On Fascination- Walter Benjamin's Images

On Fascination: Walter Benjamin's ImagesAuthor(s): Ackbar AbbasSource: New German Critique, No. 48 (Autumn, 1989), pp. 43-62Published by: New German CritiqueStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/488232 .

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On Fascination: Walter Benjamin's Images

Ackbar Abbas

Profound aversion to reposing once and for all in any one total view of the world. Fascination of the opposing point of view: refusal to be deprived of the stimulus of the enigmatic.

-Nietzsche, The Will to Power'

The Sphere of Imagery In his essay on Karl Kraus, Walter Benjamin quotes from Kraus'

speech "In This Great Age" where Kraus speaks of "these unspeakable times":

"[I]n these times, when precisely what is happening could not be

imagined, and when what must happen can no longer be imagined, and if it could it would not happen; ... In the empire bereft of

imagination, where man is dying of spiritual starvation while not

feeling spiritual hunger, where pens are dipped in blood and swords in ink, that which is not thought must be done, but that which is only thought is inexpressible (R 242-43)."2

1. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1968) 262.

2. Subsequent references to following texts by Walter Benjamin will be given par- enthetically in the essay: I Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, 1970). R Reflections, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: HBJ, 1978). OWS One Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London: New Left Books, 1979). CB Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (Lon- don: New Left Books, 1973). KN "Konvolut N (Theoretics of Knowledge; Theory of Progress)", trans. Leigh Hafrey and Richard Sieburth, in The Philosophical Forum, Vol XV, 1-2 (Fall-Winter 1983-84): 1-39.

43



44 Ackbar Abbas

Kraus wrote his speech two months after the outbreak of war. In its labyrinthine syntax and its incongruous images, the speech conveys, if only by sheer trajectory, the excessive, overpowering, blinding nature of modern experience. Events have overtaken the human capacity to imagine them. As a result, images of experience have grown contradictory: we find starvation without hunger, pens dipped in blood and swords in ink, the congenital muteness of events.

In his own essays, Benjamin shares Kraus' sense that a crisis of experience is also a crisis of the image. Modern experience has adminis- tered a shock to the imagination from which it has yet to recover. One effect of shock is to attenuate the power of the image, making experience difficult to communicate. When a visual image is too bright, one shuts one's eyes defensively against it; similarly, when reality is over- whelming, one turns defensively away from it. In either case, one perceives an after-image (I 159). In the same way, Benjamin points out how noticeable it was that at the end of the war "men returned from the battlefield grown silent - not richer but poorer in communicable experience." He goes on to say: "For never has experience been contra- dicted more thoroughly than strategic experience by tactical warfare, economic experience by inflation, bodily experience by mechanical warfare, moral experience by those in power" (I 84). The technological forces of production unleashed by capitalism and the socio-economic organization they entail have caught the modern imagination unpre- pared and lagging behind. If more prolific than ever, the sphere of imagery is also more impoverished than ever. These are times, Kraus said, when language is "subordinate to misfortune" (R 243).

The commodification of fantasy weakens the image as well. As capi- talist society approaches universal commodification, even fantasy becomes a commodity. Just as shock experience weakens the image from the outside, so commodification weakens the image from the inside, by making the image a source of merely harmless amusement. "Sat- urn's rings," Benjamin writes, "become a cast-iron balcony on which the inhabitants of the planet take the air in the evening" (R 153). For Benjamin, the caricatures of Grandville exemplify the commodification of the image: "The enthronement of merchandise, with the aura of amusement surrounding it, is the secret theme of Grandville's art" (R

CP "Central Park", trans. Lloyd Spencer, New German Critique, 24 (Winter 1985): 32-58. OGTD The Origins of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: New Left Books, 1977).



Benjamin's Images 45

152). In commodification, fashion becomes the one dubious law of historical change.3 Benjamin adds that Grandville ends in madness. "The 'Lunaparks' are a prefiguration of sanatoria" (R 94). One cannot dabble in the realm of imagery and get away lightly.

This weakening of the image both produces and stems from a weakening grip on experience. Modem experience itself now becomes highly ambiguous: within its social space the most advanced elements can co-exist with the most primitive and regressive - and be betrayed by them. Fascism marked just such a betrayal. "Without the loudspeaker," Hitler once said, "we would never have conquered Germany."4 Here we have a clear instance of how the modem ambiguities can be manip- ulated for regressive ends. The sphere of the image also constitutes a site of betrayal. Even Karl Kraus eventually succumbed to the contra- dictions he had himself so painstakingly exposed in the biting and in- choate images of his work. Benjamin had spoken of "the strange inter- play between reactionary theory and revolutionary practice that is met everywhere in Kraus" (R 247). "If I must choose the lesser of two evils," Kraus once wrote, "I will choose neither." It would seem that Kraus could not maintain such a pose indefinitely. Three years after Benjamin's essay appeared, Kraus capitulated to Austrian fascism.

The image sphere - inflated, commodified, betrayed - is nevertheless a site of struggle. In Benjamin's case, the strategy does not consist of trying to rediscover in images a lost expressiveness by identifying with better objective correlatives for experience. Nor is it a question of the kind of nostalgic idealization of archetypal images found in Jung. The Jungian link between artistic images and nostalgia Benjamin categori- cally dismisses as "clearly regressive" (KN 19)5. Better to be crass at times (as Benjamin said of Baudelaire) than to be sonorous (CP 49). Benjamin's thinking about the image will pursue different strategies.

