## 1. Biographical Sketch


Walter Bendix Schoenflies Benjamin was born on July 15, 1892, the
eldest of three children in a prosperous Berlin family from an
assimilated Jewish background. At the age of 13, after a prolonged
period of sickness, Benjamin was sent to a progressive co-educational
boarding school in Haubinda, Thuringia, where he formed an important
intellectual kinship with the liberal educational reformer Gustav
Wyneken. On his return to Berlin, he began contributing to *Der Anfang*
('The Beginning'), a journal dedicated to Wyneken's
principles on the spiritual purity of youth, articles which contain in
embryonic form important ideas on experience and history that continue
to occupy his mature thought. As a student at the universities of
Freiburg im Breisgau and Berlin, Benjamin attended lectures by the
neo-Kantian philosopher Heinrich Rickert and the sociologist Georg
Simmel, whilst continuing to be actively involved in the growing Youth
Movement. In 1914, however, Benjamin denounced his mentor and withdrew
from the movement in response to a public lecture in which Wyneken
praised the ethical experience that the outbreak of war afforded the
young. In 1915 a friendship began between Benjamin and Gerhard (later
Gershom) Scholem, a fellow student at Berlin. This relationship would
have a lifelong influence upon Benjamin's relation to Judaism and
Kabbalism, notably in his interpretations of Kafka in the early 1930s
and in the messianic interpretation of the Paul Klee painting *Angelus Novus* in
his later theses 'On the Concept of History'. Scholem would
prove instrumental in establishing and, in part, shaping the legacy of
Benjamin's works after his death (Raz-Krakotzkin 2013). 



Benjamin's doctoral dissertation, 'The Concept of Art Criticism
in German Romanticism', was awarded, *summa cum laude*, by
the University of Bern, Switzerland, in 1919. His celebrated essay on
Goethe's novella, *The Elective Affinities*, was begun shortly
after and put into practice the theory of art criticism developed in
his dissertation. Benjamin's *Habilitationsschrift* on
the *Origin of the German Mourning-Play* (*Ursprung des
deutschen Trauerspiels*)--the thesis which would have enabled
him to become a professional academic--had, he feared, with the
death of his intellectual ally, the Protestant theologian Florens
Christian Rang, lost its "proper reader" (GB 3:16). In 1925, he was forced to withdraw his submission from the
University of Frankfurt am Main and with it the possibility of a
future academic position. However, despite this academic
failure, an excerpt from the work appeared in a literary journal two
years later and the book was published the following year (1928),
quickly receiving favourable attention in a number of well regarded
newspapers and periodicals in Germany and further afield (Brodersen
1996, 154). In an ironic twist, Benjamin's
failed *Habilitation* study became the subject of a seminar
course taught at Frankfurt University in 1932-3 by Theodor
Wiesengrund (later Theodor W. Adorno).



Much of the writing for his thesis was completed in 1924 on the Italian
island of Capri, where Benjamin had retreated for financial reasons.
The stay would prove decisive, however, since it was here he met the
Bolshevik Latvian theatre producer Asja Lacis, with whom he begun an
erotically frustrated but intellectually productive relationship.
'Naples' was jointly written with Lacis in 1925, whilst *One-Way Street*,
a quasi-constructivist collection of fragments written between
1923-1926 and dedicated to Lacis on its publication in 1928, and the
unfinished *Arcades Project*,
begun in the late 1920s, both exhibit a modernist experimentation with
form that can in part be attributed to Lacis' influence. His
Marxist turn towards historical materialism was compounded by his
enthusiastic study of Georg Lukacs' *History and Class Consciousness*
whilst on Capri and a visit to Lacis in Soviet Moscow in the winter of
1926-7.


By the early 1930s Benjamin was closely involved in the plans
for a left-wing periodical to be entitled 'Crisis and
Critique', in collaboration with Ernst Bloch, Sigfried Kracauer
and, among others, the Marxist poet, playwright and theatre director
Bertolt Brecht (Wizisla 2009, 66-98). Benjamin had been introduced
to Brecht by Lacis in 1929 and over the following decade developed a
close personal friendship, in which their literary and political
affinities had been cemented under the difficult conditions of
political exile. Benjamin undertook a series of studies of
Brecht's "epic theatre" and modelled the radio
broadcasts he wrote and presented during this period upon the
latter's experiments in theatrical didacticism (Brodersen
1996, 193). In 1933, Benjamin departed Nazi Germany for the last time,
following Adorno, Brecht and many other Jewish friends into an exile he
divided between Paris, Ibiza, San Remo and Brecht's house near
Svendborg, Denmark.




During the 1930s the Institute for Social Research, by this point
under the directorship of Horkheimer and exiled from its base in the
University of Frankfurt, provided Benjamin with important
opportunities for publishing as well as an increasingly necessary
financial stipend. Theodor W. Adorno, who had been introduced to
Benjamin a decade earlier by a mutual friend, Siegfried Kracauer, was
instrumental in securing this support. An important consequence of
this dependence, however, was the editorial revisions to which key
essays in which Benjamin developed his materialist theory of art were
subjected, such as 'The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical
Reproducibility' and those on Baudelaire and Paris that grew out
of *The Arcades Project*.


With the outbreak of war in 1939, Benjamin was temporarily interned
in the French "concentration camps" established for German
citizens. On his release a few months later he returned to Paris and
there continued his work in the Bibliotheque Nationale
on *The Arcades Project*. The notes for his unfinished
research were left in the safekeeping of librarian and friend, the
writer Georges Bataille, as Benjamin fled Paris before the advancing
German army in the summer of 1940. The last few months of Benjamin's
life reflect the precarious experience of countless other Jewish
Germans in Vichy France: a flight to the border and preparations for
emigration by legal or illegal means. Lacking the necessary exit visa
from France, he joined a guided party that crossed the Pyrenees in an
attempt to enter Spain as illegal refugees. Turned back by customs
officials, Benjamin took his life in the small, Spanish border town of
Port Bou, on September 27, 1940.



## 2. Early Works: Kant and Experience




The importance of Benjamin's early unpublished fragments for an
understanding his wider philosophical project has been emphasised by a
number of scholars (Wolfharth 1992; Caygill 1998; Rrenban 2005).
Indeed, without them it becomes difficult to understand the
intellectual context and historical tradition out of which Benjamin is
writing and therefore nearly impossible to grasp the philosophical
underpinnings of his works. Of Benjamin's earliest published
writing his attempt in the essay entitled 'Experience'
('*Erfahrung*', 1913/1914) to distinguish an
alternative and superior concept of experience provides a useful
introduction to a central and enduring preoccupation of his
thought. Benjamin's concern with delineating an immediate and
metaphysical experience of spirit is valuable in providing a thematic
description of a conceptual opposition working throughout his
thought. Filtered here through the cultural ideals of the Youth
Movement, this contrasts the empty, spiritless [*Geistlosen*]
and unartistic "experiences" accumulated over a life
merely lived-through [*erlebt*] with that privileged kind of
experience which is filled with spiritual content through its enduring
contact with the dreams of youth (SW 1, 3-6). The influence of
Nietzsche in these earlier texts is discernible (McFarland 2013),
particularly, in the importance the young Benjamin places upon
aesthetic experience in overcoming the embittered nihilism of
contemporary values (although he is unable to articulate this cultural
transformation here beyond a vague appeal to the canon of German
poets: Schiller, Goethe, Holderlin, and Stefan George).


By 1918 the attempt at a more systematic and philosophically
sophisticated understanding of a "higher concept of
experience" (SW 1, 102) within what Benjamin now calls "the
coming philosophy" is articulated in relation to Kant's
transcendental idealism. Benjamin argues that the value of Platonic and
Kantian philosophy lies in its attempt to secure the scope and depth of
knowledge through justification, exemplified in the way Kant conducts a
critical inquiry into the transcendental conditions of knowledge. But
this Kantian attempt to grasp a certain and timeless knowledge is in
turn based upon an empirical concept of experience which is restricted,
Benjamin argues, to that "naked, primitive, self evident"
experience of the Enlightenment, whose paradigm is Newtonian physics
(SW 1, 101). Despite Kant's introduction of a transcendental
subject, his system remains tied to a naive empiricist
understanding of experience, of the kind privileged in the positivist
scientific tradition as the encounter between a distinct subject
(conceived as a cognizing consciousness receiving sensible intuitions)
and object (understood as a sensation-causing thing-in-itself).


In contrast, the pre-Enlightenment concept of experience invested
the world with a deeper and more profound significance, because the
Creation assumes a revelatory religious importance. This is apparent
not only in the deeply Christian world-view of mediaeval Europe, but
survives in secularized form in Renaissance and Baroque humanism, and
in "Counter-Enlightenment" thinkers such as J. G. Hamann,
Goethe, and the Romantics. Benjamin suggests that the "great
transformation and correction which must be performed upon the concept
of experience, oriented so one-sidedly along mathematical-mechanical
lines, can be attained only by relating knowledge to language, as was
attempted by Hamann during Kant's lifetime" (SW 1, 107-8).
In the essay 'On Language as Such and the Language of Man'
('*Uber Sprache uberhaupt und uber die Sprache
des Menschen*', c. 1916), Benjamin offers a theological
conception of language which draws on Hamann's discussion of Creation
as the physical imprint of the divine Word of God, to claim that there
"is no event or thing in either animate or inanimate nature that
does not in some way partake of language" (SW 1,
62-3). This implies that all experience--including
perception--is essentially linguistic, whilst all human language
(including writing, typically associated with mere convention) is
inherently expressive and creative. Language is privileged as a model
of experience in these early essays precisely because it undermines
and transgresses the neat divisions and limitations operating in the
Kantian system, including that fundamental one that distinguishes
between the subject and object of sensations. If both are
constitutively linguistic, language serves as a medium of experience
that binds the ostensible "subject" and
"object" in a more profound, perhaps mystical,
relationship of underlying kinship. More generally, Hamann's
metacritique provides Benjamin with a sense of the hypocrisy of the
Kantian separation of understanding and sensibility on the basis of an
empty and purely formal notion of pure reason, which can itself only
be postulated according to the concrete, aesthetic content of
language.



