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The Measure of the Contingent:


Walter Benjamin’s Dialectical Image

Eli Friedlander

Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project is an unfinished manuscript


on which he worked intermittently from the late twenties to his death in
1940, and whose manifest subject matter is the earliest shopping arcades,
covered streets or passages that flourished in mid-nineteenth-century
Paris. It consists of quotation material interspersed with Benjamin’s own
remarks arranged into convolutes bearing such titles as “Iron Construc-
tion,” “The Interior, the Trace,” “The Collector.” The work that continues to
exert an evident fascination has had an impact in cultural studies, and to
some extent historiography, but has as yet found no home in philosophy.
In particular, misunderstandings surrounding a notorious imagistic register
of Benjamin’s project block the appreciation of the rigor of his thinking. To
get at the philosophical ambitions of that text and challenge the present
shape its fame has taken, I want here to discuss one of its key notions,
the “dialectical image,” and show how different dimensions of this mode of
nondiscursive thinking can be traced back to a fundamental juncture in the
Kantian philosophy that Benjamin inherits and transforms.

. Some readers of Benjamin believe that the concept of the dialectical image cannot
be given a fully systematic interpretation. To take a few examples, Susan Buck-Morss

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I will guide my reading by way of certain peculiarities in Benjamin’s


use of the notion of the dialectical image, which, I assume, any account
given of it must aim to interpret. First, we think of an image as an object of
vision, yet Benjamin never uses the word see, or even imagine, to charac-
terize our relation to the dialectical image. It is “manifest” or “recognized,”
but not perceived. More striking, he thinks of the image as legible, as an
“image that is read.” Rather than setting an opposition between language
and image, he writes that “the place where one encounters [the dialectical
image] is language” (A, 462). That doesn’t just mean that such an image is
described in words (rather than, strictly speaking, perceived). Nor does it
imply that the imagistic is to be identified with a poetic, figurative, or meta-
phorical register of language (as in certain uses of the term image). Rather,
I will argue, language is the medium in which the dialectical image can
emerge at all. And its presentation is, for Benjamin, a strictly philosophical
task of writing.
The second peculiarity of Benjamin’s use of image is that he speaks
of it in the singular rather than in the plural. He does not aim to evoke nos-

argues, “The conception of the ‘dialectical image’ is overdetermined in Benjamin’s


thought. It has a logic as rich in philosophical implications as the Hegelian dialectic”
(Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectic of Seeing [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989], 67).
Rolf Tiedemann claims that the concept of the dialectical image “never achieved termino-
logical consistency” (Rolf Tiedemann, “Dialectics at a Standstill,” in The Arcades Project,
by Walter Benjamin, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin [Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1999], 942). Pierre Missac argues against Tiedemann’s claims
by rejecting his very demand for logical consistency: “one should consider [Benjamin’s]
recourse to the monad to be the product of an image, a metaphor, the same way . . . he
creates the dialectical image. . . . Considered in this way, these categories cease to rep-
resent pure antinomies and look more like surrealist metaphors” (Pierre Missac, Walter
Benjamin’s Passages [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995], 110).
. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 463. Throughout this essay, I will cite Benjamin’s
writings immediately following the quote by way of the following abbreviations: A—The
Arcades Project; SW (followed by the volume number)—Selected Writings of Walter
Benjamin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996–2003); C—Complete Cor-
respondence, 1928–1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); O—The Origin of
German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osbourne (London: NLB, 1977).
. Benjamin does write, “Only dialectical images are genuine images (that is, not archaic)”
(A, 462). But the plural form here does not mean that many dialectical images will be
formed in relation to the material of The Arcades. It is rather a way of speaking of images
in general (it is equivalent to saying “only a dialectical image is a genuine image”). In
many interpretations, this idea of a plurality of dialectical images seems to be the result of
identifying the concept too closely with that of the dream image. This leads, for instance,
to the sense that the commodity can be presented as a dialectical image. Consider, for

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Friedlander  /  Walter Benjamin’s Dialectical Image 

talgic images, snapshots of city life, or conjure the fantasy images, dreams,
and illusions of the time. Rather, the investigation of a certain subject mat-
ter would end in the presentation of a single dialectical image. Or, more
precisely, “image” is a characteristic of the mode of presentation of the
material as a whole. It is, as he puts it, “an occurrence of ball lightning
that runs across the whole horizon of the past” (SW, 4:403). By the use of
the term image, Benjamin suggests the possibility of unifying the material,
neither inferentially as an argument nor in a narrative sequence, but rather
into a perspicuous totality that admits of recognition.
Thirdly, we usually think of an image as a kind of representation, dis-
tinct from, say, linguistic signs in that it resembles the reality it represents.

instance, Max Pensky’s understanding that “the dialectical image ‘pictures’ the com-
modity no differently, in one sense than a predominant culture does. It merely shifts the
context . . . the dialectics of the dialectical image is precisely the fact that the image rep-
resents the commodity as it truly is” (“Method and Time: Benjamin’s Dialectical Images,”
in The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin, ed. David S. Ferris [Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2004], 188). Buck-Morss views similarly the commodity as
the paradigmatic object which can be turned from dream image into dialectical image:
“. . . the substance of dialectical images was to be found in everyday objects” (Buck-
Morss, The Dialectic of Seeing, 249). On both views, it seems, the dialectical image can
still be identified with a different perception of the object, thus as essentially localized.
Moreover, it is unclear in what sense the truth of that picture would involve more than the
revelation of its illusory, or phantasmagoric nature.
There seems to be an exception to the reference to the dialectical image in the sin-
gular in the exposé of 1935, one that disappears in the 1939 rewriting of it: “Ambiguity
is the manifest imaging of dialectic, the law of dialectics at a standstill. This standstill is
utopia and the dialectical image, therefore, dream image. Such an image is afforded by
the commodity per se: as fetish. Such an image is presented by the arcades, which are
house no less than street. Such an image is the prostitute—seller and sold in one” (A, 10).
Here one could argue that the commodity, the arcades, or the prostitute are all instances
of dialectical images. Yet I assume that in this passage one should emphasize the fact
that ambiguity is the manifest imaging of dialectic. That is, what Benjamin is considering
in that quote are the elements that will go into the construction of the dialectical image.
Those dream images, which are essentially plural, will be transformed into the totality of
truth which constitutes the dialectical image. It is thus necessary to distinguish this mani-
fest stage from the standstill of the final presentation of the dialectical image lacking all
ambiguity. These lines moreover refer to the imagination of modernity in Baudelaire. But
a dialectical image is not an object of the imagination. Moreover, speaking of “utopia” is
tantamount to claiming that the truth content has not yet been revealed in the dialectical
image. (On the relation of dream images and the dialectical image, see also footnote
20.) I take it that just as the dialectical image is never plural, so one might argue that the
notion of “origin,” deployed in the “Epistemo-Critical Prologue,” should be used only in the
singular.

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But the dialectical image is not the image of anything. It is indeed common
to find Benjamin using a turn of phrase suggesting that the image is a
dimension of reality made recognizable rather than a representation in the
mind, whether past or present. (In that respect it would have been better
to translate the German Bild as “picture,” as when we say that things can
suddenly present a different picture.)

