Dialectical and Pragmatic Sightseeing
in New York City[1]1]
Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free . . .
Emma Lazarus
Bronze plaque at
the base of the Statue of Liberty
If I can make it there, I'll make
it anywhere
It's up to you - New York, New
York
Frank Sinatra
Lyrics from New
York, New York
As long as there is still one
beggar around, there will still be myth.
Walter Benjamin
The Arcades
Project[2]
The 1999 English-language edition of Walter Benjamin’s unfinished manuscript known as Das Passagen-Werk (or The Arcades Project) greatly increased the accessibility and visibility of Benjamin’s materialist historiography[3] to American academe. It has not seen, unfortunately, much application to contemporary American cultural landscapes. In a pragmatic spirit, this brief paper puts Benjamin’s project to work analyzing the pathologies and possibilities of New York City, the dream capital of the 21st century. The philosophical backdrop of this paper is the issue of capitalist hegemony in urban life and the “public sphere” of public opinion.[4] I suggest that Benjamin’s pessimism about overcoming the capitalist commodification of our urban spaces, though mostly (and unfortunately) appropriate, results from his too narrowly conceived notion of the “wish image.” In fact, I try to demonstrate here that Benjamin’s negative conception of wish images (or commodities’ symbolic promises) has a positive, non-commodified counterpart which helps form and maintain effective public spheres. Specifically I argue that the central wish image which New York City projects, namely that it is, as E. B. White famously wrote, “…the city of final destination, the city that is a goal” holds out real transformative promise.
People worldwide think of New York City as “the big time;” the city in which things happen, in which one is challenged to make things happen for oneself. It is not only the city of the new, but also a city filled with expectations, wishes, hopes, and dreams. It is where ambitious people come to test their mettle. New York City is a wish image: a place in which we see ourselves in a way we wish to be, but are not yet. It is the place where anything and everything is possible; where we can attain what we wish, pursue our fantasy until we have made it a reality.
Ric Burns director of New York: A Documentary Film
says,
There really is no place in the
world quite like New York. For
generations, its dark and inimitable power have stirred men and women to the
depths of their souls, seeming the very embodiment of all ambition, all
aspiration, all romance, all desire. The
very names of New York’s streets and districts have been woven into our
collective imagination, until they have become shorthand for the whole range of
human experience. Broadway and Time
Square. Wall Street. Madison
Avenue. Fifth Avenue. Park Avenue.
Harlem. Grand Central Station.[5]
In New York City, one can become a star on Broadway, a millionaire stockbroker on Wall Street, first violin at Carnegie Hall, a jazz musician in Harlem, a ‘dot-commie’ in Silicon Alley, a fashion designer in NoLita, a public-intellectual at Columbia, or better yet, Fordham. The names of the different sections of the city all come with their own set of expectations, wishes, hopes and dreams. New York City is the dream capital of the 21st century. Its wish images lure us to become what we are not yet. It beckons us to become the person we ideally desire to be, whether that is the squatter-punk activist living on the Lower East Side or a soprano singing at Lincoln Center’s Metropolitan Opera. The wish image of New York City assures us that anything is possible.
Now, someone might disagree with this view and argue that New York City is no more special than any other cosmopolitan city. Such a position misses the point of my assertion, however. What really makes New York different is that a significant portion of the public believes that it is different. I am of course, speaking as a foreigner, an interloper, and not a native of the city. It is particularly those of us not born in New York City who invest it with a special significance. It is E. B. White’s “third” New York that we outsiders move to: “the city as goal;” and it is because the city has been idealized, turned into a wish image which a portion of the public hopes it can attain, that “the settlers give it passion,” as White said. Walter Benjamin claims that the allure of a city is always stronger to an outsider, and this is why it is more common for a foreigner to write about a particular city, rather than a native.
The superficial inducement, the exotic, the picturesque has an effect only on the foreigner. To portray a city, a native must have other, deeper motives—motives of one who travels into the past instead of into the distance.[6]
By the logic of
Benjamin’s above comment, it is the “superficial inducement” of New York City
that serves as the focus of this brief essay; an inducement that I hope to
demonstrate is not as superficial as may first appear. It is an inducement that can and does serve
as a symbolic first step into the ‘distance’ of future human endeavors and
accomplishments. As E. B. White
acknowledged, the people who believe in the dreamy image of New York City’s promise
have had the passion to continually actualize that dream.
