The Mall Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project

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The Mall Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project

3/10/2010 GEOG 325 – Lecture 3 Outline • walter benjamin’s arcades project • the mall The Mall • dead malls Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) German-Jewish Social Theorist • Art and technology • Marxism and Psychoanalysis • Modernity and History • Hashish walter benjamin’s • Consumption arcades project The Arcades Paris, late 19th C. rise of capitalism produced new spaces of consumption e.g. boulevards, cafés, arcades 1 3/10/2010 The Arcades Project •“Passagenwerk”, never published magnum opus, fragmentary writings, 1927-1940 • Baron Haussmann’s renovation of Paris duringgp( Second French Empire (1852-1870) • 36 categories e.g. "Fashion," "Boredom," "Dream City," "Photography," "Catacombs," "Advertising," "Prostitution," "Baudelaire," and "Theory of Progress." "dream- and wish-image of the collective” “a dialectical image” pointing in two directions: expressive of both oppression (by the ideology of consumption and liberation (a 24 hour utopia of Plenty) “Temples of commodity capitalism” the mall The Mall: Malls R Us (2008) The Mall • Range of retail outlets and entertainment facilities within an enclosed space • Usually privately owned and managed • First enclosed mall built in Canada: Park Royal Shopping Centre, West Vancouver, BC. 2 3/10/2010 The Mall Colerain Avenue, Ohio, USA • Ubiquitous feature of the landscape of urban areas in both developed and developing countries • Understood as theaters of a “retail drama” (Hopkins, 1991: 270), leisure spaces, tourist attractions, sites of collective dreaming, pleasure, and diversion, and strolling for the flâneur (stroller). The Mall • Representational spaces of spectacle, fantasy, and escapism • Production of nostalgia (for past places and Lougheed Mall, Burnaby times and the ‘authentic’), carnivalesque, Metrotown, Burnaby magic and fantasy • Purvey myths of “elsewhereness” (Hopkins, 1990) that manipulate time/space to evoke idealizations of other places beyond Park Royal, North Mall, W. Vancouver everyday life Yaohan Centre (八佰伴中心), Richmond 3 3/10/2010 Goss’s Mall Goss’s Mall • “Modernity is the contradictory • “Depth ontology” (p.48) Truth = hidden structures experience of a nostalgia born of • Jouissance = Enjoyment alienation from an authentic nature, Self, • Eros = Life forces of love and other, and anticipation of the • Kinesthetic = beauty of movement development of technological and social • Allegory = MtiMysterious para bl(t)ble (story) means to realize ‘immanent totality’ • Symbolic Order = Cultural rules/customs (Lukacs 1971) [coincidence of personal • The Real = sublime phenomena beyond language desire and cosmos]” (p. 48). e.g. anxiety, enjoyment • False consiousness = delusory state of mind caused by capitalism Dawn of the Dead (1974, 2004) dead malls 4 3/10/2010 5 3/10/2010 conclusions • Walter Benjamin’s work on European consumption has influenced research on malls • Geographers have focused on the mall as a space of commodified space offf fant asy, nost al gi a, and playfulness, as well as security and control • The 2000s have witnessed the death of malls throughout North America next lecture “Food” 6.

