Profane Illuminations: Digital Passages within Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project with Sarah DeMott (NYU)

Sponsored by the Urban Humanities Working Group.

Walter Benjamin's The Arcades Project has long been applied as a text to interrogate the city through the architectural structure of the arcades as a symbolic space of the public life happening within the interior of the city, a site for comparative urban existence linking Paris, Naples, and Moscow, and a reference for the evolution of contemporary commercial centers and shopping malls. In addition to referencing architecture and urban design, The Arcades Project has become a lexicon for use when considering how urban life is defined. Benjamin's thirty-six convolutes represent key terms in the study of urbanization. This paper performs a computational analysis of The Arcades Project as a way to read Benjamin's critique of modernization, labor, and urbanization in 19th-century Paris. Through the green lens of the computer terminal, the city emerges as a digital passageway allowing us—Benjamin's readers—to approximate our existences to those populating the phantasmagorical city that his Passagenwerk animates.