Walter Benjamin and his "Arcade Project"
[South Africa] J.M. Kuche, translated by Huang Canran
Selected from Inner Activities: A Collection of Literary Criticisms, Zhejiang Literature and Art Publishing House, 2010
Reprinted from the "Baoma" WeChat public account
The story is now a household name and hardly needs to be repeated. The background is the border between France and Spain, in 1940. Walter Benjamin fled occupied France and found the wife of a man he knew in a detention camp named Fitko. He said he knew Madame Fétko had a way to take him and his companions across the Pyrenees into neutral Spain. When Madame Fettko took him to scout for the best route, she noticed that he was carrying a heavy briefcase with him. She asked, do you really have to carry this briefcase? Inside, he replied, was a manuscript, "I'm afraid it's lost." Have to...... Save it. It is more important than me personally. ”1
The next day, they crossed the mountains. Benjamin walked for a few minutes before stopping to gasp for breath because he had a weak heart. They were stopped at the border. Spanish police said their documents were invalid; they had to return to France. Benjamin took an overdose of morphine in despair. Police recorded a list of the deceased's belongings. There is no record of the manuscript of the Department in the list.
What's in the briefcase, and where it disappears, we can only guess. Benjamin's friend Gersholm Schallham (1897–1982, Jewish philosopher and historian, born in Germany) believes that the lost work is the latest revision of the unfinished "arcade project"—known in English as the "arcade project". ("For great writers," Benjamin writes, "the weight of the finished work is lighter than the fragments they have been tossing and turning all their lives.") But Benjamin became the academic icon of our time for his heroic efforts to save the manuscript from the fascist war and then bring it to Spain, which he considered safe, and further to the United States. 2
Walter Benjamin at the National Library of France
Of course, the story has a happy twist. A copy of the manuscript of the "Arcade Project" that remained in Paris was hidden in the National Library by Benjamin's friend Georges Bataille (1897-1962, French writer). It was recovered after the war and published in its original form in 1982, i.e., German, interspersed with a large amount of French. Now that we have the full English translation of Benjamin's masterpiece translated by Howard Allan and Kevin McLaughlin, we can finally ask the question: Why care so much about a treatise on shopping in Paris in the 19th century?
Walter Benjamin was born in Berlin in 1892 to a Jewish family that had been integrated into local society. His father was a successful art auctioneer who expanded into the property market; the Benjamin family was wealthy by most standards. Ill and pampered as a child, Benjamin was sent to a progressive boarding school in the countryside at the age of thirteen, where he was influenced by Gustav Veneken, one of the two principals. In the years after leaving school, he was actively involved in Wieneken's anti-authoritarian, back-to-nature youth movement; it was not until 1914, when Wienerken stepped forward to support the war, that Benjamin broke with the organization.
In 1912 Benjamin entered the University of Freiburg to study philosophy. He found the intellectual environment there unsatisfactory for him, and he actively participated in the call for educational reform. When war broke out, he first falsified medical records and then moved to neutral Switzerland to avoid military service. He stayed in Switzerland until 1920, where he studied philosophy and devoted himself to writing a doctoral dissertation to be submitted to the University of Bern. His wife complained that they had no social life.
Benjamin's friend Theodor Adorno said Benjamin was attracted to college, just as Kafka was attracted to insurance companies. Despite his concerns, Benjamin did a good job of obtaining the appointed procedures for his advanced doctorate, which would make him a professor, and in 1925 submitted his dissertation on German theatre in the Baroque era to the University of Frankfurt. Unexpectedly, the paper was not accepted. The thesis fell short between literature and philosophy, and Benjamin lacked an academic protector willing to work for him. (When the paper was published in 1928, it received the respectful attention of book critics, though Benjamin himself had the opposite view and was sullen about it.) ）
After failing his academic program, Benjamin began his career as a translator, broadcaster, and freelance journalist. He was commissioned to translate Proust's Remembrance of the Lost Waters and complete three of the seven volumes.
Benjamin Manuscript, Mots clefs relatifs à Proust
In 1924, Benjamin visited the Italian island of Capri, which at the time was a favorite tourist destination for German intellectuals. There he met Asya Lazis, a theatre director and staunch communist from Latvia. The impact of this encounter was profound. "Every time I experience great love, I change radically and amaze myself," Benjamin wrote in retrospect, "and true love makes me like the woman I love." "3 In the case of this love, the transformation involves a political repositioning." Progressives who love to think, if they are wise, their path will lead to Moscow and not Palestine," Lazis told him pointedly. 4 All traces of idealism in his thoughts, let alone his flirtations with Zionism, had to be abandoned. His confidant Scholem had emigrated to Palestine and expected Benjamin to follow suit. Benjamin made an excuse not to go; he continued to make excuses until the end.
The first fruit of Benjamin's relationship with Lazis was a co-authored article published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Ostensibly about the city of Naples, but at a deeper level it is about the intellectual who grew up in Berlin who first explored a fascinating urban environment, a labyrinth of streets where houses have no door numbers and where the lines between private and public life are lax.
In 1926, Benjamin went to Moscow to meet Lazis. Lazis did not welcome him wholeheartedly (she was in contact with another man at the time); Benjamin, in his account of the visit, explores his own unhappy state of mind and whether he should join the Communist Party and follow the party line. Two years later he and Lazis briefly reunited in Berlin. They lived together and attended together the meetings of the Proletarian Revolutionary Writers' Union. Their fornication hastened Benjamin's divorce process, in which Benjamin treated his wife with a strikingly mean attitude.