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LARGE PRINT the ARCADES Contemporary Art and Walter
LARGE PRINT The ARCADES Contemporary Art and Walter Benjamin Please return to the exhibition entrance when finished Elevator lobby THE ARCADES: CONTEMPORARY ART AND WALTER BENJAMIN A Arcades, Magasins de Nouveautés, Sales Clerks B Fashion C Ancient Paris, Catacombs, Demolitions, Decline of Paris D Boredom, Eternal Return E Haussmannization, Barricade Fighting F Iron Construction G Exhibitions, Advertising, Grandville H The Collector I The Interior, The Trace J Baudelaire K Dream City and Dream House, Dreams of the Future, Anthropological Nihilism, Jung L Dream House, Museum, Spa M The Flâneur N On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress O Prostitution, Gambling 1 P The Streets of Paris Q Panorama R Mirrors S Painting, Jugendstil, Novelty T Modes of Lighting U Saint-Simon, Railroads V Conspiracies, Compagnonnage W Fourier X Marx Y Photography Z The Doll, The Automaton a Social Movement b Daumier d Literary History, Hugo g The Stock Exchange, Economic History i Reproduction Technology, Lithography k The Commune l The Siene, The Oldest Paris m Idleness p Anthropological Materialism, History of Sects r École Polytechnique 2 ARTISTS Erica Baum Walead Beshty Milena Bonilla Andrea Bowers Nicholas Buffon Chris Burden Haris Epaminonda and Daniel Gustav Cramer Simon Evans Walker Evans Claire Fontaine Lee Friedlander Rodney Graham Andreas Gursky Raymond Hains Pierre Huyghe Voluspa Jarpa Jesper Just Sanya Kantarovsky Mike Kelley Tim Lee Jorge Macchi Adam Pendleton Martín Ramírez 3 Bill Rauhauser Mary Reid Kelley Ry Rocklen Markus Schinwald Collier Schorr Cindy Sherman Taryn Simon Joel Sternfeld Mungo Thomson Timm Ulrichs James Welling Guido van der Werve Cerith Wyn Evans 4 Anne & Bernard Spitzer Gallery Introduction THE ARCADES: CONTEMPORARY ART AND WALTER BENJAMIN The Arcades Project is the final, unfinished masterwork of the great twentieth-century Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin.
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The Velvet Touch: Fashion, Furniture, and the Fabric of the Interior
Fashion Theory The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture ISSN: 1362-704X (Print) 1751-7419 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfft20 The Velvet Touch: Fashion, Furniture, and the Fabric of the Interior Freyja Hartzell To cite this article: Freyja Hartzell (2009) The Velvet Touch: Fashion, Furniture, and the Fabric of the Interior, Fashion Theory, 13:1, 51-81 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.2752/175174109X381328 Published online: 21 Apr 2015. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 83 View related articles Citing articles: 1 View citing articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rfft20 Download by: [Bard Graduate Center] Date: 20 September 2016, At: 14:21 Fashion Theory, Volume 13, Issue 1, pp. 51–82 DOI: 10.2752/175174109X381328 Reprints available directly from the Publishers. Photocopying permitted by licence only. © 2009 Berg. The Velvet Touch: Fashion, Furniture, and the Fabric of Freyja Hartzell the Interior Freyja Hartzell is a doctoral Abstract candidate in the History of Art at Yale University. She holds a BA in Art and Art History from Grinnell This article engages with Walter Benjamin’s critical readings of velvet College and an MA from the Bard linings in nineteenth-century domestic interiors and fashions in The Ar- Graduate Center for Studies in cades Project, as well as Jacques Derrida’s more recent etymological the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture. Her PhD dissertation and symbolic excavation of the hymen as textile, to argue for sensu- (in progress) examines Munich ous textiles as literal and figurative mediators of the nineteenth-century artist Richard Riemerschmid’s bourgeois desire to possess, articulated in the act of touching.
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From the Arcades to the Cascades with Benjamin and Leopold
Fast Capitalism ISSN 1930-014X Volume 14 • Issue 1 • 2017 doi:10.32855/fcapital.201701.010 Exploring the Chaos of Commodification: From the Arcades to the Cascades with Benjamin and Leopold Timothy W. Luke In this study, I work through ideas from Ben Agger on critical theory to develop a provisional exploration of how Walter Benjamin helps us understand the chaos of commodification. This analysis also unfolds as a thought experiment about the Anthropocene as economies and environments merge in today’s planetary urbanization. To accomplish these goals, I also examine the merits of mapping Walter Benjamin’s critique of capitalist modernity as well as Aldo Leopold’s understanding of biotic community against the advent of the Anthropocene to elaborate a layered critique of built and unbuilt environments in the contemporary world-system. Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) was an eclectic essayist, cultural critic, and aesthetic thinker, whose life unfolded in Germany during the Second Empire, World War I, the Weimar Republic, and Third Reich. Born in Berlin, he studied at the Universities of Freiburg and Berlin where he saw himself contributing to the outlines of a “cultural Zionism.” During World War I, he studied at the Universities of Munich and Bern before earning his PhD in 1919. Along the way, he came to know, or work with, Heinrich Rickert, Rainer Marie Rilke, Gershon Scholem, Ernst Bloch, and Leo Strauss before becoming affiliated with the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt. He continued to write on French literature, German drama, and metropolitan Europe as he interacted with Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Georg Lukács, Herman Hesse, Berthold Brecht, Kurt Weill, Hannah Arendt, George Bataille, and others, while he sought academic work in Germany.
