The Passageways of Paris:Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project and Contemporary Cultural Debate in the West

자료: http://www.wbenjamin.org/passageways.html

.........

The arcades of Paris should need no introduction to the contemporary scholar. As a social, historical and cultural phenomenon they have been immortalised by the celebrated German-Jewish writer Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), in his immense unfinished study of nineteenth-century Paris entitled Das Passagen-Werk [The Arcades Project], which occupied his attention across the 1930s and today appears to many as one of the key books of the twentieth century. [2]

What is an arcade? In its classic sense, the term denotes a pedestrian passage or gallery, open at both ends and roofed in glass and iron, typically linking two parallel streets and consisting of two facing rows of shops and other commercial establishments - restaurants, cafés, hairdressers, etc. "Arcade" is the English name: in French the arcades are known as "passages", and in German as "Passagen". [7] The modern arcade was invented in Paris, and, while the concept was imitated in other cities - there are particularly fine mid-nineteenth century examples in Brussels - the Parisian arcades remain the type of the phenomenon. Benjamin quotes a passage from the Illustrated Guide to Paris, a German publication of 1852, which sums up the arcades' essence:

"These arcades, a recent invention of industrial luxury, are glass-roofed, marble-panelled corridors extending through whole blocks of buildings, whose owners have joined together for such enterprises. Lining both sides of the corridors, which get their light from above, are the most elegant shops, so that the arcade is a city, a world in miniature, in which 04customers will find everything they need". [8]

The construction that is generally accepted as the first example of the Paris arcade proper was the Passage des Panoramas, opened in 1800 when Napoleon Bonaparte was First Consul, and still in existence. [9] There had been earlier partial precursors in Paris. The "Galeries de Bois" or Wooden Galleries inside the Palais-Royal - the former Royal Palace and residence of the Orléans branch of the royal family - offered, from 1790 until their demolition in 1828, a traffic-free space where a multitude of traders served thronging crowds under a wooden roof, and which, in literature, is the subject of a celebrated description in Illusions perdues (Lost Illusions), Balzac's classic fictional exposé of Parisian society published in 1843. [10] However, the Passage des Panoramas was certainly the first of the purpose-built glass-roofed arcades, and, therefore, of the arcades proper. This arcade, situated just off the rue Vivienne near the Bourse or Stock Exchange, to this day contains a multitude of small shops and restaurants, and culminates in the back entrance to the Théâtre des Variétés. Most of its successors were constructed between 1800 and 1830, i.e. through the Napoleonic period and under the post-1815 Bourbon monarchy, as restored after Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo; a further handful saw the light during the "bourgeois monarchy" of Louis-Philippe and the Second Empire under Napoleon III, the last being built in 1860. All these arcades - in their heyday they numbered between twenty and thirty - were located within a relatively small area of the city, on the right bank of the Seine. In the process that gave rise to them, landowners - aristocrats, bankers or large-scale traders - bent on speculation bought up and demolished old or empty properties, thus creating substantial vacant lots between streets, on which the arcades were constructed. In many cases the empty properties had earlier been private residences, but certain sites had been occupied by former convents, dissolved at the Revolution. [11] The latter connection allows the arcades to appear as a product and manifestation of secularisation from one angle, but from another as a locus for the displacement of one religion by a second one: to compulsory Christianity there succeeds the worship of the commodity.