The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project

Abstract

As is well known Walter Benjamin devoted his unfinished magnum opus to arcades, the covered shopping galleries that emerged in the mid 19th century, as the central image revealing the economic, socio-political, and cultural features of that era. From Benjamin’s point of view these were the direct material embodiment of self-consciousness, or rather, of an unconscious society fascinated by the capitalist spectacle unfolding before its eyes. Arcades reflect all the errors and shortcomings of bourgeois consciousness — commodity fetishism, reification, taking the world as a “thing in itself”, they reflect its utopian fantasies (fashion, prostitution, and gambling). In addition, they represented the first truly international style of modern architecture that became a commonplace for a whole generation of metropolitan residents the world over. By the end of the 19th century, arcades had become an integral element of any «modern» metropolis, and were imitated from Cleveland to Istanbul, from Glasgow to Johannesburg, from Buenos Aires to Melbourne. And, as Benjamin well knew, they could be found in each of the cities that had become vectors of his intellectual compass: Naples, Moscow, Paris and Berlin, setting points of intersection between vectors leading from west to east and from south to north. If the first vector indicates the movement of historical progress in terms of the realization of social and technological potential, the second evaluates history retrospectively, seeing in it mainly the ruins of an unrealized past.