"Insert into Blankness: Poetry and Cultural Memory in Benjamin's Baudelaire Interpretation"

INSERT INTO BLANKNESS: POETRY AND

CULTURAL MEMORY IN BENJAMIN’S

BAUDELAIRE INTERPRETATION

Jennifer Bajorek

Baudelaire would never have written poems if he’dhad nothing more than the usual motives poets havefor writing poetry.—Walter Benjamin1

It is the singular achievement of Walter Benjamin’s late textson Baudelaire to have sketched for us one possible way that thesubject might get through capital, one way that it (or “we”) mightmove through the radical transformations of the structures of expe-rience and memory that capital entails. I say these texts sketch onepossible way we might “get through” these transformations, if notexactly survive them, in order to underscore the differencebetween the time of this process and any forward movement. As iswell known, Benjamin based all of his theoretical calculations inthe texts of this period on the necessity of breaking with the theo-ry of history as a theory of progress. He saw this break as necessaryon account not only of certain tendencies of fascism and of whathe called “bourgeois habits of thought,” but of the theoreticalinstruments of Marxism itself, which he had begun to suspect were

Qui Parle, Vol. 16, No. 2 Spring/Summer 2007

bajorek_162.qxd 9/29/07 2:50 PM Page 97

all too reflexively intertwined with their object. The break was notonly necessary but perceived as urgent and had to be total, requir-ing nothing short of a new theory, not just of history, but its stuff.Critical to the formulation of this break and to the formation of thisnew historical material was a theory of poetry and, more specifi-cally, Baudelaire’s poetry, on which Benjamin came to base hismost original and provocative claims about capital’s history, as wellas his speculations about the shape of its future, even if theseremained fragmentary. We cannot know whether this fragmentari-ness stems from the radical incompletion of Benjamin’s writingprojects (in the mundane sense allowed by biography), or fromsomething about the nature of that future.

Benjamin was not alone among his contemporaries in his callfor a refinement of the instruments of historical materialism, norwas he alone in his articulation of this call with and through a pro-ject of literary or cultural criticism: one that would register theimprint of historical events in linguistic terms and conceive of thecollective and temporal dimensions of human experience in accor-dance with textual models. The necessity of thinking a history thatwould not be colored by, or confused with, progressive and teleo-logical protocols was an impulse shared by other social and polit-ical theorists of this period, and the textual sensibilities exhibitedby Benjamin’s “other histories” clearly anticipate those of later anti-humanisms and deconstructions of the subject, even where thesehave been less explicitly concerned with the subject’s imbricationwith capital.2 My own interest in Benjamin’s rethinking of history,to which alone his recent popularity and translatability outside thefields of philosophy and German literary studies can be attributed,lies not only in its overwhelming dependence on a theory of poet-ry and on a specific poetic project (Baudelaire’s) that was alreadycalculated at the time of its writing as an intervention in collectiveexperience, but also in that he had already discovered that capitalcalled for a wholesale rethinking of history in its conditions andmedia of transmission.3

This essay will explore the consequences of Benjamin’s extra-ordinary investment in a specific poetic corpus for his larger theo-

98 JENNIFER BAJOREK


ry of history, and it will venture a few tentative hypotheses aboutthe poetic lapses and lacunae upon which Benjamin seizes in hisinterpretation of Baudelaire. It is difficult, for obvious reasons, toconstruct a history out of gaps, holes, omissions, or other forms oflapse and blankness, and yet this is, if we follow Benjamin, thematerialist historian’s task and even our own. Critical to our under-standing of this task is, I will suggest, a deeper understanding of thetask that Benjamin assigns to Baudelaire’s poetry as a technology ofmemory that emerges under specifically capitalist conditions. Onereason for exploring in greater depth Benjamin’s description of thisstrangely intermittent technology is that it is directly connectedwith the prospect of a collectivity that would inherit and, in somesense if we follow Benjamin, be actively transmitted by capital’shistory. This brings us back both to the question of capital’s future(what shape it will take and whether there will be anyone left toinherit it) and to a more nuanced understanding of why it is at leastas urgent for us as it was for Benjamin to continue to think of cap-ital as a problem, not merely of political economy (i.e., of unevenlabor extraction), but of cultural and historical transmission.

In the larger project from which this essay is drawn, I pursuea double reading of Baudelaire and Marx that takes its cue fromBenjamin’s so-called Baudelaire book.4 Through his many disparateand fragmentary texts on Baudelaire, Benjamin was the first to sug-gest that Baudelaire’s and Marx’s texts register traces of the sameevent: modernity conceived as a change in the nature and struc-tures of transmission of experience; the mechanization of produc-tion (be it of meaning or of value) or of human labor (manual orintellectual, virtual or embodied); the impact of all these things onour conception of history and on our experience of time and, at thelimit, on anything that could still be called experience.5 ButBenjamin was also the first to explore, in these same texts, the con-nections between certain elements of literature or literary languageand the conditions of a critical and ultimately deeply politicalresponse to capital. Benjamin was preoccupied, in his initial explo-ration of these questions, with the figure of allegory, whichbecomes, in his texts on Baudelaire, the linguistic equivalent of the

99INSERT INTO BLANKNESS


commodity. In oblique relation to Benjamin’s question about alle-gory, and with a view to pushing his analysis of the connectionsbetween a specific literary or rhetorical technique and a critique ofspecific dimensions of capital still further, I ask about the social andpolitical dimensions of irony. Why do Baudelaire and Marx, twoconsummate theorists of capital’s interference at every level ofhuman life, both feel compelled to theorize this interference in anironic mode? What if irony cannot be confined to literature or tolanguage but rather comes to inflect the production or circulationof all meaning or value under capital?

If Benjamin sets out from the hypothesis that with Baudelairewe reach a “crisis of the lyric” and that the poet’s texts “render thepossibility of lyric poetry problematic,”6 my own intention is todemonstrate that there remain lessons to be drawn from theirpower to move through this crisis. Irony also names this situationof difficult transmission. For the purposes of this essay, irony willremain largely in the background, although I will suggest that itcan’t not inflect our efforts to think the collectivity that emergesunder specifically capitalist conditions of memory and transmis-sion: the collectivity re-membered, in Benjamin’s account, byBaudelaire’s poetic corpus. Irony is always there whenever we arebrought to pay attention to our own ongoing participation in capi-tal’s history.

Poetry at the Crossroads of Magic and Positivism

At the time that Benjamin was writing, Theodor Adorno wassympathetic to and even shared Benjamin’s concerns to elaboratea new materialist history from poetry, at least within certain limits.Some of these limits become legible in the infamous exchange inthe 1938 correspondence, in which Adorno roundly condemnedthe draft du jour of the Baudelaire project — even more roundlythan he had condemned the previous draft, in 1935.7 Those famil-iar with the exchange will recall some of Adorno’s most scathingcriticisms of Benjamin’s engagement with Baudelaire: You have setyourself at the “crossroads of magic and positivism”; your method

100 JENNIFER BAJOREK


has deteriorated into the “wide-eyed presentation of mere factici-ty”; you ascribe to mere “materialist enumeration” powers of illu-mination that are “reserved to theoretical interpretation” alone.8

The list is remarkable in part because it reads like so many accu-sations aimed at those of us in the humanities who remain stuck inthe mundane opacities and resistances of the material objects ofculture now that the theories to which they gave birth have migrat-ed elsewhere, to greener pastures for grander claims about theprospects for radical social and political change than it seems canbe sustained these days by the interpretation of literature or art.

But my immediate reason for quoting Adorno’s comments inthis context is that they make clear the extent to which Benjaminwas alone in his turn to this poetic corpus in order to ground hisclaims about our prospects for getting through capital. Even ifAdorno was sympathetic to the special task that Benjamin assignedto Baudelaire’s texts, his remarks signal that he misses somethingessential about the nature or texture of this task, hanging on, as hedoes in them, to the distinction between “materialist enumeration”and “theoretical interpretation” — the very distinction that, onBenjamin’s reading, Baudelaire’s poetry breaks down. The claimsthat Benjamin makes for Baudelaire’s poetry can be quite striking,even a little hyperbolic. But more striking than these claims is, Iwill suggest, the conception of poetry on which they hinge. I willsuggest, in my reading of Benjamin, that something like a break-down of this distinction between “materialist enumeration” and“theoretical interpretation” actually forms the linchpin of his argu-ments about cultural memory and the changing conditions andmedia of cultural and historical transmission under capital. Theprecise nature of this breakdown or failure is best explored throughhis well-known argument about the shock experience.9 Indeed, wemight borrow Benjamin’s own language, from his own account ofthe psychic and historical structures reorganized by capital, inorder to describe the effect of this lingering investment on Benja-min’s readers: It is as if the critic’s decision with regard to this poet-ry were itself a historical event that had left a memory trace in thepsyche of his corpus; as if his decision to freight up his reading of



Baudelaire’s poetry as a transmitter of capital’s disruption of theconditions of collective experience had disturbed and reorganizedthe structure of that psyche in a way that all our chatter about theshock experience has thus far only tried to parry. Before turning tothat theory in greater detail, we would do well to review one ortwo of the more general claims that Benjamin makes Baudelaire’spoetry bear.