During his visit to Moscow, Benjamin kept a diary, which was later revised for publication. Benjamin does not speak Russian. But instead of resorting to the interpreter, he read Moscow from the outside, according to what he later called the physiognomy, avoiding abstracting it or judging it, but presenting the city in such a way that "all facts are already theories in themselves" (goethe). 5
Benjamin's claims of the "world-historical" experiments he saw in the Soviet Union — such as his claim that the Communist Party severed the link between money and power with a stroke of a pen — seemed naïve now. However, his vision is still sharp. He pointed out that many of the new Muscovites were still peasants, living a rural life according to the rhythms of the countryside; class differences may have been abolished, but a new hierarchy was taking shape within the party. He wrote about a street fair that captured the humble status of religion: an icon to be sold with portraits of Lenin on either side, "like a prisoner caught between two policemen." (Vol. II, pp. 32, 26)
Although Asya Lazis repeatedly appears in the Moscow Diary as a background to the diary, and although Benjamin hints that their sexual relationship was in trouble, we know very little about the actual Lazis. As a writer, Benjamin did not have the talent to think of others. In Lazis's own work, Benjamin makes a much more vivid impression on us: his small spotlight-like glasses, his clumsy hands.
For the rest of his life, Benjamin either called himself a communist or a traveler. How deep was his relationship with communism?
After many years of acquaintance with Lazis, Benjamin would repeat the Marxist truth that "the bourgeoisie ... Doomed to decline, for the development of internal contradictions will become fatal" – without actually reading Marx. 6 "Bourgeoisie" continues to be his mantra to describe a mentality of his heartfelt hatred—materialistic, uninquisitive, selfish, pedantic, and above all comfortable self-gratification. He called himself a Communist, an act of moral and historical positioning aimed at opposing the bourgeoisie and his own bourgeois origins. "One thing... It is impossible to do it again: negligent enough not to run away from one's parents," he wrote in One Way Street. The One Way Street is a collection of diaries, dreamy schemes, aphorisms, miniature essays, and satirical fragments including a scathing depiction of Weimar Germany, which he declared himself a freelance intellectual in 1928. (Vol. I, p. 446) Failure to leave home early meant that he had to flee for the rest of his life from Emile and Paula Benjamin: a rebellion against his parents' eagerness to integrate into the German middle class, similar to that of many German-speaking Jews of his generation, including Kafka. What disturbed Benjamin's friends about his Marxism was that there seemed to be an element of compulsion in it, as if his actions were only reactive.
Asja Lacis (1891-1979)
Benjamin's initial intrusion into leftist discourses was depressing to read. He would slip into stupidity that can only be called self-inflicted, such as when he was avidly praising Lenin (he called Lenin's letters "the sweetness of a great epic" in an article not included in the Harvard editors), or when he repeated the euphemism of the Communist Party full of bad omens: "Communism is not radical." The intention, therefore, is not simply to abolish family relations, but to test them to determine their ability to accept change. It asked itself: Can the family be dissolved so that its parts can function socially again? ”7
This passage comes from an article commenting on Brecht's play. Benjamin met Brecht through Lazis, and Brecht's "primitive thinking", that is, stripping away all kinds of bourgeois red tape, once attracted Benjamin. The dedication to One Way Street says: "This street is called Asya Lazis Street, and she is named after her because she, like an engineer, opened this street that runs through the author." This comparison is intended as a compliment. The engineer is a man or woman who belongs to the future, impatient with nonsense, equipped with practical knowledge, determined to change the landscape with actions, actions. (Stalin also admired engineers.) He believed that writers should become engineers of the human soul, meaning that they should take on the responsibility of completely "re-functioning" humanity. ）
Among Benjamin's more famous works, "The Author is the Producer," written in 1934 as a lecture at the Institute of Fascism in Paris, is the one that most clearly shows that he was influenced by Brecht. The lecture paper explores the old question of Marxist aesthetics: which is more important than content and form? Benjamin believed that a literary work must and must be "literarily correct" in order to be "politically correct." "Politically correct" is, of course, a cliché; in practice it means following the party line closely. The Author is the Producer is intended to defend the left-wing modernist avant-garde, which in Benjamin's eyes, mainly represented by the Surrealists, against the clear and understandable realist novels with a strong sense of progress favored by the party line in literature. In order to justify himself, Benjamin felt compelled to cite the forgotten Soviet novelist Sergei Tretyakov (1892-1939, Soviet writer and poet) as an example of the combination of "correct political tendencies" and "progressive" techniques, and once again turned to the charm of the engineer: the writer is like an engineer, a technical expert, and therefore should have a say in literary and technical matters. (Vol. II, pp. 769, p. 770)
In 1931, Benjamin took a Christmas with friends
Arguing on this superficial level was not easy for Benjamin. Was it that at a time when Stalin's persecution of artists was in full swing, his decision to follow the Party line could not but cause him uneasiness? (Asya Lazis herself became one of Stalin's victims, spending several years of her life in labor camps.) Another short essay written in the same year in 1934 may provide a little clue. In his essays, Benjamin ridicules intellectuals who "pride themselves entirely on every issue", refusing to understand that if they are to succeed, they will have to face different audiences with different faces. They are like a butcher who refuses to cut pork, he said, insisting on selling whole pigs. (Vol. II, p. 743)
How do we read this article? Was Benjamin ironically praising the integrity of the old-fashioned intellectuals? Is he making a veiled confession to show that he, Benjamin, is not what he appears to be? Is he pointing out, albeit painfully, the limitations faced by an employed literati? In a letter to Scholham, it is shown that the last item is the correct interpretation (however, he does not always tell the truth to Schallum exclusively). Here, Benjamin defends communism, calling it "the obvious, justified attempt of a man who has been completely or almost completely deprived of any means of production to declare his right to possess them". In other words, his reasons for following the Party line are the same as any proletarian would have: it is in his material interest. (Vol. II, p. 853)
By the time the Nazis came to power, many of Benjamin's associates, including Brecht, sensed the ominous omen and began to flee. Benjamin, for many years, felt out of place in Germany and went to France or the Spanish island of Ibiza at the first opportunity, so he soon joined the fugitive. (His younger brother Georg was less cautious: he was arrested for political activity in 1934 and died in Mauthausen in 1942.) He settled down in Paris, writing for German newspapers under Aryan-sounding pseudonyms (Detlev Holtz, K. A. Stenpflinger), and struggling to make ends meet, or to survive on handouts. As war broke out, he found himself detained as a diaspora living in an enemy country. After being released through the efforts of pen internationals in France, he immediately made arrangements to flee to the United States and then embarked on a deathly journey to the Spanish border.
