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"Quite simply, the Passagen-Werk is one of the twentieth century's great efforts at historical comprehension--some would say the greatest." --T. J. Clark, author of The Painting of Modern Life The Arcades Project Walter Benjamin Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin "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," "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. Howard Eiland is Lecturer in Literature at MIT and the author of essays on Nietzsche and Heidegger. Kevin McLaughlin is Assistant Professor of English at Brown University and the author of Writing in Parts: Imitation and Exchange in Nineteenth-Century Literature. Belknap Press 61/2 x 10 46 halftones 960 pp.
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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.
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 Walter Benjamin's masterpiece ( vallvert )
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.
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The Capitalist-Fascist Dreamscape, Interpreted ( redcrosseknight )
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).
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Fragmentary Epic ( stencil )
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.
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 Humbug ( kindbalance )
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.
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NY Times Review ( tauras@juno.com )
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).
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