The setting is the Franco-Spanish border, the time 1940. Walter Benjamin, fleeing occupied France, presents himself to the wife of a certain Fittko he has met at an internment camp. He understands, he says, that Frau Fittko will guide him and his companions across the Pyrenees to neutral Spain. Frau Fittko takes him on a trip to scout out the best routes; he brings along a heavy briefcase. Is the briefcase really necessary, she asks? It contains a manuscript, he replies. "I cannot risk losing it. It... must be saved. It is more important than I am."
The next day they cross the mountains, Benjamin pausing every few minutes because of a weak heart. At the border they are halted. Their papers are not in order, say the Spanish police; they must return to France. In despair, Benjamin takes a fatal overdose of morphine. The police make an inventory of the deceased's belongings. The inventory shows no record of a manuscript. What was in the briefcase, and where it disappeared to, we can only guess.
Benjamin's friend Gershom Scholem suggested it was the last revision of the unfinished Passagen Werk , or Arcades Project. By his heroic if futile effort to save his manuscript from fascism and bear it to the safety of Spain, Benjamin became an icon of the scholar for our times. The story has a happy twist. A copy of the Arcades manuscript left behind in Paris had been secreted in the Bibliothèque Nationale by Benjamin's friend, Georges Bataille. Recovered after the war, it was published in 1982 in its original form - that is to say, in German with huge swathes of French.
Now we have Benjamin's magnum opus in full English translation, and are at last in a position to ask the question: why all the interest in a treatise on shopping in 19th-century France? Benjamin was born in 1892, in Berlin, into an assimilated Jewish family. His father was a successful art auctioneer who branched out into property investments; the Benjamins were, by most standards, well-to-do. After a sickly, sheltered childhood, Benjamin was sent at the age of 12 to boarding school, where he was influenced by one of the directors, Gustav Wyneken.
For years after leaving school, he was active in Wyneken's anti-authoritarian, back-to-nature youth movement; he broke with it only when Wyneken came out in support of the first world war. In 1912, Benjamin enrolled as a student in philosophy at Freiburg University.
Finding the intellectual environment not to his taste, he threw himself into activism for educational reform. When war broke out, he evaded military service first by feigning a medical condition and then, after his marriage in 1917 to Dora Sophie Pollak, by moving to Switzerland. There they stayed until 1920, reading philosophy and working on a doctoral dissertation for the University of Bern; but the lack of a social life unsettled Dora, and they returned to Berlin. Benjamin was drawn to univer sities, remarked his friend Theodor Adorno, as Franz Kafka was drawn to insurance companies.
Benjamin set out to acquire the Habilitation (higher doctorate) that would enable him to become a professor, submitting his dissertation, on German drama of the Baroque age, to the University of Frankfurt in 1925. Surprisingly, the dissertation was not accepted. It fell between the stools of literature and philosophy, and Benjamin lacked an academic patron to urge his case. His academic plans having failed, Benjamin launched himself on a career as a translator, broadcaster and freelance journalist. Among his commissions was a translation of Proust's à La Recherche du Temps Perdu; three of seven volumes were completed. In 1924, Benjamin visited Capri, at the time a favourite resort of German intellectuals.
There he met Asja Lacis, a theatre director from Latvia and committed communist. The meeting was fateful. "Every time I have experienced a great love, I have undergone a change so fundamental that I have amazed myself," he later wrote. "A genuine love makes me resemble the woman I love." In this case, the transformation entailed a change of political direction.
"The path of thinking, progressive persons in their right senses leads to Moscow, not to Palestine," Lacis told him. All traces of idealism in his thought, to say nothing of his flirtation with Zionism, were abandoned. His friend Scholem had emigrated to Palestine, expecting Benjamin to follow. Benjamin found an excuse not to come; he kept making excuses to the end. In 1926 Benjamin travelled to Moscow for a rendezvous with Lacis.
