# Realizing the Irretrievability of the Past in Memory

Speaker: Eli Friedlander
Course: Walter Benjamin: Language, Memory, History
Watch: https://ergo.org/videos/eli-friedlander-can-memory-cure-nostalgia
Transcript: https://ergo.org/videos/eli-friedlander-can-memory-cure-nostalgia/transcript/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdjP9Yr3-os

When quoting, name the speaker and link to the watch URL.

In this lecture, Eli Friedlander traces Walter Benjamin's understanding of memory as it emerges in Berlin Childhood around 1900. Friedlander shows how Benjamin's autobiography is an evocation of childhood and at the same time a reflection on the very nature of memory. Drawing on Benjamin's "monadological method," the lecture examines how childhood recollections can open onto collective historical experience. Friedlander analyzes several key images from the text, including the otter, the butterfly hunt, the moon, and the sock, revealing how each condenses an entire environment into a single memory image. The model of precipitation, where surroundings gather and crystallize, illuminates how memory images work as dreamlike condensations rather than faithful reproductions. Central to the lecture is Benjamin's striking claim that the writing of memory serves as inoculation against melancholic longing for a lost past. Rather than retrieving the past or mourning its loss, Benjamin's shows how the unfolding of memory dissolves the structure of longing itself.

## Temporality of Meaning and Memory

In our discussion of the task of the translator in the second lecture, we began reflecting on a temporal dimension of meaning. We spoke, as you recall, of the afterlife of poetic work, and it was that afterlife that was actualized in translations.

Now we want to turn to this temporality of meaning and consider it in relation to Benjamin's conception of memory. So some form of relation to the past that actualize it in memory in the present. And this will be investigated initially by turning to Benjamin's autobiography, entitled *The Berlin Childhood: Around 1900*. Later, in the next lectures, we will turn to collective memory, or more broadly, to the dimension of memory in the writing of history.

## The Berlin Childhood: Historical Context

But let's start with *The Berlin Childhood*. The first draft of this text was composed in the early '30s, around 1932, and it was initially entitled *Berlin Chronicle*, and was dedicated to Benjamin's son, Stefan. The reworking of that text was done between 1932 and 1934 mainly, but continued also later. Most of it was composed when Benjamin was staying on the island of Ibiza, where he first decided to live because of economic conditions and then realized that the political situation in Germany could not let him return to it.

By 1938, Benjamin added an important introduction to the text, which I'll discuss in a minute. But basically, it's a text that consists of short forms, short passages, which Benjamin calls also images of memory, and they have titles such as Loggias, Imperial Panorama, The Butterfly Hunt, Winter Morning, Winter Evening, and others. This work did not appear during Benjamin's life, though some of those images were published separately in newspapers. That was his mode of earning a living at the time. He would send either reviews or those passages of *The Berlin Childhood* or other small things he wrote to various newspapers, first under his own name and later, when it would become problematic for a Jew to publish in those newspapers, under various pseudonyms.

## Memory as Inoculation Against Nostalgia

Now, I want to start with the introductory passage of *The Berlin Childhood* and try to think about the logic of memory that Benjamin lays out there. As I said, the turn to writing his own childhood came with a sense of loss, of exile, of the possibility that he would never be able to return to his city of birth, to Berlin. And with that, a threat of being overcome by nostalgia, by longing, by melancholia. And Benjamin actually conceives of the writing of memory in terms of inoculation. The idea is to bring up memory in small quantities, those images that are really dangerous that provoke that kind of deep longing, namely images of childhood, but to bring them really in small quantity and then to inoculate himself to face this disease, this threat, this threat of melancholy.

I'll quote a lot from this beautiful text today. That's how he characterized this, what he aims for in this writing of his past. "I sought to limit the effects of the feeling of longing through insight into the irretrievability, not the contingent biographical, but the necessary social irretrievability of the past." This raises a question. How could an insight into the irretrievability of the past be considered an antidote to longing, to longing for that past?

## Irretrievability of the Past and Proust

Presumably the question is, in what sense do I retrieve the past in memory? Do I return to the past in writing memory? Benjamin, we saw he translated Baudelaire, but he also translated Proust, *In Search of Lost Time*. And we might think that the project of memory there is indeed the recovery of the past, of lost time. So wouldn't recognizing the irretrievability of the past just exacerbate the sense that the past is lost and therefore the melancholy, the longing, and so on?

