Susan Buck Morss 1983 Benjamin S Passagen Werk Redeeming Mass Culture F PDF

Benjamin's Passagen-Werk: Redeeming Mass Culture for the Revolution
Author(s): Susan Buck-Morss

Source: New German Critique, No. 29, The Origins of Mass Culture: The Case of Imperial
Germany (1871-1918) (Spring - Summer, 1983), pp. 211-240
Published by: New German Critique
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/487795
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Benjamin'sPassagen-Werk:
RedeemingMass Culturefr theRevolution,
by Susan Buck-Morss
I. Mass Cultureas Dream-World

I shall focus my comments on the recently published Passagen-Werk,2
Benjamin's major but unfinished study of Paris in the 19th century,
which was concerned with the origins of mass culture, and which
occupied him from 1927 until his suicide in 1940. In line with the
specific interests of this conference, I will consider his argument that
the recently out-of-date objects of mass culture possessed political,
iadeed, revolutionary power for his generation, and this will take us by
a somewhat circuitous route to Imperial Berlin, the scene of Ben-
jamin's own childhood.
Any argument based on the Passagen-Werk is necessarily tentative,
due to its extremely ambiguous status as a text. Its goal was to
reconstruct history with a political focus on the "present," but between
1927 and 1940 the political nature of the present changed con-
siderably, and thus so does the tone of the reconstruction. Moreover,
although surely Benjamin's major literary effort, the Passagen-Werk is
not only unfinished; it is nota "work" at all. It consists of reserach notes
with some commentary, carefully numbered and collected in folders
(Konvoluts)to which Benjamin gave identifying keywords ("Arcades,"
"Fashion," "Ancient Paris," "Boredom," Haussmannization," etc.) as
well as letters which he arranged A-Z; a-z. It might best be described as
1. My thanksto Philippe Invernel,BarbaraKleiner,BurkhardtLinder,Michael

L6wy, Winfried Menninghaus, and Berndt Witte, from whose contributions to the
colloquium, "Walter Benjamin et Paris" (Paris,June 1983), I learned much that was
stimulating for the revision of this paper.
2. WalterBenjamin,DasPassagen-Werk,
2 vol., ed. by RolkTiedemann(Frankfurt-
am-Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1982), Gesammelte Schriften,vol. V; hereafter PW. Citations
are noted below with their identifying Konvolut letter code.
211
212 Benjamin'sPassagenwerk
a lexicon providing concrete images, in the form of quotations from

sources on 19th-centuryParis,which illuminate the origins of modern-
ity. From them, as from building blocks, Benjamin constructed his
two essays on Baudelaire (1938 and 1939), and wouldhave constructed
the Passagen-Werk - in just what fashion, however, even the most
qualified commentator, Theodor Adorno, could not decipher, given
the fragmented condition of the surviving material.3But particularlyof
the topic of mass culture, in light of the wide dissemination of the 1936
essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,"4
which in this country at least is taken as the canonical statement by Ben-
jami on the subject, the Passagen-Werk, to which the artwork essay was
closely tied in its conception,5 provides even in its partial illuminations
an important corrective to overly-simplistic or one-sided assumptions
as to what Benjamin's mass-culture theory was all about.
It should perhaps be noted first of all that despite its reception as
such, "mass culture" (a term Benjamin didn't use) is not the central
theme of the artworkessay. The essay is concerned primarilywith art in
the age of industrialism, when it has become possible to reproduce
technologically not only the work of art, but also the subject matter
(reality)which art has striven traditionally to represent. Benjamin dealt
with the theoretical, indeed, philosophical question of what happens
to the social and cognitive function of art once its authority as an
original (the source of its "aura") has been undermined by mass
reproduction and once its efforts at the mimetic replication of reality
(which had given its forms, however illusory, a claim to truth) have
been decisively surpassed by technological means, specifically
photography and film. Benjamin's answer is clear: The result is the
liquidation of art in its traditional, bourgeois form. Art's power as illu-
sion moves over into industry (painting into advertising, architecture
into technical engineering, handcrafts or sculpture into the industrial
arts) creating what we have come to call mass culture, and is taken into
3. The bulk of the text was in Adorno's hands by 1948, during which summer he
"worked through it most exhaustively" and concluded that the mass of quotations of
which it consists was lacking in a theoretical or conceptual ordering adequate for their
interpretation, a task which, "if it were possible at all, only Benjamin could have
accomplished." (PW, 1072).
4. In Walter Benjamin, Illuminations,trans. Harry Zohn and ed. Hannah Arendt
(New York: Schocken Books, 1969). The tide, "Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner
technischen Reproduzierbarkeit," is more accurately (if less gracefully) translated,
"The work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproduceability."
5. Benjamin wrote that the artwork essay "fixes the contemporary situation from
which certain premises and questions are to be decisive for the [Passagen-Werk's] back-
ward glance into the 19th century" (PW, 1152. See also Ibid., 1150-51).
Buck-Morss 213
the service of capitalist interests for profits. But the cognitive function
of art (its ability to speak the truth) can be redeemed if in turn the artist,
remaining an outsider, takes the industrial techniques developed
under capitalism into his service. As a mimetic technology, the inven-
tion of film provided an expressive medium adequate to industrially-
transformed sense-perception. When the artist-as-philosopher takes
over as tools the formal principles of this new medium, he is able to
capture the modern experience of time (increased tempo) and space
(fragmentation)which are no longer describable in Kantiancategories,
and, via non-sequential time frames, close-up and montage, he can
begin to analyse modern reality with a scientific, politically critical
eye.
The change in the function of art corresponded to a social transfor-
mation. Benjamin considered the new urban panorama, nowhere
more dazzling than in Paris, as the extreme visual representation of
what Marx called the fetishism of commodities, wherein "a particular
social relationship between people takes on the phantasmagoric form
of a relationship between things."6 One could say that the dynamics of
capitalist industrialism had caused a curious reversal in which "reali-
ty" and "art" switched places. Reality had become artifice, a phantas-
magoria of commodities and architectural construction made possible
by new industrial processes. The modern city was nothing but the pro-
liferation of such objects, the density of which created an artificial
landscape of buildings and consumer items as totally encompassing as
the earlier, natural one. In fact, for children (like Benjamin) born into
an urban environment, they appeared to be nature itself. Benjamin's
understanding of commodities was not merely critical. He affirmed
them as utopian wish-images which "liberated creativityfrom art,just
as in the XVIth century the sciences freed themselves from philo-
sophy" (PW, 1236, again 1249). This phantasmagoria of industrially-
produced material objects - buildings, boulevards, all sorts of
commodities from tour-books to toilet articles - for Benjamin was
mass culture, and it is the central concern of the Passagen-Werk.
The nightmarish, infernal aspects of industrialism were veiled in the
modern city by a vast arrangement of things which at the same time
gave corporeal form to the wishes and desires of humanity. Because
they were "natural"phenomena in the sense of concrete matter,7they
6. Marx, Capital,cited by Benjamin (G 5, 1).

7. Benjamin considered the distinction between manufactured and non-manu-
factured objects not absolute. Neither were "natural" in the sense of ahistorical; and
- and
both were ratural as material existence: "...every true natural form [Naturgestalt]
in fact technology is also such a thing..." (K la, 3).
give the illusion of being the realization of those wishes rather than
merely their reified, symbolic expression. Mass media (Benjamin
would have called it mechanical reproduction) could now replicate
this commodity world endlessly as the mere image of an illusion
(examples were Hollywood films, the growing advertising industry,
Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will").8But the critical, cognitive func-
tion in which a politicized art might participate was precisely the
opposite: not to duplicate illusion as real, but to interpret reality as
itself illusion. This, I would claim, was in fact the goal of the Passagen-
Werk.If the artworkessay argues theoretically for the transformation of
art from illusory representation into an analysis of illusions, the
Passagen-Werk was intended to put theory into literarypractice. Itwas to
have appropriated the new techniques of film9 so that it could meet the
distracted public halfway,10in order to expose to them how and why
reality became composed of illusions in the first place.
Benjamin described the new urban-industrial phantasmagoria as a
"dream-world," in which neither exchange value nor use value
exhausted the meaning of objects. It was as "dream-images of the
collective" - both distorting illusion and redeemable wish-image -
that they took on political meaning. The new public buildings were
"dreamhouses."" The lived experience of all this, the false conscious-
ness of a collective subjectivity, at once deeply alienated and yet cap-
able of entering into the commodity landscape of utopian symbols
8. Clearly, in a world where mass media was being used for anything but critical
enlightenment, Benjamin's affirmation of film and other forms of mechanical re-
production was addressed to the cognitive potential of such media, not their present
practice. As he commented to Scholem in 1938: "The philosophical bond between the
two parts of my [artwork]study that you miss will be supplied by the revolution more
effectively than by me" (Gershom Scholem, Cited in Walter Benjamin: TheStoryof a
Friendship,trans. Harry Zohn [Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of
America, 1981], p. 207). Meanwhile, as Brecht stated (and Benjamin's work de-
monstrated): "It is conceivable that other kinds of artists, such as playrights and
novelists, may for the moment be able to work in a more cinematic way than the film
people" (Brechton Theater,ed. John Willett [New York: 1964], p. 480. Hill and
Wang.
9. "A central problem of historical materialism that finally should be seen: whether
the Marxist understanding of history absolutely precludes its graphicness. Or: In what
way is it possible to connect a heightened graphicness to the execution of the Marxist
method? The first step.. .will be to take over into history the principle of montage" (N 2,
6).
10. Cf. Benjamin, Illuminations,p. 240.
11. "All collective architecture of the 19th century provides housing for the dream-
ing collective." (H degree, 1). Included were department stores, world exhibition
halls, railroad stations, factories, museums, and of course the arcades the Passagen
themselves. Interestingly, Benjamin did not consider the 20th-century movie theater
Buck-Morss 215
with uncriticalenthusiasm he called "dream-consciousness."Ben-

