# Every Epoch Dreams the One to Follow

Speaker: Eli Friedlander
Course: Walter Benjamin: Language, Memory, History
Watch: https://ergo.org/videos/eli-friedlander-every-era-dreams-the-next
Transcript: https://ergo.org/videos/eli-friedlander-every-era-dreams-the-next/transcript/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PiWWg7RsO8I

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

In this concluding lecture, Eli Friedlander returns to the central puzzle of Walter Benjamin's The Arcades Project: how can a work so narrowly focused on the arcades of nineteenth-century Paris qualify as philosophy? Drawing on the concept of the monad from Leibniz Friedlander traces Benjamin's method of refracting a constellation of weighty and essential contents, from small, contigent and concrete historical details. The lecture moves through Benjamin's ideas about myth and wish images, the collective unconscious, and the concept of the outmoded, showing how each illuminates the relationship between technology, imagination, and historical transformation. Friedlander elucidates Benjamin's “Copernican revolution in historical thinking”, how in awakening from the dream of the past history opens to the present political moment.

## The Riddle of the Arcades Project

I return in this last lecture to what I called in my introduction the riddle of the Arcades Project. And let me remind you of some of the strange aspects of this project, why it is so difficult to see, to call it a philosophical work. One thing we spoke about is, first of all, the very limited scope of the material in space and time. We're dealing with the arcades of Paris, in some parts of the nineteenth century. And of course, that means also that we're dealing with very contingent historical material, almost I would say with very banal historical material.

So it's one thing to think of philosophy that introduces a historical dimension, but then you have to speak of the peaks of the achievement of humanity, the transformations of spirit and so on. And we're dealing... I read from what Benjamin writes in the Arcades, "This research deals fundamentally with the expressive character of the earliest industrial products, the earliest industrial architecture, the earliest machines, but also the earliest department stores, advertisements, and so on." So something very material, something very concrete, something very contingent, very banal in a way.

Is it a materialistic history? Well, yes and no. He said there's really no treatment there of the economic conditions, the state of the working class. It's really all about the superstructure. The culture, broadly speaking. And more than that, it's about the illusions of bourgeois existence. And they're approached in such a way that you almost feel that there's no place for a critical stance, or at least there's no theoretical position from which or that gives you a vantage of the material which could be said to criticize it.

On top of that, it's a work that is a montage of quotations. It's as though Benjamin wants to show something by putting together what other people said rather than actually say whatever is the problem. What I want to do is rely a little bit, remind you when I speak of various points I made in the last five lectures and see how they help us to understand better this Arcades Project as some form of philosophy, to bring out the philosophical character that, as it were, is inherent in this wealth of material content, to see how the material content can be made to express some fundamental dimensions of the human form of life, of history and so on.

## Refracting Broad Meaning from the Small

Now, let's start with this problem of the limited scope of the investigation. The phenomenon of the arcades and whatever is connected to it in nineteenth century Paris. We did encounter other instances in which we spoke of the way Benjamin takes the small, the limited, and in some sense refracts out of it broad expanses of experience, of time and space, meaning.

Think for instance of the Berlin childhood. So we have those images of memory, those small moments. But the idea was that through the memories of childhood, you can actually access something like the environment in space and time. So Berlin, the city around the nineteenth century, you can through the autobiographical writing access something like an impersonal dimension of the times, of the city and so on.

And we also had something like that when we discussed the task of the translator. So the idea was there that we take a poetic work, again, very limited context, which has its own form of unity. But through the translation, Benjamin's point was that we can refract something fundamental about language, that is the kinship between the languages. We work on the translation of the specific work, but the task of the translator has to do with bringing out, he also calls the pure language, by way of recognizing the kinship between the languages. So a similar thing should be said, I think, about the Arcades Project.

## The Arcades as Miniature

One way of describing it is that it's a miniature. Well, I don't know. I don't have the book with me, but it's something like that. And it's a bit funny to speak of it as a miniature, but I think it's the right way to conceive of this form of presentation. We tend to conceive of miniatures as reductions in size. You have architectural models, you have dolls' houses. But I think it's not going to be this kind of one-to-one reduction of size that we have to think of when we speak of the Arcades as a miniature.

Rather, the idea is that the details of this environment of life that are put together through this myriad of quotations, can out of themselves, as it were, abbreviate and refract broad and fundamental expanses of meaning or of history. It's not a one-to-one correspondence between large and small. It's more a matter of translation, you might say. So how do we think of fundamental dimensions of human existence, dynamics of history, and so on, as they manifested themselves, as they are translated and visible in the details of this limited subject matter? Translation and abbreviation is the way to think of the Arcades Project as a miniature.

