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Books > History > World history > 1750 to 1900
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The Arcades Project (Paperback, Revised)
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The Arcades Project (Paperback, Revised)
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"To great writers," Walter Benjamin once wrote, "finished works
weigh lighter than those fragments on which they labor their entire
lives." Conceived in Paris in 1927 and still in progress when
Benjamin fled the Occupation in 1940, The Arcades Project (in
German, Das Passagen-Werk) is a monumental ruin, meticulously
constructed over the course of thirteen years--"the theater," as
Benjamin called it, "of all my struggles and all my ideas."
Focusing on the arcades of nineteenth-century Paris-glass-roofed
rows of shops that were early centers of consumerism--Benjamin
presents a montage of quotations from, and reflections on, hundreds
of published sources, arranging them in thirty-six categories with
descriptive rubrics such as "Fashion," "Boredom," "Dream City,"
"Photography," "Catacombs," "Advertising," "Prostitution,"
"Baudelaire," and "Theory of Progress." His central preoccupation
is what he calls the commodification of things--a process in which
he locates the decisive shift to the modern age. The Arcades
Project is Benjamin's effort to represent and to critique the
bourgeois experience of nineteenth-century history, and, in so
doing, to liberate the suppressed "true history" that underlay the
ideological mask. In the bustling, cluttered arcades, street and
interior merge and historical time is broken up into kaleidoscopic
distractions and displays of ephemera. Here, at a distance from
what is normally meant by "progress," Benjamin finds the lost
time(s) embedded in the spaces of things.
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