1. Language and the Image

An insight into the centrality of language, of its being the very medium
of the investigation, or of the revelation of the dialectical image, is afforded
by reflecting on the prevalent place given to quotations in The Arcades,
the methodical importance of which is easy to overlook given the work’s
incomplete condition. One could easily tell oneself that Benjamin gathered
material for his investigation in the Bibliotèque Nationale in Paris but never
had the time to incorporate it into a narrative or argumentative structure.
While there is no doubt that, if completed, the work would have assumed a
more continuous appearance, citations are not just waiting there to serve
as illustration or as evidence for a view in longer stretches of argument.
Moreover, in using quotation material, Benjamin does not merely manifest
an interest in public opinion, social consciousness, or the reactions particu-
lar people or classes had to certain historical transformations, as it were

. 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 frame-
work 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 con-
tingent materials gathered in the book (singular matters as iron construction, dolls, fash-
ion, 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. Specifi-
cally, the turn to language is manifest from Benjamin’s earliest attempts to inherit Kant’s
instauration of metaphysics: “The great transformation and correction which must be
performed upon the concept of experience, oriented so one-sidedly along mathematical-
mechanical lines, can be attained only by relating knowledge to language. . . . For Kant,
the consciousness that philosophical knowledge was absolutely certain and a priori, the
consciousness of that aspect of philosophy in which it is fully the peer of mathematics,
ensured that he devoted almost no attention to the fact that all philosophical knowledge
has its unique expression in language and not in formula or numbers. . . . A concept
of knowledge gained from reflection on the linguistic nature of knowledge will create a
corresponding concept of experience which will also encompass realms that Kant failed
truly to systematize” (SW, 1:108). (See in this context my discussion of the essay “On the
Program of the Coming Philosophy,” in section 2 of this essay.)

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investigating their reception. Benjamin attributes to quotation an essential


role in the constitution of the truth of history. And such truth cannot be
identified with the consciousness of any group or class of society: “To write
history . . . means to cite history.”

. One should, at the same time, avoid falling into the opposite position to such down-to-
earth necessity to accept the incomplete state of the project. Such would be the affirma-
tion that the work must “in principle” be nothing more than a collection of fragments, as
though there is an essentially unfinished quality to Benjamin’s writing. The wealth of quo-
tations is not in the service of a rhetoric of fragmentation and incompleteness. Benjamin’s
use of quotations should neither be identified with Romantic uses of the fragmentary form
nor should it be associated with the Baroque predilection for ruins, remains, or strewn
materials, available to the allegorical gaze of melancholy. The prevalence of quotation in
The Arcades is neither merely a by-product of the unfinished state the project was left
in nor is it the reflection of a pseudo-Romantic or pseudo-Baroque refusal of closure.
Benjamin’s strenuous work over years and years does not amount merely to intellectual
collecting, taking one detour after another among fragments of thought. Granted that
a quotation is a kind of fragment, there is a tenacity in Benjamin’s use of the fragment
which is totally opposed to the reflective instability characteristic of the Romantic style or
the allegorical multiplicity of meanings that can be adjoined to the Baroque remains. For
Benjamin, if quotations are indeed fragments, they are meticulously chosen. They are the
“smallest and most precisely cut components” of a “large-scale construction” (A, 461).
One of the postulates of the concept of philosophical style in The Origin of German Tragic
Drama is “the tenacity of the essay in contrast to the single gesture of the fragment”
(O, 32). Benjamin warns, moreover, in that work, against confusing the fragmentation
of allegory with philosophical contemplation. The infinity associated with the allegorical
mode “is also the bottomless pit of contemplation. Its data are not capable of being incor-
porated in philosophical constellations” (O, 231). It would be therefore problematic to
associate, as Howard Caygill does, the dialectical image with the multiplicity of possible
meanings arising out of an allegorical image. He writes, “. . . time freezes into space form-
ing what Benjamin variously described as an allegorical or dialectical image” (Howard
Caygill, Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience [London: Routledge 1998], 141).
Insofar as the affirmation of incompletion as such does not constitute a method, I would
agree with T. J. Clark’s “refusal to let the accidental present state of Benjamin’s remains be
fetishized as his ‘method’—the book-made-out-of nothing-but-citations, the de-totalized
totality, montage, Trauerspiel, the dialectical image” (T. J. Clark, “Should Benjamin Have
Read Marx,” boundary 2 30, no. 1 [Spring 2003]: 42). But, of course, it is not necessary to
oppose the fetishization of incompletion by adopting the security provided by theoretical
detachment. It is not necessary to assume that “the oppressive chunks of quotations,” as
Tiedemann puts it, would be organized into a structure by Benjamin’s theoretical reflec-
tion. There is a conception of working with quotation that is essential to understanding the
projected structure of the book (as the claim “to write history . . . means to cite history”
suggests).
In their foreword to The Arcades Project, Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin address
the essential role of quotations in the compositional principle of the work: “The transcen-

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By taking himself to be developing “to the highest degree the art of


citing without quotation marks,” Benjamin does not confess to appropriat-
ing important ideas without proper acknowledgment. Among the wealth of
citation, it is hard to find valuable material, such as brilliant ideas or deep
insights. “I shall purloin no valuable, appropriate no ingenious formulations.
But the rags, the refuse . . .” (A, 460). Benjamin would further forgo any
justification depending on the relation of the utterance to its original con-
text (be it its source, authority, or its motivation in the events of the time).
“Quoting a text implies interrupting its context” (SW, 4:305), he writes.
In something of a reversal of Gottlob Frege’s context principle, Benjamin
thinks of quotation, the dissociation of a text from its context, as the key
to the revelation of relations that are internal to language, to the manifes-
tation of a deeper synthesis of meaning. Lacking the context motivating
the utterance, the question of its truth value can be bracketed, and the
way of meaning, which, when the utterance is used in its setting, is all but
hidden, surfaces with all its peculiar and striking traits of expression. The

dence of the conventional book form would go together, in this case, with the blasting
apart of pragmatic historicism. . . . Citation and commentary might then be perceived
as intersecting at a thousand different angles, setting up vibrations across the epochs
of recent history . . . all this would unfold through the medium of hints or ‘blinks’—a dis-
continuous presentation deliberately opposed to traditional modes of argument” (A, xi).
Whereas this puts the emphasis mostly on the destructive component of the use of quo-
tations, the emphasis I will try to develop in this essay concerns the constructive prin-
ciple, namely the possibility of a discontinuity not only as negative or critical but as the
positive presentation of immutable truth. (See my discussion in section 2 of the present
paper.) Michael Jennings importantly emphasizes this coexistence of the constructive
and the destructive in the constitution of the dialectical image in Dialectical Images: Wal-
ter Benjamin’s Theory of Literary Criticism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987),
38–39. Though Jennings entitles his book Dialectical Images, his specific discussions of
the notion of the dialectical image agrees, I think, with my use of the term in the singular.
My discussion in the present essay is aimed at showing that one can give a philosophi-
cally rigorous account of that notion that is free from what Jennings calls “the unmistak-
able stamp of Benjamin’s mysticism” (36).
. This is, I take it, part of what Benjamin means when he writes in “One-Way Street,”
“Quotations in my work are like robbers by the roadside who make an armed attack and
relieve an idler of his convictions” (SW, 1:481). In her introduction to Illuminations, Hannah
Arendt interprets this theme of robbery as follows: “[Benjamin] discovered that the trans-
missibility of the past had been replaced by its citability and that in place of its authority
there had arisen a strange power to settle down, piecemeal, in the present and to deprive
it of ‘peace of mind,’ the mindless peace of complacency” (Hannah Arendt, introduction
to Walter Benjamin, Illuminations [New York: Shocken, 1969], 39). But why, one ought

