the redemption of experience- on walter benjamin’s ‘hermeneutical materialism’.pdf
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DOI: 10.1177/0191453710387069
2011 37: 167Philosophy Social CriticismBenjamin Loveluck
materialism'The redemption of experience: On Walter Benjamin's 'hermeneutical
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The redemption ofexperience: On WalterBenjamin’s ‘hermeneuticalmaterialism’
Benjamin LoveluckEcole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France
AbstractThe aim of this article is to show how philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin related to thehermeneutical tradition – and tried to move beyond it by ‘redeeming’ human experience, whileavoiding the pitfalls of the philosophy of ‘authenticity’. Though convinced that questions relatingto historicity were central to any understanding of modern human experience, Benjaminexplicitly rejected the Heideggerian alternative, and chose a path closer to Hans-GeorgGadamer’s. He attempted to combine theological interpretation with dialectical materialism,always grounding hermeneutics in the concrete manifestations of social life, inaugurating a methodwhich I suggest could be called ‘hermeneutical materialism’. At stake was a politically motivateddefence of the ‘mimetic faculty’ – understood as (re)interpretation – in the modern, technologi-cally organized world.
KeywordsWalter Benjamin, experience, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Martin Heidegger, hermeneutics, historicalmaterialism, historicity, mimesis
Introduction
Philosophy condenses into experience so that it may have hope. But hope appears only in
fragmented form.1
The appearance of historical self-consciousness is very likely the most important
revolution among those we have undergone since the beginning of the modern epoch.
Corresponding author:
Benjamin Loveluck, 50 avenue Claude Vellefaux, Paris 75010, France
Email: [email protected]
Philosophy and Social Criticism37(2) 167–188
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Its spiritual magnitude probably surpasses what we recognize in the applications of natural
science, applications which have so visibly transformed the surface of our planet.
The historical consciousness which characterizes contemporary man is a privilege, perhaps
even a burden, the like of which has never been imposed on any previous generation.2
With the emergence of industrial society in the 19th century, the most salient features of
what came to be characterized as ‘modernity’ were already falling into place. Dramatic tech-
nological improvements, but also other shades of formalized rationality such as bureaucratic
procedures, legalism and contractualism, and the formalization of market mechanisms sig-
nalled an increasing efficiency in providing the most reliable means to the desired ends. In
this context, however, questions about the specificity and ‘authenticity’ of the human ‘expe-
rience’ of the world, and how it related to the unfolding of human history, emerged in a par-
ticularly acute form. Especially after the First World War, the tenability of the conception of
a linear ‘progress’ was challenged, and the reign of reason in its instrumental form was sub-
mitted to closer scrutiny, with many philosophies and social theories emphasizing the ‘inter-
pretative’ (verstehende) capacities of the agent in the face of both positivism and idealism. In
Germany, the long-standing tradition of ‘hermeneutics’ sought to assert the distinctiveness
of the human sciences against rationalism and natural scientific methodology.
It is against this setting that Walter Benjamin conducted his politically and theologically
informed excursions into culture, history and society. In the first part of this article I will thus
broadly outline the historical and theoretical dimensions of the hermeneutical approach, in
order to demonstrate how Benjamin’s concerns with human experience and temporality
both relate to this current of thought and distance themselves from it. After setting up this
background, I will then expose in the second part the specificity of Benjamin’s understand-
ing of the modern attitude towards the past, and seek to show how this transpires in his meth-
odological convictions, in particular his understanding of dialectical materialism. I will
argue that the ‘Janus-face’ of Benjamin’s theory, his theological and his Marxist influences,
combine to form what could aptly be called a ‘hermeneutical materialism’, since his
approach displays a theological concern for interpretation which, however, is grounded in
the most profane and concrete manifestations of social life. In the final part of this article
I will draw the implications of Benjamin’s conception of experience within modernity for
his understanding of social interaction and of the forces at play in society. This will enable
me to circumscribe what constitutes the properly political moment for Benjamin in relation
to lived experience, namely the open-ended dialectical understanding of otherness – in
particular of the past – which for him defines the task of the critic in the modern era, and
which he set out to ‘redeem’.
I The hermeneutical tradition, or towards a dialectics ofexperience
1 The rise of historical consciousness: experience confronts time
‘Hermeneutics’ is an excessively general term, which is often taken to refer to the branch
of intellectual activity dealing with ‘interpretation’ or the ‘science of interpretation’.
Its roots are numerous,3 but can be traced back in particular to the theological and
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philological interpretation of Scriptures, historical documents, or literary works. Its more
recent origins are closely associated with the ‘Romantic hermeneutics’ prevalent in
19th-century Germany: Schleiermacher and later Dilthey, in particular, were intent on
establishing the autonomy of the Geisteswissenschaften (human sciences) against the
expanding reach of natural sciences methodology, and especially in reaction to the rise
of industrial society, by insisting on the specificity of human subjectivity. These
philosophers, theologians and historians, however, still clung to an ideal of objectivity,
which they thought could be attained through a recovery of the subjective intentions of the
agent or author. This implied ridding oneself of one’s prejudices, in the belief that one
could somehow recover the inner experience (as Erlebnis) of the subject, and that such
a process of psychological empathy could lead to an objective knowledge of subjective
intentions and actions. Thus Erlebnis constitutes the ‘ultimate unit of consciousness’4 for
Dilthey, and the basis of his Lebensphilosophie (life-philosophy): experience is integrated
into a meaningful whole available to interpretation in order to construct knowledge.
The hermeneuticists of the 19th century sought to distinguish their conception of
experience from the scientific and Kantian notion of Erfahrung, or sensory experience.
Husserl, following Hegel, further developed this distinction in his phenomenological
approach, and for him experience stands for an ‘intentional relation’, a unit of meaning
which possesses teleological properties. Therefore in the words of Hans-Georg Gadamer,
‘both in Dilthey and in Husserl, both in life philosophy and in phenomenology, the con-
cept of Erlebnis is primarily epistemological’,5 since it acquires its significance in the
context of the meaningful whole of knowledge. In this sense then, it does not depart
radically from the empiricist and Kantian interpretation of Erfahrung. Furthermore,
Benjamin in particular had only harsh words for the attempted rescue of a romanticized
Erlebnis, which he thought was in fact a reactionary move, the culmination of idealism
entailing potentially disastrous consequences:
Since the end of the last century, philosophy has made a series of attempts to lay hold of the
‘true’ experience as opposed to the kind that manifests itself in the standardized, denatured
life of the civilized masses. It is customary to classify these efforts under the heading of a
philosophy of life. Their point of departure, understandably enough, was not man’s life in
society. What they invoked was poetry, preferably nature, and, most recently, the age of
myths. Dilthey’s book Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung represents one of the earliest forms
of these efforts which end with Klages and Jung; both made common cause with Fascism.6
As we shall see, the concept of experience is also central to the work of Benjamin, but
neither under the established sense of Erlebnis nor of Erfahrung. Refusing to surrender
either to the primacy of the object or to that of the subject, Benjamin understood expe-
rience as both a dialectical and a temporal phenomenon, which occurs intersubjectively
in the transmission of knowledge – an approach which bears many similarities to Gada-
mer’s account of hermeneutics.