By conceiving of New York City as “dream city,” I compare it
to Benjamin’s definition of the 19th century Parisian arcades. In Das Passagen-Werk, Walter Benjamin
diagnoses the pathologies of modern capitalism through an examination of these
arcades, precursors to contemporary shopping malls.
The covered shopping arcades of the
nineteenth century were Benjamin’s central image because they were the precise
material replica of the internal consciousness, or rather, the unconsciousness
of the dreaming collective. All the
errors of the bourgeois consciousness could be found there (commodity
fetishism, reification, the world as “inwardness”), as well as (in fashion,
prostitution, gambling) all of its utopian dreams.[7]
In her book, The Dialectics of
Seeing, Susan Buck-Morss argues that Benjamin’s aim in the Passagen-Werk
is to awaken the “dreaming collective” to the falsity of the wish images projected
by the myriad commodities contained in the arcades. He intends to awaken the reader from the “phantasmagorical”
“dream world” of modernity, or in Marxist terms, decry false-consciousness by
exposing the commodified illusions of modern progress and debunking their
symbolic representation as an expansion of traditional cultural values.[8] He envisioned using a mix of surrealism,
Freudian psychoanalysis, literature, poetry and Marx to construct a text as
photomontage. The “dialectical images” which lie at the heart of his intended
text would serve to undermine the modern myth making of capital, and awaken, or
bring class-consciousness to his reader: the somnambulist consumer.[9]
The mass consumption (and sleep-walking) that Benjamin
analyzes and criticizes in The Arcades Project has continued at
unparalleled rates in the United States and most especially in New York City,
the center of all consumerist culture.[10] Just as Benjamin saw a bourgeois dreamscape
in the Parisian arcades, it is possible to see in New York City, capitalist
phantasmagoria luring individuals into consumerist pathology. These ambitious people dream of their New
York City: living in a spacious condo in Tribeca, like that of the late JFK, Jr.,
dining at Nobu or Balthazar, clubbing at Spa, summering in the Hamptons. In this dream city, what one consumes
defines one’s personal identity. One’s
being is defined by what one’s spending habits are and what one possesses. This is the pathological outgrowth of a
fully pecuniary society. The wish
image, which is the symbolic promise of these commodities, lures individuals
into lives spent fetishizing commodities, pursuing higher levels of consumption
and in so doing perpetuating the sleepy status quo.
The Benjaminian critic asks, who has the spacious apartment in
Manhattan, the ability to shop wherever he or she desires, the cold hard cash
to pay for the meal at Nobu (let alone the face recognizable enough to get
in)? How many of us can afford these freedoms? How do these
possessions and possibilities actually affect who the vast majority of us are
or what we do? I acknowledge the power of these rhetorical questions, but
I also earnestly ask, is there any reality to the promises of this city’s wish
imagery? If so, which wish images in New York City help us to achieve
what is possible, which only lure us into the pathological?
Benjamin
is thoroughly skeptical and critical of projected wish image promises. He
argues that if there is any measure of progress in modernity it is purely
technological and mostly used to maintain and expand the dominance of the
ruling class. The wish images of commodities mask this fact. They
present the use value of the object as if all can possess it, as if the world
of goods and services, vehicles, vacation homes, haute cuisine and nightclubs,
is open and available to us all. The wishes and dreams that lure many
into submitting to a capitalist hegemony are the big lie of an unattainable
promise, the false promise of unending progress and ever expanding
freedom. Benjamin claims contra Max Weber that a process of mystification
continues under modernity. Benjamin claims that the birth of
“Capitalism was a natural phenomena with which a new dream-filled sleep came
over [the world], and, through it, a reactivation of mythic forces.” Wish
images are the appearances that mask the reality of mass exploitation; an
exploitation that affords social privilege for the few ‘legitimized’ by a
ruling class ideology which papers-over the resulting alienation for all.
These wish
images, then, in Marxian terms, contribute to a superstructure that veils the
base of abusive social relations behind the material forces of production.
