BENJAMIN, THE ARCADES PROJECT

1. to assemble large-scale constructions out of the smallest and

most precisely cut components. Indeed, to discover in the
analysis of the small individual moment the crystal of the total
event (AP, 461).
2. The materialist presentation of history leads the past to bring
the present into a critical state (AP, 471).
3. we [] would recognize todays life, todays forms, in the life
and in the apparently secondary, lost forms of that epoch (AP,
458).
4. The father of Surrealism was Dada; its mother was an arcade
(AP, 873).
5. Aragon - Le Paysan de Paris, dont le soir, au lit, je narrivais
pas lire plus de trois pages, parce que mon coeur battait
alors si fort que je me voyais force dabandonner le livre.
6. Au passage des Brsinas, tout le monde se connaissait de
boutique en boutique, comme dans une veritable petite
province, depuis des annes coinces entre deux rues de
Paris, cest--dire quon sy piait et sy calomniait
humainement jusquau dlire. [] Pour ce qui est de la
materielle, avant la guerre, on y discutait entre commerants
une vie picoreuse et dsesprment conome. (Cline,
Voyage au bout de la nuit, pp. 101-102)
7. Le passage, linterstice par excellence, a sa vie propre, ses
horaires, ses mtiers, ses intrieurs doublement intrieurs et
ses bistrots, doublement lieu de passage, doublement refuges
et phmres (Marc Aug, loge du bistrot)
8. The history and situation of the Paris arcades are to become
the key for the underworld of this century, into which Paris has
sunk (AP, p. 83)
9. Modernity the resolute effort to distance oneself from all
that is antiquated (AP, 4).
10.
In speaking of the inner boulevards, we have made
mention again and again of the arcades which open onto
them. These arcades, a recent invention of industrial luxury,
are glass-roofed, marble-panelled corridors extending through
whole blocks of buildings, whose owners have joined together
for such enterprises. Lining both sides of these corridors,
which get their light from above, are the most elegant shops,

so that the arcade is a city, a world in miniature, in which

customers will find everything they need. (The Illustrated
Guide to Paris (1852).
11.
the arcade is a city, a world in miniature, in which
customers will find everything they need (AP, 907).
12.
The world dominated by its phantasmagorias this, to
make use of Baudelaires term, is modernity (AP, 26).
13.
Haussmanns Paris is also a phantasmagoria the
phantasmagoria of civilization itself (AP, 14-15).
14.
With the Haussmannization of Paris, the
phantasmagoria was rendered in stone (AP, 24).
15.
Arcades are houses or passages having no outside like
the dream (AP, 405).
16.
19).

Things are freed from the drudgery of being useful (AP,

17.
The arcade is a street of lascivious commerce only; it is
wholly adapted to arousing desires (AP, 42)
18.

Arcades are a past become space (AP, 871).

19.
84).

Arcades aregalleries leading into the citys past (AP,

20.
Antiquated trades survive within these inner spaces,
and the merchandise on display is unintelligible, or else has
several meanings (AP, 871).
21.
Our waking existence likewise is a land at which, at
certain hidden points, leads down into the underworld and
land of inconspicuous places from which dreams arise (AP,
84).
22.
The new dialectical method of doing history teaches us
to pass in spirit with the rapidity and intensity of dreams
through what has been, in order to experience the present as
waking world, a world to which every dream at last refers (AP,
884).
23.
Whereas Aragon persists within the realm of dream,
here the concern is to find the constellation of awakening (AP,
458).

24.
First dialectical stage: the arcade changes from a place
of splendor to a place of decay.
Second dialectical stage: the arcade changes from an
unconscious experience to something consciously penetrated.
Not-yet-conscious knowledge of what has been. Structure of
what-has-been at this stage. Knowledge of what has been as a
becoming aware, one that has the structure of an awakening.
(AP, 907).
25.

the paradigm of dialectical thinking (AP, 13).

26.

It bears its end within itself and unfolds it (AP, 13).

27.
The new Passage du Caire, near the Rue Saint-Denis
is paved in part with funerary stones, on which the Gothic
inscriptions and the emblems have not yet been replaced
(Girard, cited AP, p. 56).
28.
Reasons for the decline of the arcades: widened
sidewalks, electric light, ban on prostitution, culture of the
open air (AP, 88).
29.
With the kindling of electric lights, the irreproachable
glow was extinguished in these galleries, which suddenly
became more difficult to find which wrought a black magic at
entranceways, and peered from blind windows into their own
interior. It was not decline but transformation. All at once they
were the hollow mold from which the image of modernity
was cast. Here, the century mirrored with satisfaction its most
recent past. Here was the retirement home for the infant
prodigies (AP, 874).
30.
the patented umbrella handle with built-in watch and
revolver (AP, 874).
31.
In Paris they are fleeing the arcades, so long in
fashion, as one flees stale air. The arcades are dying. [] The
arcade that for the Parisian was a sort of salon-walk, where
you strolled and smoked and chatted, is now nothing more
than a species of refuge which you think of when it rains; the
death agony of the place (Jules Clartie, in AP, 121).
32.
The fantasies of the decline of Paris are a symptom of
the fact that technology was not accepted. These visions
bespeak the gloomy awareness that along with the great cities
have evolved the means to raze them to the ground (AP, 97).

33.
Ambiguity is the manifest imaging of dialectic, the law
of dialectics at a standstill. This standstill is utopia and the
dialectical image, therefore the dream image. Such an image
is afforded by the commodity per se: as fetish. Such an image
is presented by the arcades, which are house no less than
street. Such an image is the prostitute seller and sold in one
(AP, p. 10).
34.
The ruins of the Church and of the aristocracy of
feudalism, of the Middle Ages, are sublime they fill the wideeyed victors of today with admiration. But the ruins of the
bourgeoisie will be an ignoble detritus of pasteboard, plaster
and coloring (Balzac, Ce qui disparat Paris [1845], cited
AP, p. 87).
35.
How brittle appears the stonework of the walls []:
crumbling papier-mch! (AP, 872).
36.
Its not that what is past casts its light on what is
present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather,
image is that wherein what has been comes together in a
flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words,
image is dialectics at a standstill. For while the relations of the
present to the past is a purely temporal, continuous one, the
relations of what-has-been to the now is dialectical: is not
progression but image, suddenly emergent (AP, 462)

REFERENCES
AUG, Marc, loge du bistrot parisien (Paris: Payot, 2015).
BENJAMIN, WALTER, The Arcades Project, edited by Howard Eiland,
translated by Kevin McLaughin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2002).
BUCK-MORSS, Susan, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and
the Arcades Project (Boston: MIT Press, 1991).
CLINE, Louis-Ferdinand, Mort crdit (Paris: Gallimard, coll. Folio,
1973).
GILLOCH, Graeme, Myth and Metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the
City (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996).
SCHUMPETER, Joseph, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy
(London: Routledge, 1994).
SLOTERDIJK, Peter, In the World Interior of Capital: Towards a
Philosophical Theory of Globalization (Cambridge: Polity Press,
2013).
SMITHSON, Robert, Entropy and the New Monuments (1966).
[http://www.robertsmithson.com/essays/entropy_and.htm]
--- The Monuments of Passaic (1967).
[http://www.robertsmithson.com/photoworks/monumentpassaic_300.htm]
ZOLA, mile, Thrse Raquin (Paris: Flammarion, 1980).