Cohen Benjamin's Phantasmagoria

Walter Benjamin's PhantasmagoriaAuthor(s): Margaret CohenReviewed work(s):Source: New German Critique, No. 48 (Autumn, 1989), pp. 87-107Published by: New German CritiqueStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/488234 .Accessed: 23/11/2012 16:47

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Walter Benjamin's Phantasmagoria

Margaret Cohen

Confronting the ruins of the Jamf Olfabriken Werke (Jamf Petrole- um Factory Works), in the light that breaks "some night at too deep an hour to explain away," Thomas Pynchon's Enzian reaches an "extra- ordinary understanding. This serpentine slag-heap ... is not a ruin at all. It is in perfect working order."' If readers of Walter Benjamin sometimes grasp the Passagen-Werk in an Enzian-like epiphany, at other moments they apprehend it in a fashion more suitable to Coleridge. Briefly imagining this text in all its completed majesty, they see fully devel- oped concepts where Benjamin left only fragments. The following essay results from one such glimpse into Benjamin's Kubla Khan, for it elaborates a concept that I imagine would have become a keystone of the Passagen-Werk, had Benjamin ever brought his project to comple- tion. This concept is the phantasmagoria, which recurs with troubling in- sistence throughout Benjamin's arcades project. Suggesting that Benjamin's interest in the phantasmagoria derives primarily from its technological manifestation, as 19th-century visual spectacle, I will reveal how this concept is particularly well-suited to figure Benjamin's Marxist-Freudian theory of base-superstructure relations in a society ruled by the commodity form. In addition, I will argue that the phantasmagoria fascinates Benjamin for its power to capture his own method of critical illumination. Challenging an Enlightenment opposition between ideological mystification and cultural critique, Benjamin's phantasmagoria emblematizes one of the Passagen-Werk's central methodological projects: to free Marxist analysis from its overwhelm- ing valorization of rational forms of representation.

1. Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (New York: Viking, 1973) 520.

87


88 Margaret Cohen

From Dream to Phantasmagoria: The Transformation of Benjamin's Parisian Resumes

The importance of the phantasmagoria to Benjamin emerges in his "Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century," a 1935 resumb of the arcades project written for the Institute for Social Research.2 In this text, Benjamin associates the phantasmagoria with commodity culture's experience of its material and intellectual products, echoing Marx's use of the term in Capital. Benjamin quotes Marx in the Passagen-Werk's Konvolut G: "'This fetishism of commodities has its origin ... in the peculiar social character of the labor that produces them. ... It is only a definite social relation between men that assumes, in their eyes, the phantasmagorical form of a relation between things"' (PW 245).3 As has often been observed, Benjamin extends Marx's statement on the phantasmagorical powers of the commodity to cover the entire do- main of Parisian cultural products, a use of phantasmagoria that Marx himself initiates in The Eighteenth Brumaire.4 If the commodities dis- played within the Universal Exhibitions manifest themselves as a phantasmagoria - "the phantasmagoria of capitalist culture reaches its most brilliant display in the Universal Exhibition of 1867" - intellectual reflection in the 19th century also takes on a phantasmagorical cast.5 Benjamin describes, for example, "the phantasmagoria of 'cultural history,' in which the bourgeoisie savors its false consciousness to the last," and the phantasmagorical illusions of the proletariat: "the

2. I have included the definite article in the translation of the essay's title (Paris, Die Hauptstadt des XIXe. Jahrhunderts) to distinguish it from Benjamin's 1939 essay entitled Paris, Capitale du XIXieme sidcle. When Benjamin drops the definite article in his 1939 essay, he responds to a comment in Adorno's Hornberg letter: "As a title, I should like to propose Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century, not The Capital" (Theodor Adorno, letter to Walter Benjamin, 2 August 1935, Aesthetics and Politics [London: New Left Books, 1977] 115). The 1935 essay appears in English in Reflections, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Harcourt, 1978). I have modified the translation where it seemed necessary. The 1939 essay appears as part of the Passagen-Werk (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1982). All references to the Passagen-Werk will be cited in the body of the article with the abbrcviatilonl '. All '~nlati

(ir 1f thc Palsstge-l4 k aFr Iiil,

unlcss otherwise indicated.

3. I have modified slightly the translation of this passage offered by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, who translate "phantasmagorische" as "fantastic." See Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (New York: Modern Library, 1906) 83.

4. See Susan Buck-Morss, "Redeeming Mass Culture for the Revolution," New German Critique 29 (1983): 213; and Rolf Tiedemann, "Dialectics at a Standstill," On Walter Benjamin, ed. Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986) 277.

5. Walter Benjamin, "Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century" 153.


Benjamin's Phantasmagoria 89

Commune puts an end to the phantasmagoria that dominates the free- dom of the proletariat. It dispels the illusion that the task of the prole- tarian revolution is to complete the work of 1789 hand in hand with the bourgeoisie."6

But it is only with the 1939 expose of the arcades project, "Paris, Capital of the 19th Century," which Benjamin produced to attract fi- nancial aid from an American patron, that the phantasmagoria assumes a key methodological position. The increased importance assigned to the phantasmagoria is one of many differences between this and the 1935 essay. As Buck-Morss points out, the 1939 expose is written "in a lucid, descriptive style, with a totally new introduction and conclusion, in which the dream theory is strikingly absent."'7 Consonant with Benjamin's turn away from dream theory, his 1939 sketch of the arcades project drops the controversial concept of the dialectical image. In addition, it analyzes the transformations of 19th-century Paris in more rigorously Marxist terms, taking pains to link Parisian cultural in- novations to specific economic factors. Benjamin also abandons the section entitled "Daguerre, or the Panoramas," which describes how the new 19th-century visual technologies of the panorama and photography express the century's "new feeling about life."8 For our purposes, however, the most important transformation in the 1939 sketch is the rise in importance of the phantasmagoria, which I will suggest to be the result of Benjamin's turn away from the dream.