Benjamin's keenest insight into the enemy of fascism, who deprived him of a home and a profession and ultimately led to his death, was to see the tactics used by the fascists to peddle themselves to the German people: to turn themselves into drama. These insights, most fully expressed in the 1936 book The Age of Technological Reproducibility (to use the title favored by translators of the Harvard version of Yamming's work) (the earlier English translation is Titled The Art of the Age of Technological Reproduction), was first revealed in a 1930 article reviewing a book edited by Ernst Jungle (1895-1998, German novelist).
It has become commonplace to think that Hitler's Nuremberg rally had their combined recitations, hypnotic music, mass collective dances, and dramatic illuminations derived from Wagner's Bayreuth performances. Benjamin is unique in that he claims to treat politics as a pompous drama rather than as a discourse and debate, not just fascist attire but essentially fascistism.
In the films of Lenny Riefensteinal (1902-2003, German film director) and in the newsreels broadcast in every Theater in Germany, the German masses see the image of themselves, which their leaders call them to become. Fascism harnessed the power of the great works of art of the past—what Benjamin called breath art—coupled with the multiplier power of new post-breath media, especially films, to create its new fascist citizens. For ordinary Germans, the only identity that is displayed, the one who constantly looks back at them from the screen, is a fascist identity dressed in fascist costume and making a fascist posture of domination or obedience.
Benjamin's analysis of fascism as a play has much to question. Is the core of German fascism really the politics of spectacle rather than the dream of resentment and historical retribution? If Nuremberg is an aesthetic politics, why is Stalin's May Day big scene and show-like public trial not an aesthetic politics? If the spirit of fascism is to bridge the line between politics and the media, where is the fascist component of media-driven politics in Western democracies? Aren't there different variants of aesthetic politics?
Less questionable than Benjamin's fascist analysis is his view of cinema. He sensed that cinema had the potential to expand the experience, which was extremely predictable: "Cinema... Blowing up (our) prison-like world with a tenth of a second of a second's blast, allowing us to travel peacefully and thrillingly through its widely distributed ruins and rubble. 8 What's even more astonishing about his insight is that his theory of cinema was outdated even in 1936. He overestimated the workings of montages and followed and followed only Eisenstein closely, underestimating the ability of moviegoers to quickly grasp the broader grammar of film narratives. He also shuts down visual pleasures: for him, cinema means being blown away by amazing montages and opening up new ways of watching (again, Brecht's influence is palpable).
The main concept that Benjamin used to describe the encounter of works of art in its age of technical reproducibility (essentially the age of photography—Benjamin has nothing to say about the age of printing) (although he implied in his diary that this concept was in fact the view of bookseller and publisher Adriana Monière) was a loss of breath. Until about the middle of the 19th century, he said, there was an inter-subjective relationship between a work of art and its viewer: the viewer looked at the work of art, and the work of art could also be said to look back at the viewer. This interrelation is the true meaning of the breath: "The breath of perceiving a phenomenon gives it the ability to look back at us." 9 Thus, the breath contains something magical, which derives from the ancient connection between art and religious rituals, which is now weakened.
In 1934, Benjamin took a group photo with Brecht
Benjamin first spoke of breath in A Brief History of Photography (1931). In the book he tries to explain why (in his eyes) the earliest portrait photography—arguably the cradle of photography—has an air of breath, while the photographs of the next generation have lost that breath. One explanation he proposes is that as the emulsion of photography improves and the number of exposures decreases, what the negative captures is no longer the inner spirit of the subject who wants to collect a portrait of himself, but the moment cut from the continuity of the subject's life. Another view he made was that the first generation of photographers were well-trained artists, while the next generation of photographers were skilled workers. Another explanation is that between the 1840s and the 1880s, there was some kind of change in the typical subjects, which was related to the vulgarization of the middle class.
