Capitalism and Primal History in Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project (Differences, 2014)

Volume 25, Number 3 doi 10.1215/10407391-2847973

© 2015 by Brown University and d i f f e r e n c e s : A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies

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Capitalism and Primal History in Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project

In his groundbreaking study The Messianic Reduction, Peter Fenves presents a compelling new reading of Walter Benjamin’s early writings as a sophisticated and systematic response to Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological method (Fenves 1–3). In Fenves’s provocative and sur-prising account, the development of phenomenological thought in the early twentieth century culminates not in the work of Husserl’s most recognized student, Martin Heidegger, but rather in the apparently fragmentary reflec-tions of a writer whose relationship to phenomenology has remained largely unknown. This essay explores Benjamin’s engagement with phenomeno-logical thought in his later works, including the Arcades Project, works in which Benjamin appears to incorporate his early critique of Husserl into a larger philosophy of history. In the Arcades Project, this philosophy is explic-itly opposed to the “abstract” notion of “historicality” (Geschichtlichkeit) in Heidegger, as well as to Husserl’s conception of eidetic intuition, which is described in Benjamin’s text as lacking a “historical index” (N3,1). For Benjamin, these phenomenological concepts emerged out of a particular historical epoch, an epoch that Marx defined in terms of the development

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Published by Duke University Press

124 Capitalism and Primal History

of industrial technology and the crises that marked the era of industrial capitalism. In his later writings, Benjamin therefore sought to coordinate his phenomenological concerns with his interest in Marx’s critical theory of capitalism. From that perspective, Benjamin’s “historical materialism” would appear to anticipate the more well-known attempts by later thinkers—including Jean-Paul Sartre, Henri Lefebvre, Trần Đức Thảo, Jean-François Lyotard, and Herbert Marcuse—to develop a rigorous way of articulating phenomenology with Marxism.

This essay proposes a reading of several key moments in Benja-min’s attempt to elaborate a historical materialist critique of phenomenol-ogy, a critique that would also incorporate many of the latter’s fundamental philosophical insights. This critique, I argue, entails an attempt to historicize what Benjamin refers to as primal history, an expression that can be defined in Heideggerian terms as the temporalization of time. For Benjamin, how-ever, the category of primal history included not only Heidegger’s notion of historicality but also Nietzsche’s conception of eternal return, as well as Husserl’s notion of habituation or habit, defined as a preconscious substrate of “passive activities” that condition the spontaneous acts of the rational subject (Husserl, Cartesian 66). For Benjamin, the discovery of these primal histories was bound up with the development of industrial capitalism. This would appear to imply that, in his later writings, Benjamin was engaged in the paradoxical task of periodizing an a priori condition of history (and therefore of historical periodization). Benjamin’s critical characterization of phenomenological theories of time as the historical products of a particular mode of production (industrial capitalism) is based on a philosophy of his-tory that seeks, paradoxically, to historicize an originary condition of both history and historicization itself.

For Benjamin, capitalism is associated with the emergence of historically specific forms of experience (Erlebnis), “shock-experiences” that paradoxically undermine the temporal continuity that defines expe-rience in the more conventional sense of Erfahrung, or “experience over time.” By undermining the continuity of experience from which Erfahrung arises, shock-experiences also reveal the latter’s a priori conditions. For Benjamin, then, capitalism is distinguished historically by the emergence of shock-experiences that, by disrupting experience itself, expose the lat-ter’s transcendental (and nonhistorical) conditions. This essay explores two specific examples of shock-experience, defined as a historically determinate form of nonexperience conditioned by capitalism: factory labor and crises in industrial capitalism.

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In the Arcades Project, Benjamin describes the prevalence of crises in nineteenth-century capitalism as the historical condition for the discovery of the concept of eternal return, understood as a particular example of primal history. In such crises, individuals become habituated, paradoxically, to the continual disruption of habit and to the dissolution of tradition produced by what Marx refers to as the continual “revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions [and] ever-lasting uncertainty [that] distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones” (Marx and Engels 227). Meanwhile, in his analysis of factory work, Benjamin implicitly opposes the repetitive character of industrial labor to the Heideggerian notion of “repetition” (Wiederholung), a term that refers to the retroactive movement of historicality in which “heritage” or the histori-cal past is retrieved in a moment of authentic decision made in the present. For Heidegger, this repetition of the past in the present is part of the process in which time itself (in the ordinary sense of the latter as a homogeneous suc-cession of “nows”) is originarily temporalized. For Benjamin, on the other hand, the repetition of factory labor—in which each operation is screened off from the others—disrupts the process of temporalization and therefore the emergence of time. The final part of this essay will turn to Gilles Deleuze’s (Husserl-inspired) account of the role of repetition and habit in the consti-tution of time in order to elucidate Benjamin’s notion of factory labor as a form of repetition that disrupts the process of temporalization.

This concept of repetition—which was developed in part through an engagement with phenomenological thought—appears to have had impor-tant political implications for Benjamin. Although these implications lie well beyond the limited scope of this essay, the obvious resemblance between the concept of repetition as a continual disruption of temporalization and the notion of messianic arrest (which Benjamin uses to characterize the revolutionary event) would seem to suggest that Benjamin’s critique of phenomenological thought is intimately connected with his criticism of capitalism. This connection is perhaps best exemplified in a passage from Convolute D in the Arcades Project. In the passage, Benjamin describes the particular concept of primal history that appears in the prison writings of nineteenth-century French revolutionary Louis Auguste Blanqui as a total capitulation to capitalism that simultaneously condemns the latter’s ahistorical image of itself as having always existed, from time immemorial. Blanqui’s conception of primal history is, according to Benjamin, “a comple-ment of the society to which Blanqui [. . .] was forced to concede victory. [. . .] It is an unconditional surrender, but it is simultaneously the most terrible

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indictment of a society that projects this image of the cosmos—understood as an image of itself—across the heavens” (D5a,6). What this commentary would seem to suggest is that, in Benjamin’s later writings, the abolition of capitalism is identified with the possibility of overcoming the problems posed by phenomenological theories of time.

