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Benjamin's Passagen-Werk: Redeeming Mass Culture for the Revolution

Author(s): Susan Buck-Morss


Source: New German Critique, No. 29, The Origins of Mass Culture: The Case of Imperial
Germany (1871-1918) (Spring - Summer, 1983), pp. 211-240
Published by: New German Critique
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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the recently out-of-date objects of mass culture possessed political,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

a lexicon providing concrete images, in the form of quotations from


sources on 19th-centuryParis,which illuminate the origins of modernity. From them, as from building blocks, Benjamin constructed his
two essays on Baudelaire (1938 and 1939), and wouldhave constructed
the Passagen-Werk -

in just what fashion, however, even the most

qualified commentator, Theodor Adorno, could not decipher, given


the fragmented condition of the surviving material.3 But particularlyof
the topic of mass culture, in light of the wide dissemination of the 1936
essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,"4
which in this country at least is taken as the canonical statement by Bento which the artwork essay was
jami on the subject, the Passagen-Werk,
in
its
tied
in its partial illuminations
even
closely
conception,5 provides
an important corrective to overly-simplistic or one-sided assumptions
as to what Benjamin's mass-culture theory was all about.
It should perhaps be noted first of all that despite its reception as
such, "mass culture" (a term Benjamin didn't use) is not the central
theme of the artworkessay. The essay is concerned primarilywith art in
the age of industrialism, when it has become possible to reproduce
technologically not only the work of art, but also the subject matter
(reality)which art has striven traditionally to represent. Benjamin dealt
with the theoretical, indeed, philosophical question of what happens
to the social and cognitive function of art once its authority as an
original (the source of its "aura") has been undermined by mass
reproduction and once its efforts at the mimetic replication of reality
(which had given its forms, however illusory, a claim to truth) have
been decisively surpassed by technological means, specifically
photography and film. Benjamin's answer is clear: The result is the
liquidation of art in its traditional, bourgeois form. Art's power as illusion moves over into industry (painting into advertising, architecture
into technical engineering, handcrafts or sculpture into the industrial
arts) creating what we have come to call mass culture, and is taken into

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

as the penultimate "dreamhouse." On the contrary, the technology of film provided


the opposite effect: "Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories appeared to have locked us up
hopelessly. Then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite
of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far flug ruins and debris, we
calmly and adventurously go travelling" (Benjamin, Illumination,p. 236).
12. We can date these sections because the then-existing manuscript was photographed in 1935. A second part was photographed by a different technique in 1937.
(On the question of dating, see the editor's notes (PW, 1261-62).

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
-

here like someone insane -

sets out on the macrocosmic journey

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

which to the healthy, awake person blend together in a surge of health


(blood pressure, intestinal movements, heartbeat and muscle sensations) - due to his unprecedently sharpened senses, generate
hallucinations or dream-images which translate and explain [these
sensations], so it is too with the dreaming collective which in the
arcades sinks into its own innards. This is what we have to pursue in
order to interpret the 19th century in fashion and advertisement,
building and politics, as the consequence of [the collective's] dreamcountenance" (K 1, 4, cf. G degree 14). Consumer objects, novelties and
fashions from the past [Gewesene],existed in the present as dream
images through which the collective unconscious communicated
across generations. New inventions conceived out of the fantasy of one
generation, they entered into the childhood experienced of another.
Now (and this is one of the most intriguing aspects of Benjamin's
theory), their second dream-existence began: "The experience of the
youth of a generation has much in common with dream experience."
(K 1, 1, cf. F degree 7). If capitalism had been the source of a historical
dream-state, this one was of biological origins, and the two axes converged in a unique constellation for each generation. At this intersection between social history and natural history, between society's
dream and childhood dream, the contents of the collective unconscious were transmitted. "Every epoch has this side turned toward
dreams - the childlike side. For the preceeding century it emerges
very clearly in the arcades" (K 1, 1; F degree 7).
Childhood was not merely a passive receptacle for this historical
unconscious. Childhood transformed the dream-images in accord
with its own temporal index, and this entailed their dialectical reversal
from historically specific images into archaic ones (Urbilder).I understand at least part of Benjamin's point to be this: From the child's position, all history, from the most ancient to the most recent past, occurs
in mythic time. No history recounts his or her lived experience. All of
the past lies in an archaic realm of"Ur"-history. Now, the bourgeois
ideology of historical progress does its best to overwhelm this
childhood intuition of even the most recent history as archaic and
mythically distant, by substituting for it the image of history's triumphal march, which submerges the new generations in its "irresistable" tide. (We may recall that Benjamin considered nothing so
politically corrupting: The belief in progress was itselfa myth that prevented any real historical change from occurring."14) In the marketplace, historical progress manifests itself as fashion and newness, but it
isjust this that the cognitive experience of childhood reverses:"Atfirst,
14. Benjamin, Illuminations,p. 258.

