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Benjamedia
LETTERS

McKenzie Wark August 27, 2015

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Walter Benjamin has a reputation as a sophisticated reader of literary texts. But

perhaps his media theory is not quite so elaborate. Here I shall attempt to boil it
down in a very instrumental way. The question at this juncture might be less
what we owe this no longer neglected figure but what he can do for us.

Benjamin thought that there were moments when a fragment of the past could
speak directly to the present, but only when there was a certain alignment of
the political and historical situation of the present that might resonate with that
fragment. Applying this line of thought to Benjamin himself, we can wonder
why he appeared to speak directly to critics of the late twentieth century, and
whether he still speaks to us today.

Perhaps the connection then was than he seemed to speak from and speak to
an era that had recently experienced a political defeat. Just as the tide turned
against the labor movement in the interwar period, so too by the late seventies
the new left seemed exhausted.

He appeared then as a figure both innocent and tragic. He had no real part in
interwar politics, and committed suicide fleeing the Nazis. He could be read as
offering a sort of will-to-power for a by then powerless cultural and political
movement, which thought of itself as living through dark times, awaiting the
irruption of the messianic time alongside it in which the dark times might be
redeemed. He was a totem for a kind of quiet endurance, a gathering of
fragments in the dark for a time to come. But perhaps his time no longer
connects to our time in quite the same way. And perhaps it does Benjamin no
favors to make him a canonic figure, his ideas reduced to just another piece of
the reigning doxa of the humanities.

As a media theorist, Benjamins contributions are fragmentary and scattered.

They might be organized around the following topics: art, politics, history,
technology and the unconscious. Here I will draw on the useful one-volume
collection Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Technological

Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media (Harvard University Press, 2008).

Benjamin had already started to think art historically rather than stylistically
before his engagement with Marxism. Here the work of the art historian Alois

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Riegl was probably decisive. Formal aesthetic problems are of no particular

interest in themselves. The dialectical approach has absolutely no use for
such rigid, isolated things as work, novel, book. It has to insert them into the
living social contexts. (80) Attention shifts to practices. The reception of the
work by its contemporaries is part of its historical effect on its later critics as
well. Reception may vary by class, Benjamin notes in passing, anticipating
Raymond Williams.

Not the least significant historical fact about art was the emergence of forms of
reproducibility far more extensive than the duplication of images on coins
known since the Greeks. The project for modern art history was thus an
attempt to determine the effect of the work of art once its power of
consecration has been eliminated. (56) The eternal as a theme in art in
western art at least was linked to impossibility of reproducing them. Fine art
practices thus have to be thought in terms of the historical situation in which
they appear alongside other practices, in particular new forms of
reproducibility.

Central to thinking art then is an intersection of technical and historical forces,

and hence the question of how art is made: the vital, fundamental advances in
art are a matter neither of new content nor of new forms the technological
revolution takes precedence over both. (329) Benjamin draws our attention to
the uneven history by which the mechanical intervenes in its production. So
while the piano is to the camera as the violin is to painting, reproducibility has
specific histories in regard to specific media forms.

The question of technical reproduction brings up the wider concept of

technology itself. Here Benjamin provides at a stroke a key change of point of
view: technology is the mastery not of nature but of the relation between
nature and man. (59) The technical relation is embedded in a social relation,
making it a socio-technical relation. Here we step away from merely
ontological accounts of technology towards a social and historical one, which
nevertheless pays attention to the distinctiveness of the technical means of
production.

Writing in the wake of the Great War, Benjamin is one of innumerable writers

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and artists who saw the potential of technology, including media technology,
within the context of its enormous destructive power. The war was a sort of
convulsion of the techno-social body, a sign of a failed attempt of our speciesbeing to bring a new body under control.

