Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project: Jumpstarting Your Own Method
The Arcades Project shows a method of research, writing, and thinking. Yet, none of what is here might be recognizable as “research.” Benjamin’s methodology is inventive, but it is also a very different way of thinking.
Writing as epistemological - epistemic - epistemology? Is there a relationship between how someone approaches writing and how someone approaches knowledge (i.e. what counts as knowledge)?
Take a second to think about your own method of researching, writing, and thinking. By “research,” I don’t just mean how you find out information for an essay you’re writing. I mean research in a larger sense: how do you approach new ideas, rethink your old assumptions, weigh new possiblities, etc.? How do you approach knowledge about the world? How do you develop your ideas about the world?
Benjamin offers one method for approaching a new subject/idea and researching information about it. His method is a means of developing new ideas about a subject, rather than falling back on previous notions, beliefs, and assumptions. This is why his method is called a “critical” method for writing and thinking. Walter Benjamin is a critical theorist—somone who thinks about the act of thinking.
For Benjamin–and for us, too–writing and thinking are connected. Writing does not just record knowledge after it has been “found.” Rather, as Benjamin shows here, writing can aid thinking as a process. My question to you for the week: How can you use Benjamin’s method in order to inform your own critical reseach methods?
What is the basis of WB’s methodology?
- History and culture are studied in the cracks. He studies history/culture not as the “great men and celebrated events of historiography,” but as the “half-concealed, variegated traces of the daily life of the collective” (ix). For Benjamin, history is in the cracks and corners of everyday life. You can study Big Ideas by looking at the seemingly small or insignificant details.
- Refuse to categorize, eliminate, and assume in advance of what you find. His methods were “dependent on chance” and were akin to the “collector of antiquities,” the “ragpicker,” and the collector of “curiosities.”
- Recognize that affinities exist in sometimes hidden ways. Benjamin uses the montage/collage method of quotes, signs, facts, observations, and the like. What is montage and how does it help to create links and ideas?
- Traditional modes of argument are not ontological (i.e., eternal, true, The Only Way). Montage as argument. Benjamin gives us “blinks” of citation and commentary, strung together by chance affinities. Does this make his work less meaningful than a traditionally argued book or article? Can this kind of collection-research ever be an end in itself? If so, why? How? (See page xi.) His project is aimed at a real “thesis,” if you want to call it such: “the unsettling effects of high capitalism on the most intimate areas of life and work” (xii). Note, then, how he makes his argument. . .
- Use of the “dialectical image” in historical research. Benjamin is doing historical research, remember. He is writing about 19th Century Paris, yet he is writing in the 20th century. The “dialectics” in Benjamin’s work here consists of an object which, “under the divinatory gaze of the collector, is taken up into the collector’s own particular time and place, thereby throwing a pointed light on what has been” (xii). Consider the dialectical image as a rhetorical strategy. Right now, an intense look at the Vietnam War is being examined in order to throw a pointed light on our current situation in Iraq. This might be called a dialectical image.
- What does Benjamin put together (montage) in the section you read?
- What is the result of such montage method? Do affinities develop among these pieces in a meaninful way?
In your own fieldwork, begin as Benjamin does. Your method should be more of a collector than anything else. For Thursday: Think about the work of affinities in your writing.
