. . . the radical
distinction between action and interlude . . . vanishes before the gaze of its
chosen spectator.
—Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama
. . . so long as the
approach is an aesthetic one, paradox must have the last word.
—Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama
It may be that when
interpreting a passage in the Arcades
Project we are looking for the particular brand of materialism Benjamin was
working with at any given moment. In most passages there is a reference to an
abiding truth, theological, that alternates with a direct or indirect
implication that that truth is a material construct and hence subject to
change, effectively a commodity. In this sense Benjamin is constantly tracing
the interfusion of the commodity with what might escape its grasp, a
determinative truth, and our question in reading each passage seems to be, is
there anything, on any level, that is not compromised by its association with
material culture? Benjamin is at pains to show that there is not, but the only
way to show the depths of this insight is to bring along with his materialism,
as any materialism carries with it, the culture of the spirit, of religion, of
theology that has informed and constructed history as we know it. What I'd like
to do here is work with a central idea running through Benjamin, the
"dialectics at a standstill," and show how its interpretation can be
problematized along these lines, to show how its primary appearance, in passage
N3,1 in the Arcades Project, operates
in anything but a straightforward manner, and that because N3,1 has typically
been read as putting across pure theory, "informational" writing in
Benjamin's voice as an unalloyed subject, Benjaminian criticism, particularly
of the Arcades Project, has been to
some degree misguided. What I'll first do is work through a more or less
figurative reading of the passage, one that attempts to invoke at least part of
what Benjamin may have intended with what was written, a reading that I'll
readily admit may have inadequacies, gaps, overextensions, and so on, but that
should be effective at destabilizing a straightforward informational analysis. I'll
then bring in two of Benjamin's primary editors and interlocutors, Samuel Weber
and Rolf Tiedemann, to show how they have assessed the passage and what the
implications might be of some of the gaps and inaccuracies that seem present.
My conclusion is that while readings of N3,1 and dialectics at a standstill are
often compelling, they fail to see their way clear to that passage's status as
an artifact in the Arcades Project
itself, thereby relegating a key concept in Benjamin's work to a mundane understanding
of what is perhaps a much more generative complexity and much deeper
interrogation of the materiality of language and experience.
Reading N3,1
Because a close
reading is so central to this paper, it makes sense to quote N3,1 in its
entirety here. What follows is the Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin
translation contained in the Harvard University Press edition of the Arcades Project, published in 1999:
What
distinguishes images from the "essences" of phenomenology is their
historical index. (Heidegger seeks in vain to rescue history for phenomenology
abstractly
through "historicity.") These images are to be thought of entirely
apart
from the categories of the "human sciences," from so-called habitus,
from
style,
and the like. For the historical index of the images not only says that they
belong
to a particular time; it says, above all, that they attain to legibility only
at
a
particular time. And, indeed, this acceding "to legibility"
constitutes a specific
critical
point in the movement at their interior. Every present day is determined by the
images that are synchronic with it: each "now" is the now of a
particular
recognizability.
In it, truth is charged to the bursting point with time. (This point
of
explosion, and nothing else, is the death of the intentio, which thus coincides
with
the birth of authentic historical time, the time of truth.) It is not that what
is
past
casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is
past;
rather,
image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the
now
to form a constellation. In other words: image is dialectics at a standstill.
For
while
the relation of the present to the past is purely temporal, the relation of
what-has-been
to the now is dialectical: not temporal in nature but figural
<bildlich>. Only dialectical images
are genuinely historical—that is, not archaic—images. The image that is
read—which is to say, the image in the now of its
recognizability—bears
to the highest degree the imprint of the perilous critical
moment
on which all reading is founded.
