Electronic Book Review - illuminations http://www.electronicbookreview.com/tags/illuminations en Shopping for Truth http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/spectacular <div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix"> <div class="markup">by</div> <div class="field-items"> <div class="field-item even">Adrian Gargett</div> </div> </div> <div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2002-03-31</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Dartford, England: Like tourists in a world class museum,<br /> visitors swapped souvenir photos and packed marble halls in Europe’s<br /> largest shopping centre. Bluewater, a complex of 320 shops and<br /> restaurants on the outskirts of London, is the most prominent in a<br /> series of regional mega-malls to open in Britain, where an increasingly<br /> mobile population has warmed to this most American of commercial<br /> concepts.</p> <p>Built in a former chalk quarry 15 miles east of London,<br /> Bluewater’s 1.68 million square feet of retail space make it the biggest<br /> retail shopping centre in Europe. A white roof bristling with glass<br /> cones and spike shaped air ducts gives it the look of a gleaming tent<br /> city. The complex includes a 12-screen cinema, a conservatory with<br /> tropical trees and parking spaces for 13,000 cars. Quotations by Robert<br /> Graves and other poets adorn its walls, and life-sized statues of<br /> apothecaries and candle-makers line a so-called medieval guildhall. This<br /> atmosphere is designed to recapture the pageantry of city life. Yet the<br /> 1970’s soul music echoing down its many corridors and the numerous U.S.<br /> names - like Eddie Bauer and KFC - among its shops and restaurants<br /> reinforce Bluewater’s undeniably American flavour.</p> <p>However, as the ambler passes through the illuminated spotlit<br /> pools from one more glittering façade, he may, perhaps, feel a frisson.<br /> For here, as if keeping a vaguely remembered appointment, he will<br /> encounter the ghost of an old man - bespectacled, thick-haired, Jewish,<br /> steady of gaze.</p> <p>His name is Walter Benjamin. Profession, philosopher. But what<br /> has this shadowy, long dead person to do with the $1.6 billion<br /> assemblage behind him, the largest project of its kind that Britain has<br /> ever seen? What possible interest can he have in a development<br /> comparable with the 4.2 million square foot Mall of America complex in<br /> Bloomington, Minn? The wraith is Walter Benjamin and he’d rather be in a<br /> bygone Paris, surrounded by his precious sheaves of folio notecards -<br /> convolutes as he calls them. His gaze moves across the smooth gleaming<br /> edifice of Bluewater’s exterior and rests on the wide gash through the<br /> middle of its glass covering, revealing the grey sky. This he knows<br /> about. It may not be the Passage Choiseul in 1880, but it is the same in<br /> spirit. He nods affirmatively: surely Lend Lease Projects Ltd. has<br /> reinvented the arcades of Paris, where once existence flowed without<br /> accent, like the events in dreams.</p> <p>Architecture, he recalls scribbling in the 1920s, is the most<br /> important testimony to latent mythology - and the most important<br /> architecture of the 19th century was the arcade. Might arcades have the<br /> same significance in the 21st?</p> <p>Benjamin shuffles towards the open maw in the exterior façade,<br /> the gateway to this cabinet of curiosities. He encounters. He frowns.<br /> Why is everything so clean? Where is La Chaussee d’Antin and its five<br /> million yards of gabardine and poplin? And where is the sign proclaiming<br /> it to be “the foremost house of fashion in the world, and the most<br /> dependable”? He studies the shop names. What are this Christian Lacroix,<br /> and this Armani? Where are the sculptures at the entrance of the Passage<br /> Vivienne, all the lorgnette dealers, the heaps of tortoise for sale,<br /> grinning rows of false teeth, the life-sized dolls and the fragrant<br /> manageress of La Lampe Merveilleuse?</p> <p>The ashen shade gathers himself and moves on. After a few<br /> steps, something else catches his eye: a slim booklet, protruding from<br /> an information stand. He picks it up and opens it. “All the elements<br /> needed to create city life with style can be found in Bluewater.”<br /> Benjamin frowns - far too much spectacle and not enough dream! - and<br /> stuffs the booklet into his coat pocket. He begins to proceed slowly up<br /> the length of a strange illuminated runway, skirting round a young woman<br /> in conversation with a man pointing animatedly at a window display. The<br /> philosopher winces and begins to turn away. Then something catches his<br /> ear.