Benjamin's Passagen-Werk: Redeeming Mass Culture for the RevolutionAuthor(s): Susan Buck-MorssSource: New German Critique, No. 29, The Origins of Mass Culture: The Case of ImperialGermany (1871-1918) (Spring - Summer, 1983), pp. 211-240Published by: New German CritiqueStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/487795Accessed: 23/10/2008 21:08

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Benjamin's Passagen-Werk: Redeeming Mass Culture fr the Revolution,

by Susan Buck-Morss

I. Mass Culture as Dream-World I shall focus my comments on the recently published Passagen-Werk, 2

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specific interests of this conference, I will consider his argument that the recently out-of-date objects of mass culture possessed political, iadeed, revolutionary power for his generation, and this will take us by a somewhat circuitous route to Imperial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 Ben-

jamin'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 con-

siderably, 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 thanks to 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.

2. Walter Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk, 2 vol., ed. by Rolk Tiedemann (Frankfurt- am-Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1982), Gesammelte Schriften, vol. V; hereafter PW. Citations are noted below with their identifying Konvolut letter code.

211

212 Benjamin's Passagenwerk

a lexicon providing concrete images, in the form of quotations from sources on 19th-century Paris, which illuminate the origins of modern- ity. From them, as from building blocks, Benjamin constructed his two essays on Baudelaire (1938 and 1939), and would have constructed the Passagen-Werk - in just what fashion, however, even the most

qualified commentator, Theodor Adorno, could not decipher, given the fragmented condition of the surviving material.3 But particularly of 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 Ben- jami on the subject, the Passagen-Werk, to which the artwork essay was closely tied in its conception,5 provides even in its partial illuminations 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 artwork essay. The essay is concerned primarily with 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 illu- sion 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

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).

4. In Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn and ed. Hannah Arendt (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 which certain premises and questions are to be decisive for the [Passagen-Werk's] back- ward glance into the 19th century" (PW, 1152. See also Ibid., 1150-51).

Buck-Morss 213

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 inven- tion of film provided an expressive medium adequate to industrially- transformed 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 Kantian categories, 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 transfor- mation. 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 "reali- ty" and "art" switched places. Reality had become artifice, a phantas- magoria of commodities and architectural construction made possible by new industrial processes. The modern city was nothing but the pro- liferation 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 creativity from art, just as in the XVIth century the sciences freed themselves from philo- sophy" (PW, 1236, again 1249). This phantasmagoria of industrially- produced 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,7 they

6. Marx, Capital, cited by Benjamin (G 5, 1). 7. Benjamin considered the distinction between manufactured and non-manu-

factured 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).

214 Benjamin's Passagenwerk

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").8 But the critical, cognitive func- tion 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 Passagen- Werk. If the artwork essay argues theoretically for the transformation of art from illusory representation into an analysis of illusions, the Passagen-Werk was intended to put theory into literary practice. Itwas to have appropriated the new techniques of film9 so that it could meet the distracted public halfway,10 in 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 conscious- ness of a collective subjectivity, at once deeply alienated and yet cap- able 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 re- production 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: The Story of a Friendship, trans. Harry Zohn [Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1981], p. 207). Meanwhile, as Brecht stated (and Benjamin's work de- monstrated): "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" (Brecht on 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, p. 240. 11. "All collective architecture of the 19th century provides housing for the dream-

ing 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

Buck-Morss 215

with uncritical enthusiasm he called "dream-consciousness." Ben- jamin's goal was to interpret the historical origins of this dream by transforming dream-images into "dialectical images" with the power to cause a political "awakening." In the Passagen-Werk, cultural history- writing and revolutionary pedagogy were to converge.

