"It sinks the thing into the life of the storyteller, in order to bring it out of him again."
—Walter Benjamin, "The Storyteller"
"The communicability of experience is decreasing."
—Walter Benjamin, "The Storyteller"
We are, right now, there. In the arcades, the book, the abstract construct of the Arcades Project. Desire itself is internal to the project on every level: there is no desire to escape. It is configured as such:
Just as the industrial labor process separates off from handicraft, so the form of communication corresponding to this labor process—information—separates off from the form of communication corresponding to the artisanal process of labor, which is storytelling. (See "Der Erzähler," p. 21, par. 3 through p. 22, par. 1, line 3; p. 22, par. 3, line 1 through the end of the Valéry citation.) This connection must be kept in mind if one is to form an idea of the explosive force contained within information. This force is liberated in sensation. With the sensation, whatever still resembles wisdom, oral tradition, or the epic side of truth is razed to the ground. [m3a,5]
Like so many, if not all, of the passages in the Arcades Project, this passage enacts that to which it refers, in this case the very explosion under discussion. Yet one asks, "what about our first reading, our first encounter? I've read the passage and certainly I don't feel, or read into it, an 'explosion,' though I know I see the word 'explosion' used here." I want to take some time, in this paper before you, this very example of informational prose (though one that lives as a response to this example of Benjamin’s text), I want to put in the time now to interpretatively circle around this text of Benjamin's, but to do so in a way that seeks, at least initially, to ignite it, to hold its flash before our eyes at a place where language shows itself, a dangerous, a perilous reading, a communication that the text itself refers to, so that to read this text for what it says is to undergo its disturbing subject. I will start by reading this passage to the point at which it gets us to a place where other of Benjamin's commentary takes on relevance, so that we uncover some of his key tenets and can trace their relevance, an explosive relevance, through how we understand text itself in a contemporary context of a surge of global authoritarianism. We aim indeed to discover "in the analysis of the small individual moment the crystal of the total event."
To repeat, what I'd like to do is embody in this paper the explosive moment of this passage, m3a,5, a moment that any of the passages in the Arcades Project will produce, by virtue of being part of the Arcades Project, and we must therefore extrapolate and say that, following Benjamin's lead, a moment that any passage, anywhere in life, if "read" aright, will produce as well: Benjamin's theory of reading is of course not simply a theory of reading text, but of text's world-completing opposite, image, of perception itself; quite far from being a scholarly undertaking, if not viscerally opposed to such, his theory takes us onto the very streets we ourselves inhabit. My "reading" here must do nothing less.
I
Our reading will peel back layers of meaning, a "series of thin, transparent layers . . . placed one on top of the other" ("The Storyteller" 93). It barely matters where we start in the passage, as long as we follow a trace (as Benjamin describes in other passages in convolute m), as thoroughly as possible, follow it, hunting a kind of prey, until its capture (and we can return to the nature of this studious hunt). Above all else, we must begin with what the passage actually says, following nothing more nor less than what indeed we can all agree the words we hold in front of us literally mean. We have a fidelity to this content, to this linguistic creation, as if we are placing ourselves in the role of translators, not willing to take a single subjective liberty of interpretation until we grasp the literal sense. As Benjamin writes in "The Task of the Translator," "Only if the sense of a linguistic creation may be equated with the information it conveys does some ultimate, decisive element remain beyond all communication" (Illuminations 79). This is how we will proceed here, even as the terms of our encounter with any "ultimate, decisive element" remain undefined.
