Awakening from the nightmarish slumber of phantasmagoria

Specters of a haunted world

Walter Benjamin, a critical theorist loosely affiliated with the Frankfurt School, spent more than a decade studying the Arcades in Paris, resulting in a magnum opus of aphorisms etched with concentrated wisdom alongside a codex of illuminating quotations taken from scholars, artifacts and literature from the time of its writing. Benjamin offers both aesthetic and material interpretations of ordinary everyday practices the better to understand the way in which advanced capitalism spectrally infects every social crevice of our lives and the reproduction of the larger world. What evolved in these convolutes on life under capitalism was a careful execution of aesthetic-materialist thinking stemming from the tradition of Marxism.

While it would be intellectually ingenious to whittle a work of this magnitude down to a single, central idea, it is faithful to the larger spirit of his work to suggest that Benjamin was deeply interested in tracing out the phantasmagoric experience of our lives caught within the spectral hauntings of capital. Thus, phantasmagoria is not simply a material condition but is also an experience fraught with serious psychic violence. ‘Corresponding to these phantasmagorias of the market, where people appear only as types,’ Benjamin suggests, ‘are the phantasmagorias of the interior, which are constituted by man’s imperious need to leave the imprint of his private individual existence on the rooms he inhabits.’ ¹ The combined material and psychic dissonance of advanced industrial capitalism against the larger ideal of humanity is so severe that we stand on the brink of being schizophrenically splintered; the spectral hauntings of such phantasmagoria are a complicated, layered concept trying to give voice to the spectacle of worldly collapse that has come to mark our age.

However, meditation on the phantasmagoric character of the world is not meant to be a totalizing treatise reporting our perpetual condition under the dictates of capital. The title of The Arcades Project in the original German is Das Passagen-Werk, suggesting to us that perhaps Benjamin is speaking about the liminal passageways we travel through in day-to-day experiences within an epoch of advanced industrial capitalism; the wandering that occurs through the labyrinthine material and symbolic machinery of such capitalism reveals a conflicted subject, one caught under the oppressive thumb of fetishistic practices of commodity exchange that foster a subjective abandonment. No compass will ever lead one out of such an endless maze, save the dialectical awakening to the truth that progress is the history of catastrophe.

The spirited use of a word like ‘phantasmagoria’ leaves the interested reader bewildered before a term fecund with a cornucopia of symbolic meaning. Reminiscent of the old theatrical lanterns used to backlight frightful images onto a screen, the term does mean to convey a way in which the aesthetic-material artifacts of capitalism work to infect our image-making sense of self. It is not a simple reification whereby an object is treated as a subject but, as Benjamin declares on the nature of collected commodities, we do not ‘displace our being into theirs; they step into our life’. ² Specifically differentiating between reification and phantasmagoria is not the aim of this article. Nor does this article wish to sediment the term phantasmagoria in an unshakeable definition. Rather, what follows is an exegetical gambit exploring the use of phantasmagoria across several specific contexts while leaving the term hermeneutically open.

Benjamin aphoristically reveals many metaphors throughout his convolutions that can be taken as an allegorical image of what it means to wander amid the slumberous nightmare of phantasmagoria; however, this section will focus on three in particular. Such images are allegorical in that they are imbued with a sense of our limitation as finite subjects, and such limitation always simultaneously comports us to a possible world where the ideal of our humanity is not only recognized but also ethically safeguarded. They are also allegorical, sadly, in that the objects they reference are elevated to a status of mythic standing and almost cosmological importance. These metaphoric images, in the words of Benjamin, are integrally linked to our relationship with time, suggesting:

The gambler confuses idolatry and idleness, choosing to kill time by collapsing the gift of life with statistical chance and letting the possibility for achieving something like a better world die off against the backdrop of speculative ventures for ephemeral happiness. The flâneur stores time, idly wandering about the larger architecture of advanced capitalism withholding the temporal power for worldly transformation. The collector works to accumulate a menagerie of commercial artifacts as a symbolic substitute for some deeper temporal loss. In turn, we can suggest that these three major archetypes of phantasmagoria – the gambler, the flâneur and the collector – find their experiential origins within this spectral world and can be representatively discussed by simultaneously exploring convolutions by Benjamin on fashion, boredom and the interior. While these paired phantasmagoric archetypes and experiences help to triangulate the lost subject wandering through the circuitous passageways of a ruined world, they also comport us to the possibility of awakening to a redeemed world.