But technology is not an exogenous force in Benjamin. He is neither a

technological determinist nor for that matter a social constructivist. (Note,
incidentally, how this hoary old way of framing this debate puts a finger on the
scale of the social.) Technology is obviously not a purely scientific
development. It is at the same time an historical one. As such, it forces an
examination of the attempted positivistic and undialectical separation between
the natural sciences and the humanities. The questions that humanity brings to
nature are in part conditioned by the level of production. (122) Its a matter
then of thinking the continuum of techno <-> social phenomena as instances of
a larger historical praxis.

Benjamin also dissents from the optimistic belief in technology as progress that
he thought had infected social democratic thinking in the inter-war years.
They misunderstood the destructive side of this development because they
were alienated from the destructive side of dialectics. A prognosis was due, but
failed to materialize. That failure sealed a process characteristic of the last
century: the bungled reception of technology.

This might be a useful lesson still for our own time. Benjamin does not want to
retreat from thinking the technical, nor does he fetishize it. The technical
changes to the forces of production have their destructive side, but that too
can be taken in different ways. It is destructive in the sense made plain by the
war; but it might be destructive in another sense too destructive of the limits
formed by the existing relations of production.

Tech change in media form brings political questions to the fore, not least
because it usually disrupts the media producers relation to the means of
production. The technical revolutions these are the fracture points in artistic
development where political positions, exposed bit by bit, come to the surface.
In every new technical revolution, the political position is transformed as if on
its own from a deeply hidden element of art into a manifest one. (329)

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This understanding of technology frames Benjamins approach to the politics of

both art and knowledge. Both are potentially the means by which our speciesbeing might acquire a sensory perception and a conceptual grasp of its own
socio-technical body and direct it towards its own emancipation. The task of
the cultural worker is to contribute to such a project. Its a matter of
understanding and redeploying the mode of perception in its most developed
form to such ends. The mode of perception of the early twentieth century
appear as one in which distraction and destruction [are] the subjective and
objective sides, respectively, of one and the same process. (56) That may be
even more so today.

Benjamin practiced his own version of what I call low theory, in that the
production of knowledge was not contemplative and was disinterested in the
existing language games of the disciplines. Knowledge has to be
communicated in an effective manner. The task of real, effective presentation
is just this: to liberate knowledge from the bounds of compartmentalized
discipline and make it practical. (61)

Both knowledge and art matter as part of the self-education of the working
class. Benjamin thought the social democrats had made an error in diluting this
labor point of view into a mere popular and populist pedagogy. They believed
that the same knowledge which secured the domination of the proletariat by
the bourgeoisie would enable the proletariat to free itself from this
domination. (121) The project of an art and knowledge for liberation posed
questions about the form of such art and knowledge, in which real
presentation banishes contemplation. (62)

The artist or writers relationship to class is however a problematic one. Mere

liberal sympathy for the down-trodden is not enough, no matter how sincere:
a political tendency, however revolutionary it may seem, has a counterrevolutionary function so long as the writer feels his solidarity with the
proletariat only in his attitudes, not as a producer. (84) What matters is the
relation to the means of production, not the attitude: the place of the
intellectual in the class struggle can be identified or better, chosen only on
the basis of his position in the process of production. (85)

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Benjamin was already well aware that bourgeois cultural production can absorb
revolutionary themes. The hack writer or artist is the one who might strike
attitudes but does nothing to alienate the productive apparatus of culture from
its rulers. The solidarity of the specialist with the proletariat can only be a
mediated one. (92) And so the politics of the cultural worker has to focus on
those very means of mediation. Contrary to those who would absorb Benjamin
into some genteel literary or fine art practice, he insists that technical progress
is for the author as producer the foundation of his political progress. (87)

The task then is to be on the forefront of the development of the technical

forces of cultural production, to make work that orients the working class to
the historical task of making history consciously, and to overcome in the
process the division of labor and cult of authorship of bourgeois culture.
Particularly in a time of technical transition, the job is to seize all the means of
making the perception and conception of the world possible and actionable:
photography and music, and whatever else occurs to you, are entering the
growing, molten mass from which new forms are cast. (88)

Moreover, Benjamin saw that the technical means were coming into being to
make consumers of media into producers. Benjamin is ahead of his time on this
point, but the times have surely overtaken him. The prosumer celebrated by
Henry Jenkins turned out to be as recuperable for the culture industry as the
distracted spectator. The culture industry became the vulture industry,
collecting a rent while we produce entertainment for each other. Still, perhaps
its a question of pushing still further, and really embracing Benjamins notion of
the cultural producer as the engineer of a kind of cultural apparatus beyond the
commodity form and the division of labor.

