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The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project
Walter Benjamin's 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 Benjamin's 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. Benjamin's dialectics of seeing demonstrate how to read these consumer dream houses and so many other material objects of the time — from air balloons to women's fashions, from Baudelaire's poetry to Grandville's cartoons—as anticipations of social utopia and, simultaneously, as clues for a radical political critique. Buck-Morss plots Benjamin's intellectual orientation on axes running east and west, north and south—Moscow Paris, Berlin-Naples—and shows how such thinking in coordinates can explain his understanding of "dialectics at a standstill." She argues for the continuing relevance of Benjamin's insights but then allows a set of "afterimages" to have the last word.
495 pages, Paperback
First published November 17, 1989
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About the author
Susan Buck-Morss
33 books85 followersSusan Buck-Morss is an American philosopher and intellectual historian. She is currently Professor of Political Science at the CUNY Graduate Center.
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November 29, 2020
I’m not sure if this wasn’t a much harder book to read than it needed to be. There was a lot of this that I simply didn’t understand, that I expected the author to explain to me. This might not be entirely her fault. I’m painfully ignorant of theology and the Kabbalah, for example. I know next to nothing at all about German Tragedy. So, I felt I really needed much more handholding than I think Susan felt would be appropriate this early in our relationship.
She begins in the preface: “This book is long, and its argument is intricate. It demands effort on the part of the reader. Yet I have tried to ensure that such effort is not compounded by intellectual jargon that speaks only to those already initiated into the world of academic cults (among which the Benjamin "cult" now plays a leading role). The book requires no specialized disciplinary knowledge. It presupposes no particular philosophical background.” I’m really not sure that is the case, I do think it assumed quite a lot of knowledge.
That said, this wouldn’t have been an easy book to write. It is a commentary on a book that doesn’t exist. It is, as such, the most post-modern of post-modern exercises. To try to explain. Benjamin was considered by his friends to be something of a genius. About twenty years before he died, he started collecting material for his master work. That work was intended to not only help people understand many things about the nature of capitalism, particularly the culture of capitalism, but it was also going to provide a kind of Copernican revolution in how history was written. This revolution was to be multi-sided. Benjamin didn’t particularly believe in progress – something that must have made his ‘Marxism’ a little strained. He decided he would present his history as a kind of montage – a series of images and snippets of text smashed together that, when contemplated by those who would read the book, would appear in much the way a photograph appears as it is being developed. I’ve read what I’d taken to be his notes for this project, but it seems the notes might have been pretty much what he had intended overall. Quotes from others arranged in themes with the cumulative effect of a coming to understand, rather than of being told. I understand virtually none of this.
And this is a pity, because otherwise, I think the whole idea of the Arcades Project is utterly fascinating. Let’s say you wanted to understand contemporary capitalism. It wouldn’t be completely insane to start by spending time on eBay – considering who buys, who sells, what is said in the descriptions of the products, what linked products you get to see given your search history, how the images are displayed and how the webpages are laid out, what ends up on top. You might also want to visit a shopping mall or two. But what are you likely to see while you do that? Well, there is the architecture of the place – both the virtual place in the case of eBay and the ‘bricks and mortar’ mall. And there will be similarities between the two that it will be hard to ignore. Fans of capitalism talk about how locally specific capitalism allows the economy to be, this is meant to be its greatest advantages and proof that it is mostly an ‘unplanned’ economy – but a visit to more than one shopping mall puts paid to that idea. They are nearly identical the world over. Brand store followed by brand store in near identical order.
It is not that you are sold products in such places, as much as dreams. Mannequins, perhaps without faces, perhaps without arms, wear see-through crotchless knickers in front of photographs of heavily photoshopped teenage women wearing underwear with only slightly more material while they stare at those passing and pout fervently.
All is abundance, in fact, abundance is all. There is so much of everything that it is hard not to feel bloated and nearly sickened from just looking. Even the bookshops burst out into the passageways with books on stands, books it is hard to imagine anyone will ever read. The women in the ads for bath towels look like high-class prostitutes, the sort of prostitutes you might expect to appear in novels spilling out into the aisle. The men in the suit stores are godlike. They look down on us mere men in all senses.
