Walter Benjamin's Phantasmagoria
Author(s): Margaret Cohen
Source: New German Critique, No. 48 (Autumn, 1989), pp. 87-107
Published by: New German Critique
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/488234
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WalterBenjamin'sPhantasmagoria
Margaret Cohen
Confronting the ruins of the Jamf Olfabriken Werke Jamf Petroleum FactoryWorks),in the light that breaks "some night at too deep an
hour to explain away," Thomas Pynchon's Enzian reaches an "extraordinaryunderstanding. This serpentine slag-heap ... is nota ruinat all.
It is in perfectworkingorder."'If readers of Walter Benjamin sometimes
in an Enzian-like epiphany, at other moments
grasp the Passagen-Werk
in
fashion more suitable to Coleridge. Briefly
it
a
they apprehend
imagining this text in all its completed majesty, they see fully developed concepts where Benjamin left only fragments. The following essay results from one such glimpse into Benjamin's KublaKhan,for it
elaborates a concept that I imagine would have become a keystone of
had Benjamin ever brought his project to complethe Passagen-Werk,
tion. This concept is the phantasmagoria,which recurs with troubling insistence throughout Benjamin's arcades project. Suggesting that
Benjamin's interest in the phantasmagoria derives primarily from its
technological manifestation, as 19th-centuryvisual spectacle, I will reveal how this concept is particularlywell-suited to figure Benjamin's
Marxist-Freudiantheory of base-superstructure relations in a society
ruled by the commodity form. In addition, I will argue that the phantasmagoriafascinates Benjamin for its power to capture his own method of critical illumination. Challenging an Enlightenment opposition
between ideological mystification and cultural critique, Benjamin's
central
phantasmagoria emblematizes one of the Passagen-Werk's
methodological projects: to free Marxist analysis from its overwhelming valorization of rational forms of representation.
1. Thomas Pynchon, Gravity'sRainbow(New York:Viking, 1973) 520.
87
88
MargaretCohen
From Dream to Phantasmagoria:
The Transformationof Benjamin's Parisian Resumes
The importance of the phantasmagoriato Benjamin emerges in his
"Paris,the Capital of the Nineteenth Century," a 1935 resume of the
arcadesprojectwrittenfor the Institutefor Social Research.2In this text,
Benjamin associates the phantasmagoriawith commodity culture's experience of its materialand intellectualproducts, echoing Marx'suse of
the term in Capital. Benjamin quotes Marx in the Passagen-Werk's
Konvolut G: "'This fetishism of commodities has its origin ... in the
peculiar social characterof the labor that produces them.... It is only a
definite social relation between men that assumes, in their eyes, the
form of a relation between things"' (PW245).3 As has
phantasmagorical
often been observed, Benjamin extends Marx's statement on the
phantasmagorical powers of the commodity to cover the entire domain of Parisiancultural products, a use of phantasmagoriathat Marx
himself initiates in The EighteenthBrumaire.4If the commodities displayed within the Universal Exhibitions manifest themselves as a
phantasmagoria - "the phantasmagoria of capitalist culture reaches
its most brilliant display in the Universal Exhibition of 1867" - intellectual reflection in the 19th century also takes on a phantasmagorical
cast.5 Benjamin describes, for example, "the phantasmagoria of 'cultural history,' in which the bourgeoisie savors its false consciousness to
the last," and the phantasmagorical illusions of the proletariat: "the
2. I have included the definite article in the translationof the essay's title (Paris,Die
to distinguish it from Benjamin's 1939 essay entitled
Hauptstadtdes XIXe.Jahrhunderts)
Paris,Capitaledu XIXieme siecle. When Benjamin drops the definite article in his 1939 essay, he responds to a comment in Adorno's Horberg letter: "As a title, I should like
to propose Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,not The Capital" (Theodor Adoro,
let-
and Politics[London: New Left Books,
ter to Walter Benjamin, 2 August 1935, Aesthetics
ed. Peter Demetz, trans.
1977] 115). The 1935 essay appears in English in Reflections,
Edmund Jephcott (New York:Harcourt, 1978). I have modified the translationwhere
it seemed necessary. The 1939 essay appears as part of the Passagen-Werk
(Frankfurt:
will be cited in the body of the arSuhrkamp, 1982). All references to the Passagen-Werk
ticle with the abbrcviationll 'll'. Al
'
?k arc I nic,
nl<tll,ltii ls ( iftl< Pal.s.rge,si-l;
unllcss
otherwise indicated.
3. I have modified slightly the translationof this passage offered by Samuel Moore
and Edward Aveling, who translate "phantasmagorische" as "fantastic." See Karl
Marx, Capital,vol. 1 (New York: Modern Library, 1906) 83.
4. See Susan Buck-Morss, "Redeeming Mass Culture for the Revolution," New
GermanCritique 29 (1983): 213; and Rolf Tiedemann, "Dialectics at a Standstill," On
WalterBenjamin,ed. Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986) 277.
5. Walter Benjamin, "Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century" 153.
Benjamin'sPhantasmagoria
89
Commune puts an end to the phantasmagoriathat dominates the freedom of the proletariat.It dispels the illusion that the task of the proletarian revolution is to complete the work of 1789 hand in hand with
the bourgeoisie."6
But it is only with the 1939 expose of the arcades project, "Paris,
Capital of the 19th Century," which Benjamin produced to attractfinancial aid from an American patron, that the phantasmagoriaassumes
a key methodological position. The increased importance assigned to
the phantasmagoria is one of many differences between this and the
1935 essay. As Buck-Morsspoints out, the 1939 expose is written "in a
lucid, descriptive style, with a totally new introduction and conclusion,
in which the dream theory is strikingly absent."7 Consonant with
Benjamin's turn away from dream theory, his 1939 sketch of the arcades project drops the controversialconcept of the dialectical image.