In his record of the visit, Benjamin probes his own unhappy state of mind, as well as the question of whether he should join the Communist party. Two years later the pair were briefly reunited in Berlin: they lived together and attended meetings of the League of Proletarian- Revolutionary Writers. The liaison precipitated divorce proceedings in which Benjamin behaved with remarkable meanness toward his wife. On the Moscow trip, Benjamin kept a diary which he later revised for publication.
He spoke no Russian. Rather than fall back on interpreters, he tried to read Moscow from the outside - what he would later call his physiognomic method - refraining from abstraction or judgment, presenting the city in such a way that "all factuality is already theory" (the phrase is from Goethe). Some of Benjamin's claims for the "world-historical" experiment he saw being conducted in the USSR now seem naive. Nevertheless his eye was acute. Many new Muscovites were still peasants, he observed, living village lives according to village rhythms. Class distinctions might have been abolished, but within the party a new caste system was evolving.
A street market scene captured the humbled status of religion: an icon for sale was flanked by portraits of Lenin "like a prisoner between two policemen". Though Lacis is a constant presence in the Moscow diary, and though Benjamin hints that their sexual relations were troubled, we get little sense of her physical self. Benjamin had no gift for evoking other people. In Lacis's writings we get a much livelier impression of Benjamin: his glasses like little spotlights, his clumsy hands. For the rest of his life Benjamin called himself either a communist or a fellow traveller; for years after meeting Lacis, he would repeat Marxist verities - "the bourgeoisie... is condemned to decline due to internal contradictions that will become fatal as they develop" - without having read Marx.
"Bourgeois" remained his cuss word for a mindset - materialistic, incurious, self-satisfied - to which he was viscerally hostile. Proclaiming himself a communist was an act of choosing sides, morally and historically, against the bourgeoisie and his own bourgeois origins.
'One thing... can never be made good: having neglected to run away from one's parents," he writes in One-Way Street, the collection of diary jottings, dream protocols, aphorisms and mordant observations on Weimar Germany with which he announced himself in 1928. Not having run away early enough meant that he was condemned to run away from Emil and Paula Benjamin for the rest of his life: in reacting against his parents' assimilation into the middle class, he resembled many German-speaking Jews of his generation, including Kafka.
What troubled Benjamin's friends about his marxism was that there seemed to be something forced about it, something merely reactive. Benjamin's first ventures into the discourse of the left are depressing to read - rhapsodies on Lenin (whose letters have the "sweetness of great epic"), and rehearsals of the ominous euphemisms of the party: "Communism is not radical. Therefore, it has no intentions of simply abolishing family relations.
It merely tests them to determine their capacity for change. It asks: can the family be dismantled so that its components may be socially refunctioned?" These words come from a review of a play by Bertolt Brecht, whom Benjamin met through Lacis and whose "crude thinking", thinking stripped of bourgeois niceties, attracted Benjamin for a while.
"This street is named Asja Lacis Street after her who, like the engineer, cut it through the author," runs the dedication to One-Way Street. The comparison is intended as a compliment. The engineer is the man or woman of the future, the one who, impatient of palaver, armed with practical knowledge, acts and acts decisively to change the landscape. (Stalin, too, admired engineers. In his view, writers should become engineers of human souls, meaning that they should take it as their task to "refunction" humanity from the inside out.) Of Benjamin's better-known pieces, The Author as Producer (1934) shows the influence of Brecht most clearly.
At issue is the old chestnut of Marxist aesthetics: which is more important, form or content? Benjamin proposes that a literary work will be "politically correct only if it is also literarily correct". The Author as Producer is a defence of the left wing of the modernist avant-garde, typified for Benjamin by the surrealists, who were against the party's stance on easily comprehensible, realistic stories with a strong progressive tendency.
To make his case, Benjamin appeals once again to the glamour of engineering: the writer, like the engineer, is a technical specialist and should have a voice in technical matters. Arguing at this crude level did not come easily to Benjamin. Did his faithfulness to the party cause him no unease at a time when Stalin's persecution of artists was in full swing? (Lacis herself was to become one of Stalin's victims, spending years in a labour camp.)
