NOAH ISENBERG
257
his first "Expose," from an
Illustrated Guide to Paris,
" . ..
[they are] a
city, a world in miniature." The project ultimately became Benjamin's
chief preoccupation, and even when working on other texts (e.g., on his
childhood memoirs,
A Berlin Childhood Around
1900,
his pieces on
Baudelaire and Kafka, or his "Work of Art" essay) there was frequently
a palpable connection to the arcades. Already in 1930, in a letter to Ger–
shorn Scholem, he called the project "the theater of all my struggles and
all my ideas." As such, in its fragmentary and incomplete form (as it was
purportedly hidden away in the Bibliotheque Nationale during the final
years of the war), the work is a type of reservoir of his ideas.
It
gives few
clues of consistency or chronology, and even fewer of the exact course
of development. But it does give the ideas en masse, scattered among the
passages that perhaps, in the end, constitute Benjamin's
chef d'oeuvre.
Named in the separate title headings of the thirty-six "Convolutes"
are the main figures, motifs, and ideas that circulate within Benjamin's
project. Beginning with "Arcades,
Magasins de Nouveautes,
Sales
Clerks" and continuing with "Exhibitions, Advertising, Grandville"
through "Anthropological Materialism, History of Sects," the work cov–
ers a vast amount of ground. Certain figures, such as Fourier, Marx, and
Daumier, have "Convolutes" of their own; a central "Convolute" dedi–
cated to Baudelaire-almost an autonomous work--comprises over one–
fifth of the entire manuscript. The sections themselves are made up of
citations, epigraphs, critical commentaries, aphorisms, and
bons mots,
stacked up on top of each other (originally on note cards and bundled
sheets of paper) in sometimes illuminating and other times baffling com–
binations. Needless to say, it is not your average scholarly study-Ben–
jamin's work defied scholarly models at least since his failed
Habilitationsschrift,
or postdoctoral thesis,
The Origin of German
Tragic Drama,
written in the mid-1920s-and it is not meant for read–
ing in any sort of sequential order. (It should perhaps come as little sur–
prise that, together with its publicity materials, Harvard University Press
included "A Suggested Reader's Guide to Tackling
The Arcades Pro–
ject.")
As art historian T.
J.
Clark has recently remarked, "This is a book
for moving about in, lightly and irresponsibly and, above all, fast."
In
an early passage from
A Berlin Childhood Around
1900,
Benjamin
formulates a statement that might be applied equally well to his
Arcades
Project:
"Not to find one's way about in a city is of little interest. But to
lose one's way in a city, as one loses one's way in a forest, requires prac–
tice." Readers of the
Arcades Project
will encounter, at various stages, a
kind of losing oneself in the thick labyrinthine passages of the text.
In
many respects, Benjamin's cherished figure of the
f!imeur,
adopted from