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Surpassing Estrangement: the Reconciliation Between Species Being and Subjective Architectonics in Benjamin
38 Michael Nail Surpassing Estrangement: The Reconciliation Between Species Being and Subjective Architectonics in Benjamin By Michael Nail he architectonics of life, what we might loosely call "culture," have been produced throughout history by the accidents that have issued forth originally from eco- T nomic systems, or from the systems that have subju- gated the economy. That these are accidents does not mean that these are fully undetermined by the relationship between the worker and his economic relationships. Rather, for example, it is certain that the forms of filmmaking in a certain time are deter- mined at first by the systems of economic exchange, though not directly. For instance, the progression from the silent film to the talkie was positively determined, while the phasing out of the silent film by the talkie was negatively determined. It is these negative determinations, these phasing-outs, that define the scope of culture, since the new is not yet solidified into culture until it has phased out what it supersedes. In this particular ex- ample, it is an accident of technological progress that produces Michael Nail attends Villanova University and is a member of the class of 2012. He is presently a triple major in Philosophy, English, and Hon- ors. His hopes for the future include obtaining a PhD in Philosophy and earning a professorship. Right now, his general interests gravitate within the realm of Hegel's historical influence, which is to say, the greater part of 19th and 20th century philosophy. His greatest intellec- tual concerns are found in the politics of consciousness, wherein his goal is simply to understand.
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On the Banks of a New Lethe: Commodification and Experience In
On the Banks of a New Lethe: Commodification and Experience in Benjamin’s Baudelaire Book Michael Jennings When the American painter R. B. Kitai imagined Walter Benjamin’s Paris, he painted Benjamin sitting with Charles Baudelaire in an ambiguous space above which rise both an arcade and what Benjamin himself called ‘‘an open sky of cloudless blue’’ 1—perhaps that same blank sky that hangs over the Paris of Baudelaire’s ‘‘Le cygne.’’ Kitai’s painting, ‘‘The Autumn of Central Paris. After Walter Benjamin,’’ catches Benjamin between projects. Benjamin had worked, if at first intermittently but then with increasing inten- sity, since the late 1920s on a massive history of the mid-nineteenth century in France, which bore the working title The Arcades Project (die Passagen- Arbeit). Benjamin found himself, after about 1935, under pressure from the Institute for Social Research to produce in a publishable form some portion of the vast material he had assembled for The Arcades Project. He began in 1937 to extract and reorganize material from his accumulation of citations, commentary, and reflections—that is, from The Arcades Project—toward 1. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), N1,5. Hereafter, this work is cited paren- thetically as AP and by convolute. boundary 2 30:1, 2003. Copyright © 2003 by Duke University Press. 90 boundary 2 / Spring 2003 a book on Charles Baudelaire. He thus quite literally left the arcades and took Baudelaire with him. The arcades had, of course, served in Benjamin’s notes toward his primal history (Urgeschichte) of the nineteenth century as the organizing metaphor, the figure and historical form around which the entire complex of social, cultural, political, and scientific history would have rotated.2 Drawing extensively on The Arcades materials, Benjamin began to organize his texts not around an architectural form but around the figure of a single poet.
