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Benjamin'sPassagen-Werk:
RedeemingMass Culturefor theRevolution'
by Susan Buck-Morss
I. Mass Cultureas Dream-World
I shall focus my comments on the recently published Passagen-Werk,
2
Benjamin's major but unfinished study of Paris in the 19th century,
which was concerned with the origins of mass culture, and which
occupied him from 1927 until his suicide in 1940. In line with the
specific interests of this conference, I will consider his argument that
the recently out-of-date objects of mass culture possessed political,
indeed, revolutionary power for his generation, and this will take us by
a somewhat circuitous route to Imperial Berlin, the scene of Benjamin's own childhood.
Any argument based on the Passagen-Werkis necessarily tentative,
due to its extremely ambiguous status as a text. Its goal was to
reconstruct history with a political focus on the "present," but between
1927 and 1940 the political nature of the present changed considerably, and thus so does the tone of the reconstruction. Moreover,
is
although surely Benjamin's major literary effort, the Passagen-Werk
not only unfinished; it is not a"work" at all. It consists ofreserach notes
with some commentary, carefully numbered and collected in folders
(Konvoluts)to which Benjamin gave identifying keywords ("Arcades,"
"Fashion," "Ancient Paris,""Boredom," Haussmannization," etc.) as
well as letters which he arranged A-Z; a-z. It might best be described as
1. My thanks to Philippe Invernel, Barbara Kleiner, Burkhardt Linder, Michael
iawy, Winfried Menninghaus, and Berndt Witte, from whose contributions to the
colloquium, "Walter Benjamin et Paris" (Paris,June 1983), I learned much that was
stimulating for the revision of this paper.
2. Walter Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk,
2 vol., ed. by Rolk Tiedemann (Frankfurtam-Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1982), Gesammelte
Schriften,vol. V; hereafter PW. Citations
are noted below with their identifying Konvolut letter code.
211
212
Benjamin'sPassagenwerk
3. The bulk of the text was in Adorno's hands by 1948, during which summer he
"worked through it most exhaustively" and concluded that the mass of quotations of
which it consists was lacking in a theoretical or conceptual ordering adequate for their
interpretation, a task which, "if it were possible at all, only Benjamin could have
accomplished." (PW, 1072).
4. In Walter Benjamin, Illuminations,trans. Harry Zohn and ed. Hannah Arendt
(New York: Schocken Books, 1969). The title, "Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner
technischen Reproduzierbarkeit," is more accurately (if less gracefully) translated,
"The work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproduceability."
5. Benjamin wrote that the artwork essay "fixes the contemporary situation from
backwhich certain premises and questions are to be decisive for the [Passagen-Werk's]
ward glance into the 19th century" (PW, 1152. See also Ibid., 1150-51).
Buck-Morss 213
the service of capitalist interests for profits. But the cognitive function
of art (its ability to speak the truth) can be redeemed if in turn the artist,
remaining an outsider, takes the industrial techniques developed
under capitalism into his service. As a mimetic technology, the invention of film provided an expressive medium adequate to industriallytransformed sense-perception. When the artist-as-philosopher takes
over as tools the formal principles of this new medium, he is able to
capture the modern experience of time (increased tempo) and space
(fragmentation)which are no longer describable in Kantiancategories,
and, via non-sequential time frames, close-up and montage, he can
begin to analyse modern reality with a scientific, politically critical
eye.
The change in the function of art corresponded to a social transformation. Benjamin considered the new urban panorama, nowhere
more dazzling than in Paris, as the extreme visual representation of
what Marx called the fetishism of commodities, wherein "a particular
social relationship between people takes on the phantasmagoric form
of a relationship between things."6One could say that the dynamics of
capitalist industrialism had caused a curious reversal in which "reality" and "art" switched places. Reality had become artifice, a phantasmagoria of commodities and architecturalconstruction made possible
by new industrial processes. The modern city was nothing but the proliferation of such objects, the density of which created an artificial
landscape of buildings and consumer items as totally encompassing as
the earlier, natural one. In fact, for children (like Benjamin) born into
an urban environment, they appeared to be nature itself. Benjamin's
understanding of commodities was not merely critical. He affirmed
them as utopian wish-images which "liberated creativityfrom art,just
as in the XVIth century the sciences freed themselves from philosophy" (PW, 1236, again 1249). This phantasmagoria of industriallyproduced material objects - buildings, boulevards, all sorts of
commodities from tour-books to toilet articles - for Benjamin was
mass culture, and it is the central concern of the Passagen-Werk.
The nightmarish, infernal aspects of industrialism were veiled in the
modern city by a vast arrangement of things which at the same time
gave corporeal form to the wishes and desires of humanity. Because
they were "natural"phenomena in the sense of concrete matter,7they
6. Marx, Capital,cited by Benjamin (G 5, 1).
7. Benjamin considered the distinction between manufactured and non-manufactured objects not absolute. Neither were "natural" in the sense of ahistorical; and
- and
both were natural as material existence: "...every true natural form [Naturgestalt]
in fact technology is also such a thing..." (K la, 3).