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fundamental transformation occurring in quoting is that of being raised from


a relation to reality by means of language to the plane of language itself.
That is, whatever truth can be wrested from that material, it would emerge
not from the correspondence of factual content and independently given
reality but from the relationships formed between the ways of meaning. Put
together, the quotations reveal a consistency or nexus of meaning which
itself cannot be conceived as the object of someone’s intention, thus which
is not correlative with a unity of any specific form of consciousness.
Sometimes, quoting is a way to take sides or align oneself with a
certain prevalent view, stated in the contents quoted. But, disregarding the
truth value of contents quoted, as well as avoiding any reliance on the
authority of their source, has a peculiarly equalizing effect on the material.
Everything, even “the rags and the refuse,” can be of use for revealing a
higher design, and nothing would in itself constitute a valuable piece of

to ask, would fragments of the past rob the present of its convictions? Think of the idler
first as the user of language in its original setting, who takes words as coming naturally
with what allows them to signify. Thus, oblivious to the conditions of communication, he
conceives of words if not quite as a possession, then in terms of contents having greater
or lesser value that he can communicate as pleases him. He is oblivious in principle to
what supports the possibility of representing, to the ways of meaning. (This is what, in
another context, Benjamin calls the “bourgeois” conception of language.) The idler, in
the present, would be the reader of history who thinks that he can still conceive of the
world of the past, the world that supported the communication of the past as available to
identification. Thus, for such a present, the words of the past can be thought of as unprob-
lematically available, to be inherited through that identification. Not only is the quotation
making manifest the essential lack of context of those words that reach us from the past.
The constructive work with quotations (as opposed to the idling relation to language) is
also turning one to a different nexus of meaning that cannot be conceived of as anyone’s
possession.
Robbing is not in the service of appropriating the possessions of others. For as
Benjamin puts it in the prologue to the Trauerspiel book, “To snatch hastily, as if stealing
the property of others, is the style of the routinier, and is no better than the heartiness of
the philistine” (O, 45). Rather, by quoting, the user of language is robbed of his posses-
sion, meaning language suddenly appears as something that cannot be possessed, as it
functions in the self-presentation of truth. Note in this context that the distinction between
possession and presentation serves Benjamin to characterize the contrast between
knowledge and truth: “For the thing possessed, presentation is secondary; it does not
have prior existence as something presenting itself. But the opposite holds good of truth.
For knowledge, method is a way of acquiring its object—even by creating it in the con-
sciousness; for truth it is self-presentation, and is therefore immanent in it as form. Unlike
the methodology of knowledge, this form does not derive from a coherence established
in the consciousness, but from an essence” (O, 29).

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intellectual property. The distinction between major and minor is lost. This
loss of a position to identify with would imply the forgoing of the very pos-
sibility of the author having a proper voice in the text. Not because he can-
not decide between sides, but rather because he is keyed to presenting
through what is said something over and above it. That form of presentation
gives up on the continuity of a line of argument, but also, for that matter, on
the purposive exchange in dialogue or conversation. Relying on quotation
creates constant interruption and produces writing that essentially depends
on detour or digression. But given the associations that such notions
might elicit, it is important to stress that methodical digression reflects, for
Benjamin, the understanding that truth is unapproachable, not that it is
ever receding and closure infinitely deferred. It is unapproachable insofar
as there is no aiming at it, which means that it is not the object of a directed
state of mind. At stake is a unity that is recognized in the material itself. For
Benjamin, truth is a unity of essence; knowledge is the correctness of our
way of looking at the world. The latter is a way of taking possession of the
object in thought; the former must have the form of a discovery or recogni-
tion which we can only prepare for. Forgoing the simple criterion of corre-

. Quotation, by lifting out of context, equalizes the material and prepares it to serve in
the presentation or construction of the whole. Everything is used not for its own value but
in expressing a higher design. In that sense, the work with quotation is intimately related
to Benjamin’s characterization of a medieval figure of the telling of history, that of the
chronicler: “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, 4:390). One can recognize a similar theme
in Benjamin’s assessment of Karl Krauss’s work with quotations: “Krauss’s achievement
exhausts itself at its highest level by making even the newspaper quotable. He transports
it to his own sphere, and the empty phrase is suddenly forced to recognize that even in
the deepest dregs of the journal it is not safe from the voice that swoops on the winds of
the word to drag it from its darkness” (SW, 3:453).
. Writing about his use of quotations in The Origin of German Trauerspiel, which he
models on the medieval treatise, Benjamin asserts, “In the canonic form of the treatise
the only intentional element . . . is the authoritative quotation” (O, 28; translation modi-
fied). In interpreting this claim, we need to pay attention both to the fact that a quota-
tion is an intentional element, and that in the treatise it is the only one. So that what is
presented is itself not the object of an intention, but must be constituted by the indirect
juxtaposition of the quotation: “[The] method [of the treatise] is essentially presentation.
Method is digression [Umweg]. Presentation as digression—such is the methodological
nature of the treatise” (O, 28; translation modified). Detour is not in the service of endless
deferral, but rather must be understood through the impossibility of being directed to the
total image. “The value of fragments of thought is all the greater the less direct their rela-
tionship to the underlying idea” (O, 29).

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spondence to characterize the nature of truth, a necessary condition of the


authenticity of the order discovered would be its distinctness from the sys-
tematic divisions imposed on the world by our ways of thinking. Such truth
must arise of itself from the matter at hand so as not to be a mere reflection
of our ways of representing or systematizing the world to ourselves. “Truth,”
as Benjamin puts it, in a claim which will require further interpretation, “is
an intentionless state of being . . .” (O, 36). This is not to say that it is inef-
fable or to be grasped in a mysterious intuition. It emerges in the use of
intentional elements—the quotations—to reveal significant relationships on
another plane altogether. (One of the analogies Benjamin uses to suggest
the relation of quotations to the emerging dialectical image is that of the
colored stones to the image-pattern of the mosaic.) In other words, the dis-
tinction between what we say by means of, or through, language, and what
can be revealed in language is at the same time a distinction between what
we say and what communicates itself in language.

2. Image and Totality

At different stages Benjamin refers to the distinction that we have


been drawing in different ways. In The Arcades, for instance, he writes, in
a Wittgensteinian vein, “Method of this project: literary montage. I needn’t
say anything. Merely show” (A, 460). Earlier on, he opens the “Epistemo-
Critical Prologue” of his book on the German Trauerspiel with the claim,
“It is characteristic of philosophical writing that it must continually confront
the question of presentation (Darstellung).”10 “If presentation is to stake
its claim as the real methodology of the philosophical treatise,” Benjamin
writes, “then it must be the presentation of ideas” (O, 29). I take it that
Benjamin invokes not only Plato but also Kant, for whom “idea,” the prod-
uct of reason, indicates the encompassing of a totality. Ideas are neither

. In his early essay “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” Benjamin
draws that distinction in relation to the manifestation of essence in language: “It is funda-
mental that this mental being communicates itself in language and not through language.
Languages, therefore, have no speaker, if this means someone who communicates
through these languages. Mental being communicates itself in, not through, a language”
(SW, 1:63).
10. I have modified the English translation, which has throughout “representation” for
Darstellung. The distinction between Darstellung and Vorstellung, usually translated
respectively as “presentation” and “representation,” is central to the post-Kantian
philosophical tradition, and I take it that Benjamin is drawing on it, in his emphasis on
presentation.

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perceived, nor are they the abstract products of the intellect. Rather, they
are eminently the subject of presentation—that whose realization essen-
tially involves their being expressed. We commonly emphasize presenta-
tion when something given has to be made available to others, primarily
when our problem is pedagogical: how an already objectively determined
meaning is elucidated, or taught to someone who does not know it yet.
But the didactic aspect of presentation is mostly relegated in philosophy
to psychology or pragmatics. When Benjamin, on the other hand, speaks
of the method of philosophy (or of philosophy as doctrine, Lehre), in which
presentation is essential, the latter is interpreted ontologically. For, since
nothing in experience would constitute the embodiment of the idea, it can
become manifest only by using the phenomenal material not for what it is in
fact, but so as to express something over and above it.
Though he adopts Kant’s understanding that the idea cannot find an
embodiment in experience, Benjamin refuses to think of it merely regula-
tively, as what orients a movement of thinking. Instead, by relying on quo-
tations in which language is severed from its experiential context and using
them in a construction that reveals another nexus of meaning, he wants to
find a way around the Kantian stricture and present, as he puts it, “a state
beyond all phenomenality” (O, 34). This is why Benjamin uses the term
recognition to characterize our relation to the dialectical image rather than
seeing, perceiving, or intuiting: “. . . vision [Anschauung] does not enter
into the form of existence which is peculiar to truth, which is devoid of all
intention . . .” (O, 35). Since perception or seeing involves an intentional
stance, not only what is shown cannot be said, but also what is presented
(shown) cannot be seen. Referring back in The Arcades to an earlier for-
mulation of the nature of truth in the Trauerspiel book, he characterizes the
point of emergence of the dialectical image as “the death of the intentio.”
The contrast between recognition and seeing that has an intentional
object is powerfully expressed in Benjamin’s figure of the constellation. The
notion of the constellation, which appears in The Arcades as a character-
istic of the dialectical image, is taken up from the “Epistemo-Critical Pro-
logue” to The Origin of German Trauerspiel. “Ideas are to objects as con-
stellations are to stars” (O, 34), Benjamin writes there. Tying the discussion
in The Arcades back into this initial context, in which the figure of the con-
stellation emerges, makes clear that what Benjamin is concerned with, in
the dialectical image, is the presentation of an idea. The term idea, it must
be said, does not make a regular appearance in The Arcades. It does not
have the same systematic place it had in the “Epistemo-Critical Prologue”