In The Age of Artistic Work in Its Technical Replicability, the concept of breath expands somewhat carelessly from old photographs to ordinary works of art. Benjamin said that the liberating power of new replication technologies will go far beyond compensating for the end of the breath. Cinema will replace the art of breath.
Even Benjamin's friends found it hard to understand the atmosphere of the expanded version. Benjamin visited Brecht, who lived in Denmark, several times and explained his concept in detail to Brecht, but Brecht wrote in his diary: "[Benjamin] said: When you feel someone's eyes looking at you, even if it is looking at your back, you will react (!). ）。 Since you expect that no matter what you look at, it will also look at you, which produces breath... All are mysterious, though his attitude is anti-mystical. This is how the materialist view is adopted! It's a little scary. The reactions of 10 other friends were not more encouraging.
Throughout the 1930s, Benjamin struggled to develop a suitable materialist definition to define breath and the loss of breath. He said the film is post-breathing because the camera, as a tool, cannot be watched. (There's a problem with this statement: the actors will certainly react to the camera as if the camera were looking at them.) Benjamin later revised his view that the end of the breath could be traced back to a historical moment when the crowds of the city became so dense that people—passers-by—no longer looked back into the eyes of others. In the Arcade Project, he made the loss of breath part of a broader historical development: the widespread spread of a sense of disenchantment, that is, the awareness that uniqueness, including the uniqueness of traditional works of art, has become a commodity, just like any other commodity. The fashion industry, which aims to produce unique handmade products that are to be copied and reproduced in batches, the so-called "works", is a good example.
Soon, Benjamin downplayed his optimism about the liberating potential of technology. In 1939, he said that the rhythm of a movie projector was like the rhythm of a conveyor belt. Even the 1936 essay "The Storyteller" showed that he had changed his attitude. He said that memory is the main preserver of tradition and storytelling is the main disseminator; but the privatization of life, which is typical of modern culture, is a fatal blow to storytelling. Storytelling has become artificially limited to novels, which are the product of printing technology and the middle class.
Benjamin was not particularly interested in novels as a genre. Judging from the fictional works collected in the Harvard edition of The Anthology, he did not have the talent for storytelling. His autobiographical works are made up of discontinuous, tense moments. Two of his essays about Kafka would be useful if read together with his long letter to Scholham of 12 June 1938, which regarded Kafka as an allegorical writer and teacher of wisdom rather than a novelist. But Benjamin's greatest hostility is narrative history. "History is broken down into images, not into narrative works," he wrote. Narrative history imposes causal relationships and motives from the outside; things should be given the opportunity to speak for themselves. 11
Benjamin's most fascinating autobiographical work, Childhood in Berlin around 1900, was not published during his lifetime. The earlier Chronicles of Berlin was not chronicled, as the title suggests, but rather montage-cut fragments mixed with reflections on the nature of the autobiography, and the result was that it was not so much about the actual events of Benjamin's childhood as it was about the elusiveness of memory—with a strong Proust mark. Benjamin used an archaeological metaphor to explain why he objected to an autobiography as a narrative story of his life. Autobiographers, he said, should think of themselves as archaeologists, digging deeper into a few old places in search of buried sites of the past.
In addition to the Moscow Diary and the Berlin Chronicle, the first and second volumes contain a number of short autobiographical works: a more literary essay about being absent from a lover; a record of an experience of smoking marijuana; recollections of dreams; fragments of a diary (Benjamin's thoughts of committing suicide in 1931 and 1932); and a Parisian diary for publication, including a visit to a male brothel frequented by Proust. More unexpected disclosures include: admiring Hemingway ("an education to get the right mind through correct writing") and dislike of Flaubert (knowledge is too systematic). (Vol. II, p. 472)
The foundations of Benjamin's philosophy of language were laid early in his writing life. While his view of language remained remarkably stable, his interest ebbed during his most politicized phase, and then welled up again in the late 1930s when he began to explore Jewish mystical thought again. The important essay "On Language Itself and the Language of Man" was written in 1916. In the essay, Benjamin follows Schlegel (1719-1749, German critic) and Novalis, as well as the mystic knowledge he learned from Schallum, arguing that words are not symbols that replace something else, but the name of an "idea". In The Translator's Task (1921), he attempts to speak specifically about his views on this "idea" and resorts to the example of Malami and a poetic language that is not bound by its communicative function.
How a symbolist conception of language can be reconciled with Benjamin's late historical materialism is unclear, but Benjamin believed that a bridge could be built, no matter how "reluctant and problematic" it may be. 12 In his literary essays of the 1930s, he hinted at what the bridge might have looked like. In Proust, Kafka and the Surrealists, he said, the word escaped its meaning at the "bourgeois" level, restoring its basic, postural power. The word as a pose is "the highest form, in an age of loss of theological creed, which can reveal the truth before us". 13
In Adam's day, words and postures were named the same thing. Since then, language has undergone a long depravity, and the Tower of Babel is only one of the stages. Theological task is to retrieve words with primordial, simulated power from the religious texts in which words are preserved. The task of criticism is essentially the same, for fallen languages can still guide us toward pure language with their overarching intentions. Hence the paradox of the Translator's Quest: the translation becomes something more advanced than the original, because the translation poses to the language that preceded the Tower of Babel.
