The Politics of Quotation: Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project

Author(s): James L. Rolleston

Source: PMLA, Vol. 104, No. 1 (Jan., 1989), pp. 13-27
Published by: Modern Language Association
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 JAMES L. ROLLESTON

The Politicsof Quotation:WalterBenjamin'sArcadesProject

ALTERBENJAMIN was not the firstto sense of being in the catastrophiclate phase of some
view the Paris arcades as emblematic of undecipherable,not yet intelligiblecontinuum. The
the way capitalism and technology loss of historical understanding released no one
transform not just the appearance of cities but the from the actuality of historical processes. And the
imaginative lives of their inhabitants. Alert Pari- words availableto confront that actuality remained
sians and foreign visitors in the 1830s and 1840s those of dialectical materialism, now inseparable
noted, often with suddenly vivid speculative in- from its failures as well as its successes.
sights, the rhythmic changes in urban living Walter Benjamin resolutely laid claim to this
wroughtby these strangezones consecratedto com- vocabulary,calling himself, for example, a "histor-
merce and technology, these glass-and-metalstruc- ical materialist" and a "materialist dialectician."
tures infiltrating and enveloping the old houses.' While he would not use the masterwordsof the tra-
But between 1927 and 1940, Benjamin indefatiga- dition whimsically or inconsistently, he would de-
bly collected materials relating to the arcades, and fine them operationally,by new models of historical
to the Paris of the nineteenth century generally,for narrativethat he needed to generate, test, and con-
a project of the first magnitude:to write the prehis- solidate in a single textualizingprocess. Dialectical
tory of the world crisis of the 1930s in such a way in the fullest sense, this move was latent in Benja-
that its posthistory, the language of an awakening min's thinking long before the terminology of
from the nightmare culmination of commodity Marxism became important to him. A juxtaposi-
capitalism, would become a reality. One's instinc- tion of two excerptswrittentwenty-fouryearsapart
tive shock at the seeming lack of proportion and
continuity in such a vision (what do the commer-
cial innovations of the 1830s have to do with the
totalitarian ideologies of the 1930s?) is the shock
Benjamin intended to provoke. For, while operat-
ing within the centralMarxistcategories of history,
materialism, and dialectics, Benjamin sought to
liberate those categories from their manifest com-
plicity with determinism,tyranny,and political im-
potence.
The established formula of dialectical material-
ism no longer seemed to protect left thinking from
its intellectualenemies, essentiallyunchanged since
the nineteenth century.Vulgarmaterialism,the be-
lief in open-ended "progress,"had been renewedby
twentieth-century technology; and dialectical
method, the structuring of history as the conflict
of totalized, socially coherentperiods, had been co-
opted by vast pseudoscientific schemes like Oswald
Spengler'sDecline of the West.Its critical function
debilitated, dialectic was deployed as a self-
confirming mode of encyclopedic historical
description. Clearly, the concept of history itself
was at risk. Continuities of class, culturalmeaning,
political interest-key components of any social
analysis-all seemed invalidatedby the crises of the Passagedes Panoramas
1930s. At the same time there was an unavoidable Froma contemporarywatercolor,c. 1808

13
14 The Politics of Quotation: Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project
can begin to suggest the ambition and consistency
of his project.2 The first, from his 1916 essay on
language, opposes any suggestion that words and
meaning, signifier and signified, are distinct. The
very notion of meaning is linguistic, and all
phenomena are engaged in a ceaseless process of
self-expression, in both verbal and nonverbal "lan-
guages":
Die volle Bedeutung[desBegriffsder Ubersetzung]ge-
winnter in der Einsicht,dassjede hohereSprache(mit
Ausnahmedes WortesGottes)als Ubersetzungalleran-
deren betrachtetwerden kann. Mit dem erwahnten
Verhaltnis derSprachenals demvonMedienverschiede-
nerDichteist die UbersetzungderSprachenineinander
gegeben.Die Ubersetzungist dieUberfuhrungdereinen
Sprachein dieanderedurcheinKontinuum vonVerwand-
lungen. Kontinua der Verwandlung, nicht abstrakte
Gleichheits-und Ahnlichkeitsbezirke durchmisstdie
Ubersetzung.Die UbersetzungderSprachederDingein
diedesMenschenistnichtnurUbersetzung desStummen
in das Lauthafte,sie ist die Ubersetzungdes Namenlo-
sen in den Namen.
(2.1.151)
The full importance(of the conceptof translation)is
achievedin the insightthateveryhigherlanguage(with
the exceptionof God's Word)can be understoodas a
translationof all the others.Giventhe relationbetween
languagesas thatof mediaof differingdensity,thetrans-
latabilityof languagesintoone anotherbecomesevident.
Translationis the transferencefromone languageto an-
otherthrougha continuumof transformations. Transla-
tion works throughcontinua of transformation,not
throughabstractrealmsof equivalenceand similarity.
Thetranslationof thelanguageof thingsintothatof hu-
manbeingsis a translation not onlyfromsilenceto sound
but fromnamelessnessto naming.
The second passage, his fourteenth thesis on the
philosophy of history, comes from his last work
(1940):
Die Geschichteist GegenstandeinerKonstruktion, deren
Ortnichtdie homogeneundleereZeit,sonderndie von
"Jetztzeit"erfiilltebildet.So warfiirRobespierre
dasan-
tikeRomeine mit JetztzeitgeladeneVergangenheit, die
er aus dem Kontinuumder Geschichteheraussprengte.
Die Franzosische Revolutionverstandsichalseinwieder-
gekehrtesRom.SiezitiertedasalteRomgenauso,wiedie
Mode eine vergangeneTrachtzitiert.Die Mode hat die
WitterungfurdasAktuelle,wo immeres sichim Dickicht
des Einstbewegt.Sie ist der Tigersprungins Vergange-
ne.Nurfindeterin einerArenastatt,in derdieherrschen-
de Klasse kommandiert.DerselbeSprungunter dem
alsden
freienHimmelderGeschichteist derdialektische,
Marxdie Revolutionbegriffenhat. (1.2.701)
Historyis the subjectof a structurewhose site is not
homogeneous,emptytime,buttimefilledbythepresence
of thenow[Jetztzeit]. Thus,to Robespierre ancientRome
wasa pastchargedwiththetimeof thenowthathe blast-
ed out of the continuumof history.TheFrenchRevolu-
tion vieweditselfas Romereincarnate. It evokedancient
Romethewayfashionevokescostumesof thepast.Fash-
ion has a flairfor the topical,no matterwhereit stirsin
the thicketof long ago; it is a tiger'sleap into the past.
Thisjump,however, takesplacein an arenawheretherul-
ingclassgivesthecommands.Thesameleapin theopen
air of historyis the dialecticalone, whichis how Marx
understoodthe revolution. (Illuminations261)
In the course of my essay I hope graduallyto de-
code this extremelycompressed language. For now
I want to suggest how the concepts of the essay on
language are both at work in and illuminatedby the
very late text. The uncompromising fullness of lan-
guage proclaimed by the young Benjamin-its
universal operation, its inclusion of all substance
within itself-is the essential premise of the older
Benjamin's analogy between fashion and revolu-
tion. While certainly a "higher" language, revolu-
tion needs the language incessantly produced as
fashion in order to become itself a language at all.
And the mildly paradoxical phrase "continua of
transformations"becomes a much sharperparadox
in the 1940text. The "tiger'sleap," the radical rup-
ture of continuity, is at the same time an ac-
knowledgmentthat the continuum of historyexists.
The relations among this continuum of jostling
materials, the productive moments that define it,
and the vantage point of any given present
moment-these disputed relations are central to
Benjamin'sentireproject. But such linkagescannot
be conceptualized without a double premise of on-
tological difference:temporal difference or rupture
(the need to explode the illusions of continuity in
which all present moments are embedded) and lin-
guistic difference (the distinct yet interlocking lan-
guages spoken by the past, by the layout of cities as
well as by documents, by the oppressed, who are
often barely audible, as well as by rulers). It is pre-
cisely those who would homogenize history,
prescribinga neutral continuum of events in covert
affirmation of the writer'sown moment, who pro-
duce a lifeless illusion, a version of the past that is
 James L. Rolleston
empty because it merely echoes the unac-
knowledged forces controlling the historian's own
time.
