Quotes from Beatrice Hanssen

Benjamin does attempt to decode their subjective experience, but he does this within social and historical limits, insisting that subjects inhabiting capitalist modernity, exposed to the workings of commodity fetishism, have become objects, objectified, susceptible to processes of commodification (of their labour-power, of the culture they consume).

Fashion, like architecture, inheres in the darkness of the lived moment, belongs to the dream consciousness of the collective.

Benjamin's aesthetic is dissectional, drawing on Baroque poetry, Baudelaire's writing and fashion histories. The female body becomes ornament, and in such fetishistic fragmentation, body parts are likened to alabaster, snow, jewels, minerals, and the body can, of course, be made equivalent to – that is, bought for – the metal of exchange: money.

Our act of reading, together with our reflections on its methods, therefore parallels the phenomenon's act of disappearing. What we are given to read are always the traces of a specific act of withdrawal.

An anecdote in which Kant captures himself in pithy fashion: [Kant's] Famulus, a theologian who was unable to connect philosophy to theology, once asked Kant for advice as to what he should read on the subject. Kant: Read travel literature. Famulus: In dogmatic philosophy, there are things I do not understand. Kant: Read travel literature. Walter Benjamin, 'Unknown Anecdotes about Kant', GS

Method of this project: literary montage. I have nothing to say. Only to show. I will purloin nothing valuable and appropriate no ingenious turns of phrase. But the shards, the trash: I do not wish to inventory them, but simply give them their due in the only possible way: by putting them to use.

The use of the commodity is the name and image of the commodity itself. Use-value is irrelevant to the form of consumption – and fantasy, wish, or interpretation – that seals the relation of image to consciousness. In the 'real abstraction' that constitutes the fully realized industrial commodity

Wilson provides a Lacanian psychoanalytic context for her claim; the flâneur is the Oedipal under threat. The city is a castrating labyrinth that feminizes all who enter it.22

Only dialectical images are genuine images (that is, not archaic); and the place where one encounters them is language.

Thinking is a search for siblings. Yet if thinking is a search for siblings, it also depends on finding the right distance – Abstand – from these siblings.

The flâneur traverses an economic space where wares are sold – poetry, journalism, knowledge – in the marketplace. If this is acknowledged then the flâneur's subjectivity is allied with others who sell themselves (albeit existing in competition with them), rather than with all men. He is subservient to the market.

The flâneur turned out to be a first signal of reaction – not a figure of self- realization, mastery, celebration of the modern – but a dupe who was so thrilled to be part of the crowd of consumers, who yielded to appearance, to pure illusion, and failed ultimately to gain self-understanding, let alone class-consciousness. In this regard, at least, the prostitute has a clearer consciousness, for it is not possible for her to be recuperated so easily.