The first move here is
to raise the idea of the historical index, and we note the idea that the way an
index functions is as a cipher for how Benjamin sees the operation of history
itself. An index is a text pointing to another text that materially precedes
it, the main text of the book, but one that we access, that is legible to us,
in connection with our having pre-existing ideas we bring to its use, to our
reading: we know what we are looking up. Thus there is a dialectic here between
what we already "know" and what we "learn" or find out from
the book, how these relate to and inform one another, and we see how a term in
an index functions as a portal or threshold through which this relation take
place, through which these two legibilities interact. And this idea of an
historical index is the obverse of how a dialectical image itself operates,
with the positive, visible surface being the historical text or citation we
look up, and the "negative," unseen, invisible, or immaterial realm
the ideas we bring to our reading. The actual index term that ports us through
to the historical detail can be seen as the Benjaminian "name" or
crystallization point of a "now" where these two legibilities or
recognizabilities happen, a present that is defined as material in the sense
that it is in fact printed text, that it is in fact part of a book. An
"historical index" then inverts itself in that it gives access to a
transformational movement where material and immaterial legibilities crisscross
and instantiate each other through multiple levels of material/immaterial
objects such as index text, citational text, the materiality of the ideational
book that is the subject of the passage, the text of the passage in the Arcades Project, the passage within the
context of the real and imagined network of the arcades, and the physical book
of the Arcades Project, itself
forming an index to the nineteenth century. Here we can begin to see how the
present insofar as it is infused with the past, or the past insofar as it can
only be seen through the present, functions via the zone of a textuality that
finds its own dialectical image in the book form itself, since both rely on an
indexicality to manifest or be understood (and here we note a manifest itself
is a kind of list or index, and that understanding is simply another form of
readability, legibility, recognizability).
This is how an index
operates, and this is how Benjamin says an image
operates, dividing this out right at the start of N3,1 from the much more
stable and unified "essence," which operates outside of history. Now,
Benjamin himself does work with the concept of essences, and in precisely this
way, as an unalterable force outside of history, and as something that gets at
the root nature of language and how it operates: "The idea is something
linguistic, it is that element of the symbolic in the essence of any word"
(Origin). And again: "all
essences exist in complete and immaculate independence, not only from
phenomena, but, especially, from each other" (Origin). And not to move too far away from interpreting N3,1, I'll
quote again, just to fill out what Benjamin himself had written on essences
(not least since the word "constellation" comes back near the end of
N3,1):
Just
as the harmony of the spheres depends on the orbits of stars which do not come
into contact with each other, so the existence of the mundus intelligibilis depends on the unbridgeable distance between
pure essences. Every idea is a sun and is related to other ideas just as suns
are related to each other. The harmonious relationship between such essences is
what constitutes truth. (Origin)
Thus as much as
Benjamin begins the passage N3,1 with a critique of essences, it is in fact a
key concept in his own thinking. What Benjamin is doing rather is speaking of
something he does not believe is a true essence (hence he puts the word in
quotes), or is the shadow of an essence. N3,1's "'essences' of
phenomenology" are those essences that are too much implicated in the
world itself, an association with the world that, while it may make these
essences functional for things like human sciences, habitus, style, undermines
their functioning as pure or authentic essences. What Benjamin is here saying
is that in fact images do operate as
essences similar to how he has described them in Origin—so that the historical index is related to essences—just
that they do not have what we could say is a profane character, an invented use
value, phrased here as the compromised "historicity" of Heidegger. Hence
we are dealing with essence, and an historical essence, but an essence
"entirely apart" from certain other categories of comprehending
essence and its involvement in history, an inadequate understanding that would
have essences as purely the belonging to "a particular time" and
nothing else.
At this point Benjamin
makes explicit the temporality inherent in his conception of the image, which
again is quite closely related to his conception of essence, as much as he
seems to set aside the idea of essence at the start of this passage. Images
belong to a temporal past as we would typically understand it, and that is
important to grasp. At no moment can they be said to literally anticipate
anything happening in the present, any kind of present—they are read as
"archaic" as near the end of the N3,1 passage. To this degree they
maintain the status of being still. But what feeds this existence in the past
is in fact the images' occurring now, and their occurring is a type of
legibility or readability—so quite clearly we're constantly involved with
images in the seeming contrary of picture (literally what they might be) and word
(since they have a "legibility"), though this is effectively to
define words as themselves visual and material artifacts, as components of a
broader textuality. What feeds this existence is their occurring "at"
a particular time, a time understood here as in fact our present, the
contemporary, a point in time, a "now." Their indexical character,
their authentic historical character, and by extension history itself, emerges
at the "point" at which an ideational light (if we can accept that
abstraction for now, and as we have seen light plays a key role in the Origin quote above), much as a flash
from a camera and thus also understood materially, makes our lives now
recognizable as living at the same time as past lives are comprehended in the
same way. These two "sides" of the image would not exist or function
without each other, but the flash itself is a kind of Benjaminian essence as it
enters or makes contact with the world. And this entry is only experienced in
terms of reading, a legibility that then becomes activated.