Above all, it is the simultaneous functioning of
dissonant language systemsthat providesthe model
for Benjamin's reimagining of history. The cease-
less process of language production that he posits
in 1916remains his focal point in 1940. The repub-
lican language of ancient Rome continued to be
spoken throughout the world after Rome's demise,
in law, art, philosophy, personal feeling; worn out
and "forgotten" by the eighteenth century, it be-
came usable in 1789 as a newly potent "remem-
bered" language of revolution. And the same
observation applies to the afterlife, to the forget-
tings and rebirthsof the French revolutionary lan-
guage itself. But Benjamin neverassigns priority to
the language we call political. For him, everything
speaks: buildings, administrative organizations,
utopian fantasies, advertisements, social chatter.
The speaking is not equal in volume or presence;in-
deed, it may be precisely the wearing out, the life-
lessness, of a given language that can tell us most
about the processes of social change. For these
processes are the substance, the signified, which is
utterly inseparable from the signifier of the lan-
guages that embody them. We cannot describe
these processes; we can only listen to them, making
legitimate use of our temporal vantage point-
namely, bringing to full verbal life, within the
vocabulary of the past, motives and tensions now
illuminatedby our own social relations.Our present
moment is itself wholly within this linguistic arena;
we are, in our turn, being "produced" in ways we
cannot perceive. But the synchronic structure im-
plicit in the very concept of language enables Ben-
jamin to resistan image of history as shapeless flux.
The present moment (which a priori cannot under-
stand itself) relatesto the entiretyof the past (which
has never ceased speaking) through mutual trans-
lation. The reader of history's linguistic material
makes the connection, among all the superficially
disparate "paroles" of an age, that makes it possi-
ble to construe and speak a new and higher lan-
guage, the language that blends later perspectives
into the earlier texture.And by a dialectic essential
to Benjamin's argument, the reproduction of past
languages simultaneously speaks of the present
with new clarity.For the language of the nineteenth
century is that of the twentieth century. Its seem-
ingly worn-out forms make "tiger'sleaps" into the
future inhabited by the translator, the partner in
15
conversation, the dialectician turned toward the
past.
To link Benjamin's earliest and latest writing in
this way is not to deny his intellectual development:
the textureof the two passages is prima facie wholly
different, and a study, like Richard Wolin's, of the
shifting emphases and allegiancesin Benjamin'slife
and work is obviously a legitimate enterprise. My
purpose, rather,is to suggest how Benjamin could
oppose most contemporary usages of the words
history, materialism,and dialectic yet formulate an
ongoing intellectualprojectto which these terms are
fundamental. The key assumptions of this
linguistic-politicalproject can now be summarized.
Benjamin'sunderstandingof history remains close
to the Romantics', particularly to Novalis's and
FriedrichSchlegel's:history is a self-conscious crys-
tallization of three separatemoments: the moment
of the writer, the moment on which the writer is
focusing, and the entirety of the tradition in which
the writer is embedded, a tradition that necessar-
ily includes the outwardly static realms of nature
and religion. Historical narrative is possible, but
only as a heuristicdevice:as soon as continuitiesare
proclaimed that repress the dynamics of the crys-
tallized moment, historical truth is lost. The mate-
rial of history is language, the multiple interlocking
languages of the past that have neverceased speak-
ing and that fundamentally condition the
historian'sown language. Benjamin'sexpansiveun-
derstandingof the concept of language ensuresthat
this kind of materialism is not at all reductive:the
physical world is as ideologically marked as ideas
are technologically conditioned, in a constantly
shifting force field of apparently normative lan-
guages. There would, however,seem to be a danger
of circularity:how can the historian claim access to
truth, even provisional truth? Do not the ceaseless
production and proliferationof linguistic, hence ir-
resistible, meanings simply submerge all possibil-
ity of a stabilized perspective?
The answer,crucialto Benjamin'sunderstanding
of dialectic, lies in the concept of quotation. As his
essay on language already implies, past languages
produce an immense varietyof texts:the silent texts
of buildings and urban planning, the minimal ver-
bal formalizations of public regulations, and the
slightly more elaborate descriptive style of docu-
ments and reports, with their implicit value judg-
ments. From the historian's perspective, all these
languages, though distinct from one another, are
clearly interwoven. Benjamin simply takes the fur-
16 The Politics of Quotation: Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project
ther step of aligning such texts with those produced
at a higher level of self-awareness:daily and occa-
sional journalism, escapist or satirical poetry,
projections of the future based on the present
(science fiction), diaries, and novels that seem to ar-
ticulate the "truth" of an entire society (Balzac,
Dickens). The social process as a whole speaks
through these languages as a whole, but how is that
whole to be identified? Nothing could be more mis-
leading, in Benjamin's view, than a documentary
style, a seemingly objective narrative ("social his-
tory") underpinned by a subjectively conditioned
selection from disparatetexts. Rather,Benjaminap-
proachesthe problemthroughthe ontology of a text
itself: a text compresses the fluidity of the spoken
language into the ordered space of written (or, for
nonverbal languages, constructed) syntax. It rup-
tures the continuum of the world; it quotes reality.
So the historian's isolation of sentences or para-
graphs from a text is already an intensified form of
citation, a quoting to the second power. If the pro-
cess is pursued further, acts of rupture multiply:
passages from differentkinds of text speak on a new
level when juxtaposed, texts from distant years ac-
tualize a radical change or, even more interesting,
an absence of change. At perhaps the highest level
yet imaginable, a fusion of past texts activates the
"language" of the historian'sown epoch. For with-
out such mediation the multiple languages at work
in any given present cannot be comprehended;they
are ceaselessly subjected to the censuring, masking
processes of social and economic power.
Through quotation, Benjamin's conception of
dialectic can be defined: disruptingboth the closure
toward which any text aspires and the synchronic
and diachronic continuities to which even revolu-
tionary texts are instantly assigned by dominant
languages, the historian momentarily fuses two or
more isolated passages, thus producingthe "dialec-
tical image" (Benjamin's phrase). This dialectical
image always involves, whether tacitly or explicitly,
through added commentary, the historian's own
perspective;the language it would bring into being,
in its moment of illumination, is precisely, not the
language of contemplation (conventional history
from a detached perspective), but the language of
action, politics. This perhaps surprising outcome
is implicit in the very syntax of language as Benja-
min understands it; a text certainly describes the
world, but always with a purpose, a dimension of
longing, a contrasting of what is with what might
be. To quote from a text is not to neutralize that
longing, which the speakermay or may not intend,
but to heighten it dialectically, to draw the
sedimented dreams and ideals out of an individual
word or image through the magnetizing power of
its secretallies in other texts. Benjamin summarizes
his method, insisting dialectically (and in practice
not quite accurately) on his own absence qua in-
dividual speaker from the potent new language of
quotation:
MethodedieserArbeit:Literarische
Montage.Ich habe
nichtszu sagen.Nur zu zeigen.Ich werdenichtsWert-
vollesentwendenundmirkeinegeistvollenFormulierun-
genaneignen.Aberdie Lumpen,denAbfall:die willich
nichtinventarisieren
sondernsie auf dieeinzigmogliche
Weisezu ihremRechtekommenlassen:sie verwenden.
(5.1.574)3
Themethodof thisworkis literarymontage.I havenoth-
ingto say.Onlyto show.I willstealnothingvaluableand
appropriateno brilliantformulations.Butthe rags,the
refuse:myintentionis not to makean inventoryof these
thingsbutto allowthem,in the onlypossibleway,to ful-
fill theirexistence-by makinguse of them.