Through motley drafts, revisions, phases, and thoroughgoingrestructurings of their architecture, the myriad texts comprisingBenjamin’s Baudelaire interpretation are strung together by a singlefil conducteur: This is the idea that capital touched Baudelaire’spoetry, at the level not simply of its themes, but of its language, inthe very way that it makes meaning or is made. It is, for Benjamin,in some sense always capital that produces Baudelaire’s poetry.This idea, which is difficult to reconcile with conventional under-standings of linguistic reference, requires that we grapple withBenjamin’s description of the forking path taken by experience inthe essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire.”

There is, Benjamin writes, in Baudelaire’s poetry “somethingof the isolated experience, or ‘lived experience’ [these are the tworeceived translations of Erlebnis] to which Baudelaire has given theweight of a long experience [Erfahrung]” (“M,” 343). At first glance,the reader might imagine, given this poetic freighting up of experi-ence, that we are dealing with a Romantic conception of poetry asan exteriorization of an immediate and so-called lived experienceproper to (and appropriated by) the subject conceived as a passagein or out of a space of radical interiority. Indeed, Benjamin citesWilhelm Dilthey’s influential book, Die Erfahrung und die Dich-tung (Poetry and Experience), with reference to this tradition, forwhich the passage of experience into poetry and back again wouldrequire only a temporary mediation (“M,” 314). But Benjamin’sown deft manipulation of the distinction between the two differentconcepts of experience in German makes it clear that experienceno longer refers, here, to a lyric or poetic expression that would beconceived as the mediation of a simple inside/outside structure.The entire “Motifs” essay attempts to demonstrate that Baudelaire’s



poetry, in stark contrast to Romantic tradition, derives its radicalsingularity from its power to record the accumulated weight ofexperience beyond the confines of a single psyche, consciousness,or subject and to transmit it, thus investing a radically collectiveexperience with the longue durée of Erfahrung at the very momentthat the recording or transmission of experience was becomingimpossible — that is, at the time of capital’s industrial rise in themiddle of the nineteenth century. According to Benjamin, thistransmission is the secret of Baudelaire’s success and why LesFleurs du mal, which had very little prospect of success at the timethat it was written, went on to acquire “the stature of a classic andbecome one of the most widely printed ones as well” (“M,” 314).

Benjamin gives this idea a first and still tentative formulationin the early pages of the “Motifs” essay, when he describesB a u d e l a i r e ’s poetry as “grounded in an experience [E r f a h r u ng] forwh i ch exposure to shock [C h o ck e r l e b n is] has become the norm”( “ M ,” 318). By the essay ’s end, he is considerably emboldened inhis statement of this claim, writing that Baudelaire has succeededin taking the isolated experience of shock (C h o ck e r l e b n is) andt ransforming it into a C h o ck e r f a h r u n g, that is, an experience ofs h o ck that would be transmissible to others and thus extend beyo n dthis isolation. Baudelaire’s poetry, Benjamin does not ultimately shyaway from saying, has saved what had been, at the moment of itswriting, lost to experience and transformed it precisely by t ra n s m i t-ting it, salvaging it for memory, for history, and for us.

Given the extent of capital’s interference, what this poetrytransmits did not just risk being lost to experience in some acci-dental sense but at a deeper level. Indeed, if we follow Benjamin’stext to the letter, it was lost — not only to the poet’s own experi-ence but to that of his contemporaries and, by dint of this failure ofmediation, to history, until the poetry came along. Les Fleurs dumal has become a classic (i.e., mass-produced in all of theEuropean languages) because of its power to save what had beenlost to the individual psyche or subject and transmit it, thereby ren-dering it a form of collective experience and ensuring itself, as arecord of that experience, a future at the same time. Baudelaire’s



poetry is, in this account, a technology of memory, and a technol-ogy, if not of mass production and technical reproducibility per se,then of the recording and transmission of an experience that was,thanks to capital, already becoming a mass experience, even ascapital had deprived the mass of the urban population of the oldconditions of experience (at least in Paris, the so-called “capital” ofcapital). That the loss of these conditions was not absolute and thatthe psyche could be reorganized in such a way as to support thedevelopment of new conditions for memory — and therefore forexperience — is the first claim that Benjamin makes Baudelaire’spoetry bear.

This description of the poetic freighting up and tra n s m i s s i o nof experience plays an enormous part in Benjamin’s more genera lunderstanding of experience or E r f a h r u n g. Experience seems, bydefinition, to draw the individual into the collective and yet must belaid down in memory in order to do so — even if it can only be laidd own in memory, under capital or under modern conditions, at theexpense of consciousness and accessibility to voluntary memory:“Experience is indeed a matter of tradition, in collective existenceas well as private life. It is the product less of facts firmly anch o r e din memory [E r i n n e r u ng] than of accumulated and frequentlyunconscious data that flow together in memory [G e d ä ch t n is] ”( “ M ,” 314). On the one hand, this articulation of tradition and expe-rience as an unconscious accretion or accumulation of data fitswith a common understanding of tradition as a common good thatis precisely not appropriable by a single subject (hence the meta-phor of translation that frequently crops up). In every time andplace and in every historical period, this deeper level of experienceis, if we follow Benjamin, the only one that can sustain inve s t m e n twith the weight of tradition; it is the very stuff of cultural memoryand collective experience. But Benjamin is concerned with a his-torical shift, not only in the nature of tradition or of collective expe-rience, but in the prospects for its emergence under capitalist con-ditions. That experience is always “a matter of tra d i t i o n ,” and there-fore always collective, is not in itself historically specific or a mod-ern phenomenon. What i s historically specific, in Benjamin’s



account, is the power of capital to effect a falling-off or reductionin the range of possible objects or contents of collective experience— as well as a reduction in the chances for, or frequency of occur-rence of, the kind of collective experience that would be t ra n s m i s-s i b l e, period, on any scale. For a sustained exploration of Benja-m i n ’s concept of tradition, I refer the reader to Andrew Benjamin’sl ovely article on “tradition and experience,” in wh i ch he suggeststhat it is not possible to understand Benjamin on tradition withoutfirst understanding his (ultimately more complex) arguments aboutm e m o r y, of wh i ch tradition is made.1 0 In my interpretation ofBenjamin, I differ from Andrew Benjamin’s account only where itconcludes, on the basis of an interpretation of The Storyteller, that“ The end of the story is the end of community” (“T,” 125). It couldbe argued, as I believe this is Benjamin’s own argument, that theend of the story is the beginning of poetry, and that part of what isat stake in the “Motifs” essay is the poetic rebirth of community.

Forget the Usual Motives

Enter the extended engagement with Freud’s Beyond thePleasure Principle, which Benjamin deploys in order to radicalizethis understanding of experience, or better, this understanding ofthe loss of experience as the price paid by the individual for hispsychic integration (or disintegration) under capital. “Conscious-ness,” writes Freud, “takes the place of a memory trace [DasBewußtsein entstehe an der Stelle der Erinnerungsspur]” (“M,”317). “Therefore,” continues Benjamin, intricately beading togeth-er a series of quotations not only from Freud, but Proust, Bergson,and Reik (from whose voices it can be difficult to discern his own):“‘[I]t would be the special characteristic of consciousness that,unlike what happens in all other systems of the psyche, the excita-tory process does not leave behind a permanent change in its ele-ments, but expires, as it were, in the phenomenon of becomingconscious.’ The basic formula of this hypothesis is that ‘becomingconscious and leaving behind a memory trace are incompatibleprocesses within one and the same system’” (“M,” 317). This fun-



damental incompatibility, between the emergence of conscious-ness and the inscription of a memory trace, forms the pivot ofBenjamin’s shock theory, which holds that, under modern condi-tions, the event undergone by the psyche is forced to take one oftwo paths: Wherever there is memory (i.e., wherever the event hashappened in such a way that traces are recorded), there cannot beconsciousness of the event. This lack of consciousness is the con-dition of possibility of memory and thus of historical transmissionunder modern conditions. Conversely, wherever there is con-sciousness, there can be no memory, and therefore no traces of theevent, but only a parrying and blockage of durable experience. Thisparrying and blockage are the sign of the shock defense, whose sig-nal achievement is “to assign an incident a precise point in time inconsciousness” (“M,” 317). One consequence of this fork in theroad that experience must take under modern conditions is thatvestiges of memory are “often most powerful and most enduringwhen the incident which left them behind was one that neverentered consciousness” (“M,” 317). In order for the most powerfuland durable memory, and thus for history, to emerge in Benjamin’saccount, we need the shock defense to fail.

