Benjamin's Passagen-Werk: Redeeming Mass Culture for the Revolution Author(s): Susan Buck-Morss Source: New German Critique,

No. 29, The Origins of Mass Culture: The Case of Imperial Germany (1871-1918) (Spring - Summer, 1983), pp. 211-240 Published by: New German Critique Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/487795 Accessed: 15/04/2010 11:22
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Benjamin's Passagen-Werk: Mass Culture theRevolution, fr Redeeming

by Susan Buck-Morss
I. Mass Cultureas Dream-World 2 I shall focus my comments on the recently published Passagen-Werk, Benjamin's major but unfinished study of Paris in the 19th century, which was concerned with the origins of mass culture, and which occupied him from 1927 until his suicide in 1940. In line with the specific interests of this conference, I will consider his argument that the recently out-of-date objects of mass culture possessed political, iadeed, revolutionary power for his generation, and this will take us by a somewhat circuitous route to Imperial Berlin, the scene of Benjamin's own childhood. Any argument based on the Passagen-Werk is necessarily tentative, due to its extremely ambiguous status as a text. Its goal was to reconstruct history with a political focus on the "present," but between 1927 and 1940 the political nature of the present changed considerably, and thus so does the tone of the reconstruction. Moreover, although surely Benjamin's major literary effort, the Passagen-Werk is not only unfinished; it is nota "work" at all. It consists of reserach notes with some commentary, carefully numbered and collected in folders (Konvoluts)to which Benjamin gave identifying keywords ("Arcades," "Fashion," "Ancient Paris," "Boredom," Haussmannization," etc.) as well as letters which he arranged A-Z; a-z. It might best be described as 1. My thanksto Philippe Invernel,Barbara Kleiner,Burkhardt Linder,Michael

L6wy, Winfried Menninghaus, and Berndt Witte, from whose contributions to the colloquium, "Walter Benjamin et Paris" (Paris,June 1983), I learned much that was stimulating for the revision of this paper. am-Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1982), Gesammelte vol. Schriften, V; hereafter PW. Citations are noted below with their identifying Konvolut letter code.

2. WalterBenjamin, Passagen-Werk, ed. by RolkTiedemann(FrankfurtDas 2 vol., 211

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a lexicon providing concrete images, in the form of quotations from sources on 19th-centuryParis,which illuminate the origins of modernity. From them, as from building blocks, Benjamin constructed his two essays on Baudelaire (1938 and 1939), and wouldhave constructed qualified commentator, Theodor Adorno, could not decipher, given the fragmented condition of the surviving material.3But particularlyof the topic of mass culture, in light of the wide dissemination of the 1936 essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,"4 which in this country at least is taken as the canonical statement by Bento jami on the subject, the Passagen-Werk, which the artwork essay was tied in its conception,5 provides even in its partial illuminations closely an important corrective to overly-simplistic or one-sided assumptions as to what Benjamin's mass-culture theory was all about. It should perhaps be noted first of all that despite its reception as such, "mass culture" (a term Benjamin didn't use) is not the central theme of the artworkessay. The essay is concerned primarilywith art in the age of industrialism, when it has become possible to reproduce technologically not only the work of art, but also the subject matter (reality)which art has striven traditionally to represent. Benjamin dealt with the theoretical, indeed, philosophical question of what happens to the social and cognitive function of art once its authority as an original (the source of its "aura") has been undermined by mass reproduction and once its efforts at the mimetic replication of reality (which had given its forms, however illusory, a claim to truth) have been decisively surpassed by technological means, specifically photography and film. Benjamin's answer is clear: The result is the liquidation of art in its traditional, bourgeois form. Art's power as illusion moves over into industry (painting into advertising, architecture into technical engineering, handcrafts or sculpture into the industrial arts) creating what we have come to call mass culture, and is taken into
the Passagen-Werk in just what fashion, however, even the most

3. The bulk of the text was in Adorno's hands by 1948, during which summer he "worked through it most exhaustively" and concluded that the mass of quotations of which it consists was lacking in a theoretical or conceptual ordering adequate for their interpretation, a task which, "if it were possible at all, only Benjamin could have accomplished." (PW, 1072). trans. Harry Zohn and ed. Hannah Arendt 4. In Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, (New York: Schocken Books, 1969). The tide, "Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit," is more accurately (if less gracefully) translated, "The work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproduceability." 5. Benjamin wrote that the artwork essay "fixes the contemporary situation from backwhich certain premises and questions are to be decisive for the [Passagen-Werk's] ward glance into the 19th century" (PW, 1152. See also Ibid., 1150-51).

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the service of capitalist interests for profits. But the cognitive function of art (its ability to speak the truth) can be redeemed if in turn the artist, remaining an outsider, takes the industrial techniques developed under capitalism into his service. As a mimetic technology, the invention of film provided an expressive medium adequate to industriallytransformed sense-perception. When the artist-as-philosopher takes over as tools the formal principles of this new medium, he is able to capture the modern experience of time (increased tempo) and space (fragmentation)which are no longer describable in Kantiancategories, and, via non-sequential time frames, close-up and montage, he can begin to analyse modern reality with a scientific, politically critical eye. The change in the function of art corresponded to a social transformation. Benjamin considered the new urban panorama, nowhere more dazzling than in Paris, as the extreme visual representation of what Marx called the fetishism of commodities, wherein "a particular social relationship between people takes on the phantasmagoric form of a relationship between things."6 One could say that the dynamics of capitalist industrialism had caused a curious reversal in which "reality" and "art" switched places. Reality had become artifice, a phantasmagoria of commodities and architectural construction made possible by new industrial processes. The modern city was nothing but the proliferation of such objects, the density of which created an artificial landscape of buildings and consumer items as totally encompassing as the earlier, natural one. In fact, for children (like Benjamin) born into an urban environment, they appeared to be nature itself. Benjamin's understanding of commodities was not merely critical. He affirmed them as utopian wish-images which "liberated creativityfrom art,just as in the XVIth century the sciences freed themselves from philosophy" (PW, 1236, again 1249). This phantasmagoria of industriallyproduced material objects - buildings, boulevards, all sorts of commodities from tour-books to toilet articles - for Benjamin was mass culture, and it is the central concern of the Passagen-Werk. The nightmarish, infernal aspects of industrialism were veiled in the modern city by a vast arrangement of things which at the same time gave corporeal form to the wishes and desires of humanity. Because they were "natural"phenomena in the sense of concrete matter,7they
6. Marx, Capital,cited by Benjamin (G 5, 1). 7. Benjamin considered the distinction between manufactured and non-manufactured objects not absolute. Neither were "natural" in the sense of ahistorical; and both were ratural as material existence: "...every true natural form [Naturgestalt] and in fact technology is also such a thing..." (K la, 3).

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give the illusion of being the realization of those wishes rather than merely their reified, symbolic expression. Mass media (Benjamin would have called it mechanical reproduction) could now replicate this commodity world endlessly as the mere image of an illusion (examples were Hollywood films, the growing advertising industry, Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will").8But the critical, cognitive function in which a politicized art might participate was precisely the opposite: not to duplicate illusion as real, but to interpret reality as itself illusion. This, I would claim, was in fact the goal of the PassagenIf Werk. the artworkessay argues theoretically for the transformation of art from illusory representation into an analysis of illusions, the was Passagen-Werk intended to put theory into literarypractice. Itwas to have appropriated the new techniques of film9 so that it could meet the distracted public halfway,10in order to expose to them how and why reality became composed of illusions in the first place. Benjamin described the new urban-industrial phantasmagoria as a "dream-world," in which neither exchange value nor use value exhausted the meaning of objects. It was as "dream-images of the collective" - both distorting illusion and redeemable wish-image that they took on political meaning. The new public buildings were "dreamhouses."" The lived experience of all this, the false consciousness of a collective subjectivity, at once deeply alienated and yet capable of entering into the commodity landscape of utopian symbols
8. Clearly, in a world where mass media was being used for anything but critical enlightenment, Benjamin's affirmation of film and other forms of mechanical reproduction was addressed to the cognitive potential of such media, not their present practice. As he commented to Scholem in 1938: "The philosophical bond between the two parts of my [artwork]study that you miss will be supplied by the revolution more effectively than by me" (Gershom Scholem, Cited in Walter Benjamin: TheStoryof a Friendship,trans. Harry Zohn [Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1981], p. 207). Meanwhile, as Brecht stated (and Benjamin's work demonstrated): "It is conceivable that other kinds of artists, such as playrights and novelists, may for the moment be able to work in a more cinematic way than the film people" (Brechton Theater,ed. John Willett [New York: 1964], p. 480. Hill and Wang. 9. "A central problem of historical materialism that finally should be seen: whether the Marxist understanding of history absolutely precludes its graphicness. Or: In what way is it possible to connect a heightened graphicness to the execution of the Marxist method? The first step.. .will be to take over into history the principle of montage" (N 2, 6). 10. Cf. Benjamin, Illuminations, 240. p. 11. "All collective architecture of the 19th century provides housing for the dreaming collective." (H degree, 1). Included were department stores, world exhibition halls, railroad stations, factories, museums, and of course the arcades the Passagen themselves. Interestingly, Benjamin did not consider the 20th-century movie theater