jamin's goal was to interpretthe historicalorigins of this dream by
transformingdream-imagesinto "dialecticalimages"with the power
to causea political"awakening."In thePassagen-Werk, culturalhistory-
writing and revolutionarypedagogy were to converge.
This,atleast,wasBenjamin'soriginalplan,documentedin twoearly
setsof notes, 1927and 1928-29(PW,993-1059).At thattime Benjamin
was merelya visitorin Paris;his researchwas conductedmainlyat the
in Berlin.In 1933 Benjaminwent to Parisin permanent
Staatsbiliothek
exile. Workon the Passagen-Werk proceeded in fits and starts,but the
original plan remained largely force at least as late as the 1935
in
expose of the project.Just how greatlyit changed afterthat remains,
even afterdetailedphilologicalanalysis,a debatablepoint, and it is a
question to whichwe will return.In the followingsection I will simply
try to reconstructBenjamin'stheory of the dreaming collective (das
triumende relyingon the earlynotes (1927 seriesA degree- A
Kollektiv),
degree and 1928-29 seriesa degree- h degree),the variousversionsof
the 1935 expose (includingthe preparatorynotes, 1934-35,PW1206-
1223),and those sections of the Konvoluts,particularlyK ("Traumstadt,
Zukunftstrdume, Nihilismus"
anthropologischer K 1-K 3a) and N ("Erken-
Theorie
ntnistheoretisches, N 1-N 3a), which were written
desFortschritts"
before 1935.12
II. TheSourceoftheDreamandtheTwoDream-States
Benjamin described capitalism as "a natural phenomenon with
whicha new dream-sleepcame overEurope,and in it, a reactivationof
mythicpowers"(K la, 8). Livingin Parismeant being wrappedin this
dream, which left visible traces as the city's physical elements. The
arcades(Passagen)wereone such element, in factthe veryfirst"dream-
houses" built out of the new iron-and-glassconstructionof indus-
trialism.These coveredpedestrianstreets,privatelyowned yet open to
the public, were lined with specialty shops, cafes, casinos, and
theatersdesignedto attracta fashionablecrowdin theirnew socialrole
as the penultimate "dreamhouse." On the contrary, the technology of film provided

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

which survived in Benjamin's day had deteriorated. they had become a
refuge for commodities now old-fashioned, "strange, out-of-date
things:" dentures and feather-dusters, corsettes and umbrellas,
stockings and wind-up dolls, collar buttons for shirts long since disap-
peared - all this created a montage suggesting "a world of secret
affinities" (a degree 3). It was the Surrealistswho originally recognized
that the residues of past fashions in the present possessed a mythic
power and compare them to dream-images. And it was they who first
became fascinated with the declining Parisarcades, full of such images.
Louis Argaon's description of the soon-to-be demolished Passage de
l'Opera, in Lepaysan de Paris (1926) inspired the Passagen-Werk. Ben-
jamin recalled later: "Evenings in bed I could never read more than
two or three pages before my heartbeat got so strong I had to put the
book down."'3 But Surrealists became "stuck in the realm of dreams"
(H degree 17; N 1, a). Benjamin's intent, "in opposition to Aragon,"
was "not to let oneself be lulled sleepily within the 'dream' or 'mytho-
logy' " but "to penetrate all this by the dialectic of awakening" (PW,
1214). Such awakening began where Surrealistsand other avant-garde
artists too often stopped short, because in rejecting cultural tradition
they closed their eyes to history as well. Benjamin wrote: "We conceive
the dream 1) as a historical 2) as a collective phenomenon" (PW, 1214).
Against Aragon, the Passagen-Werk"is concerned with dissolving
mythology into the space of history. This clearly can happen only
through awakening a not-yet-conscious knowledge of the past [Ge-
wesen]"(N 1,9).
In his earliest notes for the Passagen-Werk,Benjamin revived the
feudal image of a "body politic," itself out of fashion since the Baroque
era, without, however, the traditional divisions between classes of
social labor. One might be reminded of the 17th-centuryimage of a new
body politic which as frontespiece illustrated Hobbes' Leviathan,
except that Benjamin was proposing an allegorical representation of
the most recent past instead of a normative model for the present, and
the political unit was not Hobbes' ensemble of atomistic individuals,
but the (not-yet-awakened) collective: "The XIX century: a time-space
[Zeitraum](a time-dream [Zeit-traum])in which individual conscious-
ness maintains itselfever-more reflectively, whereas the collective con-
sciousness sinks into ever-deeper sleep. butjust as the sleeping person
- here like someone insane - sets out on the macrocosmic journey
through his body, and the sounds and feelings of his own insides -
13. Walter Benjamin, Briefe, 2 vols., eds. Gershom Scholem and T.W. Adorno
(Frankfurt-am-Main:Suhrkamp Verlag, 1966), vol. 2, pp. 662-63.
Buck-Morss 217
which to the healthy,awakepersonblend togetherin a surgeof health

(blood pressure, intestinal movements, heartbeatand muscle sen-
sations) - due to his unprecedendy sharpened senses, generate
hallucinationsor dream-imageswhich translateand explain [these
sensations], so it is too with the dreaming collective which in the
arcadessinks into its own innards.This is whatwe have to pursue in
order to interpretthe 19th century in fashion and advertisement,
building and politics,as the consequenceof [the collective's]dream-
countenance"(K 1, 4, cf. G degree14).Consumerobjects,noveltiesand
fashions from the past [Gewesene], existed in the present as dream
images through which the collective unconscious communicated
acrossgenerations.New inventionsconceivedout of the fantasyof one
generation,they enteredinto the childhood experiencedof another.
Now (and this is one of the most intriguingaspects of Benjamin's
theory),their second dream-existencebegan:"Theexperienceof the
youth of a generationhas much in common with dreamexperience."
(K 1, 1, cf. F degree7). If capitalismhad been the sourceof a historical
dream-state,this one was of biologicalorigins,and the two axes con-
vergedin a unique constellationfor each generation.At this intersec-
tion between social history and natural history, between society's
dream and childhood dream, the contents of the collective uncon-
scious were transmitted."Everyepoch has this side turned toward
dreams - the childlike side. For the preceedingcenturyit emerges
very clearlyin the arcades"(K 1, 1; F degree 7).
Childhood was not merely a passive receptaclefor this historical
unconscious. Childhood transformedthe dream-imagesin accord
with its own temporalindex, and this entailedtheirdialecticalreversal
from historicallyspecificimagesinto archaicones (Urbilder). I unders-
tandat leastpartof Benjamin'spoint to be this:Fromthe child'sposi-
tion, all history,from the most ancientto the most recentpast,occurs
in mythictime. No historyrecountshis or her lived experience.All of
the past lies in an archaicrealmof"Ur"-history.Now, the bourgeois
ideology of historical progress does its best to overwhelm this
childhood intuition of even the most recent history as archaicand
mythicallydistant, by substitutingfor it the image of history'stri-
umphalmarch,which submergesthe new generationsin its "irresist-
able" tide. (We may recall that Benjamin considered nothing so
politicallycorrupting:The belief in progresswasitselfa myththatpre-
vented any real historicalchange from occurring.14) In the market-
place,historicalprogressmanifestsitselfas fashionand newness,but it
isjust thisthatthe cognitiveexperienceof childhoodreverses:"Atfirst,
14. Benjamin, Illuminations,p. 258.

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

already in the next childhood memory it changes its characteristics.
Every child accomplishes something great, something irreplaceable
for humanity. Every childhood, through its interests in technological
phenomena, its curiosity for all sorts of inventions and machinery,
binds technological achievement [the newest things] onto the old
world of symbols" (n 2a, 1).
This old "world of symbols" was the storehouse for humanity's
expressions of the desire for utopia, and here Benjamin came closest to
the theory of a collective unconscious with innate archetypes pos-
tulated by C.G. Jung and Ludwig Klages. The difference was Ben-
jamin's Marxist sensibility: when old utopian desires were cathected
onto the new products of industrial production, they reactivated the
original promise of industrialism, slumbering in the lap of capitalism,
to deliver a humane society of material abundance. In terms of
socialist, revolutionary politics, then, the rediscovery of these ur-
symbols in the most modern technological products had a potentially
explosive and absolutely contemporary relevance.
For Benjamin, the truth of an object emerged in its "after-life,"(cf. N
2) when both use-value and exchange-value receeded and the poten-
tial for the symbolic expression of humanity's dreams - its wish-
dreams as well as its nightmares - came to the fore. And this precisely
desribes the child's reception of objects. Hence: "The child can in fact
do something of which the adult is totally incapable: 'discover the new
anew' For us locomotives already have the character of symbols
because we found them there in our childhood. For our children,
however, [this is true of] the automobile, from which we ourselves gain
only the new, elegant, modern, dashing side. There is no more
shallow, impotent antithesis as that which reactionary figures like
[Ludwig] Klages try to set up between the symbolic space of nature and
techne. To every truly new and natural form - and in fact technology
is also such a thing - there correspond new "images." Every
childhood discovers these new images in order to add them to the
image-treasure of humanity" (K la, 3; M degree 20).
When Benjamin referred to "our children" he was not speaking
hypothetically. The period of his first formulation of the Passagen-Werk
coincided with the childhood of his own son Stefan (born in 1918). But
it coincided as well with a long and painful divorce which put distance,
physically and emotionally, between them. His marriage was dis-
solved in 1930. His parents, with whom he had had strong conflicts as a
young man, died during the same period. The pressure in modern
society which causes ruptures in family tradition and alienation
between generations was clear to him. In 1932 at the age of forty, Ben-
jamin, convinced that his chances for personal happiness were small,
Buck-Morss 219
and threatenedby economicallyand politicallyinsecure conditions,