In addition, it analyzes the transformations of 19th-century Paris in
more rigorouslyMarxistterms, taking pains to link Parisianculturalinnovations to specific economic factors. Benjamin also abandons the
section entitled "Daguerre, or the Panoramas,"which describes how
the new 19th-centuryvisual technologies of the panorama and photography express the century's"new feeling about life."8For our purposes,
however, the most important transformationin the 1939 sketch is the
rise in importance of the phantasmagoria,which I will suggest to be the
result of Benjamin's turn away from the dream.
The phantasmagoriafigures prominently in the introductory section
of the 1939 essay, where it, rather than the "dialectical image" that is
"a dream image,"9becomes the expressive form taken by the products
of 19th-century commodity culture. Benjamin writes:
Our inquiry proposes to show how, as a consequenceof the
reifyingrepresentationof civilization,the new forms of life and
the new economicand technologicalcreationsthatwe owe to the
These
last centuryenter into the universeof a phantasmagoria.
creationsundergo this 'illumination'not only in a theoretical
manner,by an ideologicaltransposition,but also in the immediacy of perceptiblepresence.They manifestthemselvesas phantasmagorias (PW 61).
6.
7.
8.
9.
Benjamin, "Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century" 158, 160.
Buck-Morss 238.
Benjamin, "Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century" 150.
Benjamin, "Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century" 157.
90
MargaretCohen
Nowhere does Benjamin's transformation of the dream-like experience of the commodity into the experience of the phantasmagoria appear more vividly than in the conclusion to the 1939 essay. While the
1935 essay ends with Benjamin's suggestion that the demystification of
19th-century Paris is an experience of awakening ("the realization of
dream elements in waking is the textbook example of dialectical thinking"'0), the 1939 essay concludes by according the power of ideological
demystification to the phantasmagoria itself. Auguste Blanqui's Eternite
par les Astres, writes Benjamin, is "a last phantasmagoria of cosmic
character, which implicitly includes the most acerbic critique of all the
others" (PW 75). Benjamin thus transforms the 1935 opposition between dream and awakening into the difference between mystifying
and critical (illuminating) phantasmagorias.
"TheImmediacy of PerceptiblePresence":Robertson'sPhantasmagoria
While Marx's use of the phantasmagoria explains why Benjamin
applies the term to the 19th-century's "ideological transposition" of
"new economic and technological creations," it does not explain why
Benjamin describes this experience as an '"illumination"' of "perceptible presence" (PW 61). True, ideological transposition does accord
human creations a strange sort of perceptible presence, but this presence would hardly seem to be illuminating, in either a literal or a figurative sense. Benjamin, however, provides us with an alternative way to
understand the illuminations of phantasmagoric manifestation. Panorama, the Passagen-WerkKonvolut devoted to popular forms of 19thcentury visual spectacle, opens with the following fragment:
There were panoramas, dioramas, cosmoramas, diaphanoramas,
navaloramas, pleoramas (7rX w I travel by sea, boating), phantoand phanscopes,phantasma-parastasias,phantasmagorical
experiences
tasmaparastaticones, picturesque trips in a room, georamas; optical picturesques, cineoramas, phanoramas, stereoramas, cycloramas, dramatic panorama (PW 655, emphasis added).
One of these spectacles, the "phantasmagorical experience" or, as it
was also called, the phantasmagoria, was literally illuminating. Using a
movable magic lantern called a phantoscope, it projected for its spectators a parade of ghosts.
10. Benjamin, "Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century" 162.
Benjamin'sPhantasmagoria
91
If we examine the phantasmagoria as a 19th-century spectacle, we
discover that its subject matter exemplifies the 19th-century cultural
manifestations studied by Benjamin. Invented in the late 1790's by the
Belgian "doctor-aeronaut" Etienne-Gaspard Robertson, the phantasmagoria enjoyed its greatest vogue in the hands of its creator, with accounts of Robertson's popular performances appearing in newspapers
of the time." A 1798 spectacle reviewed in L'Amides Lois opened with
Robertson's answer to a member of the audience who demanded to
see the ghost of Marat:
"Because I have not been able to re-establish the cult of Marat
in an official newspaper, I'd at least like to see his shade."
Robertson pours onto a hot stove two glasses of blood, a bottle
of vitriol, 12 drops of brandy, and two copies of the Journaldes
hommeslibres.Right away, a small, livid ghost gradually begins to
appear, armed with a dagger and wearing a red cap. The man with
bristling hair recognizes it to be Marat; he wants to kiss it, the
ghost makes a terrifyinggrimace and disappears.12
On this night, the phantasmagorian also called before his spectators less
horrifying ghosts: the mythic founder of the Swiss republic, William Tell,
who appeared "with republican pride"; the ghosts of Virgil and Voltaire;
and the ghost of a woman in a Parisian dandy's gallant adventure:
A young dandy begs for the appearance of a woman whom he
tenderly loved and whose portrait in miniature he shows to the
phantasmagorian,who throws onto the burner some sparrowfeathers, a few grains of phosphorus, and a dozen butterflies. Soon, a
woman is to be perceived,her breastuncovered, her hair streaming,
who fixes on her young friend a tender and sorrowfulexpression.
A serious man sitting next to me cries, carryinghis hand to his
forehead: "Oh my God! I think that's my wife," and he runs out,
fearing that it is no longer a ghost.13
11. For my discussion of Robertson's phantasmagoria, I rely on G.-M. Coissac's
Histoiredu Cinematographe
(Paris:Editions du 'Cineopse,' 1925). All translations from
this text are mine. Since my initial research on the subject, Terry Castle has published
an illuminating and entertaining articleon the evolution of the concept of the phantasmagoria in the 19th century, which provides information on the phantasmagoria not
found in Coissac. See Terry Castle, "Phantasmagoria:Spectral Technology and the
Metaphorics of Modem Reverie," CriticalInquiry15.1 (1988).
12. L'Amides Lois,28 March 1798; quoted in Coissac 22.
13. Coissac 22.
92
Margaret Cohen
Robertson's performance reached the following spectacular climax:
"Citizens and gentlemen," said Robertson, "until now I have only
shown to you one shade at a time; my art is not limited to these triof your servant. I
fles, they are only the prelude to the savoir-faire
can show to kindly men the crowd of shades who, during their life,
have been helped by them; reciprocally,I can make evil men survey the shades of their victims."
