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01Consuming Media 10/4/07 11:17 am Page 5

into realities, often in unintended and sometimes even catastrophic ways – as
witnessed by victims of regimes like that of the Khmer Rouge. The distant is also
present in the nearby, through images and voices that carry experiences across space.
Shopping spaces and practices of media use are filled with references to the foreign
and the past, made to reinforce impressions of intimacy and urgency. This is typical
of the modern epoch. Benjamin defined the ‘modern’ not as just everything new, but
rather as ‘the new in the context of what has always already been there’. 8

Corresponding to the form of the new means of production, which in the begin-
ning is still ruled by the form of the old (Marx), are images in the collective
consciousness in which the old and the new interpenetrate. These images are wish
images; in them the collective seeks both to overcome and to transfigure the imma-
turity of the social product and the inadequacies in the social organization of
production. At the same time, what emerges in these wish images is the resolute
effort to distance oneself from all that is antiquated – which includes however, the
recent past. These tendencies deflect the imagination (which is given impetus by
the new) back upon the primal past. In the dream in which each epoch entertains
images of its successor, the latter appears wedded to elements of primal history
(Urgeschichte) – that is, to elements of a classless society. And the experiences of
such a society – as stored in the unconscious of the collective – engender, through
interpenetration with what is new, the utopia that has left its trace in a thousand
configurations of life, from enduring edifices to passing fashions. 9
Benjamin’s view of the modern as a peculiar hybrid of the new and the archaic is a
much more complex idea than those one-dimensional ‘postmodernist’ reductions of
modernity to linear progress alone. Romanticism, nostalgia and primitivism are as
akin to modernity as are futurism, classicism and abstract functionalism – and they
all, in one way or another, attack the recent past in the name of the future but by
connecting back to some kind of primal past, be it located in history or in nature. In
a similar vein, more recent modernity theorists like Paul Gilroy and Zygmunt
Bauman have suggested the historical presence of countercultures within modernity,
so that the modern is not homogenous but dichotomous, or rather polyphonic. 10
There is an inherent ambiguity in the modern and its dialectical ‘dream images’, in
which the past, present and future are overlaid.

But precisely the modern, la modernité, is always citing primal history. Here, this
occurs through the ambiguity peculiar to the social relations and products of this
epoch. Ambiguity is the manifest imaging of dialectic, the law of dialectics at a
standstill. This standstill is utopia and the dialectical image, therefore, dream
image. Such an image is afforded by the commodity per se: as fetish. Such an
image is presented by the arcades, which are house no less than street. 11
The shopping arcades are themselves dream images, in Benjamin’s sense, but they are
also filled with a wealth of other such images, in the form of commodities with
symbolic uses. Benjamin argues that fashion offers ‘extraordinary anticipations’, having

Locating Media Practices 5