The Shock of Fashion: Benjamin’s Dialectical Image

Brinae Bain

FAH 1482H Professor Kajri Jain

April 10, 2015

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Grandville was much preoccupied with the general idea of Analogy. He even began that way… With superhuman courage this man devoted his life to refashioning creation. He took it in

his hands, wrung it, rearranged it, explained it and annotated it; and Nature was transformed into a fantasmagoria. He turned the world upside down.

-Charles Baudelaire, Some French Caricaturists1

Writing in the early twentieth century, Walter Benjamin sought to question the

conformity of historicism. For him, history was an endless cycle of mythic narrative, which

always belonged to the victors. In his last work, Theses on the Philosophy of History, Benjamin

describes that it is the role of the historical materialist to seek redemption; in brushing history

“against the grain” the historical materialist has the ability to identify, remember, and extract

flashes in history that would allow for him to capture a moment in which he could “fight for the

oppressed past.”2 This moment, or monad, can be found in analyzing what Benjamin believed to

be a dialectical image. Through his work on the unfinished Arcades Project (or Passagen-Werk)

Benjamin analyzed nineteenth century Parisian modernity in search for the dialectical image, a

tool to be used by twentieth century historians that could shed light on the historical cycle of

mythic commodity. In her book The Dialectics of Seeing, a comprehensive written framework of

Benjamin’s Arcades Project, Susan Buck-Morss outlines a thematic coordinate system for

Benjamin’s progress, at the center of which exists the dialectical image (Figure 1). Appearing at

the cross section of reality and consciousness, the dialectical image is situated as a moment in

which class-consciousness can be awakened, and the present can begin to seek redemption. In

centering the dialectical image between the fossil, ruin, fetish, and wish image, Buck-Morss

1 Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon, 2012), 180. 2 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 263.

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writes that this center is also the place of the commodity.3 In this paper, I argue that fashion,

through the caricatures of Jean Ignace Isidore Gérard Grandville, exists as a moment capable of

representing dialectical standstill.

In analyzing Grandville’s images as Natural History, the fossil; Historical Nature, the

ruin; Mythic History, the fetish; and Mythic Nature, the wish image; elements from Benjamin’s

Arcades Project as characterized by Buck-Morss, I hope to “identify what is historically new

about the nature of commodities.”4 In Konvolute K, “Dream City and Dream House, Dreams of

the Future, Anthropological Nihilism, Jung” Benjamin writes, “Fashion, like architecture,

inheres in the darkness of the lived moment, belongs to the dream consciousness of the

collective…”5 Benjamin believed that fashion held a specific agency in the possibility for

redemption; in Theses he writes, “Fashion has a flair for the topical, no matter where it stirs in

the thickets of long ago; it is a tiger’s leap into the past.”6 Fashion has the ability to represent the

Jetztzeit, and through the images of Grandville, it reaches that dialectical moment.7

According to Buck-Morss, Benjamin’s Arcades Project “treats the historical origins of

the present: Natural history becomes ur-history. Its goal is not only to polemicize against the

still-barbaric level of the modern age, but, raising polemics to historical-philosophic theory, to

disclose the essence of the “new nature” as even more transient, more fleeting than the old.”8 In

other words, Benjamin hoped to expose “new nature” as an ephemeral consequence of

3 Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), 210-11. 4 Buck-Morss. The Dialectics of Seeing. 67. 5 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), 393. (K2a,4) 6 Benjamin, Theses, 261. 7 Hannah Arendt defines Jetzeit as, “they mystical nunc stans” as opposed to Gegenwart, or present. Benjamin, Theses, 261. 8 Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, 64.