## The Monad and Leibniz's Monadology

And Benjamin, of course, has some philosophical model through which he conceives of this mode of presentation. It is the monad, or Leibniz's idea of monadology. For Leibniz, to put it very simplistically, individual substances are monad, meaning each individual substance, as it were, mirrors the whole world out of itself. And the higher the monad in the hierarchy of monads, the clearer and more distinct the image of the world that's mirrored is. So you have this idea of, sometimes Leibniz puts it as the monad is a perspective on the world. It's as though you have a certain position from which you actually encompass what is most fundamental of the whole, and so on.

And the idea of visual perspective is, I think, good when you think of looking outside. But what we want to think here of with those concepts of abbreviation is actually a reversal of that. So we want to think, as it were, ontologically, meaning that the whole, again, the fundamental dimensions of the world are translated and expressed out of the material contents, out of the details of this field, which we call the material of the *Arcades Project*. So the essential is translated into the details of the constitution of that field. The more we go into the details, the better we see them as translations, refractions, abbreviations of something fundamental.

Because this concept of the monadic construction is important to Benjamin, in various contexts, from famous text on the concept of history. He writes, "To blast a specific era out of the homogeneous course of history, specific life out of the era, specific work out of the life work. As a result of this method, the life work is both preserved and sublated in the work, the era in the life work, and the entire course of history in the era."

So you see, you have this idea that, let's take this space of nineteenth century Paris. Let's refract it in the more limited space of the monads. Let's refract it in the more limited space of the Arcades. Let's even take a figure, an individual, a poet through whose work we can actually refract that whole space, even go into one of the poems and, as it were, find in it an abbreviation of this huge expanse of meaning. Remember, we drew those concentric circles with the Berlin childhood, so experience of childhood in Berlin around 1900. And we have something similar here. The work, the life work, course of history, and so on. Now let's go from this kind of way.

## Temporality and the Concept of the Immature

Of thinking a bit spatially about the expanses of meaning to the temporal dimension of the Arcades Project. So we want to try to formulate the temporality of Benjamin's historical investigation. And I begin with a concept which Benjamin uses, the concept of the immature. It's a certain temporal concept which we associated with the individual with the stage of life, usually childhood. And we want to think of the immature now in terms of the collective, in terms of a moment in history.

And one way to understand immaturity when we think of the collective is to think of what happens with new technologies that appear. So the idea is that when technologies appear, you don't know immediately what their significance is, what their correct use is, how they can benefit society. In general, what's their significance. We attempt to incorporate them in various ways, and those attempts are the immature uses of technology.

And Benjamin says there's something very special about those moments. Let's not look at when the technology is already completely incorporated, whether well or badly, as it were, what's badly used by the ruling class for its purposes. No, let's look at the beginning, and let's see what emerges in those attempts to incorporate the new technology, the immature moments.

## Technology and Radical Transformation Today

Maybe we can start by thinking actually of our present moment, because I think we are in a certain way in that place which Benjamin speaks of in relation to nineteenth century Paris. But we feel that we're at a moment where technology brings about a radical transformation of everything important. Our relation to nature, our sense of what's human, what's a self, what's the social form of existence. And of course, those things have objective manifestations in the climate crisis, in the intrusion of digital technologies in our life environment, in certain way in which learning is transformed, work, communication, the massive developments of artificial intelligence, possibility of reaching everything over the Internet.

And this transformation, of course, leaves its imprint on the material world, on our psychology, on the social, political world. And the sense is really, and here I return to the immature, is that we know more or less objectively what happens, but we're at a loss to articulate the significance of those developments. So we feel as though their full significance has not come to light. We're trying various things, but in a sense, the transformation are so rapid, that they outstrip our possibilities of recognizing their meaning, their significance, their way of, as it were, being incorporated correctly into our individual and social life.

More than that, I think, and this is the important point about distinguishing the objective effects of those technologies from what we want to think about. There's a way in which we feel that something is shifting at the most fundamental level in our understanding of ourselves and of the world. So the fundamental categories through which we made sense of the world, we found significance are shifting. We spoke of something like that in the last lecture in discussing experience and poverty and the way in which there's a shift of this fundamental duality of inner and outer with all its significance.

But I think the *Arcades Project* brings out this. This is really just a small example which we started to elaborate. In a way, every fundamental distinction starts to shift and to problematize by this excess, this intrusion of new technologies.

