The (in)actuality of Walter Benjamin: On the relation between the temporal and the social in Benjamin's work

Introduction

It is not too much to say that Benjamin's distinctive brand of redemptive critique is motivated by a form of cognitive impotence: The impossibility of escaping the form of linear temporality which is captured in the traditional sense of “history.” Benjamin's reading of the painting of Paul Klee, the “angel of history,” makes this very clear:

This is how the angel of history must look. His face is turned toward the past. Where a chain of events appear before us, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet. (4: 392, I. 2: 697) ¹

Where the angel sees the hidden circular and reiterative structure of mythic temporality, we cannot evade the sense of “a chain of events.” Evidently, we cannot make sense of a concept of history without direction or continuity. Benjamin's critical “method,” his concept of the “dialectical image”—or better, his very way of writing—is conceived as an attempt to escape this continuous template, to do what cannot be done; that is, to let the reader glimpse the true sense of history; history as the compulsive iteration of “the same,” or even as “one single catastrophe.”

Benjamin's philosophy of history and his notion of temporality have to be understood in connection with his understanding of actuality; his attempt to foreground a sense of urgency in the face of historical development and thus to alter our very “sense” of history. It is not too much to say that Benjamin's critical endeavor depends on his ability to provoke this sentiment in his readers.

And yet, as we shall see, another sense of actuality emerges in Benjamin's work, which is profoundly different from the sense of “messianic” actuality that he wishes to confer on the reader. It is this other sense of actuality which stands at the center of this paper. This latter sense of actuality can only be produced collectively. Moreover, it is only indirectly related to questions regarding material age, technological development, or innovative status. Rather, “the actual” in this sense is the “popular,” that which stands at the center of collective attention right now. The paradigmatic example of this form of actuality is of course the fashionable object. By the same token, the in-actual is the object gone out of fashion or in other ways left behind by the collective. This paper seeks to unfold and describe this form of collectively generated actuality. I hope to show that one can find no better textual basis for this task than Benjamin's work.

This is of course controversial. Indeed, a negative attitude toward this form of actuality prevails among Benjamin's interpreters. Most, if not all, attempts in the “Benjaminian” literature to address the question of actuality in and through Benjamin somehow touch on aspects of collective actuality only to distance themselves from it. Typically, Benjamin's interpreters wish to judge actuality by more cognitive and intellectually justifiable standards, or they focus exclusively on Benjamin's own messianic or theological concept of actuality, or they simply lack interest in collective actuality (see, for instance, Habermas, 1981; Isenberg, 2001; Koepnick, 1999: 213–238; Lindner, 1992; Weigel, 1997: 213–229; Wohlfarth, 1999). ²

As I will try to establish in this paper, however, it is not as easy to escape the concept of collective actuality as Benjamin's interpreters seem to think. I intend to demonstrate the intrusion of aspects of collective actuality into the very core of Benjamin's philosophy of history, his concept of messianic actuality, his conception of method, and his style of writing. Paradoxically, as I will argue, what is profoundly actual in Walter Benjamin is his way of describing the in-actual. This is not merely to repeat the established fact that notions of the obsolete, of refuse, of the forgotten, permeate his work. Rather, I attempt to show that the very sense of neglect, refuse, and obsolescence marking Benjamin's object-world results from the fact that the objects he sought out and described were once placed at the focal point of the collective imaginary. In reality, what intrigues Benjamin is the object left behind by the collective. This realization not only leads to a critique of Benjamin's own reflections on the concept of actuality but also to new reflections on the actuality of Walter Benjamin.

First, I take a step back to reflect in more sociological terms on the experience of actuality in modernity. Second, I return to Benjamin to show how constant phenomenological changes induced by the transience of modern forms of collective synchronization decisively inform his work—partly without his awareness. Third, I reflect on the actuality of Benjamin's work. Before we move on, however, an explanation of what precisely is meant by the phrases “collective actuality” and “collective synchronization” is in order.

Collective actuality

Sociology, from Durkheim to American microsociology, has traditionally focused on concrete interaction when it comes to explain the sensation of felt sociality, “effervescence,” or “we-feeling.” Alfred Schutz thus centers on the face-to-face-relation in defining the “we-relation” (1971: 25–26):

In the face-to-face situation, the conscious life of my fellow man becomes accessible to me by a maximum of vivid indications. Since he is confronting me in person, the range of symptoms by which I apprehend his consciousness includes much more than what he is communicating to me purposefully. I observe his movements, gestures, and facial expressions; I hear the intention and rhythm of his utterances. Each phase of my consciousness is coordinated with a phase of my partner. (1971: 29)

On such occasions, Schutz is on the verge of leaving behind his Weberian notion of action in favor of an investigation into “primordial” forms of sociality, which emerge at the level of preconscious synchronization. ³ We find the same inclination in Harold Garfinkel's work:

The listener experiences the occurrences of the other's action as events occurring in outer time and space, while at the same time he experiences his interpretative actions as a series of retentions and protentions happening in his inner time and connected by the intention to understand the other's ‘message’ as a meaningful unit. The communicator's speech, while it goes on, is an element common to his as well as the listener's vivid present. Both vivid presents occur simultaneously. A new time dimension is therefore established, namely, that of a common vivid present. (2006: 116)

Garfinkel focuses on the dimension of actuality in Schutz's account: A felt intensification of time through collective synchronization results in the sensation of a shared “vivid present.”

