Antiquity and Modernity at a Standstill—Interpreting Walter Benjamin’s Allegorical Image and Dialectical Image Through Charles Baudelaire

In his essay “The Painter of Modern Life” (Le Peintre de la vie moderne), a manifesto of modernity, Baudelaire portrays Monsieur Constantin Guys as representative of the latter searches for something indefinable, tentatively referred to as modernity. This essay reveals the form in which a poet, a modern hero, can give expression to modernity:

The aim for him is to extract from fashion the poetry that resides in its historical envelope, to distil the eternal from the transitory. […] Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable. There was a form of modernity for every painter of the past; the majority of the fine portraits that remain to us from former times are clothed in the dress of their own day.

(Baudelaire 1885, 51–56).

By exploring the dynamics of modernity, we may find out that while modernity is often seen as being associated with transience, therein exists an element of the eternal and unchanging, much akin to the classical definition of ancient arts. Baudelaire, in his contemplation of modernity within ancient paintings, raised the question of whether modernity itself would eventually transform into antiquity. One of the paradoxes of modernity lies in its attempt to break free from the constraints of the past, to embrace the immediate and the present, while simultaneously being enslaved by time and consuming itself in an endless cycle of obsolescence driven by the relentless march of progress (Compagnon 1994, 16; Froidevaux 1986, 90). This perpetual cycle of negation inherent in modernity, as it strives to discard the petrified remnants of antiquity, leads to its own demise. Stendhal, however, champions the beauty of the present moment, advocating for an aesthetics grounded in the ever-renewing essence of modernity, where beauty is seen as “la promesse de Bonheur” (Froidevaux 1986, 90; Stendhal 1863). Baudelaire, recognizing the radical departure from the past inherent in modernity, takes a more eclectic approach by integrating elements of antiquity into modern experience. In doing so, he seeks to transcend the linear progression of history and critiques Stendhal’s assertion that “the beautiful is neither more nor less than the promise of happiness (la beauté n’est que la promesse du bonheur)”:

That is why Stendhal, that impertinent, teasing, even repugnant mind (whose impertinences are, nevertheless, usefully thought-provoking), came close to the truth, much closer than many other people, when he said: “The beautiful is neither more nor less than the promise of happiness.” No doubt this definition oversteps the mark; it subordinates beauty much too much to the infinitely variable ideal of happiness; it divests beauty too lightly of its aristocratic character; but it has the great merit of getting away from the mistake of the academicians.

Baudelaire (1885, 51–56).

When Stendhal asserts that beauty is the promise of happiness, his primary focus is not on aesthetics but rather on the psychology of pleasure: “If we thus manage to prefer and love ugliness, it is because in this case, ugliness is beauty.” (Stendhal 1886, 34) In a footnote following this remarkable assertion, Stendhal further elaborates on his conception of beauty:

Beauty is nothing but the promise of happiness (La beauté n’est que la promesse du bonheur). The happiness of a Greek was different to that of a Frenchman in 1822. See the eyes of the Medici Venus and compare them with the eyes of the Magdalen of Pordenone (in the possession of M. de Sommariva).

Stendhal (1886, 34).

The French modifier “ne … que” restricts the definition and function of beauty, qualifying the claim to limit the content of beauty in order to render it an absolute truth. In doing so, this modifier lends an effect of essentialism to the abstract concept of beauty. Here, beauty is confined to an instrument for achieving happiness, entirely subordinate to utilitarian and hedonistic pleasure, while its aesthetic properties of modernity or antiquity are hollowed out. In the same footnote, Stendhal delves into a genealogical investigation of the reversible dichotomy of ugliness and beauty across different historical periods. He discerns that the desire for happiness compels people to attribute pleasure to beauty, reducing it to a contingent attribute of pleasure. The concept of beauty as a promise of happiness thus becomes based on a psychological state rather than a factual state of affairs, constructed through a deliberate montage of heterogeneous images tailored to individual desires. The utilitarian pleasure principle promotes comfort and conformity, aiming at the happiness of the majority. Consequently, this complacent bourgeois happiness insidiously seeks to homogenize every single individual in their mediocrity, suppressing the will for revolution. Baudelaire’s primary criticism of Stendhal lies in his view of beauty as the promise of happiness, which, in Baudelaire’s eyes, overly subjugates beauty to the constantly shifting ideas of happiness driven by ever-changing human desires, thereby fostering consumerism. Baudelaire attributes a duality to beauty, wherein the eternal aspect should be simultaneously concealed and revealed, at least through fashion, owing to the inherent duality of human nature. In the hierarchy of aesthetics, he compares “the eternally subsistent part of the beauty as the soul of art, but the variable elements are like the body of it.” (Baudelaire 1885, 51–56). Thus, he endeavours to reverse the linear progression of history, emphasizing the importance of eternity, which can be interpreted as a classical aesthetic principle.

