Walter Benjamin described the Arcades Project as “the theatre of all my struggles and all my ideas” in a letter to Gershom Scholem, and insisted repeatedly that it was more important than his own life.
In 1933, Walter Benjamin fled Nazi Germany for Paris, leaving his hometown of Berlin for the last time. Since his student days, he had been committed to the anti-dictatorship movement, writing literary criticism and analyzing the devastating effects of war in the early 20th century. He attempted communism in Moscow and collaborated with other Marxists, including playwright Bertolt Brecht—one of his closest friends—to plan a leftist magazine. The Institute for Social Research of the Frankfurt School was established in 1923 to disseminate Marxist studies, which would become one of Benjamin's most important connections (and sources of income), largely guiding the development of the Arcades Project.
Benjamin began the Arcades Project in 1927, a document that recorded the lifestyle of the flâneur in 19th-century Paris shopping arcades.
Benjamin initially thought the Arcades Project would be a 50-page text, likening it to the “prince’s kiss,” an illuminating article about the nature of capitalism in modern life that would “wake” readers from the “illusion” they lived in—a dreamlike state obscured by the allure of consumer culture and the new possibilities associated with commodities that could satisfy the deepest desires of individuals, alienated labor. The Arcades Project developed under the eternal “painted sky of summer” for 13 years, the shimmering ceiling of the library, as Benjamin continued to collect an increasing number of notes on urban life from 19th-century philosophers, novelists, and critics. This was meant to be his magnum opus; in a state of exile, Benjamin felt lonely and frustrated, describing the prospect of completing the article as “the real, if not the only reason not to give up on the struggle for existence.”
In the course of his research, in addition to his own observations and notes, he also excerpted quotes from these writers and thinkers, categorizing them into files (konvoluts) that reflected the cultural structure of the era. Many fragments in the konvoluts are vivid and striking, evoking the life scenes of 19th-century Paris. Benjamin captured these loosely shifting images and placed them alongside his now-famous maxims. These images evoke both memories and critique, conjuring a reality that is obscured and deeply rooted by materialism. On the other hand, discussions about the “theory of knowledge, theory of progress” traced the methodology of the entire project. “Say something about the method of composition itself,” he wrote hastily and vaguely, “how everything one is thinking at a specific moment in time must at all costs be incorporated into the project then at hand.”
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the Arcades Project is that it is not, and never was, a book, or even a single entity that could be called a “text.” It is essentially a card catalog; a fragmented database. Benjamin was fascinated by the unattended and seemingly useless: in his card catalog, he quoted excerpts, descriptions, and observations from writers who lived, wandered, and wrote about 19th-century Paris, creating a catalog of a complete civilization, “using its rubbish as materials rather than its artworks.” His ultimate goal in revising the catalog was to remove everything he had written, allowing the excerpts to speak for themselves, believing this was the best way to tell history.
The feeling of holding the book is also strange; it was first published in English by Harvard University Press in 1999. It weighs almost five pounds. Benjamin's editors described this massive, endless work as “oppressive,” but its inclusiveness perhaps better reflects the essence of urban life: a collection that is both random and orderly, built on ever-changing soil and taste. He wrote: “This common world has to be built from utterly heterogeneous parts that will never make a whole,” he wrote, “but at best a fragile, revisable, and diverse composite material.”
Benjamin's devoted followers have greatly emphasized the fact that he could not complete the Arcades Project after his death, wondering what the completed Arcades Project would have looked like. The text is frozen in a moment of time. Susan Buck-Morss, one of the most prominent scholars studying Benjamin and one of the first to truly sift through all his materials, responded that he left us “everything essential”—that “lamentations over the work’s incompleteness are irrelevant.” Benjamin rewrote the outline and preface dozens of times, turning it into an unwieldy tome, each time with slight modifications. From the beginning, the text has been in motion; it was born to move. There is no such thing as a complete Arcades Project.
Walter Benjamin wrote and edited the text that would later become the Arcades Project based on a Paris that no longer exists. The arcades were the physical spaces where 19th-century consumer culture was born—shopping centers that appeared in the form of street markets, narrow and winding, accommodating various transactions: cafés, repair shops, brothels, salons, restaurants, boutiques, theaters, and casinos. Some were designed for the very wealthy; others replicated the street economy for the very poor, who no longer had to fear the oncoming carriages. Benjamin marveled at these “interior boulevards, glass roofs,” where people could now be under a sky filled with sunshine or stars without enduring the wind and rain: “An arcade is a city, a world in miniature.”
