The Arcades Project - Operi

Modernity, in this work, is what a trademark is on a piece of cutlery or an optical
instrument. It may be as durable as one could wish; if the company which
produced it at some point goes under, it will come to seem obsolete. But to
impress a tradenlark on his work was Baudelaire's avowed intention. "To create a
poncif."452 And perhaps, for Baudelaire, there is no higher honor than to have
imitated, to have reproduced, with his work this state of affairs, one of the most
profane of all in the commodity economy. Perhaps this is Baudelaire's greatest
achievement, and certainly it is one of which he is conscious: to have become so
quickly obsolete willie remaining so durable. [J82,6;J82a,1]
The activity of the conspirator can be considered a sort of uprooting, comparable
to that occasioned by the monotony and terror of the Second Empire. [J82a,2]
The physiologies453 were the first booty taken from the marketplace by tlle
flaneur-who, so to speak, went botanizing on the asphalt. [J82a,3]
Modernity has its antiquity, like a nightmare that has come to it in its sleep."·'
[J82a,4]
England remained, until late in the previous century, the graduate school of
social consciousness. From there, Barbier brought back his cycle of poems entitled
Lazare