Flatley, J - Moscow & Melancholia, (2001) 191 Social Text 75

Whether I achieve the secondary purpose of my journey—to escape the deadly melancholy of the Christmas season—remains to be seen.—Walter Benjamin, Moscow Diary, 20 December

Paris changes, but nothing of my melancholy Gives way. Foundations, scaffoldings, tackle and

blocks,And the old suburbs drift off into allegory,While my frailest memories take on the weight of

rocks.—Charles Baudelaire, “Le Cygne” (The swan, trans. Anthony Hecht)

By definition, departures involve loss. For that reason, it makes sense thatthey are frequently colored by melancholia, if by melancholia we mean apotentially depressing preoccupation with absence and loss. This melan-choly of departure acquires some of its emotional specificity from the factthat departure offers to memory a relatively clear image of loss: one cansay to oneself, “At this particular moment in this particular place, I lostthese things.” This is a luxury, for usually losses are messier, more grad-ual, harder to pin down in place and time. As time goes on, the image ofdeparture can gain additional attraction because, like a coin, it can beturned over and its obverse can be seen: the image of returning to theplace that was left and thereby regaining what was lost. In the world ofone’s emotions, the idea of returning to a place can easily become con-flated with the return to an earlier moment in time.

Perhaps this mismatch between the logic of emotion and the workingsof time helps to explain why that moment of return does not necessarilyclose the melancholic circuit that has been opened but, on the contrary,often intensifies it. The fact is that sometimes returns can be even moremelancholy than departures, in at least a couple of ways. On the onehand, if nothing has changed upon your return, all the changes that havehappened in your life—your loves and losses and new jobs and purchasesand travels—seem diminished inasmuch as they are in no way registeredor indexed by your material surroundings. This lack of recognition andreflection in your physical surroundings can leave you feeling a bit ghostly

JonathanFlatley

Moscow and Melancholia

Social Text 66, Vol. 19, No. 1, Spring 2001. Copyright © 2001 by Duke University Press.

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(were all those changes in my life unreal?). On the other hand, returningto a place that has changed quite dramatically has its own spectral char-acter. Precisely at the moment of seeing how a place has changed, yourealize that the place you knew and to which you were attached no longerexists. Now, the older place exists only in your memory, and this fact, as inthe Baudelaire poem above, gives your memories an extra heft; they feelweighty, like rocks.

I experienced this second sort of return when I returned after a four-year absence to a dramatically changed Moscow in the summer of 1997.There were so many advertisements, billboards, fancy stores, ATMmachines (Bankomats; see Figure 1), and other aggressive signs that Cap-ital Had Arrived that it was hard to imagine that this was once the placewhere there were hardly any commodity fetishes (in fact there was hardlyanything to buy at all) and where it was against the law to have dollars inone’s possession. In addition, the architectural face of the city was chang-ing: new buildings and statues had appeared throughout the city, evi-dence that the construction that seemed to be everywhere where there wasnot something new was actually being completed. The city did seemrather allegorical, in Baudelaire’s melancholy sense—signifying at everyturn what had been lost. However, it occurred to me that this awareness ofunrecoverable loss, melancholic as it is, need not be depressing. It was notdepressing because I had the feeling that I was witnessing the movement

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Figure 1. Sign for an ATM machine (Bankomat) on Ulitsa Tverskaya in centralMoscow, summer 1997. Author’s photo.


of History—in particular, the forceful advance of Capital—a movementthat I was experiencing not abstractly at all but in my very own subjectiveexperience of loss. Whatever my feelings about said historical develop-ments, this awareness gave my personal life (the loves and losses and jobsand purchases) a much more than personal feeling through its allegoricalassociation with these dramatic changes. And while it was less clear howthese losses affected Moscow’s residents, it was clear that the structure offeeling in Moscow at that moment was shaped by the fact of change andloss.

Before the summer of 1997, the last time I had been in Moscow was in1993, not long after the “fall of communism” and the democratic defenseof the White House, that event for which Boris Yeltsin was both hale andheroic (both so unimaginable now). In 1993, with the Soviet system sorecently expired, one continually noticed the juxtaposition of old Sovietspaces with newly “capitalist” or “Western” ones.1 What was remarkableabout that Moscow was not so much the existence of “Western” signifiersbut their location next to and within Soviet spaces and sign systems. Thephotojournalists for the local English-language newspaper, the MoscowTimes, could not resist the seemingly endless supply of visual ironies: aCoca-Cola kiosk announcing itself as “The Real Thing” set in front of aconstructivist-style mural with the slogan “We Are Building Commu-nism,” or a young entrepreneur selling posters of Rambo (rememberRambo?) and Latin American soap opera stars in the metro under a hugemarble mural of Lenin. These incongruities had a curious effect: just ascommodity fetishism here seemed unfamiliar, even surprisingly vulgarand absurd, so too properly Soviet spaces—like the metro or state storesor even Red Square itself—acquired a new face. We might even say that itwas only just then that totalitarian Moscow—now that it was no longertotalizing—came into view. Like any space that organizes one’s percep-tions (and like ideology itself ), totalitarian space must be invisible to func-tion. So the fact that Soviet spaces were no longer the only spaces (com-bined with the withering away of Soviet discourse) meant that one had aperceptual and discursive distance from totalitarian space that had beenpreviously denied.

The now-in-relief, erstwhile Soviet mode of publicity seemed to me topossess two related characteristics: first, it addressed not individual con-sumers but members of a collectivity, parts of a mass; second, it wasdesigned to present the Soviet citizen not with the sense of a specific andindividual choice taking place at this particular moment in time but with afeeling for the reality and permanence of Soviet socialism. One did notchoose the Soviet commodity by brand name. For example, instead of

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trademarks or brand names, on the sides of trucks and on storefronts, onewould see simple declarations of what could be found within: MILK

PRODUCTS, or GROCERIES, or SHOES, or HOUSEHOLD GOODS, or BEER, orBREAD. The signs suggest that the product is totally abstract, above speci-ficity; one is led to believe that one has entered the world outside of Plato’scave, the world of pure forms, where the Soviet consumer going to buycheese purchases not a commodity—one cheese of many, chosen by oneindividual—but “Cheese” itself. In the Soviet lifeworld, one partakes ofuniversal, eternal abstractions shared by everyone alike.2 And in 1993,even though the Western commodity was insurgent, the Soviet commod-ity was still lingering around. One still saw those trucks with the big blockletter BEER signs and shopped in state stores for CHEESE.

