Susan Buck Morss the Dialectics of Seeing Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project

8/18/2019 Susan Buck Morss the Dialectics of Seeing Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project

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© 1989 Susan Buck-Morss

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic ormechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval)without permission in writing from the publisher.

This book was set in Baskerville by Asco Trade Typesetting Ltd., Hong Kong,and printed and bound by The H alliday Lithographin the U nited States of America.

Lib rary of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Buck-Morss, Susan.The dialectics of seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades project/

Susan Buck-Morss.

p. cm.— (Studies in contemporary German social thought)An English reconstruction and analysis of Benjamin’s Passagen-Werk.

Bibliography: p.Includes index.ISBN 0-262-02268-0I. Benjamin, Walter, 1892-1940. Passagen-Werk. 2. Benjamin,

Walter, 1892-1940—Philosophy. 3. Benjamin, Walter, 1892-1940 — Political and social views. I. Benjamin, Walter, 1892-1940.Passagen-Werk. English. 1989. II . Title. II I. Series.PT2603.E455P334 1989944'.361081—dcl9 89-30870

CIP


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For Eric Siggia


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Contents

Preface ix

Part i

Introduct ion 3

1 Tem po ral Origins 8

2 Sp atial Origins 25

Part II

Introduction 47

3 N atu ra l History: Fossil 58

4 M ythic History: Fetish 78

5 M ythic N ature: W ish Im age 110

6 H istorical N ature : Ruin 159

Part III

Introduction 205

7 Is This Philosophy? 216

8 Dream W orld of M ass Cu lture 253

9 M aterialist Pedagogy 287


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viii

Contents

Afterword: R evolu tionary Inh erita nc e 331

Afterimages 341

Notes 376

Bibliography 478

Illustration C redits 485

Index 488


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Preface

Th is is an uno rthodox und ertaking. It is a p icture book of philoso phy, explicating the dia lectics o f seeing developed by W alter Ben jam in , who took seriously the debris of mass culture as th e source of philosophical truth . I t draws its authority from a book that was

never written, the Passagen-Werk (Arcades project), the unfinished,m ajor project of Ben jamin’s m ature years. In stead of a “ wo rk,” heleft us only a massive collection o f notes on n ineteen th-cen tury in du strial culture as it took form in P aris— and formed th at city inturn. These notes consist of citations from a vast array of historicalsources, which Benjamin filed with the barest minimum of commentary, and only the most general indications of how the fragments were eventually to have been arranged.

I have in the present study remained scrupulously close to thefragments of this never-written work. And yet it will be clear toanyone familiar with the Passagen-Werk that I have not reproducedit here but, rathe r, proceeded num erically, ex trapolating from it inorder to illuminate the world that Benjamin experienced and described. I w ould be ha rd pu t to say wh ether this form of scholarshipis a process of discovering the A rcades project, or inv enting it. T hereade r is thus forew arned. W ha t is given here is no t an English-language sum m ary of the original G erm an an d F rench m anuscript.It is a different text, a story (of nine teen th-ce ntu ry Paris) told w ithin a story (of B en jam in’s own historical experience) w ith the goal of bringing to life the cognitive and political power of the Passagen- Werk tha t lies do rm an t within the layers of historical da ta of whichit is com posed.


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But perhaps most of all, this is the story of the interpretive process itself. T he m eaning of B enjam in’s com m entary in the Passagen- Werk is cryptic. It provides the reader with few answers as to Ben

jam in ’s in tent bu t m any clues, and th ese poin t inelu cta bly beyondthe text. Benjamin has simply not allowed us to write about hiswork as an isolated literary product. Rather (and this is no small

part of its political power) , th e Passagen-Werk makes of us historicaldetectives even against our will, forcing us to become actively involved in the reconstruction of the work. It is only by acceding tothe fact that his brilliant writing, which we are so predisposed tocanonize, is really only a series o f cap tions to the world outside thetext, that we are able to make headway in penetrating the Passagen- Werk. H e compels us to search for images o f sociohistorical realitytha t are the key to unlocking the m eaning of his com m entary—ju stas that commentary is the key to their significance. But in the

process, our attention has been redirected: Benjamin has surreptitiously left the spotlight, which now shines brightly on the sociohistorical phenomena themselves. Moreover (and this is the markof his pedagogical success), he allows us the experience of feelingthat we are discovering the political meaning of these phenomenaon ou r own.

Benjamin described his work as a “Copernican revolution” inthe practice of history writing. His aim was to destroy the mythicimmediacy of the present, not by inserting it into a cultural continuum that affirms the present as its culmination, but by discovering that constellation of historical origins which has the power toexplode history’s “ con tinuum .” In the era of industrial cu lture,consciousness exists in a mythic, dre am state, aga inst which h istorical knowledge is the only an tidote. B ut the p articu lar kind of historical knowledge that is needed to free the present from myth isno t easily uncovered. D iscarded and forgotten, it lies buried w ithinsurviving culture, rem aining invisible precisely because it was of solittle use to those in power.

B enjam in’s “C opernican revo lution” completely strips “ history”of its legitimating, ideological function. B ut if history is a ban do nedas a conceptual structure that deceptively transfigures the present,its cultural contents are redeemed as the source of critical knowledge that alone can place the present into question. Benjamin makesus awa re th at the transm ission of culture (high and low), which is


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xi

Preface

central to this rescue operation, is a political act of the highest im port— not because culture in its elf has the power to change thegiven, but because historical memory affects decisively the collective, political will for change. Inde ed, it is its only nourish m ent.

Now, writing about th e Passagen-Werk is exemplary of jus t the actof trans m itting culture which Benjam in has problematized. Th islocates the present project in a highly charged conceptual space,one that will not tolerate too great a contradiction between form

and content. A nd yet, I have found a certain degree of tension u navoidable. In form, this study is scholarly, adhering quite rigorously to the mandates of academic research, even as its content is a

protest again st academ ia’s very understa nding of cu lture. But I cansee no politically justified reason for ceding to the latte r a m onopolyof philological rigor. M oreover, as the Passagen-Werk itself makesclear, the option of a short and popu larly m arketed sum m ation ofthe Passagen-Werk would have in no way avoided the dangers of

which Benjamin warned.This book is long, an d its arg um en t is intricate . It dem ands efforton the p a rt of the reade r. Y et I have tried to ensure th at such effortis not co m pou nded by intellectual jarg on tha t speaks only to thosealready initiated into the world of academ ic cults (am ong which theBenjamin “cult” now plays a leading role). The book requires nospecialized disciplinary knowledge. It presupposes no particular

philosophical background. I t pre sumes only an openness to the

proposit ion th a t th e common, every day objects o f industrial culturehave as m uch o f value to teach us as tha t canon of cultural “ treasures” which we have for so long been taught to revere.

I am g rateful to the Andrew D. W hite Society for the Hu m anitiesof C ornell Unive rsity for a fellowship th at allowed me to begin thisstudy of the Passagen-Werk in 1982—83. T he Deutsche Akademische Au- stauschdienst generously provided support for research in Frankfurtam Main during the fall of 1984. Jurgen Habermas and Leo

Lowenthal gave me encouragement when I needed it most. I have benefited im mensely from discussions with fr iends in the U nitedStates, Germany, France, and the USSR: Hauke Brunkhorst,Jacques Derrida, Miriam Hansen, Axel Honneth, Claude Imbert,M artin Jay , D mitri K hanin, G rant Kester , Burkhardt Lindner,Michael Lowy, Kirby Malone, Pierre Missac, Valery Podoroga,G ary Sm ith, R olf Tiedem ann, H einz Wismann,_and Irving Wohl-


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farth. R eadings of the m anu script by Seyla B enhabib, P aul B reines,and Carol Halberstadt were enormously helpful, as was theresearch assistance of Leslie Gazaway, Dean Robinson, SchuylerStevens, and Cy nthia W itm ann. G radu ate students in a sem inar onBenjamin in the spring of 1985 were inspirational: WilliamA ndriette, Paul Ford, Daniel Purdy, K asian T ejapira, Jenn ifer Tiffany, Sharon Spitz, Michael Wilson, and Jiraporn Witayasakpan.The photography and art work of Michael Busch and Joan Sage

are major contributions to this study, as is the camera work ofHelen Kelley. Con sultants and p hotograph ers who helped with theimages include Ardai Baharm ast, G ran t Kester, K irby M alone, RoMalone, Danielle Morretti , Norma Moruzzi, Donna Squier, LeahUlansey, and Rob Young. David Arm strong and Arline Blaker provided years of help in prep aring the m anu script.

I tha nk L arry Cohen at Th e M IT Press for believing in the project. I appreciate his support.