A brief piece from 1934 may give a clue. Here Benjamin mocks intellectuals who "make it a point of honour to be wholly themselves on every issue", refusing to understand that to succeed they have to present different faces to different audiences. They are, he says, like a butcher who refuses to cut up a carcass, insisting on selling it whole. How does one read this piece? Is Benjamin ironically praising old-fashioned intellectual integrity? Is he issuing a veiled confession that he, Benjamin, is not what he seems to be? Is he making a practical, if bitter, point about the hack writer's life? A letter to Scholem (to whom he did not always, however, tell the whole truth) suggests the last reading. Here Benjamin defends his communism as "the obvious, reasoned attempt of a man who is deprived of any means of production to proclaim his right to them".
In other words, he follows the party for the same reason that any proletarian should: because it is in his material interest. By the time the Nazis came to power, many of Benjamin's associates, including Brecht, had read the writing on the wall and taken flight. Benjamin, who had felt out of place in Germany for years, soon followed. (His younger brother Georg was less prudent: arrested for political activities in 1934, he perished in Mauthausen concentration camp in 1942.)
Benjamin settled in Paris, where he scratched a precarious existence contributing to German newspapers under Aryan pseudonyms (Detlef Holz, KA Stemplinger) and living on handouts. With the outbreak of war, he found himself interned as an enemy alien. Released through the efforts of French PEN [the world association of writers], he made arrangements to flee to the United States, then set off on his fatal journey to the Spanish border. Benjamin's keenest insights into fascism - the enemy that deprived him of a home and a career and ultimately killed him - concern the means it used to sell itself to the German people: by turning itself into theatre.
It is commonplace to observe that Hitler's Nuremberg rallies, with their combination of declamation, hypnotic music, mass choreography and dramatic lighting, found their model in Wagner's Bayreuth productions. What is original in Benjamin is his claim that politics as grandiose theatre, rather than as debate, was not just one of the trappings of fascism, but fascism in essence. In the films of Leni Riefenstahl, as well as in newsreels exhibited in every theatre in the land, the German masses were offered images of themselves as their leaders called upon them to be. Fascism used the power of the art of the past - what Benjamin calls "auratic art" - plus the multiplying power of the new postauratic media, particularly cinema, to create its new fascist citizens.
For ordinary Germans, the only identity on show was a fascist identity in fascist costume and fascist postures of domination or obedience. Benjamin's analysis of fascism as theatre raises many questions. Is politics as spectacle really the heart of German fascism, rather than ressentiment and dreams of historical retribution? If Nuremberg was aestheticised politics, why were Stalin's May Day extravaganzas and show trials not aestheticised politics too? If the genius of fascism was to erase the line between politics and media, where is the fascist element in the media-driven politics of western democracies? Are there not different varieties of aesthetic politics?
The key concept that Benjamin invents (though his diary hints it was in fact the brainchild of the bookseller and publisher Adrienne Monnier) to describe what happens to the work of art in the age of technological reproducibility (principally the age of the camera - Benjamin has little to say about printing) is the loss of aura. Until roughly the middle of the 19th century, he says, an inter-subjective relationship of a kind survived between an artwork and its viewer: "To perceive the aura of a phenomenon [means] to invest it with a capacity to look at us in turn." There is thus something magical about aura, derived from ancient links, now wandering between art and religious ritual.
Benjamin first speaks of aura in his Little History of Photography (1931), where he tries to explain why it is that, in his eyes, the very earliest portrait photographs - the incunabula of photography - have auras, whereas photographs of a generation later have lost them. In The Work of Art, the notion of aura is extended rather recklessly from old photographs to works of art in general. The end of aura, says Benjamin, will be more than compensated for by the emancipatory capacities of the new technologies of reproduction. Cinema will replace auratic art.
Even Benjamin's friends found it hard to get a grip on aura. Brecht, to whom Benjamin expounded the concept during lengthy visits to Brecht's home in Denmark, writes as follows in his diary. "[Benjamin] says: when you feel someone's gaze alight upon you... you respond (!). The expectation that whatever you look at is looking at you creates the aura... This is the way in which the materialist approach to history is adapted! It is pretty horrifying."
