The Arcades Project - Operi

ment with dmgs. Both represented attempts to break the fixations and the encmstations
in which thinking and its object, subject and object, have been frozen under the pressure
of industrial productionY In dreams as in narcotic intoxication, Benjamin watched "a
world of particular secret affinities" reveal itself, a world in which things enter into lIthe
most contradictory communication" and in which they could display Ilindefinite affinities"
(A°,4-5). Intoxication and the dream seemed to urllock a realm of experiences in
which the Id still communicated mimetically and corporeally with things. Ever since his
earlier philosophical explorations, Benjamin sought a concept of experience that would
explode the limitations set by Kallt and regain "the fullness of the concept of experience
held by earlier philosophers," which should restore the experiences of theology.12 But the
experiences of the Surrealists taught him that it was a matter not of restoring theological
experience but of transporting it into the profane:
These experiences are by no means limited to dreams, hours of hashish eating or
opium smoking, It is a cardinal error to believe that, of "Surrealist experiences;' we
know only the religious ecstasies or the ecstasies of dnlgs . ... But the uue, creative
overcoming of religious illumination certainly does not lie in narcotics. It resides in a
prqfone illumination, a materialistic, anthropological inspiration to which hashish,
opium, or whatever else can give a preliminary lesson. (SUI, 2:208-209)
Benjamin wanted to carry such profane illuminations into history by acting as an interpreter
of the dreallls of the nineteenth-century world of things. The epistemic intention
manifest here seems to fit in vvith the context of Benjalnin's soon-to-be-formulated theory
of mimetic ability, which is, at its core, a theory of experience. 13 The dleory holds that
experience rests on the ability to produce and perceive similarities-an ability dlat underwent
significallt change in the course of species history. In the begimling a sensuous,
qualitative type of behavior of mcn toward things, it later transformed itself phylogenetically
into a faculty for apperceiving nonsensuous similarities, which Benjamin identified
as the achievements of lallguage and writing, Vis-a.-vis abstracting cognition, his concept
of experience wanted to maintain immediate contact -widl mimetic behavior. He was
concerned about "palpable knowledge" (gifiihltes Wissen), which "not only feeds on the
sensory data taking shape before his eyes, but Call very well possess itself of abstract
knowledge-indeed, of dead facts-as something experienced and lived through" (eO,I),
Images take the place of concepts-the enigmatic and vexing dre