Absence of Mind – The Arcades Project Project or The Rhetoric of Hypertext by Heather Marcelle Crickenberger

… As an alternative, Benjamin provides architecture as an artistic medium through which one might locate a means of modifying the prevailing aesthetic by modifying the human apparatus of perception. However, even architecture falls into the aesthetic of war as long as it is deemed valuable and is appropriated by the economic system, so in The Arcades Project, he turns his attention to a peculiar architectural construction—the Parisian passages—as a means of locating a structural guide for a kind of generative thought that “is totally useless for fascism” “Work of Art” 218. In The Arcades Project, this apparatus is to be identified with what Benjamin refers to as “the structure of awakening” The Arcades Project 389 [K1,3].

via Absence of Mind – The Arcades Project Project or The Rhetoric of Hypertext by Heather Marcelle Crickenberger.

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