Benjamin's shorthand on the back of the form in the Bibliothèque nationale de France
Benjamin wrote many articles on astrology, which were important additions to his essays on the philosophy of language. He said that our astrology today is a degenerate version of a large amount of ancient knowledge, which comes from ancient times, when the ability to imitate was much stronger, and people's lives and the movement of the stars can still maintain a real, imitative connection. Today, only children retain comparable imitations and use them to react to the world. As this function of imitation continued to decline throughout history, the written language became its most important repository. Benjamin therefore has always had a keen interest in the study of handwriting and calligraphy as the "expressive movements" of character. (Vol. II, p. 399)
In a number of articles written in 1933, Benjamin sketched a theory of language based on imitation. Adamian languages, he said, are onomatopoeia; synonyms in different languages, though they may sound and look different (the theory is intended to apply to both written and spoken language), all refer to "non-sensual" similarities, as has been acknowledged by various "mystical" or "theological" theories of language. (Vol. II, p. 696) Thus, pain, Brot, xleb, these words, though superficially different, are all the same when they embody the idea of "bread" on a deeper level. (Benjamin had to exert all his strength to convince us that this statement was profound, not empty.) Language is the highest development of the function of imitation, and it itself has an archive containing these non-sensory similarities. Reading has the potential to become a kind of fantastic experience that allows us to enter into a common human unconscious, where language and "ideas" are located.
Benjamin's view of language is completely out of touch with the linguistic sciences of the 20th century, but it allows him to enter the world of myth and fable, especially into Kafka's (he believes) primitive, almost human "swamp world" before the advent of mankind. (Vol. II, p. 808) The enthusiastic reading of Kafka left an indelible mark on Benjamin's own later pessimistic writing.
The story of the "Arcade Project" is roughly as follows.
In the late 1920s, Benjamin conceived a work inspired by the Arcades of Paris. It will depict urban experiences; it will be a version of the "Sleeping Beauty" story, a dialectical childhood story that strings together fragmentary texts through montage techniques and tells them in a surreal way. Like the kiss of a prince, it will awaken the European masses to the truth of life under capitalism. It would be about fifty pages long; in preparation for writing this article, Benjamin began to transcribe quotations from his reading into various categories, such as "dull", "fashionable", "dusty", etc. But when he stitches a piece of text together, it expands with new quotes and notes each time. He spoke of these issues with Adorno and Max Hawkheimer, who convinced him that he had to know Marx properly if he wanted to talk about capitalism. As a result, the idea of "Sleeping Beauty" loses its luster.
By 1934, Benjamin had a new, more philosophically ambitious plan: he would use the same montage technique to trace the cultural superstructure of 19th-century France back to commodities and their power as fetishism, a power he had noticed while reading Lukács's History and Class Consciousness. As the volume of notes continued to increase, he grouped them into an elaborate archiving system, categorized in thirty-six volumes, with keywords and indexes. He wrote a synopsis of the material he had collected so far, entitled "Paris, the capital of the 19th century," and handed it over to Adorno (benjamin was receiving funding from the Institute of Social Studies that Adorno and Horkheimer had moved from Frankfurt to New York, and was therefore obliged to do so).
Benjamin was so severely criticized by Adorno that he decided to put the plan on hold for the time being and extract a book about Baudelaire from his vast body of material. Part of the book, which was unprinted in 1938 under the title Of Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire's Writings (1938), is still constructed in a montage. Adorno again criticizes: He says that Benjamin lets the facts themselves speak for themselves; the theory is not enough. Benjamin further revised it to On Some Motifs in Baudelaire's Writings (1939), which was a better response this time.
Baudelaire was the central figure in the "Arcade Project", because in Benjamin's eyes, Baudelaire first revealed the modern city as a poetic theme in The Flower of Evil. (Benjamin doesn't seem to have read Wordsworth, who, fifty years before Baudelaire, had written about being part of the london street crowd, crowded by the eyes of all sides and dazzled by the variety of advertisements.) ）
Baudelaire, however, expresses his urban experience in an allegorical way, a literary style that has been outdated since Baroque. In The Swan, for example, Baudelaire alleges the poet as a noble bird, a swan, comically scavenging in a rocky market, unable to spread its wings and fly high.
Why does Baudelaire use fables? Benjamin turned to Marx's Capital to answer this question. Marx said that to upgrade market value to the only criterion of value is to reduce commodities to mere signs—marks of the price at which they are to be sold. Under the rule of the market, the relationship of things to their actual value is arbitrary, as in baroque symbols the head of the dead is at the mercy of time. Thus, symbols unexpectedly return to the stage of history in the form of commodities, which, under capitalism, cease to be what they appear to be, but begin, as Marx warned, beginning to be "(filled with) metaphysical subtlety and theological refinement." (The Arcade Project, p. 196) Benjamin argues that fables are precisely the correct style of the commodity age.
A literature annotation of Lyric Poets in the Age of Advanced Capitalism
While writing this book about Baudelaire (which was unfinished— the manuscript was published after his death under the title Charles Baudelaire: Lyric Poets in the Age of Advanced Capitalism), Benjamin continued to take notes on the "Arcade" and add new dossiers. Recovered from the hidden places of the work in the National Library after the war, the equivalent of nine hundred pages of excerpts, mainly from 19th-century writers, but also from Benjamin's contemporaries, were grouped into different categories, dotted with commentaries, and various plans and synopsis. Edited and published in 1982 by Rolf Tidman under the title The Arcade Project, Harvard's The Arcade Project uses Tedman's text, but omits much of Tedman's background material and editorial composition. The Harvard edition translates all French into English and adds useful annotations and plenty of illustrations. It's a beautiful book: its treatment of Benjamin's complex indexes is an exemplary triumph of typography.
