic of the angels, Lichtenberg speculated, two and two must surely add up to five. Divide ad infinitum, and in the end nothing will have been subtracted; such is the first law of Benjamin’s mystical mathematics. Such division progressively whittles away at itself and finishes by reversing the imperialist divide et impera. The revolutionary tribunal is, in other words, to keep reversing its decisions until it has finally ruled itself out of court. This alone would be the logic of a permanent revolution that could successfully contest the mythical logic of the status quo, the ‘eternal return of the same’. Each new division takes part of the previous one back until the process has completed itself by cancelling itself out. At which ecstatic point, everything will be as it was and nothing will be quite the same. An infinite series of critical decisions (yes or no) and subsequent qualifications (no but yes) adds up, in the final analytical synthesis, to a decisive, unqualified amen. The work of Lumpensammler, the (re)collector of the past, will then, like that of the little hunchback at the end of Berliner Kindheit, be done: he will have it ‘behind him’ (GS 4:304) – no longer, that is, on his back. Nothing will be excluded except exclusion itself. The divisions will finally be healed by virtue of having been multiplied: pure positivity by way of critical negativity. Where Zeno’s paradoxes prove the theoretical impossibility of what actually happens all the time, Benjamin’s demonstrate that the impossible takes a little longer. ‘To put the foregoing another way: the indestructibility of the highest life in all things. Against the prophet of doom [Verfall]’ (PW 573). The philosophy of history that derives from the programmatic postulates such as this is deeply rooted in Benjamin’s early theological writings. That the highest life is to be found in the lowest places; that nothing is a quantité négligeable; that the nameless victims of history should finally, one and all, be ‘cited’ by a ‘chronicler’ who, according to the Theses, ‘recites events without distinguishing between major and minor ones; (GS 1:694); that the historian should be a ‘herald who invites the shades to table’ (PW 603); that no one should be left out of that beggar’s banquet; that all the insulted and the injured should have their day in court – a Day of Judgement which, in its very indiscriminateness, would suspend all judgement, thereby effacing the traditional

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Judaeo–Christian version of that final reckoning as the definitive separation of the saved from the damned, releasing the world from the prescriptive rule of law, and restoring it to an original goodness (‘God saw that it was good’) that preceded the Fall from concrete names into abstract signs and empty judgements as between good and evil – all this, it could easily be shown, goes back to Benjamin’s original philosophy of language. That philosophy already provided the theoretical underpinnings of the The Origin of German Tragic Drama. If it also underlies the Passagen-Werk, it is not implicitly subjected to a materialistic critique. Not for nothing is the ‘eternal’ there identified with the ‘ruche of a dress’ rather than a Platonic ‘Idea’ (PW 578). ‘Intelligent choice’ had, however, already constituted a central methodological category in the ‘Epistemo-Critical Prologue’ to the Trauerspiel book: ‘Phenomena do not, however, enter into the realm of ideas intact, in their crude empirical state, adulterated by illusory appearances (Schien), but only in their redemptive elements. Divested of their false unity, they can, thus divided, partake of the genuine unity of truth’ (GS 1:213). Phenomena enter the world of Ideas ‘of their own accord’ (von selber), but only after having being suitably prepared. It is the mediating function of concepts to de- and re-compose them, dividing (aufteilen) the wheat from the chaff, essential from inessential elements, so that they may partake (teilnehmen) of their own ‘truth’. The ‘salvation’ (Rettung) or ‘salvaging’ (Bergung) of the phenomenal world is thus synonymous with its ‘dissolution’ (Lösung) or ‘dispersal’ (Zerstreuung), prior to the (re)collection (Einsammlung) of its ‘extremes’, its most ‘originary’ and ‘authentic’ elements, into ‘constellations’ of concepts, out of which emerge the contours of the Ideas. Of these there are a ‘finite’ number, which form an ‘enclosure’ (Gehege) or ‘circle’. Phenomena do not, in short, go straight to heaven. Such epistemological idealism, we will soon see, exhibits intriguing parallels with the ‘materialist’ method of the Passagen-Werk. But this much would already seem apparent: Platonic salvation hardly coincides with messianic apokatastasis. If phenomena do not enter that exclusive Gehege whole (integral), what happens to the condemned material, the dross, that has been separated out? The damned stuff has, it seems, quietly been left out on the doorstep of the enclosure. For there is no division without subtraction, no discrimination (Scheidung) without excrement (Ausscheidung), no waste (déjections) without dejection, no sadder, more allegorical spectacle than the refuse of the system (diesem, vorab augeschiednen, negativen Teile), the elements that fall (Abhub, Abfall) as the others ascend, the outsiders that belong to no elected party, let alone the party of the elect, and are, like Kafka’s ‘man from the country’, excluded from their own salvation. The only effort that is undertaken in the Trauerspiel book to recuperate – or at least remember – that nameless rest is the long parenthesis devoted to the silent lament of nature, seduced, violated and abandoned by the Word.15 The



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‘epistemo-critical’ programme of the Passagen-Werk might almost be defined as that of saving the phenomenal world from its Platonic salvation. Therein lies the task of that peripatetic philosophe de la rue (Baudelaire), the flâneur, alias chiffonnier. But how is theology, however heretical, to serve as working model for the practising historian? Having invoked the ‘indestructibility of the highest life in all things’, Benjamin proceeds to cite a case in point which situates his own materialist work on the work of art in the age of technical reproduction within such a theological perspective: ‘And is it not surely a violation of Goethe’s Faust to make a film of it, and are not the work and the film worlds apart? Indeed, they are. But is not a good film version of Faust also worlds apart from a bad one? It is never a question of “diametrical” contrasts, only dialectical ones, which can often barely be told apart. But it is out of such nuances that life is forever born anew’ (PW 573). Such an ongoing process of dialectical transvaluation, which evokes both Nietzschean Umwertung and Brechtian Umfunktionierung, does not, Benjamin insists, involve any lowering of ideological standards but rather a constant readjustment of one’s angle of vision (Verschiebung des Gesichtswinkels [nicht aber der Masstäbe!]). In connection with his work on Baudelaire, he specifically equates the materialist historian with an expert cameraman who knows both how to receive and to take pictures of the past. The passage in question begins by the way of a materialist reprise of the above-quoted section from the ‘Epistemo-Critical Prologue’: ‘Separating the true from the false is not the starting point for a critical method but its goal. This means . . . that it sets out from an object that is riddled with error, with doxa. The discrimination it introduces – for it is discriminative from the outset – are discriminations within this highly mixed object, whose mixed, uncritical state can hardly be overestimated. It . . . would greatly reduce its chances if it claimed to know the object as it is ‘in truth’; and it increases them considerably . . . if it progressively abandons such pretensions, thereby readying itself for the insight that . . . the “matter in itself” is not “in truth”’ (GS 1:1163). All historical experience is, in other words, saturated by ideology. It is because the historian encounters objects in so ‘mixed’ and ‘uncritical’ a condition that he has need of critical distinctions from the outset – a few heavy, massive weights, counter-balanced by as many inconspicuous facts as possible (PW 585). Materialist Ideologiekritik proceeds to subject these highly contaminated data to a type of analysis that, point for point, matches the treatment the phenomenal world received at the hands of the neo-Platonic method outlined in the ‘Epistemo-Critical Prologue’: the resulting ‘monad’ is no longer an ‘Idea’ but a ‘dialectical image’. But if the ‘truth’ of the matter only emerges as the end-product of so divisive and elaborate a method, will not too much ‘untruth’ have been discarded in the process? What, once again, of the rest – the by-products which would, this time, amount to so much materialist dross?

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It is here that the messianic image of the materialist cameraman comes to save the day: ‘The tradition of bourgeois society may be compared to a camera. The bourgeois scholar peers into it like the amateur who enjoys the spectacle of the colorful images in the viewfinder. The materialist dialectician operates with it. His job is to arrest the process (festzustellen). He may opt for a smaller or wider angle, for harsher, political or softer, historical lighting – but he finally adjusts the shutter and presses the button. Once he has carried off the photographic plate – the image of the object embedded in social tradition – it is the turn of concepts to develop it. For the plate can merely offer a negative. It is the product of an apparatus that substitutes light for shade, shade for light’ (GS 1:1165). The historical materialist combines the uncritical receptivity of a photosensitive plate with the technical expertise of a cameraman and the conceptual powers of a materialist philosopher who is able to ‘develop’ his empirical find(ing)s, which, in their raw state, remain riddled with ideology (Schein, doxa). His task is to save them from the tradition in which they are transmitted. But it is in and through this tradition that they reach him at all. The camera is the only instrument he has at his disposal. He is, accordingly, obliged to operate both with and against it. He seeks to transform the Platonic cave into a dark room – Marx’s ‘camera obscura of ideology’ also being the laboratory where ideology can sort itself out. But a certain light from outside, be it Platonic or messianic, is still needed to orient the whole process of development. The reversibility of light and shadow, ‘positive’ and ‘negative’, may be considered, in this light, as the first stage of an infinite progression towards a total mystical revelation which would, by exposing all the negatives to the shadowless light of (mid)day (Mittag der Geschichte, PW 603), thereby extinguish all negativity.16 The most-relevant materialist aspect of such mystical optics is the precise know-how that enables the cameraman to take the right shots. Even as he takes it all in he is sorting it all out. It is a question of choosing one’s angle and lighting intelligently enough. Depending on circumstances, which are always beyond his control, he opts for a ‘softer, historical’ or a ‘harsher, political’ lighting. It is strategic ability to revert from one to the other that enables him to bring different, sometimes clashing, aspects of the past into appropriately powerful relief. For lack of any active political focus, historicism reduces everything to an endless panoramic blur. Surrealism, by contrast, has Benjamin’s particular admiration for having discovered the ‘knack’ of exchanging a historical for a political angle on the past (GS 2: 300): it is this ‘primacy’ of politics over history that is to direct the PassagenWerk (PW 491). What is less apparent, especially in a Marxist context, is that a reverse emphasis can, on occasion, be no less indispensable. Despite the inherent danger of lapsing into some form of historicist ‘empathy’, the superimposition of a historical on a political optic belongs to that logic of reversion, that technique of constant readjustment, which represents the most promising method for achieving ‘historical apokatastasis’.



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It is precisely this absence of a second historical sense, a politically informed gift for ‘historical physiognomy’, for which Benjamin reproaches an otherwise irreproachable political history of the Berlin slums, Werner Hegemann’s Das steinerne Berlin. Its author is, like Kracauer, a political malcontent; Benjamin visualizes him as a quarrelsome plaintiff at the Last Judgement. But, for all its immense civic virtues, his book betrays the limitations of a purely critical, negativistic, forensic posture. It has no eye for the ‘indestructibility of the highest life in all things’, for ‘beauty even where it is most deformed’ (GS 3:265). Historical physiognomy is, moreover, itself a highly political potential of ‘god-forsaken Sunday afternoons in proletarian neighbourhoods’ (GS 2:300). This Last Judgement in the trial of the city of Berlin leaves one thing to be desired: ventilation . . . Even on the Day of Judgement, the fact that it happened so very long ago ought to count as an extenuating circumstance. For the passage of time has a moral dimension. This does not, however, lie in its progression from today to tomorrow but in the reversion (Umschlag) of today into yesterday. Chronos, like Leporello, holds in his hand a picture book, in which, one out of the other, the days fall back into the past, thereby revealing their reverse side, their hidden unconscious life. This is the province of the historian. Goethe’s theme is applicable here: ‘Es sei, wie es wolle, es war doch so schön.’ It reconciles us with the past . . . Hegemann would not be the Jacobin he is if he let the genius of history lead him by the hand and show him the way to such mercifully [begnadet] physiognomic existence . . . It never occurs to him that these barrack-like tenements [Mietskaserne], slum housing though they are, have created streets whose windows reflect not merely suffering and crime but also the uniquely sad grandeur of the morning and evening sun, and that the city child has always extracted from the stairwell and the street substances as inalienable as those that the peasant boy finds in the stable and the field . . . What you want to annihilate, you must not merely know; to complete the job, you must have felt it. Or, as dialectical materialism has it: it is a good to identify thesis and antithesis, but one can intervene in the process by recognizing the point at which the one reverts [umschlägt] to the other, the positive coinciding with the negative, the negative with the positive (GS 3:264–5). This remarkable passage announces, almost in the same breath, Berliner Kindheit um Neunzehnhundert, ‘Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit’ and the Passagen-Werk. The dialectical materialism it invokes is no doubt closer in spirit to the Theological–Political Fragment than to orthodox Marxism. But the logic is, there as here, one of political intervention. The reversion from positive to negative and back again is of the same order as the cameraman’s instant choices between

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historical and political lighting, the strategic revision, as circumstances demand, of one judgement by another, including, in the last instance, and all along, the judgement on judgement itself. The dialectician, according to the Passagen-Werk, has the wind in his conceptual sails. That wind is alternately termed ‘the wind of the absolute’ and ‘the wind of world history’ (PW 591). Apokatasasis: the hyphen between the theological and the political, the courage of one’s contradictions, the fidelity to one’s scraps.

5.    ‘Und so weiter in infinitum. . .’ Je pense aux matelots oubliés dans une île, Aux captifs, aux vaincus! . . . á bien d’autres encore! . . . tous ces vieux maudits qui meurent en silence.

Baudelaire

Et cetera? Can everything, everybody, or at least ‘all souls’ go to heaven? How do them justice meanwhile? Did not the animals enter the ark ‘two by two?’ How are the rest to be saved from being mere etceteras who, even as one ‘thinks (of)’ them, trail off, as in ‘Le Cygne’, into infinite dots, the abstract category of ‘the others’ and a self-ironical exclamation mark? Does not their vague inclusion also exclude them? How name all of Cassou’s ‘beings without name, without the possibility of existence’? The question of ‘the rest’17 is, indissociably, a political, a philosophical and theological one. Politically, it coincides with the simple, drastic questions that, in Brecht’s poem ‘Fragen eines lesenden Aebiters’, arise in a worker’s mind as he reads history books written from above. Did the great men of history achieve their results ‘all alone?’ What about the rest – the cooks and the candle-stick makers? Philosophically, the issue might be formulated, in quasi-Hegelian terms, as the Aufhebung of the Abhub – the re-collection of the leavings left, indeed produced, by the ‘labour of the concept’, the ‘lazy existence’ that the movement of the dialectic leaves by the wayside. Can such recollection take place except in memory, and does not even remembrance amount to the merely symbolic gesture of observing a moment’s silence of laying a wreath at a tomb of the unknown soldier? Can dialectics return to pick up what it left behind, without thereby becoming an impossible, totalitarian parody of apokatastasis: an advanced form of capitalism which would rehabilitate all its layabouts, recycle all its waste-products and turn into the ‘eternal return of the same?’ How would the second coming of the dialect differ from the first?18 The question of the rest – Nature’s silent plea for a second hearing,19 the little hunchback’s yearning to be included in our prayers – is, finally, a theological one. The gruff rag-picker, whose job it is to pick up the leftovers, belongs to the same family as the saints who include ‘all creatures’ in their prayers (GS 2:432), and his scurrilous activities



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correspond to the contemplative gaze of the melancholic who broods over ‘dead things’ in order to ‘save’ them (GS 1:334). But is the redemption of things any more plausible than that of nature? Is not salvation usually restricted to the soul, whose fidelity to its origins entails the abandonment of the body, the necessary betrayal of its mortal remains? How, then, save the rest, the material things, not their souls or concepts? Theology converges here with materialism. And one understands why historical materialism should, in this perspective, remain in need of theological inspiration. The theological guide to the perplexed is however, reduced in turn to the shrunken dimensions of a hunchback dwarf (GS 1:693) – a dwindling remainder and persisting reminder of the full-grown corpus of yesteryear. The only theology that can help save the rest is itself perhaps a residual one. In its absence, however, the cause of the lost and hopeless is itself perhaps a lost and hopeless one. Even with theology ‘in one’s sails’ (PW 591), the matter remains a grave one, concerning as it does the very gravity of matter. Hence the melancholy of Péguy’s ‘somber fidelity to fallen things’, the ‘hopeless fidelity’ (GS 1:333) which accompanies the attempts to save any remnant of Creation: ‘“Péguy would speak of that inaptness of things to be saved, that resistance, that heaviness of things, indeed of beings, which in the end leaves over only a little ash from the efforts of heroes and saints.” The persistence which is bred by the intention of mourning is born of a fidelity to the world of things . . . Fidelity is the rhythm of the emanatively descending levels of intention which mirror, and significantly transform, the ascending ones of the neo-Platonic theosophy’ (GS 1:334). This is materialist theology which, instead of flying upwards on the wings of Platonic enthusiasm, descends to the heart of the matter. But the effort to raise up the dead burns out in turn, returning to the dust and ashes from which redemption was intended. Yet if anything could save the rest, it would be lingering auratic gaze, the obstinate rhythm, the mimetic persistence with which mourning refuses to relinquish the objects it has lost. Such persistence recalls the ‘infinite task’ to which some of Benjamin’s early letters refer. ‘Only for the sake of the hopeless is hope given to us’ (GS 1:201). Apokatastasis – a cumulative act of salvation which repeatedly returns to the rejects of the rag-picker’s last round – is a more sanguine version of that task. It calls for endurance of philosophical contemplation (GS 1:206) and, more or less synonymously, of mourning and melancholia, as well as the indefatigable cheerfulness of the destructive character and the equally invincible ‘surliness’ (rogne, GS 1: 673) of the rag-picker: a peculiar combination, in short, of theological and anti-theological virtues. The historian’s task, as Benjamin conceives it, is as necessary and impossible as that of the translator. It is that task (traduire en une chanson le cri strident Vitrier). Even though our ‘messianic power’ is ‘weak’, ‘nothing’, according to the Theses, ‘is to be given up as lost for history’. The PassagenWerk was destined to draw the consequences from that extravagant postulate

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– and to do so, in consequence, at every level. Perhaps, then, it was destined to remain unfinished. But this could not release its author from having to multiply the chiffons. Record the history of The Arcades Project, its development. Its most problematic aspect: wanting to give nothing up, to show materialist historiography to be in a higher sense, more visual [bildhaft] than traditional history (PW 578). Necessity of keeping one’s ears open for years on end for every chance quotation, every passing mention of a book (PW 587). Say something about the method of composition : how everything one is thinking about at the time has at all cost to be incorporated into the project one is working on. Be it that this is a measure of its intensity, or that one’s thoughts are from the outset oriented towards that project. Such is the case with my present project. The pauses for reflection, the gaps between its most essential parts which are intensively turned towards the outside, will have to be characterized and protected (PW 570). But it is entirely possible for me, in contradicting my past, to establish a continuity with that of someone else, who is, as a community in turn contradicting his (PW 579). These jottings indicate the extent to which Benjamin wanted, as frenetically as Proust, to recapture lost time; to apply the logic of apokatastasis to his own writing; to incorporate every trouvaille, to synchronize every aspect of his far-flung thinking, to reintegrate the chequered history of his project, that of reintegrating history, into the project itself, right down to the ‘gaps’ between its phases, the silences of his own history. They also manifest a calm refusal to accept the alternatives prescribed by a logic of identity and contradiction, a refusal to refuse (auf nichts zu verzichten). According to the logic of apokatastasis, each new positivity reverses the preceding one. The materialist historian has, in consequence, to be, in Benjamin’s succinct phrase, immer radikal, niemals konsequent,20to be consequential and inconsequential in turn, to converse and to destroy, to judge and not to judge, etcetera, etcetera . . .

3 The FlÂneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering Susan Buck-Morss

1  A Note on Method . . . already today, as the contemporary mode of knowledge production demonstrates, the book is an obsolete mediation between two different card-filing systems. For everything essential is found in the note boxes of the researcher who writes it, and the reader who studies it assimilates it into his own note file. Walter Benjamin, Einbahnstrasse, 1928 In the Passagen-Werk, Benjamin has left us his note boxes. That is, he has left us ‘everything essential’. Lamentations over the work’s incompleteness are thus irrelevant. Had he lived, the notes would not have become superfluous by entering into a closed and finished text. And surely, the card file would have been thicker. The Passagen-Werk is as it would have been: a historical lexicon of the capitalist origins of modernity, a collection of concrete, factual images of urban experience. Benjamin handled these facts as if they were politically charged, capable of transmitting revolutionary energy across generations. His method was to create from them, through the formal principle of montage, constructions of print which had the power to awaken political consciousness among present-day readers. The Baudelaire essays (1938, 1939) were two such constructions. Had Benjamin lived, the Passagen-Werk notes would have been the source of others. The Passagen-Werk, as the 1935 exposé indicates, was to be a commentary on both ‘texts’ and ‘reality’. Benjamin recognized the difference. In the former case, he tells us, ‘philology is the fundamental science’; in the latter it is ‘theology’ (PW 574). Crucially important to a theological reading was what Benjamin described as ‘telescoping the past through the present’ (PW 588). It means that the elements of the nineteenth century which he chose to record reflected the concerns of his own era. These connections are most often not spelled out in the Passagen-Werk. Still, we can, and indeed must

34 Walter Benjamin and The Arcades Project assume their existence. Benjamin wrote explicitly: ‘The events surrounding the historian and in which he takes part will underline his presentation like a written text in invisible ink’ (PW 595). And he made it clear that he chose the Paris arcades as the central image precisely because these early forms of industrial luxury were in decay in his own time. We may be sure that his research in nineteenth-century world expositions was sparked by the Paris expositions of 1931 and 1937; the early, utopian renewal schemes which he noted made a critical constellation with Le Corbusier’s 1925 Voisin Plan to make a high-rise development out of central Paris: Grandville’s animated drawings of nature took on particular significance in the 1930s given the success in Paris of Walt Disney’s first animated feature films. In the 1850s the bourgeois state first articulated an ideology of capitalists and workers united in a common purpose – the Urform of the Popular Front line which sold out radical working-class politics in 1936. The Passagen-Werk’s focus on Napoleon III (the first bourgeois dictator) was in response to the rise of Hitler, just as its concern with Baron von Haussmann’s public architecture provided the prototype for the state-glorifying projects of Albert Speer. As a historian Benjamin valued textual exactness not in order to achieve a hermeneutical understanding of the past ‘as it actually was’ – he called historicism the greatest narcotic of the time – but for the shock of the historical citations ripped out of their original context with a ‘strong, seemingly brutal grasp’ (PW 592), and brought into the most immediate present. This method created ‘dialectical images’ in which the old-fashioned, undesirable, suddenly appeared current, or the new, desired, appeared as a repetition of the same. ‘One should never trust what an author himself says about his work’, wrote Benjamin (PW 1046). Nor should we, because if Benjamin is correct, the truth-content of a literary work is released only after the fact, and is a function of what happens in that reality which becomes the medium for its survival. It follows that in interpreting the Passagen-Werk, our attitude should not be reverence for Benjamin’s work that would immortalize it as the product of a great author no longer here, but reverence for the very mortal and precarious reality that forms our own ‘present’, through which Benjamin’s work is now telescoped. Today [1986] the Paris arcades are being restored like antiques to their former grandeur; the bicentennial celebration of the French Revolution has at least threatened to take the form of another great world exposition; Le Corbusier-inspired urban renewal projects, now in decay, have become the desolate setting for a film like Clockwork Orange: Walt Disney Enterprises are constructing technological Utopias in the tradition of Fourier and SaintSimon. When trying to reconstruct what the arcades, expositions, urbanism and technological dreams were for Benjamin, we cannot close our eyes to what they have become for us. It follows that a philological reading of the Passagen-Werk, although necessary, is not enough and that sometimes, in the



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service of the truth, Benjamin’s own words must be ripped out of context with a ‘seemingly brutal grasp’. The responsibility for a ‘theological’ reading of the Passagen-Werk (one which concerns itself not only with the text, but also with changing present reality which has become the index of the text’s legibility) cannot be brushed aside. This means simply that politics cannot be brushed aside. The following comments on the figure of the flâneur are programmatic of a method of interpreting the Passagen-Werk that tries to acknowledge this political responsibility.

2  The Extinction of a Social Species/Urforms of the Present First dialectal step: the arcades grow from a lustrous place into a dilapidated one. (PW 1213) The historical index of [dialectal] images says not only that they belong to a particular time; it says above all that only in a particular time do they come ‘to legibility’. (PW 577) As Ur-forms of contemporary life, Benjamin avoided more obvious social types and went to the margins. He singled out the flâneur, prostitute, collector – historical figures whose existence was precarious economically in their own time (although their number flourished in early industrialism),1 and socially across time because the dynamics of industrialism ultimately threatened these social types with extinction, as it threatened the arcades, the environment which had originally been so attractive to their trades. For the flâneur, it was traffic that did him in. In the relatively tranquil shelter of the arcades, his original habitat, he practised his trade of not trading, viewing as he loitered the varied selection of luxury-goods and luxury-people displayed before him. ‘Around 1840 it was elegant to take turtles for a walk in the arcades. (This gives a conception of tempo of flânerie)’ (PW 532). By Benjamin’s time, taking turtles for urban strolls had become enormously dangerous for turtles, and only somewhat less so for the flâneurs. The speed-up principles of mass production had spilled over into the streets, waging ‘war on flânerie’ (PW 547). The ‘flow of humanity . . . has lost its gentleness and tranquillity’, Le Temps reported in 1936 : ‘Now it is a torrent, where you are tossed, jostled, thrown back, carried to right and left’ (PW 564). With motor transportation still at an elementary stage of evolution, one already risked being lost in the sea. Today, it is clear to any pedestrian in Paris that, within public space, automobiles are the dominant and predatory species. They penetrate the

36 Walter Benjamin and The Arcades Project city’s aura so routinely that it disintegrates faster than it can coalesce. Flâneurs, like tigers or pre-industrial tribes, are cordoned off on reservations, preserved within the artificially created environments of pedestrian streets, parks, and underground passageways. In Victor Hugo’s old age, viewing the city from the roof of a public omnibus still preserved (for men)2 some of the panoramic pleasure of peripatetic flânerie (PW 545, 554–5), if not the freedom ‘to follow one’s inspiration as if the mere turning right or left already constituted an essentially poetic act’ (PW 547). Today the very efficient metro system extinguishes the view (except for a glimpse of the Seine at Bir Hakeim or the tree-lined Boulevard at Glacière), and places diminish to dots and colours on a map, or block letters on the station walls.3 In the metro there is no verging off course, no time for the flâneur’s ‘irresolution’ (PW 536). The old, buff-coloured metro cars still allow air to penetrate; the new ones, blue and black, are sealed as tight as space-capsules. In them, pressed during rush hour up against the next person like so many sandwiches, with nothing but solipsism and indifference for defence,4 the would-be flâneurs face fellow-travellers and replicated wall advertisements while fighting off boredom or panic (the two are close). But when darkness turns the traffic jam into a garland of lights, and exhaust fumes are overpowered by sidewalk smells of food and drink, the crowd in its leisure hours still enters into the nighttime panorama of the boulevards5 in order to re-enact en masse, as an atavistic practice, the combination of distracted observation and the dreamlike reverie that is characteristic of the flâneur. The present uninhabitability of Paris streets is a recurrence of the past. ‘Until 1870 carriages dominated the streets’; it was because of this that ‘flânerie first took place principally in the arcades . . .’ (PW 85). Under Napoleon III the elements of modernity moved out of the womb of the arcades and settled onto the new boulevards built by Haussmann. The construction of wide sidewalks first made strolling on the boulevards possible, hastening the decline of the arcades,6 and corresponding to a change in the function of flânerie. Benjamin made a cryptic note: ‘Dialectic of flânerie: The interior as street (luxury)/the street as interior (misery)’ (PW 1215). The arcades, interior streets lined with luxury shops and open through iron and glass roofs to the stars, were a wish image, expressing the bourgeois individual’s desire to escape through the symbolic medium of objects from the isolation of his/her subjectivity. On the boulevards, the flâneur, now jostled by crowds and in full view of the urban poverty which inhabited public streets, could maintain a rhapsodic view of modern existence only with the aid of illusion, which is just what the literature of flânerie – physiognomies, novels of the crowd – was produced to provide. If at the beginning, the flâneur as private subject dreamed himself out into the world, at the end, flânerie was an ideological attempt to reprivatize social space, and to give assurance that the individual’s passive observation was adequate for knowledge of social reality. In Benjamin’s time, even this ideological form



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of flânerie was at the brink of decline: The flâneur had become a ‘suspicious’ character.7 The flowering of flânerie was brief, corresponding to the first blooming of the arcades. This era of origins is irretrievable. Benjamin’s concern was not nostalgia for the past, but the critical knowledge necessary for a revolutionary break from history’s most recent configuration. He claimed the past was illuminated only when lit by the present (PW 573), and the converse was equally true: ‘Every present is determined by those [past] images which are synchronic with it’ (PW 578). Such images are ‘dialectical’, in one sense of the term, when they are negated and preserved in history at once. In our own time, in the case of the flâneur, it is not his perceptive attitude which has been lost, but rather its marginality. If the flâneur has disappeared as a specific figure, it is because the perceptive attitude which he embodied saturates modern existence, specifically, the society of mass consumption (and is the source of its illusions). The same can be argued for all of Benjamin’s historical figures. In commodity society all of us are prostitutes, selling ourselves to strangers; all of us are collectors of things. ‘The dialectical image . . . is the Urphänomen of history’ (PW 592). Benjamin’s images are truth-as-image, presented ‘naked before the eyes of the attentive observer’8 – archetypes in Goethe’s sense, but with a historical index.9 The arcades are such an archetype, a concrete manifestation of economic facts which in their own self-development – unfolding a better word – let emerge from themselves the series of concrete historical forms of the arcades, just as the leaf unfolds from itself the entire abundance of the empirical plant world. (PW 577) In connection with these historical forms, the figure of the flâneur ‘who goes botanizing on the asphalt’10 is crucial. It provides philosophical insight into the nature of modern subjectivity – that to which Heidegger referred abstractly as the ‘throwness’ of the subject – by placing it within specific historical existence.11 In the flâneur, concretely, we recognize our own consumerist mode of being-in-the-world. Benjamin wrote: ‘the department store is [the flâneur’s] last haunt’ (PW 562). But flânerie as a form of perception is preserved in the characteristic fungibility of people and things in mass society, and in the merely imaginary gratification provided by advertising, illustrated journals, fashion and sex magazines, all of which go by the flâneur’s principle of ‘look, but don’t touch’ (cf. PW 968). Benjamin examined the early connection between the perceptive style of flânerie and that of journalism. If mass newspapers demanded an urban readership (and still do), more current forms of mass media loosen the flâneur’s essential connection to the city. It was Adorno who pointed to the station-switching behaviour of the radio listener as a

38 Walter Benjamin and The Arcades Project kind of aural flânerie.12 In our time, television provides it in an optical, nonambulatory form. In the United States particularly the format of television news-programmes approaches the distracted, impressionistic, physiognomic viewing of the flâneur, as the sights purveyed take one around the world. And in connection with world travel, the mass tourist industry now sells flânerie in two and four week packets.13 The flâneur thus becomes extinct only by exploding into a myriad of forms, the phenomenological characteristics of which, no matter how new they may appear, continue to bear his traces, as Urform. This is the ‘truth’ of the flâneur, more visible in his afterlife then in his flourishing.

3 Second dialectical step . . . Not-yet-conscious knowledge of past existence. Knowledge of that which has been as a making-self-conscious which has the structure of awakening. (PW 1213) A central problem of historical materialism that finally should be seen: . . . in what way is it possible to connect a heightened graphicness to the execution of the Marxist method? The first stage . . . will be to take over into history the principle of montage. (PW 575) Benjamin’s distinction between Erfahrung and Erlebnis paralleled that between production, the active creation of one’s reality, and a reactive (consumerist) response to it: ‘Erfahrung is the product of work; Erlebnis is the phantasmagoria of the idler’ (PW 962). To the idler who strolls the streets, things appear divorced from the history of their production, and their fortuitous juxtaposition suggests mysterious and mystical connections. Time becomes ‘a dream-web where the most ancient occurrences are attached to those of today’ (PW 546). Meanings are read on the surface of things: ‘The phantasmagoria of the flâneur: reading profession, origins and character from faces’ (PW 540). ‘The idler, the flâneur, who no longer understands anything of production, wants to become an expert of the market (of prices)’ (PW 473). Now, if Marx’s economics are correct, this expert of the market will never understand anything of value. Yet Benjamin made a strategic choice in the Passagen-Werk to focus on consumption rather than production, and this in a work in which, to quote Adorno, ‘every sentence is and must be loaded with political dynamite’.14 If the Passagen-Werk was to have been more than a critique of false consciousness, just what is Benjamin doing in the phantasmagoria of the marketplace, the commodity-filled dream-world of



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the flâneur/consumer? Benjamin writes: In the face of the ‘wind of history’ (PW 592) for the dialectician, ‘thinking means setting sails. How they are set is the important thing’ (PW 571). ‘What for the others are digressions are for me the data that determine my course’ (PW 570). But this course is precarious. To cut the lines that have traditionally anchored Marxist discourse in production and sail off into the dreamy waters of consumption is to risk, politically, running aground. Does the Passagen-Werk project avoid this risk? The question is asked not in the name of Marxist orthodoxy, but rather, in the critical spirit of Adorno, who grew alarmed by the apparent affirmation of mass consciousness and lack of class differentiation in Benjamin’s theory. To test the waters, consider the following assertion typical of Benjamin’s commentary in the Passagen-Werk : ‘[The flâneur] takes the concept of being-for-sale itself for a walk. Just as the department store is his last haunt, so his last incarnation is as sandwichman’ (PW 562). Why the sandwichman? In a Charles Dickens novel there appears ‘an animated sandwich composed of a boy between two boards’,15 but the fact that this figure had its own history in the nineteenth century is a class marker ignored by Benjamin. Tracing class history, it appears, is not the kind of knowledge he is after. Nor does it interest him that sandwiches also have a social history. The first ‘sandwich’ (inanimate, composed of cold beef

Fig. 3:1. L’homme-sandwich. (Miroir du Monde, nr. 316, 21 March 1936, p.45)

40 Walter Benjamin and The Arcades Project between two bread slices) was invented as a mode of repast in the 1760s by John Montague, Earl of Sandwich, in order to save himself the need of leaving the gambling table (OED). This class marker, coincidentally, intersects again with Benjamin’s course. For if sandwich-eating became a bourgeois fashion in the nineteenth century (entering Parisian discourse in 180316 and undergoing the proliferation of forms typical of capitalist production),17 then so did gambling, and the nineteenth-century gambler is a major figure in the Passagen-Werk. But, again, what intrigues Benjamin is not the social history of gambling as a pastime among ruling classes despite changes in the mode of production, but the particular historical form of gambling within industrial capitalism which is prototypical of the way time passes: if flânerie is the lived experience of the ‘phantasmagoria of space’, then gambling is that of the ‘phantasmagoria of time’ (PW 1212). The historically specific nature of the gamblers’ gestures is that they ‘show us how the mechanism to which the players in a game of chance entrust themselves possesses them body and soul, so that even in their private spheres and no matter how passionately moved they may be, they can no longer function in any way but reflexively’ (CB 135, trans. altered). Benjamin connects this behaviour not only to the harried city dweller or the flâneur jostled by the crowd, but to the industrial worker’s gesture at the machine. Of course the capitalist who gives himself over to fate at the gaming table is replicating in his leisure his activity of gambling on the stock market during the ‘work’ day, but this parallel is for Benjamin less revealing than the characteristic ‘futility, the emptiness, the inability to complete something’ (CB 134) which connects the gambler to the machine labourer: ‘Gambling in fact contains the modern worker’s gesture . . . The jolt in the movement of machine is like the so-called coup in a game of chance’ (CB 134). The relation of the industrial worker to the thing-world of production, Benjamin is arguing, is not different from the relation of consumers to the thing-world of consumption: neither is social experience (Erfahrung) of a type that could lead to knowledge of the reality behind appearances (cf. PW 472). Is he suggesting a description of consciousness in which class distinctions are irrelevant? Yes, and no. Yes, because if workers’ productive activity does not lead to knowledge, then critical theory cannot privilege the cognitive experience of the proletarian class. No, because when the same words are used to describe the most remote social phenomena (the bourgeoisie, leisure-time, gambling; the proletariat, work-time, machines,) dialectical images are created out of the language itself. For Benjamin, ‘language is the place where one meets dialectical images’ (PW 577), and this in two ways: the same concept can describe two socially remote realities; or, the same reality can be described by the most antithetical linguistic terms. With the aid of the mimetic skill of correspondences, Benjamin places concepts strategically, off-angle against referential contents, rather than letting them hover over them like luffing sails. (Note that for Benjamin, against structuralists



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and post-structuralists, the dialectic power of language exists only if the things as referents are not bracketed out.) The result is a tension between words and the things they represent which, far from blurring distinctions, functions to sharpen perceptions intensely. For the dialectician ‘words are sails. How they are set, secures them as concepts’ (PW 591). Once they are set, it is not within language, but within the space between language and reality that the cognitive process is compelled forward. But in which direction? Toward a theory of modern perception in which the producer and consumer are alike afflicted by an illusory, false consciousness, a collective unconsciousness in which reality takes on the distorted form of a dream. If the goal is revolutionary cognition, will this tack possibly lead us to it? Is it enough for our critical autonomy that, rather than being carried along by the historical drift of the consumer society, we, situated within it, fight upwind? More, on the course of loitering, will there be any wind to move us? Benjamin was counting on the explosive force of the dialectical images to jolt people out of their dreaming state. Revolutionary cognition occurred not at the point of production, but at the moment of ‘awakening’. Perceived images were dream-symbols which needed interpretation, and this required a historical knowledge of origins. Benjamin described the ‘pedagogic’ side of his work: ‘to educate the image creating medium within us to see dimensionally, stereoscopically, into the depths of the historical shade’ (PW 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 in the Passagen-Werk are flat, situated, as Adorno complained, ‘on the crossroads of magic and positivism’.18 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. The spatial, surface montage of present perception which makes all of us flâneurs can be transformed from illusion to knowledge once the ‘principle of montage’ is re-functioned temporally, that is, once the axis of montage is turned ‘into history’; it makes it possible ‘to grasp the design of history as such. In the structure of commentary’ (PW 575). Let us return to get our bearings to Benjamin’s comment ‘The sandwichman is the last incarnation of the flâneur’ (PW 565), and take a different tack. The double exposure of past and present is presented here as a riddle, in which knowledge of the past does not historicize present truth, but crystallizes it. The unravelling of this riddle would place Benjamin’s readers within an image-sphere where revolutionary ‘awakening’ was possible, as I hope to demonstrate. The sandwichman was a denigrated, yet familiar figure in Paris in the 1930s, one which would have entered the perceptive range of most citydwellers. Human billboards, they advertised and publicized the products

42 Walter Benjamin and The Arcades Project and events (cinemas, store sales) of bourgeois consumer culture. Yet they themselves, despite the uniforms they were loaned to give a respectable appearance, were associated closely with poverty: ‘You have seen them passing on our streets, emaciated and shabby in their long grey coats and under their caps with polished visors. Let us speak in all frankness: I am scarcely a partisan of their job. Typically, neither the dignity of publicity nor that of man ends up increased by these pitiful processions.’19 The sandwichmen, casual labourers, part-time and non-unionized, were recruited from the ranks of the clochards, 12,000 of whom were registered in Paris in the mid-1930s as sans domicile fixe.20 They slept where they could, beneath the Seine bridges, and one would suppose, in the shelter of the decaying arcades (as they already had in the era of their origins).21 Marginal people, proletarian declassés, these were ‘the whole population of the ragged, the tattered, and the hungry which society had cast out’.22 During the depression years of the 1930s, to be sure, society’s cast-outs were multitude. What could be more removed than this ‘last incarnation’ from the original flâneur of a hundred years earlier who, with his dandy-like appearance, developed a reactionary life-style that looked back to an era when leisure was a way of life, and a sign of class dominance? What indeed? For the flâneur, and for the urban writers who styled themselves after him, such characters – vagabonds, ragpickers, cab-drivers – were merely part of the urban landscape, and hardly the most attractive one (CB 21–2). But even when an author expressed sympathy for the new urban destitute, it was of a sort peculiar to modern perception. It evoked emotion without providing the knowledge that could change the situation. Benjamin mentions Balzac who, passing a man in tatters, ‘touched his own sleeve and came to feel there a rent through which gaped the poor man’s elbow’ (PW 561). Such empathic identity (Einfühlung) was as characteristic of the commodity world as it was inadequate. The momentary feeling of horror or sympathy for a stranger was related to that ‘love at last sight’ which infected the erotic life of the city-dweller (CB 125). Einfühlung could be evoked by things as well as people.23 As a form of solidarity, it was a purely mental event, and dissipated quickly from consciousness. The flâneur records the merely apparent reality of the marketplace, behind which the social relations of class remained concealed. The emphatic relationships he establishes in their place make not only human misery, but ‘the [class] struggle against misery into an object of consumption’.24 There was no way the mimetic gesture of Einfühlung could close the gap between classes, no way that the flâneur and the clochard could become one under its sign – which might be read as an expression of the desire for a common humanity, but not its realization. It should be clear that what was at stake for Benjamin was a very present concern, the problem of the politically committed, bourgeois writer and intellectual of his own time. The humanism which led ‘men of letters’ to support the Popular Front against



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fascism, or to join the international movement of disarmament, was one of which Benjamin as a Marxist was suspicious. In ‘The Author as Producer’ (1934) Benjamin gave didactic answers. On the world peace movement , he quoted Trotsky: ‘When enlightened pacifists undertake to abolish War by means of rationalist arguments, they are simply ridiculous. When the armed masses start to take up the arguments of Reason against War, however, this signifies the end of war’ (UB 92). On the intellectuals’ solidarity with the proletariat, he insisted: ‘political commitment, however revolutionary it may seem, functions in a counter-revolutionary way so long as the writer experiences his solidarity with the proletariat only in the mind and not as a producer’ (UB 91). Precisely this second lesson is the point of the historical montage of flâneur and sandwichman. The task of the man of letters is to understand clearly his objective position in the productive process, and for this the historical figure of the flâneur proves invaluable. The flâneur is not the aristocrat: not leisure (Musse) but loitering (Müssiggang) is his trade. In order to survive under capitalism he writes about what he sees, and sells the product. To put it plainly: the flâneur in capitalist society is a fictional type: in fact, he is a type who writes fiction. Flânerie promoted a style of social observation which permeated nineteenthcentury writing, much of which was produced for the feuilleton section of the new mass newspapers. The flâneur-as-writer was thus the prototype of the author-as-producer of mass culture. Rather than reflecting the true conditions of urban life, he diverted readers from its tedium (GS 1:1193).25 Observed by his public while he ‘works’ at loitering (PW 559–60), the flâneur-as-writer may have social prominence, but not dominance. His protests against the social order are never more than gestures because (not surprisingly under capitalism) he needs money. The prototype of the rebellious flâneur is the bohème,26 who like Baudelaire, has ‘political insights [that] do not go fundamentally beyond that of the professional conspirator’ (CB 13). His objective situation connects him with the clochard, and in fact the bravado of their politics of loitering, its anarchism and individualism, is the same. ‘Society didn’t want anything to do with me’, he said philosophically, ‘and I didn’t want anything to do with it. I made my choice . . . and I’ve got my independence’. These lines could have been spoken by an advocate of l’art pour l’art in 1860 just as well as by their actual speaker, a Paris clochard in the 1930s.27 In both cases there is self-deception.28 The nineteenthcentury writer ‘goes to the marketplace as flâneur, supposedly to take a look at it, but in reality to find a buyer’ (CB 34). There, in the stereoscopic depth of history, he is brought face to face with the twentieth-century clochard, supposedly scornful of society, but in reality a sandwichman who advertises its coming attractions.

44 Walter Benjamin and The Arcades Project 4 What do we know of the streetcorners, curbstones, the architecture of the pavements, we who have never felt the streets, heat, dirt and edges of the stones under naked sole . . . ? (PW 1018) But if the political lesson for bourgeois intellectual and unemployed proletarian is the same, their social reality is not. Capitalism has two ways of dealing with leisure, stigmatizing it within an ideology of unemployment, or taking it up into itself to make it profitable. The dividing line cuts between prosperity and suffering, and it makes a great deal of difference on which side one falls. The flâneur is the prototype of a new form of salaried employee who produces news/literature/advertisements for the purpose of information/ entertainment/persuasion (the forms of both product and purpose are not clearly distinguished). These products fill the ‘empty’ hours which timeoff from work has become in the modern city. Writers, now dependent on the market, scan the street scene for material, keeping themselves in the public eye and wearing their own identity like a sandwich board. They live in a certain district, frequent a certain café, and the fame of both person and place goes up. Benjamin notes that such a writer acts as if he knew Marx’s definition that ‘the value of every commodity is determined . . . by the socially necessary labor time of its production . . . In his eyes and frequently also those of his employer, this value [for his labor time] receives some fantastic compensation. Clearly the latter would not be the case if he were not in the privileged position of making the time for the production of his use-value observable for public evaluation, in that he spends it on the boulevards and thus at the same time displays it’ (PW 559–60). Bourgeois writers need a mass audience and depend for employment on those capitalist pleasure-industries which hold that audience captive. Financially, many have done well, and in certain cases (beginning with Hugo, Sue, La Fontaine) they achieved political power as well. Even those who like Baudelaire have been self-conscious secessionists from society are caught in the unresolved tension within bourgeois society between the ‘outsider’ and the ‘star’.29 The inter-war ‘lost’ generation which was Benjamin’s own (although he was not yet then a star) found each other on the Paris streets, observed as well as observer – Breton’s circle at the Café Certà , and Sartre’s at the Deux Magots. Artists and writers had become part of the Paris landscape, as significant a component to the ‘phantasmagoria’ of the city as the clochards. But in the latter, antithetical case, capitalism, rather than paying the idler-on-the-street, turns its reserve army of the unemployed out onto the street and then blames them for being there. The clochards of Paris are still with us. Capitalism replenishes their number, if not drastically via



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depressions, then gradually via automation.30 Their numbers rise and fall with the economic weathervane, but whichever way the wind blows, these twenty-four-hour loiterers do not disappear. They are a (frequently romanticized) Paris institution, achieving an almost mythic status. And yet to attribute their permanence (some are reputed to have metro stops as mailing addresses) to some archetypal weakness (or strength) of character would be to fail to see the permanence of the social order which needs to create a myth about them in order to conceal the reason why, in an affluent and ‘free’ society, such poverty exists. ‘As long as there is still one beggar’, wrote Benjamin, ‘there still exists myth’ (PW 505). Our perception of the clochards illustrates the deceptiveness of Einfühlung. They fascinate us the more their poverty, intoxication, dirt and idleness seem to come from defiance rather then hopelessness. It is their spitting in the eye of bourgeois decorum and their total disregard for its success values to which we, observing from the safe side, feel drawn. Yet to contemplate falling into their vulnerable state evokes a shudder, a fact which the authorities may count on, allowing these street-dwellers as a presence that constrains the rest of us. Included among ‘us’ must be Benjamin, who never denied his bourgeois class background. He wrote of his youth: ‘I never slept on the street in Berlin . . . Only those for whom poverty and vice turn the city into a landscape in which they stray from dark ’til sunrise know it in a way denied to me.’31 Poverty and vice. Labouring classes and dangerous classes. To whom do the streets ‘belong’? In the early notes for the Passagen-Werk (1927–29) Benjamin began a formulation: ‘Streets are the dwelling place of the collective. The collective is an eternally restless, eternally moving essence that among the façades of buildings, endures (erlebt), experiences (erfährt), learns and senses as much as individuals in the protection of their four walls. For this collective the shiny enamelled store signs are as good and even better a wall decoration as a salon oil-painting is for the bourgeoisie. Walls with the “défense d’afficher” are its writing desk, newspapers are its libaries, letterboxes its bronzes, benches its bedroom furniture – and café terraces the balcony from which it looks down on its domestic concerns after work is done’ (PW 994 again, 553, 1051). The same passage appears in Benjamin’s 1929 review of Franz Hessel’s book Spazieren in Berlin, except that the subject (which still seems to have Benjamin’s approval) is not the Kollektiv, but ‘the masses [die Masse] – and the flâneur lives with them’ (GS 3:198). In the 1938 essay on Baudelaire, the idea undergoes a significant change. In place of the collective, the flâneur alone takes possession of the streets. He no longer sleeps on its benches; and the walls are now ‘the desks against which he presses his notebooks’ (CB 37). The passage has a new conclusion: ‘That life in all its variety and inexhaustible wealth of variations can thrive only among the grey cobblestones and against the grey background of despotism was the political secret on which the physiologies [written by the flâneurs] were based’ (CB

46 Walter Benjamin and The Arcades Project 37). The tone of the revision (the flâneur writes ‘against the grey background of despotisms’) is clearly critical, and the reason for the change is fascism. In a late (post-1937) entry to the Passagen-Werk Benjamin mentions as the ‘true salaried flâneur’ and ‘sandwichman’ Henri Beraud (PW 967), proto-fascist journalist for Gringoire, whose nationalist and anti-Semitic attack on Léon Blum’s Minister of the Interior led the latter to suicide. (Benjamin noted that intimations of such politics could already be found in Baudelaire, whose diary contained the ‘joke’: ‘A fine conspiracy could be organized for the purpose of exterminating the Jewish race’ [CB 14]). Like a street hawker, the financially successful Beraud peddled the fascist line which camouflaged class antagonisms by replacing them with the pseudo-issue of race. The vertical divisions between classes was thereby displaced onto a horizontal one between nationals and outsiders, allowing the attack on the Left to be concealed under the jargon of patriotism. A salaried flâneur profits by following the ideological fashion. Benjamin connects himself ultimately to the police informer and in a late note makes the association: ‘Flâneur–sandwichman–journalist-in-uniform. The latter advertises the state, no longer the commodity’ (GS 1:117–9) In an economically precarious and ideological extremist climate like the 1930s the penalty for a writer’s refusal to toe the political line could be great. After 1933, Benjamin’s anxieties over money were constant; after 1939, his fear was for personal safety. For this independent Leftist and exiled German–Jew, Paris did not provide a lasting refuge. He wrote in what was surely a late entry:

Fig. 3:2. German street scene, 1933. Escorted by armed guards a Jew stripped of his shoes and trousers carries a ‘humorous’ legend: ‘I am a Jew, but I have no complaints about the Nazis’. (Archiv Gerstenberg)



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‘The proletariat has a very specific experience of a metropolis. The emigrant has in it a similar one’ (PW 437). It is impossible to pin down the Passagen-Werk fragments with chronological precision and thus to argue, for example, that Benjamin no longer spoke of the collective positively after 1933.32 But even if he did change his evaluation of the revolutionary potential of the masses, this may not be the crucial point. It seems to me that throughout the Passagen-Werk Benjamin (entirely consistently) argued both (1) only the proletarian class had potential power as a revolutionary subject; and yet (2) only by awakening the not-yet-conscious collective could that class be addressed. The emphasis here was on awakening (a state the bourgeoisie would never reach).33 The dreaming collective might include both classes. It was simply the ‘crowd’, and it was the source of misleading and illusory perceptions. Two (late) quotations are crucial. On the crowd as the observed: ‘In fact this [1860] “collective” is nothing but appearance (Schein). This “crowd” on which the flâneur feasts his eyes is the mold into which, 70 years later, the “Volksgemeinschaft” was poured. The flâneur, who prided himself on his cleverness . . . was ahead of his contemporaries in this, that he was the first to fall victim to that which has since blinded many millions (PW 436). And as the observer: ‘The audience of the theatre, an army, the inhabitants of a city [form] the masses, which as such do not belong to a particular class. The free market increases these masses rapidly . . . in that every commodity collects around itself the mass of its customers. The totalitarian states have taken this mass as their model. The Volksgemeinschaft attempts to drive everything out of individuals that stand in the way of their complete assimilation into a massified clientele. The only unreconciled opponent . . . in this connection is the revolutionary proletariat. The latter destroys the illusion of the crowd (Schein der Masse) with the reality of the class (Realität der Klasse)’ (PW 469). Fascism appealed to the collective in its unconscious, dreaming state. It made ‘historical illusion all the more dazzling by assigning to it nature as a homeland’ (PW 595). After 1937 Benjamin noted that Erlebnis had come to mean that surrender to fate encapsulated in the Hitler Youth slogan: ‘I am born a German, and therefore I die’ (PW 962). Far from ‘compensating for the one-sided spirit of the times’ (Jung), this reaction was totally permeated by it (PW 589–90). Benjamin asked the question: ‘Should it be Einfühlung in exchange-value which first makes people capable of the total Erlebnis [of fascism]?’ (PW  963) ‘To the eye which shuts itself when faced with this experience [of the “inhospitable, blinding age of bigscale industrialism”] there appears an experience of complementary nature as its almost spontaneous after-image” (GS 1:609). Fascism was that after-image. While condemning the contents of modern culture, it found in the dreaming collective created by consumer-capitalism a ready-at-hand receptable for its own political phantasmagoria. The psychic porosity of the unawakened masses absorbed the staged extravaganzas of mass meetings as readily as it did mass culture.34 And if the sandwichman was the last, degraded incarnation of the flâneur, he himself underwent a further metamorphosis (see image p.46).

48 Walter Benjamin and The Arcades Project Les extremes se touchent. On the historical, conceptual level, the images of flâneur and sandwichman converge. But on the existential, perceptual level, as social extremes they remain distinct. (Both axes are necessary for knowledge; neither – empirical perception nor historical conception – conflates into the other.) The difference is between feeling totally at home on the streets, and being exposed and vulnerable there because one is totally homeless. The rulers feel public space to be extension of their own personal one: they belong there because it belongs to them. For the politically oppressed (a term which this century has learned is not limited to class) existence in public space is more likely to be synonymous with state surveillance, public censure and political constraint.

5 Sie können sich nicht vertreten,sie müssen vertreten werden. Marx, 18. Brumaire To inhabit the streets as one’s living room, is quite a different thing from needing them as a bedroom, bathroom or kitchen, where the most intimate aspects of one’s life are not protected from the view of strangers and ultimately, the police. Benjamin noted from a 1934 book, Images de Paris, this ‘portrayal of suffering, presumably under the Seine bridges . . . A bohemian woman sleeps, her head bent forward, her empty purse between her legs. Her blouse is covered with pins which glitter from the sun, and all of her household and personal possessions: two brushes, an open knife, a closed bowl, are neatly arranged . . . creating almost an intimacy, the shade of the interior around her’ (PW 537). The homeless bohemian is a woman. In the USA today her kind are called ‘bagladies’. They have been consumed by the capitalist society which makes of Woman the prototypical consumer. Their appearance, in rags and carrying their worldly possessions in worn bags (from Bloomingdale’s, perhaps) is the grotesquely ironic gesture that they have just returned from a shopping spree. Some of the early sandwichmen were women (a fact Benjamin does not note), and sexual difference complicates the politics of loitering.35 In 1884 a writer for the London Times reported: ‘Yesterday . . . I met . . . a procession of . . . girls . . . bearing sandwiches advertisements’; and the following year there appeared in the Pall Mall Gazette: ‘We have, and not so very long ago, seen women employed as “sandwiches”’ (OED). The step from displaying sandwich-board advertisements to the display of one’s own body for sale seemed to them a small one. It was the era of the moral reform movement in England, which brought a shift from the regulation of sexuality to its repression. The Gazette spearheaded the campaign. It culminated in a public



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demonstration of 250,000 in Hyde Park to demand raising the female age of consent from thirteen to sixteen. Josephine Butler exclaimed: ‘The crowds and the days remind me of revolution days in Paris.’36A recent historian has argued: ‘Compared to mid-Victorian moral-reform movements, this new social-purity crusade was more oriented to a male audience, more hostile to working-class culture, and readier to use the instruments of state to enforce a repressive sexual code.’37For women, state ‘protection’ cut two ways, as under its banner in the late nineteenth century an attempt was made to limit their social freedom and curtail their access to public life. Sexual repressiveness was not lacking in Paris. Benjamin noted: ‘1893 the coquettes were driven out of the arcades’ (PW 270). Like the flâneurs, they had been at home there.38 ‘In an arcade, women are as in their boudoir’ (PW 612). Prostitution was indeed the female version of flânerie. Yet sexual difference makes visible the privileged position of males within public space. I mean this: the flâneur was simply the name of a man who loitered; but all women who loitered risked being seen as whores, as the term ‘street-walker’ or ‘tramp’ applied to women makes clear. ‘Les grandes horizontals’ became a term of reference for prostitutes in the era of Haussmann’s boulevards. The popular literature of flânerie may have referred to Paris as a ‘virgin forest’ (PW 551), but no woman found roaming there alone was expected to be one. The politics of this close connection between the debasement of women sexually and their presence in public space, the fact that it functioned to deny women power, is clear, at least to us. But it is not clear whether Benjamin should be included among ‘us’ on this point. It was not Benjamin’s politics to employ feminism as an analytical frame. True, there is a statement in the Baudelaire essay (1938): ‘The lesbian is the heroine of modernity’ – but heroines, like heroes, were ultimately tragic figures, individualistic and unfruitful in their social protest.39 True, he affirms Bachofen’s image of a matriarchal Utopia, but as an expression of nostalgia for the lost mother, not an affirmation of the free woman. True, Benjamin redeems from oblivion the political manifesto of the Saint-Simonian feminist Claire Démar, and praises it, compared to the ‘grandiloquent fantasies’ of Enfantin, as ‘unique in its power and passion’ (CB 91). The Passagen-Werk gives serious consideration generally to her writings. Démar called for radical sexual freedom for women and the absolute termination of patriarchy: ‘No more motherhood! No law of race. I say: no more motherhood. Once a woman has been freed from men who pay her the price of her body . . . she will owe her existence . . . only to her own creativity . . . Then, only then, will man, woman and child all be liberated from the racial law of exploitation of humanity by humanity’ (PW 974). Yet Benjamin does not follow up on his gesture of yielding to a woman’s voice. Instead, he cites Baudelaire, who addresses prostitutes in his poems while the women themselves remain mute: ‘Baudelaire never wrote . . . about whores from the whore’s viewpoint’ writes Benjamin, (PW 438), and proceeds to do likewise.

50 Walter Benjamin and The Arcades Project The image of the whore, the most significant female image in the Passagen-Werk , is the embodiment of objectivity, not subjectivity. Not the prostitute but ‘prostitution’ is a keyword; and it is coupled with ‘gambling’ as a manifestation of the alienation of erotic desire (in the man) when it surrenders itself to fate: ‘for in the bordello and gaming hall is the same, most sinful delight: to insert fate within desire, and this, not desire itself, is to be condemned’ (PW 612–13). For Benjamin, while the figure of the flâneur embodies the transformation of perception characteristic of modern subjectivity, the figure of the whore is the allegory for the transformation of objects, the world of things. As a dialectical image, she is connected in the Passagen-Werk with the constellation of ‘exhibition’, ‘fashion’, and ‘advertisement’: ‘The modern advertisement demonstrates . . . how much the attraction of woman and commodity can fuse together’.(PW 436). As seller she mimics the commodity and takes on its allure: the fact that her sexuality is on sale is itself an attraction. If society traditionally channelled erotic desire through the elaborately regulated and constrained exchange of women as gifts, the great excitement of the whore is that she promises the buyer liberation from all of that. Benjamin writes: ‘Not in vain the relationship of the pimp to his wife, as a “thing” which he sells on the market aroused intensively the sexual fantasies of the bourgeoisie’ (PW 436). Benjamin wrote: ‘The love for the prostitute is the apotheosis of Einfühlung onto the commodity’ (PW 475). In the nineteenth century this is what was new about the ‘oldest profession’. The prostitute’s natural body resembled the lifeless mannequin used for the display of the latest fashion; the more expensive her outfit, the greater her appeal. Benjamin states as a theme: ‘Attempt to allure sex into the world of things’ (PW 1213). What he calls the ‘natural’ desire for procreation was thus diverted: ‘The sexuality which formerly – socially – was made mobile by the fantasy of the future productive powers [i.e., having children] is now only made so by the [fantasy] of the power of capital’ (PW 436). To desire the fashionable, purchasable woman-as-thing is to desire exchange-value itself, that is, the very essence of capitalism. Once this occurs, ‘the commodity . . . celebrates its triumph’ (PW 435): erotic desire, instinctual nature itself, and also those forces of fantasy life that might imagine a better society, are cathected onto commodities. Trapped within capitalism, they become its enthusiastic source of support. If the whore is a commodity and seller in one, so of course, are all wagelabourers under capitalism.40 Marxists habitually exclude prostitutes from the revolutionary class because their labour is ‘unproductive’, and assign them, disparagingly, to the Lumpenproletariat. Benjamin admits: ‘The prostitute does not sell her labor power; instead her trade brings with it the fiction that she is selling her capacity for pleasure . . .’41 But behind that fiction, increasingly, the difference becomes negligible: ‘Prostitution can claim to count as “work” at the moment work becomes prostitution. In fact the lorette is the first to renounce radically the camouflage of a lover. She



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already has herself paid for her time; from there she is not very far away from those who claim to be wage laborers’ (PW 439). At the same time, and particularly in times of unemployment, workers must make themselves ‘attractive’ to the firm: ‘The closer work comes to prostitution, the more inviting it is to describe prostitution as work – as has long been true in the argot of prostitutes. The convergence considered here proceeds with giant steps under the sign of unemployment; the “keep smiling” [English in original] on the job market adopts the behaviour of the whore who, on the love market, picks up someone with a smile’ (PW 455). Intellectual workers are no less prostituted. Benjamin notes that Baudelaire as a writer identified with whores. The convolut entitled ‘Baudelaire’ documents the transformation of social relations under capitalism, of which prostitution is prototypical, by recording the transformation of erotic life (in the male) as it appears in Baudelaire’s poetry. It is the honesty of Baudelaire, the shocking, raw immediacy of his sense impressions of the new urban reality, recorded before consciousness could manage to construct false reconciliations or wholeness, which for Benjamin makes him so useful for critical insight, even when the poet himself had no theoretical grasp of the source of the problem. In Baudelaire’s poetry, with the whore as the allegorical figure in an ‘erotology of the condemned’ (PW 438), the debasement of erotic life is presented in all its facets, and in satanic lividness: the fetishistic fragmentation of desire, the dismemberment of the female body, the connection of sexuality and death, the isolation and fixation of the senses, the boredom and angry despair which permeates erotic life; the loneliness, and its result, ultimately, in impotence. But even if the poet identified with whores, they remain the ‘other’ for him, a field of symbolic rather than experienced meaning. Einfühlung, projection onto women passing by, as onto commodities in store windows, entails not the loss of self, but incorporation of the world (women, things) as fantasy images within one’s own day-dreams (and then losing oneself in them). This is the flâneur’s ‘illustrative seeing’. Like an allegorist composing an emblem book, he writes ‘his reverie as text to the images’ (PW 528). Benjamin noted: ‘Baudelaire’s readers are men. It is they who have made him famous. They are the ones he redeemed’ (PW 418). ‘For men [Baudelaire] means the presentation and transcendence of the lewd side [coté ordurier] in their sexual life’ (GS 1:673). Benjamin comments ‘Women don’t like him’ (ibid). No wonder. When Baudelaire inscribes his poems as allegory on the body of the whore, as a woman she is reduced to a sign, which is to suffer the same degradation as the sandwichman. Benjamin describes Einfühlung as the ‘unlimited tendency to represent the position of everyone else, every animal, every dead thing in the cosmos’ (GS 1:1179). But women are not dead things. They are (silenced) subjects. If they are represented solely through the man as speaker, even the most outrageous claims may be taken seriously,42 which would not be the case if they were speaking for themselves.

52 Walter Benjamin and The Arcades Project When prostitutes have given voice to their experiences, and when they have described the modern debasement of erotic life in the terms of the behaviour of men, one gets a very different picture of the problem. Listen to them: [Capitalists and authorities exercise their power by day, then] . . . off they go to pay us a visit. And once they’ve got us stripped to our chemises they stop their gabble, their illusions of grandeur collapse and their arrogance disappears. They all start stammering like little boys who want twopence to buy sweets. (Amélie Hélie, 1913)   All these prosperous citizens . . . tender husbands and affectionate fathers, arrogant lawyers, famous doctors and eloquent members of parliament turned out to be mentally sick. As a rule their wives had no idea of the type and degree of their aberrations. It was only on us that they ventured to make their appalling demands. (Anna Salva, 1946) Women in the modern era have not been silent. Nor have they refrained from action. In Benjamin’s notes on the nineteenth century there crop up in several contexts the revolutionary acts of women – the armed group of Vesuviennes in the 1848 revolution, for example – and he notes that the revolutionary ‘mob’ took on the image of a castrating Medusa (PW 852). But these quotations (like those from Claire Démar) are left largely unmediated by his theoretical commentary.43 At the same time he suggests a redemptive image of the whore ‘in distorted form to be sure’, which feminists will find disturbing: ‘the image of value to everyone and which is tired out by no one’; she becomes the ‘unquenchable fountain’ of the sweet milk of ‘the giving mother’ (PW 457). This is quite far from the militant image of women in the June insurrection of 1848, rebelling against capitalism and patriarchy (in distorted form, to be sure) by ‘cutting out the genitals of several prisoners’ (PW 856). Ultimately, perhaps, in the eyes of men whose erotic desire is distorted by commodity reification, potentially castrating women (like reptiles and other threats of nature) are safest under glass (see image p. 53).

6 Like the flâneur, the whore stands on the brink of extinction in the twentieth century precisely when her characteristics have begun to permeate all of erotic life. ‘Money has sex appeal’ one hears, and this formula itself gives only the crudest outlines of a fact which reaches far beyond prostitution. ‘Under the domination of commodity fetishism, the sex appeal of [every] woman is tinged to a greater or lesser degree with the appeal of the commodity’ (PW 435–6). Sexual liberation for women under capitalism has had the nightmare effect of ‘freeing’ all women to be sexual objects (not subjects). It must be



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Fig. 3:3. Mannequin vivant installed in a display window. (Miroir du Monde, 1936)

admitted that women have collaborated actively in this process. If men in the late bourgeois era, like gamblers, have surrendered their power of agency to the blind forces of fate, then women, like whores, have used their power of agency against itself: they make themselves objects. Even with no-one looking, and even without a display case, viewing oneself as constantly being viewed inhibits freedom. As with all surveillance, it is a form of censorship. Throughout the Passagen-Werk Benjamin’s observation on the process of the self-censorship of women and its connection with perception of class difference are insightful (and his criticisms are deserved). He notes generally women’s ‘participation through fashion in the nature of commodities’ (PW 1211). He cites an 1883 description of the ‘tyranny’ of fashion, to which women submit to maintain their social status (PW 125), and refers to George Simmel’s comment that women rely on fashion due to the ‘weakness’ of their social position (PW 127). The nature of women’s commodification, Benjamin observes, has changed to reflect the changing conditions of capitalist production. The regimentation of the assembly line has come to be reflected in a new form of sexiness: the chorus line, with its display of women ‘in strictly identical clothes’ (PW 427). In the modern city, women appeared as ‘mass produced’ through the ‘masking of individual expression’ under make-up: ‘later the uniformed “girls” of the review underline this’ (PW 437). Women in capitalist society – all women – impersonate commoditities in order to attract a distracted public of potential buyers, a mimesis of the world of things which by Benjamin’s time had become synonymous with sexiness. Benjamin considers it the supreme manifestation of the mechanization of

54 Walter Benjamin and The Arcades Project nature, the victory of the inorganic over the organic. Like Baudelaire, he connects it with death, noting that psychoanalysis, which develops as a science under capitalism ‘doesn’t hesitate . . . to envisage the relationships between death and sexuality and, more precisely, the ambivalent apprehension of finding the other in the other’; the connection exists also in literature in the figure of the ‘femmes fatales, the conception of a female machine, artificial, mechanical, without standards in common with living creatures, and always murderesses’ (PW 849). Mechanical dolls are an invention of bourgeois culture. In the nineteenth century these automatons, as well as wax figures, were common. As late as 1896 the ‘doll motif had a socially critical meaning. Thus “You have no idea how these automatons and dolls become repugnant, how one breathes relief in meeting in this society a fully natural being”’ (PW 848). Ironically, if playing with dolls was originally the way children learned the nurturing behaviour of adult social relations, it has become a training ground for learning reified ones. The goal of little girls now is to become a ‘doll’.44 This reversal epitomizes that which Marx considered characteristic of the capitalist-industrial mode of production: machines which bring the promise of the naturalization of humanity and the humanization of nature result instead in the mechanization of both. Marx in his early writings claimed that the quality of erotic relationships provides an index as to the degree of social progress: ‘The relationship of man to woman is the most natural relation of human being to human being. It therefore reveals the extent to which man’s natural behaviour has become human, or the extent to which the human essence in him has become a

Fig. 3:4. Street hawkers, wind-up toys, and children. (Miroir du Monde, 1936)



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natural essence.’45 Marx concludes: ‘From this development one can therefore judge man’s whole level of development’.46 Benjamin knew the early writings of Marx through the Riazonov (1928) and Landshut and Mayer (1932) editions – both are cited in the Passagen-Werk – and he judges the degree of alienation in capitalist society in precisely these terms. Benjamin was no apologist for the bourgeois family, believing that lasting relationships within existing society could be maintained only negatively, through the destructive energies which emanate from an unfree desire (PW 438); but he argued that within ‘free’ sexuality, where sex has a machine-like character and attraction a commodity-like one, violence is intrinsic to erotic relationships, and sadism its logical manifestation: ‘Exposure of the mechanistic aspects of the organism is a persistent tendency of the sadist. One can say, the sadist sets out to substitute for the human organism the image of machinery. Sade is the child of an epoch which found delight in automatons’ (PW 466). Benjamin saw a close connection between distortions of modern erotic life and fascism (and modern warfare) on the one hand, and political impotency on the other (PW 431–3; 457); and conversely, the close affinity of erotic and revolutionary passion (PW 135). Sexual desire cathected onto commodities, demanding immediate possession, was unable to sustain the distances within desire that were the source of the ‘aura’ of love. The result was the ‘disintegration of love’ (PW 617) and the political desire for utopia suffered accordingly. Speaking of the bourgeoisie, Benjamin wrote: ‘the class struggle is the social cause of the disintegration of aura’ (PW 433). And further: ‘The disintegration of aura and – conditioned by a defensive position within the class struggle – the withering of the capacity for a better nature are one and the same. Thereby the disintegration of aura and the disintegration of potency are in the end one and the same’ (PW 457). How much in the Passagen-Werk was Benjamin speaking of himself?

7 Male impotence – key figure of loneliness – under its sign productive power comes to a halt – an abyss separates human beings from their own kind. (GS 1:679) I believe that [the Passagen-Werk’s] conception, even if it is very personal in its origins, has as its object the decisive historical interests of our generation. (GS 1:1137) In his evocative section on Paris as ‘the city of mirrors’, Benjamin comments: ‘Women see themselves here more than elsewhere, thus arises the specific beauty of Parisian women. Before a man looks at them they have already seen themselves reflected ten times. But the man too sees himself flashing

56 Walter Benjamin and The Arcades Project up physiognomically . . . Even the eyes of passers-by are hanging mirrors’ (PW 666–7). The surreal image of the hanging mirrors reflects the contradictory extremes of visibility and anonymity of the city-dweller. Extraordinary narcissism and self-absorption are the reverse side of that Einfühlung which projects promiscuously onto everything and everyone. The city-dweller is constantly distracted by external stimulae never assimilated by consciousness, and comes continuously close to crowds of people never known by name. It leads to the loneliness peculiar to the modern city. The expression of this within philosophy is that existential isolation of the subject characteristic of late idealism. Benjamin cites Adorno’s study of Kierkegaard whose philosophical subject, as flâneur, goes for a walk never leaving his room (PW 530). Unlike the earlier bourgeoisie (e.g., Beethoven,47 or Rousseau48) the modern city-dweller does not have the luxury of the vita contemplativa on solitary walks. Nor is this public sphere a place of dialogue.49 Benjamin gives us the lived, perceived side of the urban alienation in a description that is surely autobiographical: ‘An intoxication comes over the person who trudges through the streets for a long time and without goal. The going wins a growing power with every step. Ever narrower grow the seductions of the stores, the bistros, the smiling women; ever more irresistible the magnetism of the next street-corner, a distant mass of foliage, a streetname. Then comes the hunger. He desires to know nothing of the hundred possibilities to still it. Like an ascetic animal he strides through unknown quarters, until finally in his room which, strange to him, lets him in coldly, he collapses in the deepest exhaustion’ (PW 525). This other side of urban existence was belied by the alluring, even euphoric descriptions in flânerie literature of the city as ‘landscape’ or the streets as ‘interior’,50 but the sense that the modern city was either natural or homey was ultimately illusion according to Benjamin: ‘For the flâneur his city is no longer a homeland – even if, like Baudelaire, he was born in it. It represents for him a show-place’ (PW 437). Benjamin suggests that to be a member of the crowd, rather than positing ‘the crowd’ as an object of fascination for the self-exempt narrator, is to experience an alienation that can be excruciating. Those who feel it most strongly are outsiders: foreigners and the poor (PW 437). How is the loneliness of the anonymous mass to redeemed? Would it not be best simply to reject the new reality and turn away? Intellectuals have been among the most eager to try. ‘Since the end of the last century philosophy has made a series of attempts to lay hold of “true” experience in opposition to the kind that manifests itself in the standardized, denatured life of civilized masses . . . Their point of departure, understandably enough, was not man’s life in society. What they invoked was poetry, preferably nature, and most recently, the age of myths. These efforts ended with Klages and Jung, who made common cause with fascism’ (CB 110). The process of knowledge moves in the opposite direction. If we as modern subjects have in fact given up our power of agency, then the first step in regaining it is to acknowledge its loss, and to read our



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own behaviour as an expression of that commodity capitalism which acts through us. In this case, if violence is done to human signification, it has an objective source. It is one thing to create out of others allegorical figures for one’s own fantasy-projections. It is quite another to see ourselves suddenly from the outside, as actors on a Brechtian stage, where the allegory we portray is the system of capital itself. In the Passagen-Werk notes, the author and his daily life are visible. It is not difficult through our own flânerie to reconstruct Benjamin’s work schedule with the clues he has left us. Arriving from the Left Bank by subway, he would have surfaced at Rue 4 Septembre through the still-standing art nouveau portal. In bad weather (he preferred grey mornings) he would have sought the shelter of the Passage Choiseul (built in 1825) with its clothing and stationery stores catering to office workers; he would have turned left through its stillmoribund extension toward the Rue Sainte-Anne, exiting a block from the small, lush-green square de Louvois, the quiet peace of which ends abruptly at the Rue de Richelieu. Crossing its speeding lanes of traffic, he would reach the safety of the entry courtyard of the Bibliothèque Nationale. He worked ‘the whole day there’ finally accustoming himself to the ‘annoying regulations’ in the main reading room (PW 1100), with its nineteenth-century iron and glass dome, and on its ceiling, a ‘painted summer sky’ (PW 1059). Seated below, one hears the constant rustle of the dusty leaves of books. And when one tires of reading or waiting for a book, a short stroll from the library brings to view all of central Paris. Benjamin surely worked this way, uncovering in his research the history of those places through which he moved. The themes of the Passagen-Werk can in fact be mapped out typographically on a small section of Paris, with the old Bibliothèque Nationale at its hub. In an era when Paris’ first commercial airport was being constructed, and the ambivalent commodity culture was about to descend upon a still largely pre-industrial world, Benjamin found that culture’s elements in their earliest, original form concentrated in a section of Paris easily reached by foot. He worked here like an ethnographer in a village,51 except that his informants were things and spoke of a past life. Included within his walking terrain were, first and foremost, the surviving arcades which ring the Bibliothèque Nationale: Choiseul, Vivienne, Colbert, Puteaux, Havre, Panoramas, Jouffroy, Verdeau, Princes, Caire, Grand-Cerf, Vero-Dodat. A stroll through the Palais-Royal brought him to the Seine, on the banks of which in 1937, as in 1867 and 1889, pavilions of the world exhibitions were built; to the north past the Bourse three passages – des Panoramas, Jouffroy, Verdeau – are linked together; in the Passage Jouffroy is an entry into the Musée Grévin, which houses wax figures in fashionable and historical tableaux. ‘No form of eternalizing is so startling as that of the ephemeral and the fashionable forms which the wax figure cabinets preserve for us. And whoever has once seen them must, like André Breton (Nadja, Paris, 1928) lose his heart to the female form in the Musée Grévin who adjusts her stocking garter in the corner of a loge’ (PW 117).

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Fig. 3:5. Woman adjusting her stocking garter. (Musée Grévin. Photo: Buck-Morss)



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The wax woman still adjusts her garter, as she has for half a century. Her act is a moment frozen in time. She is unchanged, defying organic decay. But her red dress is musty; her figure and hair no longer fashionable; she has clearly aged. To the east, Benjamin could walk from Les Halles to the Marais through a Parisian landscape which urban renewal has since totally transformed. But there is still the garment district, the backstage wardrobe for the Parisian scene, and naked mannequins in display windows selling themselves wholesale to the trade. To the west, along the boulevards toward the Opéra, Benjamin moved onto the Parisian stage proper. Fashionable shops and the Grand Magazins – Printemps, Galeries de Lafayette – line the Boulevard Haussmann. In the vicinity of the Gare St. Lazare, an outmoded52 ‘factory of dreams’ (PW 514), this display of commodities gives way suddenly to the display of women, prostitutes. The shock of the transition and its erotic effects are no less today. The whores of St Lazare and St Denis, the ambivalent angels of Benjamin’s ‘negative theology’, flanked both sides of the field of observation in which he discovered the world in miniature: ‘One begins a walk through Paris with an aperiti[f ], that is, about 5 or 6 o’clock. I wouldn’t want to pin you down. You can take your departure from one of the great railroad stations . . . If you want to know my opinion, I suggest the Gare St Lazare. There you have in fact half of France and half of Europe about you: names like Havre, Provence, Rome, Amsterdam, Constantinople infuse the streets like sweet filling in a torte. It is the so-called Europe quarter, in which the greatest cities of Europe have each presented their compliments to a street as the representative of their prestige. There reigns a rather precise and strict etiquette in this diplomatic corps of European streets. Each contrasts strongly with the others, and should they have something to do with each other – at the corners – then they meet very politely without any ostentation’ (PW 998). Within a vision of streets that greet each other, the alienation of the city melts away. Brecht criticized Benjamin’s animation of the world of things as ‘mysticism’. But it is also the impulse of children, whose mimesis of the inorganic world expresses the fairy-tale wish to awaken congealed life in petrified objects – and to undo the reification of commodities in the process. It is perhaps precisely here that the communist goal of a humanized nature finds its ontogenesis. Socializing children to mimic machines distorts this impulse and inverts the results. For Benjamin the dimension of childhood had further significance. Against the compensatory, ahistorical ‘archaic’ images of Jung or Klages, he treated the fragmentary perceptions which bombarded the city-dweller as historical clues. For the flâneur-as-detective, traversing urban space became a movement back in time. ‘For the flâneur, the following transformation occurs with the street: it takes him through a time which has disappeared . . . It leads down, if not to the mothers, then still into a past which can be all the deeper in that it is not his own, private one. Still it always remains the past of a youth. Why however that of his lived life?’ (PW 1052). A temporal map is imposed upon the spatial one. The distracting chains of the

60 Walter Benjamin and The Arcades Project images which constitute urban perception function as dream images which trigger in Benjamin the historical memory of his own urban childhood. It doesn’t matter that the images are of early nineteenth-century Paris and his own childhood was in late nineteenth-century Berlin. The dream images constructed by capitalism move freely across national boundaries. And they move as well over the boundary between an individual’s actually lived experiences and the collective history of earlier generations which is ‘experienced’ only through books. What does matter, on the individual and the collective level, is that by tracing these images back to their source, one wakes up from the dream with the historical knowledge necessary to interpret it as nightmare – or realize it as wish. Images enter the psyche of the individual, but they are collectively perceived by the mass of passers-by. They ‘speak’ to those passing, and, in the inverted world of capitalism where things are related but people are not, they become the means through which isolation of both individuals and generations is overcome. The ground which he traverses, the asphalt, is hollow. His steps awaken an amazing resonance; the gas which beams down on the pavement throws a double-meaning light on this double floor. The figure of the flâneur proceeds as if driven by clockwork over the stone street with its double floor. And inside where the machinery is stored, there is a toy clock, as one finds in old toys, and it plays: Out of our childhood, out of our childhood A song is always following me. With this melody he again recognizes what is around him: not as part of his own youth, the most recent one; instead, an earlier childhood speaks to him, and it is the same to him whether it is a presentiment of [this] one or of his own . . . Something else: that memory-filled intoxication in which the flâneur moves through the city not only draws nourishment from that which comes before his eyes, but also allows him to be affected even by the knowledge of dead dates as something experienced and lived. This felt knowledge . . . was recorded in the course of the nineteenth century in an almost incomprehensibly vast literature [which provided historical knowledge of] ‘Paris street by street, house by house’. (PW 1052–4) The fusion of childhood history and collective history is the most puzzling aspect of Benjamin’s theory, one that he never analytically clarified. More than a theory, it was an insight, that the power of historical remembering, its political strength as a motivation for present action, is the same, whether one is remembering one’s own life or a collective life never experienced directly. He conceived of the past on both levels as a ‘dream-state’, and historical recollection which allowed its interpretations as ‘awakening’. But the two



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levels, individual and collective, were not simply analogous in the abstract. They intersected concretely, because every childhood was superimposed on a particular segment of collective history. Indeed the material components of both rememberings were the same. What gave Benjamin’s research in the Passagen-Werk such an intensity of focus was that the images, the history of which he traced on the collective level, were deeply implanted in his memory on a personal one. It made it possible for him to follow the mandate: ‘One must experience history as if one had lived it’, and to comment: ‘I deal with the arcades just as if they had in fact happened to me’ (PW 1214). And of course they had. The Berlin of Benjamin’s childhood had its own shopping arcades, Friedrichstrasse and Kaisergalerie. And it had its own boulevards and flâneurs, prostitutes and sex-automats, commodityphantasmagoria and the sandwichmen. All the elements with which we have been concerned are condensed within one passage from Benjamin’s childhood memories: Beggars and Whores In my childhood I was a prisoner of the old and new West End. My clan lived in both these quarters then, in an attitude which was a mixture of obstinacy and self-reliance, making of them a ghetto which is viewed as its fief. I remained enclosed in this quarter of the propertied class, without knowing of any other. The poor – for rich children of my age existed only as beggars. And it was a great progress in knowledge when, for the first time, it dawned on me that poverty was the disgrace of badly paid labor. That was in a small, written piece, perhaps the first, which I composed entirely for myself. It had to do with the sandwichman, and with the humiliation which he experienced from a public which had no interest in his leaflets. Thus it was that the poor man – this was my ending – secretly threw away his entire pack. Certainly the least fruitful resolution of the situation. But no other form of revolt occurred to me at that time other than sabotage; this clearly out of my most personal experience. I returned to it when I attempted to establish my independence from my mother. But my preference was to do this during shopping, and indeed with a stubborn wilfulness which often brought my mother to desperation. I had, namely, taken on the habit of remaining always half a step behind her. It was as if in no case did I want to build a front, even with my own mother. How much I had the public city streets to thank for this dreamy resistance became apparent later as its labyrinth opened up to my sexual instinct . . . [I ]felt the possibility of independence from [my mother’s] domination to be alliance with these streets, in which I appeared not to be able to find my way. There is no doubt at any rate that a feeling – a deceitful one, sadly – of renouncing my mother and her (and my own) class was at fault for the incomparable fascination of addressing a whore on a public street. It might take hours before I could manage it. The

62 Walter Benjamin and The Arcades Project horror that I felt in doing it was the same as that with which a sex-automat would have filled me, which would have been set in motion by asking a simple question. And so I tossed my voice through the slot. Then the blood rose to my ears and I was not capable of picking up the words that fell there before me out of the heavily made-up mouth. I ran away, only on the same night, and frequently still, to repeat the foolhardy attempt. When I then, many times already toward morning, paused in an entryway, I had entangled myself hopelessly in the asphalt bonds of the street, and it was not the purest of hands that freed me.53 The urban world of the Passagen-Werk is a Vexierbild, an image that can be read two ways: as the childhood of the bourgeois culture, and as the culture of the bourgeois child. There is no redemption for the individual without a social one; while the standard for social revolution is the material happiness of the individuals of which society is composed. But for all their overlapping and entwining, these exist on separate registers.54 Neither individual history nor collective history can be reduced to the other.55 Rather, by filling out the substance of the one, the other is brought into relief more sharply.

