The Arcades Project
translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin
Harvard, 960pp, £24.95

Walter Benjamin, who died fleeing from the Nazis in 1940 leaving behind a large quantity of enigmatic manuscripts concealed in places like the Bibliothèque nationale, was long an insider tip, but is now recognised as one of the very great minds of the 20th century. His magnum opus, The Arcades Project, has finally been translated into English, 17 years after the German edition and trailing the Italian and French translations by some years. If the low price for such a large academic volume - £24.95 - is anything to go by, the publishers expect this to be a major event.

It is, however, a slightly odd work. The "Arcades" of the title are Paris's first shopping arcades. Many of these still exist, though they are on a small scale compared to modern malls. They were built in the mid-19th century when advances in the technology of construction (glass and cast iron) and of lighting (gas) first made such developments possible. They became the setting for displays of luxury goods, for the self-display of the fashionable and eccentric, and for the pursuit of thrills like sex and gambling.

For Benjamin, the intriguing aspect of the arcades is the extent to which they were linked with social history and the manifestations of the collective unconscious of the time. They formed, he argues, a "threshold" between two worlds. One is the world of trade and business, in which the arcades perform their overt function as markets for the transmission of commodities. The other is the deeper world of the psyche.

Entering the arcades, the various figures of bourgeois Paris - the shopper, the dandy, the punter, the gambler - slip into a subterranean world illuminated by the flickering flames of the gas. They encounter a world of dreams and of ecstatic depersonalisation. In sensuous interaction with the objects they desire, would-be consumers are themselves transformed into objects. They cease to be agents guided by the deliberate rationality of operators in the market, and slide into a picture in which people become things and things become animated displays charged with arcane significance.

At the same time, however, the Parisians were uneasy in their dream. In it, they imagined their awakening from their thing-like condition. They fight back against the shocks and indignities of their condition by acquiring fantasy identities as street-fighters, detectives and other desperadoes. The figure of the conspirator, as exemplified by Auguste Blanqui, was particularly enthralling. Even these fantastical role-models, however, could not seriously engage with reality; like the avatars in modern internet games, they stayed strictly virtual. Conspiracy, though ostensibly realpolitik enacted by tight-lipped ascetics, in the end itself froze back into the posture and the mask.

Underlying all this was a sense of decline and of the loss of contact with nature. Every age thinks it is the first to face this; but in fact, as Benjamin shows, this loss - of grip, of purpose, of belonging - is certainly prolonged, and possibly recurrent. The relentless march of the international market, today's "globalisation", and our fear of it, are nothing new. Not only in Benjamin's day, but even in the mid-19th century (if commentators like Engels were to be believed), the top-hatted mill-owner had already long been submerged in the anonymity of the public stock market with its institutional investors.

The reactions Benjamin perceives in the arcades are all part of the "fetishism" which, in his argument, manifests this fear of decline. Sexuality is reduced to morbid exhibitionism. Prostitution, as Benjamin illustrates, reaches enormous proportions; widespread child prostitution becomes a fact of city life.

In the fetid interieur of the arcades, provocative dress becomes a standard feature. "Obscene" dancing (the cancan, for example) becomes epidemic and has to be supervised by the constabulary. Naturalness in all forms becomes unfashionable. Prostitutes reduce even pregnancy to a role played by occasionally bearing a child for two or three months before aborting it. The disregard for "natural" procreation creates worries that some alternative means of producing children will have to be invented. Sexuality, Freud surmises, is becoming redundant for human beings.

Up to this point, Benjamin's depiction could pass as an essay in slow-moving psycho-history, if not from the "Annales" school then perhaps as a melancholic version of Simon Schama. There is some suggestion from the packaging of the English translation that this is what the publishers hope. A reader expecting such a narrative, however, will be startled, partly by the superabundance of learning and loose ends (the "Arcades Project" is, after all, mainly a preparatory compendium of quotations), but mainly by the strong argumentative position which emerges in those sections where Benjamin does start to display his own position.