The history of the "Arcade Project" is the history of delays and mistakes in the starting, the history of wandering in the labyrinth of archives when engaging in the perseverance of the temperament of collectivism, the history of constantly changing the theoretical basis, the history of criticism that affects too easily, (it should mean that Benjamin is too concerned about Adorno's criticism) and, in general, the history of Benjamin's lack of grasp of himself. All this means that the book was extremely incomplete when it came to us: it was conceived incompletely and was never written in any conventional sense. Tedman likened it to the building material of a house. In the supposedly completed house, the materials would have been constructed by Benjamin's thought. We know the general pattern of that idea, based on Benjamin's criticism and rhetoric, but we do not always see how that thought fits with or embraces the material.
In this case, Tidman says, it seems best to produce only versions of Yarmyn's own text and eliminate the quotes. But Benjamin's intention, no matter how utopian, was to carefully withdraw his own comments at some point, leaving the quotations to bear the weight of the entire structure of the house.
An 1852 tourist guidebook said that the arcades of Paris were "the inner streets ... Glass-roofed, marble-paneled promenades, buildings that run through the block... Lined up on both sides... The most elegant commodity, the whole arcade becomes like a city, a miniature world". (The Arcade Project, p. 31) Their breathable glass and steel buildings were quickly imitated by other Cities in the West. The heyday of the arcades extended until the end of the century, until department stores overshadowed them. For Benjamin, their decline was part of the unfolding logic of the capitalist economy; he did not foresee their comeback at the end of the 20th century in the form of urban malls.
This "arcade" book was in no way intended to be an economic history (although one of its ambitions was to radically correct the discipline of economic history). The first description suggests something more like Berlin Childhood:
We know that in ancient Greece there were places where roads led to the underground world. Our awake existence is also like a land, and some hidden point leads to the underground world—a land full of all kinds of unobtrusive places, from which dreams arise. We passed by them without any doubt all day, but as soon as we fell asleep, we couldn't wait to fumble the way back, lost in the dark corridor. During the day, the labyrinth of urban dwellings resembles consciousness; those arcades ... Unnoticedly stretched out onto the street. At night, however, under the rows of gloomy houses, their thicker darkness protruded like some kind of threat, and passers-by hurried by at night—unless we had emboldened him to turn into the narrow alley. (Arcade Project, p. 84)
Two books became benjamin's role models: Louis Aragon's The Peasants of Paris (the 1970 English translation of The Sleepwalker, the 1971 English translation of The Paris Farmer), especially the tribute to the arcades of the opera house, and Franz Hesser (1880-1941, German writer and translator) "Walking through Berlin", which focuses on Caesar's Promenade and its power to evoke memories of bygone times. His own work was influenced by Proust's theory of involuntary memory, but his dreams and fantasies were more historically concrete than Proust's. He often tried to capture the "hallucinatory effect" experience of Parisians wandering among the objects on display, an experience that can be recalled in his own time: when "arcades dot the cosmopolitan landscape like caves with the fossil remains of vanished monsters: consumers of the pre-imperial capitalist era, the last dinosaurs of Europe". (The Arcade Project, p. 540)
The great invention of the "Arcade Project" should be its form. Like the Neapolitan Essay and the Moscow Diary, it juxtaposes fragments of past and modern texts, based primarily on the principle of montage, in the hope that they would spark each other and shine on each other. Thus, for example, if the entry for "Dossier L" (2,1), which refers to the opening of an art museum at the Palace of Versailles in 1837, is read in conjunction with the entry (2,4) of "Dossier A" that traces the trajectory of the arcade's development into a department store, the analogy that "the museum is to the department store what the work of art is to the commodity" will jump into the reader's mind. (The Arcade Project, pp. 37, 408)
According to Max Weber, the salient feature of the Modern Age was the loss of faith, disenchantment. Benjamin had a different view: capitalism had hypnotized people, and only when they understood what was going on in them would they awaken from the collective curse. The inscription of "Dossier N" is taken from Marx: "The change of consciousness can only take place in ... The world wakes up from its dream of seeing itself. (The Arcade Project, p. 456)
The dream of the capitalist era is embodied in commodities. These dreams and commodities as a whole constitute an illusionary effect, constantly changing shape according to fashion trends, and offering them to a large group of enchanted worshippers as an embodiment of their deepest desires. The hallucinatory effect always hides its source (which exists in alienated labor). Thus, what Benjamin calls the illusionary effect is a bit like Marx's ideology—a set of public lies underpinned by the power of capital—but more like what Freud called "dream work" that operates at a collective, social level.