8 Regarding the dialectic of cultural history: it is very easy with every epoch to bifurcate its various areas according to specific perspectives, so that the ‘ fruitful,’ ‘ future-filled,’ ‘ living,’ ‘positive’ lies on one side, and the futile, outof-date, withered part on the other . . . But on the other hand . . . it is decisively important to apply to this, at first excluded, negative part a new division so that with a shift of the visual angle (but not the standards!) there emerges in it as well something else positive, new, compared with the earlier description. And so on [ad] infinitum, until the entire past is brought into the present in a historical apokatastasis. (PW 573) Why does the history of society, which documents the wrong state of things, have to be redeemed? It is this world which must be transformed; no other one exists. It thus is a foolish question, at least for the materialist. Only the true believer burns books or scorches the earth. Only the blindly faithful can anticipate the apocalyptical destruction of all things with anything but the deepest grief. Was it, then, because of Benjamin’s irreligion that he insisted on the redemption of that which has been? As a dream-image, loitering allows a subversive reading, and it is surely not insignificant that Hitler banned both prostitutes and vagrants from the streets. The loiterer refuses to submit to industrial social controls: ‘Boredom in the production process originates with its speed-up (through machines).



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The flâneur with his ostentatious composure protests against the production process’ (GS 1:486). Loiterers ignore rush hour (ibid.); rather than getting somewhere they hang around. Their practice ‘is a demonstration against the division of labor’ (PW 538). Instead of pursuing private ends they enjoy (the public) view. Or, they are on strike. (When did sandwich-boards first make their appearance on the picket lines?) The fantasies which populate the reverie of the flâneur are also a form of resistance. Like the worker’s daydreaming at the machine, they are a survival of that ‘heroic laziness’ which Marx feared was threatened by industrialism (PW 962). The nightmare reality of capitalist industrialism has unleashed more dreams of paradise than any other social form, and material happiness is their most recurring theme. Even if, as Adorno warned, the culture industry manipulates the images of these fantasies, one could (and Benjamin did) cite Marx: ‘The reform of consciousness consists only therein, that one wakes the world . . . out of its dream of itself ’ (PW 570).56 The gesture of loitering points in two directions. It is a condemnation of capitalism to which exploitative labour and unemployment are intrinsic. But it is also the hellish, negative image within existing society of that which could become positive within a radically different one. It looks to a regime in which cutbacks in labour-time, automated production, and the saturation of markets would be, not the cause of crisis, but the intended, humane result. Rather than resulting in personal tragedy for individuals which disciplines them and brings them back into line, it would mean the collective actualization of the potential for happiness and freedom which a socially organized technology might achieve. Benjamin saw prostitutes as distorted images of the material, physical desire for sensual happiness which, against the ‘anthropological nihilism’ of right-wing modernists like Céline or Benn, his negative theology affirmed. As the motto for ‘Anthropological Materialism’ he chose: Gustav: Your buttocks is . . . divine Berdoa: Should it not be immortal? Gustav: What? Berdoa: Nothing. (PW 971) If prostitution was a symptom of the ‘disintegration of love’, it also robbed sexuality of its illusions. In its place, ‘the revolutionary side of technology comes to expression’ as the freeing of erotic life from biological necessity, the ‘tyrannical’ and ‘odious’ laws of nature ‘to which love submits’. Benjamin noted: ‘And in fact: the sexual revolt against love originates not only from a fanatic, possessed sexual desire; it proceeds as well from the desire to make nature docile and suited to it.’57 The gesture of mimicking the commodity world could be redeemed as well. If adults – assembly-line workers, goose-stepping soldiers, ‘girls’ in the

64 Walter Benjamin and The Arcades Project chorus line – have been regimented and transformed into machines, one has only to reverse the image to recover the child’s dream of Utopia, where things are humanized rather than humans reified. The socialist vision thus understood is a redemption of childhood, just as childhood play is the vision of a redeemed society: ‘It is one of ther great services of [Charles] Fourier to have established play as the canon of labor which is no longer exploitative. Such labor, animated by play, is not the production of value, but is directed toward an improved nature . . . One in fact finds [such labor] realized in child’s play’ (PW 456). For Benjamin, the productive potential of technology,58 and the democratic potential of a mass desire for happiness must remain the dream of humanity despite the existing forms of both. His antinomial reading of reality as a sign of divine countenance was, granted, a theological, indeed, Kabbalist procedure, but in an era when theology was ‘small and wizened and moreover, can’t allow itself to be seen’ (GS 1:693), Marx’s materialist theory was indispensable. Marx provided the class analysis with which ‘to forge the amorphous mass, which was then being wooed by an aesthetic socialism [fascism], into the iron of the proletariat’ (CB 121). Marx in his early works considered the development of erotic life as the criterion for social progress. And Marx’s analysis of capital indicated scientifically the socialist, positive direction inherent in technology, despite the persistent tendency to create ever-new instruments of military destruction, about which Benjamin wrote: ‘Because the lust for profit of the ruling class sought satisfaction through it, technology [that “immense wooing of the cosmos”] betrayed man and turned the bridal bed into a blood bath’ (OWS 104). But Marx’s theory guaranteed no happy ending. Not in Benjamin’s time. Not in our own time, in which, with our massing of weapons and protracted economic crisis, this sentence sounds an alarm that we are living on borrowed time: ‘if the abolition of the bourgeoisie is not completed by an almost calculable moment in economic and technical development (a moment signalled by inflation and poison warfare), all is lost’ (OWS 80). The photographs opposite were published in 1911, in an exposure of the financial interests behind the arms build-up, and a warning against the possibility of the First World War. They were reprinted in 1933 in a special issue of Crapouillot on armaments, as an exposure of the persistence of these financial interests, and a warning against the possibility of the Second World War. Fashion is the ‘eternal recurrence of the new’ in the (mass-produced) form of the ‘always the same’ (GS 1:677). There is a recorded tradition which is catastrophe (PW 591). That it keeps going on like this is the catastrophe (PW 592).



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4 Passage Work Barbara johnson Baudelaire’s unique importance consists in having been the first one, and the most unswerving, to have apprehended, in both senses of the word, the productive energy of the individual alienated from himself – agnosticized and heightened through concretization. Walter Benjamin to Max Horkheimer, 16 April 1938 Ah! êtes-vous encore bien disposé à me gronder; si tu l’es encore, cela prouve que tu m’aimes davantage.    [Ah! are you still well-disposed toward yelling at me; if you are, that goes to prove all the more that you love me.] Charles Baudelaire to his half-brother, Alphonse, 2 November 1837 Consum’ d with that which it was nourish’ d by. William Shakespeare, Sonnet 73

1   Consumption Charles Baudelaire was a part of Walter Benjamin’s life from as early as 19151 until 25 September 1940, when Benjamin took his own life while fleeing the Nazis. Baudelaire thus encompasses the two poles of Benjamin’s thought, which have traditionally been called messianism and Marxism,2 or – using the names of Benjamin’s two most important correspondents – Gershom Scholem (who followed Zionism to Palestine) and Theodor Adorno (who followed the Institute for Social Research to the United States). And indeed, Benjamin does seem torn between addressing Scholem and addressing Adorno, but, although his vocabulary changes between the Origins of German Tragic Drama 3 and Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism,4 something prevents one from simply seeing in this a straightforward progression from one to the other. If only because it was Adorno who first saw the importance of the Trauerspiel book. Benjamin’s aim, as he put it in the recently translated Arcades Project [Passagen-Werk] (a monumental collection of quotations and commentaries that comes without an instruction manual), was to use Baudelaire as a passageway into the whole nineteenth century, and particularly into the



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development of industrial capitalism after the French Revolution. But the figure Benjamin uses to describe Baudelaire’s importance is interesting: What I propose is to show how Baudelaire lies embedded in the nineteenth century. The imprint he has left behind there must stand clear and intact, like that of a stone which, having lain in the ground for decades, is one day rolled from its place.5 We will come back to this rolling stone later, but for the moment, let us follow the traces of Benjamin’s Marxism. There are curious slippages in reports of Baudelaire’s importance for Benjamin’s attempts at a historical materialist analysis, complicated by problems in translation. On the back cover of the French edition of Benjamin’s book on Baudelaire, Baudelaire’s importance is advertised as follows: ‘Baudelaire – le premier à avoir appréhendé la force productive de l’ homme réifié. [Baudelaire – the first to have apprehended the productive force of reified man]’. The importance of this notion for the editors of the book is reinforced by its slightly lengthened – but still truncated – occurrence in Jean Lacoste’s preface: ‘La signification tout à fait exceptionnelle de Baudelaire tient en ceci que, le premier (. . .), il a appréhendé (. . .) la force productive de l’ homme aliéné: il l’a reconnue et, par la réification, lui a donné plus de force. [Baudelaire’s exceptional significance lies in the fact he was the first (. . .) to have apprehended (. . .) the productive force of alienated man: he recognized it and, through reification, gave it even more force]’ (ellipses in the French).6 We are told that the quotation is from a letter Benjamin wrote to Max Horkheimer on 16 April 1938, explaining his new plans for his Baudelaire project (to be rejected by Adorno six months later). The full sentence from the letter, which I have already cited as one of my epigraphs, reads, in English: ‘Baudelaire’s unique importance consists in having been the first one, and the most unswerving, to have apprehended, in both senses of the word, the productive energy of the individual alienated from himself – agnosticized and heightened through concretization.’7 The German text reads: ‘Die einzigartige Bedeutung Baudelaires besteht darin, als erster und am unbeirrbarsten die produktivkraft des sich selbst entfremdeten Menschen im doppelten Sinne des Wortes dingfest gemacht – agnosziert und durch die Verdinglichung gesteigert – zu haben.’ The Arcades Project is indeed filled with sentences from Benjamin and others beginning, ‘Baudelaire was the first . . .’ Here is another one, very close to the passage from the letter: The unique importance of Baudelaire resides in his being the first and the most unflinching to have taken the measure of the self-estranged human being, in the double sense of acknowledging this being and fortifying it with armor against the reified world.8

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A footnote to this passage indicates that the German plays on the expressions ‘ding-fest gemacht’ and ‘gegen die verdinglichte Welt’. What becomes clear from all these quotations is that the self-estranged human being becomes ‘dingfest’ [arrested? made into a thing?] while the reified world becomes ‘verdinglicht’ [solidified? made into a thing?]. But what exactly is a self-estranged human being? And what is its productivity? The larger question raised by this fluctuating quotation could be formulated as: ‘What is the relation between reification and alienation?’ On the one hand, they can be seen to be the same. Private property, on the one side, and the private name, on the other, both involve appropriations as if they constituted essences. One’s ‘own’ name and one’s ‘own’ property constitute illusory possessions that economics and psychoanalysis will put in question. But on the other hand, they pose a question about the relation between inner reality and outer circumstances that cannot be so simple. If ‘alienation’ can be produced when anything considered natural or transparent is displaced, then the economic and the psychological experiences of the human being are analogous, but somehow the discrepancy between inner and outer reality in part defines what it means to be human. It is as if the economic and the psychological should reflect each other, but yet the sense of one’s own existence inheres in the ways in which one escapes determination by that reflection. How can this gap be understood? The analogy takes on a characteristic form with the development of capitalism. Both kinds of alienation have the structure of a commodity – that is, both the human being and the thing are worth only what they will sell for. Benjamin was very aware of the conflation of those two structures – as, for example, in the whore, who was both seller and commodity in one. But the ‘double sense’ on which Benjamin insists indicates that they are not quite the same, and that Baudelaire’s importance lies in exploring the productivity of their relation. The poet and the whore are all too much alike when art has to compete in the marketplace (as Baudelaire himself proclaimed by comparing art to prostitution), but what is the relation between resembling a whore and resembling an old boudoir? Jean-Paul Sartre, theorist of alienation in an existential sense, revolutionized Baudelaire studies by suggesting – after years of critics’ lamenting that Baudelaire did not have the life he deserved – that in fact Baudelaire had exactly the life he wanted.9 This was alienation with a capital A, but only in a psychological sense. In fact, Sartre could take on all the geniuses of the nineteeth century and express his anger at the simple fact that they had a psychology. Modern psychology takes precisely the form of getting what you say you do not want, and no one fleshed out this notion better than Baudelaire, Flaubert and Mallarmé. As Baudelaire puts it in a letter to his mother dated 26 March 1853: Je suis coupable envers moi-même; – cette disproportion entre la volonté et la faculté est pour moi quelque chose d’ inintelligible. – Pourquoi, ayant une idée si juste, si nette du devoir et de l’utile, fais-je toujours le contraire?



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   [I am guilty toward myself; – this disproportion between the will and the ability is for me something unintelligible. – Why, if I have such a clearly defined sense of duty and utility, do I always do exactly the opposite?]10 All the stages and rages of life, which Sartre documents so mercilessly, are in fact not the exception but the rule. The immense productivity of Baudelaire consists of creating a psychology that does not have health and well-being as its end, but is rather alienated irremediably. Instead of claiming, as Adorno did of Benjamin while editing Benjamin’s correspondence, that he was productive ‘in spite of self-alienation’,11 Benjamin would claim that Baudelaire (and indeed Benjamin) was productive because of it. Or rather – that it was that alienation itself that became productive, often against the express wishes of the author. Because hope and illusion had kept the image of imminent health and happiness constantly before workers’ eyes, previous psychologies had been able to cover over the fact that the alienation of labour was structural, not contingent. But the experience of the workplace is tied to the fact that the fruits of one’s labour do not belong to oneself but to those who pay for them. Baudelaire renounces any illusions of happiness and explores what human psychology would be like if it didn’t imagine a remedy. Or rather – he imagines a remedy, but knows he will never reach it. As Benjamin puts it, ‘“Spleen et idéal” – . . . For Baudelaire, there is no contradiction between these two concepts. He recognizes in spleen the latest transfiguration of the ideal; the ideal seems to him the first expression of spleen’ (AP 24). Baudelaire does not recommend such a state of affairs, but neither does he turn away from it in favour of a more desirable outcome. He describes the diminishing returns – and the perverse liberation – of such a structure in many ways: as autophagy, as irony, as the resuscitation of one’s own vampire. Self-estranged man takes himself as an object of consumption because the production of objects of consumption is always for the benefit of someone else. ‘Je fais bouillir et je mange mon coeur [I boil up and eat my own heart]’12 is assuming ownership of one’s own labour, even at the expense of eating oneself up. The addictive nature of this self-defeat is what is genuinely unbearable. We do not want to admit that modern desire comes into being as desire for what is not good for us. But everything else can too easily be appropriated by the forces of control. As Michel Foucault has exhaustively demonstrated, the law creates more of whatever it forbids. What Sartre calls ‘bad faith’ can otherwise be called ‘life’. To the extent that there is a desiring subject at all, it cannot coincide with its own use-value for the other. But if ‘free’ labour is free only to alienate its labour, then labour power enters into the circuit of commodities, and the difference between persons and things takes on a new form. A person’s ‘worth’ becomes inseparable from the marketplace. It was in an attempt to deny this reduction of all value to

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a universal equivalent that both nineteenth-century artists and nineteenthcentury moralists clung desperately to maintaining a difference between ‘my value’ and ‘my values’. As Baudelaire says in his projects of self-defence (between his indictment and his trial), ‘Je sais que l’amant passionné du beau style s’expose à la haine des multitudes. Mais aucun respect humain, aucune fausse pudeur, aucune coalition, aucun suffrage universel ne me contraindrot à parler le patois incomparable de ce siècle, ni à confondre 13 l’encre avec la vertu. [I know that the passionate lover of beautiful style opens himself up to the majority’s hatred. But no human respect, no false modesty, no coalition, no universal suffrage will constrain me to speak the incomparable dialect of this century, nor to conflate ink with virtue.]’14 In an economy run more and more by the marketplace, all values are eventually converted into exchangevalues.15 But as a result, the commodity acquires what both Marx and Freud call ‘fetishism’. It seems curious that both Marx and Freud should have recourse to the same word to describe what seem like totally different phenomena. For Marx, the ‘fetishism of the commodity’ is the way in which value seems to inhere in the object rather than in the labour that produced it. For Freud, sexual fetishism is the election of an (often inorganic) sexual substitute so as to deny the sexual lack that would otherwise have been discovered in the mother. Benjamin speaks more than once in The Arcades Project of ‘the sex appeal of the inorganic’, which brings Marx and Freud together in a surprising new way. Of course, Marx and Freud lived during the golden age of imperialism, during which cross-cultural exchange underpinned invisibly all forms of metropolitan prosperity. Could imperialism have underpinned its most visible alienations as well? Nothing could suit our post-colonial moment better than a rectification of the proper meaning of the fetish. But, as William Pietz has written, it is precisely the absence of such a proper meaning that has called the fetish into existence in the first place: My thesis is that the fetish, as an idea and a problem, and as a novel object not proper to any prior discrete society, originated in the cross-cultural spaces of the coast of West Africa during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.16 By speaking of the sex appeal of the inorganic, Benjamin could combine the eroticism of the prosthesis (the prosthesis of the mother’s phallus, according to Freud) with the mystic attraction of the commodity. Marx was intent on combatting precisely that attraction: it is the gleam of the commodity that blinds the buyer to the human labour that produced it. It is therefore surprising to read in one of Marx’s early texts that the sensuous enjoyment which is lost in alienated labour is similar to the relation between a fetishist and his object – surrounded by the gleam of its spiritual value as the gleam of a commodity that gets itself to market without human labour: ‘The



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nations which are still dazzled by the sensuous splendour of precious metals, and are therefore still fetish-worshippers of metal money, are not yet fully developed money-nations.’17 Marx therefore has to document the stripping away of such sensual enjoyment by the money form (the universal equivalent) before being able to demystify the subsequent enjoyment of the commodity (the ‘fetishism of the commodity’) as a refusal to see the human labour that produced it. Here is how Baudelaire’s poetry gives voice to what Marx tries to repress, as described in Benjamin’s book on Baudelaire: If the soul of the commodity which Marx occasionally mentions in jest existed, it would be the most empathetic ever encountered in the realm of souls, for it would have to see in everyone the buyer in whose hand and house it wants to nestle. Empathy is the nature of the intoxication to which the flâneur abandons himself in the crowd. ‘The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being himself and someone else as he sees fit. Like a roving soul in search of a body, he enters another person whenever he wishes. For him alone, all is open; if certain places seem closed to him, it is because in his view they are not worth inspecting’ (‘Les Foules’). The commodity itself is the speaker here. Yes, the last words give a rather accurate idea of what the commodity whispers to a poor wretch who passes a shop-window containing beautiful and expensive things. These objects are not interested in this person; they do not empathize with him. In the sentences of the significant prose poem ‘Les Foules’ there speaks, with other words, the fetish itself with which Baudelaire’s sensitive nature resonated so powerfully; that empathy with inorganic things which was one of his sources of inspiration.18 If Baudelaire was indeed a poet who understood the immense productivity of alienated or reified man, it was thus because, far from taking the route of the healing, lucidity, or health which both Marx and Freud imply lies behind the distortions of the fetish, he was capable of going in the opposite direction and making the distance itself into poetry. In a note appended to the paragraph quoted above, Benjamin writes: The second ‘Spleen’ poem is the most important addition to the documentation for this that was assembled in the first part of this essay. Hardly any poet before Baudelaire wrote a verse that is anything like ‘Je suis un vieux boudoir plein de roses fanées’ (I, 86) (‘I am an old boudoir full of faded roses’). The poem is entirely based on empathy with material that is dead in a dual sense. It is inorganic matter, matter that has been eliminated from the circulation process.19 Thus, on the one hand, there is no difference between reification and alienation; on the other, the history of conflict between Marxism and psychoanalysis suggests that things cannot be so simple.

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These two realms of discourse begin, in fact, with a gesture that sweeps away either inner or outer reality. Marx becomes Marx by renouncing his youthful relation to poetry and emotion;20 Freud becomes Freud when he realizes that the truths his hysterical patients tell him are psychic truths not necessarily borne out by historical reality. The relation between inner and outer realities is severed, and that severing brings with it powerful insights. Each side is able to concentrate on and analyze its differences from itself. Henceforth, economics and psychology become radically distinct studies. But language fits neatly into neither side – it is the network that articulates the difference and the passage between them. There would be no inside and outside if it were not for language, but once there is, the two cannot be told apart. Value, sexuality, and cross-cultural contact continue to run on a necessary misprision: the fiction that what is wrong can be rectified. ‘Commodities’ appears to be an odd translation of ‘goods’ (another odd word) – a strange rendition of what in German is simply ‘wares’ (Waren). Why was this word chosen in English? I thought it must be a distortion of a simpler concept, but was surprised to find that such a ‘simpler concept’ was – at least in English – itself a distortion. The word ‘commodity’ originates in the production of things that have a reference to the needs and desires of man. ‘Commodity’ is the ease which the commodity is supposed to produce. The relation between psychological well-being and material objects is present in the word from the begining. And therefore, it is not possible to distinguish desire from need in humans, between use-value and exchange-value. Marx wants to strip off all exchange-value (all mimetic desire produced because of someone else’s desire, all price, a fiction that corresponds to no properties of the object) from things and get back to use-value. But the fetishism of the commodity he rails against is contained in the word ‘commodity’ itself. At least in English. What about French? Baudelaire has no thought of Marxism in his preface to the Petits poèmes en prose, but something of that archaic sense comes through when the new genre is advertised as catering to everyone’s commodité: ‘Mon cher ami, je vous envoie un petit ouvrage dont on ne pourrait dire, sans injustice, qu’il n’a ni queue ni tête, puisque tout, au contraire, y est à la fois tête et queue, alternativement et réciproquement. Considérez, je vous prie, quelles admirables commodités cette combinaison nous offre à tous, à vous, à moi et au lecteur.21 [My dear friend, I’m sending you a little work about which people cannot say, without injustice, that they cannot make head nor tail of it, because everything, on the contrary, is at once head and tail, alternatively and reciprocally. Just think, I beg you, of what perfect convenience that combination offers everyone – you, me, and the reader]’ (I, 275; emphasis mine). In other words, the philological transformation of facility into marketability is itself a process of making something dingfest. The same process is at work in a passage from Wladimir Weidlé that Benjamin quotes (AP 225):



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Etymology of the word ‘comfort’. ‘In English, it is used to mean consolation (“Comforter” is the epithet applied to the Holy Spirit). Then the sense became, instead, well-being. Today, in all languages of the world, the word designates nothing more than rational convenience.’ Benjamin could have added: ‘In English, the word stands for an item of bedding’, and the process of concretization of ‘comforter’ is complete. Hence the double meaning of dingfest – made into a thing, on the one hand, and arrested or made subject to the law, on the other. The word ‘apprehend’, surprisingly, has these two senses as well, plus one more: understand, arrest, and fear. Here, the psychological sense of ‘apprehend’ comes like a parasite along with the senses of ‘fix’ and ‘arrest’. The psychological dimension is thus an unwanted third sense entirely created by translation. But in a sense it is the possibility of such accidental productivity that Baudelaire seeks out by making things dingfest. Agnosziert means something like ‘entirely material’ and ‘durch die Verdinglichung’ means ‘through concretization, reification’, which are indeed the same words Marx chose, for the same reasons. But the unidentified dread – which comes out of translation and thus has no proper origin – deserves to be followed further. Perhaps that sense was what led Freud to study the ‘uncanny’: the uncanny that comes from making things prematurely dingfest – burying them alive. This is exactly what happens to the ‘comforter’. Or to the ‘afghan’. The commodity is produced as a search for ‘ease’. Benjamin indeed remarks on the fate of the word ‘souvenir’ in a similar sense: The things sold in the arcades are souvenirs [Andenken]. The ‘souvenir’ is the form of the commodity in the arcades. One always buys only mementos of the commodity and of the arcade. Rise of the souvenir industry. (AP 864) From being the stuff of history, the souvenir becomes dingfest into the kitchiest of reminders. What then becomes of the past that continues to haunt us?

2   Correspondences One could say that the decline of bourgeois life is presented here through the decline of the art of correspondence. Adorno to Benjamin, 7 November 1936 The magic columns of these palaces Show to the amateur on all sides,

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In the objects their porticos display, That industry is the rival of the arts. ‘Nouveaux Tableaux de Paris’ (Paris, 1828), vol. 1, p. 27. Epigraph to the opening section of Benjamin’s exposés of 1935 and 1939 of The Arcades Project Tout va bien au Sonnet, la bouffonnerie, la galanterie, la passion, la rêverie, la méditation philosophique. Il y a là la beauté du métal et du minéral bien travaillés. Avez-vous observé qu’un morceau de ciel, aperçu par un soupirail, ou entre deux cheminées, deux rochers, ou par une arcade, etc., donnait une idée plus profonde de l’ infini que le grand panorama vu du haut d’une montagne? [Everything looks good as a Sonnet – foolishness, gallantry, passion, reverie, philosophical meditation. It has the beauty of metal or stone that has been well cut. Have you noticed that a view of the sky, glimpsed through a basement window, or between two chimneys, two rocks, or through an arcade, etc., could give a more profound sense of the infinite than the grand panorama seen from the top of a mountain?] Charles Baudelaire, letter to Armand Fraisse, 18 February 1860; emphasis added Eager to earn the support of the Institute for Social Research for his work on the arcades, Benjamin sent Adorno his first exposé of the whole project, and responded eagerly to Adorno’s comments on it. On 10 June 1935, he wrote: Amongst all the things in your letter, none struck me more forcibly than the position you seem to take up with regard to the question of the ‘mediation’ between society and psychology. Here we are both pulling at the same rope, although I was unaware of the fact in this particular form – though it is hardly an ideal situation to find Fromm and Reich are both pulling hard at the other end. I shall be looking at Freud soon. Incidentally, can you recall whether there is any psychoanalytic study of waking, or studies to that effect, in Freud or his school?22 Three years later, an even more financially desperate Benjamin sent a longer essay to be published in the Institute’s journal, and again it was Adorno who tried to explain the Institute’s rejection of Benjamin’s text for its lack of  ‘mediation’: Unless I am very much mistaken, your dialectic is lacking in one thing: mediation. You show a prevailing tendency to relate the pragmatic contents of Baudelaire’s work directly and immediately to adjacent features



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in the social history, and, whenever possible, the economic features, of the time.23 This question of ‘mediation’ between economic features and social history implies that the two domains are distinct and that there is a middle ground between them. But this was precisely what Benjamin’s model of historical materialism denied. Rejecting all ‘development’ that implies a gradual process, Benjamin likened his dialectical process to the shock of awakening. There is no middle ground between dreams and awakening. ‘The compelling – the drastic – experience, which refutes everything “gradual” about becoming and shows all seeming “development” to be dialectical reversal, eminently and thoroughly composed, is the awakening from dream’ (AP 389). The formative role played by Marcel Proust for modernity resided for Benjamin partly in the fact that his seven-volume novel begins with a scene of awakening. Elsewhere, Benjamin writes: ‘Arcades are houses or passages having no outside – like the dream’ (AP 406). Another model for Benjamin’s ‘lack’ of mediation can be found in the trace of that Baudelaire-stone rolled from its place in the nineteenth century. The hollow left by such a stone does not relate to it as the material fact does to the total social process but rather as a photographic negative relates to a print. Studying Baudelaire is like studying art in the age of its mechanical reproduction, like studying its lost aura when its halo has already fallen in the mud. Confirmation of the photographic metaphor for Baudelaire’s relation to the nineteenth century comes from one of Benjamin’s earliest remarks about the poet: An image to characterize Baudelaire’s way of looking at the world. Let us compare time to a photographer – earthly time to a photographer who photographs the essence of things. But because of the nature of earthly time and its apparatus, the photographer manages only to register the negative of that essence on his photographic plates. No one can read these plates; no one can deduce from the negative, on which time records the objects, the true essence of things as they really are. Moreover, the elixir that might act as a developing agent is unknown. And there is Baudelaire: he doesn’t possess the vital fluid either – the fluid in which these plates would have to be immersed so as to obtain the true picture. But he, he alone, is able to read the plates, thanks to infinite mental efforts. He alone is able to extract from the negatives of essence a presentiment of its real picture. And from this presentiment speaks the negative of essence in all his poems.24 What is striking in this depiction of history is the absolute dependence of the essence of things on technological invention. Fluids and negatives were precise enough to capture the true picture even when they had not quite

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been invented yet. Indeed, they were the true picture, of which a talented poet could have a presentiment. It was not really a matter of the mechanical reproduction of art that had changed in the nineteenth century, but the speed at which technology was developing mechanical representation itself. Involuntary memory and unconscious traces enabled a new kind of detection of a history that had never been conscious. Photography was first put to use in criminology. And the detective novel could only have been invented when the reading of traces was a meaningful and possible intellectual challenge. In other words, what Benjamin discovered as he pored over the engravings and photographs in the Cabinet des Estampes was the historicity of the means of representation – the relation between the increasing tempo of technological change and the precise dating of the representation of the world that each change entailed. His fascination – and ours – is not only with a vanished world but with the grain and techniques of representation itself. All the short-lived technological experiments had a different valence to those who did not know which technological inventions would survive. At the time of gaslights, daguerrotypes and wax cylinders, people had no idea that electricity, photography and phonograph records would render them roads not taken. The arcades came and went with a speed that makes them a snapshot of a moment in the development of marketing and city planning. Some metro stations still preserve the traces of Art Nouveau (Benjamin analyses it as Jugendstil) that, contemporary with discoveries in mass transportation, appeared 100 years later as a quaint and old-fashioned style having nothing to do with technology itself. But the organic forms after which Art Nouveau strove are displayed at the precise moment that the organic was being definitively overtaken by the mechanical. This changed the very notion of what was real. Benjamin quotes from Nadar’s description of photographic work in the Paris catacombs: With each new camera setup, we had to test our exposure time empirically; certain of the plates were found to require up to eighteen minutes. – Remember, we were still, at that time, using collodion emulsion on glass negatives . . . I had judged it advisable to animate some of these scenes by the use of a human figure – less from considerations of picturesqueness than in order to give a sense of scale, a precaution too often neglected by explorers in this medium and with sometimes disconcerting consequences. For these eighteen minutes of exposure time, I found it difficult to obtain from a human being the absolute, inorganic immobility I required. I tried to get around this difficulty by means of mannequins, which I dressed in workman’s clothes and positioned in the scene with as little awkwardness as possible; this business did nothing to complicate our task . . . This nasty ordeal of photographing in sewers and catacombs, it must be said, lasted no less than three consecutive months . . . Altogether, I brought back a



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hundred negatives . . . I made haste to offer the first hundred prints to the collections of the City of Paris put together by the eminent engineer of our subterranean constructions, M. Belgrand. (Nadar, Quand j’ étais photographe, Paris 1900, quoted by Benjamin, AP 673–74.) Like Proust’s mémoire involontaire, memory is a prisoner of material objects – which might very well correspond to no original. ‘That is the reason’, writes Benjamin, ‘old photographs – but not old drawings – have a ghostly effect’ (AP 393). Whatever the truth-value of an involuntary memory, therefore, it cannot help being historical. It belongs to its time all the more for never having been conscious. Excavations in the Paris underground play a crucial role in the analysis of the arcades for Benjamin. It is as though the arcades themselves were the above-ground version of the underground. Below the streets of Paris, a whole second world opened up when Haussmann’s modernization projects began. Benjamin writes many times out of his fascination for that world: But another system of galleries runs underground through Paris: the Métro, where at dusk glowing red lights point the way into the underworld of names. Combat, Elysée, Georges V, Etienne Marcel, Solférino, Invalides, Vaugirard – they have all thrown off the humiliating fetters of street or square, and here in the lightning-scored, whistle-resounding darkness are transformed into misshapen sewer gods, catacomb fairies. This labyrinth harbors in its interior not one but a dozen blind raging bulls, into whose jaws not one Theban virgin once a year but thousands of anemic young dressmakers and drowsy clerks every morning must hurl themselves. Street Names – Here, underground, nothing more of the collision, the intersection, of names – that which aboveground forms the linguistic network of the city. Here each name dwells alone; hell is its demesne. Amer, Picon, Dubonnet25 are guardians of the threshold. (AP 84) Benjamin’s Barthesian system of thematic cross-references constitutes yet another parallel ‘linguistic network’. Here are some more quotations from Benjamin’s Arcades about the metro as an underground road map of Paris: Paris is built over a system of caverns from which the din of Métro and railroad mounts to the surface, and in which every passing omnibus or truck sets up a profound echo. And this great technological system of tunnels and thoroughfares interconnects with the ancient vaults, the limestone quarries, the grottoes and catacombs which, since the Middle Ages, have time and again been re-entered and traversed. Even today, for the price of two francs, one can buy a ticket of admission to this most nocturnal Paris, so much less expensive and less hazardous than the Paris

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of the upper world. (Benjamin, Convolute C [‘Ancient Paris, Catacombs, Demolitions, Decline of Paris’], AP 85)   In 1899, during work on the Métro, foundations of a tower of the Bastille were discovered on the Rue Saint-Antoine. Cabinet des Estampes. (AP 91)   The prisoners gave all the passages the names of Paris streets, and whenever they met one another, they exchanged addresses. (Engländer, quoted by Benjamin, AP 89)   The Paris stone quarries are all interconnected . . . In several places pillars have been set up so that the roof does not cave in. In other places the walls have been reinforced. These walls form long passages under the earth, like narrow streets. (Benzenberg, quoted by Benjamin, AP 89) The modern transportation system requires the traveller to pay only when passing from one world to the other. ‘One is reminded’, writes Paul de Man, ‘that, in the French-speaking cities of our century, “correspondance” meant, on the trolley-cars, the equivalence of what is called in English a “transfer” – the privilege, automatically granted on the Paris Métro, of conecting from one line to another without having to buy a new ticket.’26 De Man makes this remark in the course of an analysis designed to deflate the mystical pretensions while elevating the rhetorical achievements of Baudelaire’s most famous poem entitled, precisely, ‘Correspondances’. But Benjamin shows that the poem’s mystical aims cannot be so easily dismissed. The poem ‘Correspondances’ seems to promote the coherence of the natural world, a coherence among the five senses that points to an underlying spiritual coherence. Benjamin does not discount the seduction of natural coherence: La Nature est un temple où de vivant piliers Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles; L’ homme y passe à travers des forêts de symboles Qui l’observent avec des regards familiers. Comme de longs échos qui de loin se confondent Dans une ténébreuse et profonde unité, Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarté, Les parfums, les couleurs, et les sons se répondent. Il est des parfums frais comme des chairs d’enfants, Doux comme les hautbois, verts comme les prairies, – Et d’autres, corrompus, riches et triumphants, Ayant l’expansion des choses infinis Comme l’ambre, le musc, le benjoin et l’encens, Qui chantent les transports de l’esprit et des sens.



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[Nature is a temple, where the living pillars Sometimes murmur indistinguishable words; Man passes through these forests of symbols Which regard him with familiar looks. Like long echoes conflated in the distance Into a unity obscure and profound, Vast as the night and as the light, The perfumes, colours, and sounds correspond. There are some perfumes fresh as a baby’s skin, Mellow as oboes, verdant as prairies, – And others, corrupt, rich, and triumphant, With all the expansiveness of infinite things, Like ambergris, musk, benjamin, incense, That sing the transports of spirit and sense.] De Man writes – and Benjamin would agree – that ‘the prosaic transposition of ecstasy to the economic codes of public transportation is entirely in the spirit of Baudelaire and is not by itself disruptive with regard to the claim for transcendental unity. For the transfer indeed merges two different displacements into one single system of motion and circulation, with corresponding economic and metaphysical profits.’27 As Benjamin put it in a letter to Horkheimer in April 1938: ‘The fundamental paradox of his theory of art – the contradiction between the theory of natural correspondences and the rejection of nature – should become transparent’.28 But just when Benjamin might have demystified the natural symbol in favour of historical allegory and considered the poem a perfect example of the ‘myth’ of the coherence of the natural world, he writes: The important thing is that the correspondances record a concept of experience which includes ritual elements. Only by appropriating these elements was Baudelaire able to fathom the full meaning of the breakdown which he, as a modern man, was witnessing . . . The cycle of poems that opens the volume probably is devoted to something irretrievably lost . . . What Baudelaire meant by correspondances may be described as an experience which seeks to establish itself in crisis-proof form.29 The mystical, mythical elements – however deluded – can never be eliminated. In the nineteenth century they were simply transferred from the forest of nature to the cathedral of industry: ‘On Baudelaire’s “religious intoxication of great cities”: the department stores are temples consecrated to this intoxication’ (Benjamin, AP 61).

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The delay in writing this letter threatens to indict me and all of us. Adorno to Benjamin, 10 November 1938 You were surely not surprised to see that I did not compose a response to your letter of Nov 10 from one minute to the next. Your letter gave me a shock, even if the long time it took you to respond made it possible for me to surmise its contents. Benjamin to Adorno, 9 December 1938 N’oublie pas ton adresse. [Don’t forget your address.] Charles Baudelaire to his half-brother Alphonse, 1 April 1832 Ma chère mère, je me suis toujours défié de la poste d’Honfleur. Cependant, je ne sais pas si l’ insuffisance est constaté à Paris ou à Honfleur.    [My dear mother, I’ve never trusted the Honfleur post office. But I don’t know whether the postage due was noted in Paris or Honfleur] Charles Baudelaire to Madame Aupick, 15 January 1862 I would like now to take another look at a moment in Adorno’s letter critiquing Benjamin’s Baudelaire which to me identifies very precisely the incompatibility between traditional Marxism and what Benjamin was trying to do (C 581 in Corresp): ‘I have a sense of such artificiality whenever you put things metaphorically rather than categorically. This is particularly the case in the passage about the transformation of the city into an interior for the flâneur. I think that one of the most powerful conceptions in your study is here presented as a mere “as if”’. A mere ‘as if’. The logic of your argument, he implies, is metaphorical rather than categorical. Adorno, of course, was no stranger to the metaphor that takes over the category. He wrote, for example, to Benjamin on 3 January 1937: The image of the dive has often been a source of consolation to me in my work. For with the latter I am rather like someone who, in a den of ill repute, comes upon the stricken body of a sad old acquaintance from earlier and better times; and the unfortunate man expresses his dying wish to be buried in a mountain cemetery; getting the body up there is no easy task; and we can only hope that the funeral attendants enjoy the splendid view to be had from the top. (CA 169) Yet in this letter to Benjamin he disallows such writing. Metaphor is a mere ‘as if’; to be taken seriously, a statement has to be categorical. Artifice



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is out of place here: the statement has to be a new truth. But perhaps it is the difference between metaphorical and categorical that for Benjamin has changed. ‘As if’ got a bad name from Browning’s ‘Last Duchess’, who is described by her murderer as ‘looking as if she were alive’. Perhaps it is all too easy to see the killing, the crime against life, that art is. But is there no ‘as if’ in life? Does ‘as if’ imply that something else is the real thing? Isn’t what constitutes the ‘real thing’ the fundamental question here? Some light may be shed on the fallacy of ‘as if’ by Benjamin’s comment on child’s play and toys: An adult relieves his heart from its terrors and doubles happiness by turning it into a story. A child creates the entire event anew and starts again right from the beginning. Here, perhaps, is the deepest explanation for the two meanings of the German word Spielen: the element of repetition is what is actually common to them. Not a ‘doing as if ’ but a ‘doing the same thing over and over again’, the transformation of a shattering experience into habit – that is the essence of play. (SW 2:120) For Adorno, then, ‘as if’ is not uncanny – not the premonition of a shift in the literal itself. For Benjamin, ‘as if’ is the uncanny. The biggest difference between Adorno and Benjamin involves the status of Marxism itself. For Adorno – perhaps speaking for the Institute – it is a meta-discourse designed to explain the unfolding of history; for Benjamin, it is itself historical. This research – which deals fundamentally with the expressive character of the earliest industrial products, the earliest industrial architecture, the earliest machines, but also the earliest department stores, advertisements, and so on – thus becomes important for Marxism in two ways. First, it will demonstrate how the milieu in which Marx’s doctrine arose affected that doctrine through its expressive character (which is to say, not only through causal connections); but, second, it will also show in what respects Marxism, too, shares the expressive character of the material products contemporary with it. (AP 460) Benjamin has often been described as interpreting nineteenth-century ‘reality’ directly: the ‘wide-eyed presentation of mere facts’, as Adorno put it (C 283). Such an aim led Susan Buck-Morss to call her study of The Arcades Project The Dialectics of Seeing31 designed ‘to illuminate the world that Benjamin experienced and described’ (p. ix) and only to add ‘captions’ to that world (p. x). In philosophy, the ‘fallacy of misplaced concreteness’ concerns treating abstractions as if they were in the world. This, too, is called ‘fetishism’.32 But Benjamin’s radical approach to historical materialism is precisely to treat the world itself as a fallacy of misplaced concreteness.

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Of course, Benjamin encourages this conflation of world and text by saying, ‘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’ (AP 464). Because The Arcades Project consists of a huge collection of quotations and comments without an overriding synthesis, it is often compared, by Benjamin himself as well as by his commentators, to a great montage: For Benjamin, the technique of montage had ‘special, even total rights’ as a progressive form because it ‘interrupts the context into which it is inserted’ and thus ‘counteracts illusion’ and he intended it to be the principle governing the construction of the Passagen-Werk: ‘This work must develop to the highest point the art of citing without quotation marks. Its theory connects most closely with that of montage.’ (Buck-Morss, Dialectics, p. 67; the quotations are from Benjamin.)    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. (AP 460 [Convolute N: ‘On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress’])   Notes on montage in my journal. Perhaps, in this same context, there should be some indication of the intimate connection that exists between the intention making for nearest nearness and the intensive utilization of refuse – a connection in fact exhibited in montage. (AP 861) Heterogeneous fragments are simply juxtaposed; ‘I needn’t say anything’. Benjamin tried to ‘show’ not ‘tell’, but he underlines the use of throw-away items (old newspapers, fish bones, ticket stubs) in montage. ‘By their waste shall you know them . . .’ ‘Showing’ involves displaying that which never constituted the valuable or interesting spectacle, but rather its unconscious backdrop. It quickly becomes apparent to his best interpreters – sometimes as if against their own intentions – that, far from being mere ‘captions’ to realities, Benjamin is transforming what counts as ‘real’. Even captions become allegorical texts, and the question of reading reality ‘like a text’ becomes a question of what reading a text is like. Benjamin spent years in the Bibliothèque Nationale and the Cabinet des Estampes collecting, gathering, taking notes. When, at the end of 1939, he was advised to get out of Paris, he instead renewed his library card. Susan Buck-Morss reports: From May to September 1935, and again in January 1936, he worked in the archives of the Cabinet des Estampes in the Bibliothèque Nationale. If such research in iconographic documentation was ‘still rare’ among



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historians, it was unheard of among philosophers. Benjamin had copies made of relevant illustrations which he found there, keeping them in his Paris apartment as ‘a kind of album’.   The album appears to have been lost. It makes little difference, however . . . (Buck-Morss, Dialectics, p. 71) On the contrary, if we are to take seriously Benjamin’s distinction between ‘image’ and ‘text’, this album would have been invaluable. Not as ‘illustration’ or ‘documentation’, but as the thing itself. In other words, not meta-, not a supplement to a reality known otherwise. Benjamin writes: It is said that the dialectical method consists in doing justice each time to the concrete historical situation of its object. But that is not enough. For it is just as much a matter of doing justice to the concrete historical situation of the interest taken in the object. (AP 391 [‘Dream City and Dream House, Dreams of the Future’]) Historical concreteness is thus always misplaced if it is considered to reside in the object alone. Dialectical history is a history of the interaction between objects and subjects. The expression ‘the book of nature’ belongs to the metaphysical realm. If the world is a book, God is its author. Is this still in some way true for Benjamin? Not in any obvious sense, certainly – at least as an origin or end. Yet how are we to understand the role theology plays with respect to dialectical materialism? In Benjamin’s first thesis on history, written right after the Institute’s rejection of his essay on Baudelaire, he describes the historical materialist as a puppet who always wins at chess – but only because a wizened theologian hidden under the table pulls the puppet’s strings. Perhaps it is after all Marxism which seeks to attain a God’s eye view of phenomena – and indeed, any meta-discourse that aspires to stand outside the phenomenon it describes. Historical materialism can always win, but only because of a hidden theological framework. The two discourses that seem to promise a clear-cut opposition between the world and what lies beyond or beneath it – theology and philology – are in fact the only ones capable of taking the measure of both the desire for, and the impossibility of, that separation. In The Arcades Project itself, Benjamin warns, ‘Bear in mind that commentary on a reality (for it is a question here of commentary, of interpretation in detail) calls for a method completely different from that required by commentary on a text. In one case, the scientific mainstay is theology; in the other case, philology.’ (AP 460). At another point, he adds, ‘To prove by example that only Marxism can practice great philology, where the literature of the previous century is concerned.’ (AP 476) The Arcades Project develops the way all scholarship develops: through note-taking, quotation, and commentary. But it seems to stop there, and

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thus, is always considered ‘unfinished’. And indeed, Benjamin’s death did bring the work to a halt. But how do we know what ‘finished’ means any more, if there could be no overriding thesis or synthesis? The word ‘passages’ describes the collection of quotations of other books – but not in German. The Passagen-Werk is as if awaiting its translation into English or French. The idea that there is some truth behind the displacements drives the displacements, but again and again one discovers only the nothing that is there. Yet that ‘nothing’ can only be discovered when one is looking for something else. Mallarmé: Nous savons, captifs d’une formule absolue que, certes, n’est que ce qui est. Incontinent écarter cependant, sous un prétexte, le leurre, accuserait notre inconséquence, niant le plaisir que nous voulons prendre: car cet au-delà en est l’agent, et le moteur dirais-je si je ne répugnais à opérer, en public, le démontage impie de la fiction et conséquemment du méchanisme littéraire, pour étaler la pièce principal ou rien. (Oeuvres Completes, Paris: Gallimard, 1945, p.647) [We know perfectly well, prisoners of an absolute formula, that there exists nothing but what is. However, precipitously to set aside illusions, on this account, would point up our inconsistency, denying the pleasure we aim to take: for that very beyond is its agent, its motor I would even say if I were not reluctant to take fiction apart, in public, unbelievingly, and thus expose the whole literary mechanism, in order to display its principal part or nothing.] Impie has the same significance as agnoziert. The central nothing is the navel of the dream of representing the world. Going back to it is the only way to keep discovering that nothing, that world, that language. It is not that the world does not exist. It can fall down on your head at any time. But the closer you get to it, the more it dissolves into the technologies of representation, which both enable and produce what can be seen. There is a difference between the image and the word, but both are profoundly historical, and both fail to be the ‘wide-eyed presentation of mere facts’ they pretend to be. ‘The circumstances of this failure are multifarious. One is tempted to say: once he was certain of eventual failure, everything worked out for him en route as in a dream’ [Benjamin on Kafka (Arendt p. 17)]. This is why Benjamin writes to Adorno ‘on est philologue ou on ne l’est pas [either one is a philologist or one isn’t]’ about the rejection of The Arcades Project. In other words, unless the process of becoming dingfest is understood as something that also happens in language and in representation and not just in the world, then the very concept of ‘world’ is inadequate. Souvenir, comforter, logo. Is there any relation, then, between the writing of scholarship and the writing of letters? Does the existence of an addressee – and an address



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– change the nature of writing and its relation to history? What are the correspondances in correspondence? The search for material and psychological ease is very apparent in the letters of both Baudelaire and Benjamin, but in different ways. Both lived in miserable material conditions most of their lives, and they wrote in part to earn money. Sons of the bourgeoisie unreconciled to not being supported by it, they scraped together an inadequate existence through literary commissions and translations. Some perverse sense of honour prevented them from making life easy. They sold but did not violate themselves. But whereas Baudelaire’s correspondence reads like one long financial lament mainly addressed to the mother, Benjamin’s is itself a place of thinking addressed to the friend. Benjamin was very lucky in having the misfortune of having to keep in touch with friends at a distance. One has the impression that if they had not moved away, he would have treated them as if they had. Benjamin always sounds both utterly alone and utterly collaborative. His thought was dialectical in the truest sense – it needed the response of the other. Adorno sometimes found it more dialectical than he could handle – it made too many demands on the reader – Benjamin tended to write dialectical questions, not answers. Benjamin wrote as if he could take for granted that the other wanted his thought – that the other wanted nothing more than his every thought (which he was sometimes reluctant to reciprocate). But Baudelaire wrote as if the other wanted not his thought but only his success. In his first letters to his brother and mother, he constantly apologizes for not being able to deliver the prize he has promised. His letters are promises to reform, not thought. In fact, he was probably right – Baudelaire’s thought would no doubt not have been welcome. Everyone he wrote to would probably have been appalled at it. If the court considered his poems intolerable, this was no accident: they were probably written with everything he left out of his letters. Which did not mean that his poems did not also address the figure of the lost mother. Benjamin, on the other hand, was amazingly fortunate in the number of people who wanted him to think. When he was forced to write to friends with requests for money, he was very aware of the danger of losing that freedom (CA 49). Even before his financial debts, in other words, Baudelaire had the task of explaining to the other why he has fallen short. The other is treated as someone who wants only his success from him, but also as someone who really wants it. Baudelaire writes to his brother that he wants to give him a first in school for his birthday. The ensuing guilt for falling short of his promise was in fact the proof that Baudelaire had a place in his brother’s, mother’s and step-father’s lives. But nothing is less certain. The elicitation of the promise in the first place was, unbeknownst to the young Baudelaire, already the gift of something to live up to. I am worth only what living up to what I promised satisfies in you, he seems to say, but to satisfy you would

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enable you to turn your attention away from me. If I want to keep your attention, I will have to keep failing. For in fact, you actually want nothing from me: your life would be simpler if I didn’t exist. This is another part of the Oedipal structure: the parents who leave their son out to die. At his own expense, Baudelaire was able to make that ever-unfilled promise – and the ever-renewed address – into poetry. ‘Baudelaire’s unique importance consists in having been the first one, and the most unswerving, to have apprehended, in both senses of the word, the productive energy of the individual alienated from himself – agnosticized and heightened through concretization’ (C 557). Reading the intolerable struggles and the intolerable wisdom of both Baudelaire and Benjamin with helpless hindsight, one can only wish it would have been possible then to fulfil a fantasy of Nadar’s: As if an enchanter or a stage manager, at the first peal of the whistle from the first locomotive, gave a signal to all things to awake and take flight.33

5 Ruin and Rubble in the Arcades1 esther leslie The schema of empathy The commodity empathizes with the customer Virtuoso of this empathy: the flâneu the whore The customer empathizes with the commodity The empathy with the commodity is empathy with exchange value But that means empathy with the price Apotheosis of this empathy: love of the whore2

The Contradictions of the Flâneur Walter Benjamin’s writings on the Paris arcades and urban industrial culture often feature in contemporary examinations of ‘modernity’. Much has been written about his investigation of the aesthetics of merchandise and his insights into a burgeoning mass consumerism. Indeed this research may nowadays be referenced more frequently than Benjamin’s once much reproduced essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility’. In the 1970s academic (and non-academic) attention focused on Benjamin’s materialist history of artistic production, distribution and reception as presented in the ‘Artwork Essay’ and in ‘The Author as Producer’ (1934). The political events of 1968 had brought Benjamin into legibility.3 His thoughts discharged then after some years’ delay. Most useful to the ’68ers were the statements on political art and Benjamin’s dissections of fascism. John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (1972) introduced Benjamin’s ideas on art and mass reproducibility to an English audience, via the appropriately mass mediation of television. Benjamin was adopted by theorists and practitioners as a leftist mascot, and a materialist who could recommend directions for art interpretation, and, more importantly, cultural practice. But approaches in the 1980s and 1990s, inflected by the priorities of feminist and postmodernist scholarship as they have loomed in cultural studies, art history and sociology and visual culture, turned increasingly to those aspects of Benjamin’s work concerned with consumerism – and the historical home of the consumer, the city.4 Interest shifted away from cultural

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production and critique towards consumption and commentary. Far from blasting the chimeras of commodity fetishism, Benjamin seems to have become the commodity’s high-priest.5 In an essay on the place of Benjamin in Cultural Studies, written in 1992, Angela McRobbie claims that the reinvigoration of interest in Benjamin in the 1980s owed much to the fact that Benjamin’s critique was not formulated around the Marxist ‘fetishes’ of the 1970s. She lists these ‘fetishes’ – the idea of the working class as an emancipatory force, the notion of history moving inexorably towards socialism, the belief in social progress.6 But McRobbie’s reading was wishful thinking, and her sketch of Benjamin’s work with its allegedly new standpoint faulty. For example, while it is true that Benjamin is scathing about the bourgeois and social-democratic notions of social progress, he formulates these criticisms in order to theorize the conditions and measure of actual social progress. He is not sceptical about progress per se. As he puts it in Convolute N, ‘On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress’, in The Arcades Project: Definitions of basic historical concepts: Catastrophe – to have missed the opportunity. Critical moment – the status quo threatens to be preserved. Progress – the first revolutionary measure taken.7 Benjamin sets about a struggle over terminology and definition, questioning the content of phrases. The calamitous concepts of the past, which have led us to where we are now, must be challenged by a recovery of the content of terms. Neither does Benjamin forswear the working class as agent – subject – of revolutionary change. For him, the historical subject ‘is not transcendental but the fighting, oppressed class in its most exposed situation’.8 It was on its behalf that Benjamin criticized the official leadership of political parties who constantly misled those same oppressed people, who were ready to fight but whose energies were repeatedly dissipated. Of course, the relationship of Benjamin’s speculations to Marxism has been much debated, and for good reason. Benjamin adhered to no party and no orthodoxy. His relationship to Marxism and historical materialism was a probing one. He read Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg, Korsch and Lukács, along with other names from the communist and workers’ movement – revolutionary thinkers who in no way stuck fast to the social-democratic belief in inevitable progress towards socialism. The ideas he drew from them streamed into his attempts to think dialectically, to imagine social transformation and its conditions, to understand the fetishism of the commodity, the actual and potential directions of technological change, and the pressures of commodification on cultural production. Of late, John Berger’s materialist and pedagogic version of Benjamin has been overwritten, replaced by a consumerist, superficial Benjamin. This Benjamin is peeled off from his materialist body, fragile and unsubstantial,



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always collapsing, always failing.9 Attempts are made to yoke Benjamin’s researches into the urban scene to assaults on Marxist historical materialism via a fascination with consumption, which necessarily endorses consumption as a type of freedom and self-expression. In accentuating consumption, production slides out of view. This is peculiar, for Benjamin’s curiosity, certainly in the last fifteen years of his life, was directed at questions of production, from questioning determinants on the production of art to the aesthetic demands raised by production art to modes of production and the experience of labour. Much of the recent ‘Benjaminiana’ that foregrounds consumerism and the city-scape fixes on the figure of the flâneur, a type who was the epitome of fashionability in late nineteenth-century France, and who came newly into vogue. Benjamin examined the figure of the flâneur as he appeared in social fact and in Charles Baudelaire’s writings. Baudelaire sketched the flâneur in his essay ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, presenting him as a quintessential modern spectator. The flâneur loves to wander through the streams of urban masses, anonymous in the throng, observing the spectacle of modern life. Baudelaire aligns the flâneur with the modern artist, whose task it is to extract the flâneur’s gait, the fleeting glances, and the brisk gestures, and express these evanescent impressions, for eternity, in art. The flâneuristic artist chronicles the spaces of leisure of a middle class at play, but tries to remain solitary, on the margins or lost in the crowd. This loner fixed the attention of a number of commentators. He came in the 1980s and 1990s to be embodied in postmodern (wo)man − as positive role-model. Such a take celebrates the flâneur’s self-abandonment to the pleasures of consumption. In her 1992 essay on Benjamin and Cultural Studies, McRobbie tried to explain what in Benjamin’s writings matched the preoccupations of her moment. Benjamin, she argues, spoke to an intellectual interest in: The integrated experience of everyday life including the urban environment, architecture, consumer culture, and the ‘passage’ of the individual at whatever precise historical moment in time through these forms, whether he or she, for example, is the flâneur of urban modernity, or the insulated walkman of postmodernity.10 McRobbie concentrates on Benjamin as scholar of metropolitan consumer culture, and nominates the flâneur (or his modern-day incarnation in the walkman) as prime figure for analysis and identification. Susan Buck-Morss echoes this: ‘In the flâneur, concretely, we recognize our own consumerist mode of being-in-the-world’.11 The flâneur appears to stand for the consumer in us. And it appears, at first glance, as if this consumer is understood truly to be the consumer who is sold to us, who features in the advertisements and the press; leisured, master of the market, possessor of choice, delighted by capitalism’s spectacular displays. Many of those who write now of

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flâneurs, consumerism and modernity’s ocularity assert a double-gendering, and so mask the extent to which this figure who strolled the public space of the arcades had become, in the 1980s, the focus for an argument between feminists about the position of women in modernity, in modernism, and in ‘male’ accounts of the modern. A key argument was whether the concept of the flâneur offers a subject position for women or whether the flâneur’s gaze over public space is a ‘male gaze’: patriarchal, ‘panoptical’ and controlling.12 The debates on this question, oscillating between discussions of fictional representations and historical personages, touched on many themes: the ideology or actuality of women’s position in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century; the condemnation of a patriarchal regime of ocularity; the celebration or denigration of a flâneurist mode of being in the world per se. When the debates turned their attention to Benjamin, the majority decision veered towards condemnation of Benjamin before the feminist tribunal convened to judge on moral conduct. Janet Wolff’s article ‘The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity’ opens with the following assertion: ‘The literature of modernity describes the experience of men’.13 Wolff insists that ‘the literature of modernity’ details a public world that excludes women or perceives them solely as signs of their husbands’ powers of consumption. This results from the fact that women are confined to the private realm. Women, asserts Wolff, are socially denied literary modernity’s ‘way of seeing’. This ‘way of seeing’ is the voyeuristic gaze of the flâneur, at home strolling the streets, supreme in the public realm.14 When, in male accounts of modernity, women step out of their private realm – most often, notes Wolff, in the guise of whores, murder-victims and widows – they are subjected to men’s lecherous looks, powerless to express their point of view. Though sometimes visible in the public arena, the ideology of appropriate spaces denies them the opportunity to formulate their own accounts of their experience. They are ignored or spoken for. In a subsequent article Wolff reiterates her claim that the female version of the flâneur, the flâneuse, does not exist in the literature of the modern, insisting that, far from being a critical reflection, ‘Benjamin’s images collude with a patriarchal construction of modernity’.15 The flâneur, like all men according to patriarchy-theory, is assumed to possess ‘power’. Elizabeth Wilson takes issue with aspects of Wolff’s account.16 Wilson contends that, in the late nineteenth century, women did participate in modernity. They participated, she argues, not only passively as part of the spectacle of the modern, but also actively and creatively.17 In Paris, in Baudelairean modernity, women gained certain freedoms, though this occurs, claims Wilson, at the price of their oversexualization. And, switching focus to representations, Wilson insists that, if flâneurs were, as Wolff declares, inhabitants of the streets, then modern writers did envisage the female counterpart, a flâneuse. After all the spaces of modernity detailed by Zola, Proust, Dickens and others were frequently urban sites of consump-



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tion populated by women.18 In numerous realist and naturalist novels the flâneuse appears as shopper. And like the shopper, committed to making window-shopping capitalism’s favourite pastime, she too adheres to the edict: don’t touch until bought. But, if a beady-eyed presence in public space is qualification enough for flâneurdom, then the flâneuse might also be the prostituted woman who surveys the teeming crowds for ‘tricks’, and whose promise echoes consumerism’s ‘buying permits touching’. Wilson is willing to countenance the synthesis of three principal figures in Benjamin’s and Baudelaire’s visions of modern life: the poet parallels the prostitute parallels the flâneur, all engaged in a ‘universal prostitution created by consumerism’.19 There was, of course, a historical affinity between these three figures. All existing outside conventional morality and eschewing more regular ways of making money, they inhabited the suspect zones of bohemia. This position is also advanced by Buck-Morss in her studies of Benjamin’s version of modernity; prostitution was the female version of flânerie.20 Wilson rebuffs Wolff’s claim that the particular intense gaze of the flâneur is completely unavailable to women. If the flâneur’s gaze is a witnessing of the fervid but unfulfilled promises of urban pleasure, then the prostitute knows it as well as any urbanite. But crucially Wilson asserts that the flâneur’s position was actually unstable, indicative of masculinity in crisis, rather than in control. He represents not the triumph of masculine power, but its attenuation, to the point of invisibility.21 As such the flâneur, in truth largely a fantasy figure of an avant-garde’s anxious imagination, communicates reflection on bourgeois sexual and social relations. Wilson provides a Lacanian psychoanalytic context for her claim; the flâneur is the Oedipal under threat. The city is a castrating labyrinth that feminizes all who enter it.22 To be sure, the instability of the flâneur’s position in the late nineteenth century – at least as recollected in Benjamin’s project – issued from menaces related to the development of urban industrial capitalism. His life-style, in as much as it relied on an intimacy with the city-scape, was further threatened by continuing urbanization. Though stimulated into being by metropolitan modernity, its processes threatened to annihilate him. For example, the flâneur was imperilled by modernization: the increasing number of controls, an elaborate web of registrations (house numbers, police photography and the like), developments that catch traces and bring life ever more tightly into an administrable grid. In his writings on the Parisian arcades, Benjamin summons up Baudelaire’s depiction of the flâneur as city stroller, windowshopper and ponderer of modernity. But he does not just give the flâneur a walk-on part through the scintillating verdure of modernity. He disabuses the character’s illusions. Benjamin is keenly attuned to the economic context of the flâneur. He evokes him, and fixes him historically and socially. His livelihood – for Benjamin’s flâneur gets by as a homme de lettres or journalist, a poet of everyday life, supplying the feuilleton press – is permanently under threat. Benjamin’s flâneur, as artist, as journalist, as urban stroller, is

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presented as fundamentally endangered through his encounter with capitalism. But this can only be understood if the flâneur is grasped as much as a producer as a consumer, and, as such, subject to the contradictions of commodity society. The flâneur traverses an economic space where wares are sold − poetry, journalism, knowledge – in the marketplace. If this is acknowledged then the flâneur’s subjectivity is allied with others who sell themselves (albeit existing in competition with them), rather than with all men. He is subservient to the market. For example, Benjamin writes: In the flâneur, the intelligentsia sets foot in the marketplace − ostensibly to look around, but in truth to find a buyer.23 In actuality, claims Benjamin, flânerie outflows in commercial work: journalism, illustration. The thoughts on the crowd, the musing on urban seductions, the pleasures of the city all get converted into hard cash. This was Baudelaire’s disappointment. Flâneurs have to retail their wares by the column inch or text box. This hero of modernity, the flâneur: ‘takes the concept of marketability itself for a stroll’.24 Economically fixing the flâneur permits Benjamin to accent an analogy between flâneurs, prostitutes and labourers; the mind on sale matches the body for sale as tart or as wage-slave. For Benjamin, it is clear that flâneurs and artists, like manual and mental labourers too, are ensnared in the contradictions of capital. As vendors of their efforts they are precariously poised, always subject to market rejection. And the rebellious milieu from which they emerge and in which they hatch their misgivings about modernization and their fantasies of social and economic autonomy, is a strife-filled home, housing an array of competing individuals, outbidding each other in self-abasements before the market. Benjamin indicates that the shelf-life of the flâneur is limited; he will have, in time, to scrape a living, and scrap his illusions. Yet postmodernized flâneurs as consumers – and by extension postmodernized renderings of Benjamin − lose any sense of the contradictions in the arenas of consumption and the figure of the flâneur as subject to class struggle and class tension. Benjamin’s arcades as microcosm of historical potential and disappointment, of promise and betrayal, are reduced to rubble if these social, historical pressures are occluded, for they − class antagonisms, the tension between construction and destruction, mastery and loss of control, the relation between production and consumption − are precisely what structure Benjamin’s analysis in The Arcades Project and related works. The first arcades were built in Paris for Napoleon’s return from the Egyptian campaign. War proves to be the other face of industrial expansion. But the war turns inwards, as class war. The arcades were swallowed up in the Haussmannization of Paris. Haussmannization, a modernization project inaugurated by Emperor Napoleon III, was the name for the construction of vast boulevards designed to confound barricade-building and



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to enable the swift passage of state vehicles. Haussmann, appointed as the prefect of the Seine between 1853 and the Emperor’s fall in 1870, aimed in his re-planning to move the working classes and the poor out of the city centre to the east and to remodel the west for the bourgeoisie. The objective was to flush out the hidden haunts of low-life where bohemia − including flâneurs − had once gathered and in which they had barricaded themselves. The arcades, places of chance encounter, fell victim to this city tidy-up, described by Marx, in The Civil War in France, as ‘razing historic Paris to make place for the Paris of the sightseer!’ Paris was to be turned into a location for touristic contemplation, in an effort to halt revolution and struggles for power. As Benjamin writes, arcing between past and present: ‘Haussmann’s work is accomplished today, as the Spanish war makes clear, by quite other means’.25 By the time of writing about the arcades, Benjamin’s object of study had already become unfashionable, and, in part, obliterated, which makes The Arcades Project a piece of history writing in the sense that Benjamin loves best. The ruined hopes of the past − dimly remembered from his own childhood − loom into greater visibility in his historical construction. Benjamin unearths things, impulses, objects and matter that has decayed. First, in the earliest attempt, in 1927, to present his interest in the arcades, Benjamin follows the surrealist procedure to the letter, montaging a pile-up of disparate industrially produced fragments. In the crowded arcades of the boulevards, as in the semi-deserted arcades of the Rue Saint-Denis, umbrellas and canes are displayed in serried ranks: a phalanx of colorful crooks. Many are the institutes of hygiene, where gladiators are wearing orthopedic belts and bandages wind round the white bellies of mannequins. In the windows of the hairdressers, one sees the last women with long hair; they sport richly undulating masses, petrified coiffures. How brittle appears the stonework of the walls beside them and above: crumbling papier mâché ‘souvenirs’ and bibelots take on a hideous aspect; the odalisque lies in wait next to the inkwell; priestesses in knitted jackets raise aloft ashtrays like vessels of holy water . . . Over stamps and letterboxes roll balls of string and of silk. Naked puppet bodies with bald heads wait for hairpieces and attire. Combs swim about, frog-green and coral-red, as in an aquarium; trumpets turn to conches, ocarinas to umbrella handles; and lying in the fixative pans from a photographer’s darkroom is birdseed.26 This is the same uncanny jumble of outmodedness that attracted the surrealists. But Benjamin develops a more critical aspect. Untimeliness is a political–economic category. Capitalism itself becomes outmoded, yet still present in the nineteenth century. This is evidenced in the setbacks and repeated uptakes of revolutionary struggle. Paris is the capital of the nineteenth century because the echoes of the French Revolution – a revolution

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on behalf of the universe – reverberate through it in revolutionary wave after wave. Paris in the nineteenth century was an Ur-place, a site to mine in order to find out about the mechanisms of bourgeois rule and the renewed attempts to oppose it. It is there that the contradictions of bourgeois class rule are most spectacular, as class alliances are formed and broken. Consolidated is the rule of capital alone. Benjamin’s 1935 and 1939 synopses of The Arcades Project ascend to the revolutionary climax of class struggle. The Communards burn down the Paris that the ‘artist-demolitionist’27 Baron Haussmann had built in his ‘financial’ and ‘military’ re-planning of the city.28 But this negation of his negation is not sustained, and the class fighters allow themselves to be, once again, duped. A Paris guide from 1852 describes each glass-roofed and marble-lined passageway as ‘a city, a world in miniature’.29 Such description attracted Benjamin, who had long harboured a fascination for the small, the child’s tiny facsimiles of things and the miniature worlds in snow shakers or on stamps. Parisian arcades are a miniature dramatization, importantly of the wider world, that is to say of the antinomies of capitalism. The flâneur − along with other figures from The Arcades Project − is necessarily an actor in that agitated setting. Nationalism versus internationalism was one important contradiction projected into the arcade as microcosm (and one whose future was being fought over in Spain in the 1930s as Benjamin wrote his arcades jottings). The arcades were an international architectural form, and they were crammed with colonial plunder. The empire provided the impulse for an expansion in commodity production, in terms of new sources of raw materials, which could be worked over and sold off in the newly established markets and zones of influence. But the effects of empire also reflect back on the imperialist nations, not least by providing the raw materials of a burgeoning commodity market. Imperialism gripped the world as a total system, a vast market and completely exploitable productive source. Imperialism was unifying the world, through trade routes and commodity exchange or plunder. In describing how Victor Hugo published a manifesto to all the people of Europe to mark the world exhibition of 1867, Benjamin notes how the motifs spin off into a fantasy of actual unification of peoples, attributing a common language and will.30 For the international workers’ associations, internationalism remained a dream, which the First World War rudely disturbed. The world exhibitions quashed any aspirations to internationalism, dividing their displays along national lines. Class divisions were apparent too. They promised to be places where everyone could rub shoulders democratically and where status was relocated in objects themselves and not persons. Benjamin quotes Rjazanov to point out how isolated from actuality this dream was: In 1855 the second world exhibition took place, this time in Paris. Workers’ delegations from the capital as well as from the provinces were



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now totally barred. It was feared that they gave workers an opportunity for organizing.31 The brokers of a new social order had determined that bonds emerge only between consumers, not workers. However the workers’ bond of class solidarity threatened to endure and had to be thwarted. If a mass of consumers were forged, non-class identifications might emerge. Here a new form of consumer experience proved useful. The arcades gave way to the department store. In these palaces of the commodity a modern mass is forged: For the first time in history, with the establishment of department stores, consumers begin to consider themselves a mass. (Earlier it was only scarcity that taught them that.) Hence, the circus-like and theatrical element of commerce is quite extraordinarily heightened.32 This, Benjamin indicates, writing from the perspective of the 1930s, might be the mass that eventually enters the stage of history not as a revolutionary subject, but as the mass of mass politics, which can be moulded into Volk or public, in order to prevent it gaining self-understanding in class terms.33 Consumers emerge blinking from the arcades and enter a new buying zone – the department store, where the rules are different, where the victory of scale is obvious. The mass gains a certain self-consciousness, as a mass an sich, a mass of consumers, made equal (to each other, to the commodity) in the fact of exchange. They are educated in commodity lore. Specifics of the department store: the customers perceive themselves as a mass; they are confronted with an assortment of commodities; they take in all the floors at a glance; they pay fixed prices; they can make exchanges.34 The new modes of consumerism in the arcades, department stores and in the world exhibitions (training schools for this new relationship to commodities) strive to colonize consciousness. The fact of consumerism, with its priority of the commodity, aims for domination, an incursion even into the unconscious world. For Benjamin this was a consciousness invaded by the petrifying and fantastic workings of commodity fetishism and reification. Mirrored in the endless reflections of shop windows, the crowd, claims Benjamin, transforms into a spectacle. It sees itself walking and buying. Efforts are made to tame and train the nineteenth-century mob, to turn it into a consumer crowd that forgets its role in production. Acts of production are obscured, concealed, in the commodities’ cocky sovereignty. The arcades are stocked high with the cultural by-products, specious clusters of projected fantasies and congealed monuments to the days of their production and all that has recently been ‘forgotten’ and is called the Moderne,

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modernity. They collaborate briefly with fashion – die Mode, the modish. But Benjamin is ever-keen to stress the dialectical switch involved. At the same time as consciousness is colonized by the commodity, consciousness responds to the utopian side of commodity production, holding open a space for genuine response to the presentations of commodified desires. The impulse for accepting the commodity is the actual wish to see dreams fulfilled. Advertising makes this so much clearer. Flushed out of the arcades, the flâneur emerges from the dream of capital into a harsher light.35 The modernized city turns visibility back on the strollers, making them subject to surveillance. It attempts to rob them of their curiosity about the urban environment. The flâneur becomes a suspect, subjected to authority’s scrutiny, more than he is able to use the power of his gaze to fathom modernity. (The prostitute too knows those probing legal, medical, official looks.) Another menace to the flâneur’s lifestyle comes some time later in the guise of Taylorism, with its factory system of mass production demanding universal speed-up and standardization in all areas of life. Benjamin notes how ‘Taylor popularized the watchword “Down with dawdling!”, and this slogan becomes part of a general cultural war against lassitude’.36 The flâneur’s sluggish pace comes to represent a protest against speed-ups and the ‘division of labor which makes people into specialists’.37 The flâneur possesses the artful Marxist knowledge that value stems from socially necessary labour time – and that is why he drags his heels. In as much as the production system of Taylorism wins out, the flâneur is on the losing side of a class struggle over pace of life and autonomy of action.38 Sadness accumulates around the flâneur, because the social environment no longer supports the fantasy-life that this figure desires. Benjamin observes: In the flâneur, one might say, is reborn the sort of idler that Socrates picked out from the Athenian marketplace to be his interlocutor. Only, there is no longer a Socrates, so there is no one to address the idler. And the slave labor that guaranteed him his leisure has likewise ceased to exist.39 Benjamin notes that the gaze of the flâneur, the allegorist’s gaze ‘as it falls on the city, is the gaze of the alienated man’.40 This flâneur leads a way of life that is still just about able to light up a conciliatory gleam on the approaching desolation of the city-dweller. But only just. The flâneur is an observer – of the market.41 To that extent he is a consumer, for sometimes he decides to buy. But, importantly, he is also a supplier for the market.42 He gazes, he observes, but he is also gazed upon, observed. In fact, to have the gaze turned back on him is what he wants but also shuns. For if he is overly visible, exposed, then he is ‘a true suspect’ and so subjected to the mechanics of power and law. But if he is ‘completely undiscoverable, concealed’, then he is overlooked and ignored.43 He has to be visible to sell his wares, and yet the



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battle to grab customers’ attention is fierce and there is much competition. The flâneur enacts, as part of his make-up, the circuit of consumption and production, two unseverable parts of a whole process, sometimes distributed across classes, here combined in one figure. In as much as he is a producer or supplier for the market, his labour-power − like any worker’s labour-power, according to Marx − becomes a commodity. Benjamin’s Arcades Project has as leitmotif the interrogation of the commodity form. Various sections of The Arcades Project – especially the sections titled ‘Fashion’, ‘Marx’, ‘Arcades, Novelty Shops, Banner (makers)’, ‘Methods of Display, Advertisement, Grandville’, ‘The Collector’, ‘Stock Market, Economic History’, ‘The Flâneur’, ‘Baudelaire’ and ‘Prostitution, Game’ – theorize the commodity and commodity production. The arcades, and the commercial zones that follow them, are gateways to a commodity hell. Central to the study is a probing of the subjectivity of those who are implicated in commodity relations. While, for Benjamin, the flâneur is desperately entangled in commodity consumption and production, the prostitute too appears as another, possibly more significant, victim of commodity culture: a commodity to be bought and a consumer of its trappings, in order to enhance her commodity appeal. In debates on women, flânerie and the public sphere, various feminist critics note Benjamin’s fascination with prostitution and some bemoan the fact that Benjamin was too caught up in his own desire for the buyable woman to critically evaluate the prostitute’s subjectivity. Wolff and BuckMorss complain that the prostitute is reduced to a sign.44 Referring to Benjamin’s comment that, unlike Brecht, Baudelaire never wrote a poem about a whore from the whore’s point of view,45 Buck-Morss reports that: He cites Baudelaire, who addresses prostitutes in his poems while the women themselves remain mute: ‘Baudelaire never wrote . . . about whores from the whore’s viewpoint’ writes Benjamin, and proceeds to do likewise.46 Wilson agrees that ‘Benjamin as much as Baudelaire objectifies the prostitute’.47 And Wolff reiterates the point, asserting that, though Benjamin recognized Baudelaire’s failure to speak from the perspective of the whore, for him too ‘the prostitute stands for a male-defined set of possibilities and sexual and (economic) meanings’.48 McRobbie concurs: Benjamin’s relationship to the world of prostitution might be seen, after twenty years of feminist debate and scholarship, as no different from that of any of his middle-class counterparts of the period. The prostitute remains a shadowy, anonymous figure in his writing. As in the writing of Baudelaire . . . she is, at most, a fellow deviant, another outsider. Benjamin notes that she is a commodity, a ‘mass article’ but he takes this no further,

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preferring to remember the more pleasurable function of the prostitute and the even greater excitement of seeking her out.49 It is worth returning to Benjamin’s panorama of the modern to see, in contrast to McRobbie’s representation, how pivotal the figure of the prostitute is in Benjamin’s critique of capitalist modernity, as are also other females, in particular, the fashionable mannequin and the factory worker. Capitalist modernity, Benjamin argues, conjures up a market of female types, spectacularly on view in the shopping arcades. They are first glimpsed inside the labyrinthine storehouses of products. Benjamin refers to this array of types: Feminine fauna of the arcades: prostitutes, grisettes, old-hag shopkeepers, female street vendors, glovers, demoiselles – this last was the name, around 1830, for incendiaries dressed as women.50 These female types include sex-objects, sex-sellers, commodity-retailers and a feminine moment of political action (albeit transvestite or performed). These, together with numerous other women who populate Benjamin’s phantasmagoria of nineteenth-century Paris – widows, sex-murder victims, fashion mannequins, lesbians, female factory workers − are arguably specimens of conventional femininities brought to a point of crisis.51 Benjamin does attempt to decode their subjective experience, but he does this within social and historical limits, insisting that subjects inhabiting capitalist modernity, exposed to the workings of commodity fetishism, have become objects, objectified, susceptible to processes of commodification (of their labour-power, of the culture they consume). Objectification occurs in the social world, prior to representation of that social world. In the section on commodity fetishism in Capital Marx indicates that, in capitalism, the labour of the individual is realised as an act of exchange between products, and so, for the producers, the relations connecting the labour of one producer with that of the rest appear, not as direct social relations between individuals at work, but as they really are, as thinglike or material (sachlich) relations between persons and social relations between things.52 Note Marx’s insistence that the fetishized experience of social relations is not incorrect, not an ideological delusion, but is a correct experience of a defective actuality. Circumstances appear to people ‘as they really are’. Marxist criticism faces soberly the real conditions of life. It acknowledges the existence of reified relations and, then, sets out to explain and overcome them. If the prostitute is a thing in Benjamin, it is because she is a thing for capital.53 The dehumanizing effects of capital’s organization act precisely to turn us into things. Consumption has active and passive connotations, designating consumer and consumed, and it is women who – in actuality and in Benjamin’s allegorical system – smash against the full force of consumption’s duality: women



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as consumers – especially of fashion, and women as consumed, as whores, as wives, as workers. The focus on women in Benjamin’s studies of capitalist modernity is extraordinary. The female body is laid out as the landscape of hell and Benjamin provides a guided tour.54 To focus on Benjamin’s interest in the deathly and negative aspects of socially and historically consummated femaleness is to reiterate the often submerged fact that Benjamin’s studies of commodity-producing society form a critique of capitalism and not a celebratory description. Benjamin registers a historical shift in gender, sexual and social relations. The resourceful aspect of Benjamin’s gesture lies in his construction of female sexuality as potentially politically disruptive; that is transgressive and modernist. He selects the prostitute and the mannequin as model figures, emissaries of a whole system of exploitation, reification, alienation. Like the flâneur, and yet more socialized, more representative, these women stand in for every person in commodity-producing society.

Diamonds are a girl’s best friend: women and fetish In various accounts of nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century modernity the prostitute is seen to jeopardize family stability.55 In addition to this, Benjamin’s archival burrowings register a nineteenth-century cult of gender ambiguity, as well as a feminist critique of sexual relations. Both set in turmoil traditional roles. Benjamin collects quotations by and about the Utopian Socialists, with their claims to androgyny, and he also records the bisexuality of a sectarian tendency that he names as proponents of an ‘anthropological materialism’.56 Benjamin understands this interest in sexual ambiguity as a by-product of a more extensive questioning of sexual roles in industrial capitalism. He observes a change in sexual roles and relations wrought by economic reorganization, and he notes the Utopian Socialist critique of still-prevalent sexual roles. The new status of metropolitan women, subjected by work and urbanization to industrial violence, throws much sedimented custom into chaos. Cultural, legal and politically patrolled divisions of gender disintegrate. Factory workers, in particular, are seen to smack up against political culture – a process that is termed by Benjamin, and Baudelaire before him, a ‘masculinization of woman’.57 Benjamin writes: During the nineteenth century women were for the first time used in large numbers in the production process outside the home. This was done for the most part in a primitive way, by employing them in factories. As a result masculine traits were bound to appear in these women eventually. These were caused, in particular, by the distorting influence of factory work. Higher forms of production, as well as the political struggle per se, fostered masculine characteristics of a more refined nature. The Vésuviennes movement can perhaps be understood in such a way. It

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supplied the February Revolution with a corps composed of women. ‘We call ourselves Vésuviennes,’ it says in the statutes, ‘to indicate that a revolutionary volcano is at work in every woman who belongs to our group’.58 Where Wilson perceives the metropolis as a maze that feminizes all who enter it, Benjamin proposes rather that the city, or better, industrial capitalism, actually masculinizes those who come into contact with it. The spaces opened up by mechanical labour invite or demand a new access of women to modern life. And this access may result in political organization, a revolutionary movement that further tramples the gender barriers already made shaky by social change. There is a shift in the actuality of women’s roles and this shift is classed. Engels speaks similarly, using the phrase ‘unsexed’ to describe women workers. Observations on gender mutability are present in Marx’s assessment of the social–sexual changes ushered in by capitalist modes of production. Marx reminds the reader of Capital of the revolutionary potential interred within capitalism. However terrible and disgusting the dissolution, under the capitalist system, of the old family ties may appear, nevertheless, modern industry, by assigning as it does an important part in the process of production, outside the domestic sphere, to women, to young persons, and to children of both sexes, creates a new economical foundation for a higher form of the family and of relations between the sexes.59 All become equal as sellers of labour power. In Benjamin’s Arcades Project, as in Marx, women are shown within commodity relations. The effects are multiple; providing the basis for a radical transformation of family relations, as well as an involvement in an absolute and deathly exploitation. This is the contradictory, at once revolutionary–futurist, then reactionary–restorative drive of capitalism. In Benjamin’s work this is manifested in the various positionings now available for the female – amongst others, the whore, who sells her body, the worker who sells her body/mind as labour power, and the mannequin, a super-consumer who models on her body the constricting grip of the commodity. Becoming ungendered or thinglike are processes connected to their admission into exchange. It is exchange that makes possible a certain equality, the strange equality of all who stand before the labour market. Far from being invisible in this world of exchange, women (albeit women in crisis) – in the guise of prostitutes, workers, and mannequins – are in the spotlight. The metropolis is a stage for the new woman. Benjamin registers the illuminated shopfronts as eyes.60 For females even the eyes of passersby are hanging mirrors.61 Such visibility they themselves cannot overlook. Commenting on Parisian street style, Benjamin remarks:



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Women here look at themselves more than elsewhere, and from this comes the distinctive beauty of the Parisienne. Before any man catches sight of her, she already sees herself ten times reflected.62 In city streets street-walking women know they are surveyed, subjected to looks. Their own eyes peruse and judge their own appearance. They are objects for themselves. On catching a glimpse of themselves in reflecting windows, they confuse themselves with the hard bodies of shop-window mannequins. The mannequins’ rigid but exquisite forms fuse with the dream-egos of women, providing perfect, but stiff, role-models. And fashion draws them further into ‘the universe of matter’.63 Fashion ‘prostitutes the living body to the inorganic world’, making women pioneer–explorers in a new continent of artifice.64 This new continent is commodity-country, a historical, manufactured zone, far from the world of nature and everything that talk of nature makes inevitable. Fashion, Benjamin insists, whilst locking the mannequin into the endlessness of modish consumption, also provides an escape route out of nature’s despotic control. The fashion for masculine dress, with cravats and suits and monocles, in screeching colours65 is taken to be a utopian attempt to escape the tyranny of nature and the burden of the biological.66 In that respect, Benjamin assumes that the ‘fashion-victim’ displays solidarity with the nineteenth-century feminist Claire Démar, whose manifesto he quotes: No more motherhood! No more law of the blood. I say: no more motherhood. And, in fact, the woman emancipated . . . from the man, who then no longer pays her the price of her body, . . . will owe her existence . . . to her works alone. For this it is necessary that the woman pursue some work, fulfil a function. And how can she do this if she is always condemned to give up a more or less large part of her life to the care and education of one or more children? . . . You want to emancipate the woman? Well, then, take the newborn child from the breast of the blood-mother and give it into the arms of the social-mother, a nurse employed by the state, and the child will be better raised . . . Then, and then only, will man, woman, and the child be freed from the law of blood, from the exploitation of humanity by humanity.67 The political culture of the nineteenth century has effected a reversal. Women disrupt the continuity of care and reproduction into which they have been thrust and with which they have been identified. Instead, they demand interruption itself, creativity and self-creativity, rather than the commitment to family, to a man and to children. The analogue of this advanced political demand is sympathy for the inorganic. Women lock onto the fetishistic, the hard, unproductive and dead. Fashion’s fibres and gemstones are dead. Women display the congealed substance of the commodity.

