Reservations of the

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
, H E RE ARE THE ALPS,' Basil Bunt­

T ing is supposed to have scribbled

on his copy of the Cantos. 'What
is there to say about them?' Mainly this, in
the brief poem that follows:

They don't make sense. Fatal glaciers, crags

cranks climb,
jumbled boulder and weed, pasture and
boulder, scree ...

It takes some getting used to. There are the

Alps,
foolsl Sit down and wait for them to crumblel

Well, yes, I guess I shall end up scribbling

much the same thing. I do think that Ben­
jamin's Arcades Project- over a thousand pages
of it in this first English-language edition
- is some kind of prose Communist Cantos
to set beside the verse Fascist one we have.
And the comparison immediately suggests
the problem. Even Bunting is scribbling to
keep his spirits up. Admiring the Cantos is
one thing, reading them another. There will
never be a shortage of cranks climbing the
crags, using the latest featherlite interpret­
ative equipment, but will there be strollers?
Will people enjoy themselves? At this altit­
ude will they learn anything?
If the answer in Benjamin's case is yes, as
I believe it is, it can only come with heavy
qualiftcations. For what we have in The Ar­
cades Project is the wreckage of a book that
did not get written. Hitler, exile, poverty,
despondency, the fall of France, fear, flight
and suicide got in the way. And maybe the
project itself careered out of control before
the final disaster. Any reader will develop
opinions on that subject well in adv�ce of
page 1073.
Benjamin came to Paris for much the
same reasons as other artists and intellect­
uals in the early 20th century, and adopted
much the same way of life. He was in love
with modem French literature, and out of love
with his native academy. He wanted to drift
and burrow in a city that seemed 'more like
home' to him than Berlin - the phrase crops
up in a letter from 19I3 - but at the same
time deeply strange, deeply alien. Mostly he
would pass the day in libraries or read fever­
ishly in his room far into the night - The
Arcades Project is testimony to his being in­
curably un rat de bibliotheque - but he savour­
ed Paris also because the traces of the recent
past were still so thick on the ground there.
Paris was up-to-date and old-fashioned, with
the two conditions coexisting street by street
or shop by shop: you could take a detour
through the 1860s each morning on your
way to work.
 Imn 1927,
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language edition does a fine job with this

atus is helpful, and properly spare.

have done without the memoir of Benjam­
I
wild, often intractable material. Its appar­
could

in's flight and death at the end of the book,

but this is because I believe we should read
Tht Arcades Project as mourning for bourgeois
society, not as a long premonition of the
war and the camps. (I grant the two are inter­
twined.) I am not qualified, putting it mild­
ly, to pass judgment on the translation from
the German, but I have the impression it
is careful, and often it is eloquent When
it comes to the hundreds of citations in
French (the original German edition kept
them as they were) things are somewhat
more patchy. Poetry in particular gives the
editors trouble. The point of Barthelemy's
weird poem on 'Steam' - yes, another one
- is that the railroad is a leveller of class dis­
tinctions here and now, not in some chthonic
hereafter. Hugo's 'Plus de mot senateur!
Plus de mot roturier!' does not mean 'No
more words, Senator! Commoner, no more!'
There are other problems; but what else
would one expect in a book of this size and
eccentricity? By and large, the edition is a
heroic achievement
Do not think, by the way, that the editors'
rough indications of what each convolute
contains - the dossiers themselves were
labelled simply with letters of the alphabet
(44 in all, from A to Z and then from lower­
case a to r) - will necessarily point you to
where Benjamin is at his best on a given
subject If you want to know why the arc­
ades mattered so much to him, do not get
stuck in Convolute A, the official repos­
itory, too full of lumpy information, but
go straight to Convolute C ('Ancient Paris,
Catacombs, Demolitions, Decline of Paris')
or Convolute D (,Boredom, Eternal Return')
or Convolute L ('Dream House, Museum,
Spa'). The folder on Fashion is disappoint­
ing (maybe suitably repetitive), 'The Streets
of Paris' horribly thin, 'Prostitution, Gamb­
ling' a dumping ground for anecdotes, most­
ly arch and obvious. Benjamin has brilliant
things to say about all these subjects. His

