
Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project as a blueprint for living online - aabhay
https://reallifemag.com/the-arcades-project/
======
claudiawerner
While I appreciate Benjamin's point (very much so, in the sense of "dealing
with what we have" in the commodified and totalizing culture of capitalism, as
he might put it), I am also sympathetic to Adorno and Marcuse's thoughts
against the project - the idea that engaging in commodity culture can be
liberating is just as valid as the idea that it sinks one deeper into the
totality. Marcuse's argument, in fact, was that the only hope for resistance
against the system came from _outside_ its totalizing influence, those who had
not been integrated into the system yet. The idea of 'the arcade' does not
seem to be realized anywhere. Readers of the article (or indeed Benjamin's
works) may get the impression that this is a space that (1) already exists, or
(2) we can create in today (after Benjamin's time). Both of these suppositions
are doubtful. Adorno noted in the preface to the second edition of _The
Dialectic of Enlightment_ that it had in some ways become more relevant than
when it was initially published.

~~~
aabhay
Interesting comment! I’m not the author of the article, but I know them. I
think her perspective is that we are free to imagine arcades within the web
construct, flaneuring through the images and ideas in an ambulatory way,
trying to grasp the totality in different ways. I take it as an antithesis to
the more common interpretation of the web as a filter bubble. I think like all
of Benjamin’s work, there’s a performative element — he’s not simply trying to
extract the truth of the matter but rather encouraging us towards a more
‘adventurous’ being.

