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Memories of capitalism: cities, phantasmagoria and arcades

Walter Benjamin 1999: The Arcades Project, Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin
McLaughlin, Cambridge, MA; London: Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press.

Only by approaching the subject from some distance and, initially, foregoing any view of the
whole, can the mind be led, through a more or less ascetic apprenticeship, to the position of
strength from which it is possible to take in the whole panorama and yet remain in control of
oneself (Walter Benjamin, 1985c: 561).

Manchester, May 2004

The train takes about an hour from Lancaster to Piccadilly Station in Manchester, UK.
I am here conducting some research on Manchester museums, notably the recently built
Urbis. I have also agreed to write an essay on Benjamin’s Arcades Project so I am
thinking about matters of spatial translation. I wonder: ‘Can I do a stroll in central
Manchester that will capture something of Benjamin’s approach to the modern capitalist
city — notably modelled on Paris in his Arcades Project (1999a) and his associated
writing on Surrealism (1985b) and Baudelaire (1973a)?’ ‘Will that approach translate
in time and space?’ ‘Can the recently translated Arcades Project, now treated by many
as his Magnum Opus and one of the great historical works of the twentieth century
(albeit in its unfinished “note-form”), be a continuing source of inspiration in helping
us to glean new insights into the contemporary twenty-first century city?’ ‘Or is it just
an unfinished jumble of sometimes inspiring aphorisms interspersed in nearly 900 pages
of quirky, dusty nineteenth century quotations that, since its publication in German in
1982 and translation into English in 1999, has spawned an industry of Benjamin
interpretation and all the attendant pitfalls of dry academicism?’ I am not certain.
As a good flâneur, I don’t have a particular route in mind but do have some idea of
a theme to my stroll. I set out intent on a walk through the crowds of shoppers, tourists
and office workers aiming at capturing something of central Manchester’s
entrepreneurial mix of consumerism, service sector production, heritage preservation,
novel urban forms and palimpsest of architectural styles and urban material culture; of
continued urban decay sitting alongside new public-private funded regeneration in the
form of the centrality given to the symbolic economy (Moloch, 1976; Harvey, 1989;
Zukin, 1995) that is now the heart of Manchester. There might have been other tours I
could have taken: the Gay village around Canal Street, China Town, the ‘curry mile’ in
Rusholm. But I have chosen ‘memories of capitalism’ rather than ‘identity, diaspora
and difference’ as my guiding theme in walking the city — as it was for Benjamin too.
I imagine setting off down through Piccadilly Gardens towards the Arndale shopping
centre, but a building at the side of the station catches my eye. At first glance it looks
like a very ornate, but to my mind, rather typical late Victorian office building. On closer
inspection it turns out to be a derelict fire station . . .
I don’t intend here to try and offer a full summary of Benjamin’s writing on the city,
centred on his unfinished Arcades Project. That task has been done now on numerous
occasions, usually requiring a whole book to achieve anything like an overview of such
Views expressed in this section are independent and do not represent the opinion of the editors.
1 From the philosophical preface to Benjamin’s Trauerspiel study (1985c).

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188 Review essays

a dense, unfinished, convoluted, repetitive and sometimes contradictory work (for such
works of reconstruction and interpretation see, for example, Buck-Morss, 1989; Cohen,
1995; Gilloch, 1995). What I want to do instead is highlight two central motifs in
Benjamin’s work that influenced his understanding of modern city life: ruin/emergence
and phantasmagoria and what they have to tell us about the character of modern
experience. Here, I want to situate some observations on these themes in his work
alongside my sense of them on the stroll through Manchester as well as in my
recollections and researches thereafter in writing this essay. I aim to follow Benjamin’s
method of creating a spatial play involving the juxtaposition of textual figures within a
montage. For him, this method was his central historiographic means of constructing a
new whole or constellation that might allow Truth to be revealed independent of any
subjective interpretation. My aim in doing this is less all encompassing: to see whether
the Arcades Project can tell us something about the figural qualities of the contemporary
city, in this case Manchester, that other approaches cannot and whether that city itself
in any way speaks to the Arcades Project.

The convoluted city I: ruin/emergence

It’s not that what is past casts light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is
past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to
form a constellation. In other words: image is dialectics at a standstill. For while the relation
of the present to the past is purely temporal, the relation of what-has-been to the now is
dialectical: not temporal in nature but figural. Only dialectical images are genuinely historical
— that is, not archaic — images. The image that is read — which is to say, the image in the
now of its recognizability — bears to the highest degree the imprint of the perilous critical
moment on which all reading is founded (Benjamin, 1999a: 463, N3.1).

