How does Walter Benjamin’s writing and particularly his use of

montage challenge the ways in which city life is represented?

“These arcades, a recent invention of industrial luxury, are glass-roofed, marble-paneled

corridors extending through whole blocks of building, 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 passage is a city, a world in miniature.”

Illustrated Guide to Paris: (quoted in the Arcades Project; Expose of 1935 p.3)

1
Introduction

What does the city represent? Is there a conventional or consensus view of the city and if

so can this view be challenged by the individual observation or critique?

The city is monolithic by nature, a homogeneous space that represents state, power,

business, commodities and culture. Walter Benjamin took the architectural montage that

was 19th Paris and deconstructed and analysed it. He broke it up into fragments and then

with these fragments built his own montage in the form of his greatest work, the Arcades

Project. This project was developed over a 13-year period and remained incomplete at

the time of Benjamin’s tragic death in 1940. Like a symphony which ends on a discordant

and unresolved chord we are left with many unanswered questions. And yet this

posthumous work has proven hugely influential since its publication in Germany in 1982

and its subsequent publication in English in 1999. Within the oblique map that is the

Arcades Project Benjamin challenges the way in which the city is represented.

This essay explores how Benjamin’s writings, especially the Arcades Project, challenge

the physical and the imaginary city, the conventional representation and the convention

that the city represents.

Methodology:

In this essay I will surrender to some of the key concepts in Benjamin’s work. I will look

at how his representation of the city can influence how we view and understand the city. I

am especially interested in looking at the central themes in Benjamin’s greatest work, the

Arcades Project, a work Benjamin described as “the theatre of all my struggles and all

my ideas”.[1] With these struggles and ideas he aimed to chronicle the history of the

2
nineteenth century, over which Paris majestically presided. I will use some of the central

themes from this posthumous work to form a kind of road map through which my

exploration will navigate and proceed. I will examine important motifs, motifs which

challenge the ways in which city life is represented, such as consumerism, fetishism, the

flâneur and montage.

I am including in this essay a number of photographs. These images form part of a series

that I am currently working on titled ‘fragments of London’. The series is inspired by

Benjamin’s use of what he called “literary montage”, a literary convention he employed

in his essay One Way Street from 1928 and also in his Arcades Project. The photographs

depict fragments of the city, in this case the city of London. The aim is to create a

montage of fragmented images that on the surface may seem unrelated but which are

linked in some way.

“In 1839 it was considered elegant to take a tortoise out walking. This gives us an idea of

the tempo of flânerie in the arcades.” [2]

To achieve these photographs I attempt to take on role similar to that of a flâneur. I

wander the streets of London with camera in hand in search of fragments. I am interested

in photographing the details which mostly go unnoticed. The city, like an open-air arcade,

presents me with the opportunity to stroll, make observations and form images in my

mind and through my lens. My camera like the turtle sets the pace at which I stroll.

3
The Arcades Project:

The Arcades Project is a textual montage consisting of fragmented ideas. It is a text that

can bring little joy to the mind that comprehends intellectual phenomena in a logical or

chronological manner, to use Benjamin’s metaphor, “like the beads of a rosary”. [3]

These fragments of ideas and philosophy develop and deepen over time. In the words of

Buck-Morss:

“These [philosophical intuitions] “develop” only in the sense that a photographic plate

develops: time deepens definition and contrast, but the imprint of the image has been

there from the start” [4]

Benjamin’s fragments of ideas and philosophy seem to be particularly relevant in the

current epoch. In this time when consumerism has well and truly established itself as a

kind of generic religion for the masses. Benjamin’s investigations into the urban space,

especially from the perspective of the urban stroller, the flâneur occupy an important

place in a broad range of diverse academic departments, from culture and media studies

to architecture and photography. I will explore more closely the role of the flâneur later in

this essay but for now I would like to examine the background to the Arcades Project and

Benjamin’s use of the arcades as a metaphor for the city.

The city of Paris was Benjamin’s chosen city both as a place of exile and as a controlling

metaphor for this work, a phantasmagorical city as a metaphor for past and future. In

1926 Benjamin collaborated with his close friend Franz Hessel on a translation of Marcel

Proust’s A la recherché du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time). In the following year

Benjamin and Hessel wrote a short article titled ‘Arcades’. This became the starting point

4
for Benjamin’s Arcades Project, a work that would develop over a 13 year period and

remain incomplete at the time of his death.

The Arcades Project takes its name from an architectural form of the nineteenth century.