We recognize these ideas of an intensification of felt time from Durkheim's account of forms of collective synchronization. Such synchronization takes place not only in actual aboriginal ritual but also in tribal life as such, organized around reiterative and orderly patterns of gathering and dispersal. There is no doubt that the late Durkheim's account of ritual behavior is founded on concepts of synchronization. ⁴

However, at the same time, Durkheim's account possesses interesting features that allow for a departure from the insistence on copresence. With the increasing circulation of identical objects and images in modern culture, it becomes ever more obvious that the interactionist perspective cannot stand alone. And, as a matter of fact, what Durkheim tells us is that the social has never simply ended where the crowd ends—objects have always had a socially mediating role. The charged object integrates the clan between the periods of actual gathering, thus keeping the clan “together” even when its members are scattered over vast distances. In this way, Durkheim undermines his own sharp distinction between gathering and dispersal and opens up new perspectives. The modern circulation of objects makes it possible to extend and decentralize dynamics of synchronization or effervescence, and thus to enlarge the cult on an unprecedented scale. ⁵ But this modern cult is often ephemeral. Its duration varies with the duration of its corresponding cultic object fascination, ranging from the most ephemeral fad (with its promotion of a high sense of actuality), via longer lasting “classic” artistic and intellectual objects, to “timeless” national or religious symbols. ⁶

Moreover, following Durkheim the effervescent “energies” resulting from collective synchronization emanate toward us from the cultic object placed at the center of collective attention: Durkheimian symbolism is essentially a form of projection. ⁷ It conveys the cultic object with a conspicuous phenomenology. This feature gains importance in a mediated scenario where the collectives in which we participate has become increasingly anonymous. Diffuse and vague collective sentiments imperceptibly influence our interests, fascinations, and desires “behind our backs.” Most often we do not see or feel this collective; it is, as it were, incarnated in the object world. In this sense, the Zeitgeist is a social occurrence, a large-scale and anonymous form of collective synchronization that defines the limits of a certain period. This process always takes place through certain object fascinations or aversions—the objects we remember when we think back to a certain epoch of our lives.

Durkheim was right when he emphasized the lack of an all-encompassing and simultaneous “collective consciousness” in modern society. But he remained too focused on the level of the whole. He did not see with sufficient clarity the complicated network of more or less ephemeral, more or less intensive, more or less vaguely defined cults interlacing, and overlapping across the fabric of modern society, none of them stretching to cover the whole. He also neglected the ephemeral and aesthetic dimension of modern experience in favor of an impossible insistence on stable political or moral pseudoreligious narratives. Consequently, to capture our very sense of modernity, we need to convey Durkheim's static template—the focus on common object fascinations, around which collective formations turn—with a dynamic dimension.

A last clarification: The concept of the social proposed here is of a mass-psychological flavor. Even though my influences—Schutz, Garfinkel, and Durkheim—would reject such a positioning, there can be no doubt that the tenor of the late Durkheim's concept of effervescence is essentially mass psychological, or that the figures of mutual synchronization found in Schutz and Garfinkel can be found also in larger collective aggregates. The reason for taking my point of departure in the writings of Schutz and Garfinkel is the explicit relation between collective synchronization and the experience of actuality to be found therein. Durkheim contributes to the framework by tying this sense of actuality to phenomenological changes to an object standing at the center of effervescent synchronization. This focus on mediation makes it possible to leave the interactionist perspective behind and connect to the large-scale, anonymous, and dynamic forms of collective synchronization characteristic for modern society. We could have elaborated this framework further by consulting Herbert Blumer on “collective selection” (1969) or Randall Collins on “interaction ritual” (2004), yet the basic dynamic is clear: Collective effervescence is inseparable from a sensation of actuality; it originates in forms of collective entrainment, synchronization, or convergence (I shall not here seek to distinguish between these concepts); and it is projected onto a shared object.

