La Modernité et la métropole: Pour une lecture de l’espace urbain au XIXe siècle (review)

Reviewed by: La Modernité et la métropole: Pour une lecture de l’espace urbain au XIXe siècle Michael Marrinan Jovicic, Jelena, ed. La Modernité et la métropole: Pour une lecture de l’espace urbain au XIXe siècle. London, Ontario: Mestengo Press, 2007. Pp. xi-xix, 126, 4 illus. ISBN 978-0-9699145-6-3 The present volume of essays, edited by Jelena Jovicic, is the product of a workshop from the 2006 meeting of the Association canadienne des études francophones du xixe siècle held at York University. In the context of the current economic meltdown, realignment of former colonies, and increased competition for natural resources, it seems almost the relic of a lost past: although the conference encouraged submissions dealing with nineteenth-century cities in general, five of the six essays focus exclusively upon Paris. Moreover, they all engage to some degree the canonical account of Parisian modernity outlined in “Paris: Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” Walter Benjamin’s exposé for his unfinished Arcades Project. Benjamin’s view of modernity, as is commonly known, was deeply influenced by Charles Baudelaire, Karl Marx, Georg Simmel, Siegfried Kracauer, and Georg Lukacs: all figure largely between the lines of his exposé and overtly in his accumulated notes. Central to Benjamin’s reading of modern Paris are the concepts of circulation—both of people and goods—and social alienation—of people from one another and from their surroundings. On his account, Georges Haussmann’s wholesale renovations of the city materialized these concepts in pavement and stone. “The inhabitants of the city no longer feel at home there,” wrote Benjamin; “they start to become conscious of the inhuman character of the metropolis.” In my view, the essays of the Jovicic volume gain traction and contemporary interest when challenging—rather than replicating—Benjamin’s dominant paradigm. The essay by Jelena Jovicic is the most sustained immersion in Benjamin’s topos. Jovicic develops parallels between the shopping spaces described in Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames and Foucault’s panopticon, as well as Serres’s thermodynamic machine, to bring Benjamin’s thinking up to date, but without dislodging the seminal importance of his thought to her argument (40–2). Her claim that Zola constructs a “livre-magasin” to orient the reader as flâneur (38) is not exactly a fresh insight, but she could have strengthened her point by analyzing at least one image of the commercial interiors [End Page 167] that inspired Zola’s novel. Jovicic recuperates Zola as cultural critic by suggesting that Mouret’s marriage to a somewhat plain but good-hearted salesgirl named Denise, enacts “une sorte d’imagerie utopique” announcing “l’avenir radieux de toute la société moderne” (43). For Jovicic, this “happy ending” is a productive counter-discourse to the novel’s sustained critique of consumer society, one that completely coincides with Benjamin’s formulations of modernité and the métropole (44). By contrast, Michael Graves approaches Benjamin as a theorist rather than a littéraire. His essay attends to the drift in Benjamin’s thinking about Paris, from his first writings of the late 1920s, to the two versions (1935 (1939) of the exposé itself, although Graves is not the first to signal such a move. Central to his argument is a passage from the 1935 exposé deleted in 1839: “Corresponding to the forms of the new means of production, which in the beginning is still ruled by the form of the old (Marx), are images in the collective unconscious in which the old and the new interpenetrate. These images are wish images” (33). Benjamin accepts the Marxist precept that relationships between economic base and cultural superstructure are indirect and out of phase. Graves argues the fissure is masked via unconscious constructs shaped by psychological drives (24). On his account, “lingering remnants of the past are omnipresent, yet not immediately decipherable,” so that individuals do not perceive their environment “as a coherent group of substantial, meaningful things, but rather as traces of things” (24). Traces—visible cultural and social phenomena disconnected from reality—circulate alongside another category also produced by psychological processes: the commodity fetishism that represses “the true nature, value, purpose, and...

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