Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project as a blueprint for living online

https://reallifemag.com/the-arcades-project/

by aabhay • 7 years ago

29 2 7 years ago

While I appreciate Benjamin's point (very much so, in the sense of "dealing with what we have" in the commodified and totalizing culture of capitalism, as he might put it), I am also sympathetic to Adorno and Marcuse's thoughts against the project - the idea that engaging in commodity culture can be liberating is just as valid as the idea that it sinks one deeper into the totality. Marcuse's argument, in fact, was that the only hope for resistance against the system came from outside its totalizing influence, those who had not been integrated into the system yet. The idea of 'the arcade' does not seem to be realized anywhere. Readers of the article (or indeed Benjamin's works) may get the impression that this is a space that (1) already exists, or (2) we can create in today (after Benjamin's time). Both of these suppositions are doubtful. Adorno noted in the preface to the second edition of The Dialectic of Enlightment that it had in some ways become more relevant than when it was initially published.

aabhay• 7 years ago

Interesting comment! I’m not the author of the article, but I know them. I think her perspective is that we are free to imagine arcades within the web construct, flaneuring through the images and ideas in an ambulatory way, trying to grasp the totality in different ways. I take it as an antithesis to the more common interpretation of the web as a filter bubble. I think like all of Benjamin’s work, there’s a performative element — he’s not simply trying to extract the truth of the matter but rather encouraging us towards a more ‘adventurous’ being.

Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project as a blueprint for living online

Related Stories