Benjamin passagen pdf

Glass and iron construction, concealed by decorative architecture or con- fined to transitory applications in the nineteenth century, began to come into its own in the s: it could now be seen how, in the course of the nineteenth century, "the development of the forces of production freed the forms of design from art" 59, Benjamin repeatedly identified liberating, future- oriented phenomena with "functional" advances. By functional, he meant design that is matter-of-fact, stripped of ornament, and appropriate to the purpose at hand.

His preference for "constructed" spaces and objects has been aptly described as a left-Bauhaus ideology. The polemical sense of this view in the s and s lay in its rejection of facile anti-modernism. Today, the dominant constellation has changed: "functional" has come to mean integration into the bald logic of instrumental rationality - think of the omnipresent glass shoebox skyscraper. We would do well to remember the very different accents of Benjamin's endorsement of Sachlichkeit in the constructivist sense.

In the two final sections of the pr6cis, Benjamin provided glimpses of how the process of awakening, breaking the hold of phantasmagoria, had tentatively begun within the nineteenth century. The sixth section was entitled "Haussmann, or the Barri- cades.

The conjunction of the two final sections expresses Benjamin's hope that a construction of the subversive implications of culture here, Baudelaire's poetry might help provide the canon of an actual awakening in history: the defeat of the regressive forces of fascism in the s.

This hope-against-hope shrank to a desperately small remnant after the failure of the Popular Front governments, which were certainly the last stop on the way to the Second World War. Thus, in its full scope, the Arcades project was meant to recast the theory and method of socio-cultural history while redefining our image of nineteenth- century capitalist modernity. Benjamin has long been thought of as a philos- opher and literary critic, because the works that had previously been pub- lished were only gestures toward the broader vision of social and cultural history whose outlines are now available.

A full evaluation of the Arcades project will require collaboration by social theorists, historians, and Benjamin specialists. A reckoning with the theory of the Arcades project might well begin with the two facets of concretion captured in the concept of the dialectical image: constellations of past and present, and phantasmago- ria. Throughout his work, Benjamin vehemently denounced the conception of history he referred to as historicism Historismus.

The Arcades manuscripts pro- vide us with a rich mine of further arguments, including formulations couched in the language of dreaming and awakening - an idiom central to the project, but missing in the theses. Thus, we can now begin to sort out the value of this critique.

Benjamin's attack on historicism cuts across the usual fronts with respect to the philosophy of history. In its simplest form, historicism began from what may loosely be called the historical way of thinking: that truth must always be found in the historical modulations of a subject rather than in timeless essences or natural laws. By Benjamin's time, historicism had developed into a specific, complex doctrine that had spread from the discipline of history itself to become a core assumption of all the cultural and social sciences, particularly in Germany.

It is certainly strange to find "progress" included here: historicism had partly originated as a German protest against the French Enlightenment doctrine of progress. On the other hand, certain key features of historicism were omitted: the principle of organic "individualities" as the subjects of history, or the statist dogma of the primacy of foreign relations at the expense of social history. The point of Benjamin's critique was not to endorse either idealism or positivism.

Rather, he called for a "Copernican revolution" in historical thinking, which would be analogous to Kant's in epistemology. In histori- cism the past. But now this relationship is to be reversed: what has been is to become a dialectical reversal, the sudden insight of an awakened consciousness. Politics receives primacy over history The historicity of images means not only that they belong to a certain time, but that they come to readability Lesbarkeit at a particular time in the future.

In this sense "every present is determined by the images which are synchronic with it" Benjamin's concept of concretion has an inex- tricably temporal dimension: The dialectical method is said to aim at doingjustice to the concrete, historical situation of its object. But that is not enough. For it is just as concerned with doing justice to the concrete. At least in this respect, Benjamin's dialectic of historical interpretation resembles Gadamer's: reception involves contact between the present and specific moments in the past, not all o f which are always equally available; reception is never just passive acceptance, but creation anew.

In his essay on Proust , Benjamin had insisted that presence of mind was the precon- dition of autobiographical memory, and in the notes for the Arcades project he maintained that present-mindedness was indispensible to true historical memory.

He advocated a deliberately partial, engaged history rather than a neutral, past-minded account. Yet Benjamin's concept of awakening, as opposed to Gadamer's notion of ongoing dialogue, holds out for the idea that in the synchronicity of ages the ultimately "true" image of the past is glimpsed. What really bothered Benjamin about the c o m p o u n d he called historicism?