The phantasmagoria figures prominently in the introductory section of the 1939 essay, where it, rather than the "dialectical image" that is "a dream image,"9 becomes the expressive form taken by the products of 19th-century commodity culture. Benjamin writes:

Our inquiry proposes to show how, as a consequence of the reifying representation of civilization, the new forms of life and the new economic and technological creations that we owe to the last century enter into the universe of a phantasmagoria. These creations undergo this 'illumination' not only in a theoretical manner, by an ideological transposition, but also in the immediacy of perceptible presence. They manifest themselves as phantasmagorias (PW 61).

6. Benjamin, "Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century" 158, 160. 7. Buck-Morss 238. 8. Benjamin, "Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century" 150. 9. Benjamin, "Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century" 157.


90 Margaret Cohen

Nowhere does Benjamin's transformation of the dream-like experience of the commodity into the experience of the phantasmagoria appear more vividly than in the conclusion to the 1939 essay. While the 1935 essay ends with Benjamin's suggestion that the demystification of 19th-century Paris is an experience of awakening ("the realization of dream elements in waking is the textbook example of dialectical thinking"'0), the 1939 essay concludes by according the power of ideological demystification to the phantasmagoria itself. Auguste Blanqui's Eternit6 par les Astres, writes Benjamin, is "a last phantasmagoria of cosmic character, which implicitly includes the most acerbic critique of all the others" (PW 75). Benjamin thus transforms the 1935 opposition between dream and awakening into the difference between mystifying and critical (illuminating) phantasmagorias.

"The Immediacy of Perceptible Presence": Robertson's Phantasmagoria While Marx's use of the phantasmagoria explains why Benjamin

applies the term to the 19th-century's "ideological transposition" of "new economic and technological creations," it does not explain why Benjamin describes this experience as an "'illumination"' of "perceptible presence" (PW 61). True, ideological transposition does accord human creations a strange sort of perceptible presence, but this presence would hardly seem to be illuminating, in either a literal or a figurative sense. Benjamin, however, provides us with an alternative way to understand the illuminations of phantasmagoric manifestation. Pano- rama, the Passagen-Werk Konvolut devoted to popular forms of 19th- century visual spectacle, opens with the following fragment:

There were panoramas, dioramas, cosmoramas, diaphanoramas, navaloramas, pleoramas (rX, E o

I travel by sea, boating), phanto- scopes, phantasma-parastasias, phantasmagorical experiences and phan- tasmaparastatic ones, picturesque trips in a room, georamas; optical picturesques, cineoramas, phanoramas, stereoramas, cyclora- mas, dramatic panorama (PW 655, emphasis added).

One of these spectacles, the "phantasmagorical experience" or, as it was also called, the phantasmagoria, was literally illuminating. Using a movable magic lantern called a phantoscope, it projected for its spectators a parade of ghosts.

10. Benjamin, "Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century" 162.



If we examine the phantasmagoria as a 19th-century spectacle, we discover that its subject matter exemplifies the 19th-century cultural manifestations studied by Benjamin. Invented in the late 1790's by the Belgian "doctor-aeronaut" Etienne-Gaspard Robertson, the phantasmagoria enjoyed its greatest vogue in the hands of its creator, with ac- counts of Robertson's popular performances appearing in newspapers of the time." A 1798 spectacle reviewed in L'Ami des Lois opened with Robertson's answer to a member of the audience who demanded to see the ghost of Marat:

"Because I have not been able to re-establish the cult of Marat in an official newspaper, I'd at least like to see his shade."

Robertson pours onto a hot stove two glasses of blood, a bottle of vitriol, 12 drops of brandy, and two copies of the Journal des hommes libres. Right away, a small, livid ghost gradually begins to appear, armed with a dagger and wearing a red cap. The man with bristling hair recognizes it to be Marat; he wants to kiss it, the ghost makes a terrifying grimace and disappears.12

On this night, the phantasmagorian also called before his spectators less horrifying ghosts: the mythic founder of the Swiss republic, William Tell, who appeared "with republican pride"; the ghosts of Virgil and Voltaire; and the ghost of a woman in a Parisian dandy's gallant adventure:

A young dandy begs for the appearance of a woman whom he tenderly loved and whose portrait in miniature he shows to the phantasmagorian, who throws onto the burner some sparrow feath- ers, a few grains of phosphorus, and a dozen butterflies. Soon, a woman is to be perceived, her breast uncovered, her hair streaming, who fixes on her young friend a tender and sorrowful expression.

A serious man sitting next to me cries, carrying his hand to his forehead: "Oh my God! I think that's my wife," and he runs out, fearing that it is no longer a ghost.'3

11. For my discussion of Robertson's phantasmagoria, I rely on G.-M. Coissac's Histoire du Cinimatographe (Paris: Editions du 'Cineopse,' 1925). All translations from this text are mine. Since my initial research on the subject, Terry Castle has published an illuminating and entertaining article on the evolution of the concept of the phantasmagoria in the 19th century, which provides information on the phantasmagoria not found in Coissac. See Terry Castle, "Phantasmagoria: Spectral Technology and the Metaphorics of Modern Reverie," Critical Inquiry 15.1 (1988).

12. L'Ami des Lois, 28 March 1798; quoted in Coissac 22. 13. Coissac 22.


92 Margaret Cohen

Robertson's performance reached the following spectacular climax:

"Citizens and gentlemen," said Robertson, "until now I have only shown to you one shade at a time; my art is not limited to these tri- fles, they are only the prelude to the savoir-faire of your servant. I can show to kindly men the crowd of shades who, during their life, have been helped by them; reciprocally, I can make evil men sur- vey the shades of their victims."

Robertson was invited to this test by almost unanimous cheers. Two individuals alone were against it; but their opposition only ir- ritated the desires of those gathered.

