153

Where the subject has been resurrected in recent theory, it has largely been to move it beyond a certain impasse. This impasse is not new; indeed, it is perhaps constitutive of the notion of the subject itself since Kant.1 Theoretical reflection on the subject has since then been plagued by the fundamental paradox of thinking cognition in general terms: any transhis-torical conception of the boundaries of thought necessarily assumes what it excludes—namely, the contingent being that thought them in the first place. One can think, it seems, the consistency of the subject, but only at the cost of the contingency necessitated by it; as consistent mediator between being and thought, this subject is necessarily barred from this contingency in turn. Amidst contemporary theory that has remained com-mitted to the subject beyond its post-structuralist “death,” this problem has persisted in the form of what Bruno Bosteels calls a “doctrine of absent causality,” capable only of thinking contingency (being, the Real) as the subject’s cause.2 And it is perhaps out of frustration with its repeated con-frontation with the impasse of the subject onto the being assumed by it that recent theory has turned more urgently to alternative models of thinking a subject not merely delineated by structure and what remains.3

* The author would like to thank David Nirenberg, Paul Mendes-Flohr, Eric Sant-ner, Patrizia McBride, Paul Fleming, and Johannes Wankhammer for their inspiration and assistance in preparing this article.

1. For a critique of the advent of this problem with the Kantian transcendental sub-ject, see Quentin Meillasoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency (New York: Continuum, 2008).

2. Bruno Bosteels, Badiou and Politics (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2011), p. 188. For a synthesis of the problem of thinking contingency beyond structure in contemporary psy-choanalytic and hermeneutic thought more generally, see ibid., ch. 5.

3. Among the most notable here we could cite Slavoj Žižek’s recent reappraisal of contingency in Hegel and Alain Badiou’s leveraging of a mathematical paradigm toward

Matteo Calla

The Production of the Subject in Late Benjamin*

Telos 171 (Summer 2015): 153–73doi:10.3817/0615171153www.telospress.com

154 MATTEO CALLA

This paper proposes that the problem of thinking subject and con-tingency together is addressed in the form of a seeming incompatibility in Walter Benjamin’s thought: between transhistorical theology and historical materialism. Unlike many recent attempts to do so, however, Benjamin’s account of the subject is itself a historically contingent rather than ontologically consistent one. If recent studies have shown that Benja-min’s earlier writings already present a speculative theological critique of the impasse of the Kantian subject onto being, then starting with the more Marxian-inflected works of the 1930s, this impasse is reconceptualized not as an ontological fait accompli, but as itself the product of a historical field of mediation arising with mass modernity.4 Yet while those texts—most notably “The Storyteller” and “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” —conversely present a deterministically materialist subject bound from being, Benjamin dialecticizes his concep-tion following Adorno’s critique of his historiography in 1938.5 It is in the two central texts after this moment—”On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” and the theses “On the Concept of History”—that he will formulate a material-ist mediology of a subject coterminous with the media existent at a given historical moment (a heterogeneous field encompassing architectonic and spatial, visual, print, and socioeconomic media) that allows for the pos-sibility of speculative experience. And just as this subject is produced in this historical field of mediation, Benjamin will theorize in the latter essay a messianic countermediation aimed at its destruction—a destruction synonymous with the revelation of what is truly transhistorical about the subject, singular historical contingency itself. Such is the revolutionary wager of the methodology of materialist historiography exemplified in the Arcades Project: its theologically figured ability to inspire not only

thinking the consistency of the real/material beyond of structure and a subject conceived as the very dialectical intersection of structure and contingency.

4. See Howard Caygill, Walter Benjamin and the Colour of Experience (London: Routledge, 1998), and Peter Fenves’s magisterial The Messianic Reduction: Walter Benja-min and the Shape of Time (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2010).

5. Adorno rejected Benjamin’s early version of the Arcades Project, “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,” on behalf of the Institute for Social Research in 1938, on the grounds that they were in fact undialectically too materialist, lacking a component of theoretical interpretation necessary for their dialectical autonomy. The terms of Adorno’s critique follow his call for more dialectics in his 1936 response to the “Work of Art” essay. For a presentation of these debates, see Aesthetics and Politics (London: Verso, 2007), and Giorgio Agamben’s discussion in “The Prince and The Frog,” in Infancy and History (London: Verso, 1993), p. 107, as well as Adorno’s own critique of montage in Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minnesota: Minnesota UP, 1997), p. 155.

THE PRODUCTION OF THE SUBJECT IN LATE BENJAMIN 155

distraction but also a destruction of the subject and the historical order producing it, at once marking the production of its repressed complement.6

Before proceeding to Benjamin’s material/theological account of the production and destruction of the subject after 1938, this paper will first examine the moment that he historicizes its grounds: the reconfiguration of the earlier proto-Gnostic theory of the fall of language into a structurally homologous theory of linguistic alienation under conditions of mass moder-nity in the 1930s, reducing language to a referential order characteristic of the categorical mode of cognition mediating the transcendental subject.

IThe opposition between the aura and reproducibility of an artwork, together with the devaluation of the former, is well known through its popularization in the 1936 version of “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” in which Benjamin presents a celebratory account of the decline of the “here and now” of the unique work of art.7 This account assumes the form of a Marxian secularization hypothesis in which the aura of the singular work of art, finding its original value in religious practice, persists in a modern milieu characterized by reproduc-ible media in the surplus form of a fetish value associated with capitalism and fascism. Yet a glimpse outside the bounds of the “Work of Art” essay demonstrates—beyond the more general difficulty, discussed by Miriam Hansen, of establishing a consistent definition of aura throughout Ben-jamin’s oeuvre—that the valuated opposition “auratic/reproducible” is directly contradicted in other major essays produced around the same period.8 This is particularly true of literary media, where we see the very

6. In “On the Concept of History” Benjamin writes of his materialist historiogra-phy, in direct opposition to a simple theory of distraction: “Materialist historiography . . . is based on a constructive principle. Thinking involves not only the movement of thoughts, but their arrest as well. Where thinking suddenly comes to a stop in a constellation satu-rated with tensions, it gives that constellation a shock, by which thinking is crystallized as a monad . . . in this structure the historical materialist recognizes the sign of a messianic arrest of happening, or (to put it differently) a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past” (Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Selected Writings, vol. 4, trans. Harry Zohn [Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 2003], p. 396).

7. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproduc-ibility,” in Selected Writings, vol. 3, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Harry Zohn (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 2002), p. 103.

8. As Miriam Hansen has suggested in her gloss of the term’s shifting usage through-out Benjamin’s work, aura takes on a variety of positive and negative valences after being first introduced in 1930. See Miriam Hansen, “Benjamin’s Aura,” Critical Inquiry 34, no. 2 (2008): 336–75.

156 MATTEO CALLA

reversal of the celebration of the demise of aura with modernity—most notably in “Karl Kraus” (1931) and “The Storyteller” (1936). These essays return to a theological theory of the fall of language, pronounced in transhistorical form and valorizing a lost pre-historical presence, found in Benjamin’s early pre-Marxist works, particularly “The Task of the Trans-lator” (1923) and “On Language as Such and On the Language of Man” (1916). Yet they mark the moment of a heterodox Marxian historiciza-tion of these theories, transforming this earlier account of language’s fall into its alienation under the dominant forms of mass mediation, in turn entangled with the mediation of exchange under the commodity relation.

Benjamin’s essay on Karl Kraus indicates most clearly this shift toward a historical mediology of linguistic alienation, rendering it in a syncretic form that mixes eschatological theology and critical Marxism. Like Ben-jamin in the Arcades Project, Karl Kraus himself engaged in a certain eschatologically inflected practice of montage in his 1918 drama The Last Days of Mankind, a satire concerning the horrors of the First World War purportedly comprised entirely of quotations—transforming the matter of history into an apocalyptic myth regarding its end.9 The newspaper, the object of much of Kraus’s own critique in the journal he edited, Die Fackel, is the central object of critique in “Karl Kraus,” providing us with Benjamin’s understanding of language’s fall into referentiality within a determinate signifying structure under its modern mediation.

An “expression of the changed function of language in the world of high capitalism,”10 the modern newspaper is one site that, as a component of capitalist productive relations, serves to debase the word. Benjamin sees Kraus’s critique of this debasement as being centered on the mixing of fact and opinion—an interpretation of the facts—in the newspaper: “The very term ‘public opinion’ outrages Kraus. Opinions are a private manner. The public has an interest only in judgments. Either it is a judging public, or it is none. But it is precisely the purpose of the public opinion generated by the press to make the public incapable of judging, to insinuate into it the attitude of someone irresponsible, uninformed.”11 Presenting the facts already interpreted, modern print journalism fixes their signification. In a proto-deconstructive critique, Benjamin’s Kraus levies his charge against

9. See Edward Timms’s discussion of the play in Karl Kraus, Apocalyptic Satirist: Culture and Catastrophe in Habsburg Vienna (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1989), p. 371.

10. Walter Benjamin, “Karl Kraus,” in Selected Writings, vol. 2, trans. Edmund Jeph-cott (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1999), p. 405.

11. Ibid., p. 433.

THE PRODUCTION OF THE SUBJECT IN LATE BENJAMIN 157

the repression of any interpretable excess that might make the facts open to the interpretation or judgment of the reader itself. Here the factual content of the newspaper assumes a determinately referential mediating function, transformed, as an interpretation of events, into a signifier made to corre-spond directly with a particular signified. The end result is the debasement of language as empty “phrase,” or fallen word reduced to referentiality. Specifically, Benjamin defines the “phrase” as “linguistic expression of the despotism with which, in journalism, topicality [Aktualität] sets up its dominion over things.”12

Here we glimpse the extension of Benjamin’s critique beyond the mixture of fact and opinion in the newspaper attacked by Kraus, to the complicity of referential language with capitalist productive relations themselves. As Benjamin insists, the “phrase”—as “the label that makes a thought marketable, the way flowery language, as ornament, gives a thought value for the connoisseur” is “an abortion of technology [Technik].”13 As print technology allows for the generation of an increasing amount of journalistic content, the newspaper industry moves to incorporate “everything that has happened in the meantime, anywhere, in any region of life, politics, economics, art, and so on,”14 into its referential register. This demand further reduces the word to the role of determinate mediator between subjects and things, its production dictated by the relevance of the now-signifer, or its exchange value to a market of readers. Subordinated to a factual signified to which it is limited to representing, language as signifier must disavow any negative excess beyond its fixed reference that might not be subject to circulation, the precondition for its subordination to exchange value under the commodity form.15 As signifier, language has become alienated in Marxist terms: transformed from something in which

12. Ibid., p. 434.13. Ibid., p. 435.14. Ibid.15. This critique of the reduction of language to referential mediator is found already

in a theological register in “On Language as Such and the Language of Man (1916),” in which Benjamin writes, “The word must communicate something (other than itself). In that fact lies the true Fall of the spirit of language” (Selected Writings, vol. 1, trans. Edmund Jephcott [Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1996], p. 71). In his reading of the essay, Peter Fenves contrasts the fallen mediating language to a primordial language on Kantian grounds, “understood as the communicability of ‘spiritual essence,’” an “infinitude of language [that] does not derive from an iterative operation of synthesis; rather, every language is immediately infinite,” suggesting the complicity of the reduction of language to referential signifier–signified relations with the repression of language’s pre-subjective historical infinitude (Fenves, Messianic Reduction, p. 138).

158 MATTEO CALLA

content and form, author and reader are involved in communal meaning production, to a homogenous commodity from which the subject is split.