Albeit lacking an explicit understanding of these dynamics, Michel Foucault's less known version of his famous text on Kant and the enlightenment, “Qu'est-ce que les lumières?” (1994) is illustrative. Indeed, Foucault's text is essentially a text on actuality. He understands the French Revolution as an event or “object” around which effervescent collective “gathers” and “synchronizes.” Basically, he sees the modern experience of history as a “temporalization” or “dynamization” of the Durkheimian template. What is actual changes with the collectives forming around it. Writing about Immanuel Kant's reception of the French revolution, Foucault states that:

[Kant is] not [interested in] the revolutionary drama itself, [but in] the way in which the revolution is turned into a spectacle, how it is perceived by the surrounding spectators who do not participate, but who observes it, who are present, and who, for better or for worse, let themselves get carried away. (1994: 684)

It is through the “great revolution” that Kant addresses the “question” of “his belonging to a definite ‘we’” (1994: 680). This collective is held together by its relation to the shared and charged event. It cannot be understood as an externally or statistically defined “generation”; rather, its temporal borders are a result of social synchronization, of a vague sense of belonging—and of “tuning-in”—to a collective.

Now, it would be too much to assert that the modern collective is held together exclusively by common object fascinations (or aversions). Granted, modern culture possesses a high degree of rational forms of collective coordination, of both a functional—“systemic”—and communicative nature. But the effervescent forms of coordination that interested Durkheim have not simply disappeared. They are not sublimated into Kantian or Habermasian forms of esteem (Achtung) for reason or for the better argument; nor are they completely eclipsed by the commodity or circumscribed by functional imperatives, as in the writings of the early Frankfurt School. Both positions wish to explain collective coordination, or collectively engendered fascinations, desires, and identifications, without taking into consideration the concrete effervescent processes of synchronization taking place around these fascinations—producing, nourishing, and reinforcing them in the first place. In my view, this is simply untenable.

Effervescent energies—consciously or unconsciously inherent to all belonging to a “we”—constantly and indiscernibly influence our judgments, our discourses, and our artistic endeavors. Sometimes such forces assert themselves and override practical, cognitive, or aesthetical criteria; as Foucault remarks, individuals “let themselves get carried away.” Sometimes there is simply no apparent reason behind the collective actualization of this or that object other than the effervescent synchronization taking place around it. This is what we acknowledge when we discard our former fascinations, or those of others, as “merely fashion.”

It is time to come back to Benjamin.

Collective in-actuality

In contrast to the young Benjamin, who at times takes the powers of collective synchronization and the sense of “actualization” they generate seriously, ⁸ the older Benjamin—and the secondary literature—largely neglects or even covers up these dynamics. Benjamin's treatment of the “energies of the unfashionable” in his essay on surrealism is symptomatic of this. Never does he recur to the actual collective gatherings and dispersals underlying the phenomenological changes to the objects in question. Even where he grants the existence of a living modern cult—as for instance in the case of the fascist “aestheticization of politics” in the so-called Artwork Essay—its inherent social forces tend to disappear (4: 251–283, 3: 101–133, I. 2: 506–508, VII. 2: 382–384). In Benjamin, virtually all modern cults are “formed” or “reproduced” from above; rarely do they assert themselves in their own right. ⁹ Moreover, Benjamin never explicitly acknowledges that mechanical reproduction does not dispel aura but rather enhances it. ¹⁰ As we have seen, mass production and mediation do not eclipse ritual, but enlarges and decentralizes it. Indeed, the very point of departure of Benjamin's famous essay is the existence of a highly mediated fascist cult.

In light of these ambivalences, it is surprising to note that Benjamin deliberately seeks out objects and places where a (former) collective is tangible. The spaces that interest Benjamin are exactly those where the former presence of an effervescent and fascinated collective still resonates: The arcades, the baroque “mourning-play,” the outdated are not simply illustrations of Benjamin's flair for the “failed,” but rather objects that once were anything but rejected and refused. As a matter of fact, it is exactly those objects whose collectively generated attractions were most intense that subsequently take on the special appearance that interests Benjamin.

Benjamin ignores this collective aspect of his own fascinations. It is telling, for instance, how the effervescent collective, almost completely missing in Benjamin's later treatment of the arcades, is directly present in one of his main influences, namely Franz Hessel's treatment of the Berlin Kaysergalerie:

The whole center of the arcade is empty. I rush quickly to the exit. I feel the ghostly hidden crowds of people from days gone by, who hug the walls with lustful glances at the tawdry jewellery, the clothing, the pictures […]. At the exit, at the window of the great travel agency, I breathe more easily; the street, freedom, the present. ¹¹

The well-known Benjamin interpreter Susan Buck-Morss essentially continues in the same vein:

[Only] because these decaying structures [the arcades] no longer [hold] sway over the collective imagination, is it possible to recognise them as the illusory dream images they always were. Precisely the fact that their original aura has disintegrated makes them invaluable didactically. (1989: 159)

In another article, Buck-Morss directly describes how objects robbed of their cult change their appearance: the Parisian arcades, once magical “fairy grottoes” (V. 1: 614), suddenly appear, we are told, as narrow and stifling, “their perspective claustrophobic, their gaslight too dim” (Buck-Morss, 1995: 6). And yet, also in Buck-Morss' account, the relation between the social and the phenomenological disappears as an object of investigation in its own right.