Let the thread, the trace, start with communication, since a fidelity to this passage will admit that "form of communication" is its first and most consistent subject. Again, I want to say what is completely obvious: Benjamin—and the passage is in the mode of "commentary," Benjamin's voice as author—has in view, is speaking of, two forms of communication, information and storytelling. We want to be clear that there are two distinctly different categories of things, forms of communication, that are here brought forward: there is an analogy, with on one side informational communication and the "industrial labor process," and on the other side "handicraft," the "artisanal process of labor," and "storytelling." Now, storytelling and information are quite famous in Benjamin studies and beyond, most directly as a result of Benjamin's essay "The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nicolai Leskov." This essay, at least on its surface, provides us with a great deal of detail as to how Benjamin defines storytelling and sees its function in the culture of his time as well as historically, storytelling and information being quite different and evincing an atrophying of genuine storytelling over time, a distancing and disappearance of its elemental function of the "exchange" of experiences. Most basically, storytelling is "experience which is passed on from mouth to mouth," an oral tradition of the epic. It is a disappearing art, a disappearance that parallels and corresponds to both natural evolution and changing social structures. And the art of storytelling is held up against, contrasted and compared with its opposite form of communication, information. The informational form is characterized by journalistic or newspaper writing, where the "essence" of a matter is immediately conveyed. It complements the "full control of the middle class . . . in fully developed capitalism," it "supplies a handle for what is nearest":
Information . . . lays claim to prompt verifiability. The prime requirement is that it appear "understandable in itself." Often it is no more exact than the intelligence of earlier centuries was. But while the latter was inclined to borrow from the miraculous, it is indispensible for information to sound plausible. (Illuminations 89)
Thus storytelling and information are divergent forms of communication, evolving from one toward the other according to different social and material functions and exigencies. However, as might already be obvious, and as we can see in m3a,5 in the Arcades Project, the relationship between the two grows tenuous under scrutiny, such that one could hypothesize a resurgence of storytelling within informational communication, or a corresponding disappearance of the informational within the story. Taking "The Storyteller" as a source for such a reversal, there are any number of points where Benjamin seems to problematize any straightforward understanding of, for instance, storytelling's relationship to that same material, capitalistic domination of culture with which information seems to align. For instance, the last sentence in the first paragraph of the essay, referring to storytelling's disappearance:
It is as if something that seemed inalienable to us, the securest among our possessions, were taken from us: the ability to exchange experiences.
Storytelling is here characterized in materialist, economic terms: "inalienable," "possessions," "exchange." The implication is that at its root, in its most primitive formations, storytelling functioned exactly as information does, not as a conduit for the miraculous but as something with everyday use value. And Benjamin goes on to describe storytelling as containing "practical interests," "agricultural advice," "scientific instruction," finally saying "It contains, openly or covertly, something useful." And this usefully extends to the abstract, the immaterial, the realm of morals, counsel, proverbs, a dreamlike or illusory nature of storytelling that is also reflected in the essay's first paragraph as an aspect of just how far away storytelling is from our ability to perceive it. We see only the "great, simple outlines" that may or may not indicate a "human head or an animal's body," though how these shapes appear to us "are prescribed by an experience which we may have almost every day," a journalistic phenomena but one also founded in the quite material "rock" mentioned in the paragraph. This evolution from one to the other happens before our eyes in the essay, within which we also take note how that "living immediacy" so important to storytelling must also be actively compromised by Benjamin himself, insofar as he is attempting throughout the essay to bring the ideal storyteller Leskov "closer to us," and hence must certainly be "increasing our distance from him." In speaking or writing of storytelling Benjamin extends its distance from us, clearing the ground even more decisively for the appearance of information (which in any case storytelling shares an identity with).
But rather than a close reading of "The Storyteller," I'd like to continue tracking the explosion of m3a,5. Not to defuse it, or to perform a kind self-destruction by getting too close, waiting too long to turn away, but in some sense to let it slowly detonate in front of us, a circling around, an analytical approach but one that contains a willingness at each moment to feel. We take, then, these categories and these reversals, storytelling and information and their interfusion, from "The Storyteller" into our reading of m3a,5. As mentioned above, the different forms of communication, these different uses of language, behave in concert with forms of labor, the industrial/informational "separating off" from storytelling/the artisanal. What Benjamin does here is introduce two levels of equivalence, one the equivalence industrial/informational // storytelling/artisanal, the other the seemingly double "separating off" itself, the informational separating off from storytelling, industrial labor separating off from the artisanal. Those separations are slow historical movements—as we can see in, among other places, "The Storyteller," "hardly any other forms of human communication have taken shape more slowly"—an equivalent slowness in both categories. And as we have seen, the process is quite convoluted, one aspect or side of the dialectic appearing in the guise of the other, with an hallucinatory or dream-like character, minute phylogenetic shifts in emphasis, all tending toward a material instantiation of capital itself. As we move and read along toward the second sentence of the passage then, that action of "separating off" is front and center, occupying focus, a kind of mental inertia to our experience of reading.
