Remains To Be Seen. - Review - book review

STANLEY CAVELL ON THE ARCADES PROJECT

Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999, 1,074 pages, $39.95.

So it was for this that Walter Benjamin summoned voices to blend and to contend with his, and with each other's, ones that he found to flow along his dreams (e.g., p. 467)--his and (he claims, as a philosopher must) ours (e.g., pp. 212, 391)--from which the work of this work is variously to join in awakening us (e.g., pp. 388, 458), rescuing (e.g., pp. 473, 476) or say redeeming (e.g., pp. 332, 462) the phenomena of our world, processes that require blasting phenomena from their historical successions (p. 475), suggesting thought as a volcano (p. 698), forming new constellations (e.g., p. 463), allegorizing (e.g., pp. 211, 330, 367) the dialectical in every genuine image (e.g., 462, 473), where the place one encounters such an image is language (p. 462), in which the past and future are polarized by means of anticipating as it were the present (p. 470) (a thought Benjamin compliments Turgot for formulating [p. 478]; for us it is quite pure Thoreau), and where, further, "the present" is not a fixed point but a scene of ruins (p. 474), illuminated by flashes of lightning (e.g., pp. 91, 226, 456) (a melodramatic but recognizable vision of Wittgenstein's Investigations), each of which marks a now, a dawn, of recognition (e.g., pp. 463, 473), allowing thought to be drawn, as by the magnetic North Pole (p. 456) (which others correct for, which Benjamin claims to correct by), not toward purported permanencies and their petrified (p. 366) understandings (supporting our familiar forms of social cohesion) but to the debris or detritus of a culture (pp. 460, 543), occasions for reading, for rebuking the idea of decline as much as the idea of progress in history (e.g., 460).

FOR THOSE OF US frightened away from this most rumored of unfinished or unpublished or unwritten modern works by how much we must miss in Benjamin's deployment of German, the labors of love manifested in this English presentation expose us--I speak for myself--to a preliminary question: How much do I understand of my present state, as registered in my opening improvised recording, in reading this work? I assume that anyone concerned with the fate of the arts in conjunction with the state of philosophy and with efforts to uncover the present and the past in one another will know something of Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project and will have an interest in the event of its translation into English--will know that in it, Benjamin takes the emergence and recession of the maze of Paris arcades in its nineteenth century as the key to that Paris, and to its consciousness of itself, and takes that Paris as the capital place from which we are to awaken to knowledge of twentieth-century existence. Since the few pages of a proper review would allow at most for more rehearsals of the text's appearance, together with a few hasty formulas about why it appears so, I have thought instead to begin a task of responding to the text, seeking some points of orientation toward it from where I find myself--not concealing the anxiety in approaching a work so burdened by ambition and originality, a task that, while no doubt intermittent, suggests no predictable end.

I am not so much asking what it would be to understand the linking of Benjaminian concepts as they come to me, but what it would be to see how such instigations are manifested in the work of The Arcades Project. This is only my way of registering that its form or texture--with its citations, often multiple, ranging from a sentence to a long paragraph, from more than 800 texts, mostly French, otherwise German, bearing on the life and works of Paris through the nineteenth century, interspersed at varying intervals with one or more similarly sized comments of Benjamin's own, all collected into thirty-six "convolutes"--is as urgent an issue to respond to as any citation or juxtaposition (Benjamin says montage) of citations within the structure; indeed that the form of The Arcades Project, the visibility of its existence as discontinuity and accretion, is its pervasive and inescapable issue. It is this condition of process rather than the question of the work's evident sense of unfinishedness (or uncompletability ) that strikes me as constituting its aura of modernity, together, I mean, with its mode of incessant self-mirroring.

Whether one takes the work as incomplete or as complete in its controlled fragmentation, prior facts are that it exists as a collection, and that the concept of a collection is one of its master tones, surrealist in its reach. Again, if you find that montage is what determines its endlessness, then you must note the pertinence of the concepts of constellation and of dispersion in the text, distinguishing allegorizing from collecting. My emphatic perception at the moment is of this text as work, as production without a product (a way to think about its claim to philosophy, or rather, to philosophizing). It is how I respond to the German title, Passagen-Werk (I believe Benjamin's working title was Passagenarbeit). This might offer some protection against a tendency to conceive too simply of Benjamin's volume, or package, as itself arcades, breaking passages through established constructions and putting commodified sayings on display: After all it is the figure of the flaneur, made for arcades, that Benjamin pr oposes for his reader: "In the flaneur, one might say, is reborn the sort of idler that Socrates picked out from the Athenian marketplace to be his interlocutor. Only, there is no longer a Socrates. And the slave labor that guaranteed him his leisure has likewise ceased to exist." If Benjamin is here staking his claim to a certain afterlife of philosophizing, his Arcades Project may be taken as establishing the conditions (of memory as thinking, of thinking as explosion, of perception as allegory, of the chances of concurrence in Poe's crowd) under which philosophy is still possible.