The invisible, inner structure of Benjamin's Passagen-Werk

Title

The invisible, inner structure of Benjamin's Passagen-Werk

Description

Let us take a moment to develop this notion that Benjamin thought in coordinates. His unfolding of concepts in their “extremes” can be visualized as antithetical polarities o f axes that cross each other, revealing a “dialectical image” at the null point, with its contradictory “moments” as axial fields. … The axes of these coordinates can be designated with the familiar Hegelian polarities: consciousness and reality. If the termini are to be antithetical extremes, we might name those on the axis of reality, petrified nature/transitory nature, while in the case of consciousness, the termini would be dream/waking. At the null point where the coordinates intersect, we can place that “ dialectical image” which, by 1935, stood at the “mid point” of the project: the commodity. Each field of the coordinates can then be said to describe one aspect o  the physiognomic appearance of the commodity, showing its contradictory “faces”: fetish and fossil; wish image and ruin. In the positioning of the fields, those under the sign of transitoriness would need to be affirmed. [The Figure] represents this invisible, inner structure of the Passagen-Werk (Benjamin's Arcades Project). …Granted, too, that coordinates exhaust neither the concept of “dialectical images” nor Benjamin’s visual schemata for thinking. There is no reason to claim for the system of coordinates in [] anything more than the heuristic value which first prompted its construction, that is, that it makes coherent in one perceptual grasp the whole span o f the Passagen material assembled between 1927 and 1940.

Designer

Buck-Morss, Susan

Date

1989

Source

The Dialectics of Seeing

Bibliographic Citation

Buck-Morss, Susan. 1989. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. The MIT Press. Display D. Pages 210-211.

is composed of

Cross/axis

has attribute

Solid Line

use feature

Brace

depict things of type

Typological or Classification

Coverage

commodity

dream

history