Talk:Arcades Project

Just for the record, this isn't related to sociology. If anything it would be classified as literary theory, perhaps philosophy. 72.8.95.34 07:20, 14 September 2007 (UTC)

• I changed it to "History" (before seeing your comment here) -- I agree with you that it isn't sociology (that made me laugh too), but neither is it strickly philosophy or literary theory. I did not know all the possiblities available for categorization but it struck me that History was broad enough. I mean it is really *everything* right? Art criticism and literary criticism and political observation and fashion critique and poetry and philosophy and Marxist analysis and he even records what people were saying about other worlds! And I guess, even some sociology! It is an amazing book. It strikes me as a sort of scrapbook of Paris in the 19th century (not in the Middle-aged, stay-at-home mom / Dr.'s wife, cut and paste and add stickers from the QVC to pictures of kids sense!) but in an amazing archival accumulation sense with the added benefit of insightful filtering and juxtaposition. Oh well, I am sleepy (4am here). Ciao! Saudade7 01:54, 25 September 2007 (UTC)

To add to the above, I've just seen an interview led by Alexander Kluge with a literary critic [1] where they're both saying that had it been completed, it woulda been one of 20th century's most fundamental works of philosophy, historical, sociological, and political analyses, and that Benjamin's basic thesis in it is that the reason why the 20th century is going down the drain between 1910 and 1940 (world wars, the failure of the 1918 German revolution, rise of fascism) is because we haven't properly understood the 19th century, its dreams, aims, and ambition yet, or in short the "dream" that it was, both in the meaning of the utopias that it brought forth but also its fundamental delusions and its lack of understanding of itself (both in how the conscious Ego cannot be aware of its unconscious Id impulses, and in how eras can only be understood in hindsight, in a historian's perspective), in a socio-political and socio-psychological context and with strong overtones of Marxist analysis and Freudian mass psychology. In short, because people hadn't learned the lessons of the 19th century yet and were still in an unconscious, pre-Enlightened collective "dream" state, the 20th century was going down the drain, and Benjamin's ambition with the Arcades Project was to unearth the unconscious collective lessons of the 19th century "dream". Each chapter was to be devoted to a historical French figure as the archetype of a certain socio-political and socio-economic milieu and a corresponding age or era within the 19th century. All that combined into an original, materialist theory of history, which Tiedemann in his preface defines as that according to Benjamin, we can never understand any historical event while it is in progress, only in hindsight when we know its outcome, its consequences for our present time, that we must analyze the differences between the past's original promises, how it came to fail in delivering upon these promises, and that we must learn from these mistakes, as all prior attempts at revolution failed from still being too conformist (which already in the 1930s appears to include the October Revolution). --79.242.222.168 (talk) 16:49, 23 July 2016 (UTC)