contemplatedsuicideseriously.Duringthatsameyear,in the midstof
writing short pieces necessaryfor his financialsurvival,he wrote to
Scholem,"somethingelse is coming into being behind my back- in
the form of some notes I have been making...concerningthe history
of my relationshipto Berlin."15 These notes took shape quicklyin two
versions,Berliner (dedicatedto Stefan),6andBerliner
Chronik Kindheitum
1900.1 They were childhood reminiscences structured not as
chronologicalautobiography,but as "discreteexpeditions into the
depth of memory."18As self-analysisthis projectseems to have been
therapeutic,givingBenjaminthe powerto put the pastbehind him. At
the same time he was testingthe childhood dream-theoryon himself,
and practicingon the level of individualhistorywhat he hoped even-
tually to accomplish in the Passagen-Werk for the collective, a re-
constructionof the past in the light of the present, in order to break
away- "awaken"- from it.19
Benjamin'schildhood memories are less of people than of those
urban spaces in Imperial Berlin which formed the settings for his
experiences- parks,departmentstores,railroadstations,citystreets,
cafes, and school buildings. They concern as well the materialpro-
ducts of industrialism - a wrought-iron door, the telephone, a
chocolate-dispensingslot machine. The world of the modern city
appearsas a mythicand magicalone in whichthe child Benjamin"dis-
coversthe new anew,"and the adult Benjaminrecognizesit as a redis-
covery of the old.20One thing became clear to him from the ex-
15. Letter, 28 February, 1932, cited in scholem, TheStoryofa Friendship,

p. 180. Ben-
jamin had already written about his childhood in the set of aphorisms, Einbahnstrasse,
published in 1928. Although this early account contained the memory of childhood
dreams, what was new in the later essays was precisely the memory of the waking life of
childhood as a dream-state.
16. The dedication was at first to several contemporaries, friends of Benjamin.
Their names were ultimately crossed out and replaced with "for my dear Stefan."
BerlinerChronikwas written in spring 1932. More directly personal (and political) than
the laterversion, itwas left unpublished until 1970 when Gershom Scholem edited the
manuscript. An English translation appears in Walter Benjamin, Reflections:Essays,
Aphorisms,Autobiographical Writings,ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New
York: Harvest/HBJ, 1978), pp. 3-60.
17. Written in fall 1932 and published in sections in various journals, but first
published as a single text in 1950.
18. WalterBenjamin-Gersom Scholem:Briefwechsel,
1933-1940, ed. Gershom Scholem,
(Frankfurtam Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1980), p. 28.
19. In his post-1937 notes toKonvolutK, Benjamin cited the Freudian TheodorReik
on memory and its healing power due to the fact that the conscious reconstruction of
the past destroys its power over the present (see K 8, 1; K 8, 2).
20. He included a similar reminiscence in the Passagen-Werk, and the "discovery" is
periment. This was not the form that the Passagen-Werk itself could
take. As he wrote later: "The Ur-history of the 19th century which is
reflectedin the gaze of the child playing on its threshold has a much dif-
ferent face than that which it engraves on the map of history" (PW,
1139). At no time did Benjamin suggest that the child's understanding
of historical reality was itself a direct insight into truth. But the
reconstruction of childhood as Ur-history could provide a model for
the reconstruction of the collective history of the 19th century. In the
1928-29 notes he wrote: "When as children we received those great
collections, 'The Universe and Humanity,' 'The New Universe,'
'Earth,' did not one's gaze fall always first on the colorful "mineral
landscape" or 'lakes and glaciers of the first Ice Age'? Such an ideal
panorama of a scarcely-past Ur-epoch meets the gaze in the arcades
which are scattered in every city. Here is housed the last dinosaur of
Europe: the consumer" (a 3 degree). There was an analogy, but not an
identity, between the childhood dream-state and the historical one.
The natural history of the child and the social history of the collective
were separate axes. They had to be kept apart conceptually in order to
avoid the ideological mistake of conflating social history and the
natural state of things (a problem, in our own time, of sociobiology21).
Nonetheless, these axes always intersected, and the cognitive perspec-
in the formof a utopianwish-image:"Manyyearsagoin a citytramI sawanadvertising

placardwhich,ifit hadenteredintotheworldwithproperthings,wouldhavefoundits
admirers,historians,exegeticiansandcopyists,as muchasanygreatliteratureor great
painting.And infactitwasbothatthesametime.Butas canoccursometimeswithvery
deep, unexpectedimpressions,the shockwasso strong,the impression,if I maysayit
thus, hit me so powerfullythatit brokethroughthe bottomof consciousnessand for
yearslay irretrievablesomewherein the darkness.I knewonly thatit had to do with
'Bullrichsalz'...ThenI succeededone fadedSundayafternoon...[in discoveringa sign
on whichwaswritten]'Bullrich-Salz.'It containednothingbut the word,but around
this verbalsign there arose suddenly,effortlessly,that desert landscapeof the first
placard.I haditbackagain.Itlookedlikethis:movingforwardin theforegroundof the
desertwasa freight-wagondrawnby horses.It wasladenwithsackson whichwaswrit-
ten Bullrich-Salz."One of these sacks had a hole out of which salt had already
dribbledfor a while onto the earth.In the backgroundof the desertlandscape,two
postscarrieda largesignwiththewords:'is thebest.'Whataboutthe traceof saltonthe
path throughthe desert?It constructedletters,and these formed a wad, the word
'Bullrich-Salz.'Was the preestablishedharmonyof Leibniz not childishnesscom-
paredwiththis knife-sharp,finelycoordinatedpredestinationin the desert?And did
therenotlie in thisplacarda likenessforthingswhichin thislifeon earthno one hasyet
experienced?A likenessfor the every-dayof utopia?"(G la, 4) Note thatthe child's
inventive reception of this mass-cultureform as a sign of a reconciliatednature
indicatesthat childhood cognitive powers were not without an antidote to mass
culture'smanipulation.
21. I am indebtedtoJohn Foresterfor this comparison.
Buck-Morss221
tive of both was necessaryto capture the ambivalenceof the his-

torical situation.
As a maxim for transformingdream-images into "dialectical"
images, which is how the former looked upon wakening,Benjamin
wrote:"No historicalcategorywithout naturalsubstance;no natural
categorywithout its historicalfilter"(0 degree 80). This dialecticbe-
tweennatureand history(moreclearlyworkedout by Adornothanby
Benjamin22) functioned on both levels (childhood and society),and
was furthercomplicatedby the superimpositionof the dialecticbe-
tween archaicand modern, and the double value-meaning(negative
and positive)of the terms.All this lends Benjamin'stheoreticalpoint a
densitydifficultto unravel,but it is possibleto pull at leastsome of the
strandsapart.In the arcades,the recentlyout-of-datefashions,new to
formergenerationswerehistoricalobjectswhichappearedas fetishes,
ur-imageswith a mythicmeaning,from the perspectiveof the present
one. Butthe "newness"of fashionundercapitalismwasa myth,merely
the fetishized "wish-image"of change within an unchangedsystem,
and the childhood axis of cognition thereby stumbled accidentally
upon a truth. Hence the importance of the natural history of
generations,whose perspectiveprovidedthatsymbolicangleof vision
which made possible a criticalperceptionof the new as the "always-
the-same."But the cognitiveaxis of social historywas also necessary
because its allegorical (as opposed to symbolic) orientation de-
monstratedthatthe mythicur-imageshad a material,historicalbase,
and thus (against Klages and Jung) they had transientrather than
ontologicalstatus.Forexample,those arcadeswhich survivedin Ben-
jamin'stime had a bombed-outappearance,typicalof obsolete urban
constructions,so thatin them the "wish-symbolsof the previouscen-
tury"appearedturned "into rubble"(BW,50). Preciselythis natural
history of objects, their appearance in the present as "wrecked
material"(PW, 1215) was a sign of the transitorinessof historical
phenomena, including, ultimately,bourgeois class domination.
Withinthe cognitiveaxisof childhood,Benjamintookgreatpainsto
demonstratethat as a "natural"mythic state it was bound at every
point to history.In thePassagen-Werk he citedErnstBloch:"theuncon-
scious is an acquiredcondition in specifichuman beings..."(K2a, 5).
22. See Adorno's 1932 speech, "The Idea of Natural History," where the argument
is explicitly indebted to Benjamin, who influenced Adorno deeply during this period.
As was frequently the case, Adorno articulated Benjamin's ideas with a greater
philosophical and expository rigor, for the details of Adorno's argument, see chapter
3, Susan Buck-Morss, TheOriginofNegativeDialectics:Theodor W.Adono, WalterBenjamin,
and theFrankfurtInstitute(New York: Macmillan Free Press, 1977).
As the contents of the unconscious were images of concrete, his-

