The Arcades Project - Operi

image. Physiognomic thought was assigned the task of "recognizing the monuments of
the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled" (Expose of 1935, section VI,
end) .
The prolegomena to a materialist physiognomies that can be gleaned from the Pas­
Jagen.-Werk counts among Benjamin's most prodigious conceptions. It is the programmatic
harbinger of that aesthetic theory which Marxism has not been able to develop to
this day. Whether Benjamin's realization of rus program was capable of fi.llfilling its
promise, whether his physiognomies was equal to its materialist task, could have been
proven only by the actual composition of the PasJagen-JiVerk itself.
Modified concepts of history and of the writing of history are the link between both
ArcadeJ sketches. Their polemical barbs are aimed at the nineteenth-century notion of
progress. "Vith the exception of Schopenhauer (by no coincidence, his objective world
bears the name "phantasmagoria"), idealist philosophers had turned progress into the
"signature of historical process as a whole" (N13)) and by doing so had deprived it of its
critical and enlighteillilent functions. Even Marx's tnlst in the unfolding of the productive
forces hypostatized the concept of progress, and it must have appeal"ed untenable to
Benjamin in light of the experience of the twentieth century. Similarly, the political praxis
of the worker's movement had forgotten that progress in terms of proficiency and information
does not necessarily mean progress for humanity itself--and that progress in the
domination of nature corresponds to societal regress.21 In the first ArcadeJ sketch Benjamin
already demanded "a philosophy of history that at all points has overcome the
ideology of progress" (0°,5), one such as he later worked out in the historical-philosophical
theses. TIlere the image of history reminds the reader more of Ludwig Klages's lethal
juggling with archetypal images (UrbildCl) and phantoms than of the dialectic of the forces
and the relations of production, It is that Angel of History who appears in one of the
theses as an allegory of the historical materialist (in Benjamin's sense)22 and who sees all
history as a catastrophe "which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front
of rus feet" (Illuminations, p. 259). The Angel abolishes all categories which until d,en
have been used for representing history: this materialist sees the "everything 'gradual'
about becoming" as refuted, and "development" is shown to be only "seeming') (1'°,6;
Kl,3). But more than anything else, he denounces the "establishment of a continuity"
(N9a,5) in history) because the only evidence of th:"1t continuity is that of horror, and the
Angel has to do with salvation and redemption. TIle Passagen-JiVerk was supposed to
bring nothing less than a "Copernican revolution" of historical perception (Fo ) 7; K1)1-3),
Past history would be grounded in the present, analogous to Kanes epistemological
grounding of objectivity in the depths of the subject. The frrst revolution occuncd in the
relationship in which subject and object, present and past meet in historical perception:
Fonnerly it was thought that a fixed point had been found in "what has been;) and
one saw the present engaged in tentatively concentrating the forces of knowledge on
this ground, Now this relation is to be overturned, and what has been is to become
the dialectical reversal-the irnlption of awakened consciousness. Politics attains
primacy over history. The facts become something that just now first happened to
us, first struck us; to establish them is the affair of memory, (K1,2)
The historical line of vision no longer falls from the present back onto history; instead it
travels from history forward. Bejamin tried to "recognize today's life, today's forms in
the life and in the appaTently secondary, lost forms" of the nineteenth century (N1,U).
Our contemporary interest in a historical object seems "itself preformed in that object,