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understood its signicance in terms of goals made such an account increasingly imperative. Benjamins writings from this period exhibit a breadth of interests that is hardly imaginable from the more literary focus of his writings between 1916 and 1926. There are essays on hashish; a group of writings from 1927 dealing with Russia and his visit to Moscow, most notably his Moscow Diary. He also writes on pornography and the state, Chaplin, gambling, the destructive character, the cultural history of toys, graphology; there are radio broadcasts on the Lisbon earthquake, the Firth of Tay railway disaster, a Kafka story. In addition he produces reviews of ction such as Alfred D blins Berlin o Alexanderplatz, reviews of critical and historical writings, as well as writings on contemporaries such as Bertolt Brecht, Julien Green, Robert Walser, and other still living authors such as Andr Gide and Paul Val ry. From these e e varied writings, this chapter will focus on those that form the core of his critical thinking in these years: One-Way Street, Surrealism, On the Image of Proust, Theories of German Fascism, and Karl Kraus.

One-Way Street (19231926, pub. 1928)

To grasp topicality as the reverse of the eternal in history.

The epigraph Benjamin invents for One-Way Street denes the inuence that led to its writing while pointing to where this street should be located: This street is named / Asja Lacis Street / after her who / as an engineer / cut it through the author (SW 1, 444). Cutting through can be rendered a little more literally as a breaking through, which also has all the character of a breakthrough in Benjamins thought. In this respect, the title of this book is important: in a one-way street there is no turning back. However, Benjamin is not making an absolute break with his past. Looking back in 1928, he writes that in One-Way Street an earlier aspect of my character intersects with a more recent one (C, 293). This sense of an intersection points to Benjamins awareness that this new direction, while radically different from the style and method of his earlier writings, does not turn away from the concerns of those writings. Rather, Benjamin develops the more theoretical and philosophical concerns of his earlier writing through materials that test these concerns in a more historical and political way. A remark from this time summarizes the position Benjamin now adopts: any denitive insight into theory is precisely dependent on practice (C, 248). Benjamin also gives One-Way Street a specic historical and intellectual context. When Benjamin confesses that the book owes a lot to Paris

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(C, 333), he means that it was there he discovered the format for the notebook [One-Way Street]. Specically, he is referring to the surrealist movement in Paris and one of its principal participants, Louis Aragon. While the format of One-Way Street has its origin in surrealisms exploration of the everyday, Benjamins text lacks the dreamlike character that surrealism cultivated. Instead, he practices a writing that offers reections on objects of everyday experience under titles such as Filling Station, Breakfast Room, Gloves, Toys, and Mexican Embassy. There are also theses on writing and criticism some of the latter presented in parallel columns underlining the dialectical mode of presentation that characterizes this work. There are records of dreams too, a visit to Goethes house, recorded souvenirs of places traveled to, as well as more theoretical reections. Adorno aptly summarizes Benjamins aphoristic style of writing as well as the montage-like format of this work in the following terms: the fragments of One-Way Street . . . aim less to give a check to conceptual thinking than to shock through their enigmatic form and thereby set thinking into motion.4 Adornos use of the word shock a word that will become increasingly important in Benjamins thinking in the 1930s characterizes the non-discursive character of this work. Yet, rather than import this later term prematurely, the montage format of One-Way Street can also be seen as extending to the point of rupture the digressive method described in the Prologue to the Origin of the German Tragic Drama. The discontinuous presentation of One-Way Street interferes with any easy assimilation of its sections according to an underlying idea. The political aspect of One-Way Street emerges here. The concept of an underlying, unifying idea is identied as a hallmark of bourgeois thinking especially when it is used to justify the historical signicance of such a class. In One-Way Street, Benjamin sets out to present experience in a way that is no longer subservient to the representation of such ideas. As the titles of various sections in One-Way Street indicate, contemporary experience claims attention but without asserting any all-encompassing narrative that would frame the experience of the present within a history. The following entry from One-Way Street makes explicit that such a narrative has no hold on the present:
Torso. Only he who can view his own past as an abortion sprung from compulsion and need can use it to full advantage in every present. For what one has lived is at best comparable to a beautiful statue that has had all its limbs broken off in transit, and that now yields nothing but the precious block out of which the image of ones future must be hewn. (SW 1, 467)

