Between the Registers: The Allegory of Space in Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project

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If anything in the world of literature, of text, may be rightly characterized as a Thing, it is surely Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project. Not a history, not a treatise; not even strictly a sourcebook, for it also delivers Benjamin's comments, not a work of criticism, in its utter disjointedness, not even, properly, a work. The Arcades Project may well be described as a Thing that confronts us in its arbitrariness, its Geworfenheit, its Thrownness, ¹ its irreducible and irrefutable materiality. Its aggressive repudiation of any prior known or recognized genre qualifies it to be the literary counterpart of an exile. The Arcades Project is an uncanny simulacrum, like the dollhouse in Edward Albee's Tiny Alice, or like the backup file that my computer, autonomous of my volition, will create of this essay as I compose it, a simulacrum of action taking place simultaneously to its call into Being, in real time, in virtuality. Over the same thirteen years during which Benjamin's life advances toward its seemingly inevitable annihilation, a life that proceeds by the systematic withdrawal of the socioeconomic and even material underpinnings that made it possible, The Arcades Project comes to occupy a space and set of logical, generic, disciplinary representational conditions making it manifestly impossible. The phenomenon of Benjamin and the composition of The Arcades Project, whatever it might be, are inseparable. Although Benjamin's progressive loss, to whatever degree of his own connivance, of everything he ever valued, can only have been excruciating, his textual double, The Arcades Project, emerges into Being and persists solely on the ground of an impossible set of assertions. In their utter impossibility, an intransigence endowing cultural history and criticism and thinking itself with an unprecedented dynamic and flow, resides the only positivity that can be said to have emerged from Benjamin's tortured existential trajectory.

The Arcades Project is a Thing, one of those bizarre and even humorous composites, like the hat that Charles Bovary is fated to wear into his new classroom at the outset of the novel named after his spouse who is so imprudent in her collusion with her drives, or like Franz Kafka's Odradek. ² The Arcades Project is utterly anomalous. It arises to fill an impossible task, the reconfiguration of nineteenth-century Paris and the experience of living in it under the aura of the epistemological, cultural, and, yes, political formations that arose in its aftermath. It may well be easier for us to acknowledge this dream of imaginative reconstitution when an author of fiction, perhaps of magical realism, assigns it to a character—as when Jorge Luis Borges has his consummate scholar of the peninsular Golden Age, Pierre Menard, compose several strategic passages of Don Quixote ³ without having read the novel—than it is for us to imagine the act of the textual reconstitution of Paris during the Second Empire that was achieved by an actual scholar, Walter Benjamin. The Arcades Project assembles an incompatible array of materials, whose composite effect is to completely disqualify one another. Benjamin, in a strategy reminiscent of Marshall McLuhan's memorable analysis of the first page of the New York Times, ⁴ not only places historical first-hand accounts of the developments and events from the period of his interest, literary improvisations on the same motifs, popular documents, such as brochures and handbills, and historical, sociological, and critical retrospections of a much later provenance, directly alongside each other. He also makes sure to cite witnesses and analysts whose attitudes toward the unfolding developments could not be more antithetical. As we shall see, one of Benjamin's most cunning strategies in composing The Arcades is the subsequent disclosure of the political ramifications of works and assertions initially cited in a milieu of purported neutrality, "repressive tolerance," or "historical objectivity." Charles Fourier and Grandville, ⁵ introduced in the early convolutes as endearing, spacey...