ISSN 1479-7585 Print/ISSN 1740-1666 online/03/010047-14 © 2003 Taylor & Francis LtdDOI: 10.1080/1479758032000079774Journal for Cultural Research, Vol. 7, No. 1, 2003, 47–60

Things Temporal Expos´e, Passages fromBenjaminAlexandre LefebvreAbstractNineteenth-century Paris was for Walter Benjamin the site of a singular historicalevent, the ur-form of bourgeois modernity. It was a “hellish” time disastrously bent onrepeating itself and yet a threshold of great promise and possibility. By focusing onBenjamin’s 1935 and 1939 Expos´es for The Arcades Project, my paper develops thekeywords of the Expos´es (Arcades, Fashion, etc.), and elaborates ways in which theseobjects articulate such different temporal possibilities. For example, “fashion” enacts aneternally recurrent and capital time, whereas “arcades” represent wish images of the pastthat might be actualized into utopian promises of the future. My argument developsBenjamin’s “objective” framing of temporality. In the Expos´es specific and phenomenalthings communicate temporalities specific to modernity. Objects not only communicatetime but also enable the temporal experience of the modern subject. This readingchallenges idealist interpretations of temporality grounded within an interiorizingsubject. I do not argue that Benjamin privileges an objective temporal horizon “over” thesubject but rather that he resituates dialectical possibilities of temporality in theengagement between subjects and commonplace objects.As I study this age which is so close to us and so remote, I compare myself to asurgeon operating with local anesthetic: I work in areas that are numb, dead – yetthe patient is alive and can still talk.Walter Benjamin, The Arcades ProjectI. The passage of Walter BenjaminListen. Things speak; we can hear them in the Arcades:A look at the ambiguity of the arcades: their abundance of mirrors, whichfabulously amplifies the space and makes orientation more difficult . . . Thewhispering of gazes fills the arcades. There is no thing here that does not, whereone least expects it, open a fugitive eye, blinking it shut again; but if you lookmore closely, it is gone. To the whispering of these gazes, the space lends its echo.“Now what,” it blinks, “can possibly have come over me?” We stop short in somesurprise. “What indeed, can possibly have come over you?” Thus we gentlybounce the question back to it (Benjamin 1999:542)What kind of address is this? What is the vocative function of these blinks,whispers, gazes and questions? This first set of questions treats perceptibility.48 A. LefebvreHow do moderns – a wanderer in the arcade, for example – recognize and engagewith objects and space? How does the subject negotiate encounters with objects?Many readers of Benjamin’s Paris writings perceive in them exteriorization of thespirit, an Ent¨ausserung gone mad (Leslie 2000:153; Markus 2001; Mehlman1993:68–9). They find a space – fugitive, interrogative, conspirational thatdevelops a claim made by Hegel to the truth of its exaggeration; namely, that to“endow objects with life is to make them into gods” (O’Neill 1996:5). We shallargue that Benjamin articulates a certain crisis of immanence that is acceleratedand exaggerated in commodification whereby we experience not the thingness ofthe thing but rather the thingness of the self and the selfness of the thing.Perception and perceptibility involve more than simply the capacity to see, but“depends upon and supports a temporal organization of the world” (Marder

2001:28). This brings us to a second group of questions raised by this passagearound temporality. The passage above carries on in the present participle. Thewhispering never stops and it is never exactly locatable. It is fugitive but fills, opensbut shuts, interrogates but echoes, all in the suspension of time. Its detective-styletropes are not incidental. This passage seems to be the scene of a crime. But of acrime which repeats itself, preserves and returns to itself. It concludes with thespecularity of its beginning; its closing question only mirrors more questions.With the problematic of perceptibility and time in mind, we will turn to theExpos´e texts, which occupy the rest of the essay. Only two of the several Expos´esBenjamin wrote to solicit support for his never completed Passengen-Werk remain.One is dated 1935 and the other 1939. (The principal difference between the twois that the 1939 version includes substantial theoretical development in the formof an introduction and conclusion.) Each section of these short texts is organizedaround a particular thing or object. Thus, in the 1935 Expos´e, we find six divisionscorresponding to: arcades, panoramas, world exhibitions, the bourgeois interior,streets of Paris, and barricades.We shall develop these keywords and consider how objects become perceptible,and a problem of perceptibility, as they communicate (whispering and glancing)varied possibilities of temporal experience. This is a strange and difficult notionfor the subject who is both actant and actor within these “times”. When we speakof the “objects” of the Expos´es, we refer both to the objective and phenomenalmodernity of nineteenth-century Paris, and also to a resituated dialectic betweenthis modernity, human subjects and material objects. It is a little like Derrida putsit – “the thing is not an object [and] cannot become one” – in the sense that objectand subject are not to be counterposed and bounded in opposition to one another(Derrida 1984:12).Instead, we speak of these objects “as though they had struck us” (Benjamin1999:206). This involves giving close attention to the things themselves, sinkingwith them “into the deepest stratum” (206). Our reading of the Expos´e texts notonly accords primacy