Chapter 4

Anonymous Historiography: AMetaphorology

oftheConstellation inBenjamin, Giedion
andMcLuhan

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NormFriesen

Abstract Walter Benjamins notion of the constellation marks a particularly rich

conjunction of the material, dialectical and religious impulses in his work. First
appearing in his habilitation study for the University of Frankfurt, the term refers to
a caesura in the flow of thought and thus of the dynamics of historical consciousness and recollection, resulting in an image of dialectics at a standstill. Benjamin
developed this notion further while working on his Arcades Project at the
Bibliothque national in Paris in the 1930s, and while in contact with fellow Jewish
historian, Siegfried Giedion. Unlike Benjamin, Giedion was able to develop his
Parisian research further in America as Mechanization Takes Command: A
Contribution to Anonymous History (Giedion S, Mechanization takes command: a
contribution to anonymous history. Oxford University Press, NewYork, 1948). The
constellation reappears in this massive work, particularly in Giedions brief methodological introduction. Finally, similar characterizations are conspicuous in yet
another programmatic opening; in this case, for a text which incorporates a related
cosmic category into its very title. This is McLuhans Gutenberg Galaxy: The
Making of Typographic Man, published nearly 30years after McLuhans first of
many encounters with Giedion and his work. Using Hans Blumenbergs metaphorology, this chapter traces the probable transmission of the constellation from the
old world to the new, and across these three landmark studies in material history.
The chapter highlights the significance of the image of the constellation in each,
showing how it has changed and evolved from its initial conception in Germany to
its final reappearance in Canada.

Keywords Siegfried Giedion Walter Benjamin McLuhan Explorations in communication Media studies Media theorization in Canada

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This chapter has benefitted greatly from input provided by Michael Darroch and Reto Geiser.
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N. Friesen (*)
Boise State University, Boise, ID, USA
e-mail: normfriesen@boisestate.edu
Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016
N. Friesen (ed.), Media Transatlantic: Developments in Media
and Communication Studies between North American and German-speaking
Europe, DOI10.1007/978-3-319-28489-7_4

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Throughout his prolific career, Hans Blumenberg has undertaken extended analyses
of the tropes, images or metaphors through which the physical and cultural world
have been understood. Among these are the book of nature, which casts the world
or cosmos as an open, readily-decipherable text, or the universe as a gigantic clockwork, a rational heliocentric machine, to be understood purely in terms of its
mechanical operations. Referring to the historical analysis of such absolute metaphors as metaphorology, Blumenberg characterizes the truth sought in their
study as follows:
we ask about the relevance of absolute metaphors, their historical truth. This truth is
pragmatic in a very broad sense. By providing a point of orientation, the content of absolute
metaphors determines a particular attitude or conduct [Verhalten]; they give structure to a
world, representing the nonexperienceable, nonapprehensible totality of the real. To the
historically trained eye, they therefore indicate the fundamental certainties, conjectures,
and judgments in relation to which the attitudes and expectations, actions and inactions,
longings and disappointments, interests and indifferences, of an epoch are regulated. What
genuine guidance does it give? This form of the truth question, formulated by pragmatism, is pertinent here (2010: 14)

Applying Blumenbergs metaphorology to the image of the constellation in the

work of Walter Benjamin, Sigfried Giedion and Marshall McLuhan, of course, must
begin with some qualification. It goes without saying that the constellation is not a
strictly absolute metaphor as Blumenberg defines it. It certainly does not indicate the fundamental certainties, conjectures, and judgments according to which an
epoch in this case, the interwar and postwar eras in the West might be regulated.
The metaphor of the constellation is multiply reflected and relative, expressive of
historical contingencies and epistemological limitations rather than of absolute
epochal structures and certainties.
However, the metaphor of the constellation certainly does conform to number of
Blumenbergs other criteria. As this chapter shows, the constellation indeed provides a kind of point of orientation for Benjamin, Giedion and McLuhan as well
as for Theodor Adorno, whose engagement with the metaphor represents an important digression or interlude in this account. It works to capture a kind of qualified
nonexperienceable, nonapprehensible totality of the real generally a kind of
anti-totality whose unity is defined by the common reality of its incompletion. And
the attitudes and expectations, actions and inactions to which the constellation
as a metaphor gives expression, are in this case the dispositions and work of pioneering cultural historians, rather than the Zeitgeist dominant in a given epoch.
Benjamin, Giedion and McLuhan all share a keen interest in the minutiae of the
specific, often recent histories, while of course diverging in many other ways.
Finally, retracing the (possible) lineage of the metaphor of the constellation from
Walter Benjamin in the 1920s all the way to McLuhan in the 1960s is itself an
overtly historical undertaking. It can be seen to represent a response to the historical
truth question about the metaphors pragmatic function in giving genuine guidance to three epochal efforts specifically Benjamins work over much of the course
of his truncated career, through Giedions Mechanization takes Command (1948)
and finally, McLuhans Gutenberg Galaxy (1962). This apparent lineage of the