Right away, the phantasmagorian throws onto the burner the reports of May 31 - those pertaining to the massacres at the pris- ons of Aix, Marseille and Tarascon; a collection of denunciations and decrees; a list of suspects; the collection of judgments of the Revolutionary Court; a bundle of demagogic and aristocratic newspapers; a copy of the Reveil du Peuple. Then he pronounces with emphasis the magic words: conspirator, humanity, terrorist,justice, Jacobin, public safety, exaggerated, alarmist, hoarder, Girondin, Moderate, Orleanist. Immediately, one sees groups covered with bloody veils rising up; they surround, they press the two individuals who had refused to give in to the general wish, and who, frightened by this terrible spectacle, run out of the room hastily, giving horrible howls... One was Barrbre [sic], the other Cambon.'4

If the ghosts haunting Robertson's phantasmagoria resemble the ghosts in Benjamin's arcades, the phantasmagoria performs on these spectral presences a transformation that exemplifies the ideological transposition of material reality Benjamin describes. Robertson turns the bloody events of recent history into aesthetic apparitions, fantastic nightmares of an evening's entertainment. Divested of their material reality, however, these historical figures are more than merely entertaining. Robertson helps them to entrer dans la le'gende, integrating them into the pantheon of "the phantasmagoria of 'cultural history,"' where they play the role of evil demons to the proud hero who founds Swiss bourgeois liberty. Robertson's representation thus seeks to exorcise the demonic power of the revolutionary memories haunting Parisian imagination, an exorcism which the journalist, Poultier-Delmotte, well understands when he personifies it in the flight of two ex-members of

14. Coissac 23.



the Committee for Public Safety, Cambon and Barere. What better synecdoche for the ideological transposition worked by "the phantasmagoria of 'cultural history"' and "the phantasmagoria of civilization" than the phantasmagoria itself?.

In The Camera Obscura of Ideology "Concerning the doctrine of the ideological superstructure," writes

Benjamin in a key passage from Konvolut K:

At first it seems as if Marx wanted only to establish a causal relation between superstructure and base. But the observation that the ideology of the superstructure reflects these relations in a false and distorted manner already goes beyond this. The question is, namely: if the base, to a certain extent, determines the conceptual and practical material of the superstructure - this determination is, however, not one of simple reflection - how is it then to be char- acterized, leaving aside the question of the causes for its emer- gence? As its expression - the superstructure is the expression of the base (PW 495, emphasis added).

Objecting to Marx's description of a mimetic base-superstructure relation, Benjamin points out that this description does not do justice to the complexity of the relation that Marx himself implies. If Benjamin privileges the phantasmagoria as an emblem for Marxist ideology, it is in part, I would suggest, because this concept allows him to correct Marx's falsely mimetic representation by simultaneously retaining and refining the technological metaphor for ideology employed lay Marx in the notion of the camera obscura.

When Benjamin takes Marx's description of ideology to task, he challenges a common Marxist representation of ideology inaugurated by a celebrated metaphor from the early Marx: "in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura .. ."15 Substituting the phantasmagoria for the camera obscura, Benjamin corrects the over-simplified relation between ideological representation and reality projected in Marx's metaphor. While, like historical "vulgar natural- ism," the camera obscura mechanically reverses the external world in the darkened chamber of thought, the magic lantern of the phantasmagoria

15. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology: Part One, With Selections from Parts Two and Three and Supplementary Texts, ed. C.J. Arthur (New York: International Publishers, 1976) 47.


94 Margaret Cohen

inverts painted slides which are themselves artistic products (PW 575). It does not project a reflection of the objective world but rather the objective world's expression, its representation as it is mediated through imaginative subjective processes. The aesthetic effect of the phantasmagoria also more closely resembles the subjective experience of ideological transposition that Marx describes. While the camera obscura does not attempt to fool its audience into mistaking its two-dimensional in- versions of reality for the outside world, the phantasmagoria endows its creations with a spectral reality of their own. Robertson's phantasmagoria expresses not only the non-mimetic inflection that Benjamin works on Marx's representation of ideology as the camera obscura, but also the content of Benjamin's own relation to these representations. The forerunner of the magic lantern, the camera obscura provided the optical principles which this later technology refined.

In suggesting the 19th-century phantasmagoria as a spectacle that el- egantly captures Benjamin's non-mimetic modification of Marxist ac- counts of ideological representation, I extend Benjamin's interest in this spectacle well beyond its brief mention in Konvolut Q. This extension, however, is consonant with Benjamin's approach to the technology of visual representation throughout his Parisian production cycle. From the cycle's first work, One-Way Street, Benjamin seeks to nuance equations of visual and ideological illusion through an appeal to historical occurrence, and it would be instructive to examine closely his representations of stereoscopes, panoramas, dioramas, and photographic and early cinematic procedure in light of this concern. Speaking gener- ally, we might say that Benjamin invokes these spectacles to investigate how, as Marx put it, the content goes beyond the phrase. The 19th-century experience of illusory visual representations adds complexity to the rhetoric of visual illusion prominent in Marx's discussions of ideology - indicating, also, the extent to which these discussions are the product of a particular time and place. Putting theory and history into a mu- tually challenging relation, Benjamin's treatment of 19th-century visual representation furthers his attempt to forge a historically nuanced Marxism that is capable of apprehending both 19th-century commodity culture and its implication in the culture that it describes.

In considering Benjamin's interest in the link between visual technology and tropes of ideological illusion, let me suggest that Benjamin's in- creasing fondness for the phantasmagoria explains a previously men- tioned difference between his 1935 and 1939 Parisian exposes. I have



pointed out that the 1939 expose abandons the section of the 1935 essay entitled "Daguerre, or the Panoramas." One could argue that Benjamin turns away from photography because he has already devoted a substan- tial essay to the subject, except that he seems to have no qualms about retaining a large section on Baudelaire, about whom he had already written and published elsewhere. Rather, it seems to me that Benjamin's turn away from photography and the panorama is evidence of the phantasmagoria's increased conceptual power. While Benjamin toys in 1935 with photography and the panorama as vivid expressions of the 19th- century's "new feeling about life,"'6 by 1939 he has settled on the phantasmagoria as the visual emblem of this feeling. He thus relegates alternative forms of visual representation to a distinctly subordinate place.

