Benjamin’s Arcades Project today: From the European metropolis to the global city

Abstract

This essay reads Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project (1927–40) as an analysis of 19th-century Paris that anticipates non-western and global urban space in the postmodern age of a late capitalist consumer society. In Benjamin’s analysis, the French capital cites images of colonial or non-western cultures for the formation of its European identity. Conversely, the accelerating hybridization and virtualization of today’s global cities, here exemplified by Hong Kong, appropriate images from Europe, fusing these by borrowing from their own history in order to fashion their own metropolitan diversity. As a result, Benjamin’s Europe-centred text can be re-employed as a framework for analysing representations of non-western cities; correspondingly, focusing on a (western) description of a city like Hong Kong allows Benjamin’s reconstruction of 19th-century Paris to appear as a foundational space of today’s transnational capitalism.

Keywords:

• Walter Benjamin
• cultural citation
• global cities
• Hong Kong
• intercultural translation
• transnational capitalism

Notes

1. For further representative examples of the rapidly growing interdisciplinary scholarship on globalization and global cities from a cultural perspective, see Krause and Petro.

2. For further explanation of the term Aktualisierung (actualization) in the context of Benjamin, see Goebel, Benjamin heute, 9–11, 43–44.

3. My following remarks build on arguments previously presented in my study Benjamin heute and my essay “Benjamin’s ‘Traumhäuser des Kollektivs’ heute.”

4. One of the earliest and still relevant studies in this area is Bolle’s. See also Shields.

5. This area remains relatively unexplored; Turner and, more extensively, Chisholm offer innovative insights into the significance of Benjamin’s theories for the construction of queer city space.

6. See the contributions in Gumbrecht and Marrinan, which on the whole prefer close readings of Benjamin’s artwork essay, with only sporadic references to its implication for the age of digital technologies.

7. Along these lines, see Grossman for a critique especially of Marxist and deconstructive Benjamin readings.

8. For insightful essays on the figure of the flâneur in Benjamin and subsequent social contexts, see Tester.

9. Bhabha offers pertinent theoretical insights into the subversion of western hegemonic discourses and their subversion by (post)colonial voices.

10. For a differentiated analysis of the question of whether and to what extent Hong Kong is a global city, see Forrest et al. The authors argue that Hong Kong is “locked into the global economy in a distinctive way”. Although not a “truly global command centre”, it is a “hub of corporate travel and international tourism”. This, together with the city’s “transformation from a major centre of manufacturing to an overwhelmingly service-sector-based economy, would suggest the importance of external global influences in the shaping of its social and spatial structure” (210). I will discuss other, more specifically cultural, aspects of this spatiality.

11. Huang suggestively draws on Benjamin’s categories, such as the flâneur and the phantasmagoria, for an analysis of Wong Kar-wai’s film Chungking Express (1994) as a representation of global Hong Kong.