Why Republicans Don't Write [Literary] Fiction; or, Mark Helprin and Sky-Gazing

Over at n+1, Benjamin Nugent wonders "Why Don't Republicans Write Fiction?"  There must, he writes,

be somebody who can write a decent character-driven short story who also thinks George W. Bush is a good president.

I wanted to find these conservative somebodies: I wanted to talk to them, to find out what they thought of their minority status—whether they thought the publishing world was arrayed against them, or had other explanations for the apparent predominance of their liberal counterparts. And I wanted to read their work, to see  whether it could illuminate the contemporary conservative experience in ways that Republican-penned potboilers and political columns just don’t.

But I couldn't find them.

With the smug air of someone who's spent five hours reading bad literary criticism, I let loose an exaggerated sigh punctuated by Mark Helprin's name.  Somehow anticipating this reaction, Nugent proceeds to spend the rest of the essay discussing Helprin's most popular novel, Winter's Tale (1983).  He convincingly argues that reading it provides "a sense for how being a conservative feels."  Convincing, but not entirely correct. 

Winter's Tale is one of those books adolescents on the cusp of protraction clutch to their chests while mumbling gushing words about the beauty of its prose and its purity of spirit.  The novel appeals to those blessed (or cursed) with the conviction that the world is meaningful but ultimately unknowable—everything has its place so everything will work out in the end.  Cosmic justice works so long as the technocrats keep their compassionate corruption to themselves.  Nugent is absolutely correct to invoke Sean McCann and Michael Szalay's "Do You Believe in Magic? Literary Thinking and the New Left."  But the invocation of my co-blogger and my advisor in an article about my favorite novel from 1991 until my sophomore year of college points to the other source of Helprin's appeal: an implicit faith in order. 

Gravity's Rainbow might never offer a full account of who They are, but people who spend years trying to decipher Their Plan believe in its existence.  It can be understood, we only lack the tools or vision to do so.  Helprin approaches the same problem from a different angle: he convinces readers that order reins but will always be ineffable.  It is a magic realism based on a naive notion of karma.  Call it "folk karma" if you will—and Rich will—but I think it (or something like it) is largely responsible for the appeal of both Winter's Tale and Gravity's Rainbow.  Readers of both feel connections impervious to rational explanation.  Is this what being a conservative feels like?  I honestly don't know.

However, not only do I frequently feel like this, I do so at the urging of someone not usually listed among the great conservative thinkers: Walter Benjamin.  I'm thinking of his seventeenth thesis on the philosophy of history here:

Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well. Where thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions, it gives that configuration [Konstellation] a shock, by which it cristallizes into a monad. A historical materialist approaches a historical subject only where he encountes it as a monad.

I slyly inserted the German Konstellation in there because it better accords with the rest of Benjamin's notion of non-linear history.  My attraction to Benjaminian thought—The Arcades Project in particular—originates with his obsession with Konstellation as a legitimate intellectual position.  Only I'm at loss to defend it as such, since for me, this mode of thought is inherently literary.  Just watch.

In 1995, I graduated from high school.  My favorite books were Winter's Tale and Gravity's Rainbow.  In my final semester, I had what could only be called a crushing crush of a crush on the student teacher in my English class.  She and I bonded over mutual recognition of our taste in jackets, withering remarks about my classmates and her favorite book, Winter's Tale.  When the school year ended, she said her husband—I was crushed—was about to open a used bookstore.  So the summer before my freshman year, I applied for a job at Caliban's Books.  We talked about books for a while, and it turned out his favorite book was Gravity's Rainbow.  (Later that year, he and I would transcribe and index The Crying of Lot 49 in Microsoft Word to be better able to break the code.)  So Winter's Tale landed me a job at Caliban's Books working for a guy whose favorite novel was Gravity's Rainbow.  This all seemed—still seems—somehow meaningful. 

A Konstellation observed. 

This is the power of a Helprin novel, and despite all the nods to political conservatism Nugent points out, I'm not convinced that this will-to-order is necessarily conservative.   

