In order for a part of the past to be touched by actuality, there must be no continuity between them.
Walter Benjamin [N7,7]
In reading the Arcades Project one must be sensitive to Benjamin's articulation of Paris as the capital of the 19th century where a particular collision between experience and thinking takes shape. Benjamin's intention and approach throughout the project require a suspension of progressive, linear thinking. The project's method is rich because it combines philosophical, literary and political topics with an inscription in the material objects and "lived experiences" of a particular epoch. In his writing, Benjamin uses non-linear figures to suggest singular configurations of thinking. These figures, which appear and disappear according to a certain iterability, are one of the strengths of Benjamin's writing. In this way he teaches not how to apply a method, but how to create a multiple and rich study of a specific time, that has its echoes in the present as well as in the future. In this paper I shall closely examine some of the moments of the Arcades Project, trying to follow the way in which Benjamin configures an aesthetic of modernity, how he rethinks experience and knowledge within the context and the effects of a particular epoch.1
It is possible to find connections (as well as disjunctions) not only among the fragments that compose a single convolute, but also among fragments that appear within different parts of the project. Although a single title is given to each convolute that corresponds to that section's materials, as in "Baudelaire", "Iron Construction", "Boredom", "Conspiracy, compagnone", each convolute contains fragments that echo the material found in others. Even if these convolutes are still "notes and materials" and, as Tiedemann notes, can be considered "provisional divisions into chapters", I believe one of the most important strategies in Benjamin's writing is to disintegrate any possible essential and rigid coherence or to problematize approaching "things in themselves".
I want to follow some of these threads by starting from some of the more theoretical fragments – those of convolutes N and K – while simultaneously expanding my reading to some related notes that are in other parts of the project. Then I will follow the singular relation to space and time that Benjamin inscribes and entangles particularly with the 19th century. I shall emphasize the relationship between these two groups of fragments, as both of them stress the importance of fleeting images that flash before the observer and suddenly disappear. In addition, both employ dense, non-linear, weblike modes of thinking. As a result, both types of fragments are textual "constellations" of ideas rather than linear, structured arguments. In other words, the text of the Arcades Project shares the complex, interconnected form of the very arcades it considers.
The first fragment of the convolute N in which Benjamin defines knowledge2 is a remarkably suggestive one.
In the fields with which we are concerned, there is knowledge only in lightning flashes. The text is the long roll of thunder coming after. [N 1, 1]
Knowledge receives its strength from the speed of the interval that elapses between lighting and thunder. The knowledge of the fields that concerns Benjamin is given only in "lighting flashes", and the "text", the script of knowability, is what one hears as a rumble for a long time afterward.
Because the dynamic of lightning flashes and thunder is one that is interrupted and scattered, the way in which Benjamin directs his investigations cannot be conceptualized within linear or progressive time. Instead his investigations can be compared to a sea voyage, a traversing; insisting on the comparison with navigation, Benjamin stresses that the interference of the magnetic pole, which others consider an impediment, is for him the guidepost that determinates his orientation and direction. "The differentials of time" are crucial elements of his method.
Comparison of the attempts of others to the undertaking of a sea voyage in which the ships are drawn off course by the magnetic north pole. Discover this north pole. What for others are deviations are for me the data which determine my course. – On the differentials of time (which for the others disturb the "main lines" of the inquiry) I base my reckoning. [N 1, 2]
These few examples from Benjamin's writings demonstrate the collision and crossing that operates between theory and experience; in fact, if the author is trying to define a method, this method itself is inscribed in his consideration of the experience. The intervals, the differentials of time, are indispensable for the method Benjamin adopts to compose the Arcades Project. This implies that not only this method (a calculated navigation) is affected by the intervals, but also that even as these intervals remain active throughout his project, they do not stay completely under its control. In addition, these intervals disjoint or spatialize the different parts of the project. Thus, the distance between the intervals convolutes the elements that interest Benjamin so that they "are turned most intensively to the outside". [N1, 3] Already in these few sentences, an idea of imparting and sharing emerges, that simultaneously divides and spatializes a thought-process. This thought-process alters itself upon encountering a singular epoch, in which the possibility of the completely different can "take place"3 both in thought and in writing.
