By Megan Mushin Gardner
This essay presents a reading of Walter Benjamin’s Passagen-Werk in English translation as The Arcades Project. I focus on the work’s form and Benjamin’s theses on the construction of history. I begin by contextualising the work and then offer a “naïve” reading, considering the work’s presentation and implications read without Benjamin’s self-reflective theoretical context. I then engage with this more theoretical material to further develop the implications of my first analysis. I argue that the work exemplifies a method of writing history, by virtue of its specific fragmentary structure and Benjamin’s writings in Convolute N. I conclude with some reflections on other art historical theories and their interaction with Benjamin’s characterisation of historical perception, suggesting The Arcades Project offers a novel historical methodology applicable to the writing of art history.
Through The Arcades Project, Benjamin intended to construct a history and to enunciate that construction. Consequently, in the act of reading The Arcades Project, constructing its history and its interpretation is inseparable from its “point”. Though The Arcades Project has come to me as an atomised text – a hardcover, paginated, English-language book – it was not conceived as such. Alongside editorial content, the book includes multiple iterations of Benjamin’s work on the project: exposes, first sketches, early drafts, addenda, and the Convolutes, which are my focus here. The Convolutes are ordered from A to Z, then a to z, corresponding to Benjamin’s division of 426 folded yellow papers prepared from 1927 until his death in 1940.[i] Each paper was folded in half into a “folio,” the first and third sides of which were handwritten on, then systematically filed.[ii] These papers evidence research and collection of historical material undertaken by Benjamin in (and about) Paris. Benjamin quotes phrases, sentences and paragraphs from more than 800 French and German texts, relating implicitly or explicitly to nineteenth-century Paris.[iii] With no rigorous system, the citations are interspersed with Benjamin’s own comments (undifferentiated in the original folios), that may precede, trail or interrupt extended quotations, may contextualise or critique, or may take up pages at a time of dense excogitation.
The project’s material was not published until 1982. It has since been received as something of a key to Benjamin’s “intellectual physiognomy”, but also as a “monumental ruin”.[iv] Subsequent analyses have made biographical and interpretational inroads via rag-pickers, colportage, dreams, and any other piece of nineteenth-century detritus that forms Benjamin’s work, each author inevitably noting the impossibility of any wholesale summary or determination of the work in an introductory caveat.[v] How then to make sense of this assemblage? I begin with a naïve reading of the work, considering the elements of Benjamin’s project that are self-evident in its literal form and content. I then turn to the “quintessential theoretical” Convolute N to grasp Benjamin’s broader theory of history and his potential methodological goals in assembling The Arcades Project.
Across The Arcades Project, Benjamin considers his subject through a minute lens. The bulk of the work consists of specific quotes with minimal, if any, interpretation or connection to a larger argument. Though perhaps comparable in scale, the work is an inversion of the architectonic projects of Hegel or Kant, taking the minutiae of every-day “truths” as the point of departure. Reading the work on the level of its individual fragments, little insight is offered into any larger argument they may serve or Benjamin’s editorial reasoning – for example, his particular focus on Paris and the “terrain of the nineteenth century” over any other place (for example, his birthplace and one-time home Berlin); his selection of particular motifs and themes as his organisational mechanism (ranging from “Dolls” to “Social Movements); and his personal obsession with Baudelaire (over any other nineteenth-century Parisian) captured in the monstrous Convolute J.[vi]
If a conventional “argument” is to be made from Benjamin’s fragments, the task’s completion falls to the reader. The logic of Benjamin’s assemblage is only distantly legible, and each page begs the question, “why this fragment here?” The words were chosen, considered, and assembled by Benjamin, and there is a broad sense that each fragment belongs to its page and is conversant with its neighbours and its Convolute, if only because of conventional trust between reader and author. Because The Arcades Project presents the outcome of editorial decisions, but with no way of reconstructing Benjamin’s exact decision process, the work breathes an intangible subjectivity. Historical material is staged in a latent space where its meaning is suspended across multiple fields, only concretised by the judgement of the reader and Benjamin’s elemental signposting through reference numbers and Convolute titles. Even such titles can seem separated by the opaquest distinctions: for what reason does a fragment belong to “Dream House, Museum, Spa” and not “Dream City and Dream House”? A fragment from the latter mentions “the works of M. Haussmann,” a direct reference to the subject of Convolute E (“Haussmannization, Barricade Fighting”) – yet Benjamin forgoes any cross-reference. He compels his reader to construct and order alongside him, to encounter and problematise such gaps and slippages, and to make sense out of his fragments.[vii]
