The Arcades Project - Operi

[1] (Balzac was the first to speak of the ruins of the bourgeoisie. But he still
knew nothing about them. It was Surrealism which first got a glimpse of
the field of debris left behind by the capitalist development of d,e forces of
production. )
But it was Surrealism that first opened our eyes to them. These ruins became,
for Surrealism, the object of a research no less inlpassioned than that which the
humanists of the Renaissance conducted on the rellmants of classical antiqnity.
Painters like Picasso and Chirico allude to this analogy. This unrelenting confrontation
of the recent past with the present moment is something new, historically.
Other contiguous links in the chain of generations have existed within the
collective consciousness, but they were hardly distinguished from one another
within the collective. The present, however, already stands to the recent past as
the awakening stands to the dreanl. The development of the forces of productiou,
in the course of the previous century, shattered that centuris wish synlbols
even before the monuments representing them had collapsed, and before the
paper on which they were rendered had yellowed. In the nineteenth century, this
development of the forces of production worked to emancipate d,e forms of
constnlction from art, just as in the sixteenth century the sciences freed themselves
from philosophy. A start is made widl architecture as engineered consUUction.
Then comes the reproduction of nature as photography. The creation of
fantasy prepares to become practical as commercial art. Literature submits to
montage in the feuilleton. All these products are on the point of entering the
market as commodities. But dley linger on the threshold. They stop halfway.
Value and commodity enter on a brief engagement before d,e market price
makes their union legitimate. From this epoch derive the arcades and interieurs,
the exhibition halls and panoranlas. They are residues of a dreanl world. But
given d,at the realization of dream elements, in the course of waking up, is the
paradigm of dialectical thinking, it follows that dialectical thinking is d,e organ of
historical awakening. Only dialectical thinking is equal to the recent past, because
it is, each time, its offspring. Every epoch, in fact, not only dreams the one to
follow but, in thus dreaming, precipitates its awakening. It bears its end within
itself and unfolds it-as Hegel already noticed-by cunning. The earliest monuments
of the bourgeoisie began to cmmble long ago, but we recognize, for the
first time, how they were destined for d,is end from the beginning.