3. On fashion, see also "Theses on the Philosophy of History" #XIV, where Benjamin describes fashion as "a tiger's leap into the past" but adds that this jump "takes place in an arena where the ruling class gives the commands" (I 263).

4. Quoted in Jacques Attali, Noise, trans. Brian Massumi, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985) 87.

5. In "Konvolut N," Benjamin quotes very critically the following passage from Jung's essay "On the Relationship of Analytic Psychology to the Poetic Work of Art": "The nostalgia of the artist retreats from dissatisfaction with the present until it reaches that source image in the unconscious which is suited to compensate the one-sidedness of the spirit of the age. His nostalgia seizes the image, and as he brings that into consciousness, the image changes its shape until it can be adapted by contemporary man to his own context" (KN 19).



46 Ackbar Abbas

Dream According to Adorno, the rebus is the appropriate model for

Benjamin's philosophy.6 We certainly find in Benjamin's work many striking images: "the eternal is more like lace trimmings on a dress than like an idea"7; "dream loosens individuality like a bad tooth" (R 179); "boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience" (I 91); and "genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby" (OWS 67). Moreover, Benjamin's strongest images tend to appear at the most crucial part of his argument. For example, he explains Kraus' subversive use of quotation with a complex analytic image, de- scribing how Kraus "imitates his subjects in order to insert the crowbar of his hate into the finest joints of their posture" (R 252). What Benjamin said about Baudelaire - that he was ever prepared to "place the image in the service of thought" (CP 41) - can be said about himself too.

Gershom Scholem, in an attempt to subsume Benjamin under a broadly defined mystical tradition, speaks of him as an esoteric writer, a producer of authoritative and quotable sentences, where the illuminat- ing is meshed with the enigmatic.8 I would contend, however, that Benjamin's use of the image tends neither toward mysticism, nor toward demystificatory political critique as developed by the Frankfurt School, but toward a mode of critical reflection that I call fascination. By way of taking up the subject of fascination, let me begin by contextualizing Benjamin's "practice of the image."

In the context of modernity, where shock experience and commodification have weakened or compromised the image, the kind of commit- ment to the image that we find in Kraus or Baudelaire or Benjamin takes on the status of heroism. "It takes a heroic constitution," Benjamin writes, "to live modernism" (CB 74). Benjamin comments explicitly on the nature of this modem heroism. It is not the heroism of ancient times, as in the figure of the gladiator, but rather a heroism of little deeds, whose figures include the traveling salesman, the ragpicker, the collector as well as the writer, the purveyor of images. Proust, to take one of Benjamin's key examples, was an aesthete, a monomaniac and a snob - a paradigm of false consciousness. What redeems him for Benjamin is

6. Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1981) 230.

7. Quoted in Adorno, Prisms, 231. 8. Gershom Scholem, On Jews and Judaism in Crisis (New York: Schocken Books,

1976) 199.




his ability to empty "the dummy, his self" in order to "keep garnering that third thing, the image" (I 207). The practice of the image is therefore a form of cultural resistance - hence the aspect of heroism.

The social experience of modernity, then, is the larger context that allows us to see what is involved in the practice of the image. One important locus of this experience is the Surrealist project. Benjamin's comments on Surrealism clearly distinguish between various practices of the image and their implications. Benjamin remained highly ambivalent about the Surrealist use of the image; nevertheless, both his interest in Surrealism and his reservations about it help us to situate Benjamin's own practice of the image.

In Benjamin's account, Surrealism was not just another avant-garde "poetic movement," consisting of "eternal discussion" but no deci- sions (R 177). Surrealist writings, Benjamin says, "are not literature but something else . . concerned literally with experience, not with theories and still less with phantasms" (R 179). It was the most "integ- ral, conclusive, absolute of movements," radical in the way it pushed "'poetic life' to the utmost limits of possibility" (R 178) and "the first to liquidate the sclerotic liberal-moral-humanistic ideal of freedom" (R 189). Above all, Surrealism moved towards a mode of perception that Benjamin calls profane illumination, "a dialectical optic that perceives the everyday as impenetrable, the impenetrable as everyday" (R 190).9

The power of Surrealism for Benjamin lay in its recuperation of the visual: "Balzac was the first to speak of the ruin of the bourgeoisie. But only Surrealism exposed them to view. The development of the forces of production reduced the wish symbols of the previous century to rubble even before the monuments representing them had crumbled" (R 161). Surrealism discovered a method for reading and representing cultural forms which consists of highlighting the temporal gap, the hysteresis, between the wish symbols (of Progress, Stability and so on) and the monuments that embodied them. The wish symbols have crumbled under the weight of history: the monuments still stand, but as the ruins of an intention, the "residues of a dream world" (R 162). The Surrealists learned to read these dream residues by occupying the threshold between waking and sleeping, and by wearing away this threshold "by the steps of

9. However, Benjamin is careful to add: "This profane illumination did not always find the Surrealists equal to it, or to themselves, and the very writings that pro- claim it most powerfully, Aragon's incomparable Paysan de Paris and Breton's Nadja, show very disturbing symptoms of deficiency" (R 179).



48 Ackbar Abbas

multitudinous images flooding back and forth" (R 178). It is therefore thefriction between images that wears down bourgeois defenses and ex- poses their reality to view as a dream residue, a ruin, a facade, while the Surrealist is a cat-burglar, a climber of facades, a climber who "must make the best use of every ornament."'0 The image/ornament provides at least some footing in the Surrealist's progress through a world of monumental ruins.

