At the outset of Forwards in The Arcades Project, Benjamin’s intention and purpose are stated as “to grasp such diverse material under the general category of signifying the ‘primal history’ of the nineteenth century” (ix) and “to document as concretely as possible, and thus lend a ‘heightened graphicness’ to, the scene of revolutionary change that was the nineteenth century” (xii). At the first glance, this kind of aspiration appears to be an impossible collective dream. However, the historical configuration of archive shapes itself by the awakening of recording, collecting, analyzing, filing, which, finally, turns out to make itself come true.

Consideration should be given to “wholly unique experience of dialectic” (389), which manifests the archive in the way of continuous reversal, introspection and enlightenment. In this process, the fact that archive reveals itself as an awakening method, rather than comply with the gradual developing history, suffice to put diverse time and space together into the whole system of archive.

“The new, dialectical method of doing history presents itself as the art of experiencing the present as waking world, a world to which that dream we name the past refers in truth. To pass through and carry out what has been in remembering the dream!-Therefore: remembering and awaking are most intimately related. Awakening is namely the dialectical, Copernican turn of remembrance. [Kl,3]” In this sense, the dialectical method provides a way researching into the documentary and the art of archive from both sociological and psychological aspects. The inside of the “what has happened” is not only a single universe that conducts the operation of archive or shapes the inherent concept we originally regard it to be, but miscellaneous personal experiences and thoughts that integrate each other throughout different time and space as well.

In On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress, the positive and negative elements on the cultural-historical dialectic are investigated as a methodology in archive that encompasses the understanding of history. The “dialectical image”, a central term of The Arcades Project, casts a light on the interpretation of time and space of the silent documentary. “In the dialectical image…it is manifest, on each occasion, only to a quite specific epoch-namely, the one in which humanity, rubbing its eyes, recognizes just this particular dream image as such. It is at this moment that the historian takes up, with regard to that image, the task of dream interpretation. [N4,1]” (464). This is an interesting part of the “dialectical image” theory that regardless of the far-away living space in different stages of history, the objects that may have been forgotten for a long time suddenly come to live due to the dialectical thinking about the past. Time and space have a reunion and the realization of the collective dream reconstructed itself from thousands of ramifications which encompass the combination of time and space by the dialectical method.

In the “Exposes of 1935,” Benjamin writes,

The realization of dream elements, in the course of waking up, is the paradigm of dialectical thinking. Thus, dialectical thinking is the organ of historical awakening. Every epoch, in fact, not only dreams the one to follow but, in dreaming, precipitates its awakening. It bears its end within itself and unfolds it—as Hegel already noticed—by cunning (5)

Here, I believe is where we see the crux of Benjamin’s project, encompassing his rules and aspirations alike: to create an organ of historical awakening by bearing its existence and its end within itself.

This process begins in the text that precedes the “Convolutes” with Benjamin’s conversation of the commodified objects of industrial capitalism. Particularly in the vying for separation of the industrial and the artistic, Benjamin notes the commodification of things in their transition from value-in-use to value-in-existence. He then uses this idea to reflect the capitalist commodification of people by juxtaposing the differentiation between the work sphere and the home sphere—a realm where one is useful, to the utopia of home, where one can collect the commodified art and all “things are free from the drudgery of being useful” (6). Benjamin writes that through the collection, “the irreal center makes its place in the home…the interior is the asylum of art [and] the collector is the true resident of the interior” (6). The ideas surrounding the privatization of the home, which come from the capitalist allowance of private ownership, are here displayed as commodified in itself; the home becomes an object of spectacle and uselessness that encompasses the collection and its collector. Benjamin carries the commodification of humans, by both themselves and others, to the idea of the archive writing, “‘The History of Civilization’…makes an inventory, point by point, of humanity’s life forms and creations” (14). So, not only has art and humanity been commodified by industrial capitalism, but the cycle continues with humanity’s urge to commodify their existence in and through the archive.