For Benjamin, the main task of the Arcades Project was to awaken the mass in a
capitalist society from its myth-immersed and dream-like false consciousness into an
aware and active class-consciousness. The notion of a crisis of revolutionary
consciousness had emerged within Marxism after the failed proletarian revolutions in
Europe in the years 1918–23 (see Lukács, 1971). Following in this Lukácsian tradition,
he sought to address that problem in a wholly unorthodox, novel and theoretically
syncretist manner. Benjamin’s aim was inherently modernist before it was Marxist (see
Lunn, 1982): to write a book made up almost entirely of quotations from historical
sources with as little commentary as possible. His method was to use those sources in
a montage with some of his own (minimal) analyses interspersed within it to create a
figural constellation that would be self-revealing in its shock-effect. Revelation and
awakening were the central motifs here and not interpretation.
The project remained unfinished at his tragic death in 1940. The extensive notes for
it were left in the charge of Georges Bataille for hiding in the Bibliotheque Nationale
during the Nazi occupation of France. Benjamin had organized them into Convolutes:
thematic sections of quotes with limited commentary by him alongside. Although
unfinished, that form conveys something of the method and style that he would have
wanted to retain in the finished work (see Tiedemann, 1999).
The aim of bringing together a montage of contemporary sources in such a way was
to induce in the reader a sense of shock and of recognition. This shock effect was
intended to act in the manner of a Proustian involuntary memory in which people would
see the longings and wish-images, not of their own past but that of humanity as a whole,
conveyed in those sources as a true utopian image premised on the dream of a classless
society (wish-images that capitalism, moreover, had captured and turned into a deceiving
phantasmagoria):
Ambiguity is the manifest imaging of dialectic, the law of dialectics at a standstill. This
standstill is utopia and the dialectical image, therefore, a dream image. Such an image is
afforded per se: as fetish (Benjamin, 1999b: 10).

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Inspired by both a symbolist theory of language — most notably influenced by his

reading of Baudelaire and Mallarmé (see Lunn, 1982) — and the Jewish mystical
tradition associated with reading the Kabbala (see Scholem, 1954), he sought out,
through such a montage principle, the correspondences within language itself,
something that was not communicated by subjective or inter-subjective interpretation;
a language that revealed, named, a hidden Truth. That language, the Name, could be
revealed as a utopian wish-image within the writing, the architecture and the material
culture of a particular time by creating what he called ‘dialectics at a standstill’ or
‘dialectical images’ (also monads; see Wolin, 1982). The Arcade, although only one of
the examples through which he sought to explore these dialectical images, in effect
stands for all of the commodity-spaces and artefacts of industrial capitalism that could
be subjected to this process.
Benjamin’s focus was on the time in which industrial capitalism was born in the
nineteenth century, exemplified most clearly for him in the development of Paris during
the Second Empire. Those wish images were not revealed by such artefacts standing on
their own but by Benjamin’s intervention in bringing them into contact with the present
in the manner of a collage. The shock-effect of such juxtaposition, spatially rather than
temporally conceived, something he learnt from the Surrealists (heirs to symbolist poets
like Baudelaire), would act as a source of ‘profane illumination’ in which the wishes
for human happiness would come to be revealed for all to see as having been turned
into an illusory form by capitalism (see Benjamin, 1985b; Cohen, 1995). His hope was
that the dream state of false or mythic consciousness (something that, for Benjamin,
even the Surrealists like Aragon, 1987, and Breton, 1961, remained within) would be
startled into a state of wakefulness. As Buck-Morss puts it, for Benjamin:
Humanity’s historical responsibility is an interpretive task, ‘naming’ both the socialist potential
of the new nature and the failure of history to realize it. This task is the vital core of the
Passagen-werk (1989: 240).

From Piccadilly I head north east in the direction of Ancoats. I want to visit Aflecks
Palace just off Oldham Street. To get there I set out on a meandering route through a
series of streets up towards Oldham Road full of old warehouses, mills, shops, disused
lots, run-down housing and areas now given over to car parking. I am in the very
epicentre of the nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution. Canals, mills, warehouses,
workers’ houses had been built here in the early years of the nineteenth century. Other
than those rural factory-mills built in river valleys in the latter years of the eighteenth
century, Ancoats was the first purpose-built urban industrial zone in the world. It was
at the centre of Manchester’s textile trade in the nineteenth century and also a key
location for successive waves of migrant labour, notably Irish, Poles and Italians:
At the moment, the revitalization of Ancoats is only beginning. The mills look solid enough
on the exterior, but inside they’re at an advanced stage of decay, and have only been saved
from demolition by the efforts of an organization based in one of the few mills in Ancoats to
have been renovated already . . . [such as] the Beehive Mill on Jersey Street. As you approach,
you hear the sound of drums and electric guitars — this is the place where many of
Manchester’s bands rehearse and record. On the roof there’s a sign saying Sankey’s Soap —
not a soap factory but a night club which may shortly re-open. There’s a snack bar on
the ground floor, and upstairs are the offices of three important organisations, each of
them playing a key role in the redevelopment of Manchester: Eastside Regeneration, The
Ancoats Urban Village Company, and The Ancoats Building Preservation Trust (http://
www.manchesteronline.co.uk/ewm/newsletter/ewm412.html, accessed 8 July 2004).

Unlike the industrial area of Castlefield at the other end of Deansgate (see Degen,
2003), this area has yet to feel the full effects of gentrification and the heritage industry.
It is shabby but happening — seedy is the word. I cross Great Ancoats and walk back
down Oldham Street. I enter Aflecks Palace, Manchester’s famous second hand clothing
emporium replete with diverse subcultural references. When I first visited it about 12