But by 1997 one was immersed in the world of trademarks and salespitches in which the attraction of immediate consumption had supersededthe promise of the communist eternity; one had become an individual,choice-making consumer. In other words, in Moscow’s new visual field thesigns of capital were much more confident; they no longer coexisted—adventurously, humorously, grotesquely—side by side with the recentlydead Soviet spaces as they had in 1993. Now capital dominated thesespaces. Much of Moscow now looked like Times Square (the old loud andseedy one, itself expiring as I write); there were huge billboard advertise-ments everywhere, and the commodity addressed one at every turn, in away that was disorienting to see in Moscow (but that did not make anuncomfortable setting for my commodity-trained sensibilities). Indeed,even as I drove into the city from the airport, I was somewhat shocked bya series of Calvin Klein advertisements hanging on lampposts along theroad into Moscow. The image was familiar: it depicted a waifish woman inher underwear and could have been copied exactly from Calvin Klein adsI had seen recently at New York City bus stops or in the Interview maga-zine I had read on the plane. It was a bit surprising to see the image itselfin Moscow, but more strange to see the same image repeated maybe fiftyyards apart, one right after the other. One does not usually see serial rep-etition so explicitly performed in actual advertisements. While the sameimage might be on hundreds of bus stops in New York, it would not behanging from consecutive lampposts along Fifth Avenue or the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway or, indeed, on any road. These kinds of spaces, in theUnited States and in the former USSR, if they are used to display images,tend to be used for civic events—flags on civic holidays or decorationsduring a parade. Which is to say: the model of publicity for the new com-modity fetish in Moscow appeared to have been borrowed from the oldSoviet, official forms of publicity.

Back in 1993, it had seemed that in Moscow everyone (to borrow

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from Baudelaire) was celebrating some funeral.3 People were quite preoc-cupied with the recent and—it must be admitted—surprising and spec-tacular expiration of the Soviet. At the time I had the impression thatpeople felt that because the Soviet system had been killed off, capitalismand democracy would magically arise, that the West would save Russia,that the plenitude, predictability, and rationality that (the fantasy went)characterized life in the West would finally arrive in Russia. The govern-ment too appeared to be lost in celebrating the funeral and hence seemedto think that no ideology of a legitimating sort was necessary. Of course,as is now well known, the absence of a reasonable economic plan and alegitimizing ideology was felt soon enough, and repeatedly, to (nearly) every-one’s lament. This left the average post-Soviet citizen with an uncomfort-able and uncanny repetition of the Soviet rhetoric (and reality) of deferral,rhetoric that goes something like: “Modernity, with all its comforts, will bearriving very soon, we just have to endure this difficult period of transitionfirst.”

This desire-for-transition-into-modernity seems to have continuedand intensified in the Moscow of 1997 to the point that no one wanted toeven remember the funeral: they were ready to let the dead bury theirdead. There seemed to be a desire to forget about the Soviet past, anunwillingness to linger on what had recently been lost. Indeed, Moscowcity space itself seemed to erase the Soviet from historical memoryaccording to two complementary strategies: either by repairing all thewrongs committed under its aegis and picking up at the moment rightbefore the revolution (what we might call a redemptive or compensatoryimpulse) or by simply erasing traces of the Soviet or pretending they arenot there in the name of a bright, new, modern, capitalist future (an apoc-alyptic let-the-dead-bury-their-dead strategy).

Take, for example, the rebuilding of Manezh Square (the huge squarejust adjacent to Red Square) as an enormous and luxurious undergroundshopping mall and aboveground pedestrian mall (see Figure 2). Previ-ously, Manezh was a large asphalt open space, with congested trafficaround the edges and cars somewhat randomly parked throughout themiddle of the square. That dirty, noisy, exhaust-filled, anonymous-industrialManezh was directly adjacent to the traditional, classic Russian beauty ofRed Square seemed to allegorize the sudden arrival of Soviet modernity inhistorical time. Also, the wide-open spaces of Manezh made it a site ofanti-Soviet modernity: it was there that many of the huge anti-Sovietdemonstrations took place in the early 1990s. And more recently, it hasbeen the site of various Stalinist, right-wing, anti-Yeltsin demonstrations.Rebuilding this space not only makes such demonstrations in the futuremore difficult but also erases the memory of them and of the dirty and



crowded version of Soviet modernity itself. That it is now a shoppingmall only seems to underscore the desire to place consumption at thecenter of the new post-Soviet lifeworld, and the desire for consumptionitself to be a mechanism for asserting that it is a post-Soviet lifeworld.

Indeed, in that summer of 1997, the possibility of “normal” “Western”-style consumption of various kinds did seem to be on everyone’s minds.For example, the conspicuous consumption of the new class of New Rus-sians was a frequent topic of conversation. In part this was because theNew Russians were themselves a new phenomenon: New Russians madeup the small class of super-rich Russians who had made a ton of money inthe shady dealings right after the “fall of communism.” About them, jokeslike the following circulated widely: one New Russian shows up at a partyand sees that another New Russian is wearing the same tie he is. The firstone asks, “How much did you pay for the tie?” and the second one repliesproudly, “Two hundred dollars.” The first one then says, with disdain:“You idiot—I got mine for three hundred.” That someone was spending alot of money in Moscow was clear from the number of new, expensiveboutiques around Moscow. But not only expensive boutiques; there were also French-style café’s and middlebrow not-so-expensive Euro-pean clothing stores and new movie theaters. And shoe stores: I wasstunned by the sheer number of shoe stores in Moscow, and not only

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Figure 2. New Manezh Square, summer 1997. Author’s photo.


shoe stores but shoe kiosks. It was as if the memory of the shoe storesMoscow lost when the Bolsheviks came to power—in 1920 their numberwent from 689 to 11—had lived on in the Soviet unconscious, waiting forthe moment when Moscow could be compensated for the loss.4 This wasa good example, I thought, of how “retribution,” as Walter Benjaminwould remark in another context, “is fundamentally indifferent to thepassage of time.”5

One’s visual field was altered not only by the new assertiveness of the commodity but also by the many construction projects under way inthe center of Moscow, particularly by two new monumental construc-tions: the statue of Peter the Great by Zurab Tsereteli and the Cathedralof Christ the Savior, with its enormous gold domes (see Figures 3, 4, and5). These two constructions dominated the skyline of central Moscowand were frequent topics of public and private discourse. Zurab Tsereteliwas a prominent Soviet-era sculptor who also happened to be a close per-sonal friend of Moscow’s mayor, Yuri Luzhkov, and his sculpture wasoriginally designed as a statue of Christopher Columbus upon the five-hundred-year anniversary of his “discovery” of America. It was to be agift to a city in Florida, but the city refused it, and Luzhkov, good friendthat he was, offered to buy it for Moscow and change it into a monumentto Peter. The main feeling in Moscow—besides sheer amazement—wasthat not only was the statue stunningly ugly but that it was also inappro-priate for Moscow, since, after all, Peter was the founder of Petersburg (hemoved the capital from Moscow). However, the monumentalization ofPeter is appropriate in its own way for this new Moscow, inasmuch as hereferences the pre-Soviet past, and precisely that past marked by a newcommitment to modernization and contact with “the West,” thereby help-ing to construct a history for Moscow from which the Soviet is excluded.

