The Arcades Project Quotes

“The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are "status quo" is the catastrophe. It is not an ever-present possibility but
what in each case is given. Thus hell is not
something that awaits us, but this life here and now.”
― Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project

“As long as there is still one beggar around, there will still be myth.”
― Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project

“Something different is disclosed in the drunkenness of passion: the landscape of the body... These landscapes are traversed by paths which lead sexuality into the world of the inorganic. Fashion itself is only another medium enticing it still more deeply into the universe of matter.”
― Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project

“Everything remembered, everything thought, all awareness becomes base, frame, pedestal, lock and key of his ownership. Period, region, craft, previous owners - all, for the true collector, merge in each one of his possessions into a magical encyclopaedia whose quintessence is the fate of his object.”
― Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project

“Historical materialism has every reason to distinguish itself sharply from bourgeois habits of thought. Its founding concept is not progress but actualization.”
― Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project

“Not architecture alone but all technology is, at certain stages, evidence of a collective dream.”
― Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project

“That things are "status quo" is the catastrophe.”
― Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project

“For the materialist historian, every epoch with which he occupies himself is only a fore-history of that which really concerns him. And that is precisely why the appearance of repetition doesn't exist for him in history; because the moments in the course of history which matter most to him become moments of the present through their index as "fore-history," and change their characteristics according to the catastrophic or triumphant determination of that present.”
― Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project

“Trace and aura. The trace is appearance of a nearness, however far removed the thing that left it behind may be. The aura is appearance of a distance, however close the thing that calls it forth. In the trace, we gain possession of the thing; in the aura, it takes possession of us.”
― Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project

“For the philosopher, the most interesting thing about fashion is its extraordinary anticipations. It is well known that art will often-for example, in pictures-precede the perceptible reality by years. It was possible to see streets or rooms that shone in all sorts of fiery colours long before technology, by means of illuminated signs and other arrangements, actually set them under such a light. Moreover, the sensitivity of the individual artist to what is to coming certainly far exceeds that of the grande dame. Yet fashion is in much steadier, much more precise contact with the coming thing, thanks to the incomparable nose which the feminine collective has for what lies waiting in the future. Each season brings, in its newest creations, various secret signals of things to come. Whoever understand how to read these semaphores would know in advance not only about new currents in the arts but also about new legal codes, wars and revolutions.-Here, surely lies the greatest charm of fashion, but also the difficulty of making the charming fruitful.”
― Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project

“These arcades, a recent invention of industrial luxury, are glass-roofed, marble-panelled corridors extending through whole blocks of buildings, whose owners have joined together for such enterprises. Lining both sides of the corridors, which get their light from above, are the most elegant shops, so that the arcade is a city, a world in miniature, in which customers will find everything they need.”
― Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project

“The realization of dream elements, in the course of waking up, is the paradigm of dialectical thinking. Thus, dialectical thinking is the organ of historical awakening. Every epoch, in fact, not only dreams the one to follow but in dreaming, precipitates its awakening. "It bears its end within itself and unfolds it-as Hegel already noticed-by cunning. With the destabilizing of the market economy, we begin to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled.”
― Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project

“At the entrance, a mailbox: last opportunity to make some sign to the world one is leaving.”
― Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project

“The private individual, who in the office has to deal with reality, needs the domestic interior to sustain him in his illusions. This necessity is all the more pressing since he has no intention of allowing his commercial consideration to impinge on social ones. In the formation of his private environment, both are kept out. From this arises the phantasmagorias of the interior, which, for the private man, represents the universe. In the interior, he brings together the far away and the long ago. His room is a box in the theater of the world.”
― Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project