Arcades were passages lined on either side by businesses, shops and concessions. Built

from iron and glass these buildings housed juxtapositions of window displays made up of

various kinds of commodities, shop signs, mannequins and of the people who passed

through its passages. The Paris arcades sheltered the first modern form of consumerism

and turned shopping into an aesthetic event. With their vast display of diverse

commodities the arcades were a perfect place in which to linger and practice the art of

window shopping and to develop a desire for commodities.

The first example of an arcade was the Passage des Panoramas, which opened in 1800.

There were some earlier example (Balzac for example mentioned one such arcade in his

novel ‘lost illusions, 1843) but they were not constructed in the same way. They were

wooden structures rather than the glass and iron of the Passage des Panorama, which

incidentally is still in use today. Most of the Paris arcades were built between 1800 and

1830 and most were erected on the right bank of the river Seine. This ground previously

housed old buildings including convents, dissolved during the Revolution. This

connection presents the arcades as a product and manifestation of secularisation from one

perspective but from another as a locus for the displacement of one religion by another;

from compulsory Christianity to the worship of the commodity. A city guide from 1852

described the arcade as “a city, a world in miniature” [5]. Benjamin was intrigued by

5
such descriptions because of his fascination for representations of the world in miniature.

For example show shakers, stamps and toys, which he was fond of collecting. The

arcades were for Benjamin miniature cities within the city and as such they were the

perfect object through which to study the antinomies of capitalism.

This type of environment offered the Parisians of the nineteenth century an alternative

universe of consumption. A universe within which they could walk free from the noise of

horse-drawn carriages and the discomforts of rain, snow or mud outside.

“A shelter from showers, a refuge from winter wind or summer dust, a comfortable and

seductive space to wander through” and also “a route that is always dry and even, and a

sure means of reducing the distance one has to walk”. [6] Amedee Kermel

This quote could be describing the shopping malls in use today. Their womb-like nature

offers similar comfort to its inhabitants and protection from the elements. The arcades

held out the promise of a utopian world, a dream world within the city. But the utopia

dream sought after by the passageur was not the utopia offered by the arcades.

Benjamin explores a myriad of motifs in the Arcades Project including panoramas, world

exhibitions, flâneur, prostitution, department stores, and boredom. From 1934, without

abandoning the aforementioned themes he added themes that were more political in

nature like the boulevard-building “Haussmannization” of Paris, Marx and Baudelaire

etc. Benjamin compiled in his arcade project a vast array of interlinked scraps made up of

quotes and notations. He placed them onto index cards arranging them into files, called

6
konvolute (convolutes). He was in a sense creating a historical map of nineteenth century

Paris.

Benjamin’s aim was to treat bygone relics of the arcades period such as its architecture,

technologies and artefacts as the precursors of modernity, in other words, as the past

witnesses of the present. This did not however amount to a form of “industrial

archaeology” but rather an allegorical prompting of these dead witnesses to speak of their

affinities to our time. Benjamin was giving voice to the origins of commodity fetishism.

He read the arcades as a phenomenon of extreme cultural ambivalence. The German

philosopher Theodore Adorno employed the term “dialectical image”,[7] that which

points in two directions at once and is expressive of both oppression (by the ideology of

consumption) and liberation (into a utopia of plenty). Adorno’s “dialectical image” and

the phenomenon of extreme cultural ambivalence are perhaps even more visible in this

current epoch. Certainly in the privileged cities of the west we are now experiencing an

age of extreme materiality. And yet the expectation of living in a utopian state has not

materialised. We have simply acquired more lawyers to add to this facade that is the

homogenous city. Where is the utopian dream that modernity seemed to promise? If

Benjamin was alive today and in the guise of the flâneur took a stroll down Oxford Street

would he simply bare witness to an extreme form of what he saw in the arcades? Would

he see even more clearly the cultural ambivalence that surrounds us?

7
Image 1: The lure of the commodity. Window shopping on Regent Street, London. Dec.
21st, 2005.

Benjamin was interested in unearthing what lay behind the facade that is the monolithic

and homogenous city. Behind this facade lay history, the past which promised a utopian

future through modernity but which didn’t deliver. It is important to note that Benjamin

was writing at a time when the arcades were in decline. And he saw a looming dystopia

in the rise of fascist Germany.

With its labyrinth of passages, and fragmented nature, the Arcades Project physically

resembles the city itself. In reading it we take on the aimless role of the flâneur, the idle

stroller whom Benjamin so ambivalently admired.