Regarding this, in the preliminary schematization of the Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin conceived the title “Antiquity and Modernity” for the second part of the book. In his “Introduction to Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism,” Michael Jennings asserts that the second part of the book on Charles Baudelaire develops, as a formal element of allegorical perception, the “dissolve” through which antiquity comes to light in modernity and modernity in antiquity. In Baudelaire’s terms, nothing in his own century comes closer to the task of the hero of antiquity than the task of giving form to modernity (Jennings).

Benjamin lauds the dualistic view of modernity embodied in the title of Baudelaire’s first cycle of poems in Les Fleurs du mal—“Spleen et idéal.” Benjamin asserts that Baudelaire combined “the oldest loanword in the French language” with “the most recent one,” as Baudelaire “recognizes in spleen the latest transfiguration of the ideal; the ideal seems to him the first expression of spleen.” (Benjamin 2002, 22–23) In the title, the “supremely new” is presented to the reader as something “supremely old.” Benjamin esteems that “the face of modernity itself blasts us with its immemorial gaze.” (Benjamin 2002, 22–23). We will explore Baudelaire and Benjamin’s dualistic view of antiquity and modernity through the analysis of Baudelaire’s two poems, “To a Woman Passing By” and “The Swan.” In his poem “To a Woman Passing By,” Baudelaire writes:

Around me roared the nearly deafening street.

Tall, slim, in mourning, in majestic grief,

A woman passed me, with a splendid hand

Lifting and swinging her festoon and hem;

Nimble and stately, statuesque of leg.

I, shaking like an addict, from her eye,

Black sky, spawner of hurricanes, drank in

Sweetness that fascinates, pleasure that kills.

One lightning flash … then night! Sweet fugitive

Whose glance has made me suddenly reborn,

Will we not meet again this side of death?

Far from this place! too late! never perhaps!

Neither one knowing where the other goes,

O you I might have loved, as well you knew!

Baudelaire (2011, 189)

In the opening of the poem, the urban soundscape “the nearly deafening street roared (la rue assourdissante hurlait)” threatens to overwhelm us. Meanwhile, the widow, “in majestic grief (en grand deuil),” seeks to captivate us with her fleeting fashion in an enchanting manner: “lifting and swinging her festoon and hem (Soulevant, balançant le feston et l’ourlet).” Simultaneously, the woman exudes nobility with her jade-like leg reminiscent of ancient statues, evoking a hint of Winckelmannian classical aesthetics characterized by noble simplicity and quiet grandeur. The “I” is almost overcome by the fleeting beauty and eternal essence embodied by this femme fatale:

Far from this place! too late! never perhaps!

Neither one knowing where the other goes,

O you I might have loved, as well you know!

(Ailleurs, bien loin d’ici ! trop tard ! jamais peut-être !

Car j’ignore où tu fuis, tu ne sais où je vais,

Ô toi que j’eusse aimée, ô toi qui le savais !)

Baudelaire (2011, 189)

In this poem, the use of the imperfect tense in “I drank in sweetness that fascinates (je buvais…La douceur qui fascine)” and “Oh you who know it (ô toi qui le savais)” is notable. Unlike the perfect tense, which is used for events that are fully completed, the imperfect tense does not imply a definite beginning or ending of an action. The duration of the event being described is unspecified, and this enunciation eternalizes the encounter in memory. The ongoing nature of the imperfect tense perpetuates the present moment, allowing it to endure. In the final sentence, the use of the conditional tense, “Oh you who I might have loved (Ô toi que j’eusse aimé),” suggests that the sudden and unforeseen instance of love at first sight may not have occurred in the past. This tense serves as a subtle expression of wishful conjecture or remorse over something that should have been achieved. Baudelaire’s conception of modernity is one subjugated to the past through shared decrepitude, or even as an empty signifier, much like the never-happened love at first sight. He mourns for what was and lacks hope for what is to come, expressing a futile expectation due to the collapse of the linear and progressive view of history. Another poem that illustrates this dualistic perspective of Baudelaire on modernity and antiquity is his “The Swan”:

The Swan

To Victor Hugo

I

Andromache, I think of you—this meagre stream,

This melancholy mirror where had once shone forth

The giant majesty of all your widowhood,

This fraudulent Simois, fed by bitter tears,

Has quickened suddenly my fertile memory

As I was walking through the modern Carrousel.

