"To great writers," Walter Benjamin once wrote, "finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they labor their entire lives." Conceived in Paris in 1927 and still in progress when Benjamin fled the Occupation in 1940, The Arcades Project(in German, Das Passagen-Werk) is a monumental ruin, meticulously constructed over the course of thirteen years--"the theater," as Benjamin called it, "of all my struggles and all my ideas."

Focusing on the arcades of nineteenth-century Paris-glass-roofed rows of shops that were early centers of consumerism--Benjamin presents a montage of quotations from, and reflections on, hundreds of published sources, arranging them in thirty-six categories with descriptive rubrics such as "Fashion," "Boredom," "Dream City," "Photography," "Catacombs," "Advertising," "Prostitution," "Baudelaire," and "Theory of Progress." His central preoccupation is what he calls the commodification of things--a process in which he locates the decisive shift to the modern age.

The Arcades Projectis Benjamin's effort to represent and to critique the bourgeois experience of nineteenth-century history, and, in so doing, to liberate the suppressed "true history" that underlay the ideological mask. In the bustling, cluttered arcades, street and interior merge and historical time is broken up into kaleidoscopic distractions and displays of ephemera. Here, at a distance from what is normally meant by "progress," Benjamin finds the lost time(s) embedded in the spaces of things.

Walter Benjamin's effort to unlock the mystery of industrial culture became his central mission, which he pursued by combing the streets of the Paris he loved--or, more exactly, by combing old books about these streets. The materials he culled from these books and his commentary on them constitute The Arcades Project, his masterpiece, which he worked on for 13 years...For students of urban life and industrial culture, The Arcades Projectis a gold mine of insights and apercus.

In addition to presenting a considerable intellectual challenge simply by virtue of its ambitious contents, Benjamin's project raises serious and varied questions of form…producing an effect that one finds difficult to label definitively analytic or aesthetic; the montage as Benjamin uses it is both at once: it produces knowledge, yet it does so through a mode of presentation that seems intrinsic to the knowledge produced. The Arcades Projectis a work that one not only reads or studies, one "experiences" it as well.

The Arcades Projectmust be among the most influential works of modern literature. Expansive and visionary, it reinvented pretty much every academic discipline by rejecting the autocratic storytelling of history in favor of elegant notes and vignettes which gather into a picture which seems to be endlessly modifying.

Benjamin was a vital member of what cultural and art historian Robert Hughes has called the 'modernist laboratory' of the early part of the 20th century, and, like Virginia Woolf or Paul Cezanne or any other modernist worth her salt, his masterwork presents its own form as worthy of as much interest as its content...Fragment or not, The Arcades Projectis a vast creative work that is one part realist novel, one part cultural anthropology, and one part social history and critique.

It is those who parody our world who help to unmask its craziness, and to offer pointers as to how what is might be otherwise…Benjamin indulges in this customary "brushing against the grain of history"…My aim in stressing this side of the book is simply to suggest how kaleidoscopic an object it is, offering the reader challenge of construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction, not once, but over and over again.

[This book is] the sort of work that will make a considerable dent in the academic landscape or at the very least lead to a new line of thematic inquiry and stream of responsive academic publications...[This edition] provides us with a wealth of material...It stands to be worked and reworked endlessly by its readers and this is why Eiland and McLaughlin's phenomenal work of labour should be recognized as a major contribution to the field of critical and cultural theory today.

Knowledge of The Arcades Projectis essential for a full comprehension of Benjamin's intentions and achievement in the 1930s--especially his highly original and influential attempt to define the idea of the modern.

[Readers can] enjoy the book's open-endedness and follow personal itineraries...As Harvard gradually publishes his collected works, Benjamin's strengths become evident.

It is a rare event when a book as long touted or as eagerly awaited actually lives up to these publishing clichés. But this is undeniably true in the case of this translation of Walter Benjamin's Das Passagen-Werk [The Arcades Project], originally issued in 1982...Anglophone readers can finally begin to take true measure of Benjamin's place in 20th-century thought and literature.