Throughout the 1930s Benjamin struggled to develop an acceptably materialist definition of aura and loss of aura. Film is postauratic, he says, because the camera, being an instrument, cannot see. (A questionable claim: actors respond to the camera as if it is looking at them.) In a later revision he suggests that the end of aura can be dated to the moment in history when urban crowds grew so dense that people - passers-by - no longer returned one another's gaze. In the Arcades Project he makes the loss of aura part of a wider development: the spread of a disenchanted awareness that uniqueness, including the uniqueness of the traditional artwork, has become a commod ity like any other commodity. The fashion industry, dedicated to the fabrication of unique handiworks intended to be reproduced on a mass scale, points the way here.
In the late 1920s Benjamin conceived of a work that would deal with urban experience; inspired by the arcades of Paris, it would be a version of the Sleeping Beauty story, a dialectical fairy tale told surrealistically by means of a montage of fragmentary texts. Like the prince's kiss, it would awaken the European masses to the truth of their lives under capitalism. It would be 50 pages long; in preparation for its writing, Benjamin began to copy out quotations under such headings as Boredom, Fashion, Dust.
But as a stitched-together text, it became overgrown each time with new quotations and notes. He discussed his problems with Adorno and Max Horkheimer, who convinced him he could not write about capitalism without a proper command of Marx. The Sleeping Beauty idea lost its lustre.
By 1934 Benjamin had a new, more philosophically ambitious plan: using the same method of montage, he would trace the cultural superstructure of 19th-century France back to commodities and their power to become fetishes. As his notes grew in bulk, he slotted them into an elaborate filing system based on 36 convolutes (from German Konvolut : sheaf, dossier) with keywords and cross-references. Under the title "Paris, Capital of the 19th Century" he wrote a résumé of the material, which he offered to Adorno (he was by then receiving a stipend from, and was thus in some measure beholden to, the Institute for Social Research, which had been relocated by Adorno and Horkheimer from Frankfurt to New York).
From Adorno, Benjamin received such severe criticism that he decided to set aside the project and extract from his mass of materials a book about Baudelaire. Adorno saw part of the book and was again critical: facts were made to speak for themselves, he said; there was not enough theory. Benjamin made further revisions, which had a warmer reception.
Baudelaire was central to the Arcades plan because, in Benjamin's eyes, Les Fleurs du Mal first revealed the modern city as a subject for poetry. (Benjamin seems not to have read Wordsworth, who, 50 years before Baudelaire, wrote of what it was like to be part of a street crowd, bombarded on all sides with glances, dazzled with advertisements.)
Yet Baudelaire expressed his experience of the city in allegory, a literary mode out of fashion since the Baroque. In Le Cygne, for instance, he allegorises the poet as a swan, scrabbling comically in the paved marketplace, unable to spread his wings and soar.
Why did Baudelaire opt for the allegorical mode? Benjamin uses Marx's Kapital to answer his question. The elevation of market value into the sole measure of worth, says Marx, reduces a commodity to nothing but a sign - the sign of what it will sell for. Under the reign of the market, things relate to their actual worth as arbitrarily as, for instance, in baroque emblematics, a death's head relates to man's subjection to time. Emblems thus make an unexpected return to the historical stage in the form of commodities which, as Marx had warned, "(abound) in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties". Allegory, Benjamin argues, is exactly the right mode for an age of commodities.
While working on the never-completed Baudelaire book, Benjamin continued to take notes for the Arcades. What was recovered after the war from its hiding place in the Bibliothèque Nationale amounted to some 900 pages of extracts, mainly from 19th-century writers but from contemporaries of Benjamin's as well, grouped under headings, with interspersed commentary, plus a variety of plans and synopses.