A note on translations: Even wh en E nglish translation s of Be n jam in are available , I have m ade my own, not alw ays because Ifound th e form er to be lacking, b u t because in every case I have feltit necessary to make th at jud gm en t, an d to benefit from the associations o f m eanings th at com e throu gh more clearly in the original.Sometimes, however, the English translation s are so artful th at, o utof respect for the talents of the translators, I have ad hered strictlyto their wording, and credited them by name.


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Part I


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Introduction

“We have,” so says the illustrated guide to Paris from the year 1852,[providing] a complete picture of the city of the Seine and its environs,“repeatedly thought of the arcades as interior boulevards, like those theyopen onto. These passages, a new discovery of industrial luxury, are glass-covered, marble-walled walkways through entire blocks of buildings, the

owners of which have joined together to engage in such a venture. Lining both sides of these walkways which receive their light from above are themost elegant of commodity shops, so that such an arcade is a city, a worldin miniature.” 1

Comments Walter Benjamin: “This quotation is the locus classicus for the representation of the arcades [Passagen\,,,'z which lent theirnam e to his m ost daring intellectual project. Th e Passagen-Werk wasto be a “ m aterialist philosophy of history,” c onstructed with “ theutmost concreteness”3 out of the historical material itself, theou tdated rem ains of those nineteen th-century buildings, technologies, and commodities that were the precursors of his own era.As the “ ur-phe nom ena” of m odernity, they were to provide them aterial necessary for an interpre tation of history’s most recentconfigurations.

T he Paris Passages bu ilt in the early nineteenth cen tury were theorigin of the modern commercial arcade. Surely these earliest,ur-shopping malls would seem a pitifully mundane site for philosophical inspiration. But it was precisely Benjamin’s point to brid ge th e gap betw een everyday experience and traditio nalacade m ic concerns, actually to achieve tha t phenomenological hermeneutics of the profane world which Heidegger only pretended.4Benjamin’s goal was to take materialism so seriously that the his-


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0.1 Passage Choiseul, Paris.

torical phen om ena themselves were broug ht to speech. Th e projectwas to test “how ‘concrete’ one can be in connection with the history o f philosoph y.”5 Corsets, feather dusters, red and green-colored com bs, old p ho togra ph s, souv enir replicas of the V enu s diM ilo, collar buttons to shirts long since discarded — these battered

historical survivors from the d awn of industrial c ulture tha tappeared together in the dying arcades as “a world of secretaffinities”6 were the philosophical ideas, as a constellation of concrete, historical referents. M oreover, as “ political dy na m ite,” 7 suchou tdated prod ucts of m ass culture were to provide a M arxist-revolutionary, political edu cation for Benjam in’s own g eneration of


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6

P a n I

ly rich an d provocative collection of outlines, research notes, andfragmen tary com m entary. It d em onstrates clearly that the Arcades

project was the m ost sig nif icant underta king of th is very significantintellectual figure. But the Passagen-Werk itself does not exist— noteven a first page, let alone a dra ft o f the w hole. T his non existenttext is the object of the pre sen t study.

Intellectual biographies have commonly spoken of Benjamin’sthought in terms of three developmental, quasi-dialectical stages,describing the first (to 1924, when his friendship with GershomScholem was strongest) as metaphysical and theological, thesecond (when in Berlin during late W eima r he came u nder the influence of Bertolt Brecht) as M arxist and m aterialist, an d the third(when in exile in Paris he was affiliated with the Institut fa r Sozial-

forschung and intellectually close to Theodor Adorno) as anattempt to sublate these two antithetical poles in an original synthesis. It was a nticipated tha t the posthumo us pu blication o f thePassagen-Werk would be that synthesis, resolving the persistentambiguities between the theological and materialist strands in his

previously published works. T he Passagen-Werk does indeed bringtogether all the sides of Benjamin’s intellectual personality withinone conception, forcing us to rethink his entire opus, including hisearly writings. It demonstrates, moreover, that he was not just aw riter of brill iant b ut fragm entary aphorisms. Th e A rcades projectdevelops a highly original philosophical method, one which might

best be described as a dia lectics of seeing.M uch o f the secondary literature on Benjamin has been pre

occupied with determining the influences (of Scholem, Brecht, orA dorno— or Bloch, Kra cau er, even Heidegger) w hich were of m ostsignificance.15 This study purposely avoids the convention ofacademic hermeneutics that defines the theories of one thinker interm s o f the theories o f ano ther, as such a m ethod ensures th at thewhole intellectual project becomes self-referential and idealist, hermetically sealed w ithin precisely those m usty corridors of acad em iafrom which Benjamin’s work attempts to escape. It experimentswith an alternative hermeneutic strategy more appropriate to his“dialectics of seeing,” one that relies, rather, on the interpretive

power of im ages tha t m ake conceptu al poin ts concre te ly , w ith re fe rence to the world outside the text.


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7

Introduction

To the mind that would comprehend intellectual phenomena interms of logical or chronological development wherein one thingleads to another, to use Benjamin’s metaphor, “like the beads of arosa ry ,” 16 his work offers little satisfaction. I t is gro un ded, rath er,on philosophical intuitions sparked by cognitive experiencesreaching as far back as childhood. These “develop” only in thesense that a photographic plate develops: time deepens definitionand con trast, bu t the im print o f the image has been there from the

start. In spite of the metamorphoses that his writing undergoes instyle and form o f expression, he held on to his philosophical intu itions tenaciously because, quite simply, he believed them to betrue.

Where, then, to begin?


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Temporal Origins

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Origin [Ursprung], although a thoroughly historical category, nonetheless has nothing to do with beginnings [. . .]. The term origin does not

mean the process o f becoming of that which has emerged, but much more, that which emerges out of the process o f becoming and disappearing. The origin stands in the flow of becoming as a whirlpool [ . . . ] ; its rhythm is apparent only to a double insight.1

O ne can speak of the origin of the Passagen-Werk in the simple historical sense of the time and place it was conceived. B ut if “ origin”is understoo d in B enjam in’s own p hilosophical sense, as “ thatwhich em erges out of the process of becoming and disap pearing ,”then the moment is arguably the summer of 1924, and the place isnot Paris, but Italy. Benjamin had gone there alone, leaving hiswife and six-year-old son in Berlin, in order to bring to paper his

Habilitationsschrift, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (The Origin of German Tragic Drama), w ith which he hoped to secure an academic

position a t th e U niv ersity of Fra nkfurt.H e stayed in C apri am ong Berlin friends, including Ern st Bloch.

His marriage to Dora Poliak had for some time been in difficulty.2

At thirty-two, he had not yet achieved economic independencefrom his parents, in whose Berlin household his own shaky financesstill at times forced him to live. His father was an investor in innovative urban projects (including a department store and an ice-skating palace) with uneven success. Benjamin had a critical, indeed cynical evaluation of his parent’s bourgeois existence, leading


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1 T em po ral O rigins

to “bitter arguments” with his father that “largely ruined” theirrelationship.3 The chance for an academic position at Frankfurtwas, he wrote to Gershom Scholem, his “last hope” for escaping“the increasingly gloomy atmosphere of the financial situation,”4made critical by Germany’s astronomical inflation.5

As early as 1916, Benjamin had told Scholem that “he saw hisfuture in a lectureship in philosophy,” and the conception of hisstudy on German Trauerspiel dates from this year.6 Philosophical

questions even then preoccupied Benjamin. But the canon of bourgeois philosophical texts in no way in spired his obedient respect. He made, Scholem recalls, “immoderate attacks on Kant,”whose theory of experience he considered impoverished7; he was“ repelled” by Hegel, whose “m ental physiognom y” he called “ thatof an intellectual bru te.” 8 No r did more recent philosophical de bates capture his interest.9 Shortly afte r he arriv ed in Italy, Ben jam in attended an in ternational congress fo r philosophy in cele bra

tion o f the U niversity o f N ap les’ seventh centennial. It reinforced,he wrote to Scholem, his previous conviction (based not on Marxism, b ut on a m ore general criticism of culture) “ tha t philosophersare the most superfluous, hence worst paid lackeys of the international bourgeoisie”:

Nowhere did there appear to be a real concern with scholarly communication. As a result, the entire enterprise very soon fell into the hands of Cooks Tours, that provided the foreigners with countless “reduced-rate

tours” in all directions through the countryside. On the second day I let the conference go its way and went to Vesuvius [ . . . ] and was yesterday in the splendid National Museum of Pompeii.10

B enjam in’s choice in 1923 of F ran kfur t as the place for his Habilitation was ba sed less on hopes for inte llec tua l collegiality11 th an onexpediency. The Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Universität wasnew, liberal, an d mo re open th an m ost places for Jew ish professors,and he had connections there. But one senses that in pursuing this possib ility, Benja min, more desperate than enth used, was goingthro ug h the m otions.12 G ran ted, he enjoyed the isolated intensity ofindividua l scholarship, and he had adop ted m any of the social formalities an d private-familial living h ab its o f the bourgeoisie in spiteof himself. M oreover, given his idiosyn cratic writing style and theacadem ic na ture of the topics he ha d thus far chosen to write