8
The Flâneur

First I would like to examine what it means to be a flâneur. Simply defined it means ‘one

who strolls aimlessly through urban spaces.’ However it is common to associate the word

flâneur with one who is idle and who has the decadent luxury of having enough time to

take meandering and aimless strolls in the name of curiosity. The term was appropriated

by a number of theorists to represent a more substantial activity. Benjamin highlighted

the cognitive value associated with the urban stroll. Benjamin’s flâneur is an active

sociologist or a reader of the environment around him.

As inhabitants of a city space we have little time to observe the visual complexities that

surround us. Small details or fragments escape our attention as we travel to and from

work or dash through the high streets in pursuit of some commodity. Our visual and

indeed aural awareness is made blunt through the stresses brought about by the culture of

urban living. This lack of engagement in our environment results in our visual awareness

and intelligence becoming rusty.

When Benjamin used the term flâneur he was talking about a very different individual.

Indeed ‘individual’ is a key word in Benjamin’s concept of the flâneur. For him the

flâneur was always in possession of his individuality. The flâneur did not experience the

city as part of the crowd but rather as an individual. It is a question of attachment to

oneself, involvement without the city.

“The street becomes a dwelling for the flâneur; he is as much at home among the facades

of houses as a citizen is in his four walls. To him the shiny, enamelled signs of businesses

9
are at least as good a wall ornament as an oil painting is to the bourgeois in his salon. The

walls are the desk against which he presses his notebooks; news-stands are his libraries

and the terraces of cafes are the balconies from which he looks down on his household

after his work is done.”[8]

The flâneur’s movement creates anachronism: he travels urban space, the space of

modernity, but is forever looking to the past. This reminds us of Benjamin’s angel who is

driven by the storms of progress “irresistibly into the future, to which his back is

turned”[9]

In the city that Benjamin inhabits the flâneur is an endangered species. He has been

marginalised by the social and technological conditions of modernity: the ever increasing

domination of social space by a consumer culture and the bureaucratisation of the

everyday. In the words of Susan Buck-Morss; the flâneur:

“like tigers, or pre-industrial tribes, are cordoned off on reservations, preserved within

the artificially created environments of pedestrian streets, parks, and underground

passages.” [10]

The writer Ian Sinclair echoes Benjamin’s concerns in his work ‘London Orbital’:

“Pausing to admire the potential photo-op, we are interrogated by a security patrol……

You are allowed to walk a half mile between security shakedowns. …..CCTV cameras,

panning restlessly, alert the monitor jockeys. Calls come in from nervous watchers.

‘Walkers.’ Walkers without dogs.” [11]

10
The Arcades Project both constitutes and contains the clue to how the flâneur may have

adapted to the conditions of modernity and beyond and in doing so perhaps avoided

extinction. To date all the conservation work on this endangered species has been done

by cultural theorists with a nostalgic yen to take on the role of the flâneur for themselves.

In structure the Arcades Project is a kaleidoscope of pieces gleaned from literature and

mass media which textually evokes the urban phantasmagoria of Paris. And so strolling

through the fragmented, nebulous textual passages of the Arcades Project becomes a task

analogous to the flâneur’s aleatory negotiation of the city’s ever-changing landscape.

Benjamin imagines he has much in common with the flâneur. In his deep meditation of

past and present he, in his own words becomes a ragpicker unearthing “the rags, and

refuse” from the Bibliotheuqe Nationale. [12] The flâneur is also unearthing the past as

he wanders the streets collecting images in his mind, which later may be translated into

art or literature.

We can detect in Benjamin’s mourning of the loss of the flâneur the ‘dialectic of the

flâneur’. After all Benjamin as a literary ‘ragpicker’ had much in common with the

flâneur. Buck-Morrs’ comments that the flâneur “becomes extinct only by exploding into

a myriad of forms, the phenomenological characteristics of which, no matter how new

they may appear, continue to bear his traces, as ur-form. This is the truth of the flâneur,

more visible in his afterlife than in his flourishing.” [13]

11
As a photographer of urban spaces I am particularly interesting in the overlap between

the spatial practice of the flâneur and the spatial practice of the photographer. In her

critique ‘On Photography’ Susan Sontag highlights this overlap when she writes:

“photography first comes into its own as an extension of the eye of the middle-class

flâneur, whose sensibility was so accurately charted by Baudelaire. The photographer is

an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitring, stalking, cruising the urban

inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous

extremes.” [14]

Here Sontag is thinking of a tradition of photographers such as Atget, Brandt, and Brassai

all of who were interested in photographing the darker aspects of the city space.

