Shopping for Truth

Adrien Gargett on Pierre Missac’s unification of empirical biography and textual production, and the development of a “criticism of indirection” too often missing from Benjamin studies.

Dartford, England: Like tourists in a world class museum, visitors swapped souvenir photos and packed marble halls in Europe’s largest shopping centre. Bluewater, a complex of 320 shops and restaurants on the outskirts of London, is the most prominent in a series of regional mega-malls to open in Britain, where an increasingly mobile population has warmed to this most American of commercial concepts.

Built in a former chalk quarry 15 miles east of London, Bluewater’s 1.68 million square feet of retail space make it the biggest retail shopping centre in Europe. A white roof bristling with glass cones and spike shaped air ducts gives it the look of a gleaming tent city. The complex includes a 12-screen cinema, a conservatory with tropical trees and parking spaces for 13,000 cars. Quotations by Robert Graves and other poets adorn its walls, and life-sized statues of apothecaries and candle-makers line a so-called medieval guildhall. This atmosphere is designed to recapture the pageantry of city life. Yet the 1970’s soul music echoing down its many corridors and the numerous U.S. names - like Eddie Bauer and KFC - among its shops and restaurants reinforce Bluewater’s undeniably American flavour.

However, as the ambler passes through the illuminated spotlit pools from one more glittering façade, he may, perhaps, feel a frisson. For here, as if keeping a vaguely remembered appointment, he will encounter the ghost of an old man - bespectacled, thick-haired, Jewish, steady of gaze.

His name is Walter Benjamin. Profession, philosopher. But what has this shadowy, long dead person to do with the $1.6 billion assemblage behind him, the largest project of its kind that Britain has ever seen? What possible interest can he have in a development comparable with the 4.2 million square foot Mall of America complex in Bloomington, Minn? The wraith is Walter Benjamin and he’d rather be in a bygone Paris, surrounded by his precious sheaves of folio notecards - convolutes as he calls them. His gaze moves across the smooth gleaming edifice of Bluewater’s exterior and rests on the wide gash through the middle of its glass covering, revealing the grey sky. This he knows about. It may not be the Passage Choiseul in 1880, but it is the same in spirit. He nods affirmatively: surely Lend Lease Projects Ltd. has reinvented the arcades of Paris, where once existence flowed without accent, like the events in dreams.

Architecture, he recalls scribbling in the 1920s, is the most important testimony to latent mythology - and the most important architecture of the 19th century was the arcade. Might arcades have the same significance in the 21st?

Benjamin shuffles towards the open maw in the exterior façade, the gateway to this cabinet of curiosities. He encounters. He frowns. Why is everything so clean? Where is La Chaussee d’Antin and its five million yards of gabardine and poplin? And where is the sign proclaiming it to be “the foremost house of fashion in the world, and the most dependable”? He studies the shop names. What are this Christian Lacroix, and this Armani? Where are the sculptures at the entrance of the Passage Vivienne, all the lorgnette dealers, the heaps of tortoise for sale, grinning rows of false teeth, the life-sized dolls and the fragrant manageress of La Lampe Merveilleuse?

The ashen shade gathers himself and moves on. After a few steps, something else catches his eye: a slim booklet, protruding from an information stand. He picks it up and opens it. “All the elements needed to create city life with style can be found in Bluewater.” Benjamin frowns - far too much spectacle and not enough dream! - and stuffs the booklet into his coat pocket. He begins to proceed slowly up the length of a strange illuminated runway, skirting round a young woman in conversation with a man pointing animatedly at a window display. The philosopher winces and begins to turn away. Then something catches his ear.

“We live in a sanitised world with enclosed malls,” Eric Kuhne, the centre’s Texas-born architect is saying. “You’re in a completely different mindset here. It’s a series of theme based streets through which millions of people will walk. The concept is to re-imagine with light and glass the essence and spirit of metropolitan London. I don’t like American shopping centres; they’re designed like chilling fortresses. They make us feel like roaches running for cover when the lights are turned on.”