</p> <p>“We live in a sanitised world with enclosed malls,” Eric Kuhne,<br /> the centre’s Texas-born architect is saying. “You’re in a completely<br /> different mindset here. It’s a series of theme based streets through<br /> which millions of people will walk. The concept is to re-imagine with<br /> light and glass the essence and spirit of metropolitan London. I don’t<br /> like American shopping centres; they’re designed like chilling<br /> fortresses. They make us feel like roaches running for cover when the<br /> lights are turned on.”</p> <p>Benjamin’s eyes narrow and he turns to confront the architect.<br /> “Excuse me for interrupting your discourse, Sir, but you are wrong,” he<br /> says politely but firmly. “There must be ‘enclosure.’ This thing you<br /> have created should be a dream house of the collective. How can you<br /> dream here? Where is the ennui, the huddling, and the stuffiness? And<br /> the erotic - where is that? You can’t reach the future by relying on<br /> mere organised thought and history with its Scotland Yard credentials,<br /> but only by dreaming and waking.” But the pair are quite plainly<br /> completely unaware of Benjamin’s apparition: they see and hear nothing<br /> of him and walk through the faint shimmer of his presence.</p> <p>The old man pauses to collect himself. “Intolerable,” he<br /> mutters. “Things have never been the same since tarmac replaced the<br /> cobbles in Paris and those cafe layabouts were - unfortunately for<br /> philosophy and literature - able to hear each other speak. And as for Le<br /> Corbusier allowing all that light into buildings - I ask you! How can<br /> one possibly awake from a tawdry miasma when there is no miasma?”</p> <p class="longQuotation">One would be well advised to approach<br /> Benjamin in an indirect and partial manner, almost through stealth, or<br /> even unawares, en passant, in accordance with the method by which<br /> Benjamin made his best finds as a collector. It will be a question not<br /> so much of assuming the proper distance to Benjamin but of situating<br /> oneself at the appropriate point in space, whether this is to the side<br /> or below. One must run the risk of a certain arbitrariness, which will<br /> pay off if a hitherto-unnoticed detail reveals itself in a fleeting<br /> flash of light. (Pierre Missac)</p> <p> In<br /><span class="booktitle">Walter Benjamin’s Passages</span>, Pierre Missac’s method of indirect critique stands in striking<br /> contrast to other critical approaches to Benjamin. It is Missac’s<br /> response to the question of the appropriate distance from Benjamin’s<br /> work at which the critic should be located. This question, as Missac<br /> argues in the chapter entitled “Writing about Benjamin,” illuminates a<br /> key problem with Benjamin criticism: either a critic takes up a<br /> standpoint too close to the work, and the criticism becomes mere<br /> imitation, tautology; or the standpoint is too distant, and Benjamin is<br /> seen through the lens of an ideology, or his work is assimilated to an<br /> existing discipline - Benjamin as a philosopher of science, for example.<br /> Additionally, while other approaches may attempt to deal with the<br /> contradictions and fragmentation in Benjamin’s work through a<br /> “resolution by oxymoron” - “the Marxist rabbi” - or by dividing<br /> Benjamin’s work into two periods - the early and the late or the<br /> theological and the materialist - Missac is intent on avoiding such<br /> treatment. If Missac’s own entrance into Benjamin’s oeuvre seems<br /> deliberately elusive, this is in part because of his commitment to<br /> following out the complexities of Benjamin’s character and work rather<br /> than trying to cover them over with the structures of existing<br /> formulations. </p> <p>What this approach produces is a structure that collects<br /> seemingly independent images and details in order to have them conspire,<br /> in the course of the analysis, to yield a new and unexpected larger<br /> pattern or framework of insight. Without collapsing the difference<br /> between empirical biography and textual production or attempting to<br /> reduce one to the other, Missac struggles to articulate the many points<br /> of contact between the two in which Benjamin’s central concerns are<br /> interconnected.</p> <p> Missac’s sophisticatedly textured and almost lyrically rhythmic<br /> prose, which at its best reflects Benjamin’s own accomplished writing<br /> from<br /><span class="booktitle">One-Way Street</span><br /> and<br /><span class="booktitle">Berlin Childhood 1900</span><br /> sets into sharp relief Benjamin’s understanding of the<br /> dialectic, of reading and writing, and of film and photography as<br /> complex allegories of time and history. Missac’s text proceeds by<br /> emphasizing central Benjaminian figures such as the miniature, the<br /> philosophically vital difference between stamp and postcard, the<br /> collector and perhaps most originally the gambler. Throughout Missac<br /> meditates obsessively and brilliantly on the figures of “passage” and<br /> “passing” evoked in the study’s title, figures that serve to illuminate<br /> in their plethora of different meanings and contextual uses the better<br /> part of Benjamin’s