The old Paris is gone (the form a city takes

More quickly shifts, alas, than does the mortal heart);

I picture in my head the busy camp of huts,

And heaps of rough-hewn columns, capitals and shafts,

The grass, the giant blocks made green by puddle-stain,

Reflected in the glaze, the jumbled bric-à-brac.

Once nearby was displayed a great menagerie,

And there I saw one day—the time when under skies

Cold and newly bright, Labour stirs awake

And sweepers push their storms into the silent air—

A swan, who had escaped from his captivity,

And scuffing his splayed feet along the paving stones,

He trailed his white array of feathers in the dirt.

Close by a dried out ditch the bird opened his beak,

Flapping excitedly, bathing his wings in dust,

And said, with heart possessed by lakes he once had loved:

“Water, when will you rain? Thunder, when will you roar?”

I see this hapless creature, sad and fatal myth,

Stretching the hungry head on his convulsive neck,

Sometimes towards the sky, like the man in Ovid’s book—

Towards the ironic sky, the sky of cruel blue,

As if he were a soul contesting with his God!

II

Paris may change, but in my melancholy mood

Nothing has budged! New palaces, blocks, scaffoldings,

Old neighborhoods, are allegorical for me,

And my dear memories are heavier than stone.

And so outside the Louvre an image gives me pause:

I think of my great swan, his gestures pained and mad,

Like other exiles, both ridiculous and sublime,

Gnawed by his endless longing! Then I think of you,

Fallen Andromache, torn from a husband’s arms,

Vile property beneath the haughty Pyrrhus’ hand,

Next to an empty tomb, head bowed in ecstasy,

Widow of Hector! O! and wife of Helenus!

I think of a negress,^[1] thin and tubercular,

Treading in the mire, searching with haggard eye

For palm trees she recalls from splendid Africa,

Somewhere behind a giant barrier of fog;

Of all those who have lost something they may not find

Ever, ever again! who steep themselves in tears

And suck a bitter milk from that good she-wolf, grief!

Of orphans, skin and bones, dry and wasted blooms!

And likewise in the forest of my exiled soul

Old Memory sings out a full note of the horn!

I think of sailors left forgotten on an isle,

Of captives, the defeated … many others more!

Baudelaire (2011, 173–77)

In “The Swan,” Andromache (aka Andromaque) laments the death of Hector. At the same time, the speaker mourns the disappearance of old Paris in front of “the new Carrousel, new palaces, scaffoldings (le nouveau Carrousel, palais neufs, échafaudages),” epitomizing the juxtaposition of two allegories of different temporal dimensions. In The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire (Das Paris des Second Empire bei Baudelaire; 1938), Walter Benjamin comments: “Les Fleurs du mal is the first book of poetry to use not only words of ordinary provenance but also words of urban origin.” (Benjamin 2003, 62). Baudelaire combined words like quinquet, wagon, omnibus, and did not shy away from terms like bilan, réverbère, and voirie. This is characteristic of the lyric vocabulary, where imagery from ancient and modern allegory may appear suddenly and without prior prediction. Walter Benjamin designates Baudelaire as “a lyric poet in the era of high capitalism.” Benjamin explains this in his essay “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,” where he states that Baudelaire’s lyric poetry “pays homage to modernity, but it also pays homage to aspects of antiquity in modernity […] there is an interpenetration of classical antiquity and modernity, and in him, too, the form of this superimposition-allegory appears unmistakably.” (Benjamin 2003, 62). Allegory is a key concept in Benjamin’s speculation on alternative patterns of history, diverging from the linear and progressive historical model, whether referring to Baroque allegory or to the modern Baudelairean allegory incorporating transcendental and mythological elements. Through these allegories, Baudelaire, in Benjamin’s view, can disrupt the chain of linear history and synthesize the different layers of historical temporalities into the same network (Pensky 2001, 86).

In allegory the observer is confronted with the facies hippocratica [death’s head] of history as a petrified, primordial landscape. Everything about history that, from the very beginning, has been untimely, sorrowful, unsuccessful, is expressed in a face – or rather in a death’s head.