Historicality and Historical Materialism: The Originary Past in Heidegger and Benjamin

In The Ticklish Subject, Slavoj Žižek insists on a “striking” paral-lel between Heidegger’s conception of historicality and Benjamin’s historical materialism:

As for Heidegger’s notion of authentic choice as a repetition, the parallel with Benjamin’s notion of revolution as repetition [. . .] is striking: here also, revolution is conceptualized as a repetition that realizes the hidden possibility of the past, so that a proper view of the past (the one that perceives the past not as a closed set of facts but as open, as involving a possibility that failed, or was repressed, in its actuality) opens only from the standpoint of an agent engaged in a present situation. (20)

In this passage, the critique of historicism presented in Heidegger’s Being and Time is identified with the one developed by Benjamin in “On the Con-cept of History.” Like Heidegger, Benjamin, according to Žižek, conceives of the past as retroactively posited in a moment of authentic decision or choice that is made in the present. In contrast to the ordinary historicist concep-tion of time as an endless succession of “nows,” the past does not simply determine the present and future in a mechanical fashion. Rather, for both Heidegger and Benjamin, according to Žižek, the past returns from the present of an authentic decision that “repeats” or “retrieves” (wiederholen) the historical past as a “hidden possibility,” one that is only revealed by the authentic decision in retrospect.1

The parallel that Žižek identifies, however, was emphatically rejected by Benjamin. In a letter to Gretel Adorno from 1938, Benjamin expressed his annoyance at being identified in a Soviet publication as a “follower of Heidegger” (qtd. in Löwy 3). In a letter to Gershom Scholem, moreover, Heidegger’s conception of history is dismissed in the strongest possible terms: “[W]hat [Heidegger] says about historical time (and which I

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am able to judge) is nonsense, but [. . .] his statements on mechanical time are, as I suspect, also askew” (Correspondence 82).

As Howard Caygill has argued, however, this dismissal did not imply a refusal on Benjamin’s part to engage with Heidegger’s theory of historical time. In “Tragedy and Trauerspiel,” Benjamin outlines a critique of the concept of historicality as an essentially tragic and insufficiently secularized conception of time. Although the fragment, according to Caygill, succeeds in identifying a fundamental ambiguity in Heidegger’s concep-tion of history,2 Benjamin’s letters to Scholem from the 1930s indicate that he intended to develop a more thoroughgoing attack against Heidegger, one that would incorporate elements of Marx’s critical theory of capitalism. In a letter from 1930, Benjamin describes a plan to pursue a collaborative project with Brecht who, at the time, encouraged his interest in Marx and his enthu-siasm for unorthodox readings of Marx, such as the one developed by Karl Korsch. The plan—which never materialized—was “to establish a very small reading circle [. . .] led by Brecht and myself, to destroy Heidegger” (qtd. in Buck-Morss 389). In another letter written several months later, Benjamin anticipated the need to include a critique of Heidegger’s conception of history as part of a projected epistemological introduction for the Passagenwerk. Benjamin’s remarks in this later letter suggest that Heidegger’s theory of historical time was opposed not only to his own but also to the elements from Hegel and Marx that he intended to use as part of the methodological framework (or “scaffolding”) for the project as a whole:

I intend to pursue the project on a different level than I had pre-viously planned. [. . .] I now see that I will at least need to study some aspects of Hegel and some parts of Marx’s Capital to get anywhere and to provide a solid scaffolding for my work. It now seems a certainty that, for [the Arcades Project] [. . .] an intro-duction that discusses epistemology is necessary [. . .], a discus-sion of the theory of historical knowledge. This is where I will find Heidegger, and I expect sparks will fly from the shock of the confrontation between our two very different ways of looking at history. (Correspondence 359)

The epistemological introduction was never completed, of course. Some of the material that Benjamin meant to include, however, appears in the theses presented in “On the Concept of History,” a text that was originally supposed to serve as the theoretical program for a separate book on Baude-laire, one that Benjamin hoped to extract from the larger Passagenwerk.

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In the manuscript, moreover, formulations that seem to be variations on Benjamin’s theses appear in Convolute N, which consists primarily of notes that were to be used to compose the epistemological introduction to the Pas-sagenwerk that was never completed. What we find in the notes, however, is not the sustained confrontation with Heidegger that Benjamin anticipated in the letter to Scholem. Instead, the Convolute contains only two short and extremely condensed sets of remarks on the concept of historicality, remarks linking the latter to the apparently larger problem—pursued throughout the Passagenwerk—of producing a “primal history” or Urgeschichte of nine-teenth-century capitalism in Europe.