214
Benjamin'sPassagenwerk
give the illusion of being the realization of those wishes rather than
merely their reified, symbolic expression. Mass media (Benjamin
would have called it mechanical reproduction) could now replicate
this commodity world endlessly as the mere image of an illusion
(examples were Hollywood films, the growing advertising industry,
Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will").8But the critical, cognitive function in which a politicized art might participate was precisely the
opposite: not to duplicate illusion as real, but to interpret reality as
itself illusion. This, I would claim, was in fact the goal of the PassagenWerk.If the artworkessay argues theoretically for the transformation of
art from illusory representation into an analysis of illusions, the
was intended to put theory into literarypractice. Itwas to
Passagen-Werk
have appropriated the new techniques of film9 so that it could meet the
distracted public halfway,'" in order to expose to them how and why
reality became composed of illusions in the first place.
Benjamin described the new urban-industrial phantasmagoria as a
"dream-world," in which neither exchange value nor use value
exhausted the meaning of objects. It was as "dream-images of the
collective" - both distorting illusion and redeemable wish-image that they took on political meaning. The new public buildings were
"dreamhouses."" The lived experience of all this, the false consciousness of a collective subjectivity, at once deeply alienated and yet capable of entering into the commodity landscape of utopian symbols
8. Clearly, in a world where mass media was being used for anything but critical
enlightenment, Benjamin's affirmation of film and other forms of mechanical reproduction was addressed to the cognitive potential of such media, not their present
practice. As he commented to Scholem in 1938: "The philosophical bond between the
two parts of my [artwork]study that you miss will be supplied by the revolution more
effectively than by me" (Gershom Scholem, Cited in Walter Benjamin: TheStoryofa
Friendship,trans. Harry Zohn [Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of
America, 1981], p. 207). Meanwhile, as Brecht stated (and Benjamin's work demonstrated): "It is conceivable that other kinds of artists, such as playrights and
novelists, may for the moment be able to work in a more cinematic way than the film
people" (Brechton Theater,ed. John Willett [New York: 1964], p. 480. Hill and
Wang.
9. "A central problem of historical materialism that finally should be seen: whether
the Marxist understanding of history absolutely precludes its graphicness. Or: In what
way is it possible to connect a heightened graphicness to the execution of the Marxist
method? The first step...will be to take over into history the principle of montage" (N 2,
6).
10. Cf. Benjamin, Illuminations,p. 240.
11. "All collective architecture of the 19th century provides housing for the dreaming collective." (H degree, 1). Included were department stores, world exhibition
halls, railroad stations, factories, museums, and of course the arcades the Passagen
themselves. Interestingly, Benjamin did not consider the 20th-century movie theater
Buck-Morss215
with uncritical enthusiasm he called "dream-consciousness." Benjamin's goal was to interpret the historical origins of this dream by
transforming dream-images into "dialectical images" with the power
to cause a political "awakening." In the Passagen-Werk,
cultural historywriting and revolutionary pedagogy were to converge.
This, at least, was Benjamin's original plan, documented in two early
sets ofnotes, 1927 and 1928-29 (PW,993-1059). At that time Benjamin
was merely a visitor in Paris;his research was conducted mainly at the
in Berlin. In 1933 Benjamin went to Paris in permanent
Staatsbiliothek
exile. Work on the Passagen-Werk
proceeded in fits and starts, but the
original plan remained largely in force at least as late as the 1935
expos6 of the project. Just how greatly it changed after that remains,
even after detailed philological analysis, a debatable point, and it is a
question to which we will return. In the following section I will simply
try to reconstruct Benjamin's theory of the dreaming collective (das
Kollektiv),relying on the early notes (1927 series A degree - A
triiumende
and
1928-29 series a degree - h degree), the various versions of
degree
the 1935 expos6 (including the preparatory notes, 1934-35, PW 12061223), and those sections of the Konvoluts,particularly K ("Traumstadt,
Nihilismus"K 1-K 3a) and N ("ErkenZukunftstridume,
anthropologischer
Theoriedes Fortschritts"
N 1-N 3a), which were written
ntnistheoretisches,
before 1935.12
II. TheSourceof theDreamand the TwoDream-States
Benjamin described capitalism as "a natural phenomenon with
which anew dream-sleep came over Europe, and in it, a reactivation of
mythic powers" (K la, 8). Living in Paris meant being wrapped in this
dream, which left visible traces as the city's physical elements. The
arcades (Passagen)were one such element, in fact the very first "dreamhouses" built out of the new iron-and-glass construction of industrialism. These covered pedestrian streets, privately owned yet open to
the public, were lined with specialty shops, cafes, casinos, and
theaters designed to attracta fashionable crowd in their new social role
216 Benjamin's
Passagenwerk
as consumers. Once the height of bourgeois luxury, the Paris arcades
which survived in Benjamin's day had deteriorated. they had become a
refuge for commodities now old-fashioned, "strange, out-of-date
things:" dentures and feather-dusters, corsettes and umbrellas,
stockings and wind-up dolls, collar buttons for shirts long since disappeared - all this created a montage suggesting "a world of secret
affinities" (a degree 3). It was the Surrealistswho originally recognized
that the residues of past fashions in the present possessed a mythic
power and compare them to dream-images. And it was they who first
became fascinated with the declining Parisarcades, full of such images.