[Actually, I  am, but the self-deprecation didn't shine through.  It's a misreading of Benjamin I'm selling here; but it's not one you're meant to buy.  My fault entirely, though, as I vagued up the second-to-last paragraph too much to make that point clear.]

Comments

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

To be totally honest about not being totally honest, the Konstellation there ain't quite as impactive as it could be...you know, because I'm not that kind o' blogger. Which is only to say, I think this is one of those places where the personal and professional collide, but I lack the balls to embrace the collision and its violence.

[Your Therapist]

Anhedonia, man, anhedonia.

[CR]

Not sure about your little story there as quite the same thing as Benjamin's talking about but it is a very strange sentence, isn't it?

Where thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions, it gives that configuration [Konstellation] a shock, by which it cristallizes into a monad.

The weirdness is that the stopping seems at the same time to form the "Konstellation" and to provide the shock that changes the Konstellation into a monad. So when is it ever just a Konstellation? At what point hasn't it yet crystallized into a monad?

Unless he means for us to imagine the Konstellation as a sort of place where thought stops, like a train stops at a station. The Konstellation isn't conjured by the stoppage, it's just where stopped thought stops.

[Sisyphus]

I still have the exact same reaction whenever I see that passage from Benjamin: what the hell does it mean to crystalize into a monad? I just can't really visualize it.

And I'm sure I know of a lot of conservative-libertarian writers, and non-Bush Republican conservatives (i.e. old skool republicans), but in asking for someone who is simultaneously 1) conservative, 2) a good writer and 3)thinks Bush is a good president requires perfect-storm-like conditions, considering that even the right is backing away from his typhoons of stupidity.

What's also interesting (tho' only tangentially related) is how many writers slid into conservatism as they grew older, particularly right after WWII, like Eliot and Dos Passos, and perhaps even Hughes, and George Schuyler et al. Not only did they retreat from the Left, they largely rejected their earlier formal experimentations. I still can't figure out how much of that is just them growing older or a sea change in the times or something even more strange.

[Luther Blissett]

I don't think Benjamin's dialectical images are about hidden order or meaningful coincidence. He spends an entire Convolute of the Arcades Project collecting tidbits about Jung so as to distinguish these dialectical images from archetypes -- and while Benjamin doesn't address the Jungian idea of synchronicity, I can't see the dialectical image as a moment of synchonricity.

The dialectical image is a monad because its contraditions form a whole, an atom, an unresolvable head-butting, like those Dr. Seuss characters who face each other on the road and refuse to budge each to the other. In Benjamin's terms, it's "dialectics at a standstill." This is where Adorno constantly criticized Benjamin's theory.

The question Benjamin never resolves is whether the dialectical image is a function of perception or historiographic construction. His comparisons of the dialectical image to surrealist practice or to film montage lead me to think that the dialectical image is not something "actually existing" in the past but something smashed together in the historian's practice, in his writing -- basically the citational practice Benjamin employs. But in the second outline of the Arcades Project, Benjamin organizes the project around key spatial images -- the barricades, the arcades, the flaneur, etc. Here, it's like the dialectical image is something the historian cuts out of the dead body of the past in order to diagnose its ills, like a biopsy of a tumor. These dialectical images are historical fragments in which the Raymond Williams categories of residual, dominant, and emergent all co-exist without dialectically resolving.

So it's not about perceiving some hidden order. It's about seeing a historical datum in which the primitive and the futuristic co-exist, in which the barbaric hides a spark of the utopian. William Gibson's images throughout "The Gernsback Continuum" are dialectical images.

(And doesn't Pynchon ultimately view these perceptions of hidden order as a misreading of the world? His characters always *want* some unified conspiracy to oppose, but what they ultimately face is a loosely knit array of forces. This is especially apparent in *Vineland*, *Mason & Dixon*, and *Against the Day*. It might be what separates immature from mature Pynchon: the realization that They are nothing more than a disorganized bunch of greedy, nasty, but ultimately preterite too, people: Hector, Brock Vond, Jesuits, the EIC, the plutocrats, etc.)