We are in the world of Marx’s ‘commodity fetishism’ from the first volume of Capital. For Marx, the thing to notice about commodities, that he built his theory upon, was that they enter into exchange relationships with each other. It is their exchange value that he was interested in, much more than their use value. He recognised that the ‘uses’ of commodities weren’t nearly as easy to define or to constrain as were their exchange values. But even with that said, he also realised that people don’t just purchase commodities for the exchange value embodied in them. Rather, like holy relics, the material composition of the commodities can seem almost completely irrelevant to people’s desire for the commodities themselves. When Marx uses the word ‘fetish’ he isn’t using it in the sense of wearing feathers on your nipples – rather he was speaking of its original meaning, an object that acquires religions significance over and above the material that it is composed of. A religions icon might be, literally, a lump of wood with some paint and lacquer, but to a religious person it might feel as if it is a kind of manifestation of god. The fetish (as an index pointing to something beyond materiality) hides the physical nature of the object. And so it is with commodities too. Commodities, to Marx, display the rich interplay of relations within society that brought them into existence – not least the relations of production involving the exploitation of workers by capitalists. But all this is hidden behind the fetish of the commodities, not least in how people use commodities to define their own identity. We rarely consider the children mining for rare metals in impoverished nations when we purchase our latest iPhone – the fetish hides the relations to production embodied in the product. But the tragedy of those relations persist, all the same.
Benjamin’s arcade project focuses on the first shopping malls – the Paris arcades – and he looks in depth at the meaning behind these. Not only at the materials that needed to be brought into existence before they could be made – iron and glass mainly – but also at the types of behaviours that came into existence with these passageways or how human behaviours that had always existed became modified within these dream palaces. One character who came into existence at around the same time was the flaneur. This is someone who spends their time wandering about the city watching people and, as the French would have it, window-licking. At one point in this book, she mentions that in the 1840s flaneurs would sometimes take their turtles for a walk down the arcades – that gives an indication of the pace of their existence. The point of these places was to sell goods – but they created worlds within worlds – and those worlds were worlds of fashion and worlds of abundance.
Fashion, of course, is an anxious business. What is at the peak of fashion and of good taste today is staid and gauche tomorrow. And changing fashion is the mainstay of capitalism – the need to constantly purchase is driven by changes in fashion. For the customer to learn of these changes, the early passages provided a glimpse into what is new. This change of fashion is repeatedly referenced by a play on Nietzsche’s eternal return of the same. Recently, I keep seeing newspaper articles on Princess Diana that imply she was not really the fashion icon that people made her out to be. The articles invariably do this by showing photos of some of the outfits she wore and pointing out how tasteless they were. It’s hard to imagine anyone could be fooled by this – the point of the latest fashion is to make the previous fashion look absurd – or why would you buy the latest?
But this return of the same is also a product something more than fashion. Our time is always one that fits within a system of differences where past-times speak to us. This isn’t solely a matter of us recreating the fashions of the past, but rather our judging our own time in relation to how we understand past times – the past becomes a ventriloquist with our own voice. The desire to recreate classical forms in modern cities isn’t just about fashion, it comments on both past and present.
There is a lot jammed into this book, perhaps too much. The story of Benjamin, however, is one of tragedy. In his attempted escape from the Nazis, he brought a manuscript with him that he told everyone was worth more than his life. No one really knows what the manuscript contained now, or where it ended up, but people speculate that it was something that might tie together the fragments of his arcade project. He died, the manuscript went missing – or perhaps it was destroyed. And like that one of the most significant books of the twentieth century was both never written and survives as tantalising fragments.
She begins in the preface: “This book is long, and its argument is intricate. It demands effort on the part of the reader. Yet I have tried to ensure that such effort is not compounded by intellectual jargon that speaks only to those already initiated into the world of academic cults (among which the Benjamin "cult" now plays a leading role). The book requires no specialized disciplinary knowledge. It presupposes no particular philosophical background.” I’m really not sure that is the case, I do think it assumed quite a lot of knowledge.
That said, this wouldn’t have been an easy book to write. It is a commentary on a book that doesn’t exist. It is, as such, the most post-modern of post-modern exercises. To try to explain. Benjamin was considered by his friends to be something of a genius. About twenty years before he died, he started collecting material for his master work. That work was intended to not only help people understand many things about the nature of capitalism, particularly the culture of capitalism, but it was also going to provide a kind of Copernican revolution in how history was written. This revolution was to be multi-sided. Benjamin didn’t particularly believe in progress – something that must have made his ‘Marxism’ a little strained. He decided he would present his history as a kind of montage – a series of images and snippets of text smashed together that, when contemplated by those who would read the book, would appear in much the way a photograph appears as it is being developed. I’ve read what I’d taken to be his notes for this project, but it seems the notes might have been pretty much what he had intended overall. Quotes from others arranged in themes with the cumulative effect of a coming to understand, rather than of being told. I understand virtually none of this.
