James L. Rolleston The Politics of Quotation: Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project, PMLA, 104, 1, January, 1989, pp. 13-25
"Walter Benjamin was not the first to view the Paris arcades as emblematic of the way capitalism and technology transform not just the appearance of cities but the imaginative lives of their inhabitants. Alert Parisians and foreign visitors in the 1830s and 1840s noted, often with suddenly vivid speculative insights, the rhythmic changes in urban living wrought by these strange zones consecrated to commerce and technology, these glass-and-metal structures infiltrating and enveloping the old houses. (1) But between 1927 and 1940, Benjamin indefatigably collected materials relating to the arcades, and to the Paris of the nineteenth century generally, for a project of the first magnitude: to write the prehistory of the world crisis of the 1930s in such a way that its posthistory, the language of an awakening from the nightmare culmination of commodity capitalism, would become a reality. One's instinctive shock at the seeming lack of proportion and continuity in such a vision (what do the commercial innovations of the 1830s have to do with the totalitarian ideologies of the 1930s?) is the shock Benjamin intended to provoke. For, while operating within the central Marxist categories of history, materialism, and dialectics, Benjamin sought to liberate those categories from their manifest complicity with determinism, tyranny, and political impotence.
"The established formula of dialectical materialism no longer seemed to protect left thinking from its intellectual enemies, essentially unchanged since the nineteenth century. Vulgar materialism, the belief in open-ended "progress" had been renewed by twentieth-century technology; and dialectical method, the structuring of history as the conflict of totalized, socially coherent periods, had been co-opted by vast pseudoscientific schemes like Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West. Its critical function debilitated, dialectic was deployed as a self-confirming mode of encyclopedic historical description. Clearly, the concept of history itself was at risk. Continuities of class, cultural meaning, political interest-key components of any social analysis-all seemed invalidated by the crises of the 1930s. At the same time there was an unavoidable sense of being in the catastrophic late phase of some undecipherable, not yet intelligible continuum. The loss of historical understanding released no one from the actuality of historical processes. And the words available to confront that actuality remained those of dialectical materialism, now inseparable from its failures as well as its successes.
"Walter Benjamin resolutely laid claim to this vocabulary, calling himself, for example, a "historical materialist" and a "materialist dialectician." While he would not use the master words of the tradition whimsically or inconsistently, he would define them operationally, by new models of historical narrative that he needed to generate, test, and consolidate in a single textualizing process. Dialectical in the fullest sense, this move was latent in Benjamin's thinking long before the terminology of Marxism became important to him. A juxtaposition of two excerpts written twenty-four years apart can begin to suggest the ambition and consistency of his project (2). The first, from his 1916 essay on language, opposes any suggestion that words and meaning, signifier and signified, are distinct. The very notion of meaning is linguistic, and all phenomena are engaged in a ceaseless process of self-expression, in both verbal and nonverbal "languages:"
""The full importance (of the concept of translation) is achieved in the insight that every higher language (with the exception of God's Word) can be understood as a translation of all others. Given the relation between languages as that of media of differing density, the translatability of languages into one another becomes evident. Translation is the transference from one language to another through a continuum of transformations. Translation works through a continua of transformations, not through abstract realms of equivalence and similarity. The translation of the language of things into that of human beings is a translation not only from silence to sound but from namelessness to naming.""
The second passage, his fourteenth thesis on the philosophy of history, comes from his last work (1940):
""History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogeneous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now. Thus, to Robespierre ancient Rome was a past charged with the time of the now that he blasted out of the continuum of history. The French Revolution viewed itself as Rome reincarnate. It evoked ancient Rome the way fashion evokes costumes of the past. Fashion has a flair for the topical, no matter where it stirs in the thicket of long ago; it is a tiger's leap into the past. This jump, however, takes place in an arena where the ruling class gives the commands. The same leap in the open air of history is the dialectical one, which is how Marx understood the revolution.""
"In the course of my essay I hope gradually to decode this extremely compressed language. For now I want to suggest how the concepts of the essay on language are both at work in and illuminated by the very late text. The uncompromising fullness of language proclaimed by the young Benjamin-its universal operation, its inclusion of all substance within itself-is the essential premise of the older Benjamin's analogy between fashion and revolution. While certainly a "higher" language, revolution needs the language incessantly produced as fashion in order to become itself a language at all. And the mildly paradoxical phrase "continua of transformations" becomes a much sharper paradox in the 1940 text. The "tiger's leap," the radical rupture of continuity, is at the same time an acknowledgement that the continuum of history exists. The relations among the continuum of jostling materials, the productive moments that define it, and the vantage point of any given present moment-these disputed relations are central to Benjamin's entire project. But such linkages cannot be conceptualized without a double premise of ontological difference: temporal difference or rupture (the need to explode the illusions of continuity in which all present moments are embedded) and linguistic difference (the distinct yet interlocking languages spoken by the past, by the layout of cities as well as documents, by the oppressed, who are often barely audible, as well as by rulers.) It is precisely those who would homogenize history, prescribing a neutral continuum of events in covert affirmation of the writer's own moment, who produce lifeless illusion, a version of the past that is empty because it merely echoes the unacknowledged forces controlling the historian's own time." p. 15
"Above all, it is the simultaneous functioning of dissonant language systems that provides the model for Benjamin's reimagining of history. The ceaseless process of language production that he posits in 1916 remains his focal point in 1940. The republican language of ancient Rome continued to be spoken through the world after Rome's demise, in law, art, philosophy, personal feeling; worn out and "forgotten" by the eighteenth century, it became usable in 1789 as a newly potent "remembered" language of revolution. And the same observation applies to the afterlife, to the forgettings and rebirths of the French revolutionary language itself. But Benjamin never assigns priority to the language we call political. For him, everything speaks: buildings, administrative organizations, utopian fantasies, advertisements, social chatter. The speaking is not equal in volume or presence; indeed, it may be precisely the wearing out, the lifelessness, of a given language that can tell us most about the processes of social change. For these processes are the substance, the signified, which is utterly inseparable from the signifier of the languages that embody them. We cannot describe these processes; we can only listen to them, making legitimate use of our temporal vantage point-namely, bringing to full verbal life, within the vocabulary of the past, motives and tensions now illuminated by our own social relations. Our present moment is itself wholly within this linguistic arena; we are, in our turn, being "produced" in ways we cannot perceive. but the synchronic structure implicit in the very concept of language enables Benjamin to resist an image of history as shapeless flux. The present moment (which a priori cannot understand itself) relates to the entirety of the past (which has never ceased speaking) through mutual translation. The reader of history's linguistic material makes the connection, among all the superficially disparate paroles of an age, that makes it possible to construe and speak a new and higher language, the language that blends later perspectives into the earlier texture. and by a dialectic essential to Benjamin's argument, the reproduction of past languages simultaneously speaks of the present with new clarity. For the language of the nineteenth century is that of the twentieth century. Its seemingly worn-out forms make "tiger leaps" into the future inhabited by the translator, the partner in conversation, the dialectician turned toward the past.