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years ago this old Victorian building was full of second-hand clothing and record outlets,
places to get a tattoo or piercing done and had numerous notice boards advertising
clubs, bands and gigs. A centre of all things alternative, it was a place whose social
centrality made it a magnate for punks, Goths, ravers and all subcultures in-between.
Today it is still recognizable as such, at least in its material references, but has gone
much more up-market. This is still a place to get tattooed or pierced, though there are
not as many places for that as there were. And there are still a few second-hand shops.
But what has arrived, what now dominates, are shops selling expensive new clothing:
brightly coloured club-wear and fetish-ware predominate:
In the last-mentioned broad district included under the name Ancoats, stand the largest mills
of Manchester lining the canals, colossal six and seven-storied buildings towering with their
slender chimneys far above the low cottages of the workers. The population of the district
consists, therefore, chiefly of mill-hands, and in the worst streets, of hand-weavers. The streets
nearest the heart of the town are the oldest, and consequently the worst; they are, however,
paved, and supplied with drains. Among them I include those nearest to and parallel with
Oldham Road and Great Ancoats Street. Farther to the north-east lie many newly built-up
streets; here the cottages look neat and cleanly, doors and windows are new and freshly painted,
the rooms within newly whitewashed; the streets themselves are better aired, the vacant
building lots between them larger and more numerous. But this can be said of a minority of
the houses only, while cellar dwellings are to be found under almost every cottage; many
streets are unpaved and without sewers; and, worse than all, this neat appearance is all pretence,
a pretence which vanishes within the first ten years (Engels, 1973:87–88)

I double-back along Oldham Street towards Ancoats. There are also numerous record
shops, a couple of sex shops, boutiques, a few cafes and bars, and all the trappings of
contemporary youth culture here too. Shops selling club-wear rub shoulders with old
working-class pubs and the occasional remaining Italian tailor’s shop. This is an area
ripe for development (see Zukin, 1989). The dereliction is receding, though if one looks
carefully new outlets with funky shop-fronts on the ground floor still have an empty and
somewhat derelict look on the floors above:
Hence it comes that Ancoats, built chiefly since the sudden growth of manufacture, chiefly
indeed within the present century, contains a vast number of ruinous houses, most of them
being, in fact, in the last stages of inhabitableness. I will not dwell upon the amount of capital
thus wasted, the small additional expenditure upon the original improvement and upon repairs
which would suffice to keep this whole district clean, decent, and inhabitable for years together.
I have to deal here with the state of the houses and their inhabitants, and it must be admitted
that no more injurious and demoralizing method of housing the workers has yet been
discovered than precisely this. The working-man is constrained to occupy such ruinous
dwellings because he cannot pay for others, and because there are no others in the vicinity of
his mill; perhaps, too, because they belong to the employer, who engages him only on
condition of his taking such a cottage (Engels, 1973: 89).

I look for a café. I am in need of a cappuccino. None of the cafes here take my fancy.
‘I could get one in Urbis a bit further on’ I think:
Occasionally when an epidemic threatens, the otherwise sleepy conscience of the sanitary
police is a little stirred, raids are made into the working-men’s districts, whole rows of cellars
and cottages are closed, as happened in the case of several lanes near Oldham Road; but this
does not last long: the condemned cottages soon find occupants again, the owners are much
better off by letting them, and the sanitary police won’t come again so soon. These east and
north-east sides of Manchester are the only ones on which the bourgeoisie has not built,
because ten or eleven months of the year the west and south-west wind drives the smoke of
all the factories hither, and that the working-people alone may breathe (Engels, 1973:89–90):

For Benjamin, everything in an industrial capitalist (and thereby also a consumer)

society presented as new, fashionable and desirable — as progressive, happening,

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groovy, now, hip — reveals the ever-same of the commodity form and the inevitable
betrayal of the dreams of happiness of its consumers. Only when such novel
commodities, architectures and confident expressions to the idea of progress fall into
ruin and decay does their initial promise reveal its hollowness and its frailty. The arcades
— fashionable, novel glass-roofed palaces to the promises of consumer happiness and
luxury in the early nineteenth century — fell into decay and seediness within a century.
Department stores now look tired when compared to out-of-town shopping malls . . . the
dot.com boom? For Benjamin, the arcades are a figure, a dialectical image, for
everything that is associated with industrial capitalism and consumer culture. For him,
the idea of progress is a myth but a powerful one, ‘Capitalism was a natural phenomenon
with which a new dream-filled sleep came over Europe, and, through it, a reactivation
of mythic forces’ (Benjamin, 1999a: 391, K1a.7). Yet that idea of progress is always
already in a state of catastrophe, its dreams in need of rescue. For Benjamin that was
something Marxists too had to recognize as well as bourgeois consumers. For him,
historical materialism had uncritically absorbed the bourgeois idea of temporal progress
in an un-dialectical manner (1973b). He sought to challenge the taken-for-granted notion
of progress as a linear one-directional condition in which society was moving. There
needed to be an acknowledgment that catastrophe was an ever present force:
The massive regeneration of the East Manchester area is really beginning to take shape with
ambitious plans for residential and business development in the Beswick, Openshaw and
Ancoats areas. The vision of ‘Venice of the North’ has been adopted for the regeneration of
Ancoats’ Cardroom Estate. Renamed ‘New Islington’ (the area’s historic name, when it was
the centre of the textile trade), the area will be transformed by a £200 million regeneration
scheme. This will incorporate a new canal basin between the Ashton and Rochdale canals,
creating numerous waterways running between buildings and earning its association with
Venice. Urban Splash, the lead developers in the project, unveiled their groundbreaking scheme
on Monday. The regeneration is part of the Millenium Communities Programme which
is a government strategy to improve developments all across the country (http://
www.eastserve.com/opencms/opencms/Where_I_Live/local_news/Venice_of_north.html,
accessed 9 July 2004).

The convoluted city II: phantasmagoria

There, too, are crossroads where ghostly signals flash from the traffic, and inconceivable
analogies and connections between events are the order of the day (Benjamin, 1985b: 231).