This method seeks to turn inside-out a particular epoch (the 19th century), and a particular space (Paris). The arcades constitute the emblematic architectonic spaces to which Benjamin directs a large part of his attention in relationship to objects, to humans and to attitudes. He distances his investigation both from an idea of decline and from myth. In particular, he wants to dissolve myth in the space of history. This myth-dissolving impulse is evident in his treatment of Aragon. On the one hand, Aragon's work presents an enormous interest and provides an opening to Benjamin's research in the history of the arcades. However, on the other hand, according to Benjamin, Aragon maintains an attitude that insists too much on "dream" and mythology. Aragon is plunged into a mythology that needs to be dissolved.4 But how to dissolve the myth? How must temporality be conceived in order to consider that period? For Benjamin, this move is possible only through a shift from a dream to an awakening, "the concern is to find the constellation of awakening" [N1,9]. In another convolute Benjamin compares the state of sleep and the one of wakefulness to the passage from childhood to adulthood. The first moment, childhood, is the primary stage which has something in common with dreams, while the other, adulthood, related to wakefulness. For Benjamin, Proust is exemplary because his writing emerges in a period in which it is no longer possible to interpret dreams inside a tradition. In fact, if up until a certain time a dream could be interpreted in such a way as to reinscribe it into a tradition, Proust is related to "a generation that had lost all bodily and natural aids to remembrance and that, poorer than before, was left to itself to take possession of the worlds of childhood in merely an isolated, scattered and pathological way." [K 1, 1] Benjamin adopts what he calls the "experimental technique" of rememoration from Proust.5 This "experimental technique" solicits a Copernican revolution in the sense that "what has been" is no longer fixed, immobile in a place toward which the present can move, but it irrupts as the awakened consciousness. Benjamin remarks that in the state of sleep the body remains connected to a high inner sense, while the boundary between sleeping and wakefulness is difficult to define. Benjamin writes:
The nineteenth century a spacetime (a dreamtime) in which the individual consciousness more and more secures itself in reflecting, while the collective consciousness sinks into ever deeper sleep. As the sleeper however – in this like the madman – sets out on the macrocosmic journey through his own body, and the noises and feelings of his innards, which to the waking and salubrious sense converge in one surge of health – blood pressure, intestinal churn, heartbeat, and muscle awareness – as these sensations, in the extravagantly heightened inner senses of the sleeper, generate illusion or dream imagery which translate and account for them, so likewise for the dreaming collective which, through the arcades, communes with its own insides. We must follow in its wake so as to expound the nineteenth century in fashion and advertising, in buildings and politics, as the outcome of its dream visions. [K1, 4]
In this way Benjamin tries to telescope a particular experience of an epoch by intermingling bodily experiences with psychological and conceptual experiences. It is very important that Benjamin emphasize this bodily experience and the state of "wakefulness within all possible centers" [K1,5], which, inscribed in a singular moment, he transposes from the individual to the collective. While making this transposition, Benjamin also says that all that is external to the individual (fashion, architecture, etc.) becomes internal for the collective. He constructs a relationship between an inside and an outside in which the two remain disjointed even if they are bound tightly together. Both poles are crucial and their connection consists of the threads that lead Benjamin's thinking through all the convolutes. Before considering some of the fragments in which Benjamin writes on these material formations of the 19th century, however, I want to return to convolutes N and K in order to follow some crucial connections that Benjamin poses between the dialectical images and their constellations in relationship to temporality, history and knowability.
As in the dream, all the sensations are connected to the body, in Benjamin's comparison to the 19th century, such sensations are inscribed in the cycle of the eternal recurrence. In the collective they erupt out of the cycle when they participate in history. Benjamin says that they remain in the cycle "until the collective seizes upon them in politics and history emerges." [K 1, 5] This relation of the 19th century to dream is considered from a theological moment, the moment of waiting for an awakening. If a dream exists, it "waits secretly for the awakening; the sleeper surrenders himself to death only provisionally, waits for the second when he will cunningly wrest himself from its clutches." [K1a,2] For Benjamin the dialectical method offers the way to "do justice" to a particular and concrete historical situation [K2,3]. A particular object is wrenched from its previous state and arrives at a moment that is the "now being", which is the moment of wakefulness.