Here it is my contention that Benjamin retains his focus and amplifies it, exposing an abyssal, vertiginous truth of language and literary writing but at the same time transforming that into a performative, dramatic characterization of the text in front of us, which if "kept in mind" as the passage suggests can be said to constitute a living glimpse into the structural underpinnings of, simultaneously, the 'how' and 'what' of, among other things, the literal temporal moment in which Benjamin must have been writing, which insofar as language dialectically disintegrates in front of us must be identical to that disintegration, that pulling away or separating off, that Benjamin glimpsed as happening historically as well as contemporaneously. What we have the prospect of is a performance induced in language by Benjamin, a "phantasmagoria" of referentiality that, like any phantasmagoria, is artificially constructed, technologically intended (to use the language of Origin, as well as the preceding passage, m3a,4), but by that very fact intersects with a transhistorical immediacy constituent of language as it is conceived at a new level of purity. We must remember here the ongoing dialectic and interchangeability in the Arcades Project between commentary and citation: that again and again citation—Benjamin quoting others, going outside his text—is revealed to be more germane to his overriding intent than anything he might say in "his own words;" and that commentary—Benjamin speaking without quotation marks, as it were, seeming to communicate in "his own words"—again and again accesses an identical figural or symbolic dimension as the citations that embody Benjamin's intent in writing. In this passage then, m3a,5, Benjamin incorporates another level of "separating off" in that, first of all, he incorporates a long parenthetical comment, a breaking away from the commentary that is the first sentence. And indeed this break from the commentary is precisely a citation, one that is, rather than a quotation of his own text, a deeply informational referencing format of numbering pages, paragraphs, and lines: it reads almost like a bank ledger or legal brief. It is a constitutively informational, as much as it is scholarly, form of reading that we do in reading the text of this parenthesis, of this separating off.
And if we follow its thread, look to its reference, we are confronted once more not only with the "citation" mentioned in the parenthetical comment, but with yet another broadening out of the meanings at work in m3a,5. For just as this parenthetical is "contained within" this passage, again to use the language of m3a,5 itself, so information has "contained within it" an explosive force, such that it is appropriate that here within the informational form of communication we might expect to find that explosion. In this case then we read the reference itself, effectively Section IX of "The Storyteller," and find reference upon reference to one thing being contained in another, yet another phantasmagoric appearance of "storytelling." The first part of the cited paragraph is worth quoting:
The storytelling that thrives for a long time in the milieu of work—the rural, the maritime, and the urban—is itself an artisan form of communication, as it were. It does not aim to convey the pure essence of the thing, like information or a report. It sinks the thing into the life of the storyteller, in order to bring it out of him again. Thus traces of the storyteller cling to the story the way the handprints of the potter cling to the clay vessel.
Combined with m3a,5, the level of referentiality that this quote conveys is extraordinary, a vertiginous dialectical play of polysemous meaning that "kept in view" produces what might be characterized as precisely a seemingly non-linguistic, inward explosion or dismantling of certainties. Indeed by quoting this passage, these passages, and commenting on them, we do exactly that "keeping in mind" that Benjamin seems to refer to as forming "an idea of . . . explosive force." We can look here at the "milieu of work" within which storytelling operates and is in fact necessary for it to "thrive;" we can look at the "essence" contained within a "thing" that information aims to convey; we can look at the "life of the storyteller" that contains the "thing." One containment, one separating off, after another as storytelling interacts with work and a material environment, as it processes a world in a proto-informational manner that correlates identically with the formal structure of m3a,5, making the passage into a visual, material performance of its own meaning, in many ways incarnating language, bringing the abstract into visible existence, but only an abstraction that explosively disintegrates.