## Shifting Fundamental Categories

I'll give a list of some of the themes that we can think of. How do we distinguish between the animate and the inanimate, the intelligent and the automatic, the technical and the creative, the instrumental and the final ends, environment and individual, isolation and relatedness, authenticity and reproduction, work and play, and so on and so forth.

So when we speak of shifts, we speak of the way in which there is some kind of, how do we put it? The way in which those categories helped us to make sense of the world, as it were, comes to an end. We need to reconceive them. We need to find again what their significance is in the face of those new developments. We need to address each of those categories and oppositions by itself, but also the way they depend on one another and connect with one another.

So in a sense, the significance of our world is dependent on having this network of connections between all those different dimensions and concepts and so on, and really the way they hold together. And that's why I speak here of really not just the meaning of those concepts, but really their significance. It's a point where knowledge and value come together. And we spoke again of different places in which for Benjamin this issue of significance, of something meaningful and not just meaning, is addressed.

We started with that in Benjamin's vision of language, and there's a way in which we can say, these upheavals that technology brings with it are such that we are left with the task not to name creation like the early essay on language, but really to express and actualize the significance that is yet to be given to those transformations. It's as though nature needs a new outlet, a new form of expression, a new form of actualization because of this shift which we recognize in modernity.

## Imagination and Wish Images

What opens up in these conditions of radical transformation, of struggle with the immature technologies is, for Benjamin, the space of the imagination. It is as though we have certain dreams and hopes and wishes, as it were, a sense of utopian possibilities of those new technologies. And on the other hand, of course, we have the dread, the fears, the anxieties, apocalyptic visions, think of AI and so on, and climate crisis. Something opens in the space of the imagination in these conditions where we don't quite know what the significance of those transformations are.

And we're talking of imagination not as a psychological concept, not as a faculty of the soul. We're talking about this opening of the imagination of the collective as it is expressed concretely in the form of life. I read here from the 1935 exposé of the project, of the Arcades Project, so that's really a concentration of all the themes of the Arcade. But I think Benjamin there expresses very clearly this intuition of the opening of the space of the imagination.

And he writes this, "Corresponding to the form of the new means of production, which in the beginning is still ruled by the form of the old marks, are images in the collective consciousness in which the old and the new interpenetrate. These images are wish images. In them, the collective seeks both to overcome and to transfigure the immaturity of the social product and the inadequacies in the social organization of production. At the same time, what emerges in these wish images is the resolute effort to distance oneself from all that is antiquated, which includes, however, the recent past. This tendency deflects the imagination," the term in German is Bildphantasie, "which is given impetus by the new back upon the primal past."

So this space that opens up, this space of utopia, but also of dread, is not an element of psychology. It doesn't have to do with the consciousness of people. It is expressed materially.

## Material Traces of the Collective Unconscious

It has left, Benjamin writes, "its trace in a thousand configurations of life from enduring edifices to passing fashions." So the hopes and the suffering of the collective must be or can be read from the consideration of that concrete material existence. It's as though the collective unconscious, let's call it, manifests itself in all those material which Benjamin gathers for his Arcades project.

And when put together, when ordered, somehow they start to form a picture, which is, first of all, really the expression of this polarity, call it, between utopian dreams and the burden of, I will call it now, the mythical. We saw it a little bit in this discussion of the inner and outer in *Experience and Poverty*, but really what I want to stress here is this way in which he speaks of the imagination being deflected upon the primal past. What is this primal past?

## Primal Past, Fate, and Myth

What surfaces there? That's the question. And we saw in our discussion of fate and character, that Benjamin has an understanding of fate in which we can speak of really an environment of human life, of collective existence that is ruled by the ambiguity of fate.

And what he's trying to bring out here by speaking of primal history, both utopia and myth, is that we find ourself looking at this environment in the historical investigation as expressing a life caught up in the suffering and curse of fate, in the living environment. It's as though we see that humanity going around in circle, we see eternal return, as it were governed by an unknown or unwritten law. And this is the first very strong sense of the unity of this space of life that is to be brought out in gathering the material.

Maybe I'll go a little bit into the contents that Benjamin discusses in the exposé, and again, more and more expanded and broader form in the *Arcades Project*, and give you a sense of those shifting categories and the way in which the duality of myth and utopia, as it were, rule this space of life.

