ABSTRACT
The fundamental problem that faces any attempt at a conceptual analysis of Benjamin’s approach to the topics of revolution and history is that he deploys notions that belong to the domain of individual experience. His theory of modernity with its emphasis on the disintegration of collective experience further aggravates the problem. Benjamin himself understood the problem to be primarily that of the conceptualisation of collective experience (its possibility and sites) under the conditions of modern bourgeois society. For Benjamin, the bourgeois individual is incapable of collective experience. He understands the rise of the intérieur in the nineteenth century as a compensation for the increasing alienation of social relations and roles. The significance Benjamin attaches to glass architecture is its (supposed) potential to dismantle the bourgeois interior, to relieve the resident from its burden of habits and possessions. Similarly, Benjamin sees in the collector not only the Surrealist but also the materialist historian, and in the collection both the bricolage and the ‘citation.’ This chapter explores the tension between the collector’s approach to the past, which explicitly aims to free things from the drudgery of being useful, and the approach of the allegorist, which is premised on the utilisation of images for their meaning.