The work to which Benjamin is referringhere is
his arcades project (Das Passagenwerk, Vol. 5 of
GS), the study of Paris in the nineteenth century
that Benjamincollected materialsfor from 1927un-
til 1940 and intended to write using the methodol-
ogy of quotation. The book was never written,
although essays and prospectusesemergedfrom his
efforts, and his studies on Baudelaire, assembled
posthumously, became an extraordinary book
(Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Age of
High Capitalism). One cannot say that these
preliminaries give any idea of what the final work
might have looked like, since they are far from
reflecting the methodological rigor Benjamin in-
tended to impose on himself: "I have nothing to
say." The 1982 publication of the entire collection
of materials, however,suggests much about Benja-
min's understandingof history, modernity, and di-
alectical method and about the specific ways in
which he sought to make the languages of
nineteenth-century Paris resound anew. Above all,
the learned debate surrounding his "Theses on the
Philosophy of History"-does theology or Marx-
ism have the upper hand?-looks very different in
the light of these materials:4with their many repe-
 James L. Rolleston
titions, their quick, informal annotations, these
notes exemplify both the limitless ambition and the
strict self-discipline of Benjamin'stheoretical proj-
ect. His remarkable melding of perspectives-the
philosophical, the literary,the sociological, the lin-
guistic, the political, the theological-is what ena-
bles him to will his own withdrawal from the scene
as an individual. His individuality is wholly ex-
pressed in his vivid, excited yet skeptical responses
to the texts of the past. And readers who find cer-
tain key terms in the published essays vital but
somehow elusive can see these words here in action,
informal and probing, imposing specific connota-
tions while remaining still open, unfinished.
One such word is aura. In the major essays, "The
Storyteller" and "The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction," aura can appear to be
a long-range diachronic concept of a fairly tradi-
tional, Schillerian kind. Surrounding the revered
objects of older societies based on ritual, aura im-
plies both directness and distance, a human senso-
rium attuned to manual crafts as well as to the
organic round of the seasons; in short, it involves
a structureof instinctual responses no longer avail-
able to industrializedhumanity. These essays, how-
ever,are neither melancholy nor dispassionate:they
communicate great urgency, as if all the values as-
sociated with aura were somehow recoverable.But
the deterministic premises exclude this possibility;
industrialization is obviously irreversible. Some-
thing seems to be missing, namely, Benjamin's un-
derstanding of history as linguistically organized,
a notion that pervades his essays without being
spelled out. Paul Fry has astutely remarked that
aura seems to be "inseparablefrom the moment of
distraction in which it is reproduced"(195). Benja-
min has produced the concept of aura dialectically,
from a perspectivein which only its absence can be
known. He is doing for preindustrial society as a
whole what the Renaissance and neoclassicism did
for ancient Greece, with the difference that he is
fully aware of creating a necessary dream, a
projected antithesis to the as yet undecoded lan-
guage of an urbanized, "distracted," nonauratic
world. This linguistic perspectiveenables him to set
aura in a series of binary relations with terms that
do evoke specifically urban experiential structures.
"Spur und Aura. Die Spur ist Erscheinung einer
Nahe, so fern das sein mag, was sie hinterliess. Die
Aura ist Erscheinung einer Ferne, so nah das sein
mag, was sie hervorruft.In der Spur werdenwir der
Sache habhaft; in der Aura bemachtigt sie sich
17
unser" 'Traceand aura. The trace is the appearance
of proximity, howeverremote the object that left it
behind. Aurais the appearanceof distance,however
close the object that evokes it. In the trace we take
possession of the object; in aura it takes possession
of us' (5.1.560). Although Benjamin uses this defi-
nition of aura, without its antipode, in "The Work
of Art in the Age of MechanicalReproduction,"the
context generates an unnecessary ambivalence:the
experience of aura is contrasted, in a neutral tone,
with the "(Anliegen der gegcnwartigenMassen) die
Dinge raumlich und menschlich 'naher' zu brin-
gen" 'the desire of contemporary masses to bring
things "closer" spatially and humanly' (Illumina-
tions 223). A reader unaccustomed to this short-
hand will tend to assign positive, nostalgic value to
aura. But the fuller context of the quotation from
Das Passagenwerk shows that Benjamin means al-
most the opposite. In the age of fascism and ad-
vanced communications, aura is the illusion of
distance produced by trivial dictators who have
learned how to "take possession of" the masses.
Not that Benjamin wants aurato be confined nega-
tively either: the goal of producing a language of
modernity is to enable us actually to describe our
own experience. And without the binary tension
with what that experience is not, such description
is impossible.
That fascism takes possession of the masses' uto-
pian longings does not mean that those longings are
to be condemned. Benjamin seeks precisely to ar-
ticulate a syntax that would liberate longing from
its imprisonment within the language of commodi-
ties. But such a syntax absolutely requires dia-
lectical thinking, a rigorous exploration of why
modernity, in its bourgeois format, necessarily ex-
cludes, marginalizes,and depoliticizes the utopian.
Die VersederSeligenSehnsucht"keineFernemachtdich
schwierig,kommstgeflogenundgebannt"-beschreiben
die ErfahrungderAura.Die Ferne,die,imAugederGe-
liebten,denLiebendennachsichzieht,ist derTraumvon
derbesserenNatur.DerVerfallderAuraunddie-durch
die defensive Position im Klassenkampfbedingte-
Verkummerung derPhantasievorstellungvon einerbes-
sernNatursind eines. Damit sind der Verfallder Aura
und der Verfallder Potenzam Endeeines. (5.1.457)
Thelinesin [Goethe's]"BlissfulLonging"-"nodistance
weighsyou down,you fly hither,bewitched"-describe
the experienceof aura.The distancethat, in the loved
one'seyes,drawsthelovertowardit, is thedreamof a bet-
18 The Politics of Quotation: Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project
ternature.The declineof auraandthe shrivelingof the
fantasyimageof a betternature(conditionedby a defen-
sive posturein the classstruggle)areone and the same.
Thusthe declineof auraand the declineof potencyare
ultimatelyone and the same.
Since we live within this double decline, we have no
direct access to its meaning. Judgments about it
constitute the small change, the cliches of everyday
language; they are in no way outside that language.
Only through the dialectic of quotation, the acti-
vation of the past, does meaning become con-
ceivable.
The material of the arcades project is collected
thematically, with groups of texts ranging from the
hugely long section entitled "Baudelaire"to a brief
one on "the stock exchange, economic history."
One of these sections concerns "impotence":in the
new language Benjaminis seekingto forge,the ther-
apeutic phenomenon of impotence, widely ana-
lyzed in the nineteenth century, will speak without
categorical mediation both to the growing fascina-
tion with "art for art's sake," aestheticized sterili-
ty, and to the drainingawayof political potency that
is structured into the institutions of bourgeois
democracy.While neitherauranor political potency
is availableto the citizen of late capitalist societies,
the capitalist ruling establishment is centrally con-
cerned with producing an illusion of their availabil-
ity strong enough to assuage the longing for them
and to dislocate immediate perceptions. Hence, if
alternatives are even to be conceived, it is essential
to generatea language in which decline of aura and
decline of potency are lived, comprehended as ac-
tualities, not as mere intuitions of absence.
Another juxtaposition of sentences evokes both
Benjamin's seemingly instinctive use of dialectical
thought structuresand the problematicrole of aura
in an industrialized world:
Das Wartenist gewissermassen
die ausgefiitterteInnen-
seite der Langenweile [sic]. . . . Die Blanquische The-
orie als eine repetitiondu mythe-ein fundamentales
Exempelder Urgeschichtedes neunzehntenJahrhun-
derts. . . Die "ewige Wiederkehr" ist die Grundform
des urgeschichtlichen,mythischenBewusstseins ....
Das Lebenim BannkreisderewigenWiederkehr gewahrt
eineExistenz,dieausdemAuratischennichtheraustritt.
(5.1.176-77)
Waitingis in a sensethe well-nourished
interiorof bore-
dom. . . . Blanqui's theory [of recurrence]as a repeti-
tion of myth-a fundamentalexampleof the primal
historyof thenineteenthcentury.. . Eternalrecurrence
is the originaryformof primal,mythicalconsciousness.
. .Life, in the hypnotizedcircleof eternalrecurrence,
suppliesan existencethatneveremergesfromtheauratic.
