The Arcades Project - Operi

For the reader endowed with such an imagination, the dead letters Benjamin collected
from dle holdings of the Bibliotheque N ationale will come to life. Perhaps even the
building Benjamin did not manage to build will delineate itself before the imaginatively
speculative eye in shadowy outlines.
These shadows, which prevent us from making a surveyable, consistent drawing of the
architecture, are often traceable to problems of a philological nature. The fragments,
which are mostly short and often seem to abbreviate a thought, only rarely allow us to
glimpse how Benjamin planned to link them. He would often first write down ideas,
pointed scribbles. It is impossible to detennine whether he plalmed to retain them in the
course of his work. Some theoretical notes contradict each other; others al'e hardly
compatible. Moreover, many of Benjamin's texts are linked with quotations, and the mere
interpretation of those citations cannot always be separated from Benjarnin's mvn position.
Therefore, to assist the reader in finding his bearings in the labyrinth this volume
presents, I shall briefly sketch the essentials of Benjamin's intentions in his Passagen-Werk,
point out the theoretical nodes of his project, and try to approach explication of some of
its central categories.
The Passagen-Werk is a building with two completely different floor plans, each belonging
to a particular phase of the work. During the first phase, from about mid-1927 to the fall
of 1929, Benjalnin planned to write an essay entitled "PariseI' Passagen: Eine dialektische
Feerie" (paris Arcades: A Dialectical Fairyland).8 His earliest references to it in letters
characterize the project as a continuation of One-Way Street (Letters, 322), though Benjamin
meant a continuation less in terms of its aphoristic form than in the specific kind of
concretization he attempted there: "this extreme concreteness which made itself felt there
in some instances-in a children's game, a building, and a situation in life "-should now
be captured "for an epoch" (Letters, 348). BeIamin's original intention was a philosophical
one and would remain so for all those years: "putting to the test" {die Probe az!/das
ExempeO "to what extent you can be 'concrete' in historical-philosophical contexts" (Letters,
333). He tried to represent the nineteenth century as "commentary on a reality')
(0° ,9), rather than construing it in tlle abstract. We can put together a kind of "catalogue
of themes" from the "First Sketches" about the Passagen-Werk. The catalogue shows us
what the work was supposed to treat at this level: streets and wal'ehouses, panoramas,
world exhibitions, types of lighting, fashion, advertising and prostitution, collectors, the
flaneur and the gambler, boredom. Here the arcades themselves are only one theme
among many. They belong to tllose urban phenomena that appeared in the early nineteenth
century, witll the emphatic claim of the new, but they have meanwhile lost their
functionality. Benjamin discovered the signaulre of the early modern in the ever more
rapid obsolescence of the inventions and innovations generated by a developing capitalism's
productive forces. He wanted to recover that feature from the appeal-ances of the
unsightly, intentione recta, the physiognomic way: by showing rags, as a montage of trash
(0°,36). In One-1iVcly Street his thinking had similarly lost itself in the concrete and partiClllar
and had tried to wrest his secret directly, without any theoretical mediation. Such a
surrender to singular Being is the distinctive feature of this thinking as such. It is not
affected by the rattling mechanisms of undergraduate philosophy, with its transcendental
tablets of commandments and prohibitions. Rather, it limits itself to the somewhat limitless
pursuit of a kind of gentle empirical experience" (ftlnjJirie). Like Goethe's Empirie, it
does not deduce tlle essence behind or above the thing-it knows it in the things themselves.
'"The Surrealists were the first to discover the material world characteristic of the nine-