The Arcades Project

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by Walter Benjamin,

Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin Mclaughlin

Harvard University Press

Due/Published March 2002, 1088 pages, paper

ISBN 0674008022

New in paper (S02)

"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.

Contents

Translators' Foreword

 Exposés
"Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century" (1935)
"Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century" (1939)

 Convolutes
Overview

 First Sketches

 Early Drafts
"Arcades"
"The Arcades of Paris"
"The Ring of Saturn"

 Addenda
Exposé of 1935, Early Version
Materials for the Exposé of 1935
Materials for "Arcades"

 "Dialectics at a Standstill," by Rolf Tiedemann
"The Story of Old Benjamin," by Lisa Fittko

 Translators' Notes
Guide to Names and Terms
Index

Review

Here it is...Benjamin's study of the Paris arcades has been one of the most eagerly-awaited publications in recent memory (and now it's out in paper). Never published in his own lifetime, Benjamin had been working on the project for years, compiling a massive amount of information and ideas on the Paris arcades (glass-enclosed space between buildings that included stores). Having never realized a final form, this edition is composed mostly of fragments that create a kind of montage, exploring a variety of subjects -- fashion, boredom, the collector, advertising, prostitution, photography, and the theory of progress. All of this adds up to one of the most penetrating studies of nineteenth century capitalism and consumer culture, and one that continues to have profound resonance. An underlying theme running throughout the work is Benjamin's view of the arcades as a modern-day temple, where products are worshiped and primal feelings persist.

In a review of the work T.J Clark writes, "Quite simply, The Arcades Project is one the greatest efforts of historical comprehension -- some would say the greatest, even in its fragmentary form. And the fragmentary form is in any case not untrue to Benjamin's overall intentions. The book would surely have remained a palimpsest of quotations, for reasons Benjamin several times explains in his writings: the palimpsest in Benjamin's form, his own eccentric effort at totalization."