At issue . . . 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). (A, [N1a, 6], 461)
The expression ‘the book of nature’ indicates that one can read the real like a text. And that is how the reality of the nineteenth century will be treated here. We open the book of what happened. (A, [N 4, 2], 464)
—(Walter Benjamin, Convolute N: ‘On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress,’ Arcades Project)
Benjamin’s conception of materialist historiography is intimately bound up with his notion of the dialectical image [dialektische Bilder]. Despite the importance of the idea in Benjamin’s unfinished Arcades Project [Das Passagen- Werk ] it is difficult to settle on an acceptable account of the intended significance of Benjamin’s use of the word ‘image’ in it. The difficulty arises on two main counts. First, Benjamin’s definition of the dialectical image in the Arcades is somewhat difficult to pin down since it is intended both as a new theory of materialist historiography and as a conception of revolutionary, practical intervention in prevailing circumstances. In neither the theoretical nor the practical dimensions of the concept, however, is it made clear what warrants or recommends the use of the term ‘image.’ The scholarship on the dialectical image testifies to this difficulty since it would be impossible to reconstruct from it any consensus regarding what Benjamin’s category of the dialectical image could mean qua ‘image.’ Indeed much of the scholarship tends to skirt around this precise problem. At one end, scholars insist on the material figures that Benjamin uses to structure his approach to history in the Arcades as the distinctive mark of his way of thinking; at the other, they attempt to remedy the fragmentation such a focus on dispersed material figures suggests by invoking ideas that should point to the rigour and inventiveness of his approach to history, such as the notion of history as ‘citation’ or truth as a ‘constellation.’ In neither case does the scholarship succeed in clarifying the significance of Benjamin’s use of the terminology of the image, which, I think, requires attending to the problem of how meaning can be ‘read’ in sensuous forms. Second, there is the important problem of squaring the functions of the particular species of the dialectical image with the critical perspective Benjamin’s early writing takes on the hermeneutics of the image. Indeed one of the perplexing features of the concept of the dialectical image is the very choice of the vocabulary of the image [das Bild] given Benjamin’s early polemic stance on the ‘reading’ of meaning in sensuous forms in, for example, his essay on ‘Goethe’s Elective Affinities.’
In earlier chapters we have seen Benjamin’s condemnation of the image. He argued that sensuous form embodies ambiguous meaning. In the essay ‘Goethe’s Elective Affinities’ the image is associated with the ambiguity of myth and he calls for critical violence to ‘annihilate’ it. In his conception of the allegory, it is true, Benjamin seems to establish a more positive account of the image, but it is clear that this account is positive only in the sense that the sensuous form is transcended in allegorical knowledge. The theory of similitude seeks an experience of things that could allow for a recollection of the whole. He describes Proust as ‘homesick for the world distorted in the state of similitude,’ and Proust’s sentences as the ‘entire muscular activity’ needed to gather together the ‘stratum in which the materials of memory no longer appear singly, as images, but tell us about a whole’ (SW II, 247). In the importance it allocates to the experience of ‘things’ as a point of access to ‘a whole,’ does the theory of similitude thereby recuperate the otherwise maligned category of sensuous form? What is important in similitude is the coordination between such references to an experience of a whole and the transparent experience of the world as an ‘undivided whole’ in the Language essay. Similitude belongs to the evaluative schema of Benjamin’s early thinking in which the lowering over things of opaque form in the Fall is opposed to the transparent relation to the essence of things in naming language. Here, too, then, sensuous form is not championed; what is sought is the authentic experience of things as these things are captured in ‘words’ (or to use the vocabulary of the essay on Language, ‘naming language’).
Viewed from this background, Benjamin’s notion of the dialectical image, arguably the conceptual pivot of his Arcades Project, seems puzzling. The figures of the flaneur, the prostitute, the gambler, and the failed revolutionary that feature in the text are also question begging. Why does Benjamin choose these seemingly marginal figures from the nineteenth century? Ostensibly, these figures are supposed to point to their redemption in the twentieth century. But then how can the choice of these two centuries escape the appearance of an arbitrary selection of historical moments? The conceptual architecture of the Arcades—specifically, its peculiar selection of material and understanding of history—seems to sit oddly with the terms of his early condemnation of the image on the grounds of its arbitrary character.
The methodology outlined in the Preface to Benjamin’s Origin of German Tragic Drama can go some way to explain his choice of material. In the Preface Benjamin argues that to understand a general situation or rule one needs to explain the exception. Hence we might say that for Benjamin the marginal figures that are treated in the Arcades are not arbitrary because he thinks it is the extremities of the nineteenth century which reveal the truth of the century as a whole. This conception of the exception from the early Preface helps to explain the significance of the category of the marginal or the exception, but not the specific examples he chooses.
The conception of historical truth he outlines in this earlier Preface also provides a cogent frame for his seemingly arbitrary choice of historical moments in the Arcades. Benjamin’s dialectical images are not just geared for making the truth of the nineteenth century recognised in the twentieth. The materials of the nineteenth century furnish the material for knowledge of the truth of human history as such. In the dialectical image, in other words, instead of the seeming arbitrariness of two ages, there is the experience of an absolute moment of truth in human history. Still, these methodological qualifications are theoretical claims that do not fully explain the selection of particular images in the Arcades. The question of how to reconcile this project with Benjamin’s earlier work remains.
In this chapter I would like to give critical consideration to the issue of how Benjamin uses the vocabulary of the dialectical image in The Arcades Project. In particular, I would like to consider the significance of the amendments that his late use of the terminology of the image makes to his earlier conception regarding reading images. Do the points of difference between the earlier and the later schemas make Benjamin’s positions on the topic of the image completely incompatible? The highly pointed account of the pernicious effects of the hermeneutic perception of the image in the early work seems to be at issue in crucial respects in the position outlined in Benjamin’s Arcades. In other words, Benjamin’s early conception of the image seems to be substantially incompatible with the one he later defends. Further, his earlier position furnishes specific criteria for identifying the substantial difficulties the later one entails. Hence the following question arises: what guides Benjamin’s choice of the terminology of the image in his Arcades?
My discussion is divided into four main parts. First, I examine the place of the dialectical image in the Arcades. Next, I look at three representative ways that the scholarly reception has framed Benjamin’s conception of the dialectical image. In each of these three cases I argue that the problem of why Benjamin chooses the terminology of the image is sidestepped. The failure to address adequately the issue of the image hampers the capacity of this scholarship to deal with some of the significant problems of the Arcades, such as Benjamin’s peculiar approach to history. How does the material he assembles bear the revolutionary meaning he attaches to it? Does this meaning, as some critics have argued, ultimately boil down to the persuasive assertion of the interpreter?1 Without an appreciation of what is at stake in Benjamin’s use of the vocabulary of the image, these questions and objections, I suggest, remain unanswerable. In the third section I examine how the theoretical and practical dimensions of Benjamin’s account of the dialectical image may respond to the charge of arbitrariness. Further, the study of these dimensions points to significant continuities and breaks between the Arcades and Benjamin’s early work on the topics of epistemology and revolutionary experience.
In the fourth section, I defend the thesis that Benjamin seeks in the vocabulary of the dialectical image an immediately experience-able knowledge that could charge revolutionary aspirations. My thesis is that the dialectical image brings together aspects of the two conceptions that his earlier work had placed in opposition. On the one hand, Benjamin uses aspects of his conception of the Revelation to support the claim that the dialectical image embodies historical truth. On the other, he appeals to myth when he argues that this truth is immediately experienced in the materiality of the image. Each of these early views is altered in their transposition to the context of the materialist historiography of the Arcades. For instance, the early and later works share the view that meaning is authentic insofar as it is intentional and articulated in language. When sensuous forms are isolated from the transcendent intention of the Revelation, they are described in the early work as mythic forms that induce anxiety and guilt. In its defence of the idea that the dialectical image is encountered in language, the Arcades attempts to retain the criterion of articulated intention. However, since the absolute theological perspective of God’s creative word, which organised the account of the Revelation in the early work, has been left behind, the Arcades allows instead that images embody experience-able historical truth. The new conceptual arrangement secures the possibility that material forms may bear significant meanings and saves such meanings from arbitrariness and transitoriness. How Benjamin thinks these particular meanings can effectively be placed in the service of revolutionary desire is another question, which I will take up in the following chapter.
Benjamin worked on The Arcades Project between 1927 until his death in 1940.2 He intended it to provide the apparatus for a new mode of historical thinking. The vast collection of materials and citations he gathered would come to speak directly to the reader, and his connecting passages of commentary and interpretation would, in Rolf Tiedemann’s words, ‘almost seem to vanish beneath the very weight of the excerpts.’3 The English language edition of the Arcades includes Benjamin’s overview of the project in two pieces from 1935 and 1939, the first written to engage the Institute for Social Research to sponsor it as an official institute research project, and the second, on Horkheimer’s suggestion, as a way to find Benjamin an American sponsor. Neither of these pieces was intended for publication. The bulk of the posthumously published project has been edited and arranged from the ‘Notes and Materials,’ which Benjamin had subdivided into named and lettered folders, or convolutes, now making up the major part of Volume 5 of Benjamin’s Gesammelte Schriften. The English edition, which includes the draft material for the 1935 and 1939 Exposés as well as Tiedemann’s supplementary essay, runs to well over one thousand pages.
The ‘notes’ include important reflections of Benjamin’s on historical method, amongst them the outline of his conception of the ‘dialectical image’ in the N convolute. The category, which is arguably the conceptual pivot of the project, is also referred to in the 1935 Exposé as well as in Benjamin’s draft materials for the Exposé.4 I will discuss below the implications of the nuances these different sources contain for any attempt to understand what he intends by the ‘dialectical image.’
As the title indicates, Benjamin attaches manifold significance to the Paris arcades—les passages. The 1935 and 1939 Exposés of the project describe these arcades as the most significant architectural forms of the nineteenth century. The arcades represent technological progress of a highly specific kind: they are among the first built constructions to use steel and glass. Benjamin credits the dexterity in the use of such material with a telling significance for the meaning of the century. ‘It is the peculiarity of technological forms of production (as opposed to art forms) that their progress and their success are proportionate to the transparency of their social content. (Hence glass architecture)’ (A, [N4, 6], 465, his emphasis). The new architectural forms of the arcades deploy materials in ways that transform the relation that hitherto obtained between the ‘interior’ and ‘exterior.’ Herein lies the crucial idea that in the lace-like ironwork of these arcades, built of the material of steel and glass over which human beings have a newfound technical disposition, are the materialised ancestral wishes for making the world human. Modern technical progress gives birth to distinctively new hopes, which the dialectical image supposedly renders legible and accessible to experience.
