Benjamin and Metaphors

What fascinated him about [superstructure and substructure] was that the spirit and its material manifestation were so intimately connected that it seemed permissible to discover everywhere Baudelaire's correspondences, which clarified and illuminated one another if they were properly correlated, so that finally they would no longer require any interpretative or explanatory commentary. He was concerned with the correlation between a street scene, a speculation on the stock exchange, a poem, a thought, with the hidden line which holds them together and enables the historian or philologist to recognize that they must a11 be placed in the same period. When Adorno criticized Benjamin's "wide-eyed presentation of actualities" (Briefe II, 793), he hit the nail right on its head; this is precisely what Benjamin was doing and wanted to do. Strongly influenced by surrealism, it was the "attempt to capture the portrait of history in the most insignificant representations of reality, its scraps, as it were (Briefe II, 685)." 

If, for example -and this would certainly be in the spirit of Benjamin's thought -the abstract concept Vernunft (reason) is traced back to its origin in the verb vernehmen (to perceive, to hear), it may be thought that a word from the sphere of the superstructure has been given back its sensual substructure, or, conversely, that a concept has been transformed into a metaphor -provided that "metaphor" is understood in its original, nonallegorical sense of metapherein (to transfer). For a metaphor establishes a connection which is sensually perceived in its immediacy and requires no interpretation, while an allegory always proceeds from an abstract notion and then invents something palpable to represent it almost at will. The allegory must be explained before it can become meaningful. a solution must be found to the riddle it presents, so that the often laborious interpretation of allegorical figures always unhappily reminds one of the solving of puzzles even when no more ingenuity is demanded than in the allegorical representation of death by a skeleton. Since Homer the metaphor has borne that element of the poetic which conveys cognition; its use establishes the correspondences between physically most remote things -as when in the Iliad the tearing onslaught of fear and grief on the hearts of the Achaians corresponds to the combined onslaught of the winds from north and west on the dark waters (Iliad IX, 1-8); or when the approaching of the army moving to battle in line after line corresponds to the sea's long billows which, driven by the wind, gather head far out on the sea, roll to shore line after line, and then burst on the land in thunder (Iliad IV, 422-23). Metaphors are the means by which the oneness of the world is poetically brought about. 

 -Hannah Arendt, "Walter Benjamin: 1892-1940." Contained in Illuminations