Benjamin’s eyes narrow and he turns to confront the architect. “Excuse me for interrupting your discourse, Sir, but you are wrong,” he says politely but firmly. “There must be ‘enclosure.’ This thing you have created should be a dream house of the collective. How can you dream here? Where is the ennui, the huddling, and the stuffiness? And the erotic - where is that? You can’t reach the future by relying on mere organised thought and history with its Scotland Yard credentials, but only by dreaming and waking.” But the pair are quite plainly completely unaware of Benjamin’s apparition: they see and hear nothing of him and walk through the faint shimmer of his presence.

The old man pauses to collect himself. “Intolerable,” he mutters. “Things have never been the same since tarmac replaced the cobbles in Paris and those cafe layabouts were - unfortunately for philosophy and literature - able to hear each other speak. And as for Le Corbusier allowing all that light into buildings - I ask you! How can one possibly awake from a tawdry miasma when there is no miasma?”

One would be well advised to approach Benjamin in an indirect and partial manner, almost through stealth, or even unawares, en passant, in accordance with the method by which Benjamin made his best finds as a collector. It will be a question not so much of assuming the proper distance to Benjamin but of situating oneself at the appropriate point in space, whether this is to the side or below. One must run the risk of a certain arbitrariness, which will pay off if a hitherto-unnoticed detail reveals itself in a fleeting flash of light. (Pierre Missac)

In Walter Benjamin’s Passages, Pierre Missac’s method of indirect critique stands in striking contrast to other critical approaches to Benjamin. It is Missac’s response to the question of the appropriate distance from Benjamin’s work at which the critic should be located. This question, as Missac argues in the chapter entitled “Writing about Benjamin,” illuminates a key problem with Benjamin criticism: either a critic takes up a standpoint too close to the work, and the criticism becomes mere imitation, tautology; or the standpoint is too distant, and Benjamin is seen through the lens of an ideology, or his work is assimilated to an existing discipline - Benjamin as a philosopher of science, for example. Additionally, while other approaches may attempt to deal with the contradictions and fragmentation in Benjamin’s work through a “resolution by oxymoron” - “the Marxist rabbi” - or by dividing Benjamin’s work into two periods - the early and the late or the theological and the materialist - Missac is intent on avoiding such treatment. If Missac’s own entrance into Benjamin’s oeuvre seems deliberately elusive, this is in part because of his commitment to following out the complexities of Benjamin’s character and work rather than trying to cover them over with the structures of existing formulations.

What this approach produces is a structure that collects seemingly independent images and details in order to have them conspire, in the course of the analysis, to yield a new and unexpected larger pattern or framework of insight. Without collapsing the difference between empirical biography and textual production or attempting to reduce one to the other, Missac struggles to articulate the many points of contact between the two in which Benjamin’s central concerns are interconnected.

Missac’s sophisticatedly textured and almost lyrically rhythmic prose, which at its best reflects Benjamin’s own accomplished writing from One-Way Street and Berlin Childhood 1900 sets into sharp relief Benjamin’s understanding of the dialectic, of reading and writing, and of film and photography as complex allegories of time and history. Missac’s text proceeds by emphasizing central Benjaminian figures such as the miniature, the philosophically vital difference between stamp and postcard, the collector and perhaps most originally the gambler. Throughout Missac meditates obsessively and brilliantly on the figures of “passage” and “passing” evoked in the study’s title, figures that serve to illuminate in their plethora of different meanings and contextual uses the better part of Benjamin’s oeuvre.

One central function of “passage” for example, other than its inference towards Baudelaire’s poem “A une passante” (considered crucial to Benjamin) and to Passagen-Werk itself, is that of being one of the triggers animating Benjamin’s philosophical preoccupation with death and decay, transience and mortality. Missac has a deeper project re-invoking the themes of death and survival and setting the image of the “passage” in relation to that of the grave or tomb, “tombeau” in French. To this image Missac situates his book in a dialectical relation in that he foregrounds the theoretically intriguing and painfully empirical fact that Benjamin has no marked grave and that no one wrote him a formal tombeau - a poem, on the occasion of the dedication of his monument, honouring the dead writer’s achievement, such as Mallarme wrote for Baudelaire or Poe. Missac’s text thus both perpetrates Benjamin’s eternal coming-to-pass and interrupts it by becoming the very tombeau desired.