Read under these conditions, The Arcades Project can be thematised through its specific historical material. By painstakingly collecting historical material, Benjamin assembles a diorama of “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century”.[viii] He draws together words and images produced by witnesses to the city in modernity. The collection of these words speaks to a particular time and place that is, for Benjamin, of deep political, intellectual, and aesthetic importance.[ix] Read together, there seems to be a convolution of historical moments amounting to a specific, dioramic construction of some “Paris” in the reader’s mind. At the same time, this is far from an authoritative, naturalised history. Benjamin’s Paris “is not the only Paris, not even the true one.” This Paris is “brilliantly illuminated” by the words of hundreds of historical agents, but “conceals another Paris… a nocturnal, spectral, imperceptible Paris.”[x] Each choice made in the assembly of the project also represents a choice not made, a fragment discarded. Benjamin’s Paris is constrained by the texts he could access, the technology of his time, his determinative selection, method of arrangement, ordering of quotations, addition of original prose, and the myriad other contingencies that result in the particular occasion of The Arcades Project, in some sense achieving his stated intention “to preserve the intervals of reflection.”[xi]
Benjamin’s ill-defined authorship and montage of meaning effects a causal looseness in the text that could be construed as vapid post-modernism. Such a reading veers the project towards purely subjective meaning and provides little insight into material history. Nonetheless, while the project is not a naturalised capital-H-History of Paris, it also has far greater remit than the individual airs of its author. Benjamin was a self-identified materialist.[xii] The work comprehensively engages with quotation, so that Benjamin consistently refers to shared material experience among subjects, so that their material productions (articles, books, lithography, etc.) “are not strangers to one another, but are, a priori […], interrelated in what they want to express.”[xiii] For instance, Convolute S (“Painting, Jungendstil, Novelty”) cites the words of Remy de Gourmont, Salvador Dali, Dolf Sternberger, among others, each fragment constructed out of words that were written, printed on pamphlets and pages, and distributed. The fragments of The Arcades Project are lifted from a material context, and always refer to that concrete history made real by the historical subjects of that time and place. This reference to inter-subjective history, as well as Benjamin’s editorial fingerprints, make this work specifically interpretable and its reading consequential to finding meaning in the history of Paris in modernity.
Read without the context of Benjamin’s explicit theories of history, The Arcades Project constructs a dioramic “history” of modern Paris. At the same time as it represents a specific construction, this history is also exemplary, demonstrating a method that is potentially applicable in any historical investigation. Below, I consider Benjamin’s direct engagement with concepts of history, how this affects the reading of The Arcades Project, and its implications for the practice of art history.
Convolute N contains the most specific fragments on Benjamin’s method and objectives in The Arcades Project.[xiv] He perhaps most pithily summarises this as “literary montage,” recalling the photomontage technique used by contemporary avant-garde artists. The project’s “ready-made” fragments described above are cast as information-bearing material to be “montaged”. They are cut from their original context, still retaining some of their former significance, and gaining yet more in their new-found place among other fragments.[xv] Crucially, Benjamin’s stated principle of organisation is “to grasp the construction of history as such.”[xvi] He rejects historical methods of “saying and progression”, which he views as a naturalising tool of bourgeois power, in favour of “showing and actualisation”.[xvii] This principle is what renders the project’s particular material and assembly demonstrative of a novel historical method.