Nonetheless, the phenomenology of the failed and rejected constitutes a basic and constant theme—maybe the constant theme—in Benjamin's work. This is so not least for “methodological” reasons. As early as in his book on the Baroque, Benjamin tells us that the utopian “origins” of (another) future are to be recovered in “the most peculiar and exaggerated [verschrobensten] of phenomena, in the most impotent and clumsy attempts, just as in the overripe figures of decadence [Spätzeit]” (I. 1: 227).

In his early essay on surrealism, “Traumkitsch” we find parallel impulses. ¹² In both cases, it is in the refused, failed, and exaggerated object that collective dreaming crystalizes; it is here the redemptive critic may seek out progressive thoughts, wish images, or utopian claims. It is this “method” that he later wants to reinvent and put to use in relation to the object world of 19th-century Paris. In the Passagen-werk, he notices laconically “The pathos of this work: There are no periods of decline. [I attempt] to see the nineteenth century just as positively as I tried to see the seventeenth, in the work on Trauerspiel” (1999: 458, V. 1: 571). In the period of high modernity, it is the arcades, (early) cultural industrial kitsch, the world exhibitions, old playthings, the bourgeois intérieur, it is the faded phantasmagorias of a Grandville, a Saint Simon or a Fourier, that provide the easiest access for the critic to the former focal points of collective dreaming.

What is important to us, however, is what Benjamin overlooks: that such phenomenological changes mirror integrations and disintegrations—gatherings and dispersals, to use a Durkheimian vocabulary—at the social level. Benjamin moves in another direction: With fatal consequences, he insists on the Marxist vocabulary. His attempt to wrap up these cultic forces and their phenomenological correlate in the black box of Marx's commodity fetish has harmed his own work and the phenomena he investigated. The bleak picture of the social under capitalist conditions, the one-sided focus on the commodity as an eclipse of the social and on the isolated and alienated individual “atom,” have not only caused early critical theory to overlook its proper participation in an effervescent collective—a Marxist cult, the traces of which cannot escape the contemporary reader—but have made it blind to all species of effervescent synchronization.

Moreover, as Susan Buck-Morss (1995) has convincingly shown, there is no qualitative difference between the socialist phantasmagorias of “production” and the capitalist phantasmagorias of “consumption.” To posterity, the wish images of the early Soviet era are in every way as excessive, totalitarian, and megalomaniacal, or overtly idyllic, kitschy, and naive, as the ones found in capitalist culture—and, correspondingly, just as apt to harbor the claims to happiness to be rescued by redemptive critique. Strangely enough, this parallel does not make Buck-Morss question Benjamin's Marxist framework; nor does it prompt her interest in the relation between effervescent collectivity and the traces it leaves behind in the object world. The same goes for Benjamin himself.

And yet, as we shall see in the following, Benjamin's work may decisively facilitate an investigation into the temporal and phenomenological consequences of our embeddedness in forms of effervescent synchronization. One may say that a fascination with the “revolutionary energies of the outdated” permeates Benjamin's whole oeuvre. His concept of the redemption of utopian claims belongs among his early ideas and predates his “meeting” with Marx. ¹³ In a sense, the very magnitude and unfinished state of the Passagen-Werk demonstrate a lifelong fight with the forms of destruction brought about by time and history. The Passagen-Werk epitomizes Benjamin's attempt to live up to one of the ethical imperatives of his early childhood: To include even the bücklichte Mannlein in his prayers. In short, to forget nothing. Undoubtedly, the sense of history as a “permanent catastrophe” (I. 2: 660), found in baroque melancholia and later in Baudelaire's “spleen,” resonates with biographical experiences. One should not forget the fact that Benjamin grew up with one leg in 19th-century historicism and another in modernism—it is across this divide that many of his late efforts at redemption take place. The sheer radicalism of this cultural rupture can hardly be overestimated; probably, it has created more kitsch and refuse than any other “generational gap” in modern cultural history. It is not unreasonable to think that—alongside other significant experiences of Benjamin's generation, not least the First World War—it is the experience of these ruins that allowed him to conceive of history as nature from early on; it is not unreasonable to think that these ruins decisively informed Benjamin's concept of “natural-history”; that they resurfaced in his later idea of a “pre-history of modernity”; and that they ultimately reemerged in his “method” of writing, in his theory of “dialectical images.”

