The Arcades Project

"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," show more "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... show less

I go through this book now and then with no purpose in mind. The raw materials of a book, Benjamin planned to write, are on offer as the raw materials for others to think on. And that's all I do with it. I read, I sit, I think of Arcades. Anyone who lives in Melbourne could walk into Howey Place in the city and look up at the covered arcade and think what it meant to have that glass and steel roof above your head when shopping.

I get the sense that had Middlemarch's Mr. Casaubon been a better and more confident person, he would have at best left us with the Arcades Project.

The Arcades is an impossible project: impossible to write, impossible in any ordinary sense to read. The impossibility, for Benjamin, seems to have been the point. For the reader, it makes the Arcades a kind of paradoxical or negative key to the rest of Benjamin's work.

It's sort of cheating to mark this as read, since you skip around for days and just enjoy. One of those books that zips together all kinds of stray bits of knowledge.

Proto-hypertext with the flaneur as the modern day idling web surfer. Prescient and beautiful.

I have a digital copy of this book and sometimes I look at it from time to time. It’s got all kinds of interesting things in it, but I don’t have time to read it. The photos are really important because sometimes he’s talking about Lily and scratch things and without the photos it’s so much harder to decide what’s going on even with the photos if you’re not familiar with this particular district in Paris France, we won’t be able to get very much out of this book.