LOOKING

1
LOOKING SEEINGStage 1 Semester 2Walter
Benjamin The Arcades Project

• Alexandra M. Kokoli
• a.m.kokoli_at_rgu.ac.uk

2
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (1927-1940
Das Passagenwerk, 1st publ. 1982)

• Chronologically belongs to late Modernism
• YET, see 1st publ. date!
• In terms of content, anticipates postmodernist
  ideas
• E.g. emphasis on consumption as a site of social
  identification
• In terms of form, even more so
• Unfinished bundles of notes with two
  made-to-order overviews
• Not a work, but a work in progress (Arbeit, not
  Werk)
• The research project as an end in itself
• A kind of history writing, yet fragmented,
  heterogeneous, lacking concrete conclusions
• the Arcades Project may be characterized as
  a website, in a verbal medium, on 19th-century
  Paris. Henry Sussman, SUNY Buffalo
• Perception(s) as important as fact(s) emphasis
  on vision and the spectacle

3
Walter Benjamin (b. Berlin, 1892 d.
French/Spanish borders, 1940)

• Left-wing Jewish intellectual and philosopher
  important figure in CRITICAL THEORY
• Earned money as freelance writer, critic and
  translator
• Most key works published posthumously
• Edited and contextualised by famous
  contemporaries (e.g. Theodor Adorno and Hannah
  Arendt)
• The Arcades Project the theatre of all my
  struggles and all my ideas (WB correspondence,
  1930)

4
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction, in Illuminations (London Pimlico,
1999), pp. 211-244

• Modern technology effects changes beyond the
  technological
• Changes on the status of the work of art, which
  loses the aura of the unique original.
• Political changes too the loss of aura effects
  a loss of the actual historical dimension of the
  work of art.
• Reproducibility ? loss of context, ultimately
  loss of meaning
• Aesthetic contemplation becomes dissociated from
  the properly lived experience of the autonomous
  individual.
• To aestheticise (new meaning) to empty out
  meaning to make any informed judgement by the
  individual impossible and/or irrelevant.
• The role of phantasmagoria spectacles help
  switch off intellectual/critical faculties
• "All efforts to render politics aesthetic leads
  to one thing war. (p. 234)
• Extremely influential the debate continues
  (Adorno and Horkheimer, Debord, McLuhan, and more
  recently, Agamben).

5
Influences/Starting Points

• Charles Baudelaire (1941-1867), French poet and
  critic.
• Benjamins translations of CBs work became the
  starting point for his theoretical writings on
  translation.
• Benjamin greatly influenced by CBs anatomies of
  the crown, the city, and his own time.
• WBs own approach to history
• criticism of linear, causal notions of history.
• constellation a (metaphorically) spatial
  relation of events and contexts. Multiple entry
  points complex cross-referencing.
• The politics of vision humanity will be prey to
  a mythic anguish so long as phantasmagoria
  occupies a place in it. (Exposé of 1939,
  Introduction)

6
The Arcades Project STRUCTURE

• Several hundred notes and reflections grouped in
  sheafs or convolutes
• Quotations of various lengths from a wide range
  of sources (from poets and philosophers to
  tourist guides and newspapers)
• Although unfinished, already meticulously
  cross-referenced
• Categorised in seemingly incommensurable groups
  e.g. Fashion Boredom, Eternal Return
  Marx The Flâneur Anthropological
  Materialism, History of Sects
• Two synopses (exposés) written to order (1935
  1939), in which he lays out his main points of
  reference and principles for its
  transdisciplinary construction, incl.
  architecture visual mass media (phantasmagorias
  and panoramas) urban existence (the flâneur)
  interiors politics.
• First sketches and early drafts

7
Why the ARCADES?

• Architectural form of the 19th c. covered
  passage through blocks of buildings lined with
  shops and other businesses
• A whole world in miniature!
• Gives rise to window-shopping
• Makes shops into tourist sites
• Forerunner of the department store
• Made possible by new technologies of iron
  construction
• Made popular thanks to
• The appearance of luxury goods stores
• The attraction of novelty (magasins de
  nouveautés, i.e. fancy goods stores)
• Esther Leslie the external skeleton montaged
  structure of the arcades mirrors that of WBs work

8
Les rue-galeries literally!

• Those who have seen the gallery of the Louvre
  may take it as a model for the street-gallery in
  Harmony. E. Silberling, Dictionnaire de
  sociologie phalanstérienne (Paris, 1911) A3a,5
• About looking and being looked at
• Goods on display, but also shoppers under mutual
  visual scrutiny
• FASHION climate control allows for more
  delicate, showy clothing and shoes, disposing of
  the need for heavy coats

9
Phantasmagorias panoramas

• Phantasmagoria
• An optical effect produced by a magic lantern (
  ancestor of the slide projector). Figures are
  painted in transparent colours on glass, the rest
  painted opaque black, and projected onto a
  screen. The figures would often be made to appear
  as in motion, with quick switching of the slides
  and other tricks.
• 2. 18th/19th c. popular street spectacle
  sometimes a ghostly spectacle, hybrid between a
  séance and a picture show.
• A medley of figures illusive images.
• Associations
• Mass entertainment (part of masscapitalistcultur
  e)
• Communion with the beyond
• Hallucination dream
• Panorama continuous narrative scene or
  landscape painted to conform to a flat or curved
  background, which surrounds or is unrolled before
  the viewer. Precursor to the large-screen moving
  image

