tential for reversal (Umschlag), as a state, in other words, whose revolutionary pos-
sibilities should be recognized and exploited.
Architecture or the Physiognomy of an Era
It is in its architecture that the true reality of an era achieves its clearest expression:
according to the Passagenwerk, architecture is the most important testimony to the
latent “mythology” of a society.^64 Benjamin’s aim is to read the character of the nine-
teenth century in the physiognomy of its architecture: by analyzing the “surface” of
this culture—its fashions and its buildings—he hopes to identify its deeper, more
fundamental characteristics.
This endeavor is crucial to his work. Benjamin sees the Parisian shopping ar-
cades as the major architectural achievement of the nineteenth century. In these
covered streets with their typical Parisian names—Passage du Pont-Neuf, Passage
de l’Opéra, Passage Vivienne, Galerie Véro-Dodat (figures 54 and 55), Passage des
Panoramas (figures 56 and 57), Passage Choiseul—an inexhaustible source of
metaphors, analogies, and dream figures can be found that are at the same time
grafted onto the tangible reality of an urban, metropolitan form. The Passagenwerk
can be read, then, as an encyclopedic display of the historical potential that lies dor-
mant in the word Passage, or arcade: Benjamin projects endless ramifications of
meaning, associations, and connotations onto the object of his study.^65 He sees the
arcade as a dialectical image—it is a momentary flash in which a number of funda-
mental aspects of history, of past, present and future, are synthesized in an ex-
tremely condensed form. Similar to a monad, it reflects the entire reality of the
nineteenth century.
The arcades owed their existence to the rise of retail trade, particularly the
trade in luxury articles, and also to new construction technologies: above all that of
iron and glass architecture. This combination of developments gave rise to a new,
typically nineteenth-century, urban form: the arcades form a transition zone between
the “outdoor world” of the street and the interior space of the home. They really con-
stitute an “inside” without an “outside”: their form is only revealed from the inside;
they do not have any exterior, or at least none that we can easily visualize. In this
sense, according to Benjamin, they resemble our dreams:^66 one can know an arcade
from its inside, but its exterior shape is unknown and even irrelevant to those who
are inside.
The transparency of glass roofs is what gives the arcades their particular qual-
ity. It is this that makes the Durchdringungof inside and outside possible, giving them
their character of a transitional zone between street and home. The glass roofs made
the arcades a superb space for the flâneur,the aimless city stroller: if the street con-
stitutes a sort of “living space” for the masses and for the flâneurwho dwells in the
midst of the masses, this metaphoric projection is achieved spatially in the arcade:
3
Reflections in a Mirror