The Colonies in Concrete

Abstract

While a number of scholars have sought to lift Walter Benjamin's urban writing out of its original European context and to appropriate it for studies of postcolonial cities and cultures, few have attempted to situate Benjamin's original analyses of urban consumer culture within the wider context of European colonialism in the nineteenth century. Yet Benjamin's montage of the Parisian capital in the Arcades Project captures a key moment in the integration of metropolitan consumer publics into new global markets, and, with its plethora of exotic commodities, imperial spectacles and world fairs, records popular imaginative constructions of the colonies as spaces of leisure, luxury and abundance. This essay suggests that, in linking these images to the abstract and mysterious properties of the commodity form, and in underscoring the forms of abstraction at work in the ‘dreamworlds’ of metropolitan consumer culture, Benjamin's work can be seen to expose a colonial politics of the visible at the heart of nineteenth-century metropolitan consciousness. His theoretical interventions, moreover, give shape to an alternative mode of reading the metropolis – one that brings traces of the uneven histories and structural legacies of colonial exchange into the field of vision.

• Benjamin
• Walter
• colonialism
• commodities
• urban culture
• visual politics

Notes

1 Here it is important to note the hermeneutic struggle over conflicting ‘Benjamins’ within contemporary scholarship. As various critics have observed, elements of Benjamin's linguistic, mystical and messianic thought have tended to sit uneasily with his later materialist and unorthodox Marxism (see Leslie 2000). In any case, as Benjamin's biographers have noted, his work towards the end of the 1920s made a departure from the concerns of Weimar academic circles under the influence of the militant avant-gardism of the Surrealists. The beginning of the Arcades marked, in his own words, the ‘end of an epoch of careless, archaic, philosophizing … [and] rhapsodic naiveté’ (1994, 488–489).

2 In this way the historiographic method proposed by Benjamin has already proven useful for the kind of postcolonial scholarship that has sought to excavate traces of the cultural and economic inequality that persists under contemporary globalization. In an essay which begins with Benjamin's Angel of History, Neil Lazarus has called for a suitably materialist engagement with global history in all its complex and persistent unevenness (2013, 534).

3 Benjamin's explicit if unorthodox use of Marx throughout the Arcades calls for an understanding of the commodity that remains to some degree subject-centred. For a critique of contemporary locations of agency in objects, see Wolff (2012).

4 One satirical cartoon from 1840, for example, shows the British army forcing crates of opium onto the Chinese (Renonciat 1985, 294).

5 For Marx, the ‘concrete relationships of cooperation and dependency between different types of labour that are needed to produce commodities are invisible. They have no discernible social expression’ (Osborne 2005, as cited in Cunningham 2013, 49). Nevertheless, Cunningham affirms ‘it is the metropolis which, above all, spatializes this displacement in its ‘concretizing’ of that abstraction inherent to social relations of exchange’ (50).

6 Hardt and Negri (2000, 298) outline the structural forms of violence through economic dependency that this entailed.

7 This colonial history led to the establishment of territorial enclaves for finance and trade such as Hong Kong, and, in a contemporary sense at least, cannot be entirely separated from the machinations of international property markets. See Marx (1981, 2007).

8 As Buck-Morss (1991, 114) has shown, Benjamin diverged from the Surrealists in his reluctance to rest revolutionary hope directly on the capacities of the individual imagination.

9 Benjamin, as Jameson explains, acknowledges that all ‘great’ documents of ‘civilization’ that have survived and have been transmitted through ‘the various museums, canons and “tradition” of our own time, are all in one way or another profoundly ideological, have all had a vested interest in and a functional relationship to social formations based on violence and exploitation’ (1981, 289).

10 Benjamin suggests in the Arcades that the commodity's ‘fetish character attaches as well to the commodity-producing society – not as it is in itself, to be sure, but more as it represents itself and thinks to understand itself whenever it abstracts from the fact that it produces precisely commodities’ (1999a, 627).