In the mid-19th century, Prefect of the Seine Georges-Eugène Haussmann changed the face of the city. The arcades were replaced by soulless boulevards, designed for large carriages and crowd control, hostile to the flâneur or urban wanderer; in light of this, the consumer culture represented by the arcades seemed uniquely human, a bottom-up historical expression.
Benjamin fundamentally opposed any linear narrative of history, such as development or progress. He wrote in his Theses on the Concept of History: “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” By the time he began writing, the Paris arcades had long passed their prime. Perhaps that is the problem. These pieced-together fragments provide us with a way to read history through temporal folds; they create a “dialectical image,” or a moment of insight that allows history to become recognizable in the present. For example, fashion is one of the core ways Benjamin explores the dialectical image of this collapsing era: style is the most ephemeral of all markers, forced into “eternal return” by mass production and exploitative labor, forever providing modernity.
As Benjamin wrote, this state of being immersed in the ruins of history, as a way of “extending the past into the present,” has political significance: it is a way of placing oneself under the spell of materiality and experiencing history amid all its contradictions, rather than attempting to negate it through the historical determinism advocated by Benjamin’s contemporaries. Benjamin wrote that we need to “rescue” history with a “firm, seemingly brutal grasp,” twisting history with our bodies to see reality; those who have read his work today might think the same.
Reading history through the lens of contemporary consumer culture may not seem as radical as it did at the time, but when writing in the 1930s, Benjamin sought to identify perspectives that had almost no explicit academic study at the time; Thorstein Veblen wrote The Theory of the Leisure Class at the turn of the century, but there were few critical works studying this emerging culture of consumerism. Benjamin was both shocked and fascinated by the mass production of culture, reading literary works created through labor. He saw himself as part of the information age, perhaps earlier than most of his contemporaries.
Benjamin believed that modern life itself is an illusion, a dreamland produced by capitalism; to restore our consciousness from this state requires some jolt. He quoted Marx in the Arcades Project, writing: “The reform of consciousness consists solely in … the awakening of the world from its dream about itself.” Benjamin considered himself a Marxist, and his contributions to Marxist literature and critiques of modern capitalism are unparalleled; but the most useful aspect of Benjamin’s view of this dreamlike existence is that this interpretation does not infantilize the enchanted dreamers and consumers, as some Marxist critiques do. For Benjamin, the meaning of “awake” or “enlightened” is less about the moment of awakening than the moment when the dream state of the past intersects with the awakened state of the present. This is the moment when meaning spontaneously arises, when reality is illuminated—forever only in the now. Knowledge and meaning do not rely on a structural historical event (revolution), but emerge continuously.
Though not explicitly mentioned, the Arcades Project was created under the shadow of the 1937 Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne. While the exposition attempted to showcase progress and capitalist consumer culture, Benjamin’s project of collecting and displaying his research sought to complicate the understanding of commodities. Unlike leftists of his time, Benjamin was deeply influenced by Jewish mysticism, forming a more contradictory aesthetic and literary style than his colleagues. He believed that the “allure” of the consumer resonated with them.
Benjamin's aversion to the “whole” and his love for the “fragment” largely determined his attitude toward history and urban life; this seemed to allow him to see the allure of the commodity itself as a poetic object, rather than merely a lifeless component of a larger, more threatening system. Benjamin invoked objects as if they were almost sentient beings, frequently contemplating their existence; he believed they could not simply be dismissed as a symptom of capitalism, as one day we all might be liberated from capitalism like his comrades. To him, the commodities circulating in capital flow were almost enchanting, even magical. At the very least, they were worthy of special attention, as they represented something significant about exchange and value while accommodating the labor that created them. Commodities established passionate relationships with individuals as customers or potential customers. “If there were such a thing as a commodity-soul,” Benjamin wrote, “it would be the most empathetic ever encountered in the realm of souls, for it would be bound to see every individual as a buyer in whose hand and house it wants to nestle.”
Theodor Adorno largely funded Benjamin's project and served as its editor, worried that Benjamin was straying from traditional Marxist theory. He believed Benjamin's obsession and near-worship of commodities was a defense mechanism of Stockholm syndrome, “protecting yourself from the feared object with a kind of inverse taboo.” The “feared object” he referred to was the commodity, but perhaps Benjamin opposed this interpretation because it also involved the individual's mobility in Paris, participating in the circulation of commercial goods, essentially becoming the commodity itself. Placing individuals participating in modern capitalism under a “taboo” would be a form of defeatism that Benjamin was not interested in; his concept of the “dialectical image” shows us another, perhaps more valuable way to understand the reality of modern consumers.