Literary montage is posed as the “language” where “dialectical images” are encountered. These dialectical images are Benjamin’s alternative to the history of “things ‘as they really were’”, and are the conceptual apparatus that Benjamin engages in his investigation of modern Paris and the historiography of that investigation.[xviii] Benjamin elaborates on this idea in a discursive fragment:
It’s not that what is past casts light on which is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that where in what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation […] For while the relation of the present to the past is a purely temporal, continuous one, the relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical: it is not progression but image, suddenly emergent—Only dialectical images are genuine images […]; and the place where one encounters them is language.[xix]
Between historical detritus, in “the smallest and most precisely cut components,” Benjamin conceives of the emergence of historical meaning that, from the outset, unravels “the naturalization of historical time, and by extension philosophical naturalism.”[xx] Naturalised histories reflect the “purely temporal, continuous” relation of the present to the past. Dialectical images actualise a historical perception analogous to the image as “a simultaneously available field” for visual perception.[xxi] Material from the “what-has-been” bears witness to life outside of “now-time” (Jetztzeit), and where the “now-time” encounters this material, a synthetic activity occurs. These encounters are manifest in constellations. Across time and history, centres of meaning organise around historical subjects and their material world. In a dialectical image, centres meet, assembling into novel meaning. Yet the “now-time” of the historical subject is slippery – the present always dissolves into the past. Within its confines, however, these constellations provide an infinitesimal flash of legibility out of which historical material is invested with novel meaning.[xxii] The Arcades Project is a laboratory for the emergence of these constellations, where these encounters are staged in Benjamin’s diorama of modern Paris.
What is crucial, however, is not the montage as such, but the process of montaging. If conventional history is evident in the order of things, Benjamin sees historical meaning in the ordering of things, “by making use of them”.[xxiii] For him, the meaning of the historical material of “what-has-been” proliferates as it is perceived through accumulating “now-time”, becoming increasingly “integrated” with significance. However, there is no point at which this process can stop. For the historical perceiver, now-time is on-going, and as such, each dialectical image remains infinitesimal.[xxiv] The object of The Arcades Project is not to grasp history, but to grasp the assembling of history, and in that sense, The Arcades Project could only ever render this thesis legible through the action of its construction and reconstruction. The project is not to have produced a constellation of meaning but to be constellating. This emphasises practice: Benjamin’s practice of collecting, arranging; and my practice of creating meaning from the words and fragments before me, the layers of history implicit in this book, my own memories and experiences. Benjamin could not have achieved this through abstract description but only by enacting an interminable demonstration: The Arcades Project.
Anyone who engages with Benjamin’s collection of material is implicated in this demonstration. Reading through the convolutes, in any manner, causes both quotation and Benjamin’s writing to interact, juxtapose and converse with each other. Even within a single fragment (for example, [X 3,5] on Marx), words are plucked from distant pages, placed side-by-side, encoding some meaning out of their old and new contexts. As the fragments are staged and restaged by the reader encountering them, facets of Paris and modernity emerge.[xxv] In a fragment of Convolute I (“The Interior, The Trace”), an author describes a piece of “extinct” Second Empire furniture, a furmeuse, that facilitated cigar smoking; below it, a newspaper article marvels at the “variety and inexhaustibility” Parisian chimneys.[xxvi] These fragments of historical information are cast across time and space (both between each other, and with the reader), their meaning hollowed-out in part by their fragmented form. Their meaning is also recuperated. Through the residues of their context, their position within Benjamin’s collection, the knowledge, desires, and unique historical situation of the reader, these fragments partake in ongoing historical construction: fashions of furniture, bourgeois interiors, iron and upholstery, novelty and proliferation…
The act of engaging with The Arcades Project exemplifies a historical method that is consonant with writing art history. The project’s form demonstrates how historical perception must be understood in relation to the ongoing negotiation of historical terrain. Benjamin’s method considers not only the “concrete historical situation of the object,” but also that of “the interest taken in the object.”[xxvii] Since 1940, such implications have been reflected in other interpretive methods. For example, Gramsci’s analysis of hegemonies and Derridean deconstruction both challenge “naturalised” history and tradition and consider the effects of including the historical viewer when rendering a historical view. It would be anachronistic to pose The Arcades Project here as a source text for post-structuralism – the intellectual lineage of these theorists cannot be resolved into a simple narrative of influence.[xxviii] Nevertheless, The Arcades Project both conceives of and demonstrates a historical method that dispenses with a singular narrative, that recognises the interests of power in historical perception (bourgeois interests, for Benjamin), and the novel meaning in “facts of daily existence”.[xxix] Perhaps more than others in this lineage, Benjamin practices his method before anything else (including making that method explicit), always recognising it is the “doing” itself that matters.