Dialectical thinking is indispensable for formulat-
ing the historical premisesof lives structuredby ca-
pitalism, which are inescapably specialized,
isolated, prefabricated. Aura must be experienced
as a negative because it is constantly being repro-
duced as an illusory positive, an indulgence of the
longing for coherence. Equally hard to perceive-
embedded as we are in the language of historical
cause and effect, trends, roots, and progress-is
that the key truth of the "age of history" is the im-
possibility of history,the perpetualreplayingof the
same scenario of power, exploitation, and the illu-
sion of change. This truth is expressed in the myth
of eternalrecurrence,formulatedby the famous rev-
olutionary Auguste Blanqui in his last book writ-
ten in prison, L 'eternitepar les astres: Hypothese
astronomique (1872). Blanqui's work anticipates
Nietzsche, and Benjamin'sexcitementat this discov-
ery is palpable. That a revolutionary should, with-
out diminution of intellectual energy, produce a
wholly disillusioned version of the realm of politi-
cal action is for Benjamin a key exampleof "primal
history," that radical rupture of surface phenome-
na which enables the dialecticianto penetrateto the
"origin." Origins, in Benjamin's language, may be
produced at any moment; they are not to be con-
fused with the illusory "sources"of linear histories.
An origin is both synchronicand diachronic,a mo-
ment (a year, a decade) when a self-consistent cul-
tural language comes into being, a discourse that
generates both its own myths (e.g., history) and the
refutation of those myths-here the theorization of
(capitalist) recurrence.
The surface mood corresponding to the myth of
recurrenceis boredom, a common complaint in the
nineteenth century (Benjamin notes, without com-
ment, Lamartine's 1839 remark that "La France
s'ennuie" [5.1.167]). Benjamin equates boredom
with waiting;to wait without expectation of change
is ultimately the same as refusing the idea of
change, and this refusal means, through a dialecti-
cal shift in the experience of time, an opening
toward a change beyond all prediction. Nietzsche
makes this move in theorizing recurrence,and Ben-
jamin's purpose is not to explain or even to contex-
tualize Nietzsche but to annotate and juxtapose the
 James L. Rolleston
many textual signs of the crisisthat becomes explicit
in Nietzsche'sthought. This effort certainlyinvolves
empathy with the nineteenth century, but not the
historicist's empathy of self-denial and false neu-
trality; for Benjamin the partially mystified lan-
guages of the two centuries meet in the act of
quotation, to be intensified through "translation"
into a repoliticized syntax and vocabulary that can
only be produced in this way:
Langeweileist immerdie Aussenseitedes unbewussten
Geschehens. . . . Man muss sich nicht die Zeit ver-
treiben-mussdieZeitzu sicheinladen.SichdieZeitver-
treiben(sichdieZeitaustreiben,abschlagen):derSpieler.
Zeit spritztihm aus alien Poren.-Zeit laden,wie eine
BatterieKraftladt:der Flaneur.Endlichder Dritte:er
ladtdieZeitundgibtin veranderter Gestalt-in jenerder
Erwartung-wiederab: der Wartende. (5.1.162,164)
Boredomis alwaystheoutwardsignof unconscioushap-
pening. . . . One must not wastetime but must load time
intooneself.Towastetime(to propeltimeout fromone-
self): thegambler.Timeis spurtingout of hiseverypore.
Toloadup time,as one chargesa battery:the flaneur.Fi-
nallythe thirdtype:he loads up time and reproducesit
in changedform,the formof expectation-the one who
waits.
Boredom and waitingare figuresof resistanceto the
empty recurrenceof history.The auraticlife implies
the failureto resist:the events of daily life take pos-
session of the individual who assents to them. And
such assent was (and is) extraordinarilyeasy. The
entire apparatus of modern technology, under
bourgeois control, is dedicated to making the pass-
ing of daily time painless, enjoyable, and full of
novelty. It is virtually impossible to describe this
process, since it has no outside; it remains cultur-
ally universal. One option is to celebrate the situa-
tion ironically, to disrupt temporal uniformity
through acceleration: Baudelaire makes this move
in praising "le nouveau," the other side of his deso-
late spleen and boredom. Baudelaire is the key fig-
ure through whom Benjamin gains access to the
primal history conjoining the nineteenth and twen-
tieth centuries; and it is another theme of Baude-
laire'sthat providesthe core impulse for Benjamin's
archaeology-his declared hostility to nature and
his production of openly invented and exotic land-
scapes. In this respect, too, Baudelaireis rupturing,
through ironic exaggeration, the illusory continui-
ties in which he is embedded. Technology'sshatter-
19
ing of preindustrialsociety is encoded in the refusal
of industrialsociety to acknowledgeany change:in-
stead of political innovation, what is offered and re-
offered as the new is an infinite series of simulacra
of preindustrialsociety. Where nature was, there is
now the reproduction of nature. Stated abstractly,
this insight is hardly new: Heine, Marx, and
Nietzsche, as well as Baudelaire, saw the paradox
clearly. But Benjamin'stemporal perspectivedrives
him toward a new response, one that is not ethical
or metaphysical but linguistic. Marx's revolution-
ary consciousness, Baudelaire's ironic intensity,
Nietzsche'sethical transformation-all have proved
powerless in the face of the normalcy of bourgeois
recurrence.
The third of the three master concepts, materi-
alism, becomes indispensable at this point. Benja-
min's project is materialist in the sense that he
locates the origin of modernity-the birth of the
newly systemiclanguage of commodities-in a ma-
terial object, the Paris arcades, the glassed-in pas-
sages of shops that began to be installed between
the old houses in the early 1800s.Why the arcades?
These structuresprovide, for Benjamin, an almost
complete symbolic text for the commercial produc-
tion of daily life as it was undertaken (and elabo-
rately masked) throughout the urban world of the
century. There is first the virtuosic and manipula-
tive deployment of the new technologies of glass
and steel. The contours of the existing relations be-
tween buildings are not destroyed but blurred. In
one sense, it becomes unclear where the outside
ends and the inside begins. Whether one calls this
process the privatization of the public realm or the
surrenderof privateto public,these materialobjects
can be read as easily as Balzac's novels in their re-
articulation of human experience in the industrial
age. In another sense, however,the inside of the ar-
cades clearly prevails over the outside; Benjamin
has collected many citations devoted to the "interi-
orization" of city life, from the recurrentfantasies
of a future Paris completely glassed over to the
"domestication" of the streets, with people feeling
free to move furniture from overcrowded apart-
ments onto the street outside.
Within the arcadesthemselves the production of
nature proceeded apace, the glass roof sealing in
rather than opening up. Benjamin notes the im-
mediate interestin the exotic:the first theme arcade
seems to have been devoted to Egypt, drawing on
the collective memory of the Napoleonic campaign
(5.1.104). History and geography are anthologized
20 The Politics of Quotation: Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project
Passage des Panoramas (c. 1937)
in the little shops, that is, deracinated and dereal-
ized; the shops providethe spectatorand consumer
with a seemingly inexhaustible urban "nature,"
protectedfrom death and decay by the new rhythms
of commerce. And, early on, as the structures be-
gan to "blossom" in sinuous decorative patterns,
Benjamin links the seeming intimacy of the arcades
to the seeming grandiloquence of the Crystal Pal-
ace and the trade fairsof the second part of the cen-
tury.The project of enclosureand "naturalization"
is open-ended, since everykind of restlessnessmust
be assuaged.
The more politics is repressedin the new urban
landscape, the more it becomes legible in the mar-
gins of the text:
Das Maskentreibender Stile, das sich durchdas 19teJahr-
hundert dahinzieht, ist eine Folge davon, dass die Herr-
schaftsverhaltnisse unsichtig werden. Die bourgeoisen
Machthaberhaben die Macht oft nicht mehr an der Stelle,
an der sie leben (Rentner)und nicht mehr in direktenun-
vermittelten Formen. Der Stil ihrer Wohnungen ist ihre
falsche Unmittelbarkeit. (5.1.288-89)
The masklike play of styles that pervades the nineteenth
century results because power relations are becoming in-
visible.Thebourgeoispowerholdersoftenno longerhave
powerin the placewheretheylive(aspensioners)andno
longerin direct,unmediatedforms.The style of their
apartmentsbecomesthe falseexpressionof theirpower.
