Vogues of language

A7a,3: Language functions on an almost hieroglyphic level with the rebus and evolves into "literary and military allusions," is seen as a "vogue" and folded into the progress of fashion. The signboards themselves carry the full import of civilization through this thoroughly commercial rhetoric, a complete equivalence drawn here between literary quality and military power. We also see here a commentary on the extreme material nature of linguistic meaning, since even as all human life is extinguished it survives in petrified form, a kind of eternal ashen substance. Following on to A7a,4 the "brand name" becomes the central topic, so that this symbolic nature of language, its "signage," is further expanded on. Here the collusion of government and industry in shaping communicative practices, public discourse in the marketplace, and the perceptual habits of the masses is shown to be flourishing as early as 1824, and with his final sentence—"The importance of good professional standing is magnified in proportion as consumer know-how becomes more specialized."—Benjamin throws into relief the manner in which bourgeois society steps in through government power and social standing to shape linguistic usage at perhaps its deepest level, naming. Insofar as the arcade is a force for specialization it pushes the masses into a place of symbolic powerlessness and reshapes language as a corporatized abstraction. What to do? The A7a,5 passage presents a protest, "two demonstrations per day," but it plays out as perfect comedy, far outside and with little impact on the system, the protesters themselves "market speculators" and "unlicensed brokers" that the police can hardly be bothered with as they lead them to the slaughter like sheep. Human dignity is nowhere to be found, which is reiterated again in A7a,6 with the reference to the murderer in the "Passage due Cheval Rouge" (the red horse, again the nonhuman as function of naming), and finally in A7a,7 the return of the signboard...