The Paris arcades

Abstract This chapter interprets Benjamin’s unfinished masterpiece, The Arcades Project, an archaeology of mass consumption. Historicizing the public/private divide, Benjamin interprets nineteenth-century Paris as a series of inversions, reflections, mirror images, and regressions, almost like a musical composition. What holds it together is the narcissistic aura of the commodity form. The chapter also explains Benjamin’s overall theory of history as organized through images: mythic, empirical, and dialectical or messianic.