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Marvellous
T.J. Clark
THE ARCADES PROJECT
by Walter Benjamin, translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin Mclaughlin.
Harvard, 1073 pp., £2 4.95,3 December 1999,0 6740 4326 x
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sposesd sayofthestraidustght-jaaway cket, tthat,he Englonceish
language edition does a fine job with this
vast Convolute J,
insights simply crop up elsewhere. Even the
on Baudelaire, at which
the reader heaves a sigh of anticipatory re
lief, opens with a great dust-heap of duti
ful quotations from requisite authorities,
before Benjamin plucks up the courage to
recognise 'the literature' - the endless mix
ture of pseudo-biography and moralisiDg
for what it is. ByJS9 (that is, over a hundred
pages later) he is flying. Then for page
after page the aphorisms come with the hiss
and flash of The Gay Scimet (and Nietzsche
himself becomes more and more a grey pre
sence in the text, pursuing Baudelaire down
a hall of mirrors). Even the dutiful quotat
ions improve. The half-dozen copied out
from de Maistre are breathtaking.
Part of the point of reading The Arcades
Project, then, is being prepared to lose one's
way. I do not think reviewers should set up
too many signposts, or pretend that other
readers will not fmd quicker ways through
the maze. All readers of Benjamin will have
moments when they think they have got it at
last We gloat and gape and chafe at the bit,
but then we think we see what the charl
atan is up to - he is showing his hand at
last He can say what he means if he wants
to - so why shouldn't we?
In the beginning, I believe, in the late
1920S, a simple and beautiful idea animated
the book. It is not one many of us would
entertain now. Over the generations, so Ben
jamin thought, bourgeois society is slowly
waking up - waking to the reality of its
own productive powers, and maybe, if help
ed along by its wild child, the proletariat,
to the use of those powers to foster a new
collective life. And always, however stertor
ous and philistine the previous century's
slumber may have been, it was dreaming
most deeply of that future life, and throw
ing up premonitions and travesties of it
Once upon a time, what we call 'education'
consisted essentially in interpreting dreams
like these - telling the children about trad
ition, or the coming of the Messiah, or simply
having them learn and recite the tales of
the tribe. In the bright classroom of the 20th
century, this could not happen; and so the
peculiar discipline called 'history' had to
take over the task. It would tell us what the
bourgeoisie once dreamed of, and interpret
its dreams - poetically, tendentiously - in
the hope that when we dead awakened,
we would know what to do with the tools
(the 'information') our slaves had forged
for us.
HERE, you might wonder, does
J
ning. I take it that most (not all) of the
huge Convolute was done from 1934 on
wards. How, if at all, the decision to make
a separate book about Baudelaire affected
the arrangement of the folios is something
scholars have fallen out about These mat
ters are not entirely esoteric, because any
reader will sense that something happened
to the book about Paris as the 1930S dragged
on. It is not just Baudelaire who gets in
everywhere; there is Marx, and the fetish
ism of commodities, and socialism and class.
Reading the dossiers begun, or largely flesh
ed out, in these later years involves con
stantly wondering where the new material
(and the new theory) is going, and whether
Benjamin himself really knew. The pro
spectus of 1935 is beautiful, plausible; but
going back to the convolutes that ought by
rights to put flesh on the bones of the new
argument, you begin to feel that whole sect
ions of the prospectus were more window
dressing than promissory note.
This is depressing. And anyway we should
be grateful for what we got Maybe the best
way of approaching the question of what
became of The Arcades Project is simply to
take the Baudelaire Convolute for what it is,
and ask why it got so large - why it took
over. The centre of gravity at the very begin
ning of the notecards, as you would expect
if some of them date from the first cam-
paign in the late 1920S, is Baudelaire as a
character, an actual inhabitant of the ter
rible dream world of arcade and interior.
'His voice is . . . muffled like the night-time
rumble of carriages filtering into bedrooms
upholstered with plush': one can imagine
Benjamin's excitement at coming across this
in Maurice Bar[(�s. There are good mom
ents, but essentially the convolutes are on
a false trail here. They are fitting the poet
too literally into a frame.It takes many, many
folios before the collage of quotations begins
to secrete a genuine sequence of thought
At last Benjamin appears to realise that his
subject ought to be 'Baudelaire' as a pro
duction in Baudelaire's poetIy - as a pec
uliar kind of hero with no interior life.