Robertson was invited to this test by almost unanimous cheers.
Two individuals alone were against it; but their opposition only irritated the desires of those gathered.
Right away, the phantasmagorian throws onto the burner the
reports of May 31 - those pertaining to the massacres at the prisons of Aix, Marseille and Tarascon; a collection of denunciations
and decrees; a list of suspects; the collection of judgments of the
Revolutionary Court; a bundle of demagogic and aristocratic
newspapers; a copy of the Reveildu Peuple.Then he pronounces
with emphasis the magic words: conspirator,
humanity,terrorist,justice,
alarmist,hoarder,Girondin,Moderate,
Jacobin,publicsafety,exaggerated,
Orleanist.Immediately, one sees groups covered with bloody veils
rising up; they surround, they press the two individuals who had
refused to give in to the general wish, and who, frightened by this
terrible spectacle, run out of the room hastily, giving horrible
howls... One was Barrere [sic], the other Cambon.'4
If the ghosts haunting Robertson's phantasmagoria resemble the
ghosts in Benjamin's arcades, the phantasmagoria performs on these
spectral presences a transformation that exemplifies the ideological
transposition of material reality Benjamin describes. Robertson turns
the bloody events of recent history into aesthetic apparitions, fantastic
nightmares of an evening's entertainment. Divested of their material
reality, however, these historical figures are more than merely entertaining. Robertson helps them to entrerdans la legende,integrating them
into the pantheon of "the phantasmagoria of'cultural history,"' where
they play the role of evil demons to the proud hero who founds Swiss
bourgeois liberty. Robertson's representation thus seeks to exorcise
the demonic power of the revolutionary memories haunting Parisian
imagination, an exorcism which the journalist, Poultier-Delmotte, well
understands when he personifies it in the flight of two ex-members of
14.
Coissac 23.
Benjamin'sPhantasmagoria
93
the Committee for Public Safety, Cambon and Barere. What better
synecdoche for the ideological transposition worked by "the phantasmagoria of 'cultural history"' and "the phantasmagoria of civilization"
than the phantasmagoria itself?
In The Camera Obscura of Ideology
"Concerning the doctrine of the ideological superstructure," writes
Benjamin in a key passage from Konvolut K:
At first it seems as if Marx wanted only to establish a causal relation between superstructure and base. But the observation that
the ideology of the superstructurereflects these relations in a false
and distorted manner already goes beyond this. The question is,
namely: if the base, to a certain extent, determines the conceptual
and practical material of the superstructure- this determination
- how is it then to be charis, however, not one of simple reflection
acterized, leaving aside the question of the causes for its emergence? As its expression- the superstructure is the expression of
the base (PW 495, emphasis added).
Objecting to Marx's description of a mimetic base-superstructure relation, Benjamin points out that this description does not do justice to
the complexity of the relation that Marx himself implies. If Benjamin
privileges the phantasmagoria as an emblem for Marxist ideology, it is
in part, I would suggest, because this concept allows him to correct
Marx's falsely mimetic representation by simultaneously retaining and
refining the technological metaphor for ideology employed by Marx in
the notion of the camera obscura.
When Benjamin takes Marx's description of ideology to task, he
challenges a common Marxist representation of ideology inaugurated
by a celebrated metaphor from the early Marx: "in all ideology men
and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a cameraobscura .. ."15
Substituting the phantasmagoria for the cameraobscura,Benjamin corrects
the over-simplified relation between ideological representation and reality projected in Marx's metaphor. While, like historical "vulgar naturalism," the cameraobscuramechanically reverses the external world in the
darkened chamber of thought, the magic lantern of the phantasmagoria
15. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, TheGermanIdeology:Part One, WithSelections
Texts,ed. C.J. Arthur (New York:International
fromPartsTwoand Threeand Supplementary
Publishers, 1976) 47.
94
MargaretCohen
inverts painted slides which are themselves artisticproducts (PW575).
of the objective world but rather the obIt does not project a reflection
world's
its
jective
expression, representation as it is mediated through
imaginative subjective processes. The aesthetic effect of the phantasmagoria also more closely resembles the subjective experience of ideological transposition that Marx describes. While the cameraobscuradoes
not attempt to fool its audience into mistaking its two-dimensional inversions of reality for the outside world, the phantasmagoria endows
its creations with a spectral reality of their own. Robertson's phantasmagoria expresses not only the non-mimetic inflection that Benjamin
works on Marx's representation of ideology as the cameraobscura,but
also the content of Benjamin's own relation to these representations.
The forerunner of the magic lantern, the cameraobscuraprovided the
optical principles which this later technology refined.
In suggesting the 19th-centuryphantasmagoriaas a spectacle that elegantly captures Benjamin's non-mimetic modification of Marxist accounts of ideological representation, I extend Benjamin's interest in
this spectacle well beyond its brief mention in Konvolut Q. This extension, however, is consonant with Benjamin'sapproach to the technology of visual representation throughout his Parisian production cycle.
From the cycle's first work, One-WayStreet,Benjamin seeks to nuance
equations of visual and ideological illusion through an appeal to historical occurrence, and it would be instructiveto examine closely his representations of stereoscopes, panoramas, dioramas, and photographic
and early cinematic procedure in light of this concern. Speakinggenerally, we might say that Benjamin invokes these spectacles to investigate
how, as Marx put it, the content goes beyond the phrase. The 19th-century experience of illusoryvisual representationsadds complexity to the
rhetoric of visual illusion prominent in Marx's discussions of ideology
- indicating, also, the extent to which these discussions are the product of a particulartime and place. Puttingtheory and history into a mutually challenging relation, Benjamin'streatmentof 19th-centuryvisual
representation furthers his attempt to forge a historically nuanced
Marxism that is capable of apprehending both 19th-centurycommodity culture and its implication in the culture that it describes.