"To link Benjamin's earliest and latest writing in this way is not to deny his intellectual development: the texture of the two passages is prima facie wholly different, and a study, like Richard Wolin's, of the shifting emphases and allegiances in Benjamin's life and work is obviously a legitimate enterprise. My purpose, rather, is to suggest how Benjamin could oppose most contemporary usages of the words history, materialism, and dialectic yet formulate an ongoing intellectual project to which these terms are fundamental. The key assumptions of this linguistic-political project can now be summarized. Benjamin's understanding of history remains close to the Romantics', particularly to Novalis's and Friedrich Schlegel's: history is a self-conscious crystallization of three separate moments: the moment of the writer, the moment in which the writer is focusing, and the entirety of the tradition in which the writer is embedded, a tradition that necessarily includes the outwardly static realms of nature and religion. Historical narrative is possible, but only as a heuristic device: as soon as continuities are proclaimed that repress the dynamics of the crystallized moment, historical truth is lost. The material of history is language, the multiple interlocking languages of the past that has never ceased speaking and that fundamentally condition the historian's own language. Benjamin's expansive understanding of the concept of language ensures that this kind of materialism is not at all reductive: the physical world is as ideologically marked as ideas are technologically conditioned, in a constantly shifting force field of apparently normative languages. There would, however, seem to be a danger of circularity: how can the historian claim access to truth, even provisional truth? Do not the ceaseless production and proliferation of linguistic, hence irresistible, meanings simply submerge all possibility of a stabilized perspective?
"The answer, crucial to Benjamin's understanding of dialectic, lies in the concept of quotation. As his essay on language already implies, past languages produce an immense variety of texts: the silent texts of building and urban planning, the minimal verbal formalizations of public regulations, and the slightly more elaborate descriptive style of documents and reports, with their implicit value judgements. From the historian's perspective, all these languages, though distinct from one another, are clearly interwoven. Benjamin simple takes the further step of aligning such texts with those produced at a higher level of self-awareness: daily and occasional journalism, escapist or satirical poetry, projections of the future, based on the present (science fiction). diaries, and novels that seem to articulate the "truth" of an entire society (Balzac, Dickens). The social process as a whole speaks through these languages as a whole, but how is that whole to be identified? Nothing could be more misleading, in Benjamin's view, than a documentary style, a seemingly objective narrative ("social history") underpinned by a subjectively conditioned selection from disparate texts. Rather, Benjamin approaches the problem through the ontology of a text itself: a text compresses the fluidity of the spoken language into the ordered space of written (or, for nonverbal languages, constructed) syntax. It ruptures the continuum of the world; it quotes reality. So the historian's isolation of sentences or paragraphs from a text is already an intensified form of citation, a quoting to the second power. If the process is pursued further, acts of rupture multiply; passages from different kinds of text speak on a new level when juxtaposed, texts from distant years actualize a radical change or, even more interesting, an absence of change. At perhaps the highest level yet imaginable, a fusion of past texts activates the "language" of the historian's own epoch. For without such mediation the multiple languages at work in any given present cannot be comprehended; they are ceaselessly subjected to the censuring, masking processes of social and economic power.
"Through quotation, Benjamin's conception of dialectic can be defined: disrupting both the closure toward which any text aspires and the synchronic and diachronic continuities to which even revolutionary texts are instantly assigned by dominant languages, the historian momentarily fuses two or more isolated passages, thus producing the "dialectical image" (Benjamin's phrase). This dialectical image always involves, whether tacitly or explicitly, through added commentary, the historian's own perspective; the language it would bring into being, in its moment of illumination, is precisely, not the language of contemplation (conventional history from a detached perspective), but the language of action, politics. This perhaps surprising outcome is implicit in the very syntax of language as Benjamin understands it; a text certainly describes the world, but always with a purpose, a dimension of longing, a contrasting of what is with what might be. To quote from a text is not to neutralize that longing, which the speaker may or may not intend, but to heighten it dialectically, to draw the sedimented dreams and ideals out of an individual word or image through the magnetizing power of its secret allies in other texts, Benjamin summarizes his method, insisting dialectically (and in practice not quite accurately) on his own absence qua individual speaker from the potent new language of quotation:
""The method of this work is literary montage. I have nothing to say. Only to show. I will steal nothing valuable and appropriate no brilliant formulations. But the rags, the refuse: my intention is not to make an inventory of these things but to allow them, in the only possible way, to fulfill their existence-by making use of them.""