For Benjamin, the image of the gambler is integrally bound up with the image of the prostitute in a rather complicated web of meaning, such that ‘love for the prostitute is the apotheosis of empathy with the commodity’. ⁴ The complementary trope of the gambler ‘is the infernal counterpart to the music of heavenly hosts’. ⁵ On the one hand, we may interpret prostitution here in a way that echoes the Marxist sentiment that we find ourselves in a stage of human history pathologically rampant with a stupefying devotion toward the logic of commodification drawn out to its natural ends in the universal selling of not only our labor power but our very experience of being human. Gambling, on the other hand, is a self-annihilation of the weak Messianic power imbued in human beings to see beyond the throes of the spectral hauntings of phantasmagoria and act toward the good of redemption. The thread between the gambler and the prostitute is one that reveals the way in which we continue to exist in this world unreflectively aware of the ways we fundamentally participate in debasing our own subjectivity. Prostitution is not at all an attack on womanhood but, as with the gambler, is something of a vivification of a trope of human experience that means to speak to the ways in which we have all learned to prostitute ourselves and gamble away ourselves before the forces of phantasmagoria. Still, we ought to be wary of the use of the prostitute as such a trope given that it could too easily make the feminine other synonymous with the wicked, licentious object of sexual difference.

The loss experienced by the gambler is one of annihilating time in the sense of squandering the combined possibility of our powers for emancipation. Citing Ludwig Börne in the ‘Gamblers’ Banquet’, Benjamin joins in imagining:

Benjamin laments the combined waste of our immense human productivity. The image of the gambler, then, is one of our toying with speculative chance for material pleasure at the loss of the temporal power to think the world differently and, in so doing, bring about a change to the material order of things that would yield the enduring happiness that is the counterpart to ephemeral pleasure ventured in games of prospect.

However, such games are not meant simply to refer to literal ventures in casinos. Instead, Benjamin is referring to the ways in which the gambler ventures his or her temporal power in idolized substitutes meant to fill the chasm of our own inaction in the world. ‘Money’, Benjamin reflects, ‘is what gives life to number; money is what animates the marble maiden.’ ⁷ The number is then a sort of cipher indicating the way in which we remain trapped in phantasmagoria through a fetish with statistical representation, suggesting that the whole of the world can be captured in a process of valuation by assigning everything a mere price. The outcome, of course, is a world of gambling: a constant, unnatural management of risk that spends all of our weak Messianic power in hopes that the odds of fate will strike in our favor and yield some fictive sense of happiness in a world that feels so direly empty of meaning. As Benjamin reminds us:

Again, Benjamin is concerned about the way in which such phantasmagoric engagements with the world sap our divinatory power, which will be explained more fully in the next section of this article as we explore the power of being dialectically startled before the angel of history. However, the temperament of the gambler and the location of its experience in the larger world points toward our task-at-hand as we continue to give tropic character to the force of phantasmagoria. The gambler, as we have discussed the archetype thus far, can be said to have its roots in an experience of fashion. As Benjamin reminds us, ‘the gambler is driven by essentially narcissistic and aggressive desires for omnipotence’ ⁹ and truly it can be said ‘only the future that has not entered as such into his consciousness is parried by the gambler’. ¹⁰ One way we can understand a world where the future has not entered into our consciousness coupled with the narcissistic drive for omnipotence is through the experience of fashion. This may seem like a strange representational pairing; however, the dressing-up of ourselves in the garbs of fashion, in all that such an activity encompasses, is something of an attempt to make ourselves something we are not, as something of an imagined greatness.

For Benjamin, fashion is where we ‘intimate a body that never knows full nakedness’. ¹¹ Thus, the phantasmagoric experience of our lives in the modern world is one where we constantly spend our energies as we dress ourselves up in the simulacra of human subjectivity. The gambler is an ideal trope to think through such an experience, for we dress ourselves up in a great variety of ways. Certainly, we don the garments of authority in vestments of social power, we paint ourselves with make-up meant to arose desirability, and we adorn ourselves with countless accessories to reflect the inner presence of a unique personality; in all of these attempts to dress ourselves up, both literally and allegorically, we still stand bankrupt of what these symbols are meant to represent. For, as Benjamin suggests, ‘fashions are a collective medicament for the ravages of oblivion. The more short-lived a period, the more susceptible it is to fashion.’ ¹² Thus, the world seems ravaged by oblivion such that authentic expressions of our personhood are laid to waste by a larger system that fundamentally devalues anything outside of the reach of commodification. Fashion, then, is a ripe metaphor giving rise to the image of the gambler who must always expend his or her self for the chance of receiving the adornments of the world that would dress ourselves up with enough meaning to live on in a time marked by its disdain for subjective uniqueness.

