The Arcades Project [Paperback]

Walter Benjamin (Author), Rolf Tiedemann (Editor), Howard Eiland (Translator), Kevin McLaughlin (Translator)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0674008022 | ISBN-13: 978-0674008021 | Publication Date: March 30, 2002

"To great writers," Walter Benjamin once wrote, "finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they labor their entire lives." Conceived in Paris in 1927 and still in progress when Benjamin fled the Occupation in 1940, The Arcades Project (in German, Das Passagen-Werk) is a monumental ruin, meticulously constructed over the course of thirteen years--"the theater," as Benjamin called it, "of all my struggles and all my ideas."

Focusing on the arcades of nineteenth-century Paris-glass-roofed rows of shops that were early centers of consumerism--Benjamin presents a montage of quotations from, and reflections on, hundreds of published sources, arranging them in thirty-six categories with descriptive rubrics such as "Fashion," "Boredom," "Dream City," "Photography," "Catacombs," "Advertising," "Prostitution," "Baudelaire," and "Theory of Progress." His central preoccupation is what he calls the commodification of things--a process in which he locates the decisive shift to the modern age.

The Arcades Project is Benjamin's effort to represent and to critique the bourgeois experience of nineteenth-century history, and, in so doing, to liberate the suppressed "true history" that underlay the ideological mask. In the bustling, cluttered arcades, street and interior merge and historical time is broken up into kaleidoscopic distractions and displays of ephemera. Here, at a distance from what is normally meant by "progress," Benjamin finds the lost time(s) embedded in the spaces of things.

(20001203)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

You could spend years trying to read Walter Benjamin's The Arcades Project--after all, he spent much of the last 13 years of his life doing the research. When he committed suicide in 1940, he destroyed his copy of the manuscript, and so for decades the work was believed lost. But another copy turned up, and Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin have translated it into English. It is a complex, fragmentary work--more a series of notes for a book than a book itself--which probes the culture of the Paris arcades (a cross between covered streets and shopping malls) of the mid-19th century and the flaneur ("the man who walks long and aimlessly through the streets" in an "anamnestic intoxication [that] ... feeds on the sensory data taking shape before his eyes but often possesses itself of abstract knowledge--indeed, of dead facts--as something experienced and lived through"). The Arcades Project is, frankly, so dense a work that one hardly has enough time to glimpse fleetingly at its sections--over 100 pages of notes on Baudelaire alone!--before mentioning it to you, though one certainly looks forward to the opportunity to peruse it at leisure. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

Because he was Jewish and a Marxist in Nazi Germany, history was against the great literary and cultural critic Walter Benjamin (1892-1940). His writings were left scattered in ephemeral publications, went unpublished or were simply left unfinished when, in 1940, the critic committed suicide because he believed that the Gestapo was about to seize him. In Germany, his works have been compiled and scrupulously edited, and now, at last, American readers too have access to his final, great unfinished work in an edition that is both well translated and helpfully annotated by the editor of the German edition, Rolf Tiedemann. In 1927, Benjamin began taking notes for a book that would critique the cultural, public, artistic and commercial life of Paris, a city Benjamin thought of as the "capital of the nineteenth century." The arcades of the title are the city's glass-covered shopping malls dating from that era. This edition is comprised of the fastidious notes he made for this never-completed study. Essentially, Benjamin was planning to write a prehistory of the 20th century. The lively arcades--colorful scenes of public mixing, modern shopping and quotidian activities of all sorts--figure as a focusing device. His ambition was to integrate a picture including advertising, architecture, department store shopping, fashion, prostitution, city planning, literature, bourgeois luxuries, slums, public transit, photography and much more. His perspective is largely Marxist, but not in any conventional or dogmatic sense. Benjamin's chief virtue is an uncanny originality of vision and insight that transcends the constraints of ideology. (Dec.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 1088 pages
• Publisher: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (March 30, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0674008022
• ISBN-13: 978-0674008021
• Product Dimensions: 10 x 6.4 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #17,959 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #6 in Books > Literature & Fiction > History & Criticism > European
  • #26 in Books > History > Europe > France
  • #38 in Books > History > Europe > Germany

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

43 of 48 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fragmentary Epic, June 15, 2000

By 

Ralph Beliveau (Norman, Oklahoma USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Arcades Project (Hardcover)

In the fifth of his "Theses on History" Benjamin mentions that "every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disapear irretrievably." This work represents a significant way of not forgetting. It is fragmentary...but it reminds us that the texts we read are all fragmentary, and we assemble and contextualize them as we read them.