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Sexual fetishism and commodity fetishism are allied here too. The woman as commodity fetish also embodies a sexual fetish. Benjamin conceives the sexual fetish as that which is hardened, glossy, glamorous and fatal.68 In fetishism, sexuality dismantles the barriers between the organic and the inorganic worlds. Jewellery is its ally in this. Fashion affirms the rights of the corpse over the living. Much of Benjamin’s discussion in the section devoted to fashion in The Arcades Project concentrates on the connections between fashion and death. The textile industry is central to Benjamin’s poetics of Marxism. Benjamin is sure that the alterations in fashion beat out incessantly the tempo of modernity. He writes: ‘Fashion prescribed the ritual by which the fetish Commodity wished to be worshipped’. It shows too how much the new is indeed the eternal return of the ever-same.69 Fashion is, by definition, condemned to death. Marx, in Capital, provided a materialist core for Benjamin’s idea of fashion as intimate with death. Marx details how ‘the murderous, meaningless caprices of fashion’ are linked to the anarchy of production, where demand cannot be predicted and where gluts lead to starvation.70 The textile industry was central to the formation of the factory system of exploitation, in Marx’s account. It was in the cotton mills that women and children were employed en masse, ‘cheaply’ and mechanically spinning materials harvested by those who had been born to work and worked to death, in the US slave states.71 In detailing modern women’s affinity for the anatural and the commodified, Benjamin is not caught up in a romantic nostalgia for a lost naturalness. His aim is to validate, out of the wreckage, the explicit shift of women into the realm of history and culture, recognizing the enormity of its social and political implications. It is the revolutionary chance for salvation. Benjamin is not a moralist, providing positive images, but a purveyor of a negativity with an explosive charge. The revolutionary function of prostitution, argues Benjamin, is to release erotic life from the chains of biological necessity, the ‘odious’ laws of nature to which love submits.72 In some sense capitalist modernity’s smudging of the boundaries between the sexes is responded to by Nazism − after the failure of social revolution at the end of the First World War. Nazism propels an immense rearguard action to re-define sexual boundaries – with a focused attack on sexual liberational politics – as part of an attempt to secure, if only ideologically, a new social order arranged around ‘Kinder, Küche, Kirche’.73 Benjamin’s promotion of an idea of sexuality as artefact counters fascism’s patronage of a swindle of the natural: biology as destiny, nature as fixity. The de-auraticized, technological sexuality that Benjamin ascribes to modern women and the positioning of women visibly in the social sphere is his attempt to adjust romanticized perceptions of woman as outside the social and historical, inside the private and natural. She displays the system’s potentially revolutionary drive – to detonate nature (in line with Benjamin’s avowed politics of ‘cracking open of natural teleology’),74 in order to inaugurate human history.



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The female body is dissected, turned into a landscape (a place where aura had once been experienced), but this landscape is one of bleak, inert scenery. It is no longer nature, but historical because commodified. The mass-produced mannequin-woman has abandoned auratic femininity.75 She underlines her commodity-character through cosmetics. No-one does this more than the whores who wear make-up like masks. There is no authentic self, just presentations of selves for the needs of the job. Benjamin writes: In the form taken by prostitution in the big cities, the woman appears not only as commodity but, in a precise sense, as mass-produced article. This is indicated by the masking of individual expression in favor of a professional appearance, such as makeup provides. The point is made still more emphatically, later on, by the uniformed girls of the music-hall review.76 Sex for money, consumer-sex, while indicative of the exchange-fixated relations of commodity fetishism, is also sex denuded and disruptive of the ideologically abused mythology of individualized love harmony. Benjamin’s women and female effects conjure up anti-nature. Fashion invents ‘an artificial humanity’.77 Benjamin’s aesthetic is dissectional, drawing on Baroque poetry, Baudelaire’s writing and fashion histories. The female body becomes ornament, and in such fetishistic fragmentation, body parts are likened to alabaster, snow, jewels, minerals, and the body can, of course, be made equivalent to − that is, bought for − the metal of exchange: money.78 Such deadly inorganicism impersonates a more generalized social actuality, wherein the body is a machine for work, the machine-pendant described by Marx.79 Benjamin recognizes an erotics of capitalism. Capitalism is a system that banks on the production and maintenance of desire. Commerce produces an erotic charge, peculiarly aligned with the modern organization of sexuality. The city whore enstages the co-ordinates of a new lust, an ‘erotology of the damned’.80 Benjamin notes that, in high capitalism, earning money becomes a mad passion and love a financial affair. Capitalism eroticizes money, that already dead, congealed residue of productive labour. The erotic ideal is supposed to be not the grisette who gives herself to men but the lorette who sells herself to men.81 Love of a prostitute is ‘the apotheosis of empathy with the commodity’.82 Cash itself is invested with an erotic charge. Purchasability can itself become part of the sexual attraction. Economies of scale come to play a part. That there is a plentiful supply of women − evident later too in the revue, where each is strictly uniform − underscores their commodity character and fully infiltrates the sexual drive of the city-dweller.83 Prostitution is, for Benjamin, not just a by-product of city culture, it is the way of life for all, and moreover, it is a strategy for surviving in city culture. That is to say, it is realistic; it recognizes affairs ‘as they are’:

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Prostitution seems to offer the possibility of enduring a life in which the most immediate objects of our use have turned more and more into mass commodities. In big-city prostitution, the woman herself becomes a massproduced article.84 The sex-appeal of each woman is tinged to a greater or lesser degree with the appeal of the commodity, and, Benjamin notes, this is why the relationship of the pimp to his woman as a ‘thing’ to be sold on the market has massively excited the sexual fantasies of the bourgeoisie.85 Under the domination of commodity fetishism, relations between social subjects are masked. The client, the private man, represses knowledge of material and human relations in order to avoid confronting contradictions between his class ideology and his activity. He clings to the object. He empathizes with it. The fashionable woman is masked by cosmetics and clothes, emanations of non-natural ‘feminine fauna’. She is a consumer. She is a consumer of the trappings of cosmetics and fashion to heighten her appeal or signal her status. Fashion is the dialectical ‘exchange’ between ‘Weib und Ware’ (woman and ware/commodity).86 Prostitutes rely on fashion, the appeal of the striking and revealing dress, to sell their body as thing. As thing, she is also to be consumed. Recording the development of the woman as focal point in commercial appeals, Benjamin argues that: ‘the modern advertisement shows . . . to what extent the attractions of the women and those of the commodity can be merged’.87 Benjamin notes how, in capitalism, an economic system of universalized exchange is broadcast using women as objects and enticing them as complicit subjects. (This is why, for Benjamin, the lesbian may be one of modernity’s heroines, her life unfolding as a protest against social order, the family and the role of motherhood. Hers is the ‘heroic’ attempt to escape commodification and to avoid the compulsive logic of heterosexual attraction, which appears to underpin commodity culture.)88 The prostitute is an extreme example of a (mass-)consumed woman. In the nineteenth century she slunk, for convenience sake, through the arcades, originary natural habitat of the commodity too. The arcade is described by Benjamin as ‘a street of lascivious commerce only; it is wholly adapted to arousing desires’.89 That is why, he comments, it is not surprising that prostitutes lurked in their shadows, before Haussmannization shoved them out onto city streets. Benjamin’s woman is ruined, a ruined thing. Her fashionable body tabulates the decay of human relations, her worn-out, ceaselessly performing body exhibiting the consumption of mortal energy. This woman-construct is a casualty of capitalist modernity, and its traces mark themselves on her commodity-body turned thing-for-use. Her ‘continual preoccupation with her beauty’ is a never-ceasing burden, a Sisyphean labour.90 Love relationships mirror social relationships in the workplace in which people regard each other as things. Marx, who gauges human liberation by the relationship



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between man and woman, makes this observation in the Paris economic and philosophical manuscripts of 1844: Prostitution is only a particular expression of the universal prostitution of the worker, and since prostitution is a relationship which includes not only the prostituted but also the prostitutor – whose infamy is even greater – the capitalist is also included in this category.91 Work has invaded the space of the erotic. The ‘love at last sight’ spasm that grasps the lover on the street as he spies a desirable woman is not a convulsion initiated by the raptures of love.92 It is not sexual pleasure that charms him but a laborious obsession with futureless reiteration, induced by both the massification of bodies on the street and the endless, fruitless labour of mass reproduction. Benjamin cites Baudelaire’s description of lovers ‘racked by their labors’, either bored or worked to death.93 Death and decay is correlated with consumerism and entertainment. Benjamin mentions the catacombs on the Place Denfert Rochereau, where he rented an apartment. There skulls and bones are tossed out of their graves and arranged in geometric shapes. Benjamin connects this grisly deadness to sites of mass society and fantasy: palaces of optical illusion, temples and places of commerce and travel.94 Through his depictions of social relationships in the metropolitan space, Benjamin illustrates Lukács’ idea of reification, the process of becoming thinglike.95 This reification can be aligned with the deadliness that attaches to the prostitute. Her whorish eyes do not see, but instead display ‘the gaze in which the magic of distance is extinguished’.96 Benjamin entwines Lust and Leiche, carnal pleasure and corpse (correlated to woman and ware).97 This fusion of sex and death, is, of course, a Romantic figure, but for the Romantics too such fatal desire was historically precipitated, connected to the industrial onslaught on nature. But Benjamin is not mournful. It is better to recognize the current basis of social relations, than to perpetrate the cosy lie of ‘humanism’. The whore − the commodified woman − plays out the logic of the capitalist system, which is immanently destructive. She does this simply by being. As written by Benjamin, she exposes, just shows; repeating the methodology of The Arcades Project itself: 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.98 In putting the whore to use Benjamin transforms her. The prostitute, as ‘broken-down matter’, is ‘elevated’ into theory. Benjamin turns her into allegory, for allegory may be a tool for making meaning of matter, even

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fragmented or ruined matter.99 Matter is transfigured by theoretical activity, which transmutes a complex of social relations into a dialectical image. This specific dialectical image dissolves the divide between production and consumption erected by commodity society. As dialectical image the prostitute synthesizes the exploitative labour of sales and marketing and the commodity as exchange-value, in that she is salesgirl and commodity, ‘seller and sold’, in one.100 A double exploitation is imaged and its particular force is to make graphic the extent of human alienation and the commodification of the self. The political twist of Benjamin’s argument is to load the ruination or the negativity of the commodity-woman with a politically positive charge. Prostitution and denatured femininity are read as social symptoms. To affirm their existence destroys heart-warming ideologies, and counters the reactionary myth of woman as nature, outside history, outside social processes. Ruination is redeemed by Benjamin, and endowed with a critical charge. Benjamin’s critical methodology is ripped through on the female body. The whore is emblem of the dismal spectacle of unlove at the chilled heart of modernity. The fashion mannequin is a spectre from the realm of the undead. The woman worker has relinquished her sex. A methodology that aims to encapsulate the destructive activity of capitalism mimics its actions, repeating its violence in the text and on its images, by turning the whore into allegory, the mannequin into effigy, the worker into material. The question is whether the turning of the whore into allegory or the mannequin into effigy or the worker into material reduces her to the position of a sign, or whether, as Benjamin seems to claim, such a move honestly appraises the brutality to which she is subjected and which lays waste to her. Possessed of self-consciousness, she may then in turn lay waste to the social order, which is already emerging and re-emerging as ruin.

Street Walking in The Arcades Project The nineteenth century is re-envisaged through its fragments. Benjamin’s study of the arcades investigates the composition of an epoch; the age of industrial capitalism, as seen and theorized, from varying perspectives: by producers and consumers, politicians and intellectuals, the socially powerful, the disenfranchised and the social resisters. As such it is a panoramic examination. Modern experience is characterized through rapid shifts of focus. And what is snapped, snapped up, snapped onto in these arcades and new spaces of display, of lighting, of advertisement and leisure, is product, commodities. Commodities are short-lived, their existences correlated to fashion’s caprices. In Benjamin’s schema of the dynamic of the modern, that which is novel rapidly becomes outmoded. It quickly becomes out-of-date fashion. Remaindering is the other side of this – history as bargain bin. And in this scenario of built-in obsolescence, modern commodities disclose



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secret connections to the mythological, that which is ancient and out of reach. This is the dialectic established at the core of the modern. All that is novel is rapidly superannuated and on the brink of becoming antiquated. The new, then, contains its antithesis – as possibility – dialectically inside itself. Any map of the modern, such as is The Arcades Project, whose object – the arcades, department stores, social movements against capitalism, world exhibitions and so on, all already aged by the 1920s – could at best trace the broken contours of now decrepit labyrinths. And so, a disrupted sense of time is conveyed in the fragments of The Arcades Project. Each moment, each short quotation or comment appears briefly, spurting up high from the bed of time,101 only to disappear again back into the rubble of an unfinished book, an incomplete thought, an uncompleted, interrupted action. But this time of delay, of afterwards, is an indication again of the method of interpretation – where meaning might come of the fragments of a dream, related upon awakening, in all its intensity. Dreams are key here. The commodity is dream-infested. In the process of commodification, wish-images, fragments of utopian potential, promised in the first flirtatious kisses of modern industrialism, congeal into fetish. Their pledges exist only as vestiges. The arcades were home to the dreams of the nineteenth-century masses and their masters. The arcade houses a collective body, who wears it like an exoskeleton. The dreaming collective sinks down in its inner life into the arcades, just as the sleeper receives messages from his inner-bodily processes, noises, blood pressure and so on translated and elucidated in dream pictures.102 Prostitutes too have their dreamy side. Benjamin exposes the mystification that accrues around the fantastic utopian image of the whore as inexhaustible and never-refusing mother – ‘an availability that holds for everyone’.103 The arcades, Benjamin tells us, are fluid places, and there things strike us ‘like realities in the dream’, ‘dissolved in a constant flux’, something new always supervening, always delaying revelation of meaning until waking.104 A dream logic then is the most we might expect from such a bundle of notes and fragments and images. This is appropriate enough, for the dream features everywhere in the project, as in Benjamin’s work as a whole. The dream, for Benjamin, is an index of freedom − our social dreams indicate our social utopias. Children’s whole existence is seen to be dreamlike, and so utopian. The central core of the project fragments, expounds and details how modern reality, this only an appearance of modern reality, might be experienced, if it is not penetrated by analysis, as a dream world stoked by myth. Capitalism was a natural phenomenon with which a new dream-filled sleep came over Europe, and, through it, a reactivation of mythic forces.105 Haussmann had obliterated history when he cut the boulevards through old Paris.106 Into the evacuated space of historical consciousness descended

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the dreams, the mist of fetishism and phantasmagoria. Or the phantom solidified like lava, as Benjamin indicates when he writes: ‘With the Haussmannization of Paris, the phantasmagoria was rendered in stone’. Fetishism and the phantasmagoria were cultivated in the world exhibitions, out of which crawled the modern entertainment industry and the consumer’s dreamy disposition with its attitude of ‘pure reaction’.107 In The Arcades Project the nineteenth century is shown as ruin, through ruined form and through the theme of ruination. Its ruins were already contained in its plans. In his 1935 exposé Benjamin writes that it was Balzac who first spoke of the ruins of the bourgeoisie, but it was surrealism that first allowed its gaze to wander uninhibitedly across the field of rubble that the capitalist development of the productive forces had left in its wake. Balzac could see the ruination contained in that order − immanent to it − but it takes time and a liberated consciousness (or rather the awakened consciousness, which remembers the dream) to cash this out fully. Now, in Benjamin’s moment of writing, 1930s, there was no doubt. The ruins of past promises were visible, and beyond the broken promises lay even more devastation. Ruin and devastation recur, as motif and historical fact. Ruin is a natural phenomenon and a social one. The Arcades Project moves fluidly between both types of ruin. One of the striking aspects of nineteenth-century capitalism, as represented in Benjamin’s harvest of quotations, is its simultaneous naturalization and mythologization of social and historical forces. This took on various forms: Grandville’s lithographs of over-lively commodities; the fetishistic language of stocks and shares and misconceptions of the value-form; the re-iterated ideological succumbing to fate; the countless images of Paris poised on the eve of destruction. There are several references to Pompeii’s volcano in The Arcades Project, and in a children’s radio lecture on the demise of Herculaneum and Pompeii, Benjamin speaks of the ashes which ‘nested in the creases of garments’, the curves of ears, between fingers, shafts of hair and lips, and these ‘solidified before the bodies decomposed, so that we possess today a series of faithful imprints of individuals’. The volcano is a particular mode of destruction. It petrifies. It acts like a snapshot of an otherwise ungraspable history.108 Volcanic ruin is a model for memory become history. In the autobiographical snapshots of his ‘Berlin Chronicle’, which Adorno identified as the subjective counterpart of The Arcades Project, Benjamin finds in his memory of school: Rigidly fixed words, expressions, verses that, like a malleable mass, which has later cooled and hardened, preserve in me the imprint of the collision between a larger collective and myself. Just as, when you awake, a certain kind of significant dream survives in the form of words though all the rest of the dream content has vanished, here isolated words have remained in place as marks of catastrophic encounters.109



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Into this petrified landscape, the proletariat, in conjunction with technologies, should have erupted a second time, in an already volcanic landscape, to cash in the promises of their masters. But they failed to become the final agents of destruction.110 The naturalizing, mythical effects of capitalism won out, even when the proletariat’s own representatives enthusiastically embraced the natural and automatic role that it and the productive forces should play in the script of emancipation. One convolute of The Arcades Project is called ‘Boredom and Eternal Return’. The old is inherent in the new, it is a return. This represents the Janus face of progress, pulling in two directions at once. Progress is presented dialectically: as opposed to its potential direction, human progress, its actual, present stakes are social regress, accompanied by a technological progress. Progress is adjoined to catastrophe.111 Precisely this capitalist technological idea of progress ushers in catastrophe. The optical bedazzlements of the nineteenth century − new gas lighting, new colour dyes, new modes of harnessing energy − turn into the colourful infernos of the First World War and then intensify in the holocaustic fire terror of the Second World War. The ruins of the twentieth century were the part-ruins of the nineteenth century, detonated once again by technology gone crazy. Technological advance is not progress but a wheel without beginning and end, whose fateful destructive/productive dynamic can ultimately only be ripped apart – ruined again – by a simultaneously sober and intoxicated proletariat.112 In any case, its victims must be awakened from its dreams. The Arcades Project was originally to be called a ‘dialektische Feen’, a dialectical fairy scene. Benjamin’s first conception was the telling of a politicized version of the Sleeping Beauty story as a fairy-tale of awakening (from this myth of permanent progress and human submission to destiny). In Pariser Passagen 1, he refers to youth as fulfilling that role of the sleeping princess, possessing an experience akin to the experience of dreaming. The twentieth century would need to awaken from the objects of the nineteenth, from the promises of abundance, from the seductive objects in the park of attractions. Benjamin wrote to Adorno in June 1935 to ask if he knew of any psychoanalytic study of awakening.113 Adorno, for his part, thought that Benjamin’s project did not get to the point of awakening and was continuous with bourgeois psychology, whereby bourgeois society privileges dream and the subjective interior as the prime mediator of social reality. For him, to maintain such a historically specific model of self is to fall under the ‘spell of bourgeois psychology’. For Benjamin, though, the spell can be broken through a ‘Technik des Erwachens’, ‘technique of awakening’.114 For Benjamin, biographically, the first stage of awakening had been historically specific. It had been the First World War, blasting his consciousness shockingly awake. It is this experience which he reworks as a social experience through the 1920s and 1930s, in The Arcades Project. Benjamin analyses a social shell shock. The critic turns therapist. There is a play-off, then, in Benjamin’s

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work between the representation of the dream, given in fragments and quotes, speaking for itself with all its confusion, and the tentatively begun labour of analysis – social psychoanalysis. Benjamin wished to portray the Paris of the Second Empire as a prototype, the origin of capitalist bourgeois civilization. The politically current relevance of his historiography is found in that civilization’s vanishing point in his here and now. Benjamin looks back at the dream of the past, engaging in a sort of mock-predictive historicizing. Historical materialism becomes a critical exercise in a time of crisis. The materialist presentation of history leads the past to bring the present into a critical state.115 The mixing of time points, of cause and effect, fused in a melange of multiple historical determinations, is a methodological feature of The Arcades Project. Historical progress is dispensed with, but, at the same time, all events are seen as interconnected, implicated in each other. Critical analysis will reveal the events’ permanently current germaneness, just as the unconscious knows no time, but time is needed to present a diagnosis. The work on The Arcades Project takes place through a period of political intensity – and only appears to be a backward looking archaeology. The ruins of history spike the present. We can speak of two directions in this work: one which goes from the past into the present and shows the arcades, and all the rest, as precursors, and one which goes from the present into the past so as to have the revolutionary potential of these ‘precursors’ explode in the present. And this direction comprehends as well the spellbound elegiac consideration of the recent past, in the form of its revolutionary explosion.116 Ruin upon ruin. The ruins must be detonated again. Benjamin sees his work as a contribution to the crisis of new historical thinking in the intellectual civil war of the 1920s. The Arcades Project participates in this same sense of a connection between social crisis and intellectual crisis, a sense of necessary social revolution and critical–intellectual revolution as concomitant. The Arcades Project asks how a mythic dream consciousness, such as the longing for dream fulfilment in the commodity or the idea of love satisfied in prostitution or the desire for human union through imperialism, can be rattled, forced to wake up from the wishful thinking it indulges. Perhaps a simple assertion of the actuality of commercial brutality would suffice. Perhaps boredom in the end would finally force a change, through being unsustainable. Marx had characterized Second Empire history in France, in Hegel’s terms, as ‘grey on grey’: history without events; development whose sole driving force seems to be the calendar.117 Such boredom cannot be endured by living breathing humans. But boredom also induces sleep.



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The yawn is the gesture of both. Strangely, the dreaming collective is realized between 1917 and 1927 in the post-encephalitic wave of dream/sleeping sickness which swept Europe, sending its victims into Sleeping Beauty and Blue Beard comas. It is only in the interpretation of dream fragments that we can become conscious and fully understand them, and so, it is only upon awakening, shedding the dream’s grasp in favour of knowledge, drawn from the dream, that freedom can be restored. Benjamin writes in his 1935 exposé of The Arcades Project that the arcades and intérieurs, the exhibition halls and panoramas: Are residues of a dream world. The realization of dream elements, in the course of waking up, is the paradigm of dialectical thinking. Thus, dialectical thinking is the organ of historical awakening.118 Historical awakening is an aim of the project as a whole. Benjamin writes: The new, dialectical method of doing history teaches us to pass in spirit – with the rapidity and intensity of dreams – through what has been, in order to experience the present as a waking world, a world to which every dream at last refers. And then, elsewhere: ‘It is at this moment that the historian takes up . . . the task of dream interpretation.’ The study of the nineteenth century would bring the historian and the reader to the threshold of the present, to the point of waking. The political value of that history − fact, dreams, all of it − lies in its reconstruction and interpretation, to remove thought from the realm of mythology, remaining sensitive to its relevance in the present.119 Dreams might be able to be read, which is to say interpreted as wish-symbols which, made conscious, could then be striven after in reality. However, dreams can also be too seductive, countering activity. Does Freud not say that the dream is a trick to keep us sleeping? And Benjamin knows their dangers: Motif of dream time: atmosphere of aquariums. Water slackening resistance.120 The technique of awakening was never completed. Benjamin only compiled the raw materials for an analysis that was yet to be carried through to completion. An ambiguous consciousness is delineated in The Arcades Project, in order to establish the political actuality and potential of this mass. Consciousness might turn out to be catastrophic. Or it might become a consciousness of the catastrophe, combined with the will to interrupt the endless flow of the novel as the ever-same.

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From 1934, while Benjamin was making notes for The Arcades Project, his own dreams, he claimed, became ever more politicized. Conceiving of history as a territory, a series of spaces and spatial relationships, he wrote to Scholem that his dreams and the historical traces he perceives in them ‘represent an illustrated atlas of the secret history of National Socialism’.121 Echoing Joyce’s ‘history is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake’, Benjamin wants to wake up from his dreams turned historical nightmare. The imperialist mentality is turned in on itself, into the self. Space – the space–time, the time of dreams, Zeitraum, Zeittraum − has become a map of Lebensraum, the living space that Hitler’s army set out to conquer in the East. While the Nazis pushed one way, Benjamin has moved in the opposite direction: from country to country, stumbling finally to ground on a stretch of no-man’s-land between Spain and France. These are bad dreams. The collective has succumbed to the spectacle. The mass finds a home in the totalitarian states, where Gleichshaltung, conformity, co-ordination, is an effort to produce a stunningly homogeneous social receptacle. Benjamin brings the phantasmagoric consciousness and its glossing over of the reality of class difference into connection with both commodity fetishism and totalitarianism, forming a span between his study of nineteenth-century Paris and his meditations on Nazi Germany. The circumstance of the new is perhaps nowhere better illuminated than in the figure of the flâneur. His thirst for the new is quenched by the crowd, which appears self-impelled and endowed with a soul of its own. In fact, this collective is nothing but appearance. This ‘crowd,’ in which the flâneur takes delight, is just the empty mold with which, seventy years later, the Volksgemeinschaft (‘People’s Community’) was cast. The flâneur who so prides himself on his alertness, on his nonconformity, was in this respect also ahead of his contemporaries: he was the first to fall victim to an ignis fatuus which since that time has blinded many millions.122 The flâneur turned out to be a first signal of reaction − not a figure of selfrealization, mastery, celebration of the modern − but a dupe who was so thrilled to be part of the crowd of consumers, who yielded to appearance, to pure illusion, and failed ultimately to gain self-understanding, let alone class-consciousness. In this regard, at least, the prostitute has a clearer consciousness, for it is not possible for her to be recuperated so easily. As worker and buyer in one, as commodity, seller and consumer, she is unable to mask the social contradictions and to succumb to illusions. She may well be, indeed, the worthiest heroine of modernity.

6 Geheimmittel: Advertising and Dialectical Images in Benjamin’s Arcades Project Max Pensky Bullrich Salt! Once you know about it You’ ll never spend a day without it! Advertising placard, streets of Berlin, 19321 At the center of the methodological puzzles of The Arcades Project, surely, is Benjamin’s ‘doctrine’ of the dialectical image. The scare quotes here indicate a tacit fact that any sustained appraisal of The Arcades Project must ultimately face: while Benjamin insisted that the dialectical image stood at the methodological heart of the project – indeed while he insisted that the dialectical image was the ‘quintessence of method’ itself – his account of what dialectical images were, what their precise methodological function should be taken to be, was for a variety of reasons never developed into a theory or doctrine in a systematic and perspicuous way. Instead, Benjamin bequeathed to his subsequent interpreters a collection of theoretical fragments, or even clues, to be pieced together. Decades of Benjamin interpretation have taken up the question of the dialectical image, rightly recognizing it as the distinctive mark of Benjamin’s mature theory, and as the continuing source for, and threat to, Benjamin’s relevance as a social theorist. Dialectical images have been traced back to the sources of Jewish mysticism, of Christian apocalyptic literature, or Goethean and Romantic scientific and literary theory. They have been cross-indexed with contemporary literary theory, transposed to the language of psychoanalysis and political sociology, aesthetic avantgardism and prehistoric magical consciousness, mapped onto axial grids, taxonomized and rhapsodized.2 And yet despite these efforts – many of which are extraordinarily useful and eloquent – at the heart of The Arcades Project, the ‘lightning flash’ of the dialectical image has to this day remained much more a dark star, indeed a black hole, a ‘singularity’ following its own methodological rules and capable, it appears, of absorbing an unlimited number of efforts at critical illumination. There are certainly at least two possible explanations for this state of affairs. Either we may simply not have gotten the interpretation of the

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doctrine of dialectical images that we need, or there may be no such thing as a ‘doctrine’ capable of the kind of critical interpretation we would desire. The dialectical image is, as Susan Buck-Morss observes, ‘overdetermined’ in Benjamin’s work;3 Rolf Tiedemann claims that the idea ‘never achieved any terminological consistency’.4 The goal of this chapter is to offer some interpretation of a short entry from Benjamin’s Arcades Project as a way of framing a few questions about the status of the dialectical image in the work as a whole. In the present context, much of my remarks will necessarily be somewhat truncated, for I am offering an example of problems and tendencies, and not arguing how such an example validly applies to The Arcades Project as a whole. First, Benjamin understands the dialectical image both as ‘the quintessence of method’ and as ‘the’ historical object itself, that is, the object of critical–historical analysis, the explanandum as well as the explanans of materialist historiography, which critical historiographical practice first generates from the detritus of material memory, rather than merely preserves as a mode of the transmission of dominant cultural traditions.5 The dialectical image thus constitutes for Benjamin a decisive answer to the question of how a Marxist cultural criticism can retain a commitment to the ‘graphic’ character of cultural artefacts, their material specificity, while also analysing them on Marxist presuppositions as expressive modes of an historically specific form of economic reproduction.6 This leads to the second distinctive aspect of the dialectical image. It marks the interruption of an alternative temporality, an intrusion of another time into the ‘dream-time’ or ‘always-the-same’ of capitalist consumption, itself a time of myth (repetition, with its logical connection to meaninglessness and subjection) that deploys the hypnagogic appearance of endless progress to mask its own delusional core, as described in a well-known passage from the Convolute N: It’s not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on the past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words, image is dialectics at a standstill. For while the relation of the present to the past is a purely temporal, continuous one, the relation of what has been to the now is dialectical: is not progression but image, suddenly emergent – Only dialectical images are genuine images (that is, not archaic); and the place where one encounters them is language. (N2a,3) The images constitute a ‘Now’ or, even more famously, a ‘Now of legibility’ in which the faded commodity contains a previous generation’s dreams of an emancipated (i.e., classless) utopian future, the present’s immediate relation to that past anticipation via the construction of a specific material memory, and, at the intersection of the present and the past, the intrusion of archaic



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wish-images – together with archaic fears, aversions, and fantasies. The image is unstable, loaded with temporal power; critical agency sparks it, exploding it from the temporal continuum: When thought comes to a standstill in a constellation saturated with tension, the dialectical image appears. It is the caesura in the movement of thought. Its position is, of course, not arbitrary. In a word: it is to be sought where the tension between the dialectical contradictories is greatest. In this manner, the object constructed in the materialist representation of history is itself the dialectical image. It is identical with the historical object; it justifies its explosive removal from the continuum of historical happening. (N10a,3) Constituting a temporal shock of legibility, the dialectical image serves as a pinion around which present, past, fantasy and prehistory are collected into one focal point, one singularity, whereby the ideological ruse of chronic, developmental time and of serial progression suddenly collapses, and the present, in a moment of awakening, presents itself with the graphic image of its own possibilities: In the dialectical image, what has been within a particular epoch is always, simultaneously, ‘what has been from time immemorial.’ As such, however, it is manifest, on each occasion, only to a quite specific epoch – namely, the one in which humanity, rubbing its eyes, recognizes just this particular dream image as such. It is at this moment that the historian takes up, with regard to that image, the task of dream interpretation. (N4,1) But what are dialectical images meant to be images of ? Here again, Benjamin provides a rich collection of clues and references, yet the answer to this apparently simple question remains oddly elusive. There is good reason to see the dialectical image much as Adorno seems to have seen it in his essay on ‘The Idea of Natural History’ from the early 1930s: image springs forth at the moment where dialectical oppositions are simultaneously developed to their extreme such that they revert to one another. Hence the conceptual poles of nature and history, of object and subject, developed ‘consistently’ yield not the Hegelian moment of sublimation of consciousness and being but the image of natural history, an image that bears a different character in relation to the historically concrete world of objects from which it materially derives. In seventeenth-century baroque, the image-character that freezes dialectics is the corpse (nature and history, subject and object, neither and both); in the nineteenth century, it is the industrial commodity that ‘springs forth’ as dialectical image.7 In the notes to The Arcades Project from the mid-1930s, Benjamin spent considerable time on Marx’s theory of

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commodity fetishism, and there is much evidence that he sought to conjoin Marx’s understanding of the fetishized commodity with his own doctrine of the dialectical image. In the 1935 exposé, ‘Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century’, Benjamin analyses the rise of world expositions, advertisement, and entertainment industries as the sources for the ‘metaphysical subtleties’ (Marx) of the industrial commodity. Dialectical images represent commodities, for the first time, as moments in the relation between myth and anti-myth. Portrayed as fetish, (as simultaneously a utopian wish and the very act and mode of its denial) the commodity is to be stripped of its theological cloaking and, from the perspective of natural history, for the first time represented as what it is.8 Finally, a refashioned mode of allegorical representation constructs images of the commodity as misdirected Utopia and as a real hell; a revelation of the specific aura of the commodity that Benjamin first recorded, obliquely, in Baudelaire’s lyric.9 These references to the dialectical image outline the most obvious of Benjamin’s conceptual commitments. The commodity fetish, constructed in an image powerful enough to rupture the dream-time of capitalist modernity, was meant both to illuminate the mythic character encoded in the cultural forms of the nineteenth century, and to provide a shock strong enough to mobilize collective consciousness to resist that character, to transform that culture, in the present. In what follows I will try to raise three questions about the status of images in The Arcades Project: the question of the mere presence of dialectical images in the material (where are they?), of the claim for sovereign knowledge on the part of the critic that they extend (are dialectical images made or found? or both?) and finally, concerning the understanding of commodity fetishism that they presuppose (what are they images of?) The initial question, of where the dialectical images in The Arcades Project are, seems quite odd at first blush. Is The Arcades Project not replete with all manner of detailed descriptions of industrial artefacts, with the first emergent forms of their exhibition, display, and consumption? The answer is: ‘Yes and No’. It is certainly true that The Arcades Project, at least in the form that we now read it, contains a vast amount of notes relating to the material physiognomy of nineteenth-century Paris; above all the manner in which the ‘dream-time’ of consumption manifested itself, as phantasmagoria, in specific architectural forms: the arcade itself, of course, along with world exhibitions, department stores, railway stations and the like. It is also true that the entries, above all the earliest material, often develop phenomenologically very rich and evocative accounts of the textures, colours, the physical quiddity of early industrial goods themselves, a task very near to Benjamin’s heart in the initial project, a ‘thick’ description of the ‘dialectical fairy tale’ of emergent capitalist material culture. On the other hand, if we recall the terms in which Benjamin described dialectical images that were cited above,



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one could plausibly object that there is actually very little in the material of The Arcades Project that rises to meet Benjamin’s own criteria.10 We may offer several responses to this. First and most obvious would be the objection that The Arcades Project is merely a collection of notes and excerpts, theoretical jottings and speculations, for a never-completed work. Hence it is idle to wonder where, or whether, it ‘contains’ dialectical images. We will never be able to determine with any confidence how Benjamin intended to construct the final form of the work, and we must therefore resist the temptation to take any of his theoretical reflections as either adequate or inadequate. We will come back to this objection, but for the moment it is enough to say that while The Arcades Project falls far short of the status of a finished work, it also greatly exceeds the status of a mere collection of notes and materials. Second, one might object that the doctrine of dialectical images itself tends to contradict a naïve demand for examples, insofar as the very essence of the images – the presentation of the genuine object of historical understanding, in its particularity, the momentary legibility of material culture – is incompatible with the very idea of exemplarity, which presupposes an application of concepts that the doctrine of the dialectical image would seem to rule out. But this objection works too well, since if it is true – if we err in asking for an example of a dialectical image – then there evidently can be no ‘doctrine’ of them in any recognizable sense, hence they would be unserviceable as the methodological basis of the project, and would seriously undermine the positive status of The Arcades Project as a work of critical social theory. (Adorno appears at times to have held this view.) This brings us to a second set of questions. What sort of knowledge does the doctrine of the dialectical image presuppose? The doctrine of dialectical images, it seems, extends extraordinary claims of sovereign knowledge on behalf of the materialist critic. By ‘sovereign knowledge’ I mean a capacity for immediate intellectual intuition of the historical and social truths of discrete things, a mode of epistemic insight into historical material that exceeds all familiar epistemic models for the production of knowledge, insofar as those models are premised on, and seek to explain, the limitations of consciousness, and the forms of discursive or representative mind that are compensations for those limits. The doctrine of dialectical images, if it is one, challenges the familiar Kantian notion of understanding as the capacity to generate knowledge of the world through some rule-governed application of concepts to sensory data. What distinguishes the material of The Arcades Project from dialectical images as they are described in Convolute N is the claim to knowledge of the materialist critic, a claim that seems to be unsubstantiated by appeal to a specific epistemology. The critic must know how to endow the shards and pieces of recovered historical material into a constellation from which a dialectical image will emerge; must know, in other words, the historical fate of the material itself. Here we are faced with both questions

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concerning the extent of the knowledge that must be attributed to the materialist critic, as well as the kind of knowledge the critic must have.11 As for the third question, concerning what dialectical images are images of: here Benjamin seems to have provided more helpful explanations than in other contexts. The doctrine of dialectical images describes the representation of a graphic image of the fetishized commodity at the moment where its fetish character falls away, revealing the secret of the commodity for what it is: the commodity-as-image monadically encapsulates both the archaic wishes for happiness on the part of a ‘dreaming collective’ and, simultaneously, the hell of eternal repetition characteristic of a mode of economic and cultural reproduction that ensures that such wishes remain mere phantasmagoria. The commodity, in this sense, bears a troubled relation with the notion of ‘image’, since it is unclear how a dialectical image can be an image ‘of’ the commodity. Images are to be the intrusion of the absolutely singular into the mythic multiplication of entities in modern industrial production; in fact much of the shocking, arresting power of the image is meant to derive from the interruptive force of material singularity into the dreamlike repetition that characterizes regimes of production, consumption and epistemic representation under the conditions of industrial capitalism. Benjamin certainly shared the general Marxist view that specific modes of material and symbolic reproduction generate, or are expressed by, distinctive modes of experience and cognition. But if dialectical images are meant to be images of ‘the’ commodity, we are of course dealing here with a concept – the concept of the commodity – which groups together a range of otherwise dissimilar phenomena under a rule, subordinating them to a general formation which will naturally exert a priority over images, and, as a determinate judgement, will translate images back into exemplary instances generated in relation to concepts. Indeed dialectical images, or ‘dialectics at a standstill’, attempt to rescue for thought precisely the ‘addendum’ or remainder that the application of concepts cannot entirely exhaust.12 One way of thinking about this problem is to ask how (textual) representation itself can preserve the extreme particularity of its object – especially since, in the case of the commodity, precisely what is to be ‘imaged’ is the way that just this particularity expresses a constellation of alienated social relationships and frustrated expectations. Evidently one first step would be to clarify the nature of the relationship between ‘commodity’ and ‘image’; another would be to insist that dialectical images cannot be images of ‘the’ commodity, but would have to be images of a commodity – a specific thing – in which the extreme graphicness of the image itself would succeed in capturing and compressing the entire pre- and post-history of the object, in its social constellation, without lapsing into a presentation of the object as typical of the class of commodities in general. Such a representational act would of course necessarily fail, insofar as the historical object, precisely as a commodity, can be represented only through the logic of equivalence in which it is produced.



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But negative dialectics, whether in Benjamin’s more tactile, immediate and explosive sense, or in Adorno’s version that operates through the subversion of Hegelian dialectical logic, ultimately depend on this second-order representation – the representation of a specific failure of an act of representation – for its success. Dialectical images, which were intended to save the concrete particular historical object from the abstractive tendencies of both idealist and positivist historiography, would need to capture the uniqueness of a commodity while at the same time also capturing the commodity’s mythic status as a repetition. They would need to show how a commodity’s particularity consists precisely in its nearly perfect expression of mythic compulsion, how the image character of the commodity also retains elements of an addendum that constitutes an internal resistance to this repetition, disturbing it from within but represented only through an absence or loss. My suspicion is that the doctrine of the dialectical image, fully realized, actually entails a distinctive loss or occlusion of the commodity itself as fetish, that is, understood as an enciphered (but not especially mysterious) narrative of concrete social actions and relations bearing a concrete, ‘thick’ history. The sovereign knowledge of the materialist critic, in other words, masters the temporality of the image-fragment at the expense of the commodity itself, which remains unfathomed and unrepresentable. I now want to offer an exegetical analysis of one entry of The Arcades Project, with the goal of discussing these three sets of questions in further detail. Many years ago, while riding in a streetcar, I saw an advertising poster, which, if things were as they should be in this world, would have found its admirers, historians, exegetes, and copyists just as any great painting or poem. And in fact it was both of these at once. But as can occasionally happen with very profound and unexpected impressions, the shock was so forceful; the impression, if I can put it so, struck me with such violence, that it broke entirely through the ground of consciousness and lay, for years, unrecoverable somewhere in the darkness. I knew only that it had to do with ‘Bullrich Salt,’ and that the originating warehouse for this seasoning was a small cellar on the Flotwellstraße, past which I rode for years with the temptation to alight at this point and inquire after the poster. Then came the faded Sunday afternoon that I arrived in that northerly (?) Moabit, a district that, four years ago, had struck me as a phantomal construction intended precisely for this particular time of day, then, while in the Lützowstraße I was paying the tariff, measured by the weight of its enameled blocks of houses, of a porcelain city that I had had shipped to me from Rome. Omens already had pointed to this afternoon as one of special significance. And so it ended with the discovery of an arcade, a story too berlinisch to be told here in this Parisian space of memory. Earlier, however, I had stood with my two lovely companions before a

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miserable tavern, whose window had been enlivened with an arrangement of signboards. One amongst them read, ‘Bullrich Salt.’ It contained nothing other than these words, but suddenly, effortlessly, the desert landscape of the first poster formed itself around this written mark. I had it again. It looked like this: in the foreground of the desert, a freightwagon moved slowly, pulled by horses. It was loaded with sacks, bearing the words ‘Bullrich Salt.’ One of these sacks had a hole, from which salt had already trickled for a long stretch upon the desert ground. In the background of the desert landscape, two posts carried a large sign with the words ‘Is the Best.’ But what about the salt trail on the path through the desert? It made letters, which formed a word, the word ‘Bullrich Salt.’ Was the pre-established harmony of Leibniz not child’s play compared with this predestination in the desert, played out with such razor sharp precision? And was there not, in that poster, a parable [Gleichnis] of things that no one has yet experienced in this earthly life? A parable for the everyday of Utopia? (G1a,4) At first glance our passage would seem to be a poor candidate as a basis for any claims about dialectical images. It is marooned, so to speak, near the beginning of Convolute G (‘Exhibitions, Advertising, Grandville’), and, except for the obvious connection to the ‘metaphysical niceties’ of the function of the advertising image, would seem to have only an indirect relation to the themes of the adjacent entries. Clearly, Benjamin’s interest here lies in the intricate relation between industrial commodities, their public representations in the form of advertising image, private involuntary memory, and the wish-content or utopian energies often unconsciously released in the act of representation itself, energies that enter into a constellation of mutual influence with the ‘hellish’ core of the commodity form. The rise of advertising and the intersection of technology and art in the advent of the advertising image in the first half of the nineteenth century are areas in which Benjamin was, of course, very interested. Yet despite occasional mentions of the significance of advertising technologies for a phenomenology of the commodity form, the concept of advertisement and advertising image plays a relatively minor role in The Arcades Project, particularly in comparison to the enormous amount of citations from contemporary literary sources. The earliest, ‘enchanted’ drafts of The Arcades Project from the late 1920s often describe the dreamlike, enigmatic effect of old and out-of-date advertising signs and posters in the Parisian passages in the years immediately preceding their destruction.13 Here the surreal effect is produced through the unintentional connection of the advertised product or shop name with archaic wish images. Firms or products reproduce natural signs marking sites of entrance to the underworld or other thresholds, or invoke archaic fantasies. Clearly, Benjamin’s reading of Aragon’s Paysan de Paris, a book that reprints dozens of advertising signs and posters, would connect the



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‘enchantment effect’ of old advertisements to the surrealist project generally.14 But this concern fades, apparently, from the first to the second stages of The Arcades Project, along with Benjamin’s dedication to phenomenological descriptions of material configurations. Convolute G offers a small number of entries describing the genesis of the advertising image at the opening of the nineteenth century, when, Benjamin writes, the developmental tempo of representational art finally began to accelerate in proportion to that of technology, resulting in the birth of modern, technically produced fashion industries as well as modern image-plus-text advertising. The modern advertisement, by implication, is generated as a world of representational art which no longer has time to assimilate technological development and therefore must ‘express’ technological imperatives immediately and unreflectively, hence for the first time bypassing the institutional and disciplinary restraints that tended to mediate the relation between industrial production and aesthetic representation, and in this way unintentionally reactivating dream images in relation to mass industrial production itself. Advertising, in other words, is ‘the ruse by which the dream forces itself on industry’.15 Benjamin is referring to the narrow historical window where advertising unconsciously generates utopian wish or dream images through the very act of representation. Nineteenth-century advertising tended to advertise more than it meant to: fine-art depictions of elegant middle class patrons, sumptuous and unwieldy packaging, labels tightly crammed with testimonials – and above all a characteristic visual misdirection, an allegorical mis- or over-determination that for Benjamin unintentionally captures an essential truth of the commodity form, namely the arbitrary (hence hellish) relation between the commodity’s use-value and the range of signifiers surrounding it.16 (Indeed the curious misconnection between the art of the advertising poster and its commercial function, which caught Benjamin’s attention in relation to Grandville’s art,17 remains to this day a peculiar feature of the ‘theory of advertising’: the most memorable advertisements are those that associate a spectrum of vivid and unexpected images with a product. However, it is also known that the most memorable advertisements are also frequently the least successful in causing an increase in sales, since images strong enough to ‘break through the ground of consciousness’ are rarely successful in compelling consumers to adopt a recognition of a brand, and to prefer it to other more or less indistinguishable ones. As we are about to see, clearly there is a sense in which the advertising poster for Bullrich Salt is a failure of this sort, albeit a highly interesting one.) Moreover, there is an interesting sense in which the Bullrich Salt fragment does not ‘fit’ into The Arcades Project easily or comfortably, a status Benjamin himself is quick to affirm. I think that this odd status, which I will now discuss briefly, holds a potential key for answering in some measure the question about the sovereignty of knowledge that the dialectical image implicitly extends.

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The fragment describes a personal (indeed a highly intimate) web of experiences of Benjamin himself, and what Benjamin says of one strand of this web – the discovery of an arcade with his ‘two beautiful companions’ – counts for the entry as a whole. It is ‘too berlinisch’ to be told here, in this Parisian space of memory [Erinnerungsraum]. Too berlinisch: this means, too autobiographical, to be sure, to maintain any direct bearing on the topic at hand. But given Benjamin’s own convictions concerning the intersections of the most personal experiences with the concrete material physiognomy of a social group at a given historical moment, the entry is also the eruption of an alternative Zeitraum, that of Berlin. This peculiar status of the Bullrich Salt entry – its multiple interruptions of autobiography into text, of the twentieth into the nineteenth century, of Berlin into Paris – does not in itself disqualify the excerpt as a candidate for a dialectical image. Indeed I want to argue that it in fact nominates it as one. Clearly, the other texts we must have in mind as we read this passage are the autobiographical sketches, Berlin Chronicle and ‘A Berlin Childhood around 1900’. These texts, dating from the early 1930s, were written during a highly significant hiatus from Benjamin’s work on The Arcades Project between 1929 and 1934, a time of enormous personal difficulty, and were of supreme personal significance to him. The dyad Paris–Berlin was in many senses formative for Benjamin’s theoretical and literary corpus. The Berlin texts are interposed between the earliest work on The Arcades Project, with its preoccupations with images of enchantment, distraction, boredom, delusion and the ‘subaquatic’ arcades, and the notes from 1934 to 1935, culminating in the 1935 exposé, ‘Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century’, which consciously developed a far more straightforward ‘sociological perspective’ on the dynamics of collective consciousness, and an effort to apply Marxist categories, above all the category of commodity fetishism, directly to the material context of nineteenth-century material culture. The Arcades Project bears a spectrum of complex and often not entirely consistent relationships to the Berlin texts. The entry on Bullrich Salt is remarkable for its status as a troubled (and therefore all the more revealing) point of contact between the Paris notes and the Berlin writings – to use a geological metaphor, it appears as a weakened or eroded point in the surface material of The Arcades Project notes, a point where Berlin, ineluctably, extrudes through the mantle of Parisian time–space, and becomes exposed as an outcropping in the surface of the text. As such it deserves special attention, for its poor ‘fit’ in the Paris material indicates a rift or discontinuity, a node of heterogeneous or unassimilable material.18 And in fact just this status is characteristic of those moments in The Arcades Project that do begin to rise to meet the criteria of ‘dialectical image’ – temporal disruption, extreme graphicness, sovereign knowledge, and dialectical presentation of the commodity as fetish. Here we may even begin to speculate on an answer to our first question: where are the dialectical images in The Arcades Project? They seem to show



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up, or start to show up, at those moments in the material where a finite set of highly personal experiences, nearly always occluded, infiltrate the historical material like a hidden magnetic ore, generating a field strong enough for the historical material to begin to cluster into a textual configuration. Proust, more than Marx, is the relevant intellectual precursor in this sense, and ‘the commodity’ a mnemonic trigger for a vortex of memory, a confusion of time that permits an entire age, like the span of a single life, to appear transfigured.19 This is most evident in the earliest drafts from the late 1920s (Passagen, Parisier Passagen, etc.) recording Benjamin’s own Parisian excursions (often in the company of Franz Hessel). Another striking aspect of the passage is the open attempt to translate a Proustian sensibility concerning time, memory and materiality (and a certain version of Freud) directly into the more concrete idiom of the dialectics of social relations; a collectivization and materialization of Proust’s doctrine of involuntary memory that loomed large as an ambition during the initial sketches for The Arcades Project from the late 1920s.20 The notion that an image can create a shock strong enough to be preserved entirely intact, and that such an image can, through a ‘secret medium’ (geheimes Mittel) – the entirely accidental or fortuitous encounter with certain sensory triggers – be perfectly, ‘effortlessly’ reconstructed or recovered, certainly bears open tensions with much of The Arcades Project’s concern with the fragility of the past, with its essential transience (and certainly introduces a problem in reconciling Proustian and Freudian models of memory, reminiscence, shock, and loss). Temporality remains subservient to, and an expression of, the dialectic of matter and memory. We could, if we wished, cobble together a strictly linear chronology for the ‘series’ of events narrated here. (I’ve tried; it’s not nearly as easy as it looks at first glance.) But the narrative reconstruction of a coherent chronology seems not just difficult but irrelevant, and in fact the passage asks us to abandon just this chronological perspective, to replace it with a constellation of recovered mnemonic elements that coalesce around a written mark; a constellation of lived experience whose organizational structure bears a complexly stratified, ‘perpendicular’ relation to the continuum of chronological time. Not linear narrative but the strength of an image itself generates an ‘apokatastasis’ of otherwise temporally heterogeneous moments of concrete, lived experience, which ‘telescope together’. The image itself generates a site of construction, a Now in which a range of superseded past times fuse. As they do so, they intermingle image-contents of a primaeval past with those of a utopian future, a dialectical tension reproduced in the imagistic cargo of the poster itself, in which archaic images of a divine language and a mystical causality (a secret medium); wherein nature, in a distantly Leibnizian sense, fuses human with natural laws and ‘sees to it’ that human error and misdirection culminate in the inscription of meaning. ‘Bullrich Salt’ is the allegory of meaning, or better, the allegory of a state where no allegories are needed; a utopian moment in

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which what appeared, under the sign of history, as loss (in the desert) hints for a barely discernible instant at a messianic futurity where history, as the space of exile, is also recuperation. Self-loss is transfigured into a ‘mapping’, and this interminable mapping discloses a superimposition, or perhaps an interminable series of them. The landscape to be mapped, the space of personal memory, erodes or falls away to reveal the (collective?) unconscious space where the utopian images still subsist. But this very mapping erodes away the berlinisch space of autobiography or myth, revealing, beneath it, the desert landscape of the Holy Land, the space of history. The passage opens with the most private of urban experiences, the compulsory solitude and contemplation of the mass-transit passenger. A ride in a streetcar is a peculiar form of urban flânerie: plying unfamiliar streets, it is of course still possible to become truly lost even as the iron rails predestine the course one will traverse.21 In the repetition of the daily commute, the moving car window cinematically frames a series of urban tableaux, which assume something of the dull lustre of mythic, non-linear narration. We see straight away here the distinctive visual doubling of the dialectic of myth and anti-myth. The meandering streetcar in- or de-scribes a written mark on the material physiognomy of the city, just as the writing of the advertising image is written, pressed into the consciousness of the consumer, yet at the same time the mark itself ‘marks’ nothing but itself, just as the freight wagon, lost in the desert, unerringly inscribes its own name in its own name, onto the sand. The image of the desert as ‘mystical writing pad’ thus forms in the tension separating myth and anti-myth. In the tension separating meaning and delusion, turned back upon itself (writing only its own name over and over, as in Benjamin’s Kafkaesque parable of Shuvalkin), the commodity can only unceasingly signify its own internal lack of significance or the impossibility of meaning. And yet the visual representation of this hellish interior, the advertising image, is precisely the moment where this mythic hell, via representation, can be mastered and transformed into a mark signifying its opposite. ‘Loss’ comes to represent its exact counterpart. Just as Leibniz’s doctrine of pre-established harmony insisted that in this, the best of all possible worlds, the laws governing spiritual and physical causalities must ultimately converge, so the wagon-as-stylus promises a Utopia of meaning and a convergence of all possible causal regimes. As a Zeitraum or memory space, the passage transposes its temporal complexities onto spatial relations as well, and here too the description follows the developmental path of the commodity image itself, the mirror-in-mirror doubling characteristic of myth and anti-myth. Just as subjects riding streetcars must learn to master a mode of sensibility in which the desert landscape of the poster is virtually superimposed over the framed image of urban streets, the passage will introduce a distinctive spatial confusion that matches the temporal tangle: where, exactly, apart from a place known as



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‘Benjamin’, are we? Streetnames and geographical references multiply as if under a spell. The ‘northerly Moabit’ (in the German original ‘northerly’ is followed by a question mark in parentheses), the scruffy proletarian district that seems to have held an erotic, rather than political interest for Benjamin himself, lies both immediately to the north of, and yet also thousands of miles (years) away from the leafy Tiergarten district. But at the same time the desert landscape of the poster – the landscape of history, of exile and expectation – superimposes itself on the streets of Berlin, which would place the land of the Moabites to the south-east of the Holy Land, where Ruth and other semi-strangers, other anonymous workers, come from, and presumably return to at night. City and desert superimposed: a breath, once again, of the city as mythical landscape and the Holy Land as the ethical space of anti-myth, both as a secret prevision of the ruined city (cities for Benjamin always appear, under the sign of natural history, as prefiguring their own catastrophic destruction22) that is its future, and also the primal memory of the barren plain on which the metropolis Berlin, with its brave, rectilinear, and fragile streets and avenues, had so recently appeared. The image-character of the commodity, Bullrich Salt, is constituted not by the visual contents of the advertising poster as such but in the constructed constellation that relates those visual elements to moments of personal biography and the social physiognomy of the modern metropolis at a specific historical moment. Hence Benjamin must simultaneously affirm and disavow the constructive activity, the sovereign knowledge, of the critic in the moment of legibility itself. The image both ‘happens’ and does not happen. It exists only in the medium of interpretive intention. It is, just as what it represents, lost. Conjured as an absolute presence, of course, the image rises to presence only under the premise that it exists, has an ontological status, only as a long-forgotten object. (My own futile efforts, over the space of ten years, to find a reproduction of this advertising image in the present, confer on it [for me] a special status as verschollen, as a vanished image. It is an image that exists only by the effects of the textual traces of the memory of it.) Its history, the pre- and post-history of the commodity that allows it to attain to the status of an image in this way, is necessarily bracketed by the critic whose sovereign knowledge consists in identifying the affinities between particles of a visual array and cognitive or imaginative contents derived from subjective reflection. Hence what does not ‘appear’ here is – the commodity. Here is a hint toward the second and third of our questions, the claim to sovereign knowledge of the dialectical image, and its conception of the commodity fetish. Perhaps the unrepresentability of a commodity in its unique particularity is one element of the ‘metaphysical subtleties’ in which commodities assume the form of social relations, and hence undertake an internal dialectic between the human and the inhuman. And yet, that which seems to escape incorporation into an image is presumably just what the

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dialectical image was all along to be of: the commodity as individual thing, the Salz-an-sich. The sovereign knowledge of the materialist critic appears to be based less on an interweaving of highly personal and highly objective knowing, but even more on another kind of tapestry, a web of knowing and unknowing. Let me elaborate. It is not the commodity that the critic ‘knows’ – cracking that hieroglyph would entail a kind of uninflected knowledge of the web of social relations encapsulated in commodities. It would mean revealing the processes by which social relations oblige the commodity to assume a hieroglyphic character, and would dissolve the appearance of mystery. This is what Adorno had wished for in his own texts of this time: a new sociological method as in ‘The Actuality of Philosophy’ and ‘The Idea of Natural History’.23 But Benjamin consistently values the hieroglyphic or inscrutable character of the industrial commodity for precisely the way it appears, and just this deployment of the allegorical faculty leaves the commodity itself a Gleichnis. At the same time, the quest to introduce the graphic particular into critical social theory, to supplant the dependence on conceptual abstraction with a ‘felt contact with the objects themselves’, as Adorno put it, surely could have been satisfied with a better, thicker account of the specific social physiognomies of particular things. Such a task would be far more epistemologically humble than the construction of a messianic now-time, to be sure, but would gravitate toward just the sort of historical knowledge that Benjamin seems to leave out: knowledge about particular commodities, and the very specific human histories that constitute them, the genesis narrative of the social field of production in which the commodity comes into being. But Benjamin rejects just this genesis narrative as hopelessly entangled in the oppressiveness of the sheer repetition of the historical and the mythic. Hence his insistence on eruptive time, on the image-character of commodities – a fundamental dimension of their fetish character – becomes more and more difficult to separate from the advertising image. And in this sense, Benjamin’s account records, but does not criticize, the modern indeterminacy between art and commodity economy. Just as the gap of unknowing between image and commodity is something that the dialectical image and the advertising image share, along with temporal confusion, graphic presentation, shock, mobilization of consciousness, and claims to sovereignty. Benjamin’s sovereign knowledge, in other words, depends on the construction of affinities between the image-character of commodities and the most intimate web of experiences, a closed loop that leaves commodities themselves largely excluded and unknown. This aspect is most clearly visible as we ourselves, focusing on Benjamin as a historical object, indulge here in some historicism, and betray Benjamin’s own dictum that ‘history collapses into images, not stories’ – or at least provisionally refuse that choice. Remarkably, Benjamin’s entry on Bullrich Salt also reveals just how little he knew about his commodity, about Bullrich Salt. To begin with,



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Benjamin appears not to know that Bullrich Salt, the commodity in question, is not a ‘seasoning’ [Gewürz] as he calls it, but in fact a patent medicine, a Geheimmittel (‘secret medium’), and an enormously popular one at that. This is a pity, since the Wirkungsgeschichte of Bullrich Salt – the story of how, over the course of the nineteenth century, it emerged as one of the most widely-used and widely-advertised patent medicines in Germany – is certainly a story worth telling. August Wilhelm Adolph Bullrich (1802–59), a Berlin pharmacist, had first begun marketing his ‘Universal Reinigungs-Salz’ [Universal Purification Salt] as early as the late 1820s,24 and by 1835, paper packets of Bullrich Salt emerged as one of the very earliest advertised and widely distributed commodities in Germany. The product itself is composed nearly entirely of sodium bicarbonate (baking soda). It was initially marketed as a cure for heartburn – and to this day remains one of the most familiar and bestselling over-the-counter antacids in Germany. It was also, importantly, the earliest example of a patent medicine manufactured from industrially produced chemicals as opposed to plant extracts, an advance that Bullrich himself apparently interpreted as the advent of a new era of industrial efficiency in the manufacture and effectiveness of medicinal preparations. In fact, Bullrich was among the last of a generation of ‘amateur’ inventors whose products, marketed under their own names, gained a nearly universal familiarity over the course of the century, and one of the earliest pharmacists in Germany to adopt new industrial technologies for the fabrication of a mass-produced and mass-marketed consumer product of this kind, virtually establishing the class of popular drugstore remedies.25 Bullrich’s product was an immediate hit, and with aggressive and innovative advertising (Bullrich Salt was among the earliest patent medicines to employ printed labels crammed with ‘authentic’ testimonials from happy consumers), quickly gave rise to a ‘Bullrich cult’ of dedicated followers – led by Pharmacist Bullrich himself, who increasingly ascribed curative powers to his invention extending well beyond heartburn, and who apparently consumed his own product in almost unbelievably prodigious quantities (he died of a stroke at the age of 57; one can’t help but imagine that hypertension must have played a part).26 Rather than restricting the curative effects of his medicine to the digestion, Bullrich began to attach medical and eventually even spiritual powers to his product, with the result that Bullrich Salt quickly transmogrified from a mundane medicine-chest item to a true patent medicine, a Geheimmittel, a secret medium. A kind of German Dr Kellogg, Bullrich published pamphlets disparaging professional medicine and urging a return to ‘natural’ healing methods. Increasingly gripped by the conviction that he had discovered the long-sought ‘universal medicine’ that could absorb all the body’s impurities and contaminants, Bullrich even began to attach religious significance to his product, once memorably describing it (diluted in mineral water) as the ‘artificial holy water’ through

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which the innards of the saved could undergo a continuous internal baptism, provided they keep drinking it.27 (To this day Bullrich Salt is a familiar sight in pharmacies and grocery stores; its television advertisements are produced by the high-profile Giesing-Team agency. Indeed the very word ‘Bullrich’ is ‘a name that became a concept’.)28 Patent medicines are of course marked by the wide range of ills that they claim to cure, and by what one could describe as the loose understanding of physical causality that they muster as a support to these claims. Patent medicines are thus well-named in German as Geheimmittel, for they are produced and marketed on the assumption that many people will find causality, as they have experienced it, in an unhappy situation which they are eager to abandon in favour of a secret causation restoring wellness, balance, order. Every patent medicine markets a secret Utopia in the here and now, a fact borne out very clearly by a trip to any health food store. But above all, patent medicines are distinguished by the energetic advertising campaigns undertaken to disseminate their claims, and the history of advertising shows that patent medicines have frequently been at the forefront in introducing new advertising techniques and technologies – this is certainly the case with that advertising powerhouse Bullrich-Salz. Patent medicines, to be sure, presuppose a rather oblique relation to knowledge. For this reason they are of interest as early commodity forms. Their extravagant claims, and their capacity to connect to universal human ills and wants (who would not wish for a powder that fixed up your heartburn, as any teaspoon of baking powder will do, and also removed ‘bodily impurities, nervous complaints, haemorrhoids, hydrophobia, lameness, cramps, cataracts, and croup’?) mark them as precursors of the distinctive form of the industrial commodity. Every commodity, one might say, is a Geheimmittel of one kind or another, at least insofar as every commodity bears, as Marx put it, a secret or ‘mysterious character’ consisting in the social relations (Benjamin would say, dreams of the collective) that the commodity encapsulates and reflects back to the consumer, for whom it then assumes the character of a social hieroglyph. The role of use-value recedes in proportion to the power of the disseminated image to evoke a network of affective references, a fact Benjamin unwittingly demonstrates as he decodes the hieroglyph while having a perfectly mistaken understanding of what the use-value (however dubious) of the commodity actually is. Indeed in the fully realized commodity, it is exactly the use-value that becomes fantastic. The use of the commodity is the name and image of the commodity itself. Use-value is irrelevant to the form of consumption – and fantasy, wish, or interpretation – that seals the relation of image to consciousness. In the ‘real abstraction’ that constitutes the fully realized industrial commodity, Bullrich Salt succeeds in transmogrifying itself into an abstract constellation of social relations, hence free to accumulate, like a dirty snowball, the scattered chips of collective dreams, fears, fantasies, desires and wishes that



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it registers, reflecting them back in the precise image of their unconditional refusal.29 The advertising image, then, in its fully realized form succeeds in having no content; it is an image of image, a mirror that reflects back the subjective intention. The image in this way takes on a fundamental feature of the commodity – over-determination arising from the productive requirements of capitalism itself – just as the representation of the image, in representing just this over-determination in order to capture both its hellish and utopian modalities, ceaselessly replicates just this structure, driving the dialectical image back into allegory. The wagon that writes its own name is in this way neither lost nor found, neither named nor unnamed. The dialectics of the dialectical image is hence always on the brink or at the threshold of freezing and shocking, while this threshold itself is the moment of indifference between dialectical and allegorical image, and, according to another perspective, the moment of indifference between dialectical image and advertising image as well. For who is to say whether the dialectical image can muster the knowledge to represent the conditions of its own possibility, as opposed to reflecting back, infinitely, the advertising image in a satanic game of mirror-on-mirror? And isn’t just this – the attempt to provide an image of image, of reflection of reflection – the very heart of the dialectical image as well? Patent medicines, in this sense the Urform of the industrial commodity, effectively exist only in the image of their advertising, since the ‘consumption’ itself is the consumption of the image. The history of the commodity as a web of social relations would thus lead to a micro-history of its advertising or a genealogy of the social production of specific images. It is no surprise that patent medicines were throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries at the very forefront of new advertising technologies, from packaging and labelling to print advertising in newspapers to the modern advertising campaign complete with anchor slogan–image combination and strategies for market creation and market saturation. Berlin in the first decades of the twentieth century rivalled and in many ways surpassed New York and London as an innovative ground for experiments in urban advertisement. Bullrich Salt, always an innovative firm in the history of advertising, undertook one of the most original, influential and widely studied campaigns in the history of modern advertising over the course of the early 1930s. Beginning in 1929, Berlin was saturated with advertisements in a variety of novel, indeed often inadvertently surrealist forms. Most effective and memorable was the rhymed couplet, printed in large font on advertising posters, which appeared in streets, on buildings and in public places throughout the city – one is reproduced at the beginning of this essay. These catchy twoline poems (a technique later Americanized in the form of widely-separated Burma-shave rhymes on busy roadways) are still familiar to virtually any German with urban memories of the 1930s. High-visibility tin placards on busy public streets were supplemented with very large, transparent signs, in

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the shape of Bullrich Salt packages, with internal electric lighting for optimal night-time viewing. But most impressive surely were the ‘Bullrich Giants’ designed to be something like human Litfaßsäulen: hired men bearing ‘larger than life-sized Moor’s heads made of papier mâché, on which long coats had been attached, which completely covered the bearers and allowed them only a narrow slit at eye level for orientation. Front and back were covered with highly legible advertising copy. In Berlin nearly every child knew the original Bullrich Giants and this previously unknown form of advertising brought the first measurable results very quickly.’30 No measurable results, apparently, with Benjamin, who spent much of the years 1929–33 in Berlin, and who remained apparently untouched by the most intense advertising assault ever mounted in a major European metropolis. (It is also possible – just – that the Bullrich entry in The Arcades Project narrowly precedes the Bullrich campaign.) Had Benjamin registered this advertising campaign, he may have taken note of the vast improvement of advertising technologies in the years separating it from the older, inadvertently devastating streetcar poster, a bit of nineteenth-century image-technology that must have appeared out of date and somewhat quaintly nostalgic at the time. Or perhaps, according to an arcane principle of advertising technique, precisely the ‘success’ of the older poster somehow immunized him against the later campaign – allowing him to use the commodity image as a gathering point for his own mnemonic energies exactly because the commodity itself did not intrude on its own advertisement? The doctrine of the dialectical image may be a historically specific form of intellectual protest lodged against a commodity-based economy at the moment when advertising technologies had not yet caught up with the capacities of a consumer society to process and orient itself according to images and image-based systems. In this sense it depends on a peculiar receptivity to culturally generated images, a form of sensitivity that we may well have lost. In fact, the dialectical image may owe its power to fascinate largely to the fact that we are no longer in a position to distinguish whatever a dialectical image may be (have been) from an advertising image – an image that, as I have argued, bears a similar relation to commodities, a dialectic of concealment and disclosure that ultimately depends upon, rather than dissolves, the commodity’s character as a social hieroglyph. Benjamin distrusted anything but an image-based approach to the critique of the commodity form because he was convinced that new technologies had deprived narratives of social domination of their last vestige of aura. His methodological radicalism was motivated both by a sociologically sophisticated reading of the dynamics of cultural production and a deeply normative understanding of the dynamics of cultural memory and the social construction of time.31 And yet Benjamin’s images may have solved the methodological problem of the narrative form in social theory too well. The explosion of models of the construction of time under conditions of



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industrial capital allows a critical alternative only in the vision of a social anti-time, destroying all developmental narratives and reconstructions, and placing its hopes in the modernist category of the shock of the ever-the-same within the absolutely new. But the choice between images and narratives (or reconstructions) for critical social theory may not be as stark as Benjamin saw it. New modes of critical social theory, moving beyond the traditional spectrum (idealist or positivist) that Benjamin faced, must pursue a task that Benjamin recognized clearly – the methodological task of recovering the concrete particular into a normative theory of social domination; the task, in other words, of a cultural Marxism that would be capable of thick accounts of the material dynamics of domination while retaining the capacity to relate such accounts to a theoretical reconstruction of socially embedded reason and its other.32

7 A MATTER OF DISTANCE: BENJAMIN’S ONE-WAY STREET THROUGH THE ARCADES GERHARD RICHTER Truth and goodness are siblings only in beauty – the philosopher must possess just as much aesthetic power as the poet. Those without aesthetic sense are our pedantic philosophers [Buchstabenphilosophen]. Hegel, Hölderlin and Schelling, ‘Das älteste Systemprogramm’ (1796–97) Criticism is a matter of the right distance. Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street Thinking is a search for siblings. There can be no thinking, at least not the kind of thinking that unfolds in philosophical and literary writing, that will not have turned upon finding a sibling. Thinking, and the thinking of thinking, is the thinking of, by, and for the sibling. It is the searching thinking that seeks connections with the sibling as the one who is related yet different, related in difference, and both the same and different in relation to the common parent whose existence both unites and divides the siblings. Thought seeks to establish relays, to articulate relations, merging with and departing from what is closest to it. It seeks a sibling to sustain it, an other who will read along even in the absence of their father’s guarantees, in a gesture that also works to maintain distance between the siblings. This thought seeks to erase difference in order to join its sibling completely in a fraternal embrace while, at the same time, perpetuating the difference that separates it from its sibling in order to establish itself as the one who differs. No literature without siblings, no philosophy without siblings, no thinking without siblings. Thinking is a search for siblings. Yet if thinking is a search for siblings, it also depends on finding the right distance – Abstand – from these siblings. ‘Let us suppose’, Walter Benjamin writes, ‘that one makes the acquaintance of a person who is handsome and attractive but impenetrable, because he carries a secret with him. It would be reprehensible to want to pry. Still, it surely would be permissible to inquire whether the person has any siblings and whether his or her nature could not explain somewhat the enigmatic



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character of the stranger. In just this way critique seeks to discover siblings of the work of art. And all genuine works have their siblings in the realm of philosophy.’1 These words resonate with readers of his One-Way Street (Einbahnstraße), the lyrical book of paratactically assembled and theoretically suffused thought-images (Denkbilder), albeit perhaps in the space of an inversion: while Benjamin seeks to articulate the elective affinity between literature and philosophy by progressing from a poetic form to a conceptual superstructure, a reading of his One-Way Street also reveals a dialectical inversion of this trajectory. If Benjamin’s Arcades Project (Passagen-Werk) can be read as a philosophical system (or as a systematic non-system of the kind that the Romantic theorist Friedrich Schlegel once demanded), then One-Way Street can be read as the poetry that accompanies, radicalizes, and transforms it.2 As readers of One-Way Street, we might therefore turn Benjamin’s remarks around – reversing the direction of their one-way street – by suggesting that all genuine works of philosophy also have their siblings in the realm of literature. It is perhaps only by considering Benjamin’s philosophical and literary siblings in concert that we can begin to trace the intricate and self-reflexive movement of his language that once led his friend Hannah Arendt to suggest that what is ‘so difficult to understand in Benjamin is that he, without being a poet, thought poetically [dichterisch dachte], and that for him metaphor had to be the greatest and most enigmatic gift of language’.3 We could say that it is this very difficulty that implicitly returns Benjamin to the siblinghood of philosophy and literature that Hegel, Hölderlin, and Schelling demanded in ‘Das älteste Systemprogramm’ (‘The Oldest SystemProgram’), a document they anonymously co-authored during the age of German thought to which Benjamin’s dissertation is devoted. In these pages, I wish to argue that such concerns are lodged in the language of proximity and distance, standstill and movement, approaching and leaving behind that the passages and passage-ways, stops and continuations, recesses and dark spaces of One-Way Street and of The Arcades Project conjure. Benjamin’s textual model of historical method, in which the siblings named philosophy and literature are inscribed, cannot be thought of in isolation from the ways in which his texts engage the question of finding and maintaining the rechte Abstand, or right distance, from the phenomena his gaze encounters on the rhetorical streets of Berlin and Paris.

SIBLINGS AND REVERS: ONE-WAY STREET AND ARCADES The siblinghood between the philosophy of The Arcades Project and the literariness of One-Way Street becomes visible when we recall the respective place of each in the trajectory of Benjamin’s writings. In 1928, Berlin’s Rowohlt Verlag published both his Trauerspiel study and the constellation of Denkbilder collected in One-Way Street that define the city and its life as

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a semiotically charged text to be read. Under the dust-jacket pastiche by the constructivist photographer Sascha Stone, with whom Benjamin collaborated on questions concerning the theory of photography and of reproduction in general, the Denkbilder collected in One-Way Street are among the most polished of Benjamin’s texts. They show Benjamin as a writer. Here, the montage principle, later elaborated in The Arcades Project, brings together, under such suggestively cryptic titles as ‘Imperial Panorama’, ‘First Aid’, and ‘Construction Site’, various reflections of philosophical, personal and political significance: reflections that are situated in the semiotics of early twentieth-century industrial culture. In its self-reflexively apodictic manner, this text collects some of the early Benjamin’s most provocative and relentless thoughts: ‘When will we be ready to write books like catalogues?’; ‘What, in the end, makes advertisement so superior to criticism? Not what the moving red neon sign says – but the fiery pool reflecting it in the asphalt.’4 These reflections, indebted to the fragments, aphorisms, and Denkbilder of F. Schlegel, Nietzsche, Valéry and Kraus are printed, in the original 1928 edition, in an avant-garde typeface and page design that mirrors contemporary constructivist typology in the tradition of Jan Tschichold, Kurt Schwitters, and others. In One-Way Street, the Denkbilder are not positioned in accordance with an overarching narrative principle but rather are arranged according to a systematic non-system, as if situated along a city street in which individual Denkbilder become the figurative shops, signs, buildings and urban sites at which readers may interrupt their strolls like leisurely flâneurs on a promenade.5 Indeed, the sixty Denkbilder or stops along One-Way Street can be conceptualized in visiospatial terms, as is suggested by the architecture of Daniel Libeskind, who recently made One-Way Street the spatial basis of the sixty ‘stations of the star’ in his design for an extension of the Jewish Museum in Berlin.6 A book of streets, gas stations, advertising signs, dreams, quotidian reflections, and philosophical insights, One-Way Street is, as one reader puts it, no ‘weighty tome’ or ‘academic monument’ – it ‘has more of the appearance of a city plan: avenues of open space cross its pages, between compact and irregular blocks of text’.7 The Denkbilder of One-Way Street that act as a map of the city also may be conceived as the ‘heteroclite construction site of different “moments” that constitute Benjamin’s thinking’, rather than as the record of a closed urban system.8 Yet, while One-Way Street shares its metropolitan figures with other modernist texts that were close to Benjamin’s thinking at the time, such as Louis Aragon’s ‘Passage de l’Opéra’ from Paysan de Paris and Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, its various philosophical investments are more nuanced.9 Indeed, One-Way Street, like so many of Benjamin’s ‘city texts’, can be read, among other things, as emerging from, and transforming, a specific concept of experience that is indebted to Kant and extended by Benjamin’s corpus, through an obsession with notions of colour, the image, and the visual world more generally, into the space of urban experience, the visual arts, as well as to the siblings named philosophy and literature.10



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The element in Benjamin’s thought that works to transform the traditions of Kant and German Idealism is developed in One-Way Street, a text that also often is read as staging Benjamin’s turn to Marxism under the troubled aegis of his lover, Asja Lacis, to whom the book is dedicated.11 But the text also figures, as Miriam Hansen reminds us, as ‘part of a more general turn, around 1925, among critical intellectuals as strongly influenced by Jewish messianism and gnosticism as Benjamin, from lapsarian critiques of modernity to a more curious and less anxious look at contemporary realities, in particular the marginalized, ephemeral phenomena of everyday life and leisure culture’. As such, the book employs ‘textual strategies that articulate . . . the political, erotic, and aesthetic implications of the Bahnung, or pathway, cut by modernity, the street that entwines technological and psychic registers in the book’s title trope’.12 We could say that Benjamin’s style here also engages the aesthetic principles of Weimar Germany’s movement of Neue Sachlichkeit, with its phenomenologically sober emphasis on things found in the object world and its interest in a cool and distanced engagement with apparently marginal appearances. This sober turn toward the marginal and the ephemeral, a turn that Benjamin shared with such friends and colleagues as Theodor W. Adorno, Ernst Bloch, Max Horkheimer and Siegfried Kracauer, is staged in the Denkbilder of One-Way Street as something like his poetics of historical montage, a principle that The Arcades Project later radicalizes. Suspicious of any form of totality, Benjamin’s gaze here is directed at the marginal and forgotten, and he is fascinated with the hidden illuminating power of seemingly insignificant cultural objects such as children’s books (of which he was an avid collector) and kitsch objects. Indeed, children’s snow globes, as Adorno tells us, were Benjamin’s favourite items. This meticulous searching for the strange or insignificant is an eminently political gesture, not because it enacts any preconceived programme of what deserves to be collected and studied and what does not, but because it refuses to accept the condition of insignificance as something natural, exposing it instead as a cultural and political construction that relies on problematic unspoken assumptions. The segment ‘Construction Site’, for instance, describes the joy that children experience in rummaging through the debris of a construction site and the delight they take in putting into syntactical relation seemingly disparate objects to build new forms.13 This image should be read figuratively because it is also that of Benjamin’s historical materialist, the rag-picker and garbage collector of history. He looks awry, seeking his material and inspiration not in a culture’s officially sanctioned venues but in the refuse and debris that has been overlooked, repressed or marginalized. Through a strategic poetic montage, in which the neglected debris of history is placed into a new grammatical constellation, a revolutionary image emerges. This, for Benjamin, is the image of history itself. Most of the literary One-Way Street’s philosophical sibling, The Arcades Project, was composed not, as the earlier text, in a setting of relative security,

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but during Benjamin’s Parisian exile from the German fascists. As is well known, he spent his days in the great reading hall of Paris’s Bibliothèque Nationale, hunched over stacks of books and file-card boxes, scribbling and filling in his microscopic handwriting one notebook after another. Returning to the studies of the city and modern culture that he had begun in 1927 while working on One-Way Street, Benjamin now shifts his gaze from the streets of Berlin to those of Paris, focusing his attention on the role that nineteenth-century Paris and writers such as Baudelaire played in the construction of modernity. In his various studies of Baudelaire in the context of western modernity, he investigates such paradigmatic figures as the sandwichman, the whore, or the flâneur strolling through the metropolis, the elegant idleness of his pace symbolized by the turtle on a leash that he would sometimes take along. The works on Baudelaire belong to the immediate conceptual orbit of The Arcades Project, the massive assemblage of commentary, quotations and observations on Parisian life, centred on the ‘passages’ or glass-covered indoor arcades that were the early prototypes of the modern shopping mall. While Benjamin’s gaze in One-Way Street is directed at outdoor objects in plain view, the arcades as a critical leitmotif now compel him in his studies of modernity not only because of his interest in the revolutionary aspects of glass architecture that he discovered in the work of science-fiction writer Paul Scheerbart but also because, in walking through them, one has the feeling of being indoors and outdoors at the same time. This double experience allows Benjamin to call into question the schism between public and private spaces upon which bourgeois ideology so heavily relies, a schism that is an object of critique in One-Way Street and that also is encrypted in the language of a potential revolution in his essay on ‘Surrealism’: ‘to live in a glass house is a revolutionary virtue par excellence. It is also an intoxication, a moral exhibitionism, that we badly need.’14 Because Benjamin conceives of Paris as the capital of the nineteenth century in his Arcades Project, he is able to discern in it the very fibres that constitute modern capitalist culture, with its commodity fetishism, its technophilia, and its political aberrations. He refers to this peculiar conceptual constellation as the ‘sex appeal of the inorganic’. Reading everything from street lighting to iron constructions, from boredom to kitsch object, and from prostitution to world expositions, Benjamin’s genealogy of modernity puts into grammatical relation a multiplicity of images that is barely containable even by an extended concept of Husserl’s phenomenological Lebenswelt, or life world.15 Benjamin, like Bloch, works to find in small and obscure objects the seeds of a radically innovative historiography that expresses philosophical rigour through the aesthetic strategies of pastiche or montage that already had been the strategy of One-Way Street: ‘Method of this project: literary montage. I have nothing to say. Only to show. I will purloin nothing valuable and appropriate no ingenious turns of phrase. But the shards, the trash: I do not wish to inventory them, but simply give them



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their due in the only possible way: by putting them to use.’16 Even though it remained unfinished, Benjamin hoped in his materialist work on the arcades to illuminate a powerful method of cultural analysis that relies on historical specificity, rhetorical awareness and far-reaching political insights. The task of coming to terms with this method, that is, the task of learning to read, in the emphatic sense of the word, is what ultimately Benjamin wished to hand down to us. This task, for him, is always lodged in the relation of the two siblings, philosophy and literature. The elective affinity between philosophy and literature is cast into sharper relief when we recall that, from the beginning, Benjamin conceived of One-Way Street and The Arcades Project as siblings. Since Benjamin began to make tentative plans for the contours of The Arcades Project as early as 1927, there is a significant temporal and conceptual overlap with One-Way Street. As Benjamin writes to Gershom Scholem on 30 January 1928, ‘once I have, one way or another, completed the project on which I currently am working, carefully and provisionally – the highly remarkable and extremely precarious essay Paris Arcades: A Dialectical Fairy Play (Pariser Passagen: Eine dialektische Feerie) – one cycle of production, that of One-Way Street, will have come to a close for me, in much the same way in which the Trauerspiel book concluded the German cycle. The profane motifs of One-Way Street will march past in this project, hellishly intensified.’ In the same missive, Benjamin reassures himself, by assuring his friend, that his work on the Paris Arcades ‘is a project that will just take a few weeks’, not realizing, or perhaps not admitting to himself, that the project would never be completed and that the additional twelve years he devoted to it would occupy the remainder of his life.17 It is as though with one hand, Benjamin were writing to ensure the completion of an incompletable project while, with the other hand, erasing that very promise. This double gesture enacts what One-Way Street ironically posits: ‘To great writers, finished works weigh more lightly than those fragments on which they work throughout their lives. For only the more feeble and distracted take an inimitable pleasure in closure, feeling that their lives have thereby been given back to them. For the genius, each caesura, and the heavy blows of fate, fall like gentle sleep itself into his workshop labor. Around it he draws a charmed circle of fragments.’18 Here, we could say that One-Way Street acts as an explanatory supplement to The Arcades Project even before the latter has been written, a movement that corresponds to Benjamin’s abiding attachment to the demand by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the Austrian poet and early supporter of Benjamin, to ‘read what was never written’. The peculiar sibling relationship between One-Way Street and The Arcades Project figures prominently in Benjamin’s interactions with his other friends. For instance, in a letter dated 10 March 1928, Benjamin thanks Kracauer for his ‘friendly inquiry concerning the Arcades [Passagen]’, suggesting that ‘if it [The Arcades Project] succeeds, One-Way Street will present its intended

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form only in it’.19 Finally, Benjamin elaborates the conceptual and theoretical connection between the two projects in a February 1928 letter to Hofmannsthal: While One-Way Street was being written, I did not really feel that I could write you about it and, now that you have the actual book before you, it is even harder for me to do so. I do, however, have one request that is very close to my heart: that you not see everything striking about the book’s internal and external design as a compromise with the ‘tenor of the age.’ Precisely in terms of its eccentric aspects, the book is, if not a trophy, nonetheless a document of an internal struggle. Its subject matter may be expressed as follows: to grasp timeliness as the reverse of the eternal in history [Aktualität als den Revers des Ewigen in der Geschichte zu erfassen] and to make an impression of this, the side of the medallion hidden from view. Otherwise, the book owes a lot to Paris, being my first attempt to come to terms with this city. I am continuing this effort in a second book called Paris Arcades [Pariser Passagen].20 Benjamin here articulates the methodological stance that ties the literary sentences of his thought-images in One-Way Street to the theoretical sentences of his Arcades Project. His sentences work to make visible the connection between, on the one hand, what is immediate and topical and, on the other, the larger invisible structures of historical cognition. Like the individual stops along his One-Way Street – gas stations, construction sites, and the Mexican Embassy – the coordinates of the arcades – the iron construction, the dream house, and the railroads – provide, through the illumination of this or that striking detail, a glimpse of the totality which these details at once contain and dissimulate. This stance, according to The Arcades Project, allows Benjamin ‘to discover in the analysis of the small individual moment the crystal of the total event’, in an effort ‘to break with vulgar historical naturalism’ and to ‘grasp the construction of history as such’.21 But it is no accident that Benjamin’s German mobilizes the word Revers to describe the methodological stance that connects his two texts. While Revers means ‘reverse side’, as in the backside of a coin, it also conjures a homophonic relationship to the French reverie, the dream-like meditation that often is simultaneously the method and the subject both of One-Way Street, as in Benjamin’s ‘Goethe dream’, and of The Arcades Project, with its sustained reflections on the epistemology of dreams, dream houses, and future dreams in Convolutes K, L, and elsewhere. Both siblings are books of and about dreams, of waking and sleeping, of sleep-walking and of coming to terms with a history that is punctured by the urgent signal of an ‘alarm clock that in each minute rings for sixty seconds’.22 Yet, Revers interweaves the two sibling texts in a more mediated sense as well. Revers not only means ‘reverse side’, it also refers to a lapel or any



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textile segment that is folded back at the front of a garment. If Benjamin here locates the spectral site of historical cognition, a momentary flashing up of what he later will call dialectical images, on the folds and margins of a garment, his language resonates with that of The Arcades Project in which we learn that ‘the eternal, in any case, is far more like the ruffle on a dress [jedenfalls eher eine Rüsche am Kleid ] than some idea’.23 As he so often does in his work, Benjamin thinks of the textile, even the most obscure textile weave, in terms of the Latin textum, the woven basis that gives us the word and concept ‘text’.24 To the extent that the eternal reveals itself at all, it does so only in the marginal textile–textual place of a half-superfluous ornamentation (the lapel, the ruffle) that nevertheless is aesthetically vital and philosophically charged. What reveals itself here is the flowing textual ‘ornament’ that One-Way Street, in a gesture reminiscent of Kracauer’s theory of the ornament, describes as possessing an extraordinary ‘density [Dichtigkeit] of presentation [Darstellung]’ in which ‘the difference between thematic and excursive expositions falls away’.25 That this act of reading the weave of history as a textum is suffused with questions of obligation, responsibility, ethics, and their declaration is encrypted in the juridical dimension of the word Revers. In German, der Revers also denotes a written declaration of a juridical or legally binding kind, an official obligation, as in ‘einen Revers unterschreiben’, to sign a legal declaration or a contract. If Benjamin reads the textum as a figure in which history presents itself, if only fleetingly, he assumes a certain responsibility, an ethical obligation in the reading of that textum. But to whom or what, we might ask, does Benjamin assume responsibility? What is the nature of his obligation? And how might one determine whether or not justice is done to this obligation in the act of reading and writing? These questions, I wish to suggest, for the Benjamin of One-Way Street and The Arcades Project cannot be thought of in isolation from methodological questions of proximity and distance.