Such an alienation critique is suggested in the attack on opinion in “Karl Kraus” (“For opinion is false subjectivity that can be separated from the person and incorporated in the circulation of commodities”16). Yet it is manifested fully by Benjamin himself in “The Storyteller,” where he further emphasizes the complicity of referential language in the demise of the communicability of a certain modality of experience (Erfahrung) with capitalist modernity. Appearing the same year (1936) as the “Work of Art” essay, it offers a historical narrative that, with reference to language, produces the opposite historical valuation of the decline of unique pres-ence associated with aura: if the former essay valorizes modernity and the reproducible work (particularly cinematic montage) for its distractive rupture with the authority of singular auratic artwork associated there with fetishism, then “The Storyteller” expresses nostalgia for the “incompa-rable presence [Stimmung]” of the oral storyteller, lost in modern print media’s reproducible and referential form.17

The fall of language is fully manifested here as language’s alienation. Oral storytelling is an “artisanal form of communication,”18 in which “a connection is established between soul, eye, and hand. Interacting with one another, they determine a practice. We are no longer familiar with this practice. The role of the hand in production has become more modest, and the place it filled in storytelling lies waste.”19 The mass print media (espe-cially the novel and the newspaper) critiqued in the Kraus essay are again to blame (“Experience [Erfahrung] has fallen in value . . . every glance at a newspaper shows that it has reached a new low”20), as is the referential use of language in information, where it is stripped of interpretable surplus.

16. Benjamin, “Karl Kraus,” p. 439.17. Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” in Selected Writings, 3:162 (translation modi-

fied). Harry Zohn translates “Stimmung” here as “aura,” but it is interesting to note that although the storyteller valorized in its namesake essay possesses all the characteristics of aura found in the “Work of Art” essay published alongside it (unique presence garner-ing authority, a certain surplus beyond referential content, even, in its coming from afar emphasized in contrast to information in the newspaper, conforming to one of Benjamin’s definitions of aura as “the unique apparition of a distance,” appearing in the “Work of Art” essay, p. 104, and again in the “Little History of Photography” and “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire”), Benjamin resists using the term in “The Storyteller,” perhaps so as to avoid contradicting its sister essay explicitly.

18. Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” p. 149.19. Ibid., p. 161.20. Ibid., p. 143.

THE PRODUCTION OF THE SUBJECT IN LATE BENJAMIN 159

By contrast, Benjamin asserts, “it is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanations as one recounts it.”21 The communi-cation of Erfahrung in storytelling has to do, then, with the preservation of language’s referential indeterminacy—which, as with Kraus, em-powers its audience in that “[i]t is left up to him to interpret things the way he understands them, and thus the narrative achieves an amplitude that information lacks.”22

While introducing a relation between an as yet theoretically undevel-oped modality of experience (Erfahrung) and nonreferential language, “The Storyteller” adheres to the proto-deconstructionist logic of inter-pretive free play appearing in the Work of Art essay—even if in direct opposition to its sister essay on technically reproducible artworks, this free play is associated in the case of language with the singular oral pres-ence of the storyteller. And while hinting at the possibility of Erfahrung’s communicability in the reproducible medium of print in the example of Leskov and the discussion of historiography and the chronicler,23 “The Storyteller” still largely exemplifies the undialectical historicism of the “Work of Art” essay, positing an “auratic” past associated with oral story-telling and presence against a fallen present dominated by print and mass production. “Karl Kraus,” on the other hand, more emphatically posits the possibility of a literary intervention in a dominant historical logic charac-terized by referential overdetermination. Associated with the theological dimension of language, there citation—the foundational unit of both the newspaper and Benjamin’s own materialist historiography in the Arcades Project—assumes not only a distractive force subverting the auratic spell, but a destructive and revelationary one: “In the quotation that both saves and punishes, language proves the matrix of justice. It summons the word by its name, wrenches it destructively from its context, and thereby calls it back to its origin.”24

This is an opaque and theological summa, and it is not until the rejec-tion of Benjamin’s nascent experiment in materialist historiography, “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,” by Adorno and the Institute for Social Research in November 1938 that this eschatological side of liter-ary montage, absent from the “Work of Art” essay’s materialist theory of distraction, will return. In “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” the theoretical

21. Ibid., p. 148.22. Ibid.23. Ibid., p. 451.24. Benjamin, “Karl Kraus,” p. 454.

160 MATTEO CALLA

rewrite of “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire” called for by Adorno, Benjamin will turn directly to the effect of modern media on per-ception and experience in a manner wholly opposed to the “Work of Art” essay’s privileging of a distractive and transient modality of consciously mediated experience (Erlebnis) over an immediate one (Erfahrung), sug-gesting that Erlebnis is in fact the dominant experiential modality within mass modernity’s field of mediation. “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” will thereby connect the mediological account of the decline of Erfahrung present in nascent form in “The Storyteller” to the production of the sub-ject bound from being. The essay will render clear the relation between the severing of the word from meaning under its referential use in modern print, and such media’s enforcement of a homologous split in the subject it mediates from the object world. “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” thus describes the historical field of mediation into which Benjamin’s histo-riography seeks to intervene, clarifying the need for a dialectization of earlier binaries of singular aura and destructured reproducibility, theology and materialism.

IIBenjamin does not dialecticize his materialist historiography according to Adorno’s demand for theoretical interpretation to balance its destruc-tured presentation of historical motifs following the Institute for Social Research’s rejection of “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire.” Yet he nonetheless answers the Frankfurt theorist’s call directly in “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” presenting there a theory of the effect of late nineteenth-century mass capitalism on perception and the historical subject couched in the language of critical theory.