to the object but also develops the modalities in whichobjects function as bearers and possibility of time. This reading of “objective time”is contrary to interpretations of Benjamin (and even of Benjamin himself) whichstress the idealist and voluntarist qualities of his dialectical historicism. Therefore,this will not be a reading in which Benjamin rescues the rags and refuse of historyin order to escape a stalled dialectic of modernity (Buck-Morss 1989:244–52). Norwill this essay support images of the collector-historian piecing what “comestogether in a flash with the now to form a constellation” (Benjamin 1999:462).Things Temporal Expos´e, Passages from Benjamin 49Both of these frames are too idealistic and interiorizing to develop the thoughtthat things themselves structure perception and time.The first part of this paper elaborates objects as circulating temporalities ofrecurrence and iteration, and focuses on fashion and the commodity form asnouveaut´e. The second part traces counter-times: objective expressions oftemporalities not resumed by circuits and circulation of commodities as novelty.Finally, the concluding remarks stress an untimely event of the subject fromwithin a context in which horizons of temporality have been objectively relocatedin what Benjamin believed to be the “originary” moment of modernity, Paris,Capital of the Nineteenth Century.II. The ruffle of eternityThe 1939 Expos´e opens and closes (with) damnation, the temporality ofSisyphus. Here, there, then, and now, we moderns are “under sentence ofdamnation”, a “mythic anguish”, where “torments of hell figure as the latestnovelty of all time, as pains eternal and always new” (Benjamin 1939:26). Callingthis “hellish” time, Benjamin points to the contradiction in a social order thatpostures as dynamic and novel, while simultaneously forcibly ensuring that no

relations, no distributions and no rules ever change. Benjamin’s text indicates thatthis eternally recurring economy of punishment is singularly historical – a productof its times, “the complement of that society” (1939:25) – and also an abeyance ofthe possibility of time, except for iterative perdition.Here, we observe a peculiar temporality. Modern damnation is renderedimmanently and tautologically: we are damned because we endure punishmentsbut these punishments constitute damnation. This is a universe which repeatsendlessly and “performs – imperturbably – the same routines” (Benjamin citingBlanqui 1939:26). Punishment is the fact that we have to keep on enduringpunishment. Benjamin’s “sentence of damnation” (1939:26) has an inexpiablesyntax and thus of duration; it suffers punishments from within an immanentlygenerated form of time/timelessness, while this form is nothing else than its mostformidable punishment. As Baudelaire puts it, the person living in hellish time“sees nothing but disillusion and bitterness, and before him nothing but a tempestwhich contains nothing new, neither instruction nor pain” (Benjamin 1968a:193).Since we argue for a displacement of “time” into objectivity, we will develop aspecific example of hellish temporality. In the Expos´es there is a sustaineddisplacement of the experience and possibility of time into the objective modernityof nineteenth-century Paris. Perhaps the most singular enactment of temporaldamnation is crystallized within “fashion”. Indeed, Benjamin anticipated constructingThe Arcades Project as a “metaphysics of fashion”, whereby fashionwould be the “modern measure of time” (Buck-Morss 1989:97). The relevantquality of fashion is its production of a particular consciousness of time: novelty.The novelty form of commodity time is precisely its operation of hellish time: adynamic standstill. It is dynamic because of its “new velocities” of accelerationand antiquation but this dynamism is in service of “eliminating all discontinuitiesand sudden ends” (Benjamin 1999:65–6). Fashion “overcomes” [aufgehoben] birthand death, ruptures that would impinge on its present moment. Fashioncirculates birth and death so that they propose no significant disjunction, only arecurrence of the same rising and passing away.50 A. LefebvreCapital-time is economic circularity: a time that never gives anything withoutreappropriation, circular return, repetition and capitalization (Derrida 1992:101).But fashion proceeds by disjunctures and breaks as the temporality of nouveaut´e,“[which is] a quality independent of the use value of the commodity. It is thesource of that illusion of which fashion is the tireless purveyor . . . this semblanceof the new is reflected, like one mirror in another, in the semblance of the everrecurrent” (Benjamin 1939:22; 1935:11). Since nouveaut´e is a quality independentof the use value of the commodity, it is separate from and anterior to itsmanifestations in the commodity. The material object is a latent or late arrival toits temporal form (the nouveaut´e of fashion). Novelty is the originary time ofdamned modernity: new while recurrent. Completely un-substantial and tireless,novelty is never anything other than contemporaneous: “to be contemporaine detout le monde – that is the keenest and most secret satisfaction that fashion canoffer” (Benjamin 1999:66).Yet novelty in itself is impossible; it is only a quasi-temporality. Newness, for allits independence from the commodity, requires objects as vehicles to announceitself. Benjamin makes the Hegelian point that spirit (or time) cannot remainindeterminately abstract but must pass into substantiality (Hegel 1991:185). Butwhile Hegel circulates spirit as witness to the manifest dynamic of history,Benjamin shows this concretization to be crystallized and suspended. Thiscrystallized dialectic is expressed in Benjamin’s remark that “the eternal is anycase far more the ruffle on a dress than some idea” (1999:69). The ruffle is timedone-up as frozen substantiality; whether the dress is of this season or the last itpromises the same for eternity. Novelty is a perfect example of the performance