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ab o u t,13 it was difficult to imagine him in anythin g b ut an acad em ic profess ion. A t issue was less th e desirabil ity than the possibility oftraditional solutions. Benjamin believed that the bourgeois orderwas already und erm ined, and he clearly suspected th at his life pathwas on quicksand. His mood is apparent in a short piece, laterentitled “ Imperial Panoram a: A To ur of G erman Inflation,” whichwas written while traveling in Germany in 1923.14 It questions theviability of personal solutions of any kind, challenging attempts to

claim for oneself a “special jus tification ,” given the “ chao s” of thetimes, in which the phenomenon of bourgeois decline had become“ stability itse lf” 15:

The helpless fixation during the past decades on concepts of security and possession prevents the average German from perceiving the highly remarkable stabilities of an entirely new kind that underlie the present structure. Since the relative stability o f the period before the war benefited him, he believed every condition that dispossessed him must, eo ipso, be regarded as unstable. But stable relations do not need to be pleasant rela

tions and earlier there were already millions for whom stabilized conditions amounted to stabilized wretchedness.16

T he rea lm of private relations was no t imm une to the effects ofinflation:

All more intimate personal relations are illuminated by the glare of an almost inhuman, piercing clarity in which they are scarcely able to survive. Due to the fact that, on the one hand, money stands devastatingly in

the center of all vital interests, yet on the other, precisely this is the barrier before which almost every human relationship breaks down, in both natural and ethical relations, the sphere of unreflective trust, calmness, and health is increasingly disappearing.17

Benjam in gave this text to G ershom Scholem in the form of a scroll,on the occasion of the latte r’s emigration from G erm any later th atyear. Referring to the almost Nietzschean pessimism hanging overthe piece, Scholem recalled: “It was hard for me to understand

w ha t could keep a ma n who had w ritten this in G erm an y,” 18 andhe urged Benjam in to consider joining him in Palestine. AlthoughBenjamin, sharing Scholem’s interest in Judaic thought, was thencomfortable expressing philosophy in theological terms,19 andalthough he would later consider the proposal seriously, preciselyin this year “ in which the c atastrophic developm ent of inflation and


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1 Temporal Origins

the general breakdown of interpersonal relationships rend ered the prospect o f em ig ration acute fo r h im ,” he “ displayed an attitude ofreserve toward Palestine [. . . ].”20

Behind this reserve was Benjamin’s awareness that his owncreativity depended for its nourishment on the Europe that wasdisintegrating . W ha t gave his philosophical intuitions a claim totruth was that they were embedded in his own historical experience, and addressed specifically to the generation that had shared

them. That claim might indeed not survive a transplant to suchrad ically different soil, nourished by a Zion ism o f which he wassuspicious n ot only because o f its na tionalist p artic ula rism ,21 bu t because he saw in its “ agricultural orientation” 22 an attem ptedescape, an artificial return to a preindustrial world. Contemporaryhistorical reality was necessarily the philosopher’s material, even ifit now seemed to be leading him personally into a dead end.

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Th ese con siderations d eterm ined Ben jamin ’s state of m ind in thesummer of 1924, creating the specific constellation within which,w ithou t the a u tho r’s yet b eing aware o f it, the Passagen-Werk ha d itsorigins. There was a muse who presided over the moment. LikeAriadne, she prom ised to lead him out of the cul de sac tha t seemedto lie before him. But if her function befitted the antiquity of the

Mediterranean world where they met, her means were the mostm od em : She was a Bolshevik from L atvia, active in po strevolutionary Soviet culture as an actress and director, and a member of theCommunist Party since the Duma Revolution. In Benjamin’swords, she was “ ‘an o utstanding C om m unist ,’” and ‘“ one of them ost outstanding wom en I have ever m et.” ’23 H er nam e was AsjaLacis. Beginning in Ju n e, Be njam in’s letters to Scholem from C apriwere full of “cryptic allusions,” but Scholem was “able to put two

and two together.”24 Benjamin was in love with her.Asja Lacis has recalled in her memoirs their first meeting. She

was in a shop to buy almonds and did not know the Italian word.Benjamin helped her by translating. He then came up to her onthe piazza a nd asked if he could carry h er packages, introduc inghimself with great bourgeois politeness. She recalled her firstimpression:


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Eyeglasses that threw light like small spotlights, thick, dark hair, narrow nose, clumsy hands—the packages fell out of his hands. In brief, a solid intellectual, one from a well-to-do background. He accompanied me to the house, took his leave and asked if he might visit me [ . . . ].

He came back the very next day. I was in the kitchen (if this cubbyhole can be called a kitchen) and cooked spaghetti [. . . ].

As we ate spaghetti, he said: “I have been noticing you for two weeks, how, in your white dresses, you and [your daughter] Daga who has such long legs, didn’t walk across the piazza, but fluttered.”25

Here is Benjamin’s account to Scholem:

Right here much has happened [. . . ] not the best for my work which it threatens to interrupt, perhaps also not the best for that bourgeois life- rhythm so indispensable for all work, but absolutely the best for a liberation of vitality and an intensive insight into the actuality of a radical Communism. I made the acquaintance of a Russian revolutionary from Riga [ . . . ] ■ 26

In retrospect, it might seem less surprising that Benjamin shouldhave now experienced “an intensive insight into the actuality of aradical Communism” than the fact this had not happened sooner.Yet it was actually quite far from the anarcho-socialist politics ofhis earlier years in the Jugendbewegung, which rebelled againstschool and family rather than the economic system, and whichcalled for social renewal as a generation rather than a class.27 Ben

jam in had taken li ttle poli tical in terest in the Bolshevik Revolu tionwhen it occ urred ,28 even if he adm ired the co ndu ct of left-wing Ge rman Communists during the war, particularly Karl Liebknecht’srefusal to vote for war credits in the Reichstag.29 He was bound tofind intellectually barren and uninteresting the neo-Kantian, posi-tivistic reception of Marxism that characterized the Social Democratic P arty. A nd ye t despite this, his pers istent criticism o f the bourgeois world in which he had been raised and which he now sawas in decline, touched close to the Marxist perception.30

Benjam in ha d always cou nted him self am ong the left-wing, indeed, radical intellectuals of his generation, but ever since his stude nt days before the war, he had been skeptical of pa rty po litics, nom atte r w ha t ilk. H e wrote in 1913: “ In the deepest sense, politics ischoosing the lesser evil. Never does the Idea appear, always theP arty.” 31 Benjam in’s resistance to active political pa rticipa tion had

been a poin t of dis pute w ith E rnst Bloch for as long as th ey had


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1 Tem poral Origins

known ea ch other, an d Bloch, it will be remem bered, was now withBenjamin on Capri. Given Benjamin’s theological orientation inthese early years, one might have expected he would have beensympathetic to Bloch’s own Messianic interpretation of Marxism.But w hile he felt a kinship to elements o f Bloch’s thou gh t, he couldnot accept the latter’s totalizing fusion of empirical history andtheological transcendence, Marx and the Apocalypse, and heread Bloch’s Geist der Utopie (Spirit of Utopia) in 1919 with“impatience.”32

The young Benjamin believed in the possibility of metaphysicalknowledge of the objective world— “ abso lute” ph ilosophical ex

perience of tru th as revelation33— and held tha t (again st the basictenet o f idealism) it would n ot end up show ing him his own reflection. He insisted that there was ‘“something perceptibly objective’” in history.34 If he rejected from the start the Hegelianaffirmation o f history itself as m eaningful,35 he believed the m ean

ing which lay within objects included their history most decisively.36 Scholem repo rts th at in 1916 Benjam in h ad on his desk

a Bavarian blue glazed tile, depicting a three-headéd Christ; he told me that its enigmadc design fascinated him [ . . . ] . In the twenties he was apt to offer philosophical reflections as he brought forth a toy for his son [ . . . ] . In his room in Paris hung a tattoo artist’s large pattern sheet [ . . . of which he was] particularly proud.37

This quasi-magical cognitive attitude toward historical matter

rem ained basic to Ben jam in’s unde rstand ing o f m aterialism .Scholem recorded his “extreme formu lation” : “ ‘A philosophy tha tdoes not include the possibility of soothsaying from coffee groundsand cannot explicate it cannot be a true philosophy.’”38 As Blochhas com m ented, B enjamin proceeded “as if the world werelanguage.”39 The objects were “mute.” But their expressive (forBenjamin, “linguistic”) potential became legible to the attentive

philo sopher who “ nam ed” them , translating th is potential in to th e

hu m an langu age o f wo rds, and thereby b ringing them to speech.40M arxism had no co m parable theory of the language of objects. Butwhat made Communism potentially more suited than theology forthe task as Benjamin already understood it was that rather thanturning its back on the realities of the present, Com m unism m ade

precisely th ese its home, affirm ing the potential of present indus-


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trialism while criticizing its capitalist form, and thus groundingutopian thinking in actual historical conditions. Moreover, its uni-versalism cut across the religious sectarianism of theology which,for all his ap preciation o f Ju da ism , Benjamin had never accepted.

