Capitalism In Charles Fourier's 'The Arcades Project'

We may locate Benjamin’s central wish image in the Parisian arcades themselves. According to Benjamin, the arcades—those architectural marvels unthinkable before capitalism created the material conditions for them—ladening with tantalizing products, and overflowing with plenty, formed the basis for Charles Fourier’s imaginary utopian dwelling, the phalanstery: “Fourier saw, in the arcades, the architectural canon of the phalanstery. Their reactionary metamorphosis with him is characteristic: whereas they originally serve commercial ends, they become, for him, places of habitation” (5). The abundance in the arcades suggests a dwelling of human plenty, where everybody’s needs can and will be met. Indeed, the products in the arcades appear to

In a letter to Benjamin, Max Horkheimer reasonably objected to such an “incomplete” view of history: “Past injustice has occurred and is complete . The slain are really slain.” Benjamin’s responds in The Arcades Project by claiming that history is not a science, but rather a category of mindfulness known as remembrance ([Eingedenken)]: “Such mindfulness can make the incomplete (happiness) into something complete, and the complete (suffering) into something incomplete” (471). While Benjamin is forced to concede that this is indeed “theological” thinking, his view of remembrance is nonetheless rooted not in theological abstractions, but rather in “an experience that forbids us to conceive of history as fundamentally atheological” (471). It is wholly characteristic of Benjamin that there should be an experiential core to even his most far-flung theological and messianic conceptions: the experience of remembering past suffering is enough to caution against conceiving past suffering as completed in every

Adorno found this position to be naïve. As Richard Wolin describes, Adorno “criticizes Benjamin’s unqualified and uncritical acceptance of technically reproduced art as well as the essay’s complementary rejection of all autonomous art as being inherently ‘counterrevolutionary.’” Benjamin does not exactly ignore the control and manipulations of what Adorno and Max Horkheimer would later, in The Dialectic of Enlightenment, call the “culture industry.” He argues, for instance, that there can be “no political advantage” from the mechanical reproduction of film “until film has liberated itself from the fetters of capitalist exploitation” (113). However, the space Benjamin devotes to this threat is much more modest than the space he gives to its revolutionary qualities, which he finds intrinsic in technology itself. An example of this faith in the intrinsic mechanisms of technologies of reproduction is his concept of “reception in distraction”: “A person who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it; he enters into the work, just as, according to legend, a Chinese painter entered his completed painting while beholding it. By contrast, the distracted masses absorb the work of art into themselves” (119). For Benjamin, film is like architecture: we come to understand it “not so much by way of attention as by way of habit” and “in the form of casual noticing, rather than attentive observation”