How would realizing irretrievability be one, in some sense, with fulfilling memory? Now, Benjamin adds in the introductory passage something that was already hinted at in the passage I just read, that he seeks this, not the biographical, personal irretrievability, but some sense of social irretrievability of the past.

## Personal to Collective: The Monadological Method

This means that Benjamin is writing autobiographically, that is, about his own contingent existence and life, but he wants to get in and through the memory of childhood to something like collective existence. He wants to find out of the experience of childhood, the memory of that experience, something like an opening onto the impersonal surroundings of the city, of the time, and so on.

There's here, if you pay attention, something which we discussed in various places, and which I called the monadological moment, in Benjamin's methods. Came up in *The Task of the Translator* there. We have the small poetic work that opens up onto language as a whole in the translation. Here, it is the memory of childhood that opens up to the spaces of the city, to Berlin, to the era around 1900, to something like collective existence that you reach through the experience of the child in memory.

Maybe one way to bring it out is visually. You could think of really the title of this work in terms of three concentric circles. Let's draw them first. *Berlin Childhood around 1900*. So you have here the experience of childhood, the world of the child, which opens the expanses of the city, as it were, through that experience, which gives you a sense of life around 1900.

This is a form of title that Benjamin likes a lot. He has something similar in writing that's related to the Arcades Project, *Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire*. So you have the poetry of Baudelaire, Paris the city, and the era, the Second Empire. So something like this structure, which I call monadological, because the individual opens up to the world, as it were, refracts the world out of itself, is something we're going to encounter also in our discussion of the Arcades.

## Depth of Experience Through Images

Now, Benjamin clarifies in that introduction that he doesn't want to tell stories about his childhood, doesn't want to tell about various events that happened to him, various friends he had, his family, parents, and so on. No, he wants to go to the depth of experience in memory, precisely where he can encounter something impersonal. He wants to get to something that bears or reflects collective experience.

And I quote, "This has meant that certain biographical features which stand out more readily in the continuity of experience than in its depth altogether recede in the present undertaking, and with them go the physiognomies, those of my family and comrades alike." So how does the depth of experience appear in memory? And what is the alternative to narrating life through anecdotes, incidents, persons encountered, and so on? Here we come to the way Benjamin speaks of those passages as images, images of memory.

## Images as Condensation of Environment

There's some kind of contrast between story and image. Benjamin seeks to, I quote, "Get hold of the images in which the experience of the big city is precipitated in the child of the middle class." An image appears initially in relation to an environment, environment of the city. The big city, the experience of the big city. And the thought is not that the child represents himself, the various things he encounters in the city, rather, I would say the image is a condensation of that environment.

It's as though, and we'll think about it in a moment, the environment is absorbed in certain images of memory. Now, think of a surrounding, think of what surroundings are for us. We're not quite directed at surroundings. That's the idea. They surround us. Surroundings are not an intentional object of consciousness. We are not directed to them. We do not think of them now as some kind of landscape we encompass from afar. We are in them. They are not objects of consciousness.

They're not quite an unconscious, at least when we think of the Freudian unconscious. But there's something about them that, as it were, support the various things we do, we are conscious of, we are directed to, and so on. They are the world in which the human creature goes about its business, and part of the question is what it means to illuminate those surroundings, to bring them up, in that case, in memory, if they're not objects of our consciousness.

## Precipitation as a Model for Memory

So we don't grasp surroundings. If anything, we should say that we absorb surroundings. And I think this is the importance of a term I now emphasized in what I read, the term precipitation in relation to memory. Benjamin seeks to get hold of the images in which the experience of the big city is precipitated in the child of the middle class.

Precipitation is a term we use in chemistry. It means a change of state, from gas to liquid, from liquid to crystals. It would be as though the surroundings are, let's say, fluid, can't grasp them, but they condense and are precipitated in a memory image. So the memory image really condenses those surroundings. They are, in some sense, absorbed in it.

They are gathered in the image, and of course, in memory, the question is, how do we get hold of the images and open out of them those surroundings? In what sense do we recall not only the individual image, but the way in which that image is pregnant with its world?