Claudel once argued that Baudelaire's true
subject was remorse, this being 'the only
inner experience left to people of the 19th
century' - a verdict that is too Catholic
for Benjamin, and too optimistic. 'Remorse
in Baudelaire is merely a souvenir, like re
pentance, virtue, hope, and even anguish,
which . . relinquished its place to morne
incuriositl. '
Allegory, therefore, is Baudelaire's form,
because only allegory can enact the final
disappearance of'experience' in the Second
Empire and its replacement by glum in
difference, stupefied brooding, fixation on
the endless outsides of things. 'Pascal avait
son gouffre, avec lui se mouvant /- Helas!
tout est abime, -action, desir, reve, /Parole!'
'The allegorical experience was primary for
Baudelaire': his actual, everyday apprehens
ion of his surroundings was as a flow of
enigmatic fragments . Quite abruptly, as I
said before, the quotations in the Convolute
become less random and respectful, and start
to take on a horrifYing momentum - hit
after hit of petrifaction, freezing laughter
and useless, galvanised gaping. 'Baroque
allegory sees the corpse only from the out
side; Baudelaire evokes it from within.'
This train of imagery begins at last to
interact with the reading Benjamin was
doing at the same time in Marx and Karl
Korsch. In particular, Benjamin begins to
grasp the point (for him) of a central pro
position in Capital: that under the rule of
markets and commodity production, men
and women increasingly come to see their
existence as formed -that is, animated, sub
stantiated - by the things they produce. 'The
participants in capitalist production, ' to
quote Marx in characteristic vein, 'live in a be
witched world and their own relationships
appear to them as properties of things.' So
the Baudelaire question becomes the follow
ing: how could it possibly have happened
that something as null and repulsive as the
life of the commodity in the 19th century
-the life it provided consumers, but above
all its life, its unstoppable, loathsome viv
acity - gave birth to poetry? To a poetry
we cannot stop reading, and which seems
to speak to generation after generation of
the real meaning of the New? How did the
commodity take on form, and attain a meas
ure of (cackling, pseudo-satanic) aesthet
ic dignity? (A comparable question for us
would be asked of the 'digital', or the
image of information. But they await their
poets. )
The answer to the question, roughly, is
that it did so in Baudelaire by means of a re
treat to allegory. Allegory is the commod-
ity's death's head. 'The allegories stand for
what the commodity makes of the experi
ences people have in this century.'
W
o jamin's project be attempted for
the 20th century, by some stoic ex
patriate in Los Angeles or Hong Kong twenty
years or so from now? Are there pieces of
the gone city which one day a writer will
teach us to fall in love with again? Maybe.
Maybe the great cinemas of the 1930S and
1940s, a few of which, if we are lucky, will
resist the logic of the multiplex. (Going to
the Castro on a Saturday night, sitting in the
audience 1400 strong, laughing and gasp
ingat Giida and RtarWindow- that's my image
ofcollective dreaming.) Maybe we shall muse
over old 1V sets and airport lounges, techno
pop museums, 'parking structures', Holo
caustMemorials and dog-eared copies ofjaws
or Tht StIjish Gmt. And everywhere we shall
stumble over the Star Trek consoles ofaban
doned Pes. Perhaps only these will have the
proper whiffof pseudo-utopia about them.
And Benjamin's Paris? Not much is left
ofit. The reading room of the Bibliotheque
Nationa/e, where Benjamin thought he could
hear the leaves of the summer trees in the
great murals rustling in time to the turning
of pages, is empty, waiting for the state's
next bright idea. When last I peered into
it from the entry booth I felt like Robert
Lowell outside the Old South Boston Aquar
ium - 'Its broken windows are boarded
the airy tanks are dry. ' The arcades them
selves still fight, quixotically, to keep the
spectacle at bay. The beautiful Passage vero
Dodat, where new Daumiers once flutter
ed in the office window of La Caricature, is
now a short cut on the way from the plastic
Pyramide du Louvre to the putrid Forum
des Halles. Cock an ear at either entrance
and you can hear the funeral music. There
are one or two less tragic passages across
from the reading room itself, to which one
can imagine Benjamin adjourning in the
late afternoon after the plod through Capital.
They are inevitably a bit overpainted and
boutique-ifiedj but on a dreary Wednesday
in February, with piles of cardboard boxes
spilling styrofoam, and shopkeepers stand
ing at their doors looking despairing but
contemptuous of custom (looking Paris
ian, in other words), you get a sense ofhow
things might have been. Go there, and I
guarantee you will forget the Internet. The
past will wink at you, and a future worth
having will cross your mind. 0
London Review of Books
VOLU M E 22 N U M B E R 12 2 2 J U N E 2000 £2.75 US A N D C A N A D A $ 3 . 9 5