Puzzling over the curious return of allegorical lyric poetry with moder-nity in Baudelaire, Benjamin begins the essay by speculating that the form is out of sync with the consciousness of its readers. He suggests that such historically specific perceptual norms—marked by an inability to concen-trate and lack of interest and receptiveness—could be due to “a change in the structure of [the reader’s] experience [Erfahrung],”25 a change principally evoked by the increase of environmental stimulus with the nineteenth-century emergence of the “urban masses.”26 These masses—not

25. Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Selected Writings, 4:314.26. Ibid., p. 320. Such a claim is already present in nascent form in “The Storyteller”:

“This process of assimilation [of Erfahrung], which takes place in the depths, requires a

THE PRODUCTION OF THE SUBJECT IN LATE BENJAMIN 161

a signifiable class or collective but the “amorphous crowd of passers-by, the people in the street”27—form the central theme of Baudelaire’s work for Benjamin, yet crucially only as a kind of conspicuous absence (and this will become important in a moment) rarely referenced in his poetry.

Benjamin explains this change in the structure of modern experience in a remarkable historicization of the psychoanalytic theory of trauma that has him reading Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1921) by way of Georg Simmel’s “The Metropolis and Modern Life” (1903). He employs Freud’s theory to distinguish between two types of shock experience specific to modernity’s field of mediation: one conscious and historically normative (Erlebnis), the other unconscious and in decline (Erfahrung, which will characterize Baudelaire). The basic hypothesis taken from Freud is “‘emerging consciousness takes the place of a memory trace.”28 Consciousness is opposed to the inscription in memory, serving instead to protect against stimuli by screening against “the effects of the excessive energies at work in the external world,” which pose “the threat of shocks.”29

In a Simmelian twist, however, the necessity of this screening by con-sciousness in light of the modern emergence of masses renders Erlebnis a historically normative modality of experience:

The greater the shock factor in particular impressions, the more vigilant consciousness has to be in screening stimuli; the more efficiently it does so, the less these impressions enter long experience [Erfahrung] and the more they correspond to the concept of isolated experience [Erlebnis]. Perhaps the special achievement of shock defense is the way it assigns an incident a precise point in time in consciousness, at the cost of the integrity of the incident’s contents.30

Erlebnis, a product of the conscious registering of shocks that denotes the effective screening against external stimuli, is shock experience stripped of an inscription in memory. As the result of the successful conscious mediation of the excessive modern environmental stimuli that would oth-erwise produce a trauma, it is experience only in a mediated sense; viewed

state of relaxation which is becoming rarer and rarer. . . . [It is] already extinct in the cities” (Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” p. 149).

27. Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” p. 320.28. Ibid., p. 317.29. Ibid.30. Ibid.

162 MATTEO CALLA

differently, Chockerlebnis is precisely what results when immediate experience (Erfahrung) is blocked, precluding trauma and the permanent memory trace. Since the mass culture emerging in the nineteenth century is characterized by an excess of external stimuli, modern consciousness is in turn characterized by Erlebnis and perceptual overmediation: it produces a subject totally severed, through the mediation of conscious representa-tion, from the object world. Such “experience” is devoid of content, since conscious representation is in this sense precisely what intervenes between the inscription of the object world in the subject. Erlebnis is instead the very agent of their cleaving.31

Contentless Erlebnis thus corresponds to those empty and referential modern print forms that enforce the boundary between signifier and an intended signified, emptying the now-signifier of any nonreferential sur-plus allowing for the collective production of meaning. “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” thus makes explicit the analogy between the historical split of the signifier from signified and subject from object: the alienation of language under a referentiality enforced by mass modernity’s field of mediation is here analogous to the cleaving of the subject under the very same historical mediation. While the mass is the central culprit in “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” the essay maintains the heterogeneous nature of this totalizing historical mediation, suggesting, in a passage citing Kraus, the complicity of other media such as the newspaper, in enforcing the impasse of the subject of Erlebnis onto being:

Newspapers constitute one of many indications [of the decrease in an individual’s ability to assimilate Erfahrung]. If it were the intention of the press to have the reader assimilate the information it supplies as part of his own experience [Erfahrung], it would not achieve its purpose. But its intention is just the opposite, and it is achieved: to isolate events from the realm in which they could affect the experience [Erfahrung] of the reader.32

31. Benjamin’s analysis here constitutes a dialectical reversal of the historical dis-course of Erfahrung and Erlebnis. If, as Peter Fenves discusses, the notion of Erlebnis as “singular, momentary, and unrepeatable” (Fenves, The Messianic Reduction, p. 156) lived experience was developed by Wilhelm Dilthey and Martin Buber against the notion of a monolithic transcendental Erfahrung (as in Kant), then here it is precisely what begets a “transcendental” subject of mediate experience. Writes Fenves, “To develop a concept of experience that is fundamental distinct from that of knowledge without becoming a concept of Erlebnis is, in short the task that Benjamin assigns himself in the opening para-graphs of ‘On the Program of the Coming Philosophy’” (ibid., p. 157).

32. Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” p. 315.

THE PRODUCTION OF THE SUBJECT IN LATE BENJAMIN 163

If the overmediated Erlebnis of the modern city dweller bounds them from being, then these subjective boundaries are in turn reinforced by other media determining the subject’s relation to being within the particular his-torical field in which they are present.

