| buy book | THE ARCADES PROJECT By Walter Benjamin. London: Harvard University Press. 1999 In 1927 the German Marxist critic and essayist Walter Benjamin began assembling notes for a study of the iron and glass-roofed shopping arcades built in Paris in the 1820s and 30s. His researches continued until his death in 1940 but the study was never completed, and it is still unclear what final form he intended it to take. What survives is a patchwork of long quotations from contemporary and nineteenth-century poets, novelists, philosophers, critics and historians stitched loosely together by Benjamin’s own, mostly brief, comments and interpretations. Benjamin saw the Paris arcades, with their shops and department stores and the merchandise they purveyed, as a kind of dream world, a ‘phantasmagoria’ which, despite its wealth and complacency, represented a crisis in the development of Western culture: the first clear and complete manifestation of the ‘commodity fetish’. And yet the main subject of the Arcades Project is not politics or economics, still less architecture, but history itself. Benjamin seems to have set out to write, or rather compose, a new kind of history, one that rejected the conventional view of the past as an objective reality that could be examined from the stable viewpoint of the present. He proposed instead a model of time as a constellation in which past and present coincide. His new kind of history would recover and relive the ‘untimely, sorrowful and unsuccessful’ events that conventional history, with its inbuilt assumption of progress, necessarily ignored. But does the Arcades project in its surviving form, organized thematically under diverse headings (Fashion, The Collector, The Interior, Modes of Lighting, Mirrors, Idleness), actually constitute a revolutionary kind of history? According to the translators (working on the basis of the German edition of 1982), the montage-like structure of the project is the deliberate formal counterpart of its ‘blasting apart of pragmatic historicism’. I remain sceptical, however. For example, the section entitled ‘Iron Construction’, which includes quotations from authors well known to architectural readers (Sigfried Giedion, Amédée Ozenfant, Auguste Perret) fails to deliver any fresh insight into its subject. It seems like what it probably was, merely a collection of relevant references awaiting a more considered formulation. The book contains various items of supporting material, including a vivid account of Benjamin’s flight from France to Spain in 1940, written by Lisa Fittko, his guide across the Pyrenees. The day after she left him outside the village of Port Bou he committed suicide, probably unnecessarily. This truly was an untimely, sorrowful and unsuccessful event, and Fittko’s account seems more real than anything in the Arcades Project. COLIN DAVIES |