Phantasmagoria as the Afterlife of Allegory Robertson's spectacle contains yet another attraction for Benjamin,

if we are attentive to its linguistic content. The term phantasmagoria was coined by Robertson in 1797 to describe his ghostly performances, although the etymology underwriting his neologism is unclear. Littre proposes the following etymology: "E. 4&v0r aopa, apparition (see ghost, and 6yo p ieW, speak: speak to the ghosts, call the ghosts."'7 Le Robert, in contrast, suggests that the word comes from "the Greek phantasma 'ghost,' and agoreuein 'to speak in public,' under the infl. of allegory ( - > Phantasm); for Guiraud, 'popular hybrid' offantasme and gourer, agourer 'to fool."' s While Littr 's etymology captures Robert- son's procedure, the principal etymology offered by Le Robert is more significant for Benjamin. Deriving phantasmagoria etymologically from allegory, it links this term to Benjamin's privileged metaconcept of allegory in The Origin of German Tragic Drama. The supposition that Benjamin's interest in phantasmagoria stems partially from the term's etymological relation to allegory is supported by Benjamin's repeated association of the Passagen-Werk project to this earlier work. When Benjamin writes to Gershom Scholem, for example, of his newly-conceived arcades project, he describes it as a Parisian version of The Origin of German Tragic Drama:

16. Benjamin, "Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century" 150. 17. Emile Littri, Dictionnaire de la langue frangaise, vol. 3 (Paris: Gallimard, 1963)

1407; my translation. 18. Le Robert, Dictionnaire de la languefrangaise, vol. 4 (Paris: Le Robert, 1985) 404; my

translation.


96 Margaret Cohen

When I have finished the work with which I am now occupied, carefully, provisionally. ... the production cycle of One-Way Street will be closed for me in the same way that the tragic drama book closed the German one. The profane motifs of One-Way Street will parade by in hellish intensification.19

Granting the phantasmagoria a place of honor in his hellish parade, Benjamin privileges a term which modifies the etymology of the Ger- man cycle's key metaconcept in a fashion expressing an important difference between 17th-century Germany and 19th-century France. While constructed on the model of allegory, the word "phantasmagoria" is comprised of somewhat different etymological components - of phantasma and agoreuein rather than allegory's allos and agoreuein. The difference between the etymologies of allegory and phantasmagoria expresses a significant difference between the worlds that Benjamin uses these terms to conjure up. Allegory's etymology can be read to mean, among other things, "speaking other" within the agora - a term that means the marketplace as well as the public place. True to its etymology, 17th-century allegory remains for Benjamin within the marketplace, but it also indicates an alternative to it. The fallen aspect taken by the sacred in the realm of the profane, allegory continues to point towards the sacred, and hence towards a possible theological redemption of secular history.

Allegory's etymology implies the possibility of redemption and as such contrasts with the etymology of the phantasmagoria, which substi- tutes ghosts for the allos that signifies allegory's transcendence. Appear- ing as allegory's demonic Doppelglinger, the phantasmagoria remains firmly rooted in the haunted realm of commercial exchange. Its etymology thus well expresses Benjamin's conclusions about the commodity origins of 19th-century Parisian hell and about the inescapability of this hell.20 Indeed, Benjamin's 1939 expose on the arcades explicitly suggests the phantasmagorical commodity as the 19th-century equivalent to 17th-century allegory. He writes: "to the singular debasement of things

19. Walter Benjamin, Briefe (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1966) 455; my translation. 20. I invoke the term "hell" with the simultaneous despair and playfulness Benja-

min gives it; what better evidence of the ambiguity of Benjamin's designation than his decision to privilege the phantasmagoria as its emblem? For the playfulness of this designation, see also the wittily hellish characterization of Paris in the minor genre of Parisian panoramic literature dear to Benjamin and exemplified by Hetzel's Le Diable a Paris (Paris: 1846).



by their meaning, which is characteristic of 17th-century allegory, corre- sponds the singular debasement of things by their price as commodities" (PW 7 1). This sentence substantially modifies the translation of allegory into the 19th century that Benjamin proposed in his 1935 resume of the arcades project: "as in the seventeenth century the canon of dialectical imagery came to be allegory, in the nineteenth it is novelty."21

Benjamin already contrasts the permanently fallen experience of the phantasmagoria with provisionally fallen allegory in the final pages of The Origin of German Tragic Drama:

In God's world the allegorist awakens. ... Allegory, of course, thereby loses everything that was most peculiar to it: the secret, privileged knowledge, the arbitrary rule in the realm of dead objects, the supposed infinity of a world without hope. All this vanishes with this one about-turn, in which the immersion of allegory has to clear away the final phantasmagoria of the objective and, left entirely to its own devices, rediscovers itself, not playfully in the earthly world of things, but seriously under the eyes of heaven (emphasis on phantasmagoria added).22

Interestingly, Robertson's spectacle enacts Benjamin's contrast between the temporarily fallen allegory and the permanently fallen phantasmagoria. Robertson's phantasmagoria often ended with the topos of the memento mori dear to the allegorical imagination. Displaying the "skeleton of a young woman standing on a pedestal," Robertson pronounced the following admonition: "'You who have perhaps smiled at my experiments, beauties who have experienced a few moments of terror ... this is the fate that is reserved for you, this is what you will be one day. Remember the phantasmagoria."'23 While related to the allegorical memento mori, Robertson's final gesture diverges from the final allegorical use of this topos as it is described by Benjamin. Rather than turning enchantment into death, the final moment of allegory turns death into eternal life, a transformation which Benjamin invokes by citing a passage from

21. Benjamin, "Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century" 158. For a general discussion of how Benjamin translates his 17th-century concept of allegory into the 19th century, see Lloyd Spencer, "Allegory in the World of the Commodity: The Importance of Central Park," New German Critique 34 (1985).

22. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (Lon- don: New Left Books, 1977) 232.

23. From an account in Le Courrier des spectacles, 22 February 1800; quoted in Coissac 27.


98 Margaret Cohen

Lohenstein: "'Yea, when the Highest comes to reap the harvest from the graveyard, then I, a death's head, will be an angel's countenance."'24

In his Mimoires, Robertson makes explicit that his spectacle charac- terizes a world in which the possibility of theological transcendence has been lost. Recounting his interest in the supernatural investiga- tions of the 17th-century Jesuit, Father Athenasius Kircher (who was, not so coincidentally, the inventor of the magic lantern), Robertson writes: "Father Kircher, it is said, believed in the devil, and the example could be contagious, for Father Kircher was endowed with such great knowledge that many people would be tempted to think that if he believed in the devil, he had good reasons for this."25 Robertson's attempts to imitate the occult knowledge of Kircher soon reveal to him, however, the divide separating the late 18th from the 17th century. He invents the phantasmagoria, he goes on to tell us, as consolation for this divide: "'The devil refusing to communicate to me the science of wonders, I set myself to making devils, and my wand had only to move in order to force the whole infernal procession to see the light."'26 Turning to technology as an imperfect substitute for the au- thentically supernatural, Robertson associates the phantasmagoria with the same disappearance of the religious demonic as Benjamin. In continuing, nonetheless, to link his technological creation to some sort of supernatural power, Robertson not only mocks the demonic but also points to the demonic potential of human invention. His phantasmagoria thus well expresses Benjamin's Marxist understanding of the strangely supernatural power evinced by "the new creations" in their ideologically transposed forms, a power humanly created rather than theological in origin.

While Benjamin's familiarity with Robertson's writings is difficult to determine, it alters neither his interest in the technological phantasmagoria nor my fundamental premise that Benjamin privileges phantasmagoria as the Passagen-Werk's potential allegory. A synecdoche for the cultural products of the Parisian 19th century, this concept is suffi- ciently polyvalent to invoke the theoretical apparatus Benjamin uses to render these products meaningful.

24. Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama 232. 25. Memoires recr'atifs, scientifiques, et anecdotiques du physicien-aironaute E.-G. Robertson;

quoted in Coissac 20. 26. Coissac 20.



Phantasmagoria and Benjamin's Marxist-Psychoanalytic Dream In giving an account of the phantasmagoria's historical origin, I

have stressed above all this concept's relation to Benjamin's Marxist concerns. But Benjamin's interest in the phantasmagoria extends, I would suggest, beyond a concern with the ideological transposition of material reality in a commodified world. The psychological significance of the concept also suits it to invoke the psychoanalytic theory that Benjamin fuses with Marxism to explain why ideological transposition takes disfigured form.

The Passagen-Werk's fusion of Marxist and psychoanalytic theory is not only one of its greatest seductions but also one of its most recalci- trant aspects, largely because Benjamin never clearly worked out the details of this fusion. Benjamin used Freud's description of the disfigu- rations produced by repression to characterize the opacity of ideological transposition - the "expression" that we saw him substitute for Marx's "reflection" in the passage from Konvolut K quoted above. But whether more than aesthetic factors motivate the comparison of ideology to repressed representation is a question with which Benjamin struggled throughout the 1930's.27 Buck-Morss gives the most coherent systematization of Benjamin's fragmentary comments on the subject when she discusses Benjamin's translation of Freudian dream theory to the collective sphere. Positing Benjamin's interest in a collective unconscious that is class-bound, she refutes Adorno's charge that the arcades' dreaming collective is a classless collective. "Class differentia- tions were never lacking in Benjamin's theory of the collective unconscious," Buck-Morss writes, "indeed, even in his earliest formulatiqos he considered it an extension and refinement of Marx's theory of the superstructure: the collective dream manifested the ideology of the

27. On the psychoanalytic inflection that Benjamin gives to Marxist theory, see Buck-Morss's essays "Redeeming Mass Culture for the Revolution," New German Cri- tique 29 (1983), and "Walter Benjamin - Revolutionary Writer," New Left Review 128 (1981). See also Tiedemann's "Dialectics at a Standstill," On Walter Benjamin, ed. Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986); Bernd Witte, "Krise und Kritik. Zur Zusammenarbeit Benjamins mit Brecht in den Jahren 1929-1933," Peter Gebhardt et al., Walter Benjamin - Zeitgenosse der Moderne (Monographien Literaturwissenschaft, vol. 30 [Kronberg: Scriptor Verlag, 1976]); and Winfried Menninghaus's section on the relation between the Freudian myth and the Benjaminian dream in "Walter Benjamin's Theory of Myth," also in On Walter Benjamin. Barbara Kleiner offers a surrealist view of the matter in "L'eveil comme categorie centrale de l'experience historique dans le Passagen-Werk de Benjamin," as do, less successfully, Rita Bischof and Elisabeth Lenk in "L'intrication surreelle du reve et de l'histoire dans les Passages de Benjamin." These last two essays are published in Walter Benjamin et Paris (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1986).


100 Margaret Cohen

dominant class."28 Buck-Morss's argument is rich and sophisticated, but to understand Benjamin's interest in the phantasmagoria, it is important to consider one of his hypotheses about ideology's repressed character that Buck-Morss neglects. This consideration suggests Benja- min's turn towards the phantasmagoria as the obverse of his turn away from the dream.