In Heidegger’s writings, of course, primal history is employed as a synonym for the temporalization of time, a process in which the past is retroactively posited in the present by an act of authentic “retrieval” or “repetition.” This “ecstatic” constitution of time within primal history estab-lishes the originary condition for the vulgar conception of time that underlies history as well as our ordinary, empirical experience of the world: “World entry happens only insofar as [. . .] ecstatic oscillation temporalizes itself [. . .]. World-entry is based on the temporalization of temporality. The primal fact, in the metaphysical sense, is that there is anything like temporality at all. The entrance into world by beings is primal history [Urgeschichte]” (Metaphysical 209).

Primal history, then, as the temporalization of time, is “prior” to time itself in the vulgar sense of the latter as an endless succession of “nows,” moving from the past to the present and into the future. As an origi-nary process that precedes the emergence of time, primal history cannot be identified with any particular historical origin, with any “intratemporal” event that can be said to have been the first to occur within time.

In the Passagenwerk, Heidegger’s temporalization of time appears as one particular account of primal history. The other accounts include those of Kant, Bergson, Nietzsche, the Surrealists, Proust, and Blanqui. Although Benjamin, like Heidegger, conceived of primal history as a prior, or rather a priori, condition of historical chronology, its discovery or formulation in the works of writers like Blanqui and Nietzsche, according to Benjamin, was nevertheless conditioned by the specific historical circumstances that prevailed in nineteenth-century Europe. In that sense, one of the primary objectives of the Passagenwerk is the paradoxical task of periodizing the philosophical preoccupation with primal history as a historically specific phenomenon, one that emerged under the conditions of nineteenth-century monopoly capitalism.

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In Convolute K, Benjamin describes the historical discovery of primal history in Kantian terms as a “Copernican revolution in historical perception.” “The Copernican revolution in historical perception is as fol-lows: Formerly it was thought that a fixed point had been found in ‘what has been’ [das Gewesene] and one saw the present engaged in tentatively con-centrating the forces of knowledge on this ground. Now this relation is to be overturned, and what has been is to become the dialectical fixation” (Arcades Kl,2). Benjamin’s characterization of the Copernican revolution in historical knowledge recalls Kant’s famous description of the Copernican revolution affected in his critical philosophy: “Thus far it has been assumed that all our cognition must conform to objects [. . .]. [W]e assume that objects must conform to our cognition” (21). Just as the object in Kant’s revolution must conform to our knowledge in general, so the Gewesene or the “having-been” of the historical past must conform to our perception of history. This reversal or revolution—which overturns the earlier assumption that the Gewesene is a fixed or unalterable fact to which historical knowledge is supposed to conform—is also apparent in Heidegger’s conception of history. In Being and Time, the term Gewesene is used to refer to the heritage (Erbe) or historical past that is originarily posited in Dasein’s “primal” temporalization of time (Heidegger, Being 383–86, 390–91).

In the Trauerspiel book, the word that Benjamin uses to refer to this a priori condition of history is “origin” (Ursprung), a concept that he opposes to that of historical “origination” or genesis (Entsehung) (Origin 45). The relationship between Ursprung and Entsehung—between primal origin and historical origination—is a paradoxical one. As an a priori condition of time, origin does not originate within empirical history; that is, it could not have occurred as an actual historical event. As such, “That which is original is never revealed in the naked and manifest existence of the factual.” At the same time, however, Benjamin insists that origin is an “entirely historical category,” one “which will constantly confront the historical world, until it is revealed fully, in the totality of its history” (45). Like the primal histories that proliferated in nineteenth-century Europe, therefore, origin is an origi-nary condition of history whose existence becomes apparent at a particular moment within the history that it constitutes.

In the Passagenwerk, Benjamin identifies this particular moment with the development of industrial technology: “In this work I mean to wrest from primal history [Urgeschichte] a portion of the nineteenth century. The alluring and threatening face of primal history is clearly manifest to us in the beginnings of technology” (K2a,1). Modern technology, then, makes

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manifest the primordial or “mythic” condition of history. As Benjamin explains in Convolute N, this consequence of technology is due in part to its destructive effect on tradition as well as on inherited ways of perceiving the world:

The momentum of primal history in the past is no longer masked, as it used to be, by the tradition of church and family—this at once the consequence and condition of technology. [. . .] [W]e ourselves are no longer bound to this world by tradition. The perceptual worlds [ Merkwelten] break up more rapidly; what they contain of the mythic comes more quickly and more brutally to the fore [. . .]. This is how the accelerated tempo of technology appears in light of the primal history of the present. (N2a,2)

By undermining tradition, therefore, technology simultaneously exposes its primordial process of transmission, thereby creating the conditions for a Copernican revolution in which origin or Gewesene is understood as an a priori condition of historical knowledge as opposed to an actual event in the distant historical past that is fixed for all time.

Technology, Crisis, and the Collapse of Experience

What remains unexplained in this passage, however, is how exactly tradition is undermined by technology. The account (or at least one of the accounts) that emerges out of the scattered remarks in the Passagen-werk is one that appears to rely upon Marx’s analysis of the contradiction between the relations and the forces of production within capitalist society. In Convolute D (which deals with the concepts of primal history contained in the works of Blanqui and Nietzsche), Benjamin notes that the “notion of eternal return”—which he describes elsewhere as “the fundamental form of the Urgeschichtlichen” (primal history)—“appeared at a time when the bourgeoisie no longer dared count on the impending development of the system of production which they had set going” (Arcades D9,3). Nietzsche’s conception of primal history emerged during a particular moment in time that Marx defines in the Communist Manifesto in terms of the “revolt of modern productive forces [. . .] against the property relations [. . .] of the bour-geois and of its rule” (Marx and Engels 229). The concept of eternal return is made manifest at the same moment in history that the fundamental con-tradiction of capitalism is exposed, a moment described in the Manifesto as

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one in which the “productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property” (229).

