Remnants of a Dream World

Abstract

This epigraph is itself a quote, just as the ideas that this essay presents are prefigured in the image-based historical sensibility that Walter Benjamin formulated as a genuine form of cultural and historical interpretation of the nineteenth century. Benjamin cited Michelet in the first section of his exposé for Das Passagen-Werk (The Arcades Project; 1982), “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth-Century,” and again as the epigraph to “Convolute F: Iron Construction.” The phrase becomes a historiographic leitmotif for his later research and encapsulates the utopian impulse in the capacity of imagination to anticipate what is not yet actual, but conceived as possible: those dream images in which the inadequacies of the social organization are transfigured, and the collective that brings its historical experience into remembrance. In the intricate relationship between these wish images and the residues of their material expression, Benjamin traces the historical origins of the cultural forms of industrial modernity and also deems them the storehouse for humanity’s expressions of utopian desires. He writes in the 1935 exposé, “[T]he experiences of such a society … engender, through interpenetration with what is new, the utopia that has left its trace in a thousand configurations of life, from enduring edifices to passing fashions” (Benjamin 5).¹ These material configurations of life in the nineteenth century are precisely the stuff that collective utopian dreams were made of. Though viewed from the twentieth century as modernity’s debris and ruins, dusty images, outdated commodities, and remnants of a world once enchanted by the new, they constitute the historical traces of latent utopia.

Each epoch dreams the one to follow.

—Jules Michelet, quoted in Walter Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk (The Arcades Project)