Kyle VanHemert

November 10, 2006

Position Paper on Benjamin�s “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century”

Benjamin’s “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century” is a fragmentary prototype of his unfinished Arcades project, a sweeping study of nineteenth century Parisian life informed by sociological readings of urban phenomena. This essay, too, appears to be unfinished; Benjamin’s sentences are short and the sections skeletal. Each section offers a brief commentary on a particular element of nineteenth century Parisian existence through the discussion of an individual figure. Benjamin’s retrospective analyses of arcades, panoramic paintings, world exhibitions, interior spaces, the poetry of Baudelaire, and urban barricading serve to illuminate individual compartments of the place and period, and Benjamin only briefly attempts to unify these topics. Each vignette provides its own unique truth about the human condition in the face of industrial capitalism. I will provide a brief recapitulation and commentary on each section, followed by a relevant question.

In the first section, headed “Fourier, or the Arcades,” Benjamin traces the history and significance of the Parisian arcade. The prominence of the arcade, beginning in 1822, is architecturally rooted in the flourishing textile trade and the advent of building in iron. The arcade, described by a guidebook as “a city, indeed, a world in miniature,” is a model for socialist Charles Fourier’s phalanstery, a self-contained utopian community. This utopia, and with it the arcade, embodies a unique dialectic; at once, the space encompasses hyperactively transforming modern relevance and prehistoric egalitarianism. How might we conduct a Benjaminian reading of the outmoding of the department store in our own time, like the outmoding of the arcade in his?

In the second section, headed “Daguerre, or the Panorama,” Benjamin investigates the relationship of painted panoramas and developments in photographic technologies. Initially, Benjamin notes the aim of the panorama to accurately represent changes in nature over a period of time as a prefiguring of the capabilities of cinema. Benjamin then discusses two ramifications of the rise of photography: the outmoding of particular types and functions of painting and the expansion of commodity trade. With this dualistic reading, Benjamin succinctly evaluates the photograph in both an artistic and economic—and, consequently, a greater social—context. How or why has painting remained a relevant artistic medium with the proliferation of increasingly advanced visual media and technologies?

In the third section, headed “Grandville, or the World Exhibitions,” Benjamin discusses world exhibitions and their relationship with the commodification of culture. The recent ancestor of the world exhibition is the national industrial exhibition which existed as a reaffirming entertainment for the working class. The world exhibition is a spectacle of commodification in which even the attendee becomes commodity. He is isolated from extant culture and from himself, immersed in the phantasmagoria of the fair. Later in the section, Benjamin discusses the dialectical nature of fashion, linking the natural body with the unnatural mass culture. Is the Internet a type of virtual world exhibition? If so, is the Internet user commodified similarly to the exhibition-goer?

In the fourth section, headed “Louis-Philippe, or the Interior,” Benjamin examines the sociological significance of the individual’s private space. In the nineteenth century, the living space is separate from the working space, and thus it is separate from his social and commercial considerations. One’s private space becomes an infinite area of personal fantasy and a stronghold for the reclamation of art. In this space, the usefulness of commodified objects is shed in appreciation of their artistic essence. In a private collection, an object’s sole function is to be possessed; the very process of collecting removes the collector from the aggravating commodification of the era of mass reproducibility. Could we read an individual’s personal computer as his twenty-first century “interior”? If so, what does he collect?

In the fifth section, “Baudelaire, or the Streets of Paris,” Benjamin explicates the unique relationship between the poetry of Baudelaire and the city of Paris. Benjamin elaborates the concept of the flâneur, a liminal gaze that is at once part and reflective of the urban crowd. Paris figures as a vague specter of a subject in Baudelaire’s poetry, its modern society foggily enveloping the traditional topics of lyric poetry. Benjamin next discusses the notion of novelty of a commodity as a quality of endlessly transformed sameness that is experienced with the increasingly accelerated invention and outmoding of culture. This feature, novelty, creates the false notion of “cultural history.” What the hell does “the department store is the flâneur’s last practical joke” mean?

In the sixth section, “Haussmann, or the Barricades,” Benjamin looks at the construction of Parisian streets and the vision of civic planner Baron Haussmann. Haussmann’s wide streets, Benjamin explains, are intended to deter the construction of barricades, safe-proofing Paris against civil war. Benjamin next touches upon the Paris Commune, the socialist government briefly in power in 1871. Benjamin ends by briefly bringing together the previously discussed phenomena; the arcade, the panorama, the exhibition, and the interior are remnants of a half-realized dream world. Only a retrograde reading of these tiny things, Benjamin concludes, reveals them all to embody the “cause” which brings about a very significant later “effect”: the fall of the bourgeoisie.