The Arcades: The City in a Single Glance

Louis Aragon describes Paris’ Arcades as “sanctuaries of a cult of the ephemeral, the ghostly landscape of damnable pleasures and professions. Places that yesterday were in comprehensible, that tomorrow will never know”[1]. His comments describe a phenomenon that illuminated the dreary, rainy Parisian streets with bright lights, vibrant colors, and an alluring cacophony that began in the 19th-century and lasted until the early portion of the 20th. Walter Benjamin investigates these fascinating components of urban space. His massive opus of research, The Arcades Project (1932), describes the effects of the arcades on both the city and the crowd. By accumulating an incredible amount of contemporary criticism regarding both the arcades and their secondary effects, Benjamin is able to define the arcades as a sensual oasis amidst a bleak and dreary urban landscape that ultimately fails to abate the prevailing feelings of isolation and malaise.

                Benjamin further embellishes upon his motif of the urban environment isolating the individual and eventually assimilating him into a faceless mass of automatons. If urban spaces were dynamic confluences of new technologies and humanity’s daily life, one would initially think that a large city is incapable of putting us to sleep with a lullaby of boredom and banality. However, Benjamin rejects the notion of a buzzing urban metropolis tantalizing its citizens with miraculous advancements of technology and comfort. As adults, we are desensitized to the “new”. He envies the child because “he can do what the grownup absolutely cannot: recognize the new once again. For us, locomotives already have symbolic character because we met with them in childhood”[2]. In other words, we are so used to interacting with technology, all the comforts and wonders it provides fail to affect our mundane perspective on the world.

                Furthermore, Benjamin saturates the city with ennui by applying Marx’s alienation though mechanical reproduction. Marx feels the mechanization of humanity is a consequence of the increased production of technology. As both the commercial and technological tempo of an economy increase, so does the rate of production yielded by a “collective machine”. Marx defines this entity as “an organized system of various kinds of single machines, and of groups of single machines, [that] becomes more and more perfect … in other words, the more [raw materials] passage from one phase to another is effected not by the hand of man, but by machinery itself”[3]. As machines replace people, a system becomes more efficient. Eventually, man becomes so isolated from his labor, he is relegated to repetitiously performing an inane action such as pushing a single button or pulling a lever for hours in a factory. Benjamin believes that the city’s appetite for technology and luxury goods warrants a feverish rate of production. Accordingly, people are replaced by machines and thus denied a familiar, independent connection to their environment by applying their specific trade.

                As we slowly feel less like people and more like machines, Benjamin feels that we are slowly lulled to sleep. In exchange for our contribution to the city’s appetite for goods and commerce, we are rewarded with trivial gifts of trite technological comforts. Paris’ natural climate does nothing to abate the palpable feelings of malaise. Benjamin states the rainy climate, “Makes days not only gray but uniform. For morning until evening, one can do the same thing- play chess, [and] read, engage in argument”[4]. Building upon the modern sense of boredom discussed by Freud in Civilization and its Discontents, Benjamin states, “We are bored and we don’t know what we are waiting for”[5]. Should we not be ecstatically frolicking in a wonderland of technologies and the comfort both provided a modern economy dumping its cornucopia of production on a single, focal point? In his article in Paris bei Sonnenschein und Lampenlicht, Julius Rosenberg describes a second-hand encounter with a stock mogul. As told through the experience of a friend, the mogul meets his visitor at the doors of his baroque residence decked in opulence and splendor. As his host led him into a “large glass-roofed gallery whose walls were decorated entirely with camellias and hothouse plates, “ he noticed a prevailing sense of “a suppressed boredom in that lay in the air; at the very first step, you breath a vapor as of opium”[6]. Rosenberg goes on to describe the hosts and his family stumbling about their house like somnambulists. Benjamin includes several examples such as this in order to create the paradoxical texture of malaise in one of the most modern and advanced cities in the world. Through themes previously identified by Baudelaire and Marx’s division of labor, Benjamin clearly establishes what would appear to be an unavoidable conundrum.

            Enter Paris attempt to abate the everyday melancholy and boredom of urban life: the arcade. Benjamin describes these commercial hubs as clean places of refuge from the rain, mud, and dangerous traffic of the Parisian street. Ultimately, the arcades provided one the opportunity to behold Paris’ entire commercial potential in a single glance. Individuals could leisurely stroll under glass roofs protecting them from ran and atop marble floors capping the mud and filth of the streets. In the anthology Fourier (1932), Poisson describes the arcades as a place to spend “a winter’s day in a Phalanstery, to visit all parts of it without exposure to the elements, to go the theater and the opera in light clothes and colored shoes without worrying about the mud and the cold”[7]. Benjamin claimed the arcades continue to develop until they became an entity capable of enabling the reconstruction of the past 1500 years of French history should a catastrophic event level the city to the ground.

            However, the novelty of the arcades quickly dissipated. While initially serving as an oasis from the city’s gloom, they quickly became just as overcrowded as the streets outside. “As soon as the Parisians had got a taste of the new galleries,” explains Tony Moilin in Paris en l’an 2000 (1869), “ they lost all desire to set foot in the streets of old- which they often said, were fit only for dogs”[8]. Soon, the arcades’ novel shops and boutiques became just as commonplace as the traditional storefronts lining the muddy streets of Paris. Once again, the chance to enjoy a unique and individual experience faded as the arcades became swirling eddies of the crowd.

            In other words, the arcade experience was no longer subservient to the individual’s will. This massive proliferation of commerce soon began to affect those strolling amongst its clean porticos and take control of their experience in the arcade through an invisible but palpable force: fashion. Commercialism’s gaze is reflected upon itself in the form of fashion. It controls what people wear and to what stores they go to purchase their contemporary uniforms of subservience. In the arcades, people who frequent certain stores considered fashionable while abstaining from patronizing others. Benjamin describes this experience yet another form of isolation of the self in an urban environment. Frantically, people searched for a final foothold of individuality. If the city dictated how they acted, worked and dress, to what could they turn?

            Benjamin moves his project to focus on perhaps the last bastion of maintaining a familiar connection with one’s physical environment: the interior space of the home. Since pristine temples of commerce failed to provide an experience subservient to the will of the individual, people naturally focused on making their home their own. Benjamin states the dwelling served as a receptacle of the person for “it encased him with all his appurtenances so deeply in the dwelling’s interior that one might be reminded of inside a compass case, where the instrument with all its accessories lies embedded in deep, usually violet folds of velvet”[9]. By barricading ourselves from the outside world, we are able to exercise a total sense of control over our environment. Benjamin jokes about creating monuments of dead relatives by filling entire walls with their pictures. However, even this haven is still not a hermetic bunker- the city still attempts to violate our inner sanctum through the infiltration of what Benjamin calls “outside things”. The objects range from a telephone to a piece of furniture. In other words, we are unable to create an unadulterated sense of isolation from the outside world; however, we are able to exercise control of its influence in our home.

            Contrasting Baudelaire’s hopeless plummet into debauchery, Benjamin continues to allude of the possibility of enjoying an experience subservient to individual will while living in the city. While the city’s economy mechanizes its workforce, one can still control the city’s influence in his own home. He has the option of ignoring the external world’s established behavioral norm or embracing. For Baudelaire, there is no escape from the will and designs of the city. This is a notion to which Benjamin would respond, “Shut the front door.”

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[1] Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press), 87.

[2] Ibid., 390.

[3] Ibid., 394.

[4] Ibid., 104.

[5] Ibid., 105.

[6] Ibid., 104.

[7] Ibid., 44.

[8] Ibid., 53.

[9] Ibid., 220.