In Capital, these bourgeois relations of property are identified with the exchange of commodities, an exchange in which the value of goods is measured according to labor time. In the Convolute devoted to Marx in the Passagenwerk, Benjamin refers to the exchange of commodities as a relationship that is mediated by the “abstraction [of] ‘mere labor.’ ” In this relationship, commodities are “compared with one another quantitatively, in terms of duration” (X3a,4). According to Marx, this property relation—mediated by the duration of labor—comes into conflict with the forces of production due to the fact that technology continually decreases the quan-tity of labor time required in the production of goods. The results of this diminution of value are capitalist crises that “in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity,” an “epidemic of over-production” in which the very tendency of technology to produce more material wealth without labor paradoxically becomes that principal cause of the underconsumption of this material wealth (Capital 131). In these crises, “Society,” as Marx explains in the Manifesto, “suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary bar-barism; it appears as if a famine [. . .] had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce” (Marx and Engels 229).

For Marx, these crises, arising out of the contradiction between the forces and relations of production, were the distinguishing feature of a bourgeois society in which technological change continually undermines all settled traditions and social relationships: “Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and vener-able prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air” (Marx and Engels 227). For Benjamin, this dissolution of tradition and the “uninter-rupted disturbance of all social conditions,” produced by the prevalence of capitalist crises in nineteenth-century Europe, provided the historical context in which the idea of eternal return would emerge.

The idea of eternal recurrence [. . .] displays [. . .] a trace of the economic circumstances to which it owes its sudden topicality. This was manifest at the moment the security of the conditions

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of life was considerably diminished through an accelerated suc-cession of crises. The idea of eternal recurrence derived its luster from the fact that it was no longer possible, in all circumstances, to expect a recurrence of conditions across any interval of time shorter than that provided by eternity. [. . .] Very gradually [. . .] recurrence became a little less frequent, and there could arise, in consequence, the obscure presentiment that henceforth one must rest content with cosmic constellations. Habit [Gewohnheit], in short, made ready to surrender some of its prerogatives. Nietzsche says, “I love short-lived habits,” and Baudelaire already, through-out his life, was incapable of developing regular habits. Habits are the armature of long experience [ Erfahrung], whereas they are decomposed by individual experiences [ Erlebnisse]. (Arcades J62a,2)

The notion of eternal return—in which the recurrence of conditions is imag-ined on a cosmological scale—only becomes topical in a historical context in which both tradition and habit are dissolved by the everlasting uncertainty created by crises arising from the development of the forces of production. Habits that provide the armature for “experience over time” (Erfahrung) are undermined by the “isolated experience of the moment” (Erlebnis) that prevails in periods of crisis.

Factory Labor and Habit

Like Erfahrung and Erlebnis, the word habit (Gewohnheit) that Benjamin employs in this passage, as well as in other parts of the Passagen-werk, appears to be taken from the writings of Husserl. Unlike the concepts of Erfahrung and Erlebnis, however, “habit” is not a technical term. Rather, it is an “operative concept,” an expression invented by Eugen Fink to refer to words that are frequently used in Husserl’s writings but that are never explicitly thematized (64). In works such as Ideas 2 and Crisis of European Sciences, Husserl employs a cluster of terms to refer to the operative concept of habit, including Gewohnheit, Habitus, Habitualität, and Stil (style). These terms are applied to a wide range of behaviors and processes, both social and individual. For Husserl, the ego itself is a “substrate of habitualities,” of habits operating at all levels of conscious experience but often without the ego’s explicit awareness (Husserl, Cartesian 66). The term habitus, for example, is used to refer to habituated or inherited ways of perceiving the

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world, to “perceptual manners” and “embodied set[s] of sensuous perceiv-ings” (Moran 61). In that sense, habitus corresponds to what Benjamin calls the “perceptual worlds” (Merkwelten) that are broken up, along with tradition, by the accelerated tempo of technology. Meanwhile, at the level of judgments, habit refers to “sedimented” beliefs or convictions that orient the ego’s meaning-bestowing activity while remaining “pre-conscious.” Finally, in the social sphere, habit or habituated activity appears as tradition or custom (Sitte) (Moran 66).

In the Passagenwerk, Benjamin appears to identify Husserl’s conception of habit or style with Heidegger’s notion of historicality, oppos-ing these two different ideas to his own methodology, his theory of the dialectical image:

What distinguishes images from the “essence” [ Wesenheiten] of phenomenology is their historical index. (Heidegger seeks in vain to rescue history for phenomenology abstractly through “histo-ricity” [Geschichtlichkeit].) These images are to be thought of entirely apart from the categories of the “human sciences,” from so-called habitus, from style, and the like. Every present day is determined by the images that are synchronic with it: each “now” is the now of a particular recognizability. [. . .] It is 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 purely temporal, the relation or what-has-been to the now is dialectical [. . .]. Only dialectic images are genuinely historical—that is, not archaic images. (N3,1)

What distinguishes the dialectical image from “essentiality” (Wesenheiten) is its “historical index.”3 This historical index, however, cannot be equated with either historicality (Geschichtlichkeit) or habitus. As Benjamin’s com-mentary suggests, these concepts remain “abstract” attempts to provide an account of the temporal or historical dimension of essence (seeking to “rescue history for phenomenology abstractly”).