Moreover, what we have
in the passage is in fact the historical index being personified, speaking, it
"says," dictating what the image is up to. In this sense, the index
is in control, has agency. Again, the image doesn't only belong to a particular
time, the index tells us, just as citations do not belong only to the time to
which they refer, a kind of historicism that Benjamin has also critiqued
elsewhere, such as the "Work of Art" essay. And to rephrase just a
bit, what images do in addition to belonging to a particular time is that they
"attain to legibility at a particular time." Again, this idea invokes
the idea of reading, saying that an image actively "attains" a
readability, an ability to be comprehended. Again, there is an agency to this
attainment, a self-willing, somewhat like the index having an ability to speak
here in this passage, a mechanistic thing taking on human qualities. But we can
note as well that Benjamin, in the next sentence, actually rephrases the
concept, then calling it "this acceding
'to legibility'", here making the active agent the legibility itself,
rather than the image, an image that in this case "accedes." So it's
not clear which one, if either, contains the legibility or is responsible for
its emergence, either in or as the image. We note here as well that "to
legibility" is placed in quotes, taking on a citational status, which is
yet another indication of alternate usage of the idea, its being placed here,
as with other citations, in a dialectical reverse from its initial appearance.
The passage goes on to
outline that the point at which this readability happens is a "critical
point," and that it is located at "the interior" (a topic
Benjamin treats extensively in Convolute I, on interiors, making them
effectively indistinguishable from what is thought to be an
"outside") of images, and that the thing that constitutes that
interior is in fact movement. If
indeed images are Benjaminian (as opposed to Heideggarian) essences, then they,
again, operate along the same lines as words themselves, with varying uses and
a kind of nucleonic core that translates into an essential being, but one
defined as movement. We might presume that this movement is in fact the
attaining/acceding of readability or legibility. All this being said, it is at
this point in the passage, at this interior place as it were, that Benjamin
shifts to a discussion of the present moment, the now, the "present
day," as itself a kind of interior or middle point. And here we can see
that not only are images indexed to their time, but that time, that now, is
"determined" by multiple images synchronically occurring within it.
The critical point of movement is exactly what might otherwise be understood as
a static now of the present day, and here we see what Benjamin first describes
as legibility is expressed as "recognizability." Again, multiple
references to critical "points" occur throughout the passage: the
"now," a point in time, is one, but we also have the "critical
point" at the interior of the image, the "bursting point" where
truth is charged with time, the point of "explosion," the
"flash" where things come together, the "standstill"
itself, and finally the "perilous critical moment on which all reading is
founded." All these are the same thing, all these are figural, all these
are indexed to historical time, "a particular time."
Conclusions to the Reading of N3,1
What we can see quite
clearly here is that this "now" (which again appears within and
outside of quotes) is infused with dialectical relationships at every turn,
such that "dialectics at a standstill" must be considered right
alongside the "movement" mentioned earlier in the passage, as well as
alongside the obviously nonstable "bursting" and
"explosions" that result from the "death of intentio" and the appearance of truth, historical truth, as
much defined in terms of the present as the present is in terms of it, where
"what has been comes together in a flash with the now," the formation of a constellation.
"Standstill" in this passage is infused with all these meanings, so
that we should clearly never be misled by its surface, informational, or
profane meaning of motionlessness. Benjaminian dialectics is not motionless: it
in fact works to define our very notion of movement itself, with a dialectical
interchange of pure language at its core. Here, just as with every other
passage in the Arcades Project—and
much more clearly so when we deal with those passages outside of Convolute N,
passages that are overtly quotes from outside sources, citation—our
"legibility" is characterized by a doubleness that extends into a
semantic universe of unfolding meaning, an extension that is itself, rather
than an obsessive concern for motionlessness, is far more to the point of
Benjamin's overall project, even as this phantasmagoric legibility is folded
into, and hence cannot be said to be critically outside of or a critical
reference point for assessment for, the founding concept of the Arcades Project itself. If anything,
"dialectics at a standstill" seems to be most interesting as a
radically contradictory phrase.
