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.

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. She uses images throughout the book to demonstrate that Benjamin took the debris of mass culture seriously as the source of philosophical truth. 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. 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. Walter Benjamin's magnum opus was a book he did not live to write. If you can’t find the resource you need here, visit our contact page to get in touch.Įstablished in 1962, the MIT Press is one of the largest and most distinguished university presses in the world and a leading publisher of books and journals at the intersection of science, technology, art, social science, and design. The MIT Press has been a leader in open access book publishing for over two decades, beginning in 1995 with the publication of William Mitchell’s City of Bits, which appeared simultaneously in print and in a dynamic, open web edition.Ĭollaborating with authors, instructors, booksellers, librarians, and the media is at the heart of what we do as a scholarly publisher. Today we publish over 30 titles in the arts and humanities, social sciences, and science and technology.

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Walter benjamin ways of seeing