Benjamin further suggests that this structuring of experience as Erleb-nis by modernity’s dominant media must be understood in relation to the medium of exchange—the commodity form—to which such media are in turn subjected. Completing the analogy between the alienation of lan-guage from immediate experience (Erfahrung) under its referential use and the classically Marxian alienation of the wage laborer itself, he states: “The shock experience [Chockerlebnis] which the passer-by has in the crowd corresponds to the isolated ‘experiences’ [Erlebnis] of the worker at his machine.”33 Subjected to mass labor, the worker exchanges the self-determined capacity to produce singular works for a mediate role in the means of production, their labor homogenized like referential language itself. Benjamin compares the worker to a gambler, suggesting that “[t]he hand movement of the worker at the machine has no connection with the preceding gesture for the very reason that it repeats that gesture exactly.”34 Maintaining the centrality of the homogenizing character of exchange value in the analogy with gambling, Benjamin suggests that it is precisely this substitution of unique work for homogenous product that produces Erlebnis, in which each moment, screened off from the one preceding it, appears as its exact repetition. Divorced from the unmediated creation of a unique product, the worker is alienated both socioeconomically and experientially. Structurally absent is the possibility of difference—the precondition for revolutionary awareness—an absence reflected and rein-forced in the homogeneity of referential media subjected to the logic of the commodity and the Erlebnis of the urban dweller. Like the gambler and the worker, the subject of modernity continually strives to experience qualitative difference, only to be rewarded with equivalence and the ever same. Without this experience of difference, modern perception is reduced to eternal recurrence, precluding the possibility of the system’s own undo-ing. Such a vision of the world of distractive Erlebnis, celebrated in the 1936 “Work of Art” essay, now appears as an indictment of a historically specific state of eternal return referred to in relation to Louis-Auguste Blanqui in the 1939 expose of the Arcades Project as “a vision of hell.”35

33. Ibid., p. 329.34. Ibid., p. 330.35. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaugh-

lin (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1999), p. 25.

164 MATTEO CALLA

What, then, of the singular aura critiqued in the “Work of Art” essay and praised in “The Storyteller”? Does, as per the former text, the auratic artwork remain the very epitome of the fetish under modernity? Or, as per the latter, does singular presence exist as an alternative to mass homoge-neity? If both undialectical solutions appeared acceptable to Benjamin in 1936 (albeit relative to different media and in intertextual tension with one another) then neither are by 1939. Answering the question of aura’s his-torical status in “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” brings us to the second modality of experience, immediate and unconscious Erfahrung, and to the figure of Baudelaire.

The experience of the singular aura changes with modernity because Erfahrung has become traumatic. This is the second shock experience, characteristic of Baudelaire. Unlike the modern subject whose overme-diated Erlebnis precludes Erfahrung, Baudelaire is a “traumatophile type” who “made it his business to parry the shocks . . . with his spiritual [geistigen] and physical self.”36 Put differently, Baudelaire is one who experiences, in the sense of Erfahrung, the material world in its singular immediacy, without the mediation of conscious representation.

It is this now-traumatic Erfahrung that begets the ambivalence of Baudelaire for Benjamin: forming the subject of his poetry and the promise of contingent experience, as well as the grounds of its allegorical character and structural determination with modernity. Recall that for Benjamin it is the mass that is both the central theme of Baudelaire’s poetry and the rare object of determinate reference. Specifically, Benjamin states, “The masses had become so much a part of Baudelaire, that it is rare to find a description of them in his works. His most important subjects are hardly ever encountered in descriptive form.”37 The mass had become internal to Baudelaire, a part of him precisely because of his unmediated exposure—an Erfahrung beyond the division between subject and object representation that likewise cannot be figured within a referential structure of signifi-cation, based on the signifier–signified divide, that would reproduce this division. Baudelaire’s Erfahrung thus precludes the representation of the mass itself in his poetry, yet this unrepresentable Erfahrung crucially forms a communal excess beyond referentiality, persisting in literary form as the presence of an immediacy that can necessarily be embodied only as a representational absence.

36. Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” p. 319.37. Ibid., p. 322 (my emphasis).

THE PRODUCTION OF THE SUBJECT IN LATE BENJAMIN 165

Yet conversely, it is Baudelaire’s unmediated exposure that creates the allegorical character of his poetry, as an escape from a historical real rendered traumatic by modernity. Allegory, as Benjamin suggests in a convolute from the Baudelaire section of the Arcades Project, views this historical milieu as debased.38 In lieu of conscious representation, Baude-laire “parries” the shock of the historically singular under mass modernity with his artistic representative apparatus, the intolerability of this envi-ronment motivating the devaluation of such representations to an ideal meaning as a means of adding another layer of mediation to his subjective armature. His allegory thus subordinates the singular material instance to a generalizable set of signifiers, in turn subordinated to an ideal meaning. It is this subordination of material difference to ideal equivalence that mani-fests the homology between allegory and the commodity form referenced in another Arcades convolute, “The ruling figure of [Baudelaire’s imagina-tion]—allegory—corresponded perfectly to the commodity fetish.”39

Benjamin’s Baudelaire thus problematizes contingent historical expe-rience in modernity even as he presents its possibility. If Baudelaire exists as the very possibility of experience (Erfahrung) beyond the representa-tive boundaries of the subject in modernity despite its determinate field of mediation, then he also demonstrates how such an immediate experi-ence of historical singularity is in turn entangled in the dominant historical structuration, pushing, through the traumatic nature of the modern milieu, the intervention of representation further in the direction of totality.

This is how we should understand the complicity of the experience of aura with the fetish logics of capitalism and fascism in modernity. In a historically specific analogy with the logic of the psychoanalytic drive appropriate to Benjamin’s use of Freud’s theory of trauma here, it is pre-cisely in this way that fetishism redirects the desire for uniqueness and difference that capitalism disavows and thus creates: in the subordina-tion of a singular moment of unmediated presence historically rendered traumatic back into a structure of homogeneity. Limiting experience to conscious representation within a determinate signifying network, mass modernity precludes the possibility of an experience of singular materiality not marred by the lack endemic to generalities of the reproducible signifier or quantitative value. In doing so, it creates a certain surplus desire for such singularity, likewise reappropriating this surplus desire back into structure

38. See Benjamin, The Arcades Project, convolute J56a,6, p. 330.39. Ibid., convolute J70a,4, p. 368.

166 MATTEO CALLA

in the form of a value in excess of use. For Benjamin, such surplus desire becomes fetishistically attached to novelty, the substantial appearance of difference. In the Baudelaire section of the Arcades Project’s “Expose of 1939,” he writes:

[The specific signification which the commodity acquires by virtue of its price], to which things are subject because they can be taxed as commodities, is counterbalanced in Baudelaire by the inestimable value of novelty. La nouveauté represents that absolute which is no longer accessible to any interpretation or comparison. It becomes the ultimate entrenchment of art. The final poem of Les Fleurs du mal: “Le Voyage.” “Death, old admiral, up anchor now.” The final voyage of the flâneur: death. Its destination: the new. Newness is a quality independent of the use value of the commodity. It is the source of that illusion of which fashion is the tireless purveyor. The fact that art’s last line of resistance should coincide with the commodity’s most advanced line of attack—this had to remain hidden from Baudelaire.40

Newness is the illusory representation of precisely that nonrepresentable surplus of singular materiality—“that absolute which is no longer acces-sible to any interpretation or comparison.” It thus becomes the mechanism by which capitalism channels the surplus desire that it itself creates, repre-senting in turn a form of surplus fetish value. Fashion is the manifestation par excellence in the Arcades Project of this surplus desire resystematized as fetish value.

Ultimately an ambivalent figure for Benjamin, then, Baudelaire thus demonstrates the need for an aesthetic intervention that dialecticizes the binary of immediate Erfahrung and mediate Erlebnis, theological aura and materialist reproducibility. And the radical promise of his poetry presents precisely this—a mediate embodiment of immediacy found not in its alle-gorical character symptomatic of modernity, but the nonreferential surplus (for Baudelaire the unrepresented mass) that indexes this historical Erfah-rung in mediate form. Such a nonreferential literary absence, lauded previously in “The Storyteller” on the grounds of its deconstructive ability to draw an audience into communal meaning production, here presents singular historical experience beyond the subject–object split enforced by modernity, precisely as that which is in turn beyond a determinate representation that would reinscribe this split. And this singularity is the

40. Ibid., p. 22.

THE PRODUCTION OF THE SUBJECT IN LATE BENJAMIN 167

true lost “object” of the subject of mass capitalism’s historically specific desire, external to the existing field of mediation.41

IIIA crucial problem remains: how to reveal this absent index of immediate historical Erfahrung apart from the substantial order of referential signifiers subject to fetishism in which it is embedded? This problem brings us to Ben-jamin’s historiographical countermediation to modernity’s heterogeneous field of mediation—the Arcades Project. Yet in order to address it, it is nec-essary to turn briefly to Benjamin’s theory of translation espoused in “The Task of the Translator” (1923), in which the latter historicist theory of the alienation of language is still articulated in transhistorical and theological form. As Peter Fenves suggests, the goal of translation is nothing less than revealing an immediacy of “language disentangled from designation,”42 the nonreferential surplus separate from the referential order of signifiers.

The essay rejects a translational mode that would treat the common referent intended by words in different languages as the focus of transla-tion; that is, the referred concept common, in the example in the text, to Brot in German and pain in French. Instead, the theory of translation aims to reveal what cannot be translated: the formal singularity of words in different languages, or the formal difference between how a word in one language and a word in another intend the same concept. Resolutely a relation of irreducible difference, rather than interreferential différance, this purely negative differential surplus of form in excess of referential content, a “nucleus . . . best defined as that element in the translation which does not lend itself to a further translation,”43 is that which makes words intending the same referent exclusive to one another. It is precisely where the slide of common interreferential signification stops.

41. This idea of nonsignifying language embodying a theological lost “object” of desire is related to Eric Santner’s discussion of the psychotheological significance of the “designified signifier, this peculiar surplus of address over meaning,” relative to Gershom Scholem’s definition of revelation in a letter to Benjamin dated September 20, 1934: as a “nothingness,” “a state in which revelation appears to be without meaning, in which it still asserts itself, in which it has validity but no significance.” See Eric Santner, On The Psychotheology of Everyday Life (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2001), p. 38; The Cor-respondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem 1932–1940, trans. Gary Smith and Andre Lefevere (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1992), p. 142.

42. Fenves, Messianic Reduction, p. 151.43. Benjamin, “Task of the Translator,” p. 257.

168 MATTEO CALLA

It is at this locus of a word’s irreducible difference however, that Benjamin paradoxically locates a commonality between words, a “supra-historical kinship”44 of languages. In addition to what a word says (its determinate object of reference), the formal difference of a word in excess of its content commonly embodies what it cannot say, over and above the referential: “In all language and linguistic creations, there remains in addi-tion to what can be conveyed something that cannot be communicated.”45 It is this unique quality of a particular word that manifests the intention common to words—their “suprahistorical kinship”—which is their desire for “pure language.”46 While not manifesting this pure language alone, the differential singularity of a word is considered to be a fragment of it: a “nucleus of pure language.”47 Beyond the determinately referential con-tent of certain texts lies a nucleus of utopian desire that is itself a fragment of utopia: a suprahistorical commonality located at the purely negative site of material difference.