Reading Benjamin can easily lead to a fascination with the avant-garde arts of
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the early and mid 20

century, but surely this is to misunderstand what his

project might really point to in our own times. Benjamin had a good eye for the
leading work of his own time, which sat in interesting tension with his own
antiquarian tendencies. His focus on the technical side of modern art came
perhaps from Lzl Moholy-Nagy and others who wrote for G: An Avant Garde

Journal of Art, Architecture & Design.

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He understood the significance of Dada, the post-war avant-garde that already

grasped the melancholy fact that within existing relations of production, the
forces of production could not be used to comprehend the social-historical
totality. Dada insisted in a reality in fragments, a still-life with bus-tickets. The
whole thing was put in a frame. And thereby the public was shown: Look, your
picture frame ruptures time; the tiniest authentic fragment of daily life says
more than painting. Just as the bloody finger print of a murderer on the page of
a book says more than the text. (86) The picture-frame that ruptures time
might be a good emblem for Benjamins whole approach.

His optimism about Soviet constructivism makes for poignant reading today.
He celebrated Sergei Tretyakov, who wanted to be an operating rather than a
merely informing writer. Too bad that the example Benjamin celebrates is from
Stalins disastrous forced collectivization of agriculture. Tretyakov would be
executed in 1937. Still, Gerard Raunig has more recently taken up the seemingly
lost cause of Tretyakov.

Benjamin was however surely right to take an interest in what Soviet media had
attempted up until Stalins purge of it. To expose such audiences to film and
radio constitutes one of the most grandiose mass psychological experiments
ever undertaken in the gigantic laboratory that Russia has become. (325) This
was one of the great themes of the Soviet writer Andrei Platonov.
Unfortunately Benjamin, like practically everyone else, was ignorant of
Platonovs work of the time.

Surrealism contributed much to Benjamins aesthetic, particularly its

fascination with the convulsive forces lurking in the urban and the popular. Like
the Surrealists, and contra Freud, Benjamin was interested in the dream as an
agency rather than a symptom. Surrealist photography taught him to see the
photograph in a particular way, in that its estrangement from the domestic
yielded a free play for the eye to perceive the unconscious detail.

Surely the strongest influence on Benjamin as a critical theorist of media was

the German playwright Berthold Brecht and his demand that intellectuals not
only supply but change the process of cultural production. Brechts epic

theater was one of portraying situations rather than developing plots, using all

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the modern techniques of interruption, montage, and the laboratory, making

use of elements of reality in experimental arrangements. Benjamin: It is
concerned less with filling the public with feelings, even seditious ones, than
with alienating it in a enduring way, through thinking, from the conditions in
which it lives. (91)

One thing from Brecht that could have received a bit more attention in
Benjamin is his practice of refunctioning, basically a version of what the
Situationists later called dtournement. This is the intentional refusal to accept
that the work of art is anyones private property. Reproducibility has the
capacity to abolish private property in at least one sphere: that of cultural
production.

Here the molten dissolution of forms of a purely aesthetic sort meets the more
crucial issue of ownership of culture. But Benjamin was not always clear about
the difference. There were not always novels in the past, and there will not
always have to be; there have not always been tragedies or great epics. Not
always were the forms of commentary, translation, indeed even so-called
plagiarism playthings in the margins of literature (82) Here he comes close
to the Situationist position that all of culture is a commons, but he still tended
to confuse formal innovation within media with challenges to its property form.

