ABSTRACT
I want to suggest a method for looking at the phenomena of daily life that draws on the historical methodology defined by Walter Benjamin in his Arcades Project (Benjamin, 1989). While Das Passagen-Werk was published posthumously, I think the collection reveals enough about Benjamin’s concept of history as it relates to the present and as it is articulated culturally to use this work as one possible way to begin to develop analyses of contemporary culture. What struck Benjamin in his consideration of the nineteenth-century Paris arcades was the dynamic juxtaposition these produced between the public and the private, with the shops carved out and constructed within older living space, and the way in which the shops referenced past historical periods and foreign geographies in their commodities and decor. From the juxtapositions Benjamin developed a materialist approach to history which he described as analogous to the theory of montage. He realized that the references to the past functioned as quotations; that is, the present embodies significant meaningful moments of the past and quotes these in its creation of the now. As defined by Benjamin, neither montage nor quotation suggests stasis as they now do in relation to structuralist and poststructuralist theory. Rather, they contribute to a dialectical reading of historyhistory defined not as a continuum projected out of the past and propelled by progress into the future, but history apprehended from our vantage-point in the present as ruptured moments that take on significance because of their relationship to the present. As he put it:
Historicism contents itself with establishing a causal connection between various moments in history. But no fact that is a cause is for that very reason historical. It became historical posthumously, as it were, through events that may be separated from it by thousands of years. A historian who takes this as his point of departure stops telling the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary. Instead, he grasps the constellation which his own era has formed with a definite earlier one.