For Gadamer indeed, the original attempt to transcend the objectivism inherited from
classical science and thus entrench the specificity of human experience is to be
welcomed, but he recognizes the limitations of a conception of experience which is still
reduced to an epistemological function in classical hermeneutics. The real, for Gadamer,
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is not merely what is manifest and scientifically observable as sensory data, and on
the other hand the experience of understanding reaches beyond intentionality: it is a
‘happening’, which cannot be seen as the appropriation by subjective consciousness
of an external reality it could somehow distance itself from. Hence the dialectic which
he suggests is essential to being – and thus to meaning in a universal sense – is one
between the known (qua tradition) and the unknown, the familiar and the strange, the
pre-judgement and the not-yet-judged. It is a ‘fusion of horizons’ as the mediation of
historical alienation,7 by which the hermeneutical task consists essentially in a process
of perpetual integration and rejection. Indeed, in this context the problems of historical
determination and historical understanding emerge particularly saliently, and are corre-
spondingly dealt with at length by both Benjamin and Gadamer.
According to Gadamer, hermeneutical reflection is prompted by the ‘rise of historical
consciousness’8 derived from a consciousness of loss of or estrangement from tradition, a
sentiment which is itself linked to the problem of interpreting texts written in a past context.
The existence of such a sentiment may thus reach back as far as the emergence of writing, but
it acquired an unprecedented dimension with the diffusion of the printed book: if the
theological and philological origins of hermeneutics signalled a concern for the ‘correct’
interpretation of meaning derived from written texts – which were supposed to express a reli-
gious, historical, etc., truth – then such a technological change as the development of print
posed the problem in ever more acute terms, profoundly affecting the relationship to
tradition of society as a whole. Gadamer singles out both Schleiermacher’s insistence on the
need to ‘reconstruct’ the past and Hegel’s concern for its (dialectical) ‘integration’ as
manifestations of and responses to the problem of ‘historical consciousness’.9
Thus Gadamer concurs with Benjamin’s intimation that the difficulty facing philosophy
in both its empiricist and its idealist guises resides in their integration of the temporal
dimension in their accounts. The question of history was central to the conception of
human experience which constituted the focus of the Geisteswissenschaften. However,
the Diltheyan attempt (following Schleiermacher) to a reconstruction of the past did not
differ essentially from the objectivism of the ‘historical school’ of Ranke and Droysen.10
Following Husserl’s attempt at a phenomenological overcoming of the ‘epistemological
problem of history’,11 eventually the centrality of consciousness as historically
conditioned, and the embeddedness of experience in time, came to be fully recognized
by Heidegger, jettisoning the static separation of subject and object: thus ‘experience’
could no longer be understood in the abstract, and metaphysics had to be abandoned
in favour of an ‘ontology of being’.
2 ‘Historicity’ and experience: beyond the Heideggerian alternative
Heidegger’s crucial insight was that understanding, and more generally the experiencing
of the world, is never only about being but is being itself. At the same time, Dasein
(being as being-in-the-world) is caught up in its historicity, since it is both ‘thrown’ in
the world and ‘projects’ itself in the future. Thus experience and understanding stand
precisely at the historical knot linking past and future, through and as existence. Instead
of positing a transcendental ego and the objects apprehended by its understanding, the
relation between the two is stressed, and understanding appears not as the activity of
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consciousness but as ‘a mode of the event of being’. The ‘forgetting of being’ which
Heidegger denounces amounts to a forgetting of both the finitude of being and its
constitutive part in the existence of meaning. For Heidegger in contrast, being only exists
within meaning, and not merely, as is characteristic of metaphysical thinking, as a mind
which apprehends meaning (i.e. truth, or the forms, etc.). Understanding thus acquires a
much larger, ontological significance, which has major implications for hermeneutics:
Dasein or human existence essentially consists in being raising questions about Being,
aware of its being-in-the-world. Thus instead of ‘representational thinking’ Heidegger
proposes das andenkende Denken, a thinking that recalls, since Dasein’s understanding
of itself and of the world depends on an interpretation inherited from the past, a
pre-understanding acquired within the concrete social context.
Similarly, Gadamer endeavours to show how the strangeness of temporal distance is
enabling, and not something to be overcome by ‘transposing oneself into the spirit of the
age’. The individual cannot be separated from the community which provides him or
her with fore-understanding, and as such cannot relinquish the historically developed
dimension of such fore-understandings: her or his experience of the world is essentially
historical because it is essentially of a collective nature, and this collectivity is always in
the process of mediating past and present. Thus there exists an ontology of understanding
prior to judgement, constituted by pre-judgements or prejudices, which then appear in a
new, positive guise as the very conditions of experience:
The important thing is to recognize temporal distance as a positive and productive condition
enabling understanding. It is not a yawning abyss but is filled with the continuity of custom
and tradition, in the light of which everything handed down presents itself to us.12
Furthermore, the fundamental principle which Gadamer calls ‘historically effected
consciousness’ (wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein)13 then represents the initial
precondition, realized through language, of ‘the real power of hermeneutical conscious-
ness’, namely ‘our ability to see what is questionable’.14 There is then no ultimate
self-knowledge, but rather a continuous coming-into-being of meaning, through the
experience of dialectical questioning – a questioning which is itself made possible by
the recollection of tradition and prejudices: the past is not there to be restored in its pristine
condition nor to be forgotten, but rather to be mediated with the present.
For dialectical understanding to be truly meaningful, it must be ‘open’ in a radical
sense, reminiscent of the Socratic ‘knowledge that one does not know’. The openness
to and awareness of resistance, non-sense, concealedness, nothingness, finitude, or
absence are as essential to being as what ‘is’ in a more tangible sense: indeed being
is not merely ‘there’ but is dialectically structured, through understanding, with what
is not – that which is foreign to it, and which challenges both itself and its perception
of the world at the same time. ‘Logically considered, the negativity of experience
implies a question’,15 and understanding is always an existential experience, the con-
frontation of the familiar with the foreign. As we shall see, for Benjamin the acknowl-
edgement of such a finitude of being through the recognition that the unknown enters
into a dialectical relationship with the known is the essential teaching of the religious
sentiment.
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Thus instead of the illusory ideal of total disclosure (or, say, Absolute Knowledge)
conveyed by methodical objectification, it appears that the essential task of thought and
understanding lies not in attaining an objectivity of consciousness. Rather, at its core
it consists in experiencing the dialectical nature of being (in concealment and uncon-
cealedness) through the encounter with the radically different/other, and accepting that
truth lies in the historically determined tension between the foreign and the familiar
(and not merely in what is disclosed). Furthermore, the insistence that cognition is a
productive as well as a collective process of re-cognition over time implies that under-
standing always happens within a moral perspective, and hermeneutics thus presents
itself as awareness of the ethical-historical domain pervading experience and understanding.
Such an assertion collapses the Kantian separation between theory of knowledge and
philosophy of values, and moreover leads to Gadamer’s focus on the notion of application.
In this, however, Gadamer already reaches beyond the limitations attached to Heidegger’s
conception of the ‘historicity of Dasein’, which for the latter is subordinated to the quasi-
metaphysical investigation which he is pursuing, namely the question of the ontological
meaning of Being – the quest for ‘authenticity’, in fact an unfortunate attempt to grasp Being
outside or beyond practical social relations.