The ambivalence of power relations defines the ar-
cades also. The freedom to stroll and wander, be-
loved of the new archetypal observer,Baudelaire's
flaneur, is acted out within the symbolic control of
the enclosure. Benjamin finds the earliest reference
to a flaneur in a 1798police report complaining of
the difficulty of identifying people in crowds
(5.1.526).Commerceneeds crowds,and the arcades
generatethem. Yetthese crowdsmay produceinten-
sified isolation rather than politics, not only be-
cause of the richly documented administrative
measuresfor the control of crowdsbut also because
of an unstable dialectic at the heart of the flaneur's
consciousness, one that folds the observerback into
the commercialcontinuity: "Dialektik der flanerie:
einerseits der Mann, der sich von allem und allen
angesehen fuihlt, der Verdachtige schlechthin,
andererseitsder v6llig Unauffindbare, Geborgene.
Vermutlich ist es eben diese Dialektik, die 'Der
Mann der Menge' entwickelt" 'Dialectics of
flanerie:on the one hand, the man who feels looked
at by everyone and everything, the epitome of the
suspicious person; on the other hand, the person
who is completely untraceable,protected. Presum-
ably it is just this dialectic that [Poe's] "Man of the
Crowd" develops' (5.1.529).
The concept of quotation rearticulatesthe rela-
tions between the three master concepts-dialectic,
materialism, and history: (1) the language that will
bring the nineteenth century to consciousness in a
twentieth century as yet helplessly immersed in its
unrecognizedpast-this language is to be produced
dialectically, through a technique of rupture and
montage that refuses the (commercially) prefabri-
cated continuities of history; (2) the language will
be structuredby quotations in which the unguard-
ed documentarysentence speaks directlyto the iro-
ny of Baudelaire, dispensing with the traditional
hierarchies of intellect and sensibility, which in a
world ruled by commodities have become mere
masking devices; (3) the historical truth that needs
to be documented is the myth of eternal repetition
of the same, a myth created, not on Zarathustra's
mountaintop, but by the limitless ambition of
capitalismto structurea "normal"everydaylife de-
void of politics-a structuringconditioned by, and
in turn conditioning, the need to reproducenature,
 James L. Rolleston
to reinventa preindustrialworld wheremass politics
have no place. Benjamin stresses the delight of the
materialist in the eloquence of nineteenth-century
produced objects, especially the most ephemeral
and useless: in them the text of reproduced nature
and repressed politics becomes ever more legible,
the more the quoted objects are juxtaposed.
If the arcadesprojectweredescribableexclusively
through the schema just outlined, Benjamin could
justifiably be charged with offering mere antihis-
tory. Instead of presenting events as moving stead-
ily forward at the whim of politicians, so the
argument might go, he shows us events moving in
meaningless circlesat the whim of technological in-
novation. But for Benjamin technology is far from
being the base for superstructural phenomena.
Rather,it is an importantelement in the open-ended
"text"of the nineteenthcentury;and his quest is for
the syntactical rules governingthat text. To a reader
like Benjamin, such rules are peculiarly legible at
points of apparent marginality, in utilitarian tech-
nologies or in subjective emptiness. Nothing could
be more energeticand speculativethan his addenda
to the quotations on boredom and impotence.
What fascinates him about the eternal recurrence
of modernity is that it comprises two antithetical
moments, fabulous inventiveness and the sudden
evaporation of meaning, involving a certain di-
achrony:the industriallandscape has to be invented
before the signs of decay can be discerned. But, as
Benjamin's texts reveal, there is nothing gradual
about either the invention or the decay: the full
range of industrial fantasies and controls is on the
scene by 1830; they are noted by contemporaries,
and pronouncements about decay follow almost
immediately.5
This cycle, of course, is built into the structureof
fashion, which is central to the capitalist project.
But Benjamin, like Baudelaire,refuses to take such
phenomena lightly. For the rhythmof obsolescence
controlling fashion has produced a trap into which
most historianshave fallen:the discerningof a "rise
and fall" of this or that political-cultural
phenomenon-in other words, an extrapolation
from the style of the new, recurrenthistory patterns
to a postulation of substance.In making this move,
historians imagine for themselves some kind of ex-
ternal position, presumablysuperiorto the deluded
processes they are describing. But they are the
deluded ones; they have simply succumbed to the
capitalist machine's constant production of its ul-
timate exquisite seduction: decay. "Es gibt keine
21
Verfallszeiten"'There are no periods of decay,' in-
sists Benjamin (5.2.1023). Moreover,we live within
the system as it works to manufacture the illusions
of growth and decay; there is no intellectually neu-
tral place to stand outside it. The pseudodramas of
modern recurrenceare continually being produced
for our stimulation and tranquilization, and our
only recourse, the task Benjamin set himself, is to
force into consciousness, through the electricity
generated by quotation, the language of the
phenomena in which we are embedded. Only with
a precise descriptive language will genuine politics
be possible. For the utopian impulse of revolution
has been fully programmedinto the nonpolitics of
recurrence.
To evoke the colossal inventiveness of early
modernity, the birth moment of the arcades, Ben-
jamin frequently quotes Balzac. Because the com-
mercial machine aims at generating "natural"
images, fantastic and documentary modes are in-
tertwined in literarytexts from the outset, and Bal-
zac, as his contemporaries often noted, seems to
have invented the actual human beings of the Sec-
ond Empire. But, in seeking the syntax of the mod-
ern, Benjamin is interested less in Balzac's
psychological or "prophetic" powers and more in
his extraordinary openness to the profusion and
jumble of the new culturalanthologizing and to the
genuine abyss between modern and premodern ex-
perience. Benjamin cites a passage from Le cousin
Pons:
Croire que les 6evnementsanterieursde la vie d'un
homme . . . peuvent6treimm6diatementrepresentes
par des cartesqu'il mele, qu'il coupe et que le diseur
d'horoscopediviseen paquetsd'apresdeslois mysterieu-
ses, c'estl'absurde;maisc'estl'absurdequicondamnait
la vapeur,quicondamneencorela navigationa6rienne,
quicondamnaitlesinventionsde la poudreet de l'impri-
merie, celle des lunettes,de la gravure,et la derniere
grandedecouverte,la daguerreotypie.Si quelqu'unfut
venudirea Napoleonqu'unedificeet qu'unhommesont
incessamment et a touteheurerepresent6s paruneimage
dansl'atmosphere,quetousles objetsexistantsy ont un
spectresaisissable,perceptible,il auraitloge cet homme
a Charenton.... Et c'estla cependantce queDaguerre
a prouv6par sa decouverte. (5.2.840)
Tobelievethat eventspriorto a man'slife . . can be
immediatelyrepresentedby cardsthat he shuffles,that
he cuts, and that the tellerof horoscopesdividesinto
packetsaccordingto mysteriouslaws-that is absurdity;
butit is absurditythatcondemnedsteampower,thatstill
22 The Politics of Quotation: Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project
condemnsaerialnavigation,thatcondemnedthe inven-
tionsof gunpowderandprinting,thoseof eyeglasses,en-
graving, and the most recent great discovery, the
daguerreotype.If someonehad come to tell Napoleon
thata buildinganda manareceaselesslyandat anytime
representedby an imagein the atmosphere,thatall exis-
tentobjectshavesucha tangible,perceptiblespectralim-
age,he wouldhaveconsignedthatpersonto Charenton.
. .And yetthat'swhatDaguerrehasprovedbyhisdis-
covery.
Photography was born into a context of competing
modes of phantasmagoric production, such as
panoramas. Its potential for precision was always
already shaped by the commercial need to produce
images of power and escape. Objectivity is to sub-
jectivity as decadence is to the "blooming" of com-
modities; all values are inscribedin a grid of illusory
oppositions, applaudedor condemned accordingto
the needs of the productive cycle.