"I don't have to say anything. Just show," Benjamin said. Another: "Ideas are to objects what constellations are to stars." If this mosaic of quotations is properly constructed, a pattern will emerge, a pattern that exists more than the sum of its parts but cannot exist independently of them: this is the essence of the new form of historical materialist writing that Benjamin believed he was engaged in. 14
What disappointed Adorno with the 1935 plan was Benjamin's belief that mere combinations of objects (in the case of the book, out-of-context quotations) alone could tell the whole story. Benjamin, he wrote, was at a "crossroads between magic and positivism." In 1948, Adorno had the opportunity to see the full picture of the "arcade" and again cast doubt on its theoretical weakness. 15
Benjamin's response to this criticism relies on the concept of dialectical image, which he traces back to the interaction of symbols of the Baroque period—ideas expressed by images—and Baudelaire-esque allegories—that they were replaced by the interaction of symbolic objects. He believed that fables could take over the role of abstract thought. Objects and figures inhabiting the arcades—gamblers, prostitutes, mirrors, dust, wax figures, mechanical toys—are (in Benjamin's view) symbols, and their interaction produces meaning, an allegorical meaning that does not need to be rapped by theory. Similarly, fragments of text taken from the past and then placed in the charge field of the historical present have the ability to function, like the many elements of a surrealist image, spontaneously interacting and unleashing political energy. (Benjamin writes, "The events surrounding and involving historians will be subliminal in his statement, like a text written in invisible ink.") 16 Thus the fragments constitute the image of dialectics, a dialectical movement that has been frozen for a moment and is available for examination, a "dialectic in stillness." "Only a dialectical image is a true image." (Arcade Project, p. 462)
The theories appealed to in Benjamin's extremely anti-theoretical book are exquisite, so let's stop there. But what can the reader who is indifferent to the theory, to the reader who does not see the dialectical image as vividly as it is assumed to be attained, to the reader who may not be able to compliment the excellent narrative of the dawn of socialism after the long sleep of capitalism, what can they get from The Arcade Project?
The shortest list will include the following:
A treasure trove of curious material about early 19th-century Paris (e.g. men who had nothing better to do would go to the morgue to see the naked).
Second, a sharp and unique mind that has learned from consulting thousands of books over many years is an enlightening quote. (Tedman makes a list of about eight hundred and fifty books that have actually been cited.) Some quotes come from writers we think we already know (Marx, Hugo); others come from lesser-known writers who, based on the evidence presented here, deserve to be rediscovered—e.g., Hermann Lotzer (1817-1881, German philosopher and logician) by Hermann Lotzer (1817-1881), the author of Microcosm (1864);
A compilation of concise observations of Benjamin's favorite subjects, which, after his wipes, shone with a highly aphoristic luster. "Prostitution can be required to be considered 'work', when work becomes prostitution." "Perhaps the reason why the earliest photographs are so incomparable is that they represent the earliest images of machines and people encountering people." (Arcade Project, pp. 348, p. 678)
Glimpse Benjamin jokingly looking at himself in a new way: the collector of "keywords in a secret dictionary", the compiler of a "magical encyclopedia". As a hidden reader of an allegorical city, Benjamin suddenly seemed close to his contemporary, Howe Lu Borges, an allegorical writer of the rewritten universe. (The Arcade Project, pp. 211, 207) Their common hobby was, of course, Jewish mystical philosophy, which Borges had studied carefully for a long time, and Benjamin turned his attention to it when his faith in the proletarian revolution waned.
From a distance, Benjamin's tome is curiously reminiscent of another great ruin in 20th-century literature— Ezra Pound's Poems. Both works are the product of years of painstaking reading. Both works are constructed with fragments and quotations and follow the aesthetics of imagery and montage in the heyday of Modernism. Both works have economic ambitions and employ economists as the main figures (one is Marx, the other is Gesell (1862-1930, German theoretical economist) and Douglas (1879-1952, British economist, proposer of the "social credit theory") ). Both authors invest in antiquity-style intellectual texts and overestimate their significance for their own times. Neither of them knew when to stop. Both were eventually eaten by the monster of fascism – Benjamin tragically, Pound shamefully.
The fate of the Psalms is that several fragments are included in the anthology, and the rest (Van Buren (1782-1862, the eighth president of the United States), the Maratesta family (the Italian family of the 13th to 16th centuries), Confucius, etc.) are quietly removed. The fate of the Arcade Project may be similar. We can expect a condensed student edition, mainly taken from dossiers B ("Fashion"), H ("Collector"), I ("Inside"), J (Baudelaire"), K ("Dream City"), N ("Theory of Knowledge"),and Y ("Photography"), with quotations deleted so that they can no longer be deleted, and most of the comments that remain will be Benjamin's own writings. And that's not entirely a bad thing.
Even within the scope of Benjamin's choice, he has much to blame. While he is not necessarily a true economic historian, he has spent years reading economic history, but he conspicuously ignores the countries in the world where capitalism flourished in the 19th century, namely, Britain and the United States. In his approach to department stores, he sees no decisive difference between the department stores of Paris and those of New York and Chicago: the former erecting barricades for mass customers, and the latter playing the role of educating working-class shoppers to develop middle-class spending habits. He also ignores the fact that arcades and department stores especially cater to women's desires and go to great lengths to shape those desires and even create new ones.
The range of interests embodied in the first two volumes of Benjamin's Anthology is broad. In addition to those discussed here, a selection of his early essays on education with a considerable idealism are selected; numerous literary and critical essays, including two long essays on Goethe, one of which explains Affinity and the other is a superb overview of Goethe's career; a rambling treatise on various topics in philosophy (logic, metaphysics, aesthetics, philosophy of language, philosophy of history); essays on teaching, children's literature, toys; and a fascinating essay on the collection of books various travelogues and initial attempts at fiction. The essay on Affinity is especially a strange performance: an elongated aria, with a delicately crafted and elaborate prose, on love and beauty, myth and fate, and this aria reaches a tense high note with the secret similarity between the plot of the novel that Benjamin sees and the tragico-comedic game of four-man lust involving him and his wife.
