The Arcades Project

Originally planned as a magazine article to be completed with his friend Franz Hessel, Walter Benjamin began work on ‘The Arcades Project’ in 1927.
Initially taking shape in a small black notebook the work would span the rest of Benjamins life and end up forming 426 double pages of manuscript that he deposited with his friend George Bataille to be stored in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris on the outbreak of war in 1939.
From it’s origins as an essay ‘The Arcades Project’ became a series of quotations that Benjamin collected to be formed into what he described as ‘a literary montage.’
Benjamin saw himself as a ‘ragpicker’. A man sifting through the detritus of history and forming a narrative from the refuse. He had appropriated this vision of the ragpicker as poet from Charles Baudelaire and used another of Baudelaire’s images, that of the ‘flaneur’, to form the theme of ‘The Arcades Project.’
Baudelaire saw the ‘flaneur’ as ‘a person who walks the city in order to experience it.’
Benjamin saw the ‘flaneur’ as a product of modernity and the city. Specifically he believed that the Arcades, areas of the city covered with steel and glass protecting those inside from the elements, provided a natural staging post for the journeys of the ‘flaneur.’
The Arcades contained new kinds of shops and living quarters, novel forms of architecture and provided a fresh showcase for fashion, advertising and photography and Benjamin saw in them the shaping of the modern world.
Starting as an essay then, ‘The Arcades Project’ moved rapidly into a much larger work than Benjamin first anticipated. Initially his plan was to avoid analysis:
‘I needn’t say anything. Merely show.’
Benjamin hoped to do this by collecting quotations. Soon he had collected over 600.
Benjamin took pride in his archival organisation and felt that the quotations were so well collated and organised that ‘you can get an overview at a glance.’
The bibliography for the project eventually stood at 850 titles.
With the work threatening to spiral out of control Benjamin attempted to use some of the material he had collected for ‘The Arcades Project’ for a shorter work on Baudelaire.
Neither project was completed.
On September 27th 1940 Walter Benjamin committed suicide in a town called Portbou on the border between France and Spain while trying to avoid being captured by the invading Nazi forces. The group he was with had been denied passage at the border.
Benjamin had been carrying two manuscripts with him when he died.
One of these was ‘On the Concept of History’ which Hannah Arendt collected when she crossed at Portbou a few months later and passed on to Theodor Adorno.
The other had disappeared. There is speculation that it could have been a final form of ‘The Arcades Project’ but this seems unlikely.
Instead, editions of ‘The Arcades Project’ have been published since 1980 based on the notes in the manuscript stored in the Bibliotheque Nationale.
Critics have seen these versions as speculative at best but it seems unlikely that Benjamin would have objected too strongly to people picking though his rags...