And this is a pity, because otherwise, I think the whole idea of the Arcades Project is utterly fascinating. Let’s say you wanted to understand contemporary capitalism. It wouldn’t be completely insane to start by spending time on eBay – considering who buys, who sells, what is said in the descriptions of the products, what linked products you get to see given your search history, how the images are displayed and how the webpages are laid out, what ends up on top. You might also want to visit a shopping mall or two. But what are you likely to see while you do that? Well, there is the architecture of the place – both the virtual place in the case of eBay and the ‘bricks and mortar’ mall. And there will be similarities between the two that it will be hard to ignore. Fans of capitalism talk about how locally specific capitalism allows the economy to be, this is meant to be its greatest advantages and proof that it is mostly an ‘unplanned’ economy – but a visit to more than one shopping mall puts paid to that idea. They are nearly identical the world over. Brand store followed by brand store in near identical order.
It is not that you are sold products in such places, as much as dreams. Mannequins, perhaps without faces, perhaps without arms, wear see-through crotchless knickers in front of photographs of heavily photoshopped teenage women wearing underwear with only slightly more material while they stare at those passing and pout fervently.
All is abundance, in fact, abundance is all. There is so much of everything that it is hard not to feel bloated and nearly sickened from just looking. Even the bookshops burst out into the passageways with books on stands, books it is hard to imagine anyone will ever read. The women in the ads for bath towels look like high-class prostitutes, the sort of prostitutes you might expect to appear in novels spilling out into the aisle. The men in the suit stores are godlike. They look down on us mere men in all senses.
We are in the world of Marx’s ‘commodity fetishism’ from the first volume of Capital. For Marx, the thing to notice about commodities, that he built his theory upon, was that they enter into exchange relationships with each other. It is their exchange value that he was interested in, much more than their use value. He recognised that the ‘uses’ of commodities weren’t nearly as easy to define or to constrain as were their exchange values. But even with that said, he also realised that people don’t just purchase commodities for the exchange value embodied in them. Rather, like holy relics, the material composition of the commodities can seem almost completely irrelevant to people’s desire for the commodities themselves. When Marx uses the word ‘fetish’ he isn’t using it in the sense of wearing feathers on your nipples – rather he was speaking of its original meaning, an object that acquires religions significance over and above the material that it is composed of. A religions icon might be, literally, a lump of wood with some paint and lacquer, but to a religious person it might feel as if it is a kind of manifestation of god. The fetish (as an index pointing to something beyond materiality) hides the physical nature of the object. And so it is with commodities too. Commodities, to Marx, display the rich interplay of relations within society that brought them into existence – not least the relations of production involving the exploitation of workers by capitalists. But all this is hidden behind the fetish of the commodities, not least in how people use commodities to define their own identity. We rarely consider the children mining for rare metals in impoverished nations when we purchase our latest iPhone – the fetish hides the relations to production embodied in the product. But the tragedy of those relations persist, all the same.
Benjamin’s arcade project focuses on the first shopping malls – the Paris arcades – and he looks in depth at the meaning behind these. Not only at the materials that needed to be brought into existence before they could be made – iron and glass mainly – but also at the types of behaviours that came into existence with these passageways or how human behaviours that had always existed became modified within these dream palaces. One character who came into existence at around the same time was the flaneur. This is someone who spends their time wandering about the city watching people and, as the French would have it, window-licking. At one point in this book, she mentions that in the 1840s flaneurs would sometimes take their turtles for a walk down the arcades – that gives an indication of the pace of their existence. The point of these places was to sell goods – but they created worlds within worlds – and those worlds were worlds of fashion and worlds of abundance.
Fashion, of course, is an anxious business. What is at the peak of fashion and of good taste today is staid and gauche tomorrow. And changing fashion is the mainstay of capitalism – the need to constantly purchase is driven by changes in fashion. For the customer to learn of these changes, the early passages provided a glimpse into what is new. This change of fashion is repeatedly referenced by a play on Nietzsche’s eternal return of the same. Recently, I keep seeing newspaper articles on Princess Diana that imply she was not really the fashion icon that people made her out to be. The articles invariably do this by showing photos of some of the outfits she wore and pointing out how tasteless they were. It’s hard to imagine anyone could be fooled by this – the point of the latest fashion is to make the previous fashion look absurd – or why would you buy the latest?
But this return of the same is also a product something more than fashion. Our time is always one that fits within a system of differences where past-times speak to us. This isn’t solely a matter of us recreating the fashions of the past, but rather our judging our own time in relation to how we understand past times – the past becomes a ventriloquist with our own voice. The desire to recreate classical forms in modern cities isn’t just about fashion, it comments on both past and present.
There is a lot jammed into this book, perhaps too much. The story of Benjamin, however, is one of tragedy. In his attempted escape from the Nazis, he brought a manuscript with him that he told everyone was worth more than his life. No one really knows what the manuscript contained now, or where it ended up, but people speculate that it was something that might tie together the fragments of his arcade project. He died, the manuscript went missing – or perhaps it was destroyed. And like that one of the most significant books of the twentieth century was both never written and survives as tantalising fragments.