In mythology, Phantasos was the son of Hypnos, and was one of the ancient Greek gods
of dreams. The other two were Ikelos and Morpheus. Ikelos sent dreams to people in
animal form. Morpheus sent dreams in the form of people. Phantasos was responsible
for sending dreams to people of inanimate objects, or things. It is Phantasos that
Benjamin seeks out in the Arcades Project. His is the figural message concealed within
material culture; a figural message, perhaps, of a modern bourgeois civilization
dreaming itself into existence through the commodity. In a capitalist society Phantasos
has become the god of the commodity fetish:
There is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the
[phantasmagoric] form of a relation between things (Marx, 1938: 43).

I turn from the Ancoats area back towards the city centre. Past streets of dereliction:
unoccupied shops, a few remaining clothing sweatshops unlikely to be paying the
minimum wage, warehouses with second-hand white goods, boarded up buildings, grass
growing from their roofs and gutters, old peeling Socialist Worker posters, disused
advertising hoardings. I head towards the Arndale Centre. It is a massive building site,
at least part of it. This area around Exchange Square, perhaps more than any in

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Manchester, has undergone considerable renovation since the mid-1990s. The so-called
Millennium Quarter boasts a public square, a multiplex cinema and urban entertainment
complex in an old print works, Urbis — a newly built museum of the city and several
department stores. Big London names like Selfridges, Harvey Nicholls and Heals are
now here. The contrast with what I have just left behind is dramatic.
Die phantasmagorische Form. Moore and Aveling’s 1887 English translation from
the third German edition of Marx’s Das Kapital uses the less prosaic word ‘fantastic’
rather than ‘phantasmagoric’ in its translation of this famous passage on commodity
fetishism. Nonetheless, as Benjamin knew well, it is there in the German and he makes
much of it in the Arcades Project. It is the term that he uses when speaking of myth,
dream and fantasy in relation to the bourgeois city, spaces of popular culture, the interior,
and to consumer culture in general. All are subject to the effects of commodity fetishism.
Marx was clearly also aware of the phantasmagoria tradition that began in Paris in the
late eighteenth century as an extension of the entertainment offered by magic lantern
shows (see Altick, 1978). He uses the word a number of times throughout his work as
a metaphor to refer to illusory spectacles.2 If fact, he was quite fond of using metaphors
of optical tricks, ghostly apparitions and mechanical visualizing apparatus when
discussing matters of knowledge and ideology (see Derrida, 1994).
The illusory world of the camera obscura and later the phantasmagoria that is based
on this technical apparatus is how Marx explains the operation of both ideology and
fetishism within capitalist society. Phantasmagoria is the governing trope in how he
presents the ‘mystical’ nature of commodity fetishism to us: something obscuring the
role of labour power in the production of value and attributing it instead to something
derived from objects themselves in the process of exchange.
I had been intending to come to this area of Manchester on 16 June 1996 to collect
a couple of paintings I had bought from an exhibition in the Royal Exchange on Cross
Street. However, the IRA had intervened that day by exploding a 1,500 kg bomb that,
while it caused no fatalities, resulted in many minor injuries from flying glass, utter
devastation to the city centre and millions of pounds worth of damage. It has taken
almost a decade to regenerate the area; renovations to the Arndale centre are still going
on in 2004. As with all entrepreneurial cities (Harvey, 1989), regeneration now involves
public-private partnerships and a mixture of values associated with public access,
government accountability and private profit — creating a new kind of phantasmagoria
in which spectacle has to present itself as accessible and actively participative rather
than something merely consumed. As well as the square, the cinemas and shops, luxury
flats and numerous well-known franchised coffee outlets, the centre-piece of the
Millennium quarter is the newly built museum of the city, Urbis (meaning in Latin, ‘of
the city’).
A public-private museum, it seeks to convey what it is to live in a generic world city
(it is not a museum of Manchester). A hands-on multimedia experience with no
conventional museum artefacts, its gallery themes and displays are clearly influenced
by urban studies (though this is largely unacknowledged directly) in its four permanent
galleries of interactive exhibits. These are organized around the themes of arrival
(Simmel), change (Chicago School), order (Foucault), and explore (Baudelaire).
Benjamin is perhaps ‘too difficult’ to be given a floor of his own but his work, like that
of the commodity itself, is the absent-presence, the ghost, in these phantasmagoria
displays of city life to city dwellers.
The original phantasmagoria was a form of popular spectacle that emphasized the
principle of deception or concealment, particularly associated with the presentation of
the figure of the ghost (on the history of the phantasmagoria see Quigley, 1948; Altick,
1978; Barnouw, 1981; Cohen, 1989; 1995; Crary, 1990; Castle, 1995; Heard, 1996;
During, 2002). The earliest phantasmagorias were shown in Europe, notably Paris, in
the latter part of the eighteenth century. A combination of the earlier traditions of magic

