WALTER BENJAMIN
191
subjected to montage, in the
feuilleton.
All these products are on the
point of going
to
market as wares. But they hesitate on the brink. From
this epoch stem the arcades and interiors, the exhibitions and panora–
mas. They are residues of a dream world. The realization of dream
elements in waking is the textbook example of dialectical thinking. For
this reason dialectical thinking is the organ of historical awakening.
Each epoch not on ly dreams the next, but also, in dreaming, strives
toward the moment of waking. It bears its end in itself and unfolds it–
as Hegel already saw-with ruse. In the convulsions of the commodity
economy we begin to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as
ruins even before they have crumbled.
-Translated from the German
by
Edmund Jephcott
