1. Translator’s Task According to Benjamin Walter
The task of the translator consists in finding that intended effect [intention] upon the language into which he is translating which produces it in the echo of the original (Benjamin, Arendt and Zohn 76)
2. Decline of Storytelling
One reason for this phenomenon is obvious: experience has fallen in value. And it looks as if it continues to fall into bottomlessness. Every glance at a newspaper demonstrates that it has reached a new low, that our picture, not only of the external world but of the moral world as well, overnight has undergone changes which were never thought possible (Benjamin, Arendt and Zohn 83-84) However, I think that there still are possibilities for storytelling in the Modern Age, but it is necessary to restore the dying exchange of experience.
3. Invention of Photography
In all the arts there is a physical component which can no longer be considered or treated as it used to be which cannot remain unaffected by our modern knowledge and power (Benjamin, Arendt and Zohn 217)
4. Task of the Historiographer
In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it. Historians need to ”blot out everything they know about the later course of history” (Benjamin, Arendt and Zohn 255-256)
5. Arcades Project
“We know that, in the course of flanerie, far-off times and places interpenetrate the landscape and the present moment. When the authentically intoxicated phase of this condition announces itself, the blood is pounding in the veins of the happy flaneur, his heart ticks like a clock, and in wardly as well as outwardly things go on as we would imagine them to do in one of those "mechanical pictures" which in the nineteenth century (and of course earlier, too) enjoyed great popularity, and which depicts in the foreground a shepherd playing on a pipe, by his side two children swaying in time to the music, further back a pair of hunters in pursuit of a lion, and very much in the background a train crossing over a trestle bridge” (M2,4).
Benjamin’s Arcades Project is a criticism of the nineteenth century history. In fact, Benjamin Walter changed the concept of town in the twentieth century. Benjamin Walter believed that his century is too much concentrated in the previous one’s dream. He was also convinced that the city life has great influence on the life of its people.
Arcades Project was written under the impact of the surrealism movement. Benjamin states that Baudelaire’s genius is a melancholic one. To be able to move forward and to progress it is necessary to get rid of the obsessive idea of the fashion, commodity, and the idea of the new. Collective unconsciousness brought these obsessive ideas. According to Benjamin Walter, every epoch has a dream to follow. This dream may be a classless society. Though it is clear, that such society is the Utopia ("Full Text of "Benjamin Walter the Arcades Project" n.p.).
The problem is that architecture outgrew art in the nineteenth century. Here arcades played an important role. Benjamin Walter demonstrates that the time is measured by means of the emphatic ‘now’. It characterizes the dialectical feature. ‘The now of recognizability’ “arises from the constellation of past and present” (McCole 249). It is Benjamin’s conception of historical events and images. The above mentioned passage clearly reflects the idea of the ‘The now of recognizability’. The happy flaneur will appear only when people in the town stop concentrating on the past and start paying more attention to the future.
Works Cited
Benjamin, Walter and Rolf Tiedemann. The Arcades Project. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1999. Print.
Benjamin, Walter, Hannah Arendt, and Harry Zohn. Illuminations. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968. Print.