4 Anonymous Historiography: AMetaphorology oftheConstellation inBenjamin

etaphor corresponds to an explicit and documented record of contact between

m
Benjamin and Giedion in France, and Giedion and McLuhan in Canada and the
US.Both of these genealogies, the one empirical and the other more speculative, are
the subject of this chapter.

4.1 Walter Benjamin (18921940)

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Walter Benjamins notion of the constellation marks a particularly rich conjunction

of the material, dialectical and religious impulses in his thought. The original and
most extensive exposition of this metaphor is provided by Benjamin in the Epistemo-
Critical Prologue (Erkenntniskritische Vorrede) to his study of the baroque tragedy,
The Origins of the German Tragic Drama (1928). Benjamins explication of the
constellation begins with an abstract discussion of the connection of the idea to
relevant historical objects or phenomena to which it is seen to apply:

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The idea belongs to a fundamentally different world from that which it apprehends. For
phenomena are not incorporated in ideas. They are not contained in them If ideas do not
incorporate phenomena then the question of how they are related to phenomena arises.
The answer to this is: in the representation of phenomena The set of concepts which
assist in the representation of an idea lend it actuality as such a configuration. (2009: 34)

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To paraphrase: Benjamin is here concerned with the need to protect the historical
object or phenomenon, in its singular specificity, from dominating or incorporating
power of the apprehending idea. According to the structure of Benjamins metaphor, the alienation of the phenomenon from the idea is mediated and given actuality in terms of a conceptual, spatial configuration. In this way, the historical
phenomenon is made relevant or meaningful for the present without falling under
the generalizing sway of the idea. The significance of the idea, Benjamin continues, can be illustrated with an analogy:

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Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars. The significance of phenomena for ideas
is confined to their conceptual elements. the idea, the objective interpretation of phenomena-or rather their elements-determines their relationship to each other. minute historical
phenomena are said to have the potential to be redeemed. (2009: 34)

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The idea determines the relationship of multiple phenomena to each other,

just as the stars relationships to one another are in a sense determined by constellations, recognizable as mythical figures and creatures. In this context, the basic
significance of the constellation lies in its connecting or mediating power, in its
potential to bring together material particularities with overarching notions or ideas,
without reducing one to the other. Only in this way, Benjamin concludes, do minute historical phenomena have the potential to be rescued.
To return momentarily to Blumenberg, the constellation provides the historian
with a particular type of guidance. It can be said to offer a point of orientation,
to encourage a particular attitude or conduct. This attitude or conduct, as Benjamin
understands it, is epistemo-critical, and can be said to have its place in the broadly

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Burckhardtian undertaking of Kulturgeschichte. Simply put, this consists of bringing obscure minutiae, particularized cultural and historical phenomena whether
of baroque drama (Benjamin), of industrial aesthetics (Giedion) or of manuscript/
print culture (McLuhan) into fruitful connection with concerns that are much less
ephemeral.
In the fragments of Benjamins later Arcades Project (19271940), the epistemo-
critical metaphor from his study of baroque drama takes on a distinct historical-
materialist and dialectical inflexion, with the temporal and historical tensions at its
core being both heightened and extended. Benjamin describes the mediating function of constellation or configuration in terms of discontinuous but dialectical mediation. Associated in his understanding with both dreaming and awakening,
Benjamin emphasizes the abrupt, irruptive appearance of the constellation as a dialectical image that is blasted out of the continuum of historical process (1974:
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Its not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what
is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now
to form a constellation. In other words, image is dialectics at a standstill. (1999: 462)

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The relationship of the elements of the past to the present is one that is actualized
irruptively. This occurs through a dialectic that is neither centrifugal nor centripetal, neither positive nor negative. It is instead discontinuous and brittle, a dialectic whose interrelations and tensions are manifest all at once, in a single moment,
as if through the suspension of historical time, rather than through its unfolding. The
historians task, as a result, is sharply differentiated from the work of antiquarian
immersion or reconstruction, and portrayed as the collection and juxtaposition of
heterogeneous historical elements with one another and with the now of the author,
the text and the reader. Benjamin makes it clear that method holds out the possibility
of redeeming the myriad historical details and fragments that he was collecting and
annotating while he was at the Bibliotheque nationale in Paris: This standstill is
utopia, and the dialectical image, therefore dream image.