THE THREATS OF UMREIßEN In our approach to the question of Abstand, a concept upon which Benjamin wishes us to meditate, we may turn to comments made by the earliest readers of One-Way Street, Benjamin’s friends and collaborators. After all, from the beginning, One-Way Street, the only ‘literary’ work to be published during his lifetime, was a textual meeting place for him and his writerly friends, all of whom would in time compose their own philosophical fragments and literary–philosophical Denkbilder and whose work he later cites at various points in The Arcades Project, especially Adorno, Bloch and Kracauer. These friends all loitered on Benjamin’s One-Way Street. As early as 1926, Benjamin sent a selection of the Denkbilder that were to evolve into One-Way Street to Kracauer, who was working for the influential newspaper

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Frankfurter Zeitung. When Kracauer arranged for a selection of them to be printed in the Frankfurter Zeitung later that year, he invented the title Kleine Illumination for them. This title, Kracauer’s gift to his friend, eventually became, as Illuminationen in German and Illuminations in English, indissociable from Benjamin’s name.26 Indeed, it is on the territory opened up by One-Way Street that these friends find common ground. As Benjamin reports to Kracauer on 15 February 1928, ‘Wiesengrund [that is, Adorno] and I have seen each other quite a bit in a productive way. He has now also met Ernst Bloch’.27 It is thus hardly an accident that Benjamin’s early original title for One-Way Street was Plaquette für Freunde (Booklet for Friends).28 Significantly, Adorno, Bloch, and Kracauer all published major, but often neglected, essays about their friend’s One-Way Street: Adorno shortly after his return to Germany from American exile after World War II, Bloch and Kracauer both in 1928, the year of its publication. We could say that these friends already intuited the question of proximity and distance that Benjamin’s work broaches. In ‘Revue Form in Philosophy’, Bloch, whom Benjamin himself considered his most perspicacious reader, describes how the reader of One-Way Street enters the text’s construction of houses and business establishments joyfully at first but then experiences a bewildering disorientation: ‘Then something starts to bother us, changes right next door, reverses directions yet again. This is how we fare in the first attempt of this kind that Benjamin has undertaken’.29 Likewise, Kracauer’s review which, to Benjamin’s delight, appeared on the latter’s birthday, suggests the importance of positionality for Benjamin’s writerly and philosophical stance. Here, borrowing Benjamin’s own language, Kracauer gestures toward the variegated phenomena that line One-Way Street and that spell Benjamin’s writerly signature: ‘In Benjamin, philosophy regains the determinateness of its content; the philosopher is placed in the “elevated position midway between researcher and artist.” Even if he does not reside within the “realm of the living,” he retrieves from the storehouses of lived life the meanings that were deposited there and that are now awaiting a recipient.’30 Both Bloch and Kracauer sense in Benjamin’s writing an abiding preoccupation with the question of positionality, that is, the notion of a writerly stance in perpetual negotiation with its own proper proximity to, or distance from, that to which it relates. This relentless negotiation is not an external imposition on a conceptual and methodological position that is already in place and secure once and for all; on the contrary, the interminable negotiation of proximity and distance is inscribed, constitutively, in the very force that first propels one to assume a stance. After the reflections by Bloch and Kracauer, it is Adorno’s essay ‘Walter Benjamin’s Einbahnstraße’ that opens perhaps the most suggestive perspectives on a variety of levels. While Benjamin himself referred to One-Way Street variously as his ‘book of aphorisms’ and his ‘Notizenbuch’, or notebook, he always was uneasy with this designation. As he writes to Scholem



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in 1926, ‘I am working only on the notebook that I am reluctant to call a book of aphorisms [das ich nicht gern Aphorismenbuch nenne].’31 While Bloch’s review already had emphasized the book’s preoccupation with mobilizing a philosophy of allegorical images, it was Adorno’s essay on One-Way Street that furnished the more apt designation of Denkbild for the short, lyrical-philosophical snapshots that are brought into a constellation by the montage technique for which the book is indebted to surrealism. One-Way Street, Adorno tells us, ‘is not, as one might at first think, a book of aphorisms but rather a collection of Denkbilder: a later series of short prose pieces by Benjamin, related in their substance to One-Way Street, does in fact bear that name’.32 Emphasizing the imperative to think that becomes visible in the Denken of these Bilder, Adorno points to the ways in which ‘for the most part, reflection is artificially excluded, and the physiognomy of things is given over to the flash – not because Benjamin the philosopher despised reason but rather because it was only through this kind of asceticism that he hoped to restore thought itself at a time when the world was preparing to expel thought from human beings’. The ‘absurd’, Adorno continues, ‘is presented as though it were self-evident, in order to disempower what is selfevident. The piece “Souterrain” [“Cellar”] demonstrates this intention and at the same time, insofar as the form of philosophical robbery permits, gives an outline of it [bezeugt ebenso diese Intention, wie es sie, soweit die Form des philosophischen Überfalls das überhaupt gestattet, einigermaßen umreißt].’33 Adorno’s commentary assumes significance through its performative allusions, such as its mobilization of Benjamin’s ‘philosophical robbery [philosophische Räuberei]’, which is an implicit reference to a line in Benjamin’s Denkbild ‘Hardware’: ‘Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out, armed, and relieve the idle stroller of his conviction.’34 By citing Benjamin only indirectly, that is, by citing him without citing him, Adorno re-enacts the very citational robbery that is at work in Benjamin’s own methodological stance. This practice of citational robbery also is the principle according to which much of the material in The Arcades Project was assembled into so-called convolutes. At the same time, Adorno’s word umreißt playfully mobilizes an important undecidability that inheres in the written form of a small group of certain German two-way prefixes. German prefixes, in general, belong to one of two categories, separable or inseparable, although two-way prefixes can belong to either category. When used separably, the verb introduced by a prefix tends to have a more literal or concrete meaning, while the same verb, when introduced by a prefix that is used inseparably, assumes a more abstract and figurative meaning. The difference between a two-way prefix that is used separably and one that is used inseparably can only be perceived in spoken German, where the compound word is stressed either on the opening prefix or on the verb stem, but not in a written utterance. Thus, Adorno’s word umreißt (diese Intention . . . einigermaßen umreißt) hovers undecidably between two meanings whose

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difference cannot be adjudicated in writing. On the one hand, the word umreißen, when stressed on the second syllable (um’reißen), can mean ‘to give an outline’, the signification that Adorno’s English translator imagined. But, on the other hand, when the stress is placed on the first syllable (‘umreißen), the verb means to tear down, topple, or collapse something. It is no accident that Adorno’s language plays so seriously with these meanings, since they point to a fundamental aporia lodged in Benjamin’s own thought. For Benjamin, the tropological unpredictability of presentation causes the very text that enacts an author’s intention to break with that intention. In so far as the finished work resists a full expression of authorial intention, the ‘work is the death mask of its conception [Das Werk ist die Totenmaske der Konzeption]’.35 Seen in this light, the truth of a work, if there is one, is the truth that accounts for the ways in which the work itself is incommensurate with any authorial intention, an intention that itself is destabilized by this incommensurability. If One-Way Street here insists on a fundamental non-identity between meaning and intention, it takes up a thought that Benjamin had expressed previously in the Trauerspiel book. ‘Truth’, we read there, ‘is the death of intention’.36 Thus, by becoming himself a cunning citational robber of a text that proclaims the method of citational robbery, Adorno mobilizes his sentences to illuminate a constellation of core concerns in his friend’s writings, concerns that set the stage for our consideration of the problem of Abstand in Benjamin’s thought. There can be no reading of the Denkbilder in which Benjamin engages matters of proximity and distance that does not also problematize the act of determining Abstand and its vulnerability to an irreducible difficulty: when one comes close enough to the phenomenon to outline it or to articulate its contours (um’reißen), one always also runs the risk of being too close to it, of threatening to undo and topple it in an act of misunderstanding (‘umreißen).

Proximity and Distance The preoccupation of One-Way Street with questions of proximity and distance comes even more sharply into focus in the Denkbild ‘These Surfaces for Rent’. There, we read: Those who lament the decay of criticism [Kritik] are fools. For its day is long past. Criticism is a matter of the right distance [Kritik ist eine Sache des rechten Abstands]. It was at home in a world where perspectives and prospects counted and where it was still possible to adopt a standpoint. But now objects have much too burningly encroached upon the body of human society. ‘Unself-consciousness’ and ‘the innocent gaze’ have become a lie, perhaps even the wholly naïve expression of a plain lack of purview or jurisdiction [plane Unzuständigkeit].37



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In the reconfigured space of early twentieth-century industrial culture, even the concepts by which that reconfiguration could be measured have changed. If Kritik conventionally relies on pronouncing its judgements from a position of epistemological and ethical security, the phenomena that are its objects have transformed this very scheme – there is no metaphysical ground to stand on, no universalization without a fissure, and no reliable grand narrative that could underwrite this or that critical pronouncement. This inability or lack calls into question the kind of epistemological privilege that, for and since Kant, enables us to tell the difference between genuinely critical and merely dogmatic philosophy. For Benjamin, criticism and critique have met with their own Unzuständigkeit – not because they are incompetent or wrong but because their tools and assumptions do not apply in a locality over which they no longer have jurisdiction. This movement of critical displacement signals for Benjamin the advent of a new critical activity: that of ascertaining den rechten Abstand, the right distance from the phenomenal world which, in its ideological configurations, variously works to dissimulate the concept of distance either as false proximity or as radical absence.38 In an intertextual relay, such a re-evaluation of the concept and experience of distance also informs a little-known Benjaminian fragment, written in 1923 as a sketch for One-Way Street, ‘Thoughts on an Analysis of the Condition of Central Europe’. There, we learn that there can be no community without a fundamental experience of distance. Benjamin warns that the proximity brought about by suffering and social necessity also may cause distance – a condition of possibility for sober and rigorous reflection – to disappear, so ‘that under such circumstances more than just human distance is lost’.39 It is consequently no undiluted pleasure that modern transportation technology, for instance, has caused the existential phenomenon of distance to disappear. As Benjamin writes: On a trip through Germany, it is impossible to achieve the feeling of being on a journey. There are no more journeys in Germany. Trains serve only local traffic. Every half hour, new passengers board, ride along for a while, and make room for new ones. In this way distances, whose covering or conquering [Überwindung] once mediated a certain feeling of joy, crumble, breaking apart into uniform little pieces.40 For Benjamin, the experience of pleasure is predicated upon distance. While this pleasure is not simply located in distance itself, it does reside in the possibilities that distance opens up. That is to say, in order for distances to be traversed or, as Benjamin says, ‘conquered’, distance first must exist. There can be no conquering or transgression without the perpetual impetus of something to be conquered or transgressed. Through the logic of supplementarity, the continued condition of possibility for something to be

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undone or surpassed is firmly lodged in what is to be undone or surpassed. The movement of undoing or surpassing thus is most fully itself when its fundamental allegiance to that from which it attempts to separate itself, that in whose terms it is measured, remains visible, however faintly, in the series of traces that traverse it. The concerns with proximity and distance in the fragment on Europe and in One-Way Street are explicitly staged in the opening sentences of his 1936 essay ‘The Storyteller’. We could say that this essay connects One-Way Street with The Arcades Project in its problematization of the stance that the reflecting subject must assume as it gives experience and reflection over to language. Taking up his trope of the rechten Abstand from One-Way Street, Benjamin tells us: The storyteller – as familiar as his name may sound to us [so vertraut uns der Name klingt] – is, in his living effectiveness, by no means fully present to us [keineswegs durchaus gegenwärtig]. He is something that already is distant from us and that is distancing itself even further [Er ist uns etwas bereits Entferntes und weiter noch sich Entfernendes]. To present someone like Leskov as a storyteller does not mean bringing him closer to us but, rather, increasing our distance to him [heißt nicht, ihn uns näher bringen, heißt vielmehr den Abstand zu ihm vergrößern]. Viewed from a certain distance [Aus einer gewissen Entfernung betrachtet], the great, simple outlines which define the storyteller win out in him. Better said, they come into view through him [sie treten an ihm in Erscheinung] just as in a rock a human head or an animal’s body may appear to the observer at the proper distance and the correct angle of vision [wie in einem Felsen für den Beschauer, der den rechten Abstand hat und den richtigen Blickwinkel, ein Menschenhaupt oder ein Tierleib erscheinen mag]. This distance and this angle of vision are prescribed for us by an experience for which we have occasion on an almost daily basis [Diesen Abstand und diesen Blickwinkel schreibt uns die Erfahrung vor, zu der wir fast täglich Gelegenheit haben]. It tells us that the art of storytelling is coming to an end.41 In Benjamin’s meditation on proximity and distance, what is most familiar to us – a concept such as the storyteller, for instance – actually is not present to us, or only is familiar to us in its distance and continued distancing. Here, we are closest to it (vertraut sein) when it is removed from us, when it is present but not presently here with us (uns keineswegs gegenwärtig). This concept already is at a distance from us (bereits Entferntes) but, in its distance, becomes visible as that which continues to distance itself from us (weiter noch sich Entfernendes), so that its very distance is what makes its movement and behaviour visible to the one from whom it departs. Were it closer to us, we might not be able to comprehend the reality of its withdrawal from us: in this proximity, it nevertheless could be withdrawing



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from us, but without our knowing it. This is why, for Benjamin, to present (darstellen) something as something else, the way that Leskov, for instance, is presented as a storyteller, means, not to decrease, but to increase our distance from what is to be presented. Only by increasing our distance to what is to be presented can we begin to fathom the truth of that idea or object, that is, the way in which it is en route away from us. This procedure asks that we remain close to the presented object or idea by departing from it. But one runs the risk of entirely losing from sight what is to be presented. If it is too close, then at the moment in which one wishes to trace its outline (um’reißen), one inadvertently topples it (‘umreißen) and understands nothing. If one is too far removed from the object or idea in the moment of its presentation (um’reißen), the contours that one’s outline assume will be too coarse and too inexact, so that one’s act of um’reißen once again will result in the destructive forces of ‘umreißen. From either perspective, one fails to perceive the essential traits that the idea or object exhibits. These traits only will be brought into focus ‘at a certain distance [einer gewissen Entfernung]’. Once this gewisse Entfernung or proper distance – the distance that holds out the promise of hermeneutic certainty – has been assumed, we may, as Benjamin tells us, perceive a human head or an animal’s body in the rock formation. This appearance is predicated upon the rechten Abstand and the richtigen Blickwinkel, two concepts with which we are confronted almost daily and which our experience ‘prescribes’ for us, writes for us ahead of time – schreibt uns die Erfahrung vor – in a gesture that renders our action of perceiving a form of delayed action or retroactivity (the Freudian Nachträglichkeit that always arrives after fact) in response to a writing that already is in place. A Vorschrift is not only a regulation, rule or law, but also a ‘pre-scription’ or ‘pre-writing’, a ‘pre-text’ that is already written and in place at the outset of any act of writing or speaking. As Jacques Derrida reminds us with regard to the arche-writing that is always already in place – that is, the general ‘text’ of a culture or language into which one is born – writing precedes speech. Yet what would be the rechte Abstand, the correct distance, and the richtige Blickwinkel, the proper perspective, of which Benjamin writes? Are the criteria for what would constitute such coordinates to be found within the object or idea itself or must they be administered by an external system of reading and understanding? In the first case, would one not already have had to assume the rechte Abstand in order to extract from the object or idea the coordinates of the position one should assume in relation to it? In the second case, would the act of administering an external system of criteria not already constitute an act of hermeneutic violence that could not possibly do justice to the presentational singularity that a certain object or idea demands? Certainly, such an external imposition would violate a core theoretical principle of The Arcades Project, whose ‘methodological inventiveness’, as Werner Hamacher reminds us, cannot be thought in isolation

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from ‘its demand that history writing be reinvented for every topic and for every occasion’.42 The idea that neither option relents in its opposition to the writer’s efforts is a central premise of Benjamin’s thinking. From this perspective, we could even say that all of Benjamin’s mature work meditates obsessively on the rechten Abstand in a plurality of contexts and modulations: from his readings of Kafka, Proust, and Brecht to his theory of photography, from his concept (or non-concept) of translation and his notion of reproducibility to his philosophy of the angel of history. The abiding difficulty of these concerns is brought into sharp relief in Benjamin’s aporetic examples of finding the rechten Abstand and the richtigen Blickwinkel. Thus, on the one hand, it is only through having found the right distance and the correct angle of vision that the human head and the animal body become visible to us in the rock formation. Only here do they become a proper ‘text’ to be read at all. On the other hand, Benjamin implicitly problematizes this scene of recognition when he decides not to tell us whether the shapes of the human head and the animal body actually exist – carved into the rock by artisans or ancient natives, for instance. In this refusal to specify whether obtaining the correct distance and the proper angle of vision actually does give rise to the recognition of an empirical ‘text’ or whether it only serves to create the illusion that this text is present when it actually is not, Benjamin destabilizes the criteria by which we could differentiate between lucid perception and delusion, insight and blindness, hermeneutic success and its failure. Because the language of Benjamin’s example refuses to illustrate decisively what it purports to depict on the surface, it works to strengthen the point that it seeks to make; illustrating in its own failure the way in which it fails to illustrate and exemplifying the ways in which it fails to exemplify, it succeeds in the moment of its failure. Failing successfully, it hovers once again between um’reißen and ‘umreißen – in an exemplary fashion. If the movement of this successful failure gives us Abstand and Blickwinkel to think of as concepts in which triumph cannot be thought of in isolation from defeat and in which correctness is infected by its other, then Benjamin can been seen to view the phenomena, in relation to which these concerns were first formulated, as also gradually becoming affected by them. Here, the aporias of method are tied to the aporias of the phenomenon itself. This is why Benjamin has the art of storytelling, the very phenomenon that gave rise to his methodological concerns of Abstand and Blickwinkel, disappear: daß es mit der Kunst des Erzählens zu Ende geht. What experience pre-scribes for us, the letters that are spelled out in the arche-text that awaits us as the methodologically encumbered latecomers, is the writing of the disappearance of the phenomenon. What we finally read in the aporia of the rechten Abstand is the arche-text proclaiming that the phenomenon is always already disappearing. Neither that it already has disappeared nor that it will disappear in the future but rather that the process of its disappearing is under



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way – now. Our act of reading, together with our reflections on its methods, therefore parallels the phenomenon’s act of disappearing. What we are given to read are always the traces of a specific act of withdrawal. This obsession with the liminal act of disappearing is also why, in the first sketches for The Arcades Project, the Paris Arcades I, begun in mid-1927 that overlap with One-Way Street, Benjamin records his fundamental methodological interest in the appearance of things in the moment when they are about to disappear, that is, ‘things in the moment of the “being-no-longer” [Dinge im Augenblick des Nicht-mehr-seins]. Arcades are such monuments of being-no-longer . . . And nothing of them lasts except the name: passages . . . In the inmost recesses of these names the tearing down or the toppling is working [Im Innersten dieser Namen arbeitet der Umsturz]’.43 Benjamin’s aporetic Umsturz, the violent yet barely visible undoing that is inscribed in the very heart of the phenomenon, here convenes with the logic of Adorno’s undecidable umreißen. What makes these phenomena what they are is also the kernel of their undoing, the Sturz or fall, the Umsturz or Umriß of their stance. But they have not quite fallen yet – and reading them means catching them in the act of falling, in their perpetual toppling out of view. Dinge im Augenblick des Nicht-mehr-seins: in the wider orbit of Benjamin’s writing, these ghostly phenomena not only assume anthropomorphizing names such as storyteller, translator, flâneur, prostitute, or collector, they also assume the more ephemeral names of aura, awakening, boredom, conspiracy, idleness, messianism, translation, progress, and reproducibility.

Distance and Alterity One of the guises assumed by the search for the right Abstand and Blickwinkel in The Arcades Project is the question of the movement of the image, the Bild. What in One-Way Street is mobilized as the Denkbild, in The Arcades Project assumes the name ‘dialectical image’ (dialektisches Bild ). The dialectical image measures distance and proximity, angle of vision and perspective, in the traces of its own spatio-temporal positionality. As one of Benjamin’s semi-concepts, intuitions that in their very movement resist a totalizing and foreclosing definition, the dialectical image is lodged in the paradox that, on the one hand, all images must ‘freeze’ and arrest movement in order to become legible while, on the other, dialectics, in both the ancient sense of continuous disputation and in the modern Hegelian sense, by definition can never be frozen or brought to a complete standstill.44 In this context, the dialectical image reconfigures the ways in which the image is both articulated and traversed by the past and the present. ‘It is not’, Benjamin writes, ‘that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other

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words, image is dialectics at a standstill’. He argues that ‘while the relation of the present to the past is a purely temporal, continuous one, the relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical: is not progression but image, leaplike or crack-like [sprunghaft]. – Only dialectical images are genuine images (that is, not archaic); and the place where one encounters them is language. Awakening.’45 In Benjamin’s thinking, the dialectical image is a name for the articulation of a relational stance. Rather than imparting the quality of a mimetic image to what reveals itself when we simply assume that the present casts its light on the past or when the past illuminates the present, the dialectical image constitutes the scene, space and form of a certain temporal rupture in which time and space are out of joint. This out-of-jointness is the Sprunghaftigkeit, possessing both the qualities of leaps and cracks that characterize our relation to the past, the present and the future, a relation that is perpetually at odds with itself. Benjamin’s word sprunghaft also deserves special attention here because it illustrates more generally how his concepts are never simply themselves. As Adorno reminds us, ‘in contrast to all other philosophers . . . Benjamin’s thinking, as paradoxical as it may sound, was not one that took place in concepts . . . He unlocked what could not be unlocked as though with a magic key.’46 That Benjamin thinks conceptually without concepts means, according to Adorno, that in his work ‘thought is meant to acquire the density of experience without losing any of its rigor’.47 As a consequence of this Sprunghaftigkeit, the thinking of any concept, for Benjamin, requires experiential density and analytic rigour. In one of the Benjaminian Denkbilder later assembled in book form by his editors in the collection by that name, he hints at the theoretical assumptions that inform this stance. There, he thematizes the moment of cognition (Erkenntnis) as such. In the Denkbild ‘Secret Signs’ that belongs to the constellation ‘Short Shadows II’, Benjamin, referring to Alfred Schuler, writes: ‘A word of Schuler’s has been preserved for us. Every cognition [Erkenntnis], he said, contains a dash of nonsense, just as in ancient carpet patterns or ornamental friezes it was possible to find somewhere or other a minute deviation from the regular pattern.’ Benjamin continues: ‘In other words, what is decisive is not the progression from one cognition to the next, but the leap or crack [Sprung] inherent in any cognition itself. This is the inconspicuous mark of authenticity which distinguishes it from every kind of standard product that has been produced according to a scheme.’48 For Benjamin, what is significant about thinking is not its teleological progression from one certain fact of knowledge to the next, the progressive movement of covering the terrain that is to be fully thought, but rather an appreciation of the leap or crack, the blind spot without which conceptual thinking cannot occur. It is no accident that Benjamin chooses the German word Erkenntnis, or cognition, here, because, unlike mere Wissen (knowledge) Erkenntnis signifies the moment and process of attempting to translate perceptual phenomena into



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the security of interpreted knowledge. But his thinking focuses on the ways in which the process of cognition depends in its very formation on what has not yet been fully understood. If full understanding of a phenomenon had already occurred, there would be no more process of active reading or interpretive cognition, but only the treacherous stasis of allegedly secure knowledge. Cognition, and the understanding that it promises, is thus fully itself only when non-cognition and non-understanding still reside within it. Put another way, cognition only can be what it is when it actively encounters and openly engages its abiding blind spots. These blind spots – Benjamin’s leaps or cracks – constitute the defective but necessary architecture of all his concepts. And it is precisely in their ‘deviance’ or aberration that these blind spots become authentic, an authenticity that cannot be thought of apart from their implied failure as concepts. Understood from this perspective, Benjamin’s notion of the dialectical image, along with his considerations of Abstand and Blickwinkel, conform to the movement that is inextricably intertwined with the cracks and fissures that traverse the ghostly scene of their conceptual appearance. The specific temporal conceptualization that Benjamin has in mind for the dialectical image becomes more legible when we put it into syntactical relation with a parallel passage from his 1931 essay ‘Literary History and Literary Scholarship’. Disenchanted with the state of the German academy and especially with the conservative models of reading that it propagates, Benjamin proposed a model of reading historically that breaks with received academic wisdom and that is applicable not only to literary works but also to cultural objects and social texts in the widest sense: ‘For with this the work transforms itself inwardly into a microcosm, or indeed a microeon. What is at stake is not to portray literary works in the context of their time, but to give over to presentation the time that perceives them – our time – in the time during which they arose. It is this that makes literature into an organon of history; to achieve this, and not to reduce literature to the material of history, is the task of literary history.’49 It is easy to misread Benjamin’s movement. Our time, he argues, comes to presentation only in what it is not, that is, in the critical reading of a time that precedes it.50 But, for Benjamin, reading historically does not simply mean arranging works in their own chronological configuration and to locate in them, in a mimetic arrest, the material content necessary for the confirmation of what one already assumes to be true of a particular historical moment. Nor does it mean retroactively imposing on texts of the past the concerns and issues of the later age in which they are read. Rather, to read historically in this way means to decipher within the historicity of a text the obscure constellations that inform our own time without being reducible to it. The condition of possibility for this undertaking is the disruption of history: both past and present are torn from their immediate contexts or, as in Benjamin’s later ‘Theses on History’, ‘exploded’ out of their putative teleology. In this double

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rupture, the historicity of a text may become legible only subsequent to its removal from its historical embeddedness; and the present in turn can only be approached when it is contemplated through the prism of a historical time that is not its own. Thus, both past and present must first disown what is properly theirs in order to become themselves. Only subsequent to such renunciation of self-identity can they become what they are – and even then only in and as an other. For Benjamin, the space of this multiple disjunction names the historicity and spatiality of the act of reading. We could say that only here, in the leap- or crack-like (sprunghafte) otherness of reading, are the proper Abstand and Blickwinkel found. They are found precisely when the displacement of various temporal categories enables them to recognize themselves in and as an other. What these categorical markers recognize in their other – the present in the past and the past in the present – is the way in which they always already are an other, traversed by an otherness that renders their identities other, even when no other ‘other’ is present. The dialectical image, as something sprunghaft, thus makes visible the fundamental encounter, in the other, with an otherness that always already speaks through and as the self. This dialectical image names the relation of phenomena in time and space that such an encounter facilitates. Abstand and Blickwinkel are articulated by this displaced relation to the other and even to otherness itself. The Arcades Project further elaborates the relation of the dialectical image to history as it emerges in the scene of reading. As Benjamin tells us: What distinguishes images from the ‘essences’ of phenomenology is their historical index. (Heidegger seeks in vain to rescue history for phenomenology abstractly through ‘historicity’.) These images are to be thought of entirely apart from the categories of the ‘human sciences,’ from so-called habitus, from style, and the like. 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. And, indeed, this acceding ‘to legibility’ constitutes a specific critical point in the movement at their interior. Every present day is determined by the images that are synchronic with it: each ‘now’ is the now of a particular recognizability. In it, truth is charged to the bursting point with time. (This point of explosion, and nothing else is the death of the intentio, which thus coincides with the birth of authentic historical time, the time of truth.) It is not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words: image is dialectics at a standstill. For while the relation of the present to the past is purely temporal, the relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical: not temporal in nature but figural [bildlich]. Only dialectical images are genuinely historical – that is, not archaic – images. The image that is



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read – which is to say, the image in the now of its recognizability – bears to the highest degree the imprint of that critical, dangerous moment that lies at the ground of all reading [den Stempel des kritischen, gefährlichen Momentes, welcher allem Lesen zugrunde liegt].51 Amplifying his discussion of the way in which the past and the present interact with each other in the Abstand and Blickwinkel provided by a certain displacement, Benjamin here specifies what he calls the ‘historical index’ of this displacement. Heidegger’s attempt, in Being and Time, to ‘point to temporality [Zeitlichkeit] as the meaning of the Being of that entity which we call “Dasein”’52 relies on a phenomenon, temporality, that ‘has the unity of a future which makes present in the process of having been’.53 According to Heidegger, ‘only in so far as Dasein has the definite character of temporality, is the authentic potentiality-for-Being-a-whole of anticipatory resoluteness . . . made possible for Dasein itself. Temporality reveals itself as the meaning of authenic care.’54 Yet while Heidegger’s attempt, in Benjamin’s reading, to articulate through temporality a concept of history for the sake of a phenomenological thinking that often is not fully attuned to the historicity of its phenomena and that of its own methodological assumptions, Benjamin wishes to differentiate his understanding of dialectical images from that gesture. Extending the trope of ‘the death of intention’ from the Trauerspiel study through One-Way Street to The Arcades Project, he emphasizes the historical chargedness not of temporality but of the moment or event of its interruption. He names the event of this interruption ‘dialectics at a standstill’, a designation that paradoxically perpetuates the movement of the dialectic and the cessation of that movement all at once. In so doing Benjamin displaces the relation of the present to the past – a temporal relation – onto the relation between the now and the what-has-been in a way that allows him to call it no longer temporal but figural or figurative (bildlich). To the extent that the relationship articulated by this dialectical image is figurative, it also enters a spatial dimension. The image of history that it yields is most authentic when it departs from the temporal. These figurative and spatial dimensions, even when employed in the articulation of a temporal one, hinge on the problem of Abstand and Blickwinkel, on finding the correct relation among the phenomena. But because this relation is bildlich to the core – figurative through and through – it can only be encountered in and as language (und der Ort, an dem man sie antrifft, ist die Sprache). What we awaken to is language itself. But this encounter with the dialectical image in language, the dialectical image in whose flashes a relation that was previously thought to be temporal becomes legible in the spatial and figurative dimensions, cannot escape the treacherous act of reading itself. It is no accident that Benjamin speaks of a ‘critical, dangerous moment’ that is the unavoidably shaky and fissured ground upon which all reading is based. This reading of what is figurative,

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bildlich, may lead one astray, and it may cause one to follow detours when one wishes to find a direct path to the proper Abstand and Blickwinkel. This is why, for Benjamin, the reading to which his method gives rise, the reading that sets out to establish the correct distance and perspective, is traversed by the ever present prospect of an aberration. This aberration unfolds on the level of both the concept and the signifier. Thus, in an often neglected methodological reflection in The Arcades Project, Benjamin tells us: Comparison of other people’s attempts to the undertaking of a sea voyage in which the ships are drawn off course by the magnetic North Pole. To find this North Pole. What for others are aberrations, for me are the data that determine my course [Was für die anderen Abweichungen sind, das sind für mich die Daten, die meinen Kurs bestimmen]. – On the differentials of time which, for others, disturb the ‘great lines’ of an inquiry, I base my calculation.55 If Benjamin, in language that echoes the many instances of nautical rhetoric throughout The Arcades Project, causes his course to deviate from that of others in his welcoming of aberrations (Abweichungen) not merely as a threat to legibility but also as a constitutive moment of the methodological principle, then the results of the attempt to find the right Abstand and Blickwinkel may be as unpredictable as the sea itself. What sort of an Abweichung or aberration might we imagine is at stake here?

The C(o)urse of Aberration I would like to suggest that an exemplary moment in a text by Paul de Man, a reader of Benjamin’s who shares the latter’s concerns with figural (bildliche) language, helps us to shed light on this question. In ‘Semiology and Rhetoric’, de Man notoriously illustrates the tension between grammar and rhetoric by referring to the seemingly aporetic reply that the television character Archie Bunker offers to his wife’s question as to whether he wishes her to lace his bowling shoes over or under: ‘What’s the difference?’ It is impossible to tell whether Archie Bunker actually hopes to learn the difference between the two ways of tying one’s shoes or whether he thinks that there is no value in even considering this question. De Man concludes that the ‘grammatical model of the question becomes rhetorical not when we have, on the one hand, a literal meaning and on the other hand a figural meaning, but when it is impossible to decide by grammatical or other linguistic devices which of the two meanings (that can be entirely incompatible) prevails’. De Man continues: ‘Rhetoric radically suspends logic and opens up vertiginous possibilities of referential aberration. And although it would perhaps be somewhat more remote from common usage, I would not



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hesitate to equate the rhetorical, figural potential of language with literature itself.’56 According to de Man’s model, the turnover of the grammatical mode into the rhetorical mode does not simply occur when we have two possible meanings side by side, a figural and a literal meaning, unmediated and in isolation from one another. That is to say, the presence of more than one meaning, as these meanings are determined by various levels of concreteness or abstractness, does not yet constitute sufficient cause for the switch from grammar to rhetoric. Rather, that switch occurs only when it is impossible to ascertain which meaning is dominant or manifest in this or that situation. De Man’s model thus is based not on a presence, but on an absence: not on the mere presence of multiple meanings but on the absence of criteria that would enable the reader to distinguish among the meanings that are present. The argument is not that this absence can reliably be diagnosed and then designated as literature but rather that the potential of the appearance of this absence of decidability, as a permanent threat, whether or not it is actualized, cannot be separated from the figural workings of the literary text, even from a notion of the more extended cultural and political ‘text’ as, in some sense, literary. De Man thinks of these movements as being mediated by ‘vertiginous possibilities’, even as the logic of a ‘referential aberration’. But an interesting performative slippage occurs in de Man’s language. This slippage is registered by the comma in his phrase ‘the rhetorical, figural potentiality of language’. De Man sets out to construct a model that aims to show when the transformation from grammar into rhetoric does and does not occur. He argues that this transformation does not simply occur when literal and figural meanings of a statement co-exist. It does occur, he argues, when the prevailing meaning (literal or figural) cannot be discerned. But the comma in de Man’s phrase seems to be of an enumerative or extending nature, assigning a status of equality to the terms ‘rhetorical’ and ‘figural’ when the category of the ‘figural’ had previously been used, in opposition to the literal, to explain the occurrence of the ‘rhetorical’ in the first place. The comma that de Man inserts between these two words thus works to equate the category with the terms in which another category is to be explained. This movement itself enacts the very point that de Man is trying to make in as far as it radicalizes, by gesturing in the direction of a tautological threat, the ‘vertiginous possibilities of referential aberration’. After all, if even the category of the rhetorical has been tacitly collapsed with one of the categories necessary to explain it, then the undecidability of the aberration that de Man diagnoses can be extended to include rhetoric itself: the problem is not just that we cannot decide between the literal and the figurative, but that we cannot tell the difference between rhetoric and what is not rhetoric, perhaps even grammar itself. The performative nature of de Man’s enigmatic comma thus enacts the trajectory of his own argumentation – it is not simply an uninteresting mistake, an oversight that easily could be rectified by taking recourse to some stable system of correctness, such as the code of a punctuation system

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from which this sentence could be said to be a mere clerical or inadvertent aberration. Rather, it is a philosophically interesting error to the extent that the ‘aberration’ that it performs cannot easily be corrected by a truth administered by this or that system.57 We could say that this not insignificant error performs something of the very rhetorical aberration that it itself diagnoses. I clarify de Man’s radical aberration here because it helps us to understand the stakes of Benjamin’s own method of radical aberration in rhetorical terms. If The Arcades Project programmatically endorses aberration as its principle, then its methodology, if it has one, unfolds on the far side of any programme thought to be capable of containing textual aberration. Indeed, it invites aberration as both a threat and as a promise. The presence of aberration will not permit the dialectical image to be yoked to authorial intentionality of any kind, nor will it tolerate the delusional comforts of a mimetic or analogous model of political, historical or cultural presentation. Like de Man’s radical aberration, Benjamin’s aberration is concerned with doing justice to the textual nature of the phenomena that are encountered ‘on the dangerous, critical ground’ that underlies all reading. Such an aberration thus would seek its truth in the figurative elsewhere – and it is only there that the questions of Abstand and Blickwinkel meet with the uncanny rigour of their articulation. Thus, what connects the ways in which Abstand and Blickwinkel are theorized in The Arcades Project meets with the ways in which truth itself is mobilized in its literary sibling, One-Way Street, as necessary aberrations from what presents itself. As we read in the thought-image ‘Technical Aid’: Nothing is more miserable than a truth expressed as it was thought. Committed to writing in such a case, it is not even a bad photograph. And the truth refuses (like a child or a woman who does not love us), facing the lens of writing while we crouch under the black cloth, to keep still and look amiable. Truth wants to be startled abruptly, at one stroke, from her self-immersion, whether by uproar, music, or cries for help. Who could count the alarm signals with which the inner world of the true writer is equipped? And to ‘write’ is nothing other than to set them into motion.58 For Benjamin, then, truth, at least the truth that is expressed in textual phenomena such as writing and images, can only become what it is as an aberration from itself. The truth of the truth is one that, in its expression, departs from any mimetic model. This kind of truth resists us, will never fully yield itself to us. It is something that is on its way to becoming something else, that is, is becoming an aberration. We could say that for Benjamin such an aberration is what writing felicitously sets into motion. The concept of truth as aberration in writing that is poeticized in One-Way



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Street reappears in The Arcades Project as what escapes: ‘“The truth will not run away from us,” reads one of Keller’s epigrams. With this, the concept of truth with which these presentations break is formulated.’59 But this textual model of aberration does not guarantee anything, not even the aberration itself – for aberration does not always occur, and even when it does, it may not always be the same kind of aberration. For Benjamin, the rechte Abstand and the richtige Blickwinkel are knowable precisely in that moment, mediated by the Denkbild and the dialectical image, when one cannot distinguish between an aberration and a non-aberration and when one has taken leave of the delusional belief that it could be possible to decide once and for all whether an aberration or a non-aberration signals a triumph or a failure. The ‘correct’ angle of vision that would allow us to cast an allegorical gaze on the right distance from the phenomenological world thus is to be found in aberration itself. We recall how Benjamin tells us that what ‘for others are aberrations, for me are the data that determine my course’. The infinite deferral of a judgement as to whether these aberrations are the straight line of a one-way street or the curvy passageways of the arcades – this deferral also names Benjamin’s ethico-political hope. Abstand here cannot be thought in isolation from Anstand, the ethos and practice of decency. Abstand and Anstand: these two siblings together name the thinkability of Benjamin’s aberration, an aberration from any single meaning that could be imposed upon the very relationship between Abstand and Anstand. This aberration pivots on the difference of one consonant. We could say that Benjamin’s signature appears in the space in which the Anstand of any Abstand can begin to be thought as the Abstand from the Anstand that would foreclose the movement of aberration in the form of an impossible possibility. It is only in this form that Benjamin might have nothing more to which to take exception (zu beanstanden). To realize that ‘the core of Benjamin’s philosophy’, as Adorno claims, is traversed by ‘the paradox of the impossible possibility’ is to grasp that Benjamin ‘overcame the dream without betraying it and making himself an accomplice in that on which the philosophers have always agreed: that it shall not be’. The paradox of the impossible possibility: it signals Benjamin’s theoretical and political interests, and it touches all of his concepts and semi-concepts. For readers of Benjamin such as Adorno, a mode of writing like the one performed ‘in One-Way Street and that marked everything he ever wrote, originates in that paradox’. Indeed, it ‘was nothing other than the explication and elucidation of this paradox, with the only means which philosophy has at its disposal, concepts, that drove Benjamin to immerse himself without reserve in the world of multiplicity’.60 The engagement with Abstand and Blickwinkel as forms of aberration in Benjamin’s literary and philosophical sibling-texts can be read as a meditation on an impossible possibility and on the political concerns that, as a question of decency, or Anstand, lodge this impossible possibility in the variegated linguistic

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movements of his signature. This impossible possibility, which, like Proust’s writing under Benjamin’s gaze, ‘is assigned a place in the heart of the impossible’, names the ethico-political commitment that resists any premature closure of meaning and that retains its openness to a radical otherness.61 This is why Benjamin can write to Scholem one year after Hitler’s seizure of power, ‘I take as my starting point the small, nonsensical hope’.62 The cruel fate that Benjamin suffered at the hands of the Nazis just six years after writing this sentence should not deter his readers from reading, again and again, the innumerable aberrations without which the dream of the impossible possibility would hardly be dreamable. After all, for Benjamin, this dream of the impossible possibility and the possible impossibility, that is, the multiple and unacknowledged possibilities still lodged within impossibility itself, will always offer the promise and the programme of a coming philosophy.

8 ‘THE COLPORTAGE PHENOMENON OF SPACE’ AND THE PLACE OF MONTAGE IN The Arcades Project BRIGID DOHERTY

GESTEIGERTE ANSCHAULICHKEIT What did Walter Benjamin mean when he described the ‘method’ of his Arcades Project as ‘literary montage’? ‘I needn’t say anything, merely show’, he wrote. ‘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’.1 What did Benjamin intend when he asked, ‘in what way is it possible to conjoin a heightened perceptibility or vividness (gesteigerte Anschaulichkeit) to the realization of the Marxist method?’ and when he then answered, ‘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. And, therefore, to break with vulgar historical materialism. To grasp the construction of history as such. In the structure of commentary’ (N2,6). This essay emerges from my attempts to comprehend, and to respond to, those questions. I have little to say in what follows about what Benjamin may have meant by ‘Marxist method’. Instead I approach that question as it were from the other side, by trying to shed light on the ‘first stage’ of Benjamin’s proposed ‘undertaking’, that is, his wish to ‘carry over the principle of montage into history’. In addition to The Arcades Project I turn in this essay to a number of texts by Benjamin that, read together, situate montage within a constellation of concepts concerning experiences of intoxication (Rausch), embodiment, and the effects of works of art.2 I am hardly the first to take seriously Benjamin’s promulgation of montage as the method of The Arcades Project.3 What I hope now to contribute to the commentary on the topic is an account, or at

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least the beginnings of an account, of the place of montage in The Arcades Project that will help in particular to clarify the relationship of Benjamin’s experiment in writing history to his understanding of the situation, or the fate, of the work of art in modernity. It is worth noting that my remarks in this context do not touch on a number of works by Benjamin that I take nonetheless to be central to any understanding of what he meant by montage (to name only the most prominent among them, One-Way Street, ‘Surrealism’, Berlin Childhood Around 1900 and ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility’, the latter an essay to which I refer only briefly below). What follows, then, is partial; it is also speculative, especially with regard to how Benjamin attempts to establish a connection between montage and the work of the Belgian artist Antoine Wiertz (1806–65), whom he variously describes as an ungeschlachter Ideenmaler (ungainly painter of ideas) and der Maler der Passagen (the painter of the arcades) (GS 3:505; PW 1013). Still more speculative than my analysis of Benjamin’s reflections on Wiertz are my claims concerning what Benjamin may have had in mind when he constructed the figures that deliver, in The Arcades Project and elsewhere, what he calls das Kolportagephänomen des Raumes (the colportage phenomenon of the room, or, more generally, of space), a phenomenon he connects, on the one hand, to nineteenth-century painting, and, on the other hand, to photomontage practices of the 1920s and 1930s. According to Benjamin, in the historical present of his composition of The Arcades Project, intoxication, specifically Haschisch-Rausch, establishes the conditions of possibility for an experience of that phenomenon, and montage emerges as a literary and pictorial medium with the potential variously to formalize and to materialize aspects of that experience and its relation to history, in particular the history of the nineteenth century and what Benjamin describes as the ‘nihilism [that] is the innermost core of bourgeois coziness’, a nihilism that he understands to have taken shape in exemplary fashion in the décor of the period’s domestic interiors (I2,6).

AUF TRAUM MÖBLIERT The sixth entry in Convolute I of The Arcades Project opens with a line borrowed from Benjamin’s friend Franz Hessel that speaks of a ‘dreamy epoch of bad taste’ (I1,6). Given the references among the convolute’s preceding five entries to French furniture design circa 1830, to Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Philosophy of Furniture’ (1840), and to efforts to protect the wallpaper of Parisian drawing-rooms from the effects of gaslight employed in modern buildings, the reader is bound to recognize the epoch in question as the nineteenth century, the subject of The Arcades Project as a whole, for which Benjamin in 1935 proposed the title ‘Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth



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Century’. ‘Yes’, he elaborates, ‘this epoch was wholly adapted to the dream, was furnished in dreams. The alternation in styles – Gothic, Persian, Renaissance, and so on – meant that: over the interior of the middle-class dining room spreads a banquet hall of Cesare Borgia, out of the boudoir of the lady of the house a Gothic chapel arises, the master’s study, iridescent, turns into the chamber of a Persian prince’ (I1,6). Thus Benjamin conjures the nineteenth century’s shifts from one style of domestic interior décor to another as apparitions that loom, compressed and evanescent like the scenography of a dream in which chronological sequence is replaced by simultaneity – ‘a past become space’ (raumgewordene Vergangenheit), to borrow the phrase he used to describe those few Parisian arcades still in existence when he began work on The Arcades Project in 1927 (PW 1041; AP 871). In I1,6, interiors do not so much change over time from Renaissance to Gothic to Persian décor as styles hover or linger room-by-room, nonsynchronously, as if dreamily, and altogether in bad taste. To this juxtaposition of period rooms corresponds a medium of visual representation that summons the moment of Benjamin’s writing and establishes that moment’s relation to the nineteenth century: ‘The photomontage that fixes such images for us corresponds to the most primitive form of perception belonging to these generations. Only gradually have the images among which they lived detached themselves and settled on signs, labels, posters, as the figures of advertising’ (I1,6; emphasis mine). We cannot see the photomontage that ‘fixes’ (fixiert) the ‘images’ (Bilder) Benjamin describes. Instead we are made to imagine, via the text’s vivid, and sometimes comic, juxtapositions of words and its allusion to the fixing of photographic images, a constellation of montages that show the Renaissance Festsaal of Cesare Borgia (model statesman of Machiavelli’s The Prince) hovering over a bürgerliches Speisezimmer, a gotische Kapelle rising above the Boudoir of a Hausfrau, and the Arbeitszimmer of a Hausherr changing into the Gemach of a Persian prince. Like the socalled ‘trick-films’ of the early cinema, that grouping depends upon effects of montage as much within the individual frames of the images as at the intervals between them.4 Hence for Benjamin, the ‘most primitive form of perception’ (primitivste Anschauungsform) of those who dwelt in nineteenthcentury interiors anticipated or prefigured, precisely in its primitiveness – that is to say as if in the nontechnological medium of the dream or, better, in the near mediumlessness of the dream, produced without an apparatus in our embodied minds – the effects of the technological medium of motion pictures, effects that Benjamin here ‘fixes’ or brings to a standstill as ‘photomontage’. However, the images that figure the nineteenth century as ‘furnished in [or according to] dreams’ (auf Traum möbliert), and that prefigure the effects of film, take shape not in a picture but in Benjamin’s own writing, as if that writing was a medium – like photomontage – in which images could

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be juxtaposed and fixed, as if the pages of The Arcades Project were surfaces – like signs, labels, posters – on which the images of the previous century were meant, dialectically, first to ‘settle’ (sich niederschlagen) and then to be read. As noted above, in Convolute N Benjamin invokes montage in connection with his effort to produce a heightened perceptibility or vividness (gesteigerte Anschaulichkeit) in the writing of history (N2,6). What Benjamin means by Anschaulichkeit and related terms such as Anschauungsform, mentioned above, is a question to which we shall return; suffice it to say at this point that Anschaulichkeit is a crucial concept in Benjamin’s writings on art and politics, and one that, in The Arcades Project and elsewhere, is often bound to ‘the principle of montage’ (N2,6). The thematics (interiors, dreams, the uncanniness of historical periodization and of the spatiality and temporality of its figuration) and the expository mode (ironic juxtaposition, parataxis) of I1,6 are typical of The Arcades Project, which Benjamin conceived as ‘an experiment in the technique of awakening’ (K1,1) and of which he writes, in Convolute N: ‘Method of this project: literary montage’, the latter a phrase whose punctuated parataxis itself sets out to exemplify the technique it names (N1a,8). In what follows, I address Benjamin’s concept of montage and its potential deployment as a ‘technique of awakening’ – a medium of illumination and agitation intended to arouse the reader cognitively as well as politically. With regard to the historical images it fixes, montage as Benjamin promulgates and begins to conceptualize that technique in The Arcades Project emerges specifically as a technique of awakening that corresponds to, but crucially does not represent the mere persistence or continuity of, forms of perception that he associated with the nineteenth-century bourgeois interior – furnished in or according to dreams – as a more or less ‘private’ counterpart to the phantasmagoria of the period’s modernity as manifested in the display, exchange, and consumption of commodities and images. One stated aim of The Arcades Project as an experiment in writing the history of the nineteenth century was ‘to render the image of those salons where the gaze was enveloped in billowing curtains and swollen cushions, where, before the eyes of the guests, full-length mirrors disclosed church doors and settees were gondolas upon which gaslight from a vitreous globe shone down like the moon’ (I1,8). In ‘rendering the image’ of salons (das Bild des Salons geben) where mirrors could appear to open onto churches and settees could seem to float on moonlit Venetian canals, Benjamin hoped to expose the nineteenth-century domestic interior as ‘a stimulus to intoxication and dream’, a space whose effects upon its inhabitants he compared to the Rausch of his own experiments with hashish. Several entries in Convolute I establish the terms of Benjamin’s reckonings with the domestic space and décor of nineteenth-century bourgeois dwellings and their relation to the modernity of his contemporary moment. I want to proceed by citing in full a key entry, I2,6, before moving to an analysis, first, of the place of I2,6 in



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Benjamin’s theory of the nineteenth-century interior, and second, of the place of that theory in his writings of the late 1920s, and, more generally, in his conceptions of the body and the work of art. Nineteenth-century domestic interior. The space disguises itself – puts on, like an alluring creature, the costumes of moods. The well-fed petitbourgeois philistine should know something of the feeling that the next room might have witnessed the coronation of Charlemagne as well as the assassination of Henry IV, the signing of the treaty of Verdun as well as the wedding of Otto and Theophano. In the end, things are merely mannequins, and even the great moments of world history are only costumes beneath which they exchange glances of complicity with nothingness, with the petty and the banal. Such nihilism is the innermost core of bourgeois coziness – a mood that in hashish intoxication concentrates to satanic contentment, satanic knowing, satanic calm in indicating precisely to what extent the nineteenth-century interior is itself a stimulus to intoxication and dream. This mood involves, furthermore, an aversion to the open air, the (so to speak) Uranian atmosphere, which throws a new light on the extravagant interior design of the period. To live in these interiors was to have woven a dense fabric about oneself, to have secluded oneself within a spider’s web, in whose toils world events hang loosely suspended like so many insect bodies sucked dry. From this cavern, one does not like to stir. (I2,6) As the editors of The Arcades Project note, this entry reproduces material from the protocols of Benjamin’s second experiment with hashish, which took place in Berlin in January 1928. Unlike the intoxicated solitary wanderings through city streets and cafés recorded in his 1932 essay ‘Hashish in Marseilles’, the second hashish trance unfolded in the Berlin apartment of Ernst Joël and Charlotte Joël-Heinzelmann – he: Benjamin’s friend from their days in the youth movement, she: a photographer who portrayed Benjamin in a series of pictures taken in Berlin in 1929. A physician and co-author, with Fritz Fränkel, of the scientific article ‘Der HaschischRausch’ (1926), cited extensively by Benjamin in ‘Hashish in Marseilles’, Joël arranged and also participated in the experiment, along with, in addition to Benjamin, Joël’s colleague Fränkel and the philosopher Ernst Bloch.5 As the various reports on the experiment reveal, the apartment itself became the focus of some of the participants’ most intense experiences. In his report Benjamin meditates at length upon how, as a hash trance takes hold, ‘you start to play around with rooms in general. You start to experience seductions of your sense of orientation’ (SW 2:85–6; GS 6:560–1). It is those meditations that figure again in The Arcades Project, where exactly the effects that seduced an intoxicated Benjamin in 1928 have their way with the ‘well-fed middle-class philistine’ (der satte Spießer) of the previous

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century, who ‘should know something of the feeling’ that grand historical events might have transpired in the rooms he now occupies, and who thus should be led to the nihilistic recognition that ‘the great moments of world history are merely costumes beneath which [things, which are merely mannequins,] exchange glances of complicity with nothingness, with the base and the banal’. ‘Such nihilism’, Benjamin asserts, ‘is the innermost core of bourgeois Gemütlichkeit’ (I2,6).6 The ‘exchange of glances of complicity’ between things cloaked in ‘great moments of world history’ and ‘the base and the banal’ recalls the graphic spatial relation established in I1,6, where Cesare Borgia’s banquet hall lifts itself up over (schiebt sich über) a middle-class dining room while a Gothic chapel ascends from (steigt heraus) a Hausfrau’s boudoir, images that Benjamin says we apprehend as photomontage (a form of representation oriented to the Anschauungsform of the earlier epoch) and that call in turn for comparison with his claim, in I2,6, that ‘to live in these [nineteenth-century] interiors was to have woven a dense fabric about oneself, to have secluded oneself within a spider’s web, in whose toils world events hang loosely suspended like so many insect bodies sucked dry’, this last a lurid image also derived from the experience of the January 1928 hashish experiment, which felt to Benjamin ‘rather like being wrapped up, enclosed in a dense spider’s web in which the events of the world are scattered around, suspended there like the bodies of dead insects sucked dry’ (SW 2:86; GS 6:561). This appraisal of nineteenth-century interiors is portentous: when rooms become ‘alluring creatures’ that seduce their inhabitants, they in effect act like arachnids fashioning webs to trap their prey, who, once captured, occupy a world in which the web makes history present as a collection of desiccated corpses – or, less luridly, rooms seduce and disorient their occupants with images of grand past events superposed above the everyday life of domestic spaces. In its expression of Benjamin’s wish ‘to render the image of those salons where the gaze was enveloped in billowing curtains and swollen cushions, where, before the eyes of the guests, full-length mirrors disclosed church doors and settees were gondolas upon which gaslight from a vitreous globe shone down like the moon’, I1,8 similarly asserts the interpenetration of the bodily and the visual in the simultaneity of experiences (of being wrapped up and of glimpsing the historical past within the private space of the present) that Benjamin attributes both to himself as hash-eater and to der satte Spießer as avatar of nineteenth-century private life.7 And Benjamin’s efforts to render the images of the interiors in which those experiences variously took place and found expression involve the invocation of techniques of literary and pictorial montage as media especially well suited to figuring – perhaps virtually reinstantiating, in present-day spaces – aspects of those experiences. The disposition of the nineteenth-century bourgeois interior is a crux in Benjamin’s thought in The Arcades Project as elsewhere. Moreover I suggest that the historical experience of the interior as Benjamin presents it in The



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Arcades Project provides a model for the composition of the project itself, insofar as Benjamin sets out to discover and indeed to incorporate what he sees as the nihilism of bourgeois Gemütlichkeit in a new form of history writing to which bodiliness and visuality are, in the fullest sense of the word, integral. I do not claim that the interior is unique among the project’s many subjects in offering itself as a model in the sense I propose here. Nor do I attempt a comprehensive or definitive account of the interior as a Benjaminian subject. But if the scope of my analysis in this essay is necessarily limited both by my argument’s chosen terms and by the relationships I suggest we recognize among them, I take the questions addressed here to be central not only to The Arcades Project but also to Benjamin’s aesthetic theory more generally, and especially as it developed between 1927 and 1940.

DAS KOLPORTAGEPHÄNOMEN DES RAUMES Further along in the protocol to the January 1928 hash experiment Benjamin gives a name to the awakening sense that historical events have taken place in the private interiors of the present. He calls it ‘the colportage phenomenon of the room’ or, more broadly conceived, ‘the colportage phenomenon of space’ (das Kolportagephänomen des Raumes), a phrase that links the experience of the interior invoked at the beginning of the report to trivial literature, the dime-novels of vendors hawking books on city streets and at country fairs. To return to the colportage phenomenon of the room: we simultaneously perceive all the events that might conceivably have taken place here. The room winks at us: what do you think might have happened here? The connection between this phenomenon and colportage. Colportage and caption [Unterschrift]. To be conceived as follows [so vorzustellen]: think of a kitschy oleograph on the wall, with a long strip cut out from the bottom of the picture frame. There is a tape running through the batten, and in the gap there is a succession of captions: ‘The Murder of Egmont’, ‘The Coronation of Charlemagne’, and so on. (SW 2:88; GS 6:564–5) As I have indicated, in The Arcades Project Benjamin’s thoughts return more than once again to the colportage phenomenon of space. Convolute G invokes the phenomenon as ‘Prostitution of space in hashish, where it serves all that has been’ (G16,2), thus announcing how it might be bound to an erotics of commodification. Although the discussion of the ‘appearances of superposition, of overlap’ in M1a,1 is especially rich in implications for what we might make of the colportage phenomenon of space with regard to montage, an adequate treatment of those passages lies outside the scope of the present essay. Also in Convolute M, which calls the colportage phenomenon

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of space ‘the flâneur’s basic experience’, Benjamin acknowledges the difficulty of establishing the connection between colportage and the experience of a room that invites (or seduces) its occupant to inquire into its own past: ‘The space winks at the flâneur: What do you think may have gone on here?’ ‘Of course’, Benjamin admits, ‘it has yet to be explained how this phenomenon is associated with colportage’ (M1a,3). In The Arcades Project that association is no less crucial for remaining unexplained. For its part, the 1928 hashish experiment report strives to make the association between colportage and rooms that wink as they make the past present in hallucinations of historical events perceptible, vivid, and comprehensible (anschaulich) by reconceiving colportage pictorially in the form of a ‘kitschy oleograph’ with a moveable band of captions that operate like subtitles to a film – except in this case the picture, a still image hanging in a frame on the wall, presumably never changes, even as its captions describe events separated widely in place and time. Oleographs were one sort of inexpensive picture made available for mass distribution by nineteenth-century developments in technological reproduction, and in that sense they provide a pictorial counterpart to the dime-novels of colportage. But it is Benjamin’s fantastic transformation of the oleograph by means of supplementary captions that attempts to make the colportage phenomenon of the room anschaulich by presenting a shifting interplay of image (Bild ) and caption (Unterschrift) to be activated by a viewer pulling a tape through a gap in a picture frame. What is Benjamin doing with that picture? He is using it (as a means of presentation); and he is imagining a mechanism (the apparatus of the moveable caption) that would make it available for use by others. What Benjamin does with the picture in the hashish experiment report is thus linked to what he aimed to do with the text in The Arcades Project: ‘Method of this project: literary montage. I need not say anything. Merely show [zeigen]. 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]’ (N1a,8).

DIENSTMÄDCHENROMANE DES NEUNZEHNTEN JAHRHUNDERTS In his 1929 essay ‘Chambermaid’s Romances of the Past Century’ (figure 8.1), Benjamin argues that insofar as colportage deals in ‘typical subject matters’ (typische Stoffe), the ‘formal idioms’ of its products ‘embody the artistic aims [künstlerische Wille] of various generations and classes’ and thereby demand the attention of a literary history that would generate something other than ‘hackneyed aesthetic appreciations’ (SW 2:230, 225; GS 4:621, 620). Benjamin’s sense of the significance of colportage for lit-



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erary history is indebted to the Viennese art historian Aloïs Riegl, whose concept of the Kunstwollen echoes in the phrase ‘künstlerische Wille.’8 In this instance, künsterlische Wille, as the projection of the desires and intentions of specific human collectives (‘classes and generations’), determines the forms of colportage and its presentations of ‘typical subject matters’. Moreover, Benjamin suggests, the few ‘truly living’ subject matters of colportage ‘that continue to have an impact and are capable of constant renewal’ must be recognized as not just ‘typical’ but ‘eternal subject matters’ (ewige Stoffe), which makes the collective consciousness and intentions of classes and generations as expressed in colportage available for interpretation beyond literary or cultural history. ‘The archive of such eternal subject matters’, Benjamin explains, ‘is the dream, as Freud has taught us to understand it’ (SW 2:230; GS 4:621). Which is to say, first, that dreams are a resource (an ‘archive’) for those composing the contents of colportage as for those consuming them, and, second, that writing the history of colportage must involve regarding dime-novels, like dreams, as repositories of material to be analyzed (for conscious as well as unconscious content), and also plundered, as dreams are plundered in colportage. No more is made of the connection between colportage and dream in ‘Chambermaid’s Romances of the Past Century’, but the connection is bound to be resonant in our present context, all the more so because of what Benjamin says next: Works that orient themselves so directly to feeding the public hunger for subject matters [Stoffe] are interesting enough on their own; but they become even more so when the same spirit is expressed graphically and colorfully through illustrations. The very principle of such illustrations testifies to how closely the reader is bound to the material [enge Bindung des Lesers an seinen Stoff ]. He wants to know exactly where they belong [aufs Haar genau wissen, wohin sie gehören]. If only we had more such pictures! But where they were not protected by the stamp of a lending library – like two of those shown here – they have followed their predestined path: from the book to the wall to the rubbish bin. (SW 2:230; GS 4:621) Included as one of the illustrations to Benjamin’s essay and marked indeed with the stamp of a lending library, the frontispiece to Lady Lucie Guilford, die Fürstin der Rache, genannt Die Hyäne von Paris displays its original caption – ‘I swear it: they shall all suffer the fate of this man!’ – below the image of a woman who stands finely dressed and monumental before an empty settee and a table blazing with tall candles inside a room outfitted with patterned curtains, wallpaper, tablecloth and carpet. She holds a dagger in a hand lowered at her side and firmly rests a foot that is hidden among the deep folds of her skirt on the back of a man lying face-down on the

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Fig. 8:1. Walter Benjamin, ‘Dienstmädchen Romane des vorigen Jahrhunderts’, Das illustrierte Blatt (April 1929). Stadt- und Universitätsbibliothek/Senckenbergische Bibliothek, Frankfurt am Main.



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floor. The man is certainly unconscious if not already dead. That much established at first glance, Lady Lucie Guilford ’s would-be reader might next notice that in the frontispiece the dagger’s blade is clean, which ought to make her wonder when and how the weapon will be put to use in the novel that follows. The woman raises her other arm and hand, index finger extended, in a gesture that does not so much lack conviction as its depiction lacks clarity. The caption, it seems, would have that hand underscoring what the woman swears while celebrating what she has done, but the limb has swung up so high and wide that it appears entirely disconnected from whatever might be communicated by her face, which itself lacks emotion even as it is said to utter words of passion. As the vehicle of a gesture to express what the woman is meant to be saying, the hand might just as well merely be pointing upward, unemphatically, to the heavens, or to some place less elevated. A maidservant stands behind the table holding a tray with a chalice and a small platter. Disproportionately smaller than her mistress, her face pinch-lipped and seemingly peaked, the maid stands as if in a separate spatial register and appears at once transfixed by what is afoot and desirous of a deus ex machina to deliver her from this scene, for example by drawing her back behind the curtains, as it were taking her offstage. A reader of the novel would come to understand that the woman’s frontispiece gesture anticipates what the text’s eponymous protagonist will do by way of orchestrating the man’s fate, rather than indicating what she has already done to lay him out face down on her parlour floor: the maid with her platter-andchalice-bearing tray is waiting for her lady to cut off the man’s head, and Lady Lucie may be pointing to the soon-to-be-severed head’s upstairs destination. Readers of Benjamin’s essay learn this neither from the frontispiece itself, which as I suggested gives little hint of such gruesome drama, nor from its emphatic original caption, but from the unimpassioned caption Benjamin himself appends: ‘The beauty portrayed here is a collector of preserved human heads, which she keeps on the shelves of a cupboard in her house’ (SW 2:227). Benjamin’s inscription is sardonic (Lady Lucie is no beauty), but it does not mock the novel. Instead the matter-of-fact presentation of the book’s ‘bloodthirsty’ subject encapsulates Benjamin’s central concerns in the essay and signals the importance of captions and bodiliness in his account of colportage, themes whose analysis will help us in turn to clarify what he means by ‘the colportage phenomenon of space’ and how that phenomenon relates to montage. From the choice of the word Stoffe to designate the subject matters or stories of chambermaid’s novels to the description of the Stoffhunger des Publikums, Benjamin presents the relation of the reader to the colportage text in terms whose materialism is specifically bodily. Illustrations such as the frontispeice to Lady Lucie Guilford are what demonstrate the corporeal nature of the relation between reader and book in its full intensity, revealing the enge Bindung des Lesers an seinen Stoff in the reader’s wish to situate illustrations within those texts as if down to the last ‘hair’

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(aufs Haar wissen wohin sie gehören) (SW 2:230; GS 4:621). Especially given the essay’s earlier nod to Freud, this enge Bindung might almost suggest the transposition into the relation of reader and book of an experience of human connection, or of the longing for such an experience – that is, an experience of being bound, as if physically, to something as though to somebody. Like a human being’s primal bond, the bond of reader and book in this case turns on nourishment: ‘let us not forget that the book was originally an object of use [Gebrauchsgegenstand ], indeed a means of subsistence, a foodstuff [Lebensmittel]. These in particular were devoured. Let us study through them the nutritional chemistry of the novel! [Studieren wir an ihnen die Nahrungsmittelchemie der Romane!]’ (SW 2:230: GS 4:622).9 Two aspects of Benjamin’s representation of the consumption of colportage as an object of use that is also a source of sustenance – a thing for which one hungers and when given the chance devours – demand our attention. First, what is the relationship between, on the one hand, the kind of use described at the end of the essay, in which colportage emerges as a Gebrauchsgegenstand and more precisely a Lebensmittel or Nahrungsmittel, and, on the other hand, the kind of use mentioned earlier, in which a reader who has purchased a work of colportage tears the illustrations from the book, hangs them on the wall, and then, with their obsolescence, disposes of them in the trash? Second, what would it mean to study the nutritional chemistry of the novel? The frontispiece of Lady Lucie Guilford, which displays all the ‘clumsiness’ Benjamin recognizes in colportage, represents the so-called Princess of Vengeance with a fresh victim at her feet and a servant, indeed a chambermaid – that is, a woman who shares the occupation of the consumers of nineteenth-century colportage named in the essay’s title – standing by to assist in the final stages of arranging the man’s fate. Benjamin’s caption lets us know what will happen next: the man’s head, severed, preserved and placed on a cupboard shelf, will join Lady Lucie’s collection, which we may assume to have begun with the remains of a fellow who earned her wrath through romantic betrayal. In this way Benjamin makes dismemberment and collecting the Stoff of the novel as a literary commodity to be devoured by a public of domestic servants whose fictional counterpart appears as a reluctant but spellbound accomplice to an act of bloodthirsty violence performed by a lady of aristocratic background. ‘There is’, Benjamin remarks in the body of the essay, ‘the question of why, in stories that were written in the heyday of the bourgeoisie, moral authority is always tied to a lady or a gentleman of rank. Perhaps because the servant classes still felt a certain solidarity with the middle class and shared its most secret romantic ideals’ (SW 2:230). In this case ‘moral authority’ commits to vengeance and takes up a practice of beheading in which the aristocracy enlists the help of the servant class. For their part, ‘romantic ideals’ are taken to pieces and laid to rest as profane relics, objects that must simultaneously show, on the faces of the one-time beloved and his unlucky semblables, the effects of destruction



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and of preservation. Thus the Stoffhunger des Publikums in this case attaches to the dialectical effects of Lady Lucie’s violence: insofar as she destroys the men who are her victims she preserves them as things to be beheld, ghoulishly, in a domestic cupboard. Severing one kind of attachment and establishing another, she turns the men’s heads into Gebrauchsgegenstände in the household economy of her romantic vengeance, where she refunctions them for display as a collection. For Benjamin in The Arcades Project, the bibliophile is unique among collectors in that she or he uses the objects in her or his collection (H2,7; H2a,1; O°,6; O°,7). In the case of colportage that use is taken to an extreme, as the bibliophile becomes bibliophage – devouring novels and destroying them, by tearing out their illustrated pages. What Lady Lucie does with the severed heads of men bears some relation to what Benjamin says readers of colportage do with illustrations when they remove them from novels and hang them on the wall. (If tearing out pages of illustrations did not do violence to books it would not be forbidden by lending libraries.) Thus the chambermaids’ ‘solidarity’ with Lady Lucie might be said to stem from a shared engagement in practices of dismemberment that form part of a larger dialectic of material destruction and aesthetic preservation – or, more generally, (graphic) violence and (graphic) visibility or perceptibility (Anschaulichkeit). This dialectic in turn exemplifies the kind of use of things that takes place in the consumption of books as a means of sating Stoffhunger – the consumption, or devouring, that Benjamin sees as an impetus to reconceive the writing of literary history as a study of the Nahrungsmittelchemie der Romane. ‘We are still clumsy’, he says, ‘in our efforts to touch these clumsy works’ (SW 2:230; GS 4:622). On Benjamin’s model, the colportage novel, an object to be devoured, as it were enters the reader’s body. The reader does not project herself empathetically into the novel – not even, perhaps especially not, when confronted with both a character who shares her place in the social order, and a heroine, a woman of action who occupies a more privileged and presumably more desirable place. The illustration torn out of the book and hung on the wall might seem like a token or a remainder of empathy experienced in reading, but Benjamin’s stress on and clear appreciation of its fated obsolescence and disposability suggests he saw it otherwise. This is a topic to which we return below; for now it should be enough to note that removing an illustration from a book within which a reader previously had worked to situate it ‘down to the last hair’ means transporting the picture and with it the story as Stoff into the reader’s own space, and this represents a way of using and in the end disposing of visual and textual Stoffe that Benjamin opposes to empathy.10 When the reader of a chambermaid’s novel tears out its illustrated pages and mounts them on the wall of the space in which she lives, she makes a kind of homemade montage, and when she disposes of those pictures she presumably replaces them with others that will likewise satisfy, temporarily, her Stoffhunger. Because he would like to look at them, Benjamin wishes that more colportage illustrations had been preserved, but he admires what

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the readers of colportage have done and indeed he wants to be in a position to feel and to encourage others to feel ‘a certain solidarity’ with the readers’ impulse to use and appropriately to dispose of illustrations. Moreover, by incorporating some of those illustrations into his own essay, he expresses a wish for solidarity with a reader who belongs to ‘the lower classes’ and with that reader’s appreciation of bloodthirsty subjects such as Lady Lucie Guilford, from which Benjamin, like a chambermaid, extracts an illustration, almost as if to imitate, with books as his object, Lady Lucie’s practice of taking bodies to pieces. When finally he composes his own unlurid caption in the matter-of-fact but graphic language of what he calls, in a related context, an anschaulicher Bericht, Benjamin aligns the writing of literary history with the consumption of colportage understood as a complex enterprise of incorporation, and of embodiment more broadly conceived. The literary historian in this scenario resembles not only Lady Lucie and the chambermaid-reader, but also the colporteur, the ‘salesman’ who is their intermediary (SW 2:225). La Liseuse de romans (figure 8:2), a painting by Antoine Wiertz to which we return below, depicts the distribution of cheap novels as a kind of infernal work, and both the atmosphere of the lady’s bed chamber and the satanic character of the disseminator of intoxicating novels in Wiertz’s painting recall in turn Benjamin’s discussion, in I2,6, of the ‘mood’ of nineteenth-century bourgeois Gemütlichkeit and the cavernous interiors that were that mood’s counterpart: ‘a mood that in hashish intoxication concentrates to satanic contentment, satanic knowing, satanic calm in indicating precisely to what extent the nineteenth-century interior is itself a stimulus to intoxication and dream’. Hence Benjamin’s connection to Lady Lucie Guilford involves both the incorporation into his own writing of the practices of heroines who collect severed heads and of readers who tear pictures out of books, and the composition of a caption to thematize, indeed to actualize and in some sense to promote, that incorporation.

DER MALER DER PASSAGEN Antoine Wiertz, idiosyncratic painter of historical subjects, prolific writer on art and related topics, agitator on behalf of social causes from the abolition of capital punishment to the training of women in the use of firearms, emerges as a significant figure in The Arcades Project. As noted above, Benjamin calls Wiertz ‘the painter of the arcades’ (H°,13), and several times he cites the artist’s Oeuvres littéraires from an edition published posthumously in Paris in 1870. Focused on photography, Convolute Y opens first with an epigraph and then an excerpt from Wiertz’s 1855 essay on that subject, which Benjamin introduces as ‘a prophecy’ (Y1,1). The phrase ‘Wiertz as precursor of montage (realism plus tendentiousness)’ appears as one of the ‘Themes of The Arcades Project’ listed among the materials for the 1935 exposé,



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Fig. 8:2. Antoine Wiertz, La Liseuse de romans (1853). Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Brussels, Belgium

‘Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century’, and the exposé itself asserts that ‘Wiertz can be characterized as the first to demand, if not actually foresee, the use of photographic montage for political agitation’ (AP 902, AP 6; PW 1209, PW 49). That assertion remains unelaborated in The Arcades Project, but it calls out to be situated in relation to the use to which a paraphrase of the same section of Wiertz’s essay on photography that Benjamin cites in Y1,1 was put by the Berlin Dadaists some fifteen years earlier, when a montage poster showing a cut-out photographic portrait of the open-mouthed, clench-fisted Dadamonteur John Heartfield bore the typographic caption: ‘wiertz: Dereinst wird die Photographie die gesamte Malkunst verdrängen und ersetzen’ (one day photography will suppress and supplant the entire art of painting). That line also serves as an epigraph to Wieland Herzfelde’s catalogue essay introducing the Dada exhibition in which that poster appeared, which presents photomontage as the culmination of a displacement of painting by photographic media understood to have been foretold by Wiertz in the mid-nineteenth century.11 For his part, Benjamin explains that ‘the grandiose mechanical–materialistic divinations of Wiertz have to be seen in the context of the subjects of his painting – and, to be sure, not only the ideal utopian subjects but

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also the ghastly, colportagesque ones [die gräßlichen, kolportagehaften]’ (O°, 17). Among the Wiertzian subjects Benjamin lists in ‘Paris Arcades I’ are La Liseuse de romans (1853), with which Wiertz intended to ‘electrify’ his audience, and Pensées et Visions d’une tête coupée (1859), which figures the ghastly in a triptych depicting the spectacle of a beheading and its fantastic aftermath of torture and delusion. La Liseuse de romans (figure 8:2) represents the consumption of cheap literature as a kind of erotic ecstasy in which a naked woman who appears hypnotically transfixed by the small volume she holds up before her eyes gets her books not from a lending library but from a demon who slips them surreptitiously onto the edge of the bed that supports the female reader’s all-but-writhing body. I have more to say below about Wiertz’s attempt, in Pensées et Visions d’une tête coupée, to depict a situation in which the severed head beneath the scaffold ‘believes that it still exists above, forming a part of the body, and [continues] to wait for the blow that will separate it from the trunk’ (O°,19).12 A third painting by Wiertz that is mentioned by Benjamin in The Arcades Project, Le Soufflet d’une dame belge (1861) (figure 8:3) unites the ghastly and the kolportagehaft and suggests what led Benjamin to the formulation ‘Wiertz as precursor of montage (realism plus tendentiousness)’, with realism here displayed in a protocinematic exploration of the effects of a gun fired by a woman at very close range into the face of a man assaulting her from behind. If the realism of the man’s destroyed face flying off in a burst of fire and smoke and a splatter of flesh and brains is protocinematic and in that more or less technical sense a precursor of montage, it is also kolportagehaft, or we might say B-movielike, especially in the way the painting juxtaposes the violence the woman does to the man’s head with the gun, to the violence the man does (and would have done) to the woman’s body with his hands, one of which has now let go of her in a futile attempt to shield, or perhaps to retrieve, his face. That juxtaposition recapitulates Wiertz’s interest in the uncanny temporality of cognitive and bodily experiences of violence exemplified in its most extreme form in Pensées et Visions d’une tête coupée. Here, the human arm raised to the blasted head seems to have been directed there at once to protect and to rescue it, in each case too late in relation to the split-second action of the nearby firearm. The tendentiousness of Wiertz’s colportage-realism emerges in its weird imitation of bodies and attitudes out of the seventeenth-century baroque paintings of Peter Paul Rubens, in this instance specifically the mockdecorous draping of the raging, nearly naked woman in diaphanous fabric that rings her exposed trunk and manages, despite the aggressive grasp of the man in uniform, just barely to cover her genitals. The swirl of cloth at the woman’s crotch, the howling grimace of her noble face, the uncanny liveliness of the man’s arms and hands (especially the taut forearm and hand that hold the woman in what will soon be a death-grip), and the appalling proximity of the man’s beefy epaulet to the eruption of his wounded face, which so to speak explodes in the face of the viewer of the painting, are



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among the work’s signal B-movie details, arranged to make the man a monster and the woman a heroine. Wiertz, then, evokes the poses and subjects of baroque history painting in a picture that, as he explains in the catalogue entry of which he was unnamed author, ‘was executed with the intention of proving the necessity of having women trained in the use of firearms. It was Monsieur Wiertz, as we know, who had the idea of setting up a special rifle range for ladies and offering, as prize in the competition, a portrait of the victorious heroine’ (O°,22).13 At stake in a contemporary woman’s firearm training is therefore both her ability to protect herself effectively, the cause for which the ghastly painting should serve as propaganda, and her capacity to become a ‘heroine’, for which she should be awarded a portrait to be painted by Wiertz, an artist for whom this situation represents conditions calling for ‘realism plus tendentiousness’ to be delivered both in paintings that are ghastly and kolportagehaft and in heroic portraits that fit the bill for civic awards ceremonies. But how exactly are we to understand Wiertz’s version of ‘realism plus tendentiousness’ as a precursor to montage? It is almost as though, in the example of Le Soufflet d’une dame belge, we should recognize the demand for photomontage Benjamin sees in Wiertz specifically in the construction of a trajectory of pictorial colportage-realism comprising the firearm, the explosion, and the shattered head – a construction intended, tendentiously, to frame the shock of a contemporary event, captured as if photographically, even protocinematically, with the heroism of history painting. The Belgian woman’s ‘blow’ (soufflet) is a gunshot (in German, ein Geschoß), and as such it calls to mind Benjamin’s account of the effects of the work of art in Dada – in the case of Dadaist pictures, a work of art, itself produced by means of montage, that created a demand for the ‘physical shock effect’ of cinematic montage: From an alluring visual composition or an enchanting fabric of sound, the Dadaists turned the artwork into a missile [ein Geschoß; a projectile or gunshot]. It jolted the viewer, taking on a tactile quality. It thereby fostered the demand for film, since the distracting element in film is also primarily tactile, being based on successive changes of scene and focus which have a percussive effect on the spectator. Film has freed the physical shock effect – which Dadaism had kept wrapped, as it were, inside the moral schock effect – from this wrapping. (SW 3:119; GS 7:379; italics in original) In ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility’, Benjamin further asserts that in producing works of pictorial montage the Dadaists ‘achieved . . . a ruthless annihilation of the aura in every object they produced, which they branded as a reproduction through the very means of its production’ (SW 3:119). Elsewhere in the so-called ‘artwork essay’, Benjamin makes two related claims. First, that ‘technological reproduction can place the copy of the original in situations which the original itself cannot attain. Above all, it enables

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Fig. 8:3. Antoine Wiertz, Le Soufflet d’une dame belge (1861). Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Brussels, Belgium

the original to meet the recipient halfway, whether in the form of a photograph or in that of a gramophone record. The cathedral leaves its site to be received in the studio of an art lover; the choral work performed in an auditorium or in the open air is enjoyed in a private room’ (SW 3:103). Second, that, in the ‘field of the perceivable [im anschaulichen Bereich . . .] the destruction of the aura is the signature of a perception whose “sense for sameness in the world” [Sinn für



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das Gleichartige in der Welt] has so increased that, by means of reproduction, it extracts a sameness even from what is unique’ (SW 3:105). The phrase Sinn für das Gleichartige in der Welt, which Benjamin borrows from Danish novelist Johannes V. Jensen’s Exotische Novellen, also appears in ‘Hashish in Marseilles’, where it alludes to an experience similar to that of the colportage phenomenon of space. ‘Here, while I was in the state of deepest trance’, Benjamin writes, ‘two figures (middle-class philistines [Spießer], vagrants, what do I know?) passed me as “Dante and Petrarch.” “All men are brothers.” So began a train of thought that I am no longer able to pursue. But its last link was certainly much less banal than its first, and led on perhaps to images of animals’ (SW 2:677; GS 4:414). Benjamin tells us nothing about the ‘images of animals’ to which his train of thought on that occasion perhaps led him, but it is tempting to imagine those animals in relation to Zarathustra’s, who announced to their master the doctrine of the Eternal Recurrence that the appearance of Dante and Petrarch, recast as ‘small men’ (whether Spießer or Strolche), actualizes.14 Succumbing to further temptation, we might imagine the ‘Dante’ who passed Benjamin on the street in Marseilles to resemble the one depicted by Eugène Delacroix in his Barque of Dante (1822), a painting in which the author of the Divine Comedy gesticulates in horror at the drowning bodies of the lost souls who surround his vessel. ‘Hashish. One imitates certain things one knows from paintings: prison, the Bridge of Sighs, stairs like the train of a dress’ (M2,3). Perhaps more to the point, in the protocol to his second hashish experiment, Benjamin writes: ‘the room itself became more velvety, more aflame, darker. I uttered the name Delacroix’, and his next paragraph introduces nothing other than the scenario of the colportage phenomenon of space in which Benjamin-as-hash-eater ‘experience[s] the feeling that in the next room events such as the coronation of Charlemagne, the assassination of Henri IV, the signing of the treaty of Verdun, and the murder of Egmont might have taken place’ (SW 2:85). All of which suggests that Benjamin’s efforts to conceptualize the colportage phenomenon of space and montage involved an attempt to rethink nineteenth-century painting as a form of perception or intuition (Anschauungsform), a source of knowledge, and an archive of things to be imitated and thereby transported (phantasmatically, in hash trances, and actually, in technological reproductions) into the space, or the rooms, of the present. Wiertz’s work, Benjamin admits, ‘has little to do with great painting’, but that does not diminish and may in fact define its interest for the ‘connoisseur of cultural curiosities’ and the ‘physiognomist’ of the nineteenth century, two types whose kinship with Wiertz himself as with the author of The Arcades Project we should not fail to recognize.15 ‘Once the nineteenth century is Baedeker-ready and its ruins are ripe for moonlight, the Museum Antoine Wiertz in Brussels will belong to the list of obligatory destinations for honeymooning couples’, Benjamin announces at the beginning of his 1929 article, ‘Antoine Wiertz: Gedanken und Gesichte eines Geköpften’ (GS 4:805). In the meantime, he takes it upon himself to present an excerpt from

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the museum’s catalogue, which, like the remarks on Le Soufflet d’une dame belge, was written by Wiertz and reprinted posthumously in his Oeuvres littéraires. The excerpt in question ‘is, if one wants to put it this way, the “caption” or “inscription” [Beschriftung] to [Wiertz’s] monumental triptych, Pensées et Visions d’une tête coupée. Not only the tendentiousness, but also the grandiose costuming and the compositorial power of his report seem to us to warrant its delivery from obscurity’ (GS 4:805–6). Set out under a series of headings that shift from matter-of-fact to melodramatic – ‘Triptych: First Minute, Second Minute, Third minute’; ‘First Minute: On the Scaffold’; ‘Second Minute: Beneath the Scaffold’; ‘Third Minute: In Eternity’ – Wiertz’s short paragraphs recount the artist’s experimental inquiry into the question of ‘whether for a few seconds following its separation from the body the head remains capable of thought’, an inquiry he undertook by establishing a ‘magnetopathic rapport’ with a newly severed head. In prose that injects elements of Gothic horror into the protocol of a pseudoscientific investigation (the artist was indeed a devotee of Poe), Wiertz reproduces the answers he gave to questions posed by the magnetopath, Herr D., under whose suggestive influence he operated during his rapport with the severed head. What the man condemned to death by beheading actually suffered, Wiertz explains, ‘no human language can express’ (GS 4:807). Wiertz’s writing makes the situation of the severed head and of the artist who becomes its medium vivid by means of what Benjamin calls its ‘grandiose costuming’ (großartige Einkleidung), designed to convey the ‘grandiose sleight of hand that the consciousness executes in death’ (O°,19). That work gets done by the ‘compositorial power’ (kompositorische Kraft) that shapes Wiertz’s prose typographically, penetrating it with headings, ellipses, sequences of telegraphic phrases, and the occasional melodramatic ‘Oh!’16. Wiertz crafted the text as a long caption (légende) to be displayed beneath the picture, and in The Arcades Project Benjamin refers to the painting’s ‘große“ légende”’ or ‘Erklärung’ (O°,19; K2a,2), but it is the term Beschriftung, placed within quotation marks in the 1929 article, that demands our attention. A Beschriftung is an inscription, and it can be a caption, but when understood differently, as Benjamin’s ‘if one wants to put it that way’, and especially his quotation marks, themselves assertions of compositorial power, seem to ask us to do, a Beschriftung might more awkwardly but perhaps more aptly be called a ‘making-writing’ (Be-Schriftung), an attempt to render legible ‘what no human language can express’.17 The Beschriftung means to make what Wiertz describes as inexpressible visible in the grandiosity of its language and in the material of its typographic composition, which symbolizes, manifests and thematizes inexpressibility in the demonstrative form of ellipses, dashes, and the like, and which in so doing makes legible, or ‘makes writing’, that which the painting attempts in a different way to present as inexpressible. That is, the Beschriftung means to make the painting legible as a depiction of experiences that exceed the representational



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capacity of human languages (as opposed to having the painting appear or remain merely incomprehensible in its idiosyncrasy and opaqueness). And this the Beschriftung aims to do by predicating the textual presentation of the inexpressibility of certain human experiences on the capacity of writing, specifically printed writing, put together with compositorial force, to make inexpressibility anschaulich, that is, perceptible, visible, graphic. Assembled as a sequence of three minutes that compresses the timelessness of what Wiertz understands to have been the head’s actual experience, and set out in blocks of type introduced by headers denoting that minute-by-minute experience, the ‘thoughts and visions’ that are the Stoff of Wiertz’s Beschriftung appear, or rather read, as if scripted for transposition, by means of montage, into the frames of a film. Indeed Benjamin’s article itself, less an essay than a long citation accompanied by a short commentary, might be described as a montage experiment in which citation does not repair or suture the dismembered fragment by resituating it, but instead thematizes and refigures dismemberment (and beheading (köpfen) in particular, with that word’s potential typographical resonances) as a form of writing, in this case as in the case of the extraction of illustrations from colportage novels, the writing of captions. In Benjamin’s Beschriftung or ‘making-writing,’ bloodthirsty texts and graphic illustrations interpenetrate one another such that texts become graphic and pictures become luridly literary, or colportagesque.