## The Otter: Rainy Days and Condensation

Those things are actually exemplified in Benjamin's text through various images. So there's always this play between evoking memories of childhood and having those memories be occasions to reflect about the work of memory, about what an image is, about how images condense surroundings, and so on. And we can start with two images that actually relate to animals, the otter and the butterfly hunt. Let's start with the otter.

We spoke of the precipitation of surroundings, and of course, precipitation is also a term for when clouds condense and starts to rain. And Benjamin speaks of the rainy days in the city. And those rainy days, he says, bring something like an all-over quality to the city. It becomes this kind of uniform gray, really that rain brings out the city as a unified environment in some sense. It's also, Benjamin says, transforms the sense of time of the child. In rainy weather, from morning until evening, one can do the same thing. That's the child that stays at home, as it were.

But of course, this whole grayish environment, for Benjamin, precipitates in an image that bears no obvious similarity to that environment. That image is the image of the otter in the zoo. So, "When I gazed into the water," he writes, "it always seemed as though the rain poured down into all the street drains of the city, only to end up in the one basin and nourish its inhabitant. Whether it was formed in this runoff of the rains or only fed from arriving streams and rivulets is something I could not have decided." So this whole environment is gathered in this animal, in this little cistern of water in the zoo.

And something about the way the otter surfaces and dives back is, for Benjamin, something that also gives us the sense of this ephemerality, this fleeting quality of memory. He speaks of the glistening inmate of the cistern, which after briefly darting up to the surface, would immediately hurry back to urgent affairs below. And the fleeting character is of course also one way of saying, well, those memories are fleeting, not because it's hard to grasp the image, but because it's hard to grasp it as a form of gathering or condensation of this whole fluid environment.

## The Butterfly Hunt: Mimetic Identification

Again, the butterfly hunt is not a rainy day. It's a summer day. Somehow it's interesting that animals are, for Benjamin, examples of this relation that he wants to form between experience and environment, between image and environment. It's as though animals come with their environment. They're connected to their environment by instinct, we say. They're naturally inseparable from their environment. But environment is also something that is, in various ways, absorbed by the child through something like a mimetic identification.

Of course, it's not a mimesis of some specific thing. It's not the child playing doctor or whatever, airplane. But we need to understand how the child absorbs or identifies, in some sense, with that environment, with those surroundings. And I think that's what the butterfly hunt teaches us. Bring back memories of butterfly hunts. I don't know if you have them. I have them. What happens when you try to catch a butterfly? You go with his movement from flower to flower, generate some strange identification between your movements and the movement of the butterfly.

And Benjamin writes, "Between us now, the old law of the hunt took hold. The more I strove to conform in all the fibers of my beings to the animal, the more the butterfly itself, in everything it did, took on the color of human volition." It's as though I identify myself with the movements of the butterfly, and then the butterfly looks as if he's constantly evading me, as though he has something like human volition in him. That's the strange mimetic identification described here.

But what is more important to our point is that the identification with the movement of this colorful creature, something you can actually see and trace and so on, is the support for an absorption of the surroundings. Look at how Benjamin describes it. The flight of the butterflies is governed by the conspiring elements, winds and scents, foliage and sun. Elements of the environment, the wind, the sun, the scent, shadows, and so on, things that when you follow the creature, you, as it were, absorb those elements that rule the movement of the butterfly.

It's as though Benjamin uses the term conspiracy here. It's as though the elements conspire and come together in the movement of the butterfly. So they come together in that movement, and the child identifies with that movement and therefore absorbs those surroundings. They enter the child, those intangible dimensions, through his identification with the flight of the butterfly.

I won't say what happens later with the butterflies. You know what happens. Benjamin says, "In order to regain my human existence, I have to pin the butterfly in this collection." Anyway, so we say we have images here, but those

## Memory Images as Dreamlike Condensations

Images are not images of perception. They're not ways of having a synthetic unity of conscious perception. There's another kind of unity in memory images. The unity is that of absorbing their surroundings, absorbing them, and in some sense harboring them in that image.

And Benjamin says, when you think of it, those images that condense surroundings feel to us many times like dream images. Somehow our childhood, our memories of childhood, are not clear memories, this and that. They sometimes feel to us like dreams. And that's because those images condense the surroundings. Condensation, well, that's one of the terms that Freud uses to describe the work of the dream.