## Paris Capital of the 19th Century

Let's look at the two exposés of the project, the two summaries that Benjamin calls Paris Capital of the 19th Century. There are two versions of that text from '35 and '39, and the 1939 version is divided into five main sections, each pairing a proper name and an architectural phenomenon, broadly speaking, that belongs to the 19th century. We have Fourier and the Arcades, Grandville, really interesting, caricaturist, and the World Exhibitions, Louis Philippe and the Interior, Baudelaire and the Streets of Paris, and Haussmann and the Barricades.

In those sections we also have, and I mentioned it in discussing experience and poverty, we have various types which, as it were, emerge in the transformed form of existence of the collective. These include the flaneur, the gambler, the collector, the bourgeois dweller of the interior, the detective, the prostitute. And I think when you look deeper into Benjamin's use of the material, you start feeling that we also have what I call there an expression of the fundamental categories through which we make sense of our existence.

So here's a partial list, and I won't be able to actually show you how they are developed in the exposé, but I list them. The mechanical and the living, uniqueness and repetition, the typical and the authentic, the new and the primal, work and play, work and idleness, construction and destruction, inner and outer, which we discussed, public and private, means and ends, individual and collective, life and death, and so on and so forth.

Really when you start to acquire this first picture of that material environment, what you feel is the shift in those fundamental categories at the deepest level and the necessity to, as it were, express them in a new form or realize them in a new form that fits the transformation of the mode of existence. And more importantly, we start to see that those material organize themselves in terms of this polarity of, on the one hand, dreams of utopia and on the other hand, the burden of myth, the two sides of primal history.

## Blanqui and Eternal Return

And so the history that Benjamin is doing in the Arcades is first of all showing this face of primal history within the form of life of the 19th century. Myth and so on is not something that we find in ancient cultures. Sure, we have various ways in which the myth of the ancient world expressed something like those fundamental dimensions. But the point is that whatever myth was about back then is expressed now anew, due to those transformation in the space of the nineteenth century. So it's the nineteenth century in the garb of those mythical burdens and those wishes and hopes of humanity.

One way we can see that duality as very fundamental is in the last, well, it's not quite a section, it's the conclusion of the 1939 exposé, which has the title Blanqui and Eternal Return. So Blanqui was this revolutionary, this admired figure who, I guess, first of all, stands for dreams of utopia. But he was also imprisoned for a very long time, more or less around the last revolutionary upheaval of the Paris Commune in 1871. And in prison, Benjamin writes, he composed this text entitled *L'Éternité par les astres*, Eternity by the Stars. And it contains this, Benjamin says, really hallucinatory vision of eternal return.

Eternal return, we saw, is precisely the form of existence in a space of fate. So with the figure of Blanqui, you have on the one side the dreams of utopia, on the other side, the dread of the mythical or the burden of fate. And for Benjamin, those two sides, he says, summarize, as it were, what he tries to present in the various sections of the exposé. It's this nightmarish scene, dream scene, which he nicely captures by speaking of the space of the arcade as Zeitraum. So Zeitraum is space time, like in physics and so on. But this is not a space time, this is a Zeitraum, space dream time, as it were, or time dream space.

Now let's ask ourselves, and now I get to another term that is important for this all-over temporal understanding of the mode of doing history in the Arcades Project.

## The Concept of the Outmoded

The other term I want to talk about is the outmoded. We have the immature on the one side and the outdated or outmoded on the other side. Let's introduce that term through the question: When is it possible to recognize that space of the past as this dream configuration, as this nightmarish configuration? Obviously, it's not part of the consciousness of the people that dwell in those interiors, walk around in the arcades. It's something like an unconscious of that period that emerges, not immediately.

It's like when we were talking about the task of the translator. Something about the original, of course, as a unity, but only later in time are we capable of drawing language or meaning to a higher level through translation. And translations belong, I recall, to the afterlife of the poetic work. And similarly here, we want to say that somehow recognizing this space as primal history is something that has to do with transformation that affect the material suddenly starts to radiate another kind of meaning, or details that were completely inconspicuous in that time in the life of the collective start to look to us strange and worth interpreting. Like in a dream.

And the concept of the outdated is something I think that actually follows well the intuitive sense we have of the strangeness of things of the past, of outdated things. Sometimes when you have a form of life, you have various implements and fashions and ways of living that are, as it were, part of that form of life. You use them, you don't notice them. They are completely merged into that life. But then the form of life disappears and the things remain.