Every street is a vertiginous experience for the flâneur. However the streets do not evoke

in him a personal and private past through the interior realm of memory. On the contrary,

the fixity of the signs deposited there allows him to visit the past in his memory, a past

that is much vaster and never lived by him. Benjamin asks:

“Couldn’t an exciting film be made from the map of Paris? From the unfolding of its

various aspects in temporal succession? From the compression of a centuries-long

movement of streets, boulevards, arcades, and squares into the space of half an hour?

And does the flâneur do anything different?’ [15]

The phantasmagoria: masses of people promenading through the arcades and streets in a

dreamlike state or fever created a veil for the real nature of the economy. It was the

flâneur who stepped aside from the crowd and who fulfilled dreams, surpassed graphic

fantasies and answered uneasy expectations.

12
My view of the flâneur is somewhat romanticized, however this is the attitude that has

been consistently expressed by historians of the flâneur.

Montage:

Benjamin was especially interested in the potential of montage, a technique made famous

by the European avant-garde of this time. For Benjamin montage was not only a style but

a philosophy of history: it entailed focusing on the discontinuities separating past and

present, and emphasizing a utopian rather then progressive notion of historical

transformation, as a way to preserve a reservoir of hope in otherwise damaged life.

The title ‘Arcades Project’ derives both its name and its structure from the nineteenth

century architectural form. The arcades were an architectural montage of iron and glass

which housed juxtapositions of shop-signs, window displays, mannequins and

illuminations. As the nineteenth century evolved into the twentieth century, montage was

no longer a prescript or construction in technology but was now used to describe art and

literature: from the arcades to Dada and surrealism to the city novels of James Joyce and

others. Montage construction treats its material elements as contrasting segments that

must be bolted together for maximum impact. In literary form this involves fragments,

apercus, swift shifts of though, the establishment of relationships between disparate

objects. Benjamin compiled in his arcade project a vast array of interlinked scraps made

up of quotes and notations. In placing them onto index cards and arranging them into

konvolute (convolutes) he set out to create his map of the nineteenth century. It is

13
impossible to determine if Benjamin intended the Arcades Projects to result in the book

we have now: a collection of mostly fragments of other books. It is very possible that he

intended this work to result in a literary montage interspersed with occasional comments.

In One Way Street, Benjamin wrote:

“The quotations in my works are like robbers lying in ambush on the highway to attack

the passerby with weapons drawn and rob him of his conviction.” [16]

Furthermore Benjamin states the following in his file on methodology:

“Method of the project: literary montage. I needn’t say anything. Merely show. I shall

purloin no valuables, appropriate no ingenious formulations. But the rags, the refuse –

these I will not inventory but allow, in the only way possible, to come into their own: by

making use of them.”[17]

Benjamin’s methodology was analogous to dream interpretation. The dream presents an

array of images, vivid fragments, which are not understood until contemplated and

worked out to form a narrative through patterns of causation. Paris was an appropriate

city to extract these fragments from for it was the ‘most dreamed of object of the

surrealist’. It was the capital of dreams and the dream of capital. The arcades housed the

dreams of the nineteenth century masses and so too did the city.

Both in the Arcades Project and in One Way Street, Benjamin introduces a new kind of

reading suited to the new non narrative form that was montage. Each individual section

of the text, as one element in a montage, forms, in a favourite Benjaminian metaphor, one

star in a constellation: from that star, prospects and “eccentric figurativeness” open out

onto other sections of the text, often at a considerable remove. [18]

14
Historical awaking is a key aim of the Arcades Project as a whole. Benjamin writes: “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 a waking

world, a world to which every dream at last refers”. [19]

Through studying the nineteenth century the reader is brought to the threshold of the

present, to the point of waking. Benjamin represents a kind of dream interpreter of

history.

In his literary montage Benjamin assembled his fragments without regard for disparities,

much like a cubist collage. One Way Street is a good example of an avant-garde,

modernist aesthetic. Benjamin understands montage to be a form that evolved from

technology during the course of the nineteenth century.

“The Kaleidoscope was itself an invention of the nineteenth century. But it was preceded

by the Chinese Puzzle which, because its juxtaposed elements were not the true ur-

phenomenon of the principle of montage as a constructive principle” [20]

At the end of the nineteenth century the first architectural manifestation of this principle

of montage came into existence with the building of the Eiffel Tower.

