The Arcades Project - Operi

teenth century, and in it a specific r!lytllOlogi( rnod(rne. It is to that mode1TI mythology that
Aragon devotes the preface to his Paysan de Parify while Breton's Nadja reaches up into its
artificial sky. In his essay "Surrealism,') which he called an "opaque folding screen placed
before the Passagen-Werk" (Letters, 348), Benjamin praised the Surrealists as "the first to
perceive the revolutionary energies that appear in the 'outmoded; in the first iron con­
stnlCtions, the first factory buildings, the earliest photos, the objects that begin to be
extinct, grand pianos in the salon, the dresses of five years ago, fashionable restaurants
when the vogue has begun to ebb from them."g This stratum of material, the alluvium of
the recent past, also pertains to the Passagen-Werk.Just as Aragon, sauntering through the
Passage de POpcra, was pulled by a vagw de rEves into strange, unglimpsed realms of the
Real, so Benjamin wanted to submerge himself in hitherto ignored and scoDled reaches of
history and to salvage what no One had seen before him.
TIle nearly depopulated aquarium llUlllaiu) as Aragon described the Passage de 1'0pera
in 1927, two years after it had been sacrificed to the completion of the inner circle of
boulevards-the ruins of yesterday, where today's riddles are solved-was mmlatched in
its influence on the Passagen-Werk (see Letters, 488). Benjamin kept quoting the lueur
glauque of Aragon's arcades: the light that objects are immersed in by dreams, a light that
makes them appear strange and vivid at the same time. If the concept of the concrete
formed one pole ofBelamin's theoretical armature, then the Surrealist theory of dreams
made up the other. TIle divagations of the first Arcades "sketch)) take place in the field of
tension between concretization and the dream. to TIrrough the dream, the early Surrealists
deprived empirical reality of all its power; they maltreated empirical reality and its pur­
posive rational organization as the mere content of dreams whose language can be only
indirectly decoded. By turning tlle optics of the dream toward the waking world, one
could bring to birth the concealed, latent thoughts slumbering in that world's womb.
Belamin wanted to proceed similarly with the representation of history, by treating the
nineteenth-century world of things as if it were a world of dreamed things. Under capital­
ist relationships of production, history could be likened to the unconscious actions of the
dreaming individual, at least insofar as history is man-made, yet without consciousness or
design, as if in a dream. "In order to understand the arcades from the ground up, we sink
them into the deepest stratum of the dream" (FO,34). If the dreanl model is applied to the
nineteenth century, then it will strip the era of its completeness, of that aspect that is gone
forever, of what has literally become history. TIle means of production and way of life
dominant in tllat period were not only what they had been in their tiTne and place;
Belalnin also saw the image-making imagination of a collective unconscious at work in
them. TImt imagination went beyond its historical limits in the dream and actually
touched the present, by transferring "the thoroughly fluctuating situation of a conscious­
ness each time manifoldly divided between waking and sleeping," which he had discov­
ered in psychoanalysis, "from the individual to the collective" (Go,27). BelaInin wanted
to draw attention to the fact that architectonic constructions such as the aI'Cades owed
their existence to and served the industrial order of production, while at the same time
containing in themselves somedung unfulfilled, never to be fulfilled within the confines of
capitalism-in tius case, the glass arclutecture of the fu ture Benjamin often alludes to.
Each epoch" has a "side turned toward dreaIlls, the cluld's side" (F°,7). The scrutiny this
side of history was subjected to in Benjamin's observation was designed to "liberate tile
enormous energles oflustory ... that are slumbering in the once upon a time' of classical
historical narrative" (0°,71).
Almost concurrently with his first notes for tlle Passagen-WerkJ Benjamin included in
Ius \'vritings many protocols of Ius own dreams ; tlus was also when he began to experi-