In the context of many readings regarding collecting and archiving, it’s hard not to see Walter Benjamin’s scrapbook-style text, particularly “Convolutes,” as a hoard—an amassed pile of thoughts, reflections, photos, journal fragments, textual excerpts, and images of nineteenth-century (mostly Parisian, or at least Western) culture rendered through language. Through the litany of traces—“the rags, the refuse”—of the nineteenth-century culture and economy, and from thinkers and writers of the time, Benjamin attempts to undercut the singular (or maybe binary-based) narrative that often entraps historiographers (460). In fact, he quite clearly announces his intentions to ‘show’ instead of ‘tell’ through his method of “literary montage,” which renders a multitude of connections that a reader can follow like a single thread in a tangled mass.

The composition seems distinctly postmodern (although too early to be so?), including meta-discussions of the method itself—for example, the metaphor of the climber looking over a “panorama”—and utilizing juxtaposition rather than linear thought (461). However, other qualities seem to reflect the architecture of the arcade itself. In “Convolutes,” some fragments have thematic labels, such as “Weather” and “Awakening,” which suggests one thread that a reader could untangle—or, in terms of architecture, one store that a patron could duck into, the items ‘for sale’ displayed based on a theme. Each section of “Convolutes,” encyclopedia-like, also includes clear titles, which seems to serve as categories of thought—like placards labeling the offerings of a store. Section “O” really is about prostitution and gambling, although it includes everything from journal quotes that discuss women’s virtues to lists of names (“prostitutes, grisettes, old-hag shopkeepers…”) to reflections on the economic functions of prostitution (“the dialectical function of money in prostitution”) and so on (492-494). With Benjamin’s reflections (e.g. “Years of reckless financial speculation under Louis XVIII. With dramatic signage of the magasins de nouveautés, art enters the service of the businessman”) hanging next to photos, fragments of text from journals, book excerpts, or even lists (e.g. a list of arcade names), this cut-and-paste arrangement doesn’t put his ideas and gut reactions (“The influence of commercial affairs on Lautréamont and Rimbaud should be looked into!”) ‘in conversation with’ the “rags” as much as include his thoughts like water droplets in a indistinguishable river of droplets whose only connection is the time period—the universe that they briefly share (34, 37).

These chapters of amassed ephemera relating to notable subjects of the century do have a slight quality of what a researcher may see or take away from an archive. However, Benjamin has tried to include “everything one is thinking at a specific moment in time,” unlike a historian with a hypothesis would transcribe into their notebook in a reading room or the archivists themselves may choose to preserve. If Benjamin’s work reflects any archive—or a semblance of an archive, or maybe all archives—The Arcades Project reveals the actions of both the archiving itself and (the absence of) the historian’s development of a narrative from that archive. Benjamin has collected text like objects (more so images, in his terms), numbered them and put them in “folders.” This act could appear as a commentary on the archive, but Benjamin’s goals seem just as readily applicable to the researcher or the historian than the archivist. On a basic level, Benjamin shows that an archive is a composition, always, because it’s been collected and arranged. The archivist and a historian are composers. The best solution is to allow for as many interpretations as possible by resisting dialectical tendencies and swimming in a sort of echo chamber of language that holds all thoughts distinct but equal through form.

In “Exposés,” Benjamin states that “dialectical thinking is the organ of historical awakening” (13). Since Benjamin may have believed that synthesizing two ends of a binary does not lead to truth, but instead to typecasting, to novelty, to commodification, to myth, to the lie of progress, did he attempt to “include everything” in this manuscript to resist dialectical thinking in order to prevent “historical awakening”– to resist the archive? Or did Benjamin see himself “eternalizing” the nineteenth century and making the “progress” of that time a part of the performed routines of “history”–a master archive of archives (26)?