15
A Dialectical Image:

Benjamin claimed that the arcades were “the most important architecture of the

nineteenth century” [21]. He read them as a phenomenon of extreme cultural

ambivalence. The arcades had two faces, they were a significant historical object and a

“dream and wish image of the collective.” [22] Theodor Adorno used the term

“dialectical image” to describe that which points in two directions.

As a leftist intellectual of the pre-war generation Benjamin was somewhat unique in

being just as enchanted by the consumer spectacle of the modern city as disturbed by the

power of this enchantment to produce a public caught in the city’s phantasmagorias.

Marx’s used the term phantasmagoria in his work ‘Das Kapital’ to present the illusions

and spectacles that he imagined as repressed wishes. Here was Benjamin’s clue to

depicting sensual immediacy. Capitalist modernity had come to focus in Paris under the

monarchy of Louis Philippe (1830-48) and the Second Empire of Napoleon III (1852-70).

How could Benjamin describe the regressive elements and utopian potentials of this

culture in “dialectical images”? He wanted to show the regressive elements along with

the utopian potentials of this culture in tangible and effective “dialectical images”. He

achieved this by systematizing his mountain of research notes into colour-coded index

cards. The various exposés and plans for the project provide a sort of guide for the

purposes of orientation in the Arcades Project. For example the 1935 exposé emphasises

the architectural interests of the project. Its sections are named after a charged nineteenth

century space and a figure that is closely associated with that space: Fourier or the

Arcades; Daguerre or the Panoramas; Grandville or the World Exhibitions; Louis-

16
Philippe or the Interieur; Baudelaire or the Streets of Paris; Haussmann or the Barricades.

These section headings are like pharoses on a city plan, and help to give shape to the city,

the epoch and the project itself.

Image 2: The preacher speaks of a utopian dream. Speaker corner, London, Sunday
Dec. 18th 2005.

17
Benjamin and the city of Paris:

Benjamin first visited Paris in 1913, a two week trip made during his Berlin student days.

In the same year Benjamin attended a series of lectures by the modernist Georg Simmel,

whose Philosophy of Money and Metropolis and Mental Life left a huge impression

Benjamin. Like his former teacher, Benjamin in his Arcades Project recognized how the

metropolis “intensified emotional life” and presented the “continuous shift of external

and internal stimuli.” The tempo of the city, its endless interactions and encounters, its

dissonance and unexpected upheavals, contrasted markedly with the slower pace of the

village or small town.

As mentioned already Benjamin’s image of the city was a “dialectical image”. On the one

hand he knew that the city was a manifestation of a huge economy, one large division of

labour exchange. A place where money was the common measure of all human worth

and value and quality is reduced to quantity. Paradoxically, this culture also offers to its

inhabitants the opportunity for individual and collective freedom librating them from

small-town prejudice and enlarging one’s experience and frame of reference.

18
Layla: meaning intoxication. Labels of commodity fetish, Soho, London

Benjamin’s perspective on the city was tempered in no small way by Baudelaire, a man

he had great admiration for. Baudelaire’s allegorical style influenced Benjamin greatly. It

is through Baudelaire that Benjamin takes us on a tour of the Paris of the Second Empire

of Louis Napoleon. Boulevards blasted open by the Emperor’s master builder Baron

Georges Haussmann, “mirrors,” “fashion,” “boredom,” “idleness” and “prostitution,” all

these Baudelairean motifs feature heavily in the Arcades Project.

19
Consumerism

Conceptually, the Arcades Project can be read as a history of capitalism, with an

emphasis on the transformation from a culture of production to one of consumption.

Benjamin was intrigued by the material cultural that was capitalism and the modern city.

He was drawn to its institutions and to the traces of capitalist production.

Image 4: In the age of mobile phones the phone box begins to look redundant. And yet it
takes on new roles. Once a place from which to communicate, now a place where a
mysterious specific other can communicate with you.

The city is primarily a place for commerce. A space where buying and selling is the order

of the day, and indeed night. The high street like a montage, presenting a juxtaposed

collection of disparate window displays, all vying for the unreasonable and excessive

20
attention of the passing public, trying to seduce them into the game of consumer

fetishism.

The arcade was the forerunner to the shopping mall: The Parisian bourgeoisie and the

California Valley Girl share the same ancestral heritage. Fourier viewed the arcades as

“the architectural canon of the phalanstery,” a recuperative environment where human

beings could come together in an authentic, self-supporting community. Inside,

everybody would relish the good life and experience and the utopian charm of modernity.

