The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades ProjectWalter Benjamin's magnum opus was a book he did not live to write. In The Dialectics of Seeing, Susan Buck-Morss offers an inventive reconstruction of the Passagen Werk, or Arcades Project, as it might have taken form. Working with Benjamin's vast files of citations and commentary which contain a myriad of historical details from the dawn of consumer culture, Buck-Morss makes visible the conceptual structure that gives these fragments philosophical coherence. She uses images throughout the book to demonstrate that Benjamin took the debris of mass culture seriously as the source of philosophical truth. The Paris Arcades that so fascinated Benjamin (as they did the Surrealists whose "materialist metaphysics" he admired) were the prototype, the 19th century "ur-form" of the modern shopping mall. Benjamin's dialectics of seeing demonstrate how to read these consumer dream houses and so many other material objects of the time—from air balloons to women's fashions, from Baudelaire's poetry to Grandville's cartoons—as anticipations of social utopia and, simultaneously, as clues for a radical political critique. Buck-Morss plots Benjamin's intellectual orientation on axes running east and west, north and south—Moscow Paris, Berlin-Naples—and shows how such thinking in coordinates can explain his understanding of "dialectics at a standstill." She argues for the continuing relevance of Benjamin's insights but then allows a set of "afterimages" to have the last word. |
Contents
Spatial Origins | 25 |
Introduction | 47 |
Fetish | 78 |
Wish Image | 110 |
Ruin | 159 |
Introduction | 205 |
Dream World of Mass Culture | 253 |
Revolutionary Inheritance | 331 |
Notes | 376 |
Bibliography | 478 |
Other editions - View all
The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project Susan Buck-Morss No preview available - 1991 |
The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project Susan Buck-Morss No preview available - 1991 |
Common terms and phrases
Adorno aesthetic Afterimages allegoricists allegory appears Arcades project architecture artist Baroque Baudelaire's become Benjamin notes Benjamin to Scholem Berlin bourgeois cited cognitive collective commodity concept consciousness construction critical cultural dialectical image dream early emblem empirical Ernst Bloch eternal experience exposé expositions expression fact fashion Fetish figure flâneur Frankfurt am Main German Gershom Scholem Haussmann Historical Nature human ibid idea industrial intellectual interpretation jamin Jugendstil Kabbalah Kabbalist Konvolut Lacis Le Corbusier Letter literary Marx Marxist mass material Materialist Pedagogy meaning Messianic metaphysical modern montage Moscow myth Mythic Nature nineteenth century Notes to pages objects original Paris Passagen Passagen-Werk Passages past phantasmagoria philosophical photography poem political potential precisely present production progress proletariat reality revolution revolutionary Ruin Saint-Simonian sense social society Street symbols Theodor W theological theory Tiedemann tion tradition trans Trauerspiel study truth ur-history utopian Walter Benjamin Wish Image writing wrote Zentralpark