From Word To Word

I have just been browsing through a book I picked up a few weeks ago at a local used book store. I am not actually supposed to be buying more books until I find the shelf space to put them, and this particular book does fill rather a lot of shelf space, but I had nothing else to do downtown while my wife was shopping, and it looked like such an interesting book, so I bought it anyway. The book is Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project.

Let me be clear. I am most certainly not recommending that you go out and buy this book, not unless you are the sort of person who likes spending too much money on books that you will probably never read but that you keep around because they are interesting in a useless sort of way. The Arcades Project is not a book that you will likely read. I have no intention of reading it through myself. There are two versions of an essay that Benjamin based on the project, and these do make interesting reading, but The Arcades Project itself is less a coherent text than it is an experiment in research method. It has more in common with something like Roland Barthe’s S/Z, despite being entirely dissimilar in structure, than it does with a standard work of theory. It is the method behind a certain approach to theory, and this is what makes it both so interesting and so unreadable.

Structurally, The Arcades Project is essentially a huge notebook, or, perhaps more accurately, a huge series of files on various subjects, mostly related in some way or another to the development of a certain culture that Benjamin associates with the rise of the arcade as an architectural form in 19th Century europe. Each of these loosely organized files contains quotations from a range of authors, many of whom are very obscure, along with Benjamin’s own commentary, which ranges from brief notes, to longer reflections, to the beginnings of more polished works. The sum of these collections and reflections is massive, running to something like 850 large pages in my edition: a truly staggering piece of scholarship.

The effect of the volume, even on a mere browser like myself, is to portray the subject of research, even something as seemingly insignificant as the arcade, as inexhaustible. No matter how minute and rigorous, it seems to say, research will never attain mastery over its subject. Its proper mode is not to be definitive, but to wallow in the infinity of its task, to revel in its minutia. Its proper product is not the authoritative text but the collage or the notebook. There is something both beautiful and impossible about this.  Perhaps this is why I cannot stop browsing the book but I cannot start reading it either.