This, at least, was Benjamin's original plan, documented in two early sets of notes, 1927 and 1928-29 (PW, 993-1059). At that time Benjamin was merely a visitor in Paris; his research was conducted mainly at the Staatsbiliothek in Berlin. In 1933 Benjamin went to Paris in permanent exile. Work on the Passagen-Werk proceeded in fits and starts, but the original plan remained largely in force at least as late as the 1935 expose of the project. Just how greatly it changed after that remains, even after detailed philological analysis, a debatable point, and it is a question to which we will return. In the following section I will simply try to reconstruct Benjamin's theory of the dreaming collective (das triumende Kollektiv), relying on the early notes (1927 series A degree - A degree and 1928-29 series a degree - h degree), the various versions of the 1935 expose (including the preparatory notes, 1934-35, PW 1206- 1223), and those sections of the Konvoluts, particularly K ("Traumstadt, Zukunftstrdume, anthropologischer Nihilismus" K 1-K 3a) and N ("Erken- ntnistheoretisches, Theorie des Fortschritts" N 1-N 3a), which were written before 1935.12

II. The Source of the Dream and the Two Dream-States Benjamin described capitalism as "a natural phenomenon with

which a new dream-sleep came over Europe, and in it, a reactivation of mythic powers" (K la, 8). Living in Paris meant being wrapped in this dream, which left visible traces as the city's physical elements. The arcades (Passagen) were one such element, in fact the very first "dream- houses" built out of the new iron-and-glass construction of indus- trialism. These covered pedestrian streets, privately owned yet open to the public, were lined with specialty shops, cafes, casinos, and theaters designed to attract a fashionable crowd in their new social role

as the penultimate "dreamhouse." On the contrary, the technology of film provided the opposite effect: "Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and fur- nished 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 pho- tographed 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 disap- peared - all this created a montage suggesting "a world of secret affinities" (a degree 3). It was the Surrealists who 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 Paris arcades, full of such images. Louis Argaon's description of the soon-to-be demolished Passage de l'Opera, in Le paysan de Paris (1926) inspired the Passagen-Werk. Ben- jamin recalled later: "Evenings in bed I could never read more than 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 'mytho- logy' " but "to penetrate all this by the dialectic of awakening" (PW, 1214). Such awakening began where Surrealists and 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). Against Aragon, the Passagen-Werk "is concerned with dissolving mythology into the space of history. This clearly can happen only through awakening a not-yet-conscious knowledge of the past [Ge- wesen]" (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-century image 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 [Zeitraum] (a time-dream [Zeit-traum]) in which individual conscious- ness maintains itselfever-more reflectively, whereas the collective con- sciousness 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.

Buck-Morss 217

which to the healthy, awake person blend together in a surge of health (blood pressure, intestinal movements, heartbeat and muscle sen- sations) - due to his unprecedendy sharpened senses, generate hallucinations or dream-images which translate and explain [these sensations], so it is too with the dreaming collective which in the arcades sinks into its own innards. This is what we have to pursue in order to interpret the 19th century in fashion and advertisement, building and politics, as the consequence of [the collective's] dream- countenance" (K 1, 4, cf. G degree 14). Consumer objects, novelties and fashions from the past [Gewesene], existed in the present as dream images through which the collective unconscious communicated across generations. New inventions conceived out of the fantasy of one generation, they entered into the childhood experienced of another. Now (and this is one of the most intriguing aspects of Benjamin's theory), their second dream-existence began: "The experience of the youth of a generation has much in common with dream experience." (K 1, 1, cf. F degree 7). If capitalism had been the source of a historical dream-state, this one was of biological origins, and the two axes con- verged in a unique constellation for each generation. At this intersec- tion between social history and natural history, between society's dream and childhood dream, the contents of the collective uncon- scious were transmitted. "Every epoch has this side turned toward dreams - the childlike side. For the preceeding century it emerges very clearly in the arcades" (K 1, 1; F degree 7).

