The Arcades Project - Operi

In the poetry of Baudelaire, notwithstanding the new and original signature
which allegory inscribes there, a medieval substrate makes itself felt beneath d,e
Baroque element. Tills involves what Bezold calls "the survival of the ancient
gods in medieval humanism:"'" Allegory is the vehicle for this survival. [179,1]
At the moment when the production process closes itself off to people, the stock
in trade becomes accessible to them-in the form of the department store.
[179,2]
On the theory of dandyism. The tailor's is the last line of business in which d,e
customer is still catered to on an individual basis. Story of the twelve frock
coats .. 136 More and more, the person commissioning work plays a heroic role.
[179,3]
Insofar as the flaneur presents hinlself in d,e marketplace, his flanerie reflects the
fluctuations of commodities. Grandville, in his drawings, has often depicted the
adventures of the strolling conullodity. [179,4]
On the phrase "racked by their labors":"" with the Saint-Simonians, industrial
labor is seen in the light of sexual intercourse; the idea of the joy of working is
patterned after an inlage of the pleasure of procreation. Two decades later, the
relation has been reversed: the sex act itself is marked by the joylessness which
oppresses the industrial worker. [179,5]
It would be an error to think of the experience contained in the correspondances as
a simple counterpart to certain experiments with synesthesia (with hearing colors
or seeing sounds) that have been conducted in psychologists' laboratories. In
Baudelaire's case, it is a matter less of the well-known reactions, about which
effete or snobbish art criticism has made such a fuss, than of the medium in
which such reactions occur. Tills medium is d,e memory, and with Baudelaire it
was possessed of unusual density. The corresponding sensory data correspond in
it; they are teeming with memories, which run so thick that they seem to have
arisen not from this life at all but from some more spacious vie anlirieure. It is this
prior existence that is intimated by the "familiar eyes""38 with which such experi­
ences scrutinize the one who has them. [179,6]
What fundamentally distinguishes the brooder from the thinker is that the for­
mer not only meditates a thing but also meditates his meditation of the thing.
The case of the brooder is that of the man who has arrived at the solution of a
great problem but then has forgotten it. And now he broods-not so much over
the matter itself as over his past reflections on it. The brooder's thinking, there­
fore, bears the inlprint of memory. Brooder and allegorist are cut from the same
cloth. [179a,l]