218

Benjamin'sPassagenwerk

granted, the technologically-new gives the effect of beingjust that. But


already in the next childhood memory it changes its characteristics.
Every child accomplishes something great, something irreplaceable
for humanity. Every childhood, through its interests in technological
phenomena, its curiosity for all sorts of inventions and machinery,
binds technological achievement [the newest things] onto the old
world of symbols" (n 2a, 1).
This old "world of symbols" was the storehouse for humanity's
expressions of the desire for utopia, and here Benjamin came closest to
the theory of a collective unconscious with innate archetypes postulated by C.G. Jung and Ludwig Klages. The difference was Benjamin's Marxist sensibility: when old utopian desires were cathected
onto the new products of industrial production, they reactivated the
original promise of industrialism, slumbering in the lap of capitalism,
to deliver a humane society of material abundance. In terms of
socialist, revolutionary politics, then, the rediscovery of these ursymbols in the most modern technological products had a potentially
explosive and absolutely contemporary relevance.
For Benjamin, the truth of an object emerged in its "after-life,"(cf. N
2) when both use-value and exchange-value receeded and the potential for the symbolic expression of humanity's dreams - its wishdreams as well as its nightmares - came to the fore. And this precisely
desribes the child's reception of objects. Hence: "The child can in fact
do something of which the adult is totally incapable:'discover the new
anew' For us locomotives already have the character of symbols
because we found them there in our childhood. For our children,
however, [this is true ofi the automobile, from which we ourselves gain
only the new, elegant, modern, dashing side. There is no more
shallow, impotent antithesis as that which reactionary figures like
[Ludwig] Klages try to set up between the symbolic space of nature and
techne. To every truly new and natural form - and in fact technology
is also such a thing - there correspond new "images." Every
childhood discovers these new images in order to add them to the
image-treasure of humanity" (K la, 3; M degree 20).
When Benjamin referred to "our children" he was not speaking
hypothetically. The period of his first formulation of the Passagen-Werk
coincided with the childhood of his own son Stefan (born in 1918). But
it coincided as well with a long and painful divorce which put distance,
physically and emotionally, between them. His marriage was dissolved in 1930. His parents, with whom he had had strong conflicts as a
young man, died during the same period. The pressure in modern
society which causes ruptures in family tradition and alienation
between generations was clear to him. In 1932 at the age of forty, Benjamin, convinced that his chances for personal happiness were small,

Buck-Morss 219

and threatened by economically and politically insecure conditions,


contemplated suicide seriously. During that same year, in the midst of
writing short pieces necessary for his financial survival, he wrote to
Scholem, "something else is coming into being behind my back - in
the form of some notes I have been making...concerning the history
of my relationship to Berlin."'SThese notes took shape quickly in two
versions, BerlinerChronik
(dedicated to Stefan),'6and BerlinerKindheitum
1900.17 They were childhood reminiscences structured not as
chronological autobiography, but as "discrete expeditions into the
As self-analysis this project seems to have been
depth of memory."'"18
therapeutic, giving Benjamin the power to put the past behind him. At
the same time he was testing the childhood dream-theory on himself,
and practicing on the level of individual history what he hoped eventually to accomplish in the Passagen-Werk for the collective, a reconstruction of the past in the light of the present, in order to break
away -