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

W such a history start? What are its

objects? Where did the sleep of the
bourgeoisie take place? In many odd parts
of the city, Benjamin thought, but above all
in the arcades. The 19th century had been
extraordinarily rich, almost prodigal, in its
production of 'dream houses of the collect­
ive'; at one point Benjamin draws up a list
of 'winter gardens, panoramas, factories,
wax museums, casinos, railway stations',
and one could easily add to this from oth­
er sections of the book: the Crystal Palace
(ground zero of the bourgeois imagination),
the Eiffel Tower, the unearthly reading rooms
done by Henri Labrouste for the Biblio­
theque Nationale and Bibliotheque Sainte­
Genevieve, maybe Hector Guimard's Metro
entrances, certainly the lostGalerie des Mach­
ines. But the arcades are central for him,
because he senses that only in them are
the true silliness and sublimity of the new
(old) society expressed to the full. The arc­
ades are thoroughgoing failures and abiding
triumphs. They were old-fashioned almost
as soon as they declared themselves the lat­
est thing. Their use of iron and glass was
premature, naive, a mixture of the pompous
and fantastic. They were stuffY, dingy and
monotonous; dead dioramas; perspectives
itou.ffles; phantasmagoria of the dull, the
flat and the cluttered. 'The light that fell from
above, through the panes .. was dirty and
sad.' 'Only here,' De Chirico said, 'is it poss­
ible to paint. The streets have such gradat­
ions of grey.' They were always 'close' (to
recall a word that seemed to dominate my
childhood), there was sure to be thunder
by the end of the afternoon. Drizzle was
their natural element. They did not keep out
the rain so much as allow the splenetic con­
sumer to wallow in rain publicly, his breath
condensing drearily on the one-way glass.
(In this climate glass roofs could never be
kept clean.) 'Nothing is more characteristic
than that precisely this most intimate and
most mysterious affair, the working of the
weather on humans, should have become
the theme of their emptiest chatter. Noth­
ing bores the ordinary man more than the
cosmos.' Rain was the guarantee of bore­
dom, thank God, since it meant that one
could not 'go out'. The arcades allowed a
whole century to be housebound and at
loose ends in the company of strangers.
They were waiting rooms, caves containing
fossils of the primitive consumer, mirror
worlds in which out-of-date gadgets ex­
changed winks, front rooms on endless
Sunday afternoons with dust motes circul­
ating in the half-light Odilon Redon was
their painter - his very name sounded like a
ringlet on a cheap wig in the back of the
shop. They were waxworks of the New. Arcs
de Triomphe (commemorating victories in
the class struggle).
 For all these reasons they were wonder­
ful. They were a dream and a travesty of
dreaming - in the golden age of capital, all
worthwhile utopias were both at the same
time. Or perhaps we should say that they
were pieces of nonsense architecture, in
which the city negated and celebrated its
new potential, rather in the way that those
other distinctive 19th-century creations, non­
sense verse and nonsense novels (Alice or
Edward Lear or Grandville's Un Autre Monde),
negated and exalted mind, logic, innoc­
ence and naivety. What the arcades released,
above all, was the possibility - a botched
and absurd possibility, but for all that in­
toxicating -of a city turned inside out 'Some­
thing sacral, a vestige of the nave, still at­
taches to this row of commodities.' 'The
d omestic interior moves outside, ' but even
more, the street, the exterior, becomes the
place where we live - where we linger all
day on a permanent, generalised threshold
between public and private spheres, 'neith­
er on the inside nor truly in the open', in
a space belonging to everyone and no one.
We linger, we drift, we fantasise. 'Exist­
ence in these spaces flows without ac­
cent like the events in dreams. Flanerie is
the rhythm of this slumber. ' The proper
inhabitant of the arcade is the stroller. For
only the stroller is wordless and thought­
less enough to become the means by which
the arcades dream their d ream - of intim­
acy, equality, homelessness, return to a deep
prehistory. 'For the flaneur, every street is
precipitous. It leads downward - into a past
that can be all the more spellbinding be­
cause it is not private, not his own. '
What I have done in the previous two
paragraphs, you will realise, is sew together
clues, images and half-embedded arguments
which are scattered through many dispar­
ate convolutes in The Arcades Project itsel£
Benjamin meant them to be scattered . One
of the things that d efeated the project, it
seems to me, was his wish for a style of
argument which would be as jam-packed
and thing-like as its objects of study. (And
as boring. He revered the principle of bore­
dom at work in Proust ) Sol am doing viol­
ence in my summary to what Benjamin had
to say, or how he thought he had to say
it But not, I hope, to the bare logic of the
imagery, which is strong and consistent -
and urgent, for all its Through the Looking­
Glass tricks.
The arcades were a vision of the city
as one great threshold, between public and
private, outside and inside, past and pre­
sent, stultifying d reariness (the reign of the
commodity) and final Dionysian rout (Paris
as fun house, Paris as Commune, Paris as
diorama burning down). Of course in the
early 20th century this vision had become
old-fashioned. 'We have grown very poor in
threshold experiences. ' The arcades were
irremediably in decline, victims of the cult
of fresh air and exercise, streets with a care
for pedestrians (it was only when tarmac re­
placed cobblestones that loungers in cafes
could hear themselves speak), electric light
and vice squads with a sense of mission
as opposed to a taste for the on-the-spot
deal. Dickens, we could say, gives way to
Kafka. Benjamin naturall y hated this tum of
events. Bourgeois society would only be­
come bearable, he believed, if ithad the cour­
age to be stuffY, overcrowded, bored, and
erotic again - to sleep, to d ream, to see its
own tawdriness and absurdity, and there­
fore to wake to its inftnite power.

