The Arcades Project

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Montage exploring Paris arcades and consumer origins.

If you're intrigued by the intersection of history, culture, and philosophy, "The Arcades Project" might just be the tome for you. It weaves together a tapestry of observations and commentary, offering a profound look into Paris's past and the dawn of the consumer society. Benjamin's work is not just a book but an experience for anyone interested in the depths of urban studies and the birth of modernity.

Note: While we do our best to ensure the accuracy of cover images, ISBNs may at times be reused for different editions of the same title which may hence appear as a different cover.

The Arcades Project

Regular price
Unit price
per
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ISBN: 9780674043268
Date of Publication: 1999-12-10
Format: Hardcover
Related Topics: Theory, History, Architecture, Essays, History
Goodreads rating: 4.44
(rated by 3039 readers)

Description

To great writers, Walter Benjamin once wrote, "finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they labor their entire lives." Conceived in Paris in 1927 and still in progress when Benjamin fled the Occupation in 1940, The Arcades Project (in German, Das Passagen-Werk) is a monumental ruin, meticulously constructed over the course of thirteen years--"the theater," as Benjamin called it, "of all my struggles and all my ideas." Focusing on the arcades of nineteenth-century Paris-glass-roofed rows of shops that were early centers of consumerism--Benjamin presents a montage of quotations from, and reflections on, hundreds of published sources, arranging them in thirty-six categories with descriptive rubrics such as "Fashion," "Boredom," "Dream City," "Photography," "Catacombs," "Advertising," "Prostitution," "Baudelaire," and "Theory of Progress." His central preoccupation is what he calls the commodification of things--a process in which he locates the decisive shift to the modern age. The Arcades Project is Benjamin's effort to represent and to critique the bourgeois experience of nineteenth-century history, and, in so doing, to liberate the suppressed "true history" that underlay the ideological mask. In the bustling, cluttered arcades, street and interior merge and historical time is broken up into kaleidoscopic distractions and displays of ephe
 

Montage exploring Paris arcades and consumer origins.

If you're intrigued by the intersection of history, culture, and philosophy, "The Arcades Project" might just be the tome for you. It weaves together a tapestry of observations and commentary, offering a profound look into Paris's past and the dawn of the consumer society. Benjamin's work is not just a book but an experience for anyone interested in the depths of urban studies and the birth of modernity.

Note: While we do our best to ensure the accuracy of cover images, ISBNs may at times be reused for different editions of the same title which may hence appear as a different cover.