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

decision-making powers, we can demonstrate what was specifically at stake in
Benjamin‟s first understandings of natural history.
For Benjamin, natural history would refer to events before they are privatized and
ordered by kingship‟s moral decision-making. This meant, for Benjamin, that the content
of natural history was composed of names – words that were communally held and
understood to be open to criticism and discussion in the discovery of their meaningful
use. Natural history could not be the ordered words of a teleological story of conquest,
the characteristic of the chronicles from which trauerspiel playwrights drew their source
material. The king‟s authorized words, Benjamin would think of as that which belonged
to a separate medium from that of the name. Kings spoke with “title.” This is because
titles are, when not being used ironically, inherently insular. They hold force for those
who appropriate to themselves the power to designate them with meaning and the veneer
of continuity. The trauerspiel study, with its sustained interrogation of the formal
differences between kings and the dramatis personae, intimated a more general theory of
linguistic mediation that underlies how things are thusly made taboo.
Natural history, then, is a history that would be free from the taboo that titles
signify. In Arcades we are given the example of just this kind of historiographer in “The
Collector.” A Collector is motivated by his will to convert privately held objects into
publicly accessible resources, useful for a kind of collective historical understanding that
fails to privilege divine hierarchies and definitions of “man.” This leaves open to the
Allegorist, the Collector‟s antagonist, that which is non-human for his own unique
historical recording. What is at stake in the Collector‟s conversion of the titles of things
back into names is the redemption of the historical changes that these collected objects
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