After a brief glance at Rolf Tiedemann’s essay, which appears at the end of the English translation of The Arcades Project (which used to be the introductory essay to the original German), it seems Tiedemann speculates that had The Arcades Project been “finished” it would have offered “nothing less than a materialist philosophy of the history of the nineteenth century”—no small accomplishment (929). However, seeming not to lament a work interrupted, Tiedemann suggests that most of Benjamin’s central theoretical concerns, while present in The Arcades Project, were developed and exist in a more comprehensive forms in his other essays and publications. And so, intended or not, to remain unfinished appears to be a governing principle of Benjamin’s masterwork.
Can there be intention in (un)intention? Some version of this question seems central to the structure and thought of the text. And, if this text is to be considered as archive (unfinished) the question of how to delimit its contents needs to be asked. How does one respond to the dialectical image—the “genuinely historical” image? Is the archive drive that response?
Every present day is determined by the images that are synchronic with it: each “now” is the now of a particular recognizability. In it, truth is charged to the bursting point with time. (This point of explosion, and nothing else, is the death of the intentio, which thus coincides with the birth of authentic historical time, the time of truth.) It is not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words: image is dialectics at a standstill. [N3,1]
In other words this dialectical image in the now of its recognizability seems (from my limited reading so far) to be not just a theoretical element in The Arcades Project, but also a key to its structure. It is an idea that applies to the incomplete nature of the text as well as (in my mind) illuminates Benjamin’s method of reading and recording: collecting. The now signals the simultaneous death of intention and the birth of truth—a truth that is experienced (felt). I can’t help but imagine that the numerous citations and responses accumulated in The Arcades Project are record of Benjamin’s own flashes of the now deep in the stacks of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris.
Since rescue of the dialectical image is an impossibility—the image inevitably lost to successive serial moments—the idea, as concrete structure, remains ambiguous [N9,7]. And maybe the idea becomes more elucidatory in terms of method.
Initially, when I think of “method” what comes to mind is the scientific method (defined, organized), or methods of artists or composers for example the Suzuki method to violin, or the Abramovic method of performance, etc. While “method” suggests in these cases something definitive by naming, The Arcades Project as “archive-as-method” proposes something less proven—a method that becomes form not as a means towards production, rather as means towards actualization: unfinished, ragged, a collection (its collector “resident of the interior”), The Arcades Project is a method of “fathoming” [N2a,4]. Trace this image: a weighted line thrown from a ship: the line jumps as knots tied to measure depth clip at regular intervals over the rail—disruptions, resistances to the tug of the weight. Or, in the resounding once the weight strikes the sea floor—the line vibrating. Arcades is anti-method: “Progress has its seat not in the continuity of elapsing time but in its interferences—where the truly new makes itself felt for the first time, with the sobriety of dawn” [N9a,7].
[Train] like Lumèrie’s train, again here, the metaphor of temporal continuity
(not progress)
Here, though instead of the photogenic moment (external)
—the train passing through the point of intersection between the three main spatial directions—the bodies in the interior of the train [car]: their stasis
now illuminated, now recognizable
as passengers in that they are not moving [given that they are not moving]
—at what intersection are they—what shock or
explosion into the now?
February 25, 2015 at 3:40 am
Concerning “Anti-Method”:
I was a little caught up in thinking about Benjamin’s method of citation and cross referencing, which reveals in-part his mode of reading. But, I wonder if “method” is the most accurate word when in the text those references, and links between convolutes are more like structure. And so, if those two things are different, can structure elucidate method completely? Does structure allow for the replication of method? The anti-method that I saw in The Arcades Project seems captured within the role of intuition, or in that “now” which marks the death of “intentio” and the birth of truth (that pre-cognitive flash). Accounting for the role of intuition in Benjamin’s selection process seems impossible, just as it might be impossible to account for the role of intuition in any creative practice no matter how conceptually rigorous (there’s always some instinctive provocation leading to a decision). So in this way, yes, The Arcades Project resists replication. Why that ruffle in that moment and placed there, will be always just beyond our knowing. But, it presents a fact, and leads more to a question of now that that particular detail is there, what’s it accomplishing? Again, another question that isn’t fully answered by Benjamin because he never directly responds in a causal way, always parallel, adjacent, or oblique.