And even more to the point is the "Valéry citation" at the heart of m3a,5—and here I think we can go so far as to note that in m3a,5 Benjamin layers his meaning yet again by switching from the informational references to page, paragraph, and line number, over to the commentary-like "through the end of the Valéry citation" as he in fact references here, not commentary as with the numerical references, but in fact a citation, yet another instance of the oscillation of one "form of communication" to another. (As a brief aside I'd like to point out that as much as this "reading" might seem unusual, a stretch, it is entirely in keeping with the overall movement of the passage, in fact the heart of that movement since it is so centrally located, the "essence" as it were.) I'll include here the full paragraph containing the Valéry citation at its conclusion:
The intellectual picture of the atmosphere of craftsmanship from which the storyteller comes has perhaps never been sketched in such a significant way as by Paul Valéry. "He speaks of the perfect things in nature, flawless pearls, full-bodied, matured wines, truly developed creatures, and calls them 'the precious product of a long chain of causes similar to one another.'" The accumulation of such causes has its temporal limit only at perfection. "This patient process of Nature," Valéry continues, "was once imitated by men. Miniatures, ivory carvings, elaborated to the point of greatest perfection, stones that are perfect in polish and engraving, lacquer work or painting in which a series of thin, transparent layers are placed one on top of the other—all these products of sustained, sacrificing effort are vanishing, and the time is past in which time did not matter. Modern man no longer works at what cannot be abbreviated."
There are a number of things to be worked out here, not least that the heart of m3a,5 is Benjamin referencing his own work, bringing an autoeroticism to the orgasmic explosion that we might interpret as a hinging together of subjectivity with the material nature of language, an enclosed and overlapping referentality whose truth can only be revealed by performing it at its deepest level. I'll also point out here how indeed through the Arcades Project, in so many respects mechanical and informational in nature, Benjamin is placing himself precisely in the role of the storyteller, that lost art, since as we have seen the vast majority of the passages are crafted, flawless pearls, highly developed, engaged as we have seen in a "long chain of causes [references] similar to one another." Again, as mentioned above, these are the "thin transparent layers" of textual meaning that, brought to the surface, dismantle the very constitution of textual meaning itself, and in many ways Benjamin seems to want to indicate that language dismantles itself in such a way. These "products" then are precisely not "vanishing" in the way Valéry indicates, and here it is that we can say that the Arcades Project accomplishes its full realization, perhaps another level of that explosion, that now of recognizability (readability, legibility) in what is clearly intended by passages such as this to be the very reading I am attempting, that any reader I might have is attempting, a reading that is a writing, exactly as Benjamin's was, that documents and works its way through the layering inherent to language itself, a translation of a certain common, shared being, this brand textual messianism, but perhaps only in quotation marks, in many ways branding language as material.
II
As m3a,5 states, the polyhedral and abyssal experience of knowledge to which I've just referred is a force "liberated in sensation" and I'd like to point out that an important aspect of this passage is that even as we associate "sensation," through many passages in the Arcades Project and particularly in "The Storyteller," with storytelling, the artisanal form of labor—think of the handprints on the clay vessel in the above quote (or the "handicraft" at the start of m3a,5)—Benjamin here seemingly does an about-face or abrupt shift of meaning and links sensation with the informational form of communication, not storytelling. Thus what produces this liberation, this referentiality, the messianic explosion, is, while perhaps a concept borrowed from the artisanal, what must be a kind of attenuated sensation that links directly through informational content and form of communication to the industrial labor process. It is mechanism, automation, and the overwhelming tide of use-value devoid of traditional human content—in fact, what we've come to expect as precisely the "de-sensitized"—that finally explodes into what we know as liberation, where "wisdom, oral tradition, or the epic side of truth" are "razed to the ground." If we are following this passage, we need to theorize how the world created by capital, exactly the in-human world, a world of rampant oppression and the disappearance of human personality, will hold as its culminating moment, and perhaps be the only path toward, human liberation and the return of that personality (again even as we thought it would be something like the liberation of the machine, as bizarre as that concept seems). Here, and this has profound relevance for contemporary forms of communication in which a co-opted variant of liberatory protest is promulgated by barely hidden dominant ideologies ("Make America Great Again"), the machinic comes to prominence but only in the guise of a "liberation" tied in every detail to the artisanal and traditional modes of understanding. And here it is we should hypothesize within Benjamin's writing a dual nature to the "explosion" we have been focusing on, with a potentiality through technological dominance not only for a sudden leap into what we might understand as liberation, but also for a radical dropping away, a razing to the ground in perhaps quite different terms as suggested above, of precisely that liberation itself, a falling away or quantum leap into new modalities of the disappearance of what we know as the human at progressively deeper levels of the commodity and capital itself, a circulating back into existence of the primitive, the darkest underside of capital. In this sense the implications of "explosion" can be drawn out in terms of its associations with danger, violence, bodily harm, bombs, the instruments of war, the fact that it is technologically produced, and so on. This metaphor of human liberation is precisely that component of human creation—not to say handiwork—that defeats human existence. The word "explosion" exists at the intersection of these extremes. In this sense we experience the explosion only when we hold its dual meanings simultaneously in mind, a type of "dialectics at a standstill," to use another concept central to Benjamin's later writing, two paths of infinitely receding referentiality.