"The work to which Benjamin is referring here is his arcades project, the study of Paris in the nineteenth century that Benjamin collected materials for from 1927 until 1940 and intended to write using the methodology of quotation. The book was never written, although essays and prospectuses emerged from efforts, and his studies on Baudelaire assembled posthumously, became an extraordinary book (Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Age of High Capitalism.) One cannot say that these preliminaries give any idea of what the final work might have looked like, since they are far from reflecting the methodological rigor Benjamin intended to impose on himself:
""I have nothing to say."" p. 16
"The 1982 publication of the entire collection of materials, however, suggests much about Benjamin's understanding of history, modernity, and dialectical method and about the specific ways in which he sought to make the languages of nineteenth-century Paris resound anew. Above all, the learned debate surrounding his Theses on the Philosophy of History-does theology or Marxism have the upper hand?-looks very different in the light of these materials (4); with their many repetitions, their quick, informal annotations, these notes exemplify both the limitless ambition and the strict self-discipline of Benjamin's theoretical project. His remarkable melding of perspectives-the philosophical, the literary, the sociological, the linguistic, the political, the theological-is what enables him to will his own withdrawal from the scene as an individual. His individuality is wholly expressed in his vivid, excited yet skeptical responses to the texts of the past. And readers who find certain key terms in the published essays vital but somehow elusive can see these words here in action, informal and probing, imposing specific connotations while remaining still open, unfinished." p. 17
"One such word is aura. In the major essays, The Storyteller and The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, aura can appear to be a long-range diachronic concept of a fairly traditional, Schillerian kind. Surrounding the revered objects of older societies based on ritual, aura implies both directness and distance, a human sensorium attuned to manual crafts as well as to the organic round of the seasons; in short, it involves a structure of instinctual responses no longer available to industrialized humanity. These essays, however are neither melancholy nor dispassionate; they communicate great urgency, as if all the values associated with aura were somehow recoverable. But the deterministic premises exclude this possibility; industrialization is obviously irreversible. Something seems to be missing, namely, Benjamin's understanding of history as linguistically organized, a notion that pervades his essays without being spelled out. Paul Fry has astutely remarked that aura seems to be "inseparable from the moment of distraction in which it is reproduced." Benjamin has produced the concept of aura dialectically, from a perspective in which only its absence can be known. He is doing for preindustrialized society as a whole what the Renaissance and neoclassicism did for ancient Greece, with the difference that he is fully aware of creating a necessary dream, a projected antithesis to the as yet undecoded language of an urbanized, "distracted," nonauratic world. This linguistic perspective enables him to set aura in a series of binary relations with terms that do evoke specifically urban experiential structures . . . Trace and aura. The trace is the appearance of proximity, however remote to the object that left it behind. Aura is the appearance of distance, however close the object that evokes it. In the trace we take possession of the object; in aura it takes possession of us." Although Benjamin uses this definition of aura, without its antipode, in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, the context generates an unnecessary ambivalence; the experience of aura is contrasted, in a neutral tone, with . . . "the desire of contemporary masses to bring things 'closer' spatially and humanly." A reader unaccustomed to this shorthand will tend to assign positive, nostalgic value to aura. But the fuller context of the quotation from Das Passagenwerk shows that Benjamin means almost the opposite. In the age of fascism and advanced communications, aura is the illusion of distance produced by trivial dictators who have learned how to "take possession of" the masses. Not that Benjamin wants aura to be confined negatively either; the goal of producing a language of modernity is to enable us actually to describe our own experience. And without the binary tension with what that experience is not, such description is impossible.
"That fascism takes possession of the masses' utopian longings does not mean that those longings are to be condemned. Benjamin seeks precisely to articulate a syntax that would liberate longing from its imprisonment within the language of commodities. But such a syntax absolutely requires dialectical thinking, a rigorous exploration of why modernity, in its bourgeois format, necessarily excludes, marginalizes, and depoliticizes the utopian.
""The lines in [Goethe's] Blissful Longing- "no distance weighs you down, you fly hither, bewitched"-describe the experience of aura. The distance that, in the loved one's eyes, draws the lover toward it, is the dream of a better nature.The decline of aura and the shriveling of the fantasy image of a better nature (conditioned by a defensive posture in the class struggle) are one and the same. Thus the decline of aura and the decline of potency are ultimately one and the same.""
Since we live within this double decline, we have no direct access to its meaning. Judgements about it constitute the small change, the clichés of everyday language; they are in no way outside that language. Only through the dialectic of quotation, the activation of the past, does meaning become conceivable.
"The material of the arcades project is collected thematically, with groups of texts ranging from the hugely long section entitled, Baudelaire to a brief one on the stock exchange, economic history. One of these sections concerns "impotence": in the new language Benjamin is seeking to forge, the therapeutic phenomenon of impotence, widely analyzed in the nineteenth century, will speak without categorical mediation both to the growing fascination with "art for art's sake," aestheticized sterility, and to the draining away of political potency that is structured into the institutions of bourgeois democracy While neither aura nor political potency is available to the citizen of late capitalist societies, the capitalist ruling establishment is centrally concerned with producing an illusion of their availability strong enough to assuage the longing for them and to dislocate immediate perceptions. Hence, if alternatives are even to be conceived, it is essential to generate a language in which decline of aura and decline of potency are lived, comprehended as actualities, not as mere intuitions of absence.
