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