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standardized historicism. The “new nature,”- the technology, machines, products of industry- is a

product of transitory economic cycles; in Benjamin’s twentieth century, industry has established

an entire consumer culture on easily accessible objects. This is in contrast to the “new nature” of

the nineteenth century, products of bourgeois commodity, whose objects are looked back upon in

Benjamin’s time in antiquated arcades in mystification.9

Benjamin’s Arcades Project establishes the now-obsolete city arcades as the home to the

‘fossil,’

As rocks of the Miocene or Eocene in places bear the imprint of monstrous creatures from those ages, so today arcades dot the metropolitan landscape like caves containing the fossil remains of a vanished monster: the consumer of the pre-imperial era of capitalism, the last dinosaur of Europe.10

By equating the nineteenth century consumer to the ‘monstrous’ dinosaur, Benjamin signifies

that the age of modernity was controlled by the economic cycle, much like the prehistoric era

was dominated by a cycle existent in predatory nature. Further, it seems that much like advanced

knowledge would be needed to establish the herbivorous nature of the fossilized organism in a

cave, a certain knowledge would be required to understand the combinations of objects found in

the arcades, such as a “hair dryer and Venus de Milo” or “broken screws atop the musical

score.”11

However these objects, products of bourgeois vogue, represent the ‘trace’ of Natural

History. As Buck-Morss explains, “Even after his early metaphoric ur-landscape of consumer

dinosaurs and modern ice ages recedes, Benjamin sustains the physiognomy of the fossil in the

idea of the “trace.” The imprint of objects particularly visible in the plush of bourgeois interiors

9 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 875. (a°, 3) Benjamin writes, “These items on display are a rebus…” 10 Ibid., 540. (R2,3) 11 Ibid., 875. (a°, 3)

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or the velvet lining of their casings.”12 Ultimately, the fossilized Natural History can be found in

the products of the bourgeois class. This association of the organic and the inorganic is crucially

important to this concept; in this case the organic becomes physically adhered to the inorganic.

This relationship can also be seen in Grandville’s 1847 book, Les Fleurs Animées.

In Les Fleurs Animées, Grandville personifies flower species in fashionable animations

characterized by the feminine body. In the illustration Myosotis (1846) (Figure 2) Grandville

characterizes a Forget Me Not as a woman in an elegant gown standing on a riverbank.

Interestingly in this image, unlike the others of the series, the woman’s face is covered as she

waves towards what appears to be a paddle steamer in the background. As a technological

breakthrough in the early nineteenth century, the paddle steamer represents the “new nature” that

the woman so excitingly turns to. Her gown, composed of the bank’s natural flora, is

contemporary to the mid 1840s; the corseted woman could be a figure in one of the century’s

popular fashion magazines. Her shoulder-bearing gown, accented with flowers is similar to a

gown found in the Ladies Cabinet in 1845 (Figure 3).

In the image, Grandville depicts a woman who is simultaneously a progeny of the natural

world and a woman of ‘la vie moderne.’ In her stance she almost seeks the ship in the distance,

establishing a desire (whether the woman’s or Grandville’s) to establish a connection between

nature and the inorganic global world of colonialism and production. The ‘trace’ exists in the

depiction of the organic inhabitant on the inorganic commodity of fashion, evidenced in reality

by the English fashion plate. In this image, nature becomes opposed to history; that is if we see

history in the traditional sense of modernity’s cycle.

12 Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, 211.

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The interaction between history and nature can be understood through a lecture by

Theodor Adorno, “The moments of nature and history do not disappear into each other, but break

simultaneously out of each other and cross each other in such a way that what is natural emerges

as a sign for history, and history, where it appears most historical, appears as a sign for nature.”13

Buck-Morss breaks down this association; she identifies that the argument is based on

“juxtaposing binary pairs of linguistic signs from the language code (here history/nature), and, in

the process of applying these signs to material referents, crossing the switches.”14 In Grandville’s

allegorical representation of nature and history both signs remain identifiable without indication

of the referents, in this case, actual articles such as the dresses of the fashion plate. By allowing

for allegory to take precedence, both nature and history are easily distinguishable, enabling their

representation in the form of critique. It is in the ability to be critiqued that fashion through

Grandville becomes part of the dialectical standstill. In this moment, the historical materialist can

separate fashion from both history and nature, essentially “blasting a specific life [in this case

fashion] out of the era.”15

Directly opposed to Natural History on the axis of reality is Historical Nature, or the ruin.

