When reading the Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century essay and the second one that shifts focus to Baudelaire, I’m struck by Benjamin’s devotion to Baudelaire, such as the way in which he writes about the figure of the ragpicker in the ragpicker poem. Let me begin with the “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century” essay. This is the one that begins “I. Fourier, or the Arcades” which discusses the two conditions Benjamin believes were necessary for the emergence of the Paris arcades. This becomes the crucial moment for the reader to ask, “what were the ‘Paris’ arcades?” They were not the modern-day coin arcades that were host to retro coin-slotted game machines, nor were they the slot machines pound in the very same pachinko arcades or casinos. Instead, the Parisian arcades were shopping centers with a number of stores clustered together in long street lanes.

            The first condition for their emergence according to Benjamin was “the boom in the textile trade” (30). This refers to a rise in factories and the ability to produce—and reproduce—products, merchandise, and commodities in greater number. This boom then kept the arcades well-stocked with the very store-displays themselves becoming an attraction mirroring art-galleries and museums. The second condition, which I find slightly less interesting, is the beginning of “iron-construction.” I believe Benjamin means the construction of buildings and other (infra)structures using iron. The second condition ties back to stratification and the use of land, because where else must such structures or architectural wonders be constructed but over the land we use.

            The second chapter, “II. Daguerre, or the Panoramas,” holds some of my interest for its discussion on the nature of photography and image-capturing in relation to the field of mimetic art. Benjamin writes the popularity of panoramas coincided with the rise of arcades: through panoramas people sought to create scenes identical to that of nature (a mimetic art). Panoramas precede but also set up (because it’s through technical devices panoramas were created apparently) photography and film and then sound film. I like that aspect of panorama as “an expression of a new attitude toward life” by the city-dweller who “attempts to bring the countryside into town” (34).

I wonder how, it at all, this mirrors a desire for land where land itself becomes scarce. If looking purely through the lens of the landscape, the city represents little to no space—rather, it’s a scarcity of space via land. That the stratification of land has created a commodity, an economy, or a scarcity itself, of landscape—that land’s a finite resource to be apportioned out and acquired. The city serves as a nexus for wealth, opportunity, and cosmopolitanism that represents nearly limitless and infinite space (for capital). Under this lens the city as a landscape, according to Benjamin, becomes a landscape for the flaneurs. All this coincides that shift to the photographer who can capture never-before-seen or outside the realm of the mundane images (like sewers). The flood of photographic images and copies of images normally inaccessible changed the market (35).

The next section “III.Grandville, or the World Exhibitions,” interest me for some of the following discussion points: that “world exhibitions are places of pilgrimage to the commodity fetish” and that they “open a phantasmagoria which a person enters in order to be distracted” (36). Of course it’s the implication my family and I may in fact be phantasmagoric viewers when we travel, marveling at nothing we can’t easily find in proximity of our home or our homeland (two different places). I wonder if that’s a distinction Césaire made when writing in un cahier. Section IV. Louis Philippe, Or the Interier, a quick blip in the essay for me.

V. Baudelaire, Or the Streets of Paris, probably also a blip in passing in the whole essay but my favorite part because of the careful attention it pays to Baudelaire the lyric poet. The “allegorical genius” (40). “For the first time, with Baudelaire, Paris becomes the subject of lyric poetry. This poetry is no hymn to the homeland; rather, the gaze of the allegorist, as it falls on the city, Is the gaze of the alienated man. It is the gaze of the flaneur, whose way of life still conceals behind a mitigating nimbus the coming desolation of the big-city dweller” (40). Here, I’ll say, probably something I could relate to Cesaire… Benjamin writes that the “Paris of his poems is a sunken city, and more, submarine then subterranean” and that “the modern is a principal accent of his poetry” (41). The implication here is that these subterranean elements things I’d argue made up the entirety of Cesaire’s notebook, are in-fact modern. And for poetry to be a modern poetry, then, implies that a poetry portrays and writes in the underbelly of the city.

The final section, on Haussmann, though short has some interesting takes on space as it is occupied by the flaneur. Unexpectedly it’s on the stock exchange: “Trading on the stock exchange displaces the poems of gambling handed down from the feudal society. The phantasmagorias of space to which the flaneur devotes himself find a counterpart in the phantasmagorias of time to which the gambler is addicted. Gambling converts time into a narcotic” (43). Actually, the imlpications here, when thought about through geologic deep time as well as the accumulation of wealth through property and interest, bring up cause for concern that even the desire for landscape and place itself has become a phantasmagoria, an addiction. And that concludes, for now, my thoughts on this essay by Benjamin.

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