Childhood was not merely a passive receptacle for this historical unconscious. Childhood transformed the dream-images in accord with its own temporal index, and this entailed their dialectical reversal from historically specific images into archaic ones (Urbilder). I unders- tand at least part of Benjamin's point to be this: From the child's posi- tion, all history, from the most ancient to the most recent past, occurs in mythic time. No history recounts his or her lived experience. All of the past lies in an archaic realm of"Ur"-history. Now, the bourgeois ideology of historical progress does its best to overwhelm this childhood intuition of even the most recent history as archaic and mythically distant, by substituting for it the image of history's tri- umphal march, which submerges the new generations in its "irresist- able" tide. (We may recall that Benjamin considered nothing so politically corrupting: The belief in progress was itself a myth that pre- vented any real historical change from occurring.14) In the market- place, historical progress manifests itself as fashion and newness, but it isjust this that the cognitive experience of childhood reverses: "At first,

14. Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 258.

218 Benjamin's Passagenwerk

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 pos- tulated by C.G. Jung and Ludwig Klages. The difference was Ben- jamin'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 ur- symbols 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 poten- tial for the symbolic expression of humanity's dreams - its wish- dreams 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 dis- solved 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, Ben- jamin, convinced that his chances for personal happiness were small,

Buck-Morss 219

and threatened by economically and politically insecure conditions, contemplated suicide seriously. During that same year, in the midst of writing short pieces necessary for his financial survival, he wrote to Scholem, "something else is coming into being behind my back - in the form of some notes I have been making...concerning the history of my relationship to Berlin."15 These notes took shape quickly in two versions, Berliner Chronik (dedicated to Stefan), 6 and Berliner Kindheit um 1900. 1 They were childhood reminiscences structured not as chronological autobiography, but as "discrete expeditions into the depth of memory."18 As self-analysis this project seems to have been therapeutic, giving Benjamin the power to put the past behind him. At the same time he was testing the childhood dream-theory on himself, and practicing on the level of individual history what he hoped even- tually to accomplish in the Passagen-Werk for the collective, a re- construction of the past in the light of the present, in order to break away - "awaken" - from it.19

Benjamin's childhood memories are less of people than of those urban spaces in Imperial Berlin which formed the settings for his experiences - parks, department stores, railroad stations, city streets, cafes, and school buildings. They concern as well the material pro- ducts of industrialism - a wrought-iron door, the telephone, a chocolate-dispensing slot machine. The world of the modern city appears as a mythic and magical one in which the child Benjamin "dis- covers the new anew," and the adult Benjamin recognizes it as a redis- covery of the old.20 One thing became clear to him from the ex-

15. Letter, 28 February, 1932, cited in scholem, The Story ofa Friendship, p. 180. Ben- 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 was written in spring 1932. More directly personal (and political) than the laterversion, itwas left unpublished until 1970 when Gershom Scholem edited the manuscript. An English translation appears in Walter Benjamin, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New 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 Benjamin-Gersom Scholem: Briefwechsel, 1933-1940, ed. Gershom Scholem, (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1980), p. 28.

19. In his post-1937 notes toKonvolut K, Benjamin cited the Freudian TheodorReik 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, and the "discovery" is

220 Benjamin's Passagenwerk

periment. This was not the form that the Passagen-Werk itself could take. As he wrote later: "The Ur-history of the 19th century which is reflected in the gaze of the child playing on its threshold has a much dif- ferent 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 form of a utopian wish-image: "Many years ago in a city tram I saw an advertising placard which, if it had entered into the world with proper things, would have found its admirers, historians, exegeticians and copyists, as much as any great literature or great painting. And in fact it was both at the same time. But as can occur sometimes with very deep, unexpected impressions, the shock was so strong, the impression, if I may say it thus, hit me so powerfully that it broke through the bottom of consciousness and for years lay irretrievable somewhere in the darkness. I knew only that it had to do with 'Bullrichsalz'...Then I succeeded one faded Sunday afternoon... [in discovering a sign on which was written] 'Bullrich-Salz.' It contained nothing but the word, but around this verbal sign there arose suddenly, effortlessly, that desert landscape of the first placard. I had it back again. It looked like this: moving forward in the foreground of the desert was a freight-wagon drawn by horses. It was laden with sacks on which was writ- ten Bullrich-Salz." One of these sacks had a hole out of which salt had already dribbled for a while onto the earth. In the background of the desert landscape, two posts carried a large sign with the words: 'is the best.' What about the trace of salton the path through the desert? It constructed letters, and these formed a wad, the word 'Bullrich-Salz.' Was the preestablished harmony of Leibniz not childishness com- pared with this knife-sharp, finely coordinated predestination in the desert? And did there not lie in this placard a likeness for things which in this life on earth no one has yet experienced? A likeness for the every-day of utopia?" (G la, 4) Note that the child's inventive reception of this mass-culture form as a sign of a reconciliated nature indicates that childhood cognitive powers were not without an antidote to mass culture's manipulation.