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with uncriticalenthusiasm he called "dream-consciousness." Benwas to interpretthe historicalorigins of this dream by jamin's goal transforming images"with the power dream-imagesinto "dialectical to causea political"awakening." thePassagen-Werk, In culturalhistoryand revolutionary were to converge. writing pedagogy This,atleast,wasBenjamin's originalplan,documentedin twoearly setsof notes, 1927and 1928-29(PW,993-1059).At thattime Benjamin was merelya visitorin Paris;his researchwas conductedmainlyat the in StaatsbiliothekBerlin.In 1933 Benjaminwent to Parisin permanent exile. Workon the Passagen-Werk proceeded in fits and starts,but the remained largely in force at least as late as the 1935 original plan expose of the project.Just how greatlyit changed afterthat remains, even afterdetailedphilologicalanalysis,a debatablepoint, and it is a question to whichwe will return.In the followingsection I will simply try to reconstructBenjamin'stheory of the dreaming collective (das triumende Kollektiv), relyingon the earlynotes (1927 seriesA degree- A and 1928-29seriesa degree- h degree),the variousversionsof degree the 1935 expose (includingthe preparatory notes, 1934-35,PW1206K and those sections of the Konvoluts, 1223), particularly ("Traumstadt, K Nihilismus" 1-K 3a) and N ("ErkenZukunftstrdume, anthropologischer Theorie N ntnistheoretisches, desFortschritts" 1-N 3a), which were written
before 1935.12

II. The Source theDream theTwo and Dream-States of described capitalism as "a natural phenomenon with Benjamin whicha new dream-sleepcame overEurope,and in it, a reactivation of mythicpowers"(K la, 8). Livingin Parismeant being wrappedin this dream, which left visible traces as the city's physical elements. The arcades(Passagen) one such element, in factthe veryfirst"dreamwere houses" built out of the new iron-and-glassconstructionof industrialism.These coveredpedestrianstreets,privately owned yet open to the public, were lined with specialty shops, cafes, casinos, and theatersdesignedto attract fashionablecrowdin theirnew socialrole a
as the penultimate "dreamhouse." On the contrary, the technology of film provided the opposite effect: "Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories appeared to have locked us up hopelessly. Then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far flug ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go travelling" (Benjamin, Illumination,p. 236). 12. We can date these sections because the then-existing manuscript was photographed in 1935. A second part was photographed by a different techrique in 1937. (On the question of dating, see the editor's notes (PW, 1261-62).

216 Benjamin's Passagenwerk as consumers. Once the height of bourgeois luxury, the Paris arcades which survived in Benjamin's day had deteriorated. they had become a refuge for commodities now old-fashioned, "strange, out-of-date things:" dentures and feather-dusters, corsettes and umbrellas, stockings and wind-up dolls, collar buttons for shirts long since disappeared - all this created a montage suggesting "a world of secret affinities" (a degree 3). It was the Surrealistswho originally recognized that the residues of past fashions in the present possessed a mythic power and compare them to dream-images. And it was they who first became fascinated with the declining Parisarcades, full of such images. Louis Argaon's description of the soon-to-be demolished Passage de Benl'Opera, in Lepaysan de Paris (1926) inspired the Passagen-Werk. recalled later: "Evenings in bed I could never read more than jamin two or three pages before my heartbeat got so strong I had to put the book down."'3 But Surrealists became "stuck in the realm of dreams" (H degree 17; N 1, a). Benjamin's intent, "in opposition to Aragon," was "not to let oneself be lulled sleepily within the 'dream' or 'mythology' " but "to penetrate all this by the dialectic of awakening" (PW, 1214). Such awakening began where Surrealistsand other avant-garde artists too often stopped short, because in rejecting cultural tradition they closed their eyes to history as well. Benjamin wrote: "We conceive the dream 1) as a historical 2) as a collective phenomenon" (PW, 1214). "is Against Aragon, the Passagen-Werk concerned with dissolving into the space of history. This clearly can happen only mythology through awakening a not-yet-conscious knowledge of the past [Gewesen]"(N 1,9). In his earliest notes for the Passagen-Werk, Benjamin revived the feudal image of a "body politic," itself out of fashion since the Baroque era, without, however, the traditional divisions between classes of social labor. One might be reminded of the 17th-centuryimage of a new body politic which as frontespiece illustrated Hobbes' Leviathan, except that Benjamin was proposing an allegorical representation of the most recent past instead of a normative model for the present, and the political unit was not Hobbes' ensemble of atomistic individuals, but the (not-yet-awakened) collective: "The XIX century: a time-space in (a [Zeitraum] time-dream [Zeit-traum]) which individual consciousness maintains itselfever-more reflectively, whereas the collective consciousness sinks into ever-deeper sleep. butjust as the sleeping person - here like someone insane - sets out on the macrocosmic journey through his body, and the sounds and feelings of his own insides 13. Walter Benjamin, Briefe, 2 vols., eds. Gershom Scholem and T.W. Adorno (Frankfurt-am-Main:Suhrkamp Verlag, 1966), vol. 2, pp. 662-63.

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which to the healthy,awakepersonblend togetherin a surgeof health (blood pressure, intestinal movements, heartbeatand muscle sensations) - due to his unprecedendy sharpened senses, generate hallucinationsor dream-imageswhich translateand explain [these sensations], so it is too with the dreaming collective which in the arcadessinks into its own innards.This is whatwe have to pursue in order to interpretthe 19th century in fashion and advertisement, building and politics,as the consequenceof [the collective's]dreamcountenance" 1, 4, cf. G degree14).Consumer and (K objects,novelties existed in the present as dream fashions from the past [Gewesene], images through which the collective unconscious communicated of acrossgenerations.New inventionsconceivedout of the fantasy one enteredinto the childhood experiencedof another. generation,they Now (and this is one of the most intriguingaspects of Benjamin's theory),their second dream-existence began:"Theexperienceof the of a generationhas much in common with dreamexperience." youth (K 1, 1, cf. F degree7). If capitalismhad been the sourceof a historical this dream-state, one was of biologicalorigins,and the two axes conin a unique constellationfor each generation.At this intersecverged tion between social history and natural history, between society's dream and childhood dream, the contents of the collective unconscious were transmitted."Everyepoch has this side turned toward dreams - the childlike side. For the preceedingcenturyit emerges very clearlyin the arcades"(K 1, 1; F degree 7). Childhood was not merely a passive receptaclefor this historical unconscious. Childhood transformedthe dream-imagesin accord reversal with its own temporalindex, and this entailedtheirdialectical I undersfrom historically specificimagesinto archaicones (Urbilder). tandat leastpartof Benjamin's point to be this:Fromthe child'sposition, all history,from the most ancientto the most recentpast,occurs in mythictime. No historyrecountshis or her lived experience.All of the past lies in an archaicrealmof"Ur"-history.Now, the bourgeois ideology of historical progress does its best to overwhelm this childhood intuition of even the most recent history as archaicand mythicallydistant, by substitutingfor it the image of history'striumphalmarch,which submergesthe new generationsin its "irresistable" tide. (We may recall that Benjamin considered nothing so The politicallycorrupting: belief in progresswasitselfa myththatprevented any real historicalchange from occurring.14) In the marketplace,historical progressmanifestsitselfas fashionand newness,but it "At thisthatthe cognitiveexperienceof childhoodreverses: first, isjust
14. Benjamin, Illuminations, 258. p.

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granted, the technologically-new gives the effect of beingjust that. But already in the next childhood memory it changes its characteristics. Every child accomplishes something great, something irreplaceable for humanity. Every childhood, through its interests in technological phenomena, its curiosity for all sorts of inventions and machinery, binds technological achievement [the newest things] onto the old world of symbols" (n 2a, 1). This old "world of symbols" was the storehouse for humanity's expressions of the desire for utopia, and here Benjamin came closest to the theory of a collective unconscious with innate archetypes postulated by C.G. Jung and Ludwig Klages. The difference was Benjamin's Marxist sensibility: when old utopian desires were cathected onto the new products of industrial production, they reactivated the original promise of industrialism, slumbering in the lap of capitalism, to deliver a humane society of material abundance. In terms of socialist, revolutionary politics, then, the rediscovery of these ursymbols in the most modern technological products had a potentially explosive and absolutely contemporary relevance. For Benjamin, the truth of an object emerged in its "after-life,"(cf. N 2) when both use-value and exchange-value receeded and the potential for the symbolic expression of humanity's dreams - its wishdreams as well as its nightmares - came to the fore. And this precisely desribes the child's reception of objects. Hence: "The child can in fact do something of which the adult is totally incapable: 'discover the new anew' For us locomotives already have the character of symbols because we found them there in our childhood. For our children, however, [this is true of] the automobile, from which we ourselves gain only the new, elegant, modern, dashing side. There is no more shallow, impotent antithesis as that which reactionary figures like [Ludwig] Klages try to set up between the symbolic space of nature and techne. To every truly new and natural form - and in fact technology is also such a thing - there correspond new "images." Every childhood discovers these new images in order to add them to the image-treasure of humanity" (K la, 3; M degree 20). When Benjamin referred to "our children" he was not speaking hypothetically. The period of his first formulation of the Passagen-Werk coincided with the childhood of his own son Stefan (born in 1918). But it coincided as well with a long and painful divorce which put distance, physically and emotionally, between them. His marriage was dissolved in 1930. His parents, with whom he had had strong conflicts as a young man, died during the same period. The pressure in modern society which causes ruptures in family tradition and alienation between generations was clear to him. In 1932 at the age of forty, Benjamin, convinced that his chances for personal happiness were small,

