ABSTRACT
In his prehistory of modernity, Benjamin’s intention of reading the nineteenth
century as a text that speaks to us in the twentieth should not be taken to imply
that a restricted hermeneutic interest lay behind the project. The reality of the
nineteenth century was presented to itself as a phantasmagoria, as a dream
world, a world of illusions, a mythical world. It was a particular form of ‘reason’
that would ‘clear the entire ground and rid of it of the underbrush of delusion
and myth. Such is the goal here for the nineteenth century’.1 The recognition
and subsequent destruction of that dream world was undertaken with the
purpose of our awakening through remembrance of the hidden past. Benjamin
was impressed by one of the young Marx’s aims of ‘waking the world … from its
dream about itself’. Like Marx, Benjamin came to realise that this was no easy
task for even the most critical method. Benjamin’s starting point was the ‘pro-
fane illumination’ of surrealism which confronted ‘the world distorted in the
state of resemblance, a world in which the true surrealist face of existence
breaks through’.2 Like the work of Aragon, Breton and others it used the city of
Paris as its focal point; it was both historical and critical, and not prepared to
celebrate the myths of modernity but to undermine them. Benjamin sought to
reveal the dreams of the collectivity wherever they were housed – in the arcades
and other ‘dream houses’ – through the process of awakening. As a historical
project this meant the unification of awakening and remembrance: ‘indeed,
awakening is the exemplary instance of remembering: the instance in which it is
our fortune for us to recall the most immediate, most banal, most nearby things.
What Proust meant by the experimental rearrangement of furniture in the half
sleep of early morning, what Bloch recognised as the darkness of the lived-out
moment, is nothing other than what is to be secured here and collectively, at the
level of the historical.’3