21. I am indebted toJohn Forester for this comparison.

Buck-Morss 221

tive of both was necessary to capture the ambivalence of the his- torical situation.

As a maxim for transforming dream-images into "dialectical" images, which is how the former looked upon wakening, Benjamin wrote: "No historical category without natural substance; no natural category without its historical filter" (0 degree 80). This dialectic be- tween nature and history (more clearly worked out by Adorno than by Benjamin22) functioned on both levels (childhood and society), and was further complicated by the superimposition of the dialectic be- tween archaic and modern, and the double value-meaning (negative and positive) of the terms. All this lends Benjamin's theoretical point a density difficult to unravel, but it is possible to pull at least some of the strands apart. In the arcades, the recently out-of-date fashions, new to former generations were historical objects which appeared as fetishes, ur-images with a mythic meaning, from the perspective of the present one. But the "newness" of fashion under capitalism was a myth, merely the fetishized "wish-image" of change within an unchanged system, and the childhood axis of cognition thereby stumbled accidentally upon a truth. Hence the importance of the natural history of generations, whose perspective provided that symbolic angle of vision which made possible a critical perception of the new as the "always- the-same." But the cognitive axis of social history was also necessary because its allegorical (as opposed to symbolic) orientation de- monstrated that the mythic ur-images had a material, historical base, and thus (against Klages and Jung) they had transient rather than ontological status. For example, those arcades which survived in Ben- jamin's time had a bombed-out appearance, typical of obsolete urban constructions, so that in them the "wish-symbols of the previous cen- tury" appeared turned "into rubble" (BW, 50). Precisely this natural history of objects, their appearance in the present as "wrecked material" (PW, 1215) was a sign of the transitoriness of historical phenomena, including, ultimately, bourgeois class domination.

Within the cognitive axis of childhood, Benjamin tookgreat pains to demonstrate that as a "natural" mythic state it was bound at every point to history. In the Passagen-Werk he cited Ernst Bloch: "the uncon- scious is an acquired condition in specific human beings..." (K 2a, 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, The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adono, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute (New York: Macmillan Free Press, 1977).

222 Benjamin's Passagenwerk

As the contents of the unconscious were images of concrete, his-

torically specific matter (automobiles, telephones, the arcades them-

selves) rather than the eternal psychical archetypes that Jung sug- gested, 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 dream- states was itself a function of history: when capitalism's new dream-

sleep 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 them- selves 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 never executed" (ed. note, PW, 1145). Still, the Passagen-Werk material makes clear what further line Benjamin's argument would have taken. WhereJung would see, for exam- ple, 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 con- tinued 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 his- torical 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's story: "some- thing 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, unac- countable and yet real and unquenchable" (Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 118).

25. Benjamin, Reflections, p. 28.

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to new generations consciously through tradition-bound stories, myths or fairy tales. Given modernity's rupture of tradition, this was no longer possible. Instead, the transferal occurred indirectly and unconsciously, through the mediation of things, which as symbols underwent at the boundary of generations a dialectical reversal from the new to the archaic Benjamin spoke of the "arcades...in which we, as in a dream, once again live the life of our parents and grandparents.." e degree 2). And on the dialectical reversal: "The impression of the old- fashioned can only come to be where, in a certain way, it is effected by the most contemporary. If in the arcades there lie the beginnings of the most modern architectural form, then its old-fashioned effect on peo- ple today has just as much to say as the antiquarian effect of the father on his son" (B 3, 6).