To begin with, he acknowledged that the idea of progress had once had a critical edge: "In Turgot, the concept of progress still served a critical function. Benjamin's concern was the com- placency later bred among social democrats by the adoption of the ideas of evolution and progress. In the face of orthodox "mandarin" professors preaching against the decadence of industrial capitalist society, social demo- crats had backed into the opposite error - the simple-minded belief that industrial progress automatically leads to social progress - which paralyzed the will to action.

The idea of automatic progress also obscured perception of the dangers of historical regression, those constellations of modernity and prehistory that Benjamin called Urgeschichte. Past-mindedness was a "nar- cotic," which dulled awareness of the urgent task of bringing the past into the present , Closely connected was the inadequacy of empathy as a method, both because it meant isolating the present from the influence of the past and because the meaning of any given historical image is never fully present at its occurrence but only unfolds later in time.

His concept of the dialectical images encapsules all these objections and presents a global alternative to the historicist ideal of portraying the past "as it really was. First, we must be clear about the issue of relativism itself. In fact, the analytic philosophy of history has suggested conclusions remarkably like Benjamin's by examining the logic of narrative form. For example, Arthur Danto, in his Anal 'tic Philosophy o f History', has noted that the explanation of any event depends on finding an appropriate description, which requires an act of interpretation; and the context of interpretation includes later events, which help reveal the meaning of what has come before.

In a society whose future has not been foreclosed, the past can never be a closed book: it will always be subject to revision - in principle - from the standpoint of the present.

Further, what Danto pointed out is actually one of the operating assumptions of most historians reluctant as they may be to admit it in theory : that the reinterpretation of the past occurs in generational waves whose origins lie in the political tides of the present.

The history of interpre- tations of the French Revolution is the textbook case and the bread-and- butter of any doctoral student of French history. The existence of these waves may be necessary, not merely contingent; some degree of temporal relativism may be intrinsic to historical objectivity.

But to complicate matters, Benjamin was not a consistent relativist in even this sense. As noted, the image of awakening implies objective if not timeless - truth. Attemptto considerthe 19thcentury as thoroughly positivelyas I tried to see the 17th in the study on Baroque tragic drama. No belief in periods of decay Among the maxims of classical historicism was that all eras are equally close to God.

This was an admonition to the historian, more observed in the breach than in the practice, not to intrude his own evaluations into the account. And precisely one of the hallmarks of Benjamin's vision was the ability to discern coherence and the emergence of the new in what were otherwise seen as periods of decay. His model was the art historian Alois Riegl, who had detected the emergence of a new aesthetic in the ornamental forms of late Roman art and decoration, a style that had previously been treated as a degeneration from classical ideals.

Benjamin had done some- thing analogous for allegory and Baroque tragic drama in the case of the seventeenth century and may be argued to have had the same aim for the modern era. In this context, Benjamin's invocation of past-mindedness made polemical sense: to resist "mandarin" tirades against modernist decadence by using a weapon from their own arsenal, rather than back into faith in progress.

But he thereby entangled his philosophy of history in a contradic- tion he seems to have overlooked. The contradictions go further: Benjamin certainly also believed in periods of decay. His much-discussed theory of the decay of the aura and of experience is a case in point. And the possibility of decay implies its opposite, continuity, whose existence Benjamin likewise both assumed and denied.

In order for works to have a post-history in which their meaning unfolds, their transmis- sion must be assured. Even discontinuity in the meaning of the contents of tradition presupposes a certain continuity in its transmission. The fact is that Benjamin's concept of history operates on various levels: his programmatic statements about the philosophy of history are often at odds with his operating concept of cultural and historical processes.

For the sake of the Arcades project, it may even be necessary to uncouple it from certain of his global statements. For example, in arguing against historical continuity, he asserted that the only continuity is that of an ongoing catastrophe.

The implication would be that each rebus yields the same message in the end: history is hell. But making this point hardly requires the number of reitera- tions the Arcades project would have involved. In certain ways, Benjamin's explicit critique of historicism works against the actual richness of his historical vision.

Much more promising is Benjamin's concept of phantasmagoria, whereby cultural images may be read as an endless variety of configurations of utopia and regressive distortion. As already mentioned, the surreal and psychoanalytic bearings of this concept have long been neglected.

