The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought)

About this book

Walter Benjamins magnum opus was a book he did not live to write. In The Dialectics of Seeing Susan Buck-Morss offers an inventive reconstruction of the Passagen Werk or Arcades Project as it might have taken form. Working with Benjamins vast files of citations and commentary which contain a myriad of historical details from the dawn of consumer culture Buck-Morss makes visible the conceptual structure that gives these fragments philosophical coherence. She uses images throughout the book to demonstrate that Benjamin took the debris of mass culture seriously as the source of philosophical truth. The Paris Arcades that so fascinated Benjamin (as they did the Surrealists whose "materialist metaphysics" he admired) were the prototype the 19th century "ur-form" of the modern shopping mall. Benjamins dialectics of seeing demonstrate how to read these consumer dream houses and so many other material objects of the timefrom air balloons to womens fashions from Baudelaires poetry to Grandvilles cartoonsas anticipations of social utopia and simultaneously as clues for a radical political critique. Buck-Morss plots Benjamins intellectual orientation on axes running east and west north and southMoscow Paris Berlin-Naplesand shows how such thinking in coordinates can explain his understanding of "dialectics at a standstill." She argues for the continuing relevance of Benjamins insights but then allows a set of "afterimages" to have the last word.