I would like us to discuss this quote.

"The situation of consciousness as patterned and checkered by sleep and waking need only be transferred from the individual to the collective. Of course, much that is external to the former is internal to the latter: architecture, fashion - yes, even the weather - are, in the interior of the collective, what the sensoria of organs, the feeling of sickness or health, are inside the individual. And so long as they preserve this unconscious, amorphous dream configuration, they are as much natural processes as digestion, breathing, and the like. They stand in the cycle of the eternally selfsame, until the collective seizes upon them in politics and history emerges." - Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project

http://graphics.boston.com/bonzai-fba/Globe_Photo/2006/06/10/1149949858_8314.jpg

http://graphics.boston.com/bonzai-fba/Globe_Photo/2006/06/10/1149949858_8314.jpg

He says this again and again, and often says it better.

I buy this, though I wonder about what some of the ways the collective can seize upon this individual internalism is. Would he have seen abortion politics as an attempt to turn the internal into this collective experience - and the corresponding opinions on abortion represent various places that the history/politics may go?

I mean, likely he was talking about Communism V Fascism (since isn't that what he's always talking about?) and the embrace of the individual suffering/illness as public politics. Communism attempting to resolve that illness and Fascism trying to exploit it.

(Is this the kind of discussing you were looking for?)

i hope otto found love

total complexity-theory bait. he even says "emerge." but i'm sort of a sucker for complexity theory, so i say otm -- with all the predictable caveats. part of the problem with this kind of thing (with complexity theory in general) is figuring out at which point it stops being metaphorical and becomes just descriptive. i sure don't think benjamin knew.

Nevermind my previous comment. He's definitely talking about Communism here and /not/ fascism. As in, Communism politicizing art. Or, in this case, architecture, or fashion. I'm not sure how one would go about politicizing weather tho. Can you? (Katrina, maybe?)

more like walter bendyermind

What does Benjamin have to do with cheap & outdated stock vector illustrations.

Also, is this suggesting that weather is, like fashion or architecture, a conscious way of imposing style/form upon something natural (ie: Armani:Clothing :: Ionic:Homes :: Weather:Something Else)? Or is it just saying that architecture and fashion form this internal consciousness - and also weather does. Which would extend the internal consciousness from these limited human pursuits into the realm of the realm of climatology, or just life in general. We dream ourselves, so-to-speak. Or is this some kind of Rortian construct: The weather doesn't exist until we describe it as so.

But very cool quote. I dig.

Page # plz?

total complexity-theory bait. he even says "emerge."

Yes but he also says "the cycle of the eternally selfsame" which sounds less emergent than Buddhist.

Same thing, I guess. Zen and the art of ant colony maintenance.

i think it just means that "weather" is a collective human construct.

i don't think he means that the collective can/will control the weather. but i do think he's talking about a marxist/utopian level of collective awareness and action. making the normal marxist mistake of confusing the descriptive with the prescriptive. (this is not just a marxist mistake, obv. just that his version of it is the marxist version.)

xpost:

yeah that's funny, i was just thinking that complexity theory is a sort of attempted scientific model of enlightenment.

This isn't Zen, so much. It's more like the opposite. XP

tipsy, I agree. He's saying that weather is the narratology of climate, I think. But he seems so excited to add "AND WEATHER TOO" that I wonder what he's getting from it.

My friend thinks that he loves the weather idea because it's almost a literalizing of the internal individual. You burp, it thunders. It rains, you piss. Etc. It dramatizes the relationship between your internal process and the internal collective.

i've always secretly liked that harmonica tag in teh perfect strangers theme

well you could pretty easily push that "internal process" metaphor too far. but really i need to read this to know where he's going with it. one of those things that's been on the should-read list for a while.

Also, I think he's speaking of a primordial human consciousness here. That we remain in a forgotten, "amorphous dream configuration," until the collective seizes upon these things in politics, and then history begins. History is a process of politicizing these things. Or making these things explicit.

History comprises the collective's notable burps.

That sounds pretty close. Notable being the important word - not just notable in terms of worthy of being noted, but notable in that it /was/ noted. The process of noting the burp makes history.

Is this guy pre- or post-Jung?

Contemporary, but he's not writing about collective unconscious.

The process of noting the burp makes history.

but the danger the potential danger comes in thinking that because you noticed the burp, you can control it or harness it or whatever. that was the marxist fallacy (just as much as it is the milton friedman fallacy).

xpost:
well yes and no. he's talking about trying to make the collective unconscious conscious, isn't he? (right, a different collective unconscious than jung's, but still.) making the autonomic deliberate, or something.

Right, I don't think it's controllable. And your noticing isn't intentional. It springs into consciousness. Again, I think this goes back to Communism politicizing art. When you begin to be aware of these processes, then history comes into being. And this, tautologically, make sense as well. Your organs don't get narrative in your body until you notice them. When your kidney starts to hurt, you notice them and suddenly they change your personal history. When we notice the weather burping (or thundering), we start to narratize it. But moreso, we politicize it.

"*Fiat ars--pereat mundus*," says Fascism, and, as Marinetti admits, expects war to supply the artistic gratification of a sense perception that has been changed by technology. This is evidently the consummation of "*I'art pour l'art*." Mankind, which in Homer's time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art.

its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.

that does sound like the american right wing, post-9/11.

When you begin to be aware of these processes, then history comes into being.

but of course in practice what happens is you begin to try to manufacture the processes, and/or to pretend they're happening when they're not. the downfall of the ideologue.

Btw, does anyone have a page number for this quote?

I don't. Sheesh, really didn't expect this many responses to this thread.

you should have called it 'i would like us to not discuss this quote quite so much jeez'

Where'd you get the quote from, Roxy? I'm trying to trace it back to the text.

a convoluted google result suggests maybe pg 389-90

another for pg 390, and mention of Convolute K1, .5

Cool, I'll look that up at the library tomorrow. What kind of google search are you doing?

Nevermind; looks like you were right. Thanks :)

you should have called it 'i would like us to not discuss this quote quite so much jeez'

Ha! No, I'm glad.

I got it from the opening of Concrete Reveries by Mark Kingwell.

This Walter Benjamin person is no fucking poet, that's for goddamn true. This quote seems so abstracted as to be unsensical.

Needs more breast milk.

the tough bit to me is "until the collective seizes upon them in politics and history emerges."