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The "Colportage Phenomenonof Space" and the Place ofMontage in The ArcadesProjectBrigid Doherty aa Princeton UniversityPublished online: 07 Aug 2010.
To cite this article: Brigid Doherty (2006) The "Colportage Phenomenon of Space"and the Place of Montage in The Arcades Project, The Germanic Review: Literature,Culture, Theory, 81:1, 37-64, DOI: 10.3200/GERR.81.1.37-64
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THE GERMANIC REVIEWCopyright © 2006 Brigid Doherty
The “Colportage Phenomenon ofSpace” and the Place of Montage
in The Arcades ProjectBRIGID DOHERTY
GESTEIGERTE ANSCHAULICHKEIT
hat did Walter Benjamin mean when he described the “method”of his Arcades Project as “literary montage”? “I needn’t say any-
thing, merely show,” he wrote. “I shall purloin no valuables, appropri-ate no ingenious formulations. But the rags, the refuse—these I willnot inventory but allow, in the only way possible, to come into theirown: by making use of them.”1 What did Benjamin intend when heasked, “in what way is it possible to conjoin a heightened perceptibil-ity or vividness [gesteigerte Anschaulichkeit] to the realization of theMarxist method?” and when he then answered,
The first stage in this undertaking will be to carry over the principle ofmontage into history. That is, to assemble large-scale constructions outof the smallest and most precisely cut components. Indeed, to discover inthe analysis of the small individual moment the crystal of the total event.And, therefore, to break with vulgar historical materialism. To grasp theconstruction of history as such. In the structure of commentary[?] (N2,6)
This essay emerges from my attempts to comprehend, and to respondto, those questions. I have little to say in what follows about what Ben-jamin may have meant by “Marxist method.” Instead, I approach thatquestion from the other side, by trying to shed light on the “first stage”of Benjamin’s proposed “undertaking,” that is, his wish to “carry overthe principle of montage into history.”
In addition to the Arcades Project, I turn in this article to a numberof texts by Benjamin that, read together, situate montage within a con-stellation of concepts concerning experiences of intoxication(Rausch), embodiment, and the effects of works of art.2 I am hardlythe first to take seriously Benjamin’s promulgation of montage as themethod of the Arcades Project.3 What I hope now to contribute to the
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commentary on the topic is an account, or at least the beginnings ofan account, of the place of montage in the Arcades Project that willhelp in particular to clarify the relationship of Benjamin’s experimentin writing history to his understanding of the situation, or the fate, ofthe work of art in modernity. It is worth noting that my remarks in thiscontext do not touch on a number of works by Benjamin that I takenonetheless to be central to any understanding of what he meant bymontage (to name only the most prominent among them, One-WayStreet, “Surrealism,” Berlin Childhood around 1900, and “The Work ofArt in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” the latter an essayto which I refer only briefly below).
What follows, then, is partial; it is also speculative, especially with re-gard to how Benjamin attempts to establish a connection between mon-tage and the work of the nineteenth-century Belgian artist AntoineWiertz (1806–1865), whom he variously describes as anungeschlachter Ideenmaler (ungainly painter of ideas) and der Maler derPassagen (the painter of the arcades) (Gesammelte Schriften [GS] 3:505; GS 5: 1013). Still more speculative than my analysis of Benjamin’sreflections on Wiertz are my claims concerning what Benjamin mayhave had in mind when he constructed the figures that deliver, in the Ar-cades Project and elsewhere, what he calls das Kolportagephänomendes Raumes (the colportage phenomenon of the room, or, more gener-ally, of space), a phenomenon he connects, on the one hand, to nine-teenth-century painting and, on the other hand, to photomontage prac-tices of the 1920s and 1930s. According to Benjamin, in the historicalpresent of his composition of the Arcades Project, intoxication, specifi-cally Haschisch-Rausch, establishes the conditions of possibility for anexperience of that phenomenon, and montage emerges as a literary andpictorial medium with the potential variously to formalize and to mate-rialize aspects of that experience and its relation to history, in particularthe history of the nineteenth century and what Benjamin describes asthe “nihilism [that] is the innermost core of bourgeois coziness[Gemütlichkeit],” a nihilism that he understood to have taken shape inexemplary fashion in the décor of the period’s domestic interiors (I2,6).
AUF TRAUM MÖBLIERT
The sixth entry in Convolute I of the Arcades Project opens with a lineborrowed from Benjamin’s friend Franz Hessel that speaks of a “dreamyepoch of bad taste” (I1,6). Given the references among the Convolute’s
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preceding five entries to French furniture design circa 1830, to EdgarAllan Poe’s “Philosophy of Furniture” (1840), and to efforts to protectthe wallpaper of Parisian drawing-rooms from the effects of gaslight em-ployed in modern buildings, the reader is bound to recognize the epochin question as the nineteenth century, the subject of the Arcades Projectas a whole, for which Benjamin in 1935 proposed the title Paris, the Cap-ital of the Nineteenth Century. “Yes,” he elaborates,
this epoch was wholly adapted to the dream, was furnished in dreams.The alternation in styles—Gothic, Persian, Renaissance, and so on—meant that: over the interior of the middle-class dining room spreads abanquet hall of Cesare Borgia, out of the boudoir of the lady of the housea Gothic chapel arises, the master’s study, iridescent, turns into thechamber of a Persian prince. (I1,6)
Thus, Benjamin conjures the nineteenth century’s shifts from one styleof domestic interior décor to another as apparitions that loom, com-pressed and evanescent like the scenography of a dream in whichchronological sequence is replaced by simultaneity—“a past becomespace” (raumgewordene Vergangenheit), to borrow the phrase heused to describe those few Parisian arcades still in existence when hebegan work on the Arcades Project in 1927 (GS 5: 1041; Arcades Proj-ect [AP] 871).
In I1,6, interiors do not so much change over time from Renaissanceto Gothic to Persian décor as styles hover or linger room by room,nonsynchronously, as if dreamily, and altogether in bad taste. To thisjuxtaposition of period rooms corresponds a medium of visual repre-sentation that summons the moment of Benjamin’s writing and estab-lishes that moment’s relation to the nineteenth century: “The pho-tomontage that fixes such images for us corresponds to the mostprimitive form of perception belonging to these generations. Onlygradually have the images among which they lived detached them-selves and settled on signs, labels, posters, as the figures of advertis-ing” (I1,6; emphasis added; translation modified). We cannot see thephotomontage that “fixes” (fixiert) the “images” (Bilder) Benjamin de-scribes. Instead, we are made to imagine, via the text’s vivid, andsometimes comic, juxtapositions of words and its allusion to the fixingof photographic images, a constellation of montages that shows theRenaissance Festsaal of Cesare Borgia (model statesman of Machi-avelli’s The Prince) hovering over a bürgerliches Speisezimmer, a go-tische Kapelle rising above the Boudoir of a Hausfrau, and the Arbeits-zimmer of a Hausherr changing into the Gemach of a Persian prince.
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Like the so-called “trick-films” of the early cinema, that grouping de-pends on effects of montage as much within the individual frames ofthe images as at the intervals between them.4 Hence for Benjamin, the“most primitive form of perception” (primitivste Anschauungsform) ofthose who dwelt in nineteenth-century interiors anticipated or prefig-ured, precisely in its primitiveness—that is, as if in the nontechnolog-ical medium of the dream or, better, in the near mediumlessness of thedream, produced without an apparatus in our embodied minds—theeffects of the technological medium of motion pictures, effects thatBenjamin here “fixes” or brings to a standstill as “photomontage.”