‘If a woman of taste,’ Benjamin sadly reflects, ‘while undressing at night, should find herself constituted in reality as she has pretended to be during the day, I’d like to think she’d be discovered next morning drowned in her own tears.’ ¹³ Such an example certainly carries a vein of sexism deserving our careful amendment. On the one hand, Benjamin might, indeed, be correct in making such a bold claim to help us realize the asymmetrical experience of structural forces at play in a world that would whittle down sexual difference as knowable only through our attempts to fashionably approximate socially determined norms of an impossible beauty. Yet, on the other hand, we can suggest that this example should be reinterpreted to speak to the ways in which all people would find themselves wrought with self-loathing and melancholia if we were ever to capture a glimpse of ourselves as we pretended to be so direly other to ourselves throughout the day. The creative energies of being that are spent to bring such a made-up approximation of self to take form is something of a daily gamble to hope that we will be seen as valued via the adornments of fashion. Of course, fashion is not meant to be strictly synonymous with articles of clothing but instead should be taken as a signifier for the valuation of our subjective self as it finds its Doppelgänger in the commodity form.

Thus, for Benjamin, the attendances of fashion impact society over time, suggesting:

Truly, then, the image of the gambler and the fetishistic quality of fashion are but a means to relate the ways in which life captured within the forces of phantasmagoria are slowly necrotized. As our lives become increasingly distanced from actual organic experience and slowly, instead, made to tarry with inorganic substitutes that can indeed be bought and sold through market forces, we find that ‘fashion is the recherché – the always vain, often ridiculous, sometimes dangerous quest – for a superior ideal beauty’; ¹⁵ and it is this quixotic quest that seeks to hide what is beneath the veneer of fashion: a slowly dying corpse deprived of the light of authentic human experience. Perhaps, such a corpse was indeed once a living, breathing human being, but one that has now been suffocated by the many layers of clothing meant to hide the splendor of our selves. However, the forces of commodification can never fully transform the material and subjective grandeur of what makes us human into things utterly ripe for the logic of exchange powering the larger system of capitalism. Such forces can only attempt to approximate subversive means for us to be made into a thing, trying to dress up that which always resists objectification.

Despite the pessimistic undertones rampant within such an analysis, we should be left with a sense of critical possibility. The deeper forces of phantasmagoria certainly carry the power to cause great distortion to our authentic experiences in the world, but still something in us will always resist such forces. The trick, as it were, is to realize we are simply caught between the nightmarish slumber of a phantasmagoric world and the possibility of a redemptive dream onto awakening. Benjamin gives us a bit of hope at the end of his meditation on the gambler and fashion; he suggests that ‘the less a man is imprisoned in the bonds of fate, the less he is determined by what lies nearest at hand’. ¹⁶

The flâneur is another symbolically rich and philosophically complicated archetype of our experience of phantasmagoria for Benjamin. The term ‘flâneur’ is etymologically derived from the French word for ‘to stroll’ and should conjure in our imagination a figuration of idle people seemingly lost and wandering about in a world of idolatry; ‘Man as civilized being,’ Benjamin reflects, ‘as intellectual nomad, is again wholly microcosmic, wholly homeless, as free intellectually as hunter and herdsman were free sensually.’ ¹⁷ The flâneur, temporally speaking, lives almost as an amnesiac: a nomadic wanderer within the architecture of capitalism unable to muster a free intellect capable of threading together an image of the self across time. Childhood has been stolen from the flâneur who never really had the chance to grow up, to live out a life that was not infected by the dogmatic dictates of an illusory capitalist world; the privileges that nourished the flâneur – culture, education and wealth – have pre-emptively marked the flâneur as an unreflective, idle wanderer of the streets whose existential condition is one of ephemerally engaging with the grand artifacts of capitalism merely through the senses. As Benjamin remarks:

Thus, the flâneur is something of an ‘observer of the marketplace. His knowledge is akin to the occult science of industrial fluctuations. He is a spy for the capitalists, on assignment in the realm of the consumers.’ ¹⁹ The tropes of personhood bought and sold within the fashion of our epoch are certainly the garments dressing up the flâneur, but the strolling – the storing of time as one places energy into a battery – is the result of having an almost alien unfamiliarity with our selves. For, as Benjamin aphoristically remarks, the deeper phantasmagoric experience of the flâneur is the ability to read from faces the profession, the ancestry, the character’. ²⁰ Thus, the flâneur is unable to engage authentically with others, and must pursue a nomadic existence absent from community. People, as engaged by the flâneur, are seen as things – destined a priori in value by the hierarchies of class relations. That is to say, human personality is a readable artifact of capitalist dictates meant for passive observation rather than active engagement. In the face of such solipsistic-like emptiness, what else would one do but wander?

