在《觀看的辯證法》一書中，蘇珊·巴克-莫爾斯對《觀看的辯證法：瓦爾特·本雅明(pronounced ben-ya-MEEN),與拱廊計劃拱廊 (班雅明稱它們為「商品資本主義的原始神殿」)計劃 探討了她認為如果班雅明能夠活到完成關於巴黎拱廊的著作，他可能會寫些什麼》（Passagen Werk）進行了富有創意的重構，展現了它原本可能呈現的形態。巴克-莫爾斯利用班雅明浩瀚的引文和評注，這些資料包含了消費文化萌芽時期的大量歷史細節，揭示了賦予這些碎片以哲學連貫性的概念結構。Walter Benjamin's magnum opus was a book he did not live to write. In The Dialectics of Seeing, Susan Buck-Morss offers an inventive reconstruction of the Passagen Werk, or Arcades Project,

 

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Walter Benjamin's magnum opus was a book he did not live to write. In The Dialectics of Seeing, Susan Buck-Morss offers an inventive reconstruction of the Passagen Werk, or Arcades Project, as it might have taken form. Working with Benjamin's vast files of citations and commentary which contain a myriad of historical details from the dawn of consumer culture, Buck-Morss makes visible the conceptual structure that gives these fragments philosophical coherence. She uses images throughout the book to demonstrate that Benjamin took the debris of mass culture seriously as the source of philosophical truth. The Paris Arcades that so fascinated Benjamin (as they did the Surrealists whose "materialist metaphysics" he admired) were the prototype, the 19th century "ur-form" of the modern shopping mall. Benjamin's dialectics of seeing demonstrate how to read these consumer dream houses and so many other material objects of the time—from air balloons to women's fashions, from Baudelaire's poetry to Grandville's cartoons—as anticipations of social utopia and, simultaneously, as clues for a radical political critique. Buck-Morss plots Benjamin's intellectual orientation on axes running east and west, north and south—Moscow Paris, Berlin-Naples—and shows how such thinking in coordinates can explain his understanding of "dialectics at a standstill." She argues for the continuing relevance of Benjamin's insights but then allows a set of "afterimages" to have the last word.

瓦爾特·本雅明的鉅作是一部他未能完成的作品。在《觀看的辯證法》一書中，蘇珊·巴克-莫爾斯對《拱廊計劃》（Passagen Werk）進行了富有創意的重構，展現了它原本可能呈現的形態。巴克-莫爾斯利用班雅明浩瀚的引文和評注，這些資料包含了消費文化萌芽時期的大量歷史細節，揭示了賦予這些碎片以哲學連貫性的概念結構。她在書中運用圖像，顯示班雅明認真看待大眾文化的殘骸，將其視為哲學真理的源頭。令班雅明（以及他所推崇的超現實主義者，他們的「唯物主義形而上學」也令他著迷）如此著迷的巴黎拱廊，正是現代購物中心的原型，是19世紀的「原始形態」。班雅明的觀看辯證法揭示瞭如何解讀這些消費主義的夢想之家以及當時的眾多其他物質對象——從熱氣球到女裝，從波德萊爾的詩歌到格蘭維爾的漫畫——它們既是對社會烏托邦的預示，同時也是激進政治批判的線索。巴克-莫爾斯將班雅明的知識取向繪製在東西南北軸線上——莫斯科-巴黎，柏林-那不勒斯——並展示了這種坐標思維如何解釋他對「停滯不前的辯證法」的理解。她論證了班雅明洞見的持續意義，但最終卻讓一連串「後像」來作結。

The covered arcades of Paris, wrought with iron and surmounted by sparkling ceilings of glass, have been among that city's most celebrated architectural features since the 19th century. But for Susan Buck-Morss, an associate professor of government at Cornell University, the arcades have been the focus of a lengthy task of scholarly detective work, an attempt to decipher a massive, mysterious, unfinished tome by a renowned critic and philosopher who has been dead for 50 years.

For the last eight years, Professor Buck-Morss has studied the arcades to try to make sense of the unfinished compendium of fragments that were eventually intended to form the magnum opus of Walter Benjamin, the Berlin-born philosopher who has come to be regarded as one of the truly original and influential thinkers of modern times, the intellectual forebear of a host of contemporary schools of thought.

Professor Buck-Morss's long effort has culminated in a book, ''The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project,'' recently published by M.I.T. Press ($29.95). It is a long and at times complicated essay about what she believes Benjamin, had he lived to produce his book on the Paris arcades, might have written.