Benjamin affirmed the rupture in tradition because it freed sym- bolic powers from conservative restraints for the task of social transfor- mation. (Although one can find statements by Benjamin that seem to lament the loss of tradition, he was a supporter of the institution of the bourgeois family,26 and whatever positive attitude he had toward theology, it did not include organized religion as an institution.27) And clearly, Benjamin affirmed the mythic power of wish-images which found unconscious, symbolic form in commodities and mass culture.28 But as dream-images they were fetishes, alienated from the dreamers, and dominating them as an external force. This was the nightmarish side of the dream, and it existed in the state of childhood as well. Ben- jamin criticized Jung "who wants to hold awakening far away from

26. During his years in the youth movement, his group, in rebellion against the "inhumanity" of parents, was "seriously intent 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. 19-21). He referred in Einbahnstrasse to 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 procure- ment it was later to render to my awakened drive" (Reflections, p. 53).

28. In the 1934-35 notes Benjamin mentions: "the positive in the fetish" (PW, 1213).

224 Benjamin's Passagenwerk

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 ex- perience of a generation the two converge. The coming-to-con- sciousness of a generation is an explosive moment unique in re- volutionary 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 (mit List): The reference to Hegel was intentional. 29

Benjamin seems to have been suggesting a rather extraordinary rever- sal 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 transferred from 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 ill- ness 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 emerges out of them" (K 1, 5). The Passagen-Werk, with the goal of his-

29. In his 1935 expose, Benjamin wrote: "Every epoch...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 histori- cal unconsciousness achieves its goal through the generational coming-to-con- sciousness of those subjects.

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torical awakening, was to provide a politically explosive answer to the collective, socio-historical form of the child's question, "Where did I come from?" Where did modern consciousness, or more accurately, the images of modern dream-consciousness come from? Speaking of Surrealism, the aesthetic expression of that dream-consciousness, Benjamin wrote: "The father of Surrealism was Dada; its mother was an arcade" (PW, 1057).

Benjamin originally conceived of the Passagen-Werk as a "dialectical fairy-tale" (PW, 1138). In it the dreaming collective of the recent past appeared as a sleeping giant ready to be awakened by the present generation, and the mythic powers of both dream states were affirmed, the world re-enchanted, but only in order to break out of history's mythic spell, in fact by reappropriating the power bestowed on the objects of mass culture as utopian dream symbols. "Fairy tales," he wrote in the (1934) Kafka essay, "are the traditional stories about vic- tory over these [mythic] forces."30 The goal of Benjamin's "new dialec- tical method of history writing" was "the art of experiencing the present as the waking world to which that dream which we call the past (Gewesenes) in truth relates" (K 1, 3).31 Told with "cunning,"32 the Passagen-Werk would accomplish a double task: it would dispel the mythic power of present being (Wesen) by showing it to be composed of decaying objects with a history (Gewesen). And it would dispel the myth of history as progress (or the modern as new) by showing history and modernity in the child's light as the archaic. Told properly, this fairy

30. Benjamin, Illumiantions, p. 117. 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 trick mythic 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 invinc- ible" (Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 117). Adorno suggested instead that fairy tales were a stage prior to myth, belonging to an age ofinnoence rather than cunning. (Interesting- ly, Benjamin's one-line comment on Ulysses cited above becomes fundamental to Adorno's argument in the chapter on Odysseus in Dialectic of Enlightenment.)

See also in the Passagen-Werk: "The coming awakening stands like the wooden horse 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. Ben- jamin 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.

226 Benjamin's Passagenwerk

tale would use enchantment to disenchant the world: "We here con- struct 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 sorrow- ful, fascinated contemplation of the most recent past as its revo- lutionary explosion" (0 degree 56).