LES ENFANTS D’ÉDOUARD An entry in Convolute I that appears shortly after Benjamin’s evocation of the nineteenth century, and the juste milieu in particular, as an epoch ‘furnished in (and through) dreams’ (I1,6), mentions once again his experience of hashish intoxication in the Joëls’ Berlin apartment: During my second experiment with hashish. Staircase in Charlotte Joël’s studio. I said: ‘A structure habitable only by wax figures. I could do so much with it plastically; Piscator and company can just go pack. Would be possible for me to change the lighting scheme with tiny levers. I can transform the Goethe house into the Covent Garden opera; can read from it the whole of world history. I see, in this space, why I collect colportage images. Can see everything in this room – the sons of Charles III and what you will.’ (I2a,1) Ernst Bloch’s report on the January 1928 hashish experiment likewise includes a passage about a ‘staircase in [a] studio’ in the Joëls’ apartment. I do not hesitate to acknowledge the significance of Bloch’s conceptions of dream and utopia for Benjamin’s thought in the 1920s, and Benjamin himself, in a 1929 radio broadcast on ‘Children’s Literature’ praised a ‘lovely essay’ by Bloch

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(‘Die Rettung Wagners durch Karl May’) in the context of his own musings on the ‘substantial, powerful nourishment’ that children obtain from ‘works of colportage’ (GS 7:256, 617). Nonetheless I read Bloch’s report on the 1928 hashish experiment as a record not of his own thoughts or utterances, but of the musings of his friend Benjamin.18 Indeed when Benjamin transposed those same remarks into Convolute I of The Arcades Project, he made sure to introduce them with a definitive ‘I said’. Here I take Benjamin at his word, though I do not think there is much at stake in the question of who said what on the occasion of the hashish experiment. It is what Benjamin did, or rather thought he could do, with the images recorded in his own notes, and in Bloch’s report, that interests me. Bloch’s report reads: Staircase in studio: A structure habitable only by wax figures. I could do so much with it plastically; Piscator and company can just go pack. Would be possible for me to switch the lighting around with tiny levers. Can transform the Goethe house into the London Opera. Can read from it the whole of world history. I see, in this space, why I collect colportage pictures. Can see everything in this room – the sons of Richard III and what you will. (GS 6:567) Benjamin makes two changes to the notes when he incorporates them into The Arcades Project (I2a,1).19 First, he specifies the studio as belonging to Charlotte Joël[-Heinzelmann], which is to say that he places the ‘structure habitable only by wax figures’ in a photographer’s studio, indeed the studio of a photographer whose touching portraits of Benjamin, perhaps taken in that very space, are among those pictures of him now most often reproduced.20 Second, he replaces the name ‘Richard III’ with ‘Charles III’, an effort at correction that has the effect of leading the reader even farther from the historical ‘facts’. Surely Benjamin meant not the sons of Charles III (of Spain) but the sons of Edward IV (of England), hence Edward V and Richard, Duke of York, the nephews of Richard III, more commonly known as the ‘princes in the tower’, the subject of Paul Delaroche’s major work of 1830, Édouard V, roi mineur d’Angleterre, et Richard, duc d’Yorck, son frère puiné, ou Les Enfants d’Édouard. A massive success in the Salon of 1831, Les Enfants d’Édouard is a picture Benjamin would have known. It seems probable that he would have seen the painting in the original, at the Louvre, and it is perhaps even more likely that he would have encountered Delaroche’s work in one reproductive medium or another, since engravings as well as photographs of his paintings, including a photograph of Les Enfants d’Édouard by Gustav Schauer that was published in Berlin in 1861 (figure 8:4), were especially numerous and circulated widely; indeed, according to art historian Stephen Bann, Delaroche (1797–1856) was ‘without contest, the most extensively reproduced artist of his age’.21 Perhaps more to the point, Benjamin no doubt would have read Heinrich Heine’s



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account of his own encounter with Les Enfants d’Édouard in his criticism of the 1831 Salon in which it was first shown. ‘When I stood before the picture of Delaroche’, writes Heine: It kept returning to my mind how I once, in a beautiful castle in dear Poland, also was before the portrait of a friend, and conversed with his sweet, lovely sister, and secretly compared her eyes to those of the friend. We also spoke of the painter of the picture, who died not long before, and how all people pass away, one after the other – Ah! The dear friend is himself dead, shot by Prague; the lovely lights of the beautiful sister are also extinguished; their castle is burned down, and I am overcome by frightful loneliness when I

Fig. 8:4. Photograph of Paul Delaroche, Édouard V, roi mineur d’Angleterre, et Richard, duc d’Yorck, son frère puiné, ou Les Enfants d’Édouard (1830), Gustav Schauer Verlag, Berlin, 1861. British Library, London.

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reflect that not only do our beloved ones vanish so quickly from the world, but that no trace remains even of the scene where we once lived with them; it is as if nothing of it had ever existed, and all was an idle dream.22 Faced with the plight of Les Enfants d’Édouard, Heine is reminded of a scene from his own past in which the uncanny resemblance among persons (siblings) and works of art (painted portraits) provided an occasion for reflection on the transience of human life, or rather the endless repetition of death, especially in the context of political violence. In the case of Heine’s recollection of his Polish friends, the ‘scene [Schauplatz] where we once lived with them’ also no longer exists, and his awareness of the absence of that scene or stage, that space of viewing and container of experiences – an awareness provoked by the ‘melancholy idea’ (wehmüthiger Gedanke) of the captive and soon-to-be murdered young king and his younger brother and, more precisely, by the ‘shattered look’ of Edward V, who seems at once ‘to have suffered much’ and yet to be still a boy, ‘a broken flower’ whose ‘legs . . . hang down with their long, blue velvet peaked shoes from the couch, yet do not reach the ground’ – has the effect of suggesting that ‘none of it had ever existed, and all was an idle dream’.23 Heine speaks of the ‘tragic dignity’ of Edward’s ‘pale, sickly face’. And it seems, moreover, that the young king’s visage confronts us with a virtual physiognomic anachronism, as though, with the mien of a melancholy old man, he were beholding the scene presented to us by Delaroche from a moment in time other than the one in which the painting places him, and thereby providing us with a model for our own looking, the kind of looking, or rather the kind of dreaming, that Heine describes in his ekphrasis. In Les Enfants d’Édouard, that kind of looking or dreaming finds its opposite in the figure of the little dog, who, ‘running to the door, seems to announce by his barking [indeed, I would say, in his entire tense disposition, especially in what seems, from the rear, to be his acute gaze at the doorframe through which light pours into the princes’ chamber] the coming of the murderers’.24 If the supernaturally aged face of the young king prompts us to think about the past and how we see it (as reality, situated in a place that still exists or can be envisioned still to exist, or as dream), then the dog’s disposition, in particular his way of looking, provides us with a model for our potential attentiveness, as viewers of the painting in the thrall of a desire, perhaps a drive, to know what is to come. For Heine, as for Benjamin, it is the coincidence of those two ways of seeing what goes on in the spaces that we designate as historical that accounts for the force of a picture like Delaroche’s. The painting provides us with a kind of Anschauungsunterricht, a set of lessons in perception or intuition, in seeing the past from, or in, our place in the present.25 Heine, we might add, is like the flâneur as Benjamin describes him in Convolute M, insofar as he ‘composes his reverie as text to accompany the images’ (M2,2); in the terms set out in Convolute M, the colportage phenomenon of space itself represents ‘the flâneur’s basic experience’ (M1a,3), and Heine’s text, read as a kind of caption, stands for ‘colportage illustration encroaching on great painting’ (M2,1).26



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If Benjamin is remembering, or being visited by, Delaroche’s depiction of the young princes awaiting, not quite unwittingly, the arrival of assassins dispatched by their uncle, he has in mind a painting that itself embodied a new approach to history painting in the nineteenth century. According to Bann, ‘a painting such as Princes in the Tower [Les Enfants d’Édouard] is, on one level, a composite of different objects capable of being considered individually and related to specific historical criteria’, that is, a painting whose composition in every sense and at every stage involved collecting, including Delaroche’s citation of structures and images from the history of art, his gathering together, based upon his research on the history of England, of objects to be depicted as elements of the habitat and heraldry of the princes (he commissioned and supervised the making of the princes’ costumes, bedstead, and draperies by ‘the best authorities’ while on a trip to London to ‘visit the scene of his picture’) and his posing of plaster effigies of the princes in his studio.27 ‘But it is also’, Bann explains, ‘a space activated by a strong narrative, whose endless potential for being rerun is signalled simply by the intrusive light that blazes from behind the closed door’.28 For Heine, that narrative had the potential for being rerun specifically as a story drawn from his own life: ‘When I stood before the picture of Delaroche, it kept returning to my mind how I once, in a beautiful castle in dear Poland, also was before the portrait of a friend . . .’29 In Bann’s account, Les Enfants d’Édouard is a painting composed ‘in such a way as to create an irruptive tension between the space of the picture and another, by definition inaccessible space’. Moreover the composition invokes a pictorial principle or mode derived from early Renaissance representations of the Annunciation, which is to say that Delaroche’s work instantiates what Bann calls, with reference to the work of art historian Michael Fried, ‘the repetitionstructure of post-Renaissance European painting’, a structure that demands, in this context, to be understood in relation to the modes of recurrence invoked by Heine, and, in turn, by Benjamin, not least because Delaroche’s mode with regard to repetition is specifically and multifariously citational.30 Delaroche’s Les Enfants d’Édouard engages the politics of the founding in 1830 of the July Monarchy of Louis-Philippe, and does so, according to Bann, in a manner that invites ‘a particular kind of response from the great middle class that was to be the favored beneficiary of the July Monarchy’.31 Benjamin, for his part, linked Louis-Philippe specifically to the nineteenth-century middle-class interior, twice titling sections of his Arcades Project exposés ‘Louis Philippe or, the Interior’. In Les Enfants d’Édouard Delaroche framed an appeal to ‘bourgeois sensibility’ under Louis-Philippe by recasting the story of Shakespeare’s Richard III as a drama in which the protagonist’s guilt does not figure – above all because in Delaroche’s painting the princes remain forever unsmothered. What Les Enfants d’Édouard offers, in opposition to the ‘moralities of circumstance’ of the history painting that immediately preceded it, is what Bann calls an ‘open representation’ that responded to, and helped to produce, a ‘desire for history’ among the members of an increasingly powerful nineteenth-century bourgeois public,

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a public to which one of Delaroche’s contemporaries attributed a demand that historical representations ‘be embodied . . . in palpable forms . . . be made palpable to sight, no less than to feeling’.32 Thus Bann would have us recognize the affinity of Delaroche’s painting to the ‘new historiography’ of Prosper de Barante, who, in a preface to his Histoire des ducs de Bourgogne (1824), discusses ‘what people want’ from history: ‘they wish to know what there was before our time in respect of the existence of peoples and individuals. They insist on their being called up and brought living before our eyes’.33 In Heine, Benjamin would have read a description of Delaroche’s approach to historical representation that resonates with his own assertions, in The Arcades Project, that the ‘method’ of montage was intended to produce effects of ‘gesteigerte Anschaulichkeit’, increased perceptibility or vividness. Delaroche, writes Heine, ‘has no great predilection for the past in itself [die Vergangenheit selbst], but for its representation [Darstellung], for making its spirit vivid [Veranschaulichung ihres Geistes], for writing history with pigments [mit Farben]’.34 Which is to say that Heine’s account of Delaroche prefigures Benjamin’s ambitions in The Arcades Project, and attributes a version of those ambitions to a painter whose pictures (whether Benjamin was conscious of this or not) virtually correspond to what he imagined doing, ‘plastically’, in his vision of a ‘structure habitable only by wax figures’ but manipulable in the manner of a stage set. ‘Hashish. One imitates certain things one knows from paintings: prison, the Bridge of Sighs, stairs like the train of a dress’ (M2, 3). The term ‘Bridge of Sighs’ comes from the first line of Canto IV of Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1818), and Benjamin likely had in mind paintings of that Venice site by J. M. W. Turner, whose work had appeared in engraved reproduction in Finden’s Illustrations of Lord Byron’s Life and Works (1833). For its part, the ‘prison’ to be imitated might invoke not only the one to which the Bridge of Sighs leads but also the Tower of London in which Delaroche’s princes await assassination. In his own invention of a ‘structure habitable only by wax figures’ Benjamin conceived a space, an image, from which he imagined he could ‘read the whole of world history’, and in which he thought he could see why he ‘collect[ed] colportage images’. ‘Collecting’, Benjamin asserts in Convolute H, ‘is a form of practical memory, and of all the profane manifestations of “nearness” it is the most binding [die bündigste]. Thus, in a certain sense, the smallest act of political reflection [Akt der politischen Besinnung] makes for an epoch in the antiques business. We construct here an alarm clock that rouses the kitsch of the previous century to “assembly” [zur “Versammlung” ]’ (H1a,2). In The Arcades Project, Benjamin does not say why he collects colportage images, but he does propose as it were to show why he does so, by making, in or as writing, an image in which, if we cannot exactly ‘read the whole of world history’ perhaps we nevertheless can see how, at the moment of his discovery (or



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invention) of ‘the colportage phenomenon of space’, a phenomenon that embodies (as if in wax figures) and situates (as if within a photographer’s studio) an Anschauungsform of the nineteenth century, Benjamin could come to associate that Anschauungsform with montage as a medium of contemporary artistic production (‘photomontage’) and as a technique for writing a new kind of history (‘literary montage’) (I1,6; N1a,8). Collecting colportage images – moreover, as it were, writing them, as Benjamin declares his intention to do in the literary montage of The Arcades Project – can thus be understood as a ‘technique of awakening’ that aims to effect a double arousal, bestirring present day readers in part by ‘[rousing] the kitsch of the previous century to “assembly”.’ In other words, to return to the terms set out in the treatment of nineteenth-century interiors in Convolute I, The Arcades Project attempts to make present a ‘confrontation with furniture’ that Benjamin recognized (in Poe and elsewhere) as a ‘struggle to awake from the collective dream’ (I1,4). Reconfigured prospectively as a dialectical image to be composed by means of a technique of literary montage that Benjamin proposes as the project’s ‘method’, furniture as it is broadly conceived in The Arcades Project confronts us as the décor of dreams and hash trances, and, potentially, as an apparatus for awakening Benjamin and his contemporaries from their seductions.35 Fundamental, then, to Benjamin’s conception of montage, is that montage had the potential to emerge as a medium for composing history in new, and newly perceptible – newly vivid, newly graphic, perhaps indeed newly palpable – forms. A medium first dreamed of, and dreamed in, by the generations of the nineteenth century, montage corresponds to an Anschauungsform framed in its utopian guise by a history painter such as Wiertz. To Benjamin’s invocation of Wiertz, I suggest we add Delaroche and his pictorial inventions of historical spaces habitable by plaster effigies of princes posed as if within an especially well-decorated theatrical set.36 In the hash experiment, Benjamin imagines his own plastic inventions outstripping the accomplishments of the avant-garde scenographer Erwin Piscator. He fantasizes taking hold of the levers that control stage lighting, and finds in his own imagined theatrical experiments an explanation for why he ‘collects colportage images’. In The Arcades Project, montage corresponds to the ordinary, oneiric stagings of the nineteenth century’s bourgeois interiors, and to the restagings of those interiors in painting, and in writing about painting, of that epoch. With regard to his own age, Benjamin promulgated montage as a technique of awakening that, in contemporary art, especially Dada and surrealism, attempted to actualize, often in imitation of the effects of present-day cinema and nineteenth-century colportage alike, the gesteigerte Anschaulichkeit to which he himself aspired in reconceptualizing the writing of history.

9 WALTER BENJAMIN’S DREAM OF ‘HAPPINESS’1 ELISSA MARDER The secular order should be erected on the idea of happiness. The relation of this order to the order of the messianic is one of the essential teachings of the philosophy of history . . . For, in happiness all that is earthly seeks its downfall, and only in happiness is its downfall destined to find it. ‘Theological-Political Fragment’ SW 3:305–6

1   THE DREAM’S STONE The story is well known. In 1940, Walter Benjamin arrives, too late, at the French–Spanish border and commits suicide. The location of his grave is unknown. But the fragments that constitute the remains of his most famous posthumous work, the Passagen-Werk, The Arcades Project, have survived. The manuscript of this unfinished work was delivered after the war, in place of its author, to New York in 1947. The text of this book (if this immense edifice composed only of quotations and fragments can be thought of as a ‘book’) would wait until 1982 to be reconstituted and published for the first time, in Germany. Benjamin’s first written mention of the project is to be found in a 1928 letter to his friend Gershom Scholem, in which Benjamin announces the imminent completion of his work, even before – but in the same breath as – he simultaneously invokes its ‘provisional and precarious’ conception and its possible failure. He writes: Once I have, one way or another, completed the project on which I am working, carefully and provisionally – the highly remarkable and extremely precarious essay ‘Paris Arcades: A Dialectical Fairy Play’ . . . As for the rest, I am still unable to tell you anything about it, and do not even have a precise conception of its length. In any case, it is a project that will take just a few weeks.2 As for the duration of his labour, these few weeks were to spread out over more than thirteen years. As for its dimensions, over the years the work split into



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fragments and spawned diverse projects of which the very last, the projected book on Baudelaire, was to attain the greatest significance to him despite (or because of?) its having remained as unfinished as the ‘arcades project’ from which it had originally sprung.3 The pages of the Passagen-Werk multiplied, becoming more and more voluminous without ever consolidating into a text recognizable as such, or ever taking on the ultimate form of which Benjamin appears to have dreamt. Three months later, in April 1928, Benjamin writes again to Scholem about his ongoing project: Quant à moi, I do not want to omit mention of the fact that I am still working on the Paris Arcades. I have probably occasionally mentioned or written to you how slowly the work is taking shape, and about the obstacles it faces. But once I manage to get everything under control, an old and somewhat rebellious, quasi-apocryphal province of my thought will really have been subjugated, colonized, managed. There is still a lot missing, but I know precisely what is missing. I will finish it in Paris, one way or another. And then I will have put to the test the extent to which it is possible to be ‘concrete’ in the context of the philosophy of history. Nobody will be able to assert that I made things easy for myself.4 This letter contains both Benjamin’s first specific description of the task and stakes of his work and his last promise of its prompt and possible completion. One might even say that the work on the Parisian arcades came closest to its end – was, as it were, finishable – only during these first few months of its construction. Thereafter, the more the project advances, the further it recedes from the horizon of an imaginable end. In this figure of negative teleology we can already discern the faint traces of Benjamin’s refusal of normative temporal and spatial structures through the invocation of a certain ‘messianism’ (a messianism that appears most often under the sign of the word ‘happiness’ and that itself poses significant challenges to reading methods, even as it is also an allegory of reading) that emerges explicitly in Benjamin’s late works on the concept of history.5 From its very origin (which is not an origin in the usual sense), Benjamin’s Passagen-Werk demands to be read through its relentless resistance to the familiar categories of production and completion. Therefore, by reading Benjamin’s ongoing reflections about the writing of the Passagen-Werk in his correspondence and the rest of his works through the prism of the Passagen-Werk’s structuring motifs, we see that the very difficulties Benjamin experiences and describes in constructing his work are themselves both a staging of the task aimed at in the book and a commentary on it. Over the years, the book begins to assume shape through his difficulties in writing it. In his sustained and increasingly wilful commitment to his inability to write the projected book, Benjamin inscribes a precise and elaborate reading of the very work he has apparently failed to write. But even from its outset, as the early letter to Scholem

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attests, this book was always already destined by Benjamin to be both a risky and a redemptive (re)reading of his own, earlier, texts and concerns. As he explains in that letter, he sees this work as a return to an ‘old province’ of his thinking through which he will finally be able to stage, realize, enact or perform the ‘concrete’ construction of history that presumably had hitherto eluded him. But, as we shall see, it is paradoxically and precisely this primordial engagement with ‘concrete’ history that draws Benjamin (via his reflections on knowledge as well as the specific form that these reflections should take in his future book) into more and more virtual and even dreamlike domains. Indeed, and this point cannot be overemphasized, the primary task of the Passagen-Werk is based on Benjamin’s working premise that only by working on and through the dream can one attempt to become emancipated from the deluded, misguided and ideologically interested legacy of nineteenthcentury historicism, to interrupt the course of progressive historical time, and to gain access to what he calls ‘concrete’ history.6 Benjamin’s work on the Passagen-Werk is in large part an extension of his engagement with thinking about the importance of dream-work that he first begins to articulate rigorously in the 1929 essays ‘Surrealism’ and ‘On the Image of Proust’. In this sense, the Passagen-Werk explicitly makes the dream central to the philosophy of history. In fact, Convolute K of the Passagen-Werk can be read as an implicit critical commentary on Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams (despite the fact that there is no clear evidence either that Benjamin knew this text well or had read it carefully). In Convolute K, Benjamin proposes that the dream is not, as Freud would have it, a royal road to an individual unconscious, but rather the model through which one can read the ways in which collective historical fantasies become manifest in external forms such as architecture and fashion. Thus, to cite an example among many from Convolute K, he writes: ‘Fashion, like architecture, inheres in the darkness of the lived moment, belongs to the dream consciousness of the collective. The latter awakes, for example, in advertising’ (K2a,4). But his real concern lies not in the dream itself but rather in the relation between the dream and the moment of awakening. If the dream is a production of historicist fantasies, the moment of awakening provides the necessary critique of those fantasies as well as the concrete method through which they can be interpreted, dismantled and abolished. Thus it will follow that, for Benjamin, that which is ‘concrete’ in history is only accessible via an engagement with the relation between dreaming and awakening. What is more, and this is part of the same logic, the dream functions in a double-edged way with respect to ‘concrete’ history. On the one hand, the dream of a continuous history transmitted to us by the philosophy of history removes us from what is concrete in true history. But on the other, 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



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moment of awakening. Awakening is, then, opposed to the dream without for all that being external to it.7 On the contrary, waking is formed, lies dormant, within the inner folds of the dream, but only reveals its concrete material and political force at the moment of awakening. This is also what Benjamin means by the following aphorism: ‘The imminent awakening is poised, like the wooden horse of the Greeks, in the Troy of dreams’ (K2, 4). The name Benjamin gives for the relation between the dream and the moment of awakening is ‘dialectic’ and through this ‘wholly unique experience of dialectic’ (K1,3) he claims that the concept (and content) of history must be refigured: The Copernican revolution in historical perception is as follows. Formerly it was thought that a fixed point had been found in ‘what has been,’ and one saw the present engaged in tentatively concentrating the forces of knowledge on this ground. Now this relation is to be overturned, and what has been is to become the dialectical reversal – the flash of awakened consciousness. Politics attains primacy over history. (K1,2) This ‘dialectical’ moment of awakened (political) consciousness necessarily entails a destruction of the very form of ‘consciousness’ presupposed by the dominant nineteenth-century philosophy of history. The moment of awakening produces new historical relations (founded on politics rather than so-called historical ‘facts’). Through these relations a different set of historical objects as well as a different model of ‘historical’ time emerge. The temporality of awakening ruptures continuity, cause and effect relations, as well as all related forms of narrative development or ‘progress.’ Thus in Convolute K when Benjamin writes that ‘there is a wholly unique experience of dialectic’, he glosses this assertion by referring the moment of awakening to the refutation of all seeming ‘development’: ‘The compelling – the drastic – experience which refutes everything “gradual” about becoming and shows all seeming “development” to be dialectical reversal, eminently and thoroughly composed, is the awakening from dream’ (K1, 3). It is through the waking internal to the structure of dreaming that Benjamin strives to awaken us from the dream of history. In this way, The Arcades Project is conceived as an attempt to awaken the repressed history of the nineteenth century from the sleep in which its own dreams of history have left it wrapped. No progress, then. The logic of the ‘task’ of the book, the aim of which is to render history ‘concrete’ while absolutely refusing any progressivist presentation of history, or indeed any narrative representation of the historical object, weighs more and more heavily on the concrete construction of the book itself. Since the very gesture of the book depends entirely on the possibility of uncovering a form capable of staging concrete history even as it

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contests all known methods and all existing philosophy, what form could possibly befit and respond to such a demand? What is more, Benjamin is only too conscious that such a project risks falling into the trap of all those who believe themselves to be ‘modern’ by claiming to invent new forms ab nihilo. In May 1928, barely a month after the letter in which he proclaimed the end of his projected essay, Benjamin writes once more to Scholem. This time, he describes his project as a wild beast stalking him in a nightmare: 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 if I have failed to water it at the most distant Springs during the day. God knows what it will do when, one of these days, I set it free. But this will not happen for a long time, and though I may already be constantly staring into the housing in which it does what comes naturally, I let hardly anyone else have a look inside.8 More and more preoccupied with his work in the subsequent years leading up to his death, Benjamin devotes his material and physical existence to the material and practical exigencies of his research. Even as he dwells alone inside his dream-work construction like a house into which he refuses to let others enter, he inhabits the city of Paris as if this external, collective space were internal to the solitary, virtual time and space of his work. The ongoing work on The Arcades Project creates a strange and powerful bond between Benjamin and the city of Paris itself. Throughout the remaining years of his life, the strength of this strange attachment to Paris determines his decision not to leave France until 1940, in spite of obvious and known dangers. During this time, Benjamin was certainly well aware of the risk he was taking in order to preserve his contact with the city. And yet, as he makes explicit in his letters, the entire project of the Passagen-Werk is seemingly entirely dependent on his actual physical presence in Paris. But the city vital to him and his work is to be found neither in the streets, nor the real ‘arcades’, nor even in the important personal contacts he establishes with the intellectual world of Paris, but in the passages of books and documents buried deep in the Bibliothèque Nationale. The Paris he inhabits is the one he constructs himself on the basis of the voluminous quotations he gathers, copies out, and collects. And it is these fragments that constitute the greater part of the book we read today. This city of citations becomes for him the construction site of the ruins of the nineteenth century. Modern Paris provides Benjamin with the virtual point of entry for the construction of a future book of ‘concrete history’ assembled from the fragments, remains and detritus of the nineteenth century that he unearths in the library. In a sense, his own lived experience of the city mimes the experience he had earlier translated in Baudelaire’s Tableaux parisiens: his Paris becomes trans-



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formed into Baudelaire’s ‘swarming city, city teeming with dreams’ where ‘everything becomes allegory’.9 Along with the dream, Baudelaire’s allegory will become one of the critical foundations of Benjamin’s conception of a ‘concrete’ construction of history. Thus even at the seemingly innocuous or contingent ‘biographical’ level, Benjamin’s own charged relation to the city of Paris (mediated through the dual experience of exile and attachment and ‘lived’ at the threshold between the virtual and real) takes on added resonances when put in conjunction with his writings about Baudelaire’s strange relation to Paris. In the section of the Passagen-Werk devoted to Baudelaire and allegory (the immense, difficult and unwieldy Convolute J), Benjamin establishes a connection between Baudelaire’s inability to be at home in the city of Paris and to his specific use of allegory in his poetry: No one ever felt less at home in Paris than Baudelaire. Every intimacy with things is alien to the allegorical intention. To touch on things means, for it, to violate them. To recognize things means, for it, to see through them. Wherever the allegorical intention prevails, no habits of any kind can be formed. Hardly has a thing been taken up than allegory has dispensed with the situation . . . But to become obsolete means: to grow strange. Spleen lays down centuries between the present moment and the one just lived. It is spleen that tirelessly generates ‘antiquity’. And in fact, with Baudelaire, modernity is nothing other than the ‘newest antiquity’. Modernity, for Baudelaire, is not solely and not primarily the object of his sensibility; it is the object of a conquest. Modernity has, for its armature, the allegorical mode of vision. (J59a,4) In this sense, one might say that Benjamin’s relation to Paris is ‘allegorical’. His habits, such as they are, provide neither familiarity nor continuity. This ‘allegorical’ vision of Paris ‘lays down centuries’ for Benjamin between the time of his lived experience and the writing of his book. The book itself ‘tirelessly generates “antiquity” ’ and resists the various seductions of promised completion and the dream of a ‘new’ form for ‘modernity’. What he calls the ‘enigmatic’ exigency of his project haunts his nights and forces him to lose himself in it in the remotest regions of the library during the day. He buries himself, then, in the library the better to live within his passages. After his death, his unfinished book on the passages will survive him after having been buried during the war in the very same library in which its author had earlier buried himself alive. Now, the very structure of this coincidence – at once ‘biographical’ and ‘historical’ – haunts his entire written corpus and establishes a curious link between the end of Benjamin’s life and the potential survival of his text.10 For if there is one question that traverses all his work, and that defines its most essential ‘task’, it is that of the urgent need to rethink all that is implied

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in every gesture of transmission. His engagement with the aesthetic, philosophical, cultural and historical implications of transmission determines the arguments of his most celebrated essays. For example, Benjamin presents his philosophy of language through a reflection on the role played by translation in the survival of a literary work in ‘The Task of the Translator’.11 In ‘The Storyteller’, Benjamin presents a genealogy of the history of modern narrative forms via an analysis of the disappearance, produced by modern life, of the communicability of experience.12 In ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility’, Benjamin shows how and why the function of art and thereby its historical and political status depend on the means – the media – of its transmission.13 And in the posthumously published ‘Theses on History’, Benjamin insists on the need to acknowledge and counteract the violence inherent in all traditional transmission of history. In this text (as in the notes in Convolute N of the Passagen-Werk on the basis of which he wrote the ‘Theses’), Benjamin declares that the work of the historian is not to recount history, but to interrupt its course. In 1940, shortly before his death, he writes: To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was’ (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. Historical materialism wishes to retain that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to man singled out by history at a moment of danger. The danger affects both the content of the tradition and its receivers . . . In every era the attempt must be made to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it . . . Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.14 Saving the dead. Such is the dangerous task of the historian. There is danger for every element of the past as well as for all those who receive the transmission of history. In other terms, as William Faulkner famously phrased it: ‘The past is never dead. It isn’t even past’. Every historical recitation reproduces history and recreates it in the present, and the violence of this continuous recitation of the past in the present forcibly perpetuates the violence of the past into the present. In another passage of the ‘Theses’, Benjamin describes the process thus: ‘there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another. A historical materialist therefore dissociates himself from it as far as possible. He regards it as his task to brush history against the grain’ (256–57). In a similar vein, in a fragment from Convolute N of the Passagen-Werk, Benjamin writes: ‘There is a tradition that is catastrophe’ (N9,4).



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In short, we can see that for Benjamin all transmission is fraught with danger, and history is written only in moments of peril. There is no truly historical writing that does not take the measure of this danger. But to take the measure of danger entails risking death in the name of the uncertain survival of every last thing that has been oppressed, repressed, rejected and forgotten by the transmissive force of the tradition. Such is the task that Benjamin assigns himself in his Passagen-Werk. Thus, from the very beginning of this work, from the first mention of it in the letter to Scholem, Benjamin describes it as a vital, but essentially dangerous and even deadly, thing, whose ultimate significance can only become readable after the event and in direct proportion to the risks taken during its construction. Well before Benjamin himself was confronted with the dangers of history in his biographical existence, he enacted the danger of history in his relation to the writing of his book. The idea of the danger of history on which the book is based extends to the destiny of the book as well as the fate of its author. From 1929 onwards, Benjamin begins to understand that the risks inherent in the construction of his book no longer permit him to think seriously of its end. But more profoundly, for Benjamin the process of his work acquires a sort of life independent of any imaginable and even desirable end. The ongoing project on the arcades becomes a living thing with its own demands and within which Benjamin leads a sort of dream-life parallel to the life he leads in the world and in his published writings. As we have seen, his dreamed-of work on the arcades makes him work on the dream. In 1929, Benjamin digs into his own reflections on dreams in the Passagen-Werk and publishes two important essays: ‘Surrealism’15 and ‘The Image of Proust’.16 In a letter to Scholem, Benjamin describes the essay on surrealism as ‘an opaque screen placed in front of the Paris Arcades – and I have many a reason to keep secret what goes on behind it’.17 This declaration intimates that the arcades project needs to be protected against the outside world. The essay on surrealism is only the published and public face of the inner experience that is the Passagen-Werk. In the essay on surrealism, Benjamin expounds his new theory of ‘profane illumination’ in which the point is to use dreams and intoxication to detach experience from the course of continuous history. He writes: In the world’s stucture, dream loosens individuality like a bad tooth. This loosening of the self by intoxication is, at the same time, precisely the fruitful, living experience that allowed these people to step outside the charmed space of intoxication.18 Similarly, in the essay on Proust, Benjamin pursues his reflections on profane illumination by focusing on the strange temporality of the experience of life as it reveals itself in Proust. According to Benjamin:

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Proust’s method is actualization, not reflection. He is filled with the insight that none of us has time to live the true dramas of the life that we are destined for. This is what ages us – this, and nothing else. The wrinkles and creases in our faces are the registration of the great passions, vices, insights that called on us; but we, the masters, were not at home.19 The gesture of ‘actualization’ that Benjamin identifies in Proust becomes the germ of his own conception of the ‘dialectical image’ of history in the Passagen-Werk. The dialectical image is not a representation of history, but it presents to us the history of a past time that happened without our knowing it, and which comes looking for us, momentarily, at the moment of awakening. Thus he writes in the Passagen-Werk: There is a not-yet-conscious knowledge of what has been: its ‘advancement’ has the structure of awakening. (K1,2) or again: Just as Proust begins the story of his life with an awakening, so must every presentation of history begin with awakening. In fact, it should treat of nothing else. This one, accordingly, deals with awakening from the nineteenth century. (N4,2) In 1930, in a letter written in French to Scholem, Benjamin refuses to describe his work to him, but announces that the work is ‘the theatre of all my combats and all my ideas’. We must hear in the word ‘theatre’ the echo of his reading of the surrealists and Proust. The book has become the living drama of a ‘non-yet-conscious-knowledge’ of history. This history is an active performance and living scene even though it happens only in a book that, moreover, looks more like a dream than a book. ‘Theater of all his conflicts and his ideas’,20 the space of the book takes on the proportions of a dream in which Benjamin immerses himself. In the theater of this ‘other scene’, this andere Schauplatz, what Benjamin would like to witness is the showing of the dream’s stone, concrete history – i.e. the trace of all the true dramas of history we do not have the time to live but which re-emerge in the dream at the moment of awakening.

2   THE DREAM OF HAPPINESS In 1933, following the advice of his close friend Gretel Adorno, wife of the philosopher Theodor Adorno, Benjamin left Berlin definitively and moved to Paris where he continued work on The Arcades Project. At the same time, he continued writing a series of articles called Deutsche Menschen for the



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newspaper Frankfurter Zeitung, under the name ‘Detlef Holz’. During the 30s, the two Adornos become the confidants and privileged addressees of the ongoing plans and projects of the Passagen-Werk. The role played by Theodor Adorno in this phase of Benjamin’s work has been well documented by critics and historians.21 But the more subtle (and perhaps more salient) importance given by Benjamin to Gretel Adorno has been much less studied. And this importance becomes legible, first of all, on the basis of a single word, a name, not even a name, but a nickname. From the moment Benjamin moved to France, he never again addressed himself to Gretel by her real name in the letters he sent her. Henceforth, he always called her ‘Felizitas’ when he wrote to her and when he mentioned her in his letters to her husband, his friend Theodor. What is more, he did not sign the letters to ‘Felizitas’ with his own name ‘Walter’, but with his pseudonym ‘Detlef’. ‘Felizitas’ could be translated as ‘happiness’ in English and ‘Glück’ in German. A mere term of endearment, perhaps, but, as we shall see, this happy name, the word ‘happiness’ occupies a critical place in Benjamin’s thought. For now we might wonder why Benjamin confers precisely this name on Gretel at the moment he takes refuge in France. Reading all the letters addressed to Gretel/Felizitas reveals that for Walter/Detlef, Felizitas is the allegorical name he gives to the person who embodies for him a promise of survival. However, if, throughout the correspondence with ‘Felizitas’, one discovers that the name ‘Happiness’ is clearly associated with ‘survival’, it is not at all clear that the survival in question can be simply referred either to the life of the man or that of his work. Indeed, throughout his work (perhaps most notably in ‘The Task of the Translator’, but also in the essays on Baudelaire, Proust, Kafka, surrealism and the ‘Berlin Chronicle’ to cite only the most obvious) Benjamin explicitly challenges the apparently ‘natural’ distinction between biological ‘life’ and the ‘life’ of a work. It is therefore all the more striking to find that in the letters to ‘Felizitas’, Benjamin repeatedly intimated that the survival of his ‘papers’ should take precedence over that of his own life. Thus, in a letter to Felizitas in November 1938, Detlef wrote: I have reason to congratulate myself for every piece of paper I had the foresight to put into your hands in March 1933. As of now, the only thing yielded by my persistent efforts to get some more of my books, but above all my papers, out of Berlin is the virtual certainty that the following things have been destroyed: the complete papers of the two Heinles, my irreplaceable archive on the history of the leftist bourgeois Youth Movement, and finally my own youthful writings – among them the 1914 Hölderlin essay.22 Here Benjamin proclaims his happiness – he ‘congratulates himself’ – on having had the felicitous good fortune (‘foresight’) of having delivered his

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papers to the woman who bears the name of Happiness. Everything that was not fortuitously placed into the hands of ‘Happiness’ was destroyed. What is more – but we will not have time to analyze here in detail this essential thread of the story – in the allusion to the ‘complete papers of the two Heinles’, Benjamin conjures up the spectre of a past suicide which undeniably prefigures the image of his own future suicide.23 Fritz Heinle was a poet who committed suicide with his fiancée in 1914 because of his despair about the war. Benjamin describes his friendship with Heinle and the story of his death in the ‘Berlin Chronicle’, one of his finest autobiographical texts. In the chronicle, Benjamin recounts that ‘Fritz Heinle was a poet, and the only one of them all whom I met not in life but in his work. He died at nineteen and could be known in no other way.’24 But Benjamin, who boasts of having met Heinle ‘in poetry’ rather than ‘in life’, will end up rejoining Heinle in his death and in the death of his work. For Benjamin was the addressee chosen by Heinle to receive his suicide note and it was Benjamin who took charge of all Heinle’s writings – which were destroyed after his departure from Berlin. In other words, one may say that Heinle did not have the luck of having an addressee called ‘Happiness’. For, according to the implacable logic of the letters Detlef sent to Felizitas, we can see that for him, ‘to save one’s life’ means saving the existent work as well as prolonging the available work time so as to safeguard the survival of the future or even virtual – that is, not-yet-written – work. Felizitas is, then, the chosen addressee of his final, important and unfinished work, the book on Baudelaire. This book emerges from The Arcades Project like a monstrous outgrowth. During most of the construction of the Passagen-Werk, Benjamin had planned to include within it the work on Baudelaire and had therefore devoted to it the greatest part – the enormous Convolute J. But towards the end of his life (and perhaps as an indirect consequence of his celebrated altercation with Theodor Adorno in 1935) Benjamin considers that the work on Baudelaire must be separated from the Passagen-Werk, and therefore decides to write a new book entirely devoted to Baudelaire. Henceforth, the unfinished book on Baudelaire becomes the greatest passion of his life and Felizitas becomes the privileged addressee of the greatest expression of that passion. In a letter of June 1939, he wrote to her: ‘You would do me a favour by opening up in good time a copy of the Flowers of Evil and looking at it through my eyes. We would then be sure to encounter one another, since my thoughts are now fixed on this text day and night’.25 And, in the same letter, talking of the ‘new version’ of the text he is writing on Baudelaire, he says: I have never been certain in any earlier work to this degree of the vanishing point at which (and, as it now seems, from time immemorial) all my reflections come together from the most divergent points.



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But if Benjamin judges that the book on Baudelaire is the ‘vanishing point’ of all his earlier work, it follows, in macabre fashion, that this book will become the vanishing point of the very possibility for any actual ‘future’ work as well. For Benjamin’s dedication to this particular work is one of the determining reasons why he delays his attempts to leave France. Implicitly, then, Benjamin actively decides to risk his own (biological?) life in order to safeguard the survival of his book on Baudelaire. In a very late letter to Felizitas, Benjamin explicitly avowed that he understands that the decision to continue to work on this book may end by costing him his life. He describes his impasse thus: The fear of having to abandon the Baudelaire once I have begun writing the sequel [to the ‘Motifs’ essay] is what makes me hesitate. The sequel will be a work of monumental breadth and it would be a delicate matter to have to stop and start again and again. This is, however, a risk I would have to take. I am constantly reminded of it by the gas mask in my small room – the mask looks like a disconcerting replica of the skulls with which studious monks decorated their cells. This is why I haven’t dared to begin the sequel to the Baudelaire. I definitely hold this work more dear to my heart than any other. It would consequently not suffer being neglected even to ensure the survival of its author.26 In order to understand how the letters sent by Benjamin to Felizitas are themselves a reflection on (and of) his shocking declaration that he can imagine choosing the life of his Baudelaire book over that of his own personal survival, we must return to his philosophical and critical writings. Now, one of the most enigmatic, difficult and unavoidable concepts in Benjamin’s thought is precisely the one he presents under the same name he gives to Felizitas, i.e. the name ‘Happiness’. When writing in German, the word he uses is Glück. We will not here have the time to begin an adequate analysis of the crucial function that this concept fulfills in Benjamin’s thought. But it suffices to quote a few mentions of this key word to see the extent to which Benjamin puts it to work. For example, his whole reading of Proust turns around this word. For Benjamin, Proust’s work is entirely based on what he calls a ‘quest’ for happiness and he congratulates Jean Cocteau on being the first to recognize that fact: Cocteau recognized what really should be the major concern of all readers of Proust. He recognized Proust’s blind, senseless, obsessive quest for happiness . . . There is a dual will to happiness, a dialectics of happiness: a hymnic form as well as an elegiac form. The one is the unheard-of, the unprecedented, the height of bliss; the other, the eternal repetition, the eternal restoration of the original, first happiness. It is this elegiac idea of happiness – it could also be called Eleatic – which for Proust transforms

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existence into a preserve of memory. To it, he sacrificed in his life friends and companionship, in his works plot, unity of characters, the flow of narration, the play of imagination.27 In this passage (and in virtually all of Benjamin’s texts in which the word figures prominently), the word ‘happiness’ names the relation between a kind of ‘sacrifice’ and a form of ‘redemption’. Although these two terms, ‘sacrifice’ and ‘redemption’, are clearly marked as ‘theological’, it is not clear that they can simply be read according to any available theological paradigms or traditions. Nor it is any accident that the terms of ‘sacrifice’ and ‘redemption’ are, in some sense, most explicitly elaborated by Benjamin in the context of Proust’s ‘profane’ literary work. According to Benjamin, Proust sacrifices – in his life and in his work – all the links that establish a temporal and narrative continuity in the name of the happiness of ‘memory’. Of course, the memory in question here is precisely not the memory of the past ‘the way it really was’ that could be evoked by voluntary memory, but rather the involuntary memory that comes to us through dreams in the moment of awakening or else in certain rare, fortuitous moments of waking life – like the one that Proust describes in his famous encounter with a madeleine. And it is in this experience of involuntary memory – which does not partake of everyday temporality or of ‘life’ in the common sense (even as it brings us closer to the ‘concrete’ elements of the everyday and opens up the possibility of another form of ‘afterlife’) that Benjamin invokes the vitally destructive power of happiness. For Benjamin, the ‘happiness’ one seeks for in art or finds in the dream opens up the possibility of what he calls in the texts from the late 1920s: ‘profane illumination’. The ‘happiness’ of profane illumination aims at destroying the world and there is no destruction without loss of ‘life’. In his later works, Benjamin makes this the task of the artist and, in so doing, brings the work of the artist into relation with the work of the historian although they do not share, strictly speaking, the same task. One might say that the work of the artist sets the stage for the work of the historian. If the artist ‘destroys’ the world in pursuit of the ‘happiness’ of profane illumination, the historian prepares the ground for the possibility for the figure of redemption: the Messiah. Although this question is too complicated to address here, we can say, in a preliminary way, that for Benjamin, the Messiah’s ‘coming’ is not an ‘event’ that might or will occur in a distended or promised ‘future’, but rather constitutes the very force that determines (and is always already potentially present in) ‘concrete’ history. It is along these lines that Benjamin establishes an indissociable bond among the function of art in the wake of the ‘aura’, the concept of history, and the figure of redemption in his later works. Thus, in the part of the PassagenWerk entitled ‘Theoretical Reflections on Knowledge’ (Convolute N), he writes:



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There vibrates in the very idea of happiness (this is what that noteworthy circumstance teaches us) the idea of salvation. This happiness is founded on the very despair and desolation which were ours. Our life, it can be said, is a muscle strong enough to contract the whole of historical time. Or, to put it differently, the genuine conception of historical time rests entirely upon the image of redemption. (N13a,1) Here, in the image of ‘a muscle strong enough to contract the whole of historical time’, we find again an articulation of what Benjamin describes elsewhere as the historical force of the ‘dialectical image’ that appears only in a flash at a moment of peril. But we also see again an image analogous to the one Benjamin discusses in his essay ‘On the Image of Proust’. If, in the Proustian image, through the ‘profane illumination’ of art, one retraces the effects of something like ‘concrete history’ without ever encountering it as such, through the ‘dialectical image’, ‘concrete history’ calls to us and makes us accountable for all the losses of the past. In the ‘Theses on Philosophy of History’, Benjamin pursues this idea by proposing that we are endowed only with a ‘weak messianic force’, and that it is in the very weakness of this force that we find ourselves confronted (and affronted) by our debt towards history: Our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of redemption. The same applies to our image of the past, which is the concern of history. The past carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred to redemption. There is a secret agreement between past generations and our present one. Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that has preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim. That claim cannot be settled cheaply. Historical materialists are aware of that.28 Now we can begin to hear the powerful reverberations of the name ‘Happiness’ as it traverses Benjamin’s letters of exile to Felizitas. Profane and human woman, Felizitas stands in for an unnamable ultimate addressee to whom Benjamin addresses his final, unfinished works. It is to her that Benjamin addresses one of his final texts – a text that takes the form of a dream from which Benjamin awakens with a lasting impression of an image of ‘happiness’. From what Benjamin says about the dream, as he addresses it to the one he calls ‘Happiness’, we learn that if we were in a position to be able to read this dream, we would find that it condenses – like a muscle strong enough to contract an entire life’s work – all of the elements of Benjamin’s life and work that we have brought out in this essay, that is, the essentially oneiric status of the Passagen-Werk, the relation between dream and awakening in the ‘concrete’ construction of history, the refusal of any traditional transmission of history, the concept of the dialectical image that

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can emerge only in a moment of danger, the experience of profane illumination produced by art, and the sacrifice of ‘life’ in the name of an uncertain survival. The set of these elements – as they are gathered in this dream of happiness – constructs what Benjamin elsewhere calls a ‘constellation’. For Benjamin, the act of reading is indissociable from the act of presenting a ‘constellation’ of concrete elements constructed at a given moment in time from the traces of a lost history. He explains this idea in a text entitled ‘On the Mimetic Faculty’ in which he writes: ‘ “To read what was never written.” Such reading is the most ancient reading prior to all languages, from entrails, the stars, or dances.’29 And one can add to this list – without betraying his thought at all – the reading one does of dreams, or even in dreams. And thus we arrive finally at the end of this preliminary study. But this conclusion is itself only virtual, only a vanishing point towards which we have been directed from the start – and this vanishing point is none other than a dream of happiness that Benjamin has eleven months before his death, and that he recounts, in a letter written in French, to his dear Felizitas. In 1939, Benjamin found himself interned for two months in the Voluntary Workers’ Camp in Nevers. He was allowed to send only two letters a week and these letters were obligatorily written in French. Among the letters that Benjamin wrote in the camp, the one that interests us here is the longest and the most striking. Benjamin himself points to the importance of this letter when, later, after his release from the camp, he again writes to Felizitas to reproach her with not having recognized the singular importance of the dream-letter he sent from the camp: ‘I did not delay and have already sent you the one I wrote. It was the story of the dream that filled me with happiness. It would be unfortunate if my letter had not reached you. I am almost inclined to think it did not, however, because you make no mention of the dream.’30 This letter, written in French at a moment of danger, appears as a constellation through which Benjamin’s entire oeuvre acquires a new kind of legibility through its translation into French and through the condensation of the dream-work through which it passes. And if we were to take up the challenge of reading it – according to the very principles of reading practised by Benjamin in his life and work – it would illuminate, for an instant, like the dialectical image it resembles, the totality of Benjamin’s corpus – including the unfinished works and the complicated history of their survival.31 Perhaps, one should not forget that the question of the history of that survival is itself bound up with Benjamin’s own complex relation to the French language and to the French literary texts that he translated and to which he devoted the greater part of his later life. But perhaps, also, it is not by chance that the question of Benjamin’s relation to ‘French’ imposes itself here, as it were, in a text written ‘in translation’ by a ‘foreigner’. For Benjamin, survival – if there is any survival – is accomplished only in the work of its passage through death and translation.



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Although this is not the time or the place to engage in a full reading of the dream in question, this essay aims to enable us to appreciate the grave significance of this dream and to understand what might be at stake for Benjamin in the particular form and language of its transmission. In the letter in which Benjamin reproaches Felizitas for not having acknowledged receipt of the dream, he himself plaintively gestures to its implicit gravity. It would seem that for Benjamin, this dream letter becomes legible only if, in some sense, one understands that it is (among other things) a ‘suicide’ letter. But we can call it a suicide letter only if the word ‘suicide’ is itself read through Benjamin’s own extended reflections on suicide. In this sense, the suicide letter that predates Benjamin’s own later suicide in ‘life’ might be understood as a prefiguration of that later event even if it is most certainly not (and this cannot be stressed too strongly) either a narrative historical explanation, or an intellectual defence, or even a psychological account of that future, literal act. But if, nonetheless, the letter reads like a suicide letter, the first trace of this suicide – which we might be tempted to call ‘happy’ – becomes legible in the very opening salutation of the letter. For here, and this is the only occurrence of this gesture in the whole of Benjamin’s published correspondence, he sends this letter to Gretel Adorno without calling her either by her real name or by her allegorical name ‘Happiness’. But the name ‘Happiness’ which disappears from the inaugural address of the letter reappears in the strange feeling of happiness that Benjamin experiences at the moment of awakening. And as we have just said, although we will not here propose a reading of the dream – and still less an interpretation of it – by pointing to Benjamin’s ‘experience’ of happiness, as he addresses this experience to the one whom he here refuses to name, we discover that this dream text promises a reading (by Benjamin) of his own method of reading itself. Thus: My dear, I had such a beautiful dream while lying on my cot last night that I am unable to resist my desire to tell you about it. There are so few beautiful, not to mention pleasant, things about which I can tell you. This is one of the dreams, the likes of which I may have once every five years, that center around the motif of ‘reading’. Teddie will remember the role played by this motif in my reflections on epistemology. The sentence I spoke aloud at the end of the dream happened to be in French. This is another reason to give an account of it in the same language. . . . After this dream, I could not fall asleep for hours. Out of happiness. And I write to you to share these hours with you. . . . Love, Detlef.32 But if, for now, the reading of this dream through the experience of happiness that accompanies its moment of awakening must remain at the level

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of a promise, the promised reading could interrupt the course of the story of Benjamin’s life’s work as it has been told, the critical and philosophical tradition into which it has too easily been assimilated, by asking us to take on differently the debt and responsibility of its survival.

10 THE DREAM-REALITY OF THE RUIN1 STATHIS GOURGOURIS Reading Walter Benjamin’s Passagen-Werk means confronting the obdurate question of how one becomes – and what it means to become – the reader of an imaginary text. The gravity of the question does not emerge from the status of the text. To say that the Passagen-Werk is imaginary is hardly to deny its reality but, as we shall see, to account for the deepest sense of the real. Rather, the urgency and difficulty of the question concerns the construction of a reading position in regard to a work that never ceases being a project, resisting thus the present time of reading even after being fashioned into a printable text by a superior editor (Rolf Tiedemann), who selfconsciously assumes the burden of enclosing an untamable project between two book covers. The matter is further complicated by the work’s own relation to temporality, both as exterior dimension (its historical time frame, which would include Walter Benjamin’s own internal historical framing – let us say, his ‘psychical’ time) and as content (Benjamin’s persistent ruminations on the significance of time throughout the project, particularly in regard to the epistemological status of the dialectical image). Thus, we not only face the difficulty of becoming readers of a work whose time-frame eludes the ‘immediacy’ of the present time of reading (since, as incomplete project, it projects its time of reading into an indeterminate and, in the last instance, unrealizable future), but we also face a work whose core reflections concern the significance of time in excess of all recognizable temporalities: as space-time, dream-time, now-time, time of awakening, mythic time, epochal time (‘times of history’), emergent time (of the radically new), twilight of remembrance, momentary flash, dialectics at a standstill and so on. Complications abound. Such excessive temporalities themselves emerge into the recognizable textual realm as a result of an extraordinary force of reading the minutest details of history by an author who oftentimes foregoes his limitless drive for speculation and renders the historical material he reads devoid of any interpretive marks, of any decipherable traces of his reading consciousness. The ‘oppressive chunks of quotations’, to use Tiedemann’s characterization, bear in fact their own composite temporality: as bare-bones textual indications of Benjamin’s own reading time, which are then splintered and mutated into mythistorical instances of his journey through the labyrinthine passages of this project over the years. Of course, these mythistorical instances can only manifest themselves in the ‘now-time’

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(Jetztzeit) of readers who take up the impossible task, now registering as ‘archaic’ images (ruins of reading) in a dialectical encounter with emergent history, propelled by a sort of inbuilt process of radiation that keeps this imaginary text animate and in the present tense throughout.2 The various historical encounters stage the question each time anew: how does one become a reader of a project that employs the force of reading in an unprecedented radical sense, so that it lays both its object and its method of reading to ruin? Where does one find the entrance into a field of ruins of reading and how does one anchor oneself in a textual sea that continually subverts one’s reading orientation? The question is posed here as the formidable arche¯ of the historical reception of a text that can neither claim to possess nor to know arche¯ or telos. Constructing a reading position in regard to a text that shatters history and itself with the force of a split atom might best be cast in light of Theodor Adorno’s general formulation of construction as ‘alienation from material and as mastery of material’, a simultaneity that Adorno considers to be ‘already eminently dialectical’.3 In such terms, to become a reader one must achieve the contradictory position of being master of the textual material (in a sense equal to its author, though obviously from the standpoint of an other) without, however, assimilating the coordinates of the textual waters – that is, while remaining alien to the text’s conditions of existence. Although the reader does work authorially on the text, as it has been amply theorized in recent literary criticism, and therefore imbues the text with the historical forces of his reading position, no reader can exist without being cognizant of the radical alterity of his reading position, particularly in regard to a text that at some last instance (even if not exactly ever verifiable) remains impenetrable and uninterpretable, untranslatably other, like Freud’s notion of the navel of the dream. This relation is objectively dialectical, forming and being formed by a historical encounter that cannot outperform its finitude. In the case of the Passagen-Werk, the difficulty one faces as a reader does not consist merely in recognizing one’s alterity but precisely in recognizing mastery. In an elemental sense, Benjamin’s methodology of montage demands a like way of reading, perhaps even enforces a way of reading that places the equation between alterity and mastery in perpetual ambiguity. Strictly speaking, no reader can master this material, since even its own author never did quite gain mastery over it. Rather, as his authorship depended on his being essentially a collector of moments of reading history, his historical alterity to the material was never abolished. The most palpable evidence is that no text as such was ever constituted in Benjamin’s lifetime. But this is merely symptomatic. That Benjamin’s position in relation to this work – as author/reader, master/alien – still remains undeconstructibly ambiguous (in his terms, dialectical) is due not to the work’s unfinished nature but to the work’s methodological nature, its design. By extension, that we are compelled to read a text that never existed in its author’s lifetime,



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except as a collection of a reader’s traces, does not suggest that we approach it the way we would approach an unpublished fragment (and Benjamin himself left behind a great deal of such unfinished pieces). The hard fact of The Arcades Project is that we face an imaginary text, whose envisioned but unconstituted reality is for ever lost along with its author but whose operative principles are fully constituted and its methodology a reality that cannot be eluded. This makes for paradoxical reading waters; the reader is forced both to improvise in high seas and to remain alert to the compass of the text’s curious method. The reading position cannot be constructed once and for all, or more precisely, it is constructed as a threshold of reading that cannot be traversed, hence feeding and preserving intact a whole range of ambiguities. For instance, The Arcades Project can be read as a modernist novel (bearing all the elements that extend, at the limit, to the unreadable world of the Joycean text), but equally also read as an Enlightenment treatise that charts a definite field of argument with precise objectives, even though its mode of argumentation does follow a mysterious geometry. The reader is inadvertently thrust into an ambivalent practice. As literature, Benjamin’s text demands that we orient ourselves toward an intrinsic mode of theoretical knowledge, made accessible by the text’s own performative parameters – its relentless montage of quotation and aphorism – and made tangible ‘in lightning flashes’, as Benjamin himself was fond of repeating. Although such flashes of knowledge describe Benjamin’s own experience of being author/reader of history, they end up built into the project by methodological exigency, as foundational formal elements, thereby providing conditions for their ‘recurrence’ (once they undergo, we presume, a process of mutation) in the text’s future historical encounters with its readers. As treatise, on the other hand, Benjamin’s text provides both a history and a philosophy of history – as he calls it, ‘the Urgeschichte of the nineteenth century’ – which comes across as an allegorical encyclopedia, nominally of Paris (as ‘the capital of the nineteenth century’), but essentially of the entire social imaginary of nineteenth-century capitalism as it reveals itself in the objects of everyday life. Though, by virtue of the montage method, we may experience the knowledge of this natural history of everyday objects as a lightning flash, the work also forces upon us the radiation-like knowledge of an allegorical ‘system’ whose precise contours, though not necessarily decipherable as a whole, gradually permeate our horizon of understanding. This ambivalent understanding is a sort of formal condition that characterizes Walter Benjamin’s entire way of thinking and writing. His idiosyncratic trajectory is based on the continuous engagement with the intersection between literature and philosophy. The substantial epistemological problems of this intersection were never abandoned. In essence, Benjamin’s work as a whole – if one could condense it to a single point (a rather infertile task) – wrestles with the question of how worldly existence can yield self-knowledge

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without violating the indefiniteness of experience. In this process literature and philosophy are complicit as two sides of the same coin. Just as, for Benjamin, a worldly universe includes theological interrogation (in such a way as to explode theology’s ‘natural’ reliance on religion), so does the question of knowledge – which is essentially a quest – include the differential (indeed antagonistic) equation between literature and philosophy without the dogmatic need to resolve it. Still, although this epistemological problematic remains foundational, The Arcades Project sharpens the entire complex by orienting the interrogation toward the specific parameters and demands of the social-historical. This is a crucial development in Benjamin’s own orientation. It is not to say that The Arcades Project signals a radical break in Benjamin’s trajectory – the matter is hardly worthy of interest in any case – but it is to say that Benjamin, without compromising his commitment to the problems of philosophy and literature, makes a conscious decision to push this commitment further into the domain of history and historiography. Obviously, this was the furthest away from an academic decision. Benjamin had no sense of academic discipline, a condition he bore at great personal cost to the very end. But he did have an uncanny sense of discipline as a thinker, pursuing the micrological dimensions of a problem with relentless rigour. In this respect, the entire epistemological complex of Benjamin’s literary meditations, whose succinct expression was the treatise on the German Trauerspiel (but also the lone strands on Kraus, Kafka and Brecht), finds the sharpest personal expression in his taking up, in full consciousness, the task of the historian. As materialist historian – the qualification, in Benjamin’s mind, was a matter of epistemological rigour – the reader of the social-imaginary of nineteenth-century capitalism finds it imperative to incorporate his methodological reflections, even anxieties, hunches or doubts, into the text itself, into the actual praxis of historical inquiry and narration. Methodological reflection becomes compelling to the materialist historian as document of his own entry into history; it delineates the process of self-fictionalization that is already inserted into the text of the historian’s existence; it testifies to the self-realization that the materialist historian is always simultaneously both a subject and an object of history. As such, the allure of these occasionally stunning aphoristic self-reflections is hard to resist. Scattered among the often inscrutable ruins of Benjamin’s own time of reading history, which become graver (and more resistant to reading) as they are made to bear the weight of the historical object itself, these self-reflections have the effect of an oasis of reading. It is hardly surprising that they have commanded most of the attention in commentaries on The Arcades Project so far. As a result, the tendency is to read the work philosophically in a narrow sense, in accord ultimately (even if not explicitly claimed as such) with Adorno’s tendency to read The Arcades Project strictly as a ‘theoretical’ project.4 For all the importance of this sort of reading approach, I would argue that we miss out a great deal if we refuse to grant these methodological reflections



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the status of quotation, that is, the status of the ruin of reading history that figures as this text’s elemental building block. Indeed, just as the quotations selected and copied by Benjamin bear the implicit mark of his own reading moments (and are thus unarticulated instances of methodological decision), so do Benjamin’s explicit reflections, as recorded instances of the reader’s consciousness, bear tacitly the objective historical trace of quotation – perhaps as objets trouvés of Benjamin’s internal historical universe. Benjamin himself is quoting such innermost considerations when he articulates an explicit reminder: ‘Say something about the method of composition itself: how everything one is thinking at a specific moment in time must be at all costs incorporated into the project then at hand’ (N1,3). Here, even the instance of knowledge as lightning flash exceeds its obvious metaphoric reliance on the visual in favour of the spatiotemporal. For Benjamin, the moment is a dialectical element whose spatial and temporal coordinates are intertwined. The moment designates simultaneously both a complete, self-sufficient unit of time – a unit that can be conceptualized spatially as a self-sufficient domain, so that we can speak of occupying (besetzen) the moment – as well as the meaning of the ephemeral, the transient, the momentary, as that domain of time that registers as event before or as it vanishes in a flash. In this respect, the spatio-temporal dimensions of the flash coexist with the spatio-temporal dimensions of radiation, subverting thus the traditional terms of historical narration whereby the diachrony of events figures as fool-proof as does the precise geography of historical action. Any sort of actual recuperation of time and place of historical event, as well as any sort of belief in the possibility of actual narration of past events, is thus recognized as delusion: ‘The history that showed things “as they really were” was the strongest narcotic of the century’ (N3,4). Benjamin’s ambition to split ‘the nucleus of time lying hidden within the knower and the known’ (N3,2) – in other words, within the dialectical domain of historian-as-subject-of-history and historian-as-object-of-history – goes much further than mere repulsion of the narcoleptic forces of traditional historiography. It becomes in his own terms a liberation of the bound-up energies of historical thinking, indeed of history itself as animate imagistic energy stored in humanity’s objective dimension. Benjamin’s logic of nuclear fission against traditional historiographical methods bears simultaneously, as positive act, the force of its dialectical opposite, the synchronous fusion of elements scattered in time. The curious claim ‘the historical index of images not only says that they belong to a particular time [but] that they attain legibility [Lesbarkeit] only at a particular time’ (N3,1) makes sense only if the ‘moment of event’ and the ‘moment of knowledge’ achieve synchronous articulation. Given that the ‘moment’ is a spatial as well as a temporal element, this synchronicity requires the creation of a tangible domain in which event and knowledge achieve veritable

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co-incidence. The time and domain of co-incidence is also the moment of legibility, the moment in which history becomes readable and thus present. The materialist historian, precisely insofar as she or he remains cognizant of being always also a historical object, knows that this moment of legibility is internal to the historical object, unhinged from the particular time in the past that registered it as event. The temporal dimension of history – which is always, let us repeat, also spatial dimension – becomes decipherable as a legible moment in the flash of knowledge which produces and marks itself in an image that demands to be read. The historian’s task is to be an alert reader of residual images of historical time in which the past registers its knowledge of the present at the same time that a certain knowledge of the present enables the past to emerge. Every present day is determined by the images that are synchronic with it: each ‘now’ is the now of a particular recognizability . . . It is not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words: image is dialectics at a standstill. For while the relation of the present to the past is purely temporal, the relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical: not temporal in nature but figural [bildlich] . . . The image that is read – which is to say, the image in the now of its recognizability – bears to the highest degree the imprint of the perilous critical moment on which all reading was founded. (N3,1) Two things need to be noted here, apart from the difficult notion of ‘dialectics at a standstill’ to which we shall come later. First, the centrality of reading in Benjamin’s entire conceptual framework of dialectical time; second, the decisive gesture to conceptualize the problem in figural rather than abstract language. I will forgo an extensive discussion of the first, beyond underlining it as confirmation of the epistemological gravity of reading, including the significance of Benjamin the reader, to which I alluded at the outset. Few texts remind us of the ‘perilous critical moment’ of reading as subversively as Benjamin’s obsessive collection of notes for this extraordinary project. This is precisely because we are not called upon to read the logical unfurling of ideas in abstract language but to figure out the physiognomic logic through which the words themselves allude to their constitution as objects carrying the flash of history within them.5 Hence, Benjamin’s foundational unit of signification in the construction of The Arcades Project becomes the ‘thought-image’ (Denkbild ). Let us note that Benjamin takes by all accounts a radical risk, not merely in the context of historiography but also Marxist aesthetics, in forging an elemental co-articulation of image with dialectics. To put it bluntly, for Benjamin dialectical thinking outstrips the contours of language, which



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has marked since Plato’s time the domination of philosophical over poie¯ tic thinking, in order to attain the signature of the concrete and the tangible – and by extension, in order to seize the performative energies of humanity’s psychic Vorstellung. Though Benjamin’s incorporation of Freudian methodological categories is rather scant and idiosyncratic, his insistence on the figural nature of social fantasy, as it imprints itself on the multifold objects of history, reminds us of Freud’s insistence on the figural logic of dream-work. If the avowed influences on the decision to perform (instead of theorizing) history’s materiality, in terms of technique, is surrealist and Brechtian thinking (both founded on an imagistic rather than verbal conceptualization of action), the unavowed undercurrent of Benjamin’s conception of the legibility of historical time in (and as) an image is Freud’s recognition of society’s dream reality. From his earliest drafts – following explicitly a Bergsonian rather than Freudian logic – Benjamin had articulated the succinct thesis that ‘in order to understand the arcades from the ground up, we [must] sink them to the deepest stratum of the dream, we [must] speak of them as though they had struck us’ (F°,34). The wonderful isometry of the first phrase – to learn from the elementary level going up requires us to submerge ourselves in the elemental – is extended, in the latter phrase, into the physiognomic space of the flâneur, whereby objects come to exist only once they forcefully encounter – and thus interrupt, even if only for a moment – the field of wandering non-possessive perception. Allowing objects to strike consciousness is a way of granting objects a self-sufficient reality and thus submerging abstract consciousness into the object’s concreteness. Benjamin’s attempt to shatter conventional conceptualization with the production of Denkbilder emerges out of the desire for palpable knowledge (gefühlte Wissen), for transforming the most abstract level of perception into concrete experience. The space– time dimensions of this transformative process are best ‘conceptualized’ as the dimensions of dream-reality, whichever way one configures it: whether in terms of the unconscious zone in which the traces of social-historical experience are restaged as constitutive elements of the psyche or as the substratum of social-historical space–time in which the psychical projections of an entire society are kept animate as unconscious forces, often against the grain of historical fact. This latter view prevails in certain instances in The Arcades Project notes when Benjamin tends to read society’s dream space as a state of sleep, of an unconscious relation to reality. For example: ‘Capitalism was a natural phenomenon with which a new dream-filled sleep came over Europe, and through it, a reactivation of mythical forces’ (K1a,8). Such phrases, though entirely straightforward, are curiously difficult to interpret. On the surface, the rhetoric suggests the rather conventional equivalence between mystification and mythification with all of its Enlightenment traces intact. Considering also that Benjamin hardly relies on Freudian categories for his

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theorization of the dream space (and therefore presumably does not draw on Freud’s insistence on the worldly legitimacy of the uninterpretable, ‘dark’, non-rational knowledge inherent in dream language), the reader might be swayed by rhetorical convention toward the view that the dream-filled sleep of capitalism defines more or less the opiate conditions of its ideology. It is not wrong to attribute this sort of position to Benjamin’s view; it is merely partial. Benjamin’s configuration of both the dream-space and myth, as inventories of collective social imaginary significations, obeys his penchant for ambivalence, whether as methodology or way of life. From this standpoint, the ‘ideological’ fashioning, the petrifying force, inherent in society’s dream-state (and myth too, though we shall not presently focus on this) coincides with its subversive potential, the underlying flux of society’s historical refuse that will unlock the deadly progression of historical givens. The complexity of Benjamin’s use of the dream as device for historical analysis is most evidently imprinted in an allegorical notion that permeates the entire project: awakening (das Erwachen). The rigour with which Benjamin submits this notion to ambiguity is monumental. He opens Convolute K with a deceptively straightforward articulation that attributes to ‘awakening’ the gradual process by which humanity’s future emerges into reality. Though he employs the pattern of emerging from childhood as a thought-image, Benjamin hardly subscribes to progressive or developmental models when he speaks of awakening to the future. Sleep is indeed figured as the initial stage of all life, individual and collective – the dream-arche¯ of worldliness: ‘a generation’s experience of youth has much in common with the experience of dreams. Its historical configuration is a dream configuration’ (K1,1). As such, it enforces a retrospective structure according to which one can trace in society’s dream-life its ‘childhood’, except that this retrospection does not translate into a progressive reconstruction of the road toward ‘adulthood’ but rather animates the dream instances of ‘what has been’ (das Gewesene) into synchronous existence with the now.6 This dream-arche¯ becomes accessible through ‘an experiment in the technique of awakening’ whose inaugural figure is Proust’s rearrangement of time in the moment of remembrance. In this respect, ‘what has been’ – the historical past – comes to be insofar as it emerges in remembrance, not as something that existed in temporal suspension waiting to be discovered but literally as something that emerges out of the dream-state and becomes what it was (in time) – what it is (in essence) – in the present tense of consciousness. Much like dream-reality comes to exist only insofar as it exceeds its psychic plenitude and leaves its traces (often mangled and confused but in rare moments also terrifyingly clear) on the bodily reality of the awakened consciousness, so does the scattered refuse of real history register its awakening by opening dream-reality to ‘palpable knowledge’. If indeed Benjamin’s thought-image of awakening is to evade being tainted with the romantic–rationalist trope of the ‘light of



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knowledge’, it must signify ‘the flash of awakened consciousness’ as the very agent of dream-reality. This is how we might begin to understand Benjamin’s claim that at such a moment ‘politics attains primacy over history’ (K1,2). If society’s dream-reality consists of history as past event (‘what has been’), it becomes properly historical, as experience/event (Erlebnis), by virtue of a specific praxis: the gesture of remembrance. ‘Awakening’ becomes possible because the moment of remembrance (in a Proustian sense) is the sort of praxis that makes possible in turn the emergence of what has been into consciousness (which is to say also, as consciousness): ‘There is a not-yet knowledge of what has been: its advancement (Förderung) has the structure of awakening’ (K1,2). This notion of advancement, configured in the image of emergence, of being mined up from the darkness, has a peculiar temporality. Benjamin signifies the process of ‘advancement through awakening’ as a dialectical reversal, enacted not merely as retroactive movement instead of progression but also as a flash: ‘The compelling – the drastic – experience, which refutes everything “gradual” about becoming and shows all seeming “development” to be dialectical reversal, eminently and thoroughly composed, is the awakening from dream . . . The new, dialectical method of doing history presents itself as the art of expressing the present as waking world, a world to which that dream we name the past refers in truth’ (K1,3). The art of experiencing the world in a state of awakening is tantamount to the techne¯ of dialectical history. The fundamental element in this techne¯ is the dream, which becomes the vehicle, the means, by which remembrance enables the actualization of what has been. Awakening, remembrance and actualization (that is, presentification) of the historical past all take place in a flash of coincidence in such a way that Benjamin concludes: ‘Awakening is merely the dialectical, Copernican turn of remembrance’. The entire trope rests on the idea that the deepest historical traces are inscribed in society’s dreams; otherwise, historical time is thoroughly elusive. In order to accede to history’s actual experience – to the materiality of Erlebnis (which otherwise vanishes along with the event’s completion) – one must accede to society’s dreamtime. In a profoundly subtle gesture, Benjamin suggests the intertwining of Zeitraum (space–time: the coordinates of the social-historical proper) with Zeit-traum (dream-time: the dimension within which history exists in order to be retrieved and actualized). The task of the (materialist) historian is to dispel the illusion of dreamlessness (Traumlösung) and to establish the spatio-temporal coordinates of society’s dreams as history’s indelible traces. According to Benjamin, dreamlessness is an illusory condition of the collective consciousness – in the most precise sense, the condition that bars society’s access to its own imaginary. As the moment of remembrance, awakening is hardly the interruption of the dream, the actualization of dreamlessness. On the contrary, it is the dialectical undoing of dreamlessness, indeed the figuring of both awakening and dreaming as dialectical

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images. As Benjamin puts it, in a single suspended phrase: ‘The first tremors of awakening serve to deepen sleep’ (K1a,9). This curious phrase is comprehensible only as a threshold image, a thought-image of passage, in which the moment of awakening as Zeitraum means the immersion into one’s dreamtime (Zeit-traum). The paradoxical simultaneity is meant to liberate the figure of awakening from the metaphorics of clarity or unimpeded rationality. At the same time, it is meant to liberate the dream from its exclusive association with obscurity, debilitating darkness. Instead, dream-time is refashioned in an archaic sense as the time (and space) of awakening to one’s internal, submerged dimensions of actual experience – in the most precise sense: the historical trace, the psychic landscape formed by what has been. Benjamin configures one’s awakening simultaneously with the awakening of the historical past, which lies concentrated in the ‘subjective’ nucleus and, once actualized, comes to exist in an altered but also, more significantly, altering condition: ‘One could speak of the increasing concentration (integration) of reality, such that everything past (in its time) can acquire a higher grade of actuality than it had in its moment of existence. How it marks itself as higher actuality is determined by the image as which and in which it is comprehended. And this dialectical penetration and actualization of former contexts puts the truth of all present action to the test . . . To approach, in this way, “what has been” means to treat it not historiographically, as heretofore, but politically, in political categories’ (K2,3). This last distinction is uniquely transgressive of tradition. Essentially, it means that if the historical is based on the archaeological reconstruction of ‘what has been’, traditionally careful to remain within the reconstructed Zeitraum of events past, then the political comes to consist of the re-enaction of ‘what has been’ (which has been kept in society’s dream-pool as imaginary signification) by an immersion into and actualization of history’s Zeit-traum. This demands a different understanding of both historiography and political action, which is to say, a different understanding of both spatiality and temporality – perhaps even of our entire arsenal of traditional images and metaphors of relation. Eduardo Cadava puts this in the most succinct perspective: ‘The past – as both the condition and caesura of the present – strikes the present and, in so doing, exposes us to the nonpresence of the present. If it is no longer a matter of the past casting its light on the present or of the present casting its light on the past, it is because the past and present deconstitute one another in this relation. The coincidence of this exposure and deconstitution defines a political event, but one that shatters our general understanding of the political. It tells us that politics can no longer be thought in terms of a model of vision. It can no longer be measured by the eye.’ It is likewise with our understanding of history: ‘For Benjamin, the truth of history does not involve the representation of an “eternal past” but rather the production – in relation to an agent and a present moment (even if neither the agent nor the present has a simple identity) – of an image. This truth of history is performed when we



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take the risk of making history rather than assuming it to belong only to the past. It happens, in other words, when we understand historicity as a kind of performance rather than as a story or a form of knowledge.’7 Taking the risk of making history, of course, is the very essence of political praxis – and Cadava’s great insight is to recognize that praxis is linked to the metaphorics of making, that it entails a poie¯ tic aptitude (the performative force of poiein), and is not linked to the metaphorics of seeing, to the visionary rhetoric that befits prophecy. It would be useful to remember here that throughout his work Benjamin attempts to release history from the anthropocentric metaphysics of the idealist tradition and to create another domain that makes historical analysis possible from the standpoint of an alternative nature, which surpasses human nature not in the direction of divine nature but rather in the direction of animate matter. As is widely known, for Benjamin (as for Adorno, who will theorize this further) the category of ‘natural history’ entails simply an other nature and an other history – a nature and a history that alter themselves and each other. Benjamin’s pages are haunted by fragments of ‘alien’ entities, covering a range of subjectivities whose constitutive model is no doubt Kafka’s own multi-natured myth-ontological universe. From stones to angels, Benjamin’s cornucopia of natural history suggests an implicit but definite rearragement of the category of the living being.8 This becomes a basic principle in Benjamin’s orientation, indeed the necessary predisposition that makes the conceptualization of The Arcades Project possible. In order to release subjectivity from the metaphysical tyranny of the anthropocentric ideal – formed by the Christian imagination as the symptom of providing God with a tangible image – Benjamin must proceed with a pair of simultaneous antithetical gestures: to create, on the one hand, a new language that will animate inanimate matter (the stone) and to abolish, on the other hand, the language that exempts divine beings (angels) from the inimitable power of the psyche. History’s Ursprung is not to be located finally in an ortho-logical decision about the domain of praxis but in the core of psychic matter itself, in the adventures of the imagination that provide an inspiration in the most literal sense: as social life’s actual breath. Certainly, without the first dimension (praxis as decision) history cannot exist as event. But without the second dimension (praxis as poie¯ sis) there is no capacity for the overturning of events, there can be no revolutionary imagination. It is in this sense that Benjamin’s work adheres consistently to the path that retroactively turns the dark and unspoken springs of history into literature. This poie¯tic act – for this is precisely a thinker’s duty: to turn the prattein of thought into poiein – does not purport to understand history as a science but as the core Zeitraum of psychic matter. From this standpoint, the inanimate (apsychon) has no meaning in the natural world. Even the stones (and surely the ruins, la nature morte of civilization) become part

