Inner Workings

by J. M. Coetzee

  The groundwork for Benjamin’s philosophy of language was laid early in his career. Although his ideas on language remained remarkably stable, his interest receded during his most political phase, re-emerging only in the late 1930s, when he again began to explore Jewish mystical thought. The key essay, ‘On Language as Such and the Language of Man’, dates from 1916. Here, following Schlegel and Novalis as well as what he had learned of Jewish mysticism from Scholem, Benjamin argues that a word is not a sign, a substitute for something else, but the name of an Idea. In ‘The Task of the Translator’ (1921) he tries to give body to his idea of the Idea, appealing to the example of Mallarmé and a poetic language set free of its communicative function.

  How a Symbolist conception of language could ever be reconciled with Benjamin’s later historical materialism is not clear, but Benjamin maintained that a bridge could be built, however ‘strained and problematic’ it might be.12 In his literary essays of the 1930s he hints at what such a bridge might look like. In Proust, in Kafka, in the Surrealists, he says, the word retreats from signification in the ‘bourgeois’ sense and resumes its elementary, gestural power. Word as gesture is ‘the supreme form in which truth can appear to us during an age deprived of theological doctrine’.13

  In Adam’s time, the word and the gesture of naming were the same thing. Since then language has undergone a long fall, of which Babel was only one stage. The task of theology is to recover the word, in all its originary, mimetic power, from the sacred texts in which it has been preserved. The task of criticism is substantially similar, for fallen languages can still, in the totality of their intentions, point us toward pure language. Hence the paradox of ‘The Task of the Translator’: that a translation becomes a higher thing than its original, in the sense that it gestures toward language before Babel.

  Benjamin wrote a number of pieces on astrology, which are essential pendants to his writings on the philosophy of language. The astrological science we have today, he says, is a degenerate version of a body of ancient knowledge from times when the mimetic faculty, being far stronger, allowed real, imitative correspondences between the lives of human beings and the movements of the stars. Today only children preserve, and respond to the world with, a comparable mimetic power. As that mimetic faculty deteriorated through history, written language became its most important repository. Hence Benjamin’s abiding interest in graphology, in handwriting as an ‘expressive movement’ of character. (V2, p. 399)

  In essays dating from 1933, Benjamin sketches a theory of language based on mimesis. Adamic language was onomatopoeic, he says; synonyms in different languages, though they may not sound or look alike (the theory is meant to work for written as well as spoken language), have ‘nonsensuous’ similarities to what they signify, as ‘mystical’ or ‘theological’ theories of language have always recognised. (V2, p. 696) Thus the words pain, Brot, xleb, though superficially different, are alike at a profounder level in embodying the Idea of bread. (Persuading us that this claim is profound rather than vacuous demands Benjamin’s utmost powers.) Language, the supreme development of the mimetic faculty, bears within itself an archive of these nonsensuous similarities. Reading has the potential of becoming a kind of dream experience giving access to a common human unconscious, the site of language and of Ideas.

  Benjamin’s approach to language is entirely out of step with that of twentieth-century linguistic science, but it gives him royal access to the world of myth and fable, particularly to the (as he conceives of it) primeval, almost prehuman ‘swamp world’ of Kafka. (V2, p. 808) An intensive reading of Kafka was to leave an indelible mark on Benjamin’s own, pessimistic last writings.

  The story of the Arcades Project is roughly as follows.

  In the late 1920s Benjamin conceived of a work inspired by the arcades of Paris. It would deal with urban experience; it would be a version of the Sleeping Beauty story, a dialectical fairy tale told surrealistically by means of a montage of fragmentary texts. Like the prince’s kiss, it would awake the European masses to the truth of their life under capitalism. It would be some fifty pages long; in preparation for its writing, Benjamin began to copy out quotations from his reading under such headings as Boredom, Fashion, Dust. But as he stitched a text together, it became overgrown each time with new quotations and notes. He discussed his problems with Adorno and Max Horkheimer, who convinced him he could not write about capitalism without a proper command of Marx. The Sleeping Beauty idea lost its lustre.