torically specific matter (automobiles, telephones, the arcades them-
selves) rather than the eternal psychical archetypes that Jung sug-
gested, they were historically, not biologically inherited.23 What was
"eternal" was the utopian impulse, that desire for happiness which was
a protest agianst social reality in its given form, and this was nowhere
more manifest than in childhood.24
The dialectical interpenetration of social and natural history was a
specifically modern phenomenon: "This inexorable confrontation of
the most recent past with the present is something historically new"
(PW, 1236). In fact, the intensification of mythic power in both dream-
states was itself a function of history: when capitalism's new dream-
sleep fell over Europe, it was the cause of a "reactivation of mythic
powers" (K la, 8). Precisely the city landscape "confers on childhood
memories a quality that makes them at one as evanescent and as
alluring tormenting as half-forgotten dreams."25 In the pre-modern
era, fashions did not change with such rapidity, and the much slower
advances in technology were "covered over by the tradition of church
and family" (N 2a, 3). But now: "The worlds of memory replace them-
selves more quickly, the mythic in them surfaces more quickly and
how the accelerated tempo of technology looks" (N 2a, 2).
faster against them. From the perspective of today's Ur-history, this is
how the accelerated tempo of technology looks (N 2a, 2).
In the pre-modern era, collective symbolic meaning was transferred
23. In 1936 Benjamin proposed to Horkheimer an essay for the Institut fir
Sozialforschung on Klages and Jung: "It was to develop further the methodological
considerations of the Passagen-Werk, confronting the concept of the dialectical image
- the central epistemological category of the
'Passagen' - with the archetypes ofJung
and the archaic images of Klages. Due to the intervention of Horkheimer this study was
never executed" (ed. note, PW, 1145). Still, the Passagen-Werk materialmakes clear what
further line Benjamin's argument would have taken. WhereJung would see, for exam-
ple, the recurrence of a utopian image as "successful return" of unconscious contents,
Benjamin, far closer to Freud, cited Bloch, that its repetition was the sign of that con-
tinued social repression which prevented the realization of utopian desires (K 2a, 5).
Or, whereJung would see the image of the beggar as an eternal symbol expressing a
trans-historical truth about the collective psyche, for Benjamin the beggar was a his-
torical figure, the persistence of which was a sign of the archaic state, not of the psyche,
but of social reality which remained at the level of myth despite surface change: "As
long as there is still one beggar, there still exists myth" (K 6, 4).
24. For Benjamin, as for Bloch (see Spuren),utopian desire was based on memory, not
anticipation. Cf. his comment (1934) on the singing mouse in Kafka'sstory: "some-
thing of our poor, brief childhood is in it, something of lost happiness which can never
be found again, but also something of active present-day life, of its small gaieties, unac-
countable and yet real and unquenchable" (Benjamin, Illuminations,p. 118).
25. Benjamin, Reflections,p. 28.
Buck-Morss 223
to new generations consciously through tradition-bound stories,

mythsor fairytales.Givenmodernity'sruptureof tradition,thiswasno
longer possible. Instead, the transferal occurred indirectly and
unconsciously, through the mediation of things, which as symbols
underwentat the boundaryof generationsa dialecticalreversalfrom
the new to the archaicBenjaminspokeof the "arcades...in whichwe, as
in a dream,once againlive the life of our parentsand grandparents.."
e degree2).And on the dialecticalreversal:"Theimpressionof the old-
fashionedcan only come to be where,in a certainway,it is effectedby
the most contemporary.If in thearcadestherelie the beginningsof the
most modern architecturalform, then its old-fashionedeffecton peo-
ple todayhasjust as much to sayas the antiquarianeffectof the father
on his son" (B 3, 6).
Benjaminaffirmedthe rupturein traditionbecause it freed sym-
bolic powersfromconservativerestraintsforthe taskof socialtransfor-
mation. (Althoughone can find statementsby Benjaminthatseem to
lamentthe loss of tradition,he wasa supporterof the institutionof the
bourgeois family,26and whatever positive attitude he had toward
theology,it did not includeorganizedreligionas an institution.27)And
clearly, Benjamin affirmed the mythic power of wish-images which
found unconscious,symbolicform in commoditiesand massculture.28
Butas dream-imagestheywerefetishes,alienatedfrom the dreamers,
and dominatingthem as an externalforce. This was the nightmarish
side of the dream,and it existedin the stateof childhood as well. Ben-
jamin criticizedJung "who wants to hold awakeningfar awayfrom
26. During his years in the youth movement, his group, in rebellion against the
"inhumanity"of parents, was "seriouslyintent upon the abolition of the family." It was
"before the realization matured that no one can improve his school or his parental
home without first smashing the state that needs bad ones." (Benjamin, Reflections, pp.
19-21). He referred in Einbahnstrasseto the bourgeois family as a "rotten, dismal
ediface" (ibid.,p. 91).
27. Benjamin recalled his sexual awakening when, en route to the synagogue on the
Jewish New Year's Day, he became lost on the city streets, and his "bewilderment,
forgetfulness, and embarrassment were doubtless chiefly due to my dislike of the
impending service, in its familial no less than its divine aspect. While I was wandering
thus, I was suddenly and simultaneously overcome, on the one hand, by the thought
'Too late, time was up long ago, you'll never get there' - and, on the other, by a sense
of the insignificance of all this, of the benefits of letting things take what course they
would; and these two streams of consciousness converged irresistibly in an immense
pleasure that filled me with blasphemous indifference toward the service, but exalted
the street in which I stood as if it had already intimated to me the services of procure-
ment it was later to render to my awakened drive" (Reflections, p. 53).
28. In the 1934-35 notes Benjamin mentions: "the positive in the fetish" (PW,
1213).
the dream" (PW, 1212; again, N 18, 4). In contrast, he insisted: "We
must wake up from the world of our parents" (PW, 1214).
The biological task of awakening from childhood becomes a model
for a collective, social awakening. But more: in the collective ex-
perience of a generation the two converge. The coming-to-con-
sciousness of a generation is an explosive moment unique in re-
volutionary potential within the historical dimension of the dreaming
collective " for which its children become the fortunate occasion of its
own awakening" (K la, 2). In this moment, precisely by rejecting the
existing world created by their parents, the new generation furthered
the realization of their parents' utopian dreams. "The fact that we have
been children in this time is part of its objective image. It had to be thus
in order to release from itself this generation. That means: we look in
the dream-connection for a teleological moment. This moment is one
of waiting. The dream waits secretly for the awakening; the sleeper
gives himself over to death only until recalled; he waits for the second
in which he wrests himself from capture with cunning" (K la, 2).
With cunning (mitList):The reference to Hegel was intentional. 29
Benjamin seems to have been suggesting a rather extraordinary rever-
sal of Hegel, one which turned Hegel's abstract, philosophical
language which literally deified historical progress into the allegorical
language of fairy tales, as a restorative validation of the child's
experience of "progress" as Ur-history. His pedagogy was a double
gesture, both the demythification of history and the re-enchantment of
the world. In his allegorical depection of history, the reification of
commodities as reversed by bringing them to life: "The condition of
sleep and waking...has only to be transferredfrom the individual to the
collective. To the latter, of course, many things are internal which are
external to the individual: architecture, fashions, yes, even the weather
are in the interior of the collective what organ sensations, feelings of ill-
ness or of health are in the interior of the individual. And so long as
they persist in unconscious and amorphous dream-form, they arejust
as much natural processes as the digestive processes, respiration, etc.
They stand in the cycle of the ever-identical [myth in the negative sense]
until the collective gets its hands on them politically and history
emerges out of them" (K 1, 5). The Passagen-Werk, with the goal of his-
29. In his 1935 expose, Benjamin wrote: "Everyepoch...carries its ending within it,
which it unfolds - as Hegel already recognized - with cunning" (PW,59). For Hegel,
through cunning, Reason (consciousness) works its way into history by means of the
passions and ambitions of unwitting historical subjects. But for Benjamin, the histori-
cal unconsciousness achieves its goal through the generational coming-to-con-
sciousness of those subjects.
Buck-Morss 225
toricalawakening,was to providea politicallyexplosiveanswerto the

collective,socio-historicalform of the child's question, "Wheredid I
come from?"Wheredid modern consciousness,or more accurately,
the imagesof modern dream-consciousnesscome from?Speakingof
Surrealism,the aesthetic expression of that dream-consciousness,
Benjaminwrote:"Thefatherof Surrealismwas Dada;its motherwas
an arcade"(PW,1057).
Benjaminoriginallyconceivedof the Passagen-Werk as a "dialectical
fairy-tale"(PW,1138). In it the dreamingcollectiveof the recent past
appeared as a sleeping giant ready to be awakenedby the present
generation,and the mythicpowersof both dreamstateswereaffirmed,
the world re-enchanted,but only in order to break out of history's
mythic spell, in fact by reappropriatingthe power bestowed on the
objects of mass culture as utopian dream symbols. "Fairytales,"he
wrote in the (1934) Kafkaessay,"arethe traditionalstoriesabout vic-
toryoverthese [mythic]forces."30 The goal of Benjamin's"newdialec-
tical method of history writing"was "the art of experiencing the
presentas thewakingworldto whichthatdreamwhichwe callthe past
(Gewesenes)in truth relates" (K 1, 3).31 Told with "cunning,"32 the
Passagen-Werk would accomplish a double task: it would dispel the
of
mythicpower presentbeing (Wesen) by showingit to be composedof
decayingobjects with a And it would dispelthe myth
history(Gewesen).
of historyas progress(or the modern as new)by showinghistoryand
modernityin the child's light as the archaic.Told properly,this fairy
30. Benjamin, Illumiantions,p. 117.