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and threatenedby economicallyand politicallyinsecure conditions, contemplatedsuicideseriously.Duringthatsameyear,in the midstof writing short pieces necessaryfor his financialsurvival,he wrote to Scholem,"somethingelse is coming into being behind my back- in the the form of some notes I have been making...concerning history of my relationshipto Berlin."15 These notes took shape quicklyin two um Kindheit Chronik versions,Berliner (dedicatedto Stefan),6andBerliner 1 1900. They were childhood reminiscences structured not as chronologicalautobiography,but as "discreteexpeditions into the As this depth of memory."18 self-analysis projectseems to have been the powerto put the pastbehind him. At therapeutic, givingBenjamin on the same time he was testingthe childhood dream-theory himself, and practicingon the level of individualhistorywhat he hoped evenfor tually to accomplish in the Passagen-Werk the collective, a reconstructionof the past in the light of the present, in order to break away- "awaken" from it.19 Benjamin'schildhood memories are less of people than of those urban spaces in Imperial Berlin which formed the settings for his experiences- parks,departmentstores,railroadstations,citystreets, cafes, and school buildings. They concern as well the materialproducts of industrialism - a wrought-iron door, the telephone, a chocolate-dispensingslot machine. The world of the modern city appearsas a mythicand magicalone in whichthe child Benjamin"discoversthe new anew,"and the adult Benjaminrecognizesit as a rediscovery of the old.20One thing became clear to him from the ex15. Letter, 28 February, 1932, cited in scholem, TheStory Friendship, 180. Benofa p. jamin had already written about his childhood in the set of aphorisms, Einbahnstrasse, published in 1928. Although this early account contained the memory of childhood dreams, what was new in the later essays was precisely the memory of the waking life of childhood as a dream-state. 16. The dedication was at first to several contemporaries, friends of Benjamin. Their names were ultimately crossed out and replaced with "for my dear Stefan." Berliner Chronik written in spring 1932. More directly personal (and political) than was the laterversion, itwas left unpublished until 1970 when Gershom Scholem edited the manuscript. An English translation appears in Walter Benjamin, Reflections: Essays, ed. Aphorisms, Writings, Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New Autobiographical York: Harvest/HBJ, 1978), pp. 3-60. 17. Written in fall 1932 and published in sections in various journals, but first published as a single text in 1950. 18. Walter Scholem: 1933-1940, ed. Gershom Scholem, Benjamin-Gersom Briefwechsel, (Frankfurtam Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1980), p. 28. 19. In his post-1937 notes toKonvolut Benjamin cited the Freudian TheodorReik K, on memory and its healing power due to the fact that the conscious reconstruction of the past destroys its power over the present (see K 8, 1; K 8, 2). 20. He included a similar reminiscence in the Passagen-Werk, the "discovery" is and

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itself could periment. This was not the form that the Passagen-Werk take. As he wrote later: "The Ur-history of the 19th century which is reflectedin the gaze of the child playing on its threshold has a much different face than that which it engraves on the map of history" (PW, 1139). At no time did Benjamin suggest that the child's understanding of historical reality was itself a direct insight into truth. But the reconstruction of childhood as Ur-history could provide a model for the reconstruction of the collective history of the 19th century. In the 1928-29 notes he wrote: "When as children we received those great collections, 'The Universe and Humanity,' 'The New Universe,' 'Earth,' did not one's gaze fall always first on the colorful "mineral landscape" or 'lakes and glaciers of the first Ice Age'? Such an ideal panorama of a scarcely-past Ur-epoch meets the gaze in the arcades which are scattered in every city. Here is housed the last dinosaur of Europe: the consumer" (a 3 degree). There was an analogy, but not an identity, between the childhood dream-state and the historical one. The natural history of the child and the social history of the collective were separate axes. They had to be kept apart conceptually in order to avoid the ideological mistake of conflating social history and the natural state of things (a problem, in our own time, of sociobiology21). Nonetheless, these axes always intersected, and the cognitive perspec-

in the formof a utopianwish-image: yearsagoin a citytramI sawanadvertising "Many which,ifit hadenteredintotheworldwithproperthings,wouldhavefoundits placard or and historians, admirers, exegeticians copyists,as muchasanygreatliterature great And infactitwasbothatthesametime.Butas canoccursometimeswithvery painting. if the deep, unexpectedimpressions, shockwasso strong,the impression, I maysayit and that thus, hit me so powerfully it brokethroughthe bottomof consciousness for somewherein the darkness.I knewonly thatit had to do with yearslay irretrievable a I 'Bullrichsalz'...Thensucceededone fadedSundayafternoon... discovering sign [in It 'Bullrich-Salz.' containednothingbut the word,but around on whichwaswritten] that desert landscapeof the first this verbalsign there arose suddenly,effortlessly, of in I haditbackagain.Itlookedlikethis:movingforward theforeground the placard. drawnby horses.It wasladenwithsackson whichwaswritdesertwasa freight-wagon ten Bullrich-Salz." One of these sacks had a hole out of which salt had already of dribbledfor a while onto the earth.In the background the desertlandscape,two a carried largesignwiththewords:'is thebest.'Whataboutthe traceof saltonthe posts path throughthe desert?It constructedletters,and these formed a wad, the word Was the preestablished 'Bullrich-Salz.' harmonyof Leibniz not childishnesscomin predestination the desert?And did finelycoordinated paredwiththis knife-sharp, a therenotlie in thisplacard likenessforthingswhichin thislifeon earthno one hasyet of experienced?A likenessfor the every-day utopia?"(G la, 4) Note thatthe child's inventive reception of this mass-cultureform as a sign of a reconciliatednature indicatesthat childhood cognitive powers were not without an antidote to mass culture'smanipulation. for 21. I am indebtedtoJohn Forester this comparison.

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torical situation.

tive of both was necessaryto capture the ambivalenceof the his-

As a maxim for transformingdream-images into "dialectical" images, which is how the former looked upon wakening,Benjamin wrote:"No historicalcategorywithout naturalsubstance;no natural categorywithout its historicalfilter"(0 degree 80). This dialecticbetweennatureand history(moreclearlyworkedout by Adornothanby functioned on both levels (childhood and society),and Benjamin22) was furthercomplicatedby the superimpositionof the dialecticbetween archaicand modern, and the double value-meaning(negative and positive)of the terms.All this lends Benjamin's theoretical point a difficultto unravel,but it is possibleto pull at leastsome of the density strandsapart.In the arcades,the recentlyout-of-datefashions,new to formergenerationswerehistoricalobjectswhichappearedas fetishes, ur-imageswith a mythicmeaning,from the perspectiveof the present one. Butthe "newness" fashionundercapitalism a myth,merely of was the fetishized "wish-image" change within an unchangedsystem, of and the childhood axis of cognition thereby stumbled accidentally upon a truth. Hence the importance of the natural history of generations,whose perspective providedthatsymbolicangleof vision which made possible a criticalperceptionof the new as the "alwaysthe-same."But the cognitiveaxis of social historywas also necessary because its allegorical (as opposed to symbolic) orientation demonstratedthatthe mythicur-imageshad a material,historicalbase, and thus (against Klages and Jung) they had transientrather than ontologicalstatus.Forexample,those arcadeswhich survivedin Benjamin'stime had a bombed-outappearance, typicalof obsolete urban of constructions,so thatin them the "wish-symbols the previouscentury"appearedturned "into rubble"(BW,50). Preciselythis natural history of objects, their appearance in the present as "wrecked material"(PW, 1215) was a sign of the transitorinessof historical phenomena, including, ultimately,bourgeois class domination. Withinthe cognitiveaxisof childhood,Benjamintookgreatpainsto demonstratethat as a "natural"mythic state it was bound at every he point to history.In thePassagen-WerkcitedErnstBloch:"theunconscious is an acquiredcondition in specifichuman beings..."(K2a, 5).
22. See Adorno's 1932 speech, "The Idea of Natural History," where the argument is explicitly indebted to Benjamin, who influenced Adorno deeply during this period. As was frequently the case, Adorno articulated Benjamin's ideas with a greater philosophical and expository rigor, for the details of Adorno's argument, see chapter 3, Susan Buck-Morss, TheOrigin Negative Dialectics: Theodor Adono, Walter W. of Benjamin, and theFrankfurt Institute(New York: Macmillan Free Press, 1977).