"awaken" -

from it.'9

Benjamin's childhood memories are less of people than of those


urban spaces in Imperial Berlin which formed the settings for his
experiences - parks, department stores, railroad stations, city streets,
cafes, and school buildings. They concern as well the material products of industrialism - a wrought-iron door, the telephone, a
chocolate-dispensing slot machine. The world of the modern city
appears as a mythic and magical one in which the child Benjamin "discovers the new anew," and the adult Benjamin recognizes it as a rediscovery of the old.20 One thing became clear to him from the ex15. Letter, 28 February, 1932, cited in scholem, TheStoryofa Friendshi,p. 180. Benjamin had already written about his childhood in the set of aphorisms, Einbahnstrasse,
published in 1928. Although this early account contained the memory of childhood
dreams, what was new in the later essays was precisely the memory of the waking life of
childhood as a dream-state.
16. The dedication was at first to several contemporaries, friends of Benjamin.
Their names were ultimately crossed out and replaced with "for my dear Stefan."
BerlinerChronikwas written in spring 1932. More directly personal (and political) than
the laterversion, it was left unpublished until 1970 when Gershom Scholem edited the
manuscript. An English translation appears in Walter Benjamin, Reflections:Essays,
Aphorisms,Autobiographical
Writings,ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New
York: Harvest/HBJ, 1978), pp. 3-60.
17. Written in fall 1932 and published in sections in various journals, but first
published as a single text in 1950.

18. Walter
Scholem:
1933-1940,ed. GershomScholem,
Briefwechsel,
Benjamin-Gersom

(Frankfurtam Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1980), p. 28.


19. In his post-1937 notes toKonvolutK, Benjamin cited the Freudian Theodor Reik
on memory and its healing power due to the fact that the conscious reconstruction of
the past destroys its power over the present (see K 8, 1; K 8, 2).
20. He included a similar reminiscence in the Passagen-Werk,
and the "discovery" is

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

identity, between the childhood dream-state and the historical one.


The natural history of the child and the social history of the collective

were separate axes. They had to be kept apart conceptually in order to


avoid the ideological mistake of conflating social history and the
natural state of things (a problem, in our own time, of sociobiology21).
Nonetheless, these axes always intersected, and the cognitive perspec-

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

to new generations consciously through tradition-bound stories,


myths or fairytales. Given modernity's rupture of tradition, this was no
longer possible. Instead, the transferal occurred indirectly and
unconsciously, through the mediation of things, which as symbols
underwent at the boundary of generations a dialectical reversal from
the new to the archaic.Benjamin spoke of the "arcades...inwhich we, as
in a dream, once again live the life of our parents and grandparents.."
e degree 2). And on the dialectical reversal:"The impression of the oldfashioned can only come to be where, in a certain way, it is effected by
the most contemporary. If in the arcades there lie the beginnings of the
most modern architectural form, then its old-fashioned effect on people today hasjust as much to say as the antiquarian effect of the father
on his son" (B 3, 6).
Benjamin affirmed the rupture in tradition because it freed symbolic powers from conservative restraintsfor the task of social transformation. (Although one can find statements by Benjamin that seem to
lament the loss of tradition, he was a supporter of the institution of the
bourgeois family,26 and whatever positive attitude he had toward
theology, it did not include organized religion as an institution.27)And
clearly, Benjamin affirmed the mythic power of wish-images which
found unconscious, symbolic form in commodities and mass culture.28
But as dream-images they were fetishes, alienated from the dreamers,
and dominating them as an external force. This was the nightmarish
side of the dream, and it existed in the state of childhood as well. Benjamin criticized Jung "who wants to hold awakening far away from

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

torical awakening, was to provide a politically explosive answer to the


collective, socio-historical form of the child's question, "Where did I
come from?" Where did modern consciousness,

or more accurately,

the images of modern dream-consciousness come from? Speaking of


Surrealism, the aesthetic expression of that dream-consciousness,
Benjamin wrote: "The father of Surrealism was Dada; its mother was
an arcade" (PW, 1057).

as a "dialectical
Benjamin originally conceived of the Passagen-Werk
fairy-tale" (PW, 1138). In it the dreaming collective of the recent past

appeared as a sleeping giant ready to be awakened by the present


generation, and the mythic powers of both dream states were affirmed,
the world re-enchanted, but only in order to break out of history's
mythic spell, in fact by reappropriating the power bestowed on the
objects of mass culture as utopian dream symbols. "Fairy tales," he
wrote in the (1934) Kafka essay, "are the traditional stories about vic-

