Cecilia

Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century Walter Benjamin

Written in 1935, as an exposé or synopsis of his Arcades Project, which he had been working on for around eight years (since 1927), Walter Benjamin´s essay concentrates his main ideas regarding art, politics, economy, society, history and literature in just a few pages. Moving fluidly from one discipline to the other, as well as from facts, to theories and ideas, to social phenomena, he manages to describe and at the same time criticize the situation of Paris, the city where he had been living after fleeing his native Germany controlled by the Nazis. The text is divided into six sections in what, at a first glance, may seem to be a collage of ideas, as the author does jump from one to the other, but by reading into them it becomes apparent how each one is deeply related to the previous, and how he is slowly guiding the reader with little steps into these bigger jumps. Each of these sections in made out of two parts, a physical, tangible concept and a person somehow related to it.

Taking the Arcades as his starting point, he enters straight into the core of the Parisian society; by emphasizing how the use of iron an glass in building and the growth of the textile trade during the turn of the century had been key factors in the creation of a new collective consciousness: an illusion or a fantasy of the combination between the old and the new. Technology had acquired a new role in people´s lives and, together with its modes of production, had been given a variety of uses leading to the “fetishization of commodities” and their “phantasmagorical” power over society transformed their way of living and experiencing cities.

Aside from the obvious and widely known early critique to the capitalistic system that would eventually turn Arcades into Shopping Malls, Benjamin sees in them Fourier´s phalanstery(1.1), where a commercial space has become a dwelling space as well. In “Daguerre, or the Panoramas”, he goes on to speak of these panoramas as the novelty of a technological revolution of art as he questions the role of Art in the new market of reproduction. “Grandville, or the World Exhibtition” leads the reader into how World Exhibitions which universalized the Arcades and their merchandise through fashion.

This experiencing of the city, until now completely public is constantly being shaped through the individual´s relationship with objects as well as through their relationship to each other. Benjamin is constantly referring to these dualities in the individual´s life, in “Louis‐Philippe, or the Interior” he develops the idea of the public against the private: “For the private individual, the place of dwelling is for the first time opposed to the place of work. The former constitutes itself as the interior. Its complement is the office. The private individual, who in the office has to deal with reality, needs the domestic interior to sustain him in his illusions.”1 In this sense, Benjamin is speaking about the creation of the individual´s subjectivity, which is changing in the modern world and has these two complimenting components, explicitly influenced by the physical environment. Through these ideas the reader is left to evaluate the way in which he perceives architecture, which used to be a physical, external entity, but is now, in its domestic form, related to his objects, products of consumerist behaviors that will contribute to the formation of the subjectivity.

With the character of the flâneur, he lets the reader imagine a certain way of experiencing the city and its streets. As a person who wanders and looks around but does not engage in its activities, the flaneur looks at the crowds for refuge, he is an outsider at the same time as he is immersed in his surroundings, just as the reader is. The idea of class struggle is constant in every section, especially through his writings of Haussman´s “embellishment” of Paris in order to avoid the construction of barricades. By stating this he is

1

Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999, p. 7

asking the reader to reflect on how Architecture and even Urbanism affect the individuals´ relations with each other, and how they work as a political tool to exercise control.

All of these ideas, while being looked at from the various discipline´s points of view, are directly related to Architecture. Through his mode of writing, “…the elliptical method of the exposé corresponds to Benjamin´s underlying conceptions of history and allegory”2 he allows the reader to think of his own subject of interests as the central theme, which he will then relate to all the others, whether it is an architect, a sociologist, a politician, an artist, a historian, a member of the bourgeoisie or of the proletariat, Benjamin addresses them all in the same level, while only asking of them to be aware of his cultural background to fully understand the depth of his critique. Through his writings, architecture appears to be so much more than the built environment, but as a set of complex relations that take part in every‐day lives.

Each section of this essay begins with an epigraph as introduction to the topic he will then address, he also uses these quotations (most of them of poems by diverse writers) in the middle of some sections. The use of these short paragraphs appear surrounded by physical gaps, blank spaces on the page, that allow for a visual and mental break and allow him to prove or emphasize a point, or give the reader some bigger clue of where he is trying to get to. These epigraphs describe or summarize, exemplify or relate, compare or contextualize; an idea to a previous one in an architectural arrangement of prose and poetry.

“If language is a necessary part of architecture, the difficulty is to describe the relationship in such a way as not to make language simply an accessory‐ for as well as being part of architecture, language is unquestionably a system on its own right”.3 Benjamin is not using this “Language of Modernism”, to which Adrian Forty refers to, with words such as form, function, user, space or context, since he is not speaking directly from an architectural point of view, but what he does in order to achieve this complex whole of relations between the object and his ideas is develop his own system of language.

1.1 Perspective of Fourier´s phalanstery

2

Higonnet, Patrice, Anne Higonnet, and Margaret Higonnet. Façades: Walter Benjamin's Paris”.Critical Inquiry, University of Chicago Press. 1984. p.393 3 Forty, Adrian. Words and Buildings. A Vocabulary of Modern Architecture, Thames and Hudson, 2004, p. 13