For Benjamin the question of the changes in the way the world is experienced, and the
extent to which this is linked to altered notions of temporality, are also crucial but in a
decidedly political sense. In what follows I will be arguing that despite major differences
in their approaches and especially in their conclusions, Benjamin’s undertakings share
the hermeneutical concern of Heidegger and Gadamer for notions of ‘being’ and ‘time’
and how these interact as dialectical ‘experience’. The main divergence, however, is the
materialist and thus political twist which Benjamin gives to these themes, and which
helps him avoid the pitfalls inherent in ‘the jargon of authenticity’ (as Adorno called
it).16 Susan Buck-Morss comments on how Benjamin’s enterprise, in particular through
his celebrated work on 19th-century Paris (the Passagen-Werk or Arcades project), can
be understood as an attempt to provide hermeneutics with a truly concrete grounding in
modernity:
The Paris Passages built in the early nineteenth century were the origin of the modern com-
mercial arcade. Surely these earliest, ur-shopping malls would seem a pitifully mundane site
for philosophical inspiration. But it was precisely Benjamin’s point to bridge the gap
between everyday experience and traditional academic concerns, actually to achieve that
phenomenological hermeneutics of the profane world which Heidegger only pretended.17
II The dialectical image: awaking from the narcotics of history
1 Benjamin both mystic and materialist, neither theologian nor Marxist
As is well known, both the Jewish theologian Gershom Scholem and the Marxist writer
Bertolt Brecht were friends of Benjamin, whose intellectual achievements may be char-
acterized as ‘Janus-faced’, as he himself referred to his theory. Benjamin’s early thinking
is distinctly theological in its thrust, and his endorsement of a Marxist political orienta-
tion in the late 1920s eventually led to the ‘Konigstein program’ of 1929 (decisive in the
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intellectual trajectory of both Benjamin and Adorno), where he recognized the need
to work with both orientations concomitantly.18 Benjamin realized that his study
The Origin of German Tragic Drama (completed in 1925) was already tending towards
the approach he wanted to develop in what came to be known as the Passagen-Werk –
the historical study of 19th-century Paris which was initiated in 1927 and was to repre-
sent Benjamin’s major work. This project, which he worked upon until his death in 1940,
was never to be completed in a form other than a collection of notes and historical frag-
ments, but for Buck-Morss ‘[a completed Passagen-Werk] might now be valued as not
only the most important cultural commentary on modernity, but one of the greatest lit-
erary achievements of the twentieth century (as, in its absence, has often been conjec-
tured)’.19 Benjamin himself, aware of the political significance of his historical
outlook, and demonstrating how seriously he took the ‘rise of historical consciousness’,
wrote: ‘This work – comparable, in method, to the process of splitting the atom – liber-
ates the enormous energies of history that are bound up in the ‘‘once upon a time’’ of
classical historiography. The history that showed things ‘‘as they really were’’ was the
strongest narcotic of the century.’20
Benjamin’s work has fallen prey to various misrepresentations – either by commen-
tators from the left, by Jewish thinkers, or by ‘postmodern’ philologists, each neglecting
different aspects of his writings in order to appropriate him.21 The most common assess-
ment concerning Benjamin’s status as a philosopher or cultural critic, however, is that he
attempts to fuse theology and historical materialism, but fails to provide a convincing
synthesis: thus Scholem characteristically reacted against the materialist strand in his
works, Brecht mistrusted the theological overtones of his formulations, while Adorno
felt nervous with both.22 Such attitudes may be understood as the result of a presumption
that the categories of tradition and the religious are incompatible with historical materi-
alism’s allegiance to a critical and secular methodology. However, Benjamin’s interest
in tradition does not imply a reverence or nostalgia for the archaic and the mythological,
and his Marxist influences do not amount to any crude economic determinism. Such
assessments do not do justice to the specificity of Benjamin’s thought, and to his funda-
mental reworking of conceptions of time and space in relation to human – and in partic-
ular political – experience. Approached from a hermeneutical standpoint, what first
appear as irreconcilable antitheses do not in fact amount to mutually exclusive stances.
Benjamin’s theological sensitivity allows him to take seriously the pivotal role of reli-
gious experience permeating bygone eras, as well as inspiring his enterprise with the
affirmative spirit of redemption, while his historical materialism grounds his elabora-
tions in the concreteness of critique. Further, in this manner, Benjamin’s undertaking
is profoundly hermeneutic, inspired as it is by the Kabbalist tradition of theological inter-
pretation (through the influence of Scholem), and yet attached to the most material and
profane manifestations of social life.
The crux of the Kabbalist approach is the notion that the ‘concern for tradition is in
the interest of its transformation rather than preservation’,23 and the implicit recognition
that the past is always contained within the present, albeit in a radically different form.
The need to revere the past is understood as a way of departing from it, thus unleashing
the future (in particular its ‘Messianic possibilities’) rather than remaining trapped in a
petrified present: to face the past – especially in its alienness – is to acknowledge the
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temporal nature of both collective and individual experience, and perhaps avoid the
erection of self-referentiality as absolute, or hailing as ‘progress’ what merely parades as
the new. The historicity of experience, whereby ‘truth’ is not an absolute but is to be found
in the monad constituted by the present’s relation to the past,24 is in some ways akin to
Nietzsche’s conception of ‘untimeliness’25 and more specifically to the Gadamerian ‘fusion
of horizons’ outlined above, and has crucial implications for Benjamin’s theoretical
elaborations. He would later write, while working on the Passagen-Werk, that:
Resolute refusal of the concept of ‘timeless truth’ is in order. Nevertheless, truth is not – as
Marxism would have it – a merely contingent function of knowing, but is bound to a nucleus
of time lying hidden within the knower and the known alike. This is so true that the eternal,
in any case, is far more the ruffle on a dress than some idea.26
Benjamin did not perceive Kabbalism’s anti-systemic approach to exegesis to be incom-
patible with historical materialism, although he admittedly infused a radically novel
meaning to the latter, as is clear in particular from the ‘Theses on the Philosophy of
History’.27 However, Buck-Morss notes that Kabbalism’s influence on Benjamin, though
strong, was relatively indirect, and that his familiarity with Kabbalist texts was in fact lim-
ited. In contrast, Benjamin felt a crucial affinity with the Surrealist movement’s literary
explorations (in particular Louis Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris, but also Andre Breton’s
Nadja, etc.), in which he found echoes of his early interest in German baroque tragic
drama, and which were to prove of greater practical significance for Benjamin’s thought
than Kabbalism.
2 The constellation or dialectical image as ‘awakening’
Especially in the Passagen-Werk Benjamin’s enterprise presents itself as one of collecting,
gathering objects (in particular citations from 19th-century writers) and assembling them in
a particular montage. Such ‘constellations’ or ‘dialectical images’ are ascribed meaning or
‘light’ by virtue of their theologico-political orientation, their capacity to ‘blast open the
continuum of history’28 by unearthing specific alternatives in the mediation of past and
present. In the Passagen-Werk Benjamin thus intended to construct elaborate ‘constel-
lations’ by piecing together the citations and documents he had assembled in such a way
that they would reveal a dialectical tension to the present reader and onlooker: the
bourgeois interieur, the shopping arcades, the photographic medium, but also characters
which he deemed particularly significant such as the flaneur, the prostitute, or the
gambler were to be presented under a new light, pregnant with monadological truth.
To achieve this result, it was necessary to present the material in such a way that one
could relate to it, and yet feel its alienness: namely, provoke a hermeneutical understanding
of the past.
Benjamin recognized that Heidegger was attempting to deal with the same ‘crisis’ in
thought which had been brought about by historical consciousness, and was aware of the
intellectual nodal point at which he found himself. In this sense the concerns of ‘classical
hermeneutics’ were also his own, but for him only the direction indicated by Surrealism
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constituted a properly revolutionary and constructive alternative, as opposed to the
reactionary path which he thought Heidegger’s Holzwege amounted to:
Of vital interest to recognize a particular point of development as a crossroads. The new
historical thinking that, in general and in particulars, is characterized by higher concrete-
ness, redemption of periods of decline, revision of periodization, presently stands at such
a point, and its utilization in a reactionary or a revolutionary sense is now being decided.