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

Passagen-Werkwould accomplish a double task: it would dispel the


mythic power of present being (Wesen)by showing it to be composed of
decaying objects with a history (Gewesen).And it would dispel the myth

of history as progress (or the modern as new) by showing history and


modernity in the child's light as the archaic. Told properly, this fairy

30. Benjamin, Illumiantions,p. 117.


31. Benjamin was suggesting a"dialectical reversal"of historical cognition. Instead
of presenting the past as the "fixed point" with which present knowledge tried to come
into touch, "this relationship is to be reversed, and the past become[s] the dialectical
transformation, the invasion...[into] awakened consciousness. Politics maintains
primacy over history" (K 1, 2).
32. Benjamin saw fairy tales as the stage coming, both phylogenetically and
ontogenetically, after humans had learned to use the cunning of reason to trickmythic
powers: "Ulysses, after all, stands at the dividing line between myth and fairy tale.
Reason and cunning have inserted tricks into myths: their forces cease to be invincible" (Benjamin, Illuminations,p. 117). Adorno suggested instead that fairy tales were a
stage prior to myth, belonging to an age ofinnoence rather than cunning. (Interestingly, Benjamin's one-line comment on Ulysses cited above becomes fundamental to
Adorno's argument in the chapter on Odysseus in Dialecticof Enlightenment.)
"The coming awakening stands like the wooden horse
See also in the Passagen-Werk:
of the Greeks in the Troy of the dream" (K 2, 4). Hegel interpreted history as rational,
turning reason itself into a myth which justified whoever happened to be ruling. Benjamin interpreted history as a dream in order to achieve precisely the opposite political
effect, allowing reason to enter history by breaking its mythic course, the recurrent
cycle of domination.

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

(August 2, 1935)54with its quite devastating criticism, including the


charge that Benjamin had abandoned his own original conception.
Benjamin's response came indirectly in a letter (August 18) to Gretel
Adorno: "...nothing of this first draft [the reference is to the 127-29
conception of the Passagen-Werk]has been given up and no word
lost...[the expos6] not the 'second' plan, but the other. These two
plans have a polar relationship. They represent the thesis and
antithesis of the work. Thus this second one is for me everything else
buta closure. Its necessity rests in thefact that...the insights which were
there at first allowed no immediate shaping - only one that would be
inexcusably 'literary.'Thus the subtitle of the first plan, given up long
ago, 'a dialectical fairy tale' (PW, 1138). Did Benjamin give up his
childhood theory as well? In the same letter he spoke of the absolute
and forms like BerlinerKindheit
distinction between the Passagen-Werk
um 1900, and said that "making this knowledge clear to me" had been
"an important function of the [expose]" (PW, 1139). If not only the
too-literary form but also the elaborated content of the original conception had been abandoned, it would be difficult to justify his
simultaneous claim that no word of the first draft had been lost. And in
fact, that claim was quite literally true. Benjamin had not thrown out
the early notes, or the early sections of the Konvolutsdealing with the
dream-theory, and he never did. Adorno's knowledge of these notes
was limited to what Benjamin read to him in Konigstein in 1929. We do
not know whether their discussions there included the double dreamstate. We do know that the absence of it in the expos6 was not what
Adorno lamented when he accused Benjamin of betraying an earlier
plan. Instead, it was the depiction of the 19th-centurycommodity-world
as a utopia, rather than a criticism of it as "hell." It was the imagery ot
"negative theology" that Adorno missed, not that of childhood and
fairy tales. Ironically, had Benjamin included an elaboration of the
theory of childhood it might have warded off another of Adorno's
criticisms, that the entire conception had become "de-dialectized"
(PW, 1129). The childhood theory was complex and indeed confused,
but without it too much of both the affirmative, utopian elements and
the archaic, ur-image aspects of the construction had to be situated
solely within the socio-historical axis, as if they existed in the actual
collective consciousness of the 19th century. Furthermore, when he
claimed that contained within the images of the collective (rather than
that of childhood which intersects history and reverses its poles) there
were "elements of pre-history - that is to say of a classless society," or
34. PW, 1127-36. English trans. in Ernst Bloch et al., Aestheticsand Politics(London:
NLB, 1977).

