[Crosstalk] HyperStudio Talk - Howard Eiland on Benjamin's ARCADES

[madeleine clare elish]

<http://hyperstudio.mit.edu>

HyperStudio Talk

Reality as Palimpsest: on Benjamin's /Arcades/
Howard Eiland <http://lit.mit.edu/people/heiland.php>

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Tuesday, February 23, 5 - 7 pm
Lecture & Discussion
Room 2-135 <http://whereis.mit.edu/?mapterms=2&mapsearch=go>
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*/At HyperStudio we are investigating how technology can enhance and 
enrich humanities research. Inspiration for our work comes not from 
technology, but from the very media texts and artifacts on which each 
project is based. During this month's HyperStudio Talk, we're honored to 
have Howard Eiland discuss Walter Benjamin's /**/Arcades Project/* 
<http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/BENARC.html>*/ and explore how such 
a complex and unique text might benefit from being reinterpreted and 
re-presented in digital space./*

The unfinished magnum opus of the cultural critic Walter Benjamin, his 
/Arcades Project/ (/Das Passagen-Werk/, 1927-1940), a study of the Paris 
arcades and their surrounding milieux in the nineteenth century, is like 
no other book. It is the book of a city or the book as city.

Benjamin himself speaks of "an imaginary city of arcades [/eine 
imaginäre Stadt von Passagen/]," a city of passages, and his model 
reader is the Parisian flâneur, the urban stroller who discovers in the 
surfaces of the present day—the storefronts and building facades and the 
plethora of signs—a manifold historical depth. Superimposed on the 
flâneur's present reality is a remembered past or several 
interpenetrating pasts: at a busy street corner he sees the ghost of a 
barricade once erected by rebellious workers, or in a modern tram he 
sees traces of the old horse-drawn omnibus and, at a lower level, the 
stagecoach. Through this localized and stratified historical memory and 
historical imagination, the city is read as a palimpsest—Theodor Adorno 
once remarked that Benjamin "immersed himself in reality as in a 
palimpsest"—and this palimpsest-character is also understood in 
cinematic terms as a multiple exposure, a kind of vertical montage.

No doubt there could be further elaborations today in terms of the 
*articulation of cyberspace*. A vivid example of this multidimensional 
seeing is provided by an entry in The /Arcades Project/ (G1a,4), the 
story of a poster advertising "Bullrich Salt." The use of narrative 
dissolves and image-overlays in this vignette points to Benjamin’s 
theory of film and what he calls the "prismatic work" performed by 
cinema in disclosing unexpected stations within everyday milieux. It is 
a nice coincidence that, around the time Benjamin was composing his 
story about the poster, Walther Ruttmann was being celebrated throughout 
Europe for his city film, /Berlin: The Symphony of a Great City/, in 
which at one point a sandwich man appears bearing an advertisement for 
"Bullrich Salt."


About the speaker

*Howard Eiland* <http://lit.mit.edu/people/heiland.php> has been 
involved since the late nineteen-eighties with the multi-volume Harvard 
University Press edition of the works of Walter Benjamin, an influential 
German writer who died in 1940 while in flight from the Nazis. He 
co-edited three volumes of Benjamin's /Selected Writings/ and 
co-translated Benjamin's massive /Arcades Project 
<http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/BENARC.html>,/ and he has also 
translated Benjamin's /Berlin Childhood around 1900/ and his /On 
Hashish./ His recent publications include work on film and jazz. He is 
presently collaborating on a biography of Benjamin, and is a Lecturer at 
MIT.

For more information:
web http://hyperstudio.mit.edu
617-253-4312

 





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-- 

madeleine clare elish

mit comparative media studies | hyperstudio
77 mass ave. e15-318, cambridge, ma 02139 
mcelish at mit.edu

http://hyperstudio.mit.edu