"[The Arcades Project] suggests a new way of writing about a civilization using its rubbish as materials rather than its artworks: history from below rather than above. And [Benjamin's] call elsewhere for a history centered on the sufferings of the vanquished, rather than on the achievements of the victors, is prophetic of the way in which history writing has begun to think of itself in our lifetime..."What does The Arcades Projecthave to offer? The briefest of lists would include: a treasure hoard of curious information about Paris, a multitude of thought-provoking questions, the harvest of an acute and idiosyncratic mind's trawl through thousands of books, succinct observations, polished to a high aphoristic sheen, on a range of subjects...and glimpses of Benjamin toying with a new way of seeing himself: as a compiler of a 'magic encyclopedia'...[A] magnificent opus."

At last, we can glimpse Benjamin's avowed masterpiece, The Arcades Project, and pay homage to this strange, vulnerable man, for whom letters and thought and books were everything. It was thirteen years in the making, and scribbled beneath the 'painted sky of summer'--the huge ceiling mural of Paris' Bibliothand#232;que Nationale...Benjamin claimed The Arcades Projectwas 'the theater of all my struggles and all my ideas.' This struggle, and those ideas, aimed to chronicle the whole history of the nineteenth century, over which Paris, majestically, presided, whose arcades symbolized the city's heart laid bare...Harvard's Belknap [Press] is brave to publish such an esoteric and pricey specimen. Along with its two recent volumes of Benjamin's Selected Writings, and with a concluding collection in its way soon, we are now much better able to assess the man--foibles and all--and his legacy as a creative whole.

Benjamin was a vital member of what cultural and art historian Robert Hughes has called the 'modernist laboratory' of the early part of the 20th century, and, like Virginia Woolf or Paul Cezanne or any othermodernist worth her salt, his masterwork presents its own form as worthy of as much interest as its content...Fragment or not, The Arcades Projectis a vast creative work that is one part realistnovel, one part cultural anthropology, and one part social history and critique.

[This] edition does a fine job with this wild, often intractable material. Its apparatus is helpful, and properly spare...By and large, the edition is a heroic achievement.

Whether the theme is fashion, collecting, gambling--or any other key to the period--Benjamin lays out a gripping commentary on each. The result is a city-in-miniature. But it is the method underpinning the work that is perhaps the most interesting. In the methodological convolute 'N' Benjamin refers to it as a form of 'literary montage'--Benjamin's shorthand way of saying that each convolute is composed of numerous quotations which are lifted from various sources and then spliced together on the same page. The method enables Benjamin to blast away at received notions of art and cultural history...Besides a useful introduction, this first English edition also contains a number of early drafts and the as yet untranslated second exposé from 1939. Together, these pieces give an insight into Benjamin's anarchic working method, whereby he constantly reshuffles his material.

Quite simply, the Passagen-Werkis one of the twentieth century's great efforts at historical comprehension--some would say the greatest.

Benjamin's crowning achievement...The Harvard University Press edition of Benjamin now in monumental progress is an admirably generous undertaking.

Benjamin's work is the most advanced, most complex, and most comprehensive study of the dominant motifs and unresolved tendencies of the nineteenth century that continue to be of critical importance for us today. No other study has measured up to its methodological inventiveness, or so exemplarily met its demand that history writing be reinvented for every topic and on every occasion.

If The Arcades Projectis still worth reading today, it is not only for the quixotic pleasures of its dead ends, but for the traces of hope it finds within 'the guilty context of the living' (as Benjamin wrote elsewhere). Through an analysis of the 'collective dream' of the 19th century, Benjamin hopes to liberate the 20th.

Walter Benjamin(1892-1940) was the author of many works of literary and cultural analysis.Howard Eilandis Lecturer in Literature at <>Massachusetts Institute of Technology.Kevin McLaughlinis Assistant Professor of English at <>Brown Universityand the author of Writing in Parts: Imitation and Exchange in Nineteenth-Century Literature.

Translators' Foreword

Exposés

"Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century" (1935)

"Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century" (1939)

Convolutes

Overview

First Sketches

Early Drafts

"Arcades"

"The Arcades of Paris"

"The Ring of Saturn"

Addenda

Exposé of 1935, Early Version

Materials for the Exposé of 1935

Materials for "Arcades"

"Dialectics at a Standstill," by Rolf Tiedemann

"The Story of Old Benjamin," by Lisa Fittko

Translators' Notes

Guide to Names and Terms

Index