Benjamin then applies this idea of the commodification that has permeated humanity and society as a whole through the ideas of capitalism to the literary. Writing from the onset of globalization, Benjamin demonstrates the fragmented form of the Capitalist world in the organization and piecing of his text, while rejecting the commodification that it prescribes via the content of the text. Furthermore, he utilizes archiving—a practice that he has already equated with capitalist commodification—in inventorying texts that reject and/or challenge the social situation within which the practice of archiving thrives. Herein, he creates the organ, or the dialectic with which he hopes to promote historical awakening. By displaying the “convolutes” both in the form of—and using a method encompassed by—industrialized Capitalist society, Benjamin produces a dialectic that initiates a reflection on society by its members.

Considering the collection from the view of the dialectic in play, it seems as though the boundaries of the text collection—whether outright or discrete—are that it must continue the dialectic by providing content that in some way forces the reader to reflect back upon capitalist society. Furthermore, it must do so in orchestration using archiving–a commodifying act–alongside a form that resonates with Capitalist globalization. Within this dialectical presentation that encompasses the present state of Benjamin’s society and views alternate to that of the bourgeoisie middle class, is found the potentiality to awaken history to its alterability.

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)?

After a brief glance at Rolf Tiedemann’s essay, which appears at the end of the English translation of The Arcades Project (which used to be the introductory essay to the original German), it seems Tiedemann speculates that had The Arcades Project been “finished” it would have offered “nothing less than a materialist philosophy of the history of the nineteenth century”—no small accomplishment (929). However, seeming not to lament a work interrupted, Tiedemann suggests that most of Benjamin’s central theoretical concerns, while present in The Arcades Project, were developed and exist in a more comprehensive forms in his other essays and publications. And so, intended or not, to remain unfinished appears to be a governing principle of Benjamin’s masterwork.

Can there be intention in (un)intention? Some version of this question seems central to the structure and thought of the text. And, if this text is to be considered as archive (unfinished) the question of how to delimit its contents needs to be asked. How does one respond to the dialectical image—the “genuinely historical” image? Is the archive drive that response?

Every present day is determined by the images that are synchronic with it: each “now” is the now of a particular recognizability. In it, truth is charged to the bursting point with time. (This point of explosion, and nothing else, is the death of the intentio, which thus coincides with the birth of authentic historical time, the time of truth.) It is not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words: image is dialectics at a standstill. [N3,1]

In other words this dialectical image in the now of its recognizability seems (from my limited reading so far) to be not just a theoretical element in The Arcades Project, but also a key to its structure. It is an idea that applies to the incomplete nature of the text as well as (in my mind) illuminates Benjamin’s method of reading and recording: collecting. The now signals the simultaneous death of intention and the birth of truth—a truth that is experienced (felt). I can’t help but imagine that the numerous citations and responses accumulated in The Arcades Project are record of Benjamin’s own flashes of the now deep in the stacks of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris.

Since rescue of the dialectical image is an impossibility—the image inevitably lost to successive serial moments—the idea, as concrete structure, remains ambiguous [N9,7]. And maybe the idea becomes more elucidatory in terms of method.

Initially, when I think of “method” what comes to mind is the scientific method (defined, organized), or methods of artists or composers for example the Suzuki method to violin, or the Abramovic method of performance, etc. While “method” suggests in these cases something definitive by naming, The Arcades Project as “archive-as-method” proposes something less proven—a method that becomes form not as a means towards production, rather as means towards actualization: unfinished, ragged, a collection (its collector “resident of the interior”), The Arcades Project is a method of “fathoming” [N2a,4]. Trace this image: a weighted line thrown from a ship: the line jumps as knots tied to measure depth clip at regular intervals over the rail—disruptions, resistances to the tug of the weight. Or, in the resounding once the weight strikes the sea floor—the line vibrating. Arcades is anti-method: “Progress has its seat not in the continuity of elapsing time but in its interferences—where the truly new makes itself felt for the first time, with the sobriety of dawn” [N9a,7].