In considering Benjamin'sinterestin the link between visual technology and tropes of ideological illusion, let me suggest that Benjamin'sincreasing fondness for the phantasmagoriaexplains a previously mentioned difference between his 1935 and 1939 Parisianexposes. I have
Benjamin'sPhantasmagoria
95
pointed out that the 1939 expose abandons the section of the 1935 essay
entitled "Daguerre, or the Panoramas." One could argue that Benjamin
turns away from photography because he has already devoted a substantial essay to the subject, except that he seems to have no qualms about
retaining a large section on Baudelaire, about whom he had already written and published elsewhere. Rather, it seems to me that Benjamin's
turn away from photography and the panorama is evidence of the phantasmagoria's increased conceptual power. While Benjamin toys in 1935
with photography and the panorama as vivid expressions of the 19thcentury's "new feeling about life,"'6 by 1939 he has settled on the phantasmagoria as thevisual emblem of this feeling. He thus relegates alternative forms of visual representation to a distinctly subordinate place.
Phantasmagoria as the Afterlifeof Allegory
Robertson's spectacle contains yet another attraction for Benjamin,
if we are attentive to its linguistic content. The term phantasmagoria
was coined by Robertson in 1797 to describe his ghostly performances, although the etymology underwriting his neologism is unclear.
Littre proposes the following etymology: "E. 4a&vrca a, apparition
(see ghost, and 6y a p E , speak: speak to the ghosts, call the ghosts."17
Le Robert,in contrast, suggests that the word comes from "the Greek
phantasma 'ghost,' and agoreuein'to speak in public,' under the infl. of
allegory( -> Phantasm); for Guiraud, 'popular hybrid' offantasme and
gourer, agourer 'to fool."'18 While Littre's etymology captures Robertson's procedure, the principal etymology offered by Le Robertis more
significant for Benjamin. Deriving phantasmagoria etymologically
from allegory, it links this term to Benjamin's privileged metaconcept
of allegory in The Origin of German TragicDrama. The supposition that
Benjamin's interest in phantasmagoria stems partially from the term's
etymological relation to allegory is supported by Benjamin's repeated
association of the Passagen-Werkproject to this earlier work. When
Benjamin writes to Gershom Scholem, for example, of his newly-conceived arcades project, he describes it as a Parisian version of TheOrigin
of German TragicDrama:
16. Benjamin, "Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century" 150.
de la languefrancaise,vol. 3 (Paris: Gallimard, 1963)
17. Emile Littre, Dictionnaire
1407; my translation.
de la languefrancaise,
18. LeRobert,Dictionnaire
vol. 4 (Paris:Le Robert, 1985) 404; my
translation.
96
MargaretCohen
When I have finished the work with which I am now occupied,
carefully, provisionally.... the production cycle of One-WayStreet
will be closed for me in the same way that the tragic drama book
cosed the German one. The profane motifs of One-WayStreetwill
parade by in hellish intensification.19
Granting the phantasmagoria a place of honor in his hellish parade,
Benjamin privileges a term which modifies the etymology of the German cycle's key metaconcept in a fashion expressing an important difference between 17th-century Germany and 19th-century France.
While constructed on the model of allegory, the word "phantasmagoria" is comprised of somewhat different etymological components ofphantasma and agoreueinrather than allegory's allos and agoreuein.The
difference between the etymologies of allegory and phantasmagoria
expresses a significant difference between the worlds that Benjamin
uses these terms to conjure up. Allegory's etymology can be read to
mean, among other things, "speaking other" within the agora - a term
that means the marketplace as well as the public place. True to its etymology, 17th-century allegory remains for Benjamin within the marketplace, but it also indicates an alternative to it. The fallen aspect taken by the sacred in the realm of the profane, allegory continues to
point towards the sacred, and hence towards a possible theological redemption of secular history.
Allegory's etymology implies the possibility of redemption and as
such contrasts with the etymology of the phantasmagoria, which substitutes ghosts for the allos that signifies allegory's transcendence. Appearing as allegory's demonic Doppelgdnger,the phantasmagoria remains
firmly rooted in the haunted realm of commercial exchange. Its etymology thus well expresses Benjamin's concusions about the commodity
origins of 19th-century Parisian hell and about the inescapability of this
hell.20 Indeed, Benjamin's 1939 exposei on the arcades explicity suggests
the phantasmagorical commodity as the 19th-century equivalent to
17th-century allegory. He writes: "to the singular debasement of things
19. WalterBenjamin,Briefe(Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp,1966)455;my translation.
20. I invokethe term"hell"withthe simultaneousdespairand playfulnessBenjamin givesit;whatbetterevidenceof the ambiguityof Benjamin'sdesignationthanhis
as its emblem?For the playfulnessof this
decisionto privilegethe phantasmagoria
of Parisin the minorgenreof
designation,see also the wittilyhellishcharacterization
Parisianpanoramicliteraturedearto Benjaminandexemplifiedby Hetzel'sLeDiablea
Paris(Paris: 1846).
Benjamin'sPhantasmagoria
97
by their meaning, which is characteristic of 17th-century allegory, corresponds the singular debasement of things by their price as commodities" (PW 71). This sentence substantially modifies the translation of allegory into the 19th century that Benjamin proposed in his 1935 resume
of the arcades project: "as in the seventeenth century the canon of
dialectical imagery came to be allegory, in the nineteenth it is novelty."21
Benjamin already contrasts the permanently fallen experience of the
phantasmagoria with provisionally fallen allegory in the final pages of The
Originof GermanTragicDrama:
In God's world the allegorist awakens.... Allegory, of course,
thereby loses everything that was most peculiar to it: the secret,
privileged knowledge, the arbitraryrule in the realm of dead objects, the supposed infinity of a world without hope. All this
vanishes with this one about-turn, in which the immersion of alleof the objective and,
gory has to clear away the finalphantasmagoria
left entirely to its own devices, rediscovers itself, not playfully in
the earthlyworld of things, but seriously under the eyes of heaven
(emphasis on phantasmagoria added).22
Interestingly, Robertson's spectacle enacts Benjamin's contrast between
the temporarily fallen allegory and the permanently fallen phantasmagoria. Robertson's phantasmagoria often ended with the topos of the mementomoridear to the allegorical imagination. Displaying the "skeleton of
a young woman standing on a pedestal," Robertson pronounced the following admonition: "'You who have perhaps smiled at my experiments,
beauties who have experienced a few moments of terror .. . this is the
fate that is reserved for you, this is what you will be one day. Remember
the phantasmagoria."'23 While related to the allegorical mementomori,
Robertson's final gesture diverges from the final allegorical use of this
topos as it is described by Benjamin. Rather than turning enchantment
into death, the final moment of allegory turns death into eternal life, a
transformation which Benjamin invokes by citing a passage from
21. Benjamin, "Paris,the Capitalof the Nineteenth Century" 158. For a general discussion of how Benjamin translateshis 17th-centuryconcept of allegory into the 19th
century, see Lloyd Spencer, "Allegoryin the World of the Commodity: The Importance
of CentralPark,"New GermanCritique34 (1985).