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As the contents of the unconscious were images of concrete, historically specific matter (automobiles, telephones, the arcades themselves) rather than the eternal psychical archetypes that Jung suggested, they were historically, not biologically inherited.23 What was "eternal" was the utopian impulse, that desire for happiness which was a protest agianst social reality in its given form, and this was nowhere more manifest than in childhood.24 The dialectical interpenetration of social and natural history was a specifically modern phenomenon: "This inexorable confrontation of the most recent past with the present is something historically new" (PW, 1236). In fact, the intensification of mythic power in both dreamstates was itself a function of history: when capitalism's new dreamsleep fell over Europe, it was the cause of a "reactivation of mythic powers" (K la, 8). Precisely the city landscape "confers on childhood memories a quality that makes them at one as evanescent and as alluring tormenting as half-forgotten dreams."25 In the pre-modern era, fashions did not change with such rapidity, and the much slower advances in technology were "covered over by the tradition of church and family" (N 2a, 3). But now: "The worlds of memory replace themselves more quickly, the mythic in them surfaces more quickly and how the accelerated tempo of technology looks" (N 2a, 2). faster against them. From the perspective of today's Ur-history, this is how the accelerated tempo of technology looks (N 2a, 2). In the pre-modern era, collective symbolic meaning was transferred

23. In 1936 Benjamin proposed to Horkheimer an essay for the Institut fir Sozialforschung on Klages and Jung: "It was to develop further the methodological considerations of the Passagen-Werk, confronting the concept of the dialectical image - the central epistemological category of the 'Passagen' - with the archetypes ofJung and the archaic images of Klages. Due to the intervention of Horkheimer this study was materialmakes clear what never executed" (ed. note, PW, 1145). Still, the Passagen-Werk further line Benjamin's argument would have taken. WhereJung would see, for example, the recurrence of a utopian image as "successful return" of unconscious contents, Benjamin, far closer to Freud, cited Bloch, that its repetition was the sign of that continued social repression which prevented the realization of utopian desires (K 2a, 5). Or, whereJung would see the image of the beggar as an eternal symbol expressing a trans-historical truth about the collective psyche, for Benjamin the beggar was a historical figure, the persistence of which was a sign of the archaic state, not of the psyche, but of social reality which remained at the level of myth despite surface change: "As long as there is still one beggar, there still exists myth" (K 6, 4). 24. For Benjamin, as for Bloch (see Spuren), utopian desire was based on memory, not anticipation. Cf. his comment (1934) on the singing mouse in Kafka'sstory: "something of our poor, brief childhood is in it, something of lost happiness which can never be found again, but also something of active present-day life, of its small gaieties, unaccountable and yet real and unquenchable" (Benjamin, Illuminations, 118). p. 25. Benjamin, Reflections, 28. p.

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to new generations consciously through tradition-bound stories, mythsor fairytales.Givenmodernity's ruptureof tradition,thiswasno the transferal occurred indirectly and longer possible. Instead, unconsciously, through the mediation of things, which as symbols underwentat the boundaryof generationsa dialecticalreversalfrom the new to the archaicBenjamin whichwe, as spokeof the "arcades...in in a dream,once againlive the life of our parentsand grandparents.." e degree2).And on the dialectical reversal: "Theimpressionof the oldfashionedcan only come to be where,in a certainway,it is effectedby If the most contemporary. in thearcadestherelie the beginningsof the most modern architectural form, then its old-fashionedeffecton peoeffectof the father hasjust as much to sayas the antiquarian ple today on his son" (B 3, 6). Benjaminaffirmedthe rupturein traditionbecause it freed symfor restraints the taskof socialtransforbolic powersfromconservative mation. (Althoughone can find statementsby Benjaminthatseem to lamentthe loss of tradition,he wasa supporterof the institutionof the and whatever positive attitude he had toward bourgeois family,26 And it did not includeorganizedreligionas an institution.27) theology, affirmedthe mythic power of wish-imageswhich clearly, Benjamin and massculture.28 found unconscious, symbolicform in commodities Butas dream-images werefetishes,alienatedfrom the dreamers, they and dominatingthem as an externalforce. This was the nightmarish side of the dream,and it existedin the stateof childhood as well. Benjamin criticizedJung "who wants to hold awakeningfar awayfrom

26. During his years in the youth movement, his group, in rebellion against the "inhumanity"of parents, was "seriouslyintent upon the abolition of the family." It was "before the realization matured that no one can improve his school or his parental home without first smashing the state that needs bad ones." (Benjamin, Reflections, pp. to 19-21). He referred in Einbahnstrasse the bourgeois family as a "rotten, dismal ediface" (ibid.,p. 91). 27. Benjamin recalled his sexual awakening when, en route to the synagogue on the Jewish New Year's Day, he became lost on the city streets, and his "bewilderment, forgetfulness, and embarrassment were doubtless chiefly due to my dislike of the impending service, in its familial no less than its divine aspect. While I was wandering thus, I was suddenly and simultaneously overcome, on the one hand, by the thought 'Too late, time was up long ago, you'll never get there' - and, on the other, by a sense of the insignificance of all this, of the benefits of letting things take what course they would; and these two streams of consciousness converged irresistibly in an immense pleasure that filled me with blasphemous indifference toward the service, but exalted the street in which I stood as if it had already intimated to me the services of procurement it was later to render to my awakened drive" (Reflections, 53). p. 28. In the 1934-35 notes Benjamin mentions: "the positive in the fetish" (PW, 1213).

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the dream" (PW, 1212; again, N 18, 4). In contrast, he insisted: "We must wake up from the world of our parents" (PW, 1214). The biological task of awakening from childhood becomes a model for a collective, social awakening. But more: in the collective experience of a generation the two converge. The coming-to-consciousness of a generation is an explosive moment unique in revolutionary potential within the historical dimension of the dreaming collective " for which its children become the fortunate occasion of its own awakening" (K la, 2). In this moment, precisely by rejecting the existing world created by their parents, the new generation furthered the realization of their parents' utopian dreams. "The fact that we have been children in this time is part of its objective image. It had to be thus in order to release from itself this generation. That means: we look in the dream-connection for a teleological moment. This moment is one of waiting. The dream waits secretly for the awakening; the sleeper gives himself over to death only until recalled; he waits for the second in which he wrests himself from capture with cunning" (K la, 2). With cunning (mitList):The reference to Hegel was intentional. 29 Benjamin seems to have been suggesting a rather extraordinary reversal of Hegel, one which turned Hegel's abstract, philosophical language which literally deified historical progress into the allegorical language of fairy tales, as a restorative validation of the child's experience of "progress" as Ur-history. His pedagogy was a double gesture, both the demythification of history and the re-enchantment of the world. In his allegorical depection of history, the reification of commodities as reversed by bringing them to life: "The condition of sleep and waking...has only to be transferredfrom the individual to the collective. To the latter, of course, many things are internal which are external to the individual: architecture, fashions, yes, even the weather are in the interior of the collective what organ sensations, feelings of illness or of health are in the interior of the individual. And so long as they persist in unconscious and amorphous dream-form, they arejust as much natural processes as the digestive processes, respiration, etc. They stand in the cycle of the ever-identical [myth in the negative sense] until the collective gets its hands on them politically and history with emerges out of them" (K 1, 5). The Passagen-Werk, the goal of his-

29. In his 1935 expose, Benjamin wrote: "Everyepoch...carries its ending within it, which it unfolds - as Hegel already recognized - with cunning" (PW,59). For Hegel, through cunning, Reason (consciousness) works its way into history by means of the passions and ambitions of unwitting historical subjects. But for Benjamin, the historical unconsciousness achieves its goal through the generational coming-to-consciousness of those subjects.

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toricalawakening, to providea politicallyexplosiveanswerto the was form of the child's question, "Wheredid I collective,socio-historical come from?"Wheredid modern consciousness,or more accurately, come from?Speakingof the imagesof modern dream-consciousness Surrealism,the aesthetic expression of that dream-consciousness, was Benjaminwrote:"Thefatherof Surrealism Dada;its motherwas an arcade"(PW,1057). as Benjaminoriginallyconceivedof the Passagen-Werka "dialectical fairy-tale" (PW,1138). In it the dreamingcollectiveof the recent past appeared as a sleeping giant ready to be awakenedby the present generation,and the mythicpowersof both dreamstateswereaffirmed, the world re-enchanted,but only in order to break out of history's the mythic spell, in fact by reappropriating power bestowed on the of mass culture as utopian dream symbols. "Fairytales,"he objects wrote in the (1934) Kafka essay,"arethe traditionalstoriesabout vicoverthese [mythic] forces."30 goal of Benjamin's The "newdialectory tical method of history writing"was "the art of experiencing the presentas thewakingworldto whichthatdreamwhichwe callthe past in (Gewesenes) truth relates" (K 1, 3).31 Told with "cunning,"32 the would accomplish a double task: it would dispel the Passagen-Werk of presentbeing (Wesen) showingit to be composedof by mythicpower And decayingobjectswitha history(Gewesen). it would dispelthe myth of historyas progress(or the modern as new)by showinghistoryand modernityin the child's light as the archaic.Told properly,this fairy

30. Benjamin, Illumiantions, 117. p. 31. Benjamin was suggesting a "dialectical reversal"of historical cognition. Instead of presenting the past as the "fixed point" with which present knowledge tried to come into touch, "this relationship is to be reversed, and the past become[s] the dialectical transformation, the invasion...[into] awakened consciousness. Politics maintains primacy over history" (K 1, 2). 32. Benjamin saw fairy tales as the stage coming, both phylogenetically and ontogenetically, after humans had learned to use the cunning of reason to trickmythic powers: "Ulysses, after all, stands at the dividing line between myth and fairy tale. Reason and cunning have inserted tricks into myths: their forces cease to be invincible" (Benjamin, Illuminations, 117). Adorno suggested instead that fairy tales were a p. stage prior to myth, belonging to an age ofinnoence rather than cunning. (Interestingly, Benjamin's one-line comment on Ulysses cited above becomes fundamental to Adorno's argument in the chapter on Odysseus in Dialectic Enlightenment.) of "The coming awakening stands like the wooden horse See also in the Passagen-Werk: of the Greeks in the Troy of the dream" (K 2, 4). Hegel interpreted history as rational, turning reason itself into a myth which justified whoever happened to be ruling. Benjamin interpreted history as a dream in order to achieve precisely the opposite political effect, allowing reason to enter history by breaking its mythic course, the recurrent cycle of domination.