Baudelaire’s poetry is, for Benjamin, everywhere marked bythe failure of the shock defense. Framed within a theory of memo-ry and of the changing protocols of historical transmission (it isalso, almost incidentally, a psychoanalytic theory), Baudelaire’spoetry, even before Benjamin ventures an interpretation of a singleline of it, is assigned a collective and historical task: WithoutBaudelaire’s poetry, no history of the nineteenth century, and thusno document of the transformation of experience by capital: nosaving and transmission of that history to us. Poetry is, in thisaccount, a privileged and even the only possible form of collectiveor cultural memory for the subject of capital at the time of its indus-trial emergence. Without poetry — or, more accurately, withoutBaudelaire’s poetry — it seems there would be, for this subject, noexperience; without the invention and intervention of this newtechnology of memory appropriate to modernity, there would beno history of the twentieth or even the twenty-first century: no us.



The second claim that Benjamin makes for Baudelaire’s poet-ry is that this poetry dreams of capturing an experience that would“establish itself in crisis-proof form” (“M,” 333). Like the claim thatLes Fleurs du mal is essentially one big mass-produced palimpsestof modern experience, the claim that this poetry seeks to establisha “crisis-proof” experience holds out, once again, the promise ofmemory and historical transmission under seemingly impossibleconditions. When conjugated with certain other claims thatBenjamin makes for this poetry’s privileged relation to the com-modity, however, the claim for the establishment of a crisis-proofexperience in poetic form lends to this poetry a highly specificintentionality. This intentionality is connected with the artwork, butwith an artwork that has made its peace with the commodity, itspolitical-economic anamorph.

It is worth noting, before turning to Benjamin’s description ofthis intentionality and of the linkage it must provide (between apoetry that would succeed in establishing a crisis-proof experienceand a poetry that would be produced according to the laws or logicof the commodity), that this new technology of memory( B a u d e l a i r e ’s poetry) is marked by a radical dislocation of know l-edge. If we follow Giorgio A g a m b e n ’s account of the destruction ofwhat he calls “traditional experience,” the disjunction betweenk n owledge and experience performed by Baudelaire’s poetry inB e n j a m i n ’s account can in fact be understood as a return to or of as e p a ration that was, once upon a time, constitutive of experience.1 1

( The disjunction between knowledge and experience can be corre-lated with, even if it is not identical to, the disjunction betweenconsciousness and memory just rehearsed. I will refrain fromu n p a cking here the consequences of A g a m b e n ’s decision to incor-p o rate Benjamin’s Baudelaire interpretation into a panoramic histo-ry of philosophy from wh i ch capital is conspicuously absent.) Quiteapart from whether we accept A g a m b e n ’s description of an ancients e p a ration between science and experience, mind and soul, n o u sand p s y ch e, and thus, on the border of language and death,between human and divine knowledge (“IH,” 19), his attention to aradical incommensurability of knowledge and experience embed-



ded in the history of philosophy exposes the fra m e work of a theoryof history in wh i ch history necessarily emerges from, or as, a hiatuswithin consciousness or knowledge. In Benjamin’s account, it iswith the transmission of just such a hiatus that poetry is ch a r g e d .E ven if this hiatus is first identified with an ancient history and adeeply sedimented and (in A g a m b e n ’s account) inaccessible tra d i-tion, how e ve r, it comes to be identified with the advent of moder-n i t y. We thus find replicated in Benjamin’s concept of experience— and illuminated by A g a m b e n ’s attention to the disjunctionbetween knowledge and experience — the communication ori n t e r p e n e t ration of ancient and modern in a single topos, trope, orsign that is a signature gesture of Baudelaire’s poetic project in L e sFleurs du mal, and above all of the poems of the Tableaux parisiens(of wh i ch Benjamin was, it cannot hurt to recall, the tra n s l a t o r ) .

But how, more precisely, does Benjamin tell us that the gar-den of forking paths that threatens to suppress experience on twosides — parrying or blocking it in consciousness or retaining it inmemory only by virtue of a failure to register it on a conscious level— comes to be legible in a poem? How does a poem or a poeticcorpus signal its intention to get experience, under the threat of itspermanent suppression, across? We might turn to one of the versepoems that Benjamin quotes at greatest length in the “Motifs”essay, Le Soleil, to explore at greater length how he derives hisclaims for this poetry’s special intentionality with regard to its read-ers and ultimately to the commodity.12 While he might have chosenother poems of Les Fleurs du mal that explicitly thematize poeticproduction as commodity production (such as La Muse vénale ),Benjamin prefers to read Le Soleil as the poem that will shed lighton the conditions of production of Baudelaire’s poetry:

Le long du vieux faubourg, où pendent aux masuresLes persiennes, abri des secrètes luxures,Quand le soleil cruel frappe à traits redoublésSur la ville et les champs, sur les toits et les blés,Je vais m’exercer seul à ma fantasque escrime,Flairant dans tous les coins les hasards de la rime,



Trébuchant sur les mots comme sur les pavés,Heurtant parfois des vers depuis longtemps rêvés.

Through decrepit neighborhoods on the outskirts oftown, whereSlatted shutters hang at the windows of hovels that shel-ter secret lusts;At a time when the cruel sun beats down with redou-bled forceOn city and countryside, on rooftops and cornfields,I go out alone to practice my fantastical fencing,Scenting chances for rhyme on every street corner,Stumbling over words as though they were cobble-stones,Sometimes knocking up against verses dreamed longago.13

In a loose analogy with Baudelaire’s own description of his friendthe painter Constantin Guys at work in his atelier (in The Painter ofModern Life), Benjamin introduces the poem’s opening stanza as adepiction of the shock defense, thus installing the attempt to parrythe blows of the shock, and thus the attempt to block the emer-gence of experience, at the heart of Baudelaire’s poetic project:“Baudelaire made it his business to parry the shocks, no matterwhat their sources, with his spiritual and physical self. This shockdefense is rendered in the image of combat. In the opening stanzaof Le Soleil, Baudelaire portrays himself engaged in just such fan-tastic combat” (“M,” 319). In truth, there is only a single word inthe quoted lines that can be understood to indicate such a combat:This is the description of poetic composition as an escrime, or fenc-ing match. But even if it attaches itself explicitly only to a singleword, Benjamin’s argument for the existence of a “traumatophiletype” in Baudelaire’s poetry — the type of subject for whom con-sciousness has intervened to parry the shock — is convincing.Bolstering and even extending this interpretation is the fact that thesun’s rays mercilessly beating down (Quand le soleil cruel frappe à



traits redoublés) suggests a generally hostile environment and oneinimical to poetic composition. But his decision to confine hisinterpretation of this image to the level of what is essentially auto-biography does not advance us any further in understanding howwe get from a simple self-portrait of the traumatophile to a morenuanced and more mediated recording and transmission of theshock experience (more nuanced and more mediated than straightautobiography) and one that would be specifically poetic.14 LeSoleil may show parrying, but does it also perform it?

Looking more closely, we notice that Benjamin’s interpreta-tion of the poet-as-traumatophile overlooks and has the effect ofoccluding elements of Le Soleil that actually work to confirm manyof the most compelling elements of his shock theory. For example,the inside/outside structure of the urban landscape, in which thespeaking “I” is described as passing houses depicted as harboringsecrets and closed and shuttered against the noonday sun, is almostimmediately troubled by the fact that the sun does not seem tofunction as a condition of visiblity in these lines. The poet’s task,and thus the work of poetic composition, is precisely not to pene-trate an interior (be it of a self or of others) from which he, like thesunlight, has been barred. The work of writing poetry is describedas taking place in a liminal space and in a decidedly other placewith regard not only to a shuttered interior but to any possible illu-mination. Within this a-topic anti-enlightenment scene, the poet’sstance may, to be sure, still be understood as combative: He maybe mad and fighting demons (like the figure in Les Sept viellards,which Benjamin also mentions); or he may be fighting the sun inmultiple senses (battling the heat but also working odd hours); orthe combative stance of the poet figure may simply signify the dif-ficulty of poetic labor. No matter which interpretation we may beinclined to give to this combat, however, none can account ade-quately for the vexed relationship that poetic production bears toconsciousness here, as exemplified by the encounter of the poetwith the accidents of rhyme in the poem’s remaining lines. Recallthat the rhymes do not simply arrive by sheer happenstance offlânerie. Rather, they are depicted as bubbling up from the recess-



es of memory, or even as arriving, more obliquely — and in a lit-eral sense, given the explicit emphasis on distraction and stumblingin the stanza’s closing lines — by dint of memory’s lapse.

