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In the most important pursuits of life, an object often flatters and charms at a distance, which vanishes into nothing as we approach it; and 'tis well if it leave only disappointment in our hearts. Sometimes a severer monitor is left there.
Ann Radcliffe1
In the Arcades Project, Benjamin attempts to decipher the historical relationships between the economic and technological foundation of a society and its cultural representations.2 This project can be traced back to Marx, its originator, for whom the superstructure was determined by the infrastructure. However, even though Benjamin's historicist reflection has its roots in Marx's social analysis, it does not share its scientific aspiration. For Benjamin, cultural representation is the expression of a collective unconscious that can be traced back to a political, technological and economic latent content. Commodities of industrial society are not only analyzed in terms of material production, they also function as a support for symbolic representation. In the Arcades Project, Benjamin establishes the analogy between the Freudian model of dreamwork and culture as the expression of a latent economic content: 'If a work of literature, an imaginative composition, could arise from repressed economic contents in the consciousness of a collective, as Freud says it can from sexual contents in an individual consciousness, then in the above description [of the arcades] we would have before our eyes the consummate sublimation of the arcades, with their bric-à-brac growing rankly out of their showcases'.3
By drawing on the Freudian model of analysis, Benjamin borrows a method that initially analyzed individual subjectivity, and applies it to the discipline of history which concerns collective destiny. In a similar move, he appropriates the notion of remembrance of the past which Proust analyzed in the following terms: 'It is a labour in vain to attempt to recapture [the past] : all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach, of intellect, in some material object . . . which we do not suspect' (403). He then combines the Freudian metaphor of the dreamwork with the Proustian search for the past to forge a new conception of historiography: 'the new, dialectical method of doing history presents itself as the art of experiencing the present as...