Abstract
The Parisian arcades were the forgotten urban topographies through which Walter Benjamin sought to release his theory of the “dialectical image.” The Arcades Project’s aphorisms intertwine exterior and interior into a continual surface of interiority abruptly bursting forth as a site of “reception,” for it is in their spatial manifestation that these images are supposed to conjure up the “now of recognizability.” Benjamin’s spatiotemporal coordinates are intersected in Adorno’s notion of “natural history,” a double image of nature and history that interplays with the peculiar “ambiguity” of “the social relations and products of this epoch” defined by Benjamin. Taking into account Adorno’s temporality, together with a close reading of his critique of Benjamin’s dialectical image, this chapter is an attempt to sketch a spatiotemporal interpretation of the image by constellating the simultaneously different and similar ways these thinkers construe the spatialization of time in the image.
This chapter is based on my MA dissertation completed at the University of Tel Aviv (2014) under the supervision of Prof. Moshe Zuckermann.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Benjamin’s The Origin of German Tragic Drama was written between 1924 and 1925 and published in Berlin in 1928.
- 2.
“In the secularization or spatialization of historical time, in the ‘setting to stage’ of history, Benjamin located one of the profound innovations that marks the mourning play, and, by implication, modernity (…) the instauration of modernity implied a fall from historical time into an inauthentic form of spatialization” (Hanssen 54–55).
- 3.
That is, within the limits of what can be said in a limited space. My reading will focus on Adorno’s response to Benjamin’s first exposé (1935), a response underlying Adorno’s reading of Benjamin’s baroque book, also formulated in Adorno’s lecture “The Idea of Natural History” (delivered in 1932), and in his Kierkegaard Construction of the Aesthetic (published in 1933).
- 4.
A passage interspersed, apart from the explicit reference to Marx, with references also to Hegel, Freud, Jung and Bloch. It is Marx’s historical materialism that is rendered here through Hegel’s dialectics of development; the collective can experience Bloch’s “darkness of the lived moment” only within the darkness of ideology’s “camera obscura” (5: 497, 393). “Not-yet conscious knowledge of what has been” entails repetition and circular time, thus invoking Jung’s archaic images and the collective unconscious (5: 590, 471). “Freud’s doctrine of the dream as a phenomenon of nature (Naturtraum). Dream as historical phenomenon” (5: 1214, 908), a formulation prefigures the “inadequate” “reflections of the base by the superstructure,” “not because they will have been consciously falsified by the ideologues of the ruling class, but because the new, in order to take the form of an image, constantly unites its elements with those of the classless society” (5: 1224, 893, italics mine).
- 5.
The phrase “dialectical image” first appeared in print in Adorno’s book on Kierkegaard, half a century before it appeared in the German edition of The Arcades Project in 1982 (McLaughlin 204). This will be cited later in this chapter.
- 6.
As Adorno writes, “For the proposition seems to imply three things: a conception of the dialectical image as if it were a content of some consciousness, albeit a collective consciousness; its direct – and I would almost say developmental – relation to the future as utopia; and the idea of the ‘epoch’ as the proper self-contained subject of this objective consciousness.”
- 7.
Adorno’s critique dwells on the conflict inherent in Benjamin’s reading of historical practices exceeding their ideological content, as Benjamin notes: “On the doctrine of the ideological superstructure. It seems, at first sight, that Marx wanted to establish here only a causal relation between superstructure and infrastructure. But already the observation that ideologies of the superstructure reflect conditions falsely and invidiously goes beyond this” (5: 495–496, Arcades 392).
- 8.
Benjamin’s notion of allegory is based on its relation to the symbol. If the symbol premises a unity of form and content, of worldly and the divine, allegory exposes this arbitrary connection. “The unity of the material and the transcendental object, which constitutes the paradox of the theological symbol, is distorted into relationship between appearance and essence […] whereas in the symbol destruction is idealized and the transfigured face of nature is confronted with the facies hippocratica of history as a petrified, primordial landscape” (1: 336, The Origin of German Tragic Drama 160).
- 9.
For “the relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical (…) not progression but image … only dialectical images are genuine images (that is, not archaic); and the place where one encounters them is Language” (5: 577, Arcades 462).
- 10.
“The collective consciousness is then invoked,” Adorno writes to Benjamin, but “it cannot be distinguished from Jung’s conception of the same” (Briefe 141, Correspondence 107).
- 11.
In the Arcades Benjamin writes: “All categories of the philosophy of history must here be driven to the point of indifference (auf den Indifferenzpunkt zu treiben). No historical category without its natural substance, no natural category without its historical filtration” (5: 1034, 864).
- 12.
In his response to the exposé Adorno points out to “Hegel’s extremely important concept of second nature, which has since been taken up by Georg (Lukács)” and its relation to the panoramas (Correspondence 110).
- 13.
