The Start of Something Big
These notes are the ruin of a great structure that never got built.
By JAMES MILLER
The Arcades Project'' was a legend long before it became a book. First conceived by the German critic Walter Benjamin in 1927, it began as a relatively straightforward effort to illuminate the commercial culture of nascent capitalism by examining, in minute detail, the first Parisian ''arcades,'' distant prototypes of our modern-day indoor shopping malls. ''These arcades,'' as Benjamin explained in an early draft, quoting an 1852 illustrated guide to Paris, ''are glass-roofed, marble-paneled corridors extending through whole blocks of buildings, 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 arcade is a city, a world in miniature.''
At first, the young critic, renowned in left-leaning Weimar literary circles, hoped to complete a single short essay, to be called ''Parisian Arcades: A Dialectical Fairyland.'' But Benjamin quickly expanded his conception: Instead of an essay primarily about the first French shopping malls, he now imagined composing an urgeschichte, or ''primal history,'' penetrating the essence of the society and culture of the 19th century -- a history incomparably richer and more vivid than anything previously written.
Time passed. Benjamin devoted himself to journalism. Then, in 1934, returning to the ''arcades project,'' as he often called it, Benjamin embarked on a fresh round of readings and meditations on a wild array of loosely related topics, from the early history of the Parisian advertising industry to the poetics of Victor Hugo.
Benjamin's hopes soared. By bringing back to life in images and anecdotes the Paris of Baudelaire and Marx, of the bohemian bistros and revolutionary barricades, he dreamed of composing a new kind of epic poem, forged from primary documents, a montage of such artistry and political immediacy that readers would be stopped in their tracks by the recognition that here -- in the superficially unrelated happenings of a single city in a previous century -- might be found clues for facing up to the predicaments of present-day Europe, where fascism and Communism were pitted in a battle to the death against liberalism, and also each other.
In a typically gnomic notebook entry, Benjamin wrote, ''This work -- comparable to the method of atomic fission, which liberates energies bound up within the atom -- is supposed to liberate the enormous energies of history that are slumbering in the 'once upon a time' of classic historical narrative.''
Benjamin's hopes would remain unfulfilled, his eschatological history unfinished. In 1940, after entrusting his literary remains to his Parisian friend Georges Bataille, a librarian at the Bibliotheque Nationale, Benjamin committed suicide at 48 in a small town on the border between France and Spain, convinced (wrongly) that the Nazis were about to prevent him from making an escape to America.
By then, Benjamin's reputation was secure among a variety of influential cognoscenti, including Bertolt Brecht, Gershom Scholem, Theodor Adorno and Hannah Arendt. But it was only a decade later, with the publication of ''A Portrait of Walter Benjamin'' by Adorno, that the legend of ''The Arcades Project'' began in earnest. Several years younger than Benjamin, Adorno by 1950 was well on the way to winning fame as perhaps the most powerful figure on the academic left in West Germany. The extensive correspondence between Adorno and Benjamin - now happily available in English as ''The Complete Correspondence 1928-1940'' -- reveals the complexities of their tortured philosophical friendship. Benjamin clearly relished the extravagance of the younger man's admiration for his magnum opus: ''I regard your work on the 'Arcades,' ''Adorno wrote in 1935, ''as the decisive philosophical word which must find utterance today.'' But cursed with a monumental sense of self-importance, Adorno could not resist chiding and cajoling, trying to get Benjamin to write something other than drafts and outlines. ''Your study,'' he carped in 1938, referring to a yet another draft of an essay drawn from ''The Arcades Project,'' ''is located at the crossroads of magic and positivism.'' This observation was not meant as a compliment.
The ''Portrait'' that Adorno published in 1950 was, in sharp contrast, a hagiography. Here Adorno eulogized his dead friend in the most lavish of terms. In addition, he revealed the existence, in manuscript form, of an unfinished and unpublished masterpiece -- the ''Passagen-Werk,'' or ''Arcades Project.'' Fusing ''politics and metaphysics, theology and materialism, myth and modernity, nonintentional matter and extravagant speculation,'' this work, as Adorno now described it, sounded -- literally -- unbelievable. A ''shocking montage,'' it consisted ''solely of citations'' in which ''mysticism and enlightenment are joined for the last time.''