Benjamin also had his own idiosyncratic relation to past cultures. The range of
artifacts from the past over which Benjamins attention wander is a wide one.
His was a genius of the fragment. He was alert to the internal tension in
aesthetic objects. Those that particularly draw his attention are objects that are
at once wish-images of the future but which, at the very moment of imagining a
future, also reveal something archaic.

th

Famously, in writing about mid-19

century Paris, he took an interest in

Parisian shopping arcades, with their displays of industrial luxury, lit by gas
lighting and the weak sun penetrating its covered walkways through the ironframed skylights. These provide one of the architectural forms for the
imagination of the utopian thinker Charles Fourier who thinks both forwards
and backwards, mingling modern architecture with a primal image of class
society.

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Actually, one could dispute this reading. Charles Beech, Fouriers biographer,
thinks the Louvre was his architectural inspiration. And Fouriers utopia is
hardly classless. On the contrary, he wanted a way to render the passion for
distinction harmless. The method might be more interesting in this example
than the result.

Benjamin is on firmer ground in relating the daguerreotype to the panorama.

(Of which the Met has a fine example). The invention of photography expands
commodity exchange by opening up the field of the image to it. Painting turns
to color and scale to find employment. This chimes with McLuhans
observation that it is when a medium becomes obsolete that it becomes Art,
where the signature of the artist recovers the otherwise anonymous toil of the
artisan as something worthy of private property: The fetish of the art market is
the masters name. (142)

Art favors regression to remote spheres that do not appear either technical or
political. For example: Genre painting documents the failed reception of
technology When the bourgeoisie lost the ability to conceive great plans for
the future, it echoed the words of the aged Faust: Linger awhile! Thou art so
fair. In genre painting it captured and fixed the present moment, in order to be
rid of the image of its future. Genre painting was an art which refused to know
anything of history. (161) So many other genres might fall under the same
heading.

Benjamin also draws our attention to a class of writing that saw a significant
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rebirth closer to our own time, but which in the Paris of the mid-19

century

was represented by Saint-Simon. This is that writing that sizes up the

transformative power of technology and globalization but omits class conflict.
These days it is called techno-utopianism. In distancing itself from such
enthusiasms, critical theory has all too often made the reverse error: focusing
on class or the commodity and omitting technological change altogether or
repeating mere petit-bourgeois romantic quibbles about its erosion of the
homely and familiar. The challenge with Benjamin is to think the tension
between technical changes in the forces of production and the class conflicts
in which it is enmeshed but to which it cannot be entirely reduced. In thinking
the hidden structural aspects not just of consciousness but also of

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infrastructure as the Benjamin channels Sigfried Giedion: Construction plays

the role of the subconscious.

The life of the commodity is full of surprises. For instance, consider Benjamins
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intuition about how fashion was starting to work in the mid-19

century.

Fashion prescribes the ritual according to which the commodity fetish

demands to be worshipped. (102) Fashion places itself in opposition to the
organic, and couples the living body to the inorganic world. This is the sex
appeal of the inorganic, which Mario Perniola will later expand into a whole
thesis. (102)

Fashion makes dead labor sexy. It points to a kind of value that is neither an
exchange value nor a use value, but that lies in novelty itself a hint at what
Baudrillard will call sign value. Just as fashion brings out the subtler
distinctions of social standing, it keeps a particularly close watch over the
coarser distinctions of class. (138)

Another artifact that turned out to have a long life is the idea of the home and
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of interior decoration. The mid-19

century bourgeois was beginning to think

the home as an entirely separate, even antithetical, place from the place of
work, in comparison to the workshops of their artisanal predecessors. The
private individual, who in the office has to deal with reality, needs the domestic
interior to sustain him in his illusions. (103) One might wonder if in certain
respects this distinction is now being undone.

The central thread of Benjamins work on Paris was supposed to be Baudelaire,

who made Paris a subject for lyric poetry. It was a poetry of the urban
wanderer, the celebrated flaneur, who for Benjamin had the gaze of the
alienated man. The arcades and department stores used the flaneur as a kind of
unpaid labor to sell goods. Its a precursor to social media.