In what way this "now being" (which is something other than the now-being of "the present time," since it is a being punctuated and intermittent) already signifies in itself a higher concretion – this question, of course, can be entertained by the dialectical method only within the purview of an historical perception that at all points has overcome the ideology of progress. [K2,3]
This past is also understood as a vision that gains intensity from the concretion of reality, while acquiring a higher actuality "by the image as which and in which it is comprehended."
The Copernican revolution, the awakening, is not intended to be a past that illuminates the present or vice versa, as this would for Benjamin constitute a purely temporal relation. On the contrary, what interests Benjamin is the provisional relationship between "what has been" and the "now being" – a dialectical image that emerges when "what has been" and the "now being" crystallize in a constellation of a certain period's knowability and its possible modes of thinking. But as a constellation moves, it acquires at every moment a differential visibility, so this visibility changes in relation to the place and to the time of the observer. In a similar way, Benjamin's writing moves among the different convolutes. The dialectical image is opposed to an "essence" in any phenomenological direction that one can think (in particular we should situate this text in the same period as Heidegger's writing and not much after Husserl's); as a constellation of lighting flashes, the dialectical image is not characterized by an "essence", but by its historical index. Indeed, Benjamin remarks that he is concerned with historical indices. Negating or moving away from the concept of essence also implies undermining stability and therefore the possibility of transformation. What is important for the historical index is that images "enter into legibility at a specific time" [N3,1]. Not only temporally, but also spatially, an articulation that insists on the figure of a constellation, because it has a particular imaginary, complicates the structure of Benjamin's method. If an historical object is "to be blasted out of the continuum of historical succession, that is because its monadic structure demands it." [N10,3] But these singular configurations or constellations are conjured up by Benjamin. He is particularly interested in objects from the 19th century that have lost their use-value at the moment of writing and are "ciphers" because they are "alienated things [that] are hollowed out." In this respect, in relation to the nineteenth century the method to which Benjamin refers ought to be attentive to the movement between obsolescence and meaning.6 The dialectical images are provisional stops between hollowed-out things (which have increased enormously during the 19th century) and an "emerging meaning," where a particular intersection of their death and their earlier significance leaps. The knowability immediately "mediated" through the dialectical image, appears at the moment in which a particular dynamic between motion and rest connects singular objects of history.
Where thinking comes to a standstill in a constellation saturated with tensions – there the dialectical image appears. It is the caesura in the movement of thought. [N10a,3]
If there is a dialectical relationship between motion and rest, this also relates to the fact that nothing in this process is stable. Instead, the anachronistic method in which Benjamin inscribes his thought implies a possibility of transformation. So if there is an intention to construct in this kind of knowledge and history, this intention does not negate the anachronism at the core of events and their interpretation. A particular dialectic between movement and rest, between avance et retard, allows the possibility of fixing dates and places.7 This occurs in Benjamin's writing mostly in the realm of disappearance.
Historical knowledge of the truth is possible only as overcoming (Aufhebung) the illusory appearance. Yet this overcoming should not signify sublimation, actualization of the object but rather assume, for its part, the configuration of the rapid image. The small quick figure in contrast to scientific complacency. This configuration of rapid image goes together with recognition of the "now" in things. But not the future. Surrealist mien of things in the now; philistine mien in the future. The illusion overcome here that an earlier time is in the now. In truth: the now <is> in the inmost image of what has been. [Oo, 81]8
Arcades: spaces, objects and humans
Benjamin reiterates the method established in the more theoretical convolute "N" throughout the Arcades Project. Even though each individual convolute can appear to be self-contained, it is possible to retrace Benjamin's method of "imparting" in the sections that focus on material objects and on literature. What is interesting is the transit to movement with which Benjamin inextricably ties a singular understanding of space and time to material or literary objects. The dialectic of the standstill, the now of recognizability, and the monadic structure of the approach to knowability are all factors that knit together the individual elements of the Arcades Project. In this second part of the paper I will focus on some fragments related to the arcades in which the question of space is more directly present. The arcades are the exemplary monuments of the19th century:
Being past, being no more, is passionately at work in things. To this the historian trusts for his subject matter. He depends on this force, and knows things as the are at the moment of their ceasing to be. Arcades are such monuments of being-no-more. And the energy that works in them is dialectic. The dialectic takes its way through the arcades, ransacking them, revolutionizing them, turns them upside down and inside out, converting them, since they no longer remain what they are, from abodes of luxury to <x>. And nothing of them lasts except the name: passages. And: Passage du Panorama <sic>. In the inmost recesses of the names the upheaval is working, and therefore we hold a world in the names of old streets, and to read the name of a street at night is like undergoing a transformation. [Do,4]9
In one appendix of the notes the arcades are inscribed in a particular dialectical staging:10
Thesis
Flowering of the arcades
under Louis-Philippe
The panoramas
The magasins
Love
Anthithesis
Decline of the arcades at the end
of the nineteenth century
Plush
Miscarried matter
The whore
Synthesis
Discovery of the arcades
The unconscious knowledge of what
has been becomes conscious
Theory of the awakening
Dialectic of persp.