They are material, and you start finding them in flea markets and all kinds of places. And they acquire a different quality. Sometimes it looks quite ridiculous, I think, when we think of fashions of the nineteenth century, of the crinoline or whatever, I don't know. But there's a strangeness that has to do with the detachment of things from their form of life and remaining, as it were, as an afterlife of the material. There's again a type for Benjamin that deals with this transformation of the character of things when they are detached from their life, and that is the collector.

## The Collector and Transformed Significance

There's a very nice discussion of collecting and the collector in the part of the exposé that has to do with the interior, which we discussed a bit in the last lecture. But if you think of it, collecting is all about the transformed significance that things acquired when you take them out of use. In their use, they're the most worthless things possible. Stamps and subway tickets. I don't know. These people collect those Pez dispensers of sweets.

But then something happens to them when they're detached from that life in which we didn't notice them and put in a new context. They're put together with other things in the collection, and suddenly you see other aspect. They gain another significance. And so for Benjamin, this idea of things acquiring strange aspect that makes them readable and interpretable has to do precisely with time passing, with their afterlife, with their being outdated.

He attributes the discovery of this strange character of outmoded things to the surrealists, that Breton can boast an extraordinary discovery. He was the first to perceive the revolutionary energies that appears in the outmoded. In the first iron constructions, the first factory buildings, the earliest photos, object that have begun to be extinct. Not one before these visionaries and augurs perceived how destitution, not only social but architectonic, the poverty of interiors, enslaved and enslaving objects can be suddenly transformed into revolutionary nihilism.

We don't know yet what this transformation comes to, but of course it has to do with starting to recognize or to interpret aspects of those outmoded things that were not visible when they were part of the form of life. And again, the association with surrealism suggests that the character that the past has, something like this dream quality, and dream is going to be interpretable.

## Childhood of the Collective

Now, let's think of it slightly differently. Recall the *Berlin Childhood* for a moment. We said that the autobiographical writing is keyed to images of childhood, and we said, does memory of childhood have something like a dream quality to them? And part of Benjamin's explanation of that special quality of childhood memory, in part what makes us long to childhood or feel nostalgic about those memories, is that they absorb within them, as it were, the space and time, the surroundings of life. And in some sense, what's possible in writing the past would be to hold to those attractive image and draw them out and thereby actualize or reveal those surroundings that were inhering in them.

Now, of course, each person has their own childhood, and we know childhood is something important for the adult. There's enough psychoanalytic theory about the way in which, in some sense, childhood is at issue in potential we might have to transform our adult existence, and the return to childhood and the interpretation of those dreamy memories of childhood is crucial. But this is all the individual. What is striking about Benjamin's conception, and we sort of lead to that, is that this can be said also about the collective and about history, basically.

So when he investigates the Paris arcades, those are for him the childhood of his own time. So every present would have a childhood that belongs to it, historically speaking. That's, as it were, the past which can be revealed as significant for us, sure, with this distance that the afterlife creates, but which can be seen as crucial for understanding our present position and for transforming it. Benjamin writes, "Generations' experience of youth has much in common with the experience of dreams. Its historical configuration is a dream configuration. Every epoch has such a side turned towards dreams, the child's side."

So if childhood was first for us the immature, then we now have the concept of the afterlife of that period which connects to our present existence, and we can start to understand that there is some deep life nexus that connects past and present in this form of historical investigation. It is as if we think of history, well, you can do Roman history, you can do medieval history, you can this place, that place, maybe try to do universal history even. That's not what Benjamin thinks is history when you think of the stakes of history. History has this dual character. It's almost like as if it's important to recognize in the present what is that childhood which is going to be the locus of this historical investigation. And it's important to see that historical understanding of that period takes the form of recognizing the transformation, the dream character in the afterlife of the material of that childhood.

So I read from *The Arcades*, "Historical understanding is to be grasped in principle as an afterlife of that which is understood. And what has been recognized in the analysis of the afterlife of works, in the analysis of fame, is therefore to be considered the foundation of history in general." So the afterlife of works is what he talks about in *The Task of the Translator*. It's always this kind of dual form of dealing with the past and revealing a way of actualizing or raising that past or transforming the present by way of the recognition of this form of the past.

The present sees itself related by a bond of life to that specific past, and it can redeem or rescue it or redeem itself by rescuing the past. This is Benjamin, has in *On the Concept of History*, this way of speaking of weak messianic power. That's what they mean. How do you form this connection between past and present so that you can understand that you have the power to actually redeem the past?