Just as the sleeper - in this respect like

the madman - sets out on the macrocosmic
journey through his own body, and the noises
and feelings of his insides, such as blood
pressure, intestinal churn, heartbeat and
muscle sensation (which for the waking and
salubrious individual converge in a steady surge
of health) generate, in the sleeper's extra­
vagantly heightened inner awareness, illus­
ion or dream imagery which translates and
accounts for them, so likewise for the dream­
ing collective, which, through the arcades,
communes with its own insides. We must fol­
low in its wake ['we' means historians and
revolutionaries here] so as to expound the
19th century - in fashion and advertising, in
buildings and politics - as the outcome of its
dream visions.

We are still essentially in 1928-29. What I

have been d escribing is The Arcades Project,
not 'Paris, Capital of the 19th Century' (One
book never gives way d efinitively to the other,
but there are differences, as we shall see.)
Mixed up in the flISt conception of the pro­
ject is the even stranger and more difficult
idea that part of recovering the dream of
the 19th century will involve seeing in its
bright apparatus of modernity the tracell -
the bubbling to the surface, as in a tar pit
full of mastodon bones - of a deep past,
an UrJJlSchichtt. Why so? Because the first
heroic stages of industrial capitalism had
been a moment in which Nature itself had
reared its ugly, beautiful head again, as man­
kind's eternal opponent. 'Capitalism was
a natural phenomenon' - this is early in
Convolute K - 'with which a new d ream­
filled sleep came over Europe and, through
it, a reactivation of mythic forces.' (The stress
here should be on 'natural' . ) 'The alluring
and threatening face of primal history is
clearly manifest in the beginnings of tech­
nology.' A genuine awakening, then, will
involve retrieving this first horror and d e­
light at the machine. The locomotive and the
dinosaur are one. Iron bridges lead to the
Lower Cretaceous. The arcades are aquaria,
but the tanks have only coelacanths in them.
Benjamin knew that in sketching such
an account of bourgeois experience he was
as much execrating what historians do as
imitating it The monster called 'cultural
history' is on several occasions squarely
in his sights. He hated the idea of historic­
al empathy, if by that was meant a fitting
of oneself into the past like a hand into a
glove, and the attendant fantasy that what
one was feeling was how it must have felt
to be truly back then, before the future hap­
pened . The other side of the coin of em-
p athy was always, he reckoned, a surreptit­
ious (unthought-out) Idea of Progress or,
just as bad, of Decline - the two assumpt­
ions, or some grisly hybrid of both, shaping
what counted as evidence and what couId
be cast aside as trivia or garbage. 'To the
Dustbin of History' was Benjamin' s strange
d evice.
Therefore he thought very hard, and wrote
very clearly (considering the difficulty of the
issues), about what might be meant by a
dialectical approach to the past It was a
matter of finding a way between the Scylla
of empiricism ('History always flashing its
Scotland Yard credentials' , a lovely phrase
he borrowed from Ernst Bloch) and the
Charybdis of total immersion. But equally,
he wanted an approach that went beyond
!!Ie lumpen choice usually on offer in hist­
orical studies between positivism and relat­
ivism. 'Each age gets the history it deserves
or fantasises' - you know the argument
And of course our return to the past is inter­
ested and partial, and in a sense we make
the past we desire. Benjamin's project could
hardly be more up front about that But
why do we desire this past specifically? That
is the interesting question. Who is to say
that it isn' t the past itself that has fashioned
our desire for it: that we do not go back to
these objects in particular (these arcades, this
moment in 1830, these poems by Baude­
laire) because the d reams they express were
always waiting for us to d ream them proper­
ly, in a state of wakefulness? In our avid
Now, a long-ago Then fully becomes itself.
'The illusion overcome here is that an earlier