Appropriately, therefore, a major strategy in the surrealist practice of the image is deliberate anachronism. Anachronism can take the form of showing ruins as modern, as Breton does in Nadia. Benjamin says that Breton was the first "to perceive the revolutionary energies that appear in the 'outmoded,' in the first iron constructions, the first factory buildings, the earliest photos, the objects that have begun to be extinct, grand pianos, the dresses of five years ago, fashionable restaurants when the vogue has begun to ebb from them" (R 181). Or anachronism can take the form of showing the modern as ruins, as in Louis Aragon's Paris Peasant. In this novel, Aragon presented the modern city of Paris as the most surrealistic object of all, as a site overlaid with myth and "peo- pled with untecognized sphinxes." The experience of such a city bor- ders on an experience of phantasmagoria where, because of the uneven development of the different strata that make up modern society, the modern and the premodern co-exist. The reader senses this historical differential most palpably in those parts of the city which are on the point of disappearing as a result of "progress." A "modern light" radi- ates from these unusual places, and in no place more so than the cov- ered arcades of Paris, with their "glaucous gleam, seemingly filtered through deep water ... Places that were incomprehensible yesterday, and that tomorrow will never know."" When we consider Benjamin's work as a whole, it is clearly Surrealism that bridges the span between baroque allegory and modern allegory of the Arcades Project.

However crucial Surrealism was for Benjamin, he nevertheless care- fully distinguished his own position on the image from those of the

10. "The climber of facades must make the best use of every ornament." Quoted by Ernst Bloch in his "Recollections of Walter Benjamin." See On Walter Benjamin, ed. Gary Smith (Cambridge, Mass. and London: MIT Press, 1988) 344. In the Surrealism essay, Benjamin speaks of "the breakneck career of Surrealism over rooftops, lightning conductors, gutters, verandas, weathercocks, stucco work - all ornaments are grist to the cat-burglar's mill" (R 180).

11. Quotations from Louis Aragon, Paris Peasant, trans. Simon Watson Taylor (London, 1978) 28-9.




Surrealists. If Surrealism contributed the notion - with the force of a revelation - that myth and dream images too belong to history, the Sur- realists failed to take the important next step: their approach to history via myth and dream never got out of the dream back into history, but instead plunged them further back into myth. Comparing his own project with Aragon's, Benjamin writes: "Aragon persistently remains in the realm of dreams, but we want here to find the constellation of waking. While an impressionistic element lingers on in Aragon ('mythology') ... what matters here is the dissolution of 'mythology' into the space of history" (KN 2-3). If the Surrealist project was concerned to "win the energies of intoxication for the revolution," they failed on two counts. On the one hand, anachronism as a method had no clear direction. Anachronism remained too anarchic, so that the energies of Surrealism were frittered away in what Benjamin describes sardonically as "a praxis oscillating between fitness exercise and celebration in advance" (R 189). On the other hand, the Surrealist project was undialectical, in that the participants were interested only in the "mysterious side of the mysterious," the dream for the sake of the dream, all of which could only prod- uce "overheated fantasies" which, Benjamin suggests, were no better than "the well-ventilated utopias of a Scheerbart" (R 185). By contrast, the epitome of dialectical thinking for Benjamin is "the realization of dream elements in waking," and such dialectical thinking, he adds, is the movens of historical awakening (R 162). These last few sentences from the Expose to the Arcades Project define both Benjamin's interest in and distance from the Surrealist practice of the image.

Fascination How can one use images dialectically for purposes of historical awak-

ening? To answer this question, it will be necessary to reconstruct a defi- nition of image for Benjamin, and its relation to fascination. Benjamin seeks historical understanding by acceding to the fascination of the image. His thinking about the image, dispersed throughout his work, constitutes a manual on how to use fascination as a critical tool.

Fascination is not normally associated with critical thought. In ordina- ry parlance, "fascinating" is often no more than a sexy surrogate for "interesting." Yet a glance at the OED reveals a chequered etymology which gives it a certain ambivalence. Originally linked with dubious practices like witchcraft and the casting of spells which deprive one of any power of resistance, "fascination" now connotes the irresistibly attractive.



50 Ackbar Abbas

However, the old meaning has not been completely obliterated. We are reminded time and again that in the allure of fascination lies a lure. Per- haps it is because of this ambivalence that when fascination is involved in cultural and political theory, it is most often disparaged as a state of illusion and passivity, characterized by the loss or suspension of the critical faculties. Fascination may also become associated with sexual fetishism and the fetishism of commodities and criticized for being an instrument of social and political manipulation.

Adorno, in his demystifying comments on Poe and Baudelaire's "cult of the new," provides an illustrious example of such a negative view on fascination. In Minima Moralia,12 Adorno argues that such an obsession with newness is merely "a rebellion against the fact that there is no longer anything new" in a society increasingly dominated by mass production. The "new" is therefore just another face of the always-the-same. Poe and Baudelaire's (mystifyied) response was to extract "a stimulus ... from dread and despair," to go after sensation at all costs, to let evil flow- er. Both were blind, however, to the narcotic value of the stimulus: "not for nothing were Poe, Baudelaire, Wagner addictive types." Neither could they see the complicity of the search for new sensations with socio-

political reaction: "Its pluralism is the many-colored fata morgana in which the monism of bourgeois reason sees its self-destruction glitter de-

ceptively as hope ... Fascism was the absolute sensation ... Goebbels boasted that at least the National Socialists were not boring." The "new" then becomes a "cryptogram for the most unequivocal reaction," even more so in today's world when "the appeal to newness ... has become universal" than in Baudelaire's world: "What Baudelaire commanded

through the power of images, comes unbid to will-less fascination." Adorno seeks to make connections between cultural forms and poli-

tics, but his "demystification" of Poe and Baudelaire arrives at an under-

standing of them that forecloses on his own insights. Adomo's critique seems to force him into assimilating Baudelaire to "the monism of bour-

geois reason"; in spite of his reference to the power of Baudelaire's im-

ages, he can do no more than register this power and attribute it to the deluded and deluding workings of fascination.