22. Walter Benjamin, TheOriginof GermanTragicDrama,trans.John Osbore (London: New Left Books, 1977) 232.
23. From an account in Le Courrierdes spectacles,22 February 1800; quoted in
Coissac 27.
98
Margaret Cohen
Lohenstein: "'Yea, when the Highest comes to reap the harvest from the
graveyard, then I, a death's head, will be an angel's countenance."'24
In his Memoires,Robertson makes explicit that his spectacle characterizes a world in which the possibility of theological transcendence
has been lost. Recounting his interest in the supernatural investigations of the 17th-century Jesuit, Father Athenasius Kircher (who was,
not so coincidentally, the inventor of the magic lantern), Robertson
writes: "Father Kircher, it is said, believed in the devil, and the example could be contagious, for Father Kircher was endowed with such
great knowledge that many people would be tempted to think that if
he believed in the devil, he had good reasons for this."25 Robertson's
attempts to imitate the occult knowledge of Kircher soon reveal to
him, however, the divide separating the late 18th from the 17th century. He invents the phantasmagoria, he goes on to tell us, as consolation
for this divide: '"The devil refusing to communicate to me the science
of wonders, I set myself to making devils, and my wand had only to
move in order to force the whole infernal procession to see the
light."'26 Turning to technology as an imperfect substitute for the authentically supernatural, Robertson associates the phantasmagoria
with the same disappearance of the religious demonic as Benjamin. In
continuing, nonetheless, to link his technological creation to some sort
of supernatural power, Robertson not only mocks the demonic but
also points to the demonic potential of human invention. His phantasmagoria thus well expresses Benjamin's Marxist understanding of the
strangely supernatural power evinced by "the new creations" in their
ideologically transposed forms, a power humanly created rather than
theological in origin.
While Benjamin's familiarity with Robertson's writings is difficult to
determine, it alters neither his interest in the technological phantasmagoria nor my fundamental premise that Benjamin privileges phantasmagoria as the Passagen-Werk'spotential allegory. A synecdoche for the
cultural products of the Parisian 19th century, this concept is sufficiently polyvalent to invoke the theoretical apparatus Benjamin uses to
render these products meaningful.
24.
25.
quoted
26.
Benjamin, The Origin of German TragicDrama 232.
Memoiresrecreatifs,scientifiques,et anecdotiquesdu physicien-aeronauteE.-G. Robertson;
in Coissac 20.
Coissac 20.
Benjamin'sPhantasmagoria 99
and Benjamin'sMarxist-Psychoanalytic
Dream
Phantasmagoria
In giving an account of the phantasmagoria's historical origin, I
have stressed above all this concept's relation to Benjamin's Marxist
concerns. But Benjamin's interest in the phantasmagoria extends, I
would suggest, beyond a concern with the ideological transposition of
material reality in a commodified world. The psychological significance of the concept also suits it to invoke the psychoanalytic theory
that Benjamin fuses with Marxism to explain why ideological transposition takes disfigured form.
The Passagen-Werk's
fusion of Marxist and psychoanalytic theory is
not only one of its greatest seductions but also one of its most recalcitrant aspects, largely because Benjamin never clearly worked out the
details of this fusion. Benjamin used Freud's description of the disfigurations produced by repression to characterizethe opacity of ideological transposition - the "expression" that we saw him substitute for
Marx's "reflection"in the passage from Konvolut K quoted above. But
whether more than aesthetic factors motivate the comparison of ideology to repressed representation is a question with which Benjamin
struggled throughout the 1930's.27Buck-Morss gives the most coherent systematization of Benjamin's fragmentarycomments on the subject when she discusses Benjamin's translation of Freudian dream theory to the collective sphere. Positing Benjamin's interest in a collective
unconscious that is class-bound, she refutes Adorno's charge that the
arcades' dreaming collective is a classless collective. "Class differentiations were never lacking in Benjamin's theory of the collective unconscious," Buck-Morsswrites, "indeed, even in his earliest formulatiqUs
he considered it an extension and refinement of Marx's theory of the
superstructure: the collective dream manifested the ideology of the
27. On the psychoanalytic inflection that Benjamin gives to Marxist theory, see
Buck-Morss'sessays "Redeeming Mass Culture for the Revolution," New GermanCritique29 (1983), and "WalterBenjamin - RevolutionaryWriter,"New LeftReview128
(1981). See also Tiedemann's "Dialectics at a Standstill,"On WalterBenjamin,ed. Gary
Smith (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986); Berd Witte, "Krise und Kritik. Zur
ZusammenarbeitBenjamins mit Brecht in denJahren 1929-1933," Peter Gebhardt et
derModeme(Monographien Literaturwissenschaft,vol.
al., WalterBenjamin- Zeitgenosse
30 [Kronberg:ScriptorVerlag, 1976]);and WinfriedMenninghaus's section on the relation between the Freudian myth and the Benjaminian dream in "WalterBenjamin's
Theory of Myth," also in On WalterBenjamin.BarbaraKleiner offers a surrealistview of
the matter in "L'eveil comme categorie centrale de l'experience historique dans le
de Benjamin," as do, less successfully,Rita Bischof and Elisabeth Lenk in
Passagen-Werk
"L'intricationsurreelle du reve et de l'histoire dans les Passagesde Benjamin." These
last two essays are published in WalterBenjaminet Paris(Paris:Editions du Cerf, 1986).