Louis Argaon's description of the soon-to-be demolished Passage de
Benl'Opera, in Lepaysan de Paris (1926) inspired the Passagen-Werk.
jamin recalled later: "Evenings in bed I could never read more than
two or three pages before my heartbeat got so strong I had to put the
book down."'" But Surrealists became "stuck in the realm of dreams"
(H degree 17; N 1, a). Benjamin's intent, "in opposition to Aragon,"
was "not to let oneself be lulled sleepily within the 'dream' or 'mythology' " but "to penetrate all this by the dialectic of awakening" (PW,
1214). Such awakening began where Surrealistsand other avant-garde
artists too often stopped short, because in rejecting cultural tradition
they closed their eyes to history as well. Benjamin wrote: "We conceive
the dream 1) as a historical 2) as a collective phenomenon" (PW, 1214).
Against Aragon, the Passagen-Werk"is concerned with dissolving
mythology into the space of history. This clearly can happen only
through awakening a not-yet-conscious knowledge of the past [Gewesen]"(N 1,9).
In his earliest notes for the Passagen-Werk,Benjamin revived the
feudal image of a"body politic," itself out of fashion since the Baroque
era, without, however, the traditional divisions between classes of
social labor. One might be reminded of the 17th-centuryimage of a new
body politic which as frontespiece illustrated Hobbes' Leviathan,
except that Benjamin was proposing an allegorical representation of
the most recent past instead of a normative model for the present, and
the political unit was not Hobbes' ensemble of atomistic individuals,
but the (not-yet-awakened) collective: "The XIX century: a time-space
[Zeitraum](a time-dream [Zeit-traum])in which individual consciousness maintains itselfever-more reflectively, whereas the collective consciousness sinks into ever-deeper sleep. butjust as the sleeping person
-
through his body, and the sounds and feelings of his own insides 13. Walter Benjamin, Briefe, 2 vols., eds. Gershom Scholem and T.W. Adorno
(Frankfurt-am-Main:Suhrkamp Verlag, 1966), vol. 2, pp. 662-63.
Buck-Morss 217
218
Benjamin'sPassagenwerk
Buck-Morss 219
"awaken" -
from it.'9
18. Walter
Scholem:
1933-1940,ed. GershomScholem,
Briefwechsel,
Benjamin-Gersom
220
Benjamin'sPassagenwerk
periment. This was not the form that the Passagen-Werkitself could
take. As he wrote later: "The Ur-history of the 19th century which is
reflectedin the gaze of the child playing on its threshold has a much different face than that which it engraves on the map of history" (PW,
1139). At no time did Benjamin suggest that the child's understanding
of historical reality was itself a direct insight into truth. But the
reconstruction of childhood as Ur-history could provide a model for
the reconstruction of the collective history of the 19th century. In the
1928-29 notes he wrote: "When as children we received those great
collections, 'The Universe and Humanity,' 'The New Universe,'
'Earth,' did not one's gaze fall always first on the colorful "mineral
landscape" or 'lakes and glaciers of the first Ice Age'? Such an ideal
panorama of a scarcely-past Ur-epoch meets the gaze in the arcades
which are scattered in every city. Here is housed the last dinosaur of
Europe: the consumer" (a 3 degree). There was an analogy, but not an
in the form of a utopian wish-image: "Many years ago in a city tram I saw an advertising
placard which, if it had entered into the world with proper things, would have found its
admirers, historians, exegeticians and copyists, as much as any great literatureor great
painting. And in fact it was both at the same time. But as can occur sometimes with very
deep, unexpected impressions, the shock was so strong, the impression, if I may say it
thus, hit me so powerfully that it broke through the bottom of consciousness and for
years lay irretrievable somewhere in the darkness. I knew only that it had to do with
I succeeded one faded Sunday afternoon...[in discovering a sign
'Bullrichsalz'...Then
on which was written] 'Bullrich-Salz.' It contained nothing but the word, but around
this verbal sign there arose suddenly, effortlessly, that desert landscape of the first
placard. I had it back again. It looked like this: moving forward in the foreground of the
desertwas a freight-wagon drawn by horses. It was laden with sacks on which was written Bullrich-Salz." One of these sacks had a hole out of which salt had already
dribbled for a while onto the earth. In the background of the desert landscape, two
posts carried a large sign with the words: 'is the best.' What about the trace of salt on the
path through the desert? It constructed letters, and these formed a wad, the word
'Bullrich-Salz.' Was the preestablished harmony of Leibniz not childishness compared with this knife-sharp, finely coordinated predestination in the desert? And did
there not lie in this placard a likeness for things which in this life on earth no one has yet
experienced? A likeness for the every-day of utopia?" (G la, 4) Note that the child's
inventive reception of this mass-culture form as a sign of a reconciliated nature
indicates that childhood cognitive powers were not without an antidote to mass
culture's manipulation.
21. I am indebted to John Forester for this comparison.
Buck-Morss 221
tive of both was necessary to capture the ambivalence of the historical situation.