Finally, at the
conclusion of the passage, with "the image that is read,"[1]
this now emerges. It "bears to the highest degree," that is,
organically gives birth to, as its most crucial characterization, "the
imprint." We note that this imprint is a mechanical process, like printing
itself, almost as if the image is doing the printing, that mechanical production
of legibility. And that legibility is a "perilous critical moment,"
again referring to the other moments in the passage. This is where "all
reading is founded," so that here reading founds reading, simultaneously
both material and immaterial, in equal measure.
Images
"index" history, we use them in all their brevity to page back into
time to locate what we already have in mind. Again, we pass through the terms
in an index to locate what precedes the index but also to serve whatever
pre-existing purposes we might have. This passage as a whole is not about its
straightforward content but much more about accessing, attaining, acceding to a
reading of this perilous critical moment, around which all its ideas are
organized, but also that in its very performativity
of a timeless truth reveals itself to be another text, an "imprint,"
a material of text, writing, publication that also indexes history. It is then a
critique of the Arcades Project as a
whole, just as the passages immediately following in N3,3 or N3,4, and thereby
it "resolutely refuses", as in N3,2, that precise timeless truth to
which it seems to be acceding. In this way "dialectics at a
standstill" is, again, not a timeless truth of this text. Again, as in
N3,2, the truth of N3,1 is "bound to a nucleus of time lying hidden within
the knower and the known alike." It's this nucleus, an organic and hence moving thing, perhaps more than anything
that we should be keeping in mind, keeping in view.
Interpretations of N3,1
and "Dialectics at a Standstill"
What I'd like to do
now is look at two critics, Samuel Weber and Rolf Tiedemann, who take passage
N3,1 and "dialectics at a standstill" as formative within Benjamin's
oeuvre and attempt to draw out some of the implications of what seem to be
variant ways of reading or assessing what Benjamin is up to. In chapter 15 of
his Benjamin's -aiblities, Samuel
Weber quite compellingly discusses how Benjamin invokes through his works a
"generalized—or perhaps better, generative—textuality" that itself
problematizes the possibility that any text could ever "legitimate itself
in its own terms." That impossibility of legitimation is referred to as an
"exposure" that in particular marks the Arcades Project. Weber cites N3,1 as a way to substantiate and
expand on this overall point, and while he uses as a base translation the
passage I quote above from Eiland and McLaughlin, he in fact changes significant
terms and phrasings, and I'd like to quote his translation in full to read some
if its emendations as perhaps symptomatic of the tendencies to limit a reading
of some of Benjamin's key concepts:
What
distinguishes images from the "essences" of Phenomenology, is their
historical index. . . The historical index of the images indicates not merely
that they belong to a particular time, it indicates that only in a particular
time do they come to be readable. And this coming to be readable defines a
critical point in their innermost movement. Every present is determined through
those images that are synchronic with it: every now is the now of a determinate
knowability. In it truth is charged with time to the breaking point. (This
breaking, nothing else, is the death of intention, which thus coincides with
the birth of genuine historical time, the time of truth.) It is not that what
has gone by casts its light upon the present, or that the present casts its
light upon what is gone; rather the image is the constellation that ensues when
what has been converges with the now in a flash. In other words: image is
dialectics at a standstill. For while the relation of the present to the past
is purely temporal, that of what has been to the Now is dialectical: not
temporal in nature but rather imagistic. Only dialectical images are genuinely
historical, i.e., not archaic images. The image that has been read, which is to
say, the image in the Now of knowability, bears to the highest degree the stamp
of the critical, dangerous moment that underlies all reading.
Weber removes the
preamble about essences, which positions dialectics within the framework of
Benjamin's thought about stability and movement and the relation between these.