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4.2 An Adornian Intermezzo (19351966)

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This uncharacteristically hopeful sentence, invoking both dream and utopia, is

found in Benjamins draft preface to his Arcades Project, and marks one of the first
points of transmission for the constellation metaphor. Although this point of connection is transatlantic, occurring between Europe and America, the metaphor does
not at this point take hold in the new world. Instead, it remains with Theodor
Adorno, then living in exile in Los Angeles, only to appear later in Germany (in a
number of publications from the 1950s and 1960s), and in the posthumous publication of Adornos correspondence with Benjamin in the 1970s. Of special interest
here is a frequently cited letter from the summer of 1935in which Adorno criticizes
Benjamins notion of the constellation as being undialectical, as being too closely

4 Anonymous Historiography: AMetaphorology oftheConstellation inBenjamin

aligned with bourgeois subjectivity: it is the dream, awakening and other psychological phenomena that Adorno sees as being uncomfortably close to that which is
dialectical in general and to Benjamins dialectical image in particular:

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If eliminating the magical aspect of the dialectical image by representing it as dream

psychologizes it, by the same token this attempt falls under the spell of bourgeois psychology. For who is the subject of the dream? In the nineteenth century, certainly only the
individual (1994: 497)

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The problem for Adorno is not at all the notion of the constellation as such. It is
instead the lack of mediation between the disparate elements that the constellation
simultaneously brings together and holds apart. Oversimplifying, Adorno is objecting to the apparent lack of distance and mediation he deemed necessary to separate
individual subjectivity and psychology from phylogenetic phenomena whether of
society, popular culture or capitalist production.
Adorno offers a positive and sustained explication of Benjamins constellation
some 30years after this exchange, in the context of his 1966 Negative Dialectics.
Adorno emphasizes that the value of the constellation lies with Benjamins original
intent: Its ability to punctually illuminate the historical object in its uniqueness
without at the same time reducing it to abstraction or homogeneity:

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The unifying moment survives without delivering itself to abstraction as a supreme principle. It survives because there is no step-by-step progression from the concepts to a more
general cover concept. Instead, the concepts enter into a constellation. The constellation
illuminates the specific side of the object, the side which to a classifying procedure is either
a matter of indifference or a burden. (1981: 162)

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Adorno sees in the image of the constellation the possibility of avoiding the
negation of negation that he consistently sought to avoid. It could preserve rather
than repress the heterogeneity and negativity that would otherwise be equalized in
the synthetic moment of the Hegelian dialectic, or in (other) classifying procedures.
For Adorno, the object, particularly as it relates to its dialectical opposite, the subject, remains in irreconcilable and dynamic tension, never to be reduced to or by a
third, a unity, or a supreme principle. Scrupulous in his anti-systematicity, Adorno
clarifies the value of Benjamins metaphor for his own negative dialectics. However,
in so doing, it is notable that Adorno, unlike Giedion and McLuhan, stays well
within the scope of the metaphor as it was originally conceived.
Speaking of Giedion, while Benjamin was working on his Arcades Project in the
1930s, he came to know this young Jewish historian who had recently published a
book on modern French architecture: Building in France Building in Iron
Building in Ferroconcrete. This was a text which Benjamin greatly admired, and
which greatly influenced his own investigations, being referenced and quoted multiple times in the fragments of the Arcades Project. In his only extant letter to
Giedion, Benjamin described the books electrifying effect: I am studying in
your book You possess radical knowledge and therefore you are able to illuminate, or rather to uncover, the tradition by observing the present (Benjamin, as
cited in Giorgias, 1998: 53).