III. Marx, Freud, and the Origins of Mass Culture I have said that Benjamin maintained the original plan for the

Passagen-Werk, including the double dream-theory outlined above, at 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 include three of them in the published Passagen-Werk. All of the ver- sions refer to the following: dream-world, utopian wish-images, collective consciousness, generations, and, most emphatically the con-

ception 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 wish-

images [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 ver- sion 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 con- sciousness, [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)34 with 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 conception of the Passagen-Werk] has 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 distinction between the Passagen-Werk and forms like Berliner Kindheit 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 con- ception 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 dream-theory, and he never did. Adorno's knowledge of these notes was limited to what Benjamin read to him in Konigstein in 1929. We do not know whether their discussions there included the double dream- state. 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-century commodity-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

34. PW, 1127-36. English trans. in Ernst Bloch et al., Aesthetics and Politics (London: NLB, 1977).

228 Benjamin's Passagenwerk

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 con- ception of a collective consciousness on the influence of Brecht, and argued against it on Marxist grounds: "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 ser- iously.35 I 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 ajustifica- tion 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 N the well- 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 him- self 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 he had begun to "look around" in the first volume of Marx's Capital. A Konvolut (X) on "Marx" was begun in 1935. In that year Benjamin spoke of the concept of the fetish- character of commodities as standing "at the center" of the Passagen-Werk (ibid.); in 1938 it was still the book's "fundamental category" (PW, 1116).

In March 1937 Benjamin wrote to Horkheimer"that the definitive and binding plan of the [Passagen-Werk], now 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).

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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 deter- mines 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,37 but 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,"38 but, 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."39 If one takes the bourgeois class to be the generator of a collec- tive 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 continua- tion 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, The Interpretation ofDreams, trans. and ed.James Strachey (New York: Avon Books, 1965), p. 123.

39. Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, p. 194.

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Now, precisely this bourgeois class ambivalence is documented by a whole range of quotations which Benjamin included in the Passagen- Werk material at all stages of his research. He found it not only in the commodities and architecture of 19th-century Paris, but in the con- temporary writings offuturologists, social utopians, city planners, and social commentators. Utopian writings were the "depository of collec- tive 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 con- tinuous change. But on the latent level (the level of the true wish of the dreamer), it was seen as the eternalization of bourgeois class domina- tion. 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-ima- gining...[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 rearrange- ment 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 pro- moted was expressed as well in 19th-century style: architecture cus- tomarily 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 con- sidered 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 politically significant that 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 com- modity 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 royalty where they were seduced by every psychological trick into 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 scar- city.)" (A 4, 1). This was a turning point. In Paris after 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 proportions. Much of the Passagen-Werk is 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 exhi- bitions.

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, staged by the state, and in this sense anticipated the Volkfest of fascism (G 4, 7).

232 Benjamin's Passagenwerk

1889 (for which the Eiffel tower was built); and in 1900 Paris witnessed 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 produc- tion, "kitsch," as bourgeois class guilt: "the expression within the overproduction of commodities of the bad conscience of the pro- ducers" (P degree 6).

It is true, as Adorno criticized, that Benjamin's 1935 expose pre- sented 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 interpenetra- tion with the new, produce the utopia which leaves its traces in thousands of configurations of life, from permanent buildings to tran- sient fashions" (PW, 1239). But in the same text Benjamin stated explicitly: "The new is a quality independent of the use value of the com- modity. It is the source of that illusion which is inseparable from the dream-images of the collective. It is the quintessence of false con- sciousness, 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 occa- sion 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, Arcades: The History of a Building Type, trans. Jane 0. Newman andJohn H. Smith [Bos- 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, Ben- jamin 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 double- edged nature of the appearances with which we are dealing in the 19th century?" (K 3,5). The goal of course was material abundance,45 which is why the dream functioned legitimately on the manifest level of collective wish-image. But the commodity-form of the dream gene- rated 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. IV. Generation and Class Politics

It was at precisely this historical point that Benjamin's generation entered the scene. Born in 1892 in Berlin, then a newly-arrived indus- trial metropolis, Benjamin was introduced to "reality" in its mass- culture, 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 perpen- dicular...[exposing the child to] a blizzard of changing, colorful, con- flicting letters...Locust swarms of print, which already eclipse the sun of what is taken for city-dweller's intellect..."46 Benjamin wrote that the

44. Benjamin's understanding of dialectical argumentation was to show the posi- tive side of each negative aspect in an infinite serial bifurcation. The redemptive ges- ture 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-of- date, 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, p. 78.

