THE COMMUNIST FLÂNEUR, OR, JOYCE’S BOREDOM

At the outset, I should apologize for an essay that will have less to say about Joyce than you may desire. In my 2001 book, Joyce Beyond Marx, I say everything I have to say about Joyce. In this short essay, I am trying to apply the technique of the constellation to his work - to approach Finnegans Wake indirectly through commentary on works that can be configured with it in the context of its production. In a sense, these commentaries make visible not the Wake itself but the historical space from which it emerges.In The Arcades Project, a collection of notes and sketches for a critical work that was never written as far as we know, Walter Benjamin notes that "commentary on a reality [...] calls for a method completely different from that required by commentary on a text" (AP 460/N2,!).1 Yet elsewhere in this literal work-in-progress, he says this about the dialectical images that his commentary on reality tries to produce: "the place where one encounters them is language" (AP 462/N2a,3). One encounters them in language not because that they are merely linguistic products but because the dialectical perception of the historical image requires the intervention of language that reaches across time and drags the past into the present. In The Arcades Project, Benjamin pursues images of the nineteenth century, but he is always aware that the object of his work-in-progress is the present. In his own reformulation of the Hegelian/Marxist dialectic, the Paris arcades are the thesis, which is posed by the dream consciousness of a culture, its remembrance of things past. They are products of dream consciousness not because they are unreal but because their true social significance lies not in the self-evident expression of the history they derive from but in the history they anticipate. They enter waking consciousness, the antithesis, as a ruin that has somehow survived the processes of time, which it now signifies. But for Benjamin, the dialectical image is neither ruin nor dream, for the synthesis that makes the historical image dialectical lies in the act of perception itself: not in waking consciousness but in the process of awakening (see AP 463-4/N3a,3). Benjamin writes that "The now of recognizability is the moment of awakening" (AP486/N18,4).I want to look at an image not from the nineteenth but from the twentieth century, from the time in which Benjamin produced The Arcades Project, This is the historical dream from which we are trying to awake; for the thirties is as remote from us as the Paris Commune was from Benjamin. The image lies in the final scenes of Charlie Chaplin's City Lights, which was released in 1931. Usually, this film is considered to be more sentimental and less politically charged than the later Chaplin movies Modern Times and The Great Dictator, Conceived before the stock market crash of 1929, City Lights is nonetheless one of the first analytical responses of mass culture to the social contradictions that became visible in the Great Depression. Beneath the sentimental pathos of the story lies an allegorical structure that often escapes even its best critics. Juxtaposition of Chaplin's movie with Benjamin's notes makes that structure visible.More than any other Chaplin movie, City Lights presents the little lramp as the flâneur. As such, in Benjamin's language, he "sabotages the traffic" (AP 42/A3a, 7) by becoming an obstacle to the machine-like movements of the crowd. His "nonchalance" is "an unconscious protest against the tempo of the production process" (AP 337-8/J60a,6). Though the opening scenes in Modern Times may seem to epitomize this protest as Charlie is literally sucked into the gears of the industrial machine that he brings momentarily to a halt, the opening images of City Lights see beyond the specific factory to the whole of society and its class system as a social factory. In the later movie Modern Times, Charlie is the factory worker who runs amok despite his best efforts to conform to the system: his idleness is directly correlated with his line of work and periodic unemployment. …