In many respects Missac intends to construct a work that is clearly designed to be a tombeau for Benjamin, in that it integrates Benjamin’s character, life and work into the complex unity that constitutes that whole - an homage demonstrating how his work anticipated the future and how it encompasses vital elements that extend resonantly into the contemporary condition. However, this is very much a “post-tradition” tombeau and this is why the motif of the “passage” is the most appropriate central image deployed. Among other things, “passage” in Benjamin, and for Missac writing about Benjamin, signifies transition and change. It allows an exploration of the multifaceted elaboration of the central but enigmatic question of the nature of the dialectic in Benjamin and the variety of aspects of “writing” in Benjamin’s work, from discussions of genre, including the thesis and the aphorism, with their associated issues of brevity and complexification, to the interplay of linear and dialectical composition and the notion of a secret or interior architecture in the work. In this sense too, Missac’s book consists of a series of repeated attempts to approach Benjamin’s death - at the impassable border between France and Spain - by routes and through aspects of his life and work. The book is a series of passages to Benjamin’s death as well as a tombeau for one who had none.

The notion of the ‘passage” also explicates Missac’s criticism of indirection. It refers to a mode of seeking and comprehending that is non-frontal but sudden and indirect, like the movements of the knight in chess, to which Missac repeatedly compares to Benjamin’s mode of operating. This in turn leads back along another avenue to the central theme of Benjamin’s relation to time and space, and thus to the aura, and the phenomena of distance as well. Far away so close, too early and yet too late define not only to discern the aura of the artwork but also Benjamin’s relation to the act of writing, and to time past, present, and future. In the “too early” and the “too late” the present moment is obliterated. The destruction of the present is opposed by a countervailing force in Benjamin’s relationship to time, notably the instant, the messianic rupture. This image of the passage leads us by another indirect route to the dialectic in suspension and to Benjamin the “materialist” historian.

Benjamin’s personal battle with time ended with his suicide and while Missac’s routes lead inevitably to that moment, the intention is additionally to open the possibility of Benjamin’s survival, by demonstrating how Benjamin’s work anticipated the future, and diversifying the analysis into the present. Benjamin’s program is engaged at several points: through a reflection on the contemporary progression of reading and literature, for instance, foreshadowed by Benjamin’s interpretation of Mallarme’s “Un Coup de des” as a proto-advertising poster. These inquiries are taken further in a chapter where Missac examines Benjamin’s discussions of photography and film in relation to his concepts of time and history. This proves, characteristically, to be far more than a recapitulation of Benjamin’s essay on the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. Missac presents film as the epitome of the dialectical process, the constructive negation of each momentary image by the one that succeeds it. Here Benjamin’s effort to stop time in its course is pushed to an extreme. This discussion subsequently transmutes to form the context for Missac’s extended exploration of Benjamin’s battle with time, which became his adversary; in this connection Missac again comes to the question of the dialectic in the dialectical image and the dialectic cessation.

If in this way Missac’s critical writing is a refined form of mourning, the author registers the extent to which such writing as mourning must also exceed and fall short of itself: “There is a mode or function of writing,” Missac reflects, “in which it comes to fulfilment, and puts itself in question.” It is as if Missac’s sensitivity to Benjamin’s language animates his own, for instance when he notes that if Benjamin’s writing has a richness, not comparable to the works of other writers, this is because we find in them the echo or perhaps the ineffaceable trace of the fundamental problems of the philosophy of language. His acute awareness of these problems haunted him, and he manifested that awareness in the most concrete way possible. Missac’s investigation adeptly animates the philosophical relationship between passage and myth. When Missac cunningly relates this unique Benjaminian hauntedness, as he does, to the catastrophic loss of the fountain pen, the systematically windblown hairstyle, in the casual outfit, or the philosophical implications of playing games of chess, he reaches through analysis of the smallest details - as though they were the miniature objects of which Benjamin was so infinitely fond - toward conclusions more startling and far-reaching than those achieved by the most panoramic reviewers.

