The Arcades Project - Operi

ture is the expression of the infrastnlCture. The economic conditions under which
society exists are expressed in the superstructure, precisely as, with the sleeper, an
overfull stomach finds not its reflection but its expression in the contents of dreams,
which, from a causal point of view, it may be said to "condition." (K2,5)
BeIamin did not set out according to ideology critique;18 radler, he gave way to the
notion of materialist physiognomies, which he probably understood as a complement, or
an extension, of Marxist theory. Physiognomies infers the interior from the exterior; it
decodes the whole from the detail; it represents dIe general in the particular. Nominalistically
speaking, it proceeds from the tangible object; inductively it commences in the
reahn of the intuitive. The Passagen.-Werk "deals fundamentally with the expressive character
of the earliest industrial products, the earliest industrial architecture, the earliest
machines, but also dIe earliest department stores, advertisements, and so on" (Nla,7). In
that expressive character, Benjamin hoped to locate what eluded the immediate grasp: the
Sign.atu} the mark, of the nineteenth century. He was interested in the "thread of expression":
"the expression of the economy in its culture will be presented, not the economic
origins of culture" (Nla,6). Benjamin's trajectory from the first to the second sketch of the
Passagen-Werk documents his efforts to safeguard his work against the demands of his torical
materialism; in this way, motifs belonging to metaphysics and theology survived
undamaged in the physiognomic concept of the epoch's closing stage, 1'0 describe the
expression of economics in culture was an attempt "to grasp an economic process as
perceptible Urphenomenon, from out of which proceed all manifestations of life in the
arcades (and, accordingly, in the nineteenth century) " (Nla,6). Benjamin had already
enlisted Goethe's primal phenomenon (UljJilanomenj to explicate his concept of truth in
Orig7.·n if tlte German Trauerspiel:19 the concept of 'origin" in the Trauerspiel book would
have to be "a strict and compelling transfer of this Goethean first principle from the realm
of nature to that of history," In the Passagen-Werk! then:
I am equally concerned with fathoming an origin, To be specific, I pursue the origm
of the forms and mutations of the Paris arcades from their begimring to their decline,
and I locate this origin in the economic facts. Seen from the standpoint of causality,
however (and that means considered as causes), these facts would not be primal
phenomena; they become such only insofa1' as in their own individual development-'\mfolding"
might be a better term-they give rise to the whole series of the
arcade's concrete historical forms, just as the leaf unfolds from itself all the riches of
the empirical world of plants. (N2a,4)
Metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties reappear here in the theory of epistemology,
even though they seemed vanquished after they learned of their ironic mlllasking by
economics. How could Ur-phenomena, which represent themselves as the expression of
economic facts, distinguish themselves from those ideas in Benjamin's TrauersjJiel book
which represent themselves by empirical means? Benjamin resolves tlns problem with his
early notion of a monadological truth, winch presides at every phase of the Passagen-Werk
and remains valid even in the theses "On the Concept of History," vVhereas in the
TrauersjJiel book tlle idea as monad lcontains tlle image of the world" in itself,20 in the
Pa,rsagen-Wer/( the expression as [k-phenomenon contains the image of history in itself.
The essence of capitalist production would be comprehended vis-avis the concrete historical
forms in which the economy finds its cultural expression. TIle abstractions of mere
conceptual tlunking were insufficient to demystify this abhorrent state of affairs, such that
a mimetic-intuitive corrective was imposed to decipher the code of the universal in the