The reflections of the base by the
superstructure are therefore inadequate, not because they will have been
consciously falsified by the ideologies of the ruling class, but because the
new, in order to take the form of an image, constantly unites its elements with
those of the classless society. The collective unconscious has a greater
share in them than the consciousness of the collective. From the former
come the images of utopia that have left their trace in a thousand
configurations of life, from buildings to fashions.
Benjamin offers a more subtle analysis of base and superstructure than that offered by Marx. He expands the role of the superstructure through his concept of the wish image. What Benjamin means by a wish image is any sort of new creation, from an ‘advance’ in technology to an architectural style, which projects the promise of the object--its full use and value--as it would be in a classless society, rather than how it is under the class division of a capitalist economy. We consumers buy into the promises these products project, rather than trying to actualize the true freedoms that these products falsely symbolize. The emergence of an informed public whose mutual interest is a shared freedom and progress is suppressed when our desires, instead of being shared, are commodified and individualized. “If I could just find the money to buy that new Imac, I’d have the creative freedom missing in my life.” Real freedom is replaced with empty promises.
Benjamin does not blame a consciously manipulative ideology of the ruling class, as Marx did, for superstructural falsity. Instead, Benjamin sees this falsity and emergence of wish imagery as an outgrowth of a deep psychological fissure in modernity. This psychic fault line results from tension between the conception of history as progress, the actual unmet promises of the material forces of production and alienation in the social relations of production. Wish images emerge out of the collective unconscious, which, as a sort of collective defense mechanism, remains immersed in the fantasy of utopian promise.
Benjamin’s dialectical criticism reveals the fact that the wish images which New York City projects are possibilities very few can actualize. The city yields itself completely to those with wealth and power and influence, in a partial way for me, a credit card carrying member of the white consumer-class, and less for those who have no access to the material conditions (i.e., money and power) that make its wish images real possibilities. Wish images close our eyes to the present by appealing to the natural reality of the eternal past, in which we are all, equally, human beings, each with equal capacities and abilities and access to the fruits of our labors. The dream world of the collective is a classless society in which the consciousness of the collective has no stake. As long as we continue to occupy this dream world, Benjamin argues, class-consciousness and the revolutionary transformation that it demands, that is real progress (freedom defined as self-possession of any externalization of our personal creative capacity) is always out of reach. We are condemned, in Benjamin’s view, to be lulled to sleep by the wish imagery of the new, which is, in reality, nothing new, but only more of the same.
Benjamin criticizes the assumption of progress in modernity—the smooth
transition from what was less satisfactory and reasonable to what is more
adequately reasonable. In Benjamin’s critical conception of temporality,
history is not a story
of progress, but rather an “eternally recurring barbarism of prehistory.”[11] Benjamin, quoting Lotze, writes,
To the view that ‘there is progress enough if…while
the mass of mankind remains mired in an uncivilized condition, the civilization
of a small minority is constantly struggling upward to greater and greater
heights,’ Lotze responds with the question: ‘How, upon such assumptions, can we
be entitled to speak of one history of mankind?’ (Lotze, Mikrokosmos,
vol. 3, p. 25.)[12]
There can be no talk of real
progress in history until all of us share in the material advancement of
history. Universality is a necessary
condition of historical progress.
Buck-Morss explains how Benjamin’s dialectical analysis “construct[s] a
counter-discourse by unearthing buried markers that expose ‘progress’ as the
fetishization of modern temporality….”[13] Modernity, in
other words, conceives of itself as perpetual progress and expansion of
freedom, when, in reality, Benjamin claims, freedoms actually diminishes under
the weight of obsessive production and consumption of the next ‘new’ thing. Modernity has become, in Benjamin’s
view “…an endless repetition of the
‘new’ as the ‘always-the-same.’”[14] We are, in a literal sense, ‘slaves to
fashion,’ as the saying goes.
Benjamin’s concerns should, I think, remain a key critical
concern of our intellectual landscape.
The promise of modern progress has been held up too long by
capitalism--both in the sense of a false lure held before the public and in the
sense of a delay of real social progress.