Dialectical reading can understand and navigate seemingly contradictory thoughts in a roundabout way; with it, Benjamin provides us with two images of our reality. The image of the dream to be “awakened” and revealed is that of the flâneur participating in the arcade economy of commodities and advertisements. But there is always an image of desire, in fact, the flâneur still represents a certain aesthetic, an appreciation for the details of the urban environment, a focus on a life of leisure and beauty. This dialectic provides us with a useful way to interpret our reality as modern network consumers: not only as commodified parts of a process but also as observers and absorbers through the pleasure of wandering. Similarly, he believed that the audience or readers as a consumer group had revolutionary potential: he believed that reading this “literary montage” would prompt readers to generate their own commentary, just as film audiences derive meaning and stories from a series of images. Thus, the text is not only a lesson in history but also a lesson in how to read history: from the bottom up, from the ruins.
Adorno was overwhelmed by the Arcades Project; he accused Benjamin of striking his readers with a lack of authorial “mediation.” But that is precisely the point: the Arcades Project is not a critical analysis but a record of the capitalist experience. Benjamin commented: “Commentary on a reality calls for a method completely different from that required by commentary on a text.” This modernist and capitalist dream reality cannot be captured by theory or a unified, direct narrator. Benjamin's unique ability to frustrate and confuse Marxists makes him particularly suited for the internet age; his cinematic montage technique, a strong democratic ideal, is part of Benjamin's better prophecy for the digital age. His project does not need to inject theory, for the facts are their own theory; modern images, art, and commodities themselves are ideas.
Online life is an immersive capitalist experience, softened into a comfortable, pleasant dream—Benjamin attempted to replicate this experience in his text to reflect the experience of the arcades themselves. Responding to the reality of capitalism in the way Benjamin called for is not to resist this totalitarianism but to escape it in some way. He insisted that there is something almost human in commodities, which panicked his Marxist partners the most, but perhaps this was also his most urgent argument: he insisted that commodities must be redeemed and viewed as akin to humans because modern humans are a kind of commodity.
Benjamin positioned the flâneur as the central figure of the Arcades Project, as both a product and a driver of these dreamlike commercial centers. **Baudelaire first explored the flâneur in his poem about modernity, Les Fleurs du Mal, a figure who strolls through the city, reporting on modern life. **Unlike the truly modern person, who walks with purpose, the flâneur is fundamentally nostalgic, always looking back at the city around him that has long since passed away; as Christopher Butler wrote in Early Modernism, his goal is to “extract the eternal from the transitory.” Benjamin's flâneur is the lens through which he distorts the past into the present.
The flâneur always deliberately presents himself as leisurely and idle (notoriously walking so slowly that he could stroll with a turtle in the arcades), but he often is not the dandy he pretends to be: more likely, he is a “reporter,” writing articles for the pamphlets and tabloids that were just beginning to gain popularity, often quite poor. But the impression that he is wandering in the arcades, willing to spend money, is meant to persuade others to see what he sees, forcing them to consider buying what he might not be able to afford. The rise of the flâneur's status in society coincided with the beginning of mass cultural production: tabloids, classified ads; his wandering is part of the process of consumption or influencing consumers.
This flâneur is one of the early “influencers” of 19th-century Paris, as much a product as the goods he promotes. Benjamin wrote: “He takes the concept of being-for-sale itself for a walk, just as the department store is his last haunt, so his last incarnation is as sandwichman.” Standing on the street corner, with two wooden boards draped over his shoulders, the sandwichman, like the flâneur, despite class differences, is humanity's advertisement: creating culture, desire, and consumption practices through highly self-aware self-presentation and self-ideals. He wrote, “Empathy with the commodity is fundamentally empathy with exchange value itself; the flâneur is the virtuoso of this empathy.” Only by resonating with commodities can individuals truly understand and appreciate the labor that produced them—and the labor that “sells” them: the flâneur, the buyer, the “influencer,” and the sandwichman. The reason the flâneur empathizes with commodities is that he knows he is a commodity too.
Within the glass interiors of the arcades, objects are transformed into commodities, and thus the flâneur is transformed into a consumer, while also being a product of the consumer. Leisure becomes economic labor. The internet, like the arcades, feels like “a city, a world in miniature”; it feels like every interaction involves a transfer of capital. Social media creates its own flânerie, where our internet roles are defined by the products and ideas we consume, or expressed as the selves we consume. Life on social media is like an endless shopping mall tour, showcasing our tastes while observing others’ tastes. Like the flâneur, we are only valuable in visibility. The “cyberflâneur” refers to those who wander online, utilizing the image of leisure to create “use value,” generating what Baudelaire called “the cult of oneself.”