[son2]

Winter's Tale is one of those books adolescents on the cusp of protraction clutch to their chests while mumbling gushing words about the beauty of its prose and its purity of spirit.

Hells, yes. Do you take credit for this phrase, "adolescents on the cusp of protraction"? Because I'm going to start using it. It struck me because my father clutches Mark Helprin novels to his chest while gushing about their "exquisite," "sublime" prose. Barf.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

I knew taking out the personal material would render this post overly opaque. I meant to equate Helprin-love with a misreading of Benjamin; that Helprin's attractive only when you don't understand what Benjamin or Pynchon is up to. That said, I still love Benjamin and want to discuss him...but he probably deserves his own post for that. (Or series, as I'd love to do some sort of group read of Benjamin. Time to think, then back at you with more Benjamin.)

Son2, however, that phrase is mine, but as this site is Creative Commons, you're more than welcome to it. (It's one of those that, when I write, am not quite sure if it's clunky or well-turned. I'm glad someone thinks the latter.)

[The Constructivist]

Well, Hawthorne invoked Divine Providence to explain why all human action to end the evil of slavery was bound to not only fail but make matters worse and to try to convince Americans to understand that its evil was part of a larger good, which it was his generation's job to wait for and witness. Even if this may have been an attempt to rearticulate abolitionist arguments about America's national sin, it may well be an example of a conservative urge to respect a hidden order yet to be revealed.

[Adam Roberts]

Luther's account of the Benjaminian Konstellation is very interesting, suggestive. I'm trying to think how it works in, you know, real life (as in that Hegelian example of the dialectic: 'Justice' as ideal, perfect thesis, 'law enforcement' as practical, flawed antithesis, real-life societal structures of Law as synthesis).

So is Benjamin saying (to stay close to the subject of Scott's post) that, eg, an individual is subject to a complex interaction of ideological and political forces, external and internal, until suddenly s/he just stops and thinks "I see now! George W. Bush is the greatest president since Lincoln!" ... which thought coalesces into a monad that reasoned debate can no longer shift?

Or is the indvidual example asinine? Does B. actually mean that this is how history works, fluid and complex until suddenly, bam, it's October 1917 and Revolution has distilled monadically out of the Konstellation of historical forces?

[Luther Blissett]

Adam, my understanding is that these dialectical images exist/are constructed out of the materials of the past. For Benjamin, the cultural expressions of commodity capitalism often have one leg in the past and one leg in the future. Science fiction is great for this, and I think it's sort of what Jameson keys into too. So we could take a certain past vision of the future and see it as "dialectics at a standstill," as an image in which some aspects seem out-dated and other aspects utopian. Benjamin tried to criticize the residual and redeem the emergent.

But all of this historical activity took place with the cast off fragments of the past. Capitalism throws everything into the dust bin, and it's Benjamin's job to search through the dump to find bits and pieces of a future. Adorno saw all this as typical Benjaminian religious nonsense posing as Marxism.

[N. Pepperell]

Scott - Just putting up my hand for a group reading of Benjamin :-)

Luther - I've turned around the same issues you raise about the... ontological status of Benjamin's discussion of history. I've tended to use Benjamin's imagery to highlight the contemporary resonance of our uses of the past - to discuss our tendency to go casting about, scenting like Benjamin's tiger for what interests us in the past: a process we do often without recognising that, when we find our prey, we have actually been hunting ourselves... Without realising it, we go casting about in the past for our own mirror, and experience a shock of recognition when we suddenly encounter some charged fragment ourselves in history...

I've toyed with the idea that Benjamnin's prospect of a past citable in all its moments has something to do, not actually with history, but with a present that could actually freely recognise its own interests, rather than having to cloak them in the aura of inherited truths and precedent. Our desires from transformation - like what we tend to find staring back at us when we look into history - have a contemporary aspect, indexed weakly to history in that we have constituted certain potentials in historical time, and our recognition that these potentials exist is what generates our dissatisfaction with how they remain unrealised in the present...

I think you're quite right to point to Benjamin's critique of Jung - I think a lot of his intention can be unpacked from this: and this critique also has the element of grasping how what can seem universal and timeless, can instead be inculcated via quite mundane contemporary experiences...