The encasing of the street in steel and glass construction in the arcades provides particularly significant instances of the nineteenth-century life. This reference to the new architectural arrangements established in the arcades may be considered as a model for the aspirations of the project itself, not least in respect to the material it gathers and presents for the ‘perception’ of the nineteenth century. The dialectical image is Benjamin’s theory of the transformation of this material into legible historical truth, providing the meaning-context for action in a ‘figural <bildlich> ’ relation to the ‘now’ (A [N3, 1], 463). In the ‘dialectical image,’ he writes, ‘what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation’ (A [N3, 1], 463). Typically he expresses the operation of the dialectical image through the metaphor of awakening: ‘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’ (A, [N4, 3], 464).
The dialectical image stages a figural relation to the whole of the nineteenth century.5 Since the relation is figural, it presents the century through concrete instances, such as the ‘transparent’ architecture of les passages, or the miniaturised form of specific objects, such as the discarded commodities, which are housed in the shops in the arcades. These buildings and objects become ‘dialectical images’ when they are ‘readable’ or ‘recognisable.’ The ‘legibility’ of images is what makes the dialectical images ‘genuinely historical— that is, not archaic—images’ (A, [N3, 1], 463). ‘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’ (A, [N3, 1], 462). He writes:
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.
(A, [N4, 1], 464)
The idea that what ‘has been within a particular epoch is always . . . “what has been from time immemorial” ’ shows, further, that this historical index points beyond the twentieth century to the truth of human history tout court. In the Origin of German Tragic Drama, Benjamin defines ‘origin’ in similar terms: namely, as that which is ‘lifted out of’ the process of becoming.6 ‘The naked and manifest existence of the factual,’ he had argued in that earlier work, is unable to reveal anything. Rather, the ‘totality of history’ is the schema of revelation for truth. I will return to this point.
Alongside material on the iron and glass construction of les passages Benjamin places citations about distinctive ‘types’ of modern conduct or experience such as the flaneur and the dandy, the gambler, the prostitute, and the collector, with information on topics of past social history, such as the arrangement of things in domestic interiors, department stores, panoramas, and the arcades. His plan to assemble the materials for a new kind of ‘history’ that would be ‘citable in all its moments’7 intends that we relate to these moments as ‘legible’ or ‘readable’ images: ‘The expression “the book of nature” indicates that one can read the real like a text. And that is how the reality of the nineteenth century will be treated here. We open the book of what happened’ (A [N4, 2], 464). The repeated references to citation and the idea that the dialectical image is ‘encountered’ in language give some sense of the complexity that surrounds his use of the word ‘image.’ Against the ‘visual’ associations of the word ‘image,’ Benjamin uses the word in the peculiar sense of a vivid form that crystallises and expresses the century. The century is presented, not in stories, but in images: ‘Only dialectical images are genuine images (that is, not archaic); and the place where one encounters them is language’ [‘Nur dialektische Bilder sind echte (d.h.: nicht archaische) Bilder; und der Ort, an dem man sie antrifft, ist die Sprache. ’ (GS I, 577)] (A, [N2a, 3], 462). There are reams of literary citations and poetic images from Baudelaire, Blanqui, Hugo, Nietzsche, and Proust, amongst others, which stand alongside material collected in the latter part of his work on the project related to the Paris Commune and barricades, Haussmann, Saint-Simon, and Social Movements. The method of ‘literary montage’ [‘Methode dieser Arbeit: literarische Montage ’ (GS I, 574)] (A, [N1a, 8], 460), which governs the arrangement of these diverse elements, and which for a few scholars constitutes in some manner the ‘method’ of the ‘dialectical image,’8 deliberately ignores the contexts and networks, the ‘category’ to which these elements belong. Benjamin states in the N convolute that the dialectical image does not require ‘ingenious formulations’: ‘I needn’t say anything. Merely show. . . . the rags, the refuse—these I will not inventory but allow, in the only way possible, to come into their own: by making use of them’ (A [N1a, 8], 460). The idea of ‘merely showing’ the refuse, like those of ‘opening the book’ of ‘what happened’ or of a history that could be ‘citable in all its moments,’ is related to his aspiration to present the nineteenth century ‘in the now of its recognisability’ (A, [N 3, 1], 462–463). The refuse is shown to contain historical truth. Its ‘recognisability’ is that of the historical truth it contains. The dialectical image does not impart knowledge, in the sense of information. It awakens to action by making past wishes ‘recognisable’ and, through the ‘experience’ of indebtedness, actionable. In the dialectical image, the revolutionary will is formed.
After all, Benjamin’s project has an explicitly revolutionary intent. Citing the 1928 study Bauen in Frankreich by Sigfried Giedion, who writes that ‘ “[a]part from a certain haut-goût charm . . . the artistic draperies and wall-hangings of the previous century have come to seem musty,” ’ Benjamin argues that the charm these furnishings from the nineteenth century exercise ‘is proof that these things, too, contain material of vital importance for us’ (A, [N1, 11], 458).9 This ‘vital importance’ relates specifically to ‘the radioscopy . . . of the situation of the bourgeois class at the moment it evinces the first signs of decline.’ Hence these old decorative forms are, he writes, ‘of vital importance politically; this is demonstrated by the attachment of the Surrealists to these things’ (A [N1, 11], 458, emphasis added). Benjamin continues: ‘we . . . recognize today’s life, today’s forms, in the life and in the apparently secondary, lost forms of that epoch’ (A [N1, 11], 458). This recognition underpins the revolutionary significance of his idea of the ‘historical index’ of images. This index ‘not only says that they belong to a particular time; it says, above all, that they attain to legibility only at a particular time’ (A, [N3, 1], 462). The legibility images attain is the ‘point of explosion’ (A, [N3, 1], 463) that ‘liberates’ ‘the enormous energies of history’ (A, [N3, 4], 463). History is not the story of the past. Historical truth is not ‘knowledge’ of the past, but the ground of human life, what renders it meaningful. Historical time is not the chronological flow of time, but the fulfilled moment.
The complexity of the elements involved in the conceptualisation of the dialectical image has given rise to divergent interpretations of its significance and meaning for Benjamin’s approach to history.
Some critics have been tempted to conflate the ‘dialectical image’ with Benjamin’s earlier conception of allegory, which appears substantially analogous to the mode of operation of the ‘dialectical image.’10 Allegory, too, is trained on the problem of extracting redemptive meaning from historical ‘ruins.’ However, the conception of allegory in his Trauerspiel book is premised on an uncompromisingly hostile relation to the transitory forms of the material world. It points to the beyond. Such a perspective would appear to be incompatible with the view he develops in the Arcades that ‘the eternal . . . is far more the ruffle on a dress than some idea’ (A [N3, 2], 463). Indeed the conception of historical knowledge that drives the Arcades more or less inverts the perspective of allegory. It does not look beyond sensuous forms to a transcendent meaning. Instead it seeks in sensuous forms the ‘expression’ or vehicle for the ‘perception’ of historical truth, which ‘rescues’ the form from transitoriness. Thus, despite the temptation to conflate the two categories, the ‘allegorical meaning’ of these phenomena is not what Benjamin is aiming at. He is working instead on the general notion that one small ‘part’ can function to present (and make palpable) the ‘whole.’11 Such an idea seems close to how the symbol or the ur-phenomenon is understood in his early writings. These latter each put forward a version of the idea that in the image one perceives a truth that is presented in sensuous form. Benjamin seems to distinguish his use of the vocabulary of the ur-phenomenon in the Arcades from its Goethean articulation, which his early essays had likened to the ‘chaos of symbols.’ In the Arcades Benjamin states that his treatment of this concept in the Trauerspiel book extracts it ‘from the pagan context of nature’ and brings it ‘into the Jewish contexts of history.’ In his work on the arcades, similarly, he considers ‘the origin of the forms and mutations of the Paris arcades from their beginning to their decline.’ Hence the ‘facts’ he treats are not ‘primal phenomena.’ Instead they ‘become such only insofar as in their own individual development—“unfolding” might be a better term—they give rise to the whole series of the arcade’s concrete historical forms, just as the leaf unfolds from itself all the riches of the empirical world of plants’ (A, [N2a, 4], 462). The connection of the ‘sensuous form’ (in the dialectical image) to the ‘whole’ distinguishes it from the symbol. The ‘unfolding’ of the ‘concrete historical forms’ in the arcades yields the knowledge of the nineteenth century and beyond this century of human history itself. The aim of the exercise is ‘to discover in the analysis of the small individual moment the crystal of the total event’ (A, [N2, 6], 461). The project, he states, attempts to ‘conjoin a heightened graphicness <Anschaulichkeit> to the realization of the Marxist method. . . . The first stage in this undertaking will be to carry over the principle of montage into history. That is, to assemble large-scale constructions out of the smallest and most precisely cut components’ (A, [N2, 6], 461).
The methodology suggested by this intriguing idea that the mode of access to ‘the crystal of the total event’ is the ‘analysis of the small individual moment’ needs to be considered alongside the materials he assembles for this purpose—‘the smallest and most precisely cut components’—and his assertion that the Arcades resolves the problem of how to make ‘history’ ‘graphically perceptible’ (A, [N1a, 6], 460 & A, 911).12 The ‘dialectical image’ would presumably be an important part of Benjamin’s aspiration to construct the apparatus for the graphic, revolutionary perceptibility of the historical truth.13 Like most topics in Benjamin scholarship, however, it is difficult to find consensus about what this idea could mean or even what would count as a problem in Benjamin’s use of it.
I would now like to discuss three representative accounts of the dialectical image from the academic literature on the Arcades. In my view, despite their impressive treatments of aspects of Benjamin’s late work, each of these accounts looks past the problem of what Benjamin meant by the dialectical image, and specifically the question of why, given his early criticisms of the ambiguity entailed in the hermeneutic relation to sensuous form, he chooses to use the vocabulary of the image at all.
In general, the tone of Benjamin scholarship is one that avoids critical engagement with his writing and instead treats it in a posture of religious exegesis. Still, it is surprising that there is no sustained account in the literature as to why Benjamin describes the graphic perceptibility of history in ‘citation’ in the vocabulary of the image. One finds instead the regret about its obscurity, frequent celebrations of its ‘concreteness’ and speculative constructions that repudiate the use of the vocabulary of the ‘image’ altogether.