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to the Trauerspiel book (maybe because that might have mistakenly sug-
gested an understanding of his project as idealistic rather than material-
istic). My reason nevertheless to want to think of the dialectical image as
inflected by the earlier discussion is that many of the terms surrounding it
in The Arcades, in particular the figure of the constellation and the charac-
terization of the task of philosophy as one of presentation, are common to
the two works. I assume, then, that when Benjamin speaks in The Arcades
of engaging in the construction that would reveal the dialectical image, it is
the later formulation that he gives to what he called earlier the task of the
presentation of an idea.
In trying to unpack the significance of the figure of the constellation,
the first thing to say is that in bringing together stars, unifying phenomenal
material, nothing further is added to it; there is no experiential element
that acts as glue, so to speak. But we have nevertheless something more
than the mere dispersion, namely an organization, or configuration, of the
material. The nature of that configuration would have to be distinguished
from something we might think of as the structural unity of the factual. That
latter factual or propositional unity is manifest in asserting, for instance, that
the table stands next to the chair, or that the table is brown. But that propo-
sitional form of unity—in which there is an ordering, which is more than
a mere list of elements—is characterized by the elements falling under a
concept, a relation, or a logical form. Such higher-order universals bring the
objects together to make a fact. None of them is operative in the configura-
tion of elements in a constellation. As Benjamin emphasized, “phenomena
are not incorporated in ideas. They are not contained in them” (O, 34).
The issue isn’t merely that facts are contingent, whereas what one is
looking for is a universal or lawful unity. For even if general laws might hold
for phenomena, ideas “do not become functions of the law of phenomena”
(O, 34). That which is gathered, or “apprehended,” is not to be identified
with what it makes manifest, the idea. But nor does that material fall under,
or is “comprehended in,” the idea, “in the way in which the concept genus
includes the species” (O, 34). Ideas, rather than concepts, rules, or laws,
are the highest or most significant unity that can be recovered in language
(O, 34).
But this is not to say that concepts have no role in the presentation
of the idea. One should not confuse the claim that the unity of the presen-
tation is not a conceptual unity with the claim that concepts are absent from
such a presentation. Indeed, without the work of the concept, discarding
knowledge altogether, one would be at risk of relying on some sense or

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intuition, falling upon an unhealthy mysticism, rejected outright by Benjamin.


Benjamin criticizes not only the conflation of a methodology of science with
the presentation of ideas but also the conflation of that latter strenuous
task with various forms of intuitive or mystical grasp. Indeed, if one wants to
hold to the sense that ideas are presented in language, then retaining con-
ceptual articulation is crucial. The issue is to position the concept properly
in relation to the task of the presentation of the idea. The role of concepts
is one of discrimination rather than unification. That is, there is no attempt
to bring all the phenomena that are necessary to present the idea under a
common concept or law, but, on the contrary, to make these as articulated
and distinct as possible. There is a shift from the idea that conceptual work
is related to the making of generalizations to the idea that it allows the dis-
secting of phenomena in such a way as to bring their singularity in details.
Note that in a constellation every star is an extreme. The constellation is
drafted between extreme points. Concepts, one could then say, allow us
to make phenomena into extremes by subdividing them, so that between
such extremes the constellation can be spanned (see O, 34–35).
Benjamin, then, seeks to avoid the contradiction inherent in the visu-
alization of the transcendent idea by complicating the question of what it
is to “see” a constellation, that is, by distinguishing the vision of a unity of
experience from recognizing the idea in the discontinuous configuration
of the multiplicity of disconnected phenomenal material. Viewed in terms
of the temporal, spatial, or causal unity of experience, a constellation is
not an object. In a similar way, the philosophical constellation will bring out
material unrelated through objective connections of inference, succession,
or causality. We would recognize that diverse material belongs together,
yet without having in advance an object of experience of which these are
aspects, features, or properties.
The multiplicity of materials for sure is characteristic of the start-
ing point of any investigation as concrete as Benjamin’s work on the Paris
arcades. But my point here is that multiplicity and discontinuity, far from
pointing to the unfinished state of the project, or to a stylistic predilection
for fragmentary writing, are implied by the task of presenting an idea. They
are characteristics of the dialectical image, the utterly stable end point
of the investigation. Discontinuous multiplicity would first constitute an
acknowledgment of the finitude of thinking, of the incapacity of thinking
itself to encompass the material as a unified totality. It would avoid the
illusory transference of the mode of unity of objects of experience onto the
realization of the idea. But rather than arguing that because we are finite

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Friedlander  /  Walter Benjamin’s Dialectical Image  13

we cannot recognize totality, the claim is that a certain harmony in that


discontinuous multiplicity is that form of presentation of totality, of the idea
adequate to human finitude. In other words, thinking does not merely fail
at producing a unified perspective. For a mere failure does not produce an
image. Thought must be arrested as though recognizing what is striking:
“To thinking belongs the movement as well as the arrest of thoughts. Where
thinking comes to a standstill in a constellation saturated with tensions—
there the dialectical image appears” (A, 475). In speaking of tensions, I
take it that Benjamin expresses the understanding that the deeper one
enters the concrete details of reality, the more the simple polarization into
true and false (or good and evil) is avoided. The strict negation that comes
with the perspective of the judgment about an object gives its place to a
multiplicity of extreme cases in tension with each other through which a
constellation can be drafted.11 Benjamin, one might say, inherits dialectics
yet forgoes its movement. His is a dialectics at a standstill. Note further the

11. There follows another way to distinguish the intentional object of intuition from the
recognition of the dialectical image by saying that in the latter case, through the gathering
of the material, a hidden power, or inner life, is revealed in increasing intensity. “Truth is
not an intent which realizes itself in empirical reality; it is the power which determines the
essence of this empirical reality” (O, 36). The intensity of the presentation is achieved by
bringing together extensive quotation material, none of which is “powerful” in itself. Deny-
ing that the dialectical image can be an object of vision makes clear that the manifestation
of intensity is not to be formulated in terms of the power of intuition that can grasp the
passing nondiscursively, but rather it is a matter of the highest degree of expression.
A figure that expresses the idea of the highest tension achieved between extremes is
the following: “To encompass both Breton and Le Corbusier—that would mean drawing
the spirit of contemporary France like a bow, with which knowledge shoots the moment
in the heart” (A, 459). Ignoring for a moment the fact that Breton and Le Corbusier are
both contemporaries of Benjamin, what is important is the opposition formed between
the two figures. The force of the account would be to find a vantage point from which it
is possible to hold to that opposition. This would be what constellating these extremes
in tense coexistence would come to. The past can be presented in such a way that it
encompasses both without doing away with the opposition, thus revealing the intensity of
its potential.
Another interesting figure to present the dimension of intensity in relation to the exten-
sive text appears at the opening of Convolute N: “In the fields with which we are con-
cerned, knowledge comes only in lightning flashes. The text is the roll of thunder that
follows” (A, 456). Here, the lightning is an intensity, the manifestation of a force, but the
task is to present it by way of the dispersed echo, the roll of thunder, at a distance. On that
figure of the echo and the dialectical image, see my essay “On the Musical Gathering of
the Echoes of the Voice: Walter Benjamin on Opera and the Trauerspiel,” Opera Quarterly
21, no. 4 (Autumn 2005): 631–46.