Whilst Benjamin is not interested in returning to the pre-critical
project of a rationalist deduction of experience, nor to a directly
religious conception of the world, he is interested in how the
scientific concept of experience that Kant is utilising distorts the
structure of Kant's philosophical system, and how this might be
corrected with the use of theological concepts. Epistemology must
address not only "the question of the certainty of knowledge that
is lasting", but also the neglected question of "the
integrity of an experience that is ephemeral" (SW 1, 100).
Benjamin's suggestion as to how this project might be formulated
within the Kantian system is sketchy, but nonetheless indicates some of
the preoccupying concerns of his later writings. In general, it
involves the expansion of the limited spatio-temporal forms and
essentially causal-mechanistic categories of Kant's philosophy
through the integration of, for example, religious, historical,
artistic, linguistic and psychological experiences. Benjamin's
enduring concern with the new, the outmoded and the heteronomous
reflect this attempt to integrate more speculative phenomenological
possibilities of experience into the remit of philosophical
knowledge. It resists privileging any single discipline of knowledge,
preserving a multiplicity that implicates truth in the problem of
aesthetic representation. This would lead Benjamin to attempt a radical
rethinking of the philosophical concept of the Idea, away from its
dualistic associations with a timeless and purely rational essence of
things.


Benjamin also believes that a more speculative metaphysics would
necessitate the abolishment of the sharp distinction between Nature
and Freedom--or causal mechanism and moral willing--in
Kant's architectonic. Since it is a specific understanding of
"dialectic" which mediates between these two spheres in
Kant's critical system, this entails a speculative rethinking of the
Kantian dialectic. This suggests that new possibilities of syllogistic
logical relations might themselves be opened up, including what he
calls "a certain nonsynthesis of two concepts in another"
(SW 1, 106; cf. Weber 2008, 48). The relation of nonsynthesis hinted
at here can be seen to inform Benjamin's understanding of the Idea as
a constellation of extremes in the *Origin of the German
Mourning-Play* and of the dialectical image in his mature
writings. In this sense, Benjamin's metacritique of Kant represents an
attempt to construct an alternative post-Kantian tradition to that of
Hegelian dialectics. It therefore required a new philosophy of
history.


## 3. Romanticism, Goethe and Criticism


Benjamin initially sought to develop these ideas in the context of
Kant's philosophy of history, believing it was in this context that
the problems of the Kantian system could be fully exposed and
challenged (C, 98). A very early article, 'The Life of
Students' ('*Das Leben der Studenten*',
1915), is useful for suggesting how these problems manifest themselves
within the philosophy of history. It rejects a "a view of
history that puts its faith in the infinite extent of time and thus
concerns itself only with the speed, or lack of it, with which people
and epochs advance along the path of progress" and contrasts
this with a perspective "in which history appears to be
concentrated on a single focal point, like those that had
traditionally been found in the utopian images of the
philosophers" (SW 1, 37). The latter, 'messianic'
view of history has a distinct intention and methodology: it aims to
grasp how elements of what Benjamin calls "the ultimate
condition" and "highest metaphysical state" of
history--which we might call the historical Absolute--appear
not as the *telos* or end of history, but as an immanent state
of perfection which has the potential to manifest itself in any
particular moment (SW 1, 37). He claims that the necessary recognition
of such metaphysical condition requires an act of criticism
[*Kritik*] (SW 1, 38). Benjamin had initially proposed Kant's
philosophy of history as the topic of his doctoral dissertation, and
while he felt it necessary to change this to the Early German
Romantics' philosophy of art, crucial features of the proposed project
survive in the final work. Astute readers, he says, may still discern
in it an "insight into the relationship of a truth to
history" (C, 135-6). Specifically, the concept of art
criticism operating in Romantic aesthetics rests upon epistemological
presuppositions that reveal the 'messianic' essence of
Romanticism (SW 1, 116-7; n.3, 185). The messianic conjunction
between the highest metaphysical state of history and the ephemerality
of each particular moment is here seen as theoretically determining
the Romantic relationship between the artistic Absolute--or what
Benjamin defines as the Idea of art--and each particular
artwork.


In his doctoral dissertation, Benjamin argues that the philosophical
relationship between the Idea of art and particular artworks posited in
Romantic aesthetics must be understood in relation to Fichte's
theory of reflection. This sought to ground the possibility of a
certain and immediate type of cognition without recourse to the
problematic notion of an intellectual intuition. For Fichte, reflection
indicates the free activity of consciousness taking itself as its own
object of thought: its capacity for thinking of thinking. In doing so,
the initial form of thinking is transformed into its content. In such
reflection, thought seems capable of immediately grasping itself as a
thinking subject and therefore of possessing a certain kind of
immediate and foundational knowledge. Although Benjamin introduces a
number of specific criticisms of Fichte's philosophical position
in his dissertation, he nonetheless values the Fichtean concept of
reflection for providing the epistemological foundation of Friedrich
Schlegel's and Novalis' understandings of the metaphysical
function of art criticism. Some scholars have, however, questioned the
accuracy of Benjamin's interpretation of Fichte's concept
of reflection and the importance he accords to it in Romantic
epistemology (Bullock 1987, 78-93; Menninghaus 2005, 29-44). 


Unlike in Fichte, here immediacy and infinitude are not mutually
exclusive aspects of cognition. The uniqueness of the Romantic concept
of the Absolute resides in the fact that the Romantic conception of
infinitude regards it not as empty but "substantial and
filled" (SW 1, 129). Benjamin argued that the Romantics
specifically identified this structure of the Absolute with the Idea of
art, and in particular with artistic form (SW 1, 135). Art criticism
becomes central to this concept of infinite fulfilment because, like
the epistemological relation between reflection and thought in Fichte,
criticism both consummates the finite and particular work by raising it
to a higher level--in which the form of the work is transformed
into content as the object of criticism--and simultaneously
connects the work's particular artistic form with the continuity
and unity of absolute form in the Idea of art. Criticism is, for the
Romantics, the continuation and ongoing completion of the particular
work through its infinite connection with other art works and works of
criticism. By conceiving the Idea of art as a 'medium of
reflection', the early Romantics dissolve the Enlightenment
world-view of the positive sciences that Fichte inherited from Kant,
and in doing so overcome the critical injunctions placed upon the
experience of the infinite (SW 1, 132; 131). This conception of a
fulfilled infinity constitutes the messianism that Benjamin claims is
essential to Early Romantic epistemology.


In the version of the dissertation formally submitted to the
university, Benjamin concludes by identifying the Romantic theory of
art criticism with 'the consummation of the work' (SW 1,
177). The artwork provides the immanent criterion for critical
reflection, which in turn completes the work by raising it into an
autonomous and higher existence. This immanent criticism rejects both
the dogmatic imposition of external rules (such as those of classical
aesthetics) and the dissolution of aesthetic criteria (with the appeal
to artistic genius). It provides, Benjamin thought, one of the
fundamental legacies for a modern concept of art criticism. The version
circulated amongst friends and colleagues does not conclude with a
complete affirmation of Romanticism, however, but contains a critical
afterword that renders explicit the critical objections that Benjamin
had carefully inserted into the text. These suggest that the Romantic
theory of art, and by implication the structure of the Absolute it is
grounded upon, is problematically one-sided and incomplete with regard
to (1) its formalism, (2) its positivity, and (3) its singularity. 


1. Since the content of each, successive,
level of reflection is supplied by the form of its object, the
criticism unfolds the germ of immanent criticizability contained in
each particular artwork's form. This formalism precludes any
serious discussion of the artwork's specific content.
2. Conversely, anything immanently uncriticizable cannot constitute a
true work of art. As a consequence, Romantic criticism is unable to
differentiate between good or bad artworks, since its only criterion
is whether a work *is* or *is not* art. Such criticism
is entirely positive in its evaluation, and lacks the important
negative moment essential to judgement.
3. Finally, Schlegel "committed the old error of confounding
'abstract and 'universal' when he believed he had to
make that [Absolute] ground [of art] into an individual",
Benjamin claims (SW 1, 166-7). He therefore gave a "false
interpretation" of the unity of all works when he conceived this
as pertaining to some mystical, singular and transcendental work.


The consequent need for what Benjamin presents as a Goethean
modification of Early German Romanticism is laid out in the afterword.
The relation between these criticisms of Romanticism and Goethe's
thought is suggested in the claim that, "Ultimately the mystical
thesis that art itself is one work...stands in exact correlation with
the principle which asserts the indestructibility of works that are
purified in irony" (SW 1, 167). With its mistaken emphasis on the
singularity of the Idea of art, Romantic fulfilment only coincides with
the infinity of the unconditioned, meaning that fulfilment is an
essentially non-historical category of the infinite. Such criticism
cannot be described as judgement, since all authentic judgement
involves an essential negative moment of completion in
"self-annihilation" (SW 1, 152). Consequently, because
'Romantic messianism is not at work in its full force' here
(SW 1, 168), the Romantics were increasingly forced to turn to the
"accoutrements" of ethics, religion and politics to provide
the content required to complete their theory of art. 


Goethe's conception of aesthetic judgement and his principle
of the 'uncriticizability' of great works provided Benjamin
with a way of thinking the necessary modification to the Early German
Romantic Idea of art. His explication of the implicit metaphysical
structure of Goethe's corresponding Ideal of art reveals the
contrasting features of his structure of the Absolute: as a sphere of
pure content, a medium of destructive *refraction*,
and a plurality of discontinuous archetypes (Charles 2020, 53-67). Because finite, particular
works can never be romanticized into the unity of an individual
Absolute, they remains immanently incomplete and yet nonetheless
incapable of higher consummation: a "torso", dismembered in
relation to the whole, corpse-like in its deadness. In this context,
the true task of criticism becomes not the consummation of the living
work, but that destructive completion of the dying one.