Benjamin did once liken phantasmagoria to what Lukfics called false consciousness 1II: Accord- ing to Benjamin, phantasmagoria play a role in the consciousness of society analogous to that of symptoms in the psychic economy of a mentally disturbed individual. They result from repressed wishes and traumas - or in the case of society, "the inchoateness of the social product as well as the deficiencies of the social system of production" And "according to the law of repression," the more thoroughly such facts are repressed, the more productive of images - phantasmagoria a society becomes III: Like the manifest content of dreams, phantasmagoria conceal a latent content whose expression is permitted only in distorted form.

Society is dreaming a nightmare from which it is trying to "awake" that is, its wishes seek expression, recognition, and fulfillment. Its tentative and disguised attempts at awakening must be interpreted by the historian acting as a political dream-interpreter. Because Benjamin's contact with psychoanalysis was indirect, we can expect a systematic comparison of Benjamin and Freud to be of slight philological significance but great theoretical consequence. To begin with, Benjamin's concept of phantasmagoria embodies the fundamental ambivalence of the psychoanalytic idea of wish fulfillment.

Dreams, like any symptoms, are compromises: a wish is expressed and thus "fulfilled" at the price of being distorted almost beyond recognition. Phantasmagoria are wish-images in the same sense: although distorted, revealing the compulsion to repress and disguise, they nevertheless express genuine wishes in the only way possible at the time, short of the overthrow of the system psychic or social - of which they are part.

For Freud, dreams represented compromises between uncon- scious wishes and defense mechanisms: for Benjamin, the terms of the compromise were different: their ambiguity Zweideutigkeit, double mean- ing lay in their regressive and utopian coordinates.

Regressive, because they express the ensnarement of history in Urgeschichte; utopian, because they imply the promise of fulfillment. Phantasmagoria can be read as traces of attempts to simultaneously "overcome and transfigure the deficiencies of social reality" Likewise, what Benjamin regarded as the ever-present threat of a resurgence of mythic forces corresponds to a motif deeply embedded in Freud's thought.

Significantly, he identified the paradigm of all complexes with a name from antique tragedy: Oedipus. For Benjamin, too, ancient tragedy represented a first victory for humanity over the forces of myth, but a victory that must always be won anew. Finally, Benjamin's descriptions of mythic forces call to mind certain of Freud's accounts of the price for failing to master conflicts successfully: especially the compulsion to repeat the patterns established by a conflict that has not been overcome - Wiederholungszwang, repetition compulsion, which Freud generalized to apply to the life of the instincts as such in his pessimistic old age.

But the differences go as deep as the similarities. They begin with Benjamin's attacks on the categories of personality and subjectivity. The rebuses of manifest content that interested Freud were the products of the individual psyche, whatever structures may be common to the species. Benjamin es- poused two alternatives, very different not only from Freud's image of the psyche but also from one another.

First, he spoke of transferring psycho- analytic concepts from the individual to the "collective" 49 i This lead him to speculative formulations, with Jungian overtones, about a "dreaming collective" and even a "collective unconscious.

In fact, Benjamin did not always draw a clear line between rejecting methodological individualism and hypostasizing a collective subject.

A critique of Jung, planned but unfortunately never carried out, would have helped clarify the issue. But in other formulations, Benjamin attacked the category of subjectivity as such, not just an exaggerated individualism. He located the unconscious in the physical world, stressing that his concern was the liberation not only of the human, social world but of the world of objects as well: by contrast with psychoanalysis, "the Surrealists were less on the track of the soul than of things" II: Or on the figure of the collector: The decisivethingabout collectingis that the objectis released fromall its functionsin order to enter into the closest possible relations with that whichis similar.

This is the diametrical opposite of usefulness Here we constitute an alarm clock which calls the kitsch of the previous centuryto "assembly" Languages Deutsch Polski Edit links. The Arcades Project has been posthumously edited and published in many languages as a collection of unfinished reflections. On several occasions Benjamin altered his overall scheme of the Arcades Projectdue in part to the influence of Theodor Adornopsasagenwerk gave Benjamin a stipend and who expected Benjamin to make the Arcades project more explicitly political and Marxist in its analysis.

Benjamin first mentioned the Arcades project in a letter to his friend Gershom Scholemdescribing it as his attempt to use collage techniques in literature.

By using this site, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The Passagenwerk or Arcades Project was an unfinished project of German literary critic Walter Benjaminwritten between and Articles lacking in-text citations from July All articles lacking in-text citations All articles with specifically marked weasel-worded phrases Articles with specifically marked weasel-worded phrases from May All articles with unsourced statements Articles with unsourced statements from May Articles with unsourced statements from May This article includes a list of referencesbut its sources remain unclear because it has insufficient inline citations.

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