Name: The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought)
ISBN: 9780262022682

Synopsis

Walter Benjamin's magnum opus was a book he did not live to write. In The Dialectics of Seeing, Susan Buck-Morss offers an inventive reconstruction of the Passagen Werk, or Arcades Project, as it might have taken form.

Working with Benjamin's vast files of citations and commentary which contain a myriad of historical details from the dawn of consumer culture, Buck-Morss makes visible the conceptual structure that gives these fragments philosophical coherence. She uses images throughout the book to demonstrate that Benjamin took the debris of mass culture seriously as the source of philosophical truth.

The Paris Arcades that so fascinated Benjamin (as they did the Surrealists whose "materialist metaphysics" he admired) were the prototype, the 19th century "ur-form" of the modern shopping mall. Benjamin's dialectics of seeing demonstrate how to read these consumer dream houses and so many other material objects of the time - from air balloons to women's fashions, from Baudelaire's poetry to Grandville's cartoons - as anticipations of social utopia and, simultaneously, as clues for a radical political critique.

Buck-Morss plots Benjamin's intellectual orientation on axes running east and west, north and south - Moscow Paris, Berlin-Naples - and shows how such thinking in coordinates can explain his understanding of "dialectics at a standstill." She argues for the continuing relevance of Benjamin's insights but then allows a set of "afterimages" to have the last word.

Susan Buck-Morss is Professor of Political Philosophy and Social Theory at Cornell University. The Dialectics of Seeing is included in the series Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought, edited by Thomas McCarthy.

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Since you've just finished Buck-Morss's reconstruction of Benjamin's thinking, reading Aragon's *Paris Peasant* (the primary Surrealist text Benjamin himself was in dialogue with) will let you experience the raw material that inspired Benjamin's dialectical method. Aragon wanders the arcades with the same attention to debris and dream-logic that Benjamin theorized, giving you the phenomenological ground truth beneath the philosophical architecture you've just studied.

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Debord takes Benjamin's insights about commodity culture and consumer consciousness and develops them into a full critique of late capitalism—he's essentially asking: what happens when the entire world becomes an arcade? His aphoristic style mirrors Benjamin's fragmentary approach, and his analysis of how images colonize reality feels like the natural endpoint of the trajectory Buck-Morss traces through Benjamin's work.

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