![]() ![]() It shared many properties with Benjamin’s system, with private codes that signified potential connections between the documents. ![]() But the structure of the arcades project continues to inspire me.Ībout two decades after Benjamin’s death, the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann began managing his research and reading notes using a technique that now goes by the name zettelkasten. Since then, Benjamin’s actual arguments have grown more mysterious to me the older I get, the less I seem to understand him. If I’d ever gotten around to writing my dissertation, the arcades would have played a central role in it. (Harvard University Press eventually published it in 1999.) I spent weeks retracing Benjamin’s steps through the Paris arcades-the few that remain-trying to discern myself some of the strange enchantment he saw in them. The entire collection-more than a thousand pages long-had been published in German, but the English translation was still years away. When I was in grad school in the early 90s, the passagenwerk was a kind of mythical white whale for literary theory types. The passagenwerk had been his central intellectual focus for more than a decade: “the theater of all my struggles and all my ideas,” as he once described it. He died, tragically, in 1940, committing suicide in Spain during an ill-fated attempt to escape occupied France. Whether Benjamin ultimately intended the project to coalesce into a linear book remains unclear. Benjamin also bundled them into a series of thematic clusters-he called them “convolutes”-addressing a wide range of topics: fashion, iron construction, panoramas, boredom, prostitution, gambling. Many of the fragments were encoded with a private system of 32 colored shapes, denoting thematic connections between the ideas. It was entirely built out of interlinked fragments: quotes from poets or old tour guides or sociological essays, interspersed with Benjamin’s own gnomic aphorisms. The passagenwerk was a kind of intellectual labyrinth-a cross between a commonplace book of quotations and a surrealist poem. Because its initial inspiration was the Parisian passages or arcades, the early prototypes of modern shopping malls, Benjamin’s project came to be called the passagenwerk -usually translated as the "arcades project" in English. ![]() In the late 1920s, the German philosopher and cultural historian Walter Benjamin began collecting notes for a project about nineteenth-century Paris and the historical imagination. ![]()
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