The present is partial and intense because it is the site of repetition, the place continually structured by repetition, an eternal recurrence, and therefore the potential site of its disruptive continuity.

Benjamin’s writing strives to attain a haunted and incommensurable quality by constructing a strategic constellation which does justice to its ghostly resistance to understanding and its deeply and powerfully critical transformative potential.

To what extent does Benjamin’s language stage this “haunted” quality which it so clearly evokes? Is this hauntedness found in the figure for the self-referential condition of language in which according to Benjamin “language communicates itself” rather than a separable content? “It is not that what is past casts its light on what is present or that what is present casts its lights on what is past,” Benjamin explains in the Passagen-Werken, “rather, an image is that in which the Former and the Now merge, like a flash of lightening, into a constellation.” What this implies is that the Benjaminian flash that gives rise to the potentially legible image of history both illuminates and blinds.

What is idiomatic and singuar in a text, what Benjamin calls “the extraordinary, the amazing” - how it confirms its context which simultaneously betrays it in order to remain faithful to it. For Benjamin there can ultimately be no cultural analysis that does not somehow strive to come to terms with, and therefore become affected by, the movement and difficulty of the language that it would take as its object of study, and it is in this sense that Benjamin insists on a textual model of cultural and historical interpretation. As he writes in an early fragment, “theory must not refer to reality but rather must be a matter of language.”

One may also approach Benjamin’s writings by induction, so to speak, moving from the less to the more, from one part that can be grasped to a whole that is constantly threatening to elude one’s grasp but that can be reconstituted bit by bit. This would mean adopting the method that starts with the leaf in order to then rediscover “all the riches of the empirical world of plants.” (Pierre Missac)

One of the principal concepts Benjamin invents to describe what happens to the work of art in the age of technological reproducibility (principally the age of the camera) is the loss of “aura.” Until roughly the middle of the 19th century, he says, an intersubjective relationship of a kind survived between an artwork and its viewer: “To perceive the aura of a phenomenon [means] to invest it with a capacity to look at us in turn.” There is thus something magical about aura, derived from ancient links, now wandering between art and religious ritual. Benjamin first speaks of aura in his Little History of Photography (1931), where he attempts to explain why it is that, in his eyes, the very earliest portrait photographs - the incunabula of photography - have auras, whereas photographs of a generation later have lost them. In “The Work of Art,” the notion of aura is extended rather recklessly from old photographs to works of art in general. The end of the aura, says Benjamin, will be more than compensated for by the emancipatory capacities of the new technologies of reproduction. Cinema will replace auratic art. In this formulation Benjamin’s concept, in its incubational stage, proves highly elusive, and yet it is clear that the general analysis is working in a direction that is quite compelling. Throughout the 1930’s Benjamin struggled to develop an acceptable materialist definition of aura and loss of aura. Film is postauratic, he says, because the camera, being an instrument, cannot see. In a subsequent revision he suggests that the end of aura can be dated to the moment in history when urban crowds grew so dense that people - passers-by - no longer returned one another’s gaze. In the Arcades Project he makes the loss of aura part of a wider development: the spread of a disenchanted awareness that uniqueness, including the uniqueness of the traditional artwork, has become a commodity like any other commodity. The fashion industry, dedicated to the fabrication of unique handiworks intended to be reproduced on a mass scale, points the way here.

In the late 1920s Benjamin conceived of a work that would deal with urban experience; inspired by the arcades of Paris, it would be a version of the Sleeping Beauty story, a dialectical fairy tale told surrealistically by means of a montage of fragmentary texts. Like the prince’s kiss, it would awaken the European masses to the truth of their lives under capitalism. It would be 50 pages long; in preparation for its writing Benjamin began to copy out quotations under such headings as Boredom, Fashion, Dust. However, as a stitched together text, it became overgrown each time with new quotations and notes. Subsequently he became disillusioned with this version after criticism from Adorno and Horkheimer that he lacked sufficient grounding in Marxist theory.