Both the flaneur and the facebooker are voluntary wanderers through the
signage of commodified life, taking news of the latest marvels to their friends
and acquaintences. The analogy can be extended. The flaneur, like todays
creatives, was not really looking to buy, but to sell. Benjamins image for this is
the prostitute: the seller of the goods and the goods to be sold all at once.

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The flaneur as bohemian, not really locatable in political or economic terms as

bourgeois or proletarian, is a hint at the complexities of the question of class
once the production of new information becomes a form of private property.
Who is the class that produces, not use values in the form of exchange values,
but sign values in the form of exchange values? Benjamin comes close to
broaching this question of our times.

Benjamin offers a rather condensed formula for what he is looking at in his

historical studies of wish-images. Ambiguity is the appearance of dialectics in
images, the law of dialectics at a standstill. This standstill is utopia and the
dialectical image, therefore, dream image. Such an image is afforded by the
commodity per se: as fetish. (105)

The commodifed image is a fragment of dead labor, hived-off from a process it

obscures. This is the image as fetish, a part-thing standing in for the wholeprocess of social labor. And yet at the same time it cannot but bear the trace of
its own estrangement. As fragment it is fetish, but as mark of the absence of a
real totality it points in negative toward utopia.

The Paris Commune of 1871 put an end to a certain dream image, forwardlooking yet archaic. It was no longer an attempt to complete the bourgeois
revolution but to oppose it with a new social force. The proletariat emerged
from the shadows of bourgeois leadership as an independent movement. The
dialectic might move forward again.

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But this was only one of two developments that characterize the later 19

century. The other is the technical development of the forces of production

subsuming the old arts and crafts practices of cultural production. Aesthetics,
like science before it, becomes modern, meaning of a piece with the
development of capitalism as a whole.

Benjamin: The development of the forces of production shattered the wish

symbols of the previous century, even before the monuments representing
them had collapsed. In the nineteenth century this development worked to
emancipate the forms of construction from art, just as in the sixteenth century
the sciences freed themselves from philosophy. A start is made with

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architecture as engineered construction. Then comes the reproduction of

nature as photography. The creation of fantasy prepares to become practical
as commercial art. (109)

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Out of the study of 19

century Paris, Benjamin develops a general view of

historical work that might properly be called historical materialist. Every

epoch not only dreams the one to follow but, in dreaming, precipitates its
awakening. It bears its end within itself and unfolds it as Hegel already noted
by cunning. With the destabilizing of the market economy, we begin to
recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have
crumbled. (109) Benjamin pays much less attention to an epochs ideas about
itself than its unconscious production and reproduction of forms, be they
conceptual or architectural. (Which incidentally is why I am more interested in
container ports and server farms than the explicit discourse of neoliberalism
as a key to the age).

The historical-reconstructive task is not to restore a lost unity to the past, but
rather to show its incompletion, to show how it implies a future development,
and not at all consciously. Fragments from the past dont lodge in a past totality
but in constellation with fragments of the present. Benjamin: history becomes
the object of a construct whose locus is not empty time but rather the specific
epoch, the specific life, the specific work. The historical materialist blasts the
epoch out of its reified historical continuity and thereby the life out of the
epoch and the work out of the lifework. Yet this construct results in the
simultaneous preservation and sublation of the lifework in the work, of the
epoch in the lifework, and of course of history in the epoch. (118)

Historical materialism sees the work of past as still uncompleted. (124) The
task is to find in every sense the openings of history. To put to work an
experience with history a history that is originary for every present is the
task of historical materialism. The latter is directed toward a consciousness of
the present which explodes the continuum of history. (119)

The materials for historical work may not actually exist. In his essay on Eduard
Fuchs, Benjamin draws attention to their shared passion for collecting, and for
the collection as the practical mans answer to the aporias of theory (119)

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Whether Daumiers images, erotica or childrens books, the collector feels the
resonance in low forms.

