Walter Benjamin's Phantasmagoria

Abstract

Confronting the ruins of the Jamf Olfabriken Werke (Jamf Petroleum Factory Works), in the light that breaks some night at too deep an hour to explain away, Thomas Pynchon's Enzian reaches an extraordinary understanding. This serpentine slag-heap ... is not a ruin at all. It is in perfect working order.' If readers of Walter Benjamin sometimes grasp the Passagen-Werk in an Enzian-like epiphany, at other moments they apprehend it in a fashion more suitable to Coleridge. Briefly imagining this text in all its completed majesty, they see fully developed concepts where Benjamin left only fragments. The following essay results from one such glimpse into Benjamin's Kubla Khan, for it elaborates a concept that I imagine would have become a keystone of the Passagen-Werk, had Benjamin ever brought his project to completion. This concept is the phantasmagoria, which recurs with troubling insistence throughout Benjamin's arcades project. Suggesting that Benjamin's interest in the phantasmagoria derives primarily from its technological manifestation, as 19th-century visual spectacle, I will reveal how this concept is particularly well-suited to figure Benjamin's Marxist-Freudian theory of base-superstructure relations in a society ruled by the commodity form. In addition, I will argue that the phantasmagoria fascinates Benjamin for its power to capture his own method of critical illumination. Challenging an Enlightenment opposition between ideological mystification and cultural critique, Benjamin's phantasmagoria emblematizes one of the Passagen-Werk's central methodological projects: to free Marxist analysis from its overwhelming valorization of rational forms of representation.