Benjamin's essay on 'Goethe's *Elective
Affinities*' (1924-5) provides an exemplary piece of
such criticism, whilst developing the concept further by situating it
more explicitly within the context of history. Here, criticism is
charged with the task of revealing what Benjamin calls the
"truth content of a work of art", which is intimately
bound up with its "material content" at the beginning of
the work's history (SW 1, 297). In contrast to mere
commentary--which proceeds no further than a consideration of
these now historically anachronistic features of its material
content--the aim of criticism is the destruction of this outer
layer in order for the work's inner truth content to be grasped. The
fundamental philological error of commentary is merely to situate the
work in relation to the "lived experience
[*Erlebnis*]" of its author's biographical life
(exemplified in Friedrich Gundolf's 1916 biography
of *Goethe*), instead of the broader medium of historical
reception through which it has passed down to the contemporary
critic. Benjamin's Romantic theory of immanent criticism insists that
the work must contain its own inner criterion, such that the critic
proceeds from the work itself and not from the life of the author (SW
1, 321). Beginning, therefore, with the odd and striking features of
Goethe's work that come to preoccupy later critics, Benjamin examines
how these are derived from techniques borrowed from the distinct form
of the novella. This novella-like construction grants the *Elective
Affinities* its strange, fable-like quality, which differentiates
it from the naturalism of a typical novel. It is this mythical layer,
as the real material content of the work, which expresses the presence
of a pantheistic and "daemonic" attitude toward nature in
Goethe's work.


Truth content, in contrast, is not to be sought in the conspicuous
features of the work's technique, but in the unity of its
distinct form. The task of criticism is to make this truth content an
object of experience. It concerns itself not with the life or
intentions of the artist, but with that semblance or appearance of life
that the work itself possesses by virtue of its mimetic capacity for
representation: its linguistic expressiveness, which is described as a
verging and bordering on life (SW 1, 350). What is essential to art,
however, and what distinguishes it from the semblance of nature, is the
"expressionless [*Ausdruckslose*]":
that critical violence within the work of art that "arrests this
semblance, spellbinds the movement, and interrupts the harmony"
(SW 1, 340). "Only the expressionless completes the work" *as*
a work of art, Benjamin argues, and it does so by shattering the
work's semblance of unity, the false appearance of totality
pertaining to it. Unlike the intensification of Romantic reflection,
when this semblance itself becomes the object of a higher-level
semblance, a refractive dissonance is opened up. Drawing on
Holderlin's concept of the caesura to describe this moment,
Benjamin calls it a "counter-rhythmic rupture" (SW 1, 341).
In focusing its efforts on representing this caesura, genuine criticism
in turn deepens the refractive violence, performing a destructive or
mortuary act of self-annihilation upon the work.


Art, at the very limit of its mimetic capacity, draws attention to
its construction and in doing so finds the resources to encapsulate a
deeper truth. It is against what Benjamin calls the Christian-mystical
certainty in future reconciliation (which Goethe inserts into the
conclusion of the novella as an attempt to counter the mythical
fatalism which holds sway elsewhere) that he instead endorses the
paradoxical glimmer of hope identified with the image of a shooting
star which appears in Goethe's novella (SW 1, 354-5). If the
image of the star retains its relationship to the symbolic here, it
does so in accordance with Benjamin's earlier description of the
expressionless as "the torso of a symbol" (SW 1, 340).
However, it might be better to understand the significance of the
caesura here in the context of the theory of allegory. This is only
properly formulated in Benjamin's next major work, his thesis on
the *Origin of the German Mourning-Play* (*Ursprung des
deutschen Trauerspiels*, 1928).


## 4. Baroque Constellations



 'Mourning-play' (*Trauerspiel*)
is a term used to characterise a type of drama that emerges during the
baroque period of art history in the late 16th and early 17th century.
The principle examples discussed in Benjamin's thesis come not
from its great exponents, Pedro Calderon de la Barca and William
Shakespeare, but the German dramatists Martin Opitz, Andreas Gryphius,
Johann Christian Hallmann, Daniel Caspar von Lohenstein, and August
Adolf von Haugwitz. Their plays are characterised by a simplicity of
action which is comparable to the classicism of earlier Renaissance
theatre, but also contain peculiarly baroque features. These include an
exaggerated and violent bombast in their language (including a
figurative tendency towards linguistic contraction), an absence of
psychological depth in its characters, a preponderance of and
dependency upon theatrical props and machinery, and a crude emphasis on
violence, suffering and death (cf. Newman 2011; Ferber 2013).


Leaving aside for now the methodological introduction (referred to
in English as the 'Epistemo-Critical Prologue'), the first
part of Benjamin's thesis is concerned with repudiating the dogmatic
attempt by later critics to impose onto these plays the external
criteria of Aristotelian aesthetics, which are rooted in classical
tragedy. Benjamin's understanding of tragedy here (and his approach to
the mourning-play in general) is partially influenced by Friedrich
Nietzsche's *The Birth of Tragedy*. Benjamin claims
that *The Birth of Tragedy* substantiates the critical insight
that the empathy of undirected modern feeling is unhelpful for properly
grasping ancient tragedy (OGT, 93). Instead, Nietzsche undertook a
metaphysical inquiry into the essence of tragedy as a dialectical
interplay of the contrasting aesthetic impulses of Apollonian
semblance and Dionysian truth. This dialectic is central to Benjamin's
own philosophical investigations, particularly his claim--derived
from his discussion of Goethe's *Elective
Affinities*--that an expressionless moment is constitutive of
art, in which the limits of semblance are broached precisely in order
to illuminate an artistic truth.


But Benjamin is also critical of Nietzsche for restricting his
approach to aesthetics, and therefore renouncing the understanding of
tragedy in historical terms. Lacking a philosophy of history,
Nietzsche's study was unable to situate the political and ethical
significance of the metaphysical and mythical features it isolates
(OGT, 93). Influenced by ideas from Franz Rosenzweig and Florens
Christian Rang (Asman 1992), Benjamin presents tragedy as
expressing a perceived break between the prehistorical age of mythical
gods and heroes and the emergence of a new ethical and political
community. The historical limitations of Nietzsche's theory of
tragedy become acute when it comes to the question of the possibility
of a recuperation of the tragic form in modern theatre. Whilst
Nietzsche tends to simply denounce the weakness of modern drama against
the strength of the Greeks (excepting, in his early work, the operas of
Wagner), Benjamin is concerned with establishing whether the historical
conditions of the tragic form are themselves a limit to its
contemporary efficacy. 


In line with the principles of Romantic criticism discussed above,
mourning-plays contain their own distinct form and should be criticised
according to their own immanently discovered standards. The
"content [*Gehalt*]" and "
true object" of the baroque mourning-play is not, as it is in
tragedy, myth but rather historical life (OGT, 46). As with
Goethe's borrowing of the novella form, this content is in part
derived from other aesthetic structures, principally the eschatological
focus of mediaeval Christian literature: the Passion-Plays,
Mystery-Plays and chronicles whose historiography portrayed "the
whole of the course of history, world history as salvation history" (OGT,
65). But the Lutheran renunciation of the Catholic emphasis upon good
works, and the secularizing tendency implicit in the naturalistic legal
and political philosophies of the 16th and 17th century (discussed in
relation to Carl Schmitt's theory of sovereignty) resulted in the
stripping bare of human value and significance from such history. This
tense, antinomical combination of transcendence and immanence produces
an uneasy hybrid, in which history--as a narrative of the human
march towards redemption on the Day of Judgement--loses the
eschatological certainty of its redemptive conclusion, and becomes
secularized into a mere natural setting for the profane struggle over
political power. 


Benjamin's reflections on sovereign violence in the 17th century
may be contrasted with his discussion of the revolutionary kind in his
earlier 'Critique of Violence' ('*Zur Kritik der
Gewalt*', 1921), itself a response to Georges
Sorel's *Reflections on Violence* (1908). These texts have
provoked a number of responses in the context of political theology,
most notably from Carl Schmitt, Jacques Derrida and Giorgio
Agamben. Schmitt responded directly to Benjamin's essay in *Hamlet
or Hecuba* (1956). Derrida's section on the 'Critique of
Violence' in his *Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of
Authority* (1989) interrogates this evocation of a revolutionary
kind of divine violence, a critical engagement which continues in
Derrida's discussion of the messianic in *Spectres of Marx*
(1994) and 'Marx and Sons' (1999), and in relation to
Schmitt in *The Politics of Friendship* (1994). These complex
relations between Benjamin, Schmitt, and Derrida have become the
subject of a number of studies, including Agamben's *State
of Exception* (2004) (Bredekamp 1999, 247-266; Liska 2009),
although more careful studies have emphasized the clear divergences
between Benjamin's position and those of Derrida and of Schmitt (Tomba
2009, 131-132; Averlar 2005, 79-106; Weber 2008,
176-194). In this respect, it was not Schmitt's political
theology but the reactionary vitalism of Ludwig Klages that proved a
more influential and enduring object of fascination for Benjamin (Fuld
1981; McCole 1993, 178-180, 236-246; Wolin 1994,
xxxi-xxxviii; Wohlfarth 2002, 65-109; Lebovic 2013,
1-10, 79-110; Charles 2018, 52-62). 


In the second part of his thesis, Benjamin employs the concept of
allegory to expose the implicit eschatological structure of these
works. However, the first part utilises the distorting tension of this
structure to distinguish the specific and historically conspicuous
technique of the German baroque mourning-play. This concludes by
identifying sorrow or mourning (*Trauer*)
as the predominant mood inherent to its metaphysical structure, in
contrast to the suffering of tragedy. With the "total 
secularization of the historical in the state of creation...History
passes into the setting" to become natural history (OGT, 81),
whose attendant cognition is a melancholic contemplation of things
which derives enigmatic satisfaction from its very recognition of their
transience and emptiness (OGT, 141). "For all wisdom of the
melancholic hearkens to the deep", Benjamin claims:
"it is won from immersion in the life of creaturely things, and
nothing of the voice of revelation reaches it. Everything to do with Saturn
points into the depths of the earth..." (OGT, 157).