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

chose Marx's statement as motto for this Konvolut(which is the central


one concerning method): "The reform of consciousness consists only
therein, that one wakes the world...out of its dream ofitselPf'(PW,570).
Class differentiations were never lacking in Benjamin's theory of the
collective unconscious. Indeed, even in his earliest formulations he
considered it an extension and refinement of Marx's theory of the
superstructure: the collective dream manifested the ideology of the
dominant class. "The question is namely, if the substructure determines the superstructure to a certain extent, in terms of the material of
thought and experience, but this determining is not simply one of
copying, how is it...to be characterised? As its expression. the
superstructure is the expression of the substructure. The economic
conditions under which society exists come to expression in the
superstructure, just as with someone sleeping, an over-filled stomach,
even if it may causally determine the contents of the dream, finds in
those contents not its copied reflection,but its expression"(K 2, 5; cf. M
degree 14). It is the bourgeoisie, not the proletariat, whose dream
expresses the discomfort of an overly-full stomach. The same entry
claims that Marx never intended a direct causal relationship between
substructure and superstructure: "Already the observation that the
ideologies of the superstructure reflect [social] relations in a false and
distorted form goes beyond this" (K 2, 5). Freud's dream theory gave a
ground for such distortion. Benjamin's direct references to Freud
remained limited and quite general,"7 but on this point, even if direct
indebtedness cannot be proved, clearly there was a consensus. Freud
had written that "ideas in dreams..[are] fulfillments of wishes,"3s but,
due to ambivalent feelings, they were censored and hence distorted.
The actual (latent)wish might be almost invisible at the manifest level,
and was arrived at only after the dream's interpretation. Thus: "A
dream is a (disguised) fulfillment of a (suppressed or repressed)
wish."39If one takes the bourgeois class to be the generator of a collective dream, the socialist tendencies of that industrialism which it itself
created would seem to catch it in an unavoidably ambivalent situation.
The bourgeoisie desires to affirm that industrial production from
which it is deriving profits; at the same time it wishes to deny the fact
that industrialism creates the conditions which threaten the continuation of its own class rule.

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

Now, precisely this bourgeois class ambivalence is documented by a


whole range of quotations which Benjamin included in the PassagenWerkmaterial at all stages of his research. He found it not only in the
commodities and architecture of 19th-century Paris, but in the contemporary writings of futurologists, social utopians, city planners, and
social commentators. Utopian writings were the "depository of collective dreams" (PW, 1212), and architectural constructions "had the role
of the subconscious" (PW, 1210), but both were expressions of
specifically bourgeois ideology. He found descriptions of future Paris
in which cafes were still ordered according to social classes (K 6a, 2).
Images of Paris projected into the 20th century included visitors from
other planets arriving in Paris to play the stock market (G 13, 2). On the
manifest level the future appeared as limitless progress and continuous change. But on the latent level (the level of the true wish of the
dreamer), it was seen as the eternalization of bourgeois class domination. In his early notes Benjamin considered whether "there could
spring out of the repressed economic contents of consciousness of a
collective, siriiilarlyto what Freud claims for [the] sexual [contents] of
an individual consciousness...a form of literature, a fantasy-imagining...[as] sublimation..." (R 2, 2). The culture of the 19th century
unleashed an abundance of fantasies of the future, but it was at the
same time "a vehement attempt to hold back the productive forces"
(PW 1210). Hence changing fashion was merely "a camoflage of very
specific desires of the ruling class," a "figleaf' (PW, 1215) covering up
the fact that, to cite Brecht: " 'The rulers have a great aversion against
violent changes.' "40 19th-century urban planning was an attempt to
improve society through the rearrangement of things (buildings,
boulevards, parks)at the same time it worked to prevent the rearrangement of social relations - Haussmann's "strategic beautification" of
Paris had as its "real aim...the securing of the city against civil war"
(PW, 57). The bourgeois individual as flaneur could take delight in the
"crowd" precisely because it was not congealed into a revolutionary
class (j 66, 1). Bourgeois class resistance to the industrialism it promoted was expressed as well in 19th-century style: architecture customarily masked the new technology with ornament; industrially
produced objects were typically enclosed in casings (I 4, 4).
Commodity fetishism, which, as we have seen, Benjamin considered key to the industrial urban phantasmagoria, could be viewed
40. The Brecht quotation (from a 1935) article) continued: "They [the rulers]would
prefer that the moon stand still, and the sun no longer run its course. Then no one
would get hungry any more and want supper. When they have shot their guns, their
opponents should not be allowed to shoot; theirs should be the last shots" (B 4a,
1).

