What’s the ‘Matter ’ with Materialism? Walter Benjamin and the New Janitocracy

This paper examines Walter Benjamin’s argument that the matter—the materials —of materialist historiographyare the objects that have been forgotten and discarded by modern bourgeois commodity culture. Just as Benjamin saw in child’s play and children’s playthings a potential ‘playing out ’ and ‘recollecting ’ of that which has been dropped, left behind, forgotten and forsaken, he likewise saw the historical endeavor as one which engaged the discarded materials of bourgeois culture and cut through progressivist, universalist history—revealing in so doing a materialist and indeed ‘messianic ’ history. The consequences of this redemptive relation (these redemptive relations) are drawn out in the essay and culminate in the figure of the revolutionary custodian and the ‘New Janitocracy’. Gershom Sholem once wrote of his friend Walter Benjamin that “it is one of Benjamin’s most important characteristics that throughout his life he was attracted with almost magical force by the child’s world and ways.