opposition between allegory and symbol on the one hand and that between bour-
geois interiority and avant-garde destructiveness on the other:
What is at stake is not only the material substantiality of the world but
the locality of the meaning-producing light: in the symbol it is “translu-
cence,” light emanating from an interior; whereas in allegory the ray
comes from the outside. This is the essential topology that structures
the rhetoric of the symbol-allegory opposition as well as that of bour-
geois subjectivity and its interiority. Against it, a pathos of exteriority or
of the surface emerges in Modernism: it revalorizes allegory in all its
theatricality.^82Allegory—“the dissolution of the speculative synthesis of subject and object, visible
in the dismembered body and in the ruin”^83 —finds its counterpart in the preoccupa-
tion of the avant-garde with montage and construction. Instead of imitating an or-
ganic figure, the avant-garde opts for a mechanistic principle of design. This
modernistic principle has in mind a world in which the false ideal of the cultivation of
inwardness is liquidated in favor of a radical publicity. The goal of this publicity is
transparency as an unconditional revolutionary duty: in a genuinely classless society
in which collectivity reigns instead of individuality, privacy becomes an out-of-date
virtue that in no way should survive revolution.
The fact that there is such a striking similarity in Benjamin’s work between his
critique of the romantic-idealist concept of the relation between symbol and allegory
and his interpretation of modernist aesthetics is not so strange after all. The rejection
of nineteenth-century tradition is an equally crucial element in modernist culture. It
should not surprise us, then, that Benjamin put special emphasis on this rejection.
What appeals to him in certain elements of the avant-garde movement is their “de-
structive character.” He is convinced that these people in particular are the ones who
give a face to the age and who are capable of paving the way to the future: “Some
pass things down to posterity by making them untouchable and thus conserving
them, others pass on situations, by making them practicable and thus liquidating
them. The latter are called destructive.”^84 It is these destroyers who have the most
to offer humanity. It is their work that is genuinely worthwhile. Benjamin quotes
Adolf Loos: “If human work consists of destruction, it is truly human, natural, noble
work.”^85
In Benjamin’s view, destructive work is essential for the process that human-
ity is obliged to go through in its historical confrontation with technology and with
modern civilization. Only by way of a process of purification, with all the inevitable
pain that that involves—implying as it does the destruction of the old—will it be pos-
sible to create the conditions for a new humanity, a humanity that will be intrinsically
committed to the gesture of destruction:
3
Reflections in a Mirror