234 Benjamin's Passagenwerk

whole of his later childhood was "a period of impotence before the city."47 He recalled his "dreamy recalcitrance," when, being led by his mother, "we walked through the streets, rarely frequented by me, of the city center."48 Benjamin's introduction to civic life was as a con- sumer: "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 com- modities - was 'the town.' "49 Benjamin never implied that his experience of the city was anything but class-bound, a situation inten- sified by the false sense of security that class-belonging seemed to offer GermanJews at the turn of the century. In Berliner Chronik: "The poor? 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 lit- tle men pushed wheelbarrows, labored with pickaxes, and shone lan- terns 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."52 And in the Passagen-Werk: "What do we know of the streetcorners, curb- stones, 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, Ben- jamin'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 dream- ing 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, p. 11. 51. Ibid., p. 12. 52. Ibid., p. 27.

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from the collected facts with which this work [Passagen-Werk] is con- cerned, to [show] how they appear in the becoming-self-conscious process of the proletariat?" (0 degree 68) If there is a clear class distinc- tion 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 "waking- up" 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 impotence? His own testimony is incriminating. In Berliner Chronik he 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."53 Here 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 Berliner Chronik, at 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 "in any place or even in the most limited degree" (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 place."54

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, p. 11. 54. Walter Benjamin, "The Author as Producer" (1934), Understanding Brecht, trans.

Anna Bostock (London: NLB, 1973), p. 93.

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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 furni- ture to doorknobs, from bathrooms to bay-windows, the new "porosi- ty, 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 in- habitants 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 cen- tury has grown musty," Benjamin remarked: "We, however, believe that...it also contains for us vital stuff...for our knowledge...illuminat- ing the bourgeois class position at the moment when signs of decline first appeared within it. Politically vital stuff at any rate, that substan- tiates 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 Uhu entitled 'The New Parents' and 'The New Children.' Thomas Mann, piqued, replies in Berliner Tageblatt and 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 Chronicle, trans. Fred 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 Ben- jamin's generation were devalued in the present as hopelessly old- fashioned: "Every generation 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" (B 1 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).57 The contrary desire to outgrow and to recapture the lost world of childhood together determined a gen- eration's interest in the past, which Benjamin believed could be mobilized for utopian, revolutionary politics. The bourgeois intellec- tual could see his struggle to break from past culture as an allegory for the colletive struggle - a model, perhaps even a prophetic one - but never a substitute, no more than the mass-culture audience was itself already the revolutionary collective.58

56. "What are 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 the early 1930s Bernd Witte notes: "The intellectual...is seen by Benljamlin in the role of the psychoanalyst of the collective neurosis [-this is nowhere more true than in the Passagen-Werk]: inadequate consciousness occurs, he believes, according to the schema of repression, the mechanism ofwhich is capable of being discovered by the intellectual-as- specialist 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 al., Walter Benjamin - Zeitgenosse der Modem (Monographien Literaturwissenschaft vol. 30 [Kronberg/Ts.: ScriptorVerlag, 1976], p. 15). Despite declarations to the contrary, the Passagen-Werk often seems to be aimed at bourgeois intellectuals, with the goal of revolutionizing the educators, rather than educating the revolutionary class.

58. In Benjamin's early notes, the concept of the collective is used very loosely. Cer- tainly, the success of fascism, with its "class-blind" concept of Volksgemeinschaft, made 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 Volksgemeinschaft attempts to drive everything out of individuals that stands in the way of their complete assimilation into a massified clientel. The only unreconciled op- ponent. .. in this connection is the revolutionary proletariat. The latter destroys the illu- sion of the mass (Schein der Masse) with the reality of the class (Realitat der Klasse)" (J 81a, 1).