Literally as a representation of the decaying past, the ruin is a reminder of death. Buck-Morss

defines Benjamin’s ruin as “the form in which the wish images of the past century appear, as

rubble, in the present. But it refers also to the loosened building blocks (both semantic and

material) out of which a new order can be constructed.”16 The idea of the ruin originated in

Benjamin’s analysis of Baudelaire’s allegorical poetry; to quote Benjamin, “It was Baudelaire’s

13 Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, 59. Here she cites Adorno’s Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1, pp. 360-61. 14 Ibid. 15 Benjamin, Theses, 263. 16 Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, 212

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endeavor to make the aura which is peculiar to the commodity appear. In a heroic way he sought

to humanize the commodity.”17 Allegory is situated as the antithesis to myth; in its antithetical

position, allegory becomes the tool for understanding time. In allegory, “[time] is represented by

the idea of an unfulfilled infinite progression.”18

In the image, A quoi bon du reste la personne? (1844) (Figure 4) Grandville literally

asks, “What good is the rest of the person?” Coat racks with human characteristics wear clothing

suitable of the bourgeois class. The humanistic characteristics of the material objects are

uncanny. It is most evident in the central, forward-facing male figure. A mannequin takes on the

role of a dandy; adorned with a cane and hat, the tailor’s accessory “implies a quintessence of

character.”19 This male figure accompanied by a female companion appears to be the center of

attention. The group itself appears to represent several types of clothing; pictured are walking

hats, formal top hats, formal heeled boots for men, parasols, and bonnets. They all stand in a

circle, emphasizing the rotational effect of fashion.

In a mythical sense, the wearer, the human, becomes closely associated with the

inorganic and the clothing becomes the living being, there is an almost death of the human.

Michele Hannoosh writes, “The essence of the individual is literally taken over by fashion…It

represents the increasing mechanization of the human, the reduction of the individual to a replica

following the law of the type.”20 Here allegory provides a view of death. Humanity has

disappeared into the organic; their salvation is alluded to in the cycle of fashion. The symbol of

17 Walter Benjamin, “Central Park,” New German Critique 34 (Winter, 1985): 20. 18 Richard Wolin, Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 66. 19 Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter Of Modern Life,” in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. Johnathan Mayne (London: Phaidon, 2012), 9. 20 Michele Hannoosh, “The Allegorical Artist and the Crisies of History: Benjamin, Grandville, Baudelaire,” Word & Image 10 (January-March, 1994): 47.

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death serves as an emblem of salvation. In Grandville’s image, the subject of death is central to

its meaning, but fashion represents the measure of time.21

Moving opposite on both the axis of reality and consciousness, Mythic History, the Fetish

situates itself between the petrified nature of reality and the dream state. Buck-Morss defines the

fetish as “the keyword of the commodity as myth phantasmagoria, the arrested form of history. It

corresponds to the reified form of new nature, condemned to the modern Hell of the new as the

always-the-same.”22 The fetish then, is the new nature – technology, machines, products of

industry- that have been faulted by modernity. She continues, “this fetishized phantasmagoria is

also the form in which the human, socialist potential of industrial nature lies frozen, awaiting the

collective political action that could awaken it.”23 Benjamin’s view of modernity can found in

Konvolute S, “Painting, Jugendstil, Newness,”

The “modern,” the time of hell. The punishments of hell are always the newest thing going in this domain. What is at issue is not that “the same thing happens over and over,” and even less would it be a question here of eternal return. It is rather that precisely in that which is newest the face of the world never alters, that this newest remains, in every respect, the same.!This constitutes the eternity of hell. To determine the totality of traits by which the “modern” is defined would be to represent hell.24

Benjamin is critiquing the cyclical nature of commodity exchange. What is new is always the

same; in capitalist production fashion is dependent on this recurring nature.

This notion is accurately depicted in Grandville’s La Mode (Figure 5). Published in 1844,

this sketch features a woman draped in a pastiche gown. Representing the Goddess of Fortune,

the woman towers over the spectators below as she spins the wheel of fate. With various fashions

throughout the centuries depicted, some even predictive, fashion’s fortune is adherent to a

21 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 830. (C°, 2) 22 Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, 211. 23 Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, 211. 24 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 544. (S1,5)

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limited cycle of repetition and chance. Yet, each year, in every season, haute couture is always

presented as the “new.” In his text accompanying this image Grandville writes,

Après avoir mis la gloire dans le succès, on a dû naturellement placer l’art dans la mode. Aussi règne-t-elle sans partage. Muscadins, incroyables, dandys, fashionables, lions, se sont succédé sans diminuer en rien sa puissance. Ce sont toujours les mêmes ridicules sous d’autres habits.25

Grandville’s statement emphasizes the power of fashion. In its ability to withstand the habitual

promenade of various Parisian factions, fashion exists as the static element to the ephemerality of

humanity’s “ridiculous” progression.