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tale would use enchantment to disenchant the world: "We here construct an alarm clock which rouses the kitsch of the last century to 'assembly' - and this operates totally with cunning" (h degree 3). It would dissolve the dream, empowering the collective politically by providing the historical knowledge required to realize that dream. An allegory of historical origins and a symbolic tale of power: these were to have been the two faces of the Passagen-Werk. One, that which goes from the past into the present and which represents the arcades as precursors; and [the other], that which goes from the present into the past, in order to let the revolutionary completion of these 'precursors' explode in the present, and this direction also understands the sorrowful, fascinated contemplation of the most recent past as its revolutionary explosion" (0 degree 56). III. Marx,Freud,and the Originsof Mass Culture I have said that Benjamin maintained the original plan for the including the double dream-theory outlined above, at Passagen-Werk, least until 1935, the year he completed his expose of the project for the Institut fur Sozialforschung. At this point the philological situation becomes murky. There are at least six copies of the 1935 expose, with differences in wording significant enough to have caused the editor to All include three of them in the published Passagen-Werk. of the versions refer to the following: dream-world, utopian wish-images, collective consciousness, generations, and, most emphatically the conception of dialectical thinking as historical awakening which was sparked by the residues of mass culture. Noticeably absent is the image of the slumbering body-politic, as well as any reference to a "dialectical fairy tale." The theory of the childhood dream-state is stated explicitly and in detail in the preparatory notes (1934-35); but in the expose itself, it is only implied in vague statements like: "...in these wishimages [of the collective] there emerges an energetic striving to break with that which is outdated - which means, however, the most recent past" (PW, 1239).33 The expose elicited from Adorno his now famous "Hornberg letter"
33. This was the wording in "T", the first typoscript of the expose which was the version sent to Adorno. In the earlier "M " was a more explicit reference, later deleted: "This inexorable confrontation with the most recent past is something historically new. Other neighboring links in the chain of generations stood within collective consciousness, [and] scarcely distinguished themselves from one another within that collective. The present, however, stands already in relation to the most recent past in the same way as does awakening to dream" (PW, 1236). (For an identification of the various expose versions, see the editor's note (PW, 1251).

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(August 2, 1935)34with its quite devastating criticism, including the charge that Benjamin had abandoned his own original conception. Benjamin's response came indirectly in a letter (August 18) to Gretel Adorno: "...nothing of this first draft [the reference is to the 127-29 has conception of the Passagen-Werk] been given up and no word lost...[the expose] not the 'second' plan, but the other. These two plans have a polar relationship. They represent the thesis and antithesis of the work. Thus this second one is for me everything else buta closure. Its necessity rests in the fact that...the insights which were there at first allowed no immediate shaping - only one that would be inexcusably 'literary.'Thus the subtitle of the first plan, given up long ago, 'a dialectical fairy tale' (PW, 1138). Did Benjamin give up his childhood theory as well? In the same letter he spoke of the absolute Kindheit and distinction between the Passagen-Werk forms like Berliner um 1900, and said that "making this knowledge clear to me" had been "an important function of the [expose]" (PW, 1139). If not only the too-literary form but also the elaborated content of the original conception had been abandoned, it would be difficult to justify his simultaneous claim that no word of the first draft had been lost. And in fact, that claim was quite literally true. Benjamin had not thrown out the early notes, or the early sections of the Konvoluts dealing with the and he never did. Adorno's knowledge of these notes dream-theory, was limited to what Benjamin read to him in Konigstein in 1929. We do not know whether their discussions there included the double dreamstate. We do know that the absence of it in the expose was not what Adorno lamented when he accused Benjamin of betraying an earlier plan. Instead, it was the depiction of the 19th-centurycommodity-world as a utopia, rather than a criticism of it as "hell." It was the imagery ot "negative theology" that Adorno missed, not that of childhood and fairy tales. Ironically, had Benjamin included an elaboration of the theory of childhood it might have warded off another of Adorno's criticisms, that the entire conception had become "de-dialectized" (PW, 1129). The childhood theory was complex and indeed confused, but without it too much of both the affirmative, utopian elements and the archaic, ur-image aspects of the construction had to be situated solely within the socio-historical axis, as if they existed in the actual collective consciousness of the 19th century. Furthermore, when he claimed that contained within the images of the collective (rather than that of childhood which intersects history and reverses its poles) there were "elements of pre-history - that is to say of a classless society," or
and 34. PW, 1127-36. English trans. in Ernst Bloch et al., Aesthetics Politics(London: NLB, 1977).

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stated: "Every epoch not only dreams the next, but while dreaming impels it toward wakefulness" (which survived unchanged in all three versions), his position appeared as indistinguishable from Jung's approach as Adorno feared. Adorno blamed the overly-positive conception of a collective consciousness on the influence of Brecht, and argued against it on Marxistgrounds: "It should speak clearly and with sufficient warning that in the dreaming collective there is no room for class differences" (PW, 1129). There is no doubt that Benjamin took Adorno's criticisms seriously.35I believe there is also no doubt that he attempted to stick to his position despite them. The material relating to theoretical questions which he added to the Passagen-Werk after 1935 intensified a direction of research he had in fact already begun: to ground the basic premise of his dream-theory - that the 19th-centurywas the origin of a collective dream from which an "awakened" present generation could derive revolutionary consequences - in the theories of Marx and Freud.36 Interestingly (and dialectically), he found in Marxist theory ajustification for the conception for the conception of a collective dream, and in Freud an argument for the existence of class differences within it. Of course Marx had spoken positively of a collective dream, and more than once. After 1935 Benjamin added to Konvolut the wellN known quotation from Marx:"It will then become clear that the world has long possessed the dream ofsomethingwhich it only has to possess with consciousness in order to possess it in reality" (N 5a, 1). And he
35. The original copy of Adorno's Hornberg letter is among the Benjamin papers recently discovered in George Bataille's archive, Bibliotheque Nationale. Benjamin gave it a careful reading, making penciled notes and double red lines in the margin not always at those points in Adorno's formulations which the latter would have himself considered most eloquent. Benjamin's notations include question marks and exclamation points which seem to indicate he was not always in agreement. 36. Before receiving Adorno's reaction to the expose, Benjamin wrote him (une 10, 1935) expressing his preference for Freud's theory over that of Fromm and Reich, and asking whether Adorno knew if in Freud or his school there was "at present a psycho-analysis of awakening? or studies on this theme?" (PW, 1121); he said too that A he had begun to "look around" in the firstvolume of Marx's Capital. Konvolut (X)on "Marx"was begun in 1935. In that year Benjamin spoke of the concept of the fetish(ibid.);in character of commodities as standing "at the center" of the Passagen-Werk 1938 it was still the book's "fundamental category" (PW, 1116). In March 1937 Benjamin wrote to Horkheimer"that the definitive and binding plan now of the [Passagen-Werk], that the material research for it is finished except in a few small areas, would proceed from two fundamentally methodological analyses. The one would have to do with the criticism of pragmatic history on one side, and of cultural history on the other as it is presented by the materialists;the other [would deal] with the meaning of psychoanalysis for the subject of materialist history-writing" (PW, 1158).