time is in the Now. In truth: the Now is the
inmost image' - one could almost say, the
cunning facsimile -'of what has been.' 'His­
torical understanding is to be grasped, in
principle, as an afterlife of that which is to
be understood. ' Only the sunniest of relativ­
ists believe they have 'constructed' the Then
on their own terms.
 One way of characterising Benjamin's
thoughts about past and present is to call
them theological -in the sense that he can
never escape (nor does he want to) from the
notion of a past destined to complete it­
self in a future, to awaken, to become fully
present in a flash of lightning-knowledge.
History exists to be redeemed. Granted. But
this is theftamework. It seems to me a grot­
esque misreading of Benjamin, at least in
The Arcades Project, to call him a theologic­
al thinker at heart, if by this is meant (as
it usually is these days) not a Marxist think­
er, not a historian, not a dialectical mater­
ialist. 'My thinking, ' he says in Convolute N,
'is related to theology as blotting pad is re­
lated to ink. It is saturated with it. Were one
to go by the blotter, however, nothing of
what is written would remain. ' Lately we have
had the blotter till we are blue in the face.
That is because the writing - the actual
crazy revolutionary edifice - is so full of
bad words and unvarnished partisanship.
Convolute a, which the editors call 'Social
Movement' but which is really a chronicle of
poverty, exploitation and working-class de­
spair, will never be a preferred object of the
Benjamin cult.
Behind Benjamin's vision of time un­
folding lies his reading of Proust as much
as of the Pentateuch. At one point in the
'Dream House' convolute, he copies out the
great passage from Swann's Way, beginning
just before the scene with the madeleine,
as if to remind himself where his notion
of history was rooted . 'The past is hidden
somewhere outside the realm, beyond the
reach, of intellect [or of empathy], in some
material object . which we do not sus­
pect ' And a lot of the fascination of The
Arcades Project, especially for those of us who
have tried to study the 19th century on dif­
ferent terms, is in seeing what happens in
practice as a result of such a conception of
history. If historical writing is a continual
dialectical warfare between past and pre­
sent - a continual shaping and forcing of
the configuration of the past so as to re­
lease from it the meanings it always had
but never d ared state out loud, the mean­
ings that permeated it as an unbreathable
atmosphere or a shameful secret - then
what entities and images will come first?
Those in which an epoch most d eeply lives
its contradictory nature is the answer. And
'lives' here means freezes as much as mob­
ilises, expresses as well as garbles, hyper­
trophies as much as trivialises. Wherever the
historian senses contrad iction truly throt­
tling an object or a practice, he or she can
intervene.
Intervening is one word for it; collecting
would be another. For Benjamin would cer­
tainly rather have his book be a collection of
19th-century artefacts than a 'study' - of
'The Bourgeois Experience', say. What he
thinks he is building - he says this explicit­
ly in Convolute H - is an alarm clock to
rouse the kitsch of the previous century,
and have it gather in a great uprising of the
overlooked. Collecting is perhaps another
word for aflegorising here. And that leads
to the other main topic of The Arcades Project:
the poet Baudelaire.
THE QUESTION is whether Baude­
laire existed from the very begin­
ning in Benjamin's mind as a second
centre of gravity in the book he was plan­

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.'

Around the middle of the century, the con­

ditions of artistic production underwent a
change. This change consisted in the fact that
for the first time the form of the commodity
imposed itself decisively on the work of art,
and the fonn of the masses on its public. Part­
icularly vulnerable to these developments
was the lyric. It is the unique distinction ofILs
Flrurs du mal that Baudelaire responded to pre­
cisely these altered conditions with a book of
poems. It is the best example of heroic con­
duct to be found in his life.