Dial. of fashion
Dial. of sentim.
{Diorama
Plush-perspective
Rainy weather}
In this schema Benjamin considers the passages as "objects", and it is well known that the author considers them to hold a privileged place. "Passagen" (in German), or "passages" (in French), form one of the cores of Benjamin's research. They are particular architectural constructions that are extremely complex in their use and in their material articulation, and they receive a correspondingly complex consideration from Benjamin. Materially, they are architectural structures which, if they are public spaces, are at the same time covered and protected areas; but as "passages" they also contain temporal meanings. One such meaning is inscribed directly in the idea of "passing", as something that is finishing; another can be found in the idea of "passing through" as an experience that takes place temporally and spatially. Moreover, if the arcades are places, at the same time they contest the idea of place as a stable entity by fostering movement in space and time. In this way, their structure contests the very idea of the self-containment usually present in an architectural and material structure. These particular architectural structures, which Benjamin inscribes in a dialectical process, can only be understood after they are no longer in use, afterwards, after the moment in which they were at the apogee. So the meanings of "arcades" are multiplied by Benjamin's writing in a way that allows for a certain potentiality or possibility. As Samuel Weber has pointed out, Benjamin's use of key terms is crucial for approaching his writing and thinking. Weber has pointed to a suffix that punctuates some of Benjamin's terminology.
If a leap or a crack is the way Benjamin describes the way "thinking" gains access to the "domain of writing," one rather unusual stylistic trait that recurs throughout his writings may help readers "push forward" into the labyrinthine realm of his thought. It is the tendency to formulate certain key concepts in nouns that employ the suffix –ability or –ibility (in German –barkeit). [...] Nouns formed in this way refer to a possibility or a potentiality, to a capacity rather than an actually existing reality. Communicability, for instance, does not refer to an accomplished act as does communication; the same holds true for knowability, which is by no means equivalent to knowledge.11
Now I want to consider more closely this kind of knowability of the arcades, as a possible architecturability12 that Benjamin sets in motion in his writing. It is well documented that Benjamin was deeply interested in the architectural constructions of the 19th century as well as in the contemporary research of authors such as Giedion and Meyer. Benjamin started the Arcades Project in 1927 and his interest in Giedion's 1928 study Building in France, Building in Iron, Building in Ferro-concrete is well known. This book aimed "to extract from the vast complexity of the past those elements that will be the point of departure for the future" (85). After reading this text, Benjamin sent a letter to Giedion, where he wrote: "the few passages that I read electrified me."13 What was it that interested Benjamin so much in Giedion's work? Giedion considers the arcade as the prototype of architecture in glass and iron, a calculated structure that will be used for the construction of exhibition buildings, stations, stores and other mass-mediauratic structures. In "First attempts", while considering the introduction of iron into architecture as the shift from "craftsmanship to industrial building production", Giedion writes:
It started with the introduction of iron in roof framing. The wooden beams of theaters and warehouses burned like tinder. One tried to replace them with iron. Soon one saw that iron construction required little space, allowed much light to stream in, and, when used in combination with glass, was especially suited for the roofing of courtyards. Glass and iron galleries appeared, the true point of departure for railroad stations, market halls, exhibition buildings.14
And then Giedion continues considering the particular dynamic between glass and iron:
Glass houses, with their – compared to walls – virtually invisible exterior shell, provide the impetus for the introduction of cast-iron supports and skeleton constructions. (103)
Giedion's analysis of the dynamic of constructions in iron and glass was important to Benjamin, as was the fact that galleries, as temporary constructions, were the first step to technological constructions in which the skeleton construction implied repetition and mechanization. A certain typology and technology of construction, first introduced for temporary structures, becomes in this century to be considered stable, and therefore to exclude the possibility of change. For Benjamin, Giedion's articulation of the relationship between subconscious and the structures of the 19th century was crucial. But Benjamin wanted to radicalize the way in which Giedion connected architecture to psychological and collective processes.15