August 9, 2014
This is a highly accessible explanation of one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century. Walter Benjamin's essays are closely examined in light of the work he toiled at for most of his career: The Arcades Project. Essentially, the Arcades Project was an attempt to understand 19th century Arcades of Paris as allegory. Buck-Morss explains Benjamin's use of allegory in light of the Trauerspeil investigation of Baroque Tragic Drama. Through it, she connects Benjamin's unique, but well founded, interepretation of Marxism and marxist social criticism to his interpretation of the nineteenth century consumer culture and ultimately to the social situation of Germany and Europe in the twenties and thirties. This web of social, historical, political, artistic and philosophical investigation all comes together through an investigation of allegory as an excess of meaning. I learned a lot about how Benjamin's writings worked, why he and Adorno came into conflict at times, and the unique vision of Benjamin's philosophy.
April 22, 2025
Obwohl das Buch aus einem akademischen Kontext kommt, ist es auch für Leute mit solider kultureller Bildung ziemlich gut lesbar. Man muss noch nicht mal sehr viel über Walter Benjamin wissen. Es hilft aber, wenigstens den Kunstwerk-Aufsatz von ihm gelesen zu haben oder die Berliner Kindheit um 1900.
Buck-Morss versucht, glaube ich, drei Ziele zu verbinden: Zum einen ist ihr Buch ein philosophische Argumentation, dass Walter Benjamin als Philosoph gelesen und interpretiert werden muss, nicht als philosophierender Literat / Schriftsteller bzw. Vorläufer eines im Prinzip ästhetisierenden, politisch irrelevanten Dekonstruktivismus, der ihn selbst als marxistischen politischen Philosophen entschärft. Zweitens ist ihr Buch selbst so eine philosophische Interpretation seiner politisch-theologischen Philosophie (Buck-Morss nimmt den messianisch-theologischen Komplex bei Benjamin sehr ernst und versteht ihn nicht als irgendwie metaphorisch oder literarisch.). Und drittens ist das eine Art Einführung ins dialektische Sehen mit und nach Benjamin für die Lesenden selbst.
Aus dieser Tripel-Struktur ergeben sich auch, habe ich den Eindruck, die Redundanzen, die vor allem im Mittelteil das Buch ein bissle aufblähen. An anderen Stellen ist die Redundanz wirklich hilfreich, weil man gerade als lesende Person, die das Buch einfach von a nach b liest, nicht immer alles präsent hat, was man vor ein paar Tagen gelesen hat. Richtig super ist der Schlussteil, wo Buck-Morss dialektische Bilder aus dem Passagen-Werk in die Gegenwart (also hier die späten 80er, auch schon ewig her) spiegelt. Man wird dazu animiert, dass jetzt zum vierten Mal in die eigene Gegenwart zu Übertagen. Und man sieht das Alte im Hype ums Neue.
Für Benjamin-Interessierte absolut empfehlenswertes Buch. Für Kulturwissenschaftler*innen und Philosoph*innen auch.
Buck-Morss versucht, glaube ich, drei Ziele zu verbinden: Zum einen ist ihr Buch ein philosophische Argumentation, dass Walter Benjamin als Philosoph gelesen und interpretiert werden muss, nicht als philosophierender Literat / Schriftsteller bzw. Vorläufer eines im Prinzip ästhetisierenden, politisch irrelevanten Dekonstruktivismus, der ihn selbst als marxistischen politischen Philosophen entschärft. Zweitens ist ihr Buch selbst so eine philosophische Interpretation seiner politisch-theologischen Philosophie (Buck-Morss nimmt den messianisch-theologischen Komplex bei Benjamin sehr ernst und versteht ihn nicht als irgendwie metaphorisch oder literarisch.). Und drittens ist das eine Art Einführung ins dialektische Sehen mit und nach Benjamin für die Lesenden selbst.
Aus dieser Tripel-Struktur ergeben sich auch, habe ich den Eindruck, die Redundanzen, die vor allem im Mittelteil das Buch ein bissle aufblähen. An anderen Stellen ist die Redundanz wirklich hilfreich, weil man gerade als lesende Person, die das Buch einfach von a nach b liest, nicht immer alles präsent hat, was man vor ein paar Tagen gelesen hat. Richtig super ist der Schlussteil, wo Buck-Morss dialektische Bilder aus dem Passagen-Werk in die Gegenwart (also hier die späten 80er, auch schon ewig her) spiegelt. Man wird dazu animiert, dass jetzt zum vierten Mal in die eigene Gegenwart zu Übertagen. Und man sieht das Alte im Hype ums Neue.
Für Benjamin-Interessierte absolut empfehlenswertes Buch. Für Kulturwissenschaftler*innen und Philosoph*innen auch.