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figure of saturation: A saturated solution, say, can precipitate and crystal-


lizes at the slightest shock. Given our previous considerations, I interpret
that change of state as the ascendance from language as representative to
the image emerging on the plane of language itself. As though moving from
truth being a relation between language and world to the truth emerging in
language. In other words, the arrest of thought occurs when there are no
more ways to advance, when the ways of meaning implicit in language have
been made explicit, raised, and expressed on the plane of language. From
their gathering in the presentation emerges the striking and unapproach-
able image.

3. Image and the Construction of Truth

In an early attempt to inherit Kant (the essay “On the Program of


the Coming Philosophy”), Benjamin criticizes Kant’s reliance on the form-
content distinction, and in particular his understanding of contents in terms
of the given in sensation. With such a scheme, he argues, no metaphysics
of experience, or a priori knowledge of a lower order than knowledge of
objects in general, is possible. Once Kant introduces concepts beyond the
categories of the understanding in the attempt to develop metaphysics
within its proper bounds, the only anchor philosophy would find for univer-
sality and necessity is in the connection of its contents to the forms of intu-
ition. Therefore, only what is mathematizable in nature can be part of such
a “poor” metaphysics of nature. This would preclude precisely the possi-
bility of accounting for the time-bound, historical elements of experience
metaphysically.
Benjamin conceived of the turn to language as allowing him to reach
deep enough into the particularities of reality so as to broaden metaphysics
to all domains of experience. His later move from language to language
material (namely the methodical use of quotation) allows a type of materi-
alism that does not relinquish the aim of finding a meaningful nonempirical
order in language. For the emphasis on language material does not consti-
tute a simple rejection of idealism but rather is implied by the task of pre-
senting an idea. It is a materialism from above, so to speak.
With such a dependence on the given material, however, there is
the danger that the presentation would lack any critical edge. The idea,
in the Kantian thinking, is not just that which orients our quest for knowl-
edge. It also casts judgment on reality as it is. And if indeed what is at
stake is the presentation of an idea, then its transformative power must

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Friedlander  /  Walter Benjamin’s Dialectical Image  15

be accounted for. Something of this worry is expressed in a famous letter


Adorno addresses to Benjamin in the late thirties. In it he objects to what he
perceives as Benjamin’s wish to let things speak for themselves, “without
theoretical interpretation,” and complains that Benjamin is “omitting all the
crucial theoretical answers, and even in making the questions invisible to
all but initiates” (SW, 4:100). Such “self-effacing” writing would not only be
powerless, politically speaking, but it would also fall prey to the spell of what
it engages with. A forceful theorizing is required, according to Adorno, to
overcome the amazement or infatuation with mere facticity. The theoretical
vantage point would make criticism possible, revealing the true nature of
the material and exposing the illusory character of what are, after all, the
products of early capitalism. Benjamin’s materialism, whatever it may be,
would seem to Adorno incompatible with the Marxist variety.
Benjamin was fully aware that mere immersion in the material can
induce amazement (he thought that surrealism sometimes succumbed to
that threat). In a formulation that brings to the fore all the tensions implicit in
our previous considerations, he speaks of allowing the materials “in the only
way possible, to come into their own: by making use of them” (A, 460).
The apparent contradiction between using and letting be is evident
also when Benjamin describes his work as engaged in “the construction of
history as such,” while adding, “in the structure of commentary” (A, 461).
Even if he undertakes, as he puts, a “construction out of facts . . . construc-
tion with the complete elimination of theory,” isn’t what is constructed the
very opposite of what exists as such, to be commented upon? And how
can construction and commentary serve what would be a destructive func-
tion of criticism? A commentary’s attention to detail, even devotion to the
particularities of the subject matter, would be continuous with Benjamin’s
ascetic withdrawal from theoretical pronouncements. But by remaining
close to what it considers, the commentary would seem to lack critical dis-
tance. Even more, the commentary begins in a prejudgment concerning
the value of the work, with an assumption that its meaning is complete, set.
It is written out of a sense of a preexisting immutable standard. A commen-
tary is appropriate to scriptures or to a work having the status of a clas-
sic. Benjamin thus adopts the paradigmatic form of writing on authoritative
classical works of the past to structure his writing on the not so distant,
messy beginnings of modern reality.12

12. The relation of criticism and commentary develops and undergoes transformations
throughout Benjamin’s writings. He opens his essay “Goethe’s Elective Affinities” with

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The invocation of commentary does not, I want to argue, forgo criti-


cism, but it does reject certain forms it might take. Indeed, one might have
imagined that the way to avoid relying too much on external theoretical pre-
suppositions would be to develop a method of internal criticism, which works
from the given contents to reveal their conditions of possibility. Benjamin’s
doctoral dissertation, “On the Concept of Criticism in German Romanti-
cism,” is mostly devoted to the investigation of such a philosophico-literary
practice of criticism, which brings out the value of a work of art by inten-
sifying its meaning through internal reflection. But the dissertation ends,
significantly, with an esoteric epilogue, itself unsubmitted, “for those with
whom,” as Benjamin writes in a letter at the time, “I would have to share it
as my work” (C, 141). That epilogue sets the essential criticizability of art
advocated by the Romantics against Goethe’s understanding of the uncriti-
cizability of art. For the latter, the task of art is the imitation of a model, the
realization in a perceivable form of the ideal of art. In other words, works of
art are judged not by their potential to generate further meaning but by their
being prototypes that express to the utmost the immutable archetype that
allows judgments of beauty at all.

that contrast: “Critique seeks the truth content of a work of art; commentary, its material
content” (SW, 1:297). While Benjamin describes his engagement with Goethe’s work as
critique, he emphasizes that the two tasks cannot be easily separated, for “the more
significant the work, the more inconspicuously and intimately its truth content is bound
up with its material content.” With time, the material content comes to the fore, whereas
the truth content remains hidden, “therefore the interpretation of what is striking and
curious—that is, the material content—becomes a prerequisite for any later critic” (SW,
1:298). In effect, Benjamin makes commentary bear the burden of criticism. In his later
work on Brecht’s poetry, which he explicitly calls a commentary, he writes, “A commen-
tary, as we know, is different from an assessment. An assessment evaluates its subject,
sorting out light from obscurity. The commentary takes for granted the classical status of
the work under discussion and thus, in a sense, begins with prejudgment. It also differs
from the assessment in that it concerns itself only with the beauty and positive content of
the text” (SW, 4:215). The problem of writing on modern reality as though it is a classic is
posed explicitly in Benjamin’s commentary on Brecht’s poetry: “So the situation becomes
highly dialectical when the commentary, a form that is both archaic and authoritarian, is
applied to a body of poetry that not only has nothing archaic about it but defies what is
recognized as authority today” (SW, 4:215).
The commentary on a classic can be related to Benjamin’s work with quotations, inso-
far as making use only of quotation precisely forgoes the evaluative perspective that
makes a judgment possible. All quotations are of equal value and, as with a classic, every
detail now achieves a positive value insofar as it plays a part in the presentation of a truth
of a different order.