There may be no metaphor in Benjamin's universe more important than the ruin. It connects his Baroque book with his late work. Yet, the modern cult, leaving its fascinations behind, does not ruin things in the same way as did the Thirty Years' War. In contrast to baroque experience, the destruction of modern objects takes place without physical disintegration. The objects—at least the objects that interest Benjamin—do not go out of circulation because their use–value is eroded; rather, their use–value is eroded because they are left behind by the cult. ¹⁴ This is not overtly recognized by Benjamin; yet, it explains why “we begin to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled” (1999: 13, V. 1: 59).

The objects have no time to disappear on their own accord, but are marked by the forces of destruction even before they get old. The scratches and wounds of such objects are not caused by the passage of time, but by the sudden absence of collective attention. It does not hurt the objects to simply get old; what hurts them is the ridicule, the repression, and the hiding away, the sudden lack of attention. This is the reason why the heap of ruins keeps growing in modernity. The “storm” of oblivion has social origins, beyond its material or technological sources.

Unfortunately, Benjamin does not see this. As a good Marxist he insist that the shortening of the hold the objects have on us is propelled by “the development of the forces of production”—as if technological development, and not first and foremost forms of collective “selection,” is the decisive factor in determining and constituting what is actual, or emphatically “new.”

Nevertheless, when Benjamin asks whether “motives of redemption can be found especially in fashion” (4: 179, I. 2: 677), another understanding of what is at stake surfaces in spite of him: Will the ever-growing speed of cultic gathering and dissolution ultimately render the powers of our embeddedness in effervescent collectivity visible? Will it contribute to a growing recognition of the power wielded by the social over our senses, our gaze, and our desires? Could it even contribute to the formation of a strange form of fascination with the ability of social powers to ruin things, without doing them the slightest physical harm, but by simply leaving them behind? As we shall see toward the end of this paper, this is exactly the case in contemporary Western popular culture.

Benjamin not only sensed the sheer magnitude of this constant destruction much more clearly than any other theoretician of the 20th century but also investigated its phenomenological contours; however, due to his Marxist (and Freudian) perspective, he never sufficiently theorized its collective aspects. Nevertheless, the powers of the effervescent collective and the actualizing or de-actualizing spell it throws on objects not only inform Benjamin's concrete efforts of critical redemption, but also his way of writing. This brings us back to the beginning of this paper: to Benjamin's own sense of actuality.

Writing the in-actual

Benjamin's use of “images” is not to be considered “supplementary” in relation to an underlying conceptual dimension, a “theory” to be distilled or carved out—let alone the product of an idiosyncratic personal “style” or desire for aesthetical ornament. ¹⁵ The attempt to write in images is as tangible in Benjamin's earliest work on the Arcades Project—his attempt to write at the threshold of awakening and dream—as in his later methodological reflections on “dialectical images.” The attempt to escape linear narrative through images, and to avoid the sensation of historical progression by “forcing” time to a “standstill” in a “constellation” of past and present, is as old as the redemptive and messianic traits in Benjamin's work.

Although better at describing it than at understanding its underlying collective dynamic, Adorno was intrigued by the distinct “phenomenology” surfacing in Benjamin's texts:

[T]he petrified, frozen or obsolete components of culture; everything in culture that renounced on the appearance of the domestic appealed to Benjamin's thought like the fossil or the plant in the herbarium to the collector. Small glass globes, containing a landscape on which it snows when one shakes the globe, were among his favourite accessories. Over the gate to his philosophical dungeons, the French word for still-life, nature morte, should be written […]. (1999: 14–15)

The Benjaminian world is a profoundly de-actualized world; a world left behind by the collective still living in it. The paradigma of this experience is the experience of the museum object—not the canonical classic or the “cultural good,” but the object exhibited in the dusty wing of the museum, where nobody comes around to look anymore. Again without really recognizing the social layers of the phenomenologies he “writes,” Benjamin remarks in a passage on the arcades that, “[t]he customers are gone, along with those taken by surprise. Rain brings in only the poorer clientele without waterproof or mackintosh” (1999: 873, V. 2: 1044). And yet, once it was different:

All this is the arcade in our eyes. And it was nothing of all this. [The arcades] radiated through Paris of the empire like grottoes. For someone entering the Passage des panoramas in 1817, the sirens of gaslight would be singing to him on one side, while oil-lamp odalisques offered enticements from the other. With the kindling of electric lights, the irreproachable glow was extinguished in these galleries which suddenly became more difficult to find […]. It was not decline but transformation. […] (V. 1: 580, V. 2: 1045)

Again Benjamin is at least partly wrong: It is not because “the sirens of gaslight” stopped “singing” that the arcades “suddenly became more difficult to find”; it is not the advent of “electric lightning” that extinguishes the “irreproachable glow” of the arcades. Rather, the “irreproachable glow” of the arcades is collectively “constructed” from the outset, and this explains why they “became harder to find” when the cult died away. In a sense, the collective is this light; or, at least, it directs the light's extinguishing or continual glow. This collective may be manipulated or even coerced, but it ultimately decides for itself when it will leave this or that object in the shadow and begin to radiate in yet other directions.

