Untitled Document

New Statesman 13 March 2000
Books

Gone Shopping

The Arcades Project Walter Benjamin [Harvard University Press 1999,1074 pages, £ 24.95.]

In 1940, Walter Benjamin committed suicide in the Spanish Pyrenees. He was 48, had heart problems and believed that his escape from fascist Europe had failed. During those last dreadful days, he carried with him a huge unfinished manuscript which he valued over his own life. That manuscript -the raw material from 13 years of research into the character of 19th century Paris, slivers of which had been seen by Adorno amongst others- was destined to become a legend of elusive promise. It represented the core of a life's work of cultural criticism by one of the best minds of the 20th Century.

So the publication in English of The Arcades Project, unlike many other millennial extravaganzas, really is an event. Its thousand pages of dense textual matter come with big, quivering adjectives like momentous and important attached. The book is undoubtedly both of those things but it has to remind us why, because its value as a text -whether it can be considered finished or even written- is disputable.

The Arcades is an assemblage of quotations, notes and theses which wrestle with themselves to extraordinary effect. In his lifetime, Benjamin only saw published the fragmentary collection One Way Street, and he initially conceived the Arcades Project as a continuation of that book. Today, his reputation is based on essays on Kafka, cannabis, bibliophilia and German tragic drama, though he remains best known for 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.' In this seminal essay, Benjamin argued that the coming of reproductive technologies had destroyed the "aura" of authenticity and originality surrounding artworks. A newly democratised relationship between viewer and work of art altered and reduced its value and authority as an object. That essay, the crucial 'On the Philosophy of History' and his obsessive returns to Baudelaire are key products of his research on Paris' passages, or covered shopping arcades, which he described as "the theatre of all my struggles"

For Benjamin, Paris was the capital of the 19th Century. He wanted to "unfold", or open up and reappraise, that century by examining the imperial city through its arcades. He described the arcades as irradiating the city "like fairy grottoes" and representing the "milieu of Lautreaumont" -the poet of montage and re-appropriation who so inspired the Situationists. Benjamin's Parisian grottoes were the original temples of consumer capitalism, generating a kind of empty rapture and dream-like reverie that his entire critical effort was designed to disrupt and "awaken" us from.

The Arcades divides into bales of notes with quixotic headings and initially appears formidable. There are small but important sections with titles like; Fashion, Dream City, Boredom, Haussmannisation, Barricade Fighting, and Iron Construction. But the heart of the book is in the longer sections on The Flaneur, Baudelaire, The Collector, Marx, Fourier, and On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress. Benjamin was attempting to write a materialist history of the 19th Century, although his famously idiosyncratic Marxism is fully revealed in notes here.

In these larger sections Benjamin sketches his complex notion of "dialectics at a standstill". He argued that the past meets the present in an image -a kind of visual allegory- which is received in a flash of all-seeing perspective. Suddenly, the history of everyday phenomena -encountered among glittering exhibitions of commodities, or streets of agitated crowds- is illuminated and opened to judgment and change. Benjamin's underlying aim was to unveil the economic factors behind social formations. His somewhat loose language is inspired not only by Marx but the gorgeous utopianism of Charles Fourier and Benjamin's own reading of Jewish mysticism.

His best summary of the Arcades Project is in re-published proposals like "Paris, Capital of the 19th Century", where he argued that "a passage is a city, a world in miniature." Benjamin was seeking a "perspectival articulation" of its culture, whereby unexpected, newly forged angles of approach reveal its hidden aspects and relationships.

His idiosyncratic perspective allowed him to suggest that along with Haussmann's efforts to hinder civic rebellion, for example, it was the newly fashionable crinoline which "necessitated ... the widening of the streets." His writing is alive to the force of such concrete details and invests anecdotal testimony with the potency of the "insurgent."

So, Benjamin's Arcades is a book of wonders whose publication does not diminish him. This collection will retain its legendary status and its embracing openness will continue to generate readings of Benjamin. It is also a privilege to gain access to the workings of such a distinctive mind. A conventionally complete condensation of this material would be priceless, but Benjamin's attempt to conjure an entire century by means of one city has already found its optimised form here.

[I've restored one or two cuts made to the piece that ran in the New Statesman, just because every word counts in these very short, condensed pieces]