Thursday, March 5, 2009

Title Submerged by the Text that Followed

"The dreaming collective knows no history. Events pass before it as always identical and always new. The sensation of the newest and most modern is, in fact, as much a dream formation of events as the "eternal return of the same". The perception of space that corresponds to this perception of time is superposition. Now, as these formations dissolve within the enlightened consciousness, political-theological categories arise to take their place. And it is only within the purview of these categories, which bring the flow of events to a standstill, that history forms, at the interior of this flow, as crystalline constellation.- The economic conditions under which a society exists not only determine that society in its material existence and ideological superstructure; they also come to expression. In the case of one who sleeps, an overfull stomach does not find its ideological superstructure in the contents of the dream-and it is exactly same with economic conditions of life for the collective. It interprets these conditions; it explains them. In the dream, they find their expression; in the awakening, their interpretation."

Walter Benjamin, Early Sketches, Arcades Project, p. 854