31. Benjamin was suggesting a "dialectical reversal"of historical cognition. Instead
of presenting the past as the "fixed point" with which present knowledge tried to come
into touch, "this relationship is to be reversed, and the past become[s] the dialectical
transformation, the invasion...[into] awakened consciousness. Politics maintains
primacy over history" (K 1, 2).
32. Benjamin saw fairy tales as the stage coming, both phylogenetically and
ontogenetically, after humans had learned to use the cunning of reason to trickmythic
powers: "Ulysses, after all, stands at the dividing line between myth and fairy tale.
Reason and cunning have inserted tricks into myths: their forces cease to be invinc-
ible" (Benjamin, Illuminations,p. 117). Adorno suggested instead that fairy tales were a
stage prior to myth, belonging to an age ofinnoence rather than cunning. (Interesting-
ly, Benjamin's one-line comment on Ulysses cited above becomes fundamental to
Adorno's argument in the chapter on Odysseus in Dialecticof Enlightenment.)
See also in the Passagen-Werk: "The coming awakening stands like the wooden horse
of the Greeks in the Troy of the dream" (K 2, 4). Hegel interpreted history as rational,
turning reason itself into a myth which justified whoever happened to be ruling. Ben-
jamin interpreted history as a dream in order to achieve precisely the opposite political
effect, allowing reason to enter history by breaking its mythic course, the recurrent
cycle of domination.
tale would use enchantment to disenchant the world: "We here con-
struct an alarm clock which rouses the kitsch of the last century to
'assembly' - and this operates totally with cunning" (h degree 3). It
would dissolve the dream, empowering the collective politically by
providing the historical knowledge required to realize that dream.
An allegory of historical origins and a symbolic tale of power: these
were to have been the two faces of the Passagen-Werk. One, that which
goes from the past into the present and which represents the arcades as
precursors; and [the other], that which goes from the present into the
past, in order to let the revolutionary completion of these 'precursors'
explode in the present, and this direction also understands the sorrow-
ful, fascinated contemplation of the most recent past as its revo-
lutionary explosion" (0 degree 56).
III. Marx,Freud,and the Originsof Mass Culture

I have said that Benjamin maintained the original plan for the
Passagen-Werk,including the double dream-theory outlined above, at
least until 1935, the year he completed his expose of the project for the
Institut fur Sozialforschung. At this point the philological situation
becomes murky. There are at least six copies of the 1935 expose, with
differences in wording significant enough to have caused the editor to
include three of them in the published Passagen-Werk. All of the ver-
sions refer to the following: dream-world, utopian wish-images,
collective consciousness, generations, and, most emphatically the con-
ception of dialectical thinking as historical awakening which was
sparked by the residues of mass culture. Noticeably absent is the image
of the slumbering body-politic, as well as any reference to a "dialectical
fairy tale." The theory of the childhood dream-state is stated explicitly
and in detail in the preparatory notes (1934-35); but in the expose
itself, it is only implied in vague statements like: "...in these wish-
images [of the collective] there emerges an energetic striving to break
with that which is outdated - which means, however, the most recent
past" (PW, 1239).33
The expose elicited from Adorno his now famous "Hornberg letter"
33. This was the wording in "T", the first typoscript of the expose which was the ver-
sion sent to Adorno. In the earlier "M " was a more explicit reference, later deleted:
"This inexorable confrontation with the most recent past is something historically
new. Other neighboring links in the chain of generations stood within collective con-
sciousness, [and] scarcely distinguished themselves from one another within that
collective. The present, however, stands already in relation to the most recent past in
the same way as does awakening to dream" (PW, 1236). (For an identification of the
various expose versions, see the editor's note (PW, 1251).
Buck-Morss227
(August 2, 1935)34with its quite devastating criticism, including the

charge that Benjamin had abandoned his own original conception.
Benjamin's response came indirectly in a letter (August 18) to Gretel
Adorno: "...nothing of this first draft [the reference is to the 127-29
conception of the Passagen-Werk]has been given up and no word
lost...[the expose] not the 'second' plan, but the other. These two
plans have a polar relationship. They represent the thesis and
antithesis of the work. Thus this second one is for me everything else
buta closure. Its necessity rests in the fact that...the insights which were
there at first allowed no immediate shaping - only one that would be
inexcusably 'literary.'Thus the subtitle of the first plan, given up long
ago, 'a dialectical fairy tale' (PW, 1138). Did Benjamin give up his
childhood theory as well? In the same letter he spoke of the absolute
distinction between the Passagen-Werk and forms like BerlinerKindheit
um 1900, and said that "making this knowledge clear to me" had been
"an important function of the [expose]" (PW, 1139). If not only the
too-literary form but also the elaborated content of the original con-
ception had been abandoned, it would be difficult to justify his
simultaneous claim that no word of the first draft had been lost. And in
fact, that claim was quite literally true. Benjamin had not thrown out
the early notes, or the early sections of the Konvolutsdealing with the
dream-theory, and he never did. Adorno's knowledge of these notes
was limited to what Benjamin read to him in Konigstein in 1929. We do
not know whether their discussions there included the double dream-
state. We do know that the absence of it in the expose was not what
Adorno lamented when he accused Benjamin of betraying an earlier
plan. Instead, it was the depiction of the 19th-centurycommodity-world
as a utopia, rather than a criticism of it as "hell." It was the imagery ot
"negative theology" that Adorno missed, not that of childhood and
fairy tales. Ironically, had Benjamin included an elaboration of the
theory of childhood it might have warded off another of Adorno's
criticisms, that the entire conception had become "de-dialectized"
(PW, 1129). The childhood theory was complex and indeed confused,
but without it too much of both the affirmative, utopian elements and
the archaic, ur-image aspects of the construction had to be situated
solely within the socio-historical axis, as if they existed in the actual
collective consciousness of the 19th century. Furthermore, when he
claimed that contained within the images of the collective (rather than
that of childhood which intersects history and reverses its poles) there
were "elements of pre-history - that is to say of a classless society," or
34. PW, 1127-36. English trans. in Ernst Bloch et al., Aestheticsand Politics(London:
NLB, 1977).
stated: "Every epoch not only dreams the next, but while dreaming
impels it toward wakefulness" (which survived unchanged in all three
versions), his position appeared as indistinguishable from Jung's
approach as Adorno feared. Adorno blamed the overly-positive con-
ception of a collective consciousness on the influence of Brecht, and
argued against it on Marxistgrounds: "It should speak clearly and with
sufficient warning that in the dreaming collective there is no room for
class differences" (PW, 1129).
There is no doubt that Benjamin took Adorno's criticisms ser-
iously.35I believe there is also no doubt that he attempted to stick to his
position despite them. The material relating to theoretical questions
which he added to the Passagen-Werk after 1935 intensified a direction
of research he had in fact already begun: to ground the basic premise of
his dream-theory - that the 19th-centurywas the origin of a collective
dream from which an "awakened" present generation could derive
revolutionary consequences - in the theories of Marx and Freud.36
Interestingly (and dialectically), he found in Marxist theory ajustifica-
tion for the conception for the conception of a collective dream, and in
Freud an argument for the existence of class differences within it.
Of course Marx had spoken positively of a collective dream, and
more than once. After 1935 Benjamin added to KonvolutN the well-
known quotation from Marx:"It will then become clear that the world
has long possessed the dream ofsomethingwhich it only has to possess
with consciousness in order to possess it in reality" (N 5a, 1). And he
35. The original copy of Adorno's Hornberg letter is among the Benjamin papers
recently discovered in George Bataille's archive, Bibliotheque Nationale. Benjamin
gave it a careful reading, making penciled notes and double red lines in the margin -
not always at those points in Adorno's formulations which the latter would have him-
self considered most eloquent. Benjamin's notations include question marks and
exclamation points which seem to indicate he was not always in agreement.
36. Before receiving Adorno's reaction to the expose, Benjamin wrote him (une
10, 1935) expressing his preference for Freud's theory over that of Fromm and Reich,
and asking whether Adorno knew if in Freud or his school there was "at present a
psycho-analysis of awakening? or studies on this theme?" (PW, 1121); he said too that
he had begun to "look around" in the firstvolume of Marx's Capital.A Konvolut (X)on
"Marx"was begun in 1935. In that year Benjamin spoke of the concept of the fetish-
character of commodities as standing "at the center" of the Passagen-Werk (ibid.);in
1938 it was still the book's "fundamental category" (PW, 1116).
In March 1937 Benjamin wrote to Horkheimer"that the definitive and binding plan
of the [Passagen-Werk], now that the material research for it is finished except in a few
small areas, would proceed from two fundamentally methodological analyses. The
one would have to do with the criticism of pragmatic history on one side, and of
cultural history on the other as it is presented by the materialists;the other [would deal]
with the meaning of psychoanalysis for the subject of materialist history-writing"
(PW, 1158).
Buck-Morss229
chose Marx's statement as motto for this Konvolut(which is the central

one concerning method): "The reform of consciousness consists only
therein, that one wakes the world...out of its dream of itself' (PW,570).
Class differentiations were never lacking in Benjamin's theory of the
collective unconscious. Indeed, even in his earliest formulations he
considered it an extension and refinement of Marx's theory of the
superstructure: the collective dream manifested the ideology of the
dominant class. "The question is namely, if the substructure deter-
mines the superstructure to a certain extent, in terms of the material of
thought and experience, but this determining is not simply one of
copying, how is it...to be characterised? As its expression. the
superstructure is the expression of the substructure. The economic
conditions under which society exists come to expression in the
superstructure, just as with someone sleeping, an over-filled stomach,
even if it may causally determine the contents of the dream, finds in
those contents not its copied reflection,but its expression"(K 2, 5; cf. M
degree 14). It is the bourgeoisie, not the proletariat, whose dream
expresses the discomfort of an overly-full stomach. The same entry
claims that Marx never intended a direct causal relationship between
substructure and superstructure: "Already the observation that the
ideologies of the superstructure reflect [social] relations in a false and
distorted form goes beyond this" (K 2, 5). Freud's dream theory gave a
ground for such distortion. Benjamin's direct references to Freud
remained limited and quite general,37but on this point, even if direct
indebtedness cannot be proved, clearly there was a consensus. Freud
had written that "ideas in dreams..[are] fulfillments of wishes,"38but,
due to ambivalent feelings, they were censored and hence distorted.
The actual (latent) wish might be almost invisible at the manifest level,
and was arrived at only after the dream's interpretation. Thus: "A
dream is a (disguised) fulfillment of a (suppressed or repressed)
wish."39If one takes the bourgeois class to be the generator of a collec-
tive dream, the socialist tendencies of that industrialism which it itself
created would seem to catch it in an unavoidably ambivalent situation.
The bourgeoisie desires to affirm that industrial production from
which it is deriving profits; at the same time it wishes to deny the fact
that industrialism creates the conditions which threaten the continua-
tion of its own class rule.
37. His familiarity with Freudian theory may have been largely second-hand, from
two distinct sources, the Frankfurt Institute, and the Surrealists.
38. Sigmund Freud, TheInterpretation ofDreams,trans. and ed.James Strachey (New
York: Avon Books, 1965), p. 123.
39. Freud, Interpretationof Dreams,p. 194.
Now, precisely this bourgeois class ambivalence is documented by a