Adorno did not entirely approve of Benjamin's important work on Baudelaire. Between critics there arise differences of methodology and evaluation. Unlike Adorno, Benjamin did not understand Baudelaire's

12. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, trans. E.F.N. Jephcott, (London: New Lett Books, 1974) 235-238, Section 150, entitled "Late Extra."




involvement in bourgeois society to mean an identification with its ethos. Quite the contrary: "When we read Baudelaire," Benjamin writes, "... we are given a course of historical lessons by bourgeois society ... Bau- delaire was a secret agent - an agent of the secret discontent of his class with its own rule" (CB 104). Benjamin arrived at his reading employing a methodology which distinguishes itself from Adorno's method of critique in important ways, specifically in its use of fascination and the image. Benjaminian method gives fascination itself a critical role. He sees in fascination not a will-less affect, not the response of last resort, but a will- ingness to be drawn to phenomena that attract our attention yet do not submit entirely to our understanding. Benjamin works out a method sensitive to an ambiguous and complex situation, a method which in practice consists of patiently entrusting thought to the folds of the image. It never disdains to look again at what critique too hastily dismisses. Its motto might well be one of Kafka's aphorisms: "All human error is im- patience, a premature renunciation of method, a delusive pinning down of a delusion." 3 We can follow Benjamin's thinking on fascination and the image by turning first to his studies of Baudelaire. In writing about Baudelaire, Benjamin is concerned to show how social experience enters into Baudelaire's poetry, particularly the decisive 19th century experience of the crowd - the amorphous, metropolitan masses. Though we rarely find a direct description of the crowd in Baudelaire, its image is nevertheless "imprinted on his creativity as a hidden figure" (CB 120). Baudelaire's reaction to the crowd remained cautiously and consciously ambivalent: he was drawn to it, and as afldneur became part of it, but he also tried to dissociate himself through the disdain of the dandy. "There is something compelling about this ambivalence" (CB 128), Benjamin writes, and his reading of Baudelaire is itself guided by an attempt to situate the ambivalent image of the crowd. The image's ambivalence which Benjamin now shows - in moving from the poetry to the social tensions that energize it - is a measure of Baudelaire's social ambivalence as a member of the petit bourgeoisie. For this class, consciousness of the commodified nature of their (intellectual) labor has not yet been awak- ened in them. Theirs is a class without much power, hence a class with not much to do, with time on its hands, in search of enjoyment. Benja- min goes on to unravel the social implications of this enjoyment-without-power:

13. Franz Kafka, The Great Wall of China, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (New York: Schocken Books, 1970) 162.



52 Ackbar Abbas

[T]he more this class wanted to have its enjoyment in this society, the more limited this enjoyment would be. The enjoyment prom- ised to be less limited if this class found enjoyment of this society possible. If it wanted to achieve virtuosity in this kind of enjoyment, it could not spurn empathizing with commodities ... Final- ly, it had to approach this destiny with a sensitivity that perceives charm even in damaged and decaying goods (CB 59).

The analysis establishes ambivalence not as a modish indecisive- ness, but as a modus operandi which enlists the power of fascination for critique. Fascination is not a merely enjoyable delusion: "The deepest fascination of this spectacle of the crowd for Baudelaire lay in the fact that as it intoxicated him it did not blind him to the horrible social reality" (CB 59). Only in assenting to the fascination of the image of the crowd could Baudelaire, within his class position, experience the nature of the commodity and so become "perhaps the first to conceive of an originality appropriate to the market" (CP 37). If fascination has a certain ambivalence, it is the ambivalence of the mask that doubles as a gas-mask, a critical apparatus that allows one to breathe in an inhospi- table atmosphere. It allows one to work through the social tensions of the age. "The index of heroism in Baudelaire: to live at the heart of irreality (of appearance). To this belongs the fact that Baudelaire did not know nostalgia" (CP 43).

Benjamin knew nostalgia but did not give in to it. If he uses fascination for critique, it is because he uses the image as a critique of reason. In the relation between image and reason, the image critiques reason and not the other way round.'4 It critiques the tendency of reason to explain, to explain away, to rationalize, to turn into myth, to achieve homogeneity. Benjamin notes that "knowledge comes only in flashes. The text is the thunder rolling long afterward" (KN 1). The image is not garrulous. It has a hermetic, monadic quality; it closes itself off from explanation. But it is precisely its monadic character - like the storyteller's art that is also "free from explanation" (I 89) - which allows the image to arouse "astonishment and thoughtfulness." The monadic image may be closed off (from explanation), but it is not closed up. It relates to mythic continuums dialectically by interrupting

14. Benjamin's argument with the Kantian version of critique is that it is based on too narrow a view of experience. See "Program of the Coming Philosophy," trans. Mark Ritter, in The Philosophical Forum, Vol. XV, 1-2 (Fall-Winter 1983-4): 41-51.




them; hence it can be said to contain time, as "a precious but tasteless seed" (I 265). [Benjamin points out that Leibnitz "the philosopher of the Monadology was also the founder of infinitessimal calculus" (OGTD 48).] Conceived in this way, the image is potentially an agent of historical understanding. It is like a seed that protects itself while awaiting the right historical conditions for germination. When the time comes, it promises to wake us from the wet dreams of reason.