Weber goes on to replace "attain to legibility" with "come to be
readable" and then "acceding to 'legibility'" with "coming
to be readable." Thus, the subtle but crucial difference between
"attain" and "accede" is elided with the generic
"coming to be", "readability" replaces
"legibility"—odd since the section in which this chapter appears in
Weber's book is entitled "Legibilities"—and then Benjamin's quotation
marks around the second "legibility" are deleted, a move that
de-emphasizes yet again another instance of dual or dialectical meaning at work
in the passage, as we've seen above. Moreover, Weber replaces
"recognizability" with the much more general and vague
"knowability," losing the substantial connection to visuality implied
by image, legibility, and readability. While "standstill" certainly
refers to an abstraction within the realm of theoretical dialectics, it's also
I believe paramount to maintain its associations with more material object such
as a still photograph. It's possible to extract other implications of Weber's
edits here, but overall we can see a pulling away from a number of the central
complexities contained in the passage, most of which result in an understanding
of dialectics that is considerably limited when compared to a more "open"
interpretation.
Weber's commentary,
where some of the implications of his translation surface, then moves forward
in an equally if not more problematic manner. But what I'd like to do now is
take his commentary and read it closely as a way to converse with his text, enter
into its textual sphere, and by extension work with these key ideas of
Benjamin's, bringing to the surface, along the way, more of the complexity of
Benjamin's original concepts.
Weber first writes:
"The 'historical image' that Benjamin describes here is not something that
can simply be seen, but something that must be read." The statement is a truism: if we've been reading
closely this is one of the first things we notice, the complete overlap and
interweaving of legibility and visuality. Weber's initial approach to the
passage then appears too simplified. He goes on: "Its 'readability' or
legibility—its Lesbarkeit—is what
results from the highly conflictual kind of relations that produce it."
Here we have an interpretation of the effective cause of legibility—"what
results from"—that is entirely one sided, missing the key subtlety in
Benjamin's passage of legibility creating the relations that create it. As
Benjamin writes in N3,2, "truth is not . . . a merely contingent function
of knowing, but is bound to a nucleus of time lying hidden within the knower
and the known alike."
Weber continues:
"This is why Benjamin takes pains to emphasize that the historicity of an
image does not result simply from its belonging to a particular epoch, but
rather, from what he designates as its 'synchronic' relation to it."
Indeed, precisely in the material Weber has elided at the start of the passage,
Benjamin is at pains to reject "historicity" altogether, he specifically
says that images are "entirely apart." There is no "historicity" of the image at all:
it is entirely historical, at the same time as it is entirely of the present.
Rather than "historicity," what Weber seems to intend to mean is both
"historical index" and "legibility," but even then there's
still the fact that what Benjamin says is that the "now" is
determined by images that are "synchronic with it" in equal measure
as those images are determined by that "now." There is a co-creative
process at work to which Weber's prose brings rather a certain linearity, even
as it cites this "synchronic" relation.
Weber continues: "Such
synchronicity is constituted as much by separation as by convergence."
Here Weber introduces an idea of "separation" that does not seem to
be in Benjamin's text. Benjamin does speak specifically of convergence and
simultaneity, but not of separation. Weber, however, holds on to the idea
through the balance of his interpretation, transforming it into the idea of
"distance." He goes on: "It is precisely this simultaneity,
involving both proximity and distance, that is the condition of any possible
'knowledge' of images, their 'knowability.'" We can note here that with
the addition of concepts of "proximity and distance" as well as the vagueness
of the idea of "knowledge," we seem to have moved some way away from
Benjamin's text. Weber continues: "Such 'knowabilty' is situated not in
the interval between two fixed points, for instance between the Past shedding
its light on the Present, or the Present shedding its light on the Past, but
rather in a different sort of space: that of a convergence that does not result
in a simple identity." Here the idea of "fixed points" between
"Past" and "Present" (it's not clear why these terms are
capitalized here and not in the translation of the passage) is unfortunate,
since Benjamin's passage, while it does reference "points," does so
with only the one point, of explosion, the now. To invoke these other
"points" is simply confusing. Another potentially confusing addition
here is the idea of "identity," which again is not referenced in
Benjamin's passage. Weber continues: "What it produces is articulated
through two very different and yet complementary figures in Benjamin's writing:
the Blitz, the lightening flash, and
the constellation, the more or less
stable agglomeration of stars." Here again there is an accuracy to this
comment but even more there is a misdirection and passing over of subtlety. The
"flash" and the "constellation" are not exactly "very
different": as Benjamin writes, images "come together in a flash to
form a constellation." Hence identity may well come to play a role here,
since the argument seems to be possible, or at least operative, that the flash
and the constellation are one and the same thing. Rather than noting how they
might simply be "complementary" it's more likely that exploring in
depth their interaction would get closer to Benjamin's meaning, the complexity
of how words are functioning in this central passage and in the Arcades Project overall.