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Friedlander  /  Walter Benjamin’s Dialectical Image  17

I mention this context so as to give another name to the peculiar


notion of image at play in The Arcades. The dialectical image makes rec-
ognizable an archetype. The Urbild, the archetype, is not a conceptual,
abstract unity but a concrete and singular totality (strictly speaking, in the
Kantian terminology, an ideal rather than an idea).13 It is real, indeed has

13. This context allows us to assess the centrality of Goethe in elaborating the imagistic
dimension of The Arcades: “The dialectical image is that form of the historical object
which satisfies Goethe’s requirement for the object of analysis: to exhibit a genuine syn-
thesis. It is the primal phenomenon of history” (A, 474). For the early Romantics, the idea
orients a movement of criticism in which gradually the contingent individuality of the work
dissolves in the process of incorporating and finding a place for it, in relating it to other
works, genres in the medium of the idea of art. Any notion of essential individuality (as
an end point) is foreign to the Romantic sensibility. The ideal, on the other hand, is mani-
fest as a stopping point of thought, in which concrete individuality is acknowledged at
the same time as the idea is presented. That stopping point creates various dimensions
of discontinuity in the presentation. First, one could speak of the multiplicity and discon-
tinuity of materials that do not form a unity of experience, a discontinuity necessary to
have that material present the ideal. Call this the constitution of a prototype whose func-
tion is to present the archetype. Second, there is a discontinuity between that prototype
and other prototypes—say, other attempts to make manifest the idea. There is no sense
in which they belong to a common medium of art and can be related. Reflection is the
Romantic term describing the movement of thought that creates the continuity of the
medium of art. Benjamin calls the discontinuous necessary relation a “refraction”: “Just
as, in contrast to the idea, the inner structure of the ideal is discontinuous, so, too, the
connection of this ideal with art is not given in a medium but is designated by a refrac-
tion” (SW, 1:179). Third, and most importantly, there is for each prototype a “vertical”
discontinuity that marks its essential separation from the invisible archetype. This vertical
discontinuity can also be understood as the “unapproachability” of the image. (This is in
contrast to what is characteristic of Romantic criticism, namely the infinite approach that
indicates the orientation of criticism by that which is only a regulative idea.) Unapproach-
ability is the correlate of the intentionless nature of truth. (Approach demands a way of
approach, thus a way of being directed to what one approaches, making it an object of a
certain intentional stance.)
The ideal is by definition not realized in a perceptible unity of experience; it is not an
intentional object of vision. The ideal is invisible: “Works cannot attain to those invisible—
but evident—archetypes . . . they can resemble them only in a more or less high degree”
(SW, 1:180). But of course this appeal to resemblance cannot be a simple similarity of the
perceptible and the invisible. Benjamin thus writes, “For those images are invisible, and
‘resemblance’ signifies precisely the relation of what is perceptible in the highest degree
to what in principle is only intuitable. In this, the object of intuition is the necessity that the
content which announces itself in the feelings as pure, become completely perceptible.
The sensing of that necessity is intuition. The ideal of art as object of intuition is therefore
necessary perceptibility—which never appears purely in the artwork itself, which remains
the object of perception” (SW, 1:180). The primal images are invisible, yet, in this early for-

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the highest degree of reality, but it is not an element of the phenomenal


world. While not itself constructed, it is presented in the constructions out of
the phenomenal material. Only thus can the ideal serve as a standard that
makes the assessment of empirical reality possible. The archetype is the
standard or measure of the realization of the idea in contingent contents.
Reality is not measured by being compared, placed against the standard.
The relation of an archetype to phenomenal reality cannot be conceived in
terms of simple similarity or resemblance. For the archetype is essentially
invisible and the phenomenal reality perceivable. Rather, by way of the con-
struction, the standard is recognized and, at the same time, existing reality
is judged, criticized. In other words, the archetype casts a destructive ver-
dict on reality as we know it, since its very recognition demands the destruc-
tion of the homogeneous continuum of space, time, and meaning. Its image
is constituted out of language torn from its initial context. At the same time,
phenomena, by partaking in the construction and making the standard rec-
ognizable, are “saved” or even, Benjamin says, “redeemed.” They receive
their place in the affirmation of a different order. The constructive and the
destructive come together in the presentation of the standard.14

mulation, Benjamin thinks of them as intuitable. But intuition is not necessarily identified
with the material of the senses. There is room to speak of intuitability, which is not vision
or perception. This is why Benjamin thinks that the presence of the intuitive content is
identified by the intensification of significant perception. The highest degree of meaning
embodied in the perceptual is what Benjamin calls “necessary perceptibility.” The visual
field seems precisely to be identified by its contingency—things could be otherwise than
where they are. Therefore, there is no object of necessary perception that is itself percep-
tible, but rather the organization (holding together) of the perceptual can be expressed
to the highest degree. Thus the idea of necessary perceptibility is related, at this stage
of Benjamin’s writing, to the distinction between perception and intuition. Intuition can
manifest itself in feeling. That is, precisely as a demand to be expressed: “the object of
intuition is the necessity that the content which announces itself in the feelings as pure,
become completely perceptible” (SW, 1:180). There is thus a demand, which announces
itself in feeling, to make the object of intuition perceptible. It is a demand for intensification
of perceptibility (of meaning in the perceptual).
14. This coexistence of the destructive and the constructive can be traced back to
Benjamin’s understanding of Karl Krauss’s use of quotation: “To quote a word is to call
it by its name. . . . In the quotation that both saves and punishes, language proves the
matrix of justice. It summons the word by its name, wrenches it destructively from its
context, but precisely thereby calls it back to its origin. It appears, now with rhyme and
reason, sonorously, congruously, in the structure of a new text. As rhyme, it gathers the
similar into its aura; as name, it stands alone and expressionless. In citation the two
realms—of origin and destruction—justify themselves before language” (SW, 2:454).
In her interpretation of the role of quotations in Benjamin’s writing, Arendt refers to this

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Friedlander  /  Walter Benjamin’s Dialectical Image  19

Consider further that just as classicism, where speaking of an ideal


would be appropriate, assumes the perfection of the work of art not in
itself, but insofar as it brings out a standard in nature (paradigmatically
the beauty of the human body), so for Benjamin the construction is neces-
sary to present the nature of things. He breaks with the idea of truth as a
mere social construct just as much as with “vulgar historical naturalism” (A,
461) that would assume a simplistic correspondence to a preexisting reality.
A peculiar realism thus emerges from our consideration of the dialectical
image. Peculiar, insofar as the manifestation of truth is made possible only
by way of the construction of quotations. The image constructed would be
true to nature insofar as it presents that nature which is not visible inde-
pendently. Paradoxically, maybe, such nature is more recognizable in the
image constructed than in the phenomenal world.15

essay on Krauss in which the dialectic of the destructive and the constructive is devel-
oped: “In this form of ‘thought fragments,’ quotations have the double task of interrupting
the flow of presentation with ‘transcendent force’ (Schriften I:142–43) and at the same
time of concentrating within themselves that which is presented” (Arendt, introduction
to Illuminations, 39). But what remains unclear in her description is how, precisely, the
destructive transcendent force is identical with the constructive presentation. That iden-
tity is central to my understanding of the construction of the archetype.
15. The Goethean ideal will necessarily involve a moment of inaccessibility or invisibility of
a core which must be brought out by the relation of the perceptible material. In the context
of art, Benjamin claims that Goethean archetypes are presented in the constructions of
art, in the prototypes, but are not identified with them. Rather, they themselves, though
invisible, inhere in nature. Being invisible, though, they are the highest reality and can
only be grasped by way of their “imitation,” by the constructions of art. The work of art is
understood as a construction that is necessary to make manifest the truth of nature. Truth
becomes intuitable in art, but not because art represents the truth: “the true, intuitable,
ur-phenomenal nature would become visible after the fashion of a likeness, not in the
nature of the world but only in art, whereas in the nature of the world it would indeed be
present but hidden (that is overshadowed by what appears)” (SW, 1:181). Compare also:
“Here everything turns on the more exact definition of the concept of ‘true nature,’ since
this ‘true’ visible nature, which is supposed to constitute the contents of the artwork, not
only must not be immediately identified with the appearing, visible nature of the world,
but rather must first be rigorously distinguished from that nature on a conceptual level,
whereas afterward, to be sure, the problem of a deeper, essential unity of the ‘true’ visible
nature in the artwork and of the nature present in phenomena of visible nature (present
though perhaps invisible, only intuitable, ur- phenomenal) would be posed” (SW, 1:181).
The rejection of the “spatial” figure of correspondence that underlies naturalism is paral-
leled by the rejection of a naïve metaphysical realism by insisting that there is a task of
realization in relation to the past. The past is not completely real until the present realizes
it. (This is the temporal basis for claiming the compatibility of realism and construction.)
Only on the assumption that the ultimate reality of the past is yet to be realized can one

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In his preface to the book on the German Trauerspiel, Benjamin


thinks of his historical inquiries as a form of natural history. Similarly, in The
Arcades he describes what he is doing by means of the religious expression
of “reading the book of nature.”16 In contrast to the scientific investigation
of reality for the sake of knowledge, that expression usually indicates the
search for a teleological order of nature manifesting God’s design, show-
ing nature to be created. The fact that Benjamin nevertheless uses such
a theological register in relation to the not so flattering products of metro-
politan existence would imply that the reality he aims to wrest out of that
material is akin to the presence of nature. With the dialectical image, “the
concept of Ur-phenomenon [is] extracted from the pagan context of nature
and brought into the Jewish contexts of history” (A, 462).