This brings us to Benjamin's “messianic” philosophy of history. We now see that it is not the light of messiah's gaze that changes the contours of the world—suddenly revealing its scars and wounds—in Benjamin's writings. Rather, it is the very real experience of disposal that marks his actual work. This is also one of the main reasons behind Benjamin's fascination with Baudelaire. Here he retrieved the phenomenological characteristics of modern experience that interested him, and which he sought to incorporate in his own writing: The sense of history as “catastrophe in permanence.” Benjamin cites Baudelaire's poem Les Foules:

Henceforth you are nothing more, O living matter, /Than a piece of granite enveloped in a vague sense of horror, /Slumbering in the depths of some misty Sahara– /An old sphinx ignored by the careless world, /Erased from the map, and whose fierce nature/Sings only to the rays of the setting sun. (4: 80, I. 2: 558)

It comes as no surprise that Baudelaire is praised for his ability to “empathize” with “matter that has been eliminated from the circulation process” (Ibid.). Adorno's (1990: 13) remark that Benjamin “involuntarily depicted the habitual world […] in the light of the setting sun,” sufficiently indicates the fusion of Benjamin's own stylistic endeavors with Baudelaire's. Indeed, Baudelaire is commended by Benjamin for his ability to fathom modern experience by transposing and reworking it in the context of an anachronistic style conveying even the most “modern” experiences with a sense of decrepitude. By the same token, Benjamin's prehistory of modernity brings out the ruins in things—the fragility and the vanity of the dreams inscribed in these ruins are brought to the fore in all their painful and naive details. Messianic forces become most tangible at the point where objects appear most outdated and prehistoric; where they themselves begin to glow with the need for redemption; where they become victims of a “history” which has essentially degraded to a vast and continual power of destruction. It is in seeking out the “places” where the maelstrom of history can be most clearly demonstrated that the Messiah may really be brought to listen. And yet, as we have seen, these “places” are first and foremost marked by a sense of collective abandonment and not by the relentless growth of the forces of production.

This displacement of perspective has profound consequences for Benjamin's theory of dialectical images. If Benjamin forces time to a standstill, it is only because he temporalizes everything he touches. He forces the reader to take up the perspective of his angel of history, who, as we saw in the opening lines of this paper, sees everything past as ruined and in need of redemption. This constant and relentless destruction is written into the objects. The aging of the past is so radical that it starts to eat into the present—in fact, even the present is depicted as already irretrievably past. Adorno (1990: 44) remarks that in Benjamin all objects are furnished with a “deadly shimmer.” Yet, this deadly shimmer does not simply result from a “theory” of dialectical images; rather, it bears testimony to an unacknowledged talent for seeking out instances of collective “de-actualization” in all its guises.

Now, Benjamin describes the recognition hidden in his images in terms of shock—of, as it were, Jetztzeit; a momentary explosion of the sense of progress and linear temporality. When history comes to a halt, an acute sense of actuality is felt that releases, as Sigrid Weigel writes, “a form of energy in history.” This “leads to the recharging of stiffened factual circumstances,” and thus to a revitalization or reactualization of the hopes and desires for a better life. As Benjamin writes in “Über den Begriff der Geschichte,” “every second [is] the small gateway in time through which Messiah may enter” (4: 397, I. 2: 704). This image is in itself profoundly actualizing inasmuch as it tells the critic that every moment counts and that it is possible to fundamentally change things.

Yet, this is only half of the story. Benjamin's concept of messianic actuality rests on the paradigma of the phenomenological transformations objects undergo when left behind by the cult. In this sense, Benjamin's “theory of the dialectical image” is not directed by a “messianic light” or an idiosyncratic philosophy of history, but rooted in real experiences we all know on first hand. By the same token, the Marxist and Freudian impulses found in his work can be seen as mere ornament; detached conceptual impulses plastered onto—and sometimes even covering up—the fundamental experience of modernity that constitutes Benjamin's real source of “inspiration”: that of the decay of collectively generated fascinations.

This brings us to the methodological problems facing the Benjaminian historian: How to reactualize the messianic traces in the de-actualized?