To grasp how the form of these works are determined by their truth
content requires a reconstruction of the baroque concept of the
allegorical which structures its mood of melancholic contemplativeness.
Benjamin's claim is that a genuine understanding of the
allegorical as it emerged in its highest form in the 17th century has
been obscured by, on the one hand, the later Romantic aestheticizing of
the symbol and, on the other, by the tendency to conceive the
allegorical negatively in its contrast with this devalued, aesthetic
concept. It is only by first recovering a genuine theological concept
of the symbol, therefore, that we are able in turn to distinguish an
authentic concept of the allegorical. This it to be done by reasserting
the profound but paradoxical theological unity between the material and
the transcendental found in the symbolic. The fundamental distinction
between theological concepts of symbol and the allegory will then be
seen as concerning not their differing objects (Idea vs. abstract
concept), but the differing ways in which they signify, express or
represent this object. Benjamin will conclude that this difference is,
specifically, a temporal one. 


Drawing on undeveloped insights found in the work of the
mythographers Georg Friedrich Creuzer and Johann Joseph von
Gorres, Benjamin points out how "the temporal measure for the experience of the symbol[*Symbolerfahrung*] is the mystical instant
[*Nu*]" (OGT, 173). We must understand the temporality of
the allegorical, in contrast, as something dynamic, mobile, and
fluid. This authentic concept of allegory arises in the 17th century
baroque as a response to the antithesis between mediaeval religiosity
and Renaissance secularization discussed earlier. The spatialization
of the temporal structure of eschatology in the allegorical
corresponds to the naturalization of the religious structure of
history in the baroque: "Whereas in the symbol, with the
sublimation of downfall, the transfigured countenance of nature reveals itself 
fleetingly in the light of salvation, in allegory
there lies before the eyes of the observer the *facies hippocratica* [lit. 'Hippocratic face'
= the sunken, hollow and pinched features exhibited by the dying] of history
as petrified primal
landscape. History, in everything untimely, sorrowful, and miscarried that belongs to it from the beginning, is inscribed in a
face--no, in a death's head [*Totenkopfe*]"
(OGT, 174).


From the perspective of the allegorical, the instantaneous
transformation within the symbolic becomes a natural history slowed to
such an extreme that every sign appears frozen and--seemingly
loosened from every other relationship--arbitrary. The concrete
corporeality of the written script exemplifies this allegorical
emphasis upon things. Allegory is not the *conventional*
representation of some expression, as misunderstood by later critics,
but an *expression* of convention [*Ausdruck der
Konvention*] (OGT, 185). Allegorical expression includes as its
object this very conventionality of the historical, this appearance of
insignificance and indifference. That is, convention itself comes to
be signified or expressed. What Benjamin rediscovers in the
allegorical is, then, something akin to the concept of the
expressionless, as the torso of a symbol, introduced in the essay on
Goethe. Benjamin argues that this predominance of the allegorical
viewpoint in the 17th century baroque finds it most dramatic
expression in the mourning-play, and that consequently the Idea of the
mourning-play must be grasped via the allegorical.


 The *Erkenntniskritische Vorrede*
or 'Epistemo-Critical Prologue' to the work may be
understood as having  two central functions: it provides a direct
methodological justification for the theory of criticism being utilised
in the work, by way of a problematization of existing disciplinary
approaches, and it implicitly recovers a concept of allegorical
experience which is delineated  in the second part of the thesis
in terms amenable for modernity. At the level of methodology, Benjamin
advocates the necessity of a transdisciplinary approach (Osborne 2011, 24) to artworks,
capable of critically overcoming the epistemological and historical
limitations of the existing disciplines of the philosophy of art and
the history of art (specifically, literary history). This
transdisciplinary aspect of Benjamin's thesis may partially
account for the difficulties in its reception at the University of
Frankfurt, where the thesis was rejected by the departments of both
philosophy and literature. Much of the theoretical discussion in the
Prologue is concerned with correcting the methodological one-sidedness
of each existing approach by way of the positive features of the other.
In general, the philosophy of art correctly attends to the problem of
essences, but remains hampered by its lack of any adequate historical
consideration. Conversely, the history of art is preoccupied with
historical lineage but has no adequate concept of essence. Yet it is
not simply an amalgamation of aesthetics and history that is required,
but their radical rethinking in accordance with first a historical
concept of essence and second a philosophical concept of history. 


 Broadly speaking, Benjamin's theory of Ideas transposes the
philosophical problem of metaphysical realism into the context of
aesthetics. That is, it asks about the reality of aesthetic genres such
as 'tragedy' or of artistic epochs such as the
'Renaissance' that classify a group of particular works
according to a set of common characteristics. The Prologue criticises
existing traditions of aesthetic nominalism for their inadequate
resolution of the problem. The uncritical use of inductive methods
demonstrated by literary historians rejects the hypostatization of
terms such as "Renaissance" on the grounds that it promotes
a false identity between similar empirical features, which obscures
their diversity. This aversion to any realism of constitutive Ideas is
grounded on the positivist criterion of factual verification. A term
like the "Renaissance" is consequently utilised by them
only on the proviso that it is understood as merely an abstract general
concept. This quickly leads to scepticism, however, since its still
fails to address the problematic criteria by which this general concept
is initially picked out and abstracted from the multiplicity of
particulars or on what grounds these particulars are grouped together.
Consequently, it fails to appreciate the necessity of the Platonic
postulation of Ideas for the representation of essences: whilst
concepts seek to make the similar identical, Ideas are necessary to
effect a dialectical synthesis between phenomenal extremes (OGT, 18-19).
In contrast, philosophers of art possess a concern with the essential
that ends up renouncing any notion of generic forms, on the grounds
that the singular originality of every single work entails the only
possible essential genre must be the universal and individual one of
art itself. The error--as Benjamin had previously charged the
Early German Romantics, discussed above--is to dissolve real and
important aesthetic structures or forms into an undifferentiated unity
(of art), which denies their irreducible multiplicity (OGT, 21-23).



The theory of Ideas presented in the Prologue is truncated and
difficult to understand outside the context of Benjamin's earlier
works, and the philosophical tradition that it engages with is further
obscured in the first English translation. However, the critical aspects of
Benjamin's investigation advocate--against aesthetic
versions of positivist empiricism--a metaphysical realism, and,
against certain versions of philosophical idealism, a non-singular
essentialism. That is, he does not restrict the possibility of
metaphysical reality only to actual empirical particulars and he
advocates the multiplicity and not singularity of the essence
(understood, in Goethean terms, as a harmony and not a unity of truth).
In doing so, he must address that  'theological'
paradox, mentioned in the discussion of symbol and allegory, of how the
transcendental/supersensuous appears immanently within the
material/sensuous. Benjamin is clear that the relation between Ideas
and phenomenon is neither one of Aristotelian 'containment'
nor one of Kantian lawfulness or hypothesis. Ideas are not given to
some intellectual intuition, but they are capable of being sensuously
represented. Such a sensuous representation of the truth remains the
task of philosophy.


Benjamin's theoretical elaboration proceeds by startling imagistic
reconfigurations of pre-existing elements within the philosophical
tradition. He offers a number of possibilities for thinking such Ideas
in the Prologue, taken from the realm not only of philosophy but of
aesthetics, theology and science. The first is the Platonic Idea, here
divorced from its association with the scientific ascent to some
purely rational, objective knowledge (such as appears in the account
of dialectic in the *Republic*) and instead linked to the
discussion of beautiful semblance in the *Symposium* (OGT,
6). The second is that of the Adamic Name, as developed in his
earlier theory of language. In this context, he comments that the
Early German Romantics were frustrated in their attempt to renew the
theory of Ideas because truth took on the character of reflective
consciousness for them, rather than that intentionless, linguistic
character in which things were subsumed under essential Names by
Adam's primal-interrogation [*urvernehmen*] (OGT, 15). Naming
is the primal history [*Urgeschicte*] of signifying, indicating
a thing-like disinterest which contrasts with the directed, unifying
intentionality of Husserlian phenomenology (OGT, 14). The third is
the Goethean Ideal, which is recalled here in the context of the
Faustian "Mothers" and which implicitly gestures towards
his earlier discussions of Goethe (OGT, 11). Finally, and most famously,
Benjamin compares the virtual objectivity of the Idea represented
through the reconfiguring of actual phenomena to an astrological
constellation, which simultaneously groups together and is revealed by
the cluster of individual stars (OGT, 11). Truth is said to be "actualized in the round dance of presented Ideas [*vergegenwartigt
im Reigen der dargestellen Ideen*]" (OGT, 4). This concept of the constellation is taken up
directly in Adorno's inaugural lecture 'The Actuality of
Philosophy', where he speaks of 'the manipulation of
conceptual material by philosophy...of grouping and trial
arrangement, of constellation and construction' (Adorno 1931,
131). It comes to inform Benjamin's philosophical practice in his
major writings from this point onwards, from *One-Way Street*
(1928), via the methodological demand for the construction of history
and the attendant theory of the dialectical image in his work related
to the "Arcades Project" in the 1930s, through to the
concept of history presented in his celebrated late essay, 'On
the Concept of History' (1940). 