It also wakens us from "that most terrible drug - ourselves - which we take in solitude" (R 190). How can we write an autobiography that is not intoxicated with self-infatuation? How can we bypass the self? Here is one strategy: "He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging... He must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter ... For the matter itself is only a deposit, a stratum, which yields only to the most me- ticulous examination what constitutes the real treasure hidden within the earth: the images, severed from all earlier associations, that stand - like precious fragments or torsos in a collector's gallery - in the prosaic room of our later understanding" (R 26). These artifacts of a life stand out against the psychological coziness of a stable interiority, "the prosaic room of our later understanding." They are no longer there for quiet contemplation, but rather challenge in their incongruity our understanding of ourselves.

In autobiography as in politics, the no-longer-contemplative image already constitutes a form of action. Thus the revolutionary writer of bourgeois origin can be more profitably deployed in the "sphere of imagery" than in attempts to become a "master of proletarian art" (R 191). Benjamin makes this point at the conclusion of his Surrealism essay, where he also, following Aragon, makes a distinction between image and metaphor: "nowhere do these two - metaphor and image - collide so drastically and so irreconcilably as in politics" (R 191). What for example is the political program of the bourgeois parties? Benjamin answers sardonically: "a bad poem on springtime, filled to bursting with metaphor" (R 190). To "organize pessimism," it is necessary "to expel moral metaphor from politics and to discover in political action a sphere reserved one hundred per cent for images" (R 191). Metaphors explain, while images provide evidence. Metaphors reconcile us to power with stories about newness: images show us that the Emperor has no clothes.

The image is a form of action whenever it is used not as a contemplative expressive trope but as an apotropaic device. In speaking of



54 Ackbar Abbas

Baudelaire's images, Benjamin refers to their lack of originality, to their obsession with stereotypes. He also refers to their absent-minded quality, as if they were engaged in a kind offantasque escrime, a fencing with the shock experiences of the 19th century (CB 69-70). Or he speaks of the Surrealists' use of jokes, of invectives, of misunderstand- ing, of "all cases where an action puts forth its own image" (R 191). In fact, we can now see that in these and other cases the image for Benjamin is very much "an object riddled with error" (CP 103), a het- erogeneous mixture of old and new, of observations and fantasies, comprised of elements that do not cohere. Proust was to discover that "no image satisfies him" (R 6). As one turns aside horror only with an image of horror, so one will have to combat error with error.

An image then does not make things appear "as they really are." It is exactly appearance, constructed inevitably by ideology and desire, that needs to be questioned. "The history which showed things 'as they really were,"' Benjamin observes, "was the strongest narcotic of the 19th century" (KN 9). What Benjamin calls the image's lack of appearance (Scheinlosigkeit), its inability or refusal to shore up appearance, becomes its most radical quality. It initiates a game of hide-and-seek with the understanding, a game of appearance and disappearance. The image no longer pretends to give a full, satisfactory and unbiased representation of events. Rather it presents a trace, a displacement of experience. It bypasses society's representation of itself to gain entry to the unconscious of culture. "Living," Benjamin writes "means leaving traces" (CB 169) - but traces of an experience already on the way to being obliterated, traces of eminent disappearance. "Anything about which one knows that one soon will not have it around becomes an image" (CB 87). The image, therefore, like some angel of interpretation with the traces of disappearance folded in its wings, enables us to follow an experience which for various reasons cannot come to light.

Benjamin in his Arcades Project attempted to reconstruct "the prehisto- ry of the modern," that is, the unconscious of modernity. He follows the traces of disappearance by attending to inconspicuous details. In the 19th century, when the shock of modernity overwhelms and smoth- ers the individual, threatening to reduce private life in the big city to inconsequentiality, the traces of life take on a certain mute pathos. An example of such is the 19th-century bourgeois fondness for putting cov- ers and cases over objects. At one level, such a practice is pathetic, an attempt to preserve a factitious identity for objects as a compensation for




the loss of human identity, much like the practice of customizing auto- mobiles today. At another level, however, such a practice is an unconscious form of resistance. The encased objects have blurred outlines, like illegible handwriting; this makes it difficult to place and hence to control them. Benjamin finds a trace of Utopian desire even in the most banal of cases. One sees this mixture of pathos and resistance in other examples, like the practice briefly fashionable around 1840 of taking turtles for a walk in the arcades. This slow pace is the fldneur's veiled protest against the frenetic "division of labor which makes people into specialists" (CB 54). Even the dandy, whom the very notion of protest would strike as inelegant and hence alien, shows traces of resistance. Benjamin reconstructs the dandy's displaced social meaning as follows:

The trade network . .. felt the most varied, most frequent, most unforeseeable tremors. A merchant had to react to these, but he could not publicly display his reactions. The dandies took charge of the conflicts thus created. They developed the ingenious training that was necessary to overcome these conflicts. They combined an extremely quick reaction with a relaxed, even slack demeanor and facial expression (CB 96).

