The arcades put things together in a different configuration, and out of this comes a radically new set of architectural and urban forms. It's not hard to see the appeal of this for Benjamin, as a description of his own method. The Arcades Project occupied him for much of the last decade of his life. Many of his published essays, such as the Baudelaire piece, grew out of it. The project itself was unfinished, and strictly unfinishable. He was reputedly carrying the thousand-odd pages of it on his person when he tried to cross the border to Spain on the last day of his life. He drafted and rearranged the filing systems for it several times, and kept on accumulating materials, including thousands upon thousands of citations: it makes up about a sixth of Benjamin's entire assembled output, and it's in nothing like final or even cogent draft form. It's a fascinating and intractable ruin, passages in both senses: in part, the dream of a book made up entirely of the words of others, one which would offer itself as a sort of arcade allowing new accesses to and juxtapositions of these:
the philosopher as flâneur.
| The very form of the thing is inseparable from its argument: it is an example of what it talks about. What Benjamin is making in the Arcades Project and in the "Theses", as just about everywhere else, is also, necessarily and irreducibly, a theory about reading: about how and where and under what conditions meaning arises in the fortuitous interconnections of things. Like Serres and Musil, it's a writing from inside the boiler. And like them, it's a writing which doesn't just take reading and writing as metaphors for the historical or the political, or vice versa, but as intimately bound to the very possibility of those. |