Home for the flâneur is found throughout the vast, sprawling architecture of the streets and the surrounding panoramic landscape of artifacts of exchange value. While the flâneur may have never known the luxuries of the bourgeois in all of their richness of taste, the streets gives something to the flâneur of a simulated fortune:

There is much in this world to capture the attention of the flâneur who strolls the aisles of the metropolis hypnotically ensnared by the siren song of commercial distractions. The city, as Benjamin means to tell us, is something of a playhouse for the proletariat to imagine itself in the image of its bourgeois counterpart. The city functions as a mansion for the poor. Gasoline lamps are taken as the equivalent of a swinging chandelier cut from the finest crystal, grandiose shop signs double as an aesthetic menagerie of artwork rivaling the finest museums, ornately decorated park benches function as a bedroom suite, and the café terrace is a likeable facsimile to any bourgeois balcony overlooking the vestibule of an old manor. The artifacts of the city emulate a powerful, alluring luxury many of us will never fully know, but the overall effect is one of deep intoxication or felt anesthesia that numbs our revolutionary senses:

Benjamin poetically reminds us that the flâneur is a figure that is starved and exhausted by the endless wandering through the labyrinthine passageways of the larger phantasmagoric, capitalist world. The source of such wandering, an aimless pursuit that leaves one emaciated in spirit despite being a temporal storehouse, is boredom. As Benjamin discusses the matter, such boredom can be seen as something like a philosophical treatise on our apathy. While we hold all the necessary power to fundamentally change the world for the good, the forces of phantasmagoria veil us from action and work so that we forget that ‘only revolution creates an open space for the city’. ²³

One must remember that the motif of boredom in Benjamin is discussed simultaneously with the idea of the eternal return. For Benjamin, the experience of boredom is politically charged and is nothing less than the very ‘threshold to great deeds’ ²⁴ and represents to us ‘an index to participation in the sleep of the collective’. ²⁵ Thus, the nightmarish, slumbering quality of phantasmagoria presents itself again and boredom is yet another sedative, bringing sluggishness despite our ability to awaken onto redemptive justice. Benjamin describes the significance of boredom further, suggesting:

The flâneur takes shelter in the infinitely repeating pattern (arabesque) of boredom lining the fabric of our existence in a world that slumbers before its own revolutionary potential. This infinite railway of world-weariness that locks us into an endless maze of eternally repeated banality has each of us lost in something like a prison cell of our own making multiplied to infinity for ‘boredom is always the external surface of unconscious events’. ²⁷ Nothing about the parade of sycophants that would siphon value from the empty rituals of the streets can release us from such eternal imprisonment save our own moral work.

‘The universe’, Benjamin suggests, ‘is a site of lingering catastrophes.’ ²⁸ In our next section we will explore such a thought in its larger profundity while thinking about the act of becoming dialectically startled before the angel of history. However, we must remember again the dual nature of phantasmagoria and the reason why Benjamin links boredom to the eternal return. In his convolution on boredom and the eternal return, Benjamin collects a litany of quotations from Louis-Auguste Blanqui in his work L'éternité par les astres [Eternity through the Stars] (1872). ‘He thus inscribes his fate,’ writes Geffroy reflecting on Blanqui, ‘at each instant of its duration, across the numberless stars. His prison cell is multiplied to infinity. Throughout the entire universe, he is the same confined man that he is on this earth, with his rebellious strength and his freedom of thought.’ ²⁹ The world, then, is pitiable. As gamblers we spend all of our temporal power in acquiring the chimerical promises of an impossible personhood imbued in the trinkets of fashion. As wanderers we store all of our temporal power as we travel through the vestibules of the streets meant to mirror the palatial wealth of the affluent as we find ourselves imprisoned in an eternally recurring boredom. To treat these figurations and corresponding experiences of phantasmagoria as determinate symbols of our future life is to be trapped. For, if the fate of the future world is already known as an eternal return of the present, then we have no coherent sense by which to understand the meaning of the larger world and ourselves in that world. Without the possibility of becoming other than figurations caught in the experiences of phantasmagoria, we become nothing more than the broken-down matter of the commodity; we become destined to collect fragments of such detritus to repair a broken, fragmented imago by giving it coherence in a collected menagerie of things meant to mirror a healthy interiority.