Buck-Morss 229 chose Marx's statement as motto for this Konvolut (which is the central one concerning method): "The reform of consciousness consists only therein, that one wakes the world...out of its dream of itself' (PW,570). Class differentiations were never lacking in Benjamin's theory of the collective unconscious. Indeed, even in his earliest formulations he considered it an extension and refinement of Marx's theory of the superstructure: the collective dream manifested the ideology of the dominant class. "The question is namely, if the substructure determines the superstructure to a certain extent, in terms of the material of thought and experience, but this determining is not simply one of copying, how is it...to be characterised? As its expression. the superstructure is the expression of the substructure. The economic conditions under which society exists come to expression in the superstructure, just as with someone sleeping, an over-filled stomach, even if it may causally determine the contents of the dream, finds in those contents not its copied reflection,but its expression"(K 2, 5; cf. M degree 14). It is the bourgeoisie, not the proletariat, whose dream expresses the discomfort of an overly-full stomach. The same entry claims that Marx never intended a direct causal relationship between substructure and superstructure: "Already the observation that the ideologies of the superstructure reflect [social] relations in a false and distorted form goes beyond this" (K 2, 5). Freud's dream theory gave a ground for such distortion. Benjamin's direct references to Freud remained limited and quite general,37but on this point, even if direct indebtedness cannot be proved, clearly there was a consensus. Freud had written that "ideas in dreams..[are] fulfillments of wishes,"38but, due to ambivalent feelings, they were censored and hence distorted. The actual (latent) wish might be almost invisible at the manifest level, and was arrived at only after the dream's interpretation. Thus: "A dream is a (disguised) fulfillment of a (suppressed or repressed) wish."39If one takes the bourgeois class to be the generator of a collective dream, the socialist tendencies of that industrialism which it itself created would seem to catch it in an unavoidably ambivalent situation. The bourgeoisie desires to affirm that industrial production from which it is deriving profits; at the same time it wishes to deny the fact that industrialism creates the conditions which threaten the continuation of its own class rule.

37. His familiarity with Freudian theory may have been largely second-hand, from two distinct sources, the Frankfurt Institute, and the Surrealists. 38. Sigmund Freud, TheInterpretation ofDreams,trans. and ed.James Strachey (New York: Avon Books, 1965), p. 123. 39. Freud, Interpretation Dreams,p. 194. of

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Now, precisely this bourgeois class ambivalence is documented by a whole range of quotations which Benjamin included in the PassagenWerk material at all stages of his research. He found it not only in the commodities and architecture of 19th-century Paris, but in the contemporary writings offuturologists, social utopians, city planners, and social commentators. Utopian writings were the "depository of collective dreams" (PW, 1212), and architectural constructions "had the role of the subconscious" (PW, 1210), but both were expressions of specifically bourgeois ideology. He found descriptions of future Paris in which cafes were still ordered according to social classes (K 6a, 2). Images of Paris projected into the 20th century included visitors from other planets arriving in Paris to play the stock market (G 13, 2). On the manifest level the future appeared as limitess progress and continuous change. But on the latent level (the level of the true wish of the dreamer), it was seen as the eternalization of bourgeois class domination. In his early notes Benjamin considered whether "there could spring out of the repressed economic contents of consciousness of a collective, similarly to what Freud claims for [the] sexual [contents] of an individual consciousness...a form of literature, a fantasy-imagining...[as] sublimation..." (R 2, 2). The culture of the 19th century unleashed an abundance of fantasies of the future, but it was at the same time "a vehement attempt to hold back the productive forces" (PW 1210). Hence changing fashion was merely "a camoflage of very specific desires of the ruling class," a "figleaf' (PW, 1215) covering up the fact that, to cite Brecht: " 'The rulers have a great aversion against violent changes.' "40 19th-century urban planning was an attempt to improve society through the rearrangement of things (buildings, boulevards, parks)at the same time it worked to prevent the rearrangement of social relations - Haussmann's "strategic beautification" of Paris had as its "real aim...the securing of the city against civil war" (PW, 57). The bourgeois individual as flaneur could take delight in the "crowd" precisely because it was not congealed into a revolutionary class (j 66, 1). Bourgeois class resistance to the industrialism it promoted was expressed as well in 19th-century style: architecture customarily masked the new technology with ornament; industrially produced objects were typically enclosed in casings (I 4, 4). Commodity fetishism, which, as we have seen, Benjamin considered key to the industrial urban phantasmagoria, could be viewed
40. The Brecht quotation (from a 1935) article) continued: "They [the rulers] would prefer that the moon stand still, and the sun no longer run its course. Then no one would get hungry any more and want supper. When they have shot their guns, their opponents should not be allowed to shoot; theirs should be the last shots" (B 4a, 1).

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as a textbook case of Freud's concept of displacement: social relations of class exploitation were displaced onto relations between things, thus concealing the real situation with its dangerous potential for revolution. By the late 19th century, it was politicallysignificantthat the bourgeois dream of democracy underwent this form of censorship: Benjamin spoke of the "phantasmagoria" of "egalite" (PW, 1209), wherein the political concept of equality was displaced onto the realm of things, the consumer replaced the citizen, and the promise of commodity abundance became a substitute for social revolution. "La Revolution," Benjamin noted, came to mean "clearance sale" in the 19th century (D degree 1). Department stores replaced specialty stores (A 3, 5), bringing the consumer into a sumptuous architectural space fit for royaltywhere they were seduced by every psychological trickinto consumption for its own sake (A 3, 6). It was the great discovery of capitalist retailing (one which compensated in part for the capitalistic dynamics of over-production) that every sort of desire, from sexual to political, could be displaced onto commodities and hence become a source of capitalist profits. Benjamin wrote: "With the founding of department stores, for the first time in history, the consumers felt themselves as the masses. (Before they learned that only through scarcity.)" (A 4, 1). This was a turning point. In Parisafter the working class threatened the bourgeoisie in theJune days of the 1848 revolution, the latter found themselves on the defensive. At the same time, with the establishment of Louis Napoleon's dictatorship, the era of the arcades' brilliance was over. The age of mass consumption began, and with it, a century of the new as the ever-the-same, only in grander and grander is proportions. Much of the Passagen-Werk an attempt to document this transition. Commodities and technology burst from the confinement of luxury shops and the arcades. Commodities multiplied; technology grew to monumental size. The once-dazzling gaslights were eclipsed by electricity, which was used for huge decorations and advertising on building facades. the dream-houses, still built of iron and glass, became vast, overwhelming buildings for a mass public - railroad stations, department stores, and the great halls of the world exhibitions. The first international exhibition was in London in 1851. Paris followed with two of its own in the next decade.41 It was decided to celebrate the centennial of the French Revolution by an exhibition in
41. As Benjamin noted, whereas London's first exhibition was organized by private entrepreneurs (G 6; G 6a, 1), the French industrial exhibitions (as early as 1789) were state-organized (G 4, 4). They were thus the earliest form of politics-as-mass-spectacle, of staged by the state, and in this sense anticipated the Volkfest fascism (G 4, 7).

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1889 (for which the Eiffel tower was built); and in 1900 Pariswitnessed an equally spectacular international exhibition which expressed in fairy-land form the heightened political and economic competition of imperialism. The extravagant expositions were no longer ideology for a bourgeois elite, but ideology for the working masses, who took pilgrimages to these enshrinements of commodities to worship as idols those objects on display which their own labor had produced.42 In 1900 the socialists complained that due to the exposition "the year was lost for propaganda" (G 4, 6). By the end of the century, the dream, clearly of bourgeois origins (and bourgeois in the latent wish that it expressed) in fact had become "collective," spreading to the working classes as well (and to every capitalist industrializing country43).The mass marketing of dreams within a class system that prevented their realization in anything but symbolic form was quite obviously a growth industry. In his earliest notes, Benjamin interpreted the aesthetic style of this mass production, "kitsch," as bourgeois class guilt: "the expression within the overproduction of commodities of the bad conscience of the producers" (P degree 6). It is true, as Adorno criticized, that Benjamin's 1935 expose presented a very positive representation of the collective dream, and thus of mass culture in which it found expression. In the version Adorno received was the statement "The experiences [of Ur-history] which are deposited in the unconscious of the collective, through interpenetration with the new, produce the utopia which leaves its traces in thousands of configurations of life, from permanent buildings to transient fashions" (PW, 1239). But in the same text Benjamin stated explicitly:"The new is a qualityindependent of the use value of the commodity. It is the source of that illusion which is inseparable from the dream-images of the collective. It is the quintessence of false consciousness, whose agent is fashion. This illusion of the new is reflected, like one mirror in another, in the appearance of the always-again-the-

42. (G 9a, 6; G 10; G 13a 3). Benjamin's interest in Paris' world exhibitions had a very present motive: in 1931 and 1937, Paris again was the scene of this form of mass ideology. (In our own time it has been threatened to be repeated in 1989 on the occasion of the second centennial of the French Revolution). 43. By 1900 the arcades became a hallmark of industrially-arrived cities from Cleveland to Milan to Moscow. The later arcades, unlike the original Paris ones, were built in monumental proportions. (See the exhaustive history: Hermann Geist, The Arcades: History a BuildingType,trans.Jane 0. Newman andJohn H. Smith [Bosof ton: The MIT Press, 1983].)