This critical characterization of phenomenology departs from what Robert Dostal describes as the “common view” that Heidegger’s philosophy differs from Husserl’s in its “recognition of the significance of the finitude, worldliness, and historicity of our human predicament—the recognition that our access to things is always colored and preshaped

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by the sense of things circulating in our historical culture” (Dostal 120). What the Passagenwerk would appear to imply, on the contrary, is that the concept of historicality—with its notion of a subject-in-the-world, embedded in a particular tradition that is authentically reappropriated as heritage—is already anticipated in Husserl’s concept of habitus, defined as a preconscious substratum of inherited and habituated perceptions, opinions, and customs.

Contrary to Werner Hamacher’s interpretation of this passage, however, Benjamin does not “also undertake [. . .] to save history for phenom-enology,” presumably by attempting to develop a less abstract approach to this problem in his theory of dialectical images (Hamacher 161–91). Unlike the phenomenological conception of the relationship between the “what is” of the present (Wesenheiten) and the “what has been” (des Gewesenen) of the past, the “relation of what-has-been to the now (Jetzt-Zeit)”—which constitutes the dialectical image—is not “temporal” in nature. As such, it is not historical in the ordinary sense of the term. But neither can the rela-tionship of the “now” to the “what-has-been” be identified with the ecstatic and retroactive movement of historicality, a movement in which the past is retrieved from the perspective of an authentic decision that is made in the present. As Benjamin explains, “It is not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past.” The constella-tion of the now with the primal past that obtains in the dialectical image is not a temporal relation or movement (either forward or backward in time), but rather a “synchronic” cessation or “dialectical fixation” of time: “image is dialectics at standstill.”4

Benjamin’s historical materialism, therefore, is not only opposed to historicism, defined as a concept of history that seeks to recover the past as “it actually was.” Contrary to Žižek’s reading of Benjamin, Benjamin’s historical materialism also implies a critique of the concept of historicality in which the past is posited as something that “will have been” by a decision made in the present. But if Benjamin does not seek to save history (either as it actually was, according to historicism, or as it will have been, according to Heidegger), neither is his analysis of the primal history of nineteenth-century Europe primarily interested in the ways habit or authentic tempo-ralization serves to perpetuate history. Rather, in the Passagenwerk, as well as in the essay on Baudelaire that is derived from the manuscript, Benjamin examines how the development of industrial technology, as the historical condition in which primal history is made manifest, also invalidates both historicality and habit. In the case of Nietzsche and Baudelaire, of course,

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the “accelerated succession of crises” under industrial capitalism disrupts the formation of habit.

This unsettling of tradition and habit, however, was by no means something specific to petty bourgeois intellectuals (to employ Benjamin’s characterization of Nietzsche, Baudelaire, and Blanqui). In the Convolute titled “Boredom and Eternal Return,” Benjamin describes “factory labor as [the] economic infrastructure of the ideological boredom of the upper classes.” This “spiritually barren, petty bourgeois discontent” is identified with the concept of eternal return as the “obscure presentiment” that every-thing one has ever experienced has already happened again and again in the infinite duration of cosmological time (D2a,4). What this implies is that the dissolution of habit, through which the idea of eternal return is made manifest, is also bound up with the development of industrial labor and, more specifically, by what Marx describes in the Grundrisse and elsewhere as the displacement of labor from its traditional role as the active agent within the process of production (705).

In “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” Benjamin distinguishes unskilled factory labor from traditional, artisanal labor on the basis of the particular forms of habituation or training involved in each type of work. In traditional labor, “practice” endows the worker’s performance with “its appropriate technical form in experience and slowly perfects it.” Through practice, the worker slowly obtains a habituated mastery or “experience” (Erfahrung) over a particular process of production. In factory work, on the other hand, this process is not controlled by the laborer. Rather, it “appears to the factory worker [. . .] in an independent, objectified form,” as a process of production coordinated by a mechanical system that operates “[i]ndepen-dently of the worker’s volition.” Within this industrial process of production, therefore, the experience required in traditional labor becomes a potential source of inefficiency and error. In industrial capitalism, this problem is eliminated by means of what Benjamin refers to as drilling. Through drill-ing, the worker learns to perform repetitive tasks that require a lack of experience or technical mastery. Labor is adapted to a process of production in which work is reduced to an automatic series of gestures adjusted to the autonomous movement of heavy machinery (175–76).

In the Baudelaire essay, therefore, drilling refers to a paradoxi-cal form of conditioning, a habituating activity that inhibits the formation of habits. Unlike practice, drilling (as a process in which “practice counts for nothing”) does not develop the worker’s abilities, but rather turns “the lack of any development into a specialty” (175–76). By routinizing this lack

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of development, drilling prepares the worker to engage in what Lukács describes, in paradoxical terms, as the passive activity that labor performs within the industrial process of production. In this process, “man” no lon-ger appears “as the authentic master of the process; on the contrary, he is a mechanical part incorporated into a mechanical system. [. . .] [H]is lack of will is reinforced by the way in which his activity becomes less and less active and more and more contemplative” (89).

For Benjamin, this passive or contemplative activity is one in which the perception of time or duration itself is disrupted. In factory work, the continuous unfolding in time of the successive stages of an individual process of production—characteristic of artisanal labor—is replaced by a repetitive series of identical gestures, operations that have “no connection with the preceding operation for the very reason that it is its exact repetition. [. . .] [E]ach operation at the machine is just as screened off from the preced-ing operation as a coup in a game of chance is from the one that preceded it [. . .]. The work [. . .] is [. . .] devoid of substance” (“Baudelaire” 177).

