the arcades project / walter benjamin

Re the psychoanalytic theory of memory: “Freud’s later researches made it clear that this view [the concept of repression] must be enlarged …. The machinery of repression … is … a special case of the … significant process which occurs when the ego is unequal to meeting certain demands made upon the mental mechanism, The more general process of defense does not cancel the strong impressions; it only lays them aside …. It will be in the interest of clarity for me to state the contrast between memory and reminiscence with deliberate bluntness: the function of memory [the author identifies the sphere of “forgetfulness” with “unconscious memory” (p. 130) is to protect our impressions; reminiscence aims at their dissolution. Essentially memory is conservative; reminiscence, destructive.”

Theodor Reik, Der iiberraschte Psychologe (Leiden, 1935), pp. 130-132.

[WB: K8,1]

… The medium is the memory, and with Baudelaire it was possessed of unusual density. The corresponding sensory data correspond in it; they are teeming with memories, which run so thick that they seem to arisen not from this life but from some spacious vie anteriure. It is this prior existence that is intimated by the “familiar eyes” with which such experience scrutinize the one who has them.

[WB: J79,6]

What fundamentally distinguishes the brooder from the thinker is that the former not only meditates a thing but also meditates his meditation of the thing. The case of the brooder is that of the man who has arrived at the solution of a great problem but then has forgotten it. And now he broods – not so much over the matter itself as over his past reflections on it. The brooder’s thinking, therefore, bears the imprint of memory. Brooder and the allegorist are cut from the same cloth.

[WB: J79a,1]

… Politics attains primacy over history. Indeed, historical “facts” become something that just now happened to us, just now struck us: to establish them is the affair of the memory. And awakening is the great exemplar of memory – that occasion on which we succeed in remembering what is nearest, most obvious (in the “I”). What Proust intends with the experimental rearrangement of furniture, what bother Bloch recognizes as the darkness of the lived moment, is nothing other than what here is secured on the level of the historical, and collectively. There is a not-yet-conscious knowledge of what has been: its advancement has the structure of awakening.

In this historical and collective process of fixation, collecting plays a certain role. Collecting is a form of practical memory, and of all the profane manifestations of the penetration of “what has been” (of all the manifestations of “nearness”) it is the most binding. Thus, in a certain sense, the smallest act of political reflection makes for an epoch in the antique business. …

If it is imagination that presents correspondence to the memory, it is thinking that consecrates allegory to it. Memory brings about the convergence of imagination and thinking.

[J66,3]

Between the theory of natural correspondences and the repudiation of nature exists a contradiction. It is resolved insofar as within the memory impressions become detached from individual experiences, so that the long experience stored up in those impressions is released and can be fed into the allegorical fundus.

[J66,5]

On the Passion of the aesthetic man in Kierkegaard and its foundation in memory: “Memory is emphatically the real element of the unhappy man …. If I imagine a man who himself had had no childhood, … but who now … discovered all the beauty that there is in childhood, and who would now remember his own childhood, constantly staring back into that emptiness of the past, hen I would have an excellent illustration of the truly unhappy man.” Soren Kierkegaard, Entweder-Oder (Jena, 1911), vol. 1 pp. 203-204 (“The Unhappiest Man”).

[J63,4]

 Self-photography and the unrolling of the lived life before the dying. Two kinds of memory (Proust). Relationship of this kind of memory with the dream.

“He carried about him as sorrowful trophy … a burden of memories, so that he seemed to live in a continued paranesia …. The poet carries within himself a living duree which odors call forth … and with which they mingle … This city is a duree, an inveterate life-form, a memory …. If he loved in …. A Jeanne Duval some immemorial stretch of night …, this will be only a symbol … of that true duree …

[J14,2]

Delvau[i] on Chodruc-Duclos: … His bones took more time to rot than his name took to erase itself from the memory of men,” Alfred Delvau, Les Lions du jur (paris, 1867), pp. 28-29.

[A5a,2]

“theme … of … the affirmation of a mysterious presence at the back of things, as in the depths of the soul – the presence of Eternity. Hence the obsession with timepieces, and the need to break out of the confine’s of one’s own life through the immense prolongation of ancestral memory and of former lives,” Albert Beguin, L’Ame romantique et le reve (Marseilles, 1937), vol. 2 p. 403.

[J20a,1]

 Regarding “L’Amour du mensonge” . From a letter to Alphonse de Calonne: “The word ‘royal’ will help the reader understand the metaphor, which transforms memory into a crown of towers, like those that weigh down the brows of the goddesses of maturity, of fertility, of wisdom.” Fleurs du mal, ed. Jacques Crepet (Paris, 1931), p. 461.

[J44,2]

Happiness of the collector, happiness of the solitary: tete-a-tete with things. Is not this the felicity that suffuses our memories – that in them we are alone with particular things, which range abut us in their silence, and that even the people who haunt our thoughts then partake in this steadfast, confederate silence of things. The collector “stills” his fate. And that means he disappears in the world of memory.

      [By Lisa Fiitko, reconstructed from memory, a journey with Walter Benjamin]

      Sure, sure. “But Mr. Benjamin, do you realize that I am not a competent guide in this region? I don’t really know that road, I have never been up that way myself. I have a piece of paper on which the mayor penciled a map of the route from his memory, and then he described to me some details of turns to be taken, a hut on the left, a plateau with seven pine trees which has to remain to our right or we will end up too far north; the vineyard that leads to the ridge at the right point. You want to take the risk?”

      “Yes,” he said without hesitation. “The real risk would be not to go.”

           

Google Books.

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