The Arcades Project - Operi

Death and fashion. Rilke, the passage from the Duineser Elegien.28
Characteristic of Jug ends til are posters with full-length figures. So long asJugend­
stil lasted, man refused to grant a place to things on the giant silver surface of the
mirror, and claimed it for himself alone.
Definition of the "modem" as the new in the context of what has always already been
there.
"The clever Parisians ... , in order to disseminate their fashions more easily, made use of
an especially conspicuous reproduction of their new creations-namely tailors' dum­
mies . ... These dolls , which still enjoyed considerable importance in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, were given to little girls as playthings when their career as fashion
figurines had ended:' Karl Grober, Kinderspielzeug aus alter Zeil (Berlin, 1927), pp. 31-32.
Perspective in the course of centuries. Baroque galleries. Scenography in the
eighteenth century. < GO, 1 0 >
Play on words with 'I-rama" (on the model of 'I diorama") in Balzac at the beginning of
Rre Goriol.
Ruckert: virgin forests in miniature.
To cultivate fields where, until now, only madness has reigned. Forge ahead with the
whetted axe of reason, looking neither right nor left so as not to succumb to the horror
that beckons from deep in the primeval forest. But every ground must at some point have
been turned over by reason, must have been cleared of the undergrowth of delusion and
myth. This is to be accomplished here for the terrain of the nineteenth century.
Microcosmic jounley which the dreamer makes through the regions of his own body. For
he has this in common with the madman: the noises emanating from within the body,
which for the salubrious individual converge in a steady surge of health and bring on
sound sleep if they are not overlooked, dissociate for the one who dreams. Blood pres­
sure, intestinal chum, heartbeat, muscle sensations become individually perceptible for
him and demand tbe explanation which delusion or dream image holds ready. This
sharpened receptivity is a feature of the dreaming collective, which settles into the arcades
as into the insides of its own body. We must follow in its wake in order to expound the
nineteenth century as its dream vision.29
Rustling in the painted foliage under the vaulted ceilings of the Bibliotheque Nationale­
produced by the many pages continually leafed through in the books here.
Heathscape, all remains ever new, ever the same (Kafka, Der Prozef3).
Modernity, the time of hell. The punislunents of hell are always the newest thing going in
this domain. VVhat is at issue is not that "the same thing happens over and over" (much