But this on its own will not quite do

as diagnosis. As with the arcades and col­
lective dreaming, Baudelaire botches and
travesties the work he takes on. His vers­
ion of allegory is in many ways ludicrous
- deliberately strained, tendentious and
'shocking' More like a pastiche than the
real thing. (But is there a 'real thing' to al­
legory ? Do not all 'allegories become dat­
ed because it is part of their nature to shock'?)
In any case, an allegory of capitalism is ob­
liged to take the very form of the market -
novelty, stereotype, flash self-advertise­
ment, cheap repeatable motif - deep into
its bones. 'Baudelaire wanted to create a
poncif, a cliche. Lemaltre assures him that he
has succeeded.'
Finally, then, after what seems like long
wandering away from the world of the arc­
ades, we begin to see that Baudelaire, at
the level of syntax, diction and mode, be­
longs precisely there - breathing the mephit­
ic air, looking sullenly through the clouded
glass. 'It is the same with the human mat­
erial on the inside of the arcades as with the
materials of their construction. The pimps
are the iron uprights of this street and its
glass breakables are the whores.' 'No one
ever felt less at home in Paris than Baude­
laire. Ellery intimacy with things is alien to
the allegorical intention.' The arcades are
the epitome and generalisation of home­
lessness - the dream of a society with no
room of one's own to go back to.
 Does it need to be said that in contemp­
lating Baudelaire, Benjamin is contemplat­
ing (allegorising, idealising) himself? At
times the reflections on Baudelaire's loneli­
ness and impotence hardly pretend to be
verdicts on somebody else. And more and
more, as the notion emerges of a poetry
made out of stupefied fragments, frozen
constellations, advertisements, trademarks
and death rattles - a poetry of capital that
could truly take on the commodity's chat­
tering liveliness and lifelessness - it is the
convolutes themselves one sees, dancing
attendance on I.e Spleen de Paris.
I said previously that during the 1930S
Les Fleurs du mal kept company with Capital
in Benjamin's reading. This fact is, on the
whole, unwelcome to the Benjamin indus­
try, and their efforts to explain it away have
been strenuous. Rolf Tiedemann's essay,
'Dialectics ata Standstill', printed in the back
ofthe book here, is one locus classicus. This
makes it difficult to keep a sense of pro­
portion in reply ing. I think the fairest ver­
dict on Marxism as a mode of thought in
the Paris project is that it is pervasive, vital