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A revolution in style, even if it occurred on a mass basis, was no sub- stitute 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, Moder- nism stripped the objects of all those cultural expressions which pro- vided 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 19th- century's "narcotic historicism, its passion for masks, in which nonetheless there hides a signal of true historical existence..." (K 1 a, 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. Dwarfs and Giants In 1939, with World War imminent, the Institut fur Sozialforschung

requested a new expose of the Passagen-Werk in hopes of getting outside funding for it. Benjamin produced a French version in a lucid, descrip- 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 Passagen- Werk.60 The 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.61 Never intended for publication (-"they would open gate and door for an enthusiastic misunderstanding"62-), they resurrect the theological language of the early Passagen-Werk notes:63 all of history appears as

59. The significance of this example was pointed out to me byJoel Remmer. 60. The material came largely from the later entries to Konvolut N which concerned

the theory of historical progress. 61. Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften 1:3, p. 1226. 62. Ibid., p. 1227. 63. Cf.: "The modern, the time of hell..." (g degree 17).

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catastrophe, a hellish, cyclical repetition of barbarism and oppression. But the "resignation without hope" of Blanqui is absent; in its place is the desire to "better our position in the struggle against fascism" (thesis VIII). It leads to an apocalyptic conception of breaking out of this his- torical cycle, in which the proletarian revolution appears under the sign of Messianic Redemption.

In the theses, Benjamin speaks of "shock," rather than awakening, as the revolutionary moment of breaking from the past, but they are different words for the same experience. "Images of the past" replace the term "dream-images," but they are still dialectically ambivalent, mystifying and yet containing "sparks of hope" (VI). The revolution, the "political world-child," has yet to be born (X), but the utopia it would usher in is understood in the child-like terms of Fourier, whose most fantastic day-dreams of cooperation with nature "prove to be sur- prisingly sound" (XI). "The subject of historical knowledge is the struggling, oppressed class itself' (XXI), but the entire "generation" possesses "messianic power" (II). Moreover, it is still in fashion that revolutionary prefiguration can be discovered. It is the meaning of the strange XIVth fhesis: "Fashion has a weather-sense for the present even if it moves about in the thickets of the past. It is the tiger spring into the past Only now it occurs in an arena in which the ruling class has com- mand. The same leap under the free heaven of history is the dialectical one, which is how Marx understood the revolution." Camoflaged within the new discourse, the old elements of Benjamin's thinking are still there and they often make meaningful precisely those pro- nouncements in the theses which are most baffling on their own.

In thesis XVI, Benjamin explicitly rejects the historicist's "once upon a time"; the historical materialist "leaves it to others to expend them- selves" with this whore in the bordello of historicism. "He remains master of his power, adult enough to blast open the continuum of his- tory." And yet, there was a way of telling fairy tales which was not this prostituted one. In 1936, in "The storyteller," Benjamin reconsidered the form of the fairy tale which he had supposedly dropped years before as a model for thePassagen-Werk. Here are the relevant passages:

"The fairy tale, which to this day is the first tutor of children because it was once the first tutor of mankind, secretly lives on in the story ...Whenever good counsel was at a premium, the fairy tale had it, and where the need was greatest, its aid was nearest. This need was the need created by the myth. The fairy tale tells us of the earliest arrangements that mankind made to shake off the nightmore which the myth had placed upon its chest...64 The liberating magic which the fairy tale has

64. Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 10.

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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."65 The fairy tale, which uses re-enchantment to disenchant the world, also has some- thing 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 fairy tale."66

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 dwarf of 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 collec- tive. The first thesis on the dwarf and the puppet begins: "Bekanntlich soil es...gegeben haben." It has been translated: "The story is told..." Ben- jamin's last position is that of the story-teller. He reverts to this 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 Passagen- Werk, 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 weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has claim. That claim cannot be setted cheaply. The historical materialist is aware of this."

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