Visual Cultural Studies On Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project

As an imaginative and insightful thinker, Walter Benjamin is committed to break the barriers of various modern disciplines. His research scope is broad, which involves the philosophy, the history, the sociology and so on. In The Arcades Project Walter Benjamin displayed visual images with no comment, so that things can get their proper position in the space.Walter Benjamin investigated the Paris arcades in the nineteenth century and made a visual representation of urban space. The thesis tries to grasp his academic thoughts from the dimension of visual culture. Cities are space of visual domain when human eyes have the relationship with space. Space is opened up by the eyes, and eyes illuminate the things in space. Nowadays technology performs the power to transform the invisible things into visual pictures. Walter Benjamin’s thought shows theoretical significance to us with no doubt.The introduction outlines the background and significance of this thesis, and makes a review of the study of Benjamin in china and abroad. Walter Benjamin’s way of seeing in The Arcades Project is the Flaneur’s dreamy gaze and gaze to pursue truth. The first chapter of the thesis traces the important exposition on the eyes and visual of western tradition, and discusses about watching and gazing in Benjamin’s major works. The second chapter focuses on the Flaneur and the crowd. Walter Benjamin adapted his seeing to the Flaneur who was walking into the crowd in "the Arcades Project". The crowd was presented as the city’s most dramatic scene, and in Benjamin’s view their eyes cannot capture, which was losing the ability to gaze gradually. The third chapter focuses on the relationship between dream and awakening because the capitalist society was in the face of Phantasmagoria. This chapter starts with Benjamin’s external gaze, which is to present the view of a kaleidoscope of fairyland in capitalist society. Benjamin aimed at prompt the collective consciousness awakening from a dream state. The fourth chapter proposed the allegorical gaze as Walter Benjamin’s method. He looked into the historical development of capitalism, and excavated the depressed historical memory, which reveals the truth of history. So Walter Benjamin’s work is not only to explore critique of capitalist modernity, but also to reflect the history of redemption demands.Through the reconstruction of The Arcades Project from the dimension of visuality, the article concludes that Benjamin’s project offers an inspiring thinking to the urbanization nowadays and plays a positive role in literary criticism, space research and visual cultural studies.