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Walter Benjamin, the Arcades Project, Trans
Arcade magic Buse, P Title Arcade magic Authors Buse, P Type Article URL This version is available at: http://usir.salford.ac.uk/id/eprint/3142/ Published Date 2001 USIR is a digital collection of the research output of the University of Salford. Where copyright permits, full text material held in the repository is made freely available online and can be read, downloaded and copied for non-commercial private study or research purposes. Please check the manuscript for any further copyright restrictions. For more information, including our policy and submission procedure, please contact the Repository Team at: [email protected]. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1999), 1073 pp. ISBN 0-674-04326-X It is difficult to predict the fate of The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin’s enormous and unfinished work on the cultural history of nineteenth-century Paris, which has finally been published in English. For some time now, the Passagen-Werk has had a quasi-mythical status, filtered down to an anglophone audience through such crucial intermediaries as Susan Buck-Morss in The Dialectics of Seeing.1 First published in 1982 in Volume 5 of the Gessamelte Schriften and then in French in 1989, its interest for Benjamin scholars has passed its height, and non-experts now have the opportunity to assess its wider importance and usefulness. With the simultaneous rolling release by Belknap of the Selected Writings, those of us who have known Benjamin
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Benjamin Now: Critical Encounters with the Arcades Project
y 2 / 30:1 / sheet 5 of 224 6808 boundar Introduction Philip Rosen What follows is composed of papers first presented 6–7 April 2001 at a symposium held by the Forbes Center for Research in Culture and Media Studies at Brown University.1 This symposium, ‘‘Benjamin Now: Critical Encounters with The Arcades Project,’’ was provoked by the 1999 English- language translation of Walter Benjamin’s monumental Das Passagen- Werk, the most legendary work of the most legendary of twentieth-century cultural interpreters and theorists. There was also a new and (as of this writing) ongoing multivolume set of translations appearing as Benjamin’s Selected Writings from Harvard University Press. While focused on The Arcades, then, the symposium implicitly considered the extent to which the English-language academy has a ‘‘new’’ Benjamin on its hands. We thought, as my co-organizer Kevin McLaughlin puts it in his afterword, that ‘‘now might be an opportune moment for a reconsideration of the critical work of Walter Benjamin.’’ 1. I am responsible for the overall tenor and substance of this introduction, but a few of its paragraphs include specific wording that is heavily inflected by Kevin McLaughlin’s contributions to symposium-related documents. I am grateful for his collaboration and generosity. boundary 2 30:1, 2003. Copyright © 2003 by Duke University Press. Tseng 2003.2.27 07:19 2 boundary 2 / Spring 2003 Our ‘‘now’’—not Benjamin’s. McLaughlin is implicitly referring to Ben- jamin’s concept of Jetztzeit, the ‘‘now-time,’’ the point at which objects, activi- y 2 / 30:1 / sheet 6 of 224 ties, and actions from the past may be cognized in a unique and hereto- fore unrecognizable constellation, as an image, a figure.
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KEVIN MCLAUGHLIN Dean of the Faculty George Hazard Co
KEVIN MCLAUGHLIN __________________________________________________________________________ Dean of the Faculty George Hazard Cooker Professor of English and Comparative Literature Professor of English, Comparative Literature and German Brown University __________________________________________________________________________ Brown University Box 1857 Providence, RI 02912 [email protected] EDUCATION Ph.D., Comparative Literature, New York University, 1989 M.A., Comparative Literature, New York University, 1985 B.A., English, McDaniel College, 1981 PROFESSIONAL APPOINTMENTS Brown University Dean of the Faculty, 2011-present George Hazard Cooker Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and German Studies 2012-present (promoted to full professor in 2003) Chair of the English Department, 2009-2011; 2005-2008 Interim Chair of the German Department, 2010-2011 Nicholas Brown Professor of Oratory and Belles Lettres, 2005-2011 Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature, 2000-2003 Manning Endowed Assistant Professor of English, 1997-2000 Assistant Professor of English, 1996-1997 St. John’s University Assistant Professor, English, 1994-1996 Harvard University Assistant Head Tutor, Literature Concentration, 1993-1994 Lecturer, Literature Concentration, 1988-1993 PUBLICATIONS Books: Walter Benjamin’s Philology of Life: Hölderlin, Romanticism, Goethe (under review). Poetic Force: Poetry after Kant. Stanford University Press, 2014. Paperwork: Fiction and Mass Mediacy in the Paper Age. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
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