and dissimulation of eternal recurrence. In novelty, the “bourgeoisie enjoys itsfalse consciousness to the full” in which the newest and latest thing enjoins ahyperamnesic temporality performed in both the object as ephemeral and in theexperience of the thing as new (1935:11). Fashion is that which produces a facultyof forgetfulness ensuring its temporality of recurrence because “every current offashion or of worldview derives its force from what is forgotten” (Benjamin1999:393).As communicants of nouveaut´e, objects are temporal experience for the subjectof fashion or urbanity. Capitalist modernity has concretized and disseminated theboredom and ennui requisite for experiencing its objects. Second Empire Paris isan “ever, ever, ever”, a “monotony feed[ing] on the new” (Benjamin 1999:109,111). This newness and its monotony are embodied and expressed in the mediumof the things of Paris whose temporal consciousness or condition is one ofobjective, stalled temporality. The objective nouveaut´e Benjamin discerns precludesalternative temporal materialities and possibilities; reality as the exhaustivemeasure of humanity can promise only recurrence. With Blanqui, Benjaminconcludes that humanity figures as damned in this phantasmatic civilization:“everything new it could hope for turns out to be a reality that has always beenpresent; and this newness will be as little capable of furnishing it with a liberatingsolution as a new fashion is capable of rejuvenating society” (1939:15).The things and substances of recurrent time are not restricted to fashion alone.“On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” Benjamin begins to outline “a change in thestructure of experience” in the period broadly referred to as Second Empire Paris(1968a:156). Running through complex coordinates of memory and time inBergson, Freud and Proust, Benjamin depicts modern subjects so bombarded byThings Temporal Expos´e, Passages from Benjamin 51objective shocks and sudden stimuli that they are unable to register andcoordinate their impressions into lasting memories. Describing the technologiesof the newspaper (disjoint and inchoate informational montages), gambling(punctums of shock and chance), and the crowd (jostling sites of wildness anddiscipline) Benjamin declares that “technology has subjected the human sensoriumto a complex kind of training” (1968a:175). This training is such that thepedestrians and people of Paris are “capable only of reflex actions”, able only tomimic the tempo, speed and repetition of memories liquidated by the technologiesthey imitate (1968a:176, 178). The urban subjects Benjamin depicts are notnude or reduced idealist centers of apperception. Instead, Benjamin’s Parisiansubjects apprehend and express the temporalities of the objects that have formedtheir temporal consciousnesses.Like his depictions of fashion, time is grafted onto a variety of objects thatpalpably structure and limit the temporality of “eternal transience” they enable(Benjamin 1999:348). In great part, what the Expos´es undertake is to detail howeternal recurrence structurally inserts and pervades itself in the spatial forms ofbourgeois modernity:[The] spatialization of historical time [is] one of the profound innovations thatmarked the mourning play and, by implication, modernity. Or, as [Benjamin]phrased it economically, “history merges into the setting” . . . the instauration ofmodernity implied a fall from historical time into an inauthentic form ofspatialization . . . (Hassen 1998:54–5).Thus, in each major section of the Expos´es Benjamin posits a spatial concretion ofeternally recurrent/novel time similar to what I detailed using “fashion”. Forexample, the long avenues of Baron Georges Haussmann’s urban planningreplaced the warren of medieval Paris, thereby setting in place a spatial apparatusfor capital speculation and circularity. Moreover, with the help of these newproperty and circulatory city forms, “Haussmann’s project was to secure the cityagainst civil war” by widening the boulevards such that barricades would beineffective (Benjamin 1939:23). With Haussmann’s “broad perspectives” in mind

we can again see how Benjamin in the Expos´es develops the recurrence of time inspatial forms. “With the Haussmannization of Paris, the phantasmagoria wasrendered in stone”: the phantasmagoria – metaphor of circuitry, fetish and illusion– communicates times that only spin around and around, re-volutions preventingrevolutionary interruptions (1939:24).And while Haussmannization established phantasmagoric time publicly, thebourgeois int´erieur spatializes eternal recurrence privately. Both retreating from,and sustaining the shock-anesthetization of city life, the “domestic interiorsustains [the private individual] in his illusions” (Benjamin 1939:19). In this space,the “individual” ensconces himself in cultured and individuated spaces “tocompensate for the absence of any trace of private life in the big city” (1939:20).By leaving imprints to palliate a traceless and anonymous modern publicexistence these spaces elicit a time and mood “indicating precisely to what extentthe nineteenth-century interior is itself a stimulus to intoxication and dream”(Benjamin 1999:216). This is a dream which both confines and condemns thehistorical hour to an eternal one. In the complicity of Haussmannization with theint´erieur we can see how Benjamin treats these forms as “space-times” and52 A. Lefebvre“dreamtimes” [zeit-traum] wherein “the individual consciousness more and moresecures itself in reflecting, while the collective consciousness sinks into everdeeper sleep” (1999:389).Let us consider one more instantiation of hellish time: Baudelaire’s herald in thepoem “Les Sept Vieillards”. Here the poet meets seven individuals all alike:Doubtless to you my dread seems ludicrous,Unless a brotherly shudder lets you see:For all their imminent decrepitude,These seven monsters had eternal life!I doubt if I could have survived an eighth,Such apparition, father and son of himself,Inexorable Phoenix, loathsome avatar!