The richness and complexity of these stanzas’ description ofthe poetic process cannot be overemphasized, nor can the reso-nances between this depiction and Benjamin’s description of theforking path taken by experience in the shock theory. If we empha-size this encounter of labor with accident, and the central role with-in the poetic process granted these rhymes tripped ove r, as the soli-tary walker trips over paving stones, then the poet’s combat doesindeed seem fantastical or futile (ma fantasque escrime). The long-sought verse appears to arrive as a distant memory, and as if byi nvoluntary memory, but also by accident at the same time. Le Soleilsuggests that the stuff of poetry cannot be conjured up from memo-ry by sheer force of will, nor can it be produced by some other con-scious process, but only involuntarily: by stumbling over wo r d s .

We will return to this opaque field of stumbling blocks fromwhich the lines of poetry are remembered. It is among other thingsa figure of our own participation, as readers, in the work performedby Baudelaire’s poetry if it is to perform the work of collective orcultural memory in such a way that its history, the history of capi-tal, will also be transmitted as our own.

Still on the topic of Baudelaire’s poetic process, we might turnto another passage, from another text by Benjamin, wh i ch puts thisnotion of a poetic l a p s e in contact with a slightly different accountof Baudelaire’s poetic process. In “Central Pa r k ,” Benjamin writesabout certain poetic secret weapons that Baudelaire is able to devisethanks to his “deep experience” (E r f a h r u ng) of the commodity:

Baudelaire’s strategy in the literary market: through hisdeep experience of the nature of the commodity, he wasenabled, or compelled, to recognize the market as anobjective court of appeals (see his advice to young writ-ers). Through his negotiations with editors, he was con-tinuously in contact with the market. His techniques:defamation (Musset), and counterfeit (Hugo). Baude-



laire was perhaps the first to conceive of a market-ori-ented originality, which for that very reason was moreoriginal in its day than any other (créer un poncif). Thisc r é a t i o n entailed a certain intolerance. Baudelairewanted to make room for his poems, and to this end hehad to push aside others. He managed to devalue cer-tain poetic liberties of the Romantics through his classi-cal deployment of the alexandrine, and to devalue clas-sicist poetics through the characteristic ruptures anddefects he introduced into classical verse. In short, hispoems contained special provisions for the eliminationof competitors (“CP,” 168).

If we look closely at this passage, we see that Benjamin in factsw i t ches gears in the middle of this explanation of wh a tBaudelaire’s poetry shares with the commodity. First, he supportsthe claim that Baudelaire was “the first to conceive of a market-ori-ented originality” by citing the poet’s famous remark about thedesire or need to create a cliché (créer un poncif) as the hallmarkof genius. He then switches to a different genre of evidence andexample, drawn not, as we might expect, from the stock of images,clichés, or tropes that might be offered as evidence of a market-ori-ented originality (that is to say, an originality adapted to mass ortechnological production and thus no originality at all) but ratherfrom the sphere of a-semantic poetic elements and above all meter.

It is extremely interesting, but ultimately very difficult, toargue that a certain metrical tic, a given caesura, a given deploy-ment of the alexandrine, assured the elimination of Baudelaire’scompetitors. This kind of argument can be very difficult to sustain,as can any argument about the origin or production of a poem ina-semantic elements of language, or for the intentionality of a poet-ic project that would ground itself in a-semantic elements of lan-guage, for much the same reason it gets tricky asking questionsabout the “meaning” of the occurrence of certain letters in a text —the question to which we are always pushed by poetic rhythm ormeter.15 This difficulty is not unrelated to the disjunction between



knowledge and experience that Agamben traced in his essay on thedestruction of experience (nor is it unrelated to what he calls infan-cy), but it is even more important to note that part of what is atstake in this difficulty is that we need a different language to talkabout the mass production and technical reproducibility of lan-guage than we do to talk about such potentialities with regard toimage technologies such as the lithograph, daguerreotype, or pho-tograph.16 It remains a question whether Benjamin ever succeeds indeveloping such a language in any of his Baudelaire texts. Even inthe absence of this language, however, his remarks about theimprint left on Baudelaire’s poetry by the poet’s “deep experience”of the commodity do make clear the determining role played by thecommodity in the emergence of any possible experience undercapital. To say that Baudelaire’s poetry bears the burden of docu-menting the transformation of subjective experience under capital,and that it documents this transformation and transmits it to us, asour own experience, only if and insofar as it is itself a commodity,is to say that there will be no experience, no collective or culturalmemory, no history under capital without the invention and inter-vention of a mode of experience that can come through circulationintact. It is to say that, under modern conditions, there will be noexperience — no real, transmissible, durable experience, noErfahrung — that does not come to us via the market, which, weare now able to see more clearly, is not simply the telos ofBaudelaire’s poetry but forms part of the complex of mechanismsby which his poetry transmits history to us.

Insert into Blankness

It is one thing to attribute the singularity of a poet or his poet-ic corpus to the blanks or gaps he puts into his poetry, as these twootherwise significantly different descriptions of Baudelaire’s poeticprocess seem to do. But it is really quite striking to find this singu-larity attributed to the poet’s skillful manipulation of a certain gapor blankness in a single breath with the claim that this poetry is, atthe same time, a new technology of memory, and when this blank-



ness can be construed as something approaching meaning’s nega-tive image. At the very least, we may recognize that there emerges,from Benjamin’s remarks about the blanks, gaps, and caesura ofBaudelaire’s verses, beyond a simple description of the caesura’smetrical function, a deeper disjunction between memory andmeaning that echoes the lapse of memory in the guise of con-sciousness that was the pivot of Benjamin’s shock theory. In anoth-er passage from the “Motifs” essay, Benjamin describes Baude-laire’s poetry as an “insertion into blankness” in a way that suggestshow meaning might come to insert itself, if not beyond, then pre-cisely because of this lapse.

Quoting Va l é r y ’s well-known essay, Situation de Baudelaire( “ B a u d e l a i r e ’s Situation”), Benjamin accepts Va l é r y ’s attribution ofan urgent sense of literary destiny to the poet: “How to be a greatpoet, but neither a Lamartine nor an Hugo nor a Musset?” ButValéry does not actually speak of destiny; he speaks instead ofB a u d e l a i r e ’s “raison d’état,” and it is this turn of phrase that stick swith Benjamin. There is, Benjamin writes, “something odd aboutreferring to a ‘reason of state’ in the case of a poet. It contains some-thing remarkable: the emancipation from isolated experiences[E r l e b n i s se]. Baudelaire’s poetic production is assigned a mission.Blank spaces hovered before him, and into these he inserted hispoems. [Es haben ihm Leerstellen vo r g e s chwebt, in die er seineG e d i chte eingesetzt hat]” (“M,” 318).1 7 The description of wh a tB a u d e l a i r e ’s w r i t i n g gets stuck into as blank or empty space seems,at first glance, to require a slight revision of the palimpsestic mod-els of history and of memory that are the special province of poet-ry elsewhere in the “Motifs” essay, in wh i ch, as we have seen, thelapse in question is understood to be t ransmitted by the poem.Here, we see a second description of Baudelaire’s poetry, wh i chhad up to now figured as a technology of memory connected withmanifold displacements of the event, losses and failures of memo-r y, and writing on multiple planes and in multiple psychic systemsat once, in wh i ch poetry is inscribed within a still larger palimpsest.

Among the possible interpretations we may rule out is thatthis emptiness or blank space is another name for the gap in liter-



ary history that Baudelaire supposedly fills: as if to be a great poet,but neither a Lamartine nor an Hugo, meant that Baudelaire andhis corpus could be inserted in the empty space between an Hugoand a Mallarmé. We can rule out this interpretation of literary his-tory as a story of great men and the anxiety of their influencebecause throughout virtually all of his critical and philosophicalessays on literary texts Benjamin adamantly objects to this kind oflinear narrative in his efforts to excavate a different kind of literaryhistory. It is helpful to understand what is so wrong about this con-ception of what, in his essay on Fuchs (“Eduard Fuchs: Collectorand Historian”) Benjamin calls “cultural history” if we want tograsp this final description of Baudelaire’s poetry as an “insertioninto blankness” and, by extension, to get the nature and texture ofBenjamin’s own materialist history right.18 In “Eduard Fuchs,”Benjamin launches a polemic against the notion of cultural historyby mobilizing a claim that was first made by Marx and Engels inThe German Ideology. This is the critical Marxist notion that thereis no independent history of religion, no independent history ofpolitics, and no independent history of culture, outside materialisthistory, which grasps all of the different human sciences as the“reflection in thought” of economic facts. Benjamin writes:

There is no document of culture which is not at thesame time a document of barbarism. No cultural histo-ry has yet done justice to this fundamental state ofaffairs, and it can hardly hope to do so.