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of an interminable historical dynamic. On the other hand, superhuman forces – traditionally thought to accede, via their sublimity, to the divine – cease being considered supernatural, as forces beyond nature; they belong to dream-time. (Herein, incidentally, resides a big part of Benjamin’s idiosyncratic anti-Romanticism.) This entails a new cognitive orientation that enables us to comprehend how history and nature are intertwined. Since humanity’s poetic capacity has the power to animate whatever the human imagination will conjure up, the dimensions of history are redefined as human categories in an entirely different way. With an extraordinary philosophical gesture, Benjamin discredits anthropocentrism while simultaneously expanding the imaginary realm of human action. In order to understand this gesture, we must accept a foundational overturning of history’s cognitive tradition. For Benjamin, the arche¯ of totality is anarchic; the ground of human action is ephemeral and always in flux; history lays its foundations on its own transience. From this standpoint, the transcendental position of Kantian critique, whether ethical or aesthetic, becomes impossible. Every decision is crushed by the ceaseless flow of nature–history, but precisely because history never ceases, every decision also registers its timeliness as interruption; it is creative; it becomes event. This is another way to understand Benjamin’s famous notion that revolution is tantamount to the handbrake that interrupts history’s runaway train toward destruction. Benjamin’s work (but also his actual life) is animated by this undeconstructible contradiction; hence, his methodology is built on ambiguity. We cannot confront Benjamin outside this idiosyncratic, inconclusive, but surely subversive dialectic of history. With him we must accept the foundational ambiguity of every effort to conceptualize or to represent the nature of history – to decide as to the nature of history. Whatever we do, we are confronted by a dialectical image, which is, in his own words, a dreamimage. Benjamin spoke of the dialectical image as the actualized form of the ambiguity of dialectics (or its ambivalence, were we to consider it, psychoanalytically, as a dream process), a momentary form that registers in a flash of interruption. He understood the dialectical image as the language that renders, in more or less readable terms, the very essence of dialectical ambiguity/ambivalence, the very law of what he called ‘dialectics at a standstill’. His statement is well known: ‘Ambiguity is the manifest imaging of dialectics, the law of dialectics at a standstill. This standstill is utopia and the dialectical image, therefore, dream image. Such an image is afforded by the commodity per se: as fetish’ (‘Exposé of 1935’ AP 10). It is broadly understood that the theoretical constitution of the dialectical image is fundamentally linked to Benjamin’s reflection on the problem of commodity fetishism, as witnessed by the remarkable dialogue he had with Adorno, which is itself, however, contingent on the historical exigencies of present time. No doubt, in the midst of his immersion in the research



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of the most intangible layers of nineteenth-century capitalism (whose material manifestation is the urban Zeitraum of Paris), Benjamin invents the notion of the dialectical image not only to seize on the elusive logic of this history but also to elucidate the myth-ontological dimension of the commodity fetish in the most destructive moment of capitalist barbarism as he experienced it directly: the commodity of Nazi aesthetics.9 True to the demands of his own theory of history, Benjamin submits the research of ‘what has been’ into a co-articulation with ‘what is present’, making certain, all the while, to infuse the Zeit-traum of both with the montage between the quotation of the past and the self-reflection of the present. In this respect, the entire methodology of The Arcades Project is itself a dialectical image. The fact that Benjamin forges this dialectical confrontation between two different cultural instances of Zeit-traum deserves a moment of attention. Though the explicit task of this enormous project is an archaeology of the dream-reality of capitalism as such, precisely so as to make possible one’s awakening to capitalism’s horrid (Nazi) present, the project’s spatio-temporal restriction on nineteenth-century Paris is hardly accidental. Benjamin’s insistence on Paris as the capital signification of the archaic element in this dialectical image carries an existential force; it resides at the core of his being. The very life of the project is contingent on a self-enforced condition of Parisian existence, which goes beyond the historical demands of exile because it is a condition that primarily belongs to the order of the project. Precisely because this is an existential demand, it ultimately runs counter to common social-historical sense and drags Benjamin through a series of indecisive gestures before the force of events which, at the limit, cost him his life. Benjamin’s own sense of this existential demand is unequivocal: ‘I can only write [this work] in Paris from its first to its last word – at first, naturally, only in German – this much is now clear to me.’10 The inserted qualification is striking. Benjamin is aware that he is situated between two languages, not merely the distinct languages of the archaic and the modern, the mythical and the historical, but literally, the French and the German. One may not pause at the adverbial distinction of German as natural, but one has to be amazed at the suggestion that the work also needs and deserves to be written, secondarily, in French, in the language of its object. Benjamin’s profound knowledge of French literature and his command of not just the language but the entire cultural framework is evident from his translations of Baudelaire and Proust and, even more, from his inimitable essays on French literature composed throughout his life. In a sense, Benjamin is unique in the history of German thought, insofar as his commitment to things French is so extensively cultivated that, rather playfully, one may go so far as to consider him the belated parteneur of Mme. de Stäel in self–other dialogues, which thus makes the Passagen-Werk Germany’s reciprocal response to De l’Allemagne. But Benjamin’s peculiarity, in this respect, is even more dramatic once we consider that he chose to exercise/

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exorcize his inheritance of German Entfremdung by concentrating on the French instead of its Greek aspect. Surely, the ultimate quest is the same; whether one takes on the ruins of Paris or the ruins of Athens, for the Germans the task is still to accede to the imaginary of modernity. Yet, there may be a difference; at least, Benjamin’s peculiar ways suggest there is. The imaginary of modernity sought in the Greek element is unavoidably a quest that demands immersion in the ideal (indeed, a colonization of the ideal, as I have mentioned elsewhere), while what is sought in the French element is the real – particularly as Benjamin does not trap himself in any idealization of revolutionary Paris but instead elicits from Paris the dream-reality of nineteenth-century capitalism. It is possible to link this tendency with Benjamin’s explicit commitment to materialist history, which thus grants to the investigation of the real (the natural–historical, in his language) precedence over the ideal (sometimes identified, wrongly in my opinion, with the mythical). In fact, The Arcades Project is itself an investigation of the mythical as real. When Benjamin first conceives the grand gesture of making tangible the dream-reality of Paris he already knows that he must immerse himself in the myth of Paris, the modern myth of the city that emerges from the Revolution. That he arrives at this position by way of literature – by way of translating Baudelaire and Proust into German – is commensurate with the enormous mythopoetic power of French literature since the early nineteenth century to institute Paris as the primary object of national–cultural foundation, starting specifically with Balzac’s monumental Comédie Humaine and, from Benjamin’s standpoint, culminating in Proust’s early twentiethcentury equivalent, A la recherche du temps perdu.11 Paris, as a mythical object of literature, is post-revolutionary Paris. Though the Revolution itself forged a great myth (whose epic poet, retroactively, is Jules Michelet, the nation’s historian), the city seems to achieve symbolic autonomy as a postrevolutionary city – indeed, post-Napoleonic, after the bourgeois national state institution is fully entrenched. It is only then that the status of the city of Paris as the nation’s capital commences its real history, yet insofar as it is proclaimed by Benjamin to be ‘the capital of the nineteenth century’ it is also then that Paris emerges as history’s dream-city. Benjamin conceptualizes this entire complex with extraordinary precision. He turns his micrological focus – his ‘Medusan fixating gaze’ as Adorno has famously called it – not on Paris as such but on the reality of Paris as dream-city. What differentiates Paris from any other city in the nineteenth century is the fact that it is constituted as the site of a postrevolutionary imaginary, a condition whose irreversibility appeals precisely to Benjamin’s penchant for what vanishes in history, for what becomes archaic by assuming a shadowy dream-like existence in society’s imaginary. Paris, as ‘the capital of the nineteenth century’, emerges out of the ruins of the revolution that made Europe’s nineteenth century what it is: a creative/destructive



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event in history – that is, a radical poie¯ tic event – whose actual traces are so diffused in their vast determination of history, geography, economics, politics and culture in Europe’s nineteenth century that they vanish beneath the very Zeitraum they create. Paris achieves an allegorical status that turns it into the core dialectical image of this Zeitraum (hence Benjamin’s sweeping characterization of it): namely, the site of remembrance of the revolutionary moment (which presumably still animates the awakening both to ‘what has been’ and ‘what is present’) and the site of a fully constituted commodified society, the triumph of bourgeois capitalist life, which is to be traced in its full range of fetish symptoms (architectural, economic, political, aesthetic, psychological, literary). This is why the figure of Haussmann and the phenomenon of Haussmannization is so central to The Arcades Project. Benjamin conceptualizes Haussmannization in the totality of its ambiguous and contradictory dimensions. Already in the first exposé of the project (1935), he points to the formal contradiction between the perceptual mindset behind the linear open spaces of Haussmann’s boulevards and the fraudulent speculation that his urban planning produces in the market. The straightness of the plan is predicated on the crookedness of its (financial) means. Haussmannization involves the art of demolition – not merely of living spaces but also of living means. Haussmann himself identified his work as that of an artiste démolisseur.12 But the lapse in this self-characterization is that the object of demolition turns out to have been the subject of the logic of demolition. Haussmannization is, for all practical purposes, the demolition of revolutionary Paris – indeed, of Paris as the living space of a revolutionary imaginary – according to the logic of demolition initiated by the Revolution and institutionalized for its sake. Yet, in the architect’s mind, this logic is animated by a counter-revolutionary desire. The construction of open boulevards is explicitly aimed at the destruction of the possibility of erecting rebel barricades, as well as for the expediency of dispatching counter-insurgency forces into working class neighbourhoods. Benjamin correctly understands this new architectural conceptualization – this ‘strategic embellishment’ of the city, as it was known at the time – as a measure of absolute state authority, expressed under emergency powers and aimed to secure the city-space (site of state power) from the threat of civil war, which is to say by all historical accounts, class war. But the revolutionary legacy of this logic, the power of radical creative/destructive poiein, cannot be effaced. As Benjamin points out, the barricades erected during the Commune draw their advantage of strength and size precisely from the openness of Haussmann’s boulevards so that, he argues in impeccable dialectical fashion, ‘the burning of Paris is the worthy conclusion to Haussmann’s work of destruction’ (‘Exposé of 1935’, AP 13). Benjamin goes to great lengths to establish a dialectic of Haussmannization, whether by extensive quotations revealing the ambivalence of Haussmann’s

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contemporaries toward the project or by his own methodological understanding of the project’s principles and consequences. Benjamin understands that ‘demolition sites [are themselves] sources for teaching the theory of construction’ (C6a,2) and that the expansive history of technology, for all its power to posit and construct the new, speaks the language of destruction: ‘along with great cities have evolved the means to raze them to the ground’ (C7a,4). The fact is that the numerous parks, squares and public gardens that make up the Paris landscape we now know were all created by state decree after the massive demolitions of inhabited spaces. They were to serve not merely as forces of urban decongestion – the overpopulation of Paris by the middle of the century, itself the result of technology (the new rail system) as well as economics, had made much of the city uninhabitable – but also as forces of (re)unification. As the old principles of autochthonous unity between little hamlets collapse, the new artificial city demands new unifying venues; as internal border elements marking the neighbourhoods that emerge from the ruins of the old mediaeval township conglomerate, the parks and gardens exemplify the ambiguity of Haussmann’s logic of creation/destruction. The debate as to the merits of his project extends well into the 1920s and 1930s and occupies the mind of many of Benjamin’s modernist-minded contemporaries. Lucien Dubech and Pierre d’Espezel’s Histoire de Paris (1926) constitutes in Benjamin’s collection of quotations the most enraged critique of Haussmann’s legacy. Their critique bears, of course, the distinct mark of twentieth-century experience – they liken Haussmann’s creations to the artificial urban spaces created as a consequence of the American expansion westward – but the most trenchant critique is that Haussmann’s demolition was just a formalist practice and lacked historical vision. Benjamin quotes: ‘The most striking feature of [Haussmann’s] projects is their scorn for historical experience . . . His thoroughfares rarely possess any utility and never any beauty. Most are astonishing architectural intrusions that begin just about anywhere and end up nowhere, while destroying everything in their path . . . We must not accuse him of too much Haussmannization, but of too little. In spite of the megalomania of his theories, his vision was, in practice, not large enough. Nowhere did he anticipate the future. His vistas lack amplitude; his streets are too narrow. His conception is grandiose but not grand; neither is it just or provident’ (E5a,1). The ability of the two writers to assess Haussmann’s failure is possible only from the vantage point of the Haussmannian future. The radical renovation that Haussmann conceived on the old city’s ruins falls far short of the demands raised by the new technological phase; only half a century later the city seems just as densely populated as it was in his own time, the streets just as narrow and inadequate. If Haussmannization was meant to signify modernization it failed on its own terms. Yet, perhaps driven by his penchant for dialectical precision, Benjamin also submits us to the viewpoint of Fritz Stahl, a German contemporary



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of the two French historians, who similarly sees in Haussmann the urban planner ‘who indirectly created all the American metropolises’, but, contrary to Dubech and d’Espezel, considers this the work of a twentieth-century visionary ‘who did not destroy Paris but rather brought it to completion’ (E14a). This last statement has an unwitting ironic underside. What Haussmann brought to completion was the logic of building by destruction; this was the legacy of the French Revolution. The crucial difference is that Haussmann’s destructive action aimed at the appropriation of the city by the state. This historical trajectory, whose imaginary may have been already in place but whose expression was hardly determined, was conducted with hubristic acceleration and magnitude and thus, as Auguste Blanqui was to put it, ‘failed the future no less than the present’ (quoted by Benjamin, E11a, 1). At the very least, it instituted a pattern of laying history into ruin in order to achieve modernity, which comes to be, in the latter part of the twentieth century, routinely part of urban planning projects throughout the world. The proper answer to Haussmann’s state-sponsored demolition in the name of modernization could only be a bona fide archaeological response to the present, which is exemplified in Maxime du Camp’s monumental six-volume account, Paris: Ses origines, ses fonctions et sa vie dans la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle (1875), a remarkable work that Benjamin assiduously assimilated into The Arcades Project. The reason is obvious. Du Camp’s work is Benjaminian in conceptualization. Instead of providing his own assessment, Benjamin prefers to quote extensively from an 1895 essay by the critic Paul Bourget, who identifies du Camp’s basic psychological and epistemological principle to be ‘the law of inevitable destruction which governs everything human’, a kind of anthropological force residing within history to which Haussmann was never alert. As the fear of aging begins to consume him, du Camp reanimates the old orientalist desire he shared with his dear friend Gustave Flaubert, which had led them in their youth to extraordinary peregrinations through ‘dead cities’ – archaic imaginaries. Both friends had found inherent in this desire the inspiration toward meticulous documentation, the translation of sensory experience to a sort of archaeological writing even when it is engaged in profound self-reflection. This task of translation entails deep personal engagement. Bourget claims that, in order to achieve his goal, du Camp took on a series of disguises, not being ‘averse to trying his hand at all sorts of jobs – performing the role of omnibus conductor, street sweeper, and sewerman – in order to gather materials for his book’ (C4). Du Camp’s ethnographic performativity, which aspires toward immersion in the darkest corners of the dream-reality of Paris, could not be further away from Baron Haussmann’s haughty altitude of surveillance that creates the delusion of producing the future. Entirely contrary to Haussmann’s imagination, du Camp discovers the task of being the future historian of a Paris long past, a Paris that already lies in ruins, by immersing himself

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in an archeological Jetztzeit. Says Bourget: ‘By one of those keen intuitions with which a magnificent subject for a work flashes before the mind, he clearly perceived the possibility of writing about Paris this book which the historians of antiquity had failed to write about their towns’ (C4). Bourget’s sentence is uncannily like one of Benjamin’s. Du Camp envisions his future as an ancient historian of modernity: this is the distilled essence of Walter Benjamin’s dialectical image of the materialist historian’s task. The Arcades Project itself may be seen as the mutated extension of du Camp’s historical excavation. More than any other work – of the vast number Benjamin quotes and the few he endows with privileged quotation – du Camp’s Paris is the key precedent, at least as far as its overall effect is concerned (since in intention and execution it remains characteristically nineteenth-century orientalist).13 Du Camp’s archaeology of modernity presupposes a dialectical mind able simultaneously to perceive the object anew and to measure it as evidence of something that already carries within it its future antiquity. When he devotes himself to this task, Paris appears suddenly in a new light – the light of archaeological documentation – which at the same time registers also as a ruin that needs to be preserved. In this respect, du Camp acts much like a collector of antique memorabilia, at least in method if not in essence. His archaeological objects are the collectible debris of the history of Paris as they continue to exist, in spite of their shattering, in the whirlwind of everyday life: the diachrony of present time. The collection of history’s debris composes a dream terrain in which each collectible bears within it the fragmented Zeitraum of its historical emergence. Because du Camp’s archaeology does not separate the various temporal registers of its context – both its object and its framework occupy past, present and future all at once – it reveals the same dream logic that Benjamin attributes to the practice of the collector: ‘the collector lives a piece of dream life. For in the dream, too, the rhythm of perception and experience is altered in such a way that everything – even the seemingly most neutral – comes to strike us; everything concerns us’ (H1a,5). In other words, as collectors, we find ourselves surrounded by multiple traces of time and space which have come to form an entirely different set of coordinates where, much like in the world of a dream, the most disparate and improbable associations produce an otherworldly sense of corporeal coherence. In this respect, du Camp’s history of Paris is not merely a conscious history of its dream-reality – a term he obviously would not use but is borne out by the mode in which he maps his terrain – but also produces a history of Paris as dream experience. Benjamin, the reader, being also a kindred dreamer, finds in du Camp’s terrain a familiar collection of the same elements he goes to such lengths to document, nearly a century after they have been scattered as debris of a lost history. The extraordinary thing about du Camp is that he perceived so incisively the necessity of collecting the traces of Paris in such a fashion, that he under-



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stood so profoundly that his contemporary traces, from the vantage point of a future already apparent, were themselves already ruins, dispersed and antique, and thus demanded collection. Benjamin elucidates the ramifications of such action with inimitable style. What is decisive in collecting is that the object is detached from all its original functions in order to enter into the closest conceivable relation to things of the same kind. This relation is the diametric opposite of any utility, and falls into the peculiar category of completeness. What is this ‘completeness’? It is a grand attempt to overcome the wholly irrational character of the object’s mere presence at hand through its integration into a new expressly devised historical system: the collection. And for the true collector, every single thing in this system becomes an encyclopedia of all knowledge of the epoch, the landscape, the industry, and the owner from which it comes . . . Collecting is a form of practical memory, and of all the profane manifestations of ‘nearness’ it is the most binding. Thus, in a certain sense, the smallest act of political reflection makes for an epoch in the antiques business. We construct here an alarm clock that rouses the kitsch of the previous century to ‘assembly’. (H1a,2) Obviously, for Benjamin, who was himself an avid collector of many things (among them significantly, in the terms I outlined above, children’s books), the notion of collection, much like ‘awakening’, is of decisive importance to The Arcades Project because it is permeated all the way through with the project’s fundamental elements: the fetishism of commodities, the dialectical image of modernity, the multifold nature of historical time, the montage method itself. Collection, in this context, refers specifically to collection of antiques, though the method underlying it has broader application. Adorno is right to call antique stores (as well as bazaars and arcades – spaces where collectible debris of history achieve exchange-value) ‘world trade markets for the temporal’.14 He helps us focus on the crucial theoretical significance of antique value itself. The idea that an object achieves value because it embodies the mark of another epoch – because history, though dead, lives in it – can emerge only from an imaginary that has achieved a notion of modernity through the capacity for mass industrial production. As the bourgeoisie grows and consolidates its power by permeating the social–cultural field, it produces another sort of differential need against the homogenizing forces of mass commodification. The wealthier strata seek to rise above this homogenization by investing in the rarefied object of another era, which would be itself (at least in the beginning of antique collecting) a document of pre-industrialized production. History is put through a loop. Antecedent to this phase of bourgeois fetishism of antiques (as a counteraction to the fetishism of mass commodities) is an essentially anti-bourgeois condition: the dilettantish fondness for collection of historical artefacts that

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first emerges in the ranks of colonial aristocracy, primarily in seventeenthcentury England, and is often linked to a newfangled desire for Grand Tour memorabilia. The operative signification here was not yet the antique but the archaic, which is a curious amalgam between the properly ancient (pilfered objects from sites of Greek and Roman ruins) and the properly exotic (the broad range of orientalia, but also the occasional mediaeval remnant in the Orient from the Crusades period). Perhaps one might argue that the underlying principles of the dilettantish aristocrat collector of historical artefacts and the bourgeois collector of antiques are similar, and that the real shift takes place in the marketplace. The antique store is quintessentially bourgeois and belongs to a certain imaginary of modernity that imbues with value the rarefied traces of the politically and economically dismantled aristocratic past. Benjamin is clearly focused on the latter. It is the economy of collection that interests him, in the full range of the notion – oikonomia: the organizing principles of bourgeois interiors as inventories of Zeitraum, as well as the strictly economic principles of circulation and accumulation of objects that have been thrown out of the bounds of mass commodification but still contain the traces of their historical emergence. Benjamin argues that ‘the most hidden motive of the person who collects can be described as taking up the struggle against dispersion’ (H4a,1), so that the collector acts then as an allegorical ingathering force, or seen from another standpoint, as the braking force against the continuous spinning out of commodity production, where objects are ‘meant’ to be turned into refuse and be replaced by new potentially wasted objects, ad infinitum. Collectors are not only essentially allegorists, as Benjamin claims, but they are also historiographers whose field of action is not textual but tactile. They collect and rearrange tangible ruins, preserving thus the existence of a ruined world: ‘We need to recall what importance a particular collector attaches not only to his object but to its entire past, whether this concerns the origin and objective characteristics of the thing or the details of its ostensibly external history; previous owners, price of purchase, current value and so on. All these – the ‘objective’ data together with the other – come together, for the true collector, in every single one of his possessions, to form a whole magic encyclopedia, a world order whose outline is the fate of this object’ (H2,7; H2a,1). But in a collector’s hands, the object’s fate includes its being recognized as refuse and reinserted in an economy of signification where its use-value is fully altered. If indeed the collector, by means of a fetishistic obsession, serves to keep inventory of the traces of history and thus retain their access to representation, he also facilitates their re-emergence into another life. The collected traces come to form another order of signification, another sort of Zeitraum that literally permeates and alters the present tense of history’s subject: ‘The true method of making things present is to represent them in our space (not to represent ourselves in their space) . . . We don’t displace our being into theirs; they step into our life’ (H2,3).



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The collector is thus always a collector of dialectical images. Historically speaking, the desire to fetishize the epoch-making object of the past parallels the desire to develop and accumulate the newest of the new, to participate objectively in the creation of the new. This is certainly the ideological axis of a vanguard bourgeoisie that seeks to outperform even the political– economic–cultural foundation of its class existence: mass commodification. Hence, in the privileged interiors of the early twentieth-century high bourgeoisie one finds the collection of antiques sharing a space filled with prime objects of technological innovation: electricity, the telephone, the wireless. From this point on, the experience of the ruin of history arguably achieves a different meaning in relation to the new and needs to be distinguished from the experience of the ruin as classic wholeness.15 Of course, in The Arcades Project, interiors may occupy a central place (particularly in the discussion of the collector), but the overall conceptualization of the arcades drags these semiotics of interiority into the public domain. Benjamin refines this apparent discrepancy because his core interest is the ruin of dream-history, which is to say, both the history of society’s dreams and the dreamlike recollection of society’s experience of history. His dialectical mind retains the force of this condition when he contemplates the ‘modernist’ desire for the new: the new as rupture of history. In this respect, Benjamin rightfully rejects Adorno’s criticism that he attributes to modernism an immutable character.16 On the contrary, as he argues throughout the text of The Arcades Project (by method alone, by gesture instead of language), the flash of the dialectical image enables us to apprehend the new (the now) only in co-incidence with the archaic (what has been), in a simultaneity that precludes mutual identification and immutability: ‘It’s not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present casts its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words, image is dialectics at a standstill. For while the relation of the present to the past is a purely temporal, continuous one, the relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical: is not progression but image, suddenly emergent’ (N2a,3). This famous quotation is arguably the most articulate expression of a radical, difficult idea that challenges comprehension and justification alike. It is important right off to dispel any impression that dialectics at a standstill implies a binary stand-off. Even if we follow strictly Adorno’s characterization that Walter Benjamin’s mind is ‘Medusan’ and that his micrological technique seizes on ‘the most minute in which historical movement halts and sediments into an image’, reducing everything ‘to the “static” idea (Vorstellung) of movement itself’,17 we would fall far short of the idiosyncratic richness of this conception. To begin considering in what sense the pulsating aspects of the dialectical image are undertheorized, I would suggest, at the very least, that we draw on Freud’s profound understanding that the psychic Vorstellung is always in flux – not as continuous progression

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but as synchronous performance of images/representations that are intrinsically dynamic. Let us note that dynamis does not actually mean movement but power, potentia. Dream images are invested with and by means of such dynamis, a pulsating force that brings psychic matter in and out of focus in incalculable ways. The same applies to the notion of ambiguity – let us recall Benjamin’s aphoristic statement in the first exposé: ‘ambiguity is the law of dialectics at a standstill’. Ambiguity, too, always pertains to a dynamic condition. The splintering of meaning never happens once and for all; an ambiguous word is never ambiguous in the same way twice. The ambiguity of a word is always a historical condition. As such, the duplicity of signification is never entirely deconstructible, since the doubleness of meaning cannot imply two distinct positions. Positions are mobile and antagonistic. The still life of dialectics that Benjamin went to such extraordinary lengths to stage before us is exactly the flash of contention, the dynamic force itself as interruption of positions. Dialectics at a standstill is a moment of constellation, a montage of forms constituted in mutual contention. Benjamin locates such a moment in the very intersection of the subjective power of thinking and the objective resistance to the incursion of thought: ‘To thinking belongs the movement as well as the arrest of thoughts. Where thinking comes to a standstill in a constellation saturated with tensions – there, the dialectical image appears. It is the caesura in the movement of thought. Its position . . . is where the tension between dialectical opposites is greatest. Hence, the object constructed in the materialist presentation of history is itself the dialectical image. The latter is identical with the historical object; it justifies its violent expulsion from the continuum of historical process’ (N10a,3). Benjamin does not clarify whether it is ever possible to apprehend this real expulsion of the historical object – the object of history as ruin – except as a subjective act of conjuring, as a projection of consciousness. Theodor Adorno expresses a similar concern in one of his crucial points of critique to Benjamin’s project: ‘The concept of the dialectical image cannot be derived from the immanence of consciousness. Rather, the immanence of consciousness as intérieur is itself the dialectical image for the nineteenth century as alienation . . . Accordingly, what is required is not to transpose the dialectical image as dream into consciousness, but to dispose of the dream in its dialectical construction and to understand the immanence of consciousness itself as the constellation of the real’.18 Though Adorno’s warning against a subjectivist vision of the dialectical image is well founded, it circumvents in turn a fundamental question that Benjamin’s project desperately seeks to address: namely, why isn’t the dream a constellation of the real? How is the immanence of consciousness exempted from the dream-reality of the ruin? There is, of course, a Freudian path to a response, which I would rather prefer to evade, not least because the terms of the dialogue between Benjamin and Adorno deserve the risk of commitment to their brilliant idiosyncracy, for all their perilous dimensions.



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Adorno certainly raises the stakes by arguing for the animating powers of the object in commodity fetishism, which is after all the main significational currency of the definition of the dialectical image. The fetish character of the commodity is not a fact of consciousness but it is dialectical in the pre-eminent sense of producing consciousness [emphasis mine] . . . To understand the commodity as dialectical image means to understand it also as the motif of its own destruction and its ‘sublation’, instead of as pure regression to something older. On the one hand, the commodity is the alienated object in which use value withers; on the other hand, it is the surviving object that, having become alien, outlives its immediacy.19 In other words, the fetish object accedes to another economy, in part of its own making, but also in part because the economy of use-value forces upon it a regime of expulsion. We would fall short of the problem’s full range if we did not acknowledge that the fetish is a use-value of sorts, outside or beyond the actual use-value of the object and in excess of the exchange-value of the commodity. Perhaps the use-value of the fetish can be described as the dynamis that forms a community of believers in its value (a community of collectors, of allegorists, of historians, of dreamers), a dynamis that forges a socially binding, constitutive (though alienated) dream-reality of pleasure. The desire to make dialectics stand still can thus be seen also as the commodified desire itself, the paradoxically binding power of the fetish ‘to liberate things from the bondage of being useful’,20 which Benjamin uses as a sort of homeopathic pharmakon to the reality of commodified life under capitalism. In other words, one of the modes of ‘free’ life under capitalism is to appropriate the force of reification for oneself. Nonetheless, the gesture of allegedly immobilizing the dialectic has left Benjamin open to critiques of seeking recourse to the mythical, since the mythical tends conventionally to be perceived as timeless. Yet, the mythical in Benjamin operates not according to timelessness but according to the principle of Jetztzeit – the other side of the timeless, the most extremely temporal, the vanishing moment of experience right before history becomes frozen in time. Benjamin’s quandary consists of the challenge to appropriate the ‘collective’ capacity of the purely formal power of myth while retaining the fully fledged material singularity of the social–historical moment, or from another standpoint, to interweave dialectically the indefinite particularity of the living with the ‘objective’ ground of a society’s collective dream-life. In such terms, Benjamin’s broader interest in elucidating society’s collective Bildphantasie, the image-making capacity that potentially undermines the entrenched regime of historical givens, is a way of understanding the mythistorical character of the social–imaginary against society’s uninterrogated mythological images. This was precisely the enormous task of The

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Arcades Project, which is both the historical theory and the poetic method of the dialectical image. This paradoxical project demands of the dialectical image to de-institute the mythological power of the image – its fetish character – by reinvesting the image with the power of knowledge in a lightning flash: as non-propositional, non-rational knowledge, as scientia intuitiva, profane illumination, awakening to the ambiguity of dream-reality, of mythistorical thought. Benjamin’s ambivalence on the question of myth is nothing less than the key to his universe. In the full range of this tension between the mythological and the mythistorical, Benjamin’s investment is dialectical through and through: myth is destroyed by means of myth; myth is rescued by means of its destruction.21 This still image of ambiguity is neither a critique nor an indication of the failure of dialectical thought. Rather, it is a refiguration of dialectics from a process of identity formation (drawn from the last instance of Hegel’s conception of the self-recognition of the Spirit) to a non-identitarean process in which discontinuity and interruption form the methodological nucleus. This stilling force does not arrest dialectics; it disrupts its teleological desire. This is why Benjamin slips the suspended phrase ‘it is good to give materialist investigations a truncated ending’ (N9a,2) into the midst of his definitive theoretical and methodological reflections on knowledge. A thinker in dialectical images recognizes that there is no way to circumvent the mutability of matter. The material is continuously under conditions of transformation, of shaping and reshaping, of movement and mutation. No one mind can round off the material; a mind can invent closure, or even claim to have discovered closure, but in the material universe every closure is itself existence under conditions of transformation. The dialectician of history – who is thus unavoidably a materialist historian – can only provide a truncated ending. He knows that the matter can never be closed; he knowingly becomes part of the matter by contributing to history the force of his interruption.

11 THE ENTICING AND THREATENING FACE OF PREHISTORY: WALTER BENJAMIN AND THE UTOPIA OF GLASS DETLEF MERTINS

CONCRETE Consider a detail, or, more accurately, several related details, from Walter Benjamin’s reading of modern architecture and its historical origins in the iron and glass constructions of nineteenth-century Parisian arcades, exhibition halls and department stores. So ‘electrified’ was Benjamin by his first glimpse into Sigfried Giedion’s 1928 Building in France: Building in Iron, Building in Concrete (Bauen in Frankreich: Bauen in Eisen, Bauen in Eisenbeton) that he immediately put it down again until he ‘was more in touch with my own investigations’ – referring in all probability to his well-known Arcades Project. But when he returned to Giedion’s book shortly thereafter, he began reading it backwards. Furthermore, the last section, depicting the architectural history of reinforced concrete, so impressed him that before turning to the rest of the book, which concerned iron construction, he wrote Giedion an immensely complimentary letter that suggested that perhaps they might meet in Paris during the spring.1 Given the strategic importance of iron for Benjamin’s prehistory of modernity, this enthusiasm for concrete is quite surprising, as is his apparent lack of interest in Giedion’s genealogy of iron morphologies. But consider a further detail. Four months after writing his letter to Giedion, Benjamin published a short text describing his admiration for several ‘books that have remained alive’, including Alfred Gotthold Meyer’s 1907 Iron Constructions (Eisenbauten).2 While acknowledging Giedion’s book within his tribute to Meyer, Benjamin gives pride of place to the earlier study, which predated the major developments in concrete but attended confidently to the role of construction in bringing into existence new conditions for building, dwelling, and spatial experience. For Benjamin:

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This book continues to astonish us thanks to the farsightedness with which the laws of technical construction, which through the dwelling become the laws of life itself, were recognized and identified with uncompromising clarity at the beginning of the century . . . But what makes Meyer’s book so exceptional is the assurance with which it succeeds again and again in situating the iron construction of the nineteenth century within the context of the history and prehistory of building, of the house itself. [Meyer’s and Giedion’s books] are prolegomena to any future historical materialist history of architecture.3 Where Meyer had recognized that the future of iron would be bound up with reinforced concrete, it remained for Giedion to tell the story of how this new kind of ‘stone’ had developed technically and how the great architect–constructors August Perret, Tony Garnier and Le Corbusier had turned it into the privileged medium for materializing new forms of life during the first decades of the twentieth century. According to Giedion, where the earlier generation had successfully addressed the importance of utilitarian buildings, it was the task of the current generation, among whom he recognized Le Corbusier as leader, ‘to take the problem of dwelling from individual dilettantism and pseudo-handicraft production into the realm of industrial standardization through the most precise comprehension of living functions’. Beginning with the proposition that the house must be thoroughly bathed in air, Giedion portrays Le Corbusier’s distinctive achievement as having reinterpreted spare concrete construction into a new form of dwelling, an ‘eternally open house’ – his concrete Domino skeleton, whose applicability he had demonstrated in his housing estate in Pessac-Bordeaux, France, of 1924–27. Giedion presents Le Corbusier’s housing project, as the architect himself did, as following from Tony Garnier’s dramatic utopian vision for a new kind of city – his light, loose, and limber Cité Industrielle of 1904. In the ‘fantastic expansion’ that grows out of the cellular arrangements of cubic houses in garden settings, Giedion ‘feels the connection between rationality and vision which the emerging age delineates perhaps most sharply’.4 Coming to the defence of the Pessac housing, often accused of being ‘as thin as paper’, Giedion explains that ‘the solid volume is eaten away wherever possible with cubes of air and rows of windows suddenly passing into the sky’. Elaborating on the revolutionary implications, he writes: Corbusier’s houses are neither spatial nor plastic: air flows through them! Air becomes a constituent factor! Neither space nor plastic form counts, only relation and interpenetration! There is only a single space. The shells fall away between interior and exterior. Yes, Corbusier’s houses seem as thin as paper. They remind us, if you will, of the fragile wall paintings of Pompeii. What they express in reality, however, coincides completely with the will expressed in all of abstract



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painting. We should not compare them to paper and to Pompeii but point to Cubist paintings, in which things are seen in a floating transparency, and to the Purist [Charles-Edouard] Jeanneret himself, who as architect had assumed the name Le Corbusier. In his Peinturemoderne . . . he likes to assure us that he has deliberately chosen only the most ordinary bottles and glasses, that is, the most uninteresting objects, for his pictures so as not to detract attention from the painting. But the historian does not see this choice as accidental. For him the significance of the choice lies in the preference for floating, transparent objects whose contours flow weightlessly into each other. He points from the pictures to the architecture. Not only in photos but also in reality do the edges of houses blur. There arises – as with certain lighting conditions in snowy landscapes – that dematerialization of solid demarcation that distinguishes neither rise nor fall and that gradually produces the feeling of walking on clouds.5 It was enthusiastic prose such as this, about the new abstractly technological domestic architecture – hovering open cubes of air capable of engendering in architecture the effect of paintings in which transparent interpenetrating glass objects generate an unprecedented spatial liquidity – that so ‘electrified’ Benjamin at a time when he was preparing his essay on surrealism, published just two weeks before he wrote to Giedion.6 And it was in this essay that he first invoked the houses of Le Corbusier, along with those of the Dutch functionalist J.J.P. Oud, as helping to organize a new physis that would realize the Utopia envisioned by the humorist Paul Scheerbart in his Glass Architecture (Glasarchitektur) of 1914.7

GLASS In Scheerbart’s fantasy treatise the material and technological inventions of his time are projected into a future architecture as the precondition for a new ‘glass culture’ that would ‘completely transform humanity’.8 Sharing the implicit environmental determinism that marked various turn-of-the century movements for the reform of life, society and the means of production, Scheerbart begins his account of the anthropologically transformative potential of glass walls, steel and concrete structures, electric lighting, heating and cooling systems, metal chairs, vacuum cleaners, cars, aircraft, and floating architecture by suggesting that ‘if we want our culture to rise to a higher level, we are obliged, for better or worse, to change our architecture’.9 If the current culture has grown from an environment of closed rooms, then a new culture, radically distinct from entrenched traditions, requires that the closed character be removed from the rooms in which people live. And this can only be achieved by introducing glass architecture, ‘which lets in the light of the sun, the moon, and the stars, not merely

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through a few windows, but through every possible wall which will be made entirely of glass – of colored glass’. The book’s one hundred and eleven sections – written in a straightforward, almost positivistic and technical language – outline the architectural characteristics of a future Utopia that would be the legitimate heir to the extraordinary technical innovation of the nineteenth century. In his essay examining the achievements and weaknesses of surrealism, Benjamin was principally concerned with what he called ‘the crisis of the intellectual . . . [and] the humanistic concept of freedom’.10 He argued that the revoluntionary intelligentsia had failed not only in its efforts to make contact with the proletarian masses. Rather than perpetuate the intellectual’s conception of contemplation as a revolutionary force, he suggested re-situating intellectual work in the sphere of images, which he would later theorize in terms of the distracted class consciousness of the proletariat . . . Consequently, the essay attempts to pull what Benjamin calls the trick of profane illumination from the surrealist contemplative notion of experience as poetic, pushing life to the utmost limits of possibility. To correct the surrealists’ ‘pernicious romantic prejudices’, Benjamin draws on Scheerbart’s vision of glass architecture, both directly and indirectly. If the French literati stand at the head of a powerful intellectual stream, intoxicated by poetic reverie, Benjamin inscribes himself as an outside observer who stands in the valley, able from there to gauge the energies of the movement and to calculate where, along this intellectual current, to install his power station. Seizing on André Breton’s ability to transform the profane into illumination, Benjamin seeks to generate a materialistic, anthropological kind of inspiration. Breton, Benjamin recounts, ‘was the first to perceive the revolutionary energies that appear in the “outmoded”, the first iron constructions, the first factory buildings, the earliest photos, the objects that have begun to be extinct’. No one before had ‘perceived how destitution – not only social but architectonic, the poverty of interiors, enslaved and enslaving objects – can be suddenly transformed into revolutionary nihilism . . . [can be converted] into revolutionary experience, if not action . . . [bringing] the immense forces of ‘atmosphere’ concealed in these things to the point of explosion’.11 Early iron constructions attracted Benjamin’s interest for their potential to transform into a revolutionary nihilism capable of fulfilling the utopian dream of a glass culture. The chemically explosive quality of profane illumination is linked to what Benjamin considered a radical theory of freedom. For the surrealists are, he writes, ‘the first to liquidate the sclerotic liberal–moral–humanistic ideal of freedom, because they are convinced that “freedom, which on this earth can only be bought with a thousand of the hardest sacrifices, must be enjoyed unrestrictedly in its fullness without any kind of pragmatic calculation, as long as it lasts” ’.12 While sharing this antihumanist conception of freedom as moments of hard-won liberation rather than as a new stable order,



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Benjamin remains careful to distance his ideas of profane illumination and revolutionary experience from what he calls the surrealists’ ‘inadequate, undialectical conception of the nature of intoxication’. He takes issue with their ‘histrionic or fanatical stress on the mysterious side of the mysterious’, and contrasts Apollinaire’s ‘impetuous’ and ‘overheated embrace of the uncomprehended miracle of machines’ to the ‘well-ventilated utopias of Scheerbart’. To transform the contemplative crucible of surrealist writing into a fully revolutionary thermodynamics, Benjamin presents the ‘curious’ dialects of intoxication, whose structure, it seems, is homologous with that of ‘revolution’. In addition to the opium-eater, the dreamer, and the ecstatic, he claims that the reader, the loiterer, and the flâneur are also types of illuminati. Moreover, he speculates that all ecstasy in one world is perhaps ‘humiliating sobriety in that complementary to it’. Anxious to step ‘into a world that borders not only on tombs of the Sacred Heart of altars to the Virgin, but also on the morning before a battle or after a victory’, he counters the delights of the Boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle in Breton’s Nadja with the thought that ‘living in a glass house [like living with the doors open] would be revolutionary virtue par excellence . . . an intoxication, a moral exhibitionism, that we badly need’.13 And in reply to Breton’s proposition that ‘mankind’s struggle for liberation in its simplest revolutionary form . . . remains the only cause worth saving’, Benjamin asks, ‘but are [the surrealists] successful in welding this experience of freedom to the other revolutionary experience that we have to acknowledge because it has been ours, the constructive, dictatorial side of revolution? In short, have they bound revolt to revolution? How are we to imagine an existence oriented solely toward Boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle, in rooms by Le Corbusier and Oud?’14 – rooms that Benjamin understood as materializing Scheerbart’s rationalist dream, as containing traces of Utopia. At this point, Benjamin notes that ‘to win the energies of intoxication for the revolution – this is the project about which surrealism circles in all its books and enterprises’. To bind destruction and construction – enthusiasm and rationality – into a dialectic would be, as Benjamin comments in his notes for The Arcades Project, ‘to encompass both Breton and Le Corbusier – that would mean drawing the spirit of present-day France like a bow from which knowledge of the moment hits the center of the heart’.15 Here, he imagines the conjoining of these extremes as an instrument of cognition – a bow with which to shoot to ‘the center of the heart’ – capable of producing what he elsewhere calls ‘the Now of recognizability’ in which every particular epoch, past and present, reveals itself as ‘always also “things as they always have been” ’.16 The idea of combining extreme rationality and extreme fantasy was both a topos in writings that took engineering as the paradigm of the new architecture and key to the shocking cognitive effects of Dadaist

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montage. The critic and historian Franz Roh, like Giedion a student of Heinrich Wölfflin, described montage in 1925 as a precarious synthesis of the two most important tendencies in modern visual culture: ‘extreme fantasy with extreme sobriety [Nüchternheit]’.17 Alfred Meyer wrote of the ‘formative fantasy’ of calculated engineering, ‘here more reason, there more fantasy’,18 while the combination of rationality and vision in Garnier’s Cité Industrielle led Giedion to prefer the more lasting effects of engineering to the momentary rush of cocaine.19 While Benjamin’s dialectics of extreme polar opposites is not to be found in Scheerbart, there is a curios double-sidedness to his portrait of modern technology as both rational and enchanting – similar to Meyer’s introduction of the Crystal Palace of 1851 by imagining a children’s fable ‘of iron giants and glass maidens’ and his suggestions that the glass pavilion at the Paris World’s Fair of 1900 was a fairy tale come true.20 In Glass Architecture, a text so dry that it is hard to read from beginning to end, Scheerbart intersperses practical suggestions and technical information with momentary revelations about the ‘marvellous effects’ of Tiffany glass; the ‘splendour of glass palaces’ with gardens paved in stone and majolica tiles that rival Arabian gardens; and the potential of producing ‘glass brilliants [the size] of pumpkins’, because ‘primitive people and children are enraptured by colored glass’. And in a passage that combines the critical perspective of cultural theory, the pleasure of the fantasist, and the indefatigable experimentalism of the inspired inventor, he writes, We are not able at the end of a cultural period – but at the beginning. We still have extraordinary marvels to expect from technics and chemistry, which should not be forgotten. This ought to give us constant encouragement. Unsplinterable glass should be mentioned here, in which a celluloid sheet is placed between two sheets of glass and joins them together.21 In Scheerbart’s utopian dream, then, the rationality of technology and the enchantment of art coincide in a new paradigm of technological organicity marked by the image of a glass milieu that would, according to the poet, extend the psychological effects of Gothic stained glass and Babylonian glass ampullae to all realms of life, making homes into cathedrals with the same ‘peculiar influence’ that was already known to the priests of ancient Babylon and Syria. Through this secularization of spiritual experience, ‘a composed and settled nation’ will emerge, blissful and healthy, its every desire already fulfilled.22



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EXPRESSION Benjamin’s reading of modern architecture through Scheerbart’s glass lens may seem surprising to students of twentieth-century architecture. Architectural historians have tended to associate Scheerbart exclusively with Bruno Taut and his Crystal Chain circle of the chaotic period at the close of the First World War: expressionist fantasies of utopian cities among the mountains, exuberantly coloured buildings radiating ectasy, concrete flowing formlessly, and steel suspended magically.23 And, of course, Taut’s privileged relationship with Scheerbart was marked by his dedication of his Glass House at the 1914 Werkbund exhibition in Cologne to Scheerbart and Scheerbart’s reciprocal dedication of his book Glass Architecture to Taut.24 With its fountain streaming inside an ecstatic interior of coloured glass, encased like a precious seed in an outer shell of glass block, Taut’s pavilion was to be a symbol – in the full Romantic sense of the term – for the renewal of ‘organic’ society. Taut’s friend the critic Adolf Behne had likewise, in 1919, given Scheerbart’s vision a leading role in what he hoped would be the ‘return of art’, criticizing European humanism, valorizing poverty and advocating the return to primitivism through which the creative power of the masses would awaken.25 In so doing, Behne championed Taut, and to a lesser extent Walter Gropius, as the architects who promised to fulfil Scheerbart’s vision. During the 1920s, it became characteristic of progressive architectural modernism in Germany to strive for the restoration of that premodern community, order, and harmony that had been shattered by industrialization and metropolitanization, not by rejecting technology, but rather by (re)turning to nature – to the primitive and originary – through the most advanced building science and technology set in the open landscapes of the German garden cities, exemplified by the Siedlungen of Berlin and Frankfurt am Main. The implication of the expressionist desire to fuse technic and organic was not lost on Benjamin, whose reading of Scheerbart, like his reading of many others, involved transformative extensions and rewritings. While Benjamin used Scheerbart’s vision of glass architecture in ways that contributed strategically to his theory of modern culture, he never referred to Taut or to those preoccupations with the properties of colour, reflection and luminosity that Taut took from Scheebart. Benjamin was, in fact, antagonistic toward expressionism whose organicist hubris he associated with fascism.26 Where Behne considered architects like Taut capable of restoring the full unity of an organic society through industry, Benjamin considered the physiognomy of a redeemed future to remain radically unthinkable from what was already at hand. As he cautioned in concluding a review of Scheerbart’s ‘asteroid-novel’ Lesabéndio of 1913: Art is not the forum for utopia. It is nevertheless appears that from the perspective of art the definitive word could be spoken about this book,

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because it is so full of humour, it is precisely this humour that exceeds the domain of art and makes the work into a testimony of spirit. The continued existence of that testimony is not eternal and is not grounded in itself, but will be sublated into that greater (some)thing [das Gröszere] of which it is evidence. Of that greater (some)thing – the fulfillment of utopia – one cannot speak, only bear witness.27

GESTALTUNG Benjamin considered not Taut, but Le Corbusier, Oud, Adolf Loos and the architects of the Bauhaus as those who were ‘realizing’ Scheebart’s ideas in what he took to be the most extreme rationalist and antiorganic architecture: an architecture without ‘art’, governed by the spirit of pure engineering. Consistent with the polemical statements of the architects themselves, Benjamin understood their buildings to have realized the latent potential of industrial means of construction and new synthetic materials (glass, iron and concrete) finally liberated from the false bourgeois Kultur that had imposed the forms of previous historical epochs onto the ‘new’, enveloping them in myth throughout the nineteenth century. While unexpected, Benjamin’s interpretation of glass architecture was not so much a misreading of late-1920s modern architecture by an outsider from the literary world. Rather, his association in the mid-1920s with the extraordinary mixture of ‘elementarist’ avant-gardists around the magazine G may have given him an insight into the after-history of glass architecture that historians have generally overlooked. The magazine itself, produced through the studios of film-maker Hans Richter (who was principal editor) and architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (who contributed financing as well as articles and projects), assembled evidence of a new culture characterized by the multi-faceted notion of elementary Gestaltung (form-giving), which bridged a diverse array of post-expressionist artistic research, cut across disciplines, and broke the barrier between art and engineering. Founded by Richter and Viking Eggling, the original circle consisted of Hans Arp, Tristan Tzara, Ludwig Hilberseimer and Theo van Doesburg, but soon expanded to include Mies, El Lissitzky, Werner Gräff, Noam Gabo, Antoine Pevsner, Frederick Kiesler, George Grosz, Man Ray, Walter Benjamin and Raoul Hausmann – embracing Dadaists and neoplasticists, constructivists and surrealists. Benjamin’s translation of Tzara’s short essay ‘Photography from the Other Side’ appeared in the third issue (June 1924) together with Mies’s call for a more effective embrace of industrialization for buildings through the invention of improved synthetic materials and the reorganization of the trades to combine factory production of parts and on-site assembly that would realize the potential of rational ‘montage’ fabrication.28 Consider, as well, that as late as 1926, in an article on the properties, potentials and technical development of glass construction, Walter Gropius



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linked his newly completed Bauhaus building at Dessau to Scheerbart’s vision when he wrote that ‘glass architecture, which was just a poetic utopia not long ago, now becomes reality unconstrained’.29 In the previous year, van Doesburg, too, had written of the significance of glass for bringing the new architectural image into harmony with the new needs and tempo of life, mentioning Gropius but singling out Loos and Kiesler in Austria and Mies in Germany as being ‘among the architects who, engrossed in the task of their times, try to innovate architecture in essence and in construction’ leading the way to a new architecture that will be ‘light, open, clear and, above all, temporary’.30 Then again, van Doesburg’s programme for his design of the House of an Artist for Léonce Rosenberg in 1923 navigated a Scheerbartian path between Le Corbusier’s purism and Taut’s utopian fantasy of ‘alpine architecture’. ‘Your atelier’, he writes to Rosenberg: Must be like a glass cover or like an empty crystal. It must have an absolute purity, a constant light, a clear atmosphere. It must also be white. The palette must be of glass. Your pencil must be sharp, rectangular and hard, always free of dust and as clean as an operating scalpel. One can certainly take a better lesson from doctors’ laboratories than from painters’ ateliers. The latter are cages that stink like sick apes. Your atelier must have the cold atmosphere of mountains 3,000 meters high; eternal snow must lie there. Cold kills the microbes.31 Gropius himself had collaborated with Taut and Behne, both before and after the war, had called architecture ‘the crystalline expression of man’s noblest thoughts’,32 had admired and enjoyed Scheebart’s writings, ‘full of wisdom and beauty’, and recommended them to friends.33 He had also, in 1919, hired Lyonel Feininger as one of the first masters of the Bauhaus on the recommendation of Behne, who considered Feininger’s paintings to be exemplary of his conflation of cubism and Scheerbart’s utopianism, the ultimate realization of which would be architectural. While Feininger’s mediaevalizing crystalline woodcut for the first programme of Gropius’s Bauhaus is well known, it should also be noted that Feininger’s crystalline paintings and the transparent ‘glass architecture’ paintings of Moholy-Nagy were displayed in the Bauhaus exhibition of 1923 together with Gropius’s prismatic blocks for industrialized housing rendered on a Feiningeresque landscape. This show signalled the celebrated ‘turn’ of the Bauhaus from an expressionist elementarism to the functionalist constructivism for which it became most known (Gropius’s ‘synthesis of art and technology’), a turn marked most directly by the departure of Johannes Itten and the arrival of MoholyNagy, who adopted the persona of the artist-as-engineer as well as the cause of glass architecture. In the immediately preceding years, Moholy-Nagy had deliberately realigned his work with Kasimir Malevich’s crystalline

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suprematist paintings on the one hand, and Behne’s programmatic writings for a future cubist glass architecture, on the other. Beginning with the painting titled Glass Architecture, which first appeared on the front page of the celebratory issue of MA (1 May 1922), Moholy developed a distinctive preoccupation with transparency involving a complicated play of planes showing through one another, first in paintings, then photograms, lithographs, photographs, photocollages, stage sets and films, as well as in his Light-Space Modulator of 1922–30.34 In 1929, Moholy concluded the summary statement of his Bauhaus pedagogy, Von Material zu Architektur, with a portrait of the emergent dematerialized transparent ‘architecture’. This series of images includes the same close-up of the Bauhaus at Dessau that Gropius had used for his 1926 ‘Glasbau’ article and cultiminates in a negative multiple-exposure photograph by Jan Kamman of the Van Nelle Factory in Rotterdam (Brinkmann & van der Vlugt, architects), which Moholy describes as ‘the illusion of spatial interpenetration, such as only the next generation will possibly experience in reality – as glass architecture’.35 According to Oskar Schlemmer, the influence of Berlin Dada on Gropius’s turn in 1923 should also be disregarded;36 nor, we might add, should van Doesburg’s alter ego as a Dadaist, nor the enthusiasm of the entire Dada circle for Scheerbart. The Dadaists, too, had admired Scheerbart’s writings, having formed themselves as a separate group out of the milieu of Herwath Walden’s magazine Der Sturm, which had consistently brought Scheerbart’s writings to the artistic community of Berlin before and during the war. In fact, the Dadaists considered themselves to be the ‘diapered children’ of a new age and Scheerbart to be their spiritual father.37 Hannah Höch had an extensive Scheerbart library. Raoul Hausmann and Johannes Baader renamed the Club Dada in March 1919 in homage to Scheerbart as the Club zur blauen Milchstrasse. The philosophers most associated with Dada, Anselm Ruest and Salomo Friedländer contributed considerably to the interest in Scheerbart after the war. Even the ‘Dada architect’ Ludwig Hilberseimer wrote about him. While the expressionists had invested their hope for the renewal of organic wholeness in the figure of the New Man, whose deep inwardness was to provide the strength for a reconciliation with a troubled, fragmented and uncertain modern world, the Dadaists rejected such transcendental and intoxicating subjectivity and reworked the New Man into an inorganic, historically and materially contingent figure who ‘carries pandemonium within himself . . . for or against which no one can do anything’.38 In photocollages, montages, and assemblages – constructive techniques developed in opposition to the media of painting and sculpture – they portrayed the new subjectivity as internalizing contradiction (rationality–fantasy; order–disorder) and living through the paradox of a technology born of nature but seemingly cast against it. And playfully, they recast themselves into fictional personae to re-enact satirically and critically the relationship of self to the structures of society and culture. As early as



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September 1919, Hilberseimer cautioned against the misinterpretation of Scheerbart by expressionist architects, signalling a post-humanist line of research in the direction of Benjamin’s later readings of Dada and glass architecture.39 By 1920 Raoul Hausmann’s conception of the New Man shifted from puppets to engineers as he began to portray constructors and technical drawings, practicality and conventionality as a means to achieve a ‘synthesis of spirit and matter’, which he called ‘Présentismus’.40 In his ‘In Praise of the Conventional’ of 1922 he opposed the fantasy of ‘artistes’ with ‘the fantasy of the technician, the constructor of machines . . . the scientific experimentor . . . the watchmaker, welder or locomotive engineer’.41

POVERTY In Benjamin’s essay in 1933, ‘Experience and Poverty’, glass architecture assumes the characteristics of a revolutionary surface for a new subjectivity – an austere and slick surface on which it is hard to leave traces, accumulate commodities, or form habits.42 It becomes a metaphor, perhaps an instrument, for Benjamin seeking to think the possibility of beginning again at the beginning, as a potential of the catastrophic yet cleansing devastation of something like a war. The promise of modernity, for Benjamin, writing on the eve of Hitler’s proclamation of the Third Reich, is to be found, paradoxically, in the most abhorrent manifestations of inhumanity, in the impoverishment of experience brought on by the development of technology. With the prospect of war once again on everyone’s lips, Benjamin chose to revisit the experience of the Great War: the first war of technology and the war that was to end all wars. He did so in order to argue that this ‘monstrous unfolding of technology’, with its capacity to destroy entire cities and erase all traces of the past, has brought to mankind ‘a wholly new impoverishment’, a kind of barbarism whose destructiveness had a positive moment, eliminating ‘the dreadful mishmash of styles and worldviews in the last century’ to crate a tabula rasa on which humanity is once more free of ‘human experience in general’, able to begin living again at the beginning. Where the expressionists had sought, after the devastation of the First World War, to renew the bourgeois ideal of organic and transcendental experience, Benjamin took this unprecedented destruction as an opening for the working masses to be liberated from the experience altogether, from preconceived cultural ideals, as a child longs to be freed of the received ‘experience’ of adults. These children of modernity ‘yearn for an environment in which they can bring their poverty – their outward and ultimately their inward impoverishment as well – to such a pure and clear validity that something descent will come of it’. Thus the erasure of ‘experience’ (Erfahrung) as something passed on had become necessary for the possibility of ‘experience’ (Erlebnis) as something

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lived – the elimination of history for the openness of historicity.43 But, for Benjamin, any effort to restore experience in the organic sense remains problematic under the conditions of capitalism whose myth-making apparatus simply appropriates them to the service of a false naturalism, concealing the disquieting truths about capitalism in the process, just as the auratic experience of objects has been corrupted. Without relinquishing hope for the return of experience, organicity and aura, but also without pretence to depict or create it, Benjamin adopted a radically anti-organic perspective aimed at working through the problematics of capitalism, industry and the technological environment that they were producing. As he indicates in the notes for The Arcades Project, ‘The redemption of an epoch assumes the structure of an awakening, thoroughly governed by artifice. Only with artifice, and not without it, do we free ourselves from the realms of dreams’.44 Passing in his text from the battlefield to modern architecture, Benjamin proposes a kind of ‘traceless’ living in a technologized environment that had realized itself fully, that is, transparently, its physiognomy no longer deformed to harbouring secrets. This image of glass links destruction and construction indissolubly and draws together the houses of modern architecture, a poem by Bertolt Brecht and portraits of a new post-humanist subject figured interchangeably as children, barbarians, engineers, and proletariat. Citing the refrain: ‘Erase the traces!’ from the first of Brecht’s poems in From a Reader for Those Who Live in Cities of 1930, Benjamin writes, ‘That was something for which Scheerbart with his glass and the Bauhaus with its steel have opened the way: they have created spaces in which it is difficult to leave traces’45 – spaces that, together with telescopes, airplanes and rockets, were the precondition for transforming the humanity of the past into ‘new creatures, worthy of notice and affection’. Brecht’s poem provides a vivid image of a keen desire to escape bourgeois subjectivity. In order not to be caught, controlled or denounced in the modern metropolis of industrial capitalism, in order to slip past the codification of identity by friends, parents, habits, repeated thoughts and photographs Brecht suggests taking cues from how the fugitive erases the traces of his life. If you meet your parents in Hamburg or elsewhere Pass them like strangers, turn the corner, don’t recognize them Pull the hat they gave you over your face, and Do not, O do not, show your face Rather Erase the traces! . . . Whatever you say, don’t say it twice If you find your ideas in anyone else, disown them. The man who hasn’t signed anything, who has left no picture Who was not there, who said nothing:



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How can they catch him? Erase the traces!46 In his essay on the impoverished poet of the Second Empire in Paris, Charles Baudelaire, Benjamin elaborates the problem of the bourgeoisie whose social system extends control ever further, prompting them to seek refuge in the privacy of their homes, where they become asocial and constitutionally resistant to control. For Baudelaire, however, the interior provides no refuge. Fleeing his creditors, he roves about continuously in the city that had long since ceased to be home to the leisurely flâneur.47 For Benjamin’s revolutionary subjects erasing one’s traces could become a paradigmatic form of resisting the growing network of social controls and, at the same time, playing at a modernity yet to come, just as children playing a game will always begin again at the beginning as if for the first time.48 The bourgeois citizen, by contrast, encased in the domestic interior with its accumulation of knick-knacks and habits, like the commodity whose utility is shrouded by myth, remained burdened with the hidden secrets of capitalist exploitation: alienation, poverty and the maniacal empathy of commodities. Benjamin’s reworking of Scheerbart’s harmonious Utopia into an image of glass as living without the traces offers hope for working through these problematics at precisely the moment when the optimism of the Weimar Republic, in its architecture as in its politics, was eclipsed by the rise of fascism. From the Dadaists to Brecht via the elementarism identified in G, Benjamin takes us into a milieu in which the tracelessness of the fugitive becomes an image for a groundless ground on which collective dreams pass into reality free of the resistance of history, culture and matter.

TRACES In addition to nurturing the phantasmagoria of commodity fetishism, fashion and entertainment, what interested Benjamin about the Parisian arcades was that in them iron – a fully artificial building material – made its appearance for the first time in the history of architecture, having being developed in greenhouses, workshops and industrial structures. It was through the ‘functional nature’ of iron that ‘the constructive principle began its domination of architecture’, marking the shift within it from art to engineering, decorator to constructor, representation to presentation – a shift that had by Benjamin’s time already entailed over a century of battles. For him that century was characterized by its deficient reception of technology,49 by the production of images in which the old continues to intermingle with the new, ‘wishful fantasies’ in which ‘the collective seeks both to preserve and to transfigure the inchoateness of the social product and the deficiencies in the social system of production’. These wish-fulfilling images (which is

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how Freud had characterized dreams) tend to direct the visual imagination ‘back to the primeval past’, thus linking their power of prophecy (for that which is to follow appears first in the images of dreams) to ‘elements from prehistory, that is, of a classless society’. Intimations of a classless society, archived in the collective unconscious, mingle with the new ‘to produce the utopia that has left its traces in thousands of configurations of life, from permanent buildings to fleeting fashions’.50 While the arcades had inspired the architectural form of Charles Fourier’s utopian community (the phalanstery was imagined to be a city of arcades), Benjamin emphasizes that Fourier’s Utopia was a ‘reactionary modification’ of the arcades into dwellings: simply ‘the colourful idyll of Biedermeier’ inserted into the austere, formal world of the empire – a clear demonstration of how images in the collective consciousness intermix old and new. Benjamin’s conception of the dream-consciousness of the collective revolves around the problems and potentials that such interminglings pose for the passage from the prehistory of modernity to a fully revolutionary state of redemption – to the return of origins, of prehistory in its other sense as Ur-history, that paradise where living leaves no traces. For the dream likewise has a double sense, referring not only to utopias but also to the historical nightmare of capitalism from which it is necessary to awaken. For Benjamin, its essence is not any latent meaning or idealist form, but rather, is constituted by the dream-work. While Benjamin seems in some way to concur with Max Weber’s analysis of how Enlightenment rationality had ‘disenchanted’ the world, he also recognizes that the modern world is not yet free of myth, for things produced as commodities under the conditions of alienated labour are enveloped by false mythologies, evident in advertisements, fashion and architecture : ‘Capitalism is a natural phenomenon with which a new dream-sleep came over Europe, and in it, a reactivation of mythic powers’.51 These myths, as Georg Lukács had pointed out, gave the world of reified commodities the appearance and status of ‘nature’ – a second nature that occluded the original as it exploited it.52 To awaken from the bad dream of capitalist phantasmagoria, to dissolve mythology into the space of history was Benjamin’s primary motive for The Arcades Project, which he thought of – in terms similar to the work of dreams and dream analysis – as his Passagenarbeit, or work of passage.53 The historical materialist in Benjamin considered awakening to occur in stages54 and thought that while utopian projections such as those of Fourier or Scheerbart,as well as the work of the architects, would necessarily remain deficient manifestations of the utopian impulse – the pulse of the originary struggling to free itself from history – they could, nevertheless, be understood as moving in the direction of such freedom through history (toward the Now of recognizability), through developments in the forces of production that – without forethought, let alone overt politics – ‘reduced the wish symbols of the previous century to rubble even before the monuments rep-



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resenting them had crumbled’. This development of the forces of production in the nineteenth century had: Emancipated constructive forms from art, as the sciences [had] freed themselves from philosophy in the sixteenth. Architecture makes a start as constructional engineering. The reproduction of nature in photography follows. Fantasy creation prepares itself to become practical as commercial art. Literature is subject to montage in the feuilleton.55 In every sphere, the naturalist conventions of bourgeois art were displaced by the paradigm of technology and construction. And it was construction that in the nineteenth century served the role of the subconscious, as Benjamin quotes from Giedion’s Bauen in Frankreich.56 To be more precise, Benjamin’s citation from Giedion should be read with his commentary in The Arcades Project where he attempts to rework Giedion’s thesis as follows: ‘Shouldn’t one rather substitute [for the unconscious]: “the role of the bodily processes” on which “artistic” architecture would then lie like dreams supported by the scaffolding of physiological processes?’57 Construction – bauen – then, as a kind of direct bodily production of labour, a potentially unmediated, collective physiological event in which dream-consciousness comes to realization as ‘traces in thousands of configurations of life’. Construction whose rationality progressively approaches transparency, whose physiognomy becomes increasingly an index of necessary material and social causes, as developments in the forces of production, pursuing their own technical logic, bring about the ruination of bourgeois culture and society. ‘It is’, Benjamin writes, ‘the peculiar property of technical forms [technische Gestaltungsformen] (as opposed to artistic forms [Kunstformen]) that their progress and their success are proportionate to the transparency of their social content. (Whence glass architecture.)’58 And elsewhere: ‘One can formulate the problem for the new art this way: When and how will the form worlds of the mechanical, in film, in the building of machines, in the new physics, etc., rise up without our help and overwhelm us, make us aware of that which is natural about it?’59 Benjamin describes the arcades and bourgeois interiors, the exhibitions and panoramas of the nineteenth century as the ‘residues of a dream world’ at the beginning of the bourgeois epoch, as products of bourgeois class consciousness .They became a focus of his study, for in them he thought it was possible to glimpse the true face of prehistory. ‘For us’, he notes, ‘the enticing and threatening face of prehistory [Urgeschichte] becomes clear in the beginnings of technology, in the dwelling style of the nineteenth century; in that which lies closer to our time, it has not yet revealed itself’.60 In the thousands of configurations of life, in the technology and dwelling style of his own time – in other words, in the residues of the collective dream-world at the beginning of the proletarian epoch, at the beginning of the epoch of modern architecture – prehistory had not yet revealed itself.

12 ‘GLASS BEFORE ITS TIME, PREMATURE IRON’: ARCHITECTURE, TEMPORALITY AND DREAM IN BENJAMIN’S ARCADES PROJECT TYRUS MILLER A topic of great prominence in The Arcades Project is that of architecture, its materials, developments, and debates. In one sense, indeed, Walter Benjamin’s whole mature work stands under an architectural image: in the empty, transparent volume of the arcade or Passage, architecture is factually and figuratively present in Benjamin’s work.1 Around its hollow core, he crystallizes a central cluster of themes: the interrelations between built spaces, the unconscious figurative processes of dreams, and the multiple temporalities that the historian confronts in writing the history of the city and its culture.2 One central node of Benjamin’s reflections on architecture is provided by the seminal treatise and manifesto of architectural modernity, Building in France: Building in Iron, Building in Ferro-Concrete by the Swiss architectural historian Sigfried Giedion, dubbed by scholars ‘the apologist-in-chief’3 and the ‘ghostwriter’4 of the Modern Movement in architecture. Giedion was the secretary of the CIAM (Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne) and author of one of the most influential works of twentiethcentury architectural theory, Space, Time, and Architecture, based on lectures delivered in 1938 at Harvard University and published in 1941. His later book, Mechanization Takes Command (1948), is a landmark work in the history of technology. His claim in this study to be writing the ‘anonymous history’ of the twentieth century bears close comparison to Benjamin’s focus on the anonymous, collective dissemination of the arcade as a nineteenthcentury architectural and cultural space.5 Other focal points of Benjamin’s investigations of architecture include: the creation of city ‘perspectives’ in the Haussmannization of Paris; the architectural reorganization of social time implicit in the glass and iron constructions of the universal exhibitions; and the reconstellation of interior



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and exterior space, street and dwelling place, effected by the new building materials and architectural forms. My essay seeks to traverse the hidden conceptual throughways that connect them in Benjamin’s thought – or at least, might have connected them had Benjamin brought The Arcades Project to completion.

DIFFERENTIAL TIME, DREAM HISTORIOGRAPHY In the first section of his 1935 exposé for The Arcades Project, ‘Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century’, and as the epigraph to Convolute F on ‘Iron Construction’, Benjamin quoted from Michelet’s ‘Avenir! Avenir!’ a remark that became a historiographic motto for a whole phase of his Arcades Project research: ‘Each epoch dreams the one to follow’.6 Within the text of the first section of the 1935 exposé, though without identification, Benjamin also quotes a kind of architectural specification of Michelet’s maxim, from Sigfried Giedion’s Building in France, published in 1928. ‘In the nineteenth century’, Giedion wrote, ‘construction plays the role of the subconscious’.7 In thus quoting Giedion out of context, however, Benjamin implicitly enlists the architect for that prophetic historical dream-work indexed by the Michelet quote, and in turn, refocuses both passages on the function of cultural forms as collective dream-figures.8 The full passage from Giedion’s Building in France vehemently attacks the nineteenth-century legacy of the ‘artistic’ architect in favour of the functional principles represented by his technical rival, the engineer. Within a historical perspective of technology-driven advances in building, it questions the autonomy and retrograde beaux-arts orientation of the profession of architecture: We say that art anticipates, but when we are convinced of the indivisibility of the life process, we must add: industry, technology, and construction also anticipate. Let us go further: architecture, which has certainly abused the name of art in many ways, has for a century led us in a circle from one failure to another. Aside from a certain haut-goût charm the artistic drapery of the past century has become musty. What remains unfaded of the architecture is those rare instances when construction breaks through. Construction based entirely on provisional purposes, service, and change is the only part of the building that shows an unerringly consistent development. Construction in the nineteenth century plays the role of the subconscious. Outwardly, construction still boasts the old pathos; underneath, concealed behind facades, the basis of our present existence is taking shape.9

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Insofar as Giedion’s interest here is historiographic and not simply polemical and programmatic, he seeks to uncover future developments speculatively within the data of history, within the phenomena of the recent past. As he writes, the historian must ‘extract from the vast complexity of the past those elements that will be the point of departure for the future’ (85). Benjamin, however, takes Giedion’s remark in a markedly different direction, towards a theoretical reformulation of the Marxist problem of base and superstructure in terms of a dynamic of cultural figuration. Thus, when in Convolute K (‘Dream City and Dream House, Dreams of the Future, Anthropological Nihilism, Jung’), Benjamin quotes Giedion’s linkage of construction and the subconscious, he rejects the looseness of Giedion’s concept of the ‘subconscious’: 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? (K1a,7) Benjamin, in contrast with Giedion, does not simply conflate the ‘subconscious’ with a repressed or even more vague ‘latent’ content that would emerge with the full development of modern architecture. Rather, he splits Giedion’s ‘subconscious’ into a dynamic semiotic topology, an architectural ‘dream-work’ within which social forces are at once expressed and contained, developed and diverted, by means of architecture’s ambiguous forms. This more dynamic historical dream-hermeneutics thus also informs the context in which Benjamin quotes Giedion in the 1935 exposé, rather than the more limited genealogy of architectural progress that Giedion’s book sketches: Just as Napoleon failed to understand the functional nature of the state as an instrument of domination by the bourgeois class, so the architects of his time failed to understand the functional nature of iron, with which the constructive principle begins its domination of architecture. These architects design supports resembling Pompeian columns, and factories that imitate residential houses, just as later the first railroad stations will be modeled on chalets. ‘Construction plays the role of the subconscious.’10 Underlying this whole reworking of Giedion’s remark is a historiographic hypothesis that Benjamin would also develop in his essay on ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility’ as a key tenet of a historical materialist theory of culture. Between the emergence of new technological and material forces of production and that of the new cultural forms by which these forces are assimilated and mastered, Benjamin identifies a necessary and powerfully effective time-lag. In the implicitly



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psychoanalytic terms of the collective cultural dream-theory that Benjamin was at this time developing, he diagnoses a ‘psychic conservatism’ in the forms in which the collective represented itself, in the context of massive new economic, technological and physiological-corporeal forces seeking to be expressed in symbolic forms. Through this psychoanalytic analogy, Benjamin roots the expressive fecundity of nineteenth-century society and the ideological function of these proliferating cultural forms in a single ontological feature of historical time: its multiplanar, internally divided and differential character. In his methodological reflections in the crucial Convolute N (‘On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress’), Benjamin acknowledged the guiding importance of this historical ontology: ‘On the differentials of time (which, for others, disturb the main lines of the inquiry), I base my reckoning’ (N1,3). Yet given the extremely broad range of Benjamin’s interest and the great diversity of material his studies embraced, why should architecture have occupied a central place in his methodological attempts to develop a historiography based on ‘the differentials of time’? Three motivations seem most important in explaining Benjamin’s gravitation towards architecture. Architecture is intrinsically collective; it displays quite clearly the multiple registers of time that shape its historical present; and its evolution is closely tied to large-scale transformations of intellectual labour in the late nineteenth and twentieth century. As an instance of art and of everyday culture, architecture necessarily entails both collective production and collective reception. Even when it offers refuge in domestic spaces such as the family home or ambiguous escape in liminal spaces such as the arcade, it retains its explicit connection to publicness and publicity. Its reception nearly always involves a large component of practical, embodied activity performed by those passing through or dwelling in built spaces. Methodologically and rhetorically, then, it also facilitates a metaphorical movement typical of Benjamin’s writing, a shuttling between specific description and theoretical generalization and an analogous projection of mass phenomena out of Benjamin’s single perspective as observer and interpreter. A note from Convolute M (‘The Flâneur’), typical of passages also found in Benjamin’s impressionistic ‘city portraits’ of Naples, Marseilles, Berlin or Moscow, illustrates well this metaphorical translation and projection from a singular to collective scale: Streets are the dwelling place of the collective. The collective is an eternally unquiet, eternally agitated being that – in the space between the building fronts – experiences, learns, understands, and invents as much as individuals do within the privacy of their own four walls. For this collective, glossy enameled shop signs are a wall decoration as good as, if not better than, an oil painting in the drawing room of a bourgeois; walls with their ‘Post No Bills’ are its writing desk, newspaper stands its

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libraries, mailboxes its bronze busts, benches its bedroom furniture, and the café terrace is the balcony from which it looks down on its household. The section of railing where road workers hang their jackets is the vestibule, and the gateway which leads from the row of courtyards out into the open is the long corridor that daunts the bourgeois, being for the courtyards the entry to the chambers of the city. Among these latter, the arcade was the drawing room. More than anywhere else, the street reveals itself in the arcade as the furnished and familiar interior of the masses. (M3a,4) In passages such as this, the field of single social facts and experience becomes permeable to figural representation, an effect of what Benjamin would elsewhere refer to as the ‘mimetic faculty’. Methodically subjecting historical facts to figural associations, Benjamin sought to discover critical ‘constellations’, immanent but hidden in the material, thus disclosing unapparent connections between seemingly unconnected entities or phenomena. Such figural handling of archival materials, in turn, makes it possible to incorporate empirical data in incongruous contexts and on scales not envisaged in typical historiographic uses of documentary evidence. In this way, even the architectural and spatial aspects of individual dreams become utilizable as heuristic devices in a materialist history of the city: The dread of doors that won’t close is something everyone knows from dreams. Stated more precisely: these are doors that appear closed without being so. It was with heightened senses that I learned of this phenomenon in a dream in which, while I was in the company of a friend, a ghost appeared to me in the window of the ground floor of a house to our right. And as we walked on, the ghost accompanied us from inside all the houses. It passed through all the walls and always remained at the same height with us. I saw this, though I was blind. The path we travel through arcades is fundamentally just such a ghost walk, on which doors give way and walls yield. (L2,7) Benjamin’s personal dream of a ghost passing through walls becomes, when registered in Convolute L (‘Dream House, Museum, Spa’), a cipher of another, collectively experienced dream-like loosening of the bounds between self and others and between the subject and the object-world. Forming part of the real phantasmagoria of an actuality that exhibits the phenomonology of dream, arcades embody the disquieting paradoxes of dream-spaces and disclose the collective world of the city in the light of dreams. We discover here an urban landscape that is transparent yet opaque, open yet confining, perspicacious yet labyrinthine, glittering and garish yet full of shadows – features allegorically diffused throughout the enormous plethora of single objects and themes taken up in The Arcades Project yet concentrated in the architectural features of the arcades.



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As a built structure, architecture poses in a particularly ostentatious way the everyday presence of differential rhythms of time: rhythms of physical emergence and decay, rhythms of social and ideological change, rhythms of valuation and devaluation, rhythms of fashion and obsolescence. In a note from Convolute N, Benjamin cites a phrase from the longer passage from Giedion discussed above. In this note, rather than the postulate of construction as an architectural ‘subconscious’, he focuses on Giedion’s ironic ascription of a ‘haut-goût charm’ to the artistic legacy of the nineteenth century and gives this affect a diagnostic value in the writing of history: ‘We, however’, Benjamin writes: believe that the charm they exercise on us is proof that these things, too, contain material of vital importance for us – not indeed for our building practice, as is the case with the constructive possibilities inherent in iron frameworks, but rather for our understanding, for the radioscopy, if you will, of the situation of the bourgeois class at the moment it evinces the first signs of decline. In any case, material of vital importance politically; this is demonstrated by the attachment of the Surrealists to these things, as much as by their exploitation in contemporary fashion. In other words: just as Giedion teaches us to read off the basic features of today’s architecture in the buildings erected around 1850, we, in turn, would recognize today’s life, today’s forms, in the life and in the apparently secondary, lost forms of the epoch. (N1,11) Methodologically, architecture stands as the extreme ‘constructive’ pole of Benjamin’s historiography, which explores precisely the temporal polarization and tension that exists in the field of cultural artefacts. ‘To encompass both Breton and Le Corbusier’, Benjamin writes, ‘that would mean drawing the spirit of contemporary France like a bow, with which knowledge shoots the moment in the heart’ (N1a,5). Yet these pure extremes – the surrealist embrace of the obsolete and Le Corbusier’s emphatic modernity – are but points of reference against which the typical historical artefact reveals its dreamlike ambiguity of forward- and backward-looking, anamnesic and lethean elements. In the case of architecture, the most regressive and anti-constructive legacy of the nineteenth century was, according to both Giedion and Benjamin, the house. As Giedion wrote (and as Benjamin quotes, in Convolute L): ‘The house has always shown itself “barely receptive to new formulations” ’ (L1, 8). The latter part of Giedion’s book prognosticates solutions to the problem of human dwelling through the constructive possibilities of ferroconcrete in housing. Le Corbusier is the hero of this latter section, being the architect who, through the removal of supporting walls and an innovative use of glass, disintegrated the opposition of space and plasticity in building, creating ‘the eternally open house’.11 Analogously, Benjamin observes that ‘Le Corbusier’s

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work seems to stand at the terminus of the mythological figuration “house” ’ (L1a,4).12 More typically, however, Benjamin occupies himself with instances in which the house, in its traditional rigidity and resistance to public exposure, falls short of Corbusierian openness. In this case, domestic objects, rather than standing exposed in the transparency of their functional objecthood, combine in enigmatic hieroglyphs that purport to express, as if in a dream, the private, ‘interior’ subjectivity of the owner. In Convolute I (‘The Interior, The Trace’), Benjamin makes this link between the symbolically dense domestic interior and dream by quoting Baudelaire’s introduction to his 1852 translation of Poe’s ‘Philosophy of Furniture’: ‘Who among us, in his idle hours, has not taken a delicious pleasure in constructing for himself a model apartment, a dream house, a house of dreams?’ (I8,3). In other instances, Benjamin diagnoses a dreamy contamination of inside and outside spaces: The domestic interior moves outside. It is as though the bourgeois were so sure of his prosperity that he is careless of façade, and can exclaim: My house, no matter where you choose to cut into it, is façade. Such façades, especially, on the Berlin houses dating back to the middle of the previous century: an alcove does not jut out, but – as niche – tucks in. The street becomes room and the room becomes street. The passerby who stoops to look at the house stands, as it were, in the alcove. (L1a,1) He also assimilates to the house certain putatively public spaces in which the social forms that are articulated there retain traces of domesticity and privateness: most prominently, the museum and the arcades themselves. The arcades are characterized by the same absence of a clear inside–outside topology as the house described in the previous quotation: Against the armature of glass and iron, upholstery offers resistance with its textiles. (I3,1) Arcades are houses or passages having no outside – like the dream. (L1a,1) Likewise the museum enfolds the interior into its public space and scale. It reassembles in collectively available dream-figures the fragments of a past that eludes the individual domestic collector, while at the same time offering an expressive compensation for the loss of an active relation to history. Benjamin develops this idea by way of a commentary on a remark by Giedion about the regressive affinity of the nineteenth century for the museum as an institution and space: Museums unquestionably belong to the dream houses of the collective. In considering them, one would want to emphasize the dialectic by which



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they come into contact, on the one hand, with scientific research and, on the other hand, with ‘the dreamy tide of bad taste’. . . . This thirst for the past forms something like the principal object of my analysis – in light of which the inside of the museum appears as an interior magnified on a giant scale. (L1a,2) In all these cases – domestic space, arcade, and museum – it is not their realized contemporaneity that attracts the gaze of the materialist historian, but rather their incomplete modernity: the encrustation of anachronisms, archaisms and ornaments that renders them figurally rich material for historical interpretation. Finally, as the Venice School historians Manfredo Tafuri and Francesco Dal Co have pointed out – in part, influenced by Benjamin’s theoretical writings – modern architecture was closely tied to the enormous transformations of twentieth-century capitalism and the corporate state, and thus forms a pivotal point for understanding the change in the nature and function of intellectual labour in modern society.13 In his own reflections on intellectual labour, Benjamin gave greater consideration to the changing role of writers and visual artists in the age of reportage and cinema and never developed, like Tafuri and Dal Co many years later, a detailed disciplinary critique of architecture. Yet Benjamin’s essayistic remarks on the ‘refunctioning’ of intellectual work may apply even more appropriately to architecture than to the artistic disciplines that he treated in, for example, ‘The Author as Producer’ and ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility’. In The Arcades Project, for example, Benjamin hints that architecture, even more than photography, may have exposed the limits of the concept of art in the nineteenth century: Architecture was historically the earliest field to outgrow the concept of art, or, better, . . . it tolerated least well being contemplated as ‘art’ – a category which the nineteenth century, to a previously unimagined extent but with hardly more justification at bottom, imposed on the creations of intellectual productivity. (F3,1) The strong methodological centrality of architecture in The Arcades Project implies that Benjamin intuited its importance as a site for further reflection in his evolving critique of traditional intellectual labour. In another respect, however, Benjamin’s use of architecture in The Arcades Project adumbrates a disciplinary critique of architecture in favour of a unitary urbanism (or urban cultural studies, perhaps). For Benjamin enthusiastically embraced the basic historiographic thrust of Giedion’s Building in France, which as Sokratis Georgiadis has noted, ‘not only challenged the appropriateness of the inherited concept of form, [but] also questioned the legitimacy of the architectural discipline itself’.14 Giedion, like Benjamin,

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metaphorically projected a phenomenology of urban experience, with its complexity and technologically facilitated interpenetration of elements, into a new (inter-)disciplinary methodology and epistemology of urbanism: It seems doubtful whether the limited concept of ‘architecture’ will indeed endure. We can hardly answer the question: What belongs to architecture? Where does it begin, where does it end? Fields overlap: walls no longer rigidly define streets. The street has been transformed into a stream of movement. Rail lines and trains, together with the railroad station, form a single whole. Suspended elevators in glazed shafts belong to it just as much as the insulated filling between the supports. The antenna has coalesced with the structure, just as the limbs of a towering steel frame enter into a relationship with city and harbour. Tall buildings are bisected by rail lines. The fluctuating element becomes a part of the building. Architecture has been drawn into the current from the isolated position it had shared with painting and sculpture. We are beginning to transform the surface of the earth. We thrust beneath, above, and over the surface. Architecture is only a part of this process, even if a special one.15 In Convolute N, Benjamin quotes precisely the continuation of this passage: Giedion’s evocation of the view from the Eiffel Tower or the Pont Transbordeur, in which the distinctive shapes of the mobile objects are dissolved, when glimpsed through the iron net of the structure. Developing the methodological implications of this passage, Benjamin goes on to suggest that the historian too must view things within a conceptual montage that dissolves the traditional disciplinary frameworks within which historical objects have been constituted. ‘In the same way’, Benjamin writes, ‘the historian today has only to erect a slender but sturdy scaffolding – a philosophic structure – in order to draw the most vital aspects of the past into his net’ (N1a,1).