– I turned my back on the whole damned parade. (Benjamin 1999:362)[Que celui-l`a qui rit de mon inquietude,Et qui n’est pas saisi d’un frisson fraternal,Songe bien que malgr´e tant de decrepitudeCes sept monsters hidieux avaient l’air eternal!Aurais-je, sans mourir, contempl´e le huiti`eme,Sosie inexorable, ironique et fatal,D´ego ˆ utant Ph´enix, fils et p`ere de lui-mˆeme?– Mais je tournai le dos au cort`ege infernal. (Baudelaire 1968:173)]The discovery of the absolutely novel and infinitely reproducible type is theultimate physiognomy. Here the temporality of novelty and recurrence areobjectified in the human subject: “the newness for which [Baudelaire] was on thelookout all his life consists in nothing other than this phantasmagoria of what is‘always the same’ ” (Benjamin 1939:22). What sort of “herald” could this be(1939:24)? What future can this type bring tidings of? Can an avatar speak if it isalways and only the present iterated? The stillborn Phoenix, the auto-engenderingspawn, an eternally imminent decrepitude – all these are versions of damnedtemporality. Baudelaire’s horror is due both to the infinite repetition in space andto the singular articulation of time. Most disquieting is the brotherly shudder wefeel, for we now look like Baudelaire himself and realize that counting him andourselves, we have multiplied far beyond eight.To conclude this section I repeat that in its objective orientation, bourgeois Parisof the Second Empire has forbidden any becoming-time of time. In its commodityform, Paris is an anachronism. Now, let us turn to other objects and consider howBenjamin will discover possibilities of non-contemporaneity, projection, restorationand inconclusiveness.III. Memories of the future

Baudelaire is not alone in disquietude. Parisians too feel estranged from theircity: “they no longer feel at home there, and start to become conscious of theinhuman character of the metropolis” (1935:12). The inhuman is an aptThings Temporal Expos´e, Passages from Benjamin 53characterization of a city whose objective temporal properties enact only monadicrecurrence. Derrida provides us with an observation to frame this anxiety:In order to constitute the space of a habitable house and a home, you also needan opening, a door and windows; you have to give up passage to the outsideworld [l’´etranger]. There is no house or interior without a door or windows. Themonad of home has to be hospitable in order to be ipse, itself at home, habitableat-home in the relation of the self to itself. (2000:61)Though not using the same terms as Derrida, Benjamin depicts Paris of theSecond Empire as having shuttered itself so that nothing (no-thing) different ornew can emerge or enter. To mix Benjamin and Derrida slightly, the interior doeshave entrances and windows but these simple open onto the broader field ofHaussmann’s stony spinning phantasmagoria. Nothing is ever new because ofnovelty. It is necessary for any home or space to be open to an other who mayenter and potentially disrupt. The conditions of hospitality are those ofintersubjective dialectics more generally: the other must inhabit, affect andengage with the self for either of these two positions to exist. What we tried todemonstrate in the previous section may be considered the foreclosure of atemporal hospitality. Negatively put, the objects disseminating novelty-timeblock the entrance of other time forms so that the present is reiterated.Benjamin realizes this necessity of the guest and other (hospitality). But hereorients the entrance. To achieve non-contemporaneity within itself (and thusredeem the possibility of a critical present rather than recurrent presencing)Benjamin locates alternate temporalities within the same objects enactingrecurrent time. He expresses this immanent and objective otherness through thecategories of “wish-image” and “primal past”. These images emerge whereverand whenever “old and the new interpenetrate” (1935:4), i.e. fashion, arcades,crowds and boulevards but in such a way these new things are not resumed intonovelty. For within these new forms and objects there exist traces which could,potentially, overcome the stammering and stalled dialectic of novelty and“transfigure the immaturity of the social product” (1935:4).What sort of traces? How could the “new” and the time-forms in which itinheres be thought differently and transfigured? “Overcoming” this socialimmaturity requires the realization that this so-called immaturity is the mostdeveloped time-form of Second Empire Paris (i.e. novelty). When Benjamin writesthat “what emerges in these wish images is the resolute effort to distance oneselffrom all that is antiquated – which includes . . . the recent past” (1935:4), heidentifies a distance that must be put between a mode of time that is itselfantiquated, or a form of time which is the constant antiquation of the present intothe recent past, over again.To distance oneself from the eternal present is to “deflect the imagination (whichis given impetus by the new) back upon the primal past. In the dream in which eachepoch entertains images of its successor, the latter appears wedded to elements ofprimal history [Urgeschichte]” (1935:4, my emphasis). The “primal past” does notmean an ideal unrealized. Rather, the potential of the primal past motivates andimpels us to critically reflect upon the present because its desires were neverfulfilled. What provokes this reflection, Benjamin avers, is the impetus of the newand of new social products that might be engendered such that they would not54 A. Lefebvreservice recurrence. Objects embody alternative time-forms that deflect us from thecycle and closure of hellish time unto an indeterminate and open primal past:“And the experiences of such a society – as stored in the unconscious of thecollective – engender, through interpenetration with what is new, the utopia that