Buck-Morss cites Benjamin's ambiguous comparison of ideology to the dream of an overfed sleeper - a comparison which follows the passage from Konvolut K on the expressive character of the superstructure - in order to argue "the bourgeois class .. . [as] the genera- tor of a collective dream."29 But the cause of ideological distortion pos- ited by Benjamin's comparison is, in fact, more ambiguous than Buck- Morss's coherent account of it allows. When Benjamin writes "the economic conditions under which a society exists come to expression in the superstructure, just as with someone sleeping, an overfilled stom- ach, although it may causally 'determine' the contents of the dream, finds in those contents not its copied reflection but rather its expression," he suggests the dream as "causally 'determined"' not only, as Freud and Buck-Morss would have it, by the unconscious processes of the sleeper, but also by the excessive activity of the material realm (PW 495).30 If we translate his metaphor to the belly of the social body, we infer that the dream will be determined by "the economic conditions under which a society exists." Describing the dream that is ideology as the product of obscured forces of production, Benjamin embarks on an enterprise which will find its full elaboration in Althusser.31 True, he neither represents the forces of production in unconscious terms nor articulates their relation to the sleeper's unconscious, but he nonetheless proposes disfigured ideology as causally determined by an objective material realm. Benjamin's interest in desubjectivizing the realm that produces disfigured ideology becomes increasingly appar- ent as his work on the arcades project proceeds. Notably, Benjamin grapples with this question in "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire," where

28. Buck-Morss 229. 29. Buck-Morss 229. 30. I have slightly modified Buck-Morss's translation of this passage. See Buck-

Morss 229. 31. Buck-Morss 229. The Althusserian ring to this enterprise is not, I suspect, co-

incidental; there exists much evidence that Benjamin, like Althusser (via Lacan), de- rived his idea of the material unconscious from a surrealist fusion of Marx and Freud. I discuss this matter extensively in my forthcoming Towards a Post-Realist Theory of Ideolo- gy: Paris, Surrealism, and Walter Benjamin.



the subject's Freudian manner of representing objective conditions becomes a response to the transformation of nature into second nature.

If Benjamin sees the dream as a tempting pivot between Marx and Freud, it is not only because it occupies a central position in Freud's theory of repression, but also because Marx describes ideology in dream-like terms.32 Nonetheless, the dream's psychic causality (at least in a Freudian world) prevents it from encompassing the material com- ponent which plays a definitive role for Benjamin in the formation of ideology. Adorno raises such an objection to the dream in the Hornberg letter:

If the disenchantment of the dialectical image as a "dream" psychologizes it, by the same token it falls under the spell of bourgeois psychology. For who is the subject of the dream?... The notion of collective consciousness was invented only to divert attention from true objectivity and its correlate, alienated subjectivity.33

When Benjamin turns from ideology as dream to ideology as phantasmagoria in his 1939 rewrite of the 1935 Paris expose, he seems to ac- knowledge Adorno's objections. However, in order to understand how the phantasmagoria solves the problem of the dream's subjective agency, the concept's psychoanalytic significance needs to be clarified.

Like the dream, the mental phantasmagoria is an irrational phe- nomenon whose psychically motivated content Freud would seek to reveal. But while Freud indubitably demonstrates the subjective origin of the dream, his success with seemingly supernatural, waking occur- rences is less assured. While Freud suggests these experiences to be the products of psychic repression, his ambiguous explanations of them in "The 'Uncanny"' amply demonstrate that they are also responses to collective history and to objective events which, at times, entirely blur the distinction between objective and subjective causality.34 Castle makes a similar point when she discusses the significance of the historical phantasmagoria for Freud's attempt to master ghostly occurrence. She writes:

32. As the epigraph to Konvolut N, Benjamin cites a passage from Marx's letter to Arnold Ruge about Paris as "the new capital of the new world": '"The reform of consciousness consists only in this: to wake the world . .. from the dream of itself'" (PW 570). (Karl Marx, letter to Arnold Ruge, September 1843, The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert Tucker [New York: Norton, 1978] 12).

33. Adorno to Benjamin, Aesthetics and Politics 112-13. 34. Freud writes, for example: "An uncanny experience occurs either when repressed


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Freud struggled with the paradoxes of spectralization, largely by attempting to define a cognitive practice - psychoanalysis - which would exorcise these "ghostly presences" once and for all. But ... Freud never fully escaped the pervasive crypto-supernatu- ralism of early 19th-century psychology.35

If Benjamin turns from the dream to the phantasmagoria, I would suggest that it is precisely because phantasmagorical mental activity proves problematic for Freud. A moment when Freud's recuperation of psychological processes for subjective causality starts to break down, the phantasmagoria liberates Benjamin from "the spell of bourgeois psychology" within the terms of bourgeois psychology itself.36

"A Last Phantasmagoria": Benjamin as Phantasmagorian Benjamin concludes his 1939 expose by designating as phantasma-

gorical the ideological product that is critical of ideology. We have seen him call Blanqui's Eternite par les Astres a "last phantasmagoria" that "implicitly includes an acerbic critique of all the others" (PW 75). To conclude our examination of Benjamin's interest in the phantasmagoria, we need to understand why he uses the term in a fashion op- posed to his use of it in the essay's previous sections. If the phantasmagoria's polyvalence in the realm of ideological mystification is clear enough, what aspect of this concept suits it to designate practices of ideological critique?

The answer to this question lies as much in Benjamin's understanding of contemporary critical activity as in the phantasmagoria itself. Throughout the Parisian production cycle, Benjamin states that the Enlightenment's critical procedures no longer function in today's world.37 With all experience saturated by the phantasmagorical power

infantile complexes have been revived by some impression, or when the primitive be- liefs we have surmounted seem once more to be confirmed. Finally, we must not let our predilection for smooth solution and lucid exposition blind us to the fact that these two classes of uncanny experience are not always sharply distinguishable." Sigmund Freud, "The 'Uncanny"' [Das 'Unheimliche'] (1919), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 17, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953-74) 249.