oeuvre. </p> <p> One central function of “passage” for example, other than its<br /> inference towards Baudelaire’s poem “A une passante” (considered crucial<br /> to Benjamin) and to<br /><span class="booktitle">Passagen-Werk</span><br /> itself, is that of being one of the triggers animating<br /> Benjamin’s philosophical preoccupation with death and decay, transience<br /> and mortality. Missac has a deeper project re-invoking the themes of<br /> death and survival and setting the image of the “passage” in relation to<br /> that of the grave or tomb, “tombeau” in French. To this image Missac<br /> situates his book in a dialectical relation in that he foregrounds the<br /> theoretically intriguing and painfully empirical fact that Benjamin has<br /> no marked grave and that no one wrote him a formal tombeau - a poem, on<br /> the occasion of the dedication of his monument, honouring the dead<br /> writer’s achievement, such as Mallarme wrote for Baudelaire or Poe.<br /> Missac’s text thus both perpetrates Benjamin’s eternal coming-to-pass<br /> and interrupts it by becoming the very tombeau desired. </p> <p>In many respects Missac intends to construct a work that is<br /> clearly designed to be a tombeau for Benjamin, in that it integrates<br /> Benjamin’s character, life and work into the complex unity that<br /> constitutes that whole - an homage demonstrating how his work<br /> anticipated the future and how it encompasses vital elements that extend<br /> resonantly into the contemporary condition. However, this is very much a<br /> “post-tradition” tombeau and this is why the motif of the “passage” is<br /> the most appropriate central image deployed. Among other things,<br /> “passage” in Benjamin, and for Missac writing about Benjamin, signifies<br /> transition and change. It allows an exploration of the multifaceted<br /> elaboration of the central but enigmatic question of the nature of the<br /> dialectic in Benjamin and the variety of aspects of “writing” in<br /> Benjamin’s work, from discussions of genre, including the thesis and the<br /> aphorism, with their associated issues of brevity and complexification,<br /> to the interplay of linear and dialectical composition and the notion of<br /> a secret or interior architecture in the work. In this sense too,<br /> Missac’s book consists of a series of repeated attempts to approach<br /> Benjamin’s death - at the impassable border between France and Spain -<br /> by routes and through aspects of his life and work. The book is a series<br /> of passages to Benjamin’s death as well as a tombeau for one who had<br /> none.</p> <p>The notion of the ‘passage” also explicates Missac’s criticism<br /> of indirection. It refers to a mode of seeking and comprehending that is<br /> non-frontal but sudden and indirect, like the movements of the knight in<br /> chess, to which Missac repeatedly compares to Benjamin’s mode of<br /> operating. This in turn leads back along another avenue to the central<br /> theme of Benjamin’s relation to time and space, and thus to the aura,<br /> and the phenomena of distance as well. Far away so close, too early and<br /> yet too late define not only to discern the aura of the artwork but also<br /> Benjamin’s relation to the act of writing, and to time past, present,<br /> and future. In the “too early” and the “too late” the present moment is<br /> obliterated. The destruction of the present is opposed by a<br /> countervailing force in Benjamin’s relationship to time, notably the<br /> instant, the messianic rupture. This image of the passage leads us by<br /> another indirect route to the dialectic in suspension and to Benjamin<br /> the “materialist” historian.</p> <p>Benjamin’s personal battle with time ended with his suicide and<br /> while Missac’s routes lead inevitably to that moment, the intention is<br /> additionally to open the possibility of Benjamin’s survival, by<br /> demonstrating how Benjamin’s work anticipated the future, and<br /> diversifying the analysis into the present. Benjamin’s program is<br /> engaged at several points: through a reflection on the contemporary<br /> progression of reading and literature, for instance, foreshadowed by<br /> Benjamin’s interpretation of Mallarme’s “Un Coup de des” as a<br /> proto-advertising poster. These inquiries are taken further in a chapter<br /> where Missac examines Benjamin’s discussions of photography and film in<br /> relation to his concepts of time and history. This proves,<br /> characteristically, to be far more than a recapitulation of Benjamin’s<br /> essay on the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. Missac<br /> presents film as the epitome of the dialectical process, the<br /> constructive negation of each momentary image by the one that succeeds<br /> it. Here Benjamin’s effort to stop time in its course is pushed to an<br /> extreme. This discussion subsequently transmutes to form the context for<br /> Missac’s extended exploration of Benjamin’s battle with time, which<br /> became his adversary; in this connection Missac again comes to the<br /> question of the dialectic in the dialectical image and the dialectic<br /> cessation.