May 3, 2009
This book blew me out of the water! Got me really into turn of the (nineteenth) century Paris, Haussmann's reshaping of Paris, and flaneurs, which I later picked up in my art history classes.
October 6, 2022
Ókláraðar bækur eru áhugaverð fyrirbæri, því að eru ekki allar bækur ókláraðar að einhverju marki? Og er það ekki umræðan og umfjöllunin sem að fylgir bókinni það sem að klárar bókina? Ef svo er þá er þetta þrekvirki eftir Susan Buck-Morss mikilvægur þáttur í að ýta Verslunarsalaverkefni Benjamins í átt að því að vera kláruð bók, ef bók má kalla.
Bókin er meira en 30 ára gömul bók, en samt stendur hún enn fyrir sínu. Bókin kom einnig út 10 árum áður en ensk þýðing á verki Benjamins var gefin út og var því í áratug eina leiðin fyrir hinn enskumælandi heim til að komast í kynni við verkið. Buck-Morss hefur með þessari bók sinni staðið sig með prýði og veitt ótal lesendum ákveðið kort til að styðja sig við áður en haldið er inn í það völundarhús sem er Verslunarsalaverkefnið.
Mæli eindregið með fyrir öll þau sem eru að íhuga að hætta sér í Verslunarsalaverkefnið.
Bókin er meira en 30 ára gömul bók, en samt stendur hún enn fyrir sínu. Bókin kom einnig út 10 árum áður en ensk þýðing á verki Benjamins var gefin út og var því í áratug eina leiðin fyrir hinn enskumælandi heim til að komast í kynni við verkið. Buck-Morss hefur með þessari bók sinni staðið sig með prýði og veitt ótal lesendum ákveðið kort til að styðja sig við áður en haldið er inn í það völundarhús sem er Verslunarsalaverkefnið.
Mæli eindregið með fyrir öll þau sem eru að íhuga að hætta sér í Verslunarsalaverkefnið.
April 27, 2008
Buck-Morss is the most capable and astute of current Benjamin commentators.
March 8, 2023
O interessante desse comentário absurdamente bem construído que a Susan Buck-Morss faz da obra benjaminiana é a sua capacidade de encontrar uma espécie de fio condutor em uma filosofia tão marcada pelo aspecto do fragmento, mas de uma maneira que não empobrece o pensamento de Walter Benjamin e nem o transforma em uma espécie de espantalho de si mesmo.
Por meio da identificação de um interesse político e histórico que perpassaria Benjamin nas distintas fases de seu pensamento, Susan Buck-Morss é capaz de organizar as ideias benjaminianas em seu tempo e fazer, se apropriando da própria forma que o autor encara a relação existente entre presente e passado dentro da história, apontamentos quanto à realidade presente. Comentário filosófico de altíssima qualidade que deveria ser trazido pro Brasil, possivelmente talvez em uma nova tradução, pra dar uma chacoalhada nos cursos e nas pesquisas em Benjamin que pipocam nas universidades.
Por meio da identificação de um interesse político e histórico que perpassaria Benjamin nas distintas fases de seu pensamento, Susan Buck-Morss é capaz de organizar as ideias benjaminianas em seu tempo e fazer, se apropriando da própria forma que o autor encara a relação existente entre presente e passado dentro da história, apontamentos quanto à realidade presente. Comentário filosófico de altíssima qualidade que deveria ser trazido pro Brasil, possivelmente talvez em uma nova tradução, pra dar uma chacoalhada nos cursos e nas pesquisas em Benjamin que pipocam nas universidades.
December 14, 2024
Wonderful. One of the clearest accounts of Benjamin's later work I've come across, very readable, while preserving the stakes and not falsely casting him as seller of a merely interesting form of aesthetic critique. I plan to recommend part one to friends who want to get into Benjamin but don't know how to approach his wide-ranging and, admittedly, often strange and difficult body of work. I particularly loved the section on "fetish" and his notion of 19th century capitalism as hell.
Currently reading
May 5, 2011My friend bought this for me for my birthday with an epigram, "Don't read this."
October 24, 2012
Such a well written and interesting academic book. Contextualizes Benjamin's Arcades project in his own vision, the ideas that influenced him, and finally, in the modern post-WW2 context.
January 21, 2024
This book has been sitting on my shelf waiting for me to read it for at least 25 years now. Why didn't I get to it sooner considering my long term interest in Benjamin and the Frankfurt School? Who knows? Maybe the book and I both knew that the time wasn't ripe yet for me to absorb what was inside. Whatever the case, I'm more than happy to have finally cracked its pages and begun. Especially after recently finishing Pensky's Melancholy Dialectics as I feel they compliment each other quite well.