As a maxim for transforming dream-images into "dialectical"
images, which is how the former looked upon wakening, Benjamin
wrote: "No historical category without natural substance; no natural
category without its historical filter" (0 degree 80). This dialectic between nature and history (more clearly worked out by Adorno than by
Benjamin22)functioned on both levels (childhood and society), and
was further complicated by the superimposition of the dialectic between archaic and modern, and the double value-meaning (negative
and positive) of the terms. All this lends Benjamin's theoretical point a
density difficult to unravel, but it is possible to pull at least some of the
strands apart. In the arcades, the recently out-of-date fashions, new to
former generations were historical objects which appeared as fetishes,
ur-images with a mythic meaning, from the perspective of the present
one. But the "newness" of fashion under capitalism was a myth, merely
the fetishized "wish-image" of change within an unchanged system,
and the childhood axis of cognition thereby stumbled accidentally
upon a truth. Hence the importance of the natural history of
generations, whose perspective provided that symbolic angle of vision
which made possible a critical perception of the new as the "alwaysthe-same." But the cognitive axis of social history was also necessary
because its allegorical (as opposed to symbolic) orientation demonstrated that the mythic ur-images had a material, historical base,
and thus (against Klages and Jung) they had transient rather than
ontological status. For example, those arcades which survived in Benjamin's time had a bombed-out appearance, typical of obsolete urban
constructions, so that in them the "wish-symbols of the previous century" appeared turned "into rubble" (BW, 50). Precisely this natural
history of objects, their appearance in the present as "wrecked
material" (PW, 1215) was a sign of the transitoriness of historical
phenomena, including, ultimately, bourgeois class domination.
Within the cognitive axis of childhood, Benjamin took great pains to
demonstrate that as a "natural" mythic state it was bound at every
he cited Ernst Bloch: "the unconpoint to history. In the Passagen-Werk
scious is an acquired condition in specific human beings..." (K 2a, 5).
22. See Adorno's 1932 speech, "The Idea of Natural History," where the argument
is explicitly indebted to Benjamin, who influenced Adorno deeply during this period.
As was frequently the case, Adorno articulated Benjamin's ideas with a greater
philosophical and expository rigor, for the details of Adorno's argument, see chapter
3, Susan Buck-Morss, TheOriginofNegativeDialectics:Theodor
W Adorno,WalterBenjamin,
and theFrankfurtInstitute(New York: Macmillan Free Press, 1977).
222
Benjamin'sPassagenwerk
As the contents of the unconscious were images of concrete, historically specific matter (automobiles, telephones, the arcades themselves) rather than the eternal psychical archetypes that Jung suggested, they were historically, not biologically inherited.23What was
"eternal"was the utopian impulse, that desire for happiness which was
a protest agianst social reality in its given form, and this was nowhere
more manifest than in childhood.24
The dialectical interpenetration of social and natural history was a
specifically modern phenomenon: "This inexorable confrontation of
the most recent past with the present is something historically new"
(PW, 1236). In fact, the intensification of mythic power in both dreamstates was itself a function of history: when capitalism's new dreamsleep fell over Europe, it was the cause of a "reactivation of mythic
powers" (K la, 8). Precisely the citylandscape "confers on childhood
memories a quality that makes them at one as evanescent and as
alluring tormenting as half-forgotten dreams."25In the pre-modern
era, fashions did not change with such rapidity, and the much slower
advances in technology were "covered over by the tradition of church
and family" (N 2a, 3). But now: "The worlds of memory replace themselves more quickly, the mythic in them surfaces more quickly and
how the accelerated tempo of technology looks" (N 2a, 2).
faster against them. From the perspective of today's Ur-history, this is
how the accelerated tempo of technology looks (N 2a, 2).
In the pre-modern era, collective symbolic meaning was transferred
23. In 1936 Benjamin proposed to Horkheimer an essay for the Institut fuir
Sozialforschung on Klages and Jung: "It was to develop further the methodological
considerations of the Passagen-Werk,
confronting the concept of the dialectical image
- the central epistemological category of the 'Passagen' - with the archetypes ofJung
and the archaic images of Klages. Due to the intervention of Horkheimer this study was
materialmakes clear what
never executed" (ed. note, PW, 1145). Still, the Passagen-Werk
further line Benjamin's argument would have taken. WhereJung would see, for example, the recurrence of a utopian image as "successful return" of unconscious contents,
Benjamin, far closer to Freud, cited Bloch, that its repetition was the sign of that continued social repression which prevented the realization of utopian desires (K 2a, 5).
Or, where Jung would see the image of the beggar as an eternal symbol expressing a
trans-historical truth about the collective psyche, for Benjamin the beggar was a historical figure, the persistence of which was a sign of the archaic state, not of the psyche,
but of social reality which remained at the level of myth despite surface change: "As
long as there is still one beggar, there still exists myth" (K 6, 4).
24. For Benjamin, as for Bloch (see Spuren),utopian desire was based on memory, not
anticipation. Cf. his comment (1934) on the singing mouse in Kafka'sstory: "something of our poor, brief childhood is in it, something of lost happiness which can never
be found again, but also something of active present-day life, of its small gaieties, unaccountable and yet real and unquenchable" (Benjamin, Illuminations,p. 118).
25. Benjamin, Reflections,p. 28.
Buck-Morss 223
26. During his years in the youth movement, his group, in rebellion against the
"inhumanity"of parents, was "seriouslyintent upon the abolition of the family." It was
"before the realization matured that no one can improve his school or his parental
home without first smashing the state that needs bad ones." (Benjamin, Reflections,
pp.