For Benjamin, the arcades themselves, for all
their evident functionality, were inseparable from
their image-making capacity:
Solangein [denPassagen]die Gas-ja dieOllampenge-
brannthaben,warensie Feenpalaste.Aberwennwirauf
demHohepunktihresZauberssiedenkenwollen,so stel-
lenwirdie PassagedesPanoramasuns 1870vor, als sie:
auf der einen Seite hing das Gaslicht,auf der andern
flackertennoch die Ollampen.Der Niedergangbeginnt
mit derelektrischenBeleuchtung.Aberein Niedergang
wares im Grundenicht,sonderngenaugenommenein
Umschlag.WieMeuterernachtagelangerVerschw6rung
einenbefestigtenPlatzsichzu eigenmachen,so rissmit
einemHandstreich dieWaredieHerrschaftiiberdiePas-
sagenan sich. Nunerstkamdie EpochederFirmenund
Ziffern.DerinnereGlanzderPassagenerloschmitdem
AufflammenderelektrischenLichterundverzogsichin
ihreNamen.AbernunwurdeihrNamewieeinFilter,der
nur das innerste,die bittereEssenzdes Gewesnenhin-
durchliess. (5.2.1001-02)
As longasgasandoil lampsburnedinthem,[thearcades]
werefairypalaces.But whenwe wantto thinkof them
at the heightof theirmagic,weimaginethearcadeof the
panoramaaround1870,whenon the one sidehungthe
gaslight,on theothertheoil lampsstillflickered.Thede-
cline beginswith electriclighting.But it was not fun-
damentallya decline,but morepreciselya reversal.As
mutineers,afterconspiringfor days,seizea fortifiedpo-
sition,so thecommodity,at one stroke,seizedpowerover
the arcades.Onlynow camethe epochof numbersand
large firms. The innerglow of the arcadeswas extin-
guishedwith the blazeof electriclightsand stole away
intotheirnames.Butnowthe namebecamelikea filter,
whichonly releasedthe most secret,bitterestessenceof
whathad been.
It is important to grasp the strategyBenjamin used
in this passage, which is in every sense dialectical.
Superficially he is attributing the decline of the ar-
cades to technological change, but the intimate link
between the visibility of technology and the invisi-
bility of the ruling class is a premise of this descrip-
tive style. Moreover,the decline was so sudden that
it was not really a decline at all but a dialectical
shift, a transformation of object into readabletext.
"Naming" is a central theme of Benjamin's early
essay on language; as the arcades "became" their
names, their syntax becomes verbal. And political
activity is present here too. The date 1870, the time
of the Commune, cannot be accidental. Since the
book remained unwritten, we cannot know how
Benjamin would have integrated his thematic texts
on the Commune with his analyses of technologi-
cal change. But the quotations concerning the
Commune tell of the extreme self-consciousness
with which the uprising was based on existing
revolutionary texts-and of the way in which its
failure was itself instantly textualized, as the myth
of recurrencerose to the surface of consciousness.
Clearly 1870 is the moment, the rift through which
the text of the industrial landscape suddenly be-
comes legible, to contemporaries as well as to later
observers. The image-making productivity of ear-
ly modernity,the play of styles and moods that cul-
minates in Baudelaire's time, the Second Empire,
can suddenly be seen for what it is.
Such moments owe their lasting power of illumi-
nation, Benjamintells us, to their containing within
themselves both their prehistory and their posthis-
tory (Nachgeschichte).The posthistory of 1870has
been the persisting indecipherability of what was
briefly legible to the few (Blanqui, Nietzsche) as the
text of recurrence. Between 1870 and Benjamin's
time the numberless programs for radical change
were without exception absorbed into the recur-
rence they sought to transcend. In his own attempt
at decoding the text, Benjamin deployed the im-
agery of dream and awakening:
Die kopernikanischeWendungin der geschichtlichen
Anschauungist dies:manhieltfur den fixenPunktdas
"Gewesene"undsah die Gegenwartbemiiht,an dieses
Feste die Erkenntnistastendheranzufiihren.Nun soil
 James L. Rolleston
sich diesesVerhaltnisumkehrenunddas Gewesenesei-
ne dialektischeFixierungvon derSynthesiserhalten,die
das Erwachenmit den gegensatzlichenTraumbildern
vollzieht.Politik erhaltden Primatiiberdie Geschich-
te. Undzwarwerdendiehistorischen"Fakten"zu einem
uns soebenZugestossenen:sie festzustellenist die Sache
derErinnerung. UndErwachenistderexemplarische Fall
des Erinnerns.Jener Fall, in dem es uns gelingt, des
Nachsten,Naheliegendsten(des Ich) uns zu erinnern.
(5.2.1057)
TheCopernicanshiftin historicalperspectiveis this:the
fixedpointusedto be "thepast,"andthepresentendeav-
ored,gropingly,to alignits understanding withthisgiv-
en entity.Nowthisrelationis to be inverted,andthepast
is to receiveits dialecticaldefinitionfromthe synthesis
thatthe act of awakeningachievesthroughthe structur-
ing of antitheticaldreamimages.Politicsattainsprima-
cy over history. That means that historical "facts"
becomesomethingthathasjusthappenedto us:to grasp
hold of them is the task of memory.And awakeningis
the modelact of remembering, thatact in whichwe suc-
ceedin remembering the thingsthatareclosest,mostin-
timate,in remembering the self.
One section of the arcades project is devoted to
Jugendstil because Jugendstil constitutes, in Ben-
jamin's view, a false awakeningfrom the dream, an
intensification of modernity toward paradox rath-
er than clarity. Jugendstil artists understand very
well the dynamics of recurrence; but instead of
translating its symptoms, such as impotence and
boredom, into political understanding, they trans-
figure, fetishize these very symptoms. In particular
these artists make the move most distrustedby Ben-
jamin, the undialecticalrestorationof aurathrough
new stagings of ritual and illusory distance:
DerJugendstilforciertdasAuratische.Nie hattedieSon-
ne sich besserin ihremStrahlenkranze gefallen. ...
Maeterlincktreibtdie Entwicklungdes Auratischenbis
zumUnwesen.Das SchweigenderdramatischenPerso-
nen ist eine von dessen Ausdrucksformen ....
Grundmotivdes Jugendstilsist die VerklarungderUn-
fruchtbarkeit.Der Leibwirdvorzugsweisein den For-
men gezeichnet,die der Geschlechtsreifevorhergehen.
(5.2.692)
Jugendstilforcesthe auratic.Thesunhadneverfelt bet-
ter than in their wreathswoven from its rays ....
Maeterlinckdevelopsthe auraticto the point of mon-
strosity.The silenceof dramaticcharactersis one of its
forms. ... A basic motif of Jugendstil is the transfig-
23
urationof infertility.The body is preferablydrawnin
those formsthat precedesexualmaturity.
For all its sophistication, Jugendstilacts out once
again the prescribedsequencesof consumercapital-
ism: anthologizing the exotic, reproducingtechnol-
ogy as if such tools were natural phenomena,
idealizinga humanness severedfrom all social func-
tioning, claiming to purify and transform social re-
lations through the intimate refinements of
aesthetic ritual.6 Benjamin is thus able to link
Jugendstil to its apparent opposite, futurism, that
explicit glorification of recurrenceand technology
which opens directly onto the debased auratic ritu-
als of fascism:"Der reaktionareVersuch,technisch
bedingte Formen aus ihrem funktionalen Zusam-
menhange herauszulosen und sie zu natiirlichen
Konstanten zu machen-das heisst zu stilisieren-
tritt ahnlich wie im Jugendstil etwas spater im
Futurismus auf" 'The reactionary attempt to un-
couple technically defined forms from their func-
tional context and to turn them into natural
constants, that is, to stylize them, emerges, as in
Jugendstil, in futurism somewhat later' (5.2.693).
Benjamin'sideal for the arcades project is, as we
saw earlier,a montage of quotation devoid of com-
mentary: "I have nothing to say." The realization
of such an ideal, however,would requirethe read-
er to deploy a politically activated language. The
implicit circularityis that of language as such: with-
in the reader'smind the completed citational struc-
ture would crystallize the syntax indispensable for
decoding the text. The nineteenth century would be
both fully internalized and transcended by a polit-
ical consciousness. Thus Benjamin'sfailureto com-
plete the work appears, once one's sadness at his
individual fate is absorbed,appropriateto his refus-
al of all prematurelanguages. On the one hand, the
quotations as juxtaposed continue to suggest even
more provocativejuxtapositions. And, on the oth-
er hand, Benjamin's comments and independent
speculations permit certain keywordsto acquire a
new identity. These words would have to belong to
an "awakened"vocabulary.Though included in the
dictionary, they urgently need the politicized con-
notations without which the industrial age cannot
be brought to full consciousness.7
To conclude, I will briefly explorea crucial exem-
plar, the word pair Erfahrung and Erlebnis, which
have become familiar through Benjamin's pub-
lished essay "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire."Since
24 The Politics of Quotation: WalterBenjamin's Arcades Project
the dictionary defines both terms as "experience,"
the translator, Harry Zohn, assigns that meaning
only to Erfahrung, while varying the renderings of
Erlebnis according to context (Illuminations 163).