The collector is a peculiar figure that has great difficulty constituting a sense of the self in a deeply fragmented, incoherent world. Such a world works in many ways to break any sense of a whole imago for a given subject into atomized form, meaning we must collect the inorganic matter of the world to find some semblance of subjective coherence for our organic life. Collection, then, is the act of trying to restore our imago by creating something of a menagerie of personhood out of the various artifacts of the capitalist world which, when fashioned together, ‘form a whole magical encyclopedia, a world order, whose outline is the fate of his object’. ³⁰ The act of collection is physiologically reductive to something of the order of a Pavlovian behaviorism reminiscent of nest-building. ³¹ However, philosophically we are talking about an archetype of phantasmagoria that takes up time and renders it in altered form; waiting for the world, and us in that world, to make sense seems to be an eternal task. Until then, we must dress ourselves up by inviting objects of the world into our psychic space to fashion a semblance of wholeness. ‘The true method of making things present’, Benjamin remarks, ‘is to represent them in our space (not to represent ourselves in their space).’ ³² Thus, for the collector the things of the world are received in the interiority of our mind, such that we do not ‘displace our being into theirs; they step into our life’. ³³

However, the act of collection carries a deep detachment from the organic world and the original functions of the objects collected are also detached from ordinary use value and instead made to reverberate subjective meaning that not only gives dramatic character to the larger world but also functions as a substitute to practical memory. Benjamin, in a lengthy passage, cogently explains:

Collection is more than merely trying to find a way to speak an image of ourselves to the larger world. Collection also enacts something like a quixotic search to reach out to a place beyond the heavens where the perfect form of things lay unknown to the world of human beings. There is something deeply irrational, to be sure, about the objects collected but this fetish for things occurs because the larger world, perhaps, is even more irrational. So, with the broken-down matter of the world we scramble to paint an image of ourselves through a private language of the things that have stepped into the space of our minds, which is an act that represents ‘the elevation of the commodity to the status of allegory’. ³⁵

There is something obscene and pitiable occurring in the act of collecting, making it a doubly important phenomenon. On the one hand, we have fallen victim to becoming a mere trope in the language of exchange relations that gives us identity through the things that we buy or acquire. Yet, on the other hand, there is something of a desperate attempt by people to reach beyond the psychically limiting and subjectively encroaching forces of the culture industry as we try to divine another sense of ourselves made from the debris of the world. ‘Private property’, says Benjamin quoting Karl Marx, ‘has made us so stupid and inert that an object is ours only when we have it, when it exists as capital for us, or when … we use it.’ ³⁶ However, the collector is trying to accomplish something much more secret, much more pitiable:

Fashioning a secret dictionary that can give meaning to the self for those who have been initiated into such a private language is a desperate plea to rise out of the quicksand of an incoherent world and draw some semblance of salvation for us on a private island of meaning. The experience of the collector as an archetypal figure lost in the slumber of a phantasmagoric world is derived, in part, from the experiential ways in which the world constantly threatens to collapse itself upon our very interiority.

Such a bout of protecting our self from the infectious elements of the larger world that would make our subjectivity synonymous with the dictates of market capitalism can be something of a maddening battle:

The person is leveled to the status of a commodity. This leveling becomes something of a pathological infection where the world of external objects breaks into the interiority of our minds. We are reminded that such an experience is one that can rightly end in madness. The infection of the interior is indeed pathological. Benjamin reminds us of the way banal artifacts and events of capitalism are something of a germ cell that becomes the cancerous protagonist in the works by figures like Kafka. ³⁹ Once such a germ begins to spread, the external capitalist world of things takes up space in our interiority. Worse yet, we have not only let the logic of capitalism into our minds but also invited in the very artifacts that will block our mental escape from the subjective prison walls of the culture industry. The need to collect becomes an affront to the symbolic, to the ability for human beings to wield a language capable of giving resonating voice to transcendent possibility. Just as the flâneur was able to retreat from a materially impoverished life by experiencing the richness of the streets as an imagined facsimile of the bourgeois life never once lived, the collection of things to bring coherence to our imago is a similar imagined facsimile of a healthy subjective state. One need only find the appropriate artifact to speak the truth of one’s personhood: commercial correlates of personhood that veil the impoverished state of our consciousness of self through the artifacts dressing up our very imagination to mirror the material character of the epoch at hand. Melancholy may, indeed, become the shelter for authenticity, a cage to hold the strange figure that would demand existential elevation. Yet, we cannot forget that these are but archetypal figurations caught in perverse experiences meant to give conceptual shape to the meaning of a world shrouded in the nightmare of phantasmagoria. And such slumber can indeed be blasted away in the moment of becoming dialectically startled before the angel of history.

However, in this triply layered image of phantasmagoria we can indeed find some sort of hope for a future that itself might contain the very spaces for belonging we so desperately need in order to give shelter to something like a dream of freedom. Toward such redemption, Benjamin suggests:

This poetic fragment taken from some of the writings produced by Benjamin on methodology suggests the importance of confronting such troubling images of a society failing to live up to its larger ideals. Benjamin suggests that these images are an aesthetic window that reveals to us the very condition of our life in a given historical epoch. Therefore, dialectical images of the lived experience of suffering in this world should call attention to the pervasiveness of certain forms of inequality, unfreedom and injustice alive and well throughout our supposedly advanced society. It is only when we confront such images that we are reminded of the larger ideals making up our society. If such issues are left unattended, then we face living in a world where dialectics comes to a standstill and the true possibility of a peaceful world is reduced from its utopian splendor to a mere shadow.