(Benjamin 1998, 166)

In this poem, the allegorical physiognomy of natural history is embodied in the ruins, symbolizing irresistible decay, much like what the speaker paradoxically observes in the ever-changing Paris, witnessing decrepitude akin to “the jumbled bric-à-brac (le bric-à-brac confus)” and “busy camp of huts (ce champ de baraques).” Stendhal cherishes an optimistic view of the self-negation characteristics of modernity, wherein beauty, as the promise of happiness, submits itself excessively to the infinitely variable idea of human desires. In contrast, the speaker discerns the collapse of Paris into ruins and experiences constant melancholy, as “Paris may change, but in my melancholy mood” (Paris change! mais rien dans ma mélancholie). Here, the allegorical model of a catastrophic history lacks the messianic pattern of completion (Pensky 2001, 110). The speaker is aware of a desperate helplessness in the face of the petrification of inevitable horror due to the seemingly ever-renewing metropolis, which in reality represents constant ruination. In the era of high capitalism and in the commodified cityscape, the act of absorbing oneself in allegories combining antiquity and modernity, according to Walter Benjamin, leads to “a hypersubjective brooding, self-commodification, acedia, [and] political passivity” (Pensky 2001, 116). This renders the speaker nostalgic for antiquity but inept at mustering the courage to launch a revolution or resist the seemingly inevitable modernization of the world. According to Stéphane Mosès’ analysis of Walter Benjamin’s vision of the Messiah, “the idea of discontinuity [is] the foundation of the authentic tradition,” and “[t]he Messiah interrupts history; the Messiah does not appear at the end of an evolution” (Mosès 2009, 111). Although in “The Swan,” the melancholic speaker juxtaposes antiquity and modernity to extract something eternal and classical from the transient modernity, the attempt has failed and the speaker ends up constantly lamenting the ever-changing transitory phenomenon, which becomes allegorical for antiquity and modernity. In other words, such sloth and powerless melancholy will lose its critical-messianic edge, which can interrupt the projected linear history. However, this discontinuity can be implicitly observed in Baudelaire’s use of modernized terms in this poem. Whether consciously or unconsciously, he employs these terms to reveal the symptom of the Zeitgeist of modernity through the peculiarity of words emerging from the dialectical images at a standstill:

It’s not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words, image is dialectics at a standstill. For while the relation of the present to the past is a purely temporal, continuous one, the relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical: is not progression but image, suddenly emergent. Only dialectical images are genuine images (that is, not archaic); and the place where one encounters them is language [Awakening].

Benjamin (2002, N2a, 3)

When the speaker in “The Swan” becomes preoccupied with archaic images in a retrospective frame of mind, such as the old Paris, Andromaque and Pyrrhus, the critical-Messiah, even his revolutionary insight is obscured by “a giant barrier of fog (la muraille immense du brouillard).” It is only in the infinitesimal element of one or two words that Walter Benjamin observes “a world of particular secret affinities” revealing itself, where things have access to “the most contradictory communication” and display, in Goethe’s term, to what is called “infinite affinities” (Benjamin 2002, 934).

In order to ignite a new revolution, emancipate oneself from the tyranny of linear historical narratives, and escape the acedia of melancholic allegorical images of antiquity, Benjamin explored dialectical image turns. Specifically, he aimed to replace melancholic subjectivity with a new critical subjectivity, as the former “consists in the arbitrary assignment of meanings” (Pensky 2001, 112), whereas the latter involves the revelation of meaning through the clash of the present and the past, the ancient and the modern, at a standstill:

In what way is it possible to conjoin a heightened graphicness <Anschaulichkeit> to the realization of the Marxist method? The first stage in this undertaking will be to carry over the principle of montage into history. That is, to assemble large-scale constructions out of the smallest and most precisely cut components. Indeed, to discover in the analysis of the small individual moment the crystal of the total event.

(Benjamin 2002, 461)