In 1923 the redemptive moment in the otherwise profoundlygloomy piece, “Imperial Panorama: A Tour through German Inflation” was expressed theologically. Benjamin wrote that the sufferer of poverty and deprivation m ust “ so discipline h im self tha t hissuffering becomes no lon ger the do wnhill road o f ha te, b ut the rising pa th of pra ye r.”41 T his was the version Scholem received on theoccasion of his emigration. W hen the piece was p ub lished in 1928,there had been a significant substitution: Now suffering is to become “no longer the downhill road of grief," bu t “the rising path ofrevolt ”42— “m ino r revisions,” state s Scholem .43 H e is no t totallywrong. Indeed, it is rem arkable how little the structure of Ben

ja m in ’s th ought was alte red in accom m odating his “ politicalradicalization.”44 But while Scholem means to demonstrate by thisexam ple the dep th of B enjam in’s com m itmen t to (Judaic) theology,in fact it demonstrates how secondary for him was the theologicalformulation, compared to the philosophico-historical experienceitself.45 And, of course, the political implications of these “minorrevisions” were profound.

Asja La cis’ work first raised for Benjam in the qu estion: “ W ha t isthe intelligentsia like in a coun try in which its emp loyer is the p roletariat? [ . . . ] W ha t do intellectuals have to expect from a prole tarian government?”46 1924 was the year of Lenin’s death, whenSoviet cultural life was still open to innovations. Lacis was part ofthe Communist Party’s intellectual avant-garde, radical in aesthetic form as well as social content. In the year before their meetingshe had worked with B recht’s Expressionist theater in M unich, an dshe would later become assistant to the “ A git-prop” director Erw inPiscator. Lacis saw her work as an integral p art o f the revolutionary transformation of society. As innovator of a proletarian children’s theater, she designed a revolutionary pedagogy for childrentha t was the antithesis of authoritarian indoctrination: T hrou ghtheir improvisational play on stage, children were to “teach andeducate the attentive educators.”47 Such practices threw a criticallight onto the musty halls of academ ia which B enjamin ha d beentrying to convince h im self to enter.


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Work on the Habilitationssckrift

was going slowly. In Capri hediscussed it with Lacis, who recalled:

He was deep in work on The Origin o f German Tragic Drama. When I learned from him that it had to do with an analysis of German Baroque tragedy of the seventeenth century, and that only a few specialists know this literature— these tragedies were never played— I made a face. Why busy oneself with dead literature? He was silent for a time, and then said: First I am bringing into the discipline of aesthetics a new terminology. In contemporary discussions of drama, the term tragedy and tragic drama

are used indiscriminately, just as words. I show the fundamental difference between [them . . . ]. The dramas of the Baroque express despair and contempt for the world— they are really sad plays.

[ ‘ " ISecond, he said, his inquiry was not merely an academic piece of research; it had a direct connection to very actual problems of contemporary literature. He expressly emphasized that in his work he described Baroque plays in search of linguistic form as a phenomenon analogous to Expressionism. For that reason, so he said, I have handled the artistic prob

lematic of allegory, emblem and ritual in such detail. Up to now the aestheticians have evaluated allegory as an art medium of second class. He wanted to prove that allegory was artistically a highly valued means, and more, it was a particular artistic form of understanding truth (Wahmehmen) ,48

Despite Benjamin’s defense (which, recounted by Lacis after the passing o f half a centu ry, is still one of the clearest sum m aries of theinten t of his Trauerspiel study ), h er criticism h it its mark. Benjamin

was having great difficulty writing the theoretical introduction tothe piece, no t only because of the d istractions of being in love, bu talso because the “ them atic restrictions” of the study were making it“awkward” for him to express his own thoughts.49 Although he didcomplete a draft of the work by that fall, and was indeed quite

ple ased with the results50 (w hich bear no trace of his new comm itm ent to Co m m unism ), he began simultaneously to formulate a newwriting project. It represented his response to what he called the

“C om m unist signals” o f that summ er, which marked

[. . . ] a turning point, awakening in me the will not, as before, to mask in an outmoded form the contemporary (aktuell) and political moments in my thinking, but to develop them, and to do this experimentally, in extreme form. Naturally this implies that what recedes is the literary exegesis o f German literature [ . . . ]. 51


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Part I

XDdtct Benjamin

Urfprung

6es bcutfdjen Crauecfpiels

J 9 2 8

ifrnf t K otuo bll T)frlag • Berlin

1.1 The Origin of German Tragic Drama. 1.2 One Way Street, jacket design by Jas cha Stone.

T he new project, a “ booklet for friends” of “ my aphorism s, jokes,dre am s,” 52 was w ritten in sh ort sections, m any of w hich were published separate ly as fragm ents in daily new spapers . T heyappeared together in 1928 as Einbahnstrasse (One Way Street), andincluded as possibly its earliest component the revised, politicizedversion of the 1923 fragment “ Im perial Panoram a: A T ou r of G erman Inflation.”

W ork on this book of aphorism s n ot only overlapped the w ritingof his Habilitationsschrift, but undercut i t . One Way Street describesthe irretrievable passing of tha t w orld in which, with The Origin of German Tragic Drama, Benjamin was trying to make his mark. Themethodological introduction of the Trauerspiel study, unabashedlyabstract and esoteric, defines the form of the work as a “philosophical treatise.”53 The philosophical theory of “ideas” that itcontains draws on the entire canon of traditional, academic philosophy, from Plato and Leibniz to Hermann Cohen and MaxScheler, an d at the sam e tim e affirms “ the topics of theology [ . . . ]without which truth cannot be thought.”54 Nothing could contrast


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1 Te m pora l Origins

more strongly than the opening section of One Way Street, whichrejects the “ preten tious, universal gesture of the book,” denou ncingas sterile any “literary activity [. . . that] takes place within a literary frame,”55 and praises instead “leaflets, brochures, newspaperarticles an d placard s” because only the “ ready language” of theseforms “shows itself capable of immediate effectiveness.”06 Theopening section is nam ed “ Gas Station.” I t begins: “T he c onstruction o f life at the m om ent lies far m ore in the pow er of facts than in

convictions.”57 And it ends by stating that such convictions “arefor the gigantic a pp ar atu s of social life w ha t oil is for machines: youdo not go up to a turbine and pour machine oil all over it. Youspu rt a bit of it in the hidden rivets an d joints tha t you m ustknow.”58 Between the Trauerspiel study and One Way Street, theau tho r’s und erstanding of his trade had changed from esoteric treatise w riter to m echan ical engineer.

3

In the Trauerspiel study, the abstractness of representation has theeffect of sealing the rea de r within the text, th a t creates its own win-dowless world. As in the stuffy, upholstered bourgeois interiors ofthe ninetee nth century, one is threa tene d w ith claustrop hob ia.59 Incontrast, the atmo sphere of One Way Street has all the light, air, and perm eability of th e new architecture of G ropiu s or Corbusier. T he

ou tside world o f gas stations , m etros, traffic noises, an d neo n lights,wh ich threaten s to disru pt intellectual conc entration, is incorpo ratedinto the text. These material substances rub against thought with afriction that generates cognitive sparks, illuminating the reader’sown life—world. Gloomy d escription s of the decaying bourgeoisorde r are juxtap osed with the m ost varied ap horistic observations:“In summer those who are fat attract attention, in winter, thosewho are thin.”60 “The Automobile Disease: [. . .] Its etiology: the

secret wish to discover out of the general decline the q uickest wayto do oneself in .” 61 “ Genuine polemics takes a book in ha nd aslovingly as a cannibal prepares a baby.”62 “One complains about beggars in the South and forgets th a t th eir tenacio usness in front ofone’s nose is as justified as the obstinacy of the scholar before adifficult text.”63 All of these are assembled without regard for dis-


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Part I

parit ies of size and discontinuitie s in kin d, like so m any discre te

pieces in a photom onta ge or a Cubist collage. In short, One Way Street represents an avan t-garde, m odernist aesthetics.64

But if the style of these two works is antithetical, the content ofthe old-fashioned work m ain tains a striking affinity to the new one.The Trauerspiel study attempts to “redeem” allegory theoretically.One Way Street does this practically, an d transforms the m eaning ofredemption in the process. Not the allegorical object (tragic drama), but the allegorical practice is redeemed. In Baroque dramas,na tura l images— a dog, a stone, an old wom an, a cypress tree— areemblematic representations of ideas.65 In Benjamin’s modernistfragments, images of the city and of comm odities function sim ilarly: a “filling station ” (as we have seen) depicts the pra ctica l role ofthe intellectual. “Gloves” become the emblem for modern humanity’s relation to its own a nim ality .66 Some titles ha ng like sho p signsover their fragmentary contents (“Optician,” “Stamp Shop,”“W atches and Jew elry,” “ Dry G oods”); others are city comm andsfor attention (“Caution, Steps!” “Begging and Loitering Forbidden!” “Post no Bills!” “Closed for Repairs!”), public warnings

posted over w hat m ig ht otherw ise be mis taken as private practices(writing, dream ing), while “ Fire A larm ” is the w arning sign over adiscussion of revolutionary practice. One Way Street in no waymimics the stylized rhetoric and bombastic gestures of Baroquedram a. It is not the desire to rehabilitate an arcan e dram atic genrethat motivates Benjamin,67 but the desire to make allegory actual.The allegorical mode allows Benjamin to make visibly palpable theexperience of a world in fragments, in which the passing of timem eans not progress bu t disintegration.