Nevertheless, the crucial element does not liehere. If the concept of culture is problematic for histor-ical materialism, it cannot conceive of the disintegrationof culture into goods which become objects of posses-sion for mankind. Historical materialism sees the workof the past as still incomplete. It perceives no epoch inwhich that work could, even in part, drop conveniently,thing-like, into mankind’s lap. The concept of culture —as the embodiment of creations considered indepen-dent of the production process in which they originate,



or better, of a production process in which they contin-ue to survive — has a fetishistic quality. Culture appearsreified. The history of culture would be nothing but thesediment formed in the consciousness of human beingsby memorable events, events stirred up in the memoryby no genuine experience — that is to say, by no polit-ical experience (“EF,” 267-268).19

In his efforts to clear away this fetishistic concept of cultureas appropriable good, Benjamin elaborates a notion of history thatclosely parallels the notion of experience we get in the shock the-ory. History, the reader will note, is neither embodied in createdworks nor remembered by a consciousness. Like the experiencewhich seems at once to produce and to give us access to it, histo-ry consists of something other than what is “merely” memorable inthe voluntary sense — as if consciousness and the truth of experi-ence (and in the Fuchs essay that experience is identified explicit-ly as political and, therefore, collective experience) were, precise-ly, at odds. The materialist historian’s task, as distinguished from thecultural historian’s, is thus to find, and also to keep, what is herecalled incompletion in the work. In order for him — or her — todo this, however, incompletion must be inscribed in, recorded, andultimately vehiculated by the work in such a way that its author orproducer is precisely not conscious of it.

It is one thing to say that the work must convey the fact of thepast’s not being over. But if we take seriously Benjamin’s insistencein this passage on the radical failure of human consciousness togive us access to genuine — i.e., political — experience, we musttake this idea one step further, and conclude that the work mustconvey historical incompletion without meaning or wanting to.Whatever traces of genuine experience are borne by the work can-not, by definition, be understood as a content: They are not thethemes or meanings that an author sticks in his work, as if the workwere a container or a vessel that could then transmit them to us,precisely because he is barred, in Benjamin’s account, from havingany consciousness of it. The truth of experience and stuff of history



are, for Benjamin, the polar opposite of such a content.To clarify the relationship between this notion of historical

truth and the special task Benjamin assigns to Baudelaire’s poetry,we might cite Benjamin’s preoccupation, in his understanding ofthe artwork, with the distinctive marks left by the artisan on itsexternal form. In this passage from the “Motifs” essay, Benjamin’sartisan is not a figure of the author, at least not in any simple sense,but rather of the storyteller, and thus stands for a certain handlingof the work in the process less of its creation than of its transmis-sion, although in truth Benjamin’s understanding of the artworkbreaks down this distinction:

The replacement of the older form of narration by infor-mation, and of information by sensation, reflects theincreasing atrophy of experience. [T]here is a contrastbetween all of these forms and the story. . . . A storydoes not aim to convey an event per se, which is thepurpose of information; rather, it embeds the event inthe life of the storyteller in order to pass it on as experi-ence to those listening. It thus bears the trace of the sto-ryteller, much the way an earthen vessel bears the traceof the potter’s hand (“M,” 316).

Whatever is vehiculated by these traces cannot be assimilat-ed to information about the event. These traces are rather a meta-phor for an unconscious or other surface for psychic inscriptionwrit large as a vessel, whose only mode of access to the truth of theevent would not, however, be metaphoric but precisely meto-nymic. This is, perhaps, counterintuitive but not impossible to graspgiven Benjamin’s own handling, as it were, of the figure of the ves-sel. For Benjamin, the vessel is a markedly textual metaphor for thestory or the work: It is both the bearer of traces and an inscribedsurface. And yet, given his explicit valorization of the power of thevessel (or of the story) to convey, not the event per se, but rather thetraces left by those who have handled or communicated it, we mayconclude that the vessel gives us access metonymically, precisely



not to a meaning that it could contain and then spit back out again,but to a whole host of events and meanings that have left their markon its external surface.

Benjamin’s description of Baudelaire’s poetry as an insertioninto blankness echoes key elements of his materialist conception ofhistory articulated as a series of metonyms and in accordance witha logic of the Spur, or trace, and furthermore casts into relief theconnections between this materalist conception of history and theshock theory. Recall, again, the bare bones of that theory: Wherethere is information, there can be no memory; where there is con-sciousness, there can be no traces of the event. Given the funda-mental incompatibility of trace and information in Benjamin’saccount, it makes sense to think that the “information” receivedabout an event may take on the contours of a gap or blankness foreither the individual psyche that handles it or for the poem it writesor reads. Consciousness here functions as a form of blankness forthe modern subject, bearing no traces of his experience. This read-ing has the merit of allowing us to line up what previously seemedlike disparate forms of lapse or blankness (the lapse of modern con-sciousness with regard to historical experience, the lapse of thealexandrine in the caesura, the lapses or blank spaces into whichBaudelaire allegedly inserted his verse), such that this blanknesscan be given a more unifying and even totalizing meaning — as ifblankness could function as a moment of simple suture, markingthe passage of poetry into history as well as, at the same time, thetransmission of experience in poetic form.

Benjamin’s Cookie

We should be cautious, how e ve r, if we find ourselves tempt-ed to give a meaning to these blanknesses that would articulate toohastily or too seamlessly the task of Baudelaire’s poetry with that ofhistory simply by filling in the blank, or by making consciousnessstand as a figure of negative knowledge, or of a lost content ormode of production of tradition — indeed, by making any of theseblanknesses stand in for a temporarily lost but ultimately recove r-



able meaning. Benjamin himself gives us seve ral reasons to be cau-tious, here, one of wh i ch is the distinction between historical andpre-historical data, for wh i ch he also marks out a ritual and memo-rable space in Baudelaire’s poetry in the “Motifs” essay. Benjaminintroduces the distinction, between historical and pre-historicaldata recorded in memory (and, therefore, in poetry), by way of acommentary on what is easily the most famous sonnet of the F l e u r sdu mal, C o r r e s p o n d a n c e s. This commentary doubles as a discus-sion of the larger poetic doctrine of “correspondences,” wh i ch haslong stood at the heart of the most canonical debates in Baudelairestudies (debates about the poet’s relations to nature, to the past, tosymbolism, etc.). At first glance Benjamin’s approach to the corre-spondences seems not to distinguish itself from these other morec o nventional readings of Baudelaire’s sonnet: for example, where itposits the correspondences as evidence of the crisis-proof experi-ence successfully established and captured in an “homage tobygone times” that had escaped the poet in the guise of le tempsp e r d u (Benjamin himself is here paying homage, explicitly, toP r o u s t ’s Baudelaire interpretation) or “the outdated” (“M,” 334). Th esonnet C o r r e s p o n d a n c e s becomes evidence, in this interpretation,of the successful establishment of these nostalgic correspondencesbetween past and present; the correspondences are or can becomenostalgic precisely insofar as they are empty of historical meaning.“C o r r e s p o n d a n c e s,” Benjamin writes, “are the data of recollection— not historical data, but data of prehistory. What makes festived ays great and significant is the encounter with an earlier life.Baudelaire [also] recorded this in a sonnet entitled La Vi ea n t é r i e u r e. The images of caves and vegetation, of clouds and wave swh i ch are evoked at the beinning of this second sonnet rise from thewarm vapor of tears — tears of homesick n e s s . . . . What is pastmurmurs in the correspondences, and the canonical experience ofthem has its place in a previous life” (“M,” 334, emphasis mine).

The very possibility that there could exist such a distinction,between a poetic transmission of prehistorical versus historicaldata, is shocking to the reader of the “Motifs,” for this distinctionsuggests an alternative model of poetry and of poetic composition,



in which the past would be recorded but not transmitted histori-cally. If we take this distinction seriously, we must conclude that atleast some of Baudelaire’s poetry is not a technology of memorybut only of loss. The lapse of memory represented by the success-ful recollection of prehistorical data is not a model of poetry towhich history could ever attach itself — and yet it is also, if we fol-low Benjamin here, a model of Baudelaire’s poetry.