Since the perception of time or duration, as Aristotle explains in the Physics, depends on the perception of movement (kinesis) and change (metabole), the repetitive nature of factory work (which arises from the isola-tion of each individual movement from the one that precedes it) implies an experience that is paradoxically devoid of the very perception of time that constitutes the condition of experience itself (see Heidegger, Basic Problems 241–42). Through factory labor, therefore, the worker obtains “experience” in a form of passive activity in which the perception of time—and therefore the possibility of experience itself—is systematically impaired or disrupted. (And for Benjamin, it is the interruption of the perception of time within factory work—as opposed to its exploitative character—that fundamentally characterizes the “drudgery” of industrial labor.)

Like the crises that rendered Baudelaire incapable of developing regular habits, therefore, factory work is an Erlebnis or “isolated experi-ence of the moment” that undermines Erfahrung or “experience over time,” experience that labor requires in order to achieve its “appropriate techni-cal form.” Factory work is a “shock-experience” (Chockerlebnis) that is “seal[ed] off from experience [Erfahrung]” insofar as it involves the passive performance of repetitive gestures that are screened off from each other (Benjamin, “Baudelaire” 177).

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Repetition

The concept of repetition (Wiederholung) that Benjamin employs in his discussion of factory labor corresponds in many respects to the one developed by Deleuze in Difference and Repetition, a text that draws on many of the same philosophical sources that Benjamin cites in the Passagenwerk, including the theories of time in Husserl, Nietzsche, Bergson, and Heidegger. In his analysis of repetition, moreover, Deleuze relies extensively on the empiricist idea of association, an idea that underlies not only the “opera-tive conception” of habit, but also the concept of “passive synthesis” that, in Husserl’s analysis of time-consciousness, constitutes the most fundamental condition of time and conscious experience.5

In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze defines repetition—or rather its apprehension by the mind—as the result of a “contraction” of sensory impressions that arises from “habit.” Confronted with “perfect[ly] independent” phenomena—“cases, elements, agitations or homogeneous instants”—the imagination “contracts [. . .] successive independent instants into one another.” Past impressions are retained in the present while those that tend to succeed them are anticipated to return: “Whenever A appears, I expect the appearance of B” (70).

As David Hume points out—in a section from A Treatise of Human Nature cited by Deleuze in Difference and Repetition—the relationship between sensory impressions or instants established by means of contraction or habit is not a relation of time. Rather, it is that of a “perceivable succession of changeable objects,” a change from one individual sensory impression to another, as opposed to the homogenous movement of duration or time that occurs independently of the particular changes it measures (Hume 356). According to Hume, it is the “succession of [. . .] impressions” that forms the foundation of time itself: “[F]rom the succession of ideas and impressions we form the idea of time [. . .] and according as [. . .] perceptions succeed each other with greater or less rapidity, the same duration appears longer or shorter to his imagination” (356). Since the idea of duration or time, more-over, is presupposed in the idea of causation (causes necessarily preceding their effects within time), the repetition of sensory impressions produced by contraction is also distinct from the relationship of cause and effect (“An object may be contiguous and prior to another, without being considered as its cause” [Hume 77]). This implies that the “anticipation” or “expecta-tion” produced by the contraction of instants cannot be equated with the

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conscious prediction of an occurrence in time produced by a preceding event or a previous action.

But while the “perceivable succession of changeable objects” cannot be reduced to the determinations of time and causation, it consti-tutes nevertheless the foundation from which time and causation emerges, as abstractions formed on the basis of particular contracted impressions or instants. Although repetition, in Deleuze’s terms, “does not constitute time any more than it causes it to disappear [. . .], indicat[ing] only its con-stantly aborted moment of birth,” time, however, “is constituted only in the originary synthesis [or contraction] which operates on the repetition of instants. This synthesis contracts the successive independent instants into one another, thereby constituting the lived, or living, present. It is in this present that time is deployed” (Difference 70). Repetition therefore pro-duces a “living present” that constitutes a foundation of time that remains irreducible nevertheless to the determination of time it conditions.

As the foundation on which time itself is deployed, the “living present” that is passively produced by contraction is not (or is “not yet”) a particular segment or dimension of time. Rather, the living present consists of “simultaneous presents with very different durations which are [. . .] con-tiguous with one another” (Deleuze, Difference 80). These “simultaneous presents” are repetitions of particular, successive impressions that have not yet been subsumed under the abstraction of time and that therefore coexist contiguously within the same living present. In order for time to emerge from these simultaneous presents, it is not sufficient, as Deleuze explains, for a particular present to pass, while being retained in the mind; it is not sufficient, in other words, for a particular present to become a particular past. Such a particular past, contracted with a particular present, would remain contiguous with other contractions (each having their own specific duration) coexisting within the living present. Time, then, cannot emerge from the contraction of two particular instants. Rather, it can only emerge as a result of the synthesis of a particular present and “the past in general,” a synthesis in which “all of the past coexists with the new present in rela-tion to which it is now past,” and in which “each present present is only the entire past in its most contracted state” (82).