MD concentrates on Benjamin's examination of allegory through German baroque tragic drama, Baudelaire and the surrealists. Its focus is on Benjamin's belief that although these genres, movements and artists used material objects to philosophically describe their broken world they all failed for numerous reasons that all had some connection to the melancholic lack of actual praxis. For Benjamin the goal was to break free of melancholy - which was coupled with subjective interpretations leading to a void of relativity - and use these material objects to create the lightning bolt of objective redemptive and revolutionary truth.
In The Dialectics of Seeing, Buck-Morss uses Benjamin's lifelong work on his Arcades Project to also show how he concentrated on historical material objects to attempt this revolutionary lightning bolt of redemption for society. I had always been a bit confused about what exactly Benjamin meant by historical material dialectics, and Buck-Morss does an excellent job of clarification in this area. What's more, she uses example after example to demonstrate what Benjamin was on about (something I always found lacking in Benjamin himself).
I think one reason I always held off from starting TDoS was that I was worried it would be a bit too complicated for me. That fear seems to have been unfounded, as Buck-Morss is an extremely clear writer. Sure, perhaps that feels true because of the other books I've read recently and in the past, and again, there is always this chicken and egg feeling with these things (I believe I've previously mentioned Lacan in this regard). Yet even so I feel that the writing of Buck-Morss is very approachable, and anyone who has even a remote interest in this area should get to it post haste.
If I have one negative thing to say it's not about Buck-Morss or this work, but instead about Benjamin himself. More so in Melancholy Dialectics than in this book, but still in both, Benjamin argues for and assumes that his thought and method of criticism and analysis will be different than those he is writing about. The German baroque playwrights eventually abandoned material objects when their lack of ultimate meaning, their sliding of interpretation and some ultimate referent, led them into a dark deep void where only theology (the transcendental over the material) could save them in the end. Baudelaire stuck with objects until the end but ultimately never got farther than a powerless anger and bile. The surrealists similar but ending in a sense of Play that lacked any revolutionary strength.
Benjamin thought he was different. That his method of dialectic materialism was a lightning bolt that would lead society to new objective truths of meaning and praxis. It was certainly a worthwhile goal. But can Meaning ever really be objective? In the end, weren't Benjamin's constellations of objects from the near past telescoped into his present merely just another person's subjective truth or meaning? Could they ever be anything more?
I believe there is one objective truth Benjamin might have showed us, which is that it is possible for individuals to have experiences that change them. Change their thinking and in some cases everything about them. Perhaps this is close to Badiou's Event, and the Truth of that Event leads to an ethics of carrying that Truth forward in your life and, if convincing enough, the lives of those around you. Maybe instead of subjective and objective truths, we should talk about strong and weak truths. Truths that others might share or perhaps you can convince them to share, and truths that even you on a dark night aren't sure you even believe.
In any event, this book not only made me want to read more Benjamin, but also affected my thinking about several topics and for that it deserves my deep appreciation.
MD concentrates on Benjamin's examination of allegory through German baroque tragic drama, Baudelaire and the surrealists. Its focus is on Benjamin's belief that although these genres, movements and artists used material objects to philosophically describe their broken world they all failed for numerous reasons that all had some connection to the melancholic lack of actual praxis. For Benjamin the goal was to break free of melancholy - which was coupled with subjective interpretations leading to a void of relativity - and use these material objects to create the lightning bolt of objective redemptive and revolutionary truth.
In The Dialectics of Seeing, Buck-Morss uses Benjamin's lifelong work on his Arcades Project to also show how he concentrated on historical material objects to attempt this revolutionary lightning bolt of redemption for society. I had always been a bit confused about what exactly Benjamin meant by historical material dialectics, and Buck-Morss does an excellent job of clarification in this area. What's more, she uses example after example to demonstrate what Benjamin was on about (something I always found lacking in Benjamin himself).
I think one reason I always held off from starting TDoS was that I was worried it would be a bit too complicated for me. That fear seems to have been unfounded, as Buck-Morss is an extremely clear writer. Sure, perhaps that feels true because of the other books I've read recently and in the past, and again, there is always this chicken and egg feeling with these things (I believe I've previously mentioned Lacan in this regard). Yet even so I feel that the writing of Buck-Morss is very approachable, and anyone who has even a remote interest in this area should get to it post haste.
If I have one negative thing to say it's not about Buck-Morss or this work, but instead about Benjamin himself. More so in Melancholy Dialectics than in this book, but still in both, Benjamin argues for and assumes that his thought and method of criticism and analysis will be different than those he is writing about. The German baroque playwrights eventually abandoned material objects when their lack of ultimate meaning, their sliding of interpretation and some ultimate referent, led them into a dark deep void where only theology (the transcendental over the material) could save them in the end. Baudelaire stuck with objects until the end but ultimately never got farther than a powerless anger and bile. The surrealists similar but ending in a sense of Play that lacked any revolutionary strength.
