The Arcades Project - Operi

Dialectics at a Standstill
Approaches to the Passagen-We rk.
By Rolf Tiedemann
There are books whose fate has been settled long before they even exist as books.
Benjamin's unfinished paJsagen-Werk is just such a case, Many legends have been woven
around it since Adorno first mentioned it in an essay published in 1950.1 Those legends
becalne even more complexly embroidered after a two-volume selection of Benjamin's
letters appeared, which abounded in statements about his intentions for the project. But
these statements were neither complete nor cohercnt.2 As a result, the most contradictory
rumors spread about a book that competing Benjamin interpreters persistently referred to
in the hope that it would solve the puzzles raised by his intellectual physiognomy. 111a1:
hope has remained um"ealized. The answer that the fraglnents of the Passagen-Werk. give to
its readers instead follows Mephisto's retort, "Many a riddle is made here," with Faust's
IMany a riddle must be solved here."
In fact, for some years the texts that provide the most reliable information about the
project Benjamin worked on for thirteen years, from 1927 until his death in 1940, and
that he regarded as his masterpiece, have been available. Most of dle more important
texts he wrote during the last decade of his life are offshoots of the Passagen-Werk., If it had
been completed, it would have become nothing less than a materialist philosophy of the
history of dle nineteenth century. The expose entitled "PariSI the Capital of the Nine­
teenth CenL1Jry" (1935) provides us with a summary of the themes and motifs Benjamin
was concerned with in the larger work. TIle text introduces the concept of "historical
schematism" (5:1150),3 which was to serve as the basic plan for Benjamin's constmction
of the nineteenth century. On the other hand, "Das Kunstwerk lin Zeitalter seiner techni­
schen Reproduzierbarkeit" (The Work of Art in the Age of Te chnological Reproducibil­
ity; 1935-1936) has no thematic connection with the Passagen-Werk (dealing with
phenomena belonging to the twentieth rather than to the nineteenth century), but is
nevertheless relevant from dle point of view of methodology. In that essay, Benjamin tries
to "pinpoint the precise spot in the present my historical construction would take as its
vanishing point' (Letters, 509), '"Dle great l fragmentary work on Baudelaire, which came
into being in the years 1937-1939, offers a "miniature model" of The Arcades Prqject, TIle
methodological problems raised by the "Work of Art" essay were, in their turn, addressed
once more in the theses IOber den BegrifI der Geschichte" (On the Concept of History) .
In Adorno's opinion, dlese theses "more or less summarize the epistemological considera­
tions that developed concurrently with The Arcades Prqject."4 vVhat survives of this proj­
ect-the countless notes and excerpts that constitute the fifth volume of Benjamin l s
Notes for tllis essay begin on page 1012.