"Another juxtaposition of sentences evokes both Benjamin's seemingly instinctive use of dialectical thought structures and the problematic role of aura in an industrialized world:
""Waiting is in a sense the well-nourished interior of boredom . . . Blanqui's theory [of recurrence] as a repetition of myth-a fundamental example of the primal history of the nineteenth century . . . Eternal recurrence is the originary form of primal, mythic consciousness . . . Life, in the hypnotized circle of eternal recurrence, supplies an existence that never emerges from the auratic.""
Dialectical thinking is indispensable for formulating the historical premises of lives structured by capitalism, which are inescapably specialized, isolated, prefabricated. Aura must be experienced as a negative because it is constantly being reproduced as an illusory positive, an indulgence of the longing for coherence.
"Equally hard to perceive-embedded as we are in the language of historical cause and effect, trends, roots, and progress-is that the key truth of the "age of history" is the impossibility of history, the perpetual replaying of the same scenario of power, exploitation, and the illusion of change. This truth is expressed in the myth of eternal recurrence, formulated by the famous revolutionary Auguste Blanqui in his last book written in prison, L'éternité par les astres: Hypothese astronomique (1872). Blanqui's work anticipates Nietzsche, and Benjamin's excitement at this discovery is palpable. That a revolutionary should, without diminution of intellectual energy, produce a wholly disillusioned version of the realm of political action is for Benjamin a key example of "primal history," that radical rupture of surface phenomena which enables the dialectician to penetrate to the "origin." Origins, in Benjamin's language, may be produced at any moment; they are not to be confused with the illusory "sources' of linear histories. An origin is both synchronic and diachronic, a moment, (a year, a decade) when a self-consistent cultural language comes into being, a discourse that generates both its own myths (e.g. history) and the refutation of those myths-here the theorization of (capitalist) recurrence." p. 18
"The surface mood corresponding to the myth of recurrence is boredom, a common complaint in the nineteenth century (Benjamin notes, without comment, Lamartine's 1839 remark that "La France s'ennuie"). Benjamin equates boredom with waiting; to wait without expectation of change is ultimately the same as refusing the idea of change, and this refusal means, through a dialectical shift in the experience of time, an opening toward a change beyond all prediction. Nietzsche makes this move in theorizing recurrence, and Benjamin's purpose is not to explain or even to contextualize Nietzsche but to annotate and juxtapose the many textual signs of the crisis that becomes explicit in Nietzche's thought. This effort certainly involves empathy with the nineteenth century, but not the historicist's empathy of self-denial and false neutrality; for Benjamin the partially mystified languages of the two centuries meet in the act of quotation, to be intensified through "translation" into a repoliticized syntax and vocabulary that can only be produced in this way:
""Boredom is always the outward sign of unconscious happening . . .One must not waste time but must load time into oneself. To waste time (to propel time out from oneself): the gambler. Time is spurting out of his every pore. To load up time, as one charges a battery: the flaneur. Finally the third type: he loads up time and reproduces it in changed form, the form of expectation-the one who waits.""
Boredom and waiting are figures of resistance to the empty recurrence of history. The auratic life implies the failure to resist: the events of daily life take possession of the individual who assents to them. And such assent was (and is ) extraordinarily easy. The entire apparatus of modern technology, under bourgeois control, is dedicated to making the passages of daily time painless, enjoyable, and full of novelty. It is virtually impossible to describe this process, since it has no outside; it remains culturally universal. One option is to celebrate the situation ironically, to disrupt temporal uniformity through acceleration: Baudelaire makes this move in praising "le nouveau," the other side of his desolate spleen and boredom. Baudelaire is the key figure through whom Benjamin gains access to the primal history conjoining the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and it is another theme of Baudelaire's that provides the core impulse for Benjamin's archaeology-his declared hostility to nature and his production of openly invented and exotic landscapes. In this respect, too, Baudelaire is rupturing, through ironic exaggeration, the illusory continuities in which he is embedded. Technology's shattering of preindustrial society is encoded in the refusal of industrial society to acknowledge any change: instead of political innovation, what is offered and reoffered as the new is an infinite series of simulacra of preindustrial society. Where nature was, there is now the reproduction of nature. Stated abstractly, this insight is hardly new: Heine, Marx, and Nietzsche, as well as Baudelaire, saw the paradox clearly. But Benjamin's temporal perspective drives him toward a new response, one that is not ethical or metaphysical but linguistic. Marx's revolutionary consciousness, Baudelaire's ironic intensity, Nietzsche's ethical transformation-all have proved powerless in the face of the normalcy of bourgeois recurrence.
"The third of the three master concepts, materialism, becomes indispensable at this point. Benjamin's project is materialistic in the sense that he locates the origin of modernity-the birth of the newly systemic language of commodities-in a material object, the Paris arcades, the glassed-in passages of shops that began to be installed between the old houses in the early 1800s. Why the arcades? These structures provide, for Benjamin, an almost complete symbolic text for the commercial production of daily life s it was undertaken (and elaborately masked) throughout the urban world of the century. There is first the virtuosic and manipulative deployment of the new technologies of glass and steel. The contours of the existing relations between buildings are not destroyed but blurred. In one sense, it becomes unclear where the outside ends and the inside begins. Whether one calls this process the privatization of the public realm or the surrender of private to public, these material objects can be read as easily as Balzac's novels in their rearticulation of human experience in the industrial age. In another sense, however, the the inside of the arcades clearly prevails over the outside: Benjamin has collected many citations devoted to the "interiorization" of city life, from the recurrent fantasies of a future Paris completely glassed over to the "domestication" of the streets, with people feeling free to move furniture from overcrowded apartments onto the street outside.