In Baudelaire’s poem “The Swan,” the potential for revolutionary power flickers in “the small individual moment [reflecting] the crystal of the total event” (Pensky 2001, 112) through dialectical images, as exemplified by the term “le travail.” This word generates dazzling flash beams that goad us to awakening. If Baudelaire’s revealing linguistic flash is to be perceived anywhere, it ought to be in key words such as “le travail,” which demonstrates abrupt contrasts between antiquity and modernity, where one can encounter the dialectical image—an idea Walter Benjamin emphatically conceptualizes. Paul Claudel gave it its definitive formulation when he remarked that “Baudelaire combined the style of Racine with the style of a journalist of the Second Empire,” a statement that had been cited by Benjamin (1973, 100). “Le travail” is a word used by journalists of the Second Empire. Thus, Baudelaire attempts to dissolve the mythology of Andromaque into the space of history, into the urban space of banal travail. This echoes the notion of dialectical image in Convolute N. Here, the superimposition of mythology and the portrayal of modern Paris, as well as the obsolete, ancient elements embodied by the Louvre, such as “heaps of rough-hewn columns, capitals and shafts,” all constitute dialectical images. It is not so much the past casting its light on the present, or vice versa, but rather the past and the present coming together in a flash with the now to form a constellation, and thus the image becomes dialectics at a standstill. It is not about progression nor about the melancholic allegory of Andromaque, but rather about images suddenly emergent. Simultaneously, we encounter dialectical images in language, exemplified by “Le travail” according to Benjamin. The key word “Le travail” encoded in Baudelaire’s lamentation on the death of antiquity can serve as a symptom disclosing the disease of the 19th century, liberating the enormous energies of history that are slumbering in the “once upon a time” of classical historical narrative (Benjamin 2002, 933). In the following strophe, Baudelaire writes:

Once nearby was displayed a great menagerie,

And there I saw one day—the time when under skies

Cold and newly bright, Labor (Le travail) stirs awake

And sweepers push their storms into the silent air—

Baudelaire (2011, 173–77)

There, one morning, at the hour when Labor awakens, the road network (voirie) spits out a huge flux of commuters—the workers in the early shifts subject to the industrial temporal cadences, whose nonchalant and alienated physiognomy is embodied by the silent, cold atmosphere in the morning. In the last version, “Le travail” in uppercase comes to the city as the new divinity, the apotheosis of labor and work in modernity. It is no longer the heroic labor of Hercules but the works of workers in the construction site and in mundane life. It is noteworthy that in French, “le travail” designates at the same time the labor of Hercules and everyday work. However, in the nineteenth century, the poet witnesses the demolition of ancient heroes and the tyranny of mundane exploration of labor. Here, the verse “Cold and newly bright, Labor stirs awake” is symptomatic for decoding the dialectical image. Once the image has been deciphered, it will dissolve the incantation of capitalist ideology of progress, which distills an illusory dreaming of the ancient sublimity in the mass. Benjamin denies many a Marxist critics’ views about culture as the superstructure that mirrors the development of the economic infrastructure. Instead, Benjamin draws attention to the fact that “the ideologies of the superstructure reflect relations in a false and distorted manner” (Benjamin 2002, 939). He elaborated on this statement:

But already the observation that ideologies of the superstructure reflect conditions falsely and invidiously goes beyond this. The question, in effect, is the following: if the infrastructure in a certain way (in the materials of thought and experience) determines the superstructure, but if such determination is not reducible to simple reflection, how is it then—entirely apart from any question about the originating cause—to be characterized? As its expression. The superstructure is the expression of the infrastructure. The economic conditions under which society exists are expressed in the superstructure—precisely as, with the sleeper, an overfull stomach finds not its reflection but its expression in the contents of dreams, which, from a causal point of view, it may be said to “condition.”

(Benjamin 2002, K2, 5).

The Baudelairean poet, as an offspring of his epoch, is conditioned by the reality naturalized by the capitalist ideology of progress and constant production. Given that he is obsessed with the “depressive, deathly fixation of melancholia” as a result of the trans-historical practice of allegorical image orientation towards antiquity, he devotes himself to constructing a phantasmagoric collage of images as his own detachment from historical materialism, and suffers from intense mourning over the disappearance of old Paris and the demolition of sublime ancient heroes into ruins— a kind of “hopelessness in the face of the universality of death” (Pensky 2001, 1–20). However in reality, the universality of capitalist ideology is a sham that strives to impose its system of discourses a second nature as natural as first nature. Theodor Adorno pungently criticizes Benjamin’s method of allegory and aforesaid dialectical images in his “A Portrait of Walter Benjamin”:

He [Benjamin] is driven not merely to awaken congealed life in petrified objects—as in allegory—but also to scrutinize living things so that they present themselves as being ancient, “ur-historical” and abruptly release their significance. Philosophy appropriates the fetishism of commodities for itself: everything must metamorphose into a thing in order to break the catastrophic spell of things. Benjamin’s thought is so saturated with culture as its natural object that it swears loyalty to reification instead of flatly rejecting it […] the glance of his philosophy is Medusan.