The Making of an Icon

巴黎的拱廊，鐵藝精湛，玻璃穹頂璀璨奪目，自19世紀以來一直是這座城市最著名的建築特色之一。然而，對於康乃爾大學政治學副教授蘇珊·巴克-莫爾斯（Susan Buck-Morss）來說，這些拱廊卻成為了她漫長學術研究的焦點，她試圖解讀一位已故50年的著名評論家兼哲學家留下的一部龐大而神秘的未完成巨著。

在過去的八年裡，巴克-莫爾斯教授一直致力於研究這些拱廊，試圖理解這部由零散片段組成的未完成文集。這部文集原本計劃成為瓦爾特·班雅明（Walter Benjamin）的代表作。這位出生於柏林的哲學家被譽為現代最具原創性和影響力的思想家之一，也是許多當代思想流派的先驅。

巴克-莫爾斯教授的長期研究成果最終匯集成書——《觀看的辯證法：瓦爾特·本雅明與拱廊計劃》，該書近期由麻省理工學院出版社出版（售價29.95美元）。這是一篇篇幅較長、有時略顯複雜的論文，探討了她認為如果班雅明能夠活到完成關於巴黎拱廊的著作，他可能會寫些什麼。

偶像的塑造

48歲的班雅明是一位被追捕的猶太人，1940年，他誤以為自己逃離納粹佔領下的法國的計畫失敗，在法西邊境自殺身亡。他是新馬克思主義團體「法蘭克福學派」的成員。如今，許多文學和藝術評論家以及後現代主義思想家，無論是建築、攝影、電影還是新聞專業的學生，都將本雅明奉為偶像，認為他的作品為他們自身的思想奠定了基礎。

Professor Buck-Morss has tried to reconstruct Benjamin's order and the book's meaning.

''It was an excruciating kind of medieval scholarship, and I wondered sometimes why I was doing it,'' Professor Buck-Morss said in a recent interview at Cornell. ''It was also very rewarding, because the man was exceedingly, eccentrically brilliant. The arcades project had a certain craziness about it, but Benjamin put all his brilliance into it.''

巴克-莫爾斯教授試圖重構班雅明的版面和這本書的意義。

「這是一種極其痛苦的中世紀學術研究，我有時甚至懷疑自己為什麼要做這件事，」巴克-莫爾斯教授在最近康乃爾大學的一次採訪中說道。 「但同時，這也讓我受益匪淺，因為本雅明是一位才華橫溢、特立獨行的天才。拱廊計劃本身就帶有某種瘋狂的色彩，但本雅明將他所有的才華都傾注其中。”

''Everything that becomes commonplace in the city starts in the arcade,'' she said, ''from the international building style - since the arcade is imitated from Moscow to Buenos Aires - to gas lighting to the disappearance of the distinction between public and private space, which is one of the characteristics of modern capitalist culture.''

Dazzling and Deceptive

It seems logical to assume that for Benjamin the arcade was also the epitome of bourgeois illusion and deception, a place where capitalist distractions were highly concentrated to divert the mind. They were dazzling structures, shaped like crosses and churchlike in their very appearance, which led Benjamin to call them the ''original temples of commodity capitalism.''

Thus the arcades provided a means to understand in every detail the vast revolution in culture and society, the huge transformations of everyday life brought about by capitalism.

“城市裡一切習以為常的事物都始於拱廊，”她說道，“從國際化的建築風格——因為從莫斯科到布宜諾斯艾利斯，拱廊都被競相模仿——到煤氣燈照明，再到公共空間與私人空間界限的消失，而這正是現代資本主義文化的特徵之一。”

耀眼奪目，卻充滿欺騙

對班雅明而言，拱廊也是資產階級幻象與欺騙的縮影，是資本主義消遣高度集中、轉移人們注意力的場所，似乎合情合理。這些拱廊建築耀眼奪目，外形如同十字架，宛如教堂，因此班雅明稱它們為「商品資本主義的原始神殿」。

由此可見，拱廊提供了一種途徑，讓我們得以細緻入微地理解文化和社會的巨大變革，以及資本主義為日常生活帶來的巨大轉變。

「記者，一個遊蕩者搖身一變成了偵探，負責報道新聞，」巴克-莫爾斯教授寫道。 「攝影記者則像獵人一樣四處遊蕩，伺機而動。」到了20世紀30年代，隨著法西斯主義席捲歐洲，班雅明對遊蕩者的描述也帶上了陰鬱的色彩。他指出，正如賣三明治的小販向街頭熙熙攘攘的人群兜售「大眾文化的誘惑」一樣，其他類型的遊蕩者，也可以兜售「意識形態的時尚」。

班雅明將煽動民眾仇恨的宣傳者視為一種新型的遊蕩者，其生存環境與最初的職業閒逛者——那些本質上棲身街頭的人——所處的條件大致相同。

「遊蕩者——賣三明治的小販——身著制服的記者，」班雅明在他的一篇殘篇中寫道。 “後者宣傳的是國家，而不是商品。”