Benjamin's concern to reincorporate the perspective of
art's temporal transformation demands an analogous
radicalization. The "genetic and concrete classification"
(OGT, 24) that Benedetto Croce called history (in order to distinguish
it from that generalizing thought that abstracts away from change and
development) must now be reconciled with Benjamin's theory of
Ideas. For the messianic philosophy of history that grounds
Benjamin's work problematizes existing formulations of the
concepts of history and historical origin. In line with his discussion
of the Idea, the concept of historical origin should not be reduced to
the causality and actuality of the empirically factual, nor should it
be regarded as a purely logical and timeless essence. It is not
merely, Benjamin argues, "the coming-to-be of what has originated " and cannot be recognized in "the naked, manifest existence of the factual" (OGT, 24). For the
'historical' sequence that permits the Idea to be
represented must include not only that of the actual phenomena of a
given period, but also that of their subsequent development in the
understanding of later epochs. An investigation of the essence of the
German mourning-play, for example, cannot restrict itself to
contemporaneous events and actual plays as if these were
'facts' settled and decided once and for all, but must
also investigate the changing understanding of this historical epoch
and the varying reception of these plays, including the prior
conditions of its own self-understanding. But nor is it a
"purely logical" category, as if the Idea were some
essence detached from and unrelated to history, to be grasped through
an abstraction from all these particular historical developments (OGT,
25). Origin [*Ursprung*] is therefore distinguished from a
merely genetic coming-into-being [*Enstehung*] and evolutionary
development of 'pure history', to include the essential
inner history of the "life of the works and forms" (OGT,
24-6). The "science of the Origin" is a philosophical
history, a history of the essential, whose contemplation enlists a
dialectical perspective to grasp the form of the "original
phenomenon": as something subject to a process of becoming and
disappearing, and therefore only partial and incomplete. Benjamin
once again resorts to an image: "The origin stands as eddy in the
stream of becoming and vigorously draws the emerging material into its
rhythm" (OGT, 24). Criticism
attempts to virtually reassemble the fore- and after-history [*Vor-
und Nachgeschichte*] of the phenomena into a historical
constellation, in which the Idea is represented and the phenomena
redeemed. This is its messianic function in relation to the historical
Absolute. 


The Prologue also seeks to rescue the allegorical experience
recognised in the mourning-plays for a modern theory of criticism.
Allegorical contemplation aims at the ruination of things so that it
can, in its redemptive moment, construct [*baun*]
a new whole out of the elements of the old. The character of this
construction distinguishes it from the creative invention of fantasy,
since it manipulates and rearranges pre-existing material. To leave an
imprint or impression of this construction [*Konstruktion*]
is one of its aims. This dual emphasis upon destruction and
construction has led a number of scholars to see an anticipation of
Derridean deconstruction in Benjamin's work (Fischer 1996,
Section 1: Modernity/Postmodernity; Weber 2008, 122-128), although it
should be noted that his consideration of the specific historicity of
this concept of criticism and his insistence of the immanent truth
content of artworks remains resolutely modernist, and cannot be easily
assimilated into any 'postmodernist' position (cf. Weigel
1996, xiv). The underlying affinity between romanticism and the baroque
lies in their shared modernist concern with correcting classicism in
art and the quasi-mythical perspective of classicism in general (OGT,
230; 185). The Prologue reflects upon this 'modernity' of
the baroque when it notes how the "Striking analogies to the current state of German literature have repeatedly given rise to ...immersion in the Baroque" (OGT, 36). Although Benjamin is
citing the similarities between Expressionism in modern literature and
the Mannerist exaggeration of the baroque, his own reconstruction of
allegorical experience and its value for aesthetic theory is
experienced according to a historical conjunction between the baroque
past and the modernity of Benjamin's present: modernity both
reveals and is revealed in the baroque. 


The book on mourning-plays concluded Benjamin's German "cycle
of production" (C, 322). At the beginning of the 1920s
Benjamin became immersed in what was planned as a large-scale study of
political thought, of which only a few fragments and the 'Critique of
Violence' remain (Steiner 2001, 61). As Uwe Steiner notes, while
Benjamin's political thought may be situated in the milieu of
Expressionist Nietzsche-reception, the centrality that the realization
of happiness occupies in his definition of politics as "the
satisfaction of unenhanced humanness" is constructed in direct
opposition to Zarathustra's tragic heroism (Steiner 2001, 49-50,
61-62). This marks both a continuity with and a break from what Irving
Wohlfarth has called his earlier "politics of Youth" (Wohlfarth 1992,
164), which drew heavily on a philosophy of history and culture
influenced by Nietzsche's *Untimely Meditations*. Benjamin
remarked that his break from the Youth Movement did not constitute the
abandonment of this earlier thought, however, but its submergence into
a 'harder, purer, more invisible radicalism' (C, 74). This in part
accounts for what T. J. Clark describes as the "cryptic" character of
- what Adorno termed (SW 4, 101-2) - the anthropological materialism
of *The Arcades Project*, where, Clark comments, it is "as if
such a politics were being actively aired and developed elsewhere"
(Clark 2003, 45-46).



A new cycle was initiated with *One-Way Street*
(*Einbahnstrasse*), written 1923-6, published 1928),
whose form and content puts into practice that speculative concept of
experience, with its allegorical immersion into the depths of things,
which was theoretically articulated in the works considered above. The
city furnishes the sensuous, imagistic material for *One-Way
Street*, whilst the genres of the leaflet, placard and
advertisement provide the constructive principle by which it is
rearranged as a constellation. This formal methodology resembles the
technological media of photography and film, as well as the
avant-garde practices of Russian Constructivism and French
Surrealism. This entails what Adorno describes as a "philosophy
directed against philosophy" (Adorno 1955, 235) or what Howard
Caygill calls a "philosophizing beyond philosophy"
(Caygill 1989, 119).


The presentation of contemporary capitalism as metropolitan
modernity in *One-Way Street* also marks the turning point in
Benjamin's writings, away from what he retrospectively called
"an archaic form of philosophizing naively caught up in
nature" (BA, 88) towards the development of "a political
view of the past" (SW 2, 210). The theory of experience outlined
in his early writings is enlisted for revolutionary ends. In the
essay, 'Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European
Intelligentsia' (1929), Surrealist experience provides an
example of a "profane illumination", which in contrast to
the sacred and moralistic kind found in religion was guided by a
political and a "materialistic, anthropological
inspiration" (SW 2, 209). The latent energy residing in the most
destitute and outmoded of things is, through the construction of new
political constellations, transformed into an intoxicating,
revolutionary experience (SW 2, 210). The possibility of such a
profane illumination of nineteenth century Paris, to be presented as
the origin of modernity, preoccupied the remaining decade of
Benjamin's life, and his research for the monumental and unfinished
"Arcades Project" provides the material from which all his
remaining work is constructed.



## 5. The Arcades Project


The city was the seedbed of Benjamin's 'gothic' Marxism
(Cohen 1993); Paris its testing ground. All of Benjamin's writings
from the autumn of 1927 until his death in 1940 relate in one way or
other to his great unfinished study 'Paris--Capital of the
Nineteenth Century', otherwise known as *The Arcades
Project* (*Das Passagen-Werk*), after its founding image,
taken by Benjamin from the 1926 novel, *Le Paysan de Paris*, by
the French surrealist Louis Aragon. This was a book of which Benjamin
wrote: "I could never read more than two or three pages in bed
at night before my heart started to beat so strongly that I had to lay
the book aside." (BA, 88) The arcades would become just one of
five or six archetypal images of the psychosocial space of
19th-century Paris around which the project was organized--each
paired with a particular, thematically representative individual. But
it provided the model for the others, and its surrealist origin and
liminal utopian impulse, neither quite inside nor out, established the
wish-image and the dream-image--on the threshold of sleeping and
waking--at the heart of a work that was initially conceived as a
kind of 'dialectical fairytale'. (The figure with whom
'the arcades' was paired was the utopian socialist Charles
Fourier.) All of Benjamin's major essays of the 1930s derived their
impetus and orientation from his Arcades work, and served to defer its
completion in the act of elaborating its elements. 


This deferral was also, in part, the result of a process of
maturation--a kind of ripening--immanent to the work
itself. *The Arcades* was a vast and ambitious project, not
simply in terms of the mass and breadth of its archival sources
(sought out by Benjamin in the Bibliotheque Nationale in
Paris), but also--indeed, primarily--with respect to its
philosophical and historical intent, and the methodological and
representational challenges it posed. Its sprawling, yet minutely
investigated historical object was to act as the point of entry into
the philosophically comprehended experience of metropolitan
capitalism--not some past experience, or the experience of a past
phase of capitalist development, but the experience of the capitalist
metropolis in Benjamin's own day--through the construction of a
specific series of relations between its elements 'then'
and 'now'. The practice of research, conceptual
organization and presentation that it involved was self-consciously
conceived as a working model for a new, philosophically oriented,
materialist historiography with political intent. Its final,
fragmentary and 'ruined' status has come to stand not
simply as the sign of a failure of completion, but as a paradigm of a
form of constitutive incompletion that is characteristic of all
systematically oriented knowledge under the conditions of
modernity. In this respect, in its very failure to be actualized, it
confirmed the fundamental historical and philosophical truth of
Benjamin's earlier analysis of the Romantic fragment--extending
the genre in a hitherto unimagined way.