4. Image and Time

One of the striking aspects in Benjamin’s understanding of the dia-


lectical image is its temporality, in particular the relation formed between
the past investigated and the present that can recognize its image. It is
somewhat pointless to state that it is in the present that one is engaged in

think of the necessity of a construction to reveal history as such (see section 4 of the
present essay).
16. “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, 464). Or again: “The historical method is a philological method based
on the book of life. ‘Read what was never written,’ runs a line in Hoffmannsthal. The reader
one should think of here is the true historian” (SW, 4:405). Benjamin is clearly aware of
the distinction between reading the real and reading a text, for he adds, “Bear in mind
that commentary on a reality (for it is a question here of commentary, of interpretation in
detail) calls for a method completely different from that required by commentary on a text.
In one case, the scientific mainstay is theology; in the other case, philology” (A, 460).
Yet the argument of the present essay is committed to the claim that in both cases the
material is textual, for even the commentary on the real relies on the construction out
of quotations. Benjamin, one might say, reads the real, essential being by considering
what is revealed in human language. The theological dimension implicit in this enterprise
would require tracing it back to the early vision of the relation of the language of created
beings to the language of man in “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man”
(SW, 1:62–74). The dimension of natural life is shown by putting together the quotation
material. For sure, this juxtaposition of a theology of the language of nature, or of created
being, and the concerns of The Arcades opens many new questions which we are not in
a position to answer in this essay. Among them, the most troubling would be as to what
form of natural life could emerge from the consideration of The Arcades material.

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Friedlander  /  Walter Benjamin’s Dialectical Image  21

learning about the past. Not much more illuminating would be the claim that
sometimes the understanding of the past depends on present discover-
ies of evidence previously hidden. But neither would it be strong enough
to claim that only in the present do we have a “proper” perspective on
the past. Benjamin singles a specific moment in which the material comes
together as a totality, that is, in which it is justified to speak of the recogni-
tion of an image. The real issue in relating present and past is that “the Now
of Recognizability,” as he calls it, is correlative to the temporality internal to
the meaning of the past itself: “truth . . . is bound to a nucleus of time lying
hidden within the knower and the known alike” (A, 463).17
This time internal to meaning should be distinguished both from
the objectively measurable time and from the subjective structure of the
experience of time. Any meaningful phenomenon has an inner life whose
realization is brought about by a work of expression in that present which
recognizes it. The past becomes fully real (realized) in the present. The
relation of present and past must be formulated ontologically, so that rec-
ognition is at the same time a realization of its object: “In regard to such a
perception, one could speak of the increasing concentration (integration)
of reality such that everything past (in its time) can acquire a higher grade
of actuality than it has in the moment of its existing” (A, 392). One might
say that in the dialectical image Benjamin brings together the two senses
of “realizing.” Realizing as making something real, actual, on the one hand,
and recognizing something clearly, on the other.18 This is strikingly put by

17. The temporality Benjamin singles out cannot be described in terms of a simple con-
trast between mechanistic time and teleological time. The realization of meaning is in no
way a gradual process involving a progressive time line from past to present, as though
we have a simple maturing of meaning or the realization of a potential. Such a structure
would assume a continuity in time, a medium which would allow the unfolding of the
telos. On Benjamin’s account, “in order for a part of the past to be touched by the present
instant there must be no continuity between them” (A, 470). And also, “. . . since the
different epochs of the past are not all touched in the same degree by the present day
of the historian (and often the recent past is not touched at all; the present fails to ‘do it
justice’), continuity in the presentation of history is unattainable” (A, 470). To emphasize
the lack of continuity, Benjamin sometimes describes this relation, formed between a
particular past and a present realizing it, as a leap (see, in particular, section 14 of “On
the Concept of History”).
18. Benjamin’s term for the recognizability of the dialectical image is Erkennbarkeit. Such
recognition is not merely cognitive but is intimately related to actualization (Aktualisie-
rung). I use the double meaning of “realization” to cover both significations. This double
meaning itself hints at the position between objective and subjective. To unpack some of
the ordinary language complexities of the term, note that realization would seem to have

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emphasizing how knowledge of a historical object is not “knowledge about”


but really part of the being of the object itself: “Historical ‘understanding’
is to be grasped, in principle, as an afterlife of that which is understood”
(A, 406). Historical knowledge is a meeting point between the ripening of
the past and the awakened interests of the present (which, if awakening is
properly understood, are not its preexisting interests).
Benjamin’s formulations constantly avoid putting the weight on the
past or on the present, on subject or object, constantly avoiding perspectiv-
ism and metaphysical realism. For him, the idea of how “things really were”
is as problematic as that of the thing in itself. The Kantian echo is most
obvious when Benjamin appropriates a famous figure from the introduction
of the Critique of Pure Reason: “The Copernican revolution in historical
perception is as follows. Formerly it was thought that a fixed point had been

an intimate relation to time, as it is often used with a temporal determination: “Now I real-
ize my mistake”; “I realized there and then that this life was not for me”; “In time I came
to realize the significance of that encounter.” This relation to time is not something we
would emphasize with other types of cognition. (One might say, “Now I know the theory
of relativity,” so as to emphasize how bad last year’s physics professor was.) We ask
“How do you know?” “Why do you believe?” and often “When did you realize?” It does
not make sense to ask “Why did you realize?” and also, only in special cases, “How did
you realize?” which seem to mean what led to the realization rather than explain how
the realization itself occurred. One can possess knowledge, but there is no such thing
as holding to a realization (though it might need “digesting,” and it can be translated,
for instance, into a change in one’s attitude toward another person). There is something
momentary to realization.
The momentary nature of realization finds its echo in the way in which realization is
construed as a kind of perception: “Do you realize what you are doing!?” often means
“Can’t you see?” “Do you realize what you are saying!?” could mean “Can you hear your-
self!?” Yet the rhetorical sense of these questions hints that realization is not like seeing
something utterly new. It is no revelation, but a recognition that has a certain simplicity to
it. One would not use realization in relation to something extremely complex which cannot
be taken in as a whole. (It can be said of someone that they know the theory of relativity,
not that they realize it.)
Realization cannot solely depend on acquiring new information, nor is it reducible to
a mere change of mind. Realization can sometimes have an “all at once, things coming
together” feeling to it. This notion of things coming together can be related to the question
of how time can be presented in an image (the dialectical image). The further implication,
then, is that realization has something of an arresting quality. (We speak of a shock of
recognition.) That arrest can be construed in terms of meaning being fulfilled in time.
Importantly, “realization” could also be used to mark the end of a long process of matur-
ing. We speak of “gradually realizing something.” Or, one would say, “In time, I came to
realize.” The passive form makes clear that it is not through an effort of mine but rather by
something working itself out that realization occurs.