Parts of One Way Street are as sad and melancholy a com m entaryon the social state of things as any tragic drama, with cities inruins,68 social rituals empty,69 the objects morbidly cold.70 Butthere are others tha t recount m oments of happiness— as a child, particula rly , and as a lover— when, as fleeting in stances o f fulfillm ent, symbolic expression is dem anded. If petrified na ture and .decaying objects provide the imagery ad eq uate to allegory, the im agery of the symbol th at w ould show'fleeting m atter in a redeem inglight is (as the Trauerspiel study argued71) organic nature, activeand live, an d for tha t reason unalterably passing. O n being in love:


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1 T e m p o r al O r ig in s

1.3 Asja Lacis (left). 1.4 Dora Benjamin (right).

Our feelings, dazzled, flutter like a flock of birds in the woman’s radiance. And as birds seek protection in the leafy recesses of a tree, so our feelings take flight into the shaded wrinkles, the awkward gestures and invisible blemishes of the body we love, where they can lie low in safety.72

Recalling his own childhood experience of reading:

For a week you were wholly given up to the soft drift of the text that surrounded you as secretly, densely, and unceasingly as snowflakes. You entered it with limitless trust. The peacefulness of the book, that enticed you further and further! [. . . To the child] the hero’s adventures can still be read in the swirl of letters like figures and messages in the drifting snowflakes. His breath is part of the air of the events narrated, and all the participants breathe with his life. He mingles with the characters far more closely than grown-ups do. He is unspeakably touched by the deeds, the words that are exchanged, and, when he gets up, is blanched over and over by the snow of his reading.73

Co unterpo sed to the symbolic experience of reading, Benjam in describes the experience o f w riting in the m ode o f the allegorical:“ Th e finished work is the d eathm ask of its conception.” 74 Ben

jam in ’s poin t is th a t, w hether it is expressed allegorically (as eternal passing) or symbolically (as fleeting eternity) temporality enters into every experience, not just abstractly as Heidegger would


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Part I

have it, as the “historicity” of Being, but concretely. That which is

eternally true can thus only be captured in the transitory, m aterialimages of history itself. “ [. . .T ]r u th refuses (like a child o r awom an w ho does n ot love us), facing the lens of w riting while wecrouch un de r the black cloth, to keep still and look am iable.” 75

Both One Way Street and The Origin o f German Tragic Drama were published by Rowohlt in Berlin in J a n u a ry 1928. T he dedication toOne Way Street, like the title, expresses the irrev ersibility of histo ryand the decisiveness of new events: “ This street is nam ed A sja

Lacis Street after her who, like an engineer, cut it through theauthor.”76 But the dedication to The Origin o f German Tragic Drama looks backw ards and remembers:

Conceived in 1916. Written 1925.Then, as now, dedicated to my wife.77

One year before these books were published, Benjamin formulatedthe earliest plans and notes for the Passagen-Werk. O bserving that itcontained the same “ profane motifs” as One Way Street bu t in “ fiendish intensification,” he asserted that this project would close the“ cycle of produc tion” that h ad begun with One Way Street, jus tas the Trauerspiel study had completed the cycle on Germanliterature.78 Yet in the sense that we have just demonstrated, withthe closing of the first “ cycle,” nothing essential to the theory o f the

Trauerspiel study ha d been left beh ind .79 It has p rom pted us to lookfor the origins of the A rcades project at the historical mo m ent whenthe two “ cycles” overlapp ed, an d to examine in some detail the twoworks that allegedly divide them. Applying Benjamin’s definitionof origins not to the literary genre of the tragic dra m a bu t to hisown literary produc tion, the Passagen-Werk emerged in the eddy between two antithetical movements, the disappearing, “outmodedform” of the Trauerspiel study and the bourgeois intellectual world

which it represented on the one hand, and Benjamin’s new avant-garde literary attitude and political commitment to Marxism thatdeterm ined the “ process of becoming” on the other. T his was, asScholem writes, “exactly in keeping with his true convictions,which at no time permitted him to write finis to an old way ofthinking and to start a new one from a fresh A rchime dean po int.”80


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1 T em po ral O rigins

While surely in keeping with his character, Benjamin’s positionwas philosophically am biguous. T he irreversibility of time an d theconsequence of inexorable decay tha t determines One Way Street —indeed, the concept o f the tem porality o f truth generally— wouldseem to be in conflict with the Trauerspiel study’s metaphysicalun de rstan din g o f philosophy as the represe ntation of eternal ideas, asif “constellations” of truth were impervious to precisely that transitoriness which was supposed to be truth’s most fundamental

quality. P ut an othe r way: If the historical transiency of the physicalworld is its truth, how is m«ta-physical speculation about it possi ble? B enjam in’s answer was a t th is time a visual im age: “ M ethodological relationsh ip between the m etaphysical investigation and thehistorical one: a stocking turned inside out.”81 The issue is notthereby resolved, and it is a question to which we will need toreturn.82

Surely the influence of Asja Lacis on B enjam in was as decisive as

it was irreversible. She recalled that it included a definitive rejection of im m igration to Palestine.

Once [on Capri] he brought with him a text book of the Hebrew language and said he was learning Hebrew. His friend Scholem had promised a secure existence for him there. I was speechless, and then came a sharp exchange: The path of thinking, progressive persons in their right senses leads to Moscow, not to Palestine. That Walter Benjamin did not go to Palestine, I can say righdy was my doing.83

At the very least, Lacis was telescoping the course of events, asBenjamin was never closer to immigrating to Palestine than fouryears after this “sharp exchange” (and one year after his trip toMoscow).84 Ultimately, it would be the Passagen-Werk, not “the

path to M oscow,” th a t kept him in Europe. But the “ liberation ofvitality” that he experienced as a philosopher, a writer, and a human being clearly was her doing,85 and for anyone who has known

the creative intensity of the erotic and the political as ? doubleawakening, wherein work and passion are not separate corners oflife but fused intensely into one, the decisive significance of theirrelationship will come as no surprise.

Yet B enjamin did n ot m ake any has ty changes in his life course.He returned to Berlin, to his wife Dora and their son.86 And he

persis ted in his a ttem pt to secure a teachin g post in Frankfurt. ByApril 1925, B enjam in had finished revising the Trauerspiel study. H e


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Part I

tion in Jeru salem . T he earliest notes for an “ essay” on the Paris

Arcades date from this sum m er. In N ovem ber, Benjamin was backin Berlin. In the spring of 1928, he seriously considered going toJerusalem. He separated from his wife Dora in the summer; theirslow and painful divorce dragged on for a year. For two monthsthat winter he lived with Asja Lacis, who had come to Berlin in

N ovem ber to work in th e film departm ent of the Soviet T rade M is sion. I t was through h er th a t he became p ar t of Berlin’s leftist the ater circle, and m et and befriended Bertolt Brecht. In the au tum n o f

1929, he traveled with Lacis to Frankfurt. They spent several daysin the nearby Ta un us m oun tains at Kônigstein, in “un forgettable,”conversations with Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and GretelKarplus that marked a “historic” turning point in Benjamin’s own

philosophical approach, th e “ end of an epoch of ca reless, archaic ,nature-biased philosophizing.”96 It was to this small group thatBenjamin read his early notes to the Passagen-Werk, and the groupenthusiastically heralded it as a model of w hat the new epoch of

philosophiz ing would become.In 1930 Benjam in spoke o f beginn ing a “ new life.”97 T he h istor

ical moment could not have been less auspicious. The crisis inworld capitalism brought severe unemployment to Germany, threatening his own economic position. The political crisis that broughtthe Nazis to power destroyed it decisively. In March 1933, urged

by Grete l K arp lu s, he left G erm any perm anently. H e moved toParis, and took up the Arcades project again, this time with extensive historical research in the Bibliothèque Nationale. Except for

extended visits with Brecht in Svendborg, Denmark (and with hisson and former wife in San Remo), Benjamin stayed in Paris, convinced that the Arcades project could only be completed there.But when the city fell to Hitler in 1940, he had no choice but toleave. Aided in securing an American visa by the exiled Frankfurt

Institut f i r Sozialforschung, he m ade plans to join Adorno, H orkheim er, and the other Institute m embers in New York, and n am ed a texton which he was working “C entral P ark,” in anticipation o f asylum

there. B ut when he encou ntered problems crossing the b ord er intoSpain, Benjamin took his own life with an overdose of morphine.His researc h notes, two exposés of the Arcades project, and severalseries of conceptual notes (including those read at K ôn igstein),were left beh ind in P aris, and survived. It is these which, first pu blished in 1982, constitute the Passagen-Werk.