has left its trace in a thousand configurations of life, from enduring edifices to passingfashion” (1935:4–5, my emphasis). The wish-image – here, a utopia tracing itsmemory – is a fundamentally temporal concept. Moreover, it is inscribed inobjects, incommunicable except through objects.Before returning to the object-time thematic, we should to develop the temporalimplications of the wish-image. Although not directly elaborated in the Expos´es,this wish-time relation is expressly treated in “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire”.“Antithetical” to gambling or fashionable time (the time of the perpetualpunctum), a wish reaches out or back in time, relating the present and future toone’s earliest hopes of fulfillment: “[a wish] accompanies one to the far reaches oftime, that fills and divides time. Thus a wish fulfilled is the crowning ofexperience” (1968a:179). Wishes therefore require focused and almost concertedattention to follow it to completion; in fact, the temporality of the wish is such thatthe wish “merely completes” time (1968a:179). As a wish-image, the tracesdiscerned in “thousands of material configurations” would require a perceptivereader to actualize these objective potentials. A subject could complete thetemporal possibilities inhering within the object and thereby accomplish the wishas the experience of a speculative unity between realized object and redeemedsubject. In its realization, the object would be rescued from both oblivion andrecurrence. And its rescue would also be our own for “[it is] a matter of doingjustice to the concrete historical situation of the interest taken in the object”(Benjamin 1999:391). By realizing our deepest and most sustained longings, theobject would be released from “its former being into the higher concretion ofnow-being [Jetztsein] (waking being!)” (Benjamin 1999:391).Thus, Buck-Morss represents a heroic epic, full of motifs of rescue and peril.The dialectical historian “ ‘blasts apart’ the continuum of history, constructing‘historical objects’ in a politically explosive ‘constellation of past and present’, asa ‘lightning flash’ of truth . . . a reflection of true transcendence” (Buck-Morss1989:241). In these terms, objects are devoured by their realized potential; they areaccomplished through the assemblages of a subject able to guide the coincidentwish of the subject and object to completion. In the Afterword to her Dialectics ofSeeing, Buck-Morss unequivocally locates Benjamin texts through the ambition ofachieving wish images: “Benjamin’s dialectical images are neither aesthetic norarbitrary. He understood historical ‘perspective’ as a focus on the past that madethe present, as revolutionary now-time” (1989:339). Revolutionary now-timeovercomes the punctum of recurrent time; the flash of realization is brought aboutonly with the perspective and transcendence of seeing an object to fruition in thetemporality of the wish-image. Benjamin, she writes, “kept his eyes on this beacon[of revolutionary now-time]” and objects unlock their promises in orbit of thisrevolutionary instantiation (Buck-Morss 1989:339).Buck-Morss is by no means alone in her interpretative strategy. Max Penskyfollows Buck-Morss closely in his “question of the nonarbitrariness of thedialectical image” (1992:212). Graeme Gilloch goes so far as to identify the“fundamental basis” of Benjamin’s critical historiography in two proceduralsteps: objects are first emptied out and overcome of myth, and afterwards theThings Temporal Expos´e, Passages from Benjamin 55object appears in its “afterlife” as a “form of premonition” signing towards thefuture (1996:137–8). Mitchell, like Gilloch, avers that Benjamin “aim[s] at theformulation of dialectical images, which would capture the objectivity of historicallife as a form of natural history” (Mitchell 2001:183, my emphasis). BeatriceHassen identifies a speculative idealism in the Trauerspiel whereby the objecttravels outside of itself in order to be relieved by redemption and objective selfpossession,thereby becoming and being for-itself:At the deepest point of its fall or immersion into nothingness, allegory in factturned into a redemptive figure of itself. A metafigure of sorts, it became,