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In the passage of history (its transit), the past loses its signifying details. In this way, the past no longer dominates the present. If it did, the meaning of the present would only be the result of the past in such a case the present and therefore our experience could have no meaning of its own. Since the past is interrupted like an abortion, this leaves the present as the time in which the future is shaped but, as Benjamin points out, this future is only created as an image. Since this image only exists in the present, the future to which it refers for its meaning does not yet exist. The image is in this sense a torso, a ruin that cannot be completed. This incompleteness conrms that the image can only belong to the present. This emphasis on the image reects Benjamins growing interest in it as the primary means by which meaning and signicance are expressed. Here, the word Benjamin uses to describe each of the small texts that make up One-Way Street becomes important. They are thought-images or Denkbilder (sometimes also translated as thought-gures). This term indicates not only the role that the image occupies in his thinking but also the extent to which knowledge (both historical and philosophical) occurs as a succession of images. With this alignment of experience and knowledge in the image, Benjamin not only transposes the concerns of his preceding writings on literature into a more general cultural critique, but also nds a way to account for the role of the critic in relation to contemporary experience. The section entitled This Space for Rent takes up the question of criticism in the contemporary world. It opens with the pronouncement Fools lament the decay of criticism (SW 1, 476). What such fools fail to understand is that the world in which criticism was at home is no more. The kind of criticism rejected here is one that relies on a world in which perspectives and prospects counted and where it was still possible to adopt a standpoint (SW 1, 476). In such a world, perspective and standpoint represented what was real. To Benjamin, this kind of criticism is a lie or even just sheer incompetence. When Benjamin explains why this is so, there appears an argument that will later provide the basis of his most well-known essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility:
Today the most real, mercantile gaze into the heart of things is the advertisement. It tears down the stage upon which contemplation moved, and all but hits us between the eyes with things as a car, growing to gigantic proportions, careens at us out of a lm screen. And just as the lm does not present furniture and facades in completed forms for critical inspection, their insistent, jerky nearness alone being sensational, the genuine advertisement hurls things at us with the tempo of a good lm. Thereby matter-of-factness is nally dispatched. (SW 1, 476)

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In a world where images repeatedly hit us between the eyes, a criticism based on standpoint has no signicant role since it can nd no place in which to establish itself. Equally, matter-of-factness no longer holds its sway over understanding because the distance necessary to this point of view has been torn down. Already, the critique of distance that characterizes Benjamins later analyses of photography and lm can be discerned here. Although the contemporary experience of word and image (in the advertisement) renders obsolete a criticism based on distance and contemplation, this is not to say that the task of criticism has been relinquished by Benjamin. The section entitled The Critics Technique in Thirteen Theses considers its survival even as it admits that the critic is now a strategist in the literary struggle (SW 1, 460). One-Way Street is an example of this strategic approach. Through the montage-like organization and the aphoristic quality of this work, Benjamin attempts to embody the present in such a way that its signicance is experienced. This approach avoids a single standpoint and, in doing so, asserts that such a standpoint is no longer a means to comprehend contemporary experience. As the strategic character of this critical writing emerges, the vocabulary that has dominated his preceding writing (poetized, expressionless, unpresentable, idea and ideal, etc.) disappears.
Suggested further reading Margaret Cohen. Benjamin Reading the Rencontre. In her Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of the Surrealist Revolution. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. 17392. Michael Jennings. Walter Benjamin and the European Avant-Garde. In The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin. Ed. David S. Ferris. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 1834. Henry Sussman. Walter, the Critic. In his The Task of the Critic. New York: Fordham University Press, 2005. 7598.

Surrealism. The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia (1929)

A dialectical optic that perceives the everyday as impenetrable, the impenetrable as everyday.

As Benjamin observes, surrealism is the rst movement to put forward a radical concept of freedom since the writings of the nineteenth-century anarchist Mikhail Bakunin. In this essay, Benjamin examines how surrealism sought to