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Spatial Origins

One only knows a spot once one has experienced it in as many dimensionsas possible. You have to have approached a place from all four cardinal points if you want to take it in, and what’s more, you also have to have left

it from all these points. Otherwise it will quite unexpectedly cross your path three or four times before you are prepared to discover it.1

Underlying Benjamin’s transient existence during the late 1920sand 1930s is a structure that locates the Passagen-Werk geographically, and lends it a spa tial order. R ath er th an consisting of a sim ple “ path to M oscow,” this order incorporate s all four poin ts on thecompass (display A). To the West is Paris, the origin of bourgeois

society in the political-revolutionary sense; to the East, Moscow inthe same sense marks its end. To the South. Naples locates theM editerranea n origins, the myth-enshrouded childhood ofW esterncivilization; to the North, Berlin locates the myth-enshroudedchildhood of the a uth or himself.

The Arcades project is conceptually situated at the null point of

Display A

Berlin

Paris - ■Moscow

Naples


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2 Sp atial Origins

form of N aples’ underdevelopm ent, where “ poverty and miseryap pe ar as contagious as they are pictu red to be to children .” 7 Ben jam in and Lac is record the disorganization of the working class:“ W ith the paw n shop an d lotto, the state holds this proletariat in avice: w ha t it advances to them in one han d it takes back again withthe other.”8 For this class, self-consciousness is less political thantheatrical:

Even the most wretched person is sovereign in the double consciousness of playing a part in every corruption, every never-to-return image of Neapolitan street life, enjoying the leisure of their poverty, and following thegrand panorama.9

Traditional life goes on, except now, as a tourist show, everything isdone for money. Tou rs and replicas of the ruins of Pompeii are forsale10; natives perform the legendary eating o f m acaroni with the irhan ds for tourists for a p rice.11 A rtists create the ir work in pastels

on the street on which a few coins are tossed before feet erase it.12Cows are kept in five-story tenements.13 Political events are turnedinto festivals.14 One sees neither an ancient society nor a modernone, bu t an im provisatory culture released, an d even nourished, bythe city’s rapid decay.

The essay “Naples” appeared in the Frankfurter Zeitung in 1926.It is to be compared with those articles that still comprise the“ travel” section of Sun day newspapers. T here is no lack of hum or

or entertainment. There is no explicit political message. Rather,hardly noticeable to the reader, an experiment is underway, howimages, gathe red by a person w alking the streets of a city, can beinterpreted against the g rain o f idealist literary style. T he imagesare not subjective impressions, but objective expressions. The

phenom ena— buildings, hum an gesture s, spatial arrangem ents—are “read” as a language in which a historically transient truth(and the tru th of historical transiency) is expressed concretely, and

the city’s social formation becomes legible within perceived experience. This experiment would have central methodological importfor the Passagen- Werk.

Moscow

A t the tu rn o f the yea r 1926-27, Benjamin traveled to Moscow.Shut out from conversation by his ignorance of the Russian lan-


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guage, he attem pted to “ see” the presence of the Revolution by the

same kind of image analysis, the same sensory experience of tem porali ty , that he and Lacis had employed in th e essay on Naples.He explained his intent to Martin Buber, who had commissionedhim to write an essay on “Moscow” for his journal Die Kreatur.

[. . .A]ll theory will be kept far from my presentation [...]. I want to present the city of Moscow at the present moment in such a way that “everything factual is already theory” [the citation is from Goethe], thereby refraining from all deductive abstraction, all prognosis, and even, with

in limits, all judgment [. . .] .15

In the essay, the “concrete life-appearances” in Moscow thatstruck Benjamin most deeply are made to reveal “without theoretical excursus” their “internal position” in a political sense.16 Like N aples, Moscow appears in transition, with elem ents o f the villagestill playing “h ide-and -seek ” 17 w ith the city. B ut the tran sition is tosocialism, so th at the qu ality of transitoriness th at in N aples len t to

life the sense of theater, here places “each life, each day, eachthou gh t [. . .] on a laborato ry tab le.” 18 W hereas in Na ples, tra n siency expressed the instability a nd precariousness of social ou tcomes left to fate, in Moscow the changing locations of offices andstreetcar stops, an d the incessant furniture rearrang em ents are self-conscious, underscoring society’s “astonishing” experimentation,and an “ unco nditional readiness for m obilization.” 19

Nonetheless, M oscow’s im ages are am biv alent. Begging ex ists

only as a “ corp oration o f the dying ,” hav ing lost its “ strongest base, society’s bad conscience” 20; but, sim ultaneously , the NewEconom ic Policy (NE P) is creating a new m onied class. I f the

N eapolitans sell their past to strangers, in Russia th e proletaria nsthemselves visit the museums, and feel at ease there.21 Moscow’svillagelike squa res have n ot, as in Eu rope, been “ profaned an d de stroyed” by m on um en ts.22 And ye t icons of Len in are sold as tou ristreplicas o f the R evo lution wh ich, like religion before it, is in dan ge r

of becoming reified and dominating the people who created it.23T he am bivalence o f these images is evidence tha t it makes a difference which class rules— and tha t the future is not thereb yguaranteed.24

R em arkab le is B enjam in’s sense of where the critical mo m ent forthe success o f the R evo lution lies. I t is no t in the realm of the p ro duction quo tas, b ut in the jun ctu re between polit ical power an d


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ly in pre industria l form. Hence the new significance o f artists, whoare socially useful precisely as experimenters who discover the human and cultural potential within the new technology. Hence alsothe dilem m a o f the P arty. Econom ic revolution is the prerequisiteo f the cu ltura l revo lution wh ich is its goal, b ut in struggling toachieve the former the latter is neglected, or even repressed. In theSoviet Union, as economic planning takes precedence, official culture itself becomes reactionary.

It is now apparent in Russia that European values are being popularized in just the distorted, desolating form for which ultimately they have imperialism to thank. The second academic theater— a state-supported institute— is presenting a performance of the Oresteia in which a dusty Greek antiquity struts about the stage with as much phoniness as in a German court theater.29

Avant-garde experimentation is no longer encouraged:

Controversies regarding form still played a not inconsiderable role at the

time of the civil war. Now they have fallen silent. And today the doctrine is official that subject matter, not form, decides the revolutionary or counterrevolutionary attitude [ Haltung] of the work. Such doctrines cut the ground from under the feet of the literary producers [. . .T]he intellectual is above all a functionary, working in the departments of censorship, justice, finance, and, if he survives ruin, participating in the action— which, however, in Russia means power. He is a member of the ruling class.30

For two months (December 6-February 1), Benjamin observed

Soviet cultural life, living in a M oscow hotel, his pension subsidized by the Soviet sta te .31 H e had com e to Russia w ith th e thought ofcommitment, to Asja Lacis and the Communist Party.32 As his personal d ia ry of the trip testifies,33 both anticip ations were disappointed. The artists and intellectuals with whom Benjamin camein con tact were m em bers of the left-cultural opposition w ho feltthemselves caugh t in a doub le-bind, as com m itm ent to the P arty ofrevolution increasingly entailed the repression of w ha t they saw asthe intelligentsia’s revolutionary work. One had, frustratingiy,more freedom to develop the new technological forms in bourgeoiscenters (Berlin, Paris) that co-opted the results. The alternativeswere power without freedom, or freedom without power. The pote ntial of inte llectu als to contrib ute to the creation of a trulysocialist culture demanded both, and nowhere did they existtogether. In his diary, Benjamin outlined the dilemma:


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life emblematically, as an allegory for social reality, and sensed

keenly that no individual could live a resolved or affirmative existence in a social world that was neither. The reader of Benjamin’sMoscow diary feels impatience (as one can discern Lacis did then).W hy was there not more ofJack Reed in this man’s character; whycould he n ot com m it hims elf in love and in politics? His last days inMoscow were preoccupied with buying Russian toys for his collection. His last m eeting with A sja was as indecisive as all the earlierones. His last words in the diary are these: “At first she seemed to

turn arou nd as she walked aw ay, then I lost sight of her. H oldingmy large suitcase on my knees, I rode through the twilit streets tothe station in tea rs.” 41 W as his impotence childish, or wise? O r wasit both?