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There are 16-odd passages from Building in France that are quoted and sometimes also interpreted in Benjamins Arcades Project. One describes construction
as playing the role of the subconscious in the nineteenth century, displaying both
individualistic and collectivist tendencies (1999: 390). Another details, in its own
obscure way, Gideons notion of anonymity in history and the arts. Speaking of
glass and metal in nineteenth-century architecture as enabling the intoxicated
interpenetration of street and residence, Benjamin uses Giedions characterization
to underscore the anonymity of these novel forms:

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the new architecture lets this interpenetration become sober reality. Giedion on occasion
draws attention to this: A detail of anonymous engineering, a grade crossing, becomes an
element in the architecture. (1990: 423)

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At a third point, Benjamin refers to anonymous art [that appeared] in family

magazines and childrens art books, connecting this reference with Giedions pregnant observation that Whenever the nineteenth century feels itself to be unobserved, it grows bold (1990: 154).
A shared interest in urban architecture, aesthetics, nineteenth-century history and
anonymous design are all manifest in these citations taken by Benjamin from
Giedions inaugural study. Apart from the aforementioned letter and other scattered
and brief references to Giedion in the Arcades Project, there is hardly a word (in the
printed record) explicitly connecting Benjamin and Giedion.1 At the same time, it
has been frequently noted that there is no shortage of resonance between what
Benjamin observes in Giedion, and the unfinished book project that Giedion himself
was also working on at the time. Speaking specifically of this unfinished study of
Giedions, Dauss and Rehberg note:

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The book project with the working title The Emergence of modern Man was to be about
the effects of industrialization on the spirit [Seelenleben] of modern man. In the centre, as
was the case with Benjamins Arcades Project, stood the nineteenth century as the origin of
modernity. (2009: 143; my translation)

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Similar congruence is also evident in the case of Mechanization Takes Command,

as Tyrus Miller recognizes:

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to be writing the anonymous history of the twentieth century bears close comparison to
Benjamins focus on the anonymous, collective dissemination of the arcade as a nineteenth-
century architectural space. (2006: 240)

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One exception to this is the appearance of Giedions name on a list of recipients drawn up by
Benjamin to receive his 1936 anthology titled Deutsche Menschen and possibly also his The
Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility (Dauss and Rehberg 2009: 143). On a
related note, in a quasi-autobiographical text titled On the Ruling Taste, Giedion himself characterizes his eventual abandonment of his 1930s study of modern man for Mechanization takes
Command as follows: The material for this [unfinished study] was gathered during the summer of
1936in the Bibliotheque national in Paris. Then it was put aside, unused. In connection with an
appointment in America it seemed to me more urgent to make some studies of the effect of mechanization upon our daily lives, which, through the power of the same ruling taste, was misused in a
way somewhat similar to art. This I tried to do in Mechanization takes Command. (1956: 14).
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4 Anonymous Historiography: AMetaphorology oftheConstellation inBenjamin

Indeed, overt references to anonymous cultural undertakings in art, engineering or history are a clear point of explicit commonality between Benjamin and
Giedion, and as I shall later show, also McLuhan.

4.3 Sigfried Giedion (18881968)

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In an introductory section of Mechanization takes Command that is itself specifically titled Anonymous History, Giedion writes:

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The meaning of history arises in the uncovering of relationships. That is why the writing of
history has less to do with facts as such than with their relations. These relations will vary
with the shifting point of view, for, like constellations of stars, they are ceaselessly in
change. Every true historical image is based on relationship, appearing in the historians
choice from among the fullness of events, a choice that varies with the century and often
with the decade, just as paintings differ in subject, technique, and psychic content. (1949:
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The task of the historian for Giedion, like Benjamin, is to establish constellations through a kind of a-temporal lucidity. Central to understanding this work is
the image of the constellation particularly as it is ever tied to the fragment, with
the known factsscattered like stars across the firmament, as Giedion further
explains (1948: 23).
Despite the brevity of these references (the only ones made to the constellation
in Mechanization takes Command), the basic combination and interrelation of elements from Benjamin remain: historical objects, or Giedions facts or fragments scattered like stars across the firmament; they acquire meaning through
their relations, which are recognized through the painstaking work of the historian.
Facts are significant only insofar as they are represent[ed] as fragments as Giedion
puts it, and these representations are mediated in this sense by their relationships,
forming a historical image that as Giedion says, becomes apparent only when
these representations are seen together.
At the same time, Giedions references to the constellation register a number of
figurative changes in the metaphor changes that are largely retained in McLuhans
use of the trope. There is no reference in Giedion to a sudden, irruptive flash or cessation of motion, or to a possible moment of redemption. Instead, he speaks of the
relations between historical elements as varying with the shifting point of view
of the observer. This strange and perhaps strained adaptation of the metaphor of the
constellation suggests that constant and gradual alterations in these relationships is
also expressive of historical change itself: These relations, Giedion is also in
effect saying, are ceaselessly in change, shifting with the historians very choice
of facts, which may vary with the century and often with the decade. The
observers changing point of view and positional changes in the objects being
viewed become difficult to disentangle in this description. A similar difficulty,
together with Giedions anti-Burkhardtian affirmation of historical change as

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p rogressive and gradual, is clearly evident in McLuhans description of the constellation a description to which this chapter now turns.