"Within the arcades themselves the production of nature proceeded apace, the glass roof sealing in rather than opening up. Benjamin notes the immediate interest in the exotic: the first theme arcade seems to have been devoted to Egypt, drawing on the collective memory of the Napoleonic campaign. History and geography are anthologized in the little shops, that is, deracinated and derealized; the shops provide the spectator and consumer with a seemingly inexhaustible urban "nature," protected from death and decay by the new rhythms of commerce. And, early on, as the structures began to "blossom" in sinuous decorative patterns, Benjamin links the seeming intimacy of the arcades to the seeming grandiloquence of the Crystal Palace and the trade fairs of the second part of the century. The project of enclosure and "naturalization" is open-ended, since every kind of restlessness must be assuaged.
"The more politics is repressed in the new urban landscape, the more it becomes legible in the margins of the text:
""The masklike play of styles that pervades the nineteenth century results because power relations are becoming invisible. The bourgeois power holders often no longer have power in the places were they live (as pensioners) and no longer in direct, unmediated forms. The style of their apartments becomes the false expression of their power.""
The ambivalence of power relations defines the arcades also. The freedom to stroll and wander, beloved of the new archetypal observer, Baudelaire's flaneur, is acted out within the symbolic control of the enclosure. Benjamin finds the earliest reference to a flaneur in a 1798 police report complaining of the difficulty of identifying people in crowds. Commerce needs crowds, and the arcades generate them. Yet these crowds may produce intensified isolation rather than politics, not only because of the richly documented administrative measures for the control of crowds but also because of an unstable dialectic at the heart of the flaneur's consciousness, one that folds the observer back into the commercial continuity:
""Dialectics of flânerie: on the one hand, the man who feels looked at by everyone and everything, the epitome of the suspicious person; on the other hand, the person who is completely untraceable, protected. Presumably it is just this dialectic that [Poe's] "Man of the Crowd" develops.""
"The concept of quotation rearticulates the relations between the three master concepts-dialectic, materialism, and history: (1) the language that will bring the nineteenth century to consciousness in a twentieth century as yet helplessly immersed in its unrecognized past-this language is to be produced dialectically, through a technique of rupture and montage that refuses the (commercially)prefabricated continuities of history; (2) the language will be structured by quotations in which the unguarded documentary sentence speaks directly to the irony of Baudelaire, dispensing with the traditional hierarchies of intellect and sensibility, which in a world ruled by commodities have become mere masking devices; (3) the historical truth that needs to be documented is the myth of eternal repetition of the same, a myth created, not on Zarathustra's mountaintop, but by the limitless ambition of capitalism to structure a "normal" everyday life devoid of politics-a structuring conditioned by, and in turn conditioning, the need to reproduce nature, to reinvent a preindustrial world where mass politics have no place. Benjamin stresses the delight of the materialist in the eloquence of nineteenth-century produced objects, especially the most ephemeral and useless: in them the text of reproduced nature and repressed politics becomes ever more legible, the more the quoted objects are juxtaposed.
"If the arcades project were describable exclusively through the schema just outlined, Benjamin could justifiably be charged with offering mere antihistory. Instead of presenting events as moving steadily forward at the whim of politicians, so the argument might go, he shows us events moving in meaningless circles at the whim of technological innovation. But for Benjamin technology is far from being the base for superstructural phenomena. Rather, it is an important element in the open-ended "text" of the nineteenth century; and his quest is for the syntactical rules governing that text. To a reader like Benjamin, such rules are peculiarly legible at points of apparent marginality, in utilitarian technologies or in subjective emptiness. Nothing could be more energetic and speculative than his addenda to the quotations on boredom and impotence. What fascinates him about the eternal recurrence of modernity is that it comprise two antithetical moments, fabulous inventiveness and the sudden evaporation of meaning, involving a diachrony: the industrial landscape has to be invented before the signs of decay can be discerned. But, as Benjamin's texts reveal, there is nothing gradual about either the invention or the decay: the full range of industrial fantasies and controls is on the scene by 1830; they are noted by contemporaries, and pronouncements about decay follow almost immediately. (5)" p. 21
"This cycle, of course, is built into the structure of fashion, which is central to the capitalist project. But Benjamin, like Baudelaire, refuses to take such phenomena lightly. For the rhythm of obsolescence controlling fashion has produced a trap into which most historians have fallen: the discerning of a "rise and fall" of this or that political-cultural phenomenon-in other words, an extrapolation from the style of the new, recurrent history patterns to a postulation of substance. In making this move, historians imagine for themselves some kind of external position, presumably superior to the deluded processes they are describing. But they are the deluded ones; thy have simply succumbed to the capitalist machine's constant production of its ultimate exquisite seduction: decay. "There are no periods of decay," insists Benjamin. Moreover, we live within the system as it works to manufacture the illusions of growth and decay; there is no intellectually neutral place to stand outside it. The pseudodramas of modern recurrence are continually being produced for our stimulation and tranquilization, and our only recourse, the task Benjamin set himself, is to force into consciousness, through the electricity generated by quotation, the language of the phenomena in which we are embedded. Only with a precise descriptive language will genuine politics be possible. For the utopian impulse of revolution has been fully programmed into the nonpolitics of recurrence.