Dream and the Syncopations of History The most heterogeneous temporal elements thus coexist in the city . . . Whoever sets foot in a city feels caught up as in a web of dreams, where the most remote past is linked to the events of today. Ferdinand Lion, quoted by Benjamin in M9,4 ‘Dream’, as Benjamin’s handling of architectural examples demonstrates, designates a particular dynamic by which ‘differentials of time’ are actual-



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ized in the figures and configurations of cultural objects. To provide the ontological armature of this conception of objects as condensed figures of an internally differentiated time – analogous to what Gilles Deleuze would call, in his philosophy of cinema, ‘time-images’16 – Benjamin appeals particularly to the philosopher Henri Bergson. Thus, in Convolute H (‘The Collector’), Benjamin establishes a dense association between Bergsonian ontology, the architecture of the arcades, the dream and the collector as the semblable of the materialist historian: At the conclusion of Matière et mémoire, Bergson develops the idea that perception is a function of time. If, let us say, we were to live vis-à-vis some things more calmly and vis-à-vis others more rapidly, according to a different rhythm, there would be nothing ‘subsistent’ for us, but instead everything would happen right before our eyes; everything would strike us. But this is the way things are for the great collector. They strike him. How he himself pursues and encounters them, what changes in the ensemble of items are effected by a newly supervening item – all this shows him his affairs in constant flux. Here, the Paris arcades are examined as though they were properties in the hand of a collector. (At bottom, we may say, the collector lives a piece of dream life. For in the dream, too, the rhythm of perception and experience is altered in such a way that everything – even the seemingly most neutral – comes to strike us; everything concerns us. In order to understand the arcades from the ground up, we sink them into the deepest stratum of the dream; we speak of them as though they had struck us.) (H1a,5) Benjamin’s formulations here are themselves condensed and perhaps not wholly cogent as an explication of Bergson’s philosophy. But the basic thought is that the collector and the dreamer establish a dynamic reciprocity between objectivity and time that is different from the static way in which objects appear to us in everyday life. Everyday objectivity, according to Bergson, depends on masking the differentials of time under the guise of stable, given objects, with their external, quantitative, spatialized forms. The objects of the collector and dreamer, in contrast, are only the component elements of complex temporal images: memories, historical or genealogical representations, and so on. In everyday life, ‘objects’ take precedence over the images of time. In collecting and dreaming, in constrast, the qualities, values and meanings of objects instead derive from their place within an open-ended, evolving attempt to render time visible (or tangible). The collection of historical fragments and the treatment of them as the materials of a collective dream housed in the arcades entails for Benjamin a methodological imperative: to account for the differentials of time in the handling of historical objects and to mobilize them as the fulcrum of historical interpretation.

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The dreamlike figural excess of nineteenth-century iron constructions – of which the arcades are a prime example – offer Benjamin a crucial site to explore the differentials of time within a given historical moment. Correlatively, the idea of temporal ambiguity becomes a primary motif of Benjamin’s formal explication of individual artefacts: forms are traced back to ontological tensions within the field of time, tensions indicated by ambiguous figural aspects of functional, commercial and technological objects. In his interpretation of cultural forms, Benjamin thus takes as a basic ontological–hermeneutic principle the heterogeneity of temporal origins, a temporal complexity in which such ambiguity-producing tensions within cultural objects are ultimately rooted. In some cases, this heterogeneity expresses itself in the mixture of emergent and residual historical aspects within any artefact of the historical present.17 Thus, for example, he reads the arcade as being architectonically skewed between emergent properties of architectural horizontality and a residual verticality rooted in the sacral space of the Baroque church: The arcade as iron construction stands on the verge of horizontal extension. That is a decisive condition for its ‘old-fashioned’ appearance. It displays, in this regard, a hybrid character, analogous in certain respects to that of the Baroque chuch . . . On the other hand, it may be said that something sacral, a vestige of the nave, still attaches to this row of commodities that is the arcade. From a functional point of view, the arcade already occupies the field of horizontal amplitude; architecturally, however, it still stands within the conceptual field of the old ‘hall’. (F4,5) In other instances, the differentiation of time involves not only the historical stratification of the cultural artefact, but also its inscription within several different contemporaneous rhythms of social and material time. Thus, Benjamin notes with interest the disproportion between the time it took to prepare the world exhibitions, with their allegorical cities of glass and iron, and the actual duration of the exhibitions themselves. One observer cited by Benjamin, for instance, established the ratio as being approximately one year of preparation for every month of exhibition (G6a,3). Here Benjamin perhaps comes closest to the analyses of social rhythm in Marx’s Capital, where the relation between the cycles of production and circulation, the cycles of value embodiment in living labour and fixed capital, and the cycles of reproduction and crisis imply nothing less than a complex – and too infrequently noted – social ontology of time. For Benjamin, in turn, Marx’s theory of the ‘fetishism of the commodity’, in which social relations appear under the guise of relations between things, takes on a strongly Bergsonian, time-oriented aspect. The object, artefact, or built structure appears as the crystallized dream-image of much more complicated, temporal relations across social and historical distances.



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At the largest scale, the dream-figures of culture emerge out of a fundamental dissonance between the rhythms of development in the arts and in technology. In both The Arcades Project and the artwork essay, Benjamin thus diagnosed a growing lag between the function and form of the arts and the material forces in the productive and technological spheres. Thus, for example, in Convolute G (‘Exhibitions, Advertising, Grandville’), he writes: In all areas of production, from the Middle Ages until the beginning of the nineteenth century, the development of technology proceeded at a much slower rate than the development of art. Art could take its time in variously assimilating the technological modes of operation. But the transformation of things that set in around 1800 dictated the tempo to art, and the more breathtaking this tempo became, the more readily the dominion of fashion overspread all fields. Finally, we arrive at the present state of things: the possibility now arises that art will no longer find time to adapt somehow to technological processes. The advertisement is the ruse by which the dream forces itself on industry. (G1,1) Though Benjamin speaks specifically here of advertising, this passage applies equally to the nineteenth-century emergence of glass and iron architecture, connected especially with exhibition halls and leisure spaces such as arcades and winter gardens, before being taken up in more functional contexts such as train stations. Benjamin suggests that a new relationship between art and industry had to be negotiated in the nineteenth century, and the genealogy of this process is a succession of dreamlike configurations of architecture, commodities, and images. ‘Industrial exhibitions as secret blueprint for museums’, he writes. ‘Art: industrial products projected into the past’ (G2a,6). In this same convolute, Benjamin goes on to quote from Building in France about the nineteenth-century impulse to realize the Gesamtkunstwerk in architectural form, an ambition which led, in Giedion’s words, to a questionable ‘premature synthesis’. Yet in the passage Benjamin quotes, from Giedion’s discussion of exhibitions in a chapter on ‘Experimental Architecture’, Giedion accents the visionary, even cosmic motivation of these ‘premature’ precursors of such equally ambitious contemporaries as Le Corbusier. Benjamin, however, offers a more dialectical view of the ideological ambiguity of such ‘premature syntheses’, which express inchoate liberatory aspirations within the shackles of outmoded, aestheticizing forms. Thus, he makes the following caveat to Giedion’s remarks: ‘But these “premature syntheses” also bespeak a persistent endeavor to close up the space of existence and of development’ (G2,3). The ‘premature synthesis’ that comes from aestheticizing the new industrial forces have the closure of the dream, which can be exited only by ‘awakening’: critically and practically shattering the framework of the collective dream itself.

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The corollary and complement to this dynamic of ‘prematurity’ is the rhythm of obsolescence, which lends the products of the nineteenth century that savour of decrepitude that Baudelaire diagnosed in his ‘Spleen’ poems. Prematurity and obsolescence are conjoined in the architecture of collective dream, which captures in figural form precisely this temporal polarization of the urban artefact’s existence: The dusty fata morgana of the winter garden, the dreary perspective of the train station, with the small altar of happiness at the intersection of the tracks – it all molders under spurious constructions, glass before its time, premature iron. For in the first third of the previous century, no one as yet understood how to build with glass and iron. That problem, however, has long since been solved by hangars and silos. (F3,2) Yet this accelerated obsolescence, this mortification of the collective dream, the sclerotic hardening of nineteenth-century iron constructions into brittle, exposed skeletons in the twentieth-century city, also has a positive aspect in Benjamin’s view. As functionality begins to retreat from these buildings, figural incongruities that reveal their social and material contradictions, their historical and temporal dissonances, come to the fore. ‘The first structures made of iron served transitory purposes: covered markets, railroad stations, exhibitions’, Benjamin writes. ‘Iron is thus immediately allied with functional moments in the life of the economy. What was once functional and transitory, however, begins today, at an altered tempo, to seem formal and stable’ (F2,9). These aging constructions henceforth become objects that may be cited and utilized by the materialist historian in his work of critical destruction and redemption of the past. Or as Benjamin put it programmatically in the 1935 exposé: ‘Every epoch, in fact, not only dreams the one to follow but, in dreaming, precipitates its awakening . . . With the destabilizing of the market economy, we begin to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled’.18

FROM STIFLED PERSPECTIVES TO HORIZONTALITY The stifled perspective is plush for the eyes.

(E1, 7)

A crucial motif of Giedion’s celebration of glass and iron and ferroconcrete building is how these materials allow the architectural structure to be increasingly open, which in turn intensifies the continuity and interpenetration of architecture with the urban context. Thus Giedion relates Mart Stam’s superstructure of the Rokin Dam in Amsterdam (1926) to the Eiffel Tower (1889), juxtaposing a sketch of the Dutch structure to a sharply angled



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photograph of suspended stairs in the Eiffel Tower. His caption to the Stam image reads: ‘Only now do the seeds that lie in structures such as the Eiffel Tower come to full fruition. The affinity with a building such as the Eiffel Tower lies not merely in the connection and interpenetration by suspended transportation or free-hanging stations; one reaches the conclusion viewing both buildings: architecture no longer has rigid boundaries’.19 By the second half of the book, dedicated to ferroconcrete construction, Giedion rises to a hymn of praise for the new post-monumental openness of Le Corbusier’s houses: The solid volume is opened up wherever possible by cubes of air, strip windows, immediate transition to the sky. The new architecture shatters the original conceptual polarity: space or plasticity. The new situation can no longer be understood with these old terms! Corbusier’s houses are neither spatial nor plastic: air flows through them! Air becomes a constituent factor! Neither space nor plastic form counts, only relation and interpenetration! There is only a single, indivisible space. The shells fall away between interior and exterior.20 As Georgiadis points out, Giedion places the observer at the centre of his investigations, for whom the visual field of the city is increasingly a floating field of objects in space.21 Besides allowing the architect to dematerialize support and enclose greater continuous volumes within the building, iron and glass lattices extend the observer’s eye horizontally beyond the building’s boundaries as well. They draw together in a common visual framework objects at different points in depth, projecting them onto a flattened perceptual plane where perspectival depth cues are replaced by complex interrelations within an indefinitely extended space.22 Benjamin, similarly, adopts this idea of intensified interconnection between elements of the urban environment and between interior and exterior spaces. Like Giedion, he values the resulting illumination and disenchantment of the domestic interior. Alluding to imagery in André Breton’s Nadja, he asserts in his ‘Surrealism’ essay that ‘To live in a glass house is a revolutionary virtue par excellence’, and praises Le Corbusier’s liquidation of the dwelling’s monumentality. Benjamin’s use of such concepts as interpenetration and horizontality, however, have a decidedly more dialectical application in The Arcades Project than in Giedion’s book. In contrast to Giedion, Benjamin accentuates the failures and partial gropings towards a more adequate application of new architectural materials and techniques. What Giedion would treat as mere faux frais along the road to Corbusierian urbanism, Benjamin would take as the main focus of his historical investigations: the dream-forms within which new technologies are grasped, mastered, and transformed in collective practice. Thus Benjamin writes of a culturally productive ‘perplexity’ in the face of a ‘superabundance

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of technical processes and new materials that had suddenly become available’. The effort to assimilate them more thoroughly, he comments: led to mistakes and failures. On the other hand, these vain attempts are the most authentic proof that technological production, at the beginning, was in the grip of dreams. (Not architecture alone but all technology is, at certain stages, evidence of a collective dream.) (F1a,2) Accordingly, Benjamin stresses the dialectical tensions within particular buildings or particular instances of architectural discourse between emergent technical features and regressive forms, between the stifled hints of a modern, disenchanted horizontality of space and the residues of a premodern, mythic, hierarchical topology of place. In Convolute I, he captures this dialectical tension with aphoristic concision: ‘Against the armature of glass and iron, upholstery offers resistance with its textiles’ (I3,1). One of the most important instances in The Arcades Project of the ambiguity that results from flawed, partial attempts to assimilate technological change was the ‘Haussmannization’ of Paris that began in the Second Empire and lasted long enough to leave its final, corrupt traces in Louis Aragon’s surrealist novel of 1926, Le Paysan de Paris, set in an arcade destined to fall victim to the dregs of the long-late Baron’s reconstruction plan. (‘Surrealism was born in an arcade’ [C1,2], Benjamin notes.) Benjamin’s main thematic motif in the notes devoted to Haussmannization is that of ‘perspectives’, Haussmann’s reorganization of city space around the visual perspectives allowed by long, wide boulevards that converge on key monuments. He notes a ‘remarkable propensity for structures that convey and connect – as, of course, the arcades do. And this connecting or mediating function has a literal and spatial as well as a figurative and stylistic bearing’ (E2a,4). Along with this apparent allusion to Giedion’s emphasis on spatial continuity and visual extension, Benjamin also quotes Le Corbusier’s admiring remarks about Haussmann’s radical ‘surgical experiments’ with meagre, mechanical implements, which are pictured in Le Corbusier’s 1925 book Urbanisme (see Benjamin’s note E5a,6). Far, however, from germinally anticipating Giedion’s free horizontality, for Benjamin this urban reconstruction under the sign of ‘perspective’ was a means of containing and controlling modernity within the bounds of aesthetics. Rather than a liberation of urban modernity, it was an early instance of ‘the aestheticizing of politics’, in which the masses are allowed to ‘express themselves’ rather than ‘represent themselves’.23 Thus, Benjamin writes, ‘Haussmann’s predilection for perspectives, for long open vistas, represents an attempt to dictate art forms to technology (the technology of city planning). This always results in kitsch’ (E2a,7). As in the artwork essay of 1935, moreover, Benjamin does not fail to see the contemporary telos of this grand-scale kitsch as being fascism and technological warfare: ‘Haussmann’s work is accomplished today, as the Spanish war makes clear, by quite other means’ (E13,2).



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Such half-hearted realizations as Haussmannian ‘perspective’ are not simply ambiguous in their social effects. Rather, as Benjamin saw, the dedifferentiation of inside and outside, of space and plasticity, of observer and object, etc. that Giedion celebrates in modern architecture does not in itself carry any single, determinate political valence. For Benjamin, such dedifferentiation adumbrates both progressive and regressive tendencies, and the polarization of these tendencies in a given moment is an index of an opportunity to be seized politically. The promiscuous complexity characteristic of urban environments can manifest progressive impulses, by working to disenchant the myth of interiority and expose the individual to the forces of collective practice. As Benjamin writes: ‘The intoxicated interpenetration of street and residence such as comes about in the Paris of the nineteenth century – and especially in the experience of the flâneur – has prophetic value. For the new architecture lets this interpenetration become sober reality’ (M3a,5). But it may also work regressively. The interpenetration of inside and outside may also cast public, collective spaces under the shadow of interiority, thus constituting such spaces as ‘dream-houses’ of the collective. In Convolute L, Benjamin enumerates a number of such ambiguous collective spaces: ‘Dream houses of the collective: arcades, winter gardens, panoramas, factories, wax museums, casinos, railroad stations’ (L1,3). His catalogue, in short, embraces many of the crucial spaces of collective work, consumption, transportation, and leisure in the nineteenth century. The arcade, notably, stands in The Arcades Project as the example par excellence of this political reversibility of advanced technology and its effects on collective experience. If, materially, the arcade turns towards the future of architectural construction, experientially, it also projects individual interiority onto a mass scale, with the attendant reactionary implications. ‘Actually’, Benjamin notes in Convolute R (‘Mirrors’), ‘in the arcades it is not a matter of illuminating the interior space, as in other forms of iron construction, but of damping the exterior space’ (R1a,7).

DWELLING, OR THE ADDICTION TO DREAMS I conclude with some brief reflections on two notes that Benjamin dedicated to the problem of dwelling (Wohnen). These appear in Convolute I where, associating dwelling with the interior and domestic space, Benjamin adopts a resolutely critical note towards this theme. The first reads: The difficulty in reflecting on dwelling: on the one hand, there is something age-old – perhaps eternal – to be recognized here, the image of that abode of the human being in the maternal womb; on the other hand, this motif of primal history notwithstanding, we must understand dwelling

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in its most extreme form as a condition of nineteenth-century existence. The original form of dwelling is existence not in the house but in the shell. The shell bears the impression of its occupant. In the most extreme instance, the dwelling becomes a shell. The nineteenth century, like no other century, was addicted to dwelling. It conceived the residence as a receptacle for the person, and it encased him with all his appurtances so deeply in the dwelling’s interior that one might be reminded of the inside of a compass case . . . The twentieth century, with its porosity and transparency, its tendency toward the well-lit and airy, has put an end to dwelling in the old sense. Set off against the doll house in the residence of the master builder Solness are the ‘homes for human beings’. Jugendstil unsettled the world of the shell in a radical way. Today this world has disappeared entirely, and dwelling has diminished: for the living, through hotel rooms; for the dead, through crematoriums. (I4,4) The second, shorter note follows up the thought of the shell, while offering a grammatical observation that invites being contrasted to Martin Heidegger’s etymologizing approach: ‘To dwell’ as a transitive verb – as in the notion of ‘indwelt spaces’; herewith an indication of the frenetic topicality concealed in habitual behavior. It has to do with fashioning a shell for ourselves. (I4,5) As such, these notes appear in relative isolation: Benjamin did not take up the theme of dwelling as directly in the rest of The Arcades Project, although clearly dwelling is indirectly at issue in the numerous notes on interiors, the house, and figures such as the collector and the flâneur. Yet these two specific notes remain significant for several reasons. First, the theme of dwelling appears with a much more positive accent in Giedion than in Benjamin. One might, indeed, argue that dwelling is the positive, utopian telos of Giedion’s account of modern architecture. As he writes in the introduction to Building in France: ‘The task of this generation is: to translate into a housing form what the nineteenth century could say only in abstract and, for us, internally homogeneous constructions’.24 And returning to this point in his conclusion, he asserts: ‘our age has one primary demand: the creation of a humane and unconfined human dwelling that meets minimum standards’.25 It is, he suggests, only when the technological materials and practices evolved earlier in industrial contexts like train stations and factories begin to transform the foundations of human dwelling that architecture may be truly completed/overcome in modern urbanism. In contrast to Giedion, Benjamin does not embrace modern architecture for its utopian potential to solve the problem of dwelling. For him, architectural modernism is rather to be celebrated precisely for its negative, nihilistic aspect. Modern architecture, in his view, is not a means to restructure



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dwelling, harmonizing it with technology and urban collectivism, but definitively to abolish the already residual existence of dwelling in the twentieth century.26 Benjamin’s notes reveal that he occupies an extreme position in a wide spectrum of positions among German sociologists, philosophers, cultural critics and literary-artistic intellectuals from Nietzsche and Tönnies to Weber and Simmel to Spengler and Heidegger about the problem of dwelling.27 Alongside this catalogue of German thinkers, the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen also merits special mention. For Ibsen’s late play The Master Builder (1892), from which Benjamin cites the leitmotif phrase ‘homes for human beings’, represents one of the profoundest literary echoes of the problem of dwelling at this time.28 For these cultural intellectuals, the concept of dwelling became the intersecting point of reflections on such various issues as the problem of community, the nature of metropolitan experience, the relation to tradition, the question of technology and technical knowledge, and even, as Nietzsche’s and Ibsen’s examples suggest, the death of God and the potential nihilism of the individual will. Especially insofar as dwelling was seen by these intellectuals as threatened or obsolete in the modern metropolis, it became the focus of various melancholic diagnoses of decline, nostalgic wishes for return, and utopian desires to reinvent dwelling in the womb of technology and metropolitan life. Architectural modernism and the avant-garde were touched by each of these attitudes, often in contradictory and incoherent amalgams. In contrast to his predecessors, Benjamin – like Emmanuel Levinas and the late Heidegger, in Francesco Dal Co’s view29 – accepts the irreversible dissolution of the sphere of dwelling as a given and even desirable outcome of metropolitan development. He thus implicitly renders equally obsolete all those cultural discourses that mourn dwelling’s loss, those that yearn for its retrieval from the ruins of history, and those that strive for its utopian reinvention in the coming age. Benjamin’s references to ‘addiction’, ‘habit’, and ‘shell’, finally, suggest that his notes on dwelling should be connected to the more central problematic of the affective and cognitive dimensions of urban ‘shock’ experience. Drawing upon the metaphorics of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Benjamin implied that the interiorized shell of dwelling – the dream house of the collective – is first and foremost a sheath of rigid, deadened matter to defend against the shock of urban experience. The loss of this shell is traumatic, and new forms of experience will not be mastered without various regressions, conservative retrenchments, and false reconciliations in the face of the danger of awakening from the protective dream. If the final, tragic fall of Master Builder Solness in Ibsen’s play represents at once the culmination of the dream of dwelling and a catastrophic awakening from it in the moment of death, the task that Benjamin sets for future constructors is yet more daunting. Neither to reinvent the sacral roots of dwelling

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with sublime church-like houses (the fatal project of Ibsen’s Solness) nor to construct utopian ‘castles in the air’ (as the young Hilde Wangel wants Solness to do), but rather to survive and master the interminable fall into secularized space.30 In this sobering air outside dwelling, which surrounds the destruction–construction sites of the metropolis, architecture must seek the authentic spur to radical creation.

13 REMAINS TO BE SEEN STANLEY CAVELL For those of us frightened away from this most rumoured of unfinished or unpublished or unwritten modern works by how much we must miss in Benjamin’s deployment of German, the labours of love manifested in the English presentation expose us – I speak for myself – to a preliminary question: How much do I understand of my present state, as registered in my opening improvised recording, in reading this work? I assume that anyone concerned with the fate of the arts in conjunction with the state of philosophy and with efforts to uncover the present and the past in one another will know something of Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project and will have an interest in the event of its translation into English – will know that in it, Benjamin takes the emergence and recession of the maze of Paris arcades in its nineteenth century as the key to that Paris, and to its consciousness of itself, and takes that Paris as the capital place from which we are to awaken to knowledge of twentieth-century existence. Since the few pages of a proper review would allow at most for more rehearsals of the text’s appearance, together with a few hasty formulas about why it appears so, I have thought instead to begin a task of responding to the text, seeking some points of orientation toward it from where I find myself – not concealing the anxiety in approaching a work so burdened by ambition and originality, a task that, while no doubt intermittent, suggests no predictable end. I am not so much asking what it would be to understand the linking of Benjaminian concepts as they come to me, but what it would be to see how such instigations are manifested in the work of The Arcades Project. This is only my way of registering that its form or texture – with its citations, often multiple, ranging from a sentence to a long paragraph, from more than 800 texts, mostly French, otherwise German, bearing on the life and works of Paris through the nineteenth century, interspersed at varying intervals with one or more similary sized comments of Benjamin’s own, all collected into thirty-six ‘convolutes’ – is as urgent an issue to respond to as any citation or juxtaposition (Benjamin says montage) of citations within the structure; indeed that the form of The Arcades Project, the visibility of its existence as discontinuity and accretion, is its pervasive and inescapable issue. It is this condition of process rather than the question of the work’s evident sense of unfinished-ness (or uncompletability) that strikes me as constituting its aura of modernity, together, I mean, with its mode of incessant self-mirroring.

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Whether one takes the work as incomplete or as complete in its controlled fragmentation, prior facts are that it exists as a collection, and that the concept of a collection is one of its master tones, surrealist in its reach. Again, if you find that montage is what determines its endlessness, then you must note the pertinence of the concepts of constellation and of dispersion in the text, distinguishing allegorizing from collecting. My emphatic perception at the moment is of this text as work, as production without a product (a way to think about its claim to philosophy, or rather, to philosophizing). It is how I respond to the German title, Passagen-Werk (I believe Benjamin’s working title was Passagenarbeit). This might offer some protection against a tendency to conceive too simply of Benjamin’s volume, or package, as itself arcades, breaking passages through established constructions and putting commodified sayings on display: After all it is in the figure of the flâneur, made for arcades, that Benjamin proposes to his reader: ‘In the flâneur, one might say, is reborn the sort of idler that Socrates picked out from the Athenian marketplace to be his interlocutor. Only, there is no longer a Socrates. And the slave labor that guaranteed him his leisure has likewise ceased to exist.’ If Benjamin is here staking his claim to a certain afterlife of philosophizing, his Arcades Project may be taken as establishing the conditions (of memory as thinking, of thinking as explosion, of perception as allegory, of the chances of concurrence in Poe’s crowd) under which philosophy is still possible. Then if I think how the concept of work (or labour) occurs with Benjamin’s work, I think of his handsome compliment to Fourier: ‘To have instituted play as the canon of a labor no longer rooted in exploitation is one of the great merits of Fourier . . . The Fourierist utopia furnishes a model, of a sort to be found realized in the games of children.’ Can we say that Benjamin responds to Fourier as allegorizing children’s games so as to rescue the missed opportunities of industrialized human work? How is it that among the dominating presence of modern thought, Benjamin (together perhaps with Wittgenstein, who also remarkably invokes children and games) is unafraid of pathos; or rather, why does he find pathos indispensable to his writing? Clearly not out of nostalgia for the past of which we are the dream and the dreamers. But of something like the reverse: Kant said that in human knowledge objects are given to us along with the endless conditions of their appearing. Benjamin wishes us to bear the knowledge – that is, demands of his words that each bears the pain of perceiving – that each thing given to us appears not only through the work of endless others but through a contortion in what should count as work. Is this reading Benjamin? About reading he says, for example: ‘The image that is read – which is to say, the image in the now of its recognizability – bears to the highest degree the imprint of the perilous critical moment on which all reading is founded’; and ‘the historical index of the images not only says that they belong to a particular time; it says, above all, that they



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attain legibility only at a particular time’; and ‘image is that wherein, by dint of lightning, what has been enters into a constellation with the now’. In which now of recognizability is this bulk of pages legible, compiled in a labour begun in 1927? When they were read and reported on over the years to friends destined for fame (Adorno, Scholem, Brecht), who were variously inspired and dismayed? When they were left hurriedly in 1940 to be buried somewhere Georges Bataille would know about in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris? After they survived the war to be edited and published in Germany in 1982? In the emergencies of translation? May I make a constellation of Benjamin’s repeated idea of a flash of lightning with Emerson’s remark near the opening of ‘Self-Reliance’ (no more famous that it is unknown, to Benjamin for example), also about reading: ‘A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages’? Doesn’t Emerson confirm this advice in his essay ‘Experience’, when the idea of ‘persisting to read or to think’ is associated with ‘flashes of light’, marking sudden arrivals (nows) as following perilous journeys? But then, recursively, how is it that Emerson constitutes a now of recognition for me? (Herman Melville’s image of a ‘shock of recognition’ would have interested Benjamin.) I might say it is because of the way I read Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, the only part completed for publication signed in 1945, after various rumours and dictations to pupils over more than a decade, published with editorial addenda in English 1953, followed by a stream of Nachlass. It was not until 1960 that had I found the now of legibility (or a now of legibility) for Wittgenstein’s work. And how shall I know that my conviction was or is sound? It might help to say that it is confirmed in noting that Benjamin’s redemptive reading invokes the idea of rescuing phenomena. This is a way of indicating how I put together Wittgenstein’s remarking: ‘what we do is to lead words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use’, with his observing: ‘We feel as if we had to penetrate phenomena: our investigation, however, is directed not towards phenomena, but, as one might say, towards the “possibilities” of phenomena.’ This latter observation, as I argued a lifetime ago, virtually quotes Kant’s idea of critique, but unlike Kant, for whom our possibilities of phenomena are fixed, Wittgenstein’s vision is rather of human existence as perpetually missing its possibilities; put otherwise, as captivated by false necessities. One of Benjamin’s definitions of ‘basic historical concepts’ is: ‘Catastrophe – to have missed the opportunity.’ Thoreau sometimes puts the perception comically, once, in Walden, when depicting his being interrupted in reading Confucius: ‘There never is but one opportunity of a kind.’ I note that Benjamin declares that his comments are saturated with theology, if necessarily inexplicitly, and that Wittgenstein advised a student to read Philosophical Investigations from a religious point of view. Then I should not forbear seeking, or questioning, another of my nows in the antitheological Freud (not unrelated to a certain rescuing of Freud in

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the philotheological Lacan), when early in the Introductory Lectures, Freud confesses: ‘The material for [the] observations [of psychoanalysis] is usually provided by the inconsiderable events which have been put aside by the other sciences as being too unimportant – the dregs of the world of phenomena.’ This picks up Benjamin: ‘Method of this project: . . . I shall purloin no valuables . . . But the rags, the refuse – these I will . . . allow, in the only way possible, to come into their own: by making use of them.’ (Freud’s dregs and Benjamin’s refuse are each interpretable with Wittgenstein’s ordinary; the differences are where I come in.) But ours does not seem to be a time in which for many people Freud is legible, or usable. Nor is it a propitious time for the later Wittgenstein, nor for the other philosophers of missed possibility I have cited. None has the intensity of prestige that Benjamin’s work seems to have acquired. If this is true, is it because Benjamin now brings something seriously new, unheard of, which would have to mean, for him, some other access to the archaic? Is it somehow his old capacity for having to be cared for taking hold on a large scale? Does it express our drive to reparation for having missed him? Is it that his isolation, expressed in his unforgettable suicide, is now to become legible? Sometimes, in The Arcades Project, one reads what is a citation as something from Benjamin’s own pen, neglecting to have noticed that the entry began with a quotation mark or some other signal, and then finds that an interesting stretch of prose is identified as the work of some monster of fame, such as Baudelaire or Hugo or Zola or Balzac or Proust, or alternatively of someone quite unknown. (There is ample reason for this: Benjamin declares it essential to his work ‘to develop to the highest degree the art of citing without quotation marks’.) Is this to be allegorized as the impenetrability of the ways of fame, or say of the needs of a culture, or of a culture’s interpretation of its needs; or a reminder of the insufferable, seemingly unsurmountable taste and talent of the French for literary discussion? The perpetual assault of expressiveness, of the sheer clamour of articulateness, becomes an oppressive demand for response, for the reader, for the writer. In the Baudelaire dossier – much the longest, mined variously by Benjamin for separate publications, real and imagined, to reveal something of the ungovernable Arcades Project beyond the circle of friends who found it sane – there comes eventually a stretch of ten pages (AP 330–40) of entries from Benjamin alone. The intensity becomes so cruel that one finds oneself longing for a citation that could relieve this obligation to perform with incessant, simultaneous brilliance, surprise and philosophy. A measure of the size of the Baudelaire material: The following two entries (I mean the flash of illumination that may arc between them) span more than 100 pages: ‘His [Baudelaire’s] utterances, Gautier thought, were fully [full?] of “capital letters and italics” . . . I do not even critize his jerky gait . . . which made people compare him to a spider. It was the beginning of that angular gesticulation which, little by little, would displace the round graces of the



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old world’ (AP 248); ‘The “jerky gait” of the ragpicker is not necessarily due to the effect of alcohol. Every few moments, he must stop to gather refuse, which he throws into his wicker basket’. (AP 364) Why (according to what allegories) make a work that cannot be read through? Perhaps to remind the reader that his and her work must perpetually find its own end. Why make a work that cannot be written to an end? Perhaps to remind the writer of a reason to suffer awakening without end. It is work that is capable of recognizing, in a response to Nietzsche, ‘suicide as signature of modernity’. Then The Arcades Project, constructive, modernist, and unending, is not so much an argument against suicide as it is an attestation, so long as the work can continue, that deprives suicide of its point.

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Notes chapter 1    1 In Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870s. Ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1979), 79–97.    2 Theodor W. Adorno, Konstruktion des Aesthetischen in Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp), vol. 2, 94ff.    3 Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony, edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 103–104; Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, part 1, edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 42. As apparent from the German translation, Kierkegaard refers to his ‘booty’ as ‘images’.    4 Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, translated by C.K Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin (New York: Vintage Books, 1981), vol. 1, 51.

Chapter 2    1 This is a considerably abridged version of ‘Et Cetera? De l’Historien comme Chiffonnier’ in Walter Benjamin et Paris (ed. H. Wismann; Paris: 1986), 559–610. A longer version has also appeared in Passagen. Walter Benjamins Urgeschichte des XIX, Jahrhunderts (ed. N. Bolz and B. Witte; Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1984), 70–95.    2 In his letter of 10 November 1938, Adorno quotes his wife, Gretel, as having jokingly observed that Benjamin was postponing the completion of the Passagen-Werk for fear of then having to re-emerge out of its hidden recesses.    3 Is it too fanciful to visualize the hunchback, another dealer in debris, as suffering from the same déformation professionnielle as the chiffonnier – pliant, in Baudelaire’s phrase, sous un tas de débris? Each of them is ‘the inhabitant of deformed (entstellt) life’ and the agent of its messianic restoration (zurechtstellen) (GS 2:432).    4 It was in surrealism that Benjamin discovered such militant parti pris des choses: ‘It was the first to stumble on the revolutionary energies contained in the “outmoded”, in the first iron constructions, the first factory buildings, the earliest photos, the objects that have begun to die out, grand pianos, the dresses of five years ago, fashionable haunts when the vogue has begun to ebb from them. The relation of these things to the revolution – no one has a more precise idea of that than these authors. No one before these seers and augurs perceived how destitution – not merely social but architectonic, the poverty of interiors, enslaved and enslaving objects – can suddenly be transformed (umschlagen) into revolutionary nihilism. Let us not even dwell on Aragon’s Passage de l’Opéra. Breton and Nadja likewise are lovers who convert into revolutionary experience if not action, everything we have experienced on sad railway journeys (railways are beginning to age), on god-forsaken Sunday afternoons in the proletarian areas of the great cities, in our first glance through the rain-blurred window of a new apartment. They bring the powerful “atmospherics” (Stimmung) contained in these objects to the point of explosion’ (GS 2:299–300).    5 Benjamin does not seem to have needed Adorno’s reminder, in his letter of 1 November 1938, that beggary itself is, in the person of the chiffonnier, subjected to the law of

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exchange-value. Cf., for example, the following passage: ‘When the new industrial processes had given refuse a certain value, rag-pickers appeared in the cities in large numbers. They worked for middlemen and constituted a sort of cottage industry located on the street. The rag-picker fascinated his epoch. The eyes of the first investigators of poverty were fixed on him with the mute question as to where the limit of human misery lay’ (GS 1:521). ‘Raggedness’, he further notes, ‘is a specific form of poverty – by no means simply its most extreme form’ (PW 472). In this context, he approvingly cites Lotze’s observations on the historical specificity of Verlumptheit, and dismisses Huizinga’s panoramic survey of das Interesse für das Verlumpte from the Middle Ages to the present as a typical example of ‘cultural history at its worst’ (PW 603). The economic function of rag collection for the paper industry is expounded by David Séchard in Les Illusions Perdues.    6 Cf. GS 1: 617–8.    7 Benjamin also points out the emergence of increasingly rebellious accents in the various drafts of the poem’s closing lines. In the two earlier versions, wine ‘warms’ or ‘appeases’ the ‘heart’ and ‘calms’ the ‘suffering’ of the rag-pickers; in the final version, it ‘drowns’ their ‘rancor’ and ‘cradles’ their ‘indolence’. Cheap wine, a contemporary is quoted as saying, saved the government from popular unrest on several occasions (GS 1.2:520).    8 Benjamin does not mention certain obvious ironies in the poem which would surely complicate his reading of it if he were not proposing to ‘use’ the poem rather than ‘interpret’ it. (Cf., on this distinction, GS 4:142, and, for a more elaborate reading of the poem, my ‘Et Cetera? De l’Historien comme Chiffonnier’, loc. cit, 582 passim). Baudelaire’s chiffonnier may dream socialist thoughts (‘Terrasse les méchants, relève les victims’), but the combination of wine and socialism has clearly gone to his head. He dreams, moreover, of being followed by his companions and dictating new laws. If religion is the opium of the people, ‘Le Vin des Chiffonniers’ raises the question whether socialism might not in turn amount to the same thing. It would itself be the dream, or stupor, from which, as in ‘Assommons les Pauvres’, the poor deserve to be rudely awakened. Cf. the passing references to the chiffonnier in the second Chant of Lautréamont’s Chants de Maldoror (éd. de la Sirène; Paris: 1920), 75: the rejection of this sorry figure – who is at once pitiable and pitying – is part of a Nietzschean campaign against all philanthropic humanism. The abjection of the rag-man did indeed prick the social(ist) conscience of nineteenth-century observers. In Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (ed. D.I. Struik; New York: 1964), 75 passim, it represents the unconscionable limit of capitalist exploitation, along with prostitution and child labour. But insofar as philanthropy merely covered up such exploitation, the rag-man also fared badly at its hands. Two opposite attacks on philanthropy were mounted. While socialists denounced its hypocrisy on behalf of the exploited, Nietzsche, Baudelaire and others tarred socialism in turn with the same brush. The rag-man is often caught in the ideological cross-fire between the two camps.    9 Benjamin’s fundamental objection to Ernst Bloch’s Erbschaft dieser Zeit was that its author, despite his admiration for Benjaminian montage, still assumed the posture of a grand seigneur instead of a Lumpensammler. Where an earthquake has taken place, Benjamin observes in his letter of 6 February 1935, the only respectable course for a grosser Herr is to help out by distributing his Persian carpets as blankets and cutting his priceless draperies into clothes. Cf. Benjamin’s account of the surrealist Fassadenkletterer who uses ornaments as so many footholds (GS 2:298); in the PassagenWerk he proposes to follow suit: ‘How this work was written: rung by rung, wherever chance offered a narrow foothold’ (PW 575).   10 ‘The poets find the refuse of society on the street and discover their heroic model in that very refuse. A common type is thus seemingly superimposed upon their illustrious



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type. It is permeated by the features of the rag-picker, with whom Baudelaire repeatedly concerned himself. A prose portrayal of the figure appeared one year before “Le Vin des Chiffonniers” . . . This description is an extended metaphor for the activity of the poet after Baudelaire’s own heart. Rag-picker or poet – refuse concerns both of them, and both go about their solitary business at hours when respectable citizens are fast asleep; even their gestures are the same. Nadar speaks of Baudelaire’s “jerky gait”; this is the walk of the poet who roams the city in search of rhyme-booty; it must also be that of the rag-picker who pauses at every moment to pick up the refuse he comes across. There is much to indicate that Baudelaire secretly wished to bring this relationship out’ (GS 1:583). One is strangely reminded here of the ‘intermittent rhythm’ and ‘constant resumption’ that is, according to the ‘Epistemo-Critical Prologue’ to the Trauerspiel book, characteristic of philosophical meditation (GS 1:208). There too it is a question of allegorical fragments (Denkbruchstücke), ‘disparate’ particulars that are assembled into a ‘mosaic’. Cf. also, on the rag-picker as the model of the modern hero, (PW 465).   11 Charles Baudelaire, ‘L’Ecole Païenne’, in Oeuvres Complètes (ed. Y. G. le Dantec; Paris, 1958) 979.   12 Cf. my ‘Hors d’Oeuvre’, in Walter Benjamin, Origine du Drame Baroque Allemand, (Paris: 1985), 7–21, on the progressive approaches of Prince Charming, the shining knight of historicist Wissenschaft, who will, according to Benjamin’s revised version of Sleeping Beauty, one day come to rescue his dormant manuscript on the German Trauerspiel from the oblivion to which its academic rejection had relegated it. Benjamin portrays himself as having trespassed into an academic ‘lumber-room’ in order to ‘weave himself a professorial robe’ at an ‘old fashioned spinning wheel’ (GS 1: 901–2). The upshot was the ironical facsimile of an academic treatise – a patchwork composed of the most diverse materials and studded with the rarest quotations from little-read material. Here too, then, Benjamin, the author of a ‘poor truth’, poses as something of a rag-picker, who first raids university property and finally trashes it. Cf., on this whole episode, my ‘Resentment Begins at Home. Nietzsche, Benjamin and the University’, in Looking after Nietzsche, (ed. L. Rickels; Buffalo, NY: 1987).   13 Today rag-collecting is no longer a metaphor for destructive, revolutionary activity. It is either (as in the case of third-world countries, bag ladies and clochards) a matter of sheer survival, or else (in affluent western societies) synonymous with la mode rétro, the fashion for flea-markets, the nostalgia for quilts, the restoration of clutter.   14 Cf., in this connection, Dietmar Rieger, Diogenes als Lumpensammler (Munich, 1982). This association seems to have been a commonplace of the period. Cf. the informative article on the chiffonnier in the Grand Dictionnaire Larousse Universal du XIX Siècle (Paris, 1869): ‘We say philosophers, because every rag-man carries in him the stuff of a Diogenes. Like the latter, he enjoys the nomadic life, endless strolls, the independence of the lazzarone. He considers with profound contempt the slaves who lock themselves up from morning to night in a workshop . . . the philosopher–rag-man works when he likes . . . Diogenes threw away his bowl; the rag-picker has no less disdain for the goods of this world . . . The multiple holes in his cast-off clothes afford a glimpse of his pride; he knows how to say to the great of the earth: “Get out of my light”’ (Vol. 4, 96). Cf. also the rag-picker’s ‘philosophical’ examination of his basket in Pyat’s Chiffonnier de Paris: ‘Tout finit là tôt ou tard . . . à la hotte! (Remuant le tas du pied). L’amour, la gloire, la puissance, la richesse, à la hotte! . . . Toutes les épluchures! . . . Tout y vient, tout y tient, tout est chiffon, haillon, tesson, chausson, guenillon!’ He proceeds to pick up a subscription to a stock-holding company, an invitation to a society ball, a speech to the French Academy, a police ordnance, and a bone: ‘A la hotte! à la hotte! . . . comme le reste . . . Et dire que tout cela refera du beau papier à poulet, de belles étoffes à grandes dames, et que ça reviendra là encore et ainsi de suite jusqu’à dv‘extermination.’ (Vol. 4, 97). The motif of the etceteras here rejoins that of the eternal return of the same.

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  15 More importantly, if in a different sense, Benjamin’s whole book ‘saved’ the past in much the same way that the Passagen-Werk would propose to do: ‘The mood (Pathos) of this work: there are no periods of decline. Attempt to see the nineteenth century in as thoroughly positive a fashion as I attempted to see the seventeenth century in the book on the Trauerspiel ’ (PW 571).   16 Cf. the mystical notion of Blendung in which Benjamin’s dissertation, Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik, culminates (GS 1:119).   17 Cf., on ‘le reste’, Jacques Derrida, Glas, (Paris: 1974), which begins thus: ‘Quoi du reste aujourd’hui, pour nous, ici, maintenant, d’un Hegel?’ (7).   18 This is the central question of Adorno’s Negative Dialektik, (Frankfurt: 1966).   19 Cf., on this motif, my ‘Sur quelques motifs juifs chez Benjamin’, in Revue d’Esthétique 1, (Paris: 1981), 141–61.   20 Briefe, 425

Chapter 3    1 The collector came into his own later, Benjamin connects him with the decline of the arcades when, as flâneur and prostitute disappeared from them, the collector expanded his terrain and assembled there the out-of-date products of the earlier period (PW 272). Ultimately, this figure, too, was threatened by industrialism : ‘I do know that time is running out for the type that I am discussing here . . . But, as Hegel put it, only when it is dark does the owl of Minerva begin its flight. Only in extinction is the collector comprehended’ (Walter Benjamin, ‘Unpacking my Library’, in Illuminations [trans. Harry Zohn; New York: Schocken Books, 1969], p. 67).    2 Women were forbidden on the roofs (PW 544).    3 Benjamin comments on the ‘fate of street names in the vaults of the metro’ (PW 1008).    4 Benjamin noted the observation of Georg Simmel that the crowding of urban life would be ‘unbearable’ without psychological distance, and that the money-nature of social relationships functioned as ‘an inner protection against the all-too-pressing proximity’ (PW 561).    5 The ‘flâneur of the night’ was encouraged as early as 1866 by stores open until 10.00 pm (PW 540).    6 Other causes were electric lighting, the banishing of prostitution, and the new culture of free air, which found the old passageways stifling (PW 1028).    7 Walter Benjamin, ‘Die Wiederkehr des Flâneurs’ (review of Franz Hessel, Spazieren im Berlin, 1929), GS 3:198.    8 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, cited in Georg Simmel, Goethe (Leipzig: Verlag von Klinkhardt and Biermann, 1913), p. 57. Benjamin refers to this book (and this page) when commenting on the affinity between his concept of truth and that of Goethe (PW 577).    9 The Passagen-Werk documents the source (Ursprung) of contemporary mass society, and understands the causal connection in terms of the Goethean concept of Urphänomen: ‘Ursprung – that is the concept of the Urphänomen brought out of the pagan connection with nature and into the Judaic connection with history . . .’ (PW 577). Theology, like the flâneur also threatened by modernity with extinction, might well be described as the dialectical Urform of Benjamin’s method, negated and preserved at once : ‘My thinking is connected to theology like the ink-blotter to ink. It is totally saturated with it. But if it were up to the blotter, nothing that has been written would remain’ (PW 588).   10 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire’, CB 36.



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  11 ‘What separates the [dialectical] images from phenomenology’s “essences” is their historical index. (Heidegger searches in vain to save history for phenomenology abstractly, through “historicity”)’ (PW 578).   12 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Radio Physiognomik’ (Frankfurt-am-Main: Adorno Estate, 1939), p. 46.   13 Discussed in Susan Buck-Morss, A Tourguide to Modern Experience, unpublished.   14 Letter, Adorno to Benjamin, 6 November 1934 (PW 1106).   15 Oxford English Dictionary (hereafter OED).   16 Petit Robert. When did the sandwich become the traditional lunch of the worker? Did it make it possible for him to remain at his work station, like Lord Montague at his gambling table?   17 A Glasgow confectioner, 1866, made 100 different varieties of sandwiches (OED).   18 Letter, Adorno to Benjamin, 10 November 1938, in GS 1:1096.   19 Miroir du monde, 22 March 1936, p. 45.   20 Brassaï, The Secret Paris of the 30’s, (trans. Richard Miller; London: Thames and Hudson, 1977), pp. 32–3. See also ‘Clochards’ Dictionnaire de Paris (Larousse, 1964), pp. 135–6.   21 ‘And those who cannot pay . . . for a night’s lodging? Well, they sleep where they find a place, in passages, in arcades, in any possible corner where the police or the owners allow them to sleep undisturbed’ (Friedrich Engels, Die Lage Arbeitenden Klasse in England [1844] cited in PW 94).   22 Brassäi, Secret Paris, p. 32.   23 Projection onto miserable persons, commodities on display, stars on the screen, women passing by, made them fantasy figures within one’s own experience (Erlebnis), while they themselves remained mute (PW 528). See section 5 below.   24 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Author as Producer’, UB 96.   25 Among his modern forms: the reporter, a flâneur-become-detective, covers his beat (PW 54); the photo-journalist hangs about like a hunter ready to shoot (PW 964).   26 Cf. an 1843 description: ‘I mean by bohemians that class of individuals whose existence is problematic . . . of which the majority awake in the morning without knowing where they will eat at night; wealthy today, starving tomorrow; prepared to live honestly if they are able, and otherwise if they are not’ (cited in PW 539).   27 Cited in Brassaï, Secret Paris, p. 30. Cf.: ‘A rag-picker cannot, of course, be part of the bohème. But . . . everyone who belonged to the bohème could recognize a bit of himself in the rag-picker. Each person was in a more or less obscure revolt against society and faced a more or less precarious future’ (CB 20).   28 Benjamin praised Baudelaire for seeing through that deception: ‘I who sell my thought and want to be an “author”’ (CB 34).   29 Benjamin noted in a count of clippings from newspapers made in 1911, ‘the names of Baudelaire and Victor Hugo could be found as often as Napoleon’ (PW 372).   30 Cf. Alexandre Vexliard, Introduction à la sociologie du vagabondage (Paris: Marcel Riviere et Cie, 1936), pp. 90–1.   31 Walter Benjamin, OWS 330.   32 In fact, at least as late as the 1935 exposé, Benjamin expressed hope that the ‘dreaming collective’ could be awakened (at the same time that class differences were insisted upon).   33 In the early note: ‘Did not Marx teach us that the bourgeoisie can never itself come to fully enlightened consciousness? And if this is true, is one not justified in attaching the idea of the dreaming collective (i.e., the bourgeois collective) onto his thesis?’ (PW 1033).   34 ‘The flames on the sides of the Nuremberg stadium, the huge overwhelming flags, the marches and speaking choruses, present a spectacle to [today’s] modern audiences not

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unlike those American musicals of the 1920s and 1930s which Hitler himself was so fond of watching each evening’ (George Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses [New York: Howard Fertig, 1975], p. 207).   35 I am indebted to Mary Lydon for material in this section. See her article, ‘Foucault and Feminism. A Romance of Many Dimensions’, Humanities in Society 5, nos. 3 and 4 (Summer/Fall 1982).   36 Cited in Judith R. Walkowitz, Prostitution and the Victorian Society: Women, Class and the State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), p. 246.   37 Walkowitz, Prostitution, p. 246.   38 One prostitute was nick-named the Passage des Princes.   39 The ‘spirituality’ and ‘pure love’ of the lesbians which ‘knows no pregnancy and no family’ was connected, like androgyny and male impotence, with barrenness (GS 1: 661, 672); in the absence of collective politics, suicide became ‘the only heroic act’ remaining ‘in reactionary times’ (CB 76). (It was the act taken by Claire Démar and by Benjamin himself.)   40 Hence Marx’s statement in the 1844 manuscripts: ‘Prostitution is only a specific expression of the general prostitution of the labourer’ (PW 802).   41 The comment continues: ‘In so far as this represents the most extreme extension which the range of the commodity can experience, the prostitute was always a precursor of the commodity economy. But precisely because the commodity character was otherwise underdeveloped, this side of it didn’t remotely need to become so harshly prominent. In fact, for example, medieval prostitution did not demonstrate the crassness which was the rule in the nineteenth century’ (PW 439).   42 As an example of such a claim, consider Benjamin’s totally serious speculation at the close of the Convolute on fashion: ‘The horizontal body position had the greatest advantages for the female of the species of homo sapiens, if one considers the oldest specimens. It made pregnancy easier, as one can already gather from the girdles and bandages which pregnant women today are accustomed to use. Starting from here one might perhaps dare to ask whether the upright posture in general didn’t occur earlier with the little man than with the woman. Then the little woman would have been for a while the four-footed accompanier of the man, as it is today with a dog or cat. Indeed, from this idea it is only perhaps one step further to the possibility that the frontal meeting of the two partners in the sex act was originally a form of perversion, and perhaps it was not in the least this mistake through which the woman learned to stand upright’ (PW 132)[!]   43 Recent scholarship has documented the prevalence of the Medusan image of the crowd, and the connection between the fear of unconstrained female sexuality and the threat of proletarian revolution in nineteenth-century France. See Susanna Barrows, Distorting Mirrors (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982). See also Neil Hertz, ‘Medusa’s Head: Male Hysteria under Political Pressure’, Representations, 1:4 (1983).   44 Similarly, where Dickens could still see an ‘animated sandwich’, human life lending its qualities to the thing (a quality which gives Grandville’s work a socially utopian character), the twentieth century sees simply the ‘sandwichman’, the human-turned-thing.   45 Karl Marx, ‘Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts’, Paris, 1844 (first published 1928).   46 Marx, ‘Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts’. Benjamin refers not to this passage, but to one directly preceding it (on communal property and the communality of women) in PW 802.   47 ‘In the first years of [the nineteenth] century, one could see a man touring the ramparts of Vienna every day, whatever the weather, in snow or sunshine: it was Beethoven who, deep in flânerie, was repeating his wonderful symphonies in his head before putting them down on paper; for him the world didn’t exist . . . he didn’t see . . . his spirit was elsewhere’ (PW 568).



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  48 ‘It is decisive that Rousseau still enjoys himself – on his leisure walks – but the turning toward the outside has not yet occurred’ (PW 567).   49 ‘In the flâneur, so one could put it, there returns the idler to whom Socrates left himself open as a partner in dialogue in the Athenian market. Only there is no Socrates any longer, and so he remains unaddressed. And also the slave labour has ceased, which guaranteed him in his idleness’ (GS 1:685).   50 ‘“Landscape out of pure life”, as Hofmannsthal once called it . . . or more accurately, for [the flâneur] the city separates sharply into its dialectical poles: it opens itself to him as landscape; it encloses him as a room’ (PW 1053).   51 At the same historical moment, Lévi-Strauss left Paris for Brazil, in search of Indian villages still untainted by western civilization. He landed in Rio de Janeiro in 1934: ‘The change from one hemisphere to the other, and from one continent and climate to another, had, in the first instance, done little more than render superfluous the thin glass covering which, in Europe, serves to create the same conditions artificially. My first impression of Rio was of an open-air reconstruction of the Gallerias of Milan, the Galerij in Amsterdam, the Passage des Panoramas, or the concourse of the Gare Saint Lazare’ (Claude Lévi-Strauss, Triste Tropiques, [trans. John and Doreen Weightman; New York: Atheneum, 1978], p. 85).   52 ‘To be sure: today in the era of automobiles and airplanes only gentle, atavistic fears still stir within the dark halls [of railroad stations] and that worn-out comedy of departure and return which is played before the background of Pullman cars makes out of the railroad platform a provincial stage’ (PW 512).   53 Walter Benjamin, ‘Berliner Kindheit um Neunzehnhundert’, GS 4:287–8. A similar version appears in ‘Berliner Chronik’.   54 Acknowledging these registers as separate distinguishes the adult from the child, the sane person from the madman. Hitler in his last days believed that if he was to be destroyed, all of Germany and indeed the world must go with him. Just this conflation of the individual and the collective is to be avoided (now more than ever). The world does not die with us, and the price of hope for the world is precisely our own transiency. Hence: ‘there is infinite hope; but not for us’ (Kafka).   55 Benjamin’s autobiographical confessions are more than an allegory of objective social forces (wherein the subject evaporates, and personal responsibility along with it); nor is Benjamin’s vision of the origins of modernity simply the projection of his own neurotic concerns (wherein the need for social revolution disappears behind the figure of Oedipus). Adorno and others have made much of Benjamin’s ‘anti-subjectivism’. To be sure, he acknowledges the disintegration of the bourgeois subject, whose longing for communion takes the form of attempting to posit nature and history as its own product (and then dominate it). As Shereen Mahmood has pointed out in an unpublished paper: ‘The author’s self, in the shape of a presiding narrative voice precisely delimiting and ordering the significance of experience, is a construct that Benjamin avoids’. His childhood reminiscences destroy the narrative ego by mapping experience on urban space ‘non-directionally’; they are ‘fractured narrative acts in thrall to the regimen of the city’. But Benjamin’s imagination maintains a power which is nothing if not autonomous, anticipatory of an agency which overcomes subjective isolation through mimesis rather than domination.   56 Despite Adorno’s concerns, in Benjamin’s theory of the dreaming collective, class differences were in no way lacking. He in fact considered it a refinement of Marx’s theory of the superstructure: ‘The economic conditions under which society exists come to expression in the superstructure, just as with someone sleeping, an over-filled stomach, even if it may causally determine the contents of the dream, finds in those contents not its copied reflection, but its expression’ (PW 495). It is of course the bourgeoisie, not the proletariat, whose dream expresses the discomfort of an overly-full stomach. This

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is the ideological, distorted form of the collective dream. Yet with a shift of the ‘visual angle’ (but not the standards!), an affirmative interpretation of the dream is possible.   57 According to Benjamin the technological control of nature was not synonymous with its domination. In Einbahnstrasse: ‘The mastery of nature, so the imperialists teach, is the purpose of all technology. But who would trust a cane wielder who proclaimed the mastery of children by adults to be the purpose of education? Is not education above all the indispensable ordering of the relationship between generations and therefore mastery, if we are to use this term, of that relationship and not of children? And likewise technology is not the mastery of nature but of the relation between nature and man’ (OWS 104). Benjamin considered talk of the exploitation of nature misleading. The source of the problem was capitalism. In the 1939 exposé: ‘The conception . . . of the exploitation of nature by man is in fact the reflection of the exploitation of man, spoken by the owners of the means of production’ (PW 64, cf. 455–6).   58 Within Benjamin’s double vision, even military technology could be redeemed. He wrote in 1925–26: ‘Men as a species completed their development thousands of years ago; but mankind as a species is just beginning his. In technology a physis is being organized through which mankind’s contact with the cosmos takes a new and different form from that which it had in nations and families . . . In the nights of annihilation of the last war the frame of mankind was shaken by a feeling that resembled the bliss of the epileptic. And the revolts that followed it were the first attempt of mankind to bring the new body under its control. The power of the proletariat is the measure of its convalescence. If it is not gripped to the very marrow by the discipline of this power, no pacifist polemics will save it. Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation’ (OWS 104).

Chapter 4    1 Benjamin’s first mention of Baudelaire occurs in a letter of January 1915, to Ernst Schoen. In the published correspondence, it occurs between news of close friend Wolf Heinle’s suicide and the letter of rupture Benjamin wrote to his former mentor Gustav Wyneken in March. Both of these events were directly concerned with the outbreak of World War I.    2 See, for example, Peter Demetz’s well-known introduction to Reflections (New York: Schocken, 1986) and Terry Eagleton’s Walter Benjamin: or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism (London: Verso, 1981).    3 Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama (trans. John Osborne; London: NLB, 1977).    4 CB, as in Abbreviations.    5 AP 321.    6 CB, French edition: Walter Benjamin, Baudelaire (Paris: Payot, 1979), preface, p. 9.    7 C 557.    8 AP 322.    9 Jean-Paul Sartre, Baudelaire (Paris: Gallimard, 1963).   10 Charles Baudelaire, Correspondance (Paris: Pléiade, 1966), I, 214.   11 Corr., p. xvii.   12 ‘Un fantôme’ (‘Les ténèbres’)   13 Note the ways in which horror of conflation here is diametrically opposed to the search for conflation in the poem ‘Correspondances’.   14 Baudelaire, Oeuvres completès, vol. 1, p. 181.   15 Take, for example, the idea of ‘pricelessness’ to sell a credit card in a recent advertising campaign – the illusion that something escapes exchange is used to market pure exchange-value.



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  16 William Pietz, ‘The Problem of the Fetish, I’, Res, pp. 5–11, Spring 1985, New York: Cambridge University Press, p. 5.   17 The Marx-Engels Reader, (ed. Robert C. Tucker; New York: Norton, 1978), p. 98 (‘Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844’).   18 CB 55.   19 CB 55–6.   20 Cf. Andrew Parker, ‘Why Western Marxists Don’t Like Poetry’, unpublished lecture.   21 Adam Christian pointed out the false cognates in commodité and, since the French translation of ‘false cognates’ is faux amis, tied them to the prose poem ‘La fausse monnaie’, which is about the falseness of a friend (Unpublished junior essay, 1999).   22 CA 99.   23 CA 282.   24 ‘Baudelaire’, I, p. 361.   25 Brand names.   26 Paul de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia, 1984), p. 251.   27 De Man, Rhetoric, p. 251.   28 C 557.   29 Benjamin, Baudelaire, pp. 139–40.   30 My subtitle is taken from an essay written in honour of Paul de Man in 1984 by Shoshana Felman entitled ‘Postal Survival, Or The Question of the Navel’ in Yale French Studies 69, p. 68, and alluding to the following letter Paul de Man wrote to the author the previous summer: ‘Rather than entrusting the (perhaps unique) copy of this text to the singularly decrepit mailman who insures postal survival in this place, I prefer to return it to you myself next week.’ (Paul de Man to Shoshana Felman, Maine, 23 August 1983).   31 Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989).   32 Pietz, p. 6.   33 Nadar, Quand j’ étais photographe (Paris), p. 281. Quoted by Benjamin, AP 90.

chapter 5    1 This essay draws on reworked parts of two essays − ‘On Making-up and Breaking-up: “Woman” and “Ware”, “Craving” and “Corpse” in Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project’, in Historical Materialism 1 (winter 1997): 66–89; ‘Dreamsleep: Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project’, Things 13 (winter 2000−2001): 48–67.    2 GS 1:1159.    3 The specifically 1960s’ rediscovery of Benjamin by the cadres of social revolt is encapsulated in their image of him with photocopier in one hand and a joint in the other.    4 See, for just a few examples, Norbert Bolz and Bernd Witte, Passagen (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1984); David Frisby, Fragments of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1985); Christine Buci-Glucksmann, ‘Catastrophic Utopia; The Feminine as Allegory of the Modern’, in Representations 12 (Spring 1986): 220–9, drawn from her Walter Benjamin und die Utopie des Weiblichen (Hamburg: 1984); Sigrid Weigel, ‘Traum – Stadt – Frau; Zur Weiblichkeit der Städte in der Schrift’ in K.R. Scherpe, Die Unwirklichkeit der Städte; Großstadtdarstellungen zwischen Moderne und Postmoderne (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1988); Margaret Cohen, Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Laura Marcus and Lynda Nead (eds), ‘The Actuality of Walter Benjamin’, in New Formations 20, (1993).    5 See, for one example, Sean Nixon, ‘Exhibiting Masculinity’, in Stuart Hall, Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, (London: Sage/Open

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University, 1997), pp. 333−6. That Nixon is one of those hooligan theorists on a smash and grab ram-raid, rather than shopping around discerningly and knowledgeably in Benjamin’s oeuvre, is indicated by his mistaken belief that Grandville is some type of department store. Grandville was in fact a caricaturist, and indeed Benjamin’s favourite satirist of commodity fetishism. See p. 333.    6 Angela McRobbie, ‘The Passagenwerk and the Place of Walter Benjamin in Cultural Studies: Benjamin, Cultural Studies, Marxist Theories of Art’, in Cultural Studies 6, 2, (1992): 147–69. Also to be found in McRobbie, Postmodernism and Popular Culture, (London: Routledge, 1994).    7 AP 474.    8 GS 1.3:1243.    9 Gerhard Wagner notes the emergence, in the 1980s, of an image of Benjamin as ambivalent, caught, immobilized like a rabbit, between the headlamps of Marxism and theology. Wagner puts this down to a crisis of legitimation for the left in the 1980s. See Wagner, Benjamin Bilder: Aspekte der Westeuropäischen Rezeption Walter Benjamins von 1978 bis 1991 (Hamburg: Bockel Verlag, 1992). For a reading of Benjamin’s various failures, see ‘Benjamin’s Finale; Excavating and Re-membering’, in my Walter Benjamin, Overpowering Conformism (London: Pluto Press, 2000).   10 McRobbie, ‘The Passagenwerk, p. 149.   11 Susan Buck-Morss, ‘The Flâneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering’ in New German Critique 39 (Fall 1986); Special issue on Walter Benjamin, p. 105; reprinted as Chapter 3 of this volume, p. 37.   12 For key contributions see Janet Wolff, ‘The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity’, first published in Theory, Culture and Society, vol. 2, 3 (1985). Cited here from Andrew Benjamin (ed.), Problems of Modernity (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 141–56. Also to be found in Janet Wolff, Feminine Sentences: Essays on Women and Culture (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990); Elizabeth Wilson, The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder, and Women (London: Virago); ‘The Invisible Flâneur’, in New Left Review 191 (January–February 1992): 90–110; Griselda Pollock, ‘Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity’, in Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art (London: Routledge, 1988); Patrice Petro, Joyless Streets: Women and Melodramatic Representation in Weimar Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989).   13 Wolff, ‘The Invisible Flâneuse’, p. 141.   14 Wolff, ‘The Invisible Flâneuse’, p. 154.   15 Janet Wolff, ‘Memoirs and Micrologies: Walter Benjamin, Feminism and Cultural Analysis’, in New Formations 20 (1993): 121–2.   16 Wilson, The Sphinx in the City, p. 56. Wilson, ‘The Invisible Flâneur’, 98–100.   17 Wilson, The Sphinx in the City, p. 56.   18 Wilson, ‘The Invisible Flâneur’, 101.   19 Wilson, The Sphinx in the City, p. 55.   20 Buck-Morss, ‘The Flâneur’, p. 49. For Buck-Morss’s development of this material, see Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and The Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989).   21 Wilson, ‘The Invisible Flâneur’, 109–10.   22 Wilson, ‘The Invisible Flâneur’ 110.   23 AP 10.   24 AP 448.   25 AP 147.   26 AP 872.   27 AP 128.   28 AP 125. These are Le Corbusier’s terms.



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  29 AP 31.   30 AP 80–1.   31 AP 182.   32 AP 43.   33 See, for example, GS 7. 1:370.   34 AP 60   35 Lighting is significant. The ever-increasing harshness of light from flickering oil and gas lamps through electrical light to neon lighting is noted by Benjamin in The Arcades Project, which devotes one convolute to types of illumination. For example: ‘So long as the gas lamps, even the oil lamps were burning in them, the arcades were fairy palaces. But if we want to think of them at the height of their magic, we must call to mind the Passage des Panoramas around 1870: on one side there was gas light; on the other oil lamps still flickered. The decline sets in with electric lighting. Finally however it was no decline but, properly speaking, a reversal. As mutineers, after plotting for days on end, take possession of a fortified site, so the commodity by a lightning stroke seized power over the arcades. Only then came the epoch of commercial firms and figures. The inner radiance of the arcades faded with the blaze of electric lights and withdrew into their names’ AP 834.   36 AP 436; ‘The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire’, SW 4:31. See also ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, SW 4: 349.   37 ‘The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire’, SW 4:30–1.   38 AP 388; 427.   39 Benjamin, ‘Central Park’, SW 4:186.   40 AP 10.   41 AP 427.   42 See AP 446−7.   43 AP 420.   44 See Wolff, ‘Memoirs and Micrologies’, 122; Buck-Morss, ‘The Flâneur’, p. 51.   45 See Benjamin, ‘Central Park’, SW 4:174.   46 Buck-Morss, ‘The Flâneur’, p. 49.   47 Wilson, ‘The Invisible Flâneur’, p. 106.   48 Wolff, ‘Memoirs and Micrologies’, p. 122.   49 McRobbie, ‘The Passagenwerk’, p. 154.   50 AP 494.   51 See AP 511.   52 See Marx, Capital (New York: The Modern Library, 1906), p. 84; in this translation, as in the more recent Penguin Capital, vol. 1, the German word sachlich is translated as ‘material’.   53 He does not however rest content with blank description, of course, as we shall see later.   54 AP 69−70.   55 See Wilson, ‘The Invisible Flâneur’, p. 92−3.   56 See AP 807ff.; and ‘The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire’, SW 4:56−9.   57 ‘The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire’, SW 4:58.   58 ‘The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire’, SW 4:58.   59 Marx, Capital, p. 536.   60 AP 354.   61 AP 538.   62 AP 537. Men too see their ‘own physiognomy flash by’, notes Benjamin.   63 AP 70.   64 AP 8.   65 AP 75.

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  66 See AP 493−4.   67 AP 810.   68 See AP 8.   69 AP 8.   70 Marx, Capital, p. 525.   71 Marx, Capital, pp. 484−5.   72 AP 493.   73 This policy was but a repetition of Wilhelminian social politics, whence the phrase originated. Of course, as various commentators have pointed out, the Nazi policy of enticing women back into the home through financial rewards for child-bearing and the like were not very successful in reality, and at points (particularly during the war) the number of women in paid employment rose. However, as Detlev Peukert notes, women were directed towards certain types of labour, such as repetitive assembly line work, defined as more appropriate to their sex, as they could supposedly find compensatory emotional sustenance in their family life. These were also jobs that were low-skilled and easy to withdraw as the market fluctuated. See Detlev Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition and Racism in Everyday Life (London: Penguin, 1993), pp. 176−8.   74 AP 631.   75 ‘Central Park’, SW 4:171.   76 AP 346.   77 AP 80.   78 See AP 79−80.   79 See ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, SW 4:329.   80 AP 347.   81 AP 75.   82 AP 375.   83 AP 339.   84 ‘Central Park’, p. 171.   85 AP 345.   86 AP 62−3.   87 AP 345.   88 See AP 318.   89 AP 828.   90 AP 73.   91 Karl Marx, Early Writings (London: Penguin, in association with New Left Review, 1975), p. 350.   92 See ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, SW 4:324.   93 See AP 367.   94 AP 834.   95 See Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness (London: Merlin Press, 1983), pp. 83−110.   96 AP 314; see also 331.   97 AP 62.   98 AP 460.   99 See AP 207. 100 AP 10. ‘Seller’: the translation in both Harry Zohn’s version and Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin’s version carries connotations of ownership of what is sold, whereas ‘Verkäuferin’ in fact seems to suggest, in this context, a shopgirl, i.e. a worker. 101 See Benjamin’s description of Brecht’s epic theatre for the origin of this phrase. ‘What is Epic Theatre (first version)’ in Understanding Brecht (London: Verso, 1998), p. 13. 102 AP 389.



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103 See AP 361. 104 AP 841. 105 AP 391. 106 AP 132. 107 AP 18. 108 GS 7.1:218. 109 ‘Berlin Chronicle’, SW 2:602. 110 AP 91. 111 AP 473. 112 See ‘To the Planetarium’ in One-Way Street, SW 1: 486−7. See also the final paragraph of ‘Theories of German Fascism’, SW 2. 113 PW 1121. 114 AP 838. 115 AP 471. 116 AP 862. 117 Benjamin cites Marx’s Der achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte, from whence this quotation stems, AP 357. 118 AP 13. 119 AP 458 120 AP 861. 121 Gershom Scholem (ed.), Walter Benjamin/Gershom Scholem. Briefwechsel 1933−1940 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1980), p. 128. 122 AP 345−6.

chapter 6    1 ‘Wer Bullrich-Salz erst einmal kennt sich nie im Leben davon trennt!’ is the original, making a more accurate translation: ‘Once you get to know Bullrich Salt, you’ll never be without it for the rest of your life’, an even more unintentionally ominous slogan than the rhyming version I supplied.    2 The most sustained and influential attempt at a theory of Benjamin’s dialectical image is surely Susan Buck-Morss’s The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and The Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989).    3 Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, p. 67.    4 Rolf Tiedemann, ‘Dialectics at a Standstill: Approaches to the Passagenwerk’, in Gary Smith (ed.), On Walter Benjamin (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 284.    5 For a fuller account of the epistemological and methodological status of the dialectical image, see my essay, ‘Method and Time: Benjamin’s Dialectical Images’, in David S. Ferris (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 177–98. The following four paragraphs of the present essay appear in slightly different form in that earlier essay.    6 ‘Marx lays bare the causal connection between economy and culture. For us, what matters is the thread of expression. It is not the economic origins of culture that will be presented, but the expression of the economy in its culture. At issue, in other words, is the attempt to grasp an economic process as perceptible Ur-phenomenon, from out of which proceed all manifestations of life in the arcades (and, accordingly, in the nineteenth century’ (N1a,6).    7 ‘More and more relentlessly, the objective environment of human beings is coming to wear the expression of the commodity. At the same time, advertising seeks to disguise the commodity character of things. What resists the mendacious transfiguration of the

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commodity world is its distortion into allegory. The commodity wants to look itself in the face. It celebrates its incarnation in the whore.’ ‘Central Park’, SW 4:173.    8 ‘Corresponding to the form of the new means of production, which in the beginning is still ruled by the form of the old (Marx), are images in the collective consciousness in which the new is permeated with the old. These images are wish images; in them the collective seeks both to overcome and to transfigure the immaturity of the social product and the inadequacies in the social organization of production. At the same time, what emerges in these wish images is the resolute effort to distance oneself from all that is antiquated – which includes, however, the recent past. These tendencies deflect the imagination (which is given impetus by the new) back upon the primal past. In the dream in which each past epoch entertains images of its successor, the latter appears wedded to elements of primal history [Urgeschichte] – that is, to elements of a classless society. And the experiences of such a society – as stored in the unconscious of the collective – engender, through interpenetration with what is new, the Utopia that has left its trace in a thousand configurations of life, from enduring edifices to passing fashions.’ ‘Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century’, SW 3:32–3.    9 ‘The refunctioning of allegory in the commodity economy must be presented. It was Baudelaire’s endeavor to make the aura which is peculiar to the commodity appear. In a heroic way he sought to humanize the commodity.’ ‘Central Park’, SW 4:175.   10 For an especially striking negative judgement on this matter see Jacques Ranciere, ‘The Archeo-modern Turn’, in Michael S. Steinberg (ed.), Walter Benjamin and the Claims of History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), p. 33: ‘When we look at the collection of citations which constitute the Arcades book, we cannot help being struck by a strong disparity: in light of Benjamin’s deep theoretical concern with the archaeology of the arcade, conceived as the embodiment of the bourgeois dream, the sections devoted to the working-class movement, the barricades, social thought, and so on are essentially made of plain notes and citations from second-hand books with few comments. They form something like a heap of scraps or wreckage which makes no real sense, only an impression; a place devoted to the fulfilment of a pious and wishful thinking, something like the well-known motto of our youth: never forget the class struggle; never forget the working class!’   11 Not coincidentally, no other question serves to polarize the contemporary intellectual fronts in Benjamin scholarship so clearly. Faced with just this question, Susan Buck-Morss finally sees no alternative save the introduction of a negative theology, specifically with Kabbalism, and for this reason is led to conclude that a negative theology, in some form or other, must be introduced as a necessary postulate in order to save any philosophical content in The Arcades Project. This obliges Buck-Morss to conclude that dialectical images, unlike allegory, bear ‘objective’ truth, a truth whose last and only foundation is theological: a sub-optimal outcome, in my view, for any assessment of the contemporary relevance of The Arcades Project in light of the current status of cultural studies and material historiography. See Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, pp. 240–2.   12 Benjamin is evidently attempting to develop a non-conceptual philosophy, the project of Adorno’s Negative Dialectics thirty years later. Benjamin does not make explicit, as Adorno did, the internal connection between concepts and reification, though the preface to the Origin of the German Mourning Play does make an effort to do so.   13 See, for example, the short text ‘Arcades’ from 1927, ‘Already the inscriptions and signs on the entranceways . . . which multiply along the walls within . . . already they have about them something enigmatic’ (AP 871); or ‘The Arcades of Paris’ from 1929, and its description of the introduction of the first mass-produced advertising poster, for Wilkie Collins’s novel The Woman in White, in 1861, the ‘first drops of a shower of letters ran down the walls of houses (today it pours unremittingly, day and night, on the big cities)’ (AP 876).



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  14 ‘The writings of the surrealists treat words like trade names, and their texts are, at bottom, a form of prospectus for enterprises not yet off the ground. Nesting today in trade names are figments such as those earlier thought to be hidden in the ‘cache’ of poetic vocables.’ (G1a,2; AP 173.)   15 G1,1; AP 171.   16 ‘Superposition and advertising: “In the Palais-Royal, not long ago, between the columns of the upper story, I happened to see a life-sized oil painting representing, in very lively colors, a French general in full-dress uniform. I take out my spectacles to examine more closely the historical subject of the picture, and my general is sitting in an armchair holding out a bare foot: the podiatrist, kneeling before him, excises the corns.” J.F. Reichardt, Vertraute Briefe aus Paris (Hamburg, 1805), vol. 1, p. 78’ (G1,5; AP 172).   17 ‘The enthronement of merchandise, with the aura of amusement surrounding it, is the secret theme of Grandville’s art. This is reflected in the discord between its utopian and its cynical elements. Its subtleties in the presentation of inanimate goods correspond to what Marx called the “theological whims” of goods. This is clearly distilled in the term spécialité – a commodity description coming into use about this time in the luxury industry; under Grandville’s pencil the whole of nature is transformed into spécialités. He presents them in the same spirit in which advertising – a word that is also coined at this time – begins to present its articles. He ends in madness.’ ‘Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century’, 37.   18 Moreover we can easily identify its precise correlate, the other end of the Passage, in the ‘Berlin Chronicle’, a passage of that text which, probably not coincidentally, describes the role of Franz Hessel as the fifth and last ‘guide’ who disclosed to Benjamin the distinctive physiognomy of Berlin, and whose role in Benjamin’s work (as co-translator of Proust, as experimenter with the techniques of urban flânerie in both Paris and Berlin) cannot be underestimated. Hessel in fact serves as a guide for the secret intersection or hidden passage between Berlin and Paris, a passage in every case marked by the eroticization of space. The reference to Hessel here is extraordinarily opaque – a reference to louche flâneries and seductions in the Berlin outskirts. But it ends in a way that definitively links it to the Bullrich Salt entry, with Benjamin’s brief recollection of ‘marauding Sunday afternoon excursions on which we discovered an arcade in the Moabit quarter, the Stettin tunnel, or liberty in front of the Wallner theater’. ‘Berlin Chronicle’, SW 2:599.   19 ‘All reification is forgetting’, Horkheimer and Adorno say in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, referring not so much to a loss of a content of consciousness but to a broader disturbance in the dynamics of social memory. For an interesting discussion see Richard Terdiman’s analysis of the commodity form as a ‘systematic perturbation in the realm of memory’. Richard Terdiman, Presents Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 11–13.   20 I have explored the role of Proust in the early sketches of The Arcades Project in ‘Tactics of Remembrance: Proust, Surrealism, and the Origin of the Passagenwerk’, in Michael P. Steinberg (ed.), Walter Benjamin and the Demands of History, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996).   21 Indeed one can argue that the novel, serial landscape, framed through the window of the moving train in the ‘grand railway tour’ of the late nineteenth century, provides the predominant visual metaphor of foreignness, an effect even more influential for the cultural imaginary than the more familiar experience of acceleration and speed. See Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Geschichte der Eisenbahnreise: Zur Industrializierung von Raum und Zeit im 19. Jahrhundert (Munich: Hanser Verlag, 1977), contrasted with the more familiar argument in Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983).