* The quotations are from Benjamin's Charles

Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era ofHillh Capitalism.
 and superficial. More than once in the con­
volutes you come across Benjamin copying
out a hoary passage from Marxist script­
ure - the 'theological niceties' paragraph,
the sentences from the 1844 manuscripts
on the 'sense of having' - and then a few
pages (months, years?) later copying it out
again, like a slow learner kept in after school.
In each case, the passages are taken from
introductions or anthologies. Things get
more serious later - I shall come to that -
but even in the beginning the Shakespeare's
Holinshed rule applies. Benjamin learned
more about the logic of capitalism from a
skim of Hugo Fischer and Otto Ruhle than
most of us ever shall from months in the
Marx-Engels archive. Given the surround­
ing circumstances of Marxism in the 1930s,
the flimsiness of Benjamin's materialism
may even have been a positive asset It meant
that he never seems to have felt the ap­
peal of high Stalinism, nor even that of its
partner in the Dance of Death, the Frank­
furt School. 'Marxist method' never got
under his skin. Not for him a lifetime spent
like Adorno'S, building ever more elabor­
ate conceptual trenches to outflank the
Third International. One has the impression
Benjamin hardly knew where the enemy
within dialectical materialism had dug itself
in. He is Fabrice del Dongo at Marxism's
Waterloo.
But none of this means that his Marxism,
such as it was, did not feed and enliven the
project he had in hand. His reading grew
deeper as the decade wore on. Capital was
dreamed over, clearly for weeks on end.
Many of the quotations taken from the 1844
manuscripts are striking - it is hard to be
dull when choosing aphorisms from this
source - and the brief headings he gives his
fragments speak already to his sense of how
Marx might work for him. 'On the doctrine
of revolutions as innervations of the col­
lective', one of them reads. 'A derivation
of class hatred that draws on Hegel', says
another. The way is beginning to open to­
wards the searing flrst pages of the Baude­
laire book. 'When we read Baudelaire we are
given a course of historical lessons by bourg­
eois society. ' 'From the outset it seems more
promising to investigate his machinations
where he undoubtedly is at home - in the
enemy camp' (he means the bourgeoisie) .
'Baudelaire was a secret agent - an agent
of the secret discontent of his class with
its own rule. ,*
By the end of the 1930s, there is a real
convergence betweenMarx's understanding
of capitalism's key representational logic -
the logic of commodity exchange - and
Benjamin's sense not just of what Baude­
laire was doing, but of the £laneur, the auto­
maton, the photographer, the prostitute,
the feuillrtoniste. 'Abstract labour power' be­
comes his subject. That is, the conversion
of actual sweat-and-skill operations on the
body of Nature into items and quantities,
to be bid up or down. Forced equivalence of
the unequal. He sees the 19th century more
and more as a society with abstraction as its
doppelganger, haunting and deranging its
great panoply of inventions - 'whereby the
sensuous-concrete counts only as a pheno­
menal form of the abstract-general' What
the new Paris book aims to do, above all, is
to show this inversion actually happening.
'Actually happening' is the key.
For Benjamin is deeply dissatisfied with
the un-sensuousness of most Marxist de­
monstrations. 'Must the Marxist understand­
ing of his tory necessarily be acquired at the
expense of history's perceptibility? In
what way is it possible to conjoin a height­
ened vividness [Anschaulichkeit] to the realis­
ation of Marxist method?' Or again:
Marx lays bare the causal connection between
economy and culture. For us, what matters is
the thread of expression. It is not the econom­
ic origins of culture that will be presented, but
the expression of the economy in its culture.
At issue, in other words, is the attempt to
grasp an economic process as perceptible Ur­
phenomenon, from out of which proceed all
manifestations ofIife.
One way of saying this (which we have
heard repeatedly since Benjamin's death) is
that we need, as counterweight to the theory
of the commodity as a form of alienated
social relations, a parallel theory of its evoc­
ation of endless desire. A theory of con­
sumption, that is, as well as exchange. But
late Benjamin cannot really be enlisted in
this cause. His thinking in the 1930S is head­
ed not towards clean alternative theories
of the power of capitalism, but towards a
theory of the nesting of consumption in
exchange (that is, in the cruelty and force of
relations of production). 'It would be an
error to deduce the psychology of the bourg­
eoisie from the attitude of the consumer'
- this is towards the start of the dossier
on Marx. 'It is only the class of snobs that
adopts the consumer's standpoint' - for
'snobs' we could nowadays substitute' sym­
bol managers' and Post-Modern inteUect-
uals. 'The foundations for a psy chology of
the bourgeois class are much sooner to be
found in the following sentence from Marx,
which makes it possible, in particular, to
describe the influence which this class ex­
erts, as model and as customer, on art 'I
shall spare you the heavy sentence in quest­
ion, but it has to do with capitalism not just
as a whirl ofexchange value, butas a system
of appropriation and control of the labour
ofthe proletariat
This coming to consciousness of capital
as a form of specific domination over lab­
our is fundamental to Benjamin. It is the
great problem he is struggling with in the
last three years of his life. For, of course, it
puts his initial, wonderful idea ofthe 'dream­
ing collective' at risk. Which collective? is
now the question. Whose collective? At the
expense of who else's dream of commun­
ity? It is not that Benjamin was ever in two
minds about the arcades being a fantasy
of togetherness strictly on the bourgeoisie's