The few scholars who have made critical comments about Benjamin’s use of the terminology of the image have been censured by others as insufficiently sensitive to Benjamin’s unique style. Rolf Tiedemann’s complaint that Benjamin’s use of the term ‘dialectical image’ and ‘dialectic at a standstill’ [Dialektick im Stillstand ] lacks ‘terminological consistency,’ for instance, is rejected by Pierre Missac as unjustified and a misapprehension of the style of Benjamin’s thinking.14 The ‘philosophical’ approach of Tiedemann is rebuked as a ‘sterile approach via logic, which is unusable in practice.’15 Missac argues against Tiedemann that the concept of the dialectical image, like that of the dialectic at a standstill, is an ‘oxymoron,’ a term which he does not intend to wield against Benjamin as a criticism. In Missac’s view we should not take Benjamin’s terminology ‘literally’; its value lies in the way its conjunctions intensify and provoke thinking.16
According to Missac, many of Benjamin’s core notions are ‘images’ and ‘metaphors.’ This means, he insists, that categories like the ‘dialectical image’ are not antinomies, but ‘surrealist metaphors,’ which bring with them the ‘power of profane illumination.’ Despite its status as a ‘metaphor,’ Missac nonetheless thinks that it is possible to specify that within the concept of the ‘dialectical image,’ ‘image’ has ‘the upper hand’ over ‘dialectic.’17 Apparently, this is not just because of the general importance of the vocabulary of the image as ‘one of the first and original sources of Benjamin’s mode of thought,’18 nor because the category is primarily ‘metaphorical,’ but also because the features that render the image so indispensable to Benjamin’s thinking are prominent in his approach to history. Missac explains: ‘there is nothing better than the image, no better means of not saying too much than to show something.’19 Here he echoes Benjamin’s formulations cited above in which he implies that the material he has assembled and constructed will speak on its own without any need for him to ‘say’ anything. However, formulations like these still require explanation: what could it mean to say that material speaks for itself? Since ‘the image’ in Missac’s understanding is related to ‘showing’ and avails itself of the associative power of metaphor, its mode of presentation is placed in his account ‘halfway between reproduction and description, sometimes becoming tableau or even anecdote.’20 When Missac concludes that the dialectical image ‘is an antidote to monotony and introduces change, or will allow it to be hoped for in the form of the image,'21 he has, however, in the guise of fidelity to Benjamin’s suggestive formulations, failed to explain how this ‘showing’ mode of ‘presentation’ could perform such a function, nor why the change it introduces would be ‘hoped for,’ specifically, ‘in the form of the image.’22 For all the importance credited to the category of the image, little is said beyond the repetition of adjectives like ‘concrete’ and ‘graphic,’ or aspirations like ‘historical perceptibility’ to tell us either how this category is understood or what it could mean in the specific context of ‘materialist historiography.’ In particular, in eschewing the problem of explaining the sense of the image as ‘dialectical’ Missac has obscured Benjamin’s attempt to use the vocabulary of the image as a graphic mode of access to specifically historical ‘knowledge.’ In the dialectical image historical truth is experienced, not just that of the nineteenth century but, Benjamin believes, the truth of human history as such.
The sense in which Benjamin uses the term ‘dialectical’ is not the conventional Marxist one. In its Marxist stamp the term dialectic generally describes how the confrontation of two contradictory forces or tendencies is the motor of historical progress. It is the logic of historical development. The point of such theory, as in the Marxist ‘dialectic’ of the relations and the forces of production, was to show how these tendencies, in the process of their historical reproduction, lead to the formation of a new organisation of production and more generally of the economy. In contrast, by ‘dialectic’ Benjamin identifies and highlights the ‘ambiguity [that is] peculiar to the social relations and products of this epoch.’ ‘Ambiguity’ he writes ‘is the manifest imaging of dialectic, the law of dialectics at a standstill’ (A, 10, 1935 Exposé). The becoming image of dialectic; the tension-laden crystallisation of the interactive dynamics between two forces—this is ‘ambiguity.’ This is a dialectic that can be perceived, and experienced here and now.
The dialectical image cannot amount merely to some nebulous way of ‘showing’ the ‘hope for change in the form of an image,’ it needs to perform the precise function of historical ‘awakening’ through the access it provides to historical knowledge of the past. The ‘dialectic at a standstill’ that brings together the present with a past wish or dream in an image makes possible the (revolutionary) experience of a historical truth. The standstill, Benjamin writes, ‘is utopia and the dialectical image, therefore, dream image’ (A, 10, 1935 Exposé).23 The crucial question that arises from the designation of the image as ‘dialectical’ is what Benjamin means by ‘historical knowledge.’ I will return to this question in detail in the final section.
Eli Friedlander is critical of readings like Missac’s that suppose both that Benjamin’s project comprises fragmented interventions and that there is some kind of virtue in this fragmentation. Friedlander rightly emphasises the significance for Benjamin of the fact that the dialectical image is encountered in language. He claims that language is the form of ‘mediation’ that bears out Benjamin’s claim that the experience of the dialectical image is ‘universal and necessary.’ For Friedlander the role of language makes Benjamin’s Arcades Project a philosophical one:
Emphasizing the linguistic nature of Benjamin’s investigation of history is essential, not only so as to properly understand the dialectical image. Language provides the framework in which it becomes possible to conceive of Benjamin’s enterprise as philosophical, akin to the elaboration of a metaphysics of experience. Philosophy can find in the contingent materials gathered in the book (singular matters as iron construction, dolls, fashion, and collecting, to take but a few examples) the degree of necessity and universality characteristic of its inquiries (if at all) only through the mediation of language.24
If we leave to one side this need for the rectifying perspective of ‘philosophy,’ which seems to be more reassuring for the interpreter than it is for understanding how the contingent materials gathered could acquire ‘necessity and universality’ in the ‘mediation of language,’ Friedlander’s account introduces two new difficulties for understanding the semantics of the image in Benjamin’s writing. First, in rebutting the thesis that Benjamin’s Arcades envisions a fragmented conception of history, Friedlander asserts that there is continuity between the notion of a ‘constellation’ of truth in the 1927 Preface and the conception of the Arcades. He neither addresses the problem of why they should be treated as continuous, nor the evident points of discontinuity between them. I will address the problem of the presupposition of a continuity in Benjamin’s corpus on the topic of the image in more detail in section four of this chapter. I will also discuss there the significance of the claim that it is language that lifts the image into a sphere of ‘mediation.’ Suffice it to note here that precisely in his choice of the language of the image and in its attachment to certain forms of material culture in the Arcades Benjamin signals a modification of the key tenets of his earlier work. This means that interpretations that postulate an unproblematic continuity in Benjamin’s writing cover over the difficult questions altogether. Second, Friedlander maintains that the vocabulary of the image is suggestive of a fragmentary approach to history. He argues that the ‘image’ implies a ‘mental’ representation rather than a form with the external solidity of truth that Benjamin wants. For this reason he suggests the substitution of the vocabulary of the ‘image’ with that of the ‘picture,’ which is presumably untainted by the subjective status of the ‘image.’25 The substitution re-names rather than solves the problem of Benjamin’s choice of the vocabulary of the image.
Despite his sensitivity to just those features of Benjamin’s theory of the dialectical image that may protect it from the allegation of arbitrariness, Friedlander’s attempts to rebut this criticism are unsatisfactory. It may be true that Benjamin wishes his presentation of the nineteenth century to avoid the flaw of arbitrariness, but the question to ask is whether and how it could be successful in that ambition. Friedlander prejudges this issue in Benjamin’s favour: in tying the conception of truth from the Preface to the Trauerspiel book to the model of history as citation in the Arcades as if these were self-evidently continuous, he circumvents the questions of what Benjamin is doing when he claims that ‘truth’ arises from the experience of the dialectical image, and of whether or not this particular project is compatible with the epistemology defended in the earlier Preface. Although Friedlander is right to think that the experience of truth in the dialectical image is the postulate that saves it from arbitrariness, he quarantines this experience of truth from Benjamin’s revolutionary aspirations and thus also from the question of what kind of truth it is. To be specific, it is the ‘truth’ that allows humanity to make history (and the world) its own, like the name does in Paradise.
Finally, I would like to mention Susan Buck-Morss’s approach to the topic of the image. Buck-Morss argues that Benjamin intended ‘to take materialism so seriously that the historical phenomena themselves were brought to speech.’26 Things like buttons, corsets, and combs, she writes, ‘ were the philosophical ideas, as a constellation of concrete, historical referents.’27 Hence she defends her ‘hermeneutic strategy’ in The Dialectics of Seeing of relying ‘on the interpretative power of images that make conceptual points concretely, with reference to the world outside the text.’28 Like Missac, she overlooks entirely the jarring effect of supposing that ‘historical phenomena themselves were brought to speech’ with Benjamin’s argument in, for example, the essay on Goethe’s Elective Affinities that such a position ascribes a demonic authority to the image. She invokes the persistent view amongst Benjamin commentators that he always believed in the (positive) significance of images. In describing Benjamin’s aspiration for graphic or concrete historical perceptibility in terms of ‘the world outside the text,’ Buck-Morss’s approach also excludes proper consideration of the citation model of history and the central position of language in Benjamin’s account of the dialectical image:
In the Passagen-Werk Benjamin was committed to a graphic, concrete representation of truth, in which historical images made visible the philosophical ideas. In them, history cut through the core of truth without providing a totalizing frame. Benjamin understood these ideas as ‘discontinuous’. As a result, the same conceptual elements appear in several images, in such varying configurations that their meanings cannot be fixed in the abstract. Similarly, the images themselves cannot be strung together into a coherent, non-contradictory picture of the whole. A historical construction of philosophy that is simultaneously (dialectically) a philosophical reconstruction of history, one in which philosophy’s ideational elements are expressed as changing meanings within historical images that themselves are discontinuous—such a project is not best discussed in generalities. It needs to be shown.29
The approach she takes only highlights some of the difficulties in Benjamin’s approach. Buck-Morss’s view that he is bringing historical phenomena into speech and that the meaning of his position can only be ‘shown,’ like Missac’s claim that his work is intentionally oxymoronic, only intensifies the impression of arbitrariness in Benjamin’s selection of and approach to the revolutionary significance of historical material.