The reemergence of the collective

In his last desperate years, Benjamin did in fact speculate about inscribing the effervescent cult in the service of messianic actuality. Fashion, Benjamin notes, is capable of doing to the object what he wants to do to the reader, capable of bridging time and rendering the claims for happiness and justice made by the past on us audible:

[To] Robespierre ancient Rome was a past charged with now-time [jetzt-zeit]; a past, which he blasted out of the continuum of history. The French revolution viewed itself as Rome reincarnate. It cited ancient Rome exactly the way fashion cites a bygone mode of dress. Fashion has a nose for the topical no matter where it stirs in the thickets of long ago; it is the tiger's leap into the past. Such a leap, however, takes place in an arena where the ruling class gives the commands. The same leap in the open air of history is the dialectical leap Marx understood as revolution. (4: 395, I. 2: 701)

Even if the cultic object has a past, it is no longer “historical.” It becomes emphatically actual when seized by the contemporary collective. What is important here is that Benjamin clearly conceptualizes fashion as a collective dynamic that has the power to make in-actual things actual. Fashion epitomizes his wish to blow open the historical continuum and let historical objects “enter into our space.” Following this “method of making things present,” we “don't displace our being into [their space]; they step into our life” (1999: 206, V. 1: 273). The cultic object is directly torn from its past context and inserted into the present without hermeneutical effort.

What happens, as it were, allegorically and individually when reading Benjamin—the felt revitalization of a utopian “origin”—here takes place in reality and on a collective level. Benjamin's reflections thus represent a step in the direction of a collective political praxis. Ideally, real collectives should form around the utopian contents that surface in “old” objects, investing them with the power to ignite history and bring about change. The Jacobin attempt to intensify revolutionary spirit by reanimating or redeeming past utopian “origins” should be seen in this “political” perspective.

On the other hand, aside from the fact that it does not distribute “actuality” according to intellectual and political merit, Benjamin is well aware that fashion is a selective and despotic power, which actualizes with the one hand while it de-actualizes with the other. Fashion, as we have seen, engenders ruins. It can hardly be a durable solution to call on it to save them.

But what would this “leap” of fashion look like if it took place “under the open skies of history?” Surprisingly, Benjamin does not deliver a particularly Marxist response to this enigmatic remark. Rather, he gives a sociological or even “Durkheimian” response—albeit with utopian overtones:

What characterizes revolutionary classes at their moment of action is the awareness that they are about to make the continuum of history explode. The Great Revolution introduced a new calendar. The initial day of a calendar presents history in time-lapse mode. And basically, it is this same day that keeps recurring in the guise of holidays: which are days of remembrance [Tage des Eingedenkens]. Thus, calendars do not measure time the way clocks do; they are monuments of a historical consciousness, of which not the slightest trace has been apparent in Europe for the last hundred years. In the July Revolution an incident occurred, in which this consciousness came into its own. On the first evening of fighting, it so happened that the dials on the clock towers were being fired at simultaneously and independently from several locations in Paris. (4, 395, I. 2: 701–702)

Benjamin here understands the modern cult as a direct continuation of archaic ritual behavior—without falling back into the perspective of the traditional “hot crowd” of mass psychology. What he actually tells us is that a truly revolutionary collective is a collective capable of consciously synchronizing itself. Only such a collective will be able to put a stop to the speeding up of time and thus to be continuous with its own history.

In this way, Benjamin opens up a sociological path sealed off since the beginning of the last century—a path toward theories of collective synchronization. Unfortunately, however, this path is no sooner cleared than it is closed off again. Even as he reaches down into the age-old phenomenon of synchronization and effervescence, his lapidary remark that the festive days of the calendar are nothing but “monuments of a historical consciousness, of which not the slightest trace has been apparent in Europe for the last hundred years” is telling: In his mind, the festive ritual pertains to a relationship with the past rather than a present social bond. Until the end, Benjamin sees the social through the lens of the possibility of redemption of past content. Thus, it is only because fashion, in Benjamin's eyes, has the same redeeming powers as the archaic festival, i.e. the power to “cite” the past, to revitalize tradition, that it interests him in the first place.

On the one hand, Benjamin takes a decisive step out of the shadow of prevalent “critical” prejudices. Certainly, fashion is a fundamental collective dynamic, a dynamic rooted in timeless forms of effervescent synchronization, which are, however, found in modern society only in a somewhat fragmented, dynamic, mediated, and “individualized” form. Only actual effervescent dynamics are capable of actualizing the in-actual. The reader does find glimpses of this notion of the social in Benjamin.

