"Paris Arcades was to be Walter Benjamin´s most demanding project for a new method of gaining insight into history: a history in images reflecting the multilayered character of the past. Benjamin´s historical-phylosophical approach was directed against the authority of dogmatic systems, taking the marginal, the particular and the fault lines as its orientations... Benjamin practiced "shock montage"... taking inspiration from the Surrealism´s intuitive aesthetic methods of appropriating the world of dead things, he undertook to integrate the principle of the montage as an epistemological technique... in Paris Arcades Benjamin dialectically correlated aspects of the past and the present... They lay bare the elastic conceptual web with which Benjamin ordered the wealth of material he had gathered... Pictorial-material thought constitutes the methodological program: "I have nothing to say--only to show"". Essay by Nikola Doll _ Documenta (13) /// www.hatjecantz.de /// www.hup.harvard.edu