Benjamin’s treatment of “rags and refuse”, though mostly limited to written material, echoes the ideas and impacts of Alois Riegl, and his academic interest in “crafts” beyond canonical or high artworks. Benjamin not only cites works that have continued to serve canonical memory in their own right (such as Baudelaire’s Les fleurs de mal or Marx’s Das Kapital) but also the extraordinary amount of material that is forgotten (“refused”) through both determination and chance and rendered anonymous and ghostly with time.[xxx] As Benjamin recognised, this material bears witness to past happenings. By the investment of the historical subject, this material can be re-awoken to create radically novel meaning.[xxxi] Given the many artists and cultural theorists Benjamin worked alongside, it is notable that The Arcades Project is largely devoid of images.[xxxii] His focus on linguistic work is perhaps principled, but begs the question of what dialectical images may emerge from visual history, particularly in a contemporary time of camera phones, the internet, and ever-accelerating production of images.[xxxiii]
The Arcades Project is a strange book. It abrogates conventions of authorial guidance, evidence, and interpretation. At times, both its form and content vehemently disagree with the premise of the book medium itself. Benjamin’s fragments cover a terrain of material both vast and deep. Any and every encounter with this assemblage returns its reader with some new configuration of historical detritus and historical meaning. This meaning is deeply specific, speaking to the intricate historical life of Benjamin’s Paris: fashion, catacombs, modes of lighting, Haussmannization and so forth. At the same time, The Arcades Project problematises historical perception more broadly. It entwines the fragments, the reader, and the history they interface with in an exemplification of history’s construction, interminable and inescapable. The writing of art history not only asks the question of what art is, but also what history is. This essay has attempted to broach the latter, opening a space in which art and other cultural products can be staged. This is not for history’s restitution, but for the practice itself: the staging, the restaging, and restaging again, writing and rewriting, thinking, and dreaming, wondering and wandering, as through the Paris Arcades.
Megan is in her final semester of a Bachelor of Arts with an extended major in Art History and a minor in Philosophy, and a Bachelor of Science with a major in Bioinformatics. Her academic interests include critical theory, contemporary art history, and marginal historiographies. Her non-academic interests include making art, watching movies, and riding her bike.
ENDNOTES
[i] Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1997), 50. I use Buck-Morss’s timeline of the construction of the Arcades Project as a reference for the chronological development of The Arcades Project in this paper.
[ii] Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, notes to pages 21-31 in The Arcades Project, by Walter Benjamin, ed. Rolf Tiedermann, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 958.
Hereafter, editorial citations are cited in shortened format; Benjamin’s fragments are cited as AP.
[iii] Stanley Cavell, “Remains to be Seen,” in Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project, ed. Beatrice Hanssen (London: Continuum, 2006), 259.
[iv] Rolf Tiedermann, “Dialectics at a Standstill: Approaches to the Arcades Project,” in The Arcades Project, 929; Eiland and McLaughlin, translator’s forward to The Arcades Project, x.