All this being said,
Weber does in his next paragraph explore this very complexity. I'll quote the
paragraph here, but I'd like to try to observe how Weber begins with a
description of one kind of reading (effectively the overly simple reading I've
been outlining thus far), then opens out to characterize a dialectical
interfusion of movement and stability, so that we can trace points at which our
understanding of this interfusion can be clarified against perceived
inaccuracies of Weber's treatment.
One
might be tempted here to try and relativize the tension of these two figures
[again, flash and constellation] so dear to Benjamin by ascribing the
"flash" to the manner in which "what has been," in coming
together with the "Now," acquires a certain stability as the
"constellation." And that would not be entirely wrong. The point,
however, is that this constellation in and of itself remains marked by the
abrupt and instantaneous process out of which it emerges. It is defined by the potentiality of Zerspringen, of breaking apart, which Benjamin describes as the
"genuinely historical time, the time of truth." Truth then, with
Benjamin as with Heidegger, entails not the correspondence of an intention with
an intended object: it is not the fulfillment, and hence, confirmation, of a
temporal movement, tending toward a goal, but rather "the death of
intentio" which is simultaneously the "birth" of another kind of
time, not that of the subject, but of "history" and of
"truth."
Again, passing through
a "relativizing" reading, Weber arrives at a clear conception of the
actual nature of the Benjaminian constellation, which almost entirely defines
the dialectics at a standstill. Weber sees that the stasis is no stasis at all
and is infused with, defined by, a dynamic movement, pure movement, a breaking
or explosion, the flash. But that is as far as this reading will take us, since
it is at this point that Weber seems to be continuing to work out what he wants
to say, bringing in concepts and ideas that either are not found in Benjamin's
text or are products of Weber's own translation. For instance,
"potentiality" is not invoked in Benjamin, as much as the
"breaking apart" gives a sense of disjunction at the heart of the now
that is also absent from Benjamin. Neither does Benjamin deal with the idea of
an "intended object" and that teleology as Weber brings it into his
analysis here. Finally we can see again a lack of clarity where Weber here
cites "intentio" whereas his translation in fact removes the Latin
and simply uses "intention," almost as if in writing Weber went back
to Benjamin's text and was finding new significance to what was actually there.
In any case, what we can see toward the end of this paragraph is multiple
levels of symbolic meaning and dialectical activity moving toward, breaking
through, exploding into the surface of Weber's interpretation. Our fluid
understanding then of dialectics at a standstill is alive and well in Weber's
argument, even if we can perceive a kind of fumbling about with it.
I'll cite Weber's
final paragraph of analysis of N3,1 only because it seems to confirm many of
these characteristics toward accurate insight, reliance on truisms, misleading
mistranslations, and the pulling back from the real complexities of Benjamin's
text:
Only
in this sense can the dialectical image be said to be both "knowable"
and "legible." "Knowable" because "legible." But
"knowledge" here is as unstable as is truth, and "reading"
is the articulation of the two. Articulation, here as elsewhere, designates not
simply identity or synthesis, but a disjunctive bringing-together and
keeping-apart, for instance of the most extreme movement—that of the lightening
bolt (blitzhaft)—and the most extreme
stasis, that of the constellation.
Here again the use of
"knowable" rather than "recognizable," a much easier synonym
for "legible," seems to get in the way of a clear understanding of
Benjamin's text. (In some ways it's as if this paragraph were written before
the clarity that was apparently reached in the preceding paragraph.) Weber in
fact seems to be working through the inadequacies of his own translation,
working his way back to simply saying "legible" rather than "knowable."
But here to say that truth is "unstable" while not at the same time
that it is static as well, is to cease working with truth as a dialectical
term. Then Weber brings in the idea of "articulation," again perhaps
misleading since we're already working with the legible in both an active and
passive sense, so "articulation" seems to get in the way with yet
another similar concept, and then on top of that the idea of
"reading" is brought in. And here again the idea of
"keeping-apart" is used, whereas that's not particularly a concern in
Benjamin's text and so works to confuse Weber's discussion.