"To evoke the colossal inventiveness of early modernity, the birth moment of the arcades, Benjamin frequently quotes Balzac. Because the commercial machine aims at generating "natural" images, fantastic and documentary modes are intertwined in literary texts from the outset, and Balzac, as his contemporaries often noted, seems to have invented the actual human beings of the Second Empire. But, in seeking the syntax of the modern, Benjamin is interested less in Balzac's psychological or "prophetic" powers and more in his extraordinary openness to the profusion and jumble of the new cultural anthologizing and to the genuine abyss between modern and premodern experience. Benjamin cites a passage from Le cousin Pons:
""To believe that events prior to a man's life . . . can be immediately represented by cards that he shuffles, that he cuts, and that the teller of horoscopes divides into packets according to mysterious laws-that is absurdity; but it is absurdity that condemned steam power, that still condemns aerial navigation, that condemned the invention of gunpowder and printing, those of eyeglasses, engraving, and the most recent great discovery, the daguerrotype. If someone had come to tell Napoleon that a building and a man are ceaselessly and at any time represented by an image in the atmosphere, that all existent objects have such a tangible, perceptible spectral image, he would have consigned that person to Charenton. . . . And yet that's what Daguerre has proved by his discovery.""
Photography was born into a context of competing modes of phantasmagoric production, such as panoramas. Its potential for precision was always already shaped by the commercial need to produce images of power and escape. Objectivity is to subjectivity as decadence is to the "blooming" of commodities; all values are inscribed in a grid of illusory opposites, applauded or condemned according to the needs of the productive cycle.
" For Benjamin, the arcades themselves, for all their evident functionality, were inseparable from their image-making capacity:
""As long as gas and oil lamps burned in them, [the arcades] were fairy palaces. But when we want to think of them at the height of their magic, we imagine the arcade of the panorama around 1870 when on the one side hung the gaslight, on the other the oil lamps still flickered. The decline begins with electric lighting. But it was not fundamentally a decline, but more precisely a reversal. As mutineers, after conspiring for days, seize a fortified position, so the commodity, at one stroke, seized power over the arcades. Only now came the epoch of numbers and large firms. The inner glow of the arcades was extinguished with the blaze of electric lights and stole away into their names. But now the name became like a filter, which only released the most secret, bitterest essence of what had been.""
It is important to grasp the strategy Benjamin used in this passage, which is in every sense dialectical. Superficially he is attributing the decline of the arcades to technological change, but the intimate link between the visibility of technology and the invisibility of the ruling class is a premise of this descriptive style. Moreover, the decline was so sudden that it was not really a decline at all but a dialectical shift, a transformation of object into readable text. "Naming" is a central theme of Benjamin's early essay on language; as the arcades "became" their names, their syntax becomes verbal. And political activity is present here too. The date 1870, the time of the Commune, cannot be accidental. Since the book remained unwritten, we cannot know how Benjamin would have integrated his thematic texts on the Commune with his analyses of technological change. But the quotations concerning the Commune tell of the extreme self-consciousness with which the uprising was based on existing revolutionary texts-and of the way in which its failure was itself instantly textualized, as the myth of recurrence rose to the surface of consciousness. Clearly 1870 is the moment, the rift through which the text of the industrial landscape suddenly becomes legible, to contemporaries as well as to later observers. The image-making productivity of early modernity, the play of styles and moods that culminates in Baudelaire's time, the Second Empire, can suddenly be seen for what it is." p. 22
"Such moments owe their lasting power of illumination, Benjamin tells us, to their containing within themselves both their prehistory and their posthistory . . . The posthistory of 1870 has been the persisting indecipherability of what was briefly legible to the few (Blanqui, Nietzsche) as the text of recurrence. Between 1870 and Benjamin's time the numberless programs for radical change were without exception absorbed into the recurrence they sought to transcend. In his own attempt at decoding the text, Benjamin deployed the imagery of dream and awakening ;
""The Copernican shift in historical perspective is this: the fixed point used to be "the past," and the present endeavored, gropingly, to align its understanding with this given entity. Now this relation is to be inverted, and the past is to receive its dialectical definition from the synthesis that the act of awakening achieves through the structuring of antithetical dream images. Politics attains primacy over history. That means that historical "facts" become something that has just happened to us: to grasp hold of them is the task of memory. And awakening is the model act of remembering, that act in which we succeed in remembering the things that are closest, most intimate, in remembering the self.""
One section of the arcades project is devoted to Jugendstil because Jugendstil constitutes, in Benjamin's view, a false awakening from the dream, an intensification of modernity toward paradox rather than clarity. Jugendstil artists understand very well the dynamics of recurrence; but instead of translating its symptoms, such as impotence and boredom, into political understanding, they transfigure, fetishize these very symptoms. In particular these artists make the move most distrusted by Benjamin, the undialectical restoration of aura through new stagings of ritual and illusory distance:
""Jugendstil forces the auratic. The sun had never felt better than in their wreaths woven from its rays . . . Maeterlinck develops the auratic to the point of monstrosity. The silence of dramatic characters is one of its forms . . . A basic motif of Jugendstil is the transfiguration of infertility. The body is preferably drawn in those forms that precede sexual maturity.""
"For all its sophistication, Jugendstil acts out once again the prescribed sequences of consumer capitalism: anthologizing the exotic, reproducing technology as if such tools were natural phenomena, idealizing a humaness severed from all social functioning, claiming to purify and transform social relations through the intimate refinements of aesthetic ritual (6). Benjamin is thus able to link Jugendstil to its apparent opposite, futurism, that explicit glorification of recurrence and technology which opens directly onto the debased auratic ritual of fascism:
""The reactionary attempt to uncouple technically defined forms from their functional context and to turn them into natural constants, that is, to stylize them, emerges, as in Jugendstil, in futurism somewhat later.""
