The Arcades Project transforms historical research into a practice of montage. Benjamin assembles quotations, advertisements, architectural fragments, commodities and observations without subordinating them to a continuous explanatory narrative, allowing the nineteenth-century metropolis to become legible through constellations rather than chronology. The arcade is both material structure and epistemic device: a glass-covered commercial interior in which modernity rehearses its forms of spectacle, consumption, obsolescence and collective dreaming. Benjamin’s method interrupts historicism by bringing heterogeneous fragments into sudden proximity, producing dialectical images in which past and present illuminate one another. The theoretical contribution lies in treating the city as an archive whose minor objects contain compressed social relations. Rather than reconstructing a totality from above, the work extracts historical truth from residues, surfaces and obsolete technologies. It bridges literary criticism, urban archaeology, media theory and exhibition practice by making arrangement itself an argument.