The simplest definition is "moment that has been
lived," or "livedmoment," which catches the actual
German etymology. In the Baudelaireessay Benja-
min develops the distinction in relation to defini-
tions of memory. In the arcades project the range
is broader: "Die Erfahrung ist der Ertrag der Ar-
beit, das Erlebnis ist die Phantasmagorie des
Miissiggangers" 'Experience is the harvest from
work, the lived moment is the phantasmagoria of
the idler' (5.2.962). Since this remarkis made in the
thematic context of idling (Miissiggang), the reader
is alerted to its dialectical intention. Benjamin
elaborates, in another comment: "Was die Er-
fahrung vor dem Erlebnis auszeichnet, ist, dass sie
von der Vorstellung einer Kontinuitat, einer Folge
nicht abzulosen ist" 'What distinguishesexperience
from the lived moment is that it is inseparablefrom
the idea of a continuity, a sequence' (5.2.964). Since
the whole thrust of the project is to clarify the dis-
continuities of an urban existence, it becomes clear
that experience, the deriving of wisdom from work
and lived continuity, is precisely what modernity
rendersunavailable; Benjamin argues this point in
"The Storyteller." To articulate a modern syntax,
then, he must explore what the lived moment in-
volves, since it defines the mode of experience ac-
tually available to us.
By dialectical necessity, the exploration is nega-
tive in tone. Produced by the consumption cycles of
capitalism, lived moments are ecstasies of artifice
that the system has aimed at gradually domesticat-
ing, so that there has ceased to be a counterdefini-
tion of experience with which to contrast them. In
the nineteenth century the "need for sensation"
(Sensationsbedurfnis) intensified, and services
sprang up to satisfy the need. Among the new pro-
fessionals was the gossip journalist (Feuilletonist),
who "verfremdetdem Grossstadterseine Stadt. So
ist er einer der ersten Techniker, die durch das
gesteigerte Bediirfnis nach Erlebnissen auf den
Plan gerufen werden" 'alienates the city from the
city dweller. He is thus one of the first technicians
called into being by the heightened need for lived
moments' (5.2.966). The emphasis on the lived mo-
ment seems to imply that the material continuities
of work and community have been culturally
devalued; whatever the relational context of one's
existence, one learns to discount it, aspiring instead
to a ceaseless supply of lived moments produced by
the ever-expandingnetwork of urban stimuli. As a
dialectician, Benjamin presses this bleak reality to
its consummation in the antiexperienceof the First
World War:
Das intentionaleKorrelatdes "Erlebnisses"
ist sichnicht
gleich geblieben.Im neunzehntenJahrhundertwar es
"dasAbenteuer." InunsernTagentrittes als "Schicksal"
auf. Im SchicksalstecktderBegriffdes "totalenErleb-
nisses,"das von Hauseaus todlichist. Der Kriegprafi-
guriert es aufs Uniibertrefflichste.("Dass ich als
Deutschergeborenbin, dafiirsterbeich"-das Geburts-
traumaenthaltschon den Chockder todlichist. Diese
Koinzidenzdefiniertdas "Schicksal.") (5.2.962)
Theintentionalcorrelativeof the livedmomenthas not
remainedthe same.In the nineteenthcenturyit was"the
adventure." Inourdayit appearsas "fate."In fateis con-
tainedthe conceptof the "totallivedmoment,"whichis
by definitiondeadly.The warprefiguresthis perfectly.
("ThatI was born German,for that I am dying"-the
traumaof birthalreadycontainsthe shockthatis dead-
ly. This coincidencedefines"fate.")
In this somewhat elusive comment we feel Ben-
jamin's intensely linguistic consciousness at work.
Can the oxymoron "total lived moment" be made
to yield a dialecticalturn?Once the seeminglynega-
tive concept of the lived moment is forced into jux-
taposition with the equally unpromising "fate,"the
two wordsbegin to seem jointly movableonto a new
linguistic plane. Benjamin explored one set of pos-
sibilities in his Baudelaireessay:through the notion
of "involuntarymemory,"derivedfrom Proust and
Freud, a structure of genuine experience becomes
imaginable, a mutual illumination of an acciden-
tal lived moment and the entirety of an individual
life reanimatedas fate. Here I would point to anoth-
er linguisticconnection, the association of the word
fate with a familiar Benjamin figure, the collector:
Manerinneredochnur,vonwelchemBelangfureinenje-
denSammlernichtnurseinObjektsondernauchdessen
ganzeVergangenheit ist, ebensowohldie zu dessenEnt-
stehungundsachlicherQualifizierung gehortwiedieDe-
tails aus dessen scheinbar ausserlicherGeschichte:
Vorbesitzer,Erstehungspreis, Wertetc. Dies alles, die
"sachlichen"Daten wie jene andern,riickenfur den
wahrenSammlerin jedemeinzelnenseinerBesitztiimer
zu einerganzenmagischenEnzyklopadie,zu einerWelt-
ordnungzusammen,derenAbrissdas Schicksalseines
Gegenstandes ist. Hieralso,auf diesemengenFelde,lasst
 James L. Rolleston
sich verstehen,wie die grossenPhysiognomiker(und
SammlersindPhysiognomiker derDingwelt)zu Schick-
salsdeuternwerden. (5.1.274)
Let us rememberhow significantfor a collectoris not
onlyhisobjectbutalsoits entirepast,thatwhichbelongs
to its creationandauthenticityas wellas thedetailsfrom
its apparently externalhistory:previousowners,purchase
price,value,etc.All this, the "factual"datesas muchas
the others,coalescesforthetruecollector,witheveryone
of his possessions,into a whole magicalencyclopedia,
intoa worldorderwhoseoutlineis thefate of his object.
Here,in thisnarrowdomain,canbe understoodhowthe
greatphysiognomists(andcollectorsarephysiognomists
of the worldof things)becomeinterpreters of fate.
The simultaneous detachment and involvement of
the collector suggest a key to the dialectical recov-
ery of lived moments. Like the collector, the ordi-
nary individual in the urban machine severs
(involuntarily, to be sure) moments of experience
from one another and from their functional context
in the work world or in any collectiveenterprise.But
the model of the collector suggests that it is possi-
ble to reconstitute these moments as an acknowl-
edged fate, a collection of events that can be read
as the text of a single story, the epoch as a (re-
pressed) political object. And the consciousness
that undertakes such reading can only be po-
litical.8
Aware of the elitist element in the collector im-
age, Benjamin develops the lived moment as a
potential locus of resistance in "The Work of Art
in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." The ur-
ban masses cannot be released from the incessant
production of lived moments, but their discontinu-
ous subjectivity can perhaps be valorized through
another term Benjamin seeks to install in the new
political language, distraction (Zerstreuung). In
their very distractionthe masses may resistthe more
blatant artificesof fascist ritual, may even appropri-
ate the new technologies to achieve a genuine anal-
ysis of the urban landscape. To be sure, Benjamin
is advocating this dialectical move, not describing
it. And RichardWolin reproacheshim for excessive
optimism, for falling into the technologism against
which he himself so often warned (Wolin 192). But
25
Paul Fry observes that Benjamin's exploration of
the term distraction is in harmony with an ancient
tradition, one that has been marginalized by the
new, obsessive rituals of aura: "The oldest notions
of distraction are in fact associated with preternat-
ural wisdom, even with holiness" (205).