35. Castle 59 36. Adorno to Benjamin, Aesthetics and Politics 113. 37. See, for example, One-Way Street's "Imperial Panorama," in One-Way Street and

Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London: New Left Books, 1979).



of the commodity, even the critic cannot achieve the distanced and multi-dimensional relation to his/her object necessary for rational thought. "Criticism [Kritik] is a matter of correct distancing," writes Benjamin in One-Way Street.38 "It was at home in a world where per- spectives and prospects counted and where it was still possible to take a standpoint. Now things press too closely on human society. The 'un- clouded,' 'innocent' eye has become a lie.""39 Because of the impossi- bility of gaining critical distance, rational demystification can no longer be the critic's task. Rather, the critic must seek to appropriate the distorted and distorting power of ideological transposition to ideologically disruptive ends.

When Benjamin uses the phantasmagoria to designate commodity culture's acerbic critique, he solves a problem that accompanies his post-Enlightenment redefinition of critical activity: how to represent critical thought when its traditional metaphysical configuration breaks down? For in invalidating Enlightenment "Kritik," Benjamin deprives himself of the traditional metaphysical rhetoric for critical knowledge as well. Following traditional metaphysics, Enlightenment discourse maps its opposition between valid rational and mystified non-rational thought onto the field of physical vision. Figuring rational thought as the natural vision of natural objects, it represents mystified thought in opposition - either as technologically aided vision or as a technologically produced show (the procession in Plato's cave is the first phantasmagoria). Benjamin himself figures rational thought by employing the visual tropes of Enlightenment discourse, as the previously quoted passage from One-Way Street makes clear. But these tropes do not ade- quately encompass the concept of contemporary critical activity which Benjamin sets forth. A form of thinking that is neither entirely rational nor entirely mystified, Benjamin's critical activity transgresses not only a conceptual opposition fundamental to Enlightenment epistemology but also the physical practices that Enlightenment discourse invokes to infuse its concepts with life.

In order to express his understanding of contemporary critical activity, Benjamin hence must devise figures of his own, of which the phantasmagoria is but one late example. Throughout the Parisian production cycle, Benjamin represents contemporary critique as the disruptive appropriation of existing visual technologies, translating into visual terms his

38. Benjamin, One-Way Street 89. 39. Benjamin, One-Way Street 89.


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his understanding of critical activity as the disruptive appropriation of ideological transposition. Benjamin's new critical tropes, we notice, hold a chiasmic relation to the Enlightenment rhetoric they supersede. Associating critique with artificial vision to suggest its non-rational and mystified aspects, Benjamin simultaneously asserts that such critique gives valid access to the way things are. Benjamin's new tropes thus employ visual rhetoric in orthodox Enlightenment fashion while refusing the conceptual opposition between reason and mystification on which Enlightenment visual rhetoric is based. Invoking Enlightenment discourse only better to confuse its terms, Benjamin devises figures for critical activity which perform on traditional epistemological rhetoric the disruption that they propose as critical praxis.

Among the visual technologies Benjamin explores to figure ideological illumination, advertising and cinema are prominent. Benjamin also investigates the expressive potential of various 19th-century forms of popular spectacle - stereoscopes, panoramas, mechanical toys, and magic lantern shows - which attract him for their historical content as well. But the fact that Benjamin concludes his 1939 Parisian expose by characterizing the disruptive manipulation of ideology as phantasmagorical suggests that he privileges the figurative potential of the phantasmagoria. Undoubtedly, Benjamin's interest in the "last phantasmagoria" derives primarily from the phantasmagoria's polyvalent ability to figure ideological mystification. We should not, however, overlook features of the phantasmagoria that suit it to express Benja- min's vision of contemporary ideological critique.

When the original phantasmagorian summoned up the ghosts, he performed a critical gesture whose ambiguous relation to rationality recalls the rational status of the contemporary critical gesture valued by Benjamin. Turning supernatural beings into the product of human ingenuity even as he maintained their supernatural form, Robertson simultaneously rationalized the demonic and demonized rational thought. More importantly, the technological phantasmagoria aptly expresses the relation of Benjamin's method of ideological illumination to standard procedures of Marxist cultural critique. We return here to Marx's metaphor for ideology, but view it from the other side.

Marx's metaphor of the camera obscura represents both ideology and critical knowledge in standard Enlightenment terms. Opposing the darkened space of ideological illusion to the sun-filled landscape outside, Marx suggests critical activity as the passage from technological spectacle to natural world. Marx's Enlightenment figuration of knowledge well



expresses his faith in the illuminating power of rational critique. But for Benjamin, this understanding of ideology renders Marx's (and Marx- ism's) Enlightenment conception and figuration of critical activity ques- tionable. Scattered throughout the arcades' methodological fragments is Benjamin's suggestion that Marxism can only make critical use of reason if it expands Marx's implicit challenge to the possibility of reason in a commodified world. Benjamin's polemical attack on the Enlightenment suppositions inhering in Marxism is, of course, a critical Pandora's box that is debated from the moment Adorno's stinging Hornberg letter takes Benjamin's ambiguous dialectical images to task. Without raising its lid, I wish only to suggest that it takes the form of the phantoscope. It is Marx who introduces the concept of the phantasmagoria to designate commodity culture's non-rational ideological transposition of the material world. When Benjamin uses the concept to designate ideology critique, he thus invokes a post-Enlightenment moment in Marx to correct the Enlightenment understanding of "Kritik" upon which Marx relies. In the process, Benjamin provides a technological figure for critical knowledge that modifies the Enlightenment vision of the critic's task - exemplified in Marx's notion of the camera obscura. The last phantasmagoria turns the world as it is outside the camera obscura into artificial show. Unable to have direct access to the sun-filled real, critical thought remedies enclosure in the cave of ideology by producing technological spectacles of its own. In so doing, the critical phantasmagorian works with a medium of illumination that itself encapsulates Benjamin's post- Enlightenment challenge. The fire kindled by the phantasmagorian in the phantoscope transforms the unfiltered natural light of rational understanding into an energy somewhere between nature and art. Stolen by Prometheus for man, this light of the gods is also the first technology.