[v] See for example: Irving Wohlfarth, “Et Cetera? The Historian as Chiffonnier,” in Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project; Elissa Marder, “Walter Benjamin’s Dream of Happiness,” in Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project; Bridget Doherty, “The Colportage Phenomenon of Space’ and the Place of Montage in The Arcades Project,” in Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project.
[vi] AP, [N1,4], 457.
[vii] AP, [K6a,1], 400.
[viii] Luke Carson, “Desert Island Book Review: Walter Benjamin, “The Arcades Project”,” Genre 33, no. 3 (2000): 371. This is thought to be the eventual title of Benjamin’s completed Arcades Project.
[ix] Benjamin alludes to the political dimension of the Arcades Project in his essay “Surrealism,” writing that the “outmoded” material of the world of things contains “revolutionary energies,” which can be mastered by a “trick consist[ing] in the substitution of a political for a historical view of the past.” Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol 2, bk.1, eds. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland and Gary Smith, trans. Rodney Livingston et al, (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2005), 210. Furthermore, Benjamin actualises and practices the visual politics he prescribes in the Work of Art essay, where technological reproduction can put copies of original works “into situations which would be out of reach for the original itself.” Analogously, the literary montage of the Arcades Project is a politically pregnant arrangement of fragments (“originals”). Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zorn, (London: The Bodley Head, 2015), 214. This political, Marxian thread runs through most of Benjamin’s work and offers further insights and interpretations of the Arcades Project. For brevity, however, I leave this more prescriptive analysis untreated in this essay.
[x] AP, [L5,3], 415.
[xi] AP, [N1,3], 456.
[xii] Tiedermann, “Dialectics at a Standstill,” 931. See also fragment N2a,4: “To be specific, I pursue the origin of the forms and mutations of the Paris arcades from their beginning to their decline, and I locate this origin in the economic facts.” AP, [N2a,4], 462.
[xiii] Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” in Illuminations, 68.
[xiv] Hannah Arendt, introduction to Illuminations, 11.
[xv] AP, [N1a,4], 459; AP, [N2,6], 461.
[xvi] Again, Benjamin politicises this historical perception: “To approach, in this way, ‘what has been’ means to treat it not historiographically (sic), as heretofore, but politically, in political categories.” AP, [K2,3], 392. This further complicates how and to what end Benjamin was writing The Arcades Project, but is, again, beyond the scope of this essay and not essential to my argument.
[xvii]AP, [N1a,8; N2,2], 459-60.
[xviii] AP, [N3,4], 463.
[xix] AP, [N2a,3], 462.
[xx] Andrew Benjamin, “Two Forms of Gesture: Notes on Aby Warburg and Walter Benjamin,” Aisthesis 10, no. 1 (2017): 23.
[xxi] Michael Baxandall “Patterns of Intention,” in The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, ed. Donald Preziosi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 47.
[xxii] As a concrete example, Benjamin presents me, the reader, with an extract from a nineteenth-century book imagining a futuristic Paris of the twenty-first century. A nineteenth-century imagination created this meaning contained in that extract. Upon its collision with me, in the time and place I occupy, a unique configuration of meaning emerges with these words. I can grasp the idea of futurism in a certain way because of an intervening development of science-fiction. I can envision the extract’s evocations of glass and steel because of the urban material environment I engage with every day, in my “daily life”, and in the media I consume.
[xxiii] AP, [N1a,8], 459.
[xxiv] AP, [K2,3], 392; This is editorially hinted at in the structure of The Arcades Project book. The book includes Benjamin’s Convolutes, First Sketches and Early Drafts alongside subsequent commentaries, such that, despite the physical limitations of the book form, there is some projection of the work’s temporal quality, and it being an on-going practice.