The cathedral, while enjoying a bit more public support, was alsoengineered by Luzhkov, and it seemed to function more to testify to hisability to “get things done” than anything else. The original cathedral,built in the nineteenth century, had been destroyed by Stalin, and formore than a decade it was to be the site of the new Palace of the Soviets(see Figure 6). That monumental project never got under way; instead,the huge foundation pit that had occupied the site for more than a decadewas converted by Nikita Khrushchev into the largest outdoor heatedswimming pool in the world, which it remained until Luzhkov undertookto rebuild the cathedral. The failed Palace of the Soviets project exempli-fies the infamous slowness of Soviet construction projects, which was acommon topic of Soviet-era jokes. The cathedral underscored that thiswas a new Moscow, one where things could actually get built. Also, therebuilding had a restorative logic that seemed to give instant legitimacy to



any building project: the Soviet is over, and we are now in the process ofrestoring what the Soviet system took away from us so we can moveahead. Whatever the Soviet took away—from shoe stores to the cathedral—must be recovered, no matter the cost, no matter whether we liked it inthe first place. Much of the construction in Moscow that summer seemedto be motivated by this restorative logic.

Together, these projects asserted that Moscow was now to have a newrelation to its past and to Russia’s past, one that underscored the continu-

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Figure 3. Zurab Tsereteli’s statue of Peter the Great (formerly of Columbus).Photograph by Kristin Romberg.



Figure 4. Cathedral of Christ the Savior, under construction, summer 1997.Author’s photo.


ity between the current Russia and its pre-Soviet past. In this sense, thereis a neat symmetry between the Tsereteli statue, which commemoratesPeter the Great, famous for opening Russia to “the West,” and the cathe-dral, which references the architectural achievements connected to Rus-sia’s specifically Russian religious past.

However, one still saw plenty of old Lenins and the hammer and sick-les lingering around the city. But they registered now neither as symbols ofthe current regime nor as those of a regime that had just died. The juxta-position of Soviet symbols and new commodity ones was no longer novel,no longer surprising. The funeral, it would seem, is over: no need tomourn the Soviet any longer—we have left that in the past. But if one isnot lucky enough to be a New Russian, one might have the sense that “thefuneral baked meats did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables,” that thewhole mourning process has been botched or left uncompleted, and thatthere are still ghosts to be dealt with. And there are: the only somewhatless ubiquitous hammers and sickles are the most visible clue that theSoviet lingers on, secretly, very much like a ghost, behind the scenes, inthe structures of feeling as well as the structures of power. Just as theSoviet styles of publicity shape the display of Calvin Klein ads that greetyou on the way into the city from the airport, so too Luzhkov’s mode ofoperation as he rebuilt the cathedral or orchestrated support for the

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Figure 5. Top of Cathedral of Christ the Savior from several blocks away,summer 1997. Author’s photo.


Tsereteli statue reminds the post-Soviet subject of the old Soviet strong-arm tactics. Likewise, the rhetoric of newness, modernity, and progress, asI mentioned above, repeats the rhetoric that sought to legitimize the Sovietsystem for so long. The explicit denial of the Soviet past is a mechanismof disavowal for the New Russian ruling classes, a disavowal that allows


Figure 6. Etching of Palace of the Soviets, designed by B. M. Iofan, which wasto be constructed on the site where now stands the reconstructed Cathedral ofChrist the Savior.


them to pretend that they are doing something new and modern, when infact they are relying on the survival of Soviet modes of existence. This isa disavowal, unfortunately, with which the World Bank and InternationalMonetary Fund (IMF), the American and Western European govern-ments, and the multinationals have been only too happy to collude.

In this context, I find myself thinking that a little more melancholy, alittle more explicit lingering over the Soviet past, might help people toopenly confront and contest the current order of things. It could also behelpful for the people who are currently suffering—and they are many—since it could connect that suffering with “past sufferings” and remind usas well of the “forgotten futures” that were once potential responses tothat suffering.6 I wonder, for example, how, instead of (or along with) theCathedral of Christ the Savior, we might be reminded of the bizarre his-tory of that site—the failed utopian project of the Palace of the Sovietsthat turned into the largest outdoor heated swimming pool in the world.For this is the history that tells us of the desire, among other things, for anoncapitalist, alternative modernity, a future that Russia seems to haveforgotten that it once desired.

It was in part the promise of such an alternative modernity that broughtWalter Benjamin to Moscow in December 1926. In making sense of thecurrent Moscow and its forgotten futures, the concerns and approachBenjamin brought to that Moscow can, I think, offer us some assistance.Throughout his writings, but especially in the “Theses on the Philosophyof History” and in his writings on Baudelaire, Benjamin championed apoliticizing, splenetic melancholy that offers an alternative to the apoca-lyptic and redemptive attempts to negate the Soviet past. In Benjamin’sview, clinging to things from the past enables interest and action in the pres-ent world and is indeed the very mechanism for that interest.7

The challenge for Benjamin is to figure out how to sustain not simplyany interest in the world but an oppositional political interest. This is whyhe is so concerned “to reassess and redefine the conditions of experience,affectivity, memory and the imagination”:8 for Benjamin, if one cannotimagine caring about and having an emotional investment in one’s histor-ical situation, then critical insight and willpower are essentially irrelevant.9

Therefore, in order to understand Benjamin’s methodology and how itmight help us map out the possibilities for an oppositional structure offeeling in the current Moscow, we must reconstruct his view of affect. Intwo writings from the 1920s, one from “One Way Street” and one fromthe Moscow Diary itself, Benjamin suggests what are for him the key ele-ments of affective experience: its materiality, its disjunctive temporality,and the fact that it works through attachment and connection.

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Here Benjamin speculates on the logic of love, suggesting that emo-tion seems to require certain angles, corners, and spaces in which toreside.

He who loves is attached not only to the “faults” of the beloved, not only tothe whims and weaknesses of a woman. Wrinkles in the face, moles, shabbyclothes, and a lopsided walk bind him more lastingly and relentlessly thanany beauty. This has long been known. And why? If the theory is correctthat feeling is not located in the head, that we sentiently experience a win-dow, a cloud, a tree, not in our brains but rather in the place where we see it,then we are, in looking at our beloved, too, outside ourselves. But in a tor-ment of tension and ravishment. Our feeling, dazzled, flutters like a flock ofbirds in the woman’s radiance. And as birds seek refuge in the leafy recessesof a tree, feelings escape into the shaded wrinkles, the awkward movementsand inconspicuous blemishes of the body we love, where they can lie low insafety. And no passer by would guess that it is just here, in what is defectiveand censurable, that the fleeting darts of adoration nestle.10

When we love we become attached to what is defective, weird, awk-ward in the beloved rather than “beauty” itself. It is the weird that “binds”us. This fact is especially interesting because it reveals to us somethingabout the nature not only of love but also of feeling or emotion moregenerally. Benjamin hypothesizes that sensory feeling (Empfindung) isexperienced not in the brain but in the materiality of the place. Emo-tions, in this case “adoration,” take advantage of this fact about senseperception in order to find a place to reside and hide, like the birds amongthe leaves. Love and adoration travel along the material paths of sensationto find a dwelling place; the “fleeting darts of adoration” require some-where to “nestle.”