Benjamin's 1928 description of the arcades project suggests that he conceived of his own project of critical illumination as a phantasmagorical spectacle from its inception. In the letter to Scholem quoted above, Benjamin describes his work as a ghostly procession: "The profane motifs will parade by in hellish intensification."" This important letter also provides a provisional title to the Passagen-Werk, as Benjamin shapes his spectacle in a specific 19th-century form: "Parisian arcades. A dialecticalfterie."4" While the fairytale aspects of Benjamin's interest

40. Benjamin, Briefe 455. 41. Benjamin, Briefe 455. The word "theory," not coincidentally, derives from a

Greek word meaning spectacle as well as viewing.


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in 'fierie" have been amply discussed, the word's specific meaning for the 19th-century needs to be clarified. The term 'fjerie" was introduced in 1823 Paris to designate a theatrical spectacle "where supernatural characters appeared ... and which demanded considerable scenic means," notably mechanical ones.42 All the mode during the middle part of the century, these productions led Flaubert to comment, "'Along with suckling pig, the fiene is the heaviest thing that I know of.'"43

Benjamin did not maintain the awkwardfterie as a visual emblem for his Parisian project of representation and critique. Exploring the potential of various 19th- and 20th-century visual technologies to figure his vision of critical activity, Benjamin most often settled on the cinema, a state-of-the-art medium with a mobile view point not unlike his own: "Method of this work: literary montage. I have nothing to say. Only to show," he wrote in the Konvolut's section N (PW 574). Far from invalidating my argument for the expressive centrality of the phantasmagoria in Benjamin's Parisian production cycle, Benjamin's representation of his own practice in cinematic terms fortifies it. What is the phantasmagoria but proto-cinema? A form of visual representation crucial to the pre-history of cinema (in the process of figuring out how to use the magic lantern to phantasmagorical effect, Robertson made it easily portable), the phantasmagoria proceeds by the same principle of juxtaposition that underwrites cinematic montage.

To propose Benjamin as a phantasmagorian? The ghost of Adorno, making a terrifying grimace, appears: "you need not fear that I shall suggest that in your study phantasmagoria should survive unmediated or that the study itself should assume a phantasmagorical character.""44 If Adorno repeatedly demands the "explosion of the phantasmagoria," it is perhaps because this grand inquisitor of rationality scents the challenge to his own activity implied by Benjamin's fondness for the term.45 Benjamin does not mystify material reality in his phantasmagoria, but he does not exactly demystify it either. Rather, material reality becomes one more representation in his magic theater, part of a ghostly conceptual parade that includes not only the phantasmagorias of 19th-century Paris, but concepts of the base and superstructure, of relations of production,

42. Le Robert, vol. 4, 444. 43. Le Robert, vol. 4, 444. 44. Theodor Adorno, letter to Walter Benjamin, 10 November 1938, Aesthetics and

Politics 127. 45. Adorno to Benjamin, Aesthetics and Politics 113.



and of mediation and demystification as well. Adorno may bristle. And Benjamin, it should be pointed out, is hardly more comfortable with the phantasmagoria's enchanting possibility. Forced to employ such procedures because Enlightenment critical practices no longer function, Benjamin ultimately hopes for an end to the world of phantasmagorical vision. When Benjamin conceives of criticism as enchantment, however, he does more than mourn criticism's decline. Admitting criticism's commerce with magic, he draws attention to its power to locate contemporary demons and press them into positive political service.

"The world dominated by its phantasmagorias, is - to use an expression from Baudelaire - modernity," writes Benjamin in the conclusion to the 1939 "Paris, Capital of the 19th Century" (PW 77). Benjamin's critical association of the phantasmagoria with modernity in no way invalidates my argument for the phantasmagorical nature of his criticism. If Benjamin is one of modernity's more acerbic critics, it seems to me indisputable that he remains preoccupied with modernity's defining concerns. As do we. And hence, my vision of the elabor- ated phantasmagoria fading, I do not only cry, behold it was a dream. Surveying the ruins of postmodernism, we are confronted with prolif- erating representations instead of the reality that produced them, or rather, with the fact that the distinction between reality and representation has stopped making sense. Such realization, however, in no way dispels, but rather exacerbates the need for concrete material practice. I am not too easy, either, with Benjamin's critical phantasmagoria, sus- picious of the mystifying ends to which its enchantment can be put. But perhaps this very danger indicates its vitality.


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Issue Table of ContentsNew German Critique, No. 48 (Autumn, 1989), pp. 1-192Front Matter [pp. 1-108]Walter Benjamin: Ethnic Fears, Oedipal Anxieties, Political Consequences [pp. 2-42]On Fascination: Walter Benjamin's Images [pp. 43-62]Walter Benjamin's Love Affair with Death [pp. 63-86]Walter Benjamin's Phantasmagoria [pp. 87-107]Troping toward Truth: Recontextualizing the Metaphors of Science and History in Benjamin's Kafka Fragment [pp. 109-133]Adorno, Ritter Gluck, and the Tradition of the Postmodern [pp. 135-154]A Knowledge That Would Not Be Power: Adorno, Nostalgia, and the Historicity of the Musical Subject [pp. 155-175]Reviews"Der Unterschied Liegt in Der Differenz": On Hermeneutics, Deconstruction, and Their Compatibility [pp. 176-192]

Back Matter [pp. 134-134]

Documents

Cohen Benjamin's Phantasmagoria