ironically, a dialectical trick that imbues lifeless matter with the spirit ofresurrection . . . his analysis retained the salvific model such a new conception ofhistory was to explode. (Hassen 1998:100, 102)Without this redemptive determination, Buck-Morss cautions, “the possibilitiesfor reconstructing the past are infinite and arbitrary” (1989:339). My objection tosuch a diagnosis is twofold. First, with this salvational trick the object is absorbedinto a hermeneutic whose category of meaning remains founded in aninteriorizing human subject. By insisting on the constellation of the revolutionarybeacon, these readings of Benjamin limit and program the very objects they claimto redeem and liberate. Moreover, and this is my second criticism, such readingsof Benjamin as redeemer of objects place the temporality of objects in a way verysimilar to fashionable time. They depend upon the presentation of a subject whodialectically attempts to redeem a past that lays urgent claim on the present toimprove the future. Such a method, it may be argued, is subjectivist or voluntaristand ultimately betrays Benjamin by inscribing a classical subject/object dialectic,one that “has obscured patterns of circulation, transference, translation, anddisplacement” (Brown 2001:12).Let us try to abandon the productivist, engineering character of an independentsubject who already knows what has to be taught and done. Rather than deploya hermeneutic of salvation and wish-realization as now-time and actualization ofthe object, let us attempt to interpret the objective engagement that Benjamindescribes in the Expos´es through the poetic trope of apostrophe. To myknowledge, “apostrophe” does not appear in Benjamin’s work. I want to makeuse of it heuristically to help understand and also to motivate my generalargument of Benjamin’s displacement of time into things. An apostrophe callseither to an absent person or to an inanimate entity. In this case, wish-traces leftin thousands of material configurations are being apostrophized. These things aredoubly absent; first in that they disappoint their potential and second becausethey enact the inanimacy of hellish time:Corresponding to the form of the new means of production, which in thebeginning is still ruled by the form of the old (Marx), are images in the collectiveconsciousness in which the old and the new interpenetrate. These images are wishimages; in them the collective seeks both to overcome and to transfigure theimmaturity of the social product and the inadequacies in the social organizationof production . . . These tendencies deflect the imagination (which is givenimpetus by the new) back upon the primal past . . . And the experience of such asociety – as stored in the unconscious of the collective – engenders, throughinterpenetration with what is new, the utopia that has left its trace in a thousandconfigurations of life, from enduring edifices to passing fashions. (1935:4)56 A. LefebvreHere, our deposited, utopic wish images are addressed as a promesse de bonheur.“Utopia” is promissory in temporal terms – a not-yet event impelling advent. Wecall to the object in hope and expectation; we allow it to deflect and inhabit ourimagination rather than repeat its current manifestation as in fashion, forexample. As Baudelaire writes in “Le Voyage”, we travel “deep in the Unknownto find the new” (Benjamin 1939:22) but here the Unknown emerges from withinthe familiar and mundane to lead us out of self-incurred immaturity.At this level, however, the notion of the “apostrophe” is no different from the“revolutionary beacon” Buck-Morss reads into Benjamin if we invoke it only toheed our own call and constellation. The Unknown would only be what we hadengendered all along. But Benjamin’s apostrophe is not limitable to this modelbecause the call issues from two directions. On the one hand, the “collectiveconsciousness” calls out to its own objects and receives, in the form of utopia, apromise of the future. On the other hand, objects engender our wish images andconfigurations of life, thus reversing the direction of the address. As Benjaminremarks, our wish images and imagination are given impetus by what is new. Wecall to them and they call to us. The objective (the things, forms of life) and the

social (collective consciousness) occupy the positions of addresser and addresseeat the same time. Modern objects are inanimate and absent from their potentialbut can awaken the collective consciousness. The social addresses its objects onlyto receive, from them, a transfigurative jolt of the primal past interpenetrated withwhat is new.I want therefore to distance my interpretation from the programmaticity ofobject-time as revolutionary actualization. As Marder suggests, this may involvea “special form of active passivity . . . [which] unblocks hidden passages andallows the past to pass through us and meet us in the present” (2001:12). Themodern subject – if s/he has the fine, focal ears for it – responds to an objective callin space that opens horizons of time. As with the passage that opened my essay,this call could be nothing more than a glance or a whisper. In objects there can bediscerned traces and utopic transpositions that a repetitious present andconsciousness have not yet managed to efface. We moderns have engendered andstored these traces in objects with the effect that “they” call forth to us, and werespond. In this sense, the collective consciousness receives a memory of thefuture, elements of a classless arche that might be re-newed. These objects could,perhaps, foretell of a primal past to-come, and a classless future that may relievetheir form as produced and consumed commodities.Communing with these objects transfigures not the object but the listeningsubject who is also affected. As Victor Burgin writes, “the subject itself is soluble. . . it is at the origin of feelings of being invaded, overwhelmed, suffocated”(1996:155). This is not the narcissism of picking up what we ourselves depositedbut the possibility of breaking out of the confirmatory speculation of eternallyrecurrent modernity. These objects surprise by their suggestion; they demonstratethe distance between our dreams and our current social forms. By so doing, theyencourage the “resolute effort to distance [our]self from all that is antiquated –which includes, however, the recent past.” Primal history is the a-venir of the past.The primal past should not be read as a condition to recover, but as spur impellingus to transfigure an immaturity of recurrence. The immaturity to overcome is notnaivety or unsophistication, but a form of time objectively communicated.