In this case then it is far too simplistic a view that we can either attribute truth value to the functioning of information and the mechanized labor process, or we indict that communicative and labor process by virtue of its mechanistic nature. One thing we should again note, then, is that everything in this passage, from information and storytelling to wisdom/tradition/epic and the "explosion" itself takes on this double cast, a constant dialectical receding from view into an obverse meaning. Again, my sense is that to take singularly either side of these equations is an inadequate description of what the passage is conveying, even as they fold into each other. I want to focus just one moment more on that about-face or inversion of meaning itself as the most important content or take-away in our reading of m3a,5. It appears to be an intentional incursion by Benjamin on our readerly consciousness—and reading here seems to be very much at stake—a kind of progress of the passage, of the readerly time of the passage, where we pass through a period at the start of the passage of being abstractly convinced of the redemptive nature of the artisanal and storytelling, only to have those expectations, that entire framework of values upended, dismantled, and inverted by its opposite. We can express, as I have been doing to some degree, this oscillation in a number of ways: that the informational switches or separates off to storytelling, that the mode of commentary switches to the citational, that the industrial switches to the artisanal, the oppressive to the liberated, that a kind of compression of crafted writing switches to the explosive or something with outward/inward velocity, that our expectation that storytelling will uphold and reveal wisdom, oral tradition, and the epic switches to those very things being razed to the ground. The whole vast apparatus of language, material, and history is constructed and performed only to lead us to the shock of being taken down the path of their re-valuation and completely contradictory outcomes. This, precisely, is the fate of the technological, a "dialectical fairy tale" that is invoked along the way toward an ever-increasing and abstracted incarnation of the incarnatable: material itself. That about-face of the substitution of information for storytelling in this passage then performs the deeply perilous character of language itself, of following the trace of reading, being turned against by the very prey one has so patiently and carefully pursued.
And reading is the immaterial activity that leads us through these layers of linguistic referentiality—symbolically, allegorically—to these reversals. Finally we interrogate the immaterial process of reading itself as an internalization of the materiality of book and text whose end result is a process of the reader's bringing into their imaginative space or being a transcendent historical substance within which they both appear and disappear. The question finally becomes a kind of interrogation of language itself and whether it can indeed have any liberatory character at all or whether it must exist only as a commodity to its core, the ascendance of which returns human existence to a primitive state. Again, to quote Benjamin's "Exposé of 1935," "In the dream in which each epoch entertains images of its successor, the latter appears wedded to elements of primal history." A key window into the process by which language, and hence reading, leads both toward and away from redemptive experience is Benjamin's 1933 essay "On the Mimetic Faculty." Here the primitive human trait of imitating, of finding similarities in the universe, is put forth as a determinant of the roots of language and both human production and perception. The mimetic also has a phylogenetic history of transformation such that its origins in magic, physicality, and ritual have "liquidated" over time, disappearing into the "nonsensuous" without leaving so much as a residue. Thus occult practices still form the defining elements of human existence, but the practices have been progressively mediated by new uses of language, new forms of reading and writing. Benjamin also writes of this phenomena in an earlier version of this essay, "Doctrine of the Similar":
If, at the dawn of humanity, this reading from stars, entrails, and coincidences was reading per se, and if it provided mediating links to a newer kind of reading, as represented by ruins, then one might well assume that his mimetic gift, which was earlier the basis for clairvoyance, very gradually found its way into language and writing in the course of a development over thousands of years, thus creating for itself in language and writing the most perfect archive of nonsensuous similarity. In this way, language is the highest application of the mimetic faculty—a medium into which the earlier perceptual capacity for recognizing the similar had, without residue, entered to such an extent that language now represents the medium in which objects encounter and come into relation with one another.
