I think this came through in Weber's
sense that origin is a historical rather than a logical category for
Benjamin, at once a coming-to-be and passing-away (containing both
the previous form and the one that is in relation to it). For me the
image of the eddy [Strudel]
was useful, taking it as both the swirling of fluid, like an
accumulation, and, the reverse current that is created when that
fluid flows past an obstacle, creating a space devoid of flow on the
downstream side of the object. I was thinking of history, what has
passed-away, for Benjamin as this accumulation. And I was thinking of
what has come to be in this almost paradoxical space of one "devoid
of flow". It's something in the arrest of that which has
passed-away that prevents that which is present, coming next, or
having come-to-be, asserting itself in a progressive temporality, so
it stands still: "The historical materialist cannot do without a
notion of the present which is not a transition, but in which times
takes a stand, and has come to a standstill" ("Theses").
And the arrest is this claim of the past, "we are endowed with a
weak messianic power, to which the past has a claim" ("Theses").
History no longer having the form of historical movement that
consists in passing.
I'm interested in the way in which
Benjamin is concerned with the association of history with the
rhetoric of the "new", and as such, how futurity merely
becomes a projective space of the present, which legitimates projects
and temporalities of continuation (thus nothing actually "new").
Continuation, or historicism—making the past legible, not citable,
to, and as, a universalism (i.e. taking only the qualities that
support such a universalism)—has very little to do with history.
Benjamin will say history can only transcribe itself in allegory, or
in the ruin of symbolic language (cf. Origin German Tragic Drama,
p.158-167). So thinking with his point that "ideas are to
concepts, as constellations are to stars" from OGTD, it's
something in the fracture of conceptual language—and it's in that
fracture that historical representation can take place. Things that
exists with symbolic weight/meaning are often described as
"monuments", and in this sense ruins are the fracturing of
monuments: "ruins are in the realm of things, what allegories
are in the realm of thoughts" (OGTD). This seemed to me a
similar place to where Derrida began when talking about
structuralism, at a moment of its height, like the forethought (which
is also thereby, the thought) of its monumentalization. Thereby
taking structuralism as a kind of monument: "If it recedes one
day". It seemed to me where deconstruction sets to work is a
similar place to where allegory would; where something is established
in (almost) the same move as it is shown to be at its limit (a form
of dialectics), something in the mode of establishment itself seems
important.
Along these lines—a starting point
which is also an aftermath—I was really intrigued by the metaphor
of the city (already a metaphor for site and structure) and how it is
linked to structure's appearance, or darstellbarkeit
(representability): "Somewhat like architecture of an
uninhabited or deserted city, reduced to a skeleton by some
catastrophe of nature or art. A city no longer inhabited, not simply
left behind, but haunted by meaning and culture. This state of being
haunted, which keeps the city from returning to nature, is perhaps
the general mode of the presence or absence of the thing itself in
pure language." This seemed so Benjaminian to me, describing a
kind of ruination. A "state of being haunted", is present
in Weber's reading: "the dead do not depart, or if they do, it
is only to return as ghosts. Instead of defining identity, death
returns as the shadow that splits life into a life that consists
largely in passing away, and a death like Kafka's Gracchus, has
nowhere to go but back to the living" (Weber, 158). And I liked
this line also: "Thus it is in no way paradoxical that the
structuralist consciousness is a catastrophic consciousness,
simultaneously destroyed and destructive, destructuring, as is all
consciousness, or at least at the moment of decadence, which is the
period proper to all movement of consciousness". "Decadence"
here is really intriguing, and it made me come back to monuments and
establishing, the sense of something being at its height is when it
falls. I've gone on too long, but I want to quote this long section
from "Paris, the Capital of the 19th Century", to get to a
greater sense of the monument/ruin relation: "Balzac was the
first to speak of the ruins of the bourgeoisie. But it was surrealism
that first opened our eyes to them. The development of the forces of
production shattered the wish symbols of the previous century, even
before the monuments representing them had collapsed. In the 19C this
development worked to emancipate the forms of construction from art,
just as in the 16C sciences freed themselves from philosophy. A start
is made with architecture as engineered construction. Then comes the
reproduction of nature as photography. The creation of fantasy
prepares to becomes practical as commercial art. Literature submits
to montage in the feuillton. All these products are on the point of
entering the market as commodities. But they linger on the threshold.
From this epoch derive the arcades and interieurs, the exhibition
halls and the panoramas. They are residues of a dream world. The
realization of dream elements in the course of waking up, is the
paradigm of dialectical thinking. Thus dialectical thinking is the
organ of historical awakening. Every epoch, in fact, not only dreams
the one to follow [Chris: seeming inversion of Marx's, "Mankind
thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve,
since closer examination will always show that the problem itself
arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already
present or at least in the course of formation." from "Preface
to Contribution of the Critique of Political Economy"] but, in
dreaming, precipitates its awakening. It bears its end within itself
and unfolds it—as Hegel already noticed, by cunning. With the
destabilizing of the market economy, we begin to recognize the
monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled"
(Aracdes Project, 9).
This maybe gets to the problem of
signification. Benjamin needs a monument to see ruins, again: "ruins
are in the realm of things, what allegories are in the realm of
thoughts". In Acts of Religion Derrida
says this about monuments: "One cannot love a monument, a work
of architecture, an institution as such except in ruin". The
difficulty is that as soon as one symbolizes the ruin—as soon as
one desires to name and identify it—one changes the ruin into
something else, that's Benjamin's argument as I take it (as soon as
the ruin is symbolized (so not allegory) as ruin it becomes something
other than ruin. In this sense it becomes a monument ). It
seems like a analagous point to Derrida's point in "Force",
that in the end structuralism cannot account for the metaphoricity of
its own site and so "stifles force under form"—it has to
monumentalize itself. And so I was taking metaphoricity as a kind of
force. There seems to be a question as what produces force, and
writing this after week 2 that seems to be the conflict with Lacan.
It's almost as if the monument produces the force, sets it off (this
would where Benjamin is to me), whereas for Derrida that can't be the
case, because, as in the quote, the monument is already a ruin.
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