View of an arcade (the passage Choiseul, located in the second arrondissement of Paris), as an example of the characteristic architecture of the covered arcades of 19th-century Paris.
Passagenwerk or Arcades Project was an unfinished project of German philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin, written between 1927 and 1940. An enormous collection of writings on the city life of Paris in the 19th century, it was especially concerned with Paris' iron-and-glass covered "arcades" (known in French as the passages couverts de Paris).
Benjamin's Project, which many scholars[1] believe might have become one of the great texts of 20th-century cultural criticism, was never completed due to his suicide on the French-Spanish border in 1940. The Arcades Project has been posthumously edited and published in many languages as a collection of unfinished reflections. The work is mainly written in German, yet also contains French-language passages, mainly quotes.
Overview
Parisian arcades began to be constructed around the beginning of the nineteenth century and were sometimes destroyed as a result of Baron Haussmann's renovation of Paris during the Second French Empire (ca. 1850–1870). Benjamin linked them to the city's distinctive street life and saw them as providing one of the habitats of the flâneur (i.e., a person strolling in a locale to experience it).[2]
Benjamin first mentioned the Arcades Project in a 1927 letter to his friend Gershom Scholem, describing it as his attempt to use collage techniques in literature.[3] Initially, Benjamin saw the Arcades as a small article he would finish within a few weeks.[4]
However, Benjamin's vision of the Arcades Project grew increasingly ambitious in scope until he perceived it as representing his most important creative accomplishment. On several occasions Benjamin altered his overall scheme of the Arcades Project, due in part to the influence of Theodor Adorno, who gave Benjamin a stipend and who expected Benjamin to make the Arcades project more explicitly political and Marxist in its analysis.[3]
The project's structure is idiosyncratic. The convolutes correspond to letters of the alphabet; the individual sections of text— sometimes individual lines, sometimes multi-paragraph analyses —are ordered with square brackets, starting from [A1,1]. This numbering system comes from the pieces of folded paper that Benjamin wrote on, with [A1a,1] denoting the third page of his 'folio.'[6] Additionally, Benjamin included cross-references at the end of some sections. These were denoted by small boxes enclosing the word (e.g., ■ Fashion ■).[7]
The sections of text are at times Benjamin's own thoughts, and at other times consecutive quotations. These two types of textual sections are differentiated in their typography, with a large typeface for his writing and a smaller one for citations. This convention comes from the German version, but has no basis in Benjamin's manuscript. The convolutes also make extensive use of epigraphs from obscure publications.
Publication history
The notes and manuscript for the Arcades Project and much of Benjamin's correspondence had been entrusted to Benjamin's friend Georges Bataille before Benjamin fled Paris under Nazi occupation. Bataille, who worked as a librarian at the Bibliothèque Nationale, hid the manuscript in a closed archive at the library where it was eventually discovered after the war.[8]
The full text of Benjamin's unfinished magnum opus was published in English translation by Harvard University Press in 1999 after years of difficult editorial work undertaken by Rolf Tiedemann, the editor of the landmark 1982 German edition.
The publication of the Arcades Project has given rise to controversy over the methods employed by the editors and their decisions involving the ordering of the fragments. Critics argue that this reconstruction makes the book akin to a multi-layered palimpsest.[9] The Arcades Project, as it stands, is often claimed to be a forerunner to postmodernism.[10]
Notes
↑ Agamben, Giorgio (1993). Stanzas. Minneapolis: Uni. go Minnesota Press. pp.xvii.
↑ Benjamin, Walter; Benjamin, Walter; Benjamin, Walter (2002). "Volute M [Flaneur]". In Eiland, Howard; MacLaughlin, Kevin (eds.). The arcades project. Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. ISBN978-0-674-00802-1.
↑ Benjamin, Walter; Benjamin, Walter (2012). "Letter to Gershom Scholem January 30th, 1928". In Scholem, Gershom (ed.). The correspondence of Walter Benjamin: 1910 - 1940. Chicago, Ill London: Univ. of Chicago Press. p.322. ISBN978-0-226-04237-4.
↑ Eiland, Howard; Jennings, Michael William (2014). Walter Benjamin: a critical life. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. ISBN978-0-674-05186-7.
↑ "Archiveology". Research in Film and History. Retrieved 2023-09-19.
Bibliography
Primary source
Walter Benjamin (2002), Rolf Tiedemann (ed.), The Arcades Project, New York: Belknap Press, p.1088, ISBN0-674-00802-2 Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Translators)
Secondary sources
Susan Buck-Morss. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought), Boston: MIT Press, 1991, 505 pages. (English) ISBN0-262-52164-4
Beatrice Hanssen (ed) Walter Benjamin And the Arcades Project (Walter Benjamin Studies), London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2006), 256 pages. (English) ISBN0-8264-6387-8.
Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin was a German Jewish philosopher, cultural critic, media theorist and essayist. An eclectic thinker who combined elements of German idealism, Romanticism, Western Marxism, Jewish mysticism, and Neo-Kantianism, Benjamin made enduring and influential contributions to aesthetic theory, literary criticism, and historical materialism. He was associated with the Frankfurt School, and also maintained formative friendships with thinkers such as playwright Bertolt Brecht and Kabbalah scholar Gershom Scholem. He was related to German political theorist and philosopher Hannah Arendt through her first marriage to Benjamin's cousin Günther Anders though the friendship between Arendt and Benjamin outlasted her marriage to Anders. Both Arendt and Anders were students of Martin Heidegger, whom Benjamin considered a nemesis.
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Flâneur is a French noun referring to a person, literally meaning "stroller", "lounger", "saunterer", or "loafer", but with some nuanced additional meanings. Flânerie is the act of strolling, with all of its accompanying associations. A near-synonym of the noun is boulevardier. Traditionally depicted as male, a flâneur is an ambivalent figure of urban affluence and modernity, representing the ability to wander detached from society with no other purpose than to be an acute observer of industrialized, contemporary life.
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"The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire" is one of a diptych of completed essays that was composed during the preparatory outlining and drafting phase of Walter Benjamin's uncompleted composition of the Arcades Project. "Paris, Capital of 19th Century" is its sister essay. The major themes of The Arcades Project—the construction of the Parisian arcades in the early 19th century, their blossoming as a habitat for the flâneur, their demolition during Haussmanization—appear as leitmotifs in both essays.
"Paris, Capital of the 19th Century" is one of a diptych of completed essays that was composed during the preparatory outlining and drafting phase of Walter Benjamin's uncompleted composition of the Arcades Project. The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire is its sister essay. The major themes of The Arcades Project—the construction of the Parisian arcades in the early 19th century, their blossoming as a habitat for the flâneur, their demolition during Haussmannization—appear as leitmotifs in both essays.
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