I'd like to turn here
to a more explicit engagement with "dialectics at a standstill," that
of Rolf Tiedemann in his "Dialectics at a Standstill: Approaches to the
Passengen-Werk," which appears in the back matter of the Eiland and McLaughlin
translation of the Arcades Project. More
conversant with Benjamin's work, on seemingly every possible level, than any
other commentator who has written on Benjamin, Tiedemann turns to the idea of
the "dialectics at a standstill" later in his essay, using it as an
organizing principle of the Arcades
Project and Benjamin's work overall. However, in Tiedemann's writing about
the topic and other ideas surrounding it in the Arcades Project, questions arise as to the thoroughness of the
interpretation of dialectics at a standstill as a material concept contained
with the framework of the Arcades Project
itself.
Tiedemann begins a
close look at dialectics at a standstill on page 942, as follows:
"Dialectical image and dialectics at a standstill are, without a doubt,
the central categories of the Passegen-Werk."
Now, as I've tried to show above, it is difficult to believe that either
dialectical images or dialectics at a standstill could in fact be central
categories of the Arcades Project
since they appear, effectively, as characters within that work itself. Due to
this nature of their appearance, they cannot stand outside the work as
operating principles. And indeed when one looks closely at the passage, or for
that matter the convolutes, in which they are explicitly mentioned, it appears
that the language of these passages is not to be taken in a straightforward or
informational way, but as figurative, itself imagistic, carrying implication
seemingly outside of the text itself. Thus, there is in fact some doubt as to
the centrality of these categories.
Tiedemann goes on:
"We can distinguish two meanings [for these two terms] in Benjamin's
texts; they remain somewhat undivulged, but even so cannot be brought totally
in congruence." Tiedemann then in fact turns away from the Arcades Project proper to access, first,
the 1935 exposé to the Arcades Project,
and then "On the Concept of History." As I've tried to show in this
paper, I've attempted to interpret dialectics at a standstill exclusively within
the framework of the Arcades Project
itself, and so have brought another sense, reading, or legibility to the
language of the book, whereas Tiedemann is turning away from the "main
text" and citing other of Benjamin's texts that, while they may
specifically mention dialectics at a standstill, do so in work and writing that
is positioned far differently from what appears in the Arcades Project, outside text that is intended to be read
functionally, in a linear way, non-figuratively, informationally. Is it fair to
make this distinction? Can it possibly be true that Benjamin intended the more
discursive commentary in the Arcades
Project to be read symbolically, figuratively? While there are any number
of indications in the Arcades Project
itself that there is effectively no distinction between what appears as
commentary and what appears as citation, that all is to be read at a symbolic
level, I'm not sure it matters that we concern ourselves with the
appropriateness of when and where to rule out a figurative reading. My
impression here is twofold: one, that the blanket assumption that reading the
commentary as non-figurative language in fact impedes a full understanding of
the Arcades Project, since it works
to prevent our experience of the intermingling of citation and commentary; two,
that if we do a figurative or symbolic reading of a passage that seems purely
discursive and it seems to take us somewhere, to constructive and compelling
insights, I'm not sure why we wouldn't do it.
Thus, with his first
meaning of dialectical images and dialectics at a standstill, Tiedemann turns
not to an analysis of how the text of the Arcades
Project itself functions on a material level but to what is technically the
outside text of the 1935 exposé. Specifically, he quotes two areas of this text:
In
the dream, in which each epoch entertains images of it successor, the latter
appears wedded to elements of Ur-history—that
is, to elements of a classless society. And the experiences of such a
society—as stored in the unconscious of the collective—engender, through interpenetration
with what is new, utopia.
Ambiguity
is the manifest imaging of dialectic, the law of dialectics at a standstill.
This standstill is utopia, and the dialectical image, therefore, dream image.
Such an image is afforded by the commodity per se: as fetish.