Such material has to be thought at one and the same time in terms of what it
promises and what it obscures. Whatever the historical materialist surveys in
art or science has, without exception, a lineage he cannot observe without
horror. The products of art and science owe there existence not merely to the
effort of the great geniuses who created them, but also, in one degree or
another, to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries. There is no document
of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. (124)

Benjamin sets a high standard for the sorts of political claim that cultural work
of any kind might claim, as it is always dependent on the labor of others. It
may augment the weight of the treasure accumulating on the back of
humanity, but it does not provide the strength to shake off this burden so as to
take control of it. (125)

He did not share the optimism of inter-war social democracy, which still tended
to see capitalism as a deterministic machine grinding on it its own imminent
end. Benjamin was far more attuned to the barbaric side that Engels had
glimpsed in his walks around Manchester. This barbarism, taken over from
bourgeois culture, infected the proletariat via repression with masochistic and
sadistic complexes. (137)

Benjamin thought both art and literature from the point of view of the pressure
put on them by modern technical means. Script having found, in the book, a
refuge in which it an lead an autonomous existence is pitilessly dragged out
into the street by advertisements and subjected to the brutal heteronomies of
economic chaos. (171) A great poet might acknowledge rather than ignore this.
Mallarm was in the Coup de ds the first to incorporate the graphic
tensions of advertising into the printed page. (171) A quite opposite reading,
incidentally, to the recent and very interesting one offered by Quentin
Meillassoux.)

Benjamin also grasped the role of the rise of administrative textuality in shaping
its aesthetics: the card index marks the conquest of three dimensional

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writing. And today the book is already an outdated mediation between two
different filing systems. (172) The modern poet needed to master statistics and
technical drawing. Literary competence is no longer founded on specialized
training but is now based on polytechnical education, and thus becomes public
property. (360) One wonder what he would have thought about the computerassisted distant reading of the digital humanities.

His more famous study is of photography and its transformation of the mode of
perception, influenced by the remarkable photographer and activist Germaine
Krull (subject of a recent retrospective). The first flowering of photography was
before it was industrialized, and before it was art, which arises as a reaction to
mechanical reproducibility. The creative in photography is its capitulation to
fashion. (293)

Benjamin draws attention to pioneers such as Julia Margaret Cameron and

David Octavius Hill. Looking at his image of the Newhaven fishwife, Benjamin
feels an irresistible compulsion to search such a picture for the tiny spark of
contingency, the here and now, with which reality has, so to speak, seared
through the image-character of the photograph (276) The camera is a tech
for revealing the optical unconscious. (278)

Eugene Atget comes in for special consideration as the photographer who

began the emancipation of object from aura. This is perhaps the most slippery
and maybe least useful of Benjamins concepts. What is aura, actually? A
strange web of space and time: the unique appearance of a distance, no matter
how close it may be. While at rest on a summers noon, to trace a range of
mountains on the horizon, or a branch that throws its shadow on the observer,
until the moment or the hour becomes part of the appearance this is what it
means to breathe the aura of these mountains, that branch. Now, to bring
things closer to us, or rather to the masses, is just as passionate an inclination
in our day as the overcoming of whatever is unique in every situation by means
of its reproduction. (285) Aura is the unique appearance of a distance, at
odds with transience and reproducibility.

Where other critical theorists put the stress on how commodity fetishism and
the culture industry limit the ability of the spectator to see the world through

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modern media, Benjamin saw a more complex set of images and objects. He
does not deny such constraints: But it is precisely the purpose of the public
opinion generated by the press to make the public incapable of judging (361)
But rather tries to think them dialectically as also implicated in their own
overcoming. Even a limited and limiting media cannot help pointing outside
itself, and at the same time containing its own trace of its own limits.