As such, progress is a promise which rather than being actualized tends
to induce a collective sleep. Each of
us pursues his or her own progress, buying into the public image that our own
advancement is possible, without seeing these false promises as a pathological
outgrowth of capitalism. The public
believes in and pursues the dreamy promise of individual freedom, and thereby
defers the revolutionary awakening required to achieve real progress.
The process of dialectical demystification that Benjamin
offers is misplaced, however, if we fail to realize the emancipatory role that
wish imagery and its imaginative projection play in liberating us from the past
and present and leading us into the “not-yet-existent” freedom of the future. Wish images, contra Benjamin, contribute to
the project of discovering and actualizing real individual and collective
possibilities, the pragmatist claims, by allowing for dramatic rehearsal and
imaginative role-playing. Benjamin
fails to realize the vital role that wish images play in uniting and
maintaining public spheres. The vast
majority of images and ideals that are currently made public lead to behavior
that benefits profit seekers. A
democratic public will remain largely inchoate and unorganized, as John Dewey
recognized, as long as those who will profit from particular pursuits control
the desires and interests of the public.
The smoothest road to control of political conduct is by control of public opinion. As long as the interests of pecuniary profit are powerful, and a public has not located and identified itself, those who have this interest will have an unresisted motive for tampering with the springs of political action in all that affects them.[15]
The wish imagery that garners the interest of the masses and that hypnotizes us into the sleepy complacence of pursuing consumer fashions, however, can also be used as a weapon against the very forces that have perfected its art. For example, current community activists in Manhattan’s Lower East Side have literarily created non-colonized public spaces through the gorilla gardening movement. The original members of this movement were artists who encouraged local residents to imagine how beautiful their neighborhoods would be if all the trash-strewn vacant lots were reclaimed as green spaces, places for outdoor sculptures, and flower and vegetable gardens. This movement began in the late 70s, and now consists of over a thousand local gardens all over New York City. Another group, called “Transportation Alternatives” formed because of a founding member’s vision of a car free Manhattan. In less than six years, they have over five thousand members working for better bicycling, walking, and public transit—and fewer cars, in the city. Another small but politically active public sphere emerged to form an alternative book store and press called “Blackout Books,” which serves as a space for community meetings and a resource for educating local residents about issues of mutual concern. A group that has come out of the Blackout Books community has formed a semi-annual “Reclaim the Streets” community party in which the politically active and informed core reaches out to a less informed and active, but larger, public. All of these publics emerged out of the fantastic imaginings of their members. The dream alternative is, in Hegelian terms, a determinate negation; it is informed by the current mode of production, but only in the sense that it is a rejection of it. A strict dichotomy between wish imagery and the ideals that are integral to achievement can only be maintained if we use a correspondence theory of the truth. The line is blurred between the two when the truth of a belief is derived from the consequences of the action performed on the basis of said belief. In the spirit of Hegel and Marx, we understand the dialectical method when we begin to move from absolutism to experimentalism. Awakening is not a momentary flash of insight; or better, it is not merely that, not an instantaneous revolution of heart and mind. We must be willing to tarry with the negative and move slowly towards our goal, a goal that is transformed by the process of pursuing it, and one that enriches our means of pursuit as we proceed. A truly dialectical analysis of wish imagery is then a pragmatic one. That is, one in which the opposition between fantasy and reality is acknowledged but not reified. Benjamin’s reified notion maintains a false dichotomy between the fantasy and reality manifested in wish imagery.
Benjamin undermines his own position, and Jürgen Habermas
locates this tendency in most neo-Marxist thinking, by focusing solely on the
productive aspect of our collective relationship to phenomenon. Analyzing the wish imagery of contemporary
culture in terms the production paradigm reveals pathological tendencies in our
fantasies but it obfuscates the more subtle role of wish images: the need for
imaginative projection as an aid to conceptualizing and actualizing alternative
publics.