I like this example because Benjamin has picked the most humanistemotion, love, in order to make his antihumanist point that emotion is notsomething that comes from some innermost self. In this picture, subjec-tivity is not self-contained or containable. Love, or adoration, or by exten-sion emotion itself is not a subject-object phenomenon that comes from“inside” and moves outward toward objects (or, as Heidegger put it, “Amood . . . comes neither from ‘outside’ nor from ‘inside’ ”).11 Rather, it isstrictly and irreducibly relational; it occurs in the “between.” Affects existin forms of nonintentional attachment. Intellection, on the other hand,inasmuch as it works through representation, or negation, loses any traceof the world in which the experience happened. What you are left with isa concept, a knowledge—with the advantage, of course, that the object isnow under your control, in your brain. But the object no longer has thatevocative power; it is no longer a handhold for memory. For Benjamin,



emotions are interesting because they put us—precisely at those momentswhen we care most, when we really feel the value of something—“outsideof ourselves.”

This outsideness can also bring with it a sense of temporal disjunc-tion, an interruption of homogeneous time. While in Moscow, Benjamingoes to the state museum and is surprised and pleased by a Cézannepainting he sees.

As I was looking at an extraordinarily beautiful Cezanne, it suddenlyoccurred to me that it is even linguistically fallacious to speak of “empathy.”It seemed to me that to the extent that one grasps a painting, one does not inany way enter into its space; rather this space thrusts itself forward, espe-cially in various very specific spots. It opens up in corners and angles inwhich we believe we can localize crucial experiences of the past; there issomething inexplicably familiar about these spots.12

Here Benjamin does not explain how the painting does what it does—why this Cézanne? He is much more interested in an experience of theobject than in the object itself. All he says of it formally is that “it depictsa road running through a wood. There is a group of houses to one side.”(It has been deduced, though Benjamin did not mention it, that the paint-ing is The Road to Pontoise.) First, Benjamin notes that he understoodthrough this painting that it is not correct to speak of “empathy” in aes-thetic experience. One does not imagine oneself inside the painting oreven identify with the general “feeling” produced by it. Indeed, thisescapist mode would be analagous to the acedia-producing empty con-templation against which he rails in the “Theses on the Philosophy ofHistory.”13 Rather, the painting has its own kind of agency: its space“thrusts itself forward,” bringing with it an entirely unexpected dialecticalflash of lightning where certain “crucial experiences” from the past can be“localized.” While it is like Proust’s madeleine in its temporally disjunctivereturn to a past moment, it is unlike Proust in that this painting has nopersonal, indexical meaning for Benjamin: it is not as if he had this paint-ing or a similar one in his house as a child. But these “angles and corners”nonetheless produce an effect like Freud’s uncanny; they are “inexplicablyfamiliar.”14 It is as if those “crucial experiences” from our past are them-selves each equipped with their own image, but one that does not becomeclear to us until we see an image that is in some way similar to it.15 Indeed,for Benjamin, we have no other way to access such memories.

The “spots” in this painting, then, are inexplicably familiar for Ben-jamin, I believe, because the painting manages to invoke what he else-where calls the “mimetic faculty.” This is the faculty that allows us toperceive similarities, an ability that seems especially operative in the region

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of emotion and that for Benjamin is in some sense the basic element ofexperience itself. (“Experiences,” he would write elsewhere, “are livedsimilarities.”)16 It is a faculty that is in decline, in large part because thecommodity-money system encourages us to think in terms of equivalenceand identity, of how things can be made exchangeable. For Benjamin,similarity—being alike and in relation to but not equivalent—is anentirely different quality from identity. It is, as Benjamin says in anothercontext, what allows us to distinguish friends from enemies.17 And it isthis perception of similarity that the historical materialist of the “Theseson the Philosophy of History” must evoke and that Robespierre in thesame text relies on to create a revolutionary approach to the present. TheCézanne painting then is important not only because it helps us survive inan experience-deprived world but also because it reminds us of this kindof experience itself. It reminds us that emotions have their own peculiartemporality and that in order to exist, they require a material form andthat it is by being affected that we connect both to the past and to theworld.

In his prioritizing of affect, Benjamin is relatively unique in twentieth-century Marxism and indeed in the Western philosophical tradition (withsome notable counter examples), where the philosophical subject, thethinking subject, is the foundation of any political-ethical consciousness.Opposition is usually the domain of critique, distance, representation—ina word, negation. Where intentional cognitive reflection generally consti-tutes the sine qua non of oppositional consciousness, affect is generallyseen as the faculty of collusion and inauthenticity. Sartre’s The Emotions:Outline of a Theory would be paradigmatic here. There, Sartre holds thatemotions are a form of degraded consciousness that arises in relation tothwarted will.18 We have an emotion, he writes, when “the paths tracedout become too difficult, or when we see no path, we can no longer live inso urgent and difficult a world. All the ways are barred. However, wemust act. So we try to change the world, that is, to live as if the connectionbetween things and their potentialities were not ruled by deterministicprocesses, but by magic.”19 Emotion is a magical transformation of theworld, where rather than accept that our will is thwarted, we trick our-selves into thinking that the world is other than it is. It is a sour grapes the-ory of emotion—we want some grapes, but we can’t reach them, soinstead we become disgusted by their sourness. And in a sense, a realtransformation does take place—except it is our own body that is trans-formed rather than the world: our body actually experiences that disgust.Because emotions thereby act not on the world but on the body, they represent—in a prefiguring of bad faith—an escapist, ineffective,degraded form of consciousness.20



Clearly Benjamin is quite far from Sartre. Where Benjamin sees emo-tion as the chief characteristic of experience in its “strict sense” (i.e.,Erfahrung), for Sartre emotion is a degraded consciousness. And whereasfor Benjamin emotion is a mechanism of attachment to the material world,for Sartre it is precisely the entry into a completely imaginary world.Nothing, as it were, could be less political for Sartre, since emotions arethe barrier to effective action in the world.