However, the images that figure the nineteenth century as “furnishedin [or according to] dreams” (auf Traum möbliert), and that prefigurethe effects of film, take shape not in a picture but in Benjamin’s ownwriting, as if that writing was a medium—like photomontage—in whichimages could be juxtaposed and fixed, as if the pages of the ArcadesProject were surfaces—like signs, labels, posters—on which the imagesof the previous century were meant, dialectically, first to “settle” (sichniederschlagen) and then to be read. As noted above, in Convolute NBenjamin invokes montage in connection with his effort to produce aheightened perceptibility or vividness (gesteigerte Anschaulichkeit) inthe writing of history (N2,6). What Benjamin means by An-schaulichkeit and related terms such as Anschauungsform is a ques-tion to which we shall return; suffice it to say at this point that An-schaulichkeit is a crucial concept in Benjamin’s writings on art andpolitics, and one that, in the Arcades Project and elsewhere, is oftenbound to “the principle of montage” (N2,6).
The thematics (interiors, dreams, the uncanniness of historical peri-odization and the spatiality and temporality of its figuration) and theexpository mode (ironic juxtaposition, parataxis) of I1,6 are typical ofthe Arcades Project, which Benjamin conceived as “an experiment inthe technique of awakening” (K1,1) and of which he writes, in Convo-lute N: “Method of this project: literary montage,” the latter a phrasewhose punctuated parataxis itself sets out to exemplify the technique itnames (N1a,8). In what follows, I address Benjamin’s concept of mon-tage and its potential deployment as a “technique of awakening”—amedium of illumination and agitation intended to arouse the readercognitively as well as politically. With regard to this historical images itfixes, montage as Benjamin promulgates and begins to conceptualizethat technique in the Arcades Project emerges specifically as a tech-nique of awakening that corresponds to, but crucially does not repre-
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sent the mere persistence or continuity of, forms of perception that heassociates with the nineteenth-century bourgeois interior—furnished inor according to dreams—as a more or less “private” counterpart to thephantasmagoria of of the period’s modernity as manifested in the ex-change, display, and consumption of commodities and images.
One stated aim of the Arcades Project as an experiment in writing thehistory of the nineteenth century was “to render the image of those sa-lons where the gaze was enveloped in billowing curtains and swollencushions, where, before the eyes of the guests, full-length mirrors dis-closed church doors and settees were gondolas upon which gaslightfrom a vitreous globe shone down like the moon” (I1,8). In “render[ing]the image” of salons (das Bild des Salons geben) where mirrors couldappear to open onto churches and settees could seem to float onmoonlit Venetian canals, Benjamin hoped to expose the nineteenth-century domestic interior as “a stimulus to intoxication and dream,” aspace whose effects on its inhabitants he compared to the Rausch ofhis own experiments with hashish. Several entries in Convolute I es-tablish the terms of Benjamin’s reckonings with the domestic spaceand décor of nineteenth-century bourgeois dwellings and their relationto the modernity of his contemporary moment. I want to proceed byciting in full a key entry, I2,6, before moving to an analysis of the placeof I2,6 in Benjamin’s theory of the nineteenth-century interior and ofthe place of that theory in his writings of the late 1920s—and, moregenerally, in his conceptions of the body and the work of art.
Nineteenth-century domestic interior. The space disguises itself—putson, like an alluring creature, the costumes of moods. The well-fed petit-bourgeois philistine should know something of the feeling that the nextroom might have witnessed the coronation of Charlemagne as well asthe assassination of Henry IV, the signing of the treaty of Verdun as wellas the wedding of Otto and Theophano. In the end, things are merelymannequins, and even the great moments of world history are only cos-tumes beneath which they exchange glances of complicity with noth-ingness, with the petty and the banal. Such nihilism is the innermostcore of bourgeois coziness—a mood that in hashish intoxication con-centrates to satanic contentment, satanic knowing, satanic calm in indi-cating precisely to what extent the nineteenth-century interior is itself astimulus to intoxication and dream. This mood involves, furthermore, anaversion to the open air, the (so to speak) Uranian atmosphere, whichthrows a new light on the extravagant interior design of the period. Tolive in these interiors was to have woven a dense fabric about oneself,to have secluded oneself within a spider’s web, in whose toils worldevents hang loosely suspended like so many insect bodies sucked dry.From this cavern, one does not like to stir. (I2,6)
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As the editors of the Arcades Project note, this entry reproduces mate-rial from the protocols of Benjamin’s second experiment with hashish,which took place in Berlin in January 1928. Unlike the intoxicated soli-tary wanderings through city streets and cafés recorded in his 1932essay “Hashish in Marseilles,” the second hashish trance unfolded in theBerlin apartment of Ernst Joël and Charlotte Joël-Heinzelmann—heBenjamin’s friend from their days in the youth movement, she a pho-tographer who portrayed Benjamin in a series of pictures taken in Berlinin 1929. A physician and coauthor, with Fritz Fränkel, of the scientificarticle “Der Haschisch-Rausch” (1926), cited extensively by Benjaminin “Hashish in Marseilles,” Joël arranged and also participated in the ex-periment, along with, in addition to Benjamin, Joël’s colleague Fränkeland the philosopher Ernst Bloch.5 As the various reports on the experi-ment reveal, the apartment itself became the focus of some of the par-ticipants’ most intense experiences. In his report, Benjamin meditates atlength on how, as a hash trance takes hold, “you start to play aroundwith rooms in general. You start to experience seductions of your senseof orientation” (SW 2: 85–86; GS 6: 560–61). Those meditations figureagain in the Arcades Project, where exactly the effects that seduced anintoxicated Benjamin in 1928 have their way with the “well-fed middle-class philistine” (der satte Spießer) of the previous century who “shouldknow something of the feeling” that grand historical events might havetranspired in the rooms he now occupies, and who thus should be led tothe nihilistic recognition that “the great moments of world history aremerely costumes beneath which [things, which are merely mannequins,]exchange glances of complicity with nothingness, with the base and thebanal.” “Such nihilism,” Benjamin asserts, “is the innermost core ofbourgeois coziness” (I2,6).6
The “exchange of glances of complicity” between “great momentsof world history” and “the base and the banal” recalls the graphicspatial relation established in I1,6, where Cesare Borgia’s banquethall lifts itself up over (schiebt sich über) a middle-class diningroom while a Gothic chapel ascends from (steigt heraus) a Haus-frau’s boudoir, images that Benjamin says we apprehend as pho-tomontage (a form of representation oriented to the Anschauungs-form of the earlier epoch) and that call in turn for comparison withhis claim, in I2,6, that “to live in these [nineteenth-century] interiorswas to have woven a dense fabric about oneself, to have secludedoneself within a spider’s web, in whose toils world events hangloosely suspended like so many insect bodies sucked dry.” This last
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quotation is a lurid image also derived from the experience of theJanuary 1928 experiment, which felt to Benjamin “rather like beingwrapped up, enclosed in a dense spider’s web in which the eventsof the world are scattered around, suspended there like the bodiesof dead insects sucked dry” (SW 2: 86; GS 6: 561). No doubt thatthis appraisal of nineteenth-century interiors is gloomy: when roomsbecome “alluring creatures” that seduce their inhabitants, they in ef-fect act like arachnids fashioning webs to trap their prey, who, oncecaptured, occupy a world in which the web makes history presentas a collection of desiccated corpses—or, less luridly, rooms seduceand disorient their occupants with images of grand past events su-perposed above the everyday life of domestic spaces. In its expres-sion of Benjamin’s wish “to render the image of those salons wherethe gaze was enveloped in billowing curtains and swollen cushions,where, before the eyes of the guests, full-length mirrors disclosedchurch doors and settees were gondolas upon which gaslight froma vitreous globe shone down like the moon,” I1,8 similarly assertsthe interpenetration of the bodily and the visual in the simultaneityof experiences (of being wrapped up and of glimpsing the historicalpast within the private space of the present) that Benjamin attrib-utes both to himself as hash-eater and to der satte Spießer as avatarof nineteenth-century private life.7 And Benjamin’s efforts to renderthe images of the interiors in which those experiences variously tookplace and found expression involve the invocation of techniques ofliterary and pictorial montage as media especially well suited to fig-uring—perhaps virtually reinstantiating, in present-day spaces—as-pects of those experiences.