</p> <p>If in this way Missac’s critical writing is a refined form of<br /> mourning, the author registers the extent to which such writing as<br /> mourning must also exceed and fall short of itself: “There is a mode or<br /> function of writing,” Missac reflects, “in which it comes to fulfilment,<br /> and puts itself in question.” It is as if Missac’s sensitivity to<br /> Benjamin’s language animates his own, for instance when he notes that if<br /> Benjamin’s writing has a richness, not comparable to the works of other<br /> writers, this is because we find in them the echo or perhaps the<br /> ineffaceable trace of the fundamental problems of the philosophy of<br /> language. His acute awareness of these problems haunted him, and he<br /> manifested that awareness in the most concrete way possible. Missac’s<br /> investigation adeptly animates the philosophical relationship between<br /> passage and myth. When Missac cunningly relates this unique Benjaminian<br /> hauntedness, as he does, to the catastrophic loss of the fountain pen,<br /> the systematically windblown hairstyle, in the casual outfit, or the<br /> philosophical implications of playing games of chess, he reaches through<br /> analysis of the smallest details - as though they were the miniature<br /> objects of which Benjamin was so infinitely fond - toward conclusions<br /> more startling and far-reaching than those achieved by the most<br /> panoramic reviewers.</p> <p>The present is partial and intense because it is the site of<br /> repetition, the place continually structured by repetition, an eternal<br /> recurrence, and therefore the potential site of its disruptive<br /> continuity.</p> <p>Benjamin’s writing strives to attain a haunted and<br /> incommensurable quality by constructing a strategic constellation which<br /> does justice to its ghostly resistance to understanding and its deeply<br /> and powerfully critical transformative potential.</p> <p> To what extent does Benjamin’s language stage this “haunted”<br /> quality which it so clearly evokes? Is this hauntedness found in the<br /> figure for the self-referential condition of language in which according<br /> to Benjamin “language communicates itself” rather than a separable<br /> content? “It is not that what is past casts its light on what is present<br /> or that what is present casts its lights on what is past,” Benjamin<br /> explains in the<br /><span class="booktitle">Passagen-Werken</span>, “rather, an image is that in which the Former and the Now<br /> merge, like a flash of lightening, into a constellation.” What this<br /> implies is that the Benjaminian flash that gives rise to the potentially<br /> legible image of history both illuminates and blinds. </p> <p>What is idiomatic and singuar in a text, what Benjamin calls<br /> “the extraordinary, the amazing” - how it confirms its context which<br /> simultaneously betrays it in order to remain faithful to it. For<br /> Benjamin there can ultimately be no cultural analysis that does not<br /> somehow strive to come to terms with, and therefore become affected by,<br /> the movement and difficulty of the language that it would take as its<br /> object of study, and it is in this sense that Benjamin insists on a<br /> textual model of cultural and historical interpretation. As he writes in<br /> an early fragment, “theory must not refer to reality but rather must be<br /> a matter of language.”</p> <p class="longQuotation">One may also approach Benjamin’s writings<br /> by induction, so to speak, moving from the less to the more, from one<br /> part that can be grasped to a whole that is constantly threatening to<br /> elude one’s grasp but that can be reconstituted bit by bit. This would<br /> mean adopting the method that starts with the leaf in order to then<br /> rediscover “all the riches of the empirical world of plants.” (Pierre<br /> Missac)</p> <p> One of the principal concepts Benjamin invents to describe what<br /> happens to the work of art in the age of technological reproducibility<br /> (principally the age of the camera) is the loss of “aura.” Until roughly<br /> the middle of the 19th century, he says, an intersubjective relationship<br /> of a kind survived between an artwork and its viewer: “To perceive the<br /> aura of a phenomenon [means] to invest it with a capacity to look at us<br /> in turn.” There is thus something magical about aura, derived from<br /> ancient links, now wandering between art and religious ritual. Benjamin<br /> first speaks of aura in his<br /><span class="booktitle">Little History of Photography</span><br /> (1931), where he attempts to explain why it is that, in his<br /> eyes, the very earliest portrait photographs - the incunabula of<br /> photography - have auras, whereas photographs of a generation later have<br /> lost them. In “The Work of Art,” the notion of aura is extended rather<br /> recklessly from old photographs to works of art in general. The end of<br /> the aura, says Benjamin, will be more than compensated for by the<br /> emancipatory capacities of the new technologies of reproduction. Cinema<br /> will replace auratic art. In this formulation Benjamin’s concept, in its<br /> incubational stage, proves highly elusive, and yet it is clear that the<br /> general analysis is working in a direction that is quite compelling.