Ultimately the lived moment gains its potency
from its constitutive role in Benjamin's own enter-
prise. Benjamin is fully awarethat his life is made
of discontinuous moments, that "experience"is not
to be had. And so he discovers, in the urban land-
scape of the nineteenth century, all his partial
selves-the flaneur, the collector, the critic-who
have constructed life models out of this initial de-
basement of human temporality.These models are
individualist modes of resistance, conditioned by
self-ironyand self-enclosure.For Benjamin, the cri-
sis has deepened in everysense in the twentieth cen-
tury, not because of the disastrous political events,
but precisely because of our utter inability, as iso-
lated and fated individuals, to read the language of
these events, to speak politically. Benjamin'sdream
of a montage of quotations, from which his own
voice might ultimately be absent, does not express
a renunciation of the individual for the collective;
rather,it representsa heightenedversionof what the
individual might be. We are still dreaming the
dreams of the last century and are inexorablyobey-
ing its command of novelty, whenever we think
seemingly novel thoughts. Fantasiesof exploration,
of discovery, of escape perpetuate themselves
through new versions of subjectivity and technol-
ogy, in a symbiosis that is open or masked accord-
ing to the imperativesof the consumer moment. To
awaken from the dream, we must learn to read it as
a text; but to become such readers, we must distill
from it a language that is outside it as well as inside.
Only through a language born in the deprivatized
zone of quotation, a political language finally ade-
quate to the mystificationsof capitalism,can we ac-
knowledge and confront the alarming identity
between the text of the nineteenth century and that
of the twentieth.
Duke University
Durham, North Carolina
26 The Politics of Quotation: WalterBenjamin's Arcades Project
Notes
1 reform through detention: "Forthe prison, in its realityand visi-
Already in 1822 Fourier, in his Theorie de l'unite univer-
selle, locates the "rue-galerie" within his urban utopia as "la
principalepiece du palais d'harmonie, dont on ne peut avoir au-
cune idee en civilization" 'the principal room in the palace of
harmony, of which one can have no idea in civilization' (qtd. in
Gesammelte Schriften 5.1.92; all referencesto Benjamin, unless
otherwise noted, are cited from this work and identified by vol-
ume, part, and page numbers; translations are my own unless
otherwise indicated). According to Benjamin's source (Marcel
Poete, Une vie de cite Paris, 1925)therewas a hiatus in the build-
ing of the arcades between 1800 (the date of the "passage des
Panoramas") and 1822, and most of them were constructed be-
tween 1822 and 1834 (5.1.86). Benjamin evokes their "physiog-
nomy" by citing a sentence from Baudelaire: "Il me parut
singulier que j'eusse pu passer si souvent a c6te de ce prestigieux
repaire sans en deviner l'entr6e" 'It seemed strange to me that
I could have so often walked past this prestigious establishment
without guessing its point of entry' (5.1.108).
2 The quoted passages are from the 1916 "Uber die Sprache
uberhaupt und uber die Sprache des Menschen" and the 1940
"Uber den Begriff der Geschichte" (1.2.693-704), translated in
Illuminations by Harry Zohn, whose version is cited here
(2.1.151).For a full discussion of Benjamin'smeditations on lan-
guage, see Winfried Menninghaus.
3 The
theory of redemption sketched here is best understood
in linguistic terms. A language omits nothing. Yetit is not an in-
ventory, not a list of substantives, but a syntax, a systematizing
instrument with dialogue and change inherent in its ontology:
"The historian's task, as Benjamin conceives it, is as necessary
and impossible as that of the translator.It is that task. . . . Even
though our 'messianic power' is 'weak,' 'nothing,' according to
the Theses, 'is to be given up as lost for history.' The Passagen-
werk was destined to draw the consequences from that extrava-
gant postulate-and to do so, in consequence, at every level.
Perhaps, then, it was destined to remainunfinished" (Wohlfarth
167).
4 Michael Jennings certainly transcendsthis controversybut,
in his effort to "contextualize"Benjamin, assigns him to the fol-
lowing categoriesin the space of two pages (37-38): "mysticism,"
"historical materialism .. .deeply attached to German ideal-
ism," "mandarin optimism of his Marxism," "pessimism,"
"dimensions that can only be described as Utopian," and "ni-
hilism." The problem with attaching Benjamin to these isms is
that his project,like Derrida'scritiqueof the metaphysicsof pres-
ence, intends to put in question the inherited language of histor-
ical description. And Benjamin has no "alternative" language
in which to do this. The wordshe uses are necessarilyprovisional,
written inside the "dream"of technological capitalism. If we ac-
cept this metaphor for the modern experience, we must surely
acknowledge that we have not yet awakenedfrom the dream. In-
deed the pace of requiredinnovation and obsolescence, inaugu-
ratedat the time of the arcades,is obviously accelerating.All our
isms speak this language. There is (as yet) no outside, no
hors-texte.
5 In a
striking confirmation of Benjamin's reading and dat-
ing of the syntax of modernity,Michel Foucault stressesthat the
recurrent"failure" of prisons (like the "decay" of bourgeois in-
stitutions generally) is built into the initial conceptualization of
ble effects, was denounced at once as the great failure of penal
justice. In a very strange way, the history of imprisonment does
not obey a chronology in which one sees, in orderly succession,
the establishment of a penality of detention, then the recogni-
tion of its failure;then the slow rise of projects of reform, seem-
ing to culminate in the more or less coherent definition of
penitentiarytechnique;then the implementation of this project;
lastly, the recognition of its successes or its failure. There was
in fact a telescopingor in any case a differentdistributionof these
elements. And, just as the project of a corrective technique ac-
companied the principle of punitive detention, the critique of
the prison and its methods appearedvery early on, in those same
years 1820-45; indeed, it was embodied in a number of formu-
lations which-figures apart-are today repeated almost un-
changed" (264-65).
6 Jugendstil's refusal of dialectical opposition, of course,
makes these artists peculiarly accessible to Benjamin's dialecti-
cal reading of them, much as advertising images open a politi-
cal perspective onto today's society: "Keine geschichtliche
Erscheinung ist in der Kategorie der Flucht allein fasslich; im-
mer pragt sich dieser Flucht auf was geflohen wird" 'No histor-
ical phenomenon is comprehensible solely in terms of the
category of escape; the flight is always stamped by the reality of
what is being fled' (5.2.683). In this section, Benjamin names-
besides Maeterlinck-Wilde, Beardsley,the young Rilke, Stefan
George, and Odilon Redon; he also sees the sterile perfection of
Ibsen's Hedda Gabler as an anticipatory critique of Jugendstil
(5.2.684).
7 This translation of social text into operational language
reinforces Susan Buck-Morss'sresponse to Benjamin'spolitical
challenge;in her view,his notations wereneverintendedto docu-
ment "all" the issues of modernity. Benjamin had not, or could
not have, understood certain structuresof oppression that fem-
inist readings of the Westernpast have since yielded. It is up to
us, not to "complete" Benjamin'spanoramic work, but to keep
it open and active: "On their own, the historical facts in the
Passagen-Werkare flat, situated, as Adorno complained, 'on the
crossroads of magic and positivism.' It is because they are, and
were meant to be, only half the text. The reader of Benjamin's
generation was to provide the other half from the fleeting im-
ages that appeared, isolated from history, in his or her lived ex-
perience. The spatial, surface montage of present perception
which makes all of us flaneurs can be transformed from illusion
to knowledge once the 'principleof montage' is turned into his-
tory . . " (Buck-Morss, "Flaneur" 109).
8
"[Fuchs'] Gedanke ist, dem Kunstwerk das Dasein in der
Gesellschaftzuriickzugeben,von der es so sehr abgeschniirtwor-
den war, dass der Ort, an dem er es auffand, der Kunstmarkt
war, auf dem es, gleich weit von seinen Verfertigernwie von de-
nen, die es verstehen konnten, entfernt, zur Ware einge-
schrumpft, uberdauerte" '[Fuchs's] thought is to give back to
the work of art its existence in society, from which it had been
so radically dislocated that the place where he found it was the
art market, a place in which, equally remote from its makersand
from those who could understand it, it persisted, shrunkeninto
a commodity' (Benjamin 2.2.503).
 James L. Rolleston
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Bolz, Norbert W., and RichardFaber,eds. Antike undModerne.
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Buck-Morss, Susan. "Benjamin's Passagen-Werk:Redeeming
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