Dialectically startled before the angel of history

Benjamin was steadfast in his intellectual commitment not only to the ideals of socialism but, more generally, to unearthing the many ways our everyday reality is mechanistically caught up in the larger machinery of industrialization that sows and reaps a surplus of exchange value out of our humanity, leaving catastrophe and suffering as a by-product of its extraction. In one of his more powerful aphorisms, Benjamin offers a bit of poetic explanation for some commonly used intellectual terms:

Giving aesthetic life to this declaration Benjamin famously describes an image of the angel of history inspired by the painting Angelus Novus by Paul Klee. ⁴² The angel has spread its wings and is looking towards us yet spies out of the corner of its eye a tragedy of the past that cannot be ignored. It is a catastrophe of the highest magnitude, one marked by the fact that subsequent catastrophes continue to pile upon this original foundation. This angel, representing the weak Messianic power inherent in all human beings, stands motionless but aware of the original catastrophe. It is an image racked with guilt both for what the angel has noticed and for the stillness that has become its prison.

However, this catastrophe is not something for the simple fodder of critical analysis. Confronting catastrophe is the beginning of any redemptive project. We have to confront catastrophe if we are ever to awaken from the nightmarish slumber of phantasmagoria. Benjamin suggests to us that if it is our obligation to correct such catastrophes of present history, then we must forge what some have called an anamnestic solidarity with the dead. The words in this curious phrase are indeed purposeful. With each generation we seem to lose our memory of times past. It is not that historical texts fail to record the events of the past, but, rather, our temporal distance from such events clouds our memory of the meaning behind the sacrifices made and suffered by the dead. Following the way in which Plato uses the term anamnesis in the Meno and Phaedrus, we are told that the knowledge of the soul is eternal. In our constant rebirthing into the world we lose our understanding of the last life and spend our time trying to remember what has been forgotten. The edifice of our lives is built on the backs of those who came before, and their suffering has been pathologically built into the foundation of our present society. Without repair, such past injustice fuels our amnesia within the phantasmagoria of the present. We must animate a memory of solidarity that stretches out beyond time to all people (dead, living, and perhaps not yet born) that acknowledges the redemptive duty we must accept if we are ever to be free, either in death or life.

Thus, the angel of history is showing us that the sort of grandeur we live in today is only possible because of the continued wreck of catastrophes that has bequeathed to us the many privileges of life that come with living in empire, which Benjamin calls ‘the style of revolutionary terrorism, for which the state is an end in itself’. ⁴³ Instead, we are called to awaken to our deeper ethical obligation to enact redemption. Without such redemption we are not ever living free but simply living freely atop the catastrophic suffering of our fellow human beings. If we examine this image from afar we are, metaphysically speaking, objects made by the context of an original catastrophe of suffering playing master over our objective experience of the world; the only solution to such slavish relations, following Hegel, is to perform the sort of work of redemption that would authentically expand our lived consciousness of freedom.

The angel of history stands motionless because ‘a storm is blowing from Paradise; it got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer use them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm’, Benjamin tells us, ‘is called progress.’ ⁴⁴ The novelty of such progress is simply a reinvention of the old that ossifies our being, historicizing tragedy with the promise of an alliance with those who would usher forward the next coming epoch without attending to the ailments needing repair in the previous generation. Yet, the power of dialectical images contains within it a somewhat sublime, and perhaps even divine, quality that gives us the chance to release the shackles of the long chain of history leading back to the original catastrophe. Benjamin speaks of how our receptivity to dialectical images can indeed promise such sought-after redemption:

The antichrist Benjamin speaks of is perhaps our stillness before dialectical images. Such images are themselves experiences that rupture through the veil of progress and reveal to us the world-weariness that haunts our lives. The angel of history is the archetype of such a dialectical image, but perhaps clarity can be gained from an example. A possible image would be something like the televised open-casket funeral of Emmett Till. This moment was something of a triggering event spreading a gruesome and realistic picture of the racism so very much alive in the 1950s and justifying the coming rebellion of the civil rights movement.

Emmett was a 14-year-old boy who received the fatal backlash of the combined resentment and fear of white supremacy just over a year after the US Supreme Court voted for de-segregation. Two men kidnapped and beat this young child to death because rumors around the town had spread that he had, simply, ‘whistled at a white girl’. The police found the body three days later abandoned in a nearby river. The Till family chose to have an open-casket funeral and many came to mourn this personal loss and public betrayal, including the media. Television had only recently gained its popularity among the masses and carried a strange sort of credibility to the families watching its moving pictures that seemed to (re)present the truth of the world in its images. What people saw was gruesome, horrifying and certainly dialectical in the sense meant by Benjamin.