Online, just as in the arcades, the boundaries between products and experiences, professions and personalities become blurred, and we all resemble merchants selling leisure products: by publicly displaying our consumption, we are transforming what reddit users call “slack” into economic output. Technically, slack is the natural blend of leisure and work: by definition, the two are inseparable. The online “slacker” embodies the simultaneous production and consumption.
As I grew up, during exam periods, my mother always told me that I should strictly delineate my work and leisure time. The more I rested during study time, the longer my study time would be; if I focused on completing my work, I would have more time to play. Perhaps because my studies never involved the endless resources the internet provides, this work always had an endpoint; that pile of books would eventually thin out. But the work I do now is different; I now “research” and write articles about social media and “online life,” so I am required to use social media and “online life.” This magazine is a growing document that records the various thoughts and knowledge we continuously generate while idling online, also documenting our realization that everything we do is closely related to our state of online life. Contributing thoughts and ideas for it requires me to be proficient at the crossroads, sidewalks, highways, and back alleys of the internet, observing the mundane like a flâneur, anxiously waiting for the “knowledge” Benjamin spoke of to appear in “flashes.”
In Beyond the Blogosphere: Information and its Children, Aaron Barlow and Robert Leston define the Arcades Project's catalog as a precursor to the internet, as both are fragmented, incomplete, and built on discontinuities. Both have their own “scrapbooks” that record realities and experiences, essentially “a vast social club providing a private room for any traits individuals might exhibit,” or more simply, “a more convenient shopping center.” They also note that the Arcades Project has a “single controlling mind” behind it, which the internet lacks. Benjamin did not intend to insert his own direct analysis, which differs in this version of the text, as part of the final catalog: he described his intention that the project is a pure “montage” of different voices from different eras. Benjamin was reluctant to impose a prescriptive narrative on readers about what they were consuming, making it easy to imagine he would appreciate the essentially democratic, spontaneous, and organic nature of internet use.
This book attempts to “dissolve” a mythologized view of history—Benjamin warned that this view could and is being effectively used as a tool of fascist oppression—and resist historicization by “flooding it with its own debris.” However, the flood of the Arcades Project is also a very carefully marked and organized system. The labeling system Benjamin used is similar to what we use on websites today: each fragment is categorized under a main category, or its konvolut, often with one or more other konvolut names added to the end of the fragment as a guide for where else the fragment can and should be read. The book encourages flânerie as the most vibrant, democratic, and unregulated non-linear practice of the city—and the internet itself. The Arcades Project is very suitable for reading in the digital age, where consumerism and the behavior of “cyberflânerie,” this wandering online, are very prevalent. In reading the Arcades Project, we must fully see our time as an extension of Benjamin's time while distorting it into our present form; we imagine the Arcades Project as his Tumblr, envisioning his extensive footnotes as hyperlinks and geotags. The catalog of modernity changes just like our online lives.
We can imagine what Benjamin's blog would look like if he lived in our time; the Tumblr tag “arcades-project” illustrates this: like the text itself, this page is a collection of quotes and images, some from Benjamin and some from his sources, pieced together to form a mosaic of these strange capitalist children. “Researching Benjamin” is a WordPress site that initially focused on a paper about the Arcades Project in the context of the digital age, attempting to do justice to the cautious and unconventional archiving methods adopted by Benjamin's catalog. It uses internal linking in the same way Benjamin's thematic tags do—similar content appears under multiple headings, breaking traditional categorization.
A similar blog, Arcades Awakening, attempts to provide readers with an experience closer to what the site creator believes Benjamin offered his readers. The author of the site writes in the introduction, “I very much want to capture the essence of his thought, but reading the linearity of the Arcades Project on paper makes it difficult to clarify his ideas, as ultimately these thoughts are modular—more like a constellation than a simple chain.” This site also encourages a roundabout reading approach, focusing on Benjamin's detailed catalog system, with each page displaying either a fragment or just fragments under a specific tag.
These attempts to recreate the Arcades Project online seem to understand that the key to reading this book is understanding how history is narrated, and thus an understanding of power. The internet fulfills the task Benjamin set for readers he never saw in his lifetime: to disrupt official or hegemonic narratives, making their current material manifestation—a pile of pages printed and bound by Harvard University Press—seem somewhat odd.
The Arcades Project aims to capture all the contradictions of intense emotional and psychological experiences in metropolitan life: it explores both the commodification of the metropolis and the city as a place of liberation. In the arcades, just like in the city, everything is defined by alienated labor. But like the city, the arcades also provide a space to escape this sense of alienation, as well as the most intense and enchanting human experiences Benjamin could imagine. Online life is the urban life of the 21st century: all intimacy or online friendships are generated on the basis of transactions, and we are always aware of our “exchange value.”