Benjamin thought he was different. That his method of dialectic materialism was a lightning bolt that would lead society to new objective truths of meaning and praxis. It was certainly a worthwhile goal. But can Meaning ever really be objective? In the end, weren't Benjamin's constellations of objects from the near past telescoped into his present merely just another person's subjective truth or meaning? Could they ever be anything more?
I believe there is one objective truth Benjamin might have showed us, which is that it is possible for individuals to have experiences that change them. Change their thinking and in some cases everything about them. Perhaps this is close to Badiou's Event, and the Truth of that Event leads to an ethics of carrying that Truth forward in your life and, if convincing enough, the lives of those around you. Maybe instead of subjective and objective truths, we should talk about strong and weak truths. Truths that others might share or perhaps you can convince them to share, and truths that even you on a dark night aren't sure you even believe.
In any event, this book not only made me want to read more Benjamin, but also affected my thinking about several topics and for that it deserves my deep appreciation.
August 3, 2021
Susan Buck-Morss’ book is an extremely detailed and thorough review of Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project – an incomplete assemblage of fragmentary essays, reviews, dreams and such, in a similar vein to his One Way Street compilation, where “The principle of construction is that of montage, whereby the image’s ideational elements remain unreconciled, rather than fusing into one ‘harmonising perspective’.” She makes reference to the the fact that at several points in her seven year investigation she was tempted to simply surrender to “semiotic free fall” and label the work ‘postmodern’ and be done with it, but felt that it deserved more.
Dialectics implies simultaneity, juxtaposing binary pairs of linguistic, symbolic or ideological themes, and it seems therefore suitable that the book should look at the work from several perspectives, and keep shifting its view of the work, from within Benjamin’s mindset, to the cultural context, to the history of philosophy and so on. Benjamin set out, as she notes, to create “not a philosophy of history, but philosophy out of history.”
Whilst I have intense admiration for the work, and I think it is both valuable and necessary reading for Benjamin fans, there is a point at which too much information stifles the creativity. Similar to how a joke that needs to be explained stops being funny, or a magic trick revealed loses its magic, this book reveals so much that there’s not much left to the imagination. Careful reading however identifies the sentences that you are looking for, such as “Benjamin’s philosophy is the anti-idealist construction of the intelligible world” on page 175.
Buck-Morss quotes Benjamin as saying “a presentation of confusion need not be the same as a confused presentation.” Her review is anything but confused or incomplete, and perhaps, because of that, because it is so different to the free-flowing ambiguity of Benjamin’s incomplete work, something feels ‘off.’ Ironically, by having nothing missing, something is lost.
Dialectics implies simultaneity, juxtaposing binary pairs of linguistic, symbolic or ideological themes, and it seems therefore suitable that the book should look at the work from several perspectives, and keep shifting its view of the work, from within Benjamin’s mindset, to the cultural context, to the history of philosophy and so on. Benjamin set out, as she notes, to create “not a philosophy of history, but philosophy out of history.”
Whilst I have intense admiration for the work, and I think it is both valuable and necessary reading for Benjamin fans, there is a point at which too much information stifles the creativity. Similar to how a joke that needs to be explained stops being funny, or a magic trick revealed loses its magic, this book reveals so much that there’s not much left to the imagination. Careful reading however identifies the sentences that you are looking for, such as “Benjamin’s philosophy is the anti-idealist construction of the intelligible world” on page 175.
Buck-Morss quotes Benjamin as saying “a presentation of confusion need not be the same as a confused presentation.” Her review is anything but confused or incomplete, and perhaps, because of that, because it is so different to the free-flowing ambiguity of Benjamin’s incomplete work, something feels ‘off.’ Ironically, by having nothing missing, something is lost.
January 12, 2025
Walter Benjamin trabajo durante mucho tiempo en un libro que nunca llegó a publicar, se trata de el libro de los pasajes del cual conservamos la mayoría de las notas que fueron tomadas por el autor para así poder abordar diferentes temas. No realizado el libro lo que nos queda son las citas , eso es lo que conservamos un montaje de citas.
Entre ellos se encuentran las relaciones de producción y también la manera que el público tiene de relacionarse con los objetos que se ponen a la venta y si el fetichismo de la mercancía está causando estragos en una sociedad ávida de consumo.
Los instintos de la masa es una frase utilizada por Benjamin que se refiere a todos aquellos que se dejan arrastrar por ideas que directamente les llevan a la perdición y, no se realmente si conscientemente, caminan hacia ello. Algunos de los regímenes autoritarios del siglo XX se materializan en ello.