In this regard, the writings of the Surrealists and the new book by Heidegger [Being and
Time] point to one and the same crisis in its two possible solutions.29
In his essay ‘Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia’,30 Benjamin
indeed emphasizes the ‘crisis ... of the humanistic concept of freedom’31 reflected by
Surrealism’s recognition of the primordiality of language (thus decentring the self), and
paradoxical insistence on the demystifying potential lying at the heart of the ‘experiences’
of dreams and narcotics:
Breton notes: ‘Quietly. I want to pass where no one yet has passed, quietly! – After you,
dearest language.’ Language takes precedence.
Not only before meaning. Also before the self. In the world’s structure dream loosens
individuality like a bad tooth. This loosening of the self by intoxication is, at the same time,
precisely the fruitful, living experience that allowed these people to step outside the domain
of intoxication.32
The ‘given’ of experience and the boundaries of certainty are thus radically challenged in
these experiments, undermining any naturalization of a reality presented as fixed and
unchanging. Thus Benjamin’s turn to Surrealism enabled him to successfully integrate
his Brechtian influences – Surrealist techniques bearing particular resemblance to
Brecht’s practice of Verfremdung (estrangement): to reveal what seems natural and
immutable as historical, and thus subject to revolutionary change. However, Benjamin
did not unreservedly endorse all the tenets of Surrealism, and for him ‘the true, creative
overcoming of religious illumination’ resides in a ‘profane illumination’ of ‘materialis-
tic, anthropological inspiration’ rather than indulging in religious and drug-induced
ecstasy, or even surrendering oneself completely to dream.33
His treating of 19th-century industrial society as a ‘dream world’ was tied to the idea
that, in the words of Rolf Tiedemann, ‘under capitalist relationships of production,
history could be likened to the unconscious actions of the dreaming individual, at least
insofar as history is man-made, yet without consciousness or design, as if in a dream’.34
He was thus echoing Marx’s notion of ‘phantasmagoria’ or ‘commodity fetishism’, the
ideology begotten by the abstraction of value in capitalist production,35 as well as
Lukacs’ notion of ‘reification’, whereby commodity exchange obscures and ‘objectifies’
the social relations at play in society.36 Following the Marxist vein on this count, he
sought to develop a broader understanding of ‘phantasmagoria’ by extending the notion
to the realm of cultural values, and retaining the critical thrust of a historical materialist
outlook.37 If Surrealism’s practice of a ‘fusion of horizons’ blended dream and life, past
and present, sacred and profane, intoxication and soberness, Benjamin (like Gadamer)
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held fast to a dialectical differentiation between these categories, through his notions of
‘awakening’ and ‘recognizability’. He writes about the Passagen-Werk that ‘whereas
Aragon persists within the realm of dream, here the concern is to find the constellation
of awakening’.38 If the historian must to some extent ‘take up the task of dream interpre-
tation’, it is also necessary to recognize ‘[a] particular dream-image as such’.39
And the ‘trick’ of ‘substitut[ing] ... a political for a historical view of the past’40 meant
that this awakening took the form of a dialectic, as it entered into a constellation with
remembrance, with the past.41 Influenced by Marcel Proust’s A la Recherche du temps
perdu, Benjamin was acutely aware of the relationship between the shock of awakening
and the capacity for remembering already laid bare by the Surrealists, and sought to
incorporate this insight in his understanding of dialectics:
Is awakening perhaps the synthesis of dream consciousness (as thesis) and waking
consciousness (as antithesis)? Then the moment of awakening would be identical with the
‘now of recognizability’, in which things put on their true – surrealist – face. Thus, in Proust,
the importance of staking an entire life on life’s supremely dialectical point of rupture:
awakening. Proust begins with an evocation of the space of someone waking up.42
The phenomenon which Benjamin refers to allegorically as ‘awakening’ consists in a
discontinuity provoked by an image ‘wherein what has been comes together in a flash
with the now to form a constellation’. It is not merely that ‘what is past casts its light
on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past’: such a perspective would
implicitly fix either the past or the present, so Benjamin insists that ‘while the relation of
the present to the past is a purely temporal, continuous one, the relation of what-has-been
to the now is dialectical: it is not progression but image’.43 Benjamin, in the Passagen-
Werk in particular, aimed at ‘showing’ rather than ‘saying’, in the sense that he saw his
task as informed by the notion of immediacy which an image can convey, but taking
place in the realm of language. In Buck-Morss’ words ‘what was needed was a visual,
not a linear logic’:44 Benjamin’s intention was to construe linguistic images as ‘dialectics
at a standstill’ instead of seeking an ideal resolution or Aufhebung of the dialectic. Hence
the unsettling tension or ‘force field’45 between both parts of the dialectic was to be pre-
served, so that the conceptual elaboration thus constructed preserved the dynamic and
openness of experience, instead of marring it by either fixing the pre-given categories
or lapsing into the mere shock of the new – Heidegger’s semantics being a prime
example of an attempt which on many counts is guilty of both. Thus he writes that ‘only
dialectical images are genuine images (that is, not archaic); and the place where one
encounters them is in language’.46
Indeed, Benjamin’s notion of awakening is a far cry from Heidegger’s support of a
‘National Awakening’, betraying the darker side of Heidegger’s elaborations on the
‘historicity’ of Dasein in Being and Time. This ultimately led him to reify a concept
of Being construed as an absolute, and rely on the emergence of a historical subject –
the Volksgemeinschaft under National Socialism – in order to attain ‘authenticity’,47 and
can be linked to his political engagement with the Nazis.48 His later writings concerning
Seinsgeschick (the ‘implacable fate’ of the ‘destiny of Being’) are further evidence that
the concept of ‘Being’ had been essentialized and that his purported transcendence of
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metaphysics was somewhat exaggerated, despite the critique of ‘logocentrism’ (‘of the
intrinsic and inalienable link between ‘‘reason’’ and ‘‘power’’’) which he initiated.49
In contrast, experience as awakening is understood by Benjamin in terms of ‘redemp-
tion’, whereby utopia is not presented as a telos of history but rather as the ever-present
possibility or ‘weak Messianic power’ inherent in the praxis of ‘now-time’ (Jetztzeit) –
not the single culmination of an absolute emancipatory move then, but rather a constantly
recurring event which takes place through the ‘now of recognizability’.50 It represents a
capacity for openness towards the ‘revelation’ which is experienced when one is confronting
past and present. In this sense, Benjamin’s notion is akin to the stress laid by Gadamer on the
‘event’ or ‘happening’ of being, which is permanently caught up in the process of re-
cognition, of creatively mediating its pre-understanding with the unknown or foreign to
which it is confronted and constantly forming new pre-understandings. Thus emerges the
micro-capability of initiating change, especially for the cultural critic, rather than succumb-
ing to a certain ideology of causality:
Historicism contents itself with establishing a causal connection between various moments
in history. But no fact that is a cause is for that very reason historical. It became historical
posthumously, as it were, through events that may be separated from it by thousands of
years. A historian who takes this as his point of departure stops telling the sequence of
events like the beads of a rosary. Instead, he grasps the constellation which his own era has
formed with a definite earlier one. Thus he establishes a conception of the present as the
‘time of the now’ which is shot through with chips of Messianic time.51
However, in order for time to unleash its revolutionary or ‘Messianic’ potential, the ‘now
of recognizability’ is for him entrenched in the concreteness of experience. Time
becomes a tangible component of experience, while, for instance, Heidegger’s claims for
authenticity remain confined to the abstract nature of his formulations:
What distinguishes images from the ‘essences’ of phenomenology is their historical
index. (Heidegger seeks in vain to rescue history for phenomenology abstractly through
‘historicity.’) ... Every present day is determined by images that are synchronic with it: each
‘now’ is the now of a particular recognizability. In it, truth is charged to the bursting point
with time. (This point of explosion, and nothing else, is the death of the intentio, which thus
coincides with the birth of authentic historical time, the time of truth.)52
Thus Benjamin provides a distinctive approach which cannot be subsumed under either
the orthodox categories of Marxism or theological study.53 Following Buck-Morss, for
Benjamin ‘theological illumination that redeems past history, and political education that
condemns it, are one and the same endeavour’,54 which is to say that both reverence for the
past as fixed, and extreme criticism levelled against it (for instance, in certain manifesta-
tions of deconstructionism) are fruitless. Moreover, they risk lapsing into a legitimation of
the status quo either by entrenching a petrified ‘reality’ of historical linearity or by advo-
cating a rootless (and aestheticized) subjectivism. To confront theology and materialism is
to confront the ‘foreign’ of the unknown which only faith sustains but which is open to
interpretation, to the seemingly ‘familiar’ of concrete, disclosed linear logic.