2 See http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/, accessed 15 March 2004).

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lantern show, Chinese shadow play and magic displays, phantasmagoria involved the
back projection of ghostly images onto a translucent screen (or in some cases smoke)
hung in the middle of a darkened room around which an audience sat.
An entertainment that first used some of these elements was shown by Francois
Seraphin to the court at Versailles in 1784. It was soon relocated to that centre of popular
entertainment, consumption and political ferment — The Palais Royal — around the
same year (see Quigley, 1948: 76–7; on the Palais Royal see Hetherington, 1997). The
Palais Royal was also the site of the first Arcades (see Geist, 1985). The technique was
taken up, popularized and named as a Phantasmagoria by Paul Philidor in 1789 who
held a show under that name in Berlin in that year (see Heard, 1996; During, 2002: 102)
However, the person who is more commonly given the credit for naming and inventing
the phantasmagoria in 1798 was the Belgian entertainer Etienne-Gaspard Robertson,
who apparently stole the idea from Philidor (see Heard, 1996) and whose shows caused
a sensation in Paris in the aftermath of the Revolution (see Quigley, 1948: 77–8; Castle,
1995: 144ff; Cohen, 1989; During, 2002: 102ff).
As much popular theatre as magic lantern show (see Cohen, 1989) — assistants would
sometimes move around the audience dressed as skeletons — Robertson’s shows were
dominated by the presentation of images of the recently dead figures from recent French
history such as Rousseau and Voltaire, and by leading figures from the Revolution such
as Marat. Their ghostly images were projected onto a screen in the middle of the room
— as ghosts returning to haunt the spectators in the aftermath of the Terror.
The principle of concealment was expressed through hiding the projectors from view,
something not done with earlier magic lantern shows. In effect, what was concealed was
what produced the images. The images were intended to appear as if they just emerged
and had a life of their own independent of any mechanical apparatus for projecting them
as images. The central concealment of production and the presentation of the images as
independent entities makes this a seemingly apposite metaphor for Marx.
Typically, Robertson would ask a member of the audience whose ghost they wanted
to see, he would then throw an item on a fire to call them up and then, as if by magic,
the ghost would appear in all its spectral horror. In a room in which all the candles had
been snuffed out, the audience was only able to see the ghostly appearances dance in
the middle of the room. Not only could they not see the projector, they couldn’t see the
screen onto which they were projected either:
This floor [in Urbis] focuses on four main themes within the overall thematic structure: the
experience of entering the city; the pushes and pulls of migration; the resources you need to
deal with city life; the unpredictable changes wrought by city living (http://www.urbis-
resources.org.uk/index.php/exhibit/arrive, accessed 21 September 2003).
Following the popularity of the phantasmagoria shows in Paris they were soon to
cross the channel. Philidor resurfaced in London now operating under the name of Paul
de Philipsthal (a one-time partner of Madame Tussaud, see Heard, 1996; During, 2002:
102) and introduced the Phantasmagoria there in 1801 when he exhibited it at the
Lyceum in the Strand (see Altick, 1978: 217; Castle, 1995: 150). Its popularity led to
many imitators in the early years of the nineteenth century, the first of whom was a
clown called Mr Bologna who performed at Covent Garden and set up his own
phantasmagoria show which he called ‘Phantsacopia’ following Philipsthal’s success
(see Beresford-Chancellor, 1925: 119):
The growth of the modern city presented a radical challenge to the existing order of cities —
new fears and anxieties brought forth new discourses and techniques concerned to order and
control the big city populations and the spaces they inhabited. These challenges were also part
of the wider transformation of experience — new forms of behaviour, new public spaces, new
living places, new working and leisure patterns, new pleasures and fascinations. In this floor
we look at order and control in cities, how these are established, negotiated and imposed both
by ‘authorities’ and by our own changing cultures of self control. But this floor also looks at
the other side to order — disorder, evasion, disappearance, marginality, crime along with

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tracking, surveillance, detection, discipline (http://www.urbis-resources.org.uk/index.php/

exhibit/order).

It was from these early London shows that the word first appeared in English in 1802
(OED). From there, it made its way into other languages, including German, in the early
years of the nineteenth century. Indeed, one of the key sources for the popularity and
spread of the word beyond the limited world of these magic shows and into a general
discourse was Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (2000) where he used the word to mean
losing touch with reality in a more general societal sense (see During, 2002: 102),
creating an illusory world more complex than allegory to unravel:
We sit in a boundless Phantasmagoria and Dream-grotto; boundless, for the faintest star, the
remotest century, lies not even nearer the verge thereof: sounds and many-coloured visions flit
round our sense: but Him, the Unslumbering, whose work both Dream and Dreamer are, we
see not; except in rare half-waking moments, suspect not (Carlyle, 2000: 43).