Junto al fetiche, la moda, lo nuevo y la novedad, la capacidad del sistema para mostrar esas novedades y crear un deseo que tal vez es solo artificial, pero efectivo para el sistema sirven para analizar algunos fenómenos como las Exposiciones Universales que son espejos en los que los propios escaparates se miran a la hora de ofrecer sus productos.
Las novedades se suceden sin pausa, la producción cada vez es mayor y algunos fenómenos como la fotografía o mas tarde el cine van a cambiar la manera de percepción del espectador y la relación que este tiene con la imagen.
Gran parte del pensamiento de Benjamin se encuentra en este concienzudo y bien articulado trabajo que puede completarse con otros textos de Walter Benajmin como "Calle de sentido único" o "Breve historia de la fotografía".
Entre ellos se encuentran las relaciones de producción y también la manera que el público tiene de relacionarse con los objetos que se ponen a la venta y si el fetichismo de la mercancía está causando estragos en una sociedad ávida de consumo.
Los instintos de la masa es una frase utilizada por Benjamin que se refiere a todos aquellos que se dejan arrastrar por ideas que directamente les llevan a la perdición y, no se realmente si conscientemente, caminan hacia ello. Algunos de los regímenes autoritarios del siglo XX se materializan en ello.
Junto al fetiche, la moda, lo nuevo y la novedad, la capacidad del sistema para mostrar esas novedades y crear un deseo que tal vez es solo artificial, pero efectivo para el sistema sirven para analizar algunos fenómenos como las Exposiciones Universales que son espejos en los que los propios escaparates se miran a la hora de ofrecer sus productos.
Las novedades se suceden sin pausa, la producción cada vez es mayor y algunos fenómenos como la fotografía o mas tarde el cine van a cambiar la manera de percepción del espectador y la relación que este tiene con la imagen.
Gran parte del pensamiento de Benjamin se encuentra en este concienzudo y bien articulado trabajo que puede completarse con otros textos de Walter Benajmin como "Calle de sentido único" o "Breve historia de la fotografía".
May 25, 2025
I’ve waited some almost 20 years to read this book. It was recommended to me a couple decades ago by a colleague, and has always sat on the shelf, looking at me, not so much laughing as saying wait, our time will come. It was wonderful. Like spending time with one of the world’s great people, Walter, Benjamin. Very intimate, inspiring, almost unattainably intellectual, lots of talk of dialectics and materialism. The theory, the text are both so dense. I can’t believe I finally got through this. But I couldn’t read anything else for the last couple of weeks. It’s been something of a bottleneck. Let alone, having waited these nearly 20 years. Worth the weight. Complicated.Very timely for what I’m doing now. Extra extraordinary to see the true lines related to work we have coming up at the ICA, namely, the Stephanie Dinkins project.
May 13, 2017
A stimulating and exciting introduction to what is one of the most obscure, unique, and mysterious texts I've encountered. Benjamin truly is unlike any other thinker.
Read
October 8, 2019Seriously breathtaking scholarship.
June 22, 2021
This book are addictive.
May 11, 2022
A beautiful picture book encyclopedia of Benjamin’s life and thought.
April 12, 2024
sorprendentemente me aclaro en un autor q pensaba tener ya claro, muy buenas explicaciones aunque quizás en algún momento puntual pueda pecar de ingenua en alguna interpretación
October 24, 2024
so good it got me sending a thank you emails to Susan Hoca
April 3, 2025
de lo mejorcito de este siglo
September 22, 2025
Buck Mors siempre hace libros muy especiales.
October 14, 2016
An erudite, beautifully written overview of Benjamin's work. I recommend reading Benjamin's major essays —particularly "Theses on the Philosophy of History," "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," and the Baudelaire essays — before starting this book. It's not an easy read, but anyone immersed in Benjamin won't be daunted by that.
January 4, 2012
This is one of the most insightful philosophical commentaries around--not merely exclusive to Benjamin commentaries. I mean to say it is one of the most insightful commentaries, period. This book opened up Benjamin (as well as dialectical reasoning and critical social theory) to me in ways unanticipated. Highly recommend.
July 7, 2010
Fine book. Extremely helpful understanding both Benjamin and what he attempted and what he managed to achieve. Very inspiring storytelling, very smart analysis. A good time was had by all.
October 5, 2009
it's a good analysis of the arcades project. it helps clarify a lot of insight in which benjamin leaves extremely ambiguous. has to be read coinciding with the the arcades project or after.
November 1, 2011
Muy buena investigación sobre un libro tan especial como el "Passagenwek" de Walter Benjamin.
books-interrupted
August 29, 2008But what I read was really good.
December 29, 2014
This book was a great support for reading Benjamin's The Arcades project. Recommended.
March 28, 2017
Benjamin is the Messi of hermeneutic Marxism.
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