The dandy, thefldneur, the bourgeois love of casings, the collector: all these ambiguous figures seem like so many social aberrations, destined for the trashcan of history. However, Benjamin manages to reconstruct a whole parallel praxis from these parapraxes. "The experiences of this society . .." he writes, "leave their traces in a thousand configurations of life, from permanent buildings to ephemeral fashions" (CB 159).

The most striking example of the image as the trace of disappearance can be found in Benjamin's commentary on Baudelaire's sonnet "A Une Passante." It is hardly a coincidence that sonnet and commentary treat the subject of fascination. Benjamin's discussion of the poem comes in the context of a discussion of the detective story whose social content was "the obliteration of the individual's traces in the big city crowd" (CB 43). "A Une Passante" gives us the erotic trace of this experience of obliteration. Its first two quatrains begin by presenting the poet's fascination for an unknown woman, dressed uninvitingly as in mourning, seen for the first and last time in an anonymous crowd. "Far from eluding the erotic in the crowd, the apparition which fascinates him is brought to him by this very crowd. The delight of the urban poet is not so much love at first sight as love at last sight" (CB 45). While the quatrains present what



56 Ackbar Abbas

might be no more than a piquant situation, the two tercets that follow transfigure the situation. They show decisively that the figure of fascination is ultimately an oxymoronic figure: the moment when passion seems frustrated (the woman disappears back into the crowd) coin- cides exactly with the moment when passion "burst out . . . like a flame." The oxymoron suggests that the passion will have no outcome: it is an impotent passion, or what Sartre would call a useless passion. Benjamin nevertheless poses the question: what is the social content of this impotent passion? He implies that if erotic passion is now ren- dered impotent, then this is because the bourgeois experience of social and political impotence has invaded and permeated even erotic experience. In Central Park, Benjamin attributes this paralysis in affective life to "the paralysis of social fantasy," which comes about when "the fantasy of the bourgeois class ceased to concern itself with the future of the productive forces unleashed by themselves" (CP 37). In "A Une Passante" the coincidence of passion and paralysis creates of impotence both a gesture of submission and a token of resistance to social conditions of the age and its "fugitive beaut6."

Medusa Benjamin's gloss on Baudelaire already suggests that fascination is

not mere absorption in the image; it also involves seeing a dialectical relation between the image and history. We can now look more closely at what Benjamin had to say about fascination and history by first con- sidering some of Benjamin's images of history.

One familiar Benjaminian image is the wind of history: "To be a dialectician means to have the wind of history in one's sails. The sails are the concepts. It isn't enough, though, to have sails at one's disposal. The art of setting them is the decisive factor" (KN 21). However, a more char- acteristic and paradoxical image of history is that of the Medusa whose look turns history into a frozen landscape. "The glance of his philosophy is Medusan," Adorno said of Benjamin.15 Adorno's remark illuminates nicely the relation between fascination and history in Benjamin.

In the classical myths, the Medusa evokes fascination and terror. Freud, in a short note, relates the image to the castration complex: the Medusa represents the female genitals, and the absence of a penis fills the male spectator with horror. In fact, some of Freud's remarks have a

15. Adorno, Prisms 233.




relevance to Benjamin's theory of the image. For example, Freud speaks of the apotropaic function of horror, whereby the Medusa image is not just a representation of horror but also a device for warding off evil. In a second set of observations, Freud notes that the Medusa's hair is frequently represented by snakes (penis symbols). Freud explains the apparent contradiction with castration by suggesting that the very multi- plication of penis symbols itself signifies castration. Similarly, he observes that the stiffening one feels at the sight of the Medusa could be inter- preted as both terror (the fear of having no penis) and consolation (the possession of a stiff penis). Interesting here is the suggestion that it is not at the level of appearance that we can understand the Medusa image. "Observe," says Freud about the snakes and the stiffening, "that we have here once again the same origin from the castration complex and the same transformation of affect."'6 Similarly, it is not at the level of appearance that Benjamin reads history. There too something analo- gous to a "transformation of affect" must be considered.

Medusa as the image of history in Benjamin relates directly to the problematic of disappearance. Like Medusa, history cannot be viewed directly. Benjamin, we recall, speaks of modem experience as one of shock. And like Medusa, history in the sense of "things as they are" remains invisible and can only be represented by something other than itself. In Freud, such a ratio gives rise to the theory of the sexual fetish, a surrogate or substitute for that forever missing object, the female phal- lus. In Benjamin, this is the moment when images - monadic, apotropaic, destructive of appearances - come into their own.

Even when speaking of history,, Benjamin sees Baudelaire as exem- plary. In a world that wanted to speak of progress, Baudelaire speaks of a world "sinking into the rigidity of death. Baudelaire found this experience of a world entering rigor mortis set down with incomparable power in Poe ... Compare the head of Medusa in Nietzsche" (CP 50). Baude- laire was contestatory for Benjamin in other respects as well. While with the century's new processes of production, "appearances (Schein) are crystallized in commodities," "petrified unrest" is the image of Baude- lairean life, "a life that knows no development" (CP 40). "Petrified unrest" no longer remains contemplative; it is not a way of avoiding or es- caping from history, but rather an interruption of it, a punctuation of

16. See Sigmund Freud, "Medusa's Head," in Sexuality and the Psychology ofLove, ed. Philip Rieff (New York, 1963) 212-3.



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mythic organic continuities. It is as if only when the Medusan glance had momentarily transfixed history that history could be seen in its various and contradictory layers of appearances. Similar to his description of "the most fascinating ring" he had ever seen, a signet ring with a Medu- sa's Head carved in garnet, Benjamin tells us that the unevenly translu- cent layers of the stone, when held up against the light, make the Medu- sa's head itself appear in all its fascination (R 33).