But this is an issue I've always wanted to work through more carefully - and nothing I've said casts any particular light on Scott's question of concepts like constellation or monad - other than to suggest that Benjamin seems to have something in mind like a present moment pregnant with historically-constituted potentials, that certain understandings of history - ones which treat the past as something that inevitably unfolded the way that it did - undermine our ability to grasp that all times had this pregnant dimension, this element of potential that then went unrealised - and that developing a different way of thinking about history, one more adequate to this sense of crisis, potential - and defeat - could also be integrally related to how critical theory might reconceptualise itself, in an era when it no longer understands itself as the voice of the lockstep progressive movement of history...

Sorry this is all so compressed - I've about exhausted my procrastination limit for the day, and have to rush back to work :-)

[Frowner]

Hi there. I'm a naive critic who isn't even on stilts, so I don't really have any useful insights to offer, although I enjoy reading Acephalous very much. I do, however, have a curious conservative novel that I like a lot: The Birth of the People's Republic of Antarctica, by the revealingly-named John Calvin Batchelor. It's an odd, badly organized book which isn't written in a way that attracts a lot of conservatives but has such dubious politics that it doesn't exactly attract left-wing folks either.

It's a book that wants to have a point but doesn't, I think. The stated conclusion is that people are fundamentally horrible, violent and selfish, clannish and so on, but that one should nonetheless be prepared to wage an incoherent, bloody struggle against states and ideologies because this struggle is both noble and neccessary. But the book also devotes a lot of time to describing specific political failures, which tends to make you think about how to avoid them.

The main crisis of the book is a convulsion of ultra-nationalism in Europe during which immigrants and foreigners are attacked, imprisoned or cast into statelessness. Then there's plague, and abandoned former client states, and a lot of violence. Also several protracted anti-utilitarian passages.

It's about underlying order, I guess, but the underlying order is both inevitable and terrible.

The prose--well, I wouldn't know good writing if it wore a sign around its neck--but it's not nearly as fakey-sublime cloying as (I find) Helprin.

(Just for the sake of oddity, I would also mention the extremely didactic libertarian children's book The Girl Who Owned A City, which is set in the cluster of suburbs where I grew up and which involves a deeply implausible plague.)

[Ray Davis]

Scott, you're not the online writer I feel closest to (for one thing, we've never met), but you're sure good at prodding. I envy your students. (And your authors, should you ever become an editor.)

Let's see if I can contain this response to the space of a comment field.

Given the time-and-nation spans being covered here, "Right vs. Left" is an iffy dichotomy. Young "revolutionary" T. S. worked for a bank while a "revolutionary" Fascist-to-be tried to raise funds from inherited wealth for him to quit the day-job. Scott and CR, speaking as a Benjamin fan, I got no problem admitting that Benjamin (no matter what his intentions) makes no sense as a political propagandist in his day or our own; I don't think Adorno would've disagreed, and I know for sure the current crop of Benjamin-dissers wouldn't.

Luther, constellations are something the star-gazer invents, and crystallization in Stendhal's sense works the same: thinking is stopped; perception clears -- but what's perceived is something different from what's there according to most witnesses. Suddenly we find firm ground to stand on and work from and write about: the ground we made from the stuff we're suddenly (as of constellization) immoderately devoted to. The historian insists on the "materiality" of the subject, but what makes him a historian (as opposed to just some guy) is his creation of perception of that subject.

Finally and in passing, it pisses me off that Jameson used his latest platform to further encourage academics to confuse the concerns of science fiction with "utopias".

[CR]

Scott and CR, speaking as a Benjamin fan, I got no problem admitting that Benjamin (no matter what his intentions) makes no sense as a political propagandist in his day or our own; I don't think Adorno would've disagreed, and I know for sure the current crop of Benjamin-dissers wouldn't.