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History then dissolves from a naturalized continuum (subject to what are deemed
natural laws of development) into the discontinuities provoked by a confrontation of
foreign and familiar: the unknown causes a break, which challenges the known in an
endless process of dialectical mediation. For Benjamin, however, if this process is not
to be degraded into the individual experience of mere shock, it needs to recover the
collective basis of its dynamic, itself manifest in what he called the ‘mimetic faculty’:
the concrete illustration of the ‘hermeneutical experience’ which has been dealt with
‘in the abstract’ until this point. Otherwise thought risks being frozen in reification – the
extreme manifestation of which can be observed, according to him, in society’s relation
to technology. The result of Benjamin’s literary and historical explorations revealed to
him a ‘change in the structure of experience’55 of far-reaching consequences for notions
of the subject in relation to time and space.
III Mimesis and human experience
1 Stars in their eyes: the ‘mimetic faculty’
Nothing distinguishes the ancient from the modern man so much as the former’s absorption
in a cosmic experience scarcely known to later periods. Its waning is marked by the flower-
ing of astronomy at the beginning of the modern age. Kepler, Copernicus, and Tycho Brahe
were certainly not driven by scientific impulses alone. All the same, the exclusive emphasis
on an optical connection to the universe, to which astronomy very quickly led, contained a
portent of what was to come. The ancients’ intercourse with the cosmos had been different:
the ecstatic trance. For it is in this experience alone that we gain certain knowledge of what
is nearest to us and what is remotest to us, and never of one without the other. This means,
however, that man can be in ecstatic contact with the cosmos only communally. It is the
dangerous error of modern man to regard this experience as unimportant and avoidable, and
to consign it to the individual as the poetic rapture of starry nights. It is not; its hour strikes
again and again, and then neither nations nor generations can escape it, as was made terribly
clear by the last war, which was an attempt at new and unprecedented commingling with the
cosmic powers.56
Although the establishment of such a link between human social experience and stellar
observation may seem remote, only tangentially significant, or even unacceptably ‘eso-
teric’ and speculative, the above passage captures the deep sense in which for Benjamin
the experience of the world changes across time. Benjamin’s depiction of the individual
‘poetic rapture of starry nights’ reveals the extent to which experience has been reduced
to the subjective level of a self abstracted from its socio-historical context, and reminds
one of Kant’s evocation of ‘the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me’.57
The science of astronomy – the origins of which are as old as the first documented
evidence of human civilization itself – provided early philosophers with a stimulus to
go beyond the immediacy of life. But the interest in interpretation (namely, hermeneu-
tics) derives essentially for Benjamin from a religious impulse, and from the astrological
outlook on the stars – as the attempt at interpretation or understanding of the messages of
the gods, an interpretative yearning which would later be directed towards the Scriptures.
Analogies and magical correspondences were central to human experience, since
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looking for signs and manifestations of the future, or explanations for the past and
present meant that society took an active part in the constitution of these truths: the
signs had to be ‘interpreted’, and significant events or perceived manifestations of the
religious truth were repeated through the crucial experience of ritual.
Benjamin’s essays ‘On the Mimetic Faculty’ and ‘Doctrine of the Similar’58 set out
to show how the power to perceive and reproduce similarities lies at the core of expe-
rience, and how the religious behaviour alluded to above in fact expresses a deeper
urge towards imitation. Benjamin notes that mimicry, the production of similarities,
is a widespread natural phenomenon, but that in human beings such a behaviour has
become so sophisticated that it is barely recognizable. Thus the ability to see simila-
rities and reinterpret them is according to him a remnant of ‘the once powerful com-
pulsion to become and to behave mimetically’. It must be stressed, however, that the
‘mimetic faculty’ does not refer to mere repetition: reproduction is never a strict imi-
tation of what is encountered insofar as the difference which triggers the mimetic
impulse is not to be subsumed into sameness. Rather it is an appropriation of what
is encountered, but through reinterpretation: Martin Jay, following Philippe Lacoue-
Labarthe, characterizes it as a paradoxical logic or ‘hyperbologic’ which ‘follows
from the fact that mimetic substitution means both the need to imitate what already
exists and the realization that what exists is itself insufficient and must be supplemen-
ted by the imitation’.59 It is thus originally not the exact reproduction of something
construed as authentic or genuine, which mimesis would merely duplicate because
of a yearning for total identification with an absolute. Rather, for Adorno such an
understanding signals ‘a general mimetic abandonment to reification which is the
principle of death’.60
Benjamin remarks that the mimetic compulsion can be most clearly observed in
children and childhood experience: ‘Children’s play is everywhere permeated by mimetic
modes of behavior, and its realm is by no means limited to what one person can imitate in
another. The child plays at being not only a shopkeeper or teacher, but also a windmill and
a train.’61 This can be understood for Benjamin as the ‘ontogenetic history’ of the mimetic
ability, but it is also necessary to uncover its ‘phylogenetic history’ in order to fully grasp
its significance, and the form under which it manifests itself. In particular, Benjamin
establishes a link between the religious interpretation of signs and linguistic development,
whereby language and writing constitute the ultimate repository of a secularized mimetic
power, the non-sensuous (i.e. conceptual) guise of what was originally a sensuous
apperception of similarities:
‘To read what was never written.’ Such reading is the most ancient; reading prior to all
languages, from entrails, the stars, or dances. Later the mediating link of a new kind of
reading, of runes and hieroglyphs, came into use. It seems fair to suppose that these
were the stages by which the mimetic gift, formerly the foundation of occult practices,
gained admittance to writing and language. In this way, language may be seen as the
highest level of mimetic behaviour and the most complete archive of nonsensuous
similarity: a medium into which the earlier powers of mimetic production and compre-
hension have passed without residue, to the point where they have liquidated those of
magic.62
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2 Language and community
‘Perceiving and producing resemblances’ thus appears as the grounds for (concept-based)
abstraction, originating in a compulsion to behave/become like something else.