The key to this
reading is the fetish and the intimate relation, the identification, of the
commodity with utopia. The standstill is a reference to dream and ambiguity,
two things we would not normally associate with motionlessness, and movement
insofar as it has commodity character is static. Thus to refer to the
dialectics at a standstill within the material context of the Arcades Project is perfectly
appropriate, since in that work, and only there, is its material status made
manifest to the highest degree, whether as commentary or citation. What's
missing in Tiedemann's discussion is exactly that status as a component of the
larger work, one that fills out Benjamin's ideas in these two quotes and works
to show that consciousness even at this removed level can be seen as a
commodity fetish, controverting Adorno's critique that such a thing was not
possible.
Tiedemann's second
major meaning for dialectical image and dialectics at a standstill is that they
function "almost like a heuristic principle, a procedure that enables the
historical materialist to maneuver his objects." He includes a long quote
from "On the Concept of History" (again working outside the actual
text of the Arcades Project) that,
because it seems to include a misreading, I will cite in full:
A
historical materialist cannot do without the notion of a present which is not a
transition, but in which time stands still and has come to a stop. For this
notion defines the present in which he himself is writing history . . .
Materialist historiography . . . is based on a constructive principle. Thinking
involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well. Where thinking
suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions, it gives that
configuration a shock, by which it crystallizes into a monad. A historical
materialist approaches a historical subject only where he encounters it as a
monad. In this structure he recognizes the sign of a messianic cessation of
happening, or, put differently, a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed
past. (Illuminations, pp. 264-265)
Benjamin's sense here
seems clear, even with the confusing double negative in the first sentence. He
is saying that the historical materialist (of which presumably in some sense he
counts himself as one) must have the stasis of his own critical perspective.[2]
This stasis provides the "constructive principle" on which history is
founded. But we must also factor in here the way in which that stasis is
constitutionally linked in a back and forth dialectical emergence with the
movement of "transition," which includes a vast array of ideas of
movement, including the "flow of thoughts," thinking itself (making
stasis a kind of non-thinking), the process of crystallization,
"happening." We can't elide the fact that there is no point at which
the dialectic at standstill comes up as a central topic where ideas of movement
are not also and equally in play. What I am attempting to point out here is
that again and again, in both Tiedemann, Weber, and other critics, we have an
over-reliance on an informational reading of the Arcades Project, resulting I would say in a kind of gravitation in
criticism of Benjamin and the Arcades
Project to the more discursive convolute N and an interpretation that
settles far too readily on notions of the importance of stasis, even as those
same critics resist close readings of the more directly citational material in
the Arcades Project. Even here in
Tiedemann's commentary on this passage from "On the Concept of
History" we can see this tendency in action, as he flatly states
"Benjamin's dialectic tried to halt the flow of movement, to grasp each
becoming as being." Yes, I would say this is true, but that being is never
without an immediate dialectical shift back into becoming. Again, Tiedemann
writes "through the immobilizing
of dialectic, the historical 'victors' have their accounts with history
canceled, and all pathos is shifted toward salvation of the oppressed" (my
emphasis). This comment suggests a degree of hope in Benjamin, a sense of the
messianic and theological, that perhaps should not be so seamlessly put
forward.
Conclusion
With these
complexities circulating through any reading of Benjamin, it's perhaps not fair
to any given critique dealing with Benjamin to hold it to the fire, as it were,
of summarizing what sets out to be non-summarizable. But in fact I'm not at all
sure that's the case: as much as a number of critics will go ahead and admit
that Benjamin's methodology is that of very exactly "no methodology,"
and as much as critics will admit that Benjamin locates this conundrum not only
within historiographic and scholarly discourse but within language itself, it's
true that there seems to be a firm barrier for scholars, those who use the
rigorous techniques of scholarly analysis, to using those same techniques to go
on to interrogate the very forms of their own outputs in the way Benjamin
himself has modeled. The culture of information-based scholarly discourse has
not budged to any significant degree since the appearance of the Arcades Project, as much as the secret
of that work banishes the traditional epistemological assumptions that enable
that discourse to maintain its status of presumed effectiveness. Hence, as we
read the Arcades Project, a massive
number of questions arise that might quite productively enable us to both move
away from a discourse that resolutely stands in the way of knowledge and to
experiment with alternative ways of speaking and communicating that might
resonate far more with experience as we seem to have it as our daily lot.
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