Bookmark: Reading Platform

A regular reading group focusing on texts and screenings ranging from art, culture, politics, philosophy, anthropology and sociology.

If you would like to suggest reading material and chair an informal discussion, or deliver a presentation, please make this known on the group page, or alternatively send an email to tomjamesholland@gmail.com.

You can also join the Bookmark: Reading Platform Facebook group page to keep up with events, share information, and join the debate.

Following our last discussion of Benjamin's On the Concept of History, the plan for our next meeting is to look at another posthumously published work: The Arcades Project (1982).

Seeing as it's essentially a gigantic unfinished collection of fragments, Hussein has suggested we start with the 13 page long "Exposé of 1939" at the beginning of the book. This can be accessed via the links below. There will also be a few physical copies of the book at the meeting which we can use to select/discuss random fragments from any of the 'convolutes.'

Link to the Exposé of 1939

Link to Convolute N - Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress

Link to full text

“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 36 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 ephemera. Here, at a distance from what is normally meant by “progress,” Benjamin finds the lost time(s) embedded in the spaces of things.

• Synopsis from the 2002 edition by Kevin McLaughlin, translated by Howard Eiland.