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same. The product of this reflection is the phantasmagoria of that 'cultural history' in which the bourgeoisie thoroughly enjoys its false consciousness" (PW, 1246). Where Adorno found need of a dialectical argument leading from one of these evaluative poles to another, Benjamin simply stated both contradictory positions, and spoke of the fundamental "ambivalence" in the historical situation,44 which, he claimed, Marx had demonstrated in his chapter on the fetish character of commodities, "an ambivalence... very distinct, for example, in machines, which intensify exploitation rather than lightening the human condition. Is there not, in fact, connected to this the doubleedged nature of the appearances with which we are dealing in the 19th century?" (K 3,5). The goal of course was material abundance,45which is why the dream functioned legitimately on the manifest level of collective wish-image. But the commodity-form of the dream generated the expectation that the international, socialist goal of mass affluence could be delivered by national capitalist means, and that expectation was a fatal blow to revolutionary working-class politics. and IV. Generation ClassPolitics It was at precisely this historical point that Benjamin's generation entered the scene. Born in 1892 in Berlin, then a newly-arrived industrial metropolis, Benjamin was introduced to "reality" in its massculture, mass-consumerist, dream-world form. For a child, even a protected, bourgeois child, that dream experience could be a nightmare. Building walls were plastered with advertisements which "forced the printed word entirely into the dictatorial perpendicular...[exposing the child to] a blizzard of changing, colorful, conflicting letters...Locust swarms of print, which already eclipse the sun of what is taken for city-dweller's intellect..."46Benjamin wrote that the
44. Benjamin's understanding of dialectical argumentation was to show the positive side of each negative aspect in an infinite serial bifurcation. The redemptive gesture was theological: "...regarding the dialectic of cultural history: It is very easy with every epoch to bifurcate its various areas according to specific perspectives, so that the "fruitful," "future-filled," "living," "positive" lies on one side, and the futile, out-ofdate, withered part on the other... But on the other hand...it is decisively important to apply to this at first excluded, negative part a new division so that with a shift of the visual angle (but not the standards!)there emerges in it as well something else positive, new, compared with the earlier description. And so on infinitum, until the entire past is brought into the present in a historical apokatastais" (N la, 3). (Apokastasis is the conception of redemption in which all are saved.) 45. "Never would socialism have entered the world if one had only desired to inspire the workers with a better organization of things. The strength and authority of the movement lies in Marx's understanding that they would be interested in an organization in which they had it better" (K 3a, 1). 46. Benjamin, Reflections, 78. p.

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whole of his later childhood was "a period of impotence before the city."47He recalled his "dreamy recalcitrance,"when, being led by his mother, "we walked through the streets, rarely frequented by me, of the city center."48Benjamin's introduction to civic life was as a consumer: "In those early years I got to know the 'town' only as the theatre of purchases... [I]t was only in the confectioner's that our spirits rose with the feeling of having escaped the false worship that humiliated our mother before idols bearing the names of Mannheimer, Herzog and Israel, Gerson, Adam, Esders and Madler, Emma Bette, Bud and Lachmann. An impenetrable chain of mountains, no caverns of commodities - was 'the town.' "49 Benjamin never implied that his experience of the city was anything but class-bound, a situation intensified by the false sense of security that class-belonging seemed to offer Chronik: "The poor? GermanJews at the turn of the century. In Berliner For rich children of his [Benjamin's] generation they lived at the back of beyond."50 He knew the working class through the glass rhombus on the table of his aunt's apartment, "containing the mine, in which little men pushed wheelbarrows, labored with pickaxes, and shone lanterns into the shafts in which buckets were winched perpetually up and down."5' He admitted: "I never slept on the street in Berlin... Only those for whom poverty or vice turns the city into a landscape in which they stray from dark till sunrise know it in a way denied to me."52And in the Passagen-Werk: "What do we know of the streetcorners, curbstones, the architecture of pavements, we who have never felt the streets, heat, dirt, and edges of the stones under naked soles, never investigated the unevenness between the broad slabs, or their fitness to lead us?" (K degree 28) What indeed? If, as I have tried to show, Benjamin's theory of the dreaming collective did not blur class distinctions, can the same be said of his theory of political awakening? In his earliest notes, Benjamin indicated that the bourgeoisie who had generated the dream remained trapped within it: "Did not Marx teach us that the bourgeoisie can never itself come to a fully enlightened consciousness? And if this is true, is one notjustified in attaching the idea of the dreaming collective (i.e., the bourgeois collective) onto his thesis?" 0 degree 67) And immediately following: "Would it, in addition, not be possible,

47. Ibid., p. 4. 48. Ibid. 49. Ibid.,p. 40. Those caverns included the Berlin arcades, such as the Kaisergallerie on Friedrichstrasse, built in 1871-73, just after Bismarck's victory over France. 50. Benjamin, Reflections, 11. p. 51. Ibid., p. 12. 52. Ibid., p. 27.

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from the collected facts with which this work [Passagen-Werk] conis to [show] how they appear in the becoming-self-conscious cerned, process of the proletariat?"(0 degree 68) If there is a clear class distinction between who remains asleep and who becomes conscious, what does Benjamin mean, for example, when he resolves: "We must wake up from the world of our parents" (PW, 1214 cited above)?Just who is the "we" to whom he refers? Is it bourgeois children? Then "wakingup" might mean taking the place of one's parents as the new generation of rulers. To say that the proletariat class must wake up from the world of bourgeois parents is perhaps more politically accurate, but it is theoretically meaningless because it does not explain how, at the line of a generation, the barrier of class is crossed. To say that the process of bourgeois adolescent awakening parallels that of the proletariat's political awakening is a metaphor, not a theory, and risks the criticism that Benjamin's perception of the need for the proletariat class to seize power was merely a fantasy, a projection - based on his own fears of he Chronik impotence? His own testimony is incriminating. In Berliner refers to "abject poverty" as an "exotic world," and admits that the "feeling of crossing the threshold of one's class for the first time had a part in the almost unequalled fascination of publicly accosting a whore in the street."53Here the application of Freudian theory again reveals the existence of class differences, but it is the credibility of Benjamin, a bourgeois author writing revolutionary pedagogy for the proletariat, which is undermined. This criticism would not have taken Benjamin by surprise. The interpenetration of sexual and political motifs was self-conscious in at BerlinerChronik, the same time their confusion may have been a reason why he saw that forms like it were "not allowed to lay claim" to the Passagen-Werk any place or even in the most limited degree" "in (PW, 1138). Benjamin never pretended to be anything but a bourgeois writer. Referring to attempts by intellectuals to take their place "at the side of the proletariat," he protested: "But what sort of a place is that? The place of a well-wisher, an ideological patron. An impossible The class division was undeniable. But Benjamin felt that there was a confluence in the objective positions of intellectuals and proletariat, due to the specific constellation of economic and cultural history. Industrialism had led to a cultural "crisis," and close on its heels there followed the economic one, in which the collective dream experienced
53. Benjamin, Reflections, 11. p. 54. Walter Benjamin, "The Author as Producer" (1934), Understanding trans. Brecht, Anna Bostock (London: NLB, 1973), p. 93.

place."54

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tremors set off by the "shaking of commodity society" (PW, 59). Around this historical constellation the experience of his generation congealed, and well into the 1930s Benjamin found in it an extremely precarious cause for hope. Thus he could write to Scholem (August 9, 1935): "I believe that [the Passagen-Werk's]conception, even if it is very personal in its origins, has as its object the decisive historical interests of our generation" (PW, 1 137). The convergence of interests between intellectuals and workers of this generation had to do with the fact that their youth was separated from their adulthood by a dialectical reversal of the contents of the collective dream. In all of the collective images architecture, fashion, even advertising - their lifetime spanned a total revolution in style.55 By the 1920s, in every one of the technical arts, and in the fine arts affected by technology, style underwent a radical transformation. Ornate, historically-eclectic architecture gave way to the International style of the Bauhaus and le Corbusier. From furniture to doorknobs, from bathrooms to bay-windows, the new "porosity, transparency, free light and free air essence makes living in the old sense nothing" (P degree 3; again I 4, 4). Functionalism stripped technology of its casings. In women's fashions as well, the casings of corsettes, crinolines, and long skirts disappeared. In hair styles and office buildings, the demolition of 19th-century styles left no area of daily life untouched. The 19th-century interiors encased their inhabitants in drapings and plush velvet, in which living meant "leaving traces" (PW, 53); it is against le Corbusier's 1920s private villas, the clean, white, bare spaces of which expunge all traces of the residents that this observation takes on a dialectical force. Commenting on Siegfried Giedion's statement that "the artful drapery of the last century has grown musty," Benjamin remarked: "We, however, believe that...it also contains for us vital stuff...for our knowledge...illuminating the bourgeois class position at the moment when signs of decline first appeared within it. Politically vital stuff at any rate, that substantiates the Surrealists' fixation on these things" (K la, 7). The revolution in style was the dream-form of social revolution -

55. The sense of being a "new" generation was wide-spread among Weimar intellectuals: Cf. 1926: "In a comment in the journal Tagebuch, Brecht takes issue with Thomas Mann and his son Klaus Mann, who had published articles in Uhuentitled 'The New Parents' and 'The New Children.' Thomas Mann, piqued, replies in Berliner and Tageblatt once again explains his position toward the younger generation. Brecht drafts an answer, but does not publsih it: 'His view is that the difference between his generation and mine is altogether negligible. In answer I can only say that in my view, in a possible dispute between a surrey and an automobile, it will surely be the surrey that finds the differences negligible.' " (In Klaus V6lker, Brecht trans. Fred Chronicle, Wieck [New York: The Seabury Press, 1975], p. 47).