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  22 The ‘desertification’ of the city, or the appearance of the modern metropolis as a ‘predesert’, is the unification of the image of catastrophe with that of mythic permanence, that is, the sign of the historical. The image of a world of capitalist overgrowth that both deserves and signifies its own destruction, and that this destruction in turn opens an ‘ethical space’, can be found in various forms in Benjamin; in the gloss on the ‘destructive character’, for example, but also in Benjamin’s interest in Daudet, and his persistent ‘surprise at the continued existence of the everyday world, of the feeling [here Benjamin cites Daudet] that this world is “predestined for a catastrophe or several, meteorological or social”’. Parisier Passagen 2, and the ‘Untergang von Paris’ convolute, refer to the ‘pre-ruined’ Paris while making explicit that the expected catastrophe is not aerial bombardment but revolution: ‘Paris is a counterpart in the social order to what Vesuvius is in the geographic order: a menacing, hazardous massif, an ever-active June of Revolution. But just as the slopes of Vesuvius, thanks to the layers of lava that cover them, have been transformed into paradisiac orchards, so the lava of revolution provides uniquely fertile ground for the blossoming of art, festivity, fashion.’ (PW 1055–6; AP 882); cf. also Jonathan Boyarin, Storm from Paradise: The Politics of Jewish Memory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), pp. 48ff, and Jeffrey Mehlman, Walter Benjamin for Children: An Essay on His Radio Years (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 23: ‘The Paris-Pompeii metaphor in Benjamin is coherent with the intention of the Project: to attend to the French nineteenth century with such devastating precision of perception that the dream that it was – and which we continue to dream – will all but shrivel up and come undone.’   23 See Adorno, ‘The Actuality of Philosophy’, in Telos 31 (Spring 1977): 120–37.   24 Wolfgang-Hagen Hein and Holm-Dieter Schwarz (eds.), Deutscher ApothekerBiographie (Ergänzungsband), (Stuttgart: Wissenschaftliche Verlagsgesellschaft MBH, 1986), p. 60.   25 Ernst Elmar, Das ‘industrielle’ Geheimmittel und seine Werbung. Arzneifertigung in der zweiten Hälfte des 19ten Jahrhunderts in Deutschland, (Würzburg: JCL-Verlag, 1975).   26 See Wilhelm Versofen, Die Anfänge der chemisch-pharmazeutischen Industrie. Eine wirtschaftshistorische Studie, (Vol. 1; Berlin und Stuttgart: 1949), p. 160ff.   27 See Axel Helmstädter, ‘Natron als Allheilmittel. Arzneitherapie nach August Wilhelm Bullrich’, Geschichte der Pharmazie 43, Jahrgang 4, (1991).   28 See Fritz C. Müller, Was stekt Dahinter? Namen, die Begriffe wurden (Düsseldorf u. Wien: Econ-Verlag GMBH, 1964), p. 62, where ‘Bullrich Salt’ appears between the entries for ‘Buffalo Bill’ and ‘Bunsen burner’.   29 ‘With price tag affixed, the commodity comes on the market. Its material quality and individuality are merely an incentive for buying and selling; for the social measure of its value, such quality is of no importance whatsoever. The commodity has become an abstraction. Once escaped from the hand of the producer and divested of its real particularity, it ceases to be a product and to be ruled over by human beings. It has acquired a ‘ghostly objectivity’ and leads a life of its own . . . Cut off from the will of man, it aligns itself in a mysterious hierarchy, develops or declines exchangeability, and, in accordance with its own peculiar laws, performs as an actor on a phantom stage.’ Benjamin quoting Otto Rühle, Karl Marx, pp. 384–5, (G5,1).   30 Helmstädter, ‘Natron als Allheilmittel’, p. 62.   31 See Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde (London: Verso, 1995), chapter 4.   32 See Jay Bernstein, Recovering Ethical Life: Jürgen Habermas and the Future of Critical Theory, (London: Routledge, 1995), chapter 1, ‘Critical Theory: The Very Idea’. For attempts to relate Benjamin to contemporary currents in critical social theory, see Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing; also John McCole’s attempt to recover Benjamin’s notion of cultural reproduction for a reading of Bourdieu’s theory of cultural fields of



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production in Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition. For a commentary on Benjamin’s possible role in an expansion of a discourse-based critical social theory, see Axel Honneth, ‘A Communicative Disclosure of the Past: On the Relation between Anthropology and Philosophy of History in Walter Benjamin’, in Laura Marcus and Lynda Nead (eds), The Actuality of Walter Benjamin (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1998).

chapter 7    1 Walter Benjamin, ‘Goethe’s Elective Affinities’, 1:297–360, (333); ‘Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften’, GS1:123–201, (172). When two citations are given, the first one refers to an English edition, the second to a German edition. Where only a German source is cited, translations are my own. I have modified existing translations when necessary in order to increase their fidelity to the original.    It is as though these published concerns had their siblings in unpublished ones, for instance in Benjamin’s 1925 curriculum vitae, in which he writes that ‘I majored in philosophy and minored in modern German literary history and psychology. Since the center of gravity of my scholarly interests lies in aesthetics, my philosophical and literary studies have increasingly converged.’ Walter Benjamin, ‘Curriculum Vitae (I)’, SW 1:422–3, (422); ‘Lebenslauf (I)’, GS 6:215–16, (215).    2 I am thinking of Schlegel’s poetological demand, made in the context of the literary and philosophical ambitions of his Athenaeum fragments, that ‘it is equally fatal for the mind both to have a system and to have none – hence, it will have to decide to combine both’. Benjamin cites Schlegel’s sentence in his dissertation on the German Romantics. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism’, SW 1:116–200, (140); ‘Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik’, GS1: 7–122, (48).   An extended reading of Benjamin’s relationship to the concepts of the System and of Systematicity in both the Early Romantics and in Hegel can be found in Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism (trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester; Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988).    3 Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht. Zwei Essays (Munich: Piper, 1971), 22.    4 Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street, SW 1:444–88, (457, 476); Einbahnstraße, GS 4:83–148, (105, 131).    5 Detlef Schöttker, Konstruktiver Fragmentarismus. Form und Rezeption der Schriften Walter Benjamins (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1999), 181–5.    6 See Daniel Libeskind, Erweiterung des Berlin Museums mit Abteilung Jüdisches Museum (ed. Kristin Feireiss; Berlin: Ernst und Sohn, 1992); and Bernhard Schneider, Daniel Libeskind. Jüdisches Museum Berlin: Zwischen den Linien (preface by Daniel Libeskind; photographs by Stefan Müller; Munich: Prestel, 2001).    7 Victor Burgin, ‘The City in Pieces’, in In/Different Spaces: Place and Memory in Visual Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 139–58, (139).    8 This designation of One-Way Street is offered by Rainer Rochlitz, The Disenchantment of Art: The Philosophy of Walter Benjamin (trans. Jane Marie Todd; New York: Guilford, 1996), 126.    9 See Bernd Witte, ‘Walter Benjamins Einbahnstraße. Zwischen Passage de l’Opéra und Berlin Alexanderplatz’, in Walter Benjamin. 1892–1940, (ed. Uwe Steiner; Bern: Lang, 1992), 249–72. For a reading that places One-Way Street in the literary tradition of surrealism, see Josef Fürnkäs, Surrealismus als Erkenntnis. Walter Benjamin – Weimarer

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Einbahnstraße und Pariser Passagen (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1988). More recently, Michael W. Jennings situates One-Way Street in relation to the political and aesthetic forms of the historical avant-garde: ‘Walter Benjamin and the European Avant-Garde’, in The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin (ed. David Ferris; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 18–34.   10 See the Kantian re-reading of Benjamin’s category of experience through the notion of ‘colour’ proposed by Howard Caygill, Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience (London: Routledge, 1998).   11 The dedication, encrypting love, desire, and violence, reads: This street is named//Asja Lacis Street//after her who//as an engineer//cut it through the author [Diese Straße heißt//ASJA-LACIS-STRASSE//nach der//die sie als Ingenieur//im Autor durchgebrochen hat]. Benjamin’s preference for durchgebrochen’ over ‘durchbrochen’ leaves an unsettling undecidability intact. Lacis both enabled and disabled this textual street: she broke it through the author and she broke it apart within him (durchgebrochen). For an extended reading of the relationship between Benjamin and Lacis and its significance for some of Benjamin’s theoretical concerns, see Gerhard Richter, ‘Benjamin’s Body: The Alterity of the Corpus in the Moscow Diary’, in Walter Benjamin and the Corpus of Autobiography (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2000), 125–62.   12 Miriam Hansen, ‘Benjamin and Cinema: Not a One-Way Street’, in Benjamin’s Ghosts: Interventions in Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory (ed. Gerhard Richter; Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 41–73, (48).   13 See Michael W. Jennings, ‘Trugbild der Stabilität. Weimarer Politik und MontageTheorie in Benjamins Einbahnstraße’, trans. Gerhard Richter and Michael W. Jennings, in Global Benjamin, Vol. 1 (ed. Klaus Garber and Ludger Rehm; Munich: Fink, 1999), 517–28, (527). A consideration of One-Way Street in the context of the avant-garde aesthetics of Berlin constructivism is offered by Eckhardt Köhn, ‘ “Nichts gegen die Illustrierte!” Benjamin, der Berliner Konstruktivismus und das avantgardistische Objekt’, in Schrift Bilder Denken. Walter Benjamin und die Künste (ed. Detlev Schöttker; Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp and Berlin: Haus am Waldsee, 2004), 48–69, especially 58–9.   14 Walter Benjamin, ‘Surrealism’, SW 2:207–21, (209); Der Sürrealismus, GS 2.1:295– 310, (298).   15 A sustained reading of the general relations between Benjamin and Husserlian phenomenology remains to be performed. An excellent start has been made by Peter Fenves, ‘The Genesis of Judgment: Spatiality, Analogy, and Metaphor in Benjamin’s “On Language as Such and on Human Language,”’ in Walter Benjamin: Theoretical Questions (ed. David Ferris; Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 75–93.   16 AP 460; PW 574.   17 C 322–3; GB 3:322–3.   18 Benjamin, One-Way Street, 446 ; Einbahnstraße, 88.   19 GB 3:342.   20 C 325; GB 3:331.   21 Benjamin, AP 461; PW 575.   22 Benjamin, ‘Surrealism’, 218; Der Sürrealismus, 310.   23 Benjamin, AP 463; PW 578.   24 Benjamin himself makes this observation in his essay on Proust: ‘If the Romans, in Latin, called a text “the web” or “the woven”, then no one’s text is more of a web or more densely woven than that of Marcel Proust.’ Walter Benjamin, ‘On the Image of Proust’, SW 2: 237–47, (238); ‘Zum Bilde Prousts’, GS 2.1: 310–24, (311). This passage is interwoven with another in One-Way Street, where we read in the thought-image ‘Caution: Steps’: ‘Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven’. Benjamin, One-Way Street, 455; Einbahnstraße, 102.



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  25 Benjamin, One-Way Street, 462 ; Einbahnstraße, 111.   26 See also Benjamin’s letter of gratitude to Kracauer, dated 20 April 1926. GB 3:145.   27 GB 3:334.   28 C 284; GB 3:16 and 85 (the early German edition on which the English translation is based omits Benjamin’s first reference to the planned title). Benjamin’s early title was inspired, as Schöttker suggests, by Hofmannsthal’s book of aphorisms Buch der Freunde, which is listed in Benjamin’s list of books read and which he cites in The Arcades Project. Benjamin also makes implicit reference to Novalis’s plan, in 1799, to write a book of aphorisms ‘dedicated to friends’, which would inscribe One-Way Street in an extended tradition that links aphoristic writing to friendship. Schöttker, Konstruktiver Fragmentarismus, 186–7.   29 Ernst Bloch, ‘Revueform in der Philosophie’, Erbschaft dieser Zeit (expanded edition; Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985), 368–71, (368).   30 Siegfried Kracauer, ‘On the Writings of Walter Benjamin’, in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays (trans. Thomas Y. Levin; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 259–264, here 264; ‘Zu den Schriften Walter Benjamins’, Schriften, Vol. 5, pt 2 (ed. Inka Mülder-Bach; Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1990), 119–24, (124).   31 Benjamin, C 302; GB 3:161.   32 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Benjamin’s Einbahnstraße’, Notes to Literature, Vol. 2, (trans. Shierry Weber Nicholson; New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 322–7 (322); ‘Benjamins Einbahnstraße’, Noten zur Literatur, Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 11, (ed. Rolf Tiedemann; Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 680–5, (680).   33 Ibid., 323; 681f.   34 Benjamin, One-Way Street, 481; Einbahstraße, 138.   35 Benjamin, One-Way Street, 459; Einbahstraße, 107.   36 Walter Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama (trans. John Osborne; London: New Left Books, 1977), 36; Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, GS 1.1:216.   37 Benjamin, One-Way Street, 476; Einbahnstraße, 131.   38 From a different perspective, a general discussion of the culture of distance in Weimar Germany can be found in Helmut Lethen, Cool Conduct: The Culture of Distance in Weimar Germany (trans. Don Reneau; Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).   39 Walter Benjamin, ‘Gedanken zu einer Analysis des Zustands von Mitteleuropa’, GS 4.2: 916–35, (923). I discuss this fragment at greater length in the context of Benjamin’s, Derrida’s and Žižek’s concepts of Europe and the problems of Eurocentrism, see Gerhard Richter, ‘Sites of Indeterminacy and the Specters of Eurocentrism’, Culture, Theory and Critique 43:1 (2002).   40 Benjamin, ‘Mitteleuropa’, 924.   41 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller’, SW 3:143–66, (143); Der Erzähler, GS 2.2: 438–65, (438–9).   42 On the back cover of the hardbound first edition of The Arcades Project’s English translation.   43 Benjamin, AP 833; PW 1001.   44 For a discussion of the genesis of the dialectical image in Benjamin’s thought, as well as a useful summary of previous attempts by Benjamin scholarship at reading this semiconcept, see Ansgar Hillach, ‘Dialektisches Bild’, in Benjamins Begriffe (ed. Michael Opitz and Erdmut Wizisla; Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000), 186–229. In this context, compare further Rainer Nägele, Thinking Images, in Benjamin’s Ghosts: Interventions in Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory (ed. Gerhard Richter; Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 23–40.   45 Benjamin, AP 462; PW 576–7.   46 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Erinnerungen’, Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 20, 173–8, (177).

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  47 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘A Portrait of Walter Benjamin’, Prisms, (trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), 227–41, (240); ‘Charakteristik Walter Benjamins’, Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 10, 238–53, (252).   48 See Walter Benjamin, Denkbilder (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994), 125ff.; in the standard editions as ‘Short Shadows (II)’, SW 2:699–702, (699); ‘Kurze Schatten (II)’, GS:425–8, (425).   49 Walter Benjamin, ‘Literary History and the Study of Literature’, trans. Rodney Livingstone, SW 2:459–65, (464); ‘Literaturgeschichte und Literaturwissenschaft’, GS 3:283–90, (290).   50 In this movement, one should also hear the echoes of Benjamin’s theory of translation. Benjamin suggests that ‘translation finds itself not in the center of the language forest but on the outside facing the wooded ridge; it calls into it without entering, aiming at that single spot where the echo is able to give, in its own language, the reverberation of the work in the alien one’. Benjamin, ‘The Task of the Translator’, SW 1:253–63, (258–9); Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers, GS 4.1:9–21, (16).   51 Benjamin, AP 462–3; PW 577–8.   52 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson; New York: Harper Collins, 1962), 38; Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1986), 17. For a discussion of the question of the historical index in Benjamin and Heidegger, see Christopher Fynsk, ‘The Claim of History’, Diacritics 22: 3–4 (Fall–Winter 1992): 115–26. The complex general relationship between the thought of Heidegger and that of Benjamin, beyond the tone of the merely polemical, is only now slowly coming into view. Useful recent examples are Martin Seel, ‘Sprache bei Benjamin und Heidegger’, Merkur 46 (1992): 333–40; Howard Caygill, ‘Benjamin, Heidegger and the Destruction of Tradition’, in Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy: Destruction and Experience (ed. Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne; London: Routledge, 1994), 1–31; Samuel Weber, Mass Mediauras: Form, Technics, Media (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996); Stefan Knoche, Benjamin-Heidegger: Über Gewalt. Die Politisierung der Kunst (Vienna: Turia and Kant, 2000); and Beatrice Hanssen, ‘Benjamin or Heidegger: Aesthetics and Politics in an Age of Technology’, in Walter Benjamin and Art (ed. Andrew Benjamin; London and New York: Continuum, 2005), 73–92.   53 Heidegger, Being and Time, 374; Sein und Zeit, 326.   54 Ibid.   55 Benjamin, AP 456; PW 570.   56 Paul de Man, ‘Semiology and Rhetoric’, in Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 3–19, (10).   57 For a general discussion of the categories of error and mistake in de Man, see Stanley Corngold, ‘Error in Paul de Man’, The Yale Critics: Deconstruction in America (eds Jonathan Arac, Wlad Godzich and Wallace Martin; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 90–108.   58 Benjamin, One-Way Street, 480; Einbahnstraße, 138.   59 Benjamin, AP 463; PW 579.   60 Adorno, ‘Portrait of Walter Benjamin’, 241; ‘Charakteristik Walter Benjamins’, 252–3.   61 Benjamin, ‘On the Image of Proust’, 237; ‘Zum Bilde Prousts’, 311.   62 CS 135; GB 4:478.



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chapter 8    1 See AP 460 (Convolute N1a,8). In citing from AP, I have on occasion modified the translation slightly. This essay was originally presented as a talk, first in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University in November 2002, and then at the conference ‘Walter Benjamin: Critical Constellations’ at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in January 2004. My thanks to Eric Downing, John McGowan and Christopher Wild, organizers of ‘Walter Benjamin: Critical Constellations’, to my fellow presenters at that event, Sam Weber and Eduardo Cadava and, last but by no means least, to James Rolleston, for the exceptionally thoughtful, helpfully critical, and evocative response he offered to this material on that occasion. A shorter version of this essay is forthcoming in The Germanic Review.    2 I should like to signal here, more or less at the outset, my regret that this essay does not have room for a discussion of Charles Baudelaire’s writings on hashish intoxication that would address some of the significant similarities and differences between Benjamin’s treatment of that subject and Baudelaire’s, specifically where the emphasis on the importance of taking hash in a ‘poetically decorated apartment’ and the deployment of metaphors and anecdotes of theatrical and pictorial representation are concerned. Relevant passages from Baudelaire would include the treatments of ceiling paintings in On Wine and Hashish (Du vin et du haschisch, 1851) and The Poem of Hashish (Le Poëme du haschisch, 1858/60), as well as the discussion of a hash-eater’s viewing of a theatrical performance in The Poem of Hashish, in Charles Baudelaire, Artificial Paradises (trans., intro. and notes Stacy Diamond; New York: Citadel, 1996), pp. 21, 54–8, 47–53.    3 See, for example, Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms, (trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), pp. 229–41 (esp. 239–40); Eiland and McLaughlin, ‘Translators’ Foreword’, and Rolf Tiedemann, ‘Dialectics at a Standstill: Approaches to the Passagen-Werk’, in AP ix–xiv, 929–45 (esp. 931–7); Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and The Arcades Project, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), p. 73 and passim; and Howard Eiland, ‘Reception in Distraction’, Boundary 2, 30.1 (Spring 2003): 51–66.    4 See Tom Gunning, ‘ “Primitive” Cinema: A Frame-Up? Or, The Trick’s on Us’, in Early Cinema: Space – Frame – Narrative (ed. Thomas Elsaesser with Adam Barker; London: British Film Institute, 1990), pp. 95–103 (98, 101); ‘The Cinema of Attractions’ in Elsaesser (ed.) Early Cinema, pp. 56–62; and ‘The Exterior as Intérieur: Benjamin’s Optical Detective’, Boundary 2, 30.1 (Spring 2003): 105–29.    5 SW 2:673–4, 84–90. In citing from SW, I have occasionally modified translations. On Benjamin’s hash experiments, see Hermann Schweppenhäuser, ‘Die Vorschule der profanen Erleuchtung’, in Walter Benjamin Über Haschisch (ed. Tillman Rexroth; Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1972), pp. 7–30. Benjamin’s remarkable review of the exhibition ‘Gesunde Nerven’ (1930), and a related journal entry of 11 October 1928 regarding a conversation with Ernst Joël about exhibition techniques, deal with montage, Veranschaulichung and Vergegenwärtigung in ways that are apposite to the present essay. See GS 4:557–61, 1043. Unless otherwise noted, all translations of GS are my own.    6 On the figure of the Spießer as invoked by Behne and portrayed, in related ways, in the montages of the Berlin Dadaists, see Brigid Doherty, ‘The Work of Art and the Problem of Politics in Berlin Dada’, October 105 (Summer 2003): 73–92 (78 and passim).    7 See Michael Fried, Menzel’s Realism: Art and Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century Berlin (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002), pp. 234–9, for a critique of Benjamin’s conception of the nineteenth-century bourgeois interior, and in particular his claims concerning ‘traces’.    8 On Benjamin’s relation to Riegl’s art history, see Wolfgang Kemp, ‘Fernbilder: Walter Benjamin und die Kunstwissenschaft’, in Links hatte sich noch alles zu enträtseln (ed.

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Burkhardt Lindner; Frankfurt a.M.: 1978), pp. 224–57; Thomas Y. Levin, ‘Walter Benjamin and the Theory of Art History: An Introduction to “Rigorous Study of Art”’, October 47 (Winter 1988): 77–83; and Michael W. Jennings, ‘Walter Benjamin and the Theory of Art History’, in Memoria: Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) zum 100. Geburtstag (ed. Uwe Steiner; New York: Peter Lang, 1992), pp. 77–102.    9 On literature as nourishment and art as something to be incorporated, see also Benjamin, ‘Dream Kitsch,’ ‘Children’s Literature,’ ‘Some Remarks on Folk Art,’ and ‘Hofmannsthal and Aleco Dossena,’ in SW 2:3–5, 250–6, 278–80, 421–2. The Hofmannsthal essay is especially interesting for its treatment of the author’s ‘genius for quoting’ and his production of texts that were ‘nourishing, but not really edible’ because they were not really ‘digestible.’ On Anschauungsunterricht in ‘Dream Kitsch,’ see Brigid Doherty, ‘Max Ernst: A Retrospective’, Artforum (September 2005): 295–7, 332, 347.   10 On the opposition between Einfühlung and Vergegenwärtigung, see AP 846.   11 See Wieland Herzfelde, ‘Introduction to the First International Dada Fair’ (trans. and intro. Brigid Doherty), October 105 (Summer 2003): 93–104 (100); see also Doherty, introduction to Herzfelde, ‘Introduction’, 97.   12 See A.J. Wiertz, Ouevres littéraires (Paris, 1870), pp. 491–5. See p. 491 on capital punishment; see also p. 501 on women bearing arms.   13 Wiertz, Ouevres littéraires, p. 501.   14 See Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra in The Portable Nietzsche (ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann; New York: Penguin, 1954), pp. 103–439 (329–33). For the German see Nietzsche, Also Sprach Zarathustra, Kritische Studienausgabe (vol. 4; ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari; Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuchverlag, Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 1999), pp. 271–7. Convolute D of the Passagen-Werk is subtitled ‘Die Langeweile, ewige Wiederkehr’, with Benjamin drawing on Karl Löwith’s erroneous citation of Nietzsche’s ‘Ewige Wiederkunft des Gleichen’ (see Karl Löwith, Nietzsches Philosophie der ewigen Wiederkehr des Gleichen [Berlin: Die Runde, 1935]. On the relation of Nietzsche’s concept of eternal recurrence to the writings of Heinrich Heine, see Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), pp. 317–20, and Gerhard Höhn, ‘Eternal Return or Indiscernible Progress: Heine’s Conception of History after 1848’, in A Companion to the Works of Heinrich Heine (ed. Roger F. Cook; New York: Camden House, 2002), pp. 169–99. I have more to say about Heine’s conception of history, specifically in relation to French painting in the epoch of the juste milieu, below.   15 See Benjamin, ‘Antoine Wiertz: Gedanken und Gesichte eines Geköpften’, GS 4:805. On Benjamin’s failure to recognize the complexity of the history of nineteenthcentury painting, see T.J. Clark, ‘Should Benjamin Have Read Marx?’, Boundary 2, 30.1 (Spring 2003): 31–50 (46–7); see also Fried, Menzel’s Realism, pp. 253, 296–7 n. 14. Benjamin’s treatment of the subject is somewhat more extensive in ‘Letter from Paris (2): Painting and Photography’, SW 3:236–48, and the related fragments in GS 7:815–23, than it is in the materials associated with The Arcades Project, but those texts hardly invalidate the criticisms Clark and Fried make of The Arcades Project itself.   16 Wiertz, Ouevres littéraires, p. 493.   17 Compare the discussion of Durchdringung in Convolute O°, 10; see also the treatment of Beschriftung in GS 3:505–7.   18 Bloch deals extensively with colportage, montage, and intoxication in the essays collected in Heritage of Our Times (trans. Neville and Stephen Plaice; Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990); in his review of Benjamin’s One-Way Street (1928), he describes the ‘form’ of Benjamin’s book as having emerged from ‘colportage,’ and he speaks of ‘Benjamin’s little formal experiment’ as offering its readers ‘photomontages’ (334–5). As early as 1926, and especially around the appearance



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of Heritage of Our Times in late 1934, Benjamin expressed his discomfort regarding what he took to be Bloch’s excessive debt to his own work in his correspondence with Adorno and others; see, for example, C 299, 459, 478, 483, 493.   19 The editors of the English translation have added one more, theirs more to the point: they replace ‘London opera’ with ‘Covent Garden opera,’ see Convolute I2a,1.   20 See Beatrice Hanssen, ‘Portrait of Melancholy (Benjamin, Warburg, Panofsky)’, MLN 114.5 (1999): 991–1013.   21 Stephen Bann, Parallel Lines: Printmakers, Painters, and Photographers in NineteenthCentury France (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001), p. 2.   22 Heinrich Heine, ‘The Salon: The Exhibition of Pictures of 1831’, in The Works of Heinrich Heine (vol. 7.; trans. Charles Godfrey Leland; New York: Croscup and Sterling, n.d.), pp. 194 (67–68), translation modified. For the German see Heine, ‘Gemäldeausstellung in Paris 1831’, in Der Salon. Erster Band. Sämtliche Schriften (vol. 3.; ed. Klaus Briegleb and Karl Pörnbacher; Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1997), pp. 29–73 (59–60). In the course of his discussion of Delaroche, Heine offers accounts of various kinds of ‘history’ that can be ‘seen’ in, or as Heine puts it, ‘on’ [auf ], the pictures on display at the Salon, including one he associates with a painting by Louis-Léopold Robert that hung near Delaroche’s Cromwell and Charles I (1831) ‘on which we see a history, . . . a tale without a beginning or an end, which eternally repeats itself [die sich ewig wiederholt] . . . the history of humankind!’, a history Heine opposes to the ‘history of the world’ [Weltgeschichte] into which he is compelled to immerse himself when looking at Delaroche’s Cromwell and Charles I (Heine, ‘Salon’, 84). As discussed below, in the case of Les Enfants d’Édouard, the history that repeats itself in the context of Heine’s looking is his own, in particular an episode from that history that took place in a space similar to the princes’ chamber. Towards the end of ‘The Exhibition of Pictures of 1831’, Heine attributes to the social and political uprisings and crises taking place at the time of his writing a sequence of effects in which the ‘cacophony of world history’ [mißtönender Lärm der Weltgeschichte] penetrates the room in which he writes, reverberates in his mind, and finally alters his perceptions of the features, disposition, and allegorical meanings of the human figures depicted in the paintings shown in the 1831 Salon, among them Cromwell and Charles I in Delaroche’s eponymous work, and Liberty in Eugène Délacroix’s Liberty Leading the People (Heine, ‘Gemäldeausstellung’, pp. 69–71).   23 Heine, ‘Salon’, pp. 67–8; ‘Gemäldeausstellung’, pp. 69–71.   24 Heine, ‘Salon’, p. 67.   25 For Benjamin’s conception of Anschauungsunterricht, which is connected, with regard to literature and literary history, to colportage, and, with regard to exhibition technologies of the 1920s, to montage, see SW 2:250–6, and GS 4:557–61.   26 On Heine as flâneur, see Klaus Briegleb, Opfer Heine? Versuch über Schriftzüge der Revolution (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1986).   27 Stephen Bann, Paul Delaroche: History Painted (London: Reaktion Books, 1997), pp. 102, 94.   28 Bann, Delaroche, p. 102.   29 Heine, ‘Salon’, p. 67.   30 Bann, Delaroche, pp. 99, 119. Michael Fried, Manet’s Modernism or, The Face of Painting in the 1860s (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 163.   31 Bann, Delaroche, p. 99.   32 Bann, Delaroche, pp. 104, 106.   33 Bann, Delaroche, p. 87.   34 Heine, ‘Salon’, p. 62; ‘Gemäldeausstellung’, p. 57; Bann, Delaroche, p. 107.   35 On Benjamin’s conception of ‘furnished man’ (der möblierte Mensch) and its relation to his invocation of Anschauungsunterricht, see Doherty, ‘Max Ernst.’ It is worth noting

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here that apparatuses of Anschauungsunterricht and the paintings of Delaroche both figured significantly in 1920s montage works by Ernst (1891–1976). For Benjamin’s appreciation of Ernst, part of which appears, without mention of Ernst or the Parisian surrealism with which he was associated, as entry I1, 3 in The Arcades Project, see ‘Dream Kitsch (Gloss on Surrealism),’ SW 2:3–5, also discussed in Doherty, ‘Max Ernst.’   36 On Delaroche’s relation to theatre, including the production of a play, Les Enfants d’Édouard (1833) by Casimir Delavigne (1793–1843), that was inspired in part by Delaroche’s painting of that subject in the Salon of 1831, see Bann, Delaroche, pp. 102–5.

chapter 9    1 The text that follows was initially presented as a lecture, written and presented in French, at Cerisy-la-Salle in August 2001. This lecture was subsequently published as ‘La Pierre du rêve: Le Bonheur de Walter Benjamin’, in Le Livre Imaginaire. La Revue des Sciences Humaines, vols 266/267 (Avril–Septembre), 2002, 175–190. The essay that follows is a revised version of an English translation (by Geoffrey Bennington, whom I thank here) of the original French lecture. This text can be called an ‘essay’ to the extent that this word retains its earlier meanings of ‘attempt’, ‘gesture’ or ‘promise’. As such, it recalls the specific conditions of its construction: the verbal stigmata of its original ‘foreignness’ and its subsequent passage through (re)translation. The conditions under which the essay was initially produced were also determined by, and have a bearing on, the very questions around which it turns. I would like to thank Eduardo Cadava for talking through these questions with me and Bruno Chaouat (The University of Minnesota), Jim Creech (Miami University, Ohio) and Elisabeth Ladenson (The University of Virginia) for inviting me to lecture on this material.    2 Letter of 30 January 1928, C 322. For the German text, see Walter Benjamin, Gershom Gerhard Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno, Briefe (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1966). For the French text see: Walter Benjamin, Correspondance (Tomes I & II; trans. Guy Petitdemange; Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1979).    3 Although this book was never completed or published during Benjamin’s lifetime, it has been published posthumously as: Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, a Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism (London: Verso, 1983) 5 CB. Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: Ein Lyriker Im Zeitalter Des Hochkapitaismus. 2 Fragmente (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1969).    4 C 333 (23 April 1928).    5 My treatment of the concept of ‘happiness’ in Benjamin’s writings has been influenced by Giorgio Agamben’s discussion of it in ‘Walter Benjamin and the Demonic: Happiness and Historical Redemption’, in Potentialites: Collected Essays in Philosophy. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), pp. 138–59.    6 The critical literature devoted to Benjamin’s conception of ‘concrete history’ is immense. The following essays are of particular interest: Christopher Fynsk, ‘The Claim of History’, Diacritics 22 (1992); Elissa Marder, ‘Flat Death: Snapshots of History’, Diacritics 22.3–4 (1992); Kevin McLaughlin, ‘Virtual Paris: Benjamin’s Arcades Project’, in Benjamin’s Ghosts: Interventions in Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory (ed. Gerhard Richter; Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002); Jacques Rancière, ‘The Archaeomodern Turn’, in Walter Benjamin and the Demands of History (ed. Michael P. Steinberg; Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996); Irving Wohlfarth, ‘Smashing the Kaleidoscope: Walter Benjamin’s Critique of Cultural History’, in Walter Benjamin and the Demands of History (ed. Michael P.



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Steinberg; Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996). The vast critical literature on The Arcades Project in English was inaugurated by Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and The Arcades Project (Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought; Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 1989). For an exceptionally nuanced treatment of the question of history in Benjamin see Eduardo Cadava, Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). Over the last twenty years, there has been a veritable explosion of critical collections of essays on Benjamin in English. Some of the major titles are: Andrew E. Benjamin and Peter Osborne, Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy: Destruction and Experience (2nd edn; Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2000); Andrew E. Benjamin (ed.), Walter Benjamin and Art (London and New York: Continuum, 2005); David S. Ferris, Walter Benjamin: Theoretical Questions (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996); David S. Ferris, The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin (Cambridge Companions to Literature; Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Beatrice Hanssen and Andrew E. Benjamin, Walter Benjamin and Romanticism (Walter Benjamin Studies Series; London and New York: Continuum, 2002); Kevin McLaughlin and Philip Rosen, (eds), ‘Benjamin Now: Critical Encounters with The Arcades Project’, Boundary 2, 30 (2003). Gerhard Richter (ed.), Benjamin’s Ghosts: Interventions in Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002) (ed.), Gary Smith; Benjamin: Philosophy, Aesthetics, History, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).    7 See ‘Traumatic Awakenings (Freud, Lacan, and the Ethics of Memory)’, in Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), pp. 91–112 for a treatment of the complicated relation between the dream and the moment of awakening. Although Caruth does not discuss Benjamin, my essay has been greatly influenced by her work on this question.    8 C 335 (24 May 1928).    9 The lines are taken from two of Baudelaire’s most famous poems in Les Fleurs du Mal: ‘Les Sept vieillards’ and ‘Le Cygne’. Charles Baudelaire, Claude Pichois and Jean Ziegler, Oeuvres Complètes, (nouvelle édn; Paris: Gallimard, 1975).   10 Benjamin’s complex understanding of the relationship between a ‘life’ and a ‘work’ complicates the task of his readers and biographers. For nuanced readings of some of Benjamin’s ‘autobiographical’ texts see Carol Jacobs, In the Language of Walter Benjamin (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); Gerhard Richter, Walter Benjamin and the Corpus of Autobiography (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2000). For more traditional biographies, see Momme Brodersen, Walter Benjamin: A Biography (trans. Malcolm R. Green and Ingrida Ligers; London and New York: Verso, 1996); Bernd Witte, Walter Benjamin: An Intellectual Biography (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991).   11 ‘The Task of the Translator’, SW 1:253–63.   12 ‘The Storyteller: Observations on the Works of Nicolai Leskov’, SW 3:143–66. GS 2.2:438–65.   13 ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility’, SW 3:101–33. This text was never published during Benjamin’s lifetime. However, a shorter version of this text was published in French: ‘L’Oeuvre d’art à l’époque de sa reproduction mécanisée’ (trans. P. Klossowski, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, 5, (1936). For a reprint of the French text along with a discussion of the relevant documents pertaining to its writing, see Walter Benjamin and Jean-Maurice Monnoyer, Écrits Français (Paris: Gallimard, 1991). This essay has been the source of much critical commentary. For some of the best recent work on the problem of art in Benjamin, see: Benjamin, ed., Walter Benjamin and Art; Howard Caygill, Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience (London and New York: Routledge, 1998); Eva Geulen, ‘Under Construction: Walter

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Benjamin’s “Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”’, in Benjamin’s Ghosts: Interventions in Contemporary Literature and Cultural Theory (ed. Gerhard Richter; Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002); Rainer Rochlitz, The Disenchantment of Art: The Philosophy of Walter Benjamin (New York: Guilford Press, 1996); Samuel Weber and Alan Cholodenko, Mass Mediauras: Form, Technics, Media (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996).   14 ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt, Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), p. 255. All subsequent English translations of this text refer to this edition. This text has also been reprinted in SW 4: 389–400.   15 ‘Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia’. SW 2:207–21. GS 2.1: 295–310.   16 ‘On the Image of Proust’. SW 2:237–48. GS 2.1:310–24.   17 C 348 (15 March 1929).   18 ‘Surrealism’, SW 2:208.   19 ‘On the Image of Proust’, SW 2:244–5.   20 C 359 (20 January 1930). The original French version of this letter can be found in Benjamin, Correspondance, vol. 2, 27–30.   21 For the first presentation of the Benjamin-Adorno conflict about The Arcades Project in English see section III (pp. 100–41) of Ernst Bloch, Aesthetics and Politics (London: New Left Books, 1977).   22 C 578–9.   23 For a remarkable reading of the role that Fritz Heinle’s suicide played in Walter Benjamin’s life and work, see Shoshana Felman’s book chapter ‘The Storyteller’s Silence: Walter Benjamin’s Dilemma of Justice’, in Shoshana Felman, The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Traumas in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002) pp. 10–53.   24 ‘Berlin Chronicle’, SW 2: 604.   25 C 609.   26 C 626 (17 June 1940).   27 ‘On the Image of Proust’, SW 2:239. For a beautiful reading of this essay see ‘Walter Benjamin: The Image of Proust’, in Carol Jacobs, In the Language of Walter Benjamin, 39–58.   28 ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, p. 254.   29 ‘On the Mimetic Faculty’, SW 2:722.   30 C 619–20 (14 December 1939).   31 I plan to read this dream more fully in a book length study on Walter Benjamin’s late writings. Jacques Derrida has recently proposed a partial reading of this dream in Fichus (Paris: Galilée, 2002). In Derrida’s text, although Gretel Adorno is important, she emerges primarily as a privileged mediator of the relationship between the two men: Benjamin and Adorno. Derrida imagines himself writing a letter to Gretel Adorno in which he asks her to tell him about the relationship between ‘Teddie’ and ‘Detlef ’: ‘(Si Gretel Adorno vivait encore, je lui écrirais une letter confidentielle au sujet des rapports entre Teddie et Detlef. Je lui demanderais pourquoi Benjamin n’a pas de prix, et lui ferais part de mes hypotheses à ce sujet’.) Throughout Fichus, Derrida playfully and explicitly makes references to his own various forms of identification with Benjamin including the fact that they share the same birthday. The text as a whole can be read as a (posthumous) version of the letter to Gretel Adorno that Derrida imagines writing in the text. But although Derrida’s reading is incomparably rich in its elaboration of his own relationship to Benjamin, it is striking that although he does ask: ‘Pourquoi Benjamin raconte-t-il ce rêve à la femme, non au mari?’, he nonetheless seems to assume that ‘Detlef ’ meant to write to ‘Teddie’ by passing through ‘Gretel’.



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In other words, he does not dwell on the fact that the figure of Gretel Adorno is called Felizitas and that she is the primary addressee of Benjamin’s dream-text.   32 C 614–6 (12 October 1939). For the original French text of this letter, see Benjamin, Correspondance (trans. Petitdemange), 307–9.

chapter 10    1 This essay, originally commissioned by the Walter Benjamin Studies Series, is included in my book Does Literature Think? Literature as Theory for an Antimythical Era (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003) and appears here by permission of the publisher.    2 Benjamin does mention in passing that this work is ‘comparable in method to the process of splitting the atom’ in that it ‘liberates the enormous energies of history that are bound up in the “once upon a time” of classical historiography’. See N3,4.    3 In Adorno’s letter to Benjamin, 2 August 1935, C 499.    4 Adorno was the first reader of The Arcades Project by Benjamin’s own choice. He was the recipient of the very first ideas as far back as their famous discussions at Köningstein in 1928 and was entrusted with several excerpts of the project in draft form. This is not to say he fully understood Benjamin’s terms and intentions, but he did engage with the most implicit significations of the project in ways that open it up to deeper understanding, even radicalizing some of its elements (despite some questionable presuppositions). Adorno’s observations, as they are known from correspondence, are of great interest and will occupy us below.    5 In his famous introduction to the Passagen-Werk, Rolf Tiedemann speaks of Benjamin’s ‘materialist physiognomics’ which he determines to be a revolutionary contribution to Marxist aesthetic theory. His definition is especially useful to my orientation, not just regarding Benjamin but the general framework of literature as theory: ‘Physiognomy infers the interior from the exterior; it decodes the whole from the detail; it represents the general from the particular. Nominalistically speaking, it proceeds from the tangible object; inductively, it commences in the realm of the intuitive’. See the appendix ‘Dialectics at a Standstill’, AP 940.    6 Benjamin’s insistence on childhood as central trope in the figuration of awakening deserves some serious interrogation of its own. Surely, Benjamin can transfer the language of individual consciousness to a collective frame because he recognizes the individual as an indefinite entity whose fragments are singular and whose integration requires an unending process of dialectical antagonism. But when he puts forth such statements as: ‘Task of childhood: to bring the new world into symbolic space’ (K1a,3), he lends to the condition of childhood – to the ‘historical index of childhood’, as he says later on – an enormous exigency. The project of Berliner Kindheit, if nothing else, demands that we do not underestimate the significance of Benjamin’s childhood experience in his conception of The Arcades Project. His persistent and anxious concern with the nineteenth century – particularly as it is increasingly directed toward the century’s psychic images than its explicit ideas – is in large part an attempt to retrieve the dialectical images dormant in the depths of his own psychic being. His invocation of the power of childhood needs to be measured in terms of the trauma of exile under such conditions, as the now irreversible destruction of the German life he knew as a child becomes terrifyingly recognizable.    7 Eduardo Cadava, Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997) pp. 71, 72–3. Cadava’s reading of Benjamin’s notion of awakening is the most creative and trenchant of all I have come across.    8 An exemplary work in this direction is Beatrice Hanssen’s Walter Benjamin’s Other History: Of Stones, Animals, Human Beings, and Angels (Berkeley: University of

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California Press, 1998). Regarding Benjamin’s intersection with Kafka in these terms, see also Lorenz Jäger’s masterful essay ‘Primat du gestus’ (trans. Philippe Ivernel), Europe 804 (April 1996): 124–39.    9 Thinking in such terms, Benjamin’s insistence on the significance of ‘awakening’ should be seen also as an attempt to neutralize the Nazi slogan ‘Germany Awake!’ as Cadava convincingly argues (Words of Light, 81–4). This lends to certain of Benjamin’s cryptic statements – such as: ‘The imminent awakening is poised, like the wooden horse of the Greeks, in the Troy of dreams’ (K2,4) – a highly politicized and presently insurrectionary character, in which both the archaic and the modern, the past and present, the mythical and the historical are dialectically inflamed.   10 Letter to Theodor Adorno, 31 May 1935, C 490.   11 This argument is made explicitly by Roger Caillois in an essay that exercised great influence on Benjamin and was extensively quoted in The Arcades Project. Caillois’s emphasis, in terms remarkably akin to Benjamin’s, is placed on Balzac, Baudelaire and the early roman policier, and he quotes Baudelaire as being conscious of literature’s mythopoetic power – Baudelaire speaks of Balzac’s heroes as myth-personae of a modern Iliad. See Roger Caillois, ‘Paris, mythe moderne’ in La Nouvelle Revue Française 284 (May 1937): 682–99.   12 Benjamin lends to Haussmann’s criminal arrogance the touch of Balzacian myth: ‘Haussmann who, faced with the city plan of Paris, takes up Rastignac’s cry of “A nous deux maintenant!”’ (E12,3).   13 In perfect philological fashion, as if following to the letter the directives of Ernest Renan, Maxime du Camp announces at the outset that he does not feign to be a historian of Paris but rather, ‘given that Paris is a body, I have only tried to practice anatomy’. In Paris: Ses origines, ses fonctions et sa vie dans la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle (Hachette, 1875), 8.   14 Letter to Walter Benjamin, 2 August 1935, C 501.   15 For a detailed argument on ‘the ruin as whole’, see Marilyn Manners and Stathis Gourgouris, ‘On the Road to Ruin and Restoration’, Strategies 3 (Spring 1990): 227–42.   16 See Letter to Theodor Adorno, 9 December 1938, C 586.   17 Theodor Adorno, ‘Introduction to Benjamin’s Schriften’, in (On Walter Benjamin: Critical Essays and Recollections trans. ed. Gary Smith; Robert Hullot-Kentor; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 12.   18 Letter to Walter Benjamin, 2 August 1935, C 496.   19 Letter to Walter Benjamin, 2 August 1935, C 495, 497–8.   20 Exposé of 1935 AP 9. The translators have opted to render Fron as ‘drudgery’, which is a correct, though more figural, meaning. Given, however, the semantic frame of my argument and Benjamin’s own rendering in his French version of the exposé (1939) as servitude, which encompasses the term’s other aspects (compulsion, slavery, bondage), I have opted to follow the version by the translator of the Benjamin–Adorno correspondence (in which Adorno reproduces the phrase intact). All in all, however, we cannot evade the fact that, under capitalist discipline, the servitude to use-value is enormous drudgery.   21 This is also the crux of Winfried Menninghaus’s unique insight into this relation in his extraordinary essay ‘Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Myth’ (trans. Gary Smith) in On Walter Benjamin, 292–325.



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chapter 11    1 The letter from Walter Benjamin to Sigfried Giedion, 15 February 1929 is published in Sokratis Georgiadis’s introduction to the English edition of Sigfried Giedion, Bauen in Frankreich: Bauen in Eisen, Bauen in Eisenbeton (Leipzig and Berlin: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1928), trans. J. Duncan Berry as Building in France: Building in Iron, Building in Ferro-Concrete (Santa Monica, CA: The Getty Center for the Study of Art and the Humanities, 1995), 53.    2 See Alfred Gotthold Meyer, Eisenbauten (Esslingen: Paul Neff, 1907).    3 Walter Benjamin, ‘Bücher, die lebendig geblieben sind’, GS 3:170 (my translation unless otherwise noted).    4 Giedion, Building in France, 167    5 Giedion, Building in France, 169    6 Benjamin copied the beginning of this citation in his notes for The Arcades Project. See M3a,3.    7 Paul Scheerbart, Glass Architecture, (trans. James Palmes; New York: Praeger, 1972), 74. Several authors have explored Benjamin’s reception of Scheerbart, most notably, Pierre Missac, Walter Benjamin’s Passages, (trans. Shierry Weber Nicholson; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), Ch. 6, ‘Glass Architecture’, 147–72; John McCole, Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 1993), Ch. 4, ‘Owning Up to the Poverty of Experience: Benjamin and Weimar Modernism’, 156–205; and Hubert Bär, Natur und Gesellschaft bei Scheerbart: Genese und Implikationen einer Kulturutopie (Heidelberg: Julius Groos Verlag, 1972). See also Detlef Mertins, ‘Playing at Modernity’, in Toys and the Modernist Tradition (Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture, 1993), 7–16. It was Gershom Scholem who introduced Benjamin to Scheerbart on the occasion of Benjamin’s wedding to Dora Sophie Kellner in 1917. Scholem recounts, ‘I was a great admirer and collector of the writings of Paul Scheerbart, and as a wedding present I gave them my favourite books, Scheerbart’s utopian novel Lesabéndio, which is set on the planetoid Pallas and, with Alfred Kubin’s drawings, presents a world in which the “essential” human qualities have undergone complete transformation. This was the beginning of Benjamin’s conversion to Scheerbart; three years later he made this book the subject of a major essay, “Der wahre Politiker” (The True Politician), which unfortunately has not been preserved’ (Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship [New York: Schocken Books, 1981], 38).    8 Scheerbart, Glass Architecture, 137 (my translation from the German edition, Glasarchitektur [Munich: Rogner & Bernhard, 1971]).    9 Scheerbart, Glass Architecture, 25.   10 Walter Benjamin, ‘Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia’, in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, (ed. Peter Demetz; trans. Edmund Jephcott; New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 177–92; ‘Der Surrealismus: Die letzte Momentaufnahme der europäischen Intelligenz’, GS 2.1: 295–310.   11 Benjamin, ‘Surrealism’, 189.   12 Benjamin, ‘Surrealism’, 189   13 Anthony Vidler has pointed to the complex relationship between this image of Benjamin’s and that offered by Breton in Nadja: ‘As for me, I continue to inhabit my glass house, where one can see at every hour who is coming to visit me, where everything that is suspended from the ceilings and walls holds on as if by enchantment, where I rest at night on a bed of glass with glass sheets, where who I am will appear to me, sooner or later, engraved on a diamond.’ See Anthony Vidler, ‘ Transparency’, in The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 218.

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  14 Benjamin, ‘ Surrealism’, 180, 181, 189.   15 N1a, 5.   16 N4, 1.   17 Franz Roh, Nach-Expressionismus. Magischer Realismus: Probleme der neuesten Europäischen Malerei (Leipzig: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1925), 46.   18 Meyer, Eisenbauten, 48, 4.   19 Giedion, Building in France, 83, 77.   20 Meyer, Eisenbauten, 54, 153.   21 Scheerbart, Glass Architecture, 44, 47, 66, 73.   22 Scheerbart, Glass Architecture, 72.   23 Many historical surveys, including Reyner Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (New York: Praeger, 1960); Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture: A Critical History (London: Thames & Hudson, 1980); and William Curtis, Modern Architecture since 1900 (Oxford: Phaidon, 1982) have been consistent with the more specialized treatments of Bruno Taut by Gustav Pehnt, Rosemary Haag Bletter and Iain Boyd Whyte, all of which stress the link between Scheerbart and Taut. While Whyte’s Bruno Taut and the Architecture of Activism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982) acknowledges the Dadaists’ admiration of Scheerbart (p. 180), this receives only minor mention. Similarly, Regine Prange’s recent Das Kristalline als Kunstsymbol: Bruno Taut und Paul Klee (Hildescheim: Georg Olms, 1991) does not discuss Dada, but provides a reference to Ludwig Hilberseimer’s essay on Scheerbart (see note 39 below).   24 See Rosemarie Haag Bletter, ‘Paul Scheerbart and Expressionist Architecture’, VIA 8 (1986): 127–35, as well as her more extended treatment in Bruno Taut and Paul Scheerbart’s Vision: Utopian Aspects of German Expressionist Architecture (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1973). Scheerbart’s correspondence with Taut from December 1913 to February 1914 is published in Paul Scheerbart, 70 Trillionen Weltgrüsse: Eine Biographie in Briefen 1889–1915, (ed. Mechtild Rausch; Berlin: Argon, 1992), pp. 458–68.   25 Adolf Behne, Die Wiederkehr der Kunst (Berlin: Kurt Wolff Verlag, 1919).   26 See Walter Benjamin, ‘Karl Kraus’, GS 2.1:334–67.   27 Walter Benjamin, ‘Paul Scheerbart: Lesabéndio’, GS 2.2:618–20.   28 G: Material zur elementaren Gestaltung – Herausgeber Hans Richter 1923–1926, (ed. Marion von Hofacker; Munich: Der Kern, 1986). Cf. Werner Gräff, ‘Uber die sogenannte G-Gruppe’, Werk und Zeit 11 (1962): 3–5; ‘Concerning the So-called G Group’, with introduction by Howard Dearstyne, Art Journal 23, no. 3 (Spring 1964): 280–2; and Raoul Hausmann, ‘More on Group G’, Art Journal 24, no. 4 (Summer 1965): 350–1. See also Hans Richter, ‘Dr Walter Benjamin’, in Köpfe und Hinterköpfe (Zurich: Der Arche, 1967), 87–8.   29 Walter Gropius, ‘Glasbau’, Die Bauzeitung 23 (1926): 20, 159–62; reprinted in Hartmut Probst and Christian Schädlich (eds), Walter Gropius, Vol. 3, Ausgewählte Schriften (Berlin: Ernst & Sohn, 1988), 103–6.   30 Theo van Doesburg, ‘Vernieuwingspogingen der Ooostenrijksche en Duitsche architectuur’, Het Bouwbedrijf 2 no. 6 (June 1925): 225–7; idem, ‘The Significance of Glass: Toward Transparent Structures’, in Theo van Doesburg on European Architecture: Complete Essays from Het Bouwbedrijf 1924–31, (trans. Charlotte I. Loeb and Arthur L. Loeb; Basel: Birkhäuser, 1990), pp. 63–9.   31 Quoted in A. Elzas, ‘Theo van Doesburg’, De 8 en Opbouw 6 (1935): 174; cited by Nancy Troy, The De Stijl Environment (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), 106 (her translation).   32 Walter Gropius in an untitled pamphlet on the occasion of the Exhibition for Unknown Architects organized by the Arbeitsrat für Kunst in 1919.



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  33 Letter from Walter Gropius to Hermann Finsterlin, 17 April 1919; cited in Marcel Fransciscono, Walter Gropius and the Creation of the Bauhaus in Weimar: The Ideals and Artistic Theories of its Founding Years (Chicago: University of Illinois, 1971), pp. 124, 156.   34 For a fuller account of Moholy-Nagy’s relationship to the disembodied utopia of Adolf Behne and the work of his ‘glass architecture period’, see Krisztina Passuth, MoholyNagy (London: Thames & Hudson, 1985), pp. 22–7.   35 Lázló Moholy-Nagy, Von Material zu Architektur (1929; repr. Mainz: Florian Kupferberg, 1968), p. 236. The captions read ‘Walter Gropius 1926: The Bauhaus in Dessau’; ‘Construction of the skeleton for a planetarium of the Zeiss Works: A new phase in grasping space: a formation of people in a suspended transparent net, like a formation of airplanes in the ether’: and ‘ “Architecture”: From two superimposed photographs (negative) emerges an illusion of spatial interpenetration, such as only the next generation will possibly experience in reality – as glass architecture’.   36 Oskar Schlemmer, ‘The Staatliche Bauhaus in Weimar, 1923’, in Hans. M. Wingler, The Bauhaus: Weimar, Dessau, Berlin, Chicago, (trans. Wolfgang Jabs and Basil Gilbert; Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1969), pp. 65–6.   37 For an account of Club Dada as a ‘Scheerbart society’, see Hanne Bergius, Das Lachen Dadas: Die Berliner Dadaisten und ihre Aktionen (Giessen: Anabas Verlag, 1989), pp. 42–7. Much of this confusion stems from the ambiguity of ‘expressionism’ as an art–historical category, which Paul Fechner’s book Der Expressionismus (Munich: R. Piper, 1914) brought into usage to designate a broad array of modern painting, distinguished only from cubism and futurism. Thus, when Herwath Walden called Scheerbart ‘the first expressionist’ (see ‘Paul Scheerbart’, Der Sturm 6 [1915]: 96), he established a line of interpretation that remained unaffected by the subsequent formation of Berlin Dada and its claim to the legacy of Scheerbart.   38 Richard Huelsenbeck, ‘Der neue Mensch’, Neue Jugend 1 (1917): 2.   39 Ludwig Hilberseimer, ‘Paul Scheerbart und die Architekten’, Das Kunstblatt 3, no. 9 (September 1919): 271–3. In his review of Arthur Korn’s Glas im Bau und als Gebrauchsgegenstand of 1926 and Konrad Werner Schulze’s Glas in der Architektur der Gegenwart of 1929, Hilberseimer reiterated his rationalist interpretation of Scheerbart’s visionary utopia and claimed that it had anticipated the widespread use of construction in glass by the late 1920s. See Ludwig Hilberseimer, ‘Glas Architektur’, Die Form (1929): 521–2. Post-humanism in architecture was first identified and analysed by K. Michael Hays, Modernism and the Posthumanist Subject: The Architecture of Hannes Mever and Ludwig Hilberseimer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992).   40 Raoul Hausmann, ‘Présentimus’, in Raoul Hausmann: Texte bis 1933, (ed. Michael Erlhoff; Munich: Texte-Kritik, 1982), 2:25–6.   41 Raoul Hausmann, ‘Lob des Konventionellen’ in Texte bis 1933, 49.   42 Walter Benjamin, ‘Erfahrung und Armut’, GS 2.1:213–19.   43 At the same time, Benjamin insists consistently on the concreteness of historicity, explaining in the Passagen-Werk that what distinguishes his notion of images from ‘the “essences” of phenomenology is their historic index (Heidegger seeks in vain to rescue history for phenomenology abstractly, through “historicity”.)’ (N3,1).   44 G1,7.   45 Benjamin, ‘Erfahrung und Armut’, 217.   46 Bertolt Brecht, ‘Ten Poems from a Reader for Those Who Live in Cities’, in Bertolt Brecht Poems, (ed. John Willett and Ralph Mannheim; London: Eyre Methuen Ltd., 1976), pp. 131–50; Bertolt Becht, ‘Aus dem Lesebuch für Städtebewohner’, in Versuche, Vol. 2 (Berlin: Gustav Kiepenheuer, 1930).   47 CB 47; GS 1.2:511–604.   48 CB 47. For a fuller treatment of Benjamin’s writings on toys, play and new beginnings, see Mertins, ‘Playing at Modernity’.

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  49 See, for instance, Walter Benjamin, ‘Eduard Fuchs, Collector and Historian’, OWS 358.   50 Walter Benjamin, ‘Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century’, 147–8; ‘Paris, die Hauptstadt des XIX. Jahrhunderts’, PW 45–60.   51 K1a,8.   52 Georg Lukács, ‘Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat’, in History and Class Consciousness (1922: Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971).   53 Richard Sieburth makes the distinction between Passagenwerk and Passagenarbeit in ‘Benjamin the Scrivener’, in Benjamin: Philosophy, Aesthetics, History, (ed. Gary Smith; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 26.   54 K1,1.   55 Benjamin, ‘Surrealism’, 161.   56 Giedion, Building in France, 3.   57 K1a,9.   58 N4,6. Walter Benjamin, ‘N (Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress)’, in Benjamin: Philosophy, Aesthetics, History, (ed. Gary Smith; trans. Leigh Hafrey and Richard Sieburth; Chicago: University of Chicago, 1989), 58.   59 K3a,2.   60 K2a,1.

chapter 12    1 For a richly documented social history of the arcades as a building type, see Johann Friedrich Geist, Arcades: The History of A Building Type (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983). Geist also stresses the innovative nature of Benjamin’s choice of the arcades as his object of investigation: ‘Walter Benjamin . . . was the first to recognize the arcade as a phenomenon of the century and to view it in context’. (Geist, Arcades, 115).    2 For a complementary account, with somewhat different focal points, see Detlef Mertins, ‘Walter Benjamin and the Tectonic Unconscious: Using Architecture as an Optical Instrument’, The Optic of Walter Benjamin (ed. Alex Coles; London: Black Dog Publishing, 1999), pp. 196–221; and Detlef Mertins, ‘The Enticing and Threatening Face of Prehistory: Walter Benjamin and the Utopia of Glass’, Assemblage 29 (1996): 7–23; reprinted as Chapter 11 of this volume. For more general accounts of Benjamin’s historiography in The Arcades Project, see Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and The Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989); and John McCole, Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993).    3 Iain Boyd White, ‘Introduction’ to Sokratis Georgiadis, Sigfried Giedion: An Intellectual Biography (trans. Colin Hall; Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993), vii.    4 Hilde Heynen, Architecture and Modernity: A Critique (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 4.    5 The ‘elective affinities’ between Benjamin and Giedion are notable. Nearly the same age, they both critically adopted to the study of art and culture the methodologies of the art historians Heinrich Wöfflin and especially Alois Riegl; both were involved in literary work, including, in both cases, as minor playwrights; both occupied themselves early in their careers with revising previous low estimates of Baroque art and culture and with critiques of Romanticism; both self-consciously adopted methods of montage and construction for the writing of history; both saw the politics and concerns of the present as a necessary horizon for historical writing; both aligned themselves with the politicized avant-garde, and in architecture specifically with Le Corbusier and functionalism. As with Giedion’s participation in the CIAM, Benjamin



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had practical contacts with the architectural avant-garde through the journal G, which had at its head the abstract film-maker Hans Richter and architect Mies van der Rohe (see Mertins, ‘The Enticing and Threatening Face of Prehistory’, 232ff. above). Following the publication of Giedion’s Bauen in Frankreich in 1928, Benjamin wrote him an appreciative letter, reprinted in Sigfried Giedion, Building in France: Building in Iron. Building in Ferro-Concrete, trans. J. Duncan Berry (Santa Monica, CA: The Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1995).    6 Jules Michelet, quoted in Walter Benjamin, ‘Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century’ (1935), AP 4; epigraph to Convolute F (‘Iron Construction’), AP 150. According to Benjamin’s German editor Rolf Tiedemann, Benjamin quoted this article from a printing of Michelet’s article in a journal in the late 1920s: Jules Michelet, ‘Avenir! Avenir!’ Europe 19/73 (15 January 1929): 6.    7 Sigfried Giedion, quoted in Benjamin, ‘Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century’, 4.    8 For further discussion of the concept of collective dream in Benjamin’s work more generally, see my article ‘From City-Dreams to the Dreaming Collective: Walter Benjamin’s Political Dream Interpretation’, Philosophy and Social Criticism 22/6 (1996): 87–111. For an analogous attempt in Britain in the 1930s and 40s to interpret dreams as indices of collective consciousness, see my article ‘In the Blitz of Dreams: Mass-Observation and the Historical Uses of Dream Reports’, New Formations 44 (2001): 34–51.    9 Giedion, Building in France, 87. Emphasis mine.   10 Benjamin, ‘Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century’, 4. Emphasis mine.   11 Giedion Building in France, 168.   12 See, however, Karel Teige’s criticisms of Le Corbusier, which centre upon the residues of received geometrical forms and ‘cosmically’ justified proportions and orientations in such projects as his proposal for the League of Nations complex in Geneva. Interestingly, in the light of Benjamin’s association of individualistic interiority and the domestic interior, Teige especially focuses on what he sees as Le Corbusier’s illegitimate equation of house and public building. (Karel Teige, ‘Anti-Corbusier’ [collected articles from 1929–31] in Teige, Arte e ideologia, 1922–1933 [ed. Sergio Corduas; trans. Sergio Corduas, Antonella D’Amelia, and Barbara Zane; Turin: Einaudi, 1982], 203–48).   13 On this problem, see: Manfredo Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1976); Manfredo Tafuri, Theories and History of Architecture (New York: Harper & Row, 1976); Manfredo Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth: Avant-Gardes and Architecture from Piranesi to the 1970s (trans. Pellegrino d’Acierno and Robert Connolly; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987); Manfredo Tafuri and Francesco Dal Co, Modern Architecture (2 Vols; trans. Robert Erich Wolf; New York: Rizzoli, 1976); Francesco Dal Co, Figures of Architecture and Thought: German Architecture Culture 1880–1920 (New York: Rizzoli, 1990).   14 Sokratis Georgiadis, ‘Introduction’ to Giedion, Building in France, 43.   15 Giedion, Building in France, 91.   16 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image (trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989).   17 I draw this terminology of ‘residual’ and ‘emergent’ features from Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977) and The Sociology of Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995 [1981]).   18 Benjamin, ‘Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century’, 13.   19 Giedion, Building in France, 145.   20 Giedion, Building in France, 169.   21 Georgiadis, ‘Introduction’ to Giedion, Building in France, 42–3.   22 Benjamin’s other major source on iron construction, Alfred Gotthold Meyer’s 1907 study Eisenbauten, discussed in similar terms the ways in which mirrors and glass

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led to the dematerialization of walls and the elimination of contrast as a cue for the perception of space. Into Convolute R (‘Mirrors’), Benjamin copied a long passage from Meyer that outlines a trajectory from the use of windows in the Gothic cathedral, through the mirrored halls of Rococo palaces, to the glass and iron greenhouses and exhibition pavilions of the nineteenth century: ‘Of course, for sensuous perception, these glass surfaces are themselves practically dissolved in light . . . In this way, however, one sacrificed that fundamental means of all spatial organization: contrast . . . In terms of the unfolding valuation of space, therefore, we see a continuous progression. At its end stand the greenhouses, and the halls of the Crystal Palace in London’ (Meyer, quoted in R2a,1). Giedion was also aware of Meyer’s work, but claims to have read it only when Building in France was going to press. For further discussion of Meyer in the context of the architecture debates in Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, see Georgiadis’s ‘Introduction’ to Giedion, Building in France, 33–5.   23 I am, of course, freely paraphrasing here from Benjamin’s most famous essay, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility’. For a complementary account of Haussmannization as the constitution of an aesthetic ‘spectacle’ (in Guy Debord’s sense) of urban life, see T.J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Monet and his Followers (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).   24 Giedion, Building in France, 86.   25 Giedion, Building in France, 203.   26 Although it is true that Benjamin’s work as a whole may exhibit a more ambivalent attitude to the question of dwelling than I am describing here with reference to The Arcades Project, I believe the basic direction he adumbrates is the liquidation of dwelling, an active project of necessary destruction. I thus have to disagree respectfully with Hilde Heynen’s otherwise excellent account of Benjamin, when she concludes: ‘The most striking feature in all this is Benjamin’s strategic attempt to understand modernity and dwelling as things that are not in opposition to each other’. (Heynen, Architecture and Modernity, 118).   27 For context on the debate around dwelling, I am indebted here to Francesco Dal Co’s provocative essay, ‘Dwelling and the “Places” of Modernity’ in his Figures of Architecture, 12–81.   28 For example, Ibsen clearly articulates the connection between building and renunciation that would become so essential for the functionalist aesthetic of modern architecture. In Act II, Solness tells Hilde: ‘To be able to build homes for other people, I have had to renounce . . . for ever renounce . . . any hope of having a home of my own. I mean a home with children. Or even with a father and mother’. (Henrik Ibsen, The Master Builder in Four Major Plays, [trans. James McFarlane and Jens Arup; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981], 315). In passages like this, Benjamin detected Ibsen’s nostalgic lament for the social ‘homelessness’ of the builder (notably, Solness rejects the title ‘architect’) who, through the embrace of technological means and a competitive ethos, increasingly has had to subordinate his personal ‘art’ to the utilitarian, impersonal function of providing ‘homes for human beings’.   29 See Dal Co, Figures of Architecture, 35–42.   30 In a strange anticipation of Ibsen’s fiction, the arcade architect Giuseppe Mengoni, designer of Milan’s famous Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, whose allegorical features were intended as a secular counterpoint to the cathedral in the adjoining piazza, fell to his death from the triumphal arch shortly before the opening ceremonies in 1876.

CONTRIBUTORS Susan Buck-Morss is Professor of Political Philosophy and Social Theory at Cornell University. She is author of Thinking Past Terror: Islamism and Critical Theory on the Left (Verso, 2003), Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (MIT Press, 2000, 2002), The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and The Arcades Project (MIT Press, 1989), and The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute (Macmillan Free Press, 1977; republished, 2002). Stanley Cavell is Walter M. Cabot Professor Emeritus of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University. He is the author of numerous books, including Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow (Harvard University Press, 2005), A Pitch of Philosophy: Autobiographical Exercises (Harvard University Press, 1994) and Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays (Scribner, 1969, reprinted by Cambridge University Press, 2002). Brigid Doherty is Associate Professor of German and Art & Archaeology at Princeton University, where she his also affiliated with the Programs in European Cultural Studies, Media & Modernity, and Gender Studies. Stathis Gourgouris is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Colonization, and the Institution of Modern Greece (Stanford University Press, 1996) and Does Literature Think? Literature as Theory for an Antimythical Era (Stanford University Press, 2003), as well as numerous essays on psychoanalysis, political theory, music, and film. Beatrice Hanssen is Professor of German at the University of Georgia, Athens. She is the author of Walter Benjamin’s Other History: Of Stones, Animals, Human Beings and Angels (University of California Press, 1998, 2000) and Critique of Violence: Between Poststructuralism and Critical Theory (Routledge, 2000), a study that investigates the dialogue between Foucault, Derrida and the representatives of the Frankfurt School. She also co-edited The Turn to Ethics (with Marjorie Garber and Rebecca Walkowitz, Routledge, 2000) and Walter Benjamin and Romanticism (Continuum, 2002). Together with Andrew Benjamin she is editor of the series Walter Benjamin Studies, which includes the volume Walter Benjamin and Art (Continuum, 2005). Barbara Johnson is Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Frederic Wertham Professor of Law and Psychiatry in Society at Harvard

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University. She is the author of, among other books, Mother Tongues: Sexuality, Trials, Motherhood, Translation (Harvard University Press, 2003), The Wake of Deconstruction (Blackwell, 1994), and A World of Difference (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987). Esther Leslie is Reader in Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck College, University of London. She is the author of Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism (Pluto, 2000), Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant Garde (Verso, 2002) and Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry (Reaktion, 2005). Elissa Marder is Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Emory University. Her book Dead Time: Temporal Disorders in the Wake of Modernity (Baudelaire and Flaubert) was published by Stanford University Press in 2001. Her published articles (in French as well as English) cover a wide range of essays on topics in French literature, literary theory, feminism, film, psychoanalysis and photography. She is currently working on a number of projects including a study of Walter Benjamin’s writings in French tentatively entitled Walter Benjamin’s French Corpus; a book on early nineteenth century French Literature (Revolutionary Perversions: Literary Sex Acts 1789–1848); and a collection of essays relating to questions of subjectivity, sexuality and technology. Detlef Mertins is Professor and Chair of the Architecture Department at the University of Pennsylvania. He has published extensively on the history of modern architecture, including the English edition of Walter Curt Behrendt, The Victory of the New Building Style; The Presence of Mies; and Metropolitan Mutations: The Architecture of Emerging Public Spaces. He is currently completing a monograph on Mies van der Rohe and co-editing an English edition of the avant-garde journal, G: Material zur elementaren Gestaltung. Tyrus Miller is Associate Professor of Literature at the University of California at Santa Cruz. He is author of Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction, and the Arts Between the World Wars (University of California Press, 1999) and numerous essays on the avant-garde. Max Pensky is Professor of Philosophy at Binghamton University, State University of New York. He has published widely on critical theory, political philosophy, and contemporary German politics and culture. His works include Melancholy Dialectics: Walter Benjamin and the Play of Mourning (Massachusetts, 1993, second edition 2001). Gerhard Richter teaches critical theory and intellectual history at the University of California, Davis, where he is Associate Professor of German.



Contributors

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He is the author of Walter Benjamin and the Corpus of Autobiography (Wayne State University Press, 2000, 2002), Ästhetik des Ereignisses. Sprache – Geschichte – Medium (Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2005), and the forthcoming Thought-Images: Frankfurt School Writers’ Reflections from Damaged Life. He is the editor of Benjamin’s Ghosts: Interventions in Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory (Stanford University Press, 2002), Literary Paternity, Literary Friendship (University of North Carolina Press, 2002), and, with Jost Hermand, Sound Figures of Modernity: German Music and Philosophy (University of Wisconsin Press, 2006). Irving Wohlfarth is Professor of German at the University of Reims, France. He has published numerous articles on Walter Benjamin and is co-editor, together with Alexandre Kostka, of Nietzsche and “An Architecture of Our Minds” (Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1999). Together with Catherine Coquio, he is editor of Parler les camps, penser les génocides (Albin Michel, 1999).

Index Adorno, Gretel 192, 193, 194, 195, 197, 198, 199, 265n, 290–1n Adorno, Theodor 2, 5, 9–10, 37, 38, 39, 41, 56, 63, 66, 67, 69, 73, 74–5, 80, 81, 84, 85, 108, 109, 115, 117, 119, 126, 135, 139, 140, 141–2, 147, 148, 155, 192, 193, 194, 202, 204, 211, 212, 214, 219, 221, 222–3, 261, 265n, 267n, 268n, 271n, 278n, 279n, 287n, 288n, 290n, 291n, 292n Agamben, Giorgio 288n Apollinaire, Guillaume 22, 229 Aragon, Louis 4–5, 8, 120, 134, 254, 265n Arendt, Hannah 84, 133, 290n Arp, Hans 232 Aupick, Madame 80 Baader, Johannes 234 Bachofen, Johann Jakob 49 Balzac, Honoré de 42, 108, 214, 262, 292n Banham, Reyner 294n Bann, Stephen 179, 181, 182, 288n Bär, Hubert 293n Barante, Prosper de 182 Barrows, Susanna 270n Bataille, Georges 261 Baudelaire, Charles 2, 3, 4, 8, 9, 13, 15, 16–17, 18, 19–20, 21, 22, 27, 30, 33, 43, 44, 46, 49, 51, 54, 56, 66–7, 68– 9, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 78–9, 80, 85–6, 89, 91, 97, 99, 103, 105, 116, 136, 185, 188–9, 194–5, 214, 237, 246, 252, 262, 265n, 267n, 269n, 278n, 285n, 289n, 292n Beethoven, Ludwig van 56, 270n Behne, Adolf 231, 233, 234, 285n, 295n Benjamin, Andrew E. 289n Benjamin, Stephan 11 Benjamin, Walter Arcades Project (Passagen-Werk) 2, 4, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13–16, 17–19, 20, 21, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 30, 31, 32, 33–64, 66–8, 69, 70, 72–3, 74, 75, 77, 78, 81, 82, 83–4, 88, 92, 93, 94, 97, 100, 102, 105, 107–12, 113–31, 133–9, 141, 144, 145, 147, 150–1, 152, 154,







155, 157–64, 169, 170–3, 175, 178, 180, 182–3, 184, 185, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 196, 197, 201– 24, 225, 229, 236, 238, 239, 240–56, 259, 260, 262, 263, 266n, 267n, 268n, 269n, 270n, 271n, 275n, 278n, 279n, 280n, 282n, 283n, 285n, 286n, 288n, 291n, 295n, 298n ‘The Author as Producer’ 43, 87, 247 Berlin Childhood Around 1900 7, 25, 61–2, 122, 158 Berlin Chronicle 2, 11, 108, 122, 193, 194, 271n, 279n ‘Central Park’ 276n, 278n ‘Chambermaid’s Romances of the Past Century’ 164, 165 Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism 10, 27, 40, 42, 43, 45–6, 49, 56, 64, 66, 83, 185, 193, 194–5, 237 ‘Children’s Literature’ 286n ‘The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism’ 281n ‘The Destructive Character’ 5, 7 Deutsche Menschen 192 ‘Dream Kitsch’ 4, 7, 286n, 288n Ein Aussenseiter macht sich bemerkbar 21 ‘Erfahrung und Armut’ 295n ‘Franz Kafka’ 15, 84 ‘Goethe’s Elective Affinities’ 281n ‘Hofmannsthal and Aleco Dossena’ 286n ‘Karl Kraus’ 294n ‘Literary History and Literary Scholarship’ 149 ‘On the Image of Proust’ 186, 191–2, 193, 195–6, 197, 282n ‘On the Mimetic Faculty’ 198 One-Way Street 3, 33, 45, 64, 132, 133–9, 140–4, 147, 151, 154–5, 158, 272n, 277n, 281n, 282n, 283n The Origin of German Tragic Drama 2, 4, 13, 15, 17, 22, 26, 66, 133, 137, 142, 151, 204, 266, 267n, 278n, 283n ‘Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century’ 14, 15, 116, 241, 296n



Index

‘Parisian Arcade – A Dialectical Fairlyland’ 3, 137, 184 ‘Short Shadows (II)’ 284n ‘Some Remarks on Folk Art’ 286n ‘The Storyteller’ 144, 190, 283n, 289n ‘Surrealism’ 5–6, 8, 158, 186, 191, 193, 253, 282n, 294n, 296n ‘The Task of the Translator’ 190, 193, 284n ‘Theological-Political Fragment’ 184 ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ 15, 31, 149, 190, 197, 290n Understanding Brecht 43, 276n ‘Unknown Anecdotes about Kant’ 1 ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproductibility’ 87, 158, 173–5, 190, 242, 247, 289n, 298n Benn, Gottfried 63 Benzenberg, Johann Friedrich 78 Beraud, Henri 46 Berger, John 87, 88 Bergius, Hanne 295n Bergson, Henri 11, 249 Bernstein, Jay 280n Blanqui, Auguste 217 Bletter, Rosemary Haag 294n Bloch, Ernst 9, 11, 135, 136, 139, 140, 141, 161, 177–8, 266n, 286–7n, 290n Blum, Léon 46 Bolz, Norbert 273n Borgia, Cesare 159, 162 Bourdieu, Pierre 280–1n Bourget, Paul 217, 218 Boyarin, Jonathan 280n Brassaï, Gyula Halász 269 Brecht, Bertolt 23, 24, 25, 30, 59, 97, 146, 204, 236–7, 261, 276n Breton, André 4, 5, 6–7, 44, 57, 228, 229, 245, 253, 265n, 293n Briegleb, Klaus 287n Brodersen, Momme 289n Browning, Robert 81 Buci-Glucksmann, Christine 273n Buck-Morss, Susan 81, 82–3, 89, 91, 97, 114, 269n, 277n, 278n, 280n, 285n, 289n, 296n Bullrich, August Wilhelm Adolph 127–8 Burgin, Victor 281n Butler, Josephine 49 Cadava, Eduardo 210–11, 289n, 292n Caillois, Roger 4, 292n

303

Caruth, Cathy 289n Cassou, Jean 12, 30 Caygill, Howard 282n, 284n, 289n Céline, Louis-Ferdinand 63 Charles III 177, 178 Cholodenko, Alan 290n Christian, Adam 272n Clark, T.J. 286n, 298n Cocteau, Jean 195 Cohen, Margaret 273n Cohn, Jula 3 Collins, Wilkie 278n Confucius 261 Corngold, Stanley 284n Curtis, William 294n Dal Co, Francesco 247, 257, 297n, 298n Daudet, Alphonse 280n de Man, Paul 78, 79, 152–4, 273n de Quincey, Thomas 8 de Stäel, Madame 213 Dearstyne, Howard 294n Debord, Guy 298n Delacroix, Eugène 175 Delaroche, Paul 178, 179, 180–2, 183, 287n, 288n Delavigne, Casimir 288n Deleuze, Gilles 249 Démar, Claire 49, 52, 101, 270n Demetz, Peter 272n Derrida, Jacques 145, 268n, 283n, 290n d’Espezel, Pierre 216, 217 Diamond, Stacy 285n Dickens, Charles 39, 90, 270n Dilthey, Wilhelm 19 Diogenes 20, 23, 267n Disney, Walt 34 Döblin, Alfred 134 Doesburg, Theo van 232, 233, 234 Doherty, Brigid 285n, 286n, 287n, 288n du Camp, Maxime 217–18 Dubech, Lucien 216, 217 Dürer, Albrecht 10 Eagleton, Terry 272n Edward V 178, 180 Eggling, Viking 232 Eiland, Howard 276n, 285n Elmar, Ernst 280n Elzas, A. 294n Emerson, Ralph Waldo 261 Engels, Friedrich 11, 100, 269n

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Engländer, Sigmund 78 Ernst, Max 288n Faulkner, William 190 Fechner, Paul 295n Feininger, Lyonel 233 Felman, Shoshana 273n, 290n Fenves, Peter 282n Ferris, David S. 289n Finsterlin, Hermann 295n Flaubert, Gustave 68, 217 Ford, Henry 21 Foucault, Michel 69 Fourier, Charles 34, 64, 238, 260 Fraisse, Armand 74 Frampton, Kenneth 294n Fränkel, Fritz 161 Fransciscono, Marcel 295n Freud, Sigmund 8, 14, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 111, 123, 165, 168, 186, 207, 221–2, 238, 257, 261–2 Fried, Michael 181, 285n, 286n Friedlander, Salomo 234 Frisby, David 273n Fromm, Erich 74 Fürnkäs, Josef 281n Fynsk, Christopher 284n, 288n Gabo, Noam 232 Garnier, Tony 226, 230 Gautier, Théophile 262 Geist, Johann Friedrich 296n Georgiadis, Sokratis 247, 253, 293n, 296n, 297n, 298n Geulen, Eva 289–90n Giedion, Sigfried 5, 225, 226–7, 230, 239, 240, 241–2, 245, 246, 247–8, 251, 252–3, 255, 256, 296n, 297n Gladstone, William 20 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 27, 29, 37 Gourdon de Genouillac, H. 12 Gourgouris, Stathis 292n Gräff, Werner 232 Grandville, Jean Gérard 34, 108, 121, 270n, 274n, 279n Gropius, Walter 231, 232–3, 234, 294n Grosz, George 232 Gunning, Tom 285n Hamacher, Werner 145–6 Hansen, Miriam 135 Hanssen, Beatrice 284n, 287n, 289n, 291n Hausmann, Raoul 232, 234, 235, 294n

Haussmann, Baron Georges Eugène 4, 34, 36, 49, 77, 93, 94, 107, 215, 216, 217, 254, 292n Hays, K. Michael 295n Heartfield, John 171 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 110, 132, 133, 224, 268n, 281n Hegemann, Werner 29 Heidegger, Martin 2, 37, 150, 151, 256, 257, 269n, 284n, 295n Heine, Heinrich 178–80, 181, 182, 286n, 287n Heinle, Fritz 194, 290n Heinle, Wolf 272n Hélie, Amélie 52 Helmstädter, Axel 280n Hertz, Neil 270n Herzfelde, Wieland 171 Hessel, Franz 2, 3, 9, 45, 123, 158, 279n Heynen, Hilde 296n, 298n Hilberseimer, Ludwig 232, 234, 235, 294n, 295n Hillach, Ansgar 283n Hitler, Adolph 62, 156, 235, 269n, 271n Höch, Hannah 234 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von 5, 137, 138, 271n, 283n Höhn, Gerhard 286n Hölderlin, Friedrich 132, 133 Honneth, Axel 281n Horkheimer, Max 66, 67, 79, 135, 279n Huelsenbeck, Richard 295n Hugo, Victor 12, 36, 44, 94, 262, 269n Huizinga, Johan 266n Husserl, Edmund 136 Ibsen, Henrik 257, 258, 298n Jacobs, Carol 289n, 290n Jägers, Lorenz 292n Jeanneret, Charles-Edouard 227 Jennings, Michael W. 282n, 286n Jensen, Johannes V. 175 Joël, Ernst 161, 177, 285n Joël-Heinzelmann, Charlotte 161, 177, 178 Joyce, James 112 Jung, Carl 47, 56, 59 Kafka, Franz 15, 26, 84, 146, 193, 204, 211, 271n, 292n Kamman, Jan 234 Kant, Immanuel 1, 3, 8, 134, 135, 143, 260, 261



Index

Kaufmann, Walter 286n Keller, Gottfried 155 Kemp, Wolfgang 285n Kern, Stephen 279n Kierkegaard, Søren 2, 5, 9, 10, 56 Kiesler, Frederick 232, 233 Klages, Ludwig 56, 59 Knoche, Stefan 284n Köhn, Eckhardt 282n Korn, Arthur 295n Korsch, Karl 88 Kracauer, Siegfried 20, 22, 29, 135, 137, 139–40, 283n Kraus, Karl 134, 204 Kubin, Alfred 293n La Fontaine, Jean de 44 Lacan, Jacques 262 Lacis, Asja 2, 135, 282n Lacoste, Jean 67 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe 281n Lautréamont, Comte de 266n Le Corbusier 5, 34, 226–7, 229, 232, 233, 245, 251, 253, 254, 296n, 297n Le Play, Frédéric 21, 22 Leibniz, Gottfried 124 Lenin, V.I. 6, 88 Leskov, Nikolai 145 Lethen, Helmut 283n Lévi-Strauss, Claude 271n Levin, Thomas Y. 286n Levinas, Emmanuel 257 Libeskind, Daniel 134 Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph 25 Lion, Ferdinand 248 Lissitzky, El 232 Loos, Adolf 232, 233 Lotze, Hermann 266n Louis-Philippe 181 Löwith, Karl 286n Lukács, Georg 88, 105, 238 Luxemburg, Rosa 88 Lydon, May 269n McCole, John 280–1n, 293n, 296n Machiavelli, Niccolo 159 McLaughlin, Kevin 276n, 285n, 288n, 289n McRobbie, Angela 88, 89, 97–8 Magendie, Francois 12 Mahmood, Shereen 271n Malebranche, Nicolas 15 Malevich, Kasimir 233–4 Mallarmé, Stéphane 14, 68, 84

305

Man Ray 232 Manners, Marilyn 292n Marder, Elissa 288n Marot, Clément 16 Marx, Karl 12, 15, 16, 28, 38, 44, 48, 54– 5, 63, 64, 70–1, 72, 73, 81, 88, 93, 97, 98, 100, 102, 103, 104–5, 110, 115–16, 123, 128, 250, 266n, 269n, 271n, 277n, 278n, 279n Mehlman, Jeffrey 280n Melville, Herman 261 Mendelssohn, Erich 5 Mengoni, Giuseppe 298n Menninghaus, Winfried 292n Mertins, Detlef 293n, 295n, 296n, 297n Meyer, Alfred Gotthold 225, 226, 230, 298n Michelet, Jules 214, 241 Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig 232, 233, 297n Missac, Pierre 293n Moholy-Nagy, Lázló 233, 234, 295n Monnoyer, Jean-Maurice 289n Montague, John, Earl of Sandwich 40, 268n Mosse, George 269n Müller, Fritz C. 280n Nadar, Felix 76–7, 86, 267n Nancy, Jean-Luc 281n Napoleon I 92, 269n Napoleon III 34, 36, 92, 93, 242 Nietzsche, Friedrich 1, 5, 6, 7, 8, 16, 19, 24, 134, 257, 263, 266n, 286n Nixon, Sean 274n Novalis 283n Osborne, Peter 280n, 289n Oud, J.J.P. 227, 229, 232 Parker, Andrew 273n Passuth, Krisztina 295n Peale, Norman Vincent 24 Péguy, Charles 31 Pehnt, Gustav 294n Perret, August 226 Petro, Patrice 274n Peukert, Detlev 276n Pevsner, Antoine 232 Pietz, William 70 Piscator, Erwin 183 Plato 207 Poe, Edgar Allen 158, 176, 246, 260 Pollock, Griselda 274n Prange, Regine 294n

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Proust, Marcel 2, 10, 11, 32, 75, 77, 90, 123, 146, 156, 191–2, 193, 195–6, 208, 214, 262, 279n, 282n Pyat, Félix 20 Rancière, Jacques 278n, 288n Ranke, Leopold von 24, 190 Redon, Odilon 9 Reich, Wilhelm 74 Reichardt, J.F. 279n Renan, Ernest 292n Richard III 178 Richter, Gerhard 282n, 283n, 289n Richter, Hans 232, 294n, 297n Rieger, Dietmar 267n Riegl, Aloïs 165, 296n Rilke, Rainer Maria 8 Rjazanov, David 94–5 Robert, Louis-Léopold 287n Rochlitz, Rainer 281n Roh, Franz 230, 294n Rosen, Philip 289n Rosenberg, Léonce 233 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 3, 56, 271n Rubens, Peter Paul 172 Ruest, Anselm 234 Rühle, Otto 280n Sade, Marquis de 55 Saint Simon, Henri 34 Salva, Anna 52 Sartre, Jean-Paul 44, 68–9 Schauer, Gustav 178–9 Scheerbart, Paul 136, 227–8, 229, 230, 231, 232, 233, 234, 235, 236, 237, 238, 293n, 295n Schelling, Friedrich 132, 133 Scherpe, K.R. 273n Schivelbusch, Wolfgang 279n Schlegel, Friedrich 133, 134, 281n Schlemmer, Oskar 234, 295n Schmitt, Carl 6 Schoen, Ernst 272n Scholem, Gershom 3, 9, 66, 137, 140, 156, 184, 185, 188, 191, 192, 261, 288n, 293n Schöttker, Detlef 281n, 283n Schreber, Daniel Paul 7 Schuler, Alfred 148 Schulze, Konrad Werner 295n Schweppenhäuser, Hermann 285n Schwitters, Kurt 134 Séchard, David 265n

Seel, Martin 284n Shakespeare, William 21, 66, 181 Sieburth, Richard 296n Simmel, Georg 53, 257, 268n Smith, Gary 289n Socrates 96, 260, 271n Speer, Albert 34 Spengler, Oswald 257 Stahl, Fritz 216–17 Stam, Mart 252–3 Stone, Sascha 134 Sue, Eugène 44 Tafuri, Manfredo 247, 297n Taut, Bruno 231, 232, 233, 294n Taylor, Frederick 96 Teige, Karel 297n Terdiman, Richard 279n Thoreau, Henry David 261 Tiedemann, Rolf 114, 201, 285n, 291n, 297n Tönnies, Ferdinand 257 Trotsky, Leon 43, 88 Troy, Nancy 294n Tschichold, Jan 134 Tzara, Tristan 232 Valéry, Paul 134 Versofen, Wilhelm 280n Vexliard, Alexander 269n Vidler, Anthony 293n Wagner, Gerhard 274n Walden, Herwath 234, 295n Walkowitz, Judith R. 270n Weber, Max 238, 257 Weber, Samuel 284n, 290n Weidlé, Wladimir 72–3 Weigel, Sigrid 273n Whyte, Iain Boyd 294n, 296n Wiertz, Antoine 158, 170–7, 183 Williams, Raymond 297n Wilson, Elizabeth 90–1, 97, 100, 274n Witte, Bernd 273n, 281n, 289n Wittgenstein, Ludwig 260, 261, 262 Wohlfarth, Irving 288n Wolff, Janet 90, 91, 97, 274n Wölfflin, Heinrich 230, 296n Wyneken, Gustav 272n Zeno of Elea 25 Žižek, Slavoj 283n Zohn, Harry 276n Zola, Émile 90, 262