[xxv] On another level, the fragments converse with the project itself. Words, phrases, and passages recur with slight permutations throughout The Arcades Project and Benjamin’s other writings. A fragment considers “an encyclopaedia of knowledge” in the “magic circle” of collected objects, evoking the “magic encyclopaedia” of the 1931 essay “Unpacking my Library.” Benjamin practices literary montage through his “canon” of work, by “blasting” his own writing out of their chronological contexts and linear relations to the rest of his writing. AP, [H1a,2] 205; Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library,” 62.
[xxvi] AP, [I3,9; I3,10], 219.
[xxvii] AP, [K2,3] 391.
[xxviii] There are certainly theoretical intersections between Benjamin’s work and post-structuralist scholarship (such as in Baudrillard’s Symbolic Exchange and Death); however, their exploration is beyond the scope or argument of this essay.
[xxix] AP, [N5a,5], 467.
[xxx]Benjamin characterises his “rescue” of historical material on at least two fronts: escaping “discredit and neglect” (in other words, lost to time); an escaping from calcification in tradition, where material that is not lost is placed under “a certain strain” (in other words, overdetermination), through their “enshrinement as heritage.” AP, [N9,4], 473.
[xxxi] I draw here upon a letter written by Adorno, where he formulates Benjamin’s idea of dialectal images: “With the vitiation of their use value, the alienated things are hollowed out and, as ciphers, their draw in meanings. Subjectivity takes possession of them insofar as it invests them with intentions of desire and fear…. Dialectical images are constellated between alien things and incoming and disappearing meaning, are instantiated in the moment of indifference between death and meaning.” AP, [N 5,2], 466.
[xxxii] There are significant similarities between Benjamin and Aby Warburg, who applied a similar ethos to paintings and other cultural media “as the bearers and shapers of social memory” that “need to be continually supplied with meanings so that the mnemonic energy and potential enclosed within them may burst forth and that they may assume an effective presence in the social sphere.” Marek Tamm, “Introduction: Afterlife of Events: Perspectives on Mnemohistory,” in Afterlife of Events, ed. Marek Tamm (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 10.
[xxxiii] The recent advent of generative AI potentially extends this even further. Through such technology, Benjamin’s process of discovery, selection, and arrangement in the Biblioteque Nationale can be arbitrarily expanded to the scope of the internet. The synthetic powers of such generative AI could facilitate ongoing practice of Benjamin’s dialectical history, colliding material across vast time and space.
WORKS CITED
Baxandall Michael. “Patterns of Intention.” In The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology. Edited by Donald Preziosi. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Benjamin, Andrew. “Two Forms of Gesture: Notes on Aby Warburg and Walter Benjamin.” Aisthesis 10, no. 1 (2017): 21–40.
Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Edited by Rolf Tiedermann. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999.
Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Edited by Hannah Arendt. Translated by Harry Zorn. London: The Bodley Head, 2015.
Benjamin, Walter. Selected Writings. Vol 2, bk. 1. Edited by Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland and Gary Smith. Translated by Rodney Livingston et al. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2005.
Buck-Morss, Susan. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1997.
Carson, Luke. “Desert Island Book Review: Walter Benjamin, “The Arcades Project”.” Genre 33, no. 3 (2000): 361-72.
Cavell, Stanley. “Remains to be Seen.” In Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project, 259-63.
Doherty, Bridget. “The Colportage Phenomenon of Space’ and the Place of Montage in The Arcades Project” In Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project, 184-200.
Hanssen,Beatrice, ed. Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. London: Continuum, 2006.
Marder, Elissa. “Walter Benjamin’s Dream of Happiness.” In Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project, 157-83.
Tamm, Marek. “Introduction: Afterlife of Events: Perspectives on Mnemohistory.” In Afterlife of Events. Edited by Marek Tamm. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137470188_1
Tiedermann, Rolf. “Dialectics at a Standstill: Approaches to the Arcades Project.” In The Arcades Project, 929-45.
Wohlfarth, Irving. “Et Cetera? the Historian as Chiffonnier.” In Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project, 12-32.
Featured photo by Manolo Chrétien on Unsplash.
EXORDIUM 
1 Comment