There emerges, in light of this second model of poetry andthis second technology of loss, the recognition of a poetic lapsethat is utterly devoid of meaning, not in the sense that it is emptyof content (or even of semantic content, as was the case in the pas-sage about the caesura), but in the sense that its meaning has notbecome historical. Benjamin does not say explicitly here that theseprehistorical data recollected in the correspondences will neverbecome historical, but certainly the prospect threatens, and, in anycase, we know that the essential possibility of this distinction,between data that are historical but have not yet been recognizedas such and those that are not (and that have even been falselyjudged historical), is the most basic condition of the emergence ofa rigorously materalist conception of history for Benjamin.

Given the critic’s own thematization of this distinction as onethat could itself belong to or be transmitted by Baudelaire’s poetry,we, as readers, must confront the possibility that we ourselves donot know how to read, or that we will not be able to recognize ashistorical, the blanknesses that crop up in Benjamin’s own inter-pretation and handling of Baudelaire’s poetry. For there is a kind ofcentral silence running through those passages of the “Motifs” thatdeal, appropriately enough, with inclusions that manifest them-selves as exclusions and things that become legible only in theirabsence — things that Benjamin himself finds “in” Baudelaire’spoems without telling or showing us exactly how, or where, to readthem. For example, we may hear this silence in the critical linesabout the figure of the masses: “The masses had become so mucha part of Baudelaire that it is rare to find a description of them inhis works. His most important subjects are hardly ever encounteredin descriptive form. As Desjardins so aptly put it, [Baudelaire] was



‘more concerned with implanting the image in the memory thanwith adorning and elaborating it’” (“M,” 322). Or again: “Baude-laire describes neither the Parisians nor their city. Avoiding suchdescriptions enables him to invoke the former in the figure of thelatter” (“M,” 322); “The crowd, whose existence Baudelaire isalways aware of, does not serve as a model for any of his works;but it is imprinted on his creativity as a hidden figure” (“M,” 321);or finally: “In Tableaux parisiens, the secret presence of the crowdis demonstrable everywhere” (“M,” 323). Even as we are told thatBaudelaire placed “the shock experience [Chockerfahrung] at thecenter of his art,” and even as we are told that the masses are, forthe poet, a decisive factor in shock’s production, Benjamin keepssilent about how the poetry records the shock it must both experi-ence and transmit. How does the poetry implant the image inmemory — presumably in our memory, in the recesses of our greatbig involuntary cultural memory — without actually including it?How does the poetry, omitting the description of two things (Parisand Parisians), end up invoking both?

Benjamin’s silence, as to how the events undergone by thepsyche actually get inserted in the poetry, calls to mind one lastpassage from an earlier fragment: one of the critic’s first knowntexts on Baudelaire, written in 1921 and titled, simply, “Baude-laire.” In this remarkable little text, he writes:

Let us compare time to a photographer — earthly timeto a photographer who photographs the essence ofthings. But because of the nature of earthly time and itsapparatus, the photographer manages only to registerthe negative of that essence on his photographic plates.No one can read these plates; no one can deduce fromthe negative, on which time records the objects, the trueessence of things as they really are. Moreover, the elixirthat might act as the developing agent is unknown. Andthere is Baudelaire: he doesn’t possess the vital fluideither. . . . But he, and he alone, is able to read theplates, thanks to infinite mental efforts.20



What I find compelling about this early photographic theory of his-tory, although it is in many respects cruder than the similar theorieswe find in later texts (including “On the Concept of History”) is thatit so deliberately and explicitly omits a single vital element: thedeveloper. This omission or exclusion — it is not an oversight butrather calculated and deliberate and the whole point of the passage— calls to our attention what can seem at times strangely displacedor forced underground in the interpretation of Baudelaire’s poetrythat Benjamin gives us in the shock theory. This is any adequatetreatment of the material interface between psyches. There is nostoryteller, no artisan, like the one we saw depicted in the “Motifs”essay, who would bring the figure of the vessel along with him, noinformation and, even more to the point, no narration representedhere: Baudelaire is not a storyteller; he is a poet. And perhaps evenmore than the material interface between psyches (or between psy-che and text), Benjamin’s shock theory needs a thesis about thematerial interface between consciousness and memory: whetherwe conceive of both of these as somehow internal to a given psy-che or text, or whether we conceive of a psyche/text as some kindof switching mechanism between two otherwise radically disjoint-ed circuits traced by the data of experience. The shock theoryneeds a theory of language or, at the very least, of reading, a ques-tion on which “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” can seem strange-ly silent, especially in comparison with Benjamin’s other writings.

You will recall that, in the shock theory, poetry is the privi-leged mechanism whereby experience comes to be recorded andeven becomes, in Benjamin’s account, the condition of possibilityof experience’s recording and transmission under capital. The task,at least, assigned to Baudelaire’s poetry is clear. But Benjaminrepeatedly ends up eliding any coherent thesis about the materialinterface through which Baudelaire’s poetry would actually trans-mit the shock experience to us, whether in the mode of a consciousparrying or in some other mode. Benjamin also writes: “One won-ders how lyric poetry can be grounded in an experience for whichexposure to shock has become the norm. One would expect suchpoetry to have a large measure of consciousness. . . . This is



indeed true of Baudelaire’s poetry” (“M,” 318). Benjamin explicitlyattributes “a large measure of consciousness” to Baudelaire’s poet-ry, and yet he never actually tells us whether it is because of, ordespite, this “large measure” of consciousness that this poetry suc-ceeds in transmitting the truth of historical experience to us. Weknow that there are poems, such as Correspondances, that succeedin establishing a crisis-proof experience, but these are not thepoems, in Benjamin’s account, of truly historical interest.

Poetry may be a psyche, but it cannot only be a psyche. Orrather, if it is to be thought within the sphere of psychic life, thensomething must be introduced into the psyche allowing it to move,in oblique relation to consciousness, in and out of history. Onlylanguage has the materiality necessary to mediate this movementin and out of the sphere of collective experience and the propermeasure of opacity necessary to “carry,” as it were, metonymicallythe memory traces that form the unconscious inscription of history.And it is only of language that Baudelaire’s poetry consists —unless, that is, we count, in oblique relation to language, the myr-iad and disparate forms of blankness theorized by Benjamin. Theclosest we come in Benjamin’s essay to a figure of language thatcould sustain this dual demand — to perform but also effectively toblock mediation — is a material object that is already familiar to usfrom Benjamin’s analysis of Proust in the “Motifs” essay. This is thecookie, which has the power to perform mediation only by block-ing it and to do so metonymically.

P r o u s t ’s cookie — the madeleine — is, in Benjamin’s inter-pretation and like the earthen vessel, a metonymic figure allow i n gfor the distinction between information, on the one hand, andaccess afforded to the truth of the event by involuntary memory, onthe other. “One afternoon,” explains Benjamin, “the taste of a kindof pastry called a madeleine, to wh i ch he later repeatedly returns,t ransported him [Proust/Marcel] back to the past, whereas beforethen he had been limited to the promptings of a memory wh i cho b e yed the call of conscious attention. This he calls mémoire vo l o n-t a i r e. Its signal ch a racteristic is that the information it gives aboutthe past retains nothing of that past” (“M,” 315). Benjamin goes on



to emphasize the a c c i d e n t a l nature of our encounter, as moderns,with the truth of our experience: “Proust says, [this is Benjaminquoting Proust] ‘that the past is situated ‘somewhere beyond ther e a ch of the intellect and its field of operations, in some real object,though we have no idea wh i ch one it is’” ( “ M ,” 315, emphasismine). The past is situated somewhere beyond the reach of intellect— that is, Benjamin says, echoing Proust, in a cookie. Of course,the past is not actually i n the cookie and is rather metony m i c a l l ylinked to it: like the traces of experience inscribed on the ve s s e l ’sexterior surface. The trick is thus to find the right cookie at the righttime. For what the cookie actually “records” and carries as itsmeaning is not something inside it but rather the traces of all theo t h e r things that were going on at that time in Marc e l ’s life, wh e nhe also happened to have had the experience of eating the tisane-dunked madeleines. Under modern conditions, the individual runsthe risk of living his whole life without stumbling upon the right trig-ger of involuntary memory and thus without ever gaining access tothe truth of his experience, as Benjamin takes care to emphasize.