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4.4 Marshall McLuhan (19111980)

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McLuhan and Giedion first met while McLuhan was working in St. Louis Missouri.
As biographer Philip Marchand explains, they remained in regular contact thereafter, with Mechanization Takes Command long serving as a central reference point
for McLuhan:

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Giedions Mechanization Takes Command, published after McLuhan had left St. Louis,
remained a resource for McLuhan throughout his career. In that book, Giedion examined a
wide range of human objects nineteenth-century bathroom fixtures, Marcel Duchamps
painting Nude Descending a Staircase, and a Chicago meat-packing plant and demonstrated how they all reflected a single process, the increasing mechanization of human life.
The book showed McLuhan how fundamental changes in technology affected all aspects of
human existence and how any artifact, no matter how humble, could reveal clues to new
patterns of life. (1998: 78)

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McLuhan wrote an enthusiastic book review of Mechanization Takes Command,

appearing in the Hudson Review in 1949 some 10years after first meeting Giedion.
McLuhan describes this text as providing readers with a new set of tools. This
figurative tool kit is one that allows the devoted reader, McLuhan indicates, to reach
insights about the widest variety of aesthetic, historical and quotidian matters:

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[Giedion] makes very heavy demands of his readers since he presents ideas not as things to
be known or argued about, but as tools with which the reader must work for many years.
And Giedion offers to him a new set of tools for working not only with the materials of
writing and the plastic arts, but with the entire range of daily object and actions. (1949: 599,
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Later, in a 1968 essay titled Environment as Programmed Happening, McLuhan

returns to a sustained discussion of Giedion, quoting at some length from precisely
the section of Mechanization Takes Command which was provided above: This
passage, as McLuhan sees it, is a kind of a manifestation for a mosaic approach
that has supplanted the pictorial [method]transform[ing] the entire environment. Giedions Anonymous History approach, McLuhan continues,
accepts the entire world as an organized happening that is charged with luminous
and exciting messages (1968:123124). Aside from echoes of contemporary youth
culture, what is perhaps most striking in McLuhans description is the importance
he ascribes to Giedons notion of anonymous history, particularly as a methodological heuristic to be employed or practiced by the reader or historian for many
years.
This 1968 text, taken together with McLuhans 1949 book review leave little
doubt as to the deep and lasting impact of Giedions approach on McLuhans own
work. It is therefore not surprising that during the nearly 20years that separate these
two publications, the same set of metaphors would reappear in his first book-length

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work, the 1962 Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. Here is how
McLuhan introduces the methodology he uses in this text.

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The Gutenberg Galaxy develops a mosaic or field approach to its problems. Such a mosaic
image of numerous data and quotations in evidence offers the only practical means of
revealing causal operations in history. The alternative procedure would be to offer a series
of views of fixed relationships in pictorial space. Thus the galaxy or constellation of events
upon which the present study concentrates is itself a mosaic of perpetually interacting
forms that have undergone kaleidoscopic transformation particularly in our own time.
(1962: n.p.)

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Like Giedion, McLuhan emphasizes not so much the recognizable and actualized configuration presented by a constellation, but its changes, or its kaleidoscopic transformation, occurring over historical time. However, like both Benjamin
and Giedion, McLuhan utilizes the metaphoricity of the night sky to characterize
the vast multiplicity of historical datum relevant to his study. Also, the discernment
of this configuration (in this case, whether stable or perpetually interacting) is for
all three constitutive of the task of the historian. This astrophysical imagery is developed further in McLuhans conclusion to the Gutenberg Galaxy, when he asks:

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What will be the new configurations of mechanisms and of literacy as these older forms of
perception and judgment are interpenetrated by the new electric age? The new electric
galaxy of events has already moved deeply into the Gutenberg galaxy. Even without collision, such coexistence of technologies and awareness brings trauma and tension to every
living person. (1962: 278279)

