The Boulevard Angel of History: Towards Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project

Abstract

Between 1927 and 1940, Walter Benjamin collected and systematized material around the Paris market arcades — their history, economics, architecture, and socio-communicative nature. The Arcades Project (Passagenarbeit) was never completed and appeared only in summary form during the philosopher’s life (Paris: Capital of the Nineteenth Century) and in fragments within a number of essays. The greater part of the manuscript was made up of 36 thematically organized files (fashion, leisure, the flaneur, interior, progress, etc.) and labelled with roman numerals, but not gathered together into a single volume. These fragments consisted of quotes in German and French from literature and documents of the 19th and 20th centuries. They are excerpts from historical tractates, libretti, memoirs, advertising prospectuses, and notices. Within Arcades the author’s re flections serve as framing devices that conceptually link these documents together, more rarely, they serve as the primary content of individual sections. Benjamin considered his project to be a non-linear text (like the panels of Aby Warburg’s Memnosyne Atlas) where each image would take part in a retrospective uncovering under the critique of ‘capitalism as religion’ and in unmasking the system of connections that enable us to ‘awaken’ from ‘the dream of history’. Without explicating links between objects and phenomena, Benjamin rather made use of constructive elements of display, overlap, and mounting that moved expression from abstract analysis to mimetic reconstruction. This article examines the history of the Arcades Project, illustrates its methodological and aesthetic principles, and links with Benjamin’s philosophical conception. It also prefaces the publication of Arcades: Convolute A introduces the joint project of Versus and Ad Marginem Press with the aim of publishing a complete commentary to Benjamin’s text.