(Adorno 1981, 233)

In order to disclose the dreamy nature of this illusion and montage of antiquity, and to break through the lament over the universality of death, Benjamin refers to his ultimate resort—awakening—as “genuine liberation from an epoch” (Benjamin 2002, h.3). This employs a Hegelian method of sublation (Aufhebung), wherein the thesis is the present naturalized as nature by capitalist ideology, while the antithesis is the dreamy projection of the present (namely the nineteenth century according to Baudelaire and Benjamin in his Arcades Project), which is mirrored by mythologized nostalgia embodied by the melancholic allegorical image; the synthesis is the “genuine liberation from an epoch” (Benjamin 2002, h.3), which by no means suggests that we should indulge ourselves in the allegorical image of antiquity to escape from the present; instead, we should operate a “dissolution of ‘mythology’ in the space of history” (Benjamin 2002, 935) in considering the past. As Walter Kaufmann interprets Hegelian Aufhebung in a quite evocative way, the “present” can be visualized as “something that is picked up so that it may no longer be there just the way it was, although […] it is not cancelled altogether but lifted up to be kept on a different level” (Kaufmann 1966, 144). What does Walter Benjamin’s Awakening mean in light of dialectical images and Aufhebung? Susan Buck-Morss asserts that Benjamin’s approach of dialectical image is objective as compared with the allegorical image, which is imbued with subjective intention and arbitrary association of ancient and modern images. Moreover, she confirms that dialectical image is a Marxist method with socio-historical significance, though she also accentuates the mystic-theological aspect of the method by citing Scholem’s perception that it is “a reflection of the true transcendence” (Buck-Morss 1989, 241). With that said, I do not discern any authentic Marxian approach to cultural criticism, but only the Hegelian absolute spirit under the disguise of Messianism. Regarding this, Marx debunks rather severely:

The mystification which the dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands, by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general form of working in a comprehensive and conscious manner. With him it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.

(Marx 1974, 29)

Here, Benjamin, by juxtaposing past texts and present images, intends to make them clash with each other and generate a suddenly illuminated Messianic flash of redemption so as to make visible the utopia that he conceives. (Pensky 2001, 120) The Arcades Project is an allegory of the Kabbalist mysticism that Benjamin implicitly refers to, since in the Arcades composed of many narrow gates: “For in it every second was the narrow gate, through which the Messiah could enter.” (Benjamin 2007, 123). Buck-Morss is right to say that the dialectical image is not subjective because the agency of history may not even take subjective initiative to accelerate a breakup; rather, the agency is objectified as a puppet manipulated by mystical forces. By this token, the revolution is an inward transformation of the way of viewing the world, while the real world is only an external phenomenon embodied by a phantasmagoric absolute spirit rather than the material world reflected in the mind. (Marx 1974, 28–30) For Marx, the genuine revolution lies in the transformation of the fundamental economic structure, so that it can no longer continue its mode of production and the forces of production will be emancipated from their enslavement. The most complete critique and revolution of society and culture can only be accomplished by the destruction of the capitalist economic base. Once the economic base is blasted out, the culture and society, as superstructure, will inevitably collapse.

After all, it is somehow unwise for Benjamin to evoke Baudelaire as a prototype for his experiment of dialectical images, whose status identity and class position are a bit ambiguous and faltering between proletariat and bourgeois. Benjamin’s chiffonnier’s collection of fragments in The Arcades Project amasses the dregs of high capitalist society. Through magical alchemy, he sublimates the dregs into engrossing pieces of artwork. This sublimation even diminishes the potential force for the outburst of a Marxist revolution by replacing readers’ revolutionary action with readers’ contemplation of artwork. Thus it even induces readers to unconsciously consent to capitalist culture through its grandeur and intoxicating effects of commodity fetishism.

Worse still, Benjamin fails to distinguish between different classes, but uses ambiguous words such as “collectivity” to blur the line between the different standpoints and economic interests of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. (Clark 2003, 46) In reality, the bourgeois class is very adept at mystifying and even beautifying the brutal history of exploitation, rendering it mesmerizing in order to hypnotize the proletariat class into contented slumber. So instead of awakening mass consciousness, Benjamin’s Arcades Project bedazzles readers through its phantasmagoric dialectical images. These images obscure the mechanisms of mass production and the logic of exchange of use values in capitalist commodity fetishism, such as the process of reification and the bloodstained exploitation of labor through glaring images such as the flâneur and the arcades. They subjugate dialectics to a standstill, deprived of sublation in social revolution, and deter any transformation in economic infrastructure or in ideological superstructure.