  By 1934 Benjamin had a new and more philosophically ambitious plan: using the same method of montage, he would trace the cultural superstructure of nineteenth-century France back to commodities and their power to become fetishes, to which he had been alerted by Georg Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness. As his notes grew in bulk, he slotted them into an elaborate filing system based on thirty-six convolutes (from German Konvolut, sheaf, dossier) with keywords and cross references. Under the title ‘Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century’ he wrote a resumé of the material he had thus far assembled, which he offered to Adorno (Benjamin was by then receiving a stipend from, and was thus in some measure beholden to, the Institute for Social Research, which had been relocated by Adorno and Horkheimer from Frankfurt to New York).

  From Adorno Benjamin received such severe criticism that he decided to set aside the project for the time being and extract from his mass of materials a book about Baudelaire. Part of this book emerged in 1938 as ‘The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire’, still built according to the method of montage. Again Adorno was critical: facts were being made to speak for themselves, he said; there was not enough theory. Benjamin produced a further revision, ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’ (1939), which had a warmer reception.

  Baudelaire was central to the Arcades plan because, in Benjamin’s eyes, Baudelaire in Les Fleurs du mal first revealed the modern city as a subject for poetry. (Benjamin seems not to have read Wordsworth, who, fifty years before Baudelaire, wrote of what it was like to be part of a London street crowd, bombarded on all sides with glances, dazzled with advertisements.)

  Yet Baudelaire expressed his experience of the city in allegory, a literary mode out of fashion since the Baroque. In ‘Le Cygne’, for instance, Baudelaire allegorised the poet as a noble bird, a swan, scrabbling about comically in the paved marketplace, unable to spread his wings and soar.

  Why did Baudelaire use allegory? Benjamin calls upon Marx’s Capital to answer the question. The elevation of market value into the sole measure of worth, says Marx, reduces a commodity to nothing but a sign – the sign of what it will sell for. Under the reign of the market, things relate to their actual worth as arbitrarily as, for instance, in Baroque emblematics a death’s head relates to man’s subjection to time. Emblems thus make an unexpected return to the historical stage in the form of commodities, which under capitalism are no longer what they seem, but, as Marx had warned, begin to ‘[abound] in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties’. (AP, p. 196) Allegory, Benjamin argues, is exactly the right mode for an age of commodities.

  While working on the Baudelaire book (which was never completed – the manuscript was published posthumously as Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism), Benjamin continued to take notes for the Arcades and add new convolutes. What was recovered after the war from its hiding place in the Bibliothèque Nationale amounted to some nine hundred pages of extracts, mainly from nineteenth-century writers but from contemporaries of Benjamin’s as well, grouped under headings, with interspersed commentary, plus a variety of plans and synopses. These materials were published in 1982, in an edition by Rolf Tiedemann, as the Passagen-Werk. The Harvard Arcades Project uses Tiedemann’s text but omits much of his background material and editorial apparatus. It translates all the French into English and adds helpful notes as well as a wealth of pictorial illustrations. It is a handsome volume: its handling of Benjamin’s complex cross-referencing is a triumph of typographical ingenuity.

>   The history of the Arcades Project, a history of procrastination and false starts, of wanderings in archival labyrinths in a quest for exhaustiveness all too typical of the collecting temperament, of shifting theoretical ground, of criticism too readily acted on, and generally speaking of Benjamin not knowing his own mind, means that the book that has come down to us is radically incomplete: incompletely conceived and hardly written in any conventional sense. Tiedemann compares it to the building materials of a house. In the hypothetical completed house these materials would be held together by Benjamin’s thought. We possess much of that thought in the form of Benjamin’s interpolations, but cannot always see how the thought fits or encompasses the materials.

  In such a situation, says Tiedemann, it might seem better to publish only Benjamin’s own words, leaving out the quotations. But Benjamin’s intention, however utopian, was that at some point his commentary would be discreetly withdrawn, leaving the quoted material to bear the full weight of the structure.