The shopping mall serves a similar role as the original arcades. However, unlike the

elegant glass and iron structures that were the Parisian arcades, many of the shopping

malls in existence today have little or no aesthetic value. They are situated outside the

city centre to accommodate the ever-expanding communities that constitute the city

suburbs, and the car. These building tend to be aesthetically bland but extremely

functional, accommodating all kinds of shopping experiences, and offering a huge array

of eating options and entertainment, increasingly in the form of a cinema or a Cineplex.

These cinemas play a similar role to the panoramas, which featured in the early arcades.

Today we see people; especially the middle classes, increasingly retreat into suburban

havens that include shopping malls. They no longer partake in the culture of street life but

rather disengage it, both geographically and politically. In contrast, Benjamin upholds the

central city street. His city is a city of hope, a place alive with pedestrians and activity. In

21
the streets the outside becomes inside and the idle wanderer becomes the flâneur.

Benjamin, in his writing sings a paean to this expansive and all inclusive urban space.

Conclusion:

The unfinished work, whether it is in the form of literature, art or music can offer little in

the way of resolution. Like Mahler’s unfinished 10th Symphony the Arcades Project

leaves us in a wilderness of the unknown, in this case Benjamin’s wilderness. What did

we get instead of the promised utopia that modernity did not deliver? Benjamin doesn’t

attempt to answer this question. He leaves us free in this regard, free in the wilderness to

draw our own conclusions. These conclusions however can never accompanied by

resolution. The Arcades Project fails in this regard.

In the broader context of cultural history, Benjamin’s writings have been most explicitly

influential in shaping the study of the modern city. His search for the Urgeschichte (the

original history, the utopia that lies beneath the homogenous city) has become an end in

its own right. Above all he has taught us to question how we define or perceive the city,

individually and collectively. To look beyond the monolith to the fragments which

constitute it, and to apprehend the past that lives in the present.

22
Bibliography:

1. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, Howard Eiland and Kevin Mclaughlin, trans.

(Cambridge, Mass., 1999), translators’ foreword, p. x

2. Walter Benjamin, ibid. [M3, 8], p. 422

3. Benjamin, "On the Concept of History" in selected writings: Volume 4, 1938 – 1940,

trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge, Mass. & London: Belknap Harvard, 2003)

p.392Ursprung des deutschen Trauersiels, 1

4. Susan Buck Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. p.7 –

introduction

5. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, Howard Eiland and Kevin Mclaughlin, trans.

(Cambridge, Mass., 1999), p.31

6. Amédée Kermel, "Les passages de Paris" (1831), quoted in Geist (298; translation by

Christopher Rollason)

7. Susan Buck Morss, ibid.

23
8. Other Voices - online article: The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire: in

Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism. NLB 1977

URL: http://www.othervoices.org/gpeaker/Flaneur.html

9. Benjamin, "On the Concept of History" in selected writings: Volume 4, 1938 – 1940,

trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge, Mass. & London: Belknap Harvard, 2003) p.392

10. Susan Buck Morss, ibid. p.344

11. Ian Sinclair, “London Orbital”, Granta Books, London – New York, 2002. p.284

12. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, Howard Eiland and Kevin Mclaughlin, trans.

(Cambridge, Mass., 1999), [N1 a, 8], p. 460

13. Susan Buck Morss, ibid. p.346

14. Susan Sontag, On Photography, London: Penguin, 2002 p.55

15. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, Howard Eiland and Kevin Mclaughlin, trans.

(Cambridge, Mass., 1999), [C1, 9] p.83

24
16. Walter Benjamin, One Way Street, Selected Writings, vol. 1 p. 456, Marcus Bullock

and Michael W. Jennings – The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press Cambridge,

Mass. and London, England

17. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, Howard Eiland and Kevin Mclaughlin, trans.

(Cambridge, Mass., 1999), [N1 a, 8], p. 460

18. Walter Benjamin, The Cambridge companion to Walter Benjamin (chapter, Walter

Benjamin and the European avant-garde: Michael Jennings; p. 31

19. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, Howard Eiland and Kevin Mclaughlin, trans.

(Cambridge, Mass., 1999), [K1, 3], p. 460

20. Susan Buck Morss, ibid. p.74

21. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, Howard Eiland and Kevin Mclaughlin, trans.

(Cambridge, Mass., 1999), [D º, 7], p. 834

25