74 of 92 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Capitalist-Fascist Dreamscape, Interpreted, November 29, 2004

By 

Myron Makewater "redcrosseknight" (Laramie) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Arcades Project (Paperback)

As the U.S. begins more and more to embrace a cultural, if not yet explicitly political fascism, it's particularly important to look at the response earlier generations made to fascism. Walter Benjamin is a good place for us to start now, and not just because of his fascinating life and tragic death (read about it in the apparatus to The Arcades Project). Benjamin is at his best in examining the allegoric and metaphoric qualities of commercial objects and trends. He tries to understand what products and displays mean. We now live in a culture of declaration rather than fact (WMD in Iraq, the morality of torture, the chorus of creationists on the school board...); even our public discourse works like declarative advertising copy, like propaganda.

Walter Benjamin's interpretation of 19th century Parisian commerce gives us some tools with which to crack the contemporary code.

Stylistically, The Arcades Project works brilliantly. The layering of quotations and themes evokes a dream world, which is part of Benjamin's point: capitalism lulls whole social bodies to sleep, like a narcotic, like an addiction, and provides a phantasmagoria complete enough to keep consensus reality in place. Benjamin's prose sparkles; ideas pop from the page. More good news: you can effectively read around in The Arcades Project; you don't have to read through it cover-to-cover to get the point.

Finally, if you want to understand the impulses of those who are actively transforming the beautiful United States into styrofoam Walmartistan, I humbly suggest that the reader seek out Deleuze and Guattari's study Anti-Oedipus, which examines in detail the ways in which one can desire fascism (and desire in a fascist manner).

101 of 127 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a master of detail in philosophic proportions, January 14, 2000

By 

scarecrow "scarecrow" (Chicago, Illinois United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Arcades Project (Hardcover)

Benjamin worked on mountainous piles of notes,for about thirteen years beginning around 1928 for his infatuation with les passages, those passageways,girded with black iron canopes where we buy umbrellas,tobacco,shoes,books,and women. It was a microcosm of the most important city in the world, the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. It was the only city Benjamin preferred to live in despite the economic hardships of a struggling writer to do that. He found Paris at the edge of technology,much like our Silicon Valley is today,it was the beginning of progress so to speak,but with Washington and New York thrown in, all mixed in a fantastic quagmire of innovation,invention,excitement,and where the old preserves the new. Layers of cultural artifact, burdened with the scraps of histoy,all to be explained. Iron,for instance,a building material is a focus, on architecture and the Eiffel Tower, the feathery like weightlessness of the mammoth black innovative girders seen just about from anywhere in Paris. It was a step backwards for no one knew how to deveop it,simply display conceit for the colossolness of it,much like Victorian England,its bridges with giant sized rivits, thousands of them. Architecture, technology, photography were all items for Benjamin to spend his imagination here, discovering the ends of things, the values of the old. You learn French history in great detail,with notes copied as well from 1878, The Paris Commune is a chapter, one of revolution, as seen from a reader of Marx,rather than a staunch Marxist. Still Benjamin drew on the the progress of capitalism and where it fell down profoundly resulting in World Wars, and the emergence of some of the darkest pages in European history. Prostitutes and gambling are spoken of in one chapter, I found this boring and just idle passage work.Literature is visited as well with profile-like chapters on Baudelaire,the theory of knowledge, and Benjamin always inscribes a profundity, one of those items that is a recepticle a conduit for millions of thoughts preserved in one place."At no poin in time, no matter how utopian, will anyone win the masses over to a higher art, they can be won over only to one nearer to them". Something E trade practices everyday