By 1934 Benjamin had a new more philosophically ambitious plan: using the same method of montage, he would trace the cultural superstructure of 19th century France back to commodities and their power to become fetishes. As his notes grew in scale, he slotted them into an elaborate filing system based on 36 convolutes (from German Konvolut: sheaf, dossier) with keywords and cross-references. Under the title “Paris, Capital of the 19th century” he wrote a resume of the material which he submitted to Adorno.

Once again, Adorno’s comments proved adverse. In an attempt to utilize the material, Benjamin abandoned the outline of the project, but used its core to construct a book on Baudelaire. Adorno saw sections of the developments commenting that the facts should not be allowed to stand alone; a greater emphasis on theory was necessary. Benjamin made the required amendments, which received a more complementary reaction.

Baudelaire is central to the Arcades plan because, in Benjamin’s opinion, Les Fleurs du Mal first revealed the modern city as a subject for poetry. Baudelaire expressed his experience of the city in allegory, a literary mode out of fashion since the Baroque. In “Le Cygne”, for instance, he allegorises the poet as a swan, scrabbling comically in the paved marketplace, unable to spread its wings and soar. Why did Baudelaire opt for this allegorical mode? Benjamin uses Marx’s Kapital to answer this question. The elevation of market value into the sole measure of worth, says Marx, reduces a commodity to nothing but a sign - the sign of what it will sell for. Under the reign of the market, things relate to their actual worth as arbitrarily as, for instance, in baroque emblematics, a death’s head relates to man’s subjection to time. Emblems thus make an unexpected return to the historical stage in the form of commodities which, as Marx had warned, “(abound) in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.” Allegory, Benjamin argues, is exactly the right mode for an age of commodities. While working on the never completed Baudelaire book, Benjamin continued to take notes for the Arcades Project. What was recovered after WWII from its hiding place in the Bibliotheque Nationale amounted to some 900 pages of extracts, mainly from 19th century writers but from contemporaries of Benjamin as well, grouped under headings, with interspersed commentary, plus a variety of plans and synopses.

The history of the Arcades Project, a history of procrastination and false starts, of wanderings in archival labyrinths in a quest for exhaustiveness, of shifting theoretical ground, of criticisms and generally of Benjamin not knowing his mind, means that the work we are left with is radically incomplete; incompletely conceived and hardly “written” in any conventional sense. The structure is apparent but the linking thoughts remain disconnected, existing only in the form of Benjamin’s interpolations, resulting in an ambiguous fluidity.

The arcades of Paris, says an 1852 guidebook, are “inner boulevards, glass-roofed, marble-panelled corridors extending through blocks of buildings - lining both sides - are the most elegant shops, so that such an arcade is a city, a world in miniature.” Their airy glass and steel architecture was soon imitated in other cities of the west. The heyday of arcades extended to the end of the century, when they were eclipsed by department stores.

The Arcades book was never intended to be an economic history (though part of its ambition was to act as a corrective to the entire discipline of economic history). An early sketch suggests something far more like the autobiographical work, A Berlin Childhood. “One knew of places in ancient Greece where the way led down into the underworld. Our waking existence likewise is a land which, at certain hidden points, leads down into the underworld - land full of inconspicuous places from which dreams arise. All day long, suspecting nothing, we pass them by, but no sooner has sleep come than we are groping our way back to lose ourselves in the dark corridors. By day, the labyrinth of urban dwelling resembles consciousness; the arcades issue unremarked onto the streets. At night, however, under the tenebrous mass of the houses, their denser darkness protrudes like a threat, and the nocturnal pedestrian hurries past - unless, that is, we have emboldened him to turn into a narrow lane.”

Two books served Benjamin as models: Louis Aragon’s A Paris Peasant, with its affectionate tribute to the Passages de L’Opera, and Franz Hessel’s Strolling in Berlin, which focuses on the Kaisergalerie and its power to summon up the atmosphere of a bygone era. In his book Benjamin would try to capture the “phantasmagoric” experience of the Parisian wandering among displays of goods, an experience still recoverable in his own day, when “arcades dot the metropolitan landscape like caves containing the fossil remains of a vanished monster: the consumer of the pre-imperial era of capitalism, the last dinosaur of Europe.” The great innovation of the Arcades Project would be its form. It would work on the principle of montage, juxtaposing textual fragments from past and present in the expectation that they would strike sparks from and illuminate each other. Thus, for instance, if item 2,1 of convolute L, referring to the opening of an art museum at the palace of Versailles in 1837, is read in conjunction with item 2,4 of convolute A which traces the development of arcades into department stores, then ideally the analogy “museum is to department store as artwork is to commodity” will flash into the readers mind.