The production paradigm so restricts
the concept of practice [and I would add, experience] that the question arises
of how the paradigmatic activity-type of labor or the making of products is
related to all the other cultural forms of expression of subjects capable of
speech and action.[16]
Habermas demonstrates how our daily
practices and social activity, even those that directly relate to commodities,
are not thematically exhausted in terms of production. In other words, the use of commodities, what
Marx calls their use value, is not solely a factor of the labor power embedded
in them, but also “the context of use” and the “needs whose satisfaction it
serves.”[17] Our cultural and symbolic life, though tied
to modes of production, can transcend them as well. A considerable portion of the public may interpret the wish image
of this dream city in terms that are strictly capitalist--the quick buck of
Wall Street or Silicon Alley, but there also exist alternative interpretations
of New York City’s promise (e.g., the community gardens movements,
Transportation Alternatives, Blackout Books, the Reclaim the Streets movements,
etc.). These alternative visions inform
publics whose imaginative conceptions of future possibilities bind them
together in cooperative pursuits and demonstrate to the mainstream public that
there are attractive non-capitalist life options.[18]
There is an element of the mass cultural wish imagery that is
non-commodified. More specifically,
there are certain promises that New York City holds out to visitors and
prospective residents that suggest real possibilities for individual and
collective growth and flourishing, rather than merely recreating pathologies,
as Benjamin suggests. There exists on a
general level, a role for wish imagery that transcends commodification and
plays a role in motivating human endeavors.
On this general level cultural wish images act as ideals perceived by
our imagination in a way that galvanizes our wills toward actual wish
fulfillment. It is this role for the
imagination that John Dewey highlights by use of the term ‘ends-in-view.’ Clearly, a wish image has the power to
motivate. Employed as a positive
end-in-view it acts not only like an impulsive urge, but also in the sense of
“giving meaning and direction that that urge.”
A positive wish image as “…an end-in-view arises when a
particular consequence is foreseen and being foreseen is consciously adopted by
desire and deliberately made the directive purpose of action.”[19] A healthy and useful faith in such a wish
image brings about “…the unification of the self through allegiance to
inclusive ideal ends, which imagination presents to us and to which the human
will responds as worthy of controlling our desires and choices.”[20]
More than just dialectical criticism, we need to employ the
wish imagery and fantasy that capitalism so keenly uses to lure us into
commodity fetishism in order to form real communities of mutual interests and shared
concern. What capitalism tends to feed
on is how integral fantasy life is to human endeavors. Benjamin sees wish images only in the
negative sense of a false promise of progress and liberty. He fails to see the use of wish imagery as a
current and prospective lure for creative advance.
It might be argued that Benjamin’s use of “dialectical images”
is meant to play the role I am highlighting for what I call positive wish
images. These dialectical criticisms are
designed to awaken us to the real possibilities of modernity covered over by
capitalism. The awakening Benjamin
calls for is not pragmatic, however; it is messianic. Benjamin’s dialectical image is not meant to act as a lure to
creative fulfillment. He is calling for
a revolutionary awakening of human consciousness and the materialist end of
myth. His position is absolute not
experimental. Benjamin is calling for a
complete awakening from dream life to real life, whereas the pragmatist sees the
usefulness in dreams for creating improved realities. The dialectical image is a negative reminder of the alienation
and degradation of capitalism. It is a
needed revelation, but interpreted materialistically it provides no immediate
promise of future possibility outside of revolution. Wish images, positively and pragmatically conceived, act as
catalysts for community formation by articulating ends-in-view that immediately
address the anomie and psychological fissures of modernity. Pragmatic wish images are not the utopian
visions of human omnipotence that we find in capitalist modernity. Rather they are the practical employment of
a faith that we “can make it here,” indeed you must make it here and now,
rather than waiting for a revolutionary shift in the material conditions of our
circumstances before we begin to imagine better conditions.
In New York City, it is possible to see an imaginative projection of one’s fullest potentialities achieved. New York’s cultural image, that everyone in the city is struggling to make something happen--make some dream come true, gives each new arrival the hope and the strength to attempt the same. The limit of Benjamin’s dialectical vision and materialist analysis is demonstrated whenever a wish image, acting as an end-in-view, galvanizes an individual or collective will and helps achieve an ideal that originated as an imaginative projection. The main possibility promised by the wish image of New York City, that it is a different or special place, that it is a place to start again, to try to become what one really wants to be, encourages people to experiment with the limits of their capacities. It empowers individuals to pursue ideals that in other settings would be ridiculed or seem ridiculous.