We can relate Benjamin's Medusan view of history to his interest in photography and in the poetics of quotation. The fascination that photographic images exert can be profoundly unnerving: it was so for Bau- delaire. This is largely because photographic images "paralyze the asso- ciative mechanism in the beholder" (OWS 256). Even the most artfully retouched photograph cannot entirely eliminate "the tiny spark of contingency, of the Here and Now, with which reality has, so to speak, seared the subject" (OWS 243). The spark of contingency provides the point offissure of the image: it prevents it from closing up, from hiding behind the appearance of historical continuity or organic interrelated- ness. The fissure of the image ruptures myth: it provides evidence against it. When Atget photographed the scenes of Paris, he photographed them, Benjamin points out, like "scenes of crime" (I 228).

Quotation too, as used by someone like Karl Kraus, has implications similar to what we find in the photograph. Kraus' use of quotation has little to do with the citationist vogue popularized by some practitioners and apologists of post-modernist art. In one version of a post-modernist aesthetic, quotation becomes again a self-conscious, intertextual mode. By contrast, Krausian quotation comprises a form of mimetic criticism: it mimics what it criticizes. Inauthenticity is performed and exposed "behavioristically." Like the photograph, quotation has a kind of ambiguous modesty: it keeps quiet and lets the other speak, but on the tacit understanding that everything that is said can be used in evidence against the speaker. It is "a silence turned inside out" (R 243). Hence Benjamin can say that "to write history therefore means to quote history" but adds the important caveat that "the concept of quotation implies that any given historical object must be ripped out of its context" (KN 24).

Quotation, the photographic image, the Medusa figure: all three con- firm what Benjamin was to argue in the "Theses on the Philosophy of History," namely that historical thinking involves "not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well" (I 264). What is catastrophic on the other hand is an ideology that insists on seeing history as progress, an ideology




that automatically celebrates the status quo. As Benjamin puts it: "That 'things just go on' is the catastrophe ... Strindberg's thought: Hell is not something that lies ahead of us - but this life here." Redemption, Benjamin adds, "looks to the small fissure in the ongoing catastrophe" (CP 50). Paradoxically, the transfixing image makes the historical fis- sures appear, and it is at this moment of fissure that the image becomes dialectical.

The dialectical image is that image marked by an "historic index" (KN 8) and appears "when thinking reaches a standstill in a constellation saturated with tensions ... This image is the caesura in the movement of thought" (KN 24). It marks the point when "the past and the present moment flash into a constellation" (KN, 8). Thus Benjamin can say, in a crucial formulation, that "image is dialectic at a standstill" (KN 8). This formulation emphasizes the necessity of tracing a movement or fissure even in - especially in - the objects and monuments that confront us with a kind of immovable finality. The dialectical image marks a point of cross-over. It has little to do with T. S. Eliot's search for "the still point of the turning world." Similarly, when Benjamin says that the dialectical image is a "dream image" (R 157), he means that it manifests itself to contemporaries in that form, in its phantasmagoric form as it were. The historian must now take on "the task of dream interpretation" (KN 10).

Seeing the dialectical nature of the image requires a kind of reading that Benjamin calls allegory, a Medusan kind of reading. "Majesty of the allegorical intention: destruction of the organic and living - the extin- guishing of appearance" (CP 41). As our discussion has implied, allegory involves seeing the image as historical, but it also involves, more radical- ly, seeing history itself as imagistic: that is, history is to be grasped in its images. "For the historic index of the images doesn't simply say that they belong to a specific time. And indeed, this 'coming to legibility' marks a specific critical point of the movement within them. Every present is de- termined by those images which are synchronic with it: every now is the moment of a specific recognition" (KN 8). Here we find a double point: an historical moment can be understood in terms of the images that become legible at that moment; at the same time, images become legible only at a critical moment. "Criticism" and "crisis" have the same root: the critical moment is a moment of danger, when historical meaning itself is at risk, a moment when dream images are recognized behind their incognitos. Benjamin situates allegory within this moment of danger.



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"The image that is read," he says, "I mean the image at the moment of recognition, bears to the highest degree the stamp of the critical, dan- gerous impulse that lies at the source of all reading" (KN 8). For the same reason, Benjamin says that "every image of the past which is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to dis- appear irretrievably" (I 257). Catastrophe need not be an explosive moment; it could be the implosive silence of non-recognition.

Melancholy When Maurice Blanchot says that "to write is to arrange language

under fascination . . when there is no more world, when there is no world yet,"" he is alluding, through a reflection on writing, to an affinity between fascination and crisis. In this light, the fascination for fascination in some forms of contemporary discourse surfaces as a symp- tom of cultural crisis looking for ways to come to terms with itself.

Jean Baudrillard's discourse on postmodernism struggles with such self-reflexivity. Baudrillard has written challengingly on the implica- tion for today of fascination and the image. He argues that in the postmodern "society of consumption," one consumes no longer objects but codes. In this situation the distinction between "the real" and the "illusory" is finally collapsed and is replaced by the "hyperreality of simulation." In hyperreality, the abolition of distance that Benjamin spoke of as the decay of aura ushered in by mechanical reproduction reaches the point of no return with the advent of electronic media. There is now no distance that would permit a scene to unfold. Instead of scene, spectacle, prospect, perspective, we find the obscene, where everything is brought to us in close-up, as in a pornographic movie.