terms. But it was hard (the way through
Convolutes U, V and W is laborious, and
in a sense deeply obtuse) for him truly to
use his knowledge that the dream houses
were redoubts, armed camps with guns point­
ing in the direction of the Faubourg Saint­
Antoine. Only slowly do contrary dreamings
appear. Only slowly (against massive re­
sistance) does he come to see his own 1928
dreaming in the Passage Choiseul as not
just class-specific but actively on the side of
the commodity. You will have noticed, and
I hope shuddered at, the casual inclusion
of 'factories' in his initial list of Wonder­
lands. The verdict on Baudelaire as secret
agent in the enemy camp is again a verdict,
hard won, on himself.
 This does not lead him to the hairshirt
and the act of self-denunciation (it does not
turn him into a Stalinist), but rather, to
a sketch of a truly dark history of the work­
ing class, a history without consolation. The
clues to this are preliminary, but they con­
stitute one of The Arcades Project's most ter­
rifying legacies. 'It may be considered one
ofthe methodological objectives ofthis work,'
he writes in Convolute N, 'to demonstrate
a historical materialism which has annihil­
ated within itselfthe idea of progress. Just
here, historical materialism has every reas­
on to distinguish itself sharply from bourg­
eois habits of thought' Nothing could de­
monstrate the hold of those habits bet­
ter than the way the history of the urban
proletariat has usually been written - under
the sign ofredemption, with the Party or the
revolution or the socialisation of the means
of production as the Messiah who gives suf­
fering a meaning, a destiny. It is one in­
dication of how far Benjamin came in the
end from his theological origins that in the
appalling montage of working-class sad­
ness, nihilism and suicide he puts together
in Convolute a, truly no redeemer liveth. At
one moment in 1939, he extracted from the
Convolute an image of sharpshooters all
over Paris in 1830, on day two ofan uprising
already running into the sand, aiming their
guns at the clocks on the towers. In the con­
text he found for it in 1939, the 'Theses on
the Philosophy of History', the story takes
on a certain chiliastic glamour. I prefer the
tonality given it by the place it had origin­
ally, almost at the end of this relentless
dossier - we might call the whole forty or
soammipagesng intoMisthetrablclesock-where
sldreami Us
f a ce arethaefobulrmleofts
dream nspeak
g, fortosure;us from but Benjthe almiastncihasrcletheof
hell.
HIsialISly, andaIbook
ent NOT
hope tomybepraireadserever­
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T has none of th
ofoftheFasciBenjsm'amiflanvourliterature e 's ad hero of
whichhardmakesto stomach. th e
so much
Theised.bookSeveralis cranky,
tim es preposterous,
I f el t lik e fl diinsgiorgan­
nfiged,it
across t h e room. It le aves
asofcapithe buitalilsdm'insg-blinnerockslifeofshoulone di s sati s
a Marxid. Letst mehistory
getfinals lwrong.
y to some ofthe things it leaves out or talk
 One aim of The Arcades Project, at least in
its later stages, was to plot the relation
between the true (unconscious) collective
dreaming of the 19th century, encoded in
the constellation offorms, materials, novel­
ties, commodities, advertisements and liter­
ary detritus which Benjamin made his own,
and the conscious utopias of such as Saint­
Simon and Fourier. (Marx believed himself
to have surpassed such utopia-building, but
did he?) This cluster of issues never comes
into focus. Saint-Simonianism, which is the
epitome ofa kind of technocratic dreaming
of the future familiar to us digital scribes,
slips dully through Benjamin's fingers. Yet
the point at which socialism and machin­
olatry intersect is vital to an understanding
ofthe last two hundred years. Benjamin never
gets on terms with Saint-Simon, and even
his treatment of Fourier is ultimately too
picturesque, too much an item in a cabinet
of socialist curiositie8. Nor do I think his
notecards do much to clarifY the relation
of these forms ofdreaming to the one going
on in the Passage de l'Opera. And doesn't
the failure to do so - to show us even a
glimpse of how such a clarification might
be managed - point to the limits of Ben­
jamin's notion of history? For the 19th­
century 'collective' dreamed many ofits fut­
ures while it was wide awake. It dreamed
different futures, according to its changing
sense ofwhich collective (within the dream
totality of collectives) counted. And it acted
on its dreams; it acted them out
Benjamin would reply, if I understand
him, that these waking acts ofthe imaginat­
ion (these strange discourses, these rushes
to the barricade) were too flimsy and tech­
nical to lead us to the heart of things. But
were they? The Commune awaits a truly Ben­
jaminian treatment Fourier'S madness is
deeper than we know. There is a cryptic entry
in Convolute W, taking off from Marx's
1844 manuscrip�, in which revolutions are
described as 'an innelVation' - we could
almost say a coming to life - 'of the tech­
nical organs ofthe collective' , like 'the child
who learns to grasp by trying to get hold
of the moon' Reference is made to the
'cracking open of natural teleology' Both
are described as 'articles of my politics', as
if such a politics were being actively aired
and developed elsewhere. Maybe the book,
had it been written, would have faced these
questions head on. Maybe they would have
intertwined with the inconsolable history
of the proletariat sketched out in Convolute
a. Dream v. revolution, then. Collective v.
class. Utopia v. allegorical stifling and dis-
persal. One shivers at the presence of the
ghost of a further, wider dialectic in the
scattered notes. But making the ghost palp­
able would have meant throwing almost
everything back in the melting-pot.
Then we come to the question ofParisian
art, and beyond it Paris seeing. There is a
lovely phrase for the arcades in one of Ben­
jamin's first sketches - the city in a bottle' -
•