The history of the Arcades Project, a history of procrastination and false starts, of wanderings in archival labyrinths in a quest for exhaustiveness, of shifting theoretical ground, of criticism too readily acted on, and generally speaking of Benjamin not knowing his own mind, means that the book we are left with is radically incomplete: incompletely conceived and hardly written in any conventional sense. Rolf Tiedemann, who published an edition of the work in 1982, compares it to the building materials of a house. In the hypothetical completed house the materials would be held together by Benjamin's thought. We possess much of that thought in the form of Benjamin's interpolations, but cannot always see how the thought fits or encompasses the material.
In such a situation, says Tiedemann, it might seem better to publish only Benjamin's own words, leaving out the quotations. But Benjamin's intention, however utopian, was that at some point his commentary would be withdrawn, leaving the quoted material to bear the full weight of the structure.
The arcades of Paris, says an 1852 guidebook, are "inner boulevards, glass-roofed, marble-panelled corridors extending through blocks of buildings... lining both sides... are the most elegant shops, so that such an arcade is a city, a world in miniature". Their airy glass and steel architecture was soon imitated in other cities of the west. The heyday of arcades extended to the end of the century, when they were eclipsed by department stores.
The Arcades book was never intended to be an economic history (though part of its ambition was to act as a corrective to the entire discipline of economic history). An early sketch suggests something far more like his autobiographical work, A Berlin Childhood. "One knew of places in ancient Greece where the way led down into the underworld. Our waking existence likewise is a land which, at certain hidden points, leads down into the underworld - a land full of inconspicuous places from which dreams arise. All day long, suspecting nothing, we pass them by, but no sooner has sleep come than we are groping our way back to lose ourselves in the dark corridors. By day, the labyrinth of urban dwelling resembles consciousness; the arcades... issue unremarked on to the streets. At night, however, under the tenebrous mass of the houses, their denser darkness protrudes like a threat, and the nocturnal pedestrian hurries past - unless, that is, we have emboldened him to turn into a narrow lane."
Two books served Benjamin as models: Louis Aragon's A Paris Peasant, with its affectionate tribute to the Passage de L'Opéra, and Franz Hessel's Strolling in Berlin, which focuses on the Kaisergalerie and its power to summon up the feel of a bygone era. In his book, Benjamin would try to capture the "phantasmagoric" experience of the Parisian wandering among displays of goods, an experience still recoverable in his own day, when "arcades dot the metropolitan landscape like caves containing the fossil remains of a vanished monster: the consumer of the pre-imperial era of capitalism, the last dinosaur of Europe".
The great innovation of the Arcades Project would be its form. It would work on the principle of montage, juxtaposing textual fragments from past and present in the expectation that they would strike sparks from and illuminate each other. Thus, for instance, if item 2,1 of convolute L, referring to the opening of an art museum at the palace of Versailles in 1837, is read in conjunction with item 2,4 of convolute A, which traces the development of arcades into department stores, then ideally the analogy "museum is to department store as artwork is to commodity" will flash into the reader's mind.
According to Max Weber, what marks the modern world is loss of belief, disenchantment. Benjamin has a different angle: that capitalism has put people to sleep, that they will wake up from their collective enchantment only when they are made to understand what has happened to them. The inscription to convolute N comes from Marx: "The reform of consciousness consists solely in... the awakening of the world from its dream about itself."
The dreams of the capitalist era are embodied in commodities. In their ensemble these constitute a phantasmagoria, constantly changing shape according to the tides of fashion, and offered to crowds of enchanted worshippers as the embodiment of their deepest desires. The phantasmagoria always hides its origins (which lie in alienated labour). Phantasmagoria in Benjamin is thus a little like ideology in Marx - a tissue of public lies sustained by the power of capital - but is more like Freudian dreamwork operating at a collective, social level.
"I needn't say anything. Merely show," says Benjamin; and elsewhere: "Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars." If the mosaic of quotations is built up correctly, a pattern should emerge that is more than the sum of its parts but which cannot exist independently of them: this is the essence of the new form of historical-materialistic writing that Benjamin believed himself to be practising.