  The arcades of Paris, says an 1852 guidebook, are ‘inner boulevards . . . , glass-roofed, marble-paneled corridors extending through whole blocks of buildings . . . Lining both sides . . . are the most elegant shops, so that such an arcade is a city, a world in miniature.’ (AP, p. 31) Their airy glass and steel architecture was soon imitated in other cities of the West. The heyday of the arcades extended to the end of the century, when they were eclipsed by department stores. To Benjamin their decline was part of the unfolding logic of capitalist economics; he did not foresee their return, in the late twentieth century, in the form of urban malls.

  The Arcades book was never intended to be an economic history (though part of its ambition was to act as a corrective to the entire discipline of economic history). An early sketch suggests something far more like ‘A Berlin Childhood’:

  One knew of places in ancient Greece where the way led down into the underworld. Our waking existence likewise is a land which, at certain hidden points, leads down into the underworld – a land full of inconspicuous places from which dreams arise. All day long, suspecting nothing, we pass them by, but no sooner has sleep come than we are eagerly groping our way back to lose ourselves in the dark corridors. By day, the labyrinth of urban dwellings resembles consciousness; the arcades . . . issue unremarked onto the streets. At night, however, under the tenebrous mass of the houses, their denser darkness protrudes like a threat, and the nocturnal pedestrian hurries past – unless, that is, we have emboldened him to turn into the narrow lane. (AP, p. 84)

  Two books served Benjamin as models: Louis Aragon’s Un Paysan de Paris (translated into English as Nightwalker in 1970 and as Paris Peasant in 1971), with its affectionate tribute to the Passage de l’Opéra, and Franz Hessel’s Spazieren in Berlin (Strolling in Berlin), which focuses on the Kaisersgalerie and its power to summon up the feel of a bygone era. His own work would be informed by Proust’s theory of involuntary memory, but dreaming and reverie would be more historically specific than in Proust. He would try to capture the ‘phantasmagoric’ experience of the Parisian wandering among displays of goods, an experience still recoverable in his own day, when ‘arcades dot the metropolitan landscape like caves containing the fossil remains of a vanished monster: the consumer of the pre-imperial era of capitalism, the last dinosaur of Europe.’ (AP, p. 540)

  The great innovation of the Arcades Project would be its form. Like the Naples essay and the ‘Moscow Diary’, it would work on the principle of montage, juxtaposing textual fragments from past and present in the expectation that they would strike sparks from and illuminate each other. Thus, for instance, if item (2, 1) of Convolute L, referring to the opening of an art museum at the palace of Versailles in 1837, is read in conjunction with item (2, 4) of Convolute A, which traces the development of arcades into department stores, then ideally the analogy ‘museum is to department store as artwork is to commodity’ will flash into the reader’s mind. (AP, pp. 37, 408)

  According to Max Weber, what distinguishes modern times is loss of belief, disenchantment. Benjamin has a different angle: that capitalism has put people to sleep, that they will wake up from their collective enchantment only when they are made to understand what has happened to them. The inscription to Convolute N comes from Marx: ‘The reform of consciousness consists solely in . . . the awakening of the world from its dream about itself.’ (AP, p. 456)

  The dreams of the capitalist era are embodied in commodities. In their ensemble these constitute a phantasmagoria, constantly changing shape according to the tides of fashion, and offered to crowds of enchanted worshippers as the embodiment of their deepest desires. The phantasmagoria always hides its origins (which lie in alienated labour). Phantasmagoria in Benjamin is thus a little like ideology in Marx – a tissue of public lies sustained by the power of capital – but more like Freudian dreamwork operating at a collective, social level.