Ray, oh please don't misunderstand. I'm not a Benjamin-disser, at least not in this context. I actually love the way he makes things happen this way - this compacted, pseudo-logical sentence, which itself is probably best labelled an enactment of the concept of the "dialectical image," just as the thetical form of the Work of Art essay enacts the argument of the piece itself.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Ray, I take great pride in my prodding, and smile in my heart every time I inspire you to write something. As for my students, well, I wish I had some right now you could be envious of. I'd planned to write a post about how the class I subbed for last week went, but the title would've had to have been "The Deserved Hubris of the Great Teacher Reborn," so I didn't. That said, I do prod in the classroom. For example:

Me: I like to describe my class as a "benevolent democracy." Student: (sheepishly) Don't you mean "benevolent dictatorship"? Me: I don't know, do I?

I can't even admit what I'm doing without doing a bit of it. That said, much of the confusion elicited by this post was simply the product of my having inadequately set it up, such that I looked like I was proffering a reading instead of mocking myself for the one I made (via my first encounter with Benjamin) back in '95. That said -- and as I'll discuss more below -- your sense of Benjamin accords with mine. I don't think we're disagreeing here; or, if "we" are, it's you and I disagreeing with my '95 self.

Frowner, I didn't know you read Acephalous. (I'm assuming you're the same Frowner I know from Unfogged. If not, my apologies.) I think there's something to be said for dystopian fictions -- which is what The Birth of the People's Republic of Antarctica sounds like, from your description and the reviews on Amazon -- tending toward conservative assumptions about human nature. Oddly, for all their Hobbesian assumptions, they often demonstrate that the freer the market it, the more just the society dominated by it will be. I've never quite known how to reconcile that, so I usually file it under "wishful thinking." (There is the odd leftist dystopia which considers technocratic intervention equally bleakly -- The Lathe of Heaven springs to mind -- but I think these types of books emerge mostly from right/libertarian perspectives. They're also often creepy inasmuch as their authors have this "I'll show all those damn liberals!" chip their shoulders.) One of these days, I'm going to make good on one of the lists in my qualifying exams and write about utopian/dystopian fiction, so any other recommendations you may have are more than welcome. (Encouraged, even.)

The rest of you lot, writing about Benjamin, I should highlight that while Luther's account sounds convincing, I'm sure that if I sat down with the text I'd be just as confused as I ever am when reading Benjamin. The thing is, I'm always pleasantly confused, which is why I described that confusion as coming from the literary quality of the Benjaminian text. For example, what I now think of Konstellation is, well, let me (appropriately enough) cherry-pick some quotations:

NP says "Without realising it, we go casting about in the past for our own mirror, and experience a shock of recognition when we suddenly encounter some charged fragment ourselves in history."

Luther says, "the cultural expressions of commodity capitalism often have one leg in the past and one leg in the future." Also, "the question Benjamin never resolves is whether the dialectical image is a function of perception or historiographic construction."

Adam asks, "Does [Benjamin] actually mean that this is how history works, fluid and complex until suddenly, bam, it's October 1917 and Revolution has distilled monadically out of the Konstellation of historical forces?"

Since I've always associated Konstellation with a creative act -- rooted in historical and material traditions, but necessarily creative nonetheless -- with something like songwriting. Now, as I'm no songwriter, I'm imagining this is how it happens, but bear with me. A songwriter possesses two traditions: the first is of all the music he's ever heard; the second, of all the music he's ever liked. Were he to write a song based on the latter, it would be derivative; he needs the influence of the former in order to create some frisson. So when he writes a song, he sits down with all these elements; he toys around with them, balancing those he likes against those he doesn't. Suddenly, in a flash, those traditions stop conversing; the coalesce into something meaningfully new, a productive but creative stoppage of the dialectic.

For example, say a quirky indie band in the tradition of Pavement picks up a jangly guitarist. They play around with the contradictory styles, introducing neutral elements -- neither indie nor jangly, like say, house music -- and all of the sudden they hit upon a sound which stops the conversation, stalls the interaction, deadens the discourse, however you'd like to put it...and sounds like this [mp3]. In that moment, all the possible organization of stars coalesced into a singular Konstellation.