<br /> Throughout the 1930’s Benjamin struggled to develop an acceptable<br /> materialist definition of aura and loss of aura. Film is postauratic, he<br /> says, because the camera, being an instrument, cannot see. In a<br /> subsequent revision he suggests that the end of aura can be dated to the<br /> moment in history when urban crowds grew so dense that people -<br /> passers-by - no longer returned one another’s gaze. In the<br /><span class="booktitle">Arcades Project</span><br /> he makes the loss of aura part of a wider development: the<br /> spread of a disenchanted awareness that uniqueness, including the<br /> uniqueness of the traditional artwork, has become a commodity like any<br /> other commodity. The fashion industry, dedicated to the fabrication of<br /> unique handiworks intended to be reproduced on a mass scale, points the<br /> way here. </p> <p>In the late 1920s Benjamin conceived of a work that would deal<br /> with urban experience; inspired by the arcades of Paris, it would be a<br /> version of the Sleeping Beauty story, a dialectical fairy tale told<br /> surrealistically by means of a montage of fragmentary texts. Like the<br /> prince’s kiss, it would awaken the European masses to the truth of their<br /> lives under capitalism. It would be 50 pages long; in preparation for<br /> its writing Benjamin began to copy out quotations under such headings as<br /> Boredom, Fashion, Dust. However, as a stitched together text, it became<br /> overgrown each time with new quotations and notes. Subsequently he<br /> became disillusioned with this version after criticism from Adorno and<br /> Horkheimer that he lacked sufficient grounding in Marxist theory.</p> <p> By 1934 Benjamin had a new more philosophically ambitious plan:<br /> using the same method of montage, he would trace the cultural<br /> superstructure of 19th century France back to commodities and their<br /> power to become fetishes. As his notes grew in scale, he slotted them<br /> into an elaborate filing system based on 36 convolutes (from<br /><italic>German Konvolut</italic>: sheaf, dossier) with keywords and cross-references. Under the<br /> title “Paris, Capital of the 19th century” he wrote a resume of the<br /> material which he submitted to Adorno. </p> <p>Once again, Adorno’s comments proved adverse. In an attempt to<br /> utilize the material, Benjamin abandoned the outline of the project, but<br /> used its core to construct a book on Baudelaire. Adorno saw sections of<br /> the developments commenting that the facts should not be allowed to<br /> stand alone; a greater emphasis on theory was necessary. Benjamin made<br /> the required amendments, which received a more complementary<br /> reaction.</p> <p> Baudelaire is central to the Arcades plan because, in Benjamin’s<br /> opinion,<br /><span class="booktitle">Les Fleurs du Mal</span><br /> first revealed the modern city as a subject for poetry.<br /> Baudelaire expressed his experience of the city in allegory, a literary<br /> mode out of fashion since the Baroque. In “Le Cygne”, for instance, he<br /> allegorises the poet as a swan, scrabbling comically in the paved<br /> marketplace, unable to spread its wings and soar. Why did Baudelaire opt<br /> for this allegorical mode? Benjamin uses Marx’s<br /><span class="booktitle">Kapital</span><br /> to answer this question. The elevation of market value into the<br /> sole measure of worth, says Marx, reduces a commodity to nothing but a<br /> sign - the sign of what it will sell for. Under the reign of the market,<br /> things relate to their actual worth as arbitrarily as, for instance, in<br /> baroque emblematics, a death’s head relates to man’s subjection to time.<br /> Emblems thus make an unexpected return to the historical stage in the<br /> form of commodities which, as Marx had warned, “(abound) in metaphysical<br /> subtleties and theological niceties.” Allegory, Benjamin argues, is<br /> exactly the right mode for an age of commodities. While working on the<br /> never completed Baudelaire book, Benjamin continued to take notes for<br /> the<br /><span class="booktitle">Arcades Project</span>. What was recovered after WWII from its hiding place in the<br /> Bibliotheque Nationale amounted to some 900 pages of extracts, mainly<br /> from 19th century writers but from contemporaries of Benjamin as well,<br /> grouped under headings, with interspersed commentary, plus a variety of<br /> plans and synopses. </p> <p> The history of the<br /><span class="booktitle">Arcades Project</span>, a history of procrastination and false starts, of wanderings<br /> in archival labyrinths in a quest for exhaustiveness, of shifting<br /> theoretical ground, of criticisms and generally of Benjamin not knowing<br /> his mind, means that the work we are left with is radically incomplete;<br /> incompletely conceived and hardly “written” in any conventional sense.