Buck-Morss attempts to remove the apparent arbitrariness of Benjamin’s historiography with an account that emphasises Benjamin’s political intentions. She writes that the ‘ political concern’ that orientates each constellation is in fact a critical perspective on the arbitrariness that defines the modern world.30 The idea that the meaning of the work would be ‘up to the capriciousness of the reader’ is false. She writes: ‘Benjamin considered such capriciousness of meaning as a historically particular hallmark of the modern era, one that needed to be critically understood, not blindly affirmed.’ 31
The thesis of ‘capriciousness of meaning’ in the bourgeois society cannot account for Benjamin’s methodology, nor, more important, for his theory of the dialectical image; in that case, Benjamin’s images would only show the absurd arbitrariness of modern life. Buck-Morss’s claim that politics can save the project from arbitrariness needs, I think, to be put both in more penetrating as well as in more general terms to capture the issues at stake. It is not just ‘politics’ but what Benjamin specifically understands by ‘revolutionary experience’ that is at issue, which defines the principle that governs his selection of such seemingly insignificant material. Benjamin, in other words, chose to cite and display history’s ‘refuse’ in part because he wanted to show that even this material could offer a redemptive, revolutionary experience of history. The marginal and only the marginal can really test the validity of a general thesis.
There must be, in other words, better ways of answering the objection that Benjamin’s collection is arbitrary than appealing to his political intentions. The question of the method and the revolutionary intent of the book are related to the question of what he intends by the category of the dialectical image insofar as each pivot on Benjamin’s conception of historical truth. From the perspective of his conception of revolutionary experience a number of factors circumscribe the choice of his material. From the perspective of his method, too, there are restrictions imposed on what kinds of material can support genuine historical knowledge. This point is important because we can assume from Benjamin’s repeated claims that the experience of the dialectical image is ‘universal and necessary’ that he intends the Arcades to contain a theory of (genuine) historical knowledge. Strictly speaking, it is difficult for him to avoid the criticism that all of the citations selected for the project are ‘universal and necessary’—such as the studies of furnishing he invokes—and that others could not have well been used. I would now like to outline briefly the significant points of interaction between his epistemological criteria and his conception of revolutionary experience. In the final section, I will draw on this discussion to show how his treatment of the relation between the dialectical image and knowledge force certain modifications to his earlier oppositional schema of myth and the Revelation.
There are two fundamental problems that the Arcades Project raises. The first is defining in what sense the ‘image’ should be understood given Benjamin’s early condemnation of the hermeneutic of the image. The other problem is how to understand the method of the project. There is a seeming arbitrariness to the citations. Benjamin’s explicit focus in the work on marginal figures like the prostitute and the gambler seems to provide an answer of sorts to this objection. If he is able to find revolutionary meaning in junk and refuse, in figures and character types dismissed as marginal, it can be shown that his method is not arbitrary. It is only really the study of the marginal figure that can test the validity of a general thesis. And, if the method is not arbitrary, then neither is the revolutionary significance of the dialectical image susceptible to the objections raised in Benjamin’s early criticism of the hermeneutic of images.
There are two main ways that Benjamin’s method makes the case that it assembles pertinent historical knowledge. First, in his selection of ‘refuse’ Benjamin deploys an epistemological model in which the exception, i.e., what history deems to be insignificant, is shown to be the privileged site of historical knowledge. Second, in the notion that the historical index of the nineteenth century points forward to the twentieth, Benjamin sets up an historical reference point, i.e., the twentieth century, where alone the discarded refuse of the nineteenth becomes legible. The historical index acts as a principle of selection and limits the type of significance that may be attached to the diverse material he assembles. In the dialectical image the recognisability of a past wish coincides with its presentation, one which has redemptive significance tout court. It promises to redeem human kind as such. For Benjamin, ‘only a redeemed mankind is granted the fullness of its past—which is to say, only for a redeemed mankind has its past become citable in all its moments’ (SW IV, 390). There is the further point that the nineteenth and twentieth centuries constellation (i.e., the ‘dialectical images’ of the nineteenth– twentieth centuries) contain the historical truth, that is, the truth of history as such. This, then, occupies more or less the same position as the transcendent truth of the Revelation in the early essays, with the difference that here the ‘truth’ is not kept apart from the ‘image.’
The experience of the dialectical image is the redemption of the past even in its most wretched state. It is a moment of awakening that illuminates and energises the present: ‘The chronicler who narrates events without distinguishing between major and minor ones acts in accord with the following truth: nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost to history’ (SW IV, 390).
Viewed against such statements the characterisation of Benjamin’s assembled material in the Arcades and the meaning he attaches to it as ‘arbitrary’ could be said to miss the logic that drives his selection of the insignificant refuse of history. The epistemological privilege he places on the exception determines the need to see in these discarded remnants the historical ‘truth.’ Just as for Hegel, so for Benjamin, historical moments can lay claim to truths, and a specific historical moment to absolute truth.
The past wish has been compressed and passed over by history. But in presenting this past wish as recognisable the dialectical image awakens it in the recognising person and awakens the latter by their experience of the past wish. The past wish is recognised (experienced) and thereby those who entertain the wish redeemed. In awakening the past, the dialectical image redeems the past in all its moments, that is to say that it redeems the past even in its most wretched condition. The redemption of past moments in materialist historiography before the present (humanity) has the same structure as the ‘hope for the hopeless’ engendered in the spectator in his ‘Goethe’s Elective Affinities.’ For Benjamin, the experience of the dialectical image is one of revolutionary perception. On the topics of method and of revolution, Benjamin’s writing presents startling continuities, which are pertinent to solving the problem of the dialectical image.
Benjamin’s earliest writing signals his sympathetic view of a certain type of revolutionary politics. His 1914 essay on ‘The Metaphysics of Youth’ and the 1921 ‘Critique of Violence’ each show a commitment to revolutionary experience. These early essays have a more militant tone than the conception of revolutionary experience defended in the later work. For instance, he writes in the ‘Critique of Violence’: ‘[i]f the rule of myth is broken occasionally in the present age, the coming age is not so unimaginably remote that an attack on law is altogether futile. But if the existence of violence outside the law, as pure immediate violence, is assured, this furnishes proof that revolutionary violence, the highest manifestation of unalloyed violence by man, is possible, and shows by what means’ (SW I, 252). In later essays, like the 1929 essay ‘Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia,’ he describes revolutionary experience as the desire to see things differently. Similarly, in the Arcades the revolutionary intent is not articulated in the form of a political program. Instead it is the fundamental way of experiencing things in their freshness. The human relation to things that he describes as our ‘mimetic faculty,’ which we examined in the previous chapter, is the key to this nest of ideas around revolutionary experience. In the essay on youth Benjamin refers to waking up and partaking ‘of the morning repast of youth. Things perceive us; their gaze propels us into the future, since we do not respond to them but instead step among them’ (SW I, 13). This early essay depicts a vivid space which evaporates the monstrous sheen of ‘gay colors’ and ‘masks’ for the ‘ethereal, . . . uncanny, [and] chaste’ (SW I, 16). In this piece, it is the dream that is evocative of the intense experience of youth. In the Arcades the meaning of the dream has changed: it is the ‘awakening’ that takes on the privileged status of revolutionary experience and it is the ‘dream’ that is evocative of the semblance of phantasmagoria. In either case, the emphasis falls on the new way that things are experienced. ‘Awakening’ is, for instance, aligned to a new vision of things that strips back their phantasmagoric sheen.32 Just as in the early essay on youth, Benjamin rails against the ‘imprisonment’ of ‘calendar time, clock time, and stock-exchange time’ (SW I, 11) and looks for ‘a ray of light’ in which the self would experience ‘timelessness’ (SW I, 12), so, too, in his theses ‘On the Concept of History’ revolutionary experience is described in terms of intense experience, which he specifies is like the red letter day of ‘holidays,’ in which time is not ‘homogeneous, empty’ but ‘filled full by now-time [Jetztzeit]’ (SW IV, 395). The model of revolutionary experience is one that claims the whole self, as in the absorption of children in playing a game. The perspective he takes, which holds the redemption of the past to be revolutionary experience, also restores to each moment a significance that is lost in the ‘calendar time’: ‘nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost to history’ (SW IV, 390).
It is unsurprising, therefore, that the revolutionary intent of Benjamin’s Arcades project does not sit easily with any of the categories of classical Marxism. His dispute with Marxism goes to the very core of the Marxist conception of history. Benjamin characterises the ‘entire theoretical armature’ of Marxism as the attempt to weld together three things: the concept of the class struggle, the notion of historical development or progress, and the ideal of the classless society: ‘From this erroneous conception Marx’s epigones have derived . . . the notion of the “revolutionary situation”, which, as we know, has always refused to arrive’ ( SW IV, 402–403). Benjamin challenges not just his epigones but Marx’s own definition of revolution when he states: ‘Marx says that revolutions are the locomotive of world history. But perhaps it is quite otherwise. Perhaps revolutions are an attempt by the passengers on this train—namely, the human race—to activate the emergency brake’ (SW IV, 402).
The difference with Marx can in particular be seen in Benjamin’s framing of the Arcades not as the study of economic processes but as the graphic perception of history in cultural phenomena. The design of his materialist historiography aims at a new mode of perception of the past. As such, it is revolutionary in the distinctive sense that Benjamin understands this term. Revolution is intimately linked with the ‘idea of redemption’ of the past (SW IV, 389). Further, for him the medium of redemption is a particular kind of ‘experience.’
In his earliest essays, Benjamin describes real revolution as a different kind of experience, which is akin to ‘the eros of creativity’ (SW I, 43): in the ‘unceasing spiritual revolution . . . new questions would be incubated, in a more ambitious, less clear, less precise way, but perhaps with greater profundity than the traditional scientific questions’ (SW I, 43). This perspective on revolutionary experience from his essay on ‘The Life of Students’ is sustained in his later work. Consider, for instance, the claim regarding Surrealism in his 1929 essay that:
[The] 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. This is not the place to give an exact definition of Surrealist experience. But anyone who has perceived that the writings of this circle are not literature but something else— demonstrations, watchwords, documents, bluffs, forgeries if you will, but at any rate not literature—will also know, for the same reason, that the writings are concerned literally with experiences, not with theories and still less with phantasms. And these experiences are by no means limited to dreams, hours of hashish eating, or opium smoking.
