boundary 2 an international journal of literature and culture,
volume 30 number 1 spring 2003.
Benjamin Now: Critical Encounters with The Arcades Project
a special issue co-edited by Keven McLaughlin and Philip Rosen.

Duke University Press ISSN0190-3659
www.dukeupress.edu/journals

Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher
mosher@svsu.edu
Saginaw Valley State University,
University Center
MI 48710 USA.

This issue of the literary journal boundary 2 is dedicated to exploring the Arcades Project, the great unfinished work that the eclectic German critic Walter Benjamin worked on from the 1920s until his 1940 suicide. Benjamin’s unfinished project attempted to encapsulate, in all its complexities, Paris in the nineteenth century. The work-in-progress consisted of a large quantity of convolutes, or lawyers’ file-folders on subjects such as the poet Baudelaire, the cartoonist Grandville, panoramas, prostitution and the iron architecture of Paris’ shopping arcades.

The work survives only because Benjamin entrusted the convolutes to a young librarian in the Parisian library, who happened to be the eroticist George Bataille. Harvard University Press in 1999 issued it all as a fat hardcover The Arcades Project translated and edited by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. To dip into this trove at random is to press ones face against a jumbled shop window, or to dig into one of the shaggy convolutes Walter has personally entrusted to you. This issue of boundary 2 explores some issues raised by the research it contains.

Early in the journal, T. J. Clark, author of The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers, asks ‘Should Benjamin Have Read Marx?’. Clark then expresses relief at the eclecticism of Benjamin’s reading, its tenets of commodity fetishism mixed in with his interests in Surrealism and the kabbalah. Samuel Weber discusses Benjamin’s interest in obscure architectural spaces and concomitant linguistic ones. The history of Benjamin’s attempted book on Baudelaire, the poet’s peripatetic presence ambling the streets of Paris a significant unifier to the Arcades project, is detailed by Michael Jennings.

Peter Fenves compares the styles of philosophical writing in Leibniz and Benjamin, while Cladia Brodsky Lacour compares the literary styles of Holderlin and Benjamin in their evocations of place (whether mountain landscapes or Parisian shopping arcade). The translators of the recent Harvard edition of the Arcades project, Kevin McLaughlin and Howard Eiland, also both have contributions here. While McLaughlin muses upon the critical reaction to the Arcade Project’s publication, Eiland writes of the prevalent distractedness in capitalist society, in both nineteenth-century Paris and contemporary global (post-) modernity.

The origins of the fashion system is Peter Wollen’s topic. Benjamin’s insights to the nineteenth-century bourgeois domestic interior are juxtaposed by Tom Gunning to that era’s developing literary genre the detective novel, home of the snooping sleuth who fingers the damask carpet to shake out its clues. In a very different interiorized realm, the Mishna and Gemara--rabbinical commentaries upon the Torah--and the Hebraic typographical conventions that lay them out surrounding one another, are discussed by Henry Sussman. The avid book collector Benjamin was surely aware of these, and perhaps informed his vision of the (sadly, un-) completed Paris volume. Needless to say, the Arcades Project offers terrific challenges for hypertext designers to bring a virtual architectural form to its many-chambered convolutes, without resulting in a dark and confusing Winchester Mystery House of disassociations.

Walter Benjamin, was an early critic of pop culture, giving Charlie Chaplin (much as George Orwell gave postcards and children’s books) the same incisive and scholarly attention that he did Baroque drama and the art of Paul Klee. In one of the most personal pieces of Benjaminiana, Lindsay Waters touches warmly on the rock n' roll — (in the work of a European with little interest in jazz who died in 1940???) — that nonetheless electrifies Benjamin's arcades appropriately.

Waters’ essay is entitled ‘Come Softly, Darling, Hear What I Say: Listening in a State of Distractio — A Tribute to the Work of Walter Benjamin, Elvis Presley, and Robert Christgau’. Here Waters ponders a television memory from 1956, of a young, Elvis Presley in white tie and tails, singing ‘Hound Dog’ to a live Basset hound on the Steve Allen Show . This ordeal humiliated a genius as sure as an embarrassed Benjamin stuffing himself, his Baudelaire writings, into the ill-fitting tuxedo of conventional academic form and style for the approval of Theodore Adorno in order to elicit funds from the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research to further his work. In this essay Waters gives proper pride of place to rock writer Lester Bangs, who like Benjamin, died tragically too young. To this reviewer, Bangs wrote with the same single-minded obsessiveness and animated heart that inspired Benjamin’s historical gleanings. Bangs was as intellectually fired up by the bass line on the Stooges’ ‘Fun House’ as Benjamin had been when discovering a description of an odd out-of-the-way intersection, since demolished, in old Paris by one of the Goncourt brothers. These are the kind of epiphanic connections in the world, in literature and in thought, in which Bejaministes the world over relish. This issue of boundary 2 is deserves its place beside the volume that inspired it on my own Walter Benjamin shelf.