A Ficto-Historical Theory of the London Underground . Marko Jobst

became department stores, associated with commerce and slave to its laws; or dwellings and homes, as in Fourier’s phalansteries. That is what the source claimed, the absence of the Underground palpable in what was written.

      In Walter’s writings, the Parisian arcade was the threshold, a ‘point of passage’; that was what gave it its ‘disquieting’ sense of ambiguity (Caygill, 1998: 132-3). The challenge to the distinction between private and public, artifice and nature, was erased. Sell. Sleep. Pass through and move away. This is how Walter understood the arcades, as containing latent, unrealised futures. Does this sound familiar? But isn’t it the Underground he describes?

      There was another source on my table, here, in the British Library reading room (as the woman across the table pulled a scarf over her shoulders to protect herself from recycled air, no fresher here than in the tunnels you walked through as you read my message). This other book, the source I let whisper in my ear, pointed out that the separation of the two would always be relative: ‘Benjamin writes of arcades themselves as kinds of interiors in the city, spaces that reorganise relations between inside and outside,’ he wrote, then related what Walter had written. ‘The domestic interior moves outside…. The street becomes room and the room becomes street.’ And also, ‘Arcades are houses or passages having no outside – like the dream’ (Rice, 2007: 10). In Benjamin’s project, the arcades were physical, material embodiments of ‘technological, commercial and spatial developments of the nineteenth century,’ representative of that century only (Rice, 2007: 11). That’s what the source maintained.