which he drops when he moves the sketch

into Convolute Q. The phrase was surely
not lacking in poetry, but maybe the poetry
was of the wrong kind. Benjamin wanted
his arcade windows always to be dusty, not
opening onto the outside world. Visual art
for him was confined to Grandville, Eifid,
Daguerre and Nadar, the panorama paint­
ers, Daumier (a separate convolute is begun
on him, but quickly peters out), Redon, the
Metro entrances. Manet is mentioned only
once in passing - striking in a projectwhere
Baudelaire is the main guide. Impression­
ism does not get a look inj Ingres barely
figuresj Seurat not at all. Benjamin's Paris
is all interior, all gaslit or twilit. It has
no true outside - no edges, no plnn air, no
Argenteuil or Robinson. No place, that is,
where Nature itself is put through the sieve
of exchange value, and laid on in the form
of daytrips and villeBiaturtsj and no answer­
ing dream of pure visibility and outward­
ness, or ofthe endless strangeness ofearth­
bound life. No D6euntr sur I'htrbe or Grande
Jatte.
 Paris for Benj amin is a city ofsigns, words
and gesticulations, not scenes and sights.
He is a flaneur not a tourist. Nowhere in
the convolutes is there an entty from Mur­
ray or Baedeker. I do not believe Benjamin
was deeply (meaning blankly) receptive to
the sheer look of things. He was at home
in the Passage des Panoramas, with the in­
door machinery of visualisation working
full tilt; one senses that ifhe had ever found
himself on Manet's Butte de Chaillot, or at
Caillebotte's great intersection of the rue
de Saint Petersbourg and rue de Turin, he
would not have allowed himself the true
frisson of loss of bearings and entty into
the realm of the eye. Agoraphobia was not
his thing. Somewhere he tells the story
of Mallarme crossing the Pont de l'Europe
every day and being 'gripped by the tempt­
ation to throw himself from the height of
the bridge onto the rails, under the trains,
so as finally to escape the mediocrity which
imprisoned him' But he does not build on
the anecdote, and he does not quite see its
point. Benjamin's Paris is not frightening
enough - not empty enough, disenchanted
enough. I do not think the Paris book is suf­
ficiently aware that its arcades were pathetic
enclaves of dreaming - reservations of
the marvellous - in a great desert of the
smart. Benjamin wanted the wonderful too
much.
One way of putting this (it has the air ofa
formula, but it gets matters clear) is to say
that Benjamin's Paris, you could say, is all
dream and no spectacle; the apparatus of
spectacle is not understood by him to in­
vade the dream life and hold unconscious
imagining in its grip. Not to recognise the
way the city was becoming a regime offalse
openness, even in the time of the arcades,
seems to me to miss something essential
about bourgeois society - something dread­
ful and spellbinding. If you leave out Mal-
larme swaying by the railings, you leave
out part of modernity's pain. Equally, if you
leave out the line of painting that runs from
Delacroix to Matisse (and Benjamin does,
essentially) you leave out too much ofwhat
made the pain endurable: meaning bourg­
eois hedonism, bourgeois positivism and
lucidity. This is not a matter of pitting high
art against photography and caricature, by
the way (of course we need histories of all
three), but of asking what this particul­
ar high art has to tell us about the culture
that spawned it 'Why was there no French
Idealism?' reads one of the notes Benjamin
made at the time of his 1935 prospectus.
There cannot be an image-answer (a dialect­
ical image-answer) to that question with­
out Monet and Cezanne. And the question
is vital. It connects with the further quest­
ion ofwhy the painting of Paris in the 19th
century still matters to the bourgeoisie so
much.
 ILL ANYTHING remotely like Ben-

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