Now, I could very well be wrong about this, but it's how I connect his historical project to the notion (strongly if irrationally held) that he's talking about an inherently creative historiographical moment. You know, history as art.

[Ray Davis]

Scott, that's how I read Benjamin too, almost. The great pop song stands alone. (Well, in a genre and so on, but unless it's a parody it doesn't insist that you remember other pop songs while you're dancing to it.) Whereas history (like criticism) is art with a dependency: the constellation isn't a freehand sketch, it depends on the stars; crystallization isn't a sculpture or a checklist for My Perfect Mate, it depends on saturated solutions or experience with a human being; the "historical materialist" creates the monad but insists on the accuracy and reality of the evidence that led to creation. The ideal self-validating history (like the ideal criticism) would be a collage of primary materials which makes the reader re-experience that creative moment. More like the ideal mash-up than the ideal pop song.

[Frowner]

Hi there, SEK. (I am indeed the very same Frowner from Unfogged, and I'm also that unhappy creature, a non-academic who reads fancy-pants theory--hence the reading of this blog.)

The odd thing about Birth of the People's Republic of Antarctica is the way its critique of "liberal" IMF-style international aid is so close to a left-wing one. Also the way it constantly identifies with "marginal" people (draft-dodgers, gay men (written in the early eighties, remember), the lumpen working class, immigrants) and the modern state as the cruel cause of their marginality. It's a book that is written from the perspective of a weak and already-defeated enemy of the modern state, someone who is out of power and hence identifies with the out-of-power, rather than a triumphant conservatism which has to justify existing suffering or else take responsibility for mending it.

I'm more familiar with left-wing sort-of-dystopias than with conservative ones (Nalo Hopkinson's Brown Girl in the Ring for example) where the dystopian-ness works as a sort of ground-clearing so that everyone sees and agrees on the enemy, has a shared philosophy, etc, also where the really strong modern state has been cleared away. Like, you can rebel against an evil post-collapse ruler who lacks a vast industrial infrastructure and has only the scraps of the previous high technology, while it's rather hard to stage an armed uprising against your average high-tech developed state. I always feel that left wing dystopias are really utopias under another name, which gives me the creeps a little.

[Luther Blissett]

Here's what Susan Buck-Morss, who to me is Benjamin's best reader, has to say:

"[The dialectical image] is a way of seeing that crystallizes antithetical elements by providing the axes for their alignment. Benjamin's conception is essentially static (even as the truth which the dialectial image illuminates is historically fleeting). He charts philosophical ideas visualoly within an unreconciled and transitory field of oppositions that can perhaps best be pictured in terms of coordinates of contradictory terms, the 'synthesis' of which is not a movement toward resolution, but the point at which their axes intersect. In fact, it is precisely as crossing axes that the terms continuity/discontinuity . . . appear in the very early *Passagen* notes in connection with the dialectical 'optics' of modernity as both ancient and new: They are to be understood as the 'fundamental coordinates' of the modern world" (*The Dialectics of Seeing*, 210).

Buck-Morss traces the various terms Benjamin uses as substitutes for "dialectical image" -- fossil, trace, fetish, wish image, ruin. About the last term there, she writes: "The *ruin*, created intentionally in Baudelaire's allegorical poetry, is 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. Note that the figures of the collector, the ragpicker, and the detective wander through the fields of the fossil and ruin, while the fields of action of the prostitute, the gambler, and the flaneur are those of wish images, and of the fetish as their phantasmagoric form. Haussmann builds the new phantasmagoria; Grandville represents it critically. Fourier's fantasies are wish images, anticipations of the future expressed as dream symbols; Baudelaire's images are ruins, failed material expressed as allegorical objects" (212).

I understand this in relation to the contemporary historical novel. Remember how Fredric Jameson argues in *Postmodernism* that postmodern historical fiction does not represent the past but rather pastiches the styles and images of that past? And then Linda Hutcheon replies that this is true, but that this is exactly postmodern historical fiction's critical power: it represents the past as the sum total of its mythic and ideological images collected in the present in order to criticize these images.