10
The lure of the commodity

• From economies of production to
• cultures of consumption
• NB an ideological, not actual shift! (Theres no
  avoiding economic relations simply a question
  of covering them up)

11
Commodity Fetishism

• Fetishism typical of primitive civilisations
  the rationally unfounded attribution to an object
  qualities that are not supported by its practical
  function magic
• Marx our rational capitalist societies arent
  immune!
• Separation of use-value (real) and exchange-value
• Luxury goods
• The boutiques of the arcades the temples of the
  new religion of commodity fetishism

12
The commodity itself is the speaker here. (WB)

• Cf. Judith Williamson, Decoding Advertisements
  (London Marion Boyars, 1978), pp. 12-13
• In the connection of people and objects, the two
  become interchangeable . Objects are made to
  speaklike people say it with flowers.
  Conversely, people become identified with
  objects the Pepsi People

13
Haussmannisation

• Baron Georges Eugène HAUSSMANN (1809-1891) as
  prefect of the Seine (1853-70) carried out
  large-scale renovations of the city
  (modernisation of sanitation, public utilities,
  construction of the Paris Opera and Les Halles)
• Gentrification pushed the poor out to the
  banlieues
• Made barricading impossible his true goal to
  secure the city against civil war (WB, Ex 1939,
  E.)
• Esther Leslie Haussmann had obliterated history
  when he cut the boulevards through old Paris.

14
Note on historical contextFrance in the
mid-19th c.

• 1848, reign of Louis-Philippe 1 suffrage
  public gatherings illegal
• February 1848 Revolution Paris in barricades ?
  The Second Republic (1848-52)
• Democratic freedoms but commercial decline
• Conservative reaction against red scare
• December 1851 coup dissolved the national
  assembly President Louis Napoléon Bonaparte
  becomes Emperor Napoléon III

15
The flâneur stroller wanderer

• After Baudelaire, man of the crowd (cf. his
  essay The Painter of Modern Life social
  commentary and exposition of own poetics)
• A symptom of modernity at home in the anonymity
  of the city, among strangers
• A detached observer (?)
• WB extremely intrigued, but ultimately not
  convinced of the subversive potential of the
  flâneur
• The idleness of the flâneur is a demonstration
  against the division of labour. M5,8
• The flâneur sabotages the traffic. Moreover, he
  is no buyer. He is merchandise. A3a,7

16
No conclusions, but far from aimless

• History not simply the past
• The work of the historian to make the past
  momentarily reappear in the present in a flash
  (cf. Theses on the Philosophy of History,
  Illuminations)
• Thus, the past sheds lights on itself and the
  present
• The ruins of history spike the present (E.
  Leslie)
• The 19th c. phantasmagoria illuminates 20th c.
  capitalism and the emergent society of the
  spectacle
• If in the arcades reality becomes like a dream,
• and WBs analysis is inspired by dream
  interpretation
• Then the Arcades Project aims to awaken!

17

• WB saw the 19th c. Parisian arcades as having
  something to reveal about the world he lived in.
• What, if anything, do the arcades have to do with
  us?
• What is the meaning of the Arcades Project now?

18
e-Arcades by Robin Michalshttp//www.e-arcades.co
m/
                                   
                                               
                                               
                                               
                                               

• Inspired by Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project,
  e-Arcades is an excursion of association among
  quotations concerning technology. Borrowing
  Benjamin's methodology of juxtaposing quotes,
  e-Arcades grasps at an understanding of the
  effect of our technologies on how we think as
  well as live.

• The industry is running scared from the
  technology that evens out the creative field and
  makes artists harder to pimp. I'm glad to be a
  contributor to the bomb.
• Chuck D Public Enemy, speaking of MP3 1999
• cf. his Rapstation.com, a multi-format site
  with TV radio original programming the free
  downloads

19
Important Announcement

• Seminars for groups 1 2 this Wednesday, 5
  March, will take place in GA49 (on the left of
  the canteen entrance) instead of the studio.

20
READING LIST

• Core Reading
• Excerpts from The Arcades Project published in
  Other Voices, 1.1 (March 1997)
• 1. The Arcades http//www.othervoices.org/gpeaker/
  Arcades.html
• 2. The Flâneur http//www.othervoices.org/gpeaker/
  Flaneur.html
• 3. The Commodity http//www.othervoices.org/gpeake
  r/Commod.html
• Further Reading (Library Internet resources)
• Baudelaire, Charles, The Painter of Modern
  Life, in The Painter of Modern Life and Other
  Essays, trans. and ed. Jonathan Mayne (London
  Phaidon, 1995), pp. 1-41. Shelfmark 759.06 BAU
• Benjamin, Walter, The Arcades Project, trans.
  Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge,
  MA Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,
  1999). Shelfmark 944.361 081 BEN
• Buck-Morss, Susan, The Dialectics of Seeing
  Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project
  (Cambridge, MA MIT Press, 1989). Shelfmark 720.1
  BEN
• Caygill, Howard, Walter Benjamin The colour of
  experience (London Routledge, 1998). Shelfmark
  701 BEN
• Leslie, Esther, Walter Benjamins Arcades
  Project http//www.militantesthetix.co.uk/waltben
  j/yarcades.html
• The Walter Benjamin Research Syndicate (an
  on-line research resource for individuals
  interested in the writings and critical theory of
  WB) http//www.wbenjamin.org/walterbenjamin.html