The mutilated body of Emmett Till spoke volumes about catastrophe, and the image bore great confusion in the sociological imagination of the larger public. We are given the picture of a murdered child whose appearance carries with it no symbol of youthful innocence, but instead seems ravaged by a sort of hatred, terror and pain that no human being could ever imaginably suffer and still remain human. Yet, Emmet did. His face is obliterated from the series of concussive blows those men belted upon his small body and his face is eaten up by the decomposition that quickly took place when he was abandoned in the river. This sort of horror makes us wonder: are we looking at the face of a child, or instead do we see a monster represented in the failure of our humanity to offer the kind of solace and shelter any child deserves?

Benjamin believed that dialectical images carry such force that they are able to awaken within us a weak sort of Messianic power to transcend the nightmarish trappings of phantasmagoria toward some higher ideal of justice always looming on our future horizon:

Indeed, the unbearable guilt one endures when seeing such a dialectical image is so potent that we might be reminded of our need to further the work of redemption. The use of terms like weak ‘Messianic power’ and ‘divinatory knowledge’ is not meant to be synonymous with religious idolatry or dogmatic genuflection; rather, these terms echo past ways in which many posed the unknowable power of the imagination to think beyond the apprehension of reality in the world at hand. It is, simply enough, the ability for our minds to grasp the possibility of things beyond our finitude, to think the ideals of freedom, justice and equality in their perfect form and through the power of judgment ascertain how near or far our world rests from such ideals. Dialectical images such as the mangled body of Emmett Till are not giving us a representation of our fate to live forever trapped in some frozen reality of racism. Our relationship to dialectical images is, indeed, quite complex, as Benjamin suggests:

Thus, dialectical images are constantly comporting us toward the realization of our shared guilt and with it serve as a reminder that we must form an anamnestic solidarity with the dead giving life to yet another chance to awaken into a new world of more just relations between human beings.

It is curious that Benjamin ended the previous convolutions with the word awakening. Benjamin believed that we must not lose hope and wallow in despair; instead, our engagement with dialectical images must ‘fan the spark of hope’ as we learn to use the varied forces of advanced capitalism against itself. Benjamin confirms this sentiment in his meditations on historical epochs:

While Benjamin would have certainly criticized television as some sort of bully pulpit giving commodities center stage in our interior spaces, he would have also marveled at the way the transmission of the dialectical image of Emmett Till played its part in triggering the social revolution of the civil rights movement. Such a widespread consciousness-raising should be enough creative inspiration and historical testimony not only to ‘fan the spark of hope’ but to set it brightly ablaze.

Thus far, we have explored the various archetypes of phantasmagoria and the possibility of becoming dialectically startled before the angel of history. This article moves toward its conclusion as we turn toward thinking about building a redemptive imagination. Benjamin suggests that history might itself be best illuminated to us through a methodological approach that draws constellations of theory and practice out of various instances of history for the purpose of vivifying the possibility of justice as a teleological projection on a future horizon of what we might become together.

Benjamin, citing correspondence from his long-time friend Theodor Adorno, describes the notion of thinking by means of constellation and its integral relation to a startling redemptive imagination:

In this section of his massive magnum opus, Benjamin collects numerous citations from dialecticians, including Marx, reminding us that ‘primal history groups itself anew in images appropriate to that century’ ⁵⁰ for history is ‘not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words, image is dialectics at a standstill.’ ⁵¹ Paradoxically, Benjamin suggests to us that it is only by suspending motion and time that we are able to replete ourselves with the critical sensibility to truly observe, at least in part, the inner workings of history and progress – which, for Benjamin, radiates an inimical relationship to catastrophe – so that we might begin to think, finally, the imaginative workings of redemption. ‘For while the relation of the present to the past is a purely temporal, continuous one,’ Benjamin continues, ‘the relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical: is not progression but image, suddenly emergent. Only dialectical images are genuine images (that is, not archaic); and the place where one encounters them is language.’ ⁵² Puncturing time is not a wound to the temporal but instead a dialectical incision to hold back the infectious, pathological automaticity of a world obedient to the march of an assembly-line rhythm of produced life. However, it is a maneuver requiring us to call forth our combined creative and material faculties to a task of perhaps impossible proportions, but one that must be addressed if we are ever to live even a moment of a free life.