And Benjamin, in a way, says dreams belong to the character of memory, of certain memories. For instance, the memories of childhood. And that's because those memories are not organized according to a certain narrative pattern, according to what happened before, what happened after, according to things that you identify. No, they are dreamlike because a whole environment is precipitated in them.

## Color and Mimetic Absorption

Now, let's continue with various examples to explicate what is happening here, this character of memory, of childhood memory. I want to go into examples that have to do with color and discoloration. The image entitled Colors in the *Berlin Childhood* develops, I think, a bit further this idea of what a mimetic identification with an environment comes to. And again, it's not an act of identification. It's not active mimetic identification, but it must be a form of absorbing the surroundings.

And the image entitled Color basically describes how the child wanders in an abandoned summer house with transparent stained glass windows. So think of the light going through those colored stained glass windows. "Whenever I wandered about inside it, passing from one colored pane to the next, I was transformed. I took on the colors of the landscape that now flaming and now dusty, now smoldering and now sumptuous, lay before me in the window." So the child, in a way, is surrounded by this environment of color. He is colored by the environment and in that way absorbs that environment.

There are various nice things about this passage. Benjamin moves to describe something like the experience of the child, using watercolors. And there's something nice about this experience of working with watercolors. Usually use watercolors on a paper that's quite absorbing in its consistency. And so sometimes, when you touch with the brush, with watercolor the paper, what happens is that the stain expands, as the color is absorbed by the paper.

And Benjamin describes this way of opening up, this absorption of the color as what leads to the absorption of the child in the color. It, so to speak, reverses the direction of activity and receptivity. The child actively applies watercolor, but then is absorbed by the cloud of color that opens up.

I mentioned that in part, Benjamin has writings of all sorts, but among other things, he wrote a lot about childhood. And he wrote about illustrations of children's books. He was a collector of those books. And I want to read a few lines from an essay entitled *The World of Children's Books*, where precisely this idea of mimetic identification is at issue.

All form, every outline that man perceives corresponds to something in him that enables him to reproduce it. The body imitates itself in the form of dance. The hand imitates and appropriates it through drawing. But this ability finds its limit in the world of color. The human body cannot produce color. It relates to it not creatively, but receptively, through the shimmering colors of vision.

So the idea is, you can imitate, you can play at being a doctor, you can imitate an airplane, a windmill, you can draw a cat, you can imitate various things. But in some sense, your body cannot imitate color. The color is what you absorb, you receive, you're receptive to, rather than actively encompassing it.

## Discoloration, Loss of World, and The Moon

This is something that I want to follow up with, discoloration. If we go with the idea that somehow color around us is almost the medium in which we are absorbed into the world. Of course, we can perceive things, we can direct ourselves to things, but there's also a way of being in the world, being absorbed, we say, in that environment. And color becomes, for Benjamin, what stands for this absorption in surrounding and of the surroundings. But this also implies that discoloration will involve a loss of world, that there's a particular way of distance that emerges between myself and those surroundings.

And discoloration, this is important, it's not just a result of darkness. There's a difference between not seeing things because it's dark and seeing things discolored. Discoloration is, as it were, seeing things in another light. And that's precisely the theme of one of the most beautiful passages in the *Berlin Childhood*, the image of memory called The Moon.

The Moon, I think, draws out the imaginary implications of the fact that white is opaque or cloudy, but there's no such thing as transparent white. That's something that interested Goethe. We mentioned Goethe at some point. Something that interested Wittgenstein in his remarks on color. And Benjamin, as it were, gives us a childhood experience of this sense that white is not transparent, or there's no transparent white.

The light of the moon is this whitish light, and it streams into the child's room at night. And Benjamin says it's accentuated by various white things in the room: the porcelain jugs, the marble surfaces, the cream-colored basins. They all create precisely a sense of discoloration of that room. "When the moon was there in the room and I awoke, I was effectively unhoused, for my room seemed willing to accommodate no one besides the moon." This is a strange way of putting it, but if we think of color as what absorbs you in the world, then discoloration throws you out of the world. You feel like you're unhoused, as Benjamin says.

