The Arcades Project - Operi

Dialectic of the commodity
A canon for this dialectic to be drawn from Odradek"
11,e positive in the fetish
Dialectic of the newest and oldest
Fashion is a canon for this dialectic also
The oldest as newest: thc daily news
cIne newest as oldest: the Empire
First dialectical stage: the arcade changes from a place of splendor to a place
of decay
Second dialectical stage: the arcade changes from an unconscious experience
to sometbing consciously penetrated
Not-yet-conscious knowledge of what has been. Structure of what-has-been
at this stage. Knowledge of what has been as a becoming aware, one that
has the stmcture of awakening.
Not-yet-conscious knowledge on the part of the collective
All insight to be grasped according to the schema of awakening. And
shouldn't the "not-yet-conscious knowledge" have the structure of dream?
(Dream kitsch
Parisian chronicles) (the terrifying knock on the door)
the ugliness of the object is the terrifying knock
on the door when we're asleep5
(We fashion an epoch in the history of the antiques trade and construct a
clock by which to tell when objects are ripe for collecting.)
We constmct an awakening theoretically-that is, we imitate, in the realm of
language, the trick that is decisive physiologically in awakening, for awak­
ening operates with cunning. Only with cunning, not without it, can we
work free of the realm of dream.
Awakening is the exemplary case of remembering: the weighty and momen­
tous case, in which we succeed in remembering the nearest (most obvious).
What Proust intends with the experimental rearrangement of furniture is no
different from what Bloch tries to grasp as darkness of the lived moment.
Here the question arises : In what different canonical ways can man behave
(the individual man, but also the collective) with regard to dreanling? And
what sort of comportment, at bottom, is adequate to tme waking being?
We conceive the dream (1) as historical phenomenon, (2) as collective phe­
nomenon.