Paris

A t the beginning o f his stay in M oscow, Benjamin w rote to Ju laCohn: “ [. . . V Jarious c ircum stances make it likely that from nowon I will contribute substantial articles to Russian journals fromabro ad, and it is possible that I m ight do considerable work for the[Great Soviet ] Encyclopedia.”42 He in fact completed one article forthe Encyclopedia, an entry on Goethe.43 It is a clearly written, highlyoriginal interpretation of the im pact o f class on the produ ction, re ception, and historical transm ission of G oethe’s work. B ut (ironically repeating the jud gm en tal values of bourgeois academ ics) theSoviet editorial board considered it too un orthodox, and ultim ately

rejected it.44 As Benjamin wrote to Hofmannsthal in June 1927:“ [ . . . ] I was able to observe [in M oscow] for myself ju st howopportunistically it [the editorial board] vacillated between theirM arxist program of knowledge and their desire to gain some so rt ofEuropean prestige.”45

Benjamin was w riting from Paris, during an extended stay w hichresulted in the earliest notes for the Arcades project. In part, theywere written collaboratively with Franz Hessel, Benjamin’s Berlin

editor, also living in Paris, with whom he had been working forseveral years on a translation of Proust’s Remembrance o f Things Past.*6 In pa rt, they were Benjam in’s own notes, which soon beg anto take on m uch larger propo rtions than the originally plan ne d a rticle. The latter notes particularly show the influence of Paris’ most


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avant-garde literary movement: Surrealism.47 Benjamin recalledthat the conception for the Passagen-Werk was inspired by readingLouis Aragon’s Surrealist novel, Le Paysan de Paris, in which theParis arcades figure centrally:

[ . . . Ejvenings in bed I could not read more than a few words of it beforemy heartbeat got so strong I had to put the book down [. . .]. And in factthe first notes of the Passagen come from this time. Then came the Berlinyears, in which the best part of my friendship with [Franz] Hessel wasnourished by the Pajia^n-project in frequent conversations. From thattime came the subtitle: A dialectical Fairy Scene.48

B en jam in’s early notes49 are fragm ents o f com m entary in which thegreat majority of the project’s themes are stated in abbreviatedfashion. They are assembled in no particular order: Arcades,fashion, boredom, kitsch, souvenirs, wax figures, gaslight, panoramas, iron construction, photography, prostitution, Jugendstil,

flaneur, collector, gambling, streets, casings, department stores,metros, railroads, street signs, perspective, mirrors, catacombs, interiors, weather, world expositions, gateways, architecture, hashish, Marx, Iiaussmann, Saint-Simon, Grandville, Wiertz, Redon,Sue, Baudelaire, Proust. Central methodological concepts are also present in the notes: dream im age, dream house, dream in g collective, ur-histo ry, now-of-recognition, dialectical image.

The list itself suggests the Surrealists’ fascination with urban phenom ena, w hich they experienced both as som eth in g objectivean d as som ething dream t. In 1927 Benjamin began to write an essayon Surrealism (published in 1929). At a time when the CommunistParty was critical of the avant-garde,50 this essay expresses Ben

jam in ’s enthusia sm for th e “ radic al concept of freedom” 51 to whichthe Su rrealists gave voice, an d for the ir “profane illum ina tion” 52 ofthe m aterial world. Th ey p resented the “ su rrealist” face of Paris,

“the center of this world of things and the most dreamed-ofobject,”53 in images which had the psychic force of memory tracesin the unconscious.54 André Breton’s novel Nadja (1928), Benjaminnotes, is a book more about Paris than about the elusive heroinena m ed in the title.55 Breton includes photographs o f Paris em pty of people th a t m ark th e narrated events as if transient experiencecould be m ade present within the m aterial space of cafés an d street-com ers know n to the reader. Louis A rago n’s novel, Paysan de Paris,describes in detail one arcade, the Passage de l’Opera, just before


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this m aterial space itself disappea red, tom down to build the

Boulevard H aussm ann. In both books the ephemeral quali ty of thematerial world is charged with meaning. The early Passagen-Werk notes speak of a “crossroads” in “the development of thinking”where, in regard to “ the new gaze at the historical w orld,” a decision must be made concerning “its reactionary or revolutionaryevaluation. In this sense, the same thing is at work in Surrealismand H eidegger.”56

At the same time, Benjamin’s essay also criticizes the nihilistic

anarch ism of Surrealism, the lack of a constructive, dictatorial, anddisciplined side to its thinking that could “bind revolt to therevolution.”57 The Surrealists recognized reality as a dream; thePassagen-Werk was to evoke history in order to awaken its readersfrom it. Hence the title for the Arcades project in this early stage:“a dialectical Fairy Scene.” Benjamin was intending to tell thestory o f Sleeping Bea uty once aga in.58

Berlin

From autu m n 1928 to spring 1933, Benjamin spen t m ost of his timein Berlin. In these last years of the W eima r Republic, he m anagedto eke out a living, working in his own “little writing factory,”59and he achieved considerable success.60 He was a regular contributor (1926-29) to the Berlin literary jou rna l Literarische Welt, which

published his article s “ alm ost weekly ,” 61 while his contr ib utions(1930—33) to the Frankfurter Zeitung averaged fifteen articles per

year. U sing the form at o f the book review, he turn ed these feuilletons into a forum for a politicized discussion of the literary writer’s social situa tion .62

Even more innovative was Benjamin’s work in the new massm edium o f radio. In the years from 1927-33, radio stations inFrankfurt and Berlin broadcast eighty-four programs written anddelivered by Benjamin.63 These included a regular program forBerlin you th th at drew on the com mon experience of the city, m uch

as the novels of Arago n a nd Breton had draw n on their read ers’com mo n experience of Paris, as the context as well as the conten t ofthe story. But these programs were not fiction, nor was their stylesurreal. W hile entertaining an d often hum orous, they h ad a ped agogic purpose, to teach their young audiences to read both the


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[. . . ] with the purpose of demonstrating to the bourgeois intelligentsia

that the methods of dialectical materialism are dictated by their own necessities [. . . ]. The journal should serve as propaganda for dialectical materialism through its application to questions that the bourgeois intelligentsia is compelled to acknowledge as their own.68

Benjamin had indeed taken up the role of the “left-wing outsider”that he had contemplated in Moscow as a tempting alternative toParty membership.69 He wrote to Scholem during a short visit toParis in Ja n u a ry 1930 th a t his goal was “ to be considered as the

best critic of [conte m porary] G erm an literatu re,” which entailed“recreating” the genre of literary reviews.70 Yet the conditions ofcultural crisis that allowed Benjamin, however tenuously, to sustain himself as an outsider, allowed criticism from the Right toflourish as well. Benjamin’s efforts had been to convince bourgeoisintellectuals that their own objective interests compelled them tothe side of the p roletariat. M eanwhile, the pro letariat was itselfshifting sides.71

T he Nazi slogan, “Deutschland ErwacheT' (“Germany, Awaken!”)urged something very different from Benjamin’s conception, notawakening from recent history, but recapturing the past in a

pseudo-his torical sense , as m yth. H itler used th e mass m edium ofradio to foster a political culture antithetical to that for which Ben

jam in was working. Fascism reversed the avant-garde practic e of putting re ali ty onto the stage, sta gin g not only poli tical spectacles b u t his torical events , and th ereby m akin g “ reali ty ” its elf th eater.M oreover, this totalitarian inversion of the L eft-cultural programwas t riu m ph an t in term s of political success, as the Left was not.For B enjamin, who u nderstood “ self-reflection” not in the psychological, but the “historico-philosophical” sense,72 these developments were experienced as a personal crisis. Against the backdropof fascism, the pedag ogic pla n of the Passagen-Werk, a presentationof history th at w ould ¿/«mythify the presen t, h ad becom e all them ore urgent. H e w rote to Scholem in 1930 that the A rcades projectwas still “th e th ea ter o f all my struggles and all my ide as,” necessitating, for a “ firm scaffolding, a m ore serious theoretical grou ndin g,“ no thing less th an a stu dy of certain aspe cts of Hegel as well ascertain parts o f Capital.” 73 Benjam in was realizing how m uch work,an d therefore time, the p roject would entail. F or the left-wing intellectual “outsider,” however, time was running out.