The disposition of the nineteenth-century bourgeois interior is a cruxin Benjamin’s thought in the Arcades Project, as elsewhere. Moreover, Isuggest that the historical experience of the interior as Benjamin pre-sents it in the Arcades Project provides a model for the composition ofthe project itself, insofar as Benjamin sets out to discover and indeed toincorporate what he sees as the nihilism of bourgeois Gemütlichkeit ina new form of history writing to which bodiliness and visuality are, inthe fullest sense of the word, integral. I do not claim that the interior isunique among the project’s many subjects in offering itself as a modelin the sense I propose here. Nor do I attempt a comprehensive or de-finitive account of the interior as a Benjaminian subject. But if the scopeof my analysis in this essay is necessarily limited both by my argu-ment’s chosen terms and by the relationships I suggest we recognize
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among them, I take the questions addressed here to be central not onlyto the Arcades Project but also to Benjamin’s aesthetic theory moregenerally, and especially as it developed between 1927 and 1940.
DAS KOLPORTAGEPHÄNOMEN DES RAUMES
Further along in the protocol to the January 1928 hash experi-ment, Benjamin gives a name to the awakening sense that historicalevents have taken place in the private interiors of the present. Hecalls it “the colportage phenomenon of the room” or, more broadlyconceived, “the colportage phenomenon of space” (das Kol-portagephänomen des Raumes), a phrase that links the experience ofthe interior invoked at the beginning of the report to trivial literature,the dime-novels of vendors hawking books on city streets and atcountry fairs.
To return to the colportage phenomenon of the room: we simultaneous-ly perceive all the events that might conceivably have taken place here.The room winks at us: what do you think might have happened here?The connection between this phenomenon and colportage. Colportageand caption [Unterschrift]. To be conceived as follows [so vorzustellen]:think of a kitschy oleograph on the wall, with a long strip cut out fromthe bottom of the picture frame. There is a tape running through the bat-ten, and in the gap there is a succession of captions: “The Murder ofEgmont,” “The Coronation of Charlemagne,” and so on. (SW 2: 88; GS6: 564–65)
As I have indicated, in the Arcades Project, Benjamin’s thoughts returnmore than once to the colportage phenomenon of space. Convolute Ginvokes the phenomenon as “Prostitution of space in hashish, where itserves all that has been” (G16,2), thus announcing how it might bebound to an erotics of commodification. Although the discussion of the“appearances of superposition, of overlap” in M1a,1 is especially rich inimplications for what we might make of the colportage phenomenon ofspace with regard to montage, an adequate treatment of those passageslies outside the scope of the present article. Also in Convolute M, whichcalls the colportage phenomenon of space “the flâneur’s basic experi-ence,” Benjamin acknowledges the difficulty of establishing the con-nection between colportage and the experience of a room that invites(or seduces) its occupant to inquire into its own past: “The space winksat the flâneur: What do you think may have gone on here?” “Of course,”Benjamin admits, “it has yet to be explained how this phenomenon is
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associated with colportage” (M1a,3). In the Arcades Project, that asso-ciation is no less crucial for remaining unexplained.
For its part, the 1928 hashish experiment report strives to make theassociation between colportage and rooms that wink as they make thepast present in hallucinations of historical events perceptible, vivid, andcomprehensible (anschaulich) by reconceiving colportage pictoriallyin the form of a “kitschy oleograph” with a movable band of captionsthat operate like subtitles to a film—except in this case, the picture, astill image hanging in a frame on the wall, presumably never changes,even as its captions describe events separated widely in place andtime. Oleographs were one sort of inexpensive picture made availablefor mass distribution by nineteenth-century developments in techno-logical reproduction, and in that sense they provide a pictorial coun-terpart to the dime-novels of colportage. But it is Benjamin’s fantastictransformation of the oleograph by means of supplementary captionsthat attempts to make the colportage phenomenon of the room an-schaulich by presenting a shifting interplay of image (Bild) and cap-tion (Unterschrift) to be activated by a viewer pulling a tape through agap in a picture frame. What is Benjamin doing with that picture? He isusing it (as a means of presentation) and he is imagining a mechanism(the apparatus of the movable caption) that would make it available foruse by others. What Benjamin does with the picture in the hashish-ex-periment report is thus linked to what he aimed to do with the text inthe Arcades Project: “Method of this project: literary montage. I neednot say anything. Merely show [zeigen]. I shall purloin no valuables, ap-propriate no ingenious formulations. But the rags, the refuse—these Iwill not inventory but allow, in the only way possible, to come into theirown; by making use of them [sie verwenden]” (N1a,8).
DER MALER DER PASSAGEN
Antoine Wiertz, idiosyncratic painter of historical subjects, prolificwriter on art and related topics, agitator on behalf of social causes fromthe abolition of capital punishment to the training of women in the useof firearms, emerges as a significant figure in the Arcades Project. Asnoted above, Benjamin calls Wiertz “the painter of the arcades” (H˚,13),and several times he cites the artist’s Oeuvres littéraires from an editionpublished posthumously in Paris in 1870. Focused on photography,Convolute Y opens first with an epigraph and then an excerpt fromWiertz’s 1855 essay on that subject, which Benjamin introduces as “a
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prophecy” (Y1,1). The phrase “Wiertz as precursor of montage (realismplus tendentiousness)” appears as one of the “Themes of the ArcadesProject” listed among the materials for the 1935 exposé “Paris, the Cap-ital of the Nineteenth Century,” and the exposé itself asserts that “Wiertzcan be characterized as the first to demand, if not actually foresee, theuse of photographic montage for political agitation” (AP 902, 6; GS 5:1209, 49).
