**Hi all – I posted my post #3 response to the wrong blog site last week. My bad!**

The Arcades Project represents a collection of Walter Benjamin’s notes, organized into “convolutes,” concerning the Paris arcades. Benjamin considered the arcades to be “the most important architectural form of the nineteenth century” (ix) that embodied the social, political, and cultural trends of the time. The arcade, as the physical representation of bourgeois and capitalist ideals, provides evidence of the growing gap between the public and private spheres. The advent of capitalism and consumerism complicated and changed conceptions of the public and private, and how individuals identified and defined themselves within the workplace and the domestic sphere. (There was a quote somewhere about increasing tobacco use and its popularization by Louis-Philippe’s sons I found interesting. It described how practice started in smaller, private establishments and then spread into more generally accepted public use, and it made a brief comment on the impact on human health from this increased sale and use of tobacco.)

Benjamin’s text is a varied, though ordered, collection of images and cultural traces of the nineteenth century. There were various new types of cultural materials that could be produced with new technologies, like the daguerreotype, and these new technologies and trends are the topics of many featured quotes in the text. All of the documented quotes and objects are connected to particular historical trends, technologies, and moments in the nineteenth century. In this way, the reader is able to reconstruct the changes taking place during this time period, viewing and comprehending them through the eyes (or voices) of its contemporaries.

Benjamin includes a quote from Grenoble that states: “The past has left images of itself in literary texts” and the “future alone possess developers active enough to scan such surfaces perfectly” (482). In Arcades, Benjamin attempted to recreate the arcades and Paris with a structure of meaning within this particular historical context. These he compiled for future “developers” to interpret and reconstruct this society for themselves. The concept of official “history” is part of the dream that Benjamin wanted readers to use dialectical thinking to awaken from.