<br /> The structure is apparent but the linking thoughts remain disconnected,<br /> existing only in the form of Benjamin’s interpolations, resulting in an<br /> ambiguous fluidity. </p> <p>The arcades of Paris, says an 1852 guidebook, are “inner<br /> boulevards, glass-roofed, marble-panelled corridors extending through<br /> blocks of buildings - lining both sides - are the most elegant shops, so<br /> that such an arcade is a city, a world in miniature.” Their airy glass<br /> and steel architecture was soon imitated in other cities of the west.<br /> The heyday of arcades extended to the end of the century, when they were<br /> eclipsed by department stores.</p> <p> The Arcades book was never intended to be an economic history<br /> (though part of its ambition was to act as a corrective to the entire<br /> discipline of economic history). An early sketch suggests something far<br /> more like the autobiographical work,<br /><span class="booktitle">A Berlin Childhood</span>. “One knew of places in ancient Greece where the way led down<br /> into the underworld. Our waking existence likewise is a land which, at<br /> certain hidden points, leads down into the underworld - land full of<br /> inconspicuous places from which dreams arise. All day long, suspecting<br /> nothing, we pass them by, but no sooner has sleep come than we are<br /> groping our way back to lose ourselves in the dark corridors. By day,<br /> the labyrinth of urban dwelling resembles consciousness; the arcades<br /> issue unremarked onto the streets. At night, however, under the<br /> tenebrous mass of the houses, their denser darkness protrudes like a<br /> threat, and the nocturnal pedestrian hurries past - unless, that is, we<br /> have emboldened him to turn into a narrow lane.” </p> <p> Two books served Benjamin as models: Louis Aragon’s<br /><span class="booktitle">A Paris Peasant</span>, with its affectionate tribute to the Passages de L’Opera, and<br /> Franz Hessel’s<br /><span class="booktitle">Strolling in Berlin</span>, which focuses on the Kaisergalerie and its power to summon up<br /> the atmosphere of a bygone era. In his book Benjamin would try to<br /> capture the “phantasmagoric” experience of the Parisian wandering among<br /> displays of goods, an experience still recoverable in his own day, when<br /> “arcades dot the metropolitan landscape like caves containing the fossil<br /> remains of a vanished monster: the consumer of the pre-imperial era of<br /> capitalism, the last dinosaur of Europe.” The great innovation of the<br /><span class="booktitle">Arcades Project</span><br /> would be its form. It would work on the principle of montage,<br /> juxtaposing textual fragments from past and present in the expectation<br /> that they would strike sparks from and illuminate each other. Thus, for<br /> instance, if item 2,1 of convolute L, referring to the opening of an art<br /> museum at the palace of Versailles in 1837, is read in conjunction with<br /> item 2,4 of convolute A which traces the development of arcades into<br /> department stores, then ideally the analogy “museum is to department<br /> store as artwork is to commodity” will flash into the readers mind. </p> <p>According to Max Weber, what marks the modern world is loss of<br /> belief, disenchantment. Benjamin has a different angle: that capitalism<br /> has put people to sleep, that they will wake up from their collective<br /> “enchantment” only when they are made to understand what has happened to<br /> them. The inscription to convolute N comes from Marx: “The reform of<br /> consciousness consists solely in the awakening of the world from its<br /> dream about itself.” The dreams of the capitalist era are embodied in<br /> commodities. In their ensemble these constitute a phantasmagoria,<br /> constantly changing shape according to the tides of fashion, and offered<br /> to crowds of enchanted worshippers as the embodiment of their deepest<br /> desires. The phantasmagoria always hides its origins (which lie in<br /> alienated labour). Phantasmagoria in Benjamin is thus a little like<br /> ideology in Marx - a tissue of public lies sustained by the power of<br /> capital - but is more like Freudian dreamwork operating at a collective,<br /> social level. “I needn’t say anything. Merely show,” says Benjamin; and<br /> elsewhere: “Ideas are objects as constellations are to stars.” If the<br /> mosaic of quotations is built up correctly a pattern should emerge that<br /> is more than the sum of its parts but which cannot exist independently<br /> of them: this is the essence of the new form of historical-materialistic<br /> writing that Benjamin believed himself to be practising.