The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project

As is well known Walter Benjamin devoted his unfinished magnum opus to arcades, the covered shopping galleries that emerged in the mid 19th century, as the central image revealing the economic, socio-political, and cultural features of that era. From Benjamin’s point of view these were the direct material embodiment of self-consciousness, or rather, of an unconscious society fascinated by the capitalist spectacle unfolding before its eyes. Arcades reflect all the errors and shortcomings of bourgeois consciousness — commodity fetishism, reification, taking the world as a “thing in itself”, they reflect its utopian fantasies (fashion, prostitution, and gambling). In addition, they represented the first truly…