What Benjamin also points out in "On the Mimetic Faculty" however is that at certain points, typically when the purely informational or semiotic aspects of language are operating at "heightened" or "rapid" level, there are "flashes" of production and perception that access these nonsensuous correspondences or similarities at the core of language and hence a primitive strata of the human. This is when we "read what was never written." Again in "Doctrine of the Similar": "the nexus of meaning which resides in . . . the sentence is the basis from which something similar can become apparent . . . flashing up in an instant."
In returning to the last sentences of m3a,5, we can note that the force contained within information is not "nonsensuous sensation" but "sensation" itself, such that our conclusion must be that the more nonsensous, informational forms of communication must have at their core something more direct, more primitive, based more in the occult and storytelling itself. And this does align with the idea that absolutely regardless of what form language takes, what form of communication we use, language is still at its base mimetic, even if this force or power is increasingly diffuse, scattered across mechanized culture in smaller and smaller bits. Here we can see as well that the reason "whatever still resembles wisdom, oral tradition, or the epic side of truth is razed to the ground" is that this phylogenetic transformation of mimesis has reached an extreme in (post)industrial society, spreading any "resemblance" to its former existence so thin that former forms of life are effectively "razed to the ground," or disappear. This does not, again, mean that language has lost its mythic power, only that its traditional centrality has been displaced or is operating differently.
To sum up briefly, language, text, and hence meaning carry with them mimetic forces that originated in ritual but are now, as much as these forces are still intact and functioning, diffused throughout mechanized mass culture (a mass computerized culture we might otherwise call the digital).
III
I've made reference to an explosive sensation that is a solipsistic turning inward of mass culture itself, as much mechanistic as primitive, regressive, violent. Through the guise of liberation and progress the most brutal and destructive aspects of what we call the human come to fore. This is a deeply material version of the "explosion," but one that makes sense most clearly in the context of authoritarianism. I'd like to turn here to another passage in the Arcades Project, m3,3, one of only two to use the word "authoritarian," where it is possible to hold side by side a theory of cultural development with a theory of the role of text and text's place in that development. Once we see how those two areas develop in conjunction with each other, we can then theorize advanced contemporary models of these phenomena, definitions of textuality, and citational practice. To quote m3,3:
Closely connected with the shattering of long experience is the shattering of juridical certitudes. "In the liberalist period, economic predominance was generally associated with legal ownership of the means of production . . . . But after the development of technology in the last century had led to a rapidly increasing concentration . . . of capital, the legal owners were largely excluded from . . . management. . . . Once the legal owners are cut off from the real productive process . . . , their horizon narrows; . . . and finally the share which they still have in industry due to ownership . . . comes to seem socially useless . . . . The idea of a right with a fixed content, and independent of society at large, loses its importance." We finally arrive at "the loss of all rights with a determined content, a loss . . . given its fullest form in the authoritarian state." Max Horkheimer, "Traditionelle lmd Kritische Theorie," Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, no. 2 (1937), pp. 285-287. Compare Horkheimer, "Bemerkungen zur philosophischen Anthropologie," Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, no. 1 (1935), p. 12. [m3,3]
The passage opens with the phrase "long experience" and by that we should understand traditional or artisanal experience, effectively the same type of experience to which storytelling refers. The passage sets out to compare the loss, decay, or shattering of this experience with the loss of juridical certitudes, a loss for which the balance of the passage provides, through a citation from Horkheimer, an illustration and trajectory or telos. From early to late forms, the steps in the process of this loss include: first, "legal ownership of the means of production;" second, development of technology and the rapid concentration of capital; third, the exclusion of the legal owners from actual ownership (here we can think of a company going public, taking on a corporate structure with a board of directors and shareholders); fourth, legal owners coming to feel socially useless, with specifically this right of ownership but by extension all rights, all certitudes, being revealed as hollow and irrelevant. For the masses the certitude of any lasting value, of any certitude at all, is untenable, a shadow of a shadow, and it is into this vacuum that authoritarianism flows, both taking advantage of an absence of any real power structure and doing so by conforming to starkly, even primitive, values of control and order.