This “pure past” or “past in general,” of course, cannot be derived with any particular past instant, since “all of the past” can never be given in any individual impression. For this reason, the past in general is not an actual past, encountered in a previous or previously present perception. Rather, it is a “presupposition,” the “pure, general, a priori element of all

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time” in which the empirical events of the past are “embedded,” situated as events within a homogenous medium of time that emerges from the contrac-tion of the present and the “past in general.” But insofar as this past in gen-eral, presupposed in every present as the “ground” or condition for the very passage of time, can never correspond to any particular impression, it is a past that never was or never existed: “[W]e necessarily speak of a past which never was present, since it was not formed ‘after.’ [It is] posed as already-there, presupposed by the passing present and causing it to pass” (Deleuze, Difference 82). This pure past that was never present and yet always already there closely corresponds to Benjamin’s conception of the Gewesene or “what has been.” In contrast to Heidegger’s notion of the historical past as a “hid-den possibility” whose repetition in the present retroactively constitutes it as a tradition or “heritage,” the Gewesene is not something that “will have been.” Rather, as Benjamin explains in his reading of Proust, it “is a mat-ter of images that we have never seen before remembering. We stand before ourselves just as we once stood in an originary past [Urvergangenheit] that we never saw” (“Proust” 238–47).

In Nietzsche and Philosophy, Deleuze identifies the notion of a “past in general” with Nietzsche’s idea of eternal recurrence. As Deleuze points out, citing a passage from Nietzsche that also appears as an entry in Benjamin’s Arcades Project (D8,1), eternal recurrence is not a mechanistic conception. The idea is not simply that, given the infinite duration of time, every event in the present must have already occurred in the distant histori-cal past, repeated an infinite series of times. The whole of the past that is repeated eternally, therefore, is not an empirical past whose causal determi-nations have been reproduced, mechanistically, over and over again in the infinite extent of the cosmos. Rather, the notion of eternal return refers to an originary becoming, a “synthesis of time and its dimensions” that—like the synthesis of the present and “the past in general”—responds precisely to the problem of the passage of time. The past that eternally recurs, therefore, is an originary past that never existed, presupposed in every present as an a priori condition of the passage of time.

This problem [is] how can the past be constituted in time? How can the present pass? The passing moment could never pass if it were not already past and yet to come—at the same time as being present. [. . .] The present must coexist with itself as past and yet to come. [. . .] The eternal return is thus an answer to the problem of passage. [. . .] This is why the eternal return must be thought of

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as a synthesis; a synthesis of time and its dimensions. (Deleuze, Nietzsche 48)6

As Deleuze explains, moreover, the “originary synthesis” of successive impressions that constitutes time is neither a conscious act of remembrance nor a deliberate operation of the understanding. Rather, Deleuze describes it, paradoxically, as an act of passive or “contemplative” synthesis, one that pre-cedes and conditions our active and intentional acts of representation. This contemplative synthesis is performed by a passive agent that precedes the emergence of the subject of conscious recollection and judgment. It therefore precedes the very distinction between subject and object. “Although [passive synthesis] is constitutive it is not, for all that, active. It is not carried out by the mind, but occurs in the mind that contemplates, prior to all memory and all reflection. Time is subjective, but in relation to the subjectivity of a passive subject” (Difference 73).

In Difference and Repetition, this “passive synthesis,” a synthe-sis that occurs in the mind but not as a result of its own deliberate action, is identified by Deleuze with “habit.” Deleuze distinguishes the term from “what is ‘habitually’ called habit,” namely, the idea that “it is through act-ing that we acquire habits.” As Deleuze argues, on the other hand, “[w]ith habit, we act only on the condition that there is a little Self within us which contemplates,” a passive Self that precedes the subject of conscious and deliberate action (73).

Deleuze’s account of the passive constitution of time out of repeti-tion or habit closely conforms to the one that Husserl develops in his writ-ings on time-consciousness. There, Husserl opposes the “living present” (lebendige Gegenwart) encountered within “lived experience” (Erlebnis) to the ordinary concept of the present as the instant or moment between the past and the future, a “natural” concept of time that underlies Erfahrung as the “experience of constituted objectivities.”7 For Husserl, the perception of this “originary” present is the aim of the epoché or the phenomenological reduction: “It belongs to the mode of being of the lived that a gaze of intuitive [erchauender] perception can be directed quite immediately to each actually and living experience as an originary living present [auf jedes wirkliche, als originäre Gegenwart lebendige Erlibnis]” (qtd. in Marion 51).

For Benjamin, on the other hand, the “lived experience” (Erleb-nis) associated with capitalist crises dissolves the habits that constitute the “armature of long experience” (Erfahrung). Similarly, in his analysis of factory labor as a passive or contemplative activity, the repetitive tasks performed by the worker are characterized as a habit that continually

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obstructs the emergence of time from succession. In factory labor, each operation or gesture is screened off from the one that precedes it, depriv-ing the worker of the ability to perceive the passage of time. In contrast, therefore, to Deleuze’s account of the ambivalent role of repetition—as a condition of time that simultaneously “indicates only its constantly aborted moment of birth”—the form of repetition that Benjamin associates with fac-tory labor is one that continually impedes the process of temporalization that constitutes time.

duy lap nguyen is an assistant professor of world cultures and literatures at the University of Houston. His work has appeared, most recently, in Interventions (2014) and Historical Materialism (2010) and is forthcoming in Thesis Eleven and Telos. Nguyen’s current research explores works by the Vietnamese philosopher Trần Đức Thảo and develops a reading of Thảo’s materialist critique of phenomenology. A second project, titled “The Postcolonial Present: Redemption and Revolution in Twentieth-Century Vietnamese Culture and History,” examines Vietnamese cinema, literature, and mass culture from the Vietnam War era.

1 For a discussion of the relation-ship between the “instant” and the notion of historicality in Heidegger, see Ward 151.