That assertion remains unelaborated in the Arcades Project, but itcalls out to be situated in relation to the use to which a paraphrase ofthe same section of Wiertz’s essay on photography that Benjamin citesin Y1,1 was put by the Berlin Dadaists some fifteen years earlier, whena montage poster showing a cut-out photographic portrait of the open-mouthed, clench-fisted Dadamonteur John Heartfield bore the typo-graphic caption: “WIERTZ: Dereinst wird die Photographie die gesamteMalkunst verdrängen und ersetzen” (one day, photography will sup-press and supplant the entire art of painting). That line also serves asan epigraph to Wieland Herzfelde’s catalogue essay introducing theDada exhibition in which that poster appeared, which presents pho-tomontage as the culmination of a displacement of painting by photo-graphic media understood to have been foretold by Wiertz in the mid-nineteenth century.8
For his part, Benjamin explains that “the grandiose mechanical-materialistic divinations of Wiertz have to be seen in the context ofthe subjects of his painting—and, to be sure, not only the ideal utopi-an subjects but also the ghastly, colportagesque ones [diegräßlichen, kolportagehaften]” (O˚,17). Among the Wiertzian sub-jects Benjamin lists in “Paris Arcades I” are La Liseuse de romans(1853; figure 1), with which Wiertz intended to “electrify” his audi-ence, and Pensées et Visions d’une tête coupée (1859), which figuresthe ghastly in a triptych depicting the spectacle of a beheading andits fantastic aftermath of torture and delusion. La Liseuse de romansrepresents the consumption of cheap literature as a kind of erotic ec-stasy in which a naked woman who appears hypnotically transfixedby the small volume she holds up before her eyes gets her books notfrom a lending library but from a demon who slips them surrepti-tiously onto the edge of the bed that supports the female reader’s all-but-writhing body. I have more to say below about Wiertz’s attempt,in Pensées et Visions d’une tête coupée, to depict a situation in whichthe severed head beneath the scaffold “believes that it still exists
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above, forming a part of the body, and [continues] to wait for the blowthat will separate it from the trunk” (Wiertz, qtd. in Benjamin O˚,19).9
A third painting by Wiertz that is mentioned by Benjamin in the Ar-cades Project, Le Soufflet d’une dame belge (1861; figure 2), unites theghastly and the kolportagehaft and suggests what led Benjamin to theformulation “Wiertz as precursor of montage (realism plus tenden-tiousness),” with realism here displayed in a protocinematic explo-ration of the effects of a gun fired by a woman at very close range intothe face of a man assaulting her from behind. If the realism of theman’s destroyed face flying off in a burst of fire and smoke and a splat-ter of flesh and brains is protocinematic and, in that more or less tech-nical sense, a precursor of montage, it is also kolportagehaft, or wemight say B-movie-like, especially in the way the painting juxtaposesthe violence the woman does to the man’s head with the gun to the vi-olence the man does (and would have done) to the woman’s body withhis hands, one of which has now let go of her in a futile attempt toshield, or perhaps retrieve, his face. That juxtaposition recapitulates
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FIGURE 1. Antoine Wiertz, La Liseuse de romans (1853). RoyalMuseum of Fine Arts, Brussels, Belgium.
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Wiertz’s interest in the uncanny temporality of cognitive and bodily ex-periences of violence exemplified in its most extreme form in Penséeset Visions d’une tête coupée. Here, the human arm raised to the blast-ed head seems to have been directed there at once to protect and torescue it, in each case too late in relation to the split-second action ofthe nearby firearm.
The tendentiousness of Wiertz’s colportage-realism emerges in itsweird imitation of bodies and attitudes out of the seventeenth-centurybaroque paintings of Peter Paul Rubens, in this instance, specifically themock-decorous draping of the raging, nearly naked woman in di-aphanous fabric that rings her exposed trunk and manages, despite theaggressive grasp of the man in uniform, just barely to cover her genitals.The swirl of cloth at the woman’s crotch, the howling grimace of hernoble face, the uncanny liveliness of the man’s arms and hands (espe-cially the taut forearm and hand that hold the woman in what will soonbe a death-grip), and the appalling proximity of the man’s beefy epauletto the eruption of his wounded face, which, so to speak, explodes in theface of the viewer of the painting, are among the work’s signal B-movie
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FIGURE 2. Antoine Wiertz, Le Souffletd’une dame belge (1861). Royal Mu-seum of Fine Arts, Brussels, Belgium.
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details, arranged to make the man a monster and the woman a heroine.Wiertz, then, evokes the poses and subjects of baroque history paintingin a picture that, as he explains in the catalogue entry of which he wasthe unnamed author, “was executed with the intention of proving the ne-cessity of having women trained in the use of firearms. It was MonsieurWiertz, as we know, who had the idea of setting up a special rifle rangefor ladies and offering, as prize in the competition, a portrait of the vic-torious heroine” (O˚,22; OL 501). Thus, at stake in a contemporarywoman’s firearm training is both her ability to protect herself effectively,the cause for which the ghastly painting should serve as propaganda,and her capacity to become a “heroine,” for which she should be award-ed a portrait to be painted by Wiertz, an artist for whom this situationrepresents conditions calling for “realism plus tendentiousness” to bedelivered both in paintings that are ghastly and kolportagehaft and inheroic portraits that fit the bill for civic awards ceremonies.
But how exactly are we to understand Wiertz’s version of “realismplus tendentiousness” as a precursor to montage? It is almost asthough, in the example of Le Soufflet d’une dame belge, we shouldrecognize the demand for photomontage Benjamin sees in Wiertzspecifically in the construction of a trajectory of pictorial colportage-realism comprising the firearm, the explosion, and the shatteredhead—a construction intended, tendentiously, to frame the shock of acontemporary event, captured as if photographically, even protocine-matically, with the heroism of history painting. The Belgian woman’s“blow” (soufflet) is a gunshot (ein Geschoß), and as such it calls tomind Benjamin’s account of the effects of the work of art in Dada—inthe case of Dadaist pictures, a work of art, itself produced by meansof montage, that created a demand for the “physical shock effect” ofcinematic montage:
From an alluring visual composition or an enchanting fabric of sound,the Dadaists turned the artwork into a missile [ein Geschoß; a projectileor gunshot]. It jolted the viewer, taking on a tactile quality. It thereby fos-tered the demand for film, since the distracting element in film is alsoprimarily tactile, being based on successive changes of scene and focuswhich have a percussive effect on the spectator. Film has freed the phys-ical shock effect—which Dadaism had kept wrapped, as it were, insidethe moral shock effect—from this wrapping. (SW 3: 119; GS 7: 379; em-phasis in original)
In “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,”Benjamin further asserts that in producing works of pictorial montage,the Dadaists “achieved [. . .] a ruthless annihilation of the aura in
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every object they produced, which they branded as a reproductionthrough the very means of its production” (SW 3: 119). Elsewhere inthe so-called “artwork essay,” Benjamin makes two related claims.First, that
technological reproduction can place the copy of the original in situationswhich the original itself cannot attain. Above all, it enables the original tomeet the recipient halfway, whether in the form of a photograph or in thatof a gramophone record. The cathedral leaves its site to be received inthe studio of an art lover; the choral work performed in an auditorium orin the open air is enjoyed in a private room. (SW 3: 103)
Second, that in the “field of the perceivable [im anschaulichen Bereich][. . .] the destruction of the aura is the signature of a perception whose‘sense for sameness in the world’ [Sinn für das Gleichartige in der Welt]has so increased that, by means of reproduction, it extracts a samenesseven from what is unique” (SW 3: 105). The phrase Sinn für das Gleich-artige in der Welt, which Benjamin borrows from Danish novelist Jo-hannes V. Jensen’s Exotische Novellen, also appears in “Hashish in Mar-seilles,” where it alludes to an experience similar to that of thecolportage phenomenon of space. “Here, while I was in the state ofdeepest trance,” Benjamin writes, “two figures (middle-class philistines[Spießer], vagrants, what do I know?) passed me as ‘Dante and Pe-trarch.’ ‘All men are brothers.’ So began a train of thought that I am nolonger able to pursue. But its last link was certainly much less banalthan its first, and led on perhaps to images of animals” (SW 2: 677; GS4: 414). Benjamin tells us nothing about the “images of animals” towhich his train of thought on that occasion perhaps led him, but it istempting to imagine those animals in relation to Zarathustra’s, who an-nounced to their master the doctrine of the Eternal Recurrence that theappearance of Dante and Petrarch, recast as “small men” (whetherSpießer or Strolche), actualizes.10 Succumbing to further temptation, wemight imagine the “Dante” who passed Benjamin on the street in Mar-seilles to resemble the one depicted by Eugène Delacroix in his Barqueof Dante (1822), a painting in which the author of the Divine Comedygesticulates in horror at the drowning bodies of the lost souls who sur-round his vessel. “Hashish. One imitates certain things one knows frompaintings: prison, the Bridge of Sighs, stairs like the train of a dress”(M2,3). Perhaps more to the point, in the protocol to his second hashishexperiment, Benjamin writes: “the room itself became more velvety,more aflame, darker. I uttered the name Delacroix,” and his next para-graph introduces nothing other than the scenario of the colportage phe-
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nomenon of space in which Benjamin-as-hash-eater “experience[s] thefeeling that in the next room events such as the coronation of Charle-magne, the assassination of Henri IV, the signing of the treaty of Verdun,and the murder of Egmont might have taken place” (SW 2: 85). All ofwhich suggests that Benjamin’s efforts to conceptualize the colportagephenomenon of space and montage involved an attempt to rethinknineteenth-century painting as a form of perception [Anschauungs-form], a source of knowledge, and an archive of things to be imitatedand thereby transported—phantasmatically, in hash trances, and actu-ally, in technological reproductions—into the space, or the rooms, of thepresent.
