Infinite spaces Walter Benjamin and the spurious creations of capitalism

Mark Cauchi

doi:10.1080/0969725032000154368

Cauchi, Mark

2003-12-01 00:00:00

ANGELAKI journal of the theoretical humanities volume 8 number 3 december 2003 Is it correct to say that the “bad infinity” that prevails in idleness appears in Hegel as the signature of bourgeois society? Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me. Pascal, The Thoughts creation, ex-cision gain and again, with example after exam- Aple, Benjamin repeats and repeats again – mark cauchi citing, miming, simulating and assimilating – sometimes ad nauseam if not ad infinitum, the structures of repetition, and the repetition of INFINITE SPACES certain structures, which pattern bourgeois culture. Like fashion, like industrial architec- walter benjamin and the ture, like the gambler, like theories of progress, spurious creations of like boredom. Each of them, for Benjamin, bears in itself the assimilative structure that generates capitalism them all, each therefore being a simile of the other, bourgeois culture thus an infinite regress of similarities. However, because “the gift of knowledge concealed, or perhaps repressed, in recognizing [similarities]” has “changed with the expressions and phenomena of the past (AP, historical development,” as Benjamin claims in N1, 9, p. 458). In order to do this, Benjamin “On the Mimetic Faculty,” the bourgeois instru- believes

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