Title

Collective Wish Images (Walter Benjamin)

Description

It is necessary to make a distinction: In nature, the new is mythic, because its potential is not yet realized; in consciousness, the old is mythic, because its desires never were fulfilled. Paradoxically, collective imagination mobilizes its powers for a revolutionary break from the recent past by evoking a cultural memory reservoir of myths and utopian symbols from a more distant ur-past. The “collective wish images” are nothing else but this. … Utopian imagination thus cuts across the continuum of technology’s historical development as the possibility of revolutionary rupture (See Figure). This means that each of the “corresponding” elements—mythic nature and mythic consciousness—works to liberate the other from myth. “Wish images” emerge at the point where they intersect.
Benjamin is not maintaining that the contents of past myths-provide a blueprint for the future. … The representations of the collective unconscious are not revolutionary on their own, but only when dialectically mediated by the material, “new” nature, the as-yet unimagined forms of which alone have the potential to actualize the collective dream. … Hence Benjamin’s theory of revolution as “innervation”: Wish images “innervate” the “technical organ of the collective,” supplying it with nerve stimulation that prompts revolutionary action.

Designer

Buck-Morss, Susan

Date

1989

Source

The Dialectics of Seeing

Bibliographic Citation

Buck-Morss, Susan. 1989. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. The MIT Press. Display C. Pages 116-117.

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Coverage

history

myth

technology