What the word’s etymology signifies is of interest too. Three interpretations of the term
have been offered (see Cohen, 1989: 95):
• ‘Ghost-speak’ or ‘speak to the ghosts’;
• or from phantasma agoreuein: to speak in public (from the agora — a place of public
discourse that was also a market place) under the influence of allegory (Robertson’s
preferred definition);
• fantasme agourer: which translates as ghostly deceiver or deceiving ghost.
In effect, the slippage between each of these equally plausible definitions opens up
the idea of the speaking ghost/illusion and the doubtful quality of what it might have to
say, the space in which it says it and the kind of language it offers. Concealment and
uncertainty are central motifs. The nature of the figure is significant too. These were
ghostly figures and not just any kind of image.
Phantasmagoria is not just a substitute term for commodity fetishism, although for
Benjamin there is a definite association between the two (though also a link to a broader
understanding of myth as well, notably in his 1935 exposé to the Arcades Project; see
1999b). The slippage in the word’s etymology also suggests something else: ‘phantasm
agora’ (see Derrida, 1994: 108). It is in the market place of illusion, of image and voice
that the ghost appears as if to speak: a voice expressed through the materiality of
unfinished disposal (that which haunts) — a voice quite different to that of the
discoursing human subject.
Unlike Lukács (1971) and Adorno (1981) who both use the notion of a
phantasmagoria in their work (‘phantom objectivity’ in Lukács) in a manner directly
related to Marx’s use of the term as a figure for an illusory fetishistic reality, Benjamin
is more ambiguous and more subtle in his usage. Certainly he treats the notion of
phantasmagoria as another word for fetishism but he also believed there was a ghostly
utopian wish-image contained in what he described as phantasmagoric (what he also
calls ‘dream-houses of the collective’: arcades, department stores, world fairs, bourgeois
interiors, cities) that was in need of redeeming rather than critiquing. This was something
that was to make him the recipient of a famous ‘ticking off’ from Adorno who would
not accept there was anything that could be redeemed in products of consumer capitalism
and who did not believe it was sufficiently Marxist to suggest that the mass could have
a collective utopian dream consciousness (1977; see Lunn, 1982; Wolin, 1982). But
Benjamin did not want to simply subject phantasmagoria to critique. Rather, he wanted
to construct them as dialectical images in order to reveal, and thereby redeem, the
genuine utopian hopes of humanity that were contained in ideals of luxury, abundance,
comfort and ease from their betrayal by capitalism. For Benjamin it is the voice of
language itself, the voice of the wish-image that needs redeeming and not exorcizing;
not an easy or a certain task; ‘even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins.
And this enemy has not ceased from being victorious’ (Benjamin, 1973a: 247).

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It is the not-quite-fully-gotten-rid-of that raises itself up to speak to us in this haunted

agorial market space in the form of a ghost: not directly but in the language of disclosure
and the aside (see Derrida, 1994). The agora was the ancient Greek public square at the
centre of Athens where the public would come to speak and listen. A Socratic space, so
to speak, it was the site of their public sphere and their market. It was also the site where
dead heroes were honoured in material form as statues. Capitalism no longer honours
the dead in its agora.
I have my coffee in Urbis and then move on towards the main shopping district. I
cross Exchange Square. This space is intended to be used as a meeting place though
mostly it is a place for walking through to the shops, though people do tend to sit out
here in the summer. A mobile phone goes off . . . distant voices barely heard. Attached
to the renovated Corn Exchange (now an up-market mall selling designer clothes) is a
large TV screen showing the BBC news as I pass.
The wishes and dreams of a capitalist culture: always hopeful of eternity but
inevitably premised as fashionable, fickle, fleeting, and therefore transitory, are
expressed in concrete and material form in such a space: in artefacts, architecture,
technological apparatus, pictures and illustrations, old adverts, signs, brands — each is
imagined as if it will be the best and will last forever, but most will only last a short
time. This contradictory temporal expression, progress and catastrophe, gives the
commodity a revenant quality. It gives the commodity all the revenant qualities of a
ghost that keeps coming back; something that has been disposed of unfavourably as the
search for novelty renders each commodity in turn outmoded. Therein rests its power
to haunt (Gordon, 1997). Its language is veiled and not easily given but it knows it can
only rest when it has finally spoken and we have understood. Not to acknowledge that
is to leave disposal unfinished and to invite the prospect of haunting. To be haunted is
to encounter the figural outside of discourse (see Lyotard, 1984). In effect, this is what
Benjamin seeks to reveal in his treatment of the phantasmagoria of commodity culture.
He seeks in his dialectics at a standstill to construct the space of the phantasmagoric
figure and thereby give it a voice, a voice that cannot be described from within capitalist
discourse and can only be redeemed outside of it.
I head for Selfridges as I have not been inside before:
Fashion prescribes the ritual according to which the commodity fetish demands to be
worshipped . . . Fashion stands in opposition to the organic. It couples the living body to the
inorganic world. To the living, it defends the rights of the corpse. The fetishism that succumbs
to the sex appeal of the inorganic is its vital nerve (Benjamin, 1999b: 8).

A quick tour up and down the escalators in the clothing departments and then into
the food hall in the basement. Sushi-bar, fine wines, caviar, several delis, a fancy bakery
and a cheese counter are in evidence. I move on towards St Anne’s square and take a
look at the theatre inside the Royal Exchange. Commerce giving way to art. All
commodity temples should end up in this way. Outside, reality again. Across the
pedestrianized road is a branch of the Disney store and just around the corner from
that, ‘un passage!’:
Arcades are houses or passages having no outside — like the dream (Benjamin, 1999a: 406,
L1a.1).

It is a late arcade, Barton Arcade dating from 1871 (the year of the Paris Commune),
but has been fully restored and is a typical example of a nineteenth-century arcade
nonetheless. It contains a few empty lots, a lighting shop and on the corner with
Deansgate a branch of the wine-merchants Oddbins. While by no means shabby, it is
very quiet, almost ghostly; I am the only one there:
Trade and traffic are the two components of the street. Now, in the arcade the second of these
has effectively died out: the traffic there is rudimentary. The arcade is a street of lascivious
commerce only; it is wholly adapted to arousing desires. Because in the street the juices slow

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to a standstill, the commodity proliferates along the margins and enters into fantastic
combinations, like the tissue in tumours — the flâneur sabotages the traffic. Moreover, he is
no buyer. He is merchandise (Benjamin, 1999a: 42, A3a.7).