Baudelaire’s poetry is, for us, a psyche, and ours to share col-lectively. But, as a psyche — and this is Benjamin’s lesson — it canbecome an experiential and historical transmitter only by becom-ing a cookie at the same time. If we follow Benjamin’s interpreta-tion out to the letter, this poetry must become the linguistic equiv-alent of Marcel’s madeleine for us, if, that is, it is to come downthrough history, to us. We should feel very lucky that Benjamin hasfound our cookie for us: in Baudelaire’s poetry. For without thismaterial interface, there is no hope of any passage or transmission,not just from memory to historical consciousness, but from one tex-tual inscription or recording of experience to another. The uncon-scious may be structured like a language, but language, or at leastin Benjamin’s account, Baudelaire’s language, must be structuredlike a cookie. If Benjamin’s theory of poetry is also going to be atheory of history or of cultural memory, then poetry must also be,for this theory, a madeleine, and it must become the linguisticequivalent of a madeleine for future generations. If we take seri-ously Benjamin’s understanding of poetry as a technology of col-



lective or cultural memory, there could be no transmission of expe-rience without a language approximating this cookie.

This explains the strange yet unmistakable emphasis on opac-ity, stumbling, and the alternating lapse and involuntary jogging ofmemory in those passages in “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire”where we see Benjamin discuss Baudelaire’s poetic process. As wesaw in his treatment of Le Soleil, Benjamin lingers on the poem’sdescription of its own poetic method, in which he is seen to gotraipsing, or quite literally, tripping through the streets of Paris,stumbling over words, and not just over words, but over fragmentsof words, over lines and rhymes, just as the solitary walker stum-bles over paving stones in the glare of the afternoon sun. You willrecall that Benjamin was quick to connect this stumbling, bum-bling poet figure with the shock experience and, therefore, with thesubject of capital. He also speaks, towards the close of this samepassage, of the “subterranean shocks” by which Baudelaire’s poet-ry is shaken. It is as if, Benjamin says, this poetry were rocked bysubterranean shocks that caused its words to collapse.

In closing, it seems worth nothing that, on the basis of thisthesis, about the instability or uncertainty, not simply of the poet’sfooting with regard to his readers or to his material, but of the struc-tures undergirding and governing the relations among his words,we may understand Benjamin’s silence about the crowd somewhatdifferently. As he explains, toward the close of his reading of LeSoleil, that the real location of the crowd in Baudelaire’s poetry —the crowd, you will recall, that is supposed to be there withoutactually being there, and whose secret presence is thus demon-strable everywhere — is not in some synesthetic echoing roar in thestreet (as both de Man and Jameson seem to suggest in theirBaudelaire interpretations), nor even in the fetishization of a pass-ing woman’s leg, but in the “words, fragments, and beginnings oflines” from which, the poet, “in the deserted streets, wrests hispoetic booty.”21 These fragments of words, collapsed in on them-selves, Benjamin explains, form the true “phantom crowd” ofBaudelaire’s poetry. It is the secret presence of these fragments thatallows Baudelaire’s poetry to give us, on Benjamin’s reading, an



account of capital as well as an account of our own destiny, asreaders, alongside these others. We ourselves are the crowd and itsmost radical point of entry into Baudelaire’s poetry.

More so than the more familiar passages about tradition asthe basis of historical transmission, and more so even than thewell-known theory of the shock experience, it is, I think, this kindof passage about the material opacities of Baudelaire’s languagethat is able to make explicit the singular challenge of Benjamin’sBaudelaire interpretation: that it has us looking for experience andfor history, and specifically for our shared history under capital, notin words and their meanings, nor in anything else that could betransmitted by any work of art or of poetry in the mode of a con-tent, but in the cracks and fissures where all that is other thanmeaning takes hold. Forget the cookie, we now see that a rockwould be enough to hold this interpretation together: All that isneeded is some material opacity stumbled upon in the course ofreading, and a sufficiently metonymic instance of language andconception of memory to allow this opacity to serve as a transmit-ter, rather than as an absorber, of shock.

Returning one last time to the Fuchs essay, we will recall thatthe materialist historian’s task was not just to find, but to keep,incompletion in the work. We may now phrase this problem a lit-tle differently, emphasizing perhaps more starkly the role of histo-ry in the production and transmission of the work (rather than therole of the work in the production and transmission of history), andspecify that the history that transmits a text to us must come downto us as incomplete. This is if and insofar it is going to be our his-tory, and quite apart from whether we disavow or recognize it assuch. The work of art or of poetry is not somehow incidental to his-tory, nor does it pass through history unscathed, as its simple medi-um of transmission, or in such a way that “historical continuity”can be preserved. Rather it shatters (as other texts make moreexplicit) the unity of every historical moment. This it can do onlyby adding us, another thumbprint, to its meaning or, more appro-priately, its memory.



1 Walter Benjamin, “Central Park” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings,Volume 4: 1 9 3 8 - 1 9 4 0, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Je n n i n g s(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 176. “Central Park” here-after cited as “CP.” Selected Writings, Volume 4 hereafter cited as SW4.

2 Hanssen writes eloquently of Benjamin’s “other history” in her book by that title. SeeBeatrice Hanssen, Walter Benjamin’s Other History: Of Stones, Animals, HumanBeings, and A n g e l s (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998).In borrowing, but also pluralizing, her term for Benjamin’s intervention in theoreti-cal discourse about history, my intention is to emphasize that Benjamin’s theory ofhistory can neither call itself “new” nor be unified as one (a single theory of a sin-gle history), for reasons of the commodity’s transformation of temporal experienceand for reasons of this break, for wh i ch Benjamin’s theory of history calls, with his-toricist (and ultimately narra t ive) models (Hanssen, p a s s im) .

3 To name only one recent translation of Benjamin’s theory of history onto other ter-rain, see Michael Taussig, Walter Benjamin’s Grave (Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, 2006).

4 I refer both to the fact that Benjamin’s projected book on Baudelaire was never fin-ished as a book and to the complexity of the relationship of his texts on Baudelaireto those on other themes and topics, wh i ch were (with the possible exception of theTra u e r s p i e l book) also unfinished. At the very least, the reader should keep in mindthat the book known to us as Charles Baudelaire: Ein Lyriker im Zeitalter desH o ch k a p i t a l i s m u s (Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism)is not a coherent manuscript and rather presents fragments of different drafts of wh a tm ay or may not have been a single project. In the generally accredited account(reconstructed from Benjamin’s description of the project to his friends and editors,including Adorno, in the correspondence), the 1938 essay known to us as “The Pa r i sof the Second Empire in Baudelaire” was to be the middle of three sections, withthe other two sections, “Baudelaire as Allegorist” and “The Commodity as theSubject of Po e t r y,” either unfinished or, depending on whose account one reads, notyet written. (On the complex relationship of the text published as “Central Park” tothe projected first section of the book (“Baudelaire as Allegorist”), see Lloyd Spencer,“Introduction to C e n t ral Pa r k,” New German Critique 34 (Winter 1985): 28-31.)Benjamin then scra t ched this version — in response, it is generally thought, toA d o r n o ’s criticisms — and produced “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” in its place.See Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” in S W 4, 313-55, hereaftercited as “M.” The debates about the relationship of Benjamin’s texts on Baudelaireto other projected books and texts from the same period, including, of course, themonumental project on the Paris arcades, are manifold and too complex to explorehere in depth. It may at the very least be noted that the popular perception of theBaudelaire book as a freestanding work distinct from the work on the arcades canbe attributed in large part to Rolf Ti e d e m a n n ’s editorial decisions in the SuhrkampGesammelte Sch r i f t e n, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974-1989). To give only one example illustrating the stakes and complexity of such deci-sions, we may note that one editor has claimed the 1935 essay on “Paris, the Capitalof the Nineteenth Century” as an early draft of the Baudelaire project wh e r e a sanother editor has claimed the same text as an early “exposé” of the arcades pro-



ject, with Benjamin’s own comments in the correspondence authorizing both deci-sions. For a more nuanced exploration of the relationships amongst the texts, seeM i chel Espagne and Michael We r n e r, “Ce que taisent les manuscrits: les fiches deWalter Benjamin et le mythe des Passages” in Pe n s e r, classer, écrire: de Pascal àPerec, ed. Béatrice Didier and Jacques Neefs (Saint-Denis: Presses Universitaires deVincennes, 1990), 105-118; “Les manuscrits parisiens de Walter Benjamin et lePa s s a g e n - We r k ,” in Walter Benjamin et Paris, ed. Heinz Wismann (Paris: Cerf,1986), 849-82; and “Vom Passagen-Projekt zum ‘Baudelaire’. Neue Handsch r i f t e nzum Spätwerk Walter Benjamins,” D e u t s che Vi e r t e l j a h r e s s ch r i f t 58: 593-657. Seealso Giorgio A g a m b e n ’s front matter to the Italian edition of Benjamin’s O p e r e ,Opere di Walter Benjamin, ed. Giorgio A g a m b e n ( Torino: Einaudi, 1993); andM i chael W. Jennings, “On the Banks of a New Lethe: Commodification andExperience in Benjamin’s Baudelaire Book,” Boundary 2 (Spring 2003): 89-104.