[Train] like Lumèrie’s train, again here, the metaphor of temporal continuity

(not progress)

Here, though instead of the photogenic moment (external)

—the train passing through the point of intersection between the three main spatial directions—the bodies in the interior of the train [car]: their stasis

now illuminated, now recognizable

as passengers in that they are not moving [given that they are not moving]

—at what intersection are they—what shock or

explosion into the now?

One thing that stands out to me is the balance – or, really, the explicit lack of balance – between Benjamin’s “reflections” and citations (his original or synthesizing thoughts versus his quotations.)

I think the reason why this interests me returns to the tensions in the translator’s preface between Forschung and Darstellung, or research and application: there is, despite the fact that the project remained unfinished, some desire still remains to treat this more as a composition than a commonplace book. In the translators’ view, the quotations outweighing the commentaries makes this text distinctive from Benjamin’s other use of the montage, and they suggest at least the possibility of reading “this ostensible patchwork as, de facto, a determinate literary form, one that has effectively constructed itself” (xi).

I’m a bit resistant to this logic; it almost seems to confuse organization with composition. (Is Milton’s commonplace book a new literary form in the same way – having both quotations and reflections, though primarily quotations — or is it a private form of record-keeping? If Milton had been more interested in the montage in his explicitly literary pursuits, would that change the answer?) Of course, if the Arcades is an archive, in a way this answers (or at least sidesteps) the question: it organizes and revises for the sake of information management. “Why revise for a notebook?” (xi) Well, for no reason, if a notebook is just meant to be a short-term memory aid or a brainstorming technique – but if it’s meant to be a reference, even if just for one individual’s use, organization and clarification seem like a normal approach.

Clearly the intent (and, orthogonal to the intent, the actual purpose or usefulness to external readers) of the convolutes was what stuck with me, and I found myself interested in the proportion of reflections to citations; this might have been in large part due to the typographic distinction, which I was interested to learn didn’t come from Benjamin himself but from the German editor. I was interested in the English version’s preservation of these distinctions as well as curious about Tiedemann’s logic in deciding when a passage contained enough of Benjamin’s own analysis to become distinct from a quotation: there is some principle which makes [O3a,1] a reflection and [O7a, 1] a citation, and I am not sure what that is, although I wonder if in at least some cases the language of notation is the deciding factor.

Whatever the reason for my interest, I found that the ratios changed from section to section: I at first thought that section X, [Marx], was particularly dependent on pure quotation with not much ‘original’ reflection, and wondered whether this was due to the topic at hand or to the section being late in the book and therefore possibly less developed. (The sections thin out and are in fact often missing toward the end of the book, and I reasoned that the next step after a very thinned-out section might be a section with significant quotations but fewer original thoughts, positioned firmly within the realm of preliminary research.)

Then I wondered whether I was imagining the difference in general; J [Baudelaire] and N [On The Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress] both seem to have significantly more of Benjamin’s own thoughts (in J it seems about even across the long section, while N is predominantly Benjamin’s thoughts). But P, [The Streets of Paris], seems to lean almost as heavily in the direction of quotations as X — though interestingly it did take me until the second read-through to notice this, and I’m not sure what to make of that experience. Why did the ratio strike me as off for X where a similar one didn’t for P? Another way of asking that question might be: was this a trick of my reading order (or my Marxist-saturated brain), or is there something about the subject of P that makes the sheer process of collecting and juxtaposing citations intuitively read (to me at least) as more…analytical, creative, compositional, a work-in-itself?

Of course, it may be a combination of all of these: because The Arcades Project is in the particular unfinished state it’s in, we can never be sure whether eventual work on the project would have smoothed out these differences or whether certain sections would have maintained noticeably different ratios. And even that statement preserves the idea of it as an archive rather than a draft or a literary text: I’m thinking about the possibility of Benjamin “completing” it by doing more work along this method or by signposting his information management in a clearer way, rather than by overwriting and displacing whatever we have here the moment he wrote “a syllable of the actual text” (xi, emphasis mine.)