In the ebb and flow of its changing rhythms--additions,
revisions, reformulations and retrievals--Benjamin's *Arcades
Project* provides an extraordinary case study in the labour of
conceptual construction via the configuration and reconfiguration of
archival materials. The voluminous 'Notes and Materials'
that make up the *Arcades* as it has come down to us remained
unpublished until 1982, finally appearing in English only in 1999 (GS
V; AP). Only since their publication has it been possible to get a
clear sense of the overall trajectory of Benjamin's thought during
this period--rendering redundant, or at least displacing, many of
the polemics associated with previous cycles of reception. The notes
and materials are organized into twenty-six alphabetically designated
'convolutes' (literally 'bundles') or folders,
thematically defined by various *objects* (arcades, catacombs,
barricades, iron constructions, mirrors, modes of
lighting...), *topics* (fashion, boredom, theory of
knowledge, theory of progress, painting,
conspiracies...), *figures* (the collector, the flaneur,
the automaton...), *authors* (Baudelaire, Fourier, Jung,
Marx, Saint-Simon...) and their combinations. The project as a
whole received two 'exposes' or summaries, in 1935
and 1939 (the second, in French). However, its scope and theoretical
ambition--nothing less than a philosophical construction of
"the primal history of the nineteenth century" (BA,
90)--joined with the circumstances of Benjamin's life in exile
(the constant need to earn money by writing and the uncertainty of a
publisher for the project) to frustrate its realization. The only
lengthy segment of completed text derives from the part devoted to
Baudelaire (one of five parts in the 1939 expose, cut down from
six in the initial 1935 version): the second of its three projected
sections, 'The Paris of the Second Empire in
Baudelaire'--although even this was never published in
Benjamin's lifetime. However, the central chapter of this section,
'The Flaneur', was revised and expanded (in part, in
response to an exchange of letters with Adorno) into the essay
'Some Motifs in Baudelaire', which was published in the
Institute's journal, *Zeitschrift fur Sozialforschung*
(*Journal for Social Research*) in January 1940. A powerful
compressed draft of material corresponding to the final section, on
the commodity as a poetic object, exists as 'Central Park'
(SW 4, 161-199). As the project evolved, and in response to the
barriers to its realization, Baudelaire thus became increasingly
central to Benjamin's thinking. ('Convolute J', on
Baudelaire, is by far the longest of the convolutes.) Encouraged by
Horkheimer, Benjamin planned to publish the material on Baudelaire as
a separate book, to be entitled, *Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet
in the Era of High Capitalism*. The development of this process,
whereby a primal history of the nineteenth century gradually morphed
into a book on Baudelaire and 'high capitalism', may be
represented, diagrammatically, as follows.




|  |
| --- |
| PARIS--CAPITAL OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY (1939 Expose) |
| A.  | Fourier, or the Arcades |
| (+)  | [Daguerre, or the Panorama--only in the 1935 version] |
| B.  | Grandville, or the World Exhibitions |
| C.  | Louis Philippe, or the Interior |
| D.  | Baudelaire, or the Streets of Paris

|  |  |
| --- | --- |
| | | *Charles Baudelaire, A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism* |
| 1. | [Baudelaire as Allegorist] |
| 2. | The Paris of the 2nd Empire in Baudelaire

|  |  |
| --- | --- |
| i.  | The Boheme |
| ii.  | The Flaneur\* |
| iii.  | The Modern |

 |
| 3. | [The Commodity as Poetic Object]\*\* |

 |
| E.  | Haussmann, or the Barricades |




|  |  |
| --- | --- |
| \* | Expanded and published as 'Some Motifs in Baudelaire' (1940) |
| \*\* | In draft form as 'Central Park' (1938) |




However, to reduce the project to its own, restricted *de facto*
trajectory, rich as it is, does too much violence to the historical and
philosophical framework it embodies, from which the material on
Baudelaire gains its broader significance. The overarching historical
framework is that of capitalist modernity as a 'crisis of
experience'. (The two terms, capitalism and modernity, are
inextricable for Benjamin in the context of 19th- and early
20th-century Europe.) The founding problematic of Benjamin's
thought--the expansion of the Kantian concept of experience, to
infinity--is thus here provided with a concretely historical
context, in which the notion of infinity/absoluteness becomes
associated with the concept of history itself. The problem: to
dialectically redeem the concept of experience [*Erfahrung*]
by finding an appropriate way of experiencing the crisis of experience
itself. In classically 'modern' terms, the present is
defined as a time of crisis and transition, and philosophical
experience (truth) is associated with the glimpse within the present,
via the past, of a utopian political future that would bring history to
an end. More immediately, the crisis is given political meaning by two
possible resolutions: the one destructive; the other constructive/
emancipatory--fascism and communism, respectively. In this
respect, for all his theoretical heterodoxy as a 'Marxist'
and his philosophical affinities with Adorno, Benjamin was in search
of, and in solidarity with, new forms of collectivity connected to a
communist future. Herein lay the basis of his friendship with Brecht.
Unlike Brecht, however, he conceived them within the terms of a
speculative cultural history (Caygill 2004).   




Within this framework, three distinct strands of work (discussed in
the next three sections) can be discerned: (1) investigation of the
crisis of experience via the 'crisis of the arts'
(SW  2, 212) through the interrelated terms
of *technology/technique*
[*Technik*], *aura*, *reproducibility*,
and *collectivity*; (2) philosophical distillation of the
formal structure of the experience of the new, and its historical and
political contradictions, out of its social forms, and the examination
of its relations to allegory and commodity-form; (3) construction of a
new historiography and a new philosophical concept of history. The
first may be traced through a linked series of essays of which
'Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European
Intelligentsia' (1929), 'Little History of
Photography' (1931), 'The Work of Art in the Age of its
Technical Reproducibility' (1935-9) and 'The
Storyteller' (1936) are the most important. The second is
concentrated in readings of Baudelaire and related texts by Nietzsche
and Blanqui. (The focusing-in on these three thinkers is a focusing-in
on the relationship of capitalism to modernity in its purest,
nihilistic form). The third is conjured from a reflective conjunction
of Marx, Nietzsche and Surrealism. It takes methodological form in
'Convolute N [On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of
Progress]' in *The Arcades Project* and achieved its
accidentally definitive presentation in Benjamin's most frequently
cited, but still fiercely interpretatively disputed text (Caygill
2004; Lowy 2005; Tiedemman 1989; Wohlfarth 1978): the
fragments--known as theses--'On the Concept of
History'.


## 6. Art and Technology


That Benjamin approached the symptomatic significance of the
'crisis of the arts' for the 'crisis of
experience' through the concept of *Technik* attests to
the fundamentally Marxist character of his conception of historical
development. It is the development of the forces of production that is
the motor of history. However, Benjamin was no more orthodox a Marxist
about technology than he was with regard to the concept of progress,
the Marxist version of which the German Social Democratic Party (SPD)
grounded upon it (see Section 8, below). Not only did he recognize the
potential for a "bloodbath" in a technology subjected to
"the lust for profit" (SW  1, 487)--amply
demonstrated in the horrors of the First World War--but he came
to distinguish between a 'first' and a
'second', potentially liberatory technology, the latter
making possible "a highly productive use of the human being's
self-alienation" (SW 3, 107; 113). It appears, in places, as the
basis for a kind of 'technological cosmopolitics' or
politics of a 'new collective technoid body' (Caygill
2005, 225; Leslie 2000, 153, in Osborne 2005, II: 391).



> 
> 
> The mastery of nature, so the imperialists teach, is the purpose of
> all technology [*Technik*]. But ...technology is not the
> mastery of nature but of the relation between nature and
> humanity. ...In technology a *physis* is being organized
> through which mankind's contact with the cosmos takes a new and
> different form from that which it had in nations
> [*Volkern*] and families. (SW 1, 487, translation
> amended)
> 
> 
> The collective is a body, too. And the *physis* that is
> being organized for it in technology can, through all its political
> and factual reality, only be produced in that image sphere to which
> profane illumination initiates us. Only when in technology body and
> image so interpenetrate that all revolutionary tension becomes bodily
> collective innervation, and all the bodily innervations of the
> collective become revolutionary discharge, has reality transcended
> itself to the extent demanded by the *Communist Manifesto*. (SW
> 2, 217-8)
> 
> 
> 


These passages, from the concluding sections of *One-Way Street*
and the 'Surrealism' essay, respectively, convey something
of the ecstatic character of Benjamin's political thought at the
outset of the 1930s, in which technology appears on a political
knife-edge between its possibilities as "a fetish of doom"
and "a key to happiness" (SW 2, 321). Art--an art of
the masses--appears within this scenario as the educative
mechanism through which the body of the collective can begin to
appropriate its own technological potential.



> 
> The first technology really sought to master nature, whereas the
> second aims rather at an interplay between nature and humanity. The
> primary social function of art today is to rehearse that
> interplay. This applies especially to film. *The function of film
> is to train human beings in the apperception and reactions needed to
> deal with a vast apparatus whose role in their lives is expanding
> almost daily*. Dealing with this apparatus also teaches them that
> technology will release them from their enslavement to the powers of
> the apparatus only when humanity's whole constitution has adapted
> itself to the new productive forces which the second technology has
> set free. (SW 3, 107-8)


In his footnote to this passage from the second version of
'The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical
Reproducibility' ('*Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner
technischen Reproduzierbarkeit*', 1936), Benjamin refers us
to the 'phalansteries', the "self-contained agrarian
collectives" of Fourier's socialist utopia. In the Fourier
convolute of the *Arcades Project*, these are compared to the
two main articles of Benjamin's politics: "the idea of
revolution as an innervation of the technical organs of the
collective... and the idea of the 'cracking open of natural
teleology'" (AP, [W7, 4], 631). For Benjamin, art, in the
form of film--the "unfolding <result> of all the
forms of perception, the tempos and rhythms, which lie preformed in
today's machines"--thus harboured the possibility of
becoming a kind of rehearsal of the revolution. "[A]ll problems
of contemporary art", Benjamin insisted, "find their
definitive formulation only in the context of film" (AP, [K3,
3], 394). In this respect, it was the combination of the communist
pedagogy and constructive devices of Brecht's epic theatre that marked
it out for him as a theatre for the age of film (UB, 1-25;
Wizisla 2009).