Baudrillard's radical argument is that in hyperreality the "critical thought" that judges, discriminates and produces difference loses its cutting edge because it relies precisely on what is no longer available, the scenic distance that has been abolished. Instead of critical thought, Baudrillard turns to fascination, which he calls a challenge to reference, message, code. "For fascination does not stem from meaning, it is rather exactly proportionate to the alienation of meaning ... None of the watch-dogs of meaning can understand that. Meaning is morally out- raged by fascination." 8 The symmetry of this argument with Adorno's

17. Maurice Blanchot, The Gaze of Orpheus, trans. Lydia Davis (Barrytown, New York: Station Hill, 1981) 76-7.

18. Jean Baudrillard, "The Implosion of Meaning in the Media and the Implosion




is uncanny. Whereas Adorno's critique rejects fascination, Baudril- lard's advocacy of fascination snubs critical thought. It also snubs affectivity. For Baudrillard, the contemporary form of ecstasy is not the hot, sensual ecstasy of former times but the cool ecstasy of communication,19 which knows neither alienation nor melancholy, whose em- blem might be the Cyberpunk hero's mirrorshades, a prosthetic device that turns the system's logic back on itself by duplicating it, reflecting both meaning and affect without absorbing them.20

Benjamin was prescient of the dangers of the mass media producing a situation in which "things press too closely on human society." He knew how in advertisements "sentimentality is restored to health" and how in films "people whom nothing moves or touches any longer are taught to cry again" (OWS 89). It led him to write: "Fools lament the decay of criticism. For its day is long past" (OWS 89). Nevertheless, unlike Baudrillard, his own criticism did not abandon the critical project, but attempted to reconceive it in new and non-contemplative ways. Moreover, for all its intellectuality, Benjamin's criticism is an affective criticism, a criticism of affectivity both in its rejection of sentimentality and stupor and in its use of fascination. And if we remember Marx's still pertinent remark that "the cultivation of the five senses is the work of all previous history," it becomes clear that a genuine affective criticism like Benjamin's can only be historically grounded.

In reflecting on fascination and the image in Benjamin, one is struck first by his extraordinary tact, and then by his melancholy. In Benjamin, tact is - as he said of Kraus - a form of moral alertness. It has nothing to do with tact in the weak bourgeois sense of knowing how to avoid committing the socialfaux pas, though it expresses itself as a kind of cour- tesy towards the subject, the "Chinese pitch," which allows one "not only to approach the king as if he had been born with the crown on his head, but the lackey like an Adam in livery" (R 244). Tact suggests touch, the tactile: we see this in Benjamin's own images which give the most ab- struse thought an urgent, visceral quality. Finally, tact suggests tactics, strategy: Benjamin's weapon is not, as it is for Kraus, the crowbar of

of the Social in the Masses", in The Myths of Information, ed. Kathleen Woodward (Madi- son: Coda Press, Inc., 1980) 146.

19. See Jean Baudrillard, "The Ecstasy of Communication," in The Anti-Aesthetic, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, 1983) 126-134.

20. See Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology, ed. Bruce Sterling (London: Paladin, 1988).



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hate, but the shimmer of interpretation, which is what allows him to construct his careful reading of the things of the world.

In speaking of Benjamin's tact, one should nevertheless not forget a more somber side, the melancholy that accompanied his thought like a shadow. Astrology tells us that those who like Benjamin are born under the sign of Saturn suffer from melancholy. But melancholy is not just an astrological affliction or even a biological one, as Benjamin well knows. He himself pointed out that if the allegorical image of melancholy in the 17th century was the corpse, in the 19th century it was the souvenir, the corpse of an experience (CP 54-5).

What then is the melancholic? In Benjamin, the melancholic is someone divided in loyalty between the orderliness of knowledge and the fascination of a world in disarray. Hence there are two types of melancholy. While some melancholics would betray the world for the sake of knowledge (OGTD 157),21 Benjamin's melancholy is of a different order: it stems from a refusal to betray the world. Here his closest affinity is with Kafka rather than Baudelaire or Proust. His second essay on Kafka includes what amounts to a succinct typology of melancholy. There he shows that there are two different responses to the present situation where the "consistency of truth" has been lost:

Many had accommodated themselves to it, clinging to truth or whatever they happen to regard as truth and, with a more or less heavy heart, forgoing its transmissibility. Kafka's real genius was that he tried something entirely new: he sacrificed truth for the sake of clinging to its transmissibility, its haggadic element. Kaf- ka's writings are by their nature parables. But it is their misery and their beauty that they had to become more than parables (I 147).

Benjamin's melancholy, like Kafka's, was his personal form of heroism. It al- lowed him to write. It alerted him to the fascination of the image, where his tact and his melancholy ultimately came together in the most productive way.

21. One may cite two examples. One is the nlclacholyv of Flaubert wlenl conl- fronted by history. Benjamin quotes Flaubert's remark: "Few will be able to guess how sad one had to be in order to resuscitate Carthage" (I 258). The other is the melancholy of linguistic "overprecision": "over-naming as the deepest linguistic reason for all melancholy ... and of all deliberate muteness" (R 330).



Documents

On Fascination- Walter Benjamin's Images