and observe, shop perhaps, or simply pass from one part of the city to another; shortcuts, passageways. Passagenwerk, the original title, remember that.
The source I was reading – this wasn’t Walter himself, you understand, but was one of the many commentators who keep sifting through his thoughts, the host of bodies hunched over his writing in The British Library reading rooms – this source of mine claimed the passages had no fixed meaning. They didn’t constitute autonomous places, they were ‘parasitic’ upon existing ones. That is the term the source used, the informant that he was. Open to light yet sheltered from the elements, they were private even when carved from public space. Magic, phantasmagorical, intoxicating: the residue of dreams. Walter wandering through the arcades of his mind, a guide to others, lost to himself.
Residues of a dream world. Isn’t that what makes the experience of the Underground’s endless tunnels what it is, utterly concrete and always somewhat unreal? It was the technologies of glass and iron that had made the arcades possible (my source claimed Walter had said) and they offered a glimpse of the kind of experience based on a new relationship with nature, with society as well, as a consequence. But they wouldn’t last. They would lose their ambiguous character quickly – Walter had claimed, the source maintained – and emerge fully defined, either as spaces of fixed use, or as routes, ways of mere passage. They became department stores, associated with commerce and slave to its laws; or dwellings and homes, as in Fourier’s phalansteries. That is what the source claimed, the absence of the Underground palpable in what was written.
In Walter’s writings, the Parisian arcade was the threshold, a ‘point of passage’; that was what gave it its ‘disquieting’ sense of ambiguity (Caygill, 1998: 132-3). The challenge to the distinction between private and public, artifice and nature, was erased. Sell. Sleep. Pass through and move away. This is how Walter understood the arcades, as containing latent, unrealised futures. Does this sound familiar? But isn’t it the Underground he describes?
There was another source on my table, here, in the British Library reading room (as the woman across the table pulled a scarf over her shoulders to protect herself from recycled air, no fresher here than in the tunnels you walked through as you read my message). This other book, the source I let whisper in my ear, pointed out that the separation of the two would always be relative: ‘Benjamin writes of arcades themselves as kinds of interiors in the city, spaces that reorganise relations between inside and outside,’ he wrote, then related what Walter had written. ‘The domestic interior moves outside…. The street becomes room and the room becomes street.’ And also, ‘Arcades are houses or passages having no outside – like the dream’ (Rice, 2007: 10). In Benjamin’s project, the arcades were physical, material embodiments of ‘technological, commercial and spatial developments of the nineteenth century,’ representative of that century only (Rice, 2007: 11). That’s what the source maintained.
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