Benjamin's writings on film are justly renowned for their twin
theses of the transformation of the concept of art by its
'technical reproducibility' and the new possibilities for
collective experience this contains, in the wake of the historical
decline of the 'aura' of the work of art, a process that
film is presented as definitively concluding. Much ink has been spilt
debating the thesis of the decline of the aura in Benjamin's
work. On the one hand, with regard to some of his writings,
Benjamin's concept of aura has been accused of fostering a
nostalgic, purely negative sense of modernity as loss--loss of
unity both with nature and in community (A. Benjamin 1989). On the
other hand, in the work on film, Benjamin appears to adopt an
affirmative technological modernism, which celebrates the consequences
of the decline. Adorno, for one, felt betrayed by the latter position.
He wrote to Benjamin on 18 March 1936:  





> In your earlier writings... you distinguished the
> idea of the work of art as a structure from the symbol of theology on
> the one hand, and from the taboo of magic on the other. I now find it
> somewhat disturbing --and here I can see a sublimated
> remnant of certain Brechtian themes--that you have now rather
> casually transferred the concept of the magical aura to the
> 'autonomous work of work' and flatly assigned a
> counter-revolutionary function to the latter. (BA, 128)


Brecht himself, meanwhile, was appalled by even the residually
negative function of the aura, recording his response in
his *Workbook*: "it is all mysticism mysticism, in a
posture opposed to mysticism. ... it is rather ghastly"
(cited in Buck-Morss 1977, 149). Yet Adorno did not defend
'auratic art' as such. (His defence of autonomous art was
grounded on the experience derived from following the
'autonomous' technical development of laws of form.)  




Clearly, the concept of the aura plays a number of different roles
in Benjamin's writings, in his various attempts to grasp his
historical present in terms of the possibilities for
'experience' afforded by its new cultural forms; which he
increasingly came to identify (some say precipitously) with
revolutionary political potential. Yet Adorno was wrong to see a simple
change of position, rather than a complex series of inflections of what
was a generally consistent historical account. Benjamin had written
affirmatively of "the emancipation of object from aura" as
early as 1931, in his 'Little History of Photography', in
which he described Atget's photographs as "suck[ing] the
aura out of reality like water from a sinking ship" (SW 2, 518).
It is here that we find the basic definition of aura: "A strange
weave of space and time: the unique appearance or semblance of
distance, no matter how close it may be." Importantly, the
examples given with this definition are from nature: mountains and a
branch observed "at rest on a summer's noon ... until
the moment or the hour become part of their appearance...".
The 'destruction' of the aura by transience and
reproducibility is judged "a salutary estrangement" (SW 2,
518-9). Similarly, when 'The Storyteller' recounts
the "dying out of the art of storytelling" and "the
incomparable aura that surrounds the storyteller", it is
nonetheless maintained: "nothing could be more fatuous than to
wish to see it as merely a 'symptom of decay', let alone a
'modern symptom'. It is rather, only a concomitant of the
secular productive forces of history..." (SW 3, 146; 162).
'The Work of Art' essay extends and enriches the earlier
account of photography's technological transformation of
perception ("the optical unconscious") with reference to
film. The difference resides in the insistent political dimension of
the later essay (after Hitler's taking of power in 1933), and its
determination to introduce concepts "that are completely useless
for the purposes of fascism" (SW 3, 102). The main problem with
the auratic (which is deemed historically residual, not eliminated,
indeed is perhaps ineliminable [Didi-Huberman 2004]) was that, Benjamin
believed, it was precisely "useful for fascism". This
context over-determines the essay throughout, with its almost Manichean
oppositions between ritual and politics, cult value and exhibition
value. Quite apart from the intervening technological and social
developments, it makes it a very difficult text simply to
'use' today. For some, however, it is precisely the
connection it draws between a certain kind of mass culture and fascism
that provides its continuing relevance (Buck-Morss 1992).


## 7. Baudelaire and the Modern



Benjamin's thinking of 'the modern' [*die Moderne*]
is his most important theoretical contribution to the historical study
of cultural forms. Frequently mistranslated in early English-language
editions of his writings as 'modernism', and still often
rendered as 'modernity' (although Benjamin tended to
retain Baudelaire's coinage, *la modernite*, when making
that reference), *die Moderne* designates both a formal
temporal structure and the diverse range of its historical
instances--past and present. Baudelaire is the main writer
through whom Benjamin thought 'the modern'; not as might
be expected, with reference to the canonical account
of *modernite* in 'The Painter of Modern
Life' (1859/60), but with regard to what Benjamin called the
'theory' of the modern first set down in 'The Salon
of 1845': "the advent of the true *new (die Heraufkunft
des wahrhaft* Neunen)" (SW 4, 45-6, translation
amended; GS 1.2, 580). 


In Baudelaire's 'The Painter' essay, *modernite*
famously denotes 'the ephemeral, the fugitive, the
contingent'. It is associated with transitoriness as the
generalized social instantiation of the temporality of the modern, in
the capitalist metropolis. In contrast to transitoriness as such,
however, Benjamin was first and foremost (politically and
philosophically) interested in 'the new', in its
'advent' or historical becoming, and in its quality as
newness or novelty (the newness of the new), in a way that was
conceptually distinct from the conventional opposition of the
'modern' to the 'ancient'--which
Baudelaire notoriously retained. As a result, Benjamin was consequently
also interested in what the German sociologist Max Weber would have
called its 'routinization' (although Benjamin did not use
this vocabulary): the routinization accompanying the generalization of
the new as a mode of experience--in fashion and boredom, in
particular--and the formal structure of sameness involved in its
repetition. It is here that transitoriness enters the picture--as 
a result of the generalization of novelty. Baudelaire
self-consciously embraced modernity with 'heroic effort',
attempting, like the painter of modern life, to 'extract its epic
aspects' and 'distill the eternal from the
transitory'; Benjamin, on the other hand, sought to understand it
in order to find a way out of what he called its 'hell'. He
picked up on the relationship of the transitory to the eternal in
Baudelaire's account of modernity, but first, he de-classicized
the notion of the 'eternal', refiguring it philosophically,
and second, he rendered the relationship itself strictly dialectical:
in the modern, it is transitoriness itself that is eternalized.


Thus, Benjamin did not so much take over and update Baudelaire's
portrayal of modernity as read it 'symptomatically' (in
Louis Althusser's sense), or more precisely, allegorically, in order
to uncover beneath it the experience of *the transformation of
historical time by the commodity form*. Baudelaire was able to
grasp this experience, according to Benjamin, through the
contradictory historical temporality that structured his work: at once
resolutely modern yet, in its poetic form (lyric), already
anachronistic. Benjamin similarly valued the disjunctive historical
temporality of Kafka's fables: their status as parables after the
'end of storytelling'. But whereas Kafka was for Benjamin
"the figure of a failure" (BS, 226)--the inevitable
failure of an attempt to translate the experience [*Erlebnis*]
of modernity into the language of tradition
(Judaism)--Baudelaire's poetry was able to convey the intensity
of the experience of modernity through the very tension between that
experience and his chosen, lyrical means; not merely negatively (like
Kafka), but via the way in which modernity transformed those means. In
particular, the lyric allowed Baudelaire to register the full effect
of the temporality of the modern on the dissolution of subjectivity,
and the fact that it consequently "takes a heroic constitution
to live the modern [*die Moderne*]" (SW 4, 44,
translation amended; GS 1.2, 577). The extraction of the metropolitan
'motifs' for which Benjamin's reading of Baudelaire is
justly famous--the bohemian, the flaneur, the prostitute, the
gambler, the ragpicker--are the figures via which this structure
of experience appears. Primary within Baudelaire, they are nonetheless
methodologically secondary for Benjamin, as he explained to Adorno:
"I only have to insert [them] in the appropriate place"
(BA, 90). Baudelaire had found a method--what he called
'correspondences'--which reflectively incorporated
the anachronism of the lyric form into his work. Benjamin appropriated
this method, with its dissociated 'ritual elements' (SW 4,
333), to read Baudelaire himself. In the essay 'Some Motifs in
Baudelaire', correspondences of temporal structure, experienced
as 'shock', link the machine, the film, the crowd, and the
game of chance:   





> 
> 
> What determines the rhythm of production on a conveyor
> belt is the same thing that underlies the rhythm of reception in the
> film. ... The shock experience [*Chockerlebnis*] which the
> passer-by has in the crowd corresponds to the isolated
> 'experiences' of the worker at his machine. ... The
> jolt in the movement of a machine is like the so-called coup in a game
> of chance.... (SW 4, 328-30)
> 
> 
> A single repetitive and dissociated formal temporal structure is
> detected beneath the rich array of phenomenological forms presented in
> Baudelaire's poetry: "the price for which the sensation of
> the modern could be had: the disintegration of the aura in shock
> experience". (SW 4, 343, translation amended; GS 1.2, 653) 
> 
> 
> 


Furthermore, this interpretative key, the experience of shock, is
itself understood through a series of theoretical correspondences
within Benjamin's own present; primarily, that between
Proust's 'involuntary memory' and Freud's
theory of consciousness. This theoretical correspondence is read in the
light of the 'shell shock' first diagnosed during the First
World War, about which Benjamin had previously written in his
reflections on Ernst Junger in his 1930 review essay, 'Theories
of German Fascism' (SW 2, 312-321). The connection of the
modern to fascism does not appear solely through the thematic of the
false restoration of the aura, but also within the process of its
disintegration by shock. (Structurally, the shock of the crowd is
'like' shell shock.) Baudelaire is thus not merely the
privileged writer for the advent of the theory of the modern, but the
one in whose work the nineteenth century appears most clearly as the
fore-life of the present. However, if it was through Baudelaire that
Benjamin grasped the structure of the temporality of the
'modern', it was through Nietzsche and Blanqui that he
explored its ambiguous historical meaning, via the way in which their
philosophies reflect the transformation of the new by the commodity
into the 'ever selfsame'. "Just as in the seventeenth
century it is allegory that becomes the canon of dialectical images, in
the nineteenth century it is novelty" (AP, 11):  "The
commodity has taken the place of the allegorical mode of
apprehension." (SW 4, 188)   




It is the fragment 'Central Park' that most clearly
reveals the consequences of Benjamin's reading of Baudelaire for his
concept of history: the modern completely transforms the possibilities
for the experience of history. On the one hand, it de-historicizes
experience, wresting it away from the temporal continuities of
tradition. On the other hand, a messianic structure--an opening
of history to something outside of time--reasserts itself within
the still life [*nature mort*] of modernity's restless
sameness. This is Benjamin's famous 'dialectics at a
standstill' (Tiedemann, 1982). It transforms the historical
naturalism of the baroque, analyzed in the *Origin of the German
Mourning-Play* (Section 4, above), in a futural direction. In
particular, it involves a prioritization of the interruptive stasis of
the image over the continuity of temporal succession. In fact,
Benjamin maintained: "The concept of historical time forms an
antithesis to the idea of a temporal continuum" (SW 4, 407).]
 