  ‘I needn’t say anything. Merely show,’ says Benjamin; and elsewhere: ‘Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars.’ If the mosaic of quotations is built up correctly, a pattern should emerge, a pattern that is more than the sum of its parts but cannot exist independently of them: this is the essence of the new form of historical-materialist writing that Benjamin believed himself to be practising.14

  What dismayed Adorno about the project in 1935 was Benjamin’s faith that a mere assemblage of objects (in this case, decontextualised quotations) could speak for itself. Benjamin was, he wrote, ‘on the crossroads between magic and positivism’. In 1948 Adorno had a chance to see the entire Arcades corpus, and again expressed doubts about the thinness of its theorisation.15

  Benjamin’s response to criticism of this kind depended on the notion of the dialectical image, for which he went back to Baroque emblematics – ideas represented by pictures – and Baudelairean allegory – the interaction of ideas replaced by the interaction of emblematic objects. Allegory, he suggested, could take over the role of abstract thought. The objects and figures that inhabit the arcades – gamblers, whores, mirrors, dust, wax figures, mechanical dolls – are (to Benjamin) emblems, and their interactions generate meanings, allegorical meanings that do not need the intrusion of theory. Along the same lines, fragments of text taken from the past and placed in the charged field of the historical present are capable of behaving much as the elements of a Surrealist image do, interacting spontaneously to give off political energy. (‘The events surrounding the historian and in which he takes part,’ Benjamin wrote, ‘will underlie his presentation like a text written in invisible ink.’)16 In so doing the fragments constitute the dialectical image, dialectical movement frozen for a moment, open for inspection, ‘dialectics at a standstill’. ‘Only dialectical images are genuine images.’ (AP, p. 462)

  So much for the theory, ingenious as it is, to which Benjamin’s deeply anti-theoretical book appeals. But to the reader unpersuaded by the theory, the reader to whom the dialectical images never quite come alive as they are supposed to, the reader perhaps unreceptive to the master narrative of the long sleep of capitalism followed by the dawn of socialism, what does The Arcades Project have to offer?

  The briefest of lists would include the following:

  (1) A treasure hoard of curious information about the Paris of the early nineteenth century (for instance, men with nothing better to do would go to the morgue and look at nude corpses).

  (2) Thought-provoking quotations, the harvest of an acute and idiosyncratic mind trawling through thousands of books over the course of many years (Tiedemann lists some 850 titles actually cited). Some of these are from writers we thought we knew well (Marx, Victor Hugo), others from less known writers who, on the evidence here presented, deserve a revival – for instance, Hermann Lotze, author of Mikrokosmos (1864).

  (3) A multitude of succinct observations, polished to a high aphoristic sheen, on a range of Benjamin’s favourite subjects. ‘Prostitution can lay claim to being considered “work” the moment work becomes prostitution.’ ‘What makes the first ph
otographs so incomparable is perhaps this: that they present the earliest image of the encounter of machine and man.’ (AP, pp. 348, 678)

  (4) Glimpses of Benjamin toying with a new way of seeing himself: as collector of ‘keywords in a secret dictionary’, compiler of a ‘magic encyclopedia’. Suddenly Benjamin, esoteric reader of an allegorical city, seems close to his contemporary Jorge Luis Borges, fabulist of a rewritten universe. (AP pp. 211, 207) What brings them together is, of course, the Kabbalah, over which Borges had long pored, and to which Benjamin turned his attention as his faith in the proletarian revolution waned.

  From a distance, Benjamin’s magnum opus is curiously reminiscent of another great ruin of twentieth-century literature, Ezra Pound’s Cantos. Both works are the issue of years of jackdaw reading. Both are built out of fragments and quotations, and adhere to the high-Modernist aesthetics of image and montage. Both have economic ambitions and economists as presiding figures (Marx in one case, Gesell and Douglas in the other). Both authors have investments in antiquarian bodies of knowledge whose relevance to their own times they overestimate. Neither knows when to stop. And both were in the end consumed by the monster of fascism, Benjamin tragically, Pound shamefully.

  It has been the fate of the Cantos to have a handful of anthology pieces excerpted, and the rest (Van Buren, the Malatestas, Confucius, etc.) quietly dropped. The fate of The Arcades Project may well be comparable. One can foresee a condensed, student edition drawn mainly from Convolutes B (‘Fashion’), H (‘The Collector’), I (‘The Interior’), J (‘Baudelaire’), K (‘Dream City’), N (‘On the Theory of Knowledge’), and Y (‘Photography’), in which the quotations would be cut to a minimum and most of the surviving text will be by Benjamin himself. And that would be not wholly a bad thing.