Adorno in a letter to Benjamin 29 February 1940 writes: “Objects become purely thing-like the moment they are retained for us without the continued presence of their other aspects. When something of them has been forgotten” (Correspondence 321).
- 14.
Adorno quotes Benjamin: “The worldly, historical breadth … of the allegorical intention is, as natural history, as the original history of signification or of intention, dialectical in character” (1: 357, 119).
- 15.
And therefore “method of this work: literary montage. I need say nothing. Only show” (5: 574, Arcades 460).
- 16.
“Fourier saw, in the arcades, the architectural canon of the phalanstery. Their reactionary metamorphosis is characteristic: whereas they originally serve commercial ends, they become, for him, places of habitation” (5: 47, 5).
- 17.
“Grandville ends in madness”—this is how Benjamin ends the section “Grandville, or the World Exhibitions” in the exposé. Adorno comments in his letter: “I recalled something you once said about the Arcades Project: that it could only be wrested from the realm of madness. That it avoided this realm, rather than subjugating it to itself, is revealed by the interpretation of the Saturn quotation, which has rather recoiled from it.”
- 18.
“This epoch was wholly adapted to the dream, was furnished in dreams” (5: 282, Arcades 213).
- 19.
That is, Adorno’s notion of the primacy (Vorrang) of the object (10: 742, Critical Models 246).
- 20.
“The contradictory elements in Kierkegaard’s formulation of meaning, subject, and object are not simply disparate. They are interwoven with one another. Their figure is called inwardness (Innerlichkeit)” (Konstruktion 45, Construction 29).
- 21.
This is also Adorno’s claim in “The Idea of Natural History”: “Second nature is illusory because we have lost reality yet we believe that we are able to meaningfully understand it in its eviscerated state, or because we insert subjective intention as signification into this foreign reality, as occurs in allegory” (1: 364, 124).
Works Cited
Primary Sources (German)
Adorno, Theodor W. & Benjamin, Walter. Briefe und Briefwechsel 1928–1940. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1994. Print.
Adorno, Theodor W. Gesammelte Schriften Vol. 1. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1973. Print.
Adorno, Theodor W. Kierkegaard: Konstruktion des Asthetischen, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1962. Print.
Adorno, Theodor W. Negative Dialektik. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1966. Print.
Benjamin, Walter. Gesammelte Schriften Vol. 1. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1991. Print.
Benjamin, Walter. Gesammelte Schriften Vol. 3. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1991. Print.
Benjamin, Walter. Gesammelte Schriften Vol. 4. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1991. Print.
Benjamin, Walter. Gesammelte Schriften Vol. 5. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1991. Print.
Horkheimer, Max & Adorno, Theodor W. Dialektik der Aufklärung. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1984. Print.
Primary Sources (English)
Adorno, Theodor W. & Benjamin, Walter. The Complete Correspondence, 1928–1940. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999. Print.
Adorno, Theodor W. Critical Models. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. Print.
Adorno, Theodor W. “The Idea of Natural History.” Telos no. 60, Summer 1984: 111–124. Print.
Adorno, Theodor W. Kierkegaard Construction of the Aesthetic. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. Print.
Adorno, Theodor W. Negative Dialectics. New York: Continuum, 1973. Print.
Adorno, Theodor W. Notes to Literature, Vol 2. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992.
Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Print.
Benjamin, Walter. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. London: New Left books, 1977. Print.
Benjamin, Walter. Selected Writings Vol. 3 1935–1938. Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press Harvard University Press, 2002. Print.
Benjamin, Walter. Selected Writings Vol. 4 1938–1940. Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press Harvard University Press, 2006. Print.
Horkheimer, Max & Adorno, Theodor W. Dialectic of Enlightenment. New York: Continuum, 1972. Print.
Secondary Sources
Cohen, Margaret. “Walter Benjamin’s Phantasmagoria.” New German Critique 48 Autumn 1989: 87–107. Print.
Comay, Rebecca. “Perverse history: Fetishism and dialectic in Walter Benjamin,” Research in Phenomenology 29 (1) 1999: 51–62. Print.
Cook, Deborah. “Adorno’s Critical Materialism,” Philosophy Social Criticism 32, 2006: 719–737. Print.
Eiland, Howard. “Reception in Distraction.” Boundary 2 30.1 2003: 51–66. Print.
Hanssen, Beatrice. Walter Benjamin’s Other History: Of Stones, Animals, Human Beings, and Angels. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Print.
McLaughlin, Kevin. “Ur-ability, Force and Image from Kant to Benjamin.” Releasing the Image from Literature to New Media. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2011: 204–221. Print.
Vidler, Anthony. Warped Space: Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2000. Print.
Weber, Samuel. Mass Mediauras: Form, Technics, Media. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996. Print.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2017 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Marcus, A.M. (2017). Spatiality and Temporality in Benjamin and Adorno. In: Gabriele, A. (eds) Sensationalism and the Genealogy of Modernity. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56148-0_12
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56148-0_12
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-60128-5
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-56148-0
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)