We might call this a semantic or straightforward reading of the text. But the passage also contains a theory of textuality that arises as soon as one understands the juridical certitude, specifically the "legal owner," to also include that of another certitude or owner, the "author." Here we see that long experience, tradition, as with storytelling, would be "generally associated with legal ownership of the means of production," that is, with an artisanal version of the textual creation of things like "wisdom, oral tradition, the epic side of truth" (to quote m3a,5). And we can note that once more this role is defined in specifically economic or material terms. What happens to this role, this ownership of text from a certain perspective, is that it is confronted by technology and production on a mass scale, a "rapidly increasing concentration . . . of capital," such that "the legal owners were largely excluded from . . . management." That is, a text's author is displaced by technology from that role as author; one of the processes of industrial capital is to displace the author, the story; as new economies and forms of capital take hold, in this way the certitude that was the author or story is displaced by different uses and understandings of text, specifically what we've been calling the "informational," in contrast to storytelling. The exact model for this displacement of authorship is citation itself, specifically the way Benjamin is using it in the Arcades Project, at most stages declining to contextualize texts he quotes, appropriating, even transforming, at the deepest levels the meaning of these quotes as his own. According to this reading then, text's tendency to obscure, devalue, or murder off its author as a component of capitalist progress leads to a vacuum that parallels or reinforces the political vacuum that leads to authoritarian states. What Benjamin also points to with this passage is the way he himself is implicated in a kind of authoritarian coup, given that this passage, as so many others, is effectively one long citation, displacing the author role inhabited by Horkheimer. Indeed the multiple ellipses underscore this displacement, emphasizing the author Benjamin’s role in picking and choosing what he wants of Horkheimer's text, using and abusing it, as it were. Benjamin's text, not his text at all, performs the very shattering of a certitude about which the text speaks, complains, warns. As a linguistic construct then, the passage contains within itself another version of the "about face" mentioned above, the turning away from the suspected meaning that values tradition or things like storytelling to an understanding of control as it operates through the informational and text as material. This event, then, is "given its fullest form in the authoritarian state."
We could take the analysis of what is effectively the allegorical nature of this passage further, but I'd like to conclude here by touching once again on how the Arcades Project exhibits three things I have been investigating in this paper:
- • the experiential nature of informational text
- • the way text tends over time to obscure, even as it retains, its primitive roots
- • how we might expect societies saturated with informational text to succumb to authoritarian control
As we look at the analysis of m3a,5, it is clear that the mass social organization of industrial labor—and in the contemporary context we can look at post-industrial immaterial labor—is characterized by an extreme version of informational forms of communication. Informational text promotes and embodies this tendency of separation from any artisanal understanding of communication, even as it retains its roots in the artisanal, in sensation, in what is called storytelling, a direct connection to the mimetic and the primitive. Thus in kind of psychoanalytic conception of technology itself, there is a repressed entity that circulates in a technological unconscious. At moments, what we could say is the extreme state of the informational use of language, there is a burst, an explosion, a resurgence of those tendencies informational language has obscured and buried, a resurgence characterized and brought on by the progressive "razing to the ground" of certitudes like "wisdom, oral tradition, the epic side of truth." As we have seen in m3,3, this crisis of the artisanal is structurally related to the operation of capital. But into the vacuum left by these disappearing certitudes, and as an effect of the simultaneous resurgence of the primitive, naturally arises authoritarian forms of control that indeed circle back around to satisfy those still extant desires for the old order, which perhaps had attenuated to point of losing their distinctness, to the point of the decay of the memory of their inadequacy.