The world is no longer immediately my world. It's as though the child is contemplating, he says, "an alternate Earth where the place of me is already taken." And he has various nice ways of reinforcing this sense of doubling. At night, there's this kind of stillness, and every noise, I think, sounds through that stillness, almost like an echo or repetition, something that is not absorbed in the constant noise, but rather all struck my ear as repetition. "I had no choice but to give myself up to this experience. When I returned to my bed a moment later, it was invariably with the fear of finding myself already stretched out upon it." So this doubling, this way of being thrown out of your being in the world.

And what's funny is that this kind of exhausted anxiety of the child that Benjamin describes is the occasion for the child's first engagement with metaphysics. He says nothing more remained of the world than a single stubborn question. It was, why is there anything at all in the world? Why the world? So it's as though, in discoloration you sort of fall out of attunement with the world. You lose that texture that makes you one with the world or existing in a world or in an environment.

With amazement, Benjamin writes, "I realized that nothing in the world could compel me to think the world." It seems like this is a childhood version of an experience which Heidegger describes as the withdrawal of beings as a whole, that something that gives us a sense of our being in the world, but not in relation to beings. And Heidegger says that something that you get with fundamental boredom or anxiety, and it seems like Benjamin adds, yeah, but for the child, it's a matter of color and discoloration.

## The Sock: Unveiling and the Structure of Memory

Let's talk now a bit about this character of absorption of surroundings in the image, but rather the reverse process. What does it mean to draw those images of memory and unveil or make visible the surroundings that inhere in them? To understand this logic or topology of unveiling, I'm going to consider a last passage, which I like a lot, entitled "The Sock." I brought socks to actually try to replicate an experiment that Benjamin describes that he was doing as a child, when he entered the wardrobe in the house and worked his way to a pile of socks there. I'll try to repeat that experiment, but bear with me if it doesn't work.

He writes, "There I would come upon my socks, which lay piled in traditional fashion. That is to say, rolled up and turned inside out." So how do you fold socks? You roll them out all the way to the end, and then turn inside out. Now, every pair had the appearance of a little pocket. Little pocket. Now it's going to be more difficult to reproduce it, but Benjamin writes, "For me, nothing surpassed the pleasure of thrusting my hand as deeply as possible into its interior." So I want to do that. "I did not do this for the sake of the pocket's warmth. It was the little present rolled up inside that I always held in my hand and that drew me into the depths."

So maybe I should show again. When you roll the socks, it's as though you have the pocket and you have something rolled up inside. That's what the child called the little present. My hands are too big for this experiment, but let's see. "So when I closed my fist around it, and so far as I was able, made certain that I possessed the stretchable woolen mass, then began the second phase of the game, which brought with it the unveiling. For now, I proceeded to unwrap the present, to tease it out of its woolen pocket. I drew it ever near to me until something rather disconcerting would happen. I had brought out the present, but the pocket in which it had lain was no longer there. I could not repeat the experiment on this phenomenon often enough."

Let's try to do that. So the idea would be something like that. You try to retrieve this wool mass, but actually when you pull it, everything comes apart. The present and the pocket both disappear, and you remain with a pair of socks. What's the point of this experiment, and why is it relevant to the *Berlin Childhood* and structure of memory? You have something like an element of desire, of longing for that thing hidden inside the present. Something you want to get hold of, this attractive object.

But what really interests the child is not grabbing the present. It's actually the fact that it disappears together with whatever allowed the structure of pocket and present. So it's as though the desire is neither quite fulfilled, but of course, not also frustrated or disappointed. Rather, the whole structure of desire disappears.

In terms of our discussion, the pocket are the meaning surroundings in which the image of the past that provokes longing is sheltered. The image of memory, so to speak, appears to us so significant, beyond any factual basis because it contains that environment, because it appears through that pocket or something within that environment, and that's what provokes the longing, the desire for the past, the attempt to retrieve the past in memory. So unveiling, as we want to say, in memory would not be just retrieving the memory, exposing it, and so on. What happens is exactly what happens in the game. When you try to retrieve it, you recognize that it is irretrievable, that it disappears.

So remembering and forgetting are almost the same in this structure. You lose, in trying to draw this memory that is so attractive. Whatever made for its attractiveness becomes part of a weave of meaning, socks. You realize the irretrievability of the past, but in such a way that really your longing is not frustrated. Neither do you achieve the retrieving of memory, but nor are you melancholy because it disappears. Rather, this whole structure of desire disappears.