(SW II, 208)
The revolt against Catholicism in Rimbaud, Lautréamont, and Apollinaire ‘brought Surrealism into the world.’ Instead of narcotic intoxication, the ‘true creative overcoming of religious illumination . . . resides in a profane illumination. ’ It was an overcoming, Benjamin notes, to which the Surrealists were not always equal (SW II, 208). Love is cited as one way to properly experience such illumination. His mention of Breton’s novel Nadja, articulates the key elements of his approach to history in the Arcades as the perception of revolutionary energy in ‘outmoded’ forms: the lovers Breton and Nadja are able to ‘perceive the revolutionary energies that appear in the “outmoded”—in the first iron constructions, the first factory buildings, the earliest photos, objects that have begun to be extinct, grand pianos, the dresses of five years ago, fashionable restaurants when the vogue has begun to ebb from them. The relation of these things to revolution—no one can have a more exact concept of it than these authors’ (SW II, 210).
Although there are indications in the Arcades that Benjamin wants to connect the particular experience that the ‘revolution’ involves to the possibility of changing oppressive class relations, it should be emphasised that despite the Marxist overtones Benjamin’s Arcades really understands by revolution a certain kind of experience. Benjamin’s concept of ‘experience’ may be heuristically analysed into subjective and objective dimensions. In the first, it is the ‘timelessness’ that we find, for example, in the child at play, i.e., the total absorption in the moment, i.e., the fulfilment of time. In the objective dimension (and this relates to his peculiar notion of communism as requiring a form of absolute commitment that entails ‘experimenting and taking extreme measures’33), it is the idea of belonging to a world that is ‘humanized’ (hence the importance of technology and humanisation of the alien material world) and to a humanity that is reconciled (something like the Marxian classless society) to itself, and in these two senses (humanised world, reconciled humanity) it has fulfilled the true desire of human history and thus redeemed the past.34
The structure and ambition of the Arcades Project might themselves count as ‘revolutionary.’ What Benjamin tries to do in this project is to find a new way of redeeming the wishes of the past, which means make them objects of the subjective experience in the sense I just mentioned: ‘it is an irretrievable image of the past which threatens to disappear in any present that does not recognize itself as intended in that image’ (SW IV, 391). The signs of this redemption of the past are akin to what Karl Heinz Böhrer has described as the moment of illumination that occurs in aesthetic appearance. Böhrer calls this moment ‘suddenness.’35 Similarly, the experience that occurs in the lightening flash of the dialectical image is one in which degraded refuse suddenly appears anew; its vitiated wishes now restored, legible, and actionable. ‘The dialectical image is an occurrence of ball lightening that runs across the whole horizon of the past’ (SW IV, 403).
It is instructive to compare the implications of this highly particular conception of revolutionary experience with the recurrent issue in Benjamin interpretation of the role of messianic references in his conception of history, as well as his idea of similitude. As we saw in the previous chapter, the perception of similitude appears only ‘fleetingly.’ These fleeting appearances can be understood as the momentary resurgence of the pre-lapsarian relation to things. In his description of the dialectical image Benjamin’s references to the ‘flashes’ of ‘ball lightening’ that ‘run across the horizon’ also suggest an experience of altered perception (SW IV, 403). In each case, moreover, the relation to the image is conceived in (the positive) terms of illumination. However, when the historical stakes and context of the dialectical image are taken into account, the ‘flash’ of the dialectical image pertains to a more fundamental rearrangement of perception than Benjamin envisages in his treatment of similitude. The dialectical image provides the occasion for the reorganisation of historical perception. This moment can be lost if the historical moment is not appreciated and seized [‘Catastrophe—to have missed the opportunity’ (A, 474 [N10, 2])]. In contrast, in similitude it is the condition of the loss of the pre-lapsarian condition that is the reason why the perception of similitude is fleeting and also full of pathos. Finally, it is the connection of the dialectical image to ‘truth’ that gives this concept a substantive connection to Benjamin’s conception of the Revelation. Although both similitude and the dialectical image occur in language it is the specific historical index of the dialectical image that supports its truth claim and gives it potency as a stage for historical intervention. The perception of the image in similitude is not motivated by the redemptive intent of a dialectical image: its relation to the past is structured according to the theological idea of the fall.
For Benjamin redemption of past wishes takes place in ‘revolutionary experience’ understood as ‘fulfilment.’ In his theses ‘On the Concept of History,’ he writes:
the image of happiness we cherish is thoroughly colored by the time to which the course of our own existence has assigned us. There is happiness— such as could arouse envy in us—only in the air we have breathed, among people we could have talked to, women who could have given themselves to us. In other words, the idea of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the idea of redemption. The same applies to the idea of the past, which is the concern of history. The past carries with it a secret index by which it is referred to redemption. Doesn’t a breath of the air that pervaded earlier days caress us as well? In the voices we hear, isn’t there an echo of now silent ones? Don’t the women we court have sisters they no longer recognize? If so, then there is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Then our coming was expected on earth. Then, like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak messianic power, a power on which the past has a claim. Such a claim cannot be settled cheaply. The historical materialist is aware of this.
(SW IV, 389–390)
In this passage Benjamin shifts from defining happiness as the redemption of ‘the course of our own existence,’ to a defence of the position that ‘the past’ makes a similar claim to redemption in the context of history. According to Scholem, the distinctive features of Judaic messianism are that the messianic event is public and visible. It takes place ‘on the stage of history and within the community.’36 As such, the messianic event cannot be a matter of a specific kind of individual ‘perception.’ It needs to incorporate the feeling of reconciliation I described above as the ‘objective’ dimension of Benjamin’s conception of revolutionary experience. The ‘now-time shot through with splinters of messianic time’ that the materialist historian establishes is the ‘public’ and ‘visible’ messianic event. It is, Benjamin argues, ‘the sign of a messianic arrest of happening, or. . . a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past’ (SW IV, 396, emphasis added). Whether it is a ‘messianic’ arrest of the succession of time or a revolutionary chance to redeem the past, the transformation of an historical object into an occasion for the experience of historical truth, through its removal from the temporal succession and construction of an arresting image, changes how everything appears, turning the past into the motivation for revolutionary action. Similarly, we might say that the historical index between the two centuries exists, when it is ‘recognised’ and thus ‘seen’ (i.e., rendered ‘legible’) in a ‘public’ manner. Like many ideas in Benjamin, the ‘tradition’ associated with the Judaic idea of messianism is only of limited use in understanding the meaning he gives to it. What is important is that his references to messianic redemption intend to crack open the sealed totality of the past: the claim of the past in the ‘weak messianic power’ of every generation, in other words, is the presence of the ‘opportunity’ to redeem the past.37
The ‘secret agreement’ or ‘index’ that refers the past ‘to redemption’ is the revolutionary promise of Benjamin’s historical materialism, the latter conceived explicitly as a certain form of experience, namely, the revelation of binding historical truth. On the other hand, a more critical examination of the revolutionary work that Benjamin’s conception of historiography achieves could show that the very conception of the historical ‘index’ lets him look past the technical problems of revolutionary politics. The way he presents the dialectical image or the weak messianic power of history short-circuits the need to address issues such as political motivation, still less revolutionary organisation.38
Like the diverse threads involved in his conception of revolutionary experience, certain aspects of the Arcades’ epistemology of the extreme go back to his early work. In the Preface to the Trauerspiel book Benjamin claims that it is the extreme case that reveals the truth.39 He uses the analogy of constellations and stars to describe the relation of ideas to objects: ‘phenomena are not incorporated in ideas’ but ideas are instead ‘their objective, virtual arrangement, their objective interpretation’ (U, 34). And he builds on the analogy of the astral constellation to claim that: ‘[the] idea is best explained as the representation of the context within which the unique and extreme stands alongside its counterpart’ (U, 35).
Finally, we may connect the revolutionary sentiment that drives Benjamin’s selection of material in the Arcades to the ‘escapist’ impulse that characterises his work in its totality. (Perhaps his emphasis on the ‘fragment’ can be viewed in this light.) His evident horror at the fate of the revolutionary figure August Blanqui writing about eternal return in his prison cell is an eloquent testimony to this impulse (A [D5a, 6], 112). A visceral aversion to ‘totalisation’ underlies Benjamin’s thinking. The object of this aversion in the Arcades is the resigned view that what is past—and specifically the revolutionary wishes of past generations—is beyond redemption.
I have indicated in earlier chapters that there are important changes in Benjamin’s theoretical outlook. These changes—especially the shift from the negative appraisal of the unavoidable ambiguity of the hermeneutic relation to sensuous forms, to the theory of the dialectical image as the bearer of historical truth—are crystallised in the Arcades Project. On the other hand, it is also instructive to look at how closely the conception of the dialectical image in the Arcades displays the constant elements of Benjamin’s thinking. Benjamin’s late writing on the topic of the image can be cited to show how even his late work adheres to a relatively constant set of concerns and positions, although he makes certain adjustments to the earlier schema in order to better accommodate the exigencies and aspirations of his materialist historiography.
We saw that Benjamin’s earlier work sets up two opposed perspectives on the world. On one side stands the clarity and authenticity of the creative word of God. On the other is the demonic ambiguity of the image. It is in the very nature of mythic forms—severed from the articulated clarity of divine intention—that the life-determining meaning ascribed to them is ambiguous and hence guilt-inducing. The binary schema, which places clarity of meaning and freedom from guilt on the side of the creative word, and the symbol, myth and the demonic power of ‘semblance’ on the side of the hermeneutic of forms, does not quite coincide with Biblical theology and Greek myth, perhaps despite Benjamin’s intention. For instance, the essay on Violence contrasts the legend of Niobe with God’s judgment on the company of Korah, respectively, as examples of mythic and divine violence. The contrast presupposes that the annihilation of the Levites by God removes guilt but that the punishing of Niobe by fate is guilt-inducing. One of the enigmatic ideas in some of Benjamin’s early essays concerns the way he presents human speech as a way of breaking with fate. Gide’s Oedipus is the ‘eldest of the great escape artists’ because in speaking out he challenges fate (SW II, 580). Niobe, in contrast, is reduced to mute compliance. In the essay ‘Fate and Character’ Benjamin says that when ‘character’ speaks it breaks with fate (SW I, 203). In contrast, in ‘On Language as Such and the Language of Man’ he does not view God’s menacing punitive question to Adam after the Fall, ‘Adam, where art thou?,’ as fateful, a question that reduces to silence not only Adam but his offspring throughout history. Why is it that Benjamin does not view Adam’s reduction to silence by God as a problem? Why is the ‘annihilation’ of the Levites ‘bloodless’ ‘expiation’? Why is divine violence ‘sovereign’ but mythic ‘executive’ violence pernicious? The problem may be defined as inconsistency in the application of the evaluative criteria (e.g., God’s question to Adam) and the arbitrariness in the definition of the evaluative criteria (e.g., violence in Niobe versus Korah) (SW I, 65).