100
MargaretCohen
dominant class."28Buck-Morss's argument is rich and sophisticated,
but to understand Benjamin's interest in the phantasmagoria,it is important to consider one of his hypotheses about ideology's repressed
characterthat Buck-Morssneglects. This consideration suggests Benjamin's turn towards the phantasmagoriaas the obverse of his turn away
from the dream.
Buck-Morsscites Benjamin's ambiguous comparison of ideology to
the dream of an overfed sleeper - a comparison which follows the
passage from Konvolut K on the expressive character of the superstructure - in order to argue "the bourgeois class . . . [as] the generator of a collective dream."29But the cause of ideological distortion posited by Benjamin's comparison is, in fact, more ambiguous than BuckMorss's coherent account of it allows. When Benjamin writes "the economic conditions under which a society exists come to expression in
the superstructure,just as with someone sleeping, an overfilled stomach, although it may causally 'determine' the contents of the dream,
finds in those contents not its copied reflection but rather its expression," he suggests the dream as "causally 'determined"' not only, as
Freud and Buck-Morsswould have it, by the unconscious processes of
the sleeper, but also by the excessive activityof the material realm (PW
495).30If we translate his metaphor to the belly of the social body, we
infer that the dream will be determined by "the economic conditions
under which a society exists." Describing the dream that is ideology as
the product of obscured forces of production, Benjamin embarks on
an enterprise which will find its full elaboration in Althusser.31True,
he neither represents the forces of production in unconscious terms
nor articulatestheir relation to the sleeper's unconscious, but he nonetheless proposes disfigured ideology as causally determined by an objective material realm. Benjamin's interest in desubjectivizing the
realm that produces disfigured ideology becomes increasingly apparent as his work on the arcades project proceeds. Notably, Benjamin
grapples with this question in "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,"where
28. Buck-Morss 229.
29. Buck-Morss 229.
30. I have slightly modified Buck-Morss's translation of this passage. See BuckMorss 229.
31. Buck-Morss 229. The Althusserian ring to this enterprise is not, I suspect, coincidental; there exists much evidence that Benjamin, like Althusser (via Lacan), derived his idea of the material unconscious from a surrealistfusion of Marx and Freud.
I discuss this matter extensively in my forthcoming Towardsa Post-RealistTheoryof Ideology: Paris, Surrealism,and WalterBenjamin.
Benjamin'sPhantasmagoria 101
the subject's Freudian manner of representing objective conditions becomes a response to the transformationof nature into second nature.
If Benjamin sees the dream as a tempting pivot between Marx and
Freud, it is not only because it occupies a central position in Freud's
theory of repression, but also because Marx describes ideology in
dream-like terms.32Nonetheless, the dream's psychic causality (at least
in a Freudian world) prevents it from encompassing the material component which plays a definitive role for Benjamin in the formation of
ideology. Adoro raises such an objection to the dream in the
Hornberg letter:
If the disenchantmentof the dialecticalimage as a "dream"
psychologizesit, by the sametokenit fallsunderthe spellof bourgeoispsychology.Forwho is the subjectof the dream?... The notion of collectiveconsciousnesswas inventedonly to divertattention fromtrueobjectivityand its correlate,alienatedsubjectivity.33
When Benjamin turns from ideology as dream to ideology as phantasmagoria in his 1939 rewrite of the 1935 Paris expose, he seems to acknowledge Adorno's objections. However, in order to understand
how the phantasmagoria solves the problem of the dream's subjective
agency, the concept's psychoanalytic significance needs to be clarified.
Like the dream, the mental phantasmagoria is an irrational phenomenon whose psychically motivated content Freud would seek to
reveal. But while Freud indubitably demonstrates the subjective origin
of the dream, his success with seemingly supernatural,waking occurrences is less assured. While Freud suggests these experiences to be the
products of psychic repression, his ambiguous explanations of them in
"The 'Uncanny"' amply demonstrate that they are also responses to
collective history and to objective events which, at times, entirely blur
the distinction between objective and subjective causality.34Castle
makes a similar point when she discusses the significance of the historical phantasmagoria for Freud's attempt to master ghostly occurrence.
She writes:
32. As the epigraph to Konvolut N, Benjamin cites a passage from Marx's letter to
Arnold Ruge about Paris as "the new capital of the new world": "'The reform of consciousness consists onlyin this: to wake the world ... from the dream of itself" (PW
570). (KarlMarx, letter to Arnold Ruge, September 1843, TheMarx-EngelsReader,ed.
Robert Tucker [New York: Norton, 1978] 12).
and Politics112-13.
33. Adorno to Benjamin, Aesthetics
34. Freudwrites,for example: "An uncannyexperienceoccurs eitherwhen repressed
102
MargaretCohen
Freud struggled with the paradoxes of spectralization, largely by
- psychoanalysis attempting to define a cognitive practice
which would exorcise these "ghostly presences" once and for all.
But ... Freud never fully escaped the pervasive crypto-supernaturalism of early 19th-century psychology.35
If Benjamin turns from the dream to the phantasmagoria, I would suggest that it is precisely because phantasmagorical mental activity proves
problematic for Freud. A moment when Freud's recuperation of psychological processes for subjective causality starts to break down, the
phantasmagoria liberates Benjamin from "the spell of bourgeois psychology" within the terms of bourgeois psychology itself.36
'A Last Phantasmagoria'"Benjamin as Phantasmagorian
Benjamin concludes his 1939 expose by designating as phantasmagorical the ideological product that is critical of ideology. We have seen
him call Blanqui's Eternitepar les Astres a "last phantasmagoria" that
"implicitly includes an acerbic critique of all the others" (PW 75). To
conclude our examination of Benjamin's interest in the phantasmagoria, we need to understand why he uses the term in a fashion opposed to his use of it in the essay's previous sections. If the phantasmagoria's polyvalence in the realm of ideological mystification is clear
enough, what aspect of this concept suits it to designate practices of
ideological critique?