Benjamin believes that because affects come into being throughattachment, and because they actually occur in the materiality of theworld, affective experience can provide us with a link—unmediated byconcepts—to that material world. For Benjamin, emotion attunes us notonly to disruptive, nonhomogeneous time (the stuff of historicity itself )but also to the specific historical situation we are in and to our constitutionby that historical situation: our affects are the key to disclosing to us thehistoricity of our subjectivity. To put it differently, our affective attach-ments—if we listen to them—can disclose something like what Heideggercalled “throwness,” or how we managed to find ourselves somewhere,somewhere we did not put ourselves (as if we were “thrown” there).21 Ourmodes of affective attachment can reveal to us “how we are” in relation(not to “Being” but) to a historical world, to our situatedness in thatworld. In Benjamin’s view, the politically effective critical methodologywould allow historical-material phenomena to “speak for themselves”through the paths of affective attachment, to describe those moments ofbeing outside oneself, and to trace out the historical, indexical nature ofthose attachments. In this way, one can produce a map of our affectiveattachments and, through this now referenceable affective map, figure outhow our affects work and why. It is not as if Benjamin’s emphasis onemotion means that we give ourselves over willy-nilly to our emotions; thepoint is to have some agency in relation to them. But this agency is notintentional in the usual sense of the word. The point is not that cognitionand emotion are exclusive of each other but, rather, that the historicity ofour subjectivity can be disclosed to us only by making our affective livesand their material locations accessible to intellection in what he wouldelsewhere call “a bodily presence of mind.”22 This enables us to makedecisions about what we are going to do and where we are going to go—whether or not to go to Moscow, for example—with some knowledgeabout how that might affect our mood. Emotions are not changed throughcognition or willpower alone, by deciding “Okay, I’m going to be in a dif-ferent mood now”; rather, they are transformed by “countermoods.”Countermoods can be invoked only in a mediated way, through a kind oftactical operation; we deploy tricks and devices we have picked up throughexperience in order to move ourselves into other moods, to open ourselves

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to other affective attachments. Among Benjamin’s devices were watchingfilms, wandering in the city, shopping, reading and translating Proust,smoking hashish, and going to Moscow.

Benjamin’s emphasis on affect and its materiality allowed him toimagine, for his trip to Moscow, the development of a critical practice thatwould “be devoid of all theory.” “In this picture,” he wrote, “all factualityis already ‘theory’ and therefore it refrains from any deductive abstraction,and prognostication, and, within certain bounds, even any judgement.”23

Here he hoped “to take materialism so seriously that the historical phe-nomena themselves were brought to speech.” The historical phenomena,the material sites of affective experience, would work for Benjamin some-thing like a photograph in which we find “the inconspicuous spot where inthe immediacy of that long-forgotten moment the future nests so elo-quently that we, looking back, may rediscover it.”24 I believe that Moscowheld for Benjamin in 1926, and holds for us today, many such inconspic-uous spots and “forgotten futures.”25

To begin with, one still finds collisions between modernization and itsOthers in today’s Moscow. When one emerges from the metro, for example—which is, after all, the most modern and rationalized of spaces, an alle-gory for the modernity of socialism itself—one finds oneself among aseries of old women with little bunches of handpicked dill or cucumbersor radishes who have taken a train trip in from the countryside outsideMoscow where they have grown them in their yards. This experience is socommon and so powerful that when I encounter the smell of fresh dill ina supermarket or restaurant in the States, I am immediately (and involun-tarily) brought back to that little clearing outside the metro stations inMoscow. Experiences of temporal disjunction catastrophes are no lessfrequently produced by today’s Moscow than they were by Benjamin’s.

The summer of 1997 saw the long buildup to the 850-year Moscowbirthday celebration. This celebration, heavily advertised throughout thecity, emphasized the greatness of Moscow now, its pedigree as an inter-national city, ready for foreign investment. Moscow itself was to be seen asan attractive commodity—shiny, new, sexy (see Figure 7). Not only newand sexy and shiny but also sailing through time into the future. The cel-ebration seemed to articulate a sense of Moscow’s past that was in keepingwith this sense of progress, of moving forward into the future. Anyonewho knows the history of Moscow knows that it has been filled with themost extraordinary disruptions—moments when time has stood still. Butfor the anniversary, Moscow’s history was not to be seen as one filled withheterogeneous disruptions—revolutions and wars and reconstructions—but was to be presented as a history of steady progress, achievement, and



duration. One saw the “850” everywhere, as if Moscow itself were to pro-vide the framework for feeling oneself moving through this homogeneous,stable time. The history of Moscow was not something to be drawn uponin order to intervene in the present, to disrupt the current course ofevents, but exactly the opposite; the city’s history was being used toanchor its current position, to reassure everyone that the ship of progresswas sailing full steam ahead. But the image of progress was not the onlyrepresentation of the post-Soviet experience of historical time.

For hidden collective desires for social transformation, I am led, fol-lowing Benjamin, to the new forms of the commodity and mass culture,the daily experience of consuming in the post-Soviet Russia. In the sum-mer of 1997, I was struck in particular by an advertisement for the news-paper MK, short for Moskovsky Komsomolets. Before examining the ad indetail, I will offer a little background: During Soviet times MK was theofficial organ of the Komsomol, the Young Communist League. In a wayit was the paradigmatic Soviet ideological device, directed as it was towardfuture party members. It was therefore also little read; everyone under-stood that it was a boring paper, a paper that existed only thanks to theparty. In post-Soviet times, MK ownership changed hands and the formatchanged radically: it became an extremely popular tabloid-style dailynewspaper, with gossip and gory crime stories as its mainstay. This trans-

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Figure 7. Advertisement for 850-year Moscow birthday celebration, Pushkinmetro station, summer 1997. Author’s photo.


formation of the most modest and institutional-conservative of newspa-pers into exactly the kind of lowbrow, vulgar capitalist mass-cultural pub-lication that was a perennial object of official Soviet disdain is understoodby the post-Soviet public to be pleasurably ironic and even perverse. Thisalso makes MK a kind of literal melancholic incorporation of the Sovietpast: the very name recalls that Soviet past, flaunting its flouting of thoseSoviet norms in the most gaudy-capitalist of ways, yet at the same time itrecalls that Soviet past, acknowledging that part of the attraction of MK isthat the moment of its publication is a post-Soviet moment.

That said, the following ad was plastered on city buses in the summerof 1997 (see Figure 8): “Umri Toska, Chitay MK!” [Die toska, read MK !];“Gazeta dlya vsex” [A newspaper for everyone].