In contrast to the phantasmagoric fetish, the wish image exists in the transitory nature of

reality. The wish image represents the “desire” of new technologies, new nature, to “return to a

mythic time when human beings were reconciled with the natural world.”26 New objects often

take the form of ancient symbols in attempt to mask unfamiliarity. New electric light bulbs were

shaped like gas flames, railroad cars resembled stagecoaches, and fashion traced back to the past.

Benjamin criticized this anachronistic attempt to disguise the new with a quote from Freidrich

Vischer, “It was “madness for the French fashions of the Revolution and the first Empire to

mimic Greek proportions with clothing cut and sewn in the modern manner.””27 The desire to

mask the new served a purpose, attempting to establish a revolutionary break from most recent

past.

In nature, the new is mythic, because its potential is not yet realized; in consciousness, the old is mythic, because its desires never were fulfilled…Paradoxically, collective imagination mobilizes its powers for a revolutionary break from the recent past by evoking a cultural memory reservoir of myths and utopian symbols from a more distant ur-past.28

25 Jean Ignace Isidore Gérard Grandville, L’Autre Monde (Paris: H. Fournier, 1844), 281. Emphasis mine. 26 Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, 114. 27 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 66. (B2a,3) 28 Buck-Morss. The Dialectics of Seeing. 116.

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However, invoking these images does not automatically lead to a revolutionary break, but a

“motivation for future emancipation, which will not be literally a restoration of the past.”29 So the

wish image, is the appropriation of ancient symbols in order to exercise revolutionary thought,

but it is evident that, “a dream image is not yet a dialectical image, and desire is not yet

knowledge.”30 So how does the collective attain the knowledge to move past desire? I would

argue that the dialectical image can be realized in the critical satire of Grandville’s Un Autre

Monde illustrations.

In Un Autre Monde, Grandville doesn’t appropriate the past in the technologies of the

new; instead he takes the “new natural” and applies them to a cosmological future. In these

drawings, technologies of the nineteenth century become re-appropriated onto nature. For this

discussion, I would like to draw on two images from Un Autre Monde, Pérégrinations D’une

Comète (Figure 6) and Les Poissons D’Avril (Figure 7).

Pérégrinations D’une Comète pictures a comet figured as a woman wearing an elegant

gown. Her train replicates the comet’s tail as she strolls down a promenade lit by stars emulating

gas lamps. In the illustration objects of modernity actually command nature; they form its

composition. The alignment of the stars is dependent on the Parisian pathway. The streets of

Paris are literally converted into a cosmological site of redemption in the heavens. In picturing

the material objects of commodity fetishism aligned to the glory of space, it is possible that in

‘masking nature’ this image “could provide a symbolic representation of what the human, social

meaning of technological change is all about.”31

29 Ibid. 30 Buck-Morss. The Dialectics of Seeing. 114. 31 Ibid., 117.

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In a different view, Les Poissons D’Avril focuses on humanity’s susceptibility to nature

in their desire to hold onto material goods. Here Grandville isolates the problem at large

humanity becomes so focused on the commodity that nature (and myth) have the ability to

control their destiny. In the image large fish bait luxury goods such as jewels, wine, and other

trinkets over people struggling in a pond of water, each trying to grab the object of their desire.

The faces of nature are smug in the enjoyment of power. In highlighting the relationship so

adamantly Grandville provides an avenue for knowledge to be accessed.

It is my impression that Grandville’s images are also a product of the “new nature.” His

images were published and visible for many to see, by taking advantage of printing technologies,

Grandville’s images become presented as a “potential to actualize the collective dream.”32

According to Buck-Morss in her analysis of Benjamin, “[this potential is] revolutionary…only

when dialectically meditated by the material, “new” nature.”33 Grandville’s images in Un Autre

Monde provoke the repetition of history in homogenous, empty time by bringing forward

dialectical mediations in his images.