The answer to this question lies as much in Benjamin's understanding of contemporary critical activity as in the phantasmagoria itself.
Throughout the Parisian production cycle, Benjamin states that the
Enlightenment's critical procedures no longer function in today's
world.37 With all experience saturated by the phantasmagorical power
infantilecomplexeshavebeen revivedby some impression,or whenthe primitivebeliefswe havesurmountedseem once more to be confirmed.Finally,we mustnot let
our predilectionfor smooth solutionand lucid expositionblind us to the fact that
these two classes of uncannyexperienceare not alwayssharplydistinguishable."
Edition
of
SigmundFreud,"The 'Uncanny"'[Das'Unheimliche'](1919),TheStandard
the Complete
Worksof SigmundFreud,vol. 17, ed. James Strachey (London:
Psychological
HogarthPress,1953-74)249.
35. Castle59
and Politics113.
36. Adorno to Benjamin, Aesthetics
37. See, for example, One-WayStreet's"Imperial Panorama," in One-WayStreetand
trans. EdmundJephcott and KingsleyShorter(London:New Left
OtherWritings,
Books, 1979).
Benjamin'sPhantasmagoria
103
of the commodity, even the critic cannot achieve the distanced and
multi-dimensional relation to his/her object necessary for rational
thought. "Criticism [Kritik]is a matter of correct distancing," writes
Benjamin in One-WayStreet.38"It was at home in a world where perspectives and prospects counted and where it was still possible to take a
standpoint. Now things press too closely on human society. The 'unclouded,' 'innocent' eye has become a lie."39Because of the impossibility of gaining criticaldistance, rational demystification can no longer
be the critic's task. Rather, the critic must seek to appropriate the distorted and distorting power of ideological transposition to ideologically disruptive ends.
When Benjamin uses the phantasmagoria to designate commodity
culture's acerbic critique, he solves a problem that accompanies his
post-Enlightenment redefinition of critical activity: how to represent
criticalthought when its traditional metaphysical configuration breaks
down? For in invalidating Enlightenment "Kritik,"Benjamin deprives
himself of the traditional metaphysical rhetoric for critical knowledge
as well. Following traditional metaphysics, Enlightenment discourse
maps its opposition between valid rational and mystified non-rational
thought onto the field of physical vision. Figuring rational thought as
the natural vision of natural objects, it represents mystified thought in
opposition - either as technologically aided vision or as a technologically produced show (the procession in Plato's cave is the first phantasmagoria). Benjamin himself figures rational thought by employing the
visual tropes of Enlightenment discourse, as the previously quoted
passage from One-WayStreetmakes clear. But these tropes do not adequately encompass the concept of contemporary criticalactivitywhich
Benjamin sets forth. A form of thinking that is neither entirely rational
nor entirely mystified, Benjamin's criticalactivitytransgressesnot only
a conceptual opposition fundamental to Enlightenment epistemology
but also the physical practices that Enlightenment discourse invokes to
infuse its concepts with life.
In order to express his understandingof contemporarycriticalactivity,
Benjaminhence must devise figuresof his own, of which the phantasmagoria is but one late example. Throughout the Parisianproduction cycle,
Benjamin represents contemporary critique as the disruptive appropriation of existing visual technologies, translatinginto visual terms his
38. Benjamin, One-WayStreet89.
39. Benjamin, One-WayStreet89.
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MargaretCohen
his understanding of critical activity as the disruptive appropriation of
ideological transposition. Benjamin's new critical tropes, we notice,
hold a chiasmic relation to the Enlightenment rhetoric they supersede.
Associating critique with artificial vision to suggest its non-rational and
mystified aspects, Benjamin simultaneously asserts that such critique
gives valid access to the way things are. Benjamin's new tropes thus
employ visual rhetoric in orthodox Enlightenment fashion while refusing the conceptual opposition between reason and mystification on
which Enlightenment visual rhetoric is based. Invoking Enlightenment
discourse only better to confuse its terms, Benjamin devises figures for
critical activity which perform on traditional epistemological rhetoric
the disruption that they propose as critical praxis.
Among the visual technologies Benjamin explores to figure ideological illumination, advertising and cinema are prominent. Benjamin
also investigates the expressive potential of various 19th-century forms
of popular spectacle - stereoscopes, panoramas, mechanical toys,
and magic lantern shows - which attract him for their historical content as well. But the fact that Benjamin concludes his 1939 Parisian expose by characterizing the disruptive manipulation of ideology as
phantasmagorical suggests that he privileges the figurative potential of
the phantasmagoria. Undoubtedly, Benjamin's interest in the "last
phantasmagoria" derives primarily from the phantasmagoria's polyvalent ability to figure ideological mystification. We should not, however,
overlook features of the phantasmagoria that suit it to express Benjamin's vision of contemporary ideological critique.
When the original phantasmagorian summoned up the ghosts, he
performed a critical gesture whose ambiguous relation to rationality
recalls the rational status of the contemporary critical gesture valued
by Benjamin. Turning supernatural beings into the product of human
ingenuity even as he maintained their supernatural form, Robertson
simultaneously rationalized the demonic and demonized rational
thought. More importantly, the technological phantasmagoria aptly
expresses the relation of Benjamin's method of ideological illumination to standard procedures of Marxist cultural critique. We return
here to Marx's metaphor for ideology, but view it from the other side.
Marx's metaphor of the cameraobscurarepresents both ideology and
critical knowledge in standard Enlightenment terms. Opposing the darkened space of ideological illusion to the sun-filled landscape outside,
Marx suggests critical activity as the passage from technological spectacle
to natural world. Marx's Enlightenment figuration of knowledge well
Benjamin'sPhantasmagoria
105
expresses his faith in the illuminatingpower of rationalcritique. But for
Benjamin, this understanding of ideology renders Marx's (and Marxism's) Enlightenment conception and figurationof criticalactivityquestionable. Scatteredthroughout the arcades'methodological fragmentsis
Benjamin'ssuggestionthat Marxismcan only make criticaluse of reason
if it expands Marx's implicit challenge to the possibility of reason in a
commodified world. Benjamin'spolemical attackon the Enlightenment
suppositions inhering in Marxism is, of course, a criticalPandora'sbox
that is debated from the moment Adoro's stinging Horberg letter
takes Benjamin's ambiguous dialecticalimages to task. Without raising
its lid, I wish only to suggest that it takes the form of the phantoscope. It
is Marx who introduces the concept of the phantasmagoriato designate
commodity culture'snon-rationalideological transpositionof the material world. When Benjamin uses the concept to designate ideology critique, he thus invokes a post-Enlightenmentmoment in Marx to correct
the Enlightenment understanding of "Kritik"upon which Marx relies.