I take the basic point of this ad to be the promise that by reading MK,you will relieve your toska, which means, roughly, “melancholy” (butmore on that below): Read MK and your melancholy will be relieved.The commodity contains the potential energy for social transformationprecisely because it must promise to respond to the current social situa-tion in a fundamentally compensatory way. So too, quite concretely, withthis ad: it promises to kill your toska. Which of course presumes thatthere is a toska to be killed, a toska widespread enough that this advertise-ment would work to sell newspapers. If one is inclined, as we are, to see


Figure 8. Advertisement for Moskovsky Komsomolets (“Die toska, read MK!”) oncity bus parked on Miusskaya Square, Moscow, summer 1997. Author’s photo.


toska as a fundamentally historical-social phenomenon, then we have here,the raw materials for a historical-materialist analysis of the current histor-ical situation. This advertisement offers a rich site for such a reading, as Ibelieve its logic is actually quite complicated.

First, it addresses Russians in their Russian-ness by referencing toskaitself. Toska is a famous “untranslatable,” a word that Russians feel issomehow essentially Russian, that says something about Russian-nessitself. And for the English speaker, like myself, toska is in fact a strangeand specifically Russian word, in part because it does seem to describe aparticularly Russian, and now particularly post-Soviet, structure of feel-ing. Toska has several translations: anguish, melancholia, depression, long-ing. There is something in toska that describes the feeling not only ofmissing something but of being oneself the one that is missing, of feelingoneself absent, lost, missed. Toska is the affect one might have when thereis a situation, or a place, or a relationship, or something else that youwere in and are now outside of or far away from. Hence, it is the affectused to describe, for example, homesickness (toska po rodin’e). Toska alsohas a sense of duration—it is felt over a period of time; it is a state ofbeing. For all its connotative richness, the closest term in English, I think,is melancholia. The big difference of course is that in English, you cannotrefer to melancholia as something that you do, an act in itself. For inRussian, toska can turn into a verb—toskovat. Here, “longing” seems likethe better translation, since one can long; however, this word lacks thedense clustering of connotative strands that characterizes both melancholiaand toska.

So, in this ad, Russians are being asked to recognize themselves interms of their toska. What is the specificity of this toska? Of course, thepost-Soviet toska is a rather widespread feeling at a moment of radicaltransition. There is plenty to leave one feeling missed, lost; there’s lots tomelancholize over, not least the Soviet promise of an alternative modernityand the post-Soviet promise of a modernity like everyone else’s. But let metake one specific site: inflation. With persistent or at least persistentlyintermittent inflation, the idea of the price takes on an entirely new signif-icance. This is because people on fixed incomes—pensioners—simply donot have enough money to buy the food they need. Obviously, this can beincredibly depressing, leading one to despair. But prices themselves alsobecome a strange object of melancholic fixation in a way that staves offdespair. Within each new, inflated price, the pensioner can see the previ-ous lost past prices, the days before when the pension was actually enoughto allow them to live comfortably. So even as the price itself is the sign ofone’s abjection and poverty, when one clings to the melancholic elementof the price, the price itself becomes a mechanism for a connection to the

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past.26 And the image of this past (“at a moment of danger”) collideswith the present moment, doing nothing so much as illuminating the fail-ures of the current situation.27 Here, one sees an approach to the past thatenables one (as Benjamin says) to recognize the preparation of one’s ownmisery and “thereby acquire a high opinion” of one’s powers.28 Such anapproach to the past “does not inspire resignation, but instead gives oneweapons”—it sustains a splenetic opposition to the order of things. Thesepensioners are not just depressed; they are angry. And one does regularlysee angry pensioners in stores and at markets. The melancholy fixation onprices sustains and feeds that anger. Everyone knows that high inflation isone of the greatest fomenters of revolution, inciting as it does an urgentdesire to stop time, a desire generated precisely out of a melancholy focuson the past.

To return to the advertisement, characteristically and compensatorilyenough, it is precisely mass culture that promises to act as a salve to thattoska—indeed, to kill it. Here we have another element of the ad that isquite unusual to the American eye: in no American ad would you ever seedepression directly invoked in order to sell something (except maybeactual antidepressants or the services of a inpatient psychiatric hospital).Such a reference would be far too existential and negative for the Ameri-can commodity fetish to contain. Far simpler to say “Buy this and behappy.”

So the question is: why does this ad say: “Die toska, read MK !”? Inaddition to the harshness suggested by the affect toska and the verb die,the ad is also quite difficult grammatically, as you may already havenoticed. Specifically, the structure of address appears to be split. Thefirst phrase is in the imperative—“Die toska”—and is addressed to toskaitself. Toska is being told to die. The next phrase appears to be addressedto us, the readers, for it is we (right?) who are supposed to “Read MK.”When I first saw this ad, I found myself thinking: wouldn’t it be muchsimpler to have a single structure of address: Kill toska, read MK (eventhough “Ubey Tosku, chitay MK” would distort the rhyme). This wouldbe easier to read and interpret, to start with, and also it would locateagency in the reader: by reading MK you will be getting rid of your toska.The American advertisement almost always places agency squarely in theconsumer’s hands.

So why the split address? If we presume that it is not simply badadvertising, I believe the ad is acting out a little drama of authority andpower. MK (like the state, perhaps) will take care of the toska for you—you get to watch MK doing that work, with its distanced authority. Afterall, it is not something you want to participate in, the killing of toska—better that someone else do it—but you do want to know that toska is



being taken care of by somebody, and that somebody is MK: we, the news-paper, will take care of killing toska. But only if you read MK. That’s theexchange. The second phrase—“read MK”—would then be a kind ofafterthought to the main drama of the ad. Like the Calvin Klein ads Imentioned at the beginning, this advertisement borrows from the oldSoviet forms of publicity and depends on the fact that a Soviet structureof feeling still resides in most Russian consumers. Here, one is interpel-lated not so much as a choice-making consumer but as a witness, or partof a collective witness, to the spectacle of power. Like the metro, forexample, or Soviet Cheese, the sign system is there to prove the existenceof the eternal abstraction, socialism. It makes you feel good, then, not byallowing you to feel the emotional pleasure of exercising choice, agency,and individuality; rather, the Soviet public image does its emotional workthrough a mixture of fear (of the state), awe (of its massiveness and per-manence), and pride (that you participate in this awesome and powerfulSoviet society). Indeed, in a way this recalls what had been the function ofMK when it was an organ of the Komsomol: MK interpellated you as afuture party member, a believer in the truth of Soviet socialism. There isreal toska for this mode of affective involvement in the world not onlybecause of the comfort it itself offered but also because it made oppositionso easy. It was not difficult in the late Soviet period to be cynical about theKomsomol and about Soviet socialism in general: its failures were so glar-ing, and its predictability and dullness so easy to satirize.

However, I think there is yet another possible reading. Could it be thatthe phrase “Read MK” is addressed also to toska? That is, perhaps thestructure of address is not split at all; perhaps the entire text is addressedto toska (“Die toska, read MK”). In this reading, I think there are twoways that the reader can be interpellated. In the first, the reader is watch-ing a drama where MK is telling toska both to die and to read MK, as if itdies by reading MK; the toska is separated out as not having anything todo with us—someone else is dealing with that whole toska thing, thankgoodness. At the same time, though, it is we who are reading the ad, andperhaps we are being encouraged to identify with that personified toska. Inwhich case we are being told to die, but also to read the newspaper at thesame time. What could be the possible attraction of that?