Buck-Morss 231

as a textbook case of Freud's concept of displacement: social relations


of class exploitation were displaced onto relations between things,
thus concealing the real situation with its dangerous potential for
revolution. By the late 19th century, it was politicallysignificantthat the
bourgeois dream of democracy underwent this form of censorship:
Benjamin spoke of the "phantasmagoria" of "egalit6" (PW, 1209),
wherein the political concept of equality was displaced onto the realm
of things, the consumer replaced the citizen, and the promise of commodity abundance became a substitute for social revolution. "La
Revolution,"Benjamin noted, came to mean "clearance sale" in the
19th century (D degree 1). Department stores replaced specialty stores
(A 3, 5), bringing the consumer into a sumptuous architectural space
fit for royaltywhere they were seduced by every psychological trickinto
consumption for its own sake (A 3, 6). It was the great discovery of
capitalist retailing (one which compensated in part for the capitalistic
dynamics of over-production) that every sort of desire, from sexual to
political, could be displaced onto commodities and hence become a
source of capitalist profits. Benjamin wrote: "With the founding of
department stores, for the first time in history, the consumers felt
themselves as the masses. (Before they learned that only through scarcity.)" (A 4, 1). This was a turning point. In Parisafter the working class
threatened the bourgeoisie in theJune days of the 1848 revolution, the
latter found themselves on the defensive. At the same time, with the
establishment of Louis Napoleon's dictatorship, the era of the arcades'
brilliance was over. The age of mass consumption began, and with it, a
century of the new as the ever-the-same, only in grander and grander
proportions. Much ofthePassagen-Werkis an attempt to document this
transition. Commodities and technology burst from the confinement
of luxury shops and the arcades. Commodities multiplied; technology
grew to monumental size. The once-dazzling gaslights were eclipsed
by electricity, which was used for huge decorations and advertising on
building facades, the dream-houses, still built of iron and glass,
became vast, overwhelming buildings for a mass public - railroad
stations, department stores, and the great halls of the world exhibitions.
The first international exhibition was in London in 1851. Paris
followed with two of its own in the next decade.4' It was decided to
celebrate the centennial of the French Revolution by an exhibition in

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

same. The product of this reflection is the phantasmagoria of that


'cultural history' in which the bourgeoisie thoroughly enjoys its false
consciousness" (PW, 1246). Where Adorno found need of a dialectical
argument leading from one of these evaluative poles to another, Benjamin simply stated both contradictory positions, and spoke of the
fundamental "ambivalence" in the historical situation,"44which, he
claimed, Marx had demonstrated in his chapter on the fetish character
of commodities, "an ambivalence.., very distinct, for example, in
machines, which intensify exploitation rather than lightening the
human condition. Is there not, in fact, connected to this the doubleedged nature of the appearances with which we are dealing in the 19th
century?" (K 3, 5). The goal of course was material abundance,45which
is why the dream functioned legitimately on the manifest level of
collective wish-image. But the commodity-form of the dream generated the expectation that the international, socialist goal of mass
affluence could be delivered by national capitalist means, and that
expectation was a fatal blow to revolutionary working-class politics.
IV. Generationand ClassPolitics
It was at precisely this historical point that Benjamin's generation
entered the scene. Born in 1892 in Berlin, then a newly-arrived industrial metropolis, Benjamin was introduced to "reality" in its massculture, mass-consumerist, dream-world form. For a child, even a
protected, bourgeois child, that dream experience could be a
nightmare. Building walls were plastered with advertisements which
"forced the printed word entirely into the dictatorial perpendicular...[exposing the child to] a blizzard of changing, colorful, conflicting letters...Locust swarms of print, which already eclipse the sun
of what is taken for city-dweller's intellect..."46 Benjamin wrote that the
44. Benjamin's understanding of dialectical argumentation was to show the positive side of each negative aspect in an infinite serial bifurcation. The redemptive gesture was theological: "...regarding the dialectic of cultural history: It is very easy with
every epoch to bifurcate its various areas according to specific perspectives, so that the
"fruitful," "future-filled," "living," "positive" lies on one side, and the futile, out-ofdate, withered part on the other...But on the other hand...it is decisively important to
apply to this at first excluded, negative part a new division so that with a shift of the
visual angle (but not the standards!)there emerges in it as well something else positive,
new, compared with the earlier description. And so on infinitum, until the entire past
is brought into the present in a historical apokatastais" (N la, 3). (Apokastasis is the
conception of redemption in which all are saved.)
45. "Never would socialism have entered the world if one had only desired to
inspire the workers with a better organization of things. The strength and authority of
the movement lies in Marx's understanding that they would be interested in an
organization in which they had it better" (K 3a, 1).
46. Benjamin, Reflections,p. 78.