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the only form possible within a bourgeois social context. Because of it, the objects which populated the childhood environment of Benjamin's generation were devalued in the present as hopelessly oldfashioned: "Everygeneration experiences the fashions of the most recent past as the most thorough anti-aphrodisiac that can be imagined" (B 9, 1). But precisely this was what made it "politically vital," so that "the confrontation with the fashions of the past generation is an affair of much greater meaning that has been supposed" (B1 a, 4). At the same time, as the stuff of childhood memories,56 these outmoded objects retained a symbolic power. Benjamin commented that for Kafka,"as only for 'our' generation... the horrifying furniture of the beginning of high capitalism was felt as the showplace of its brightest childhood experience" (K degree 27).57The contrary desire to outgrow and to recapture the lost world of childhood together determined a generation's interest in the past, which Benjamin believed could be mobilized for utopian, revolutionary politics. The bourgeois intellectual could see his struggle to break from past culture as an allegory for never a substitute, no more than the mass-culture audience was itself already the revolutionary collective.58
56. "Whatare the noises of an awakening morning which we draw into our dreams? The 'ugliness,' the 'old-fashioned' are only distorted morning voices that speak about our childhood" (PW, 1214). 57. Here, in the case of the bourgeois interior, Benjamin slips into a class-specific definition of "our" generation. And indeed, he never fully resolved the problem of the hiatus between class and generation. Writing generally on Benjamin's position during in the early 1930s Bernd Witte notes: "The intellectual...is seen by Benljamlin the role of the psychoanalyst of the collective neurosis [-this is nowhere more true than in the to of inadequate consciousness occurs, he believes, according theschema Passagen-Werk]: the repression, mechanism ofwhich is capable of being discovered by the intellectual-asspecialist for the collective education. The paradox in Benjamin's theory lies therein, that this social psychoanalysis - in order to remain with his image - heals not the patients, but the analyst and his colleagues" (Bernd Witte, "Krise und Kritik. Zur Zusammenarbeit Benjamins mit Brecht in denJahren 1929-1933," Peter Gebhardt et der al., Walter Benjamin Zeitgenosse Modem(Monographien Literaturwissenschaftvol. 30 [Kronberg/Ts.: ScriptorVerlag, 1976], p. 15). Despite declarations to the contrary, often seems to be aimed at bourgeois intellectuals, with the goal of the Passagen-Werk revolutionizing the educators, rather than educating the revolutionary class. 58. In Benjamin's early notes, the concept of the collective is used very loosely. Cermade tainly, the success of fascism, with its "class-blind" concept of Volksgemeinschaft, vagueness on this point ill-advised, and by the late 1930s Benjamin used this term only in a critical, negative sense. Cf.: "...everv commodity collects around itself the mass of its customers. The totalitarian states have taken this mass as their model. The attempts to drive everything out of individuals that stands in the way of Volksgemeinschaft their complete assimilation into a massified clientel. The only unreconciled opponent. .. in this connection is the revolutionary proletariat. The latter destroys the illusion of the mass (Schein der Masse) with the reality of the class (Realitat der Klasse)"(J 81a, 1).

the colletive struggle - a model, perhaps even a prophetic one - but

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A revolution in style, even if it occurred on a mass basis, was no substitute for the social revolution, and there were "Modernists" of this generation - Marinetti, for example59 - whose political impact was far from progressive. Moreover, from the political perspective, Modernism stripped the objects of all those cultural expressions which provided historical clues. 19th-century design may have been technologically reactionary when it hid function and tried to revive dying forms. But the tremendous value of its clutter was that it tacked onto the surface of things all kinds of configurations in which historical truth and utopian dreams could be read. Benjamin spoke of the 19thcentury's "narcotic historicism, its passion for masks, in which nonetheless there hides a signal of true historical existence..." (K 1a, 6). The great, the truly horrifying danger was that his generation, with its revived mythic powers, would in the process of rejecting the recent past lose contact with historical and social concreteness altogether, and that danger was synonymous with fascism. V. Dwarfsand Giants In 1939, with World War imminent, the Institut fur Sozialforschung in requested a new expose of the Passagen-Werk hopes of getting outside for it. Benjamin produced a French version in a lucid, descripfunding tive style, with a totally new introudction and conclusion, in which the dream theory is strikingly absent. Instead, Blanqui's cosmological speculations are introduced with their conception of history as the incessant recurrence of the same, suggesting a "resignation without hope" (PW, 76). One could almost conclude that Benjamin had put all talk of collective dreams and awakening definitively behind him. But it was not his last word. In 1940, he wrote a series of theses on the philosophy of history which were his last formulations concerning revolutionary pedagogy, and they drew on material from the PassagenWerk.60The theses were prompted by "the war and the constellation which it brought with it"; they contained, not new thoughts, but ones "held in custody, yes, even from myself' for twenty years.61Never intended for publication (-"they would open gate and door for an enthusiastic misunderstanding"62-), they resurrect the theological notes:63all of history appears as language of the early Passagen-Werk
59. The significance of this example was pointed out to me byJoel Remmer. 60. The material came largely from the later entries to Konvolut which concerned N the theory of historical progress. 61. Benjamin, Gesammelte 1:3, Schriften p. 1226. 62. Ibid., p. 1227. 63. Cf.: "The modern, the time of hell..." (g degree 17).

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a and catastrophe, hellish,cyclicalrepetitionof barbarism oppression. Butthe "resignation withouthope" of Blanquiis absent;in its place is the desireto "betterour positionin the struggleagainstfascism" (thesis VIII).It leads to an apocalypticconceptionof breakingout of this historical cycle, in which the proletarianrevolutionappearsunder the sign of MessianicRedemption. In the theses, Benjaminspeaksof "shock,"ratherthan awakening, as the revolutionary moment of breakingfrom the past, but they are differentwordsfor the same experience."Imagesof the past"replace the term "dream-images," they are still dialecticallyambivalent, but and yet containing"sparksof hope" (VI).The revolution, mystifying the "politicalworld-child,"has yet to be born (X), but the utopia it would usher in is understoodin the child-liketermsof Fourier,whose most fantastic of day-dreams cooperationwithnature"proveto be sursound" (XI). "The subject of historical knowledge is the prisingly struggling,oppressed class itself' (XXI),but the entire "generation" possesses "messianicpower"(II). Moreover,it is still in fashion that can revolutionary prefiguration be discovered.It is the meaningof the XIVthfhesis:"Fashion a weather-sense the presenteven has for strange if it moves about in the thicketsof the past.It is the tigerspringinto the past Only now it occursin an arenain which the rulingclasshas command.The sameleap underthe freeheavenof historyis the dialectical one, which is how Marx understood the revolution." Camoflaged within the new discourse,the old elementsof Benjamin'sthinkingare still there and they often make meaningful precisely those pronouncements in the theses which are most bafflingon their own. In thesisXVI,Benjamin "onceupon explicitly rejectsthe historicist's "leavesit to othersto expend thema time";the historicalmaterialist selves"with this whore in the bordello of historicism."He remains masterof his power,adultenough to blastopen the continuumof history."And yet, therewas a wayof tellingfairytaleswhich was not this prostitutedone. In 1936, in "Thestoryteller," Benjaminreconsidered the form of the fairy tale which he had supposedly dropped years beforeas a model forthePassagen-Werk. arethe relevantpassages: Here "Thefairytale,which to this day is the firsttutorof childrenbecauseit was once the first tutor of mankind, secretly lives on in the story ...Whenevergood counsel was at a premium, the fairytale had it, and wherethe need wasgreatest,itsaidwasnearest.Thisneed wasthe need createdby the myth.The fairytaletells us of the earliestarrangements that mankind made to shake off the nightmorewhich the myth had The placed upon its chest...64 liberatingmagicwhich the fairytale has
64. Benjamin,Illuminations, 10. p.

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at its disposal does not bring nature into play in a mythical way, but points to its complicity with liberated man. A mature man feels this complicity only occasionally, that is, when he is happy; but the child first meets it in fairy tales, and it makes him happy."65The fairy tale, which uses re-enchantment to disenchant the world, also has something very specific to do with Messianic redemption. Benjamin tells us that the storyteller, Leskov, "interpreted the Resurrection less as a transfiguration than as a disenchantment, in a sense akin to the Where in the theses on history is Benjamin's theory of the dreaming collective? It is visible nowhere, to be sure. But it hides out, the dwarfof the fairy-tale, inside the dwarf of theology, who, Benjamin tells us, himself hides out inside the puppet of historical materialism, which perhaps in turn hides inside the body politic of the dreaming collective. The first thesis on the dwarf and the puppet begins: "Bekanntlich soiles...gegeben haben."It has been translated: "The story is told..." Benlast position is that of the story-teller. He reverts to this jamin's obsolete form, when the continuous tradition of world war leaves only the hope that, within the discontinuous tradition of utopian politics, his story will find a new generation of listeners, one to whom the dreaming collective of his own era appears as the sleeping giant of the past "for which its children become the fortunate occasion of its own awakening." Consider in the light of the original plan for the PassagenWerk,the second thesis: "There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weakMessianic power, a power to which the past has claim. That claim cannot be setted cheaply. The historical materialist is aware of this."
fairy tale."66

65. Ibid. 66. Ibid.,p. 103.