Arcades Project

(Photo Credit: Ron Bentley) 

                    Das Passagen-Werk represents research that Benjamin carried out, over a period of thirteen years, on the subject of the Paris arcades—les passages—which he considered the most important architectural form of the nineteenth century, and which he linked with a number of phenomena characteristic of that century’s major and minor preoccupations… Benjamin’s intention from the first, it would seem was to grasp such diverse material under the general category of Urgeschichte, signifying the “primal history” of the nineteenth century… It was not the great men and celebrated events of traditional historiography but rather the “refuse” and “detritus” of history, half-concealed, variegated traces of the daily life of “the collective,” that was to be the object of study, and with the aid of methods more akin—above all, in their dependence on chance—to the methods of the nineteenth-century collector of antiquities and curiosities, or indeed to the methods of the nineteenth-century ragpicker, than to those of a modern historian. Not conceptual analysis but something like dream interpretation… 

from Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project 

Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (trans.)