What dismayed Adorno about the project in 1935 was Benjamin's faith that a mere assemblage of objects could speak for itself. Benjamin was, he wrote, "on the crossroads between magic and positivism". Adorno later had a chance to see the entire Arcades corpus, and again expressed doubts about the thinness of its theorising. Benjamin's response was to invent the notion of the dialectical image, for which he went back to baroque emblematics - ideas represented by pictures and Baudelairean allegory. Allegory, he suggested, could take over the role of abstract thought.
The objects and figures that inhabit the arcades - gamblers, whores, mirrors, dust, wax figures - are to Benjamin emblems, and their interactions generate meanings, allegorical meanings that do not need the intrusion of theory. Along the same lines, fragments of text taken from the past and placed in the charged field of the historical present are capable of behaving much as the elements of a surrealist image do, interacting spontaneously to give off political energy. In so doing the fragments constitute the dialectical image, dialectical movement frozen for a moment, open for inspection, dialectics at a standstill: "Only dialectical images are genuine images."
So much for the theory, ingenious as it is, to which Benjamin's deeply anti-theoretical book appeals. But to the reader unpersuaded by the theory, the reader to whom the dialectical images never quite come alive as they are supposed to, the reader perhaps unreceptive to the master narrative of the long sleep of capitalism followed by the dawn of socialism, what does the Arcades Project have to offer? The briefest of lists would include: a treasure hoard of curious information about Paris, a multitude of thought-provoking questions, the harvest of an acute and idiosyncratic mind's trawl through thousands of books, succinct observations, pol ished to a high aphoristic sheen, on a range of subjects (example: "Prostitution can lay claim to being considered 'work' the moment work becomes prostitution"); and glimpses of Benjamin toying with a new way of seeing himself: as a compiler of a "magic encyclopaedia". Suddenly Benjamin, esoteric reader of an allegorical city, seems close to his contemporary Jorge Luis Borges, fabulist of a rewritten universe.
From a distance, Benjamin's magnificent opus is reminiscent of another great ruin of 20th- century literature, Ezra Pound's Cantos. Both works are built out of fragments, and adhere to the high-modernist aesthetics of image and montage. Both have economic ambitions and economists as presiding figures (Marx in one case, Gesell and Douglas in the other). Both authors have investments in antiquarian bodies of knowledge whose relevance to their own times they overestimate. Neither knows when to stop. And both were in the end consumed by the monster of fascism: Benjamin tragically, Pound shamefully.
It has been the fate of the Cantos to have a handful of anthology pieces excerpted and the rest quietly dropped. The fate of the Arcades may well be similar. One can foresee a condensed student edition drawn mainly from convolutes B (Fashion), H (The Collector), I (The Interior), J (Baudelaire), K (Dream City), N (On the Theory of Knowledge) and Y (Photo- graphy), in which the quotations will be cut to a minimum and most of the surviving text will be by Benjamin himself. And that would not be a wholly bad thing.
What was Walter Benjamin: a philosopher? A critic? A historian? A mere "writer"? The best answer is perhaps Hannah Arendt's: he was one of "the unclassifiable ones... whose work neither fits the existing order nor introduces a new genre".
His trademark approach - coming at a subject not straight on but at an angle, moving stepwise from one perfectly formulated summation to the next - is as instantly recognisable as it is inimitable, depending on sharpness of intellect, learning lightly worn and a prose style which, once he had given up thinking of himself as Professor Benjamin, became a marvel of accuracy and concision. Underlying his project of getting at the truth of our times is an ideal he found expressed in Goethe: to set out the facts in such a way that the facts will be their own theory.
The Arcades book, whatever our verdict on it - ruin, failure, impossible project - suggests a new way of writing about a civilisation using its rubbish as materials rather than its artworks: history from below rather than above. And his call elsewhere for a history centred on the sufferings of the vanquished, rather than on the achievements of the victors, is prophetic of the way in which history writing has begun to think of itself in our lifetime.
This is an edited extract from an article that first appeared in the New York Review of Books. The Arcades Project, by Walter Benjamin, translated from the German and French by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, is published by Belknap Press/Harvard University Press (£27.50).