This observation was meant as a compliment. And thanks, in part, to Adorno's eloquent advocacy, Benjamin's unpublished work became a kind of holy grail, not least in the minds of the generation that followed. In the context of the political and cultural upheavals of the 60's, Benjamin's work seemed of fresh moment. In 1967, previously unpublished essays drawn from ''The Arcades Project'' began to appear in Germany. And in 1968, in America, one of the project's most remarkable byproducts, Benjamin's dark and prophetic ''Theses on the Philosophy of History,'' appeared in the first English-language anthology of his work (edited and introduced by Hannah Arendt), ''Illuminations.''
In the years that followed, as some of Benjamin's newfound admirers embarked on academic careers, they began to produce scholarly monographs, scrutinizing his literary remains like latter-day scholars of the cabala, struggling to unlock the nuclear energies assumed to be dormant, somewhere, in this great mass of published works and unpublished manuscripts. And so it came to pass, in 1982, that the grail finally materialized -- as a grave and weighty tome: ''The Arcades Project,'' Volume 5 of ''The Collected Works of Walter Benjamin.'' Edited by Rolf Tiedemann according to the most exacting standards of modern philology, and now faithfully rendered into English by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, this large volume reproduces every relevant scrap in the Benjamin archives, reprinting, verbatim, every entry in the more than 30 notebooks that Benjamin had meticulously maintained to organize his observations and pertinent passages from books pertaining to a variety of different topics and themes, from ''Fashion'' and ''Boredom'' to ''Barricade Fighting'' and ''the Seine.''
A palimpsest of quotations occasionally punctuated by Benjamin's own comments and aphorisms, the notebooks are stuffed full of intellectual curiosities. We learn about the Parisian craze for cashmere shawls (ignited by the French campaign in Egypt in 1798) and also about the Parisian marksmen who, at the height of the revolutionary ferment of 1830, shot the hands off clock faces, as if to stop time. Long and sometimes dull citations from miscellaneous scholars are punctuated by striking quotations from 19th-century poets and writers (in this case Victor Hugo): ''Night distributes the stellar essence to the sleeping plants. Every bird which flies has the thread of the infinite in its claw.'' The largest of the notebooks covers Charles Baudelaire, though most of the really interesting ideas are more lucidly expressed in Benjamin's various essays from the late 30's on Baudelaire (which are to be reprinted in the third, and final, volume of Harvard's definitive English-language edition of his ''Selected Works,'' due out next year).
The intricately structured propinquity of the materials that Benjamin collated in his notebooks reflects the idiosyncrasy of his manner of thinking; to call it a ''method'' is to make it sound too scientific. After he had fled Germany for Paris in 1933, he would pass days at a time in the Bibliotheque Nationale, poring over documents, simultaneously forging ahead ''with the whetted ax of reason'' -- his delirious phrase -- and sinking into mind-altering reveries. ''The notes devoted to the Paris arcades were begun under an open sky of cloudless blue that arched above the foliage,'' he writes in one passage, referring to the painted ceiling of the Bibliotheque. In yet another passage, he recalls the hallucinatory ''rustling in the painted foliage under the vaulted ceilings of the Bibliotheque Nationale -- produced by the many pages continually leafed through in the books here.''...
Benjamin frankly avowed the theological and surrealist influences on his thinking. He also, rather more perversely, insisted on the orthodox Marxist pedigree of his work, a pedigree that Adorno (like Scholem and Arendt) thought preposterous. Indeed, Benjamin's deepest (and most revealing) political sympathies in ''The Arcades Project'' are reserved for the woolliest of the utopian socialists, above all Louis-Auguste Blanqui.
A bloody-minded propagandist and fearless leader of conspiracies and secret societies, Blanqui and his disciples took part in a number of uprisings in Paris, in 1830, 1839, 1848 and 1871, each one ending in defeat. From Benjamin's point of view, the most marvelous thing about Blanqui was not his unrelenting militance but his quixotic understanding of the universe, conveyed in a book called ''L'eternite par les Astres'' (''Eternity by the Stars''), published in 1872. In it, the aging revolutionist, in retreat, raised the wild idea that ''all that one might have been in this world, one is in another. Along with one's entire existence from birth to death, experienced in a multitude of places, one also lives, in yet other places, ten thousand different versions of it.''...
James Miller, the author, most recently, of ''The Passion of Michel Foucault'' and ''Flowers in the Dustbin: The Rise of Rock and Roll, 1947-1977,'' teaches at the New School.