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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

is confrom the collected facts with which this work [Passagen-Werk]


cerned, to [show] how they appear in the becoming-self-conscious
process of the proletariat?"(0 degree 68) If there is a clear class distinction between who remains asleep and who becomes conscious, what
does Benjamin mean, for example, when he resolves: "We must wake
up from the world of our parents" (PW, 1214 cited above)?Just who is
the "we" to whom he refers? Is it bourgeois children? Then "wakingup" might mean taking the place of one's parents as the new generation
of rulers. To say that the proletariat class must wake up from the world
of bourgeois parents is perhaps more politically accurate, but it is
theoretically meaningless because it does not explain how, at the line
of a generation, the barrier of class is crossed. To say that the process of
bourgeois adolescent awakening parallels that of the proletariat's
political awakening is a metaphor, not a theory, and risks the criticism
that Benjamin's perception of the need for the proletariat class to seize
power was merely a fantasy, a projection - based on his own fears of
impotence? His own testimony is incriminating. In BerlinerChronikhe
refers to "abject poverty" as an "exotic world," and admits that the
"feeling of crossing the threshold of one's class for the first time had a
part in the almost unequalled fascination of publicly accosting a whore
in the street."53Here the application of Freudian theory again reveals
the existence of class differences, but it is the credibility of Benjamin, a
bourgeois author writing revolutionary pedagogy for the proletariat,
which is undermined.
This criticism would not have taken Benjamin by surprise. The
interpenetration of sexual and political motifs was self-conscious in
BerlinerChronik,at the same time their confusion may have been a
reason why he saw that forms like it were "not allowed to lay claim" to
the Passagen-Werk"in any place or even in the most limited degree"
(PW, 1138). Benjamin never pretended to be anything but a bourgeois
writer. Referring to attempts by intellectuals to take their place "at the
side of the proletariat," he protested: "But what sort of a place is that?
The place of a well-wisher, an ideological patron. An impossible
place.''"54
The class division was undeniable. But Benjamin felt that there was a
confluence in the objective positions of intellectuals and proletariat,
due to the specific constellation of economic and cultural history.
Industrialism had led to a cultural "crisis," and close on its heels there
followed the economic one, in which the collective dream experienced
53. Benjamin, Reflections,p. 11.
54. Walter Benjamin, "The Author as Producer" (1934), Understanding
Brecht,trans.
Anna Bostock (London: NLB, 1973), p. 93.

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Benjamin'sPassagenwerk

tremors set off by the "shaking of commodity society" (PW, 59).


Around this historical constellation the experience of his generation
congealed, and well into the 1930s Benjamin found in it an extremely
precarious cause for hope. Thus he could write to Scholem (August 9,
1935): "I believe that [the Passagen-Werk's]
conception, even if it is very
personal in its origins, has as its object the decisive historical interests
of our generation" (PW, 1137). The convergence of interests between
intellectuals and workers of this generation had to do with the fact that
their youth was separated from their adulthood by a dialectical reversal
of the contents of the collective dream. In all of the collective images architecture, fashion, even advertising - their lifetime spanned a total
revolution in style.55By the 1920s, in every one of the technical arts,
and in the fine arts affected by technology, style underwent a radical
transformation. Ornate, historically-eclectic architecture gave way to
the International style of the Bauhaus and le Corbusier. From furniture to doorknobs, from bathrooms to bay-windows, the new "porosity, transparency, free light and free air essence makes living in the old
sense nothing" (P degree 3; again I 4, 4). Functionalism stripped
technology of its casings. In women's fashions as well, the casings of
corsettes, crinolines, and long skirts disappeared. In hair styles and
office buildings, the demolition of 19th-century styles left no area of
daily life untouched. The 19th-century interiors encased their inhabitants in drapings and plush velvet, in which living meant "leaving
traces" (PW, 53); it is against le Corbusier's 1920s private villas, the
clean, white, bare spaces of which expunge all traces of the residents
that this observation takes on a dialectical force. Commenting on
Siegfried Giedion's statement that "the artful drapery of the last century has grown musty," Benjamin remarked: "We, however, believe
that...it also contains for us vital stuff...for our knowledge...illuminating the bourgeois class position at the moment when signs of decline
first appeared within it. Politically vital stuff at any rate, that substantiates the Surrealists' fixation on these things" (K la, 7).
The revolution in style was the dream-form of social revolution 55. The sense of being a "new" generation was wide-spread among Weimar
intellectuals: Cf. 1926: "In a comment in the journal Tagebuch,
Brecht takes issue with
Thomas Mann and his son Klaus Mann, who had published articles in Uhuentitled
'The New Parents' and 'The New Children.' Thomas Mann, piqued, replies in Berliner
Tageblattand once again explains his position toward the younger generation. Brecht
drafts an answer, but does not publsih it: 'His view is that the difference between his
generation and mine is altogether negligible. In answer I can only say that in my view,
in a possible dispute between a surrey and an automobile, it will surely be the surrey
that finds the differences negligible.' " (In Klaus Vdlker, BrechtChronicle,trans. Fred
Wieck [New York: The Seabury Press, 1975], p. 47).