19-21). He referred in Einbahnstrasseto the bourgeois family as a "rotten, dismal
ediface" (ibid.,p. 91).
27. Benjamin recalled his sexual awakening when, en route to the synagogue on the
Jewish New Year's Day, he became lost on the city streets, and his "bewilderment,
forgetfulness, and embarrassment were doubtless chiefly due to my dislike of the
impending service, in its familial no less than its divine aspect. While I was wandering
thus, I was suddenly and simultaneously overcome, on the one hand, by the thought
'Too late, time was up long ago, you'll never get there' - and, on the other, by a sense
of the insignificance of all this, of the benefits of letting things take what course they
would; and these two streams of consciousness converged irresistibly in an immense
pleasure that filled me with blasphemous indifference toward the service, but exalted
the street in which I stood as if it had already intimated to me the services of procurement it was later to render to my awakened drive" (Reflections,
p. 53).
28. In the 1934-35 notes Benjamin mentions: "the positive in the fetish" (PW,
1213).
224
Benjamin'sPassagenwerk
the dream" (PW, 1212; again, N 18, 4). In contrast, he insisted: "We
must wake up from the world of our parents" (PW, 1214).
The biological task of awakening from childhood becomes a model
for a collective, social awakening. But more: in the collective experience of a generation the two converge. The coming-to-consciousness of a generation is an explosive moment unique in revolutionary potential within the historical dimension of the dreaming
collective" for which its children become the fortunate occasion of its
own awakening" (K la, 2). In this moment, precisely by rejecting the
existing world created by their parents, the new generation furthered
the realization of their parents' utopian dreams. "The fact that we have
been children in this time is part of its objective image. It had to be thus
in order to release from itself this generation. That means: we look in
the dream-connection for a teleological moment. This moment is one
of waiting. The dream waits secretly for the awakening; the sleeper
gives himself over to death only until recalled; he waits for the second
in which he wrests himself from capture with cunning" (K la, 2).
With cunning (mitList):The reference to Hegel was intentional. 29
Benjamin seems to have been suggesting a rather extraordinary reversal of Hegel, one which turned Hegel's abstract, philosophical
language which literally deified historical progress into the allegorical
language of fairy tales, as a restorative validation of the child's
experience of "progress" as Ur-history. His pedagogy was a double
gesture, both the demythification of history and the re-enchantment of
the world. In his allegorical depection of history, the reification of
commodities as reversed by bringing them to life: "The condition of
sleep and waking...has only to be transferredfrom the individual to the
collective. To the latter, of course, many things are internal which are
external to the individual: architecture, fashions, yes, even the weather
are in the interior of the collective what organ sensations, feelings of illness or of health are in the interior of the individual. And so long as
they persist in unconscious and amorphous dream-form, they arejust
as much natural processes as the digestive processes, respiration, etc.
They stand in the cycle of the ever-identical [myth in the negative sense]
until the collective gets its hands on them politically and history
with the goal of hisemerges out of them" (K 1, 5). The Passagen-Werk,
29. In his 1935 expos6, Benjamin wrote: "Everyepoch...carries its ending within it,
which it unfolds - as Hegel already recognized - with cunning" (PW,59). For Hegel,
through cunning, Reason (consciousness) works its way into history by means of the
passions and ambitions of unwitting historical subjects. But for Benjamin, the historical unconsciousness achieves its goal through the generational coming-to-consciousness of those subjects.
Buck-Morss 225
or more accurately,
as a "dialectical
Benjamin originally conceived of the Passagen-Werk
fairy-tale" (PW, 1138). In it the dreaming collective of the recent past
tory over these [mythic] forces.""3The goal of Benjamin's "new dialectical method of history writing" was "the art of experiencing the
present as the waking world to which that dream which we call the past
(Gewesenes) in truth relates" (K 1, 3).s3 Told with "cunning,"32 the
226 Benjamin's
Passagenwerk
tale would use enchantment to disenchant the world: "We here construct an alarm clock which rouses the kitsch of the last century to
'assembly' - and this operates totally with cunning" (h degree 3). It
would dissolve the dream, empowering the collective politically by
providing the historical knowledge required to realize that dream.
An allegory of historical origins and a symbolic tale of power: these
were to have been the two faces of the Passagen-Werk.
One, that which
goes from the past into the present and which represents the arcades as
precursors; and [the other], that which goes from the present into the
past, in order to let the revolutionary completion of these'precursors'
explode in the present, and this direction also understands the sorrowful, fascinated contemplation of the most recent past as its revolutionary explosion" (0 degree 56).
III. Marx,Freud,and the Originsof Mass Culture
I have said that Benjamin maintained the original plan for the
Passagen-Werk,including the double dream-theory outlined above, at
least until 1935, the year he completed his expos6 of the project for the
Institut fur Sozialforschung. At this point the philological situation
becomes murky. There are at least six copies of the 1935 expose, with
differences in wording significant enough to have caused the editor to
All of the verinclude three of them in the published Passagen-Werk.
sions refer to the following: dream-world, utopian wish-images,
collective consciousness, generations, and, most emphatically the conception of dialectical thinking as historical awakening which was
sparked by the residues of mass culture. Noticeably absent is the image
of the slumbering body-politic, as well as any reference to a "dialectical
fairy tale." The theory of the childhood dream-state is stated explicitly
and in detail in the preparatory notes (1934-35); but in the expos6
itself, it is only implied in vague statements like: "...in these wishimages [of the collective] there emerges an energetic striving to break
with that which is outdated - which means, however, the most recent
past" (PW, 1239)."