Wiertz’s work, Benjamin admits, “has little to do with great paint-ing,” but that does not diminish and may in fact define its interest forthe “connoisseur of cultural curiosities” and the “physiognomist” ofthe nineteenth century, two types whose kinship with Wiertz himselfand with the author of the Arcades Project we should not fail to recog-nize.11 “Once the nineteenth century is Baedeker-ready and its ruinsare ripe for moonlight, the Museum Antoine Wiertz in Brussels will be-long to the list of obligatory destinations for honeymooning couples,”Benjamin announces at the beginning of his 1929 article “AntoineWiertz: Gedanken und Gesichte eines Geköpften” (GS 4: 805). In themeantime, he takes it upon himself to present an excerpt from themuseum’s catalogue, which, like the remarks on Le Soufflet d’unedame belge, was written by Wiertz and reprinted posthumously in hisOeuvres littéraires.
The excerpt in question “is, if one wants to put it this way, the ‘cap-tion’ or ‘inscription’ [Beschriftung] to his monumental triptych, Penséeset Visions d’une tête coupée. Not only the tendentiousness, but also thegrandiose costuming and the compositorial power of his report seem tous to warrant its delivery from obscurity” (GS 4: 805–06). Set under aseries of headings that shift from matter-of-fact to melodramatic—“Trip-tych: First Minute, Second Minute, Third Minute”; “First Minute: On theScaffold”; “Second Minute: Beneath the Scaffold”; “Third Minute: InEternity”—Wiertz’s short paragraphs recount the artist’s experimentalinquiry into the question of “whether for a few seconds following its sep-aration from the body the head remains capable of thought,” an inquiryhe undertook by establishing a “magnetopathic rapport” with a newlysevered head (Wiertz, qtd. in Benjamin, GS 4: 806). In prose that injectselements of Gothic horror into the protocol of a pseudoscientific investi-gation (the artist was indeed a devotee of Poe), Wiertz reproduces the
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answers he gave to questions posed by the magnetopath Herr D., underwhose suggestive influence he operated during his rapport with the sev-ered head. What the man condemned to death by beheading actuallysuffered, Wiertz explains, “no human language can express” (qtd. in GS4: 807).
Wiertz’s writing makes the situation of the severed head and theartist who becomes its medium vivid by means of what Benjamin callsits “grandiose costuming” (großartige Einkleidung), designed to con-vey the “grandiose sleight of hand that the consciousness executes indeath” (O˚,19). That work is accomplished by the “compositorialpower” (kompositorische Kraft) that shapes Wiertz’s prose typograph-ically, penetrating it with headings, ellipses, sequences of telegraphicphrases, and the occasional melodramatic “Oh!” (OL 493). Wiertzcrafted the text as a long caption (légende) to be displayed beneaththe picture, and in the Arcades Project, Benjamin refers to the paint-ing’s “große ‘légende’” or “Erklärung” (O˚,19; K2a,2)—but it is theterm Beschriftung, placed within quotation marks in “Antoine Wiertz,”that demands our attention. A Beschriftung is an inscription, and itcan be a caption, but when understood differently, as Benjamin’s “ifone wants to put it that way” and especially his quotation marks,themselves assertions of compositorial power, seem to ask us to do,a Beschriftung might more awkwardly but perhaps more aptly becalled a “making-writing” (Be-Schriftung), an attempt to render legi-ble “what no human language can express.”12 The Beschriftungmeans to make what Wiertz describes as inexpressible visible in thegrandiosity of its language and in the material of its typographic com-position, which symbolizes, manifests, and thematizes inexpressibilityin the demonstrative form of ellipses, dashes, and the like, and whichin so doing makes legible, or “makes writing,” that which the paintingattempts in a different way to present as inexpressible. That is, theBeschriftung means to make the painting legible as a depiction of ex-periences that exceed the representational capacity of human lan-guages (as opposed to having the painting appear or remain merelyincomprehensible in its idiosyncrasy and opaqueness). And this theBeschriftung aims to do by predicating the textual presentation of theinexpressibility of certain human experiences on the capacity of writ-ing, specifically printed writing, put together with compositorial force,to make inexpressibility anschaulich, that is, perceptible, visible,graphic. Assembled as a sequence of three minutes that compressesthe timelessness of what Wiertz understands to have been the head’s
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actual experience, and set in blocks of type introduced by headers de-noting that minute-by-minute experience, the “thoughts and visions”that are the Stoff of Wiertz’s Beschriftung appear, or rather read, as ifscripted for transposition, by means of montage, into the frames of afilm. Indeed, Benjamin’s article itself, less an essay than a long cita-tion accompanied by a short commentary, might be described as amontage experiment in which citation does not repair or suture thedismembered fragment by resituating it, but instead thematizes andrefigures dismemberment (and beheading [köpfen] in particular, withthat word’s potential typographical resonances) as a form of writing—specifically, the writing of captions. In Benjamin’s Beschriftung, or“making-writing,” bloodthirsty texts and graphic illustrations interpen-etrate one another such that texts become graphic and pictures be-come luridly literary, or colportagesque.
