The Arcades Project - Operi

two meanings in Belamin's texts; they remain somewhat undivulged, but even so calmot
be brought totally in congruence. Once-in the 1935 expose, which in this regard sum­
marizes dIe motifs of the fint draft-Benjamin localized dialectical liuages as dream and
wish images in the collective subconscious, whose "image-making fantasy, which was
stimulated by the new" should refer back to the "Ut'-past": "In the dreaIIl, in which each
epoch entertains ilnages of its 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, the utopia" (Expose of 1935, section I). "'TIle modem is said to quote
[h'-history "by means of the ambiguity peculiar to the social relations and products of this
epoch." In turn, "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" (Expose of 1935, section V),
TIIese statements drew the resolute criticism of Adorno, who could not concede that the
dialectical image could be "the way in which fetishism is conceived in the collective
consciousness;' since conunodity fetishism is not a ((fact of consciousness" (Letters, 495).
Under the influence of AdOlTIO's objections, BeIamin abandoned such lliles of thought;
the corresponding passages in his 1939 expose were dropped as no longer satisfactory to
their author (see 5:1157). By 1940, in the theses "On the Concept of History," "dialectic
at a standstill' ) seems to function almost like a heuristic principle, a procedure that enables
the historical materialist to maneuver his objects:
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 vvriting history, ... Materialist historiogra­
phy , . , is based on a constructive principle. Thinking involves not only the flow of
thoughts, but their arrest as welL "Where thilIking 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 dIe fight for the
oppressed past. (Illuminations, pp. 264-265)
In fact, Belamin's thinking was invariably in dialectical linages. As opposed to the
Marxist dialectic, which "regards every . . . developed social form as in fluid move­
ment;' 24 Benjamin's dialectic tried to halt the flow of the movement, to grasp each
becomlilg as beilig. In Adorno's words, Benjamin's philosophy "appropriates the fetish­
ism of commodities for itself: everything must metamorphoze into a clling in order to
break the catastrophic spell of things."25 His philosophy progressed imagistically, in that it
sought to ((read" historical social phenomena as if they were natural llistorical ones.
Images became dialectical for this philosophy because of the historical index of every
single image, lIn the dialectical image" of this philosophy, "what has been within a
particular epoch is always simultaneously lwhat has been from time immemorial'" (N4,1).
By so being, it remained rooted in the mythical. Yet at the same time, the historical
materialist who seized the linage should possess the skill to "fan the spark of hope in the
past;' to wrest historical tradition "anew , , , from a conformism that is about to over­
power it" (Illuminations, p, 255), Through the irrunobilizlilg of dialectic, the historical
"victors" have theli" accounts with history canceled, and all pathos is shifted toward
salvation of the oppressed.
For Benjamin, freezing the dialectical image was obviously not a method the historian