Speculative experience and history. Benjamin's goethean kantianism

127 (ibid.). Whereas the influence of the personal unconscious, as those contents which in Freudian terms ‘are capable of becoming conscious and often do, but are the suppressed’, appear in the work as symptoms, the symbolic signifies the contents of the collective unconscious, which show ‘no tendency to become conscious under normal conditions’ and cannot be ‘brought back to recollection by any analytical technique, since it was never repressed or forgotten’ (RAPP 80).

Where Jung’s description evokes the speculative experience of a transcendental realm, one which cannot be expressed directly in the consciousness but does appear in symbolic form in the mediated realm of art, it is coherent with the interpretation of Benjamin’s transcendental empiricism presented in the preceding chapters and expounded here as an expressive materialism. But Jung quickly goes on to hypostatize this transcendental realm in biological terms, as ‘inborn possibilities of ideas...inherited in the anatomical structure of the brain’, and with a ‘primitive original’ [primitive Vorlage]’ preserved in ‘the psychic residua of innumerable experiences of the same type’ (RAPP 81-1). As a consequence of this shift, the effects of Jung’s collective unconscious uncomfortably appear as an apologia in advance for German fascism.101 This effect is achieved in great art, Jung argues, through ‘the unconscious activation of an archetypal image, and in elaborating and shaping [Entwicklung und Au sgestaltung] this image into the finished work. By giving it shape, the artist translates it into the language of the present [eine Übersetzung in die Sprache der Gegenwart], and so makes it possible for us to find out way back to the deepest springs of life’ (RAPP 77).

The ‘social significance of art’ is therefore defined as ‘conjuring up the forms in which the age is most lacking...compensat[ing] the inadequacy and one-sidedness of the present’ (RAPP 82). In Convolute N of the Arcades Project Benjamin ridicules this description for reducing the ‘esoteric theory of art’ to the function of ‘making archetypes “accessible” to the “Zeitgeist”’ (AP N8, 2). It is not the archetypes or primal images that Benjamin ironizes here, but their conjunction with a notion of “accessibility” which reduces translation to conjuration and the ‘language of the present’ to a “Zeitgeist”. It is this understanding of conjunction or actualization of the archetype which renders Jung’s primal image an undialectical and therefore archaic one, and which – according to Benjamin’s criticism of historical materialism considered above – turns the crudely materialist element of Jung’s theory of ideas into a reactionary idealism.

101 ‘[W]hoever speaks in the primordial images speaks with a thousand voices; he enthrals and overpowers, while at the same time he lifts the idea he is seeking to express out of the occasional and the transitory into the realm the ever-enduring’; this archetypal situation is felt as being ‘caught up by an overwhelming power’ in which ‘we are no longer individuals, but the race’; the stirring ideal of the “fatherland” derives from ‘the symbolical value of our native land’, which activates the archetype of ‘the participation mystique of primitive man with the soil on which he dwells, and which contains the spirits of his ancestors’ (RAPP 82).