The Arcades Project - Operi

century France-back to what Marx had called the fetish character of commodities. In
1935 the "unfolding of this concept" would "constitute the center" of the projected work
(Scholem Letters, 159), and by 1938 the "basic categories" of the Passagm-Werk would
"converge in the determination of the fetish character of commodities" (5:1166), This
notion surfaces only once in the first sketch (0°,38); it was then by no means clear that
commodity fetishism was destined to form the central schema for the whole project.
"When Benjamin wrote the fiTSt expose in 1935, he was probably still unfamiliar with the
relevant discussion in Marx's writings, He apparently only began to "look around , , , in
the first volume of Capital" after completing the expose (5:1122). He was fmnihar with the
theory of commodity fetishism mainly in Lukac's version; like many other left-wing
intellectuals of his generation, Benjamin largely owed his Marxist competency to the
chapter on reification in Lukacs's Hist01Y and Class Consciousness.
Benjamin wished to treat culture in dle era of high capitalism like Lukac's translation
back into philosophy of the economic fact of commodity fetishism, as well as his application
of the category of reilication to the antinomies of bourgeois thought. Marx showed
that capitalist production's abstraction of value begets an ideological consciousness, in
which labor's social character is reflected as objective, thing-like characteristics of the
products of that labor. Benjamin recognized the same ideological consciousness at work in
the then-dominant "reified conception of culture:' which obfuscated the fact dlat "the
creations of the human mind ... owe not just their origin, but also the ways in which they
have been handed down, to a continuing social labor" (5:1255). The fate of nineteenthcentury
culture lay precisely in its connllodity character, which Berqamin thereupon
represented in "cultural values" as phantasmagoria. Phantasmagoria: a Blendwerk, a deceptive
TInage designed to dazzle, is already the commodity itself, in which the exchange
value or value-form hides the usc value. Phantasmagoria is the whole capitalist production
process, which constitutes itself as a natural force against the people who carry it out.
For Belamin, cultural phantasmagorias express "the ambiguity peculial' to the social
relations and products of this epoch" (Expose of 1935, section V). In Marx, the same
ambiguity dermes "the economic world of capitalism": an ambiguity "exemplified quite
clearly in the machines which aggravate exploitation rather than alleviate the human lot"
(1