## Awakening and the Copernican Revolution

And this leads us to a last moment in this discussion of the form of history according to *The Arcades*, which I will call the moment of awakening. The relation formed between the present and its childhood, its specific past, is key to recognizing, I would say, the critical edge or the political dimension of history. We would say if the distorted character of the past, which we start recognizing as we turn to it, has the unity of a dream, we would say nightmare, we call the possibility of its redemption or reversal in the present by way of the historical investigation awakening, or that's how Benjamin speaks of it.

This is an extremely difficult and almost paradoxical moment in Benjamin's writings on history. But I want to try to present him through an interesting figure which he deploys in convolute K of *The Arcades Project*, which is the Copernican revolution in history. Let me read you a couple of quotes. "What follows here is an experiment in the technique of awakening, an attempt to become aware of the dialectical, the Copernican turn of remembrance." And again, the Copernican revolution in historical perception is as follows: "Formerly, it was thought that the fixed point has been found in what has been, and one saw the present engaged in tentatively concentrating the forces of knowledge on this ground. Now, this relation is to be overturned, and what has been is to become the dialectical reversal, the flash of awakened consciousness."

What's all that? Well, I suppose the reference to the Copernican revolution is to Kant and to his understanding of his own philosophy as a form of a Copernican revolution. He says the traditional form of philosophical investigation has the object, as it were, there, out there, independent as a kind of center. And we think of cognition circling around the object and trying to understand it, to represent it correctly and so on. And Kant says we have to reverse that. That's the Copernican revolution. We have to recognize that it is consciousness that is, in a sense, the center, and the object is determined in its rotation, in its path, by the forms of consciousness, by the categories, by the forms of intuition, and so on.

And Benjamin takes this image and says, we can do the same with history. So traditionally, historical investigation would say, well, here's the past. Past is there, in the past, finished, out there. It's complete. Let's just circle around it and try to understand it, try to maybe identify ourself with it in order to understand it better. But basically, it's all said and done. And the Copernican revolution in history would be to say, no, don't think of it that way. Start from the present and its capacity to actualize the past. That is, to make it, as it were, more real than it was when it actually happened.

Again, that's very paradoxical, but we have to think of the meaning of real here. It's something that comes up a lot in discussions of Hegel and his famous statement that the real is the rational and the rational is the real. What's exactly real? Well, of course, we know the facts and so on. But in some sense, we said that past lived a condition of dream. Something was unreal. Something was caught up in a nightmarish condition of eternal return and fate.

And in that sense, the past can be rescued or can be seen as belonging to our present, and rescuing it expresses itself as awakening from that dream and through that awakening, transforming or revolutionizing our present. Politics attains primacy over history. "The facts become something that just now first happened to us, first struck us. To establish them is the affair of memory." The facts happened, but in another sense, as it were, we can, just like in the work of the translator, raise them to the higher level of reality in the present through this work of memory or this understanding of history.

## The Work of Art as Vanishing Point

What this transformation of the present, this revolutionary transformation of the present, this awakening from the dream which is the past comes to is, I'm afraid, something that will be difficult to go into in the space of those lectures. But let me just hint at the direction to think about what happens here, by suggesting a connection that Benjamin forms between the Arcades Project and the most famous essay, *The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility*. I think very broadly we can say that this essay in relation to the space of the arcade, to the space of dream, should be understood as a mode of actualizing the tendencies that are revealed in our investigation of the arcades, in the struggle with technology, in the way in which we relate to the environment of the city, the masses, and so on.

And Benjamin says that the Work of Art essay is the vanishing point of the arcade. So it's as though when you investigate the past, the specific past in the way in which he thinks of it, you start realizing that there are lines of forces, tendencies that are revealed that of course have to do with the way in which we recognize this dream configuration of the past. And now the task is to see how in the present we continue those tendencies. We actually go with them. We recognize the direction in which we have to act and create and so on.

And of course, you can think of it broadly in the social scale, but you can also say Benjamin wants to show us in the rather limited context of art, of the aesthetic, what kind of transformation of art is required by recognizing those tendencies in the dream configuration of the past. And so film and photography is presented in such a way as to really realize or actualize the space of significance that was left unrealized or in the dream state, in the past. This is what, say, understanding Benjamin calls at the end of the essay, the politicization of the aesthetics. It's really understanding that through that investigation, we can understand what the revolutionizing of art comes to through the proper way of thinking of photography and film.

Of course, that doesn't happen automatically. We have to recognize the potential of the medium and so on. It's a very interesting question whether and where that potential has been actually realized in the making of films and so on, but that's a different matter.