"Benjamin's ideal for the arcades project is, as we saw earlier, a montage of quotation devoid of commentary:
""I have nothing to say.""
The realization of such an ideal, however, would require the reader to deploy a politically activated language. The implicit circularity is that of language as such: within the reader's mind the completed citational structure would crystallize the syntax indispensable for decoding the text. The nineteenth century would be both fully internalized and transcended by a political consciousness. Thus Benjamin's failure to complete the work appears, once one's sadness at his individual fate is absorbed, appropriate to his refusal of all premature languages. On the one hand, the quotations as juxtaposed continue to suggest even more provocative juxtapositions. And, on the other hand, Benjamin's comments and independent speculations permit certain keywords to acquire a new identity. These words would have to belong to an "awakened" vocabulary. Though included in the dictionary, they urgently need the politicized connotations without which the industrial age cannot be brought to full consciousness (7).
"To conclude, I will briefly explore a crucial exemplar, the word pair Erfahrung and Erlebnis, which have become familiar through Benjamin's published essay On Some Motifs in Baudelaire. Since the dictionary defines both terms as "experience," the translator, Harry Zohn, assigns that meaning only to Erfahrung, while varying the renderings of Erlebnis according to context (Illuminations) The simplest definition is "moment that has been lived," or "lived moment," which catches the actual German etymology. In the Baudelaire essay Benjamin develops the distinction in relation to definitions of memory. In the arcades project the range is broader:
""Experience is the harvest from work, the lived moment is the phantasmagoria of the idler.""
Since this remark is made in the thematic context of idling, the reader is alerted to its dialectical intention. Benjamin elaborates, in another comment:
""What distinguishes experience from the lived moment is that it is inseparable from the idea of a continuity, a sequence.""
Since the whole thrust of the project is to clarify the discontinuities of an urban existence, it becomes clear that experience, the deriving of wisdom from work and lived continuity, is precisely what modernity renders unavailable; Benjamin argues this point in The Storyteller. To articulate a modern syntax, then, he must explore what the lived moment involves, since it defines the mode of experience actually available to us.
"By dialectical necessity, the exploration is negative in tone. Produced by the consumption cycles of capitalism, lived moments are ecstasies of artifice that the system has aimed at gradually domesticating, so that there has ceased to be a counterdefinition of experience with which to contrast them. In the nineteenth century the "need for sensation" intensified, and services sprang up to satisfy the need. Among the new professionals was the gossip journalist who . . .
""alienates the city from the city dweller. He is thus one of the first technicians called into being by the heightened need for lived moments.""
The emphasis on the lived moment seems to imply that the material continuities of work and community have been culturally devalued; whatever the relational context of one's existence, one learns to discount it, aspiring instead to a ceaseless supply of lived moment produced by the ever-expanding network of urban stimuli. As a dialectician, Benjamin presses this bleak reality to its consummation in the antiexperience of the First World War:
""The intentional correlative of the lived moment has not remained the same. In the nineteenth century it was "the adventure." In our day it appears as "fate." In fate is contained the concept of the "total lived moment," which is by definition deadly. The war prefigures this perfectly. ("That I was born German, for that I am dying"-the trauma of birth already contains the shock that is deadly. This coincidence defines "fate.")""
"In this somewhat elusive comment we feel Benjamin's intensely linguistic consciousness at work. Can the oxymoron "total lived moment" be made to yield a dialectical turn? Once the seemingly negative concept of the lived movement is forced into juxtaposition with the equally unpromising "fate," the two words begin to seem jointly moveable onto a new linguistic plane. Benjamin explored one set of possibilities in his Baudelaire essay: through the notion of "involuntary memory," derived from Proust and Freud, a structure of genuine experience becomes imaginable, a mutual illumination of an accidental lived moment and the entirety of an individual life reanimated as fate. Here I would point to another linguistic connection, the association of the word fate with a familiar Benjamin figure, the collector:
""Let us remember how significant for a collector is not only his object but also its entire past, that which belongs to its creation and authenticity as well as the details from its apparently external history: previous owners, purchase price, value, etc. All this, the "factual" dates as much as the others, coalesces for the true collector, with every one of his possessions, into a whole magical encyclopedia, into a world order whose outline is the fate of his object. Here, in this narrow domain, can be understood how the great physiognomists (and collectors are physiognomists of the world of things) become interpreters of fate.""
The simultaneous detachment and involvement of the collector suggest a key to the dialectical recovery of lived moments. Like the collector, the ordinary individual in the urban machine severs (involuntarily, to be sure) moments of experience from one another and from their functional context in the work world or in any collective enterprise. But the model of the collector suggests that it is possible to reconstitute these moments as an acknowledged fate, a collection of events that can be read as the text of a single story, the epoch as a (repressed) political object. And the consciousness that undertakes such reading can only be political (8).
"Aware of the elitist element in the collector image, Benjamin develops the lived moment as a potential locus of resistance in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. The urban masses cannot be released from the incessant production of lived moments, but their discontinuous subjectivity can perhaps be valorized through another term Benjamin seeks to install in the new political language, distraction. In their very distraction the masses may resist the more blatant artifices of fascist ritual, may even appropriate the new technologies to achieve a genuine analysis of the urban landscape. To be sure, Benjamin is advocating this dialectical move, not describing it. And Richard Wolin reproaches him for excessive optimism, for falling into the technologism against which he himself so often warned. But Paul Fry observes that Benjamin's exploration of the term distraction is in harmony with an ancient tradition, one that has been marginalized by the new, obsessive rituals of aura:
"The oldest notions of distraction are in fact associated with preternatural wisdom, even with holiness."