As constructions the arcades, among other significations, are associated with frames. This conception of frame and its dynamic and theoretical relation to the threshold are of particular importance:
Threshold and boundary must be very carefully distinguished. The Schwelle <threshold> is a zone. And indeed a zone of transition. Transformation, passage, flight<?> are in the word <swell>, and in the etymology ought not to overlook these senses. On the other hand, it is necessary to keep in mind the immediate tectonic framework that has brought the word to its current meaning. We have grown very poor in threshold experiences. "Falling asleep", is perhaps the only such experience that remains to us. [Mo,26]16
Benjamin considers the city the place where one can experience the "phenomenon of the boundary" (C3,3) That kind of experience happens at every architectural intersection: lines that run alongside a railroad, at the crossing of sidewalks. Precisely because it is not guided by a telos, but is an encounter with the unknown, it is an experience that is always fractured:
The city is only apparently homogeneous. From one district to the next, even its name takes on a different sound. Nowhere, unless perhaps in dreams, can the phenomenon of the boundary be experienced more originally than in cities. To know them means to understand those lines that, running alongside railroad crossings and across properties, within the park and along the river bank, function as limits; it means to know these confines together with the enclaves of the various districts. As threshold, the boundary stretches across streets; a new precinct begins like a step into the void -- as though one had unexpectedly cleared a low step in a flight of stairs. [C 3, 3]
Within the system of city boundaries, the entrance to the arcade is a threshold that demarcates a particular kind of access. Benjamin remarks that even if no specific step signaling access to the arcades exists, one can nevertheless notice the hesitation of those who cross the threshold. Those who cross the threshold face a decision.
These gateways – the entrances to the arcades – are thresholds. No stonestep serves to mark them. But this is done by the expectant posture of the few persons. Tightly measured paces reflect the fact, altogether unknowingly, that a decision lies ahead. [C 3, 6]
It is very interesting that this excerpt is concerned with a spatial agencement that also requires a crossing in time in a moment of decision. As a time of decision, this moment is suspended, disjointed. In this fragment, as in some others, Benjamin considers a material articulation while arresting the reader through an attention to the messianic time, a time to come.
1 This way of posing the relation between knowledge and experience was at the core of Benjamin's thinking since his first writings. In this sense, his text "On the Program of the Coming Philosophy" is very important. W. Benjamin, Selected Writings – Volume 1, ed. by M.Jennings and M. Bullock, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachussetts, 1996.
2 I use "knowledge", while considering the entry written by S. Weber in Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, p. 261-264. In this text Weber underlines the importance of Benjamin's German use of the suffix –barkeit (–ability). In this interpretation "knowledge" would become "knowability". I will come back to this point in this paper.
3 This reading of Benjamin from the angle of imparting and impartability in relation to language and thinking is discussed by Samuel Weber, "Benjamin's Writing Style, in Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, vol. 1, Oxford University Press, New York 1998.
Weber writes: "It is precisely the ambivalent ramifications of the 'immediacy of the medial', that is, of the originated crack or the fracture first described as imparting, that drive Benjamin's thinking and writing." (263)4 Aragon opens and prefaces his Le paysan de Paris with an introduction to a modern mythology. Very soon in the first chapter, dedicated to the "passage de l'Opéra", the intellectual sensibility expressed through the arcades is close to Benjamin's own.
La lumière moderne de l'insolite, voilà désormais ce qui va le retenir.
Elle règne bizarrement dans ces sortes de galeries couvertes qui sont nombreuses à Paris, aux alentours des grandes boulevards et que l'on nomme d'une façon troublante des passages, comme si dans ces couloirs dérobés au jour, il n'était permis à personne de s'arrêter plus d'un instant.