The expos6 elicited from Adorno his now famous "Hornberg letter"
33. This was the wording in "T", the first typoscript of the expos which was theversion sent to Adorno. In the earlier "M "was a more explicit reference, later deleted:
"This inexorable confrontation with the most recent past is something historically
new. Other neighboring links in the chain of generations stood within collective consciousness, [and] scarcely distinguished themselves from one another within that
collective. The present, however, stands already in relation to the most recent past in
the same way as does awakening to dream" (PW, 1236). (For an identification of the
various expos6 versions, see the editor's note (PW, 1251).
Buck-Morss 227
228
Benjamin'sPassagenwerk
stated: "Every epoch not only dreams the next, but while dreaming
impels it toward wakefulness" (which survived unchanged in all three
versions), his position appeared as indistinguishable from Jung's
approach as Adorno feared. Adorno blamed the overly-positive conception of a collective consciousness on the influence of Brecht, and
argued against it on Marxist grounds: "It should speak clearly and with
sufficient warning that in the dreaming collective there is no room for
class differences" (PW, 1129).
There is no doubt that Benjamin took Adorno's criticisms seriously.35 I believe there is also no doubt that he attempted to stick to his
position despite them. The material relating to theoretical questions
which he added to the Passagen-Werk
after 1935 intensified a direction
of research he had in fact already begun: to ground the basic premise of
his dream-theory - that the 19th-century was the origin of a collective
dream from which an "awakened" present generation could derive
revolutionary consequences - in the theories of Marx and Freud.36
Interestingly (and dialectically), he found in Marxist theory ajustification for the conception for the conception of a collective dream, and in
Freud an argument for the existence of class differences within it.
Of course Marx had spoken positively of a collective dream, and
more than once. After 1935 Benjamin added to KonvolutN the wellknown quotation from Marx: "It will then become clear that the world
has long possessed the dream ofsomethingwhich it only has to possess
with consciousness in order to possess it in reality" (N 5a, 1). And he
35. The original copy ofAdorno's Hornberg letter is among the Benjamin papers
recently discovered in George Bataille's archive, Bibliotheque Nationale. Benjamin
gave it a careful reading, making penciled notes and double red lines in the margin not always at those points in Adorno's formulations which the latter would have himself considered most eloquent. Benjamin's notations include question marks and
exclamation points which seem to indicate he was not always in agreement.
36. Before receiving Adorno's reaction to the exposC, Benjamin wrote him (June
10, 1935) expressing his preference for Freud's theory over that of Fromm and Reich,
and asking whether Adorno knew if in Freud or his school there was "at present a
psycho-analysis of awakening? or studies on this theme?" (PW, 1121); he said too that
he had begun to "look around" in the firstvolume ofMarx's Capital.A Konvolut (X)on
"Marx"was begun in 1935. In that year Benjamin spoke of the concept of the fetish(ibid.);in
character of commodities as standing "at the center" of the Passagen-Werk
1938 it was still the book's "fundamental category" (PW, 1116).
In March 1937 Benjamin wrote to Horkheimer"that the definitive and binding plan
now that the material research for it is finished except in a few
of the [Passagen-Werk],
small areas, would proceed from two fundamentally methodological analyses. The
one would have to do with the criticism of pragmatic history on one side, and of
cultural history on the other as it is presented by the materialists;the other [would deal]
with the meaning of psychoanalysis for the subject of materialist history-writing"
(PW,1158).
Buck-Morss 229
37. His familiarity with Freudian theory may have been largely second-hand, from
two distinct sources, the Frankfurt Institute, and the Surrealists.
38. Sigmund Freud, TheInterpretation
ofDreams,trans, and ed.James Strachey (New
York: Avon Books, 1965), p. 123.
39. Freud, Interpretation
of Dreams,p. 194.
230
Benjamin'sPassagenwerk
Buck-Morss 231
41. As Benjamin noted, whereas London's first exhibition was organized by private
entrepreneurs (G 6; G 6a, 1), the French industrial exhibitions (as early as 1789) were
state-organized (G 4, 4). They were thus the earliest form of politics-as-mass-spectacle,
staged by the state, and in this sense anticipated the Volkfestof fascism (G 4, 7).
232
Benjamin'sPassagenwerk
1889 (for which the Eiffel tower was built); and in 1900 Pariswitnessed
an equally spectacular international exhibition which expressed in
fairy-land form the heightened political and economic competition of
imperialism. The extravagant expositions were no longer ideology for
a bourgeois elite, but ideology for the working masses, who took
pilgrimages to these enshrinements of commodities to worship as
idols those objects on display which their own labor had produced.42
In 1900 the socialists complained that due to the exposition "the year
was lost for propaganda" (G 4, 6).