In the summer of 1931 and again in 1932,74 Benjamin contem-


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plated suicid e. Asja Lacis had returned to Moscow in 1930; th a tsam e yea r his m other died; his divorce was final. If he claimed to beat peace with his sub sequ ent loneliness— w hethe r in his Berlinapartment with its two-thousand volume library or in a primitivesum m er house in Ibizza— he was weary of the financial “ strugglefor existence,”75 which became increasingly arduous with fascism’srising strength . He wrote to Scholem in Ju ly 1932, of “ success inthe small things but failure in the large ones,” among which he

counted, centrally, the “Paris Passagen.”76 By 1933, even the “smallthing s” could find no pub lisher, due to a sense of “ terro r regardingevery stanc e o r me thod of expression th at does not conform totallyto the official [fascist] one.”77 The political atmosphere in Berlinhad grown stifling, allowing one “scarcely to breathe.”78 In January 1933, Benjamin broadcast his last radio program for youth. Itwas the story o f an actu al ev ent, the flood on the M ississippi in1927, an apparently “natural” disaster that was in fact caused by

the state. In an attem pt to save the po rt city of New O rleans, theUnited States government assumed emergency, dictatorial powerand ordered the de struction o f dam s p rotecting miles of shore upstream , an act th at led to an unan ticipated degree of devastation ofthis agricultural region. Benjamin tells his young listeners the storyof two b rothers, farmers in N atchez, whose entire m eans o f prod uction were thereby destroyed, and who, stranded, climbed to theirrooftop to escape the flood waters. As the river rose, one br oth er did

no t w ait for death, b ut jum pe d into the w ater: “ ‘Farewell, Louis!You see, it has taken too long. [...] I’ve had enough.’”79 But theother, h olding on un til seen and rescued by a passing boat, lived totell the story. T he b roth ers person ified two sides of B enjam in’s ownreaction to economic annihilation. In April 1931 he had describedhim self as “ [...] a shipwrecked p erson ad rift on the wreck, havingclimbed to the top of the m ast which is already torn ap art. But hehas the chance from there to give a signal for his rescue.”80

Fo r seven years, until the next flood, it was the survivor in Ben ja m in ’s character who won out.

Arcades

The arcades that in the nineteenth century housed the first consumer dream worlds appeared in the twentieth as commodity


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late schoolrooms, rides to the railroad station , shop ping excursions,skating rinks, student meetinghouses, brothel rooms, cafes, and, asa you ng child, the mythically charged Tiergarten with its stone lions,labyrinthine hedge, and Hercules Bridge. Associated with these public spaces, memories of his earliest class awareness and sexualawareness become pa rt o f a com mon, sociohistorical past; nothing pleased Benjam in more than Scholem ’s response that there weretimes reading them when he was able to come across his own

childhood.83Writing these reminiscences marked Benjamin’s leavetaking ofany homeland, and was in fact an explicit attempt to immunizehimself against homesickness.84 When he took up the Arcades pro

jec t again in Paris in 1934, it had a “ new face,” 85 more sociological,more scientific than the early notes he and Hessel had made, andwas, of course, more remote from his own personal history thanwere the texts on Berlin. Yet he retained the notion that the

Arcades project would present collective history as Proust had presented his own — no t “ life as it w as,” n or even life rem em bered, bu tlife as it has been “forgotten.”86 Like dream images, urban objects,relics of the last century, were hieroglyphic clues to a forgotten past. Benjam in’s goal was to in terpret for his own generatio n thesedream fetishes in which, in fossilized form, history’s traces hadsurvived. H e wrote: “ [. . . W Jhat Proust experienced in the phenomenon of remembrance as an individual, we have to experience

in reg ard to fashion.”87 And:

As Proust begins his life story with awakening, so must every work of history begin with awakening; indeed, it actually must be concerned with nothing else. This work is concerned with awakening from the nineteenth century.88

T he covered shopp ing arcades o f the nineteenth century were Ben jam in ’s central im age because they were the precise m ate ria l repli

ca of the internal consciousness, or rather, the unconscious of thedreaming collective. All of the errors of bourgeois consciousnesscould be found there (commodity fetishism, reification, the worldas “in w ard ness” ), as well as (in fashion, prostitution , gam bling) allof its utop ian d reams. M oreover, the arcades were the first interna tional style of m odern architecture, hence p art of the lived experience of a worldwide, metropolitan generation. By the end of the


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2.1 Galleria Principe, Naples.

nineteenth century, arcades had become the hallm ark of a “ m odern ” m etropolis (as well as of W estern im perial dom ination), a ndhad been imitated throughout the world, from Cleveland to Istan

bul, from Glasgow to Johannesburg , from Buenos Aires to M el bourne. And as Benjam in was well aware , th ey could be found ineach of the cities th at ha d become points o f his intellectual com

pass : Naples, Moscow, Paris , Berlin.


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2.4 Kaisergalcric, Berlin.


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Part II

l


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.


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Introduction

1

We are ready to enter the Passagen material itself. The reader will protest th a t it is high time, suspecting th e lengthy introduction has

been a delaying tactic in order to avoid plu nging in to the real substance of the work. The reason for the delay has been the need toestablish as a context both the personal and social history in whichthe project is embedded. This need is not pro forma. The Passagen- Werk is a double text. Ostensibly a social and cultural history ofParis in the nineteenth century, it is in fact intended to provide a

poli tical education fo r B enja m in’s ow n generation. I t is an “ ur-history,” a history of the origins of that present historical moment

which, while remaining largely invisible, is the determiningmotivation for Benjamin’s interest in the past. And although thissecond level will not be treated thematically until Part III, it isimportant for the reader to be aware of the nature of Benjamin’shistorical experiences from the start.

Now, it m ust not be forgotten tha t there is no Passagen-Werk. W eare in a real sense confronting a void. The phenomenon to whichthe title applies, volum e V o f the Gesammelte Schriften, provides abu ndant traces of an intended work without being one. Yet in sheerqu an tity, this volume cons titutes a sixth of B enjam in’s intellectual production, and its fragm ents of re search and com m entary bear onth at set o f concerns th at guided all of his m ature thinking an d w riting. The documents published as the Passagen-Werk comprise nototality. Their coherence is in relation to the rest of Benjamin’s


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Pa r t II

work, from which they can be only artificially demarcated. Indeed,the Passagen-Werk m aterial contributed directly to these other w ritings, even as the latter not infrequently affords us the clearest ex

planation as to th e m eanin g of its fragm enta ry m ate ria l. D isplay Bis a chronological table tha t shows this interrelation ship. T he list ofrelated essays is not exhaustive. (Ide as for countless m inor pieces—reviews of contem porary literature, film, pho tography — were bor-

Passagen-Werk

“Passages"

“Paris Passages I" (A* series)

Stag e I "Paris Passages II“ (a* series)

"The Ring of Saturn, or Something on Iron Construction"

Display B

Related Works

192 3 Baudelaire translations "The Task of the Translator"

1924 "Naples"

192 5 Proust translations

1926

1927 "Moscow"

1928 One Wav StreetThe Origin of German Tragic Drama

1929 "Surrealism""On the Image of Proust"

1930Hashish experiments

1931 "Karl Kraus""A Short History of Photography"

193 2 "Berlin Chronicle""Berlin Childhood in 1900"

1933 “On the Mimetic Faculty"

Notes for 1935 exposé 1935 exposé

Stage II

Konvolut Stage I 193 4 “Th e Author as Producer"“Kafka"

193 5 "The Artwork in the Age of Technical Reproduction" (published 1936)

Konvolut Stage II 1936 T h e Stor yteller

1937 "Edward Fuchs, Collector and Historian"

Stage III 1939 expos é

Konvolut Stage III 1938 T h e Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire" ("Central Park")

1939 "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire"

1940 Theses "On the Concept of History"


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rowed at times whole cloth from the Passagen-W erk.) Bu t they represent Benjamin’s major articles during the late twenties and thirties,and they are related to the Passagen complex as the visible tip of theiceberg o f his intellectual a ctivity.1

As the display indicates, it is possible to distinguish three stagesof the Arcades pro ject. Stage I (1926—29) resu lted in (a) the shorttext, “ Passage s,”2 which is “ the only fully form ulated and in tercon nected text” from the very early period of collaboration with Franz

Hessel3; (b) fragmentary notes from 1927-29, organized by theeditor as “Paris Passages I” (A° series) and the conceptually moredeveloped “Paris Passages II (a° series), which articulate themotifs (e.g., boredom, dust, fashion, the nineteenth century asHell), historical figures (Grandville, Fourier, Baudelaire, etc.), social types (whore, collector, gambler, flaneur), and cultural objects(particularly the arcades and their contents) that interested Ben

jam in fo r philosophico-fiistorical reasons; and finally, (c) the short

piece “ S atu rn ’s Rings, or Someth ing on Iron C onstruction,” theonly “ finished” pages of text.4 Benjam in’s original conception, a politicized version of Sleeping Beauty as a fa iry ta le of “ awakening,” retold along Marxist lines, was intended to

Susan Buck Morss the Dialectics of Seeing Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project

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