The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought)
Susan Buck-Morss
Language: English
Pages: 505
ISBN: 0262521644
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Walter Benjamin's magnum opus was a book he did not live to write. In The Dialectics of Seeing, Susan Buck-Morss offers an inventive reconstruction of the Passagen Werk, or Arcades Project, as it might have taken form. Working with Benjamin's vast files of citations and commentary which contain a myriad of historical details from the dawn of consumer culture, Buck-Morss makes visible the conceptual structure that gives these fragments philosophical coherence. She uses images throughout the book to demonstrate that Benjamin took the debris of mass culture seriously as the source of philosophical truth. The Paris Arcades that so fascinated Benjamin (as they did the Surrealists whose "materialist metaphysics" he admired) were the prototype, the 19th century "ur-form" of the modern shopping mall. Benjamin's dialectics of seeing demonstrate how to read these consumer dream houses and so many other material objects of the time -- from air balloons to women's fashions, from Baudelaire's poetry to Grandville's cartoons -- as anticipations of social utopia and, simultaneously, as clues for a radical political critique. Buck-Morss plots Benjamin's intellectual orientation on axes running east and west, north and south -- Moscow Paris, Berlin-Naples -- and shows how such thinking in coordinates can explain his understanding of "dialectics at a standstill." She argues for the continuing relevance of Benjamin's insights but then allows a set of "afterimages" to have the last word.
of production that it has itself set into motion. The idea of [Nietzsche's] Zarathustra of eternal recurrence and the motto embroidered on pillow covers—"Just a quarter hour more"—are complementary.174 Benjamin notes similarly that the "phantasmagoria" of Baudelaire's rêve parisian "reminds one of the world expositions in which the bourgeoisie calls out to the order of property and production: 'Stay awhile. You are so lovely! [Verweile doch, du bist so schön].'"115 The culture of the nineteenth
Benjamin, letter to Scholem 13 J u n e 1924, Briefe, vol. 1, p . 347. It was in this letter that Benjamin first mentioned meeting Lacis (not yet by name). 50. See letter, Benjamin to Scholem, 22 December 1924, Briefe, vol. 1, p . 355. 51. Letter, Benjamin to Scholem, 22 December 1924, Briefe, vol. 1, p. 368. 63. I V , p . 146. 64. Witte calls it "one of the most significant works of the German language avant-garde literature of the twenties" (Bernd Witte, Walter Benjamin [Reinbek bei Hamburg:
compulsively, like the ivory ball, into the red or black slot": Does he not transform the arcades into a Casino, a gambling hall where he places the red, blue, and yellow chips of emotion on women, on a face that appears suddenly—will it return his gaze?—on a silent mouth—will it speak to him? That which looks out at the gambler from every number on the green cloth—happiness—here winks to him out of every woman's body, as the chimera of sexuality: as his type. 146 Sin 140 As p a r t of the " m
cond e m n e d as a n offense to public morals when it a p p e a r ed in 1857, manifested a radically new aesthetic sensibility t h a t drew its breath from the " d e c a d e n t " sense experience of the m o d e r n city. At the s a m e time, these poems were concerned with the p r e m o d e r n . Christian p r o b l e m of sin a n d evil, expressed in an allegorical form t h a t h a d been out of literary fashion since the time of the B a r o q u e . W h i l e the new aesthetic sensibility
compels us to search for images of sociohistorical reality that are the key to unlocking the meaning of his commentary—just as that commentary is the key to their significance. But in the process, our attention has been redirected: Benjamin has surreptitiously left the spotlight, which now shines brightly on the sociohistorical phenomena themselves. Moreover (and this is the mark of his pedagogical success), he allows us the experience of feeling that we are discovering the political meaning of