Benjamin was well aware of Grandville’s caricatures, and wrote about the artist often. In

fact, Exposé III from the Arcades Project is devoted to the work of Grandville and the world of

phantasmagoria. In the plainest sense, “Grandville extends the authority of fashion to objects of

everyday use, as well as to the cosmos. In taking it to an extreme, he reveals its nature. Fashion

stands in opposition to the organic. It couples the living body to the inorganic world.”34 This

coupling reimagines fashion as commodity associated with death and redemption. Hannoosh

writes, “The constant presence of death allies his technique with that of the dialectical image and

32 Buck-Morss. The Dialectics of Seeing. 117. 33 Ibid. 34 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 8.

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the task of the historian, turning the mythic, organic commodity into a petrified corpse, a ruin of

the kind that the historian finds in the rubble of history.”35 In this statement, it becomes clear that

Grandville’s images serve both as a tool for Benjamin’s modern historian to use to dialectically

examine the present, but also appear to approach the dialectical condition as well, as they

“provide an image of the dream-as-promise and of the dream-as-class fantasy."36 Grandville’s

images, in their use of satire, allow for a critique of modern society and the cyclical nature of

history.

At this moment I would like to return to Baudelaire’s quote on Grandville. It is evident

that Grandville was unique even during his own time. From the introductory quote, we can

understand the Grandville has a certain fascination with rearranging reality. Baudelaire

continues,

There are some superficial spirits who are amused by Grandville; for my part, I find him terrifying. For, unfortunately, it is the artist in whom I am interested, and not his drawings. When I open the door of Grandville’s works I feel a certain uneasiness, as though I am entering an apartment where disorder was systematically organized…But it is the lunatic side of his talent that makes Grandville important. Before his death he applied his always stubborn will to the noting of his successive dreams and nightmares in a plastic form…Grandville, the artist, wanted – he really wanted – his pencil to explain the law of the Association of Ideas!37

From this excerpt we understand that Grandville’s images have the ability to make a viewer

contemplate their surroundings; his pictures provoke thought. Like hallucinatory depictions of

his unconscious, Grandville set out to capture the dream world and its ability to track the

progression of philosophical ideas.

Baudelaire’s insight into the artist provides us possible evidence for Benjamin’s interest

in Grandville’s work. Benjamin writes in his Exposé on Grandville,

35 Hannoosh, “The Allegorical Artist,” 49. 36 Ibid., 50. 37 Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, 181.

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The entertainment industry makes [the distraction of phantasmagoria] easier by elevating the person to the level of the commodity. He surrenders to its manipulations while enjoying his alienation from himself and others. – The enthronement of the commodity, with its luster of distraction, is the secret theme of Grandville’s art. This is consistent with the split between utopian and cynical elements in his work…Under Grandville’s pencil, the whole of nature is transformed into specialties.38

Like Baudelaire, Benjamin recognizes that Grandville is subject to depicting the distraction of

commodity culture. Grandville understands the connection between modernity and commodity

exchange. In his depictions of the Parisian Cosmos, astral spaces become modernized. Art,

fashion, architecture, and Capitalism all take advantage of the uncontainable natural world. In

these depictions, one begins to recognize the associations between the modern and natural world,

a relationship that Benjamin hoped to explore.

The purpose of the Arcades Project was not to analyze nineteenth century modernity;

Benjamin’s “aim was to shed light on the nature of the modern age by way of an allegorical

reading of the physiognomy of urban life.”39 His interest in the dialectical image for such a task

can be outlined in select passages from Konvolute K. Peter Wollen states that the ideology of

progress is, “some- thing that is already implicit in what we might call the ideology of fashion,

precisely because of its cyclical nature.”40 This is supported in Benjamin’s Arcades Project; he

states,

In regard to such a perception, one could speak of the increasing concentration of reality, such that everything past can acquire a higher grade of actuality than it had in the moment of its existing...It serves to ignite the explosive materials that are latent in what has been (the authentic figure of which is fashion). To approach, in this way, “what has been” means to treat it not historiographically, but politically, in political categories. []Fashion[]41

38 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 7. 39 Wolin, Walter Benjamin, 129. 40 Peter Wollen, “The Concept of Fashion in the Arcades Project,” boundary 2 30 (Spring, 2003): 138. 41 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 392. (K2,3)

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Bringing forward the ideas of Marx, Benjamin continues, “The superstructure is the expression

of the infrastructure.”

