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April 23, 2009
Photography was the defining modern mode of representation in the early twentieth century, in that there can be no thinking of history that is not at the same time a thinking of photography. Just think of photography's dual position of privilege in both the bureaucratic archives of the police, government, etc. and the family photograph album; or the preoccupations with the connections between photography, history and memory and the relation between image and text as contested ground. Or the conception of history as the mythic dimension of "collective fictions" that demand excavation for their underlying "truths.
Walter Benjamain's The Arcades Project, a mosaic of fragments, quotations and commentaries, offers a history of capitalism, with an emphasis on the transformation from a culture of production to one of consumption. Vanessa R Schwartz in Walter Benjamin for Historians says:
According to Benjamin, capitalism endowed objects with the means to express collective dreams. This drew him to particular urban architectural forms such as arcades, railway stations, department stores, and wax museums, which he called "dream houses of the collective." Such spaces seemed to acknowledge at the very least, perhaps even call into being, the crowd that would play such a vital role in both modern political revolution and the revolution in consumer culture. "In these constructions, the appearance of great masses on the stage of history was already foreseen." In these structures, the historian would discern the unfulfilled hopes and desires of the collective. For Benjamin, the nineteenth century resulted in a sleep induced by capitalism, which, by implication, had led to the rise of fascism: "Capitalism was a natural phenomenon with which a new dream-filled sleep came over Europe, and, through it, a reactivation of mythical forces." A work of history such as this was vital in order to slay capitalism by waking the slumbering collective from its nineteenth-century dream, because, as he wrote, "capitalism will not die a natural death."
The task of the historian thus became to use history as a "technique of awakening," and this project, he wrote, "deals with awakening from the nineteenth century." Benjamin's project of awakening involved the "unconscious world of remembrance" in the form of dream experience.
History is like Janus: it has two faces" pointing in two directions at once and expressive of both oppression and liberation.
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