By the end of the century, the dream, clearly of bourgeois origins
(and bourgeois in the latent wish that it expressed) in fact had become
"collective," spreading to the working classes as well (and to every
capitalist industrializing country43).The mass marketing of dreams
within a class system that prevented their realization in anything but
symbolic form was quite obviously a growth industry. In his earliest
notes, Benjamin interpreted the aesthetic style of this mass production, "kitsch," as bourgeois class guilt: "the expression within the
overproduction of commodities of the bad conscience of the producers" (P degree 6).
It is true, as Adorno criticized, that Benjamin's 1935 expos6 presented a very positive representation of the collective dream, and thus
of mass culture in which it found expression. In the version Adorno
received was the statement "The experiences [ofUr-history] which are
deposited in the unconscious of the collective, through interpenetration with the new, produce the utopia which leaves its traces in
thousands of configurations of life, from permanent buildings to transient fashions" (PW, 1239). But in the same text Benjamin stated
explicitly:"The new is a qualityindependent of the use value of the commodity. It is the source of that illusion which is inseparable from the
dream-images of the collective. It is the quintessence of false consciousness, whose agent is fashion. This illusion of the new is reflected,
like one mirror in another, in the appearance of the always-again-the-
42. (G 9a, 6; G 10; G 13a 3). Benjamin's interest in Paris' world exhibitions had a
very present motive: in 1931 and 1937, Paris again was the scene of this form of mass
ideology. (In our own time it has been threatened to be repeated in 1989 on the occasion of the second centennial of the French Revolution).
43. By 1900 the arcades became a hallmark of industrially-arrived cities from
Cleveland to Milan to Moscow. The later arcades, unlike the original Paris ones, were
built in monumental proportions. (See the exhaustive history: Hermann Geist,
Arcades:TheHistoryofa BuildingType,trans.Jane O. Newman andJohn H. Smith [Boston: The MIT Press, 1983].)
Buck-Morss 233
234
Benjamin'sPassagenwerk
whole of his later childhood was "a period of impotence before the
city."47He recalled his "dreamy recalcitrance,"when, being led by his
mother, "we walked through the streets, rarely frequented by me, of
the city center."48Benjamin's introduction to civic life was as a consumer: "In those early years I got to know the 'town' only as the theatre
of purchases...[I]t was only in the confectioner's that our spirits rose
with the feeling of having escaped the false worship that humiliated
our mother before idols bearing the names of Mannheimer, Herzog
and Israel, Gerson, Adam, Esders and Madler, Emma Bette, Bud and
Lachmann. An impenetrable chain of mountains, no caverns of commodities - was 'the town.' "49 Benjamin never implied that his
experience of the city was anything but class-bound, a situation intensified by the false sense of security that class-belonging seemed to offer
"The poor?
GermanJews at the turn of the century. In BerlinerChronik:
For rich children of his [Benjamin's] generation they lived at the back
of beyond."'5 He knew the working class through the glass rhombus
on the table of his aunt's apartment, "containing the mine, in which little men pushed wheelbarrows, labored with pickaxes, and shone lanterns into the shafts in which buckets were winched perpetually up and
down."5' He admitted: "I never slept on the street in Berlin...Only
those for whom poverty or vice turns the city into a landscape in which
they stray from dark till sunrise know it in a way denied to me."52And
in the Passagen-Werk:
"What do we know of the streetcorners, curbstones, the architecture of pavements, we who have never felt the
streets, heat, dirt, and edges of the stones under naked soles, never
investigated the unevenness between the broad slabs, or their fitness to
lead us?" (K degree 28) What indeed? If, as I have tried to show, Benjamin's theory of the dreaming collective did not blur class distinctions,
can the same be said of his theory of political awakening? In his earliest
notes, Benjamin indicated that the bourgeoisie who had generated the
dream remained trapped within it: "Did not Marx teach us that the
bourgeoisie can never itself come to a fully enlightened consciousness?
And if this is true, is one notjustified in attaching the idea of the dreaming collective (i.e., the bourgeois collective) onto his thesis?" 0 degree
67) And immediately following: "Would it, in addition, not be possible,
47. Ibid.,p. 4.
48. Ibid.
49. Ibid.,p. 40. Those caverns included the Berlin arcades, such as the Kaisergallerie
on Friedrichstrasse, built in 1871-73, just after Bismarck's victory over France.
50. Benjamin, Reflections,p. 11.
51. Ibid., p. 12.
52. Ibid., p. 27.
Buck-Morss 235
236
Benjamin'sPassagenwerk
Buck-Morss 237
the only form possible within a bourgeois social context. Because of it,
the objects which populated the childhood environment of Benjamin's generation were devalued in the present as hopelessly oldfashioned: "Everygeneration experiences the fashions of the most recent
past as the most thorough anti-aphrodisiac that can be imagined" (B 9,
1). But precisely this was what made it "politically vital," so that "the
confrontation with the fashions of the past generation is an affair of
much greater meaning that has been supposed" (B la, 4). At the same
time, as the stuff of childhood memories,56 these outmoded objects
retained a symbolic power. Benjamin commented that for Kafka,"as
only for 'our' generation...the horrifying furniture of the beginning of
high capitalism was felt as the showplace of its brightest childhood
experience" (K degree 27).57The contrary desire to outgrow and to
recapture the lost world of childhood together determined a generation's interest in the past, which Benjamin believed could be
mobilized for utopian, revolutionary politics. The bourgeois intellectual could see his struggle to break from past culture as an allegory for
the colletive struggle - a model, perhaps even a prophetic one - but
never a substitute, no more than the mass-culture audience was itself
already the revolutionary collective.58
56. "Whatare the noises of an awakening morning which we draw into our dreams?