"Ultimately the lived moment gains its potency from its constitutive role in Benjamin's own enterprise. Benjamin is fully aware that his life is made of discontinuous moments, that "experience" is not to be had. And so he discovers, in the urban landscape of the nineteenth century, all his partial selves-the flaneur, the collector, the critic-who have constructed life models out of this initial debasement of human temporality. These models are individualist modes of resistance, conditioned by self-irony and self-enclosure. For Benjamin, the crisis has deepened in every sense in the twentieth century, not because of the disastrous political events, but precisely because of our utter inability, as isolated and fated individuals, to read the language of these events, to speak politically. Benjamin's dream of a montage of quotations, from which his own voice might ultimately be absent, does not express a renunciation of the individual for the collective; rather, it represents a heightened version of what the individual might be. We are still dreaming the dreams of the last century and are inexorably obeying its command of novelty, whenever we think seemingly novel thoughts. Fantasies of exploration, of discovery, of escape perpetuate themselves through new versions of subjectivity and technology, in a symbiosis that is open or masked according to the imperatives of the consumer moment. To awaken from the dream, we must learn to read it as a text; but to become such readers, we must distill from it a language that is outside it as well as inside. Only through a language born in the deprivatized zone of quotation, a political language finally adequate to the mystifications of capitalism, can we acknowledge and confront the alarming identity between the text of the nineteenth century and that of the twentieth." p. 25
"(1) Already in 1822 Fourier, in his Théorie de l'unité universelle, locates the "rue-galerie" within his urban utopia as . . . "the principal room in the palace of harmony, of which one can have no idea in civilization." . . . there was a hiatus in the building of the arcades between 1800 (the date of the "passage des Panoramas" and 1822, and most of them were constructed between 1822 and 1834. . . . Benjamin evokes their "physiognomy" by citing a sentence from Baudelaire: . . . "It seemed strange to me that I could have so often walked past this prestigious establishment without guessing its point of entry."
"(2) . . .
"(3) The theory of redemption sketched here is best understood in linguistic terms. A language omits nothing. Yet it is not an inventory, not a list of substantives, but a syntax, a systematizing instrument with dialogue and change inherent in its ontology: "The historian's task, as Benjamin conceives it, is as necessary and impossible as that of the translator. It is that task . . . 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-and to do so, in consequence, at every level. Perhaps, then, it was destined to remain unfinished." Irving Wohlfarth, Et Cetera? The Historian as Chiffonier, New German Critique, 39 (1986), pp. 142-68.
"(4) . . . Benjamin has no "alternative" language . . . The words he uses are necessarily provisional, written inside the "dream" of technological capitalism. If we accept this metaphor, for the modern experience, we must . . . acknowledge that we have not yet awakened from the dream. Indeed the pace of required innovation and obsolescence, inaugurated at the time of the arcades, is obviously accelerating. All our isms speak this language. There is (as yet) no outside, no hors-text."
"(5) In a striking confirmation of Benjamin's reading and dating of the syntax of modernity, Michael Foucault stresses that the recurrent "failure" of prisons (like the "decay" of bourgeois institutions in general) is built in to the initial conceptualizations of reform through detention: "For the prison, in its reality and visible effects, was denounced at once as a great failure of penal justice. In a very strange way, the history of imprisonment does not obey a chronology in which one sees, in orderly succession the establishment of a penality of detention, then the recognition of failure, then the slow rise of projects of reform, seeming to culminate in the more or less coherent definition of penitentiary technique; then the implementation of this project; lastly, the recognition of its successes or its failure. There was in fact a telescoping or in any case a different distribution of these elements. And, just as the project of corrective technique accompanied the principle of punitive detention, the critique of the prison and its methods appeared very early on, in those same years 1820-45; indeed, it was embodied in a number of formulations which-figures apart-are today repeated almost unchanged." Michel Foucault Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Pantheon, 1977.
"(6) Jugendstil's refusal of dialectical opposition, of course, makes these artists peculiarly accessible to Benjamin's dialectical reading of them, much as advertising images open a political perspective onto today's society: . . . "No historical phenomenon is comprehensible solely in terms of the category of escape; the flight is always stamped by the reality of what is being fled." In this section, Benjamin names-besides Maeterlinck-Wilde, Beardsley, the young Rilke, Stefan George, and Odilon Redon; he also sees the sterile perfection of Ibsen's Hedda Gabler as an anticipatory critique of Jugendstil."
"(7) The translation of social text into operational language reinforces Susan Buck-Morss's response to Benjamin's political challenge; in her view, his notations were never intended to document "all" issues of modernity. Benjamin had not, or could not have, understood certain structures of oppression that feminist readings of the Western past have since yielded. It is up to us, not to 'complete' Benjamin's panoramic work, but to keep it open and active: "On their own, the historical facts in the the Passagen-Werk are flat, situated, as Adorno complained, 'on the crossroads of magic and positivism.' 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 flaneurs can be transformed from illusion to knowledge once the 'principle of montage' is turned into history . . . . " Susan Buck-Morss The Flaneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering, New German Critque, 29 (1986); 99-141.
"(8) . . . '[Fuch's] thought is to give back to the work of art its existence in society, from which it had been so radically dislocated that the place where he found it was the art market, a place in which, equally remote from its makers and from those who could understand it, it persisted, shrunken into a commodity.'"
Works:
Walter Benjamin Gesammelte Schriften, (Ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser), 6 vols., Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1972-85. [Trans. and published by Harvard U. Press]
Walter Benjamin Illuminations (Trans. Harry Zohn) New York: Shocken, 1969.