Although there are a number of instances where one may find inconsistencies in the application of the schema, the dialectical image is in fact composed of elements from both poles of the earlier binary schema. The dialectical image quite deliberately brings the elements of the two sides together. As such, it is not an occasional merger of aspects of these different sides, as the treatment of Oedipus and Niobe arguably are, but an explicit attempt to fuse them together in the service of Benjamin’s theory of history. Let me now set out the case that could be made in support of this thesis.
Given the conceptual function of the creative word of God and the meaning Benjamin ascribes to it as articulated intention, it is impossible to overlook the parallel with Benjamin’s insistence that the dialectical image occurs in language. As we saw, in the Language essay, Benjamin develops a three-tiered conception of language that is organised hierarchically around the cognitive status of words: the creative word of God is at the apex, the naming language of man is next, and finally, there is the degraded conception of language as the means of human communication. Recall that in his treatment of the relationship between the creative word of God and man’s naming language, ‘[m]an is the knower in the same language in which God is the creator. God created him in his image; he created the knower in the image of the creator’ (SW I, 68). I will treat the import of these distinctions for his historiography in more detail below.
The influence of theology on Benjamin’s approach to history is fundamental. It is theology that supports his claim that remembrance is not a relation to completed historical facts, but the possibility of the redemption of the past. Against Horkheimer’s view that ‘ “Past injustice has occurred and is completed. The slain are really slain” ’ Benjamin contends that ‘history is not simply a science but also and not least a form of remembrance <Eingedenken> ’
What science has ‘determined’, remembrance can modify. Such mindfulness can make the incomplete (happiness) into something complete, and the complete (suffering) into something incomplete. That is theology; but in remembrance we have an experience that forbids us to conceive of history as fundamentally atheological, little as it may be granted us to try and write it with immediately theological concepts (A, [N8, 1], 471).40
Although the approach to history as redemption of the past in the Arcades does require theology to support its perspective, it is not the creative word of God as such that grounds that perspective. Rather, the project brings together the perspectives his earlier work had opposed. In the citations the past wishes become experience-able. The century that is to be redeemed points to its redeeming century: the historical index of the nineteenth century points to the twentieth century. Benjamin’s stated motivation is not to write a Marxist history, but to write a ‘graphically perceptible’ history; a history in which the past is immediately experience-able. In the dialectical image the wishes of the nineteenth century become recognisable as revealing the truth of human history and hence as binding. In other words, the graphic perception of the image coincides with the legibility and recognition of a specific past wish as the meaning-context of the present action. The significance of the immediacy of the recognition can be appreciated through a comparison with Benjamin’s epistemology in his early works. In his Epistemo-Critical Preface to the Trauerspiel book Benjamin contrasts the knowledge reducible to human intentions with the truth that is ‘the death of intention.’ ‘Truth is an intentionless state of being, made up of ideas. The proper approach to it is not therefore one of intention and knowledge, but rather a total immersion and absorption in it. Truth is the death of intention’ (U, 36). This last phrase is repeated in the N convolute of the Arcades: ‘Every present day is determined by the images that are synchronic with it: each “now” is the now of a particular recognisability. In it, truth is charged to the bursting point with time. (This point of explosion, and nothing else, is the death of intentio. . .)’( A, [N3, 1], 462–463). If the death of intention unifies the two perspectives, in the later version ‘truth’ is grounded in the fundamental historical insight of the past ‘articulated’ human wishes, rather than the word of God.
One cannot overemphasise that what is recognisable in the dialectical image is not merely the truth of the nineteenth century, but of human history. The dialectical image retains the theological distinction of the truth that would not be dependent on transitory human intentions in so far as it provides an immediately experience-able truth. In the historical insight that the dialectical image provides knowledge is presented as immediate experience. Thus, even though his 1927 Preface contrasts knowledge guided by human intentions with the experience of an immediate immersion in truth, his notion of the dialectical image brings knowledge and truth together. However, they are brought together in a specific way that sustains and sharpens his earlier mode of evaluation: the kind of knowledge the Preface does not accept is the kind that involves transitory intentions. Similarly, the essay on language contrasts the immediately cognising Adamic name with human instrumental knowledge: ‘The absolute relation of name to knowledge exists only in God; only there is name, because it is inwardly identical with the creative word, the pure medium of knowledge. This means that God made things knowable in their names. Man, however, names them according to knowledge’ (SW I, 68). In the Arcades, too, the model of knowledge is the one that involves an immediate experience of truth. Thus the later version retains the earlier account of truth as the death of intention, but as a consequence it also assimilates historical knowledge to truth as part of this immediate experience.41 Thus ‘knowledge’ comes to have the features of paradisiacal Adamic language in the early work: more specifically, it comes to possess those very features that were denied to instrumental ‘knowledge,’ and that had infinitely removed the latter from the creative and cognising word of God. The following passage in which Benjamin cites Genesis is exemplary of the early position: ‘Language is therefore both creative and the finished creation; it is word and name. In God, name is creative because it is word, and God’s word is cognizant because it is name: “And he saw that it was good”—that is, he had cognized it through name. The absolute relation of name to knowledge exists only in God; only there is name, because it is inwardly identical with the creative word, the pure medium of knowledge. This means that God made things knowable in their names. Man, however, names them according to knowledge’ (SW I, 68).
It is not just the wishes of past generations that are made experienceable, recognisable, and knowable in the dialectical image. What is specifically at stake for Benjamin—what singles out the nineteenth century as the absolutely privileged historical moment—is that technological innovations promise human emancipation and fulfilment of (universal) human wishes. For the first time technology makes the human aspiration for happiness a real possibility and indeed definable in real features.
We might say that the technical achievement embodied in the iron lacework is in this sense the human equivalent of the divine creative word. The creative intention to make things in the image of one’s own is realised. Benjamin does something like an alternative ‘revelation’: human beings did not suffer the symbolic oppression and guilt in the pre-lapsarian world. The creative word of God was the divine revelation that yielded knowledge of the essence of things. In the Arcades Benjamin sketches out the project of a human revelation. This revelation is intended as an emancipatory experience; and it pivots not on the word of God, but on the showing in language of human wishes. In this respect, it attains the creative aspiration of human existence that is outlined as one of the features of ‘man’s’ naming language (SW I, 69). The human disposition over material forms attains its exemplary realisation in the work of the steel and glass arcades. The arcades are evidence of the nineteenth century’s new promise of human emancipation. The ideals and hopes forged in the unique technical feats of this century are deposited in the forms, people, and commodities of the arcades and they are discernible to the materialist historian. Although these ideals and hopes are first perceptible in the refuse of the nineteenth century, they are in fact the aspirations of humanity as such. In this respect what Benjamin does in tracking down the evidence of this human ‘revelation’ is also somewhat akin to the work of a mythologist. Benjamin turns the steel and glass of the Paris arcades into texts and citations, and, more specifically still, he turns these arcades into the story of the human desire for happiness. In keeping with my thesis that the dialectical image brings together the two concepts that his early work had opposed but that it does so in line with the perspective of the Revelation, it would be possible to argue that the ‘mythography’ he conducts of the steel and glass arcades is also a ‘revelation’: the dialectical image constitutes, for Benjamin, the truth of the nineteenth century and, through this absolutely privileged moment, of human history. The ambiguity of the image lay in its separation from the (revealed) truth. The recognisability of authentic human wishes in the lightening flash of the dialectical image now offers clarity and the prospect of human emancipation. (Moreover, it thereby intensifies the ‘flashes’ of perception of similitude, which had not been related in any way to an historical conception of emancipation but had expressed the residual impressions of the lost pre-lapsarian clarity.) The conceptual framing of this point can be seen more clearly against the background of the existential purchase of the respective schemas.
The key to the contrast between the perspectives of theology and myth is the articulated status of knowledge in Revelation. I have mentioned Benjamin’s contrast between knowledge steered by human intentions in the 1927 Preface and truth as the ‘death’ of human intentions. However, the definition of knowledge is not restricted to this association with human intention. The category has an existential dimension, which relates to the different kinds of life humans live according to whether they inhabit the outlook of the Revelation or that of myth. In the first, man’s naming language has a relation to God’s creative word. This relation provides an authoritative basis for the way humans inhabit the world, i.e., in the language of ‘name’ humans possess the world. They derive from it the certainty of knowing how to comport themselves. In the essays in which Benjamin pits myth against the Revelation, like ‘Critique of Violence’ and ‘Goethe’s Elective Affinities,’ the importance of the knowledge of the Revelation is that it liberates human life from guilt and anxiety. The knowledge that is at stake can be aligned to the description that is given specifically of truth in the 1927 Preface as that which is immediate and free therefore from merely human intentions. Such knowledge gives humans the security of knowing the divine intention behind nature’s forms. The mainstay of this security is the creative word of God in which there is the ‘absolute relation of name to knowledge’ (SW I, 68). In contrast, myth only has the trappings of an authoritative guide. There is no ‘truth’ underlying it. We saw that the hallmark of truth is the clarity of the transcendent ‘word.’ Without it, humans are reduced to deciphering the vital meaning that they presume is lodged in silent, sensuous forms. Since these meanings are not articulated, human beings become interpreters of fundamentally ambiguous meaning. Since the meaning that they try to interpret and which they understand to be vital truth of human life is not verbally articulate, they must live in guilt and anxiety. The real ghost behind Benjamin’s aversion to arbitrariness lies in this account of myth. The absence of truth in mythic forms leads to guilt and anxiety. Such arbitrariness is not, as Buck-Morss suggests, peculiar to his account of the ‘capriciousness’ of the twentieth century but a constant theme in his characterisation of myth that dates from his earliest work.