Thus, in thinking about Mickey Mouse cartoons, Benjamin remarks that In

these films, mankind makes preparations to survive civilization. (388) Disorder
lurks just beyond the home, encouraging the viewer to return to the familiar.
On the other hand, cinema can be a space in which the domestic environment
can become visible and relatable to other spaces. The cinema then exploded
this entire prison-world with the dynamite of its fractions of a second, so that
now we can take extended journeys of adventure between their widely
scattered ruins. (329)

The figure of the ruin in Benjamin goes back to his study of The Origins of

German Tragic Drama, his doctoral thesis (which did not receive a pass). There
the ruin in connected to allegory. Allegories are, in the realm of thought, what
ruins are in the realm of things. (180) Allegory, in turn, implies that Any
person, any thing, any relationship can mean absolutely anything else. With
this possibility, an annihilating but just verdict is pronounced on the profane
world. (175) The allegorical is central to Benjamins whole method (and taken
up by many, from Jameson to Alex Galloway). Through allegorical
observation, then, the profane world is both elevated in rank and devalued.
(175)

Benjamin saw the baroque rather than the romantic as a worthy counterpoint
to classicism, which had no sense of the fragmentary and disintegrating quality
of the sensuous world. Nature appears to the baroque as over-ripeness and
decay, an eternal transience. It is the classical ideal of eternal, pure and
absolute forms or ideas in negative. From there, he removed the ideal double. It
may creep back, at least among some interpreters, in at various moments when
Benjamin evokes the messianic, but the contemporary reader is encouraged to
complete the struggle Benjamin was having with his various inheritances.

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Historical thought and action is about seizing the fragment of the past that
opens towards the present and might provide leverage towards a future in
which it can never be restored as a part of a whole. Benjamin: structure and
detail are always historically charged. (184) And they are never going to
coincide in an integrated totality, either as a matter of aesthetics, or as a matter
of historical process.

Allegory is also connected to the dream. On the other side of the thing or the
image is not its ideal form but the swarming multiplicity of what it may mean or
become. This is where the critic, like the poet, sets up shop, in order to blaze a
way into the heart of things abolished or superseded, to decipher the contours
of the banal as rebus (237)

th

The dream was all the rage in the early 20

century, as Aragon notes in Wave

of Dreams. Benjamin refunctioned this surrealist obsession. Benjamin was

rather more interested in the dreams of objects than of subjects. The side
which things turn towards the dream is kitsch. (236) He met the kitsch
products of the design and culture industries with curiosity rather than distaste
or alarm. Art teaches us to see into things. Folk art and kitsch allow us to see
outward from within things. (255)

Benjamin has a genius for using the energies of the obsolete. But one has to ask
if the somewhat cult-like status Benjamin now enjoys is something of a betrayal
of the critical leverage Benjamin thought the obsolete materials of the past
could play in the present.

After discussing him with my students, we came to the conclusion that one
could thing of, and use, all of Benjamins methods as ways of detecting the
historical unconscious working through the tensions within cultural artifacts.
Benjamin can be a series of lessons in which artifacts to look at, and how to
look. One can look for the fragment of the past that speaks to the present. One
can look within the photograph for the optical unconscious at work. One can
look at obsolete forms, where the tension between past and dreamt future is
laid bare. One can look at avant-gardes, which might anticipate where the
blockage is in the incomplete work of history. One can look at the low or the
kitsch, where certain dream-images are passed along in a different manner to

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Benjamedia | Public Seminar

fine art.

Our other thought was that one thing that seems to connect Benjamin to the
present even more than the content of his writing is the precarity of his
situation while writing it. Like Baudelaire and the bohemian flaneur, his is in
contemporary terms a gig economy, of freelance work and of permanent
exclusion from security. This precarity seemed to wobble on the precipice of
an even greater, and more ostensibly political one the rise of fascism.
Today, the precarity of so many students, artists, traders in new information
the hacker class as I call it seems to wobble on the precipice of an
ecological precarity. If in Benjamins day it was the books that were set on fire,
now it is the trees.

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