Benjamin, Walter, Paris, the capital of the nineteenth century

Benjamin, Walter, Paris, the capital of the nineteenth century, from: Benjamin, Walter. Arcades Project. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999.

According to the translator, Benjamin’s agenda was something similar to “dream interpretation”: “The nineteenth century was the collective dream which we, its heirs, were obliged to reenter, as patiently and minutely as possible, in order to follow out its ramifications and, finally, awaken from it” (ix). Hence Benjamin’s method—not a conceptual analysis, but rather “methods of the nineteenth-century collector of antiquities and curiosities.” A montage form as a method of scholarly investigation, a determinate literary form. “Citation and commentary might be perceived as intersecting at a thousand different angles, setting up vibrations across the epoch of recent history, so as to effect ‘the cracking open of natural teleology’.” (xi)

On p. xii the translator discusses Benjamin’s view of material things as being linked to the historical perspective. “In the dusty, cluttered corridors of the arcades… historical time is broken up into kaleidoscopic distractions and momentary come-ons, myriad displays of ephemera, thresholds for the passage of… ‘the ghosts of material things’. Here, at a distance from what is normally meant by progress, is the ur-historical time, collective redemption of lost time, of the times embedded in the spaces of things.” (xii)

Paris, the capital of the nineteenth century

“World exhibitions glorify the exchange value of the commodity. They create a framework in which its use value recedes into the background. They open a phantasmagoria which a person enters in order to be distracted. The entertainment industry makes this easier by elevating the person to the level of the commodity. He surrenders to its manipulation while enjoying his alienation from himself and others” (7). “World exhibitions propagate the universe of commodities… Fashion prescribes the ritual according to which the commodity fetish demands to be worshipped.

“For the private individual, the place of dwelling is for the first time opposed to the place of work. The former constitutes itself as the interior. Its complement is the office. The private individual, who in the office has to deal with reality, needs the domestic interior to sustain him in his illusions.” (8) “From this arise the phantasmagorias of the interior – which, for the private man, represents the universe. In the interior, he brings together the far away and the long ago.” (9)

Benjamin, thus, emphasizes that since the modern age, the commodity—because so much is invested in its exchange value—became a chronotope in itself. Each commodity is a chronotope, its possession unwinds temporal and spatial dimensions that a person invests in his life (in the creation of cultural space around him/herself). A product, therefore, through its exchange value, places a person into a relation to the surrounding socio-cultural landscape, but moreover used to identify and secure his/her temporalities. Hence Benjamin’s focus on the figure of the collector: “To him falls the Sisyphean task of divesting things of their commodity character by taking possession of them. But he bestows only on them only connoisseur value, rather than use value.” (9)

Benjamin goes to examine the figure of the flaneur (Baudelaire), who the walk consumes urban space, but also, in a dialectical way, redescribes the productive relations. City (Paris) as the arena—and embodiment, and the place of objectification—of class struggle (barricades). The bourgeoisie reshapes urban space to make riots impossible—proletariat responds by using this space for an even more powerful struggle. Art – starting from constructivism to photography to montage to surrealism – as a way to explore (and, once again, objectify) the perceived decay of bourgeoisie as the driving force of historical progress.