The heyday of the arcade was from the 1790s when prototypes emerged in the Palais
Royal until around the mid-nineteenth century when it was superseded by department
stores like the Bon Marché in Paris (see Miller, 1981). Although Benjamin never makes
the point, the phantasmagoria shows are the arcades’ direct contemporary — becoming
popular at the same time (and beginning in the same place) and going into decline at
the same time (in the case of the phantasmagoria as developments in photography
became more sophisticated and the techniques more widely known).
I walk up Deansgate past the department store Kendals. Kendals, which started out
as Kendal, Milne and Faulkner, is the world’s oldest department store. Built on this site
as an expanded drapers in the 1830s, it pre-dates the Bon Marché in Paris by about 30
years (see Adburgham, 1964; Lancaster, 1995). I move on, up past the John Rylands
Library — surely one of the best examples anywhere of Victorian gothic? Unfortunately
it is being restored and is hidden by the scaffolding and sheeting. I continue up
Deansgate in the direction of Castlefield, intent on looking at the extensive regeneration
there but decide I want some lunch instead and so double back across an area once
known as St Peter’s field to ‘Restaurant, Bar and Grill’ on John Dalton Street:
The morning of the 16th was hailed with exultation by the many thousands, whose feelings
were powerfully excited on the occasion. At an early period numbers came pressing in from
various and distant parts of the county, to witness the greatest and most gratifying assemblage
of Britons that was ever recorded in the annals of our history. From Bolton, Oldham, Stockport,
Middleton, and all the circumjacent country; from the more distant towns of Leeds, Sheffield,
etc. came thousands of willing votaries to the shrine of sacred liberty, and at the period where
the Patriotic Mr Hunt and his friends had taken their station on the hustings, it is supposed
that no less than 150,000 people were congregated in the area near St Peter’s Church . . . Our
fears were raised to horror, by the appearance of the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry
Cavalry, who came galloping into the area, and proceeded to form in line ready for action;
nor were they long delayed in their hellish purpose (Manchester Observer, 21 August 1819).

The convoluted city III: on re-tracing one’s steps

After lunch I head across Albert Square and into the Town Hall. Civic Pride, that other
phantasmagoria of the Victorian city, is laid out in front of me in Gothic extravagance.
I enter into the foyer, past statues of the city fathers and famous sons of Manchester,
past a memorial to workers who fought against fascism in the Spanish civil war and up
to the reception desk where I have to sign in and be given a visitor’s badge (there is
heightened security and fears of terrorist attacks). I am allowed into the corridors of
power, but only to the first and second floors. I pass the office that used to be used by
the Mayor and its attached bathroom next door (it is etched into the nineteenth-century
glass). There are blue-green caustic tiles, wooden panelling and lovely but simple
stained glass windows everywhere — it is atmospheric and seems to become almost
more subterranean as I ascend the steps to the upper floors. This is a private-public
space, the centre of city government transformed into a cosy bourgeois interior: ‘Plush
— the material in which traces are left especially easily’ (Benjamin, 1999a: 222, I5.2).
This particular interior, with its extended tiled and panelled corridors, is like a cross
between a cathedral and a public lavatory. Trays of sandwiches, chicken nuggets and
coleslaw are being delivered to one of the committee rooms on salvers; I take a quick
look inside the Great Hall, the mythic history of Manchester is depicted in some
particularly badly painted murals around the panelled walls.
Benjamin was always ambiguous on the role and status of the flâneur in the city.
Notwithstanding his critical treatment of that figure as a part of the phantasmagoria of

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the city (1973a), he practiced this technique of strolling in many of his best-known city
portraits and memories (1985a; 2002; see Frisby, 1985; Gilloch, 1995). The central
problem for Benjamin in this work, a problem that also lay behind the Arcades Project,
was the idea of questioning the nature of experience in a modern, urban capitalist
society.
Drawing directly on Simmel’s essay ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’ (1971),
Benjamin acknowledged that metropolitan life, and that of capitalism in general, had
changed the character of human experience. This, for him, was a defining feature of
modernity. Since Goethe, poets and artists had been grappling with the issue of the
decline of experience (Erfahrung) and the question of how to forge a subjectivity in the
face of a world in which one experiences tradition, continuity, narrative and memory
principally as loss. What capitalism brings in its place is, in effect, alienation in the form
of the fragmentation of experience and an endless celebration of the now (Erlebnis).
Even the heritage industry — and there is a lot of that in Manchester — is a
phantasmagoria of the past expressed through the dreams of the present (or lack of
them); it demonstrates amnesia with regard to the past in the way that Benjamin would
have recognized (see Huyssen, 1995).
The moment that one lives through, the bombardment by stimuli, the urban reserve
and blasé attitude cultivated as a defence leads the modern subject to know experience
not as Erfahrung but as Erlebnis; as the fragmentary moment in which the subject
becomes detached from any locatedness within a broader understanding of life. A central
theme of Simmel’s Lebensphilosophie (see Frisby, 1981), Benjamin acknowledges
(1973a) this is a central concern of neo-Kantian philosophers like Dilthey (see also
Gadamer, 1975), and also of Bergson and is, significantly, a key question for both Proust
and Surrealism too (see Wolin, 1989; Cohen, 1995). Erlebnis, in this tradition, one in
which Benjamin’s thought was steeped, suggests not just disorientation but a fragmented
consciousness and that, for Benjamin, leads to a susceptibility to the powers of
phantasmagoric impression and myth which provide a false sense of identity and
consciousness.
The significance Benjamin gives to the idea of shock as a form of awakening into
experience, which he traces out from both Proust’s treatment of involuntary memories
brought about by the encounter with artefacts and Surrealism’s emphasis on ‘profane
illumination’ that comes from an encounter with strange juxtapositions of things (one
might add Freud’s understanding of the uncanny to this list) is crucial. He uses it in
formulating his own concept of dialectics at a standstill and that centres on the
question of the recovery of experience. Benjamin was never a conservative defender of
the aura of tradition, nor did he believe it was possible to return to a now lost form of
experience that capitalism had melted away. However, he did want to redeem tradition
all the same because of the utopian impulse that he believed lay behind all human
history. Jewish themes of redemption and bearing witness were always important to
his work. However, he was also a believer in the Marxist idea of praxis and his
Arcades Project was intended foremost as a contribution to that. Out of it he wanted to
awaken, through the techniques of shock and of revelation, a sense of the
impoverishment of experience within modernity and an awareness of the utopian
traces and memories of a fuller form of experience that were latent in the myths that
crystallized in the material culture of the city and which one day might be brought into
existence in a new way.
The Arcades Project stands, but also falls, in trying to reveal the ontology of a new
mode of experience that is not yet in existence except as trace in the wish-images of the
past. Would reading his finished text have revealed that new mode of experience to its
audience? Does walking the city, aware of his treatment of it as a dream world of the
collective, bring one closer to an understanding of this form of experience? Undoubtedly
Benjamin would have said not. For him the way to that experience could only come
about through revolutionary praxis (although he also believed a trace of it could be
witnessed in children’s experience of play, see Buck-Morss, 1989).