The dialectical image provides Benjamin with the idiom of an immediately experience-able truth. In the earlier work, the creative word of God had provided certainty of knowledge, where the theological perspective had been opposed to the perspective of myth. Benjamin understands the relation to the symbol and myth in a hermeneutic frame. In the perspective of myth human beings are encouraged to ascertain meanings, but the semiotic system of myth deprives these meanings of certainty. Benjamin’s early work explores the effects on human beings of an existence without the security of truth. Law is described and opposed to divine violence as ‘mythic’ in his essay on the ‘Critique of Violence.’ The association between law and myth is made on the grounds that the law is ambiguous and that it therefore induces anxiety. Similarly, in ‘Goethe’s Elective Affinities,’ Benjamin describes how when the element of water is inserted into the semiotic system of myth, even calm waters are experienced as a dangerous threat. What is distinctive about the conception of the dialectical image is that in it Benjamin brings together the salient aspects of these two perspectives. To ask why Benjamin uses the vocabulary of the image is thus to ask how this vocabulary accommodates features of the perspectives his early work had placed in opposition. In his early work, God’s creative word possesses the clarity of the Revelation on the world. The perspective is eminently cognitive. In the Arcades Project the dialectical image presents the truth in experience-able form. When Benjamin claims that ‘history decays into images, not into stories,’ the reference to ‘decaying’ perhaps has the same meaning as the idea of natural history in The Origin of German Tragic Drama. There, ‘decaying’ reveals the transcendent truth. Here, Benjamin basically says that the truth of history is to be sought in ‘images’ (of a particular type) not in ‘stories’ (i.e., usual ‘historical’ accounts).
As we have seen, Benjamin describes the experience-ability of truth that occurs in the dialectical image in terms of its recognisability. The twentieth century is an absolutely privileged historical moment. This century makes possible the legibility of the wishes of past generations. The historical index of the nineteenth-century past points to a specific age in which its wishes are supposed to become legible. Whether in the utopian hopes that abundance does not require labor, or that in steel and glass shaped according to human design, architecture will establish newly transparent forms and lives—these vitiated wishes become experience-able. The scaffolding of explanation is redundant. This—and not a ‘pictorial’ or ‘imagistic’ conception of argument—is the meaning of Benjamin’s claim that he does not ‘need to say anything, merely to show’ [‘Ich habe nichts zu sagen. Nur zu zeigen, ’ GS I, 574].
The hold of the dialectical image is, therefore, much stronger than a merely subjective feeling or interpretation. Although some critics hold that the position Benjamin defends as ‘universal and necessary’ in his Arcades is ultimately reducible to the arbitrariness of the interpreter,42 our discussion of the dialectical image has shown how Benjamin’s conceptual framework intends to insulate the Arcades Project from such criticisms. The cryptoHegelianism of the theory of a ‘history quotable in all its moments’ also holds for the theory of the dialectical image. The ‘recognisable’ truth of the nineteenth century in the dialectical image of the materialist historian of the twentieth is indeed the truth of human history as such.
Benjamin’s concept of the dialectical image straddles the two sides his early work had placed in opposition. The main point I have made in this chapter is that the full significance of Benjamin’s choice of the vocabulary of the image comes out through the careful study of how the dialectical image overlaps the perspectives of the Revelation and myth. To put my position briefly: if Benjamin wants from the dialectical image an experience-able truth, then the concept of the dialectical image needs to draw on the hermeneutic relation to images that he had excoriated in his early work under the label of ‘myth.’ In myth images have a basic existential function, which makes their necessarily ambiguous ‘meaning’ cause anxiety and (since they are authoritative) guilt. In the case of the dialectical image this existential function is transformed into a resource for revolutionary motivation and commitment. The Arcades Project brings together the early hermeneutic conception of the image with basic aspects of Benjamin’s account of the Revelation. The elements of the latter, however, are modified in their assimilation with the hermeneutic perspective of myth. In the dialectical image the recognisability of truth coincides with the presentation of the image. In this way, Benjamin’s Arcades undertakes a ‘human’ revelation. Further, this revelation brings the ‘fleeting appearance’ he had ascribed to the perception of the image in instances of ‘similarity’ into a constellation in which the image moves beyond the evocative claim of a lost feeling of belonging. The image now bears the certainty of historical truth.
1. See Jacques Rancière’s ‘The Archaeomodern Turn,’ Walter Benjamin and the Demands of History, ed. M. P. Steinberg (Cornell University Press: Ithaca, NY, 1996), 24–41; and Max Pensky, ‘Method and Time: Benjamin’s Dialectical Images,’ Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin, ed. D. S. Ferris (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2004), 177–199, for formulations of this criticism.
2. References to Walter Benjamin’s Arcades are cited in the text as ‘ A, ’ followed by the convolute reference and then the page number. The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA and London, 1999). Rolf Tiedemann’s essay, ‘Dialectics at a Standstill: Approaches to the Passagen-Werk, ’ sets out an authoritative history of the project. Tiedemann edited the German publication of the Arcades on which the English translation is based. His essay appears as an appendix in the English translation of the Arcades, trans. Gary Smith and André Lefevere, Arcades, 929–945.
3. Tiedemann, ‘Dialectics at a Standstill,’ 931.
4. It also figures prominently in his writing ‘On the Concept of History’ and ‘Paralipomena to “On the Concept of History,” ’ both in Walter Benjamin, SW IV.
5. The ‘materials’ of the Arcades had been selected with an eye to the ‘refuse’ and ‘detritus’ of history. Benjamin collected the curiosities that he thought constitute the distinctive marks of life in the nineteenth century. He emphasises that in the nineteenth century ‘refuse’ ‘increases at a rate and on a scale that was previously unknown, for technical progress is continually withdrawing newly introduced objects from circulation’ (A [N5, 2], 466). The constant production of new objects generates refuse as one of the distinctive marks of the century. The reason that the nineteenth century has significance as a site for the revelation of truths of human history is, however, as we will see, that technical progress contains the promise of human emancipation.
6. ‘Origin [Ursprung], although an entirely historical category, has, nevertheless, nothing to do with genesis [Entstehung]. The term origin is not intended to describe the process by which the existent came into being, but rather to describe that which emerges from the process of becoming and disappearance. Origin is an eddy in the stream of becoming, and in its current it swallows the material involved in the process of genesis. That which is original is never revealed in the naked and manifest existence of the factual; its rhythm is apparent only to a dual insight. On the one hand it needs to be recognized as a process of restoration and re-establishment, but, on the other hand, and precisely because of this, as something imperfect and incomplete. There takes place in every original phenomenon a determination of the form in which an idea will constantly confront the historical world, until it is revealed fulfilled, in the totality of its history. Origin is not, therefore, discovered by the examination of actual findings, but it is related to their history and their subsequent development’ ( U, 45–46).
7. The quoted phrase is from his theses ‘On the Concept of History,’ SW IV, 394: ‘The chronicler who narrates events without distinguishing between major and minor ones acts in accord with the following truth: nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost to history. Of course only a redeemed mankind is granted the fullness of its past—which is to say, only for a redeemed mankind has its past become citable in all its moments. Each moment it has lived becomes a citation à l’ordre du jour. And that day is Judgment Day.’ In the Arcades he claims that ‘To write history . . . means to cite history’ ( A, [N11, 3], 476) [‘ Geschichte schreiben heißt also Geschichte zitieren,’ GS I, 595, his emphasis]. And that: ‘This work has to develop to the highest degree the art of citing without quotation marks’ ( A, [N1, 10], 458) [‘ Diese Arbeit muß die Kunst, ohne Anführungszeichen zu zitieren, zur höchsten Höhe entwickeln, ’ GS I, 572].
8. This is the position put forward by Max Pensky in ‘Method and Time: Benjamin’s Dialectical Images,’ Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin, ed. D. S. Ferris (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2004), 177–198.
9. Benjamin cites Sigfried Giedion, Bauen in Frankreich (Leipzig and Berlin, 1928).
10. As Howard Caygill does when he uses ‘dialectical image’ and ‘allegorical image’ as if they were interchangeable terms. Howard Caygill, Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience (Routledge: London and New York, 1998), 141.
11. In convolute H Benjamin outlines his understanding of the salient differences between allegory and collection and how each differs from the project of his Arcades. As Benjamin initially presents the distinction, the allegorist seems to be ‘the polar opposite of the collector.’ In contrast to the collector’s ‘attempt to elucidate things through research into their properties and relations,’ the allegorist’s method involves dislodging things from the network and context that could form their conventional setting and determine our understanding of them. Instead, ‘from the outset,’ the allegorist ‘relies on his profundity to illuminate their meaning.’ Despite the differences, however, according to Benjamin ‘in every collector hides an allegorist, and in every allegorist a collector’ (A [H4a, 1], 211). The allegorist shares the need to collect because ‘he can never have enough of things. With him, one thing is so little capable of taking the place of another that no possible reflection suffices to foresee what meaning his profundity might lay claim to for each one of them’ (A [H4a, 1], 211). In the possible experience of the incompleteness of his Collection, the collector encounters the allegorist's view of things. If he were to 'discover just a single piece missing . . . everything he's collected remains a patchwork, which is what things are for allegory from the beginning' (A [H41, 1], 211).
12. 'Es handelt sich, mit andern Worten, urn den Versuch, einen u'irischaftlichen Prozefi als anschauliches Urphdnomen zu erfassen, aus welchem alle Lebenserscheinungen der Passagen (und insoweit des 19ten fabrbunderts) hervorgehm' (GS I, 574 [A, Nla, 6]).
13. Hence, as we saw in chapter 2, Adorno critically invokes Benjamin's 'wideeyed presentation of facticity' (SW IV, 107) and Benjamin tries to defend himself against the charge on the grounds that in 'Goethe's Elective Affinities' he had pioneered the critique of philology and that this latter conforms to what Adorno finds objectionable in the uncomplicated celebration of facticity (SW IV, 108). Arendt, on the other hand, sees no need for the defence, arguing that 'Adorno [had] hit the nail right on its head. . . .' (Hannah Arendt, 'Walter Benjamin 1892-1940,' Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, 11). Ador no's view of the matter mistakes Benjamin's critical ambitions. Equally, then, Arendt's characterisation of this celebration of facticity as the key to Benjamin's thinking downplays both the relevance of the reply he makes to Adorno, and the evidence in his work that such celebration is not at all straightforward. In particular, the shape his work takes: on this issue is most emphatically not, as Arendt claims, the result of his fascination with the Goethean ur-phenomenon. See also on the Benjamin/Adorno debate, Rebecca Comay, 'Materialist Mutations; of the Bilderverbot,' Walter Benjamin and Art, ed. A. Benjamin (Continuum: London and New York, 2005), 32-59.