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

catastrophe, a hellish, cyclical repetition of barbarism and oppression.


But the "resignation without hope" of Blanqui is absent; in its place is
the desire to "better our position in the struggle against fascism" (thesis
VIII). It leads to an apocalyptic conception of breaking out of this historical cycle, in which the proletarian revolution appears under the
sign of Messianic Redemption.
In the theses, Benjamin speaks of "shock," rather than awakening,
as the revolutionary moment of breaking from the past, but they are
different words for the same experience. "Images of the past" replace
the term "dream-images," but they are still dialectically ambivalent,
mystifying and yet containing "sparks of hope" (VI). The revolution,
the "political world-child," has yet to be born (X), but the utopia it
would usher in is understood in the child-like terms of Fourier, whose
most fantastic day-dreams of cooperation with nature "prove to be surprisingly sound" (XI). "The subject of historical knowledge is the
struggling, oppressed class itselP' (XXI), but the entire "generation"
possesses "messianic power" (II). Moreover, it is still in fashion that
revolutionary prefiguration can be discovered. It is the meaning of the
strange XIVth fhesis: "Fashion has a weather-sense for the present even
if it moves about in the thickets of the past. It is the tiger spring into the
past. Only now it occurs in an arena in which the ruling class has command. The same leap under the free heaven of history is the dialectical
one, which is how Marx understood the revolution." Camoflaged
within the new discourse, the old elements of Benjamin's thinking are
still there and they often make meaningful precisely those pronouncements in the theses which are most baffling on their own.
In thesis XVI, Benjamin explicitly rejects the historicist's"once upon
a time"; the historical materialist "leaves it to others to expend themselves" with this whore in the bordello of historicism. "He remains
master of his power, adult enough to blast open the continuum of history." And yet, there was a way of telling fairy tales which was not this
prostituted one. In 1936, in "The storyteller," Benjamin reconsidered
the form of the fairy tale which he had supposedly dropped years
before as a model for the Passagen-Werk.
Here are the relevant passages:
"The fairy tale, which to this day is the first tutor of children because it
was once the first tutor of mankind, secretly lives on in the story
...Whenever good counsel was at a premium, the fairy tale had it, and
where the need was greatest, its aid was nearest. This need was the need
created by the myth. The fairy tale tells us of the earliest arrangements
that mankind made to shake off the nightmore which the myth had
placed upon its chest...'64The liberating magic which the fairy tale has
64. Benjamin,Illuminations,
p. 10.

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

Where in the theses on history is Benjamin's theory of the dreaming


collective? It is visible nowhere, to be sure. But it hides out, the dwarf of
the fairy-tale, inside the dwarf of theology, who, Benjamin tells us,
himself hides out inside the puppet of historical materialism, which
perhaps in turn hides inside the body politic of the dreaming collective. The first thesis on the dwarf and the puppet begins: "Bekanntlich
soiles...gegeben
haben."It has been translated: "The story is told..." Benlast
jamin's
position is that of the story-teller. He reverts to this
obsolete form, when the continuous tradition of world war leaves only
the hope that, within the discontinuous tradition of utopian politics,
his story will find a new generation of listeners, one to whom the
dreaming collective of his own era appears as the sleeping giant of the
past "for which its children become the fortunate occasion of its own
awakening." Consider in the light of the original plan for the PassagenWerk,the second thesis: "There is a secret agreement between past
generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth.
Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a
weakMessianic power, a power to which the past has claim. That claim
cannot be settled cheaply. The historical materialist is aware of this."

65. Ibid.
66. Ibid.,p. 103.

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