At the outset of Forwards in The Arcades Project, Benjamin’s intention and purpose are stated as “to grasp such diverse material under the general category of signifying the ‘primal history’ of the nineteenth century” (ix) and “to document as concretely as possible, and thus lend a ‘heightened graphicness’ to, the scene of revolutionary change that was the nineteenth century” (xii). At the first glance, this kind of aspiration appears to be an impossible collective dream. However, the historical configuration of archive shapes itself by the awakening of recording, collecting, analyzing, filing, which, finally, turns out to make itself come true.

archives_shaping_man

Consideration should be given to “wholly unique experience of dialectic” (389), which manifests the archive in the way of continuous reversal, introspection and enlightenment. In this process, the fact that archive reveals itself as an awakening method, rather than comply with the gradual developing history, suffice to put diverse time and space together into the whole system of archive.

“The new, dialectical method of doing history presents itself as the art of experiencing the present as waking world, a world to which that dream we name the past refers in truth. To pass through and carry out what has been in remembering the dream!-Therefore: remembering and awaking are most intimately related. Awakening is namely the dialectical, Copernican turn of remembrance. [Kl,3]” In this sense, the dialectical method provides a way researching into the documentary and the art of archive from both sociological and psychological aspects. The inside of the “what has happened” is not only a single universe that conducts the operation of archive or shapes the inherent concept we originally regard it to be, but miscellaneous personal experiences and thoughts that integrate each other throughout different time and space as well.

In On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress, the positive and negative elements on the cultural-historical dialectic are investigated as a methodology in archive that encompasses the understanding of history. The “dialectical image”, a central term of The Arcades Project, casts a light on the interpretation of time and space of the silent documentary. “In the dialectical image…it is manifest, on each occasion, only to a quite specific epoch-namely, the one in which humanity, rubbing its eyes, recognizes just this particular dream image as such. It is at this moment that the historian takes up, with regard to that image, the task of dream interpretation. [N4,1]” (464). This is an interesting part of the “dialectical image” theory that regardless of the far-away living space in different stages of history, the objects that may have been forgotten for a long time suddenly come to live due to the dialectical thinking about the past. Time and space have a reunion and the realization of the collective dream reconstructed itself from thousands of ramifications which encompass the combination of time and space by the dialectical method.