The attraction, I believe, would be the same one that held itself out to Dostoyevsky’s Kirilov (in The Possessed ), who, you will remember,thought that by killing himself, he could achieve an Archimedean distanceon himself and indeed on all of humanity. It did not work. He confusedthe idea of his suicide with actual suicide. The imagination of one’s owndeath is, as has often been noticed, of great value. This is the experienceJean-Jacques Rousseau found in writing and about which he could say: “I

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can certainly say that I never began to live, until I looked upon myself asa dead man.”29 One thing Rousseau means by this statement is that onlywhen you are able to abstract yourself, to look at yourself as if at a dis-tance, as if you were mourning yourself, can you recognize yourself in away that allows you to remember that you are alive at all.

For Benjamin, this epitaph-like pleasure of looking at oneself as ifone were dead was also the attraction of the diary form that he adoptedfor the only prolonged period of his life while he was in Moscow. Hewrote: “Again and again the diary conjures up the death of its writer. . . .the diary writes the story of our greatness from the vantage point of ourdeath.”30 In a section from “One Way Street,” Benjamin wrote: “In adream, I took my life with a gun. When it went off, I did not wake up butsaw myself lying for a while as a corpse. Only then did I wake.”31 That thesection is called “Closed for Alterations” suggests the reparative potentialof seeing oneself from such a vantage point.32 This was the vantage pointthat was also once offered by the storyteller who, as Benjamin famouslyargued, reminded us to view our lives from the point of view of remem-brance because that is how he viewed hers or his. And the whole point ofthe story is that the listener retells it—you know as you are listening to itthat you will retell it—with details from your own experience; this knowl-edge itself shapes the structure of the listening. So each teller in his or herturn views his or her life from the point of view of death. Benjamin arguesthat the novel arises in part in order to internalize this relational mementomori function—the reminder of mortality—as the storyteller disappears.The novel promises the reader that he will share with the characters “theirexperience of death: if need be their figurative death—the end of thenovel—but preferably their actual one. . . . What draws the reader to thenovel is the hope of warming his shivering life with a death he readsabout.”33

It would seem that today, even the novel can no longer serve thisfunction, even in Moscow (the very land of the long novel), and it is nowthe commodity that offers this self-negativity, the self-abstraction essentialto holding on to the possibility of experience. Of course, the commodityhas always offered it.34 The commodity fetish offers you an abstractedimage of yourself: what you buy is that image. In this light, then, the MKad is something of an allegory for the advertisement as such and thepromises it makes. It is quite explicit about what advertising offers;indeed, it skips the middle step of offering up some concrete image ofyou-with-the-commodity and goes straight to the underlying source ofvalue: the ability to imagine oneself as a dead person. Maurice Blanchothas aptly summed up the value of this ability, the comfort it offers: “Onedoesn’t kill oneself, but one can. This is a marvellous resource. Without



this supply of oxygen close at hand we would smother, we could no longerlive; having death within reach, docile and reliable, makes life possible, forit is exactly what provides air, space, free and joyful movement. It is pos-sibility.”35 At the very least—and it is quite a bit—today’s Moscow holdsout this possibility, this “marvellous resource.” It is a resource we shouldremind ourselves to use.

Coda

It is the summer of 1999, and I have just returned from another trip toMoscow. The city is undoubtedly a more melancholic place these days.The specters seem to return daily: former Soviet hack Yevgeny Primakovhas his moment as prime minister; the bombing of Yugoslavia shockspeople into realizing that maybe all that America-is-an-imperialist-nationCold War rhetoric might not have been so far off base; and the persistenceof inflation and economic crises focuses people’s attention on the dis-junctive passage of time in a way that unpleasantly recalls the early post-Soviet economic catastrophes.

People were still in recovery from the economic crisis at the end of thesummer of 1998, when in a single day the exchange rate went from fiverubles to the dollar to about twenty-five. Nearly everyone who had anymoney in the bank lost all of it. Employment opportunities immediatelydried up. “Before crisis” and “after crisis” have entered into the everydaylanguage, underscoring the extent to which it is clear to everyone thatsome kind of epochal change took place, not just in everyone’s personalfinances but in the “progress” of the post-Soviet society. The ubiquity ofcorruption and the presence of a new super-rich class are starting to reallyirritate people. In general, people seem to be more splenetic about post-Soviet political life. And global capital is increasingly striking people as aproblem, not only for post-Soviet citizens but for the Russian State aswell. Where there were previously Calvin Klein ads there are again civicmessages: pictures of and quotes from Pushkin, mostly, since it was thetwo-hundred-year jubilee, but also even more boldly nationalist slogans,such as “NO ONE CAN HELP RUSSIA EXCEPT OURSELVES” (see Figure 9),a not-so-subtle jab at the IMF and Western aid, but also a plea, as thesmall print at the bottom notes, for people to pay their taxes. Russiankitsch seems to be making a comeback as well: in the stores they are sell-ing vodka bottles in the shape of Pushkin’s head. If Benjamin is right andthe presence of loss and brooding over the past is the key to politicaltransformation, then Russia is ready.

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Figure 9. Sidewalk advertisement: “NO ONE CAN HELP RUSSIA EXCEPT

OURSELVES” (below, in smaller print: “ ‘Everyone is required to pay the taxesestablished by law . . .’ Constitution of the Russian Federation, Statute 57”),summer 1998. Author’s photo.


Notes

I have benefited from an unusual amount of feedback in writing this essay. Iwould like to thank Danielle Aubert, Susan Buck-Morss, Jennifer Doyle, RitaFelski, Phil Harper, Alex Levant, Eric Lott, Heather Love, Randy Martin, JoséMuñoz, Lena Petrovskaya, and Kristen Romberg for their helpful comments andencouragement. Even more gratitude goes to Sasha Ivanov for the invitation towrite this essay in the first place and for numerous insights, pieces of advice, andother assistances.

1. At the time, Aleksander Ivanov and I took the opportunity to write a littleabout the strangeness of the moment. See our “Letter from Moscow,” Architec-ture New York (fall 1993). Some of the following remarks about Moscow in 1993are excerpted from this article.

2. Of course, this is all complicated by the fact that there were always a fewpeople who did get to consume Western commodities, which set the whole Sovietsystem in cynical if imaginary relief. But even though the image of the “Western”commodity shaped the Soviet relationship to consumption, it was the Soviet com-modity and the Soviet experience of consumption that nonetheless structuredmost people’s daily lives.