5 The reader will recall the simple historical rationale for a compara t ive reading ofB a u d e l a i r e ’s poetry and Marx’s critique of capital: Marx was born in 1818, in Tr i e r ;Baudelaire, in 1821, in Paris. In 1844, Marx met, and began his lifelong collabora-tion with, Engels in Paris — the same year in wh i ch Baudelaire is thought to havecomposed the first of the poems of Les Fleurs du mal. Both participated actively inthe 1848 revolutions in Europe. Marx started work on the G r u n d r i s s e in 1857, withBaudelaire publishing the first of the Fleurs in that same ye a r. Baudelaire died, pre-m a t u r e l y, of syphilis, in 1867 — the year of the long-delayed publication of the firstvolume of C a p i t a l. It is precisely this kind of data, wh i ch for nearly a century formedthe basis of (vulgar) Marxist studies of literature, that Benjamin’s Baudelaire inter-pretation is designed to contest.

6 Benjamin uses the phrase, “the crisis of lyric poetry,” with reference to Baudelaire’sfriend, Pierre Dupont, in “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire” in S W 4.He later writes, in “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” that some of Baudelaire’s motifs“render the possibility of lyric poetry problematic” (“M,” 341).

7 C o n s i d e rable attention has been devoted to Benjamin’s correspondence withAdorno and to this exchange in particular, although, to my knowledge, none of thecritical literature has interpreted the stakes of A d o r n o ’s comments on “The Paris ofthe Second Empire in Baudelaire” with direct reference to Baudelaire or indeed toB e n j a m i n ’s interpretation of his texts, choosing instead to mobilize the debatet owards a rereading of Marx (Agamben, “The Prince and the Frog”), of Derrida onMarx (Rapaport), or of A d o r n o ’s own project (Kaufman). Giorgio Agamben, “Th ePrince and the Frog: The Question of Method in Adorno and Benjamin,” in I n f a n cyand History: Essays on the Destruction of Experience, trans. Liz Heron (London andNew York: Verso, 1993). (The book I n f a n cy and History is hereafter cited as I H . )Robert Kaufman, “Au ra, Still” in Andrew Benjamin, ed., Walter Benjamin and A r t(New York: Continuum, 2005), 121-47. Herman Rapaport, “Spectres of Benjamin,”Textual Practice 19 (2005): 415-43.

8 Selections from Benjamin’s correspondence with Adorno have been made conve-niently available in the new Harvard edition of Benjamin’s writings, and I quoteA d o r n o ’s letter from this edition (SW4, 99-105). A different selection, situated with-in a broader Frankfurt school conversation, can be found in Ernst Bloch, GeorgLukacs, Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetics andPo l i t i c s (London: New Left Review, 1977).



9 For an explanation of the uneasy place occupied by Benjamin’s theory of the shockexperience in the trauma theory industry, see Ball 2006 and 2007. Karyn Ball, “Th eLonging for the Material,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 1 7(2006): 47-87 and Karyn Ball, ed., Traumatizing Theory: The Cultural Politics ofAffect in and Beyond Psych o a n a l y s i s (New York: Other Press, 2007). For a critiqueof the authority granted Benjamin’s shock theory in the emergence of more genera ltheory of traumatic modernity, see Debarati Sanyal, The Violence of Modernity:Baudelaire, Irony, and the Politics of Fo r m (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Unive r s i t yPress, 2006).

1 0 Andrew Benjamin, “Tradition and Experience: Walter Benjamin’s Some Motifs inB a u d e l a i r e” in The Problems of Modernity: Adorno and Benjamin, ed. A n d r e wBenjamin (London and New York: Routledge, 1989). Hereafter cited as “T.”

1 1 Giorgio Agamben, “Infancy and History: An Essay on the Destruction of Experience”in I H: “The idea of experience as separate from knowledge has become so alien tous that we have forgotten that until the birth of modern science experience and sci-ence each had their own place. What is more, they were even connected to differ-ent subjects. The subject of experience was common sense, something existing ine very indiv i d u a l . . . , while the subject of science is the n o u s or the active intel-lect, wh i ch is separate from experience, ‘impassive’ and ‘divine’ (though, to be pre-cise, knowledge did not even have a subject in the modern sense of an ego, butrather the single individual was the s u b - j e c t u m in wh i ch the active, unique and sep-a rate intellect actuated knowledge” (18). The essay “Infancy and History” is here-after cited as “IH.”) I am grateful to Jeff Fort for pressing me to read this text at theright moment.

1 2 Le Soleil is the verse poem quoted at greatest length after A une passante, wh i ch isquoted in full. For a reading of the traces left by Benjamin’s own attempts to parrythe blows he sustains in his reading this poem, see Elissa Marder, Dead Ti m e :Te m p o ral Disorders in the Wake of Modernity (Baudelaire and Flaubert) ( S t a n f o r d :Stanford University Press, 2001).

1 3 For purposes of simplicity, I quote Harry Zohn’s translation from the edition of the“Motifs” essay included in the new Harvard edition of Benjamin’s writings (“M,”3 1 9 - 2 0 ) .

1 4 “ S h o ck is among those experiences that have assumed decisive importance forB a u d e l a i r e ’s personality” (“M,” 320).

1 5 See also the arguments mounted by Adorno on the back of certain caesurae inHölderlin. To cite only one example of A d o r n o ’s own “materialist enumera t i o n ,” heclaims that, through the work (or play) of certain syntactical “cuts” or caesurae inH ö l d e r l i n ’s late poetry, the “mediation [of judgment] is eliminated” and we areg ranted “consciousness of the non-identical object” (Theodor W. A d o r n o ,“ Pa rataxis: Zur späten Lyrik Hölderlins” in Noten zur Litera t u r ( Frankfurt am Main:Suhrkamp, 1974), 471-73, 488 and Theodor W. Adorno, “Pa rataxis: On Hölderlin’sLate Po e t r y,” in Notes to Literature, Volume 2, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholson (NewYork: Columbia University Press, 1992), 131-33, 146. For a discussion of the impor-tance of “Central Park” within the larger constellation of Benjamin’s texts onBaudelaire, see Lloyd Spencer, “Allegory in the World of the Commodity: Th eImportance of C e n t ral Pa r k,” New German Critique 34 ( Winter 1985):59-77.

1 6 I am referring to Benjamin’s well-known essays on the work of art in the age of its



t e chnical reproducibility, in wh i ch printing technologies and, ultimately, photogra-p hy are privileged examples. It is worth noting that, in one of Benjamin’s earliestk n own fragments on Baudelaire, written in 1921, he likens the historical nature andtexture of Baudelaire’s poetry to those of photogra p hy. I discuss this text brieflyt oward the close of this essay.

1 7 See also Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften Volume 1, Part 2, ed. RolfTiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974-1989), 615.

1 8 Walter Benjamin, “Eduard Fuchs: Collector and Historian” in Walter Benjamin:Selected Writings, Volume 3: 1935-1938, ed. Howard Eiland and William W.Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Howard Eiland, et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harva r dU n iversity Press, 2002), 260-302. Hereafter cited as “EF.”

1 9 The translation of the last line is problematic, due in part to the problem of tra n s l a t-ing D e n k w ü r d i g k e i t in Benjamin: “Ihre Gesch i chte wäre nichts als der Bodensatz,den die durch keinerlei echte, d.i. politische Erfahrung im Bewußtsein derM e n s chen aufgestöberten Denkwürdigkeiten gebildet haben.” Walter Benjamin,Gesammelte Schriften, Volume 2, Part 2, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main:Suhrkamp, 1974-1989), 477.

2 0 Walter Benjamin, “Baudelaire (II, III)” in Walter Benjamin: Selected W r i t i n g s ,Volume 1: 1913-1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 361. It is worth noting that many of the pas-sages on Baudelaire in the arcades project resort to photographic or quasi-photo-g raphic logics. See, for example, this one: “What I propose to show is howBaudelaire lies embedded in the nineteenth century. The imprint he has left behindthere must stand out clear and intact, like that of a stone wh i ch, having lain in theground for decades, is one day rolled from its place” (Walter Benjamin, The A rc a d e sP r o j e c t , ed. Roy Tiedemann, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 321.

2 1 Paul De Man, “Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric” in The Rhetoric ofR o m a n t i c i s m (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 239-62. Fr e d e r i cJameson, “Baudelaire as Modernist and Postmodernist: The Dissolution of theReferent and the Artificial ‘Sublime’” in Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism, ed.C h av iva Hosek and Patricia Parker (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press,1985), 247-263.



Documents

"Insert into Blankness: Poetry and Cultural Memory in Benjamin's Baudelaire Interpretation"