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Soldiers of the Revolution: The Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune

these are theological concepts that Benjamin mobilized in the name of a future that might transcend our fallen modernity – a future he thought he glimpsed in Moscow – and it represents what we might call, after Adorno, his negative dialectics, his view of a modern world dominated by an “impoverishment of contemporary experience” and a set of technological innovations that might, nevertheless, help overcome that impoverishment (245). All of this, of course, places Benjamin squarely within the tradition of Western Marxism as defined by Perry Anderson, with its distance from actual politics, a fact Jameson acknowledges. Whether we find this form of cultural analysis to be satisfactory “depends very much on the historical value one attaches to culture and on the way in which superstructures are seen as an active part of the mode of production” (30–31). Jameson’s method suggests another response: even the most seemingly abstract theorizing can find its politics when properly historicized. One of Benjamin’s most important concepts is the dialectical image – the process by which a moment from the past is blasted out of the ideological continuity of history due to its relation to our own time – which helps us see how Benjamin’s moment, with its struggle over the fate of the masses, resonates with our own of competing right and left populisms. If we agree with Jameson that “socialism... is a theory and a politics of the productive uses of the ever-heightening power of the forces of production,” then we can see Benjamin’s work – and ultimately Jameson’s own – as an analogous effort to seize the forces of cultural production for a future that is in no way guaranteed (206).