3. See Charles Baudelaire, “The Heroism of Modern Life,” part of “TheSalon of 1846,” in The Mirror of Art: Critical Studies by Charles Baudelaire (Lon-don: Phaidon Press, 1955), 127.

4. This information (and much more of interest) is recounted in TimothyColton, Moscow: Governing the Socialist Metropolis (Cambridge: Harvard Univer-sity Press, 1995), 118.

5. Walter Benjamin, “The Meaning of Time in the Moral Universe” (1921),in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 1: 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock andMichael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 286 (here-after cited as SW1).

6. I borrow this Benjaminian phrase from Miriam Hansen’s essay “Benjaminand Cinema: Not a One Way Street,” Critical Inquiry (winter 1999): 306–343.

7. At this point in a longer version of this essay, I trace out Benjamin’s the-ory of melancholy and experience and its implications for his materialist method-ology in some detail.

8. Hansen, “Benjamin and Cinema,” 325.9. Silvan Tomkins, a more recent theorist of affect, is helpful here: “The

interrelationships between the affect of interest and the functions of thought andmemory are so extensive that absence of the affective support of interest wouldjeopardize intellectual development no less than destruction of brain tissue. Tothink, as to engage in any human activity, one must care, one must be excited,must be continually rewarded. There is no human competence which can beachieved in the absence of a sustaining interest, and the development of cognitivecompetence is peculiarly vulnerable to anomie.” From Shame and Its Sisters: ASilvan Tomkins Reader, ed. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank (Durham,N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995), 77.

10. Walter Benjamin, “One Way Street,” in SW1, 449, my emphasis. 11. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward

Robinson (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1962), 175.

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12. Walter Benjamin, Moscow Diary, trans. Richard Sieburth, ed. GarySmith (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 42.

13. See in particular “Thesis VII,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans.Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 256. In this text, Benjamin singlesout what he calls a “historicist” approach to the past and the “Social Democratic”view of “progress” (Social Democrats were the neoliberals of Benjamin’s day) forworking in tandem to produce a depressingly complacent and cynical relation toone’s historical present. In taking on historicism, Benjamin argues that what mustabsolutely be avoided—even if it is generated out of the seemingly benign impulsesof empathy or curiosity—is the “historicist” attempt to reconstruct the past “as itwas.” Historians who want to “relive an era,” for Benjamin, end up involved in “aprocess of empathy whose origin is the indolence of the heart, acedia,” that medievalsin also known as sloth. It is a mistaken response to depression, one that only makesyou more depressed because it seeks to escape rather than to transform the condi-tions that created the depression in the first place.

14. Benjamin’s observations on the Cézanne painting appear to clearly pre-figure his idea of the “optical unconscious” first articulated in his “Little Historyof Photography,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 2: 1927–1934, trans.Rodney Livingstone and others, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, andGary Smith (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 510 (hereafter citedas SW2). Also see Hansen, “Benjamin and Cinema,” 337–39, and “Benjamin,Cinema, and Experience: ‘The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology,’” NewGerman Critique 40 (winter 1987): 179–224; 210–20 in particular.

15. For Benjamin, the ability to perceive similarity—the ways that things are alike but not the same as each other, as opposed to the identity equivalence ofthe commodity economy—is the basic element of play and experience. It is anability that means-ends rationality slowly erodes in us personally and that mod-ernization has steadily eroded collectively. “The perception of similarity is inevery case bound to a flashing up. It flits past, can possibly be won again, butcannot really be held fast as can other perceptions.” “Doctrine of the Similar,” inSW2, 695.

16. Benjamin, “Experience,” in SW2, 552.17. See Benjamin’s comments on experience and spleen in “On Some

Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Illuminations, 184. 18. Jean-Paul Sartre, The Emotions: Outline of a Theory, trans. Bernard

Frechtman (New York: Philosophical Library, 1948). 19. Ibid., 58–59.20. Emotions are, he writes, “a spontaneous and lived degradation of con-

sciousness in the face of the world” (ibid., 77). It should be noted that Sartre’stheory does have the dialectical advantage of making emotions into a kind ofphotographic negative of the world; insofar as they are magical transformations inresponse to obstacles, our emotions then offer us a picture of what is missing andthereby dialectically imply the negation and transformation of the world.

21. For Heidegger, mood (Stimmung) has a disclosive power both prior toand beyond will and cognition. Mood is the most basic and primary way for us tosee how we are in relation to the world. “Ontologically mood is a primordialkind of Being for Dasein, in which Dasein is disclosed to itself prior to all cogni-tion and volition and beyond their range of disclosure. And furthermore, when wemaster a mood, we do so by way of a counter-mood; we are never free of moods.Ontologically, we thus obtain as the first essential characteristic of states-of-mind



that they disclose Dasein in its throwness, and—proximally and for the mostpart—in the manner of an evasive turning-away.” Being and Time, 175.

22. Benjamin, “One Way Street,” in SW1, 483.23. Walter Benjamin, letter to Martin Buber, 23 February 1927, in The Cor-

respondence of Walter Benjamin, ed. Gershom Scholem and Theodor Adorno,trans. Manfred Jacobsen and Evelyn Jacobsen (Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, 1994), 313.

24. Benjamin, “A Little History of Photography,” in SW2, 510.25. Miriam Hansen thematizes this phrase in “Benjamin and Cinema.”26. Thanks to Alexandr Ivanov for this insight. 27. “To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way

it really was’ (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at amoment of danger. Historical materialism wishes to retain that image of the pastwhich unexpectedly appears to man singled out by history at a moment of dan-ger.” Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, 255.

28. “The contemporary who reads a work of history and recognizes justhow long his own overwhelming misery has been in preparation — and thedemonstration of this must lie close to the historian’s heart—thereby acquires ahigh opinion of his own powers. A history which teaches him this kind of lessondoes not inspire resignation, but instead provides him with weapons.” Benjamin,“Re the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress,” in Benjamin: Philosophy,Aesthetics, History, ed. Gary Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989),74.

29. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (NewYork: Modern Library/Random House), 236.

30. Benjamin, “Metaphysics of Youth,” in SW1, 13, 15. 31. Benjamin, “One Way Street,” 477.32. One of Benjamin’s other rare experiments with the diary form was his

“Diary from August 7, 1931, to the Day of My Death,” of which the opening lineis “This diary does not promise to be very long.” SW2, 501.

33. Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” in Illuminations, 101.34. On this, see Marx on the commodity in Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, trans.

Ben Fowkes (New York: Penguin/New Left Review, 1976), 165. I discuss thisidea at greater length in my “Warhol Gives Good Face: Publicity and the Politicsof Prosopopoiea,” in Pop Out: Queer Warhol, ed. Jennifer Doyle, Jonathan Flatley,and José Muñoz (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996), esp. 115–18.

35. Maurice Blanchot, “The Work and Death’s Space,” in The Space of Lit-erature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 97.

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