In the category of
Philosophy/Religion, team
Bartleby and the Scriveners is pleased to select a book that has shaped my understanding of critical theory and left cultural theory from top to bottom. Which is a bit weird, since describing it as a "book" implies that it is complete, when in fact it is a loosely collected series of aphoristic observations that were interrupted by the untimely death of their author before they could be placed into a coherent narrative. However, the jumbled, inchoate structure of this book seems ultimately perfect for the curious age of modernity that the project describes. I'm talking, of course about Walter Benjamin's voluminous opus
The Arcades Project.
Walter Benjamin was a leftist thinker of the early 20th century, but his most important work took place between the wars, and most of it took place in Paris--and it was through walking around the unique cityscape of Paris that Benjamin conceived of this project, seeing the unique Paris arcades (covered shopping districts) as the fundamental metaphor for industrial capitalism in the age of Ford; they contained both the commodity in its fetishized form and also the possibility of a unique subliminal counterdiscourse that originates in the minds of consumers. In this way, even the most hopelessly co-opted discourses could contain within themselves the seeds of the dialectic, or of a potent rejoinder to the potent and powerful voice of capitalist ideology.
All of which, for all that it sounds a little high-falutin', would have placed Benjamin at odds with virtually every Marxist thinker of the 1930s and 40s. However, the project was never to be completed. Benjamin found himself living in Paris under the Vichy French regime, and quickly discovered that being a Marxist, an intellectual and a Jew made for a virtual trifecta of persecution. When it became clear that he was doomed to be taken to a concentration camp, Benjamin fled the Nazis, heading for Spain. However, when he arrived in Spain he was denied an entry visa and told that he would be returned to France--and to a probable death at the hands of the Nazis. He committed suicide instead, leaving behind him a briefcase full of papers with scribbled notes and annotations. This case of looseleaf meditations became
The Arcades Project, and it is perhaps the most important work of left criticism of the 20th century. It may lack organization and structure, but it is a virtual treasure-trove of aphorisms that seem to explain everything about the political and economic history of modernity, if you only care to look.