Benjamin Terms

i'm reading Benjamin's Arcade's Project for one of my classes, "Forms: Notebooks." In this space i will post links to definitions or images of words i've come across in my reading that are either unfamilar to me or have been complicated by Benjamin. i welcome posts from readers who can offer further definitions for any of these terms, or suggestions for other words that should be highlighted from the text.


panorama: "In their attempt to produce deceptively lifelike changes in represented nature, the panoramas prepare the way not only for photography but for film and sound film." (5)

Jugendstil: "The transfiguration of the solitary soul appears to be its goal. Individualism is its theory." (9)

etui: "The interior is not just the universe but also the etui of the private individual. To dwell means to leave traces." (9)

antimacassars: "Coverlets and antimacassars, cases and containers are devised in abundance; in these, the traces of the most ordinary objects of use are imprinted. In just the same way, the traces of the inhabitant are imprinted in the interior. Enter the detective story, which pursues these traces." (9)

flaneur: "The flaneur still stands on the threshold--of the metropolis as of the middle class. Neither has him in its power yet." (10)

physiognomics: "Early contributions to a physiognomics of the crowd are found in Engels and Poe. The crowd is the veil through which the familiar city beckons to the flaneur as phantasmagoria--now a landscape, now a room." (10)

chthonic: "It is the unique provision of Baudelaire's poetry that the image of woman and the image of death intermingle in a third: that of Paris. The Paris of his poems is a sunken city, and more submarine than subterranean. The chthonic elements of the city--its topographical formations, the old abandoned bed of the Seine--have evidently found in him a mold." (10)

Gesamtkunstwerk: From this watchword derives the concption of the 'total work of art'--the Gesamtkunstwerk--which would seal art off from the developments of technology. The solemn rite with which it is celebrated is the pendant to the distraction that transfigures the commodity. Both abstract from the social existence of human beings. Baudelaire succumbs to the rage for Wagner. (11)

Charles Fourier: "Marx took a stand against Carl Grun in order to defend Fourier and to accentuate his 'colossal conception of man.' He considered Fourier the only man besides Hegel to have revealed the essential mediocrity of the petty bourgeois." (17)

phalanstery: "The secret cue for the Fourierist utopia is the advent of machines. The phalanstery is designed to restore huan beings to a system of relationships in which morality becomes superfluous." (16)