Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project Quotes

“The Arcades Project further elaborates the relation of the dialectical image to history as it emerges in the scene of reading. As Benjamin tells us: What distinguishes images from the ‘essences’ of phenomenology is their historical index. (Heidegger seeks in vain to rescue history for phenomenology abstractly through ‘historicity’.) These images are to be thought of entirely apart from the categories of the ‘human sciences,’ from so-called habitus, from style, and the like. For the historical index of the images not only says that they belong to a particular time; it says, above all, that they attain to legibility only at a particular time. And, indeed, this acceding ‘to legibility’ constitutes a specific critical point in the movement at their interior. Every present day is determined by the images that are synchronic with it: each ‘now’ is the now of a particular recognizability. In it, truth is charged to the bursting point with time. (This point of explosion, and nothing else is the death of the intentio, which thus coincides with the birth of authentic historical time, the time of truth.) It is not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words: image is dialectics at a standstill. For while the relation of the present to the past is purely temporal, the relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical: not temporal in nature but figural [bildlich]. Only dialectical images are genuinely historical – that is, not archaic – images. The image that is read – which is to say, the image in the now of its recognizability – bears to the highest degree the imprint of that critical, dangerous moment that lies at the ground of all reading [den Stempel des kritischen, gefährlichen Momentes, welcher allem Lesen zugrunde liegt].51”
― Beatrice Hanssen, Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project

“Benjamin does attempt to decode their subjective experience, but he does this within social and historical limits, insisting that subjects inhabiting capitalist modernity, exposed to the workings of commodity fetishism, have become objects, objectified, susceptible to processes of commodification (of their labour-power, of the culture they consume).”
― Beatrice Hanssen, Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project

“An anecdote in which Kant captures himself in pithy fashion: [Kant’s] Famulus, a theologian who was unable to connect philosophy to theology, once asked Kant for advice as to what he should read on the subject. Kant: Read travel literature. Famulus: In dogmatic philosophy, there are things I do not understand. Kant: Read travel literature. Walter Benjamin, ‘Unknown Anecdotes about Kant’, GS”
― Beatrice Hanssen, Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project

“Fashion, like architecture, inheres in the darkness of the lived moment, belongs to the dream consciousness of the collective.”
― Beatrice Hanssen, Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project

“Only dialectical images are genuine images (that is, not archaic); and the place where one encounters them is language.”
― Beatrice Hanssen, Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project

“Our act of reading, together with our reflections on its methods, therefore parallels the phenomenon’s act of disappearing. What we are given to read are always the traces of a specific act of withdrawal.”
― Beatrice Hanssen, Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project

“Method of this project: literary montage. I have nothing to say. Only to show. I will purloin nothing valuable and appropriate no ingenious turns of phrase. But the shards, the trash: I do not wish to inventory them, but simply give them their due in the only possible way: by putting them to use.”
― Beatrice Hanssen, Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project

“Thinking is a search for siblings. Yet if thinking is a search for siblings, it also depends on finding the right distance – Abstand – from these siblings.”
― Beatrice Hanssen, Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project

“The advertising image, then, in its fully realized form succeeds in having no content; it is an image of image, a mirror that reflects back the subjective intention. The image in this way takes on a fundamental feature of the commodity – over-determination arising from the productive requirements of capitalism itself – just as the representation of the image, in representing just this over-determination in order to capture both its hellish and utopian modalities, ceaselessly replicates just this structure, driving the dialectical image back into allegory. The wagon that writes its own name is in this way neither lost nor found, neither named nor unnamed. The dialectics of the dialectical image is hence always on the brink or at the threshold of freezing and shocking, while this threshold itself is the moment of indifference between dialectical and allegorical image, and, according to another perspective, the moment of indifference between dialectical image and advertising image as well. For who is to say whether the dialectical image can muster the knowledge to represent the conditions of its own possibility, as opposed to reflecting back, infinitely, the advertising image in a satanic game of mirror-on-mirror? And”
― Beatrice Hanssen, Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project

“The use of the commodity is the name and image of the commodity itself. Use-value is irrelevant to the form of consumption – and fantasy, wish, or interpretation – that seals the relation of image to consciousness. In the ‘real abstraction’ that constitutes the fully realized industrial commodity,”
― Beatrice Hanssen, Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project

“The flâneur turned out to be a first signal of reaction – not a figure of self- realization, mastery, celebration of the modern – but a dupe who was so thrilled to be part of the crowd of consumers, who yielded to appearance, to pure illusion, and failed ultimately to gain self-understanding, let alone class-consciousness. In this regard, at least, the prostitute has a clearer consciousness, for it is not possible for her to be recuperated so easily.”
― Beatrice Hanssen, Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project

“The arcades, Benjamin tells us, are fluid places, and there things strike us ‘like realities in the dream’, ‘dissolved in a constant flux’, something new always supervening, always delaying revelation of meaning until waking.104 A dream logic then is the most we might expect from such a bundle of notes and fragments and images. This is appropriate enough, for the dream features everywhere in the project, as in Benjamin’s work as a whole. The dream, for Benjamin, is an index of freedom – our social dreams indicate our social utopias. Children’s whole existence is seen to be dreamlike, and so utopian. The central core of the project fragments, expounds and details how modern reality, this only an appearance of modern reality, might be experienced, if it is not penetrated by analysis, as a dream world stoked by myth.”
― Beatrice Hanssen, Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project

“Benjamin’s aesthetic is dissectional, drawing on Baroque poetry, Baudelaire’s writing and fashion histories. The female body becomes ornament, and in such fetishistic fragmentation, body parts are likened to alabaster, snow, jewels, minerals, and the body can, of course, be made equivalent to – that is, bought for – the metal of exchange: money.”
― Beatrice Hanssen, Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project

“In city streets street-walking women know they are surveyed, subjected to looks. Their own eyes peruse and judge their own appearance. They are objects for themselves. On catching a glimpse of themselves in reflecting windows, they confuse themselves with the hard bodies of shop-window mannequins. The mannequins’ rigid but exquisite forms fuse with the dream-egos of women, providing perfect, but stiff, role-models. And fashion draws them further into ‘the universe of matter’.63 Fashion ‘prostitutes the living body to the inorganic world’, making women pioneer–explorers in a new continent of artifice.”
― Beatrice Hanssen, Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project

“The flâneur traverses an economic space where wares are sold – poetry, journalism, knowledge – in the marketplace. If this is acknowledged then the flâneur’s subjectivity is allied with others who sell themselves (albeit existing in competition with them), rather than with all men. He is subservient to the market.”
― Beatrice Hanssen, Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project

“Wilson provides a Lacanian psychoanalytic context for her claim; the flâneur is the Oedipal under threat. The city is a castrating labyrinth that feminizes all who enter it.22”
― Beatrice Hanssen, Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project