Volumes III and IV of the Anthology include summaries of the contents of the Arcade Project from 1935, 1938, and 1939, two editions of The Work of Art in Its Age of Technical Reproducibility, The Storyteller, Childhood in Berlin, Treatises on the Conception of History, and a number of major correspondences with Adorno and Scholham, including the important letter of 1938 on Kafka.
These translations by different people are all excellent. If any of these translators deserve special praise, it is undoubtedly Rodney Livingstone, for he has dealt with the shift in style and tone with prudence, which marked Benjamin's development as a writer. Annotations are pretty much the same standard, but not exactly. The information on the characters mentioned by Benjamin is sometimes outdated or inaccurate: Karl Korsch, who was heavily relied upon in Benjamin's interpretation of Marx (Korsch was expelled from the German Communist Party for his dissent), but whose date of birth and death is noted as 1892–1939, when in fact it should have been 1886–1961 (Vol. II, p. 790, note 5) Greek and Latin were wrong, while French was sometimes quite wrong: a group of noisy priests in black robes were called " Civilized crows" are mistaken — it would be better to call them "domesticated crows." (Vol. II, p. 354, note 35) Obscure sentences—such as the "ominous spread of wandering worship" in Germany in the 1920s—are unexplained. (Vol. I, p. 454)
Some of the common practices of editors and translators are also problematic. Benjamin had a habit of writing several pages long: translators certainly did not have to follow suit, but should break them up. Sometimes two drafts of the same article are put in together without giving a reason. Ready-made English translations of some of the German texts cited by Benjamin are used, but these translations are clearly substandard. 17
What kind of person was Walter Benjamin: a philosopher? critic? historian? Just a "writer"? Perhaps the best answer is Hannah Arendt's comment: He is "one of the hard-to-classify people ... His writings are neither in conformity with existing rules nor in an innovative genre." 18
His trademark approach—not to take a problem straight, but to enter from an oblique angle, gradually moving from a perfectly structured summary to the next—is both immediately recognizable and imitable, relying on a sharp intellect, a slightly older knowledge, and his prose style becomes astonishingly precise and concise as soon as it abandons seeing itself as a Professor Benjamin. The basis of his plan, which aspires to be close to the truth of our time, is Goethe's ideal of laying out the facts as they are, making them their own theories. This "arcade" work, whatever verdict we make about it—ruins, failures, impossible plans—suggests a new way of dealing with a civilization, that is, using its garbage rather than its works of art as material: from the history below, not from above. And his call in Treatise on the Conception of History to a history centered on the suffering of the losers rather than the achievements of the victors foreshadows the method we see in our lifetimes: historical writing has begun to think of itself.
Notes
[1] Walter Benjamin, The Arcade Project, translated by Howard Allan and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 948.
[2] Selected Writings of Walter Benjamin (Vol. 1: 1913–1926, Marcus Bullock, Michael B. W. Jennings, eds., by Rodney Livingstone, Schienley Kongold, Edmond Jeffcott, harry Thorne (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 446.
[3] Selected Writings of Walter Benjamin (Vol. II: 1927-1934, Michael B. W. Jennings, Howard Alan, Gary Smith, Rodney Livingstone et al. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 473.
[4] Quoted from Susan Booker-Morse, The Dialectic of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcade Project (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), p. 21.
[5] Letter to Martin Buber, in Walter Benjamin's Correspondence 1910-1940, by Gersham Scholham, Theodor B. W. Adorno, ed., translated by Manfred Jacobson and Evelyn Jacobson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 313.
[6] Quoted in Booker-Morse, p. 383.
[7] Walter Benjamin, Seven Volumes, eds. Rolf Tidmann and Hermann Schweppenholz (Frankfurt: Zurkamp Publishing House, 1972-1989), vol. III, p. 52; Vol. II, p. 559.
[8] "Works of Art in the Age of Technological Reproducibility," in Enlightenment, edited by Hannah Arendt and translated by Harry Thorne (New York: Schocken Press, 1969; London: Jonathan Kep Press, 1970), p. 238.
[9] On Some Motifs in Baudelaire's Writings, in Enlightenment, p. 190.
[10] Quoted from The Biography of Walter Benjamin by Maume Broadson, Malcolm B. Translated by R. Greene and Ngrida Lijas (London and New York: Left Page Press, 1996), p. 239.
[11] Quoted in Booker-Morse, p. 220.
[12] Letters of 1931, quoted from Gerhard Richter, The Integration of Walter Benjamin and his Autobiography (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2000), p. 31.
[13] Quoted by Reiner Rohritz, Disenchantment in Art: The Philosophy of Walter Benjamin, translated by Jane Marie Todd (New York: Guildford Press, 1996), p. 133.
[14] The Arcade Project, p. 460; The Origins of German Tragedy, translated by John Osborne (London: New Left Books, 1998), p. 34.
[15] Quoted by Booker-Morse, p. 228.
[16] Quoted in Booker-Morse, p. 291.
[17] See Anthology, vol. I, p. 360, note 38.
[18] Enlightenment, p. 3.