TABOO: THE ACTUAL MODERNIST AESTHETIC, MADE REAL A ...

taboo, as the following remark indicates: ―It…is…certain that
taboo is the primitive form of property. At first emotively and
‗sincerely,‘ then as a legal process, declaring something taboo
would have constituted a title. To appropriate to oneself an object
is to render it sacred and redoubtable to others; it is to make it
‗participate‘ in oneself.‖ N. Guterman, and H. Lefebvre, La
Conscience mystifiée (Paris, 1936) (Arcades 228)
Taboo, under this definition, is the process where names become appropriated as
or by titles. This seemingly capricious definition is justified for Benjamin who considers
that things and their predicating properties are knowable only through a processual
understanding of language that is aimed at uncovering and unfolding the presumption of
sovereign self-participation that titles denote and thusly make ―taboo.‖ ―On Language as
Such and on the Language of Man‖ makes just this point. 2 For Benjamin the process by
which a thing can be made taboo by a title is consanguineous with his sense in which
certain other words become harbingers of our fate. That is, if titles are one kind of word
that man speaks, and in so speaking is able to make something taboo, then the other word
that man speaks is that which belongs to the category of names, and in so speaking man
becomes the harbinger of his own fate. In short, ―the theory of proper names is the theory
of the frontier between finite and infinite language. Of all beings, man is the only one
who names his own kind, as he is the only one whom God did not name…A man‘s name
is his fate‖ (69). The relationship between fate and taboo within the aesthetic practice of
modernist expression – having its origins in the baroque trauerspiel – is the implied
subject matter of much of The Arcades Project, connecting it most immediately to
Benjamin‘s early study of that genre. The two processes – making something taboo by
giving it a title and discovering the fate of man and things in their proper names – are
connected in what Benjamin understands to be ―natural history.‖ The interrelationship of
2