whole range of quotations which Benjamin included in the Passagen-
Werkmaterial at all stages of his research. He found it not only in the
commodities and architecture of 19th-century Paris, but in the con-
temporary writings offuturologists, social utopians, city planners, and
social commentators. Utopian writings were the "depository of collec-
tive dreams" (PW, 1212), and architectural constructions "had the role
of the subconscious" (PW, 1210), but both were expressions of
specifically bourgeois ideology. He found descriptions of future Paris
in which cafes were still ordered according to social classes (K 6a, 2).
Images of Paris projected into the 20th century included visitors from
other planets arriving in Paris to play the stock market (G 13, 2). On the
manifest level the future appeared as limitess progress and con-
tinuous change. But on the latent level (the level of the true wish of the
dreamer), it was seen as the eternalization of bourgeois class domina-
tion. In his early notes Benjamin considered whether "there could
spring out of the repressed economic contents of consciousness of a
collective, similarly to what Freud claims for [the] sexual [contents] of
an individual consciousness...a form of literature, a fantasy-ima-
gining...[as] sublimation..." (R 2, 2). The culture of the 19th century
unleashed an abundance of fantasies of the future, but it was at the
same time "a vehement attempt to hold back the productive forces"
(PW 1210). Hence changing fashion was merely "a camoflage of very
specific desires of the ruling class," a "figleaf' (PW, 1215) covering up
the fact that, to cite Brecht: " 'The rulers have a great aversion against
violent changes.' "40 19th-century urban planning was an attempt to
improve society through the rearrangement of things (buildings,
boulevards, parks)at the same time it worked to prevent the rearrange-
ment of social relations - Haussmann's "strategic beautification" of
Paris had as its "real aim...the securing of the city against civil war"
(PW, 57). The bourgeois individual as flaneur could take delight in the
"crowd" precisely because it was not congealed into a revolutionary
class (j 66, 1). Bourgeois class resistance to the industrialism it pro-
moted was expressed as well in 19th-century style: architecture cus-
tomarily masked the new technology with ornament; industrially
produced objects were typically enclosed in casings (I 4, 4).
Commodity fetishism, which, as we have seen, Benjamin con-
sidered key to the industrial urban phantasmagoria, could be viewed
40. The Brecht quotation (from a 1935) article) continued: "They [the rulers] would
prefer that the moon stand still, and the sun no longer run its course. Then no one
would get hungry any more and want supper. When they have shot their guns, their
opponents should not be allowed to shoot; theirs should be the last shots" (B 4a,
1).
Buck-Morss 231
as a textbook case of Freud's concept of displacement: social relations

of class exploitation were displaced onto relations between things,
thus concealing the real situation with its dangerous potential for
revolution. By the late 19th century, it was politicallysignificantthat the
bourgeois dream of democracy underwent this form of censorship:
Benjamin spoke of the "phantasmagoria" of "egalite" (PW, 1209),
wherein the political concept of equality was displaced onto the realm
of things, the consumer replaced the citizen, and the promise of com-
modity abundance became a substitute for social revolution. "La
Revolution,"Benjamin noted, came to mean "clearance sale" in the
19th century (D degree 1). Department stores replaced specialty stores
(A 3, 5), bringing the consumer into a sumptuous architectural space
fit for royaltywhere they were seduced by every psychological trickinto
consumption for its own sake (A 3, 6). It was the great discovery of
capitalist retailing (one which compensated in part for the capitalistic
dynamics of over-production) that every sort of desire, from sexual to
political, could be displaced onto commodities and hence become a
source of capitalist profits. Benjamin wrote: "With the founding of
department stores, for the first time in history, the consumers felt
themselves as the masses. (Before they learned that only through scar-
city.)" (A 4, 1). This was a turning point. In Parisafter the working class
threatened the bourgeoisie in theJune days of the 1848 revolution, the
latter found themselves on the defensive. At the same time, with the
establishment of Louis Napoleon's dictatorship, the era of the arcades'
brilliance was over. The age of mass consumption began, and with it, a
century of the new as the ever-the-same, only in grander and grander
proportions. Much of the Passagen-Werk is an attempt to document this
transition. Commodities and technology burst from the confinement
of luxury shops and the arcades. Commodities multiplied; technology
grew to monumental size. The once-dazzling gaslights were eclipsed
by electricity, which was used for huge decorations and advertising on
building facades. the dream-houses, still built of iron and glass,
became vast, overwhelming buildings for a mass public - railroad
stations, department stores, and the great halls of the world exhi-
bitions.
The first international exhibition was in London in 1851. Paris
followed with two of its own in the next decade.41 It was decided to
celebrate the centennial of the French Revolution by an exhibition in
41. As Benjamin noted, whereas London's first exhibition was organized by private
entrepreneurs (G 6; G 6a, 1), the French industrial exhibitions (as early as 1789) were
state-organized (G 4, 4). They were thus the earliest form of politics-as-mass-spectacle,
staged by the state, and in this sense anticipated the Volkfestof fascism (G 4, 7).
232 Benjamin's Passagenwerk
1889 (for which the Eiffel tower was built); and in 1900 Pariswitnessed
an equally spectacular international exhibition which expressed in
fairy-land form the heightened political and economic competition of
imperialism. The extravagant expositions were no longer ideology for
a bourgeois elite, but ideology for the working masses, who took
pilgrimages to these enshrinements of commodities to worship as
idols those objects on display which their own labor had produced.42
In 1900 the socialists complained that due to the exposition "the year
was lost for propaganda" (G 4, 6).
By the end of the century, the dream, clearly of bourgeois origins
(and bourgeois in the latent wish that it expressed) in fact had become
"collective," spreading to the working classes as well (and to every
capitalist industrializing country43).The mass marketing of dreams
within a class system that prevented their realization in anything but
symbolic form was quite obviously a growth industry. In his earliest
notes, Benjamin interpreted the aesthetic style of this mass produc-
tion, "kitsch," as bourgeois class guilt: "the expression within the
overproduction of commodities of the bad conscience of the pro-
ducers" (P degree 6).
It is true, as Adorno criticized, that Benjamin's 1935 expose pre-
sented a very positive representation of the collective dream, and thus
of mass culture in which it found expression. In the version Adorno
received was the statement "The experiences [of Ur-history] which are
deposited in the unconscious of the collective, through interpenetra-
tion with the new, produce the utopia which leaves its traces in
thousands of configurations of life, from permanent buildings to tran-
sient fashions" (PW, 1239). But in the same text Benjamin stated
explicitly:"The new is a qualityindependent of the use value of the com-
modity. It is the source of that illusion which is inseparable from the
dream-images of the collective. It is the quintessence of false con-
sciousness, whose agent is fashion. This illusion of the new is reflected,
like one mirror in another, in the appearance of the always-again-the-
42. (G 9a, 6; G 10; G 13a 3). Benjamin's interest in Paris' world exhibitions had a
very present motive: in 1931 and 1937, Paris again was the scene of this form of mass
ideology. (In our own time it has been threatened to be repeated in 1989 on the occa-
sion of the second centennial of the French Revolution).
43. By 1900 the arcades became a hallmark of industrially-arrived cities from
Cleveland to Milan to Moscow. The later arcades, unlike the original Paris ones, were
built in monumental proportions. (See the exhaustive history: Hermann Geist,
Arcades:TheHistoryofa BuildingType,trans.Jane 0. Newman andJohn H. Smith [Bos-
ton: The MIT Press, 1983].)
Buck-Morss 233
same. The product of this reflection is the phantasmagoria of that

'cultural history' in which the bourgeoisie thoroughly enjoys its false
consciousness" (PW, 1246). Where Adorno found need of a dialectical
argument leading from one of these evaluative poles to another, Ben-
jamin simply stated both contradictory positions, and spoke of the
fundamental "ambivalence" in the historical situation,44 which, he
claimed, Marx had demonstrated in his chapter on the fetish character
of commodities, "an ambivalence... very distinct, for example, in
machines, which intensify exploitation rather than lightening the
human condition. Is there not, in fact, connected to this the double-
edged nature of the appearances with which we are dealing in the 19th
century?" (K 3,5). The goal of course was material abundance,45which
is why the dream functioned legitimately on the manifest level of
collective wish-image. But the commodity-form of the dream gene-
rated the expectation that the international, socialist goal of mass
affluence could be delivered by national capitalist means, and that
expectation was a fatal blow to revolutionary working-class politics.
IV. Generationand ClassPolitics
It was at precisely this historical point that Benjamin's generation
entered the scene. Born in 1892 in Berlin, then a newly-arrived indus-
trial metropolis, Benjamin was introduced to "reality" in its mass-
culture, mass-consumerist, dream-world form. For a child, even a
protected, bourgeois child, that dream experience could be a
nightmare. Building walls were plastered with advertisements which
"forced the printed word entirely into the dictatorial perpen-
dicular...[exposing the child to] a blizzard of changing, colorful, con-
flicting letters...Locust swarms of print, which already eclipse the sun
of what is taken for city-dweller's intellect..."46Benjamin wrote that the
44. Benjamin's understanding of dialectical argumentation was to show the posi-