This faculty has essentially moved from magic, ritual and divination into language, but
what is important to note is that in this process of repetition, be it in its originary sensuous
form or its non-sensuous one, lies the very possibility for the passing on of tradition:
namely, the establishment within time of a community. It then appears that the temporal
component is crucial for the entrenchment of a sense of belonging. Adorno, for whom
mimesis would become a central theme, especially in the Dialectic of Enlightenment
written with Max Horkheimer, claims that ‘The human is indissolubly linked with imi-
tation: a human being only becomes human at all by imitating other human beings’.63
The behaviour of others which the individual seeks to imitate, the enacting of dances
and rituals, is not merely a contingent phenomenon but provides the historical dimension
without which intersubjectivity is seriously compromised. If the handing over of
tradition is a major consequence of the mimetic capacity, Benjamin stresses that the
modalities of this passing on of tradition have changed as the mimetic capacity has
changed in nature. Indeed, in two essays in particular, ‘The Storyteller’ and ‘On Some
Motifs in Baudelaire’,64 Benjamin emphasizes the way in which linguistic experience
has altered itself because the modalities of remembrance qua mimesis have changed.
In ‘The Storyteller’ Benjamin remarks that ‘the art of storytelling’, the oral transmission
of experience, is ‘coming to an end’ and that one early symptom of this decline can be
found in the rise of the novel at the beginning of modern times, reflecting the solitary
nature of Erlebnis.65 He further notes that the development of the press also signals a
radical change in the epic form and the emergence of a new medium of communication,
namely ‘information’, where ‘verifiability’ takes the precedence over any involvement
with the interlocutor.66 For if ‘the value of information does not survive the moment
in which it was new’, in contrast storytelling does not limit itself to the object which
is its concern but reveals a relationship between subject and object: ‘It does not aim
to convey the pure essence of the thing, like information or a report. It sinks the thing
into the life of the storyteller, in order to bring it out of him again.’67 Here again,
Benjamin then draws on the ontogenetic manifestation of storytelling in childhood to
prove his point: ‘The fairy tale, which to this day is the first tutor of children because
it was once the first tutor of mankind, secretly lives on in the story.’68
And so in the information age the demands placed on memory are lessened (there is
no need to retain what is told), and the individual involvement in the sharing of experi-
ence recedes as the ‘community of listeners’ dissolves and remembrance of tradition is
devalued. Such a conception of community, however, does not necessarily entail that a
mythical state of unimpaired dialogue is to be restored in order to abolish power
relations, through a hypostatized notion of rational argumentation and rational will
formation tending towards ultimate recognition and ever-improving knowledge (as can
be found in theories of discourse ethics, for instance). The point is rather that the encoun-
ter with otherness need not be resolved either in terms of sameness/identity, or in terms
of difference organized as hierarchy: regarding history, this means that the encounter
with the past can be understood neither as the positivist application of self-same
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categories across time, nor as the idealist unfolding of progress. Instead, for Benjamin it
is a question of redeeming the active reinterpretation of tradition, despite the fact that in
modernity experience is generally construed as an individual matter and social relations
are downplayed.
IV Technology the modern experience
1 Technology and alienation: ‘To the Planetarium’69
Deeply moved by the experience of the First World War, Benjamin remarks: ‘Wasn’t
it noticed at the time how many people returned from the front in silence?’70 The extent
of the incommunicability of such an experience he thought was revealing of its total
alienness, in the sense expounded by Marx. A war such as the First World War, and its
aftermath in the interwar period eventually leading to the even less communicable expe-
rience of the Second World War, was indeed the epitome of forces created by modern
society, which then came to turn against it and dominate it as an uncontrolled and
coercive ‘second nature’. As action is devolved to technology, it is also our capacity for
intersubjectivity and interpretation as located in community which are threatened.
Through writing, and especially with the advent of the written book, human involve-
ment in the repetition process already came to be limited since a certain reification is
operated when words are fixed in print, leading to the illusion that the past can be known
‘as it really was’. Furthermore, the need for public narration as the basis of collective
memory is then undermined, since the risks inherent in linguistic mediation are
made more acute with the written word: ‘The habitus of a lived life: this is what the
name preserves, but also marks out in advance.’71 As technological changes unfold, the
tendency to congeal the past is exacerbated through the proliferation of the image (in
particular, photography and film), a theme which emerges for Benjamin in particular
in the essays ‘A Small History of Photography’72 and ‘The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction’.73
Experiences are lived similarities.
There is no greater error than the attempt to construe experience – in the sense of life
experience – according to the model on which the exact natural sciences are based. What
is decisive here is not the causal connections established over the course of time, but the
similarities that have been lived.74
If Benjamin insists that experiences are lived similarities, and that an existence
concerned merely with causal connections is debased, it is because only a lived similarity
can give rise to the properly human creative potential of a ‘fusion of horizons’. In con-
trast ‘the extreme point in the technological organization of the world is the liquidation
of fertility’,75 that is, the fertility of human reinterpretation. Technology is never just a
tool. As his surrealistico-Marxist approach revealed to him, the world of commodities
‘dreamt’ by 19th-century industrial society was no innocuous fantasy. It was a Phantas-
magorie, a fetishized world into which his own era was still caught and from which we
ourselves have presumably not awoken, where mimesis could degenerate either in the
‘eternal return of the same’ with the mechanical reproduction of commodities, or into
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the mere shock of the new epitomized by fashion. Both cases in fact amount to the same
thing, since the absence of historical grounding means that one can either succumb to the
‘ideology of progress’, of the ‘most modern’, even of total novelty, or persist in the
affirmation of ‘timeless truths’ – the two sides of a same coin.
The dreamworld’s hegemonic hold means that history is ignored, and no dialectical
understanding is possible:
The dreaming collective knows no history. Events pass before it as always identical and
always new. The sensation of the newest and most modern is, in fact, as much a dream
formation of events as the ‘eternal return of the same.’ The perception of space that
corresponds to this perception of time is superposition.76
Such a state corresponds to a false resolution of what is essentially an open-ended
dialectic. In this context, for Benjamin it is significant that tradition or history is increas-
ingly objectified in a very concrete sense, by being devolved to ‘technology’.
2 The aura: returning the gaze in the age of technology
The ‘aura’ was a generic term used by Benjamin to denote, in particular concerning a
work of art but also a past document, the enigmatic within the other: the simultaneous
manifestation of sameness and difference. Thus what makes art more than an object, for
instance, and tradition or history more than a collection of facts is that despite their other-
ness or remoteness they exhibit a capacity to engage in dialogue with the onlooker, to
return the gaze since there is something essentially human about them:
Experience of the aura ... rests on the transposition of a response common in human relation-
ships to the relationship between the inanimate or natural object and man. The person we
look at, or who feels he is looked at, looks at us in turn. To perceive the aura of an object
we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return.77
The concept of Erlebnis which Dilthey and Husserl developed as industrial society was
on the rise can be interpreted from Benjamin’s perspective as alienated experience, just
as Benjamin presented the character of the gambler seeking the ‘isolated experience’ of
shock as typically modern when, precisely, taken to its extreme ‘The ideal of the shock-
engendered experience <Erlebnis> is the catastrophe’.78 The shock-like nature of mod-
ern experience resulting in the demise of the hermeneutical and dialectical confronta-
tion of familiar and foreign, is also underlined by Benjamin in the Baudelaire essay.
