The Arcades Project

This idea for this book originally germinated in Paris in 1927 and was still unfinished when the author fled the Occupation in 1940. The Arcades Project is a collection of the author's struggles and ideas. Walter Benjamin attempts to present readers with a true account of the bourgeois experience in 19th century history. The book's categories describe topics like Fashion, Boredom, Photography and Prostitution.

"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.

Conceived in Paris in 1927 and still in progress in 1940 when Benjamin fled the Nazis, only to find death on the Spanish border, The Arcades Project is his magnum opus: a new theory of history embodied in a new literary and philosophical historiography. With greater concreteness than had ever been achieved in historical narrative, Benjamin''s text immerses the reader in the milieu of the Paris arcades -- those precursors of today''s shopping malls -- during the period 1830-1870, when the modern industrial world was taking shape.

Like the arcades themselves, Benjamin''s masterwork is a vast montage in which he quotes and reflects on hundreds of topics -- fashion, boredom, the collector, advertising, prostitution, photography, the theory of progress. By excavating from printed sources a wealth of details about daily existence in nineteenth-century Paris, Benjamin brings to life a world of things -- from luxury goods, building facades, posters, and clothing fashions to barricades, omnibuses, cafes, and exhibition halls. Leading us along these corridors of the recent past, Benjamin imbues them with the intimate mystery of the streets and houses of the excavated Pompeii. Within the cluttered and colorful arcades, regarded as temples for worship of the commodity, we experience the persistence of the archaic in the modern.

The Arcades Project is Benjamin''s effort to represent and to critique bourgeois society from the post-Napoleonic era to the present age and, in so doing, to liberate the suppressed "primal history" that underlies its ideological mask. In the arcades, city street merges with domestic interior, and historical time fragments into kaleidoscopic distractions. There, before therows of display windows, and at a distance from what is normally meant by "progress", Benjamin unearths the lost time(s) embedded in the spaces of things.

Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) was the author of many works of literary and cultural analysis.