On the other hand, Benjamin cuts this synchronous impulse short. Due to a number of theoretical predispositions, he leaves fashion as an irreducible collective phenomenon behind; he cannot, or will not, break with the typical “critical” understanding of fashion as a child of capitalism, as a form of manipulation from above. He therefore neglects the autonomy of the collective; he explains away phenomenological transformations undergone by objects by recourse to Marx's concept of the commodity fetishism; or worse, he reduces fashion to clothing and design and restricts himself to critical “psycho-analytical” analysis of apparel (as in the “convolute” on fashion in the Passagen-Werk). In this way, modern forms of “mediated” synchronization—ranging, as we have seen, from fads to Zeitgeists—disappear from view.

We need to start thinking the social first. Not as a verbal or argumentative dialogue, nor as a functional totality of instrumental relations, but as a force that reaches us even when we are alone. Present sociality is a priori. Benjamin again:

[T]he image of happiness we cherish is thoroughly colored by the time to which the course our own existence has assigned us. There is happiness – such as could arouse envy in us – only in the air we have breathed, among people we could have talked to, women who could have given themselves to us. In other words, the idea of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the idea of redemption. The same applies to the idea of the past, which is the concern of history. […] Doesn't a breath of the air that pervades earlier days caress us as well? In the voices we hear, isn't there an echo of now silent ones? Don't the women we court have sisters they no longer recognize? If so: then there is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. (4: 389–390, I. 2: 693–694)

Benjamin can only think the need for redemption by taking his point of departure in the absence of concrete social relations and the wish to restore, resume, or revive them. Taken at face value, the very basis for Benjamin's redemption of the past remains actual social feelings and sentiments; the synchronic level remains the model for the diachronic level. Present social relations furnish him with the model for his wish to socialize with the past. How could it be otherwise? Granted, it would be too far-fetched to insist that Benjamin—like Schutz, Garfinkel, and Durkheim—saw effervescent collective synchronization as one of the fundamental aspects of the social. Still, his attempts to reach the reader, his wish to include us all in a cosmic “we” that encompasses even the dead, furnishes any Marxist denial of immediate sociality with a tone of pseudo.

Conclusion: The actuality of Walter Benjamin

In a sense, Benjamin's appeal to our empathy in the above citation is redundant. We do not need to exert ourselves to stretch our social emotions beyond their immediate spatial and temporal horizons: this is all taken care of through the objects around us. This should not merely be understood in the traditional phenomenological sense that we feel the presence of more or less concrete others through objects, or that the gaze of others on objects around us is presupposed in their very “constitution.” The objects that interest Benjamin are replete with sociality–or hollowed out by its absence. They do not first and foremost store images, but are also social ruins; they do not age normally, but too fast, due to their prior embeddedness in a modern temporalized cult, which has now abandoned them.

This does not happen because time itself is accelerated—whatever that would mean. It happens because of a growing fragmentation of the Zeitgeist. ¹⁶ It is the growing number of displacements in the overall structure of collective synchronization that creates different pasts and presents and permits different actualities to share the same space. The “dialogue” and the “misunderstandings” that Benjamin (with Breton) believes to take place between “generations” (2, 1: 4, II. 2: 621) are now to be conducted and resolved between ourselves (over time), and with our contemporaries belonging to other collectives.

There are signs indicating that this growing temporalization of the collective engenders a whole new relation to history. The belief in progress, so offensive to Benjamin, is vanishing—indeed, in favor of a more allegorical or even “Benjaminian” relation to history. ¹⁷ It seems that the new popular “retro” culture enjoys its objects, not as epics, but as images, tearing them out of their historical context in eclectic “postmodern” ways. The in-actual has indeed become actual; the unfashionable has become fashionable.

However, in contrast to more “critical” interpreters, I think a tone of genuine pity and compassion resonates beneath some of these ironic and allegorical ways of experiencing the petrified objects of the recent past. I also think that these new sensibilities and sensitivities entail a vague and obscure sensation of “natural-history” and “eternal return of the same”; indeed, the young cult of the ‘failed’ objects from the recent past does, I think, indulge in man's failure to create his own history. And yet, this should not be misunderstood. Today's youth culture is not shot through with “messianic splitters,” but rather with a desire to collectively commemorate our common vulnerability in the face of the enormous powers of effervescent collectivity lurking beneath our existence, shaping our aesthetical tastes and intellectual fascinations, and thus, haphazardly, giving “direction” to history. It is these sublime powers the younger generation ritually and collectively conjure up in the faded and glaring objects—they are not driven by a will to redeem the wish images nesting in the objects.

And yet, no better theoretical vocabulary exists for unfolding these new phenomenologies and sensibilities than the Benjaminian one. Benjamin was the first to address, at the center of his work, the kind of phenomenological changes that fascinate contemporary popular culture. If the effervescent collective could be brought to the surface in Benjamin's phenomenologies and theorized properly, his writings would gain actuality, not simply in cultural studies, but also in the more empirically focused departments of the sociology of culture. This paper may be considered a first attempt at such a sociological actualization.