LES ENFANTS D’ÉDOUARD
An entry in Convolute I that appears shortly after Benjamin’s evoca-tion of the nineteenth century, and the juste milieu in particular, as anepoch “furnished in (and through) dreams” (I1,6), mentions once againhis experience of hashish intoxication in the Joëls’ Berlin apartment:
During my second experiment with hashish. Staircase in Charlotte Joël’sstudio. I said: “A structure habitable only by wax figures. I could do somuch with it plastically; Piscator and company can just go pack. Wouldbe possible for me to change the lighting scheme with tiny levers. I cantransform the Goethe house into the Covent Garden opera; can read fromit the whole of world history. I see, in this space, why I collect colportageimages. Can see everything in this room—the sons of Charles III and whatyou will.” (I2a,1)
Ernst Bloch’s report on the January 1928 hashish experiment likewiseincludes a passage about a “staircase in [a] studio” in the Joëls’ apart-ment. I do not hesitate to acknowledge the significance of Bloch’sconceptions of dream and utopia for Benjamin’s thought in the 1920s,and Benjamin himself, in a 1929 radio broadcast on “Children’s Liter-ature,” praises a “lovely essay” by Bloch (“Die Rettung Wagners durchKarl May”) in the context of his own musings on the “substantial, pow-erful nourishment” that children obtain from “works of colportage”(GS 7: 256, 617). Nonetheless, I read Bloch’s report on the January1928 hashish experiment as a record not of his own thoughts or ut-terances, but of the musings of his friend Benjamin.13 Indeed, when
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Benjamin transposed those same remarks into Convolute I of the Ar-cades Project, he made sure to introduce them with a definitive “Isaid.” Here I take Benjamin at his word, though I do not think there ismuch at stake in the question of who said what on the occasion of thehashish experiment. It is what Benjamin did, or rather thought hecould do, with the images recorded in his own notes and in Bloch’s re-port that interests me. Bloch’s report reads:
Staircase in studio: A structure habitable only by wax figures. I could doso much with it plastically; Piscator and company can just go pack.Would be possible for me to switch the lighting around with tiny levers.Can transform the Goethe house into the London Opera. Can read fromit the whole of world history. I see, in this space, why I collect colportagepictures. Can see everything in this room—the sons of Richard III andwhat you will. (GS 6: 567)
Benjamin makes two changes to the notes when he incorporatesthem into the Arcades Project (I2a,1).14 First, he specifies the studioas belonging to Charlotte Joël[-Heinzelmann], which is to say that heplaces the “structure habitable only by wax figures” in a photogra-pher’s studio, indeed, the studio of a photographer whose touchingportraits of Benjamin, perhaps taken in that very space, are amongthose pictures of him now most often reproduced.15 Second, he re-places the name “Richard III” with “Charles III,” an effort at correctionthat has the effect of leading the reader even further from the histor-ical “facts.” Surely, Benjamin meant not the sons of Charles III (ofSpain) but the sons of Edward IV (of England), hence Edward V andRichard, Duke of York, the nephews of Richard III, more commonlyknown as the “princes in the tower,” the subject of Paul Delaroche’smajor work of 1830, Édouard V, roi mineur d’Angleterre, et Richard,duc d’Yorck, son frère puiné, ou Les Enfants d’Édouard. A massivesuccess in the Salon of 1831, Les Enfants d’Édouard is a picture Ben-jamin would have known. It seems probable that he would have seenthe painting in the original, at the Louvre, and it is perhaps even morelikely that he would have encountered Delaroche’s work in one re-productive medium or another, since engravings as well as pho-tographs of his paintings, including a photograph of Les Enfants d’É-douard by Gustav Schauer that was published in Berlin in 1861(figure 3), were especially numerous and circulated widely; indeed,according to art historian Stephen Bann, Delaroche (1797–1856)was “without contest, the most extensively reproduced artist of hisage.”16 Perhaps more to the point, Benjamin no doubt would have
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read Heinrich Heine’s account of his own encounter with Les Enfantsd’Édouard in his criticism of the 1831 Salon in which it was shown.
“When I stood before the picture of Delaroche,” writes Heine,
it kept returning to my mind how I once, in a beautiful castle in dearPoland, also was before the portrait of a friend, and conversed with hissweet, lovely sister, and secretly compared her eyes to those of the friend.We also spoke of the painter of the picture, who died not long before, andhow all people pass away, one after the other—Ah! The dear friend is him-
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FIGURE 3. Photograph of Paul Delaroche, Édouard V, roi mineurd’Angleterre, et Richard, duc d’Yorck, son frère puiné, ou Les En-fants d’Édouard (1830). Gustav Schauer Verlag, Berlin, 1861. BritishLibrary, London.
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self dead, shot by Prague; the lovely lights of the beautiful sister are alsoextinguished; their castle is burned down, and I am overcome by frightfulloneliness when I reflect that not only do our beloved ones vanish soquickly from the world, but that no trace remains even of the scene[Schauplatz] where we once lived with them; it is as if nothing of it hadever existed, and all was an idle dream.17
Faced with the plight of Les Enfants d’Édouard, Heine is reminded ofa scene from his own past in which the uncanny resemblance be-tween persons (siblings) and works of art (painted portraits) provid-ed an occasion for reflection on the transience of human life, orrather the endless repetition of death, especially in the context of po-litical violence. In the case of Heine’s recollection of his Polishfriends, the “scene [Schauplatz] where we once lived with them” alsono longer exists, and his awareness of the absence of that scene orstage, that space of viewing and container of experiences—anawareness provoked by the “melancholy idea” [wehmüthigerGedanke] of the captive and soon-to-be murdered young king andhis younger brother and, more precisely, by the “shattered look” ofEdward V, who seems at once “to have suffered much” and yet to bestill a boy, “a broken flower” whose “legs [. . .] hang down with theirlong, blue velvet peaked shoes from the couch, yet do not reach theground”—has the effect of suggesting that “none of it had ever ex-isted, and all was an idle dream” (“S” 67–68; “GP” 59–60). Heinespeaks of the “tragic dignity” of Edward’s “pale, sickly face.” And itseems, moreover, that the young king’s visage confronts us with avirtual physiognomic anachronism, as though, with the mien of amelancholy old man, he were beholding the scene presented to us byDelaroche from a moment in time other than the one in which thepainting places him, and thereby providing us with a model for ourown looking, the kind of looking, or rather the kind of dreaming, thatHeine describes in his ekphrasis. In Les Enfants d’Édouard, that kindof looking or dreaming finds its opposite in the figure of the little dog,who, “running to the door, seems to announce by his barking [in-deed, I would say, in his entire tense disposition, especially in whatseems, from the rear, to be his acute gaze at the doorframe throughwhich light pours into the princes’ chamber] the coming of the mur-derers” (“S” 67). If the supernaturally aged face of the young kingprompts us to think about the past and how we see it (as reality, sit-uated in a place that still exists or can be envisioned still to exist, oras dream), then the dog’s disposition, in particular his way of look-
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ing, provides us with a model for our potential attentiveness, as view-ers of the painting in the thrall of a desire, perhaps a drive, to knowwhat is to come. For Heine, as for Benjamin, it is the coincidence ofthose two ways of seeing what goes on in the spaces that we desig-nate as historical that accounts for the force of a picture like De-laroche’s. The painting provides us with a kind of Anschauungsun-terricht, a set of lessons in perception, in seeing the past from, or in,our place in the present.18 Heine, we might add, is like the flâneur asBenjamin describes him in Convolute M, insofar as he “composes hisreverie as text to accompany the images” (M2,2); in the terms setout in Convolute M, the colportage phenomenon of space itself rep-resents “the flâneur’s basic experience” (M1a,3), and Heine’s text,read as a kind of caption, stands for “colportage illustration en-croaching on great painting” (M2,1).19
If Benjamin is remembering, or being visited by, Delaroche’s de-piction of the young princes awaiting, not quite unwittingly, the ar-rival of assassins dispatched by their uncle, he has in mind a paint-ing that itself embodied a new approach to history painting in thenineteenth century. According to Bann, “a painting such as Princesin the Tower [Les Enfants d’Édouard] is, on one level, a compositeof different objects capable of being considered individually and re-lated to specific historical criteria,” that is, a painting whose com-position in every sense and at every stage involved collecting, in-cluding Delaroche’s gathering together, based on his research on thehistory of England, of objects to be depicted as elements of the habi-tat and heraldry of the princes (he commissioned and supervised themaking of the princes’ costumes, bedstead, and draperies by “thebest authorities” while on a trip to London to “visit the scene of hispicture”), his posing of plaster effigies of the princes in his studio,and his citation of structures and images from the history of art.20
“But it is also,” Bann explains, “a space activated by a strong nar-rative, whose endless potential for being rerun is signalled simply bythe intrusive light that blazes from behind the closed door” (PD 102).For Heine, that narrative had the potential for being rerun specifi-cally as a story drawn from his own life: “When I stood before thepicture of Delaroche, it kept returning to my mind how I once, in abeautiful castle in dear Poland, also was before the portrait of afriend [. . .]” (“S” 67). In Bann’s account, Les Enfants d’Édouard isa painting composed “in such a way as to create an irruptive tensionbetween the space of the picture and another, by definition inacces-
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sible space.” Moreover, the composition invokes a pictorial princi-ple or mode derived from early Renaissance representations of theAnnunciation, which is to say that Delaroche’s work instantiateswhat Bann calls, with reference to the work of art historian MichaelFried, “the repetition-structure of post-Renaissance Europeanpainting,” a structure that demands, in this context, to be under-stood in relation to the modes of recurrence invoked by Heine and,in turn, by Benjamin, not least because Delaroche’s mode with re-gard to repetition is specifically and multifariously citational.21
Delaroche’s Les Enfants d’Édouard engages the politics of thefounding in 1830 of the July Monarchy of Louis-Philippe, and doesso, according to Bann, in a manner that invites “a particular kind ofresponse from the great middle class that was to be the favored ben-eficiary of the July Monarchy” (PD 99). Benjamin, for his part, linkedLouis-Philippe specifically to the nineteenth-century middle-class in-terior, twice titling sections of his Arcades Project exposés “LouisPhilippe or, the Interior.” In Les Enfants d’Édouard, Delaroche framedan appeal to “bourgeois sensibility” under Louis-Philippe by recast-ing the story of Shakespeare’s Richard III as a drama in which theprotagonist’s guilt does not figure—above all, because in De-laroche’s painting the princes remain forever unsmothered. What LesEnfants d’Édouard offers, in opposition to the “moralities of circum-stance” of the history painting that immediately preceded it, is whatBann calls an “open representation” that responded to, and helpedto produce, a “desire for history” among the members of an increas-ingly powerful nineteenth-century bourgeois public, a public towhich one of Delaroche’s contemporaries attributed a demand thathistorical representations “be embodied [. . .] in palpable forms [. . .]be made palpable to sight, no less than to feeling” (PD 104, 106).Thus, Bann would have us recognize the affinity of Delaroche’spainting to the “new historiography” of Prosper de Barante, who, ina preface to his Histoire des ducs de Bourgogne (1824), discusses“what people want” from history: “they wish to know what there wasbefore our time in respect of the existence of peoples and individu-als. They insist on their being called up and brought living before oureyes” (qtd. in PD 87).