14. Tiedemann, 'Dialectics at a Standstill,' 942.
15. Pierre Missac, Walter Benjamin's Passages, trans. S.W. Nicholsen (MIT Press: Cambridge, MA and London, 1995), 110.
16. Missac, Walter Benjamin's Passages, 109.
17. Missac, Walter Benjamin's Passages, 110.
18. Missac, Walter Benjamin's Passages, 110.
19. Missac, Walter Benjamin's Passages, 37.
20. Missac, Walter Benjamin's Passages, 37.
21. Missac, Walter Benjamin's Passages, 112.
22. Missac, Walter Benjamin's Passages, 112, emphasis added.
23. See also A, 896, 'Early Version of the 1935 Exposé,' for different formulations of this point with the same insistence on the importance of ambiguity as the mechanism of dialectic.
24. Eli Friedlander, 'The Measure of the Contingent: Walter Benjamin's Dialectical Image,' boundary 2 (Fall 2008): 1-26, 4, N.4.
25. Friedlander, 'The Measure of the Contingent: Walter Benjamin's Dialectical Image.' See his comments on the issue of fragmentation, 1; and on the picture versus the image, 4.
26. Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (MIT Press: Cambridge, MA and London, 1991), 3-4.
27. Buck-Morss, Dialectics of Seeing, 4.
28. Buck-Morss, Dialectics of Seeing, 6.
29. Buck-Morss, Dialectics of Seeing, 55-56.
30. Buck-Morss, Dialectics of Seeing, 54, her emphasis.
31. Buck-Morss, Dialectics of Seeing, 55.
32. I refer the reader to my discussion of commodity fetishism in chapter 2. See also Rebecca Comay's essay, 'The Sickness of Tradition: Between Melancholia and Fetishism,' Walter Benjamin and History, ed. A. Benjamin (Continuum: London and New York, 2005), 88-102.
33. He gives this account in his letter to Scholem of Dec. 22, 1924. The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin: 1910-1940, trans. M.R. Jacobson and E.M. Jacobson, eds. G. Scholem and T.W. Adorno (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1994), 257. And in the letter of May 6, 1934, he writes to Scholem that 'a credo is the last thing my communism resorts to; that—even at the cost of its orthodoxy—my communism is absolutely nothing other than the expression of certain experiences I have undergone in my thinking and in my life; that it is a drastic, not infertile expression of the fact that the present intellectual industry finds it impossible to make room for my thinking, just as the present economic order finds it impossible to accommodate my life; that it represents the obvious, reasoned attempt on the part of a man who is completely or almost completely deprived of any means of production to proclaim his right to them, both in his thinking and in his life,' 439.
34. These ideas have a strong kinship with the perspective of Benjamin's early conception of the naming language and his later description of the stakes of the perception of similitude. In the case of naming language, 'man,' he writes, 'is bound to the language of things' (SW I, 69). Naming language is man's 'linguistic communion with God's word,' and it is the guarantee that 'he is himself creative' (SW I, 69). In the case of the 'fleeting' perception of similitude, which is framed as the loss of such communion, Benjamin describes Proust as 'homesick' 'for the world distorted in the state of similitude' (SW II, 240). The features of this state of similitude are described as the 'elegiac idea' that powers Proust's 'blind, senseless, obsessive quest for happiness' (SW II, 239). It is an elegiac rather than hymnic quest; it does not seek the 'unheard-of . . . unprecedented . . . height of bliss,' but 'the eternal restoration of the original, first happiness' (SW II, 239). Moreover, Proust's 'impassioned cult of similarity' is likened both to the 'opaquely similar' guise of things to one another in the dream [SW II, 239), and to the similarity of things to each other discovered in children's play (SW II, 239-240). Like the child who does; 'not tire of' the stocking, which can be 'a "bag" and a "present" at the same time,' so too Proust 'could not get his fill of emptying the dummy, his self, at one stroke in order to keep garnering that third thing, the image which satisfied his curiosity—indeed, assuaged his homesickness' (SW II, 240).
35. Karl Heinz Bohrer, Suddenness: On the Moment of Aesthetic Appearance, trans. R. Crowley (Columbia University Press: New York, 1994).
36. Gershom Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism: And Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality (Schocken Books: New York, 1971), 1.
37. J.Z. Smith distinguishes between two world-views in Mediterranean religions: the 'locative' and the 'utopian.' The former takes the maintenance of the order and organisation of social and cosmic boundaries as its focus. These locative religions are 'religions of sanctification.' They take the fragile order of the cosmos to be the product of a specific conception and labor of prior reorganisation. The 'appropriate order' of things that this reorganisation establishes needs to be maintained through 'conscious labor.' The 'utopian' tradition entails, in contrast, dissatisfaction with how things are arranged and ordered. The labor of these religious traditions is accordingly directed towards making a shift in the content and organisation of the world, however minor. (J.Z. Smith, Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of hate Antiquity [University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1990], 121). The different traditions of the messianic idea in Judaism lie on this 'utopian' side of Smith's schematic divide. Moreover, since Benjamin's conception of the dialectical image aspires to the alteration of established order, the 'messianic' dimensions of his conception of history also lie here. Thereds no purism in Benjamin's use of the vocabulary of the 'messianic.' One indication of this is his treatment as if they were synonymous of the recognition of 'the sign of a messianic arrest of happening' and 'a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past' (SW IV, 596). On the non-messianic in Benjamin see Howard Caygill's 'Non-messianic Political Theology in Benjamin's "On the Concept of History,"' Walter Benjamin and History, ed. A. Benjamin (Continuum: London and New York, 2005), 215-227. Further, there are kabbalistic elements in Benjamin's historically situated references to the 'weak messianic power,' and especially the revelation it stages of the meaning of human history tout court. The Kabbalists were, in Scholem's words, 'concerned with the mystical meaning of the redemption in which the true meaning of the event is revealed for the first time' (G. Scholem, 'Toward an Understanding of the Messianic Idea,' The Messianic Idea in Judaism: And Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality [Schocken Books: New York, 1971], 34). This kabbalistic tone, which surfaces in Benjamin's references to the revelatory force for human history of the dialectical image, is blended with the quasi-Hegelianism of Benjamin's idea that a significant historical moment brings with it the truth of history per se. The dialectical image 'redeems' the past because in the small change it forces from the identification of its vitiated wishes, it utterly changes the meaning of the past (and thus, the 'content' and 'order' of things). The minor change that is wrought is detached from the posture of the 'locative' sanctification of how things are, as Benjamin's citation of the Hasidim's saying regarding the 'world to come' in 'In the Sun' emphasises. The citation is punctuated with the phrase: 'everything will be the same as here—only a little bit different' [SW II, 664], The comprehensive scale of Benjamin's messianic view of history is relevant for unpacking this point: 'The chronicler who narrates events without distinguishing between major and minor ones acts in accord with the following truth: nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost to history.' This comprehensiveness resides alongside the idea that 'only a redeemed mankind is granted the fullness of its past.' '[0]nly for a redeemed mankind has its past become citable in all its moments' (SW IV, 394). The minor status of this alteration in which 'everything will be . . . just a little bit different' comes through in this idea of the full citation of the past. If 'nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost to history,' if the past has 'become citable in all its moments,' then the 'content' of the world seemingly remains the same, however, it is the absence of an ordering principle such as the distinction between minor and major events that irrevocably changes each nuance of the past and adjusts the entirety of the world's 'content' accordingly.
38. In line with my focus on the question of the consistency of Benjamin's conception of the dialectical image with the tone of his conceptualisation of the image in other periods of his work, some of the ideas that deserve more thorough treatment in Benjamin's conception of revolutionary politics are not treated here. In particular, the references to class politics in Benjamin's Arcades and other late works are not reducible to his critique of the adequacy of the Marxist conception of class struggle, cited earlier. Neither, however, are the references he makes to 'the struggling oppressed class' ('On the Concept of History,' SW IV, 394) to be considered as if they were straightforward.
39. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Trans. John Osborne. Introduced by George Steiner (Verso: London and New York, 1998). References to the Trauerspiel book and the Epistemo-Critical Preface are given in the text by '17,' followed by the page number.
40. See Giorgio Agamben, 'The Messiah and the Sovereign: The Problem of Law in Walter Benjamin,' Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, trans, and ed. D. Heller-Roazen (Stanford University Press: Palo Alto, CA, 1999), 160-174. Agamben contends that the use of the vocabulary of the exception in Benjamin’s ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ is a ‘citation’ from Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology, 162.
41. It is worth considering by way of comparison with the position I am developing here what Friedlander means when he claims that the significance of Benjamin’s stipulation that the dialectical image occurs in language is that language has the status of ‘mediation.’ I think that the political significance given to proximity in Benjamin’s Artwork essay also supports the interpretation I am giving here of the meaning of the immediacy in the case of the dialectical image. The Artwork essay sees in the cinema a mass art able to reintroduce the prized value of distraction as the context for the assimilation of perceptual experience [Erfahrung]. More specifically, film is able to ‘provide an object of simultaneous collective reception, as architecture has always been able to do, as the epic poem could do at one time’ (SW IV, 264). As we saw in chapter 3, the claim about distraction is made in his discussion of mémoire involontaire in Proust as well as the hive of activities like weaving, which he claims, in a more nostalgic key, was the background against which the storyteller was once heard. The Artwork essay also prizes the immediacy attained by the surgeon, who is likened to the cinematographer, over the surface engagement of the magician, likened to the painter (SW IV, 263). It is worth comparing the terminology at stake here with Benjamin’s formulation of language as ‘the “medium” of the communication.’ Benjamin’s formulation makes language as ‘medium’ contiguous with ‘immediacy.’ He writes: ‘Mediation, which is the immediacy of all mental communication, is the fundamental problem of linguistic theory, and if one chooses to call this immediacy magic, then the primary problem of language is its magic’ (SW I, 64).
42. As mentioned in Note 1 above, Jacques Rancière’s ‘The Archaeomodern Turn’ and Max Pensky’s ‘Method and Time: Benjamin’s Dialectical Images’ each make this criticism.
Agamben, Giorgio. ‘The Messiah and the Sovereign: The Problem of Law in Walter Benjamin.’ Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy. Trans. and Ed. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford University Press: Palo Alto, CA, 1999. 160–174.
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Böhrer, Karl Heinz. Suddenness: On the Moment of Aesthetic Appearance. Trans. Ruth Crowley. Columbia University Press: New York, 1994.
Buck-Morss, Susan. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. MIT Press: Cambridge MA and London, 1991.
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