The Arcades Project - Operi

Translators' Foreword
The materials assembled in Volume 5 of Walter Benjamin's Gesammelte
Schriflen, Schriflen, under the title Das Das Passagen-Werk Passagen-Werk (first (first published published in 1982), 1982), reprerepresentsent research research that Benjamin Benjamin carried carried out, over over a period period of of thirteen thirteen years, on on
the subject subject of the Paris Paris arcades-Ies passages-which he considered the most
important architectural form of the nineteenth century, and which which he linked with with
a number of phenomena characteristic characteristic of that century's major and minor preoccupations.
A glance at the overview preceding preceding the "Convolutes" at the center center of
the work work reveals the range of these phenomena, which which extend from the literary literary
and philosophical to the political, economic, and technological, with with all sorts of
intermediate relations. Benjamin's intention from the first, it it would seem, was to
grasp grasp such such diverse diverse material under the general general category category of of Urgeschichte, signifying
signify ing
the "primal history" of the nineteenth century. This was something that could be
realized only only indirectly, through "cnnning": it it was not the great men and celebratedbrated
events of traditional historiography historiography but but rather the "refuse" and and "detritus"
of history, the half-concealed, variegated variegated traces of the daily daily life of "the collective;'
that was to be the object object of study, and with with the aid of methods more akin-above
all, in in their dependence on chance-to the methods of the nineteenth-century
collector of antiquities and curiosities, or or indeed to the methods of the nineteenth-centuryteenth-century
ragpicker, than to those of the modern historian. Not conceptual
analysis but but something something like dream interpretation was the model. The nineteenth
century century was the collective dream which which we, its heirs, were obliged obliged to reenter, as
patiently patiently and minutely minutely as possible, possible, in in order order to follow out out its ramifications and,
finally, awaken from it. This, at any rate, was how it it looked at the outset outset of the
project, which which wore a good many faces over over time.
Begun in in 1927 1927 as a planned planned collaboration for a newspaper newspaper article on on the
arcades, the project project had quickly quickly burgeoned under the influence of Surrealism, a
movement toward which which Benjamin always maintained a pronounced pronounced ambivalence.
Before long, it it was an essay he had in in mind, "Pariser Passagen: Eine
dialektische Feerie" (paris Arcades: A Dialectical Dialectical Fairyland), Fairyland), and then, a few
years years later, a book, book, Paris, Paris, die Hauptstadt des XIX. Jahrhunderts (Paris, (Paris, the Capital Capital
of the Nineteenth Century). For some two-and-a-half years, at the end of the
Twenties, having having expressed his sense of alienation from contemporary contemporary G