2 In his account of authentic tem-porality, Heidegger, according to Caygill, relies upon the very “vulgar conception of time” that he seeks to explain. In Being and Time, historical time is described ambiguously as both a product of Dasein’s ecstatic temporalization of time and as a “neutral medium” for the “temporal objectification of spirit,” or Dasein. The ambiguity, then, is that of a subject (Dasein) that authentically temporalizes the very vulgar or inauthentic concep-tion of time (as a neutral medium) through which it authentically realizes itself (Caygill 5).

3 The notion of “essentiality” (Wesenheit)—which is a key con-cept in Benjamin’s “Epistemo-Critical Preface”—was derived from a work by Jean Héring, a former student of Husserl’s (see Fenves 49).

4 As Fenves points out, it is this synchronic or static character of Benjamin’s Jetzt-Zeit that dis-tinguishes it from the moment

of decision or Augenblick in Hei-degger’s account of the ecstatic constitution of time (72).

5 In Ideas 2, for example, the notion of “habit” (Gewohnheit) is explained in terms of a primitive “association” (Assoziation) that functions unnoticed in our com-portment. Seeing A “reminds” us of seeing B; “the similar motivates the similar under similar circum-stances” (Husserl, sect. 54–56). See also Kuhn and Staudigl.

6 Compare with Deleuze’s discussion of the “pure past” in Bergson’s phi-losophy and its role in the tempor-alization of time (Bergsonism 59).

7 “[T]he expression ‘lived experi-ence’ (Erlebnis) [is used] to char-acterize immanent sensations and acts of consciousness as such. The verb erleben (from which the noun Erlebnis is derived) means ‘to still be alive when something happens’ or ‘to undergo an event,’ and sug-gests the immediacy ‘with which something is grasped.’ Both sides of meaning (immediacy and acqui-sition) are compressed in the Eng-lish rendering of Erlebnis as ‘lived experience’ ” (Warren 115).

Notes

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Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge: Harvard up, 1999.

. The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin 1910–1940. Ed. Gershom Scholem and Theodor Adorno. Trans. Manfred Jacobson and Evelyn Jacobson. Chicago: u Chicago p, 1994.

. “On the Image of Proust.” Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, 1927–1930. Cambridge: Harvard up, 1999. 238–47.

. “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire.” Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. New York: Schocken, 1968.

. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Trans. John Osborne. London: Verso, 1977.

Buck-Morss, Susan. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Cambridge: mit p, 1989.

Caygill, Howard. “Benjamin, Heidegger, and Tradition.” Destruction and Experience. Ed. Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne. London: Routledge, 1994. 1–31.

Deleuze, Gilles. Bergsonism. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Zone, 1991.

. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. New York: Columbia up, 1994.

. Nietzsche and Philosophy. New York: Columbia up, 2006.

Dostal, Robert J. “Time and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger.” The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger. Ed. Charles B. Guignon. Cambridge: Cambridge up, 1993.

Fenves, Peter D. The Messianic Reduction: Walter Benjamin and the Shape of Time. Palo Alto: Stanford up, 2011.

Fink, Eugen. “Operative Concepts in Husserl’s Phenomenology.” Apriori and World. Trans. William McKenna. Ed. W. McKenna, R. M. Harlan, and L. E. Winters. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1981. 56–70.

Hamacher, Werner. “now. Walter Benjamin on Historical Time.” The Moment: Time and Rupture in Modern Thought. Ed. Heidrun Friese. Liverpool: Liverpool up, 2001. 161–96.

Heidegger, Martin. The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. Trans. Albert Hofstadter. Bloom-ington: Indiana up, 1982.

. Being and Time. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. Albany: State u of New York p, 1996.

. The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic. Trans. Michael Heim. Bloomington: Indiana up, 1992.

Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature. Oxford: Clarendon, 1978.

Husserl, Edmund. Cartesian Meditations. Trans. Dorion Cairns. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1967.

. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. Trans. R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1993.

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996.

Works Cited

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Kuhn, Rolf, and Michael Staudigl. “Passivity as Pre-predicative Constitution in Husserl: Structure and Discussion.” Phenomenology World Wide. Ed. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2010. 119–33.

Löwy, Michael. Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History.” Trans. Chris Turner. London: Verso, 2005.

Lukács, György. “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat.” History and Class Consciousness. London: Merlin, 1967. 83–222.

Marion, Jean-Luc. Reduction and Givenness: Investigations of Husserl, Heidegger, and Phenomenology. Trans. Thomas A. Carlson. Evanston: Northwestern up, 1998.

Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 1. Trans. Ben Fowkes. New York: Vintage, 1977.

. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. Trans. Martin Nicolaus. New York: Penguin, 1973.

Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. “The Communist Manifesto.” Karl Marx: A Reader. Ed. Jon Elster. London: Cambridge up, 1986. 225–34.

Moran, Dermot. “Edmund Husserl’s Phenomenology of Habituality and Habitus.” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 42.1 (Jan. 2011): 53–77.

Ward, Koral. Augenblick: The Concept of the “Decisive Moment” in 19th- and 20th-Century Western Philosophy. Hampshire: Ashgate, 2008.

Warren, Nicolas de. Husserl and the Promise of Time: Subjectivity in Transcendental Phenom-enology. Cambridge: Cambridge up, 2009.

Žižek, Slavoj. The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. London: Verso, 1999.

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Capitalism and Primal History in Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project (Differences, 2014)

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