Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project
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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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