This has two aspects. One is political. Benjamin was a declared Marxist. Commentators often gloss over this, but it has a clear structuring role in The Arcades. Not only is Benjamin's diagnosis of the ills of the age (theirs and his) Marxist. The dream that so fascinates him is the dream of commodity fetishism from the early chapters of Das Kapital; what this fetishism conceals is the commodification, under capitalism, of human individuality.

The dynamics of what follows are also Marxist. The dreamers of the Arcades are the proletarianised bourgeois. Their weakness is their historic failure to understand that they too are caught up in the class struggle. Gloom at the disappearance of nature is directed at all the world; but, as Benjamin remarks about the supposed redundancy of human sexuality, it is typical of the bourgeoisie to represent its own condition as that of humanity in general. The bourgeoisie, specifically, may be in decline; humanity generally is not.

In the phantasmagoric arcades Parisians see themselves as they "really" are - as reified commodities on the labour market. They are not the subjects of the market, they are its objects; the dreams of the arcades destroy all the illusions a waking consciousness tries to retain.

The woman with the expensive attire and the 19th-century equivalent of the Wonderbra is, in reality, bearing her body to market as a prostitute. The "creative author" is a wage-slave toiling in the anonymous sweat-shops that serviced the mass market for penny dreadfuls. The flâneur scandalising his contemporaries with the tortoise he takes for walks on a lead is, in the end, only accentuating his own superfluity in the real world of the labour market. In the end, they are all no different from the wage slaves from the factories, however much these latter may be excluded from the palaces of consumption with their dreams and marvels.

The second aspect of Benjamin's position is philosophical. This revolves around the difficult and only very indirectly "Marxist" topic of time. Each age, Benjamin says, has a longing to "awaken". This, despite Benjamin's "messianic" comments, is something to which he tries to give secular form. Awakening, for Benjamin, is a matter of breaking free from an administered continuity, and of recognising that the momentary now is, in relation to what comes before or after, the only true reality.

One of the activities in which this insight is implicit is gambling. Gambling, though on one level futile and irrational, is on another the refusal to accept the tyranny of continuous time and the petty pace, among other things by collapsing whole segments of merely administered life into the one momentous decision of chance.

Gambling, of course, remains imprisoned within the dream. It flirts with freedom, but never finally achieves it. Gambling, says Benjamin, is like never quite getting a woman to reach orgasm. What, then, is real awakening? In Benjamin's work, the answer to this remains elusive. Adorno, asking the same question, eventually concluded that awakening could never happen adequately in this world. Benjamin certainly did not subscribe to that view; though by the time of his death he probably retained little faith that orthodox socialism would bring about awakening either. So can we hope for a non-religious "awakening"? The question remains open.

• Julian Roberts is a professor of philosophy at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich.

The Arcades Project

"This piece, which is about the Paris Arcades, was begun under a clear sky of cloudless blue, which formed a dome above the foliage but was made dusty by the millions of pages with which the fresh breeze of industriousness, the heavy breath of research, the storm of youthful eagerness and the lazy gust of curiosity had been covered, The painted summer sky which looks down from the arcades into the reading room of the Bibliothéque Nationale, in Paris, has cast its dreamy lightless blanket ceiling over the first-born of its sources of understanding."

• Walter Benjamin, quoted in Walter Benjamin: A Biography, by Momme Brodersen (Verso).

"Preformed in the figure of the fâlneur is that of the detective. The flâneur required a social legitimation of his habitus. It suited him very well to see his indolence presented as a plausible front, behind which, in reality, hides the riveted attention of an observer who will not let the unsuspecting malefactor out of his sight."

"The sandwich-man is the last incarnation of the flâneur".

"Method of this project: literary montage. I needn't say anything. Merely show. I shall purloin no valuables, appropriate no ingenious formulations. But the rags, the refuse - these I will not inventory but allow, in the only way possible, to come into their own: by making use of them."

"Just as Proust begins the story of his life with an awakening, so must every presentation of history begin with awakening; in fact it should treat of nothing else. This one, accordingly, deals with the awakening of the 19th century."

• From The Arcades Project