The Arcades Project - Operi

First Sketches
Paris Arcades
These early sketches for 171e Arcades Prqject (Gesammelte Schrj/lt'll} vol. 5 [Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,
1982], pp. 991-1038) were written by Benjamin in a bound notebook that contains various other
notcs and drafts dating from mid-1927 to early 1930. Many of the sketches are crossed out in
Benjamin's manuscript, presumably because in most cases they were revised and transferred to the
manuscript of the convolutes; these canceled sketches are printed here in a smaller typesize, with
cross-references to the con"esponding entries in the convolutes and early drafts. (Some of the UllCatl­
celed sketches, in the larger typesize, were also transferred to the convolutes, and are accordingly
cross-referenced.) Cross-references should not be considered exhaustive. The numbering here, as in
"The Arcades of Paris;' is that of the German editor and bears no relation to the numbering of the
convolutes. TIle sig11 indicates an illegible word.
The asphalt roadway in the middle: teams of harnessed humans, human car­
riages. Procession of human caniages.
The street that runs through houses. 'Ii"ack of a ghost tlrrough the walls of houses.
People who inhabit these arcades: the signboards -witll the names have no th ing in COIll­
mon with those that hang beside respectable entryways. Rather, they recall the plaques on
the railings of cages at the zoo, put there to indicate not so much the dwelling place as tlle
lllline and origin of the captive animals.
World of particular secret affinities : palm tree and feather duster, hairdryer and Ve nus de
Milo, champagne bottles, prostheses, llild letter-writing manuals,
When, as children, we were made a present of those great encyclopedic works­
World and Mankind or The Earth or the latest volume of the New Uiliverse­
wasn't it into the rIlulticolored "Carboniferous Landscape" or "European Annual
Kingdom of the Ice Age" that we plunged first of all, and weren't we, as though at
first sight, drawn by an indeterminate affinity between the ichthyosaurs and
bisons, the mammoths and the woodlands? Ye t this same strange rapport and
primordial relatedness is revealed in the landscape of an arcade. Organic world
'Uld inorganic world, abject poverty and insolent luxury enter into the most
contradictory communication; the commodity intermingles and interbreeds as
promiscuously as images in the most tangled of dreams. Primordial landscape of
consumption.