arcades project excerpts A2,1_A2,6_A3,10

Shops in the Passage des Panoramas: Restaurant Veron, reading room, music shop, Marquis, wine merchants, hosier, haberdashers, tailors, bootmakers, hosiers, bookshops, caricaturist, Theatre des Varietes. Compared with this, the Passage Vivienne was the "solid" arcade. There, one found no luxury shops. Dream houses: arcade as nave with side chapels.

The regime of specialties furnishes also-this said in passing-the historical-materialist key to the flourishing (if not the inception) of genre painting in the Forties of the previous century. With the growing interest of the bourgeoisie in matters of art, this type of painting diversified; but in conformity with the meager artistic appreciation initially displayed by this class, it did so in terms of the content, in terms of the objects represented. There appeared historical scenes, animal studies, scenes of childhood, scenes from the life of monks, the life of the family, the life of the village-all as sharply defined genres. Photography.

A first winter garden-a glassed-in space with flower beds, espaliers, and fountains, in part underground-on the spot where, in the garden of the Palais-Royal in 1864 (and today as well?), the reservoir was located. Laid out in 1788.

[Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin]

Paris

Though convoluted and filled with objects for sale, the arcades offered the common man or woman a brief subterranean escape from a city designed to keep all bodies visible and industrious. In this way, the arcades function more like Deleuze-Guattari's model for smooth space, the space in which "the points are subordinated to the trajectory" (ATP 478). Their structural composition lends way to a space which is conducive to nomadism, in which "dwelling is subordinated to the journey" (ATP 478), and thus these passages become the space of flânerie--of distraction--one of Benjamin's primary obsessions in The Arcades Project.

arcades

Arcades Project excerpt_4

Baudelaire, in the section, "Les Femmes et les filles" in his essay on Guys, cites the words of La Bruyere: "Some women possess an artificial nobility which is associated with a movement of the eye, a tilt of the head, a manner of deportment, and which goes no further." Compare Baudelaire's "Le Mensonge."-In the same section, Baudelaire cites the concept of the "femina simplex of the Roman satirist" (L'Art romantique [Paris],p.109)
[Z2a,2]

Arcades Project excerpt_3

In his study "La Mante religieuse:Recherches sur la nature et la signification du mythe", Caillois refers to the striking automatism of reflexes in the praying mantis (there is hardly a vital function that it does not also perform decapitated).He links it, on account of its fateful significance, with the baneful automatons known to us from myths.Thus Pandora: "automaton fabricated by the blacksmith god for the ruin of humankind, for that 'which all shall/take to their hearts with delight, an evil to love and embrace' (Hesiod, Works and Days, line 58).We encounter something similar in the Indian Krtya-those dolls, animated by sorcerers, which bring about the death of men who embrace them.Our literature as well, in the motif of femmes fatales, possesses the concept of a woman-machine, artificial, mechanical, at variance with all living creatures, and above all murderous. No doubt psychoanalysis would not hesitate to explain this representation in its own terms by envisaging the relations between death and sexuality and, more precisely, by finding each ambiguously intimated in the other." Roger Caillois, Mesures, 3, no.2 (April 15, 1937) [Z2a,1]

arcades project excerpt

Baudelaire_ Fusées2


Throughout Baudelaire's writings, from the early novella La Fanfarlo, to an article on Mme Bovary, published in 1857, to the intimate journals, Fusées, and the prose poems, Le Spleen de Paris, there are allusions to fluid or mixed gender identities in contexts that are themselves a mixture of approval and anxious fascination. The motifs of androgyny and hysteria are intermixed and associated with heightened capacity for imagination, hypersensitivity, various forms of impotence and an inclination to excess. The hysterical or androgynous figure, whether male or female, is thus paradoxically assumed to have an increased capacity to enter into expanded states of consciousness that nourish the poetic imagination and to suffer from the inability to give them verbal form through the exercise of the "male" imagination and its "voice."

Arcades Project excerpt_2

At a certain point in time, the motif of the doll acquires a sociocritical significance .For example : ”You have no idea how repulsive these automatons and dolls can become, and how one breathes at last on encountering a full-blooded being in this society.” Paul Lindau , Der Abend (Berlin, 1896) [Z1,5]

Z_ The Doll, The Automaton

Arcades Project excerpt_1

From the Ombres Chinoises (Chinese Shadows) of the Palais-Royal: “A…demoiselle gave birth on stage, and the children could immediately scamper about like moles . There were four of them, and they danced together a few moments after the birth in a pleasant quadrille . Another young woman started tossing her head vigorously, and in the twinkling of an eye a second demoiselle had stepped fully clothed from out of her head . This latter at once began dancing but, the next minute, was seized in turn with head –shaking; these were labor pains, and a third demoiselle stepped out of her head . She, too, immediately began dancing but soon took to tossing her head like the others, and out of her arose the fourth demoiselle .It continued in this manner until eight generations were there on the stage-all related to one another through spontaneous generation, like lice.” J.F.Benzenberg, Briefe geschrieben auf einer Reise nach Paris (Dortmund, 1805 )
[Z1,4]