The 'ugliness,' the 'old-fashioned' are only distorted morning voices that speak about
our childhood" (PW, 1214).
57. Here, in the case of the bourgeois interior, Benjamin slips into a class-specific
definition of "our" generation. And indeed, he never fully resolved the problem of the
hiatus between class and generation. Writing generally on Benjamin's position during
in the role
the early 1930s Bernd Witte notes: "The intellectual...is seen by Benljamlinl
of the psychoanalyst of the collective neurosis [-this is nowhere more true than in the
of
inadequate consciousness occurs, he believes, accordingto theschiema
Passagen-Werk]:
the mechanism ofwhich is capable of being discovered by the intellectual-asrepression,
specialist for the collective education. The paradox in Benjamin's theory lies therein,
that this social psychoanalysis - in order to remain with his image - heals not the
patients, but the analyst and his colleagues" (Bernd Witte, "Krise und Kritik. Zur
Zusammenarbeit Benjamins mit Brecht in denJahren 1929-1933," Peter Gebhardt et
derModern(Monographien Literaturwissenschaftvol.
al., WalterBenjamin- Zeitgenosse
30 [Kronberg/Ts.: Scriptor Verlag, 1976], p. 15). Despite declarations to the contrary,
often seems to be aimed at bourgeois intellectuals, with the goal of
the Passagen-Werk
revolutionizing the educators, rather than educating the revolutionary class.
58. In Benjamin's early notes, the concept of the collective is used very loosely. Cermade
tainly, the success of fascism, with its "class-blind" concept of Volksgemeinschaft,
vagueness on this point ill-advised, and by the late 1930s Benjamin used this term only
in a critical, negative sense. Cf.: "...everv commodity collects around itself the mass of
its customers. The totalitarian states have taken this mass as their model. The
attempts to drive everything out of individuals that stands in the way of
Volksgemeinschaft
their complete assimilation into a massified clientel. The only unreconciled opponent...in this connection is the revolutionary proletariat. The latter destroys the illusion of the mass (Schein der Masse) with the reality of the class (Realittitder Klasse)"(J
81a, 1).
238
Benjamin'sPassagenwerk
A revolution in style, even if it occurred on a mass basis, was no substitute for the social revolution, and there were "Modernists" of this
generation - Marinetti, for example59 - whose political impact was
far from progressive. Moreover, from the political perspective, Modernism stripped the objects of all those cultural expressions which provided historical clues. 19th-century design may have been
technologically reactionary when it hid function and tried to revive
dying forms. But the tremendous value of its clutter was that it tacked
onto the surface of things all kinds of configurations in which historical
truth and utopian dreams could be read. Benjamin spoke of the 19thcentury's "narcotic historicism, its passion for masks, in which
nonetheless there hides a signal of true historical existence..." (K 1a, 6).
The great, the truly horrifying danger was that his generation, with its
revived mythic powers, would in the process of rejecting the recent
past lose contactwith historical and social concreteness altogether, and
that danger was synonymous with fascism.
V. Dwarfsand Giants
In 1939, with World War imminent, the Institut fuirSozialforschung
in hopes of getting outside
requested a new expos6 of the Passagen-Werk
it.
a
in a lucid, descripfor
French
version
funding
Benjamin produced
tive style, with a totally new introudction and conclusion, in which the
dream theory is strikingly absent. Instead, Blanqui's cosmological
speculations are introduced with their conception of history as the
incessant recurrence of the same, suggesting a "resignation without
hope" (PW, 76). One could almost conclude that Benjamin had put all
talk of collective dreams and awakening definitively behind him.
But itwas not his lastword. In 1940, he wrote a series of theses on the
philosophy of history which were his last formulations concerning
revolutionary pedagogy, and they drew on material from the PassagenWerk.6oThe theses were prompted by "the war and the constellation
which it brought with it"; they contained, not new thoughts, but ones
"held in custody, yes, even from myself' for twenty years.6' Never
intended for publication (-"they would open gate and door for an
enthusiastic misunderstanding"62-), they resurrect the theological
language of the early Passagen-Werknotes:63 all of history appears as
59. The significance of this example was pointed out to me by Joel Remmer.
60. The material came largely from the later entries to KonvolutN which concerned
the theory of historical progress.
61. Benjamin, GesammelteSchriftenI:3, p. 1226.
62. Ibid., p. 1227.
63. Cf.: "The modern, the time of hell..." (g degree 17).
Buck-Morss 239
240
Benjamin'sPassagenwerk
at its disposal does not bring nature into play in a mythical way, but
points to its complicity with liberated man. A mature man feels this
complicity only occasionally, that is, when he is happy; but the child
first meets it in fairy tales, and it makes him happy."65The fairy tale,
which uses re-enchantment to disenchant the world, also has something very specific to do with Messianic redemption. Benjamin tells us
that the storyteller, Leskov, "interpreted the Resurrection less as a
transfiguration than as a disenchantment, in a sense akin to the
fairy tale."66
65. Ibid.
66. Ibid.,p. 103.