If we are to understand Fashion as a crucial element of society’s superstructure, fashion

comes into being by the thought and experience of society. Benjamin compares this to the dream,

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…[The conditions of life] find their expression in the dream and their interpretation in the awakening.”42

In the awakening of fashion, utopian desires come to be realized. In this “always-the-same”

world, it is the job of the historical materialist to awaken a moment in which he can seek to

understand the economic conditions of society in order to recognize a revolutionary chance to

fight for the oppressed past. This is the method in which Benjamin sought to unmask the idea of

the modern itself. Benjamin saw fashion as the precursor to Surrealism. His ultimate goal was to

characterize the modern as eternal recurrence, or always-the-same, aligning it with the ideas of

mythical repetition, which was the ever-present issue with historicism’s homogenous empty

time, an objective the images of Grandville accomplish quite well.

Grandville’s images take reality and dream and combine them through allegory to

illustrate the commodity culture of nineteenth century modernity. In aligning the work of

Grandville to the coordinate system that defines Benjamin’s Arcades Project, it is evident that

the dialectical image can be found within the imagery of J.J. Grandville. His works draw

attention to nineteenth century commodity culture while representing the fossil, ruin, fetish, and

wish image. Grandville’s works serve as a dialectical image for the awakening of the consumer

class-consciousness. In providing a dialogue between the mythic and historical, creating

42 Ibid. (K2,5)

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allegorical divisions between fashion and reality, and presenting the dream characteristics of

phantasmagoria, Grandville’s images provide a chance for historical redemption.

I would like to end this paper in the same way that I started it, with a quote from

Baudelaire,

Fashion should thus be considered as a symptom of the taste for the ideal which floats on the surface of all the crude, terrestrial and loathsome bric-a-brac that the natural life accumulates in the human brain: as a sublime deformation of Nature, or rather a permanent and repeated attempt at her reformation.43

In this nineteenth century quote we recognize fashion’s ability to interact with the natural world,

to change it, to alter it, to deform it. Fashion, as Baudelaire states is a “taste for the ideal;”

consumer culture demands idealized forms through fashion despite the “bric-a-brac” of “natural

life.” Baudelaire understood that fashion was used as a mask for Nature, much like Benjamin did

in his search for Messianic redemption.

43 Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” 33.

Bibliography Baudelaire, Charles. The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays. London: Phaidon, 2012. Benjamin, Walter. "Central Park." Edited by Lloyd Spencer. New German Critique 34 (1985):

32-58. —. The Arcades Project. Edited by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge,

Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002. Benjamin, Walter. "Theses on the Philosophy of History." In Illuminations, edited by Hannah

Arendt, 253-264. New York, New York: Schocken Books, 2007. Buck-Morss, Susan. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project.

Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1991. Caygill, Howard. Walter Benjamin, The Coulour of Experience. London: Routledge, 1998. Grandville, Jean Ignace Isidore Gérard. Un Autre Monde. Paris: H. Fournier, 1844. Hannoosh, Michele. "The Allegorical Artist and the Crisis of History: Benjamin, Grandville,

Baudelaire." Word & Image 10, no. 1 (1994): 38-54. Steiner, Uwe. Walter Benjamin, An Introduciton to His Work and Thought. Translated by

Michael Winkler. Chicago, Illinois: The University of Chicago Press, 2010. Wolin, Richard. Walter Benjamin, An Aesthetic of Redemption. New York, New York: Columbia

University Press, 1982. Wollen, Peter. "The Concept of Fashion in the Arcades Project." boundary 2 (Duke University

Press) 30, no. 1 (2003): 131-142.

Figure 1:Found in, Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, 211.

Figure 2:Grandville, Myosotis, 1846.

Figure 3:Ladies’ Cabinet, Ball & Public Promenade Dresses, January 1845.

Figure 4:Grandville, A quoi bon du reste la personne?, 1844.

Figure 5:Grandville, La Mode, 1844.

Figure 6:Grandville, Peregrinations D’Une Comete, 1844.

Figure 7:Grandville, Les Poissons D’Avril, 1844.