In Heine, Benjamin would have read a description of Delaroche’sapproach to historical representation that resonates with his own as-sertions, in the Arcades Project, that the “method” of montage was in-tended to produce effects of gesteigerte Anschaulichkeit, increased
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perceptibility or vividness. Delaroche, writes Heine, “has no greatpredilection for the past in itself [die Vergangenheit selbst], but for itsrepresentation [Darstellung], for making its spirit vivid [Veran-schaulichung ihres Geistes], for writing history with pigments [mit Far-ben]” (“S” 62; “GP” 57; PD 107). Which is to say that Heine’s accountof Delaroche prefigures Benjamin’s ambitions in the Arcades Project.Heine attributes a version of those ambitions to a painter whose pic-tures (whether Benjamin was conscious of this or not) virtually corre-spond to what Benjamin imagined doing, “plastically,” in his vision ofa “structure habitable only by wax figures” but manipulable in themanner of a stage set—a space, an image, from which he imaginedhe could “read the whole of world history,” and in which he thought hecould see why he “collect[ed] colportage images.”
“Collecting,” Benjamin asserts in Convolute H,
is a form of practical memory, and of all the profane manifestations of‘nearness’ it is the most binding [die bündigste]. Thus, in a certain sense,the smallest act of political reflection [Akt der politischen Besinnung]makes for an epoch in the antiques business. We construct here an alarmclock that rouses the kitsch of the previous century to ‘assembly’ [zur‘Versammlung’]. (H1a,2)
In the Arcades Project, Benjamin does not say why he collects col-portage images, but he does propose to show why he does so, by mak-ing, in or as writing, an image in which, if we cannot exactly “read thewhole of world history,” perhaps we nevertheless can see how, at themoment of his discovery (or invention) of the “colportage phenomenonof space,” a phenomenon that embodies (as if in wax figures) and situ-ates (as if within a photographer’s studio) an Anschauungsform of thenineteenth century, Benjamin could come to associate that Anschau-ungsform with montage as a medium of contemporary artistic produc-tion (“photomontage”) and as a technique for writing a new kind of his-tory (“literary montage”) (I1,6; N1a,8). Collecting colportageimages—moreover, as it were, writing them, as Benjamin declares hisintention to do in the literary montage of the Arcades Project—can thusbe understood as a “technique of awakening” that aims to effect a dou-ble arousal, bestirring present-day readers in part by “[rousing] thekitsch of the previous century to ‘assembly.’” In other words, the Ar-cades Project attempts to make present a “confrontation with furniture”that Benjamin recognized (in Poe and elsewhere) as a “struggle toawake from the collective dream” (I1,4). Reconfigured prospectively as
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a dialectical image to be composed by means of a technique of literarymontage that Benjamin proposes as the project’s “method,” furniture asit is broadly conceived in the Arcades Project confronts us as the décorof dreams and hash trances, and, potentially, as an apparatus for awak-ening Benjamin and his contemporaries from their seductions.22
Fundamental, then, to Benjamin’s conception of montage is thatmontage had the potential to emerge as a medium for composing his-tory in new, and newly perceptible—newly vivid, newly graphic, per-haps newly palpable—forms. A medium first dreamed, and dreamedin, by the generations of the nineteenth century, montage correspondsto an Anschauungsform framed in its utopian guise by a historypainter such as Wiertz. To Benjamin’s invocation of Wiertz, I suggestwe add Delaroche and his pictorial inventions of historical spaces hab-itable by plaster effigies of princes posed as if within an especiallywell-decorated theatrical set.23 In the hash experiment, Benjaminimagines his own plastic inventions outstripping the accomplishmentsof the avant-garde scenographer Erwin Piscator. He fantasizes takinghold of the levers that control stage lighting, and finds in his own imag-ined theatrical experiments an explanation for why he “collect[s] col-portage images.” In the Arcades Project, montage corresponds to theordinary, oneiric stagings of the nineteenth century’s bourgeois interi-ors, and to the restagings of those interiors in painting, and in writingabout painting, of that epoch. With regard to his own age, Benjaminpromulgated montage as a technique of awakening that, in contem-porary art, especially Dada and Surrealism, attempted to actualize,often in imitation of the effects of present-day cinema and nineteenth-century colportage alike, the gesteigerte Anschaulichkeit to which hehimself aspired in reconceptualizing the writing of history.
Princeton University
NOTES
1. See Benjamin, Arcades 460 (Convolute N1a,8). Subsequent referencesto the Arcades Project are provided in parentheses in the body of the text, list-ing only the so-called “Convolute” number. In citing from the Arcades Project,I have on occasion modified the translation slightly. This essay was originallypresented as a talk, first in the Department of Art History and Archaeology atColumbia University in November 2002, and then at the conference “WalterBenjamin: Critical Constellations” at the University of North Carolina, ChapelHill, in January 2004. My thanks to Eric Downing, John McGowan, andChristopher Wild, organizers of “Walter Benjamin: Critical Constellations,” tomy fellow presenters at that event, Sam Weber, and Eduardo Cadava, and, last
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but by no means least, to James Rolleston, for the exceptionally thoughtful,helpfully critical, and evocative response he offered to this material on that oc-casion. A longer version of this essay will appear in Walter Benjamin and theArcades Project, ed. Andrew Benjamin and Beatrice Hanssen (London andNew York: Continuum International Publishing Group/Athlone Press, WalterBenjamin Studies Series, forthcoming).