</p> <p> In order to illuminate the structural framework of the<br /><span class="booktitle">Arcades Project</span><br /> - to facilitate an enhanced interpretation - Benjamin invented<br /> the notion of the dialectical image, for which he went back to the<br /> baroque emblematic: ideas represented by pictures and Baudelairian<br /> allegory. Allegory, he suggested, could take over the role of abstract<br /> thought. The objects and figures that inhabit the arcades - gamblers,<br /> whores, mirrors, dust, wax figures - are to Benjamin emblems, and their<br /> interactions generate meanings that do not need the intrusion of theory.<br /> Along the same lines, fragments of text taken from the past and placed<br /> in the charged field of the historical present are capable of behaving<br /> much as the elements of a surrealist image do, interacting spontaneously<br /> to give off political energy. In so doing the fragments constitute the<br /> dialectical image, dialectical movement frozen for a moment open for<br /> inspection, dialectics at a standstill: “Only dialectical images are<br /> genuine images.” </p> <p>In one respect Benjamin’s texts are deeply committed to<br /> political intervention, historical insight, and cultural<br /> demystification. Indeed epistemic concepts such as “Berlin,” “Weimer<br /> Germany,” and “Modernity” are significant to his writing, and it is<br /> essential to position Benjamin’s multiple perspective in these<br /> ideological systems. Alternatively Benjamin’s elaborately hermetic texts<br /> unfold in a singularity that appears tenaciously to resist assimilation<br /> into a structured systematic construct. Essentially, the particular<br /> theoretical beauty, and uniqueness of Benjamin’s texts resides in the<br /> presence of narrative gestures that provide openings/concepts with which<br /> to access and formulate an analysis. Any understanding of Benjamin’s<br /> writing and the experience of the singularity they afford is thus<br /> predicated upon the acknowledgement that an interpretation is a process<br /> developing through and adoption and utilization of the text itself.</p> <p>Benjamin attempted to construct a theoretical and philosophical<br /> program that would allow him, “to illuminate the work fully from within<br /> itself.” The theoretical tension between text and culture and, by<br /> extension, any historically mimetic model, is further complicated by<br /> Benjamin’s distinctive assumptions about historical traces and their<br /> highly contingent relationship to a particular context. The historical<br /> traces that mark a text, therefore do not necessarily mean that it<br /> stands in a necessary relationship to the time in which it was produced.<br /> “The time of history is infinite in every direction and unfulfilled in<br /> every moment. This means that no single empirical event is thinkable<br /> that would stand in a necessary relationship to the particular<br /> historical situation in which it occurs.”</p> <p>Any engagement with Benjamin’s writing must therefore in some<br /> way account for the tension between text and its position in history and<br /> culture. It is this issue that informs the central narrative line in<br /> Pierre Missac’s analysis.</p> <p> “It (language) is primary. Not only to meaning. Also to one’s<br /> self. In the configuration of the world, the dream loosens individuality<br /> like a hollow tooth.” For Benjamin, language both exceeds stable meaning<br /> and self. This excess, though, need not be principally destructive or<br /> nihilistic but rather, is dialectically charged. For Benjamin, it is<br /> always a matter of registering the extent to which the figural or<br /> representational dimensions of a text and a culture are structurally<br /> related in that they tend to exceed or fall short of that which they<br /> seem to concentrate upon, on the surface level. Just as Benjamin’s<br /> “storyteller” in the essay of 1936 is said to be the one who would have<br /> the wick of life be slowly but completely consumed by the soft flame of<br /> its very narration, the process of unfolding Benjamin’s writing involves<br /> registering, as Benjamin writes in<br /><span class="booktitle">Elective Affinities</span><br /> the “enigma of the flame itself,” which is to say with regard to<br /> the relation between text and culture, “the truth whose living flame<br /> goes on burning over the heavy logs of what is past and the light ashes<br /> of what has been lived.” </p> <p> From a distance, Benjamin’s magnificent opus is reminiscent of<br /> another great ruin of 20th century literature, Ezra Pound’s<br /><span class="booktitle">Cantos</span>. Both works are built out of fragments, and adhere to the<br /> high-modernist aesthetics of image and montage. Both have economic<br /> ambitions and economists as presiding figures (Marx in one case, Gesell<br /> and Douglas in the other). Both authors have investments in antiquarian<br /> bodies of knowledge whose relevance to their own times they<br /> overestimate. Neither can seem to accomplish any definite conclusion<br /> points. And both were in the end consumed by the monster of fascism:<br /> Benjamin tragically, Pound shamefully. </p> <p>“Given the abundance of texts that Benjamin copied out or wrote<br /> to be included in his magnum opus, one thinks rather of the debris<br /> heaped on the site of ancient buildings, its fate not yet decided.”