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Originating in Paris in the 1820s, arcades were decorative passages or walkways through blocks of buildings. Glass-roofed and supported by ornate ironwork columns, arcades formed interior streets; sites of conspicuous consumption for the wealthy, and places of spectacle for the poor. Hemmed in by concession stands and eclectic emporia, arcade shop fronts offered the observer a visual experience of illuminated shop-signs, objets d’art, and a cornucopia of commodities from around the world. Sociologically speaking, the importance of the Parisian arcades lies in their role as progenitor of modern consumerism and more tangentially as a prototype of the contemporary shopping mall.
The unearthing of the arcade as a site of sociological and philosophical importance is closely associated with the German literary theorist, Walter Benjamin. Benjamin was fascinated by the arcades, ”mythical” qualities, viewing them as both ”threatening” and ”alluring” – places in which the emotions were stimulated and where the spheres of public and private life were blurred and challenged. In The Arcades Project (Das Passagen-Werk), Benjamin viewed the arcades as a metaphor for the composition and dynamic form of modern industrial capitalism. He described arcade shop fronts as ”dream houses,” where everything desirable becomes a commodity (frequently on the first floor of the arcades, sexual pleasures could be bought and drinking and gambling were common). For Benjamin, the continual flow of goods, the ”sensual immediacy” of the displays, and the visual appeal of transitory fashions were all fragments of the ”commodity fetish.” Yet while newness itself becomes a fetish, the modern commodity has a built-in obsolescence – the novel inevitably becomes the outmoded. This tension is apparent in the fate of the arcades themselves. Following Haussman’s ”creative destruction” of Second Empire Paris in the 1860s, most of the arcades were destroyed to make way for the wide boulevards that characterize Paris today.
Likewise, by the time of Benjamin’s research, the arcades had largely been superseded by the modern department store with its more rationalized forms of mass urban consumption. However, surviving examples of original arcades can still be found in Paris today.
Bibliography:
- Buck-Morss, (1989) The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Cambridge: MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
- Geist, J. F. (1983) Arcades. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
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