We cannot ignore one of the most insidious aspects of capitalism: its invasion of our dream worlds and fantasy lives and its ability to co-opt these for its own ends. Contra Benjamin, however, the pragmatist argues that human beings need wish images even fantasies, re-interpreted as Deweyan ends-in-view in order to flourish to the fullest extent. We need our cities to stand for something greater than they ‘actually’ (or materially) are in order to lure us into actualizing individual and collective potentialities not yet known. Wish images, like those that proclaim the possibilities of New York City, can and do point the way toward ideal improvement and fuller actualization of creative capacity.
[1] This title suggested itself to me as I read Robert B. Westbrook’s “No Mean City,” the chapter in his intellectual biography of John Dewey, John Dewey and American Democracy (Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 83, where he discusses Dewey’s experiences in Chicago.
The cultural landscape of the city was shaped by class as well as ethnicity and stretched from lavish lakeside mansions to the sweatshops and tenements of the West Side. All the pathologies and possibilities of urban life were on full display in Chicago in the 1890s, and rapacious entrepreneurs and corrupt politicians struggled with visionary reformers for control of the city’s destiny.
The more things change, as they say, they more they stay the same. Westbrook’s words could just as easily describe the New York City that I know 100 years later in the 1990s, save the mansions are riverside rather than lakeside and the sweatshops are on the Lower East Side and Chinatown rather than the West Side (which includes areas like Greenwich Village and the Upper West Side that have long ago completed the process of gentrification that seems to define the whole of New York City as we move into the 21st century). That the entrepreneurs, corrupt politicians, and visionary reformers vie for control of New York City today, just as 100 years ago they did Dewey’s Chicago, goes without saying.
[2] Let me acknowledge that it is odd to begin a paper with three quotes. The unorthodoxy is intended. The three quotes are an effort to form a textual wish image that evokes the power of New York City as a city of great promise, not yet fulfilled. New York City as wish image is, as the first two quotes suggest, a place of great transformative capacity--a place in which to transform one’s life. The final quote, from Benjamin, brings the promise presented in the first two quotes into critical relief. Clearly, the promise is not yet fulfilled. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, prepared on the basis of the German volume: Das Passagen-Werk, ed. by Rolf Tiedemann (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 400, [K6, 4,].
[3] Describing Benjamin’s project as a “materialist historiography” is just one of many imprecise was to attempt labeling or categorization of his philosophy. Although I agree with John Dewey who once said that most labels are “misleading and obnoxious,” I am merely trying to adequately connote what Benjamin described as Geschichtsphilosophie, which Susan Buck-Morss suggests is typically inadequately translated ‘philosophy of history.’
Benjamin described the Passagen-Werk as a project in Geschichtsphilosophie. Translated, the term is imprecise. The German language allows for a montage of two concepts (Geschichts/Philosophie; Natur/Geschichte) without stipulating the semantic nature of their connection, but in this case, English is more fastidious. If Geschichtsphilosophie is translated (as is usually the case) “philosophy of history,” the implication is that history develops in a historically meaningful way, manifesting a teleological plan or goal. If it is translated “historical philosophy,” the implication is that philosophy develops in a historically relative fashion, as the expression of an evolving Zeitgeist. Both ideas miss Benjamin’s point, which was to construct, not a philosophy of history, but philosophy out of history, or (this amounts to the same thing) to reconstruct historical material as philosophy—indeed, “philosophical history” might be a less misleading nomenclature.
Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), p. 55. Buck-Morss goes on to note that Benjamin used this phrase “philosophical history” himself in another work, Trauerspiel, to connote his method of philosophically reconstructing historical origins. I think Buck-Morss would agree that in the Passagen-Werk Benjamin is as concerned about giving a history of histories (offering a historiography) as well as revealing those histories to be false in so far as they are not fully rooted in material reality, thus, I think is fair to call his project a “materialist historiography.” Buck-Morss’ agreement is witnessed on the same page quoted above where she writes, “In the Passagen-Werk Benjamin was committed to a graphic, concrete representation of truth, in which historical images made visible the philosophical ideas”—and it is this that I mean to suggest by the label “materialist historiography.”
