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The Politics of Quotation: Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

James L. Rolleston
James L. Rolleston*
Affiliation:
Duke University, Durham, North Carolina
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Abstract

An essay on language that Benjamin wrote in 1916 provides access to his “arcades project” (Das Passagenwerk), the materials on nineteenth-century Paris that he collected from 1927 until his death, in 1940. The arcades, glass-and-steel structures enclosing spaces between houses into exotic commercial zones, function as Benjamin's emblems of capitalist modernity. Rhythms of ceaseless production and obsolescence not only absorb all counterideologies (revolution) but control the language of possible experience. By juxtaposing documents on objects, technologies, and dreams with glimpses of allegorical clarity in Balzac, Baudelaire, Blanqui, and others, Benjamin seeks to establish a text that will both embody and unmask the myth of history that obscures these rhythms. His goal is a structure of quotation that will speak for itself. Such speaking requires and makes possible “awakened” readers, able to translate the repetitious syntax of commodified individualism into a usable political language.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 104 , Issue 1 , January 1989 , pp. 13 - 27
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1989

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References

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