The Arcades Project

• #push [[arcades project]]
• a [[book]].
  • ...sort of.
    • perhaps closer to a [[hypertext]], before those existed.
      • maybe a [[scrapbook]]. maybe a [[draft]]. maybe a [[collection of notes]].
  • #push [[walter benjamin]] contemporaries
    • quotes from: [[marcel proust]] [[paul valéry]] [[louis aragon]] [[andré breton]] [[georg simmel]] [[ernst bloch]] [[siegfried kracauer]] [[theodor adorno]]
  • [[foreword]]
    • in the words of the translator of our edition, the items on display ([[drafts]], [[excerpts]]) give rise to "[[a world of secret affinities]]".
    • [[benjamin]] abandoned the work in [[1940]] as he had to flee [[paris]].
    • [[benjamin]] wrote to [[gershom scholem]] on [[1934]] and said that "not a syllable of the actual text of the [[passagenarbeit]] exists yet". So perhaps what we've got is essentially only [[notes]] for a work that was never written.
    • but perhaps what we got is closer to what [[benjamin]] had in mind as an end state; he had experimented with [[montage]] before.
    • it contains [[oppressive chunks of quotations]].
    • [[convolutes]]
  • #push [[nineteenth century types]]
    • [[flaneur]]
    • [[collector]]
    • [[gambler]]
  • [[exposé of 1935]]
    • [[iron]]
    • [[glass]]
    • [[fourier]] the [[utopian]]
      • [[phalanstery]]
      • influenced [[zola]], [[marx]]