[4] The notion of a public sphere employed in this paper is the that of a community formed around a mutual interest or shared concern that is seeking to cooperatively achieve mutually agreed upon ends. One of the central issues concerning neo-Marxist debates over the public sphere has been whether an informed and effective public can emerge out of a capitalist society. Marx’s base and super-structural analysis suggests that we must revolutionize the base before we can overcome the class conflicts that would necessarily be present in the capitalist cultural realm. In other words, a functioning public sphere cannot exist in a capitalist society. Benjamin is Marxist because he suggests there cannot be any viable public sphere until capitalism is overcome. Jürgen Habermas, the most well known philosopher currently involved in this debate, is slightly more hopeful that some pockets of localized public opinion will result from the rupture points in lifeworldly colonization. I think that Benjamin has it right; we cannot have a wholly viable public sphere, in the full sense of democratic dialogue and cooperative communities of inquiry forming consensus based on mutual interests, until we have revolutionized the way that we manufacture consciousness. However, Habermas is correct that there is room for public sphere formation within the current base and superstructure. Habermas is incorrect if he thinks that this is as good as we can do. Benjamin is incorrect too however, and this is central to my paper, because he thinks that wish images can only suppress the formation of effective public spheres. Benjamin does not see the positive capacity of wish imagery to project mutual interests that confront capitalist values, namely, the profit of the few. Rather, Benjamin relies on the negative capacity of the dialectical image to awaken the masses and bring about a revolutionary shift in consciousness. Benjamin conceives of this awakening messianically rather than pragmatically and thus he remains pessimistic about the possibility of its occurrence. Again, where Habermas improves on Benjamin is where a pragmatist can improve on both: that is to acknowledge that there is room for the formation of non-colonized publics in the midst of capitalist societies and that said publics arise in the context of small communities sharing ends-in-view based on mutual interests and a desire for consensual decision making and action. These publics form around the articulation of non-colonized wish images, and serve as the only realistic first step towards lasting and radical socio-economic and cultural transformation.
[5] Ric Burns, New York: A Documentary Film. http://www.pbs.org/wnet/newyork/series/resources/NY_Guide.pdf, p.1 (my emphasis).
[6] Peter Szondi, “Walter Benjamin’s City Portraits,” On Walter Benjamin: Critical Essays and Recollections, ed. by Gary Smith (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988), p. 19. It is interesting to note that Benjamin wrote the Passagen-Werk as if he were a native of Paris; though factually a foreigner, his motives for embarking on the Passagen-Werk were certainly deep and almost solely about a recovery of the past. The issue of temporality will be more fully discussed shortly.
[7] Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), p. 39
[8] Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, see especially Ch. 8, “Dream World of Mass Culture,” p. 253-286.
[9] Ibid., p. 218-219. The actual dialectical images that Benjamin employs in the Passagen-Werk are predominantly textual ‘images.’ They consist of quotes about and descriptions of the arcades or 19th century Paris juxtaposed in such a way to evoke the inhumanity and injustice of capitalism. The ‘images’ were meant to shock the reader into class-consciousness.
[10] One way to measure consumption is by comparing levels of waste. The United States has long been the highest producer of garbage in the world, and “New York City generates more refuse than any other city in the United States (24,000 tons, or 21,768 metric tons, each day)…” Jackson, The Encyclopedia of New York City, p. 991.
[10]
[18] These small publics are not beyond colonization but they do achieve a measure of ameliorative transformation, which is a necessary first step to lasting and revolutionary transformation. One of the reasons that capitalism continues to prevail, that college freshman squirm in their seats at hearing about democratic socialism, is that capitalism holds our imagination. I can romanticize working hundred hour weeks in silicon alley until my Internet start-up holds its IPO or is bought-out by amazon.com, but can I imagine anything half as interesting about the coming communist revolution? The revolutionary fears that wish images perpetuate false-consciousness. We must awaken. We are called to class-consciousness. But, it is much more attractive to self identify as a could be entrepreneur rather than face the dismal facts of my alienated existence. Until we begin to imaginatively project possibilities alluring to the alienated psyches that populate our cities the revolution will be in perpetual deferral.
[19] John Dewey, Ethics. The Later Works, 1925-1953: Volume 7: 1932, ed. by Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985), pg. 186.