## 8. Image, History, Culture


Debate over Benjamin's conception of history was for many years
preoccupied with the question of whether it is essentially
'theological' or 'materialist' in character
(or how it could possibly be both at once), occasioned by the
conjunction of Benjamin's self-identification with historical
materialism and his continued use of explicitly messianic motifs
(Wolhfarth 1978; Tiedemann 1983-4). This was in large part the
polemical legacy of the competing influence of three
friendships--with Gershom Scholem, Theodor W. Adorno and Bertolt
Brecht--applied to the interpretation of Benjamin's final text,
the fragments 'On the Concept of History'
('*Uber den Begriff der Geschichte*',
popularly known as the 'Theses on the Philosophy of
History'). Scholem promoted a theological interpretation, Brecht
inspired a materialist one, while Adorno attempted to forge some form
of compatibility between the two. Yet the question is badly posed if
it is framed within received concepts of 'theology' and
'materialism' (the paradox becomes self-sustaining), since
it was Benjamin's aim radically to rethink the meaning of these ideas,
on the basis of a new philosophy of historical time. This new
philosophy of historical time is the ultimate goal of Benjamin's later
writings. It appears most explicitly, under construction, in
'Convolute N' of *The Arcades Project*, 'On
the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress'; it is applied to
art history in the 1937 essay 'Eduard Fuch, Collector and
Historian'; and is manifest in a condensed, rhetorically
political and problematic form in 'On the Concept of
History'. It derives from a dual critique of the 'vulgar
naturalism' of *historicism* and the deferral of action
involved in the associated Social Democratic concept
of *progress* (Kittsteiner 1986). It gives rise to a
conception of historical intelligibility based on 'literary
montage' as the method of construction of 'dialectical
images' (AP, 460-1). And it culminates in a
quasi-messianic conception of revolution as an
'interruption' of history or an 'arrest of
happening': "Classless society is not the final goal of
historical progress but its frequently miscarried, ultimately achieved
interruption" (SW 4, 402).  




Benjamin took as one of the main 'methodological
objectives' of his *Arcades Project* "to
demonstrate a historical materialism which has annihilated within
itself the idea of progress", taking as its "founding
concept... not progress but actualization"  (AP, [N2,
2], 460). He had both philosophical and political reasons for
this. Philosophically, Benjamin saw the conventional idea of progress
as projecting into the future a conception of time as
'homogenous' and 'empty' epitomized by the
attempt of Ranke's historicism to represent the past "the way it
really was" (SW4, 395; 391). This is a conception of time based
on the temporal continuity of past, present and future,
'in' which events occur and are understood as causally
connected. It is naturalistic in so far as it acknowledges no
fundamental temporal-ontological distinction between past, present and
future time; it has no sense of time as the ongoing production of
temporal differentiation. Time is differentiated solely by the
differences between the events that occur within it. In particular, it
fails to grasp that historical time (the time of human life) is
constituted through such immanent differentiations, via the
existential modes of memory, expectation and action. In this respect,
there are affinities between Benjamin's philosophy of time and
Heidegger's (Caygill, 1994).   




The political consequence of the temporal naturalism underlying the
idea of 'progress' is conformism. For Benjamin,
paradoxically, this applied in particular to the German Social
Democrats' understanding of communism as an *ideal*, in the
neo-Kantian ethical sense of the object of an 'endless
task':




> Once the classless society had been
> defined as an infinite task, the empty homogeneous time was transformed
> into an anteroom, so to speak, in which one could wait for the
> emergence of the revolutionary situation with more or less equanimity.
> (SW 4, 402)


In other words, the concept of progress is demobilizing; and Marxism
had become infected by the ideology of progress. However, rather than
positing an existential alternative, in the manner of Heidegger's
'resolute decision', Benjamin set out to construct novel
conceptions of historical time and historical intelligibility based on
the relationship, not between the past and the present, but between the
'then' and the 'now', as brought together in
images of the past. Each historically specific 'now' was
understood to correspond to (in a Baudelairean sense), or to render
legible, a particular 'then'.   





> It is not that what is past casts its light on what is
> present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, an
> image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the
> now to form a constellation. In other words: image is dialectics at a
> standstill. For while the relation of the present to the past is
> purely temporal, the relation of what-has-been to the now is
> dialectical: not temporal in nature but figural
> [*bildlich*]. Only dialectical images are genuinely historical
> ... (AP, [N3, 1], 463)


The experimental method of montage, borrowed from surrealism, was to
be the means of production of historical intelligibility. Furthermore,
the 'static' temporality of the image was understood to
connect such an experience of historical meaning, directly, to a
radical or 'revolutionary' concept of action, associated
with the idea of the present as crisis. The passage above continues:  





> The image that is read--which is to say, the image in
> the now of its recognizability [*das Bild im Jetzt der
> Erkennbarkeik*]--bears to the highest degree the
>  imprint of the perilous critical moment on which all reading is
> founded. (AP, [N3, 1], 463)


Such "perilous critical moments" are both immanent to
the temporality of modernity, at a structural level (the temporality of
crisis), and, in each particular case, contingent and conjuncturally
specific. In them, the past is understood "to bring the present
into a critical state". However, this critical state is not a
crisis of the status quo, but rather of its destruction: the critical
moment is that in which "the status quo threatens to be
preserved" (AP, [N10, 2], 474). Dialectical images counter the
threat of preservation (tradition) by virtue of the interruptive force
they are understood to impart to experience as a consequence of the
instantaneous temporality of the now, or what Benjamin famously called
now-time [*Jetztzeit*]:
"The dialectical image is an image that emerges suddenly, in a
flash" (AP, [N9, 7], 473). It is this image of the image as a
'flash' [*ein aufblitzendes*]
and the corresponding image of historical experience as the discharge
of an explosive force--the explosive force of now-time, blasting
open 'the continuum of history'--for which Benjamin
is probably best known. The philosophy of historical time which these
images sum up was elaborated by him in two main contexts: the
development of a new conception of cultural history and a political
diagnosis of the historical crisis of Europe at the outset of the
Second World War.  




Benjamin did not see culture as threatened by
'barbarism', so much as itself being implicated in
it:  





> Barbarism lurks in the very concept of culture--as
> the concept of a fund of values which is considered independent not,
> indeed, of the production process in which these values originated,
> but of the one in which they survive. In this way they serve the
> apotheosis of the latter, barbaric as it may be. (AP, [N5a, 7]
> 467-8)


The concept of culture as the values of a heritage was for Benjamin
'fetishistic': "Culture appears reified." Only
an understanding of "the crucial importance of reception...
enables us to correct the process of reification which takes place in
a work of art" (SW 3, 267; 269). For Benjamin, however,
reception--or what he called the 'afterlife'
[*Nachleben*] of the work--was not merely something that
happened to the work, externally; it was as *constitutive* of
the work itself as its 'fore-life' [*Vorleben*], or
conditions of production--which are themselves rendered invisible
by the idea of culture as value, and are themselves "involved in
a constant process of change" as the work itself changes. A
materialist cultural history would restore to the experience of works
a sense of both of these changing sets of conditions (before and
after), and the conflicts between them, in an engagement
"originary for every present", since "[i]t is the
present that polarizes the event into fore- and
after-history"  (SW 3, 261-2; AP, [N7a, 8], 471). It
is here, in an ontological rethinking of reception, that the
philosophical significance of Benjamin's interest in technologies of
reproduction lies. With these concepts of fore- and afterlife,
Benjamin founded a new problematic for cultural study.  




Benjamin was interested in 'culture' not as an
autonomous realm of values ("the independent values of aesthetic,
scientific, ethical... and even religious achievements"),
but on the contrary, like the sociologist Georg Simmel, whose *Philosophy of Money*
he cities in this regard, as "elements in the development of
human nature" (Simmel, quoted in AP, [N14, 3], 480). In this
respect, cultural study is situated within the field of a materialist
philosophy of history. And the philosophy of history insists on a
conception of history as a whole. It is here than the messianic
structure of Benajmin's concept of history confronts us as
unavoidable; although not thereby necessarily
'theological', since it is the transition of a conceptual
structure from one philosophical context into another that is at issue
(Benjamin's favorite surrealist method of
'decontextualization' and 'defamiliarization'),
not its meaning in its original theological context as such. In his
search for a non-Hegelian, non-developmentalist conception of history
as a whole, in 'On the Concept of History' Benjamin figured
now-time, quasi-messianically, alternatively as a 'model'
of messianic time and as "shot through with splinters of
messianic time." In the context of a diagnosis of the European
crisis of 1939-40 as a world-historical crisis, the
'critical state of the present' thus came, in this text, to
acquire a theological-political tenor. "A revolutionary chance in
the fight for the oppressed past" is compared to "the sign
of a messianic arrest of happening" (SW 4, 396-7). Benjamin
was aware that this rhetoric would lead to misunderstanding. But the
combination of perceived political urgency and isolation compelled him
to extend his concept of history beyond the state of his philosophical
research, experimentally, into an apparently definitive statement. It
is as if Benjamin had hoped to overcome the aporia of action within his
still essentially hermeneutical philosophy (Osborne 1995) through the
force of language alone. Formally, however, 'On the Concept of
History' should be read as a series of fragments, in the early
Romantic sense. As such, it remains resolutely negative--and
thereby importantly partial--in its evocation of the historical
whole, which is acknowledged as unpresentable. In this respect,
Benjamin's final text recalls his earliest major publication, the
1919 thesis 'The Concept of Art Criticism in German
Romanticism': as a gesture towards the philosophy of history
needed to complete a modified and 'modernized' version of
the early Romantic project.