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Neither was Benjamin the first to believe that walking the city would reveal its
hidden messages and spur people to action, and nor was he to be the last. While his
influences were clearly the Surrealists like Aragon (1987) and Breton (1961), and
before them Baudelaire and Poe, the treatment of the city as a mysterious text waiting
to be revealed dates back to writers/voyeurs like Nicholas Restif de la Bretonne in the
latter years of the eighteenth century (himself compared to the wandering and observing
Rousseau as the ‘Rousseau of the gutter’; see Billington, 1980), who would wander
through the arcades of the Palais Royal at night watching the prostitutes and their
customers at work. More recently Situationists like Debord and Chetchgelov have seen
the dérive (drifting) around the city, capturing something of its hidden traces, and
potential energies — its psychogeography — as a potential source for a reactivation of
the street and political action against the deadening powers of ‘urbanism’: commodity
culture + urban planning (see Knabb, 1989; Sadler, 1999). Also influenced by this
tradition, de Certeau (1992) has argued that walking the city be seen as a form of micro-
social resistance to city design and control — a tactics of everyday life in which the
effects of power come to be challenged, albeit in a minor and provisional way (see also
Jacobs, 1961; Lefebvre, 1971; 1991). All have placed hopes in the powers of the
ordinary to reveal the extraordinary, for the revelations of the street, a palimpsest of
many times, to awaken consciousness of real interests. Benjamin was perhaps the least
optimistic and the most melancholy of all these writers, and yet he refused to give up
on hope all the same.
I return to the entrance and leave, making my way to the nearby Manchester Art
Gallery. This is the end-point of my trip before I return to the station via back streets
full of office blocks housing the institutions of finance capital that have become
prominent in Manchester in the last decade. There are signs of recently granted lottery
money, new and refurbished galleries, a newly displayed Raphael and rooms full of
Pre-Raphaelites and artefacts from the Arts and Crafts movement. Of all the pictures
and decorative artefacts on display, one above all is captivating after the walk —
Pierre Adolphe Valette’s ‘The India House’ (1912). Valette was Art-Master at
Manchester School of Art in the early years of the twentieth century. He is
remembered today as the teacher and influence on the more famous Salford artist of
industrial life, L.S. Lowry. While most of Valette’s paintings displayed here suggest the
work of a reasonably good but largely derivative later impressionist, this one captures
something of the city that defies the positivism of Impressionism. In some ways
reminiscent of Whistler’s ‘Nocturnes’, its haunting quality seems to speak directly to
Benjamin’s treatment of the capitalist city as a city of the wish-image betrayed. Above
all, it is the fog swirling melancholy that, like Benjamin, it acknowledges in the
remaining traces, the forgetfulness, loss and betrayed hopes of the city. The India
House, its lights on, is reflected in the murky waters of the Medlock — uncertain
industrial future, the outmoded yet still grand buildings ghostly in their appearance in
the half-light. Everything remains inconclusive in such light. We attain a degree of
experience that transcends the everyday when captivated by a work of art that speaks
to us; it alters our perception — but only momentarily and half glimpsed. Reading the
Arcades Project is somewhat similar.
Benjamin’s work does not lead directly to class-consciousness and a new mode of
experience as he had hoped. But it does open up the possibility of something else,
what might be called an encounter with urbis. Benjamin’s work refuses to remain at
the level of representation. It is concerned with the figural, the ‘of the city’, that is
outside of discourse and textual interpretation. The urbis is that which we should
associate with a city’s figural qualities. Place image, tourist presentation, heritage
regeneration, ‘dream-house’ museums and city branding are an acknowledgement of
its existence but also its phantasmagoric distortion. While contemporary cultural
geography has suggested that we should become attentive to the performative and the
non-representational in understanding and knowing spatiality — to what comes after
words (Thrift, 2000), Benjamin suggests we should also consider what comes before

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them too. Before or after? In fact, the dialectical image would suggest they are part of
the same figure.
Kevin Hetherington, The Open University

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