(Modern) objects continue to interrupt the contemporaneity they themselvesThings Temporal Expos´e, Passages from Benjamin 57communicate; these same objects solicit ambiguous and dialectical standstills(1935:10). By deflecting our imaginations modern objects elicit a remembrance ofwhat was desired but never knew it(self) as such. “La modernit´e is always citingprimal history” (1935:10).Arcades (or whatever of the “thousand configurations of life” considered, athand) promise possibility: time that reaches back/into the object to find a promisewe have always already left ourselves. This is a tempus novus, which shall alwayshave been nestled within the actant-medium of the object. This temporal promiseof the substantial operates through a negative and materialist dialectic: itprohibits the gathering of the object in presence, in present; its condition is theimpossibility of immediate eschatological realization. “Ambiguity”, writesBenjamin, “is the manifest imaging of dialectic, the law of dialectics at astandstill” (1935:10). Classlessness – as a primal back-then spurred by correspondenceand interpenetration of new means – does not flash together in “nowof recognizability” [jetzt der Erkennbarkeit] presencing a delimited future; thiswould simply determine a future as appendant of a/the present. It would againbe without time, without future and futurity, without the opacity and dimnessthat must accompany dream-images and the materials used to translate them.I say “translate” because Utopia is evocative of the “pure language” ofBenjamin’s “Translator”. By pure language, Benjamin describes a “suprahistoricalkinship of languages” that no single language achieves in itself but which is themovement of one language to another (1968b:74). Pure language exists only in a

state of constant flux, it is the integration of different tongues into the action oftranslation (1968b:77). Every empirico-historical speech tries to restitute anoriginal logos in the movement of languages in translation. In this sense, the purelanguage that results from translation is similar to the double apostrophe Idetected earlier where modern objects and primal or utopic imagery reciprocallyprovoke one another into realization. In both cases – translation and apostrophe– we are witness to a task and imperative whereby the translator is poised bothto give the new product (the translation, the modern object) inspiration from theold, and have the old (the primal dream or original text) gain survival, afterlife,and heightened fulfillment in the new.Even without developing the complex relations between translation andobjective time, this example may serve to describe how “modernit´e is always citingprimal history” (1935:10, my emphasis). Translation produces an echo of theoriginal within the profane; the translator “without entering, aiming at that singlespot where the echo is able to give, in its own language, the reverberation of thework in the alien one” (1968b:76). Modernity is always leaving a trace of primalhistory – arche classlessness is pure language in that neither exist except as amovement of difference and integration – only to pick up its echo andreverberation, making our own language alien and the echo originary.Let us consider a specific instance of translation: Fourier and the arcades. Asbefore, Fourier is the cite/site where the old and new converge: “the secret cue forthe Fourierist utopia is the advent of machines” (1939:16). In order to “transfigurethe immaturity of the social product”, Fourier reaches back to a primal past priorand subsequent to all designations of maturity and immaturity. He evokes the echoof pure language, “the land of milk and honey, the primeval wish symbol . . .filled with new life” (1935:4–5). In “The Task of the Translator” Benjamin claimedthat the original lives on and gains survival and eternity in its translations; pure58 A. Lefebvrelanguage is achievable, as a sort of penumbra only in translation (1968b:72).Moreover, Benjamin insists that “The higher the level of a work [the original], themore does it remain translatable even if its meaning is touched upon onlyfleetingly” (1968b:81). What text could have a higher level than a utopic wishimage?This is perhaps why the trace of utopia “has left its trace in a thousandconfigurations of life, from enduring edifices to passing fashions” (1935:4). Primalhistory is the original existing work (although it never actually existed) that, asimpetus, provokes “reality” into achieving its own fiction, hence a movement oftranslation.Thus for Benjamin “Fourier” is not a proper name at all; instead, it is a utopianhermeneutic.Since objects are bearers of the potential of modernity, it would takea keen and careful listener – a “complex meshing of the passions m´echanistes withthe passion cabaliste” – to discern our wish images (1939:16). It takes a Fourieristicsense to perceive that Arcades, those myth-scapes of commodity, “are house noless than street . . . the phanlanstery becomes a city of arcades” (1935:10, 5).“Fourier” is the possibility of allowing an object its possibility which reality hasdebased and cheated it. Adorno too claims that a negative dialectic is a chance topenetrate “the hardened object”, to perceive and apprehend, however tenuously,“a history congealed in things” (1973:52–3).The difference between the dialectic of recognizing traces of a primal past andtranslating them through modern means, and the appearance of novelty ascommodity-time form is everything. Dream-images and primal pasts are notactualized directly nor finally but admit only temporary and provisionalinstantiation, and this is precisely the task of both the literary and Fourieristictranslator. Modernity fails when we moderns fail to recognize and realize theobjective qualities of temporality, and thus we lose our ability of response: “The