According to Max Weber, what marks the modern world is loss of belief, disenchantment. Benjamin has a different angle: that capitalism has put people to sleep, that they will wake up from their collective “enchantment” only when they are made to understand what has happened to them. The inscription to convolute N comes from Marx: “The reform of consciousness consists solely in the awakening of the world from its dream about itself.” The dreams of the capitalist era are embodied in commodities. In their ensemble these constitute a phantasmagoria, constantly changing shape according to the tides of fashion, and offered to crowds of enchanted worshippers as the embodiment of their deepest desires. The phantasmagoria always hides its origins (which lie in alienated labour). Phantasmagoria in Benjamin is thus a little like ideology in Marx - a tissue of public lies sustained by the power of capital - but is more like Freudian dreamwork operating at a collective, social level. “I needn’t say anything. Merely show,” says Benjamin; and elsewhere: “Ideas are objects as constellations are to stars.” If the mosaic of quotations is built up correctly a pattern should emerge that is more than the sum of its parts but which cannot exist independently of them: this is the essence of the new form of historical-materialistic writing that Benjamin believed himself to be practising.

In order to illuminate the structural framework of the Arcades Project - to facilitate an enhanced interpretation - Benjamin invented the notion of the dialectical image, for which he went back to the baroque emblematic: ideas represented by pictures and Baudelairian allegory. Allegory, he suggested, could take over the role of abstract thought. The objects and figures that inhabit the arcades - gamblers, whores, mirrors, dust, wax figures - are to Benjamin emblems, and their interactions generate meanings that do not need the intrusion of theory. Along the same lines, fragments of text taken from the past and placed in the charged field of the historical present are capable of behaving much as the elements of a surrealist image do, interacting spontaneously to give off political energy. In so doing the fragments constitute the dialectical image, dialectical movement frozen for a moment open for inspection, dialectics at a standstill: “Only dialectical images are genuine images.”

In one respect Benjamin’s texts are deeply committed to political intervention, historical insight, and cultural demystification. Indeed epistemic concepts such as “Berlin,” “Weimer Germany,” and “Modernity” are significant to his writing, and it is essential to position Benjamin’s multiple perspective in these ideological systems. Alternatively Benjamin’s elaborately hermetic texts unfold in a singularity that appears tenaciously to resist assimilation into a structured systematic construct. Essentially, the particular theoretical beauty, and uniqueness of Benjamin’s texts resides in the presence of narrative gestures that provide openings/concepts with which to access and formulate an analysis. Any understanding of Benjamin’s writing and the experience of the singularity they afford is thus predicated upon the acknowledgement that an interpretation is a process developing through and adoption and utilization of the text itself.

Benjamin attempted to construct a theoretical and philosophical program that would allow him, “to illuminate the work fully from within itself.” The theoretical tension between text and culture and, by extension, any historically mimetic model, is further complicated by Benjamin’s distinctive assumptions about historical traces and their highly contingent relationship to a particular context. The historical traces that mark a text, therefore do not necessarily mean that it stands in a necessary relationship to the time in which it was produced. “The time of history is infinite in every direction and unfulfilled in every moment. This means that no single empirical event is thinkable that would stand in a necessary relationship to the particular historical situation in which it occurs.”

Any engagement with Benjamin’s writing must therefore in some way account for the tension between text and its position in history and culture. It is this issue that informs the central narrative line in Pierre Missac’s analysis.