<br /> (Pierre Missac)</p> <p>Missac’s exploration of Benjamin’s writing foregrounds its<br /> fragility: for a number of important works, it is their fragility that<br /> makes a virtue of a vice and guarantees their quality as ruins,<br /> transfiguring them as debris.</p> <p>Benjamin’s trademark approach - coming at a subject not<br /> straight on but at an angle, moving stepwise from one perfectly<br /> formulated summation to the next - is as instantly recognisable as it is<br /> inimitable, depending on sharpness of intellect, learning lightly worn<br /> and a prose style which, once freed of the bonds of academic theory,<br /> became a marvel of accuracy and concision. Underlying his project of<br /> getting at the truth of our times is an ideal he found expressed in<br /> Goethe: to set out the facts in such a way that the facts will be their<br /> own theory.</p> <p> <span class="booktitle">The Arcades Project</span>, whatever our verdict on it - ruin, failure, impossible project<br /> - suggests a new way of writing about a culture using its rubbish as<br /> materials rather than its artworks: history from below rather than<br /> above. And his call elsewhere for a history centred on the sufferings of<br /> the vanquished, rather than on the achievements of the victors, is<br /> prophetic of the way in which history writing has begun to think of<br /> itself in our lifetime. </p> <p> Benjamin’s texts are nothing if not obsessive destructions of<br /> the philosophical tradition. As he states in the<br /><span class="booktitle">Passagen-Werk</span>, “construction presupposes destruction.” For Benjamin<br /> destruction always implied the destruction of some false or deceptive<br /> form of experience as the productive condition for the initiation of a<br /> new relation to the object, as when allegory seems to destabilize the<br /> symbols mis-leading veil of closure and totality, or when the rupturing<br /> of the aura in photography enables the experience of the hitherto<br /> unknown sphere of what Benjamin terms the “optical unconscious.”<br /> Proceeding from an investigation into Benjaminian moments of destruction<br /> as moments of thinking temporality (and ultimately the movement of<br /> destruction of history itself). </p> <p>Why all the interest in a treatise on shopping in 19th century<br /> France? There is no doubt that to rationalise and design Benjamin in<br /> preparation for his comfortable digestion by capital’s cultural machine<br /> is a piece of twisted prostitution of the kind he would fully have<br /> appreciated. A recovery of the sense of Benjamin’s writing is the surest<br /> path to its radical impoverishment. The object of philosophy, insofar as<br /> the reflective meditation upon thought could be taken to characterize<br /> it, is arbitrarily prescribed as undisturbed reasoning. It is thus that<br /> successfully adapted, tranquil, moderate and productive reason<br /> monopolizes the philosophical conception of thought, in the same way<br /> that the generalized somnambulism of regulated labour precludes all<br /> intense gestures from social existence. Who cares what “anyone” thinks,<br /> knows, or theorizes about Benjamin? The only thing to try and touch is<br /> the intense shock wave that still reaches us along with the textual<br /> embers, for as long, that is, as anything can still “reach us.” Where<br /> Descartes needed God to mediate his relations with his contemporaries,<br /> secular humanity is content with the TV-screen, and with all the other<br /> commodified channels of simulated communication with which civilization<br /> is so thoughtfully endowed. Such things are for our own protection of<br /> course; to filter out the terrifying threat of a realisation that would<br /> awaken us from our dream.</p> </div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/bluewater">bluewater</a>, <a href="/tags/robert-graves">robert graves</a>, <a href="/tags/mall-america">mall of america</a>, <a href="/tags/passage-choiseul">passage choiseul</a>, <a href="/tags/lend-lease-projects-ltd">lend lease projects ltd.</a>, <a href="/tags/architecture">architecture</a>, <a href="/tags/arcades">arcades</a>, <a href="/tags/eric-kuhne">eric kuhne</a>, <a href="/tags/spectacle">spectacle</a>, <a href="/tags/dream">dream</a>, <a href="/tags/illuminations">illuminations</a>, <a href="/tags/le-corbusier">le corbusier</a>, <a href="/tags/ezra-pound">ezra pound</a>, <a href="/tags/cantos">cantos</a></div></div></div> Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000 EBR Administrator 669 at http://www.electronicbookreview.com