If Benjamin transhistorically codifies this nonreferential surplus found in certain texts in the idiom of the earlier theory of the fall of language, then I would argue it enters into the later historicist theory of the alien-ation of language as the singular historical obscured in all relations of referential signification: the very remnant of historical Erfahrung indexed by the conspicuous referential absence of the mass in Baudelaire. In this later phase, the ontological fallen state of language is the historical state of mass modernity in which the singular is disavowed, returning only in the form of the fetish under the dominant system logic. History, as singular being, has become suprahistorical revelation: beyond the boundaries of the modern social order. This is the status of the theological in Benjamin’s theorization of materialist historiography after 1938: it has become history in a radical sense, while history, as the existent material field of mediation, has been transformed into “theological” equivalence and the ever same. Such a structural paradox is what begets the paradoxical nature of aura with modernity: it is at once the artwork’s “here and now” and “the unique apparition of a distance.”48

If theology returns in a positive sense at this juncture, it is only as the dialectical counterpart to historical materialism—the systemically

44. Ibid.45. Ibid., p. 261.46. Ibid., p. 257.47. Ibid., p. 261.48. Benjamin, “Work of Art,” pp. 103–4.

THE PRODUCTION OF THE SUBJECT IN LATE BENJAMIN 169

disavowed dwarf hiding under the automaton representing historical mate-rialism in the famous image introducing “On the Concept of History.” Yet already in the early theory of translation, the revelation of language’s suprahistorical nucleus is dialectical and negative; although this compo-nent of language is an untranslatable surplus beyond the common referent linking words in different languages together in signifying chains, transla-tion remains an essential task because of the interlinear nature of revealing this differential singularity. A translation that adheres to a literal rendering of the original would thus reveal—between original and translation—this essential material difference between them that is the nucleus of pure lan-guage.49 Hidden in the languages in isolation, the translator’s messianic task is to reveal the nonreferential nucleus intrinsic to certain texts via such a process of coordination, returning it to a suprahistorical status dia-lectically synonymous with the revelation of their materiality.

This is the messianic task of the materialist historiographer as well, who employs a technique of literary montage—preserving the form of the individual utterance embodying historical Erfahrung beyond referential content—in an analogous process of coordination with the common goal of revealing a singularity concealed in its referential form in isolation. In both the theses on history and “Task of the Translator,” Benjamin fig-ures this conjunction of different texts revealing common suprahistorical potential in terms of messianic redemption taken from Kabbalah, the mys-tical Jewish theology studied by Gershom Scholem. In accordance with Kabbalistic heterodoxa, Benjamin’s translator and materialist historiog-rapher both have agency in reestablishing the harmony lost in the fallen state of Galut, or exile—understood here as mass modernity.50 Conjoining different fragments to release common revelatory potential, both the task of translation and of materialist historiography are conceived as acts of repairing the “sparks of the Shekhinah”—the divine fragments formed in the “breaking of the vessels” that marks the entrance into Galut—a motif that appears in both methodological essays (“On the Concept of History” and “Task of the Translator”), as well as in “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” and “The Storyteller.”51 In a Kabbalistic figure for releasing

49. In a moment appearing to allude to the Arcades Project in “Task of the Transla-tor,” Benjamin writes, “For if the sentence is the wall before the language of the original, literalness is the arcade” (Benjamin, “Task of the Translator,” p. 260, my emphasis).

50. Gershom Scholem, “The Messianic Idea in Kabbalism,” in The Messianic Idea in Judaism (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), p. 45.

51. See “Task of the Translator,” p. 259. The same figure of the vessel appears implic-itly in thesis IX of “On the Concept of History,” according to Scholem (the angel of history

170 MATTEO CALLA

the potential embedded in language’s fallen determinate form, the transla-tor and the materialist historiographer assemble fragments of a shattered vessel, interlocking but uniquely different, and thereby revealing what “is achievable not by any single language but only by the totality of their intentions supplementing one another: pure language.”52

Here we arrive at the revelationary/revolutionary force of material-ist historiography’s countermediation. By revealing, in negative dialectic between citations, the nucleus of the singular historical absented in mass capitalism, it likewise presents the embodiment of that which is construed as the lost “object” of an unactualized surplus desire within that context. Yet because of the dialectical nature of this revelation—it is simply the interlinear difference between signifiers that contain a nonreferential surplus—the nucleus is crucially not a substantive object that could be subject to fetishism under the dominant structural logic, as is the case with both the referential signifier and the auratic art object. A mediate embodiment of immediacy, it thus presents the singular wholeness prior to a subject–object split that is reified as novelty. This beyond of the histori-cally accessible is the absence that is desired by the subject produced by modernity but continually missed. In its dialectical revelation via material-ist historiography, the subject is provided with an actualization of their repressed desire located only outside of the existing historical order and the boundaries of subject–object that its field of mediation enforces. It thus constitutes the realization of a revolutionary consciousness.

In this manner, we see the dialecticization of a logic of Zerstreuung (distraction or dispersion) and Sammlung (absorption or unification) for-merly associated in simple binary with the technologically reproducible and the auratic. By denying positivistic reinscription of a historically surplus desire beyond generalizable representation onto a substantial object, materialist historiography breaks the spell of auratic absorption—a

would like “to make whole what has been smashed” by the progression of history). It is also found as a metaphorical foil for the presence of the nonreferential story lost in the referential word in both “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” and “The Storyteller,” support-ing an understanding of the theological kernel in his late work as the singular historical being. In “On Some Motifs,” Benjamin writes: “A story does not aim to convey an event per se, which is the purpose of information; rather, it embeds the event in the life of the storyteller in order to pass it on as [Erfahrung] to those listening. It thus bears the trace of the storyteller, much the way an earthen vessel bears the trace of the potter’s hand” (Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” p. 316). This statement is echoed in “The Storyteller,” p. 149.

52. Benjamin, “Task of the Translator,” p. 257.

THE PRODUCTION OF THE SUBJECT IN LATE BENJAMIN 171

materialist force of destructuration. Yet it simultaneously “absorbs” the reader in the nonsubstantive realization of an actualizable locus for this desire, a nonsubstantivity that paradoxically localizes its actualization out-side of (or in the destruction of ) the current historical order—a theological unifying force. Revealing, in dialectic between reader and fragments, the surplus beyond representation common to both, it seeks to make irreduc-ible, non-objective singularity the site of a unifying commonality defined negatively against the historical field of mediation that obscures it.