The idea of constellations of theory and practice toward redemption deserves a bit of elaboration. At times, Benjamin invokes a more spiritual tone meant to comport us to a truer model of history and further communicate his belief in our capacity as agents capable of relating to history and progress differently. ‘Like every generation that has preceded us,’ suggests Benjamin, ‘we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim. That claim cannot be settled cheaply. Historical materialists are aware of that.’ ⁵³ As we stand thrown into the larger world, we are chained to a past marking our privilege in the present. Benjamin suggests that despite our phenomenal character we can access our profound ability to think in language. By doing so we hold a ‘weak Messianic power’ to divine our debt to the past, which surely, in his own words, ‘cannot be settled cheaply’. Without finding a way to bring life to these past tragedies we risk being slavishly imprisoned by the horrors of history, as proverbially doomed to repeat the unlearned lessons of the past. ‘To be sure, only a redeemed mankind receives the fullness of its past – which is to say, only for a redeemed mankind has its past become citable in all of its moments.’ ⁵⁴ Reminiscent of conjuring up what Hans-Georg Gadamer called effective history, or the attempt to build horizons of knowledge reaching back into past experiences with a hermeneutical understanding of the present, Benjamin is suggesting that without such a fullness of the past we lose the chance to live a redeemed life, a free life.

Speaking of the past is a precarious enterprise, and Benjamin is clear that this is no facile task of simply reporting facts captured in the annals of history, but instead recognizes that ‘to articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it “the way it really was” (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. Historical materialism wishes to retain that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to man singled out of history at a moment of danger.’ ⁵⁵ History, then, is not itself entirely disaggregated from the present nor simply seen as a temporal index confirming the progress of our current epoch; rather, history is a haunting feature of our very lived experiences in the current age, or, to invoke Benjamin more directly, ‘[h]istory is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogenous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now [Jetzzeit]’. ⁵⁶ Such thinking is itself somewhat counter-intuitive to our accustomed relation to history as a narrative appearing in schoolbook summations, yet those skilled in articulating the past know better, for:

Thus, thinking according to constellations opens up the possibility of effectively communicating our shared debt to the tragedies of the past. Perhaps, it is such constellations shedding light on our need for redemption which can cut through the six-second-sound-bite attention span robbing us of the very need to seriously consider our ethical relations – both along the dimensions of time and space – within the larger world. However, giving voice to such redemption is itself a challenging task given the myriad, complex layers of bureaucratic doublespeak foreclosing the possibility of speaking the truth of history and with it the present condition of our world through dialectical images. Benjamin is offering us a complicated tension between hope and despair, ultimately siding with the perpetual possibility of hopeful change as ‘the past carries with it a temporal index by which it referred to redemption’. ⁵⁸

Conclusion

We have taken a broad look through the work of Benjamin, noting the ways in which our freedom stands fecund of its own self-expression and also inhibited by the structural realities of aesthetic-materialist impediments of capitalism. First, we have reviewed three figurations of our character and corresponding experiences enmeshed in the forces of phantasmagoria: the gambler who kills time for the purchase of fashion, the flâneur who stores time traveling through the eternally recurring boredom of life, and the collector who alchemically transforms time by trying to give coherence to an imago before a world that leaves us fragmented. However, these tropes and their experiences are not fated determinations of who we are in the world. For, second, we have explored the way in which we still harbor the power to become dialectically startled before the angel of history so that we might build constellations of theory and practice toward moral redemption.

For Benjamin, the pedagogic force of such a dialectical challenge demands that we ‘educate the image-making medium within us, raising it to a stereoscopic and dimensional seeing into the depths of historical shadows’. ⁵⁹ Truly, our faculty for bringing value into this world, the image-making medium of our symbolic profundity that would allow such a gift, wields the full force of dialectical, stereoscopic dimensional seeing. The image of a world marked by the fragile life of freedom can never privilege the dialectical position of hope at the expense of eclipsing its counterpart in despair; and, of course, the inverse remains equally true. Indeed, the two possibilities can only be stereoscopically superimposed upon each other to yield something like a third image marking our ‘progress’ to build a redeemed world. It is a progress that announces both the failure of our humanity to bring about a peaceful world marred by catastrophes so totally alien to the idea of peace, but also, and at the same time, reminds us of the tremendous achievements we have indeed all made with respect to enlarging the register of that humanity in both subjective and material form.

We must, in some thoughtful manner, return the work of political philosophy to its place in the task of affirming the powers of us finite human beings. Our reason is a force that both enables and limits. We can think the finite truth of our empirical experiences in the world and at the same time imaginatively think beyond such limitation in aesthetic engagement with the transcendental beyond. Such ideality, however, can be all to the good or bad of freedom. However, the work of defending, enhancing and reworking the fragile life of freedom means that we must take both possibilities with equal gravity when choosing to live in this world and engage the labors of justice ever upward in aspiration to something beyond.