tive side of each negative aspect in an infinite serial bifurcation. The redemptive ges-
ture was theological: "...regarding the dialectic of cultural history: It is very easy with
every epoch to bifurcate its various areas according to specific perspectives, so that the
"fruitful," "future-filled," "living," "positive" lies on one side, and the futile, out-of-
date, withered part on the other... But on the other hand...it is decisively important to
apply to this at first excluded, negative part a new division so that with a shift of the
visual angle (but not the standards!)there emerges in it as well something else positive,
new, compared with the earlier description. And so on infinitum, until the entire past
is brought into the present in a historical apokatastais" (N la, 3). (Apokastasis is the
conception of redemption in which all are saved.)
45. "Never would socialism have entered the world if one had only desired to
inspire the workers with a better organization of things. The strength and authority of
the movement lies in Marx's understanding that they would be interested in an
organization in which they had it better" (K 3a, 1).
whole of his later childhood was "a period of impotence before the
city."47He recalled his "dreamy recalcitrance,"when, being led by his
mother, "we walked through the streets, rarely frequented by me, of
the city center."48Benjamin's introduction to civic life was as a con-
sumer: "In those early years I got to know the 'town' only as the theatre
of purchases... [I]t was only in the confectioner's that our spirits rose
with the feeling of having escaped the false worship that humiliated
our mother before idols bearing the names of Mannheimer, Herzog
and Israel, Gerson, Adam, Esders and Madler, Emma Bette, Bud and
Lachmann. An impenetrable chain of mountains, no caverns of com-
modities - was 'the town.' "49 Benjamin never implied that his
experience of the city was anything but class-bound, a situation inten-
sified by the false sense of security that class-belonging seemed to offer
GermanJews at the turn of the century. In BerlinerChronik: "The poor?
For rich children of his [Benjamin's] generation they lived at the back
of beyond."50 He knew the working class through the glass rhombus
on the table of his aunt's apartment, "containing the mine, in which lit-
tle men pushed wheelbarrows, labored with pickaxes, and shone lan-
terns into the shafts in which buckets were winched perpetually up and
down."5' He admitted: "I never slept on the street in Berlin... Only
those for whom poverty or vice turns the city into a landscape in which
they stray from dark till sunrise know it in a way denied to me."52And
in the Passagen-Werk: "What do we know of the streetcorners, curb-
stones, the architecture of pavements, we who have never felt the
streets, heat, dirt, and edges of the stones under naked soles, never
investigated the unevenness between the broad slabs, or their fitness to
lead us?" (K degree 28) What indeed? If, as I have tried to show, Ben-
jamin's theory of the dreaming collective did not blur class distinctions,
can the same be said of his theory of political awakening? In his earliest
notes, Benjamin indicated that the bourgeoisie who had generated the
dream remained trapped within it: "Did not Marx teach us that the
bourgeoisie can never itself come to a fully enlightened consciousness?
And if this is true, is one notjustified in attaching the idea of the dream-
ing collective (i.e., the bourgeois collective) onto his thesis?" 0 degree
67) And immediately following: "Would it, in addition, not be possible,
47. Ibid., p. 4.
48. Ibid.
49. Ibid.,p. 40. Those caverns included the Berlin arcades, such as the Kaisergallerie
on Friedrichstrasse, built in 1871-73, just after Bismarck's victory over France.
51. Ibid., p. 12.
52. Ibid., p. 27.
Buck-Morss 235
from the collected facts with which this work [Passagen-Werk] is con-
cerned, to [show] how they appear in the becoming-self-conscious
process of the proletariat?"(0 degree 68) If there is a clear class distinc-
tion between who remains asleep and who becomes conscious, what
does Benjamin mean, for example, when he resolves: "We must wake
up from the world of our parents" (PW, 1214 cited above)?Just who is
the "we" to whom he refers? Is it bourgeois children? Then "waking-
up" might mean taking the place of one's parents as the new generation
of rulers. To say that the proletariat class must wake up from the world
of bourgeois parents is perhaps more politically accurate, but it is
theoretically meaningless because it does not explain how, at the line
of a generation, the barrier of class is crossed. To say that the process of
bourgeois adolescent awakening parallels that of the proletariat's
political awakening is a metaphor, not a theory, and risks the criticism
that Benjamin's perception of the need for the proletariat class to seize
power was merely a fantasy, a projection - based on his own fears of
impotence? His own testimony is incriminating. In BerlinerChronikhe
refers to "abject poverty" as an "exotic world," and admits that the
"feeling of crossing the threshold of one's class for the first time had a
part in the almost unequalled fascination of publicly accosting a whore
in the street."53Here the application of Freudian theory again reveals
the existence of class differences, but it is the credibility of Benjamin, a
bourgeois author writing revolutionary pedagogy for the proletariat,
which is undermined.
This criticism would not have taken Benjamin by surprise. The
interpenetration of sexual and political motifs was self-conscious in
BerlinerChronik,at the same time their confusion may have been a
reason why he saw that forms like it were "not allowed to lay claim" to
the Passagen-Werk"in any place or even in the most limited degree"
(PW, 1138). Benjamin never pretended to be anything but a bourgeois
writer. Referring to attempts by intellectuals to take their place "at the
side of the proletariat," he protested: "But what sort of a place is that?
The place of a well-wisher, an ideological patron. An impossible
place."54
The class division was undeniable. But Benjamin felt that there was a
confluence in the objective positions of intellectuals and proletariat,
due to the specific constellation of economic and cultural history.
Industrialism had led to a cultural "crisis," and close on its heels there
followed the economic one, in which the collective dream experienced

54. Walter Benjamin, "The Author as Producer" (1934), Understanding
Brecht,trans.
Anna Bostock (London: NLB, 1973), p. 93.
tremors set off by the "shaking of commodity society" (PW, 59).

Around this historical constellation the experience of his generation
congealed, and well into the 1930s Benjamin found in it an extremely
precarious cause for hope. Thus he could write to Scholem (August 9,
1935): "I believe that [the Passagen-Werk's]conception, even if it is very
personal in its origins, has as its object the decisive historical interests
of our generation" (PW, 1 137). The convergence of interests between
intellectuals and workers of this generation had to do with the fact that
their youth was separated from their adulthood by a dialectical reversal
of the contents of the collective dream. In all of the collective images
architecture, fashion, even advertising - their lifetime spanned a total
revolution in style.55 By the 1920s, in every one of the technical arts,
and in the fine arts affected by technology, style underwent a radical
transformation. Ornate, historically-eclectic architecture gave way to
the International style of the Bauhaus and le Corbusier. From furni-
ture to doorknobs, from bathrooms to bay-windows, the new "porosi-
ty, transparency, free light and free air essence makes living in the old
sense nothing" (P degree 3; again I 4, 4). Functionalism stripped
technology of its casings. In women's fashions as well, the casings of
corsettes, crinolines, and long skirts disappeared. In hair styles and
office buildings, the demolition of 19th-century styles left no area of
daily life untouched. The 19th-century interiors encased their in-
habitants in drapings and plush velvet, in which living meant "leaving
traces" (PW, 53); it is against le Corbusier's 1920s private villas, the
clean, white, bare spaces of which expunge all traces of the residents
that this observation takes on a dialectical force. Commenting on
Siegfried Giedion's statement that "the artful drapery of the last cen-
tury has grown musty," Benjamin remarked: "We, however, believe
that...it also contains for us vital stuff...for our knowledge...illuminat-
ing the bourgeois class position at the moment when signs of decline
first appeared within it. Politically vital stuff at any rate, that substan-
tiates the Surrealists' fixation on these things" (K la, 7).
The revolution in style was the dream-form of social revolution -
55. The sense of being a "new" generation was wide-spread among Weimar
intellectuals: Cf. 1926: "In a comment in the journal Tagebuch, Brecht takes issue with
Thomas Mann and his son Klaus Mann, who had published articles in Uhuentitled
'The New Parents' and 'The New Children.' Thomas Mann, piqued, replies in Berliner
Tageblattand once again explains his position toward the younger generation. Brecht
drafts an answer, but does not publsih it: 'His view is that the difference between his
generation and mine is altogether negligible. In answer I can only say that in my view,
in a possible dispute between a surrey and an automobile, it will surely be the surrey
that finds the differences negligible.' " (In Klaus V6lker, BrechtChronicle,trans. Fred
Wieck [New York: The Seabury Press, 1975], p. 47).
Buck-Morss 237
the only form possible within a bourgeois social context. Because of it,
the objects which populated the childhood environment of Ben-
jamin's generation were devalued in the present as hopelessly old-
fashioned: "Everygeneration experiences the fashions of the most recent
past as the most thorough anti-aphrodisiac that can be imagined" (B 9,
1). But precisely this was what made it "politically vital," so that "the
confrontation with the fashions of the past generation is an affair of
much greater meaning that has been supposed" (B1 a, 4). At the same
time, as the stuff of childhood memories,56 these outmoded objects
retained a symbolic power. Benjamin commented that for Kafka,"as
only for 'our' generation... the horrifying furniture of the beginning of
high capitalism was felt as the showplace of its brightest childhood
experience" (K degree 27).57The contrary desire to outgrow and to
recapture the lost world of childhood together determined a gen-
eration's interest in the past, which Benjamin believed could be
mobilized for utopian, revolutionary politics. The bourgeois intellec-
tual could see his struggle to break from past culture as an allegory for
the colletive struggle - a model, perhaps even a prophetic one - but
never a substitute, no more than the mass-culture audience was itself
already the revolutionary collective.58
56. "Whatare the noises of an awakening morning which we draw into our dreams?
The 'ugliness,' the 'old-fashioned' are only distorted morning voices that speak about
our childhood" (PW, 1214).
57. Here, in the case of the bourgeois interior, Benjamin slips into a class-specific
definition of "our" generation. And indeed, he never fully resolved the problem of the
hiatus between class and generation. Writing generally on Benjamin's position during
the early 1930s Bernd Witte notes: "The intellectual...is seen by Benljamlinin the role
of the psychoanalyst of the collective neurosis [-this is nowhere more true than in the
Passagen-Werk]: inadequate consciousness occurs, he believes, accordingto theschemaof
repression, the mechanism ofwhich is capable of being discovered by the intellectual-as-
specialist for the collective education. The paradox in Benjamin's theory lies therein,
that this social psychoanalysis - in order to remain with his image - heals not the
patients, but the analyst and his colleagues" (Bernd Witte, "Krise und Kritik. Zur
Zusammenarbeit Benjamins mit Brecht in denJahren 1929-1933," Peter Gebhardt et
al., WalterBenjamin- Zeitgenosse derModem(Monographien Literaturwissenschaftvol.
30 [Kronberg/Ts.: ScriptorVerlag, 1976], p. 15). Despite declarations to the contrary,
the Passagen-Werk often seems to be aimed at bourgeois intellectuals, with the goal of
revolutionizing the educators, rather than educating the revolutionary class.
58. In Benjamin's early notes, the concept of the collective is used very loosely. Cer-
tainly, the success of fascism, with its "class-blind" concept of Volksgemeinschaft, made
vagueness on this point ill-advised, and by the late 1930s Benjamin used this term only
in a critical, negative sense. Cf.: "...everv commodity collects around itself the mass of
its customers. The totalitarian states have taken this mass as their model. The
Volksgemeinschaft attempts to drive everything out of individuals that stands in the way of
their complete assimilation into a massified clientel. The only unreconciled op-
ponent. .. in this connection is the revolutionary proletariat. The latter destroys the illu-
sion of the mass (Schein der Masse) with the reality of the class (Realitat der Klasse)"(J
81a, 1).
A revolution in style, even if it occurred on a mass basis, was no sub-