I argue in my diss that both critics are right. Contemporary historical novels collect the fetishes, wish images, ruined symbols and fashions, of the past. But while half of their mission is to criticize these discourses about the past, the other half is to redeem certain aspects of these images that express utopian urges, potentially fruitful seeds that fell, in the past, on rocks and bad soil.

For example, Wilson Harris's *Palace of the Peacock* is a revision of various river exploration narratives (from Walter Raleigh to Conrad). But he reverses the trajectory: rather than civilization to savagry, Harris's explorers travel from brutality to peaceful co-existence. For Harris, the moment of exploration and first contact had a utopian and a dystopia potential. Its utopian side expresses the timeless human desire for contact, for exchange, to share, to overcome solipsism and isolation. Its dystopian side expresses the timeless human desire to dominate, to own, to possess, to subjugate. (Harris's is basically an uneasy union of Benjamin and Jung.)

But like Jameson wrote, there's a late-capitalist side to all of this. I locate it in contemporary historical fiction's insistance on the figure of the historian as the main figure of historical agency. This figure takes many forms, often similar to Benjamin's types: the postmodern detective of Ishmael Reed; the archivist of DeLillo; the town historian of Toni Morrison; the journalist of Doctorow; the asset hunter of Bharati Mukherjee. So that under late capitalism, the only figure with agency is the artist, and his/her agency is strictly over symbols, images, text. Change isn't something that happens "in the world," but rather something that happens "in the text that *is* the world."

All of which is to say that I'm not sure the great pop song is a proper example of the dialectical image. A better example might be the discarded, once fashionable and now laughably outdated pop song of the recent past. Benjamin would ask that we turn to that ruin of commodity culture, that fossil of what was supposedly the most new, the most wow. And as we look at the ruin, we see in it the wishes, the dreams of that moment. And then we get down to business, debriding the dead tissue, the parts of that pop song that are throwbacks to the distant past, and trying to save the living tissue, the aspects of that pop song that were never allowed to blossom and that might save us today.

Hip-hop did this to a huge extent. It looked back to disco, to funk, to rock, to electronic music, and took what was still living, while discarding the rest: saving a breakbeat here, a guitar riff there, a bass line over there, but getting rid of stupid, outdated lyrics or ten minute synth solos or George Clinton's cosmic tirades. At its best, young hip-hop consolidated what was healthy and alive in the pop culture of the past 100 hundred years. De La Soul, Boogie Down Productions, Public Enemy, KRS-One, Erik B and Rakim, Neneh Cherry, Afrika Bambaataa, A Tribe Called Quest.

[Eileen Joy]

I think one of the very astute [if itself poetically dense] readings of Benjamin's "Theses" essay, which includes an extended meditation on his idea of the "constellation," is Eduardo Cadava's "Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History" [Princeton UP]. Also, it always helps to approach Benjamin, I believe, as a kind of mystic of historicism.

[Sisyphus]

Luther, I agree with you about Buck-Morss being a great reader of Benjamin. And your dissertation sounds intriguing!

The one twist I'd add in agreement to your outdated-pop-song theory (the "outmoded" in Benjamin's term), is that the pop song goes out of fashion, is cast aside as cultural detritus, and then is recovered by someone (the cultural critic? the collector?) who is *shocked* by a flash of "profane illumination" that reveals not only how mass culture worked in the past, but how it functions in the present moment, somewhat similar to how the surrealists wandered the modern city for chance encounters of the "sur-real" that would jolt them out of the mundane and the ordinary.

For me, that moment of recognition is akin to the moment a stargazer, looking upward, suddenly sees a constellation in what is actually a group of stars. That's why I'm confused about that whole "crystalizing into a monad" thing (apart from the pure silliness of the words), since the act of perceiving a constellation already seems to be producing the shock and arrest.

If this discussion of Benjamin continues (another vote in favor, here!), we also need to bring in his idea of the Angel of History and the Paul Klee drawing of the Angel transfixed by the piling up of catastrophe on catastrophe, blown backwards into the future (which might link up in interesting ways to other peoples' discussions of sci fi and utopia/dystopia too).