The Sex Appeal of the Commodity: Gambling and Prostitution in Walter Benjamin

"The structure of all success," writes Benjamin in "The Path to Success, in Thirteen Theses," "is basically the structure of gambling" (Selected Writings 2, part 1 146). Really? Is success structurally similar to a gambler's bet that pays off big time? Does success come by chance? Some might prefer to believe that success is the deserved outcome of diligence, expertise and hard work. Or that success is an outcome that can be willed. An aphorism of Nietzsche, for example, reads: "No victor believes in chance" (The Gay Science 150). A victor surely believes in his or her willpower, and is unlikely to credit luck as the true enabler of victory. Not so for Benjamin: "It is a deeply rooted prejudice that willpower is the key to success" ("Ibizan Sequence," Selected Writings 2, part 2 589).

Benjamin can be disagreed with. But success, like gambling, fascinates him because "success is a caprice in the workings of the universe" ("Ibizan Sequence" 589). What really fascinates Benjamin are the mysterious contingencies at work in the universe, and to explore such mysteries entails beginning with success or gambling since they both involve the same thing—an enigmatically fateful exposure to chance. Whatever the victor, successful entrepreneur, or winning gambler may believe, or refuse to believe, chance nonetheless remains central to how we feel about success, victory, or winning. A pleasurable superstition enhances the satisfaction of success: one feels as if good fortune has come at last, as if the Gods smile, vindicate the achievement, and season success with the flavor of earned luck. Contingency, fortune, luck, happenstance and hazard: the universe can still be mysterious if one believes that chance can commandeer a life, induce events of surprise and utter transformation, inject an X-factor that baffles predictability, calculation, routine, and practiced savoir faire.

It is because Benjamin is unwilling to give up on mystery and caprice that he devotes so much attention to gambling. Benjamin's remarks on gambling reflect his interest in the aleatory, but also in moments of strange fatefulness. He dwells with keen attention on the experience of shock, on being taken by surprise. He prizes abrupt temporalities—the nick of time, lightning bolts and flashing apparitions, like the passerby glimpsed by Baudelaire in "À une Passante." At issue is how to force mysteries and enigmas out of their hiding places. Time is one such hiding place: beneath the crust of routine and predictability, time stores itself, offering pent-up energies—surprises, jolts and explosive rapidities. There can be quick transformations of fortune and destiny to those—like the gambler, like the flâneur—who are willing to trigger time. Gamblers tempt fate, beg chance to turn into luck, and flâneurs stroll around the city, making themselves available for chance (but decisive) encounters. Of chance, Benjamin says that it "plays the same role that irregular verbs do in ordinary grammar. It is the surviving trace of primeval energy" ("The Path to Success, in Thirteen Theses" 146). Chance is unruly, like an irregular verb; it injects a maverick element of randomness, conjugates time into unexpected, and explosively energetic configurations. Chance befalls the flâneur on the boulevard, in over-lit Parisian brasseries and murky dive bars. Chance befalls the gambler in the gambling den and the casino.

Another place where the primeval energies of chance hold sway is in the arcade. It is a place of close encounter where everything is amenable to transformation: reality becomes available to dream, and the wares of a store (walking sticks, fans and combs) become available to uncanny metamorphosis. In the woozy, glaucous arcade-world, things and persons await their sudden metamorphosis—the blur of focus, the shift in perspective that, for Benjamin, as for Aragon or Breton, is utterly revelatory. There are casinos here, although one shouldn't dwell too long in them: in "One-Way Street," speaking of the gambling den in the Palais-Royal at number 113, Benjamin cryptically remarks that "The hours that hold the figure and the form / Have run their course within the house of dream" (Selected Writings 1...