Baudelaire writes of the emergence of the city, and of the ‘decisive, unique experience’
of being jostled by the crowd as the sensation of the modern age. Baudelaire indicated
the price which had to be paid for such a sensation: ‘the disintegration of the aura in the
experience of shock’.79
Human behaviour is acquired by attempting to reinterpret the behaviour encountered
in the society in which one is ‘thrown’. At the linguistic level, this is what Benjamin,
referring back to Genesis, calls the gift of ‘Name-giving’ attributed to man by God.
In this idea of mimesis are concentrated all the possible contradictions open to experience,
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in particular the tension between the reproduction of the same as destructive conflation of
differences, and the creative emergence of the new. This defines the hermeneutical
moment as a political moment, bearing resemblance to what Hannah Arendt refers to as
‘action’.80 Drawing on Aristotle’s praxis philosophy, which is also central to Gadamer’s
concept of application, Arendt shows how humankind is extending the control of nature to
the control of itself: active involvement and practical reasoning are replaced by the
security of making as opposed to doing, as rule and formal procedures are substituted for
action and speech. Rationalization and the technical application of science enable a
reliable and even replicable (thus predictable) organization of life, but from Arendt’s as
well as Benjamin’s perspective the fundamental human capacity for reinterpretation is
relinquished in the process.
The epitome of such a state of affairs is for Benjamin the diffusion of photography.
From the vantage-point of the Jewish taboo on graven images or Bildverbot, photogra-
phy exemplifies the heretical nature of strict imitation. In particular such reproductive
techniques lead to incommunicability because ‘the camera records our likeness without
returning our gaze’.81 Technology is always a ‘new configuration of nature’82 for
Benjamin, demonstrating that there exist no fixed categories of the ‘natural’ in relation
to the ‘man-made’. This is what a ‘historically effected consciousness’ (for Gadamer) or
‘historical materialism’ (in the particular sense in which Benjamin uses the expression)
reveals: that humanity’s trajectory on earth is neither governed by immutable ‘natural’
laws, nor is it the continuous unfolding of the new as man-made improvement or
progress – namely, it is no eternal repetition of sameness.
The ‘loss of the aura’ is significant because it attests that the reification of social rela-
tions is equivalent to a debasement of what is distinctive about human experience: the
capacity for (re)interpretation, as basis for the existence of a tradition and a politically
conscious – that is, dialectical – historical perception. Hence Benjamin’s assertion that
‘It is the inherent tendency of dialectical experience to dissipate the semblance of eternal
sameness, and even of repetition, in history. Authentic political experience is absolutely
free of this semblance.’83
Conclusion: redeeming experience, or, ‘le temps retrouve’?
To preserve the interpretative moment in mimesis by insisting on the monadological
nature of its temporal dimension, such is then the aim of Benjamin’s gazing at the stars,
and his erection of historico-political constellations. As indicated from the outset, his
approach could be dubbed ‘hermeneutical materialist’: a mystic opposed to mystifica-
tion, a materialist decrying commodification, he set himself the task of shedding astral
light on the power relations permeating the mediation of past and present, and society’s
potential for creating coercive forces – in accordance with the notion that ‘the genuine
conception of historical time rests entirely upon the image of redemption’.84
The standpoint of ‘redemption’, however, does not imply that Benjamin is referring
back to some original or authentic experience. He is neither looking beyond modernity to
a chimerical ‘postmodernity’, nor adopting a romantic or anti-modern attitude, a yearning
for a mythical golden age; rather, following Rimbaud’s injunction ‘il faut etre absolument
moderne’, like the poet he seeks to drive the possibilities of ‘now-time’ to extremes. Only
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thus may the dream-like quality of modernity be revealed for what it is, and the petrification
of myth into fate avoided. But this critical attitude is not to be understood as teleologically
guided by the projected revolutionary upheaval of a historical subject, which would lead
humanity to a utopian state of absolute freedom. Although Benjamin’s Messianic inspira-
tions sometimes seem to ascribe to the proletariat just such a potential, for him the critical
task is primarily a Sisyphean one, whereby ‘in every era the attempt must be made anew to
wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it’.85 This is so because
dreams and myths are not eradicated by technological advances, and in fact modernity’s
faith in capitalistic accumulation, rational organization and mechanical reproduction seems
to indicate a surrendering to the more destructive side of mimesis. Hence now perhaps more
than ever is it necessary to heed the storyteller’s wisdom:
The wisest thing – so the fairy tale taught mankind in olden times, and teaches children to
this day – is to meet the forces of the mythical world with cunning and with high spirits.86
It is then not a question of retrieving the originary plenitude of a forsaken, pre-industrial
experience from the depths of history. Such a moment, the paradigmatic image of which
is the blissful unity of man before the Fall, does not present itself for Benjamin as the
metaphysical model of a genuine experience which has been ‘lost’: it represents rather
the experience of loss, of an estrangement from and yet an affinity towards the past
which, as noted, is central to the rise of historical consciousness in the 19th century.
Adorno would later concur to say that in fact, the existence or not of a redeemed state
is beside the point:
The only philosophy which can be responsibly practised in the face of despair is the attempt
to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of
redemption. Knowledge has no light but that shed on the world by redemption: all else is
reconstruction, mere technique. Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange
the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear
one day in the messianic light. ... The more passionately thought denies its conditionality for
the sake of the unconditional, the more unconsciously, and so calamitously, it is delivered
up to the world. Even its own impossibility it must at last comprehend for the sake of the
possible. But beside the demand thus placed on thought, the question of the reality or unre-
ality of redemption itself hardly matters.87
Notes
1. T. W. Adorno, ‘A Portrait of Walter Benjamin’, in Prisms (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981),
pp. 240–1.
2. H.-G. Gadamer, ‘The Problem of Historical Consciousness’, in P. Rabinow and W. M. Sullivan
(eds) Interpretive Social Science: A Second Look (Berkeley, CA, Los Angeles and London:
University of California Press, 1987), p. 89.
3. In Beyond Objectivism and Relativism (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press,
1983), p. 113, R. Bernstein singles out classical and medieval rhetoric (with Vico as its last
great proponent), practical philosophy as represented by Aristotle, legal history and
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jurisprudence, Renaissance humanism, and the post-Reformation discipline of biblical
interpretation. See also H.-G. Gadamer, Truth and Method (London: Sheed & Ward, 1989),
pp. 173–84 and 307–41.
4. Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 65.
5. ibid., p. 66.
6. W. Benjamin, ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, in Illuminations (London: Fontana, 1973),
p. 158.
7. H.-G. Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics (Berkeley, CA, Los Angeles and London:
University of California Press, 1976), p. 39.
8. Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 165. See also H.-G. Gadamer, ‘The Problem of Historical
Consciousness’, as well as Adorno, in Negative Dialectics (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1978), pp. 52–5.
9. Gadamer, Truth and Method, pp. 164–9.
10. ibid., p. 198.
11. ibid., pp. 242–54.
12. ibid., p. 297.
13. ibid., pp. 300–2.
14. Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, p. 13.
15. Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 366.
16. Theodor Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press,
1973).
17. S. Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project
(Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1989), p. 3. Adorno also writes: ‘The provocative
assertion that an essay on the Paris Arcades is of greater interest philosophically than are
ponderous observations on the Being of beings is more attuned to the meaning of his work
than the quest for that unchanging, self-identical conceptual skeleton which he relegated to
the dustbin’ (Prisms, p. 232).
18. See S. Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin,
and the Frankfurt Institute (Brighton, Sx: Harvester Press, 1977), pp. 22–3. Buck-Morss’
seminal study on the Frankfurt School theorists provides an enlightening account of
Benjamin’s intellectual itinerary, in particular concerning his relationship with Adorno. See also
Momme Brodersen, Walter Benjamin: A Biography (London: Verso, 1996) for further details.
19. Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, p. 335. On the significance of the Arcades project see
also Rolf Tiedemann, ‘Dialectics at a Standstill: Approaches to the Passagen-Werk’, in Walter
Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, 1999), pp. 929–45.
20. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, N3,4.
21. See E. Leslie, Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism (London and Sterling, VA: Pluto
Press, 2000), pp. 219–35. Leslie concludes: ‘One conspicuous aspect of the ‘‘Benjaminiana’’
of the last quarter-century has been to argue that inasmuch as Benjamin was a Jew, he was less
a Marxist. Inasmuch as he is drawn to Marxism he can do so only by wrestling with his
Jewishness. He is torn between the messianic and the material, or, more extremely, between
heaven and hell. Angelic Benjamin floats in theory as a half-figure – half-Marxist, half-Jew
– and the partiality of his identifications makes it impossible to locate his theory, and it
places him on a border that cuts through all his work, and even (deconstructively? actually?)
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killed him.’ The impact of this statement is compounded by the knowledge that Benjamin com-
mitted suicide precisely on the border separating France and Spain, in a desperate attempt to flee
from the Nazis and salvage a mysterious manuscript which could have been a preliminary draft
for the Passagen-Werk (see the Afterword in Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, pp. 331–40,
as well as ‘The Story of Old Benjamin’ by Lisa Fittko in Benjamin, The Arcades Project,
pp. 946–54).
22. Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, pp. 245–8.
23. ibid., p. 233. See also Irving Wohlfarth, ‘On Some Jewish Motifs in Benjamin’, in Andrew
Benjamin (ed.) The Problems of Modernity: Adorno and Benjamin (London and New York:
Routledge, 1989).
24. The initial development of the concept of ‘monadological truth’ is to be found in Benjamin’s
study The Origin of German Tragic Drama (London: New Left Books, 1977).
25. See in particular ‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life’, in F. Nietzsche,
Untimely Meditations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
26. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, N3,2.
27. Benjamin, Illuminations, pp. 255–66.
28. ibid., p. 264.
29. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, S1,6.
30. Walter Benjamin, ‘One-Way Street’ and Other Writings (London and New York: Verso,
1979), pp. 225–39.
31. ibid., p. 225.
32. ibid., p. 227.
33. ibid.
34. Tiedemann, ‘Dialectics at a Standstill’, in Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 933.
35. Tiedemann writes: ‘Phantasmagoria: a Blendwerk, a deceptive image designed to dazzle, is
already the commodity itself, in which the exchange value or value-form hides the use value.
Phantasmagoria is the whole capitalist production process, which constitutes itself as a natural
force against the people who carry it out’ (ibid., p. 938).
36. See Georg Lukacs, ‘The Phenomenon of Reification’, in Georg Lukacs, History and Class
Consciousness (London: Merlin Press, 1971), pp. 83–110.
37. He distanced himself, however, from a crude application of the notions of economic base and
ideological superstructure: ‘In the case of one who sleeps, an overfull stomach does not find its
ideological superstructure in the contents of the dream – and it is exactly the same with the
economic conditions of life for the collective. It interprets these conditions; it explains them.
In the dream, they find their expression; in the awakening, their interpretation’ (The Arcades
Project, M�,14). Tiedemann thus refers to Benjamin’s approach as ‘materialist physiognomics’
rather than ideology critique (in Benjamin, The Arcades Project, pp. 939–40).
38. ibid., N1,9.
39. ibid., N4,1.
40. Benjamin, ‘One-Way Street’ and Other Writings, p. 230.
41. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, K1,3. See also K1,2.
42. ibid., N3a,3.
43. ibid., N2a,3.
44. Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, p. 218.
45. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, N7a,1.
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46. ibid.
47. See R. Wolin, The Politics of Being: The Political Thought of Martin Heidegger (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1990), pp. 75–95.
48. ibid., p. 9.
49. R. Wolin, The Terms of Cultural Criticism: The Frankfurt School, Existentialism, Poststruc-
turalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), pp. 127–8 and 138.
50. ‘On the dialectical image. In it lies time. Already with Hegel, time enters into dialectic. But the
Hegelian dialectic knows time solely as the properly historical, if not psychological, time of
thinking. The time differential [Zeitdifferential] in which alone the dialectical image is real is
still unknown to him. ... All in all, the temporal moment [das Zeitmoment] in the dialectical
image can be determined only through confrontation with another concept. This concept is
the ‘‘now of recognizability’’ [Jetzt der Erkennbarkeit]’ (Benjamin, The Arcades Project,
Q�,21).
51. Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 265.
52. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, N3,1.
53. For instance, Jurgen Habermas in an essay on Benjamin (‘Consciousness-Raising or Redemptive
Criticism: The Contemporaneity of Walter Benjamin’, New German Critique 17 [1979]: 30–59)
dismisses the latter’s project on the grounds that a Messianic understanding of history is incom-
patible with Marx’s theory of history, but for Buck-Morss such an interpretation is unwarranted:
‘Cognitive explosiveness in a political sense occurs, not when the present is bombarded with
‘‘anarchistically intermittent,’’ utopian ‘‘now-times’’ (Habermas), but when the present as
now-time is bombarded with empirical, profane fragments of the recent past’ (Buck-Morss, The
Dialectics of Seeing, p. 251).
54. ibid., p. 245.
55. Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism (London:
New Left Books, 1973), p. 110.
56. Benjamin, ‘One-Way Street’ and Other Writings, p. 103.
57. I. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1956), p. 166.
58. Both in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 2 (Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap
Press of Harvard University Press, 1999).
59. M. Jay, ‘Mimesis and Mimetology: Adorno and Lacoue-Labarthe’, in Cultural Semantics:
Keywords of Our Time (London: Athlone Press, 1998), p. 129.
60. Quoted in Jay, ‘Mimesis and Mimetology: Adorno and Lacoue-Labarthe’, p. 130.
61. Walter Benjamin, ‘On the Mimetic Faculty’, in Selected Writings, vol. 2, p. 720.
62. ibid., p. 722.
63. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 154.
64. Both in Benjamin, Illuminations.
65. ibid., p. 87.
66. ibid., pp. 88–9. See also pp. 160–1.
67. ibid., pp. 91–2.
68. ibid., p. 102.
69. See Benjamin’s last aphorism in ‘One-Way Street’ (Benjamin, ‘One-Way Street’ and Other
Writings, pp. 103–4).
70. Walter Benjamin, ‘Experience and Poverty’, in Selected Writings, vol. 2, p. 731.
71. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, Q�,24.
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72. In Benjamin, ‘One-Way Street’ and Other Writings.
73. In Benjamin, Illuminations.
74. Benjamin, ‘Experience’, in Selected Writings, vol. 2, p. 553.
75. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, S9a,2.
76. ibid., M�,14. See also D10a,5: ‘The belief in progress – in an infinite perfectibility understood
as an infinite ethical task – and the representation of eternal return are complementary. They
are the indissoluble antinomies in the face of which the dialectical conception of historical
time must be developed.’
77. Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 190.
78. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, O14,4.
79. Benjamin, Illuminations, pp. 195–6.
80. H. Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press,
1958), p. 175 ff.
81. Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 189.
82. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, K1a,3.
83. ibid., N9,5.
84. ibid., N13a,1.
85. Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 257.
86. ibid., p. 102.
87. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia (London: Verso, 1974), p. 247.
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