Here we witness the structural homology between the marxist and messianic senses in which the subject can be said to encounter the com-mon, contentless desire to exceed present historical possibility. Both the coming of the messiah as return to a primordial pure language and the advent of a classless, nonalienated society are eschatological, involving the necessary destruction of a historical order predicated upon lack. But if the end to a constitutive social, experiential, and linguistic absence rep-resents the return of the historically repressed, then it is not simply that destruction of the historical order precedes the establishment of utopia. Rather, production and destruction are rendered synonymous, represent-ing heterogeneous materiality’s horizon beyond the homogenous order that obscures it. While both Freud and Scholem universalize Benjamin’s historically specific account within psychoanalysis and Jewish theology respectively, in a homology with the Freudian death drive appropriate to Benjamin’s traumatic conception of mass modernity, Scholem himself sug-gests that within Judaism, the Messianic event was originally conceived thusly: not as catastrophe followed by utopia, but as a singular advent of ideality.53 The utopian and destructive desires find their unity in the ideal desire to return to an absolute state of zero tension only possible for these thinkers outside of life; whether in the form of a pure language, devoid of worldly content and not marred by the lack endemic to the referential sign, or a society beyond alienation and class antagonism. It is no coincidence then that such a locus of ideality, no longer marred by the absences charac-teristic of capitalist modernity, is represented in the Baudelaire convolutes of the Arcades Project by death: “La nouveauté represents that absolute

53. Summarizing debates within Judaism on the issue of whether or not messianic catastrophe and utopia occur simultaneously or in sequence, Scholem writes: “In an origi-nal vision, catastrophe and utopia do not twice follow after each other, but it is precisely by their uniqueness that they bring to bear with full force the two sides of the Messianic event” Gershom Scholem, “Towards an Understanding of the Messianic Idea in Judaism,” trans. Michael A. Meyer in The Messianic Idea in Judaism [New York: Schocken Books, 1971], p. 8).

172 MATTEO CALLA

which is no longer accessible to any interpretation or comparison. . . . The final voyage of the flâneur: death. Its destination: the new.”54

Transposed into Benjamin’s materialist understanding of the absence of historical singularity within mass modernity’s field of mediation, we see the anarchistic and antipositivist aspect of his historiographical inter-vention emerge. While the cognitive actualization of the surplus desire for singularity is constitutively absented under modernity, the inspirational force of Benjamin’s intervention lies in its appeal to the historically specific universality of this very contextual impossibility. Dialectically revealing an immediate experience of the singular absented under modernity, materialist historiography manifests a universal demand for fulfillment—a Marxian unifying moment that, in its strictly negative delineation, addresses the subject in their irreducible difference. It is this very refusal of substan-tive reinscription within the current historical order that directs its vector of actualization externally, toward the order’s destruction. Embodying a singular locus of possibility beyond the presently possible, materialist historiography thereby foments a desire for an ideal justice that can only come in the destruction of the historical order that lies between the subject in history and this mark of its fulfillment—a fulfillment coincident with the dissolution of the subject’s constitutive boundaries. The revolution-ary potential of materialist historiography therefore rests in its ability to inspire destruction, albeit a destruction synonymous with creation.

Underlying Benjamin’s historiographical project, then, is a systematic attempt to think the subject beyond its impasse onto contingent being. Yet unlike many recent attempts to do so—employing theological, mathemati-cal, phenomenological, or psychoanalytic models—Benjamin does not rely on transhistorical ontological or psychological claims about being or the subject to do so. Rather, the impasse of thinking the subject and contin-gency together is addressed by Benjamin through a historical mediology that sees the subject as bounded by the heterogeneous field of mediation in which it is placed—more in the manner of a Friedrich Kittler than a Kant, Hegel, or Heidegger. Beginning with the historicization of his earlier the-ory of the fall of language in the 1930s, this account does not emerge fully until “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” where it breaks dialectically with the earlier, more deterministic techno-mediological forays into thinking the decline of contingent experience with modernity. It is this historical

54. Benjamin, Arcades Project, p. 22.

THE PRODUCTION OF THE SUBJECT IN LATE BENJAMIN 173

field of mediation that begets, with mass modernity, a subject that is itself near totally barred onto being; defined by referentio-categorical cogni-tion and the intolerability of such being, such a historical field produces a structural and transcendental subject.

Unlike Kittler however, Benjamin is centrally concerned with the possibility of disrupting this mediologically produced structural impasse. In a dialectical twist, if what is historically specific about the subject of modernity is its apparent transhistoricity, then conversely what is truly transhistorical about the subject is precisely the radical historicity of its being. This “theological” character for Benjamin, repressed in modernity and conceived of only negatively, is precisely what his materialist histori-ography seeks to reveal: a countermediation whose aim is the destruction of a historically produced subject synonymous with the production of the subject of history.

This is how the apparent contradiction between the theological and materialist is resolved dialectically in Benjamin’s work after 1938—offer-ing a mediology thinking the subject and historical contingency together. But more, it invites us to think of all theories of the subject as idealizations premised on the dominant forms of mediation in a given historical context, inviting us nonetheless to question the relation of particular forms to the privileged domains that such theories prohibit or exalt. To turn this theory back on Benjamin himself then—and this is where his most dismissible claim (that subjects will be inspired to revolution upon reading a particular form of history writing) transforms into one of his most interesting—we may rightly dismiss both the emancipatory potential of the Arcades Proj-ect and its claims to autonomy, but it is certainly at the center of a diverse and cultic following—unifying phenomenologists, Marxists, and decon-structionists, inspiring operas and finger puppets—today.55 To read this popularity in conjunction with his own analysis invites us to think histori-cally about the effects of nonreferential modes in a context that has gone only further in the direction of totalizing overmediation since the theorist’s own time: the ability of the nonreferential, in its very absence, to present a completion impossible within a regime of determinate representation—a completion filled out by its spectator in a singular and interactive process encompassing nonconceptual modalities that determinate representation cannot embody.

55. See Port Bou, the opera by Elliot Sharp that debuted in New York City on Octo-ber 16, 2014.