The Arcades Project [Paperback]

Benjamin worked on mountainous piles of notes,for about thirteen years beginning around 1928 for his infatuation with les passages, those passageways,girded with black iron canopes where we buy umbrellas,tobacco,shoes,books,and women. It was a microcosm of the most important city in the world, the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. It was the only city Benjamin preferred to live in despite the economic hardships of a struggling writer to do that. He found Paris at the edge of technology,much like our Silicon Valley is today,it was the beginning of progress so to speak,but with Washington and New York thrown in, all mixed in a fantastic quagmire of innovation,invention,excitement,and where the old preserves the new. Layers of cultural artifact, burdened with the scraps of histoy,all to be explained. Iron,for instance,a building material is a focus, on architecture and the Eiffel Tower, the feathery like weightlessness of the mammoth black innovative girders seen just about from anywhere in Paris. It was a step backwards for no one knew how to deveop it,simply display conceit for the colossolness of it,much like Victorian England,its bridges with giant sized rivits, thousands of them. Architecture, technology, photography were all items for Benjamin to spend his imagination here, discovering the ends of things, the values of the old. You learn French history in great detail,with notes copied as well from 1878, The Paris Commune is a chapter, one of revolution, as seen from a reader of Marx,rather than a staunch Marxist. Still Benjamin drew on the the progress of capitalism and where it fell down profoundly resulting in World Wars, and the emergence of some of the darkest pages in European history. Prostitutes and gambling are spoken of in one chapter, I found this boring and just idle passage work.Literature is visited as well with profile-like chapters on Baudelaire,the theory of knowledge, and Benjamin always inscribes a profundity, one of those items that is a recepticle a conduit for millions of thoughts preserved in one place."At no poin in time, no matter how utopian, will anyone win the masses over to a higher art, they can be won over only to one nearer to them". Something E trade practices everyday

Herbert Muschamp, the NY Times architectural critic, has written an interesting article about Benjamin and his Paris project which appears in the Arts & Leisure section on January 16, 2000. While not strictly speaking a book review it nevertheless offers some observations as to the cultural importance of Benjamin's chef d'oevre. Another book on the Arcades Project is Susan Buck-Morss's 'The Dialectics of Seeing' (MIT 1989, 1991, 1997).

In the fifth of his "Theses on History" Benjamin mentions that "every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disapear irretrievably." This work represents a significant way of not forgetting. It is fragmentary...but it reminds us that the texts we read are all fragmentary, and we assemble and contextualize them as we read them.