Why all the interest in a treatise on shopping in nineteenth-century France?
...
In the films of Leni Riefenstahl as well as in newsreels exhibited in every theater in the land, the German masses were offered images of themselves as their leaders called upon them to be. Fascism used the power of the art of the past—what Benjamin calls auratic art—plus the multiplying power of the new postauratic media, cinema above all, to create its new fascist citizens. For ordinary Germans, the only identity on show, the one that looked back at them from the screen, was a fascist identity in fascist costume and fascist postures of domination or obedience.
...
The key concept that Benjamin invents (though his diary hints it was in fact the brainchild of the bookseller and publisher Adrienne Monnier) to describe what happens to the work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility (principally the age of the camera—Benjamin has little to say about printing) is loss of aura. Until roughly the middle of the nineteenth century, he says, an intersubjective relationship of a kind survived between an artwork and its viewer: the viewer looked and the artwork, so to speak, looked back. “To perceive the aura of a phenomenon [means] to invest it with the capacity to look at us in turn.” There is thus something magical about aura, derived from ancient links, now waning, between art and religious ritual. Benjamin first speaks of aura in his “Little History of Photography” (1931), where he tries to explain why it is that (in his eyes) the very earliest portrait photographs—the incunabula of photography, so to speak—have aura, whereas photographs of a generation later have lost it.
...
“History decomposes into images, not into narratives,” he wrote. Narrative history imposes causality and motivation from the outside; things should be given a chance to speak for themselves.
...
What was recovered after the war from its hiding place in the Bibliothèque Nationale amounted to some nine hundred pages of extracts, mainly from nineteenth-century writers but from contemporaries of Benjamin’s as well, grouped under headings, with interspersed commentary, plus a variety of plans and synopses.
...
The history of the Arcades Project, a history of procrastination and false starts, of wanderings in archival labyrinths in a quest for exhaustiveness all too typical of the collecting temperament, of shifting theoretical ground, of criticism too readily acted on, and generally speaking of Benjamin not knowing his own mind, means that the book we are left with is radically incomplete: incompletely conceived and hardly written in any conventional sense. Tiedemann compares it to the building materials of a house. In the hypothetical completed house these materials would be held together by Benjamin’s thought. We possess much of that thought in the form of Benjamin’s interpolations, but cannot always see how the thought fits or encompasses the materials.
...
The great innovation of the Arcades Project would be its form. It would work on the principle of montage, juxtaposing textual fragments from past and present in the expectation that they would strike sparks from and illuminate each other. Thus, for instance, if item 2,1 of Convolute L, referring to the opening of an art museum at the palace of Versailles in 1837, is read in conjunction with item 2,4 of Convolute A, which traces the development of arcades into department stores, then ideally the analogy “museum is to department store as artwork is to commodity” will flash into the reader’s mind. //parallels to my hopes for hypertext//
...
The dreams of the capitalist era are embodied in commodities. In their ensemble these constitute a phantasmagoria, constantly changing shape according to the tides of fashion, and offered to crowds of enchanted worshippers as the embodiment of their deepest desires. The phantasmagoria always hides its origins (which lie in alienated labor). Phantasmagoria in Benjamin is thus a little like ideology in Marx—a tissue of public lies sustained by the power of capital—but it is more like Freudian dreamwork operating at a collective, social level.
“I needn’t say anything. Merely show,” says Benjamin; and elsewhere: “Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars.” If the mosaic of quotations is built up correctly, a pattern should emerge, a pattern that is more than the sum of its parts but cannot exist independently of them: this is the essence of the new form of historical-materialist writing that Benjamin believed himself to be practicing.
...
The objects and figures that inhabit the arcades—gamblers, whores, mirrors, dust, wax figures, mechanical dolls—are (to Benjamin) emblems, and their interactions generate meanings, allegorical meanings that do not need the intrusion of theory. Along the same lines, fragments of text taken from the past and placed in the charged field of the historical present are capable of behaving much as the elements of a Surrealist image do, interacting spontaneously to give off political energy.
...
what does The Arcades Project have to offer? The briefest of lists would include: a treasure hoard of curious information about Paris; a multitude of thought-provoking quotations, the harvest of an acute and idiosyncratic mind trawling through thousands of books; succinct observations, polished to a high aphoristic sheen, on a range of Benjamin’s favorite subjects (example: “Prostitution can lay claim to being considered ‘work’ the moment work becomes prostitution”); and glimpses of Benjamin toying with a new way of seeing himself: as collector of “keywords in a secret dictionary,” compiler of a “magic encyclopedia.” Suddenly Benjamin, esoteric reader of an allegorical city, seems close to his contemporary Jorge Luis Borges, fabulist of a rewritten universe.
From a distance, Benjamin’s magnum opus is curiously reminiscent of another great ruin of twentieth-century literature, Ezra Pound’s Cantos. Both works are the issue of years of jackdaw reading. Both are built out of fragments and quotations, and adhere to the high-modernist aesthetics of image and montage. Both have economic ambitions and economists as presiding figures (Marx in one case, Gesell and Douglas in the other). Both authors have investments in antiquarian bodies of knowledge whose relevance to their own times they overestimate. Neither knows when to stop. And both were in the end consumed by the monster of fascism, Benjamin tragically, Pound shamefully.
...
What was Walter Benjamin: A philosopher? A critic? A historian? A mere “writer”? The best answer is perhaps Hannah Arendt’s: he was one of “the unclassifiable ones…whose work neither fits the existing order nor introduces a new genre.”
His trademark approach—coming at a subject not straight on but at an angle, moving stepwise from one perfectly formulated summation to the next—is as instantly recognizable as it is inimitable, depending on sharpness of intellect, learning lightly worn, and a prose style which, once he had given up thinking of himself as Professor Doctor Benjamin, became a marvel of accuracy and concision. Underlying his project of getting at the truth of our times is an ideal he found expressed in Goethe: to set out the facts in such a way that the facts will be their own theory. The Arcades book, whatever our verdict on it—ruin, failure, impossible project—suggests a new way of writing about a civilization, using its rubbish as materials rather than its artworks: history from below rather than from above.