Now here's where analytical rubber starts to hit the ground:
The distinction between structure and superstructure, Agamben claims, cannot be based on a simplistic causal relationship. The need to figure out the entire material structure before one can go up to the immaterial superstructure is a false need. If anything, Benjamin shows that there is a direct correspondence between the two, which abolishes the metaphysical or dialectical distinction between animality and rationality, nature and culture, matter and form, economy and politics, reality and poetry. By making immediate or unmediated connections between elements of the structure and the superstructure, Benjamin does not practice vulgar materialism, but a courageous one.
I think that this means that it is possible to do useful analysis of cultural artefacts/texts without necessarily having a fully developed analysis of the whole material base. I rather suspect that the fundamental insight underlying Godel's incompleteness theorem would question that approach anyhow. Be that as it may; it does seem to me that the micrological approach is fruitful (whatever Adorno said). This is possible because, Benjamin asserts, there is a third factor 'infrastructure'.
The paradigmatic example of an infrastructure is the arcades ... covered passageways that were very popular in nineteenth century Paris ... An arcade is not an expression of ideas, whether they are economic or political, material or formal. Those ideas are expressed in this thing that we call an arcade. Whatever may be the structure or the superstructure of the arcades ... it must come to manifest itself through the infrastructure, and not vice versa. The infrastructure thus becomes the secret key that unlocks the mysteries of the city.
Is other words you have to pay attention to the actual 'stuff' and the trialogue between 'stuff', processes and ideas. Which is much more like, I would argue, the way that human beings 'access' things anyway: we encounter the things in themselves, in the midst of the forces that shape and shaped us and the ways that make meaning in relation to these things (noting too the reflexivity of processing all of this through a social nexus).
I think. Though it may be that I'm reading this through the lens of the approach to cultural analysis that I have come to (and which I put out there towards the start of 'Engaging Culture') which is an attempt to synthesise the insights of several culturally analytical approaches (including Marxian) on the basis that they can't have the credibility and traction they have had without being able to do things that resonate and produce insight. However, as a Christian with a belief in human fall/ibility, and taking on board the insights of post-modern thinking, I also think that their totalising is a problem. So I like in Benjamin's insight the way that it enables us to see the relationships between 'things' in the human world as reflexive and dialogical rather than simply causal in one direction or another. I think that this is to recognise that complexity (arising from chaos) is the name of the game.
And yet, is that a further totalising? Maybe not: the point of chaos/complexity in that respect is to engender a certain humility and constrainedness about our analysing while allowing us a model of why that should be, and so remain useful. As a Christian, I also warm to the materiality and particularity of Benjamin's approach. It echoes the incarnation and the way that this gave the early church a purchase for critique of neo-platonism and thus gnosticism (which wasn't nearly as benign as the Dan Browns of the world might lead you to believe).
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