“It (language) is primary. Not only to meaning. Also to one’s self. In the configuration of the world, the dream loosens individuality like a hollow tooth.” For Benjamin, language both exceeds stable meaning and self. This excess, though, need not be principally destructive or nihilistic but rather, is dialectically charged. For Benjamin, it is always a matter of registering the extent to which the figural or representational dimensions of a text and a culture are structurally related in that they tend to exceed or fall short of that which they seem to concentrate upon, on the surface level. Just as Benjamin’s “storyteller” in the essay of 1936 is said to be the one who would have the wick of life be slowly but completely consumed by the soft flame of its very narration, the process of unfolding Benjamin’s writing involves registering, as Benjamin writes in Elective Affinities the “enigma of the flame itself,” which is to say with regard to the relation between text and culture, “the truth whose living flame goes on burning over the heavy logs of what is past and the light ashes of what has been lived.”

From a distance, Benjamin’s magnificent opus is reminiscent of another great ruin of 20th century literature, Ezra Pound’s Cantos. Both works are built out of fragments, and adhere to the high-modernist aesthetics of image and montage. Both have economic ambitions and economists as presiding figures (Marx in one case, Gesell and Douglas in the other). Both authors have investments in antiquarian bodies of knowledge whose relevance to their own times they overestimate. Neither can seem to accomplish any definite conclusion points. And both were in the end consumed by the monster of fascism: Benjamin tragically, Pound shamefully.

“Given the abundance of texts that Benjamin copied out or wrote to be included in his magnum opus, one thinks rather of the debris heaped on the site of ancient buildings, its fate not yet decided.” (Pierre Missac)

Missac’s exploration of Benjamin’s writing foregrounds its fragility: for a number of important works, it is their fragility that makes a virtue of a vice and guarantees their quality as ruins, transfiguring them as debris.

Benjamin’s trademark approach - coming at a subject not straight on but at an angle, moving stepwise from one perfectly formulated summation to the next - is as instantly recognisable as it is inimitable, depending on sharpness of intellect, learning lightly worn and a prose style which, once freed of the bonds of academic theory, became a marvel of accuracy and concision. Underlying his project of getting at the truth of our times is an ideal he found expressed in Goethe: to set out the facts in such a way that the facts will be their own theory.

The Arcades Project, whatever our verdict on it - ruin, failure, impossible project - suggests a new way of writing about a culture using its rubbish as materials rather than its artworks: history from below rather than above. And his call elsewhere for a history centred on the sufferings of the vanquished, rather than on the achievements of the victors, is prophetic of the way in which history writing has begun to think of itself in our lifetime.

Benjamin’s texts are nothing if not obsessive destructions of the philosophical tradition. As he states in the Passagen-Werk, “construction presupposes destruction.” For Benjamin destruction always implied the destruction of some false or deceptive form of experience as the productive condition for the initiation of a new relation to the object, as when allegory seems to destabilize the symbols mis-leading veil of closure and totality, or when the rupturing of the aura in photography enables the experience of the hitherto unknown sphere of what Benjamin terms the “optical unconscious.” Proceeding from an investigation into Benjaminian moments of destruction as moments of thinking temporality (and ultimately the movement of destruction of history itself).

Why all the interest in a treatise on shopping in 19th century France? There is no doubt that to rationalise and design Benjamin in preparation for his comfortable digestion by capital’s cultural machine is a piece of twisted prostitution of the kind he would fully have appreciated. A recovery of the sense of Benjamin’s writing is the surest path to its radical impoverishment. The object of philosophy, insofar as the reflective meditation upon thought could be taken to characterize it, is arbitrarily prescribed as undisturbed reasoning. It is thus that successfully adapted, tranquil, moderate and productive reason monopolizes the philosophical conception of thought, in the same way that the generalized somnambulism of regulated labour precludes all intense gestures from social existence. Who cares what “anyone” thinks, knows, or theorizes about Benjamin? The only thing to try and touch is the intense shock wave that still reaches us along with the textual embers, for as long, that is, as anything can still “reach us.” Where Descartes needed God to mediate his relations with his contemporaries, secular humanity is content with the TV-screen, and with all the other commodified channels of simulated communication with which civilization is so thoughtfully endowed. Such things are for our own protection of course; to filter out the terrifying threat of a realisation that would awaken us from our dream.