In the process, Benjamin provides a technological figure for critical
knowledge that modifies the Enlightenmentvision of the critic'stask
The last phantasmaexemplified in Marx's notion of the cameraobscura.
into artificialshow.
goria turns the world as it is outside the cameraobscura
Unable to have direct access to the sun-filled real, critical thought
remedies enclosure in the cave of ideology by producing technological
spectacles of its own. In so doing, the criticalphantasmagorianworks
with a medium of illumination that itself encapsulatesBenjamin'spostEnlightenment challenge. The fire kindled by the phantasmagorianin
the phantoscope transformsthe unfiltered natural light of rational understandinginto an energy somewhere between nature and art. Stolen
by Prometheusfor man, this light of the gods is also the firsttechnology.
Benjamin's 1928 description of the arcades project suggests that he
conceived of his own project of critical illumination as a phantasmagorical spectacle from its inception. In the letter to Scholem quoted
above, Benjamin describes his work as a ghostly procession: "The profane motifs will parade by in hellish intensification."4 This important
letter also provides a provisional title to the Passagen-Werk,
as Benjamin
his
in
a
form:
"Parisian
arcades.
shapes
spectacle
specific 19th-century
A dialecticalfeerie."4'While the fairytaleaspects of Benjamin's interest
40. Benjamin, Briefe455.
41. Benjamin, Briefe455. The word "theory," not coincidentally, derives from a
Greek word meaning spectacle as well as viewing.
106
Margaret Cohen
in ' feerie"have been amply discussed, the word's specific meaning for
the 19th-centuryneeds to be clarified.The term 'feerie"was introduced
in 1823 Paris to designate a theatrical spectacle "where supernatural
characters appeared . . . and which demanded considerable scenic
means," notably mechanical ones.42All the modeduring the middle part
of the century, these productions led Flaubert to comment, "'Along
with suckling pig, theferie is the heaviest thing that I know of."'43
Benjamin did not maintain the awkwardfeerieas a visual emblem for
his Parisian project of representation and critique. Exploring the potential of various 19th- and 20th-century visual technologies to figure
his vision of critical activity, Benjamin most often settled on the cinema, a state-of-the-artmedium with a mobile view point not unlike his
own: "Method of this work: literary montage. I have nothing to say.
Only to show," he wrote in the Konvolut's section N (PW 574). Far
from invalidating my argument for the expressive centrality of the
phantasmagoria in Benjamin's Parisian production cycle, Benjamin's
representation of his own practice in cinematic terms fortifies it. What
is the phantasmagoria but proto-cinema? A form of visual representation crucial to the pre-history of cinema (in the process of figuring out
how to use the magic lantern to phantasmagorical effect, Robertson
made it easily portable), the phantasmagoria proceeds by the same
principle of juxtaposition that underwrites cinematic montage.
To propose Benjamin as a phantasmagorian?The ghost of Adoro,
making a terrifyinggrimace, appears:"you need not fear that I shall suggest that in your study phantasmagoriashould survive unmediated or
that the study itself should assume a phantasmagoricalcharacter."44
If
Adorno repeatedlydemands the "explosion of the phantasmagoria,"it
is perhaps because this grand inquisitor of rationalityscents the challenge to his own activityimplied by Benjamin'sfondness for the term.45
Benjamindoes not mystifymaterialrealityin his phantasmagoria,but he
does not exactlydemystifyit either. Rather,materialrealitybecomes one
more representationin his magic theater, part of a ghostly conceptual
paradethat includes not only the phantasmagoriasof 19th-centuryParis,
but concepts of the base and superstructure,of relations of production,
42.
43.
Le Robert, vol. 4, 444.
Le Robert,vol. 4, 444.
44. Theodor Adoro, letter to Walter Benjamin, 10 November 1938, Aesthetics
and
Politics 127.
45. Adoro
to Benjamin, Aestheticsand Politics 113.
Benjamin'sPhantasmagoria
107
and of mediation and demystification as well. Adorno may bristle.
And Benjamin, it should be pointed out, is hardly more comfortable
with the phantasmagoria's enchanting possibility. Forced to employ
such procedures because Enlightenment critical practices no longer
function, Benjamin ultimately hopes for an end to the world of
phantasmagoricalvision. When Benjamin conceives of criticism as enchantment, however, he does more than mourn criticism's decline.
Admitting criticism's commerce with magic, he draws attention to its
power to locate contemporary demons and press them into positive
political service.
"The world dominated by its phantasmagorias, is - to use an expression from Baudelaire - modernity," writes Benjamin in the conclusion to the 1939 "Paris, Capital of the 19th Century" (PW 77).
Benjamin's critical association of the phantasmagoria with modernity
in no way invalidates my argument for the phantasmagoricalnature of
his criticism. If Benjamin is one of modernity's more acerbic critics, it
seems to me indisputable that he remains preoccupied with modernity's defining concerns. As do we. And hence, my vision of the elaborated phantasmagoria fading, I do not only cry, behold it was a dream.
Surveying the ruins of postmodernism, we are confronted with proliferating representations instead of the reality that produced them, or
rather,with the fact that the distinction between realityand representation has stopped making sense. Such realization, however, in no way
dispels, but rather exacerbates the need for concrete material practice.
I am not too easy, either, with Benjamin's criticalphantasmagoria, suspicious of the mystifying ends to which its enchantment can be put.
But perhaps this very danger indicates its vitality.