Figures of the collective dream: utopia, dream, and waking in Walter Benjamin

Benjamin identifies the political, active, revolutionary potentiality of awakening from the unachievable collective utopian dream as it is recalled and cognized in memory (as well as unconsciously). Benjamin foresees in awakening the possible solution to the failure of all utopias, he foresees a Copernican revolution of thought and action in which the political may finally prevail over history, the waking state over the dream. In the moment of its remembering, the still unconscious knowledge of that which has been (das Gewesene) has the structure of awakening: emergence from the anesthetizing embrace of the dream, with the ensuing summons to political action. The past is that utopia toward which is directed the dialectic action of making real a history capable of experiencing the present as a world awake. Benjamin advances a Copernican revolution of historical consciousness that consists in dialectically defining the past in a present instant in which dialectic schematism flashes into knowability in a new subject-object relation. Recollecting the past in the “now of knowability,” a utopian potentiality is actualized and becomes achievable in action.