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Although the constellation as a configuration of quotidian historical details

remains important in this concluding description, McLuhan can simultaneously be
seen as further diverging from the structure of the constellation metaphor originally
cast by Benjamin. Particularly McLuhans references to causal operations in history and his invocation of galaxies (then also often referred to as island universes), as ponderously colliding, suggest together that there is a rather different
metaphorical logic at play. Here, history is portrayed as interrelated collisions,
impacts or effects, interacting and cascading across vast times and spaces. The positivistic connotations and denotations in this passage are obviously a long way from
Benjamins much more ambiguous claim that ideas are to objects as constellations
are to stars and also from Adornos unifying moment that would refuse to
deliver itself to abstraction as a supreme principle.
At the same time, certain characteristics of McLuhans description point to some
clear distinctions from Giedions thinking, and (indirectly at least) a closer kinship
with Benjamin. This is evident in McLuhans explicit rejection of what he refers to
as the alternative procedure of offer[ing] a series of views of fixed relationships
in pictorial space. McLuhan instead opts, as he says, for a mosaic or field
approach. Readers of McLuhan will recognize in this distinction a familiar
McLuhanesque move; one which leaves behind the analytic visual space of subject
and object in order to embrace an all-inclusive and immersive acoustic space a
sphere whose focus or center is simultaneously everywhere and whose margin is
nowhere (McLuhan and Powers 1989: 134) Benjamin similarly refuses any easy or
analytical separation of subject (the historian) and object (historical phenomena)

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and in this sense, both clearly diverge from Giedions explanations of the historians
role, his or her choice of objects or events. The flash Benjamin describes in which
past come[s] together with the now to form a constellation occurs neither simply
in the historians perception nor exclusively in historical phenomena. Were it not for
its explicit visuality and luminosity, the flash described by Benjamin would perhaps
not be out of place in the space of immersive simultaneity so privileged by McLuhan.

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4.5 Conclusion

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My point here of course, is not simply to play some academic version of six degrees
of separation. To return to Blumenbergs metaphorology, my point is instead to
adumbrate common certainties, conjectures, and judgments in relation to which the
attitudes and expectations, actions and inactions, longings and disappointments of
Benjamin, Giedion and McLuhan appear to be expressed. In so doing, I suggest that
the pragmatic guidance given by the metaphor of the constellation is one that is
all but indispensable to the twentieth-century dialectician or cultural historian. It is
indispensable to those struggling with the weight of the positive, dialectical tradition, seeking to understand history while refusing triumphalist narratives organized
around spirit, reason, production, or any other master signifier. Indeed, despite all of
the evidence indicating otherwise, it may be that such a shared awareness or sensibility, rather than an empirically traceable process of transmission, is actually what
motivates the appearance of this metaphor in Benjamin, Giedion and McLuhan.
If this is the case, then it is clear that the shared attitude or sensibility, expectations and disappointments in question are particularly modernist. Juxtaposition and
ironic counterposition across time and genre are obviously high modern tropes: For
both Benjamin and McLuhan, as for Elliot or Joyce, epochal and quotidian phenomena whether it is J.Alfred Prufrocks peach or Stephen Daedalus ashplant gain
significance through their implied or explicit connection or configuration with historical or even mythical referents. The realization of such unexpected collocations
requires the intersection of otherwise disparate spaces and times. For Benjamin, of
course, the juxtaposition and subsequent redemption of phenomena is discontinuous and irruptive. The eschatology of Benjamin is one in which history does not
move towards the realization of a particular meaning but is constantly shot through
with it. For Giedion and McLuhan, on the other hand, the movement of history
towards particular meanings is of paramount importance even though both do not
see such movement or intensification as strictly progressive. Significantly, in the
case of McLuhan, such movement is also cyclical: Disparate phenomena and times
are brought together not through abrupt compression into a dialectical image, or
through shifts in a historians perspective, but via the grand ricorso, Vicos notion
of epochal, historical repetition. Of course, nothing could be more antithetical to the
aims of Benjamin, and after him, Adorno. Regardless, it is reference to the constellation that can be said to provide all of these thinkers and historians with genuine
guidance, a pragmatic means of understanding the fraught relationship of specificity

4 Anonymous Historiography: AMetaphorology oftheConstellation inBenjamin

and generality, while confronting a welter of historical detail ultimately irreducible

to any grand narrative arc.

[AU5]

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