Benjamin was always somewhat skeptical of empathy, as it is an inherent aspect of fantasy—but when he infused his interpretation of exchange value with his thoughts on magic and allure, he opposed the view that humans have no real value beyond their exchange value as commodities. What Benjamin called “empathy with exchange value” may turn into empathy for other human commodities on the internet for us. Every interaction takes place at a point of contradiction; it becomes dialectical, between commodification and humanization. Strangely, the commodified interactions brought about by our online lives are democratic: in acknowledging ourselves as commodities, we can also acknowledge other commodities as humans—thus, online life, like the metropolis Benjamin described, is not only isolating but also includes some complete connections and humanization.
Benjamin's flâneur embodies, to some extent, both an attachment—a sense of attachment to physical space, to history, to crowds—and a sense of observation at a distance. He is the most obsessed with recording human details, thus most aware of the human traces left in the urban environment. Benjamin evokes impressions of rooftops and street corners, crowded with fingerprints of people, so that ordinary objects create a private space in public. The crowded alleys are filled with people who have both purchasing power and leisure time, making them both familiar and strange, in a space between intimacy and anonymity, a crowded Paris emerges, “a landscape built of sheer life.”
The internet, like the consumer society Benjamin attempted to describe, is the source of our suffocation and liberation. We turn online life into our most intimate inner world, immersing ourselves in this anonymous space where we can be in our most private state, as we are completely visible in the crowd. The dangerous space is the only space we can truly trust; we expose ourselves by selling ourselves, accompanied by an inevitable thrill and uncomfortable comfort. Benjamin's unique fondness for this commodity is inseparable from the fact that it fundamentally obscures the truly terrifying aspects of production and economic interaction. Materialism is appealing to him because it always dances on the edge of danger, on the brink of what Adorno openly called fascism.
Adorno's response to this new modern capitalist totalitarianism was to call for Marxists to accumulate and disseminate their knowledge and theory; Benjamin's task was to explore the new sensations that followed. In experiencing the materialism and modernity represented by the arcades, he lacked irony and emotional distance—he welcomed the engulfment brought by the new consumer culture. His emphasis on knowledge makes this book, as well as the arcades themselves, a record of experience rather than a system.
Political theorist Jane Bennett analyzes commodity culture in her intriguing study The Enchantment of Modern Life. Bennett counters Adorno's despair over the culture industry by emphasizing the perceptual power of objects; objects are intricately linked to our physical experiences and realities. The power of capitalism does not necessarily “exist in people’s minds,” as Adorno and Horkheimer wrote, but, according to Bennett, “in bodily sites of potentially critical thought: the eyes that widen, the stomach that roils, the skin that galvanizes and registers ‘the relentless rush of facts.’” Bennett's question is not whether it exists in the commercial world, but how it exists; with enchantment comes active potential.
In the arcades, this materiality seems inseparable from the experience of wandering, intertwined with the experience of encountering urban history in the flash of the moment. Benjamin's belief in “commodity fetishism,” rather than a false consciousness, is an insight into historical and emotional realities; he seems to ask, if our fusion with commodified Parisian commercial exchanges is our truth, how can we understand the essence of those relationships on the most personal scale?
Greil Marcus, in introducing another of Walter Benjamin's essays on urban experience, points out that in the 1920s, “the trend was toward something that had yet to be called totalitarianism, embracing fragments… affirming their truth and beauty, as an instinctive (if not always political or aesthetic) resistance.” Marcus believes that Stalin, Hitler, and Adorno's “faceless totalitarianism of capitalism posed an argument to life: the whole explains the fragments… Benjamin countered that the fragments reveal the whole—like a small mammal running beneath the feet of a dinosaur, escaping it.”
The most significant difference between Benjamin and Adorno is that he offers some magic, laughter, or joy; just as now, in the arcades and online, this playfulness seems to transform the complete engulfing experience of consumer culture, fundamentally, into a human experience. Perhaps because of the resistance to a coded understanding of our online lives, we are, to some extent, participating in a resistance to self-coding. Benjamin suggests that rather than waiting for a revolution, we should create meaning from our relationship with objects and consumer culture in the ever-changing “now.” Contrary to the feeling of online life, space may be left for our spontaneous, impulsive reactions to our surroundings, in those “enchanting” moments of our commodified reality. Perhaps, in a sense, placing ourselves in our environment, engaging with the daily encounters of capitalism, and recognizing the allure of capitalism will ultimately free up space in our lives.