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Friedlander  /  Walter Benjamin’s Dialectical Image  23

found in ‘what has been,’ and one saw the present engaged in tentatively
concentrating the forces of knowledge on this ground. Now this relation
is to be overturned. . . . The facts become something that just now first
happened to us, first struck us; to establish them is the affair of memory”
(A, 389).
In this temporal transposition of Kant’s Copernican revolution, just
as in the original, it is the constitution of the object that is its reality, that is
at stake. For Kant, an object of experience is first constituted through that
involvement of the human subject. Similarly for Benjamin, history is not
merely colored by the perspective and interests of the present, but rather
achieves full reality, the historical object first emerges, by way of the involve-
ment of the present. To put it as strongly as possible, there is no such thing
as a historical essence or substance apart from this structure.
From our preceding considerations that opposed the recognition of
the idea to the knowledge of an object of experience, it must nevertheless
become obvious that there are going to be significant differences between
the two versions of the Copernican revolution. For Kant, the Copernican
revolution, the involvement of our faculties in the nature of the object, is to
show how the conditions of the very constitution of experience guarantee
the possibility of knowledge of objects of experience. Benjamin transforms
the understanding of that Kantian formula insofar as he aims to address the
possibility of the presentation of an idea with concrete phenomenal material.
In the Kantian system, every such attempt would be dialectical. But this is
precisely why it is important to remember that realization is not knowledge
but recognition.
Benjamin would further agree with Kant that temporal succession or
continuity, causality, which are characteristic of the conditions of the object
of experience, cannot determine the temporality of the realization of the
idea: “. . . no state of affairs having causal significance is for that very rea-
son historical. It became historical posthumously, as it were, through events
that may be separated from it by thousands of years” (SW, 4:397). If one
considers the individual subject, that other, noncausal or nonsuccessive
temporality is made possible by memory, by recollection. Memory would
not simply be viewed as an instrument for retrieving already formed experi-
ences. It is rather the medium of the realization of the meaning of the past.
Recollection would provide that nonsuccessive, nonhomogeneous tempo-
rality of the realization of the idea. In the individual context, Benjamin’s
autobiography, Berlin Childhood Around 1900, is an exemplary instance
of what it would mean to think of memory as such a medium of realization

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of the past. Yet a simple notion of tradition would not do to extend this
form of memory from the individual to the collective, for the concept of
tradition is too dependent on the conscious and intentional transmission of
experience. Grasping the temporality of realization requires the adoption
of Benjamin’s understanding that meaning has an inner life or afterlife. That
is, collective memory is not carried by a consciousness, but by language
and the transformations it undergoes in time. But further, since the rec-
ognition of the image occurs in a moment of arrest and discontinuity, that
recollection is a type of involuntary memory. (The individual, literary con-
figuration of involuntary memory has preoccupied Benjamin in the figure of
Proust.) The register of the involuntary can itself be expressed nonpsycho-
logistically if we keep in mind our understanding that the dialectical image
is unapproachable; it is not the object of an intentional state of mind. This is
why Benjamin will ultimately characterize the constructed dialectical image
as “the involuntary memory of humanity.”19

5. Dialectical Image and Dream Images

The drive to totality in the Kantian dialectic is the source of meta-


physical illusion. The question to raise, then, in relation to Benjamin’s inheri-

19. The problematic aspect of the dependence on chance in the awakening of such mem-
ory is raised in Benjamin’s essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire”: “According to Proust,
it is a matter of chance whether an individual forms an image of himself, whether he can
take hold of his experience. But there is nothing inevitable about the dependence on
chance in this matter” (SW, 4:315). Indeed, the distinction between the voluntary memory
of the individual and a dimension of involuntary memory, involuntary insofar as it depends
essentially on the communion with others, can exist when there is a significant medium of
tradition. Days of remembrance, as Benjamin calls them, are the occasion in which mem-
ory that is essentially independent of the volition of the individual (insofar as it depends
on participation in the communal event) is awakened. With the problematization of the
transmission of the past in modernity, there arises both the problematic dependence on
chance as well as a sense of the pathological form of recapturing the past: “Proust could
emerge as an unprecedented phenomenon only in a generation that had lost all bodily
and natural aids to remembrance and that, poorer than before, was left to itself to take
possession of the worlds of childhood in merely an isolated, scattered and pathological
way” (A, 388). In The Arcades, there is, for sure no reliance on a living tradition. Benjamin
is aware of the necessity of a synthetic construction of the past. But the voluntary/involun-
tary distinction is mapped onto the intentional/nonintentional distinction. The recognition
of the nonintentional nature of truth is not dependent on a chance discovery but is, rather,
compatible with the constructive work with quotations, which never has a direct relation
to the emergence of the image.

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Friedlander  /  Walter Benjamin’s Dialectical Image  25

tance of Kant is whether and how the recognition of the dialectical image
involves a structure of overcoming illusion. I will briefly address this point in
conclusion by thinking of the importance of the arcades for the configura-
tion of truth Benjamin aims to bring out. Though the arcades are the central
subject matter of the project, Benjamin adopted the title “Paris Capital of
the Nineteenth Century” for the two exposés he made of it. By conjoining
a place and an epoch, he intended not only to assert that Paris was a
central place in the nineteenth century. Rather, the idea is that tendencies
spread out in time are gathered in a place. By further taking the arcades as
the preeminent phenomenon investigated in his project, Benjamin implies
that they bring together and concentrate within themselves such broader
expanses of experience. In sum, we can think here of a structure of minia-
turization: nineteenth century, concentrated in Paris, concentrated in the
arcades.
For sure, not every phenomenon has this refractive power. One
might doubt how an inanimate object could contain within itself a time span.
Yet we would sometime say that certain moments or actions of a human
life could sum up that life (in particular, in tragedy). And one might even
want to claim that a life as a whole can be conceived monadically, as a
complete point of view on the world. To suggest (rather than argue) that
possibility with respect to the arcades, we must not take them merely as an
architectonic construct but as a dwelling place of the collective. Moreover,
Benjamin puts great weight on the fact that the arcades were “covered”
streets, in other words, the exterior turned into an “interior” space. More
precisely, they are, for him, an internalization of the exterior, the surround-
ings brought together in a limited place and concentrated in perceptible
phenomena.
Surroundings are essentially different from an object of attention.
They cannot be simply individuated, broken into isolated parts, and taken
in, bit by bit. Assuming the initial incorporation of an environment, its inter-
nalization, we would have to treat the perceptible phenomena in which it
is gathered as having an aura of meaning extending beyond what they are
literally speaking. One could conceive, at the individual level, of the imagi-
nation as this gathering power of meaning in images, but it would be even
better to consider this process to take place in the space of memory. That
is, the claim is not that certain experiences such as strolling in the arcades
have a dreamlike quality but rather that insofar as a world is put together
in recollection, its initial coalescing would not be as a “totality of facts” but
have the striking strangeness of a dream.

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This holds true in relation to the work Benjamin undertakes with


the traces left by the collective of its life in the arcades. In the quotations
Benjamin collects, in the sheltering spaces, not only of the arcades but
more importantly of The Arcades Project, are brought in contact iron con-
struction with photography, boredom with dolls. The conjuncture of place
and time Benjamin forms is, to use a pun he coins, not only a Zeit-Raum, a
space-time, but a Zeit-Traum, a Dream-Space-Time.
With this understanding of the necessity of the dream images as
concentrations of the surroundings, we rejoin the temporal dimension of
realization. The dream images are the reflection of a broader reality to be
given expression to. It is therefore with respect to them that one can speak
of a potential or tendency, as well as of a task, of expression. The yet to
be realized meaning of that world can be actualized in the present. In sum,
such dream images are not mere illusion or fantasy. They are the luminous
points out of which the constellation is drafted. For, only through that inter-
nalization of the expanse in a dream configuration can the truth of that
world emerge in turn in recollection.20

20. In a letter to Gretel Adorno, Benjamin writes, “The dialectical image does not draw
a copy of the dream—it was never my intention to assert this. But it does seem to me to
contain the instances, the moment consciousness dawns as one awakens, and indeed
to produce its likeness only from these passages just as an astral image emerges from
luminous points” (C, 508). One should, in effect, not confuse the dreamy luminosity of
the stars with truth emerging as those stars are constellated. “Phantasmagoria is the
intentional correlate of immediate experience” (A, 804), but for that reason it is essentially
different from the nonintentional constellation that presents the measure of significant
experience.

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