century was incapable of responding to the new technological possibilities with anew social order. That is why the last word was left to the errant negotiatorsbetween old and new who are at the heart of these phantasmagorias . . .”(1939:26). Without response, we lastingly forfeit our words to errancy andrecurrence.IV. Avenir, a-venirIn the nineteenth century this development [of the forces of production] workedto emancipate the forms of construction from art . . . A start is made witharchitecture as engineered construction. Then comes the reproduction of nature asphotography. The creation of fantasy prepares to become practical as commercial art.Literature submits to montage in the feuilleton. All these products on the point ofentering the market as commodities. But they linger on the threshold. From thisepoch derive the arcades and int´erieurs, the exhibition halls and panoramas. Theyare residues of a dream world. The realization of dream elements, in the course ofwaking up, is the paradigm of dialectical thinking (Benjamin 1935:13, myemphases)The emphases I have placed in the text are intended to draw attention to anopportunity and foreclosure of the threshold. Modernity is this threshold, which isboth a hermeneutic and a time. Objects are suspended in it and responsibilityoccurs only through it. The threshold is the utopian trace and pure language.Things Temporal Expos´e, Passages from Benjamin 59Here, subjects-objects engage the possibility of the production of temporality, i.e.the ur-moment of modernity. Not as its origin or determining point at which itcould have gone one way or another. Rather, they engage the ur-moment asopportunity for the discerning observer to envy a past that never was, andactualize – “survive”, as Adorno would later term it – what is alive once itsrealization has been missed. Recuperating these particular things Benjamin lists isimmaterial but indicates that even though all these were recuperated intorecurrent time, they lingered on a threshold for a moment they produced.As Adorno commented, Benjamin texts attempt to make “philosophicallyfruitful what has not yet been foreclosed by great intentions” (1974:52). It is notsimply that the practical must submit to the fantastic in order to evoke thedialectic. These objects are described as residual, the original having beenremoved or absent. These objects then have potency and possibility because theyare not instructed by great intentions nor programs; they are residual in that theyenable and teach us the time for dreams and wishes: this makes them original andprimary. In this sense, modernity is always originary, providing we take the timefor its objects. “Boredom is the threshold to great deeds” (1999:105) and it is thisthreshold, this possibility and primacy of the object that allows us to perceive achthonic city and modernity, without Sisyphus.Note1. The author would like to thank John O’Neill and Sonya Scott for their careful readingsof this paper.ReferencesAdorno, Theodor (1973) Negative Dialectics, New York: Continuum.Adorno, Theodor (1974) Minima Moralia, Reflections from Damaged Life, London and NewYork: Verso.Baudelaire, Charles (1968) Les Fleurs du Mal, Paris: Librairie Jos´e Corti.Benjamin, Walter (1935) “Expos´e of 1935” in The Arcades Project, Harvard: HarvardUniversity Press, 3–14.Benjamin, Walter (1939) “Expos´e of 1939” in The Arcades Project, Harvard: HarvardUniversity Press, 14-–26.Benjamin, Walter (1968a) “Some Motifs in Baudelaire” in Illuminations, New York: SchokenBooks, 155–200.Benjamin, Walter (1968b) “The Task of the Translator” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn,Schoken Books, 69–82.Benjamin, Walter (1999) The Arcades Project, Harvard: Harvard University Press.Brown, Bill (2001) “Thing Theory”, Critical Inquiry, 28(1), 1–22.

Buck-Morss, Susan (1989) The Dialectics of Seeing, Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project,Cambridge: MIT Press.Burgin, Victor (1996) In/Different Spaces, Place and Memory in Visual Culture, Berkeley:University of California Press.Derrida, Jacques (1984) Sign´eponge/Singsponge, New York: University of Columbia Press.Derrida, Jacques (1992) Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, Chicago: University of ChicagoPress.Derrida, Jacques (2000) Of Hospitality, Stanford: Stanford University Press.Gilloch, Graham (1996) Myth and Metropolis, Walter Benjamin and the City, Cambridge:Polity Press.60 A. LefebvreHassen, Beatrice (1998) Walter Benjamin’s Other History, Of Stones, Animals, Human Beings,and Angels, Berkeley: University of California Press.Hegel, G. W. F. (1991) Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress.Leslie, Esther (2000) Walter Benjamin, Overpowering Conformism, London: Pluto Press.Marder, Ellysa (2001) Dead Time, Temporal Disorders in the Wake of Modernity (Baudelaire andFlaubert), Stanford: Stanford University Press.Markus, Gyorgy (2001) “The Commodity as Phantasmagoria”, New German Critique, 83,3–42.Mehlman, Jeffrey (1993) Walter Benjamin for Children, Chicago: University of ChicagoPress.Mitchell, W. T. J. (2001) “Romanticism and the Life of Things”, Critical Inquiry, 28(1),167–84.O’Neill, John (1996) Hegel’s Dialectic of Desire and Recognition, Albany: SUNY Press.Pensky, Max (1993) Melancholy Dialectics, Walter Benjamin and the Play of Mourning,Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.Alexandre Lefebvre is a graduate student in Social and Political Thought, YorkUniversity, Toronto. His research interests include critical theory and legalphilosophy.1