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The Arcades Project

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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.

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).

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

Herbert Muschamp, the NY Times architectural critic, has written an interesting article about Benjamin and his Paris project which appears in the Arts & Leisure section on January 16, 2000. While not strictly speaking a book review it nevertheless offers some observations as to the cultural importance of Benjamin's chef d'oevre. Another book on the Arcades Project is Susan Buck-Morss's 'The Dialectics of Seeing' (MIT 1989, 1991, 1997).

The Arcades Project was Walter Benjamin's mammoth, lifelong project. The book is not complete, not because Benjamin did not finish it (which he didn't), but because the book is organized like a collage or montage, and these "art forms" are always works-in-progress. Benjamin tried to document life in XIX century Paris through the eyes of a historian/archeologist. Along with Simmel and Kracauer, Benjamin tried to make a sociological, micro-history of the habits, ideologies, and dreams of the main actors of Parisian life -politicians, leaders, revolutionaries, journalists, poets. What is more important, however, is Benjamin's conception of history that we can find in Chapter N of this book. Benjamin studied XIX century Paris from a unique perspective of history as a discontinuous chain of events. For Benjamin, there is no progress in history from A to B. B is not superior to A; both points are subsumed in the same history of domination and catastrophe. Still, what he tried to see in Paris were those events or actors that broke out from this sad universe: the Commune, the Utopians, the Rebels. Benjamin did this to discover the revolutionary potential of past societies that can be useful for the present. This book is so rich and long, that there is almost everything for anyone who is interested in cultural history, philosophy, and theology.

The English edition of Benjamin's huge construction site has an advantage over the original German: the title 'Arcades Project' is so much more honest than 'Passagenwerk', i.e. the 'oeuvre about the arcades'.
The book description here in amazon says that WB spent the last 13 years of his life doing the research for this project. That leads us straight into the conundrum: circumstances prevented the completion of the Werk. Benjamin was a Jewish German intellectual with a name as a literary critic. He absolutely had to emigrate from Germany and then to try and escape from France. He failed with the latter and gave up in despair, a suicide in sight of the uncrossable Spanish border. (I remember a very good American fictionalization of this event, called 'Benjamin's Crossing'. Forgot the author. Look it up!)
But: the way that amazon puts it is as if WB finished the book after those 13 years. Absolutely not! What we have here is a huge pile of bits and pieces: cuttings, copies, quotes, notes, aphorisms, reminders, thoughts, brainstorms..
Circumstances prevented the completion of the monster, but do the heaps of material show us the way that the whole would have taken? The editors like to make us believe that this thing would have ended up in a grand theory about capitalist esthetics, about art in the age of reproduction. I am very sceptical here.
My personal theory is that WB had nothing substantial to say about his subject, that's why he never got anywhere. He was losing himself in the vastness of his subject. Another 13 years, and he would not have been anywhere else. The essay about Paris as the capital of the 19th century is put at the beginning of the publication. The arcades of Paris were an invention of the 2nd empire (see Zola's verdict on the period). Is the essay leading anywhere? I do not see any substantial insight that would illuminate things on the scale that would justify the paper mountain.
The comments here are mostly enthusiastic, in line with the glory that WB amassed after 1960 among leftist intellectuals, 20 years after his death. One lonely single fighter dared to talk about the emperor's new clothes. Let's be more generous and give the benefit of doubt. (But I really doubt that the emperor had clothes.)
Is this a book? In the simplest technical sense that it is produced and sold as such: yes, of course. But actually, what we have between the book covers is material without structure and perspective.

This book is a nihilistic, incoherent work, and I dare anyone who reads this review to argue to the contrary. Admiration for this book is humbuggery in action. The emperor has no clothes.