2. I should like to signal here, more or less at the outset, my regret thatthis essay does not have room for a discussion of Charles Baudelaire’s writ-ings on hashish intoxication that would address some of the significant simi-larities and differences between Benjamin’s treatment of that subject andBaudelaire’s, specifically where the emphasis on the importance of takinghash in a “poetically decorated apartment” and the deployment of metaphorsand anecdotes of theatrical and pictorial representation are concerned. Rele-vant passages from Baudelaire would include the treatments of ceiling paint-ings in On Wine and Hashish (Du vin et du hachisch, 1851) and The Poemof Hashish (Le Poëme du hachisch, 1858/60), as well as the discussion of ahash-eater’s viewing of a theatrical performance in The Poem of Hashish, inBaudelaire 21, 54–58, 47–53.
3. See, for example, Adorno 229–41 (esp. 239–40); Eiland and McLaugh-lin, “Translators’ Foreword,” and Rolf Tiedemann, “Dialectics at a Standstill:Approaches to the Passagen-Werk,” in Benjamin, The Arcades Project ix–xiv,929–45 (esp. 931–37, respectively); Buck-Morss 73 passim; and Eiland.
4. See Gunning, “‘Primitive’ Cinema” 98, 101; “The Cinema of Attrac-tions”; and “The Exterior as Intérieur.”
5. Benjamin, Selected Writings 2: 673–74, 84–90. Subsequent referencesto Selected Writings are abbreviated SW. In citing from SW, I have occasion-ally modified translations. On Benjamin’s hash experiments, see Schweppen-häuser. Benjamin’s remarkable review of the exhibition “Gesunde Nerven”(1930) and a related journal entry of 11 October 1928 regarding a conversa-tion with Ernst Joël about exhibition techniques deal with montage, Veran-schaulichung, and Vergegenwärtigung in ways that are apposite to the pres-ent article. See Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften 4: 557–61, 1043.Subsequent references to Gesammelte Schriften are abbreviated GS. Unlessotherwise noted, all translations are my own.
6. On the figure of the Spießer as invoked by Behne and portrayed, inrelated ways, in the montages of the Berlin Dadaists, see Doherty, “Work ofArt” 78 passim.
7. See Fried, Menzel’s Realism 234–39, for a critique of Benjamin’s con-ception of the nineteenth-century bourgeois interior, and in particular hisclaims concerning “traces.”
8. See Herzfelde 100; see also Doherty, introduction to Herzfelde 97.9. See Wiertz 491–95. Subsequent references to this edition are abbrevi-
ated OL. See OL 491 on capital punishment; on women bearing arms, seeOL 501.
10. See Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra 329–33. For the German, see Nietzsche, Also Sprach Zarathustra 271–77. Convolute D of the Arcades Proj-ect is subtitled “Die Langeweile, ewige Wiederkehr,” with Benjamin drawing
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on Karl Löwith’s erroneous citation of Nietzsche’s “Ewige Wiederkunft desGleichen” (see Löwith). On the relation of Nietzsche’s concept of eternal recurrence to the writings of Heinrich Heine, see Kaufmann 317–20 andHöhn. I have more to say about Heine’s conception of history, specifically inrelation to French painting in the epoch of the juste milieu, below.
11. See Benjamin, “Antoine Wiertz,” GS 4: 805. On Benjamin’s failure torecognize the complexity of the history of nineteenth-century painting, seeClark 46–47; see also Fried, Menzel’s Realism 253, 296–97n14. Benjamin’streatment of the subject is somewhat more extensive in “Letter from Paris (2):Painting and Photography,” SW 3: 236–48, and the related fragments in GS 7:815–23, than it is in the materials associated with the Arcades Project, butthose texts hardly invalidate the criticisms Clark and Fried make of the Ar-cades Project itself.
12. Compare the discussion of Durchdringung in Convolute O˚,10; see alsothe treatment of Beschriftung in GS 3: 505–07.
13. Bloch deals extensively with colportage, montage, and intoxication inthe essays collected in Heritage of Our Times; in his review of Benjamin’s One-Way Street (1928), he describes the “form” of Benjamin’s book as havingemerged from “colportage,” and he speaks of “Benjamin’s little formal exper-iment” as offering its readers “photomontages” (334–35). As early as 1926,and especially around the appearance of Heritage of Our Times in late 1934,Benjamin expressed his discomfort regarding what he took to be Bloch’s ex-cessive debt to his own work in his correspondence with Adorno and others;see, for example, The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin 299, 459, 478,483, 493.
14. The editors of the English translation have added one more, theirs moreto the point: they replace “London opera” with “Covent Garden opera”; seeConvolute I2a,1.
15. See Hanssen.16. Bann, Parallel Lines 2.17. Heine, “The Salon” 67–68, translation modified. For the German, see
Heine, “Gemäldeausstellung in Paris 1831” 59–60. Subsequent references to“The Salon” are abbreviated “S”; subsequent references to “Gemäldeausstel-lung in Paris 1831” are abbreviated “GP.” In the course of his discussion of De-laroche, Heine offers accounts of various kinds of “history” that can be “seen”in, or as Heine puts it, “on” [auf], the pictures on display at the Salon, includingone he associates with a painting by Louis-Léopold Robert that hung near De-laroche’s Cromwell and Charles I (1831) “on which we see a history, [. . .] a talewithout a beginning or an end, which eternally repeats itself [die sich ewigwiederholt] [. . .] the history of humankind!”—a history Heine opposes to the“history of the world” (Weltgeschichte) into which he is compelled to immersehimself when looking at Delaroche’s Cromwell and Charles I (“S” 84). As dis-cussed below, in the case of Les Enfants d’Édouard, the history that repeats it-self in the context of Heine’s looking is his own, in particular an episode fromthat history that took place in a space similar to the princes’ chamber. Towardthe end of “The Salon,” Heine attributes to the social and political uprisings andcrises taking place at the time of his writing a sequence of effects in which the
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“cacophony of world history” (mißtönender Lärm der Weltgeschichte) pene-trates the room in which he writes, reverberates in his mind, and finally alters hisperceptions of the features, disposition, and allegorical meanings of the humanfigures depicted in the paintings shown in the 1831 Salon, among them“Cromwell” and “Charles I” in Delaroche’s eponymous work and “Liberty” inEugène Délacroix’s Liberty Leading the People (“GP” 69–71).
18. For Benjamin’s conception of Anschauungsunterricht, which is con-nected, with regard to literature and literary history, to colportage and, withregard to exhibition technologies of the 1920s, to montage, see SW 2: 250–56and GS 4: 557–61.
19. On Heine as flâneur, see Briegleb.20. Bann, Paul Delaroche 102, 94. Subsequent references to Paul Delaroche
are abbreviated PD.21. PD 99, 119. Fried, Manet’s Modernism 163.22. On Benjamin’s conception of “furnished man” (der möblierte Mensch) and
its relation to his invocation of Anschauungsunterricht, see Doherty, “MaxErnst.” It is worth noting here that apparatuses of Anschauungsunterricht andthe paintings of Delaroche both figured significantly in 1920s montage works byErnst (1891–1976). For Benjamin’s appreciation of Ernst, part of which appears, without mention of Ernst or the Parisian Surrealism with which he wasassociated, as entry I1,3 in The Arcades Project, see “Dream Kitsch (Gloss onSurrealism),” SW 2: 3–5, also discussed in Doherty, “Max Ernst.”
23. On Delaroche’s relation to theater, including the production of a play,Les Enfants d’Édouard (1833) by Casimir Delavigne (1793–1843), which wasinspired in part by Delaroche’s painting of that subject in the Salon of 1831,see PD 102–05.
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