walter benjamin on the mimetic faculty pdf

Only those for whom poverty or vice turns the city into a landscape in which they stray from dark till sunrise know it in a way denied to me. I saw sunset and dawn, but between the two I found myself a shelter.

(As I have tried to demonstrate, the arcades were full of class contrast.) In his own recollections Benjamin quite frankly admitted that the Berlin which revealed itself to him was determined by his class origin: ‘I never slept on the street in Berlin. Historical knowledge exists for it alone, and only in the historical moment.’ footnote 146īenjamin was not blind to the class differences with regard to the ‘collective’ dream.

Moreover, ‘This subject is by no means a transcendental subject, but the struggling, oppressed class in its most extreme situation. The dialectical image is to be defined as the involuntary memory of humanity.’ footnote 144 Whereas voluntary memory recalled events in sequential arrangement, the historical space of involuntary memory was ‘disorder.’ footnote 145 The image suddenly established itself ‘at a moment of danger,’ both for the object and the subject. Benjamin compared their appearance in consciousness to Proust’s involuntary memory: ‘By contracting into an instant-into a dialectical image-it enters the involuntary memory of mankind. The dialectical images were clearly not eternal archetypes, but socially specific constellations, inherited historically rather than biologically-and not via a linear genealogy. footnote 141 Adorno claimed that Benjamin seemed to presume that present dream-consciousness could exist outside of capitalist society, rather than being the distorted product of it, footnote 142 and he argued that such a position was not compatible with Marxism: ‘It should be clear and sufficient warning that in a dreaming collective no differences remain between classes.’ footnote 143 Adorno’s reservations concerning the exposé were not without reason, but Benjamin’s other writings indicate that Adorno was misreading his intent.

A dorno was suspicious of Benjamin’s notion of a collective dream: ‘For who is the subject of the dream?’ he wrote to Benjamin in 1935, referring to the Arcades exposé, where in place of the individual subject of bourgeois psychology, ‘the collective consciousness is invoked, but I fear that in its present form it cannot be distinguished from Jung’s conception’.

Walter benjamin on the mimetic faculty pdf