ABSTRACT
This chapter treats the role of the metaphor of the dream in Benjamin’s Arcades Project. The metaphor is one of the crucial ways that Benjamin attempts to give revolutionary experience a collective basis. The metaphor of ‘awakening from sleep’ is meant to provide the model for his theory of historical knowledge. This theory ascribes revolutionary, motivational significance to the experience in the twentieth century of the urban detritus from the nineteenth century. This experience makes the nineteenth century’s wish for emancipation legible and actionable. The idea that members of a group could collectively recognise and realise the aspirations of another age, so that through this recognition and realisation they constitute themselves as a collective may be queried, but in any case, it is not clear that one requires the dream metaphor to conceive of this latter process. It is argued that Benjamin’s implicit claim in using the metaphor of the dream is that the truth of the twentieth century’s past is accessible only to dream interpretation. The idea that the collective consciousness of the nineteenth century may be ‘extracted’ and collectively experienced is premised on the transfer of the metaphor ‘waking from sleep’ to theorise a historical phenomenon. The conception relies on the psychoanalytic account of the dream as wish fulfilment. Any account of the dream metaphor in Benjamin’s conception of revolution, and more generally his theory of historical knowledge, that attempts in one way or another to conjure away its fundamental conceptual role should be questioned. For Benjamin, whether or not we find this defensible, the ‘meaning’ of history has the nature of a ‘wish,’ and its realisation that of a ‘wish fulfilment.’