As Aragon considers at his time these phantasmatic landscapes, he inscribes them as one of the modern myth.
Le grand instinct américan, importé dans la capitale par un préfet du second Empire, qui tend à recouper au cordeau le plan de Paris, va bientôt rendre impossible le maintien de cese aquariums humains déjà morts à leur vie primitive, et qui méritent pourtant d'être regardés comme les recéleurs de plusieurs mythes modernes, car c'est aujourd'hui seulement que la pioche les menace, qu'ils sont effectivement devenus les sanctuaires d'un culte de l'éphémerè, qu'ils sont devenus le paysage fantomatique des plaisirs et des professions maudites, incompréhensibles hier et que demain ne connaîtra jamais. [A. Aragon, Le paysan the Paris, Gallimard Folio, Paris 1953 (21)]
5 The classic passage on awakening at night in a dark room and the ensuing orientation:
When I awoke like this, and my mind struggled in an unsuccessful attempt to discover where I was, everything would be moving round me through the darkness: things, places,years. My body, still too heavy with sleep to move, would make an effort to construe the form which its tiredness took as an orientation of its various members, so as to induce from that where the wall lay and the furniture stood, to piece together and to give a name to the house in which it must be living. Its memory, the composite memory of its ribs, knees, and shoulder-blades, offered it a whole series of rooms in which it had at one time or another slept, while the unseen walls kept changing, adapting themselves to the shape of each successive room that it remembered,whirling madly through the darkness. And even before my brain ... had collected sufficient impressions ... to identify the room, it, my body, would recall from each room in succession what the bed was like, where the doors were, how daylight came in at thewindows, whether there was a passage outside, what I had in my mind when I went to sleep, and had found there when I awoke. (Marcel Proust, Du côté de chez Swann, vol. 1, p.15. [K 8a, 2])
6"Dialectical images are constellated between alienated things and incoming meaning, are instantiated in the moment of indifference between death and meaning. While the things in appearance are awakened to what is newest, death transforms the meanings to what is most ancient." With regard to these reflections, it should be kept in mind that, in the nineteenth century, the number of "hollowed out" things increases at a rate and on a scale that was previously unknown, for technical progress is continually withdrawing newly introduced objects from circulation. [N 5, 2]
Here is one of the moments in which a particular configuration between meaning and materiality emerges in Benjmain's thought. I believe this singular configuration punctuates the entire project of the Arcades. The intention of the project is to try to position itself within the oscillation between images and meanings (language), between allegory and materiality in modernity.
7 As Françoise Proust writes:
Tout 'maintenant', en effet, tout action originarie présente vient à la fois trop tôt et trop tard, non pas tantôt l'une et tantôt l'autre, mais à la fois en avance et en retard. Elle est toujours en avance, parce qu'elle brusque le temps, le précipite, l'accélère, le conduit à son point critique explosif. Elle cherche à gagner du temps, à prendre le temps de vitesse, à aller plus vite que lui, à avoir de l'avance, à le dépasser, le doubler.Tel est bien en effet ce qu'on nomme l'inédit, l'initial, la chance d'un nouveau commencement.
(F. Proust, L'histoire à contretemps, p. 51, Les Editions du Cerf, Paris, 1994)
8 W. Benjamin, Arcades Project.
9 W. Benjamin, Arcades Project.
10 W. Benjamin, Arcades Project.
11 S. Weber, Ibid, p.262.
12 This is not Benjamin's concept. I use this term because I believe it offers a concept in relation to architecture in its material and constructive senses. It also approaches the writing and thinking of theauthor.
13 S. Weber, ibid, p. 53.
14 S. Giedion, Building in France, Building in Iron, Building in Ferroconcrete, p. 103,trans. J. Duncan Berry, The Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, Santa Monica, 1995.
15 Attempt to develop Giedion's thesis. He writes: "In the nineteenth century, construction plays the role of the subconscious." Wouldn't it be better to say: the role of the bodily process, around which, then, the "artistic"architectures gather like dreams around the framework of the physiological process?[K 1a, 7]
16 W. Benjamin, Arcades Project.