# 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]]