The Future and the Commodity: Walter Benjamin and Eric Overmyer’s On the Verge

Influenced by Frankfurt School thought, Eric Overmyer prefers Walter Benjamin’s hope for the future to pessimism like Theodor Adorno’s about capitalism’s control of the imagination. In Overmyer’s 1985 play, On the Verge or The Geography of Yearning, hope is already mixed with despair – as it is in Benjamin’s thought – because the things of this world can no longer embody Paradise; they may, however, gesture toward a lost whole which may yet be regained. As “commodities,” these things (the play’s objects, bodies, and words) gesture toward the human relationships elided in capitalist meanings, enlivening hope that utopia may yet be achieved. For Benjamin, apprehending utopia in the commodity becomes possible in the age of mechanical reproduction, with its accompanying “mass perspective” less in thrall to the cults of the past. It is a perspective the play’s women share with their audience, liberating an imagination that is always directed toward the future. But in addition to the provocation to the imagination offered by the commodity, the play effects and stages what Benjamin calls the “dialectical image”: the audience confronts these figures from the past looking forward toward them. It also registers the trope of the photograph, which brings the past forward in time. Benjamin thinks that looking toward both the future and the past renders the spectator a historical subject, one who apprehends the recurrent imperative – in the face of catastrophic failure – to regain Paradise. In On the Verge, as in Benjamin’s thought, the commodity becomes the ambivalent basis of a political poetics.