stitute for the social revolution, and there were "Modernists" of this
generation - Marinetti, for example59 - whose political impact was
far from progressive. Moreover, from the political perspective, Moder-
nism stripped the objects of all those cultural expressions which pro-
vided historical clues. 19th-century design may have been
technologically reactionary when it hid function and tried to revive
dying forms. But the tremendous value of its clutter was that it tacked
onto the surface of things all kinds of configurations in which historical
truth and utopian dreams could be read. Benjamin spoke of the 19th-
century's "narcotic historicism, its passion for masks, in which
nonetheless there hides a signal of true historical existence..." (K 1a, 6).
The great, the truly horrifying danger was that his generation, with its
revived mythic powers, would in the process of rejecting the recent
past lose contact with historical and social concreteness altogether, and
that danger was synonymous with fascism.
V. Dwarfsand Giants
In 1939, with World War imminent, the Institut fur Sozialforschung
requested a new expose of the Passagen-Werk in hopes of getting outside
funding for it. Benjamin produced a French version in a lucid, descrip-
tive style, with a totally new introudction and conclusion, in which the
dream theory is strikingly absent. Instead, Blanqui's cosmological
speculations are introduced with their conception of history as the
incessant recurrence of the same, suggesting a "resignation without
hope" (PW, 76). One could almost conclude that Benjamin had put all
talk of collective dreams and awakening definitively behind him.
But it was not his last word. In 1940, he wrote a series of theses on the
philosophy of history which were his last formulations concerning
revolutionary pedagogy, and they drew on material from the Passagen-
Werk.60The theses were prompted by "the war and the constellation
which it brought with it"; they contained, not new thoughts, but ones
"held in custody, yes, even from myself' for twenty years.61Never
intended for publication (-"they would open gate and door for an
enthusiastic misunderstanding"62-), they resurrect the theological
language of the early Passagen-Werknotes:63all of history appears as
59. The significance of this example was pointed out to me byJoel Remmer.
60. The material came largely from the later entries to KonvolutN which concerned
the theory of historical progress.
61. Benjamin, GesammelteSchriften1:3, p. 1226.
62. Ibid., p. 1227.
63. Cf.: "The modern, the time of hell..." (g degree 17).
Buck-Morss 239
catastrophe,a hellish,cyclicalrepetitionof barbarismand oppression.

Butthe "resignationwithouthope" of Blanquiis absent;in its place is
the desireto "betterour positionin the struggleagainstfascism"(thesis
VIII).It leads to an apocalypticconceptionof breakingout of this his-
torical cycle, in which the proletarianrevolutionappearsunder the
sign of MessianicRedemption.
In the theses, Benjaminspeaksof "shock,"ratherthan awakening,
as the revolutionarymoment of breakingfrom the past, but they are
differentwordsfor the same experience."Imagesof the past"replace
the term "dream-images,"but they are still dialecticallyambivalent,
mystifyingand yet containing"sparksof hope" (VI).The revolution,
the "politicalworld-child,"has yet to be born (X), but the utopia it
would usher in is understoodin the child-liketermsof Fourier,whose
most fantasticday-dreamsof cooperationwithnature"proveto be sur-
prisingly sound" (XI). "The subject of historical knowledge is the
struggling,oppressed class itself' (XXI),but the entire "generation"
possesses "messianicpower"(II). Moreover,it is still in fashion that
revolutionaryprefigurationcan be discovered.It is the meaningof the
strangeXIVthfhesis:"Fashionhas a weather-sensefor the presenteven
if it moves about in the thicketsof the past.It is the tigerspringinto the
past Only now it occursin an arenain which the rulingclasshas com-
mand.The sameleap underthe freeheavenof historyis the dialectical
one, which is how Marx understood the revolution." Camoflaged
within the new discourse,the old elementsof Benjamin'sthinkingare
still there and they often make meaningful precisely those pro-
nouncements in the theses which are most bafflingon their own.
In thesisXVI,Benjaminexplicitlyrejectsthe historicist's"onceupon
a time";the historicalmaterialist"leavesit to othersto expend them-
selves"with this whore in the bordello of historicism."He remains
masterof his power,adultenough to blastopen the continuumof his-
tory."And yet, therewas a wayof tellingfairytaleswhich was not this
prostitutedone. In 1936, in "Thestoryteller,"Benjaminreconsidered
the form of the fairy tale which he had supposedly dropped years
beforeas a model forthePassagen-Werk. Herearethe relevantpassages:
"Thefairytale,which to this day is the firsttutorof childrenbecauseit
was once the first tutor of mankind, secretly lives on in the story
...Whenevergood counsel was at a premium, the fairytale had it, and
wherethe need wasgreatest,itsaidwasnearest.Thisneed wasthe need
createdby the myth.The fairytaletells us of the earliestarrangements
that mankind made to shake off the nightmorewhich the myth had
placed upon its chest...64The liberatingmagicwhich the fairytale has
64. Benjamin,Illuminations,
p. 10.
at its disposal does not bring nature into play in a mythical way, but
points to its complicity with liberated man. A mature man feels this
complicity only occasionally, that is, when he is happy; but the child
first meets it in fairy tales, and it makes him happy."65The fairy tale,
which uses re-enchantment to disenchant the world, also has some-
thing very specific to do with Messianic redemption. Benjamin tells us
that the storyteller, Leskov, "interpreted the Resurrection less as a
transfiguration than as a disenchantment, in a sense akin to the
fairy tale."66
Where in the theses on history is Benjamin's theory of the dreaming
collective? It is visible nowhere, to be sure. But it hides out, the dwarfof
the fairy-tale, inside the dwarf of theology, who, Benjamin tells us,
himself hides out inside the puppet of historical materialism, which
perhaps in turn hides inside the body politic of the dreaming collec-
tive. The first thesis on the dwarf and the puppet begins: "Bekanntlich
soiles...gegeben haben."It has been translated: "The story is told..." Ben-
jamin's last position is that of the story-teller. He reverts to this
obsolete form, when the continuous tradition of world war leaves only
the hope that, within the discontinuous tradition of utopian politics,
his story will find a new generation of listeners, one to whom the
dreaming collective of his own era appears as the sleeping giant of the
past "for which its children become the fortunate occasion of its own
awakening." Consider in the light of the original plan for the Passagen-
Werk,the second thesis: "There is a secret agreement between past
generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth.
Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a
weakMessianic power, a power to which the past has claim. That claim
cannot be setted cheaply. The historical materialist is aware of this."
65. Ibid.
66. Ibid.,p. 103.

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

Author(s): Susan Buck-Morss

I. Mass Cultureas Dream-World

1. My thanksto Philippe Invernel,BarbaraKleiner,BurkhardtLinder,Michael

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

6. Marx, Capital,cited by Benjamin (G 5, 1).

with uncriticalenthusiasm he called "dream-consciousness."Ben-

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

as consumers. Once the height of bourgeois luxury, the Paris arcades

which to the healthy,awakepersonblend togetherin a surgeof health

14. Benjamin, Illuminations,p. 258.

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

and threatenedby economicallyand politicallyinsecure conditions,

15. Letter, 28 February, 1932, cited in scholem, TheStoryofa Friendship,

in the formof a utopianwish-image:"Manyyearsagoin a citytramI sawanadvertising

tive of both was necessaryto capture the ambivalenceof the his-

As the contents of the unconscious were images of concrete, his-

to new generations consciously through tradition-bound stories,

toricalawakening,was to providea politicallyexplosiveanswerto the

30. Benjamin, Illumiantions,p. 117.

III. Marx,Freud,and the Originsof Mass Culture

(August 2, 1935)34with its quite devastating criticism, including the

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

Now, precisely this bourgeois class ambivalence is documented by a

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

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

44. Benjamin's understanding of dialectical argumentation was to show the posi-

53. Benjamin, Reflections,p. 11.

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

A revolution in style, even if it occurred on a mass basis, was no sub-

catastrophe,a hellish,cyclicalrepetitionof barbarismand oppression.

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